Adrift: Shared Worlds

Going in to today's post, I expected to talk about an idea for a Deadlands sandbox that I have been kicking around, and I may still throw that out there as another post because it is a darned ambitious plan that may not happen for quite a while due to its scope versus my time.  The interesting bit was that, in thinking about the idea, I realized that it had its roots in the fantasy boom town idea that I wrote about previously in an Adrift post.  I also had a third idea based around a new game I picked up this past weekend called Monster of the Week that included a certain aspect of the previous two.  In that instance, I realized I had the potential to do something cool: create shared worlds.  How, you ask?  And why would you want to?  Let's take a look.

The core of the idea revolves around a common point of interest in each world:  a cave.  In the Fantasy Boomtown idea, that cave is part of a fluctuating, magical dungeon that suddenly appears, a source of treasure and magic previously unknown to the land.  A town catering to those willing to take on the dangers of the dungeon for wealth and power grows up, creating the game setting.  In Deadlands, a similar idea would be in effect: a mine in some remote place suddenly produces a strange new mineral that creates a boom town around the mine to cater to those delving into the mine, a place that is in constant flux, opening portals to random places and spewing strange dangers as a result of the powerful and unknown mineral.  The final idea I had is of a modern-day town in a world steeped in the urban fantasy tradition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, or Harry Dresden where an abandoned mine or cave system suddenly erupts in magic and chaos, spewing dangers into the local town, but also providing strange and wonderful items never seen before. 

Each setting is a mirror of the other, with the connection being the cave system that suddenly erupts into a mysterious, chaotic flux.  This common connection creates the possibility of shared worlds.  In each world, the cave would randomly open portals to strange new lands, out of which come both dangers and treasures.  What if the portals connect not only to other places, but also randomly connect each of these three worlds?  What if the three worlds are actually the same exact place in three different possible universes (here we get into the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, interesting stuff in and of itself).  The dangers are magically or otherwise twisted versions of creatures from each world, as are the treasures?  What if these unstable portals could act as temporary gateways to each world, allowing those from one to enter the other, at least for a time?  There is so much game potential here that it boggles the mind.  

Juggling each of these worlds, let alone a shared universe could be quite daunting to the game master, though it could be introduced gradually so as to build each world separately then connect them when the game is mature enough to open up new chapters in the games.  Drop hints and nods to each world as the games progress to see how long it takes the players to  figure out the connection.  Of course, this lends itself to the dangers of metagaming, another good topic for a later post, so some groups may be able to handle this idea better than others.  But I know personally I am a fan of dropping easter eggs in my games, nods to past games or pop culture references.  In this idea, I could freely do that, knowing that they aren't just head nods, but hints to something larger.  

Another possible way to handle this would be to partner with another game master, or game masters.  Each running their own games and worlds, but dropping some common element in each world to start the connection, allowing for each to borrow from the other games as sparsley or liberally as they wanted.  At some point, this could even lead to crossovers, players from one game suddenly playing in the world of another.  Game masters could even move with the players, allowing them to run games in each other's settings for fun and entertainment.  If you were feeling particularly saucy and had a good amount of time and energy, you could create an overarching campaign dealing with why these caves and portals are appearing, what they are actually doing to the worlds (probably nothing good) and how the players from each world need to help in order to end the danger.  

The idea of shared worlds is nothing new, not by a long shot.  But I wanted to share my version and how it could potentially be used in my (and potentially your) games.  I am categorizing this as an adrift idea right now due to the time and planning involved in really making this work on a macro level, but it is something I will no doubt work towards.  If you are a player in my games, my apologies for the potential spoilers, but you never know when, where, or how I might final realize this.  Hopefully this gives you something new to chew on for your games.  Happy many-worlds building!

Crits!

