AJ – Page 3 – lategaming

Status: Refugee – Perspective Selection

One thing that was bugging me about this game was that which we’ve discussed on a number of occasions about different games: scope. If you are playing refugees with only a small number of worlds available to you, the sheer scope for play is mind-boggling. This then probably requires either a lot of work on the part of the GM, or a lot of background information in the form of source books – or more likely both.

Reducing the character roles available (at least in the initial version of the game) would help give this game better focus. It occurred to me that having the players take on the role of police / enforcement would create a lot of interesting roleplaying situations. What happens when a group of refugees on a particular planet start getting angry at their conditions and decide to become militant? What if two large groups of refugees who had rivalries on Earth get transplanted to the same planet? … and so on.

Giving the focus to policing allows me as a game designer to focus on the things that are important to that sort of role. E.g. what are the laws in different alien societies, how many planets are there and how many humans to each, etc. I can more easily create rules of thumb for large numbers of planets, because I’m viewing them from a particular perspective.

For now, as I continue work on this game, I’m going to assume that the players are humans working for this agency. Expect to see some more background information and fictional snippets over the coming weeks.

Status: Refugee – A beginning

They repurposed I-90 into a massive people-processing line, putting you through checkpoint after checkpoint. This one for DNA scan, the next one for ID verification, the next for health assessment–the list seems endless. You stand under the afternoon sun, sweating (is the sun getting hotter already?), shuffling with the line and lugging your allocated 50 kilos of personal belongings that you quickly stuffed into a backpack.

Your first real glimpse of a K’toaran is when you get to the destination allocation desk. You’ve seen them on TV, but that’s different. Seeing one up close is kinda … freaky. You try not to stare at the big flat head–does this thing even have eyes?–as the big, sewage-colored alien silently offers you a token with one of its many hands. You take it and trundle on, a little shell-shocked. Maybe the extra hands are what make the K’toarans so efficient. Maybe the big head contains a really big brain. Or maybe it’s just because they seem to breathe out their ears.

You turn the colored token over in your hand. It’s made of a dull red metal and shaped like a house, and stamped in some language you can’t read. You shuffle off toward the next checkpoint. Not too far ahead of you, where the toll booths used to be, are the Bridges. It looks like someone built a Roman acqueduct across the highway and put a different world in every archway.

Last checkpoint.

Another K’toaran takes your chit and puts it in a brown blob that you assume is a computer. It spits out a wrist-band made of that same dull red metal which you strap on. The word “REFUGEE” is embossed on it in several languages, some of which you don’t recognise.

A warm, female voice comes out of the blob. “Please ensure you wear your wrist-band at all times. In addition to carrying all your identification and biological data, it maintains your credit balance and any other information needed by your adoptive government. Please follow the red line.”

Looking down at your feet you see a red line painted on the ground leading to one of the archways. As you approach, you can see a room through the Bridge, much like a waiting room at a hospital or a government office, with people sitting half-bored, half-expectant on moulded benches. You take a deep breath as you have one last look at the Boston skyline, then step through the Bridge to your new home.

On another planet.

All the games I’ve played (and GM’d)

I commented to Matt the other day that the last time I actually *played* in a game was when he ran the original WatchTower game in 1998.

This got me to thinking that although I’ve read a lot of games, and I’ve played in a lot of campaigns, I haven’t really played lots of games.Â Here’s the total list, from memory:

Advanced Heroquest
D&D
Marvel Super Heroes
MERP
SLA Industries
Torg
Traveller
Vampire

While I’ve played a much larger range of games, those are the only ones which fulfil the these criteria:

I’ve been a player (as opposed to GM)
I’ve had a character that advanced in some way (levels, experience points spent on skills, etc.)

(This, incidentally, has led me to a discovery about what I like about gaming … more in a future post).
If I look at it from the perspective of games that I’ve GM’d where my players would then fulfil these two criteria, the list would be even shorter:

D&D
SLA Industries
Pendragon

I think this is because I’ve had a tendency to run long campaigns that I’ve really enjoyed (as has the group), and so there’s been little impetus to switch game.Â Pendragon is especially good for this as the game is designed for long running campaigns.

I’d be interested to read about other people’s experiences, as players and as GMs.Â Write a comment, or post in your blog with a ping/trackback.

WotW: Earth – System Proposal

Here’s a simple system that would get a WotW: Earth game up and running. Before I go into the details, here’s what was going through my head as I designed this.

