If you don't know it already, I am a big admirer of Rob Donoghue, a game designer, game master, and person of extraordinaty quality.
He has a blog over at The Walking Mind. He recently started to write about his new D&D 5e campaign, The Thaw. If you want to observe a process of capaign creation and blending that with character creation to make some very rich storytelling material, reading Rob's write ups so far are really worth a read.
There has never been a game that Rob would not tinker with, just like every great game master, so he offers some especially interesting twists on D&D 5e character creation which could be easily ported to other games like 13th Age. He also creates some terrific visual and tactile artifacts for his game to help himself and his players as the story developes.
It is much better to go see for yourself.
I also wanted to shout out to Lex Starwalker, of Starwalker Studios. I have recently started to listen to his Game Master's Journey podcast, and I find it to be very interesting a thought provoking.
In an ideal world, Lex and Rob should get together and have a conversation, like on a podcast (right?).
In any case, both these gentlemen have lots of information, ideas and advice worth taking or appropriating or stealing for your games.
Check them out!
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Better actual play blogs than mine and other inspiration
I labor away here, and I put up records of the 13th Age games we have been playing. If people enjoy them, that's great, but really they become my notes and records for my campaign. They are in no way polished.
If I had more time (and perhaps more talent), I would do something sophisticated, because I admire the heck out of people who elevate write-ups through multiple character perspectives, add illustrations, and generally do way better than me.
A couple that I have really enjoyed include:
Brooklyn Encounters: Murder in Baldur's Gate
This blog captures the 13 sessions it took to play through this adventure. It is beautiful to look at and a pleasure to read.
Eberron: The Winter Coalition
This is the chronicle of an epic ongoing campaign. I think it has been going about three years. The write-ups are sometimes from a third person narrator (presumably the Dungeon Master), but most entries are character entries, narrating what happened from a particular character's perspective. I love reading the write-ups. I never knew much about Eberron (it came into being during a long interregnum when I was not playing or paying much attention to D&D), but man, I would love to play in Eberron in this campaign. There are hundreds of ideas to steal from the write-ups, and it is inspiring from a player/character develpment point of view, as well as from a Dungeon Master/campaign creation point of view. There is quite a back catalogue of entries, but it is well worth reading!
Other Stuff
So, I think I have sung the praises of Hunter Black before as a source of inspiration. I continue to be a big fan. If you are not reading this web comic, why not!? The team that writes, draws and letters the comic is outstanding, and the writer draws from his long experience with Dungeons & Dragons to inform his Fantasy Noir setting and characters (in the best way).
This too has an extensive back catalogue of panels to read, but every one is worth it.
Finally, yesterday I somehow managed to stumble onto Skullkickers. I may be the last guy to know about this low fantasy web comic, but it is gorgeous, action packed and funny. So far (because, again, huge back catalogue) two no-name, amoral mercenaries, a big human with knives and six shooters, and a stocky red-bearded dward with twin hand-axes generally kick butt, take names, and win and lose fortunes as monster killers. Their (mis)adventures have been very entertaining. Apparently, later in the series there is a bit more gender balance in the storylines, but I can't eveluate that yet.
What I can say is that Skullkickers is very entertaining, and again full of interesting ideas to plunder. If I am not the last person to hear of this comic, go and do yourself a favor and take a look!
That's all for now. Go play games and have fun!
If I had more time (and perhaps more talent), I would do something sophisticated, because I admire the heck out of people who elevate write-ups through multiple character perspectives, add illustrations, and generally do way better than me.
A couple that I have really enjoyed include:
Brooklyn Encounters: Murder in Baldur's Gate
This blog captures the 13 sessions it took to play through this adventure. It is beautiful to look at and a pleasure to read.
Eberron: The Winter Coalition
This is the chronicle of an epic ongoing campaign. I think it has been going about three years. The write-ups are sometimes from a third person narrator (presumably the Dungeon Master), but most entries are character entries, narrating what happened from a particular character's perspective. I love reading the write-ups. I never knew much about Eberron (it came into being during a long interregnum when I was not playing or paying much attention to D&D), but man, I would love to play in Eberron in this campaign. There are hundreds of ideas to steal from the write-ups, and it is inspiring from a player/character develpment point of view, as well as from a Dungeon Master/campaign creation point of view. There is quite a back catalogue of entries, but it is well worth reading!
Other Stuff
So, I think I have sung the praises of Hunter Black before as a source of inspiration. I continue to be a big fan. If you are not reading this web comic, why not!? The team that writes, draws and letters the comic is outstanding, and the writer draws from his long experience with Dungeons & Dragons to inform his Fantasy Noir setting and characters (in the best way).
This too has an extensive back catalogue of panels to read, but every one is worth it.
Finally, yesterday I somehow managed to stumble onto Skullkickers. I may be the last guy to know about this low fantasy web comic, but it is gorgeous, action packed and funny. So far (because, again, huge back catalogue) two no-name, amoral mercenaries, a big human with knives and six shooters, and a stocky red-bearded dward with twin hand-axes generally kick butt, take names, and win and lose fortunes as monster killers. Their (mis)adventures have been very entertaining. Apparently, later in the series there is a bit more gender balance in the storylines, but I can't eveluate that yet.
What I can say is that Skullkickers is very entertaining, and again full of interesting ideas to plunder. If I am not the last person to hear of this comic, go and do yourself a favor and take a look!
That's all for now. Go play games and have fun!
