Mining: The Purge

 

Fezzypug here with another installment Mining.  In this episode, we will be digging into the world set up in the trilogy of dystopian horror movies that include The Purge, The Purge: Anarchy, and most recently The Purge: Election Year.  What can we dig out of these movies that we can use for our roleplaying purposes?  Let's find out.

The movie trilogy begins with The Purge.  This movie introduces the concept of The Annual Purge, and shows one family's tragic experiences during one Purge.  The world introduced is a dystopian near-future, where the US economy was on the brink of collapse until a party called "The New Founding Fathers of America" (NFFA) overthrows the US government and institutes a totalitarian police state.  They institute a series of policies to stabilize the government and society, including enacting the 28th amendment to the Constitution.  That amendment enacts "The Purge", an annual 12-hour period of time where all crime is legal, including murder.  Government officials above a certain level are immune and failure to comply with the rules of The Purge are a hanging offense.  The next two movies in the series expand the world and the story, as we venture out into the streets and see how people deal with The Purge, and the groups that are involved in one way or another.  Though not the greatest films ever, they are nonetheless worth watching, if nothing more than setting up the "what-if" conversations with friends.  Oh, and all of the game potential. 

So where do we begin?  A game set directly in The Purge world has quite a bit going for it.  A dystopian police state that rewards the rich and oppresses the poor and middle class is a perfect game setting for a group of Player Characters (PCs) that get caught up in struggle to unseat the government and bring the power back to the people.  The Purge event is a catalyst to action, providing ample motivation for the PCs.  Maybe they lost loved ones to The Purge.  Perhaps they were devoted Purgers until something changed their minds and now they are working to make amends.  Perhaps the PC is a foreigner intent on helping change the system they see as a crime against humanity.  Whatever the reason, there is plenty to mine here for character motivation. 

The actual Purge night scenario is rife with possibilities in terms of adventures.  This could be a great one-shot, or series of one shots, as PCs attempt to survive the night, either hiding, trying to complete a particular job only possible on Purge Night, or trying to help others make it through the night, either as body guards, or as part of an underground group providing emergency services while the official emergency services are offline (watch The Purge: Election Night for a great example of this, including an awesome example of a Purge-proofed ambulance).  In the world of The Purge, you have a number of groups not hiding behind reinforced walls and windows.  PCs are not those people.  Their adventures would take them out into the streets to fight and survive. 

Many people are out to Purge on Purge Night, so enemy-wise as a gm the options are endless.  The best part is that you don't have to make them faceless mobs.  You can make them a part of the PCs lives if you are playing a campaign.  People that they deal with or know throughout the year may put on a mask and become something less than human on Purge Night.  How would players feel when they get cornered by a blood-drenched pack of insane Purgers only to find out that it is led by their friendly neighbor or favorite bartender?  That helps to make Purge Night adventures into more than two dimensional survival quests. 

System-wise, the sky is the limit.  This world and scenario plays well with any system, as well as pretty much any setting.  You can go traditional and make a modern scenario.  You could drop this into a post-apocalyptic setting and system, either as is, or even as something more akin to Escape from New York, where there is a whole area called the Purge Zone, where nothing is forbidden.  You could even drop this into a fantasy setting.  Imagine the PCs venturing into a perfectly normal city for some other quest, then suddenly finding themselves in the middle of the Purge Night insanity.  That could lead to a meaty adventure to discover the reason for the event and help end it (or in a twist help keep it alive if you can give some sort of reason that it plays a greater good). Sci-fi has a place for this, as well.  Imagine your PCs docking on a station just before lock down and having to survive while trying to figure out what is happening. 

As you can see, there is quite a bit of choice gaming ore to be mined from The Purge movie trilogy.  There are countless stories to be had in the Purge Night alone, not to mention how that one night can completely change and affect society and the world around it, as well as the people involved.  Whether it is a frantic and bloody one-shot or a world-changing campaign to end the bloodiest night on Earth, The Purge offers you a wealth of gaming material that has the potential to keep you and your group busy for a long time.  Can you survive? Or will you Purge?

Session Report: Aftermath!

 

We plan on writing a number of different types of articles for this blog.  Many will be gaming-related, such as the new segment I will be talking about in this post, though we will also delve into other areas, such as film and television, comics, books, and a variety of other things we enjoy (so if gaming isn't your thing, stay tuned and don't hesitate to let us know what you would like to see). 

The new segment I am introducing today is Session Report. In session reports, we will talk about games we have played recently.  We will discuss the game, the system, and anything that we found interesting during play.  These will hopefully give you a glimpse into our gaming lives and also give you a taste of a game you may not have tried, or a different take on one you play regularly. 

This past weekend, I joined friends for a weekend RPG session.  The group has been getting together to play this game for almost 20 years now.  There have been many faces through the years, but a core group has kept the story moving and has helped to create not only a good story, but also a good environment for stories to bloom and grow.  It is the type of game that players love to relive and tell others about years later. 

The game itself is a sandbox environment set in an alternate version of our world where nuclear wars devastated the planet in the latter part of the 20th century, creating the classic post-apocalyptic setting in the system Aftermath!. The setting has plenty of mutants, cannibals, killer robots, and super advanced technologies, though you could play it super low tech if you so desired. The GM for this game uses a heavily modified version of the rules for this game due to the fact that you probably need an advanced math degree to use them as presented.  As it is, the system is extremely crunchy, so having someone who knows the rules well is a must for a group to enjoy themselves.  If you have that, however, you can have some fun with it, though the skills system can potentially drive you to drink with its highly-specific nature and sometimes bizarre prerequisites. 

Our particular setting is an alternate Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The play originally centered on a society centered on a building called The Citadel.  We began as scavs, the poor saps who earned there room and board by venturing out into the city to face all manner of dangers to find anything useful to bring back.  Life expectancy was...low, though we eventually found out that The Citadel was run by a company that had a heavy hand in cloning, so they had an endless supply of bodies.  Our group eventually got tired of working for the bad guys and made an escape, settling in another part of the city in a community that was a little more forgiving and allowed our group to become a force of its own, complete with a freshly discovered survivalist base. 

