From Penny-Arcade

I am doing a bad thing here stealing words from another man but I found the following text, from today's Penny-Arcade, incredibly inspiring:

The high point of the show for my Mom was watching "Of Dice and Men" the first night. Playing host to dramatic theatre is not, strictly speaking, in the PAX charter. We talked about moving parts on Wednesday, but if you want to talk about some moving-ass parts, a stage performance constitutes an authentic whirligig. It takes some fucking balls to put on a show anywhere, let alone in a converted convention room. Something special must have happened in there, though, because people wanted to talk about it for the remainder of the show.

My mother has never entirely understood roleplaying. I don't intend to belabor the point, but when I was a young man it was the position of our church that Dungeons & Dragons held within it the clustered seeds of apostasy. She was so bewildered by what she had seen during Of Dice and Men that she made it a point to attend our D&D Live panel, where her son and his friends played this mysterious game on stage. The devil did show up, true, and we did go to hell, just as the clergy had suggested we might. Except in the actual version of events, as has happened so many times, we stood against the King of Lies at the very gates of his damned realm and emerged triumphant.

My mother came up to me after the panel was over, saying, "I'm sorry, Jerry. I'm sorry." She wiped the corner of her left eye with her thumb. "They told me it was something else."

Penny-Arcade changes lives in a very real sense. I was motivated to finally seek help and go on medication for anxiety after learning both creaters were actively using Lexapro. Hearing that someone could affect their own mother through their passion for games in such a deeply personal way really touched me.

More Ideas for Games that Won't Get Made

In The Gadget, you play as "The Gadget," a superhero cleaning up the streets in a world where traditional law enforcement has been banned in favor of "metas," men and woman with superpowers reporting to a government agency. People without powers are strictly forbidden from fighting crime, so there's no Iron Man or Batman at work in this world.

As The Gadget, you turn in criminals for cash which you use to upgrade your gear and you fight for XP which you can use to train in the standard attributes (fighting skill, strength, intelligence, endurance, speed).

Your gear is upgraded along many tiers in pseudo-scientific disciplines, such as Explosives (traps and bombs), Chemistry (gases and poisons), Electricity (ranged attacks and electrical control), Ballistics (guns and knives), and Pneumatics (exoskeletons and other devices like a grappling gun), which constitutes the main focus of the game.

The Gadget plays like a sandbox game, so you're free to build up a network of contacts and informants who give you missions once you do certain favors for them. There'd also be a small investigative component, enough to satisfy gamers who like solving puzzles but not enough to detract from the action-oriented flow of the game. A multiplayer mode is unlocked after you accomplish certain objectives, and it allows you to build up a character in advance and take on people with similar interests (eg, people who mostly play king of the hill or only play deathmatch) and similar skill levels (time played and win/loss records).

The story revolves around the Gadget making the streets a safer place first by cracking down on protection rackets and other criminals, then by addressing white-collar crime that traditional supers aren't equipped to handle, taking care of corruption in the metas, cracking a serial murder case, and finally facing off with a dangerous mutant which evolves in response to the gadgets you create.

Tarantino would be proud

I write violent adventures. I try my best to treat combat like a puzzle. This is partially because I'm invigorated by tactical exercises and partially because that's what my friends were used to - we all wanted violent, fun adventures because we're all action movie fans.

But how much is too much? And how much does authorial intent inform the level of violence in an adventure? For instance, I wrote an adventure that is one combat encounter stacked on top of another, repeated until the end. I wrote it to be unrelentingly violent, but I wonder if it was too much.

Has anyone got experience with ultraviolent adventures out there?

Pills Here!

I had a thought for a Savage Left 4 Dead game I've been tooling around on. Notably, how to implement painkillers. After some thought, I determined the best way is the simplest: A bottle of painkillers converts one Wound into a level of Fatigue. It is possible to become Incapacitated from the use of painkillers.

I considered a mechanic to deal with addiction, but dismissed that as not in the spirit of things.

Remember that Wounds and Fatigue are additive, and there is no Edge to take away Fatigue penalties. Additionally, Hard to Kill only technically deals with Wounds and not Fatigue. I think it's not as overpowering as I worry about.

Potential other ideas:

1. Fatigue penalties don't kick in for 2d6 rounds.

2. Fatigue will be a greater presence in this game due to numerous other Special Infected I'm creating, so maybe I will create Edges that deal with Fatigue as well.

