• I need to keep the ME2 disk in the drive to play? Really?

Yeah, this didn’t end up being a huge problem, because really who uses their drive for anything but installations anymore? Still, it strikes me as really … well, retro. Not in a good way.

• I have to keep track of ammo? You considered that a critical need for improving the gameplay experience over ME1?

I realize it really isn’t a huge deal in the game, because they work pretty hard to hit that sweet spot where you’re not out of ammo but not leaving any ammo behind. Still, playing as an infiltrator, my two main weapons are a sniper rifle and a heavy pistol, so I was dealing with small clips constantly. (Especially until about halfway through the game when I realized that my tech “incinerate” didn’t suck anymore.)

Did it ruin the fun? Not at all? Did it increase fun? Ehhhhhh…

• I’m working for the evilest group of humans I ever encountered in the first game? Really?

In a game balanced between playing a “Paragon” and a “Renegade”, I actually found it easy to play a hardcore Paragon while working ‘with’ Cerberus. Ever chance I had to tell my ‘partners’ to fuck off, I did so. I gave anyone who asked for it access to their private data, made the least advantageous-to-them choices, and eventually made off with not only their biggest financial investment (me), but also an advanced starship and… oh yeah, I’d say about 25 to 30% of their employees.

I feel as though my time with them was well spent.

• From what I saw of the skills table, there is very little customization/choice available during the leveling process, and I didn’t see anything like the Charm/Intimidation pair from ME1 that expanded my dialog options. This makes me sad simply because those options and what I did with them made my ME1 experience really memorable.

There are fewer skills, but they ‘branch’ at the top, once you max them out, and that actually made for a lot of different kinds of customization.

Warning: beyond this point, I will utterly spoil a whole lot of the plot elements in the game. *I* was spoiled by this post before I played it, but that’s fine, because that kind of thing doesn’t bother me much, but you are not me, and if you have any intention of every playing this game (and you should, because it’s probably the best game out there right now), you may want to stop reading now.

Now, on to that other post’s points:

1) Your entire body is pulverized, but they bring you back exactly as you were before.

Well… that’s your choice, I suppose. I did not end up coming back as I had before. Facial reconstruction and all that, you know.

2) Your ship is destroyed, but they build you a new one that’s very similar and then give it the same name. (Except the new one has the CERBERUS LOGO stenciled on the side, which is a bit odd for a super-secret shadow organization. Somehow this doesn’t cause constant problems for you every time you try to dock somewhere civilized.)

Well, yeah: it was the most advanced ship in the fleet at the time it was built (all of two years ago), so damn new that the ME1 story starts during its first shakedown run – why NOT copy it?

And they didn’t name the ship; you did. It’s called ‘grieving process’, and totally made sense to me.

And you know? It took me almost a week to finally figure out where the Cerberus logo was on the side the ship. Clearly it didn’t bother me.

Also, Cerberus is not a super-secret organization; Cerberus is… well, pick from a list of “famous”, “infamous”, and “notorious”. They might do bad things covertly, but they are a well-known entity — reminded me of Blackwater, actually.

Finally, I only docked at one ‘civilized’ place, once, during the entire game. And they were mad at me already.

3) You’re declared dead, but when you show up again the Alliance accepts you and your new career working for their enemy.

Nnnnope.

Your old buddy gets you reinstated as a Spectre, which basically means “you can do whatever you want, but you get no funding”, which… yeah, that’s (a) how it worked back in the old days, and (b) that’s what you’ve been doing already.  (They actually make a joke at one point about how the Spectres are a bit of a joke in the intel-community because the Spectres have to pay their own bills.  And anyway, that’s the Citadel, not the Alliance.)

When I ran into my old human allies from the first game (special agents of the human Alliance), they were PISSED OFF at me. That was not a fun meeting.

4) All of your original crew resign the Alliance and (on their own, apparently) join up with this terrorist organization.

Umm… let me think about this for a second. All of the original crew…

No.

Joker is back. And the Doctor is back. That’s it.

Joker joined Cerberus because after you died the Alliance broke up the crew, said that the whole Reaper threat was a hoax, and grounded him from flying. Joker. For whom flying is everything.  Then Cerberus comes along and says “listen, you’re a hero, and a great pilot; come work for us.” Of course he did.

And the Doctor flat out says (once you get her talking) that she came along to stay with Joker, cuz let’s be honest: the candybones pilot needs a doctor around, and the doctor likes having someone stable and constant in her life. She’s his mom, basically.

Lots of other guys were recruited by Cerberus because they were “Shepard sympathizers”, but they weren’t from the Normandy crew.

Cerberus and The Illusive Man, or “They call me T.I.M.”

Eh. Is he mentioned in the first game? No. He’s the shadowy power at the top; of course he’s not. He is mentioned (apparently) in the two books that coexist in the ME universe, all of which ties together.

Really, I had no problem with the Cerberus story element, except that (once you find out more about them, near the end of the game), they just don’t seem numerous enough. I mean, you’d need more people than the game says they have, just to do nothing but gather intel. I dunno.

More of the guy’s gripes

I’m not at all keen on the notion of a Shepard who is the only one who KICKS ENOUGH ASS to take on the Reapers.

In all seriousness, I didn’t know what the hell the reviewer was talking about until I started a new character to play as more of a renegade. Okay, yeah, if you play him as a renegade, there’s a lot of talk about Kicking Ass and hosing down the galaxy with bullets until the problem goes away.

That is not how was for me on my first play through. The “paragon” Shepard is a leader of men… hell, of aliens, of machines… Of everyone. I convinced a crimelord to become a social worker. I rehabilitated a dirty prison guard. I changed the path of an entire people. Two entire peoples, actually.

All with my mouth.

No, not like that.

Anyway — my personal experience with ME2 is that Shepard is a someone with the leadership skills, raw charisma, and vision to unite pretty much anyone he comes in contact with. He is a force, and it has nothing to do with the weapons he’s carrying.

The collectors weren’t mentioned in the last game.

Yes they were, just by a different name. They were the main mystery of the last game, just as they were the main mystery of ME2.

[The final boss made no sense.] Remember the goal: 1) Reach the Citadel and open the relay to let the other Reapers through. 2) Win!

Except that isn’t their ultimate goal. The real goal is to perpetually add to the Reaper population, one Reaper every 50 thousand years, built as a synthetic construct comprised of reaper tech and the gestalt of the most dominant species currently extant in the universe.

It is weird? Yeah. Is it sufficiently alien enough as a ‘thing’ that I buy it as a plot point? Also, yeah.

I don’t know why they made it look like a big human, though. That was kinda cheesy and stupid, especially when all the other reapers look exactly the same. Aside from THAT, it was fine.

The final “choice” in the game

The original poster goes on a bit about how the final choice in the game was totally binary: “destroy the horrible tech” or “give the horrible tech to the horrible organization you can’t trust”. He wanted a “keep the tech and study it yourself to find a weakness”.

To which I say: “eh”. I’d have still blown the fucking thing sky high. The only guy loyal to me who could study this stuff was Mordin, and frankly I don’t think he’d want to be within a mile of it. Once you see one of your favorite crew members melting inside a tube to feed into the Big Bad, you pretty much lose all interest in finding out how the tech works; you blow that shit up. Cracka-boom.

And… come on; it’s a Bioware game, which means you’re only half playing a game, and half reading a story/watching a movie. A really GOOD story/movie.

(Also, the fact that you have the option to keep the tech and study it or not simply means that keeping it or not keeping it won’t have much effect in the third game. Obviously. Let’s think like game designers for a second — that’s just how it works. The game is, as it must be, on rails. They are nearly invisible most of the time, but they’re there.)

I will, however, cede this point:

Even if you accept all the events I’ve nitpicked, the worst part is nothing happens. The plot does not move forward. By the end of the game we’ve got the same captain, same ship, same problems, same setup. Council is still useless. Alliance is still apathetic. Shepard & Co are the only ones who care. The Reapers are still out there.

Yes. Granted. I think that’s a fair beef.  It’s about thirty gameplay hours of exposition and set up for the end of the trilogy and, fun as it is, that’s kind of weak.

Except… you know… it’s a game. At times it’s got strong movie and story elements, but at its heart it’s still a game, and sometimes (I look back at a 4.5-years-long DnD campaign), you just show up to kill the bad guys and take their stuff, be awesome, and it doesn’t advance the plot much. Failing of the medium, I guess.

So, I’ll forgive em.

With That Said

I can’t easily express how much fun this game is, and expressing myself with words is what I do.

This was the most fun I’ve ever had playing a single person game, and it ranks in perhaps the top three to five gaming experiences for me in any category. In all seriousness, this thing is like The Matrix or Star Wars of computer RPGs – a must-see.

That may be the afterglow talking, but damn it’s good. Damn.

Last night was the only Wednesday in February where I could wrangle the Diaspora participants into the same location at the same time (which is an improvement; it had originally looked as though it would be April before we could play with the Cluster and characters we made up in January), and I’ve been reading, watching, and playing a LOT of sci fi lately, so it’s fair to say I was a little stoked and ready to go.

I’m not really much for prep work, but Diaspora has really gotten me revved up, and I’ve been all about doing Cool Hard Science research and reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading the rulebook to make sure I’ve got things worked out in my head.  It seems like the first couple sessions involve learning the game systems anyway, so I wanted to make sure I understood them.

And I came up with names and extremely wispy backstory for the NPC crew of the ship.

And… I prepped a little.

That last thing? I needn’t have bothered.

The Prep

So here’s what I did. I wanted to start the game off with a completely vanilla, Traveler-esque scenario. Not ground-breaking, but it would let me slowly introduce the mini-games inside diaspora, and establish the “norm” for the setting so that we could then riff off it.

I was a little flummoxed by all the possible options I had, though, so I poked around Abulafia and found a wonderful little “Traveller [sic] Mission Generator” that I hit refresh on a couple times until I found something fun and simple to start with.

• Courier hires the party to transport goods.
• The mission targets Asteroid Base.
• Their efforts are opposed by foreign government.

