28 September, 2014

Breaking Canon: Battlestar Galactica RPG

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: , |
[2] Comments 

For some time now, we’ve been stomping all over the canon of the reimagined show with our campaign. I figure if you’re going to roleplay in an established setting you’ve got two real choices — adhere to the established material and slavishly model it, or work in the interstices between the events of the movie/show/book…or that what you like, throw caution to the wind, and do it your way.

I’ve used all of these techniques — from playing on the edges of the Babylon 5 universe in a campaign back in the late ’90s, to throwing a large part of the franchise out the window for a Star Trek campaign a few years back. With my first Battlestar Galactica campaign, I did the second fleet thing — a smaller group looking to find a new home, working from the flashes of insight of an oracle in the fleet and an alternative book from the Sacred Scrolls. It worked well, but with the collapse of that gaming group, I tried something new — throwing out the stuff I didn’t want and building anew.

Adama: gone; replaced with a player character, Commander Pindarus. The Final Five nonsense: gone. The humanoid Cylons are actually from Kobol, and are agents of the blaze known as Seraph. I borrowed the Ship of Lights for the Blaze and the Seraphs from the old ’70s show. Added: more science fiction elements, archeological hints that the Cycle of Time has repeated for at least three or four times. And our people finally set down on Kobol this time in the midst of a civil war between the Seraph and the centurions they had created and those from the Colonies they coopted into working with them. The goal was the same: find the Temple of Athena and the roadmap to Earth.

We had established that the war and the Fall of Man was to bring them “home” under the loving embrace of “the Blaze” — the one true god…except it’s not. We had a ton of exposition under fire this last session, and some of it involved what the Blaze is/was.

After a great cliffhanger (literally) in the week before, we launched off into characters on the ground mission rappelling out of an old Olympian temple or palace while the ruins were being blasted apart around them. They’d already lost one (former) PC, scads of NPCs, and lost a major NPC — the love interest of the commander — when she broke her back falling from the building. Still alive, but paralyzed and barely able to breathe, the characters carted her to the Temple, where they used the Arrow of Apollo to open the tomb — to do this, the arrow had to be shot at a “lock”, which opened the tomb.

The tomb, however, was more of a command center for the Goddess of War. Athena presented as a hologram, demanded from them their intentions, and learning they were from the 12 Tribes, demanded a “sacrifice” — the injured and dying member insisted she be used, as she was the obvious choice and the Athena specter agreed. She was loaded into the sarcophagus of the goddess (empty), and a vial of something inside the Arrow of Apollo was loaded at the hologram’s direction into a panel of sorts. The sarcophagus went to work doing something horrific — laser light and milky liquid a la the resurrection ships — while the hologram gave them the night time sky from Earth stuff from the show, but followed it up with a zoom out to show that they are about 1100LY from the world, on the other side of the Orion Nebula. They can be there (safely) in about 300 days.

The sarcophagus was done, by this time, having repaired the injured colonel and “infected” her with the DNA of the original Athena. While her appearance won’t change — the body is mature and while it might change over time — she still looks like the colonel, has many of her memories, but has also had Athena’s memories programmed in somehow. The newly restored Athena gives them the low-down:

The Blaze is Hades, a jealous “god” who should have been the King of the Lords of Kobol, as he was the eldest, but was usurped by Zeus. At least, that is the memories, the legend, they had been created with. In truth, they are the creations of the TITANs, some kind of advanced machine intelligence that destroyed their makers…humans, then in a bout of regret, recreated life from Earth on Kobol and gave them the Lords to rule over them and help them develop. The Lords started to take the PR too seriously, especially Hades, who after the rebellion and exodus of the Ophiuchan or 13th Tribe (of whom he was the patron god), he followed them and discovered the TITANs. Intrigued by their investigations into the nature of the universe, he “saw the face of God” and went mad, fashioned himself as a god, and returned to Kobol to instill order and gain the adulation of his peers and their human charges.

Except it didn’t work out that way…and for ten thousand years or more, they’ve played out this story — over and over — with Hades hoping for the “right” outcome: he as the one God, worshipped and loved by his followers. However, just as humans created their machines that destroyed them, and the TITANs created the Lords that fashioned themselves as gods and viewed Man as their creation, and just as Man created machines in their image, the Blaze created Seraph as a replacement for his departed brothers and sisters, the Lords of Kobol.

The history is fractal — from the massive superintelligent TITANs, to the Lords, to the Blaze, the humanoid Cylons/Seraph and the humans…the same hubris to create a perfect slave destroys the maker. Athena, having remembers other iterations of the story, threw herself from Olympus not in despair over the colonies leaving, but to set her mind-state free to be transmitted to “follow the course of the Blaze” and find a way to stop him. She has been waiting for a millennia for someone to find her, having been beamed home 1000 years ago.

While this was happening, Galactica found out the mission on the ground was rapidly going FUBAR, and they jump in to nuke the Blaze’s citadel on the ruins of the “City of the Gods” on Kobol — the Tower of Dis, a massive diamondoid structure that is mostly computational substrate, but also an active energy weapon system. It’s dug into the planet to feed on geothermal energy and according to Athena, has the records of every Seraph, human puppet, Lord of Kobol, and who knows what else stored in it. If Hades escapes, the cycle will just start all over.

While Galactica  is locked in a tense fight with the Cylon fleet over the planet, and the missiles are on route, Athena and Hades have a snark off that ends with her revealing the one thing she has left: her father’s thunder. She lets the ship and the ground crews know it’s a trick she can do only once…and they have three minutes to be outside of the magnetic field of the planet. With a strike of her spear on the floor, she sets the weapon in motion.

A few more NPCs and almost two PCs, were lost trying to evac to the SAR raptor had had just gotten to them (One of the characters was physically hurled by the increasingly strong Athena into the raptor.) and they manage to barely clear the planet as the magnetic field starts to amp up sharply and the planet starts showing signs of volcanic activity all over the globe. The magnetic field collapses down to the surface and increases to a sci-fi ridiculous level and destroys the Blaze…and Kobol.

