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5 October, 2010

Hollow Earth Expedition: The Lady is a Saint

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Well…not really.  I convinced the girlfriend to try gaming this weekend, and fired off a character and a solo one-shot adventure in Hollow Earth Expedition — a simple spy story set during the IV Winter Olympics in Germany.

The adventure was a straightforward spy story:  she runs into her old friend Col. Stringer, who is here working for MI6’s Z Section (although she doesn’t know this, at first.)  She goes to the ski chalet at the top of the Kreuzeck for lunch with the colonel, but he isn’t there — instead, he is skiing away, with a couple of goons in tow.  She gets some skis and gives chase only to see him apparently ski off a cliff face to his death.  Investigating, she finds out it’s the Gestapo that was chasing him, and through her cousin Sir George Paget — a British consul here for the Olympics — that he was working for His Majesty’s Government, and that he had vital intelligence on Nazi activities that the service was hoping to convince the recalcitrant British government of the dangers of Hitler and his cronies.  She finds a key, either a locker or safety deposit key, that the SS missed when sweeping his room and goes through the process of checking it with locers on the Kreuzeck, finally finding out that it is for safe deposit boxes on the Zugspitzekopf — the tallest peak surrounding Garmisch, and where Hitler is having a big party for the Olympic winners and other guests.  She has to wrangle an invitation to get to the Zugspitekopf (this was accomplished through the Mitford sisters, Diana and Unity, who were closely tied to Hitler and his friends) when she finds a small camera that Sir George insists she must get to him, or to the consulate in Innsbruch, 25 miles away in Austria.

The adventure was set up for ski chase action (the Kreuzeck sequence), for a possible attempt to search the colonel’s room before the Nazis (the player forwent that in favor of seducing and staying close to the lead investigator and stringing him along), and for discovery of her spy mission while on the Zugspitze (she does arouse suspicion, but not immediately).  I had panned for a fight sequence on the long tram line to the Zugspitzekopf, and for a possible horse-drawn carriage or car chase int he snowy streets of Garmisch.  The player almost got away without suspicion but a few bad rolls and she raises the suspicion of the Gestapo officer, who was taking her for a visit to the police station.  She managed to avoid this by starting the car and driving away, with the officer on the running board and trying to get to her.  She purposefully sideswiped a fountain in the town square, injuring the officer badly and making her escape into Austria before the police could catch her.

It was a 4 hour deal, start-to-finish, and played very well.  With some tweaking, it could work well for any system or espionage setting.

LADY ELIZABETH “BETTY” PAGET SAINT

Archetype: Adventuress     Motivation: Thrillseeker

ATTRIBUTES:   Body 2, Dexterity 3, Strength 2, Charisma 3, Intelligence 3, Willpower 3

Secondary Attributes:  Size 0, Move 5, Perception 6, Initiative 6, Defense 5, Stun 2, Health 5, Style 5

SKILLS: Acrobatics 2 (5), Athletics 2 (4), Brawl 2 (4), Bureaucracy 1 (4), Con 3 (6), Diplomacy 3 (6), Drive 2 (5), Firearms 2 (5), Investigation 2 (5), Larceny 1 (4), Linguistics 3 (6), Melee 2 (4), Performance 1 (4), Ride 1 (4), Stealth 1 (4), Streetwise 2 (5), Survival 2 (5)

RESOURCES & TRAITS:  Artifact 1: Bugatti 57 Coupe (blue/black), Attractive, Refuge 2: Plantation home in Kenya on the shore of Lake Victoria, Status 2

FLAWS: Addiction — tobacco, Danger Magnet, Hedonist, Thrillseeker

LANGUAGES: English (native), French, German, Italian, Swahili

HISTORY:  Lady Elizabeth is the only child of Lord Thomas Saint and Lady Helen Paget.  She was born on the Kenyan family plantation 1 June, 1910.  Her father was killed in action in East Africa during the Great War leading African volunteers against German troops on the border of German East Africa.  Her mother provided a base of operations for British troops on Lake Victoria and the plantation was attacked by German gunboats and sailors in 1916, but swiftly rescued by elements of the Kings Royal Rifle Corps (led by Cpt. Michael Stringer.)  They were evacuated to England shortly afterward.

