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1 December, 2011

RPG Blog Carnival: Heroes Living & Dead

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This month’s RPG Blog Carnival focuses on our favorite characters current or past. Having been gaming for three decades, I’ve got a lot to choose from, all the more so because I’ve found myself in the GM seat for much of that — there are a host of NPCs that I loved bringing to life. I suppose the best place to start is the beginning…

The first character memorable enough to stick with me to today would have been a old Dungeons & Dragons character, Ian Antae — an half-elf warrior that was a master at manipulating people. There were the usual number of dungeon crawls that, honestly, just blend together to my mind (and is one of the reasons I don’t tend to run fantasy settings), but it was the last year or so of that campaign, where we finally added a story arc involving the “ultimate evil sorcerer” (we were in high school, so stow it!) that absolutely wasn’t cribbed from every other fantasy book cribbed from The Lord of the Rings. For me, the defining moment was after the death of half the characters, Antae kicking open a door to face the bad guy, only to find himself faced with dozens of evil critters waiting to use him as a pin cushion. More surprising was that they won out over the bad guys. After the death of the game world’s “devil/Sauron/whatever” we closed the D&D books and decided we really weren’t going to top it and turned to TOp Secret and later James Bond: 007 RPG.

I had a good MI6 agent that I enjoyed playing during this period, my first female character — Charmine McGovern. I played her for a good six years, and found it a good role playing exercise. It’s hard to get characters of the opposite sex right, but it’s doable. The trick is not to automatically make your female character a 1) lesbian, 2) sex addict, 3) just my bad-ass male character with tits. Women can be tough and competent, just like a male character, but there are certain biological truths that might not be reflected in the mechanics of the system — they don’t have the muscle mass of a man and in a fight, this can be a serious problem; they react to emotional queues differently from men, no matter how they might impact them. Since then, I’ve found I like playing women from time to time; they’re a challenge to get right and having had women in my gaming groups for the last 20 years consistently, I’ve had to get them right, or suffer the slings and arrows of ridicule for not doing so.

One of the characters from the late ’80s I absolutely loved was Athena — a genetically-engineered superhero for a DC Heroes campaign. She was child-like but incredibly smart and powerful in the beginning, finally maturing into a warrior-heroine that was very similar to her mythic namesake. She was probably the most “stereotypical” of my characters, build off the Jungian Greek god archetypes.

The next memorable character was Brigadier Douglas August-Haide (later resurrected in another campaign as Graham McDougal) — essentially an older version of James Bond: he’s slower, in chronic pain from years of hard living, and on the edge of retirement. He’s been stuffing away money from ill-gotten gains taken from bad guys over the years and is quite wealthy; he’s constantly dodging internal reviews from SIS. I got to do a Sean Connery impression. My PS90 carbine is named for him (Graham), as he was using the P90 and FN57 pistol long before Stargate SG-1 started using them. In the end, he died of a heart attack in the shower, after decades of having people try to kill him.

My favorite character around the turn of the century was an NPC in our Star Trek camapign — a sentient starship named Athena. She pulled some of the character bits I liked from the superheroine of days past, but became a unique critter. She was an Akira-class vessel, a warship, and one of the first ships to “wake” to sentiency. She was incredibly protective of her crew, a brilliant tactician who would eventually captain herself. To win against a massive Borg invasion, she seeded her “mind-state” to hundreds of starships, waking them. This allowed them to use their computational firepower, as much as their weaponry, to hack and destroy the Borg by releasing the biological elements of the Borg ships. Eventually, she was able to convince the Borg than biological-machine intelligence could work together without coercion, destroying the Borg philosophy. You could make a case, though, that the Borg won because eventually Starfleet personnel were cybernetically linked to their starships, but without the massively invasive surgeries and only if the crew wanted to be uplinked.

Of late, we’ve had so many good characters it’s hard to choose from. Our Hollow Earth Expeidtion campaign has a female “Short Round”, Shanghai Sally, that has been amusing for the wife; being small, weak, and a girl in 1930s Shanghai, she’s had to be clever about how to best use her. She’s brought out some incredibly amusing lines from the other characters, the best probably being “I have a prepubescent girl and I know how to use her….no, not like that!” Jack MacMahon, our “brick” is a impulsive, book smart common-sense stupid character with a weakness for the ladies and a penchant for doing the dumbest thing you can in a situation. He’s like Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China, but a better dresser.

Our Supernatural game gave us Jerry Neimann — quite possibly the most devastating caricature of the gaming geek ever. He’s tall, fat, balding redhead who works computer security, is a ghost hunter, and quickly became so amusing that he derails the game from time to time…and no one minds. His player pulls together a bunch of people he’s known to give us a fantastic, and while stereotypical, a completely believable characters.

