Skip to main content

Mechanic Monday: Under or Overperforming in Fantasy GM Squared

 Yeah okay definitely didn’t just finish the last post, doomscroll for a hot second, then start in on this one.  Yeah so anyway, today I want to knock out my first actual honest-to-God Mechanic Monday in a while by barfing out some thoughts for Fantasy GM Squared that came to me while I was listening to an episode of Dan Thurot’s Space-Biff Space-Cast where he interviewed TauCeti Deichmann (about Sidereal Confluence, which I am absolutely going to buy the second edition of).

I know what you’re thinking: Fantasy GM Squared? That old chestnut? That game from the 2010’s? Isn’t it done by now? Interviewer, go fuck yourself.  I had a brainwave about a way to inject another element of Fantasy Sports into it, so while I don’t know if this would actually help the game, my brainworms compel me to get it down and puzzle it out.


Hot and Cold Streaks by Class

In Fantasy GM Squared, Heroes may out-perform or under-perform their printed abilities based on how the season unfolds.  The Category cards have classes printed on them and the Scoring cards have bonuses and penalties printed on them, and each combination will result in a hot or cold streak for all played Heroes of that class this Season.  For example, the Magic Category card lining up with the 3 VP Scoring card results in a bonus for all Fools and Outlaws, and a penalty for all Paladins.  As each streak is revealed, players should take a Streak token and place it on all of the Heroes of that class, with either the Hot (bonus) or Cold (penalty) side facing up.


So yeah, that’s my big idea.  I figure we could fit a bunch of little tiny circle tokens in between all the Heroes on the punchboard that are red on one side and blue on the other, and they can represent the way that players and teams in real life sports have better or worse games and seasons than the analytics would predict.  In earlier brainstorms, I had mused on having all Heroes roll a d4 to add to their stats, but this feels - more fun? I’ll talk to the Ironrise fellas and see what they think.  If I was a real brainiac, I’d love to come up with a system where players’ predictions shaped the outcomes; like a world where everyone revealed secret votes, and the most-predicted and least-predicted outcomes came true.  But that might be a bit too fancy.  This mechanic FEELS like a sweet spot that you can play with or without to add in just the right amount of gradual RNG.

That’s all the time we have folks; tune in next week for [whatever I have time and inclination to write]!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Minimum Viable Product for WWDW?

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Beliefs as Roles

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the app...
Post a Comment
Read more