Dusty Dice

I knew Oprah played GURPS!

2009-10-11T10:45:00.001-07:00

Dice Education

2009-07-03T01:30:00.000-07:00

I'm sliding you a little knowledge - right from the horse's mouth!

I know we talk a lot about dice out here, I have a fascination for the silly things. Our randomizers are an important element of the hobby. What fun would the hobby be without the element of surprise? The suspense of a roll of the bones?

So, who better to speak about dice than Lou Zocchi. "Lou Who," you say? Oh! Well, get thee to YouTube!

Okay, yes, he goes on a bit and maybe some of you don't care. But, he isn't wrong. Let's face it, the man invented and patented a die that's named after him - he's crazy about dice! I love him!

Rolling Dice

2009-06-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

I have a D&D game going with some friends. The DM asked us to do a little out-of-game shopping and dice rolling. I decided to video my rolls for the sake of fairness. Then I decided to add titles and sound effects for giggles! I thought I'd share. Enjoy!

Yo-yoing

2009-05-24T21:42:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you have heard of yo-yo diets. Well, I'm currently yo-yo gaming.

Two Sundays ago, I was invited to play Vampire. Got my junk together, showed up, but I was one of the few that did. The Storyteller decided not enough people showed. So, we didn't game.

A week ago Saturday, my Star Wars GM flaked out. So, no gaming there.

This past Tuesday night, I was invited to do something I cannot remember doing for the longest time: play D&D on a school night. It was fun and we had a good time.

Today - today was the anti-climax to about three weeks of mixed and missed signals. It's pretty obvious that I have some personal investment in seeing the role-playing hobby survive. So, when I was approached by an MIB from SJG to run a GURPS game at a FLGS - I was all "LOL! FTW!" :)

To make a long story short, I didn't make it on the schedule at the store - no one outside of the staff knew I would be there. So, I sat for three hours. Not that it was a bad thing. I put out a little sign practically begging people to talk to me. Many did. (Shout out to S and his son S - you know who you are! Thanks for entertaining me!) Others came by said hi and talked a bit. Most were more interested in my copy of The Red Dwarf RPG (not an SJG product) than the other GURPS items on my table. (Little hint for the licensing boys in Austin, no?)

The FLGS is correcting the scheduling problem and one of the D&D players that was in the store (they had a HUGE turn out - apparently that campaign has been going for a while) stated he was interested in playing GURPS - asked me if GURPS did fantasy? Yes, indeed!

So, in all, not a total loss. Certainly is breaking up my unemployment boredom.

Gaming in the Living Room

2009-04-02T09:52:00.000-07:00

I recently had a really good time at a friend's house. He has a "Man Room" with a huge TV, surround sound, big, comfortable leather couches (with built-in cup holders!) and, of course, an XBox.

So, there I was, sitting on the couch, wireless controller in my hand, playing Civilization Revolution. If you are a Civ fan and own a console, buy this game! It's awesome. I had a great time.

In the near future, I will be buying myself a large flat panel and I have been considering my options. You might remember a while back that I looked at my options for buying a Wii - but I decided I couldn't cost justify it. Well, after my recent experience, I was again thinking about a console and looking really hard at an XBox.

I went out to Amazon and to xbox.com and looked at all the available games. The only games I really wanted on the XBox 360 are Civ Revolution and Star Wars Force Unleashed.

I keep forgetting I'm not a shoot-em-up gamer. Essentially, the XBox as well as the PS2 & 3 focus on shooters and thin RPGs that are really just shooters. I like resource management and simulation. I like Civ and WarCraft and WoW and The Sims and I'm looking forward to Star Wars: The Old Republic. With the exception of Civ, none of that is available on the XBox, PS3 or Wii.

At retail, an XBox is only $200 less than a Mac Mini.

I was excited about being able to download movies on the XBox, until I looked at the limited selection of movies. I'll be able to download movies from my Netflix account to either a Mac Mini or an XBox. I can also rent movies from the iTunes Store on a Mac Mini.

I found a great wireless keyboard with a track pad from Logitech - meaning I'll be able to chat and surf from my couch.

I already own most of the games I like to play, upgrading to a more modern Mac will allow me to play even more. I might even be able to play WoW from my couch - I'm excited about that!

I won't get Civ Revolution, but I already own Civ IV for the Mac. I won't get Force Unleashed, but I have KoTOR and I should grab and play KoTOR II and eventually I'll have SW:TOR.

The Mac will have a web browser. My PSP has a web browser. I think the Wii has a web browser. The XBox? No browser. How can this $400, internet connected device not have a web browser? This thing is built by Microsoft - how does it not have Internet Explorer built in? MS slaps Exploiter on everything! They make watches with web browsers - how is it that XBox doesn't have a browser???

A Mac Mini will also be a media player - I could buy a terabyte of external storage (for cheap! Their $100!) and rip a good portion (if not all) of my DVDs to that.

I'm back to having a problem cost justifying a $400 device (even more with accessories) for two games.

Why is it that I can't buy a device that just works? Why? You go to look at a game, it's made for only one console. Or, worse, it's made for every console but the one you own. Why would a game manufacturer make a game for only one console, or make it for three consoles but not the fourth? For years I've fought the "The Game isn't made for the Mac" battle. And now that this battle is nearly over (Mac uses Intel processors and emulates Windows faster than some PCs can run Windows) - I find a whole new world of bull!

I want one device that will run Mac & PC software and play any game I shove into it! That would be an amazing device! Everyone would want one - but likely no one could afford one!

What Zines???

2009-03-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

The OGL is one of the coolest concepts ever in the field of role-playing games in my humble opinion. The fact that WotC is now messing with it blows my mind. I guess the corporate mindset finally made it to Renton, WA. Most likely, they got a shipment from Redmond, WA.

When d20 first came out, there was a ton of buzz and rightly so - it was one of the neatest things to happen to RPGs. Everyone and their brother put up a Zine with free content. Even Steve Jackson Games, one of my favs, got in on the act. They started a subscription based zine called d20 Weekly.

Don't go looking for it, it's just a holder page out there in the ether. (I could buy the domain if I wanted it. Tempting!) d20 Weekly was ended at SJG after a rather short run. They cited at the time that the zine was losing money. At the time I remember reading (can't find the reference) that it was losing money due to the fact that there were so many d20 zines offering free content, d20 Weekly just couldn't compete.

Today I decided to write an article on various free gaming zines. I figured a stroll through Google would deliver me hundreds and I could pick out a few to showcase.

I was shocked. Repeated Google searches brought me very few results. Frankly, there were no zines I wanted to point to directly.

It's amazing to me how this hobby has struggled. There are more games available now than there has ever been. There are dozens of FREE games. The hobby has died and come back more times than a Marvel super-villain. First, the religious right tried to kill it. It came back. Then, it just wasn't cool. It came back. Now, at a time when every person under the age of 25 owns a game system and millions of people play WoW - we're seeing the hobby again retreat.

I'm tempted to start my own gaming zine, with paid writers and artists, struggle for the next few years and then ride the next wave or two of popularity. It would probably make me rich, then poor, then rich then utterly broke - but it might be a fun ride!

Virtual Tables and Tools

2009-03-04T21:05:00.000-08:00

Like many people, I have friends in other cities. Friends I miss. Friends I would love to just hang out with and even game with.

However, I don't have the cash to buy a plane ticket for a weekend in another city for a couple of RPGs. I'm sure most of you don't, either.

In these days of powerful computers and broadband Internet access, there should be ways to do remote games, right? Well, I set out to see if there were.

I decided that I needed to come up with several tools. They should all be free or low cost. They should be readily available and they should be platform agnostic (I'm a Mac guy and I have friends that fall all over the OS spectrum).

To start with, I will need to communicate with my friends and they will need to communicate with each other. This need was going to be the easiest to fulfill. I have chat accounts on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Skype and Gmail. Most of those have conferencing capabilities and even voice & video chat. I prefer Yahoo. It shouldn't be difficult to get my friends into the same chat room.

