#RPGaDAY: Day 29 - It's all fun and games until somebody loses a Fate point

Today's topic is 'most memorable encounter', and I'm drawing a bit of a blank, as I've never really been in many games which played out in discrete encounters. Instead of a single exemplar then, I'm going to run down two memorable incidents and talk a little about what makes them work.

And then this happened...

Here There Be Monsters was the 13th session of my epic WFRP game, 'Boomtown', and took the action to a whole new level. The PCs had previously fought bandits and small packs of beastmen stalking the woods near their village of Heortwald. In this session, they took a trip into the deeper woods to aid their barbarian friends - actually a group of dissident academics who have adopted a barbarian lifestyle, although there is an actual barbarian tribe living in an abandoned mansion nearby - against a massive (by their terms at least) Beastman horde.

In the end, the session involved the PCs rallying the actual barbarians to aid their new neighbours by capturing a beastman for them to fight, then dressing in beastman skins to mask their scent (eww) to rescue captives from sacrifice, and finally leading a massed battle at the neo-barbarian camp. This last was an almost note-perfect mid-game climax, and a huge step up from some of my earlier efforts at large-scale combat.

It worked because the PCs were intimately involved in the combat, battling major opponents at pivotal points in the fight; it worked because they made a major strategic and tactical contribution to the fight, and because they had to work their arses off not to get mashed into a paste by a minotaur or acid-burned by the shaman. There was threat and consequence, and as a result, there was triumph. I think it is still the best battle I've ever run.

Evil, right. Right?

My second example is from a game of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. We - being a college educated bull-man, a martial arts trained badger-man and a trailer trash bobcat-man - were tracking a group of mutant weasel archers (led by a wolverine and a psychotic bat) who were raiding meat storage facilities. We tracked them down and captured them, and we established that they needed to eat more than their own body weight in meat every day to survive. I'm pretty sure that the scenario's ending options were 'fight to the death' and 'turn them over to the authorities to be returned to the military lab that made them'; possibly, allow them to go to Alaska and try to live free.

Instead, we figured that given their unstoppable digestive systems, we could set ourselves up in a business partnership with them, collecting and disposing of condemned meat. Apart from the bat; because fuck that guy, he was a crazy, giggling killer.

This was a notable incident, because we turned the expectation on its head and were able to find a left-field solution that really worked.

Just two more days left, but I may end up doing both on Monday. The topics are rarest RPG owned and favourite RPG of all time. Not sure what's going to go into that, but I guess we'll find out.

#RPGaDAY: Day 20 - Will still play in 20 years time...

I'm not keen on that ellipsis in today's prompt. There's no call for it, and the only thing it could realistically stand for is a pause before some sort of sass.

"Will still play in 20 years time... bitch."

I mean, I know that none of these prompts are grammatically complete sentences, but this one niggles at me like the themes from Live and Let Die (which does go 'in this ever changing world in which we live in' and not 'in this ever changing world in which we're living') and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ('just repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax', apart from the first series, which had 'then repeat to yourself...'.)

Which is a pretty long winded way of saying that I have no idea what I'll still be playing in 20 years time. I suspect that I will still be gaming, but what I'll be playing escapes me. Maybe something using Fate Core, but probably not the current edition and certainly I don't think any of the other systems I currently use will last unchanged. Setting wise, I have even less of a clue. Maybe I'll finally write and sell my own game, based on my bestselling novel, retire and give up this life of crime.

Okay, actually... I don't know about 20 years, but here's my plan for 15 years in the future, which may or may not come off in the end.

Sometime between 2025 and 2029 I'm going to teach my daughter about tabletop. She's been LARPing since she was a twinkle in her parents' eyes, but I'm going to teach her about small-group, tabletop roleplaying, and I'm going to do it with Call of Cthulhu (since I'm pitching her the setting good and early). My plan is to run a session for her and any interested friends set in the unimaginably distant and romantic past of the early 1990s, with all those half-discredited tropes like MiB conspiracy theories and other Delta Green goodness. My own past will be retro, and I plan to use that.

Tomorrow's topic is Favourite Licensed RPG, and I'll talk about that if I can stop laughing at the concept. There must be something; is CoC a license?