Inside of us all there is a monster. Its little monster brain doesn't function quite properly. This monster loves games of chance. When you lose, it doesn't care, it can shrug off losses like they are nothing. When you win, the monster goes crazy, releasing dopamine all out of proportion to the scale of what is happening, making you feel wonderful about a ten dollar scratch ticket that you just spent 30 dollars to get. This monster is your brain. In the hunter gatherer days we had to get very good at accepting high risk high reward activities. Without agriculture the world was a giant slot machine spitting out animals, veggies, and berries. So our brains have become masters at forgetting our failures and rewarding those random successes.

Our games have their own random berries and mammoth herds, we call them crits. Designers have been using crits in games for a long time. Even a very old game like backgammon uses them, whenever your dice match you get twice the movement. Any bonus for a rare outcome counts as a crit for us. The most common one we see is getting a high die roll, but I would even count catching one of your out cards in Texas hold em, or getting pocket aces. Even Magic the gathering and Hearthstone have that lovely feeling when you pull the perfect card off the top of your deck. The most beloved house rule of monopoly, putting money on free parking adds crits to the game. As you can see lots of games have crits, but they are most famous in rpgs.

If we dissect the crit a little bit there are two main mechanical factors, the rate at which crits occur, and the effect that the crit has. I would add as a secondary concern the ease of execution on the crit. Another consideration is the number of rolls that you see in a typical session, in a game where you only roll a few times a night you can afford to have a higher crit rate than in a game where you roll 400 times a night. The rarity of the crit is what makes it so tasty and exciting.

The non mechanical aspects of the crit can't be ignored though. Some players are rewarded by seeing big numbers come up on the dice, other players want to hear the gory descriptions their attack. The crit adds to the natural flow of the story, they provide highs and lows to what otherwise could be just rote execution of a map combat or skill checks. When a crit is rolled it is an opening for the players and the GM to remember that they are telling a story and take a moment to bring the descriptive elements back into the game. The guy who always plays the hyper competent, super awesome, Tom Clancy Mary Sue character is annoying, but we all want to be awesome. The crit is the games way of giving us permission to indulge, to do something ridiculous with no shame.

The crit that everyone is familiar with is the dungeons and dragons old standby, the Natural 20. Rolling a 20 on a twenty sided die generally means an automatic hit, and double damage to boot. The Nat 20 is maybe the perfect crit, or at least the standard to judge the other by. With a 5% chance of happening you can expect to see a few of them on any given night of gaming. The double damage aspect is good, but not amazing. You don't need to roll nat 20's to win a fight but it helps thing along. The crit is a perfect bonus that lets you hit that unhittable enemy, pick the unpickable lock, but the game would function perfectly well without it. It happens in an intimidate and recognizable way, when that 20 pops up on the top of the die you know that something great happened.

As a side note, the crit is what makes the advantage system in 5^th ed feel so good. Advantage works out to about a +5 bonus, but if you roll two dice instead of one you get the double fun of crit hunting. So much more exciting than a +5.

The D&D crit has everything going for it, a perfect rate of occurrence, simple to resolve, no game breaking effects. It fits the game perfectly. Let's look at a game that takes all of those aspects and takes them to the other extreme, Rolemaster. The Rolemaster crit is a completely different beast. Rather than crtting fairly infrequently, a crit occurs on many of attacks that hit. Resolving the crit is complicated requiring chart look up. Rather than having a minor effect RM crits run a range of effects from nothing to killing a foe in one shot. Indeed while the goal of a D&D combat is to grind a foe's hit points to zero, in RM your goal is land a crit and kill them or degrade them so much they fall into a death spiral of penalties.

It isn't exactly fair to describe the RM wound resolution as a crit in same way a D&D crit is. Rolemaster has an involved wound system because that is one of the things they decided to model. They just happened to call it a critical hit roll. The design of RM is that they want lots of fun random rolls with potentially devastating effects. So they built a system where most hits give you a pull on the wound chart slot machine. The real crit roll is that wound roll. That's the one where a 0 does nothing and 100 instakills your enemy and a 66 makes them wet their pants for some reason. RM loves this crazy high variance and embraces it wholeheartedly.

