So I was at the SF game this weekend. We played the in-book scenario from Ken Hite's ink-still-wet new Trail of Cthulhu. This is C-O-C using Robin Laws' Gumshoe System. I recently bought Fear Itself, and have been having some difficulty with the system. Thought perhaps it was just reading 20 minutes at a time, days apart. Doesn't help, but the GM running T-O-C had a bit of struggle also and he'd been in a playtest of it. The Player's review at the end didn't give the system very high marks. It does work to eliminate possible missed clues, which is one of the primary goals of the system, but the mechanics remained a bit unclear. But this ain't a review of Gumshoe. I'll do that once I've had a 4-hr block to read Fear Itself.
This is about character backgrounds. In SF we run monthly 1-shots where the GM hands out characters w/backgrounds, like a convention game. We've had some great character interaction because of many of these. In this game, one of the character's background involved them in action outside of the central plot of the game. This meant that he and the GM had to run off sometimes and do things on the side. At one point I even joked about whether or not this character was going to join us in the investigation.
Ultimately it all came together, but it put that Player and his character at a distance from everyone else. The drag is that the character was an Army buddy of 2 of the other characters. This could have led to a number of interesting moments, but since he wasn't always around...
In the post game analysis (what is this, freakin' sports!?) the GM revealed that he'd put that stuff into the character background to make things more interesting. They were, but also very distracting. Note to self: design 1-shot character backgrounds to feed into the central storyline, or to add color. Beware of possible character sidetracking. 'Character Sidetracking' have I just invented a term?
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Are we Relating?
At the March Endgame MiniCon I played in games of Spirit of the Century and Don't Rest Your Head. Each of these games started with character creation. I did the same thing in my InSpectres game earlier, but got lessons from these games about how to do it much better.
I usually avoid any Convention game that has the following in the description, "Characters created together at start". I don't want to waste valuable game time creating characters. I spend hours and hours preparing interesting characters for convention games. At DunDraCon one of the bad games I played in was a D20 Modern game in which we all had to create characters at the beginning. This took 1.5 hrs! Now the game was scheduled for 8 hours. We ended up 'playing' for 9. Hmmm... InSpectres characters can be created in about 15 minutes and it's part of the fun. I gave the Players a brief description of some cases their characters had worked and moved ahead. It worked, but the following method worked better.
Both GM's used a Q&A process to create the characters and more importantly - establish the relationships between the characters. These are only 4-hr long games, so tick-tock on the session from the get. The 1st game was Shadowrun (using Spirit of the Century) and the GM (Brian Isikoff) flat out told us it was a revenge story. Our group had been hosed on a job 10 years earlier and now that the last of us was getting out of jail, we were after some payback - if we could figure out who screwed us.
Brian asked which one of us was the one getting out of jail. Someone volunteered. Brian asked their position in the group. They picked a job.
Who had been the leader of the group? Someone volunteered. Brian asked how he felt about the job going south. The group leader decided that he felt personally responsible for it going wrong.
Brian nodded and asked who had set up the job. I found myself volunteering. It came to me that it was a contact provided by someone I'd worked with before. I'd brought the job to the crew. How did I feel about setting up a hose job? I needed to regain respect from the crew. What was my job? Driver and repair tech, I decided.
More nodding from Brian. He asked if anyone distrusted my character for setting up the job. Someone volunteered...
And so it went until we'd established the characters and how they all felt about the incident 10 years back. We even decided if the mistrust was likely to break out into an internal gunfight, or if people were just leery of each other. The characters were loosely created in a few minutes and we were off.
With that, a simple revenge story turned into a great roleplaying experience. It was more about the character relationships than the story and everyone got into it because we understood how our characters felt about the 'situation' and each other. Brian incorporated some of the aspects of our characters into the story and the resolution had not just guns-ablazin' payback, but emotional impact. Dang!
