RPG a Day 2018 – Day Seventeen – Describe the best compliment you’ve had while gaming

Posted on August 17, 2018 by fakedtales

Describe the best compliment you’ve had while gaming

The standard answer to this is the simple one, a thanks is enough, as is the attendance of the players. It sounds trite, but it’s still true. If the players say or message a thanks, it’s nice. It makes it feel like the work put in was worth something. The same works the other way, too.

Nest

Still, we’re not here for the obvious one. Dredging up the mind canal, one of the nicer compliments I had was in a GenCon UK game of Spycraft. It was the year where the con was in what was pretty much a giant tent in a Butlins. I wrote a trilogy of Spycraft adventures which frankly could have been better, but were still entertaining to run at conventions. I ran the first one a ton of times at this Butlins GenCon UK. It was midday and no one showed up for a game. Not at first. Then these two players showed up and while I was’t used to running for two players, I decided to keep going.

The game seemed cursed. Despite knowing each other, the players both had created the same character class; a snoop. While the adventure was some investigation of a town where the populace thought they were birds, segueing to a chase on a train, these players simply showed up with briefcases and legal papers. Still, we played. As people on the RPG tables had got used to, there was the smell of the portaloos being drained which happened far too often. We kept going. Then there was a power cut. The players made their excuses and left.

I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I stayed at my table and read. The players returned. They explained that they figured they’d go back to their chalet, grab some beers and hopefully at least the smell from the loos would have dispersed by the time they returned. They handed me a beer, said that they’d been enjoying it, especially with the mission working despite their atypical set up. I don’t even like beer, but in that moment at the con, it was the perfect time for a beer and the rest of the adventure with those players.

Those Spycraft adventures are tricky to find these days. They’re available here with the other Living Spycraft documents.

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RPG a Day 2018 – Day Sixteen – Describe your plans for your next game

Posted on August 16, 2018 by fakedtales

Describe your plans for your next game

For the first time in a long time, I know what my next few games are. Plans are a little more vague these days, but that’s fine. The next games are:

Night Witches – This is a game about the real life Russian all-female bomber squadron. It has some pre-made duty stations and we’ll be playing the game to find out what happens. I’ve got no real plans, although it has a mechanic for rotating the GM when duty stations change, so I’ll be gunning for another player taking over GMing for one station, even if it’s just a short one.

Masks – This one I have plans for. Not vast amounts yet, but I have the rough idea. This is ‘season two’ of a game we’ve been playing. Last season the group were superheroes too obscure to be of much note to the public. They fought The Periodic Table of Evil, who have now come forward as The Periodic Table of Heroes. Only the players know they’re really evil, so we’ll see what they do in reaction. I have a ‘darkest future timeline’ story arc which will be activated when one player is absent from a session. They also have Chadlantic to deal with. He’s a meathead bro who inherited the role as the city’s saviour. With the Periodic Table taking over the superhero game, who knows what’s happened to Chad.

The Warren – This is a game about playing bunnies. It’s another ‘play to see what happens’ kind of game, but I’m making my own playset which is on Race Hill, just up from me in Brighton. I have some scenarios which are single sentences, but I won’t share those here as my players might read the blog.

Dungeon World – This is the last half of a story where I sent the group to hell in the conclusion of season one. From there, they’ll need to get back out of hell and face Rath, The Antigod before it turns their world into its new home.

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RPG a Day 2018 – Day Fifteen – Describe a tricky RPG experience that you enjoyed

Posted on August 15, 2018 by fakedtales

Describe a tricky RPG experience that you enjoyed

A tricky RPG experience I enjoyed came from a time before I was aware of any story games, which I assume were possibly in their infancy at the time. I wasn’t aware of any safety mechanics or anything at all along those lines.

I was running Buffy: The Vampire Slayer: The Roleplaying Game, set in Brighton. I’m a big fan of Buffy, of trashy teen drama, but I never expected to see it at the table. Buffy was a massive change to the way I run games and viewing them more like television episodes, with one monster a week and a general plot leading towards a Big Bad.