Overall, the last 30 years of gaming has provided me and the players with dozens of memorable characters, of which these were only the highlights. Some became so real to us that we would gossip about them, just like real people… It’s made for a very full life.

 

29 November, 2011

Command Level Characters in Battlestar Galactica (or Any Other Military-Style Game)

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There are a few schools of thought for playing characters in the military in role playing games. The traditional one is you start out as lowly enlisted or junior officers — this gives you the chance to be on any missions that might involve direct action — and let’s face it, military-style campaigns are about direct action. This gives the characters the chance to rise through the ranks and gives a sense of advancement and maturation, but it does have the limitation of them having to follow the orders of their superiors.

For the gamemaster, this is a godsend: you can direct the characters as needed to follow the plot without being too obvious in your railroading. It provides the characters with a goal and a certain set of parameters to achieve said goal. It also gives them authority with some protection of responsibility for any failure…you might get busted in rank, but unless you do something egregiously illegal, the command staff will soak some of the consequence.

However, there are players who will want more control over their game universe, who will want to be in the “center seat” to use Star Trek vernacular. Having your players run command level characters can seem somewhat limiting — not every commander is going to strap on his sidearm and take a Raptor (or beam) down to the planet to take charge. Nor should they — they are the captain and, while not indispensable (who really is?) they are the prime authority on the vessel and are the brains and motivator of the outfit.

This post was generated in response to a question on another posting regarding what to have command level people do in a game. The CAG is not necessarily going to be on every mission, unless they are a control freak or action junkie, or gloryhound looking to pad their military jacket. And those folks do exist…if it fits the character, don’t question it. The CO is less likely to be running about playing hero, as well — they’re older men (at least in their 40s) who are more administrators and politicians than men of action.

And that’s the key to the challenges they should be presented with: pe-Cylon attack, the CO of a ship is going to be wrapped up in politics…not just between himself and the chain of command — jockeying to get prime assignments, getting his vessel on exercises to heighten his profile for promotion — but also in actual politics. He will be trying to get noticed for promotion, which means publishing in journals on military affairs — tactics, strategy, but also defense policy. (To that end I created a Fleet Times magazine for our campaign, but also a Journal of Military Affairs, and a Journal of Military Theory that officers are often trying to get published in.)

Day to day operations mean the commander is overseeing the ship or fleet he’s running — making sure they don’t run out of food, fuel, water, that there are enough personnel manning the various positions. It’s mostly paperwork and handling disciplinary issues…it’s drudge work, and you can use that to create a sense of realism and boredom between the action sequences. Senior enlisted would be engaged in this, as well, in addition to lending a hand in turning a wrench, etc.

Disciplinary actions are also a big part of life, from dressing down the guy that is perpetually late to muster, to addressing crimes aboard, and dispensing justice. For court martial, he would be the lead on the tribunal hearing the case (unless it’s pre-attack, in which case there’s a good chance they’d just ship their problem child off to the nearest JAG office for trial.)

In a fight, things change. The commander is overseeing the battlespace and the fight; the XO watches over ship combat operations — taking the commander’s “Bring us about” into actual orders to align the ship as wanted, giving the gunnery crews their targets from the commander’s battle plan. Senior enlisted man the guns, or handle damage control teams, but can find themselves fighting a fire or fixing things. The CAG is out with the pilots fighting. Marines would be guard posts, but they also throw in on rescue of injured crew, fire suppression, etc.

In a post-attack campaign, if there’s a fleet, the commander would be engaged in politics of a different nature: trying to work with whinging ship captains, making sure repairs, parts, food, etc. were dispensed through the fleet. He would most likely be making visits to ships to shore up wobbly captains and crews terrified by the robot apocalypse.

Junior officers post-attack could find themselves getting assigned to whatever mission needs doing simply because the crew might be short-handed, overworked, or otherwise strung out. Sensitive situations, like dealing with a mutinous civilian crew might require a senior officer to go across and try to talk some sense into the ringleaders (or bash heads.)

In the Star Trek universe, the senior staff lighting out to handle every situation is a bit less realistic. Starfleet is chock-a-block full of smart, talented subject matter experts…or so it seems on screen. They’ve got scores of scientists, doctors, and the like in the TNG and later period: the captain and first officer are paper-pushers until a fight breaks out, so would be senior staff. This is a setting more conducive to the lower-level officers. (Although the “new” universe seems to be much more dangerous, and attrition higher, suggesting that go-getters find themselves promoted damned fast.)

As always, these suggestions are my opinion and may not mesh well with your group.

 

27 November, 2011

Some Campaign Tidbits for Battlestar Galactica

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Our Battlestar Galactica campaign has been on hiatus while we power through a very amusing Hollow Earth Expedition game, but soon we’ll be rotating back to BSG. For one of the adventures I put together I start fleshing out the Colonies with loads of background tidbits — sort of narrative greebles (the SFX slang for the loads of stuff on models to give them a sense of scale.)

