RPGaDay: Experience

This is the first time I've done RPGaDay, and it's certainly been an experience.  Coming up with creative interpretations of the prompts has been a challenge, and I think I would have preferred the more concrete questions of some earlier years, but I probably got more interesting blog posts out of these prompts.

It's pushed me to actually write something every day, which has definitely been good for me. Writing regularly is a skill I really need when running a campaign, when surprise actions of PCs mean I suddenly need to write new material on fairly short notice.  It's also the only way my current collection of half-written scenarios are ever going to get finished.

Along the way I've found some insights into what I do well as a GM and ways I can improve, as well as ways to get better as a player.  I've also got some potential inspiration for scenarios (because I clearly need more half-written scenarios in my collection) based on the Forest and Tower posts.

There's also been happy memories of past games,reminding me that no matter what the imposter syndrome might sometimes try to tell me, I've been doing this for a long time and I do it well.  I may not have been playing back in the 70s and 80s like certain grognards of my aquaintence, but I am an experienced RPG player and GM.

Experience isn't everything though.  Last night I played Call of Cthulhu with a GM who'd never run the game before, and we all had a brilliant time.  One of my recent Liminal games included someone playing his first ever RPG, and he did great.  The best RPGers I've played with aren't just experienced.  They're enthusiastic.  Experience might make you better at playing and GMing, but all you need to get started is to really want to do it.

RPGaDay: Portal

Before I ever played a tabletop RPG, I played one of the all time greatest CRPGs.  Planescape: Torment.

Travel in CRPGs can get a bit handwavey, as creating a large gameworld makes for a very boring time getting around it unless you have something like map travel, where you just click on the place you want to go and are instantly there, sometimes at the cost of some money, or acquire increasingly speedy mounts to get around on.  None of this is necessary in Planescape: Torment due to setting it in Sigil.

Part of the fun of Sigil was finding and activating the various portals needed to advance the plot.  There seem to be various criteria you can use:

• Temporal - requiring you to show up on a set date, or set time of day.
• Celestial - requiring specific events such as a full moon or an eclipse.
• Vocal - requiring saying the correct words.  "Speak, friend, and enter."
• Physical - requiring you to carry a certain object.
• Somatic - requiring gestures or movements.

That's just what I can think of right now, and of course you can combine more than one of these.  Fortunately this is all coming in handy now I'm playing Liminal, which sometimes requires the PCs to find their way into a fae realm.  With all this in my head, I barely had to think about how the portal in my adventure was going to work - it was like I already knew.

Once you've come up with a fun portal key, there's the challenge of getting that information across to your players.  Given how long the Lord of the Rings example took for them to figure out, I assume the GM thought he'd come up with a really simple puzzle, and was just waiting for one of them to say the right word, getting increasingly frustrated as they didn't, and ultimately asking for someone make a wisdom roll so he could just tell them the answer.

Still, he did try to make it easy, and made sure they got there in the end.  It was a good clue, and I would have been facepalming afterwards for not having got it.  My husband, on the other hand...

My advice for puzzle portals based on playing D&D with my husband:

• You don't need multiple layers of complexity in one puzzle.  Multiple layers means multiple points of failure, which can lead to exponential levels of difficulty in solving it.
• Allow some kind of dice roll to gain insight into how to solve it.  Have a back-up for if everyone fails the dice roll.  Spending an hour floundering in frustration is no fun at all.
• Don't impose serious negative consequences for failed attempts.  Players who are repeatedly punished for attempting to solve the puzzle are going to want to give up.  Imagine how different The Lord of the Rings would have been if every time they'd said the wrong word to the door they'd had to fight the Watcher in the Water?

Here's an extract from the diary of Calia Nettleglade, my first D&D character, attempting to get through one of my husband's puzzle portals.  Bear in mind that at this point we had already got through several traps, puzzles and doors that radiated necromancy so were already a little depleted on spells, hitpoints and ability to wrap our minds around my husband's logic...

We came into an octagonal room. In the centre was a column of light. Around it were four motionless figures reaching towards it, the oldest of which had clearly been there around 600 years. And in the middle - the staff!

