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December 6th, 2007
01:42 am - D&D for Kids at Thanksgiving
So on my Thanksgiving trip to home, I ran an AD&D game for my three nephews and son. My nephew Nat (age 8) had written an email to me earlier to pointedly ask me to run a D&D game for them. Later, his father explained that a friend of Nat and his brother had gotten them interested in D&D. The dad had played it in high school back in the early 80s, and still had his first-edition AD&D books that he lent to the kids. For myself, I packed up my 2004 D&D Basic Game and my pile of D&D miniatures for the trip. I also brought along my 1983 Talisman boardgame as something similar but easier for the kids.
The kids are Nat (8) and his brother Zack (6), their cousin Truman (7), and their other cousin and my son Milo (7). Also, Truman's little sister Lillian would peek in on games a bit.
Over vacation time in their grandparents house, we played a bit of Talisman at first, and then a full Talisman game (in two sessions) later. It has a number of role-playing-like elements like the character sheet, gold, and experience. It's very easy to get started with, and has clear rules that the younger players understood easily.
Which D&D?
Nat had originally waffled on whether he wanted to play with the rules from the original AD&D1 books that he had seen, or the rules in my fancy new 3.5-era Basic Set. During the break, he said he wanted the original AD&D, so I borrowed his dad's first-edition PH, DMG, and MM along with DM's Screen. However, I still used the current-edition dungeon tiles and prepainted minis.
The Action
We played in three sessions. A morning session of character generation, a fight with kobolds in the evening, and then exploring and taking on the evil necromancer and his very young black dragon the next morning.
Most of the action was all mechanics and fighting. I found that any sort of description that didn't have something down on the table for it lost their interest extremely quickly. That's partly personality and group dynamic rather than strictly age. For example, I know that Milo can hold attention longer, but it is a struggle.
Players and Characters
We did regular AD&D character generation -- best 3 of 4d6, arranged to the stats you like. House rules were you had max hit points for first level, and started with average gold. It took nearly two hours to explain everything and walk through all the character creation, especially equipment. However, I had basically planned on this.
The players and their characters were: - Nat, age 8, played "Sir Aralon (Lord of Fear)" -- a lawful good human fighter
- Zack, age 6, played "Sir Hittr" -- a lawful good human magic user
- Truman, age 7, played "Sir Dragonair" -- a neutral good dwarf fighter
- Milo, age 7, played "Eodred" -- a neutral good elven magic user
- Keary (Nat and Zack's dad) played "Ralf" -- a lawful good human cleric
Names were a troublesome point for many, including Milo who demanded I suggest a good elven name for him.
How Did It Go?
The kids loved it and were extremely eager. My parents called me "heroic" for keeping the kids all focused and entertained for that long. For the kids, the highlight was certainly their feeling of hard-won victory defeating the necromancer and her very young black dragon. It was an edge of the seat victory, and I made all my rolls out in the open declaring what number I needed. Everything was by the book, though I was prepared to fudge with the dragon's attacks by not saying which rolls were its 1d4 claws and which was its 3d6 bite.
There wasn't any depth to the game -- much less so than my Kids Games at ConQuest SF 2006. The kids were younger and had more trouble focusing. The real struggle was keeping them from arguing with each other too much, and focused on the game. The miniatures and illustrated dungeon tiles were invaluable for this. The one token role-playing interaction was that there was a captured bugbear whom I convinced Nat to not kill immediately because he agreed to help them, though he did run away when things got tough. The rest was all pretty much tactical.
Overall, it went pretty much the way I expected, except that their attention disappeared even more quickly than I thought for verbal, non-combat action.
P.S. For reference, I've added a new LJ tag for my posts covering role-playing with younger children, "kids".
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October 23rd, 2007
02:15 pm - Hârn Campaign Status
I haven't talked about my Hârn group in a while. This is a group that I've played with for several years, roughly biweekly. When I joined the group in July 2002 it was four guys: Jim, Dennis, David, and me. Daniel joined about two years ago, and Mark joined this year for the current campaign. We've played a bunch of Hârnmaster, mixed with various other campaigns -- Lord of the Rings, a little Dogs in the Vineyard, James Bond 007. Prior to our current campaign, we had wrapped up a 9-month Call of Cthulhu campaign in March (cf. "End of the Golden Dawn Campaign"). We all agreed that we were going to play a Hârn campaign using the Burning Wheel rules game-mastered by Jim, but it would take some time for both him and us to prepare. We had a boardgame session or two, then played through three Burning Wheel one-shots to try out the system. We then started in June, and had eight sessions thus far (including the character creation session).
The Campaign
Our campaign is about a group of Ilviran missionaries, come to the biggest city on the island of Hârn to found a temple there. For non-Hârn fans, Ilvir is an odd Earth god known as the creator of monsters, whose worship was founded by the earliest settlers of the island of Hârn, the Celt-analogue Jarin. We've had to deal with things like anonymous threats from rival Ilvirans, offers of help from a more violent cult, trying to buy the land for our temple from an owner hostile to our religion, and dealing with the holy creatures of our order being fought as monsters in the city's gladiatorial arena. (Well, really they are dangerous monsters, but they are still sacred to us.)
The player characters are: - Bowdyn of Ressa, played by Mark our newcomer, a stone-mason who is fighting with his wife over his decision to come to the new city.
- Jaroud the Hound-Master, played by Dennis, an enterprising dog trainer who has now struck a deal with a shady boss in the city.
- Judyn of Denach, played by myself, a formidable older merchantwoman full of schemes to advance the order and herself.
- Kalrun the Veteran, played by Daniel, a retired soldier who has forsworn killing and adopted a teenage girl orphaned by war.
- Maban the Soothsayer, a young woman first raised by a monstrous Nolah not knowing who her parents were, then by Ilvirans in awe of her. She is developing a reputation as a crazy witch and prophetess.
Thus far, most of the action has still been exploratory. In seven sessions, we have only had one armed fight, and three one-on-one fistfights. We also don't often have a conflict that we see going to Duel of Wits over, and so DoW is roughly as common. You can read session logs on Jim's campaign website.
Last Session
Just to give an idea of how things go, I'll give a picture of a session. The Saturday before last, we met at 4:00 at Jim's apartment for session seven. Everyone was roughly on time. We played for a few hours, then we had a late dinner that Jim had cooked. It started with a salad with olives and orange slices, dressed with a mix of cinnamon, lemon and oranges juices, and orange blossom water. The main course was lamb with apricots, honey, and cinnamon served over couscous. The wine with this was a Domenico 2003 Aglianico from Amador County. I'm not much of a wine connoisseur, but I liked it. Then we played for another two hours or so.
A summary of the events is posted on the site at here. Roughly, we dodged an investigation of us, found out a little more (including that we were being charged with crimes by an enemy), and as the main action successfully concluded a deal to buy the land for our temple.
Status
The next game session will be this coming Sunday. We did have a bunch of email discussion after the last session, about the way the game was headed. One of the great things about the group is that nearly everyone is interested in discussing and analyzing how the game is going.
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August 27th, 2007
12:38 pm - GenCon Indy 2007 Report
So I went to GenCon Indy the weekend before last, and I finally finished up my convention report. My trip this time was marred by a few outside factors: problems with my flight coming in, a room with very nice roommates but a bit too small, and losing my wallet on the final day. I was also nervous about the Indie RPG Awards, which went off fine on Friday -- though I always feel like I could do more for them. Here is the full report:
"GenCon Indy 2007 Report"
I was even more disappointed with the con organization this time -- starting with my first event which turned out to be five blocks away from where is was printed to be in the program I had just been given. It was nice to meet lots of people whom I had only encountered online, and I had a good time on Saturday, but I am ambivalent about going back.
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July 19th, 2007
04:49 pm - End Game April 2007 Mini-Con Report
So I had two big blocks of gaming this past weekend. The first was the quarterly mini-con at EndGame in Oakland, California -- cf. the End Game Minicon page. I had signed up to a Truth & Justice game and a Spirit of the Century game, but the T&J game didn't get any players. Instead, I played Dogs in the Vineyard (GMed by Carl Rigney) in the morning slot and Liam Burke's game Dog Eat Dog in the afternoon slot, followed by running my SotC game in the evening. I went there with my friend ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) martinemonster, who is visiting the U.S. from Norway and stayed with us a couple of days. (I had met her at Knutepunkt 2005 in Norway). I've put a full report up on my webiste as:
End Game July 2007 Mini-Con Report
I was a bit disappointed at the lack of T&J, but everything I played was fun. Dogs with Carl was solid as always. This was a low-key run where no shots were fired and there were relatively few conflicts -- notably between PCs.
The new part was playing with Liam and Dog Eat Dog. It is a game about colonialism, particularly reflecting Pacific islands where the colonials had overwhelming power. Any player describes the results of her characters actions, but the one colonial player has the power to judge how tokens are awarded and power to win in conflicts. After each scene that the colonial player is in, the natives add a rule which they gain tokens for if they follow it in later scenes.