The Cycle is broken. With the roadmap to Earth they head back for the fleet.

There was a great moment when the mission returns when the commander realizes that Athena is no longer his lover, and has his nervous breakdown in private. They also learn from her that while they have the map, they will need her to get past the “Guardians of Earth”, who will need to see someone they “know.” Hence the need to take biomass and retool it with her DNA. There were some intimations that the TITANs may be “near” Earth, and that the Blaze may or may not be destroyed. If not, they will need to attract the attention and aid of the TITANs to stop him.

If the characters follow their own plans, the fleet will split with Galactica leading the ragtag fleet of civilians to Earth, while Pegasus takes the other military assets and fights the much weakened Cylons with hit and run attacks designed to distract the enemy from the fleet’s escape.

So that’s an example of how you can take the material from an established property or universe, keep a lot of the elements (and even enhanced them), and still go your own way.

 

9 September, 2014

Enter Tradition! Games

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: |
[3] Comments 

Between rewatching Role Models and reading up on the Jedburgh Ba’ tradition, I realized something that can improve on the verisimilitude (a word I use because i love the sound of it, and it makes me sound smarter than I am) of your RPG setting. People play games, watch games, beat each other up over games…always have, always will.

Here’s some basic ideas for games your players’ characters might play:

There medieval football, the closest to which today would by the Jedburgh or Kirkwall game of ba’ (ball…with a Scottish accent.) You choose two destinations — one for the Uppies, one for the doonies (downies) from either end of town. There’ a designated person to “throw up” the ball, usually a leather hand-stitched thing about 4″ in diameter, sometimes adorned with ribbons, etc. The goal is to get the ball over the destination point up the town or down. You play in a mob — none of this small numbers crap — and it can take all day. The big honor of keeping the ball goes to someone on the winning side.

Rugby/football/soccer — There are other obvious variants of football. Some even use your foot, NFL fans. Rugby is a nice one — it’s like American football, but without all the padding and helmets. Score points by getting the ball into the goal, and have fun pummeling other people into the grass. Soccer is a bit more civilized, with mostly kicking, rather than throwing and carrying the ball, as in football and rugby.

Keep It Up — Volleyball, beach ball, tennis, badminton even jai alia are keep it up games. Drop the ball, the other side gets a point. There might be other rules, etc., but this is the basic game. Jai alia just adds the extra fun of a hard ball moving at high speeds for greater injury potential!

Get It In — Basketball, Battlestar Galactica‘s pyramid, Rollerball — all are versions of this: Get the ball, throw it in the basket/hole/whatever for points.

Ball games typically are team sports, with teams as small as doubles up to the mob scrums of handball. Team sports, like their older brother political parties, inspire intense — often idiotic — loyalty and pride. They can have a lot more subtext than just colored jerseys — they imply where you are from, your religion, your politics. Get asked in Glasgow is you are Rangers or Celtics, and they’re not just asking if you like blue or green; are you Catholic or Protestant. On a Friday night after a few pints, this could lead to a beat down in the wrong neighborhoods.

Speaking of beat downs: Contests of skill, strength, etc. are fun. Arm wrestling over a few pints? Always good. Archery or shooting contest? Obstacle courses? Boxing/karate/cage fighting matches — these are ways to have the characters earn some dosh or respect without having to run a mission of some kind.

The other major gaming you see is racing. People will race anything. If slugs were big enough to ride, we’d race ’em. Dog racing, Pinewood derbies, horse racing, bicycles, trains (yes, there have been train races),motorcycles, cars, boats, planes, spaceships — we either ride ’em or watch ’em. For powersports, half the fun is when the person biffs it. Everything from regulated tracks with warning flags, and rules for not trying to wreck other racers, road rallies where you go from point A to B, timed events (to prevent crashes), demolition derbies — add some nasty terrain and speed and it gets fun.

Games of chance: People love the easy money, and the thrill of maybe winning is enough to have people playing the Redneck Retirement Fund weekly across the United States (the lottery, for those trying to figure out the putdown…) Dice. Cards. Roulette (with or without the gun), pachinko, dominoes….the quick way to handle this in game is to have the players roll some kind of gambling skill or attributes appropriate to the matter. But if the game is the point of the adventure — say, you’re running Casino Royale as a scenario in a espionage game — why not bust out the cards for some high stakes action? Even if it’s just a few hands, it will change the flavor of the session. (I bought triad cards for Battlestar Galactica for just this thing, but the characters have been a bit to busy for games, lately…) Now add gambling to any of the situations above and you can add drama to the events.

Can you make a simple game played in a session as intense and “important” as fighting the bad guys? Have a look at Role Models — a lightweight comedy that is actually much more respectful and understanding of geek culture than something like Zero Charisma. The climactic SCA/LARP battle is not life threatening, but for one of the characters, it is central to who he is — losing the scrum to the “bad guy” really is that important, and despite the characters using boffer swords and dressed like members of KISS (seriously, see this movie!), the audience does feel that this is high stakes, even if it is stupid to some of the characters.

 

8 September, 2014

Gender and Race in Historical Game Settings

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: |
[3] Comments 

We play role playing games because we want to be something, if only for a few hours in the safety of fantasy, extraordinary. The brave fighters, the canny wizard or hacker, the fighter pilot, the plucky thief, the social diva — whatever…we want something larger than life.

Most games are set in different periods from ours. Maybe it’s the faux medieval fantasy world, Renaissance or Enlightenment pirate settings, Victorian science fiction,  interwar pulp action, or futuristic settings. the draw is the difference from your modern day life. Even espionage games typically do the spy-fi settings where you drive expensive cars, sleep with comely enemy agents, shoot things indiscriminately, and maybe — if you’re lucky — you get to blow up a volcano secret base. The point being: it’s not reality.