Right, a fine start. I took that came up with:

The crew of the Tempest is on Unity Orbital Station in the Orpheus System, and has picked up a contract to ship mining equipment to the Dauphine System (specifically, to Sebastus, an icy, distant moon orbiting Dauphine itself). The source of this material is The Ladder, an Orphean research group, represented in this deal by Amalie Silas, and the recipient in Dauphine is group of politically progressive nobles who haven’t yet given up on the stars. The director of the base is one Denys Benois.

Getting the equipment to Dauphine is complicated due to the fact that the fast, quick route to Dauphine is through Caliban who (a) polices their slip-points (b) doesn’t want Dauphine getting better at utilizing their resources and (c) is hunting for most if not all of the PC characters for different reasons, so they either need to risk it, or take a longer, potentially more costly route.

I went for a ship-based mission right off the bat because when I looked at the characters we’d come up with, everyone had some kind of ship-based combat skill somewhere in their top teirs, and there was no other kind of activity (such as social conflict, personal conflict, et cetera) that was so universally present).

“Play to their strengths for this first session,” I thought.

Anyway, having worked out the basic plan, I crawled through the book and nailed down exactly what rules I wanted to hit.

Maintenance check

This was just to introduce this idea to the players. It was a pretty easy check to make (basic maintenance, upkeep-level repairs, refueling, etc), complicated just a little bit, due to the crew not actually working at making any kind of profit recently.

Setting up the job

Which I figured might involve a little roleplay and maybe a brokerage roll.

Navigation

The trip *could* take as little as 13 days, but could run 52 days (or more), and I wanted to make sure I knew the options well enough to be able to handle all the possible permutations the players might try to pull off.

Ship to Ship combat

Because obviously, there has to be some of that. For this, I grabbed and tweaked some of the pregenned ships from the book. (The pirate ship with the “Bowls of Fresh Fruit” aspect and a captain who’s apex skill is “Profession: Spokesmodel? Sold!)  Pretty soon, I had a trio of privateer/wildcatter ships: The Ingenue, the small-but-heavily-armed Queen Maab, and the modular, ore-hauling Keepdown Krab.

Ready? Ready!

“Tempest, this it The Ingenue. Come to and prepare to be boarded. I repeat: come about and prepare to be boarded.”

Everyone looks at Captain Miranda.

Captain Miranda: “Ummmmm….”

—

We get a black screen with the words, “21 days earlier…”

—

We see the crew of the Tempest debarking, eager for a few days “shore” leave on Unity Orbital Station. As they file past, Captain Mirana “Drake” is charging their cred sticks with their pay and reminding them to be back on the ship in 45 hours. Kaetlyn, Phyll, and “Iago” (Titus Belliago) linger in the background.

As the last of the ‘lesser’ crew file down the docking port, Kaetlyn steps around in front of Miranda, hands her her cred stick and says “running low on funds yet?”

“Not yet,” Miranda’s voice is calm, but she’s clearly a little tense — since buying the ship and fleeing with the barest of skeleton crews, they’ve been hoping from system to system, filling the roster but taking on no jobs until she knew that she hadn’t been spotted by her relatives on Prospero Station. “We’ll have work lined up by the end of the day.”

“It’s a good place for it,” comments ‘Iago’. He looks around. “However, it’s possible I might not be the most welcome person here, so I think I’ll… stay on the ship.” He heads back into the Tempest without bothering to get his pay stick charged. “Good luck. Take someone with you.”

Miranda nodded. “I’d like to, actually.”

Phyll, always helpful, says “I can come along.”

Kaetlyn glowers at him.

“What?” He thinks. “You can come along too.”

“Well, I guess I have to, don’t I?”

“Oh…” he thinks some more. “Weren’t you going to go shopping?”

The glower acquires additional glower. “Well not now.”

Poor Phyll.

—

The meeting with the Ladder rep is at a sort of “rent a meeting room” facility on the station. Amalie Silas is refreshingly open and straightforward about the job; they want to hire the Tempest because it’s a Caliban-designed ship whose captain did not enter into an “indenture” relationship to afford it — this means it will be unremarkable in Caliban space, but the crew will not beholden to Caliban in anyway. This is desirable, because they are shipping deep space mining gear to Dauphine, and as Caliban routinely sends wildcatter/privateers  into that system for resources, they would NOT like this shipment being made.

The pay is good (Silas is paying for the longer, four-jump route, but points out that they can jump right through Caliban’s system if they want to risk it, drastically shortening the trip and probably reaping a tidy profit… if they don’t run afoul Caliban’s slippoint station “refuel enforcement”.

Miranda negotiates a bit, and gets Silas to put an additional 2-day pro-rated bonus on top of the standard payment if Miranda calls her crew back from shore leave immediately and sets out today. Kaetlyn storms out, her dreams of shop(lift)ing shattered.

—

The cargo bay of the Tempest is stuffed full of crates and hard-to-package mining equipment, to the point where Iago comments they’re going to need to grease the ceiling to get the last two crates on. Everyone piles back aboard, their griping nicely muted by the fat pro-rate bonus the captain hands them as they return.

They set out for the six-day burn toward Orpheus’s “northern” slip point, and the command staff meets in the CIC to discuss the route they’ll take.

No one really wants to get into specifics about why certain systems should be avoided, so some of the reasons given are a bit vague, but the upshot is that Miranda, who’s “A bit Rusty” [aspect] doesn’t like their chances of slipping to Caliban, reorienting, reacquiring the slip point, and slipping out again before they’re intercepted by “escort boats” that will “forcibly invite” them to stop and refuel at the slip point station maintained (at great expense) at Caliban’s heavily-used slip points. While it sounds good in theory, in practice almost no one in the CIC wants to set foot on that station.

With all that said, they settle on a jump path of  Orpheus -> Achilles -> Lear -> Shylock -> Dauphine, with a maintenance stop planned at Shylock’s “tourist moon” of Nasira.

Business proceeds as normal up to the first jump (except for Phyll, who takes whatever opportunity he can to sneak into the cargo bay and poke through all the “really interesting” mining equipment).

Once at the slip point, Miranda makes her calculations, Iago and Phyll initiate the jump, and The Tempest arrives at the Achilles slip point, cooling panels already deploying to shed excess heat while they calculate the next jump.  They picked up a lot of momentum on the slip, and it takes them almost five hours to get the ship back to optimal slip range. Miranda silently notes that if that slip had been into Caliban space, there’s no way they’d have gotten out before being intercepted.

In the lull, Iago leaves the helm in (NPC) Keen’s hands and heads to the galley to start putting together the day’s main “together” meal. Many on board think he enjoys his role as cook more than that of pilot. They might not be wrong.

While doing so, Iago comms Phyll, asking him to come from engineering and help out. Ariel (the ship’s V.I.) informs him that Phyll is actually in the cargo bay. Iago deduces what Phyll’s up to and tells him to leave all the stuff there.

Food prep is made, Phyll natters on about how cool and infinitely modular the so-called mining equipment is (”You could make anything out of this stuff: plasma drills, yes, but also station defense systems, ship’s guns, automated laser platforms…”), and Miranda decides to do a little research into The Ladder.

What everyone learns from this is:

• The Ladder is more R&D than manufacturing, and has a reputation (and notoriety) for providing advanced tech to “underdogs” throughout the Cluster, turning a profit, yes, but also following the credo encoded within their corporate logo: “Technology is the Great Equalizer.” (Like guns in the old west, right?)
• Dauphine doesn’t really “do” tech and space exploration. Whoever’s doing all this is a minority in Dauphine.
• NO one from Caliban will like ANYTHING Dauphine could make out of the equipment in their cargo hold.

The slip into Lear is nearly perfect: it takes the crew less than 15 minutes to reorient and slip out of the system: barely enough time to disperse heat and do the calculations. Everyone is happy about this, because Lear is a shithole.

The next jump takes them to Shylock. Reorientation is quick; Iago and Miranda get the ship on a course headed in-system, leave Ariel flying things, and head down for a Big Meal.

All eleven crew members are there, chatting about whatever comes up — talk is playfully steered by Iago to the topic of getting a hot tub installed for “crew comfort,” but Miranda quells that notion before the main course even comes out. Denied that, the crew starts speculating about the cargo, with Phyll talking about all the wonderful, destructive things one could make from the components. The talk gets turned around a little bit, and somehow returns to some speculation about a mining-laser-heated hot tub, at which point in time Miranda excuses herself and returns to the bridge.

Ariel: “Anything I can do, Captain?”

Miranda: “I’m fine.”

Ariel: “You seem… tense. Perhaps a game of chess?”

Miranda: “No…” (pause) “Load up C’tan.”

Ariel: “Yes, Captain. [pause] would you like the standard automated opponents?”

Miranda: “Two of them, yes. On Expert.”

Ariel: [dejected] “Yes, Captain.”

Miranda: [vaguely amused] “Would you like to play as well?”

Ariel: “May I?”

Miranda: “Certainly. Load scenario 23-B, with the random forest fires.”

Ariel: “Oh. My favorite…”

… and so they passed the flight.

[[I am slowly statting out Ariel-the-V.I.; one of her Aspects is totally going to be "Do you want to play a game?"]]

Their efforts are opposed by foreign government

The trip into and out of Shylock was relatively uneventful — the wear and tear from consecutive slips without maintenance was negligible, and the slip into Dauphine was, if anything, better than the Lear slip.

No sooner had they gotten reoriented, however, than Ariel announce multiple inbound contacts.

Before them, a azure-tinted holographic representation of three ships floats in the air. Over the comms, a voice says:

“Tempest, this it The Ingenue. Come to and prepare to be boarded. I repeat: come about and prepare to be boarded.”

Everyone looks at Captain Miranda.

Captain Miranda: “Ummmmm….”

Diaspora has a rule where anyone can spend a Fate point and declare something about the setting, as long as it pertains to their apex skill. Miranda’s apex skill is Brokerage (with a related “military grade” stunt that means she’s expert in the trading of goods in markets black or white); before she bought the ship, she advised hundreds of ship’s captains about the kinds of jobs to take and the kinds of upgrades to makes.

Kate spent a Fate point, announced that she knew the captain of the Ingenue and barked. “Jorge? Is that you? What are you doing and why are you in my way?”

