Tag Archives: RPGs

Our Alternity Campaign Is Still Rockin’

Posted on May 1, 2011 | 1 comment

Let’s hear it for science fiction gaming.  Our group has been running a campaign using the venerable TSR game Alternity for, goodness, nearly two years now!  The campaign is called The Lighthouse, as it is mostly set aboard the eponymous Galactic Concord space station in the Star*Drive universe. Paul is our faithful GM, who is using pretty much all the extant Alternity sources as part of one huge megacampaign.

It’s an interesting game that has a good bit of Babylon 5/Star Trek flavor.  Each player has two characters, in fact.  One is part of what we have taken to calling the “A Team” which is mostly command staff aboard the Lighthouse.  I play Captain Ken Takashi (since promoted to Admiral), the commanding officer. Patrick plays the faithful station pilot Commander Martin St. John, Bruce plays the eccentric mechalus engineer Taveer, Tim plays Haggernak, the weren station Concord Administrator (police chief). Chris was playing a CIB spy who died, and now it’s arguable which of his characters is “A team” – we’ll call it Drest, the Pict warchief who has come aboard with a task force of Picts from Lucullus who are flinging their bodies into the interstellar fray. You can check out our character sheets here.

Our second characters come from the seedy underbelly of the station. Disaffected diplomats, criminals, and other miscreants.  I play Markus the retired warlion shock trooper (who is bartender of the station bar/casino The Corner, and deals arms on the side), Patrick plays Lenny the T’sa “diplomat” (a semiretired master thief), Bruce plays Lambert Fulson the demented illegal merchant, Tim plays Ambassador Peppin (a dissolute professor who spent most of his career preying on coeds), and Chris plays Ten-zil Kem (apparently a VoidCorp diplomat but really a sleeper agent for an opposing faction).

The Lighthouse is a space station with a stardrive, and it wanders the Verge, a poorly populated part of space cut off from the main galactic civilization by a galactic war some time ago, spreading the law of the new Galactic Concord. We have been caught up in a holy war spearheaded by a variety of demented alien races who seek humanity’s death and/or enslavement. Unfortunately, they did not count on our resourcefulness, tenacity, or enormous capacity for violence.

We write up each of our adventures in some detail; you can read each session’s delightful mix of adventure and in-jokes on our session summary page.

This week will be Alternity Week here on Geek Related; we’ll celebrate the the game with some in depth looks at the system, characters, and campaign. Chime in with your experiences if you’ve played it too!

1 Comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , , , ,

Decrease Metagaming, Increase Immersion

Posted on April 26, 2011 | 18 comments

Immersion. Actually taking on the role of your character in an RPG; behaving, and ideally feeling, like you are a person in this shared fictional world. To me, immersion is the heart and soul of roleplaying.  If I just wanted to push my character around a board and perform cool combat combos, there are a lot of wargames and stuff out there that are arguably better at it, and a lot of computer games that are definitely better at it. I often wonder why people that don’t value playing “in character” play RPGs at all.

But since a lot of players don’t “get” immersion, it can be hard to achieve.  In fact, it seems like game designers don’t “get” immersion any more – D&D 4e makes it difficult with their dissociated mechanics, and that’s just the most mass-market version – a lot of the hot new indie games are more narrativist/gamist and are more interested in taking a God’s eye view to characters and scenes and thus create a story – but not to live a story. Often I think this is a result of people not having actually been in an immersive game, because the ones I’ve been in have been some of the best experiences of my life,and the other people in them don’t want to settle for less in the future either.

I read a great question on the Paizo boards about how to get more immersion and less metagaming in Pathfinder. It didn’t get near as much attention as I’d like, so I reposted it over onto RPG Stack Exchange, where it’s starting to get some great answers, especially from Runeslinger and LordVreeg.

Please consider joining the discussion here, or on RPG.SE, or on Paizo. I think that there needs to be a lot more discussion about things like immersion, which are the real core of the hobby, not “here’s some more feats or geomorphs or some shit like that.” It’s always harder to write about “soft skills” than hard skills, but the problem is that since the industry (and blogosphere) does that, eventually the hard rules stuff drowns out the soft techniques part.

