After Action Reports: Your thoughts?

I’ve found some RPG blogs that simply sum up a previous session quickly, a few brief notes on what occurred, perhaps to refresh memory at a later time, or to give outsiders a little glimpse of what they’re doing.  Also, it’s pretty easy to do.  On the other hand, some seem to go all out, not just giving some description, but lavishly describing everything.  When I wrote an Actual Play of Slaughter City with such detail, I received a huge response from those reading it (but, due to the weight of it, never got to the second, especially with the fact we never got past three sessions).  I haven’t tried that here because I thought nobody wanted to read pages of After Action Report… but perhaps you would like to.

So what are your thoughts?  Like ’em short and sweet, or do you want to read depth and detail on what other people are playing?  Leave a comment!

WotG: Session 4 After Action Report

I think I mentioned this before: This session mattered alot.  Until now, I’ve had a rough storyline, similar to my story with my first group where we tackled some minor, unimportant task (bandits) and then moved on to bigger things, I used a similarly small scale story (Bandits.  And an evil cult.  And politics.  Ok, perhaps less simple) to initiate the learning process for my players.

Now, we needed to get into the game, actually introduce some characters, lay some foundations, and get to actually sparking the fire of player creativity.

I originally intended to have a few travel sessions where the players got to know one another, but I decided that, given that we only play once a month and that we’d spend 3 sessions in “tutorial” already, it was time to simply get to the good stuff.  So, after a quick “What happened to you during the trip,”  We brought them right to Orchid Tea City (Bee and I bought an orchid as decoration) and tangled them instantly in the politics.  After Sun Lan Hua, princess of Southern Liang (Bee) had conquered the small village of Memorial on behalf of her kingdom (Southern Liang), Hanzhou, Southern Liang’s rivals, are understandably upset and have sent a decadent and effete ambassador to threaten war and gain some concessions.  Meanwhile, in the court itself, the factions of the Shadow Minister and the Flying General contend for the desolate heart and mind of the king, one advising peace (the Shadow Minister, master of the Gu clan and Erik’s father), and War (The Flying General, lord of the Ma clan, and father of Ma Wu Tai), while Sun Lan Hua deals with family troubles caused by her missing elder brother, her pesky younger brother, and her sultry, too-young step-mother (and, naturally, master Courtier).  Already, politics swirls around the revelation that Street Saint was Prince Hei, heir to the Dong clan, and the cruel, arrogant and stupid prince of the Xi, Brash Stallion, guest of the Royal Sun family here in Orchid Tea City, wants him humiliated by lending truth to the rumors that Prince Hei is gay.  There just happens to be a player-character male courtesan they can hire (And, indeed, was enjoyed over the night for a high price by Shouren, the effete ambassador of Hanzhou).  Meanwhile, the other two heroes, Gou Ying (our Street Sage) and Wolf Devil, find themselves wrapped in a noir fairy tale as a body falls from the roof and smashed into their table and when the incompetent local sheriff (used to helping drunks, not solving murder mysteries) refuses to tackle the case, the gothic, beautiful femme fatale “wife” of the victim begs them to investigate (and lands a curse on Gou Ying that forces him to “bring the noir” with him wherever he goes, which he promptly yin-yanged into a beneficial curse for his Might.  Grrrr, Daoists).  We ended on the revelation that the dead man was, in fact, a member of the Hanzhou emissaries, and that Gu Zan Xue’s (Erik’s) sister might have had something to do with it.

I thought it turned out well, more so now that I look back at it after writing that monster paragraph about it.  It had depth, complexity, much of which I’ve fluttered over.  My measuring stick has really been Bee, who is easily bored lately by any lack of quality, and she complained when I didn’t bring in a certain “irritating” PC into the game (someone she’s obviously picked out as a contrarian love interest), and she had quite a few comments after the game (the only thing she disliked was how easily the king was “duped” by his blushing bride, but there are factors she hasn’t yet picked up on).  The rest seem to be loving it…. except for Wolf Devil and Gou Ying, who were neglected slightly during the game.  They’ve asked for a private session, and I’ve eagerly accepted, as once-a-month is just too slow for me, and this gives me a middle point where I can set up a quick game, establish some of the personalities for the up-and-coming tournament and some of the evil spies and villains lurking at the edge of Orchid Tea City’s virtuous utopia.

