Been a while? Yes, it surely has! Last post was about 8 months ago. What have I been doing since then? Where are all the projects I was so excited about? How can time fly this fast? In summary to every question you might ever have: I wrote and extensively played 2 RPGs, I combined all my rules into 1 blog, and was repeatably interrupted and distracted by general life stuff.

Overview

Horizon Games Blog Consolidation – Done – This is related to my new project Fickle RPG (mentioned below). Long time readers or the especially observant might notice a new logo and link in the right sidebar. Well I was about to create yet another WordPress blog for my Fickle RPG rules when I realized I would have over half a dozen blogs if I did. That’s ridiculous.

So instead I painstakingly consolidated ALL my projects, rules, and ideas into one place: Horizon Games. Seriously that was quite an effort, but I’m happy with the result.

I collected content from all my childhood games, brainstormed projects, and rules in progress and put them onto Horizon Games. I covered Life of a Dinosaur Cowboy and Dinosaur Cowboys there as well. So for any non-DC related news or updates check out that blog instead. In other words if posts and content are dead here look at Horizon Games as I might be working heavily on another game at the time.

Bad News

Life of a Dinosaur Cowboy RPG – Cancelled – Perhaps “postponed indefinitely” would be more accurate. I still like a lot of ideas in this game, but two issues are holding me back:

1. Playtesting: Nearly impossible to solo playtest 4-5 unique PCs plus enemies. A large component of the DC RPG was the idea of turn collaboration and that’s also lost in a solo test.
2. Too Many Mechanics: From the neat D&D Next style advantage/disadvantage, to Echo Death style skill/power lists instead of classes, to allocated damage dice pool, to shared action points/orders per turn, to codified non-combat solutions, DC RPG has a TON of unique game mechanics thrown in. And I say thrown in very specifically, as I more or less dumped every single cool mechanic I had thought of or seen in the past while into this game. Which results in a mechanically overwhelming game, and one that is arguably doing a lot to achieve very little.

What I instead am doing is splitting a lot of the neat mechanics out into separate games, namely Echo Death and Fickle RPG.

Skies and Slums Expansion – Postponed – This is basically my “catch all” for future Dinosaur Cowboys development. I’m pretty tired and fatigued with tweaking the core rules, which I’ve mentioned before (basically the past 2-3 years have been “this is the last version”). If I ever DO get the urge to add or tweak a bunch to this game, it’ll be under the guise of the Skies and Slums expansion.

So until I DO get that urge, I’m going to postpone this expansion. I could add a whole bunch of new features, allegiances, weapons, dinosaurs, etc. But I want to do so only if I’m excited with the idea, and involved with the project. Which right now I’m not. My focus is elsewhere.

Mixed News

Dinosaur Cowboys v2.7 – Soonish – Although I just said I don’t want to tweak these rules much longer, I actually admittedly have a few minor changes and balance updates I need to do. They are so incredibly minor that I could realistically call it version 2.60001. Also because the changes are so small I’m not hugely motivated to do them.

Regardless I’ll cover the specifics in a post very soon, and look for the release a bit after.

Good News

Dinosaur Cowboys Battle Report – I want to sit down and play DC again very soon, mainly to use a childhood jet airplane model (specifically a swing wing F-14 Tomcat) as a center piece for posses to fight over. I also want to do my “Civil War” style game with the same posse on both sides.

So with luck I’ll get my table setup, wrangle a player, and get a battle report going before the new year.

Fickle RPG – Released – What is Fickle RPG? Well if you paid close attention to the DC RPG mechanics, you might remember the concept of “fickle” vs “flat” allocation for a damage dice pool. Great mechanic! But as mentioned above pretty much tacked on to a cumbersome, overburdened RPG.

So instead I split that mechanic out, polished it, and made a (get ready for buzzwords) light cooperative narrative RPG with interesting and choice-drive mechanical resolution ready for any genre/theme. That game is Fickle RPG

Quite a history behind the game. You might remember a year or so ago I made a post about game design, and asked the critical question “what if there was a tabletop game where combat resolution was as involved, interesting, and full of meaningful and unique decisions as the movement phase?” I think Fickle RPG answers that by having an interesting resolution system full of choice.

I had the basics bouncing around my head for quite a few months. Meanwhile I was playing a Star Wars RPG called Age of Rebellion (Fantasy Flight Games) which my friend was running. But they needed to take a hiatus. So my weekly gaming night was free. On a whim I asked the other players if they wanted to playtest a light RPG I had been working on. The interest was there…the rules weren’t. As in I hadn’t actually sat down and written the rules. So having scheduled a session for a game that didn’t exist, I hastily wrote the rules, and we played.

This initial session of Fickle RPG went really well and gave me hope that I was onto something. So I ended up running the game many more times in the past ~3 months, for around a dozen different people, between 4-5 campaign threads. Some of the players hadn’t even touched a game more complex than Settlers of Catan.

So anyway if you take one thing away from this blog post, it’s that Fickle RPG has been my focus for over half the time since my last post.

Party of Light – Played – Somewhat related to Fickle RPG, I also made another light RPG called Party of Light. The intent was to play a one-off session with my family and nieces. So the core concept is to teach roleplaying basics, different dice, etc. to kids. I’ve since played this game 4 times (so far!) and it’s been great at achieving all those goals. My nieces have had a lot of fun with it, and the game is still engaging enough for adults. Win-win all around.

If that sounds interesting be sure to read more about Party of Light. Notice how handy that Horizon Games blog is already?

Other News

Besides that what have I been doing? Preparing for my wife to give birth to our second kid. That’s been a pretty central focus. I’ve switched office locations with my work, which added a lot of commute. I’ve been running a lot of Fickle RPG nights with friends. I’ve been playing a ton of computer games like Heroes of the Storm, Vermintide, and Zombasite. I failed miserably at writing Nanowrimo this month. All in all plenty of non-Dinosaur Cowboys stuff. :)

I’d probably write more here, but I literally just finished describing my new rules on Horizon Games, so I’m tired of repeating the same text.