Our Sagittaron is the site of an ancient set of ruins outside the city of Parises (originally I was going to call it Petra.) The ruins are well known to the locals, but they aren’t talked about and have never had an archeological expedition explore them due to the religious proscriptions of the Sagittarons. In the mission, the characters learn the carbon dating suggest the site is thousands of years older than the Colonies’ settlement — are they wrong? Is this the birth place of Mankind? Or have humans colonized these worlds over and over again across time?

Tauron transportation authorities frequently “false flag” vessels, much like Liberia today — giving them “legitimate” letters of ownership, etc. Smugglers, terrorists — often their vessels fly the Tauron flag.

Virgon’s royal family still exists and are titular heads of the government, but are nothing more than figureheads. The aristocracy isn’t as powerful as they once were, save for the ones that have managed to maintain their fortunes.

Colonial shipping have specific areas — bullpens — which the various shipping companies use for their jumps between the stars in Colonial space. This is to prevent vessels from jumping on top of each other. These bullpens are chartered from the Colonial government (and before that were governed by the various Colonies’ orbital traffic control.) These bullpens are usually a few hours travel from the various worlds to prevent accidents. Colonial Fleet bullpens are usually closer to the worlds. The schedules of bullpen use are leased out to other vessels.

 

26 November, 2011

Prepping the Campaign: Beginner’s Edition

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A lot of novice game masters ask the same question: How do I plan a game or campaign?

One of the easiest ways is to start with a sample adventure or module. These were very common for Dungeons & Dragons back in the day, and most games come with some sort of introductory mission for the players. You might want to start with one or two of these to whet your appetite. Otherwise, here are a few suggestions.

First, decide what you and your group want to play. Usually, for beginning players, this is going to be Dungeons & Dragons or some fantasy variant. There are a lot of things to commend this choice — the various D&D and fantasy games have a pre-generated setting that you can drop your campaign into. For this reason license-based games like Star Trek or Supernatural are good choices, as well — there’s a well-established world to work with, you just have to carve out your own corner of it. When you have people wanting to play different things, it’s a bit more tricky — hopefully, you have a mature enough group you can do a vote. Most popular idea wins. I’d sugest if someone is truly opposed to a game or setting, take that one off the table. (I’d love to run Mouse Guard but I have one player pretty adamant about not wanting to…off the table for now.)

Second, now you know what you want to run, it’s time to decide what kind of campaign you want to run. If you’re a new GM or one with time constraints, here are a few tips that will make your efforts easier:

1) K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid): Don’t try to plan a major overarching story arc ala Babylon 5 right off the bat. Go with a serial mentality — each story is a discrete one, like a movie. You might have sequels, but each is a specific story. Craft a simple story for your first go — For example, in The Hobbit we have to walk from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain to kill Smaug and save the locals (and raid the place for treasure…) Similarly, you could go with something as simple: the characters are brought together to rescue someone/recover something/kill some bad critter for the locals.

2) How Do You Eat an Elephant? One bite at a time… Break it down into manageable parts, like a three act play or TV show:

The first act brings everyone together and they are presented with a mission — in this case, destroy a dragon that has moved into a mountain lair (or another type of lair) and is hurting people and trade around the local area. The towns have pitched in together to pay for a couple of folks to go out and snuff the reptile. (Think of it as The Seven Samurai, except you’re fighting a giant, fire-breathing monster.) You have to get the suspected location of the dragon and set out. The end of this act would be some sort of obstacle to overcome: bad intelligence, say; the dragon isn’t where they thought it was, and their expedition is exposed to discovery. Act 2 requires the party to find the real lair of the dragon by some means that is dangerous (maybe they have to lure it out so that they can follow it back to it’s home.) Up the stakes somewhat here. Eventually they find the lair. Act 3: Raiding the lair and fighting the dragon. Finally give a Coda in which they can get their pay and adulation. Alternately, you coud add another act where the townspeople try to renege on the deal.

If you want to stretch things out a bit, you can throw in a random encounter for each act. This combines the travel/exploration style game and the dungeon crawl. Often, a dungeon crawl is seen as a simple way to jump in — map out a dungeon or locale for a fight, populate it with nasties, and get on with it. I think of these as more time-consuming than complex adventures, as you have to send a fair time drawing out your maps. Alternately, you can go random and create the place on the fly.

