Entering Layout and Convention Season
about 2 months ago
– Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 12:46:54 PM
Kickstarter has eaten two drafts of this post so this will be brief:
There was no update last month. This was because A) I had an unexpected dental surgery that went very poorly and B) I have a lot of travel in the last three months of this year. Of the last twelve weeks, I'm going to be spending about half of them away from home.
Most of this is convention season! I've got to travel for work and to pay the bills. This also includes prepping for and following up from convention season, so there's less time to work on the book. I am also now down my laptop, and so am restricted in my ability to work while away from home.
I was hoping to have this update be 'The Combat chapter is off to the editor' update but because of the aforementioned we're not quite at that point yet. The mechanics are all there, the user-friendliness is not.
Good News
Chapter 0 (Intro) and Chapter 2 (Core Rules) are through layout. They'll be getting some spot art later in the development cycle but they are ready to go. With some luck, other chapters will be joining them shortly.
Bad News
A full accounting of bad news will wait until the project is shipped and I put together a retrospective. The only thing I will note here is that my laptop died while traveling and it is unlikely that many, or any, of my files will be recoverable. Everything is backed up, and all the most crucial files had already been transferred to my desktop after the move, but many of those backups are a pain in the ass to work with.
This is eventually going to slow down getting the book through layout, but for now it's just really annoying. It means that I can't get meaningful work done while traveling, so convention season is going to be less productive than hoped.
Next Steps
The Combat Chapter should be going to the editor by the end of the month. After that, there'll be some radio silence until a a substantial update in January, and I hope to include the core rules and revised pregens in manuscript form with that update.
The Final Overhaul Part Three: Narrative Phase and Misery
4 months ago
– Wed, Sep 04, 2024 at 06:16:44 PM
The Kickstarter's been done for a year and I've been workshopping versions of Guns Blazing's narrative phase for something like three.
And I still hate all of them.
Authorial Intent
Guns Blazing isn't meant to be an artistic magnus opus. It is, to be perfectly frank, the setting I had that A) paired well with the system I wanted to design and B) people were willing to pay for.
But, unfortunately, I do actually have an artistic statement to make with the game and, more specifically, with its Narrative Phase.
Guns Blazing should be a game where murdering a problem is simple and straightforward and even minor political progress is a nightmarish tangle of clashing personalities and systems outside of your control. Where the world is just bigger than you and you control less than you think even if you wrestle yourself into leadership of an international organization.
And so far none of them have done that. And I'm not really willing to put this game out without that basic building block at least functional. Or if not functional, then at least a real, honest swing for the fences.
The Correct Solution
Now, my attempts so far weren't all bad. One was basically just Blades in the Dark, and another was basically just Flying Circus. And those are incredible games with great frameworks for running an organization that do a solid chunk of what I want.
I could lightly adapt it for Ahadi's dicepool system and I'd home free. Silo in the bits of Flying Circus that work better, call it a day. It'd probably even be a good game!
Unfortunately, they're built for very different assumptions about player agency and control. Blades and Flying Circus are both games where the default assumption is that you're running an organization. Your employees might go on strike in Flying Circus, they might flip in Blades, but they are broadly assumed to be under your management.
They aren't expected to go off, do their own heist, and kill a friend of yours in the process. Or violently schism and start feeding people to an aquatic embodiment of political infighting. Or change the organization in unpredictable and occasionally negative ways.
And even that's solvable! I could make fairly minimal changes to a blades/FC fusion and call it good enough.
And I don't want to do it, which is more of an indictment of me than anything else at this point. I'd prefer Guns Blazing be something wholly new, for the narrative phase to be as novel as combat.
But, ultimately, you've all paid for a product that exists rather than something that matches the exact contours of my brainworms. And I've spent a year failing to make something I'm really happy with.
So we get my solution, which isn't quite the easy, good, and quick mashup but has roots in both games and hopefully does something interesting with it.