3. Perhaps painkillers just give a bonus to Vigor for a duration.

Why am I working in this rule? Because there's plenty of "survival horror" games and a serious lack of "action horror" RPGs. I don't know what your experience has been, but I have never creeped out my friends over the tabletop, and I can't sustain the mood that horror demands. What I can do is freak out the players with impossible odds, defy their expectations about the monsters' capabilities, and repeatedly cross the line between ally and enemy to my group.

Ideas For Games That Will Never Get Made

Like many of you, I also play those dern vidya games. I have a fondness for Tower Defense style games, but I am tired of the lack of innovation. Every game features an endless line of creepsm the same towers, and varying degrees of polish. They're essentially the same, much like platformers in the early 90s (also like 90s platformers, there's an awful lot of tie-ins).

So here is what I think is the core challenge: To preserve the familiarity of tower defense games but to introduce new mechanics to challenge the player.

My first thought was to change the creeps or the towers themselves, but after a bit of time I abandoned this thought experiment as it's not in line with the first half of my goal (to preserve the familiar). Therefore, we need the six basic towers I see in every game:

• The cheap, medium-damage and fire rate tower (starter tower)
• The fast but weak tower (machine gun)
• The slow, long range tower (usually a sniper or mortar; optional splash damage)
• The tower that slows down the bad guys
• The tower that poisons or burns the bad guys (Damage over time)
• The tower that does splash damage

Some games change up the creeps - the Protector series does an excellent job of this, with various creeps immune to/made stronger by/vulnerable to various types of damage. I think this is a good step towards our goal.

And then my mind turned towards the economy of TD games: Kill an enemy, get money/credits/energy. This is the only thing I have never seen changed.

Well, let's do something about that.

I envision a game where you play the role of an independent contractor charged with the static defense of a space colony. You have numerous contracts with various weapons companies, all of which specialize in turret defense. As one of their top customers, and due to the media attention your company is receiving, your successes and failures have a direct impact on the stock market value of these turret defense companies. Therefore, your primary means of income is not killing enemies but trading stock.

Killing an enemy with a turret made by Altair Industries, which specializes in ballistic weapons (the Rifle, the Machine Gun and Shotgun Turrets) drives their stock value up, while having a negative effect on Betelgeuse LLC (specializing in self-propelled explosives such as missile strikes, mortars, and rocket mines) as the two are in direct competition. Driving a stock price too low may result in BLLC sending mercenaries to the colony to discredit Altair Industries technology.

Other companies include CanDo Construction, whose upgrades allow you to alter the path the creeps use (through barricades, carving new roadways, moats, and other innovations), and Delta Management Solutions (whose "turrets" actually just boost the functions of other nearby turrets - a Media Team increases the stock value of successful kills, especially bosses, while Motivational Speakers might lessen the effects of failure and drive the fire rate up).

Pausing the game allows you to engage in stock trading, while randomized global events keep you on your toes - like the real market, a canny investory can cope with almost any events. Special cards are collected by completing side missions and destroying bosses, and these trump cards allow you to turn events to your favor.

Because every game now needs to have friggin' multiplayer, 4 person matches allow a dynamic market while defending separate maps. An additional sandbox mode allows players to blast away at creeps with your investors supplying money for you but only in between waves - so the resource management aspect stays at the forefront.

By combining economic strategy with tower defense, I hope to create an innovative, engaging experience without branching too far away from what the modern games is familiar with.

Zombie Centric

I can't talk much about it, but I have a project in the works.

On a related note, what are your favorite zombie-related materials?

Night of the Living Dead (1968): I saw this movie when I was 10. Needless to say, a baseball bat stayed under my bed for the next ten years. This is the movie that started it all: The genre, Romero's career, and eventually this very list.

Dawn of the Dead (1978): Dawn is a good example of a filmmaker's evolution. A successful sequel, free from the characters of the previous movie but displaying a natural evolution of the events portrayed. Materialism, militarism, and the failure of the government - themes that Romero will use throughout his career - contribute to the breakdown of society in a huge way for the first time in this movie.

Return of the Living Dead (1985): Look, this movie is fun. I like it. That's about it.

Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore) (1994): I don't know why I like this one either. It's an existential-romance-horror-porn-comedy with zombies. I suppose I've never seen sex, violence, and death linked together the way this movie does, and I haven't seen any other movie with the thesis that we bear no responsibility for our actions.

28 Days Later (2002): The first zombie movie I saw that didn't actually involve the living dead. It inspired the "fast zombies" trend of the Aughts, and inspired me thinking about how the modern political atmosphere could be used to make movies.

