RPGaDay: Want

There's not much I want, RPG-wise.  I only tend to want things when a new thing becomes available.  But there's one thing I do want, and that's a good cyberpunk game.  Because there are no good cyberpunk games.

When I say this, people tend to mention Shadowrun.  My limited exposure to it suggests that it's certainly a decent game, and the multiple editions suggest people are actually working on it.  But for me it falls down as a cyberpunk game in that it's clearly an urban fantasy game with a bunch of cyberpunk stuff pasted on.  Urban fantasy is one of my all time favourite genres, but mashing it up with cyberpunk doesn't work for me, so ultimately my reaction to Shadowrun has always been, 'ugh, get your elves out of my cyberpunk'.

So no, not Shadowrun.

The big daddy of the cyberpunk RPGs is of course Cyberpunk 2020.  I have a love/hate relationship with this game.  I love the setting.  I love the concept.  I love some of the wild and wacky cyberware options it provides.  I love the entertainment factor of playing in the incredibly 80s future it depicts.

I hate the rules.  Especially, but not limited to, the combat system and the effects of cyberware.

The combat system, Friday Night Firefight, is apparently very realistic in how it portrays the effects of getting shot, and is based on FBI data on shootings.  I don't doubt this.  Getting into a gunfight is one of the most dangerous things you can do in CP2020.  I think it's a solid combat simulator.  What it isn't, is any fun.

So when you shoot someone in CP2020, you've also got to determine in which body part you shot them, and sometimes what sub-part, e.g. if you shot them in the head, did you shoot them in the face?  Then apply the effects of armour, which includes hard armour, soft armour and implanted cyberware armour, all of which are going to be different on different body parts and which also stack to different degrees.  Then there's the matter of whether you were using armour piercing bullets, although frankly there is no reason in CP2020 that you would ever use anything other than armour piercing bullets.  And then there's criticals, and frankly I've no idea if criticals have any actual effect in the game, because when I play I just give the GM a damage number and wait for them to do the required algebra and then come back and tell me if the target is dead or not.

This kind of combat system works rather better in a video game where there's a computer to do all the number crunching for you, so I remain optimistic about Cyberpunk 2077 where I'll get the awesome setting but there's a layer of abstraction between me and the system.

And then there's the effect of cyberware.  Each piece of cyberware you give your character decreases their humanity, and by association, their empathy stat, until eventually you succumb to cyber psychosis.  This is both rather annoying when you look at the real world which is not plagued by roving bands of murderous amputees and pacemaker patients, and also drastically limits what you can do in game.  There's a bunch of basically cosmetic implants available, but they all mess with your humanity in the same way as the practical, stat-altering implants.  You might want your street samurai to have fibre optic hair and light tattoos, but once you've added sub-dermal armour, synth muscle and power wolvers, you might not have enough humanity left for anything decorative.

In short, Cyberpunk 2020 sets up this amazingly cool setting, then weighs it down with a set of rules that actively work against telling the kind of stories that it's made for.

So not Cyberpunk 2020.

Carbon 2185 uses the D&D 5e rules, and while I'm not a huge fan of 5e, it does have a decent combat engine.  It's the cyberpunk game I'm most keen to play at the moment, especially after having picked up the city source book.  But while one of my complaints about CP2020 is that there is massively too much equipment ("Why is there an entire page just for marginally different hats?") Carbon 2185 is actually rather light on the equipment options.  Maybe that will be fixed in a future source book, but right now it's a bit on the sparse side.  And while I appreciate that they've changed the hacker class from the CP2020 Netrunner than no sane GM would allow you to play, I'm not sure making it basically a wizard is what I really want.

I'm looking forward to playing it, maybe even running it.  But I also need to be able to sell it to the rest of the group, and that's not happening with a 5e hack, making this not the cyberpunk game I want.

Out in the wilds of PBTA there's The Sprawl, which I like a lot and is my current go-to cyberpunk game when I'm GMing, but which suffers from being too strongly influenced by the previous two games.  It tries to avoid the tendency of Shadowrun games to turn into a strategic planning session, but does it by abstracting too much into dice rolls and hold, and some playbooks like the Reporter have all the same 'you basically need to build the campaign around this character' issue as CP2020.