Guns Blazing: The Narrative Phase
"-so if you are ever in a revolutionary underground movement that's seeking to overthrow the state and institute a new form of government, keep an eye out for the weird quiet kid who just hangs around doing chores. Shoot that guy pretty quick, okay." - Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards, on Nicolas Ceausescu
The central conceit of Guns Blazing's narrative phase is this: The world is changing at scales impossible for single humans to fathom and no-one is in control of it. The grand organizations that change the world have a life of their own and even those nominally in charge of them never have as much control as they'd like. Everything has unforeseen consequences and bizarre knock-on effects and anyone who claims to be fully in control is incorrect or lying.
And into that, you are thrust: A few glorified apes with particularly dangerous sticks.
The narrative phase revolves around Organizations, Clocks, and Downtime Actions.
Downtime Actions
Combat is where characters in Guns Blazing are powerful, but its effects are tactical. Failure is death, but success just means you're incremented a casualty statistic and forced someone to try again later.
If you want to accomplish things, or just want to maintain your ability to fight the enemy, you have to take downtime and, ideally, actions in that downtime.
All downtime actions cost Time. Once all characters pick a downtime action or opt not to bother, the GM picks a downtime clock (See below) and ticks it, and all the actions resolve. As such, you are always on a race against the clock.
And that's a big deal, because a lot of basic functions require downtime. Healing injuries? Downtime action. Recovering Stress? Downtime action. Investigating? Downtime. Replenishing ammo? Downtime. Travel? Downtime.
Additionally, many downtime actions are gated behind the support of an organization, or get better if an organization supports them. Organizations can provide you guns and ammunition, help you hide, provide you cash, treat your wounds, and can even help you blow off stress without consequence.
But they're only willing to do this if they're happy with you. You can work around that, but it's always going to be at a cost
And if you want to score big wins, want to win independence or end a systemic injustice or better society rather than wreck some shit, you need organizations. More on that later
Clocks
Clocks work like you'd expect from Forged in the Dark games. The main divergences are:
- Clocks might be designated as Downtime clocks, which measure some longer term event and only tick as a cost of Downtime actions.
- You are expected to always have at least one Downtime clock on the field.
Organizations
Everything, from nations to corporations to resistance groups to non-hierarchical communes to your local card game group, is an organization. Each Organization is made up of smaller Organizations until you get to individual people.
(You can, perhaps, make a philosophical argument for each person being made up of organizations within their psyche but I gave up on the overt disco elysium references very early in development)
Each organization has a scope, constituency, structure, ideology, and resources. Constituency, Structure, Ideology, and Resources are simple, keyworded descriptions of who the organization serves, how it works, what it wants, and what it has. Scope is a stat that determines how widespread an organization is, ranging from 0 ('less than a dozen people') to 6 ('Global').
Higher Scope makes it easier for organizations to do things and harder to meaningfully effect them, but also makes them clumsier. They're more likely to invoke unintended consequences when they do things, and it tends to take longer for them to take action. Mechanically, it increases the Complication rating of actions taken by or with the help of that organization, makes them capable of taking action on larger scales, and provides hefty bonuses to actions at smaller scales.
The keywords associated with Constituency, Ideology, Structure, and Resources (Theoretically there's a cool acronym here, and I'll post an update with it once I come up with one. RISC, maybe?) are simpler. They just tell you what the org can and will do, as well as what it likes and the consequences of basically everything it does.
That last bit deserves explanation. And gets us into that Robert Evans quote!
Even if you work your way into an organization and take over it, you're not actually controlling it like a 4x strategy game. You're using the mechanisms of that organization to do things and the people in that organization will try to accomplish your goals with the tools available to them.
If you tell a [Criminal], [Corrupt] organization to do basically anything they are going to take bribes and break legs. If you tell an [Fractious] [Bureaucratic] organization to do the exact same thing and get the exact same roll, you're going to get a lot of office infighting and regulation.
Guns Blazing, as the name implies, deals with a lot of violent, iconoclastic organizations with a vested interest in serious changes to the social order. And to enact large scale reforms, you need big organizations that ramp up the Complication rating of doing stuff.
So if you fuck up, or you trust the wrong people, or you keep backing the helpful, quiet guy who backs your violence without question but doesn't seem to have much in the way of actual ideology...
Well, things can get very bad very quickly.
And if you refuse to play ball with any of the imperfect, clumsy factions that have a shot of improving things, you can find yourself with no-one willing to help you actually accomplish anything.
