Creepy Crawlies

It is nice to see more of my posse on board. If only to ever elusive, dashing, downright enigmatic Ebo would drop his truth bomb on us.

Alas, my last post was catty. I realize that now but I regret nothing. Jeff has shown himself to be nonplussed by the egregious attack I levelled against his character in my former post, or as it is being called "the great american novel."

To be more brief this time, I am glad Jeff is largely unstirred by my remarks, because frankly, he runs great games. For all the crap I give him, I know this game is going to be a lot of fun.

I shout and yammer that I feel marginalized, duped even. Really I think I'm just suffering from the creepy crawlies because we have stuffed 20 pounds of character creation into a 5 pound bag and I am jonesing to play. It's been nearly a week since my last fix and I need to hear the clatter of dice and smell the scent of... Scratch that. The smells I can take or leave. But if I haven't RPed a single G come Monday, I am not going to be alright.

This is officially a cry for help.

Advancement in the driver's seat? And Hi!

Hello everyone! I am Jeff, and will be posting here from time to time. I role play frequently with Lee, Ed, and the ever elusive Ebo.

Anyone who has role played with the same group for some time can quickly place their friends into different roles that they tend to play in the game. I'm not speaking of damage dealer or healer, but of how they go about engaging the game itself.

I find this to be the general breakdown:

1-2 People actively engage the plot and story of the game.

1 Person actively engages their own plots that have little to do with the game (my apologies to my GMs).

2-3 People sit back and wait to be called on.

It is the last category that concerns me, and I am often interested in how I can move those players to "get into the game".

Now, we have a long standing tradition of playing a lot of DnD and a lot of White Wolf. In both games, at the end of the session you get experience points. It is easy enough to kick back, roll the dice on your turn, and collect your reward at the end of the evening.

Recently, however, you may have read that we tried a session of Burning Wheel. I was immediately impressed by how much everyone got into their characters. I, myself, was dumbstruck by this and remained silent throughout most of the evening. People who would normally sit back and let the game go by were role playing their butts off. They were also actively trying to accomplish things.

Some of this is probably due to the game being new to us, but I suspect the advancement in the game plays a key role as well. To summarize, the advancement in this game is based on two things:

1. The actions you take during the game. Each time you do something, you might gain progress towards being better at it.

2. Role playing. Good or otherwise entertaining role playing can award you with points that eventually help to advance your character.

When you look at this, you realize that there is no bank of XP that is awarded to the group at the end of the night for being good sports. So, if you want your character to get better, you have to engage the game. This may not be a friendly approach for very new or very casual gamers (GFs and the like), but it seemed to be quite effective when we played.

So maybe we were all just excited to play the new game. I do wonder, though, if it's the power gamer deep down inside all of us that makes us realize that when we play Burning Wheel, we have to sit up, pay attention, and engage the game.

I love surprises

Welcome to Lee, my amigo who is gonna post in this space with me from now on. We are probably going to have at least 2 more contributors, our friends and co-gamers Jeff and Ebo. So hooray for us!

The title of this post is meant to be ironic. It's not that I don't like surprises, I do. But I have spent plenty of everyone's time over this weekend complaining about things that have taken me by surprise.

The aforementioned Jeff is one of the most frequent GMs in the gaming group to which I belong. His games tend to be epic and while they don't typically continue for more than 6-12 months in total. He has recently started a new game with the promise of a long running multi-faceted saga stretching from one end of the game's universe to the other.

Maybe I will give more details about the game if Jeff himself decides not to post some details, but for the time being, suffice it to say that it is a game that uses the rules mechanics from White Wolf's World of Darkness but very little of the setting details. For instance, there is a fair amount of space travel in the game that we've played so far. It sound weird but it works pretty well and we are all very familiar with it.

It seems that in his efforts to maximize the longevity, cinematics and pacing of his game, he has introduced several ancillary groups of PCs. We will spend the majority of the time playing the flagship group of characters and slip into these alternate personae as needed to keep the game engaging and tantalizing. Basically, Jeff saw an anime that he liked and decided to jack the narrative style it used.

So now, not a moment too soon, I will get to the meat of my complaint.

When first pitched to me, this idea for more PCs, more games, more POP; it sounded awesome to me. We got a brief rundown of the role that each of the sub games would be expected to fill and roughly the sort of characters we were going to be making. In all cases but the original characters, we were gonna be natural characters with no special abilities or paranormal natures. The main characters, by contrast, obtained supernatural powers after the start of the game and have been learning about them ever since. These normal people are all in very exceptional circumstances, much more so that our original group when the game began.

The big surprise, the one I mentioned way back in the title and first paragraph, was that the sub groups, who all began with no special characteristics have, in the first session of play, developed into supernatural beings as well. What makes this worse, or at least more difficult to accept in my opinion is that these characters have become being that are describe in published WoD games. The original party have received traits which Jeff designed himself which were uniquely relevant to the universe in which he has designed this game.

