Ambition and Actuality...Martial arts and Mortality

Section One is LAID OUT! On to Section Two!

I had planned on having the entire first chapter layed out by the end of the year, but alas, I fell behind. I find myself not disappointed, however. Nor should anyone else be. In the past two months, I have completed almost all design decisions and more actual layout than in the past couple of years. I credit it to a new phase of  the realization of my mortality brought about by martial arts training and seeing my abilities not so much decrease as change. I may not be as acrobatic, but my ability to fight smarter and teach has gone up immeasurably.

Prior to September, I would make ambitious goal after ambitious goal, fall short, get frustrated and stall. But I am not a college kid anymore; I do not have the same luxury of time I once did. I do not have the same abilities I once did. As my body remodels itself for stamina rather than strength and speed as it ages, I have found that adjusting my efforts to match the new diminishing capabilities and meeting all of my time commitments has actually paid off. Accepting rather than denying my mortality I am actually pacing myself and most importantly staying on pace. For the first time I have complete faith in completion and I hope everyone else reading this has faith it it as well.

Wintery and Summary

Well, I finished flowing the text to Section One of Chapter One tongiht. I am putting all of the footnote boxes in next, with the hope of finishing the section by the end of the year. And for your enjoyment, sans extras, here it is: The text from Chapter One, Section One, Character Creation Summary:

The character creation process starts when you sit down at a table with a pencil and an Ära Knochen™ character sheet. You can either photocopy the Ära Knochen™ character sheet at the end of each section, purchase a book of pre-made character sheets most likely available wherever you purchased this game, or just use a piece of ruled notebook paper.

Step One: Determine Traits

The first step to making your character requires you to determine your character's age, sex, height in centimeters to the nearest centimeter, and weight in kilograms to the nearest kilogram. These are referred to in the game as your character's required traits, as the values you select are required elsewhere in later steps to complete your character
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Once you determine your character’s required traits, you are free to designate any other traits of your character as you wish, including his eye color, hair color, complexion, hair style, and any distinguishing marks or scars.

Step Two: Determine Stats

The next step is to determine the numbers used to represent your character's natural abilities. These numbers, referred to as stats, reflect such things as his speed on foot, his range of perception, and his natural ability to perform tasks.

The first stats you need to determine are your character's attributes. Attributes are the basis for all of your character's natural abilities. For heroic humans, each attribute possesses a value from -10 to +10, with the default value of 0 being the average for a heroic human. Each attribute has a “partner” stat called a defense rating, which represents your character's natural ability to avoid taking damage from certain types of attacks.

The second set of stats you need to determine are your character's action limits, which reflect his capacity to interact with his physical environment.

•  Your character's action load determines how much your character can lift and how lifting heavy things will affect his ability to perform other actions at the same time.

•  Your character’s action move determines how fast he can walk or run and how running will affect his ability to perform other actions at the same time.

•  Your character's range of sense reflects the distances at which he can perceive his environment without difficulty  and the maximum range he is able to perceive.

The next two stats, your character's armor values (or ArmVs), reflect how well your character is able to resist physical damage. Your character has two armor values:

•  Your character's ballistic armor value (ArmVB) stat determines his ability to absorb or otherwise resist damage from ballistic attacks, such as those caused by bullets, telekinetic attacks, or explosives.

•  Your character’s non-ballistic armor value (ArmVNB) stat determines his ability to absorb or otherwise resist damage from falls and melee attacks.

Your character's remaining stats are referred to as damage capacities, and determine his ability to sustain damage and continue to function after his defense ratings fail to protect him from an attack or insult. Your character possesses two damage capacities:

•Your character's Stun Capacity (STUN) stat, determines how close he is to going unconscious. As long as your character possesses one or more points of STUN, he may continue to act unhindered

•Your character's Physical Capacity (PHYS) stat, determines how close he is to death. As long possesses one or more points of PHYS, he is alive.

