random average

Halloween tomorrow night -- some folks are coming over and I think I'll run a one-shot for something or other. I'm concidering using

(1) Genre Division's Ghost Stories. Very cool game and nice easy rules to learn.

Short version of the rules: Roll 2d6. Try to roll low. Let me know if you roll a 2 or 12. Compare against your skill+attribute for the attempt and tell me if you went under it or over it, and by how much. Or just tell me the roll and I'll figure it out. If you don't have a skill, roll anyway.

(2) Unknown Armies: should be fun just to make up a character, but that might be more work than folks want to do (though it really isn't much). The advantage I have with Ghost Stories is that I already about 12 pregen characters to choose from.

Short version of the rules: Roll percentile dice. Try to roll under your target number, but as close to it as you can. Let me know if you roll under 01's or double anything (11's, 22's, 33's, etc), whether the number makes the roll or not. If you don't have the needed skill, roll anyway.

We'll see. We'll see.

Posted by Doyce at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After this post, this page will ping as http://random.average-bear.com

Posted by Doyce at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A one-year-old boy has been bitten 30 times by a group of more than a dozen other babies at a nursery in Croatia.
Frane Simic was covered in a series of deep bite wounds all over his body, including his face, attacked after the class nanny stepped out of the room to change another baby's nappy.

Dr Sime Vuckov, head of the hospital in Rijeka which treated the boy, was found later in an abandoned parking lot nearby, staring into the middle distance. "Biting between young children is not uncommon," he said, possibly taking a deep, deep pull from a bottle of unlabeled Chechnyan vodka and wiping beads of sweat from his forehead. "But I've just... I've never seen anything like this."

Police have launched an inquiry into the biting frenzy but admit they are clueless as to the babies' reasons for attacking.

"Right now, we've narrowed it down to two basic possibilities," said Olga Shevchenko, Senior Officer of Demonic Infant Activities, in a prepared statement. "One," she said, extending an index finger that had been partially bitten off during an investigation in late 2001, "the child is some kind of living dimensional vortex who will eventually mature into his native power and destroy the majority of the coastal countries along the Aegean Sea in a bid for power - the other children were merely acting instinctively to destroy the evil they intuitively sensed, or Two: the child was the newest inductee into a secretive toddler cabal and was proving his loyalty to the group. We see that sort of thing all the time."

"I don't know," one caregiver at the school commented, holding a hand-rolled cigarette to his lips with a shaking hand, "you expect this kind of thing in... Herzegovina or Montenegro, you know? Not here." He shook his head, as though trying to will the memory of the incident away. "Not in Croatia."

Posted by Doyce at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Current schedule, through November

Oct 25, Saturday: Chrysalis C (Presuming Dave and Margie can get away in the later afternoon.)
Oct 27, Monday: Chrysalis A

Oct 31, Friday: Halloween
Nov 1, Saturday: Cry Havoc
Nov 2, Sunday: OA
Nov 3, Monday: OA

Nov 7, Friday: DnD
Nov 8, Saturday: Chrysalis C
Nov 9, OA
Nov 10, Monday: Chrysalis A

Nov 14, Friday: OA Ends (?!?)
Nov 15, Saturday: Cry Havoc
Nov 16, Sunday: Spycraft

Nov 21, Friday: DnD? (don't know if Robert and Lori can make it. Margie can't)
Nov 22, Saturday: Chrysalis C
Nov 24, Monday: Chrysalis A

Nov 27, Thursday: Thanksgiving

Posted by Doyce at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Things go awry in discussing a one-shot JL supers game with Randy on the phone.

[Warning, mention of sexual paraphenalia follows.]

