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.

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.

Werewolf – the Final Offering: Speed NPC Challenge

I’ve got one week to finish prepping all of my werewolf material, including the setting, the plot, and about 25 NPCs.  I also have a test during this week.

Wish me luck.

Werewolf – The Final Offering Impressions

With my new Dramatic Combat system and some minor modifications at the suggestion of gamers wise than me, I thought that, perhaps, it was time to revisit Werewolf and see if it could hold up to my expectations.  And so, I agreed to run a Werewolf one shot for the Knights: Final Offering


Young Uratha Initiates have on final task to be accepted among the Forsaken: they must slay a demon. A servant of the Maeljin has secreted himself in a boarding school, and it’s up to the werewolves to infiltrate the school and eliminate him. How hard can it possibly be for five werewolves to defeat one demon? Or pretend to be students?

I intend it to be like a mini-Slaughter City, a sandbox with about 20 NPCs, a rough direction for a storyline, and detailed setting information.  That way, it’ll play differently every time I run it, and I intend to run it several times (perhaps even for my werewolf fans back in Kansas).

I’m currently working on the pre-made characters (pulling away from my “detailed/Interesting PC” model of the past in favor of a more Lady Blacbird style “Here’s one character element that makes them interesting” and a solid build, as players never play “your” characters “correctly” anyway), and I must say, when you start getting into level 3 gifts, the characters quickly become more interesting than I anticipated.  I might be wrong about Werewolf being “too broken.”  If you just loosen up the gift restrictions (You do not have to take gifts “in order, and taking gifts during character creation works the same as it does during actual play) and give the werewolves about 35 experience, you get some fairly awesome characters.  I’ll share them later, perhaps.

Anyway, I’m excited, and that’s a good sign.

Slaughter City Session 3 After Action Report

The last session left me unsatisfied and disoriented, though I’m not entirely sure why.  It might simply be my lingering insomnia, actually, because overall, I thought it went really well.

We dragged Cass kicking and screaming into her story, but she quite enjoyed what she saw when she got there.  She didn’t do much, but that’s not the point.  She’s there to be an outsider looking in, watching all the cool drama and then, if she wishes, interacting or not interacting or bemoaning her situation or what have you.  The point is, she now has material to work with, and that’s good.

Roomie and Dave went crazy.  What is it with Dave?  Just because you can kill someone doesn’t mean you should.  And so, we have our first major named NPC death (with a mortal.  The other named NPC?  Also Phillip’s kill.  Stop pumping your fist and notching your belt, Dave, I can see you!), Danny Devlin, major mafioso.  Funny thing, though, that might actually work out really well for the story.  It’s certainly extraordinarily dramatic, and Roomie once commented on how he’d love to see how much damage he caused.  Well, there ya go, some serious damage.  I tell you, I’m seriously glad I statted everything up, because otherwise, this would have left me completely at a loss, but now I find myself mentally counting up the impact this will make on the world.

The group is really having a hard time adjusting to the game.  Shawn saw a serial killer nabbing someone and, without thinking, without hesitating, threw himself (unarmed) into the situation and, shock of shocks, nearly lost a limb, and sped out of there.  Likewise, Dave and Roomie just pounce on a major crime lord without thought of repercussions, and even Byler just walks up to a girl he knows belongs to someone else and tries to put the moves on her (while I’m sure it was unintentional and Byler was just trying to nom on pretty women, his complete disregard for the fact that the Crassus clearly belong to Marion and that, while Esther has been offered, she has not been given to him, really fits with his whole “spoiled bastard prince” persona. Daisy needs to raise him better, but she’s not really big on rules or discipline).  I spoke to Roomie about this, and he says we haven’t played at this power level in a long time.

Which isn’t true, our GURPS game as about this power level, possibly lower.  Of course, even there, Byler tried to kung-fu a guy who had a gun to his head executioner style with his 150 point character and was surprised when, shock of shock, it didn’t work.  Mad too, though he got over it.  I think it’s just the culture of the group: we play high-powered, epic games.  The guys are used to being uber heroes who answer to no one and seldom suffer consequences beyond dramatic, hilarious, soap-opera/comedy consequences, similar to much of the anime we like to watch.  I wasn’t kidding when I called vampire a “Dark, survival horror,” though, and the group is only slowly starting to grasp exactly what I meant.  Yes, you have kewl powers, but you’re not an Exalted vs a Mortal, you’re a former mortal with a curse.  Vampire is not a game about glory, it’s a game about consequences.

Plus the format is very strange for the group.  I generally only hit players with opponents they can handle.  They don’t expect, for example, that Porcelain, the pretty Korean woman draped all over Master Tiger in the very first session, is actually one of the most combat-capable mortals in all of Metzgerburg (up there with two of the characters the players faced yesterday).  That’s not generally how my games work.  You expect such a character at the long end of a line of increasingly bad-ass NPCs.  Instead, Metzgerburg is a sand box, the dragons are mixed in with the goblins, the bad-asses rub elbows with the mooks.  The guys really aren’t used to this.

