Interview - Bryan CP Steele - TTRPG Content Creator - Essence20 System

Today I talk with TTRPG Content Creator, YouTuber and Games Designer - Bryan CP Steele.

We discuss Renegade Game Studio's Essence20 System, Power Rangers, Transformers, Safety Tools and much more.

You can find Bryan and all of the things he's associated content via the links below.

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/BryanCPSteele
https://twitter.com/PlayRenegade
https://twitter.com/FreeLeaguePub

Website:
https://renegadegamestudios.com/
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?author=Bryan%20CP%20Steele&affiliate_id=1643000

Other:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgaFI5uyTnmYw9Et1CjIcmw/featured
https://www.facebook.com/bryan.c.steele?ref=bookmarks
https://www.instagram.com/bryancpsteele/

Please leave reviews on ITunes to help us to learn and grow as a Podcast

Yours Sincerely,

Adam 'Cosy' Powell

~~~~~~~~~~

CAST & CREW

Host: Adam Powell

Guest: Bryan CP Steele

Sound Design: Adam Powell

Edited by: Adam Powell

Music: Epidemic Sound

Cover Art: Tim Cunningham - www.Wix.com

~~~~~~~~~~

Website:
https://linktr.ee/snydersreturn
http://snydersreturn.squarespace.com
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIoZ8iiYCp919UHXUYGghbw
https://www.redbubble.com/shop/?query=Roscoe%27s%20Chimkin&ref=search_box

Buy us a TTRPG Source Book: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/SnydersReturn

Are you on DISCORD? Come hang out in our server! https://discord.gg/QgU5UNf Join us in the Snyder’s Return Facebook Group!

Visit https://www.patreon.com/snyders_return?fan_landing=true

~~~~~~~~~~~

Social Media:

Twitter - https://twitter.com/ReturnSnyder

Instagram -  Snyder's Return (@snyders_return)

Email - snydersreturn@gmail.com

