SF and Gaming Blog

It had to happen! Here’s a Play-by-Blog D&D Campaign!

I’ve wondered about using Moveable Type to manage my game archives for the Kalyr PBeM. It would be nice to integrate MT with the existing mailing list in some fiendish way. Pity Karen (owner of The Phoenyx, which hosts the Kalyr mailing list) doesn’t like MT because it uses Javascript.

This week’s Game Wish is on Equality and Equivalence

The typical party of PCs appears to be composed of equals. They may have Nodwickian henchlings or distant authority figures, but in most of the games I’ve played, the PCs are equal with respect to each other.

Is this generalization true for you as well? What other group dynamics have showed up in campaigns you have played? What other group dynamics might be workable? What isn’t workable, and why?

While the vast majority of the games I’ve played with have been composed of equals, I can think of one significant exception, the long running Vikings in Space campaign:

This was an epic DnD Spelljammer game that started out with a conventional party of equal-powered PCs. The original PCs had got to something like 12th level and we’d accumulated a menagerie of supporting NPCs including a rakshasa, an androsphynx and a djinn who’s speciality was manufacturing soft furnishings (don’t ask!)

We reached a point where the plot called for the three original PCs to separate. What we did was form three parties, each consisting of one of the original PCs, and two lower-level henchmen played by the other two players, either by conventing existing supporting NPCs into PCs, or adding new ones. We rotated through the three parties session-by-session, so everybody had their turn at playing the high-level party leader.

It worked reasonably well. The lower-level PCs generally had special abilities that gave them enough spotlight time, and we solved the problem of keeping them alive in fights by the GM pitting against opponents with the same structure as the party; ensuring the biggest and nastiest monster always attacked the high-level PC, while the lower-level PCs mopped up the enemy redshirts.

The only other game I can think of with widely separated power levels is a Fudge game where the PCs were so diverse in abilities that power levels became academic. How do you compare a troll with a sentient dragonfly?

I’m running late! This is last week’s Game Wish, on Playing and GMing.

Does GMing improve an individual’s playing? Does playing improve a GM’s GMing? In what ways? Why? If not, why not?

I’ve got back into off-line GMing recently after a break of several years. I can definitely say that playing improves a GM’s GMing. When I’m playing (under a lot of different GMs), I pay a lot of attention to the way they’re running the game, how they structure the scenarios, how they share out spotlight time, etc. Whenever I’ve particularly enjoyed a game I try and analyse what I’ve enjoyed about it, and try and apply that to my own games.

As for GMing improving my playing, I’m not so sure. Perhaps GMing improves my self-confidence, and that can reflect when I’m just a player? Also “knowing what the GM’s going through” can prevent me from doing things that will make it hard for him or her. That’s something for me to consider in the future, I think.

This Daily Torygraph story about the Belgian pensioner killed by his own booby-trap sounds too much like an RPG scenario to be true. Was he a fan of Gary Gygax’s “Tomb of Horrors”?

At first Belgian police assumed that the 79-year-old had committed suicide and bled to death from a gunshot wound to the neck after finding him at his home near the town of Charlerois.

It was an assumption which nearly cost one detective his life as he searched the house and opened a booby-trapped wooden chest. A shotgun hidden inside went off, missing the policeman by inches.

The detectives beat a hasty retreat and called in military mine-clearance experts who, after unravelling a series of enigmatic clues left in the engineer’s scribbled notes, uncovered a total of 19 death traps, among them an apparently harmless but lethal pile of dinner plates, the television and even an exploding crate of beer.

“We have never come across anything like it before. It was all fiendishly clever. The house was booby-trapped from top to bottom. We’ve had to take everything apart,” said one of the explosives experts.

It was all a plot, it seems, to get back at his ex-wife.

he set about installing the traps, most of them using concealed 12-bore shotguns triggered by barely-visible nylon threads or fishing line.

His thinking appeared to be that if he were evicted, he would ensure that the new owner would not live long enough to enjoy the benefits of the house.

The military engineers found that Dethy had numbered and catalogued each device and left coded notes for the whereabouts of each.

I’m sure some GM, somewhere, is going to make use of this…

I’ve been running my Kalyr PBeM on The Phoenyx for something like five years now. This site, run by Carl and Karen Cravens has been providing mailing lists and gamesmaster tools for PBeMs for a long time before that.

Now they’ve decided to make a major change in the focus of the site, as detailed in this announcement.

Massively Multiplayer Play By E-Mail

Okay, that header is kind of a joke. But we realized that what we often have in our application file is a gamemaster who has had a good, unique idea that he wants to try out. And that’s neat, except: when he has the next good, unique idea, is he going to want to continue with this one? If something unexpected happens to him, will we ever get another gamemaster who’s interested in picking up that game?

