SF and Gaming Blog

Why do I get the horrible feeling that one of my PBmB players is a little bit of a munchkin?

Game Dream 18 asks us to:

Do a mock review of a game that doesn’t exist, but you think really ought to. Readers are encouraged to let the author of the review know if this game exists in another form somewhere.

GURPS Trains

GURPS Trains is a new book for the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, covering a subject very close to my heart. It promises to be the definitive guide for games set in, around or involving trains. And it shows every sign of living up to that promise.

Chapter one gives a brief history of trains and railways, from the primitive mine tramways to the experimental maglevs. It contains a very useful timeline, giving the construction dates of famous routes across America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Chapter two railway operations and technology in gameable terms, explaining what all the jargon means, and how safety equipment works, and how things differ across eras and continents. It also notes that Hollywood takes enormous liberties with the latter, and a cinematic GM should also do so to remain in genre. To this end it uses the unintentionally hilarious “Cassandra Crossing” as an example. It also includes a section on the physics of train crashes, which allows the GM to calculate the odds of a character’s survival or of escaping injury based on TL, speed, and their position in the train.

Chapter three covers characters, with GURPS templates covering everything from train drivers and conductors though transport cops, and of course hobos.

Chapter four puts it all together with advice about using trains in games, covering adventures set on board or centring around trains in genres ranging from Old West to Horror to Espionage to Special Ops. It gives recommendations for running everything from train robberies, zombie infestations, or terrorist hijackings. There’s plenty of advice for running fight scenes on board moving trains, and recommends that in cinematic genres, the fight must always end up on the roof.

Chapter five describes in detail a dozen iconic trains from different eras and continents, complete with floorplans of carriages, details of significant landmarks en-route, and of the terminals and major intermediate stations, as well as some typical passengers and a couple of plot hooks for each one. It covers not just classic long-distance expresses such as the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian express and the Twentieth Century limited, but more mundane examples such as a New York Subway train, and typical north American freight train. The last two are fictitious; a massive steampunk monster running on 12′ gauge tracks, and a future maglev crossing the inhospitable surface of Mars.

Next come four sample adventures, ranging from middling to good; we have a fairly straightforward Victorian horror adventure set on board the overnight London to Inverness express, a rather more involved GURPS In Nomine adventure set on board the San Fransisco-LA “Starlight Express”, a very tough World War Two adventure centring on Yugoslavian partisans, and finally a terrorist plot aboard the Martian maglev.

The bibliography lists an enormous number of reference books, and a great list of classic train movies, from British comedy classics such as “Oh Mr Porter” to action movies like “Runaway Train” and “Von Ryan’s Express”.

All in all, a very good book, and very much not just for train anoraks. Like many of the best GURPS supplements, relatively little space is taken up with GURPS-specific rules, making GURPS Trains usable with systems other than GURPS

GURPS Trains is not actual GURPS book: GURPS is © Steve Jackson Games, and this piece of wishful thinking is not intended as a challenge to SJG’s intellectual property. But if SJG ever did publish a book called GURPS Trains, I would certainly buy it! Unless I get a playtest credit for it first, that is.

Read Monte Cook’s Wandering Monster Table for a guide to the creatures you might encounter in weblog comment threads, message boards, and mailing lists. (Link from Dodgeblogium)

For example:

Orc. This humanoid would be fine if he just gave his posts some thought ahead of time, read the FAQ, used a spellchecker, and/or didn’t post in all caps. CR 1.

Can you say Wibd?

Or alternatively:

Crusading Ogre. This encounter is dangerous because of the creature’s ability to bowl over others. The crusading ogre’s got an agenda and will barge into any discussion, no matter how unrelated, to turn it into a diatribe about that agenda. Politics, religion, operating systems — the agendas of the crusading ogres are many and varied. CR 8.

See how many you can recognise…

Now I’ve got my hands on a copy of GURPS 4th Edition.

GURPS 4th Edition is a major overhaul of the rules; it takes the 18 year old 3rd Edition rules and all the additional rules accreted from the 100+ supplements, and tries to streamline the whole thing and cut out a lot of the cruft.

It’s much bigger than the 3rd Edition Basic Set. The core rulebook now covers not only mundane but alien and superhuman abilities, so you can build non-humanoid characters like uplifted animals, really weird aliens, giant robots and spandex-clad superheroes who wear the underpants outside of their trousers.

Now I have to decide whether or not to convert my existing online games. Most of it’s quite straightforward; it’s a matter of updating those skills and abilities that have been repriced; character’s point values will change quite a bit (especially because they’ve repriced the attributes!), but capabilities should stay much the same.