Here are a few adventure seeds for various other genres:

Modern espionage/military: A RPV (Predator, etc.) has been recovered after it was used on the battlefield against your side. According to inventory, it was on route to a camp in Iraq, but has turned up here (wherever you choose here to be.) Act 1: You are to investigate the loss and find out who got the drone. Go to the unit that is supposed to have the craft and investigate. Here they could pick up on other missing gear and learn the inventory can be tweaked; the gear never arrived, so it was sold in the US (or wherever.) Act 2: Go to the next base (probably Creek or Nellis AFB) and investigate. This will rile the bad guys; set up an action sequence and give the opportunity to capture and question the traitors. Act 3: Set up a new buy through the traitor to sweep up the bad guys. Action sequence — firefight and/or chase. This could eventually lead to a new adventure tracking who used the craft, or you could tack on another Act to find the terrorists that used the Predator in the first place.

Horror: The characters are hired to investigate the disappearance of someone’s relative or friend in a small town in Maine or the Pacific Northwest (cold, wet, and foggy makes for good set dressing.) Act 1: Get hired and travel to the town. Weirdness and colorful characters that are a bit creepy. No one knows where the person is, but they find a clue (a notebook or something) that leads them to the classically creepy mansion on a cliffside. Act 2: Creep mansion is the home of a local powerbroker is trying to protect the town from an old reputation as a cult center. Research the cult. Their curiosity should be an attempt on their life under spooky circumstances. Act 3: Break into the house during a major ceremony to bring about something evil with their quarry either as the sacrifice or yet another cult member. Stop them and get out alive.

Western: Characters are hired to protect a thing or person from theft or release by bad guys. The goal is simple: get from Point A to B with the package intact in a certain length of time. Maybe you’re guarding the payroll for the railroad. Maybe you’re taking a prisoner, a famed bad guy, to trial. Act 1: Meet the package and learn of the opposition. First action sequence shows they’re going to have to fight to make this happen. Act 2: Chase sequence or hiding from the bad guys. Discovery will require a good hard ride to someplace close to Point B, but they will get boxed in somewhere. Act 3: Fight the bad guys in a spectacular shootout. Coda: Deliver the bad guy or thing.

 

 

22 November, 2011

Setting the Scene: Getting Guns Right

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Sooner or later in your game, violence will ensue. Outside of the fantasy setting, it’s likely going to involve firearms. Having been a firearms enthusiast for three decades, long before I even owned my first weapon (Hey, Mum, guess that “no toy guns” crap didn’t work!), I found that knowing something about weapons lent a certain verisimilitude to our gaming. Here’s a few common mistakes:

Revolvers don’t have active safeties. Now, this is not always the truth, Manhurin in France did a few revolvers with safeties and the Webley-Fosbury “automatic” revolver from the early 20th Century also had one. Neither do Glocks, S&W M&P pistols, nor Kel-Tec’s wee .32 and .380 autos. This might seem a small thing, but it can play into the storyline — pistols with a safety on might buy a character a few seconds. But more to the point, when you’re running a game for someone who knows their guns, they’re going to notice stuff like this.

Semi-automatic and full automatic are not the same thing. The first means the weapon fires once per trigger squeeze — just like a revolver; the latter means the weapon will continue to fire until it is out of ammunition. Autofire burns round fast. You can empty a P90 with 50 rounds in the magazine in a matter of seconds. There is also a burst function on most military firearms to prevent soldiers from blasting through all the ammo needlessly.

Autofire is not magical. It’s not like a grenade going off, killing everything the bore crosses. It’s not particularly accurate, nor is it the opposite, like some games make it out, with the accuracy going to hell, but damage going stratospheric. You don’t hose down an area to hit something — you use it to keep people’s heads down and in one place until the other guys you’re working with can get into position to take them down.

That method of “spray and pray” looks great on movie screens. Here’s how you do it. Short controlled bursts — 3-6 usually — will provide the ability to cover an area with more chance of multiple hits. It’s most useful in close quarters and tight spaces (inside a building or ship.) Out in the wilderness, you’re better off taking a good well-aimed shot.

Called shots: most games make this incredibly hard, and when you’re jumping around looking for cover while your opponent is doing the same…well, it is. But when the shooter has a few seconds to aim and take their time — a hand shot out to 15 yards is a difficult, but not impossible shot. Hitting the head is usually not as difficult as game mechanics make it out to be at standard pistol ranges (under 15 yards.)

The character’s not strong enough for this gun nonsense: this is one of the most annoying tropes in RPGs — strength limits to use a weapon without penalty. I’ve shot stuff from .22 long rifle pistols to the .458 Grand Africa bolt action rifle (OUCH!) I wasn’t a big guy when I did the latter. It wasn’t fun, but I wasn’t hampered in my accuracy. I’ve trained small, non overly strong women to shoot. they can fire a .44 magnum revolver without a loss in accuracy due to the recoil. It’s just not the most fun you would have. Ignore these idiotic penalties, unless you want to throw it on them after the first shot.