After the war, Lady Helen and Betty settled in Paddington, West London, and Betty attended St. Mary’s School for Girls from 1918-1926.  Her mother died shortly after she graduated from school and Betty inherited the family fortune.  She had her interests hit hard in 1929, but still has enough income from her investments to live comfortably.  She has traveled extensively, making a name for herself as an explorer and hunter. She is a woman of action, perpetually on the move and trying new things.

She also has a reputation as a fast woman — many of her friends being part of the “Happy Valley Set” of colonials living in Kenya, where many of her hunter expeditions were based out of.

Lady Elizabeth is 5’6″, 130 lbs, with dark hair and eyes.  She has a flat in Hammersmith.

 

30 September, 2010

Week 3: GM’ing with the iPad

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The big test was tonight, running Battlestar Galactica.  For this campaign, I’ve usually got several files open in WordPerfect on my computer — the night’s episode, the command staff NPC list, other NPC list, and the fleet vessels stats.  About 400kb a file when moved over to .pdf for the big files.

The programs used were the same: Diceshaker, PDF Reader, and some light internet use at one point using Safari.  The main concern for me was swapping between the adventure notes and NPC files — it worked fine and wasn’t particularly slow — one good point with PDF Reader:  when you open files you’ve been using, it opens them in the last position in the manuscript you were, so I was always back to where I had been on the episode notes.  Swapping over to Diceshaker was easy enough.

I had a slight issue with Diceshaker in that I had to set up a pair (in case a character/NPC had two of the same dice to roll) of each die that might be used for Cortex (d2-d12) and roll each pair separately to get the results (i.e. I need, say a d8+d6 for the character, so I roll the 2d6 and take the first, then roll the 2d8…)  Problem?  Not really.  I’m just used to having the dice set to roll at one time on the laptop dice program.

No big battles, just a knockdock-dragout between a doped up deckhand (essentially on meth) and a couple of the players.  Mirth and violence ensured with little trouble running it.

I’ve got to say, after a few times taking the tablet to the game table instead of the laptop…I like it.  It’s small and light — a big consideration if you have to carry a bunch of books with you (and even better if you can just load those books onto the device!) or have limited carry space, as I do on my Triumph.  The battery life is incredible, the screen is bright and easy to read (make sure you hide the screen behind a GM screen or something; players can often read the notes from several yards away.)

At this point I’m willing to give the iPad a qualified thumbs up as a GM/gamer tool.

 

27 September, 2010

More for Gaming with the iPad

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In lieu of a post of how the iPad performed on BSG night (we had to cancel due to most of the game group having illnesses or work), here’s a review of an iPad battle map program over on RPG.net

 

21 September, 2010

Review: Smallville RPG

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I spent last night reading over the Smallville RPG from Margaret Wies and company.  I bought it in electronic format, so I can’t speak to the quality of the physical product, but my experience with MWP has been that their books are top-notch in production value.  The .pdf has a wealth of pics from the show, is full color for all the pages, and includes a full table of contents so that you can navigate around the book quickly.  (Funnily, the font for the TOC is illegible on the iPad, but that might have been due to the program I’m reading it on.)

The first chapter is the usual “What is a Roleplaying Game?” “What is Smallville?” filler.  The meat starts in “Basics”.  Here you get the basic format of the game:  the GM is a “Watchtower”, player characters are “Leads”, major NPC/villains are “Features”, and Extras are minor NPCs.  The effect is to try and capture some of the television quality of the show.  Central to character creation is the Relationships of the Leads and these other elements.  The book has a series of examples to show how the players and GM get together to craft an intricate web of tensions between the leads and features.  It’s a great idea for mapping out a TV series, or a novel…it’s a bit daunting to new players, I suspect.  Hell…I’ve been gaming 30+ years and I think it’s overly complex.

In essence, as you read through the character creation and basic system rules, they aren’t modeling a superhero game…it’s rules for a soap opera.  I get the sense it does this quite well, but it is a shambles if you were looking to cook up a few characters easily and jump right into a game — one of the long-time strengths of Cortex.