Step Three: Determine Skills

After determining the values that reflect your character’s natural abilities, you need to determine the values that reflect his learned abilities. Each learned ability is referred to as a skill. Your character’s level of ability is represented by a number of skill levels he possesses in that skill.

Language Skills

Before determining your character's skills and skill levels, you must designate your character's native spoken language (the one he speaks most fluently). Your character begins play with the ability to speak this language at a skill level of 0. While your character begins play with the ability to speak his native language, he does not automatically gain the ability to read and write his native language. You must select reading and writing the language as a separate skill if you want him to be able to do so.

Once you select your character’s native language, you may to select the rest of his skills. Both the number and variety of skills available to your character will depend on the method you use for creating your character.

Step Four: Determine Aspects

Most heroes have something unique about them that separates them from “normal people”. These unique abilities, whether magical, spiritual, supernatural, cinematic, or superhuman in nature are reflected in the game by Aspects. 

Section Five: Possessions

Your character's possessions are broken down into two types.

Possessions on person are anything your character is carrying on him. This includes his clothes and even his underwear. If you don't put something on your character sheet, your character does not have it, so don't forget anything, from his socks and underwear to the coins jingling in his pocket.

Holdings are the things your character owns that he does not carry on him. This includes his home, vehicles, pets, or anything else either too big to carry on his person.

Step Six: Director Debriefing
Now you are almost ready to play. As has been said before, Ara Knochen is a world of high heroics, where characters walk away from swordfights and gunfights with nary a scratch. It is a world where aging has little to do with a character's abilities. It's a world where mystic powers are plentiful but not uber-powerful.

But sometimes, different gaming groups or directors will want to alter the mood of the campaign, whether to make it more or less deadly, ramp powers up or down, or alter the level of realism. In these cases, once you have completed your character, she may have all penalties or bonuses she may add to your character after it has been created.

If she has any such modifications to make, this is the step where she will either verify changes were properly made during the creation process, or apply other effects (such as those of aging) to your character.

And with that said, after applying any modifications and obtaining the director's approval, you are ready to rock!

Scribus and Slowness

There are a number of things that annoy me in the process of using Scribus (the only real opn source professional grade layout application) and while I enjoy using it (and all free software in general), I can understand why Scribus is not considered a first-tier app like Indesign or Quark.

I was laying out the final version of the Player's Guide yesterday and came up with a bit of frustration and a number of work flow destroying obstackes. Some of the problems are as follows:

1. Tables.

Tables in the current version I am using (1.4 rc6) still consider tables a set of grouped text boxes. Great idea, but entering data and formatting them is just painful! I had a chance to play with the Google Summer of Code 2011 project completed by Elvis Stansvik, and aside from of few segfaults (Non-geek translation: crashes), it seems a thousand times better. There is no indication on the Scribus Wiki as to the date it will be integrated into a 1.4 stable release, but I can't wait until it is, and fully ready for production use.

Until then, I am stuck with making my tables in LibreOffice, saving them as tiffs, opening them in GIMP and cropping them, then pasting them into Scribus as pictures. Talk about a Time-Sucking Abyss!

2. Story Editor

While the paradigm of destop publishing is seriously different from using a word processor (like Microsoft Word), I actually prefer the amount of control it gives over the document I am laying out. With that being said, the story editor tool in Scribus could still learn a thing of two from the word processing folks. Making changes in the story editor does not result in a change to the text in the editor window per se. In order to see how a section of the page is formatted, you have to look at the left side for the style type being used or move the cursor to a position where you can see the changes in the text by which settings have been toggled or selected in the top toolbar. Lame.

Because layout is such a graphic and spatial task, this old school editor (XEDIT or vi) way of doing things (non-geek translation: DOS or pre-Windows) makes it incredibly tedious to flow text and keep track of which styles you have used with a quick glance. Yes, if I had one of those fancy 24-inch wide monitors (like I should have but on which I can't rationalize spending 200 bucks when this is just a hobby) I could just keep updating in one window and watching the changes in the other, but should I really have to?

