Fearsome Foursome Festivus - Third Annual

When I was in college, I had a group of friends with whom I would game extensively.  We’ve kept in touch after graduation remaining very close.  Unfortunately, life and distance keep us from being able to see each other very often.

In no particular order, we have Adam, Josh and Serious Mike (he had to be differentiated from me somehow, and Adam enjoys assigning nicknames to people).

Josh speaks quietly and is a great sport for ribbing and teasing.  Which works well, because Adam and I certainly enjoy picking on everyone.  Josh always comes with great game ideas, but sometimes (and mostly accidentally) says and does some of the funniest things in games.

Adam likes to joke and hates when people try to tell him what he should be doing.  To the point where if someone suggests that he should do something, often he’ll do the opposite just to show them that in fact, he would do something different.  His usual stance is to avoid being serious in games, though he can come into streaks or games where he takes them quite seriously.  Just got to make sure he’s prepped for it ahead of time.

Serious Mike understands rules, numbers, and efficiency.  Very early on in our friendship, it was fun to see him come up with the most efficient method to achieve a result and explain it to the group, and then watch Adam do whatever he could to not do what Serious Mike suggested.  He has a dry and sarcastic sense of humor.

I don’t remember which of us it was that first suggested it, but three years ago we decided to pick a weekend in the Spring and head to a hotel somewhere centralized (in New Jersey, as the case turned out), bring a bunch of games, and just pretend we were back in college again playing games all weekend.  We’ve managed to do so every year now for three years.  This past weekend was the most recent one – the Fearsome Foursome Festivus, or the Fearsome Foursome Reunion Tour.

So what did we end up playing?

Zombicide

This is one I am quite familiar with.  By the time I arrived on Friday night, Josh and Adam had already played this one a few times.  We went for dinner and then got a few more games in.

At one point, Adam was trying to put together the board (which, for those who have tried, know it involves a healthy amount of cardboard).  One of the pieces on he put down made no sense where it was.  Josh deduced that Adam must be reading the instructions wrong so he took it from them, but after reading, he made no changes.  Knowing that both Josh and Adam must be wrong, I took the instructions and found that indeed, they were incorrect.  Adam laughed at how little either Josh or I trusted him.

But an example of our lack of trust for him followed later that same game!  Adam has no idea how to play games (at least that’s the opinion I have in my head despite all evidence to the contrary) so at one point Josh and I were getting excited about how close we were to winning and told Adam what he needed to do in order to get us to a full victory.

Now it’s worth saying that Adam does actually know how to play games just fine.  Unfortunately for Josh and me, he also hates people telling him what to do.  So instead of following our instructions, he took the car his character was in, drove over one of my characters, killing him, and then hopped out of the car and shot another of my characters.  I proceeded to drive over both of his characters.  While we were engaging in a battle in the streets, Josh’s two characters up and fled the scene, escaping and winning while my last character was pulled down by zombies.

Good times.

Gauntlet of Fools

Serious Mike joined us for the next game, Gauntlet of Fools.  This was the only new game for me this weekend.  At the beginning of the game, four characters were selected and each was given a random weapon.  We went around bidding on characters.  You could steal characters from other players, but to do so you had to add a boast to them (“I’ll play the Monk with the Throwing Stars, but I’ll do it while juggling!”)  Each boast provided a different mechanical disadvantage to the character.  Once all players had characters, you head into the dungeon to defeat monsters and collect gold until the monsters kill the last player.  Then whoever has the most gold wins.

Overall it was a decent game.  We were getting tired by the end of it, and most of us were not really paying much attention.  At one point I had a hungover, juggling, one-hand-tied-behind-my-back, hopping-on-one-foot barbarian head into the dungeon.  He got killed pretty quick.

Level 7

The guys wanted to try out Level 7.  We went through the first two adventures, the first time with Adam and I escaping through the elevator while Josh and Serious Mike were captured in the medical room as the Lockdown began.  The second game we all escaped as we got the aliens and guards to start fighting in the first few minutes of the game.  That gave us the breathing room to get everyone out by the end.  Wasn’t easy, but it was a lot of fun.

Flashpoint

This game has become a staple of our Reunion Tours.  Josh is the one who introduced it to me back at the first outing.  He had one expansion that I do not currently have (though I will be getting it soon).  It brings you into a two-story house.  We played two games, the first we managed to win but barely, and the second we rescued everyone we could.  Then, for absolutely no reason, we decided to try to get Josh into the house on the second story and cut the house down around him so it collapsed.  Adam took over the Captain to force Josh to move while Serious Mike and I ran around the outside of the house with chainsaws cutting down the supports.  We managed to get him killed – it was fun.