In fact, I’ve noticed they’re really struggling with the whole format: they don’t investigate much, they don’t sit up and ask to do something much, they don’t think ahead and plan and ponder the deeper implications or this or that.  They watch, they wait, and they react.  They’re treating it like an action game when it’s a game of mystery, intrigue and horror.  But that’s to be expected: we’re a few sessions in, it’s a very different style, and they’re still adjusting.

I’m going to keep at it.  Now that we’ve established a base of the setting and sufficiently involved everyone (It would have been nice to involve Dave more in storyline material, but every time I do, he kills the people I’m offering him as hooks O.O), and we can get back to killing vampires and figuring out just who the Mother and Mortimer Tooms really are.  Once the arc is finished, we can sit back and reassess and see how people are or aren’t liking the game.

Slaughter City: the Dark Bond

I mentioned before that my players are splitting up far too often.  I’d like to encourage them to stay together, rather than brutally enforcing it via metagaming.  I could ask them to stick together, but I’d rather it “made sense” and that it was a tempting option, either to avoid sticks or gain carrots.

Talking with Roomie gave me an idea.  What if the coterie bond between the characters went deeper than expected (or perhaps this is normal among all coteries): When a vampire in a coterie awakens, he has within his twisted soul a faint measure of power and love for his fellow members.  Thus, once per day, he may pass on this bond in the form of a bonus.  To do so requires touch, or at least being in sight or hearing range, and this bonus must be applied immediately to a roll. You cannot “save it up.”

I was thinking the bonus would be a rote action: you can reroll any and all failed dice on a particular roll.  This is sort of like “giving a player joss” from WotG, except it requires you to actually be there.  This means if you’re going into a dangerous or important situation, it’s useful to bring your coterie mates along “just in case,” since they can directly lend you support via the dark bond.

What do you guys think?  The bonus too strong?  “Once per session per player” too weak?  Lemme know

Slaughter City Session 2 After Action Report

At Cassandra’s request, we had another game, one earlier in the month than normal, and it might be our last for awhile (though on the other hand, I’m tempted to slip in just one more session here in about three weeks.  Tempted.  Readers: Don’t take that as gospel), and overall, I think it went really well.  I designed some interesting hooks and played out the consequences for various stories, and some players chose some very interesting solutions, resulting in, among other things, and daylight fight for our heroic cop (which earned him back all of his Willpower. How could it not?)

There were a few flaws, the greatest of which was pacing.  Despite me telling the players to be there two hours early, we still started two hours late.  My god.  Of course, the real problem was a broken computer and a sick player who ended up oversleeping alot.  So this wasn’t a situation I can or should really blame on someone.  It was just a bad roll of the dice.  However, I tried to force players to choose between situations “You can do this or you can do that, but not both,” and they ended up splitting up and going in all possible directions.  Almost no scene included two players together except for the very final scene and the very first scene.  As a result, the game involved alot of waiting for everyone.  They didn’t seem to mind, but I did.  The game is more interesting, as Walter loves to point out, when you can interrupt someone else’s story and get involved.

So I need some way to encourage the players to remain together. I can just tell them to do so, and they probably will (as they did in the first session), but it might be nice to come up with some reason, like some danger lurking on the streets that grows greater whenever they are alone.  The bad guys are coming to know the players’ faces.  Maybe they could start stalking the players and ambushing them when they find them alone.  This makes separating a calculated risk, rather than a mandated “do not do!” from on high.

Byler, Shawn and Roomie had a blast, and no surprise, they had the lions share of the game planning.  I don’t like it, though.  Not that they got to game, but that Dave and Cass hardly did.  Part of this comes from their exhaustion.  Cass even fell asleep during the game, but eagerly woke to play, suggesting that her sleepiness did not stem from boredom.  Even so, I had hardly anything planned for them.  Dave tends to play best when he gets to be a killing monster, but he isn’t active, he doesn’t pursue people unless people first pursue him.  I might need to change that, and I have a few ideas how I might (For that matter, I had an element I wanted to hit him with, and forgot). 

Cass is a bigger problem.  Stray has no background, no details, no personality.  Or, rather, she does, but Cass won’t tell me about it, presumably because it is “unfinished” yet, and she’s nervous about it (and possibly also because it’s still in flux).  Worse, she hides from the world, which inevitably results in her sitting around petting her pets, which is fun in real life, but crap in a game.  She wants to play the outsider looking in, but to do so, she must look in.  It’s not enough to simply be the hermit on the outskirts of the city, cleaning your nails and picking your nose.  If she is falling asleep from boredom, I think I know why.

I need to find a way to drag Stray kicking and screaming into a human society she can’t possibly deal with, so she can angst over boys she cannot have, so she can watch people laughing and talking that she cannot be friends with, so she knows which wicked people to stalk, and with desolate people to secretly help.  I need to draw her into Fairmount, where she can meet all the interesting people and one cat.  I’m just worried if I kick her out of her comfort zone, she’ll resent me for it, or that it’ll disrupt the background/story she’s trying to create.

