lame mage productions

We’re rolling up characters in Flashing Blades (yep, from 1984). It’s a rapiers & muskateers system, but instead of historic France we’re playing in a supressed tech sci fi setting that we created in one of our Microscope games (the “stellar empires” history), a baroque and decadent period when the alien “gas whales” are the living gods of the Imperial church.

Ping rolls her stats and decides to play a noblewoman.

P: Do I get to be Queen?
Me: Uh, no. Starting social rank for a noble is only 8. The Queen is a 20.
P: Can’t I start higher?
Me: Well, theoretically you could start as high as Duchess. You’d have to take the Title advantage, and you’d have to roll really well.
P: [grabs a d20, starts shaking it vigorously]
Me: But just to be clear, you’ll probably get a lower rank.
P: [still shaking d20 in balled fist]
Me: You only start as a Duchess on a natural 20.
P: [first signs of cramping in her shoulder]
Me: …
P: [face scrunched up in pain, arm twitching frantically]
Me: …uh, just so you know.
P: [uncurls her claw and chucks the die]

Bam, 20. Duchess.

I got so many games at GenCon that I’m resorting to an inbox/outbox system to make sure I read them all and don’t lose track of any in the shuffle.

I’ve barely made a dent in the pile, but the one I’m most interested in so far is Sign in Stranger by Emily Care Boss. I haven’t even gotten to read it yet because some people yanked it out of my hands as soon as I bought it, but the demo was really fun. To create the alien world you take turns answering set questions like “what makes the aliens distrubing to humans” but you don’t show your answers to the other players and see how they interact until the end. The results are cool and surprising. Our aliens had the attractive trait “alluring eyes” but the disturbing trait “low social boundaries”, leading to a lot of jokes about leaning in way to close and muttering “heywatchadoing?” We’re already scheduling a regular group to play it.

The ashcan of Mars Colony, a two-player game by Tim Koppang also looks quite interesting. When I first starting reading it I thought “hmm, okay, fine, work to save the colony, sure I get it” and then I hit page 23, Deception, and had my “A ha!” moment (it’s only 32 pages, so this is pretty far in). Maybe you enact effective policies, or maybe you just lie about all the good things your policies are doing and hope no one figures it out. Now I’m jazzed to try it. Advice to game designers everywhere: don’t bury the lead!

Lots more demos at the Forge booth, and I also got to talk to Chris Engle, maker of Engle Matrix Games. I’ve walked by his booth in years past back when I had no idea about the concept of Matrix games. Now I’ve got one in my hands to try out.

There was also substantial looting of the dealer booths for old school games. Another score, although technically just before GenCon, was the Prince Valiant Storytelling Game. Yeah, that’s right, from 1989. Don’t get me started about all the games I ignored because they were based on licensed media (like Star Wars d6) but which turned out to be ground-breaking…

The first story game we ever played was Capes. We were playing a very extensive Mutants & Masterminds superhero campaign so this GM-less superhero game peaked Ben’s interest. Jem, Ben and I cracked it open, and as it turns out, it started us on the path to story games.

Oh what a revelation the click and lock characters were for me! You create characters in Capes by matching a set of Persona descriptors with a set of Skill/Powers descriptors – the Hot Shot Gadgeteer, the Neurotic Brick or maybe the Neurotic Gadgeteer or the Hot Shot Brick etc. Clicking a couple together showed me that in 10 words you could have a completely useful and defined character to build from. I realized it was better to start from a straightforward concept than start with a open-ended concept and narrow it down as you go along which usually just left me with a murky character.

Strangely enough, we chose a fantasy setting probably because we had been playing supers and wanted something else. We started off each with our own hero, and our first scene pretty much proceded like a D&D encounter fighting some bandits on the road. Yawn. Now in the second scene, Jem chose to play his young archer hero again and set a conflict to rescue the girl from the bandits. I stole Ben’s Hercules-type character from him because he was cooler than my guy (that I don’t even remember any more). In my head I thought that left Ben with my lame guy, but instead, he comes out of left field as Zeus looking to have some father-son time. Doh! I think my jaw hit the floor – like you can do that? Bring in any character, bring in a character who’s not in “the party,” bring in a god?? That’s when I understood that this was a story game and not a D&D game. The fiction was the important thing.

Of course the father-son “bonding” only lasted until Zeus caught a glimpse of the beautiful girl and went to steal her from young archer. And then on my turn who should show up by Zeus’ worst nightmare… Hera.

I look at these moments and wonder how is it that these simple things were such revelations to me. Then, I remember what my friend Signa said after encountering a band of harpies in her first D&D game, “Eh, harpies. They’re all bark and no bite.” In other words, we all have to start somewhere.

We love GenCon. It’s hard to beat in terms of scope and spectacle.

But in truth our hearts belong to Go Play NW, because that’s where we really get to play the awesome games and hang out with the amazing peeps of story game-hood. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s in our own backyard…

Ping has stepped up to help organize this year, joining Tony and Phil as the GPNW team supreme. They’ve been slaving away for months to make sure we have a worry-free haven of fun.

Just three weeks until that fun starts. The game schedule is already looking crazy hot, and that’s not even counting pick up games. I’ll be playing at least one session of microscope, probably more.

There are just not enough hours in the day to play all the Geiger Counter games I want to try. I’m particularly interested in using the system in less obvious ways (not just another slasher/aliens movie). These are a few of the ideas we’ve got queued up, just waiting for a chance to play. Maybe you’ll beat us to it and try them first…

Fall of Troy — The protagonists are the heroes, kings, wives, etc. in the walled city weathering the Greek assault (the menace). Not literally Troy/the Iliad since that would encourage playing out the events as they happened, but a Troy-like situation. Characters are defenders not attackers because that works better as a menace — the attackers could always just decide to go home. Can the defenders defeat the invaders on the broad fields of battle or do the last survivors flee as their city burns? (kudos to Jem for this one)

Reverse Dungeon — What mysterious terror is marching into our dungeon and killing us poor monsters? Can kobolds, otyughs and ettins join forces and defend their lairs from the menace of the adventuring party? Talking monsters could veer towards the cartoonish, but if you envision the adventurers as a powerful yet mysterious enemy from the unknown outer world it could work. It’s obvious to think of the more powerful monsters as possible survivors, but maybe it’s the plucky wererat who survives, not the raging minotaur?

World War II — Straight Normandy Beach and pushing on to Berlin, losing guys as you go. Will the squad survive or get wiped out? If you want a twist make the whole thing a virtual prison: it’s World War II: the Matrix. Win the war or escape the illusion.

Necronomicon — The menace is an accursed book man was not meant to read. No monsters, just people going insane from reading it and possibly becoming dangerous themselves (in-game “dead” people may become expressions of the menace). More madness and unspeakable horror than shotguns & tentacles — slow-paced drama/mystery focusing on the human relationships.

Voyages of the Dauntless cross-over — Geiger Counter meets InSpectres in Spaaace! The game would actually be a flashback of events the Dauntless was investigating. What happened on this abandoned space station? Where’s the crew of this ghost ship? What happened to the survey team that went into the alien ruins? It would all get played out in Geiger Counter, with a brief narrative wrapper of the Dauntless crew finding the clues at the beginning and learning the outcome at the end. If the protagonists survive, we get to explain how they escaped and can be tracked down and rescued (or maybe this was decades ago and they’re dead from natural causes). If not, all we have are their final log entries to tell the tale…

Everyone wants to play the latest game hot off the presses and of course no game can match the molten lava power of the new D&D 4e. Even though we don’t play a lot of D&D or fantasy combat now, would we even be gamers if we weren’t curious about a new version of the staple of the gaming world?

To satisfy our curiosity, I’ve been running Keep on the Shadowfell, the introductory 4e module. Save an ill-fated AD&D game in college, I’ve never been behind the DM screen. I’ve also never been one for spending a lot of time statting characters (the longest series of games I’ve run used Truth & Justice) let alone dungeon-craft, so running the intro module was definitely the best way for me to get out of the gate and to the table. I am pleased to say, it’s been fun. But, I’m surprised to say it’s been really fun, and we all want to play more when I thought maybe we’d play once or twice and call ourselves educated. I’m even finding myself thinking about the higher level modules due to come out later this year, heh, heh, while the players flip through the PHB plotting their next level.

My job with this module has not been one of creativity. After all, it’s all there on a platter right down to where each monster is placed on the map. Instead, it’s been an exercise in restraint. There’s an agreement that the deal is to kill monsters on a battlemap and the players don’t need much of a plausible reason to do so, but it still can’t insult their intelligences. I’ve tried with varying degrees of success to eliminate the ridiculous elements of the module to keep it a reasonably serious affair. For the most part that means scrutinizing the town, townspeople and so-called town encounters. I’ve tried to keep people behaving and interacting like normal human(oid)s instead of video game barkeeps and merchants (“Good day to you, adventurer! Would you like to see my wares?”). Despite my best intentions, though, it’s been tough to get all of these things working well.

I think as a introductory module for 4e, it’s not bad and the encounters have been different enough and challenging for the players. 4e seems to offer a lot of choices for the players, and they have to coordinate to get the most out of their abilities. Speaking as a newbie DM, because we are all happy to learn the rules together, I thankfully don’t have the extra burden of having to teach anyone the system or police it alone. My job is to know the module, run the monsters and run the game. That’s complicated enough because the goal seems to be for every monster to be a unique star in the monster firmament. Every kobold has different powers and movement. This one shifts if someone moves near it, that one shifts if someone misses an attack. This one does fire, that one does acid. It’s not that it’s overwhelming even if sometimes I forget which one’s which, but it means that I have to be sure to understand each monster’s powers and what tactical and descriptive effect they have and how they work in a particular environment which also seems to be purposefully unique for every encounter. If you’ve seen one kobold in the wilderness, you really haven’t seen them all.

A couple of weeks ago, Ben and I went to Go Play Northwest, a small, mostly local roleplaying convention that focuses on indie games though given the timing there was some downright gleeful D&D 4e too. Besides meeting a great bunch of gamers and playing totally new games, there’s something very eye-opening about gaming with new people. You learn a lot about your good and bad habits that being in the same group for a long time might be masking. Sure, some games were much more fun than others, but I think that’s the grab bag of gaming and part of the con. Suffice it to say, we had a blast.

I have to tip my hat to the GoPlayNW organizers for making everyone feel welcome and making sure everyone had a game to play. Before each game slot, Tony would ask if anyone was game-less or if any GMs had open slots. If after that there were still stragglers, groups would just form ad hoc and play. Beautiful. One of the best things about many indie games is they’re designed so you can just sit down for a few of hours and play with no prep. I straggled a lot and played 3 ad hoc games, a teen slasher flick themed game of Geiger Counter and 2 sessions of In a Wicked Age, possibly one of the most fun, no-prep, quick start roleplaying games out there. Ben goes into more detail about the joys of IAWA in his Indie Exploration Kit article.

GoPlayNW won’t come around again until next year, but taking a look at the Meetups and Conventions thread on Story Games, there’s a lot of opportunity between now and then.

We went a mad binge last week with the new Descent campaign game (The Road to Legend). It’s an improvement over the original game in a number of ways, mostly because there’s more long-term development and planning instead of the usual “>spang< Gold treasure!" inflation at the end of every dungeon.

One thing that's a little slippery is that getting killed doesn't have any immediate consequences. The Overlord (aka Zargon) just collects conquest tokens which he can spend on new stuff next week, but the hero just springs back up fully healed. Mathematically it’s a win for the Overlord, but because the consequences are basically abstract it becomes too easy for the players to brush it off. “Sure I went down,” the hero says, “but then I ran back in and wiped out two manticores!” It looks like a victory (sort of), but by the rules it’s a loss because the Overlord scored a lot more conquest than the heroes. The heroes are losing the campaign and don’t even feel the sting.

Same thing in our early games of Agon. The heroes can’t die in Agon. The worse that happens is you are “defeated” and out of the fight. Don’t want to be defeated? Just spend Fate and ignore the wound. You can do that over and over again (16 times anyway). The trick is that you’re burning the lifespan of your character. It would be like playing D&D (a concrete defeat game) and every time you died having someone say “okay, you’re back up, but now your character can only reach 19th level before he retires” and so on. You aren’t losing the current fight, the concrete short-term, but in the long-term, in the abstract, you’re losing.

All in all I think using abstract defeat in game design can be a bit dodgy. It requires players to pay less attention to the immediate situation and think in terms of a meta strategy for a meta victory — basically the opposite of what you want in play. You want immersion, involvement, not abstract thinking.