Iron Kingdoms

Serious Mike ran us through the introduction session of Iron Kingdoms.  It was pretty good – I had already played through it once before at GenCon, so I generally let the other guys make the decisions about the game while I moved around and helped out.  I picked the magic character – the first time I tried using one – and he was quite good.  Blasting out spells and being able to boost hit and damage was fun.

The session itself was pretty linear (as expected for an intro).  With the exception of the fact that this time we essentially opted not to open a biscuit business like we had the first time I ran through this campaign, we did everything almost exactly the same.  The boss fight felt a little tougher, but Serious Mike was playing the villain a bit smarter and healing him for 6 or so wounds every turn.  With an armor of 19, it was tough to take him down.  We ended up doing so by surrounding him and removing his shield from the equation.

Later, I ran the group through a second Iron Kingdoms session – one I had written a while ago and just left the notes in my book.  It involved a lot of negotiating, some history, and then a small fight.  We ended up passing out at 2:30 in the morning and leaving the session unfinished (which cut out two more fights).

Quarriors

Finally, we played Quarriors.  Since last year, I had picked up two new expansions – one that introduced Locked Dice and one that introduced Quests.  Overall, neither of those expansions really added much to the game.  They brought in some needless complexity while not really adding anything of value.  The best way to play Quarriors, I think, is to use the base game and first two expansions.  They don’t really add too much more in the way of rules, and don’t muck things up too much.

Overall, due to external circumstances, the weekend did not go as long as normal and I felt we got fewer games in than usual.  Hopefully next year I’ll have a little more freedom to get some time off from work and get out there early on Friday rather than losing about a half a day there.

Through the Breach Campaign Idea

I was listening to a podcast, thac0, and they were discussing making pitches for the next roleplaying game they wanted to run.  That got me thinking a bit about what I would want to pitch as my next game.  Given all the excitement around the new Malifaux roleplaying game coming out, and given the fact that it’s not coming out until a ways off so pitching a game for it would not serve to derail me from Legend of the Five Rings (I have a bit of gamer ADD when it comes to roleplaying games), I came up with a Through the Breach campaign I would want to run.

Given that the group I would run the game for includes one person who is very familiar with the Malifaux fluff and feel, two who are somewhat exposed to it, and two who would be brand new to it, I would want to run something where not having a lot of knowledge about the world would not be a hindrance.  Added to that, I would not want to feel shackled by what is already in place in the plot and story.  Very quickly, the idea for my campaign came into focus.

The players would be among the first scouting groups sent through the Breach after it reopened, trying to figure out exactly what happened to the first group.  The Neverborn would be all but unknown, and the group would slowly be introduced to them.  At the same time, the group would be dealing with the Guild moving in and establishing their foothold in the city of Malifaux, one district at a time.

Resserectionists and Archanists would not be established groups yet, but the potential would be there for these characters to become among the first in each of those groups, and their actions would dictate how the Guild reacts to them.  I have images of a character learning about and seeking out the necromantic powers all throughout the city, and of another starting to pull together scouting groups to push off the oppressive yoke of the Guild.  Alternatively, the characters could side with the Guild and put down these uprisings of groups that are trying to move away from organized establishment of a workable society within Malifaux.  All the while, the Neverborn would be a constant threat, trying to push back against the encroaching humans.

Whether this campaign ever got off the ground or was just a pipe dream, I don’t really know.  I’m enjoying L5R far too much to consider dropping it anytime in the near future.  But after the day that story winds its course, is Through the Breach next on the plate?

Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying

Over the past weekend, one of my roleplaying groups decided to pick up the Iron Kingdoms roleplaying game and give it a try.  Several of us managed to play over Gencon and enjoyed it, but since then we’ve been playing a few other games instead.  Dan volunteered to run a quick one-shot session and made up some characters for us to use.

We had four different players and decided we wanted to make sure we had a few specific character types, just to try out the system.  We needed to have someone with a Steamjack, someone who was good with magic spells, and someone who was melee-oriented.  If possible, we wanted to try both spell-caster types (wilders and focusers), and maybe get some gunwork in there too.

Our characters came out like this:

Brian played a Field Mechanic / Arcane Mechanic with a steamjack at his disposal.  He was a Gifted Wilder.

Ellen played a Warcaster / Duelist with warcaster armor and an extra armor-boosting spell.  She was a Gifted Focuser.