If he had asked me to play a Geist game or a Changeling game I would have been all for it. But, Changeling in space? It strain credulity. I still expect for it to be fun. Hey, I can get myself into a mood for almost anything rpg-wise. I am just resentful of the way this idea was pitched. It wasn't.

I won't go too deep into anecdote-land but what follows is the capstone of my displeasure. So one of these sub-plots, or so we were told, centers on a group of people who are very influential to the point that their plans have an effect on a great many creatures and planets. Really potent stuff. These characters, or so I thought, were going to have big plans and exercise far greater control of their circumstances than our original party. Then they were kidnapped by faeries. While I admit that playing through the durance in the faerie world was very interesting, but the helpless feeling specifically contradicted what I had thought (in hindsight hoped might be truer) was going to be the point of that group.

That point being control. We had all control taken away from our characters and ourselves. This is my character. It is the only thing that is under my control in your game. When that control is taken away, it is a real kick in the balls.

Changelings in space?! A kick in the balls.

Buzz Buzz Buzz

I'm Lee and I'll be posting on this here blog. I'm a frequent player in tabletop RPGs and infrequent GM/DM.

All the talk around here has been about this fresh new blog and the fresh new podcast that will be going up in the near future, available in this space and at iTunes. This process has been significantly more complicated than I had originally intended. We had all sorts of lists, charts, graphs, toolkits, workbenches, buttons, and other varied and sundry machinery to gather before we could start. Ed is in charge of most of that thankfully. I'm not really sure what I'm in charge of but I'm sure it's important.

Burning Wheel, Round 1

My first session of Burning Wheel came out fairly well. I was expecting disaster, but everything came together.

We had a last minute addition, which I was reluctant to allow at first, but I just can't ever think of a good reason to refuse a prospective player and I am glad that I didn't do something foolish like ask him not to come. The last minute character creation (which was more like last hour character creation) bogged us down but produced one of the most memorable characters of the group.

My first impression of the game are good. The system for combat is extremely involved and we only just dipped a toe into that lake of trouble. The system as a whole is a little overly crunchy, but all together, I really enjoyed the mechanics and I think my players did too.

The big challenges after character creation and combat mainly came from the advancement system. You see, the book has a number of charts related to advancement which the players need to reference each time they make a roll in order to determine if the action was educational to them. While there is a basic logic to it that I explained to the players, Simply having the chart in front of them would have been a big help to my group I'm sure.

While I don't think it is intended to be the main focus of the game, the link between advancement and the characters actions in pursuit of the plot is by far my favorite feature of the game so far.

I will try to post some more about this game as soon as I can.

RPG addiction

My name is Ed and I'm an addict.

If you are a player of tabletop RPGs, you may be wondering what I'm worrying about. It isn't unhealthy. There is a nice helping of social interaction, a healthy amount of creativity, and a generally enjoyable time. All of these things are good for you, being addicted to RPGs is about as dangerous as being addicted to dietary fiber or smiling.

My problem is actually a little different. I love gaming and I could handle ten times as much gaming as I do presently, and it wouldn't hurt me one bit. I have been calling my condition RPG addiction but in truth it runs a little nearer to ADD.

It isn't that I play too often. In fact, I can and have complained that the games my group and I play are woefully infrequent. The problem is that, with as many RPGs as there are on the market, and more coming out all the time, I can't stay glue to one for any span of time. I will stay obsessed with one shiny new gaming product for about three days and then.... wait, what.... new shiny product? Lemme see.

Where was I. My newest project, and I think my group is pliant, will be to run as many of these as I can as often as I can until something really resonates and becomes a genuine obsession.

What's the worst that could happen? Fun?

Do I look nervous? I'm about to play Burning Wheel.

The truth of the matter is that I am about to GM a game of Burning Wheel. For those who have never heard of it, it is a table-top RPG that is as crunchy as they come.

My first observation for those who might be looking at starting up a game, is that character creation with five players and 1 set of books takes forever. I assume that we would play last weekend when I gathered my posse to make to make characters, but I also didn't assume that we wouldn't. All told we were probably together for over 5 hours without playing at all, without even finishing character creation completely.

I'll offer a little disclaimer for those who are scared by that figure. We are friends after all, we socialized, listened to music and generally had a good time the whole time. The lifepath system Burning Wheel uses to created a character is just a greedy process, and once I explained the basic idea of lifepaths to each player, each and every one of them needed some private time with the book.

I say it makes me nervous but that it an exaggeration, my friends won't string me up for running a lousy game. I've secretly made a vow to try to go "off book" as much as I can as a GM from this point forward. Burning Wheel is going to make that a genuine chore.

Until next session...