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Strike! News and Gaming Thoughts


The Design Story of Ariadne and Bob

12/19/2021

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​Ariadne and Bob started when WotC released their Rick and Morty D&D set. I thought to myself "that is a TERRIBLE match. That system will not prompt the types of adventures they have on that show." And I tried to think of what would be a really good match and came up dry… this is a problem that I can solve!

First up, they have a new weird sci-fi premise every episode. Easy. Just make some tables that let you generate stuff like “A ______ that makes _______”.  “A portal that makes you de-age” or “A glove that makes things shrink.”

The hard part is getting Rick to work. What’s the right feel? Morty says “Oh no, what is that?!” and Rick explains the dangerous weird phenomenon. Having a classic GM-and-players set-up doesn’t work. Rick doesn’t feel like Rick. The GM is the one who knows all the explanations, not Rick.

So what about making Rick the GM? This also sucks - there is now too much on the GM! They introduce every problem, set every scene, the game revolves around their hypercompetent GMPC who solves every problem except when he creates more… Yuck.

Go GMless? Most GMless games I’ve seen are very symmetrical - each player has more or less the same tools available to them. That doesn’t suit the premise here either. What if I keep the part where Rick is hypercompetent and solves every problem, since that follows from the show, but remove the other stuff and give it to Morty? Morty sets the scenes and introduces the problems and takes on that part of the GM’s role.


Now we’ve got something! Morty’s player can go “Oh no, what is that?!” and then describe some insane weird sci-fi craziness, and then Rick’s player gets to try to explain it and make it make some kind of sense. That’s a fun interaction, and one that we can build the core of the game around. So the moves and agendas for both players are designed with that in mind.

With those moves and agendas in place and the game working, now we can expand from just being a Rick and Morty game to being a game about any pair where a know-it-all drags her poor sap sidekick around. The sidekick boggles his eyes at some weird stuff and the know-it-all rolls hers and explains it. Then they both try to deal with the problem. 

That is—basically—the game!

We can just swap out sci-fi random tables for fantasy or horror or any other setting. Or, I realized, I could use this base to play the Jeeves and Wooster game I always wanted! Bertie gets in trouble and Jeeves always has a plan to solve it.

I also added in some stuff with scene structure, using an A-plot/B-plot format because that is a tried-and-true method for episodic storytelling to help keep things on track, because it’s otherwise very easy for players to end up either resolving the plot too quickly or end up spinning their wheels as they wait for someone else to resolve the plot. This lets you do a full story in a predictable length of time over a single session.

And then I added in support for a 3rd or 4th player. This part was pretty easy—they get to have a character who is at sub-sidekick level. (A Jerry or a Summer in Rick and Morty terms) And then they get to do more of the work of taking on the roles of NPCs. With only 2-players, playing NPCs and your main characters in the same scene works fine, but having that 3rd player to take on that task improves the game as it lets the other two focus more on their roles. 

So then in a 3-player game of Ariadne and Bob, everyone is the GM and no-one is. You could call it GMless, but I feel like GMful is a better term - there are 3 GMs! Bob gets to set the scenes and introduce the weirdness and start the plot in motion, Ariadne gets to explain what everything is and how it all fits together in the end, and the Chorus gets to play most of the NPCs.
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If you are interested in seeing this game in action, back today on Kickstarter!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1835460386/ariadne-and-bob



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Ariadne and Bob

12/15/2021

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Ariadne and Bob is on Kickstarter now!
Ariadne and Bob is a 2+ player roleplaying game about a know-it-all and her trusty sidekick going on adventures and getting in trouble. Ariadne can be condescending at times, but her ego is not entirely undeserved. Bob is Ariadne's long-suffering partner. The Pinky to her Brain, Morty to her Rick, the Sherman to her Peabody, etc.

This game is an absolute blast to play, and it requires no prep at all. My group has been playing it whenever we have an absence from our main game, and it's perfect. We can bust it out on short notice, it works great with low player counts, and it's built for 1-shots so we can get in a complete story in one session.

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​I've hired Vel Mini, Paul "Ettin" Matijevic, Austin Ramsay, and Jason Pitre to write playsets to customize the game to other settings and genres.

And for fans of Strike!, I am also throwing in The Ogre, a pair of classes by Gabriel Butche. As The Ogre, you and a friend control two characters in one body. This is one of the most unique tactical combat classes in any RPG, and it's very fun to play
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Strike! Now available on itch.io

9/4/2019

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I've got Strike! and all its mini-expansions up on itch.io now. If you want to buy the PDF versions, and using the paypal links on this site is not your preference, now you have another option.