Randy: So I've been thinking about this one-shot supers thing I've been wanting to do, and I figured out another good one besides the movie-x-men thing.
Doyce: What's that?
Randy: Justice League, using guys from the animated show. It works really well, and it's familiar to almost everyone even if you're not into supers.
Doyce: Cool.
Randy: The only thing that would need changing is some of Wonder Woman's background.
Doyce: Well, it's a one-shot, it's not like it'll matter that much.
Randy: Yeah, but you have to establish what kind of resources she has, and where her home is. The Amazon Island thing they use on the show is lame, and it doesn't explain a lot of stuff.
Doyce: Like...
Randy: Like why she wears a thong.
Doyce: She doesn't wear a thong.
Randy: Depends on who draws her.
Doyce: She doesn't wear a thong on the show.
Randy: No, but she's still wearing high-heeled boots. Her people have obviously studied some of the outside culture.
Doyce: Thongs and high-heeled boots?
Randy: It's a good thing they didn't make the lasso a whip.
Doyce: You have to wonder what channels they're picking up out on the island.
Randy: "Diana, we've studied the culture and found out that many of the men in the highest levels of power obey and willingly accept punishment from women dressed in this fashion -- we think it's exactly that sort of image you want to project."
Doyce: "Mother... what's this?" "That's the Golden Butt-plug of Justice; it forces evildoers to tell the truth."
Randy: Now we know what that tiara's for.

Posted by Doyce at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 69: Non-RPG Games for Gamers

Recommend three non-RPG games for RPGers. Why do you recommend these three?

Unlike a lot of the gaming groups I know, there's actual social stuff going on sometimes that doesn't involve RP gaming (directly, anyway) -- most notably, outside of forcing Dave and Margie to watch DVD's of shows they should be watching, there are various board and card-games that we play when all the gamers get together (why? because, as I've mentioned before, you can't get ALL the gamers in our group into one RP Game and hope to get anything done).

Here's a few of the good ones:
- Lunch Money: Kids beating up kids for pennies on the playground. Brutal. Tons of fun. Always good for killing about 30 minutes (and several of your friends). To please RPGer's, make people come 'story' together their moves as they play their cards :)
- Apples to Apples: Kovalic designed this card game, one of the few that I can honestly recommend for groups of 8+ participants. Good stuff and highly recommended. Replayability is good, simply because you can play 'opposites' when you get bored with the standard way.
- Balderdash: You make up... fake definitions of dates, places... basically Encyclopedia entries. Often pretty fun with the eclectic mix of useless knowledge at the command of gamers.
- Ebola Monkey Hunt: Placebo Press (very much like a Cheapass Game) -- Hunt down infected monkeys in a lab, but you have get more than the other lab assistants or you lose your job... and hey, these tranq guns work on them, too... The scent of bananas and death lingers in the air. Heheheheheh.
- Uno: Yeah, sue me -- people always raise their eyebrows at Uno, but we never fail to have a good time and laugh a lot while playing. Good, clean, vindictive, vengeful fun. Add in some of the optional rules that various members of our little cadre have used in the past and things get ugly very quick, but personally I can play the standard game all night and be perfectly happy.

Posted by Doyce at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Sunday, we had our first 'guest star' in the ongoing Nobilis game.

Hmm, before I get into that, though, let's lay a little background out.

Once upon a time, I decided to run a Nobilis 'test' game. The idea behind this was to simplify, simplify, simplify: small group, short premise, and hey let's throw in PC amnesia so that we can just ignore some of the background and rules for awhile (as the PC's learn, the players will).

Yeah well that plan didn't WORK. By the time we had our second session there were seven players involved. Still, I played through the opening arc with some success and after that sat down to figure out what to do.

What I finally settled on was adding a player and splitting the single huge group into two far-more-manageable groups of four.

The first, or 'Saturday' group (made up of Dave, Margie, Stan, and John) has been designated 'Group C' for reasons too arcane to explain, while the second or 'Monday' group (Lee, De, Randy, and Jackie) is Group A. Don't ask.

The benefits were many, but one I was looking forward to was the fact that it still gave me a chance to have guest appearances from one game in the other game, as well as massive 'crossover' events where everyone showed up to party.

The first part of that occured on Sunday, (which is of course when the 'first', 'Saturday', or 'C' group meets... duh, I mean, it's so obvious).

Obviously, there are certain people for whom it will be easier to drop in and chat with the other group, and one of the most obvious choices is Jackie, who came by to warn Chancel C about a looming threat that she and the rest of Chancel A had found out about.