I had her make a roll to see how well she knew Jorge and the Ingenue, and Kate rolled huge numbers, so I pretty much gave her everything I had on the ship:

“The Ingénue”, T2 Civilian Pirate

* Rotating license plates
* Glory-hungry pirates
* Camel of space (long time between refills and repairs)
* Friendly and approachable
* Big bowls of fresh fruit

Captain [Jorge] Demont
Profession: Spokesmodel 3; Resolve 2, Alertness 2; Charm 1, Slug Thrower 1, Intimidation 1

During the ensuing exchange, I also gave him aspects…
* I didn’t want to be a pirate
* Pretty and vain
* “I do love citrus…”

I had it all set up so that we’d be fighting these guys, plus:

“Queen Maab”
* Defending our weak friends
* Little room for cargo
* A monkey could fly this thing
* Gets pretty hot in here
* Out of ammo

And:

“Keepdown Krab”, T2 Modular Cargo Hauler
* All cargo is expendable
* Save our skins
* Unexpected burst of speed
* Plenty more space back there
* Can’t make money dead

… who wasn’t really interested in the fight; she had a full load of Dauphine ore and was ready to jump out of the system and screw the “bonus” promised by some mystery man who wanted them to empty the Tempest’s cargo hold.

But no fight was in the offing. Through a series of rolls, the crew convinced Captain Demont to come aboard and “inspect the cargo hold personally”, and I shucked the the Space Combat set up and starting setting up for a Social Combat (which I hadn’t prepped at all.)

Here are my notes… some of which won’t make sense if you haven’t played the game, but luckily the system for the conflict conveys events of real weight into the actual story of the session, so “what happens” is just as clear as “how”.

• I started with a basic kind of ‘v-shaped’ map, like the one presented for the ‘romance’ social combat in the book, so… seven zones in length. On one end of the map was the “Fight” zone, and on the other was “Flight”.
• With seven zones, the conflict was given seven turns to resolve. Each box represented an hour of real time.
• If, at the end of a turn, all the remaining pirate ships were in the Fight box, they’d decide to fight. Or leave, if they were all together in the Flight box.
• All the players got a chance to act in each turn, but they were represented on the board by a single “Tempest” marker which started at the bend in the “V”.
• The Ingenue was also at the bend in the V.
• The Queen Maab was halfway between the center and “Fight”.
• The Keepdown Krab was one square away from “Flight” at the start.
• The order of actions was Miranda -> Ingenue -> Tim -> Maab’s captain -> Chris -> Krab’s captain.

Miranda started off by receiving the captain of the Ingenue in the CIC, having Iago serve him a nice pina colada, and basically promising him a big payoff if he went back and told the other ships that the cargo bay didn’t have what they were looking for in it.

A big payoff. Big. HUGE. She tapped the amount out on a pad and showed it to him. He was very impressed.

[In game terms, Miranda used Assets to erect a "barrier" between the zone that she and the captain were in and the next zone closer to "fight". It was a BIG barrier, because she nailed the roll and tagged her Liquid Assets aspect and... some aspect on the ship, I think, maybe. At any rate, the barrier had a pass value of SEVEN. Bam.]

The talk was very pleasant, except for Dumont mentioning that the captain of the Maab seemed very motivated to fight her, and seemed to know something about why she’d be out here flying an independent trader… such talk made Miranda nervous.

[Dumont used... I think Spokesmodel or intimidate... or maybe one augmented by the other to smoothly lay down a veiled threat on Miranda -- a composure attack. The roll was good, and Miranda took two hits to her Composure track and mitigated the rest of the damage with a Minor (taggable) Consequence "Delgado might remember who I really am."]

Dumont returned to his ship with a lot to think over. As he departed, Iago revealed that he’d fed the captain a bugging device in the fruit in his drink.

[Tim did a Maneuver to put the Aspect "Bugged" on the captain. I believe he might have tagged the Captain's "I do love Citrus" to make the roll.]

Once Dumont was back on his ship, Delgado opened a tight-beam comm with him to find out what was going on and to try to get the two captains on the same page about what they were really here to do. The crew of the tempest listened in via the Bug as Delgado tried to browbeat Dumont into taking action “as they paid us to do”, and Dumont played dumb and stonewalled, clearly (to Miranda) more motivated by the fat payoff she’d promised than by Delgado’s threat.

[Delgado tried to 'get close' to Dumont by taking a move action, using Intimidate, but the barrier Miranda erected was too high, and I rolled absolute crap -- Delgado was only able to erode the barrier from a 7 to a 6, and still hadn't gotten close to Dumont in any viable way.]

Phyll, listening to this conversation, decided that the captain of the Maab needed a lesson in caution. He headed down to the cargo bay and, working with Ariel, activated all the “mining” power sources stored in the bay, calibrating their output signature to mesh with the power plant of The Tempest — specifically with the power source for the ship’s guns. Ariel, a V.I. installed on a privateer vessel, was disturbingly competent at this kind of electronic subterfuge.  When he hit the switch, the Maab read the resultant spike as though the Tempest had, approximately, a Frigate’s worth of firepower behind their beam weapons.

[Chris performed a composure attack on the captain of the Maab, rolling Engineering and tagging the Tempest's "A most Delicate Monster" aspect (which refers to Ariel) for the boost that got him the shifts he needed to fill in some boxes in on the Composure track.]

The captain of the Krab made it clear to both her allies that if they fought, she was leaving without them, and reminded Delgado that he was there to protect her ship, and that You Can’t Make Money Dead.

[The captain of the Krab made a move self action to enter into the Flight box. Basically, she was an ally for the PCs in this fight.]

ONE HOUR UP. TIME FOR ROUND TWO.

Miranda reopened comms to the captain of the Ingenue, but “accidentally” left it on an open channel, and said something like:

“You know, since we have you here, I just thought of something — there’s a job I had to turn down, very lucrative, but we didn’t have the cargo space for it. I’m friends with the client, though, and he asked me for recommendations when I turned him down. Would you lot be interested?”

[This was a Brokerage roll, and we debated whether to put an aspect on someone or something, but we instead settled on doing a "move another" action, which moved the Captain most of the way toward Flight. He wasn't QUITE convinced, though.]

I *think* the Captain replied with a tight-beam message he just got from Delgado, talking about reporting her “real identity” to Caliban. Maybe? Maybe.

[In any case, this was a compel on Miranda's "Pirate's Daughter" aspect, inducing her to panic, and Kate denied the compel, paying me a Fate point.]

[edited to fix] Tim’s attack wasn’t even an action his part. As Dumont sat on his ship, thinking things over and toying with the little umbrella from the drink Iago had served him, he noticed a sizable diamond earring pinned to the inside of the thing. An extra little bribe.

[This was, I think, a Charm check to move the Captain the last space into "Flight." It worked, once Tim tagged the Captain's "Pretty and Vain" aspect for a bonus. [edited to add] Tim was really tickled that his attack could easily be described as someone ELSE doing something.]

Delgado beamed a private message to Miranda, which she took in her ready room. It was a text message that basically said “I know who you are, and the Lafite familiy will be so relieved…”

[This was NOT a composure attack -- it was an attempt to Move Another -- Delgado was trying to move Miranda into the Fight box! I rolled A BIG number, and moved the Tempest crew entirely through the 6 Barrier, thus removing it.]

Miranda stormed out of her cabin and straight for the the gunnery stations.

Meanwhile, Phyll wasn’t done with the Maab. He ran an analysis of the other ship, and sent the captain a quick visual image of the Maab’s schematics, with all the weak points on the ship highlighted. The “caption” to the image was “proceed with caution”.

[Chris got a big hit on this with... I'm not sure what he rolled. I hope it wasn't engineering, because you can't roll the same skill twice, but I might have missed it. He tagged the Maab's "Gets a little hot in here" as well, to indicate on the map how vulnerable the ship was to beam weapons. I mitigated the damage with a Minor Consequence (second thoughts) and Severe Consequence ("The crew of the Tempest is just... too good.")]

I don’t remember what the Krab did at this point.

END OF ROUND TWO. TWO HOURS IN-GAME, DONE.

… and the conflict was almost over, too.

Miranda stormed onto the gunnery deck, pulled Anjela out of her seat, dropped in, activated every weapon within the Tempest’s considerable arsenal…

… and targeted all the weak points Phyll had just pointed out.

[Composure Attack, using Gunnery (well, Navigation with a stunt to let it sub in for Gunner, but whatever), free-tagging the Severe Consequence Phyll had just put on the captain, and Taking him Out.  This gave Kate the ability to decide what happened to the captain -- we decided he completely lost his nerve at this point, and would flee the scene, go into dry dock, and eventually sell his ship at a loss and take up farming on Achilles. He. Was. Done.]

And with that, the conflict was over. The ships parted ways…

[Miranda tagged her Liquid Assest aspect to hit a level 5 Assets check and wired a LARGE payment to Dumont, as promised (she has an aspect of "Respect, Not Fear", so she keeps her promises).]

And the Tempest turned in-system, ready to deliver their shipment.

The End.

For now.

1. Wow. Great ending. Epic.
2. In the second-to-last fight (you vs. Saren, rather than you-versus-robot-Saren), is it typical to be able to talk your way out of the fight and convince the bad guy to shoot himself in the head rather than give in to the Big Evil?  I know (a) I got to that point via the ‘blue’ dialog options that show up in the game due to my Charm skill, and (b) I had Charm absolutely maxed out at that point, but I’m wondering how rarely that solution presents itself. BECAUSE IT WAS AWESOME.
3. I found out (while transferring my saved game to ME2) that “saving” Wrex in the middle of the game was also A Thing I Did Via Charm. That makes me super-happy for two reasons.
   1. Wrex is awesome.
   2. It really makes me feel like I didn’t waste the points I spent on Charm.
4. I also got to use my Charm-opened dialog options to convince a crime boss to retire, rather than arrest/kill her. That did not suck.
5. The voice acting on the game was uniformly great. Seth Green as Joker is excellent. Whoever that guy is who plays the Captain (the actor has a gap between his two front teeth, but I can’t think of his name). Lance Henriksen as the admiral. Good stuff.
6. I was level 49 in ME1 at the end. That’s just interesting. I wonder if 50 was the cap.
7. I was completely maxed out on the “Paragon Path” in ME1. Completely. That’s also kinda cool.
8. I squeezed 47.9 hours of gameplay out of it.  Given that I paid 20 bucks for the game, that’s about 40 cents per hour of spaaaaace. Not quite MMO-levels of cost-to-entertainment-time value, but not too damn bad. (And that’s assuming I or Kate don’t play it again.) Most of the reviews I’ve read of the game mentioned finishing it in about 20 hours. Yeah. I talked the HELL out of that game. Exploring dialog options is king.