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Very nice review of Greg Rucka's Alpha over at "Thinking Too Much"
Here is a really thoughtful and interesting review of Greg Rucka's terrific new book Alpha. I am only part way through the book, so I have no comprehensive review yet, but this blog entry really captures well the depth, fun and complexity of the book. It is a great page turner, but it is far more than that too.
Read it!
Read it!
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Marvel Heroic Role Playing actual play fron "A Taste of Marvel"
Sunday my son, Ian, and I had a great time at the launch party at Labyrinth Games for Margaret Weis Productions new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game. As with Labyrinth's other demo events, this was termed a "Taste of" and it certainly was a lot of fun, even though it definitely left us wanting more.
I am not going to try to recount our experiences moment by moment as I lack the time to do it justice, but I hope that I can give an overview of the thing we experienced and convey why we had such a good time.
Ian and I drove down to Labyrinth yesterday and arrived in the area 10 minutes early. Unfortunately, it took another 15 minutes to find a parking place and another 10 or so to get back to the store. Labyrinth has a great location in Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, but parking is a challenge.
So, there were two filled tables (being run by Rob Donoghue and Nate) and our two reserved spots left at Dave Chalker's (aka Dave the Game) table. We had somewhat missed the preliminaries and did not manage to really properly introduce ourselves or catch the names of everyone at the table, though Tom Cadorette was playing Iron Man; I am sorry to say I did not catch and retain (typical for me I'm afraid) the names of our fellow players who had Ms. Marvel and Daredevil). Ian got the hero he hoped for, Captain America. I had planned to take Daredevil, but he was taken, so I grabbed Spider-Man.
Dave quickly outlined the basics of taking actions, how to build a dice pool from various character attributes and how to roll and read the dice, and then we were off and running. The game "event" was the adventure that comes with the basic book, and it, in turn, is based on the storyline of "New Avengers 1-6", a story arc called "Breakout."
The heroes had to start in different places when the breakout started. DD, in his civilian role as Matt Murdock, defense attorney, was with Ms. Marvel at a supervillain prison called The Raft. He was going to see some guy who claimed he was a former hero called The Sentry who wanted to be locked up because he believed that he killed his wife. Captain Americal was on a helicopter, returning from addressing the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, DC. Tony Stark/Iron Man was addressing a corporate gathering, and I, Spider-Man, was just about to cuddle up to my wife, Mary Jane, on the couch for a romantic comedy and our first quiet night at home in forever.
Having sketched out these beginning scense, Dave, as The Watcher (the term for the game master in MHRP), quickly launched into the central problem of our first act. Lightning seemed to strike The Raft, and to go on to overload the entire power grid, backups and black out not just the prison, but all of New York! Captain America was able to observe that a bolt of lightning also seemed to leave The Raft and head away. The residual energy fried the helicopter flight controls and it was going down!
Inside The Raft, Matt Murdock, his law partner Foggy Nelson (NPC) and Ms. Marvel suddenly found themselves in the middle of a maximum security block where all the cells were suddenly open!
Tony Stark (played hilariously by Tom, who channeled a lot of Robert Downey, Jr. for his portrayal) found his meeting suddenly cancelled by the blackout, realized that this was a huge outage that might be the result of some kind of attack and went Iron Man (while posting on Twitter, checking Stark Industries stock numbers overseas and making sure that 1000 lawyers were on retainer if this was somehow tied at all to Stark Tech).
I, as Spider-Man had to profusely apologize to MJ, put on the Wall-Crawler tights and zip off.
I quickly spotted the helicopter in trouble and swung onboard. Cap was able to take care of himself, but I rolled well to grab the SHIELD pilot and get us down safely to The Raft. This gave me an "asset" of being able to call on the pilot for help in a later roll which was a cool game effect.
Down below, Ms. Marvel was throwing thugs back into cells as much as possible, while DD as Matt Murdock did his "helpless" blind man deal while knocking around, tripping and "running into" the mob of woud-be escapees.
Up top, enter the first Super Villain. Just as Ian, as Captain America, looked into the smoking elevator shaft, he spotted the evil Count Nefaria rising out of the prison. His reaction was what any red-blooded American hero would do in his place. He jumped into the elevator shaft shield first to take out the evil-doer (and he would figure out how to survive the rest of the fall later).
Let me just say a little about how action flows in the game. There is an "action order" system, which basically has The Watcher pick someone to go first (often with input from the table), and that person finishes the character's action and picks someone else, friend or enemy, to go next, until everyone has had a turn. Last person to go, hero or villain, decides who starts the next order. This is fun, allows for fluid, yet tactical play, and really feels like the organic flow of action in comic book panels. As we played, I could visualize the action leaping off the page. It was pretty impressive.
So, for any attack, you build out a dice pool based on various attributes (see my earlier posts to describe the attributes), and then roll to try to produce a high base number and pick a leftover die, as large as possible, for an effect. Once again, simple, once you are doing it, fun (picking from the menu of what your character can do), creative, imaginative, evocative and relatively fast.
So, Cap rolled his action (attack), and Count Nefaria rolled his reaction. One thing is that the reactor knows the number to beat, so it pushes the actor to try to do as well as possible to put success out of the reactor's reach. Anyway, that was not how it worked out. Nefaria blasted Cap to the side, and suddenly he had to come up with how to survive the fall down the elevator shaft.
Fortunately, this allowed him then to choose your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to act next. I told the SHIELD pilot "cover me" made some dumb joke about Count Nefaria breaking out for good Italian food, and started shooting webbing like crazy. I managed to create a web-trampoline under Cap to save him, and it gave him a bonus on his next action as he sprang up from behind Nefaria. Second, I completely webbed Nefaria's face, so he was blinded.