Our group has the long goal of moving beyond the city and taking a larger role in shaping the future of the world in which they live.  In the meantime, they are building up their resources and a community to help them.  That means doing what they did before, but with better equipment and larger goals beyond a bottle of scotch or a rickety gun.  In the party this weekend, we had the following characters

• Hunter - Party leader and military jack-of-all-trades (also probably the longest-running character in the game, if you count all of the clone replacements...)
• Tool - Vehicular and demolitions expert (also had a completely separate personality, but he got better)
• Stitch - Psychic mentor to a group of kids with mental powers and seamstress extraordinaire (also the keeper of group momentum...if we take too long planning, chances are he will start something that will make sure we stop talking and start doing)
• James - Mutant with fur, super speed, and silky smooth fur (our own version of an X-Man)
• Luther - Shield man and muscle for the group
• Wraith (aka Tinkles) - Mutant kid with skin so tough he has better armor than many advanced armors
• Freezer Burn (aka Ziploc) - The only character I have ever known in the game to request a rapier as a main weapon...
• Rat Bag - Super young mutant kid with the power to clumsily talk to rats and zap himself when he attempts to do anything psychically.  He is totally 14 and not 9...
• Trigger - My character.  A grizzled weapon smith and sniper.  Also the subject of one of my previous post about whether or not to make my PC an NPC.  Would like nothing more than to be left alone in his workshop.  Never works out for him.  

This weekend we did quite a bit of what we usually do in this game:  plan.  We made plans for where we would head out to search for new and interesting things.  We made plans for our clan's people (lovingly named Meeples), and we made plans for what we would do when we weren't scavenging the city.  My character was able to start crafting suits of decent armor, which we were able to use both for our people and for good trading fodder.  I also made a pretty kick ass blowgun.  After gearing up, we headed to a market area called the Strip District and visited a market area in Mt. Washington that we helped recover after being devastated by an occupying force.  After these visits, we struck out in a new direction and found areas we hadn't searched.  During our trek, we endured a crazy blizzard and sub-zero temperatures, as well as a horde of starving rats that almost ate us before Rat Bag figured out how to make them go away.  Go Rat Bag.

One such new location was an industrial park that no one else had scavenged.  As a result, we were able to find some hugely important items like a warehouse of freeze dried foods, an intact ambulance, lots of car parts, and other goodies.  We encountered a new danger in bugs called Concroaches, big bugs that chewed up concrete and pooped out a quicksand that looked like concrete in order to trap anything walking across it, burying them so they can saw you to death and eat you.  It took us a while to figure out why the concrete was so unstable.  We had a number of crazy ideas.  We didn't consider bugs.  After a tussle with them, we decided they could have the areas they had claimed and focused on repairing vehicles so we could get our goodies home.

We did take a break from the industrial park to search a bit more north and encountered some warehouses that housed various parts to make Terminators.  Yes, those terminators.  Originally controlled by a rogue AI called PAN, we had thought they were done when we nuked the final safe house for PAN in a particularly epic final battle that included a bear armed with a nuke, and two party members making a final dash to ground zero before the nukes they were equipped with went off and doomed the whole party.  There was even an NFL-level spike of a party member as all three went up in a blaze of glory.  At any rate, imagine our surprise as we discovered a new group of terminators being built by our new nemesis, a group of sentient robots called NZT.  On our way sneaking out before they caught us, we encountered a building filled with large, unhappy spiders that took a dislike to us.  No party deaths, though James was poisoned and his powers sapped to mere human levels.  That is until his healing factor kicked in and he was fine. 

The rest of the game involved us fixing vehicles and planning our route home.  We have a plan for the next game session, so that means only 3 hours of planning before we play instead of 4.  In all, it is a great time, though.  People love the setting and the characters, and more than that, we love to get together and play this communal story that is the players to write.  The GM has a plot and is slowly guiding us towards the next major point, but the game and the story are mostly decided by us in a sandbox game that allows us to explore what a post-apocalyptic world might be like.  It ain't pretty, but it is fun.  Spending a solid weekend with a group you enjoy gaming with is never bad, even if it is a lot of planning...Next time we will hopefully see the return of some other players, including my lovely wife, and we will see what happens when you drive an ambulance and a van chock full of goodies through a desolated city intent on killing you for your last Twinkie. 

Failure pt three: 1st draft version

Game mechanics that enforce rewarding failure.
Some games mechanically embrace failure, but it is pretty rare. A crit fail can be devastating in combat, but the sting can be taken out with an experience reward. That's how it works in our aftermath game, skills only raise on a crit success or a crit fail. Hollow earth expeditions allows you to choose to fail certain skill rolls if they play to one of your disadvantages, this gives you a reroll or similar bennie. The 80's TSR game torg had a mechanic where the main villain couldn't be defeated until the players accrued enough clue points (I forget what they were called) and one of the main ways to get points was to get beaten by the villain or its lackeys. The fantasy flight star wars games give you the option of success and failure mixing in a single roll. Dungeon world gives you and experience point every time you fail.
I feel like mechanical rewards for failing are best used as small perks for failures out of the dice. Big game incentives like torg seem a bit awkward. You don't want the players to expect or want to lose an encounter, you just want them to not feel terrible about failing. Part of the joy of adding failure to a game is that any given encounter isn't a foregone conclusion, for the good or the bad. I do feel like torg was on to something though. Rewarding the players with information is a great way to provide a silver lining. Perhaps if they players are defeated they are let go by a lieutenant that isn't wholly on board with the bosses plan, so they might have a future ally.
Experience is a good reward as well, everyone likes progression. Extra xp for performing poorly also models real life. When learning new things there is a natural tendency to try more and more difficult tasks, failing and refining as you go.
Some games take the sting out of failure and character death by having character reboots built into the world. We recently played in a game where the PC were playing an MMO half the time, and when a character died they just respawned. In our long running aftermath game it isn't uncommon for a character that recently died to come back as a slightly different clone, or get their brain stuffed in a new body. One of the primary conceits of Eclipse Phase is that everyone has a backup of their mind, and can get it uploaded into a new body. Death in those kinds of games ends up being more of an economic punishment.

