Hey Man, well this is Babylon

This week I met with three new players to start up a new Burning Wheel campaign. This one is based in a micro-setting I’ve had kicking around in my head for some time now, originally established for a game that never actually started. I’ll try and give it to you in a sentence: “In a near-industrial fantasy world where most everyone lives in massive isolated city-states, wars are fought not by armies, but by godlike warriors who duel with the powers of the heavens.” Each city-state has its chosen Proxy, and when conflicts arise, the Proxies duel it out to determine a victor.

This core paradigm extends all the way down into the deepest dregs of society, where even the most petty legal disputes are resolved by official bouts between representative warrior-proxies. While the Magnificantes themselves may be chosen chosen by the gods (at least, that’s what most of the peasantry and the new budding labor class believes), the proxies further down the scale are just top class warriors with official recognition, lawyers who represent by power of combat skill alone.

Torch is one such city-state, and within the dirtiest of its wrought-iron-encrusted streets is where our story begins. They’re all part of the underworld surrounding the lowest rungs of the Proxy fights, either directly involved with the shady dealings that pervade these bouts, or directly affected (victimized?) by them.

It’s kind of like The Wire meets The Lies of Locke Lamora meets Robot Jox. Read more

I have a confession to make: I am frequently “that guy” at the gaming table. No, not that guy, ew, gross *shudder* thank heavens no. I actually bathe. No, I mean that guy who gets a little too into his moments, a little carried away. I frequently lose touch with the rest of the group’s needs when I’m in that awesome moment of role-playing. I don’t try to steal the spotlight, mind you, but once I have it I tend to forget I am in the forefront and just run with the moment as long as I can. It’s not a conscious move I’m making, and once I realize that I may in fact be hogging I do my best to step back, and then feel really guilty about the whole thing for a bit.

Lately I tend to leave every game session with this unspoken fear that I went too far this time, that those seemingly awesome ideas of things to do and my efforts to bring them into play crossed a line. I wonder how much of this is overly self-conscious paranoia, and how much is really me getting a bit lost and over-zealous? Fearing that the latter may be the case, I ask you: how do you reign yourselves in, folks, when the spotlight gets a little too awesome to let go? How do you avoid being this guy?

Apocalypse World – the new game from Vincent Baker – has been making the rounds through all the gaming blogs I regularly follow. It’s a grim’n'gritty, totally player/character-driven game of post-apocalyptic inter-personal relations. I’ve heard it described on more than one occasion as “Firefly, but after the bombs.” It’s wicked fun, and I’m currently involved in two steady games of it.

On more than one of these aforementioned gaming blogs, the writers have made comments to the effect of “this ain’t the tabletop version of Fallout, kids” or “if you’re looking for the apocalypse Fallout, try Gamma World instead.” My first instinct was to nod my head and think “yeah, this game is way more mature than Fallout, that’s totally right.” But upon recent deeper play-throughs of Fallout 3, I realize that that couldn’t be further from the truth. Apocalypse World is perfect for bringing the world of Fallout to life.

Let’s face it: the Fallout universe is right fucked from the get-go. It’s the blasted remains of a world scorched by a global nuclear war started in the 2100s – a war fueled by civilizations that never shed their 1950s ideals. As you wander the wasteland in any direction you wish to explore, you see the remnants of those elitist, isolationist ideals everywhere. You never once forget that the way things are now was caused by the smothering hubris of the last generation of powers-that-be, and in their stead you find only ruin and chaos.

The Fallout franchise is frequently remembered for its tongue-in-cheek humor, but what tabletop game session isn’t, as well? I’ve played all the games in the franchise to date, and while I agree that that humor is there and in droves, the most recent game in the series at times takes a stark turn towards the depressing and macabre. As a prime example of how Fallout 3 can definitely work with Apocalypse World, let’s look at the town of Grayditch. Yes, there be spoilers behind the cut. Read more

I’ve very recently been lucky to land myself a place in two separate Apocalypse World games, as a player in one and the MC of the other.

The first one takes place in the small holding of Sludge Pump, an age-old water treatment plant that is now a fortified fountain with some hard-ass raiders inside it’s concrete walls. I’m taking on the role of CJ, a tough sumbitch gunlugger with an old west code of gunslinger’s honor. The two other primary players on the scene are a hocus named Dust and an angel named Key. Dust leads a rabble of filthy Armageddon-obsessed psychopaths, while Key does her best to keep folks alive while she plays at pulling the strings of internal power. So far, it’s set up to be something of a violent go at the game’s themes.