Ryan Macklin started the Don't Rest Your Head game in a similar manner. We played 1st grade kids in the same class (I don't like games in which adults play kids). The game uses 5 questions as the primary tool in character creation. Ryan expanded this to 10, adding questions specific to the adventure. Questions like "What do the kids in your class think of you?" and "What is home life really like?" got us into the characters and their relationships. He encouraged us to start with stereotypes, the Smart Kid, the Cute Kid, the New Kid, the Fat Kid, etc. and build on that base.
We bounced around the table from Player to Player getting an idea of the what the characters thought of each other and Ryan encouraged us to twist the character concepts as far as we liked. One of the SF group, Freak Master Gil Travizo, was also in this game. He played New Kid, who seemed to have a call girl for a mom. I played Wealthy Stuck-up Kid who had no home life, a completely controlled schedule and wished his parents saw him as a person. Military Kid had a 'more loved' brother serving in Iraq. Cute Kid had a mother who always called him a fat pig and put him on a new wierd diet every few weeks. He just reeeealy wanted to eat a pizza, like other kids.
What did we think of these other kids? We got down and dirty, like only kids can. Their lunch smelled funny, they had cheap toys, they didn't have a personal chef, their clothes didn't fit right, but at least they talked to New Kid, they know all about guns - which is kinda cool.
In short order we had not only created interesting characters, but as in Brian's game established the relationships between them. When we got into the game it was a breeze to drop into character and play off of each other.
Ryan did another cool thing which was to allow us to create the villain we faced. We drew from our characters' worst nightmares and it didn't take long until we had a truly creeping bad-guy. In fact, I described the villain to someone (a non-horror fan). It actually gave them nightmares!!!
I play tested my Terror at 6666 Feet game with the SF group. The characters are on a group vacation together and the tour guide asks them all to "tell us a bit about yourself". I wasn't sure about this and I think that it added extra time to the game. I'd planned to cut it for the convention session, but since the MiniCon experiences, have decided to keep it as it sets up relationships between the characters.
Now I'm looking at using this tool for other games as well. This would be very interesting in a Call of Cthulhu Game. It so won't work in Paranoia though... Thanks Brian & Ryan!!!
I usually avoid any Convention game that has the following in the description, "Characters created together at start". I don't want to waste valuable game time creating characters. I spend hours and hours preparing interesting characters for convention games. At DunDraCon one of the bad games I played in was a D20 Modern game in which we all had to create characters at the beginning. This took 1.5 hrs! Now the game was scheduled for 8 hours. We ended up 'playing' for 9. Hmmm... InSpectres characters can be created in about 15 minutes and it's part of the fun. I gave the Players a brief description of some cases their characters had worked and moved ahead. It worked, but the following method worked better.
Both GM's used a Q&A process to create the characters and more importantly - establish the relationships between the characters. These are only 4-hr long games, so tick-tock on the session from the get. The 1st game was Shadowrun (using Spirit of the Century) and the GM (Brian Isikoff) flat out told us it was a revenge story. Our group had been hosed on a job 10 years earlier and now that the last of us was getting out of jail, we were after some payback - if we could figure out who screwed us.
Brian asked which one of us was the one getting out of jail. Someone volunteered. Brian asked their position in the group. They picked a job.
Who had been the leader of the group? Someone volunteered. Brian asked how he felt about the job going south. The group leader decided that he felt personally responsible for it going wrong.
Brian nodded and asked who had set up the job. I found myself volunteering. It came to me that it was a contact provided by someone I'd worked with before. I'd brought the job to the crew. How did I feel about setting up a hose job? I needed to regain respect from the crew. What was my job? Driver and repair tech, I decided.
More nodding from Brian. He asked if anyone distrusted my character for setting up the job. Someone volunteered...
And so it went until we'd established the characters and how they all felt about the incident 10 years back. We even decided if the mistrust was likely to break out into an internal gunfight, or if people were just leery of each other. The characters were loosely created in a few minutes and we were off.
With that, a simple revenge story turned into a great roleplaying experience. It was more about the character relationships than the story and everyone got into it because we understood how our characters felt about the 'situation' and each other. Brian incorporated some of the aspects of our characters into the story and the resolution had not just guns-ablazin' payback, but emotional impact. Dang!