WotW: Earth is set in turn-of-the-century England
Player characters are likely to have a base set of skills which can probably default to stats
Highly technical skills don’t really exist, and science is still the realm of the wealthy
Skills matched career very closely, and people generally had one career
My feeling (from reading what Matt has written) is that this is a game about normal people in an abnormal situation, so there won’t be much difference between the characters

And now the system …

Continue reading “WotW: Earth – System Proposal”

System junkie

I looked up the definition of the word junkie. It says “Drug addict, esp. heroin”, and the term gets used to describe addicts to anything – adrenaline, sports, whatever. I think junkies (of the heroin type) are looking for the perfect high, which is what I mean when I describe myself as a system junkie.

The system of any RPG is at one and the same time the best and worst part of it – the most interesting and the least interesting. OK, I’m going to stop with the Dickens. What I mean is I don’t buy a game because of the system, I buy it because of every other factor: background, artwork, genre, even print quality, all go into my decision to buy a game. System never enters into it.

However, there are lots of games out there that miss out on greatness because their system lets them down. This doesn’t stop me from playing the game, but it usually means picking out the good bits and running it in a different system, or leaving out / creating house rules for large bits of the system.

SLA Industries tops my list for this – I love crunching numbers as much as any geek (actually, probably a bit more than most, as Matt will attest), but SLA character generation took the biscuit. Other systems had more numbers, but SLA had a poor layout for the information you needed, and even when you’d done it a dozen times it didn’t get any quicker. (Also, the first edition had pretty poor binding, so the char-gen section was the first to split – now it’s all in a binder).

I’m in search of great systems. Not all systems work for every game (which is why not everyone likes GURPS). Pendragon is a great example – you couldn’t (or shouldn’t try to) re-use the Pendragon system in any other setting (with the possible exception of George R. R. Martin’s Westeros books). Likewise, Marvel Super Heroes FASERIP system works really well for the Marvel background, but poorly elsewhere, even within the genre. And yet I like both of these systems, for very different reasons (Pendragon for the passions, skill perfection, criticals and skill checks, seasons, glory, children; Marvel because I do everything with one roll on one table).
Matt and I have been bandying about ideas for a system (as he’s mentioned). In this case, the system is for a super-hero game. I know it won’t be perfect. I just want it to give a good approximation of super-hero reality, without having to be a 300 page tome. We’re only going to write it if it fills all our criteria.

Got a favourite system? What’s good and bad about it? If you were writing it now, what would you do differently? These are the same questions I’m asking myself.

Super Hero vs. Science Fiction

A little off-topic, this one.Â I was considering role-playing genre and inspirations for games (after Matt’s previous post) and I realised that I hadn’t seen a big budget science fiction movie released in ages.Â Everything had either been fantasy, kids movie or a comic book spin-off.

Am I missing anything?Â Apart from the Star Wars Episode III, has there been any scifi blockbusters in the last few years?

Keeping track of time

One of the more challenging aspects of being a GM is ensuring the game world retains its believability. Mature players (by this I mean anyone who role-plays, rather than someone who plays a one-man-army war-game) demand a world in which things happen much as they do in this world–all actions have consequences (some of which are unforeseen), and much more is happening in the world than what the characters see.

Part of creating this illusion is of course in your world building, but an equal part is time management–keeping track of all the events that you have planned to happen, and making up new ones based on the actions of your players.

One method I’ve used to do this is a simple table of time/characters. With time along the top of the table and characters (including PCs and NPCs) down the left, it is simple to prepare before the start of a session by jotting down what the NPCs will do assuming the PCs do nothing. As the session progresses, you can modify that based on player activity. One thing to be careful of is the linear nature of a table can lead you to linear thinking on the part of the NPCs. This might sound dumb, but having a table like that will literally encourage you to think within the box.

Another method I’ve used is more like a traditional brainstorm–bubbles with text associated with arrows. This means you can keep track of NPCs actions (and even non-action things like desires and intentions) in more of a flow-chart. Drawing new lines of association between bubbles as different events occur to change the landscape means that it’s more likely that things will be less linear. However, little bubbles scattered over a page make it harder to keep track of the times when events are going to occur.

Finally we get to the method I currently use, which is a mash-up of the two. I use bubbles to note down events and ideas, and a table to tell the order in which they will happen and did happen. That way the game flows freely, I can make notes quickly and still tell where everyone is at any given time, and when the players are talking among themselves I can update my table as I go.

I’ve found that having the bubbles makes it much easier for me to think up sub-plots and micro-plots on the fly, and to ensure that the characters that are relevant to that plot are available at the right times to be involved.

Marvel Super Heroes Saga

Both of us at lategaming are fans of Super Hero games. For Matt, it’s because he misspent his youth reading comic books. For me, it’s because they’re the pinnacle of escapism, and one of my favourite campaigns I ever played in was a supers game.

