8 August, 2023

RPGaDay 2023: Favorite Character

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This is a tough one. I’m perpetual GM for most of the games I’ve played, so I never have just one character; I get to play a bunch of them. Over time, there are a few that stood out, however:

There was the hill Martian that joined the crew of a cloudship in our Space:1889 game, and who became attached to the Texan gunslinger that was being played by one of the other gamers. A generally well rounded character that has a touch of the modern “strong female character” to her. she’d be more nuanced this time around.

There was Athena — the sentient starship from our early aughties Star Trek game, and who was fun for her frustrations with her crew. One of the Treknobabble things was FTL switching for their computers. I decided that she knew the answer to questions that would be asked…but causality meant she had to wait until the question was asked to respond. If they didn’t ask it, the answer would simply dissipate in her mind. She was protective and funny, with a snarky side.

There was the troll in our Rome-based D&D game that the current game group started in. Stupid, violent, but with a weird sense of honor and morals, he was convinced with a spectacular roll by the monk to stop their fight and listen to the word of God. In a later campaign with different characters a few decades later, he turned up as a lay priest in England, where his graps of the Bible and the Ten Commandments were horribly misunderstood and he went about grifting the local passersby using the bridge by his Church with massive tolls “for God.” He was probably one of the most popular with the gaming group.

Recently, I’m rather fond of our story mcGuffin in Alien, an android named Stella. An older model that’s had her mind moved from one body to another, and has possibly been witness to some really awful stuff. She was the android with the group in the original run of the Chariots of the Gods adventure that Free League put out (and I tweaked), and she has been the impetus for adventures for a few groups now. I’ve been trying to keep her in the vein of David from Prometheus — is she sentient? Isn’t she? Does she have real feelings or is it all artifice? Does it matter?

Weirdly, now that I’m playing a single character in Fallout…I don’t think it’s as interesting as the various ones I’ve had to cough up out of nowhere and breathe life into on the fly.

 

7 August, 2023

RPGaDay 2023: The Smartest RPG You’ve Played

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There’s a couple of ways this one can be taken: the smartest game (either run or the smartest players…) or the smartest setting/genre, or the smartest rules set…

I’ll go with the middle one first. The smartest game I’ve ever played was is probably the one we’re trying out now — DIE the RPG. The meta-quality of playing characters who are themselves dragged into a game and playing their characters isn’t a new idea, but the system and the setting are designed to play with the foibles and issues of the characters as the world of DIE seeks to “feed” on their hopes and desires, fears and pain. It’s also the first game to explicitly have the GM be a character/player in the game that I can think of — the world is crafted by that player’s issues. It’s an interesting aspect that can really be fun for the GM.

The smartest game as in the storyline, players’ actions, etc. has got to be the Battlestar Galactica campaign I ran for years. Running a game in an established property is tricky, especially one where the story is has already been told and has it’s own heroes — think Babylon 5, for instance, that was tricky to create a story that allowed the players to have real impact when Sheridan and the others are running around deciding the fate of the galaxy, of Star Wars — where you’re not going to get to destroy the Death Star or take out the emperor; or even Star Trek, to a point.

 

6 August, 2023

RPGaDay 2023: Favorite Game You Never Get to Play

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You can take this question two ways — a game you don’t get to play, period; or a game you don’t get to play, but run as GM. I’ll take both:

The first: We pretty much play most of the games on the shelf that I want to play. We tend to try and rotate the game and system on a regular basis to keep people from getting bored. That said, I would love to run Jovian Chronicles using some rules set that isn’t the monstrously awful Silhouette system. I’ve thought of porting it over to Cortex (the Battlestar Galactica version), but it just never quite gets there.

The second: Since I’m forever GM for most of my life, there’s a bunch I’d just like to play a character. That’s been a delight in Fallout, concentrating on one character (two if I’m playing for an absent player), but I think I’d really like to simply play in either Blade Runner or James Bond:007 (or any other espionage setting). I suspect, however, due to experience in both those venues, I’d be a pain in the ass to run for.