So maybe you want to consider adding mechanical or world based rewards and passes for failure too. Let's all fail!

Failure week pt 2: Adding the fail painlessly

So how to we add the ever present risk of failure to our games? Without frustrating the players too much. The following suggestions can be stuffed into basically any game.


The first thing to do is bring up the topic of failure with the players. Let them know that failure is an option and that it isn't the end of the world. See if the players are even interested in upping the difficulty of the game, or if they think the campaign is doing just fine as it is. Odds are the players have never considered if they think the game is too easy or too hard. They may think that things are already too dangerous.

One thing that you can do is explicitly take player death off the table. If the characters can die or not should probably be discussed at the start of any game. For some players this will take all the tension out of the game, for others it can provide a sense of safety that will allow them to act more freely. Player death is probably a full topic in its own right.

Run a game where it is explicitly clear that the players are weaker than their foes and likely to fail. This works better in a sandbox world where the players are allowed to tackle challenges at their own pace. Aftermath. Cthulu. This solution isn't a good fit for everyone. It requires players to be ok with banging their head against the wall accepting failure, but getting the much bigger reward of defeating a truly superior foe. While I personally like that style of game I don't feel like most people would.

Make being defeated not the end of the world and especially not the end of the game. Enemies take the players prisoner, or leave them stuck in a death trap. Or even just win and leave the players unconscious. The one technique I would be careful about is having the bad guys steal the players special gear, players can become very invested in loot. Imagine instead the players are defeated by goblins in the big bads army. They take one of the pcs leaving the rest. The captured pc is taken to the big bad, who interrogate s the pc, and then throws her off a, cliff where she barely survives and is nursed back to health by blink dogs. Now the players have met the bad guy, have more reason to hate him, have learned stuff about his lair etc. Some players might consider this scenario a kind of rail roading, I consider it a natural consequence of player choices. Different players have differing tolerances for this kind of thing, so know your players. And if you are a player in this situation, roll with it and embrace it as an opportunity to have something interesting happen to your character.
Make negative consequences last as short as possible. Prison break movies are fun to watch, but in the context of most games spending every third session escaping from being taken prisoner would be really tedious. Escaping the goblin camp doesn't have to be a whole session. You can do it with just a few dice rolls for escape and stealth. Ten minutes is good enough. The quicker the players bounce back and get into the fun stuff the less they will hate taking a loss.

Make running away very effective. Let the players escape bad situations easily. Rather than having the bad guys shoot then in the back or ruthlessly hunt them, just let the players make a reasonable escape. It makes retreating a real option, so encounters can be more dangerous. The PCs shouldn't necessarily be in a good position when they do escape. The bad guys can still be hunting them, or they might be forced to retreat into a disease infested swamp, retreating shouldn't be fun, but it is nice to have it on the table. The big flaw with this idea is that players hate running away. It feels like the gm stacked the odds against them, and makes things feel adversarial.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I am curious what people think. Would you want an increased failure rate in your games?

Friday we will take a look at games that mechanically encourage failure.

Failure Week Pt 1: Why you always win at D&D

Welcome to Failure week at Fezflip. How is that different than any other week here? Well this time I intend to fail. Or talk about failure anyway. So put on your chainfail, harpoon a humpback fail, get on the failboat, listen to some nine inch fails, visit your criminal friend in the failhouse, endure the failforce winds, get pelted by the failstorm, and enjoy some blogposts delivered by the failman.

Failure in Table top RPGS

Roleplaying games are designed strangely from a narrative standpoint.

Good stories tend to have victories and set backs for the main characters. Roleplaying games from their dungeons and dragons dna tend to run on design of players win an increasingly difficult series of challenges, until beating the boss in an epic battle. Players start out strong, and get whittled down to win by the skin of their teeth, but they never really take a loss along the way.

The back story of most rpgs is that the players are a small band of heroes, going up against a powerful enemy with vast resources or power. The players are underdogs up against impossible odds. But mechanically games encounters are designed with the conceit that the players will come out triumphant. So the real narrative of rpgs is the players are a small band of super powerful people, up against a giant army of crappy guys who will fight them one at a time until they are all dead.
This design is awesome, it perfectly fulfills player fantasy, they feel like underdogs the whole time, but they get to win win win as well. At the end of the night the players get to feel awesome. This style of story works excellently in the fantasy dungeon crawler. Videogames grabbed onto that model as well, so it feels comfortable to most players.

But, when you listen to people's favorite game stories, they are rarely about the time they coasted through a dungeon and defeated a Dragon with 5 hit points left. Favorite gaming stories are about epic deaths, terrible rolls, hilarious mistakes, and I will add in clever ways of defeating genuinely superior enemies. So apparently people enjoy failing! Or at least enjoy telling stories about failure.
But let's say I designed a d&d dungeon with the typical five to eight encounters, but instead of having a 95 percent chance of winning, the players only had a 50 percent chance of winning each encounter. Players would get frustrated at the constant failure, and the game likely wouldn't progress very far. They game would just feel wrong if the main villain showed up and murdered the players in the second encounter as well.

In books and movies the main villain is often directly intertwined in a story, interacting with characters. In rpgs often exposing a big bad to the party early on just results in a final battle early on. So villains tend to hide behind waves of minions. Role playing games work in a wide variety of genres and tell all kinds of stories. Many of them don't fit into the win win win paradigm. Super hero stories are normally a series of defeats, leading to a victory, the same goes with sports stories. Detective stories all all about dead ends, close calls, back alley goon beating and the like. Action movies often have the protagonists getting abused and chased for the majority of the movie. There are tons of rpgs in these genres but they still often are built on the win win win engine.