Speaking of recoil…most handguns and rifles are perfectly manageable. The worst are usually the really small revolvers and autos chambered for something heavy and the big bore African hunting howitzers. The first hurts your hand and its unpleasant…you won’t notice in a gunfight. You won’t notice you peed yourself until after, also. The heavier the gun, the most likely the recoil won’t bother you. A 12 gauge shotgun can be fired one-handed with relative comfort, but if you don’t seat it against your shoulder properly, it hurts (no…you won’t break your shoulder.) A .458 Grand African, a .416 Rigby (I know a guy had his retina detached from the recoil), and the .500 Nitros are just plain unpleasant. And unless you’re hunting a rhino, Cape buffalo, or elephant, they’re probably overkill.

Keep that in mind when your bad ass elf assassin in Shadowrun picks out her ordinance…she’s probably not going to hang a six pound Desert Eagle with scope and laser sights, and other nonsense under her arm. People looking to conceal a weapon effectively, like spies and the like are going to carry something small like a Kel-Tec .380 or a Kahr 9mm. Professionals will stick to common calibers that can be readily found, like 9mm or .40 S&W or .45ACP (.32 ACP or .38 special in early 20th century.) Hunting rifles are usually in around the .30 caliber range — .30-30, .30-06, .303 British, 7mm somethingorother; combat arms were in the same calibers until post WWII when lighter calibers that you could carry more of for a fight became the rage in NATO (the 5.56mm cartridge.)

On that. No caliber is a “sure kill” or a “one shot stop.” Most people are killed with .22s. I’ve hear stories direct from other soldiers about people surviving a .50BMG hit. Even the famed double tap doesn’t necessarily do it, if the target is drugged up or simply motivated enough.

Some tidbits to help with realism: Autos usually throw their shells to the right, but occasionally they won’t, or teh shell will bounce off of something. Nothing is worse than hot brass down a girl’s low-cut shirt or caught under the bridge of your eyeglasses. Lugers throw their shells straight up and back…into you face. they were usually shot canted to 45 degrees.

Safety stuff — Browning Hi-Powers, most CZ-75s, the FN57 all have magazine safeties. If the mag isn’t seated (or seated properly) the gun will not fire. So if you’re changing magazines with one in the pipe, you can’t fire that single round. For critical fail/fumbles, you might consider the magazine got knocked loose (especially left handed folks can catch the magazine release button — if on the side of the handle — by accident and unseat the mag.) One interesting pistol in the H&K P7: it’s squeeze cocked by depressing the front strap. An NPC that got your P7 from you might not know this…and not be able to fire right away. I’ve used all of these things in a game.

Other tidbits: Desert Eagles tend, after firing a while, to have their safeties self-engage; the recoil makes the lever drop down and lock the gun. For the “I’ve gotta have a big gangsta gat” types, this is a great malfunction to pop on them. I’ve seen rifles and pistols where tight tolerances or over-oiling lock the spent casing in the breech due to heat expansion — in these cases, clearing the jam can take minutes. (I had a P9S that had to have the magazine removed and the butt of the pistol slammed on something to work the slide and clear the casing. Needless to say, I traded the thing, sharpish.) A revolver CAN jam, but it’s usually an ammo problem — the shell can have the primer expand and catch the firing pin, or the cylinder can move, if the weapon is old and loose, and prevent rotation. Submachine guns don’t make you walk backward while firing into the air; they don’t have powerful enough cartridges for that (although the Thompson with a drum round will make the weird wavy lines you would see in old ’30s movies as the weight changed on them. It’s cool.) About the only ting that might is the old African hunting magnums and nitros. Once again: unpleasant.

Most malfunctions in autos are due to 1) magazines — either the spring isn’t pushing the rounds properly and they need cleaned and maintained, or discarded; 2) the extractor spring is bad and the shell casing isn’t being throw clear; 3) ammunition — either “dirty” (smoky, oily, nasty smoke clouds) that bind up the action with carbon, underloaded (which might make the action not run or gets a bullet lodged in the barrel), or overloaded ammo (which generates too much pressure and might run the slide on an auto too fast to reliably pick up the next cartridge, or causes a primer blowout on a revolver.) Other malfunctions are usually more serious. Most revolver issues are either ammunition, or something to do with the cylinder timing or lockup — if the cylinder doesn’t rotate or lock properly, the bullet could hit the barrel and destroy the gun.

That’s just some spitballing on the subject. Take it as you will.

 

21 November, 2011

Setting the Scene: Sex

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I’ve already discussed this in a piece on romance in-game, but this posting will focus more on the physical act of love and how it can be used (or not) in your campaign.