Neither way is right, both systems are well tailored to the kind of game that they want to be. A whole range of options in between exist. There are a bunch of things that make a game a good or bad fit for a player, determining what level of randomness you enjoy is certainly one of them. Let's all give crits some love.

The unspoken campaign

The game is running as smoothly as can be expected. Everyone is having fun, every week you get together, catch up with your friends, possibly eat some kind of meat-splosion. You play the game, push the story along, roll some dice, have some victories, catch a few defeats, you laugh and play a little bit too late and go home to get too little sleep. The next week the game is mostly forgotten, but here and there you think about what you are going to do with your character, how you are going to tackle the next challenge. Maybe you shoot a few emails back and forth before you pack up your dice and do it all again the next week. The game keeps on going like this for weeks and weeks, and eventually years and years, building up into one of those epic games you talk about for the rest of your life.

Or

The game is running smoothly, you meet, you eat, you play, you clatter dice and everything is great. Then at the end of the night someone says, “Hey I just picked up Whaling Red Seas, the game about steampunk space whaling on mars. I'm thinking about running it when this campaign ends.” Now you go home tired, get too little sleep and go about your week. Only now instead of thinking about what your character is going to do in the upcoming game, you are considering what character you are going to play, Martian dolphin shaman, Chunkor the one armed harpoonsman, Cogmartial Goodman hunting down a rogue difference engine? You might think of the minor quibbles you have with the current game and how Red Seas would fix them. You might email character concepts around, then someone might email you back, and soon there is a growing snowball of enthusiasm. You miss a few weeks of your current game due to the holidays or vacations, and next thing you know, the epic campaign is dead, and you are on to the next thing. Soon space whales are replaced by supers in the dustbowl which is replaced by cavity creeps the rpg... and you are a serial next big thing gamer.

Now I can't help it, I love trying new games and systems, I have long since accepted my fate as a next big thing gamer. However I hate that feeling when a game isn't working quite right and the game dies before its time, it never feels good to have a game die early. Perhaps it is unfair to the games that I'm playing to be constantly playing the next game in my head. It almost certainly is bad for the current game to talk about future games.

The long open ended game is great. I love the long term building of a character, the chance to build a bigger story, the freedom to wander down random little corners of the world. The short term game is great too, the chance to tell a focused story, to try new things, to maybe play a character who is a little reckless. We are telling a story together, and that includes the time not at the table. So we need to keep focused on keeping our current games going strong rather than looking into the future. Next time I'll try to keep the extra games in my head, or somehow find more time for gaming!

Ghosts n'at

We all know that Halloween is the best holiday. There is no holiday mandate other than to give out candy and dress like a monster. Giant plastic spiders inhabit our bushes. It's the time of year for horror movies and spooky tv specials. Cheetos look like skeletons and discount candy is right around the corner. Also I think this is the only time of year you can find bottlecaps, so chalky, so root beer flavored, so much love. Most importantly, it is time to run Halloween one shots!

In the ongoing quest to try new games, and maybe a little bit because of the promise of a prep free game session, I went with InSpectres. If you haven't heard of InSpectres it is a narrative style rpg. The players are franchisees of a low rent paranormal extermination chain, they are normal every day Joes going about the work of getting rid of ghosts and other nasties. There are two big mechanical twists that lie at the heart of IS, one is that the players narrate the outcomes of their successes, and the other is the reality show style confessionals. Otherwise it is a pretty typical ultralight die pool game.

Players taking full narrative control of the results is what drew me to the game. When making a skill check the player rolls a die pool, take the single best result, and if it is 4 or higher, the player describes the outcome. This is an exact flip of the conventional rpg, where the gm narrates the success based on his knowledge of the scenario. The player is encouraged to take the wheel of the story and drive it right off the road. The GM gets to describe the outcomes of failures, and all the the middle in between bits, so it isn't completely up to the players. I could easily imagine running this game GMless with some kind of rotating narrator.