Strike!: https://jimbozig.itch.io/strike
Vehicles: https://jimbozig.itch.io/vehicles
The Rogue: https://jimbozig.itch.io/rogue
Trouble in Hogtown: https://jimbozig.itch.io/hogtown
Survival: https://jimbozig.itch.io/survival

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Donation made!

12/6/2017

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And it's done! $800 to SickKids Foundation through me. There was also another $100 that was donated directly, bringing our total to $900. Thanks again to everyone who helped out!

Here are receipts for confirmation.
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The final accounting

12/2/2017

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In the end of October, I wrote a post about my 2 year old daughter, Thalia, and her treatment for stage four neuroblastoma, a common childhood cancer. Thalia was diagnosed in Jan this year and has received such amazing treatment from our pediatric hospital here in Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children, informally known as SickKids.  I put out the call to all of you to help me raise funds throughout November to make a donation to support SickKids, so they can continue to give impeccable care to children like Thalia. And you blew us away. 

In November, I received $282.57 USD from direct PDF orders on my website ($302 minus Paypal's transaction fees). I received $307.14 USD on DrivethruRPG. This adds to a total of $589.71 USD. Converted into CAD, this is $748 CAD. I also received a direct donation of $50, which I will add to the total, bringing the amount to $798 - this is the amount I will be donating in the next few days once the money all gets into one spot. I'll post pics/receipts from the donation once I get that sorted out. 

In addition, one person donated $100 themselves to SickKids Foundation. So the total raised was around $900!

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed, who brought in friends who contributed, or just shared the post so it reached a larger audience. 
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Fundraising update

11/20/2017

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Hey, just posting to update everyone on how things are going so far with the fundraiser. As of now I've made $238USD from direct PDF sales on the website and $227USD from drivethru. In addition, I received $50CAD to donate along with the rest of the money. And one person donated $100 themselves.
So all together, we are around $750CAD! That's pretty great, I think! There is still time - you have just over a week before the end of the month to get in on this. Let's see if we can break $1000!
In case this is the first you're hearing about this fundraiser, you can buy PDFs on my website: www.strikerpg.com or you can buy physical books on DriveThruRPG here: goo.gl/bp8Q7s and all the money I receive will go to charity to help sick children like my daughter, who is stuck in the hospital this week for immunotherapy, which is really no fun.
Tell your friends to get in on this before it's too late!
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Strike! Against Cancer in November

10/31/2017

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As you may know, for the last year I have been on hiatus from working on Strike! because my daughter was diagnosed with cancer (stage 4 neuroblastoma) in January when she was 18 months old. Since then she has received impeccable care from The Hospital for Sick Children here in Toronto. The treatment has been going well so far, but there is still a significant risk of relapse, which is just the nature of high-risk neuroblastoma. I'm posting about this now because I want to repay the hospital for everything they have done for us.

To that end, I will be donating 100% of my portion of all sales on Strike! products in the month of November to the SickKids Foundation supporting the hospital. If you were thinking about buying Strike!, there has never been a better time to do so - you get the game and your money goes to helping sick children, like my daughter. If you already have the game, buy copies for your friends! Christmas is coming up soon, after all.

My goal in this promotion is to make things as easy as possible for you as a customer, so all you have to do is buy the game via the paypal links here on the website (for PDFs) or via DriveThruRPG (for PDFs and physical books), and I will handle the rest. If you would prefer to donate directly to SickKids Foundation yourself, to a children's hospital local to you, or to a kids cancer charity, you can do that, too! Just make the donation in the month of November and email a photo or screenshot of your receipt to me at jimbozig@hotmail.com, and I will send you PDFs and/or discount codes up to the value of your donation (note that I cannot discount a physical book 100% because DriveThru needs to take a cut for printing costs). If you have a charity in mind and aren't sure if it meets my criteria, just send me an email and I'll let you know.

Pledge details: Yes, this will absolutely be 100% of the money coming to me that goes to the charity. I have no control over the portion that goes to Paypal or DriveThru, but every cent I get will go to SickKids Foundation. My donation will happen in early December - it takes a few days to get the money from Drivethru into my Paypal and from Paypal into my bank account. I will make an update on the website December 2nd with a full accounting of the total.

Please share this on social media so we can reach more people and raise more awareness and money!
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Updating

3/17/2017

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The links in the downloads section are changed now. Dropbox dropped support for public linking like I was using and everything broke. Stuff is re-uploaded now and should be working. Let me know if there are any issues with it!