I think we bounced back to Ms. Marvel and DD, and they were holding their own against the mob, but Foggy got taken away.
Then, in comes Iron Man and Tom played him just as overconfident as possible. He tried to fly into the shaft and basically put Nefaria through the back wall. Instead, Nefaria managed to beat his roll and get the opportunity to activate a counter attack. So, basically, Iron Man flew in, and there was a huge explosion and Iron Man flew out, not under his own power, after almost being taken out. Tom and Dave did a great job of describing how the suit's alarms were all going off and the heads-up display was filled with error messages and everything was reading "offline." Again, I could totally see it both on a comic book page, and on screen.
So, it was just me and Cap against Nefaria. I had my doubts, but while distracted Nefaria who failed to blast me, Cap completely clocked him by surprise with a shield blow to the temple. Moments later, we had him safely webbed up and had rebooted enough of Iron Man's systems to go down into The Raft to join up with DD and Ms. Marvel in the hunt for Foggy and to try to reactivate the systems onboard.
I need to metion, that during this whole action sequence, the main game currencies were flowing freely. These are Plot Points, which players receive for voluntarily taking penalties in their dice pools (rolling d4s), based on their personal foibles which are sometimes advantages and sometimes not, and also for rolling 1s, which add to The Watcher's source of currency, The Doom Pool. Players speend Plot Points to get bonuses, activate special effects and opportunities, take counter attacks, change the way dice get counted or to create stunts, among other things. The Watcher uses the Doom Pool in a similar fashion for the antagonists, but can also sometimes just roll the Doom Pool as the difficulty in a situation that calls for an challenging roll, but there is no opposing force, except for how dire the situation is.
This gives the game lots of tactile and visual goodness. When building a dice pool, you get to pick up the dice that represent the powers/skills you use. You see the Doom Pool growing or shrinking based on your actions. You can count Plot Points with hash marks, but more often (and more fun) with poker chips, counters, or some other thing you can gather in piles to see how ready you are to take on the opposition. If you are out of Plot Points, you need to start adding in some disadvantageous dice or accepting other limits to bank those for when things really count. On the other hand, there is no sense in hoarding the points. If you need to KO Count Nefaria, you need to spend and spend big (go big or go home) so you either force The Watcher to deplete the Doom Pool to save the villain early, or to allow him to go down to conserve the Doom for what else is in store. It makes the game fun and fiddly in a good way.
So, to go with my promise of not going blow by blow, after our first battles, things just continued to be fun and awesome. While Cap and I rappelled down into The Raft, Iron Man, of course, just flew underneath and punched in through the bottom to get to the control room, kinda because he could.
We played through searching for Foggy, found Foggy, got attacked by Carnage, who apparently just has a "totally disable Spider-Man" power, which got used on me. We found out that Captain America is REALLY COOL and he basically was two for two in taking out Super Villains. DD held his own and rescued Foggy. I learned about "trauma" and that is is not a fun thing for your hero to have.
Iron Man and Ms. Marvel ended up fighting Graviton. This was not Graviton's day however. For one thing, Dave's d12 kept rolling 1s, which made Graviton less of a threat. Iron Man and Ms. Marvel totally capitalized and took him out. Then Iron Man convinced him to help us, and he told us who engineered the escape and for whom (Electro for Sauron (not the big flaming eye from Middle Earth, but instead a mutant energy vampiry guy who can turn into a fire breathing Pteradactyl; go figure). We also talked to Sentry who seemed pretty crazy, but said he could help us if we called on him.
Then we went to talk to Electro. We had learned that much of the hit first and then talk had not worked so well the first time around. However, when Cap tried to talk to Electro, DD decided instead to try and take him out. I said something like, "wait, we're going with the punch first plan?" Iron Man rescued Electro's ex-girlfriend from the scene and flew off, lightning bolts started shooting around, Ms. Marvel ended up charging up Electro, and just when it seemed to be all going south, Iron Man flies back and hits Electro like a ton of, well, iron, taking him out.
We had fun interrogating him, and I told him he was going down with the Bad SHIELD guys, not the ones that worked with Captain America. They guys that did waterboarding. He said he'd spill it all if we promised minimum security Club Fed. We made the deal and off we were to find Sauron in The Savage Land.
There was a lot more fighting (I helped KO a T-Rex) and merriment (Ms. Marvel chose SHIELD over the rest of us and tried to take Iron Man out) and the game went really well.
I will spare you the details and just say, it was a heck of a good time, so I can get this posted.
Excelsior!
I am not going to try to recount our experiences moment by moment as I lack the time to do it justice, but I hope that I can give an overview of the thing we experienced and convey why we had such a good time.
Ian and I drove down to Labyrinth yesterday and arrived in the area 10 minutes early. Unfortunately, it took another 15 minutes to find a parking place and another 10 or so to get back to the store. Labyrinth has a great location in Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, but parking is a challenge.
So, there were two filled tables (being run by Rob Donoghue and Nate) and our two reserved spots left at Dave Chalker's (aka Dave the Game) table. We had somewhat missed the preliminaries and did not manage to really properly introduce ourselves or catch the names of everyone at the table, though Tom Cadorette was playing Iron Man; I am sorry to say I did not catch and retain (typical for me I'm afraid) the names of our fellow players who had Ms. Marvel and Daredevil). Ian got the hero he hoped for, Captain America. I had planned to take Daredevil, but he was taken, so I grabbed Spider-Man.