Next, we'll need a common database. As a GM, I will want a way to give out information to my players and, in turn, I want a way to see their character sheets and what not. So far, I'm very impressed with Obsidian Portal (I wrote about them recently). I have had a lot of fun putting together my new campaign. The great thing about writing in this wiki format is that it is addictive. Every time I mark something as a link - it stays red until I write the page. (Maddening!!) I keep finding myself marking links, thus I have to write more pages! I think I'm going to write myself silly!

Not only that, but I can mark info as "GM Only", so I can write material on the wiki before it will be used in the game. So, when I am on a roll, I can just keep going! If something happens in the game that invalidates that material, I can simply update it or never remove the "GM Only" check-box or just delete it - the players never have to know that something they did made me change my mind on a bit of material but I recycled it later because I needed something and was out of writing time!

Next, I needed a "table" - a virtual table. A place where I could load and share a map. Where I could roll dice and see my player's dice rolls. There are a few tools out there, some are for pay, some are free but offer premium content. The first one I tried was RPTools. This is a set of five different tools, programmed in Java (very cross platform!) and ... FREE!

Their MapTool is impressive. It has an internal chat program and dice rolling capabilities. It has tools for drawing maps. Then, you can load up pictures to act as figures for the PCs & NPCs. The whole tool is game system agnostic, easy to use and easy on the eyes.

I was very excited about this tool. However, I've not been able to get it to work for me. The program requires you to set up one machine as a server. When I tried to do this, I could list my game on RP's site, but no one could join it. I'm a pretty tech savvy guy and I had other move savvy guys have a look and we couldn't figure out the issue. As far as we can tell, my ISP is blocking the port that I need. So, as impressive as the tool is, I cannot use it.

However, I have had a blast working with the TokenTool. I've decided to use that format for making the figure-replacements I will use in whatever game I run. I've even begun making similar tokens in Photoshop.

(Speaking of Photoshop, I have been drawing maps like a madman. I've got enough material for a whole other post - look for it soon!)

The next tool I tried is RPGtonight. It, is also Free, so already I'm in love! It's web based, so no messing around with my router or trying to set up a server or whatnot.

RPGtonight has similar functionality to RPTools. There isn't a map drawing tool (but, you probably already have MS Paint or can find something better. Have I mentioned how much time I've spent on Photoshop lately??) However, the rest of the expected functionality is there. You can store and share maps and figures/minis/icons/tokens. You can even choose from maps and tokens on the site! There is a dice rolling application and there is built in text and voice chat.

However, I wish I had found RPGtonight before I found RPTools. I'm a visual guy and RPGtonight is ... messy. They aimed themselves at D&D players and there are fake wood grains and other medieval touches, that, had they been done by a better artist, might not be so obtrusive. The size of maps and tokens that one can up-load is quite small as well. They give one PLENTY of room for uploaded content, but at 500k for maps and 25k for minis, well, it's been a challenge. (I built a large and detailed map in Photoshop, shrank it down to what I thought was a reasonable size, 1.5 MB, and tried to upload it. Of course it failed. All of my shrinking work has had less than desirable results. I will likely have to cut up this map and my maps in the future will be smaller.)

I haven't yet run a game with RPGtonight, but I will soon. For free, it's certainly not a bad deal - I'm willing to compromise and I hope things will improve as money rolls in for the owners.

I'm still looking for other tools. When I find them, I'll review them here.

Boom! I guess the game is over ...

2009-02-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

I have a cautionary tale for those of you thinking about allowing some of your players to play NPCs in a crucial point of your game ...

Many years ago, early in my role playing career, a friend of mine decided to introduce a group of us to the Star Trek RPG. I was certainly hip!

We all rolled up our Federation characters and chose a name for our ship: USS The Far Side. Wish I was kidding ...

The scenario went that before the Khitomer Accords, a Federation ship is sent to a planet in the Klingon Neutral Zone. The planet is about to explode and there are humans that need to be rescued. Unfortunately, the colony is illegal. To complicate matters, the Klingons also have an illegal colony on this planet. So, as the Federation ship arrives, it detects a Klingon ship.

Both ships establish communication and determine that they want to rescue their colonists but, of course, neither trusts the other. The GM decided to allow a couple of players to play the Klingons during this negotiation. I was one of the Klingons.

So, here's Klingon logic as I understood it: if my enemy is dead, there is nothing to fear, defend against or negotiate with. Sound about right?

In our negotiations, we "Friendly Klingons" (Sure!) bravely offered to risk one of our shuttles. We would fly over to the Federation ship, pick up the Federation representatives and pilot them down to the surface so that they could observe that all the colonists got off the planet. (Sun Tzu sez: "Never accept anything the enemy offers you.")

The Federation players bought this! Geez!!!

The shuttle landed in the bay on the USS The Far Side. A specially chosen warrior (we had LOTS of volunteers!) steps out from the shuttle. He holds up his arm, displaying the remote device he is holding and yells "For the Glory of the Empire!!" Then he presses the button. The shuttle is, of course, jam-packed with explosives. (Sun Tzu sez: "All warfare is based on deception.")

BOOM!

The Federation ship is no more and the Klingons pick up their colonists and a bunch of human slaves.

The End.

We could have rolled up new characters, but, it was late into the evening and we didn't. Nor did we ever get together to play Star Trek again. True, the GM was a bit of a prat, but it would have been nice to play a different scenario.

The lesson learned: unless you are willing for your game to go totally off the rails, be ready to counteract your player's actions to keep the game rolling.

Wiki Whack!

2009-02-18T09:19:00.000-08:00

I tripped over a newish cool thing: Obsidian Portal.

The concept is that you can have a wiki for your campaign. I've tried building web pages and entire sites for games previously - it can be time consuming. In just playing around with this, I have so far found it less time demanding. I haven't written up anything for a real game - just a concept game - but it has been simple and fairly fun.

There are already some cool, whiz-bang features - more if you pay for the service. My bet is that there will be more as they go along.

Neat stuff!

Adultitis

2009-02-09T08:55:00.001-08:00

Looks like the cast at Weregeek just had a random encounter with adultitis. It catches up to every gamer eventually. Roll a Fortitude Save, DC 40!

Lego Inspirations

2009-01-28T19:51:00.000-08:00

One of the earliest posts on this blog was about my use of Lego Minifigures in role playing games. That post has been a big hit! Many people have come from search engines to this blog because of that post. In fact, we had a request! A comment came in a couple of days ago on that year old post:

"Do you have any photos of your lego collection in action? It could be inspiring..."
Ace

Well, Ace, I am a man of the people and I am here to give my people what they want! Will I show off my Legos? That's like asking a mother at a baby beauty pageant to show off her kid! I'll have my Legos in makeup and a dress in a jiffy!

But, first, let's take a walk down memory lane. About the time I began building my Star Wars Lego collection, I was doing an online comic strip. You won't have a lot of luck finding Planet Zonk any more, but there are places you can see some of it. Anyway, I thought at the time that I could promote the strip by creating fan art for other web comics and stealing their readership. Didn't work for me, but I enjoyed doing the strips. It was a challenge to do a strip in the style of the original artist. I created one strip for Irregular Webcomic and two for Legostar Galactica. The work for LG led to the photo below:

I sent this photo to my players. They didn't respond! Hmmm ... ;)

Of course, that was three years ago. While it hasn't exactly exploded, my Imperial force has grown and even improved! I was able to update some of the caps on the officers and add a team of Shadow Troopers. Excellent!

Over the last three years I really have assembled quite the roleplaying toolbox of Lego parts. I have lots of figures, with tons of accessories. I have scenery and vehicles. And, I have been trying to keep it all in one portable box. Although, I may just upgrade the box eventually! I think the key is to buy things that are inexpensive, shop for the best bargains and wait for people to put the good stuff on sale. I still love eBay and Bricklink. Lego has also recently been doing more "Army Builder" type sets, allowing for more figures for less money.