Also, if you're on a certain set of forums, you already know this, but in mid-January my 18-month old was diagnosed with cancer. Her treatment is going well so far, but it is intense. Because of this, there will be no progress on future Strike! material from me for a while.
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Updated PDF

10/10/2016

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Hey, I updated the PDF and Print versions of Strike! on DrivethruRPG.com. The print versions will be unavailable briefly as they always are when the files update, but I'm hoping that won't last more than a couple of days. The updated PDF version is up now, along with a PDF FAQ/Errata document available to anyone who has bought the game. If you already own Strike!, go download the new PDFs. If you were thinking of buying it, now is a great time to do it.

None of the changes were major - there are no gamebreaking bugs or anything. There were enough minor tweaks, corrections, and clarifications that I wanted to make that I thought updating the files made sense. Changing the rules is not something I take lightly, but the upshot is this: none of the changes are absolutely vital, but all of them improve the game in some small way, and I recommend you use them.
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How Often Should We Roll?

9/19/2016

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How often should we roll? This is a question that I feel like I should have spent some time answering in the book, because it has huge impact on certain of the mechanics. Generally speaking, you should be rolling the dice a lot. The GM should be calling for rolls often. This raises a few questions: Why? Whose responsibility is it? Why doesn’t that naturally happen for some groups? How can we make it happen?

First off, we need to ask “Why should we roll often?” The main reason is that there are parts of the game that rely on rolling a lot. If you only roll a few times per session, then players will not be rolling Unskilled often, will almost never be learning new Skills, won’t be using Action Points and thus will have little reason to generate them, won’t be making the most of their Kits if you are using those. A bigger problem is that is Fallbacks become way too strong - if each player only makes two or three Skill Rolls in a given session, then that Fallback could easily mean that they get nothing but Successes all session. If you find yourself in this situation, I think it’s best to restrict the use of Fallbacks (perhaps to once per adventure if your adventures last a few sessions) until you find yourself making more rolls. As an aside, this can also happen when you play short sessions - you may be calling for plenty of rolls, but if you only play for 90 minutes and 40 of those minutes are combat, then you still end up with too many Fallbacks per session. If rolling dice is rare, then giving characters Minor Conditions can almost feel like cheating because you know that they’ll be able to recover before their next roll, but when you call for plenty of rolls, including multiple rolls in succession, then Minor Conditions will work well, too, providing a short-term penalty and lasting only until the end of the scene.

Okay, so whose responsibility is it? Well, it is everyone’s responsibility, but the GM plays a pivotal role here. Players should be asking for rolls. Their characters improve when they roll more - especially if you are using the rules for Natural Advancement (p. ??X). If you’re not using Natural Advancement and you want to encourage the players to roll more, you should switch to those rules and tell the players the reason. The GM should generally allow players to make the rolls they want to as long as there is something at stake, even if it is minor - just keep in mind that if the stakes are small then the consequences should generally be small. Giving a player a Major Condition on a roll they didn’t have to make has the effect of discouraging them from asking to make rolls. Use Favors and Flaws more, or Minor Conditions that they can easily resolve if they roll a Cost. As the GM, if you’re already happy with how the action point economy and fallbacks are working, then you probably don’t need to change anything, but if you feel like the mechanics aren’t being used, you should try to call for more rolls. You can call for rolls whenever the players attempt to do something where there is something at stake - the only restriction is that you can think of a good Twist, and there is no rule that says you need to think of one in five seconds or less; you’re allowed to take a little time to come up with something good. You can call for multiple rolls in a row if you do it using Linked Rolls. Remember, it’s a very bad thing to require that a player succeeds on three consecutive rolls to perform their intended action, since the odds are very good that they will fail at least one of those rolls, but Linked Rolls are designed to solve that exact problem: making a Linked Roll is (on average) a slight benefit to the player, so they may be glad that you are calling for one, and linking a few rolls consecutively is a good way to give players a chance to learn new Skills and emphasize the interrelationships between Skills - being good at three Skills related to burglary is better than being good at just one, but only if you call for more than just a single Stealth roll to resolve the whole thing.

Why doesn’t it happen naturally for some groups? It’s all about habit, and it comes down to your experience with different games. Some games don’t have an economy that cares about how often you roll. Some games encourage you to wait for a really significant moment and then make one roll to resolve the whole scene. Some games want you to roll only for certain actions. If your group is used to another game with a different philosophy about rolling, then the adjustment can take a little time. The game Strike! is most like in this respect is Burning Wheel - “Advancement is Lifeblood” is what Burning Wheel claims, and that means that making rolls drives the action and drives character advancement, so the game stalls out if you’re not rolling the dice.