Ryan Macklin started the Don't Rest Your Head game in a similar manner. We played 1st grade kids in the same class (I don't like games in which adults play kids). The game uses 5 questions as the primary tool in character creation. Ryan expanded this to 10, adding questions specific to the adventure. Questions like "What do the kids in your class think of you?" and "What is home life really like?" got us into the characters and their relationships. He encouraged us to start with stereotypes, the Smart Kid, the Cute Kid, the New Kid, the Fat Kid, etc. and build on that base.
We bounced around the table from Player to Player getting an idea of the what the characters thought of each other and Ryan encouraged us to twist the character concepts as far as we liked. One of the SF group, Freak Master Gil Travizo, was also in this game. He played New Kid, who seemed to have a call girl for a mom. I played Wealthy Stuck-up Kid who had no home life, a completely controlled schedule and wished his parents saw him as a person. Military Kid had a 'more loved' brother serving in Iraq. Cute Kid had a mother who always called him a fat pig and put him on a new wierd diet every few weeks. He just reeeealy wanted to eat a pizza, like other kids.
What did we think of these other kids? We got down and dirty, like only kids can. Their lunch smelled funny, they had cheap toys, they didn't have a personal chef, their clothes didn't fit right, but at least they talked to New Kid, they know all about guns - which is kinda cool.
In short order we had not only created interesting characters, but as in Brian's game established the relationships between them. When we got into the game it was a breeze to drop into character and play off of each other.
Ryan did another cool thing which was to allow us to create the villain we faced. We drew from our characters' worst nightmares and it didn't take long until we had a truly creeping bad-guy. In fact, I described the villain to someone (a non-horror fan). It actually gave them nightmares!!!
I play tested my Terror at 6666 Feet game with the SF group. The characters are on a group vacation together and the tour guide asks them all to "tell us a bit about yourself". I wasn't sure about this and I think that it added extra time to the game. I'd planned to cut it for the convention session, but since the MiniCon experiences, have decided to keep it as it sets up relationships between the characters.
Now I'm looking at using this tool for other games as well. This would be very interesting in a Call of Cthulhu Game. It so won't work in Paranoia though... Thanks Brian & Ryan!!!
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Whatcha Been Up To?
I've been up to no good and proud to say so. Best news is I haven't been caught.
OK - the reality is that I've been up to quite a bit on the game front, but not made the time to sit down & write about it. Went to the first Endgame MiniCon of '08 a couple of weeks ago and ended up having dinner with fellow GM Brian Isikoff. He has a gaming podcast '2d6 In A Random Direction' with Endgame co-owner Chris Hanrahan. Cool stuff. We talked about blogging a bit. A couple of days after the MiniCon, Chris sends out a note that he's back on his blog. A few days after that, my archaeologist & gamer friend Matt Armstrong http://www.anthroslug.blogspot.com/ e-mailed his fellow gamers to let us know that he'd re-started his blog. Sooooo, I'm back on mine.
What's been happening since June of '07? The San Francisco game group has been going strong. Almost everyone in the group has run something. Without exception, they've been great games. We only missed one month and that was a last-minute break-down. I've run Paranoia, Unknown Armies and my own Blood Brothers style game using BRP (Chaosium) rules. B-Movie Horror mayhem with influences from the Grindhouse films. I'll run it as a single 8 hour 2-part session at KublaCon '08. Anyway, it's a kick-ass group and I'm glad it's come together.
At the home game, I concluded Feng Shui, then ran InSpectres for awhile and moved on to Serenity using BRP rules. Chaosium is supposed to publish BRP as a stand-alone system and I keep hoping it will come out. Still waiting guys...since October guys... Anyway, the Serenity game just wrapped. We called it Metamorphosis as we were using BRP (though I did buy the Serenity RPG for ref material). The captain named the ship Metamorphosis and we went with it. The game started well, but drug on and got a bit out of control. Gonna have to do some damage control, have a chat with someone. It was fun to create character sheets from scratch and start from the basics adapting BRP. Gotta say I was actually glad to be done with it. Unlikely I'll go back to it, but ya never know. At least 1/3 of the players expressed some dislike for the game - something that's never happened to me before. Others had a really great time! Go figure.
