Graph Paper Games

The Red Hood's gang of re-furbished C-listers The general consensus among my kids is that they want me to continue to run a superhero campaign, but are getting a little sick of the rules-light system Bash!  (always with the exclamation point in the title).  So I'm considering re-tooling the campaign with new rules, if not resetting the entire story.  Because Bash! was supposed to be a "beer and pretzels" game to get me by until the next big thing, I hadn't bothered going too deep, plot-wise. So right now, I'm thinking about the foundation for a new supers game, and what's on my mind is Brian Michael Bendis' run on The New Avengers and the several iterations that followed, up through the "Siege" storyline.  This isn't too surprising since it is Bendis' work that formed the core of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game, which I ran for a long while. Bendis began his arc with the "Breakout" event in which Electro is hire...

Good gravy, it's been forever since I made a blog post about gaming. So, I'm currently playing in a Star Trek RPG using the Last Unicorn Games iteration (my friend Adam's favorite).  I'm not sure if the game has hit its stride yet, mostly because there are a whole slew of pitfalls, and we seem to be stumbling into a lot of them. Complex narratives and sporadic attendance.  Sometimes OSR people have the right idea when it comes to dungeon crawling campaigns.  A complicated multi-session storyline is a bear to maintain when different people show up for each session.  I missed a big one and hadn't a clue what was going on the last time we played. Psionics.  I seem to remember there being a TNG episode about the ethical murkiness of someone using a Betazed as an interrogator, but I could be wrong.  We have two Betazed PC's--mine and someone else's, and it is hard not to ask the GM if the NPC is lying or not every time we talk to someone.  I've ...

First of all, I'd like to share a quick video about a guy who has been running D&D (or technically, AD&D First Edition, from the look of the rulebook) for 35 years straight. For someone who has never run a single campaign longer than about two years, I have appreciate that level of commitment, and the collection that has sprung out of it. I, on the other hand, have not posted in two months.  Mostly that's because I haven't been running anything, and more often than not tend to post gaming recaps these days of games that I am actually running, rather than playing.  But the games in which I have been playing haven't been running much either the last two months.  Baker Street , I fear, has succumbed to the weight of the number of players.  The last session was enjoyable, but only about half the players really engaged, at the raw number of players ensured that someone in the group had the maxed-out skill for whatever task was required. The most recent se...

First of all, I switched out the "new" fancy theme of the blog, because I wasn't really caring for it.  Back to the classic layout, I say! Second, I haven't posted in almost a month.  I'm in the thick of the roller derby season, which means making lots of practices, etc.  I am still running Bash , the superhero RPG.  We had a session last Friday, one that focused on my son's character, the Samoan superhero Haka.   Bash has been a fun game to run, and I feel like there are a lot of plot lines to be explored, especially ones connected to the PC's backstory.  But... We also returned back to my basement, which was a welcome change Two members of my gaming group have indicated their desire to run a game: Rachel wants to run Star Trek  using the Last Unicorn Games; Tony wants to do a Victorian-era Sherlock Holmes game using Baker Street.   Now, I'm leaving it to them to schedule these games, but that makes for a crowded landscape. Also in Jul...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my last session of Bash had not gone as well as I liked because my single story, which I had hoped to fill the entire session, had ended prematurely.  So this time I decided on a slew of smaller subplots and just adjust accordingly. It was a good thing, too, because I ended up having a full boat: all nine players in the campaign showed up for this session.  Of note (to me, at least) was that this was the first session in a very long time where we played back in the basement game room of my house.  I'm not sure I've been down there since I separated from my wife six months ago.  For that matter I also made my classic pulled pork for dinner, so the whole thing felt like Old Home Week for me, and that's a good thing.  Now how did the gaming session go? Prologue: Quick, to the Bat-Fax! The New Defenders have defeated Stardust, but are frustrated to find a groundswell of support for the murderous alien, especially from a Super...

So what happens when a couple of things you Kickstarted come to fruition around the same time that the FLGS in town has a fire sale and closes?  You get way too many new RPG's all at once.  Right now my nightstand is crowded with them, and I haven't even cracked open some of them yet.  What's on the reading pile? Evil Hat did a Dresden Files RPG using a proto-version of their FATE rules, and have now circled back to do another using their Fate Accelerated rules.  I got this one as a pdf and hardcover via Kickstarter, and it's a good looking book (although one page was crunched and torn when I received it, it wasn't hard to repair).  I know the source material, loved the TV show even more, and know FATE, so this one might be interesting to get into. Another Kickstarter come to fruition, Ninja High School uses the old d6 West End Games system (best known for their 1st and 2nd Edition Star Wars rules) to portray the American manga series from Antarc...