As a result of this annoying development, it it tedious as hell to lay things out. The Scribus wiki recommends doing the heavy lifting in LibreOffice, but should I have to? And if I have to, shouldn't Scribus have a tool that searches for all the formatting combinations upon import and list them as styles for easy access in Scribus so that if something needs to be tweaked, the styles are already built in?

This has arguably been the main reason why it has taken so long to write this book. I have done the heavy formatting in LibreOffice as the wiki suggests, but every port of content has of yet (I am still hoping one willn't) had niggles and little idiosyncrasies that has required post import tweaking.

Step One: A Sneak Peek

I went to the Museum of Science and Industry on the south side of Chicago today. During the visit, I found myself inspired by the Theodor Seuss Geisel (many of you will know him as Dr. Seuss) exhibit. While there were a number of prints that he kept specifically to be only shown to the public after he died (fascinating man, actually, beyond the art), the thing that really inspired me besides the whimsy of his art and his social conscience, was the reason he used a pen name rather than his own.

According to the exhibit, he had wanted to save it for the "greatest novel" he had intended to one day write. But life and success in his other endeavors resulted in the novel never coming to realization. After reading this, I started thinking about HiBRiD and realized that the very same thing could happen to me. Well, maybe not the success from the authoring standpoint, but from the standpoint of not ever completing that which I intended.

As a result, I decided to start putting the primary text for the character creation rules here for you, my readers, as I progress through the writing process.

So, without further adieu, here are excerpts of Step One of character creation using both the Quick and Custom Methods for the HiBRiD Basic Ara Knochen game...

Step One: Determine Traits

Traits represent your character's appearance. While some traits are required for purposes of game play such as your character's height and weight, all of the other traits of your character are up to you, such as his complexion, eye color, and hair color and style.

The character creation process starts when you sit down at a table with a pencil and a blank character sheet and decide upon your character's age, height in centimeters to the nearest centimeter, and weight in kilograms to the nearest kilogram. After you determine these traits by the method of your choosing, you may complete your character's appearance any way you wish.

Section One: The Quick Method

This method is designed solely to get you a character ready for play in the least amount of time as possible.

Step One: Traits

Your character, as well as any others created using this method may be of any age, but will always weigh seventy kilograms and stand 172 centimeters tall. All of the other miniscule details of your character's appearance that make your character unique but have no effects on game mechanics or rules of play are up to you. What color are your character's eyes, hair, and skin? Does he have any scars? Record all of these details in the appropriate spaces on your character sheet.

Have fun with this step. Once you have dotted your i's and crossed your t's,...get ready to dive in!!!!

Section Two: The Personalized Method

Step One: Traits

Before you begin, it helps to think of how big or little you want your character to be in general descriptive terms (e. g. as big as a football player, as short as a jockey, as little as an Olympic gymnast, et cetera) rather than a number.

Once you have decided on whether your character will be a male or female and have a firm picture in your mind of your character's size, choose one of the Body Archetypes provided in the “A Little Bit More” box*** that is the closest to what you imagined, and copy down the traits listed for that Body Archetype onto your character sheet.

Now, determine your character's age, then complete the details of all your character's other traits in the appropriate spaces on your character sheet.


***The "A Little Bit More boxes appear in the left margin for each step and provide extra information to help the guide the players in making their decision when creating their character, such as relating metric and English units, describing character attributes, explaining the different types of skills or aspects, et cetera.

Advanced and Atmosphere

Today, while I started finalizing the skills for the character templates for the Basic game, I got distracted and found myself writing a blurb about converting the Basic Templates to the Advanced. And while I was writing, I found my musings drifting to the difference between not just Basic and Advanced characters, but Beginning and Experienced players as well.

As the excitement started to brew, I found myself looking back at my last post, and I decided to follow it up with ten actions that HiBRiD player might take that separates him from a standard RPG player.

The first five of these actions are those I would consider not uncommon to a beginning HiBRiD player who "gets" HiBRiD but nonetheless has little experience playing the actual game. The second five of these actions would be analogs to the first five, but more commonly seen in an experienced HiBRiD player

A Beginning HiBRiD Player...