Dave quickly outlined the basics of taking actions, how to build a dice pool from various character attributes and how to roll and read the dice, and then we were off and running. The game "event" was the adventure that comes with the basic book, and it, in turn, is based on the storyline of "New Avengers 1-6", a story arc called "Breakout."
The heroes had to start in different places when the breakout started. DD, in his civilian role as Matt Murdock, defense attorney, was with Ms. Marvel at a supervillain prison called The Raft. He was going to see some guy who claimed he was a former hero called The Sentry who wanted to be locked up because he believed that he killed his wife. Captain Americal was on a helicopter, returning from addressing the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, DC. Tony Stark/Iron Man was addressing a corporate gathering, and I, Spider-Man, was just about to cuddle up to my wife, Mary Jane, on the couch for a romantic comedy and our first quiet night at home in forever.
Having sketched out these beginning scense, Dave, as The Watcher (the term for the game master in MHRP), quickly launched into the central problem of our first act. Lightning seemed to strike The Raft, and to go on to overload the entire power grid, backups and black out not just the prison, but all of New York! Captain America was able to observe that a bolt of lightning also seemed to leave The Raft and head away. The residual energy fried the helicopter flight controls and it was going down!
Inside The Raft, Matt Murdock, his law partner Foggy Nelson (NPC) and Ms. Marvel suddenly found themselves in the middle of a maximum security block where all the cells were suddenly open!
Tony Stark (played hilariously by Tom, who channeled a lot of Robert Downey, Jr. for his portrayal) found his meeting suddenly cancelled by the blackout, realized that this was a huge outage that might be the result of some kind of attack and went Iron Man (while posting on Twitter, checking Stark Industries stock numbers overseas and making sure that 1000 lawyers were on retainer if this was somehow tied at all to Stark Tech).
I, as Spider-Man had to profusely apologize to MJ, put on the Wall-Crawler tights and zip off.
I quickly spotted the helicopter in trouble and swung onboard. Cap was able to take care of himself, but I rolled well to grab the SHIELD pilot and get us down safely to The Raft. This gave me an "asset" of being able to call on the pilot for help in a later roll which was a cool game effect.
Down below, Ms. Marvel was throwing thugs back into cells as much as possible, while DD as Matt Murdock did his "helpless" blind man deal while knocking around, tripping and "running into" the mob of woud-be escapees.
Up top, enter the first Super Villain. Just as Ian, as Captain America, looked into the smoking elevator shaft, he spotted the evil Count Nefaria rising out of the prison. His reaction was what any red-blooded American hero would do in his place. He jumped into the elevator shaft shield first to take out the evil-doer (and he would figure out how to survive the rest of the fall later).
Let me just say a little about how action flows in the game. There is an "action order" system, which basically has The Watcher pick someone to go first (often with input from the table), and that person finishes the character's action and picks someone else, friend or enemy, to go next, until everyone has had a turn. Last person to go, hero or villain, decides who starts the next order. This is fun, allows for fluid, yet tactical play, and really feels like the organic flow of action in comic book panels. As we played, I could visualize the action leaping off the page. It was pretty impressive.
So, for any attack, you build out a dice pool based on various attributes (see my earlier posts to describe the attributes), and then roll to try to produce a high base number and pick a leftover die, as large as possible, for an effect. Once again, simple, once you are doing it, fun (picking from the menu of what your character can do), creative, imaginative, evocative and relatively fast.
So, Cap rolled his action (attack), and Count Nefaria rolled his reaction. One thing is that the reactor knows the number to beat, so it pushes the actor to try to do as well as possible to put success out of the reactor's reach. Anyway, that was not how it worked out. Nefaria blasted Cap to the side, and suddenly he had to come up with how to survive the fall down the elevator shaft.
Fortunately, this allowed him then to choose your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to act next. I told the SHIELD pilot "cover me" made some dumb joke about Count Nefaria breaking out for good Italian food, and started shooting webbing like crazy. I managed to create a web-trampoline under Cap to save him, and it gave him a bonus on his next action as he sprang up from behind Nefaria. Second, I completely webbed Nefaria's face, so he was blinded.
I think we bounced back to Ms. Marvel and DD, and they were holding their own against the mob, but Foggy got taken away.
Then, in comes Iron Man and Tom played him just as overconfident as possible. He tried to fly into the shaft and basically put Nefaria through the back wall. Instead, Nefaria managed to beat his roll and get the opportunity to activate a counter attack. So, basically, Iron Man flew in, and there was a huge explosion and Iron Man flew out, not under his own power, after almost being taken out. Tom and Dave did a great job of describing how the suit's alarms were all going off and the heads-up display was filled with error messages and everything was reading "offline." Again, I could totally see it both on a comic book page, and on screen.
So, it was just me and Cap against Nefaria. I had my doubts, but while distracted Nefaria who failed to blast me, Cap completely clocked him by surprise with a shield blow to the temple. Moments later, we had him safely webbed up and had rebooted enough of Iron Man's systems to go down into The Raft to join up with DD and Ms. Marvel in the hunt for Foggy and to try to reactivate the systems onboard.
I need to metion, that during this whole action sequence, the main game currencies were flowing freely. These are Plot Points, which players receive for voluntarily taking penalties in their dice pools (rolling d4s), based on their personal foibles which are sometimes advantages and sometimes not, and also for rolling 1s, which add to The Watcher's source of currency, The Doom Pool. Players speend Plot Points to get bonuses, activate special effects and opportunities, take counter attacks, change the way dice get counted or to create stunts, among other things. The Watcher uses the Doom Pool in a similar fashion for the antagonists, but can also sometimes just roll the Doom Pool as the difficulty in a situation that calls for an challenging roll, but there is no opposing force, except for how dire the situation is.
