The Black Helicopters Arrive

Yes, that's a Black Helicopter hovering over my house. I'm not sure what we did to deserve this at way-too-early on Sunday morning, but it did add a bit of excitement into our day. We heard this ungodly and completely unfamiliar noise coming from the back and when I looked out, I saw trees swaying and debris flying in every direction. Then I looked up. I half-expected to see repelling MIBs but after a few minutes, the menace eventually flew elsewhere.

Not something you see every day. I suspect it was inspecting power lines, but I can't really be sure.

In other news, I'm facing a HUGE deadline here at work. Posting will continue to be light until about mid-December, though I will post if I get a few spare moments.

Timetravel Hijinx

Last Saturday's episode of Slaying Solomon was a real treat. While I am the series creator and usually run things, we regularly feature guest directors. This allows me the pleasure of playing Erik as a real PC, which is an absolute joy. There's just something wonderful about playing that lovable, stinky, muscle-bound slacker that couldn't keep a secret if the fate of the world depended on it.

Anyway, the last episode (entitled "The Ghosts of Christmas Future") was directed by Greg*, who normally plays Drew. It was a brilliant, high concept episode involving a very focused application of time travel. We started the episode in the middle of an oh-my-god-we're-going-to-die brawl in the we hours of Christmas Eve/Morning. An established NPC demon with time travel powers was available to facilitate a desperate evacuation to 12 hours prior, whereby we had to relive the previous day's events as our past selves and struggle with our future selves to find a way of winning the battle once we had caught up with real time.

I had been hoping to run an episode something like this for a while because it seemed like one of the few genre TV tropes that we hadn't used yet. But as I was still trying to figure out how to make it work, Greg beat me to the punch.

And it did prove to be a small wonder of organized chaos. Greg allowed us a great deal of narrative power to define how we actually ended up in that fight. A rule of time travel (for the episode if not the entire series) was that we absolutely could not change history. So when we declared that our future selves "remembered" something from the previous 12 hours, we miraculously managed to make it happen for real.

Of course, Erik instantly remembered the he had received a call from himself (thus kicking off the whole series of events). Erik can't keep a secret, even from himself. The conversation between future Erik (played by me) and past Erik (played by Greg) was one of the highlights of my RPG life. 

Now the Greg has done this episode for Buffy, I can't imagine doing it again for this particular campaign. *But*, Oh My do I want to try something similar in the next game that I run! And it doesn't have to be time travel. This episode also served as a model for how to one of those "start the party in a cliffhanger and explain how they got there before the resolution" type games. 

* By some strange coincidence, Greg has run most of our Christmas episodes. Weird.

I'm A Sorcerer?

Interesting Friday afternoon Internet time waster courtesy of What D&D Character Am I? Not too shabby, though the class choice is a head-scratcher (and very non-optimal).

I Am A: Lawful Good Human Sorcerer (6th Level)


Ability Scores:

Strength-15

Dexterity-16

Constitution-13

Intelligence-16

Wisdom-14

Charisma-13


Alignment:
Lawful Good A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. He combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. He tells the truth, keeps his word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished. Lawful good is the best alignment you can be because it combines honor and compassion. However, lawful good can be a dangerous alignment when it restricts freedom and criminalizes self-interest.


Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.


Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.


Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Teaching The Kid To Game

It's Teach Your Kids to Game Week, which is very timely given that I'm trying to teach my own boys how to play something closer to the games I like to play. After various experiments in pushing miniatures (and Lego figs) around a map and rolling dice, I think we've fallen into a bit of a rut. Mostly, we pair off combatants, roll dice (the number and type vary from day to day) and the winner knocks out the loser. It's getting old for me and I've had limited success in persuading them to introduce other elements.

That is, until now. Last night I feel like we had a breakthrough. With my youngest asleep, my first grader and I got out the box of minis and some previously unused poster maps that I discovered in the lower reaches of Gen Con swag bin. Not having had much luck in exploratory games, I instead opted to construct a military scenario. My child would assemble a squad of 6 heroes from among the miniatures (and Legos and actions figures) and I'd do the same for the villains. Then, and this is the key point of departure from previous efforts, we each made up extremely simple character sheets for our guys. On the spot, I made up a rule that said we could distribute 4,3,3,2,2 values amongst our team members in both attack capability and defense.

For the first time, the boy was able to make interesting and significant character creation decisions. Which of his team members were the strongest attackers? Which had the highest defense? I swear, I think I saw a light bulb go off in his head.

Playing out the scenario was a lot of fun. I played it out mostly Risus-style, with the attack and defense values indicating the number of dice rolled. We even tracked damage with hit points equal to the sum of the dice. Movement rules were simple (characters could move one "zone" or engage one target in melee combat) but we did include rules for ganging up, which added a nice tactical element. 

