Tuesday, December 28, 2010

[Kerberos] Update Again!

I've been banging away at this project (I was looking for a way to combine the words "Kerberos," "Club," and "FATE" to somehow come up with an acronym of KFC, and had given it up as hopeless until Ben Baugh suggested "Kerberos FATE Conversion," so there we are) every moment I can spare between eating, sleeping, and making sure my now-all-too-mobile toddler doesn't run out the front door. My pile of reference material includes SotC, DFRPG, Diaspora, Legends of Anglerre, Wild Talents 2nd Edition, and, of course, The Kerberos Club, all of which, if I were still in school, would make this the coolest research paper ever.

A ton of would-be playtesters have contacted me, and you're all on the list. Sometime during the first week of January, I'll be sending out playtest packets to everyone with a rundown of the FATE ruleset I'm using for this book (even if you already know FATE, you need to read this stuff) and character creation guidelines. The first thing I'm going to want people to do is to make some characters -- and I want them as rules-exploity and min-maxed as possible. I want to see how bad these rules can be in the hands of someone who sticks to the letter of the law but disregards everything except sheer power. As much as I try to make characters like that, I know that there's still an internal sense of reasonableness that I just can't shake, so I'll need you guys to make those game-breaking characters for me.

Ben Baugh has a great little section in The Kerberos Club entitled "What's to Stop Me From Gaming This System?" I have a similar attitude regarding my system. I already know you can break it. I just want to see how bad it can get, and trust that the average player isn't, in Ben's words, "the kind of boor" who "would want to spoil such a marvelous bit of starry-eyed game design idealism." C'mon -- we're grown-ups.

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