18 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , ,

Fixing the Gunslinger

Posted on April 24, 2011 | 16 comments

We have been using primitive firearms in our Pathfinder campaign Reavers on the Seas of Fate, and watched with interest Paizo’s publishing of new gun rules and the Gunslinger class as part of a playtest for Ultimate Combat. In this last Reavers session, I put in a pirate captain with four levels of gunslinger to kick the class’ tires.

The gunslinger class is fine.  But the gun rules Paizo published are awful and suck utterly. Because their gun damage output is so low, and because they published them before the gunslinger class and they were therefore not up for playtest, to be viable the gunslinger ends up spending loads of abilities on getting more and more attacks, which is of course totally unrealistic with early firearms. It also drove them to include revolvers and other anachronistic weapons in a desperate attempt to fix their rules by sacrificing the game world, and even with all that they don’t favorably compare to the other classes in damage output. I actually had Wogan switch over to the Paizo gun rules for several sessions to give them a fair shake but we all decided they were just preposterously bad.

If your sword-and-sorcery fantasy world concept includes people reloading and shooting guns multiple times a round or blazing away with twin revolvers, then sure, use their rules. I think that’s a bit of a stretch however. A lot of people don’t like including firearms at all, and many of us who do want it to be more “Pirates of the Caribbean” than “Hard Boiled.” The “emerging guns” level as they describe it in the Paizo playtest doc.

Luckily, the fix is simple. I used my existing gun rules – in fact, after consideration and a year of playtest, I upped their damage to pistol: 2d6, musket: 3d6. I’ll note the gun rules in the Freeport Pathfinder Companion from Green Ronin have them doing even more damage that I just upped ours to, like 3d6/4d6! I didn’t want to go all that way yet, but after more time I can’t say we won’t. Then I told everyone “there is no combination of powers that lets you get off more than a shot per round per chamber.” Reload time is move action minimum.  No class powers to reload faster. And I don’t have revolvers and whatnot – I mean, maybe something like that could be found as part of a crashed spaceship in Numeria, but not in common use.

In fact, this pirate captain had as much as I’m willing to do in medieval/renaissance fantasy, which is a double pistol (two barrels). You can shoot both in a round at -4, or do one at a time. He had Rapid Reload so he could load and fire once a round. Or you can draw and shoot multiple pistols in a round (needing quick draw), but then you run out of loaded guns quick.

We did keep one part of the Paizo rules, kinda, in that they had firearms be a touch attack in the first range increment. We changed that to “versus flat-footed AC” (like everyone on the playtest boards told them they should do, but they ignored). This provides firearms a little extra boost. They still need it, because one shot at 2d6 damage is still worse than your average archer who can crank out 2 1d8+STR attacks with Rapid Shot (and a hundred other enhancement options besides). Especially since the guns have misfire chance.

Even with all that, the captain had a hard time hitting Sindawe – of course he wasn’t single class gunslinger (he was level 8 to the PC’s level 5, though) and Sindawe had a monk’s AC, where even flat-footed is high,and he was spending ki on keeping it at like 25.

The pirate captain got to use all his abilities. He used pistol-whip on a pirate the PCs charmed to attack him, he used quick clear because his gun jammed while Sindawe was swimming around the cave, he used snap shot on the PC’s first action, and used utility shot to set off the gunpowder keg bomb. And he combined his rogue sneak attack with it once when Sindawe was flat-footed.

So in the end, fixing the gunslinger to be a playable and balanced and non-anachronistic class is easy.

  1. Fix the guns. Use my gun rules and up the damage to pistol: 2d6, musket: 3d6
  2. Fix the gunslinger.  Change the “super fast actions” powers like Lightning Reload to something else. Maybe have Rapid Reload just take reload times down to one full round action and then Lightning Reload can take it to one move action.

I have to admit, I’m a little cheesed at Paizo. They keep running these playtests, but of the wrong things. It’s always “here, playtest this class,” seemingly more as a marketing promo than as an actual desire for input, but it’s the weapons that everyone can use that need more playtesting. Adventurer’s Armory was poorly tested and edited and was riddled with errors and bad ideas many of which haven’t been clarified to this day (like how brass knuckles etc. interact with monk attacks). They should have playtested these gun rules – most of their Gunslinger playtest was an exercise in “how do we make bad gun rules feasible” which is not an insipiring mission statement.

16 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

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

Posted on April 23, 2011 | 2 comments

Ninth Session (10 page pdf) – “Architects of Ruin” – An assault on some hidden caves goes drastically wrong and half the party is captured by various miscreants. Pirates! Ghosts! Guns! Orca! Explosions! Gates to other worlds! Thrill to the hard-hitting action in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate.