The system is sharply different from Cortex — the engine for the other MWP works.  Instead of the usual attributes for strength, intellect, etc. you have DRIVES — motivations that your character has attachments to , be they Power or Truth or Duty.  These have a die rating from d4 to d12, in keeping with Cortex (d2s are gone.)  you have ASSETS which are broken up into Distinctions — things that make your character unique like “Big Heart” or “Martial Artist”, and Abilities — in this case mostly superpowers.  Abilities have a descriptor (Blast could be a heat beam from your eyes, or an electric shock from your hand…) and some kind of limitation where it won’t work (X-Ray vision and lead, for example.)  You have RESOURCES — Extras (minor NPCs) and Locations.  You don’t have Life Points (Hit Points for the D&D fans out there.) — you have STRESSES.  Once again, the point is to emulate the various effects of the relationships.  These tensions are rated in dice as you play and those dice can work against you in play.  Stresses include Angry, Afraid, Exhausted, Injured, or Insecure…at first glance I really like this take on damage.  The more I think about it, it could be a very good alternative damage system for Cortex, if it were done right.

Most of the rolling you’ll do in Smallville are contested feats:  you’re rolling a combination of Drives, Assets, Abilities, or what have you vs. the most applicable of the NPCs or PCs you are trying to hit, convince, interrogate, whatever.  the drives explain why you are doing something, your relationship die might add if it’s your friend in trouble, etc.  You take the two highest results from the dice rolled and compare it to those of the other person.  A failure can impart Stress on the loser, which can be used against them if the contests continue.  It’s pretty simple and elegant…it’s not Cortex.

Speaking of character creation…it’s a nightmare.  It might be easier if you are putting together characters together and spending an evening or two mapping out the campaign.  There’s a series of charts using basic background archetypes and events to craft the character’s various (and I think too many) ratings in things.  Relationships are mapped out at each stage.  It means building a test character to see if you can do it while reading the book…not easy.  I tried to build Wonder Woman, just to see if I could; she’s got tons of powers, etc. so I wanted to see if I could pull it off.  I gave up halfway through.  Without setting up the relationship web, it just doesn’t work.

Once again, if you want to go heavily collaborative and spend a ton of time spitballing character ideas and relationships…this could be oodles of fun.  I’m not in that category.  That said, there is a framework of a damned good game system here that is loose enough to handle superheroes — one of the more annoying genres for roleplaying as it tends to lead to very heavy bookkeeping for character building (Champions or GURPS.)  The chart, the massive array of Drives, Abilities, Distinctions, Assets, Locations, Extras, Relationships…I think it’s overly complicated, and while that might give you a good framework for soap opera, it’s a pain in the @$$ for putting together a bunch of characters and getting into play quickly.

I will admit that some of the issues with the character creation might have come from using an electronic version of the book — lipping around to find explanations and examples I needed was annoying and often I would lose track of what i was looking for  Wait…was that a Distinction?  An ability?  Oooo…Castle‘s on TV…

There is however, a wealth of good material for how to craft sotries, a campaign (or series), and how to handle interpersonal relationships in a game.  It’s a fantastic GM resource for the new player, if you’re not using the system — lots of ideas that would be applicable to planning a game, how to set up scenes, how to maintain tension, etc…all stuff that can be learned from watching TV or movies.  (Or searching this site for my Setting the Scene posts.)

There’s also a chapter on managing online gaming, which is no surprise as there’s a healthy PbP community on the Cortex Game website, and once again — it’s a fantastic resource for that.  But as a playable game, I’m a bit dubious…and it makes me worry about what we’re going to see in Cortex Plus (the generic rules set that’s going to bolt rules from Smallville and Leverage onto the older set.)

Despite the wealth of examples and charts, the game is overly complex, in my opinion, and while I suspect it will do the job if your group wants to experience what its like to be in a series writers’ room, I don’t know how fun it would be.  There are elements that could be bolted onto your Cortex game, with some work, but overall the main utility of this book is as a gamemaster advice book.

Cost was $19.99 at drivethrurpg.net, the physical book is $40.  This is the first MWP product I can say I don’t feel I got my money’s worth.

 

20 September, 2010

Smallville RPG: First Impressions

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Okay…I broke down and bought an e-copy of Smallville RPG from Margaret Weiss’ bunch.  I’m a huge fan of the Cortex system, and after hearing about the changes for the setting, I figured I’d go ahead and have a shufty at this rules set.  (I’ve not watched the show, but I do like a good superhero game.)

I’ll do a real review in a day or two, but my initial thoughts:  it’s a soap-opera RPG with stuff for supers tossed in.  Some of the mods could be used to good effect in Cortex (there’s a Cortex Plus in the offing that I suspect does just that.)