Gendo and Titch headed in for a closer look, and then shadows came out of the walls. I shot one of them, entirely ineffectually as the arrows went straight through, but Bryson was clearly inspired by his previous success at turning, and after a few "Begone foul fiends!" the room was clear again.

That just left the matter of how we were going to get the staff out. There were four doors in the room, besides the one we'd come in through, and they all had the same picture on them. A five pointed star, with symbols in the points and in between the points, and another five pointed star in the middle. All the symbols and the central star could be pressed.

After much discussion, Sarflex and Bryson identified four of the larger in-between symbols as heaven, dark, spirit and light. They couldn't identify the other one, but Gendo thought it might be either undead or phlegm. I preferred my own interpretations: angel, communism, floaty things, the sun and evil clown, but the others weren't convinced. The smaller symbols were determined to be ice, water, fire, earth and phlegm, although the latter was later revised to air. The undead/phlegm was concluded to actually mean void.

This was all very well, of course, but didn't help us get the staff. What's more, there was a large stone block above the doorway with a certain 'get this wrong and be trapped' look about it, and the second necromancy-radiating door had closed again behind us.

Bryson decided to try pressing the heaven symbol on one door, and then the star. The stone block plummeted, and we were indeed trapped. Bryson tried a different combination of symbols...and shadows came out of the walls.

One walked straight through me. It was a very unpleasant sensation, and I felt much weaker afterwards. I did manage to stab it though, having more luck with my magic dagger, and between two of us we despatched it while Bryson did the shouty thing again. We ran over to attack another one, but in my now weakened state I couldn't do much damage to it, and before we could get rid of it it managed to touch me and drain even more of my strength. As the others destroyed it, I collapsed from the weight of my own equipment.

Of course the others found this hilarious. They were most unresponsive to my requests to 'get this bloody armour off me,' and found all kinds of entertaining uses for an helpless ranger, using me as a pillow, debating cutting my hair, arranging me in humorous positions and so on. (I should note that many of these suggestions came from the supposedly good members of the group.) Then someone happened to recall my 'you're all a bunch of bastards' vision. Funny, that.

I finally made it out of my armour, and was able to actually move a bit. We also made some progress regarding the doors. One item seemed not to fit in from each set of five - ice and spirit. Fortunately everyone agreed that it would be a good idea to get some sleep first (Rod had also been strength drained, but was significantly more mobile than me) and everyone who could prepared omen of peril spells.

The next morning I was feeling marginally better, and four lesser restoration spells later I was able to get dressed and pick up all my stuff. Needless to say, I will not be forgetting the events of the previous night....

By the time I'd fully recovered from the effects of the shadows (if not yet forgiven my companions for using me as a puppet) both Bryson and Sarflex were a bit short of spells, so we decided to rest for another day and I had a good think about both the problem of the doors and the vision from the lake. The latter was not in any way reassuring.

We took it in turns to take a guess at what to do with the doors. A couple of the others had a go, resulting in yet more rounds of shadows showing up. I avoided the first lot, letting the others deal with the problem, and once we had space I went over to the wall to poke at it. Just to check on things. Titch wanted to know why. I thought it was a good idea to keep quiet about it.

After all, if my companions had known I was worried that I was going to turn into a shadow and was checking that I wasn't turning incorporeal, they might have killed me.

I remained resolutely solid, however, and after the last round of shadows I asked if I could have a go. We needed to see the bigger picture, I thought. Maybe there was some significance to what we were being attacked by? They were shadows that chilled people - could they possibly be Dark Ice Spirits?

I cast Omen of Peril, and received word that there would indeed be peril. But I was feeling more confident in my ability to solve the puzzle than my success rate with peril omens, so I decided to ignore it. I pressed the appropriate buttons on one of the doors, and it slid down into the floor leaving a blank wall in its place, as did the one opposite it. And out of the walls came, not shadows, but shiny balls of light.

Not friendly balls of light though, and it took some time to get rid of them as we couldn't count on Bryson to zap them with the power of Zox'Atics this time. Gendo managed to grab one of them and tried to throw it into the column of light. Unfortunately the ball escaped, while Gendo was turned to stone in a sort of slam dunk position. Our sorcerers came in handy, managing to stun or daze several of them.

