Games Blog

I’ve survived the first day of Gen Con UK, even if we made a complete mess of the GURPS Cliffhangers adventure. For once it was truly bad tactical decisions, not awful dice rolling which caused things like my character getting stuck inside a crashing plane. At least I didn’t completely miss the bad guys’ Zeppellin!

Don’t like the way the demo hall closes at 6pm, which means any in-progress games have to relocate if they haven’t finished by then. Fortunately there was a free table tonight in the CCG hall; probably by the weekend these tables will be filled with hordes of Magic:the Gathering players so such an option won’t be possible.

Full report on the rest of the con on Sunday – Tomorrow night I’m at the Pyramidian dinner at Belgo’s in Covent Garden.

Thanks to Eric Olsen for this one: The Alphabet Synthesis Machine – generate your own fictional alphabet, and download it as a true type font!

This week’s WISH from Turn of a Friendly Die

What’s the most fun you ever had creating something in a game that changed the game-world?

I think this has be the goth/doom-metal band Ümläüt, which has been a feature of not one, but two games. The first game was an on-line modern-day Call of Cthulhu adventure set in London, running on the late lamented CompuServe RPGAMES forum. My PC was Karl Tolhurst, guitarist of the band. The back-story in my character submission was that the band had split after lead singer Steve Leywood had run out of sanity and murdered another band member (who was also Karl’s lover), before killing himself.

The GM skillfully wove all this into her game background; NPC Steve Leywood’s occult obsessions had turned him to incorporate forbidden Cthuloud rituals into song lyrics and getting audiences to chant them. He was later to turn up as an undead thing, to murder another band member who the GM was using as an NPC in front of another PC in a different game thread. The Cthuloid rituals themselves may or may not have been responsible for the earthquake in Docklands that did terrible damage to the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

Ümläüt have their own spoof web page, which more than one person has mistaken for the web site of a real band – the fictitious murdered keyboard player turned up on the dead rock star site. There is also a recording of Ümläüt’s music, made by my brother. The GM refuses to listen to it.

The band has now resurfaced in another on-line game, Edge of Hell running on Dreamlyrics, touring the US slightly earlier in their own timeline. They’re currently stranded in California following several dates falling through due to incompetent management. This time four out of the five members are player characters, including Steve Leywood and one of his murder victims. Time will tell if history will repeat itself; this time the crowd chant of “Iä! Cthulhu F’Tagn!” resulted in a severe thunderstorm and a power failure that terminated the show.

Game WISH from Turn of a Friendly Die

This is my first attempt at answering one of these; since I can’t think of anything to say for the current WISH, so I’ll try and answer an older one.

Describe three systems you have gamed under: one you thought was good, one you thought was all right, and one you didn’t care for. What were the good points and the bad points of each system? Did the systems support their genre? Were they complex or simple? How easy were they to GM and play? Is there a system you’d really like to try that you haven’t? Which ones wouldn’t you try based on reading them?

Since so much of my gaming nowadays is either one-shot convention games, or internet-based PBeM/PBMB games, I tend to play a lot of different systems. System matters a lot less in on-line games, so I’ll concentrate on the FtF games. I realise the last ten games I’ve played have all been for different systems, working backwards we have Blue Planet, In Nomine, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, 3rd Ed DnD, GURPS, Hero Wars, TORG, Fudge and Classic Traveller.

Good: GURPS
GURPS is unfairly maligned as an overcomplicated system that appeals only to anal-retentive simulationist gearheads, being too slow and cumbersome for most tastes. It’s not true; while the system is detailed, and strives towards realism, it only becomes over-complicated if you insist on using every possible optional rule, something I’ve never done as a GM, and haven’t seen done as a player. Most of the game’s complexity is in character generation rather than game-play; once you’ve generated characters, the actual gameplay runs smoothly. I’ve played a lot of GURPS both as a GM and as a player, concentrating on low fantasy, realistic modern-day or hard SF, genres for which GURPS excels. To me, it’s one of the few well-supported games that’s optimised towards more realistic lower-powered characters rather than towards highly cinematic action heroes. I’m not bothered by the fact that it breaks down at high power levels and can’t handle comic-book superheroes because I don’t care much for those genres.

In the good category I’d also mention Fudge, which is ideal for story-centric rules-light gaming, and Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing, the engine behind Runequest and Cthulhu, which has stood the test of time remarkably well.

All Right – d20
The best thing I can say about D&D 3rd Edition is that it’s a big improvement on what went before; they’ve cleaned up a lot of the inconsistencies and dumped most of the sillier rules. Having played quite a lot of 1st and 2nd ed. DnD over the years, I find 3rd ed an awful lot smoother in play. However, it still includes the sacred cows of DnD such as classes and levels, and the hard-to-rationalise way it treats and armour and damage – Armour doesn’t really represent armour, damage quite definitely doesn’t represent damage, and to try and rationalise what healing spells do makes my brain hurt. However, it’s a reasonable game at representing the tropes of heroic fantasy, though I don’t think d20 really works as a generic multi-genre system.