After finishing the game, I decided to install ME2. NOT TO PLAY (that’s a reward for doing revisions this week), but to mess around with transferring my saved ME1 game over to ME2. This kind of forced me to experience the first 10 minutes or so of the game. A few quick thoughts on that:

1. I need to keep the ME2 disk in the drive to play? Really? It’s 1996 again? What. The. Fuck. Bioware.
2. I have to keep track of ammo? You considered that a critical need for improving the gameplay experience over ME1?
3. I’m working for the evilest group of humans I ever encountered in the first game? Really?
4. From what I saw of the skills table, there is very little customization/choice available during the leveling process, and I didn’t see anything like the Charm/Intimidation pair from ME1 that expanded my dialog options. This makes me sad simply because those options and what I did with them made my ME1 experience really memorable.
5. AMMO? Really?

Anyway. It’s a cool looking game. SUPER pretty. It sounds like they got most of the voice actors back from the first game and added few new ones — pretty sure Miranda is Lucy Lawless. Martin Sheen is the guy with the kooky eyes… and I’m pretty sure the Ship A.I. is Caprica Six.

But if they wanted to reboot things so drastically, they should have just had me play a different guy. Seriously. Completely different guy. Or a force-grown clone. Or something.

I dunno. When I actually start play, I’ll see if the reboot annoys me enough to just roll a new character — I hear the voice actor for the female version of your protagonist is pretty good.

First, he never lets me coast during our games: not as a GM, certainly, but neither as – more simply – a roleplayer. I consider that a good thing.

Second, he challenges me on my choices. I’m not saying he busts my balls over every single thing I do in a game, but he makes sure that I know why I’m doing something — that there’s a reason for it that goes beyond “well, it’s X kind of game, so we should do X.”

But Third, he never lets me coast when it comes to the system — whatever system we’re running. What that means is that, if something is theoretically possible in the game, he will grab that ‘theoretically’ possible thing and wrangle it by the throat, dragging it from Theory into Practice.

Case in point: Diaspora. Let me point out a few things Tim did with his guy that might/would be, in another system or another time, “game breaking”.  Tim’s concept was basically:

• I’m the Benevolent Dictator for Life of an entire star system. (Except that I bailed and left a twin in my place.)
• The solar system I control is the source of life-extending food. Which I created. And kept the good stuff for myself.
• Because of this super-SUPER-food and my own experiments on myself, I am (so far) effectively immortal and can heal from just about any injury.

He’s not being a dick about it : that’s just his character concept, and if I look at it and say “I don’t think that’s possible”, he’ll work with me.

Not that I said that.

• Dude, you left a stranger that looks just like you in charge of a whole system of rich, bored, nigh-immortals? THANK YOU.
• I like super-food. I like trying to figure out how one fruity oaty bar can feed someone for a year, and how that would be remotely profitable for anyone.
• And… well, I had this idea about the whole regen thing. It’s kinda neat.

Here’s the deal with with regeneration; there’s really two things it’s likely to do. One is A Game Thing, and one is A Story Thing.

• Game Thing: You recover from wounds a hell of a lot faster than the rules allow, presumably for some game-point cost roughly equal to having internal body armor that would have stopped about the same amount of damage. That’s easy to do: you just get the “internalized gear: armor” stunt and describe it as you healing really fast. Which is fine. It’s not super-interesting to me; it’s just a thing. Whatever. (Tim: you SHOULD note that if what we came up with as a solution is unsatisfying or too non-crunchy, we can do this.)
• Story Thing: You take horrific damage that should kill another person, but it doesn’t kill you.

The thing is, people worry a lot about how to make Crazy Regeneration (TM) work as a Game Thing, but most of the time what the player wants is the Story Thing — they want a story in which their guy takes horrific damage that should kill them… and it doesn’t.

The story-point of this kind of ability is the hurt they undergo, you know?  Wolverine isn’t about his per-second-healing-rate — he’s about Surviving Shit That Should Kill You (physical and otherwise); no one would give a shit about Corwin of Amber if it weren’t for the fact that he got his eyes burned out of his head with hot pokers and kept going.

I mean… no one builds a guy with regen and then gives them agility so high they never gets hit. Where’s the fun in that?

So I listened to Tim to see what he was talking about, when he was talking about this ability.

And? He was talking about the cool scenes that would come from it.

He was talking about the story.

Right, so this is how you deal with that.

1. Make sure he can get hit a lot.  Tim built a stunt called “better living through science” that lets him determine the size of his “stress” bar (or whatever it’s called, I don’t have the book with me) from his Science skill, not Stamina. Boom. He suddenly got a very roomy stress bar for taking physical damage.
2. Make sure he’s got an Aspect that reflects this regen/durability. Why? Just to give the whole concept weight.
3. Finally: Remember what damage to this guy means.

Here’s the thing: in FATE, damage to the stress bar of a character is temporary stuff: it goes away with a few seconds’ rest at the end of the fight. Ditto Minor Consequences. Moderate Consequences take maybe a good night’s rest to shake off. Serious consequences take a fair bit longer.

On a normal guy, then, stress bar damage and minor consequences are things like little cuts, scrapes, bruises… stuff like that. Moderate might be a wrenched shoulder or a light weapon graze that draws blood. Serious is a solid hit. Blood everywhere, or a totally broken limb.

On Tim’s guy, quite simply, damage to his stress bar is described in play as something roughly similar to a normal guy’s Serious hit. That’s where damage-of-note STARTS with him — anything less is too inconsequential to mention.  From that starting point, we then ramp to the point where his “Takes awhile to shake off” injuries are things like “I chopped off my arm to escape” — because on this guy, that’s not a permanent problem.

Put more succintly: a stress-hit on a normal guy is a bruise; on Tim’s guy, I blow a hole through his leg. Increase from those starting points in parallel.

That’s it. With that tweak, we get what we’re looking for: a guy who shakes off in minutes what it would take other people months to heal from, which was the whole point.

And when he invokes that “practically immortal” aspect to give himself a bonus? That means I know that he’s solving the problem by (mis)using his body in some particularly damaging way.

Ouch. Should be fun.

Well, not to me. A few weeks ago (after reinstalling my home system), I was redownloading games I’d bought through Steam, and I got a ’suggestion’ (read: ad) to pick up Mass Effect 2, which is the current hotness in the gaming world.

And honestly, I had reservations. Yeah, I know it’s a great game, and it’s getting a lot of geek love, but it’s something like 50+ bucks, so… eh. I’ll wait.

But then I noticed Mass Effect was up on Steam, also. It *also* got a lot of gamer love when it came out.

And it was a damn sight cheaper.

… and that’s where I’ve been for the last week or so. Flying around the galaxy, fighting AI robots, pirates, smugglers, things that want to destroy all life…

And trying to hook up with other members of the crew. As one does. Of course.

It has been, not to overstate it, a blast. A few thoughts.

Gameplay

• I’d read some thoughts from people about the combat system and the inventory system and the hacking system — nitpicky complaints, largely, but complaints — and I’m just not seeing the problem.
• I believe this is because I’m playing on a PC, not a console — I’ve never been much of a console RPG gamer (Fight games? Sure. Lego Star Wars? Heck yeah. RPGs? No.)
• The hacking “maze” remains fun without cock-blocking what I’m trying to accomplish. The combat controls (once I figured out the magic behind the spacebar-driven menue) is pretty slick, and the inventory… well, yeah, okay: the inventory system is pretty stupid, but now that I understand it, it’s not that bad.

Character Customization

• I like that I can make up my own “look” for the protagonist, and specialize his skill set. Said skill set choices basically consist of:
  • All-combat.
  • Finesse Combat (sniper rifles and pistols) with some tech abilities.
  • Finesse Combat with some psychic abilities.
  • All-tech.
  • Tech + psychic.
  • All-psychic.
• I think that’s about it. I opted for the sniper-rifle/pistols option (which should surprise precisely no-one) and the tech option, because I don’t like not being able to open ’special’ doors in games of this nature.  I am very happy with the result, as he feels like a very space-age commado, and in order to cover my gaps, I need to bring my two favorite NPC crew members along on missions. (Wrex (combat and psychic) and Liara (pure psychic)).
• I love having the point-buy freedom in customizing my guy; focusing the elements of play I found interesting and pretty much ignoring the stuff that bored em. I ALSO loved that I could choose to level up the NPC crew members as well, if I wanted — it let me vicariously play all the various character options.
• In hindsight, I feel the Tech options are a little weak, and I might have likes to do some of the cool-ass “biotic” powers, but if I’d gone that route I’d have been been completely hamstrung with regard to tech problems like locked doors and encrypted macguffins, so it’s just as well.

Story Customization: Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

I went a particular route with my character; I pictured a considerate, do-the-right-thing-even-if-it-sucks, Humanity has to Earn Respect character — Malcolm Reynolds, if his stand in Serenity Valley had led to a costly victory for the Independents and eventual concession from the Alliance — and selected my responses during play based on that. The result was someone with very little “renegade” rating and a nearly maxed out “Paragon”. Moreover, the further I get into the game, the easier and more obvious those choices become for me — I’m entirely in the right mindset for this guy, even when that mindset leads me to some REALLY CRAPPY, PAINFUL decisions.

(Seriously: this game had me agonizing over some of the choices I had to make before I could move forward. A. GON. IZ. ING.)