The obvious next steps:

* Try to craft a more traditional adventure

* Introduce more complicated movement rules

* Introduce range combat

* Move to an established rules system 

* Finally, the holy grail would be start an actual mini-campaign.

Ryth XP Followup

Following up from Len's response to the question of XP in the Ryth campaign, John Van De Graf adds his two cents:

Actually I don't remember how or why we came up with XP calculations.   It might have been from Gary Gygax, or inspired by something he said, but we didn't always follow Gary's rules, and we freely modified anything we thought appropriate.  For example, Chainmail combat rules said characters got more weapon swings as they increased in level, which we thought unrealistic and did not use.  Gary told me that the rules were supposed to be a framework for a campaign, which was one of the reasons the first rule set was so vague on many issues.  I tried to get as many clarifications from Gary as I could and find out how their D&D campaigns resolved specific points, but we always felt free to experiment with our own rule modifications.

I believe that we kept track of XP for the group, then divided it evenly among the surviving characters.  Because we divided the XP, the higher level characters tended to go in smaller groups or do more solo adventures to maximize their XP.

As for how the XP system worked, it seemed to suit us because we never felt the need to change it.  We did have a range of levels, but that range was not very large:  very few players got above level 10 as I recall.  Until one of our priests got high enough to resurrect people, death was permanent so it was difficult to get past level 7.

Your Ryth Questions Answered!

Reader DHBoggs asks:

I'm curious about the Experience Point system in the "Major Rules Clarification" paragraph, which if I understand correctly was an idea from Gary Gygax. 

The basic rule seems to have been to average the levels of the combatants to get an average level to figure XP. 

I'm wondering how well this method worked for you, how you felt about it, or if any problems arose. 

One thing I can see is that it would be to the advantage of higher level characters to bring along more lower level ones to lower the group average and provide a little more XP. This may not be such a bad thing, though, since higher level caracters would assume to be leading and instructing the lower level ones in the fight, justifying a little more XP. 

Happy to wax philosophical 40 years after the fact, Len Scensny replies:

I do remember that we were concerned about our campaign developing imbalances if too wide a gap was created between characters. John and I bought in very strongly (at least I think John did too) to the fundamentally non-competitive basis of D&D. For me, one of the strongest attractions of the game was that each adventure was a session of cooperative problem solving, not a struggle to see who ended up on top - quite a paradigm shift in the gaming hobby, and in my mind the most significant break from the past that D&D offered. 

At our first large exhibition adventure, during a Detroit Gaming convention in late 75, we were explaining the game to a guy named Will Niebling, and he asked "So, how do you win?" John and I looked at each other and clearly couldn't think of a satisfactory answer. Whatever we said did seem to satisfy him, though, since he joined that session and our campaign, eventually moving to Lake Geneva and working for TSR. 

But, I digress. In my mind, it was important to have all players in an adventure within a few levels of each other, to maximize the fun for everyone, and to assure we had a large enough pool of players for any adventure. I also didn't particularly want to encourage players to try to hog too much of the fighting. In fact, watching the group efforts of the players to figure out what to do was a lot more fun than observing a bunch of die rolls. And that's not something readily measured with experience points. So there was no problem with averaging the experience for me, or as far as I could tell, with the players.

Slightly Tipsy Elevenman!

On this November 11th, 2011, I am celebrating my 41st birthday. As I mentioned to Dan Suptic on Google+, I always thought that this would be the day that I'd develop super power or be abducted by aliens or be inducted into a secret conspiracy of wizards. Or something like that. With a rare day off to have margaritas at lunch with the wife, who's to say that any of those things haven't already happened. I'll know more when the buzz wears off. For now, I'm happy to have S. John Ross dub me "Slightly Tipsy Elevenman", the greatest super hero the world has ever known.

And on a more serious, less tipsy note, I was planning on doing a crap ton of writing today for my own personal enjoyment. I've done a little bit but nothing that is really meant for the blog (some solo gaming experiments and what-not). I'm also really enjoying just having a laid-back, work-free week day with the family.

Fortifying Foes

I've been a bit out of it when it comes to following the hottest new developments from the Risus community, but I did want to give props to Dan Suptic for his new "Fortifying Foes" article over at the Risusiverse. If you run Risus games then this is stuff that you can use now! The article contains a whole menu of options to add mechanical spice to foes in combat. Some of these (like the "Backup cliche" option), are simply reminders of techniques that are already present in the game. Others are fascinating rules variants that really bring the awesome. I'm definitely going to use some of these the next time I run Risus.