Meantime, check out the hashtag and talk about your future gaming prospects. Catch you on the flipside, as all the retro investigators will be saying in 2029.

#RPGaDAY: Day 19 - Favourite Published Adventure

A cover that promises a tense, horror-
themed adventure... for those who really
care about Frugelhofen.

Man, fuck published adventures.

Okay, I shouldn't say that there are no good ones. The Enemy Within for WFRP (see Day 17) is a classic for a reason, an epic campaign consisting of a series of interlinked adventures that take your PCs from wandering ruffians to badass heroes of the Empire in a time of tumult and turmoil, taking in most of the major themes of the game along the way. I talked about it as the funniest game I'd played in, but that wasn't to say that Slagdarg the Mutant Ogre Torturer wasn't a tense fight in which Sven the Glass Dwarf almost got his head staved in, or that we didn't have moments of intense and slightly misty-eyed concern for the Graf's lovable lunk of a champion, who was acting all possessed, and just when he wanted to retire and buy a farm with his sweetheart.

The flip side of the coin is something like Lichemaster, one of my least favourite published scenarios. It's a WFRP adventure that was adapted from Terror of the Lichemaster, a Warhammer Fantasy Battle campaign, which thus consists of a series of the kind of massive combats that the roleplaying game is so bad at. It fails mostly on the grounds that, unlike its original version, it needs - and fails to - provide a reason for the PCs to give a rat's ass about the fate of the little town of Frugelhofen, rather than just punking the fuck out when the Army of Darkness comes to call. There's a whole section where the PCs are supposed to persuade the people of the town to make a stand against the horde of the undead rather than evacuating, then in the end you have to flee down the river in barrels or some such shit because you're overrun. The real problem is that there is no reason for this; not even that if you don't make that stand the undead will overtake the retreating children and other civvies (because then the villagers would be persuading the PCs, which wasn't what they wanted, I guess).

In an oWoD scenario, you're the one in the middle. Not the
one actually firing a gun at someone; the one behind that
guy.

On the up side, it doesn't have what many White Wolf adventures have, which is cut scenes. The average WW scenario contains at least one moment when the PCs are basically obliged to watch as a couple of NPCs do their thing. Maybe Sam Haight murders someone, or Baba Yaga eats a Niktuku child-vamp and asplodes, or a werewolf and a four thousand year old ghoul fight to mutual fatality, while the player characters apparently watch and do nothing. This is specifically an old World of Darkness problem, since that was a game line which had a serious crush on its metaplot, and often forgot that even if they aren't the movers and shakers of their society, the PCs are still who the game is supposed to be about.

In between these extremes, the bulk of scenarios that I've seen - especially the short-form versions, which as they appear in the back of core books I have seen most often - suffer from the problem that they are railroads. This might make them a useful aide to a novice GM, except that the nature of a railroad is that it leaves the driver without any useful tools in the event that the train jumps the tracks. They often assume a single solution, whereas as a friend once put it: "If you devise N ways for the PCs to solve a problem, they will come up with N+1, so I just set N as 0."

The best published adventures I've found are more like setting guides in which something is happening. The Enemy Within is a very open adventure, especially as it moves up to Middenheim and Power Behind the Throne (which is in fact often packaged with the Middenheim setting guide), an adventure in which the PCs could conceivably just profit as best they are able from the fall of the city to Chaos infiltrators and run off to the Border Princes to live like dissipated kings.

So, a bit of a non-answer today, and I can't promise better for tomorrow's topic 'a game I'll still be playing in 20 years time'. In the meantime, check out the hashtag for more #RPGaDAY.

#RPGaDAY: Day 17 - Funniest Game You've Played

Hello again, WFRP

The Enemy Within is a classic of 1st edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the published campaign that actually worked. Mostly. The concluding chapter was not so well-received and was later replaced by Hogshead Publishing.

The current (boxed) edition of WFRP has its own Enemy Within campaign, written by several of the same authors, but I can't speak for that at all.

