Games Blog

I haven’t done any Game WISHes for a while. This week’s one is about Multiple-GM Games.

Have you ever played in or GMed a game with more than one GM? What was your experience with it? What were the strengths and weaknesses of having multiple GMs? Was it positive or negative? Would you do it again? If you’ve never tried it as a GM or player, would you like to? Why or why not?

I’ve played in two, one good, one bad.

The bad one was the time I was one of the co-GMs, and it went badly pear-shaped, largely because of lack of communication and a basic incompatibility of GM styles. It was a space opera style game focussing on crew of space pirates. The other GM controlled the overall game setting, but wanted to play a PC as well, so he had me GMing a lot of the individual scenes. Unfortunately things didn’t go well; for example, if I was too slow in responding, he’d jump in and take a thread in a completely different direction to the one I’d planned. Eventually I came to the conclusion this just wasn’t working, and bailed out leaving the other GM to run the game on his own. The story doesn’t end there, though. The other GM eventually quit, and I volunteered to take over the game. It’s still running.

The good example was the GURPS cyberpunk game Hawaiian Vacation, which had three GMs. In this case, there was one ‘master GM’, Maughn, and two assistants who played various NPCs, both adversaries and potential allies. This worked very well, and the whole thing was one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played in.

Why was this game a success, where the game I’d co-GMed was a failure? I think it was because there was a high level of communication between the GMs, and most importantly, each of the GMs had a clearly defined role.

Would I co-GM again? Probably, because now I know where I went wrong the first time round. It would have to be with someone I know well and had a good rapport with, and we’d need to clearly define each other’s roles within the game.

Hero Quest, the new RPG set in Glorantha is out. Although billed as a brand new game, it’s really the second edition of Hero Wars, the game released about three years ago. I was very disappointed in Hero Wars; the appalling editing and layout made it very difficult to figure out quite how the system was supposed to work.

The new game is a big improvement. Although the basic game engine is the same, the actual rulebook has been completely rewritten, and the whole thing is much clearer. They’ve also changed the very freeform magic system quite a bit, introducing “common magic”, which means I can now convert my old RuneQuest character Javin, something I could not do with Hero Wars (Javin was a character with a lot of Battle Magic, but wasn’t initiated into any cult)

A lot of old time Runequest players will find Heroquest a quite different system. It’s more cinematic in power levels, and it’s very much a dramatist rather than a simulationist system, with a very abstract system for handling combat and magic. It’s possible to handle combats in a single die roll (roll well and you win the fight, roll badly and you lose), although there’s an extended contest rule for more dramatic situations which involves betting ‘action points’ on a series of dice rolls. You can use this system not just for fights, but for any dramatic contest, from some arduous physical task to trying to win the love of the princess.

Magic is totally abstract; rather than a long list of spells that do precise things and do X points of damage, you have a list of ‘affinities’ or ‘talents’ which simply have names, and it’s up to the players and the GM to decide what these abilities can do.

If anyone’s thinking of joining Dreamlyrics (not a free site, but well worth the money!), I’ve just put out a recruitment notice for my long running game, KLR.

In true comic book style, Anglegrinderman has met his arch nemesis, Justlyacquiredpropertyrightsman

Well, Anglegrinderman – now you’re about to meet your match. You’re the disease, I’m the cure. “Live parking charge free or die” that’s your slogan isn’t it? Well, we’ll soon see about that. I’m gonna teach you some respect.

Oh what’s that you’re pointing at me? A piece of industrial machinery? Well, guess what piece of industrial machinery I’m pointing at you? Yeah, that’s right – it’s an RPG.

He’s going to batter him with a hardback copy of Hero System 5th Edition, the game that can actually be used in hand to hand combat.

Wallop! Blatt! Kerpow!!

One reason I’ve been slow updating this weblog recently; I’ve been busy writing up material for the Kalyr Wiki. Much of this is the material that’s already been on line for some time, but I’ve been revising and rewriting a lot of it. If you’re a player in either of my online games, please don’t read any pages marked by spoiler warnings!

I’m definitely tempted by this new horror game on DreamLyrics. A pity the GM has to trash a perfectly good GNER Mk4 set when he could have wrecked a Virgin Voyager instead.

Amadán (aka David Edelstein) warns us about her in Online GMing Tips 2

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 62: My Favorite Villains

Describe three of your favorite villains from campaigns you’ve played in or GMed. What makes them good villains? Why are they your favorites?

This is a difficult one. Much of my gaming, the ‘opposition’ has been dumb monsters or ‘bad guy of the week’, and I haven’t done much with recurring villains. Since much of my face to face gaming nowadays is convention-style one-shots, there’s not so much scope to develop villains. Therefore most of the ones that come to mind come from online gaming.

First, from one of my own games, there’s Tanala. Tanala started out as one of my cast of background NPCs for Kalyr, a member of the psionic guild called The Academy of the Mind, and defines in my initial three-line description as a racist kandar-supremacist telepath. (The alien humanoid Kandar are the ‘master race’ in Kalyr; humans are their oppressed slaves). One of the players, Sean, wanted to play a human psionic and member of the same guild and asked me some questions about the other guild members to help him flesh out the character submission. We decided that Tanala would have to be an Enemy, which prompted me to flesh her out further; she remains one of the few NPCs to have a full-blown character sheet. She became a leading light in the underground kandar supremacist cult known as Kaasranth Sar, and acquired a lover in the form of a rather stupid and headstrong kandar knight called Kluranyr. Most of the time Tanala lurked in the background, but the knowledge she was there kept Reylorna, the human psionic PC on edge. Ultimately we has the famous incident on the road, when what started as a bout of verbal taunts ended up with Kluranyr challenging a quite different PC to a duel, and losing quite badly.

Tanala is currently recovering from a psychic interrogation gone horribly wrong; and a third PC has a contract on her. We’ll have to see how that plays out.

I can’t not mention Steve Leywood. He started life as a character in the back-story of the character submission for my own PC, Karl Tolhurst, in a present-day Call of Cthulhu game. As those who have read some of my previous Game WISHes, Steve was the singer of the band Ümläüt in which Karl was the guitarist. In the original backstory Steve had vanished after the murder of Ravila, the band’s keyboard player, who was also Karl’s lover.

The GM took all this and ran with it; weaving it all into her own campaign background. It turned out that Steve had been incorporating bits of blasphemous Cthulhoid rituals into song lyrics, getting audiences to sing along. Steve turned up as a hideous shrivelled undead creature, turning up at regular intervals to taunt poor Karl and strip away his SAN, while hunting down and killing the other surviving NPC band members in front of player-character witnesses.

Sadly the game folded. I since resurrected Karl in a completely different game, only this time Steve is a player character, played by Jill, (recipient of a Warm Fuzzy in an earlier WISH). The original game’s GM is on record as saying that Jill is the only roleplayer she knows that could play Steve as a PC. Will the bloody history repeat itself?

Sybil from the online game GURPS Cyberpunk game HVG has to be one of the strangest RPG villains I can remember. Sybil was played as a PC, without the player knowing her true nature. Sybil was an AI who’s lost her memory; it was only at the very end of the adventure we found that the green slime we’d found was Sybil; escaped experimental nanotech. And it wasn’t until the sequel we found our just how Evil this slime really was, and who was behind it. Yes, folks, not just a metaphor, this one!

The Zombie Infection Simulation simply defies description. (Requires Java, Link from Chad Underkoffler)