"Eat Chocolate! Level up!"

I played Old School Hack last night, with Risus Monkey, a few of his regular players, and Gaptooth, and it was pretty great. I have a good idea I'm going to use this one myself sometime: the awesome point system gives me pretty much exactly what I want out of a one-shot, and the character creation system... oh, man, the character creation system. Only one character in the party can be of any class at a time, and all the information for a class can be contained on a single page, so class selection is literally a matter of just throwing down all the class options the GM wants to make available down on the table and letting the players go through them and take them as they call dibs. I decided to play a Swashbuckler, and my goal was to rescue a princess -- any princess, I didn't really care who.

Risus Monkey is a great DM, his player's are extremely entertaining, and Gaptooth, in addition to running the most memorable goblin PC I've ever seen (he was convinced he was Link, and ended up on a leash for most of the evening), is an excellent artist. If he doesn't upload the picture(s) he drew of his character soon, go whack him until he does. The whole thing was pretty much perfectly in line with what I want out of a one-shot. Fast, goofy, fun.

More importantly, it was one of the few times I've had the opportunity to play with a DM who really knew his stuff. The vast majority of the DMs I've played with have been very new, and very young -- often people I'd gotten into the game myself. The handful of times I've played with who had played for a few years before I met them (in real life) it's been similarly disappointing -- either their play style clashed dramatically with mine, or they just weren't very good. RPG blogging has, in fact, been my only reliable system for finding good DMs: DMs who are as serious about the game as I am, and at it long enough to get good.

I'm not exaggerating (much) when I say that this was the most fun I've had in a single night of gaming in the last couple of years. The game I played at GenCon with Roger the GS of Roles, Rules, and Rolls was great, and I ran a few decent one-shots during college, but it's been a while since I did a one-shot that was kind of a party at the same time and where everyone was pretty much on the same page, game-wise. Been a player in that kind of a one-shot, never.

It's really reminded me that I need to play these dang things more -- in person, with live people who know what they're doing. Some other members of my high school group who have moved back to the area have been talking about running "something," but I'm really not convinced at this point that anything's going to happen -- it's one of those everyone-says-"we should run a game"-but-no-one-makes-it-happen things. Hopefully I'll be able to meet up with this new crew on a regular-ish basis, but otherwise I may need to start trolling the local game stores (Or maybe Google Plus? That's how I got this invite in the first place.) for games to join.

And now, quotes:

"Let's see if he can beat the whore's indifference."

"Hair creme probably looks like a healing potion to him."

"Red thing that appears to be Swiss! You said you would come with us?"

"Hey! Where's my rope?"

"Hey! Where's my lamp?"

"Hey! Where's my hair creme?"

"Every two weeks I am dipped in caramel, and then it's ripped off!"

"Gaptooth, the ogre proctologist."

"The only ogre proctologist."

"I'm invisible to horses!"

"This is how we roll."

"Poorly. Haltingly. And with a lot of innuendo."

My All-Women Campaign Kicks Off

So! That game. First session went fairly well. One of the players was expectedly late, one was unexpectedly late, and another didn't show up as well, but we still made characters, came up with some starting backstories, and played enough for them to decide on and prepare for their initial expedition into the wild.

Currently the roster consists of:

Helene, Elf 1 -- Exiled from her people for reasons currently unknown.

Sister Amalia, Cleric 1 -- A native of the port city to the north, Kythrea, who left when her researches led her to the cult of the archangel Inara, Lady of Morning, one of the many such cults banned by the city's Sorcerer-Tyrant.

Skeltinath, Fighter 1 -- Another native of Kythrea, who abandoned the city's petty tyranny in favor of freedom! And also treasure.

Sun, Fighter 1 -- A mermaid princess who sold her voice to a sea-witch to become human, so she could avoid the responsibilities of mermaid princess-hood. She's since had a bit of a hard time in human lands, and is prone to starting fights with shady men in bars.

I printed out an extra copy of the character creation info (the first 30-something pages of the PDF) which helped quite a bit. Especially since the Lamentations of the Flame Princess book starts out with a handy, step-by-step explanation of what to do in character creation. I probably should have also printed out a couple extra copies of the equipment list, so that everyone could have had one to peruse. At some point I need to get around to making a list specifically for Stormwatch, or whatever town they spend the most time in, that includes some items from And a 10' Pole. But for now I'm too lazy for that.

They ended up deciding that they hadn't known each other before they arrived in Stormwatch, and all met in a tavern, the Unquiet Cat. I pointed out that, all being women travelling alone and looking for adventure, they actually all had a fairly good reason to seek out each other's company, and they seemed pretty happy with that as an explanation for why they ended up at the table together. I'd handed them each a few clues to some of the adventuring site's I'd outlined in my notes, and they chatted about that and eventually decided to go for the one that Sun had heard contained a huge, possibly cursed, ruby. Then they picked up some extra equipment for the expedition, and we're all set to start the next session off with some dungeon-delving.