The campaign consisted of several linked adventures:

• The Enemy Within/Mistaken Identity
• Shadows Over Bogenhafen
• Death on the Reik
• Power Behind the Throne
• Empire in Flames (redone as Empire in Chaos)

My University gaming group played Death on the Reik and Power Behind the Throne in the twilight days of the best roleplaying time of my life. Honestly, there is nothing like university for roleplaying; when else can you get away with those sudden all-nighters without care or consequence (for me at least; as a solid 2:1 I have the comfort of knowing that all the hard graft in the world likely wouldn't have tipped me over to a first)? I was playing the game with a group who had been together for two years, as of Death, and three by the tie we played Power, and it was one of those things that just clicked.

There were a couple of other players in the first part of the campaign (taking on the elf and the druid), but the core group that carried through was:

• X, The Dandy Highwayman, whose name I forget in part because we spent most of our time ribbing him for being 'the Chosen of Sigmar';
• Gregor the even dandier illusionist, who didn't have more taste or flair than the Highwayman, but did have more money;
• Sven the Dwarf, see day 8;
• Ambrose Tully, Halfling thief-turned-honest trader.

This game was the funniest - and most fun - I ever played in, simply because the group dynamic was by then near-perfect. Highlights included:

• Everything Sven, including his absolute umbrage at being given a 'drinking allowance' after Ambrose took control of the group's finances, despite the fact that he could have handily drunk himself to death with what he was given.
• The group egging the Highwayman on to romance a princess for information, including everything from pooling resources to buy a ring of invisibility to briefing him on his lines ("Tell her 'you're the only one I can trust,' she'll love that.") The fact that we OOC fully expected (incorrectly) that she would turn out to be a murderous Slaaneshi cultist, and not a hopelessly drippy damsel after all, just added to the fun.
• Gregor insisting on splashing out to dress everyone 'suitably' for the Graf's ball, resulting in the party turning up like a pack of peacocks in the ever-so-serious City of the White Wolf.
• After the third time his enquiries at the Temple of Ulric received the same response, Ambrose decided that it must be the cult's ritual greeting, and thus opened his interview with the high priest (the gist of which was to tell the leader of a cult of storm-worshipping, wolf-wrestling battle-priests that we knew he was being blackmailed for sleeping with a serving girl) with the words 'don't make me hurt you'.
• The highwayman, seeking to rally the people, leaped onto a table, brandished the magical blade Baracul, which marked him as the chosen of Sigmar (less of an achievement since the field from which Sigmar had to select his chosen human warrior consisted of him, a halfling, a dwarf, an elf, a druid and a wizard), and declared: "I have Baracul!" Ambrose immediately leaped up next to him, drew his dagger and declared: "I have bugger all!" HELPING!
• The day after the highwayman's super-seekrit romancing of the princess, being greeted by her sassy handmaiden in the pub with the words: "Chosen of Sigmar, huh?"

It's moments like these that make a game fun, and funny, for me. Moments like the Tunkin manouevre (faced with armed goons on the far side of the door you just opened, close the door again) and deathless quotes (everyone who played in my Star Wars campaign, Beyond the Fringe, seems to call back to the almost-dead ace pilot's assurance that "I'm fine," every once in a while).

In short, rules and setting are props, but games are people.

With that in mind, the next entry is 'favourite system', so that should be interesting.

#RPGaDAY - Day 15: The benefit of hindsight

Today's topic is 'best con game', and for the same reasons as yesterday I'm going back to my readers' suggestions:

This is me in the future. Possibly the very near
future

Stephen suggests: Game you wish you could run again, with more experience now

Oh, man, like... all of them.

Of course, I don't have that much more experience now than then, since most of the games that I've run that would be worth running again are fairly recent. Well, I say that; actually some of them are pushing about 5-8 years past. Damn; I got old.

I think the game I would most like to be able to guide my younger self through is the Dark Heresy campaign I ran, which I entitled 'Lost, in Space'. The set up was great; I didn't particularly jam on the idea of running the party as Inquisitorial lackeys, so instead I gave them a back story based on the little-considered nature of an oft-neglected aspect of the WH40K universe: No-frills space travel.

