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.

Run Out the Guns Boys, It's Time for Rogue Trader!

All ahead full!

So, as my tens of regular readers know, my gaming group just finished up a long-term epic scale game that was a mash-up of Shadowrun, In Nomine, and Call of Cthulhu wherein we nuked Hastur and then went mad. Now, into the smoking breach in our schedule left by the nuke steps a new campaign called After the Gold Rush set in Fantasy Flight's Rogue Trader setting. Hilarity is about to ensue.

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.

Monday Filler - Lydia Strange

Girl Mechanic image courtesy of David Cousens and Cool Surface. 

http://www.coolsurface.com/

Okay, kids. So, I've got a heap of shit to do and not enough hours in the day to do it. Since I've been lagging on my makeposts here, I figured I needed to get something up but didn't have the time to wax philosophic about, say, class/level systems. That's for later in the week. Right now though? Oh, yes. Yes Gentle Readers, it's time to meet another cast member. This time it's Lydia Strange, a tall, red-haired drink of water with a tendency toward both fast machines and fire magic. Here she is with everyone's sidekick Bela, awaiting the arrival of some friends from out of town.

Meet the Cast: Molly Sixkiller

So, last week I got some good feedback on my little piece about Olive. So good, in fact, that I figured I'd do another one today. So, without further ado, meet Molly Sixkiller.

All Request Friday: Meet the Cast

So, my colleague Jason Richards over at Jason Richards Dot Net made a compelling post the other day called Rethinking Rifts wherein he riffed on the ideas of transhumanism in gaming that I talked about in Tuesday's post. In the comments thread that followed, he asked me if I'd post this little gem. It's a character study of a Rifts character called a "Crazy", but as described she could probably be at home in any futuristic transhuman kind of game. So, instead of doing an actual post (because A: I'm neck-deep in Rogue Trader assignments and B: I simply can't be arsed to think real hard today) I'm just going to introduce you all to Olive. She's something else.

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.

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.

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...

I Love It When A Bonus Post Comes Together: When Life Imitates (sorta) Art...

As one of the bajillion children born around our nation's bi-centennial, fully half of whom were named Jason and the other half Jennifer, I had the pleasure of growing up in the golden age of affable, cartoony, fantasy violence of 80s television. It was as fun time, a lighter time, a time before every other program was a Law and Order spin-off about rape. These were the days when you could trust Sledgehammer to shoot that big-ass magnum of his willy-nilly and blow up half of LA to catch a purse snatcher and no one would get hurt because he knew what he was doing. A time when Hulk Hogan could tie the spine of some poor, nameless heel into a pretzel on Friday night and be solving mysteries with the whole WWF gang on Saturday morning. And, most importantly, when you could watch a fugitive secret commando unit who had been imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit, and were currently operating as soldiers of fortune in the LA area, blast through the streets of Riverside or Glendale or wherever in a homemade IFV welded up from an old Delta 88 and some rusty-ass sheet steel while hanging out the windows rattling off full-auto bursts from their M-16s or Uzis or whatever was in the budget that week and generally having a ripping good time while no one really got hurt. "But Jason" you ask, "What does all this nostalgia for hilariously weak plots and hokey, poorly delivered dialogue have to do with games?" I'm glad you asked, gentle reader. It has everything to do with an idea I had about the A-Team as a party of player characters. Would you like to know more? Well, carry on..