In this supers game, we used the old Marvel system (not the old-old one, the one after that). Matt was the GM at the time, and his reason for choosing Marvel (when not playing in a Marvel universe) is that the system is very simple for resolving things, keeping the game fluid, and reducing the rules-lawyering or number-crunching which can plague other games (*cough*DC Heroes*cough*).

(Incidentally, we were talking the other day (again) about how all role-playing games are essentially super hero games–you have a character who probably has fairly broad strokes of personality (at least initially) and who has some kind of abilities which makes that character stand out from the crowd. Think about it: Vampire, D&D, Ars Magica, SLA Industries and so on ad infinitum. They all give you special powers and let you wreak havoc.)

So, when I first heard about the Saga system, which used cards for resolution in an effort to reduce the rules and numbers and promote role-playing and storytelling, I thought this was going to be excellent.

Enough rambling, let’s discuss some nitty-gritty. The game was actually published in 1998, but often that doesn’t mean much in the RPG world–I hadn’t even heard of it till last week. It was released in a boxed set (as were all the Marvel games) that comes with two books: one for rules and one with Marvel character stats in it. It also comes with a deck of cards that are used for all the resolution in the game.

The books are colour-covered but black and white on the inside. My first gripe with the game is that the font is some kind of Comic Sans-derivative font, which is incredibly hard on the eyes for reading long stretches of text, and of course should be banned. I think it’s acceptable in a comic book because those books are hand-drawn, so why not hand-written? In any other book, it smacks of amateurism. The cards that come with the game resemble those you might find in your average collectible trading card game. Full colour images of comic book heroes, with various semi-cryptic numbers and symbols wrapped around them. Having only black and white on the inside doesn’t bother me – this was after all in the age before the rise of very cheap digital printing.

The system itself is … interesting. You hold a certain number of cards in your hand at any given time (somewhere between 3 and 7, with 4 or 5 being normal for the X-men level characters). These cards are your hit-points (you discard cards when you get wounded), your dice rolls (they have random numbers on them which you use to determine success or failure) and your character/hero/karma points (i.e. using them in a particular way allows you to affect things more than you normally would be able to do). Having a hand of cards is a bit like saying you have five dice rolls to choose from each time you want to resolve something, and when you use one of them you have to roll that dice again to bring the total back up to five.

The cards have five suits. Each one is a different colour, is based on a different stat, and is named after a different Marvel character who exemplifies that stat. Resolution is as you might expect: take an ability/stat/skill/power and add the value of the card to beat some target value. The more experienced your character is, the more cards he/she can play at one time. The different suits also function as trumps for their relevant stat, so playing a “5 of Agility” from your hand for an agility based action allows you to draw a card from the top of the deck and add that to the total (and continue to draw and add for as long as you continue to draw the same trump suit).

One suit (Doom/Dr. Doom) has the added drawback that the GM (or Narrator as he’s known in this game) gets to keep those cards and use the numbers on them against you at inopportune times. This is a nice little thing the players have to keep in mind when they play those cards.

The downside of the cards is that they are completely relied upon for resolution of everything (even things like the weather, if you want). So what happens if you lose some or all of them? It’s not like dice where you can just go buy a new set. Perhaps in 1998 TSR planned to make the available to buy, but eBay is about the only place you might find them now. Also, I found the rules at times difficult to understand, but that could be just because I haven’t yet played it. Reading them didn’t make them become clear, and the examples they gave just served to muddy things even further.

The game is clearly intended to be used to play in the Marvel Universe, and with Marvel characters and a large number of the most popular are included in the Roster Book. The game itself is light on source material–it expects you to read the comics (or possibly some supplements) to fully understand anything about the universe or the characters. There’s no history or timeline as you might find in other game settings. Perhaps it’s naive of me to think that it might be necessary for those of us who haven’t read all the Marvel comics since the 1960s.

Character generation is fairly simple, but relies heavily on GM adjudication. In fact, the system is intended to be used to generate those characters that weren’t quite popular enough to be included in the Roster Book but that still feature in the comic books. It even goes so far as to say “bring the comic book with you to every session, so that everyone knows what your character looks like”.

In summary then:

Good

+ Cards are a neat idea
+ System emphasises roleplaying

Bad

– Cards can get lost/damaged and aren’t easily replaced
– System wasn’t easy to understand, examples even less so
– Lack of background info not so good for people who don’t read a lot of Marvel comics
– Bad font choice

Overall score: 3d6 (out of a possible 6d6)

If I played this game a bit to see how well the system actually worked, this might go up to 4d6.