The one big area of change is Psionics, which has a totally new system in 4E. By the looks of it there’s no way to do a like-for-like conversion; the best way will be to go back to the character concept and rebuild them from the ground up. This might well make any 4e versions of Reylorna, Hollis, Duplar and Kir look a lot different from their 3e version.

Looks like there are several options

• Keep on using 3rd edition
• Do a ‘quick and dirty’ conversion to 4e
• Retool the characters from the ground up and possibly revisiting the concepts
• Say “Oh sod it”, and convert the whole lot to Fudge
• Something else entirely

Meetup.com have revamped and reinvented themselves. There were previous GURPS and Fudge meetups scheduled for Manchester, but neither ever got enough members for any meetup to actually happen; they used to require a quorum of five. They appear to have nuked all the groups without a critical mass of members, so now there’s no GURPS group in Manchester, and no Fudge RPG groups in Britain at all. (I note that the one in Wichita, Kansas has just one member)

Mad fool that I am, I have started the Manchester Roleplayers Meetup Group, not dedicated to any one system. Whether anyone will join, I don’t know; but if you’re into tabletop RPGs and live somewhere near Manchester, sign up now!

The first date Meetup spat out was September 21, which is only four days away. I expect the first actual meetup won’t be until next month.

Most of the online RPGs I play are versions of the traditional tabletop RPG were you play one character. But there are other ways to do things, especially online

The Phoenyx is running a Lexicon Game, where the ‘characters’ are a bunch of (possibly revisionist) history scholars, and the actual gameplay revolves around their historical writings; it’s essentially a collaborative worldbuilding exercise.

Meanwhile, on DreamLyrics, Just John has a much stranger idea:

Would anybody here be into a game where your player characters hold jobs in a corporation-like organization, and where power is exercised in the traditional bureaucratic ways of deliberate obstructionism, backside-covering, slander and empire building?

And if you’re into that, would you be into having your PCs build an actual website? As players, the fun could include embellishing your corner(s) of the site with opaque jargon, badly-implemented forms, ridiculous HTML, irrelevant help screens, irritating slogans and all the other things that make corporate web sites such memorable experiences.

To top it off, the gag would be that to an innocent outsider surfing the web, this would look like a real site! My vague notion is that we’d run a standard game section here on DreamLyrics to coordinate stuff and roleplay staff meetings, but nothing on the site we’d build would link back to the game section.

A lot of scope for evil fun with this idea. I can imagine an incomprehensible (and impossible to comply with) policy on linking, and players should be responsible for sending equally incomprehensible cease-and-desist letters to any blogger than dares to link to the site.

Game Dream 11 asks us:

In every campaign, there are memorable scenes. Often, this is due as much to player participation as it is to GM flavor and skill. This week, I’d like for us to share quotes that stuck with you down through the years. What did you or your cohorts say during the game (in or out of character) that made a lasting impression?

The trouble with most in-game lines are that they’re of the ‘you had to be there’ variety; I have no idea whether any of these will be funny to anyone who wasn’t part of the game.

Still, sometimes a GM gives a golden opportunity to drop a corny joke straight into the game, especially when the mood of the game is meant to be humourous. Such a game was GODS (Guardians of Dimension). The PCs were a team of interdimensional troubleshooters, led by a telepathic horse, which also included a troll and an 2″ sentient insect, Bug. In one adventure, we landed in a tropical island, with, in the best jungle movie cliché, tribal drumming in the background.

GM: And suddenly, the drumming stops
Bug (my PC): Oh no! You know what this means!
Another PC: What does it mean?
Bug: Bass solo!

In a later game of GODS, we landed on an Old West style world, where the villagers were threatened by ‘The Banditos’

“They’ve come to steal the houses, burn the women, and rape the cattle!”

and later, once we’d defeated those banditos….

“We have saved the honour of the cows!”

Then there was a Castle Falkenstein game, set in Scotland. We captured some Prussian spies, by ambushing them as they slept. The ‘grunts’ got ordered abruptly to “Hande Hoch!”. But we woke up the commanding officer by pointing a big and scary looking firearm at him and saying:

“Did you order the continental breakfast, or the elephant gun”?

In a recent GURPS Time Travel game, when we’d slipped into what we assumed was an alternate parallel universe, and needed spare parts to repair our broken time machines. We’d found a consumer electronics store, and one player’s reaction was “You realise this is probably the local equivalent of Dixons” (For non-British readers, Dixons are a high street retailer notorious for having totally clueless sales staff who understand nothing whatsoever about the goods they’re selling).

GURPS Transhuman Space, at GenCon UK 2002, GMed by Phil Masters. I was playing Derek Repton, the ship’s engineer with a severe attitude problem. Constantine Thomas was playing the AI in the ship’s computer. The following exchange took place in a bad French accent (the AI was French)

Derek: “You stupide French Algorithme!”
The AI: “You’d better watch out next time you want the pod bay doors opened”

Finally, the Firefly game, where we had some damaged cargo pods which were starting to defrost. Fearful of some kind of biohazard, we opened them inside the cargo airlock. They didn’t contain quite what we expected.

