So, You Guys Are In This Inn...

Welcome to the Adjective Animal...

So, yesterday I spent the day doing actual work to avoid blogging. Doing actual work to get out of doing fake work, what has become of me? Anyway, since I need to write about something to justify calling myself a writer, howsabout we talk about starting campaigns?

I Want to Play This Game and Never Stop

This eagle is stunned by all the awesome

Like them or not, Muse has an awesome song called Knights of Cydonia, with an equally awesome video that you need to go watch right now. Go. Okay, back with us? Awesome, right? Yes, I know this is old news, just humor me here. I first got hip to this song through Guitar Hero III, and then to this hysterically campy video through some casual YouTube surfing. I watched, mouth agape, and in the silence I looked around at Jacko and Munin and Riff and Shade and everybody else and said, "We need to play this game, right now!" I do that a lot. I'll see some crazy thing like the Knights of Cydonia video or get really into a book (or series) and decide that I need to do some role-playing in that setting. So, let's talk about great and/or hilarious settings we want to play in, shall we?

Slow Burn

Welp, looks like my Saturdays are free again...

There is a very interesting conversation going on over at Penny-Arcade regarding the relationship between players and game masters. Specifically, how the vagaries of herding cats managing players while they run roughshod over your carefully crafted world can burn a GM out quicker than a dollar store light bulb. They pay too much time obsessing on red herrings, they don't take things seriously enough, they take things too seriously, they ignore plot, they don't respect the setting, they don't get it man, they, as Tycho puts it, dick around and eat pizza, and eventually the whole gaming experience for the game master can be summed up with this wisdom. It's true, players can shit up a game quicker than anything, and will do so at their earliest convenience. You know what though, that's their job.

Snow Day!

The view from my office...

So, we're just going to go ahead and pretend that I've been updating like normal and not been a slack-ass for the past month and a half. Let's just dive right in, shall we? Winter has come at last to the Detroit Metro Area. It snowed like a bastard all day yesterday, this heavy slurry of rain and snow that was great for snowballing and clogging the shit out of my snowblower, but not so great for staying warm or dry or shoveling without having a heart attack. Like a fool, I did all my snow removal and de-icing the walks after only five hours of constant snow, and by the time it was dark it looked like I hadn't done a thing. It was goddamned Sisyphean. Not that I have it that that bad honestly, seeing as how Ragnarok has apparently arrived for Ross and Sam up in Minneapolis where the Æsir have become manifest and the Metrodome collapsed under the weight of all the snow.

Anyway, I awoke to a blasted, frozen hellscape winter wonderland this morning with about five inches of snow under an inch of ice and a temperature of about a million below zero. Making my car drivable was more akin to getting this guy out of his glacier than civilized snow removal. So of course, as I'm standing there hacking my way through all the ice that entombed the Saturn while the dog and cat both watch me smugly from my office window, my thoughts obviously turn to using weather in role-playing games.

Risk Assessment

I'll take min/maxing for fifty, Trebek!

Let's get this out of the way right off the bat, I love it when bad shit happens to characters. Your character, my character, it doesn't matter. When a cunning plan doesn't survive first contact, when a die roll goes bad, when you role-play yourself into a corner, whenever something unfortunate happens in game it warms the cockles of my stainless-steel heart. Why? Because that threat, that jeopardy, it makes me tingle all over. In my opinion, a game that doesn't punish as much as entertain, and doesn't have an element of risk, isn't much of a game at all.

Hastur, Hastur, Hastur. See? Nothing hap...

Welp, that's it. Sadly, we did not all die in a nuclear fire while being consumed by a Shoggoth. There were, however, a few casualties. While we were crossing Lake Hali in a boat made of bones, Franco, our own Wayne Smith, decided he'd jump into the lake, which was made of mist, to see where the light beneath us was coming from. Of course it was the gate to Hastur's realm, and while down there in the mist he happened to look upon the face of The King in Yellow himself and was instantly driven mad. So, there's one. Then Yuri went absolutely apeshit when Franco started speaking to him in Yuri's mother's voice, blaming him for the miscarriage of a sister he'd never heard of. Yuri was then tranqued when he tried to twist Franco's head off. This all culminated when the remainder of the party lowered the nuke into the gate and buggered off back to Carcossa and eventually back to Earth where, as we discovered in the epilogue, they were put to work ferreting out and destroying the last vestiges of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Sadly, it was during the denouement that it was revealed that Yuri did, in fact, come to an unfortunate end. After intensive therapy and behavioral modification, Yuri was brought back to operational status with the team and even went on a few missions until at last he tricked the job into killing him as a way to end his constant emotional pain.

Now, I realize the the guys I play with and I may be in the minority here in regards to what we think is a positive outcome, but all in all it was a great way to wrap up a long and epic campaign. Sure there was a lot more Munin could have thrown at us, he could have kept us busy for years. It was better to go out on top, though. So now Shadowrun's over and it's time for me to take over as GM and run a Rogue Trader game. The RT game is already shaping up to have every session end with "and hilarity ensued", so it's looking good at first blush. I'll keep you posted.

Anatomy of a Con Game

Okay, you guys are here, this door is open but it's dark inside. Who's going first?

