Games Blog

This week’s Game Wish (I’m catching up now) is about Heart Characters

Today’s question is about your heart character. The heart character rests on the idea that over the course of a gaming career, players would revisit certain themes that were important to them for some reason, and that one or two characters in particular would embody those themes or ideas. Whatever it was about the heart character(s) would draw the player back to those themes.

Do you have a heart character? More than one? If so, what makes that character a heart character? If you don’t have one, do you think there are themes you revisit with your characters? Or do you think this entire theory is full of it, and if you do, why?

Thinking about some of my favourite characters, particularly the on-line ones that had more detailed back-stories and personalities, I do notice a couple of themes. One is the ‘Ordinary Joe’ caught up in extraordinary circumstances, the other is the character who’s life had been shattered, and must try and pick up the pieces and survive.

My very first on-line character embodied both of these. He was a technician with a comfortable life working for a large cyberpunk megacorp (formed of a merger between British Airways, Stagecoach and Virgin Trains, we decided). His life was shattered when he was falsely accused of causing a fatal accident and sent to jail for manslaughter. All his friends and family deserted him. At the point he entered play, he’d just been released having served his time, only to be caught up in the complex web of cyberpunk intrigue and violence.

I’ve already mentioned Karl Tolhurst of Ümläüt; his back story (in the game in which he first appeared) was the same basic theme; the tragedy was the murder of his lover with his best friend the principal suspect, the extraordinary circumstances were simply the fact that this was a Call of Cthulhu game.

I don’t know what this says about me except that I prefer lower power levels; spandex-clad superheroes with their kewl powerz are simply not my style.

DORK TOWER expresses the relief felt by quite a few people. Despite a comment of mine on Dodgeblogium, it looks like he was not a Cthulhu worshipper either. Or a White Van Man.

I’m running a week late here, this is last week’s one, about Sticking Points.

Every player has sticking points. (Yes, you do. You may not have had your buttons pressed yet to know what they are, but you have them.). What are some things that are absolutely no-gos for you?

I can think of three:

First, games where I’m a severe disadvantage from not knowing the game system, and where the GM isn’t prepared to take this into account when running the game. This is one of the root causes of my undying hatred of Deadlands. Much of my gaming nowadays is one-shot convention-style games, meaning I’m often faced with an unfamiliar system. When this is the case, I either want a simple transparent system, or a GM that’s willing to translate my description of what my character is trying to do into game mechanics. I’ve had a bad experience, being handed a martial artist character that could not be played effectively without my understanding of how the martial arts game mechanics worked, which of course the GM didn’t tell me until after my character had been beaten unconscious.

Secondly, games that consist of nothing but combat and die rolling. I played many years of AD&D; been there, done that.

Finally, immature and disruptive players. Reading some horror stories from other WISH-ers makes me glad I didn’t discover gaming until my 20s, and so avoided the dorky munchkin years: I’ve suffered very few of the problems other people have documented. However, I did have one problem player right at the beginning of my career as an on-line GM, when I had to expel a player-killer from the game. Since then I’ve successfully avoided playing with jerks.

Well, I survived Hatcon III, the lastest of the mini-cons by the Dreamlyrics and ex-RPGAMES crew. This one was held at the residence of Pete Hat in Brighton, hence the name.

The Virgin Voyager got me all the way from Manchester to Brighton within 20 minutes of the scheduled arrival time, pretty good by Virgin Train’s non-Euclidian time.

Gaming started on Saturday morning with Abaddon’s game with no character sheets, no setting information, opening with “You’re in a bank, holding a gun, with a ski mask on your face. You have no memory”. It later progressed to Cthulhoid tentacled things, and the demon-worshipping bank manager.

I wasn’t going to mention becoming a victim of “GM’s Girlfriend Syndrome”, except that I find I already have. I think his words were “If I had done that to her, she would have killed me”.