1. ...buys an extra point or two of Ite' with aspect points

2. ...loves tragic heroes and action movies and notices places when Ite' is used by the hero.

3. ...uses his acrobatics and tumbling maneuvers almost every time he is in combat

4. ...uses tumbling skills and various aspects to minimize the effects of falls if not completely negate falling damage.

5. ...tries to attack as many characters as he can in a round without negating his action task rolls with penalties.

A Journeyman HiBRiD Player...

1. ...not only buys one or two points of Ite' with aspect points, but ALWAYS writes a game summary of the last session and brings food or drinks for everyone to consume just to get those two extra floating Ite' points.

2. ...not only loves heroic and action movies, but actively counts the number of points of Ite' used in the movie and comments where he would have used Ite' had he been in a character's place.

3. ...not only uses his character's acrobatics and tumbling skills during every combat or action scene, but refuses to clear any distance spanning ten or more meters in a round without free running or showing off his mad parkour skillz

4. ...jumps his characters off cliffs or out of VTOLs with complete disregard for the consequences of his actions.

5. ...describes his actions and forces the director figure out how many of his described actions he can actually pull off in one action round, regardless of penalties.

HiBRiD on the Silver Screen

I was reading my last post when I realized that to share the Spirit of HiBRiD (until the game is done), it might help readers of this blog who don't know me and have never played the game to have a list of films filled with HiBRiD spirit or characters.

So without further adieu, here are ten movies that exemplify HiBRiD, just to get you started:

1. Big Trouble In Little China

This movie is simply a HiBRiD one-shot from top to bottom. Complete with exemplary action scenes, Ite' use, and the mixture of ancient and modern.

2. The Crow

The police chief and of course the title character are great player characters; the gang is a great set of second-tier baddies; the dialog, mood, and constant interplay between philosophies of meaning vs nihilism.

3. Showdown in Little Tokyo

Kenner, Johnny, and witty banter; all actions scenes are examples of how combat should roll!

4. Aliens 2

All the marines are PCs; Witty banter and smartass cracks between the marines; Ripley is just a weenie NPC specialist. A smart monster that can both outthink and outfight its enemies.

5. Akira

The Colonel and Kaneda are great PCs; Tetsuo is a wicked first-tier Baddy! Great examples of HiBRiD telekinetic abilities; great example of how just a handful of characters that are not even on the "same side" can have huge impacts on the world around them.

6. Sahara

All the characters and supporting characters are exemplary PCs; witty banter and a non-mushy modern love story; Ite' flows like water in this movie! The Yves Massard and General Kazim are great tier-one baddies.

7. Tron: Legacy

The emotional intensity of the last 5 minutes; The redemption of Rinzler/Tron by his own choice; The movement on the grid (characters are always running, flipping, freerunning, and fully committing to every physical athletic move they make; jumps from 20 to 50 meters up are commonplace; highly stylized and ritualized melee combat; great example of every man determining his own destiny.

8. Army of Darkness

Ash is a great high-heroic level PC; Examples of the cinematic aspects

9. Serenity

 All of the characters on board Serenity are great PCs; the mix of genre and cultures into an amalgam free of prejudices against people; the eternal of struggle of the heroes against a rigid society with no place for those of free spirit; a great example of a low Ite' campaign.

10. The Mummy (and The Mummy Returns)

All the characters are exemplary PCs; The mummy is a classic first-tier Baddy with a number of great second-tier baddies; action scenes are standard HiBRiD; a good amount of Ite' flows as well.

Multitudes and Attitude

There are multitudes of games in the world...

There are multitudes of role-playing games that make a subset of those games...

There are multitudes of pen-and-paper-tabletop role-playing games that make up a subset of those role playing games... 

There are multitudes of these pen-and-paper-tabletop role-playing games that use a twenty-sided die to determine action resolution...

And there are multitudes of game-designing hackers trying to independently publish their games in pursuit of  their own ideas of how those games should be played...

