Games Blog

I’ve got all my on-line games back up and running after the Xmas hiatus. The PBeM posts for my game on The Phoenyx can be found on my archive blog at Kalyr PBeM Archives. The Dreamlyrics games can be found on the message boards there under “KLR” and “AEF“

No, simply giving N gauge trains for Christmas wasn’t enough….

It was the Christmas day family party game called ‘The Adverb Game’ that gave me the idea for this. This game consists of one person having to guess the adverb from the others answering questions in the style of that adverb. Somebody (I can’t remember who) described the game as a form of roleplaying, and it got me thinking; if my neice and nephew (8 and 10) can cope with that, they could cope with a ‘proper’ RPG.

I decided to use Fudge as the system; something easy to pick up. My first thoughts were to use an adventure I’ve run before, “El Tigré” featuring Mexican masked wrestlers and three legged aliens, but following some discussion on the Gamers mailing list, I went for a ‘generic fairy tale’ setting instead, featuring a Knight, a Princess and a Wizard as the three player characters. The plot was simple; Bandits had captured the prince (prince Jugears), and the heroic player characters had to rescue him. The bandits turned out to be agents of the rival nation, Vulgaria

The game was a great success, much better than I had expected; the players (aged 8, 10, and 39) picked up the game mechanics instinctively and got into character very well. The game ran for just over an hour, when I wrapped up the game because dinner was ready! It also demonstrated to me what a joy Fudge is to GM, and how easy it is to improvise mechanics on the fly. For example, in the climax of the adventure the Wizard challenged the enemy’s magician to a magical duel. Since none of the basic spells I’d give him were really combat orientated, I improvised a magical combat system on the spot; a series of contests of Magic attribute, with the loser taking the margin of victory as damage. Needless to say, the good guy won, Prince Jugears was rescued, and everyone lived happily ever after.

And they want another game. I can see this becoming an ongoing campaign…

Amadán tells is the story of the decline and fall of In Nomine, a game line that lost it’s way very early on, and never recovered.

In a comment against Down with Cthulhu, Bruce Baugh asks me how I did a conversion from Call of Cthulhu to Fudge.

This wasn’t intended as a generic CoC to Fudge conversion, more a quick and dirty one-off conversion of a specific published scenario; all I converted were the six pre-generated PCs, and some human-scale opponents. I must point out that I haven’t tested these conversions under the stresses of a long-running campaign, or their scalability with regards to some of the more powerful monsters in the game. I guess that Great Cthulhu himself would still do 1d3 player characters damage a turn.

Attributes I handled by converting them on the basis of 2 CoC levels = 1 Fudge level, with 10-11 defined Mediocre, 12-13 being Fair, 14-15 Good, and so on. Anything 7 or lower is just Terrible, while 20+ is either Legendary or on a different scale.

Skills I handled in a similar way. At first, I tried using the percentage equivalents using the chart in the Fudge rules, but the pregen PCs came out with just about all skills at Fair, which seemed a bit bland. So I just converted them with the flat rate of 15 percentiles = 1 Fudge level, with 50% being Fair, 65% Good, 80% Great, and so on. This felt “right”, and covered the whole of the 100% range with the seven Fudge levels. It won’t work with some other BRP-derived systems that have skills going way about 100%, such as Stormbringer.

Sanity was simply a second wound track, labelled “Uneasy”, “Shaken”, “Very Shaken” and “Wibble”. Sanity rolls were against Willpower (POW in CoC), Shaken or Very Shaken characters get a penalty to the roll.

And that’s basically all there was to it.

Iä! Bruce Baugh disses Chaosium’s version of Call of Cthulhu, and puts forward the loathsome, blasphemous idea that d20 Cthulhu is actually an improvement.

Actually, he does have a point; I feel the old Chaosium rules, although groundbreaking in their time, are getting a bit dated now. But I’m far from convinced that the d20 rules are really an appropriate replacement; d20 is just a bit rules-heavy, and I have yet to see any evidence that d20 can do any style other than cinematic. The last time I ran a (non Mythos) scenario written for CoC, I converted the game to Fudge, which seemed a far better way to go.

This week’s Game WISH asks:

What do you think is the best cast size for the games you’ve played? What are the factors that go into your answer: genre, play group, gaming system, etc.?

In face to face play, I find a party of four players plus the GM to be the optimal number for just about any genre that I regularly play.

If four is the optimum, I find anything from two to six is perfectly playable. I’ve played in lengthy campaigns with just two player characters, which can work very well provided both PCs have a sufficiently wide range of abilities. For example, in the Kalyr campaign I GMed, using GURPS, the two PCs were a powerful telepath and a multi-skilled soldier of fortune type. Between the two of them they could handle most situations I threw at them, although they relied heavily on a pair of NPC combat grunts in fight scenes. The campaign may well have benefited from third PC as a combat specialist.

My practical upper limit is six; I strongly dislike large FtF parties of seven or eight PCs, something I’ve experienced in quite a few convention-style one-shots. I find there are two big problems with a group of that size: First, it’s hard to ensure that everybody gets enough spotlight time in a session, and second, combat seems to take forever.

