Uncontrollable Mutation

I’m a big fan of the basic idea of super-powers in one form or another — it can make a great play mechanic in a lot of settings, and provides a lot of interesting opportunities. I’ve made several uses of White Wolf’s Aberrant RPG for these types of games (the original d10 version, not the d20 edition they printed later), and with a few modifications (and an entirely new setting) it works really, really well. But there’s one thing in the base Aberrant setting/system I’ve always really liked that I’ve never had the opportunity to properly explore: eruptions.

For the uninitiated, Aberrant is a X-Men style super-hero setting, where some humans have experienced a miraculous mutation that gives them their powers. The initial onset of the mutation is a violent presentation of those abilities, normally preceded by a week of migraines and then triggered by a stressful event, called an eruption. It a very cool basic idea, which suggests that the character’s powers are normally selected based on their personality, and the nature of those events.

Project: Little Robo Climber Update (Project Goals)

Hey readers! I was thinking about today’s post and decided that I needed to talk a little more about the Little Robo Climber project and talk a little more about what I’m doing with it an why. Unfortunately, some more sudden deadlines arose, so I haven’t been able to work on this project much in the last little while, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead.

So what’s happened so far?

Randomness 3

Today’s almost over! Somewhere between some graphic design work and some programming, I almost forgot to write a post for today!

So I’ve talked about different methods of randomness, here and here, and gone over some of their strengths and weaknesses. But we come back to the ‘why’ of random. Why would you want to use randomness in a game?

Like I mentioned in my first post on the topic; randomness can influence the feeling of your game a lot, and games can be ultimately measured on a scale between ‘random’ and ‘deterministic’; whether it’s luck or the player that control the game’s outcome. Very rarely is any game truly random, but there are a number of purely deterministic ones. Determining where on this scale your game lies is a vital decision in the design process.

So why do we use random, and more importantly — where?

Randomness 2

So, in the last Randomness post I went over the consistency of dice and the closed system of cards. There’s more to say about both of them, but I’ll address those some other time.

Today, I want to talk about a few more kinds of randomness: pseudo random number generation and pseudo random determination.

Randomness 1

It’s Friday! Let’s talk about randomness; this is a lengthy topic, so I’ll be breaking it up in to a number of posts.

A lot of games incorporate ‘randomness’, unpredictability in order to make the efforts of the players innately risky. Games can often be measured on a spectrum as to how random they are, where on one end winning and losing is entirely unpredictable, and on the other end all elements are completely predictable and deliberate. Different levels of randomness can invoke different sensations in players, and can be very important for creating the right vibe for the game.

There’s a lot of methods used for creating randomness. Lots of games will use multiple methods for randomness in some regard in order to influence various portions of the game.