HiBRiD, alas, is one of many. It is vanilla, it is simple, it is old school. Its mechanics have been rehashed over and over, system after system, decade after decade. So why pursue it?

Because the simple mechanics are just a framework for HiBRiD's real purpose. To frame the attitude of the heroes as I imagine them, to set up the situations that I imagine make heroes great. To share my view of games and life and heroism and their interaction.

On Schedule, Strength, and Size

Schedule

Well, I have all three methods of character creation prose roughed out and organized. November will bring the final draft and the three character creation examples. Dezember should bring us the final layout of the prose for both the methods and the examples.

Strength

While roughing out the chapter, I found myself musing on character strength and how in a similar manner that damage capacity in the game is conceptualized, so is a character's strength.

In HiBRiD, a character's strength (STR) attribute determines a definite amount of mass the character can maneuver or chuck about with no effort whatsoever. It also determines the maximum amount a character can lift without having to make a task roll.

STR also determines the amount of damage a character can take before he dies, the amount of damage a character can take before having a limb disabled, and the amount of damage a character can take before an appendage is severed completely off. It represents an absolute: it is a concrete abstraction of the amount of force required to disrupt the functioning of a hero. A character may be large or small, but the STR attribute represents a concept beyond a number of newtons of force a character can generate.

Finally, STR partially determines the amount of damage the character inflicts with hand held or thrown weapons in combat. This is a pretty cut and dried use as well.

While all of these represent absolute values, the STR attribute does not define the absolute maximum a character  a character is able ever to generate; that is what heroism, player creativity, and Ite' are all for. A STR vs STR opposed task roll rarely ever occurs, because so many times, a character's will, or some skill rationalized by the player come into play. Even in the most obvious example, an arm wrestling contest, the question of who wins is not so simple as who is stronger. Do the two wrestlers need to save energy until later? Is one of them cheating? Does one of the characters have more experience and know how long to wait before surging for the final push of that opponent's wrist to the table?

Size

In addition to Ite', another unique facet to HiBRiD is the requirement of the player to determine his character's height and weight. This came about after years of players describing their characters typically describing their characters in ways such as "big as an Austrian bodybuilder" but not having any idea of the mass of such a character. This became important, because with the fluid looseness of the rules and the lack of a myriad of modifiers like in so many other games, the mass of a character in kilograms creates an easy-to-grasp-onto concept when quickly trying to determine rough and tumble guidelines on the fly during action scenes, when determining whether ropes break, pressure pads go off, the swing of a dragon's tail slams someone against a wall, et cetera.

Strength and Size

Putting these two things together further exemplifies the HiBRiD philosophy. STR and character mass are related, but not in the way you might think.

In HiBRiD, a character may be of any mass and height and have any strength; there are no limitations and no relationship between the two in this regard. A skinny-as-a-rail, 150-cm-tall lightweight may be as strong as a professional bodybuilder, no problem.

The time when STR and mass are considered important only occurs whenever a character of a given strength wishes to affect a target character of a given mass. The STR attribute quickly lets the player and director instantly know how easy it is to push, unbalance, throw, or fling about a target like a rag doll without requiring a task roll to do so; the task roll is simply used to determine how or where you want the target to land.

Thus, the attribute stays true to the philosophy of HiBRiD...Use stats only when necessary as absolute parameters, but never as absolute boundaries. Ite', after all, has a way of making all things possible....

Behind Again!

By the end of September, I had hoped to have been finished with the character creation section of Chapter One.

As I wrote the prose out, however, it prompted me to reorganize the character sheet to make it easier to follow along with the prose of the book. Now that the character sheet is complete, the text and images flow well, and...I am now behind by a month.

Probably the one bright point in this is that I am still solid in my vision, progress is still moving forward, and I have not set it aside or changed anything.

I will fire my rifle three times, turn, and run.

The Spirit of Ite' Elucidated

The true heart and soul of the HiBRiD game stems from its use of a novel mechanic called Ite'. While many games have some sort of mechanic for fudging rolls or bending the rules, the Ite' mechanic represents not just "another part of the system" but the defining game mechanic that really separates HiBRiD characters and players characters from the rest.