This gives the game lots of tactile and visual goodness. When building a dice pool, you get to pick up the dice that represent the powers/skills you use. You see the Doom Pool growing or shrinking based on your actions. You can count Plot Points with hash marks, but more often (and more fun) with poker chips, counters, or some other thing you can gather in piles to see how ready you are to take on the opposition. If you are out of Plot Points, you need to start adding in some disadvantageous dice or accepting other limits to bank those for when things really count. On the other hand, there is no sense in hoarding the points. If you need to KO Count Nefaria, you need to spend and spend big (go big or go home) so you either force The Watcher to deplete the Doom Pool to save the villain early, or to allow him to go down to conserve the Doom for what else is in store. It makes the game fun and fiddly in a good way.
So, to go with my promise of not going blow by blow, after our first battles, things just continued to be fun and awesome. While Cap and I rappelled down into The Raft, Iron Man, of course, just flew underneath and punched in through the bottom to get to the control room, kinda because he could.
We played through searching for Foggy, found Foggy, got attacked by Carnage, who apparently just has a "totally disable Spider-Man" power, which got used on me. We found out that Captain America is REALLY COOL and he basically was two for two in taking out Super Villains. DD held his own and rescued Foggy. I learned about "trauma" and that is is not a fun thing for your hero to have.
Iron Man and Ms. Marvel ended up fighting Graviton. This was not Graviton's day however. For one thing, Dave's d12 kept rolling 1s, which made Graviton less of a threat. Iron Man and Ms. Marvel totally capitalized and took him out. Then Iron Man convinced him to help us, and he told us who engineered the escape and for whom (Electro for Sauron (not the big flaming eye from Middle Earth, but instead a mutant energy vampiry guy who can turn into a fire breathing Pteradactyl; go figure). We also talked to Sentry who seemed pretty crazy, but said he could help us if we called on him.
Then we went to talk to Electro. We had learned that much of the hit first and then talk had not worked so well the first time around. However, when Cap tried to talk to Electro, DD decided instead to try and take him out. I said something like, "wait, we're going with the punch first plan?" Iron Man rescued Electro's ex-girlfriend from the scene and flew off, lightning bolts started shooting around, Ms. Marvel ended up charging up Electro, and just when it seemed to be all going south, Iron Man flies back and hits Electro like a ton of, well, iron, taking him out.
We had fun interrogating him, and I told him he was going down with the Bad SHIELD guys, not the ones that worked with Captain America. They guys that did waterboarding. He said he'd spill it all if we promised minimum security Club Fed. We made the deal and off we were to find Sauron in The Savage Land.
There was a lot more fighting (I helped KO a T-Rex) and merriment (Ms. Marvel chose SHIELD over the rest of us and tried to take Iron Man out) and the game went really well.
I will spare you the details and just say, it was a heck of a good time, so I can get this posted.
Excelsior!
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Into the Marvel Universe pt 4
Despite good intentions (Road to Hell paved? Check!), I have been less than constant in my blogging this week. Nonetheless, I will play a little catch up today while my son practices with his Pipe and Drum band.
So, I have raised a lot of questions about how the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game about to be released this next week by Margaret Weis Productions is going to play, and I have expressed various hopes while mentioning misgivings, many tied to my former experience with TSR's old Marvel Super Heroes (MSH) RPG.
However, I think that my hopes are pretty much going to be fulfilled and my worries allayed based on this terrific post (Collateral Damage #0: The Making of a New (Marvel RPG) Series) by the Chatty DM over at Critical-Hits.com. He outlines some of his challenges even though he is working on the game and goes through the start of a new ongoing campaign and the creation of the new player characters. It is a great write-up and showcases what can be done within the framework of the basic rules. While what he describes is not without a speedbump or two, it is a clear demonstration of the robust and flexible character creation possible. This is very heartening. I was pretty sure such would be the case, but, sadly, even good companies sometimes make major mistakes, especially with licensed properties (which are just no easy thing to work with (Fred Hicks has some good thoughts on them here).
So, now that I need not hold my breath on the game, what is left to say?
Hey folks, this is the blogosphere, there is always something to say.
The core of the system looks extremely sound and I see it as seriously more malleable and functional than the old MSH system (as much as I enjoyed playing it). The question I do have is how does it operate on the extremes. For example, is it going to work at the very low powered end (say you want a S.H.E.I.L.D. campaign inspired perhaps by DC's Gotham Central or Checkmate type approach (why yes, I am a flaming Greg Rucka fan))? I think the answer is yes, but I'd like to see a test drive.
Also, how does it work at the very high level side? Can you do something like the Incredible Hercules run by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente or the classic Thor stories by Walt Simonson? A campaign like these inspirations require some major city demolishing, cosmos shaking, dimension bending power to be available, and more importantly, it needs to be interesting. I think one of the problems with old MSH, was that the system just might have made the high level stuff uninteresting. Okay, you take 1000 points of damage, and we're done. Obviously, a good GM could do a lot more, but the system did not provide a lot of support.
I am thinking that in both cases, for the highs and the lows, you can get very good play from the system, but I am still hoping to see some actual play and first hand accounts.