This run had the feel of a playtest where there was a lot of focus on the draft rules and some feedback about them. It was interesting that in discussion afterwards, one player disliked the unequal power dynamic -- whereas I thought that it was very much the point of the game.
I had seven players for my Firefly/Serenity SotC game, with Liam as the extra player since I did have a seventh pregenerated character. My run went more smoothly this time, and I drew in more expertise with the system including a lot more compels on character Aspects. Also, I added stunt explanations to the character sheets, which helped. I played with variant rules to speed up conflicts, where each hit takes off as many boxes as its margin.
All in all, a good time.
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July 1st, 2007
11:16 pm - Go Play Northwest '07
So a belated report on my time at Go Play Northwest last weekend.
There has naturally been discussion of it already. On Story Games the main thread was "GPNW is teh hawtness!" along with "[Go Play NW] Photo Thread" and "Numbers, Reflections, Lessons Learned, etc.". On the Knife Fight forums, there was a thread on "I played your game at Go Play Northwest". There is also a Flickr photoset.
I'll post some of this edited as one of my usual convention reports, so think of what follows as a rough draft.
Arriving
I flew into Seattle from San Jose on an early morning flight, and I arrived at the con shortly before 10:00. At that point, though, the first slot games were already all underway and didn't have room. So I instead checked into my room, showered, and checked my email at the library, then joined everyone for lunch at noon.
When we got back, I was introduced to the sign-up system -- which was people writing games they would run on the white board and other people signing up. At that point, though, all of the announced games were basically full. There were at least half a dozen people not signed up, though. So I proposed some games. I was prepared to run five games: My Truth & Justice one-shot "Bonds of Steel", my "Spirit of Serenity" one-shot, 1001 Nights, Dead of Night, and The Weaver's Daughters. I suggested TWD first, but didn't get a quorum of interest, and then both T&J and SoS -- and people were more interested in SotC.
There were about 55 attendees both days. They ranged in age, with a few in their 20s, most in their 30s, and maybe a quarter in their 40s. There were around 5 women, and less than that of non-Caucasians. Most were local, but around a third were from out-of-town, and stayed in a dorm hall where the organizers had arranged cheap rooms.
Sat Afternoon: "Spirit of Serenity"
So I game-mastered a session of Spirit of the Century using the Firefly/Serenity background. I had pregenerated characters that I had made up for my group. However, I hadn't developed the material as a convention game to play with strangers. Also, when I played this with my group it took roughly 4 hours, rather than the 3 hours I had at GPNW. Overall, I like this setup and I'll keep it around as something to run at conventions, but definitely with some changes. The characters are all pretty good, I think, but I'll probably end up majorly revising the adventure background / situation. Going around the table counter-clockwise, the players were: - Peter Curry as Fannie Granger, a veteran Companion and the captain of the ship
- Dan Shiovitz as Lt. Pearl Hatfield, the military commander
- Charles Picard as Galvin Holloway, friend of the captain's
- John Powell as Dr. Eliza Collins, the ship's doctor
- Michael Brislawn as Lilly Shepis, a journeyman Companion and the second-in-command
- Lucian Smith as Lalu Chang, the ship's engineer
Two of the players posted comments about GPNW07 -- Dan (inkylj) posted "Go Play '07", and Lucian (lpsmith) posted "Go Play Northwest". inkylj wrote: Also as I imagine is typical for con games, it felt like we were going agonizingly slow in terms of "solving the mystery", and the spotlight was pretty shaky moving around (partly as a result of the aforementioned dumb plan stuff, although maybe I'm just griping; there was a really obvious location we didn't head to until late in the session because we were distracted by various people's side-plans). It felt like lpsmith in particular got kind of shafted by lack of spotlight, but I guess he did get to hack the computer in a few important places and get some vital plot tidbits (he was playing Lalu, the engineer; I was Pearl, the security chief). Things were quite rushed but we did get 90% of the plot exposed and came to some resolution by the end, so I think we were basically ok, although I don't know how much the GM cut things down to make us get there in time.
In practice, I have noticed that a slow start is common for convention games, but obviously I'd prefer to avoid that. When running it again, I'd make the scenario more personal to these PCs, and write in some strong relationships of the PCs with key NPCs. That's what I did with my Truth & Justice convention game, and it worked very well. Particularly given the setup of the PCs as the crew of a ship, the group dynamic was key. I don't think there's a simple way to improve it, though. When designing convention games, I will often define the inter-PC relationships a little better, giving notes for each PC on what they think of the others. However, it's still a big open question how well they'll work together.
At some point, I'll post revised scenario ideas for use with these characters. Most likely, the scenario will still involve trouble with Companions out in the territories, and it may even involve the training grounds on Newhall -- but everything else will change completely. Any other feedback is welcome.
Sat Evening: Playtest of "Know Thyself"
This was a playtest of a GMless game, organized by the author, Ryan Macklin -- who didn't play but stood by to explain the rules. The general concept was that you're playing someone who has lost their memory. Going around the table clockwise, each player takes a turn doing one scene. As the active player, you control exactly what your character does -- but the players to your left and right define where your character is, their physical body and circumstances, and everything else. The exception is in the conflict which ends a scene -- where success or failure is determined by card mechanics, but you can choose either to narrate how the conflict resolves or define a memory unlocked by the conflict.
The players were Mike Sugarbaker, Jackson Tegu, Brian Wiegman, Joe McDonald, and myself.
At the start, each player defined an impulse that would drive their character, and we came up with ones including "I need to get married immediately" and "Why do I still see my dead mother". Each player thought of five inspirational objects and wrote a purely physical descriptions of them on cards. All the cards were then put in a hat, and everyone drew out four and wrote them on his character sheet. Each recovered memory would be keyed to one of these objects -- like "a broken watch", "a check for one millions dollars, made out to cash", and "fifty feet of rope".
We then started play. One player would draw three cards with random words on them, that define the location of the scene -- like the "(Theater) of (Shameful) (Peace)" or the "(Throne Room) of (Shaken) (Wrath)". That player then frames a scene for the player on their left, describing where they are, what they see, and most (but not necessarily all) of the four objects. After the scene starts, though, the player on the other side of the active player was the GM and could define everything for that scene including physical features of the character.
In three hours with five players, we got through I think seven scenes. As one might expect from this sort of game especially as a playtest, there were many interesting ideas, but not much coherency. I already gave feedback and the rules may change, so I'm not going to go into any more detail on the game design.
To my mind, it was a little slow at first, and came alive a few turns in when Joe McDonald and I started pushing back and forth at each other. The heart of this is that other people have a huge amount of say in who your character is, even though you control everything about what you do.
Sat Night: Playtest of "Cheap"
This was a bizarre session game-mastered by author Joe McDonald. I'm hesitant to describe it too much, since it is basically a mind game where Joe subjected us to stuff where we didn't know the rules. I played with Ryan Macklin, Jake Richmond, and Nick Richmond. jake_richmond posted "Go Play NW" about the con as a whole including this session, which apparently gave him nightmares.
I was not at all traumatized, but I was in a sleep-deprived state since we were playing past midnight when I had gotten up before 5AM that morning. I connected with different parts of the game, but I totally couldn't logically put together patterns. Still, we won in the end. As Joe reported, we broke his game and took his pants.
Sun Morning: "Zorcerer of Zo"
This was a prepared event game-mastered by Edmund Metheny, using a bit of the rules and the canonical setting from Chad Underkoffler's game. Character creation started with picking one of seven wrapped gifts and unwrapping them to find out what our toy was. We then picked our Qualities and Weakness as normal for ZoZ, done in about 10 minutes or so. The players and characters then were: - mechanteanemone got a toy vacuum cleaner (made in Japan) and created Watanabe Hideko, the Happy Family Vacuum Cleaner.
- Wilhelm Fitzpatrick got a stretchy rubber poison dart tree frog, and created Chewy from Honduras.
- Laura Mortensen got an plastic ogre action figure with a cage and a pet gargoyle, and re-created Philban Detmer (whom she had played in an earlier ZoZ game).
- I got a medieval knight action figure who had a lot of accessories, and created Sir Sellalot -- an enterprising salesman.
- Jeremy Zimmerman got a pink plastic car with princess-themed stickers, and created Loue the Jalope -- who was a personal shopper and concerned transport for an imaginary princess.
- Jackson Tegu got a plastic tea set (!!!) and created Good Old Values, the Enchanted Tea Set. Its Qualities were based around different ways of arranging itself, like "Robot Imitator" by arranging the saucers and cups like a robot.
At the start, Edmund had a list of eight or so plot elements on the board that we were going to try to hit, and we added about six of our own. They were things like "Devil Ducks" and "An Enchanted Princess" and "A Daring Rescue". As the game went on, we checked off things that we had done.
The larger frame story was that we went from central Zo to the southern kingdom of Rosso, where we were charged with confronting the attacks of devil ducks on the shipping. mechanteanemone posted Go Play NW wrap-up and mini-reviews including this one. I think that between having to create characters quickly from random toys, and the list of existing plot elements, the results were confusing. Kudos to Jackson in particular, though, for his outstanding efforts to make a character out of a tea set.