I could see which way the puzzle was going this time though. Our next combination was Light Heaven Fire, which was wrong (another twelve balls of light to dispatch) but we nailed it the second time with Light Heaven Spirit.

The final doors slid away, the column of light disappeared, and with a flying leap Titch grabbed the staff. Gendo turned back to his normal self, and we legged it.

RPGaDay: Ride

Riding has never played a big part in our D&D or Pathfinder games, except as a justification for the halflings and gnomes to keep up with everyone else during normal travel.  Horses by default are thoroughly impractical, and I can't sum it up any better than Strontygirl did at the Tavern.

The only time anyone's done much riding in game is when playing those classes that have a horse as a feature: Paladins, and in Pathfinder, Cavaliers.

Digging through my old Google+ archive, I found the time my husband mispronounced his character class as 'Chavalier':

At first glance, the chavalier might appear to be riding a pony; in fact, he's had his horse lowered.  Note the Burberry barding, low profile horseshoes, reclining bucket saddle and sound system: a pixie bard, whose Light spell is also powering the horse's underlighting.  The horse itself has been trained to rear up and make revving noises.

The Chavalier's armour includes a custom paint job, body kit, helmet spoiler, Adidas sabatons and tinted visor.

The cavalier is a pretty cool class for someone who wants to play the knight in shining armour type without also having to be a paladin, but like the paladin there's always the issue of what do you do with your horse when you're down a dungeon.  Do you rule that all the dungeon corridors are big enough to fit a mounted horse down?  Less of an issue if you're playing a small race riding a dog, but then you've probably got a strength penalty which means you're not so great at the melee combat that's a key part of being a knight.

While horses in D&D and Pathfinder have their issues, they do at least avoid some of the pitfalls of real horses, who do all kinds of awkward things like reacting in blind terror to a perfectly normal pond that was fine yesterday but is now bad and scary for some mysterious horse reason.  Horse training in RPG Fantasyland must be exceptional.

The solution to most horse issues is simple: bicycles.

Sure, in the real world bicycles weren't invented until the 19th century, but it's a fantasy setting and all the required technology exists, so why not?  They're smaller than horses, so you should be able to ride one down most dungeons, and if it's a Brompton style folder you can carry it for the bits where it's not practical to ride, or else shove it in a bag of holding.  In a world with plentiful bicycles, doubtless a manufacturer will be churning out bags of bicycle holding.  They would be optimised for this particular purpose and with a command word that instantly packs away your bicycle making you combat ready - unless of course you're a member of the Chivalric Order of the Double Wheel, in which case you'll be doing all your combat from your bicycle.

Bicycles have practical applications in post-apoc games as well, of course, as a mode of transport that's significantly faster than walking and requires no fuel.  Imagine a post-apoc world where the US has completely torn itself fighting over oil, while the Netherlands is now the world power as they've never had to worry about transport.  The future's bright.  The future's orange.

RPGaDay: Close

Coming up with the close of an adventure is the part I find hardest.  Sometimes I can do a climactic final fight, but sometimes that's not how things are meant to go.  To add to the difficulty, I'm currently running campaigns at MK-RPG, which have a set 8-week length, so I have to aim to have the big finale happen on week 8.  Sometimes not helped by the players taking more or less time than I expected to complete a given scenario.

One thing I have picked up though, particularly for convention one-shots, is epilogues.  Even if the ending of the scenario wasn't particularly dramatic, wrapping it up and asking players for a few words on what their character did next sometimes seems to round things off nicely.

When I run Firefly games I really try to have a good ending scene (and some have succeeded better than others) but either way I finish off by asking the players to come up with a name for the episode.  Maybe I should expand this to other games?  It certainly works for anything inspired by episodic TV.

One time I am happy with a close is my Delta Green campaign.  The game wasn't a great fit for the group, and one player wanted to drop out, so I decided I'd wrap things up the game after he quit.  Since by this point in the campaign he was on the verge of turning into a deep one, I decided the final mission would be that he'd been kidnapped by a former member of [Redacted] who was going to use him to expose the Delta Green conspiracy.  By the end of the session, the character turning into a deep one had been killed, one character escaped, one was killed in the resulting explosion when they thwarted the plan and one ended up in a Mi-Go brain canister, which was everything he could have wanted.  While the group in general didn't jibe with Delta Green the way I'd hoped, that last player got really into his character and I felt I owed him a good finale.  I'm glad I managed to deliver.