One of the reasons that this is important to me is my own experience. One of the things that worked incredibly well in the old campaign (so very long ago (and hey here's an article about my old GM), was that it wasn't the powers that made us heroes, it was the fact that we were heroes and happened to have powers (sometimes). So, for example, we had an armored hero, who was still working hard on his I-want-to-be-Iron-Man suit. It started off fitting in a really big box and had to be carried around in a van. Sometimes, there was not enough time to don the armor. That did not stop the player. He was ex-military or law enforcement, and, for example, when Hydroman was rampaging, he was more than willing to shoot up a gas station with incendiaries (BOOM) and drive him off. Another time, a huge Sentinel robot attacked our fellow hero who was a mutant weather controller. Once again, the need to don armor was a hindrance to going "super", so the player just grabbed the nearest semi truck and rammed it into the robot, allowing me to do a little laser surgery on its head (if I recall correctly (and I had been, at that point, transformed from a ROM the Spaceknight clone into a Justice clone)).
So, the moral of the story is that, I want that feeling that the players are the heroes of the stories, powers or not, and that they have something to do, that is easily modeled by the rules. Cortex+ looks like it will do it, but I am still at the "show me" stage. After all, we are about to get The Avengers and the quote is
"Big man in a suit of armor, take that away – what are you?"
"Uh... genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist,"
That needs to work. I will be looking at Chatty DM, my own experience upcoming at Labyrinth Games, and other actual play reports to see how things play out.
But I would say things look very, very good.
So, I have raised a lot of questions about how the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game about to be released this next week by Margaret Weis Productions is going to play, and I have expressed various hopes while mentioning misgivings, many tied to my former experience with TSR's old Marvel Super Heroes (MSH) RPG.
However, I think that my hopes are pretty much going to be fulfilled and my worries allayed based on this terrific post (Collateral Damage #0: The Making of a New (Marvel RPG) Series) by the Chatty DM over at Critical-Hits.com. He outlines some of his challenges even though he is working on the game and goes through the start of a new ongoing campaign and the creation of the new player characters. It is a great write-up and showcases what can be done within the framework of the basic rules. While what he describes is not without a speedbump or two, it is a clear demonstration of the robust and flexible character creation possible. This is very heartening. I was pretty sure such would be the case, but, sadly, even good companies sometimes make major mistakes, especially with licensed properties (which are just no easy thing to work with (Fred Hicks has some good thoughts on them here).
So, now that I need not hold my breath on the game, what is left to say?
Hey folks, this is the blogosphere, there is always something to say.
The core of the system looks extremely sound and I see it as seriously more malleable and functional than the old MSH system (as much as I enjoyed playing it). The question I do have is how does it operate on the extremes. For example, is it going to work at the very low powered end (say you want a S.H.E.I.L.D. campaign inspired perhaps by DC's Gotham Central or Checkmate type approach (why yes, I am a flaming Greg Rucka fan))? I think the answer is yes, but I'd like to see a test drive.
Also, how does it work at the very high level side? Can you do something like the Incredible Hercules run by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente or the classic Thor stories by Walt Simonson? A campaign like these inspirations require some major city demolishing, cosmos shaking, dimension bending power to be available, and more importantly, it needs to be interesting. I think one of the problems with old MSH, was that the system just might have made the high level stuff uninteresting. Okay, you take 1000 points of damage, and we're done. Obviously, a good GM could do a lot more, but the system did not provide a lot of support.
I am thinking that in both cases, for the highs and the lows, you can get very good play from the system, but I am still hoping to see some actual play and first hand accounts.
One of the reasons that this is important to me is my own experience. One of the things that worked incredibly well in the old campaign (so very long ago (and hey here's an article about my old GM), was that it wasn't the powers that made us heroes, it was the fact that we were heroes and happened to have powers (sometimes). So, for example, we had an armored hero, who was still working hard on his I-want-to-be-Iron-Man suit. It started off fitting in a really big box and had to be carried around in a van. Sometimes, there was not enough time to don the armor. That did not stop the player. He was ex-military or law enforcement, and, for example, when Hydroman was rampaging, he was more than willing to shoot up a gas station with incendiaries (BOOM) and drive him off. Another time, a huge Sentinel robot attacked our fellow hero who was a mutant weather controller. Once again, the need to don armor was a hindrance to going "super", so the player just grabbed the nearest semi truck and rammed it into the robot, allowing me to do a little laser surgery on its head (if I recall correctly (and I had been, at that point, transformed from a ROM the Spaceknight clone into a Justice clone)).
So, the moral of the story is that, I want that feeling that the players are the heroes of the stories, powers or not, and that they have something to do, that is easily modeled by the rules. Cortex+ looks like it will do it, but I am still at the "show me" stage. After all, we are about to get The Avengers and the quote is
"Big man in a suit of armor, take that away – what are you?"
"Uh... genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist,"
That needs to work. I will be looking at Chatty DM, my own experience upcoming at Labyrinth Games, and other actual play reports to see how things play out.
But I would say things look very, very good.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Into the Marvel Universe pt 3
Missed out on wrting yesterday, but will try to regain ground today.
So, continuing on with my thoughts and hopes from the planned release of Margaret Weis Productions new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game I wanted to start by contrasting what I think and hope we'll see from the new game with the classic, but not perfect, TSR Marvel Super Heroes game (MSH). One of the issues with MSH was a certain inflexibility in the resolution mechanic. There was a universal chart and various abilities and powers were rated at fixed levels (good, amazing, unearthly, etc.) , and things had a fairly binary correspondence. Breaking down a door required strenght, dealing with attacking ninjas required fighting. There was not a lot of room to innovate and mix things up with the rules as written. So, if you had an armored hero who wanted to break a door down by charging or flying through the door as a self propelled battering ram, it was not really clear how to adjudicate a rating for that. The rules would tend to force a GM to either say "you can't do that" or to make up something arbitrarily. Now all games have such limitations at some point. Somewhere, the "physics" created by the rule system break down.