Next time we will look at things that GM's and players can do to add the sweet taste of bitter defeat to their games.

Adrift: burns and scalo

A quickie today, this is an idea that showed up from a random conversation at work a few years ago.

In pittsburgh there is a real estate development company called burns and scalo, and they are all over the place. They sell real estate I think they renovate, you see trucks and signs everywhere.

The game would be a one shot, the players are all roofers who haven't been working for b&s very long. They would be a mix of hard working blue collar peeps and young idiots who just want to snort pills and text all day.

They meet the orginal Burns, an old man who laments his kids friendly corporate image for the company. They have a brief run in with another roofing crew who all seem like they just got out of prison with cold eyes. Then they get their work order for the day. Fixing a roof somewhere in crafton.

The start of the roofing exploits are about getting out of work and trying to play on your phone without getting caught. The foreman has to try to get as much work done as possible. There may be mini games involved.

After a bit the players hear screaming, and ultimately find a group of 1970s vampires living in the house. They are trying to eat people, they have bee gees beards and afros. If the players call the cops the police respond with, hey that's supposed to be your problem. It turns out b&s have been contracted by the city to murder vampires.

The work orders got screwed up and the players got the dead eyed crews work order for the day. Old man burns tells them they have to kill the vampires or things will get bad and they have to do it now.

The rest of the adventure is just normal guys with nail guns fighting soul train.

Now the cats out of the bag and I can't run this. But at least it's out of my head.

Player fun versus character logic: A dilemma

 

A shorter post from me for today.  I have been mulling over a decision as as player for a while now, so I thought I would tell you the scenario and see what you think.  Maybe you have had a similar sort of question, or perhaps you can just tell me that I am thinking to hard about this.  Which may very well be the case. 

Next weekend I will be attending a weekend session for a very long-running post-apocalyptic roleplaying game (Aftermath!, for those interested in the game, though heavily modified because the rules as written are...mystifying) .  In this game, I have a player character (PC) that has survived many years of game play in a game where the life expectancy was a session or two at best, but somehow has been able to survive getting shot multiple times, getting blown up multiple times, giant rat attacks, winged apes, crazy survivors, terminator robots, and a host of other dangers that plague the everyday scavenger. Even gravity itself hates my character in the game, as is evidenced by the fact that I have fallen so many times in the game and survived that the game master actually created a new skill just for my character:  falling.

My character seems to be in a good place in terms of skills, equipment, etc.  He is a gunsmith and armor smith by trade and the party finally found a base with an awesome workshop that has almost everything he needs to ply that trade.  The base is in a community that would value his contributions.  As a character, I always had in mind he was a reluctant scavenger and survivor.  He would much rather pass his time tinkering in the shop and helping the community rather than crawling around the ruins of the city, looking for things to kill him or holes to stumble into.  Impossibly, he has found what may be as close to a happy place as he could hope to find in the miserable world in which he lives.

As a player, I enjoy playing this character.  He has some great skills that can help the party, and not just the smithing skills.  He is actually a really good combatant and is not too shabby at scavenging.  I have lived with this character long enough that he is easy to get back into, even after extended stretches between play sessions.  I would love to see the whole arc of this character, especially considering the amount of time I have put into him and his story.  As a player, there is still plenty of story left in this character.

So where is the dilemma?  As a player, I want to keep playing this character for the fun and the utility of his contributions to the group.  But lately I have been thinking about it in terms of the character.  It seems like, for this character, he has found a place that he could comfortably "retire" from adventuring and settle down.  He could work in the base, outfitting the party and repairing what gear they need fixed before their next adventure.  He could be a huge, constant help to the community around the base, making arms and equipment for better defense, and teaching others his craft so that more people could help in the same way.  It seems like, given a choice, the character would happily slip into an NPC role.  The game master has even offered to come up with a system to continue to improve the character's skills as an NPC in order to avoid suspending all growth after becoming an NPC.

I am torn between what seems like the best choice for the character versus my enjoyment (and perhaps others in the party who may like adventuring with this character).  I know I could make another interesting character that would be a different story and journey, and the idea that I could have a mini game with the original character as an NPC is tempting.  But I like the character I am playing now and as I have said, i wouldn't mind completing his journey.  So there is the choice.  What would you do?

In the end, I think I will keep playing the character.  My enjoyment ultimately outweighs the potential choice a character might make since this is a game.  Games should be fun.  If I am having fun, then keep on keeping on, right?  Of course, you do know what this means:  the next session, my character's luck will finally run out and instead of becoming an influential and essential NPC, he will probably find some hole in the street, fall in, and be devoured by giant rats.  I guess that would just be par for the course in the harsh, sadness-inducing game world in which he exists...

The 40 Year Old Gamer

 

This past Friday I turned 40.  It was an eventful sort of birthday, full of...interesting happenings.  I did get to play some games, and that got me to reflect on my life as a gamer so far, and also what the future may hold.  I hope you will indulge me as I share some of those thoughts with you.  If the ramblings about a gamer's life don't interest you, I invite you back Wednesday for our regularly scheduled gaming content.

I started fairly young as a gamer.  My family played all of the traditional family games:  Monopoly, Scrabble, The Game of Life, and others.  To me, it was part of growing up.  Family game night laid the foundation for my gaming future.  I learned how to play with others, how to follow rules and, when necessary to further group fun, how to make the rules fit our play style.  The biggest lesson, though, was also the simplest:  have fun, and help others have fun at the same time.  Though we could get competitive, my family always made sure we had fun first.  Perhaps that made me less of a competitive style player, but it definitely made me aware of everyone at the table, and how my playing affected them.