RPGaDay: Favour/Flavour

And here I am without my favourite tale of manipulating PCs into owing a favour because I already used it for Lever...

Wait, there's a different word on the dungeon map graphic to the hex map graphic!

Flavour then.  The thing that separates otherwise similar games.

I've been playing Mutant: Year Zero a lot recently.  It's my first post-apoc game, and as my write-ups might suggest, I'm loving it.  Flavour-wise it's pretty grim and gritty - after all we're living in an abandoned tube station surrounded by the ruins of London in a dying society that's struggling for food and in the grip of violent bosses and fanatic cultists.  And I nearly died at the end of the second session.

But at the same time, there's a glimmer of hope.  Our characters have a childlike innocence at the same time as their world weariness, and there's an element of building a new home.  Our characters dream of finding fame, love and peace.

And then there's my second post-apoc game, PunkApocalyptic.  I played a one-shot called 'Two Dead In Shit Town,' and between those two names I knew I was in for something very different to Mutant: Year Zero.  Another hint came from the objects we were carrying.  While Mutant characters seek out artefacts - useful if poorly understood items from the past - PunkApocalyptic characters carry...well, mine had a diploma from Trump university and another had a bag of assorted sex toys.

In Mutant: Year Zero, our characters struggle against the physical and psychological hardships of life in a post-apocalyptic world.  In PunkApocalyptic we struggled against filthy toilets, stinking rotten corpses and houses full of mutant cannibals.

Both are immensely fun games using similar archetypes in similar settings but are so unlike each other because they have such different flavours.  And that's something important to get across when pitching a game.  Fortunately I'm not running either Mutant: Year Zero or PunkApocalyptic as apparently those take me several paragraphs to describe.

Of the convention scenarios I've been running this year, two are based on other media (Alien and Firefly) so are pretty easy for people to get the flavour of.  Liminal needs a bit more explanation, but 'urban fantasy and folk horror, inspired by works like Rivers of London and The Dresden Files' seems to tell people everything they need to know.

Both the Mutant: Year Zero campaign and the PunkApocalyptic one-shot are/were streamed by Chambers of Roleplay and can be found on on YouTube.  I'll be running Alien at GrimCon and Liminal at AlbaCon.

RPGaDay: Strange

One of the great things about RPG conventions is the opportunity to try strange games - strange in that they're new to me (although obviously some of them turn out to be the other kind of strange as well.)

The latest one was The Cthulhu Hack, which I played at Virtually Expo.  While I have played it once before at Concrete Cow, that was several years ago and the game was also very much not your traditional Cthulhu investigation.  This one was, so I could really see how The Cthulhu Hack works.  Unsurprisingly, very well.  I'm not a fan of huge skill lists, so not having one was definitely a bonus for me.  The resource dice are good too - no worries about whether you're going to find a clue, only if finding said clue will deplete your resources.  The only thing I really wasn't sold on was calling them Smokes and Flashlights.  I couldn't make these very specific nouns match up with the abstract concepts they're supposed to represent.  That's a minor niggle though.  I would definitely play again, and I do love the wipable characters sheets available for it.

I've got two more strange games coming up at AlbaCon - City of Mist, and Broken Shield.  The former I'm aware of, as it was recommended to me as something similar in tone to the Birds of Prey movie.  I'm hoping for low power superheroes in a world that's both dark and colourful.  The latter I know almost nothing about, beyond that it involves a futuristic London, and I'm looking forward to finding out what it's all about.

The strangest game (weird strange as well as unfamiliar strange) I've played at a convention is probably Seco Creek Vigilance Committee, which is unlike any other game I've ever played.  A game of justice, law and revenge, with no dice, only resources and abilities.  Each character has their own agenda, which is likely to clash with both other players and the situation at hand.  It was a memorable experience obviously, since I'm writing about it now, but ultimately I didn't really jibe with the mechanics.  An interesting, creative game, but not for me.