One week, there was a werewolf convention on the Brighton seafront. In my version of this world, werewolves were pack creatures so of course they had a general convention to discuss werewolf things. The previous generation’s Scooby Gang had dealt with the convention before, so they dealt with the adults while the players dealt with the daughter of the lead werewolf. Beth was a terrible person, looking for fun (trouble) at any moment. The group’s nerd, Jordan, was instantly smitten. The group’s jock, Quentin, was also smitten. They followed her round as she got into scrapes and risked breaking the pact of the different werewolf tribes. Despite being an NPC, the group clicked with her enough that I had to bring her back for a couple more appearances. The love triangle was brilliant and terrible, as painful and lacking in any actual finesse as a real teenage love triangle would be.

In the finale, Jordan and Quentin finally confronted Beth about her affections. Beth gave the most perfect, horrible letdown talk to Jordan. I felt bad acting through Beth’s part in the story. Steve Two looked heartbroken as Jordan, a character who’d suffered a lot through the campaign. I’d had versions of this talk and I can only assume Steve Two had as well. It was raw, awkward and fantastic. There’s a thing called ‘Bleed’, which I was introduced to by the wonderful Kate Bullock talks about on The Gauntlet’s podcast. This was definitely our first experience of bleed at the table.

I had plans for the sadly nonexistent season two, where Beth would get into werewolf drugs and try to drag the straight-laced Quentin in with her. I had an NPC Jordan might get interested in, who I would kill and turn into a ghost, because literally everyone but him was a monster in the series.

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RPG a Day 2018 – Day Fourteen – Describe a failure that became amazing

Posted on August 14, 2018 by fakedtales

Describe a failure that became amazing

I’m a terrible British geek. Outside of Red Dwarf, I never really bothered with most of our big institutions. It took me years until I bothered with Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. I never watched Dr Who and outside of a couple of cheap volumes, I’d not read much Judge Dredd. Terrible, I know.

Well, I started reading those lovely giant Judge Dredd tomes to undo that sin, and I started watching Dr Who after a massive endorsement from Antony and Ashly Burch on their podcast a few years back. It was just before Matt Smith’s run started and they were gushing about Waters of Mars. I caught up on all of the modern Dr Who over one winter, all while playing Assassin’s Creed 2 and Brotherhood. It was great and of course I did what happens whenever I see a media property I like. I bought the role-playing game and started planning.

The group were mostly fans as well, so we had a great time going through time and space in a TARDIS which looked like an ice cream van. They met Lovecraft, whose hometown had become phased into an alien menagerie, they fought autons in a fun fair, teamed up with David Bowie and fled from 31st century debt collectors.

The Student was our Time Lord and he had a long-suffering companion just called Parker, another player character. The group had found World War I soldiers dotted around space and time, all pretty perplexed about what had happened to them. In the finale, we found out. The players arrived in No Man’s Land shortly before The Battle of The Somme, underneath a bombed out church. They quickly identified that Weeping Angels were attacking the soldiers and stranding them earlier in the campaign. Luckily the players had their TARDIS in the basement. Unfortunately it was surrounded by Weeping Angels, lit only by the TARDIS’ headlights.

The players were playering their way with blinking alternation systems and such to make sure no one blinked and the statues stayed where they should be. Then Lee, the player of Parker, pressed the button on the TARDIS’ keys to switch off the car alarm. There was that typical ‘bip bip’ noise and the headlights… blinked. It was such a brilliantly unconscious action, which messed everything up.

The lights blinked. The Weeping Angels were gone, the doors of the TARDIS were open. Then is vanished, stranding the group in World War I, in No Man’s Land, with no TARDIS. Suddenly this was a two-part episode and the kind of event where the players present still haven’t forgiven Lee for losing the TARDIS, several years later.

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RPG a Day 2018 – Day Thirteen – Describe how your play has evolved

Posted on August 13, 2018 by fakedtales

Describe how your play has evolved

I’m someone who’s tried to be a writer for many, many years. When I was first into role-playing I let that instinct take over. Initially I only made up anything to get players from one second-hand AD&D adventure module to the next.

There were occasionally recurring NPCs and the players either liked or tormented them. Either way, it was good. I kept pressing on and had some relatively fixed story expectations with a few of the campaigns.

I read a lot of Knights of the Dinner Table at the time and the contest between players and DM seemed like the natural state of things. Sometimes they’d ‘win’ and sometimes I would. There were some great times where we’d all hit the same kind of goal but there were often bumpy rides as well.

Games like Fiasco really changed me. They allowed me to hand off ownership of the world and story to other players. In Fiasco the first quarter to a third of the game is making characters and their connections. The rough idea is there from the playset you pick, then in creating everything, you load the story like an elaborate firework, ready to go off. Lovecraftesque’s ‘leaping to conclusions’ phase at the end of each scene has people make assumptions about where the story’s going and they’ll drive towards that, each in their own private direction until we make a mystery we all built but none of us planned.