July Update: Wheels Keep Rolling
5 months ago
– Fri, Jul 26, 2024 at 05:29:39 AM
Bad News
Testing took longer than expected. It's been hard to get enough people online at once, The Captain got exposed as non-functional and several rules needed simplifying or re-wording for ease of play.
As such, we're now about two to three weeks behind schedule. I was hoping to be testing CharGen at this point and I'm still tweaking combat rules and playbooks. I've opted to call this Done for now, though the Engineer may be tweaked in the future.
Good News
Combat now functions in the way I want it to. The Introduction is edited and off at layout, and we've got some great new art.
Here's the Chapter 0 header art from Raya Sarkar and the Chapter 3 header art from T Shirley!
Next Steps
I'm aiming to have the character creation chapter and a subsection of Perks released within a week or so to test character creation. With a little luck, the Combat chapter will be heading to the editor and the Core Rules will be headed to layout within that timeframe.
The Final Overhaul Part Two: Combat
8 months ago
– Thu, May 23, 2024 at 09:58:49 PM
Changing the core rules meant changing combat. Fortunately, combat had less of a problem than the core system. Unfortunately, the changes I have to make are pretty wide-raning.
Turn Order
Something I really liked about the original combat system was that it had a structured version of a storygame's combat resolution. Combat was 'players do things, enemies try to interrupt' in a fairly naturalistic way with Stamina as both a restraint and a way for less pro-active players to make sure they go to do stuff.
But.
It was real clunky. At no point did it get the smooth back-and-forth I was hoping for, it had a hell of a learning curve, and it never clicked in the way I wanted it to.
As such, the current initiative system will be simplified slightly and made an optional initiative replacement.
The new turn order system is a fairly traditional alternating activation system, albeit one that keeps the Stamina and Reaction mechanics.
Each round, players and enemies alternate taking turns.
During a player turn, you spend stamina to take actions. You can take as many actions as you can afford with Stamina. When it isn't your turn, you can spend less stamina for reactions. Reactions are more limited than actions, and are generally strained. Each player gets one turn per round.
During an enemy turn, the enemy takes a number of actions determined by their statblock. Enemies have unlimited reactions, but don't react to other enemies unless they have abilities that allow it.
This is functionally the same as the previous system, except that you have to take all of your Actions at the same time. It forces characters to be more considerate about where they're ending their turn and how active they want to be on a given round, and generally takes flexibility from player characters.
Attacks
So the old purchase system is gone, and while that's pretty small for the narrative phase it's an enormous change for combat. The basic structure of how an attack worked was based on it, using purchases to load every action up with choices.
Now, that's all much simpler. Every combat action has two effects, one if it Succeeds, one if you cancel the Complication.
For example, Dodging lets you move half your speed on success and half if you cancel the complication rating. It's an opposed action, so the difficulty rating is always the opponent's role (0 if unopposed), and the complication rating starts at 2.
Attacks are a bit more complicated. Most of the old effects from an attack have been moved to the weapon statline. When you declare an attack, you choose one effect from your weapon or perks to inflict on a success. The Complication rating is based on your weapon's damage and your target's armor and lets you Wound them.
This means that an Attack succeeds if it manipulates the battlefield in your favor, but the complication in any violence is that whoever you are trying to kill isn't dead yet.
In practice, allies and enemies should be roughly as survivable as they were before, but you should be a bit less likely to instantly kill foes in cover.
As a change from before, when attacking multiple enemies with different dice pools, you use the lowest pool against everyone. Differential attack pools are an optional rule, but it's enough of a pause in play that rolling once seems preferable.
Conditions
Conditions have been overhauled to be more interactive and comply with the new bonus/penalty schema. The most important ones are Shock and Suppression.
Shock replaces the old Shaken mechanic. If you get Shock and already have it, you take a Wound and Shock clears. It covers near misses and minor injuries in a simpler manner than Shaken did.
Suppression has been adjusted slightly. Instead of clearing all of it with Rally, you clear an amount equal to the successes on the Rally action and you get to clear some at the start of your turn. However, you now gain Suppression much more quickly, especially with automatic weapons on the field.