First off, introducing sex into your game depends heavily on the maturity level of the players. You don’t want full-on X-rated game play with underage kids at the table. Or guys that haven’t yet realized that women are actually people, and not some breathing sex toy. (Rent Deadgirl for an interesting look into this mindset.) Secondly, make sure everyone is comfortable with the subject. Some people have no issues with sex being part and parcel of the gaming experience — it’s a major factor in people’s lives, after all; some find adding sex really spices up a game, especially in settings where romance is a key factor (the World of Darkness settings, for instance); others cringe at the very notion of sexuality, or are simply embarrassed in that contxt (you will find female players are often embarrassed to pursue this when they are a minority in the gaming group. Men, too, but that seems less common, in my experience…)

The level of comfort and maturity tells you what you can do. With kids at the table, you might want to keep it G-rated, where a kiss is the high point of the romantic pursuit. With mature adolescents and adults, PG or R is doable: you can keep it veiled — the old we’re in bed and the pan away to blowing curtails while the girl sighs, “Oh, James…” or you cut to the next morning. For most instances, this is where most games will leave it. And having read about troubles with maturity levels on other gaming blogs, it sounds like a good idea. (Man, I’ve been lucky with my groups..!)

But for campaigns where sex might be the goal of the character, or it is an integral part of the storyline, a bit of show and tell is not necessarily a bad thing. You can still keep it “clean” but onscreen — ala Battlestar Galactica, where the sexual relations of the characters was important; it was a motivator for some, a means of control for others. For instance, the classic femme fatale of pulp and spy soties uses her feminine wiles to control the male characters. When you’re thinking with the wee head, you can find yourself in a bad situation quickly…and you put yourself there because of a woman.

Example: in our current pulp game, one of the characters has the flaw “Sucker for a Dame” — this gives you an insight into the mindset of the man. Maybe he’s overly chivalrous, but more likely, he’s a horndog who gets emotionally attached or sexually fixated on a woman (or  more) a session. This has played directly against him in the game: he has a “girlfriend”, a half-Chinese smuggler that has bedded him senseless. He’s completely smitten, now, and she’s used this to her advantage to get him to help her buy a larger vessel, to gain access to important information on the mellified man, etc. He also gets sidetracked by other women, and this will most likely eventually bite him on the ass.

A man or woman desperate for love or affection is likely to be more easily swayed with a few honeyed words or a good shag. this puts them at a disadvantage when dealing with those that would use sex to manipulate them. A character that uses their sexuality for advantage tend to have certain modes of operation that once known, could be countered easily; more over, in certain times and cultures, being sexually rapacious or even simply “sexy” can get you into trouble: you’re scandalous and have trouble with certain elements of society, you might be branded a criminal or simply an acceptable target (if you’re talking money for sex, or homosexual…)

And there’s the obvious issue with sexual relations…what is the act for in the first place: procreation. You don’t want to be a super-spy or viper pilot who finds yourself pregnant in the middle of long-term mission or the robot apocalypse. The Walking Dead dealt with this the other night: you don’t want a squalling brat that will bring even zombie in a 5 block radius to your encampment, or alert the Cylons to your location, or have it get sick while you’re on the road to whatever destination in your fantasy world. It’s also hard to fight a pack of kobolds effectively with your bairn in a papoose.

Maybe you don’t get a kid out of it…maybe you just get a case of something unpleasant. If you’re sleeping around with the busty barmaids of the fine village of Whereverthehellweare in your D&D campaign, you might want to introduce a bit of the itchy-scratchy to the character…preferably once they’re already on route to whatever dungeon or adventure they’re headed for, just so they can enjoy the burning sensation for a few sessions. You could use it against them: hard to ride a horse, or run in those cool leather pants when a case of the crabs.

Sex doesn’t have to be about fantasy porn. A GM can use sex to enhance the motivations or characters, their relations with NPCs, and to be a right bastard from time to time.

 

 

21 November, 2011

Thrilling Action Stories! After Action Report

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It’s been a week or two since I’ve done one of these: our group has been continuing their Hollow Earth Expedition campaign titled Thilling Action Stories! (exclamation mark absolutely neccesary!) This is the campaign set in 1936/37 Shanghai and has revolved mainly abou the search for a mellified man, and the attendent troubles they’ve had keeping a hold of the thing.

The latest snag was the introduction of new (hopefully recurring) villain Hanoi Shan — based on the original character from the 1920s. He’s was a native colonial administrator in French Indochina, and is now the head of the Silk Mountain Triad (for our game) and a master chemist and villain. Shan was interested in the mellified man as a means to pursue not just quick-heal medicines, but longevity drugs. He combines Chinese magic and lachemy with Western chemistry and science for the usual 1930s Pulp “science” (best personified by the Red Skull in the latest Captain America.)