Hot damn, two updates in as many days! I might just make it in the high-stakes game of RPG blogging after all. What I need now is a montage of me typing, staring into space, drinking coffee, changing diapers, and doing push-ups or jumping jacks or something backed up by the A-Team theme. Anyway, I woke up this morning in a cold sweat with a terrible realization. Origins is twenty days away! Twenty! Know how much of the prep I have done for my games? None. Well, hell. This is pretty typical, for me at least. I'm a terrible procrastinator, why put off 'til tomorrow what you can do next week? So, I've got a lot of work to do. A lot. But I figured I could procrastinate just a little longer and make a post about what goes into a good con game.

More Human Than Human: Body Modification in RPGs

Only .001 essence left? No sweat, I've got a Willpower of 6...

I tend to play mainly sci-fi or modern style games. I rarely play fantasy, as it holds little interest for me unless it's a setting like Iron Kingdoms where there's a fair amount of technology. Aside from my fetishistic love for technology and machines, one of the things I find most compelling about these games is the theme of human modification that runs through them. Think about it. Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Rifts, and a dozen other games like them all allow the player to make a Faustian bargain wherein they trade greater or lesser degrees of their humanity for some amount of power. Why? What would drive a person to graft machine parts to their body or submit to dehumanizing brain implants or accept a swift and painful death by narcotic overdose? That's the question I'm curious about, and what I want to talk about today.

Friction: on PVP in Role-Playing Games

So, back a few years ago I was playing in a Rifts game run by ace GM Levi. I came to the game late, probably a month in, right about the time all the characters were getting comfortable with each other. The gag was that while I was travelling along with them, I wasn't as big a part of the team as everyone thought. My character was a plant. I was there to pass information to my employers. So, we get to playing and I settle in, doing my best to charm my teammates and appear to be one of the gang. The team leader, a cyborg named Hunter, was terrible at his job. His player was one of those guys, the guy who thinks that his collection of stats makes him invincible and there are no consequences for his actions. He managed to get the team nearly wiped out three or four times and finally my character, who was pretty much just in it for himself, decided to take steps to ensure that Hunter would never be able to harm the party again...

What's My Motivation? Escapism in Gaming

You're going to have a hell of a penalty for that. You know that, right?

So, I've been thinking a lot lately about the whys and wherefores of the hobby. Specifically, what is it that drives us, largely grown-ass men and women with jobs and families and mortgages, to sit around a table on a regular basis and play pretend. What, for lack of a better term, is our motivation? I touched on this a little in last Friday's post when I talked about our characters as avatars of ourselves that portray us as we'd like to be. But why? Why do we pull on the cape or the body armor or the pointy hat? Why do we take up the plasma rifle or the staff with the knob on the end? That's the question that fascinates me, gentle readers. That's what I want to touch on today.

Something new! Designing new items and gear for your games.

What do I do with this?

So, today is all request Tuesday here at the Gamewerks, Gentle Readers. My good, good friend from the Great White North, Dr. Braden Campbell GM;Phd, dropped me a line last night to let me know that he'd finally gotten around to reading Motor City Gamewerks. Apparently they get the internets delivered by mule up there in Canada, or all their tubes are clogged with maple syrup or something, 'cause it sure took him long enough. Anyway, he wanted to let me know that he was enjoying what he read. So I asked him if he'd like to see anything in particular here, and he suggested that I do an article about making item and gear for your game. Specifically, items and gear that fit, make sense and don't break the setting when they ultimately fall into the grasping hands of your players. So, come on down to the lab with me, and see what's on the slab.

The Old Girl: Vehicles as Characters in Your Game

 

"She's not old, she's in her prime."

I'm not going to lie to you gentle readers, I'm an inveterate gearhead. I love machines of all kinds, but vehicles especially turn my crank, as it were. Anything from a 50cc minibike to a five-kilometre long starship capable of blowing suns all to hell and back, you give me an owners manual and a little time and I'll obsess over every little niggling detail from cylinder compression to the exact placement of the heads. I've also got this tendency to name and anthropomorphize my own vehicles, which is kind of a common quirk among gearheads. I name every vehicle I own out of a mixture of love and superstition, and feel that you can't keep a machine running without love no matter how well you maintain it. Sadly, in role-playing games, modern and future ones at least, any vehicles the players might have are often treated as background. Sort of a simple, bite-sized deus-ex machina that magically moves players from one spot to another in game without a thought. This is a missed opportunity, though. A missed opportunity for adventure and hilarity that can come from making the vehicle itself a character.

Well, Would You Look at That! The Fine Art of the Random Encounter.

 Kobolds!?

Okay, looks like this week has turned into advice week here at the Gamewerks. Today, I'm going to discuss yet another tool that every GM should have in their toolbox, the random encounter table. Gamemasters, has this happened to you? Your players have to travel from point A to point B, where A and B could be different sides of town or different continents, and you think to yourself, "You know, something should happen here to spice things up and keep these guys on their toes but I don't have anything prepared!" Don't you fret, 'cause I've got the answer to all your problems...

Building Better Worlds: Making the Most Out of Your NPCs.

 

So tell me, gentle readers, how many times has this happened to you? You're in the thick of a gaming session, and the time has come to meet with a contact. So you get to the appointed meeting place, you size each other up and someone asks the question, "So, what's this guy look like? Any distinguishing features?" or a million little other questions that players want answered and the game master shuffles through his papers and says, "uh, I don't know. Guy McPersonson? It's not important." and bang, you're out of the story. Why do gamers ask these questions? Why do they care? Are these details even important? Yes, yes they are, and I'm here to tell you why...