Games Blog

After the unfortunate demise of Docs Blog and the Game Dream meme (the entire site is sadly no more), a couple of new gaming memes have taken it’s place.

This one’s called “Lunchtime Poll” (although it’s evening over here), from Ravings of a Textual. Today’s simply asks:

What’s the strangest character you’ve ever played?

That has to be Bug. The game was a series of linked convention one-shots called “Guardians of Dimension”, played over three Gypsycons. The PCs were a team of interdimensional troubleshooters. Bug was the party’s scout, a 2″ long sentient insect. This party also included a troll, a telepathic horse and the personification of Murphy’s Law.

Bug had the advantage of being small enough to go where other party members could not. Bug’s disadvantage was an insect-like attention span, and not being very useful in combat. Had to stay well away from the baby kraken in the crashed spaceship we were exploring! The ability to speak with other insects turned out not to be terribly useful; Bug never met another insect who had anything meaningful or interesting to say.

Carl Cravens mentions the lengthy ‘What is Fudge’ discussion on the Fudge mailing list, and mentions the problems he’s been having with the system.

For me, it brings up something that’s been bugging me again. I’ve claimed Fudge as my “exclusive” system for the past several years… I run all my games with Fudge. Thing is, I haven’t had a lot of time to actually run games in the past ten years, so my hands-on experience has been lacking. The interesting part is that every time I get a hands-on experience, Fudge somehow comes up short for me.

There’s a lot of niggly little reasons, no one of which is really a big problem in itself. But despite its “toolbox” approach, there are some core bits of Fudge that are tightly locked together and it’s very difficult to tweak the system because some parameters can’t be changed without changing other parts of the system. And some of those tightly-locked pieces are what, to me, make Fudge what it is. If you remove or change them drastically, then it’s no longer Fudge

I realise that every time I’ve run Fudge, I’ve used a slightly different build. Sometimes I’ve used vanilla Fudge pretty much out of the box; other times I’ve run a very stripped-down version, inspired a bit by Castle Falkenstein, which merges attributes and broad skills into ‘abilities’, and drops gifts and faults altogether.

The one part of the system I haven’t ever changed is the part of Fudge Carl’s having problems with, the seven-level attribute scale and the Fudge dice. I have to agree with Carl, those are the very core of Fudge. I’ve always found they work tolerably well; but then my games have been modern-day or low fantasy. Carl’s trying to use Fudge for superheroes, a genre that’s never appealed much to me.

Anyway, here’s my thoughts for future games using my own Kalyr setting:

• No Attributes: I’d already eliminated those attributes that overlap too much with skills, such as Dexterity or Intelligence, now I’m taking this a step further and eliminating them altogether, making some narrowly-defined ones as skills, replacing others with gifts and faults, or talents
• In character generation, use a Traveller-style career system to determine skills. You stack together a series of Templates (need to think of a snappier name), which represent backgrounds, professions or talents. Each grants one level in six different skills. Talents fill the role of those attributes that grant skill bonuses in other systems; for example, take a talent ‘Agile’, and you get one skill level in any six skills that an agile person would be naturally good at. It’s not my intention to define every possible background, profession or talent; would-be players will be encouraged to define their own, subject to GM approval.
• Characters also have traits called Connections. Kalyr is a setting where social status and guild rank count an awful lot; so Connections represent your status with regard to the various powerful groups in the setting. They’re rated on the same Superb-Terrible scale as skills; this takes account both of rank within the group, and the power of the group.
• Gifts are much the same as vanilla Fudge; haven’t decided how many or whether they can be traded for Templates
• Faults are slightly different; they don’t give you anything extra at Chargen time, but instead grant Fudge Points every time they come up and inconvenience the character in play. You can take as many or as few as you like, according to character concept. In essence, they’re self-balancing, roleplay them and you get points for them; don’t, and you won’t.

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• Psionics still needs a bit of thought. My earlier attempt was more or less a straight conversion of the psionics rules from GURPS 3rd edition; each broad power group was bought in levels, and within each power you bought skills to make use of the power. GURPS 4th edition works in a completely different way; skills have gone, and each power is now it’s own advantage. In many ways this is a better idea, because for many powers the concept of ‘levels’ isn’t terribly useful; either you can do it or you can’t. I’m thinking along the lines of a gift for each ability, accompanied by skills the represent the ways the power can be used.

Why do I get the horrible feeling that one of my PBmB players is a little bit of a munchkin?

Game Dream 18 asks us to:

Do a mock review of a game that doesn’t exist, but you think really ought to. Readers are encouraged to let the author of the review know if this game exists in another form somewhere.

GURPS Trains

GURPS Trains is a new book for the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, covering a subject very close to my heart. It promises to be the definitive guide for games set in, around or involving trains. And it shows every sign of living up to that promise.

Chapter one gives a brief history of trains and railways, from the primitive mine tramways to the experimental maglevs. It contains a very useful timeline, giving the construction dates of famous routes across America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Chapter two railway operations and technology in gameable terms, explaining what all the jargon means, and how safety equipment works, and how things differ across eras and continents. It also notes that Hollywood takes enormous liberties with the latter, and a cinematic GM should also do so to remain in genre. To this end it uses the unintentionally hilarious “Cassandra Crossing” as an example. It also includes a section on the physics of train crashes, which allows the GM to calculate the odds of a character’s survival or of escaping injury based on TL, speed, and their position in the train.

Chapter three covers characters, with GURPS templates covering everything from train drivers and conductors though transport cops, and of course hobos.

Chapter four puts it all together with advice about using trains in games, covering adventures set on board or centring around trains in genres ranging from Old West to Horror to Espionage to Special Ops. It gives recommendations for running everything from train robberies, zombie infestations, or terrorist hijackings. There’s plenty of advice for running fight scenes on board moving trains, and recommends that in cinematic genres, the fight must always end up on the roof.

Chapter five describes in detail a dozen iconic trains from different eras and continents, complete with floorplans of carriages, details of significant landmarks en-route, and of the terminals and major intermediate stations, as well as some typical passengers and a couple of plot hooks for each one. It covers not just classic long-distance expresses such as the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian express and the Twentieth Century limited, but more mundane examples such as a New York Subway train, and typical north American freight train. The last two are fictitious; a massive steampunk monster running on 12′ gauge tracks, and a future maglev crossing the inhospitable surface of Mars.

Next come four sample adventures, ranging from middling to good; we have a fairly straightforward Victorian horror adventure set on board the overnight London to Inverness express, a rather more involved GURPS In Nomine adventure set on board the San Fransisco-LA “Starlight Express”, a very tough World War Two adventure centring on Yugoslavian partisans, and finally a terrorist plot aboard the Martian maglev.

The bibliography lists an enormous number of reference books, and a great list of classic train movies, from British comedy classics such as “Oh Mr Porter” to action movies like “Runaway Train” and “Von Ryan’s Express”.

All in all, a very good book, and very much not just for train anoraks. Like many of the best GURPS supplements, relatively little space is taken up with GURPS-specific rules, making GURPS Trains usable with systems other than GURPS

GURPS Trains is not actual GURPS book: GURPS is © Steve Jackson Games, and this piece of wishful thinking is not intended as a challenge to SJG’s intellectual property. But if SJG ever did publish a book called GURPS Trains, I would certainly buy it! Unless I get a playtest credit for it first, that is.

Read Monte Cook’s Wandering Monster Table for a guide to the creatures you might encounter in weblog comment threads, message boards, and mailing lists. (Link from Dodgeblogium)

For example:

Orc. This humanoid would be fine if he just gave his posts some thought ahead of time, read the FAQ, used a spellchecker, and/or didn’t post in all caps. CR 1.

Can you say Wibd?

Or alternatively:

Crusading Ogre. This encounter is dangerous because of the creature’s ability to bowl over others. The crusading ogre’s got an agenda and will barge into any discussion, no matter how unrelated, to turn it into a diatribe about that agenda. Politics, religion, operating systems — the agendas of the crusading ogres are many and varied. CR 8.

See how many you can recognise…

Now I’ve got my hands on a copy of GURPS 4th Edition.

GURPS 4th Edition is a major overhaul of the rules; it takes the 18 year old 3rd Edition rules and all the additional rules accreted from the 100+ supplements, and tries to streamline the whole thing and cut out a lot of the cruft.

It’s much bigger than the 3rd Edition Basic Set. The core rulebook now covers not only mundane but alien and superhuman abilities, so you can build non-humanoid characters like uplifted animals, really weird aliens, giant robots and spandex-clad superheroes who wear the underpants outside of their trousers.

Now I have to decide whether or not to convert my existing online games. Most of it’s quite straightforward; it’s a matter of updating those skills and abilities that have been repriced; character’s point values will change quite a bit (especially because they’ve repriced the attributes!), but capabilities should stay much the same.

The one big area of change is Psionics, which has a totally new system in 4E. By the looks of it there’s no way to do a like-for-like conversion; the best way will be to go back to the character concept and rebuild them from the ground up. This might well make any 4e versions of Reylorna, Hollis, Duplar and Kir look a lot different from their 3e version.

Looks like there are several options

• Keep on using 3rd edition
• Do a ‘quick and dirty’ conversion to 4e
• Retool the characters from the ground up and possibly revisiting the concepts
• Say “Oh sod it”, and convert the whole lot to Fudge
• Something else entirely

Meetup.com have revamped and reinvented themselves. There were previous GURPS and Fudge meetups scheduled for Manchester, but neither ever got enough members for any meetup to actually happen; they used to require a quorum of five. They appear to have nuked all the groups without a critical mass of members, so now there’s no GURPS group in Manchester, and no Fudge RPG groups in Britain at all. (I note that the one in Wichita, Kansas has just one member)

Mad fool that I am, I have started the Manchester Roleplayers Meetup Group, not dedicated to any one system. Whether anyone will join, I don’t know; but if you’re into tabletop RPGs and live somewhere near Manchester, sign up now!

The first date Meetup spat out was September 21, which is only four days away. I expect the first actual meetup won’t be until next month.

Most of the online RPGs I play are versions of the traditional tabletop RPG were you play one character. But there are other ways to do things, especially online

The Phoenyx is running a Lexicon Game, where the ‘characters’ are a bunch of (possibly revisionist) history scholars, and the actual gameplay revolves around their historical writings; it’s essentially a collaborative worldbuilding exercise.

Meanwhile, on DreamLyrics, Just John has a much stranger idea:

Would anybody here be into a game where your player characters hold jobs in a corporation-like organization, and where power is exercised in the traditional bureaucratic ways of deliberate obstructionism, backside-covering, slander and empire building?

And if you’re into that, would you be into having your PCs build an actual website? As players, the fun could include embellishing your corner(s) of the site with opaque jargon, badly-implemented forms, ridiculous HTML, irrelevant help screens, irritating slogans and all the other things that make corporate web sites such memorable experiences.

To top it off, the gag would be that to an innocent outsider surfing the web, this would look like a real site! My vague notion is that we’d run a standard game section here on DreamLyrics to coordinate stuff and roleplay staff meetings, but nothing on the site we’d build would link back to the game section.

A lot of scope for evil fun with this idea. I can imagine an incomprehensible (and impossible to comply with) policy on linking, and players should be responsible for sending equally incomprehensible cease-and-desist letters to any blogger than dares to link to the site.

Game Dream 11 asks us:

In every campaign, there are memorable scenes. Often, this is due as much to player participation as it is to GM flavor and skill. This week, I’d like for us to share quotes that stuck with you down through the years. What did you or your cohorts say during the game (in or out of character) that made a lasting impression?

The trouble with most in-game lines are that they’re of the ‘you had to be there’ variety; I have no idea whether any of these will be funny to anyone who wasn’t part of the game.

Still, sometimes a GM gives a golden opportunity to drop a corny joke straight into the game, especially when the mood of the game is meant to be humourous. Such a game was GODS (Guardians of Dimension). The PCs were a team of interdimensional troubleshooters, led by a telepathic horse, which also included a troll and an 2″ sentient insect, Bug. In one adventure, we landed in a tropical island, with, in the best jungle movie cliché, tribal drumming in the background.

GM: And suddenly, the drumming stops
Bug (my PC): Oh no! You know what this means!
Another PC: What does it mean?
Bug: Bass solo!

In a later game of GODS, we landed on an Old West style world, where the villagers were threatened by ‘The Banditos’

“They’ve come to steal the houses, burn the women, and rape the cattle!”

and later, once we’d defeated those banditos….

“We have saved the honour of the cows!”

Then there was a Castle Falkenstein game, set in Scotland. We captured some Prussian spies, by ambushing them as they slept. The ‘grunts’ got ordered abruptly to “Hande Hoch!”. But we woke up the commanding officer by pointing a big and scary looking firearm at him and saying:

“Did you order the continental breakfast, or the elephant gun”?

In a recent GURPS Time Travel game, when we’d slipped into what we assumed was an alternate parallel universe, and needed spare parts to repair our broken time machines. We’d found a consumer electronics store, and one player’s reaction was “You realise this is probably the local equivalent of Dixons” (For non-British readers, Dixons are a high street retailer notorious for having totally clueless sales staff who understand nothing whatsoever about the goods they’re selling).

GURPS Transhuman Space, at GenCon UK 2002, GMed by Phil Masters. I was playing Derek Repton, the ship’s engineer with a severe attitude problem. Constantine Thomas was playing the AI in the ship’s computer. The following exchange took place in a bad French accent (the AI was French)

Derek: “You stupide French Algorithme!”
The AI: “You’d better watch out next time you want the pod bay doors opened”

Finally, the Firefly game, where we had some damaged cargo pods which were starting to defrost. Fearful of some kind of biohazard, we opened them inside the cargo airlock. They didn’t contain quite what we expected.

GM: “You’re in the airlock, you’ve got a naked woman, a horse, and a large quantity of cocaine. Now what?”

I’m sure there are others.

Game Dream 10 asks us:

During games, how do you keep track of the various plot hooks, hints, and people? Are you a master of the arcane memory arts and keep them in your head? Or, are you a mere mortal who must put them to paper? How much notekeeping is too much? Do you find you are more or less organized in game than in real life?

It’s a long time since I’ve GMed a long running campaign; all my gaming nowadays is either online (PBeM/PBmB) or convention one-shots. In the online games I’ve got the advantage that a lot of the threads are still archived online, so I can (and frequently do) search back two or three years to find the name of that NPC. Of course, if a game lasts long enough it’s likely to outlast both online venues and home computers. I don’t have access to the older threads of KLR dating from before the game moved to Dreamlyrics, for instance. They do still exist as OZWIN archives on my old desktop PC that somewhere in my parent’s house, should I really need to access them.

I also maintain an extensive database of NPCs; a lot of these predate the online game and date back to the FtF game I ran ten years ago in the same setting, on the basis thatyou never throw anything away if there’s a chance it might come in useful later. A lot of this information is also online on the Kalyr Wiki, which is mainly full of wider game setting material, but does contain some lists of the names of significant NPCs.

For the last FtF game I played in, we kept a campaign journal. But rather than putting the book keeping workload onto the GM, we delegated this task to one of the players. Since we only met once a month (and sometimes not even that), some record of game sessions was essential, because nobody could remember exactly what happened six weeks before. Were I to run another FtF campaign, I’d do something similar, but maintain the journal online using a Wiki or blogging software, to which all the players have access.