Tag Archives: RPGs

Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Twelfth Session

Posted on June 6, 2011 | 3 comments

Twelfth Session (12 page pdf) – “Water Stop 2” – In our first sequel, the PCs need crew for their new ship, and remember the island of freed slaves from Water Stop (Season One, Third Session). They head there to recruit! Naturally, it’s not that easy.

This session took a whole lot of work on my part. I think it might be interesting to see how another GM does this stuf fin detail, so here’s a bit of a blow by blow about how I prepped and conducted the session.

As prep, I needed to generate eleven fully realized pirate crewmen and a dozen freed slaves for the PCs to interact with. Eek!  I used some of my favorite random generators, but wasn’t thrilled with most of what came out of them, so mainly made it up myself. And it worked!  The PCs were fascinated by the crew: Seven, Stoke, Orgon One-ear, Dum-dum, Tanned Hank, Little Mike, Big Mike, Mano, Gareb, Goat, and Slasher Jim.

I believe strongly in random generation at sea.  Random weather, random encounters… I eyeballed Zak’s Wavecrawl Kit, pulled random weather tables together from Stormwrack and other sources, and random encounter tables from everywhere they are hidden in Pathfinder stuff (Note to Paizo, I’d pay good money for a big book of random encounter tables by Inner Sea area.  I needed Gulf of Varisia area open ocean and beach/coastal encounters.

So they get going, and I roll some weather up, a snowstorm.  Just a minor one, but it gets them back used to making their Profession: Sailor checks. Sindawe was captain and Serpent was master on the helm; the snowstorm was an assisted check with Sindawe leading and Serpent assisting. They didn’t have any trouble.

Day two, the 8% chance of random encounter triggers.  Roll the dice – 00.  When you roll percentiles and get a 00 you always know something’s going to get fucked up.  I scan down the ocean table in the Bestiary and see 00 – Shoggoth.  CR 19.

Well now some GMs would puss out and say that’s too much for a fifth level party to handle. But not me. Shoggoth it is!  Hey, what’s that ahead, a giant field of sargasso seaweed?  Let’s go around. Why is it starting to come towards us?

They started to put on speed.  I used the naval version of my chase rules this time with Serpent the helmsman leading. On the fly I was assessing penalties for the ship’s skeleton crew (-4) and rolling for how hard the wind is blowing (lightly, -3). It works a lot like the foot chase rules, each side rolls Movement checks and moves up or down a range band from each other.

It was pretty cool.  They didn’t know what it was, and it was gaining on them (shoggoths swim at like 50′). Serpent/Paul joked about “it could be a shoggoth! There would be piping and stuff!” As it drew closer they heard the piping. He was deeply unhappy. He had the presence of mind to order Orgon to go get wax to stopper the crews’ ears (earning an additional -4 on Sindawe’s captaining rolls, sadly, but preventing them all from going insane).

They kept not doing real well in terms of making speed and the shoggoth kept rolling 15+. Sindawe was getting desperate and scanned the horizon with a spyglass for something, anything…  I rolled on Zak’s Wavecrawl “Random Event” table, which can be “nothing.” I got a random ship, table says merchants, d4 for size… A big fat Chelish merchantman! Sindawe rolled a 30+ Perception and saw a chance. They headed straight for it. Wogan and a gun crew had loaded a cannon on the off chance it would be useful against the shoggoth, but now they ran to the other side and loaded one with chain shot. The other ship didn’t spot them till they were barreling down on it. The shoggoth closed to close contact with the PCs’ ship and began ripping holes in it. Serpent crossed the T behind the merchantman and they shot a load into its rigging. The Teeth of Araska sailed away as the shoggoth engulfed the huge ship. They were extremely sobered by this encounter, as well they might be!

That could have been pretty bad, but I have confidence in my PCs. They could have gotten away through sheer speed, but that didn’t work, but they came up with a plan B and executed on it with precision. And that’s the kind of response really being in danger of complete extinction drives!

But we were only 1/3 done with the session by this point, that was supposed to just be a warmup random encounter! The PCs got to the island. What the heck had happened to the slaves?

Well, ahead of time I decided I’d roll 1d20 for each slave. 2-5 they died, 6-10 they were sick, 11-15 they were OK, 16-19 they were great and had leveled. 20 was “special good” and 1 was “special bad.” I got only 1 dead, but one special good and one special bad, and the main 3 slaves from their previous appearance were sick.  I brainstormed and decided that some of the rats that escaped the sinking goblin pirate ship the Sable Drake got onto the island and multiplied and have become a main food source – and one spread the lycanthropy that Captain Naki, wererat goblin captain of the ship, had. One of the slaves got bit, and changed.  Which was fine, but when he was too forward with Sevgi the ex-harem slave and she rejected him, he became forceful and the other two lead slaves had to get firm with him. Looking for revenge, he infected all three with filth fever and was waiting for Sevgi to get sick enough that a) she’s be sure to succumb to lycanthropy when he bit her and b) that she’d thank him for saving her and be hers forever! The PCs’ intervention interrupted this little love story, resulting in his attack on Sindawe.