The Zombie Survival Guide (2003): Finally, some nerd sat down and wrote it all out for us. Every angle of surviving the apocalypse has been carefully thought out and documented in this groundbreaking work. If only it were a bit more quoteable.

Dawn of the Dead (2004): This movie has no redeeming societal values. It is gory as shit and fun to watch. As a double bonus, it got me interested in Johnny Cash.

Dead End Days (2004): An internet serial that tackles the worth of advertising, big business, and viral marketing in our society. It's also very funny.

Shawn of the Dead (2004): Without a doubt, my favorite zombie movie. It runs the gamut from being hilarious to to gory to heartrending then back again in a trim 99 minutes. Along the way, it manages to hit on just about every trope in the genre while still taking itself seriously.

Land of the Dead (2005): This was (until Diary of the Dead came out) the weakest of the Romero series. However, I found elements of it intriguing, and I've watched it as research material. The most interesting aspect of this movie, to me, was the scavenging gang - maybe I read too much into it, but I saw those guys as what happened to the bikers in Dawn once someone organized them. The freebirds sold out.

World War Z (2006): This is to books what Dawn was to movies: Thinly disguised biting social commentary. It shows how human nature contributes to the apocalypse more than the zombies ever could.

Left 4 Dead (2008): L4D showed that zombie games could be fun, tense, and mainstream. I also appreciate its cooperative gameplay.

Pontypool (2008): Without a doubt, this is the most terrifying zombie movie I have ever seen. Every zombie movie depends on tension to make it work. Tension comes from incomplete information - and this is the only movie I have ever seen where I never knew more than the characters did. What happens when the virus isn't in the blood, or in food, or spread by the rat-monkey...but the English language? What happens when you only see the outbreak through the eyes of a talk radio jock, instead of at street level, hearing the confused reports of survivors...and the more confused reports from the infected themselves.

Zombieland (2009): Okay this movie is just fun, and it has some of the most innovative zombie kills I've ever seen.

Tell me about yours!

Kitchen Sink: The Setting

I had an idea to create the most Savage setting I could recently. I've got a rough concept going on, so here are some of the notes I made:

• I don't want PCs that move between multiple universes, because I want to create a single setting people can exist in. Easier that way.
  
• There will be zombies.
• Strong pulp elements.
• I want everything in the core rules to be represented, from the much-maligned Superpowers AB to the powered armor. This means we need a mix of fantasy, World War II era technology, and future sci-fi.
• Strong weird elements (should be obvious by now).
• Enough horror that the Guts skill is necessary.
• Should take place on Earth...but not necessarily in real cities. We might see a guest appearance from Arkham, for instance. Maybe "Paragon City" fills in for New York while "Lakeside" fills in for Chicago.
  
• Should have clear-cut heroes and villains. Any anti-heroes or persons in a morally gray area exist to either redeem themselves and become heroes or slide down the slippery slope to villainy.

So here's what I'm thinking:
In the war-torn land of Avalon, a desperate King Arturian III orders his most skilled sorcerers to cast out the plague that has infected the dead of his land...but something goes horribly wrong. The disease was more invasive than anyone realized and had infected the whole of the land, not simply the bloodthirsty zombies that roamed about. The world shifted, becoming whole again only at the most convenient point...a realm known as the Waygate...or to its inhabitants, Earth.

For millenia, Earth had been the nexus of thousands of multiverses. The Waygate lay at the center of a thousand universes, each stranger than the last. Earth's convenience made it a prison for pandimensional alien gods, a visiting point for sorcerers and mystics, a battleground for the forces of Heaven and Hell, and imbued many of its artifacts with a fraction of power. The Waygate suddenly found itself merged with a strange parallel universe.

The change was instant: Wherever the Mists of Avalon spread, the dead would rise and otherworldly creatures would emerge - the elves, dwarves, and other creatures of myth. After only a few months of such things, tales spread of another wave of visitors, these from the stars above...these "starmen" wield strange technology and vast knowledge. Little is known of their agenda, save that the Starmen are sworn to exterminate the undead scourge.

Meanwhile, rumors abound that the Nazi party in Germany is beginning to learn how to harness the power of the Mist. Can the heroes stop them, before the Waygate is torn apart?

Elf, human, dwarf, orc, halfling, and starman must take up arms against zombies, gangsters, survivors, the KKK, and Nazis in this two-fisted, pulp-splatterpunk, free-for-all. If it's an RPG trope, it's included.