GURPS Andromeda Incident: After Action Report 4 & 5

 Wait, where’s 4?  Well, it seems I forgot it.  A quick recap:

After time unfroze and the artillery struck, smoke covered the camp, while Quetzali assault heavies charged in.  Our recon team struggled to fend off the snipers and the Quetzali infantry engaging in suppression tactics.  The highlights: Icarus got in a fist-fight with a chivalrous Quetzali named Ajante-Ro, Bishop personally held off an entire flank by himself, Chaos was kidnapped by a xenophilic Quetzali girl (and had very little playtime), and McKenzie tried to disarm a bomb, failed, and, uh, suffered the consequences.  When the smoke cleared (literally), the team was down two of their three IFVs, they’d lost one of their recon specialists and their demo specialist, and the enemy tactical officer (Shay) left a suggestion that they retreat and lick their wounds.

Instead, the players engaged in strategic planning for the rest of the session, eventually hatching a plan to distract the mobile forces of the enemy commander with a feint at a supply depot while commandering their core comm station and artillery point, and suddenly concentrating all power on one of the now isolated bases.

In short, I got exactly out of this session what I wanted.

Which brings us to last night’s session.

Originally, I had intended for this “Cat and Mouse” Session to involve more recon, more marching, more OODA loop, but I simply didn’t have the time to express it all.  The sort of plans I have, I can see, are the sort of things that you could run for weeks, rather than “in one session,” and so I backed off on many of the requirements (for example, I discarded the need to FIND the supply depot and the comm tower, and assumed the enemy commander (Dagare-da) was stupid.  Which, in my defense, was true.

We started with Jaap (Chaos) waking up in a Quetzali prison, the inquisitive Seleya (his xenophilic captor) admiring him and expressing astonishment (followed by a torrent of questions) when she learned he could speak Tyrannic.  Afterwords, he received an interrogation by the compassionate tactical officer (Shay) who tried to prove his worth to the cruel commander (Dagare-da) to save Chaos’s life.  It didn’t work.  After hearing that he’d been slated for torture and execution, Seleya chose to betray her own and rescue the poor recon officer.  And thus, alone, isolated, armed only with his elite combat knife and an camo-cloak, poor Chaos set out.

The rest of the players (including one of the ladies who couldn’t make it last time) chose to continue marching despite having not slept at all.  After accounting for the fatigue of battle, the lack of sleep, and marching, our characters were literally running on Stims.  The heavy marines (Snow and Icarus) personally took down the enemy supply depot but found themselves faced with the full force of Shay’s mobile squad.  This cost Icarus his arm (Ajante-Ro could no longer play, and deployed limpet mines).  Shay allowed them to retreat only after realizing what their presence (and the lack of the rest of their squad) meant.

The other players succeeded in capturing both the comm station and the artillery with little trouble, as they were poorly guarded (Chaos actually took down the majority of the artillery’s guards with nothing but his knife and luck).

Then we moved to the grand battle, set on a much wider map than usual.  I had intended to hit them with wave after wave of Quetzali (they faced over 100 enemy), but then our artillery character got a critical success. I think you could argue that, at that point, their base would have been too compromised to continue, but I made them fight a single wave regardless.   Nobody walked away without a wound.  Our Shocktrooper (Rayner) took a limpet mine to the chest (Full force, I actually hit him with all the damage.  He took over 70 points worth, and was still going. Berserker).  I took down two additional players with sniper-fire, and only Chaos came out relatively unscathed, and managed to rescue Seleya, whom Dagare-Da had been torturing for her betrayal.  Still, despite their wounds, they managed to take out the enemy (and cute Amy Carver finally got a kill).

When all was said and done, I hit them with the fallout from their Super-stims.  Icarus was actually at -9 fatigue (that’s 9 damage).  The characters had given their all.  Within 8 hours of being ambushed, they had crossed miles of desert to take three major installations, turn the battle around, and with glassy eyes and bloody wounds, managed to defeat a force 5 times their size.