Well, this session didn’t quite go how I thought it would. The PCs found the hidden caves of dungeoney fun, but as most of them looked at going in through a secret door, Sindawe dives in through a sea cave and finds a whole crew of pirates at work. And then he decides to take them all on  himself! I was a bit surprised at that. He made a good run at it really, even when surrounding him and getting sneak attacks it took natural 20’s for the mook pirates hto hit his super boosted monk AC. And even the pirate captain, Screev Ten-tooth, was having a bit of a hard time shooting him with his nifty double barreled pistol. But then the captain pulled out his alchemical flare shots, which blinded Sindawe, and that left him open to some intense whupass.  I tried to encourage him to dive back in and swim for it (being in the water gets you some intense cover bonuses, he benefited from them coming in) but he just fought it out till he went down, I’m not sure why. He killed half the pirate gang, which came in handy later though, that’s for sure.

You can download Screev Ten-tooth from the Reavers NPC page. He’s an expert2/gunslinger4/rogue2.

While this was going on, the PCs tried to come in the other way – it’s possible they could have rolled the whole dungeon up in the middle – but the siren ghost fended them off, taking prisoners (Hatshepsut and Akron Erix), routing Clegg Zincher’s goons, and charming Serpent and Tommy.  So off they go, to find the giant dread wraith lover boy of the siren ghost – they were lovers back in the day, but a hateful priest and some villagers killed the siren and then the dude hung himself. I figured they were going to have to kill him, but they actually managed to talk the wraith down and get him to follow them to the siren’s lair. I made that really hard to do, and halfway he started going after Wogan because he confused him with the priest that killed the siren, but each time they talked him down – high skills and assists getting those 30+ DCs required. Thus they overcame the whole siren ghost/dread wraith thing pretty handily! She gave them a parting blessing, even.

Then they found the Dark Gate, the one opened by the blast from the Cyphergate, bringing the real world and the shadow world (aka spirit world, demon dimension, monster realm) together with their world. They realized the bits of Tammerhawk’s glyph that exploded when they disrupted the ritual in the Riddleport Light (aka Shadow in the Sky/Madness in Freeport) embedded in them are attuned to the gate somehow.

They did a hurry-up attack on the pirates – they had to break through a barricade in the face of a swivel gun, luckily Wogan knows just when to pop an obscuring mist to provide cover. They hacked through the pirate crew. The captain used a flare shot to shoot a gunpowder bomb with a short length of quickfuse on it. That took us into slo-mo really quickly – Serpent went for the keg, and other people dove for cover. I said the fuse would take d6 segments (ticks in the initiative count) to burn down, so there was a lot of risk involved. Serpent managed to grab it and chunk it out into the sea cave before it went off with a massive shuddering crash. Then the pirate captain held his gun in Sindawe and ordered them to surrender their arms.

I am not a kind and forgiving GM. When someone has a person in that position, they get a free coup de grace whenever anyone tries anything – I am NOT a believer in “the bad guy has a knife to her throat!” “We take our full round of attacks, he’s dead, yay!” That’s BS.  But luckily, Wogan had a spare Infamy Point to spend. He whipped his pistol out and shot that gun right out of the captain’s hand! He out-gunned a gunslinger. Good one. Then the orca watching over Sindawe came out of the water and chomped him.

(This generated some argument from Chris, Sindawe’s player… He swam into the sea cave during the day, when the water is illuminated from the sunlight outside and was seen easily; the orca came in at night when it couldn’t be seen… This chafed him for some reason.)

The session ended up with all of them in the water again – this time to escape the tender ministrations of the tentacle-dogs that came out of the Dark Gate after them. And then a shadow demon came boiling out!

Earlier in the session, Paul (Serpent), who had run Second Darkness for another group, had said “thanks for taking out that shadow demon, that thing was a bitch!” I was like “Uh, sure, no problem <snicker>.”

Maybe we should just start every session with the PCs all in water. Make a theme out of it. Maybe in the HBO series that will inevitably be made. “Reavers, this fall from HBO!”

My favorite exchange from this session:

The pirate captain calls, “Arr! Surrender and ye can be part of my crew!”
“What are the terms of this deal?” Sindawe calls while continuing to swim for the tunnel.
“Arr. You can be me cabin boy and I promise to not be too rough on ya.”