The game I’m actually MCing has been named “Graceland of the Wasteland” by the players, and it fits very well. I’ll go ahead and post one of the player’s basic notes here: Read more

I end this week with a poetic little idea I just had:

Heavy Metal Bands,
Using Blossoms are Falling:
Duel of Verse – Throw horns!

I’m slowly falling out of love (again) with Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. My love affair with this game has been a tumultuous one, I admit. When I first perused the leaked PDF copies pre-release, I practically loathed it. It did not seem the game for me. When I finally got a chance to actually play it, I was wowed by the tightness of its combat mechanics, the interoperability of the team roles, and the constant awareness of all your available options. In recent times I fought a brief addiction to the process of character-building, very similar to a previous addiction I had when first introduced to 3rd Edition’s drastic rules changes.

But now I feel that fling coming to an end (again?). The big kicker for me this time are the jolting unnatural transitions between the game’s core modes of play. In no other tabletop game do the words “Okay, everyone, roll for initiative” make me cringe so deeply. The switchover from Talk-Time to Fight-Time is so drastic, sudden, and severe that it breaks me out of my imaginative reverie and reminds me that yes, I really am only here to grind mobs for XP.

Consider these transitions as if they were part of a Japanese video RPG. These games have three basic modes. In Exploration Mode you move Your Guy around a typically disproportionately-represented dungeon, town, or world map. Sometimes you interact with the scenery when exclamation points appear above Your Guy’s head. Sometimes you talk to other NPCs in the game setting, most of which just repeat the same lines of dialog every time you select the talk command. Read more

(I totally meant to post this Friday, but when saving it I forgot to set the auto-post time-thinger and only realized it today. Might as well add a few more notes to it, then.)

I was going to mention this last week but got side-tracked: the Alliterated Games Forums are down for an indefinite period of time. No one was using them, and they were just collecting spammers and bots. If I bring them back up in the future, it will likely be as part of…

The new website I’m putting together! The current AG website isn’t all that easy to update without me breaking things, so I’m setting up a content management suite to handle the basics. My first order of business is to get the basic game pages set up and an official newsfeed. After that, having a forum again would be nice, but it isn’t a major priority. I also want to set up a cart application, so folks can buy things directly from my website, without me having to handle fulfillment through Paypal.

Alpha Protocol continues to rock my knickers. I am only halfway through the game, and I’m already itching for a second play-through. My current style is the suave, stealthy master of the silent kill. My second play will be all BigGuns McDoucheBaggins, the no-questions-asked bullet-loving commando. I am looking forward to see more of the drastic changes in story and play I’ve already sipped with the handful of checkpoint replays I’ve experimented with in the game so far.

One thing about it that I really dig – and wish other games would pick up ASAP – is the Social Mission. A lot of Alpha Protocol’s game play involves hands-on espionage, sneaking into secret complexes and doing all that cool stealth-action spy stuff that makes movies like The Bourne Identity awesome. But almost as many game missions are purely social: you arrive on scene, meet a guy, try and make a deal of some sort, and hopefully walk away with a new ally or piece of information. The clothes you wear in these missions frequently makes a difference, so you should remember to switch out of that tactical armor before heading off to have dinner with the syndicate honcho, otherwise you might piss her off with your incredible social faux pas. I love this, and aside from Mass Effect 2 – which only has a small handful of missions like these – I’ve not seen it implemented in other mission-based games.

This coming weekend will be Free RPG Day! Every year I get excited about this one, as my favorite local game store Guardian Games always has a big shindig to celebrate. This year I’ll be running the new teaser adventure Final Sanction for the upcoming Deathwatch RPG from Fantasy Flight Games – the newest RPG in the Warhammer 40K product line. I’m not well-versed in the W40K universe, but this one looks nice – it’s the equivalent to me of the Starcraft storyline: Space Marines in massive suits of power armor fighting wave upon wave of infectious buglike monster hordes.

I leave you with a video for a song that’s been stuck in my head all morning:

Bold statement, that, yes? And I mean every syllable of it. Let me explain.

Despite mostly-mediocre or slightly-above-average reviews, I have fully immersed myself in this game over the last few days, and plan to keep that up for the next few to follow. After completing the first two “chapters” of the game, I am convinced that like Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Alpha Protocol is one of the best representations I’ve ever seen of core tabletop RPG concepts being implemented in a digital gaming format.

