subplotkudzu | Recent Entries

I just sent out the prospectus to my play group for 2012. For those of you who want to play along at home, players have 20 points to split between the following 10 campaigns. If you give something a 0 it means that you would rather not play next year than play in this campaign. Scoring of 1+ plus means you are willing to ‘buy into’ the campaign concept; more points indicating greater interest. Each campaign has some color text, followed by a description of how I expect the campaign to run in terms of structure, feel and amount of initiative I expect the players to show in shaping the direction of the campaign.( Options after the cut )

I got the strange mid worm of trying to map the Reign "One Roll Character Generator" onto the classic Traveller lifepath system. I'm not sure why, other than a vague idea of pitching a free trader game next time 'round, but nonetheless it's there and must be dealt with.

For those not familiar with the One Role Character Generator, you roll 11d10 and, as with all One Roll Engine stuff, look for matches. Each number has a general feel to it (in Reign 1s indicate skills as a beggar, 2s are thieving, 3 is performing, 4 is merchant, 5 is sailor, 6 is soldier and so on) and 'wider' matches (three ones, or 1x3, is wider than two ones, or 1x2) indicating higher levels of ability in the area. Any unmatched dice are compared to a set of 'waste die' tables that give one off life events (such as a sudden windfall, being robbed, being the center of a mix up identity 'prince and the pauper' event ans so on). Once you know the outcome of all the dice you lay the events out in the order you like ( (so 2x4, 4x5, 2x6, the Robbed! and Unexpected Windfall events might be "I spent several years as a struggling merchant, but when I was robbed blind I was forced to become a marine in the merchant service. Much to my surprise I was picked out by the captain to inherit his ship and have forged a successful career as a ship's captain" OR "when the astrologer told the captain of the HMS Matilda to give his ship to the first person to cross the threshold I was suddenly elevated to command of a warship. Much good it did me as I was roundly mocked by my crew and forced to turn into a sword-wielding pirate just to impress them, but impress them I did...until the day when the mutinied and left me for dead. Still, I was able to escape back to port, where I was able to get a job as a petty merchant, waiting for my opportunity for vengeance." etc.)

In any event, I'm looking for advice from Classic Traveller players. My read of the classic lifepath is that it determined Longevity in the Service, Commissions and Promotions in the Service, Survival of Fatal Events and Mustering Out benefits. The Psionics rules were, either by accident or design, a mechanism to balance out PCs who had rolled poorly and mustered out too early (the cost of getting tested for Psionic strength is within reach of most characters even after a 4 year term, must be done after mustering out and diminishes with age) and so to my eye should be included. The Services are Navy, Marine, Army, Scout, Merchant and Other (which is described as a sort of general neer do well profession).

Now, my first instinct was to let the player pick any one set and apply that to Longevity in the Service, selecting the service table of their choice (not doing so would mean being in the Other category). Other sets would determine
Survival (the wider the set the more combat/life or death experiences you've seen, increasing you coolness under fire, leadership skills and intimidation, with a 1x5 meaning you 'died on the table' but were revived by advanced medicine),
Promotions (decoupling this from actual experience means you can get Mal Reynolds style sergeants who are insanely skilled with no width in commissions vs. minor gentry who purchased their Captaincy with a 2x5 roll),
Mustering Out (with 3x4 or 3x5 meaning the Traveller holy grail of your own ship or major status bonuses)
Psionics (with a selection of options based on width, with teleportation limited to a 4x5 roll)
and the remaining 6 numbers for things like Extra Combat Training, Extra Technical Skill, Extra Social Skills, and so on.
This would keep the Classic Traveller design of the character being in just a single service, and therefore feels more "Traveller"-y to me. It does, however, mean that you can't mix and match your lifepath order, since everything is occurring during your Longevity in the Service or shortly thereafter.

The other option is to have each service merit its own number? There's room for the 5 classic services (maybe removing Marines, making them people with both Navy and Army training?) plus Survival, Promotion, Mustering out, Psionics and one or two other areas (Science, which is something sorely lacking in the original rules). This does mean the possibility of someone rolling sets in Promotion and Mustering out without having any time in a Service (though waste dice options could account for that somewhat), but it also means that the character can get a more varied lifepath - several years in the Navy, followed by a short tour in the scout service, with a near death experience, etc.