However, with a game inspired by the amazing and crazy things that can happen in the pages of a comic book, the farther off you can push that rigidity, the better. This is one of the reasons I am quite pleased at the prospect of the Cortex+ system driving the new Marvel system. From what I have seen of the impementation in Leverage, the manner in which creative description and flexible ability and skill categories can work together make for a powerful and fun system that has much fewer "you can't do that" moments, and many more pick up your dice and see how it turns out moments. That is exciting to me, and I am really happy to get a test run of the game at my favorite game spot next month (Labyrinth Games in Washington, D.C.).
Now, I can still see some downsides.
First, the Marvel Universe, as much as it has produced stories and characters I have enjoyed, it comes freighted with a lot of crappy baggage. One of many not great things from Marvel is their many mediocre at best "events." The new RPG is going to have at its heart, a whole variety of the past events to sell additional products that expand the basic game and the defined universe (read lots of hero and villain descriptions and advice about running various places and aspects of the mainstream Marvel Universe). I don't begrudge Margaret Weiss Productions this organizational structure, but I think it showcases the bland filler of the Marvel Universe along side its more positive aspects. This is not to say that every event has been a failure artiistically as far as story (I'm not even competent to speak commercially), but as I have tried to go through back issues and from time to time follow through one event or another (and Civil War was the last one I seriously looked at (with disappointment)), I can't say that I love any of the big cross overs (and this goes back all the way to the Secret Wars craziness that perhaps began it all).
So, there is that which may weigh against buying much into the line of products.
Also, there is just a lot to dislike in the Marvel Universe. Obviously, both big publishers have always had trouble in balancing their portrayal of women and minorities in the pages of their books. While not bereft of success from time to time, on the whole, the comics of the Marvel Universe are targeted at the white, middle class, heterosexual, male reader who expects female heroes, when they get seen, to be seen as wish fulfillment fantasies first and their story, personality and intellect, if shown at all, are all secondary at best. This is not a view I want to subscribe to or to have prevelant at my gaming table (on those rare occiasions I get to game). So, in taking the mainstream Marvel Universe as the default field of play, I get stuck with a narrower world than I would like, and a lot of work to make it over into an image that I feel more comfortable in (and having my players, most likely including my children, play their stories).
And there are number of other things that have been woven into the Marvel Universe that just violate my worldview. People in the Marvel Universe are really much worse and more banally evil than you find in the "real" world, for all its flaws and tragedies. This comes out most strongly in the Mutant Menace trope of most X-Men/Mutant etc. books. Its like regular people, at least if they are in an X-Men book (not necessarily a Spiderman or Fantastic 4 book mind you), have the super prejudice power. It only activates normally if you are in an X-book, and then beyond all history, evolving social understanding, or ability for information to be spread and people being able to rise above their context, you always seem to have just a mob of "mutie haters." It is absolutely incoherent and frustratingly so. I mean, I know this is a super hero comic, so with flying people and blue people and telepathy and all, the threshold of the willing suspension of disbelief is pretty high. Still, emotionally, most of these stories fail because there is not enough truth to them. People are prejudiced and they do hate, and it has and will continue to lead to suffering, injustice and even genocide, but it seems like there is truth (in an emotional sense) to how it gets portrayed in the Marvel Universe. The feelings come and go depending on what book you are in, and the story of prejudice just falls on its face because it almost never is told the way things really happen. There are a number of other examples of things woven in to the fabric of the Marvel Universe that just grate against me, but ifyou are going to get Spiderman, Captain America, Kitty Pryde, et al, all the rest comes with it.
So, of course you can, under your own steam, create a completely different reality, as in the already mentioned World War G post by Fred Hicks. Or, you could chose a slightly different flavor of Marvel by trying to use the Marvel related settings in other media, such as The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes animated show, or any of the Marvel super hero movies (Spiderman (1+2 but NOT 3) Iron Man (1+2), Captain America or Thor pretty good, first and second X-Men movie and X-Men first class also pretty good; Daredevil, Elektra, any of the Punisher, Ghost Rider or Hulk movies from bad to very, very bad), but I'm not sure where that really gets you. Also, there is the "Ultimate" universe, which has some promise. Unlike the old "New Universe" where Marvel tried to generate a whole new set of heroes in a new version of a super heroic universe (which did not last long), Ultimate, really starting with the well done early issues of Ultimate Spiderman, tried to remake the Marvel Universe by shifting, tweaking and reimagining its heroes. They seem to have done a pretty good job with Spiderman. But I tried to read the Ultimate X-Men books, and, for me, it was if they took all the dumbest plots from the last forty years of X-Men and found ways to make them DUMBER. So, your mileage may vary.
In the end, there has to be a way to make a corner of the universe your own and have your players' front a center. But deciding what to take and what to leave, especially when it gets all interconnected, can be a task, and I am not sure how I might take that on.
Wrote myself through another lunch, so, here's to blogging, unfounded opinions, and forceful statements without analysis.
Thanks for reading.
