As a complete package I’d still recommend it, but somewhat less. Here’s the thing: Diablo III is all about the co-op. And the co-op is very, very good. I was playing today, trying out the wizard, when my friend Irven dropped right into my game and started playing with me. Co-op is well put-together in a lot of ways: lots of great interface touches, easy trading, and individualized loot (meaning that, if you see it on your screen, it’s yours). So what’s the problem? The problem is that, even if you’re playing single player, you’re playing co-op.

What do I mean by that? If you’re playing by yourself, nobody else in sight, you still have to connect to the servers (which sometimes go down), you still have to log into Battle.net (though this is a minor annoyance), and you still have to deal with latency (though the latency isn’t bad most of the time). It’s most irritating when all you want to do is play single player but the servers are down for maintenance; when this is the case, you can’t play. Period. It’s frustrating.

Having experienced the co-op, I can understand why they designed it the way they did. The game is better in co-op, and everything about the game facilitates co-op in the best ways possible. If that’s not your thing though, be prepared to get annoyed from time to time. That said, the experience (again, if you like games like this) is worth putting up with some irritating qualities for.

Jury Duty: The Game

It was an interesting experience. The case I was on was a civil case; we were assessing damages for a car accident. The defendant had already admitted negligence and culpability for the accident itself. What we, the jury, had to decide was how much, if any, the plaintiffs were owed in terms of monetary compensation for injuries, emotional trauma, pain and suffering, and loss of consortium.

Thing number one that they don’t show you on TV: lawyers are long-winded. The plaintiff’s attorney never used four words when twelve would suffice. Opening arguments took about three hours in total, most of the witnesses took about an hour and a half to interview, and closing arguments were another three hours. We started on Monday and 9:30 and we started deliberating on Wednesday around 12:30.

Thing number two that doesn’t necessarily come across on TV: lawyers are kind of petty. I’d imagine that a career that necessitates constant acrimony has a way of cultivating a certain tendency to constantly object to things (which they did), but I wasn’t prepared for how whiny they’d be when they did it. A lot of the plaintiff’s objections boiled down to “Nuh-uh! No fair!” Even the judge seemed pretty frustrated about it.

The final thing I didn’t expect was how little guidance was given to us in terms of how to assess compensation. The judge gave us a lot of instructions on how to apply the law, but as far as how much money we should award the only guideline we were given was “whatever seems fair.” Luckily this didn’t turn out to be an issue for us.

Why not? Because we found in favor of the defendant. Why did we do so? Because, in all honesty, the plaintiffs (there were two of them) came across as evasive and unreliable. Further, it seemed that they were deliberately trying to obfuscate the truth in order to get a large settlement for injuries that, in all likelihood, were not the result of the accident in question. Injuries from a previous accident for which they had already been paid in a previous civil suit. We deliberated for about an hour before reaching a unanimous verdict.

All in all, an interesting experience. Not one I’d like to perform again any time soon, but not one I’d object to (heh, see what I did there?) performing after a few years pass.

Alien vs. Jedi

Game System: Fate

Publisher: NA (homebrew hack)

Something is being studied aboard a Republic research station, something that should have been left well alone. Six individuals — Jedi, bounty hunters, Sith — are aboard this research station for their own reasons, but things are about to go very wrong. Enemies will have to put aside their differences if they hope to survive.

4-6 players

The Demolished Ones

Game System: The Demolished Ones (Fate)

Publisher: Rite Publishing

You wake in a cold concrete room with a group of people you don’t remember. In fact, you don’t remember much of anything. Where are you? Why are you here? Who are these people? Who are you, for that matter? Most pressing though is the question that everyone asks when they see the body in the corner: is one of these people a murderer?

The Demolished Ones is a Fate-based adventure about amnesia, identity, and the power (and danger) of knowledge in a pseudo-Victorian noir horror setting. This is a playtest of a game that will be released by Rite Publishing. If you play in this game, be ready to provide feedback (and to get credit for your feedback).

3-6 players

Long Live the King

Game System: Becoming: A Game of Heroism and Sacrifice

Publisher: Galileo Games

A wedding should be a joyous occasion, but when the king’s men come to take the bride on her wedding day, a hero must step forward.

Becoming is a game about what you must sacrifice to be a hero. Taking on the mantle of the hero makes you an outcast. In order to save the things you love, you must lose them. When you complete your quest will you still be a hero? Or have you become something else?