In junior high, I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, my first real roleplaying.  Our school had an art club, and my art teacher at the time had a large collection of books to help stimulate our artful musings.  In that collection I found a set of first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books.  I was fascinated and he caught on pretty quickly when my art took a decidedly fantastical turn.  He mentioned that the school used to have a gaming club until concerned parents shut it down.  The books hadn't been touched since then and he asked me if I would like to take them to keep.  I was beside myself with happiness. My brother had a roleplaying game that we tried to learn and quickly gave up on (Tunnels and Trolls, for the curious).  That was my only contact with roleplaying games until this point.  The frustration of that attempt almost made me turn the offer down, but the lure of those pages was too great.

I was enthralled by the books and their potential for magical stories.  I found others that were interested and we began learning the rules and playing the game.  I spent my junior and senior years jumping from group to group, learning first to be a good player, then eventually trying my hand at running a game, the role that found myself preferring, since I not only could help tell a story, but also had a better time ensuring that the group I was playing with had fun.  In college, I played to an almost hedonistic degree, playing all-night games, campaigns that lasted years, and trying out any system and roleplaying world I could.  Roleplaying has been a hobby and a love that has lasted into today for me, and will continue to be a part of my life as long as I can roll dice. 

In my life, I have played a wide variety of games:  roleplaying games, board games, video games, live-action games, text-based games, and more.  I love games of all types, something I hope to share with you as we move forward with this blog.  Roleplaying holds a special place in my heart, however.  It is what cemented gaming in my life and also where I made some of the greatest friendships I have ever had, and continue to have.  Being someone who suffers from diagnosed social anxiety, it has always been difficult for me to meet new people.  Yet gaming, and especially roleplaying, has allowed me to overcome that mental constraint by leading me to like-minded people who share common interests and have been welcoming and receptive to this shy, awkward goofball.  I love telling stories with people, and I love that this activity works so well to bring people together.

Gaming in my life has evolved from the first taste, through the hedonism of college, to the more mature version of gaming I experience today.  I am a parent, as are many of those I game with.  Schedules are packed and erratic, so regular game time becomes harder to find.  Instead of giving up on gaming, though, we try to find new ways to game, to figure out how we can adapt gaming to our lives without sacrificing the fun.  I will talk in the future about some of those ideas (my "Adrift: Fantasy Boomtown" post is a good example of an attempt at adaptation) in order to help others with similar issues.  But the overriding idea is that I refuse to give up on gaming because it is more than just a hobby.  It is ingrained in who I was and who I became, and I intend on making sure it helps me as I figure out who I will become in the future.

Gaming today for me is more than just the act of playing.  It is creating ideas and worlds to potentially play.  It is creating this blog with a friend in order to get these ideas out there in hopes of connecting with others and moving our gaming in new directions.  It is teaching my kids and their friends new games, and also how to play games with others (not just to win).  It is in looking at how I can use my love of gaming to help others through charity work.  It is in trying to create, and not just consume.

I am not sure much of that made sense.  I hope it shows you a bit more of who I am under the fez, though, and my passion for gaming.  As I enter the second half of my life, I am reflecting, but I am also looking forward to the coming years.  There is quite a bit I plan on doing, and gaming is at the heart of much of it.  Hopefully you can join me on part of that journey.

Cheers.

Keeping the straight man fun

We just started a new tabletop game a few weeks ago. I have been trying to get my head around my character. Some characters just click, they have a hook that makes them interesting and easy to play.  My last rpg character, Bracket, was an easy one. He was an exchange student from Brazil, and also a semi pro star craft player and steamer. I instantly had a lot of hooks to make the character fun to play and memorable.

My new character captain Slocum, is a different story. He is an industrial star ship captain, who was riding out his career as a cruise ship captain when an evil AI started a war and space faring civilization blasted itself back to the industrial era.

Now he is in his sixties working as a smuggler when our game begins. The party consists of a drug dealer, a permastoned space hippy, and an idealistic naive doctor. This puts me in the position of being the level headed one, the practical planner, the wet blanket straight man. This kind of party dynamic is common in rpgs. What fun is it to play the brash rogue without a palladin around to vex? But how can the lawful good pally still have fun role-playing without falling into the wet blanket party dad role?

I think it's important to not make the conflict between your level headed character and the more rebellious trouble making characters your defining character trait. It can be fun sometimes, but can grow tedious quickly, and you have to leave room for the other players to do their thing. If all you do is try to enforce your characters rules on other characters, a few things might happen. One everyone does what they want anyway, and your character becomes ineffective and unfun for you to play, or you impose your will on everyone else and their characters become less fun. Or the other characters start cutting you out of the plans and have to do everything behind your back. Find some other angle, personality trait or motivation to take center stage for you.

If you do find yourself in a situation where your moral character is getting marginalized, bypassed, and isn't very fun to play, it is probably time for some out of game conversations with the other players. Talk to them about what you want out of the character, and how you don't think things are going well. Find something to bring the characters together. Make your character less judgey, hopefully they can make their characters less evil. Embrace the power of compromise and communication.

With Slocum I'm thinking he is one of those guys that thinks everything was better when he was younger. In this case he is probably right. He feels that honor and trust has been destroyed, leaving people to revert to their selfish motives. So he has a nostalgic side. Even though he works with criminals as a smuggler, he holds himself and those he works with to a higher moral standard. Having come up in the civilian sector, he doesn't have the beatings will be administered until morale improves mentality. His management style is softer. So I'm going to play him as even tempered, perhaps a bit frustrated, but not one to get angry. Still boring, but at least a motivated boring. As a humor gimmick I'm going to call back to his cruise ship captain days and make terrifying announcements over the ships coms in a soothing captains voice. It's already happened once, "if you look out the side Windows now you will see the asteroid about to crush us into oblivion".

