I had the privilege of playing in Hans Messersmith’s one-shot of Dust Devils at Con Bravo this summer, and it was amazing! I immediately fell in love with this game, by Matt Snyder, which was the 2002 Indie RPG of the Year“. In my search for more material for the game, I discovered that Jason Morningstar had released Frost Devils, which sets Dust Devils in Nome, Alaska during the gold rush. The pitch is something like this:

Nome, Alaska, 1901. There’s a gold rush on at the very end of the Earth, attracting every manner of ne’er-do-well and fiend from deranged Kuskokwagmiut to Wyatt Earp. And you, of course.

Frost Devils is a reskinning of Matt Snyder’s excellent game Dust Devils. It can also serve as a really solid and historically meticulous resource guide to Nome at the turn of the last century for any game.

Frost Devils also provides a great looking character sheet, and a bunch of characters who have roots in the community; however, due to the fickle nature of history, the list of movers and shakers is a little light on ladies. While not a perfect solution, I have decided to go the ahistoric route– re-writing the descriptions provided so that they are more gender neutral, and providing a couple of name options for each character.

Click here to download my Frost Devils Playbooks.

And now to get you all in the mood to play Frost Devils, here are some postcards from Nome!

Nome, seen from a hot-air balloon in 1900. This postcard was published by Edward H. Mitchell of San Francisco.  This historic postcard is in the collection of Murray Lundberg, and was found online at www.explorenorth.com

Nome, seen from a hot-air balloon in 1900. This postcard was published by Edward H. Mitchell of San Francisco. This historic postcard is in the collection of Murray Lundberg, and was found online at www.explorenorth.com

Dogs hauling water, Nome, Alaska, 1899. This image was found online at www.arcticwebsite.com/

Dogs hauling water, Nome, Alaska, 1899. This image was found online at www.arcticwebsite.com/

Passengers landing at Nome, Alaska, circa 1900. This image was found online at www.arcticwebsite.com/

Passengers landing at Nome, Alaska, circa 1900. This image was found online at www.arcticwebsite.com/

Toronto Area Gamers Logo Fan Expo Canada Logo How We Play Logo

This summer I organized my first panel ever! It was for the Toronto Area Gamers as part of Fan Expo Canada‘s gaming track. The Finding Your RPG Style panel was recorded by Dave Leaman for the How We Play podcast.

Here is the description of the panel:

Every tabletop RPGs is different, and finding the one that fits your style can improve your gaming experiences. How much do you like to prepare? What type of material do you like to prepare? Should there be a Game Master? How much control over the game and the world should each player have? Our panelists will review common styles of roleplaying, and suggest games you should play to meet the needs of your RPG style.

Huge thanks to Alexander, Dave, Geoff, Jonathan and Kate for making this a great panel!

Check out the podcast here!

Agent 13

I have found that Ryan T. Goodman’s event “The Tape” based on Matt Fraction and Javier Pulido’s Hawkeye #4-5, makes a great one-shot! In preparing to run the event I wanted to include a focused team of characters for players to choose from.

I settled on offering players their choice of: Agent 13, Agent Coulson, Black Widow, Captain America, Hawkeye (Barton), Hawkeye (Bishop), Nick Fury, Quake, Spider-Woman, and Winter Soldier.

For the characters who don’t have official datafiles, I was able to find great write ups online, but wanted to make them as similar as possible to the official printer friendly datafiles to avoid any confusion for people who had never seen the system before.

This week you can download the first of these; Agent 13’s Printer Friendly Datafile, based on this datafile by Brian Liberge at Stuffer Shack.

machinemanheader

After the too early death of our original Annihilation campaign, Rob decided to start a new cosmic-themed campaign with new characters. Apparently, I have a thing for Nextwave members, since my character choice this time was Machine Man, AKA X-51/Aaron Stack. Machine Man was on my short list for the original Annihilation game but was dropped when Rob suggested that I play a female character in a Marvel game for once.

Much like Tabitha, Machine Man has a peculiar Power setup – one power set and piles of relatively small power dice. The real focus of his datafile is the combination of the SFXs Constructs and Multipower, and the Limit Exhausted (called Swiss-Army Fingers, Multitasking and Needs a Recharge in this particular Datafile). Figuring out how to maximize these isn’t intuitive, but can be highly rewarding once their potential is realized.

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d6-d6

Last week I investigated the probabilities associated with spending a fate point to invoke an aspect in FATE. The version we looked at was using FATE dice, which produce results from -4 to +4.

There is a common variant to using 4dF, which is to use d6-d6, which produce results from -5 to +5. The distribution of this dice variant looks like this:

d6-d6-Probability
So the question is, should we spend our Fate Points differently if we are using the alternate dice variant?

We can use this cumulative probability graph to help us decide:

d6-d6-Cumulative-Probabilit

Just like with 4dF, there is a threshold when you roll -2. At this point, spending a fate point will bring your result to 0; however, you would have a 42% chance of rolling a result greater than 0, and a 42% chance of rolling a result less than 0.

So if you roll a -2, and a 0 just won’t do, you’re better off with a re-roll. If you don’t feel like gambling, and a 0 is good enough, keep it.

For every result above -2, you are better off keeping the +2. For every result less than -2, you are better off re-rolling.

4dF

One of the core elements of the FATE system is that you can spend a Fate Point to invoke an aspect for +2 to your result, or to reroll. However, it has never been obvious to me when it is more advantageous to do one over the other. I’ve taken a look at the statistics and present them to you below:

Typically the fate system requires 4dF, which give results from -4 to +4 with the following distribution:

4dF-Probability

On 4dF almost one in every four rolls will result in a 0, and almost six rolls in ten will be within the range -1 to +1.

To determine when it is best to reroll vs. add +2, lets look at four cases. We can evaluate each case using this cumulative probability chart:

4dF-Cumulative-Probability

CASE 1: You Roll a -4
The worst possible result. This roll should happen once in every one hundred rolls, but now that it has happened, what should you do?

If you add +2, you have 100% chance of getting a -2; however, if you reroll, you have a 94% chance of getting at least a -2, and an 81% chance of getting better than a -2.

Verdict: Reroll


 

CASE 2: You Roll a -3
This roll is still pretty bad. You should expect to see it once in every 20 rolls.

In this case, if you add +2, you have a 100% chance of getting a -1; however, if you reroll, you have a 81% chance of getting at least a -1, and a 62% chance of getting something better. Those odds are still better than even.

Verdict: Reroll


 

CASE 3: You Roll a -2
This roll is fairly common, you should expect to see it three times in every 25 rolls.

Adding +2 now gives you a 0, which is your most common result. Rerolling now gives you the same odds of getting a better result or worse result. 19 results in 50 will get you something better, 19 results in 50 will get you something worse, and the remaining 12 results will get you the same thing.

If you want to gamble, you can roll the dice, but if it was my money, I’d take the sure thing. It is an average performance for your character, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Verdict: Reroll, or keep the +2, it’s about the same.


 

CASE 4: You Roll a -1
You’re going to see this result once in every five rolls. It is expected; an old friend. Adding +2 at this point results in a +1, which is better than 62% of the other possible results. You can reroll at this point if you are desperate, and a +1 result just won’t do it, but expect to end up with either the same thing, or something worse four times out of five.

Verdict: Keep the +2.


 

From this point on, it will always be advantageous to keep the +2 versus rerolling, with the likleyhood of rolling something better diminishing very rapidly.

So in summary, if you roll a -3 or -4, the odds are in your favor to reroll. On a -2 it could go either way. On anything that is -1 or above, keep the +2.