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Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

Saying that shards of broken glass are razor sharp is an understatement. A shattered window contains thousands of incredibly sharp edges and dagger-like points. It takes almost no force for one of these points or edges to cause a laceration. However, people in movies routinely jump through plate glass windows without receiving a single scratch. Broken glass has at least two mechanisms for slashing a person diving through a window: its weight and its inertia. First, large heavy shards of glass can fall like guillotines, slicing off body parts. Second, when a person jumps or, even worse, drives a motorcycle through a window, the shards of glass tend to stay in place due to their inertia. The only way to move them is to apply a force. If the person's body provides this force by pushing on the edge of a piece of glass, it can slice right through clothing, skin, and flesh. In the real world, jumping or driving through a plate glass window would be suicidal.

There are individuals who have accidentally fallen through windows without sustaining serious injuries. There are also people who have survived the Ebola virus. However, in both cases the odds are not particularly good.

Not sure if this is the thing to read before a Spycraft game...

Posted by Doyce at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Population: One: Monday Mashup #37: Full Metal Jacket

Oh, I could do something here with Sorcerer, tying everyone's kickers into what they fear. I could do something with the "Basic Training Horror" inside of a setting like Nobilis, but there's a really clear, perfect answer to this mashup: My Life with Master.

Full Metal Jacket is about, in part, the lengths men go to to avoid that which they cannot face. In some cases, that’s death. In some cases, it’s something else. I think I’d want the definition of the things the characters fear the most to be an integral part of character creation, in some way, because my mashup of the movie would be oriented towards catching the harrowing mood that Kubrick produced.

Well, when you've got a system in which the only numeric ratings relevant to characters are Fear, Self-Loathing, Weariness, Reason and Love -- ladies and gentlemen you've got the game for this kind of spiral into darkness.

And there’s no suspense: the characters are going to wind up smack dab against the things they want so badly to avoid. The question, in this game, is what they’ll do exactly once they realize where they’re going.

To quote lumpley, the suspense doesn't come from wondering if something's going to happen -- it comes from wondering how something's going to happen.

That's what My Life with Master gives you -- the crushing weight of inevitability and what your reaction to it will be.

Posted by Doyce at 9:44 AM | Permalink

Not just Batman, actually, in fact...

every single character that can be referenced for this stereotype/archetype is also a Big Softy. Show him a struggling young couple, a stray animal, an old but still feisty craftsman, or anything similar, and he'll put his blood and bones on the line to help them.

Conan. Mad Max. Batman. The whole bunch of'em, all softies. The inability to see that characterizes a large number of role-players who continually want to play vicious bad-asses who are not Softies and then wonder why no one wants to play with them, or why they never quite feel like they get the character "right."

It explains something I'd never really tried to voice about why Batman 'works' in the hands of some writers and doesn't in the hands of others, but the relation to PCs in RPGs is also a good one.

Posted by Doyce at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Our third session of Sorcerer, which normally runs on alternating Friday nights, was preempted by previous commitments all around. Unwilling to give up the game momentum for another two weeks, I asked the players to meet up on Thursday night instead -- a shorter session due to everyone having an early morning the next day, but certainly better than a four week hiatus from session two. All in all, I'm very glad we did it and quite impressed with how much we got done.

Intro Bits:
The Premise as defined by the group is, roughly, "What would you give up for Knowledge? Who or what would you trade for power?"

Humanity = Empathy (Connection to and investment in the people in your life)

First session is here. Second session is here.

To sum things up briefly, the game is set in the North-Boston/Cambridge area, centering around (mostly) Harvard, with some off-campus business as well (both from the tech industry and the darker side of the 'independent erotic film' industry). In events leading up to this point, the PCs have become aware that various sorcerers of no small skill have died mysteriously. Also, several coeds have disappeared from Harvard campus and at least one of them has since turned up in a snuff video after her disappearance -- Both of the missing girls are known to at least one of the PCs. It is mid-November and the weather is bad and getting worse -- torrential rain is quickly freezing to sleet and the weather service predicts a major blizzard. For more detail, see the session links above.

Now then, on with the show:

Play began with Val (pix) and Shannon (pix) limping up to their destination (a converted warehouse on the south side of the river) in Val's somewhat trashed Audi TT. Yvonne is riding in the nearly-nonexistant back seat. The rag-top is largely... rags, and the passenger-side door won't open following their encounter with a 'mothman' demon, but everyone in the car is still intact (though wet and uncomfortable). They are at the warehouse to meet with one of Yvonne's contacts, a video editing expert named Jerry Rubinek (pix) who's worked with Yvonne on some of her films (for Yvonne, see the test run scenario in the main Sorcerer book. Also, pix.). Yvonne suggested Jerry since they were trying to get the grainy, not-terribly useful, internet-hosted/hidden, streaming snuff video up to a level of detail where they could perhaps get something useful out of it. Jerry isn't really a helpful mood, but they manage to convice him with a couple hundred bucks and he gets to work -- he manages to save the streaming video to a local file and does clean it up a little bit.

BANG (suggested via players)
The images are still dim, but they can vaguely tell that the girl on the tape (one of Val's girlfriends, the one who later showed up in his closet during session 1) was killed as part of some kind of ritual. She's tied to a post in the center of a crudely drawn pentagram -- blood or red paint for the pentagram -- black candles, the works -- it might be (in fact probably is) completely useless faux-sorcery garbage that doesn't accomplish anything, but someone thought they were Doing Something when they killed this girl.

And that's all Jerry can do -- the image is still really dim -- they can't make out much about the background or anything, and although the file says it's six and a half minutes long, it cuts out at five minutes even, right after the girl dies. Val wants to try to track down the internet site where the file's being hosted (or, barring that, find out where the email came from originally), but Jerry's just a video guy, not a hacker, so they'll have to go somewhere else for that kind of help. Val dates a girl at MIT who might be able to help with that -- one Delia Beryl.

Val drops of Shannon at the Harvard Library (she wants to check out which lame faux-tradition the pseudo-ritual might have come from) and Yvonne stays with her. Val goes back to his apartment, summons Shade back from where he's checking out the murdered girl's apartment (he didn't find anything at the apartment but heard a couple cops talking outside about the video link that the lead detective in the case received) so he can fix up Val's trashed car using Warp, and then calls up Delia to see if she can help him track down whoever sent him the email link to the snuff film in the first place. He really doesn't like being taunted, and he doesn't like that someone is messing with 'his things'.

We jump back to Ken, who is just now opening an email from an anonymous remailer that leads to a disturbing snuff video.

BANG
Unlike Val, the snuff video Ken sees is not of a girl he knows. (It is, in fact, the exact same video as the one Val & Company has seen.) This is somewhat more disturbing, since the girl is apparently the "other girl" who has went missing on the Harvard Campus at the same time as the girl did that he knows.

Ken is at a loss. What does it mean? Both of the girls listed as missing in the news disappeared on the same day from the same basic location. Now he gets a video showing the murder of the girl he doesn't know, but no information at all about the girl he does know. Is someone trying to blackmail him by holding the other girl hostage, and simply killed the other girl to show that they were serious? Are they trying to lure him somewhere? If so, where -- the video doesn't show any sort of details...

... or does it?

Ken runs the North American branch of OsatoSoft, which makes everything from video games to medical records software. He has any number of useful programming tools on his laptop and, pulling the video down, sets his Cover to work in pulling more information out of the file. When it's all said and done, he has a lot of information.
* The program that transferred the video into 'streaming' format was an alpha version of the program -- those are not commonly distributed -- that list of alpha testers might be a good possible lead to the killer.
* The last minute and a half of the video was cut off of the 'main' display, but the 'preview' thumbnail information for the file still contains the data -- extracting that, he was able to view the last 90 seconds of the file, which showed that there was someone else laying on the floor just off-camera (he caught sight of a woman's (bound) leg move into the camera view just before the end of the file -- could it have been Susan's?) AND he could see that "something" was happening around the center of the pentagram during that time as well. Ken didn't know much about whether or not the ritual was genuine (bad bad Lore rolls), but just before the video ended he was pretty damn sure that he could see the results of a successful Summoning taking place.
* He also got the picture cleaned up quite well: he could tell the floor was clean cement -- as in a warehouse or garage -- and that the killer had erected tall black 'photography' drapes in the background to block any view of the space in which the killing had occurred.