~~~~~~~~~~~

Transcript

Bryan CP Steele: 0:27

Hello, and welcome to Snyder’s return a tabletop roleplay podcast, my guest today brings something to our TTRPG table. More than just an essence of the game, we get a full experience. So regardless of if you've been living off the grid, or on another planet, he provides us what is needed to morph and even transform our shear plate together. Having worked with different animals, this particular relegate has a professional tale to tell. And it's certainly more than meets the eye. We live on the edge and up shift to success as we welcome game writer TTRPG content creator YouTuber and professional nerd, Brian, CP Steele, Brian, welcome to the show. Hello, that was probably the best, if not the definitely the most, like professionally put together introduction that I have ever heard. That was awesome. Oh, thank you very much. Well, welcome to the show. Let's let's learn more about you, Brian, how did you get into tabletop role playing games, please. I started out really, really early. My, my older step brother, and my cousin threw me into role playing games when I was like seven, more or less, I was just kind of rolling dice. You know, they were like, check out these neat little math, click clacks. And, you know, what, what are you? I'm a dwarf. Alright, that's cool. What am I gonna do, I'm gonna hit this thing with an axe. You know, it wasn't really role playing. But it definitely got me started and got me into, like the concept of my own imagination. And then I just stayed as a, I just stayed as a gamer my whole life. Professionally, I didn't really kind of realise that it was ever an option until I would say late high school, I had a couple of pieces that I had written, put into, like, you know, high school magazine, the yearbook stuff, you know, that kind of stuff. But it was fiction, and people really did enjoy it. And I kind of knew at that point that I wanted to write. So I just focused on trying to get, you know, fiction into, you know, fanzines and stuff like that did some play testing some rules play testing for a couple of small companies. And then in 2002, I lucked out at the right place right time with the guys the the original crew from Privateer Press. We played a bunch of their games, loved it to death, they had me do a test piece. To write some stuff, one of their staff writers left very again, like I said, Right Place Right Time with one of their staff writers left. And within about three months, I had met up with them, and said, If there's anything that you ever wanted to give you ever, ever, anything ever needed out of me, let me know. And they saw on my show my age on my MySpace page. They, they, they said that they they saw that I had done some writings, they said, you know, can we do a test piece and they liked what I had done. And they offered me 70,000 word little contract gig that ended up being the original War Machine prime. That was my first official publication in the in the industry. We won three origins awards for it the following summer. And I knew I didn't want to do anything else. This was this was my whether it was writing fiction, or later on designing rules and stuff. I always I knew that, you know, the world of make believe is where my brain needed to be. Yeah, I'm so glad it is because we'll touch on more why in a little while. But there was a there was a bit of a jump there. If you don't mind me sort of trying to backfill the gap started at seven dwarfs hit things with sticks. Did you stay did you stay with a particular process all the way up until you sort of when you pile on professionally, primarily d&d? A various varieties. But then, you know, as I started meeting other gamers, you know, one of my best friends in the whole world he was the best man on my first wedding was the I got it was like our first our first game of riffs from palladium. And it was the very first time I remember us sitting down at our friend, our friend, Todd's house and seeing these books and he was plopping like four of these books down and one of them was, you know, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other strangeness and the other one had this big black robot with a skull face. saw it. And I was so thrown back by the idea of these things all can go together. But then like once we started to like read it and get into it and was like, so I can make anything I want. So riffs was a big was a big influence on me very very early on all the way up until probably about 1616 or 17 years old when World of Darkness took took hold was a big vampire fan did a lot of LARPing when I was when I was in high school and early college but werewolf was always my was always my baby Werewolf The Apocalypse was I loved vampire I love vampire played probably the most. But werewolf spoke to me more. I still adore that, that world in that facet. And, you know, fingers crossed, hopefully, because you know, runagate is producing worlds of darkness stuff. When werewolf becomes something that can gel together for us, I hope it gets a you know, no pun intended, say my teeth into it a little bit. Because that would that would be 17 year old me's like dream gig is to be able to do something with wearables. So the miniatures games came on roughly the same time around high school, I got sucked into like so many people I got sucked into early 40k I played exactly one game of the original robot trader 40k before the next big box that came out, and when the next big box that came out me and like three of my friends, just that we that was it. I was like no, this, this is the game that we're going to play. And obviously, you know, time has moved on. And a lot of us still play 40k But it was, you know, there have been so many other miniature games that have come gone. And I mean, heck now I'm the lead developer of one that's coming out next year. So it's stadia is all over the place. Well, definitely things to steal your con not intended, but now intended plenty of things to sink our teeth into there. And you mentioned the renegade hope potentially or going to be working on a werewolf game, they've got the World of Darkness stuff. Obviously, it's nothing, nothing is set in stone yet we're still you know, the hunter just came out, you know, Hunter reckoning just came out. And there is a lot of really, really talented people around the world of darkness side of things that renegade kind of watches out for. I just know that I have definitely spoke very loudly and often about how often I how I'd like to be involved with werewolf or they can be so hopefully that will come together to steal a vampire fund. State Your Claim maybe? Yeah. So do you. I normally ask this later. But with what you mentioned there, do you get to play much of these games still, with respect to your work, which I promise we will get to or not? It's okay. I so I would probably say that. Because of playtesting. A lot of what I play is what I'm working on. Currently, I get my locals together, they're all signed up under NDAs and whatnot. So rather than playing our own games, a lot of times they're helping me out by getting playtesting time. But that being said, I'm in two d&d games still, that I run one and then I'm being run by another. And every once in a while, I would probably say, once or once every couple of weeks, we'll get together and throw so many sounds on the table of some variety. But it's not as not as frequent as I would like, but it is still more than probably what the average person walking on the street if someone was like, How often do you play games? I probably still have a much higher number than those people. But he respectable and you mentioned that playtesting things and your work with renegade has helped create and releasing new system a it's not it's setting agnostic, not system agnostic. I think that's that's correct. So, would you like to tell us more about essence 20 And this system please, I would love to. So, essence 20 became became a reality when Elisa Teague the at the time, senior RPG producer for renegade reached out to me and a bunch of other people and said we are putting together this you know this new role playing game. It's going to be you know, Transformers Power Rangers, GI Joe and other licences in the future. Obviously everyone involved in the team we jumped on it in a heartbeat. But originally the leaf When we those, like first couple of conversations that we had about the project, it was supposed to be a five EA project, okay? Like we were not designing our own system, we were going to be designing these licences for five EA. And not too long into the, the initial kind of distribution of labour. And we had put some framework down, some of us put some words down, but for the most part, like, we were still pretty early in the production, Hasbro and and Renegade came to some kind of agreement higher on the food chain than I am. And they were like, you know, we actually want you to make your own system. And obviously, you know, renegade was like that's, that gives us something really cool to base anything we want in the future on that's not proprietary to, you know, a specific, you know, DND set of rules or anything like that. And it also gave us a lot of freedom to make the system that we because there