Stoked!

Last night I rec'd a pckage from Chaosium. In it was a copy of BRP Adventures. It's a collection of adventures for the new BRP system. They held a contest for adventures. I wrote one of the adventures in the collection. I'm now a published game writer. I'm stoked!

My adventure is Terror At 6666 Feet. It's a B-movie adventure I've run a few times. I've since run another B-movie game. Now I'm now inspired to submit a collection of 13 B-movie adventures to Chaosium as a monograph. I figure I can write up my new B-movie game and convert several CoC adventures. Gotta figure out all 13 and submit a proposal to Chaosium. Fingers crossed...

The Plan Comes Together

Spent Monday evening working on the Cyberpunk characters. Everyone picked roles they like and it looks like a team will emerge. The plan of running a sample game to prep people for this process worked like a charm. Folks came with ideas and them tweaked them easily during the process. + it was fun! Character generation can be a drag, but we had a good time.

I asked for them to work up bios based on the Lifepath process. I've already had several Email exchanges on this. Everyone's going to have a connection to the Forlorn Hope, a bar from an supplement. I Emailed everyone the background on the bar. I also 'borrowed' from the game DON'T REST YOUR HEAD. The character generation process includes a series of questions. One of these questions is, "What just happened?" For the C-Punk game, this will tell me why the characters are going to the bar at this time.

It goes against my grain to start the game in a bar. It's so old school D&D. But then we're playing C-punk 2020. It's now a retro 80's game. Weird. One has to go with the tech as imagined then, as opposed to where it's actually gone. It's like original Traveller where ship's computers were figured in tons. Funky. Next week's the kickoff...

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!!!

Survivor - Game Convention

I sat down at the table. Monday 9:AM. Some sorta Super-Hero game. I'd arrived at the convention Friday afternoon after working an early A.M. shift to get to the convention early. I gamed all the way through Friday night. Then I played all day Saturday and clean through Saturday night. Hold on. I then used liquid caffeine (tea and soda - not No-Doze which was very popular at the time) and highly sugared snackage to pull me through Sunday AND Sunday night.

So when I sat down to be Super, I'd been awake for something like 75 hours. Gotta tell ya, I felt a little greyish-green and not entirely on this planet, but I was really getting the most out of the convention - really!

As the game went on, I began to slump in my chair. An hour into it my eyes were even with the table top. The GM was using Cardboard Cutout Heroes - full color 2D miniatures. I was listening to the GM describe some new villain who had come to mash us when the drawing on my Cardboard Cutout moved. That's right. He freakin' MOVED. He actually took a couple of steps and looked at me. I responded by blinking and looking around to see if anyone else had noticed this break with reality. No one had. In fact they were continuing on, but they seemed to be sorta far away - their voices muffled.

I sat up straight, bumped the table and knocked over several of the cardboard heroes. With a bit of trepidation I reached out and set my figure upright. He didn't move. I apologized and quickly drained another (now warm) caffeinated beverage. It did - exactly nothin'. Within minutes I was back to slumpin'. And then the cardboard feak moved AGAIN. He turned and looked at me in a hands-on-hips disapproving way. Okay, sleep deprived, it took only two visits from the cardboard gods of hallucination for me to get the message. Go get some sleep. Damn. This was going to be the last game of the convention and I was going to sleep through it.

I made my apologies to the GM, told him I'd been up all night and staggered to the hotel room my friends and I were using as gamer command central. Once there, I passed out like a drunken sailor, or pirate, or some other colorful character. I awoke when housekeeping showed up and booted me out for being there past checkout time.

I remember all of about 10 seconds of the drive home. I recall leaving the hotel. I recollect lurching awake as my car left the freeway bearing down on a pair of sturdy trees and an even sturdier boulder. I swerved back on the road, convinced that the adrenaline would keep me awake for the 1/2 hour remaining of my drive. I don't remember a minute of it, but somehow I got home.

Lucky me. I got home. Stupid me. I pushed too far for the fun and bragging rights. These days I stay at the hotel and get sleep every night. I remember games and more important, I come back year after year instead of slamming into unforgiving boulders. Be safe y'all.