Bear in mind that I'd be building the tables from scratch, and the odds that I'd actually run this in ORE are pretty slim.

Alas, I never played Traveller, so I'm curious about other people's thoughts on this.

One of my players,

kriz1818 is looking for advise on GMing for a youth who is operating on the high end of the Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Does anyone have a frame of reference on this?

For those not in the know, our second child is due in mid-late December. That will give me through the end of the year to wrap up my two existing campaigns (which is, fortunately, right on schedule) before I have to start a hiatus that will likely last a year. So it's time to start planning for the 2012 campaign season. I'm soliciting ideas on what people might want to see now, since I think I'mm actually be handing out the prospectus in December 2010 so as to give me concrete projects for the next year whenever I can scrape together gaming time.

In other words, I might use the break to do something broad and deep - or from the ground up - which I haven't been able to do in a while. It would also be nice to not have to go quite so episodic next time around, in contrast to the last couple years.

I know I'm taking a risk that when we actually get to 2012 the people who voted for it initially might not be interested any longer, but it's one I'm willing to take.

Some ideas on the plate are fleshing out Mech & Matrimony, which I know has two really solid players in the Cambias/Kelly household and the rest of my play group is tepid on. I recently saw someone float the idea of a SF game based on the Labors of Hercules, which might be the vehicle I need for actually running Traveller (where the PCs are the crew of the Hercules, with a contract saying they'll get possession of the ship after completing 12 missions for their patron), or at least a free trader themed game in some SF engine. (Possibly with an all Ferrengi crew in Star Trek....) I still like the core idea of He Escapes Who Is Not Pursued, the super-hero cold case mystery game but I think it's too episodic for what I have in mind, so I might go with some other broader supers game, perhaps using the League concepts I've been bandying about for years. A Girl Genius game is another strong possibility, using either the Amber of Buffy engines depending on what type of GG game the players want. Or actually buckle down and build ARCHIVE, the onion-skin investigative horror Cthulu game I started work on and then put down. Finally, there's the Pirates & Princesses game of high seas adventure, stormy but true love and political voodoo I've been noodling around the edges of for years.

As I said, any suggestions - especially from the local player group of what they'd like to see would be appreciated.

I'm trying to lay my hands on extra copies of the 3.0 core rulebooks - Players Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual. I know it's my preferred Fantasy system (I don't like the changes to 3.5, and 4.0 doesn't do it for me.) Does anyone have copies of the 3.0 books they don't want anymore? Specifically the Monster Manual and DMG, since I already have a spare of the PHB and got copies of it for all of my regular players.

I was at my parent's house this weekend and, while checking to see if they still had our old Clue board game that I could swipe for our daughter's eventual use, I discovered that they still had my copy of 221b Baker Street: The Master Detective Game. I was overjoyed! For those not familiar with it, it's something like Clue on steroids. Rather than using process of elimination to figure out what the three cards in the middle are, you instead are read a mystery from a card, have to travel to sites around London to amass clues (the clue number associated with the location is on the back of the case card and are in the clue book) and you have to use pure Holmsian deductive reasoning to determine who committed the crime before your fellow players do.

I played this game a dozen or so times at my friend Greg's house, then got my own copy for Christmas one year and, judging from the set, managed to coerce my parents into playing three times. I think it was, on the whole, a little too complicated for my 10-12 year old age. But now just seeing the box brings back glowing memories.

I still don't have a copy of Clue, but Rachel and I have been looking for good 2 person board games for post baby bedtimes, and this might well fit the bill. Plus, it's pretty.