were things that we had already said in our meetings that we wanted to be able to try and do differently. And we were gonna try and figure out how to make, you know, the five E's system work in that way. And as soon as we got the freedom to be able to make our own system, we're like, Okay, now we don't have to do that, you know, we, you know, Transformers don't have to have 200 hit points, you know, we can make a an abstract health health system that's more based on the cinematics of the scene than it is whether or not you've got a bloody nose. Like, so that's and in doing so, essence 20 became, we knew we knew what we wanted it to end as. And then it really just kind of came down to trying to make sure that everything that we were putting into it that, you know, you didn't add so much to the soup that the soup no longer tasted good. We wanted to make a really, really good base to use, you know, cooking terms. And essence, 20 at its core is a D 20 based resolution system. But instead of adding a, you know, a static amount, or some kind of like, you know, multiple D multiple D 20s, or anything like that, it is you're rolling a D 20. And you're adding a skill, the highest result of a skill die, and your die changes based off of how proficient you are at that particular skill. And where we switched it up. Even further than that. I believe Ryan came up with it the first time when we were in the meeting, Ryan Costello from the premier from the GI Joe team. And amazing guy, by the way, is what he has forgotten more things about GI Joe than I ever knew. He did, talking to him about GI Joe, first off, just the love that comes out of him about that licence. But also, the little things that I would have never thought about like little licencing things things like he knows which names that we can't use because they were lost in 1987, because of a TV show that didn't air or like it's it's it's crazy. I love it. I learned I've learned so much from him as far as that licence goes. And he's so I hold a designer to repeat it the very much so very much so. But I digress. I think Ryan came up with it first was we want in some way to not just roll a d 20 Plus One more die, we wanted something that would give you there's that that, that that feel from Shadowrun of just throwing a pile of dice, you know, counting up your results. But without making it about this gigantic you know, this this number crunch of well, I guess I have to have a you know, a difficulty level of 97 because of all of these dice. And so he came up with the concept of the dice ladder. And that is that as soon as you are specialised in something that you're you are not just shooting but you're shooting with your favourite gun or you're not just a scientist, you are a chemical biologist and you're playing with the chemistry set. When you are that much more specific. Not only do you roll your D 20. And you roll your sleeve, you're skilled if you've achieved that you will all have the skill dice below that as well. So if let's say you've achieved a D six now we'll we'll make you feel a little cooler. You're a D eight in podcast. You have a DA pod, you have a deed and culture is the skill. Just as a regular person you would roll a d 20 plus a D eight, add it together and if it equal to or beat the difficulties set by the gamemaster or the instance you would succeed but Let's say that you have a specialty in podcasting, then your culture, skill check, you've spent at some point a skill, a skill level on podcasting, you can say you bro a DA, but you would also roll a d six, a D four and a D two, and you would take the highest result of any of those dice and add that to your D 20. So you're not getting these astrologically high numbers. So we don't have to completely shift the, the scale of how things how difficult things are, it just gives you a better chance of succeeding at the things that you're doing. And then on top of that, if any of your dice aside from the D two, if any of your dice come up the maximum number and your skill is successful, it is a critical success. And then there's all kinds of different weird critical things that can happen more often than not people focus on it in combat. And you know, it just means you do another another set of base damage. So your your hit, does that hit extra hard. But there's also a lot of things that are like if you crit maybe the target is stunned for around or if you create maybe you knock them prone or in other skill sets. Maybe it could be that you know that that that podcasting check if you also credit on it, you get they say that, you know the production value is so good that it picks up on some, you know, maybe I oh nine grabbed you and and forwarded your link. You know, there's all kinds of things you can do, basically, to explain what that cool success was. And then the versus true zero to one and fail. It's a fumble. And fumbles are bad. Well, you say you fumbles are bad. But fumbles generate something else within the system. That is true if someone's been doing their homework. When you one of the things that that everybody on the team, which I actually hate to be convinced of it. Initially, I was like no one should be you should be a penalty. Er, and everyone was like, Yeah, but you know, this is a more lighthearted cinematic game. And it should be about if you're going to if you're going to go ahead and and take the bad you should learn from your mistakes, you should fail forward. And so a fumble if you choose to keep it like you don't reroll it for any reason, or you know, if a fumble sticks, your your team gets a story point. And story points are used to either reroll dice results of one as just kind of a way to sort of mitigate you know, again, this these games are about your character supposed to be the protagonist, you're supposed to be who that spotlight is watching. If this was a TV show, the screen is almost always on you have some in some variety. And it would be a really boring show if all you did is fail all day long. So story points help you move that move the story along with the plotline by succeeding hopefully by getting these rerolls. But it also allows you to act a little cooler than you are normally you can act as though you're specialised in something when you're not when you aren't normally specialised in it. Or my personal favourite use of Story Points hands down. Every time I've run this at a convention. Someone always wowed me with this story point use and that's spending a story point to come up with basically a temporary for the for the remainder of the scene, some kind of tool or an object or an instance, you know, I had a Power Rangers convention game where some guy basically used a story point to conjure up, you know, hey, we're fighting in this guy's backyard. Does he have a barbecue? And he says said he spent a story point for the guy to have a big gas grill barbecue. So he could basically shoot it blow up and can knock out like three of the buddies. And I was like, that's the that's the kind of inventive cool stuff that we like to hopefully, you know, foster in this kind of game. And story points help with that. Absolutely. And for anyone that may be caught up by D two, D two is basically a coin flip, or evens or odds. You'll note that our stair ladder goes D two to D four. And that is a funny story. Because originally the skirt story, the ladder had a d3 in it because most people do recognise that a d3 is just half of the six. The Lisa Teague hates D threes. I was saying that here, we're here and now she hates them. And it was the funniest meeting, we had all 12 of us in the zoom. And we were talking about the skill ladder and how it was gonna go. And she was like, We got to cut that d3 out of there and we were like, okay, you know, figure it figuring there's some kind of mathematic reason or like, you know, some kind of statistics you're like there's not enough there's not enough big enough switch from the D two to D the D four. You know, it's gonna throw off our numbers of skills. 