He possess important skills that nobody else has, and similarly has contacts everywhere. So I think he will garner his share of game spotlight naturally, without the need to force the matter awkwardly. I can keep his personality subdued and still have fun with him. My goal is to let the other players indulge in their crazy with mild disdain and simmering frustration rather than anger. I plan on keeping him from being the alpha character by deferring the big choices to the naive doctor who in theory will own the ship we fly. I will give options, and take options, avoid the "my way or the airlock" style.

I still think he still needs a little something more to make him a standout character, but those kind of things often emerge during game play. I like to think I have my basics covered. I know my main role is to keep the ship and the plot moving forward. Secondarily I serve as a foil to the other characters. My goal is to have a good time enabling the other characters as much as possible.

Adrift: Fantasy Boomtown

Coinflip introduced you to the idea of our Adrift posts recently: game ideas that we have in endless supply but for one reason or another may never get around to actually using.  If the piles of papers and notebooks filled with mad scribbling and idea fragments are any indication, I may have a few of these to share.  Ok, more than few.  Frankly, I could probably fill a book or two.  I'll start by sharing on this blog, though, and see how that goes.  If anyone out there actually uses one of these adrift ideas, let us know.  I would love to actually hear about one of these little orphan ideas finding life in someone's stories.

Fantasy Boomtown Sandbox

So that idea title sounds a bit like I grabbed three words out of a hat and threw them together.  Sorry about that, but one thing I am not is good at titles.  So bear with me on this one.  I promise it isn't quite as bad as it sounds.

This idea stems from a couple of places, but the biggest comes from a problem that I am encountering at this phase of my life:  lack of time.  My gaming groups are spread out in different locations, many folks are working odd shifts, or have families that make setting up a regular, meaty segment of game time almost impossible.  The result is that running any sort of continuous campaign with the same group of people in a time frame that keeps up momentum is extremely difficult at best.  Instead, we end up board gaming or playing the odd one shot RPG game (a game that only lasts one session, often with new characters designed for that game and rarely used again).  Though I enjoy both one-shots and board games, I am left with that desire to create a story and see it grow.  So how do I accomplish both accommodating schedules and shortened attention spans while still allowing for a more complex story to develop?

My thought was, instead of having a game centering around a particular group of heroes, traveling from place to place, solving mysteries and acting like the quintessential murder hobos, why not focus on a particular place?  How do you make players care about a place and not just themselves?  How do you build a story based on a place rather than a group of characters?  And why would that be better for an erratic gaming schedule?  The idea kept nagging me.  And then I began putting it together.  What if a particularly interesting dungeon showed up, so interesting that a town suddenly grew up around it?  What if groups arrived in this town, intent on making a name for themselves and in the process helped shape the town through their decisions and actions?  Thus the fantasy boomtown idea was born.

The meta idea for this town and dungeon is to have a central place that the players call home.  This is not a temporary location that the players inhabit only as long as they have an adventure to complete.  This is where they live and work.  This is a place that they can influence.  As a game master, you can set up a number of quests that the players can choose from, perhaps on a job board.  Success or failure can cause businesses to rise or fall, people to show up or leave, or any number of effects on the town and area.  This can create a living, breathing world around the characters, making them invested in not only their characters, but the world around them. 

The Dungeon

Everything in this idea hinges on the a reason for a town to suddenly appear, a reason to spur a spike in population.  The basic idea is that, for some mysterious reason a dungeon entrance appears in some relatively mundane and out-of-the-way place.  Initial exploration quickly turned up a potential wealth of treasure, be it precious metals and jewels, esoteric magics, or other items of value.  Of course, with great wealth comes great danger.  The truly interesting part of the dungeon, though, is that every set amount of time, the dungeon randomly resets in completely new and different ways, also resetting both the dangers and the rewards.  This potentially creates a never-ending supply of wealth in the eyes of many, so they flock to the dungeon in hopes of grabbing a piece for themselves.

In game terms, this essentially creates the space for procedurally generated dungeons.  An enterprising game master might sprinkle in clues as to the nature of the dungeon and what may be causing the randomization.  There is even space here to throw in wild ideas like portals to other dimensions or planes, giving you almost limitless options for dungeons to throw at the players

The Town

The town itself can be as big or small as you want.  Did people just discover the dungeon?  Then the town may be a collection of ramshackle tents and shelters, with one or two buildings on their way to completion.  Maybe the dungeon town has been around for a little while, but changes in the dungeon have caused renewed interest and an influx into the town.

Key ideas to build into the town could include:

• A loose set of laws and agreements on how to take turns delving into the dungeon.  Perhaps some sort of daily lottery (of course the "random" selection could be influenced by interested parties) to choose which groups can enter that day.
• A portion of wealth uncovered goes to the town for upkeep, policing, etc. Perhaps groups need to have an official charter to enter the lottery for the delve.
• Groups of adventurers formed into official groups, which can be hired not just to delve, but to take care of tasks for the town or interested parties.  A job board in town could offer these alternate ideas if the lottery doesn't favor a group.

The Players

The players arrive to join one of the official groups in the town.  Perhaps the group is newly formed, and the players get to help increase the wealth and fame of the group.  Maybe they are joining a group that has fallen on hard times and have to help pull it out of the muck before they can make a name for themselves.  Whatever the reason, they are part of an official group, so that they can delve or be hired, thus creating opportunities for the players to decide their fate.

In this method of partying, you could essentially rotate players and characters.  You explain it as other members of the group since the party is most likely not the only members of the official group.  That way you can set a game time and take anyone that shows up, form the party for the evening, and game.  In this scenario, game sessions would be best set at one to two per adventure so that keeping a cohesive party is not a must.  Despite the rotating cast, you would still have a common narrative as players influence each other, their group, and the town around them.

I could go on at length about this particular idea, but I have kept you long enough.  This is definitely one of my more fleshed out ideas.  I will try to make future adrift posts a little shorter.  Thanks for indulging me.  Again, if anyone takes this idea and runs with it let me know how it goes. 