In the earlier post, I talked about building a figure for a Star Wars game. This is he: Rey Venge. (Don't poke fun! Think about "Han Solo"!) As you can see I was able to find a purple turban from the Oriental Adventures sets, a head from the Extreme Sports sets, a black and purple shirt that belonged to Professor Snape in the Harry Potter sets, legs from a figure in the DinoAttack sets and a gun from the new Batman sets. I also added a sword from the Castle sets because he found a cool sword while adventuring. I probably spent $5 or so on him, but I don't think he could be much cooler! He's totally right on and completely custom. You just can't get that in any other format without a lot of work.

The GM who is running the game where I play Rey also wanted to introduce Imperial Knights. At the time he introduced them, I didn't have the right selections in my collection to make this look good. We got around it, but I knew it could be better and it was an excuse to buy more Legos! Thus, we end up with the rather impressive group we see above. The cone shaped helmets came from eBay, everything else came from BrickLink, but from about four different vendors on BrickLink. It was fun figuring out which bits actually existed, who had them and then waiting for them to show up piece by piece in the mail. For example, the sabers; in the materials, the Imperial Knights carry "Silver" light sabers. I hoped I could find a chromed bar for the actual blade. No luck, I don't think that Lego has ever made such a thing. I thought about a clear bar, but I didn't think it would have the right effect. In the end I settled for the light grey bars but made sure I didn't use chromed handles. I think they look great. I gave them helmets just for fun, the GM seemed to like all the trouble I went to. They really stand out on the board as well. I think the plain black and red head studs really do look like closed helmets! I think these really do show off the customization possibilities of Lego.

But, Lego isn't perfect. I have felt since I started using Lego that they sorely lacked in two places: aliens & droids. The Star Wars universe is full of both and Lego hasn't done the best job putting out figures that represent the wide and wild variety of possibilities for both. Also, when they do introduce an alien or a droid, they usually tuck it into a high priced set. As far as I'm concerned, Lego could produce sets of just figures and I would buy them by the cart! But, they are in the business of selling plastic bricks. Too bad. In that vein, we have the picture above, or what I like to call my "Instant Aliens". Since you don't always have the right figure for an alien, I keep this lot around. The guys in the front left are inexpensive bits I have cobbled together with Zam Wesell heads. The Tuskens in the background are the definition of what I have mentioned up to this point. I have not paid more that $.75 cents a figure for them, you can pay much more than that for them now. And, they make great targets for your Jedi!

And, again, with the droids, I have had to come up with various ways to make droids not represented in Lego or not available inexpensively. I do indeed have typical R2-D2s and R2-D4s, but I wanted to show off some of the less typical items of my collection. I'm proud to say that I used the claws that came out a while back to mount heads on Battle Droids to create IG-88 before Lego released their own IG-88 model. The IG-88 you see in the picture is actually IG-88D! How fan-boy is that??

Last but not least, my droid army! I'm pretty proud of these guys - although I'm also a bit frustrated. In taking this picture, I had the clip on the legs of three of the Super Battle Droids break, rendering them useless. I wouldn't have minded so much if it had been the cheaper gray ones, but one of the blue ones broke. I violated my rule when I bought the blue Super Battle droids. I paid $5 a head for them. I was running a game and really wanted to scare the players and those were the only Supers on the market. Now those droids are worth about $8 a head. And, yes, I see that I mounted the arms on the gray Supers upside down and totally forgot to mount arms on one of the front droids altogether. I think I was getting tired by the time this picture was taken! I have plenty of extra arms and bodies and even heads for the tan droids, but the legs are the rare commodity. At least at one time they were rare. I like to chage out the body and arms for different colored parts - give the droids the feeling that they were built from scrap parts or that they had seen a lot of action.

Well, that's a start. I have a lot more in that box and I took a ton of pictures but I don't want to bore you. Hopefully you can find inspiration here. Just because I have primarily Star Wars figures doesn't mean you couldn't use them for other games. Lego has a wide variety of sets in current production, not to mention what they have made in the past. Your minifigures are out there!

Geomorphs & Map Bitz

2009-01-11T18:35:00.000-08:00

TSR introduced Dungeon Geomorphs when I was a kid. They were parts of maps that could be interchangeably assembled to make dungeons. Neat concept, would have made for a fast map.

When I was running D&D, mapping a dungeon was a big part of the game. But, sitting there trying to tell someone else what to draw on a bit of graph paper was time consuming and annoying.

I couldn't afford the printed Geomorphs. By accident, I discovered that a certain pad of purple graph paper I owned reacted interestingly with Crayola markers: the purple grid repelled the black marker. Thus, I could draw a dungeon on the graph paper and the purple grid still stood out.

I loved this! I began making dungeon rooms, cut them out and reassembled them into new and different dungeons. I pinned the individual rooms to a piece of cardboard. Thus, the players got to see the dungeon unveiled room by room. It worked very well and only cost me a few dollars.

A few years back, I decided to do a web site - silly me, I keep thinking there's a way to make money on the internet! Anyway, I thought it would be cool to recreate my Geomorphs. I thought I'd publish a few geomorphs a week, maybe a few maps, give DMs a reason to come back every week. Where I fell apart was trying to recreate the geomorphs I made as a kid. I wanted my "clients" to be able to take what I published and easily manipulate them for their own use. I started off making with Photoshop. It was a bad idea - how many people own Photoshop?

The key was to use a simpler program ... and thus I had to lose some features and use a simpler file format. Files in .BMP and .GIF format are about as simple as it gets for the average user. Every PC out there has software that can use those file formats: Microsoft Paint. Most Macs could find something that would work - I figured I'd link to some freeware and shareware from the site.

I worked up the attached pictures. Simple, squared off rooms, the essential bits of a dungeon. I figured I'd keep building with them, creating new and more complex ones. I never did.

Why not? The idea was, unusual for me, too simple. The color scheme worked great when making square rooms, fell right apart when doing anything beyond a square. Making simple caverns shows this off immediately. I experimented with making the grid a third color and I wasn't happy with the results. I also began finding freeware mapping tools that did a better job. The idea seemed to die in my hands, as hundreds have done before.

Attached is a sample of the rooms, a black background just to make it easy for you and a full map. I used the map in the post-Gygax game I ran last year. Feel free to use anything here in your own games.

Not all Mecha are created equal!

2009-01-05T11:08:00.000-08:00

This site has seen a few recent walks down memory lane. Some comments on a previous entry brought up some old memories of a group I hadn't thought of in years. That group, more than anything, taught me many lessons on what NOT to do as a GM.

I ran Rifts for this group. I was a big fan of Palladium after having played Heroes Unlimited. I became more excited about Palladium because they were attempting to build a universal system; a system where one could play any genre without having to change rule sets. Later I would discover a product that did this much better: GURPS.

Rifts, for those that don't know, took the next step. Rifts brought all genres into one game. Sci-Fi Aliens and Demons existed next to Mutants with super powers, medieval warriors and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. I was impressed with the concept. I bought all the books as I could afford them; I bought many of them for the art alone. It was impressive stuff.

What wasn't impressive was the game system. For all intents and purposes, Palladium was the first D20 game; it was a reworking of the AD&D game rules and, frankly, not a very good one. But, I didn't know it at the time. At the time the only other game I had played was D&D. So, Palladium seemed normal, simple, easy to understand.

I got a group together and I began a game. I won't go into details of the game I put together, even though I am still impressed with myself for bits of it to this day. However, I would like to share some of the things I did wrong centered around one player.

I don't remember the guy's name. He was, as the rest of us were, a geek. Today, I would describe him as an "otaku" - he was very into anything Japanese. The guy was rail thin and tall, kept his hair long and bone straight. He wore only black. And, frequently, he walked around with a katana in his belt. He was quite a piece of work.