I’m a bit iffy on it, but might be interested in running a test game just to see how it plays.  More to follow…

 

18 September, 2010

Hollow Earth Expedition: New Traits and Manuevers

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A lot of the Hollow Earth Expedition traits are designed to give characters certain shticks to play, but one area where they seem to be lacking is in traits for gun-bunnies.  A lot of the pulp characters of the 1930s were double gun wielding, shoot-a-bunch-of-guys types (The Shadow, The Phantom, etc…)  So here’s a few new gunner traits (and a revamped one) to give those twin nickel-plated 1911 users a bit more freedom:

RAPID SHOT (modified):  Prerequisite: Dexterity 3.  Your character can attack the same target tiwce, as per p. 69 of the core book, or they can attack two different characters at -2 die to each attack.  (So you can shoot mook #1 with your pistol at -2 dice, then mook #2 with the same penalty.  Requires the weapon to have a Rate of M or A.)  Can be bought twice — x2 the first attack is without penalty, the second at -2; x3 both attacks are with no penalty.

This will allow you to recreate the cowboy fanning the hammer on his Colt Peacemaker or blazing like sixty on his 1911…

COVERING FIRE!  Prerequisite:  Firearms 3, Weapon with a rate of M or A.  Your character has a knack for banging bullets off in a way that makes the enemy want to keep their heads down.  When laying donw cover fire, they gain a +2 die to their FRIEARMS test v. the enemy.   May be taken twice.

Covering Fire maneuver:  A character may attempt to aid a companion by keeping the head of the enemy down.  The character can roll a FIREARMS test (or if they don’t have the skill a DEX+CHA-2 die) v. the WILL of the enemy.  Each success over the WILL tests adds to the DEFENSE of the characters they are covering.

Suppressive Fire maneuver:  This is a bit different from covering fire — suppressive fire is designed to keep the enemy pinned down and unable/ unwilling to engage.  It requires a weapon with a Rate of M or A, or enough people working in concert (3+) to lay down enough fire.  With suppressive fire, the character may choose to use their Charisma instead of Dexterity (whichever is higher) and their Firearms skill v. the WILL+cover bonus of the enemy.  Every success over the WILL of the enemy keeps them from attacking for that number of combat rounds.  The characters may not actively defend while laying down suppressive fire.

 

16 September, 2010

Week 2: GMing With the iPad

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This is week 2 of gamemastering with the iPad (despite my having belatedly posted on week one yesterday…)  All of the same programs are in use: PDF Reader and Diceshaker the two primary.  All three game books are on the iPad for the reader, as were the adventure notes and NPC character sheets.

The adventure pitted the group against Blood Bay pirates whom they had to escape, using the dilapidated Latham 47.02 seaplane of Roald Amundsen (search posts for a more historically accurate version of the explorer than that in the Hollow Earth corebook.)  Mass volleys of flintlock fire had me roll the attack from pirates against the heroes as their plane was taxiing from the Blood Bay wharf, so i did a bunch of swapping from notes to the Secrets of the Surface World sourcebook (nicely formatted with a table of contents to get to the right areas of the book quickly) for stats on cannons from the pirate frigates, as well as stats for their plane (as I had forgotten to swap over the writeup on the Latham and my friend’s internet was down so I couldn’t pull it off this blog site), then back to the die roller.

I don’t think it took any more time than it would have to have shuffled through pages of the physical book, look at notes on the computer screen and roll actual dice (or on the laptop, for that matter.)

The incredible battery life of the iPad is a plus, as well:  last week the device was at a 48% charge and I kept tapping the screen from time to time to keep the notes up — a three hour session left me with about 20%.  This week, I let the thing power off from time to time, firing it up only when needed (this takes a second or two max) and used about 10% of the charge for a three hour session.

Overall, GMing a Hollow Earth Expedition game on the iPad turned out to be extremely easy, and for the most part, it didn’t slow down play.  Next week, we’ll be giving it a good kicking with my Battlestar Galactica campaign, where I normally have close to a dozen NPCs written up in one file, the fleet ships in another, game notes, etc. and I have to roll much more often for Cortex-based games than for HEX’s Ubitquity.

