Slaughter City: Preamble

Another long absence, huh? I’ve just been really busy writing up NPCs and setting material, and studying, and thus there really isn’t anything to say except “Wooh! 5 more NPCs!” and “Hey, I finally understand that bit about how computer memory management works.” And who wants to read that?

(Though, in retrospect, I think posting about my studies might be fun. I’ll be studying all next week, so maybe I’ll discuss exactly what it is and why it’s giving me problems.)

But, at long last, it’s time to run my game, so I have to put down my brush, step back, and let the audience get a glimpse of my work. And lemme tell you, that scares the crap out of me.

This game is something completely different, completely new. Most of my changes in approach and improvements in GMing skill have been gradual, an addition of one concept or two. This feels like a revolution, if I’m correct, and I’m just waiting for it to all go wrong. How? Well, I could overwhelm the players with a hojillion NPCs right off the bat, or I’ll “go McClellan” and refuse to let the players mess up my precious NPCs that took over a month to create!. Or, worst of all, the guys just go “meh” and the game ends before it begins.

I’m being irrational, of course, but stage-fright usually is, and I always get stage-fright right before a game. Never mind that every one of my players think of me as awesome. Never mind that I have to turn people away from my games. I still get butterflies in my stomach. Just how it goes, I suppose. It doesn’t help that alot of people on the internet want to see this game, and this will be my first “podcast” RPG. It’s one thing to impress a dozen players, it’s another to impress the internet. You can’t please everyone, of course, and so I have to remember that it’s my players that matter, not my external audience.

Even with all these doubts, even before I’ve run my game, I’m ready to pronounce this a success. This exercise has been mind blowing. Once upon a time, I used to just sit down at a game with no real idea of what was going to happen, and sort of improvised it. Then I learned to detail the game, to make sure I knew what things looked like and how they looked, and my games improved vastly, mainly because improvisation became alot easier when you had more material to work with. This feels the same, except for an entire campaign. If you told me to stop planning right now and just run a game until I ran out of material, I could probably complete three full stories before I even came close to running out of material.

So, paradoxically, in addition to being terrified, I have never felt more confident about a game! I can see how everything fits together. I know the history of my city, the character of my city, the characters of my city, and I have so many layers of intrigue and mystery that I could spend an entire evening just handing the players fascinating clues and they’d still not know it all (Thus, there’s no fear of someone being “too successful” on an investigation roll and forcing my hand too early).

I feel like a creative cannon, primed with more inspiration than I can handle. I’m filled to bursting with ideas, and finally, I get to show them to my players. It’ll be magnificent. I think they sense it alreayd.

I’ll keep you up to date on how it goes.

Beat Of My Own Drum

Been quite a vacation, huh? I’m still here. I’ve been putting together the last bits of Metzgerburg for the Slaughter City chronicle. I’d run out of inspiration as I struggled with Damnation City’s way of doing things. I found the stats they offered for each district to be too arcane and hard to use to “define” what I felt was the character of each district. To me, a new location should be like a new playground, with new rules that change how you play. So rather than use their stats, I added “special rules” to each area, ignoring the “stats.” Then, while I like the idea behind Damnation City’s “Ambiance” rules, and the fact that it lets you change how a part of the city feels, I felt it was too one dimensional (literally, as it’s a continuum), so I added my own descriptions and rules for each district, while using the core rules for Ambiance.

The result? I found my inspiration again. Metzgerburg is finished: 60 NPCs, 8 districts. Now all I need is the supernatural, and we can play!

60 NPCs

As promised, I have 60 NPCs for my game.

*whew*

The process isn’t done: Several are very rough, there’s not nearly as many relationships as I wanted, and I feel like there are some holes, repetitions, and some characters that need to be adjusted. But that’s not the point: I set out to make 60, and I did. And some really interesting characters resulted. I feel really pysched, like I can do this game.

Next, I need to finish Metzgerburg’s districts, and then get to the supernaturals, and then return to the NPCs and “fill them out” a little better. Then I should be ready.

^_^

Spreading the Curse

So, we’ve got to make Vampire characters tonight. I expect it’ll be a disaster, though not because of Vampire, but because this is the first time we’ve got the whole group back together since WotG, and there’s going to be problems, and that will result in drama. Not the least of which: Every time I ask for someone to do something with my microphone, they all hem and haw and pass the buck to one another. *sigh* We’ll see if that continues to be the case.

For Vampire itself, we’re in touchy territory. Alot of the players believe that it’s “gay,” by which they mean “Girls love the stuff, and if we got good at it, we’d get laid alot, which is totally not what straight men,” or possibly “But… it’s not werewolf!” Either way, I need to make my case fairly quickly, though I have been doing so for the past few weeks now, and I think I’ve solidly sold at least two of the tentative players, and the rest are operating off of trust for my excellent skill (which is good, as I do believe they’ll like the game).