(And for those of you who are not playing Risus at the moment, these techniques can serve as reminders of cool stuff that you can do in just about any other RPG)

Lady Blackbird

Lady Blackbird is a wonderful little mini-game produced by the esteemed John Harper. The premise is that in a "world" of cloud islands floating in an infinite sky, a swashbuckling aristocrat flees an arranged marriage and an Imperial cruiser aboard a diesel-punk skyship. The rules are light but the scenario is rich and I've heard nothing but good things about how it plays out in one-shots and Con games.

We did not play Lady Blackbird on Saturday night. But we might as well have been playing it, because that evening's introduction of Oddesey's new character to our Knights of the Astral Sea campaign allowed me to loot the Lady Blackbirdscenario for this session's premise. It helped that Odsysey's character concept was a swashbuckling space-opera heroine fleeing multiple arranged marriages and an evil despot of a father. It helped even more that one of the "worlds" in the Knights of the Astral Sea multiverse is the Cloudlands, a dieselpunky, Flash Gordon-style space opera setting that features countless worlds in an infinite sky. I came up with this setting in the late 90's and was totally floored when I saw the similarities in Lady Blackbird. I knew that it was only a matter of time that I'd do something with Lady Blackbird in my game.

My regular chronicler was absent during this session, so there won't be a play report from Queen Genevieve's perspective. But for the benefit of all the absent players (and anybody else that is following the story), I'll try to summarize.

***

While Queen Genevieve completed her negotiations with King Oberon of the Summer Court (and while handsome young Jude continued to fend off the advances of Queen Titania), the rest of the party lounged in a stately tower overlooking the sweltering City of Brass. While tinkering with a mysterious gadget that she had just found, Myria accidentally teleports the party to a mist-shrouded clearing in an as-yet-unknown world (that it was not in Faerie was immediately apparent). General Picton (commandant of the Queen Air Force) takes to wing is able to gather enough intelligence that the more seasoned interdimensional travelers of the group could guess that they were in the Cloudlands. 

Hiking down a path, the party arrives at small but relatively crowded smugglers port. Language is not an issue, thanks to Lord Tybalt's telepathy talent. Of the myriad of locals, only Iris (Odyssey's new PC) found it odd that these "circus performers" (they were a strange group) arrived on no known sky ship and that they were speaking an obscure language of a distant outpost of "Britannic" traders (i.e. English). While she approached the party to make conversation, an Imperial Cruiser flying the banner of her evil father appeared in sky overhead and all hell broke lose. She beckoned the party to follow her to the ship that she arrived on, a strange jet-powered craft named (appropriately enough) The Lady Blackbird. 

A brief and bloody aerial battle ensued but the Blackbird was able to jump out to a remote navigation beacon. Unfortnately, further jumps were impossible until repairs were made. In that time, the party was introduced to the crew and General Picton conducted reconnaissance on a nearby clous island. He discovered, almost too late, that it was a trap and that three Imperial gunboats were preparing an ambush. 

As it turns out, half of the Blackbird's crew (all but Captain Vance and the plucky but recently killed gunner, Snargle, were in the process of selling out Iris. A major fight ensued, with General Picton boarding one of the gunboats and Lord Tybalt boarding the others. The session ended with the enemy forces destroyed and the Blackbird's crew slain. Still in possession of the gadget that Myria was tinkering with, the party was able to teleport themselves and the Lady Blackbird(!!!) back to the City of Brass. They also learned a crucial bit of information: the Spanish Empire was in cahoots with Iris' father and were moving against (or had already moved against) the Britannic outpost on that world. As it happened, the Lady Blackbird was appropriated Spanish technology that would no doubt provide a crucial bit of intelligence to Queen Artoria and her boffins. That is, of course, after Queen Genevieve and her friends used it to depose the evil Chairman Meow and reclaim the throne of the Autumn Court.

November is Solo Game Appreciation Month

It has something to do with the whole "11-11" thing, I think, but J.F. at the Solo Nexus (and author of World vs. Hero) has declared this month to be Solo Game Appreciation Month. Seeing as how solo gaming (through the Mythic GME) was actually responsible for resurrecting this blog back in 2009, I though I'd mention it. Life is super busy now and I'm getting in a fair bit of awesome face-to-face gaming, so solo gaming has fallen by the wayside. But I still look back on those solo games that I played with great longing. They were really fun and they taught me a bunch useful techniques that supercharged by GM Fu.