I didn’t have a huge amount of inspiration for the ‘good special’ so I just had the cook have made some mango wine, resulting in quite a party. The PCs did good in only allowing a small number of the pirates on shore; I had been envisioning a big drunken pirate fight, especially as one of the slaves was trading sexual favors for supplies… Alas, it was kept more bottled up than that. The real challenge in this whole session was personnel management – can you get through this not just without killing a large number of the pirates and/or slaves, but can you make them into an effective crew that likes and/or fears you enough to not mutiny?

Speaking of revenge and sex, Captain Treeg’s woman and cleric of Calistria Ishana had been hiding out on the Teeth of Araska since she was taken. Not all that stable in the first place, her faith in the goddess of lust and revenge has driven her to fanatic heights of kill craziness. She was hoping that if she could rid the ship of the new interlopers that she could control the old crew. But Seven has been sucking up to them and clearly was their favorite. So in standard crazy-chick logic, he became target #1. Serpent was skulking out there when she broke invisibility to hold person and then coup de grace Seven. Serpent whaled away on her good and made his saves against her blindness, but she managed to murder Seven before being beaten down. I was hoping she could re-cast invisibility and escape to beset them but Serpent just does too much damage. Serpent was happy to leave Slasher Jim alone with her corpse.

Oh, and they devised a pirate Articles of Agreement (I mostly copied it from a historical one) and all signed on! The healed slaves decided they wanted off the island (except for the wererat – they marooned him, but figured that as a rat he’d get along OK) and most were good with piracy as long as it’s against the Chelish.

Tired yet?  Well, the session is still only 2/3 over. So they set out for Sandpoint to resupply and drop off the one family that didn’t want to take up the pirate life. We’ve had a shoggoth, and had Survivor-on-crack intrigue, and now we have – a winter storm!

My random weather had the temperature drop and drop some more, and a gale force wind whip up. The seas heaved as a freezing wind buffeted them.  The last third of the session was them weathering the storm.

Now, often in an RPG that can be boring. But I’ve been reading a lot of Hornblower and wanted to make the actual sailing part exciting; there’s no reason that man vs. nature, one of the fundamental kinds of literary conflict, should suck in D&D.

So here’s what we did. I rolled randomly and saw the storm was going to last nine hours (I didn’t tell them this). They had to make shiphandling checks to not founder or have other problems. The slaves, I rolled to see if any had shipboard experience, and a couple had – the others had to make Fort saves against seasickness; a couple dropped out immediately and some more succumbed to it over the course of the storm. And it was cold.  The Pathfinder cold rules say you have to save every hour, DC 15 + 1 per previous save, or take 1d6 nonlethal and be fatigued from frostbite.

This led to a really interesting battle against the elements. Each hour, I had Sindawe roll Prof: Sailor, aided by Serpent and Wogan. As long as they had 20 crew the ship was fully manned; each 5 fewer people manning the ship yields a -2 to all rolls. Based on how well they did they were fine, or being blown off course, or a worse threat like foundering or whatnot. Then came the cold saves. Wogan used the power of Gozreh in the form of channeled healing to throw off a lot of the frostbite damage, but more sailors succumbed as the storm wore on. And third, accident checks. Basically on a 1 on 1d20 something bad might happen to you – a wave comes to wash you overboard, you slip on the icy deck, someone drops a tool on your head. For each 5 by which the captain borks his roll there’s a penalty and if you’re fatigued there’s a penalty, so sometimes people were looking at a 1-3 to 1-5 chance of something risky happening over the course of that hour. Goat fell to the deck from the rigging and Bel and Pirro nearly got washed overboard; finally a chunk of ice fell from the rigging and KOed Bel. Wogan kept as many folks going as he could but by the time it was over more than half the slaves and a good quarter of the pirates were incapacitated. It was an epic battle, but just of man and ship versus the weather.

Finally they ended up in Sandpoint, dropped off the family, and bought supplies.  They wanted to buy crates of weapons, but a poor Bluff meant that the local sheriff didn’t like the looks of them and told the locals not to sell them any. We’ll see if they impress any townsfolk onto their crew in vengeance next time before they set off to find the wreck of the Sandspider! (They found that treasure map when they were returning from Viperwall aboard the Blackfin back in Return to Madness, Season One, Episode 25.)

Goodness!  I was tuckered out by the end of all this, but was happy with the results.  All the NPCs were fully realized enough that the PCs interacted with them with interest and realism. And there were a lot of call-backs to previous sessions; the players are remembering a lot of that stuff and their history is really helping to drive them. I consider it a success!