Designing Vampires is tricky, though. Setting aside interesting and potentially problematic issues (“What do you mean Humanity? You mean my vampire CARES if he kills people?!”), you can’t “just” create a vampire. Too many vampires end up these orphans of the night, who simply stepped out of their coffin without having a personality or a past. World of Darkness centers everything on humanity, so I’ll focus the players first and foremost on that. Following my abyssal advice, I’ll also try to get the players to think about their relationships with one another, so no matter how much backstabbing and cut throat gameplay we see, the coterie itself will stay united. Vampire, Mortal, Coterie: that’s the three-pronged approach I’ll take, and we’ll sort of flit from one to another until we have everything figured out.

I think the players will have the hardest time grasping both how powerful and powerless vampires are. This dichotomy actually appealed to me, as it melds the “power fantasy” that some players want with the “survival horror” that others want. If I handle it right, it’ll be the “best of both worlds,” but if I screw up, we could end up alienating both. I’m confident I have it in hand, but the players will need to design their characters appropriately, and that means conveying this truth to them well.

Wish me luck.

Wuxia Weekend

So, I finally got everyone together and had them watch a bunch of Kung Fu movies. We managed to get through Forbidden Kingdom and Red Cliff before exhaustion swept over everyone (Red Cliff is a great movie, but heavy), and we had to quit. Also, I was too sick to cook, so we had to order out. Even so, I managed to pull it off, and I’m very pleased. It’s fun to organize a party and have it go without a hitch.

And next came the WotG invitations. I actually have someone who rightfully doesn’t have time to join us seriously considering it. I’ll know soon enough, I’m sure. Mission accomplished.

On a related note, I had struggled for awhile to know what my story was “about.” In general, I know I need a “trick,” something that makes the story fun. In this case, it would be three different courts and lots of social interaction, with a solid dollop of the Great Game. But I also generally need a “twist,” a cool thing that happens at the climax that shifts the tone of the game and immediately points to where the game is going, and explains why everything just turned up a notch. I had nothing for a very long time, until after Wuxia Weekend, the thought finally hit me: If some of the kewl new Wuxia can steal from Shakespeare, why can’t I? Ironically, this thought had nothing to do with Wuxia Weekend itself, but with movies I didn’t even actually show.

^_^

Idle Military Sci-Fi GURPS thoughts

So, as often happens with my brain, while I’m in the midst of prepping for and thinking about Wuxia and Vampire, space opera stuff pops into my head.

Mostly, I’ve been thinking about the climactic battle where Walter laid down loads of artillery fire, very successfully wiping out the enemy. After discussing it (peripherally) with some friends online, something occured to me: Why didn’t the Quetzali infiltrators jam Walter’s communications?

Seems like the reasonable thing to do. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole Electronic Supremacy that seems to dominate the Ultra Tech battlefield. I grasped fairly early on that in a battle where “I see it, it dies” is the rule, not being seen is how you survive. But putting this into effect has been an another thing entirely.

I simplified alot of the Forward Observer rules in the last fight. Next time, I think, I’m going to make the following changes:

• Artillery is always an option. With orbiting warships and massive, mobile railguns that can easily fire over the horizon at enormous speeds, the players should be able to call down Artillery no matter where they are. A force that is so beaten it no longer has access to artillery generally surrenders (or goes guerilla)
• Forward Observer rules work as normal, so it takes a very long time for the shot to land. But artillery is much more powerful: either a single 100ml Thermobaric charge, or 1d6 64mm Thermobarics, or one really big beam blast or kinetic kill missile from orbit (which comes down really fast). This are more like fight-finishers than a supplement for the characters’ own fighting.
• Getting that Forward Observer roll off requires control of the electronic battlefield. In normal cases, this might be no problem, but when electronic warriors are on the field (infiltrators), they’ll automatically try to jam your comms (just like they jam your radar). The “battle” then becomes about rooting out the infiltrators and/or defeating their jamming so you can call in your artillery strike before they do.

I suspect this will add a new layer, the sort of multi-dimensional conflict that I think should epitomize UT combat. The officer struggles to beat the jamming while the soldiers struggle to root out the infiltrators, while the heavy infantry wades through the artillery barrage to try to take down the officer before he can call another.

It needs more work, but it’s coming together.

Experiments in Setting Design: Districts, Families and Sandboxes

I’m not a fan of sandbox game design. In my experience, most people who do this either create nothing and sort of hope the players will come up with something, or design gobs and gobs of stuff that quickly overwhelms the players. I vastly prefer “quest” directed gameplay, where I give you, you know, something to do, and you get to figure out what the world is like by having it run up and hit you in the face.