A member of the Rifts group was a friend of this Otaku and asked me if he could join. Sure, I said, no prob. The Otaku was of course interested in playing a Mecha Pilot from the Robotech game produced by Palladium. This was Rifts. A Mecha Pilot would fit right in, right? Wrong. My first mistake was not thinking "This character will have a huge war robot. No one else in the group is armed with a large war robot."

So, the Otaku rolled up his character and picked out a Mecha. His character arrived via one of the rifts local to the players. All was good.

I decided to make a challenge for the group. I sent in a mecha and two war robots. I honestly thought the group would take this threat without much trouble. My second mistake was not verifying this as fact. Had I bothered to read the Robotech book instead of just buying it and staring at the art, I would have seen that the best weapons in that game did half to a third of the damage done by Weapons in Rifts. And as to armor, well, there wasn't much!

So, most of the group went after the two war robots. The Otaku took the bait and went Mecha to Mecha. The shooting started, the Otaku got an early shot and hurt the mecha he was battling. A bit later, the bad mecha took his shot. I rolled for damage and gave the number to the Otaku. He looked at me in horror. I didn't understand what was wrong. He explained to me that the damage I just gave him was about double what was needed to destroy his mecha. Oops!

(Later, I bought the Rifts Conversion book. They state plainly that the mecha in Rifts were much tougher than the Robotech mecha. They recommended beefing up the numbers for the Robotech mecha to allow them to compete in Rifts. Wish I had this information sooner!!)

The Otaku made his roll and punched out of the mecha to relative safety. The rest of the party did its job and killed the other two war robots and I had the bad mecha retreat. However, when the dust settled, I had a mecha pilot without a mecha and all the replacement mecha were in another dimension!

So, the Mecha Pilot was running around without a mecha, which was frankly a bad deal for that character. The player, the Otaku, was a loud ass about the deal. He didn't take it in stride at all. I discovered as we went along that this was the core of this person: bitter, annoying, difficult to please. My third mistake was that I should have had some type of mecha fall into this character's hands. However, the guy was such a jerk, I remember thinking that maybe I didn't want him to have so much fire power. This was about the moment I looked at the rest of the group and realized my first mistake: no one else had a mecha.

Later, this and other issues brought this particular group to a screeching halt. But, the lessons I learned were: A) verify, don't assume, B) read the books, C) new players should come in at the same power as the current players, D) work around previously made mistakes.

There was some fun had in that group, but not as much as there could have been. There were a lot of battling egos and mine was not innocent. However, the lessons learned were valuable and I like to think I'm a better GM for having had that experience.

On Writing Styles ...

2008-12-31T01:28:00.000-08:00

Last post I remarked that when I began running D&D, about 20 years ago (Crom!!) - I often sat around and wrote up NPCs that were never used.

This led me to thinking about the various writing styles I have tried and rejected as I have gone along.

When I began, of course I had no idea what the heck I was doing. Thus, the PCs surfing through dungeons on magic ax heads with flails made of magic pearls, etc. I had no life outside my room, so I sat around rolling up characters just for the fun of it. Yes, I was a boring little geek who should have been learning something that would be useful later in life - like how to talk to a girl! Or how to play drums!

By the time high school came along, I still had no life. So, I spent many hours writing exhaustive notes. I'd start off with a yellow legal pad and fill in story lines and NPC stats for pages and pages. I used a .05 mechanical pencil and wrote four lines of text to every one college ruled line (try it - it's hard to read. I was an idiot.) And, of course, any night that I showed up with tons of notes and everything I wanted to do planned out - the group would decide to go off on a tangent and I was required to think on my feet.

This thinking on my feet thing seemed to happen more and more often. In certain groups, when I did have notes, I was accused of "strong arming" the group to follow what I had written. I'm sure the accusations were not far from wrong.

In college, I went the other way. Since I had a job and homework and classes that I sometimes attended (I even sometimes talked to girls!) I didn't have excessive time to write up game material. Instead of pages of notes, I'd have half a page of notes and winged the rest. Flying by the seat of one's pants can be fun. There are no restrictions for tangents and very little chance to "strong arm" a group. However, when I do fly without notes, I tend to give more stuff to the players. They walk away with bags of money and high powered items that later come back to haunt me. In one game I ran, I got around this by constantly dropping the players into a new game world every week, naked, JOB style. As you might imagine, the players hated this!

Since college, as my life has become busier and busier, I have had to refine what I do. Half of the enjoyment I get out of running and playing an RPG is writing up background material. A few of my games could easily have been expanded into novels and someday, a few might! I just don't have time to write entire legal pads full of material. My older, more sophisticated players know when I'm off my notes and exploit those moments to get more cool junk or quickly solve riddles or get rich.

There has to be a compromise. I do still write long histories of particular characters or events. Then, I take those histories and use them to make sketches of the main NPCs and add some stats. I don't waste time building full characters - my players will never care what the gardening skill of a given PC might be. They will want to know who they know? How rich they are? What information they might have access to? Super Powers? Et cetera. If during play it is required to know exactly what an NPC can or cannot do in a given area, I quickly decide and add that information to the NPC's sheet later.

I also commonly make NPC webs. Thus, we have NPC A - The Mentor. Almost every game I have ever run, I have used an NPC to mentor the PCs. He can be a teacher or a patron or a boss or what have you. NPC A has allies and enemies. I usually like to map out six to ten secondary NPCs. These NPCs also have allies and enemies, but I try not to map too far out - the players won't care unless I write a story line that makes them care.

Good players, IMHO, come to me with a background of their own. This is excellent fodder for NPC webbing. Certainly one of their friends or enemies knows or has crossed someone in my web. It doesn't take long to have a rich supporting cast, each with only a few notes on what they are best at.

Random NPCs that don't end up dead become reoccurring contacts for the PCs. That shop owner on planet Forgettable might become a connection to a local crime lord who has a connection to suppliers and pirates and mercenaries and scary cults that worship the inherit evil of the walnut! I think you can see my point: I allow the material I have already written to write material that will be used later on. With minor characters becoming contacts and sometimes major contacts, this adds a sense of continuity that I have found no other way to provide.

And, in the end, when I show up to a game with little or no notes, I am pretty good at the pants-flying routine. Those sessions are usually the best time to let the PCs have a shopping/gambling/bar room brawl trip while I sit back and sketch notes of the NPCs they meet/offend/assault for later use!

Mix up your writing style - you might find a useful tool!

Size Matters ....

2008-12-29T11:51:00.000-08:00

The first D&D game I ever ran was just myself and my cousin. I had received The Red Box for Xmas and I was eager to run. Needless to say, the game was insane and out of control. The main PC had a He-Man style breast plate with a removable double ax head that could be ridden like a surf board. Weird.

But, there were bigger problems than our unrestrained imaginations. It was only the two of us. I knew what was going on in the game and played all the NPCs. My cousin played his character. So, it came down to me trying to entertain him. Actually, I spent a lot of time not doing homework and rolling up NPCs that would never be used - but that's another story.

A few years later, I had graduated to AD&D. I ran a group of my high school friends and their friends and family. I've referred to this group before. At one point, I was DMing for at least eight regular players and another six to ten random drop ins and irregular no shows. One night, it was twelve players all at once. Ever play on a really slow WoW server? That's what combat felt like that night. Awful!

Before I left STL, I was in a group of about six that played in multiple games. This was a pretty tight group and we functioned rather smoothly. This seemed like a rather perfect size. Not too small and none too large.

My current Star Wars group is right at that magical number with five total people. Again, we function rather well and we've taken turns GMing. None too big or small. One can miss a session and the group can continue. We could probably add a player or two, but the attention we get out of the various GMs has been rather lavish.