The other big PBTA cyberpunk game is The Veil, which is post-modern cyberpunk and focused around an augmented reality overlay, which sound pretty cool and interesting while at the same time entirely not the classic cyberpunk I want to play.  Similarly, the Forged in the Dark game Hack the Planet has a focus on climate change, and while it's interesting and I'd like to give it a shot, I don't think it's going to be what I want.

A more conventional cyberpunk Forged in the Dark game was one of the stretch goals for Blades in the Dark, but it hasn't appeared yet and I won't believe it until it actually happens.

In amongst the many games in the itch.io bundle for racial justice is a game called Cyborgs and Cigarettes.  This game imagines cyberpunk style technology showing up much earlier in the wake of WW1, and sets the game during the American prohibition era.  I like it better than I expected.  The high tech/lowlife theme fits right into the setting.  It has a well chosen set of classes and an unusual dice mechanic and I'd like to give it a try some time.  But again, it's not classic cyberpunk.  Maybe if the rules work well, it could be reskinned into the classic future setting, but as-is, it's not the game I'm looking for.

The same goes for Eclipse Phase, a game I do want to try out because why would I ever not want to try out a game in which you can play an octopus?  But sleeving is not the cyberpunk I want, and that means Altered Carbon isn't on my radar either.

Right now my hopes lie in Sweden.  Helmgast brought out an updated version of Neotech last year - but unless they do an English translation some time I'm never going to be playing that.  Fria Ligan's Year Zero engine should translate well to cyberpunk, and there are various fan projects working on it, but nothing official is publically in the works.

I could make my own cyberpunk game, of course.  And in fact, I have: a Lasers and Feeling hack that I call Cyber+Punk.  For a light-hearted one-shot, it does the job.  But I want a full RPG, not a one-page hack.

There are other games that I've yet to have a look at, including Corporation and Black Code.  Maybe one of them will turn out to be the cyberpunk game I want?  While I claim that there are no good cyberpunk games, I very much want to be proved wrong.

RPGaDay: Light

Some years ago, I created a Pathfinder character called Sephone Sungrass, a halfling sorcerer.  My concept was that she had an affinity with sunlight.  Actually implementing this in Pathfinder proved tougher than expected.

There wasn't a sorcerer bloodline in the books that really worked, so I made my own 'Suntouched' bloodline.  My aim was to have it full of light spells.  This didn't really work, as there were so few light spells in the books.  In the end I made it 'fire and light' so I could add in things like Burning Sphere and Fireball which seemed like solid choices for something connected to the sun.  It also included rather disappointing spells like Daylight, which I don't think anyone has ever cast in our games, and seems to have actually vanished from PF2.

So let's try that Suntouched bloodline again.

Spell List primal
Bloodline Skills Survival, Nature
Granted Spells cantrip: light, 1st: color spray, 2nd: continual flame, 3rd: searing light, 4th: fire shield, 5th: cloak of colors, 6th: vibrant pattern, 7th: sunburst, 8th: prismatic wall, 9th: prismatic sphere
Bloodline Spells initial: ??, advanced: ??, greater: ??
Blood Magic A dazzling light shines out of you or one target, making it difficult to look at them, causing them to be concealed for 1 round. Such obvious concealment can’t be used to Hide.

(No idea on the bloodline spells, as they're unique to each bloodline and I've no idea what kind of power level they should have.)

A different set of spells this time, and I haven't had to dip so much into fire this time, by looking at the spells tagged as Visual as well as Light.  A more interesting selection, and if I got round to coming up with bloodline spells, a potentially interesting one to play if that character gets ressurected again.  (It wouldn't be the first time.)  Continual flame is still a bit rubbish though, especially for a second level spell, and the prismatic stuff just doesn't quite feel right.

But really, the sunlight powered caster in PF1 would have been better represented by a cleric with the sun domain or an oracle with the solar mystery.  In PF2 the sun domain is still there and available to clerics.  The solar oracle is gone, but its replacement, the cosmos oracle, is still a viable choice.