Unfortunately it’ll be a little; due to work and vacation trips Reavers is on hiatus for six weeks.  But we’ll be back with some hard hitting pirate action soon!

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What Do RPGs Teach You?

Posted on June 4, 2011 | 7 comments

In my recent article, Your PCs Are Murderous Cretins, I talk about the ethics of violence in RPGs and how most PCs we see are not acting in any way we would consider moral in the real world. I made a side point that ended up generating most of the controversy, which is that how we roleplay can shape our view of the world.  Not so, I am told – it’s completely separate, or cathartic, or whatever.

I find that interesting, especially since when we are talking about positive skills and attitudes, people are happy to explain the benefits that RPGs have provided them. I think many people would say that RPGs have honed their ability to navigate and exploit complex real-world rules, or GMing has made them better at public speaking or management, or they read a lot and learned a lot of history, or whatever.  Many nodded in agreement and not mockery when the X-Files character said “I didn’t spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons without learning anything about courage.”  Many books have been written by people talking about the character attributes that playing sports, or playing some other game like chess, imparted to them.

Of course, as soon as you bring up the possibility of imparting something negative, you get a lot of fear reactions. People don’t understand or want to deny the cognitive training aspect of RPGs.  But role-playing existed long before RPGs, and what it is specifically used for is teaching new skills and behaviors! Both in formal educational and business settings and in psychotherapy settings.

There’s a huge amount of non-gaming-related literature on role-playing and how it educates both didactically (you set out specifically to teach a certain thing) and developmental (more freeform roleplay which teaches by discovery). Here, try out this Google book from the Instructional Design Library series  that explains role-playing as a technique both to teach skills and attitudes.

If you for some reason cling to the unjustified belief that RPGs are different in nature than discovery-oriented roleplay (except in that people who aren’t paying attention don’t have a clearly focused end goal), try out the latest issue of the International Journal of Roleplaying that talk about this, especially “Immersion as a Prerequisite of the Didactical Potential of Role-Playing” and the part on “drift” in “Stereotypes and Individual Differences in Role-playing Games.” There are a lot of good references there which can point you to other sources that discuss this effect.

Anyway, what you have to understand is that the claim that roleplaying does not cognitively train you is plain false, and not supported by any actual research. It does.

But that’s not a bad thing!  Like I said, RPGs can teach plenty of good things, skill and character trait both.  We should just understand that teaching is a two-edged sword, and we might want to keep an eye on mindsets we might not want to be teaching people. The real world has a lot of other things trying to teach people that “groups that disagree with you are evil” and “don’t worry about the moral consequences of your actions” and a near infinite litany of other negative traits – consider whether you’re helping or hindering that process in your game.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Eleventh Session

Posted on June 3, 2011 | 3 comments

Eleventh Session (13 page pdf) – “Teeth of Araska” – A Shackles pirate ship led by the infamous Captain Grudge decides the PCs look like tasty prey. Will they be victims or victors? Thrill to the nautical naughtiness in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate!

The ship-on-ship combat was pretty happening.  I used my Quickie Mass Combat Rules to streamline it; it was the PCs and their named NPCs and four units of Riddleport Thugs against Captain Grudge, his named NPCs, and six units of Araska Pirates.

We were also using my cannon rules. I love sweeping the decks of the PC’s ship with grapeshot. It gives me a sense of accomplishment.

In the end, they had a good fight of it but they really smacked around the pirate captain without him doing all too much.  But he was part bard, after all.  You can download Captain Grudge from the Reavers NPC Page!

One of the neatest parts was when Tommy chased the elven sniper/sorcerer Selis down into the depths of the ships alone… He stabbed what he thought was the hiding elf, but it was some mook, and he got locked into a cabin and a spider swarm summoned onto him!  He frantically tried to push through the poison and distraction to pick the lock and get out of there; he succeeded but it was a close thing. A huge mass of spiders coursing out onto the deck had quite the salutary effect on everyone up there.

Once the fighting was over, we had some roleplaying – “get to know the crew,” farewells to some of the NPCs, dealing with Clegg Zincher…  Sadly, Kevin, Tommy’s player, was out, so it didn’t come to blows with Zincher (he really wants him dead.) They took the Dark Pearl back to Riddleport with Sam, Eli, and Hatshepsut while the PCs decided they wanted to take their new ship, the Teeth of Araska, out to recruit crew and maybe find some treasure.

Most of the rest of the session was inspecting the ship, planning, refitting, and generally regrouping, since the last several sessions have been nonstop desperate combat to escape the Devil’s Elbow. And having their own ship is exciting! Are they in over their heads?  Probably!