This is a playtest for a game that will be released by Galileo Games next year. If you play in this game, be ready to give feedback (and receive credit for it).

3-4 players

Episodic games, like The Walking Dead by TellTale, use a model where you buy the game in two-hour chunks or pay for a “season” beforehand and get a new two-hour chunk every X weeks. In The Walking Dead’s case, drop $25 and you get one episode per month for five months.

Another interesting model is free-to-play, where you download the game for free and play it for free, but you can buy items or other content using microtransactions. You pay for the content you want, and spend what more-or-less what you think the game’s worth.

These two models are interesting by themselves, but I’m waiting for some enterprising game company to combine the two. Most free-to-play games are multiplayer-only. I think this is a good thing because I don’t want to have to buy items in my single player game with real money; I feel it would pull me out of the experience. However, I like the idea of a multiplayer game with microtransactions for multiplayer items and content that also allows you to buy single player episodes of content if that’s what you’re interested in.

Just something I’ve been kicking around.

The dirty secret of this hack is that it’s not comprehensive in any way. I’m doing it for a con game with pregens and a specific adventure, so I’m only designing the things that will be seen by me and the players. I knew that I wanted Force-users, for example, so I had to design some ways to use the Force. Rather than designing an entire system though, I’m simply designing the elements that are pertinent to those specific characters. The closest I got to designing a full-on system was designing rules for handling the Dark Side.

I did have to figure out how I’d handle Force powers in a general sense, since I was going to have Jedi and Sith running around. I thought about using a system of powers such as those in Dresden, but that felt too complex to me. That left me with aspects, skills, and stunts that I could use to model Force powers; my solution makes use of all three to varying extents.

Any Force-user is going to have aspects that call out that Force sensitivity, and probably also aspects that call out whether that character is Jedi, Sith, or something in between. A lot of the minor uses of the Force can be modeled with simple aspect invokation: invoking on a Deceit roll for the Jedi mind-trick, invoking on an Athletics roll to run faster or jump higher.

I also needed to allow for some more overt — but general — uses of the Force; I opted to use skills for this. I created three skills that only Force-users have access to: Telepathy, Telekinesis, and Energy. Telepathy is used to communicate, to sense the presence of others, or even to do a more overt version of the mind-trick. Telekinesis is used for the force push, moving around objects, or even a direct attack like a force choke. Energy is used to either dissipate or project energy, like when Darth Vader blocks blaster bolts with his hand or the Emperor shoots lightning from his fingers.

Finally, I needed a way to encourage certain behaviors in certain characters, to provide them with “schticks” when it came to the Force. Enter stunts. Stunts provide access to more specialized — and more powerful — ways of using the Force. Anyone can block a blaster bolt with a lightsaber, but you need the Blaster Deflect stunt to redirect that bolt at someone else. You can use an aspect to jump higher with the Force, but the Force Leap stunt gives you access to a better way of doing this.

To give a clearer picture of what I’m talking about, here’s a sample character.

Jode Kelber

Aspects: Grizzled Jedi Warrior | The Council’s Justice | Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child | No Stomach for Politics | Sith-Hunter | Justice, Honor, Balance

Skills

Superb: Alertness, Weapons
Great: Intimidation, Telepathy
Good: Athletics, Telekinesis
Fair: Endurance, Resolve
Average: Might, Survival

Stunts

Riposte: When you successfully defend with Weapons against an opponent in the same zone and gain spin, you may instead deal a single point of stress to your opponent.

Blaster Deflect: When you successfully defend against a ranged attack from a blaster or similar weapon with your lightsaber, you may treat your Weapons roll as if it were an attack against any target within your zone or an adjacent zone.

Unshakable: You gain a +2 to Resolve rolls made to defend against Telepathy attacks or fear-related effects.

Force Leap: Whenever you make an Athletics roll to move you may automatically ignore one border, provided it is something that can be circumvented by jumping (even if the jump is improbable for a normal person).

Force Healing: Once per scene you may spend a fate point to reduce the severity of one consequence by one. The consequence can be yours or someone else’s.

Force Speed: Once per scene you may take an additional action during your turn at a -1 penalty to both actions you perform. You may take a supplemental action as well, but this increases the penalty to -2.

Gear

Lightsaber: Weapons, Damage: 3, can be used to defend against ranged attacks.