Perhaps it wasn’t the most accurate depiction of maneuver warfare and heroics, but at least one of my players described it as “really feeling like I was pushing my character to the edge.” I felt like I depicted the Quetzali forces in all their dread glory, and showed why humanity is such a dangerous foe.  I encouraged my players to think not just tactically, but strategically as well.  And I gave them all scars. They walked barefoot through broken glass for their victory and, I hope, I feel, it will be an adventure that they remember well.

And now we move to the second to last “arc” (I had originally planned 5 arcs, but 4 will have to do, and the 4th is the best anyway.  A 5th would risk being anti-climactic): Andromeda.

GURPS Andromeda Incident: After Action Report 3

My GURPS Military Space Opera continues, or rather, continued, as this took place several weeks ago and I’m only now getting around to posting about it.

The title for this chapter is “Cat and Mouse,” which hints at the strategic, maneuver warfare I hope to elicit from the group in this arc.  It’s a bit of an experiment, and we haven’t actually gotten to that part, but hopefully, it’ll work out well.

Instead, we ended up dealing a great deal with character development.  The story took place a few weeks after the initial landing, with the players regrouped at a supply point a few days journey (by IFV) from their destination.  While our beloved Lieutenant received the mission briefing, the players had a chance to reacquaint themselves with some of the NPCs.  As with the last session, I trimmed another “uninteresting NPC,” this time the logistics officer (“Who?” asked one of the players “Exactly,” I replied).  It’s not that she was a bad character, it’s that the players have fixated on others. 

In particular, this session turned around several NPCs and added depth.  Specifically, Mackenzie, our ladette, was joined by her loser brother, “Ducky,” which drove her into a motherly panic.  I hope this doesn’t mean Mackenzie loses some cool points, but at least Ducky’s irritatingly rude manner has won over the entire party, giving them someone to kick around.  Interestingly, this means that Amy is no longer the most useless NPC, which is something I’ll have to point out later (also the similarity between both wanting to prove themselves, but only Amy really making the effort necessary to do that). 

Doctor Emerson’s romance with one of the players continues, but his suspicious nature has come completely to the fore, including connections with the black market, a “criminal past,” and his proficiency in combat, which has made said player equally suspicious of him, adding a good dynamic to their relationship. 

Likewise, Sage Hackett’s romance with a player continues to drift between warm fuzziness and raging anger, appropriate to a Tsundere, though I’ve begun to worry that her character lacks depth.  Why is she the way she is?  Where will things go from here?  Still, the players enjoyed her, fought to make sure she stayed with the unit, and the love/hate spat between her and the player earned some laughs.

Finally, we had Kobayashi, who didn’t have a specific story, interacted with a few characters, and managed to make her mark on the players, which is important for the role she’ll be playing later on.  Interestingly, while the lieutenant’s player has decided she loves her (“Kobayashi can do anything!”) at least one player (the player of the most naive character) has grown suspicious of her.  We’ll have to see where that goes.

We ended with the players out in the wilderness, Amy telling another tall tale about her father, with one of the players ordering his recon squad to “establish a perimeter” (the smartest thing anyone did, incidentally) when the Quetazli ambush struck.  The players only had a chance to see smoke engulf the entire camp sight (artillery strike with EM smoke) and one of the recon players (the unlucky one) shot by a sniper (we’re using the blow-through rolls from High Tech, so he “only” took 11 points of damage and -10 to all checks to stop bleeding), and then the curtain closed.

The session was so popular that people have been pushing for the next session, but there’s a few things I’m worried about.  First, my plans for a strategic, rather than tactical, battle are so new I’m not sure how it’ll fare.  I also hope to establish a rapport with some of the Quetzali enemies they face, and that’s always difficult.  Finally, I get the impression that the players would like to spend much more time getting to know the NPCs and exploring relationships.  I’ve been keeping the story moving, due to tight time constraints and the desire to “leave them wanting more,” but while this has been well-received, I still feel it’s lacking something, a sense of depth, a certain |X-factor.  The NPCs from Frozen War felt like they had more depth, like they were more real, while the Andromeda characters feel either like caricatures or unexplored, like they have so much more potential than I can show.