While he worked on this, he called up his head of security at OsatoSoft North America (Adrian Black) and has him begin tracking down the true origin of a 'crank email' he received this morning. Mr. Black asks Ken what the time-stamp on the email is so that they can pull it from the company mail server without having to search through Ken's mail one by one. Ken checks the time stamp and realizes that the email was sent at almost exactly the same moment that his father collapsed on his front step this morning.

Hmmmmm.

Finally, Ken decides to call his Uncle to let him know that his father is dead. He'd spoke with his demon Doji earlier in the morning and mentioned that the call was "very important" and Ken's "luck" stays with him during the call -- he calls at noon, and it's about 4 am in Japan. Ken's Uncle is extremely groggy and, in fact, never seems to gain full command of his faculties during the whole conversation -- it seems he's not feeling well at all (chest pains?) and the news of his brother's death is very confusing to him. Ken assures his Uncle not to worry -- Ken will make sure to call the Board of Directors and let them know what's going on (he sets an alarm to do just that at a later, more reasonable hour) -- "You should just rest Uncle... you need your strength. I'll take care of everything."

Ken hangs up with smile... which fades when he notices that Doji is asking him rather incessently for his Need.

Shannon researches the 'ritual' they saw on the video but comes up with very little of use -- the thing was so hokey and/or hackneyed it could have been anything from someone badly emulating the Golden Dawn to some neo-pagan wanna-blessed-be with deep, deep misunderstandings about Satanism. Shannon suspects she'd get farther in her research if she went down to the local Blockbuster and rented The Craft -- she's fairly certain that that's what the killer did.

This frustrating bit of research was not helped by Yvonne, who was very curious how Shannon had ended up at 'the party' (yes, the one where Yvonne tried to feed a number of sorcerer's and demons to Alonzo Shaw's house). She is very curious about the level of Shannon's connection to her father Sean O'Neil (to whom Yvonne had originally sent the invitation, using Shaw's old address book in which Shannon's father was listed in such a way as to imply he was part of the same coven as Shaw), and wanted to know if Shannon knew of any of her father's allies or enemies.

Shannon in turn wants to know whom Yvonne pissed off to get the moth-spawn demons on her tail. Yvonne maintains that that happened when she got wrapped up in Shaw's affairs and thinks that it's much more likely that it would be Shaw's allies who would best know who was powerful enough to have been after Shaw -- by the way, Shannon, do your father's notes mention anything about his allies or enemies?

It's hard to tell if Shannon is more pissed about Yvonne asking all the questions or the fact that, truth be told, Shannon really doesn't know any of the answers.

Yvonne offers Shannon access to Shaw's old address book to 'look it over -- see if any of the name's jump out at you' -- and heads to the ladies room. Shannon ignores the address book until Yvonne is gone, then grabs it and pores over it. Many of the names are marked in some way with sigils that indicate their role in Shaw's life. (In fact, Shannon realizes that she's seen those runes in various places in her father's books but never knew what they meant.)

BANG
Besides her father, the first name in the book that she recognizes is Candace Lynn Voight (Val's mentor) -- she is listed in the book with the rune that means "Apprentice".

Van calls up Delia Beryl and asks if she can help him track down the location of a server hosting a pretty nasty video he's trying to find the owner of. She's willing, especially after Val fills her in a little bit (very disturbing, you shouldn't watch it, et cetera, and possibly connected to those girls that disappeared).

<In-game edit: I stepped in at this point and asked Ken and Val's players if it would be alright if I 'compressed' their NPCs just a bit -- both Val and Ken had listed a computer-savvy casual girlfriend from MIT on their list of contacts and I just couldn't see the point of it being a different person for each when it was so much more useful to the story for it to be the same person. The players thought that would be fine, we changed the NPCs name on one of the character's sheets, and it worked out very well later.>

While Delia works on that, Val calls up his mentor, the aforementioned CLV and fills her in. Candace has heard of but not seen the moth-spawn before and advises Val that they're nasty and dangerous. The 'queens' have a tendency to rebel and either uses its spawn to feed its Needs or is naturally Immanent once Summoned; either way, not good.

Delia calls back and informs Val that she can't make any headway on the hosted IP-numbered web server -- it could literally be anywhere. In the discussion she hazards a guess that she might have more luck tracking down the email sender directly, if she were on Val's machine, so he invites her over. She's a little leery at this point, because she's seen the video, knows it's connected to the disappearances, knows Val hasn't contacted the cops yet, and Val's mentioned that his 'occult contact' ("I mean, a friend I know who's got a minor in that sort of crap."), but he manages to convince her to come over anyway.

This last part is pretty complicated in regards to cell phone calls, so bear with me...

BANG
Shannon is digging through her Dad's books while Yvonne is (still?) in the restroom and finds the Apprentice symbol next to a word/name she doesn't recognize.

Delia shows up at Val's, a little nervous since no one but him is there, but generally calms down enough to work the email problem. She's not making any headway and suggests that she knows someone who's "really good" at this kind of thing and asks if she can call him in on it. Val is hesitant, but agrees, provided it's kept discreet -- he wants any clues given to the cops to be anonymous for a number of reasons (so he says), and Delia understands. She steps outside to have a private call (with Ken) and Val has Shade follow her.

BANG (player)
Shannon calls Val to inform him about the notation in Shaw's address book next to his Mistress/Master/Mentor's name... which is damn odd, considering that CLV told Val before the party in session one that she had no idea why Alonzo Shaw would even know of her, let alone invite her to a party.

Delia calls Ken and basically loops him into the whole mess by asking him to track down an email sender through an anonymous remailing service. Ken thinks that's coincidentally odd, since he's got his people on that very same thing, and agrees. Delia cautions him that the email itself contains a link to very questionable material and Ken opines that it can't be any worse than what he's already seen that day (and, technically, he's not wrong).

Delia goes back to Val's and sends the email.

Ken notes that someone went into voicemail while he was talking with Delia. It's Adrien Black, informing the boss that they have the originator's email address, and they have forwarded it on to Ken's personal email account.

(Double) BANG
Ken checks his email and finds:
* An email forwarded from Delia's account (originally from Val's account) containing a link to the same damn file someone sent him, with the same original time stamp.
* An email from Mr. Black, informing Ken that the original emailer’s address as soniel (at) lib.harvard.edu

Ken calls Delia. They have a short but very interesting conversation that Val finds unnerving as he listens in on Delia's half while Ken brings her somewhat up to speed.

Shannon notices that Yvonne STILL hasn't come back from the ladies room and it's been quite some time. She heads for the restrooms.

Ken and Val get on the phone with each other directly, compare a few notes, and agree they should meet. Val mentions that he has something of an 'occult expert' (Delia raises an eyebrow, but she's been doing that all day) working on researching elements they saw in the video -- the expert in question is doing the research at and in fact works at the Harvard Library – Val wonders if that wouldn't be the best place to meet.

Ken looks at the email address his head of security sent him and agrees that yes, that probably would be a good place to meet.

Shannon gets a call from Val indicating that he is coming over and will be meeting with a 'computer guy' who's also received the "Video Email" today and who might have some info.

Shannon barely listens, because she's checking the stalls in the restroom, and Yvonne's nowhere to be seen.

Outside, the weather's getting worse.

THOUGHTS

1. I both enjoy and regret my decision to incorporate the first session "test run" scenario into the continued plotline. On the whole it's been more useful than annoying to integrate and has allowed the players a certain immediate emotional involvement in Yvonne, so I'm going to call it a positive.
2. Ken's invested a kicker that takes him somewhat away from the main action. Particularly of note, since it's a good kicker with a fun plot around it. The part of the 'main' plot that eventually involves him somewhat with the other PCs requires he divide his attention away from that kicker-plot -- that's intentional on my part, since it plays into the premise in which he must prioritize between Power and Relationships.
3. Shannon's kicker-plot is finally moving a bit. Praise ye gawds.

When queried afterwards, Val and Ken's players liked that I 'compressed' their NPCs into a single "Delia", both because it was a bit cleaner and also afforded them a really kind of fun 'synchronicity' connection that felt like a tie-in from a 'real story'. I was pleased that it occured to me, because it moved the plot along. (Yes, it also got the one 'cut off' PC in touch with someone else, but that's a minor bonus since I have no illusions or expectations that the PCs will go into 'party-mode' and stick together for the rest of the story -- it doesn't generally suit the characters and frankly all the players are quite used to many games in which full-time player cooperation is not generally required or expected.)