Bad – Deadlands
I sometimes think the designers of Deadlands have tried as hard as possible to make a game which is the polar opposite of my own tastes. Having played it a couple of times under different GMs it’s just about the only system I refuse to play any more because I can’t stand the mechanics. I find the system of dice and playing cards and poker chips far too intrusive, the card-based initiative system is very slow and cumbersome, and the dice mechanic awful beyond description. It uses a Byzantine dice-pool mechanism using polyhedral dice which leaves the player with absolutely no clue what the character’s actual abilities are. This may intentional in an attempt to frustrate min-maxers, in which case I must be a min-maxer because I found the system incredibly frustrating in play. Couple this with what I suspect to be far too high a chance of critical failures (although the impenetrability of the probabilities mean I have no idea if I just rolled badly, or the odds were stacked against me). I hate the way the number of actions per combat round is based on a roll using this idiotic dice mechanism, and the all-too-frequent critical failure means you end up sitting out the next hour while the other players have four or five actions.

There aren’t many systems I’d really like to play but haven’t, but there are quite a few systems I’ve played a couple of times but would like to play a bit more before judging them; Hero Wars is one example; a lot of intriguing ideas there, especially the very free-form magic system.

I advertise this site as “RPGs, Trains, Music”, but I realise while I’ve posted several lengthy railway and music-related pieces, I’ve had little to say recently about the world of roleplaying games. Perhaps it’s because much of my RPG-related writing is the actual games themselves, after all, I’m running three internet-based games, two on Dreamlyrics and one on The Phoenyx, as well as playing in a couple more.

I know roleplaying games are even more uncool than trains or listening to prog-rock, and I get enough flack for them. And if you think such things are too nerdy, what are you doing surfing the web? You should be down the pub, or playing football!

What are roleplaying games anyway? Those that know can skip this paragraph; those that were originally here for the trains or the prog-rock, read on. I would describe it as a cross between co-operative storytelling and wargaming; a group of players each take the part of one major character in the story, while one (called the Games Master) takes the part of minor characters, and controls the setting. Most games use a set of published rules that define character’s abilities, and some mechanisms for determining character success at doing things. Games can cover all sorts of fictional genres, with action-adventure themes always the most popular; published rules cover things Tolkein-style fantasy, 50s style science fiction, comic-book superheroes in spandex costumes, vampires battling against werewolves, or angels battling against demons.

So what attracts me to roleplaying games? Unlike a lot of gamers, I didn’t discover RPGS until my 20s. I was never the sterotypical teenage munchkin acting out his adolescent power fantasies. One thing that I really love is the worldbuilding aspect; there’s something about creating an entire imaginary world, with it’s peoples, places, cultures, religions and even languages. And persuading other people to explore this world with their equally imaginary characters, for me, makes it all worthwhile.

I love games with rich, detailed settings, a style of gaming which has gone out of fashion in recent years. My own Kalyr setting is a case in point; it’s been written up and developed over a period of many years. One of my favoutite settings is has to be Glorantha, developed over more than 25 years, originally the setting for Runequest, now the setting for a new game, Hero Wars.

At the moment, I’m not in any long-term campaigns since I moved away from my original group. All my gaming is either one-shot games at conventions, or internet-based, either email or message board.

Do you want to visit the wondrous land of Kalyr, and experience it’s wonders first hand, as opposed to just reading this tourist brochure? Experience adventure and mystery, meet members of strange alien races, play with arcane technology and mystic powers of the mind? Well, now is the time!

Both the Play-by-Web game at Dreamlyrics and the Play-by-Email game at The Phoenyx now have openings for new players. The two games both have roots (and some player characters) dating back to the game I started on the late lamented RPGAMES forum on Compuserve more than 6 years ago.

Character generation rules can be found here.

This page on The Phoenyx lists one of the things a GM isn’t supposed to do is give people and places unpronounceable names, like, say, “Kaaneth d’n Ekyr”.

I’ve created a whole series of fictional languages for Kalyr, which I have used to name people, places and organisations. Hopefully they’re not too unpronounceable.

Unfortunately, for organisations and types of weapons I’ve tended to mix names in these invented languages and names in English rather randomly, rather than using either one or other consistently. Why is traditional type of sword called a narvork, while crude missile weapon is called a flamelance? And why is guild of technology referred by it’s Filgan name, the Karazthan, while psionic guild is referred to as “Academy of Mind”. And I really wish I hadn’t started calling these Psionic adepts “Wizards”

If I ever publish “Kalyr, the RPG” (which I won’t, because it might sell perhaps 12 copies if I’m lucky), these issues will have to be addressed. I meantime, how do you change naming conventions mid-stream in a game that’s been running for six years?

Kaaneth d’n Ekyr came to a sticky end, psionically tortured by a player character, presumably in response to his unpronounceable name….

Meanwhile, in the news

Gary Hart has been refused leave to appeal. Gary Hart, poster boy for the most sociopathic elements of the motoring lobby, is the idiot who fell asleep at the wheel after spending all night on the phone to his new internet girlfriend. His land-rover ended up on a railway line, derailed an express and killed ten people. The arrogant twit still claims he’s been made a scapegoat. I still think his five-year sentence is ridiculously lenient. His pig-headed refusal to admit responsibility makes it clear he hasn’t ‘suffered enough’.

Our intrepid fly-on-the-wall records ümlüüt on their American tour. This is the night after their show was brought to premature close by a power failure.

Just got back from Sashcon in sunny Crewe, another RPG weekend with friends from the RPGAMES community. I ran a GURPS game using my own Kalyr setting, and played in DnD3 and Runequest games.

My GURPS scenario, involving some bad guys spiking the food at an official banquet with a hallucinogenic drug, probably needs some more work, especially the ending.