Mary played a Pirate / Thief with a bit of sneaking and a lot of skills.  She was the type of character that could attack twice in a round, though we forgot to use her second attack the entire game.

I was a Stormblade / Knight with the Intellect character type, so I would give a +1 to hit and +1 to damage to everyone near me.

We used models for our fights, and rather than using a blank canvas and measuring in inches with our tape measures, we went ahead and used a square grid from our Dungeons and Dragons days.

The game was pretty straight forward.  We started with investigating a jailbreak by a notorious thief.  We were not the only bounty hunters on his trail, and as we tracked him, another group came by and instigated aggression against us (by nudging one of our horses off the shared trail).  We responded with appropriate force (by killing them all).

Soon we tracked down the bad guy and his group of merry men, talked our way into getting an opportunity to sneak up on him, and then had a huge fight.  At the end of the day, when his men were all defeated and he was at sword-point, he offered us money to let him go and we negotiated a nice settlement in exchange for giving him a one-day head start.  We ended the session there, having had the opportunity to see what we wanted to see from the system.

My thoughts were as follows:

1.       I remember enjoying the system at Gencon.  I really enjoyed it now too.  We had to do a little bit of digging through the book to make sure we were doing certain things right, having never really played before, but it was grounded enough in the Warmachine system that we didn’t have to work too hard at it.

2.       It’s a lethal system.  Despite the fact that it started out feeling like a DnD game, my character got hit twice and had one hit point left.  Where in DnD your HP increase every level.  Your character is constantly going to be a hit or two away from dying.  I like that.  In Legend of the Five Rings, a lot of interaction between players is facilitated by knowing that if you do not try to talk your way through a problem, you could very easily end up dead.

3.       Fate Points are really good and should be used often.  I think I used them the most of everyone in the group, yet I never had a lack of them.  They come back to you when you defeat an enemy or when you roll a critical success on your skill checks, so you’re going to be getting them back often.  And the things they can do are strong.  Prevent damage, heal wounds, reroll attacks, help skill checks, etc.  They are the thing that set PCs apart from NPCs, and you shouldn’t sit on them waiting for the “right time”.  I think you should always make sure you are down by at least one, because you never know when you’re going to get one back.

4.       Stormblade / Knights are awesome.  Even without taking the extra attack, my character was getting 2-3 attacks in a round.  I would attack.  If I killed that person (with a two-handed Storm Glaive it wasn’t that uncommon to do), I would attack again.  If someone near me was hit, I would attack again (once per turn).  There are ways to get unreal amounts of damage out there early on.

5.       Armor is king.  The only reason I was able to survive as well as I was is because I had a high armor, and Ellen’s Warcaster would keep up an armor-boosting spell.  The POW of most weapons was not incredibly high – usually in the 8-10 range.  My character’s ARM 17 made him a tank.  Add in the fact that Fate Points could heal me and I was sitting pretty.

6.       Charging is key.  There are no ways to boost damage that I could find in my character other than charging an enemy.  And once you charged, you would put out a third die of damage, which would usually wreck enemies.

The game has an obvious focus on the combat system, much like Dungeons and Dragons.  There are social skills available, but their system is generally just a skill check.  One thing I appreciate about the way that Iron Kingdoms does it, though, is that they use the 2d6 rather than the 1d20 to determine a roll.  In 1d20, you have equal chances to roll a 1 as you do a 10, 11, or 20.  With 2d6, the progression is not linear.  You’re far more likely to roll a 7 than you are a 2 or 12, which allows for a bit more normalcy in the dice rolls.

Overall, we all had a great time with the test run.  Next time we test it out, we might try to get some different characters on the slab.  I’m still looking forward to trying out a Rifleman / Gunmage.  He’s been on my mind since we first played at Gencon.

Gamers Lounge Special: Through the Breach Interview

Head on over to The Gamers Lounge and check out an interview with Mack Martin regarding the new Malifaux roleplaying game up on Kickstarter.  Mack goes into some detail about what to expect and what's coming down the line.  Good stuff.

Improving My Craft as a GM

I have played roleplaying games for almost two decades at this point.  Strange to realize that I have been roleplaying longer in my life than I was not roleplaying.  My preference between running games as the GM or playing them as a character has always tended towards running games.  Maybe I’m just a control freak.  I’m sure my players will attest to that.  But as most games have 4-5 players for every GM at the table, I need to make sure I can offer the best game I can.  Otherwise if I offer to GM a game, I’ll just be overruled by the rest of the group and we’ll go in a different direction.