And given that Sephone has already had one complete respec due to system changes (we briefly played using Mythras rather than any version of D&D/Pathfinder) if she does end up getting brought back I might try making her an oracle.  The class keeps the same key ability as the sorcerer (charisma) meaning she won't have to substantially change stats, and having acquired a mysterious curse would fit well with the way she keeps returning from the dead.

I wonder what other systems support a light-based caster?

RPGaDay: Shade

'Hanging a lampshade,' or 'lampshading,' is dealing with an element of a story that might threaten the suspension of disbelief by drawing attention to it and moving on.  It refers to works of fiction, and isn't really a thing in published RPG material (the TV Tropes page on the subject has almost nothing in the tabletop games section) but when I'm actually playing or running a game...

"In accordance with tradition, you all meet in a bar."

"This door leads to the toilets.  Yes, unlike most such structures, this secret underground base has been designed with adequate sanitation facilities."

"Y'all want an inspirational speech?  OK, everyone knows stormtroopers can't shoot straight, so stay in cover and you'll be fine.  Who feels inspired?"

"This is a problem that only a party of four to six adventurers can solve."

"Due to the complete lack of health and safety considerations when this castle was constructed, you're going to have to make an athletics roll to cross this bridge."

"Against my better judgement, I take the ghost's hand."

"And having described every single other feature of this room in great detail, we now get to the one you actually need to know about: the rust monster in the far corner."

"I'm going to eat this pork which is definitely not a person."

"This episode was badly written!"

Obviously this kind of thing doesn't work in all games, but in my home group where we've all been playing D&D/Pathfinder for years, or in some cases decades, we know the tropes so well that hanging lampshades on them is the way we stop everything from feeling extremely cliched.  My complaints about health and safety and the fact my dungeons always have toilet facilities has become a running joke at this point, along with my husband's puzzles that defy human logic.  It's also a way to deal with the fact that certain RPGs are a bit dated these days.  Lampshading every ridiculously 80s thing about Cyberpunk 2020 is now part of the fun of that game for us.

Contrary to what the name would suggest, an appropriately deployed lampshade can lighten the mood and brighten up the game.

RPGaDay: Couple

I saw his hair across the dance floor at the office Christmas party.

"Who's that?" I asked my co-workers, expecting to hear that he was someone's partner.  Instead we were forcibly introduced.  We spent the next four hours exchanging humorous cat stories, and finally he invited me to his D&D game the following evening.

Over the years we've both played and GMed a lot of games.

I played in his D&D 3.5 campaign, and later in his Pathfinder campaign that later became known as the Player Massacre of 2010.  (Anyone who tells you that these versions of D&D aren't deadly just aren't trying.)  He is now not allowed to have custom monsters with five or more words in their name, after we were subject to the fiendish albino vampire winged drow and the giant exploding poison zombie snake.

He played in my Scion campaign, where he completely by accident manged to make a character so hard to hit that any enemy that was remotely challenging for him would have completely flattened the rest of the party, and who seemed to be operating on some kind of flow chart.

We both played in a game of Rogue Trader, where he played the captain and I was the navigator.  Channelling Zapp Brannigan, he referred to my character as 'Lucious Lucretia'.  Together we managed to be some of the most virtuous people in the 40K universe by only committing genocide once.

I played in his Cyberpunk 2020 campaign, where we were a chrome metal band called Doomcow and I dump statted INT, meaning that my character was too dumb to realise just how horrible the things happening around her were.

He played in my Victoriana game, as an upper class magician, in the game where we learned that the most useful person to have around in Victorian London is a pre-Raphaelite artist. Right now he's playing in my Liminal game, once again playing a wizard who specialises in wards and gets suspiciously respectful any time the Council of Merlin get mentioned.

We don't always play together.  He doesn't really do the convention thing, and we don't like all the same games - he's far more into games with big robots than me, while I'm much more interested in Call of Cthulhu than him.  But most of the time our tastes line up pretty well, and between tabletop RPGs, video games and LARP, we've spent most of the last twelve years gaming together.

Being part of a gaming couple is wonderful.