I'm involved in a World of Darkness game and I warned the Storyteller early on that he was dicing with an unfriendly random encounter table. First, he is mixing the whole of the WoD together. For anyone that has ever tried to move their Vampire into a game of Werewolf or any permutation possible within the WoD, they will quickly discover that White Wolf has built several quality games, but, they have not built a consistent, cohesive universal system such as d20 or GURPS. So, strike one there.

Strike two comes from the fact that he has a group of seven including himself and has talked about adding extra players. He's right at the point of having too large of a group. Add in all the issues of running a game of Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/World of Weirdness - he's bitten off quite a chunk. To his credit, he is doing a pretty good job chewing what he doth bite. But, I have seen the beginnings of problems. I don't blame him, it's a lot to handle. He has a large group of creative players who all want attention. We're a bunch of brainy puppies, chasing each other's tails and tromping all over this poor Storyteller. I hope he yet proves that he is the exception to the rule.

So, to sum up, if your group is starting to drown in its own success, think about pruning it down. Two groups of five, in my opinion, will do better than one group of ten.

To involve the players ... or not?!

2008-12-23T12:13:00.001-08:00

The last post is something of an object lesson.

A lesson I will never learn.

In the last post I asked for feedback from my readers. I know I don't have many readers. I have a couple of ways of measuring my readership and they all tell me that I don't really have a readership. Mostly, I have a few friends who check this site because they are bored or the RSS feed tells them there is something new or a search engine brings me yet another hapless victim.

But, I asked for feedback anyway. In eleven days I got a total of one reader, my best friend, Max, telling me he reads the site. That's it. The other 5 to 10 of my readers couldn't be bothered to put up a "Me, too." It's the holidays and this isn't the most popular site in the world. So, I got about what I expected.

But what the smeg does this have to do with gaming?

Aha! You didn't think I could pull this back to topic, did you? Never underestimate my power to follow a trail of bread crumbs in the exact direction I want it to go!

Several times in the past I have made the same mistake. Either I am starting a game or am already running a game, and I turn to my players and say: what would you like to see in the game? Where would you like the game to go? I can run just about anything (except Super Heroes) here are dozens of options, choose what you want.

In nearly every case, my players looked back at me with blank stares. They had no clue. Wasn't I, as the GM/DM, supposed to do all this creative stuff? They were in no way prepared to add to my creation, other than to play it.

Now, none of my players were stupid. Most were highly creative people. But, it seems like most of us see RPGs as entertainment and we are all so used to having our entertainment pushed to us, from the page or the monitor or the screen, that we feel we have no creative bond to the work in front of us.

I have a very large collection of game books. Most are GURPS, but there are several others and it grows every year. A few years ago, we got a group together. The thought was to play D&D, but, it was agreed that we would entertain other ideas. I showed up, laid down a GURPS Basic Book and about twenty different, wild and interesting world books. I said I would happily run any of those worlds, or any combo of those worlds. No picked up a book, even to just look at its cover. The group opted for D&D. It ended up being a great game, but it just amazed me what a grip the known has on us. Everybody knows D&D. No one was prepared for me to run GURPS Ice Age Mecha!

Yet, I have been able to get groups to play other games, things that were not D&D. But, my trick was that I showed up with a game already ready already. No input from the players.

What happens to us? We had this co-creative ability as children. I have seen many people compare playing RPGs to playing that classic children's game "Let's Pretend". I disagree. In Let's Pretend, the game was about co-creation. Everyone involved added to the world. Sure, it was disorganized, the rules changed at a whim, but it was fun to see where it went. A game might start out as Astronauts in the Planet of the Sand Box, change to Astronauts at War and end up as Astronauts in the ER. But everyone participated.

So, my goal these days is to show up with a game in hand and give the players only limited creative room. If you play in a well known setting, say Star Wars, you don't have to give the players much creative room at all.

And, yet, with all of this in mind, I recently found myself plotting a possible Star Wars game, giving the players a ton of options up front. I can't seem to learn the lesson: players want to be entertained via push. Anything else is a waste of the GM's time.

So, I didn't really want or need your feedback. I will do with this blog as I wish and I hope to entertain you all. I also encourage you to go out and find new games, new worlds and every now and then, go out of your way to entertain your GM!

Helloooo - oooo - ooo! Echo - ooo - oo!

2008-12-12T11:39:00.000-08:00

So, this little blog has been around for a bit over a year and I have gotten around to writing less than *cough*30*cough* entries.

At this time of year, one is often led to look back over the last year and measure one's achievements.

I enjoy writing out here, I plan to keep writing out here. I want to write more often. I have several ideas for things I can put out here.

However - I'd love to know one thing:

Is anyone reading this blog?

Just curious. Is anyone using the materials I've presented? Have you been inspired by anything you read out here? Do you like what you see? Would you like to see anything else?

Talk to me! Comment!

I need the feedback ... obviously. ;)

Dice filled with Dice!

2008-11-25T13:40:00.000-08:00

My dice collection has grown!

When I saw these, I knew I would have to have one!

Games Workshop introduced these dice within dice packages recently. Someone should have thought of this long ago!

I bought a set of the black ones. At $6 it was pricey for some dice - but over priced is a hallmark of Games Workshop.

Of course, I tried rolling the full thing; I don't advise it. It is a fairly cheap plastic case, I doubt it will stand up to much torture. However, it did roll better unloaded than loaded. I think it might make a decent dice cup in a pinch.

However, as the catalog listing says, it can be used as a turn counter. I think this would be it's best secondary use, after keeping your dice tidy in your game bag. It's third use will be making your friends say "What a dork! He spent $6 for $2 worth of dice!"

Gaming on the Fringe

2008-10-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

Anyone noticing a pattern this TV season? Could we have a few more cop dramas?

We have, what, two Law & Order spin offs? There are at least two CSIs, The Closer, Saving Grace, Monk, Pysche, then The Mentalist and Fringe. Might as well toss in Raising the Bar and Boston Legal. So, either they are trying to be Law & Order or X-Files - or both.

Nearly a decade ago, I ran an X-Files-like game. I think it was one of the best things I ever ran. My group seemed to like it, one of my old players still talks about it.

It worked great - until the players found the truth ...

I started with, frankly, the perfect game system for it: GURPS. Simple, easy GURPS. I supplemented this with a great book - Delta Green. DG is a supplement for modern Call of Cthulhu, worth the cover price as a horror novel in its own right. (They have recently released it for d20 - Get It!) On top of this, I had the excellent GURPS supplement Cthulhupunk.

I started the game by sending all the potential players a real-life snail mail. Envelopes, stamps, the whole bit. (From the beginning, this campaign exercised my love of props.) The letter was from then president Bill Clinton, inviting the player to a meeting at the White House. The letter named the time and date. Most of the players were smart enough to get that the time and date were actually at my apartment.

In separate emails, I informed the players to show up with a character concept for an "investigator" type character. The night of the game, the players and I worked on their characters. We pulled info directly out of the Delta Green book. I passed it around and let them all look at it. (This will be important later.)

One of the best parts of the Delta Green book is the HUGE list of US government agencies with an investigative wing. Most would think of the FBI, the DoJ and a few might think about Treasury, but there are dozens of agencies. In our group, over the course of the campaign, we had FBI, CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Government Accountability Office and a Marshal from the Treasury department. And that just scratches the surface!

The fun thing about using members from all of these agencies is that they have to be secret! In real life, this kind of inter-agency co-operation would require Congressional oversight. Doing it without oversight and getting caught will get you jail time at least and shot for treason at most. So, you might consider doing it with oversight, until you think about how much red tape that might throw up.

Oversight was also taken off the table by the situation. After character creation, the PCs attended their meeting at the White House, or more precisely, a few dozen floors below the White House. When they arrived for the meeting, they witnessed a man talking to, could it be? President Clinton himself? "Clinton" left the room leaving the gentleman behind. He explained to the group that there was something going on, and that the group needed to explore it. Whatever was going on was highly unusual. He wanted them to keep their eyes open for the truly strange - even supernatural. But, most importantly, to report only to him and stay quiet about it - they were doing the bidding of the President.