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New RPG Blog Alliance

Posted on May 30, 2011 | 2 comments

Geek Related has been part of the RPG Bloggers Network pretty much since it began in August 2008. It’s simple – just a RSS feed aggregator – but it’s quite useful, and it’s how I often go read what’s up in the blogosphere.  Like many people, the hassle of actually setting up a RSS reader has never appealed to me, I’d rather just go to a Web portal. And it’s been quite worthwhile for the blog, the plurality of my referrers come from there, especially on new-article days.

Now, the RPG Blog Alliance has opened its doors and I’ve signed up.  There’s an interesting history here – an early breakaway the RPGBN was a Ning site, the Role Play Media Network.  It wanted to ‘do more’ and be more of a social network.  It didn’t get much use and recently closed its doors.  So now the RPGBA has opened up, it’s more of a blog aggregator (the RPMN’s fatal flaw was no way to aggregate blogs, and it was supposed to be for bloggers, so…) but also has social stuff – a forum and now a Google group.

I am not sure if the RPGBA has the magic mix needed to succeed or not. On the one hand, I don’t mind another aggregator.  Yay hits.  On the other hand, I’m unlikely to go use both the RPGBA and RPGBN home pages for my daily blog-checking, I’m probably just going to use one.The RPGBN’s is winning for me because it’s more concise – there’s lots of blog posts in a day and so the more articles I can see per screenful in my browser wins.

And I’m divided on the value of the “social aspect.”  On the one hand, why not? On the other – the most valuable “social” thing you can do as a blogger is go comment on each others’ posts, generating community and clickbacks.  Having any of that discussion hidden in a forum or mailing list reduces its worth. Plus, it’s not like there’s not a bunch of major RPG forums out there if you just want to hobnob with gamers. And already the fragmentation of having both a forum and a separate, unrelated Google group is worrying. I know they want to try to collaborate and accomplish Greater Things – but my experience with Internet groups accomplishing Greater Things is bad, the usual vicious infighting turns into open war the second anything like money gets involved.

Of course, one of the real underlying issues is that the RPGBN isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.  It seems to have tech problems from time to time, like just today my posts are appearing and disappearing on it, and whoever’s running it isn’t keeping up with new blog signups and whatnot, so that’s creating some pressure for an alternative to arise.

So, I wish both the networks luck, have joined them both, and will see what happens!

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 47

Posted on May 30, 2011 | 2 comments

Forty-seventh Session – While we’re on leave on Bluefall, the B Team decides to go get involved in a troubled film production starring Jack Everstar.  Hollywood style action results!

This was an enjoyable break from our Massive Alien War. Markus, Lambert, and Ten-zil go and involve themselves in a movie shoot where an explosion narrowly avoided terminating promising actor Jack Everstar’s career. We “Burn Noticed” our way onto the set easily.

I was inspired in my depiction of Markus as military consultant by “Fruity Rudy” Reyes of Generation: Kill. In the DVD extras from the HBO series you get to see Reyes, who was one of the Recon Marines that Evan Wright wrote about in his book, both play himself in the series but also train all the other actors in firearm handling, unarmed combat, etc.; it’s pretty cool.  And Markus made sure to take his shirt off at every opportunity in homage. He’s hugely muscled and has a full torso “IX” tattoo from his time in the Ninth Legion.

We broke out the whiskey at the same time our characters were attending the cast party, and as a result the drunken hilarity and shenanigans was partly in the game and partly in our gaming location.We enjoyed the Hollywood sleazeball star party. We didn’t enjoy the second one as much because of the tension of setting Jack up to get him to reveal his dark secret, but then once everyone got arrested we continued to party and trashed his mansion. A couple of us had just watched “Hangover 2” the night before and that contributed to the general debauchery.

Only three players could attend, but that was fine because not a single shot was fired in anger! We rolled some skill checks, mainly for jetski driving and actress wrangling. But in general it was an entertaining, low intensity session that afforded plenty of roleplaying.

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Lazy Memorial Day Weekend Music Videos!

Posted on May 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

Chilling this weekend?  Well, here’s a crop of my favorite geek videos to keep you company! Many are extremely NSFW. Be careful, the concentrated awesome here is extreme.

Roll a d6

The existence of this video makes me forgive D&D 4e just a little bit.

Tik Tok Star Trek Parody

Now I want to watch TOS again!

Star Trek Rap

In response – the TNG guys chase trim all the time.

Robocop Rap

OCP in the hizzouse, bitches!

I Am Murloc

Ah, some days I miss WoW.

Sorry, wordpress.com’s embedding fu begins to fail it at this point. Click the titles to go see ’em!

Nerd Rage Rap

Scream my name!

Robot Party

Hopefully you are drunk enough by this point that you really enjoy this video.

Not Enough?

Well, go look at all the music videos that have ever made it onto Topless Robot if you need more fix!

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Prepainted Plastic Pathfinder Minis!

Posted on May 26, 2011 | 12 comments

I just saw on Troll in the Corner that Paizo and WizKids are teaming up to start producing prepainted plastic minis again!  This is great news; the D&D Minis were the last thing I actually still bought from WotC and then they discontinued them.