How can we make it happen? Since it’s about habit, all it takes is a bit of conscious practice. Tell the players that you want to call for more rolls this session, and ask them to remind you about it. If you are being conscious of it and looking for opportunities, you will find them, especially if you have your friends helping out. They should be glad of it, because they will get more character advancement out of it as they learn new Skills. As noted above, the Natural Advancement rules act as an incentive to players to want to roll more, even making Conditions desirable as they help players earn new Complications.

One other quick aside about Fallbacks: a fan said that his players were simply saving their Fallbacks for the final confrontation which they knew was going to occur and then never having to worry about their assured success. There are a couple of simple tricks to play with that - drain their fallbacks early by having other impactful rolls earlier in the session. What are they losing by accepting the Twist and hanging onto their Fallback? Apparently, not enough. So Twist harder and make it worth using their Fallback early. Then, once you get to the climactic scene, take the fight to the players - make them make rolls with defeat as a possible outcome but where success won’t mean their final victory. Then - if they roll Twists - they will have to use their Fallbacks to avoid defeat on rolls without guaranteeing victory. This is essentially the same advice as before about draining their Fallbacks, just within a scene instead of across scenes. If this is insufficient, there is a simple mechanical fix: one scene per session, at the start of the scene, the GM will declare that Fallbacks are off limits. With that rule, players will want to use their fallbacks earlier since they won’t be able to use them in the climactic showdown.

Examples are always good. Here is an example to demonstrate how to have more rolls in a scene and inspire good play.

The Bad* Way: Zhen wants to poison the Duke. She must make one Wealth Roll to buy the poison, and then Rosen makes one roll to sneak the poison into the Duke’s drink. That’s only two rolls, but they resolve everything.

*Bad for Strike! specifically - the same may not hold true for every game. A game without rules that allow you to “fail forward” might suffer badly from having lots of rolls and thus too many chances to tank the whole thing with one bad roll.

A Better Way: Zhen first must seek out the ingredients for the poison. The stakes here could be whether the ingredients will be readily available or whether more effort will be needed to source them (a side-quest or having to trade away something valuable). Having found a source, Zhen and his confederates must make a Wealth Roll to actually buy them, where the stakes could be whether the ingredients found are of high quality or whether they are subpar, making this a Linked Roll. Next, Zhen must mix the poison correctly - the stakes here are whether or not the poison has all the required qualities (undetectable, fast-acting, irreversible, deadly). A Twist here might give the mixture an unfortunate strong smell, making it harder to cover up. The one roll to acquire poison has been turned into three, and each one carries with it new details about the world: Where does one go to get ingredients for poison in this city? What type of ingredients are necessary? What could be used in a pinch if the ideal ingredient is absent?

The next stage - Rosen’s infiltration - could be spread out into rolls like that as well. A sequence might look like: extortion to alter the patrol schedule, Linked into climbing to get over the wall, Linked into stealth to sneak into the kitchens; from there, test your disguise to pass for a servant, Linked into sleight of hand to slip the poison into the King’s chalice unnoticed. The key thing is that getting a Twist on most of these rolls won’t scuttle the plan entirely, since most of them will be Linked Rolls. Note also that the crucial make-or-break roll needn’t always be the final roll, either. It might be that the key roll here is sneaking into the kitchens, with a Twist there representing capture and imprisonment, while a Twist on the final sleight of hand roll might simply indicate that someone saw you do it, though not the Duke, and though you are successful in poisoning him, there is now someone who has some very strong leverage over you.

You can hopefully see how adding these extra rolls helps you put the players’ actions into context and leads to a more satisfying result. Once the players outline their plan, it won’t go amiss for you to take a minute’s break just to think about the rolls you anticipate and how they relate to one another, and to decide which should link into which. The players might still change their plans partway through and surprise you, but that is always a risk.

Oh, and one more thing before I go… the reason I wrote this post is because I struggle with this very thing when I am the GM. I have a tendency when a player has a good idea to let them make one roll to resolve the whole thing, and my scenes can wind up unsatisfying when I do that. So I decided to write about it to improve my own GMing and help you all improve yours. I hope you find it useful!
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    Jim McGarva is married to an awesome (and very patient) wife, and a father to three awesome (and not so patient) young girls. He is a math instructor who loves to play and create games.

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