In the process, she helped out the main group with a thorny problem and actually set things up so that John (who had to miss the 'C' session) can turn around and guest star in the 'A' group (which is on Thursday this week, obviously), so that part of it is really coming on nicely.

What's next? Fungus wants to have a party to celebrate the creation of the new chancel, which gives us a really good chance to do a big group thing... maybe. We'll see how the RL schedules go.

For those still reading, I should point out that there is, in fact, a gaming blog for this mess, which collects all the logs, quotes, and personal journals for the game in one place.

Posted by Doyce at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 68: Multiple-GM Games

Have you ever played in or GMed a game with more than one GM? What was your experience with it? What were the strengths and weaknesses of having multiple GMs? Was it positive or negative? Would you do it again? If you’ve never tried it as a GM or player, would you like to? Why or why not?

Since I don't LARP or PBEM, the chances of becoming involved in a multi-GM game are relatively small for me. My rare experience with tables run by multiple GMs has been with "Living" events at local conventions, where several GM's decide to 'team run' a table. The set up goes something like this:

RPG Coordinator: Guys, we're short a judge for the players we have for [event]. Who can run it.
Judge 1: I don't mind running stuff cold, but this is a long module.
Judge 2: Well, I don't need much prep, but I need some, and I haven't read this.
Judge 3: Same here.
Judge 1: Heh. Okay, I'll run the Intro and the first encounter, you take the second encounter, you take the third, I'll take the fourth and we'll just rotate until we're done.
Everyone: Cool...

This worked because people were willing to have fun with it, but mostly because they were working from a pre-written module, so keeping the judges in agreement on the (short) scenario was fairly simple.

With longer or home-grown campaigns, I'm not sure how well this situation would work. The best situation I could imagine is a sort of 'shared world' situation, where the GM's are using the same setting and PC-base, but not actually GMing at the same time, which, if they interweave their storylines, is sort of a low-grade version of co-GMing.

Personally, I doubt I'll ever do something like this as anything but a one-shot -- I don't particularly like working at someone else's pace, and the best reason I've heard for simultaneous GMing is that it allows handling a larger group of players -- THAT means that, as a GM, stuff's going on that I don't know about and which I'll hear about only secondhand (at best). I don't like that, pure and simple.

Posted by Doyce at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Okay, I've added more stuff to my "sell" list. The complete list of game books is below:

[Normally I wouldn't list the prices I'm asking, but some folks said they wanted first dibs, so if you're reading this and you want something listed below, email me and I'll take it off Amazon and send it to you some other way. You get the 'blog reader' discount of the 15% I'd have given to Amazon anyway :)]

Previously:
Revised Core Rulebook (Star Wars Roleplaying Game) [Hardcover d20] -- $21.00

Relics & Rituals (Scarred Lands) [Hardcover] -- $13.00

Hunter: The Reckoning [Hardcover] -- $17.00

Creature Collection (Scarred Lands) [Hardcover]-- $10.00

New
Farscape Role-Playing Game [Hardcover d20] --$24.00

Deadlands: The Quick & the Dead [hardcover] --$12.00

Ray Winninger's Underground (it's 2021 and the dream is dead) -- $10.00 (this can best be described as "superpunk")

Aria: Worlds (Aria Series: Canticle of the Monomyth) [Paperback] -- $20.00

Primal Order (you either know what it is or you don't) -- $15.00

BESM: Dominion Tank Police RPG and Resource Book -- $12.00

BESM: Demon City Shinjuku RPG and Resource Book -- $12.00

BESM: Sailor Moon RPG and Resource Book -- $15.00

DC Universe Roleplaying Game Rulebook -- $10.00

Posted by Doyce at 6:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I've been dumping some of my unused RPG books on Amazon in the last week or so.

I've still got Creature Collection, Relics & Rituals, Hunter: The Reckoning, Revised Core Rulebook (Star Wars), and The Transporter DVD out there, but things have moved off the shelf pretty well, which I'm pleased about: I've sent off copies of Mage, d6 Star Wars 2nd Edition, Deadlands, and Kingdoms of Kalamar to (presumably) happy buyers. Silver Age Sentinels d20 is heading out the door today.