A few of my players have expressed a like of Mutants and Masterminds, and one of them has loaned me his PDF CD so I could read the rules. To be honest, I'm not feeling the love, but I don't quite know why. At the core I think the default expectation of the rules (as with many rule sets) that the heroes are all equally powerful is too rigidly enforced. It's one thing in Champions where everyone has 350 points to buy powers and there are lots of various complex ways one character can be more powerful than another (from ideal point designs to clever synergies to the rules mis-pointing the utility of a particular power to one player not being good at builds). But this M&M is very clear in exactly what you need to do to keep your character evenly balanced, and it's pretty clear from the rules that deviation will hose you.

I might be reading too much into this, and maybe it's not having a physical copy of the rulebook to flip through, but it's been hard for me to create our new V&V heroes in Mutants & Masterminds. Not in a "How do we model their powers" way, but a "Atlas' Growth lets him grow to 20', which is huge size, and would give him a 35 Str, right on line with a Powerhouse character. But when he grows he also gets a better chance to hit because of the deceptive nature of his gravity fueled growth, and not only does M&M growth force a reduced chance to hit due to d20 size modifiers, but his attack bonus has to drop below the because his +13 effect mod is out of line with a power level 10 hero. So I could raise the power level, no one else in the team can even come close to Atlas' damage potential when grown (Calypso maxes out at 2d8, Atlas maxes out at 4d10). Maybe Calypso and Titania, who both favor stunning and entangling attacks, have campaign levels in those attacks and Calypso has below campaign levels in her water control and super-strength.

I just don't have enough feel of the system, but the idea of "everyone should start with the same scores in these key numbers and then apply +/- balancing to them, and we differentiate by how you justify those scores" just doesn't sit well with me. Can anyone who's played it offer another insight?

We had the 6th session of An Invitation today, and therefore started breaking some of the rules. For all of the previous sessions the plots were self contained - one 4-6 hour game slot, one plot - and involved matters of international espionage. This time we're doing a two-parter, and it's personal: the mark is the personal nemesis of one of the PCs, the team's Ubiquitous Black Engineer (UBE), who is a child of Opak Re, the super-tech African city from Planetary. Her nemesis is a British lord obsessed with discovering her origins (he's also, our heroes learn, a member of the Temple of Ra, the CFalk evil magician group who mix time magic and super science and think they're all reincarnation of Egyptian Pharaohs. In other words, they're barking mad).

So at the end of the first episode, from the audience's perspective, everything has gone totally wrong: the UBE's attempt to get more information out of the mark has ended with her being kidnapped and locked into a specially built travel sarcophagus, after he reveals that he's done this once before, having traveled back in time after his previous defeat at their hands and knows that his current romantic conquest is actually working with the UBE to upset his plans, but he plans to spirit her away to Africa and subject her to a fate worse than death (time-manipulated personality alteration to make her his willing empress). Duh-duh-duuuuuuh!

What the audience doesn't know is that the party changed their plans at the last minute (which they really did during the e-mail planning session, with a sudden burst of brilliance from the Eye Candy PC led them to develop the "kidnap him, isolate him in a manor house and convince him that it's 1920 and he's returned to England from his empire to write his memoirs, then turn those plans to double cross both the British and the Prussians over to the right people" plot rather than the "infiltrate his expedition to the Congo and sabotage it" plot - so last minute that I decided that in the last iteration they _had_ gone with the Congo plot), that they had already realized that the Mark was setting up the expedition to lure the UBE into his clutches, had identified the sarcophagus as the means of transport and the UBE had lockpicks hidden under flaps of fake skin so she'd be able to escape once she was inevitably locked up (and go through his files now that she's inside his base).

Rather than the mission being FUBAR, it is instead exactly going to plan. Next month's session, from a TV episode perspective, will begin with the scenes of everything going wrong last episode, the opening credits and the mark waking up to look as if he's much older, drugged to make him weaker and parapalegic, and the second half of the con well underway. Now they have a month to figure out how they'll keep him from suspecting and get him to write out his own confession.

Plus, the session was worth it to get Diane to realize that the villain was indeed totally barking mad.

Some time back I had a series of posts about how supers characters can vary drastically from system to system. With the need for a pair of pick up sessions for my first-Saturday-of-the-month group I have three new PCs built using V&V's random rolling system. I know from direct experience that all three of them are high end characters in V&V terms, so on a whim I decided to see how they'd look in the old Mayfair DC Heroes Game, built to scale to handle the big red S. After that I translated them in Champions, just because.