Changing Gears: Weapons of the Gods

So after a couple of months of obsessing on Vampire, and with Mass Effect 2 right around the corner (I should have it in my hot little hands today or tomorrow), I’ve decided to run… Weapons of the Gods.  Yeah, that was clever. 😦

My Eindhoven crowd has long heard tales of how awesome the game is, and they were really some of the first to help me understand the game (Jimmy and Menno in particular, and Rene more recently), so I’ve wanted to run this for them for a long time.  Bee also hasn’t really enjoyed a table top game since Exalted, and I hope/think that WotG will scratch that itch for her.  I can already see her tentatively expressing interest in this element or that.

I’m glad this game appeals to me so much.  Without even meaning to, I find myself falling into the WotG mode, imagining awesome fights, over-the-top characters and melodramatic intrigue.  Thankfully, Weapons of the Gods is very much a game that helps you come up with stories, so after the players made their characters, I’m already buzzing with ideas.  I’ve drawn inspiration from some of the most unexpected sources: once again, Tengou Tenghe, despite being a sub-par anime/manga, really fires me up.  Wuxia movies I had dismissed (the Banquet in particular) keep coming up in my head, offering more and more ideas.

After the enormous success and pleasure of Slaughter City, I want to write Romancing Tigers the same way, but I’m unsure if it’s a good idea.  Heaven’s Hand, my Newton game, sort of wrote itself over time.  I had an overall arc in mind, and then I simply filled out the details as we moved from session to session, allowing the players’ actions and interests to inform my choices.  Furthermore, Slaughter City is about vampires in a static location.  I need only design the people of a city, and prior relationships with the characters don’t exist, as vampires “in the world, but not of it.”  Weapons of the Gods generally favors more of a “quest” style gameplay, where characters run around, meet new people, and fight them.  Kung fu warriors are fundamentally tied to their setting, part of secret societies, clans, families and kingdoms.

On the other hand, Weapons of the Gods demands detail.  You really can’t fake a character’s martial or secret arts.  They need to be detailed.  Moreover, Weapons of the Gods encourages you to use “relationship charts” to track how NPCs feel about one another.  These two things combined encouraged me to stat all my NPCs in Heaven’s Hand, which in turn inspired the statting craze of Slaughter City.  So we’ll see.

Vampire: Frenzy

When you pick up a new game, you spend alot of time learning to master its intricacies, a dance I’m long familiar with due to my love of systems and my “Gamer ADD.” You try new things, make mistakes, re-read the book, and see things in a completely new light. And then you tell your players, they nod and agree, and life moves on.

World of Darkness is a very flexible, very “narrative” system. The rules function primarily to facilitate your telling of a story. They resolve disputes, tell you what happens next and, most importantly, help create “interesting choices,” the very core of “gameplay.”

Vampire’s frenzy rules work exactly so. They grant me a chance to step into the heads of my players’ characters and show them how alien a vampiric state really is. I can reveal how profound a vampire’s hunger or rage really is with the roll of a die. However, if I use too heavy a hand, I violate another rule that I must confess I often violate: do not tell the players what they are feeling. There’s two good reasons for this. First, it’s just bad form. A player is in control of his character (except when he’s not, the whole point of frenzy), and knows how that character feels better than I possibly can. Second, more importantly, it’s a crutch. If I say “You meet a scary guy. He’s scary. You’re scared,” most players generally dismiss the character. If I show you that he’s scary, with words like “looming” and “sinister” and “flashing eyes,” then most player characters will understand that fear and react accordingly. (There’s a third reason in a vampire game: Vampires often mess with your mind and emotions. “The vampire uses nightmare, therefore, you’re scared” creates different results, a different feel, than describing a scary character and letting the player react accordingly).

I think I over-used frenzy in the last game, though much of it was Predator’s Taint, something that always occurs. Perhaps my players wouldn’t agree: Many of Roomie’s frenzies came understandably from his hunger, while other characters (like Byler) hardly needed to roll for frenzy at all, as they were in a well-controlled environment and well-fed. According to the book, it’s “up to me” when characters should roll for frenzy, but it shouldn’t happen all the time.

The book also repeatedly states that vampires cling to their humanity to stave off the beast (ie frenzy), yet provides no mechanics for this. Thus, I propose a personal guideline: the higher your humanity, the less often I require you to roll for frenzy. Another book (I forget which) offered the idea of rolling a single die and comparing the results to your Humanity. A roll equal to or lower than your Humanity resulted in “virtuous” action, while higher than your Humanity resulted in “sinful” action. The book suggested this as a roleplaying tip, but I think it might serve well as a guide for frenzy: If I am in doubt as to whether or not you should frenzy, I will roll a die and note the above. Thus, Dave is far more likely to frenzy for “little things” than Roomie, thanks to his mounting madness after diablerizing that vampire last session.

Thoughts?