They seemed a bit hesitant about how exactly to begin -- only Sun and Helene spontaneously shared the clues they had -- and I probably nudged them a bit too much in response because I wanted to get that section figured out and out of the way before we wrapped up for the night. In the future, I'm going to try to give them more time to work things out on their own, and give them time to dither a bit if that's what they need to do.

Sun also started a fight with a guy in the bar, which gave us the opportunity to demo the combat system. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to orchestrate a slightly more involved combat, with more of the group involved, and to particularly to get to the point of someone being "knocked out" so they could see how easy it is to get to zero hit points. But they'll figure it out fairly quickly once they get into the dungeon, and several of them do have enough old school D&D experience to know at least that combat is pretty deadly.

Next time: the mysterious ruin of Phra Chedi Nam, which may or may not contain a giant cursed ruby!

My Return to d20 Modern, and Why I Shouldn't Have

The old high school gang is kinda-sorta getting back together this summer for some gaming. I say "kinda-sorta" because right now the posse consists of me, one of the four members of my original crew, her husband(!), and one of the members of the group I played with my last year of high school. There's some possibility that my brother and another member of that senior-year group will join next week, though I'm not sure how much of one. This is mostly cool, since I haven't seen most of these people much lately and I could use the excuse to get out of the house. But it also means saying "hello" to another old friend I haven't seen in a while: d20 Modern.

I've all but sworn off 3rd Edition and anything related to it, and this game, I suspect, is going to be a series of all-too-immediate lessons on why I really should continue that policy. I don't mean to harsh on anyone's buzz here; I know lots of people have all kinds of fun playing d20 and its derivatives. I've been one of them, and someday I might be again. But man, do I ever doubt that right now.

d20 Modern encourages me to focus on aspects of gaming I don't enjoy focusing on. Case in point: I'm putting together a Tough hero who specializing in surviving helicopter crashes. (Because she causes them.) I consider the Concentration skill. This seems like something my character should have. Flying helicopters is tricky; she's probably going to do it while being shot at and taking damage. And yet, in the back of my mind, I know -- we never used Concentration checks back in the day. So do I take the thing that the system says I should have, or should I bet that the GM isn't going to call me on it if I don't take it, and spend those points on something I can almost guarantee will come up? Intimidation, for instance -- I know I'll be able to create that situation. Likewise, I picked up the feat Aircraft Operation, and I probably shouldn't have, because all it does is eliminate a penalty to flying helicopters (anything besides ordinary planes, basically) that I'm pretty sure won't come up anyway. If I don't mention it, the GM's definitely not going to remember that exception.

This kind of thing pulls me away from in-game contemplation of "What can my character do?" to the meta-game judgement of "How is my GM going to handle this one particular rule?" Not to mention all the time I spend just manipulating the rules themselves. Point-buy is a major culprit here; I'm sitting there calculating the relative values of the various ability scores, thinking about the cost of odd-numbered scores versus even-numbered ones and trying to remember which of my character's abilities reference which scores, rather than, y'know, the character, or what I want to be able to do in the game.

Maybe this is a character flaw. Maybe I'm just easily distractable. But it seems to me that a large point of the joy, such as it is, in a system like this is the meta-game. And at this point in my gaming life, I don't care about the meta-game. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time manipulating the rules. I want the GM to roll some dice and tell me what happens and then get on with the actual game.

Beware the Bat!

The second session of my boyfriend's Mayan/Aztec/Ghost Conquistador dungeon ended poorly for my characters. But not for the bat.

We were using Google Voice Chat, since it's summer break and we live in different parts of the state, and aside from a few technical problems that aspect of it worked fairly well. It's not as immersive as text chat, and I could see it quickly getting very confusing with more than two people, but particularly when the DM needs the occasional explanation of what dice to use for an attack roll, it's nice to have the speed of voice.

The game served as a lesson, and a good one for a new DM to learn: it's the players responsibility to get out of dodge when danger threatens, but it's also important for the DM to understand and telegraph that danger. He didn't quite realize how tough the monster was, and so he described it in ways that made it sound less fearsome than it was; much smaller than it should have been, for one. But at the same time, I was knowlingly flirting with danger: I had one PC and a henchmen going up against what I thought was a CL 3 or 4 critter. So I'm not annoyed about it (all my protestations and threats to the contrary), it's just a good lesson. For both of us.

A Rough Homecoming

So on Friday we did character creation for the Is This Fair sequel that we're playing this summer. Or, I should say, started character creation. Spent five hours and no one's done.

Now, part of that is that the characters the players are making are fairly complex. We're using Arcana Evolved plus a couple skill tweaks from Iron Heroes and items from the Magic Item Compendium, and everyone's running one 10th level character and one 20th level character. About half the group already has a lower level version of their 20th done, but even if the idea's cooked up they've still got all the numbers and fiddling to do. One guy finished his 20th level while on site, but everyone else is still partway through one or both characters; those without pre-existing characters from the last game haven't even started their 10th levels.