But after playing things like Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto, I kinda wonder if I can’t do it another way. They create huge worlds, and then point you in a direction. Wherever you go, there are interesting possibilities, and even if you go flying off the rails, the world remains fascinating. Vampire seems ideally suited to this style of play, as does any urban fantasy game. You create the city and players just… play in it. I give a strong, starting “quest,” and then let players sort of get involved from there. My typical story involves bringing players to an interesting spot, letting them do what they want, and then wrapping up and moving on when they’ve “played enough.” This could work the same way, only on a much larger scale.

It’s not like I lack material. Weapons of the Gods had more than 50 NPCs (at least 50 fully statted holy cow). In a horror game where characters can die (and even have the players killing them off), it makes sense to try to have even more. So I’m trying an interesting experiment: Families.

Damnation City suggests designing a city in terms of Districts and Sites. You create an over-reaching district (say, Chinatown) and then design sites within it (Say, a dojo, a brothel, an occult book store). This makes it easier to figure out how to come up with an entire city worth of sites, because they’re broken down into districts.

So, why not do the same for NPCs? You come up with families of NPCs. Perhaps there’s a group of NPCs from Chinatown, chinese who descend from some immigrants back in the 1860s when people were building the rails, and now are quite Americanized. Come up with 5 specific NPCs per family, design 10 or so families. Now, it’s easier to design 50 NPCs and each NPC comes with prewritten attachements. Got a thing for the cute asian girl who keeps showing up at the night clubs? Did you know her younger sister is in school? Or her aunt is a hardcore detective? Or that a boy from the other chinatown family has opinions about the daughters of this family and who they should be with? Suddenly, there’s a whole web of relationships for your character to explore and, should he choose, screw up.

I’ll try it. We’ll see how well it works.

Wierd Wikipedia

Finally, after months of collecting, I wanted to offer my “weird wikipedia.” Try not to read it in the dark (Because, you know, it’s hard to read stuff without a light on)

After Action Report: Frozen War, Final Thoughts

As the relationship between Sasha and Walter’s character grew, I began to consider the possibility that Walter might shortchange my finale, and I was right. Given a choice between killing a mad psionic god, and abandoning the military and the planet to save his shy sweetheart, he chose the latter… and the rest of the group agreed.

But I have no complaints. The final session was as smooth as a man could ask for. We had a dramatic, climactic battle that claimed the lives of at least one named NPC (Heavy), nearly destroyed another (Katje), and despite overwhelming odds, the players managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. My anti-defeat failsafe wasn’t even necessary, though it was dramatically appropriate and fun.

The players appreciated the final choice offered to them, the role-playing opportunities, and the slow shift of tone away from military drama to full space opera. Incidentally, for those who played, the Madness Bomb was pulled straight from the pyramid.

I had zero rules complaints. This session felt like the first session where everything came together. The players enjoyed their full technological advantages, nobody fudged or messed up a die roll. Everything went well. The players demand more, and are disappointed that I’ve put everything on hold for now.

But I wanted to talk about GURPS instead. The whole point of this campaign was to sort of playtest a sci-fi game, and get an idea if I was “doing it right.” I wanted to share my thoughts.

1. GURPS is fiddle

Alot of GURPS haters complain that GURPS is too complicated. You know what? I kinda think they’re right. There’s lots of little things to remember. Consider just shooting. We had to remember: Range penalties, vision penalties, weather penalties, gravity (which we ditched), speed penalties, size modifiers, RoF modifiers, bulk, accuracy, radar aiming bonuses, computer bonuses, and weapon bonds. Unsurprisingly, we tended to miss bits. Now, it’s true that other games can be just as fiddly (I’m still learning new things about WotG and WoD), and GURPS doesn’t scatter its rules in a dozen books the way some systems do, so when I want to find something, it’s easy to do. Still, I can see their point.

2. GURPS is rugged

The typical response to the above by a GURPS fan is dismissing all those funky modifiers as unimportant, and it’s kinda true. I mean, my players certainly enjoyed the last session, where I had all my rules down pat, but they didn’t exactly hate the first session, where I made lots of mistakes. If you mess things up and wing it in GURPS, it works just fine. I like to have all that detail there, but it’s not strictly necessary. It has been and always will be “Roll three dice and look at how pretty they are.”