( Here's what happened (Long) )
I find it interesting that the women are on par in one game, much more pricey in another and cheaper in a third, but those flip flop, while the guy with the straight up "I hit people" powers was pretty much evenly pricey.

A long overdue follow up to my last post, here's how the PCs rocked in June after the May debacle.
( Fassad's Best Day Ever )

Amusing bit from the last two Arabian Nights D&D sessions.

( Player Fail behind the cut. )

Next Month? trek through dinosaur infested jungle!

Rachel: Jenny Wren, a beautiful forest maid and cockeyed optimist who can speak with animals and whose singing can produce productive dance scenes/event montages. Orphaned at birth, she was raised in part by Dr. Catseyes.

Diane: Beatrix Bunny, the most kind, brave and clever of bunnies and therefore a current owner of gold shoes of Easter . She is the mother of 20 children, ably midwifed by Dr. Catseyes, and exceedingly well organized.(1)

Jim: Quentin le Crabbe of the Azure Bay Crabbes, a gentle-man thief (he pinches things) with a gruff, short fused exterior masking his basic goodness. Dr. Catsyes helped him with some knee trouble (arthropodic surgery) recently.

( Fairy Tale Behind the Cut )
And they all lived happily ever after.

Long time, no post. Anyway, I'm starting to noodle around the edges of next year's prospectus, knowing that a lot of the voting will be eaten up by the Gaslamp Fantasy game (I'd call it a Girl Genius game, but one option is having it be set somewhere radically different - such as British Colonial India - or with a completely different history and supporting cast, so I have no guarantee that it'll actually be a GG game). I'd like to get back to running a supers game for a while, so I'm thinking of putting 3 supers options on the prospectus.

( Read more... )
I'm curious as to any opinions people my have.

Tomorrow, I post the write up to my recent ZoZ game.

How much would play balance change if you applied the STUN multipler of killing attacks only to the BODY that penetrated resistant defenses? I'm noodling on the math of making a character comic book style bullet-poof (where they shrug off bullets with no effect, but get hurt by strong punches), and noted that the current HERO rules

a) apply the STUN multiplier before penetration is calculated, and
b) let you use non-resistant PD to avoid the STUN of a killing attack.

The latter makes it clear that the resistance is just needed to protect BODY, but the former makes it hard to really have comic book resistance to conventional (2d6 or less RKA) firearms while still be hurt, comics style, by other major non-killing attacks. I'm wondering if shifting the application of the stun multiple will correct that.

12 rPD vs 2d6 RKA currently will eliminate risk of BODY loss, but STUN loss after defenses would average out at 2 to 9 points but could swing to 23 or spike to 48! In order to get the feel I want I'd need a total rPD+PD of roughly 35 (enough to eliminate the stun multiplier of any average BODY roll), and with that the character is totally immune to an equivalent 30 AP 6d6 EB (max damage 36).

By reversing the order the 12 rPD would make the character immune to a 2d6 RKA for pretty cheap, but he could settle on a final rPD + PD of, say, 20, so the 6d6 EB would likely do a point or two of stun per hit. This is much more what I want, and gives a strong reason for Viper to outfit their goons with nifty little ray guns rather than conventional weapons.

Thoughts?

23) In Cold Blood: One of a long list of classics that I haven't read, the long commute let me tear through this in audiobook and I was highly impressed - not just with the book but with the reader as well, whose ability to to realistic voice shifts to identify characters without resorting to falsettos and goofy accents was something I'd love to emulate. I was both surprised and no surprised that Capote took Harper Lee with him to the small Kansas towns to help him do research, somehow guessing that his flamboyantly outsized personality might not go over as well with the locals. Of course, I am always surprised when I remember that Capote and Lee grew up in the same town. Just one of those things.

24) Surely Your Joking, Mr. Feynman!: This collection of autobiographical essays was fascinating, both for his voice and the depth of his curiosity and willingness to experience the world. It's now on the list to read out loud to my wife. It also made clear how much the 1996 movie Infinity, by focusing on Feynman's early life and relationship with his first wife, missed the mark when trying to capture his personality.