I played in a game that was similar in some ways at AmberCon NorthWest '07 -- "Amber's Home for Imaginary Friends" game-mastered by Jennifer Zimmerman. We each got a toy out of that event, too, but it was a symbolic toy that represented a power rather than being a figure for our character. The characters in AHfIF were a little more planned, and they all had more of a thematic bond and a tie-in to the plot.
A few comments on system... We did not end up using the Story Hooks mechanic from ZoZ, with the plot elements on the whiteboard being the substitute. Also, the plausible coincidence spending was a little odd because we often made suggestions that the GM Edmund would pick up on without spending, though sometimes we would spend for some.
Sun Afternoon: "The Princ(ess)es' Kingdom"
This was a run of another kids-focused game, "The Princes' Kingdom", game-mastered by the game's author, Clinton Nixon. We had seven players, which was pretty ambitious of Clinton, I thought. He had eight pregenerated characters, one each for ages 5 to 12. Dividing them up, we had: - Mike Sugarbaker took Prince Andreü, age 6, who could turn into a fox.
- Phil Larose took Prince Vincens, age 9.
- Mike Bennett took Princess Tecla, age 10.
- Lesley McKeever took Princess Elisabet, age 8, who had magic.
- Lukos Myhan took Prince Vidal, age 7.
- I took Princess Michaela, age 11 (and as it turned out, the oldest).
- Doug Bartlett took Prince Calvet, the youngest at age 5.
I won't delve into the plot too much, but there was something of a mystery that we confronted. It uses a simplified version of the system from Dogs in the Vineyard, with only one attribute (age) instead of four, and thus escalation is only to draw in new traits. Because of the number of PCs, the system was only really invoked for effect a handful of time -- notably at the climax where Elisabet ended up taking on the bad guy one-on-one. (And there was something of a distinct bad guy in this.) There were two other times when the mechanic was invoked, but with multiple PCs the odds were such that the GM just gave.
The story was considerably less gonzo than the previous ZoZ game, but also had less distinct hooks for characters. There was some nice dynamics of age, with Calvet the 5-year-old just running wild, and Michaela as the oldest trying to nicely boss everyone around. It could have used stronger hooks for everyone to have their moment and shine differently, I think.
Conclusion
GPNW was a fun time. It's a bit distant for me, coming from California. However, I'm likely to come again at least once.
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June 16th, 2007
09:27 pm - Celebration and Dragons of the Yellow Sea
So a while back, in December 2005, I had posted "What makes a good celebration?" -- where I discussed the idea of making a good celebration and applying that to RPGs.
I now turn back to that in light of some of the revisiting of Ron Edward's GNS theory -- notably Chris Lehrich's "A GNS Question", plus some Story Games threads including complaints about jargon and Forge Glossary help; and also the Knife Fight threads (only open to members) on "GNS Theory in Wikipedia" and Ben Lehman's "To Understand Simulationism, Study Simulationism".
So partly as an extension of Chris Lehrich's excellent Ritual Discourse in RPGs, the concept of RPGs as celebration is one of the more interesting ideas to come out of the Forge, I think. I made a Celebration / Celebrationism entry in the Theory Topics wiki.
Construction vs. Deconstruction
One of the key points about my first post was the celebration shouldn't feel deconstructive. That is an important point for me. There is a big difference between a constructive work and a deconstructive work. For example, I would say that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miracleman series were deconstructive of superheroes. Reading them, the reader was struck by the contrast with what the superhero conventions are -- they expose and criticize the tropes of the superhero comic genre. On the other hand, Kurt Busiek's Astro City is celebratory. It is still transformative of earlier superhero comics, but it works more by building on what is there and transforming it. It introduces new ideas wrapped in the symbolism of superheroes, using the older tropes to introduce new things rather than dwelling on the older tropes themselves.
So a good celebration is constructive -- it builds upon what is there. This doesn't leave the object of celebration untouched. You don't leave a wedding feeling the same way about the relationship. You don't leave a birthday feeling like you did about the previous year.
Dragons of the Yellow Sea
I would like the ongoing Dragons of the Yellow Sea campaign to be a celebration of Korean culture. This is tricky, because there is a lot of elements of 19th century Korea that we don't want to celebrate -- the Confucian repression of women by men, and of commoners by yangban; as well as the insularity that ultimately proved nearly self-destructive. For example, in a deconstructive mode, I could have some scathing things to say about how the story of Chunhyang has the appearance of celebrating women, but really is enforcing women's place as chattel.
I would prefer a constructive approach, though. I'd like to create a positive, pulpy page-turner -- which isn't necessarily historically accurate but still at least draws in and celebrates Korean culture. What does that mean? Well, to some degree it means learning aspects of culture. However, it is more than that. Teaching culture can easily be dry and critical, and the students learn facts that they internalize as facts about other people. In a celebration, however, you join in the thing that you are celebrating. You will internalize what you learn differently than if you treated it as something you are a part of.
Now, I'm not trying for a masterpiece -- just a pulpy adventure saga, but one that is distinctly Korean rather than just American pulp with a veneer of Korean history. This is still difficult, I think. Some of my thoughts on the matter have been: - Highlight issues of the times -- including class conflict between yangban and commoner, corruption of the central government, and the balance of foreign influence shifting from China to Japan.
- Rather than revenge, in stories, the betrayed tends to prove his/her worth by serving the cause all the more.
- Show different sides of Confucian ideals, positive and negative.
- Show a respect of poetry and romance as popular forms of the times.
Campaign Update
We just did the second session of the campaign on Friday. It's going pretty well, I think. There are brief session summaries out on the wiki. The first two episodes were a fairly self-contained adventure, where a royal investigator came searching for the culprit who had killed the crew of a ship bearing goods for the magistrate of Jeju, and taken off with the crew.
One of the techniques that went over pretty well was assigning of nicknames. Within the Korean sources that I've read, people are generally referred to by their family names -- not their given names. This can be confusing, though, since there will often be several people with the same nickname. It's common to refer to people by their position, but also common for people to have nicknames. So we assigned nicknames to each of our characters. During the first session -- which was after the character generation session and finishing touches to the characters by email -- each player described their character, and then everyone else discussed and assigned them a nickname. The nicknames were often distinctly not what the character assigned would want, like "Princess" Song.
We're still struggling a bit with the rules, in particular that people are having trouble deciding what their Aspects should be. It's getting better, just slowly.
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May 20th, 2007
11:06 pm - D&D for an 11th birthday
So yesterday I ran a D&D game for an 11th birthday party. The birthday girl Ellie is the daughter of non-gaming friends, but she's had an interest in various games for a while. I'd run RPGs twice before for her -- once at ConQuest where I was running games in the kids room and helped out with a D&D game run by Scott Bagley. See my ConQuest 2006 Report for details. I had also run a nominally-D&D but mostly-freeform game for her and a friend at our house once, a Harry-Potter-esque game which had her younger sister and my son Milo in it as the familiars of their student wizards.
Ellie had especially asked me to come and run specifically a D&D game for her party a week or so earlier -- using the D&D Basic Set that she had gotten a little while ago. I had a strong impression that she wanted the "real thing", as she saw it, and I didn't make alternate suggestions. I've only played D&D3E a few times, and I took a few steps to prepare. She told me that there would be seven players and I knew there were only four character sheets in my Basic Set, so I had hoped there would be some extra Basic-Set-style character sheets online. Sadly, I didn't find any. I started a short ENWorld thread, "Pregens for an 11-year-old's Birthday party?" -- and I got some other advice but no actual character sheets. I mocked up one extra character sheet, but didn't have time to create more. I was prepared to give some people identical sheets and use different miniatures, but luckily it turned out better. I had been busy that week, and to complicate it further was feeling pretty sick with a cold at the time. I called off out of a game earlier in the day (sorry, Jim) and rested up.
When I got to their house, Ellie had decorated the living room with cray paper in a dungeon theme (with her parents help, naturally). The lamps had orange and yellow paper flames coming out, and there were black curtain-like walls. She had copies of a bunch of Basic-Set-style character sheets besides the four in the Basic Set (I'm still not sure where from), and she was explaining about it to the kids who were there. A few were late, though, and I let Ellie do most of the introductions with her friends and have them pick characters.
There were color sheets for the four standard characters. Ellie had photocopies of four other sheets that were of different characters, perhaps from the boardgame (?). And I had my one mock-up sheet in color. The players and their characters were: - Ellie played Lidda, a female halfling thief, one of the standard Basic Set sheets.
- Bobbie played Alhandra, a female human ranger that I had mocked up.
- Devon played Mialee, a female elven wizard whose sheet Ellie had copied from somewhere.
- Sherry played Aramil, a male elven sorcerer, one of the standard Basic Set sheets.
- Julia played Naull, a human female wizard, a copied sheet.
- Sydney played Tordek, a male dwarven fighter, a copied sheet.
- Jake played Eberk, a male dwarven cleric from the Basic Set.
