So in the last post I took a look at the MZ+ MTS and used it to design an “Average” Knight Armour. This time I’m going to design something more unique and more specialised. The Pendragon, the personal Knight Armour of the Strong Arm King Uther Pendragon. Continue reading…
So as I mentioned back in Part 1 I’m planning to use Mekton Zeta for the giant robot portions of this game. By that I mean the combat and the mecha construction. Theres actually a (weirdly?) small number of dedicated giant robot/mecha rpg’s and Mekton Zeta is one of the oldest and in my opinion one of the best. A number of the more recent mecha games use systems where the attributes are defined narratively, e.g. I mentioned Camelot TRIGGER in the last post. It uses FATE so you have statistics for your robot like “Torso: Great armour”. Nothing wrong with that per se, it lets you quickly model the salient features and start playing. I actually have a lot of time for the FATE system and its various offshoots. But when it comes to giant robots, even if you’re talking about super robots, I like the feel of getting down to the nitty gritty, to the nuts and bolts, to complex systems and sub-systems and lots of numbers. Mekton Zeta’s mecha construction system is a nice middle ground between the fairly light system of something like FATE and the overly detailed/fiddly tech creation systems from something like the Silhouette Vehicle Creation System or T:TNE’s Fire, Fusion and Steel (basically I dont want to deal with complex forumlae). Continue reading…
This is more or less the first week of my “summer holidays” (well more of a break while exams are on). So my plan for this week was to do nothing at all other than what I felt like (for those wits wondering what the difference is…shit theres no emoticon for giving someone the fingers). Which is going quite well. But my “at least one post a week” initiative has been working quite well for the last month or so, so I thought I’d throw up my tentative summer plans. I’d written a (hilariously) amusing line about what you can do when I inevitably fail. But fuck it. Maybe framing my endeavours like that isnt helping. So I’m going to keep it upbeat (Eye of the Tiger will be playing during the film version of this). Here is what I WILL get done this summer.
Programming
-> Finish Head First C# and The Programmers Guide to C# (June)
-> Get an alpha of Ave Imperator up and running (July & August)
Writing
-> From June 1st – August 31st write 1000 words a day (or 7000 a week if something unavoidable comes up)
Personal Life
-> Loose a minimum of 2 lbs a week from now until September (and hopefully after that as well)
-> Find a job (This isnt something I want to do but sadly need to do, hopefully my current contract gets renewed because I quite like working in the School of Business and with the Springboard Initiative. But I need money and as always I lamanet that that means finding a job).
I dont think these goals are impossible. To be honest, I think even objectively, I could achieve them easily enough. I’ve done so in the past. Its just a question of motivation. I cant really see my generally nihilistic outlook changing but I do want to just well, “put it over there”, I dont need to discard it I just dont want to be held down by it.
What the fuck is GIWTR? I hear the world call out as the entirety of the internet voraciously consumes my latest blog post. Worry not gentle reader, the mysteries behind the acronym will be revealed in the very next sentence. It stands for “Games I want to run”. I’ve mentioned in the past how for some odd reason spending time playing/running rpg’s makes me feel weirdly guilty these days (still cant really decide what makes it stand out, its no more time consuming than my other pastimes) so thats one barrier to getting games off the ground. Though its largely a theoretical one as the main barrier is the geographic dispersal of my usual gaming group and our seeming inability to schedule a game. But I’m sick of thinking “Oh I’d like to run this game, oh but I wont get the chance or I should be thinking about something more productive”, fuck it, from now on I’m just going to throw up whatever ideas I have whenever I have them. I’m going to think about them as much as I want and spend as much time on them as I want. You hear me brain? Anyhow the idea I’m kicking around at the moment is a post-historical reskinning of the King Arthur mythos where plate armour and warhorse’s have been replaced with anachronistic pieces of super hi-technology, specifically big fucking robots. And not “Real robots”, no sir, “Super robots” all the way. Well perhaps not. Somewhere inbetween really. Functionally equivalent to real robots but treated in terms of technology as super robots would probably be the best (if slightly unweildy way) to put it. Continue reading…
I’ve been focusing quite a bit on the mechanical nuts and bolts around the nitty gritty of gladiatorial combat. Which is clearly an important part of the game. However another important part of the game is running the ludus, i.e. playing as the lanista. This play is split into three main sections, the first is managing your gladiators, training them, keeping them sweet, buying new ones and so on. The second major part is the political or social end of things, making contacts, settings up bouts, trying to earn a bit more here and undercut a competing lanistae there (actually, as I’ll mention again, undercutting is more or less what you dont want to do). The third part is the day to day running of the ludus, insuring you have enough supplies and money to pay wages, make meals etc. Its this last part I’m going to talk about for a bit. Continue reading…