100% is because she hates the d3. It's amazing to to some of that, trying to pitch what we're all about, if you go to the renegade site, depending on where you are in the world, click on it. And you can pick up the character sheets for the various systems, I have one in here. Typically, I have transformers one and the whole power rangers book in front of me to work from. I know, I'll be picking up God at some point, the character sheet is laid out in such a clear and concise way that you can read it top to bottom left to right without having to search right across, it's so perfectly laid out for ease of use. And it breaks down into the four S's which we can get to shortly. The four the four S's or the four essences are strength, speed, smarts, and social. We didn't want to overdo the crunch in this game, we knew that there was going to be because of just dealing with the licences, there's a lot of moving parts in the in some of these licences and we knew that when it came to the setting specific rules that are gonna get laid on top of essence, 20, that those were going to end up adding some complexity that maybe we were trying to avoid. So at a core, we wanted to make the system itself like the base bone system as simple as possible. And that was literally just basically cutting a cutting a human's or a person's personality, into like the compass rose, you know, you've got your physicality on, you know, the strength side of things and the speedy side of things. And then when it comes to your emotional well being and your like mental logistics, that's that's really how far we went as far as those stats go. And it did not take us long to realise that we could not use a defined scale. Because if we wanted this system to be cross compatible, which was a goal from the very beginning, this, the cross compatibility was not something that like we added in when GI Joe started to get, you know, flesh together, it was like, Oh, how are we going to make this work? From the very, very beginning, we knew that this system was going to be at some point, if players wanted to have played Power Rangers fighting against cobra or, you know, Decepticons hitting a GI Joe base, or later on, you know, Equestria being invaded by Insecticons, then that's that, that's up to you in your table to figure that out. But we wanted to make sure that the core elements of the game stayed the same. So if you picked up in essence, 20 sheet, no matter what setting you're, it's from, you have a good idea as to what that thing can do. Obviously, the specifics, you'll need to know, based off of that, you know, I'm not expecting someone who's like super into My Little Pony to pick up a, you know, a Power Ranger sheet and go I have no idea what omega Ranger does, you know, what is omega empowerment? Do? You know, that's kind of up to the people who are building those characters. But at an at a core level, if they looked at the stat of omega empowerment, and it says they get an upshift to this, and a downshift to this and plus one to this type of damage, no matter what setting they're in, they know what the what those terms mean. And that's really weird, how you know, how the sheet evolved, the front of every sheet looks very similar, when you look at the different player character sheets, even though my little pony sheet looks very, very similar, despite having a little extra section on it for the magical friendship section. As always, as we know Friendship is Magic, of course, of course. So, these break down the strength speed smarten and social and then scores are derived from them. But what is the character creation process which is kind of universal between the system or is universal to the system and sort of split out here? Yeah, the universal essence 20 character system takes your three initial character elements, you have an origin, you have at least one influence and you have a role and your origin is exactly what it sounds like. It is where you came from. It is your earliest parts of life it is the most important kind of like centralised core part of your being a lot has maybe has changed in you since then. But it at least sets up your your initial kind of concepts and things you do in GI Joe your origin comes from what kind of branch in the military, if at all, where you were plucked from to be chosen to be a Joe. In Transformers your origin, determines what what kind of alt mode you You you when you imprinted upon something and this is what I'm going to be where your initial alamode came from is your origins. And in Power Rangers your origin is kind of your in the initial book in the the core rulebook, it is a lot of different personality cores, you know, like, are you just a generally helpful person? Are you, the guy who tries to make everybody laugh, you know, are you one of my favourites is not from around here is that's the catch all origin and Power Rangers that is you could be a robot or an alien or maybe somebody who fell in from another times, you know, another another era of time because Power Rangers does some really wacky stuff to some of the characters, we wanted to create kind of a catch all. And then with future source books that not from around here, origin gets expanded upon with basically kind of new versions of itself based off of where you might be from what kind of alien you might be, it's still that same sort of origin concept, but has a little bit of a twist to it a little bit, a little bit of an added added coat of paint. Yeah. And then, influences are important things that up until this point in your character's existence, important things that have have happened to you important things that you've done, the important things that you've lived through, something that left left a mark on you. And a lot of times this will be things like, maybe you were a trained as an EMT, you know, that's not necessarily what your character does, you know, on a day to day basis, maybe, maybe it does. But you could add that aspect to your character. So maybe you are not from around here, you're this robots. But you are also you were you served as a medical training droid, perhaps. And then, you know, that would add to your role, what's your role is going to be your actual forward, where you get forward progression from there, your role is more along the lines of like your class in d&d, the the what spells out what you are currently doing, what you are currently capable of doing, and what you are currently trying to be better at, what you're gaining experience levels in that sort of thing. And then, of course, you know, origins give you a couple of little powers, influences give you a little influence part, I mentioned that you can have that you have at least one influence, you're actually allowed to take up to three, to add these extra little, you know, like maybe your character just doesn't quite fit in the box of just one influence. Like you've got this idea. You've told your Game Master, I really want to play this character. But you know, I'm I'm torn. I know his origin. I know his role. I just know, it's between this and this on the influence, you can actually have up to three and the the balancing factor just because if there was no no balancing factor, everyone was like I'm taking three because you have three cool bonuses, your influences, for the first influence you gave your primary influence. In less, I'm trying to think if we've announced that you'll maybe it'll be it'll be the first there are in future source books, there are influences that have mandatory hang ups. Basically, the influence represents something so important, so specific, that there has to be something that balances that out. So if you choose that as your one and only influence you would still get that hang up, but under normal circumstances, your first influence you do not get the negative the negative hang up that attaches to it. Your second the third influence you get those do in fact come along with you know for for instance that not from around here, keep go back to that the hang up for that basically is because you are not from earth, you're not from humanity, you're not from that chunk of humanity. You have some social hiccups you've got some things you don't understand there's definitely parts of your current life that are just confusing so you actually suffer suffer penalties when trying to deal with them. Very rarely does a hang up, like debilitated. You know, you're like you don't look at a hang up and go Well that makes my character worthless. It's a lot of times these hang ups are cool things to roleplay little minor minor rules, hiccups that might happen if you're putting the next sort of situation. But they all sort of reflect how that aspect of your character's life has become it was important enough to give you the the that that kind of skill based benefit that true benefit. There's also So something that comes, life has baggage, you know, no matter what the, there's always baggage in. And so if you start taking extra influences to add all those extra experiences to your existence, it comes with some of that baggage. Cool, of course, and that is broken down onto the sheet. Again, very straightforward and easy to fill out and that so there is both mechanical and narrative benefits. Eve, there are benefits in taking hangups, if that makes any sense. Because, as you've said, it gives you a more rounded or it can give you a more rounded or fleshed out character that that you can present to your game master. For Approval discussion, discussion, this is a two way conversation. Well, it also in the section we're talking about story points. Story Points are not just been given by based off of symbols, they're also given when people do cool things in game. And sometimes, we, in the the GM section of the books, we actually, like, tell the GM, if someone is really playing heavy into their character, you know, if they're really deeply role playing, especially some of those hangups, feel free, you know, like, the cool stuff deserves rewards. And story points are great way to reward players for playing up those negative aspects of things, even especially in situations where they might not need to, but it is still part of their character. So you know, the cool scene happens because one of your hang ups, at the end of the scene, pop in the story point and say, That was really awesome, I didn't expect you to, you know, play up the fact that your character has been running from the law or whatever. Absolutely. So, and each of the