All in all, a pretty good session, despite being somewhat shortened.

Posted by Doyce at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

DORK TOWER explains how to acclimate Katherine to gaming.

Then again...

K: Mommy, is that you? [points at miniature]
M: It is.
K: Is that Daddy? [points]
M: Yes.
K: Is that the monster? [points]
M: Yes.
K: You have to save Daddy before he dies, kay?
M: I'll try, sweetie.

That is... more acclimated than she is already.

Posted by Doyce at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This short post will be followed by a bit more in the way of observations and a recounting of Actual Play, but for now:

• Reynaldo the explorer and his demon Drex
• Yu, a.k.a. "Slant Wiki" and his demon Mono no Awari
• Phillia, Princess of Avalon and her demon Camus
• Grace, the "Business woman" and her demon Desddin

Okay, after putting this off far too long, I have to get it down or I'm going to forget what happened (it's been all of 5 days now), so forgive the disorganization.

Due to some players calling in sick, we didn't do the normal DnD game on Friday (which is fast approaching final wrap-up). I'd been talking with that group about trying out some other games when the DnD stuff finished up, so I jumped on this opportunity to run... something. Anything. Whatever. While discussing ideas for a pick-up game, two of the players were VERY into the idea of the future apocalyptic sword-n-sorcery style "Clicking Sands" set up, so we decided to make up some characters for that and give it a try.

The players:
- Player 1 is a DnD player with probably 15 years of GMing and play experience under his belt. This is one of those guys who plays it tough -- for better or worse, he's got most of the critters in the Monster Manual memorized, and he general plays tough-as-nails fighter types who are more than willing to call down Fireballs on their position if it means winning the fight. Interestingly, he came up with a character, kicker, and demon faster than anyone else, but that might have been because he was the most 'into' the setting at the outset.

- Player 2 had not been at all interested in my 'regular' Sorcerer game for a number of reasons, so it surprised me when she decided to show up anyway and try out the system for this game -- perhaps it was the S & S idea rather than the modern setting, who knows. Her participation had mixed results -- more on that below and in previous posts.

- Player 3 plays many different genres but has probably not played outside of d20 for the last four years (and hadn't played for several years before that). He was still interested in what the game had to offer (and certainly was one of the group most interested in the 'alternate' games I've been talking about). Like player 2, character generation was a slow and painstaking selection process for him.

- Player 4 was already somewhat familiar with the Sorcerer rules from our 'normal' game and who I asked to participate simply to help with rules stuff. She started slow with chargen, commenting that 'everything I wanted to do I'm doing in the other game" but then really took off once she got a new concept firmly in her head -- in the end, she went from "I can't think of anything." to "I picked too many demon abilities again."

We talked about the setting in really broad terms and basically decided that "our" version of Clicking Sands would be sort of a mix of Mad Max (without the vehicles), Steel Dawn, and Blood of Heroes (one of my favorite flicks). I had some anime influences in the back of my head as well (Nausicaa, for example), but I kept them somewhat to myself for now.

The session, such as it was, pretty much consisted of Sorcerer-style character generation, though I think that it was only semi-sorc-style since several of the players instinctively kept their concepts to themselves instead of working as a sort of group round-robing thing, and I was too busy trying to help everyone with the nuts and bolts (with three core books between four players and only one &Sword book) that I didn't take the time to get them into a more group-mode style -- remembering to do that would have helped me later, I think.

Once character generation was done, it was already 9pm and I decided that, for better or worse, I wanted to play through each character's kicker and give people a taste of what the system played like, but stop there.

I'm going to break the following down by player:

PLAYER ONE
Reynaldo
Stamina: 6 Cybernetics (Unnatural means), Military Training
Will: 3 Survivor
Lore: 1 Wanderer (Brush with the Unknown)
Past: 6 Scout/Outrider/Explorer
Price: -1 Scarred (difficulty in social situations)
Humanity: 6
Telltale: Radiation burn scars.
Description: A sun-baked, turban-wrapped explorer of the wastelands.
Kicker: Reynaldo was hired to lead a CityLord's group of soldiers into one of the Lost Citadels and return with "powerful magicks". Well, they got what they were after. Reynaldo got 'infected' and, several weeks later, returned to the CityLord to inform his employer that he had... survived. The lord deduced that Reynaldo had in fact become just the thing he was looking for and ordered his men to capture him.

Demon -- Drex, a parasite demon defined as a sentient nanotechnology symbiote. See the leading link for details, but Drex basically repairs Reynaldo's body very quickly and lends him some neural speed, extra senses, and combat effectiveness. Its telltale is the luminescent text that 'scrolls' under Rin's skin when his powers are actively in use. It's need is Sunlight (often and regular) and its Desire is Knowledge (it's been dormant a long time).

RINALDO'S PLAY
We started off with the Kicker as advertised, with a few added details -- the CityLord wanted to lull the PC into complacency before acting to 'collect' him, so I put the character in a private room with some 'trained' girls. They were somewhat frightened of him (see his Telltale), but things were proceeding 'normally' (think of the scene with the prostitute in Last Man Standing).

As mentioned, the player in this case is a longtime DnD player who enjoys playing combat types, so I wanted to show him how combat worked in Sorcerer. That informed a lot of how this scene developed.

When the CityLord acted, I gave the player a perception test to notice the guys creeping up on the room. His Demon conveys motion sense, so between his Cover and the Demon's power, he was rolling something like 12 dice. Wow.

So, he (easily) noticed the approach of bad guys from both the hallway and an adjascent maze of rooms. Is stated action was to throw the girl off of him, slip next to the hallway door, brandish his demon-granted special damage claws, and nail the first guy that came through the door. He was rolling his Perception dice into his Cover (ambushing fell under outrider, I figured), into his Stamina, plus the bonus dice for a good Tactic and the fun description of throwing the shrieking whore off the bed.

And he STILL lost initiative to THREE of the five guys coming in. My dice were hot. Sue me.

At any rate, this gave me the chance to explain how aborting your action for a decent defense roll. The player thought that sounded like a really good idea and even came up with a good description of the 'dodge' without any prompting from me (which impressed me, since we haven't been doing anything like this in the d20 game he's in) -- the doors opened before he could get to them and left him standing naked in the middle of the room with crossbows leveled at him -- he leapt straight up and grabbed the pipes along the ceiling.

Ugh. I got a single success on three of the attacks anyway, but with his Armor ability (defined as 'fast regen') that worked out to 3 lasting and 3 temp penalties as three bolts grazed him or passed through non-critical meat.

The next round, the player was down to an effective 0 on both Stamina and Cover and didn't have his bit Perception pool to roll from, so he had to get creative.

The character described Rin swinging forward and kicking the guy right in front of him in the chest, then using that momentum to swing his legs up over his body as he hung from the pipes, throwing himself backwards as one of the attackers coming from across the room passed under him in a lunge and he landed on the bed and bounced to the opposite door.

Nice. I gave him three dice total, starting from 0.

Against five guys... all rolling five dice. Ack.

Amazingly, he wins initiative against his kicking target and opts for a 1-die dodge against the two guys that beat his initiative -- he gets a 10. His Kick hits his guy and the rest of it goes to plan, with the added bit of color of the two narrow-narrow miss/grazes from the two attackers he dodged with a 10.

Next round, he's standing in front of one guy blocking his path out of the room via the 'back door', four guys behind him between him and the 'front door' (one penalized –2 from the kick), and a maze of rooms that the back door leads to, giving him a good chance of getting some cover.

Long story short: he gets about 4 successes on the guy in the door with an edged weapon attack and runs like hell, crossbow bolts "pooking" through the sliding corrogated-plastic shogi screens that demark the rooms.

Best part I haven't yet mentioned from this scene: when I described the rooms as sort of vaguely oriental, with sliding wall panels like Japanese homes, but with the paper replaced with old, yellowing, corrugated plastic -- the player liked that. Later, during the fleeing scene, I started describing the crossbow bolts zinging after his fleeing form, and he jumped in and added the sound of them punching through the plastic screens. Definitely had a meeting of minds there.