RPGaDay: Forest

Forests in RPGs tend to be dark, wild places, filled with giant spiders and other random encounters.  But when I think of a forest in the real world, I think of the Forest of Dean.

It's weird to think of a forest as a hive of industry, but that's what the Forest of Dean used to be.  Logging and charcoal burning on the surface, mining for iron ore underneath.  About the only wild thing about the place is the wild boar, who are still mentioned on the random encounter tables that you can find placed around the forest.

(I'm sure there's a proper name for those boards that isn't 'random encounter table' but I started calling them that about ten years ago and it seems to have stuck.)

So why not use the industrial forest in your games?  Perhaps a symbiosis has formed between the dwarven mining colony and the elven forest settlement, pooling their resources to create iron to trade with the human city.  Caring for the forest doesn't have to mean fanatic hatred of anyone who harms a tree.  Carefully managed felling and replanting, managing game populations and removing invasive species could be far more interesting.

The modern day Forest of Dean is a popular tourist destination, with attractions including Puzzlewood, Clearwell Caves and the Sculpture Trail.

The first two are both used for filming, particularly sci-fi and fantasy.  Rey's fight with Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens took place in Puzzlewood, and episodes of Doctor Who have been filmed in both locations.  If you're looking for interesting location imagery for a game, there's plenty to be found here.

And then there's the sculpture trail.  There are seventeen current statues, plus several more that have been decommissioned, and they're a mine of inspiration.

Observer

Where does this staircase go?  What happens if you climb it?

Dead Wood

Who is buried here?

Melissa's Swing

This aeolian harp invites you to sound its chimes by climbing into its swing.  What does it summon?

Grove of Silence

The plaques on the trees command silence.  What might happen, should you choose to disobey?

House

This is fine.

For more of these, see the Sculpture Trail website, and some more photographs.  These bizarre structures could show up in a fantasy forest, but could just as easily be part of a Call of Cthulhu investigation.  For a modern day game, the sculture trail itself could form part of the plot.  What if a new sculpture appeared and nobody knew where it came from?

That's me inspired.  I hope you are too.

RPGaDay: Tribute

Sometimes I get to the end of a game, but feel there's a little more that needs to be said about my character.  Maybe I feel the need to capture something that wasn't part of the game session.  Maybe (quite often after horror one-shots) I want to show a little of the aftermath of the game's events.  So I write these things.  A tribute to someone who I enjoyed pretending to be for a while.

I've just finished playing the Kult: Divinity Lost scenario, Island of the Dead.  How much sense it will make to anyone who hasn't played this adventure (or who didn't end it the way we did) I don't know, but if you know Kult, you'll have an idea what a horrible experience the characters have been through...

...

Amber's fashion blog has a lot more than a thousand followers now.  She's done every chat show she can think of, and her face is on magazine covers worldwide.  There are rumours flying that Netflix will be buying the TV rights to her story; rumours that she knows are true.

It will, of course, be a work of fiction.

The real story she has told to nobody.  Not her therapist, who knows she shot two men in the head but not what Anne showed her in the cave.  Not Jennifer, who has her own traumas without having to carry Amber's too.  There are only two people who know the truth, and she hasn't spoken to either of them since they got home.  Because if she talks to them, she won't be able to hide behind the makeup and the clothes and the performance she gives to the camera.

Amber sits surrounded by pictures of herself, and the photo she's staring at on her phone is no exception, but it's not her face she's looking at.  They all ask her about Jennifer, and all the others she helped rescue.  Nobody asks her about the one she couldn't save.  Which is lucky, really.  She pushes the phone away before her hot wet tears can splash down onto it.

The nightmares are getting worse.  The drugs she's been prescribed don't seem to be helping, and the temptation to go out and find some that do is getting stronger each day.  She doesn't know how many more times she can bear to watch Simon die.

She wipes away the tears, taking a smear of mascara with them, and reaches for her phone.  A few hairs get brushed into position before she takes the selfie.  Hashtag bad day.  It's barely been uploaded a few seconds before the notifications start.  She ignores them.  They're just another part of the illusion that is her life.  Fake lashes, fake tan, fake stories, fake friends, fake smiles, all plastered on in the hope that nobody will see what's real.