But it didn't start out that way.

Ite' evolved from the simple, tacked-on, home-brewed luck point system used to fudge die rolls that I had designed for my original role-playing campaign. Each character possessed a randomly determined number of luck points (by rolling 3d6) which the player could spend to modify any d20 die task roll on a one-for-one basis. Each time a character leveled up, the player was allowed to roll again to replenish the character's luck points, but could never replenish more than the original number pool from character creation.

Despite its lack of beauty, I really liked the system because it resonated with my own sensibilities a number of ways. It reflected the concept of the hero in charge of his own destiny. It reflected the truth that luck would only get one so far. It reflected the fact that as one gains more experience in life and learns from his mistakes, he learns to capitalize on opportunities no matter how small. It was optimistic realism at its finest.

But it was slow. It didn't really flow with the hodge-podge amalgam of mechanics of our home-brew game. It too readily enabled all too often inter-party conflicts. While the essence, intent, and purpose of it was an integral and fun part of our gaming, it remained yet another clodgy, jury-rigged, mismatched, tacked-m system.

When I sat down to write HiBRiD v1.0 in 1994, I had originally endeavored to write an original, more uniform, more balanced game system. Through the playtesting, I found myself retooling, simplifying, blending, or even shredding rules left and right, resulting in a very lean rule set, reflecting a more rules-light approach toward gaming in general. When HiBRiD v2.0 emerged from the smoke and rubble in 1998, I looked back and realized that throughout my exhaustive attempts to design and redesign game mechanics, the one thing that never once changed was my desire to provide players a balanced and exciting way to control their character's own destiny without mitigating the element of randomness that makes role-playing games so great. The system I had devised so clearly and perfectly reflected the control over destiny I was looking for that I shredded the term luck and coined the term Ite'. (A story I may capitulate at a later date, should anyone so request it).

Unfortunately, though I found it easy to describe how to use the mechanic in game play on a mechanical level, when it came to articulating the spirit of the mechanic in the game book in a way to foster the fast-paced, bold, and decisive action I was hoping to achieve, I was at a loss. In the interest of moving along to other parts of the book, I took the easy way out by cursorily outlining how Ite' could be used to heal a character and "whitewashing" all the other ways to use it by using such vague terms as "acting heroically" and "creating unlikely events". The resulting prose failed to excite me when I wrote it, failed to excite me when I read it, and absolutely failed to communicate the real fun and spirit I wanted to capture when a player read the game book. Since I had so many other things to attend to at the time, however, the lackluster prose languished.

Until just today.

While I was driving to work and trying to plan the timetable for the  layout of the next chapter, I was painfully reminded of the slipshod text that awaited me. But rather than simply cringing and accepting the abysmally lackluster prose, something in my spirit attacked it without my conscious approval. As a result, I pretty much classified the use of Ite' into just a few, exciting options in a flurry of brainstorm steeped thought.

Without further adieu, here are the results of that brainstorm:

Option One: Cut Scene Healing

Ite' can be used to heal a character. In any scene a character is reduced to 0 points of STUN, he may spend a point of Ite' to bring his STUN up to full next round, when the "camera" is back on the character.

 

Option Two: Reach Into The Magician's  Hat

Ite' can be used to pull an unforseen object from seemingly nowhere, so long as it is plausible, fits the genre of the game, and can be explained quickly and extemporaneously by the player. e.g. "...darn it, the bad guys are coming...oh, look, a point of Ite' says that some guy left his car here on the street running while he went in to get his wallet...". Of course, the level of power and unlikeliness of the object can be increased by spending additional points of Ite' by all the members at the table workign together...

Option Three: Kick It Up or Down A Notch

For each point of Ite' he spends, a player can increase the level of success of a task roll.of any task he attempts, or he can affect the task roll of an opponent that would affect him by one. e.g if an opponent hits the character with Crit Success, the player can "Kick it down a notch" from instant gruesome death to standard damage, or convert a task roll from a Success to a Crit Success.