Still, I shouldn’t complain.  None of the players are.

WotG: Session 3 After Action Report

At long last, after many delays, we finally finished our introduction.  I focused entirely on the Great Game, and it went really well.  I managed to fix the problem my previous group had with the lack of kung fu in the game by offering Challenge Stones (for example, one player charged a group and I said if he killed 10 guys in 3 turns, he’d wipe some of the Force Stone off the board).  In general, I allowed alot more personal action, which I think the Great Game is designed to do.  As a result, everyone quite enjoyed themselves.

Except for Bee. Bee was bored.  She wasn’t as bored, I think, as she let on, as she had things to do, but I think I see where she’s coming from.  The introduction has been light and easy, a simple scenario meant to let you understand the game.  But it lacks the sparkle, the dazzle, the intensity that gives a game its X factor.  Bee is enjoying the game “well enough,” and the rest are enjoying it quite nicely, but I don’t want that.  I want them addicted and obsessed.  And that means kicking it up a notch.

I have two more games this week, one GURPS, one WotG.  I’ll have to see if I can pull out the awesome in that amount of time.  Wish me luck.

GURPS Andromeda Incident: After Action Report 2

Our first session ran long, so I cut out the final battle.  Knowing that my players would need extra time to put together their characters, I focused entirely on the final battle and then character creation, and that worked well.

We don’t have MapTool (yet), so I made up some of my own little tokens and a hex map, and it was BEAUTIFUL.  Not nearly as awesome as MapTool, but it certainly did the job.  The battle focused entirely on a 25 Quetzali “mooks,” Heavies and standard Soldiers, with two Assault Hovercraft and a contragravity Dropship.  The players, unsurprisingly, slaughtered all of them.  To a man.  I did manage to leave some wounds on the players and some of the NPCs, however, giving them (rightfully) the impression that they could have died.  Hooray!  Appropriately epic.
Some highlights:

• After crashing to the ground in the middle of the battle, Icarus (a battlesuited Heavy Marine played by Raoul) from ORBIT blew one of the Hovercraft out of the air with his Semi-Portable Plasma Gun, and then leaped in the way of the Dropship’s Semi-Portable Plasma Gun blast, taking the full hit and suffering a mere 5 damage.
• Jack Bishop (played by Pascal) used 3 grenades to take out 2 Quetzali heavies and heavily damage one Hovercraft
• Maddie Madison (played by Maartje) blew the Dropship out of the sky with a single missile and a string of foul-mouthed curses (seriously).

I made one change from my previous G-verse military campaign that, despite it not working well for this group yet, I liked well enough that I will keep:

So I’m playing Modern Warfare, and it occurs to me, while I’m chucking grenades, that they’re on a timer.  This is, of course, obvious in retrospect, but in most games, with 3 second (or longer) turns, this seldom comes up.  You throw a grenade, they blow up, and they kill lots of people.  First, however, this isn’t how grenades actually work (grenades seldom kill people, what they do is flush people out of cover so that you can kill them properly: With bullets), and second, GURPS has single second turns, so it has the granularity necessary to make grenades actually work properly.

But it gets better: G-Verse Humans use smart grenades which can be programmed.  They can be programmed for a very long countdown (say, like setting a charge), to blow up on impact or, my favorite, to blow up when it receives a particular radio signal.  This allows you to throw your grenades and treat them like mines, blowing them when people get close, which, of course, encourages them to keep their distance.  In our game, grenades worked this way, either keeping the Quetzali at bay, or forcing them to run.  So, I’ll be keeping my token-style grenades, I think.

I did a few things wrong.  I always do, of course.  This time, there were two errors that I can think of.  First, the players hit the ground after the Quetzali opened fire.  I declared that while they stayed down, they would avoid fire, but as soon as they came up to fire back, they would expose themselves to the suppression fire.  So they aimed (safely) and then fired (in danger).  I don’t think it works that way:  If you’re aiming, you’re exposing yourself to Suppression Fire.