IPs that we've mentioned, as we sort of move through the discussion about essence 20 each of those IPS have challenges, they face internal struggles and conflicts. With respect to the IPS themselves, were there any challenges bringing them into the project and overlaying them on top of the essence 20 system? The biggest thing so Power Rangers was the first we the Hasbro gave us kind of a roadmap as to what what needed to be out, in order to get this done, get this done, get this done. Power Rangers was the first that needed to be out and about. And it, it didn't really, as far as like, the actual system itself goes, I think that was probably one of the more straightforward ones. Because we were just basically building superheroes of a different variety, we had hundreds upon hundreds of hours worth of TV and, and hundreds of pages of comic book to draw, you know, concepts from to be able to know what these characters needed to be able to do. You know, like we could we could look at a scene and go, I need my red ranger to be able to do this. Like it has to be, this is something that has to be available for these characters to do. And it's where a lot of the perks and powers kind of grew from, was the idea that, you know, there's these things that we know these characters can do canonically so let's let's give them the opportunity to do that. Let's make let's give them just, you know, maybe vagueness, you know, if you see a character that can throw a fireball, I might not give you the straight up purchases. throw a fireball, but we did give you power blast. And power blast is effectively a fireball, but are maybe it's also, like RJs will strike or, you know, like, you could find ways to make that function narratively, for other for other characters until we come up with something more specific. And that's and that's where a lot of this came from is the the Power Rangers was laid a lot of ground rules. And then GI Joe came along. And GI Joe is an even more straightforward, like role playing entity. Because you really you have a team of good guys versus bad guys. And they, they, they fight hard. They drive vehicles. And they yo Joe like that's, you know, it's not it's not to like the little the complexity of the world. But it's just when it comes down to it. It is a very core concept of good guys versus bad guys. And there's not a lot of weirdness. You know, weirdness comes from individual characters, or maybe some of the GM plots which we can throw into, like adventures and stuff. But when it came to the actual GI Joes themselves, pretty straightforward. You know, they're trained to do something and they're probably specialised to doing something else. They have some cool equipment, and they can grab really cool vehicles from a motor pool and they fight a cobra, you know, like, like, that's, that we didn't have to worry about, you know, things that grow in size or, you know, interesting interdimensional robot Tigers that, that linked together to form giant robots, that none of that stuff really applied to God. Joe, so GI Joe became kind of, sort of like our middle middle of the, like the baseline style for some of the other things the other games did. And then there was transformers. Transformers was easily, I didn't work on the on my little pony, so I can't speak of any difficulties for the MLP stuff. But I can't say this, that transformers was the one that we kept having to come back to. Because you're dealing with things that are largely, again, no pun intended, of a completely different size. You know, you're in the unless you're dealing with a completely Cybertron based game, you're talking about robots that start at 10 to 12 feet tall, and get up to like, 30 In a world built for six foot tall people. You know, like, it's, it's awfully hard to look at our Earth, our, you know, our current thing and go, Okay, well, one of our characters is going to be a 25 foot tall thing that turns into a dump truck. Okay, how's that gonna work? You know, there was a lot of trying to reverse engineer and make that stuff function. And it really stemmed from when the we were talking about how to make the giant monsters fight in Power Rangers, is how to make those fair without just basically saying, well, they step on everybody, or you have to get into your you have to get into your swords, or they're just, they're going to defeat you. Be that we've actually I don't think we've caught a little flack from it. But there's been some of the people on the on the discord channels and the the Facebook groups and things that are that are concerned that the Power Rangers can hurt the big guys when they're not in their swords and stuff. The reason for that is because again, we had to try and deal with things as a core essence 20 base. And if we set precedent, that giant size things can just simply ignore attacks from little guys. That's going to make transformers into the most powerful licence in the in the series, there will be no there'll be no question because basically, I'm bigger than you, I'm tougher than you, I take less damage than you, I'm going to be able to school you or we you run into on a core concept level, a Power Ranger with a big that will say a vector blaster, I'm dealing with Time Force right now. And one of the books I'm writing so vector blaster, your thing, it's basically a big bazooka that shoots at the monster if I say that that big target can't be hit there can't be hurt by that vector blaster despite the fact that you've seen it in the show that it has happened that same mechanic when I shifted over and apply it to gung ho with a bazooka shooting at I don't know a his tank, you know, something that is large, or you know, even scaled up a little even further American, you know, the the Special Forces guys that fight against the transformers. And thank you. For the for the movie anyway. If that means that the Sector Seven guys just they just can't beat the big guy, because they don't have zords to call on. So we had to figure out a system that basically made it so the smaller target or the smaller guys could get benefits from hit to hit big guys. And then hopefully the big guy stats would soak up that damage. And the vise the reverse is also true. Bigger guys have a harder time hitting little guys. But more often than not the bigger guys are inflicting more damage. So when they do connect those little guys really, really do feel it. And you mentioned sort of defeating and this game handles that there is no from what I've read and what I understand there was no player death character there was no there's no player death. There's no character death. It is all defeated and unconscious and things like that to remain in that sort of cinematic situation. We wanted very early on we were talking about how a player in Power Rangers specifically because that's again, that was the first licence we dealt with. In Power Rangers the only time that characters like the Rangers die is when it is a extremely specific narrative point. Normally it's a it happens because it's the it's the the end of a giant, you know, plotline or something like that. Normally when it comes into combat, when they get knocked out or defeated before the end of the commercial break. There's a bunch of sparks and smoke and they roll around on the ground a little bit and then they lay there and they're like, oh, man, I'm out. You know, and that's We wanted to keep that feel. But we also knew that there are players out there that are going to want to play grittier, you know, some of the some of the comments for Power Rangers do get into some of the, you know, blood and viscera. GI Joe, everyone remembers that when Duke took Serpentor spirit of the chest. I remember being a kid and being like, Oh, my God, GI Joe is complete. Like, you know that that was, that was a moment. And we all you know, it's still too soon. We all remember when Optimus Prime turned grey and turn to dust. We didn't want an ironclad rule of this is how characters die. So instead, we created the defeated condition. And the defeated condition varies dramatically. In our published adventures, which are read only a couple of small ones are out right now. A lot of the scenes will have a, if the players get defeated, this happens, you know, almost kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure book of if you if you chose the wrong page, go to jail. You know, if the if the players get defeated by this particular bad guy, maybe he takes all their takes all their weapons off of them and runs for the hills before they wake up. Or maybe they're captured. And there's an alternate scene in the book that says, you know, if your players wake up in jail, here, here's the stats train, you know, stage a jailbreak. But there's nothing that says that a GM if they wanted to run a greedy game, if they wanted to run a game that was more I hate to use the term realistic when we talk about role playing games, but that has that sort of, you know, yeah, there might be some red and blue lasers. But, you know, roadblocks wielding that 50 Cal, and it's actually shooting bullets at you. That's up to the Game Master to decide. It's just, they have to keep in mind that there's really no rules for resurrection, there's no reincarnation magic. You