However, the need for verisimilitude in a setting is important for audience (your players) buy-in. So how real should you go? The societies of pre-industrial nations aren’t known for their open-minded stance on gender, race, or sexuality. Combine that with class issues and the thought of living pre-1920 should put most people off. Set that reality dial too high and you will exclude certain character types, and by extension, certain demographics of players.

Race relations were not exactly stellar prior to …well, ever. And being a woman before the first sexual revolution of the 1920s was not conducive to a life of high adventure and being treated as an equal. And what if you were poor? Not a lot of crofters had the option to race off and explore the world unless they were wearing army red. How do you handle this?

First off, no matter how real it is for the NPCs, the players are special. There are always exceptions to the rule in history. Boudica was a warrior woman who wasn’t about to take crap from anyone, but lived in a world where women were second-class citizens of the Roman Empire. We’ll get back to her in a moment. Joan d’Arc was a peasant girl and maybe a lunatic, but she was an excellent general. Mary Read was a successful pirate. Jane Digby and Lola Montez were different stripes of female adventurer when is was not acceptable. Tom Molineaux was a successful boxer, despite being black, in the 1830s. The Lafayette Escadrille had a black pilot, and plenty of women and minorities found escape in early aviation.

They are the exceptions, the special ones…the ones the players are playing.

Gender and class come together here very well — the women mentioned are not middle-class. The typical view of the domestic goddess raising kids and doing what her husband told her, while quaint, was typically a middle class thing. Aristocrats like Boudica (a Welsh queen), or Jane Digby (the former Lady Ellenborough), or the spy Lady Hamilton had the freedom to buck convention because they were wealthy or well-connected, and their eccentricities — while decried — often made them popular figures. Conversely, the poor woman could find herself with more options than the middle class woman by sheer virtue of having nothing to lose, and that they were “invisible” to proper society. By the time you get noticed, like Lola Montezz, you’ve used you talent or sexuality to become the lover of the King of Bavaria. Lower-class women pretty made the West — that madam, that landowner whose husband died…they were the ones that made Western society, not the cowboys and prospectors.

Similarly, even during the height of the slavery issue, freed or scaped blacks like Frederick Douglass traveled freely and openly spoke their mind. Jews might find themselves in a sticky situation in Nazi Germany — unless the were much-needed scientists — but with money and connections, you might still slip by. The exceptions should be the exceptions.

That doesn’t mean you should shy away from race or gender or class issues. Giving your players realistic impediments can (and should) be frustrating, but they should be able to outsmart, outfight, or out-politic their foes. They should have detractors who decry their stepping out of place or take steps to ruin the character socially, but there should always be those folks that back them. It’s actually pretty realistic, historically.

Example 1: I often ran Victorian sci-fi games. One of the players chose to play aristocrats almost exclusively. Why? Because of the freedom than money and connection gave her characters to flaunt convention and get away with it. She played almost exclusively characters that were socially adept and attractive — the sort that thrived in the nooks and crannies of the Victorian period.

Example 2: A young Chinese street urchin, female, who was able — because she was young, a girl, and Chinese was the perfect spy and go-between for the Western male characters in 1936 Shanghai. She was always in danger of physical or official abuse, was often hungry and dirty…but her utility allowed her to tag along on adventures.

Example 3: A black woman who had gone into prostitution in our Victorian game, but who managed to seduce the right men, gain some level of financial stability and notoriety, then launched on a series of adventures with the other characters who — being the exceptions to the rule — were at least tolerant of the character.

Example 4: A female Martian in a Space:1889 game got involved with an American cowboy wandering the Red Planet. Despite their string of high-profile adventures and relative acceptance by Martians, human religious types viewed their union as “bestiality.” this caused them troubles, but not insurmountable ones because they are the heroes.

 

6 September, 2014

Death and the Conventions of Genre

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: , |
[2] Comments 

Angela Murray had a neat little piece on Gnome Stew that I thought was a good starting point for an examination of death in an RPG, and how appropriate it might be due to expectations of conventions of genre. She only dips her toe into the matter, but I it raised some interest questions for me.

Character death is always a bit of a hot topic among gamers. While it’s not quite as common today as it was back in the days of yore, the issue can still bring out vehement opinions on both sides of the argument. One school of thought pushes for ‘realistic’ outcomes to dangerous choices and doesn’t flinch at the idea of a dead character when the roll of the dice turns against the player. Conversely, many modern games emphasize the idea that character death is a rare thing and should never be taken lightly.

Thinking on it, as a game master I like to avoid killing off characters when it isn’t cinematically or plot appropriate. (A point she brings up regarding Boromir’s death in The Fellowship of the Ring.) As a player, I’ve strangely been less worried about that — maybe because having been stuck with the GMing role for most of my 30 years playing, I’m used to having to off favorite NPCs when needed.

One of the mechanical points I dislike about FATE, for instance, is the use of stress over an “injury” rating for combat. I think stress could be wholly appropriate in, say, a superhero game like Marvel Heroic, where the players can take mental or social or spiritual injury that is not immediately life threatening. Even stress for minor injury seems a nice mechanic…but it just didn’t tend to have that level of finality that combat — to me — should have.

On the flip side, Dungeons & Dragons, with the armor class and hit point system that allows a guy to get hit with swords for half the afternoon also didn’t work for me. While there’s a nice quantitative method of measuring damage, the realism is so obviously non-existent as to pull me out of the experience.

I always rather liked James Bond: 007‘s approach, with light, medium, heavy damage, followed by incapacitation and killed. You could use hero points to “get out of death”, holding the reaper off until it was cinematically appropriate, or succeeding where a bad die roll might scotch a great plotline.