I have no interest in metal minis – I have plenty that have gone unpainted; I lack a life sufficiently to play RPGs but not enough to waste time with basic menial labor related to them.

Sounds like it’s just the iconics to start but maybe if it does well we’ll see the return of real plastic minis!

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Your PCs Are Murderous Cretins

Posted on May 25, 2011 | 46 comments

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.      – Theodore Roosevelt

Violence is a pretty standard part of the vast majority of RPGs. And that’s fine, to a degree.  But the routine nature of killing in most games does concern me, so I recently asked the question “How do I get my PCs not to be a bunch of murderous cretins?” on RPG Stack Exchange.You can go check the answers, some are pretty useful.

It’s hard to have a good conversation on this topic though.  Frankly, most people have a very basic grasp of ethics, and the most complex moral discussions often engaged in regarding RPGs are “Hey, we can kill people out of hand if they’re evil right?” or “It’s an evil race, so we should kill the women and children too right?” If you wrestle with questions like that, you probably can just move along from this article now. It’s pathetic and somewhat scary that those questions are debated at all let alone are generally the most sophisticated values discussion most people have around gaming.

Or people just assume you’re a “D&D is Satanic” type looking to rain on the hobby, or some kind of indie gamer hippy. Anything except think uncomfortable thoughts.

My problem with how we treat violence casually in games is that gaming is a repeated exercise that shapes our view of the world. If we are training ourselves that murder is OK, and not just in extreme circumstances, it does become part of our mindset. The excuse that it’s just a game is reasonably weak; the more we get used to mentally separating and saying “Oh, that race or people group is evil or soulless and we can victimize them freely” – it’s not like that doesn’t happen nowadays and here in our country, most recently with Abu Ghraib.

I think most of us think that killing is a passable solution in certain very highly escalated situations.  But in the average RPG campaign, “We wandered into their home uninvited and they gave us guff” is generally an excuse for murder that excites little comment. Or “they attacked us, so we beat them down and then knifed them while unconscious and took their stuff and left their bodies to rot.” Try that in your home town, you’ll find out “self defense” ends up not covering it.

There’s the “but it’s that way in all entertainment media” excuse.  But frankly – not as much. Maybe in computer games. But many movies and TV shows try to devise heroes that do as much as they can without killing (Burn Notice is a good example). And just about every action movie we watched when we were kids had the end scene where the good guy realizes he can’t just execute the bad guy because “he’s bad.” But we erode that lesson pretty hard with most RPG plots.

Greg Costikyan’s Violence and John Tynes’ Power Kill are interesting in that they are both RPGs that satirize the violence inherent in RPGs.  Check ’em out. Here’s what Violence has to say for itself:

Violence™ is a lot like Dungeons & Dragons® by that other company. You and your friends play characters in an imaginary world. You wander about a maze, kicking down doors, killing whatever you find on the other side, and taking its possessions. The main difference is this: The world isn’t some third-rate fantasy writer’s drivel about elves and dwarves and magic spells, but the world of today.
The doors you kick down aren’t those of a subterranean dungeon–unless you’re in the subway—but those of decent, honest, hard-working people who merely want to live their lives. The things you kill aren’t cardboard “monsters” whom the game defines as okay to kill because, well, they’re monsters—but fellow human beings, with families and friends and hopes and fears and highly developed senses of morality—far better people than you, in fact. And the things you steal aren’t “magic items” and “gold pieces” but stereos, computers, jewellery, and whatever other items of value you can lift.
Indeed, you yourself are a monster: a monster in the true sense, not the ‘fantasy’ one. You are a degraded, bloodthirsty savage, the product of the savage streets, a Jeffrey Dahmer, a droog, a character out of Brett Easton Ellis. You delight in pain and blood and mayhem. You won’t live long, I promise you, but you’ll leave a trail of mangled corpses in your wake.

Power Kill covers the same ground but a little artsier, it is added as a meta-level onto your game where the PCs are actually deluded people in a mental institution and their fantasy rampage was performed in the real world, and they’re getting debriefed by a shrink about it.

Let’s take some real examples from gaming of how a slightly more civilized approach to human life might play out, OK?

Night Below

Back in 2e times I decided I wanted to have a real honest-to-God high realism total immersion game. I split our large group into two different games, those on board and those not. Or at least, those who thought they were on board. Turns out a shakeout was going to occur.

As the campaign starts, a nice wizard’s apprentice named Jelleneth goes missing. The party gnome illusionist had hung out with her in the bar the night before and took an interest in finding out where she went to, and the rest of the party decided to help.

