Tag Archives: Hacking

Articles, System Split

System Split: Burning Wheel Hacks

3 Comments

Burning Wheel is past its twentieth birthday. The game, a famously complex child of the Forge, is one that everyone seems to either love or hate. I personally love it, but in this week’s System Split I’m extending a fig leaf to those on the other side (or at least those who tried to love it and bounced off).

Burning Wheel is a game predicated on its detail; thanks to its long lists of traits, skills, and lifepaths each one of its mechanics operates in a way that is predicated on its setting, itself a nerd-among-nerd’s joy of medieval history (via Desmond Seward and Barbara Tuchman) and Tolkien (via, well, Tolkien). You can’t really take much out of Burning Wheel and have it remain Burning Wheel…when the designers tried to take things out of Burning Wheel, they ended up with Torchbearer.

That all said, just because Burning Wheel is all layered into itself like an indie RPG biscuit doesn’t mean that there aren’t buttery nuggets we can take out. Those systems, like the mechanics around Beliefs, can certainly stand alone even if we usually see them in the context of something more. With that in mind, I turn to the subjects of today’s pondering. Hot Circle, a clear riff on Burning Wheel, is written by Casper Dudarec and aims to take the core mechanics of Burning Wheel down to a simple and portable core. But wait! The Gold Hack, more of a riff on the recent editions of Burning Wheel (i.e. Burning Wheel Gold), is written by Martin Van Houtte and…aims to take the core mechanics of Burning Wheel down to a simple and portable core. Huh.

Continue reading System Split: Burning Wheel Hacks →
Articles, Editorial

So You Want To Change The Rules

2 Comments

Play in any game system long enough, and you’re going to want to tweak things a little – there’s something missing, or a rule doesn’t quite work the way you want it to. Or maybe you’re coming at things fresh with an idea of what you want to do. No game system matches your idea 1:1, but there are a few that come close enough that you don’t want to have to design a game from the ground up. Whether it’s just for a home game or you’re designing one yourself to publish, that means it’s time to change or ‘hack’ the system in question. But what thoughts might you want to have along the way? I’ve got three.

Continue reading So You Want To Change The Rules →

Articles, System Hack

System Hack in Practice: Cyberpunk Blue

1 Comment

Welcome back to System Hack in Practice! We’ve looked at rolling Cyberpunk Red back to 2020, we’ve looked at pulling Cyberpunk 2020 forward into Red. Now we’re going somewhere else entirely! Let’s put down the book with the red lettering and pick up one with a blue cover; we’re shifting wavelengths into Fate Core. The working title for this monstrosity? Cyberpunk Blue.

Continue reading System Hack in Practice: Cyberpunk Blue →
Articles, System Hack

System Hack In Practice: Painting Cyberpunk 2020 Red

2 Comments

Welcome back to another System Hack in Practice! Last time, we made some considerations around Cyberpunk Red, and looked at potential ways to address early complaints from Cyberpunk 2020 fans (or not). This time, we’re looking at everything the other way around: How can we take the best parts of Cyberpunk Red and bring them into our Cyberpunk 2020 game?

Continue reading System Hack In Practice: Painting Cyberpunk 2020 Red →
Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Putting the Cyber into Cyberpunk Chimera

2 Comments

Cyberpunk as a literary genre has many touchstones, like the role of corporations in society and humanity’s relationship with technology. These have trickled down to tabletop games in different ways, but certain tropes keep coming up. Cybernetic enhancement is *the* subsystem for cyberpunk games, and has generally succeeded in early cyberpunk games where hacking, a complementary subsystem, often failed. Cyberware stands in for magic in most cyberpunk games, giving the characters access to superhuman power, though at a cost. In addition to cyberware, there is usually a digital world aspect of cyberpunk games, adjacent to but not always overlapping with the hacking rules. In early works this was a completely separate virtual world, while in modern games, there is much more focus on augmented reality, and the digital commingling with the real.

Continue reading System Hack: Putting the Cyber into Cyberpunk Chimera →

Articles, System Hack

Cyberpunk Chimera Non-Combat Mechanics

1 Comment

Tabletop RPGs evolved from wargames, which has somewhat stunted their growth with regards to most conflicts which don’t involve killing things. As board games show us, though, we can easily develop satisfying mechanics for a whole range of things other than combat. For the Cyberpunk Chimera, we’re envisioning a world that, while potentially violent and dystopic, doesn’t center around monsters or a national enemy or anything else that assumes that the majority of problems can be solved by killing.

Continue reading Cyberpunk Chimera Non-Combat Mechanics →