Slacking!

Oh, I have been slacking off posting – nothing new since September! This does not mean I haven’t been gaming like crazy. I’ve almost lost count of all the stuff I’ve been playing. Let’s break it down:

Rogue Trader – Kicked off this campaign in September and have had three sessions so far. It’s going really well and I’m enjoying it a lot. One of the things I like about campaigns is how they grow as they go along and this one is growing. Ideas that were not so clear at the start have firmed up more, other ideas discarded in favor of better ones and things happen in play that I did not expect and have to adjust for on the fly which often leads to more cool stuff. Rogue Trader also has a totally different scope and feel than Dark Heresy. In that game, the PCs were low-level scrubs whose lives and deaths went unnoticed, but whose deeds had a huge impact on their world. The RT characters are the polar opposite, rich and wielding lots of power and status and doing things on a grand scale. When we eventually get to Deathwatch, the feel of the game will change again, naturally, and the contrast is something I’m looking forward to.

Godlike – Back at the beginning of September, we finished off the Godlike: Nazi hunters campaign, and did it in ’60′s style. For a campaign that had only four sessions it was one of the deeper games I’ve run in terms of characterization, and it also captured the serious, mature tone I like to have when I run Godlike. In the final clash with the Nazi Talents, there were two characters that unhesitatingly sacrificed themselves for the team and the mission (one died, the other barely survived) and I thought it was some of the most heroic stuff I’ve seen in an RPG. That particular conflict was also totally amazing and would have looked fantastic on  screen with a big FX budget!

My other Godlike experience was…not so good. I ran my TOG302 air game at Big Bad Con, and I had the unfortunate experience of having several last minute cancellations and player switches, and then two of the players got up and left 2 hours in to go play in another game they had double booked with mine. I was not happy about this at all (in fact I was very pissed off). So unhappy, in fact, that I have decided that with the exception of the EndGame minicons, I’m not going to run games at big cons anymore – I probably won’t even attend big cons anymore. My DDC experience earlier in the year was OK, but I spent a lot of money to go (on the hotel and food) and wasn’t super thrilled with the gaming. I now I sound spoiled and anti-social, but I really prefer playing with people I know and like. I stressed out way too much and it wasn’t so much fun as it was something to simply get through, and if I feel that way about an aspect of my hobby, I should not do it, for my own sake and anyone else  involved. So that’s that. No more cons.

Friday Nite! The Friday nite gaming has been a hoot lately! Back at the end of September, Wayne ran Castle Bravo (Trail of Cthulhu), then in October Finn ran teenagers from Outer Space, and in November, Jacob ran Sufficiently Advanced. All of these games were fantastic and I was really excited about getting to play in them. I feel lucky to part of group that has so much great GMing talent in it! The Friday nite gaming will continue this month when we kick off a short Unknown Armies campaign run by Finn. Can’t wait for that!

And the Eclipse Phase game I’m is on a bit of a hiatus until next year, but my uplifted octopus character is still alive and kicking (?) Also started playing Battletech again with an invitational group down at EndGame which is lots of fun. I got into a real close-fought brain-burner of a game last time and I think that really got my old BT juices going. More of that to come in the new year as well I’m sure.

Finally, I’ve been playing the 40K miniatures game, mostly because I’ve been on a painting kick and I love the models (the game, well, it’s fun with the right people).

That’s most of what I’ve been up to the past three months. I’ll get back into the habit of posting here on my RPG blog more regularly, I promise!

Be a fan! And other stuff!

Ack! No posts for a while, but my excuse is that I’ve been gaming and getting ready to game so much lately I’ve had little time for blogging.

To catch up, my FATE/Legends of Anglerre game at the office has stalled out. I’ve lost two players (one left the company, the other just isn’t up for it at the moment – a death in the family put a damper on things and I can totally sympathize with her for that). But that’s okay – it was just a lunchtime thing and the remaining members of the group are all up for something else. We have lots of boardgames we can play too.

The Godlike: Nazi Hunters game wraps up this Friday and I really can’t wait for that! I’m so glad I got to run that as a mini-campaign. The role-playing from the Crew has been most excellent, inspired even, and everyone has brought exactly the right tone and characterization to the table. The game has achieved the level of fun I’d hoped for, as well as taking on the gritty and serious tone that makes Godlike such a great game for me. I will be proud to have this one under my belt.