Over the past few years, I’ve taken a much more deliberate approach to being a GM.  I have always enjoyed doing it, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot from running games, but over the past five years or so, I have been much more focused in trying to hone my GM-ing skills.  Sometimes I’m successful in my attempts, and other times I find I still have a lot to learn.  I thought it might be interesting to look back at some of the things I’ve tried to learn.

The Ice World – Dungeons and Dragons (4E)

I ran this story back in college with Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, and then decided to revive it when the Fourth Edition of the game came around.  It was our first long-term 4E campaign so I wanted to go with a more familiar storyline.

The setting was a world that had been dominated by an ice age ever since the Frost Dragon (one of four siblings) had been slain, unleashing his cold upon the world.  The other dragons fled, leaving their world to slowly decay.  Now the three dragons were returning, but in the form of eggs, and forces around the world were trying to gather them for their own plans.  The players had to nurture the eggs, then hide and train the newborn dragons, then lead them in a war against the other forces that were trying to claim them.

As a GM, I had a couple of goals for this campaign.  Primarily, I wanted to finish a long-term campaign.  So often I would start a campaign, get really excited about it, and then have my interest wane halfway through.  It sounds like a simple goal – just to finish a campaign – but it certainly was something I had to work at.  Knowing I would run the campaign through to the end helped me learn how to keep grasp on a growing storyline.  I used to keep expanding and expanding storylines until I could no longer keep a hold on them, and then I’d give up on the campaign and start anew.  Knowing that I would have to end the game eventually taught me how to be tighter in my storytelling.

The other thing I incidentally started doing was being more flexible in my GMing.  This is something I had been working on in the past, but I decided to push it farther this time.  When a player told me what they were doing, I tried to move away from figuring out why what they were going to do would not work and towards trying to figure out how it would work.  As a result, several parts of the story were vastly different than I anticipated.  One of the players killed off the historian who had a lot of knowledge early on just because he was a goblin.  Later, a daring escape was led down an ice mountain by one player using a second as a sled.

I actually had a harder time with the second part (being more improv-friendly) than with the first.  Running the campaign to completion was difficult at times, but I always knew that I could get it done because I was in control of the whole situation.  It would only really fail if I let it fail.  Being more flexible with players was harder because I had to always be on my toes and suppress my instinct to find the fault in plans.

The Fairy Tale World – Grimm

Grimm was a system I had wanted to run for a long time, but it took me a while to track down the book for it.  The premise was that everyone was a kid, and that the things from Grimm’s Fairy Tales were real.  This was well before the television show of the same name, so if you’re thinking it’s going to be like that, you’re a bit off.

The idea of the world is that the characters all fall into the Fairy Tale world for whatever reason and play completely in that world.  I wanted to mix things up a little and try a different type of story.  I’ve always loved time travel and the paradoxes that can come from it, so I decided to craft a story working with that as a premise.

The idea was that the characters would travel back and forth between the real world and the fairy tale world.  Every time they returned to the real world, things would have changed as a result of what happened in the fairy tale world.  Slowly the group figured out why that was happening and by the end of the game, they were able to control the changes and set the world back to normal.

In the mix with all of this was a group of adults who were trying to harvest this ability the children seemed to have to reshape the world.  And one of those people managed to get himself caught in the fairy tale world, and was able to start pushing the players around in the real world, dropping them through time.

Sound complicated?  It was.  Having gone through and finished a full campaign, I decided this time to try to test the limits of how intricate a plot I could create and still reach the goal of finishing the campaign.  I ended up with unusual situations of having the players roleplay through the results of actions they had not even set into motion yet, and then having to backtrack in future sessions and get the situations to line up with what had already been done.

My initial storyline proved far too ambitious.  After going through a few fairy tale worlds, I decided for my own sanity I had to cut the story in half and toss whole pieces out the window because, as usual, I had created far too much to work with.  I slipped into one of the hardest campaigns I’ve run where I really had to force myself to keep going.  It started to feel a bit more like a chore than like something to do for fun.  Thankfully my players were encouraging and I cut a few pieces out, restrung the plot together, and we managed to get through to the end.

Lesson learned, though.  I had to be a lot more realistic about my plots knowing that I would eventually have to tie them all down in the end.

The Four Horsemen – Alpha / Omega (and other systems)

I have never really been a fan of gaming systems.  When it comes down to it, I just don’t really care about the system we’re using.  That was never more clear than when I ran one of my gaming groups through a game of Alpha/Omega.  We had seen the game at GenCon one year, and the art for it was gorgeous.  So we decided we had to play it.