Some of the player's really dig the complexity. That's why I decided on 20th level in the first place: one or two of them have been bugging me to run "epic" for a while. Others get kind of lost. They're not as experienced with the system, and what's fairly and simple and fun for the ones into rules-tweakery (and I go into that category; I'm not much of an optimizer but I do enjoy building characters) becomes an ordeal.

Which is what it was. Five hours, and we still weren't halfway done. I've been running Traveller and Swords & Wizardry for the past year, and playing Labyrinth Lord, and it kind of blew my mind. I'd forgetten how much of a pain it can be, wrangling all the skills and feats and everything. Until now, I hadn't fully appreciated just how fast early edition D&D is, compared to 3e. And while Traveller's not quite that fast, at least it's fun, and no one gets lost. You're discovering your character as it goes along, and all the decisions are fairly simple and come one at a time. There's no math, no calculation, no flipping through books and figuring out how much all your magic items cost.

The worst part, though, is that we spent those five hours figuring out stuff I fundamentally don't care about. Fancy combat tricks, largely. Arcana Evolved is not nearly so bad about that as 3.5 D&D proper, and not all of it was combat, but even in the non-combat area, there's a level of calculated codification that, I've realize, I neither want nor need.

What I care about, with these characters, is where they're from and what they're doing in Xanadu. I care about their goals, their enemies, and (for some of them) how they feel about their parents. I care about what they're good at, what they're bad at, what they like doing and what they'd rather avoid. I don't need to know all the situations where they get a +1 bonus to whatever to know any of that, but that's what we spent those five hours figuring out.

I still feel pretty fondly towards the system, and I'm sure things will get better once I'm actually running it, once we can focus on the things that matter and I'm back to running the system I know better than anything. (Though that's another thing that bugged me on Friday. I don't know the system as well as I once did, and what's easily handled if you know it well isn't necessarily so forgiving to someone who's knowledge is a little rusty.) And if we were starting out at 1st level, or somewhere in that neighborhood, I doubt I'd mind at all. But this? This has me just about ready to swear off the high-powered end of the game, at least as a starting point. I doubt the compensations will be worth the trouble.

Sometimes the Game Master Tweaks Back

Last Friday we had this semester's second-to-last session of the Mongoose Traveller sandbox game. (Last session of the semester was on Wednesday: we moved from the usual date due to finals.) A fun time was had by all; the players got up to enough hijinks that I didn't even need to use the pirate attack scenario I'd whipped up. (Got to use it last night, though. Very impressed with Mongoose Traveller ship combat.)

One of those hijinks got me to thinking. In brief, or something like it: one of the characters, Alice Dice, is a pirate, ruffian, and sex fiend. (Before the campaign started, she'd slept with all the male PCs, and with several important NPCs in the female PCs backstories. Blame the event tables.) Lately, she's been sleeping with Zane Archer/Sir Dave Bowman, space accountant/ship engineer who is terrified of her.

At one point that night, Alice brought a (male) rugby player back to the ship and suggested to Zane that they have a threesome. I'm pretty sure her player (my roommate, incidentally) thought this would be funny, and would freak out Zane, me, and the rest of the table. A typical player antic: she was looking for a reaction.

But Zane turned out to be rather more enthusiastic about the idea than she'd been expecting, which brings me to the point of this story: Game Masters like getting a reaction out of the players just as much as players like freaking out the GM. Now, sure, it fit the character, and I also wanted to make a broader point about the setting and society. But I also knew it'd throw her and the rest of the party for a bit of a loop, especially the player explaining to her that "guys are less open to that than women are." And that's an opportunity too good to pass up.

Megadungeon Session 2: A Learning Experience

Friday night also marked the second ever foray into the megadungeon. (Yet nameless, I'm still trying to figure out a balance between the ridiculous criteria I've come up with and keeping it from sounding like a 4e power.) Halfway through the Traveller session, two players had to leave, and rather than soldier on so shorthanded I suggested that we play this crazy dungeon I'd been working on. The idea was met with enthusiasm, and so we spent an hour making characters, and another two dungeoneering.

The party consisted of:
Din Aleboot, 1st-level Dwarf (Alice Dice in the Traveller game)
Fitz the Fantastic, 1st-level magic user (Shmiff)
Yui Fluorite, 1st-level Cleric (Nina Ka-Fai)

This party was significantly less cautious than Zane Archer was in his expedition. Still fairly cautious -- they listened at doors, looked up at the ceilings, and so on -- but they were much more willing to fiddle with things. Fitz smashed a glass gramaphone, Din dipped things into mysterious freezing pools, and Yui picked up tiny robots using acid to etch things onto the walls. ("There are robots in this dungeon?!")

