Wicked North Games, Around the Web!

Looking for a convenient way to keep in touch with us and our current happenings? We’ve got you covered! Check us out on the following sites…

Wicked North Games

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/WickedNorth
Google+: http://bit.ly/uWbK1X

Twitter:
Brett: https://twitter.com/#!/brett_ski
JElliot: https://twitter.com/#!/WickedNorth

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/WickedNorthGames/videos

Yes, we’re even on YouTube! Although it has been quite some time since Jeremy and I have had the time to film a proper Video update. We do plan on utilizing this Channel in the near-future though with some exciting announcements… What do we have planned? Stay tuned to find out what’s been developing for Wicked North Games in 2012!

Brett: brettski@wickednorthgames.com
JElliot: jelliot@wickednorthgames.com

 

 

Azamar on Google+!

The Re-Gamification of Role-Playing Games

In 1996, Richard Bartle created a personality test that classifies people into four defining categories for defining the motives behind why people play games. The four categories are broken apart here, but the original names Richard Bartle used were Explorer, Killer, Socializer, and Achiever. Here these categories receive new names to suit the purposes of this discussion applied towards tabletop role-playing games.

The four personality archetypes functionally similar to those Richard Bartle described are Explorer, Fighter, Histrionic, and Collector. An Explorer has a desire to explore and see where they can go, especially in the limits of another person’s imagination. A Fighter has a strong aggressive sense, and loves the idea of competition and surpassing another competitor, as well attraction to conflict. A Histrionic primarily enjoys socialization and interaction, and this drives this person to continue regular interactions, sometimes despite other issues in social dynamics. A Collector while slightly competitive in nature is primarily about the act of fulfillment via attainment of some kind of achievement, reward, or goal, and the recognition associated with the success, literally collecting recognition and renown, imagined or real.

These player archetypes can help game designers of tabletop role-playing games the same way they assist for great game design in video games. For over three decades, the development of tabletop role-playing games has evolved, adopting more efficient game mechanics that provide more flexibility and freedom, meant to compartmentalize the various components of game play. Some of these components were borne from role-playing games such as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons: d20/3.0, GURPS, MegaTraveller, Star Wars (d6), and World of Darkness. The idea of gamification is notably a movement of bringing game design and development techniques and approaches to business, culture, and eventually society. There have been many controversial books written on the subject, some dry, some not, but within role playing games there is an opportunity to apply these techniques more directly.

Tabletop role-playing games are part of niche industry that suffers a long history of criticism and difficulty in wide spread acceptance, especially within the United States. The idea of imagined role-playing among adults where people take on the persona of fictional characters holds a perception as antisocial. Through video games, however, tabletop role-playing games have seen a rise in acceptance. People born during the “baby boomer” generation in the US now play phone games and online games, cases in point: they learned to click the mouse by playing Solitaire on early Windows, and now people can use touch screens more easily because of Angry Birds. Usability as a matter of functional goal by design is ultimately the greatest achievement of gamification. From this standpoint, tabletop games developers need to place more emphasis in usability goals. Does regular participation in a role-playing game lead to useful skills?

The piles of evidence behind role playing games resulting in more intelligent, free-thinking, mathematic, versatile, people with a greater vocabulary than their counter parts who do not play games is vast. Were role playing game developers to sit down and creatively hone in on this, they might see that role playing games may be one of the most effectively tools available to educators. As a tool for teaching, a role-playing game can cover multiple subjects, including history, geography, and language arts. The progression of mathematics and vocabulary seem to inherently go hand in hand with role playing games, since they tend to use a lot of words normally not a part of the general vocabulary in a populace, and they tend to use dice to unintentionally augment logic and math. Children have such wide imaginations and are such divergent thinkers; role-playing games are perfect for those kids who find a lecture on history boring.

Science can become a part of the process, since the scientific method of observe, record, theorize, deduce is built into the idea of such simple concepts as Dungeoneering, where characters explore, search, keep maps, and make guesses; teaching players to use caution and treat the unknown with a degree of skepticism. Through a carefully structured game world, role-playing game developers could use fictional elements to teach about large anthropological concepts, social norms, and formal behaviors, such as etiquette.

If a larger shift occurs behind the design and development of tabletop role playing games to purpose them for education, potentially wider adoption may take place of a once taboo hobby. Some strong considerations for role-playing games as educational tools involve the use of convergent and divergent thinking throughout the learning process, maintaining a loosely coupled imaginary play with rules bound to the guidance of a teacher. Children, especially young children, find imaginary play a natural source of learning and through this form of play it is likely children learn a particularly large number of their social and interactive skills. If minds are open to easier learning during this process, it is perhaps it is possible to theorize that during an imaginary process, our minds are in a state where we might learn better than not. We are keeping our minds open during imaginary play, and thus the open mindedness required perhaps increases the chances that we perceive and commit to memory some of the information presented to us. From my understanding with some more recent studies on role-playing games and children with sensory perception issues, imaginary play has served as a particular powerful tool in helping these children to find ways to explore social interactions.