Adrift: Games that will never happen

It being a holiday weekend, and my evil friends made me play Atlas Reactor last night, I am a bit late getting this Monday post up. One thing Fezzypug and I talk about is the lost campaign, that game that you get the idea for and just never gets off the ground for whatever reason. Maybe you played one or two sessions and it just wasn't working. Maybe you just never found time to run the game. So we are using Adrift to highlight some of these campaign ideas that will never be.

Poking god in the eye

I had this idea when the first Avengers movie came out. Shield has this awesome floating base, all kinds of tech and gadjits, a world wide network of surveillance, government support without government oversight. The coolest thing about Shield is that basically everyone in it is a normal person. No powers to speak of, just highly trained dedicated professionals. This got me thinking about the role of normal people in a super powered world. There are a lot of comics about this. There are characters like the Punisher, or even supposedly Batman who are normals playing with the big boys who have powers that can destroy the world. These characters are still super heroes, they have plot immunity, and take superhuman levels of bodily punishment.

What if the charcters were actual normal humans? They may be the best in their field or whatever, but still just normal people. If a normal decided to fight even a B list super villain they would be killed in one attack. This game would be about the players coming up with a plan, an organization, some way of taking out a heavy hitter supervillain.

The backstory would be that a group of super villains banded together and pulled off the ultimate plan. They would get rid of all the major super heroes, either by fighting and killing them, blackmail, imprisoning them somewhere, or whatever means necessary. At the same time one of the villains takes control of all the people in Canada, turning them into his personal mindless Canadian slave army. He claims that he can reproduce this wherever he wants, so if the world governments don't give in to the villians demands, he will mind control everyone. The governments give in, and chop up north America into super villain fiefdoms with the villains each running their own tiny empires.

The actual villians were never worked out, just some archetypes that would be fleshed out in the zero session probably. A hulk type indestructible, infinitely strong guy. A super powerful mentalist, obviously, professor X gone bad kind of thing. A super scientist, probably hiding in a powerful suit of armor with killer robots patrolling his lands. They could be anything, basically as long as they were powerful enough that defeating normal humans was trivial for them.

The players would take the role of the resistance. Just a handful of motivated individuals looking to take down the super evil. At the time I was into radical sandbox style games. So the players could take literally any path to victory they wanted. I was going to suggest that they work on one villain at a time.

They could build up a crazy organization like shield, with adventures focused on acquiring tech, bases, an army. They could build a terrorist organization, decentralized, harder to destroy but also harder to mobilize for a plan. They could just keep the group small and remain just the player characters, and work on setting clever traps and schemes. So there could possibly be a base/org management part of the game.

The adventures would be very espionage based, gathering information, finding weaknesses, recruiting assets. With the players finding ammunition against their target until they are ready to fire the plan, in some climactic showdown probably.

In my head it was a short term game, maybe 8 to 10 sessions, limited to the buildup and take down of one of the villains, with the option of extending it if the game seemed to be running well. Character death would be on the table, and the stakes would be high. Player progress could easily be destroyed if things didn't go well.

There are some issues with this game. The big hurdle I hit was player buy in. The idea of a game where you are a mouse trying to kill a tiger doesn't appeal to everyone. Some players thrive on these kinds of hard mode rpgs but they aren't for everyone. Another problem is keeping the characters involved in the fun parts of adventures, the actiony bits. It would be easy for the players to put themselves in a position where they would just stay back in the base and send minions to do things. As part of the zero session I think you have to suggest that the players build characters that want to be in the mix of things, that believe if something is worth doing, it's worth doing yourself. Using minions to do side missions would be an thing for sure. But the players need to be present for the big plot things. I feel like this kind of game doesn't fit well with my current rpg group, we tend to have shorter sessions with one fight per night as a rule. I think this game needs some room to breath so longer sessions that are potentially more boring from an action and combat perspective.

Hope you enjoyed a little insight into some of the thinking that takes place before a campaign launches. There are many more games that will never see play,

Mining for Gaming Gold

 

This week I was in an interesting conversation with some friends regarding movies and television shows.  During the conversation, someone asked me why I watch terrible horror movies.  Now, for the record, I don't just watch bad horror.  Really, I watch (almost) any horror (excluding the subgenre of horror nicknamed "torture porn").  I personally love horror that leans towards the supernatural, whether that takes the form of haunted houses, strange monsters, mythical creatures, or demonic possessions.  In truth, though, as long as the movie doesn't focus on just random torture for the sake of extreme discomfort, I am in.  And yes, that includes horror that many may deem "dab" or "trash"  (note that I don't just say movies:  if it is horror, I will consume it with gusto).  The question stands:  why would I bother with something reviews might sum up as "...I wish I had that two hours of my life back"?  For me, the answer is simple:  I am always on the lookout for role-playing (RPG) game fodder.

I am an RPG enthusiast.  I collect systems like others collect baseball cards or comics.  I love new worlds and new possibilities for stories.  I love the big budget RPG releases, and I love the tiny indie RPGs that someone hacks together in their free time and releases free into the wilds of the internet for intrepid explorers to discover.  I love running and playing games and I love having a large toolkit for telling the stories that get created when you play.  To me, the world is filled with tools for that toolkit, and most of them are not found in official manuals or books only dedicated to RPGs.  The world is filled with these tools, and horror is just one of the many places that I go to root for something new and interesting to use to tell stories.

Ok, you say, but why bother with bad horror?  Because even in bad horror I can find something useful.  Maybe that terrible movie had an interesting location that would be a good start to an adventure.  Maybe the characters were terrible, but that one was just quirky enough to be an non-player character (NPC).  Perhaps the effects for the monster looked like they were put together by a band of intoxicated toddlers, but the idea, the lore behind it, well that might make for a potentially awesome monster, or even the Big Bad of a whole campaign (kudos to you if you get the Big Bad reference).  In every movie, there may be some RPG gold.  But you can't find riches if you are afraid of getting dirty every now and again.