But I have to tell you: I’d love to play this whole thing again as a real rogue. It would be a pretty different game.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to, but who knows?  Kaylee bought Daddy Mass Effect 2 for his birthday, and it’s waiting for me to conclude it predecessor and show me how far the game’s creators have come in three years. Smirking, is what it’s doing.

(It’ll have to wait: I’m using it as my carrot-reward for doing some revisions before I let myself install it. Maybe someday I’ll even get Dragon Age and play it too.)

And honestly? That’s just a little bit sad — I know ME2 is a good game, and will probably make me love it more than the original, which means I might not feel the need to go back and really do the game up right, now that I understand how it all WORKS right from the start. (I don’t read manuals and I only use a single save-point during these games, so there’s no “go back to before I fucked everything up on Tuesday” option for me.)

I hope, at some point, I get the chance, cuz it’s a good game.

Counting myself, there were four players, and we opted to each create two worlds in “the cluster” (a series of different star systems, connected by ’slip points’ located above and below the barycenter of each system), for a total of eight.

The “theme” that we used for the system cluster was this:

• Your first system starts with the same letter as your first name.
• Your second system starts with the same letter as your middle name.
• All system names are derived from characters in Shakespeare.

This worked pretty well, and gave us some pretty evocative setting elements, especially when the players took things a bit further and wrote out some of the Aspects on the systems, their characters, and even their ship as quotes from various works of Shakespeare.

Due to scheduling problems, we won’t be able to play for a couple more weeks months, but we’re all looking forward to it.

Anyway, we did the whole Cluster and character generation the first night, then posted the results to a Google Wave where we’ve since fleshed things out a bit. Here are the results.

The less useful, but prettier, cluster map.

• Tech: -1 (Earth-level)
• Environment: -1 (1 planet that’s easily habitable (but unpleasant), breatheable air + drinkable water)
• Resources: 0 (Sustainable, no surplus, but no needs)

Aspects:

• All Summer in Day (severe storms virtually every day of the year)
• She blinded me with science
• You want water? We’ve got water.

Desc:
Keepdown was originally settled by Dauphine government agencies trying to make the jump to an interstellar presence without the requisite tech to support the effort, long-term. While Keepdown looked good on initial (albeit secondhand) survey scans, the reality the Dauphine “science settlers” found was far from ideal; a planet wracked by near-constant typhoon-level storms.

It quickly became apparent that outside help was no longer an option — Dauphine had already commited all it could into simply reaching the system — it had nothing left to invest in a work-in-progress like Keepdown.

Left with no other options, the original settlers did for themselves as best they could. Today’s “cities” are all biodomes, lurking next to massive, mostly-functional terraforming factories laboring into their third century trying to tame the wild weather. Although the world is rich in the cluster’s most commonly used slipship reaction mass, it’s far from making anyone wealthy. The settlements’ aging populations suffer from a cripplingly high suicide rate among its youth, its adult inhabitants addicted to ’sun lamp’ tanning and overly-optimistic dreams of science’s ability to Make Everything Better. Keepdown’s children dream of anything that will let them leave.

• T: +1 (Commercialize the exploitation of the system, can be exported, can trade with slipstream cultures)
• E: 0 (Single world, comfy human habitation w/o special tools, other barren worlds)
• R: +3 (Multiple exports, unobtainium!, raw material to manufactured goods, leasing slipships)

Aspects:

• Dangerously Bored Rich
• Ridiculously Nutritious Food (life extension)
• Benevolent Dictator for Life

Desc:
Trinculo could easily be the beating heart of the cluster, but the ubiquitous availability of food stuffs throughout the verdant world have both extended the native’s lifespan and expontentially increased their desire for meaningless excess in the place of actual achievement. Among the planet’s idle rich extreme sports, “reality” entertainment programming, and illicit “hunt the most dangerous game” expeditions distract the world’s finest minds. Trinculo is a world of unhealthy extremes: Mountains that breach the atmosphere, man-made buildings that attempt to, massive entertainment industries, incredibly conservative religious minorities, extremely high crime rates, and morality generally as thin on the ground as the food is thick.

Ruled (as much as anyone on the world is ruled) by the biologist-savant who developed the first ’superfoods’ from the native plantlife several centuries ago, the system resists any outside attempts to harvest resources from the system just as strongly as it resists attempts from within to push it into the Cluster as true power; those with sway in Trinculo seem more than happy to remain an insular sybaritic paradise.

• T: +2 (Commericalized slipstream technology, expensive)
• E: 0 (Single world, comfy human habitation w/o special tools, other barren worlds)
• R: -2 (Pressure for conflict, needs imports!)

Aspects:

• Ring of Scrap
• Letters of Marque
• Your Resources, Our Ships, No Questions Asked!

Desc:
In terms of both technology and the ‘geography’ of the cluster, Caliban is a Hub; its slip knots allow access to an unmatched number of other systems, and it sells (or, more accurately, indentures ownership under a letter of marque) the large majority of slipships throughout the cluster.

It’s fair to say that Caliban has taken advantage of their position. Most spacers think of Caliban and piracy interchangeably; the system runs slippoint stations at great cost, recouping that cost by gouging its customers for refuel, repair, and ’safe escort’. Resource poor (the ruling families long since stripped any and all valuable metals from the system, leaving a powdered ring of detritus circling its home world), Caliban ’sells’ its tech by requiring several years of ‘resource acquisition’ from any new slipship owner. Some pay this debt through legitimate trade and courier work, but most do so by mining illegally in other systems (often the rich-but-largely-indefensible Dauphine) or through acts of licensed piracy, hauling their annual stipend back to the giant tortuga that is Caliban.

It is very little surprise that, by the time a captain’s ship is paid off, it is simply easier for the now-independant crew to continue the same practices that brought them to that point; many of the bullet-shaped ships scouring the cluster do so at Caliban’s command, but just as many do so simply because the pirate-kings have taught them that that is the best way to do business.

• T: -1 (Earth-like)
• E: +1 (one garden, several hostile but livable w/ tech)
• R: +2 (More than it needs, but maybe not enough to start a war over)

Aspects:

• Turned our back on the stars
• Pillaged by Pirates
• Bent on Revenge

Desc:
Pinned between meddlers and pirates, Dauphine suffered for generations on the losing side of pretty much any conflict with its neighbor systems (be it Caliban’s pirate raiding of outlying mineral-rich planets and moons or Shylock’s relentless trade agreements). In a desperate bid to get out from between this vice grip, the system’s progressive political parties pushed through a major effort to colonize a new system with better connections to the rest of the Cluster. Unfortunately, Keepdown turned out to be a much less hospitable system than was hoped, and all the effort poured into colonization yielded little.

When word came that Keepdown would need decades more development to truly come into her own, all support for further expansion died, and the progressives were nigh-permanently ousted from power by an ultra-conservative, ultra-religious, anti-exploration party that rules to this day. Publically, this faction has no interest in space exploration or any of the technology that might lead that direction. In secret, they work as covert saboteurs bent on revenge against those systems (read: nearly all systems in the Cluster) that have hobbled their future.

• T: +1 (Commercialize the exploitation of the system, can be exported, can trade with slipstream cultures)
• E: +2 (One garden, several harsher but survivable w/o tech)
• R: +1 (Active trader in cluster-wide commodity markets)

Aspects:

• Neither a borrower nor a lender be
• We meddle
• Exporter of Exploiters

Desc:
Despite lacking slipship technology of its own, Shylock is a remarkably self-sufficient system with strong influence throughout the Cluster, thanks to extensive and shrewd negotiation. Shylock’s intra-system navy (both governmental and corporate) is entirely capable of exploiting the relative wealth of the system and defending the system from those (notably Caliban-indentured privateers) who would steal from them — perhaps they could not win (or even wage) an interstellar war, but they can (and do) make raiding their resources an unattractively unprofitable option.

The system is comprised of several “City States” located both on the ‘home world’ as well as on several slightly less hospital worlds (actually, all the settled ‘worlds’ are moons orbiting a vast gas giant within the system’s habitable zone). Generally, Shylock is very intent on controlling their fiefdom and maintaining independence above all other things — the only real threat being themselves and their inability to keep from meddling in other systems’ politics.

• T: -2 (Steampunk world!)
• E: -2 (HOSTILE – one world that barely supports life with non-native/understood tech)
• R: -1 (Almost viable! Lacking something!)

Aspects:

• Leper Colony in Ancient Ruins
• Extremely Mysterious Past
• Drowning in Missionaries

Desc:
Lear was, of a certainty, once a far greater world. Ruins (both human and alien in origin) dot the uninhabitable landscape of the world, shattered in places but unknown forces, but otherwise unaffected by the scorched, acidic skies. Those that remain on Lear “live” beneath the planet’s surface — living at a barely industrial-age level in vast caverns, breathing air and drinking water made useable by machines that none now understand. Few escape the confines of the planet; many are afflicted by a strange disease that remains dormant on Lear but which manifests as a highly-communicable rotting disease when a carrier travels elsewhere in the Cluster, and in any case few slip-capable ships travel to Lear in any case — only archeologists (hoping to find lost treasures or deduce the reason for the planet’s fall) or missionaries from the ultra-conservative (but mutually hostile) sects on Trinculo, Shylock, and (rarely) Dauphine) have any reason to come here, despite the widespread rumors of hidden treasures.

• T: 0 (Exploring the system, colonies, cusp, volitile)
• E: -1 (Single, Habitable but unpleasant, breatheable + water)
• R: -1 (Almost viable. Lacking something.)

Aspects:

• Tragic experimentalists
• Hostile plant life
• Slugthrowers ‘R Us

Desc:
Although Achilles has fared better than Lear, it too has fallen far from some long-past technological height. The inhabitants of the world feel that their ancestors engineered their own destruction; the collapse left their descendents fighting for their lives on a world where almost every plant on the planet is hostile and hungry. City militias are well-trained, and spend many months of each year defending settlements from hostile, possibly sentient, plant-life. What Achilles lacks in space-faring technology, it more than compensates for in the development of efficient weaponry.