 

5 August, 2023

RPGaDay 2023: The Oldest Game You’ve Played

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Does chess or Parcheesi or Go count? Probably not.

The oldest RPG I’ve played was pretty new at the time — the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. The one where you didn’t even have die, but had to cut out chits and shake them in a cup. The rules were fairly simple, especially compared to the encyclopedias you need now just to know all the bits your characters do.

The oldest game we still play is Space: 1889, although I’m running the old setting with the new, lite Broken Compass rules. The oldest rules set we used up until about 2010 was the James Bond:007 RPG. It’s still worth a look.

 

3 August, 2023

RPGaDay 2023: First RPG Bought (this year)

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Well, a lot of the stuff that has come in recently was Kickstarter between last year and the end of 2020, so the RPG bought this year was Mödiphiüs’ Star Trek Adventures, reviewed here. I had run a Star Trek game a few years ago, but I used the old Decipher system that had powered our long-running campaign of the early aughties. (A friend was a Trekkie, Enterprise was showing, I figured why not?)

Fast forward to this year. One of the other players has been running Fallout for us (review here) and the 2d20 system that had been so damned awful in playtesting years ago, was much better laid out and explained than when we were trying to struggle through the unedited playtest material for John Carter. I had popped for the PDF of the game a few years back never intending to play it, but maybe mine it for ideas at some point. After playing in Fallout, I had a pretty good sense of how the system worked, and what rules were a bit to wargame-y and would get conveniently ignored in a Trek game.

So I bought the Corebook bundle (comes with the PDFs for pretty much all the books expect Lower Decks and the Klingon supplement), a GM screen (which comes with an excellent set of starship combat sheets to aid players in what they can do when the photons start flying), and the Discovery-period sourcebook (more for the Strange New Worlds ties.) The goal is a “season 2” of the campaign we played a while back, using the 2d20 engine.

This post will also cover the Most Recent Game Bought post for tomorrow.

 

2 August, 2023

First RPG Gamemaster

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This was long enough ago I honestly don’t quite remember. I’ve been playing — starting with the box set of Dungeons & Dragons I got from Hess’ department store in…’78? ’79? maybe? Long enough that it was “dungeon master”, not gamemaster. I know it took a long time to find someone who wanted to play. There was a distant cousin I wound up running the game for, and there was an older guy who was running D&D at the local library, but I don’t remember his name, but I remember he didn’t make it very exciting; it was very rules oriented.

Once I had an actually group of friends playing by 1980, we played a lot — and I was usually the GM’d. We cycled through a lot of games — all the TSR offerings, then hit on James Bond:007, which was my favorite system until about a decade ago. It’s still damned good.

In college, others would take over running games, but they usually would last a few episodes then hand it off to me because they were busy or just didn’t have the time.

The only one that really sticks is the redheaded giant dude, totally spectrum, who ran Dungeons & Dragons for the group for about most of a session before we started working on peeling out the good gamers for our own group. This guy was stunningly misogynistic — after going through his 80 page bible on his game world, he gave us our characters, making sure the singular female got the cleric…who was mute. Better yet, he made sure his wife was getting us drinks and food. He had played once at our place and while stretching, he knocked the glass light cover off the kitchen ceiling. Shatter. Did he offer to clean up? Nope — he expected my then-wife to.

Then there was the goth Christian who ran Call of Chthulu — more on him later…

 

1 August, 2023

RPGaDay 2023: First RPG Played (this year)

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I decided to hedge my bets on this one and give the first RPG played with my daughter, and with the gaming group, this year. That gives me a chance to talk about two games!

The first is the game I was playing with my daughter (and later the wife jumped in, as well): Aegean. This is a rules lite RPG set in ancient and mythic Greece. The players can be normal folks or demi-gods, and the there’s a couple of expansions that came along as stretch goals on the Kickstarter which ended way back in October of 2021, and which was supposed to be on backers’ doorsteps in Summer of 2022. Of course, between shutting the f***ing planet down and the attendant issues that caused, while the PDF has been in hand for a while, the printed materials (as of this writing) are still vaporware.