Second, the Quetzali ran at 8 yards per turn.  Most Quetzali soldiers have a Basic Move of 8 or 9, but they also have encumbrance, reducing their Basic Move to 6 or 7.

Next week, we’ll start with the second major adventure: Cat and Mouse.  Every session, I’ve been exploring new tactical “puzzles” that the players can enjoy.  I’ve been gaining alot of inspiration from this site, if you’re interested.  Good stuff, especially if you’re a 40k player.

GURPS Andromeda Incident: After Action Report

If I hadn’t mentioned it before, I’ve dug deep into my Generic Space Opera material (G-Verse) again because I’ve decided to run a short campaign for the local RPG association. I’ve been enjoying my time with them, lacking in gaming (particularly with the slow disassociation of my Kansas group) and figured “Heck, why not?  I already have the military templates, let’s give it a go!”

The game definitely benefits from the previous run-through (Frozen War).  The templates and loadouts have slowly tightened (making premades and NPCs definitely helped as well).  Knowing the ins and outs of Ultra-Tech GURPS combat also helps, though we didn’t come to that right away.

Tonight was a “one shot” introduction to the game, meant to teach the players how to play, and to introduce them to the world, the storyline and the NPCs.  Everyone who played wanted to play again, including an old friend I never expected (he saw what I was running, attached himself at the hip, and now intends to be there for every session.  In retrospect, I should have seen this coming: He loves space opera, especially the “dark” stuff, and military games).

So: Andromeda Incident: Crash Course opened with a debriefing that introduced the world and the premise.  Each scene thereafter introduced an NPC or two and a key aspect of the game (How to fire and aim a gun, how to use first aid, how to fight in melee, and so on) as well as interesting NPCs: A tough tom-boy demolitions marine, a tempermental mechanic, a brooding doctor, an arrogant heavy marine, and so on.  Then, once everyone was set, we unleashed all hell as the orbital defense grid of the planet they were invading tore apart their ship.  The players had to choose which NPCs to rescue, with each rescue becoming more difficult and lethal, until the final set, wherein I informed players I would be actively trying to kill them.  They, of course, rescued all the NPCS without losing a character.  The bastards.

I had hoped to play out their rough landing and a short battle, but alas, we started late and while I got alot done in 3 hours, I called it quits.  We’ll get more done later.  As I said, everyone enjoyed themselves immensely.  I probably should have played hard ball, but GURPS, IMO, works best when the GM makes quick calls and focuses on “roll & shout” style play, and I did so.  The result was spectacularly cinematic rather than grim and dark, but players had the sense of impending doom and, to be frank, it was Luck that kept them alive.

A success, but hardly surprising: G-verse usually works well.  I am surprised how many people wanted to play, and how vociferously they demanded another game.

Werewolf: the Final Offering After Action Report 2

So, with some work and some arguing, I managed to schedule my Final Offering session for the Open Evening and gave it a shot.  The second time around, things went much more smoothly.  I played down the depth of the NPCs, played up the interesting factors surrounding the demons (the fight, this time around, was much better), and I kept the pacing swift.  We, in fact, managed to finish the entire session in just under 4 hours, which is an excellent clip, and it left nobody feeling underwhelmed.  I had a player who played in both, and he felt it was quite an improvement and, in his words, “probably the best session I’ll ever get out of an open evening.”  Strong praise.

I still feel that the sandbox model I’ve developed works best for campaigns or “long-shots,” multi-session one shots.  I end up feeling as though I’m missing alot of the nuance in my game, and thus all the NPCs get a glimpse, and then we move on (a female player expressed interesting in Gill, surprisingly enough, but I lacked time to even touch on him further).  I think I can learn some solid lessons from this (that I’m at my strongest when I design characters and then work a plot around them, rather than the other way around), but it’s probably a model best left to my longer games.