The reality show confessional mechanic is a stroke of genius. I have never seen a potentially complicated game mechanic like this be so clearly understood and embraced. The gist of it is that a player may stop any scene and do a solo cutaway, as if they were interviewing with the producers on a reality tv show. The player can do several odd things during a confessional. One thing is that they can add characteristics to other player characters. Go ahead and tell the camera about how your co-worker botched the job because he was obsessing about his fantasy football team, or how you are so sick of your driver's inability to ever remember anyone's name. The other player is encouraged to role play this characteristic but not required, it is certainly in the spirit of the game to roll with it. You can also use the confessional to help guide an upcoming scene, "I thought this was a run of the mill cat. 2 phantom, but things got crazy when the Russians showed up!"  The players really seemed to embrace and make good use of the confessional.

Rather than genning up characters before the game we went with the recommended method of generating characters and the franchise at the table working together. Being in Pittsburgh of course we gravitated toward a yinzer franchise, Ghosts n'at. Karen ran an ex CMU professor run out for her crazy theories on the paranormal, Scott ran with a mythical Heisman candidate Pitt QB, washed up and living in the past.

We ran two quick jobs, a very short starter job to get the format of the game down. That consisted of going to the court house to eliminate a terrible stink. The gang had busted a ghost there the week before. but it turns out it was ghostly star crossed lovers that they had split up. It was quickly dealt with despite a poorly functioning robot. The second job was a little more involved, the players went to city hall to dispatch the ghost of a corrupt mayor from 100 years ago. The ghost mayor was out for revenge against the family of the white knight DA who busted him. The DA's grandson is the current deputy assistant mayor (Pittsburgh is has no shortage of government positions).  The DA had been sucked into a ghostly dimension. The players busted the evil ghost but didn't bring DA back from ghost world. So I started to wrap the night up.

That's when something unexpected and weird happened. Scott and I were both ok with leaving the night at that.  Karen on the other hand wasn't going to let it stand that they didn't rescue the DA. It was late so we weren't going to run a third job, but we ended up talking through what the potential followup job would look like. It involved time travel, finding the DA, finding out he had become his own grandfather and deciding to stay in the past. It was just a lot of fun to have the investment in the game to do the follow up, and since the game was a one shot the freedom to just brainstorm our way through the rest of the story.

All in all I was very surprised at how well InSpectres went over with the group. There is no way it could hold up as a campaign, but as a pick up game or a one shot I think it works pretty well.  Your mileage may vary depending on your group, but with the right buy in it can be a blast. I suspect that with a few more plays it will be easier to slide into the game's particular style. For ten bucks for the pdf it is a steal.

The Favored: Deadlands

Image Copyright Pinnacle Entertainment Group

I was staring at a blank page, struggling with what I should write about today.  There are times when the well is dried and there is not much you can do to fill it.  I started down some paths and quickly gave up.  Nothing was hitting me.  In frustration, I glanced at my email to see if anything new showed up, and lo and behold I see an email from a recent Kickstarter that I backed: the 20th Anniversary edition of Deadlands, the Weird West RPG that won my heart long ago with the simple subtitle, "The spaghetti western...with meat!"  I had just received my pdf copy of the book, and paging through the copy, taking in the new art while the latest album from the Pine Box Boys played in the background (The Feast of Three Arms, of you want to check it out...horror-themed country folk), I realized I might as well talk about one of my all-time favorite systems and settings.  So here it is, one of my top 5 RPG systems and settings:  Deadlands Classic.

Now, before you go off and google Deadlands, let me clarify which I mean, because there are two versions of the western setting (as well as a couple of versions of a post-apocalyptic setting using the same world and system).  Originally, there was what is now called Deadlands Classic.  As the years progressed, the creator sought to streamline the system and make it more accessible, as well as usable in a number of ways, so he created the Savage Worlds system.  The version that I favor is the Classic system.  Savage Worlds is a decent generic system but suffers the generic system issues of losing setting-specific flavor and unique systems in favor of lighter rules that lean towards bland in order to fit into a number of settings.  Though I would happily play a Savage Worlds game, I much prefer the older system.