 

15 September, 2010

Week 1: Testing the iPad for GMing

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Starting last week I’m running a Hollow Earth Expedition game using the iPad instead of my laptop.  I did this because I’m mostly expecting to be traveling to and from the session via motorcycle, and minimizing the amount of crap you lug with you is advisable on a bike.  For the first night, I did bring all the books and GM screen with me, although I have the books in electronic format on the iPad.  Tonight, I think I’m just taking the GM screen and iPad.

For the experiment I am running Kdan Mobile’s PDF  Reader for the game books, adventure notes and major NPC character sheets (typed up in WordPerfect X3 on my laptop, then pdf’d.)  For the dice roller I’m using Diceshaker (for the iPhone, as well — it allows you to shake the device to roll.)  Diceshaker allows you to set up multiple dice for rolling — like, say 20d2 for HEX, or any configuration of dice rolled together, just pick the die set and hit reroll.  Or shake the device.  For simplicity, I put the app icons next to each other for quick swapping between notes and dice.

The first night went smoothly — swapping between NPC sheets and notes was simple enough and fairly quick.  I didn’t have to look into any of the books, so I can’t speak to how easy that would be.  The HEX PDFs are well set up with a table of contents to jump to areas of the books (unlike the Dr. Who PDFs — argh!), so I suspect it won’t be a problem.  If I know the critters they’ll run into, I could put up bookmarks, as well, to get me to the pertinent info…

Swapping to the dice is a bit more time consuming than having a die program up next to the WP window, but ordinarily I “take the average” for Hollow Earth critters and mooks, only major villains get rolls.  Also, I occasionally like to have players roll for the baddies — it’s fun as they get to bust on each other for good rolls on the villains.  The lag between the notes to dice, though, is a second or two.  Negligible.

The game venue has a wifi connection, so I can look up things I need quickly on the internet if I need.  Pictures of gear — like the Latham 47.02 seaplane were quick to find and easy to show the folks on the iPad screen thanks to the pinch/zoom of the multi-touch screen.

Overall, I found the experience a lot easier than I expected it to be, and carrying two pounds (the iPad, screen, and sundries), vs. the 15 or so pounds for books, screen, laptop, and the box of spent cartirdges I use as style point markers makes is a very tempting way to manage the games.  The real test will be next week, when I try to run a BSG campaign, where I’ve normally got multiple files for fleet ships, major NPCs, and the mission plan up in different tabs in WordPerfect on the laptop.

 

6 September, 2010

Thoughts on the Reavers

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In Firefly, the reavers were this ever-present bogeyman, lurking in the darkness of space.   In essence, they were the zombies for the universe — people who had gone mad on the edge of space.  There was no telling how many were out there, why people would be attracted to their lifestyle, and what you could expect from them…

Serenity gave us a tidy backstory to the reavers that, ultimately, cut the mystery and danger out of them.  Turned insane by the PAX, these movie reavers were de facto zombies — lots of them, never stopping, senseless.  And ultimately, not as frightening as the TV show version.  By linking them with Alliance malfeasance, the reavers become victims and that removes the awe and fear they should inspire in an RPG campaign.  Moreover, the driven violent and mad meme of Serenity reavers would seem to preclude the notion that they would work in concert.  Zombie-like, the reavers prey on “the living” (just to keep the metaphors straight.)  And for me, this is where we run into problems.  As with other “zombie” antagonists, they work together to plan and execute raids, they work in tandem at time, yet they fly around in their dilapidated spacecraft with no concern for the efficiency of the craft.

They act in mindless, violent abandon in the movie, driven that way by the PAX…yet paradoxically, they’ll all work in concert during the fight with the Alliance.  You couuld make an argument that in a target-rich environment, the reavers would naturally attack whatever they could, and the Alliance ships were simply temptations.  I don’t agree.  We’ve seen on-screen how tough it is to keep a ship running:  why would the PAX reavers fix things enough to keep the ships moving?  How would they decide who fixes what?  Like zombies…why aren’t they attacking each other, if they’re so crazed from the PAX?

Lastly, there was a small percentage of the Miranda residents that became reavers.  There’s a limited number.  The nature of their affliction would seem to preclude breeding (even by rape, if they kill their victims anyway.)  That means it’s a game of attrition.  Eventually, they’ll die out, or be hunted down by the Alliance.  Not scary.

In short, the Serenity reavers stink on ice.  Even as a convenient wrap up for the movie, they offend the storytelling sensibilities.

