Graph Paper Games

So Adam and Blacksteel have been talking a lot about why we buy new games.  I noticed about two years ago that my RPG purchases were diminishing in number fairly steeply.  To understand why, let me explain why I buy most RPG's.  I buy them like cookbooks, where I'm not going to cook every recipe out of them, or even any of them, but I get ideas about how to cook.  I take little snippets here and there and throw them into whatever game (or meal) I'm making. Several factors have contributed to the decline of RPG purchasing. 1. The price.  The cost of a hardcover RPG has risen from around $30 to $50 for a hardcover.  Some run to $70 is they are particular large or have a color interior.  Somewhere in there the price went from "sure, I can buy this a look at it and never run it and that's okay" to "um, no." 2. The closure of the used book store in my town.  Beats me why Half Price Books couldn't make it here, but they couldn't, and discount...

On the drive to school today I had a really good conversation with my two kids about gamemastering (which is a sign I'm raising them right).  The question was, if a player is having a legitimate problem with another player at the gaming table, should the GM intervene?  My kids had two very different responses. One said yes, because as the GM you have made a social contract with the players that they will have a good experience and be treated with respect.  If one player is giving the other a hard time, it's your job to say something to the offending player about how that isn't acceptable behavior. The other one said no, because that's triangulation, which isn't healthy, mature social behavior.  If the offended player comes to you complaining about the behavior of another player, you should tell them to take it up with the player one-on-one. I had my own answer, but what do you think?

Hey, there's a bunch of plot spoilers to the episode of The Walking Dead from 10/23/16 here!  After the break, I mean. Oh, and I do talk about a fictional character in an RPG who engages in abhorrent behavior most will find disturbing.  A gentle forewarning.

A couple of weekends ago I had a nice long conversation with Adam over at Barking Alien and amongst the many, many things discussed was the question of how the world evolves and progresses throughout the campaign. So let's give an example.  In a superhero RPG campaign the heroes become aware that Doctor Demolisher has been assembling parts to create a weather-control device that he plans on using to blackmail the Eastern seaboard (too soon?).  After a few sessions of wrangling with DD's henchmen as they gather the parts they need for the weather machine, the players suddenly decide one session that they are going to pursue a sideplot and infiltrate the notorious gangster Peppermint Ice's nightclub to foil his diamond-smuggling racket.   Side note: I feel Peppermint Ice's moll sidekick should be Ice Ice Baby. So, as a GM watching your players wander down the trundle path of a secondary plot, what do you do with Doctor Demolisher?  Do you have him patiently wait a...

I supported the Kickstarter for the new sourcebook detailing the history of Aaron Allston's Strike Force campaign.  This is an update and expansion upon the 96-page classic tome Aaron Allston's Strike Force  which came out in the early 1990's, and like the first book essentially outlines not only the major plots and characters of the eponymous Champions RPG campaign (which continued past the early 90's for another decade).  The campaign became a world in which multiple campaigns were spun off and included an estimated 48 players.  The core Strike Force campaign had over 260 sessions to its name. And that sounds epic, literally and figuratively.  And in that regard, while it seems highly unlikely that I could ever come close to that, there's no harm in trying to get even a fraction of that.  My longest campaign probably had about a tenth of that number of sessions.  Why not try again? It's worth noting that Allston apparently played many years twice a...

Today Blacksteel wrote a great article regarding innovation in RPG's.  You can find it here , and should totally read it just on its own merit, and not just because this blog post is a response.  If you really don't want to read it, I will tell you that the first part of the article involves the lack of something new in RPG's and the proliferation of Nth Edition iterations of RPG's that have been around for decades, e.g. Dungeons & Dragons , Shadowrun , and Call of Cthulhu . I agree with his assessment, although I might be less critical about it.  It mirrors the trend in movie making, and I suspect for the same reason: trepidation.  Why go out on a limb and create a bomb like Jon Carter: Warlord of Mars  (which wasn't even that terrible) when you can create a complete waste like Dawn of Justice  and still count on eight hundred million dollars in ticket sales and merchandising because it has Batman and Superman in it?  Not a great reason, just a...

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...

I've been buying very few actual gaming books lately, but have been slowly adding books about RPG's and GM techniques to my library.  The latest is a book called Hamlet's Hit Points  by Robin Laws.  For those who don't know, Laws is one of those game designers who has had his thumb in the pie of so many different RPG's out there he didn't even bother listing his bona vides in the back of the book. The core thesis behind Hamlet's Hit Points is that in movies and plays (and their descendants radio shows and television programs), there are nine identifiable "beats," specific moments in the narrative flow with a purpose.  There are two major kinds of beats: procedural, which either move the protagonist towards or away from an external goal; and dramatic, which move the protagonist towards or away from an internal goal (such as a personal relationship).  The movement towards and away from a goal creates two emotional responses from the viewer: hop...