It might not be clear from the names, but Jake was the token male at the party. He and Bobbie left around 8:00, while the others were all sleeping over. Everyone had a more-or-less appropriate miniature -- though I'm glad I scoured for some extra female miniatures about the house.
I briefly explained that they were going to rescue a woman Sharia and her young brother Telned. They had traced them to an ancient tomb of their people that had been taken over by an evil necromancer. However, I cut my explanations very short. The kids were all reasonably interested in the game, as talked up by Ellen, but I think with any group of seven pre-teens the group attention span is remarkably short. So I quickly started them at the dungeon door and started everyone on the basics of combat in a clash with some kobolds. There were a bunch of questions like what a d20 was, and I think it was much better to explain through doing rather than trying to teach the rules beforehand. They captured one kobold and it told them a bit, and they explored ahead but we quickly moved into the second combat. I was quick about this because a few of the players really didn't engage unless they were actively called on, and that was hard to arrange. After the second combat against the more powerful monsters, we took a break for a while. (Around this time, my spouse and sprog arrived and took a few pictures.)
There was pizza, present-openeing, some nebulous goings-on in Ellie's room, a war out in the backyard with plastic swords and rubber balls, and then cake. We then resumed the game. They searched the tomb and got some scrolls and defeated a skeleton to get a magic sword, as well as finding and rescuing the little brother. Then they faced down the necromancer, who threatened to kill the hostage woman. This got them into their first group discussion and tactics. Everyone deferred to Ellie as the leader, but most of them still had input. I pushed back a little bit here to get them to think things through, and it went pretty well. The twist in the end was that the capture woman had become a vampire and attacked them, who was quite tough and also brought in some pathos to the ending.
Her mom reported in her blog: "Everyone is playing D and D at the moment, and they're all getting sucked into the game. It's hard to follow from the outside, particularly since I've only played it once in my life and then i was pretty drunk so I can't remember it. Rook is being very patient and participating at all moments. He's awesome." (In a prior post, she described the preparations-making as "Wow, so we set up the "dungeon" with black streamers and torches, and it looks awesome! It's so exciting! The party will be really fun, if all the kids get into it and play. Eliz keeps bragging about how her dungeonmaster who is coming is "totally famous" and an international star and all. Excellent. We're lucky to know Badger's husband Rook, indeed. He runs games all the time. Internationally! I'm not kidding!") Heh.
So it went off pretty well, and we more-or-less stuck to the D&D rules, though not at all the scenario described in the Basic Set. I think that the general premise is reasonably well suited as an introductory game. The limited choices of a dungeon are excellent for a fractious group. There were a number of things which bothered me, though. - Having only four characters is really limiting, especially given that only one is the token female (the halfling rogue Lidda). Probably not coincidentally, Ellie as birthday girl got dibs on Lidda as her character.
- The dungeon scenario in the Basic Set was really empty and dull. Having a mission and an opponent were vital.
- Magic items should be really special and powerful. In particular, the players of wizard and sorcerer characters seemed a bit underwhelmed by their magic, so I really wanted their detect magic and read magic to have solid payoff.
I'm going to look at putting some introductory material online, because I was pretty disappointed at what I could find for helping someone do this.
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May 8th, 2007
01:55 pm - Initial Thoughts on Burning Wheel
So as I mentioned last time, my Hârn group tried out Burning Wheel last time we played. We did a one-shot adventure -- the convention scenario "The Sword" available on the BW downloads page. We're preparing to play a BW campaign set in Hârn, game-mastered by Jim, and we're doing two one-shot adventures to introduce us to the system. Jim lead off with some discussion of the system, but I've put off commenting until now.
Jim gave comments by email, which were addressed to the others in the group but I think are fairly intelligible to others. Our group consists of Jim, David, Dennis, Daniel, and myself. (And Elliot has played with us earlier.) For the BW one-shot, Jim invited a new player, Mark, whom he had met online. I'm giving his comments below:
Jim Chokey wrote: - As a group, we learned a *lot* about BW mechanics an how they work in practice, including the mechanics for Duel of Wits, Fight!, armor,and injury. We even dabbled a bit with Artha, resources, rules for helping, etc. We didn't always get everything right... but I think we accomplished a lot in a session for which the primary intent was 'get to know the rules'.
- I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly scripting went once we got the basic hang of it. It's an unusual mechanic, but I thought it actually worked pretty nicely in both the Duels of Wits and the Fight!. Except for some of the positioning results when we were trying to have a three way fight, it wasn't at all clunky-- and I think it added a really neat element of drama/surprise to the game.
- I was surprised by how quick Duel of Wits is as a mechanism for resolving conflict. I really enjoyed seeing you guys actually 'play out' disputes and make specific points in character.
- There was a lot of great drama-- and humor-- resulting from in-character actions. (The Elf falling to his knees and weeping while the Dwarf brought out his keg o' nog at the sight of the sword was great. I think both of those actions probably would have merited an artha award if this had been 'actual' play with developing characters.)
- The Die of Fate as a formal mechanic. I don't know if I made this overt but I used this random mechanic on several occasions throughout the game to determine what's what with situations that weren't clearly outlined or developed. "Can the door be barred on the inside? Hmm... I don't know... the module doesn't say-- let's roll a Die of Fate.... a 1... yes, there is a bar."
- Finally, there's two things that weren't specifically BW related, but I wanted to mention in the 'great' category anyway:
- David's saintlike patience while two DoWs and a long Fight! went on, none of which involved his character. Thanks for being a good sport in a sub-ideal situation, David. At next session, though, I think you we need to make sure we give you a character who can't be sidelined, no matter what, so that you get more chance for some hands-on action.
- Mark: He knew the rules as well as anyone, if not more so. Plus: He's polite. He played a good dwarf. He's well groomed. He's not socially inept. Is he really a gamer? Welcome to our group, Mark!
Some things that I would consider to have been 'not-so-great': - David getting sidelined for most of the adventure. If I were to run this again, I'd make some changes to prevent it from being so easy to pay off the Roden, which essentially removes him from the occasion. Or, I might tinker with his beliefs to make sure that he had his own interest in the sword.
- Trying to run our very first Fight! as a three-way battle. This was not so elegant and was probably a less-than-ideal way to introduce ourselves to the Fight! mechanics--- particularly positioning.
- Some sub-ideal calls on the part of the GM on how to resolve certain issues in the game--- , such as when Robard (the human played by Dennis) wanted to sneak up on the fighting dwarf and Elf. I'm not going to beat myself up over it, as it was our first session with pregenerated characters in a one-shot, but I do feel that there are some things that I should have handled differently.
- No Daniel! (We knew you couldn't make it, of course... but we missed you anyway.)
Some random thoughts and observations-- that aren't necessarily good or bad-- but which stood out in my mind... or which occurred to me since the game - Armor! I think we were all a bit surprised at what the 'all-or-nothing' armor rules meant in practice, especially after being used to HM, where armor basically cushions blows. Similarly, the VA 'Versus Armor' rating of weapons makes a big deal... as does the ability to use great strikes to increase the VA of an attack. (When reading the rules, I had thought, "Two actions, just to get a +1 on VA? What a rip? But now, I see the advantage of that."
- Beliefs, instincts, and traits: I think we got a glimmer of how these can work in driving a game's action forward, although I think the instincts/traits may have played second and third fiddle in this particular scenario with these particular characters. Once we create characters of our own who we're familiar with-- and with instincts/ traits we've chosen-- I think they'll come into play more often.
- Duel of Wits stakes: An interesting thing about DoW is that, players are required to state the 'stakes' in advance (ie. this is what happens if I win, that's what happens if you win)-- but that, in most cases, the winner will have to make some sort of concessions/ compromises to those stakes, since he will almost certainly have lost a few points.
- Except for in the DoW, I think we (and I include me in this) were not so explicit about 'stating intent' in connection with action as the game calls for. At the same time, I think that stakes may not always have been as explicit as the game calls for. In the next session, I think we may want to consider to trying be more up front about specifying PC intent and stakes.
- A curious feature of the game is that disadvantages are, in most cases, more disadvantageous than advantage dice are advantageous.
- The rules to BW are really crunchy-- and there are a lot of them. I think we have to be prepared for the fact that, at first, we may forget about some of them in the course of play... that's just going to have to be the way it is until we master the rules.
- Similarly, there are some points in which rules procedures are not 100% clear in the book. I'll be happy to be the 'point man' in trying to figure out on the BW forum what the experienced BW gurus think the right interpretation of the rules procedure is.... , but I think we also have to be prepared to accept that we may just have to come up with some 'house guidelines' for how to handle certain things.
There were also some more specific rules questions following this.
In general, I'd agree with Jim's points. We did this session explicitly examining the mechanics as a curiousity -- and the session ended up a little more competitive and more crunchy than is typical for our games. In principle, we're used to HârnMaster which is fairly complex -- but I'd been frustrated by a number of problems with those rules and how we'd be tripped up even after years of (admittedly on-and-off) play. My initial thoughts on Burning Wheel: - The armor is counter-intuitive in that the success (and degradation) of armor is independent of how much damage the attack does. This suggests that if someone has a lot of armor, besides Great Blow to get the Versus Armor bonus, you might want to ping him a lot with low-damage attacks to wear down the armor.
