SF and Gaming Blog

Game WISH 82 asks:

Sum up one or more games that you GM or play in 10 words or less. (Three is best, but not everybody is that pithy.) Don’t restrict yourself to current games if you have great ones in the past.

Three word summaries? A concept I’m familiar with; the late lamented CompuServe RPGAMES forum used three-letter acronyms to make it easy to identify games in the old Compuserve forum structure. Many people came up with short names that could be abbreviated into TLAs. So we had games like “Teatime and Tentacles” (1920s Cthulhu set in Britain) and “Have Spaceship, Will Travel” (Classic Traveller). RPGAMES successor, Dreamlyrics, has continued the practice.

Some current games:

Ahhran Empire Frontiers: “Venus Blood: The Love Boat”. I must point out that all the naughty scenes are in the members-only adult area. As the GM, I have to read that stuff…

The Stand: “You forgot to ask which airport, you idiot!” (At least for the UK players)

Edge of Hell: Goths and Groupies: Ümläüt on tour. The game isn’t supposed to be all about the adventures of the goth/black metal band, but with three player characters as band members…

Kalyr. With thirteen current players, split over two different sites, I find this game so impossible to summarise that I’ll have to leave it to the players themselves. My official title is “A world on the brink of change”.

Some older ones:

Hawiian Vacation: “Everyone I know is dead”. That GURPS Cyberpunk game did have a rather high body count; any PC whose player vanished was ruthlessly terminated.

Fragments of Chaos: “Everyone I know will soon be dead”. Well, it was a Cthulhu game.

Any convention one-shot run by the same GM as FOC: “Everyone will soon be dead”.

Then there was the long-running ADnD Spelljammer campaign that became known as “Vikings in Space”, so much so that it became the official name of the game.

Game WISH 81 asks:

What’s your favorite game system, and why? What things don’t you like about it? How much do you have to “jigger” it from published rules and why?

I don’t have a single game system, but I can narrow things down to two systems, utterly unlike one another in some ways, and very similar in others. As a GM I’m very much a worldbuilder, and want to mix and match elements to create an original game setting rather than ‘playing in someone else’s sandbox’. Therefore I don’t care so much for systems with their own settings, especially those where the game mechanics and the basic cosmology of the setting are intimately intertwined; DnD’s alignment system being a typical example.

And the favourite game systems? First, GURPS. While it’s not quite as universal as the “U” in its name applies, it’s a very flexible system with a tremendous depth of support for a huge variety of genres and settings, as my several shelf feet of GURPS books demonstrate. The only genres it doesn’t comfortably handle are very high powered ones such as four-colour superheroes, a genre I don’t really care for anyway (Am I the only gamer that really doesn’t “get” supers?). GURPS isn’t perfect, while the core game engine is very good, it’s accumulated a lot of cruft from various supplements over the years, and badly needs a fourth edition to clean it up again. The other problem it has is that some people have the idea you have to use every possible optional rule, which to me is less of a problem with the system itself, rather a problem with some of the players. Although the point-based character generation system can be quite complex and intimidating to new players, I find the actual gameplay can be much simpler and faster than games like ADnD, especially if you don’t use the (optional!) advanced combat rules. As for ‘jiggering with the rules’, I find the main thing is deciding which optional rules and subsystems to use, and which ones not to use; for my Kalyr game I’ve also come up with a few setting-specific skills. One change I have made is to use the official optional to make hit points dependant on ST, and fatigue dependant on HT, rather than the other way round.

The other favourite game has to be Fudge. While GURPS is a detailed system with rules for just about everything, Fudge is more freeform. In fact the heart of the system is simply the seven-level scale for skills and attributes (Terrible – Poor – Mediocre – Fair – Good – Great – Superb), and the dice mechanic of 4dF. A dF being a six sided die with two plusses, two minuses and two blank faces. There isn’t even a standard list of attributes or skills, instead GMs are encouraged to define their own lists appropriate to the genre and setting. It makes a wonderful game for rules tinkerers, but it’s also a joy to GM, since most of the time you can just wing it rather than have to look up obscure rules from a 700 page rulebook. In fact, when GM Fudge face-to-face I’ve never, ever, had to refer to the rulebook during play, something I can’t say for GURPS.

Of the online games I play or GM, two are Fudge, one is GURPS, and the fourth is systemless. While I’m prepared to play a great variety of systems, I’m unlikely to GM any system other than those two.

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.