So, yeah, I hope to do some solo gaming this month. And given that my birthday on is on 11/11/11, I owe it to myself to do something on the big day. I have Mythic games that I'd like to finish (like Ebon Knight and the Microscope experiment), but lately I've been itching to play test an extremely rough game engine based on Hamlet's Hitpoints that I've been kicking around. I'll keep you posted on the happenings on and any generally applicable gaming ideas that come out of it.

Practical Cartomancy

In my last post, I mentioned that I was revisiting Hamlet's Hitpoints with the idea of creating an RPG engine that borrowed heavily from the beat analysis contained therein. I don't know if this will all work out but it seems interesting and at the very least may lead to useful techniques that can be applied when running more traditional games.

A key component to my theoretical upcoming "Beat System" is a way to generate useful answers to complex (and simple) questions with only a deck of standard playing cards (Jokers included). While the Tarot would no doubt yield a more traditional (and varied) divinatory experience, they are not as easy to come by. More importantly, I was already planning on using a standard deck for generating the beats themselves (which map nicely to a standard deck) and mixing the two feels wrong.

 

So here's my dilemma: how do I best describe how to use a card's value and suit to answer questions? A casual Google search turns up various traditional interpretations of suit and value. The problem is that such interpretations are not consistent with each other.

 

So I think I'll just push forward and work things out as I write. Please forgive the rambling nature of this post as I'm in discovery mode.

 

The magic system of Castle Falkenstein associates four realms of magical effects with the four standard card suits:

1. Hearts: Emotion/Mental
2. Diamond: Material
3. Clubs: Elemental
4. Spades: Spiritual/Dimensional

 

This is a good starting place but it is ultimately unsatisfying. I'm not a fan of having all Elemental effects being grouped under one suit and the categories themselves do not lend themselves to ink-blotting quite so easily.

 

I do like using the four traditional western elements, however.

1. Earth: Body, shapes, health, solids, life, plants, wood, metals, minerals, *possibly* magnetism, the planet Earth, the planet Saturn, the underworld, agriculture, the colors green and brown, endurance, strength, physical resistance, common crafts, natural resources, wealth, etc. There seems to be a female aspect to this as well (fertility splits between earth and water).
2. Water: Liquids, storms, emotions, passive understanding, intuition, femininity, romance, flexibility, the soul, spirits, wine, weather, fertility, empathy, madness, dreams, the Moon, the color blue (and possibly green), ice, steam, faith, clergy, fame, celebrity, wise women, child birth, art, creation, and purity.
3. Air: Winds, intellect, logic, communication, problem-solving, lightning, electricity, technology, science, wizardry, technical crafts, masculine thoughts, iimposing one's will, inspiration, justice, and nobility. Also the planets Jupiter and Mercury as well as  the colors blue, white, and purple.
4. Fire: Passion, war, anger, violence, passion, destruction, direct application of force, the planet Mars, the colors red & orange, blood (shed by violence - menstrual blood associated with water instead), and primal universal energies.

That's pretty much what I want but the mapping to traditional suits is not obvious. There are a couple ways to spin it...

1. Hearts: Water
2. Clubs: Earth
3. Spades: Air
4. Diamonds: Fire

In that case, I'm guided by color more than anything else. A better mapping would consider the Tarot equivalent of the suits as well:

1. Cups -> Hearts -> Water
2. Coins (Pentacles) -> Diamonds -> Earth
3. Wands -> Clubs -> Air
4. Swords -> Spades -> Fire

I like this a lot. There are some slight deviations from tradition, though. When one considers a professional/caste symbology, things move around slightly:

5. Hearts: Clergy (standard) but also artists and celebrities and bards (well, bards can as easily fall into Clubs)
6. Diamonds: Farmers and craftsmen and laborers and defenders of the hearth and merchants (farmers seemed to be more traditionally associated with clubs)
7. Clubs: Judges, scientists, wizards, bureaucrats, lawyers, scholars, bards (the scholarly sort), diplomats (though some could lean more towards water). Nobility is traditionally the domain of the sword but more cerebral leaders would land here. Fathers as well.
8. Spades: Warriors, most nobility, demagogues, and also murderers and thrill seekers.

I like this arrangement because "female" concepts are vaguely red and "male" concepts lean more to black.

 

Ok, accepting the fact that no interpretation would line up with occultism perfectly, this works nicely.

One more few more thing...

 

52 cards = 52 weeks. Each card lines up with with week of the year.Taken sequentially, one could consider seasonal correspondences:

 

1. Winter -> Air (cold) and thus Clubs
2. Spring -> Water and thus Hearts
3. Summer -> Fire and thus Spades
4. Autumn -> Earth (harvest) and thus Diamonds

 

Anyway, these are just some thoughts that I had this weekend. I'm going to play around with things a bit to see how they work out in practice.