- Presenting hit locations was odd. I was reasonably fine with presenting arms, which suggested putting them up to block. Torso as a default also worked fine. However, presenting legs to a sword blow evoked a rather... acrobatic image.
- I found it a little unesthetic to write and erase multiple times on our scripting sheet. I'd prefer either something like card choice or a sheet where we don't erase.
- I kicked ass in the two Duels of Wits by virtue of overwhelming elfy stats, and we were agreed it was fun. Still, I was a little concerned that they might grow old as a regular thing. I think we'll just have to see on that count.
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May 4th, 2007
03:28 pm - Thoughts on Romance
So a few thoughts on romance in games. I played in another session of the Berkeley Call of Cthulhu campaign GMed by Janyce Engan (cf. The Stars Are Right Wiki). In this past session, we went into the English village of Bailey with its cult-like people, and disrupted a ritual by its spiritual leader known as The Lady. We ended up summoning the guardians of her former prison, who took her back to where she was formerly kept prisoner at a remote spot in the Faeroe islands.
Along the way, though, one of the PCs was drawn into a pagan orgy with the villagers, and I got further into the romance that my PC Henrik has been drawn into. He has fallen for an NPC, Rebecca Hopkins, who has been the girlfriend of one of the more established PCs, Auda Abisi. This last session, he decided to admit this to Auda, which lead to an awkward conversation.
Romance in General
A few months ago, Brand Robins posted on A difference between online and tabletop play, noting that cybersex is a real phenomenon in online play, but the same is almost entirely absent in tabletop play. He has also posted a Romance-in-games Survey asking about best and worst experiences and similar, which I answered.
immlass had also posted some Observations on relationships in roleplaying, where she suggests that romance/relationship stories work best when there's tension over the relationship -- either external forces set against characters in love, or external forces trying to get two reluctant characters together.
Edited to add: One more addition for the links on romance that I forgot -- the_tall_man's August 2006 post The Immersive Romance.
So I'm pondering notable role-played romances that I've been involved in:
Manfred's fling with Virgil
This was the most recent, but it wasn't all that deep. I had been playing a flamingly gay character, Manfred, in an Amber Diceless campaign, game-mastered by Madeline. After several sessions, I found he hadn't run across any romantic potential. I was somewhat concerned that his gayness would come across more as stereotyped effeminate behavior rather than actually liking men, so I requested a romantic subplot from the GM in a private email. Following this, the NPC Virgil showed up and immediately fell for him, and came up from time to time in the remainder of play.
I don't think there was a lot of tension in this one -- it was a happy, if somewhat one-sided relationship. Manfred would tend to say "Oh, hey babe" to Virgil's adoration.
Dot and Max
This was one of the highlights of the three-year Buffy campaign, Silicon Valley Slayage. Max was a senior programmer and witch, a very out lesbian loosely based on Max from the movie "Go Fish". Dot was the web designer and Slayer, a younger woman and only ambiguously bi-curious. Early in the First Season, Max at first mooned over Dot. Their romantic tension came out over our in-character blog entries besides in play -- like these: They eventually got together, and their relationship deepened in Season Two, and midway through they decided to conceive a child together by sorcerous means. In Season Three, the baby was born and it played a central role in an apocalyptic prophecy.
There was a lot of tension over the two of them during Season One. Then once they became an item, it changed. The relationship lost a little steam in Season Two because I became a half-time GM, so there was simply less time and less continuity for keeping up relations. Still, there was a lot of good stuff in there. In particular, there was tension over having a baby and the choice that meant. Then the twist in Season Three was that Max invented a duplication spell to allow Dot to split into two halves: her mommy-self and her Slayer-self. Max struggled with communicating with Dot -- plus there was some tension with the in-laws.
Borgny and Skallagrim
This was an interesting romance in the Vinland game where I was GM. Borgny the Sharp-tongued was a character who came up in the game, and Skallagrim the Dark was an unmarried PC played by Jim. A dozen sessions after her showing up as an NPC, Skallagrim spontaneously decided to approach her family about arranging a marriage. (Session #20: Skallagrim's Proposal) Actually, all of the initial PCs got married over the course of the campaign, but Skallagrim was the only one who arranged his himself -- since his parents were dead and he began as a huscarl. Borgny was a widow with a grown daughter Vagnhild, who was the quintessential surly teen.
There was some external resistance to this in the form of Borgny's family. Her parents didn't object to the marriage, since Borgny wasn't about to catch anyone of higher status. However, her father Vigfus the Proud clearly looked down on Skallagrim. Also, Vagnhild hated it, but that was no surprise. I think that this was the most sheer fun to play, because Borgny was a hugely fun character who was quite active through their courtship and marriage.
Silksif and Melnir
This was another of the romances in the Vinland game. I was GM, handling the NPC Melnir while Silksif was a PC played by Heather. Melnir was established early on as a militaristic warlord of the Raudarbank clan (in present-day New Jersey), and an ally of the PCs. Silksif was a reknown prophetess. At some point, he got into his head to propose to her. He saw her as a prize, but also as unique from other women. She, on the other hand, had huge troubles with her family situation -- and needed money and power to try to fix it. So to her, he was a way to handle her problems.
There was certainly tension in this relationship, but it went in many directions at once. Melnir was a tough warlord, and he proposed by coming with all his men armed to stay at the longhouse of Silksif's family, and then announcing his proposal. That's tension-producing, but it's not clear what direction. Also, I though the relationship was hot in the way that both of them were using the other.
Rook and Madam Sossostrich
This was an interesting one. I was a player in a campaign game-mastered by Chris Lehrich and Alex Dent-Young. The short form was that for a time in this campaign, all of the PCs came under the spell of an NPC, Madam Sossostrich -- who was channeling a goddess such that we all were in love and awe of her. Major Rook was not a PC that I had invented, but rather was created by another player. He was essentially a retired secret agent. Years earlier, while working undercover, he had ended up killing the woman in Egypt he was having an affair with, because she had found him out and was going to tell her husband.
Then at some point, Madam Sossostrich lost her channeled identity and powers. Suddenly she was just a mortal woman who had no power over us. As that was described to us, I suddenly knew that Rook had fallen in love with her.
The disappointing part was that in the subsequent adventures, nothing much happened with this -- and no one paid much attention to it. What I belatedly realized was that even though I was clear that Rook was interested in her, the others (including the GM) interpreted it as a shallow sort of lust. I couldn't exactly explain it at the time, but it was important to him, and I think it was fed by the guilt over killing the woman in Egypt. So he had this romantic ideal of loving and protecting this helpless woman.
Reflections
One of the key things that I note is that relationships have never worked as well if they were designed as relationships. Of the above, Virgil was created as a love interest for Manfred -- but the others all were relationships that arose from already-established NPCs or between PCs who weren't created as having a relationship or attraction.
The examples I found less successful -- Manfred/Virgil and Rook/Sossostrich -- were opposite in how they were handled. In Rook/Sossostrich, the GM and other players weren't clear about what I was thinking. On the other hand, the Manfred/Virgil was explicitly negotiated, but didn't have much depth.
I think I lean towards taking seriously and putting some attention to any romances, but not explicitly negotiating them out-of-game.
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April 24th, 2007
09:50 am - New Games This Weekend
So I had two games this weekend, both starting off new things for two of my groups.
So one of my groups had finished up an Amber DRPG campaign game-mastered by zdashamber a few months ago, and we played a few one-shots but are now starting a new campaign. So Saturday evening we did brainstorming and character creation for Dragons of the Yellow Sea -- a campaign that I'm GMing set in 1860s Korea of the world of Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels. It is a parallel history of our world where there are domesticated dragons. We talked about the background, who the PCs would be, and then created characters using a variant of Spirit of the Century. I had a modified stunt list -- mainly that "Drive" (cars) and "Pilot" (planes) were replaced by "Seamanship" (ships) and "Airmanship" (dragons), and modifying the "Mysteries" stunts to fit with shamans rather than turn-of-the-century psychics.
Overall, I think everyone's excited about this, and we liked all the ideas going in. I'm going to have to do a bunch more to prepare, but it's all interesting material. There's certainly an aspect to GMing this campaign which is connecting to my cultural heritage as a Korean that I've largely been distant from.
The other group just finished up a Call of Cthulhu campaign that I had been game-mastering, and on Sunday we did a one-shot adventure using Burning Wheel -- the convention scenario "The Sword" available on the BW downloads page. We're preparing to play a BW campaign set in Hârn, GMed by Jim, and we're doing two one-shot adventures to introduce us to the system.
This was mostly all about learning the mechanics. The larger lesson that I took from it was that I get competitive with this sort of mechanical environment, which I think I have to avoid. It occurs to me that in that group, we've generally been pretty cooperative as far as role-playing, and then gotten out our competitiveness in our tradition of having a round of Liar's Dice at the end of the session.
