Graph Paper Games

I painted these miniatures a long time ago and they've never seen the light of a gaming table until last night, when they got to play the role of "douchebag fratboys of the zombie apocalypse." I wanted to write about smart gamers, and why GM's sometimes get frustrated by them.  I think sometimes GM's, myself included, anticipate player activity based on what the GM thinks would make for a cool scene.  For example, the party ran across four police officers (post-apocalypse) clearly attempting to abduct a young girl to sell her into slavery (it's not a nice world).  The GM thought we would get riled up and start blasting the evil police and rescue the girl.  One player wanted to do that.  I didn't.  I figured that four armed law enforcement NPC's could do some serious damage to five regular civilians with improvised weapons.  So I my PC buy the girl using some contraband the PC's had acquired.  Hollywood heroic?  No.  Maybe Walkin...

The PC's explore the horrors of the healthcare system, after the zombie apocalypse The Friday before last Rachel was in the driver's seat as we returned to Lawrence, Kansas and the nightmarish world after aliens have unleashed a zombie plague upon the Earth.  Having recovered the remains of an NPC doctor's husband, the group returned to the hospital to discover that it had been overrun by zombies. What followed was a tense exploration of the hospital in an attempt to rescue survivors.  In the end the NPC doctor was accidentally killed by a PC who mistook her for a zombie, but one of the aliens was convinced to see the error of his ways and recruited to help humanity, which is a big win for us. Two thoughts about the game.  The player who accidentally shot first and checked later was given a lot of crap for what happened, but not by me.  That's because I'm a Genre Fiend, and a spooked guy accidentally killing a living human is not only appropriate for a ...

So pretty much since this gaming group began, all those years ago when I answered a flyer in my FLGS, there have been two GM's: myself and the guy who comments on this blog as "J Evans." Not too long ago, my son decided he wanted a crack at running a game, first using a Free RPG Day module and then his own one-shot of a "Fallout" game using d6 Space.  Shortly thereafter, J Evans' son decided to take a crack at running an actual campaign, a D&D 4E campaign that has been meeting about once a month for the past few months. That seemed to open the floodgates.  My daughter decided she wanted to run a fantasy one-shot, just to see what it was like, and despite being the youngest person in the group they went for it.  I served as her assistant, helping her run combats and citing relevant rules when necessary. Then, Rachel, another member of the group, wanted to try a mini-campaign of a totally different genre: a "Walking Dead" style...

What heroes of the 1980's have answered the call? The Doctor, Rogue Gallifreyan Time Lord Egon Spengler, Ghostbuster Nancy Drew, Spunky Girl Detective Marty McFly, time travelling musician Dudley "Booger" Dawson, slovenly fraternity member John Winger, Army enlistee

You know that something is amiss when even my wife can figure out the problem with an RPG... I bought the Fate Core System book (Evil Hat Productions) not too before heading off to EOW and have been reading it intently every since.  It is not a complicated game per se , just one that take a lot of things that are relatively unspoken or hand-waved in RPG's and builds the rules around them. I don't want to get too deep into the rules in this post, but rather just look at the pivotal one: Aspects.  Aspects are akin to the Distinctions in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying .  Actually given the timeline, MHR ripped off FUDGE/Fate.  But since I knew MHR first, I have to work from what I know.  In MHR, if you do something that dovetails with one of your Distinctions, you can either get an additional d8 (if it is positive) or a d4 and a Plot Point if it suggests a negative occurrence.  So for example if you use "Highly confident" to do something smoothly because, w...