Option Four: Make It Happen

Each point of Ite' can be used to have a specific unlikely event occur. While a point of Ite' can't directly be used to affect an occurrence or event the director describes, it can be used create an event that might interfere or interact with the event the director describes. e.g. "Yes, I realize that the crazed zombie cable guy is about to run me down in his work truck and pin me against the alley wall, but this point Ite' says that a garbage truck just happened to pull out from the alleyway and slide right between me and his pickup truck...".

Whew...well, hopefully you all get the idea...and an inkling of what makes a HiBRiD game a HiBRiD game...

Implementing Design

Designing a book is more difficult than many would imagine.  I'm not meowing; it really is.

Though the prose for the game have been finished for quite a while, I struggled a long time with where to begin. Who is the audience and what is the reading level of that audience? Should it be written in an informal or informal style? Should it be in the first or third person? Will it have an academic, textbook, or flowery flavor to the prose? Will there be footnotes or end notes? A glossary? An index?

And once I had completed that task, I struggled with graphic design decisions: what will be the color scheme? black and white? Tricolor? What weight and type of paper? How is the artwork to be layed out? Typeface? How many and how will the tables look? Standard A4, comic book, or some other novelty page size? Over the years, I have started and stopped layouts because they just didn't "feel right". The designs and plans I had made, cancelled, and remade...that I had jotted down and thrown in hanging folders...that I had implemented and finished 10+, 20+ or even 40+ pages of and placed in loose leaf binders that have piled up in my spare room...all have shaken free of their chaff and the wheat within has been rushing to the forefront of my thoughts.

Something changed when I started the HiBRiD Basic character sheet; and now that I have finished it, I found words and answers to all of my design questions drawn from within me. I have reached my Zen. I have finally rediscovered my muse.

HiBRiD was meant to be what I wanted a role playing game to be and my attempt to share it with the world. Nothing more. And with that, I am diving forward into Book One with not an inkling of doubt.. About anything.

GenCon 2011 Musings

Well, I just got back From Gen Con Indy 2011.

We had four really great sessions with all levels of familiarity with HiBRiD itself, from returning players with several sessions under their belts, to players familiar with free-form games but not HiBRiD, to players used to more structured games. As always, I came back with a number of takeaway pearls that will go into development of the game rules as well as for the Gen Con 2013 events (for which I have already begun preparing!...the players I met this year were all very inspiring!)

Takeaway 1: The Initiative System

As many of you know, I have always struggled to use the standard task roll (d20+Modifier+Ite' mechanic) for the initiative system.

I originally wanted there to be the same success levels as any task roll; you made your roll, compared it to a set DR (1=Crit Fail, 10<=Fail, 10+=Success, Nat 20=Crit Success). While it nicely integrated with the mechanics, the method seemed too arbitrary and players had a hard time using it; it was too slow.

I then settled on simply making the task roll and going from highest to lowest. While more intuitive and quicker, calling initiative was a bit clunky for the director ("OK...Nat 20's anyone?... O.K. now who got higher than 20? 15?, 17? oh, OK, let's count down...").

With running Gen Con this year, with 12 players at the table for almost all the games, I stumbled on something simpler, faster, and more elegant. Now, all players make their task roll along with the director at the beginning of the action scene. The director's result becomes the effective DR for the roll. Action then proceeds in three phases:

1. Before the bad guys
2. With the bad guys
3. After the bad guys.

I had kind of been doing it all along, but now it has been formalized and will written into the HiBRiD Basic Rules;

Takeaway 2: Game Session Player Limits

One thing I noticed this year is that a lot of gamers go to an event in groups of 3 or 4. As a result, a 12-person event can often turn into three sub-groups of players participating in side conversations. While I used to think it was because of my failure to direct the game fast enough, with so many 12 player games, it was evident that the din of the ball rooms, the two-circular-table-setup, and the excitement of the con makes concentration on events (no matter how heroic or macho) very difficult. To remedy this, instead of running four 12-player events, I may be considering five 8-player events but will accept extras. If anyone has any feedback, feel free to let me know, but as of now, I will probably be running these events at
the following times

0800 on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday
1400 on Thursday, and Saturday.