One thing I've been slowly working on for the last year is another fantasy sandbox campaign.  My prior one was generally map-based, although a city featured prominently in it.  As time went by, it lost a lot of its "sandbox" quality and became more directed on my part.  In the process, I think it lost something. So, after being away from fantasy for a solid year, it's time to get back to it.  I spent some of that last year thinking about cities.   Some fantasy RPG treat cities on a very detailed level, with maps of streets, etc.  But while that's fun "map porn" for GM's, how often would the players actually be seeing or using a map like that?  And how long would it take for them to just accrue that knowledge by exploring the city.  I've lived in my current city seven years, with a car, and I don't know how all the cities line up.  What I know are areas, neighborhoods, etc. some intimately, others not so much.  And if I was going to a n...

There are times when I think to myself, "you know, you could have done a better job being a GM that time."  Last Friday was one of those times. In my defense, after literally having no one show up for the previous June session, I went from having four, to three, to two, then back up to four people signed up for last Friday's session.  When it was down to two, I scuttled the whole thing and stopped planning.  Then, literally the day of the gaming session, two people pop up as planning to attend, and I'm scrambling for content. And with a game whose dice mechanic can be as jammy as Bash can be, that meant that we were done way earlier than I thought, and I didn't have much in the way of fallback material.  Like I said, a less-than-superlative job there. It reminded me why I dislike doing "story" style gaming, because there is always the issue of timing: sometimes you get four-fifths of the way through the story and you've gone way long in the se...

Wow, it has been six weeks since my last post.  Well, a lot has been going on.  A ton of person transitions, some vacation time, etc.  But that's not what this blog is about. Over the last six weeks, my friend John wrapped up his West End Games Star Wars campaign.  I'll admit that I wasn't in as many sessions as I might have liked--another consequence of my many responsibilities these days.  This campaign started as a closed game with a limited number of players but slowly creeped up to around seven or eight.  That's on the high side, and a lot of overlap between certain characters started to show (e.g. who flew the ship). In the final episode the GM decided to split the party.  This is always a gamble, and I'm not sure if it paid off.  This wasn't the fault of the GM, but rather the fickle hand of fate (and some decision making on the part of the players).  The first half managed to handle their scenario in a very brief period of time, ...

I was looking over my blog posts and thought, "I haven't written since March ?  Did I even run something this month?"  And sure enough, I had, but had not written a gaming recap. I suspect part of that was because it was a brief gaming session that didn't move the needle a lot except introduce the group to the archtypical Evil Billionaire Genius Supervillain and throw down with a bunch of supervillain flunkies (the eponymous Vicious Circle).  What was good about the session was some solid roleplaying with the villain and some very clever group tactics in the combat.  That's to be celebrated. I'll confess to a certain amount of ennui regarding the campaign, however.  Maybe it's all the other stuff going on right now, but I'm not really fired up.  I can tell when things are bad when I end up just recycling plots and swiping NPC's from the back of the book.   Bash!  was always meant to be sort of a pick-up, get-me-through-the-divorce kind of RPG ...

My daughter wanted me to run a Bash! session just for the younger members of the group.  She likes her PC, the Lioness, who happens to be a trained martial artist tasked with hunting a group of supernatural villains (similar to Daredevil or Iron Fist from the MCU, or Sara Lance from Legends of Tomorrow).   So, what fun high-stakes adventure with mystical overtones can I possible reconfigure for a superhero episode? I went with arguably the greatest episode of The Real Ghostbusters  animated television show, "Ragnarok and Roll." Jilted boyfriend turned supervillain Jeremy. If you need the rationale as to why "Ragnarok and Roll" is one of the best episodes, this blog post does a good job making the case.  Fun side note: it was written by James Michael Straczynski, who would go onto do Babylon 5 .  I went with the general skeleton of the plot: morbidly depressed Jeremy decides to use a magical flute to not summon Ragnarok (as in the cartoon), but Fimblevi...

So, a couple of months ago, everything shifted.  Some of it was well and goodly expected and some of it wasn't dreamed of.  But in a very short order practically every major relationship in my life changed: my spouse, my kids, my friends, the people with whom I work, and the people whom I serve in my work. Now lest this seem like some kind of pathos-ridden post, a lot of those changes were positive.  The last couple of months have seen my grow and helped me discover a lot about who I am.  But it has been a huge struggle, and some things have taken a real hit, like the amount of time and mental energy I have to dedicate to my hobbies.  I moved away from my basement where I keep all my paint and miniatures and plaster and gaming books.  I'll move back there, probably in another month or two, but in the meantime all that has lain fallow.  I think it is pretty noteworthy accomplishment that I've been running three or four gaming sessions in that time, an...