Well, two of them, an elf and a dwarf, decide they’re going to interrogate everyone they can. That evening, some travellers arrive and come into the inn.  I actually have descriptions for them (metagame: they must be important!) so they go hassle them and ask them their business.  “Slag off!” responds one. The PCs immediately pull their weapons.  The men flee the inn; the PCs pursue them all the way out of the ville and into the fields surrounding it.  One turns around and pulls out a shortsword and says “Stay back man!” and the elf shoots him with his bow.  Then the local constable shows up and takes everyone in.

He asks everyone for “their side of the story.” The PCs explain that “We thought they knew something, so we pulled weapons, chased them outside, and shot them.” “Uhhh… That’s your story? And you’re sticking to it?” The PCs totally couldn’t understand why the constable let the other guys go and held onto them. The constable tried to be nice. “Listen guys, we can take care of this with a fine, your cleric friend healed the guy you shot..  The mayor is a hard man, and if this goes to trial he’ll decide punishment in the morning.” Well, one PC went with that, but the other decided that the constable was “just shaking us down” and refused.  So the next morning, he is trotted out in front of the mayor and again earnestly explains, because in his mind it’s a valid excuse somehow, that “We thought they knew something, so we pulled weapons, chased them outside, and shot them.” “I see.  Three months hard labor in the mines.” The player didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. But off to the mines he went.  The elf and dwarf’s players realized they would be happier in the casual group and switched.

Harsh?  Sure.  But it totally got the message across, and as a result that campaign turned into a five year long epic that was the best campaign I’ve ever seen or heard of. Real personalities, real relationships, real behavior, real morality.

Curse of the Crimson Throne

Really this has become common with many of my characters, who confuse other PCs by not just murdering people. “We met that guy in this dungeon complex, and sure he surrendered and gave us his stuff and gave us info, but what do  you mean you’re letting him go and are not going to kill him?” But anyway I digress…

At the climax of Curse of the Crimson Throne, our party confronted the wicked Queen of Korvosa. “Ruler bad, we kill!” is most of the subtlety built in. But my character understood that regicide is a big hairy deal.  She got the remaining other power players of the city to draft a legal document declaring her no longer Queen and ordering her to vacate the palace. She took the time to read it and demand the Queen’s surrender rather than just all out attack. I think the party thought it was because she was a good cleric.  No, it’s because she’s not a monster.  I don’t understand “I’m Neutral” as a reason to not have moral qualms – that’s what in the real world we call “Evil.”

Conclusion

Anyway, I know many people say their gaming is just escapism and they just want to kill some orcs and not think about it. But you have to consider that it is a cerebral, participatory activity and you are training yourself to think a certain way with it, and you’re fooling yourself if you say you’re not. When you’re killing people unprovoked, not taking surrenders, killing based on race or creed, home invading, robbing… These are bad things. Sure, sometimes we play characters that do these things, and that’s not out of bounds, but we need to be extra cognizant of the character/player division and at least realize when we’re being a monster and when we’re not.

And if you are still at the level where you aren’t sure that these are bad things in the real world… You need to go un-fuck yourself. Your gaming is the least of your problems.

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The OGL: It’s Not Just d20

Posted on May 22, 2011 | 4 comments

Hey, so I keep seeing people confused about the Open Game License. My Open Gaming for Dummies article helps dispel some of that but let’s come out and get one thing clear – it’s not “just for D&D” or just d20-derived games. Open gaming is strong and diverse.

The OGL is just a license.  It’s like the open source Apache, GPL, or MIT licenses in that it can be applied by anyone – though it was written by WotC originally, it’s not owned by them and has no relation to what games can be released under it.

Guess what all game systems are open under the OGL license?

  • The Action! system (from Gold Rush Games)
  • Traveller (Mongoose’s version)
  • Runequest (Mongoose’s version)
  • The d6 system (from West End Games’ Star Wars and Ghostbusters)
  • Fudge and its newer more popular variant FATE and derivatives thereof, like ICONS

And many more, including many many d20 variants from Anime d20 to Mutants & Masterminds.  I’m not sure there’s a comprehensive list – here’s a couple that are old and out of date. But that’s like, a big share of the systems people have played over the decades.

And of course this doesn’t mention other open games published under other licenses, like Eclipse Phase is published under Creative Commons.

Really, publishers, is there a reason NOT to open license your system?  Because face it, your system kinda sucks.  They all do. Your best bet is to get it in the hands of as many people as possible so they’ll get interested and buy your products. If GURPS got open licensed, for example, maybe someone under 30 would play it.

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D&D Lair Assault: 4e Wallows In Its Own Filth

Posted on May 21, 2011 | 26 comments

The description of the new WotC Organized Play program made me throw up in my mouth a little.

I keep hoping 4e might come back from the brink.  Mike Mearls keeps posting “Ah yes, the good things we are starting to remember from older D&D editions” posts on his blog. Maybe D&D isn’t degenerating into a tactical minis game forever after all, I think.