Given the particular flexibility, simplicity, and robustness behind d6 gaming, it seems logical that d6-based role playing game mechanics should lead the way in tackling this change in the reason and methods behind role playing game development. While there is always resistance to change, role-playing games offer a lot in the way overhauling education on a grander scale while making learning more fun. The re-gamification of tabletop role-playing games is due, not only to revive an industry, but also to learn new ways to teach.

For some interesting reading on research surrounding RPG’s check out:

http://www.rpgstudies.net/

For more information on Gamification, head on over to their site:

http://gamification.org/wiki/Encyclopedia

In honor of, “Teach Your Kids to Game Week”

Brought to you by DriveThruRPG who have posted some excellent advice on getting today’s younger generations involved in the hobby of gaming. We thought we’d honor Teach Your Kids to Game Week by showing off an older video that J.Elliot had filmed of him teaching his two children how to write up characters in Azamar using the Cinema6 RPG Framework.

Please excuse our older visuals, as the video was filmed over a year ago while Azamar was still in its humble, beginning stages of development. We hope you enjoy and please, take the time to teach someone, no matter what their age the hobby of gaming!

Wicked North: A General Update!

Greetings! Please forgive our lack of updates this month, we’ve been cranking away at three separate projects as of late. The following is a summary of what we’re currently focusing our efforts on:

• Azamar Supplement: This download will feature a table of charts, a handy reference guide when running your campaign. A table which breaks down all of the Character Features in Azamar The Player’s Guide, complete character templates and a few extra bonus goodies!

• D6 Magazine: Will be out by Halloween, the d6 Community is collaborating to bring you Issue #3 which focuses on a horror theme. http://www.d6magazine.com

• Westward! Our next original setting using the Cinema6 RPG Framework. We are happy to report that Tyler Walpole is back on board, helping us develop the cover art for this Steampunk Setting, set on a distant, alien world. The settlers of Westward face a variety of hardships as they endure a hostile environment.

Please take a look at the world  and Westward Capital maps, illustrated by by the insanely talented cartographer, Herwin Wielink. Who we’re also happy to have on board! He illustrated the interior maps for Guardiin Ithural and the Capital City of Azamar in Azamar The Player’s Guide.

Check out Herwin’s website, featuring his amazing work: http://www.imaticka.nl/djekspek

Best Regards,
- The Wicked North Team

Synergy

I had a discussion today about what the point of Role Playing Games really is, and we concluded that the point is “working together in some fashion to reach a goal, while telling a story in the process”.

So after some thought on this idea, I realized this was baked directly into the game mechanics of Cinema6 and introduced quietly into Azamar.  We created a small number of Synergy-involved Character Features that provide players with the ability to essentially pool, trade, and exchange Cinema Points during game play.  This provides the industrious gaming group with decisively underhanded ways of keeping a larger party more stable.  This also gives a level meta-gaming unity seen primarily outside of tabletop role-playing games, mainly provided in video game RPGs.

We delve into this more, as in the video games, take an older classic RPG like Chrono Trigger, where the characters could “synergize” their powers and deal extra damage.  As well, they can heal their group; create protective “group” barriers that protect all in the party, etcetera.  This concept is essentially lost in the mechanics of typical table top role playing games, where the game is constructed as a hit hard, take experience, move on-type systems.  While some systems out there have attempted to stray from this, it is the essential basis from the bigger RPGs such as Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons.

One of the major goals we had in developing Cinema6 was capturing cinematic action-movie game play, but somehow we also arrived at a game mechanic that inherently supports and indeed encourages cooperative game play.  At first when this realization dawned on me, I thought it was contradicting our original plan.  However, after some thought on the subject, it seems it actually encourages the idea even further.  Cinematic game play is not only about the “hero” but also about the group of characters surviving together.  This concept of readily supporting character is seen repeatedly in cinema, as major characters would alone not survive but indeed depend on the strengths, and weaknesses, of their friends and confidantes.

So inadvertently, Cinema6 brings a comprehensive cinematic experience to role playing games, and especially to Azamar, including an element that not only increases the fundamentals of common group play, but also the replay ability by introducing even more unique ways that players can leverage the rules to create fun and different characters every time they sit down for a “new” adventure.

Game Development as an exercise in Usability: the ease of Human-Intuitive Interaction

Among the biggest elements involved with the development of tabletop games, whether board or role playing games, is Usability. In working on Cinema6, we set a goal to create a system that was not only usable, but also optimized for easiest consumption by new and younger gamers. OpenD6 provides the foundation for Cinema6, using a difficulty system based on rolling and adding up six-sided dice. Nevertheless, not everything in OpenD6 favors the idea of fundamental and simplified Usability.

OpenD6 at its core uses a mechanic called “pips”, a way of measuring character progress and development in a more tiered approach. This also makes understanding the basic of the system a little bit daunting for new and young gamers. It took me years to wrap my head around all the nuances of the “pips” system when I originally started playing Star Wars d6 published by West End Games Ltd during the early and mid 1990′s. Consequently, we dropped the “pips” and used a flat dice system, with compensation in the cost per die.