Basically, if you're not the Imperium of Mankind, the Adeptus Mechanicus or some other galaxy spanning operation able to afford your own mighty fleet of starships to tear through the Warp, or at least a Rogue Trader or minor merchant house, you're reliant on whatever is available. Since Warp travel is expensive and dangerous, and starships are a hot mess of gothic architecture, precision engineering and faith, Johnny Passenger isn't going to be chartering one. So instead, he puts himself in cryo with a tag on the cabinet and gets passed from ship to ship, at each stop being passed to someone heading in the right direction until finally, voila! You're there. It might be thirty years later, it might be a century; this is why tourism in the Imperium is limited to small areas.

The set-up for 'Lost, in Space' was that the PCs were all travelling and had ended up aboard the same freighter when it came down over a mysterious planet. With the crew dead and everyone else in cryo, they became the de jure owners of the downer ship and the campaign was them exploring the planet, recovering cryopods and trying to build a crew, while fighting other factions, local wildlife and Satanists.

There are a couple of things I would like to have done differently. Firstly, I only got the starships supplement once we'd started, and realised that the crew compliment of the ship should be closer to 50,000 than the 500 I'd pitched. That was minor, but secondly, I did a lot of rejigging as the game went on to strip out some of the more canon touristy elements of the original plan and replace the original xenos camps with other human factions. I'd like to have had that in place to start with.

Finally, I would have liked to have done something with the psychic rules, which were complex as hell. I've not looked at the Rogue Trader version in detail, but I know they are different and anything more streamlined would be good. The worst was the psyker's force staff, which required up to six rolls on a successful hit (roll to hit, roll damage, confirm critical if you rolled maximum damage - the six rolls ignores the fact that the damage can then continue to explode, I'm calling this part of the damage roll - roll Psychic activation, roll Willpower, roll bonus damage).

I was pretty happy with the way the game went, but for that reason I would have liked it to be better.

Hatty suggests: Antagonists

It's very hard to sustain an antagonist. Essentially, with any major antagonist who actually wants the PCs dead, there have to be pressing reasons why a) the PCs don't just roll up and whack them and b) they don't just throw main force at the PCs until they run out of hit points. If the antagonist - or their organisation - is too strong, why would they tolerate the continued existence of an obvious danger; too weak and the PCs will simply roll them*.

Moral consequences are a possible solution that can be used, but that's a matter of system design rather than a function of the antagonists themselves. A few possibilities include:

1) Antagonist of the week: Perhaps the simplest solution. The PCs kill - or otherwise resolve - each antagonist, then face another. Common in old-school games, provides for a limited external arc. The cunning ST of course will engineer it so that all of these minor encounters lead back to an ultimate big bad, who probably has...

2) Vast, cosmic power; itty-bitty living space: In his house, the Dark Lord is unassailable, but he can't leave his house and so has to rely on minions.

3) Fear: Give the players something other than the antagonist to worry about. If you kill Jimmy the Fingers, Knuckles McGurk will bring his boys round to call on you. Or your family. Provide pressure for the PCs to box clever, be subtle, make Jimmy look bad or set him up so that Knuckles takes him out instead. Depending on mechanics, they may just opt to hit Knuckles first, of course.

In this case, it is vitally important that you let the players know of this outside pressure before they encounter the antagonist.

4) Quest death: Lady Evilpants is not unassailably powerful, but she is immortal and unkillable, unless you employ the seekrit method that only she knows and which requires a spear forged by the smith god, a bow carved from a limb of the world tree, three hundred feet of copper wire and a rhinoceros called George. She's going to get you eventually, because she has all the time, money and low-level goons in the world, but she can neither one-shot you nor be one-shotted (or even worn down).

These are neither the only methods, nor infallible, but they are - honestly - all things I've wished I'd thought to do as the six session running antagonist lay bleeding their last seconds away in the first hour of session one.

Tomorrow I am back on track with the game I wish I owned, or possibly that will come in an epic catchup post on Monday, also covering Funniest Game I've Played and Favourite System.

Look out for the #RPGaDAY hashtag and I'll see you then.

* This subject was covered in some detail by Joss Whedon in his commentaries for Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I totally cribbed option 2 from there.