And then they just up and announce it’s a tactical minis game. No really, go read the link.  The new OP is “tailored to groups of players who enjoy solving tactical puzzles, optimizing characters, and using rules to their advantage.” You come and minmax character builds and run them through a tactical simulation. If you die, it’s back to the save point and try again. Again, really, “Adventuring groups will often attempt a challenge several times before solving it.” The “D&D Fortune Cards are a required and integral part” isn’t even in the top 10 disturbing things about this.

Frankly, Organized Play is behind a lot of the bad stuff that started to corrupt 3e. It breeds a certain mindset and playstyle with very tightly constrained encounter difficulties, point buy min maxing, etc. that ends up corrupting the expectations of players. Now they are, as the kids today say, “Sticking it in and breaking it off” as far as that’s concerned.

I wonder how the people that always object to saying that 4e is becoming exactly like a computer game can even begin to continue to say that with a straight face now.

I mean, I don’t mind wargaming. I remember a lively game of Stargrunt II I played at a Gen Con.  But WotC needs to start a separate tactical game line and stop making everyone think that it is a roleplaying game. It just breeds more “It’s only about the kill” goons that inhabit local game tables, Internet forums, and eventually the ranks of adventure and supplement authors.

P.S.  If this is  your first visit here and you just don’t understand WHY…  I’m not gonna bother to link you to the past posts that explain how 4e is different from roleplaying games, etc.; if you can’t type “4e” into the search box above if you really want to find out, then you fall below the minimum INT required to care about whether you understand what’s going on…

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Games That Really Disappointed Me

Posted on May 21, 2011 | 19 comments

A thread on TheRPGSite about “Games You Really Wanted To Like But Couldn’t” struck a chord with me.  Here’s some of the games I really, really wanted to like but was sadly crushed by. Chime in with yours!

Rune. After Feng Shui, which I loved with an intense love, I was really looking forward to Robin Laws’ next game, and Vikings are cool, so it seemed like a shoo-in. Then when I got it, it was a weird budget-driven thing that I couldn’t even begin to attempt to run. You can’t put in a trap, you have to take the trap out of the budget for opposing elements…  Spreadsheet time! To create a Rune adventure you’d have to do days of prep and math, there is no “winging it.” A warning shot of what has mostly gone wrong with RPGs since in many ways. Recently I saw the 2e clone Myth & Magic trying to put in an “XP budget” thing in their scenario building and it gave me post-traumatic stress disorder flashbacks to Rune, I said “Rip that out POST HASTE boys!”

Savage Worlds. With Savage Worlds there isn’t enough meat there unless the GM is willing to be off-the-cuffing stuff, and ours wasn’t. “I’m sorry, that seems like a valid Strength trick but the game only defines Smarts and Agility tricks.” “Oh well then this system is boring as all get out as written.” Also probably the GM’s style is to blame, he’d just suddenly take 15 minutes to build a big HeroClix battle mat and put the exact same generic goblin and dwarf minis down on it (we never fought dwarves or goblins, they were just stand-ins) and look at us and say “What do you want to do?” “To what? Where are we? What do those goblins represent? Are they attacking us or something?” But we gave it two campaigns. Once the final one ended with us getting killed by the traditional SW “guy you can’t hit ever except on super lucky dice explosions” we boycotted.

With FATE, I’ve tried Spirit of the Century and Dresden Files. Spirit of the Century was just too big.  411 pages for a “pick-up” RPG?  There was no way to bootstrap a group into playing it.  With Dresden Files, it wasn’t really the core mechanics that got us. Well, maybe it was. I just remember the wizard continually outshining other people in their specialty, and then us taking an egregiously long time to cast some detection spell. “Do we have enough juju to make it work? No? OK, we put in… Some grass, because he was on grass when he was abducted! Still not enough? We put in… A phone book with his name in it! How about now?” We stole Aspects and just added them to our Pathfinder characters in some campaigns, that works well enough. Might give FATE a try in another circumstance, but it’s operating at “two strikes.”

D&D 4e, because I actually liked D&D in Basic, 1e, 2e, and 3e; then 4e took a big steaming dump on everything the game stood for.

M&M 2e and Spycraft 2e. I loved 1e of both, and I was fine with upgrading and bought the books for both new editions sight unseen. And with both, they took a fine RPG and ladled on big levels of complexity and made it read like an encyclopedia full of definitions and not a game. They were completely un-charming and in both cases after reading some, even with my previous understanding from the earlier edition, I didn’t really want to power through reading the rest of the weighty tome. There’s a game design philosophy that sometimes comes into vogue that says “Make it read like a big ol’ dictionary, and they can just piece it together from all the individual definitions!”  And that’s about as easy as learning a foreign language from a dictionary. Game designers, stop being lazy. Write a game.

I think it’s at this point I decided giant complex games were not for me any more and started eyeballing lighter approaches (though sadly Savage Worlds was supposed to be the lead candidate there).