On the third tentacle, the optimum number for one-shots is probably the size the scenario was written for. As a GM I find it hard to retool on the fly a scenario I’d written for six 75-point GURPS characters when find I’ve got to run it for only three, especially when it’s hard to make up any balanced party from three out of the six pre-generated PCs I’d prepared! The last two games I GMed had five and three players respectively; both exactly the number I’d expected.

For online games things are somewhat different; since games often split into multiple semi-independent threads, the number of PCs has less to do with group dynamics and more to do with the number of PCs the GM can handle. In many cases this allows much larger casts than are practical in face to face gaming. For example, I’ve currently got nine players in my Kalyr PbeM. There’s one party of six, one party of two, and one lone wolf. I’m playing in two games on Dreamlyrics with large casts; one, STD, has a large number of one- or two-player threads, while the other, EOH, currently has one huge ensemble thread with a lot of inter-PC interaction, something that’s easier in a big game.

I’ve finally posted in both active threads in the Kalyr PBeM, after keeping my long suffering players waiting for far too long.

One problem I had was when a player made some references to Italian food. There is no Italy in Kalyr, so I had to edit those references a little. It’s now Keylinan food, in the style of the southern city of Keylin, which has a mediterranian climate and who’s inhabitants might well eat something resembling Italian food.

I attempted to rename Minestra di Pasta e Lenticchie into something in Vohrran (the language spoken in Keylin), but chickened out since the language is woefully undeveloped.

Actually, so is the food. Apart from the infamous “Earthworms in Garlic”, Kalyr cuisine is one of those ‘local colour’ things that needs work. All we have at the moment is this entry in the Kalyr Wiki.

Anyone want to contribute?

Game WISH 74 is Supplements You’d Like to See

Name three or more supplements (or core books, for that matter) for existing game systems that you’d like to see. Why? What inspires your interest in these supplement? What existing supplements or materials are you using instead?

First, I’d like to see another volume added to the GURPS Alternate Earths setting from GURPS Time Travel. The two existing supplements, snappily titled ‘GURPS Alternate Earths’ and ‘GURPS Alternate Earths 2′ each describe six worlds where history took a different turn, ranging from a brutal totalitarian world where the Nazis won World War Two, a world where Rome never fell, to one where the Vikings dominate the earth. While I’d like to see a third volume with six more worlds for crosstime adventurers to visit, I’d also like to see one detailing specific locales within some of the twelve worlds already published. What dark secrets lie in SS Burgundy, home of the occult Aryan mystics from Reich-5? What of the Benedictine monastic kingdoms in the Pyrenees from Midgard, surviving bastions of Christianity in a world dominated by Norse paganism?

Another GURPS books I’d love to see would be The Madness Dossier. This is one of the sample settings in Ken Hite’s GURPS Horror, in which there was a reality quake in 535AD. Everything in what we believe to be history before that date didn’t actually happen. The true history is that before 535, humanity was enslaved by the alien Anunnaku, who were not only overthrown, but completely edited out of history by means that we don’t really understand. But the Anunnaku aren’t totally vanquished, and occasionally irrupt back into our own reality. They possess the power to mess with people’s perceptions, and if enough people start to believe in them there’s the risk of a second reality quake, wiping out the last millennium and a half of our own history, overwriting it with theirs. Only the secret and ruthless men and women of Project Sandman stand in their way. All this is described in just seven pages; it deserves a full 128 page book of it’s own.

Finally, I’d like to see the In Nomine line completed. In Nomine isn’t quite dead, but its definitely on life support, and it’s by no means certain that any more will be published for it. Earlier supplements detailed many of the superiors (Archangels and Demon Princes), but many more are still to be defined in detail. Since many of my IN PCs have served Jean, Archangel of Lightning, I’d especially like to see detailed writeups of him, and of his arch enemy Vapula, Demon Prince of Technology.

This weeks Game WISH is about Religion and Controversy

A lot of neogamers I play with are uncomfortable with taking real religions and putting them into play. With all the “Satanist” backlash against D&D that there’s been, do you feel comfortable having any religion in your games? Do you scrub it of anything controversial?

Being a believer myself, I feel that including any real-world religion in a game that also includes magic and supernatural elements is always going to be a situation where you have to tread carefully, especially if any of the players are strongly religious. I would not want to include anything that made any player uncomfortable. Religious faith, much like sexuality, is an important part of people’s identity, which is why religion, like sex, can be a very touchy area.

My own position is that games must treat any real-world religions with respect; if the world-view of the gameworld is completely at odds with any mainstrean faith, then it’s better to avoid explicit mentions of that religion in the game. For example, I would never play a strongly religious character in a Call of Cthulhu game. On the other hand, I do play a believer in STD, a game based on Steven King’s The Stand, as does at least one other Christian player.

I had mixed feelings about In Nomine, the game of Angels and Demons. Some people feel the game is inherently blasphemous, and it can be if you play it that way. But it can also be one of the most explicitly Christian games out there; I’ve certainly played games that have had a very strong moral tone. It is about the ultimate struggle between Good and Evil, after all.

When it comes to fantasy worlds with fictitious religions, I have trouble imagining a plausible world where religion plays no part whatsoever. I’m very into well-defined and coherent worlds with detailed histories and cultures, and religion should play an important part in that. Take the religion out of Glorantha and you won’t have much left. Likewise my own Kalyr setting would be much weaker without the enigmatic Guardians and the array of wierd and wonderful human cults.