I've been kicking this post around for a while, but it seemed like a good time to go ahead and publish it. One of the real frustrations that I have experienced when running RPG's is when the players, for whatever reason, create Player Characters that just don't fit.  Maybe it is ego.  Maybe it is a belief that discordant PC's are better PC's, or will have more advantages, or more of a story.   Maybe they just thought it was a good fit, even it is wasn't. As an example, when I first ran Vampire: the Masquerade  lo those many moons ago, I was planning on doing a pretty typical V:tM campaign with internecine plots and Machiavellian politics.  I had two problems.  The first was the player who wanted to play a werewolf (this was before there even was a werewolf RPG from White Wolf).  The second was a player who wanted to play Batman.  Seriously, his PC's concepts would be that he would wear a mask, fight crime, and drink the blood of criminals and ...

Recently, a member of my gaming group named Rachel started running her own game, a zombie-apocalypse campaign using the FATE rules.  Initially I thought this would like "the Walking Dead" but Rachel has interposed weird cults and alien minotaurs (all of which are excellent) which is far afield of what you'll find on the TV show. I asked Rachel at the onset why she chose a zombie game, given that I had never heard her express enthusiasm for the genre, she said it was exactly because she didn't care for the genre very much.  She doesn't care for brutality in entertainment, or a proliferation of firearms in gameplay.  Her argument is that she would not want to experience the world as a player, but could somehow tolerate as the GM because she knew the players would enjoy it. It seemed really cockeyed to me, because I would think that if you didn't love the game world you were creating, it would become burdensome to continue to be the navigator and adjudicator ...

A friend recommended that I write about what I think about D&D 5E, having now run it pretty consistently for a year now.  What I initially thought about the game still really stands, namely that it has this quality of feeling like the "mode" of Dungeons and Dragons.  Not the average, not the median, but the mode--the most common example in the sample set.  There are, I know for a fact, people who play D&D in some pretty innovative and creative and pretty gonzo ways out there that might skew a sense of "mean" or "median" when it comes to some hypothetical sample pool of what people play fantasy RPG's, but if we look for how likely the game is to be played by everyone, this is probably the ruleset for that play.  To wit: elves, dwarfs, and humans; classes and spell slots; kobolds and copper pieces. I do not feel like that is a criticism, that somehow the game is lessened by that quality, but merely that it is an observation. In fact, the pl...

As is often the case, my friend Adam mentions something on his own blog which then inspires a lengthy response from me.  In this case, it was this post , entitled "An Inconsistent Truth."  In it he complains about this issues of pacing, and the way that players can slow play to a grind by being overcautious. Unfortunately, they don't know how to police themselves (or so it seems). Many of them forego what would be the most interesting, exciting, or cinematic option, instead looking to the most logical option; often making certain it is the surest, safest plan, devoid of conflict, drama, tension, and sadly, emotional impact, and resonance. Right, because for some players, survival is the ultimate point of participating in roleplaying games.  Live to fight another day, get more stuff, etc.   Now that's not particularly heroic, it reflects a more picaresque style of play whose roots go back to the very beginning of RPG's.  Those were the days of Gygaxian lethal...

So, I've been gradually getting around to writing about my three-day gaming weekend, with particular interest in what went wrong and right with each session. And now the final entry. Session Three Genre: Traveller, or more correctly "Traveller" since their game universe has gotten pretty far afield What went right: a tense, exciting plot What needs work: There might be too many vorpal swords lying around This was the "campaign" session, the latest installment in a Traveller game that has gone on for years, but only four sessions a year.  It's important to know the campaign revolves between three GM's, each taking a single session then passing it on.  Over the years the campaign has expanded from a merchant free trader to a fleet of ships belonging to a corporation headed up by the PC's.  In the previous session, the GM of the day decided to take the campaign in a new direction and pare down the scale by having a single ship of the fleet try ou...

Author's Note: Part One can be found here . Session Two Setting: Star Trek, Deep Space Nine era What Went Right: Some great roleplaying by the GM (if I do say so myself) What Needs Work: Overestimating player knowledge So this was my session, and happened on Saturday, which is always the best attended session for the weekend (in this case, nine players).  I had been hankering for running science fiction and Star Trek in general, so I figured the best way to ensure that everyone was relevant was to have the party split into two crews: Federation and Klingon.  With the help of some friends, we put together a DS9-era story rich with the classic elements of DS9: religious and cultural conflict, murky morality, and some Dominion ass-kicking.  I was pretty pleased with the scenario, but I also knew that the group was composed of a lot of die-hard Trekkies, so I crammed the last couple of months for this session watching old episodes, reading articles from online DS9 wiki...