Next up on the block? There's more than a few video tapes and DVDs I'm interested in getting rid of (here's a clue: I've had Good Morning Vietnam for five years and it's still in the shrinkwrap), and a few more game books that are crying out for new owners (Aberrant, Tales of the Jedi, Deadlands: Quick and the Dead, et cetera) -- I need to take a notebook down to the bookshelves and make a serious list.

I'm never going to get those eight shelves (two columns of four) reduced to merely four, but at least I won't have 30 books down there that I read once and never used.

Somebody else will :)

Posted by Doyce at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Arrowflight's magic system is...

Well, it reminds me of something.

I attempt to create a Wall of Earth spell from the Elementalist "Wall" template. To make it a literal wall, I have to add at least an Armor Value of 1. That adds 1 to the base difficulty of 2. But that's only an AV of 1 -- no tougher than heavy cloth. If I want my wall to be as hard as, say, plate mail, I'll need an AV of 9. Each level of AV increases the difficulty by 1, so now I'm at a difficulty of 11 -- that's not going to work. So, I add a requirement for a two-handed motion (rather than the default single hand motion) for -2 difficulty, a short incantation (rather than the default single word) for another -2 difficulty, and a rare focus item -- let's say, the heart of an earth elemental -- for a -3 difficulty. Now my spell has a difficulty of 4…

Dunno. It is a LOT like the spell-creation system I designed for Hocus Pocus, Mumbo Jumbo. Dunno.

Maybe that's what I get for writing stuff like that out and then posting it for free.

Posted by Doyce at 1:26 PM | Permalink

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 67: Storytelling

How do you tell stories in your games? Are there character stories, overarching stories, and/or other kinds of stories? Could you tell a coherent story from games you've GMed or played in? Does it matter to you? Why or why not?

Usually I tell overarching stories as the 'main' stories. I feel particularly lucky when I'm able to tell a personal character story as well, since this makes the whole experience more immediate for a particular player (or several, maybe), and it takes more work, I like. (Does for me, anyway.)

I could tell a coherent story from:
- TiHE
- The OA game (and, not incidentally, I'm clear on a lot of the PC's points of view).
- The much-lamented Prince of Alderaan game.
- Dave's IDC spycraft game (which is really something that needs to be told).
- Nobilis.

I'm a story guy. Sue me.

I doubt I could tell a story from the DnD game, although there is a story there, I'm convinced of that... I just don't know exactly where it is.

Does it matter to me? Absolutely. A game... any game longer than one or two sessions... really ought to have a story to it. If we're just playing through combat with no plot of connectivity... eh... I think I'd feel like I was wasting my time.

Heck, I know I'd feel like that.

Posted by Doyce at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ran the 'Chrysalis A' group last night (the first time with the full group), and got things rolling with the patented "throw sixteen problems at them at once and let them sort that out... by the time they do, the group dynamic will have gelled."

One notable quote from the game last night that I want to make sure to mention related to a task set them by the Boss. During the events a few sessions ago, a big cave complex under the town collapsed, killing quite a number of town inhabitants in sinkholes and the like -- they are supposed to replenish the population by bringing in 30,000 new people from... well, wherever, so long as they aren't simply 'made'.

The comment, following about ten minutes of theorizing about 'How' (involving everything from kidnapping to disaster recovery to time-travel), was this: "Let's back up and decide who we want to get. We know we can get whoever we want once we decide who that is, so let's not worry about that part."

That's one of the great Nobilis secrets: it's not the how that matters, it's the why and the who. I'm really pleased that this fact was spontaneously voiced by the players. Yay.

There is a great deal of good to be said for scheduling a regular game on a weeknight. It encourages people to focus (in theory - in practice, I seem to be immune), it feels a bit more intimate, and (for me, anyway) it refreshes you and seems to shorten up the week somehow (since you get a chance for a little playtime in the middle of work, basically).

The downsides are mostly having to figure out where everything you need the next morning ended up during the game session the night before.

Posted by Doyce at 9:26 AM | Permalink