I like horror, even bad horror, so I can put up with quite a lot of bad out of love for the genre.  But more than that, I go into each and every experience looking for some choice bits to add to my RPG toolbox.  I don't always find something, and then I am just left with a bad movie.  But more often than not I can salvage something, so the experience, to me, is very much worth the time.  So my short answer to why bad horror is " I am mining for ideas".  And you would be amazed at the gold a band of drunken toddlers can spin sometimes.

The best part is that this idea of mining sources for RPG ideas can be extended to pretty much any experience you may have.  Books, movies, television, comics, and really any experience in life are potential gold mines just waiting to be discovered.  Go into each experience not only for the experience itself, but also to discover something that will help you create an groovy story down the road.  That way, even in  experiences that may end in disappointment or disgust, you can still pull out something positive.

Look for posts in the near future where we dive into different experiences like movies, books, and games, and pull out the pieces we see as potential game ideas.  We will subject ourselves to the best and the worst in our quest to bring you the pearls that you can use in your games, and describe not only where they come from in the movie, but also how we might use them in a game.  That way, you can mine our potentially painful blog for ideas of your own.

Stay tuned.  In the meantime, dig into something on your own and see what you can find.  You might be surprised at how something that should be bad can be fun and entertaining. 

Redesigning Nix

So I have been playing a lot of the game Atlas Reactor. It is a turn based battle game, something like if overwatch were a board game. I'm enjoying it a lot, but there are a few things that stand out as being awkward. A few of the character designs are lackluster, and a couple of them I find grrahful (grrahful is a mix of the noise you make when you see art, and how awful it is.)

So I'm going to take a shot talking about why I hate a character design so much, and what we can do to fix it. The character I'm going to talk about is Nix, the sniper. You can see what he looks like here:

http://www.atlasreactor.pro/assets/img/characters/nix.png

I don't want to hot link their image, I'm sure that folks at atlasreator.pro are lovely people.

The fantasy of playing Nix is that he is a stealthy sniper, who deals good damage at a long distance, has some gadgets, and can drop into stealth to engage or escape. So the typical sneaky sniper guy. His face is hooded showing only his eyes, in an attempt to evoke menace. If you look up his gangster skin it just looks like his head is a bowling ball wearing a fedora.  He has various pouches, and a camera/optical camo thing on his head, giving him a very techy look. All of his taunts animations are pretty straightforward to the sniper fantasy, he goes shuush, talks about how cool his gear is etc. He has one awful taunt where he says "360 no scope" pole dances on his sniper rifle and shoots you. He does have one neat taunt where his gun barrel gets really long. All in all the animations involving his gun are pretty cool. But personality wise there is nothing stands out about his character apart from the most basic notes of, stealthy sniper. Compared to some of the other character designs he feels primitive, like a leftover from an earlier draft of the game.

 This brings me to the most awkward part of his design, he basically looks like a potato with a sniper rifle sticking out of him. His form is round and squat. His limbs are thick and meaty. His character model kind of waddles around the battle field on stubby legs. It feels someone in the art department saw the TF2 design guidelines about building a unique silhouette for each character decided that any unique look fits whatever character.  But the beefy meatball look doesn't play into the characters kit or fantasy at all. When I think of sniper elements and stealth, it generally brings forth images of someone either quick and frail, with an oversized gun, or someone patient, camouflaged and possibly prone.

So I really hate his character model and feel. I'm also not a big fan of his personality which doesn't go beyond, I'm a grim sniper. What would I do to make it better? I've sketched up a few quick ideas that I think would be more fun. With these designs I'm going to assume that the art designer handed down an edict that she wanted a sniper who was also shaped like a baked potato.

The first design that came to mind was "The Emperor" He is a rotund explorer and fancy gentleman. He has seen the world over and has come back with a dangerous skill set that he uses to subsidize his noble hunter lifestyle. Embracing his figure he has taken up the mantle of the savage swimmer of the far south sea, the emperor penguin. He wears a penguin hat, a long cloak that splits in two at the back like penguin wings, and carries a fancy filigreed sniper rifle. When he stealths he pulls the cloak around his body. Personality wise he is jovial, becoming invigorated as the hunt goes on. He is as in it for the sport as he is the money.

We have all seen the short guy who hits the gym, a lot, and ends up being nearly as wide as he is tall.  This version of nix has a protein packing lifestyle and is as ripped to mythic. He wanders around shirtless showing off his Russian gang tattoos. His movements are acrobatic, with lots of rolling around. He uses a sniper rifle because he is a pragmatist, and knows that shooting people with a giant gun may not be the best solution, but it nearly always is _a_ solution.

Taking a cue from a snipers ghille suit, this Nix is mostly just a bush. Instead of eyes all we get is a wide mask or faceplate that stands out against the plant like branches and leaves of his suit. Even his gun is entirely made of wood and gnarled and twisted like a tree branch. The mask and the targeting drone both call back to the tech aspect of the character. This design also helps to mitigate the stumpy legged walking animation. He can slither around the field like a leafy slug,  leaving death instead of slime in his wake. The most practical design for a real game is probably this one. It is also the design with the least personality. But I suppose being killed by a shrub is pretty cool.

Finally, I went with an actual potato with a sniper rifle. He uses his leafy limbs to manipulate the gun. And he wears boots for some reason. I went with just using the natural texutres of a potato to form his face instead of eyes and a mouth as I didn't want him to look too much like Mr. Potato head.

The real Nix design has no real personality beyond, sniper, and two disguishing features, A giant gun, and a strange body type. I would like to think that the design team could have pushed the limits a bit further. But I suppose it is early in the game's development cycle, and they want to create the launch characters specifically to be close to the archetype they fill.

There is at least one other character in this game whose overall design I hate. Maybe I will return to this subject. Have a great weekend!

-Coinflip