• T: +2 (Commericalized slipstream technology, expensive)
• E: +1 (Single world, comfy human habitation w/o special tools, other ‘need tech’ hostile worlds)
• R: +1 (Active trader in cluster-wide commodity markets)

Aspects:

• Fine on our own
• Dreamer Idealists
• We sell our tech to keep things fair

Desc:
Orpheans have always felt as though their were somewhat on the ‘outside’ of the cluster. With only a few slip connections available and readily available resources and a rich system, it would have been easy for Orpheus to isolate themselves. They have chosen not to do so. The archetypal Orphean is a dreamer and an idealist, working toward a day where the entire cluster stands on even technological footing. Meddlers (like Shylock) who would exploit or (worse) hold down another system are disliked and actively (if obliquely) resisted whenever possible. (Conversely, they have little patience for systems like Dauphine, who seem to have given up.) To that end, Orpheus sells their tech to anyone who can reasonably afford it, with none of the associated ’strings’ that come with a Caliban freetrader.

Orpheans should not be seen as high-minded austere philosophers — it’s is far more accurate to think of rugged frontiersman who beleives everyone should get a fair shake, provided they’re willing to work for it.

Click to embiggen.

On both maps, there’s some color coding going on. Systems with good environments are green. Mediocre enviros are yellow. Lear is brown. Resources are reflected in the thickness of the border, so Trinculo is super-thick and Dauphine’s is pretty good also. If the border is red, it’s tech level can create slipships.

So all this presents some fun questions: where the hell does Caliban get the resources to make their ships? The ideal solution for them is Shylock, but they’re kind of an insular system with no direct slipstream to Caliban — I’m sure they trade, but at the best possible rates they can, and it’s nigh-impossible to get the better of that deal. Trinculo, thanks to the prejudices of their benevolent dictator-for-life, rarely trades with “Caliban pirates”. Annoyingly (for Caliban) both Shylock and Trin have the technological means to make raiding their system for resources difficult and dangerous, if not entirely impossible.

That leaves Orpheus, who doesn’t like the way Caliban plays ball and is even better equipped to defend their resources… and poor Dauphine, which both has the resources Caliban needs and lacks the means to defend said resources. Dauphine’s looking for any way out of that situation, but how do you get out when the only system willing to help/trade (Orpheus) is hell and gone from you? (To get to Orpheus through relatively neutral systems from Dauphine means Dauphine -> Keepdown -> Trinculo -> Lear -> Achilles -> Orpheus. Whew.)

I like Lear near the center of the cluster, but gutted — looks like system that was once great in ages unrecorded.

• The Pirate’s Daughter
• Wants respect, not fear
• Lost Navigator
• Already died once
• Running from her past
• A little bit rusty
• The Tempest (ship)
• Liquid Assets
• A new family of my choice
• One step ahead

Skills:

• 5: Brokerage
• 4: Assets, Navigation
• 3: Culture/Tech (Caliban, Shylock, Orpheus, Keepdown), Close Combat, Stealth
• 2: Bureaucracy, Vehicles, EVA, Tactics
• 1: Resolve, MicroG, Medical, Agility, Alertness

Health: O O O
Composure: O O O O
Wealth: O O O O O

Stunts:

• Black Market Contacts (Military-grade Assets)
• Have a Thing: Ship – The Tempest
• (maybe) Naval Tactician (use Navigation @3, in place of Gunnery)

Growing Up:

- Years ago, Miranda’s great-great-grandfather was a criminal and a scavenger. In retirement, it was his bright idea to finance and build the first docking stations that surround Caliban: stations he stocked with ammunition and pirates ready to impress not just sailors, but whole ships. After generations. her family became warlords. Miranda, once ***the pirate’s daughter, now ***wants to be respected, not feared.

Starting Out:

- It was easy to convince her family to let her train as a navigator, though the only place she wanted to find herself was far away. On her first missions, she faked her own death several jumps away from home — a process that nearly killled her (***already died once) — and made her way to Shylock, happy to be a grounded but otherwise ***lost navigator.

Moment of Crisis:

- After years on Shylock, building a reputation as a consultant (brokerage), Miranda learned the downside of being well-known: her own family sought her out to hire, unknowing of her true identity. In a moment of pure unthinking panic, she bought a ship of her own to flee again, firing all the crew but one — Kaetlyn, a familiar face from Arden Station. [need to insert aspects]

Sidetracked:

On the move with her new crew, Miranda starts to acclimate to her new role as captain/owner/navigator/broker of The Tempest, a ‘independent privateer’-class ship with lots of weapons and a reputation inherited from whatever uses the previous owner put it to. It’s not the money-maker that her previous work was, but it keeps her moving and makes her financials nearly-impossible to track.

***The Tempest
***Liquid Assets

On my Own:

Things aren’t a bed of roses aboard the Tempest: her pilot hates pirates (her family, and everyone she grew up with), her engineer/gunner and communications experts both hate most planets… and they’re sleeping with each other… when they aren’t fighting. Her one real friend aboard acts like she wants to be somewhere else.

And yet, the ship is home, and her crew… well, maybe they aren’t family, exactly, but neither were the people she grew up with.

***A new family of my choice
***One step ahead
——————-

T2 Privateer – “The Tempest”

V-Shift 3, Beam 3, Torpedo 2, EW 2, Trade 2

Frame: O O O O
Data: O O O
Heat: O O O

Slipdrive: can traverse slipstreams
Interface Vehicle: has a separate vehicle capable of landing on planet surfaces (and carrying a small land-based vehicle)

• We seem to have Inherited a Reputation
• Not exactly factory-spec
• A most delicate monster
• Made for pirates, by pirates
• Out of Ammo

• Almost impossible to pass up a joke
• Leave no stone unturned
• Deep desire to help people; even against their will
• Dislikes gene meddling
• Benevolent Dictator for Life
• Practically Immortal
• Deep grudge against pirates and their kin
• Restless
• On the Lam
• I can fly anything

Skills:

• 5: Science
• 4: Culture/Tech (Trinculo, Shylock, Dauphine, Caliban, Keepdown), Pilot
• 3: Survival, Charm, Profession: Cook
• 2: Aircraft, Assets, Bureaucracy, Resolve
• 1: Archaeology, Oratory, Medical, Brokerage, Animal Handler

Health: 3 O O O
Composure: 4 O O O O
Wealth: 4 O O O O

Stunts:

• Regeneration: Health – if access to microflash-fruit within one day, regrows in minutes

Growing Up:

- Son of an archaeologist and a biologist, intensely curious adventurer, explored jungle around colony ship; got sick a lot; very sickly child, but adventurous, irrepressible; developed great sense of humor to deal with sickliness; ***almost impossible for him to pass up a joke; snuck out a lot; made friends easily wherever he went; wink and a nod from camp guards; very generous, always bringing back fruit from the jungle to give to people. Sheltered, but distractedly; experimented on things all the time. Environment of Trinculo one of extremes – everyone who came on the original ship had the heart of an adventurer, and ***struggled to leave no stone unturned. A long long time ago; perhaps knows things about the cluster that no one else knows!

Starting Out:

- Started combining various fruits and such to make powerbars for his own trips; started attacking his own sickliness with a vengeance; really wanted to solve it. Experimented on himself; secretly, and benevolently experimented on others, once he’d tested it on himself. *** Deeply resistant to direct-gene meddling; transition to knowledge as an adventure rather than the physical; met a girl with no legs; took her out on a hoverboard every day for a year; fell in love. Local Fauna break-in caused a near-famine among the crew, his powerbars helped save people until they could rebuild the stores; he decided to concentrate on nutrition as a way of both helping his own sickliness and feeding his world. ***Deep desire to help; even against their will;

Moment of Crisis:

- Fiancee (legless girl) and he are exploring for new powerbar ingredients, and come across a grove of heretofore unknown trees; they test some of the fruits, and find off the charts levels of nutrition, but the fruits only last, once picked, for a few minutes. Girlfriend named it “Flashfruit”. As they are trying to gather and preserve samples; girlfriend accidentally fell into a pile of the fruits, and ended up getting buried in a pile of them, and regrew her legs; that was the end of their relationship; she ended up leaving him soon after and he buried himself in trying to make the Flashfruit viable. Eventually did so – “Flashfood”, and history was made. He became the benevolent dictator for life. ***Practically Immortal.

Moment of Crisis 2:

- Got a wild hair to set up a doppelganger of himself; and go out exploring; try to help people. ***On the Lam. Managed to hitch a ride to Shylock; but got stuck there for several years, unable to give them anything of value to get off the planet. Eventually met a girl, Miranda, whom he was able to convince to let him be a pilot and cook. ***I can fly anything.

Out of my Control:

Was on a diplomatic mission; waylaid by pirates; rescued after befriending one of the pirates by noticing his fear of plants, and exploiting that by using a spray of the hormones of his pet Trinculo-bunny. He fed him one of his special powerbars of friendliness; which he was GOING to use on the president of Caliban, and the whole stupid mission was ruined. Would’ve stayed friends, but felt too guilty, and hatred of the gene-meddlers. ***Deep Grudge against pirates and their kin.

On my Own:

Exploring the Galaxy on the Tempest, trying to seek out new experiences, foods, loves, etc. And taking out pirates. ***Restless.

• There’s no rain in space, thank god.
• Everything burns, even water.
• You must have dropped it.
• Everything’s on a computer, somewhere.
• Finally found someone like me.
• Bad is the only kind of luck I get.
• Not a good team player.
• Friends are worse than loansharks.
• I am the static on your comms.
• Restless

Skills

• 5: Communications
• 4: Computers, Stealth
• 3: Charm, MicroG, Demolitions
• 2: Repair, Close Combat, Energy Weapons, Assets
• 1: EVA, Agility, Intimidation, Slugthrowers, Culture/Tech (Keepdown, Caliban)

Health: O O O
Composure: O O O O O
Wealth: O O O O

Stunts:

• HaXor (Military-grade Communications)
• Commo Wizard (Swap Communications (3) for Alertness checks involving comm devices)
• Bomb hobbyist (use Demolitions to determine Composure track, not Resolve)

Skill-based gear:
Personal comp, black clothes, velcro shoes, electronic fuses, sunglasses, caliban ‘boarding knife’, Ariel Arms Zephyr-class PLP (harm 2, pen 1, rng 1-4), Achilles Arms “Nightshade” palm pistol (rng 0-2, concealed, pen 1, harm 0), pressure suit (lightweight, flexible, DEF 1), small toolkit

Phase One: Growing up

Kaetlyn grew up in the unfortunately named Goneril Dome on Keepdown. Boredom and depression dominated her life, and she longed for the opportunity to leave the depressing, neverending storm of her homeworld. A dangerous accident got her charged as an adult and shipped off planet, but she escaped on a slippoint station in Caliban before she could reach her final destination (a penal mine in Dauphine).