The supernatural aspect of the game at this point was aided by our Air Force Lieutenant Colonel from the DIA, who had recently come off project Stargate. She was a Remote Viewer. In reality, many would say Remote Viewing is pseudoscience, however, in this campaign, RV was working technology. Every game needs a mage, right?

The game got weirder from there. Right away the group is investigating a murder and a series of seemingly disconnected events; the delivery of a clay vessel of rice from a archaeological site to the wrong museum in Illinois, a group of drug smugglers moving a load of africanized (killer) bees in Miami, mushroom pickers in the Pacific Northwest and several people walking around with old Chinese coins. In the end, the connection was to a cult, trying to assemble an ancient diet that would grant them immortality. In their attempts to gain immortality, they managed to steal, smuggle and even murder. Fun group.

As the PCs liberated or arrested or killed each member of the cult, the remaining members became more desperate. It was revealed that the leader had changed tactics and now wanted to build himself a jade coffin to somehow grant him immortality. The group found out the cult leader would be attending a raw jade auction. The group showed and saw that the leader was indeed present. But, he never bid on the jade. Eventually, the auction ended and the leader managed to avoid observation as he left.

The jade was transfered to a truck and the PCs involved themselves as security for the shipment. Sure enough, the shipment was attacked in a coordinated fashion. In the end, the attackers used a 007-esque vehicle to get under the truck while it was moving, open a hole in the bottom of the trailer, remove the jade and then high-tail it into the desert. The group had lost the leader and the jade. They later found the leader again and he was again able to elude them a second before they closed in on him by use of a sky-hook.

This whole "Jade Cult" story line ran over the course of more than a year. (Two years?) We played two or three times a month. I also ran other stories in the process. I tried to use X-Files creator Chris Carter's theories. Carter would write stories that were either "Monster of the Week" or "Mythos". The "MoW" episodes were just strange things that might never be explained. The "Mythos" episodes extended the longer running story arcs, sometimes connecting them. Carter explained that sometimes the Monsters of the Week came back to become part of the Mythos. I liked this idea a lot. We had a group of whacks killing people by driving "shillelaghs" through their hearts. We had people infested with symbiotic worms that granted them certain powers. The Knights Templar, The Masons, Nazis and a computer hacker that fed the PCs information whether the group wanted it or not. Et cetera, et cetera.

One of my favorite sessions was Project Peach Crate. (I have tried to write this up for Pyramid or some other magazine and I just can get whatever it was that made this so much fun on paper.) "Peach Crate" was a group who had split off from the DIA, built sensory deprivation tanks, used various drugs and performed remote viewing. They used an oil supertanker to move around. They had papers that showed that one side of the boat was not seaworthy to carry oil, but was filled with gravel ballast, when in actuality it was filled with freaky remote viewers! My favorite part of this was that I gave one of the players a map. As I said, I loves me some props. So, I mailed the map to her. But, this wouldn't be fun if it was that easy. The map had been shredded!! So, this poor player had to take scotch tape and rebuild this document. The worst part about this is that I didn't own a shredder. I was working at Boeing at the time, I used theirs. I walked out of a government contractor's building with a shredded document. Thank the gods this was before 9/11!

If the above "sensory deprivation tanks and drugs" sounds like a recent episode of Fringe, you should have seen our reaction to the first X-Files movie! The campaign had been going on for a while before the first X-Files movie came out. The player with the Remote Viewing PC and I went to see the movie together. There were about three things that seemed to be pulled directly out of my game - including the bees! I was convinced for a week that Chris Carter and I shared a brain!

But, all good things must come to an end. As the PCs got deeper into their plight and moved further out of the control of the US Government (and the conspiracy that had brought them together that night under the White House), they needed a base to work from. Their hacker friend found them just the spot - a banana plantation for cheap in Brazil. At this point, I went for broke and finally turned on the Cthulhu full blast. The local villagers and plantation workers worshiped a statue of Ol'Tentacle Face himself. The group found a Book of Knowledge Man was Not Meant to Know in the mansion house library, etc. For well over a year, I had been running Call of Cthulhu, but had never gotten them this deep into the mythos. Unbeknown to the players, the cult leader had been talking to one of the Great Old Ones - that's where he was getting his knowledge. The group had several brushes with the mythos, but nothing this direct.

The players were completely shocked at this revelation. They were not keen on playing characters that would slowly go mad. The thing that bugged me was that I hadn't realized I had done this good of a job hiding what I was doing. I sat with two Cthulhu related books next to my chair, prominently displayed, every game session. We had pulled material out of both books. I thought it was pretty obvious.

My players were not impressed and the game broke down. I had folders of information and pictures I would never use. The cult leader remains at large to this day. And, somewhere in my apartment, I have an envelope of old, Chinese coins and a terracotta pot filled with rice, both purchased at Cost Plus.

With the advent of all these cop dramas and the reemergence of X-Files-like shows on the TV, I'd love to run or play in a game like this again. I keep thinking something a little less global, more local. Maybe a "paranormal task force" in a large metropolitan police force, I think Chicago might be perfect, but New York, LA or even Seattle would work. It would be easy to blend old world mysticism and Cthulhu mythos with modern tabloid urban legend. Maybe one of the cops is psychic or they work with a psychic NPC. Throw in some interference from the Feds, especially Homeland Security and it would be as frustrating and fun as Law & Order meets The X-Files.

In the words of Dr. Bishop: "Excellent! Now let's make some LSD!"

An Embarassment of Games.

2008-09-29T16:13:00.000-07:00

For years I have been begging friends and strangers to game more.

Now, I am faced with too many games! Quite the dilemma!

As you are aware, I have been in a long running Star Wars campaign. You are also aware from previous posts that I started up a D&D game. And, from my most recent post on dice shopping, you are aware that a friend invited me to play in a World of Darkness campaign.

I wouldn't say my D&D game is dead. I still want to run it, or maybe start again with a different idea, since I'm not too impressed with my use of Undead in that game. However, one of the players in that game is also in the new World of Darkness game and both games have been primarily concentrated on her residence as the place to play - so I foresee conflicts. I want to revive this game and march on somehow, I just haven't figured that out yet.

The WoD game has been interesting. The GM had set a large task before himself. He has a large group, and those can be unwieldy. He is also combining Vampire, Werewolf and Mage into one large World of Darkness scenario. At the very least this is ... well, unwieldy! It's ambitious, but he is pulling it off so far. The group has had three sessions and I have only been able to attend one. However, the group does a lot of in-character-email and blogging and what not. So, I've been able to miss two thirds of the games and still feel like I'm part of the deal.

I missed playing in the WoD game this week because I got to play with my Star Wars group. Our Star Wars game had not gotten together for three months! Both the WoD and SW groups wanted to play at the same time on Sunday. I don't like playing on Sundays. But, both groups are filled with busy adults and Sunday is becoming popular. I would certainly rather play than not play, Sunday or not. Hopefully they won't overlap too much as we go along.

I can't think of a time since I moved to Seattle, maybe ever, when I had too many gaming opportunities. Especially not where I'm playing more than GMing. It's a new world!

Dice Shopping

2008-08-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

As many of you are aware, I'm a dice collector. One of the most fun portions of the hobby for me are the shiny, colored bits of plastic and other materials. I loves me some dice!

A friend of a friend put together a Vampire game and I was invited. I couldn't make it due to a cold, but that's another story.

I have in the past had trouble playing Vampire and other World of Darkness games. Why? Not enough dice! Specifically, d10s. The Storyteller game system is d10 based. For whatever reason, I'm always short on d10s.

A few years ago, someone wanted to play Vampire. I raided my Black & White dice set and came up with ... four d10s. Sure, I could have gotten away with just one, just lots of re-rolling. But, it's better to have some extras.