#RPGaDAY - Day 12: Magic Concerned Citizens

This is a toughie. The prompt is 'old RPG you still play/read', but I don't actually play that many games these days, and I only really read on the train; a situation barely conducive to mass market hardbacks, let alone game books. That being the case, I'm going to reminisce about a campaign that I occasionally like to relive through the GM's game reports and still point out to people as that thing that I did that was awesome and actually, you should read this stuff.

Greg Stolze and John Tynes' (thanks for the catch, James) Unknown Armies is a game about power and consequences. It's set in a world of deep occult conspiracies, where power is achieved by embracing contradictions with insane dedication, or by pursuing one archetypal aspect of humanity to the exception of all others. It has probably the best system for modelling dramatic psychological breakdown ever published, and if there are places where the elegant 'one-roll' mechanics break down and get weird (specialist combat characters, we're looking at you here), it's not the end of the world.

My first real introduction to Unknown Armies was a game that James 'Gonzo History' Holloway ran way back in '04-'05 (fuck me; this November is the 10th anniversary of this game's kick off). It was set in and around the Rose Crescent, Cambridge branch of McDonald's, with the characters a chapter of the Occult Undergrounds most naively optimistic conspiracy, Mak Attax. The Rose Crescent McDonald's is an oddity in itself, a low-key place which you might not spot for a McDonald's at all, if not for the succession of miserable looking employees who stand at the Market Square end of the crescent mournfully displaying a sign which fails to convince anyone that they are, in fact, lovin' it.

They didn't have that in '04, or I would have played the fuck out of that character.

As it was, I played Roland McDonald, an avatar of the Listener whose aversion to violence had been dangerously eroded by an abusive and hardcore Weird upbringing. His best mate was the crew's wizard, Jack, an American student whose practice of Personomancy was both an expression of and cover for her fundamental lack of self-identity (from the first, she was Jack as an employee and Jill as a student, since Cambridge students aren't allowed to work in term). Nigel was an avatar of the Merchant, but Tim could only make one game. Eventually we added Simon to the mix, a former city banker who screwed up and ended up working at McDonald's and who didn't believe to start with.

The game was a blast. We battled self-actualising adepts who were pioneering a school of magic based on manipulating others into self-harming behaviours (man, we really hated her), evil fathers possessing their sons (pushing most of Roland's buttons) and time-locked Nazis, and ultimately participated in a contest to redefine reality which played like a mixture of the Grail Quest and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

The game reports are still on LJ, and I think are public.

http://jholloway.livejournal.com/tag/rosecrescent

Why do I hark back to this game with such fondness? Well, lots of reasons.

First, it was a chance to get back to gaming with James, which I have always enjoyed (I could also have talked about his World of Darkness: Mortals live game, but that lacks the re-readability), and I think the first real chance I had to game with Allison - James's other half, and a good friend - and with Jon, whom I didn't know before, but who is now also a close friend.

It was a game in which the characters were competent and effectual, not by being some sort of badasses, but by getting their heads into the right game. The different characters, with their varied approaches, clicked beautifully as a unit with no pre-planning and the interplay between them - and the back and forth with James's NPCs - was quick, light and somehow real. As a group, we were on fire - in terms of plot and memorable badinage - and James just kept on passing us charcoal briquettes. We found ourselves in the US at the end of a ritual and instead of going home we went on a road trip, and James ran with it; we never went back to Cambridge again.

It was also one of the first long-running games I'd been in that meant something, in that it had overarching themes and an endgame, in which we won, but kind of died, or not, but won! (Go us.) We were the kind of slackers who held power-meetings at the Baker's Oven over sausage rolls and coffee, but we made it, ma! Top of the world!

Overall though, it was just a game that clicked into place and was a thing of joy at a time when, frankly, I really needed one. Sometimes, I find gaming to be a stressful hobby, when really it shouldn't be. In particular, I find that large-scale LARP can mediate the needs of its various players poorly, with the result that most weeks someone isn't feeling it.

Looking back over Rose Crescent's run reminds me of why I roleplay.

#RPGaDAY: Day 6 - Favourite game that you never get to play

So, here it is; my first ever video edition of Out of My Mind, and I go and refer to the wrong blog in the video. Twenty-first century, I am in you!