They also mapped, which let them make some intelligent decisions ("this door probably just leads to that room we've already explored") and helpd them escape at the end of the night, when I declared that it was getting late, and that anyone who was still in the dungeon when I got too tired to run would be subject to a roll on "The Table of Probable Doom." That got their attention, because when I say "them," I mean "Fitz and Din," and shortly thereafter just Fitz.

See, they'd run afoul of a heat ray. You get zapped, you save vs. 3d6 damage and melting of your armor/other metal. (Which I neglected to mention at the time, but further expeditions will discover these corpses in the proper condition.) Yui got zapped and died, and then while trying to get back towards the entrance Din was also zapped, and promptly died.

They took it pretty well, since they'd been kind of expecting something like that to happen based on my brief descriptions of the enterprise, but I'm entirely happy with how it went. The triggering mechanism wasn't completely clear, even in my mind, and then once I did come up with a decent mechanism a few seconds later, it was still something that was going to be pretty close to undecipherable to the players, without some serious investigation and perhaps a stroke of luck.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But this particular trap only gets set off some of the time, even when the triggering mechanism is met, and what I learned is that this actually can make a trap more deadly, not less. Because, for instance, you can end up with a character on the wrong side of potential death. And you can get PCs thinking they know something that doesn't trigger it, when really what's happened is they got lucky on a die roll.

So, learning experience. The players aren't bothered by it, and they've got a map so they know to avoid that room from now on. But I now I've got some things to do differently in the future.

The Trouble with Traveller

Friday's session of Traveller was a little on the disappointing side. Not that it wasn't fun -- for me, and Duke Burrin's player. But the rest of them mostly sat around and watched, occasionally engineering their own antics.

This unhappy circumstance was theoretically a product of necessity: they'd misjumped at the end of last session, and were a good half a dozen parsecs away from where they wanted to be. That many jumps means a lot of trading and a lot of accounting. But I need a better way to handle these long stretches of dice rolling and calculation necessitated by so many jumps in a row. Especially since, in our current system, it takes much longer than I should because I'm constantly getting interrupted by other, more interesting things that one or two of the other players are doing -- which then just shifts the "me and one player are having fun" problem to a different part of the table.

One way to handle this would be to have some "interesting" things pop up along the way, and the last time they misjumped that's exactly what I did. But with the end of the semester fast approaching, carrying with it at the very least a significant campaign hiatus, I didn't want to distract too much from the multitude of goals they already have. More action would have been more interesting, but it also would have meant significantly delaying their arrival at the original destination (where they hope to pick up some clues as to the location of Athene's fiancé, and perhaps learn some more about the various KordCorp resistance movements they keep running into) -- perhaps even until next year.

It would also be possible to eliminate misjumps entirely, but I think it's important to have at least that possibility present. The crew has taken steps to reduce the probability of a misjump, and that's good, but I wouldn't want to eliminate them entirely. At the very least, they give them a reason to go off and see parts of the subsector, and surrounding subsectors, that they wouldn't otherwise go to, and I believe it's important to maintain an element of danger in space travel. Particularly considering that it's one of their main activities, it's helpful to have a bit of tension during that process.

Still. The current situation isn't acceptable. Burrin's player has suggested that he write an automated program to do most of the trade table stuff, which would help. I'm also thinking that next time this happens, I'll try to handle most of it by e-mail rather than taking up table time.

A First Foray Into the Underworld

Last night I ran my megadungeon for the first time. We got off to a later start than I wanted (it was midnight by the time the game actually got going) but we spent a solid three hours playing, and a got a good chunk of the first level explored.

This was a solo game. I'm playing with my boyfriend, whom I've tried to introduce to roleplaying a couple of times before (he played Tim the Barbarian, who became the Mayor of Gnometown) but it's never quite stuck. He's not completely comfortable "pretending to be someone else," and I suspected that both the more player-challenging nature of dungeon and not having other people around to look stupid in front of would help. It did: he's been bugging me to play again today, and I have high hopes that this will become a regular campaign.

Solo gaming makes it a great third campaign, (you'll recall I'm already running Traveller and playing Labyrinth Lord online) because we don't really have to worry about scheduling it. When we've got a couple of hours, we can play. At some point, I'd like to run more players through it, but the nice thing about the dungeon is that I can have different groups of characters who don't necessarily all delve together, or even know about each other. So long as everyone picks up out of the dungeon and heads back to town by the end of the session, it's all good.

We're running Swords & Wizardry, with only a few rules tweaks at the moment (concerning shields, mostly) but I'm planning to add more as we go along, in response to both my own mad whims and actual campaign needs. We've already got a few changes that need to be made to the equipment list: he wants to buy jars, and finds the weapon weights woefully inaccurate. (That'll teach me to play D&D with a medieval re-enactor.)

He's running Zane Archer, fighting-man. (I told him about the Traveller game, and he likes the name.) So far, we've been running pretty light on background. I know the name of the small town where he's based, and I have a rough sketch of the terrain between it and the dungeon, but that's about the extent of my world information so far. We didn't determine much more about Zane, either; I suggested he was a follower of "the moon goddess," owing to the silver holy symbol he'd picked up while buying equipment (in case of werewolves) but beyond that he's just a guy who does crazy things like wander around in monster-infested labyrinths because he thinks there might be treasure.