There’s where I think I break with the modern idea that death should be rare — your characters are typically involved in hazardous adventuring. Death should be a real, present danger, but unless you are a favorite second-string character in a Joss Wheedon story, death shouldn’t just pop up and punch a big wooden spike through your chest. Or as Murray explained,

…in recent years I have had characters die in games where I didn’t have a problem with it… I never had an issue with losing a character in a horror game like Dread, or even a full-bore military-esque Shadowrun game. Eventually it struck me that my problem with character death has more to do with the genre of the game than it has to do with actually losing the character. Nobody likes losing a character, but when it fit with the story, I was okay with it.

It’s the conventions of story-telling or genre vs. the simulation/wargaming approach of gaming. Her mention of horror games is very apropos here: the horror genre has certain conventions. You’re going to lose folks, and probably messily — even if you don’t split up to cover more ground, walk backward into the monster a dark room, decide to take a shower or strip down to your underwear in the middle of events, or have a high melanin count in your skin that requires the others to elect you to go out “and see what that was.” Horror=death, or in Lovecraftian games, insanity at the very least.

For those who don’t like our characters drawing on rubber walls with out feces, or having our head ripped off after we go nuts and lose our crap…well, maybe horror is a genre to steer clear of. (Also doing horror well at the gaming table is hard I find…)

What about a military game (which Shadowrun is not…)? Say Twilight:2000 or Battlestar Galactica — life should be cheap unless you are in a story with an overarching metaplot like BSG and are playing a main character important to the plot. The post-apocalyptic genre where “life is cheap” (more the Twilight:2000 end of things) however, might be good to play troupe style, with multiple characters per player. (This is how I run Battlestar Galactica due to high attrition. Marine or Viper pilot..? Unless you are an angel or have a destiny or something…you might want to have another character in the offing.) A Western is another good example. Everyone but the lead is pretty much open season, if we’re running a spaghetti Western, and even the lead in a modern deconstructionist piece like Unforgiven.

Spy games tend to have a lone or small group of folks fighting the bad guys. It’s spy-fi like 24, or James Bond or MI5, not espionage fiction like LeCarre (which would make for a dreadful full game) or The Sandbaggers. The characters are supposed to get tashed up, hurt, have setbacks, but ultimately you stop the master plot, get the bad guy in a big raid of their volcano base, or (unless it is that unfortunate string of ’90s movies) you stop the bomb. Maybe you get killed, but it’s at an appropriate time. “Aren’t you dead yet?” “Almost, Starchild…”

In a sci-fi universe like Star Wars, however, heroes should do very well. Fate, for instance, is an excellent system for Star Trek or Star Wars precisely because the convention of that setting is heroes don’t die…they get beat up, the might lose a hand, they might have cheated or tricked their way out of death, but unless the actor thinks they’ve got a shot at a movie career, they’ll be there next week. Random character death here is not appropriate to the genre. That’s why you knew Groot was going to be okay. It’s why Lando was going to get Millennium Falcon out of the exploding Death Star, and why fire and explosions only travel linearly and as fast as the hero can run/drive/fly. It’s the in joke that must be told, even though we all know it’s crap.

It was interesting she brought up Doctor Who — the main companions always do alright. They don’t die. They might get abandoned here or there, left in an alternate reality, retire to Sussex; they don’t die. The Doctor dies(ish.) And everybody else around them — especially since the Eccleston run — have a good chance of corking it…but the companion? Nope. Their challenge is coping with all the horrible stuff that happens around them.

So how does this all fit into your game campaign? Hopefully, the players have talked about what they expect from the new campaign, and everyone has bought it on the conventions — is it grand space opera? We know what we should be getting? Is it a post-apocalyptic cars-and-deserts game? We know we might bite it. Horror — have a backup character?

Knowing the conventions of the setting you chose is important not just to setting expectations, but will help with the mechanics you use. (No, GURPS is not the only game you’ll ever need…) Fate is great for those settings where the challenge is overcoming rarely-fatal obstacles (superheroes, Star Trek/Wars, . Cortex and Ubiquity are a nice middle ground systems that have death built in, but also mechanics for avoiding death (until appropriate.) Dungeons & Dragons or d20 — at least at lower levels, is a great game for “oops! You died” games.

Match the system to the setting, and the play style to the expectations, and you’re halfway to an enjoyable game or campaign.

 

12 August, 2014

Running Short? What to Do…

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: |
Leave a Comment 

This post was inspired by Stopping Short over at Gnome Stew by my former editor Walt Ciechanowski. In it, he asked what was an appropriate thing to do when an adventure ends early in the night and you’ve still got time before everyone goes home.

The obvious thing is to kick back, talk about the session or other things, and be sociable, but say you want to keep gaming… Do you start the next adventure? Do you spend time doing the character adjustments and things of that nature? A bit of both?

My answer is simple: role play. Don’t jump into the next adventure straight off, but give the players the time to handle the “down time” stuff or the “B plot” issues that you most likely glossed over during the mad rush to stop the villain, kill the monster, or whatever you were up to that evening.

Did Character A want to go back and talk to that waitress? Did Character B really want to steal that [insert object] that could lead to a short encounter that could fill up the rest of the night? Did Character C want to have that sad graveside moment with a fallen comrade or loved one, with his friend Character D by his side to do a nice vignette for the rest of you to enjoy?

Maybe the players have a moment to enjoy their hard won laurels and some plot thread they missed can be brought up in conversation…wait, what was that in the Collector’s cage? Oh, crap..! Maybe the experiences lead them to do something different — I’ve been a viper pilot since the Fall of the Colonies, but I think i want to run for the quorum so I can make a real difference in people’s day to day lives that not letting them get killed can’t. Maybe they ended the villain of the piece, but the man who killed your beloved (To quote Rocket Raccoon, “Everyone’s got dead people!”) or made them betray you is still out there. Can you convince the others to help you exact revenge?