Deadlands Classic is a bit of a mess, system-wise, let me tell you that up front. The combats are probably the roughest part, with each attack action taking a number of dice rolls to determine to-hit, damage, location, magic rolls if needed, etc.  So one combat can go on for hours, if you let them.  The system is also ranged-oriented, so the melee rules are a little wonky, at least in the original version.  A later update smoothed some of the issues out, but the system remains close to broken in a few ways, but if you aren't above house ruling, then you should be fine.  

What it does right is add a number of setting-specific mechanics that give the system its flavor.  You use poker chips to represent experience gained, as well as chances to change dice rolls, avoid damage, etc.  Since gambling is a big theme in the mythology of the west, you have to decide whether to hang on to those chips for that experience at the end, or burn in them in a chance to alter your fate.  To keep with the gambling theme, you use a deck of cards to determine initiative.  In addition, one magic class, the huckster, actually plays a hand of cards with a demon in order to cast their spells.  Those that hate randomness in games may want to steer clear of this class because you can get anything from an epic, god-like cast off of a hand in one cast, and a complete dud in the next.  But that wildness, to me, is part of the flavor and the fun.  Beyond these unique mechanics is a skill-oriented system augmented with a merit and flaw system to build depth in a character, and a way to be rewarded for actually playing to your flaws.  

Beyond the system is the heart of the game:  the setting.  Deadlands is the epitome of "weird west", combining history, magic, horror, and a touch of humor to create a wonderful backdrop to tell stories.  The best Deadlands game can move successfully from a straight western to pure horror as a normal situation is turned on its ear by something beyond the norm.  In Deadlands, fear is food for the dark entities causing the horror in the west, making nightmares real in an attempt to sow more fear in a bid to terraform the Earth in preparation for their eventual return.  Player characters represent the light in the darkness, doing their best to fight fear with hope.  Their strongest weapon is storytelling, telling everyone the see of their victories against the darkness and lowering fear levels.  Otherwise, fear can reach a high enough level that an entire area is claimed by the darkness and only the strongest can push it back.  

The alternate history setting gives game masters (called Marshals in Deadlands) the leeway to play with historical events and figures, giving them different outcomes or backgrounds to suit the story they are telling.  In addition, death is not necessarily the end for characters.  If they die, they have a chance to come back as a sort of sentient undead called Harrowed.  If they are chosen by a dark spirit (called manitou), they must play through their worst nightmare in order to fight the manitou for control when they return to the world of the living.  Harrowed enjoy some powers and benefits, but they must constantly fight the manitou riding inside.  If they fail, the manitou can take temporary control use the character to cause the very fear they are fighting.  

I could keep going, but I will spare you my gushing.  Suffice it to say, Deadlands is one of my favorite systems.  Is it perfect?  Absolutely not.  But the unique system mechanics, combined with the wonderful version of weird west storytelling it offers makes it rise above its faults in my opinion.  So if you have never had a chance to play or run Deadlands Classic, look for the 20th Anniversary edition coming soon from Pinnacle Entertainment Group and dive into your own spaghetti western...with meat! 

Mining: The Exorcist (FOX tv series)

It's October, that magical time of year when everything comes up horror.  Rather than digging around, trying to find scraps of horror in movies and television, we get a banquet of content.  Books, comics, even music all turn a darker shade of crimson as the leaves turn and the pumpkins dominate the entrances to stores and homes all over.  On this table of bounty, I have been enjoying a number of horror offerings.  One of which is the new Fox series The Exorcist (I know, it will probably be cancelled after its first season, but I can't help myself).  I went in extremely cautious, and after 3 episodes I can say without reservation that I have moved to cautiously optomistic.  