At this point, dice were rare in this town. Wizard's of the Coast had just closed down their gaming shops. When WotC opened their shops, they drove most of the little mom & pop shops out of business and there were no shops on-line. I finally went to Barnes and Noble - I found a set of brown dice branded for Werewolf. That was the one and only set of dice they had. I just couldn't buy brown dice - I have a color coordination thing about dice. I'm a freak, yes.

I finally managed to find ten d10s in speckled blue. They were okay, but they were not my thing. They have sat on a shelf for years and I will probably donate them to the group once I get to play with them.

So, with this recent game, I looked around my dice again. I still have the blue d10s. I think I have fewer d10s in my Black & White set now than then. I then broke into my Purple set. How many d10s do I have? Five. Five!

Actually, I had 10, but they were matched sets of d10s and dTENS (numbered 10 to 00). So, either I was going to have to buy more d10s for one of my sets or .... !

I bought a ring a while back, it was delivered in a small, velvet drawstring bag. The smallest dice bag ever! In my Purple set, I have some mini (12mm) pearl dice. They are so cool, tiny and easy to carry and use. It occurred to me, I bet they make d10s in this size!

Of course they do! Good luck finding them!

My search began at an online dice shop that I found a while back and fell in love with: Advancing Hordes. They had a beautiful little shop and I loved their set up. However, by the time I had found them online, Uncle's Games had begun opening stores in the area, and they usually have a decent selection of dice. If you click on the AH link you will see the first stumbling block in my quest for the mini dice - Advancing Hordes is gone. I never bought a thing from them and now I almost feel responsible. I wish it hadn't been so.

As much as I regret the loss of a store I never shopped at, I still didn't have the dice. I went scouting around the Internet. I quickly remembered Dice Pool. They had the pearl minis! Yea! They didn't have the purple d10s! D'oh! I nearly bought the white ones and called it good.

I spent a whole night looking all over the place and came up snake eyes. The next day, I called Uncle's to see if they had any in stock. They didn't. Could they order for me - I had a number from the manufacturer's catalog (I just LOVE the Internet!). They said they would try to get something from their distributor and give me a call back.

Time passed. No call from Uncle's and it had been nearly two weeks. The game finally had a first date and I hadn't caught my cold yet so I wanted to have the dice before the game. I called Uncle's, but, to coin a phrase, no dice! They were just too rare to get from their distributors.

On a whim, I rechecked Dice Pool. They claimed to get new inventory about once a week. They had them!! I was hoping to buy 20, fill that little bag. They only had one set - so I bought another set of polyhedrals.

The dice arrived very quickly. I was totally impressed. Lots of email confirmations to let me know everything was going well - from order to shipping. In short, Dice Pool was great to work with and I would totally buy from them again.

I now have a bonsai dice set! It's very cool! I'll get a pic of it up soon.

For my birthday, I want metal dice!

Editorial Update:

I decided to alert DicePool that I had done a blog post about my satisfaction with their service. This is the email I recieved in return:

Date: Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: A Question About dicepool.com

Jericho,

I've been meaning to reply to your email, but we've been really busy.

Thanks for your positive feedback. Right now we're in the middle of
relaunching our store with a new set of features. We're down right
now, but we'll be back today or tomorrow. I just wanted to let you
know that if you or anyone else need dice that we're out of stock or
low on, let us know. We can even make special orders if you need
larger quantities that we normally stock, or we can tell you when the
dice you're looking for are back on our shelves.

Jack
dicepool.com

The Burden of the Undead.

2008-08-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting weekend. Three friends and I spent the weekend in a camper watching geeky movies (Real Genius, Legend and Ghostbusters) and playing D&D. It was a blast.

Where I ran aground was the subject matter of the D&D game. Early in the game it was clear what was going on. The town we met up in was being attacked by skeletons and zombies. We went to the local cemetery to discover a cleric conducting necromantic rituals.

This isn't a bad scenario, however, it's starting to get a little common. One of the guys with us this weekend ran a D&D game that we played a few years ago. He started the game in a small town with a big set of catacombs. Lots of undead. We didn't stay in those catacombs for long, some doofus cleric destroyed the catacombs. I was the doof, but that's a story for another day.

A while back, I got nostalgic about D&D, right after Gary Gygax died. I started running a game. My game is, wait for it, a small town with a near-by necromancer cleric sending undead to attack the small town.

With a few minor differences, the scenario my friend ran this weekend and my scenario were basically the same. He and I played in the Catacombs mentioned above, but he didn't play in my Small-Town-Undead-Panic game.

Where I'm going with this is that the undead thing seems to be a very common theme and maybe it pops into people's minds a little too easily. I feel like I let my group down and maybe that's why, yet again, interest has waned on a game I was running.

Last night when all of this came to me, I was running around in WoW - I was playing a quest involving creatures that were essentially plants that grew from seeds. It occurred to me that that would be a cool way to transport an army. Show up near a town, scatter your seeds, call up a storm, then call up some sun - maybe even sun that lasted into the night! Then, blam! Little, violent plant guys running around eating each other and growing more powerful by the second! Cast some spell that allows you to control plants and you have a hell of a magic army that only required one wizard and a cart of plant seed.

SO, the point of this post: the next time you decide to run a game, let the dead rest. Try something a little different.

Plots are us!

2008-08-05T10:09:00.001-07:00

One of you asked for it! (Thanks HollyKing!) This is Throw Away Plot #3!

Previously I threw away a plot for Star Wars and for Star Trek.

This time around, I want to throw away a plot with a Super Hero theme. This summer has been all about the Comic Book Movie. We have Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk and Batman movies dancing around our heads. In the past few years we have seen the rise of the Comic Book Movie with Spider Man, X Men, Fantastic Four and others ka-blaming through our local cineplexes. With teases at the end of some of these movies suggesting sequels and trailers for The Watchmen in the theaters - this trend will not end any time soon.

I have a spectacularly bad history with running Super Power games. I played in a great game while I lived in STL - but I should have taken a clue. While everyone else was running around in skin-tight suits, whomping people with mutant super-powers, my character had a Mac 10, a computer in his skull and shark cartilage armor. "Jakker" was more suited to a game of Shadowrun than a Supers game.

I played in a second supers game with the same GM. The game had a B-Movie feel to it - I think the GM had grabbed a copy of GURPS Supers and GURPS Atomic Horror and ran with it! The game was short lived but brilliant!

So, there I am, thinking, huh! I could run a Supers game!

I've never read comic books - I always thought they were over priced wastes of money. I would buy the omnibuses now and then - at $12 to $20 bucks, even in black and white - they were great ways to get some comic book into my life. But, really, I don't have a stack of omnibuses, just a few.

It boils down to the fact that I really don't get comic books. When I think super powers, for some reason my mind runs toward science fiction: powers would have some plausible explanation. In truth, comic books are pure fantasy. They are ancient myths with a modern spin. Superman would have been a god in another era. Spiderman is an animal avatar if there ever was one, same with Wolverine. Bruce Banner is a man possessed by a demon! The comic books have even pulled directly from myth, Thor and Hercules are still running around in pulp pages.

Yet, I have repeatedly managed to miss the point. I've run at least three Super Powered games - all failed. Proof that watching a few movies does not a good Supers GM make. The last was the most successful. It more resembled a Stephen King novel than something by Lee & Kirby and it lasted less than six months.

However, a while back I came up with an idea that I thought would be fun. It's almost Super Powers.

The story goes like this: NASA's SOHO probe detects a solar flare. The flare is pretty bad - so bad it burns out portions of the probe. The flare hits Earth and does lots of damage to the telecommunications system.

In the end, nothing is unrecoverable - the result is a day of interrupted communications but something that could have been MUCH worse. Life goes on and people have some great stories.