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April 5th, 2007
11:14 am - Gatherings I'm Missing
I thought I'd put in a mention about gatherings which I'm missing.
Nerdly Beach Party was last weekend, but I wasn't able to attend. It sounded like a lot of fun, and I'd see about trying to be at the next gathering.
The End Game April '07 Minicon is this coming Saturday, and I also won't be able to attend because the Call of Cthulhu game I'm in scheduled on top of it.
I am keeping up with indie gaming in my own groups, having played 1001 Nights with my Vinland/Buffy/Amber group last week, and With Great Power... with my GURPS guys last week and this week. No play reports on those yet, though.
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March 28th, 2007
01:29 am - End of the Golden Dawn campaign
I had two Call of Cthulhu games over the weekend. I'll talk about the first here, which was the finale of the Golden Dawn campaign which I had been game-mastering since last June.
I think it was one of the better campaign ends which I've been in. There were a few ways in which it felt forced, but in general it went very well.
( Long details ahead, slight spoilers for some published adventures )
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March 7th, 2007
12:33 am - Prostitution in the 'Verse
So this weekend I played a one-shot game set in the Firefly/Serenity universe using the Spirit of the Century rules. This was partly a chance to play in Firefly/Serenity, which a number of people expressed interest in, and also a test run of the rules. We didn't end up testing the rules very much, though we learned the basics, but we had a lot of fun.
My concept for the one-shot was using a Companions Guild ship -- an armed scout with its own security which was going on missions of interest to the Guild. So I always thought that Companions were a wasted premise in Firefly. They were in principle a set up to explore issues of sexuality, but they were never really used. Thus, I made up a bunch of pregenerated characters for the Guild ship. A key idea for these was using real-world photos of people from the Old West -- an idea taken from Floyd C. Wesel's pregenerated characters for his Serenity RPG convention games, The Crew of The Symphony.
Madeline played Fannie Granger, the captain -- an older Companion who had given up active service and married, but whose husband died in the war.
Liz played Lilly Shepis, a journeyman Companion working as second to Fannie.
Cynthia played Pearl Hart -- originally an NCO of the security forces, but we rewrote her to be the commander since no one picked the commander.
Heather played Lalu Chang, the loud-mouthed engineer.
Bill played Galvin Holloway, a former officer who since the war has become a professional gambler.
Bob played Eliza Collins, the genius but still girly doctor.
I noted that there was no cross-gender play (Bob is a woman). I had made an extra male character, Kenne Black, who was to be the commander of the security forces. However, no one picked him and we wrote him out. There was an extra male character -- and indeed Liz usually plays a male character, but this time she went for Lilly. I've got a page with all the character sheets,
The Coronado and her Crew
The scenario was that they heard that a rich man had beaten up a Companion, and headed over to the planet, Newhall, to investigate. They found a complicated setup there -- the woman beaten up was not a Companion, but rather someone who had been kicked out of the Companion Training Grounds. However, they still wanted to set straight the issues on the planet there.
Bill commented that this seemed very much like "Whores in the Vineyard" to him -- the western theme plus the power of the PCs to come in and solve the planet's problems was indeed much like a Dogs scenario. I hadn't planned that intentionally, but it fit. (The mock title reminds me of Brand and Mo's Bitches in the Vineyard game, incidentally.)
So the NPCs I had were: Kira, the woman who was beaten; Terrence, the secretly retarded man who did it; Jordan, Terrence's rich brother who owns half the planet; Sheriff Wei Lau, the local constable; and Sheydra, acting head of the local Training Grounds.
At one point, Liz used her "Uncanny Hunch" stunt to hand me a note which contained her hunch -- "Kira is protecting Jordan in some way. She knows somthing about him and is in love with him." We ran out of time and so had to wrap up the game a little abruptly, but everyone was really into it.
Nearly all of this was in-character dialogue and simple skill rolls, so we didn't do much with the system. We only got to serious conflict near the end, and at that point we were trying to get through quickly. We did try earlier using the social conflict rules for Galvin's poker game with Jordan. However, we cut that short as we agreed that it just felt too slow. It only involved one PC, and there were no maneuvers or other choices in gambling as written.
Of course, the elephant in the room was that the whole adventure was centered on prostitution, which we often commented on. For example, Madeline commented at some point, "We have a brand to protect." There were a bunch of questions and discussion about what should be done about the Training Grounds, and what the local people's attitudes were.
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February 21st, 2007
12:22 am - Cthulhu Meetup
More Cthulhu to report. As I mentioned last time, I played in a CoC game-mastered by Janyce Engan -- whom I had found through a meetup group she had set up, The Stars Are Right.
We chatted over email, and discussed a character before play. The campaign was currently in 1931, and I had been reading up on stuff about Nazi Germany based on the Amber campaign we had just wrapped up. Thus I decided to make another German character, though quite different from my Amber PC Manfred. I envisioned an artist who was a veteran of the Great War, whom I called Henrik Mueller. I think the source I had most in mind was All Quiet on the Western Front for his experiences in the Great War, and I had also recently been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and skimmed some other texts.
We met up at their place in Berkeley at 11 on Sunday, though the regular players came a bit later. They had a nice table with cheese and bread and other snacks, which various people brought. (I brought garlic pistachios which went over well.)
( Details cut for those not interested )
Most (90%+) of the game was in discussion between the characters. There were several times when the group split apart to do two simultaneous conversations, with other PCs discussing plans as others were involved with the GM. This mixed in with various philosophical and cultural discussions between the characters.
The highlight for me was when Henrik had a long talk with Rebecca as she went with him as he did sketches. She talked about herself as a soldier within their mission, and Henrik talked morosely about a "good soldier" quite possibly being a contradiction. They talked a fair bit about life, learned about each other (and Rebecca's mission), ambiguously flirted, and it ended with Henrik asking to join them (sort of).
It was a little slow for my tastes, but in general I thought it held together well. John's pulp horror stories were funny without breaking character or mood, as was Jack's pontificating. There was a lot of information, which we dragged in. I would hope that main plot events move a little more quickly in later sessions, now that the new characters are introduced and brought up to speed.
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February 20th, 2007
06:01 pm - Call of Cthulhu and Horror GMing
So I've been doing horror gaming recently. My Call of Cthulhu campaign continues apace towards its conclusion. In addition, the weekend before last I played in a new campaign of CoC with a group I met online, via the game-master Janyce -- who apparently has been running CoC since 1981 fairly continuously. Lastly, the one game which I played at this weekend's DunDraCon 2007 was Catherine Klikoff's All Flesh Must Be Eaten scenario, "May I Take Your Coat". I had never game-mastered a horror game prior to starting CoC seven months ago. It took some definite adjusting to get into, but I'm having fun with it.
Here I'll give an update on my own campaign. I last talked about it specifically in my July post Cthulhu Campaign Report. Naturally, I also have a web page for it that includes session summaries, campaign documents, and so forth. As I mentioned earlier, it is centered on the Pagan Publishing supplement "The Golden Dawn", and adapting in material from John Tynes' adventures "The Room Beyond" and "Sheela-na-gig", Kevin A. Ross' "Signs Writ in Scarlet" and "Plant Y Daear", and Fred Behrendt's "Sacraments of Evil".
A vital part of this campaign is that it is in many ways a reversal of the stereotypical Call of Cthulhu tropes, since the PCs are closer to cultists in many ways than investigators. They are involved in a secret magical society, whose focus is engaging in occult practices.
( CoC Adventure Spoilers )
Last session, the second PC died -- though he is still around for the moment due to a twist. It is one of the few games where I have PC lethality based on die rolls with no hero points or similar options to prevent it, nor fudging. In my experience, PCs rarely die and then often from explicit player buy-in.
Even further, though, is that I have messed with many of the players' characters. - Jim's PC Coneybeare found out that a magical ceremony that he had done months earlier to make an magical ankh actually invoked a fertility power (the ankh being related to the symbol of Venus and femininity), and is changing him into a hermaphrodite. This was interesting because his PC was reading the book by himself, but Jim was reading the handout (De Vermiis Mysteriis) aloud to keep everyone informed. However, I think he only realized as he was getting to the lines what they implied about his character.
- David's PC Dr. Norton has started receiving letters which another side of his personality has apparently written in his sleep. They appear in the mirror inverse of his handwriting. The notes have thus far been rather innocuous, but they know there will be issues.
- Dennis took a new PC after his earlier PC Shankley died, choosing to play a curious 19-year-old who had featured as an NPC in a prior episode -- Nathan. In the adventure, they learned that Nathan is descended from a debased serpent people. (So really, Dennis chose this explicitly by chosing Nathan as a PC, which is different than the others who had things done to them.)
- Daniel is played Dr. Woodsworth, a coroner who died this last session but was then temporarily raised from the dead by an ally of the PCs. I would have been fine with him simply dying, but given that I already had prepared background about raising the dead, I found the idea of an undead coroner irresistable.