PLAYER TWO
Yu, a.k.a. "Slant Wiki"
Stamina: 4 Unnatural Means
Will: 2 Prophetic
Lore: 4 Mad
Cover: 4 Immortal
Price: -1 Uncivilized
Humanity: 3
Telltale: Swears aloud in the dead tongues of the ancients.
Description: A crazy old Japanese man dressed in rags and smelling of stale camel urine.
Kicker: One of his most unnerving phophetic dreams (the death of his entire clan -- the remnants of the Japanese race) comes true.

Demon: Mono no Awari (Tears of Things to Come) Possessor, -4 Binding, The spirit of a dark kami. Need is consumption of entrails. Desire is Worship.

SLANT WIKI'S PLAY
Well, win some, lose some. As well as the scene for Reynaldo went; Slant's stuff went the other way. The problem's can be summarized some system-frustration (the player blew the demon binding roll and knew it, and then missed the Humanity check dropping it to a 3) on the player's part, and my own difficulty in working with them to come up with a kicker that (a) interested them and (b) helped me come up with something to do.

Result: a mutually unsatisfying kicker and nothing fun from the GM :(

Later (the next day) I thought of a better kicker. Hmm. That's probably the problem with rushing right from chargen into playing -- some of this stuff really needs a few hours to think about. :(

Anyway, we went with the Volcano explosion thing, and the player set out across the Salt Flats (formerly the Sea of Japan) toward the more populated lands to the west, (and I like this next bit, which actually came out of something from the player the next day) scratching “the Prophecies” into the ground as he walks… 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 . . .

I cut forward a couple days and we see him having almost reached the edge of the salt flats, with the pillar of ash rising from the distant verdant plateau far behind him. He’s sun burnt, dehydrated, scraped up, and arguing with himself (or his possessor, who knows?)

We did a little bit with him getting off the salt flats and running into a small group of wagons who are avoiding an area controlled by bandits – unsuccessfully as it turns out, because someone spots the bandits coming up in the distance.

NOTES:
Ugh. Uninspired and uninspiring – but as much as the player definitely wasn’t satisfied with their turn (nor was I), they emailed me a short bit of fiction the very next day and even came up with a really good Bang to start their stuff with for "next time":

New Bang: In the process of fighting the bandits, Slant Wiki discovers that the bandit leader that he’s about kill is one of his descendants – some exile from the plateau who has (somehow) thrived in the outer world.

So I don’t know – bad play, but the player obviously found some inspiration despite that. Credit that to the setting and the game’s chargen, cuz it had nothing to do with me.

PLAYER 3
Phillia
Stamina: 3 Arcane Regimen
Will: 6 Supreme Confidence, Social Magnet
Lore: 1 Naive
Cover: 6 Princess of Avalon (where’s Avalon? Who knows!)
Price: -1 Idealistic
Humanity: 6
Telltale: Her eyes are faintly luminescent (notable in dim lighting).
Description: A beautiful olive-skinned girl not yet out of her teens.
Kicker: The entire Royal family massacred while traveling somewhere. Phillia was captured and sold into slavery and found herself in the clutches of a CityLord. She woke up with a slaver's "head" in each hand and the cell door wide open.

Demon: Camus -- Parasite, Binding -4
A sentient AI chip imprinted with the personality of an ancient French surrealist and recently implanted in her head. Desire: Power. Need: Adrenaline/Endorphins.

This thing is getting long, so let me sum up a bit… the player ‘came to’ standing in the jail cell (think of the jail cells in the beginning of Ladyhawk), naked, with the slaver’s head in her left hand and his other head in her right… and the slaver isn’t a mutant.

Yeah. Oww. Don’t blame me… player’s idea. Anyway, an unidentified voice in her head got her moving and gave her directions on how to get out of the jail; “Run! Turn here! No, Left! Into those shadows now, girl. Now!” She doesn’t know where the voice is coming from, but she’s too freaked out to think about it. Most of the guards she’s able to dodge (by using her Perception: Hearing), but one comes around the corner too fast and she ends up in a brawl against a truncheon-armed guard.

This combat was interesting simply because the character wasn’t really that combat-savvy and had to improvise a lot – the group learned how full defense gave +2 dice, aside from tactics and role playing. She got a little clipped by the club at one point and the demon started shouting orders – at one point it told her to ‘just relax and let me handle it’, which led to a Will contect (+4 in the demons favor) that the player, incredibly, won. After a few exchanges (in which Psychic Force made an appearance), she managed to get Total Victory on a full dodge and trip him within arms reach of the prisoners along the hallway – she ran while they tore at his clothing and hair.

When faced with a spiral staircase, the player decided to try going down in hopes that they wouldn’t look for her there. She found ancient catacombs beneath the prison (which themselves lie beneath the city that Reynaldo and Player 4 are currently in) that reminded me very strongly of… I want to say the Scarlet Citadel? The Conan stories with the big snake in the wizard’s dungeon. Anyway.

The PC gets in an introductory argument with her demon, still trying to figure out what’s going on. She bioluminesces in response to the darkness around her, and tentatively continues into the catacombs, looking for a way out.

PLAYER FOUR
Grace
Stamina: 3 Just healthy
Will: 5 Zest for life, Lover
Lore: 2 Apprentice (to the sorcerer Markov)
Cover: 5 'Business' Owner
Price: -1 Unlucky in Love
Humanity: 5
Telltale: ‘Arcane’ tattoo on her behind.
Description: Blonde hair, blue eyes, tanned skin.
Kicker: A man shows up at her "business", asks to speak to owner -- enters the office with Grace and immediately greets Desdin by name.

Demon: Desdin. Inconspicous. -2 Binding. A ‘shapeshifting’ metallic bracelet on her wrist.
GM Note: Desdin is the most ‘traditional’ demon of the bunch… as such, he’s the hardest to figure out in terms of the ‘rules’ of demons for the Clicking Sands setting – the player’s thinking of a shadowy inconspicuous demon that lives in the bracelet (and which he uses to project armor over his master when necessary by “growing” it out over her) and who can come out when he wants to – it’s that ‘coming out’ thing that we’re having problems reconciling with the ‘technology sufficiently advanced’ view of sorcery in this setting.

So the guy shows up. He’s bearing an odd metallic staff, engraved in a way not unlike Desdin-bracelet. He says something directly to Desdin and then tells Grace that Desdin belongs to him, that the thing… left him (here I suddenly tucked my left hand inside my sleeve to make it look like a stump and the players all grin) and he wants it back. Grace demurs, and the guy freaks out – cue sorcerer battle inside a flammable room.

And let me tell you, when two sorcerers face off, each with Special Damage Lethal attacks (she has a radiation/microwave beam and his staff projects fire), it’s a DAMN SHORT FIGHT.

Grace tried to keep it ‘polite’ for a bit – knocking the staff aside, kneeing him in the groin and going for submission holds, but he kept going for the ‘big guns’ to take her down. Desdin was curiously (player: you mean “suspiciously”) reluctant to fight the guy, but after a little negotiation Grace got him to join in with his own Special damage, lethal (disease/rot) microwave beam that dropped the guy to exactly double stamina (AFTER getting half back at the end of the fight). I rule that the office is on fire and the guy is unconscious and probably dead in the middle of the room (and I’m already making his Will check to come out of it and make his escape when Grace flees the fire).

I never got the chance. Grace wasn’t willing to let her “business” go up in flames, so she used Warp to seal up the windows and shutters as best she could, grabbed the staff, ran outside the room, sealed the entrance, and basically kept people dousing all the interior walls and the building’s roof until the fire smothered itself out – the room was gutted, but the building was intact – and no one could have escaped that room.

FINIS

A few thoughts:
-- Players went for more extreme stats in this setting than they did in the modern setting.
-- Wow, the demons have a whole lot of dice on their side from the Bindings. No sorcerer has an advantage.
-- The 'setting mods' were interesting -- people didn't quite want to go to the extremes of 'thousands of years in the future' idea and kept it within, probably, a couple hundred years of the "Great Fire" (which Slant Wiki, being Immortal, actually remembers -- or he thinks he remembers it -- or his demon has fooled him into remembering a false history -- or he's crazy -- who knows?)

I’ve got more to write about this, but for now I’m just going to get it posted and perhaps put some thoughts in a follow-up post.