Having raided the hideout of Hanoi Shan, hidden in a wing of an operational textile mill, the characters rescued Dr. Drake (who had been captured in a massive raid on the Silk Mountain Triad hideout by the Shanghai Municipal Police, lead by the corrupt cop PC Inspector Ned Shrapnel. They also got into a classic fight-in-laboratory, complete with acid-filled beakers, loads of glassware with weird colored stuff in them, and the inevitable fire that gets started in the the fray. In the end, they rescued Drake — who had been tortured using a combination of hypnosis and drugs — but the factory burned to the ground with their mellified man and a massive gun shipment meant for the Kuomintang of another character (a Chinese gangster.) They also accidentally killed a bunch of prisoners under the building, the results of some of Shan’s experiments — the horror aspect of this has had to be put on hold, as a result, until next time.

In this, Dr. Drake managed to escape at the last minute by somehow turning one of Shan’s (of course) female assassins. This is the second time he’s turned a female assassin sent after him — it’s turning out very James Bond in that aspect, and I suspect it’ll be his signature move soon. (Eventually, that means he’ll have to run into his Fiona Volpe, doesn’t it..?)

A lot of the background on the mission revolves around the split authority in Shanghai. For the raid a few weeks ago, they were working with the SMP in the International Settlement, but the original theft took place in Chinese Shanghai, and the textile mill debacle in Pudong, across the river in China proper. They’ve frequently got to cross lines of control with ID checks and other issues, and even the SMP can give them trouble, as there are several nations participating in the police int he International Settlement…not all of them working for the same goals (the Japanese, most specifically.)

This has meant a lot of politicking — particularly for the Chinese gangster character who lost the gun shipment, and now either has to make good to his boss in the Green Gang and to the Public Security Bureau of the KMT (the police in Chinese Shanghai), or they lose their big connection to the government and criminal elements. This has lead them to work on stealing a bunch of guns from the regular Chinese army to resell to the PSB, and to muddy the waters and make themselves look less guilty, they are buying other guns from a White Russian competitor with ties to the Japanese in an attempt to pin the theft on him and remove him from play. This has meant running around the various environs of the city trying to coordinate a major theft and slight of hand while moving through the areas of control of the various powers — Chinese, French, and International Settlement (Japanese and British, mostly.)

The realism I’m trying to introduce here has required serious study of the city in the time period, and the urge is to throw it all at the wall…when you are creating verisimilitude like this you don’t want to chuck everything at the characters at once — hold back on the cool information about the nightsoil collectors (or what have you) until it matters. You can foreshadow some of that, of course, but don’t turn your game into a history lesson on the subject.

The setting of a split control city is turning out to be a good one. You could do much the same with Berlin of Vienna after WWII. The zones of control mean fleeing authorities by crossing those borders can help the characters, but you can also use it as a foil — are your papers in order? Is there a warrant for your arrest? Did you bribe the right guys? How do you move materiel between French controlled Vienna and British-controlled Vienna? Who the hell is in charge of what? It makes just every day chores challenging. (For a good example of how this can work, rent The Third Man with Joseph Cotten and Orson Wells. It’s about gun running in Vienna in 1949.)

 

17 November, 2011

Ouch

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games
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15 November, 2011

Tech at the Gaming Table

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games
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I’ve noted a few places online that there’s some sort of debate percolating about the interwebs about the utility/appropriateness of allowing technology at the gaming table. This seems to focus primarily on the players and their smartphones/iPods/iPads, etc. and whether these are a distraction to the gamers and the group in general. Time for me to weigh in. Well, maybe not, but I’m going to do it anyway.

I’m a bit technophile, that’s no secret (search the site for my posts on the iPad as a GM tool.) I’ve been using a laptop to GM since about 1996-97. I always wrote out my adventure notes in spiral notebooks as a kid and in the 1980s, but with my first desktop computer, I realized I could hold onto the notes for longer (notebooks have a tendency to get lost, full and thrown out, or tossed with a move.) I printed out adventures for use, could craft character sheets or backgrounds with pictures, etc. When the laptops got cheap enough, I jumped — you can have the machine at the table, with access to all your notes, have dice programs, etc.

Originally, I fought a losing battle with gamers over cell phones — no calls/texts while gaming. Most of the players were cooperative at first, but you’d let them slide for an “emergency” and next you knew, they were at it all the time. so the rule is now, no texting or answering the phone while you’re in play. If you’re on the sidelines, go ahead. With the iPod and smartphones, most of my players are now using dice programs on their phones, save for a couple of Luddites who prefer the feel of rolling the bones. Most still have their printed character sheets, but on the rare occasion I’ve gotten to play rather than GM, I’ve had my character sheet, the books, and the dice on my iPad.

Essentially, if you play with adults who respect each other, you’re not going to have then being rude about their tech use. If you play with people that can’t communicate with others in the room without texting, you will. (Although I’m sure someone will state it’s a good way to pass secret notes, and just as disruptive as handing off a slip of paper.)