The deal here is that I am messing with the PCs to a far greater degree than I have in most games. I did ask after Coneybeare found that he was becoming a hermaphrodite whether I had gone to far, but Jim (the player) at least loved that twist and has eagerly picked up on it. One point is that this connects to something which appears in a number of Lovecraft's stories -- where the narrator finds that his ancestry has tied him with horrors, such as The Festival, The Rats in the Walls, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and others.
I am struck by a contrast with what I listened to recently in The Durham 3 podcast #30. They were discussing high-trust and low-trust gaming, responding to a message from James Jeffers. ... I think that system can really support that kind of open, high-trust interchange.
"Here's the thing about D&D when I was playing it that was always a little scary is that if the GM suddenly decided to screw me, he could -- and I didn't have any real agency outside of my stats and equipment and such with which to battle back against that. Whereas in a game like PTA, if the GM decides to screw me, it just gives me more kindling for my character to move forward. It's like literally there is no way to lose in a game like that, or even in The Shadow of Yesterday, where the harder you get beaten down, because there are certain things which are simply off limits of the GM's power, or the Producer's power -- they can't kill you unless you want that to be a part of the game. They can't take from you everything that's important without checking with you first. That stuff makes it a much more solid base on which to build those trusting exercises."
This is an odd contrast with my campaign. Note that the campaign is highly non-linear, and many things flow from their choices and die rolls. My rule of thumb is that it will always turn out bad, but the way it turns out bad depends on what they have chosen. So I can and do screw with the PCs, and the players don't have any agency in that. However, they all are quite liking the campaign. I would tend to call that high trust, but it seems to clash with what Jason, Clinton, and Remi are saying.
This may connect to Meguey Baker's post on "More Alphabet Soup" -- about the two ways to treat other players' boundaries: "Nobody gets hurt" (NGH) versus "I will not abandon you" (IWNAY). However, I think the different kind of trust we are talking about is rather different than her dichotomy. In practice, I am edging up on the players' lines slowly. I was fairly certain that Jim would be fine with being changed to a hermaphrodite, for example. Still, I think it is pushing things to go there, and it is pushing by the means of my ability to do things like that as GM.
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February 11th, 2007
12:05 am - Macho Women With Guns, Redux
So last time my Vinland/Buffy/Amber group met, we ran through a one-shot adventure of Macho Women With Guns -- the same scenario which I ran for the End Game Oakland January 2007 Mini-Con (cf. my Con Report on it).
The most obvious difference was that while the con game had only three players, for this I had seven players -- five women (Liz, Heather, Cyn, Lee, Bob) and two men (Bill and Eric). I only had six pregenerated characters (though in retrospect I did have the sample character from the book), but Liz and Lee decided to play twin Bat-winged Bimbos Fluffy and Muffy. As a beer-and-pretzels game, this went much much better than my con game. Having the con as a practice run helped, but mainly it was just that everyone got into the silly fun of shooting up sexist men. Cynthia in particular got into her role as Sister "Mad" Maxine, our obligatory Renegade Nun on Wheels who had taken a Vow of Violence.
For this game, I think the large size worked well. However, I can see that we'll have see how things work with a larger group in other games. Previously we had seven people total -- but Bob and Eric are both new, and Heather wasn't in the last campaign. I think the energy level can be good, we just have to figure out how to use it best. Also, there's a physical crowding issue in our living room, but that's easily solveable -- especially if the game doesn't involve a big hex-map in the middle.
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January 22nd, 2007
10:21 pm - Saturday Games in Oakland
So I played in three games on Saturday in Oakland as part of the second KueiCon organized by Ben Lehman and Chris Chinn.
Basic D&D
When I got there around 11, Ben was DMing a game of Basic D&D, with Chris and Alexis playing -- they all noted that they wanted to start with something simple and brainless. They were nominally clearing out tunnels they had found beneath their family farm, and Ben was I think rolling up random room contents. So I rolled up a character and joined them. I had a dumb (Int 4) cleric at first. We headed into the dungeon several times, and then ran away. After a bit others started arriving and also rolled up characters. So there were several sallies where we usually had at least a few people killed. I survived two combats, ending up unconscious at 0 hit points. I was rescued and recovered, but then was killed in the next one. I then rolled up a halfling who was much more effective. We went for a hour and a half or so before we quit for lunch.
My main impression was that at least this version of Basic D&D (one of the red-cover versions) is a poorly organized book. I'm pretty familiar with the concepts, but I had to page flip constantly to find key rules like what my armor class was, etc. For example, it referred me to page 59 for alignment, and I eventually found what they were referring to on page 55. Character creation was quick, with the significant exception of buying equipment. Offhand, I think that even given the goal, this could be done much better.
Face of Angels
After going out to lunch, we split into two groups to play octaNe (by Jared Sorensen) and The Face of Angels (an RPG in development by Clinton Nixon). I went with the FoA group, which was being GMed by Ben -- with players Alexis, Michael, and myself. This is a playing-card-based game where each player has a hand of cards and resolves conflicts with the GM. There is a formal process of stakes setting where each side proposes stakes.
The setting was that we were all graduating from high school. The year was determined by the average of the year that each of us graduated, which we determined was 1992. The average was dragged down mostly by me as the oldest by a good chunk. I'm 37, while Michael and Alexis were just out of college, and Ben is late twenties. We decided to play in South Bend, Indiana -- two hours North of Chicago, and a formerly rich spot that has been in decline for a while.
I played Terrence Brown, a flamboyant theater geek. His family was poor, but he covered that well -- picking out the fanciest clothes from second-hand stores and so forth. Mechanically, he was a Jack (specialist) with his specialty being Acting. Michael played Parker B. Lewis, the rich kid whose card was Queen (supporter). Alexis played Sarah Williams, a raver girl who dealt drugs to make ends meet whose card was King (leader). She had a single mother and several siblings, but she did well for herself.
We each defined one ally and one enemy for ourselves, then the GM defined one additional relationship for each of us. My first ally was Laura Krauss, a friend since kindergarden and a theater techie. My second was Brandon McTavish, a rich kid who hated him and was currently going out with Parker's sister Stacey. I added that I had stolen his girlfriend Amanda Lewis, who was an actress he lead with. Ben added Amanda as an ally for me. Michael had his father Philip as an ally, his sister Stacey as an enemy, and Ben added Brandon (my rival) as an ally. Alexis has her dealer Bob as an ally, Laura as an enemy (whom she had been best friends in grade school with), and Ben added Samantha as an enemy (whom I forgot). We all noted that we were the pretty kids at school -- and we agreed that we all knew each other and went to the same parties, but didn't really hang out with each other.
So we started with a party at Parker's house. We started with Sarah and Laura talking, trying to make up their differences. Sarah apologized, but also convinced Laura to take some E, to show that she didn't think she was too goody-goody for Sarah. After playing a conflict, Laura agreed and took the hit. Brandon wanted to spike the punch with LSD, but Parker convinced him not to -- and instead just spikes Stacey's drink. Laura then came asking me to drive her home. While I was away, Sarah went and hit on Amanda who protested but submitted to some groping.
At this point, the event happened which gave us superpowers. Everyone at the party had a mass hallucination (or was it?) of a giant eye descending from the sky, and all fell asleep. Michael picked as Parker's superpower the ability to understand and speak every language ever. Alexis picked as Sarah's superpower the ability to give people delusions similar to schizophrenia. This started out questionable -- but came out as extremely dark particularly as they were assumed to be permanent. I originally picked the ability to run and jump at super-speed. I had some doubts about this and pondered instead doing a self-transformative power -- but Alexis and Michael supported the original idea as a "classic rather than cliche".
Around this point, we realized that we had forgotten a step, which was writing out secrets on the other PCs. The other player could later determine if the secret was true or false, but got a bonus if they accepted it as true. My secrets were: (1) that Parker's dad was a money launderer and that Parker knew, and (2) that Sarah's mother had had an affair with Bob and was pregnant. However, as it turned out, none of the secrets were played in-game.
From there, we started to split up and have separate adventures. A few random comments here: - Terrence was nearly run off the road by Brandon. He crashed, was crippled in the accident but was saved by Terrence and Sarah. He was babbling about the flames talking. This was our first hint of the major villain of the piece, a secret worldwide conspiracy called "The Voice of Fire".
- After the next day at the party, none of the PCs ever saw each other again, though Terrence and Parker had a phone call much later.
- Fitting with his flashy side, Terrence decided to become a superhero, costume and all -- calling himself Thunderbolt.
- Sarah became a major drug dealer in Chicago, and at one point played her Super-Trump which implied one of five major side effects. Taking a cue from the limit that she could affect up to a city, she took Ben's suggestion that she made the entire city of Chicago catatonic.
- After the Chicago disaster, the President blamed Thunderbolt -- and the conspiracy decided to stage a coup putting Terrence as President in his stead, against his best efforts.
- Parker was contacted by monks who knew about the Voice of Fire. He came in contact with a sentient language and mastered it, then used it to subvert the Pope and tried to take control of the Catholic Church. The conspiracy stopped him from converting congregations by engineering a revolt, but he controlled the hierarchy.
