A Jolly Jaunt into the Past

So my group has had a case of the missing players. One player went on vacation and the next went went home for two weeks. During this ‘off-season’ time I gave my players the choice of systems. In the end they decided they wanted to play a D20 Modern campaign set in the current time.

There was another caveat, they decided they wanted to play themselves. I had mentioned another game I ran wherein the characters all rolled D20 Modern mirrors of themselves. There are a lot of moving parts to this kind of conversion. First off you can never be 100% accurate when rolling yourself as a character no matter how thorough you are. Second it is a very DM driven format given the system and whatever campaign your DM dreams up. I chose for an open-ended campaign and in hind sight that was a poor decision. The players, as themselves, couldn’t think for themselves and find a driving force so the game split up.

The premise was as follows. An outbreak had occurred that was killing people. The first wave of deaths was not so bad, the second was worse. The infection began spreading from humans to animals and that’s when the mutations first began to take hold. The infected were no longer just dying, they were living but each different area of the country was suffering from a different set of mutations. The player characters soon found out that the virus was actually fungal in nature and it was being spread by alien ships hovering over major cities and heavily populated areas. We did not get far enough for them to discover that some people are immune and others just mutate in minor ways. We did get far enough to battle a few aliens but when the players did not even bother looting the bodies I realized that the game was over. Next time I will have a more structured campaign with a goal of more than just ‘survive the hideous cannibalistic walking mutant bio-hazards’.

Open games only work if you have one or more players with the proper drive to lead and forge the way. My leader fell short but it was more my fault for expecting him to take charge.

The Stupid Factor

Everyone’s seen it, the half-orc barbarian decides to cut a city guard in half because he doesn’t like what the guard told him. The party rogue decides he wants to try and steal the nobleman’s purse, amulet, rings, clothes, etc. Inevitably 80% of players fall victim to what I call the ‘stupid factor’. A fireball in the town square, an offhanded punch to the face, you never know when the stupid factor will strike. Sometimes the stupid factor manifests in a very innocuous manner. The biggest ones I’ve seen so far are “I think we deserve more money!” and “I want to find the thieves guild!”. So what do you do when the stupid factor manifests? You show your players that there are real-time consequences in the game. RPGs are nebulous and for fun but if you do something stupid and it’s not that kind of game (that’s a whole different topic!) you will squelch the fun for everyone else. It’s not fun for the other characters in your party to try and get themselves out of the coming poo-storm of “Why did X party member kill a bunch of random civilians?”

If the resulting consequences are far to harsh to recover from sometimes, just sometimes, you need to roll new characters. I’m not fond of it but I have, on occasion, wiped a party due to multiple instances of stupidity and made the players roll new characters. In the case of one person I will let them suffer and try to be a little easier on the rest of the party. Just because you came in the front gate with someone doesn’t mean you’re responsible for their actions. If someone in the party goes berserk it’s their fault.

Down to the reasons. So the first thing that comes to mind is the player getting sick of or not liking the character anymore. I’ve had it happen to me, at some points the character concept just doesn’t do it anymore. The right thing to do is talk to your DM about it. I have yet to meet a good DM that won’t let you tweak, or in some cases change out, your character if you’re not having fun anymore. In all honesty the game is supposed to be fun and engaging and if it stops being that don’t ruin it for the others. Either change something or quietly bow out of the game. Personally I would rather have a player re-roll or flat out quit than make it a bad experience for everyone else. Just recently I had a player quit. He tried Pathfinder, found out that roleplaying games are not his thing and quietly bowed out. I respect that way of going out, it’s much better than destroying the game for everyone else.

Pathfinder: Racial Profiling

We’ve all had those guys in our party, the one that wants to play a celestial half-troll bard. It happens, even I’ve indulged in the occasional drow elf character (No scimitars or niceties, he was a right bastard). What I’d like to talk about though are the oddball races and building your own race.

One of the nice things about the Pathfinder books I’ve invested in is the Advanced Race Guide, it’s quite nice. There’s a lot of info and extra rules available for both existing races and some new and old races. If you want to play a humanoid frog, Grippli, if you want to play an elemental race, they have one for each element. Personally I am big on customization, I like my players to have choices as long as they don’t go overboard and do something too strange.

Another plus for this book is that it gives very in depth detail on designing your own race, which is good considering that my players are currently running in a homebrew world. The very same world that my unpublished novel is based in. They are, as we speak, writing canon. Every session they go through, everything they succeed and fail at will affect my third and possibly forth book. I’m not even done with book 2 yet.