The system is simple — you have five attributes and fifteen of skills. To do something, add the appropriate skill and attribute and roll that number of ten-sided dice. Eights and above are successes, with 10 allowing you to activate a feat on your weapon, bank Resolve (their luck/story/hero point mechanic), give a success to a companion, or “invoke the fates”. It’s a pretty standard mechanic, especially for d6 games. It’s light, fast, and works. The character can embark on adventures from monster killing (a pretty common hero thing, even in Greek myth), to competing in contests at city games, to help to build up one’s polis — the city you are from. Players work together to create a basic polis and can get elected into the government.

Overall, the system is tight, there’s enough material to work with, and fans of the myths should be able to craft story arcs with ease. The production values, based off of the PDFs is very simple. Layouts are single column, block paragraph with easy to read typefaces. Art is at a minimum in the core book and teh follow-on Book of Heroes and Book of Empire — which I still haven’t had a chance to look through, as they came in which we were kicking the tires on other games systems at the time.

Aegean can still be pre-ordered at Kickstarter, and at DriveThruRPG. I should have gone with the print-on-demand version; proof for the print version were only spotted in April, so I’m expecting this to take another few months to see.

The other “first” for the game group was Free League’s Blade Runner. I love police procedurals and espionage adventures. Always did. Hell, they directed me into my former field of endeavor, before I got into teaching. Set in the rain-soaked, neon-lit, dystopian future of the movies, the game has the characters playing the eponymous police assassins. You can play a human or a replicant. I promptly ignored the need to be Rep-Detect and several of the characters are in other divisions of LAPD: a Robbery-Homicide detective (who caught the murder that started our campaign), a Special Investigations Service detective (they’ve got an…interesting history), and a pair of Blade Runners — an older experienced one with a dark secret, and a new Nexus 9.

The system is the Mutant Year Zero system, well the “2.0 version” I guess you might call it. Rather than rolling all d6s, the the characters roll between a d4 (really a d6 is the lowest for characters) up to a d12 depending on their attribute and their skill. A 6 or higher is a success, and a 10 or higher is a double success. (That sounds familiar…doesn’t it?) After having played Alien, where a wheelbarrow of die could seemingly not get you a success, this version of the MY0 engine (and which also powers Twilight:2000) seems to guarantee more consistent results for higher levels. It good enough I’ve been considering converting Alien over to the newer version — something Free League should seriously consider.

I’ve been enamored with the admitted-awful future of Blade Runner since I sat as a teen in the theater and watched it opening night. It still is a draw and I will admit this is the most I’ve enjoyed running a game since my five-year long epic Battlestar Galactica game ended.

Both games are good and worth a look. Aegean will set you back $25 on DriveThruRPG, Blade Runner more than that from Free League.

 

25 July, 2023

The Scheduling Dilemma and the Death of Gaming Groups

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You see the memes on social media, you’ve heard the jokes about how — to be true to the experience of the game Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Theives should have ended about halfway through and the audience should have to wait through repeated re-schedulings to see the end. It’s funny. It’s also true.

Having been gaming for about 40 (man, I’m old!) years, one thing that has set my groups apart is that everyone usually commits to being there once a week. (Some groups, for a while, were meeting two to three times a week. We had no life.) That doesn’t mean that people canceled out for illness, or a special event, or what have you; but that the remainder of the group met to do something while that player was out. Sometimes it’s a board game night. Sometimes it’s movie night. Sometimes a cook-out or something social but not gaming. (Invite the significant others and family!)

So, I’ve been particularly lucky that this hobby has been a consistent and comforting norm throughout much of my life — even during my military service. International pandemic? Fuck that — it’s nerd night Thursday!