know, it's not like a d&d game where, you know, if you choose to play down and dirty and someone dies, they're probably dead, like dead dead, you know, because that's you've chosen to go that route, for the most part defeated just means, you know, unconscious, something bad in the plot has happened. Trying to back to base or you everyone had to, for a lot of the a lot of the named bad guys. They're defeated is fleeing. You know, they, when they when they reach the defeated state, they will spend all of their actions immediately to your flee the scene as fast as possible. And then it comes down to the Game Master to look at the players and go, you know, do you give chase? Or do you let the bad guy you know, do you let Starscream you know, Xev BootMii, a blast off? Or do you follow Him? Maybe back to the base? You know, you could always use some of that to some of those defeats as storyline connections to the next scene. Yeah, I'd like to use a story point to put a tracker on Starscream so we can find the Decepticon base. Exactly. That. That's that. And that's pretty much what we would hope would happen out of out of some of these games. So, so much stuff there. We mentioned staffing, you've mentioned a few others. The current core books that are out very much focused on on the heroes definitely the GI Joe and the Transformers core rulebook are sort of centred on creating the protagonist. Is there a chance in the future for us to play the morally grey games and bring in the antagonists to our Absolutely. We announced at renegade con earlier this year that there was going to be a cobra book. And that it was not just initially people asked if it was going to just be basically a monster manual. You know, it was gonna just be here's a bunch of Cobra threats. And it's actually the exact opposite. It is a book based on building characters who are Cobra agents. And then there is a section that has a whole bunch of GI Joes and GI Joe vehicles and things started up as threats. So if you really wanted to play a cobra based game, you want 100% I mean, it needs to work alongside the the core rulebook for a lot of the initial perks and things but there's a bunch of Cobra base perks there's a bunch of there's there's a lot of stuff that is you would you would be hard pressed to see a Joe taking it or you could always use it as alternate cool stuff for your Joe's. You know, the the X Viper Mercer. That particular character is one of my favourites, you know, he probably should be built as a cobra Bay To character, but then maybe throw in like one influence that is you know, he's a turncoat. Yeah, that he, he works for the Joe's this book would allow you to make that kind of character without without like shoehorning in some of the weird stuff that a viper should be trained in. This is your he has that training from, you know from Jump Street, and then relatively recently on, I believe it was on one of the live streams with Renegade. But I could be wrong. I don't remember I may have just accidentally mentioned it. But there is a Decepticon book that does the same for the Transformers licence. Okay. Obviously, still got some time to wait on those. Because the core books just came out. And the Transformers core books is not even out yet. It'll be out very, very shortly based off of when it comes out. But I preordered it. I am waiting for my hard copy. I have the PDF open in front of me so well, what we can do there is nice segue into where can we find your good self, and everything you're associated with? Socialism? That's all good stuff. So my socials are easy. I only I've only found two different things at Brian CPCE deal on Facebook and Instagram, which I don't Instagram very often. But occasionally I do you can read definitely reach me there. I just don't, I don't post very much. I'm a bad social person. And on that one. I do Brian CBCL on Twitter as well. But then I am the professional nerd at tick tock. And on YouTube, my show tales from a professional nerd. I try to have episodes out every Friday, barring weirdness. And it's more or less me talking to a camera about the random topic at hand. I tried to do stuff that people ask that they think would be helpful tips from someone in the industry. You know, I know I did a I did one based on a on what to set up for free or first, like when you're freelancing, how to avoid being, you know, taken advantage of on your contracts. I did an entire episode on playtesting. But more often than not, it is a topic of the moment, you know, something pops up. It's important that the time and I will talk at great length. Although I tried to keep my episodes to an hour or less, because if I didn't, I would never get any work done because I would just camera all day long. So all right, well, I will make sure that all that stuff is in the description below this podcast. So scroll down, scroll down and follow those links. Your most recent video time recording was a review of GenCon 2022. So yeah, I have Miskin mentions. The last COVID Did did a number on a lot of us that that lives for those sorts of things. But this particular GenCon was the first one that I went to. I went to when I went to I went to Gen Con last year I was the you know still with me, as far as renegade news. So contracted renegade for doing all these games. But we had not really released your like, like nothing had really come out yet. This was the first time that we had a full on, you know, we had an entire room full of people playing our games. I loved swinging by and just seeing people you know, I would walk into the role playing room and just sort of like, lurk and see which which game master screens were up at which table and you know, listen to I remember someone saying something about how, you know, they yelled at fishtail. And fishtail is one of the transformer NPCs that I made for that one of the convention scenarios. So I knew exactly which table to look for. Because they were talking, you know what it was like? Fishtail. It's your turn. I was like, Oh, I love it. is open. Yeah, exactly. It's, it was it was it was a great show. Because I am at this time, I'm still just a contractor for renegade not actually staff. So it was also good for me for some of my other gigs. I mentioned earlier miniature game. I'm the lead developer on Warzone eternal, which is the Mutant Chronicles miniatures game that's coming out next year. And so we had a lot of I got to meet a lot of other people that up until this point, we're basically names names on a screen or faces in a very tiny little zoom box. So it's nice to it was nice to put a Uh, put some faces names to faces and get a lot of this one was a busy professional show for me I didn't do a lot of like, like fun gaming did a little bit I was trying to sneak in a little bit. But I'm, I'm, I'm so ecstatic that conventions are starting to come back. So, again, a link to that will be in the description as I mentioned earlier, the joy of sort of grabbing a load of dice and rolling and for shadow run. And you release something for that which is available on Drive Thru RPG, which I'll also put a link in the description. I did, I've done a little bit of work for the gentleman RPG, but most of the stuff I do for Shadowrun is just straight fiction. I've done to two novels, one novella, and a short story that I think's coming out next year, I think it's being put into a, like a collection, it's kind of thing. But I do know that I want one of the things I did while I was at Gen Con was I talked to their fiction guy, and they want me to do some more. So I got more of that coming. Amazing. It's a game I've not had the pleasure to try yet. Shadow run, but I've heard good, good, some good, some bad, but mostly good stuff about it. I think that it's on its current, it's on its sixth version right now the six the six world I like the six world set, because it is a little more loose, it's not quite so crunchy as some of the earlier ones. But I do think that a lot of the people who played earlier Shadowrun this rule set is not quite as tight, and and conformed as the earlier ones. So some of the things that they want to do and want to have rules for are going to end up being a little more flexible in six worlds. And yeah, and you kind of have to sort of take that sort of far glance at things to see how stuff works. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the system. It's just it's just definitely a different field than some of the last ones. That's fair enough. Like I have been a Shadowrun fan as far as the world goes for a long time that same person who got me into rifts is the one who sucked me into shadow run way back when something about him loving worlds that do everything. But it's it is a it's a really really neat setting. And if you get the right group and the right game master, it can be like like nail biting tents, it like when you're playing the game. Because there's a lot of like, you know, espionage and people who are your best friend but also liars. And there's a lot of that a lot of backstabbing going on and shatter and shatter owners are shady. Keep in mind well, you've mentioned a couple of systems you are running and have run d&d, you know, you play tests a lot of different systems. So either system specific sessions 20, or just game wide, specific only advice for new DMS for example that you can draw from your experience, the biggest thing when it comes to a G Tube when it comes to jamming, whether it's the first time or the 100th time is really the two big things to remember is that the it's not a role playing games aren't about winning or losing. It's not a board game. You know, it is sometimes the the harshest defeat at the table can be one of your best sessions. But also, you want to make sure that your players know from the very beginning that you are also playing this game, that you are not there to just play puppets and and do everything that they need you to do. You're there to interact with them and you're there to enjoy this collaborative effort as well. You know, it's not even for those of those people, myself included who occasionally get paid to do this. It's that's not what you're there for. You're there to enjoy yourself. If you leave game mastering you go home, and you need a drink after your game because it was so just so stressful and so hard. Maybe take a breather, take a step back. Let your players know Hey, this is stressing me out running this game. At the end of the day, these are games these are supposed to be like ways to make a smile and ways to better our our mental health. Not feel like we your net. It should never be an obligation. You should never have to feel oh, I've got to run d&d this weekend. If you're not feeling it, then don't yield your players and go hey, why don't we get together same time same place same bat channel and playing Munchkin you know plays something that's brainless. Let's just, you know, enjoy Our company, smile, eat some snacks, and have a good night. I'm not in it for the game mastering right now. And you'll, you'll get that and when you get back into it and you you sit down, then you are ready and you're like, Alright, let's do this, I've got this great game plan, your players will recognise it, they'll know, they'll know that you're in it, they'll know that you're, you know, you're not just phoning it in. And more importantly, you're having fun too. That's what this whole this whole thing is about, you know, is having fun and you know, leaving leaving any room a little happier than when you went in? Definitely, definitely not amazing advice. Thank you for the insight and you mentioned there about having having fun and enjoying it and and making sure your your plays are involved and things like that. From the safety tool side of stuff. There's some referenced in the essence 20 sort of cool books. How have a which of the safety tools calibration tools have you choose to sort of describe them to use or to use with your games. I so I find myself in into two camps. One with like, a lot of my play testers and the people I play with all the time, we don't generally need them because we've known each other for 20 years. Yeah, there's, it's, it's I know, I don't talk about this around this person. I know that if I if I make a dungeon filled with nothing but spiders and spidery type things, my wife is probably going to leave. Like let's just I'm I'm aware that that's going to be the sort of situation and I will just try to avoid that kind of thing at the table. But anything, anytime that I run anything at a convention, or anytime that I run it like a game store, or like a special event or a book signing, or something, if I'm going to do something with people that I either don't know, well, or don't know at all, I like to have it's it's technically a gamer consent form. But it's I think somebody uses the term law lines and veils now is that is the new the new term, I took the form from money cook, I absolutely love the form that he put together, it's a he's got a PDF of it on his website. It is just this big long set of, of stimulus, you new topics. And there's little bubbles next to it, that is a red light, yellow light green light. And basically you just fill in the bubble. And green light means doesn't bother me, I don't care if it's in the game, whatever. Yellow light means. If it's brought up in game, that's okay, let's just maybe not focus on it. And if it's something that it's going to be a big instance, maybe we can do like a cut to black, you know, the building starts to burn and then we cut to black and then at the next session, you know, we're dealing with the aftermath or whatever. And then the red bubble is something guys, I'm just not okay with this, this will be something that will will help rob me of the fun from this game. And there's also some blank lines, but there any additions, there's some normal Stefanelli you know, fire or, you know, the slavery abuse, you know, a lot of that stuff's already in there. But there's also wines, like, specifically drawn lines that you know, someone's right one in, you know, like, maybe they've got some weird thing with llamas, you know? I know we're making fun, but maybe like, they literally have like traumatised by the animal when they were a child and are like, I don't want to think about those silly spitting bastards, please just, you know, I don't want it. They write the write in llamas and put a big fat X on the red. And so far I think I probably handed out since I've been using them probably 50 Altogether, I think and I've only ever gotten pushback from someone maybe once where they were just like I don't know why I have to do this and basically I was like, it's for the rest of the people at the table. And it you know if you're okay with everything just green dots down the road. No, that's it takes one second for you to do this. And you cool we're good. We're good to go and we can move on. I've only ever had a couple of really weird instances. I had one one guy's very specifically put put in the notes that he is okay with fire. Like fire balls. Fire FIRE flame throwers, Fire Fire Fire. He's totally fine with that. But not very specifically. We can't do our second you can't do like buildings on fire. Okay. And and I made note of it. No, there was no there was nothing like that in that project. Killer session anyway, so it's not a big deal. But then after the session, I was like, Hey, if you don't mind me asking, I don't know, as I tell me to bounce if this is crying, but you're okay with fire, like you're not afraid of fire, but you are against, you know, the concept of structures burning down. And he let me know is like, well, apparently his family home burned down like six months before and was just like I don't I don't really want to think about, you know, I'm here trying to ignore all of that. I don't want to think about it. And I was like, Awesome, thank you. And I would have never known that if I didn't have that form. And that's so I literally, I think that it, I know that a lot of gamers get grief for like, you know, I want to check in my lines and veils, I want to make sure that you know, you got the x card and all that kind of stuff. But it doesn't take long, it's not it's 15 minutes out of a game session to get that stuff written down. And for the most part, I fit, like I said, I think most people, I've, I've gotten all green on almost everything. And a lot of times I'll get you a one or two yellows and reds in the places that you expect them to be. You know, I'll get a lot of people that are be like, Yeah, please, let's not do any weird sexual stuff at the table, please. And I'll be like, You know what, this is a Transformers game. I'm okay with that, too. Let's, let's go ahead and put a big red X on that for me, because I don't want to get into a weird place. You know, and that's, and that's weird. Knowing going into that, also had a convention that it helps me because the players sometimes don't know each other either. And so if I can know this, I can see as a scene as unfolding, if something is about to happen, that's going to get weird. Or go up against one of these, one of my players, you know, kind of crossed lines, I can go ahead and kind of step in and alter the scene. Maybe you're or possibly fast forward to seeing past the weirdness. And just try and make everybody's time a little better. Well, yeah. Thank you so much for for everything, to be honest. Both the explanation of your good self and what you do and the products and thank you for writing the games. And yeah, thank you very much. I was able to borrow a quote from one of my favourite TV shows Letterkenny love what you do never work a day in your life. That's a that's not 100% True, I work a lot more than more than people realise, but I love what I do. And so a lot of times, you know, a 10 hour day in the studio, it comes and goes, you know, like that. I'll look down at the clock and go, whew, I need to make dinner, you know, like I didn't, my family is probably outside. My studio is in my house. And I'm willing to bet that there are times where my kids are probably on living and being like, what is taking dad's so long. Because I'm I'm in the I'm in the zone, I'm working on the next coolest thing that I want to put out. And if I if I've got that flow, I don't want to wait until tomorrow, you know, I want I'm like anybody else. And I'm like a big kid, I want that, that cool stuff to happen now. And if it's if it's hitting the page at a good rate, I won't stop until