I've talked a lot about WFRP, but Only War is the one that really fits for this topic, since I've never got to play it at all. It's a streamlined version of the 40K RPG system, which I hear good things about, and also has a nice subsystem whereby each payer controls their main character and also their loyal comrade in arms, who acts as a semi-disposable adjunct to the main PC.

Like WFRP, it's the setting of WH40K that hooks me, with its insanely Gothic aesthetic and black on very dark grey morality. I also prefer the older versions of this setting, which were generally grubbier and less organised, and I'm not wildly keen on new additions like the Tau and the C'Tan. My Dark Heresy campaign had Squats and Imperial Beastmen.

Head back tomorrow for Day 7, and remember to check out the hashtag for more game-related goodness.

#RPGaDAY: Day 2 - First RPG you GMd

The first game I ever ran was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

I hear the system is good, but damn
the combination of an RPG core
book and Fantasy Flight board
game costs.

 Now, that's not the giant boxed set Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay released a couple of years ago by Fantasy Flight, nor yet the edition released by Black Library just a couple of years before that.

I'm not even talking about the re-release by Hogshead Games back in the late 90s. No, I'm talking old school 1st edition WFRP, which is apt, as this was also at school, with the same group I first played D&D with, including Kev and with the addition of Simon, the only member of that group I am still in even sporadic contact with, who would later run a wildly gonzo Star Wars game using the West End rule set, which I mention just to push my retro cred a little harder.

More on this one at a later date.

I'm not going to talk system or really setting here or anything, since WFRP is a big enough part of my gaming history that I want to keep something for later. Instead, I'm going to talk about the game that I ran, which was - in a word - Godawful*.

Hello, old school

Now, only part of the blame can really attach to me, and that's the part that comes from my reliance on published campaigns. The other part of the blame lies with the people who publish such terrible campaigns.

The notable campaigns from this part of my GMing life were one bit of the Doomstones campaign, in which the PCs survived despite being rank idiots because I could not find the section of text describing the all-but inescapable deathtrap which they almost wilfully set off, and Revenge of the Lichemaster, which contained long sections inviting you to admire the craftsmanship on their NPCs and which fell down in our case because the PCs flatly refused to be even a little bit heroic if there wasn't a cheque coming from somewhere.

In retrospect, I can't blame them. Mercenary sensibilities are, after all, much more in keeping with Warhammer's fantasy-noir ethos than self-sacrificing heroics; especially in 1st ed.

My first self-generated GMing was an extended and extending old World of Darkness (then known simply as World of Darkness) campaign which I co-ran with my then girlfriend, primarily as a means of enabling her to play outrageously twinky characters. Bringing that campaign to Uni with me was frankly a disservice to my new players, and I'm amazed as many of them as do still talk to me.

I have literally no idea what's going on with
this cover, and I never have had.

Which brings me at last to my first entirely independent GMing experience, which I believe was the one-shot game Kung-Fu Vampire Hunters, heavily influenced by the movie Mr Vampire and run under the Feng Shui rules system.

Feng Shui was a bizarre mishmash of a conceptual, drama-driven aesthetic and somewhat unwieldy rules for modelling it. Dramatic, even physically impossible, actions were rewarded on a detailed scale (taking an extra point of action to go ca-click before firing a shotgun got you a +1 bonus, while running along a line of automatic weapons fire to punch someone in the face was actually easier than just hitting them), and ultimately it was better to be specialised in something than any kind of generalist.

The plot was a pretty basic tale of rival undertakers, necromancy and hopping vampire horror, and I made at least one huge mistake in allowing one player - and this was a pattern which repeated until he left the group - to play a character wildly at odds with the rest of the party (in this case a Japanese anime sorceress in a Chinese wuxia setting). The player got upset that his thematically inappropriate schtick wasn't rewarded, and I should have shut that down at character creation; mea culpa.

This was, however, the first game I ran that I was genuinely proud of, not for the game itself, but for my first shot at a credit sequence.