Returning to the Firefly reavers:  there’s very little we know about them.  We’ve heard they might be cannibals (always terrifying), we know they allegedly rape and kill.  Yet in Bushwacked, the reavers raid a cargo vessel and leave a lone man alive, and that last man slowly “goes reaver.”  In the same episode, Shepherd Book remarks that reavers are “just men” that got to the edge of space and went mad.  These points leave open a much more exciting and frightening door:  reavers “breed” virally, mimetically.  Being a reaver is an idea.  It’s a lifestyle, not a drug-induced disease.

Based on the slim amount of information concerning the reavers in the TV show, I will endeavor to cast a newer — and I hope, from a gaming perspective — better version that is closer to the original concept.

Like the 15th/16th Century family gang in Scotland led by Sawney Bean, being a reaver is a choice (or madness, your choice.)  These are people who were already outcasts, layabouts, madmen — people who had or would eventually slip through the cracks.  Out on the edge of the ‘Verse, these people were outside the law, outside moral structure, and soon began to comport themselves that way.  The ritualistic body modification is a feature, probably the result of someone being into tattooing, self-mortification; that notion of damaging yourself to show strength, individuality, or to just make yourself more terrifying and hence a more efficient hunter, spread.  In this way, the reaver style is something that literally gets under your skin.

(If you know people into the tattoo/piercing/body mod subculture, you might note the almost addictive quality of the practice.  People don’t usually get one tattoo, or piercing, anymore.  And often, others who know people into the practice will buy in, as well.)

Assuming these people are insane, but not zombie-crazy, they are much more likely to work — like gangs — in concert with each other.  There’s a hierarchy, even if it’s more democratic, like many pirate ships were.  Many might be family based, with a patriarch/matriarch (like the Bean gang.)  They care about each other, and occasionally, they fight among their clans. They breed and raise up new generations of psychopathic hunters like themselves.  They leave people that could become like them alive (as in Bushwacked) knowing that, eventually, their victim will find and join them.

Worse, this means that not all reavers will behave the same.  You’ll never know if they’re going to chase you down, as in the Serenity pilot episode, let you live as with the man in Bushwacked, or if they’ll lay a clever trap.  Or clean themselves up and look like normal folk on the street…until they attack.  This past element adds another layer of paranoia:  not all reavers are the campfire bogeyman.  They could be aboard your vessel and you’d not know until it was too late.

And who knows..?  If you’re too much of an antisocial renegade, you might find the life appealing.  Anyone, pushed too far, could go reaver.

With this new take, you wouldn’t always know the ship bearing down on you might be reavers.  Not all their ships are going to be junked up wrecks with nihilists inside hoping to get cooked by their reactor.  They might be lazy and not maintain their vessels, leading to some of the tell-tale signs, but even these reavers will eventually do routine maintenance when they have to. Some might modify and hotrod their rides; the lack of radiation shielding on a ship might be because they get more efficiency and speed without the containment.  Some might paint their ships and adorn them with their victims, as in the movie, to intimidate their prey.

Reavers as subculture, to me, is much more intimidating, and much more useful as a roleplaying hook, than the Serenity version.  Here you have plot hooks galore:  what if someone comes back to their senses and wants out of being a reaver?  What if some rich man’s daughter runs away to join them and he wants her rescued?  What if you can actually make a deal with them, and what would they want in return?

 

30 August, 2010

Writing and Gaming

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I attended Bubonicon this year — the first sci-fi convention I’ve been to in over a decade.  It was an interesting experience in that this time around, I was much more interested in the panels than in the costuming or the merchandise tables. (The rise of the internet and the ability to buy the goods you would otherwise have to wait a year to scarf up at convention prices is why I suspect the merchandise tables were mostly flea market trash.)

One of the panels was on writers who game, and it had a few of the expected names:  Melinda Snodgrass, Walter Jon Williams, etc…  Their comments got me thinking about my own experience as a writer and a gamer, and led to this post…

There are a lot of gamemasters out there that think of themselves as frustrated writers.  I had always been interested in some form of storytelling since I was young — not necessarily writing, per se…I drifted between that, acting, cinematography, comic books, etc. but always with the intent to, some day, tell stories for a living (hence the profession of historian.)