Posted by Doyce at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore:

Seriously. How many times have you created a character who was far cooler in your head than he or she turned out to be in play? How many times have you prepped a campaign only to find that, in play, it didn't go as well as you'd hoped? Have you ever thought that, y'know, reading game books and imagining play and preparing for a game is almost as much fun as actually playing? Or even more fun than actually playing? The hobby doesn't value or teach collaboration. It values and teaches competing sole-authorship. Pre-game invention sells books but robs players of their ability to contribute; pre-game meaning is thrilling to imagine but dull to actually play. This arrangement we've got going is frickin' broken. The solution is to design games that're inspiring, but daydreaming about how much fun the game will be to play seems pointless and lame, and you can't create extensive histories or backstories because that stuff's collaborative - - so you call a friend.

Posted by Doyce at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Forge discussion on Narrative play in Amber. Ron Edwards (of Sorcerer fame) has a lengthy comment in the thread that's pretty useful.

As a grizzled Amber veteran, I suggest that your group can make the existing rules work well for their purposes (as you've described them), by "kicking the tires" a little. By that I mean ramping up your attention to certain rules, interpreting others a bit differently from their text, and ignoring or diminishing yet others - in other words, Drift. You're probably doing it already anyway. Here are some notions about one way to Drift that particular rules-set.

Also, an excellent comment on the difference between fanboy-Amber and Zelazny-Amber:

Interpret the Shadow rules in terms of impact on Story Now, rather than in terms of simulating some sort of metaphysics. Instead of being a Zelazny fanboy who wants to know "what if Shadow did this," be a Zelazny-esque author and recognize how he used Shadow-based explanations to set up conflicts and constraints. That "constraint" is especially important; throughout the stories, Shadow's malleability was far outweighed by the limitations it laid on Corwin rather than on his opportunities. Think of how difficult it was to get the Amber-ready gunpowder, how easy it was for the True Amber to stay hidden, how much fuckin' running around he had to do after the jewel based on time-flow differences, and how Brand stayed one step ahead of so many other characters for so long.

That really rang true for me, in that I've commented on a number of occasions that the reason that things like mental-contact and "locate in Shadow" get abused is because players have their character act in ways that characters in a novel are too... "polite" for.

Anyway. The sort of thing I'm linking to mainly so that other folks might see it and find it useful (y'know... those that run Amber).

Posted by Doyce at 12:31 PM | Permalink

Re-reading, I found some excellent stuff on working Possessors-inside-the-Sorcerer (and also parasite demons) in Sorcerer's Soul.

Like most everything in the Sorcerer line (or, really, everything by Ron Edwards in general), it made a vague sort of sense before but seemed quite obfuscated -- then we did some playing -- then I re-read it and it all seems terribly useful, insightful, and crystal clear.

Posted by Doyce at 2:53 PM | Permalink

It was an interesting thing, when I wrote about the game session that Jackie and Randy did with the Sorcerer rules -- Margie had read the game session and commented to me about it, but at that time Dave hadn't read it yet.

When he did, the first I heard about it was a fairly determined "I want to play this."

As I understand it, when he mentioned this desire to Margie, she shook her head, smiled and said "you go right ahead, dear." The setting, the disfunctional relationships, the 'take me to the brink of destruction and see what happens' set up... it just wasn't her cuppa.

Completely understandable. Heck, I can look at most of my games and think "this person will like this... this person won't", and I'm usually right -- I never expected Margie to enjoy Sorcerer the way she might, for example, enjoy Trollbabe (which interestingly is written by the same guy).

Anyway, my point is, we both knew that about the game at first glance.

Now, we didn't do the normal DnD game tonight, and I've been talking about trying out some other games when that game finished up, so I jumped on this opportunity to run... something. Whatever. Dave G and Robert were into the idea of the far-future, apocalyptic, sword-n-sorcery style "Clicking Sands" set up, so we decided to make up some characters and give it a try. Robert, Dave G, Jackie, and Margie, that is.

Well, with the session over, I can say that Margie and I had our intuitions in the right place.

Sometimes things don't click. Sometimes you just can't seem to get to the point where the upsides seem like they outweight the downsides. Sometimes the mechanics or the feel or the outlook just rubs you the wrong way, and sometimes it's all of those things put together.

When the night was over, three people enjoyed their stuff and one didn't and I feel kind of bad about that.

But, as the subject line implies -- we both basically already guessed it would happen. Still, it's too bad, since there was a lot from all four players that I really liked -- I hope everyone still interested gets a chance to try that setting out again.

Posted by Doyce at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

These ideas on how to 'stir up' a classic D&D game (following the regretable encounter the original poster had with a fantasy heartbreaker game) are just priceless.

You can up the ante, of course. You have some skills, if not a lot. Go roll some drunks in an alley and see what happens. I mean, are the cops really high-level? They won't even notice if you do it right, after all. Try hanging out in the theater district after dark; you might be able to waylay a hot actress -- even an heiress if you're lucky -- and can hold her for ransom or sell her into prostitution. If you pull that off, you've got a little money and the organized crime syndicates know you're an up-and-coming little group. Maybe they could use you. And if they don't like you, they're going to have to attack (which is fun) or else send you on a mission you can't possibly survive (which is also fun).

I'm rambling here, but I think if all else fails, go break some laws and cause some trouble. If he just blocks you at every turn, give up and go home. If he lets you do stuff, either things have to happen or you will end up very rich, very evil, and with a burning town behind you.

Probably not the sort of thing I should be reading before reading Margie's stuff for her Arabia game. :)

Posted by Doyce at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I recently picked up a copy of Prince Valiant, the Storytelling Game from Wizard's Attic, based entirely on two things -- its favorable comparison to the (brilliant) Adventures of the Good Knights (which I've already pimped) and this, the one and only internet review of the game.

It's a good review (though annoyingly distracted by poking fun at WoD) and a good game whose basic rules could be easily ported into just about any genre.

You could even lose the coin-tossing mechanic for basic d6's if you like. :)

Posted by Doyce at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Pokemon and.... Sorcerer.

But then I thought, aha! Why not sorcerer? Because well, when you look at Pokemon from an adult perspective, it's all really really twisted.

There's these kids who go around giving up everything just to become the best there is at getting little monsters to beat the hell out of each other.

And society encourages them to do so. It's easy to lose yourself in the whole pokemon and trainer life, but should you?

Immediately made me want to get out all our old Pokemon decks from when Justin was into that and convert some of my favorites to Sorcerer demons. :)

Posted by Doyce at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You can get a pretty cool player-driven narrative out of 3e play. See here.

Posted by Doyce at 8:17 AM | Permalink

Our second session of Sorcerer.

The Premise as defined by the group is, roughly, "What would you give up for Knowledge? Who or what would you trade for power?"

Humanity = Empathy = Connection to and investment in the people in your life.

Previous session here.

Play began with the Kicker for our third and final character, Ken Osato. A somewhat 'draft' version of Ken can be seen here. Ken's a l33t computer programmer and the current president of OsatoSoft North America. Looking over his character sheet, you can see that Ken's player (***Dave) left more hooks hanging off of him than Fisherman's Wharf.

It's Saturday morning, the morning after the events of Session One (of which Ken knows nothing -- he was busy closing a lucrative business deal) and it's raining hard. The news is talking about dropping temperatures and incoming snow, possibly a nasty blizzard (the game is set around Cambridge/MIT in the Boston area of the east coast). Ken, in his robe, is padding out to get the paper off the walk.

KICKER
He open the front door and his father (who is also his sorcerer master) is standing on the doorstep. (Something of a shock, since his dad stays in Japan mostly, running the 'main' part of the business.) Dad says, "You've killed me. Now who will save --" and keels over, apparently suffering a massive coronary.

Ken, somewhat in shock at seeing his father and shocked even moreso at the collapse, pulls him fully into the entryway and checks his pulse. Nothing. He glances outside, closes the door, and checks Dad over once again, looking for some clue as to what the old bast-- umm... man was talking about.

Plane tickets from Japan, one-way. His ostentatious pinky ring...

that golden amulet, engraved with the Katakana for "Knowledge" and "Power" that Ken's never seen his father without. Hmm. *Yoink*. *Pocket*.

Ken calls the authorities, telling them that his father just collapsed on his front step. Yes, it's awful. Please come quickly. Yes, I checked his pulse, I'm not an idiot. Goodbye.

BANG
Ken turns away from the phone, and Dad's standing right there. Over his shoulder, Ken can see the old man's body still lying in the entryway.