The game credit sequence is something I picked up from an ST in London who ran an eclectic game that several friends raved about, but which turned out to be pretty much one huge railroad. Still, it introduced me to the idea of opening each game with a piece of theme music and getting the players to introduce their characters with a montage of shots to represent them. I later expanded this idea to include the 'this week on...' section, in which the players each describe an action, and if they can naturally fit that into the game, they get bonus XP. There will likely be more mention of credit sequences later in the month.

For Kung Fu Vampire Hunters I used the theme from Mortal Kombat (Utah Saints version). I was working from cassette (wikipedia link for my younger readers), which meant I was unable to accurately control the track starts, and I actually kicked off early, but some desperate winging it meant that I still managed to hit the right beats and end the credit sequence with the music.

I have, to this day, never failed to close a credit sequence on cue, and the pressure is now almost unbearable. To their credit, none of my players have ever sabotaged me for giggles.

Check back tomorrow for more #RPGaDAY, and don't forget to read some of the other posts coming out.


* Godawful is so one word, even my spell-checker agrees

Golden College Days

Another random idea for a game for grown-ups (sort of), is the epistolary campaign, although they can be tough to organise and keep going. I was in one once that sort of fell apart, in my case because the resources of Camberley public library were simply insufficient for the rigorous academic research involved. The advantages are that there is no need to get anyone together, the group can be theoretically any size and there is no need for a fixed time slot. In addition, plenty of folks really jam on serious letter writing.

Some possibilities:

1) De Profundis. Easiest, in many ways, as it requires no GM and no central organisation, but does require serious commitment from the player group.

2) Mail Call of Cthulhu. More structured than DP, this would require a GM to provide the backing plot. The two main variations would be investigator and cult focused, and it might be fun to run two games simultaneously, with one troupe playing a disparate group of investigators and the other the leaders of a set of cells in the Cthulhu cult.

Hmm...

3) Golden College Days. The concept which prompted this post: A WFRP epistolary campaign with a group of former buddies from the colleges of Altdorf stumbling on the disparate arms of an Empire-spanning conspiracy.

4) Postcards from the Hedge. A Changeling: the Lost campaign, focusing on letters and dreams, with the scattered members of a motley investigating the manifestations of their erstwhile Keeper. It would be a slightly CoCish game of Lost, but then that style suits the epistolary format, given that mythos fiction is rooted in it and takes much of its form from its constraints.

The written letter form of this concept would be rooted in a fear of electronic communication (They can intercept celphones in the Hedge, so why not elsewhere? Why not email?), and perhaps a sense of tradition drawing on the strange and feudal nature of Lost society. You could do something similar with the Invictus, of course, but most of the people I know who would jam on that already do so as a sub-game of the IoD national Requiem chronicle.

5) Munchausen by Proxy. Easily my most tasteless pun of the year to date, this would be a variation on the 'live action' Adventures of Baron Munchausen, played by mail, with the players - again, without a GM - competing in tale-telling by mail. The exact structure might need some work for this one.

A Skype to Victory?

Recently, I've been playing in a number of games based on Skype or Google+ Hangout. These were/are:

Atomic Horror - An alternate history game using the Savage Worlds system which can perhaps best be described as a Manhattan Project spy caper with stealth Cthulhu and giant atomic laser ants. It marked perhaps the only time I am likely to play an actual Nazi.

Troy! - A 'bronze age superhero' game running under Strands of Fate, in which the PCs are the heroes of Troy, super-powered by their semi-divine parentage. Of all the games discussed here, this one works best, in part because it is the one most reliant for its success on verbal sparring and superhero in-jokes.

Stars Without Number - Post-ubertech space opera. The other two are run by +Jon Lea; this one by +James Holloway.

In all three I took the role of team weirdo, but then I seem to do that anyway, although I hope without disrupting other people's games.

It's an odd way of playing, although pretty good if you get used to it. The only problem I have found is an exaggeration of the tendency for 'the talker' to monopolise the game, where one exists, as it is harder to stay in the GM's view and consciousness when the screen switches to the current speaker.

ETA: I don't actually feel this is the fault entirely of either the talker or the GM; the rest of the players also chip in by not chipping in, as it were. I think that there is a false sense of almost telephone manners that takes over, however, and the medium itself essentially encourages us not to interrupt.

Still, it's working better than my efforts to get a table top game going and on most days it goes well.