Rachel and I have been watching Castle, Nathan Fillion's new show, on DVD and enjoying it quite a bit. It has the romantic mystery vibe of Moonlighting or Remington Steele down pat, with a very likable cast of characters played by engaging actors. One thing I noticed is how tight the show is, short scenes and no wasted moments, which made me double check and learn that an episode is a mere 40 minutes long. There is quite literally no time to waste!

We had recently tried to watch Moonlighting and Remington Steele, aslo available on DVD, but found them less than engaging. Part of this is the social norms that drive the comedic aspects have changed some in the last 20+ years, but also the shows felt slow. I don't have numbers to hand, but I suspect they had an extra 8 minutes per episode at least than Castle (a guess, but the 90's Buffy ran 44 minutes, while the 1960's Mission: Impossible ran 50), but looking them now they didn't know how to use that time - they had extended opening bits showing you the victim before the crime (whereas Castle gives you a roughly 6 second viewing of the corpse at the start of the episode before jumping to something else) scenes that were meant to evoke tension but just felt slow.

Interestingly (to me, at least) is that I also got the first disk of the first season of Six Feet Under out of the library. Being on HBO it doesn't have the commercial break driven time restrictions, and if memory served it ran about 56 minutes per episode. I was stunned by how much narrative they were able to pack into the first episode, and how tightly it was handled and how well it worked. The other two on the disk however, kept the same tightness of narrative but added an unneeded plot thread to full out the extra time. The show, being billed as en ensemble, tried to give each of the four family members an arc in each episode, but in each case one of the four plots felt extraneous, contrived or cramped - that it should have been the A plot of another episode.

Would Castle be as much fun, be so sleekly streamlined, if the writers had another 8 minutes? Or would it bloat? Would Six Feet Under have been better with less time? Is this streamlining really an improvement, or have we been trained over the last 20 years to expect less time and breathing space in the medium? More to my current needs, would a 40 minute Mission: Impossible have felt more tense than the 50 minute one? The original show used a lot of cuts to establish time passing to increase tension that now feel a little contrived, but with too little time they would never have developed the gloriously convoluted plots that they did.

I'm thinking about this in part because next months' A&E has an Ignorable Theme on per-session pacing and I think the TV show parallels are helpful. I have a big advantage over the writers of shows don't, which is that I have have a session run a little long or end up to an hour early without complaint (as long as it ends an hour early on a suitable resolution). Alan Moore comments that one liberating aspect in writing From Hell, which was initially serialized in Steven Bissette's Taboo was that the chapters did not all have to be the same length, a restriction he had always labored under in the mainline comics format. At the gaming table I don't have that restriction, but I do have to pay attention to moving the narrative forward, slowing it down to get some character detail, adding complications to keep the session from ending too soon and other issues. Thinking about how GMs do these things, and do them without affecting the players sense of immersion, is harder than it appears, so analyzing other serial fiction will hopefully help.

Sorry for the lack of conclusion - obviously I'm interested in anyone else's thoughts on pacing in either TV dramas or Gaming.

Had a rough week focusing on long form reading - working through A&E instead. In any event, this lead to rereading graphic novels

20) Y - The Last Man Vol 1-2: The early issues of this were a little harder going the second time around, as Yorick is still awfully immature at this point, but they hold up well enough. If you didn't read this when it came out, the series is finished and complied in graphic novels and I do recommend it, if only to see a well put together comic with nary an inch of spandex in it.

21) Fire: Brian Michael Bendis first work from Caliber Press in the 1990's, its good, if a little preachy. The story is that of a young man recruited by the CIA to be an agent, only to learn that he was designed to be eminently disposable. Bendis' noir sensibilities and ear for dialogue are obvious even in this early work.

22) Goldfish: Another Bendis piece, this is a crime comic (the one that Bendis is pitching to Hollywood in the aforementioned Fortune and Glory) that works very nicely, using a non-linear storytelling style not common in the comics. It;s awfully dark and depressing and no one really likable, but it's a good solid read.