It wasn’t just a case of surrendering the story to the players, sharing responsibility for it with them, but also of sometimes not prepping at all. Monsterhearts taught me this, as the first Powered by the Apocalypse game I played. Then Apocalypse World really drove it home. Have some ideas, but don’t come up with a massive plot. Some larger plots will happen naturally, some will be gifted to you by the players and their actions, some rough ideas can be jettisoned and some can be harvested for stories later if you need to.

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RPG a Day 2018 – Day Twelve – Wildest character concept?

Posted on August 12, 2018 by fakedtales

Wildest character concept?

Like the favourite/recurring NPC post, I could just throw you Action Bastard again. This is actually a difficult question to ask, especially for someone with a good couple of decades of roleplaying under their belt. You get deadened to playing things like a community of weird singing, tree people, a demon violinist, or a dishonourably discharged space soldier/ex-gynaecologist who had hooks for hands.

As someone who always ends up being the GM, when I’m a player I often end up being a leader. I’ve made a good run of unreliable characters who ensure that this isn’t the case or punish the group for trusting them too much. My first proper one was Father Talwin, for a D&D Troupe game during Third Edition which ended up with me running full time for a while. He’s probably not the wildest, as that’s likely to belong to a one-shot RPG at some point, but he’s one of the weirder, more convoluted characters.

Talwin wasn’t just a multiclassed cleric/thief. He was formerly a cultist who’d guaranteed himself long life by sacrificing his loved ones. He went through a good thousand years acquiring new families and sacrificing them. A couple of times he went cold turkey and tried not to do this, but the lure of immortality was too much. A couple of family members got away, so there was an elf general ex-wife somewhere hunting him down and a daughter who was a seeded in as an informant for the group when I was running, so that if she and Talwin met, blood would be shed.

The thing is, you make a level one (or in this case two) character when you start. You don’t make Aragorn, you make Frodo. So Talwin sounded like he’d done a lot and was great, in an evil kind of way. He’d actually given up for good, sealed off his powers and become a cleric. The thing is, all the deeds he’d done drove him to drink. A lot. Also gamble. He lost his church to a stablehand in a game of pick-up sticks and started living underneath the group’s cart. Any money he earned as a cleric ended up going on booze, until he’d sobered up by being with them for a while. After that point, he started saving his money in order to build a new temple. While the group were purchasing magic items with their ill-gotten gains, Talwin’s plan was to build a temple to Kivarra, his deity. Also a casino, bar and grill, which would be attached to it.

Talwin was useless, spending a lot of time in or under the cart, hiding from problems, but he was good fun.

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RPG a Day 2018 – Day Eleven – Wildest character name?

Posted on August 11, 2018 by fakedtales

Wildest character name?

I rarely get to be a player, so I don’t have a huge amount of great names to pull from.

If we were counting board games then my Pandemic Legacy character Spam Jammson would be my first choice. He builds bases and his catchphrase is, “You’ve been Spammed!” whenever there’s any kind of victory. And possibly as a sex boast, not that Pandemic Legacy’s got any sexual content, as far as I’m aware. I’m only in May, so it could entirely change.

For RPGs, I can’t recall all the names of the many Fiasco characters I’ve built and burnt as I’m sure some of them would be fitting. The first weird character name that comes to mind though is from a Cyberpunk 2020 game I played on a Google Hangout.

Cyberpunk_1024x1024

My character was Action Bastard.

“Look at the city. At one side the megacorporations, the privileged with all the money, all the guns and all the tech. Then here, with us, the poor, the disenfranchised. They’re oppressed, weak, unable to fight back. Let’s see what happens when we arm them all…”

That was the basic concept. This guy was part of a fleet of urban pirates whose partner was disappeared after being exposed as part of a neo-Luddite order. He was a genius with tech, so his whole deal was to arm the poor by stealing and distributing the blueprints for corporate technology. He was also kind of a terrible Iron Man. I made a power armour suit and the GM explained what could actually work in the system. I still played Action Bastard like he thought he could be Iron Man, even if he could only jump kind of high and hit slightly better than a normal person. In a game where there were stealth missions, he was a glorious hammer. My only regret is that I can’t find his urban pirate sister’s name as she was a backup character I intended for when Action Bastard inevitably died.