Stress: OOOOO

Dark Side Points: 0

Fate Points: 2

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is John Adamus, I am the Writer Next Door (http://writernextdoor.blogspot.com) and I help people make whatever they’re writing better – so for gamers, that means editing their projects or helping them organize their thoughts. For novel, story writers and screenwriters, that means helping them learn techniques and helping them revise and tell the best stories possible. It’s a lot of teaching, editing and idea development.

Why is editing important?

Editing is important for a few reasons. One: No idea ever comes out fully formed AND perfect. It might hatch from your mind pretty clearly or with a clear trajectory, but there is always some construction or evolution it undergoes as time and thought passes. Two: Editing helps turn what could be a tangle of ideas into a coherent stream of ideas or even one very deep single idea. It helps winnow down the material to its greatest clarity, removing the static and detritus that may litter up the presentation and cloud the minds of possible audience members. Third: Editing as a process is a chance to make your writing better. You will, if the editor is any good, come away from the process knowing more about how and why you do what you do and why it is or is not successful. Hopefully, you’ll also get help in changing bad habits into more positive ones and you should see better writing (and a better reception of that writing) as a result.

How did you get your start in this industry?

I say I had two starts in this industry. For many years I was an avid playtester, and although that experience ultimately soured me on the industry (a few bad business deals and shady “companies” can do that to you), it taught me that this was mostly a business seeking dollars, but driven by passion. I liked that, even if I thought some of the people weren’t the best. Flash forward to last Thanksgiving, where I attended Metatopia, a game designer convention which was only a few minutes and a few traffic lights from my house. I went there intending just to see the people whose games I enjoyed playing, maybe say hello and sort of wallflower into the background. But when I attended panels by these people and shared my opinions and ideas, the reception I got suggested I was more than a wallflower, that I had knowledge and experience to share. It ultimately led to several rather high-profile game people (who I thought previously unapproachable) coming to me to ask me to work with them on a project in the near future. My experience suggested that this was a one-and-done deal, but the more I do, the more work people keep bringing to me, so I’m very happy to have come back to this industry and carved myself a nice spot.

Of all the projects you’ve worked on professionally, what’s your favorite? Why?

I think my favorite project so far has been one of the most comprehensive and rockiest projects I’ve ever done. The Paranet Papers, the new Dresden Files RPG supplement has not had the easiest of births. The incredible team at Evil Hat has absolutely done unbelievable things and created an amazing and vast project while staying true to the success and platform of their first books. Just the scope of the supplement, and the inclusion of licensed material and respect paid to chronologies as well as canon-not-yet-written is amazing. It’s such a privilege and a pleasure to work with those writers, editors and creators on a project that I am so proud of, having seen it develop and get better and better with each draft, revision and scribbled note in a margin.

What advice would you give to those seeking to do what you do?

For those people looking to do what I do, there’s a few steps:

i. Get very comfortable reading other people’s writing, and get comfortable pointing out what works and what doesn’t – but go that extra step and say WHY you think it does or doesn’t work. Otherwise you’re just complaining, which anyone can do.

ii. Read a lot. Play a lot. Don’t get bogged down in the “favorite game” trap, because it becomes a lens through which all your biases (well my favorite game handles that this way..) passes through and you may end up influencing the work in front you unfairly.

iii. Talk to the writers. They are people. Get to know them, be friendly. You’re going to learn a lot about them (what their buttons are, what to do/not do, how they take feedback) and if they see you as people-who-happen-to-help-make-your-work-better rather than adversaries-standing-between-you-and-your-dreams, you’re going to get along A LOT better.

iv. Don’t inflate your head. Yes, you have a whole fistful of power as an editor. But don’t let that turn you into a warlord. I invoke Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a dick. You’re there to help the writer get better and there to help get the project out of thought and into reality. Great power, great responsibility and all that.

v. Be prepared to work hard, but in bursts. You have to do a LOT of hustling and connecting dots to make this an everyday job. More often than not you’re going to end up waiting on people to hand things in, waiting on them to make decisions about handing things in, and waiting on them to decide about deciding to hand things in. All while the deadline looms inflexibly in the ever-approaching future. So yes, you will get a lot work in often a little time to do it. Train yourself to work under pressure and ideally train yourself to work well with others while under that pressure. It gets frustrating sometimes, but I promise you it’s all worth it when you see the finished project.