A quick review before I do a quick mining session.  The first episode sets the stage and as such, moves fairly slowly until the very end.  We are introduced to the young priest, the old priest, the victim's family, and the victim herself. This is not a rehash of the movie, though, and the show makes sure we know this.  It also ties to the movie very briefly with an article in an old paper mentioning the tragedy at the end of the first movie. But this show is definitely a new entry in the world of the Exorcist, despite the initial similarities. There are some segments that give you hope that we will have a true horror series and not just a family drama, but it is really the last 10 minutes or so that fills you with hope for what the series will become.  I am excited to see where they go with this show, and if the horror elements of the episodes so far are an indication, it should be a fun ride.  As long as Fox execs don't screw it up...

So what can we mine from this that we can't get from any other possession story?  The one nugget in the three episodes so far that could be used for gaming purposes is the way the possession occurs.  Most posession stories show the posession from the witnesses and not from the victim.  In this show, we see the descent from the victim's perspective.  The demon is given a face, it interacts with the victim, and most of all, we see that the possession is not entirely unwilling.  We see a broken girl with issues that give the demon a way to work its way into her willingly.  It is not a hostile takeover.  It is a seduction.  What we see is a girl, hungry for attention and tired of being second best in her family, despite her successes.  At first she resists, but the demon wears her down, acts as first friend, then loved one.  This is so far one of the strongest pieces of the show, and also the nugget of rpg usefulness that I am mining from the show.

So how do we use this seductive possession scenario in our games?  From an non-player character (NPC) perspective, they are not a victim.  The seduced NPC that the player character (PC)s are meant to save may actually resist their attempts to help.  They do not see the entity as an enemy, but a friend.  Perhaps the way to defeat the entity is not an epic boss fight or intricate ritual, but a social contest with the NPC victim themselves. They must convince the NPC that the entity is an enemy and that it is the NPC's fight to win and not the PC's.  Perhaps the "final fight" requires one or more PCs to continue to convince the NPC to fight while the rest of the party deals with manifestations caused by the entity to delay or eliminate the party.  In this, we have more than a two-dimensional possession scenario, and one that can create more depth for the story and for the NPC, as well as the entity itself.  The entity is not some boring bag of experience points, but something with motivations and character.  A three way social contest between PC, NPC, and entity would be a highly entertaining final battle.

The other way the seductive possession can be used is on an NPC.  Perhaps the entity comes from a particular item the PCs pick up.  Perhaps it latches onto a PC when they visited a particular area.  Or perhaps the game master (GM) sees a particular PC flaw on a sheet that would be a powerful invitation to an entity to start its seduction, something that happens completely unrelated to the current game story line.  During play, the GM could privately send messages to the PC, tempting them with help or with ideas that could get them out of sticky situations (at some sort of cost, of course).  These can be played as social contest requiring dice rolls, but it depending on the player, it could be pure choice.  Accepting the help gives the entity another tick in possession, however the GM decides to track this.  After a certain number of ticks, the PC begins manifestations, then potentially loses partial control of their character as the entity asserts itself.  This could even happen in the middle of an adventure, so suddenly the focus is on understanding what is happening to the PC and helping them.  This could even set up a choice for the party:  help their party member and fail the quest, or finish their job at the risk of the possessed PC sinking deeper into the entity's clutches.  

There are a number of ways to use the seductive possession in a game, both on PCs and NPCs alike.  It creates an interesting dynamic, an enemy that can't be chopped or shot, and one that is not a brute, but a cunning and manipulative entity that preys on the weaknesses of mind and spirit that exist in any individual.  It is a frightening concept, much more frightening than the faceless, angry spirit that most possession stories show.  It forces a confrontation of self and of flaws that we may not want to acknowledge.  That is a horror of a different sort...