Those are the games that I really, really wanted to like, that many people told me I should like, but that in the end I like so little that if our group was like “Let’s play X” I, who generally go along with whatever game system without comment, would have to say “Uh… I don’t know if I’d really enjoy that.”

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 46

Posted on May 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Forty-sixth Session – The Externals assault the Aegis system in force, and we have our entire fleet there to prevent them. We tear them a new one. Now we have to figure out what to do with all these weirdo prisoners!

This was an interesting session.  First we spent a good bit of time planning our strategy – we knew the aliens were coming.  Since we’ve teamed up with the Medurr and have access to their drivespace denial weapon, we came up with a plan to trigger it in microbursts designed to spread incoming ships out in a big ol’ line trailing out of the system.  We’d then put our forces in one big ball and roll them on up!

Before they come, we go and get the other forces in the system on our team – some Thuldans and some VoidCorpers. The Thuldans say yes, the VoidCorpers say no.

We were interrupted by a systemwide hack. I thought we had thwarted that back in the day but apparently not.  This took a LOT of rolls to resolve.  Taveer went out into cyberspace to thwart it. The enemy AI pretty much chased Taveer off and back to the station and started attacking us!  Once we got VERA and Captain Takashi into the fight, we finally managed to cut it off.

Then we found out it was a VoidCorp AI behind it all. They had some flimsy excuse but the Admiral pretty much told them they were going to join our fleet or we were going to seize their assets in the system.They gave in.

In an attempt to turn this whole thing around, we took the AI, VORL, and put it on a barge with some External wireless codes to mess with the incoming fleet.

But before the battle – a promotion!  I had actually written that “Letter to the Admiralty” and sent it to our GM Paul  a while back so that when we were in Bluefall and could get some admirals together that we could have a board of review to promote the faithful Martin St. John to Captain.  He was surprised! And in fact, once he was promoted, we talked about a command for him – it hadn’t originally been my plan, but Takashi as an Admiral has been kinda kicked upstairs to do full fleet command tactics a lot of the time, so he offered command of the Lighthouse to St. John, who accepted. Woot!  We put as much pomp and circumstance into it as the GM had patience for (not all that much). Hell, I’d be happy to do a whole session around just the promotion, but then I’m a roleplaying freak.

Then we fought the Externals and pretty much owned them.  Only two problems – one, the second fortress ship got away despite all our efforts to catch up to them (we’re not really sure how that worked, it was GM fiat) and also the rules tended to punish us for being big.  We were using a simple abstract system that uses Space Tactics rolls; that’s where Takashi is a Viking. Well, first round he rolls Amazing and the first bit of the enemy fleet rolls like Ordinary, they lose 15% of their force and we lose 5% of ours – but we are so much bigger we lose about as many ships as they do!  We were like “WTF!” Usually “stacking” all your forces is an advantage but in this ruleset it’s not, so next time we’ll go with small task forces that should get the same effect with fewer losses.

Suddenly we went from most of the Externals being rare “never seen by humans” stuff to “We have a prison hulk full of thaal, what the heck do we do with them?” We spent a lot of time trying to turn the various client races with mixed results. Not everyone is on board with the crazy Scientology religious heart of this war, but many of them are stupes who like their congenital slavery so it’s a hard nut to crack.

The bareem were like this.  We got some sifarv turncoats to command them all to help us, but Chris had the most inspired idea; we’re putting them through Concord Marine training not only to battle harden them but also to try to inculcate them with our values. Once they accept leadership other than the sifarv, and kill sifarv on orders, then they’ll become more liberated dudes, at least that’s the idea.

The A team is going to take half the fleet to Tendril to lift its siege and the B team is going to go RIF the Algemron system, which is probably controlled by teln mind-worms.

Interestingly, I think we kinda all unanimously and implicitly backed off going from one big serious space battle thing to another – after another half hour of roleplaying suddenly the next steps became smaller and closer to home!

We were looking for the N’sss (stealth space jellyfish) we are sure are in the system, and detected the VoidCorpers beaming clandestine messages into the gas giant (where N’sss like to hang out). Admiral Takashi lost his shit. Forget about interstellar diplomacy and weak excuses, this is an act of war and/or treason and he immediately ordered a Marine strike force to load up and assault VoidCorp’s Cloud City. After the AI thing, and finding out that they are trying to stop Old Space from coming to the Verge’s rescue, it was the last straw. They are clearly traitors against humanity and he’s not going to tolerate it another second. Long term consequences can worry about themselves.

Plus, there was a throwaway rumor about problems on the set of actor Jack Everstar’s new movie and suddenly, for no real reason, all the B team (while playing naked beach volleyball on Bluefall, our usual vacation time diversion) decided we all want to meet Everstar and have cooked up a Burn Notice/Leverage style plot to all get onto his movie crew.  Woot!

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