Most of my posts are gaming recaps, and overwhelmingly they get little to no feedback or comments.  This leads me to suspect that most readers are not that interested in reading about how someone else's game went.  That's cool. But last weekend was the three-day End of the World mini-convention, and one of the few times I get to be a player, not to mention GM a genre I'm not running now, so I thought it might be interesting to look at less of what we did as a gaming session, and more of what worked and didn't work from a GMing perspective.  I'll do this in three parts, just to make it easier to read and digest. For those who don't know, at each session we use a home-grown generic ruleset based loosely on the old FASA Star Trek system, altered to suit each session's genre. Session One Setting: Morrow Project (80's Post-Apocalyptic) What Went Right: GMing on the fly What Could Use Work: Fantasy vs. Physics So the basic concept is that, in this g...

If you ask me why the Claremont era of the X-Men was so damn good, I would have to say that it wasn't the whole "Dark Phoenix" saga, or even "Days of Future Past" (although that was very good), it is the in-between moments in the series.  I'm talking about the moments between the fights where you would see the X-Men hanging around in their 70's turtlenecks and mod dresses shooting the breeze about being an unloved mutant superhero or who they have a crush on or whatever.  It was a moment when they were people and not just powers, and you the reader had the chance to actually experience the fullness of their lives. The X-Men have since lost this.  Just look at any comic book and see how infrequently the X-Men are out of costume.  Our appetites now reflect a stronger desire to more action, more splash pages, and bigger conflicts.  And in my opinion, the comics books are less interesting as a result.  You can see this in other genres, that question of pac...

So...Adam at Barking Alien wrote this .  And then some guy who actually thinks you have to type out accented English like you're Chris Claremont writing the X-Men Banshee commented on his post. Only not that charming. The issue, and I feel like I can say this without too much concern about misrepresenting Adam, is that over the years Adam has found that he has engaged in more interaction with his players when it comes to building his campaigns than he did when he was a wee lad and he felt more free to run what he was genuinely loved and players would just trust him that it would be good. Slipped in there is a bit about how players sometimes ignore what the GM is proposing in terms of tenor and theme for a campaign and create something totally out of whack with the campaign.  I know exactly what he is talking about.  It's the guy who wants to play a werewolf in Vampire the Masquerade  (happened) or a no-costume mercenary in a four-color superhero game (also ha...

So true confession time: I have completed most of my RPGaDay blog posts in advance and just schedule them to come out each day. So when I wrote a few days ago for today's RPGaDay question At some point I should write a blog post about me and horror RPG's and how they never, ever seem to work out. Well that day can be today, the day that the first answer comes out. So why is running a horror-themed RPG so difficult?  Let's break it down in no particular order. 1. I game with children.  Specifically my daughter, a sensitive pre-teen for whom I do not wish to create a collaborative story featuring gore or brutal violence for shock value.   While my RPG's do feature violence, and even death, it's the "Hollywood violence" of D&D or superhero stories or whatnot. 2. I tend to make jokes.  I won't even put this on my gaming group, but they are also guilty.  You know how this works.  Something happens and you make a pop culture reference or a M...

As I mentioned a while ago , my campaign's background changed pretty radically recently from being a sort of gothic fantasy to a grim, fantasy noir involving various factions battling each other across a devastated city.  At last Friday's session, the group told me that wanted to go from being hired swords of the various factions to creating their own faction with the goal of ultimately controlling the city. Possible gang illustration This is a big change from the original concept, a sort of "murderhobo" set-up where they were just running around exploring ruins. This is realm-building, and there is not a pre-existing set of rules in the Dungeon Master's Guide for this.  That means that for the first time in a long time, I need to go from encounter building to actually making rules. First, though, we need an endgame.  At what point does the group effectively become the dominant gang in the city?  I'm presuming that means a certain point of manpower, a ...

It seems like lately all I do is write responses to Adam's posts at Barking Alien , but sometimes he says stuff that begs a response. Like this. Some years back (and I know I mentioned it on this blog before) a friend of mine named Lee had the idea that a game session should only last four hours, or so. Around the same time, Zak Smith, and some other bloggers made mention that their sessions lasted about that long.  Then, as now, I would have to ask HOW? How is that even possible? Why is it so even if it is possible? It takes me about forty-five minutes to my Traveller games now that we run them at one of the player's homes. Round trip I'm spending $5.50, and it's taking me an hour, and a half to travel to, and from (45 minutes each way). If I'm not getting at least six good hours of gaming out of the that, I'm staying home.   Why is it so?  Short answer?  Kids.  Work.  Stuff.  I'm not knocking Adam, I'm really not.  As someone who w...