3. GURPS is powerful

So, I fudged the Forward Observer rules for the sake of the game. But, of course, Walter had to play expert and tell me that I was “wrong.” So, I grabbed the High Tech book, whipped out the full Forward Observer rules and beat him over the head with them. He gave in. Now, this wasn’t strictly necessary. I could have just given him the Disapproving Gaze of Death, but it’s nice that it was there. It satisfied Walter, it satisfied me, and the whole group enjoyed the (slightly) more detailed rules we used as a result. We had the same thing turn up again and again. Whenever there was a question, a doubt, or an argument, we could flip open the book, and it answered all of our questions. It was pretty amazing.

4. Templates and Loadouts rock

GURPS has been fun for ages anyway, but I really have to say adding templates and loadouts at the beginning of the game smoothed everything out nicely. It did this in two ways. First, it made the game alot easier for players to get into. Just pick a couple of templates at go! Worried about gear? Don’t! It’s all right there. Second, it ensured that players had things that I felt they should have. Everyone had luck, serendipity, useful skills and solid gear. This is part of the reason you didn’t see people using tech early in the game (they didn’t know what it all did), but blossoming into it later (because it was there). If they had chosen their own gear, it would have been “Power armor, guns guns guns,” and the infiltrators and mines would have destroyed them. They would never have thought of targeting computers, radar, survival gear, cuff-tape, first aid kits, trauma maintenance gear, and so on. I’m using templates and loadouts all the time now.

5. GURPS has awesome supplements

I look at my WoD collection and despair. Invictus? Never used it. The setting books? Discarded. Coteries, Nomads, the Lodge Books, the Bloodline books, Sanctum and Sigil, the Tome of the Watchtowers, the Banishers, book after book that I bought because I just wanted a book, but never used and barely read. When I do run WoD, I end up using the core books and maybe one or two additional books. And WoD is one of my favorite games. Don’t get me started on 7th Sea or oWoD or games I bought and never used.

GURPS, on the other hand, has some wicked awesome supplements. In this campaign alone, I used: GURPS Space, GURPS Ultra-Tech, GURPS Bio-Tech, GURPS High-Tech, GURPS Psionic Powers (PDF), GURPS Loadouts (as inspiration, another PDF), GURPS Action 2 (PDF), and Pyramid issue 9: Space Opera (also a PDF). Now, some people will look at this list and think “I have to buy all that to play?” No, of course not. But if you did, you’d be as well supported as I was, instead of poor and pissed off like you might be with other games.

6. Maptool rocks

Byler introduced us to it, and while it’s been a pain, it’s also been a huge boon. I’ve never really messed with GURPS tactical combat until now, but at Walter’s insistence, we started grabbing maps, and boom, the entire shape of the game changed. It does take longer to figure things out. For example, our fight in front of the secret lab took the better part of two hours, but instead of fudging and saying that there were more than they could deal with, I showed them that there were more than they could deal with, and they dealt with them anyway.

Miniatures are great, but in a game like GURPS, people want to play what they want to play, and I want to use what I want to use. We would never limit ourselves to the creativity of some modeler somewhere, and we could never afford all the pewter necessary to make our game work. I could not POSSIBLY use Quetzali if I had to rely on models. But in Maptool, it’s pretty easy to just clone pretty pictures and use them again and again.

And miniature combat has so many benefits. It provides constant tactical feedback. It helps you remember where everyone is, what they are doing, and that they are there (cough). It’s really reshaped the way we play GURPS.

So the big question is, was it a success? Did I enjoy GURPS? Would I run it again?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

It’s fiddlier than I would have liked, but the Newton crowd doesn’t care, so we’re alright. I wouldn’t run it for the Eindhoven crowd, but that’s ok. It was quite a pleasure to unveil a full setting to my players and have them eat it up and want more. Being the first GURPS game we’ve ever truly finished (with the possible exception of RG), I think this one definitely goes in the annals as a legend of a game.

Mountains and Valleys

So, a few weeks back, if you remember, I bemoaned my lack of players. I had three, barely, and I knew I was at a nadir of gaming in Newton. I believe I also mentioned that if I just kept trucking along, more players would come.

I was right.

Shawn has joined us, and Cass is poking to play, and Swoyer wants to be involved when I start running Vampire.

It’s hard, very hard, to be in a place where not many people want to game with you. It makes me lonely, but another part of me says: “Keep going, and more people will come.” See, RPGs are a social activity, and people want to know that something is worth their investment of time and effort. That may sound cold and callous, but only if you don’t understand it, and don’t compensate for it. This happened with Dark Souls (I went from 2 players to 7), Hunters Hunted (2 to 5), and it’s happening again now. I understand it, I know this, I’m not surprised by it, but there’s always that part of me that bemoans when players desert, and rejoices when they return.

Still, something for other newbie GMs to keep in mind. If you can just keep running, keep going along, and make sure other people know about it, don’t worry, game will happen, players will come.