2 Comments

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , ,

Do You Have A Question About Gaming?

Posted on April 20, 2011 | 1 comment

If you have a burning question about gaming – rules, player or GM techniques, game recommendations, and want answers without a bunch of nonsense, consider coming to ask that question on RPG Stack Exchange.  It has a bunch of experts standing by eager to answer your question.

It’s not a forum, it’s a Q&A system based on the preeminent coder tool Stack Overflow. You ask your question, be clear what you’re asking for, tag your question, and maybe revise your question based on comments from the community.  Everyone else provides honest to goodness on topic answers, nothing else is tolerated, and people vote those answers up based on how good they think they are.  You as the question asker get to select what you think the best answer is too.

I’ve despaired of asking questions on RPG forums any more. It always gets bogged down in endless threadjacks, people saying “but you shouldn’t play that way,” and dozens of posts of nonsense for every post that kinda actually tries to answer your question. RPG.SE fixes that problem in spades; it’s not for hobnobbing, it’s for serious analysis of specific questions.

Want to know about good tools for a GM to use to organize their campaign notes? Or how to reduce dice reliance in a game? Looking for ways to get PCs angry without also annoying your players?

Come ask your question, it’s free and easy, and I bet you’ll get more solid answers than if you go ask the same question on any given gaming forum!

1 Comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , ,

Submissions Open For the ENnies

Posted on April 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

The yearly RPG awards are coming around again. Check out the list of nominees. If a good product you know isn’t in there, send this link to the publisher and get them to submit themselves – there’s only a bit to go, May 8 is the deadline. Last year Paizo humiliated all the competition but this year all they have submitted is paizo.com and the Ultimate Combat playtest for some reason so it’s an open field!

Leave a comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , , ,

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

Posted on April 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

Eighth Session (8 page pdf) – “The Devil’s Elbow” – The PCs make some unlikely allies as they brave a remote island seemingly inhabited by beings from beyond time and space. All this and more, in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate.

The PCs shack up with Clegg Zincher in an unlikely alliance.  Tommy really, really wants to kill Zincher, to the point where his player’s emailing me lengthy assassination plots to ask what I think about them. But apparently he and his men are the only other people on this Godforsaken island.I had fun with the players’ interaction with  him.  He doesn’t hate them like they hate him, he’s on top and they work for some guy he has had to put in his place a couple times.  Just business from his point of view.  And whenever the players got too sassy I had him just let out a big wiseguy “Ayyyyyyyyyyyyy!”

Plus, Tommy was suffering from void death from the bite of the tentacle-dogs. He was remarkably submissive about being strapped to a cot in the infirmary tent with two other infected as a precautionary measure.  Sindawe kindly decided to go in there and sit up with him.

My chase rules come in handy in all kinds of circumstances – the PCs got attacked by tentacle dogs in the woods and hightailed it to the beach. They did well and got to the sand just as the dogs attacked.  I then made Arbitrary Surf Checks – the waves came in and out, moving the water line up and back 1d6 squares each round. That made it lively.

The rest was just island exploration. Slow paced, but I like mixing up big action pieces with lulls that build tension. Next time, a big finish!

Leave a comment

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , ,

Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 42

Posted on April 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

Forty-second Session – Tendril falls to the Externals. We send the Red Queen to Mantebron to figure out what the Externals want with the Glassmaker artifacts there – apparently they’ve extracted an alien superweapon. We risk our lives to go down to the ruins ourselves, and find out nothing that wasn’t already obvious. Then we weigh the odds – two alien fortress ships against one party of PCs.  The B Team decides “We can take ’em!” All this and more in this fortnight’s session of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!

I missed the first part of the session, resulting in the rest of the party getting chewed up by alien dogs. When a glass spider asks which one of them it should implant with horrid alien devices, Peppin and Taveer both fall all over themselves volunteering. On the basis that Peppin “sounds like you already have at least two people in there already,” Taveer is chosen and as usual plays it up to the hilt. Finally I arrive and the grenades start flying, and we finish out crawling the Glassmaker ruin, for all the good it did us.  We got a lengthy description of how unstoppable the obviously unstoppable weapon the Externals got is, which we knew already, and that they are gathering Ancient artifacts for some fell purpose, which we knew already, and that they want to make the Deepfallen on Bluefall disintegrate everyone on the planet, which we knew already.