The yurei scowls at Ken's uncontrolled shout. It glowers. Ken asks "Father, what are you doing here?" He's willing to clarify that question further (Why are you in America/Boston/My house/returned from the dead/et cetera) if necessary, but wants to see what the unspecific query will yeild.

The yurei glowers. Finally: "See to the family."

Ken blinks in astonishment. The ghost is gone.

Shakily, he calls the younger of his twin sisters, Hiroe, aka Ossie, and tells her about their father. She says she'll tell their sister and they'll both come over. Ken is nodding and half listening as he hangs up, glances in the hall mirror, sees his father standing right behind him, whirls...

nothing there.

"That's going to get very tiring, Father!"

--

Shannon is moving around her house, grousing about the bruises and carpet burns from the fight the night before. Bister is trolling through political blogs and forums looking for a good argument to jump into. Shannon is meditatively reflecting on the bad weather outside and the fact that this means she will (thankfully) not have to deal with any... people... today. Why? Because people suck.

The doorbell rings.

BANG
Through the peephole, she can see a rain-soaked, bedraggled woman.

"Please... Shannon? Miss O'Neil? I need help."

"I know!"

"No... there are people after me. I'm in trouble." Her face is blasted an desperate -- a woman on the last shreds of her Humanity. "I've got no one else to ask. Please?"

Bister's with Shannon by this point, and is emphatically against letting the woman inside.

"I helped you last night, I think."

"Which is why I came to you now! Please? I need help and a place to hide."

Shannon scowls at the door for about a minute. Finally, she unlocks it and opens the door.

"Don't drip on the floor."

"Thank you." Yvonne steps inside, carefully hiding her distate for the homeliness of the house. She pushes away her wet hair again. "Would you mind if I?..."

"Bathroom's through there."

"Thank you."

(The above bang I devised as the first potential Humanity test of the session -- really the first of the game for anything other than summoning demons. The bang worked really well and, by not rejecting the abject cries for aid from another human being (marginally still human, anyway), she avoided a Humanity Loss check -- there's even the chance for Humanity gain in the future, depending on how far Shannon sticks her neck out for Yvonne. Right now, Shannon's helping because she 'has' to, and Ryan's doing it because it might get him something.)

As soon as she hears the water for the shower turn on, she tells Bister. "Find me the phone number for that pretty boy from the party last night. His last name was Ryan. He should be in the student or faculty directory."

"With pleasure."

--

Val Ryan (Sebastian in the first game log) is getting his chest bandaged by a pre-med coed that he dates sometimes (the player has worked up quite a little harem of NPCs). The phone rings. Shannon informs him "That skinny wench that set up the party last night is at my house. I want her not to be."

"What can I do?"

"You're the one she wanted to seduce... Pied Piper her butt out of my house!"

Ryan ponders his options and considers that having the Librarian owe him a favor (or Yvonne for that matter) is worth a little effort on his part. He agrees to a date with the premed girl for several nights from now and gets ready to head out. Shade is staring in fixation at Ryan's laptop screen (the voyeur-need demon likes to read his master's email). Ryan comes around to look.

BANG
Someone (anonymous remailer) had emailed him a link to a website address which, (After several hops through numbered IP addresses), led to a video file of a short snuff film. The girl on the film is the girl that was in his closet the morning before. The film shows her getting 'hooked'.

The person doing the hooking is backlight and undiscernable. Shade, whose need is Voyerism, is ... quite exicted by this video. Ryan isn't.

So... the woman who set them up to be fed to a house is at Shannon O'Neil's house, and someone knows enough about him to know that he'd be interested in film of this particular girl being killed... and they think he can be screwed with.

Ryan is not happy about this. Time to get a gun.

Ryan calls up Douglas Lassiter III, a post-grad from old money who owes Ryan for covering up some drug possession problems the year before. Douglas' family likes to hunt and Ryan knows he has a few guns at his place. He heads over there to get his hands on a handgun and sends Shade to go over the dead girlfriend's (Juli? notes are fuzzy) apartment to see if there's anything there that might be incriminating. The news on the radio indicates that Juli wasn't the only girl gone missing in the last two days, but does NOT mention finding the girl on the banks of the river (where Ryan left the body yesterday before calling the police anonymously). Odd.

Ryan badgers Doug into giving him his handgun (opposed Will rolls). There's no shoulder holster, and he doesn't want to wear it on his belt without a carry permit (especially not in Massachusetts), so he drops it in the leather book satchel he carries most places (notepads, loose paper, and (we joke) Binding for Dummies).

CLV (Ryan's mentor) calls him on his cell on the way to Shannon's house. She just got a very interesting web page link emailed to her. Ryan figures he knows which one. CLV is not happy that someone seems to be burrowing into Ryan's life... the two of them are of an accord on this. Ryan mentions where he's headed. CLV, after hearing the Shannon took Yvonne into her house says "It sounds like she gave Yvonne Sanctuary... that's very noble of her." It doesn't sound like a compliment.

Ryan asks about "sanctuary" and CLV explains that it's basically what it sounds like: sorcerer in danger asks for aid and protection, if they're taken in, the other sorcerer agrees to protect them.

Ryan parks, gets out, walks up to the front door of Shannon's (small) home and knocks.

"I'm sure she wouldn't have done that," he comments, before hanging up.

--

Ken talks with the detective who's looking over the scene. The paramedics have covered the body. The detective seems curious about Dad's unexpected arrival in Boston... his relationship with Ken, what happened before he died, et cetera. He give's Ken his card "in case you think of anything pertinent", and leaves. Out on the walk, the detective sees the sisters show up and stops to talk with them. Hanae is perfectly under control, Hiroe is in tears. The detective and the girls talk for a bit, so Ken takes the opportunity to get properly dressed and stash the amulet in his front pocket.

The sisters come in and they talk a bit about what happened. Ken makes tea, Hiroe tries to be helpful and brings in the paper that Ken never got. Ken's object-demon Doji (a PDA) gets quite cold at one point in the conversation when ambitious Hanae starts asking about what will happen with the company, while the amulet in his pants pocket gets quite warm. Hanae makes several comments regarding Ken's good luck with business and 'how much Dad taught you that he wouldn't teach us' (ostensibly speaking about business, but who knows?).

Ken excuses himself to the master bathroom to take a look at the amulet and Doji the PDA, but nothing seems overtly amiss, and he heads back out to the rest.

BANG
Hiroe is looking at the paper's front page with big eyes and asks Ken if he doesn't "know this girl". There's a front page article in the side bar about two missing Harvard coeds, one of which is a girl Ken dates (currently they aren't getting along, because she found out that Ken hacks his Everquest accounts to give himself an unfair advantage -- it's more fun that way -- gee, wonder where he learned to think like that). The other girl in the article (the players know) is the girl that Ryan found hanging in his closet the day before... the one in the snuff film. Both live in the same organized post-grad grant-housing off campus. It doesn't look good for the girl.

--

Ryan steps into Shannon's house, looking wet but perfect. Yvonne is coming out of the bathroom and Shannon points between the two of them. "I think you know each other. Time for you to both go."

BANG
Yvonne: "But... you said you'd help me and you took me in!"
Shannon: "And now you're leaving."
Yvonne: "But you can't do that!"
Shannon: "Why not?"
Ryan: "Ahh... are you familiar with the concept of Sanctuary among sorcerers?"
Shanon: (huge pause) "What?"

A quick double check of Lore indicates that, despite her good score, she's never heard of the practice of Sanctuary. In fact, further checks throughout the session indicate a clear pattern -- hard facts on sorcery and demons are there in detail, but the social niceties of sorcerer interaction is very absent from Shannon's father's books -- as are any mention of other sorcerers he knew. Looks like Dad was as antisocial as Shannon is.

Shannon, resigned to 'doing something' about Yvonne, engages in a conversation with Ryan about the mysterious snuff film that he's asking Yvonne about. Yvonne's in the 'sleazy film' industry but only knows a few rumors about such things as snuff films. Ryan shows them the video and both Shannon and Yvonne seem to to sense something odd about it... possibly arcane?

(Player add-in here -- I liked it a lot.)

Yvonne knows a video doctor who might be able to take the feed and pull something more informative out of it, so they all pile into Ryan's Audi TT and head to the south side of the river and the docks.