GM: “You’re in the airlock, you’ve got a naked woman, a horse, and a large quantity of cocaine. Now what?”

I’m sure there are others.

Game Dream 10 asks us:

During games, how do you keep track of the various plot hooks, hints, and people? Are you a master of the arcane memory arts and keep them in your head? Or, are you a mere mortal who must put them to paper? How much notekeeping is too much? Do you find you are more or less organized in game than in real life?

It’s a long time since I’ve GMed a long running campaign; all my gaming nowadays is either online (PBeM/PBmB) or convention one-shots. In the online games I’ve got the advantage that a lot of the threads are still archived online, so I can (and frequently do) search back two or three years to find the name of that NPC. Of course, if a game lasts long enough it’s likely to outlast both online venues and home computers. I don’t have access to the older threads of KLR dating from before the game moved to Dreamlyrics, for instance. They do still exist as OZWIN archives on my old desktop PC that somewhere in my parent’s house, should I really need to access them.

I also maintain an extensive database of NPCs; a lot of these predate the online game and date back to the FtF game I ran ten years ago in the same setting, on the basis thatyou never throw anything away if there’s a chance it might come in useful later. A lot of this information is also online on the Kalyr Wiki, which is mainly full of wider game setting material, but does contain some lists of the names of significant NPCs.

For the last FtF game I played in, we kept a campaign journal. But rather than putting the book keeping workload onto the GM, we delegated this task to one of the players. Since we only met once a month (and sometimes not even that), some record of game sessions was essential, because nobody could remember exactly what happened six weeks before. Were I to run another FtF campaign, I’d do something similar, but maintain the journal online using a Wiki or blogging software, to which all the players have access.

And I’m late answering this one! Game Dream 8: I’m Late! Rewind! asks us:

How have the games you’ve been involved with dealt with the passage of time? Has it been primarily linear, skipped around a lot, or even reversed?

In face to face gaming, I don’t think I’ve seen anything other than strictly linear time, except for one game which was explicitly about time travel. Whenever the players have split up, I’ve handled the two groups by jumping back and forth between the two, not letting either group get too far ahead of the other. Just about every GM I’ve played under has done the same.

In asynchronous internet games (PBeM and PBmB), things have to be a bit more flexible to cope with different posting rates. Often players will respond to something another character said or did several posts ago, and as GM I often have entertaining hours of fun editing it all together to make coherent sense. Quite often we’ll go into what I call ‘timeslip mode’ (A term first used by my first online GM, Maughn Matsuoka), where I will start a new thread without closing the previous one. A rule I always enforce here is once I’ve started a new thread, nothing may happen in the previous thread that has an impact on the later one. A good example of this is when I had an extended conversation thread in the evening, and started a new thread with the party setting out the next morning. The ‘no change’ rule here would prevent a brawl breaking out which killed or injured anyone already mentioned in the later thread.

With multiple players in different threads, I try to keep them within sight of each other timewise, unless they’re widely separated geographically. In the worst case scenario this can lead to a player getting stuck in limbo for extended periods waiting for other threads to catch up; unfortunately this has happened to one PC in my Kalyr game. In contrast, I haven’t needed to keep the Calbeyn and Filgeth games in synch with each other; not only are the two games run on totally separate forums so that many of the players are probably not even aware of the other game, but they’re set in two cities more than a week’s travel apart. This limits the scope for anything in one game to have much impact on the other. At one time the Filgeth game was running about a week ahead of the Calbeyn one, but the Calbeyn-based party did a lot of travelling, and the two timelines are now more or less running in parallel again.

For a more extreme example of parallel timelines and the potential for continuity confusion, I’ll have to mention a game I neither GMed nor played in. It’s the semi-legendary Highlander: The Gathering run by David Edelstein. In the original game the dozen or so players were scattered throughout history, some as early as Roman times, others in the early twentieth century. Although most of the time each player had their own thread, immortal NPCs cropped up in different threads at different times, which gave mind-boggling continuity headaches. If so-and-so was alive in 1915, it means another PC can’t kill them in a duel in 1491! I’m not sure how David managed to keep the timeline consistant, although I remember a complete thread for a player who’d faded away getting removed from the continuity because events in other threads overwrote it. The present game is set in the present, but has “Flashback” scenes set in the past, which I think work in the same way as my timeslip threads: i.e. Nothing may happen in them to contradict the present-day storyline. (No duels in which the PC might die, for starters)

There’s no way I could run a game like that. Trying to keep the continuity consistent would make my head explode.