Know thy Characters

They come rushing out of the jungle like a bloody wave. They look something like undead inside out chihuahuas with bigger teeth. There's hundreds of them, with saliva spilling out between their needle-sharp gnashing teeth. What do you do?
[insert gales of laughter here for 5 minutes - 10 minutes - 15 minutes]
Seriously, there's thousands of tiny teeth about to rip you slowly into bit-sized morsels.
Chase: (gasps for breath) I pick up my Thompson submachine gun.
Margot: (through clenched teeth) I break out my double-barrel shotgun.
Terence: (holds his aching stomach) I draw my Mauser pistol and click it over to full-auto.
Scott: (stiffles a coughing fit) I whip out my twin .45 automatics, the ones with the extended clips.
Anzo: (clears his throat) I kick open the box to the Lewis Gun and shoulder it.
The things leap at you...
Rat-atat-tat, Boom-Boom, Pow:Pow:Pow:Pow, Blam.Blam., Braaaaaaap.

Thus was born the "Wall of Lead". Not a single undead-killer-chihuahua so much as nicked one of the characters with their nasty tiny sharp pointy teeth. There was just red spray and jungle mulch. And worse, none of the characters, or Players, was in any way terrified. They just blew the smoke from the barrels of their arsenal, reloaded and went to sleep for the night (the characters, not the Players). They did leave a guard. (one freakin' guard)

My first reaction was anger. How can they not be frightened? I think inside out chihuahuas are really disgusting. The Players should have at least been disgusted. I was furious. Furious! Years later, after faaaaaar to many reminders of this incident, I figured out the problems:
1. Chihuahuas aren't scary. Ugly, maybe, but not at all frightening. Bad choice for my description.
2. Hundreds of not-scary little monsters doesn't suddenly make them frightening. It makes them hilarious.
3. I shouldn't have been angry. I should have been as amused as the Players were. It was an awesome display of firepower.
4. I didn't think about the CHARACTERS. I'd spent several game sessions making them afraid of everything that moved. Unearthly horrors had plagued them for adventure after adventure and their sanity was slipping. They were more than a little unstable and were making up for it with firepower - firepower they planned to use on much more dangerous adversaries later in the adventure.

The Wall of Lead was not an over-reaction. It was a response I should have expected. They'd acquired every piece of their armory during the course of play and I should have known they'd bust it out at the first sign of trouble. After all, I'd pushed them to that level of paranoia. Heck, they didn't even break out the grenades or dynamite.

These days, I keep copies of every Player's character sheets, so that I know what their characters brings to the party and I can create encounters that fit their experience. I've also learned to applaud the characters when they create a novel situation. And I've come up with BIG scary monsters. Really. They're VERY scary.

Run Away!

You drop out of warp, not far from the K8 space station. You see right away what the problem is - the station's been taken over by Klingons. They're everywhere - at least a dozen battle cruisers. Almost as if they're expecting you, they immediately begin to close in.
Captain Smirk: Sensor sweep.
They're powering up weapons. There's no way your Scout ship's going to be able to take them all on. They're hailing you.
Captain Smirk: Raise shields. Power up phaser banks.
You realize that if you open fire you'll be nothing but dust. The Klingons are demanding that you to stand down.
Captain Smirk: We won't surrender. If we're going down we'll take as many of them with us as we can. Ready photon torpedoes.

Oh boy! This isn't how this was supposed to go. The scenario, as planned, called for the crew of the USS Perry to surrender. They get taken captive and find out what the Klingons are up to. Then they find a tricky way to escape and defeat them. How many times have we seen Kirk do this? This actually happened to me when I was running Star Trek many years ago. (Still own and dig the FASA rules)

This is a common GM dilemma. You place the characters in a situation where they're sure to be destroyed. The goal is to get them to either surrender or run away. I faced a similar problem in a Call of Cthulhu game recently. The characters arrived at a lost city. Their guide was immediately killed by overwhelming forces. I wanted the characters to run away. The rest of the scenario is about how they get home without their guide. The problem is that the Players want their characters to be heroes that fight to the bitter end. Makes for a short game if this is the beginning of the adventure. I blame this mindset on combat oriented games with easy resurrection.

After my Cthulhu game, one of the players asked me how I knew the characters would run away. I had a 3-tiered plan. In order of preference:
1. Hope that the Players are smart enough to have their characters run away. My description should let them know that they are not going to survive any other way.
2. One of the characters is a Naval Officer. I could tell him that in his military experience, the best solution here is to run away. This allows the Player to deal with the problem in character. He tells the other characters to split.
3. I just flat out tell them that their characters are going to die if they try to fight it out. I'll try to drop it casually, something like, "It's clear that If you stay and fight the oncoming horde, you're all gonna die. You might want to run back to the boat and cast off."

Run away and live to fight another day. I'm sure I'm paraphrasing here, but even Troupe Monty Python figured this out.