--

Ken talks a bit more with Hanae, with the girl making veiled comments and he sidestepping them and thinking about possible moves to make regarding OsatoSoft and his Uncle, the CFO back in Japan. The three agree to meet for dinner in a few days and figure out the logistics of timing the funeral back in Japan with the Thanksgiving break coming up in the next week. Hanae has already called her professors to arrange for bereavement extensions on her work.

After the girls leave, Ken pulls out the Amulet and sets it on the table, then pulls out Doji and 'talks' with him (he writes on a notepad screen and the demon's replies fade in over them, which we realized a little ways in was a bit like the evil diary in the second Harry Potter book, but cool despite that).

Doji says he was getting cold because... well, maybe because they were being scryed or watched? Ken asks Doji about the amulet, because he believes it's a demon (is kinda pretty almost sure) and has realized that binding it would probably (a) get him a lot of power and (b) be a really big coup if he decides to make a play for the whole company and usurp his uncle. Doji gives out some info but none of it is reassuring enough to make Ken feel that he shouldn't try to bind the amulet on short notice.

Ken 'talks' with Doji a bit more and asks it (I think -- my notes are sketchy here) to see what it could do about his missing girlfriend. The screens goes back to the leering Oni screensaver and shuts down.

--

Shannon, Ryan and Yvonne are driving out to the a disreputable area of warehouses and storage facilities along the river (Ryan drives very fast, but (Price: Arrogant) doesn't pay a heck of a lot of attention to the road). Ryan is asking Yvonne how she knows there are people after her. She describes 'grey men' who've been dogging her steps since she escaped the house and tried to grab her twice. She's pretty sure they're demons, but doesn't know if they're spawn or not or who they might serve.

Right about then, Shannon yelps and Ryan (finally) notices the grey... homeless-looking man standing right in the middle of the street in front of them. He swerves, but sort of tries to clip the guy, since he suspects this might be one of Yvonne's stalkers. (mothmen mimics -- made up on the website about three minutes earlier when I suddenly realized I needed some stats)

Ryan's cover roll for the fancy driving isn't good -- the car spins out a bit on the wet pavement and they essentially hit the thing going sideways down the street. The passenger door crumples and the ragtop above Shannon caves in as the body folds down over the car.

First combat series, listed in the order it resolved:
- Ryan wants to go straight forward with the car, hop a curb to bounce the thing a bit loose, then spin and throw it clear of the car.
- Yvonne goes for a Punishment.
- Shannon is going to command it to leave them.
- The demon is going to grab (Hold) Yvonne, so as to take off with her.
- Ryan shouts "there's a gun in my satchel!"

The car manuever works pretty well, but the demon aborts its action to get a decent defense roll and, when it's thrown away from the car, its 'coat' flares out and helps it float to the ground easily -- what's underneath ain't human. Yvonne goes for the Punish, but she's shaky and doesn't get any kind of effective dice. Shannon uses her Lore to address it in the ancient Babylonian it's expecting for commands, but it stands its ground against her command.

Second series, listed in the order the negotiated actions were rolled:
- Ryan peels out, trying to get clear of the thing.
- Yvonne goes for the gun and shoots the thing.
- The demon wants to grab Yvonne.
- Shannon goes for Punishment.

(This order was TIGHT -- three people had at least one 10 on d10s and Shannon, the slowest, had three 9's and two 7's. The demon didn't roll so well. Of the PC's demons, Shade was still at Juli's appartment and Bister doesn't have Travel and didn't want to get left behind if he left the car. Yvonne's had apparently all been eaten by Yzor.)

Ryan guns the car. Shannon opens the satchel but grabs a loose bit of paper and a pen instead of the gun. Yvonne goes for the gun and, with only two dice, gets a 10 and 9. The demon has Armor, but defended with only one die and gets a three: total success (I rule) essentially negates the effect of Armor, so two successes resolve against it on the Small Arms row and leave it with -4 die for its next action -- its attempt to grab onto the back of the car fails miserably. Shannon rises up in her seat, turning around as the car speeds up and flings her sketched paper like an Anime-style yori prayer strip at the demon's head. The thing blows its roll and the paper plasters over its featureless face, the runes glowing a fiery red. It hits the ground writhing like a wasp that got hit with Raid (four successes on the Punishment roll).

The trashed Audi speeds away (Ryan's player is considering a good classic Cadillac with a big trunk), the group deciding NOT to turn around and Contain the demon when Shannon (Lore roll) notes that those kind of demons usually don't act alone.

And that's the session.

Posted by Doyce at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I wanna do Evangelion/Sorcerer.

Posted by Doyce at 9:19 AM | Permalink

A conversation on the Forge regarding how or when the idea of Player Authorship crept into your style of play. What follows is my reply, which I'm posting here simply to have it at hand:

So: Are my experiences with player authorship relatively common to those of other Forgers? How as a greater/lesser degree of such effected the games that you have run or played in?

Largely, it's been an evolutionary versus revolutionary process for me.

Playing DnD back in high school (lo those many years ago) it was all gamist/sim stuff -- players played and the GM made the story. Period. Full stop. It was '89 in the midwest -- whattaya gonna do? :)

This style of play continued into college. Towards the end of that period I was running a game using Dangerous Journeys/Mythus (a game I still adore). This was my first experience with characters who essentially started out as competent, experience people, and it had quite a lot of influence over the game. Everything was very heavily Sim, but there was a lot of player-initiated plotting and interaction, though still well within the bounds of the designed game, and I remember the players sometimes trading in Joss (luck) to get things to happen that otherwise would not have. Never occured to me that that was player authorship, but it certainly was.

The next game was my first time GMing Amber, which I think was a game that people looking for more authorship control might have naturally gravitated towards at the time, since it gave the player so much say over what was going on -- I specifically remember part of the Combat section that told players to "just add what you like to a scene -- you need a sword and your in the castle? Put one on the wall and grab it!" Heady stuff. One player faked his own death and passed himself off as a 'new' family member for two-thirds of the entire eighteen-session campaign.

The setting helps with player-empowerment as well, since there was an inherent ability within the setting for the PCs to invent entire new worlds exactly (heh) to their personal specifications, populated with people they found interesting, and focusing on their own stories since they were compentent enough to be able to go off on their own. Players could seek out whoever they wanted to seek out, have the encounters they wanted to have ("I shadowwalk to someplace were there's a bar fight"), and talk to whomever they liked, even if they weren't nearby (Trumps).

This was one of the revolutionary shifts to the player/GM dynamic. I started GMing with much less prep on 'scenario' and much more focus on 'what happens as a result of the player actions'. I don't think it was diceless, karma-based play that did it, I think it was the setting and the sense that not having dice really 'opened things up'.

I moved after that and spent a few years finding new players (and learning that I can't PBeM worth a damn and playing Muds, where my need for Player Authorship was (sadly) channeled into an obsessive need to spend as much time Building as I did playing), after which I ran a very rewarding, very long, Amber game. While I gradually became less and less enamored of Amber DRPG's "system", this essentially cemented my expectations for player-control. In fact, it got to the point where I actually became annoyed with the players who seemed to 'just sit there and wait for some NPC to give them a job'. The players that worked well in the game were those who were self-starters or who would take a plot hook and run with it. "Passive" players were just a lot more work.

Following that game I did some stuff with the original little BESM book (which I think of as a sort of 2nd edition Amber RPG in a lot of ways). This didn't work quite as well in terms of giving the players input (which meant I was prepping a bit more and not really thrilled about that). D20 was out though and everyone was in the mood for some 'old skool' games.

The glow of that faded, however (though not as quickly as some of the campaigns have, unfortunately), and I found myself looking for something that would give me that "shared creative energy" that I had in previous games. (I still didn't have the Forge vocabulary to see that I was looking to recapture some Author-stance for my players.)

I was really down on the ADRPG, which led me to put it off for a really long time, but eventually I gave in and bought Nobilis. (Which I think really feels like an Indie game -- it's big and thick and published by someone else, but it's owned by the author and has a lot of shared philosophy with the kind of play you can get out of Forge games -- grist for another thread, perhaps).

Love at first read. Granted, the book is... well, a big beautiful mess, but there's a great 'Nobilis 101' doc on the internet that really helped me get the rules, and I started running a game. That was a year ago, and I've been very pleased -- it's a great game and allows from some fantastic character interaction.