I haven't been doing much on this blog for lots of reasons (including major life changes), but it isn't as if I am doing nothing  all this time. My gaming group played their third session of the game Bash! a few weeks ago, a game session that introduced an mysterious NPC group of metahumans (aka the Miscreants), an evil corporation (Kort Technologies, which only now I realize sounds like the Blue Beetle's Kord Technologies.  Damn.), and a handful of villains including Hot Rox, Brute, and Gunfire. Gunfire is the latest NPC swiped from the book The League of Unfortunate Superheroes , the first entry from their modern section.  Gunfire was a DC comics character, part of the company's desperate attempt to catch up with Image and the Iron Age of comics with their "Bloodlines" event that introduced a slew of violently-named gritty "heroes." Gunfire had the curious ability to shoot energy blasts from any object, meaning he could turn a wooden mal...

I've been thinking about this for a very long time.  So much so that I'm sure if I looked, I'd find earlier failed starts on the blog somewhere.  But this time I'm going to see how far this can take me. I have owned Central Casting: Dungeons for over a decade, a rare-as-hens-teeth book that is dedicated to the creation of random dungeon maps.  See, unlike some people , I frankly struggle conceptualizing what a dungeon should look like.  But Central Casting: Dungeons is a book that gives a method for creating random dungeons with hallways and rooms.  And "random" is a pretty good word for it.  The few times I've made one-page dungeons from the book's many charts the result has been completely without sense. But I've often wondered what a truly expansive random dungeon would look like.  Would the chaos event yield into patterns, like a fractal?  Or would it come out as some delightfully bizarre? So, I decided to just go with it. ...

I've been talking for a while about starting a superhero game now that the previous "home game" of D&D had wrapped up last year.  For a while I had been planning on running Champions, mostly because I thought it would be fun to run a game that meant so much to me as a college student and might promote long-term play. But as it turns out (to the surprise of few) Champions was difficult to teach and difficult to make NPC's.  Between the holidays and a bunch of stuff at home nothing was happening and the game seemed to be stalling out.  But then I found Bash, a fairly simple supers RPG that was easy to teach and easy for me to make villains, etc.  Two weeks ago I ran a test session of Bash, using 1940's WW2 characters. It was a big hit, and suddenly the WW2 session, the PC's the players had been trying to build for Champions, Bash, and the book The League of Regrettable Heroes  all jelled together into what appears to be the first session of a campaign. ...

I had the chance to follow up with several of my players who were present for the one-shot I ran last Friday of Bash! Ultimate Edition .  Many of their insights matched my own (submitted in no particular order): It's a very easy game to pick up.  The one-rule mechanic of X times 2d6 for effect with X being an attribute or a power, usually between 1 and 5 was pretty simple to grasp.  It also made play pretty quick, even with the six players that I had. The dice mechanic is jammy.  "Jammy" is a term that has somehow made into my gaming group's lexicon, meaning that there is a lot of swing in terms of results.  This is especially true because when you roll doubles of any kind, the dice "explode" and have you roll a third die to add to the total.  If it also matches the others, then it explodes again, etc. For example, if you have an Agility of 3 (low superhuman) you can get a result of 9 (two 1's would explode on the roll, so a 1 and 2 is the lowest ...

With all the craziness going on right now, I took some good advice and set aside complicated plans for long campaigns but instead ran a one-shot of Bash , a fairly rules-light superhero RPG. I also took a break from the norm by setting it in the Golden Era of Comics, with the PC's being a group of patriotic superheroes called The Defenders who are called on by FDR himself to battle the Third Reich.  They are led by American Wonder, with his teammates Pyre, Cosmo, Nitro, Haute Couture, and Blind Fury.  By the time the session was done they had battled Nazis, Tiger tanks, and eventually the Nazi's top-secret weapon, the supervillain Ubermensch!  Thankfully they were not alone, being joined at various times by the stubble-jawed Sgt. Brick  and Pat Parker, War Nurse (along with her Girl Commandos)! Pat Parker, War Nurse is an actual comic book heroine from 1946, depicted here in a bit of fan art. Bash is a pretty fun, easy system that my group picked up right aw...

I'm several days late on getting some sort of end-of-year retrospective, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know, I suspect. Way back in January 2016 I drew my D&D 5E campaign to a close.  This had been going initially as a way to try out the new rules, and lasted until then with a pretty dramatic climax.  At that point the Other Rob picked up the D&D ball and ran with it, doing his own 5E through the Fall.  That was a good game in many ways but to me illustrated the weaknesses of 5E high-level play and made me appreciate bailing out when I did. But in addition to the regular "house" game, 2016 saw a lot of people get behind the GM screen.  Rachel ran her zombie game using the FATE system.  Emma did a one-shot of her own D&D story, and is talking about starting a club at her school.  John started up a regular game of d6 Star Wars , which had a strong start and is still going on. a great photo of Rachel perched behind th...