Make it about the characters as people. Do a The Walking Dead and talk about their feelings.

Or pull up funny videos on YouTube and kill the rest of the night.

Your choice.

 

11 August, 2014

Managing Player Over-Planning

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: , |
Leave a Comment 

We’ve all been there: The game party encounters an obstacle, even simple one, and proceeds to spend the rest of the night trying to figure out what they are going to do. It’s never something simple. Everyone wants a piece of the action. Everyone’s got an idea how to overcome the thing…like opening a door.

The most egregious example I can think of from my gaming was a fantasy campaign in which the players ran across an enemy patrol camped out for the night. Stealth up and rush them? No, that would be to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). Nooooo…there was a series of convoluted plans to keep the guards from raising an alarm, using just about every off the wall trick but the most obvious — use cover of darkness, sneak up stealthy-like, and liberally apply blade to exposed throats. After an hour of nonsensical planning, one of the characters threw a rock to distract the baddies, alerting them to their presence, raising the alarm, and blowing all of their meticulous, but contradictory tactics to hell.

How do you manage this, as a GM (or even a player?) As a game master you’ve got several good options:

1) Put a time limit on it. You’ve got so much time to plan before the guard comes back, the roof closing on you crushes you, the bomb goes off, the bad guy can complete the last component of their diabolical plan. Time it so the players only have that much time.

2) When the action is happening and players start to get analysis paralysis, give them a countdown. “You’ve got ninjas closing on you and they’ll be on you in moments. You can fight, jump over the cliff into the water below, surrender, or [enter other idea they’ve thrown out] — three! two! one..!” This works great in the midst of combat or some kind of action set piece where people wouldn’t have the leisure of sipping their beverage while considering all their myriad options. Make it happen or get sliced up.

3) Give them parameters. In a game where the players are part of an agency or military, or whatever, there is the possibility (probability) they’ve got some kind of rules of engagement. Maybe they have to have zero contact with the opposition, maybe they are not to use lethal force, maybe they have to protect the [McGuffin] at all costs. Having parameters tightens the decision tree and allows the players — while still maintaining autonomy — to make faster and more appropriate choices.

This last one can be difficult for players coming from hack-and-slash campaigns, where everything is on the table, to a universe where there are laws and fairly serious consequences for breaking them (like a modern setting campaign, for instance.) I’ve found players not used to a different purpose than “kill the monster, get the treasure”, often have trouble with the notion that “you just can’t blast civilians while chasing a bad guy through the streets of Miami…” but setting up those expectations ahead of time can hone their decision-making.

4) Give hints. “That’s railroading!” No, it’s not. Now go read some indie games with clever rules for how the players can come together to write a story about combing your hair. Sometimes, there’s only going to be a few options. You’re trapped in a room with two exits. Bad guys are coming through one. Stand and fight? Climb out the other exit? Some variation on those themes..? “You’ve managed to piss off the contact you need to get information from; what do you do?” [Player hems and haws…] “You want to rough him up? Apologize and try being less a douche? Bribe him? Let the player that does this well take over?”

As a player, you can aid the group without being to pushy. Don’t start acting like a commanding general. “Hey, Seth, you’ve got a high charisma, right? Why don’t you talk to the contact instead of Bob. If that doesn’t work, Bob can do the rampaging dick thing and try to beat it out of him.” Or sometimes it’s a bit more direct. During a recent play session of Firefly, I played Zoe, but one of the others wanted Mal…and was really not equipped to do so. I would occasionally point out things on his sheet. After all — Zoe is the captain’s right arm. I tied some of my suggestions into the characters’ patter, building off of the show. (For other game settings, you might point out something from a past adventure that seems more appropriate to the character’s past actions. “You’re not going to do X again, are you, sir?”

The main thing to look for as player or GM is when the game bogs down because of disagreement. Take a few minutes break, clear out the cobwebs or put aside personal style issues, and get back to it.

 

17 July, 2014

Alternate Damage Rules: Battlestar Galactica

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

One thing I noted in the Battlestar Galactica campaign we’ve been running is that the system doesn’t quite allow for the toaster splashing antics of Starbuck and Apollo, nor are the toasters as deadly as they could be. One reason for that is the Cortex Classic mechanic for damage in a fight. As mentioned in the Discussions on Damage post from today, the idea for these possible house rules catalyzed out of a Facebook group post that caught my attention. So without further ado:

Suggestion 1: Tying the damage die to success. You need a 7 to hit the target and get a 12. That’s 5 points basic damage plus the d8W for your rifle (or viper.) At this point, anything under 5…is a 5. That means when you roll the d8W, you get between 5 and 8 as a result, so a 3 stun and 7-10 wound. This makes you a ton more effective against the toasters…and vice versa.

Suggestion 2: A static damage number that is tagged to the basic damage. As per the last example — you’ve done 3 stun and 2 wound basic damage. Now your rifle does 8 wound. This seems a lot more dangerous, and isn’t the one I would recommend.

Suggestion 3: This is one I suggest separate from the above ideas, and is one I use in my Cortex games: characters always roll an Endurance (Vitality+Willpower) versus damage taken. If they succeed, no penalty is rendered; if they fail, they are stunned for the number of rounds they missed by. This can be bought out with a plot point, or if they have Cool under Fire or some such asset. If they are hit with an extraordinary success and the character misses the roll, they suffer the effects as per the normal rules (pg 94 in the Cortex core book.)

Suggestion 4: This has also been one I’ve used in our campaigns — an extraordinary success on an injury leads to some kind of lasting effect — a broken arm, or the like — that gives the character a temporary Chronic Injury complication equal to the wound, round down. So say you take 9 wound and 3 stun, but live…you have a d8 Chronic Injury, Broken Whatever that takes that many weeks of game time to heal.

As usual, feel free to completely ignore any or all of this.

 

17 July, 2014

Discussions on Damage

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: , |
[2] Comments 

One nice thing about roleplaying is that it is social, it’s a discussion — between GM and players, between the characters, between players in different groups across the interwebz. One discussion that caught my attention was on the subject of damage or injury in a game. The question asked was static or random damage…but is that all the choices you have?

Most Fate variants have the ability to soak injury into complications like “Broken Arm” or some such mechanic that works against the character, but doesn’t take them out of the game. James Bond RPG had an excellent rules set where the quality of the attack dictated how much damage was done based off the Damage Class from A-L (character’s could usually delivery A-C damage in hand to hand; a pistol between E and G), so you might take a Light Wound on an acceptable or good hit, a medium on a very good, or a heavy on a excellent result. Cortex has a similar quality based damage system where basic damage is done by the amount of success on the attack roll. Say you have to hit on a seven, and you roll a 12; that’s 3 stun and 2 wound…but then you add the randomized damage of a dx wound or stun for the weapon. That 5 total damage was pretty good, but Oops! you rolled a one on the damage roll. Kinda sucks, huh? There’s a rule that extraordinary successes do full damage of the weapon (pg 94, Cortex core book) where the target suffers a steady d2 bleed out until they get aid, but does that accurately (or even cinematically/dramatically) represent a great shot?

One way around this is a “mook rule”, if you will. PCs that get extraordinary success or a critical hit, dispatch whatever no name henchman or monster they are dealing with. Only the lead villains or major henchmen get the benefit of damage roll. (Or to quote Nigel Power in Goldmember, “You haven’t even got a nametag! What chance have you got? Why don’t you just…lie down?”)

Another could be to take the weapon and add it to the roll for the attack. Does your sword do a d6 damage, add that to the d20 (if this were D&D, say) and whatever you beat the AC by, that’s your damage.

Another might be to use a variant of the Cortex rules — damage is based on how well you rolled over (or under, depending on the system) the target number with a set damage rating for the weapon. The downside to this is combat gets a lot deadlier for the PCs. Another option is you can’t roll below the amount you succeeded by. So if you beat a target of eight by four — you do four points before the d6 for your weapon.  Anything under 5 is four, so a total of eight or higher. There’s still some chance, but the results take quality of action into effect more.

These are just a few suggestions, but it does break us out of the flatness of a random or static only damage mechanic for a game.

 

13 July, 2014

The Game Doesn’t Suck, You’re Just Playing Wrong

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: , |
[3] Comments 

This post is going to have double purpose: To address the issues of player agency and narrative control, and to tie into a short review (as a player) of the new Firefly system.

This weekend, I got a chance to play in a game of Firefly by Margaret Weis Productions run by one of the systems leads, Mark Truman, for the game. I figured it might be interesting to see if the experience of the game would be different, and if my opinions of the game would be changed by it. Along the way, there were some interesting chances to speak with the others at the table.

Mr. Truman had had a chance to peruse the previous review, and we talked about the experience of the game as I (and others) saw it. One of my comments was that the assets and complications mechanic, as in Fate, was overly complex and could lead to some confusion for the players and the GM. The assumption seemed to that I didn’t understand the mechanic, which was incorrect — I did, and even saw use in it — or that my lack of skill with the system was coloring my perception of the game. This response, I thought, harkened back to some of the issues of the Is there a right way to Game? post from a few weeks ago, and brought up some interesting questions for me:

1) Is the skill or familiarity with a system intrinsically linked to perceiving a game as good or bad? Is it a case of “It’s not the game that sucks; you’re playing it wrong”? That was certainly the implication I inferred. (Which means I could have completely misread the statement — so consider that my “I could be full of shit” caveat.) 

2) By this metric, if you are very skilled with a set of rules does that make a game “good?”

 3) Is your skill at pretending to be a character tied to an understanding of the rules? Are are skill, familiarity, and preference linked, or is this a case of correlation not being causation?

4) Is your prefreence for one system over another based on a lack of proficiency with the system?

I’m going to start with the last point first: absolutely. I’ve known plenty of gamers for whom if the rules are not GURPS, OGL d20, or Fate, they’re not playin’. (Says the guy bitterly clinging to a half dozen defunct games…) Most of these guys have also been playing the same games for years. For these people, it is familiarity that produces preference, but what about people who do venture forth and try new games? — which I have advocated in the past.

I would suggest that for these intrepid gamers, preference comes from two factors: ease of play or learning curve, and from how well a game models the genre or the setting. Ease of play usually ties to the simplicity of the core mechanic. The traditional attribute+skill (+asset or other factor) beating a target number has been pretty standard for at least 20 years. Before that, in early D&D, it was as simple as roll a d20 and get under the number for your trait (strength, etc…) The learning curve was relatively slight, with a bit of a rise when you hit combat or magic. Add a ton of math into character creation or into managing modifiers to a roll was a good way to lose a player’s interest — although GURPS and early Champions still had plenty of adherents.

More importantly, especially with the wave of newer system designs in the 1990s, were games tailored more toward role playing rather than tactical gaming with role playing rules tacked onto them (have a look at your favorite game — if the chapter on combat is twice the size as the core mechanics, we’re talking about you…) White Wolf, Call of Chthulu, Castle Falkenstein, Fudge (later Fate) were relatively simple to learn, gave the players more say in character design than race, class, etc; and oriented toward pushing story, rather than wargames with characters. This required the games to also adhere to genre convention well.

What does this have to do with preference? There are games that have lived a long and healthy life after they went out of print. Some of those were settings that would be recreated in newer games. Case in point: Why play Last Unicorm or Decipher Star Trek when FASA already did it in the 1980s. (And there are die-hard FASA fans that will not consider doing that…) LUG Trek managed to do a good job of modeling the universe of the various Star Trek television shows, and was a lot easier to learn than FASA’s version. Decipher took a lot of the LUG ideas, thought about cramming it into OGL d20, then relented and gave a bastardized version of LUG Trek that did a good job of handling all of the series (LUG had series specific core books!), but lost some of the ease of the prior set of rules. Still I jumped to Decipher…why? The core rules were easy and the game captured the feel of Trek pretty well.