In the Phoenyx brainstorming discussions, we’ve adopted a policy of voicing any idea, no matter how weird, because we really felt we needed something different. So my idea was MMPBEM. A shared, standardized world, where gamemasters can run individual games, but benefit from a shared environment. Now gamemasters can exchange ideas (plots, NPCs, monsters), have crossover plots, even run opposing groups of players. New gamemasters can come from the ranks of players, because the world is all laid out in a shared format (probably the Wiki). The problem of non-standard offsite game homepages is solved, because nobody’s going to come to us with a pre-built game and already-existing pages.

To do all that, we need to build worlds. Worlds will have to be Phoenyx property (or the Phoenyx will have to have an unlimited license), to avoid the “I’m taking my marbles and going home” syndrome, so they have to be built from scratch. That’s usually a huge project, but in this case they really just need to be “generic” worlds with all the usual tropes for their genre… we’re specifically not striving for uniqueness, we’re just looking for a shared framework gamemasters can hang their own stories on.

I have very mixed feelings on this. It’s a bit like my attitude towards modular layouts. I like the idea of shared worlds, in that it enables something much bigger than anything a single GM can come up with. On the other hand, I’m less keen on the sort of compromises I’d have to make. Bit like the unrealistic 3-track format of Ntrak.

I also have to admit that Dwarves ‘n Elves generic fantasy isn’t to my taste either. As Karen said in the ensuing discussion:

We’re going for a sense-of-comfortable-like-old-shoes rather than sense-of-wonder, with the basic tenets of the world.

That’s really not to my taste at all. I loathe the hack fantasy of the likes of David Eddings and Robert Jordan. But I have to admit they’re enormously popular, an awful lot of people love the familiar tropes.

However, Kalyr will continue more or less unchanged, because:

Existing games get grandfathered in, and nothing about them will really change. So long as someone’s willing to gamemaster them, they’ll continue. Those that can fit into the Phoenyx standard worlds are welcome to do so, of course.

If a current (or even prospective) gamemaster wants to turn his game into a shared one, and is comfortable with all the requirements, that’s doable.

Kalyr as a multi-GM game in it’s own right? I don’t want to make any pronouncements at this stage. Let’s see how things go..

Amadán is running another message board game based on The Stand, this time on Dreamlyrics. The original game he ran several years back on Compuserve’s RPGAMES forum is one of those classic games people have talked about for years.

You can read his introduction and teaser here, and the character generation and game rules (using FUDGE this time) here.

This week’s Turn of a Friendly Die Game Wish is about Skill Mismatches

The situation often arises that a player’s real-world skills and the skills of the character she plays don’t quite match up properly. The character might be designed as a “face man”–a conman with a charming face and a ready explanation–but the player isn’t as good at extemporaneous character interaction as her character is. Or the sci/tech geek player might be adept at solving logic puzzles, even when the character is a lumbering cretin with a giant axe.

How do you deal with this mismatch, either as a game master or a player? Do you play it as-played, so that the only character who can seduce the scheming noble’s wife is the only player who can pick somebody up at the bar? Or do you play it as-written, so that the character can bluff the guards into letting him pass, even if the player’s best effort is “I’ve got an urgent message for, uh, Lord Blah-blah-blah”?

This is one of those issues where roleplayers divide into two opposing camps. There’s the school of thought that says that the player’s skills are the character’s skills, that having mechanical rules for social situations ‘steals from roleplaying’, and that a shy tongue-tied player should not be allowed to play a charismatic fast-talking character. I belong to the school of thought that doesn’t accept those arguments.

When I’m GMing, if the character has “Fast Talk” or “Sex Appeal” skill on his or her character sheet, and the player makes the skill roll, the character succeeds. Period. If the player role-plays it well, I might give them a bonus on the roll. I don’t see why a shy player should be prevented from playing a charismatic character any more that a player who’s not a skilled fencer should be prevented from playing a swordsman.

The opposite problem is a bit harder; when the player has skills the character doesn’t. In a way, it’s the same as separating In-Character and Out-of-Character knowledge. I remember playing a ‘lumbering brute’ type called “Vandal” on a chatroom game, and kept having to abandon lines of dialogue I’d written, because they used too far many long words for that type of character.

For logic puzzles and the like, whenever I’ve seen that sort of solution come up players have always dropped out of character to solve the puzzle as players, then drop back into character once they think they’ve solved it. I suppose a GM could ask players to make intelligence checks for their character for every suggestion the player comes up with, but I’ve never seen it played that way.