The 40K Dark Heresy campaign wrapped up about a month ago, with a suitably epic and cinematic ending. I’m so glad that game came together as well as it did. It was a real challenge getting the atmosphere right, and I really believe that’s the key to running the 40K RPGs – you’ve got to get your finger on the descriptions and colors of the setting, find the pulse of the dark insanity of it all and bring it out.

Once again, the Crew did an awesome job and I couldn’t have asked for their characters to have been played any better!

And now we’re moving on to 40K: Rogue Trader, continuing the grand campaign that links all three games together. This campaign is actually set about 50 years before the events in the Dark Heresy game, and I’ve enjoyed thinking up all the horrible plots the bad guys are getting up to that manifested themselves in the DH game. Hopefully, the characters in this Rogue Trader campaign will see things unfold from a totally different angle, and with a totally different flavor. In the end, it all gets tied up with a Deathwatch campaign!

And that brings me to my next point – why I’m so excited about this game (and others I’ve run or am  running). I love the characters the players have come up with! They’ve got so many cool hooks and so much potential, I can’t wait to run them through the wringer! I’m a fan of the characters and I want to see what happens to them, what they get up to, and how they deal with the challenges I throw at them.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t test them – I test the characters and sorely. They go through hell to achieve their goals, often taking losses and setbacks that really hurt. But even while I’m hitting them with a seemingly impossible situation (for example, 500 genestealer cultists, a dozen purestrain ‘Stealers and a Patriarch…heh) I am rooting for them. I won’t fudge my dice to give them an advantage, since I feel that takes away from their success – or sacrifice – as the case may be. Still, I’m hoping they pull it off, even as I’m dropping the hammer on them.

The players surprise me. They do crazy cool stuff. They make desperate all-or-nothing plays that come down to a die roll, and we all know what’s at stake. And if they pull it off, we all cheer their success or mourn their loss.

I love it! I love being a fan of the characters!

What could go wrong?

Perhaps one of the most overused adventure premises I’ve ever seen, particularly for modern or sci-fi roleplaying is, “What could go wrong?” You know, the blurb in the con program says something like “All you have to do is go here and do this. It’s a milk run, what could go wrong?” Of course you just know that means everything is going to go wrong, most likely betrayal by your PCs’ employer. Yawn. I’ll never sign up for games like these since they’re invariably as bad as they sound.

But that sort of presents the challenge of actually running a “milk run”, a game where the job is supposed to be easy and actually does go well. Which I think is pretty simple – you make the adventure about everything else but the job itself. Whatever other issues the PCs are having, those get brought forward and dealt with. Action and fight scenes may even ensue, but as far as the job goes, it’s definitely a milk run, and it does go down smoothly – no firefights, no cops, no betrayal, the PCs get paid for being pros. It’s the rest of their lives that are a big mess.

I’d probably have the job go down in the middle of the session, and make it take only a few rolls and allow the PCs to show their competency (for once). Everything else in the session would be about dealing with other problems that are entirely character focused and character driven. You sometimes see this in better TV shows, like Firefly. There was an episode or two in their where they completed their actual money-making endeavor with little sweat or hassle, but everything else unrelated to the job became a hot mess.

That makes the old “What could go wrong?” cliched adventure a lot more interesting.

GenCon Want List (if only I were going)

Among the stuff coming out at GenCon that I find myself jonesin’ for:

The One Ring: Adventures Over the Edge of the Wild – This looks too beautiful to pass up. Art by John Howe? Designed by Francesco Nepitello (who did the excellent War of the Ring boardgame)? Sold sold sold!

Burning Wheel Gold – Never got a game of BW Revised off the ground, but with some Burning Empires and a whole campaign of Mouse Guard now under my belt, I feel much more able to get into BW now.

Black Crusade – Yeah. Of course.

I know there is a ton of other stuff I’d insta-buy if I could.

Too bad I’m not going… Actually it’s a good thing I’m not going because I’d come back broke.

 

Finish what you start?

I asked the office crew, the group I play Legends of Anglerre with, how many campaigns they have ever finished – that is, played out to a conclusion and then put the game away. The actual hobbyists among them (three players) all said one or none. In almost all cases they said, their games simply went on and on and on until they ran out of steam and the game died or the group broke up. I actually found that kind of sad.