Why use Spycraft when there’s Top Secret or James Bond: 007? Why buy Victoriana when there’s Castle Falkenstein? Why buy anything else when there’s GURPS? Because the new game captures the flavor of the genre you are playing in. 

If familiarity or skill with a system were so intrinsic to preference, why would people branch out? Can you look at your favorite game for a certain genre and say “this would be better, but I like this better”? I’ll start it off — Classic Cortex would probably work just as well, if not better, for espionage games such as James Bond. But JB:007 helps emulate the world of the movies better than Cortex’s mechanics would, despite being more complex. Preference here is due to familiarity, but it does not create in me the impression that other systems are not good…for this, JB:007 just does it better. Firefly does a decent job of capturing the show, but would be better at modeling Star Trek. Take that FASA guys!

Which starts to deal with point the third: Is your skill at pretending to be a character tied to an understanding of the rules? Can a player role play well enough that the rules are incidental. After 30+ year of doing this, that’s an unequivocal YES. In other words — there’s no way to play wrong. Your “skill” as a player, nor your enjoyment of a game, is necessarily hinged on the mechanics. However, there is a way to design a game that will not play well for certain expectations. Those expectations are not wrong, nor is a preference for, say, how mechanics divvy up narrative responsibility (for instance, strong v weak GM.) Those expectations can help someone understand if running a certain system or playing with those rules is more preferable than another set of rules. (Again, see A/B test of the Firefly/Serenity rules and the “Is There a Right Way to Game?” posts.)

My response to this is — familiarity or proficiency with a system for a GM or players can make the game easier or more fun — but ultimately, the mechanics rarely make a game more fun…but they can dash it very quickly. A couple of case studies that will also play to point 2: 

Call of Chthulu is a fairly easy set of mechanics to learn, and I understood how they drove the game perfectly well. The guy running the game blew goats, so my opinion of the game has been badly tainted. I understand this preference was based on a single outlier and I have been open to trying it again…but there’s usually something I’d much rather play than a game where the point (seems to be) to see how you go mad and die. That’s not the game’s fault and Truman’s statement about GM skill is spot on here, but it also wasn’t aided by the fact I find Lovecraft-style horror unengaging — that that more taints the perception of the game and has nothing to do with familiarity of the system or the universe; a good GM could make me invest in the universe…but horror is hard to do.

Example 2: I ran Chameleon Eclectic’s version of the Babylon 5 universe for years. It has an easy base mechanic — a minus die and a plus die with the result (anywhere from a -5 to a +5) added to the skill. The combat system was a hot mess, except! I understood what it was modeling, so it made sense to me. It captured how a small injury could be instantly debilitating or not, and how a vicious injury could be leading to your very imminent demise, but not slow you down. Because I got it, I ran it well and the players quickly got a hold of the base mechanic and left the combat stuff to me to adjudicate. The rules set sucked, but because the “skill” of the GM was high, the game ran well and was, in Truman’s terms, a good game. That is wrong, however — the players and GM were good enough to rise above the limitations of a bad rules set.

Likewise, I ran Space: 1889 for years and was very familiar with it, but the limitations of the mechanics from a probability standpoint were glaringly, painfully obvious. We swapped to the Castle Falkenstein rules despite terrible combat rules (which we figured out were bad even before trying them out, but try we did.several times…) Was this due to a lack of expertise in running it? Perhaps, but they also did not model swashbuckling adventure well. We kit-bashed a version of the Lace & Steel combat rules (also a card-based game) that captured the fun of sword and fisticuffs play so well that, in one of those rare instances, they made play more fun. Players sometimes eschewed the ease gunplay for the fun of clashing blades. The new rules were not “familiar”, either, and evolved a bit over the course of play…but they accelerated the pace of fights and made it more competitive. So yes, the mechanics can aid play…but after 30 years of doing this, I can safely say it’s a rarity. Space: 1889 has a phenomenal setting that is so good game designers have started pasting it into other rules — Savage Worlds and Ubiquity. Castle Falkenstein’s steampunk meets fantasy was equally engaging but the core mechanics could not survive quirky side rules mechanics for sorcery and fighting. Again…great setting, crappy GAME.

At heart, I think the argument is between whether you think rules should help engage the players, or you players should engage with the rules. Newer indie games seem to be trying to find new ways to do the first — having the mechanics engage the players in some way by having them take part in the storytelling process. This, coupled with a recent trend of game designers wanting to view RPGs as “art” (James Franco agrees!) or “socially relevant”, leads to games more interested in the mechanics as art. They absolutely want the people playing the game to have fun, but their perception of what the fun part is, and how it is achieved might not quite jive with what their audience wants.

I would describe it this way: If you know how to tell a story, and the players are invested in theur characters and the setting, the mechanics can only hinder you. Rules light systems can capture that quite well, but in the end, good role playing and understanding the mechanics are mutually exclusive to having fun or good game rules. Familiarity can cause a better perception of the rules, but not all new games we play “suck” until we get better at them. Sometimes the mechanics enhance play, sometimes they simply disappear, and sometimes they curtail play. 

Sometimes, the game does just suck.

 

8 July, 2014

Quick, Call the Boss! or Managing Hierarchies in Your Game

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: |
Leave a Comment 

While this is not as much an issue with a lot of fantasy games, where the players are off exploring or doing whatever in a wilderness setting, modern and science fiction games — particularly where the players’ characters are part of a larger organization — can have an issue where players are quick to either slough off the danger or responsibility on NPCs.