Finally we head out, and Markus talked everyone else into taking a run at the fortress ship.  If it gets out of here with that weapon then there’s no way we can ever take it in a space combat. The ship is still partially splayed open to install it so I figure if we can get on there and sabotage it, fire it off before it’s well seated and have it rip the ship apart, or set off a nuke by it, or shoot it into the other fortress ship, or something, then we can remove the threat. And the B Team is the group of people to do it!

Leave a comment

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , , ,

Monster Mayhem is Coming!

Posted on March 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

Speaking of Necromancer Games, they had put out three volumes of good monsters in the 3.5e days called Tome of Horrors I-III.  Well, now all three are being published in one super huge volume by Frog God Games, The Tome of Horrors Complete, in either Pathfinder or Swords & Wizardry formats!

The thing is huge, and is now preordering for $90.  It’ll be over 1000 pages and have 750 or so monsters in it. And you get a PDF version along with of course.  Get this, and never want more monsters again! At least in August, when it comes out.

Leave a comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , ,

How 4e Loses Its Biggest Fans

Posted on March 31, 2011 | 10 comments

There’s a good post by Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games on ENWorld where he explains how he got converted from the “biggest non-WotC cheerleader of 4e” to saying “bah” and now planning to support Pathfinder.

WotC has perfected the art of screwing things up with this edition.  Hopefully all of Mearls’ Legends & Lore columns asking people about how they really like to play (hint: not the 4e way, is the general tenor of the responses) will culminate in a better D&D 5e sooner rather than later. And perhaps whoever is in WotC legal (and marketing, and product planning) will get tied to some railroad tracks.

10 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , ,

Razor Coast Coming From LPJ Design?

Posted on March 30, 2011 | 10 comments

[Edit: Never mind, this was an especially douchebaggy April Fool’s joke by Louis Porter. But he’s apologized for the lapse in judgement, so water under the bridge.]

If you haven’t been keeping up, Nick Logue’s Sinister Adventures was working up a mega pirate adventure called Razor Coast that had great potential. Preorders were taken. Nick kept dropping the ball, and Lou Agresta picked it up and whipped the manuscript into shape.  I was one of the two volunteer proofers on the project, and I really believe in the product.

But then Lou (and we!) delivered the product back to Nick, and it continued to languish, and finally the Sinister Web site went down for the last time. All seemed lost.

But in Louis Porter Jr’s latest blog post, he hints with his trademark subtlety (which is to say, not at all subtly) that he’s involved in it somehow and will be bringing it to market! That would be amazing. I’m glad it worked out, he did kinda bust Logue’s balls a couple times about the whole fiasco, I’m glad Nick saw that it was justified instead of backing away.

Razor Coast should be amazing – and I’ve read it! I hope it got a little cleaning up since the last version I saw, but it’ll definitely be many, many sessions of gaming goodness for those who partake, if it is finally going to see the light of day.

10 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , ,

Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 41

Posted on March 30, 2011 | Leave a comment

Forty-first Session – The Lighthouse is going to Cambria to meet the Medurr, but is knocked out of drivespace early and has to head off an alien setup. Then we throw our Picts into battle against the kroath! Under 50% losses is a victory in our book. The Medurr sign on to the Verge Alliance, and we plot strategy. All this and more in this fortnight’s session of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!

Bruce (Taveer, Lambert Fulson) has taken to attending the game via Skype, because he’s too much of a wuss to drive from Dallas to Austin every weekend. Since we upgraded to a HD camera it works pretty well, and when he starts gibbering we can mute him, which makes the game go smoother than previously even.

We discover the Medurr have a drivespace denial weapon, which we thought was impossible, in addition to the riftships we had thought were impossible. The N’sss conduct a transparent “We’re attacking the Medurr and we must be treacherous humans” ploy, which we foil by blowing up one of their ghost ships.  Then they dump a bunch of kroath on the Medurr, and the big tough Klingon centaurs start whining like bitches. So we finally pop the tab on all those insane Pict warriors we brought on board in Lucullus and start the kill.

We finished that up pretty quickly, and then burned two hours debating where to send our various battle groups to in order to defend the Verge from the “alien fleets so massive you can’t beat a single one of them,” to hear the GM tell it.  Sigh.

Leave a comment

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , , ,