Games Blog

I’ve heard of wierd RPG game ideas, but this has to be one of the strangest ideas I’ve seen. This guy even makes Ken Hite look normal.

Although it’s still a month away, I’ve now written up the adventure I hope to run at Gypsycon over Easter. Makes a change from writing the adventure the night before, as some GMs have done in the past. Unlike some people, I’ve never mastered the art of running entire adventures completely off the cuff making up everything as I go along.

Unlike last time, when I made up all the NPC stats on the fly, this time I’ve even got outline stats for all the significant NPCs in the game. I’ve statted them up in Fudge, although I may end up running the adventure using GURPS (I’ve got the pre-gen player characters in both systems).

No spoilers, because some potential players might be reading this. All I can say is that the scenario features genetically modified turnips.

The March edition of DREAMSCRIBE is out, featuring some convention reviews by yours truly.

Some Game bloggers get to be invited to the best parties. Not that I’m jealous, of course.

Game WISH 85 is all about Character Inspirations

What inspires you to create characters? Do you have partially-developed characters in mind for use when you get into a new campaign? Do you shop characters around, or do you come up with new characters when you get into a campaign? Why? If you GM, are you bothered by receiving a solicitation for a “generic” character, or does it enthuse you to get a solid proposal even if it’s not closely tailored to your game?

Short answer: it varies.

In games set in detailed fantasy or science fiction universes, I like characters to mesh in with the campaign’s setting in some significant way. I believe characters should have some sort of context; if the campaign setting is filled with all sorts of cults, guilds and megacorps, it’s a good thing to incorporate at least some of those into the character’s backstory.

As a player, sometimes I’ve had more than one idea for a campaign, and had asked the GM which one he or she would prefer before spending too much time fleshing any of them out. Unfortunately other times, I’ve just found the creative juices refuse to flow, and I’ve actually had to pass on some online games because I’ve been unable to come up with a decent concept in time.

I’ve seen a lot of batting of ideas back and forth between player and GM from both sides. For example, a recently a new player joined my ongoing Kalyr campaign with a character with ‘extensive underworld connections’. I sent the player a list of ongoing underworld NPCs, with the question “so what’s her relationship with these guys?”. Things like this help to plug the character into the gameworld, which to me is always a Good Thing. I did much the same thing with the GM of my last major face to face campaign, with Javin the river pirate of Pavis.

On the other hand, a ‘generic’ character should be able to fit somewhere into most gameworlds, although it might not necessarily fit into a narrowly-focussed campaign. One interesting case I had was the submission of a character possessed by a ‘demon’ (Who I’m told was based on a character from a David Gemmell book). I had to put in a bit of though to work out where this ‘demon’ fitted in to my gameworld’s cosmology. Quite what it is would be a spoiler for any of the game’s players that might be reading this, so I’m not going to say.

I’ve only ever created one PC based on a character from fiction; Karl Tolhurst, of whom I’ve written about before, and will probably write about again. He was based on Dan Ward, the central character from Iain Banks’ Espediar Street, a former rock star who’s band had ended in tragic circumstances.

I’ve also done a little bit of develop-in-play, from a very basic starting concept. Vandal the space pirate was an example of this. Basic concept was “big, tough and dumb as a rock”, and I just took if from there. I had a lot of fun playing that that character; he was quite different from the archetypes I usually tend to play.

Game WISH 84 asks:

What five games would you love to run/play if you had a willing group and a weekly time slot?

Transhuman Space
This is the ‘Powered by GURPS’ game set in the year 2100, and supported in depth. It’s ‘realistic’ hard SF rather than 50s space opera. There’s no FTL space travel, but mankind have colonised the solar system, Mars is being terraformed, and there are a host of habitats both in the asteroid belt and in the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There are no aliens, but there is a plethora of genetic modifications, Bioroids (think Blade Runner replicants) and AIs. There’s also plenty to do on Earth, as if the lawless frontier of space wasn’t enough. In many ways, it’s very cyberpunk, especially in the 2100 equivalent of the third world.

Hero Quest
I greatly enjoyed the Runequest campaign I played in a few years back, which sadly fell apart when I moved north. Glorantha is still the most richly detailed fantasy setting out there, and blows the formulaic Forgotten Realms style pabulum out of the water. While Runequest was a good, innovative system in it’s day, it’s rather dated twenty years later. HQ is a much more streamlined system, one for the Noughties rather than the late 70s.

Alternate Earths
I love the alternate histories in the two GURPS Alternate Earths books, with a secret struggle between dimension hoppers from rival parallels across dozens on different worlds. If I was GMing, I probably wouldn’t use the Homeline/Centrum setting ‘straight’. I’d be tempted to make it a little darker, perhaps introducing a third, more sinister set of bad guys, and I would certainly toss the cheesier elements like the ridiculous “Time Tours”.

Traveller Scouts
This would be favourite option for a game set in the Traveller universe. Travel to strange new worlds, encounter weird and wonderful societies, and get into all sorts of problems. While you may be in the pay of the mighty Third Imperium, once on a remote planet, you’re really on your own, and have to solve problems using your own initiative.

Kalyr
My own homebrewed gameworld in which I not only run two online games, but several convention style oneshots as well. Despite all this, it’s still not worn smooth from overuse. Two ideas I’d still love to try are a pair of high powered games, one centring on a party of high level psis, the other a political intrigue game of scheming nobles set in the Vohrleyn empire.

That’s the top five. If I had to choose even more, I’d include In Nomine, one of the few ‘high powered’ games I really like, Call of Cthulhu, although it’s more suited for convention one-shots, and some sort of historical fantasy combining supernatural elements with ‘real’ history; possibly along the lines of Mage:Sorcerer’s Crusade. (but definitely not 7th Sea!)

I would say “yes”. But this posting on ‘Constrained Writing’ at the The 20′ By 20′ Room doesn’t seem to agree:

Play-by-Email (with its precedent play-by-mail and play-by-post) is an interesting hybrid of the two above forms with tabletop roleplaying. I personally am not so sure pbem is roleplaying, but I do think it is an excellent writing exercise that can provide many of the pleasures of world and character creation.

I’ve been playing either PBeMs or their close relative, message board gaming for several years now, and I find them just as much ‘roleplaying’ as the more traditional tabletop style of gaming. In fact, I’m sure that many of the online games I’ve played in have much greater characterisation and emotional depth than most of the face-to-face games. It might just be that I’m better at writing than I am at improvisational acting. To many times in face-to-face gaming I’ve either thought of a witty in-character line just after the game has moved on, or got tongue-tied at just the wrong moment. It’s also true that the slow nature of the PBeM/PBmB format tends to deemphasise tactical combat, and characterisation and plot take their place.

I think it’s true that the FtF and PB** format are quite different, and appeal to a different kind of player. But I can’t see that both are not roleplaying. But MMORPGs? That’s a different story….

After a long absence, the Fudge ezine Fudge Factor is back with a new issue.

Game WISH 82 asks:

Sum up one or more games that you GM or play in 10 words or less. (Three is best, but not everybody is that pithy.) Don’t restrict yourself to current games if you have great ones in the past.

Three word summaries? A concept I’m familiar with; the late lamented CompuServe RPGAMES forum used three-letter acronyms to make it easy to identify games in the old Compuserve forum structure. Many people came up with short names that could be abbreviated into TLAs. So we had games like “Teatime and Tentacles” (1920s Cthulhu set in Britain) and “Have Spaceship, Will Travel” (Classic Traveller). RPGAMES successor, Dreamlyrics, has continued the practice.

Some current games:

Ahhran Empire Frontiers: “Venus Blood: The Love Boat”. I must point out that all the naughty scenes are in the members-only adult area. As the GM, I have to read that stuff…

The Stand: “You forgot to ask which airport, you idiot!” (At least for the UK players)

Edge of Hell: Goths and Groupies: Ümläüt on tour. The game isn’t supposed to be all about the adventures of the goth/black metal band, but with three player characters as band members…

Kalyr. With thirteen current players, split over two different sites, I find this game so impossible to summarise that I’ll have to leave it to the players themselves. My official title is “A world on the brink of change”.

Some older ones:

Hawiian Vacation: “Everyone I know is dead”. That GURPS Cyberpunk game did have a rather high body count; any PC whose player vanished was ruthlessly terminated.

Fragments of Chaos: “Everyone I know will soon be dead”. Well, it was a Cthulhu game.

Any convention one-shot run by the same GM as FOC: “Everyone will soon be dead”.

Then there was the long-running ADnD Spelljammer campaign that became known as “Vikings in Space”, so much so that it became the official name of the game.

Game WISH 81 asks:

What’s your favorite game system, and why? What things don’t you like about it? How much do you have to “jigger” it from published rules and why?

I don’t have a single game system, but I can narrow things down to two systems, utterly unlike one another in some ways, and very similar in others. As a GM I’m very much a worldbuilder, and want to mix and match elements to create an original game setting rather than ‘playing in someone else’s sandbox’. Therefore I don’t care so much for systems with their own settings, especially those where the game mechanics and the basic cosmology of the setting are intimately intertwined; DnD’s alignment system being a typical example.

And the favourite game systems? First, GURPS. While it’s not quite as universal as the “U” in its name applies, it’s a very flexible system with a tremendous depth of support for a huge variety of genres and settings, as my several shelf feet of GURPS books demonstrate. The only genres it doesn’t comfortably handle are very high powered ones such as four-colour superheroes, a genre I don’t really care for anyway (Am I the only gamer that really doesn’t “get” supers?). GURPS isn’t perfect, while the core game engine is very good, it’s accumulated a lot of cruft from various supplements over the years, and badly needs a fourth edition to clean it up again. The other problem it has is that some people have the idea you have to use every possible optional rule, which to me is less of a problem with the system itself, rather a problem with some of the players. Although the point-based character generation system can be quite complex and intimidating to new players, I find the actual gameplay can be much simpler and faster than games like ADnD, especially if you don’t use the (optional!) advanced combat rules. As for ‘jiggering with the rules’, I find the main thing is deciding which optional rules and subsystems to use, and which ones not to use; for my Kalyr game I’ve also come up with a few setting-specific skills. One change I have made is to use the official optional to make hit points dependant on ST, and fatigue dependant on HT, rather than the other way round.

The other favourite game has to be Fudge. While GURPS is a detailed system with rules for just about everything, Fudge is more freeform. In fact the heart of the system is simply the seven-level scale for skills and attributes (Terrible – Poor – Mediocre – Fair – Good – Great – Superb), and the dice mechanic of 4dF. A dF being a six sided die with two plusses, two minuses and two blank faces. There isn’t even a standard list of attributes or skills, instead GMs are encouraged to define their own lists appropriate to the genre and setting. It makes a wonderful game for rules tinkerers, but it’s also a joy to GM, since most of the time you can just wing it rather than have to look up obscure rules from a 700 page rulebook. In fact, when GM Fudge face-to-face I’ve never, ever, had to refer to the rulebook during play, something I can’t say for GURPS.

Of the online games I play or GM, two are Fudge, one is GURPS, and the fourth is systemless. While I’m prepared to play a great variety of systems, I’m unlikely to GM any system other than those two.