* It doesn’t rain in Space, thank god.
* Everything burns, even water.

Phase Two:

A ‘vent system rat’ on Arden Station, Kaetlyn made a living as a pickpocket and used her computer and comms knowledge (thanks mom and dad!) to endear herself to the brighter local privateers and those in their orbit (such as Miranda, whose family ran the station).

* You must have dropped it.
* Everything’s on a computer, somewhere.

Phase Three: Moment of Crisis

Theoretically, there are people in the cluster with worse luck, more hatred of being planetside, and just as much preference for machines as Kaetlyn, but she never really believed they existed in reality. Then she met Phyl. Sex wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d expected.

Nothing good lasts, though, and a series of colossal screw-ups left Kaet and Phyl fleeing the station as the newest crew members on a privateer… just a few hours after one of the arms of the station started venting halon and chloride into space in critical quantities.

* Finally found someone like me.
* Bad is the only kind of luck I get.

Phase Four: Sidetracked

Despite hating the idea of going planetside, Kaet was all set to hop ship and run in Shylock and trying to find a decent space station to hide out on. (The system can’t maintain slip stations, but maybe…)

Then someone bought the ship. She didn’t even know it was for sale. Apparently, neither did the captain, who wasn’t actually the owner, anyway. The NEW owner gave all of the crew their walking orders, except Kaetlyn.

She figured out why when Miranda walked on board and asked if she’d stay. Please.

Dammit. She had to say please. Kaetlyn agreed, but only if Phyl stayed on too.

* I’m not a good team player.
* Friends are worse than loansharks

Phase Five: On Your Own

So this is where she is now: the “communications officer” on a pirate ship — excuse me — “private trading vessel”. Somehow, even though the ship is taking her to parts of the Cluster she’s never seen before, she feels, somehow, like she’s moving less than she ever has before.

* I am the static on your comms.
* Restless.

Aspects

• I Hate Nature (Dad Was Eaten by a Hibiscus)
• Must Make the Machine Better
• I Really Want to be a Pilot
• I Speak Tech but not Much Else
• Defender of the Weak
• You Look Familiar
• Spry with a Six-Shooter
• Eager to Please
• The Tempest is My Lady
• Don’t Want to Feel Indebted

Skills

• 5 – Engineering
• 4 – Slug Throwers, Repair
• 3 – Stamina, Agility, Gunnery
• 2 – Resolve, Alertness, Intimidation, Survival
• 1 – Brawling, Micro G, EVA, Tactics, Culture/Tech (Achilles, Caliban)

Health: O O O O O
Composure: O O O O
Wealth: O O O

Stunts

• Military Grade Engineering
• Gun Fu (Substitute Slugthrowers for Brawling at level 3)
• **TBD** (maybe military grade slug-throwers?)

Phase 1 (Growing Up): Phyll comes from a family of “Harvesters”, the group of Achillians assigned to the front lines against the plants. He witnessed dad get eaten by a plant (**I Hate Nature) Spent time working on new tech to combat the plants (Must Make the Machine Better) while also serving time as a Harvester.

Phase 2: Became a stowaway aboard a gunrunner’s ship, was caught and forced into indentured servitude doing whatever chores they gave him. Had delusions of grandeur (I Really Want to be a Pilot) but show aptitude at keeping the ships systems running (I Speak Tech but not Much Else)

Phase 3:(Moment of Crisis): Was pressed into service to raid a ship and assassinate a political person of note aboard said ship. In midst of raid actually had a chance to kill the politico but took pity upon him (Defender of the Weak) and helped him to escape, earning the enmity of more than a few shady folks in the process (You Look Familiar)

Phase 4: (Sidetracked) — Hooked up with a tech girl while on the run and got placed aboard a ship through her influence. The ship was rather sparsely crewed so he had to serve a couple of roles, one as security of sorts (Spry with a Six-Shooter), as well as anything else that was asked of him (Eager to Please)

Phase 5: (On My Own) — Happy to be aboard the Tempest, a ship he has come to know very well (The Tempest is my lady) but he wants to feel more like a crewmember than the indentured servant he was before on his previous ship (Don’t Want to Feel Indebted)

All of this pleases me.  Initially, my plan was to watch episodes while I’m on the elliptical, and while I’m doing that, I’m not only doing that, because it’s Farscape, and it kind of sucks me in. (I’m excited to watch past third season, actually, because I don’t think I ever saw all of Season Four, and I never saw the Peacekeeper Wars.)

But in rewatching the show, I’m struck by how strongly Farscape seems modeled on the story/structure of a gaming group. Not ‘game-based fiction’, but the group itself. Not even Dragonlance reflects my experience with the ebb and flow of a game at the table, and the things that happen with your players over time.

Five players, plus the GM.

Season One:

So here’s what we’ve got when we first start playing the game.

GM: “I’m going to do this sci-fi game.”
Crichton: Cool.
Most of the players: “What about the DnD game we’ve been doing?”
GM: “This will still have most of those dynamics. All the classes are pretty much the same, it’s just a few skills that will be different.”
D’argo: “As long as I can still have a big fucking sword.”
GM: “… fine. Whatever.”

• Warrior: D’argo
• Ranger: Aeryn
• Cleric: Zhaan
• Rogue: Rigel
• Crichton, the only one who tries a new class, starting out as an ‘astronaut’ (basically a scientist/pilot multiclass with none of the multiclass disads… like the way elves and hobbits worked in original DnD).

Now, the GM quickly realizes that the guy playing Crichton is never going to miss a game session. The dude writes diary entries from his character’s point of view, podcasts random stuff, and even writes some fiction about the stuff that happens between official sessions.  A lot of the game is built around what this player does and the stuff he and the GM talk about. But everyone’s having a good time, and the bad guy seems to be working out pretty well, and word gets around. A couple more players want to join in.

And this GM has a real problem with telling a player they can’t join if they want to.

Chianna wants to play a rogue, but the group’s already got a rogue, so she goes the ‘physical burglar’ route so as to keep from stepping on Rigel’s toes.  It takes a few sessions to really take, and a it’s quite a few more sessions after that before Rigel’s player really acknowledges her at the table, but once that happens, those two kinda bond.

Stark is just a buddy of Rigel’s who’s visiting from out of town for a couple weeks and wants to play, so the GM has him play Crichton’s cellmate. The dude’s kinda of crazy, and doesn’t seem to give a crap about the actual game system — he just wants to roleplay everything instead of rolling dice, but whatever — the GM makes up death-priest variant, figuring it’ll never matter anyway, cuz the guy’ll be gone before long.

Near the end of the first story arc, the GM introduces Scorpius, whom everyone universally decides is cooler than Crase as far as bad guys go, and the GM likes playing him a lot, so Scorpius become the new big bad, and Crase flies off stage with the gunship that the GM mistakenly gave the players (he just wanted to make use of the ship-design rules he’d been playing with, and Crichton saw the design and talked him into introducing the ship via a weird pregnancy plot).

Season Two:

Six is a lot of players, but the situation doesn’t get appreciably better with the new storyline. Crichton is still super active, but the whole wormhole thing is kind of going by the wayside for the player, cuz he likes being chased by Scorpius and trying to hook his character up with Aeryn, so that’s pretty much the main arc.

Other players saw the whole torture scene stuff with Crichton, though, and want a piece of the story-action. D’argo nags the GM to push the ‘I have a son’ thing forward, for example.  Zhaan’s player is pretty pissed about the ‘crappy healing’ that clerics get in this system and continues to nag everyone to go back to the ‘real’ DnD game, but no one’s listening.

Rigel’s fine. Rigel’s always fine. Don’t worry about Rigel. He’s good.

The GM loves playing Scorpius, so he finally comes up with a way to play him even more often by sticking him inside Crichton’s head. Crichton actually stats up Scorpius’ second in command just so he and the GM can play some one-on-one ‘bad guy’ scenes.

Oh man… Rigel’s buddy actually decides to move to town (he’s got a semi-permanent gig with the local community theater). He wants back into the game. As the same death-priest guy. Crap.

Zhaan really wants to quit the game. Honestly, she’s run by Crichton (so he can play in more scenes) and the GM as much as the original player, cuz she doesn’t show up much. (Though she does come back for awhile when Stark’s player shows move into town, cuz she’s got a crush on him, but it doesn’t go anywhere, and she can’t even get his attention with a glorious death scene, so shes quits and doesn’t make a new character.)

The group is left with no healer except for the guy who’s main skill is helping people die. Crap.

So the GM finds someone to play a ‘regular’ doctor. Jool. His girlfriend. Who doesn’t game and doesn’t like science fiction. Even the guy playing Crichton thinks this is a bad idea.

Plus, the group is hitting nigh-critical mass. Too many of almost every class.

The GM wants to split the group into two separate groups for awhile. Crichton hates that idea, because he wants play more, not less, and doesn’t want to make another ‘main’ guy.

“I have a solution,” the GM says.

So the group’s get split up.

Group Moya

• Fighter, D’argo
• Rogue, Chianna
• Jool, “healer”
• Crichton

D’argo’s spending points on “I have a ship”, but he can’t do it all at once, so the GM’s letting him buy it a little bit at a time. That’s fine. But Crichton realizes that in this group he’s got nothing going on — his “Loves Aeryn” thing and “D’argo’s Buddy” doesn’t let him go after Chianna, no one’s really hunting Moya, Jool is dating the GM and they both give him dirty looks whenever he tries to hit on the character…

… so he only has wormholes to work on. This quickly gets old for EVERYONE.  The only respite is when Crichton takes a break and roleplays Braka in scenes with Scorpius.