The weekend also featured a GURPS Kalyr game GMed by yours truly, a game of Adventure! setting our two-fisted pulp heroes against fake vampires and thuggee cultists, an epic DnD game in which I didn’t play (it was at the same time as my GURPS game), a murder mystery, and more Cheapass Games games than I can remember!

No blogging for the next few days, I’m off to Hatcon, one of the so-called ‘Mini-Cons’ hosted by Pete Hat, one of the sysops from Dreamlyrics in Brighton. I expect to be GMing at least one game, but first I must endure five-and-a-half hours aboard one of the dreaded Virgin Voyagers!

You can run you laptop off the mains in one; which means I can use the laptop the train for the whole journey, despite the fact the battery no longer works. Now I’ve written part of the GURPS Kalyr con adventure for Hatcon next weekend on my trip back to Manchester from Slough. I’ll try and get it finished before the end of the week so I’m not writing things on the five-and-a-half hour journey down to Brighton on Friday! Hopefully the adventure itself will be an improvement on the Sashcon one.

I won’t name the GM who’s stayed up all night at the con finishing the adventure to be run the following day!

Turn of a Friendly Die: WISH 17: Props

How do you use props in your game? Give three examples, and discuss why you use them. What do they bring to the game? Are there any downsides to using them? For those who do convention games, are there differences between the props you use in campaigns and the props you use for con rounds?

The only props I’ve made real use of are maps, both A3 hand-drawn ones for face-to-face games, and electronic ones (drawn using Campaign Cartographer) for my on-line games.

This is an example, the city of Filgeth, used on my Dreamlyrics game, KLR.

I’ve also drawn quick tactical maps of interiors of buildings to help with fight scenes from time to time.

I find maps useful in visualising the setting of the game. I know one group that believes you shouldn’t try to map the city in a city-based game, on the grounds that it limits things; I find the opposite is true; having a map defined seems to generate ideas. The biggest downside is simply that they take a lot of time to prepare – someone commented about my A3 city map (which goes down to individual building level) “This is the work of someone with too much time on their hands!”.

I haven’t made great use of props other than maps. I’ve never used minatures in games I’ve GMed, although I’ve played in many with minatures, including loads of resin castings of furniture.

That infamous tape of Ümläüt doesn’t count – although it was inspired by a game, it’s never been used within the game itself.

Let’s see what the The Prior-Art-O-Matic has to say about RPG game systems…

FUDGE is a scooter that makes you invisible! It extends at the touch of a button and loves you as a person.

d20 is a security camera that has been featured in Star Trek! It kills weeds down to the root.

GURPS is an earring that’s made of rubber!

Hero System is like a normal hi-fi, but it has a built-in calculator

(This one is eerily appropriate)

Storyteller is a pudding that talks, is bigger on the inside than the outside and is different every time you use it.

(This one is even more eerily appropriate!)

This week’s Game Wish from Turn of a Friendly Die

In the gaming you are doing lately, what do you miss from earlier games? What works so much better you never looked back? Three examples?

I’ve moved from GMing and playing in long-running campaigns to a mix of one-shot convention-style games and PBeMs/PBMBs, so that’s a big change in gaming style!

Like many people, I started RPGing in long-running games. Over the years I played in an ADnD game and GMed a GURPS game both of which ran for more than 5 years. The GURPS game actually ran to a conclusion, which is rare, the DnD game and a later Runequest game eventually fizzled out when players dropped out.

Then I got into on-line games, initially those run on the message boards of the now-defunct Compuserve RPGAMES forum. Compared with my previous face-to-face gaming, it’s quite a different world. The games run at a much slower pace (a single evening’s tabletop gaming would take several weeks to play out on-line), but you can compensate for this by playing multiple games in parallel. At one point I was playing in six, as well as running one of my own. Following the demise of RPGAMES (documented here) I’ve continued on-line gaming on Dreamlyrics and The Phoenyx.

More recently still, I’ve started going to conventions, both the big organised ones like Gen Con UK, Dragonmeet, Stabcon and the Dudley Bug Ball, and small private ‘mini-cons’ run by people from the ex-RPGAMES community. At these I’ve played in a wide variety of one-shot games in different systems.