I was impressed at how he handled himself in the dungeon -- apparently, he's been paying attention when I talk about how dangerous and weird dungeons are. He listened at doors, backed off from fights that didn't have to happen, brought a ten-foot-pole (which he used to carry his lantern and sack on, so he could easily set them down in a fight, as well as to push open doors) and generally dungeoneered. He was sort of annoyed that being "nice" to the monsters in the dungeon didn't always make him friends (trying to help down what I described as "a giant demon-frog" hanging on hooks got him attacked by said frog) but overall his approach of "talk first, stab later" kept him from getting killed.

Unfortunately, he's not mapping (yet) and he didn't bring any henchmen. I'm hoping the dungeon will convince him of the value of the two practices; he's already gotten a bit lost, and missed a couple of semi-important features that would have been obvious if he'd had a map in front of him. If a wandering monster check (brought on by his use of a signal whistle to taunt some goblins into following him out of the room they were looting) hadn't brought the intelligent white ape he'd bothered earlier and who was more than happy to lead him out of the dungeon, the session would have taken quite a while to end. As it was, we were both tired, and I was happy for a convenient excuse to get Zane back to town.

The main thing I'm not happy with about the dungeon is that it doesn't yet have a name. Zane knows it as "those weird ruins off in the hills" which is enough to get a game going, but at some point I really need to get around to naming the dang thing. I want to give it a color+noun name, and I think the first part of that will be either "jade" or "jet," but I've yet to think of a good noun that starts with "b" and isn't "blood."

Overall, though, a good session. It'll be interesting to see how things develop from here.

At Star's End: Session 6

So tonight's game, sadly, contained no actual frogs. I tossed in a line that would have led in that direction, but the moment wasn't right. They did, however, end up naming an NPC after him, so that was good. Next week there will be frogs, I think. And I've got plans to run my megadungeon for the first time tomorrow night, so Arneson-ian goodness still awaits.

That NPC, incidentally? The weirdest thing that I've ever had a group of players do. (Normally I don't do the whole "tell me about your campaign" thing but I have to get this out there.) He's Zane Archer, a convict and accountant who for typically complicated reasons has been tooling around with them for basically the whole campaign. Tonight, Duke Marlow Burrin (the captain) and Alice Dice (the crazy pirate who's slept with everyone) threatened his life and implied they were going to send him back to prison, on account of a "treasure" that he'd somewhat stupidly mentioned. Then Burrin (for, again, excessively complicated reasons) changed his mind, decided to hire Zane, but because he's not technically out of prison had to create a new identity for him -- which included changing his name to Dave Bowman, knighting him, and convincing him to get plastic surgery, so now he looks like Johnny Depp.

(Emily, Alice Dice's player, was very surprised later when she discovered a "David Bowman" in the copy of Fight On! she was perusing while Burrin was busy space-accounting.)

In other news, they've now got enough money that they don't have to constantly scramble for enough to pay the mortgage on their ship, and to start playing with speculative trade a little bit. Which is good, because they've now got a number of non-monetary interests developing, so it's nice that they can afford to go a little out of their way occasionally.

And this session reminded me that I really, really need to get my notes in some kind of coherent order. My NPCs in particular are a mess -- there are several that are just names on paper, and we'd been on a several week long break until last week's session so my memory can't pick up the slack. This campaign has a lot of NPCs, all doing minor but important things, and my usual system of "if they're important, I'll remember why" isn't cutting it.

Overall, this campaign is really starting to come to life. I spent the first few sessions kind of throwing things at the party, and now enough things have started to stick that it's getting really interesting.

A Brief Session Report

Last night's game went smashingly well. They fought flaming topiaries, stole a Lamborghini, and got their Captain stuck in a hospital under heavy guard.

Two factors: one, I pushed on them hard, and they pushed back. None of this "we have five missions, how can we do as many of them at once?" nonsense. None of the wandering around, waiting for me to do things that typified some of the earlier sessions. Not that they weren't fun, but it was beginning to stress me out.

No, this time, the conference room they were in exploded, they had to fight their way out, and suddenly it's all schemes and plans. They do something, I react, they react to me, and everyone's happy. And I think I struck a good balance between "giving them stuff because it's cool" and "arbitrary challenge" -- I did a fairly good job of responding to their plans with problems, but not such serious problems as they couldn't overcome.

The second factor was the absences of the player who up until this time has dominated the game. He's a Duke, he's the Captain of the ship, he's the most experienced roleplayer, he normally GMs, and he's got a fairly forceful personality even outside the game. This was the first time the rest of the gang has been in charge of making the plans, which was a very good thing, and produced a much more balanced pattern of involvement than we've had so far. Hopefully, their newfound confidence will continue even once he's here again, but otherwise I'm going to need to talk to him about toning it down a bit.