Group Talyn

• Fighter, Aeryn
• Rogue, Rigel
• Priest, Stark
• MORE Crichton, who by this point in time has multiclassed so many times that the GM just simplified the system by making “Crichton” a class. Crichton loves this group, because he gets to continue to hit on Aeryn, shoot stuff, get chased by bad guys, and fiddle with wormhole tech.

But the GM is getting a little fatigued by running two groups every week. He isn’t aware of it consciously, but he resents all the time the game is taking — it starts to leak into the game itself: it’s basically impossible for anyone to do anything in any game session without making the situation worse, even if they succeed.  This trend will, we fear, continue.

——

And that’s about where I am right now in Season Three.

You gotta admit, as good as the show is, it’s weirdly similar to gaming groups.

… which in turn makes it dissimilar to any other kind of ensemble cast show I’ve ever watched. The characters are more strongly archetypal (or stereotypical, depending on how charitable you’re feeling) than anything like BSG or Babylon 5 or… well, anything.

What’s weird and remarkable is that they largely retain those archetypes even three years into the series. That’s not say they’re shallow, but their depth tends to be strictly confined to the original silos they were built into. Character archetypes. Classes. It makes the show immediately easy to grasp, no matter which episode you jump into.

(Until, if I recall correctly, Season Four, where everything goes CRAZY and the GM starts dropping acid.)

More as I think of it.

Yesterday I was pondering a couple of recent gaming purchases I’ve made. Annalise. Diaspora. 3:16. Trail of Cthulu. Like that, you know: table top roleplaying games.

And somewhere in my ruminations of same (thinking about what game I’d like to play and/or run next), my mind wandered, as it does, to other topics, one of which was my ‘to do’ list on Lord of the Rings Online, my current MMO and pretty much my default game of choice.

And while pondering that, my thoughts wandered further afield, coming (eventually) full circle to the Day Job and various duties therein: specifically, stuff I needed to get done before I would have anything that looked like free time for a little side project I’m thinking off for the online training area.

And then all these thoughts that had been wandering around walked back to me and said

“You know… the thoughts you have about LotRO are a lot more like the thoughts you have about Work than the ones you have about Games. It’s all to-do lists and stuff you want to get done, and only very rarely is it about, say, a new tactic you want to try (though it is sometimes about that) or the larger story that’s unfolding (rarely about that) or the story of your character (never). Is playing an MMO really a game? Hell, is it even play?”

And I had to admit, those thoughts had a point. That’s not to say that LotRO isn’t enjoyable (it is), and that I don’t have a good time (I do), but does it scratch the same itch as tabletop gaming or board games or tactical war games? Is it even the same as other kinds of video games?

• Tactical reward. The joy of a risky but sound plan executed successfully? MMMmmmmaybe. Sometimes. Most of the time, the game is ‘tuned’ so that you can kinda coast a bit and play at a medium level of skill and do just fine. Yes, sometimes you really have to use your shoulder-mounted thinking bone to accomplish a goal, but… hmm. Okay, I’ll say “yes”.
• Cool story. Well, there’s two kinds of stories you’ll get out of an MMO: the Big Picture Story (which will pretty much happen whether you do anything or not) and your guy’s personal story that the game probably doesn’t help you realize at all, which you’re pretty much making up in your head and whatever forum you’re writing your own character’s fanfic on. MMOs are fine on Big Story, but that’s a pretty passive experience in most cases… one’s personal story, on the other hand, is very proactive on your part in that it doesn’t happen at all if you don’t make it happen.  I used to do that, but I don’t any more for a couple different reasons, so I’m going to call this half-yes, half-no.
• Roleplaying. I’m not just talking about tabletop roleplaying, but the childlike play-pretend that exemplified the core of ‘play’. Again, there is very little in an MMO that encourages this, though there is some to be had as you stomp through the virtual world in the body of your cool-ass avatar. As for ‘gamer-style’ roleplay, maybe nothing discourages it, but it’s pretty much all on you to introduce and perpetuate. (I used to do this a lot, but I don’t now, and without my continued effort, it’s essentially an element that doesn’t exist in MMO play for me.)  I’m going to call it a Yes on child-play and a maybe-yes on gamer-play.
• Puzzle solving. This is, for most mainline MMOs, pretty rare. I can think of three or four examples in LotRO and none in WoW or CoH or anything else I’ve tried. There aren’t even any puzzle ‘mini-games’, which could be worked into some games’ crafting systems if they wanted to do it — I’m thinking here of stuff like the lockpick/hacking mini-game in Bioshock. Hell, even the ‘how do I get to point x?’ puzzles as are found in games like Tomb Raider or Mirror’s Edge are active discouraged in many MMOs.
• Planning and management. Anyone who doesn’t think that’s a viable kind of game has never played Civilization or Zoo Tycoon. MMOs have this, sometimes to their detriment, as many don’t seem to know how to express it as anything but a boring grind.
• World Creation. Please. Tell me an MMO (Second Life is not an MMO for this exercise) where you can create your own chunks of the world. No.

So… the stuff I (or my daughter) would readily recognize as ‘play’ is not strongly prevalent. There’s no real-time strategy. There’s really not even dice rolling going on to give you that little gambling frisson. There’s socialization, sure, and it’s one of the things I enjoy but… a game? Is it? Really?

Maybe.

And yet I enjoy the hell out of it. For all that it’s a lot of me finishing off one task and starting another — “working” on this guy and then “working” on this other guy — it’s still play for me.

Somehow.

I just… don’t exactly know how.

Maybe it’s scratching that itch so well that I don’t even feel it anymore.

Last year, during the holidays, Tim (I’m pretty sure it was Tim) suggested that we set up a regular gaming schedule for:

• A small group.
• On weeknights.

This coincided well with my long-time desire to get a regularly scheduled game night going again. The small group also meant that we wouldn’t have (as many) problems with not being able to play because some significant percentage of the group couldn’t make it.

By and large, it worked. Since January 14th of last year, this is (to the best of my recollection) what I’ve played:

• Don’t Rest Your Head – We did this as a one-shot with Tim and Chris and Kate, and while I think it would have been better with two sessions, it worked as a single session thanks to the players really pushing the story hard, and it was quite fun. I daresay it was perhaps the first really successful game I’ve run with Kate as a player. I remember this one fondly. That it was the first game of the ‘new’ schedule augured well for the future.
• Dogs in the Vineyard – a kind-of wrap up for an on-again, off-again story we’d played in 2008.
• Inspectres, thanks to a request from Bianca.
• In a Wicked Age – we revisited this system a couple times during the year, and Tim and Chris as a sort of desert-rat Laurel and Hardy rarely fails to entertain. I’d like to take this game out for another spin in the future, if only to see how The Wedding comes out. (Where did I put that Oracle?…)
• The Mountain Witch – this actually wasn’t a Wednesday Night game, but a weekend one-shot I ran for Kate, De, Lee, and their visiting brother Dale. The ending was something like: De killed Lee, Kate killed De, the Witch killed Kate, and Dale (saved the child and) killed himself. Glorious, bloody fun, hampered only by my misunderstanding of one ability Lee wrote down.
• Shadows Over Camelot – Not an RPG as such, but it gave us a number of good games, and not just with my gamer friends: our first win came while playing with Kate’s mom, and I personally had a fantastic time playing with my own mom and dad. Dad really got into the game.
• Primetime Adventure: Ironwall – A real milestone for me: we pitched a series and, from March to November, managed to run all six sessions in the first Season. That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but when you consider we were coordinating the schedules of five adults, and had to postpone several times when the ’spotlight’ player couldn’t show, I will happily dislocate my shoulder while patting my own back.  It’s worth noting that we all want to revisit this setting and the storyline in the future… but with a different system — very likely the Dresden Files, which will have just the mix we’re looking for. PTA is great for high-concept, but a little light on ground-level mechanics.

While we were ostensibly playing PTA, we squeezed in a couple other games as well.

• Mouse Guard, more Mouse Guard, and yet more Mouse Guard. I love this game, pure and simple. I love it enough to try Burning Wheel.
• 3:16 – A one-shot story of genocidal space marines. Good times. Would not mind going back to this game again at all.
• Danger Patrol – I enjoyed this session so much. I’d LOVE to play a short series of serials in this madcap, space opera, radio drama universe.

Give or take, that’s about 19 games over the course of the year. Call it 23 if you count Shadows over Camelot. Not quite two games every month, but damn close; I’ll take it and say thankee sai.

What I’d love to play in the coming year:

Longer stuff

• Burning Wheel or Burning Empires (probably Burning Wheel: I suspect that Diaspora might give me my spacey-sci-fi fix for 2010.)
• Diaspora – an excellent game built on the Fate 3.0 engine. I’ve had time to go over the rules now, and the social combat sub-system makes me shivery, to say nothing about ship to ship combat. Fun stuff. God I love Aspects.

Shorter Stuff

• Time & Temp – A game of time travel and underemployment. You travel through the ages actualizing solutions for the anomalies and paradoxes that threaten all of existence. You are reality’s only line of defense in the war between the rigidity of causality and freewill. Your reward: the hard earned satisfaction of a job well done. (Plus $11.50 an hour and a modest health package including comprehensive immunizations for history’s most prolific diseases.)
• Annalise is a game about making Vampire stories. Each player characters are the victims, hunters and tools of the Vampire. The best example is that you are playing the story of Dracula with one person (for example) in the role of Mina Harker, one as Van Helsing, one as Renfield. The Vampire in your game, like Dracula, is what drives the plot, but it is not a protagonist.
• Some more In a Wicked Age.
• Some more Mouse Guard.
• A little Ghost Echo, if I’m feeling cyberpunky.

What about playing? Hmm.

• I think I should hook Chris up with a copy of Trail of Cthulu and see if he wants to run it. I’ve heard good things.
• Fiasco, which doesn’t need a GM.
• Ooh, someone run some Shotgun Diaries, please.

And whatever other shiny bit of metal gets my attention.

What about you?

Ho Ho Huh?

Have a Merry Ninja Christmas.

More gaming stuff soon. Promise.