There are some problems with translating your ideas from a game into workable, salable fiction.  First — gaming is collaborative by nature.  The GM might set the plot in motion, and might nudge the players to get through the adventure on track (I have a tendency to do that), but the better storytellers don’t railroad (I have been known to do this, or to bribe the player with story/plot/hero points to stop trying to derail things…but I try to be subtle), and are willing to let the players guide the direction of the adventure.  This collaborative feature of role playing is one of the reasons it’s so fun and social, but is also is a problem for the wannabe writer who wants to cull his gaming for ideas.

There’s the problem of intellectual property.  Do you “own” the characters?  do the players?  Do they get a cut of the proceeds, or maybe a mention in the forward?  Best is to not use other people’s characters.  Come up with something new, or similar.  Avoid the problem entirely.

I’ve found most gamers, when I’ve thought about moving characters to fiction, don’t mind not getting money or credit; it’s usually enough to see their creations in print…but a thank you is appropriate.  It’s a good idea to see if the player is alright with the idea, but once again — I’d suggest against it.

(Caveat: I have written and published a novel with a character culled from a game that another player ran, but the original idea was mine and he simply took it over.  When I wrote the book, I kept the name, but the character reverted to my original conception and away from the stuff that the player had done with him.  He was okay with this.)

Second, storylines and ideas from games tend to have a certain format to them, and these are easily identified by editors who are in certain genres like fantasy.  (There’s a reason that some of the magazines for fantasy explicitly tell you not to write up your gaming sessions as a novel and send them in…they’ve seen this before.)  If you had a good plot arc and want to use it, great, but remember the collaborative nature of the game tends to make the way a game unfolds more unwieldy than a tightly plotted novel.

thirdly, characters — and this was something mentioned in the panel that I agreed with — are central to good fiction, and several of the authors admitted to culling their RPG characters for fiction…but always with some tweaking.  A game system — especially the random creation or the class-based ones — have a tendency to create archetypes that do not translate into fiction well.  Whereas having a Level 2 Elf Fighter is something that gives a nice shorthand for the player to latch onto to play a character, a fictional character is not a stat block…  (This is why I prefer systems where you build your character to the idea — one of the better ones, I think, is Cortex.  Even so, you can “feel”  the advantage/disadvantage nature of characters crafted in a game when they are dropped into short fiction.)

Characters first.  Who are they?  Where do they come from?  What do they do and why?  Add quirks.  You can almost see this template for much of genre fiction — mysteries, especially.  A lot of mystery hero(ines) have that quirks first feel to them.  I need a detective, but I need something different…this one’s fat.  This one has Tourettes.  This one is a chimp.

Stealing well-rounded characters from a game is something that I think is fully doable and can lead to a successful transition of some gaming ideas to fiction.  If didn’t, a friend of mine and I wouldn’t be tossing around the idea of a comic book based on one of our campaigns, right now.  But that’s the key:  based on — not a straight translation.  The best translators (language wise) always play with the language a bit, to fix the flavor of the writer they are translating, rather than a cold mechanical transposition.

Fourth: A lot of games, over time, develop massive backstory, and delve into a lot of ideas.  I’ve run into guys that have complete worlds, worked out to Tolkeinesque complexity and completeness, and who think that everyone in the world will be as excited by, and interested in their worlds as they are.  You’ve met them, the guys that have notebook upon notebook of history, geography, etc. that they will often truncate into a Dickensian players guide to their universe as a welcome packet for the new gamer.  Throwing everything at the wall and hoping it sticks doesn’t work for RPGs anymore than it works in fiction.

(One of my problems when experimenting with science fiction is that I concentrate on worldbuilding and forget, oh, character…plot…that stuff.)

Look at the best science fiction, for example.  Much of the time, there can be a number of intriguing ideas, but they focus primarily on one technology, one trend, and examine their world from that.  It doesn’t inundate the reader, and is more concise and interesting.  Mysteries concentrate — red herrings aside — on the problem at hand:  who killed this due in the kitchen with the candle stick?  Romances are straight-forward:  how do this girl and this guy get together and what seemingly insurmountable problems do they have to overcome to do it.

Keep it simple, keep it concise, keep it interesting.

The general consensus of the panel at Bubonicon was that, in general, it’s not particularly effective to translate gaming ideas over into fiction (Wild Cards not withstanding…)  I don’t agree, but I think it’s necessary to be very careful with what you pluck out of a game to use for fiction.  Basic storylines, character ideas — yes; transcribing your “way cool” gaming night — no.

 

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