Takeaway 3: Single Genre Gen Con Events: Eighties Action Heroes

With the great success of the con this year, I will be removing all Ara Knochen pregenerated player characters and expanding to include more characters from the eighties and nineties including Samuel L Jackson, Patrick Swayze, Mr. T, Jason Statham, Michael Biehn, Vin Diesel, and Christian Slater. I am also considering adding John Travolta and Nicholas Cage.

Oh, and for those of you failthful con goers, a little preview hint:  the current working title for the game in 2013 will be Con Air Passenger 57 in Canyonside...though that may change if I am inspired by a different movie within the next two years.

Basic and Advanced HiBRiD

As an homage to old school gaming and to make publishing the core rules quick once Gen Con is over, I will be releasing the HiBRiD rules in three volumes.

The first Ara Knochen book currently with the working title of Ara Knochen: Book One will be a rules light version, referred to as "HiBRiD Basic". It will contain:

• Character creation rules that allow the creation of a character in 10 minutes or less.
• A description of both the basic core game mechanic as well as how to direct the action
• A description all the available supernatural and inexplicable standard character powers (referred to in the rules as Aspects)
• An introduction to the campaign setting, including twenty or so character templates that represent the archetypal heroes of the setting.

The second book will contain the more complete HiBRiD rules and will be referred to as HiBRiD Advanced. These rules will be modular such that they may be swapped out with the HiBRiD Basic rules to customize the level of complexity for each gaming group. Some of the additions in this supplement will include:

• A gamut of new playtested aspects as well as a system for designing custom aspects.
• An expansion of the character creation system that allows for more in depth characters. This expansion will not only redefine the original twenty or so templates but add fifteen or twenty more.
• A Director Section for using the HiBRiD rules for other genres or game settings beyond Ara Knochen.

The third book will be the Ara Knochen gazetteer, a book describing the common denizens and hazards of Namenlos Welt as well as more in depth political, historical, technological, and social details.

Once these three books are complete, I don't see much more to do. It'll probably take so long that I should be dead by then however, so it probably won't matter that much. (That is a joke people...laugh!!!)

HiBRiD Character Generator

In true HiBRiD spirit, I have begun another creative project: The HIBRiD character generator program.

It will be written in the Ruby programming language using the Rails framework and allow you to store, update, and print out character sheets for your characters.


The first module has already been written: an aging module. It takes your character's stats and age then creates an "character aging profile" for the Director. This aging profile tells what age and month your character loses each point from his stats until he dies. It then takes the age of your character and applies all the penalties determined by his aging profile to his stats.

Why such an elaborate function? Because in the Advanced HiBRiD Rules, the number of skills a character receives depends on two stats: his age and his INTL attribute. The algorithm prevents everyone from running 122 year old characters just to jack up their character's skill repertoire or action levels.

In any case, the app is sitting on github as we speak, waiting for me to find the time to do some more work on it..

A New Beginning

Well, yet another blog. Yes, they are passe'. Yes, everyone has them...had them. Yes, everyone else is "tweeting" or "facebooking". But nevertheless, this blog is about what is going on with and behind the scenes of the HiBRiD role playing game.

First, HiBRiD, isn't even really the newest or greatest thing since sliced bread. While there are  mechanics, it is, at its core, simply a treatise on how I feel a tabletop role playing game should be played and run.

Second, while finished, remains in pieces. It took forever to write the prose, forever to decide on a color scheme and formatting for the print version, forever to settle on the first feature freeze.

Third, the game represents my odyssey. From failing out of college, to working at McDonalds, to finishing up my bachelor's degree, to powering through pharmacy school, the game has always been with me, a canvas for ideas to be remembered and played with at my own leisure. A way to manifest the "what ifs" that are constantly bouncing about in my mind.