Having characters tap their contacts, allies, or superiors for help occasionally is a good thing — it gives them a chance to interact with their organization, which makes it more real, but also more comforting; it also gives the GM the opportunity to use a deus ex machina at the behest of the players without it seeming too pat. But once a team starts calling on aid too often, it’s likely to bring their competency into question by the powers that be. Here are a few instances of how calling the office for help can be used, and a few ideas for controlling over-dependence on the NPCs for help:

They’re Turning My Car Into Swiss Cheese! I Need Backup Now! Now, goddammit!

There are times the players are going to be in too deep. That’s part of the challenge. And sometimes, they’re going to need help. If that help is “cinematically appropriate” or something likely to happen, go for it.

David One-Four, officer needs assistance! In a game where the players are a police officer, a federal agent, a soldier on the battlefield, calling for help is sometimes just a radio call away. Say your team walks into the largest drug deal in history (’til the next one), and you are out-gunned and pinned down. Calling for assistance is certainly reasonable, and hopefully will even get there in time.

In a system with rules for contacts, or getting favors, etc. this might help manage response time to a call for help. Otherwise, it’s always good to keep the players right on the edge of their seat, then bail them out at the last minute. This doesn’t mean they don’t have to chase the big bad guy through [appropriate action set piece] to catch him, it just means the mooks that have been making life a bit too hard are distracted or dispatched by the backup.

Longhorn, Devil Niner — I need a fire order at the following grid… In a military-themed game, this might scale to something like calling in a fire order from artillery or an air strike. (Come on…you know you want to…) It’s a way to make things hard enough on the players to be very challenging, yet give them a pathway to success if they can’t handle it on their own.

In a spy game, calling for help is the last thing you want to do unless you have to…

But say they call for help a bit too often, or turn to the NPCs the moment there’s any opposition. How do you handle that?

David One-Four, backup dispatched. Estimate 15 minutes… A good one is time constraints. Backup is too far away, or your division is too jammed up, or maybe that self-righteous spat in the locker room with another detective got you the Serpico treatment. Either way, no one’s showing until the music is long over…

Say again, Devil Niner? Another is comms trouble. How many times has your cell phone dropped a call for no reason at all? Radio frequencies get stepped on by other transmissions, or buildings mask the signal. Maybe that new guy didn’t programs the PLGR for the radio before you left the FOB. Or that planet you landed on plays havoc with your communicator. For whatever reason, you can’t get a call through. You can leave them hanging for longer than they’d like, or leave them to twist. Another good variant is the message is garbled enough that you get a worse result…like when your artillery starts raining fire on you.

For an espionage game, any communication with the home office is a chance for either interception of your calls, the bad guys locating you or sending someone as “help”, but actually to stop you. Worse, your organization could get nervous about the outcome of your little op that wasn’t quite sanctioned in that particular country and your are suddenly deniable. No help. Find your own extraction. Hope to see you again. If they don’t just burn you, or send someone to clean up your mess…including you.

Reduction in rank or responsibility is a very real penalty in all of these situations, especially if it’s obvious that the players were shirking their duties.

…Requesting Further Instruction!

In most game scenarios, we can assume that — unless being in the dark was part of the challenge — the players got some kind of mission briefing, or have some kind of rules of engagement. There’ a goal and parameters to work inside. But sometimes, you get overtaken by events and need some clarification:

Yamato, We’ve encountered a possible new lifeform… Sometimes, you were just to darned clever  for the players (or were unprepared and haven’t explained things particularly well) and they need help. Letting them tap that expert in exobiology, or criminal law, or calling a language expert back in Ft. Meade, or some other subject matter expert can help get a story back on the rails.

Big Bear, Duchess: Flash mission update! Another scenario where calling for further instruction from the hierarchy might be when the players discover some element of the plot that the bosses might need to know, or something has happened that would cause you to exceed your orders. Say that convoy of weapons you were supposed to stop managed to get past you with some super weapon or crossed a border into a country denied to you. Do you go in? Do you call for permission?

Superintendent, you won’t believe where the money trail leads to… Maybe that criminal investigation got a lot more interesting than you expected. Following the money, you’ve started turning up people of power — the sort that can shut your op down if they get word, or which you simply won’t be allowed to go after unless you can get cover from the higher-ups. This is an appropriate time to check in with the powers-that-be. Remember that golden rule of politics…don’t surprise your bosses.

Sometimes, however, the players are looking for a gimme…at times like that, it’s time to use the magical power of bureaucratic sloth or expectation against the players:

If you can’t handle it, Lieutenant, I’ll find someone who can! Say your mission was to beam down to a planet and observe a lesser advanced species of aliens without revealing yourself. Calling the ship to ask the science officer or captain for instructions every time you get stumped might see you recalled in favor of a “more competent officer.”

You’re on the ground, Devil Niner, not me! You’ve stumbled onto the enemy in a place they’re not supposed to be and the rest of the force is otherwise engaged…it’s you, or it’s nobody. What’re you going to do, sergeant? Let your force get flanked?

I’m not putting myself on the chopping block… Never underestimate the power of covering your own ass. Maybe your investigation is likely to embarrass someone to powerful to get to. The heat hasn’t even started to come down, but your boss isn’t going to stick his neck out for the chop this close to his pension. All that work — great stuff and you’ll get a commendation, but now it’s over…just let me know where you don’t want to go in the department so I can get you where you (don’t) want to go.

Do you know how expensive it is to retask a satellite!?!  Another given, bureaucracies don’t like to commit resources they don’t have to. Maybe you need a satellite retasked — nope! Maybe you want a mini-sub to infiltrate an area, but the navy isn’t playing along. Oh, you want an Aston Martin, Mr. Bond — you know how many £150,000 automobiles you’ve destroyed this quarter? Here’s a Vauxhall.

This is one of those things where the GM has to be aware of how often and how quickly the players resort to calling for aid or instruction when they are stumped.

 

 

« Previous Page — Next Page »