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RPG a Day 2018 – Day Ten – How has gaming changed you?

Posted on August 10, 2018 by fakedtales

How has gaming changed you?

This feels like an odd one to answer, as its become such a core part of my life. I guess if there’s one core thing which its brought to my life, its friends. My friends were mainly either my brother, the family dog or the people I wanted to make a comic company with from ages 13-18. Neither my brother or I were the most sociable growing up and I’m still hit and miss with people.

Jughead

I didn’t know anything about RPGs when I started, so I simply conscripted anyone I could find who would be willing to try out some weird game with the same name as that cartoon from the 80’s. The Gen I version of my group, The In-Fighters, tended to run through people pretty quickly either by weirding them out with the whole role-playing concept or through the existing players who weren’t great at playing nice.

As we grew up and I ran out of friends to expose to RPGs, I started encountering new people through them being players first and friends second. When I worked at a comic shop, a customer who I regularly argued about X-Men comics with dragged his friend Steve over to meet me. Steve had never played RPGs outside of video games and wanted to be try it out. Years later and Steve’s one of my best friends, an occasional member of the In-Fighters and I was the best man at his wedding.

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Alex does a rules

I met Alex from the Gen II and III In-Fighters at Monday night Magic, promised him a place in a different group and then found out he couldn’t join it because of issues with the host’s wife and new people. I added him to the already-overstuffed In-Fighters and he became not only a mainstay of the group but for several years the host when we realised he had his own place. He may have left the group but his shuffling addiction, lack of composure and friendship are not forgotten.

I think at this point all of my oldest friends are roleplayers. We’ve had our own Christmas meals for the gaming group and their loved ones. My wonderful, weird internet friends on The Huddle have a mini-convention every year which sometimes bleeds over into extra on and offline role-playing groups.

I thought this was going to be a difficult one, but without roleplaying, some of my best, closest friendships would never have existed.

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Friends! And Slatz

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RPG a Day 2018 – Day Nine – How has a game surprised you?

Posted on August 9, 2018 by fakedtales

How has a game surprised you?

I played my first game of The Quiet Year and really enjoyed it, but there was one thing which didn’t sit right. Contempt.

The Quiet Year is a game I’ve spoken about before. You tell the story of a post-apocalyptic community through the medium of a map you all draw together. Each turn you draw a card, read it out, make a decision and draw something on the map in relation to it. You take another action and most of the time draw on the map or place a die there to set up a project. Other players can’t really talk through this and they can’t say ‘no’ to any of your ideas.

Contempt is the mechanic which interacts with this. When players don’t like something another player does, they take Contempt. They don’t say anything, they just silently take a Contempt point and put it in front of them. In our first game we didn’t really engage with it and it felt like the odd mechanic out as it didn’t interact with anything in game.

Then I realised something part way through my second game. It was affecting us. If someone made as, a project to build a child army and some of the group took Contempt then that reflected how the people in and out of the fiction reacted. Other players might use their decisions to undermine or change that plan, or if no Contempt was taken then maybe they were going to be fine with it. The mechanic was quietly directing play without any of us talking to each other or doing more than angrily miming taking a token and loudly placing it in front of us, or putting it back when someone does something good for thee community.

It took a couple of attempts as the game to realise the mechanics which were going on and understand why they were happening, even though they weren’t on paper. This is yet another reason why Avery Alder is fantastic.

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RPG a Day 2018 – Day Eight – How can we get more people playing?

Posted on August 8, 2018 by fakedtales

How can we get more people playing?

This is always one of the big questions. I feel a lot of the time with games podcasts, videos and reviews, we’re mainly preaching to the choir. There are some great communities on places like G+, but at the same time it’s still mostly people already in the hobby.

New formats like streaming channels on Twitch & YouTube have helped people enjoy role-playing games even if they don’t actually pick up the dice. Wizards of the Coast have previously reported that over half the new players for D&D 5th Edition came to the hobby because of watching online games. I love that. Personally I listen to a bunch of actual play podcasts, I don’t really get Twitch yet, but when I do it’ll be through RPGs.

Community

Free RPG Day has helped, as it’s brought curious people from board games into role-playing games. I’ve had first-time roleplayers in most Free RPG Day games which I’ve run so far. Maybe more days like that would help.

Compared to my previous entries this hasn’t been a big one. I’m hoping others have better answers.

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