The myth of Hero

Excitement was in the air, that thrilling anticipation of a fresh rpg. Friends around the table ready to pass through the door of imagination. They sit ready to make bigger than life characters, explore strange worlds, defeat evil, cross and double cross. The GM pitches his world idea and players instantly snap to coming up with character concepts. Someone asks casually, “what system are we using?” The GM pauses, and reaches into his backpack, with a slight grunt he pulls two massive tomes out. Blue and gold graphics start to bring dread into hearts of the players. That internal fear confirmed when the GM says, “Let's try Hero”, as he drops the the books causing a 3.8 tablequake. Instantly fear turns to horror, the joy of the game drains to be replaced by visions of calculus and 4 hour long combats. Another game is a victim of Herophobia.

Hero's reputation as a monolithic impenetrable fortress of rules is well earned. The rule books are huge an imposing. The default setting, Champions, is potentially the most confusing variant of hero that you can run. The quick start rules in their Sidekick editions are good, but no book seems to provide an obvious signpost as to where to start. All of these choices are intentional for better or for worse. The giant rule books are a marketing point, including the famous rulebook can stop a bullet stunt. Champions deserves to be a flagship line because it highlights what hero does better than any other system, but getting that sweet super hero gold requires a lengthy time investment to make it work right. Hero is marketed and designed for Hero players first and foremost, and that has the side effect of keeping hero in the 'hardcore' rpg category during an age of light and story driven rpgs.

Hero has a lot going for it. It has a wonderfully consistent set of rules that once you understand them scales through all kinds of power levels and campaign settings. Layers of complexity can be added and removed painlessly. When people think of hero they tend to think of the full buy in version. High character point super heroes with complicated powers and multi powers. But the true selling point, and the one that puts it in a class above other generic systems is the strength of it base system. The simple bones that build into the variety of beasts it can become. My friend Chris likes to say that Hero is his go to light game. While Hero isn't a light game by the standards of modern rpg design, I know what he means. It is easy enough to apply hero to most campaign concepts, with a minimum of tweaking. For those oddball one shots it is often just as easy to throw together a few Hero characters. In games with no power, or low powers the process of making a hero character offers a lot of control while being pretty painless. At low character point levels fights move extremely quickly, letting you run very action oriented games without a lot of combat downtime.

Easy character generation, quick combats, but that doesn't sound like Hero. That isn't champions, but unfortunately Champions and Hero are mostly synonymous. So what hero needs is a quickstart that plays to those advantages. The allure of the quickstart is that you can hop right into a game quickly, but a hero quickstart would be generic, so suddenly there is a lot of work to build the world. So we need a stripped down quick start game with an easy to understand world tied into it. It turns out that before Hero came out the system published exactly what I described in 1984. It was called Justice inc. JI was a version of Champions with all the powers stripped out, and a really tight pulp hero game theme. All the rules needed to play, with a few little add ons for the sake of theme. A good set of resources for running pulp games. In many ways it was the perfect Hero supplement.

As much as I hate the Fantasy flight new Star Wars model, it might be a good line for Hero games to take. Fantasy Flight with their Star Wars rpg republishes all the core rules with some minor modifications each time they put out a major sourcebook. While this is annoying for a game where the theme changes just a little bit, it is an awesome fit for a generic system that could have wildly different settings and themes. I think a hero curious person might be more likely to buy a small tight game like JI to get a feel, then if they enjoyed it, it would be easy enough to expand into the wider game. It of course doesn’t have to be JI, a cool post apocalyptic game, some unique take or licensed fantasy game. The easiest and quickest way to learn Hero is to play with those already converted to the cult of Hero. Currently there really is no good way for new players to easily get in.

I recommend giving hero a shot. Especially if you are the kind of person who wants a game that is mechanically deeper than most. The mechanical depth is offset by its logical consistency. The math involved is very straight forward.  Hero just isn't as inscrutable as people make it out to be, if you are capable of splatbook surfing 200 pathfinder books to make some crazy build you should be fine playing some good old 1980 rpg technology. Long live Hero.

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 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.

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. 

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.