However, this summer has seen the steady encroachment of “other things” into nerd night. Work trips — unavoidable, yes; but there’s been a lot of them as every workplace seems to think they’ve got to “make up for time lost” wasting your time at conferences. Vacations — understandable. Vacationing over the last few years, unless you went to Florida (where the freedom is), was a bust. You want to make up for lost time. It got to the point where at least one of the group was out every single damned week of the summer.

We have a few techniques we use to get around the “X is gone this week” — someone else plays the missing person’s character if they are essential (or can’t just disappear for a time); the GM can run them although I’ve always found this can get tricky if the character gets killed (or you have to obviously fudge it); you can play a different game. We tend to rotate what we play on a semi-regular basis, so there’s usually a game and plot waiting where we can do a one-shot or add the missing player back in later.

Keep the momentum and the schedule going.

This is important for very simple human behavior reasons. Once something (or someone) slides out of a priority for a person, they tend to sideline it. As time goes on, it gets easier to replace that commitment with something or someone else novel. Eventually, you stop showing up. Friendships and hobbies, like any habit, survive on repetition. Break that chain and it’s harder and harder to weld it back together.

In our case, the last three to four months of vacation/work travel/illness has led to one of the core players — one that’s been consistent for 18 years (!) — to be out. A lot. The most recent call out is instructive. He’s off to GenCon last week, had work travel in the first week of August, but he was in this week…until a last minute call out to go to a concert. This is what I mean. Normally, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but after having screwed up the group and our scheduling most of the summer, this last minute call-out between call-outs is what I mean. It’s easier. Hey, come on, it’s no big deal; I’ve only canceled on you guys most of the summer.

And he’s right: it’s not a big deal. It’s a hobby, not a job…but it’s also friendships that have obviously become less important over time. The socializing outside of gaming for this one has been steadily on the decline to the point I still invite him and his significant other…but more to be polite. I know they’re not coming. (I’ve heard this a lot more from other friends talking about their interactions with their friends and families over the last three years. The global lockdowns destroyed a lot of people’s social lives.)

A few weeks before this last minute blow-off, I’d even asked if he wanted to quit or take a break (which is the same thing…) and was told “no, I’ve just been busy…” Well, we’re all busy. I work two jobs most of the year, am a parent with a spouse that needs attention, as well; and I have other friends and hobbies. I prioritize the game because I prioritize the people. I could go motorcycle or shoot with buddies. I could write more. I have a bunch of stuff to do, but I like my friends and this is our main (but not only) bond.

This is one of the reasons why game groups need to be friends. If you don’t see each other outside of the game — there’s really nothing there. Without that connection, things will inevitably draw a group apart. When you have that, the consistency flows; when you don’t…

 

25 July, 2023

RPGaDay 2023: Reflections

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I was writing the posts for RPGaDay this year in July, since inevitably I’m overtaken by events in August. It’s the start of the school year, so the day job kicks in, and the kiddo needs picked up and other school-related nonsense ensues. I’ll get a few poss in then not finish. No so this year; they’re all written and ready to drop.

One thing that struck me looking over it and a few of the RPGaDay posts from prior years is the remarkable consistency I’ve seen in certain related questions. My opinion of the “best game ever” or versions of that question always seems to go with the old James Bond:007 RPG or MWP’s Cortex. They’re different beasts: the former is a bit busy on the rules front, with levels of difficulty ranging across a wide spectrum, quality of roll ties into how well you do (which winds up being great for damage dealt), whereas Cortex is pretty lightweight, with just enough “crunch” for older-school gamers. Where both excel (Cortex moreso) was an attempt to use the uses to push roleplaying. For JB:007, it was the weaknesses system; for Cortex, the combination of abilities and weaknesses. As any first year English or film major should be able to tell you (if they graduated before about 2000), the weaknesses of a character is what makes them interesting. Supermen (and Marvelous women) are boring as dried shit. People who are flawed, weaker than their opponents but rise to the occasion, who fail but get back up — they’re the interesting ones.