The NASA researches begin seeing some anomalies. First, the strength of the flare burned out the SOHO probe, why were the communication satellites not more damaged? Further, light travels from the Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes. Yet, the flare hit Earth in under four. The leading edge of the flare touched Earth before the much closer probe's information reached Earth. The particles in the flare were traveling much faster than the speed of light!

The NASA information is largely ignored as vital info from NASA often is (but I'm not bitter!)

A few days after the flare, some strange things begin happening. Odd, unexplained accidents. Persons vanishing, appearing elsewhere, not knowing how they got there. A series of cat burglaries where nothing of real value goes missing.

Finally, a reporter pulls the threads together. His story begins with a string of beads that were stolen from the Heathrow airport. They were on display in the concourse. While digging an underground elevator shaft, a "kitchen midden" was discovered; essentially an ancient garbage dump. Archaeologists were called out to preserve what they could - they found some interesting pottery shards, bones indicating the local cuisine at the time and some other broken artifacts, including a broken string of glass beads. One of the beads was green glass and a bird had been cut into it. The burglar stole just the beads, worth no more than a few hundred pounds to a collector. A gold ring displayed next to the beads was left behind.

A 12 car accident in Chicago resulted in three deaths and dozens of injuries. However, one young lady walked away untouched. The reporter interviewed her and noticed a bead she wore on a silk cord, she found the brown, unglazed bead in an antique shop. The bead had been carved into the shape of a turtle. When the bead was carbon-dated, it was more than 3000 years old. The reporter goes on and on, detailing several incidents surrounding these beads.

In game terms, each bead gives some gift to the wearer; a power or some advantage. The beads can be any shape or size, made of any substance. Beads have been dated as far back as 10k years, but none newer that 2000 years. The beads often appear as a simple bead with a engraved design, some are cast into very complex and intricate designs, others are just a wooden bead with a painted on animal or pictograph.

Once the reporter comes forward, the race is on! It's about this point that I would bring in the players. Each player has a bead. The bead should be interesting but not super powered. Say, "underwater breathing", not "immune to bullets". Almost immediately, I imagine that the players would discover that they can easily trade the beads and the power follows the bead. They could also discover that the beads work together, so if a player had a bead that made him grow larger, and he put on a bead from his teammate that gave him fur and claws, he'd look like a werewolf! If he put on another bead, he could shoot lightning from his claws, etc.

Once this is revealed, the players are going to want more beads. So is everyone else on the planet! They will want to talk to archaeologists, collectors and antique shops to find more beads. Imagine buying super-powers, not to mention super fakes, on eBay!

We can then begin connecting all kinds of fun, historic, pseudo science and conspiracy. From crop circles to ley lines to Stone Henge to the Nasca lines to Atlantis. Where did the beads come from? Who made them? Why did they make them? Why did they reactivate? Will they be more powerful at a place of power, say an Aztec temple or Easter Island? Are they more powerful on a clear night with the whole Milky Way showering them with star dust?

Of course there are some, like our cat burglar, who got a jump on everyone else. "Scorpio", as she likes to be called, has the Heathrow Beads, as well as others she has stolen. She begins going after those that own beads, either buying, intimidating or killing them to get to her goal. Soon, she has a rather impressive necklace, not to mention an impressive collection of powers. She will be quite a challenge for the players.

I thought it might be fun to keep the astrological and astronomical associations going, introducing other villains with zodiological names like Pisces and Cancer. Even Aries and Mars could walk the Earth, and, for fun, Betelgeuse.

The great thing about beating a foe in this game: his powers now go to the group. The group increases in beads and thus power with each success. The group can also trade amongst themselves, changing and improving their powers as they go. I figured that eventually, certain beads would show up that enhance other beads or even protect them. Beads with just about any power imaginable could appear. Combining them could make whole new powers. One could even have "sets" of beads, each has a power, but as more of the set are brought together, other powers are unlocked. With the whole set, a large power is unlocked. There could also be beads that add no benefit to the user, but give benefits to the party, etc.

How do you control the power level of this game? A guy with a vest of beads will be darn near invincible and maybe without weakness. First, control the number of beads. There were only so many made, only so many can be around. Next, the beads are destroyable. Thus, in a fight, players might lose beads - but so might the bad guys! (This keeps guns and sharp-shooters in play!) In the end, I think a game like this could get very out of control unless the GM ran it with an iron hand.

Eventually, someone (player, NPC, villain) is going to try to make a new bead. They will likely destroy several to discover the technology, maybe dozens, even hundreds. Will they succeed? Will they create an even more powerful bead? Will their bead fail catastrophically? That's up to the GM and some rolls on "Craft: Bead".

The coolest part of this for me: props! I'm a GM that believes in props. In this game, each player could actually wear their beads! A bag of cheap wooden beads can be purchased at any big box craft store. A few minutes with these beads and a Sharpie or a paint pen and you would have some decent props. String them on some hemp or silk cord and BINGO! Cool props for your players!

I've thought several times of writing this up in detail and trying to get it published. I still reserve that right!

Gaming Daters?

2008-07-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

Been two months since my last post? I'm getting WORSE at this! :)

Anyway, I have recently discovered a new way to find other gamers in your area. Do you have a profile on a social networking site or dating site? Use your favorite game as a search keyword and see if there is anyone in your area playing your game. Ask them if you can join whatever game they are playing or offer to GM for them and their friends.

It's a great way to meet new people. Most dating sites or social networking sites are free. And, better, you get more gaming in your life! Go try it out and tell us what you discover.

Another throw away plot.

2008-05-05T16:01:00.000-07:00

You all might remember that I gave away a good plot a few months back - well, at least I thought it was a good plot. You can read that here.

Well, I have another one for you. My Star Wars group is talking about switching to the new Saga rules for the Star Wars RPG. Might be cool. We're still talking. I won't have to buy any books as I got my books for Xmas.

See, a friend of mine got a discounted core rulebook, got excited and wanted to play. As you can tell from my entry there in November, I was hot to play anything. So, I told the guy, I'll run anything you want after Xmas - I'll put the books on my list with high priority. My wife feels pretty safe buying me gaming books - especially if I point them out on Amazon. Cool. He wants to play something before the movies, something like Knights of the Old Republic and he wanted to play a Wookie Jedi.

Oh! Was I ever hip to that?! I dove into Wookiepedia head first! Before I knew it, I had floods of great ideas.

I told him to build a first level Wookie, best to be a Fringer type or a Scoundrel. (I hear the classes are different now, I didn't know that then.) But, I didn't want him to actually be a Jedi yet, just be Force Sensitive. And that's all I told him, other than the fact that I was setting the game before KotOR.

Matter of fact, I intended to set it WAY before KotOR! Something like 20,000 years before KotOR!

My thought was this: a Rakatan ship carrying wookie slaves crash landed on a planet in the middle of no-where. The ship was never found. The wookies freed themselves, and the Rakatan technology got loose and did to this planet what it did to Kashyyyk; namely, terraformed it.

A few thousand years later, the wooks were happy, healthy and unaware that their planet lay between Hutt space and Xim the Despot's empire. Xim and the Hutts fought a terrible war - and I thought it would be fun the make this poor little wookie planet one of the battle fields. I could just see Xim's giant battle droids taking on Klatoonian soldiers and Hutt droid tanks! All the while the PC would be in the middle, trying to save his home world. How epic is that?

I figured I would give the PC a phrik Rakatan sword. Sure, it pulsed with the Dark Side, but if the PC pumped enough Light Side energy into it, the weapon would change and become as good as a light saber in many ways, maybe even better. I thought I might get a Force ghost to act as the PC's mentor on the ways of the Jedi and the Force. I also figured there might be a Rakatan Star Map lying around that would point the PC to a non-hyperdrive fighter, like, oh, this one!

In the end, the guy in question was just too busy. He never even finished making his character. Too bad - I think this could have been a fun game. As before, it's yours to use - enjoy!