Guest Post: Jonathan Tweet's GenCon Schedule

In 1978, I went to Gen Con as a 12-year old and bought Cosmic Encounter. Nine years later, I returned as a vendor selling Whimsy Cards, and I’ve been back most years since. This year at Gen Con, I’ll mostly be promoting Over the Edge, the all-new rewrite of my influential 1992 RPG. Here’s my schedule of public events.  

Wednesday during the day, no plans, maybe I should make some. 

Wednesday night, Diana Jones Award party at the Slippery Noodle, game professionals welcome. Eager to see who wins from among the four worthy nominees.

Thursday, 11–1, Atlas Games booth, #1421. Talk to me about Over the Edge, Clades/Clades Prehistoric, Ars Magica, On the Edge, or anything. Yes, I’ll also sign whatever books of mine you bring.

Thursday, 2–3, Crowne Plaza: Pennsylvania Stn A. Basics of finding players, getting a campaign started, and taking the gamemaster role. With Darcy Ross, Robin Laws, and Justin Alexander. Crowne Plaza is the place with the creepy white statues, so that’s good. https://www.gencon.com/events/149629

Friday, 3–4, Chaosium booth, #829, signing 13th Age Glorantha, or anything. With Rob Heinsoo. 

Friday, 7pm or so until much later, ENnies reception & silent auction (6pm) and awards (8pm). Union Station Grand Hall. Last year I had a fun time bidding at the silent auction and losing all my bids. 

Saturday, 11–4, Atlas Games booth, #1421. 

Sunday, 11–2, Atlas Games booth, #1421. 

Sunday, 3, http://twitch.tv/genconstudio, live interview. 

Then 24 hours until my flight out on Monday.

Guest Post: On Dice Mechanics and Over the Edge

This is a guest post on  from Jonathan Tweet, who is in the last 24 hours of his Over the Edge Kickstarter with Atlas Games. I didn't directly contribute to the design of Over the Edge, but it turns out that I contributed indirectly! 

Rob’s first professional appearance at Wizards of the Coast was when he in brought an interesting skirmish miniatures game and showed it to leads in the game design group as a possible acquisition. It was designed as a Glorantha game, but it would work the same way for a Magic-based miniatures game. The special dice you rolled mostly had numbers on them, but some faces instead had runes that triggered special abilities. When you rolled the dice in this game, the numbers you rolled were important, but so were the runes. 

He brought the same approach to 13th Age, where a monster’s attack roll determines not only if it hits but also whether something else happens. For example, if a phase spider hits you with a d20 roll that’s even, it can make a second attack to steal one of your magic items. The attack roll means more than simply hitting or missing, and the gamemaster can use the same attack over and over with different results from round to round. 

The original Over the Edge from 1992 had a linear dice mechanic, where your roll of multiple dice resulted in a number that indicated how well you had performed the task being attempted. The new Over the Edge has a linear scale on two dice to determine success or failure, and it adds good twists (if a die is a 4) and bad twists (if a die is a 3). These are the surprising results, good or bad, that are part of the conflict’s resolution. The good twist and bad twist rule was the original concept that the whole dice rolling system is based on. That approach derives directly from Rob’s dice systems that provided results that were different not just in quantity or degree but in quality. 

The Kickstarter for the new Over the Edge ends Tuesday, August 14, at 11 am Pacific. 

Over the Edge!

Our Wednesday night gaming group stepped away from 13^th Age games for about a year to play many short campaigns of Jonathan’s new Over the Edge.

We had fun with the initial draft, but I don’t think the first mechanics entirely worked for the group. A WMD-user named Ann Thunder was our nemesis in that campaign. We were all supposedly savvy agents but the storyline was eventually titled Ann Thunder Escapes. Ann Thunder had our number.

Our second long campaign went much better, though the mechanics were still in flux. We’d made jokes about our PCs running a sandwich shop together, and when the player who loved that joke wasn’t at the table the night we created characters, we gave him his wish! We called our shop Bread, Beef, & Beyond. The ‘beyond’ included a bomb-maker whose bombs changed people for the better and a transhumanist geneticist. Now that I think of it, the plot also hinged on the moment a ritually-augmented cow took an accidental plunge off the top of a university building, so there was more beef involved than I’d realized.

The next long campaign is where the mechanics came together wonderfully. We (well, maybe that’s largely me) stopped getting knocked out of roleplaying rhythm to question the mechanics. The roleplaying took off. This final version of OTE faultlessly handled our four diverse PCs going off in different directions, having full arc-closing experiences, and looping back together in a central plot. I’m hoping we return to this campaign some day, we were either going to get thoroughly messed up by the Temple of Divine Experience or just maybe we could come out on top. Or both!

The Kickstarter runs another four days.

The Subject Will be Revealed

Back in the 90s, when Lisa and I moved to the Bay Area so I could work at Chaosium, I got some fun postcards from a non-gamer friend in the Pacific Northwest who had gotten involved in a roleplaying experience he knew I would want to hear about. Every week for about a year, the players were creating poetry and art from the perspective of their characters. They did more worldbuilding than playing, when they played it sounded like a mix of roleplaying and live-action roleplaying. The game was full of secrets and spies and conspiracies. I asked for more info.

They were on an island. There were some really screwed up people running the island. Martial arts. Aliens, probably. Definitely magic.

Wait, wait, I said: are you playing Over the Edge? My friend wasn’t sure.

Is the island called Al Amarja? Yes!

I loved that this Over the Edge GM had made the game’s publishing history invisible to the players. They were having an experience, on an island named Al Amarja, and it was so over-the-edge that the game book stayed hidden.

I told my friend that I knew the guy who’d written the game, and that I’d introduce them someday. Years later, I did.

Vault forward another few years and Jonathan has revised Over the Edge. We playtested for a few months in my gaming garage, playing multiple mini-campaigns as Jonathan streamlined the system and shaped new storytelling tricks for the off the edge/grid campaigns of the 2020s.

The Kickstarter runs for the next three weeks. Visit soon.