I should point out that there isn’t a degree in editing. This is a suite of skills acquired while other things are being taught to you. I learned how to edit while learning how to write, it just worked out that editing pays the bills sometimes faster than writing does. But while you don’t need a degree in English to do this, you do need experience with language and communication, everything else can be learned while you work.

Every time I hear people butting heads about combat versus role-play (as if there wasn’t role-play in combat) I ask myself: what about the adventure?

“What’s adventure?” you might ask. Is it interacting with courtiers and equerries? Is it brawling with them? Is it interacting with courtiers and equerries and then brawling with them? Nope. Adventure is the focal point of every single fantasy story that has ever existed and that (probably) will ever exist, from video games to books to comics. Shea Ohmsford didn’t find the Sword of Shannara in his backyard. Luke Skywalker didn’t rebuild his uncle’s moist farm after the Stormtroopers burnt it down. Gandalf wasn’t such a pain in Bilbo’s neck because he wanted Bilbo to stay in the Shire.

Those and so many other fantasy tales are adventures because they’re journeys. Bilbo Baggins went cross-country through half of Middle-earth, putting many adventures under his belt, reached his destination, stole from the dragon, witnessed (or not) the Battle of Five Armies and got back home a completely changed person — and with many tales to tell. Luke Skywalker joined the Rebel Alliance, made himself a great Jedi Master, redeemed his father and set the galaxy free — all the way meeting lots of new people and facing many dangers in worlds stranger and stranger. Shea Ohmsford journeyed the Four Lands, making friends and foes, finding out about his own past all the while looking for the weapon that would allow him to defeat the Warlock Lord — unravelling a myriad of societies, cultures and races along the way.

Last November I talked here about combat and role-play. Well, forget role-play and to hell with combat. The fulcrum of any RPG (specially if we’re talking about fantasy games) is the adventure. How have the best games you’ve ever played started? Probably with the characters heading to another town to investigate a paranormal case or traveling through the sewers to find a Nosferatu informer. Maybe they answered a cryptic plea for help from an unmapped star system. On the other hand, what are the most boring issues of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comic books? The ones when he’s king and is stuck in his palace at Tarantia; the interesting stories from that period are the ones in which he has to get out of the city to fight some threat. They had to give the crew of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine a ship, the Defiant, fewer than three seasons in because the audience numbers were going down — and why? Because you can only tell so many stories inside a space station, but with a ship that can turn frickin’ invisible mankind’s final frontier becomes a fathomless well of adventures.

Without adventure your best and most well-prepared plot isn’t worth a penny. Your best NPCs are boring, and your greatest fight scenes are nothing but a backdrop in front of which your players keep going through the same moves repeatedly. They need to explore something, be it a previous unknown floor in their building or another planet. That’s the only way your game is deserving of the word adventure.

There was really one reason I went with Fate, and when I thought of it it was a light bulb moment. The way I see it, in a Star Wars game you need a good way to model the Dark Side, and the Dark side is all about the temptation of power. It’s easy and seductive, but it’s a slippery slope and it changes you. When you think about it, compels seem tailor-made to model this.

I did have to monkey with the system a little bit. I borrowed the system of sponsored magic and debts from Dresden. The idea is that you have Dark Side points. The GM can hand out Dark Side points when you use the Force for particularly nasty things, but the main way you get them is by choosing to take them. Why do you take them? Because by voluntarily taking a Dark Side point you get the effect of an aspect invokation (a +2 or a reroll) without needing to spend a fate point or even have an applicable aspect. You just get the benefit, period.

There is, of course, a down side. You’re accumulating all these Dark Side points by calling on the Dark Side for help, and the GM can use them against you. As the GM, I can spend one of your Dark Side points to compel you to act in accordance with your baser desires. You don’t get a fate point for accepting this compel, but you do lose a Dark Side point. You can resist this compel; it’ll cost you a fate point to do so, and you keep the Dark Side point.

It gets worse, though. I can spend five of those Dark Side points to twist one of your aspects, rewriting it into a darker reflection of itself. “Hotshot Jedi” becomes “Nobody Can Stop Me”. “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child” becomes “Discipline through Fear”. The more Dark Side Points you gain, the more corrupted you become.

Finally, I can spend ten of those Dark Side Points to replace an aspect altogether with one that places you more fully under the sway of the Dark Side. The difference between this one and the five-point ability is that the new aspect needn’t be related to the old aspect; the Dark Side simply replaces a piece of your personality with evil.