- Eventually, Parker and Terrence coordinated to wipe out the Voice of Fire, and were successful.
- Meanwhile, Sarah had been running for her life after accidentally wiping out Chicago. She was beaten up and left for dead by some people, but then happened on a cult gathering after being turned away from the Mexican border. There she found Brandon now considered a prophet, and took him out.
And that's about where we left it.
A few comments on the mechanics... We had one significant change, which was that the person who accepted the stakes was the one who played first, rather than the person who initiated the conflict. Playing first is a major advantage, so giving it to the initiator strongly discouraged free play because the first person to declare a mechanic conflict had a major advantage.
So we all agreed that this was a bit skimpy because we were trying to get through all the acts in around 6 hours, and we had little contact with each other or with most of the connections after the first act. Still, there were two things pulling us away from each other and our high school connections: (1) the game starts at graduation, so we're splitting up; and (2) the system encourages a more global scale. So we made these allies and enemies based on our high school lives, but they got left behind. Ben thought that with some more time, we could have found a way to reconnect to these -- but I think it would be nicer if we didn't have to invent ways to reconnect them from scratch.
So the sequence took us from around 1PM to 7PM, and Alexis had to go. So we saw her off and went out to dinner, then returned later for the evening game.
1001 Nights
After dinner, a few people left and the remainder of us discussed what we wanted to play. We had a few options but settled on Meguey Baker's 1001 Nights. I had brought some character sheets for this, so we distributed them and all worked on coming up with characters. What we came up with was this:
- Chris played Sabik, a 14-year-old guitar player, who was always asked to play silently in the background at court functions. I don't quite remember his ambition.
- Dave (?) played Jalal, a 30-something assistant tailor. His ambition was to have a day off.
- Michael played Zara, a 19-year-old librarian for the harem library. Her ambition was to be recognized as a scholar.
- Ben played Rihana, a 16-year-old poor courtesan. Her ambition was at first to feel the touch of silk, but then he changed that to sleep with the Sultan.
- I played Cassim, a 9-year-old hostage crown prince of a kingdom conquered by the Sultan. His ambition was to be stripped of his title.
I think everyone was quite happy with this. We ended up telling two stories, with a few wrapper scenes in between. The first story was about an evil prince who had captured a woman with a perfect, godly song. The second was about a knight and a scholar who met in the desert. After that, Zara and Rihana both achieved their ambitions.
The stories went very smoothly. I had particular fun as Cassim, who was not terribly mature and would always ask questions like "I wonder if there there monsters?" and "I wonder if they were attacked by monsters?" and so forth. Michael and Ben collected the most dice, though.
The one downside was that it was a little awkward coming up with the wrapper scene where we tell stories to each other -- because our characters, though all in the court, were from such different backgrounds. I tend to think that it would be better to first agree on a group template of sorts -- i.e. how we get together to tell stories -- and then created characters.
Conclusion
Good fun had by all, I think, and bonds helped. I was not impressed by the Basic D&D we played -- but I remain thoroughly impressed by 1001 Nights and think The Face of Angels has a lot of promise.
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January 16th, 2007
12:54 pm - A Long Weekend of Gaming
So I had a long weekend of gaming.
Friday night was a playtest of the new Land of Og system with my Vinland/Buffy/Amber group. We're doing a few one-shots while we think about what campaign we're going to do next. This was good fun (or, as the cavemen say, "Bang Bang Thing").
Saturday was the EndGame Oakland mini-con, where I played in three games: playing in a scenario of Robin Laws' The Esoterrorists run by Brian Williams, then game-mastering a scenario for Greg Porter's Macho Women With Guns, then playing in a game of Gregor Hutton's Best Friends as run by Carl Rigney. In all three of these games, I was playing with Paul Tevis (of Have Games Will Travel), who suspiciously picked all the same games as me. He just posted about it as "Calling It A Mini-Con Makes It Sound Small". There were some disappointments here, but still good fun.
Sunday I game-mastered another session of my ongoing Victorian Call of Cthulhu campaign based around John Tynes' supplement, The Golden Dawn. Here they have finally hit head-on to the premise of his scenario Sheela-na-Gig and the legend of King Arthur. I am not running the scenario straight, but I love the concepts within it. This has gone very well and I'll write more about it soon.
Monday was a board-gaming day which my friend Emily hosted for the Martin Luther King holiday. I played Klaus Teuber's Entdecker, Blokus Trigon, Andreas Seyfarth and Karen Seyfarth's Thurn and Taxis and finally the recent En Garde card game (from Slugfest games).
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December 29th, 2006
10:39 pm - Amber: The End of Doubt
So our Amber Diceless campaign, "Shadow of a Doubt", wrapped up just before Christmas. I haven't posted about it on my LJ since my Amber Campaign Update in July. However, it had been going along swimmingly. zdashamber was terrific as a GM, and it was a good run.
Liz posted a summary of the campaign and its conclusion in a post on the Feminist SF blog, Roleplaying in Amber -- though it is in part about Zelazny and the reinterpretation in general for the RPG rather than about our particular campaign. There's also various stuff about the campaign on the RPGnet Campaign Wiki.
So, in the end, we lost -- though none of our enemies particularly won either. Brand destroyed the Pattern, but was killed by his daughter Alexandra (Cynthia's PC), who went out in a blaze of glory. Chaos was assaulted. To me, the interesting part of the campaign was about the loyalties. Our PCs were not the stereotype of Amberites scheming for ourselves, because we had loyalties to different modern ideologies. We did eventually compromise and come together, setting up a constitutional monarchy rather than totalitarian rule. However, our original vision of a reformed Amber was destroyed along with Amber itself.
To me, what was more than that was the images of everything. The most powerful thing about fantasy is that it has such a rich set of symbols. Alexandra's death was great -- she had grabbed a hold of her father Brand, and went with him when he teleported away. To forestall her killing him, he had teleported to high in the air. But after an exchange during which he kept teleporting upwards to keep falling, she stabbed him in the heart and then died from the fall. Cap that with us describing the statues in her honor, and Hector envying her heroic death. Madeline suggested that she could survive, but Cynthia was totally right to insist that she die.
I should comment on one of the big deals for me. So my PC, Manfred Flaschbart, was a flamingly gay turncoat Nazi officer. In the backstory he was a double-agent between the Nazis and the English resistance -- and during the game, he was a double-agent between Chaos and Amber. My mid-campaign twist with him was his demon form. In the series, shapeshifters have a demon form -- and for him I chose a female succubus-like form, which I first described to the GM in a secret email as "Bat-winged Bimbo from Hell" (a reference to Greg Porter's Macho Women With Guns).
The funny thing was that we had played out in public a number of scenes where he went into his demon form. However, none of the other PCs saw him and so the demon form had never been described for the other players. Manfred himself then described it to the others as a "hideous demon form" -- in keeping with his somewhat jokingly misogynist gayness. So two sessions later, when the other PCs finally saw it and the players asked me to describe it, I came out with it. There was much wincing at his/my describing a buxom female form as "all part of being a hideous demon". I worried a bit like I had gone too far with that, but I hope they forgave me.
Part of his other background was that he had a personal Shadow (i.e. dimension) which was inhabited by people who could slowly change their form. By the write-up, changing eye color can be done in a day; changing sex takes two months or so; while changing height may take a year or more depending on the degree of change. So the society (named "Glamaria") had a populace all with idealized bodies, and the culture was a take-off of thirties Hollywood.
Anyway, all of this adds up to a terrific campaign. I bow down before Madeline's coolness as GM, and all the other players' coolness, too.
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December 6th, 2006
01:01 pm - Tuesday Dead of Night Tryout
As mentioned in my previous post, I ended up running a game of Dead of Night yesterday, by Merwin Shanmugasundaram and Andrew Kenrick, and published by Andrew's company Steampower Publishing.
So the situation was that at the last minute, the GM of our GURPS supervillains game cancelled. So I invited the other two players, Jesse and Peter, over for some random sort of gaming. I had previously GMed a WWII soldiers game using Greg Stolze's NEMESIS, but I was not interested in that. I suggested Dead of Night as an alternative. I briefly explained the rules, and they were clearly set on playing the monsters. So I suggested two of the five pre-written scenarios with multiple monsters -- and the picked the first.
To summarize non-spoiler-y first, we had a bunch of fun, and it absolutely lived up to its claim as a pick-up-and-play pocket roleplaying game. I used a scenario and monster stats from the book, printed out character sheets, and we wrapped up the adventure in around two hours. I had previously reported on two quick games I played of DoN in my End Game April 2006 Mini-Con Report.
An important difference here was that the players were playing the monsters. Thus, I read them both the complete background and overview of the book scenario -- whereas playing humans in the con, a big part was figuring out what was going on. They copied in the monster stats from the book. So there was virtually no hidden GM-only information here. I also thought it went better than the con games, though I did have a controlled set of players whom I knew.
( Warning: Spoilers ahead for the DoN scenario )
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