So my next feat will be designing the races that exist in my homebrew world in Pathfinder. We’ll see how this works.

When Puzzles Attack

So one big thing I do in my campaign is puzzles, and I don’t mean the “roll to see if your character solves it” kind. The kind of puzzles I throw at the characters are almost always dangerous and/or deadly and they must come up with the solutions themselves. My most recent foray into puzzling my player characters occurred in Pathfinder. I pitched an ever-changing maze at them along with a few miscellaneous apparatuses and two challenges. One was an “Oops roll a reflex save” challenge which I will not repeat here because it’s reusable, and the second was a riddle of numbers.

The objective of the below puzzle is to get across the floor without getting zapped to death. Stepping on the wrong rune does 1d10 damage to all party members present in the room. Rune 1 (R1) does cold damage, Rune 2 (R2) does fire and Rune 3 (R3) does lightning damage. They are written in an ancient (and dead) royal dwarven language. They translate into 1, 2, and 3, literally. This is a good challenge for someone with the linguistics skill. You can arrange the runes in any manner but the sequence I used is below and the proper sequence is stepping on 1,2,3,1,2,3 in order. Unsurprisingly in a room full of three players and three spectators plus me as the DM they figured it out without having to take any damage. Kudos to them!

|————|
|R1|R2|R3|
|R2|R3|R1|
|R2|R3|R1|
|R2|R1|R3|
|R1|R3|R2|
|R1|R3|R2|
|————|

Wild Talents

A gritty, realistic superhero RPG set in World War II? Sign me the hell up!

So I’ve obviously obtained a copy of Wild Talents (See: Arc Dream) and I like what I see so far. One thing I have to say is that creating a character seems a bit daunting at first but after that it’s all d10 matches. I’ve encountered systems that are based around dice pools but none that require matching sets and measuring the highest numbered pair. It’s an interesting mechanic that doesn’t feel inherently clunky, which I am all for. My group consists of players familiar with RPGs, some marginally familiar with RPGs and a new player that has never experienced them before. In the end I feel like I can ease them into the system with no problem. My problem is that I want to PLAY the game much more than I want to GM it. However, I am the primary DM/GM/Storyteller for our group so that leaves me on the hook.

So let’s look at the background first, I’m looking at a world that will be a sort of cross between X-Men and the Watchmen. I want to combine  the super powers and a loose storyline based on the X-Men with the realism of the Watchmen. So anti-talent protests alongside the fact that they are usually the only ones standing between the world being threatened, destroyed or worse. Most likely the time line will somewhat mirror the setting detailed in Godlike/Wild Talents, being set in the 1940s in an alternate timeline earth where Talents have existed for ages but no one has recognized what they were. Who’s to say that Jesus wasn’t a divine Talent, the son of god? What about Napoleon? Hitler? The Salem witch trials? Yeah, talents.

With that out of the way, what about the system? Creating a character is based around a point buy system in which the GM assigns the value. Personally I am looking at about 250 points to start out with giving room for advancement and power upgrades as the characters develop themselves. All archetypes will be open, looking at X-Men there are so many different types of origins and I like that about the world. There is a lot of room for creativity. I myself have come up with a character concept that I am going to attempt to get some help building on the Arc Dream forums but we won’t go into that.

When creating your character you spend points on your stats (Body, Coordination, Sense, Mind, Charm, and Command. With a nod at Base Will and Willpower which are not dice pools.) which max out at 5d (five dice) for normal characters and 10d for supers. You can never roll more than 10d but any other dice you put in the power/stat can be used to perform other actions like called shots, which minus a number of dice from the ones you roll. Archetypes, which are basically the origins or source of your power and the powers themselves. Similar to stats are skills, those are a measurement of real-world abilities your character has from driving to speaking other languages. The same rules apply, you purchase dice with your points to give your character some background skills to fall on that don’t involve super powers. When rolling skills you roll your skill dice and the appropriate stat dice as well. Since this is a brief overview Base Will and Willpower are used for several things. They are the fuel of your powers and your drive. Bottom line, you mess up bad enough you lose willpower and if you lose enough your powers go with it.

