SF and Gaming Blog

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.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Reprieve for Greek gamers
Now they’ve issued a “clarification” to the police telling them only to prosecute gamblers, and not any other type of gamer.

The new guidelines are being distributed to all police stations in Greece in an effort to reassure internet café owners and tourists.

“The installation and use of games in public or privately owned spaces with no connection to paid services, and their usage, will in no way incur debts by or on behalf of the user, the management or any third party,” say the guidelines.

Is this a Greek Tragedy, or a Greek Farce?

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

What do you think about cross-gender characters (i.e., men playing female characters and women playing male characters)? What about GMs playing them as NPCs?

I don’t think I do female characters very well. I try to avoid the obvious cliches, and end up playing characters that are effectively blokes in drag. As a player I prefer to play male characters, as a GM my female NPCs (at the moment in my PBeMs and PBMBs I seem to be playing as many female NPCs as male) tend to be a bit two-dimensional. You’ll have to ask my players how well they come over.

I have one or two memorable experiences of playing female PCs. There was the case in an on-line Call of Cthulhu game where I was led to believe that Karl Tolhurst (him again) had been magically sex-changed, and I started posting as ‘Karla’. Turned out that it was an experimental memory transfer gone wrong, and I was one one the GM’s NPCs who believed she was Karl, having access to his memories. I also played a female computer geek with no social skills in a convention game run by the same GM.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Greek net cafes face ruin
Looks any celebrations regarding the demise of the Greek ban on computer gaming were premature. The Taliban-like Greek government has now appealed against the court throwing out their insane law as unconstitutional, and are now using underhand tactics to enforce it – such as confiscating computers from cybercafes and then setting a trial date months into the future, by which time their victims will financally ruined whatever the outcome of the court case might turn out to be.

Game Over for Greek games ban.
Looks like the Greek supreme court has thrown this stupid law out as unconstitutional. At least someone’s got some sense. Thanks to AJ on Dreamlyrics for the link.

Let’s go back into the world of make-believe after all this political stuff in news.

Today’s Game Wish from Turn of a Friendly Die is about character backgrounds.

How do you like to build character backgrounds? Do you think they are important or not? Do you prefer to write an elaborate background, or fill in later? Do you find character quizzes like the one in the ADRPG or related exercises like the round of questions in Everway character development to be useful?

For a long-term campaign (including PBeMs and PBMBs), as a player I like to detail the character’s back-story as much as I can. As a GM I also prefer the players to detail the back-story; it both gives me plot hook ideas, and shows me that they have read the setting material and understand my game world. Karl Tolhurst of Umlaut is a classic example here.

Another good example would be Javin, my character in a long-running RuneQuest campaign a few years back. We used ‘Central Casting: Heroes of Legend’ to come up with the back-story of son of a boat-maker who took up river-piracy following the Lunar invasion of Pavis.

Yet another would be my first on-line character, a GURPS Cyberpunk techie who’d been framed for causing a rail disaster and was disowned by family and friends, who proved a wonderful case of an ordinary person caught up in a situation where he was way over his head.

This isn’t to say I’ve always developed the background in advance; I’ve had some good develop-in-play characters as well, although that’s not my preferred mode. I also occasionally find a character working out differently in play to how I’d envisaged him before the game started, especially personality-wise, which sometimes requires retrospective changes.

You want bizarre conspiracy theories? Which encompass Middle Earth and Celene Dion? Try this one on Dreamscribe, written by Neil Marsden.

This week’s WISH from Turn of a Friendly Die.

Sometimes in my games, I try to set a mood, only to have a joke or out-of-character chatter/commentary ruin it by going off on a tangent or breaking everyone into laughter, occasionally including me. I have pretty much given up on trying to get my players to be serious all the time – after all, when I’m on the other side of the screen, I’m not always serious either. Plus the game is a social, fun event, and people should not feel forced to be serious or in character all the time. (I’ll save that for LARPers)

That said, how do you keep the mood? And once lost, how do you try to bring everyone back? Can you? Is it even possible?

And what do you do with that one player who is always the first one to crack a joke and break up the tension you’ve built to so carefully, no matter how many times you’ve asked/warned him/her not to do that?

A difficult one. I’ve GMed a game where the out-of-game chatter took up more time than the actual game, which was very frustrating, to say the least. The last time I played with that group we got the OOC chatter out of the way first, only trouble was that took up two entire days before we started gaming! Not ideal.

The games I’ve GMed have tended not to be highly mood-intensive anyway, perhaps that’s my problem. A lot of the gaming I play is weekend-long sessions with people I only meet two or three times a year, where the purpose is as much social as gaming. And many games are ffairly light-hearted, comedy-style games in the first place.

One thing I have considered, though, is a pun box. Like a swearbox, but for puns. I hate bad puns.

Have you ever seen or met someone — in person, on TV, in a movie, or whatever — who made you think “Oh my goodness, that’s my character!” Who was it (if you know), and what were the similarities?

In a word, no. I don’t know whether that means I don’t watch enough TV and movies, or my characters aren’t well enough defined.

However, there is one player (who shall be nameless) in my Dreamlyrics message board game for whom all her characters remind me of Dr. Who’s assistant, Leela. “Can I kill him now, doctor?”.