16) Unseen Academicals: The latest Diskworld novel, this was good but not the best Sir Terry has ever done. It occurred to me that the novel Terry has to write is the one where Veternari grooms his replacement - he is too smart and man and too savvy at business to not understanjd the basic need for succession planning. That would, I think, make an excellent end to the series.

17) All the Windwracked Stars: my first foray into Elizabeth Bear's novels, I had to start with this one because the protagonist is her character from my 90's Amber campaign. I found it slow going at first as she had to indulge in more Tell than Show for my taste to explain the world - the last human city 2000 years after Ragnarock and a few generations after the collapse of the post ragnarock civilization - and I wasn't too keen on some of the Vampire imagery that felt like it was cluttering up the book, but I am happy to admit that she pulled into together nicely and the last 100 pages were engrossing.

18) Dracula: I needed to reread Bram Stoker's classic as prep for this month's Castle Falkenstein game, and as always came away pleasantly scared. One observation this time - Von Helsing's son is dead and his wife is insane, so what the hell was his last campaign like? inquiring minds want to know.

19) The Asimov Mysteries: a collection of Issac's SF Mystery stories, these ranged from fair to excellent, with a few that surprised me iwth being outside of Asimov's usual emotional curve. Well worth reading, and I rather like Wendell Urth as a SF Nero Wolfe style housebound detective.

13) Powers volume 12 - The 25 Coolest Dead Superheroes of All Time: this is the last volume of Bendis & Oeming's super hero police procedural. The book has, over time, strayed very far from its roots while still remaining true to its fundamental concepts. Much as I have enjoyed it I am glad to see it end There is talk of them doing a reboot later, but if such a thing occurs I hope it is after enough time has passed and enough new ideas percolated to make the while thing feel fresh again.

14) Invincible volumes 9-11: Kirkman & Ottley's unabashedly straight-up super-hero book gets a little rocky here, primarily due to the intrusion of a tried trope and some subplot kudzu, but the core plotline is still humming forward nicely and it's still fun to read. For those not familiar, Invincible the the teenage son of Omni-Man, this world's Superman clone. Unfortunately for our hero, it turns out the Vilrumites are not a race of benevolent protectors, but that his father was supposed to be softening up Earth for the eventual Vilrumite takeover. His father now in self imposed exile in space, Invincible is trying to carry on the good parts of his father's legacy while dealing with the fallout of this betryal being worldwide public knowledge. It's good stuff, but I just wish Kirkman would close some of these threads off. As it stands it's like reading a run of Spider Man where we have repeated asides to _all_ of his rouges gallery all plotting to destroy him. Surely everyone in the world can't hate this kid.

15) Other Worlds, Better Lives - a Howard Waldrop Reader, selected long fiction 1989-2003: the companion to _Things Will never Be The Same_, this is more gleeful Howard Waldrop fun. Sure, "A Dozen Tough Jobs" - a retelling of the labors of Hercules set in 1920's Mississippi - is the standout here, but I quite enjoyed the others. Much fun.

After I sent out the "invitation" (i.e. the objective for next session) there was roughly two weeks of on and off e-mail discussion between the players. Some of this was expected - they decided to fake Schiffren's death, for example - but some of it was not.

( more behind the cut )

The seemed like a good enough plan. The play at the table, and the Cards, said differently. But that's for tomorrow.

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Brian Rogers

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Subplot Kudzu

thoughts on acts of creation

Recent Entries

Game Prospectus 2012 (yes, 2012)

Traveller Reign

Gaming with Aspergers?

Slouching towards 2012

Monster Manual? (and other things)

A Long Lost Treasure

Mutants and Masterminds Conceptual Problems

Caper Game Update

More Translating Characters Between Systems

Fasaad's Best Day Ever

PC Fail

Zorcerer Write Up: Love and Deathless

Supers Prospectus

Question for HERO Grognards

Books 23-24

Narrative Time

Books 20-22

Books 16-19

Books 13-15

Caper Games part II