d12 interviews: Levi Kornelson of Amagi Games.

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The d12.  A die doomed to roll itself back and forth  between other more utilitarian and beloved dice.  The d12 wishes sometimes for six less sides.  In happier, more expansive moments it dreams of eight more sides.

Don’t mistake my intentions for a sudden urge on my part to use it –that would be silly.  Instead, I will honor each face of the lonely, iconoclastic d12 with a question of our esteemed interviewee, Levi Kornelson.

Amagi Games has had a brief but fruitful life in the RPG blogosphere.  His gambits have something to offer GMs of any system.  I’m personally a huge fan of his work thus far.  Each visit to my RSS reader has turned into an a-ha! moment when I witness one of his clever designs.

Here are twelve rolls.

d1. What is your motivation for starting Amagi games?

There are a few.  First, I was already blogging like a fiend, posting stuff on RPGnet, making up little game ideas and throwing them around.  Second, at some point I got on this long kick (which I’m still on) about how every industry that centers around the transfer of information is slowly coming to offer their core content for free; it’s just the “physics” of the digital environment.  At some point, I decided to put those together.  There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the short version; the long one is really, reaaaaaallly long.

d2. What are your favorite games to play?

Let’s see.  D&D 3.5 (just getting into 4e now), Settlers of Catan, Dogs in the Vineyard, Junta, Checkers, Vampire: The Masqurade (live-action, please), Magic: The Gathering, Sly Cooper, Abalone, Spirit of the Century (which I haven’t played nearly enough), flOw, Over the Edge, Dark Heresy…   Those are games I like that I can see from my chair right now.  Plus my own stuff.  I’m not sure I can play favorites much tighter than that; I’d get too distracted.  I also make funny noises when confronted by shiny objects.

d3. Are the gambits we’re seeing coming from your game sessions, or straight from your head to the site?

Some variation of each one has seen some kind of use at my table – in many cases, many of them were lumped up into big hits of stuff I tried all at once.  Some of the gambits are from games I’ve written, and others are the only surviving, working part of attempted games that bombed.  Now, that’s not the same as saying that each one has had a thorough playtest!  Some of this stuff is only moderately well-baked; some of it happened by accident when I was trying to do something else, and some is highly mutant versions of stuff I learned from other people and their games.

d4. What’s your favorite gambit?

Broken Places.  I’d like to give a clever, witty answer here.  But it’s Broken Places, head and shoulders ahead of the others.  And that one is totally a mutation of a variation of the town creation process you’ll find in Dogs in the Vineyard; squint even a little, and you’ll spot the roots.

d5. Broken places is awesome.  I think my favorite gambit at the moment is The Sacrifice…there are just so many uses for it, so ripe for potential…How would you go about implementing this in 4th edition D&D?

Heh.

The homework on that was already done for me, over on RPGnet:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=404397

And the idea mentioned for using Temptation Dice in 4e as an encounter trick (by Mr. Tweet, even) also struck me as pretty groovy…
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1059656

d6. Give us your favorite uses of one of your gambits.

Proabably one of the most entertaining was in the (never released, didn’t actually work right) Game that Overload came from.  In it, everyone was a mage, there were several ’schools’ of magic, and each school overloaded differently.  Daemons could be created, as well as mutations, elementals, and so on.  Additionally, each school has a few “subtle” spells, so you could never be totally sure what would blow up in your face.  Magic didn’t require a roll.  But, then, it didn’t need to.  That was pretty groovy, shame about the rest of the game.

d7. Have you been running a 4e game?  If so, what is it about?  If not, what would you be running? Which of your gambits would you/ are you using?

I’m about to start playing in a game run by a friend of mine.  We had a setting session, and I suspect she’ll be snagging things from my bag of tricks from time to time, likely as ways to keep encounters fresh and interesting.  I’d be happy to see temptation dice and countdown stacks as encouter elements, to see how they mesh.
I also really need to try out wrath tokens soon, an article that’s going up right away.  It’ll be the first thing up to stray from my “I tried this!” rule – Ryan Macklin of Master Plan came up with the idea that inspired it very recently while working on his game Mythender, and talked about how it played for him.  After chatting with him about it, it was something I had to write up.  Think “Aggro”.

d8. What are your favorite features of 4e?

There’s a lot to love in 4e.  It’s cleanly designed, encourages teamwork, a lot of good stuff; it’s not actually the game I was anticipating, but it is an exceptional piece of design.  My very favorite feature, though, was the fact they included the name “Sigil” when talking about the planes.  I got up and did a little dance when I saw that.

d9. What would you change in 4e?

Ohhh, boy.
First, I’d remove the option to possess multiple action points at all, and simply rename it “focus”.  Either you’re focused or not, and you can spend your focus to get the same stuff as an action point gives.  I think it would clean up that whole concept markedly.
Second, I’d spend a good month hammering on skill challenges.  I don’t know what I’d make of them, but I’m sure that it would include crafts.  I’d be tempted to make a few very different ‘challenge systems’, and talk about how to use each as the framework for various things, so that you’d have a Race Against Time as one and A Tense Negotiation as another, with “negotiation” also being the right system for disarming traps, just plug in the skills.
Third, I would likely have quit on the spot upon first sight of the GSL.  And I think I’ll stop there, before I start ranting.

d10. Share your top five list of game designers with us.

Today, right this minute, my five favorite designers are Frank Chadwick, Jonathan Tweet, Robin Laws, Greg Stolze, and Leonard Balsera.  That’s not the same list as yesterday, and tomorrow, it’ll change again.

d11. What’s your game design “bucket list”?  What would you have liked to have done as a game designer before you kick the bucket?

I’d like to write games with absolutely everyone, all at once.  That is, I’d like to find software to put up a site that let me (or anyone else) edit PDFs online, cutting and pasting between different projects and other materials, with a body of “tinkertoys” to do it from, and a big button that said “Print this and get it in the mail!”.  And I’d like it to be totally full of people enthusiastically sharing wild ideas in the form of rules bits, setting stuff, games, and so on.

d12. This spot is reserved for tantalizing bits for the future that you want readers to know.

Something diceless, and heroic, in which hospitality is among the traits that make you great; a world in which even the virtues of the beasts are praised in song, because any creature without a face in the sight of the gods is open to monstrous corruption.

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