What the D6 System and OpenD6 does right, is fast and dynamic game play, bundled with pretty tight rhythm to reduce rolling when it matters most, such as during combat. In addition, herein lays my next largest complaint: no universal skills. From genre to genre and game to game, (while this is not really of consequence with Star Wars as the IP itself warranted an original game system), the D6 System and OpenD6 has issues taking a character from one genre to the next, fantasy to science fiction for instance, where conversions must occur and the various genres are not made seamless. In an effort to establish a baseline Usability, and focus Cinema6 on cinematic action gaming, we streamlined the attributes and skills into a singular base. The skills remain the same from Azamar, to Westward, and will continue to remain the same as we create more worlds in other genres. This makes it easy to re-use characters or as a cookie cutter for a concept between all the various worlds imaginable.

When we roll six-sided dice, the dots cause us to add them up. Whether this is from years of playing board games or not, most children have no problem sitting down and playing a Cinema6-based game. This intuitive form of game play is simple to learn, and many experiments were conducted in game testing with my children to exact this theory. Six-sided dice are the best for making board and role-playing games simple to learn and play, thereby reducing frustrations associated with learning anything new.

We are big proponents of adopting the things that work well. We are huge fans of the early Whitewolf Publishing games under the World of Darkness imprint. The big thing that they did was use symbology to make our game associations simpler. The empty dot that we fill in on tests became something else; it became a measure of improvement and character capacity. With each dot on their character sheet, a die roll given a specific action in the game. We emulated this concept by using dots on our character sheets and this provides a simple and easy way to quickly glance and understand character attributes and skills.

Cinema6 is also an attempt to provide a robust exploration of a simple game mechanic by making the idea of Character Points from the D6 System and OpenD6 go farther. For this, we created the Character Features mechanic. Normally, d6 System and OpenD6 gaming mechanics provide a single die to roll when spending a Character Point during game play, as well, it had a secondary Fate or Force Point pool, that doubled a given die roll.

With Cinema6, the Cinema Points you spend, without Character Features provide the same mechanic as Character Points and give a player another die to roll. However, when a player’s Character has a Character Feature associated with a specific Skill or Attribute, the Character Feature provides specialized rules that give that player a brief advantage, as two extra dice to roll, or a static point increase. Character Features also act as special powers and magic extensions for Characters, providing special effects or otherwise supernatural events. Character Features provide an intentional extensibility of the foundation behind the Cinema6 dice-rolling mechanic. As this, Character Features are the bread and butter of the Cinema6 System, and are the essential core that gives any world greater depth, customization, and the ability to create storytelling hooks through direct Character statistic changes.

At the end of the day, Cinema6 provides a robust game mechanic that while simple, can easily change in granularity and detail for scaling into more or less complex styles of game play as players prefer. This control is always under the purview of game masters and players, and Cinema6 seeks to recognize the desired versatility and give as many options as possible. We will continue our pursuit of improving Cinema6, as it is far from perfect.
Gaming mechanics and styles are subjective and no game developer can create something that everyone will enjoy or play with ease, but our goal remains the same. We take our time, play the game, see what works and what does not, and learn from our mistakes as we go. Cinema6 is the result of several years of game testing and play, and it is the quintessential core to our approach in the future of how we will continue to make games.

Our First Glimpse of Westward!

As Westward moves forward, we are doing so by focusing on people who make up the population.  The biggest thing that makes various people different is where they live.  Their are those who live in the big city, where there is no lack of resources or social services, no lack of water or food, the basic essentials needed to live.  In contrast, those people who live outside the Capital City struggle everyday for the basic necessities, let along the luxuries.  Farther out, their are criminals, outlaws, scavengers.  Even farther out are the Ferals, the complete antithesis of city-living, they are tribal, sometimes cannibalistic, and typically rule through sheer force.  In the coming weeks and month, we will share some of the development of Westward with you.  These early steps are demonstrating the city folk and some of the colonials, (people who choose to live outside the city but came from it).  Take a look and enjoy!

Physical Copies of Azamar are now Available at the Following Stores…

Wicked North Games is proud to announce that we’ve concluded shipping our products to the awesome folks who’ve backed us on Kickstarter. As we press forward with the development of our next setting, we’re also focusing a great deal of our efforts into getting Azamar The Player’s Guide onto the shelves at a hobby/comic book store near you!

Physical copies of Azamar are now available at the following locations:

Greenfield Games (Greenfield & Hadley, MA)

Worlds Apart Games (Amherst, MA)

Modern Myths, LLC. (Northampton, MA)

Jetpack Comics (Rochester, NH)

Myriad Games (Manchester & Salem, NH)

Additionally, print-on-demand services of Azamar are also available at DriveThruRPG.com.

 

The Wayne Foundation

Wicked North Games is proudly featuring Azamar as part of the Wayne Foundation electronic bundle.

The bundle includes over $75 worth of Roleplaying Game’s from DriveThruRPG.com at a discounted price! The mission behind the Wayne Foundation is to work towards eliminating child prostitution within the United States. So check out the bundle and consider supporting this great cause.

This effort was initiated by our friends at Troll In The Corner.

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