So I'm taking a break from GM'ing the weekly group. More time to get to my writing projects - like this blog. I also need time to prep my games for KublaCon. It's still months away, but I want to be completely ready beforehand as I'm running 4 games, most of which run 8 hours and don't start until 8PM (don't get me started on that - maybe later).
I haven't been doing anything on the screenwriting front. OK, not quite true. I went to the screenwriting Expo in Oct 2007. Great event as always and I came back deciding to stay in touch with people and work on making my own horror film. Have an idea for a re-write of one of my scripts and an original zombie idea. Exchanged e-mails with several people for a time and then faded, as usual. Got people excited about the project and then pfffff, I couldn't maintain. All I've really managed to do is put games together and attend several good games. Can't read a novel, can't get much writing done, haven't made it to the movies, have had the same Netflix selection since December. I did get most of the interior of my house painted. I also got a ton done at my dayjob - even got a raise. Also got hooked on Pandora online radio. Soooo coooool...
Actually went to DunDraCon this year. Didn't get it together to actually run. Went for Sat-Sun. Was in 4 games. 2 rocked. 2 bit. Took fellow gamer/friend James. His 1st convention. Now he's talking about going to Kubla!!! Good lessons from the one's that blew. Got to play Dunwich Horror boardgame. I now own 2 new boardgames - Redneck Life & Zombies!!!. Have been able to play them both with the weekly group as the Metamorphosis game failed to wrap. Big time fun with both. Anyway, I got to hang with the Chaosium folks and talk about products with them - like BRP...
Most recently there's been the EndGame MiniCon. I ran InSpectres in the 10AM slot with only 3 people. The 4th person didn't show. Still, we had a great time and one of the players bought a copy of the game. Cool!! He'd been playing Prime Time Adventures and wasn't having as good of a time. Was supposed to run BRP Horror for the second session, but player flakage caused cancellation. Got into Brian Isikoff's game instead. Good to meet and hang with Brian, who also runs Paranoia. Also got to try out the Spirit of the Century system. Very cool system. Next post I'll discuss some elements of the 2 games I played in that I'll look to incorporate into other games.
Really wanted to get into the Don't Rest Your Head game in the last slot, but initially it was full. Then Brian Isikoff's girlfriend had to cancel and I got her slot. Thanks Jenna! (I think it's Jenna) Anyway, Ryan Macklin ran this most excellent game. I gotta get me a copy - maybe when I go up for GoCon #2. Meanwhile I've been trying to read the rules for Fear Itself. As with other Robin D Laws stuff, I love the essence, but have a difficult time with the writing. That plus I only have a few minutes at a time to read. Gotta find a block of 4 hours to read the whole thing. It's now a freakin' jumble in my head.
That's it. Waaaaay to much for a new post, but I mostly just wanna more foward from here. If you've read this far, you must be very bored indeed. Thanks!
OK - the reality is that I've been up to quite a bit on the game front, but not made the time to sit down & write about it. Went to the first Endgame MiniCon of '08 a couple of weeks ago and ended up having dinner with fellow GM Brian Isikoff. He has a gaming podcast '2d6 In A Random Direction' with Endgame co-owner Chris Hanrahan. Cool stuff. We talked about blogging a bit. A couple of days after the MiniCon, Chris sends out a note that he's back on his blog. A few days after that, my archaeologist & gamer friend Matt Armstrong http://www.anthroslug.blogspot.com/ e-mailed his fellow gamers to let us know that he'd re-started his blog. Sooooo, I'm back on mine.