What is real?

She picks up the phone, disables notifications, and stares at it.  It doesn't fit with her image.  Amber's followers know she's not interested in some stupid little kid, just because he was on the plane with her.  But she remembers kind words, and moments of vulnerability.  Maybe there's some way she can turn this to her advantage at some point, but right now she just wants a friend.

And as she makes the call, it occurs to her, maybe he does too?

BurritoCon 5

It's a long drive to Manchester from here, which is why I've never been to any of the events hosted at Fan Boy 3: poor travel-to-game ratio.  But in this year of virtual cons, that's not a problem.

Game 1

I was up bright and early (by my standards) on Saturday morning for my first game: Tales from the Loop.  While I'd never played it before, I've played enough Fria Ligan games to know how the system worked, and we'd all sorted our characters out in advance, so in theory it should have been easy to dive straight in.

In practice, Google Meet decided it didn't like running in my Firefox browser and gave me video but no audio.  After poking settings and finding nothing helpful I switched to Chrome, my theory being that Google would make more of an effort to have their product working in their own browser.  Thankfully I was right, and off we went.

There was an obvious question of why a bookworm, a jock, a weirdo and a rocker were all choosing to hang around with each other, but when we described our characters and their problems it soon became apparent that we'd bonded over all having lost a parent.  And I soon started to realise what's so special about playing a kid.  There are things you can't do because you're a kid.  But there are also a whole bunch of things you can get away with, because you're a kid.

Playing in 1986 was also an experience.  I don't remember 1986 particularly well, but between what memories I do have, the amount of 80s movies I've seen and having just finished series 3 of Stranger Things I feel like I've got a reasonable grasp on the time.  So many times I found myself looking at something, thinking 'I should take a picture', then reminding myself that camera phones are not yet a thing.  The camera I had in 1986 took 35mm film and it would take several weeks to get the pictures back.

Tales from the Loop is a wonderful game, an excellent implementation of the Year Zero engine, and something I'm keen to play again some time.  Credit has to go to Blythy, for doing a superb job running it, and my fellow players, Bud, Kaye and Craig, for being the best friends my wannabe teen detective could wish for.

Game 2

In the afternoon I ran my Liminal scenario, Mother Said I Never Should.  Having previously run this at The Good Friends of Jacks-Con Elias, I was keen to see how this would differ from that outing.

The first difference is that we were down one player due to a family emergency.  Fortunately the character he'd chosen was not the one that's essential to the plot concept.  Tech delayed things again, with people having trouble connecting to Discord video chat, and I made the decision to switch AV over to Google Meet - making sure to open it in Chrome, of course.

Once again, Discord did its job as a dice roller and handout distributor.  Liminal is such an uncomplicated system to run that the bells and whistles of a VTT aren't needed, and the Sidekick bot handles the dice perfectly.  Taking inspiration from a game run by Paul Mitchener himself, I now barely roll dice when running this game - mathematically I don't think it makes a different on an opposed roll whether I roll the attack or the player rolls defense, and it's far more fun to put it in the players' hands.

Seeing the players create new and interesting characters based on the brief backgrounds provided, and then proceed to find new ways to approach the situation, making different uses of their various talents, was an absolute delight.  I've pitched this scenario for two more conventions already and I'm very much looking forward to running it again.

Post-Games

I believe BurritoCon traditionally ends with a trip to the pub, so the Mitchester Arms was temporarily opened for post-game chat.  Like the bar at the Good Friends of Jacks-Con Elias, this added back in a little of what's missing in virtual conventions, giving me the chance to talk to people outside of the two games I was in.

Reflections

This was a well organised event with suitably chosen time slots to allow for meals.  An evening slot could potentially have been added, but with GenCon on the same weekend, quite a lot of people had other plans.  Or were just tired out.  The upcoming convention The Owlbear and Wizard’s Staff 3 has three slots so it'll be interesting to see how it compares.

There seems to be a lovely bunch of roleplayers in and around Manchester, and getting to play with them has been a delight.  It's only a pity that when things finally return to some semblance of normality that BurritoCon will once again be too far away for me to realistically consider.