I’ve noticed that I don’t mind complexity of rules when it’s necessary (JB:007), but despise it when it’s not (D&D and and to a certain extent Modiphius’ 2d20). I like simplicity, but sometimes games can get so minimalist that you lose something (Alien, by Free League and the three skills/attribute, which Broken Compass, a current favorite, also does. In the case of BC, however, TwoLittleMice seems to have realized this might have been a bit constrained and have gone to four skills per attributes. Madness!

I’m also hoping to find time to pump out reviews of Aegean, by Stoo Goff; Avatar Legends by Magpie Games, and Blacksad, based on the excellent noir anthropomorphic comics.

 

25 July, 2023

Six Things Every New Moto Guzzi Owner Should Know

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After a few weeks of ownership, here’s a few things to know going into owning a Moto Guzzi V7.

1 — It makes noises like it’s haunted:

When it’s sitting after a ride moaning like the ghost of whateverthehell Ebenezer Scrooge’s late partner was called**, don’t worry; the gas tank’s just a bit overpressurized because you filled it to the top or it’s really hot out. You can just open the gas cap (slowly!) or leave it and terrorize your family when they go into the garage.

2 — It’s really cold-blooded:

When you take off from a cold start and the thing lugs in first and second gear like there’s something wrong, again — fairly normal. Kinda like driving a Ferrari 365GTB — until it’s warmed up a few blocks down the line, it’s best to run a little tall in the gearing. I find a block or two running in the 3k+ on the tachometer and it wakes up. (Addendum: Some of this is the fueling. Apparently, GuzziTech has a widget that will enrich the mix and get rid of a lot of the low end lag. The bitchy shifting, however, is completely an issue with the transmission oil needing to get moved around. That takes a few blocks, then she’s fine. SCR)

3 — No, you don’t have the peg clearance you think you do:

I’ve scuffed hard parts on this thing since the first test ride. I had to take the angle feelers off the bottom of the driver pegs because they were ground to point and were catching on my bloody pants. Hell, I went into a tight turn a gear higher than I tought I was and scrapped the kickstand (which protected the nice chrome pipes. Dial your suspension up a few notches and butt scoot like a professional racer or you’re gonna hit things. A least on the V7. (Addendum: After riding the bike for a while, I realized a major part of the issue is the engine never sounds like it’s straining — even redlined. I tend to ride by sound and compared to my 2010 Thruxton and 2020 Enfield Interceptor, the V7 sounds like it’s barely working. On the mountain twisties that had me hit the damned kickstand while folded against the pipe I did a quick check of my speedo…I was a good 10 mph faster than I thought I was. It’s got plenty of clearance…I’m just riding it like a lunatic! SCR)

4 — You’ve got incredible range on the thing:

My gas reserve comes on at 3.8 gallons on a 5.5 gallon tank. That’s a bit overly cautious to my mind. I usually get about 190 miles on that 3.8 gallons. That makes for a total range of around 300 miles. That’s cars with shitty gas mileage ranges. (Addemdum: It’s been getting a steady 54mpg on the “summer” gas here in New Mexico, and 50mpg on the ethanol-heavy “winter” gas. SCR)

Speaking of gas…

5 — It’ll drink anything, but stick with higher octanes:

It’s run fine at 6000′ in altitude and 90F degree weather on 85 octane but a regular diet is probably not Italian enough for it. Stick with higher octanes.

6 — Yes, people are going to want to talk to you:

…but they’re all going to be old dudes talking about when they had that Monza back in the ’80s and such. Be prepared for a plethora of questions on how reliable it is. It seems ever biker that’s never owned one thinks they’re shit because some guy told them once…and ever Guzzi owner says they’re bulletproof, except for the one time (or two, or three) when something (usually electrical) happened.

Like the modern Royal Enfields, everyone is judging the new Guzzis by horror stories from back when, let’s face it, every bike kinda sucked except for Honda.

( **For those who aren’t literarily inclined, it’s Jacob Marley.)

 

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