Simple enough on the power side they are either an Attack, a Defense or a Useful power. Putting the obvious aside a Useful power can be anything from flight to not aging. The amount of dice you allocate to a power makes it stronger in the sense of getting a better chance of rolling matches. Aside from normal dice you can also assign Hard Dice (an automatic 10) and Wiggle Dice (a variable number) to your stats, skills and powers. When designing powers a lot is left up to your imagination. There are baselines for ‘miracles’ as the game calls them but your points are the limit. I’m excited, I can’t wait to see what my players come up with.

A Walk in the Past

Recently I’ve invested in some old game books. I still have my original Dark Sun campaign settings, Forgotten Realms, Council of Wyrms, but I’ve systematically played in all of the old campaign settings except birthright, Maztica and Kara-Tur. Obviously I’m referring to D&D. As we speak my RPG shelf is expanding to the point of sagging, literally, bowing down. With all of that RPG knowledge at my disposal I have access to systems that roll every die to systems that roll one die and even some systems that don’t roll dice at all. I have personally played or GMed roughly 60% of the systems I own. I have the most stories about AD&D 2nd edition so I will favor you all with a tale of how I broke and then fixed a friend’s game.

So, having invested in a few more older books I am looking forward to implementing a good number of surprises in my current Pathfinder game. Since I have players that may read this I can’t reveal much but I will delve into a campaign setting and a certain gaming group that holds a place in my heart. While I lived in Oregon I ended up playing in a game set in a customized version of Mystara. Without knowing what I had gotten myself in to I ended up playing a human wizard that fell down a shaft and died first session. After that I rolled the DM’s antithesis – the 2nd edition Psionicist. My DM at the time had been introduced to Psionics in 1st edition back when they were raw and overpowered with no checks and balances. Reluctantly, after I explained that Psionics were given more definition, breadth and limitations via rolls, Kevin agreed to let me play a Psionicist. At first I chose to exploit Psychokinesis which focused on momentum, damage and manipulation of matter. Telekinesis, Ballistic Attack, Matter Manipulation (or Molecular Agitation) and Detonate were my first powers. At least I think they were. Anyway I proceeded to smash and trash my way through monsters by exploding objects and firing crossbow bolts at them without need of a crossbow. But when I delved into Psychoportation it was on like Donkey Kong. I single handedly moved an army from the side of one river to another in order to give them a distinct tactical advantage. It used all of my power points and I had to roll my power score to do it but after I was done we demolished the other side.

In the DM’s world Psionics were absolutely unknown which put me at an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time. Training was a bitch, I had to pay wizards until I fell into step with Tiamat’s minions and got trained by Mind Flayers (long story but I became a DM trump card). The advantage was that no one else could do the things I could do. I was able to travel to a distant city, obtain goods, food and supplies without breaking a sweat using Dimensional Travel and I could kill a person by putting a Dimension Door above and below them and hold it to terminal velocity. At level one I single handedly killed (without trying) an incoming character because he threatened me and my travelling companions. Eventually he had to retire after delving into a deck of many things and pissing off a god.

After that I rolled a halfling thief/psionicist that specialized in psychometabolic powers that could enhance his ability to steal. Body Equilibrium, Cell Adjustment and a few other form-altering powers were my weapons of choice. That character was roasted on a spit by Su Monsters. That was a shame because the DM really liked Halfass. After that I did some serious dabbling in magic via a half-elf wizard/cleric. That was my last character, unfortunately I moved  back to North Carolina. I have fond memories of 2nd edition but that hasn’t stopped me from trying every other system out there. I still use 2nd edition content in my games quite a bit, usually converting information to whatever system we are using at the time. In this instance, Pathfinder. In the future we may try Wild Talents as well.

A Fun-Filled Radioactive Time for Everyone!

Yesterday after playing Castle Ravenloft we decided to try our hand at a quick one-shot Gamma World campaign. We were able to Roll two characters and get the initial setup in less than 15-20 minutes all while I was changing diapers and fixing dinner for my two year old. That’s crazy talk right there, I know, but it was so simple to just throw something together, roll a few dice and drop them into a post-apocalyptic gamma world Jacksonville and Camp Lejeune.

After delving into my pot of crazy I came up with a backstory. They met while clearing out an old high school infested with cannibalistic radioactive robot toys and their most recent mission was to fight and drive off a group of nomadic biker rat/cockroach hybrids. Their current destination, called “Actionville” was modeled after Jacksonville and Camp Lejeune. They didn’t get very far because one of the players jumped the gun and wanted to go straight into combat. Plus I was getting hoarse.

More to come but what little we played of Gamma World warrants a hilarious comic relief-esque return.