Also, in the last half of that time-period or so I started picking up on the threads of thought on the Forge and have begun implementing some of the techniques found here as a way of giving the Nobilis system the last few things it didn't naturally have built into its setting (the way Amber did) to facilitate player authorship.

The Forge was the other big revolution in the evolution, as it's crystalized and defined some of the things I've been looking for without knowing I was looking for them. I'm starting up a proper Sorcerer game this Friday, having some great fun with the pre-game chargen (using something called Themechaser for background stuff) for an online Paladin game (running Tuesday nights on #indierpgs) in which the player creation has already influenced the setting, and I'm just hopping up and down in anticipation of getting to the next Nobilis sessions and tightening the focus of the Premise for the game and getting some more player control going.

Whew! Long post. Really helped me get my head around where some of my inclinations evolved from, though.

Posted by Doyce at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've heard a lot of interesting stuff about the new Conan RPG from Mongoose publishing -- that it gives players alot of input on the story, et cetera -- the sorts of things that currently flip my skirt up -- whatever.

I'd also heard that the author both read Sorcerer, Sorcerer & Sword, and talked quite a bit with Ron Edwards about narrativist play.

Well, lookie lookie, here's a d20 and narratavism thread that pretty much documents part of that evolution.

Kinda makes me want to go get that damn book. Again. Bleah.

I particular like this "how to help make d20 more character-driven" idea.

...personality feats.

The mechanic is simple - you take a thematic feat that has some sort of behavior associatited with it, and when you follow that behavior, you gain an action point (one per session). The action point can be spent for a roll bonus, or can be turned in at the end of the session for xp for the whole party. That last bit is genius, since it makes even the most gamist players willing to tolerate non-optimal behavior from their compatriots in the name of role playing because there's a tangible reward for it (for gearheads, the xp reward for a single point is the same as an encounter of a level equal to the party's average level).

There's a sampler of the rules with some example feats in pdf form here. The only thing I should add is that the common practice (Even by Mr. Aylott, or so I'm told) is to give each character one personality feat for free.

I don't know that it encourages the players to step in and add to the overall plotting, but it's a great thing for getting traditional KIAMO-style players to get into character a bit. I'll have to check out the game they mention the idea comes form.

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

Great quote from an old Forge post on Non-linear play in which the GM started the game with the last scene and then jumped 96 hours previous.

There has to be some rearrangement of displayed character traits. One character, in the final scene, claimed to want the "BIG EVIL" dead so badly he was willing to sacrifice the whole of Del Ray Diablo to accomplish it. When we flashback 96 hours, however, he has a family, a job, and is generally a nice guy (he coaches his son's softball team).

I see it as my job to help engineer the change... and I think it is fairly obvious how I will be going about this.

Heh. Hheehehehehhehh. Heh.

Posted by Doyce at 10:54 AM | Permalink

Same site: Lumpley's Gun Rules.

Posted by Doyce at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

lumpley games: Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore

There's... nothing I can quote here.

There's too much. Just go read the whole fucking thing. Now. Go.

Posted by Doyce at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

"Hello, my name is Doyce Testerman, and I'm a Bad Player."

A painful revelation I've come to in the last few months, but true nonetheless. I'm still trying to figure out why, because it makes me very unhappy with myself.

I've realized that what I really don't want to do any more of is be a player in games that use specific systems. D20 is one. ADRPG is another, for different reasons.

In the case of d20, there are problems stemming from the simple fact that I know the rules system pretty well:

1. Being the 'answer guy' is irritating, which puts me in a fouler and fouler mood as the session progresses.
2. Being party to a ruling that I know is wrong... well, my hubris and OCD are both too strong for this, and I end up correcting the GM. This gets particularly bad in combat scenes.
2a. I can avoid this in Con-games because, if the GM's wrong, I can just vote down on their rules-knowledge, scribble in a few notes on rules they should look up, and move on to play with someone else. Long years of dealing with 'canonized' incorrect rulings in home campaigns has, however, made me very sensitive about making sure that, for an ongoing game, the rulings are "right". I hate retconning stuff because a rule was wrong and I hate rules that constantly change between sessions because someone finally looked it up.

Call it survivor's guilt, whatever.

The worst situation for me right now is the game Jackie's running. She's a really fun GM and should be having a good time with her first 'real' campaign. She offered to run a game where I could play, but the original concept wandered... pretty damn far afield from "low-level, standard tropes, traditional game". It's her first campaign-length... anything and she's dealing with with weird, high-level, non-standard d20 stuff -- she's struggling with all the weird rules that have to be remembered for all the wierd situations, running 15 NPCs in a fight, all of which are tweaked out... and I can't seem to shut my goddamn mouth when I think we're getting a rule wrong. Usually this means that we end the session with her feeling miserable and me hating myself -- with good reason, I should certainly add.

With the other d20 game I play in we started at low-level, so the GM can learn about the characters from the beginning (like the players) a little bit at a time... also, it's not in a genre I've been GMing weekly for 3 years, which means I'm (a little) less annoyingly all-knowing. The worst thing I do in that game is try to inject narrative control into the game, which is not what the system or scenarios are set up to deal with. It's a spy-sim, and if I could get into that a little more instead of trying to lay out scenes and camera angles like I'm playing Wushu, I'd be better off.

I'm working on it... in maybe not perfect ways -- I frequently try to 'turn away' from scenes I'm not directly in because my gut instinct is to interject with meta-interpretations which it is NOT MY JOB to provide and I'm trying desperately to do less of the things I'm ashamed of doing -- cutting myself off cold-turkey seems the best thing -- hopefully it's not coming off passive-aggressive, but I can't say for sure. I flat out told Jackie that that's what I was going to do to try to curb my bad habits... I should probably mention it to Dave as well. (Then again, I probably just have. :)

Maybe it's simply that when you're used to doing one thing (GMing) all the time, you don't really quickly step out of that mindset. Sure.

• I've been playing some kind of RPG since I was ten.
  
• I can still count the home campaigns I've been a PLAYER for on one hand, and I've been playing for twenty-three years. (If I don't count the ones that aborted in < 4 sessions.)

I really feel that, at least as far as I'm concerned, I would be a better player in more narrative-style games like... well, Nobilis and many things that have come out of the Forge spring to mind -- really anything where the players contribute more than an actor's portrayal of one character.

One character is... well, doesn't matter how much I love the guy, one guy is going to get stale when you usually play "everyone else", and handle behind-the-scene plotting, and the scenery, and the descriptions, and the rules.

They say that most directors make lousy actors. Living proof, right here.

So what does the GM do to deal with the problem player when the player is himself?

Posted by Doyce at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Girl Genius RPG, using the upcoming 4th edition Gurps.

I'm not much of a Foglio fan... which is to say I'm not as much a fan as some of my friends, who are HUGE fans, but I can see where something like this would be a great deal of steam-punk fun.

Posted by Doyce at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Snarky Comment 1: News regarding Amber Roleplaying is so goddamn rare that any sort of news at all will be viewed as the damn apocalypse.

A few brief comments regarding the Guardians of Order Amber Diceless Open Forum, paraphrasing Jared Sorensen:

Snarky Comment 2: Now GoO can present Amber in two different, weak systems. Wooee.

Snarky Comment 3: Actually, three.

ANYway.

*cleansing breath*

Now no, you can't convert the DRPG to d20.

Note, this isn't about converting the DRPG, it's about representing the books. As much as any non-rpg-game-based fiction can be represented by a game, D20 can do Amber... if not as well as anything else can, at least well enough.

The books about a swinging seventies immortal with magic powers and a family he gets in sword fights with. The mechanics need to support some relatively undefined magic and cool fights, and d20 can do both.

Were I to run Amber again (no thank you) I'd rather use Trollbabe, but there it is.

Intrigue, style, and NPCs are in the hands of the gaming group. The system's just not going to have an impact on this.

It can, if you get wrapped up in the window dressing (a perennial argument of mine and Randy's that starts and stops with my heavy exposure to Champions*), but that's on the play-group.

* -- I'm starting to realize that one best things I ever did for my understanding of Game Design Theory was play lots of Champions and take that mantra "it's all special effects" to heart. You can see the same thing in Sorcerer (Ron Edwards is a long-time Champions player/GM) with the Demon Abilities -- 26 things that should be able to Do Everything -- daunting.)

Posted by Doyce at 12:50 PM | Permalink