Players Love to Fail

The Traveller game I ran Friday was a smashing success. Lots of mad hijinks, and everyone's jazzed to play next time. They even managed to pay off the costs of their first jump, and are well on their way to making their monthly mortgage payment. (I mentioned that the game really ought to be called "Space Accountant," because we've never had so much fun keeping track of money.) The interested will find detailed descriptions of the game at the campaign website.

The game reminded me of one of the first things I learned about game mastering; one of the "secrets to my success," if you will. Players love to fail. Not consistently, not exclusively, and not crushingly, but the most memorable sessions I've run were when the villain got away. (Closely followed by sessions where they finally got the villain that kept getting away, but the point still stands.)

The key is making failure interesting. Having the villain escape is a pretty interesting outcome for a combat, since it gives the players a fun, straightforward goal -- get the villain! (Barring bullshit GM shenanigans, but most decent GMs know not to set up invincible super-villains. That's not cool.) Generally, players will accept any failure that opens up an obvious avenue for adventure, or that makes their situation dramatically and entertainingly worse.

Mine weren't, for example, super pleased when Nina botched her Medic rolls and let an at the time nameless NPC die, but later they found out that the NPC had been the daughter of the Warden of the planet, prompting a small "oh, nice," moment. Later, when Alice Dice failed her streetwise roll to find out where some escaped prisoners were hiding out, she was told that, "Arr, there are some prisoners hanging out in the woods! They'll probably be eaten by dragons!" instead of a simple declaration of failure.

And there are the usual reasons why failure is a good addition to a campaign. Failure gives PCs a sense of consequence to their actions. Their successes are meaningful because they work for them, not because the GM hands them out. But players also like failing; it's not just that their successes are sweeter once they finally do achieve them. (Assuming they have some hope of success -- there's no faster way to destroy a players interest in the game than to convince them that the GM is arbitrarily out to get them.)

Sure, they'll groan and throw their hands up when the villain gets away, or one of their best NPC buddies dies, or their character gets eaten by a dragon -- but those are moments when they're involved in the game, and those are the sessions that they leave ready for the next one.

Seven Players With Computers

We finished that Paranoia game on Sunday night. We picked up right where that post leaves off, since by the time the rest of the group came back everyone else had to go home.

In between sessions, we added two players, this being a mostly social "hang out with some friends we haven't seen in a while, and maybe do some gaming" kind of affair. So we had seven players, one GM, and everyone in possession of a laptop or other chat device.

I had fun. Make no mistake. I got to bother people with a sock puppet and reprogram a bunch of scrub bots to attack my fellow troubleshooters. But I can't say I recommend the size of the group or the level of technology in use. For some, maybe, and in our group it worked out okay, but there were some problems.

Most important was that the set up slightly overwhelmed the GM. Seven people texting to you trying to pull secret bullshit is kind of hard to deal with. This is a problem in any group of that size -- I've had issues running groups that large myself -- but the technology factor amplified it. If we'd been passing notes, the volume would have likely been a bit more manageable.

It would have also made it more obvious which other players were sneaking around doing their own thing. Everyone was fiddling with their devices, but some of us were passing notes and others were just recording suspicious events. (Or goofing off, but I'll get to that in a minute.) On the one hand, it was nice for me, being one of the people getting up to a lot of the antics. (Not all -- our Happiness Officer turned the air ducts we were using into trap-filled pits of doom. Good times.) But the guy playing our Loyalty Officer pointed out that this greatly reduced our options to spend Perversity Points to thwart the other players actions.

But the major problem was just how distracting being hooked up to the internet can be. It might have been okay with a smaller group, and a large group might have been okay without the gadgets, but together? The people who weren't in the spotlight had a terrible temptation to decouple from the game entirely.

Not that it didn't go well. I had fun, and everyone else seemed to have a decent time. We've got an experienced group that works well together, and we had a good GM. But the combination of a large group and laptops has some definite pitfalls.

A Second Stab at Paranoia and a Possible New Year One Shot

Coming to you live, mid-session in a Paranoia game! A couple of the other players have left to take Maggie home, so the other half of the group is hanging out, fiddling with computers and things, and talking about Stargate.

I have a new appreciation of pre-rolled characters for one-shots. I'd been over at my Paranoia GM's house for about three hours before we finished our characters and actually started the game. It always takes my group ages to make characters, and yet somehow we always end up making them, even for short games, and characters we're never going to use again.

This is mostly because none of the other GMs in my group tend to bother rolling up characters ahead of time. Neither do I, honestly, but that's usually because the one-shot games I run tend to be out of the blue, "oh, hey, we're hanging out, we should game" kinds of affairs, or games where character creation is supposed to be short and easy. This is a lie. Character creation always takes between 30 minutes to an hour, even if it is entirely random or for a character that will be used once and then discarded.