From earlier games, I miss the long-term character development and really epic quests that you can do in a long-running campaign. For example, in the GURPS Kalyr campaign I ran, I sent the players on a quest taking them to every corner of my game world, interacting with every nation, culture and race in the world. Similarly the Runequest game saw my character Javin develop from a callow youth with a grudge against the Lunar Empire to a significant force (in a completely different body, just to confuse the Lunars). I do miss having a regular game group, even if we didn’t actually game that regularly due to scheduling problems.

The one thing I don’t miss at all are the interminable ADnD combats that used to take up two-thirds of each session!

Moving on, I find the slower pace of on-line gaming gives more time for in-depth characterisation; you can think more about the character’s motivations and back-story when you’re not holding up the action. I couldn’t imagine describing a character’s very surreal dreams in a face-to-face game, as I did several times in the first on-line game I played in, a GURPS Cyberpunk epic. I also like having a permanent record of the game, right down to the in-game dialogue. The RPGAMES/Dreamlyrics community has some superb writers!

I’ve played some very good games at conventions too; there are some wonderful GMs on the convention circuit, and many of them rerun and tweak their scenarios until they’re perfect. I’m lucky living in the UK with it’s more compact geography here, which means there are many conventions a year within easy travelling distance of most parts of the country. It’s strange RPing with complete strangers, although you do tend to run into the same people at successive cons. As for the private weekend-long ‘mini-cons’ organised by people I first met through on-line gaming, I now know many of them well enough that it’s as good as playing with a regular group. One good point is exposure to a wide variety of systems – at one point this year I had played ten consecutive games at various cons in ten completely different systems. I guess I’m not one to be fazed with learning a new system as I play; I’ll even sign up to a game without knowing what system it’s going to be run under!

My best memories of organised cons are of two very different In Nomine games, one at Gen Con UK 2000 run by Jo Ramsey, who has written for In Nomine, and one run at StabCon earlier this year by Mark Baker. The first featured Demon PCs based on the characters from the TV Sitcom “Drop the Dead Donkey” thrown into a plot loosely based on “The Omen”, featuring Tony Blair and a gunfight at a village fete in Devon. The second, an much darker Angelic game set in Naples, Italy was filled with some very powerful imagery that had me dreaming about the game that night!

While I’d like to be part of a regular (weekly or bi-weekly as opposed to three or four times a year) group, I don’t think I want to go back to 5-year epic campaigns again; there are just too many games I’d like to play or run to want to sink a large chunk of gaming time into just one. Having tasted variety, I would prefer shorter 6-month campaigns and try and get the best of both worlds. Time will tell.

This week’s Game Wish from Turn of a Friendly Die

What is your idea of the relationship between GM and player? Is the GM a host, an adversary, an enabler…?

I see the GMs role as a lot of things. Currently my GMing consists of running a couple of on-line (PBeM and PBMB) games, and the occasional one-shot convention-style scenario. In the past I have run a long-running face-to-face campaign.

While it’s possible to have a game without a GM, such a game will have a radically different form than a traditional RPG – it would either need a lot of trust between the players, or a rigidly mechanical system. But I’m digressing a bit here; let’s get back to the subject in hand.

• Enabler: Certainly, since a traditional style RPG cannot take place without someone willing to GM.
• Adventure or setting creator: While I do sometimes run published scenarios for one-shot games, all my longer games take place in my own settings. It’s the GM’s job to create a believable world with enough challenging things in it to keep the players interested. I hope I’ve succeeded with Kalyr
• Player: Especially in on-line games, which are often more story-centric than game-mechanic-centric, I sometimes feels that the GM is as much a player as the rest of the group, with the game world as their character.
• Adversary? No way! This just isn’t my style.
• Storyteller? Again, no way! Overly linear railroaded plotlines aren’t my style either. The game may be a story, but it’s a story for the players to tell, as much as the GM.