Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Just a small handful of things spring to mind in review of this week. Two nights ago I started up a new Fallout 3 game, this time with the intention of playing it like a true Wastelander. That means: not hoarding every single thing I find back in my locker at Megaton, foraging as I go, using only the weapons I can scavenge and maintain as I go, dropping what I can’t carry, and leaving small caches of equipment stashed here and there. This time my name is Shrike, a no-nonsense tough bitch from Vault 101, self-proclaimed protector of Megaton and its environs following the unfortunate violent death of its previous sheriff, the late Lucas Simms¹.

So far, my quest has been well-fought but hard-won. I’ve lost a few circumstantial allies on occasion, including a poor scavenger who got caught in the crossfire when those no-good Talon Merc goons jumped me, but thankfully, word is getting out: Shrike’s gunning for the bad guys, and the bad guys be scared. Just last night I donned my favorite leather jacket², pumped myself up on Buffout and MedX, and took out an entire clutch of nasty Raiders using only a Louisville Slugger I had affectionately named Pablo. I barely had time to catch my breath as I led my assault, needing to take them out with as much celerity as possible so as to maximize the effectiveness of my chemically-skyrocketed battle prowess. I charged through their compound – one insultingly forged out of the ruins of an old elementary school – and wiped their filthy souls from the planet with minimal injury. Then I slept off my wounds in their own beds, dragged their bodies into a central heap, peed on their dead leader’s corpse, and set them all ablaze with their own flamethrower before leaving the next morning.

I fucking hate Raiders.

What’s next for Shrike? Word is there’s some “family” of villains terrorizing the poor nearby settlement of Arefu. An easy-on-the-eyes dame named Lucy ain’t seen or heard from her folks up there in quite some time. As the new sheriff of these parts, I reckon it’s ’bout time I let these cheeky bastards know who’s now in charge ’round here. Time to go give this family a taste of the Baseball Bat o’ Justice. Pablo’s a close talker, a real social type.

This past Monday night saw another session of my weekly Savage Worlds game. I’ve become a bit slack with this game, owing in no small part to the increasing difficulty of me running games on Monday nights. This campaign’s days are acknowledgedly numbered, but thankfully this most recent session really got my blood pumping again. I eagerly await the ending few sessions of the series, in part because gaming on Mondays is takings its toll on me, but mostly because I really want to know what happens next. The beauty of running this game largely from the seat of my pants is that when it gets me, it really gets me, and I’m as eager to know the future as the players are. I’ll wait a few more sessions before I post things in detail, though.

I’ll end this post with a little idea: Iron Kingdoms, done with Warhammer FRP 3rd Edition. I think it would rock.

Footnotes

¹ PS: thanks for the bitchin’ coat and hat, Luke. RIP
² Tunnel Snakes rule! *shove*

I know I’ve mentioned this game a few times before, but I’d like to take some time out right now to put some spotlight on one of my small handful of ongoing projects. The campaign I call “Timiro Nights” started as an extended playtest for my now-abandoned KnownWorld Palladium RPG rules hack. After only three sessions, I had grown tired of the cumbersome mentality of the mechanical source material – no matter how you package or rearrange its numbers, the Palladium RPG system is just a sad sack of unbalanced hackneyed crap.

But damn me if I can’t shrug off my love for the core fantasy setting! It’s straight-up old school fantasy excitement, and my love for it is nigh boundless. The lands are rich with adventure, the gods come down and fuck with mortal pawns like it ain’t no thang, social conflict and strife are everywhere, and ancient beings of infinite malignant power lie slumbering beneath the world’s surface. It’s just plain rad, if you ask me. Of course it also helps that this was the setting I first ever “officially” tabletopp’d in, way back in my middle school years.

Anyway, long story short: KnownWorld was getting old, Palladium’s core system blows hobos, and we switched to Burning Wheel. We’ve had a much better time since then. So allow me to introduce our heroes! Read more

This past weekend I had the unexpected pleasure of running a last-minute session of the new Warhammer Fantasy RPG – the 3rd Edition boxed set from Fantasy Fight Games, to be specific. The folks over at Gnome Stew have an excellent “unpacking” article on the game, with lots of pictures of its juicy innards, so I’ll skip that part and get right to the fun.

I’ve had this for a couple of weeks now, and have been itching to give it a test run. I wasn’t expecting to break it out in full game mode so soon, having only read the player book and most of the GM book (and not even touching the magic books yet). But when the call came in, it was the first thing that popped into mind, and in hindsight, I think it was a great idea. Despite none of us having any real experience with it, the end result was a very positive one. Read more

I am currently running a game that meets once a month, sometimes a little more than that. Arranging these game sessions has been fairly taxing in the past, as sometimes one or more players (or even myself) will forget when the next session is, or instead won’t know all the details of their future schedule when we get to the part of the night wherein we set the date of our next gathering.