Amusingly, we had very similar events in both games.  Zig-Zag, our assassin, opted to be a janitor once again, and got in a seriously lethal, though not killing, blow.  A female player chose Shadowheart and played as a student, fell in love with Dixon, and used Corpse Witness on a dead pigeon.  At least this time, she got to speak to the Pigeon King and, erm, make-out with Tom-Tim (Who is now her favorite spirit character evar).  All in all, an excellent session and a big improvement over the first time around.

WotG: Session 2 After Action Report

The heroes still find themselves in the town of Memorial, having finally defeated and purged the area of the Writhing Sickness Cult, and after loudly proclaiming how they intended to win it back for Southern Liang, the Hanzhou troops show up.

Once again, I didn’t get through more than one major fight (though I had a minor, small fight too), partially because one of our players showed up very late again (he said so in advance).  We were also missing another friend.  However!  The fights were excellent.  The players have shifted from simply rolling dice to see what happens and have begun to engage in the tactics of the game.  We’ve also begun to see quite a bit of the Secret Arts (mostly cursing from Rene, who already knows the system, and the Secret Art of Genius from Erik).  So, we seem to be getting the system quickly enough (and no surprise, it’s actually pretty easy).

Most importantly, the game flowed nicely.  Everyone felt in character, I was comfortable with the setting and the spelling out of the tale, and everyone enjoyed the game quite a bit.  The final battle against the cult was somewhat anti-climactic (Erik declared the Writhing Sickness Cult particularly vulnerable to Knock Back and, of course, the evil temple was filled with lava, so naturally, the big bad warrior tossed off an AoE KB effect, and that was pretty much the entire fight), though a bigger fight against the dark, ebil Hell Clan guy was quite a bit more engaging (humorously, every character involved in rescuing the girl from Tiger Knight, including the NPC, was gay. It just kinda worked out that way.  Poor girl).  Happily, both of my gay players have expressed interest in *cough* Street Saint, which means I’m playing him correctly.  The real challenge will be next session, when I reveal Soldier, if Bee has proper chemistry with him.

Next session we dig into the Great Game, and that’s the end of the first arc.

Werewolf: the Final Offering After Action Report

Success!

We started the game promptly an hour late (But this wasn’t my fault: Dinner and clean-up ran long).  Even so, I bounced right into the story with my evocative beginning, brought the werewolves in and immediately hit that moment of “shared imagination space.”  They never left character.

By the time we were finished, we’d killed one of the three demons, the players had identified the remaining two demons, and they had a solid idea of what he was going after.  I suggested twice (at midnight and then at one) that we stop, but they kept going until 2 in the morning, at which point the girls were nearly asleep (and one was still willing to go on).  So, it seems very clear that they enjoyed it.

The high points: As with Slaughter City, you instantly get this sense that you’re stepping into a thriving world that’s “in progress.”  The players quickly identified with the NPCs and began to interact with them right away.  In particular, I think the fact that the spirit world was well defined (my description of the library earned an uttered “Oh wow,” from one of the players) really helped create this sense of exploration and world-space.  The players had the freedom to go where they wanted, the characters worked well together, and to be frank, my players were all excellent.  One player, a hard core D&Der, was the high point of the game actually, with his pompous laziness (the player himself kept his chin up at all times) and the fact that players constantly underestimated his ability to get things done.  He was also the only player to frenzy throughout the game (getting your ass beat by a punk with a burning baseball bat will do that).

The low points: I’m not sure that this sort of sandbox design is good for a one-shot.  With a more “railroady” story, I can get the players right to where I want them, and we can explore the whole story.  This almost overwhelmed them.  One of the players commented that she could barely keep the NPCs straight for the first half of the game, and indeed, it’s alot of NPCs and alot of stuff for a single session.  I also noticed that I hammered out lots of description at the beginning, and then I failed to keep it up.  The players didn’t seem to notice, but I did, and I think a couple of scenes suffered as a result (one player posed as a teacher and wanted to teach a class.  I should have settled down and offered some solid description, some dynamics, at that point).  Finally, the action felt scattered and undirected, which is part of doing it sandbox-style.

Still, I never lacked for something to do, and you could see that the players adored it.  A resounding success, but still in need of refinement.  I’d like to revisit it, clean it up, and see if the Newton group would like to play.