Afflicted is a catch-all for effects like poison, radiation, terrible burns, and other effects that debilitate and injure. It gives a penalty to actions and, if the stacks are ever greater than your Authority at the start of your turn, give you Shock and reduces itself. It has replaced Irradiated.
Exposed is no longer a condition and is now a state of cover.
Gear
All weapon kits have different traits and a list of conditions and effects they can apply with successful attacks. They also now have a damage stat, while ammo tokens have been moved to the Properties section.
Mostly, they haven't changed much.
Playtesting
I'm starting signups for the final round of playtests! These'll be running through June. You can sign up here.
The (Final???) Overhaul Part One: Core Rules
9 months ago
– Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 03:00:49 PM
So, to my embarassment, the rules have been overhauled one last time. Let's talk about the problem, then what I did about it.
It's Too Easy
Since the game started development a fairly constant issue has been that checks and combat has been too easy. The game's core system assumes trade-offs, that you're picking whether you want to succeed or avoid consequence, rationing spare successes for precious advantages. In practice, players were just...aggressively succeeding at most rolls without the need for such tradeoffs.
Due to how Strain worked, it was too punishing to deploy often outside of combat, and weighted too heavily towards skilled parties inside of combat. Players could reliably just win gunfights by standing in the open (or in cover) and opening fire in the reactive turn, which wasn't ideal.
This made some bonuses inconsequential, and anything that inflicted penalties on a foe absolutely ruinous. Speed Kills made Vanguards nearly untouchable to most foes, for example, and plenty of characters didn't bother pursuing Mastery since they could reasonably expect to bulldoze most checks without it.
It's Too Complicated
The structure of rolls made them difficult to explain. Individual checks could have helpful little flowcharts made for them and once you got what they were going for it wasn't too bad, but people needed to stop and ask for clarification far too often and, uh, the successful case was way more mental overhead than you should be asked for in a new system.
This was especially noticeable in combat: Players often got the flow of combat right immediately, and then blanked on how shooting a gun worked or when they should dodge instead of shoot.
While the purchase mechanic was cool, it wasn't justifying itself in mental overload and in the time it added to every interaction with the rules.
Pursuing a Solution
So any solution had to do a couple of things:
- It had to make the game simpler
- It had to make reactive play in combat more threatening, ideally in ways that make weak opponents more dangerous
- It had to make the game faster
- It needed to reduce successes across the board, but only by a couple per roll, and it shouldn't affect d10s too badly
- It still needed to do all the cool stuff I wanted the Ahadi engine to be able to do
The Change
The change was surprisingly simple:
- D6s are now classified as Trait Die, d10s are now Skill Die. This has no mechanical effect, but all bonuses now provide Trait Die and are harshly capped.
- Dice now succeed on 5s instead of 4s.
- Strain and Mastery now manipulate successes on dice rather than changing target numbers.
- Purchasing has been simplified down to two factors associated with each check: Difficulty and Complication.
Making all checks a little harder is a negligible drop to Skill Die, but a 33% decrease in chance-to-succeed per Trait Die and a 25% decrease in successes generated. As most dice are Trait Die, this significantly cuts the expected successes in any given die pool without reducing the maximum result.
Strain and Mastery now upgrade/downgrade die results, both rewarding having additional Skill Dice. Strain downgrades two Trait Dice or one Skill Die, Mastery upgrades two Skill Dice or one Trait Die. So characters with high Skill are more likely to lose one success to strain or gain two from Mastery, and ones with less get the opposite.
Instead of a bespoke list of Purchases, all checks now have a Difficulty Rating and a Complication Rating. You use your successes to meet these, and can choose to meet one or the other if you don't have enough successes to do both. The intent of the original rule is preserved, but it's much easier to explain "Difficulty 0, Complication 3" than it is to list off a set of potential negative outcomes to purchase away.
On the downside, I now have to reformat every check and rework all the guns.
I'm still in the process of implementing this change, and while I think this is the last overhaul of the core system likely to occur, it's very possible that things will change after playtesting.
Playtesting
I'm planning on doing some drop-in, drop-out playtesting throughout May and June while I get the game finished. There will be official recruitment posts on the discord, but I'll put some sort of sign up form here when the time comes. If you want in on what's hopefully the last phase of major Guns Blazing revisions, keep an eye out for it!