it's, you know, until I'm at a stopping point. Because, you know, Gods forbid, tomorrow comes and I forget what I was doing. Or, you know, tomorrow comes and I had a computer error or something. I want to make sure that it's that it's in that it's done. Well, when the next of these coolest things comes out in the future, I'd love to get you back on the show to discuss this and so much more. Oh, absolutely. I would love to I have never met a microphone didn't like. I think the next big thing is the Transformers core rulebook I think is the next one that's gonna that's gonna drop for everybody. Although I did hear just before GenCon that adventures in Angel Grove the first adventure campaign arc book, which so the adventures that came with the gamemaster screens are designed to be basically like one shots, not one shots as in narrative, but like, you can more or less play that in one setting. Maybe maybe two, you know, they're they're not they're not real big, huge, deep. You know, they're a single structure single a single story structure. The adventure series books, which currently we've announced two of them. We have adventures in Angel Grove and then operation called Iron. GI Joe. There is one for transformers but I don't think we've announced it yet. I probably shouldn't say it. I don't think marketing is cleared before yet. Oh, no. Hey, I'm not here to get you in trouble. But those are much bigger books. Those are like the kind of thing that's multiple adventures connected together. That could bring a kid After from like second to fifth level or secondary like like first to first to sixth or something like that. But basically giving you a good, a good narrative head start on getting into that world. And there's one of those plan for each. Each of them though the licences and then the source books come after that. The first source book that I know of is that is on his way that we have analysis across the stars for Power Rangers, which is the essence 20 look at space travel and exploration, plus a bunch of Power Rangers in space stuff. Wow, sounds very cool. And I will definitely invite you back when more and more of this stuff gets announced and released. And yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I would be glad to come and talk about cool stuff. That's this is this is what I this is one of the reasons why I love going to conventions is getting a chance to talk to people about things. And in this case, I get to talk to lots of people all at once I just can't see them. I did the GI Joe a slight tangent, but I'm still on track. The Emerald Wombly I had to double check in Google News liaise. And then I became terrified and curious and terrified to have a look in that module. I will be picking up because it sounds the artwork looks amazing. But it sounds like a lot of fun as well. It so I when they when their team divisions happen and we knew we were going to be in at least a set I said I was like I really want to make sure I do something for GI Joe and Elise was like can you smash out a like an adventure for the GM screen was like Absolutely. And I I love there are certain aspects of Cobra that I think are some of the neatest things from you know, growing up with the toys, you know, and I got to play with some of that. So this is this is someone someone on the Discord said it and I want to try and I want to try and figure out who was a steal that phrase, and just like use it as a byline and everything is that essence 20 is not a tool box. It's a toy box. And that is exactly like it when he said that I I was like that is 100% what we were aiming for is, is I want when someone says their essence 20 bookshelf as this, this, this this and this is just like when I was a kid and through that the I'm gonna share my toy box was this really dumb plastic elephant and the top of his head. So like the the elephant's head comes off and I reach in, and I grab a fistful of GI Joes. And, you know, Scorponok and be like, alright, you know, slaughters marauders are going after Scorponok today. That's the kind of thing that we want SS 20 to be able to do. And that more importantly, I want to be able to hear back from people when they say I had a game this weekend and Starscream got eaten by the red, the red Tyrannosaurus sword. And I go, that's that that was a great day. You know, like, these are, these are the kinds of things the stuff that I when my son's almost 14 now. And he's just now getting out of that age range where he doesn't really play with his action figures anymore. But I remember on the floor of our apartment of when he was playing with all these toys and these ridiculous scenes that we would come up with and hit these weird rules that he would just spout off and be like, No, you know, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle can jump this high because he's purple. Okay, all right. And you know, when you're six, that's a big deal. And that's the kind of stuff that I love to hear about what I want to think people are doing with essence. 20 is I want them I want someone to to be like, you know, I'm recreating all of those old action figure. fun moments, you know, and hopefully I all I can do is cross my fingers and hope that people higher in the foodchain do these things is that I just want I want more licences for SS 20 i You know, I want Renegades to grab just as many things that they can add to that toy box as possible. And then let us go crazy as players and gamers to just fill fill the parts of our lives that need happiness with that same sort of six year old joy of explaining to me why Donatella can jump on top of our team. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I have a few ideas for you. I owe cartoons and stuff I'd love to know because that's that's another two hour conversation of Saturday morning cartoons. Brian has been such a pleasure. I will make sure they were links to everything in the district. From below I highly recommend people go and join the running a discord the chat on there yourself often pops on and chats with people in the various chats every day Monday through Friday, one hour a day. And as part of my job description, I initially it was just to basically smooth over some rules mistakes and things some some layout issues with the Power Rangers book. But it has turned into something that I enjoy. I like getting on there and talking shop with people and helping them with their with their game ideas or, you know, someone will will find that No, they'll get that sort of that stop that plot stop point with like, I just don't know how to make this work. I love being able to be like, well, this is what I would do. You know, you don't have to obviously but you know, if I was running that game, this is what I would do. And there's such there's so many great great people on the on the discord our community is Jordan data is Renegades community manager. He kind of like runs all the socials. And he has done a fan has the job of making sure that it's it's a safe place as far as like you're not going to get in there. And with with very few exceptions, you're not going to get in there and get yelled at. And moderators do a really good job. And there are times where I will log in for my office hours. And I'll go back and look at people who have asked me questions. And there will already have been the players and things that have come forward and been like hey, it's cool. We got this here here's what here's the answer. Here's what this is. You know, there's no definitive answer in the in the raw, but these are the couple of things that we might be able to do. And very, very rarely have I seen someone come onto the discord, the renegade discord and leave upset, you know, they might be they might be confused, to hopefully be ironed out later. But like, I've I don't think we've ever I've ever seen anyone like chased away. And I've definitely been on disk gamer discords in the past that the communities are are angry, toxic, you know, oh, another new bit showed up, you know, and this is not like that the renegade discord servers are fantastic. That's partly why I'm still there. So but yes, so I will make sure to invite you, your good self, or other members of the runagate team, but I've enjoyed speaking to us, I will direct an invitation directly back to you as well. And it has been an absolute pleasure by and so thank you so much for coming on the show. It is my pleasure. I can't wait to get back in if you ever want to do an episode specifically on GI Joe weirdness. I will help you get in touch with Ryan Ryan would eat that up with a spoon. I will take you up on that offer after this. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, Brian. Awesome. Thanks.

Snyder’s Return: 1:12:54

Thanks for listening. If you'd like to learn more about the show, then go to www dot Snyder’s return.squarespace.com. Alternatively, you can find us over on Twitter. At Return Snyder. We have a link tree link in the description of this episode. And if you want to support us, come and join us over on Patreon and we also have a Discord server. Please leave us a review because we'd love to learn how to improve the channel and provide better content out for for those who are listening until we until we speak again. Thank you