So far, I’m in love with this game, and want to tell you all about all of its awesome components, right there alongside all of its annoying and downright awful ones. But this isn’t a review. Don’t get me started on how I feel that most graded online game reviews are totally bunk. I’ll save that for a later time. No, this is more of an essay.

When asking gamers to declare “what defines a game as a RPG,” you’ll get a good variety of answers. Most console gamers will be quick to define a RPG as a game with a skill-based advancement system, where the internal mechanics of your character improve as you invest rewarded experience points into them. Many tabletop gamers will tell you that yes, advancement is fun or even crucial, but the ability to make choices for their characters is also pretty requisite. Without choice, you’re really only playing a limited combat-based board game with progressing development mechanics. Without choice, you’re not playing a role. Read more

After hitting some major design hurdles in Forevergotten, I decided to take a break from that project last night and return to my prior one: Billions and Billions of Bullets. I’m glad I did, too, because the issues that had previously halted my progress on that one a few months ago were easily overcome with time and a new perspective. Now I’m happily trucking along that creative track again, with some fresh new ideas and some fitting updates to old ones.

Probably the biggest update this time is that I’ve made a major breakthrough in redefining the four main Gun Characteristics, and how they tie into the core challenge mechanic. I’m pretty excited about this, because after a good couple of hours of work I had revamped the conflict rules and tooled them into something truly rewarding in all the ways they’ve been lacking until now. Faster-flowing, and with a speed-based strategy that I just love.

This weekend I’ll be running my very first Dogs in the Vineyard game. Judd gave me some initial pointers and it was a purely downhill ride from there to create a town that I hope will really hook the players. I’ll post the details after I run it. I’m hoping this can lead to a good three-to-five-session mini-campaign before we move to the next game in our new rotating group configuration.

This coming Monday – memorial Day! – sees the second annual May of the Dead celebration around the corner at Guardian Games. Last year’s event was stellar fun, and this year’s plans are promising to at least equal that level of awesome, if not exceed it.

My play-through of Alan Wake continues slowly, primarily because I’m playing it with at least two other very interested people watching along. We finished Chapter 3 on Wednesday night, and all were in agreement: that chapter took too damn long in comparison to the two that preceded it. On the other hand, if the following chapters are going to be that long as well, then maybe this game will have a satisfactory play length. That right now is a concern we all at my place share: that this game will be disappointingly short when played out-of-the box. My worry is that with two chapters of DLC already announced at launch time, this sixty-dollar new game might not actually be complete. If I finish the game without a feeling of satisfaction, I’m not certain how I will respond to that. The reviews have been pretty positive, however, so I’m not allowing myself to dwell too heavily on the possibility of disappointment just yet.

At this very moment, I’m glad to see that my XBox Live Gamertag here shows four of my favorite games on it, and one really awesome one that I mentioned just one paragraph above.

Here are some links:

1. Yet Another Fantasy Gaming Comic – I devoured the entire 1300+ strip series of this over the past weekend, and want all of you to enjoy it as well. It made me laugh something fierce, but actually brought a couple of tears to my eyes at various points. A damn fine epic comic.
2. Agree-a-Date – Got problems matching up your gaming schedules, or heck, your social calendars? This is the best free web tool I’ve found to organizing gatherings when the free time of the intended participants is hard to sync. I’ve used it several times, with smashing results.

After re-reading my last post, I started thinking a lot more heavily on the idea of lighting mechanics, and how they both are and can be implemented in games both video and tabletop.

Video Games

I find that lighting is most often used in video games for purely atmospheric and aesthetic purposes. That’s all fine and good, but let’s get down and talk about actual mechanical uses of lighting in games. In these cases, we’re looking for games in which the lighting has direct effects not just on the mood and sensory input of the player, but on the game’s tangible play. What I’m not talking about are games which use light to limit your intake of the game (Google the infamous “duct tape mod” for Doom III to see what players think about that kind of thing). What I am talking about are implementations of lighting which enhance the actual playing of the game.

While Dragon Warrior was already discussed as having a nicely-implemented lighting system, it doesn’t fit my criteria as defined above: DW’s lighting limits your perception, and doesn’t actually enhance the mechanics. I am hard-pressed to think of a single video RPG that I’ve ever seen to make use of lighting mechanically, in fact. Read more