I'm making an exception to this general habit, and rolling up characters ahead of time for the game that I might be running on New Year's Eve. I haven't decided whether I'm going to run it, and I haven't decided what system I'm going to use, but I'm rolling up characters anyway. (I was planning on using Swords & Wizardry, but apparently one of my players has a never before mentioned life long dream of playing Traveller, so I might end up running that instead.) Luckily, they're characters for Traveller, so the generation process is pretty fun in and of itself.

Anyway, I'll probably do a more thorough session analysis once the whole thing is over and done with, but so far the game is going pretty well. There haven't been a whole lot more treason accusations than last time, but we haven't gotten very far yet, and at least one other character is keeping track of possibly treasonous activity. I've also read a bit more of the (red section of the) rulebook, and discovered that there is, in fact, a reason for wanting to turn your team mates in for treasonous behavior. You have to do it to get promoted. So there's a mystery solved.

Paranoia Quotes

"We are the computers friends. And friends clean each others stuff." Hygiene Officer Peter-R-WQR-1

"Greetings, citizen! We have no plans to eat you, no matter how tasty you might look." Loyalty Officer Mel-R-BOK-1

"Ah! There's blood everyone, just like in Beta Complex. I'll clean it!" Peter-R-WQR-1

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how clean is the dead body?" Peter-R-WQR-1

"I ate a grenade!" Mel-R-BOK-1

(From the game of Paranoia I was in about a week and a half ago. I was waiting to see if the other players had any more quotes, because this list is woefully incomplete.)

I ate a grenade!

Friday night and way into early Saturday morning me and my high school friends played some Paranoia. (XP edition, Classic style.) We used pre-made characters, the DM ran an adventure that came in the book, and it ended up being a lot of fun. I ran a REGISTERED MUTANT with the "Matter Eater" mutation and a habit of randomly chewing on things. We'll probably play again when we get together over winter break.

And with any luck, when we do play again, we'll get a little more actual "paranoia" in. I almost shot the Team Leader after she reprogrammed a robot to do something weird and wouldn't let the Hygiene Officer look at her stuff (I was the Loyalty Officer, figured that was my job) but that was the only actual accusation of treason in the game. Even that ended up getting dropped, when we went off to finish--well, what we'd decided was the mission, since we were never properly briefed.

The rest of the time we functioned as a team. I wasn't too clear on how, exactly, accusations of treason worked--was it something I should yell about and then start shooting, or wait until the team debrief and then unload?--so I mostly stuck to keeping a record of all of my Team Leader's "treasonous" actions. And the rest of the team kept focusing on "completely the mission," rather than blaming the complete failure of the mission on the rest of the team.

The near complete lack of treachery ended up not being a problem. The mission was a complete fiasco, but the guy debriefing us was responsible for it being a fiasco and wanted to keep the whole thing quiet, and it was a one-shot anyway so none of us got into any trouble. And by the time the debrief came around, I was too tired to care about reporting the treason list I'd assembled. Debrief anyway ended up being really short, because everyone was tired.

Still, the name of the game is Paranoia, so a little more backstabbing wouldn't have hurt. The big issue was just that we didn't have a good idea of why backstabbing was so crucial. I suspect that the player section of the book has some information on how you actual go about reporting treason to the computer, and on exactly how badly you can get screwed over if management decides you're responsible for the mission failure.

That wasn't the only factor: The Team Leader's player was under the impression that "there were cameras everywhere," which I don't think was true, but it would have helped if we or the game master had been more familiar with the material. It also might have helped if our secret society missions had been in more direct opposition. But basically, since we didn't know why backstabbing our teammates was a such good idea, our natural instincts took over, and we're all pretty veteran roleplayers, especially with each other. Completing the mission and working with the rest of the party come pretty naturally.

Oh yeah, and I ate a grenade, saving everyone. It was a grenade that one of my team mates had thrown, but still.

The Battlestar Game: Getting to Know a New Group

That Battlestar Galactica game I'm in is going pretty well. We just had the second session last night. They've both been short, off-the-cuff affairs--the DM has walks downstairs and says, "Hey, you guys want to game tonight?" It's kind of refreshing, used as I am to long, rigourously scheduled weekly games.

The system itself is sort of weird, and I don't yet have a real good handle on the odds involved, but I don't think we're using it as written anyway. I've never played with this GM before, or with two of the other three players, and it's the first time I've ever joined a new group as a player since I first started gaming. I'm used to responding to new player styles as a GM, but adjusting to them as a fellow player, while trying to get the hang of a another GM's style, is not something I'm used to.

This GM's style is very different from mine. We're all Viper pilots on an old Battlestar, with the campaign starting just before the Cylon attack the on colonies. That just happened last night, but most of the game up until that has revolved around the specific, minute-to-minute activities of our characters on the ship. Trying to get enough sleep, hanging around in bars, going to the gym, interacting with NPCs, getting into fights. The first session largely revolved around one character trying to get revenge on an NPC (who outranked him) for vomiting on his dress uniform. There's also a lot of "party splitting," and one-on-one interaction; when we get off duty, one guy might go to the officer's rec, another to the gym, and another to shower and bunk, and the GM goes around and resolves each scene in its turn.

I tend to skip over this kind of thing, unless the player's specifically initiate it. I'm usually busy trying to get back to "the action." But well handled, it's really quite engaging. I do worry, based on a couple of comments the GM has made about how he has the campaign "written up," that the game will end up being scripted events with these kind of character interludes in between, but that'll be a problem only when it starts getting boring. Right now, I'm having fun getting a look outside my usual gaming scene.

And -- I'd planned to write this post about how I'm the only woman in the group, which is a new and exciting experience for me, but I'll leave that until next time.

The Healing Surge Trampoline

My 4th edition summer game, the "get the band back together" game, is now officially over. I had a lot of fun running it, and the usual levels of hair-pulling frustration, and I think my players had a good time, too. In the end, a good game.

We even managed to give it a decent finale. It was clear, and had been for a while, that there was no way we would actually finish the module, if we played through it as written. I'd decided already that there was also no possibility of ever picking it up again to finish it, at least with this group, but I was reluctant to leave yet another adventure permanently unfinished, with no sense of closure. So I boosted them to 3rd level and cut out most of the second level of the dungeon, bringing them straight to the final two fights.

Not a method I'd recommend in most circumstances, but this time, it worked out okay. Mostly because it turns out that (a) the stunt rules are easy to handle and (b) the wight raining crackling purple death upon them was standing right next to a pit. Cue the Wilhelm scream, splashing, and helpful wight sound effects provided by Alefist. (Reeeeee!) After the battle, they amused themselves by dropping various objects on the very wet, very angry, and very trapped wight.

Other than that, the fight was pretty standard. They all ganged up on Kalarel at the end, neatly demonstrating that the primary purpose of having all those monsters is to distribute fire; five levels above them, he lasted about two rounds.

It had the usual near-death moments, which I'm beginning to think are an artifact of the way healing works rather than a sign of actual peril. The damage/healing system, to put it most simply, is subject to negative feedback. There are, of course, monsters that are more dangerous against bloodied foes. But those effects are dwarfed by the basic dynamic of the PCs healing abilities: the more wounded they are, the easier they are to heal.

Mostly it comes down to the death and dying rules. There are a couple of powers I know of that exacerbate the effect, but they're not what drives it. Sooner or later, the death and dying rules kick in whenever a PC takes damage. And they don't just make it impossible to die within less than 3 rounds after hitting zero, giving their friends plenty of time to get them back on their feet with a simple skill check. They also guarantee that when the character does get back into the fight, they do so with a quarter of their starting hit points -- any healing on a dying character resets them to zero before hit points get added, and that basic heal check option gives them a free use of a healing surge.

Having those back up systems in place means the monsters can have a lot of hit points, and do a comparable amount of damage to the PCs, and the only effect will be 3 rounds of "peril" before the character gets back up and pummels the monster, who does not have the healing surge trampoline. Which isn't a bad thing, exactly, but I do wonder what would happen if the player's figured it out. Is there an intermediate setting in a 4e fight, between "artificial danger" and "certain doom?"

The Little Details

This Sunday and last I ran sessions of the 4e game, which I haven't posted about mainly because there wasn't much to say about either of them. The first was fairly good, the second was distinctly lackluster. Maggie has, in usual excellent fashion, recapped the August 3rd session but likely won't have the next one up for at least a week; I'll link to it when she does.

The only thing I can really add is that naming the goblins was a surprisingly good idea. It's the first time I've done anything like that, and was shortly followed with the first time I've ever had a player feel bad about something horrible that he did to an NPC. Usually I'm happy to have people rampage around, breaking stuff and having fun, but it was sort of neat to have that happen for once.

Oh, and last Sunday we came up with the best sentence ever: "He was engulfed in sartorial flames."

Otherwise, though, I've been starting to think about wrapping this game up and starting my next one in a month or so. It was clear we were not going to come close to finishing the module in the time left before returning to school, so I bumped them up to 3rd level and skipped the entire second level of the dungeon, moving immediately to the last three fights. It's working out okay so far, and I think it'll work out better than just leaving (yet another) module hanging that we know we will never go back to.

Another Day, Another Game

We had another session of the 4e game Sunday. I just haven't reported it yet, because my wrists have been wonky lately, so I've been trying to stay off the computer. With less success than I'd like.

Not a particularly exciting session, truth be told. Only three people showed up (though a fourth did arrive about an hour before the official end, after we'd decided to break for the night) so everyone was running more than one character, but they did alright.

Maggie has, again, provide a full recap. And even better -- pictures of the table, and of Sara and Doug, the guard drakes they took from the shady looking gnome. At some point, I'll write about how I'm handling that -- 4e has no official rules for henchmen or pets, so I'm winging it.