Of course, I am the worst at dealing with gaming systems.  So I told my players to read what they felt they needed to know, and we’d go from there.  Shortly after, I got fed up with the crunch-heavy system and we adopted a different system.  That one lasted longer, but we ended up piecing one together that worked by the end of the campaign.

My goal as a GM for this one, beyond playing the game to an end, was to play a modern-ish (really more like a Blade Runner style world) game.  I love modern settings.  Supernatural, Buffy, etc. are all shows I love.  But there’s a problem when I try to translate those to roleplaying.  I suck at running modern games.  I feel stupid when I’m trying to justify a group of people infiltrating an office building and killing a businessman and then escaping because… well… what kind of sense does that make in this world?

This was an attempt to get that monkey off my back and run a modern game where the players could do outrageous things.  Because let’s face it, they do outrageous things in every genre.  It’s just easier to hide them in other genres.

The other thing I wanted to do with this game was try my hand at running a series of shorter stories.  One session “crimes” to solve with a vague overlying plot.

I managed to succeed at running the full game in a modern setting with a Supernatural bend to it, but outside of two or three sessions sprinkled here and there, I did not succeed at a “monster of the week” type campaign.  My tendency to want a large inter-woven story took over and I started piecing together parts of the small stories until they all became one large plot.

The Gods – Scion

Having proven that I could run a modern game, I wanted to return to see if I could run it a second time.  I was trying to run a superhero game, but instead I went with Scion and gave it a more mythological bend.  The premise of Scion is that the characters are literally the children of gods of a certain pantheon.  In this case, the Greeks.  But I wanted the players to go through a bit of uncertainty and exploration of who they were.

The plot here involved government conspiracies, the old Greek gods, other Scions of the Greeks, other nations and their Scions, and the Titans of old.  I tied the story of the world back as far as WWII with the allies and axis utilizing different strains of genetic manipulation to try to create super-soldiers, of which the characters were the third generation of the American version.

After Alpha/Omega, I decided I was going to pick a single system and stick with it all the way through, even if I didn’t end up liking it completely.  Also, after having a couple of great scenes from Alpha/Omega involving the back-stories of a couple of characters, I decided this time I would make sure to tie every character’s background into the plot one way or another.

I was able to achieve this with varying degrees of success.  Interestingly (though not surprisingly), the characters who were tied in more tended to enjoy the game more.  One character in particular I struggled and struggled to get involved in the game.  In the end, his was the least involved character, and I think he was fine seeing the campaign end.  Even still, the other characters got pretty well involved and enjoyed the game.

Legend of the Five Rings

This is the campaign I am currently running.  I had a few goals when I started planning this one, and time will tell if I manage to hit any of them.  A lot of my goals are based on refining previous goals, or continuing my more successful plans through to this campaign.

Foremost, I am building a campaign that hopefully does not favor one style of character over any other.  Specific sessions may favor one over the other, but I am trying to make sure every character type has equal time to shine.  In the midst of a battle to save a city, for example, the courtiers were able to negotiate treaties with other clans present to get assistance to have direct impact on the battle.

I am also taking my plans from Scion to incorporate every backstory.  Since I consider myself having failed at that last time around, I am endeavoring to put more effort into it this time around.

Finally, I am trying to plan for the long term a bit better.  Every session I create I have a list of things I am trying to accomplish beyond moving the plot of the game forward.  One session may have the following notes on my page: make sure the characters meet X and don’t like him, make sure they learn about Y event happening elsewhere, and make sure that Z happens near the characters.  I may not have devised exactly how those things are going to happen in the session yet, but keeping those in front of me helps to make sure my long-term plans actually work out well.

To achieve all of this, I have had to be far more organized than I have been before.  I am writing out all my sessions, recapping them afterwards to make sure I don’t forget what happened, and writing notes to myself for what I want to happen in the future.

While not a goal, one interesting thing about this campaign is that for the first time in a long time, I will actually know the system better than the people playing it.  I have found this is very advantageous.  Often in the past I have favored story over the crunch that goes along with it.  It might just be my point of view, but I feel like I have a lot more internal consistency this time around because the system of the world is consistent and something I understand.

I like to consider myself a good GM.  My players tend to enjoy the games I run.  We still tell stories about different sessions or scenes that we remember.  But the same as any skill out there, becoming a better GM requires one to put in the effort.  Not all of my campaigns have high responses from others, but the more I run, and the more I vary my style each time, the better I get and the more I enjoy it.