After much search, trial, and error, I’ve found a fantastic free online service that makes session-arrangement much less of a scheduling headache. It’s called Agree-a-Date. This service allows the scheduler to pick any number of dates and times he or she will be available, then have the other players pick out individually which of those offered time slots also work for them. Additionally, it includes an open-ended question and voting system, allowing easy polling of such things as “where we playing tonight?” and “what do you guys want to do for dinner?” and “who can pick up Steve this time?”

If you ever have similar problems getting our players to agree on a date for your next session, check this one out.

This past weekend, I finally made the official complete switch, fully translating the events, characters, and setting from my KnownWorld “Timiro Nights” campaign into the Burning Wheel game system. This particular campaign is relatively new (only a handful of sessions so far since inception), but it has been a consistent source of gaming joy for me since getting the group together. It’s been a while since I’ve had a group this responsive, and this eager to extend the game talk well into our downtime. I’m glad to say that so far, the conversion to the new rules has been a success. I’d like to take a few here and talk about the juicy technical bits behind that conversion, and my own ideas of how the Burning Wheel system should work. Read more

I’ve always been a big proponent of the incorporation of technology into the planning and execution of tabletop role-playing. Since my earliest days of GMing, I’ve incorporated music into my games, usually through stereos, computers, or (more recently) portable MP3 players, and I’ve occasionally been known to use a handheld voice-changer to create dramatic NPC voices. I’ve frequently found that electronic visuals can help as well, be they images keyed up on a laptop screen, transparent maps on an overhead projector (note to self: get one of these), or slide-show atmospheric visuals on a HDTV. Most recently, I’ve been pondering methods to entirely digitize my game-planning process.

First off, at least a few people are likely to wonder why someone would want to do this in the first place. After all, Pencil and Paper have been the good ol’ trusty standby since the dawn of the hobby, and are in fact the core components of the very medium itself. Gaming is supposed to consist of dice, notebooks, a mountain of gaming texts, and pencils, right? I find a few drawbacks to this format, however. As technology has evolved – and as society has in turn evolved to focus upon that technology – changes in lifestyles have seen people spending increasing chunks of time in front of computers. Not only that, but the gaming library itself has seen a dramatic shift towards the digital horizon, as more and more game companies are putting digital copies of their books available for download online, with some of them being online exclusive altogether. Even some entire gaming groups themselves have moved to entirely-digital game “tables,” using interfaces such as OpenRPG, the D&D Insider, and Skype. As my own game library drastically shrinks in physical volume, and as my laptop becomes an ever-more-crucial tool for me as a GM, I find that I likewise want to minimize the amount of paper notes I port around with me, keeping my trusty gaming satchel nice and compact. If I could have it my way, my bag would consist of nothing more than a laptop, a dice bag (I just gotta have that tangible impetus), a deck of cards, and some always-useful counting tokens.

After toying around with a handful of applications for my own planning purposes, I realized that others just might have a lot of the same questions and curiosities in this matter as I. I am now working on putting together a series of good review posts which focus on integrating a variety of different “advanced” software packages into a GM’s pre-game session-planning process. There are numerous “common” applications out there which have been regularly used by the gaming community for some time, such as MS Word & Excel (and their OpenOffice equivalents) and a plethora of simple text-based note-taking applications (Notepad, EditPlus, Textpad, etc). However, there also exists an array of even more esoteric programs that I believe could provide additional enhancement to the game-prepping process, if applied in creative ways. Mind-mapping applications, such as MindManager, XMind, and Bubbl.us, can add multi-tiered tree-based idea branching to the basic act of note-taking. Newer web-based applications such as Wikis and the rather unique Google Wave could take that power online, allowing adaptable pre-structuring of in-game encounters that can then be shared and discussed with your fellow players.

Many of these latter applications (or variants thereof) have been out there in the business world for a long time now, and have also been used by artists and designers to simultaneously streamline and enhance their creative and planning processes. I intend on using a handful of them (meaning: the free ones) and analyzing them with the Gamer first and foremost in mind. My idea here is to find a simple and free online “entry-level” adventure module, and then approach the planning of that module using these chosen applications. While my intention is to use each one separately from beginning-to-end, I will also be analyzing each one for the bigger picture of full interoperability; meaning that while my focus will be on comparing and contrasting the applications, I understand that some folks out there might find a good deal of use out of combining them for different elements.

My current target applications are a handful of the free ones: XMind, Bubbl.us, Google Wave, and Obsidian Portal. I’ve used the commercial variants a bit as well, and will be providing notes, comparisons, and links to them in my conclusions. If any of you have any recommendations on others to try and review, send them my way.

Perhaps when this is done, I will expand this series to test out and highlight other technologies as well, such as music (MP3 players vs PC media libraries), note-taking programs (OneNote, EditPlus, etc), and more.