What's been happening since June of '07? The San Francisco game group has been going strong. Almost everyone in the group has run something. Without exception, they've been great games. We only missed one month and that was a last-minute break-down. I've run Paranoia, Unknown Armies and my own Blood Brothers style game using BRP (Chaosium) rules. B-Movie Horror mayhem with influences from the Grindhouse films. I'll run it as a single 8 hour 2-part session at KublaCon '08. Anyway, it's a kick-ass group and I'm glad it's come together.
At the home game, I concluded Feng Shui, then ran InSpectres for awhile and moved on to Serenity using BRP rules. Chaosium is supposed to publish BRP as a stand-alone system and I keep hoping it will come out. Still waiting guys...since October guys... Anyway, the Serenity game just wrapped. We called it Metamorphosis as we were using BRP (though I did buy the Serenity RPG for ref material). The captain named the ship Metamorphosis and we went with it. The game started well, but drug on and got a bit out of control. Gonna have to do some damage control, have a chat with someone. It was fun to create character sheets from scratch and start from the basics adapting BRP. Gotta say I was actually glad to be done with it. Unlikely I'll go back to it, but ya never know. At least 1/3 of the players expressed some dislike for the game - something that's never happened to me before. Others had a really great time! Go figure.
So I'm taking a break from GM'ing the weekly group. More time to get to my writing projects - like this blog. I also need time to prep my games for KublaCon. It's still months away, but I want to be completely ready beforehand as I'm running 4 games, most of which run 8 hours and don't start until 8PM (don't get me started on that - maybe later).
I haven't been doing anything on the screenwriting front. OK, not quite true. I went to the screenwriting Expo in Oct 2007. Great event as always and I came back deciding to stay in touch with people and work on making my own horror film. Have an idea for a re-write of one of my scripts and an original zombie idea. Exchanged e-mails with several people for a time and then faded, as usual. Got people excited about the project and then pfffff, I couldn't maintain. All I've really managed to do is put games together and attend several good games. Can't read a novel, can't get much writing done, haven't made it to the movies, have had the same Netflix selection since December. I did get most of the interior of my house painted. I also got a ton done at my dayjob - even got a raise. Also got hooked on Pandora online radio. Soooo coooool...
Actually went to DunDraCon this year. Didn't get it together to actually run. Went for Sat-Sun. Was in 4 games. 2 rocked. 2 bit. Took fellow gamer/friend James. His 1st convention. Now he's talking about going to Kubla!!! Good lessons from the one's that blew. Got to play Dunwich Horror boardgame. I now own 2 new boardgames - Redneck Life & Zombies!!!. Have been able to play them both with the weekly group as the Metamorphosis game failed to wrap. Big time fun with both. Anyway, I got to hang with the Chaosium folks and talk about products with them - like BRP...
Most recently there's been the EndGame MiniCon. I ran InSpectres in the 10AM slot with only 3 people. The 4th person didn't show. Still, we had a great time and one of the players bought a copy of the game. Cool!! He'd been playing Prime Time Adventures and wasn't having as good of a time. Was supposed to run BRP Horror for the second session, but player flakage caused cancellation. Got into Brian Isikoff's game instead. Good to meet and hang with Brian, who also runs Paranoia. Also got to try out the Spirit of the Century system. Very cool system. Next post I'll discuss some elements of the 2 games I played in that I'll look to incorporate into other games.
Really wanted to get into the Don't Rest Your Head game in the last slot, but initially it was full. Then Brian Isikoff's girlfriend had to cancel and I got her slot. Thanks Jenna! (I think it's Jenna) Anyway, Ryan Macklin ran this most excellent game. I gotta get me a copy - maybe when I go up for GoCon #2. Meanwhile I've been trying to read the rules for Fear Itself. As with other Robin D Laws stuff, I love the essence, but have a difficult time with the writing. That plus I only have a few minutes at a time to read. Gotta find a block of 4 hours to read the whole thing. It's now a freakin' jumble in my head.
That's it. Waaaaay to much for a new post, but I mostly just wanna more foward from here. If you've read this far, you must be very bored indeed. Thanks!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