For many years now, when I get an rpg campaign going, I rarely don’t finish it. I’ve had a couple here and there that didn’t make it, but generally speaking, I run my campaigns to conclusion. Three-session mini-campaigns are great for trying out ideas (like our Godlike: Nazi Hunters game). In fact for me, three is the magic number – I like the inherent structure a start, middle and finish provide. And you can make this a modular thing too, running a six-session game, a twelve-session game (which allows for three sets of four arcs if you want to do that). My big Godlike campaign a few years ago ran 15 sessions, which gave me three sets of five sessions (though in retrospect I had only planned on six sessions for that game – it grew in the telling).

Ending a good campaign gives everyone a big sense of accomplishment or even anticipation. Case in point – our Dark Heresy campaign is ending next session, but events in that game have established things for the Rogue Trader game that will follow, so everyone is excited about it. And when it’s all over, people can point to it and talk about as something that was undertaken and resolved. It’s a good feeling.

Sticking with the same game year after year (we’ve all heard of the 20-year campaigns out there) may indeed be enjoyable for some, but I’d be tired of it for sure. There are too many cool games out there and so many interesting ideas to explore it’s almost criminal to limit yourself to a single narrow experience.

What campaigns have you run or played to conclusion?

Games played since January

Since January, I’ve been making an effort to log all my RPG sessions on RPGGeek. So far I have logged 24 sessions! Yikes! That averages out to something like one game a week. So  in short, I’ve been gaming like a madman!

To break it down by game:

Legends of Anglerre, 7 sessions – The weekly lunchtime game at the office continues. We don’t play every week but we seem to get a game in fairly regularly since we started. I’m enjoying it and I really like FATE for ease of play. I would like for the office crew to learn the rules a bit more (since they’d get more out of the game) but as fast as we go and as much as we get done in a single hour (not too much), it’s working out just fine.

Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, 5 sessions – My main monthly campaign with the regular crew. I think we’re all having a good time with this and there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for moving on into the Rogue Trader and Deathwatch segments once we wrap the Dark Heresy segment. I’m feeling confident and comfortable with the system by now and looking forward to the next game.

Eclipse Phase, 4 sessions – The only campaign I’m in as a player at the moment.

Godlike, 2 sessions – The first was the big TOG302 air combat game I ran at DunDraCon back in February. Was really nervous about it but it went well. The second was the kickoff of our short Nazi Hunters campaign. Next session is next Friday and I can’t wait!

Agon, 1 session – Played at DunDraCon. Kinda like to try this again with the regular crew.

The Laundry, 1 session – Played at the January Minicon with Wayne in the GM’s seat. Like to play this again too.

Rogue Trader, 1 session – In January. This seems to have been the last session of the campaign (we only played twice though) which petered out. The GM and the other players seemed to have lost interest, though I was raring to go. Playing the Rogue Trader let me chew the scenery to my heart’s content. But I learned enough about the game to feel confident about running it myself.

Warhammer FRP, 1 session – My first game of the year actually, which I ran for some people from work. It went well, though three out of four of the players were beginners. I’d like to play this again too, and just get in there and kill stuff!

Wow, I have been busy! And July’s still not done yet! More Godlike next week and then Dark Heresy the week after!

 

 

 

3:16, 1 session – Run at the January Minicon. Best game of 3:16 yet.

Play “under” a GM? Not “with”?

I’ve probably gone on about this before, but I’ve seen the term “play under a GM” used to talk about playing with a (given) GM in a few forum threads lately and that usage has always rubbed me the wrong way. I once voiced this opinion in a forum post and most of the responses indicated they’d never head the term being used and thought it was really curious or I was just seeing things.

No. It’s out there. People use it, often, online and in person. Google it up, you’ll find it.

What bothers me is the phrase’s straight up positioning of the GM above the players. I’m sure the people that use it don’t think much of it, if they think of it at all, but to me, it indicates that person has put the role of the GM on a pedestal. There’s also the image I get of the players being under the GM’s thumb, like he’s the cruel oppressor.

Yes, the GM naturally has a certain amount of narrative authority, but as far as I’m concerned it’s more of the “governing with the consent of the governed” variety than some sort of iron-fisted tyranny. I think I also bristle at the implication that the GM is simply there to entertain the players and it all flows from him. Everyone has a role at the table and everyone is responsible for each others’ fun. The GM’s role is different from the players’ in a trad RPG but any good gamer knows it’s not all on the GM to bring it.

I never say “I play under a great GM” or “He’s the best GM I’ve played under”. You’ll always hear me use “with” instead of “under”. Whether I’m playing in a game, or running one, everyone there at the table is with me – no one is under me nor above me.

I suppose this makes me some sort of gaming communist, but there you go. Don’t let me hear you saying you’ve played “under” me!!