What do people use at the gaming table, I wonder..?

(How do you like my swanky new poll widget? I feel so Buck Rogers…)

 

15 November, 2011

Campaign Idea: Ghost in the Shell

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I’ve been toying with a Ghost in the Shell style campaign for some time, now. It’s an interesting universe, especially the TV show, and I thought it might work well for my group. (One of the players is desperate to play a Tachikoma…I told him that I might, if this comes to fruition, let him play all the Tackikomas in the squad. It’ll annoy the hell out of one of the other players because he can do the cutesy voice.)

First consideration: which mechanics to use? I quickly threw out OGL d20 — I hate the mechanics and the class-based character rules. Savage Worlds was a possibility, but there’s certain aspects of the mechanics I just don’t like. Ubiquity just didn’t have the feel I wanted, so I turned to Cortex…but which one: Cortex Classic or the FATEified Cortex Plus? I won’t touch Smallville with a ten-foot pole; it’s a hot damned mess.Leverage had some things to recommend it here — the more fast and loose skill sets, the discriptor abilities, and the fact the characters wind up being uber-competent.

In the end I decided for Cortex Classic (a shock to any regular reader, I know…) Character creation is fairly straightforward, using the house rules that allow for the swapping of creation points between Attributes, SKills, and Traits/Complications — as with first generation Serenity rules. I do use the 2nd Edition (or Battlestar Galactica) trait rules, where they are ranked as a die, rather than the more confusing die step. No fixed experience costs for stuff, as per BSG and afterward — I use a hybrid experience based on the Serenity rules: skills cost XPs equal to the die you’re buying (raising a skill from d6 to a speciality d8, for instance, costs eight), attributes 4x the die you’re seeking (raising to a d8 Strength from d6 would cost 24 points), and Traits get raised at 2x the die/Complications are bought down at the cost of the current Complication die (lowering a combat paralysis flaw from d4 to d2 would cost 4XP. this makes buying off major complications hard — as it should be, but you can get that mild phobia under control in a few adventures.)

There are existing cybernetics rules in the core Cortex book that with a bit of tweaking mirror the cyberbrains and other tech from GitS…cyberbrains automatically give an Enhanced Communication trait, as well as a benefit to finding information. I’m stuck between whether this should be an Intelligence die step or a die bonus (example: a D Class Cyberbrain is a d4 Trait and gives Enhanced Communications d4 — wifi access with a d4 reliability and a d4 Knowledge or Expertise skill so long as they are online [or a 2 step on intelligence, haven’t decided].) These skills are essentially “book knowledge” and wouldn’t aid someone in, say, doing surgery. You might know what to look for, but you’re not going to be skilled with the scalpel…you could research karate techniques, but you don’t have the training and muscle memory to use it effectively.

Full body cyborgs would most likely have to be done as packages, especially the bad ass combat models with hidden weapons, etc. I had considered building them more as vehicles with full stat packages to mirror their being tougher, faster, etc…but then tough about the show and the portrayal of the cyborgs — bullets tear them up pretty effectively; even Kusanagi wears armor (when she’s not appealing to fanboys and otaku by being skimpily dressed.) So they’re human-scaled — just stronger, faster, etc.

Weapons and vehicles are have fairly similar real-life analogues and are easy enough to put together. Here’s my first pas at a Tachikoma:

AGL d6, STR d12, VIT d 10, ALE d6, INT d6, WIL d4 (pre-sentience) d6 (post-sentience)

TRAITS: Personality Backup d4 (mind state can be retrieved up to last back up); Thermoptic Camouflage d8

FLAWS: Curiosity d4, Duty d10

SKILLS: Athletics d4, Heavy Weapons d6, Perception d6, Tech Engineering d4

WEAPONRY: 2 7.62mm machineguns in their “arms”, 1 nose-mounted 50mm grenade launcher (or 12.7mm gatling gun.)

My next issue: do I run the game in Japan, with the characters as part of Section 9, or do I set it in another locale on the planet? I can see the first option being appealing, but I suspect the characters from the show would start creeping into the plotlines too often.

Right now, I’m leaning toward setting it either in Rio de Janerio or Sao Paolo, Brazil — an up and coming world power, with loads of black market issues, crime, etc. etc. The other option was to set it in a more futuristic India. Right now, I’m leaning toward Brazil, with a lead in adventure that would take them to Japan — I’m thinking they stumble onto a think tank smuggling ring and have to trace it back to Japan with Section 9’s aid. confiscated Tachikomas would wind up in their ESWAT (or whatever I call it) division.

That was the last point: Are they cops/military like the GitS characters, or maybe criminals..? I’m leaning toward the former.

 

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