This weekend’s gaming holds much promise. Starting tonight, I’ll be making my sixth attempt at running a Burning Wheel game. For the past few months, I’ve been running a “meet when we can” adventure campaign set in the Palladium Fantasy setting. Until now we’ve been using the KnownWorld house rules posted elsewhere on this site. However, I realized that as the game progressed, it was being played (at least by me) more and more like Burning Wheel, so I finally made the call: we’re switching. After I ported over all the characters (which was surprisingly simple), tonight we’re giving it our first go.

I am extremely hopeful. This will be my sixth attempt at getting a Burning Wheel game going, each of the priors being stymied by any number of organizational or game-idealogical setbacks. This time, it seems most everyone is on board. Cross your fingers.

Tomorrow night, the gaming continues with my first ever all-girls game night. I know a surprising numbers of lady gamers who rarely, if ever, get a chance to play. I figured this would be a great opportunity to get them together and let them play without dealing with “The Dudes” who usually grace the table, myself excluded. And given my own *ahem* tendencies, I am slightly less part of that latter crowd than most. I’ll be kicking it off with a one-shot of Cannibal Contagion, with the hopes of gauging their individual gaming styles while having a plain old good fun time. It’s my hope that this can be a semi-regular thing, maybe even allowing me to get my feet wet running 4E for the first time.

Also, Mass Effect 2? Fuck. Yeah.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t an original idea of mine by far, but I’ve never seen it written down as such, so I figured I would go ahead and do just that. I’d like to share with you a really simple procedural House Rule I’ve started using in the games I run, regardless of their core rules system. Really there are two house rules here that work hand in hand: “One Cool Thing” and “Bonus Points.”

At the beginning of every session I run, as a form of recap-and-reward, I go around the gaming table and ask each player to tell everyone about One Cool Thing they remember from the last session. Each time a player recounts a moment of the game that centered around one of the player characters,that character’s player gets a Bonus Point of some sort. I picture it kinda like the “Previously on…” montage at the beginning of most serial TV shows. It’s a way to reward awesome moments of game play while recharging the memories of the players, reconnecting them to the events of the previous session, and allowing that player-driven recount to kick-start the current session.

Bonus Points are nothing new: in-game mechanical rewards for being Awesome. Some games have similar points already in place, but many surprisingly don’t. What I do is set up a universal Bonus Point system, which can be applied to just about any game. Below are some examples of how I apply these Bonus Points in the games I’m currently running.

Shadowrun: Bonus Points in Shadowrun work as additional points of Edge, giving the character a few more uses of that oh-so-valuable attribute.

Savage Worlds: In Savage Worlds games, I implement Bonus Points as “super Bennies.” When used, a Bonus Point allows the player to re-roll the test dice, but instead of keeping the better of the two, the new results are added to the old results. Yes, all dice Ace as normal.

Burning Wheel: With Burning Wheel, the Bonus Points are obviously tied into Artha. If a player is called out only once during the One Cool Thing recounts, then they earn a Fate point. If they are called out twice or more, they earn a Persona. If there are four or more players and all of them unanimously agree on a single awesome memory of that player from the last game, then they earn a Deeds point.

D&D 4th Edition: A Bonus Point can be spent at any time to do any one of the following:

1. Gain another Healing Surge
2. Function as another Action Point
3. Re-use an already-used Per-Encounter power

Regardless of system, there’s a catch to Bonus Points: they must be used before the end of the session! Don’t try to horder them up, as they vanish if left unspent.

I’ve made some major updates to the KnownWorld rules system, which are now live. A lot of the text has been cleaned up for better ease of understanding, and a handful of additions have been put in as well. Major changes of note:

• The success threshold of the system has been changed from 5 to 6. This means that each multiple of 6 rolled on the dice nets you another success.
• Armor has been significantly changed. Check it out for yourself.
• Rules have been added for handling issues when multiple characters work together on the same task.
• Modifiers have been condensed into two types: Pool modifiers and Roll modifiers.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but Classroom Deathmatch is one of my favoritest RPGs ever.  One problem I have, however, is running it. I have always felt that it should be able to be picked up and played with a minimum of advance preparation. Unfortunately, the game’s character-creation system is sadly lacking – there really isn’t one at all, actually. As the book exists, characters consist of 50 pre-made characters that the players must randomly draw. However, this requires the GM to have pre-printed and cut all fifty of the characters, and have them on-hand. Since these get written on, it is then extremely difficult to re-use these character sheets for future games.

To combat this, I have whipped up a system of on-the-fly character creation for this game. I’ve actually used this a few times before, and only just now decided to actually put everything down in text so that others can use it. Below are the full details for creating custom characters on the fly. I hope you all find this useful, and I look forward to hearing your results! Read more