A whole different kind of weird strange happened when I signed up to play We Are Detective, a game run by James Mullen using Inspectres.   It was based on the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency TV show, and involved Peruvian hedgehog coffee being smuggled in mannequins, and that was the least weird part.  I remember balloons, and another character's ability to produce a kitten from his pockets at will.  That day I saw two forces of weird collide, in the form of GM and player, and the resulting fallout in the form of one of the strangest games I've ever played.

A fun thing about seeking out strange games at conventions is getting to play game from the future!  I played Blue Planet: Recontact at Concrete Cow about a year and a half ago.  Apparently it's still being worked on, and I hope they're getting somewhere, as I really enjoyed being a sentient gorilla on a water planet, and want to play some more.  At Tales from Dreaming Spires I played a game called Sainted London, which was set in a bizarre alternative Victorian London.  A game so new it hasn't even hit Kickstarter yet.

Not all my experiences of trying out strange games have been great, but the vast majority have been brilliant experiences.  A convention one-shot is one of the cheapest ways to try out something new, especially in these times of exclusively online gaming where travel and venue hire have ceased to be a thing.  At worst, you've only lost a few hours and at best you've got a new favourite game.

Last of the Sith, episode 7: Galaxy's Most Wanted

Gin wasn't sure why Galaxy's Most Wanted was coming to film on Listehol, but whatever was happening she wanted to be involved.  While she couldn't supply accomodation, her Dudes could certainly sort out most of the other things they needed, and of course she could tip them off about two really interesting bounty hunters to follow around.

If only there had been some interesting bounties.  There was one that would have been very interesting, given that the subject was apparently a 14' tall Duros with blue hair, but sadly he turned out to be entirely normal sized.

There was some interest in town outside the filming, however, with Borka the Hutt holding an auction for some creatures that were extinct save for these two frozen in carbonite.  Gin wasn't particularly interested, especially since she was doing her best to avoid Borka at the moment, but Track-u-bot was involved in some kind of ego contest with another droid, Track-u-mon, over who was the best tracker.  His plan was to track these rare creatures, which nobody else could do because nobody else had any.

That, and the fact that it would keep them out of the hands of rich arseholes while probably keeping Borka sweet, convinced Gin to put up enough of her organisation's money for them to win the auction.

But before they could start doing anything with their new purchases, news came that Galaxy's Most Wanted had located a felon.  And even more exciting, the felon in question was a protocol droid!  If Gin hadn't already been excited about the show, and getting to see Mnessas and Track-u-bot do their thing, this would have sealed it.  The thought of one of those despicable droids getting taken down...  It was all she could do to hold onto her Narglatch.

As Track-u-bot demonstrated his exceptional tracking skill and prepared for the take-down, they noticed something else.  Rik Avor, the host of Galaxy's Most Wanted, talking into a holocommunicator regarding the pursuit and capture.  It seemed the show might be just the teeniest bit...staged?  Not that Gin minded.  It was a great show!  And if they wanted to make it look even better for the cameras, she certainly wasn't going to complain.  She watched with glee as the droid was efficiently dismantled.

Of course the show wasn't all staged.  The footage of Mnessas, both with and without the rest of them, was completely authentic.  The cantina owner was kind enough to put up a holovid screen so that she and the Dudes could all watch the show.

There was just one loose end to tie up.  The carbonite creatures.  With Track-u-bot now confirmed as the superior tracking droid, he had no need of them.  With plentiful bidders at the auction it wouldn't be too hard to sell them to one of the other interested parties.  But there was someone else - an academic from some university who wanted to save the creatures and make sure their species was preserved, rather than the rather more unsavoury motivations of the other buyers.  The only problem is that she could afford a fraction of what the creatures were worth.

Well.  This had all started from one bad deal, made with her heart instead of her head.  But she'd come a long way since then.  She'd done some morally questionable things in that time, but she'd proved that she could get by without her family, or Khaljos Kind.  She didn't need the money.  Neither did Mnessas or Track-u-bot who were both very happy with their newfound fame and influence.  With their agreement she made the second worst deal of her life.  The galaxy's most wanted rare carbonite-frozen species went to their new, safe home.