So, continuing on with my thoughts and hopes from the planned release of Margaret Weis Productions new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game I wanted to start by contrasting what I think and hope we'll see from the new game with the classic, but not perfect, TSR Marvel Super Heroes game (MSH). One of the issues with MSH was a certain inflexibility in the resolution mechanic. There was a universal chart and various abilities and powers were rated at fixed levels (good, amazing, unearthly, etc.) , and things had a fairly binary correspondence. Breaking down a door required strenght, dealing with attacking ninjas required fighting. There was not a lot of room to innovate and mix things up with the rules as written. So, if you had an armored hero who wanted to break a door down by charging or flying through the door as a self propelled battering ram, it was not really clear how to adjudicate a rating for that. The rules would tend to force a GM to either say "you can't do that" or to make up something arbitrarily. Now all games have such limitations at some point. Somewhere, the "physics" created by the rule system break down.
However, with a game inspired by the amazing and crazy things that can happen in the pages of a comic book, the farther off you can push that rigidity, the better. This is one of the reasons I am quite pleased at the prospect of the Cortex+ system driving the new Marvel system. From what I have seen of the impementation in Leverage, the manner in which creative description and flexible ability and skill categories can work together make for a powerful and fun system that has much fewer "you can't do that" moments, and many more pick up your dice and see how it turns out moments. That is exciting to me, and I am really happy to get a test run of the game at my favorite game spot next month (Labyrinth Games in Washington, D.C.).
Now, I can still see some downsides.
First, the Marvel Universe, as much as it has produced stories and characters I have enjoyed, it comes freighted with a lot of crappy baggage. One of many not great things from Marvel is their many mediocre at best "events." The new RPG is going to have at its heart, a whole variety of the past events to sell additional products that expand the basic game and the defined universe (read lots of hero and villain descriptions and advice about running various places and aspects of the mainstream Marvel Universe). I don't begrudge Margaret Weiss Productions this organizational structure, but I think it showcases the bland filler of the Marvel Universe along side its more positive aspects. This is not to say that every event has been a failure artiistically as far as story (I'm not even competent to speak commercially), but as I have tried to go through back issues and from time to time follow through one event or another (and Civil War was the last one I seriously looked at (with disappointment)), I can't say that I love any of the big cross overs (and this goes back all the way to the Secret Wars craziness that perhaps began it all).
So, there is that which may weigh against buying much into the line of products.
Also, there is just a lot to dislike in the Marvel Universe. Obviously, both big publishers have always had trouble in balancing their portrayal of women and minorities in the pages of their books. While not bereft of success from time to time, on the whole, the comics of the Marvel Universe are targeted at the white, middle class, heterosexual, male reader who expects female heroes, when they get seen, to be seen as wish fulfillment fantasies first and their story, personality and intellect, if shown at all, are all secondary at best. This is not a view I want to subscribe to or to have prevelant at my gaming table (on those rare occiasions I get to game). So, in taking the mainstream Marvel Universe as the default field of play, I get stuck with a narrower world than I would like, and a lot of work to make it over into an image that I feel more comfortable in (and having my players, most likely including my children, play their stories).
And there are number of other things that have been woven into the Marvel Universe that just violate my worldview. People in the Marvel Universe are really much worse and more banally evil than you find in the "real" world, for all its flaws and tragedies. This comes out most strongly in the Mutant Menace trope of most X-Men/Mutant etc. books. Its like regular people, at least if they are in an X-Men book (not necessarily a Spiderman or Fantastic 4 book mind you), have the super prejudice power. It only activates normally if you are in an X-book, and then beyond all history, evolving social understanding, or ability for information to be spread and people being able to rise above their context, you always seem to have just a mob of "mutie haters." It is absolutely incoherent and frustratingly so. I mean, I know this is a super hero comic, so with flying people and blue people and telepathy and all, the threshold of the willing suspension of disbelief is pretty high. Still, emotionally, most of these stories fail because there is not enough truth to them. People are prejudiced and they do hate, and it has and will continue to lead to suffering, injustice and even genocide, but it seems like there is truth (in an emotional sense) to how it gets portrayed in the Marvel Universe. The feelings come and go depending on what book you are in, and the story of prejudice just falls on its face because it almost never is told the way things really happen. There are a number of other examples of things woven in to the fabric of the Marvel Universe that just grate against me, but ifyou are going to get Spiderman, Captain America, Kitty Pryde, et al, all the rest comes with it.
So, of course you can, under your own steam, create a completely different reality, as in the already mentioned World War G post by Fred Hicks. Or, you could chose a slightly different flavor of Marvel by trying to use the Marvel related settings in other media, such as The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes animated show, or any of the Marvel super hero movies (Spiderman (1+2 but NOT 3) Iron Man (1+2), Captain America or Thor pretty good, first and second X-Men movie and X-Men first class also pretty good; Daredevil, Elektra, any of the Punisher, Ghost Rider or Hulk movies from bad to very, very bad), but I'm not sure where that really gets you. Also, there is the "Ultimate" universe, which has some promise. Unlike the old "New Universe" where Marvel tried to generate a whole new set of heroes in a new version of a super heroic universe (which did not last long), Ultimate, really starting with the well done early issues of Ultimate Spiderman, tried to remake the Marvel Universe by shifting, tweaking and reimagining its heroes. They seem to have done a pretty good job with Spiderman. But I tried to read the Ultimate X-Men books, and, for me, it was if they took all the dumbest plots from the last forty years of X-Men and found ways to make them DUMBER. So, your mileage may vary.
In the end, there has to be a way to make a corner of the universe your own and have your players' front a center. But deciding what to take and what to leave, especially when it gets all interconnected, can be a task, and I am not sure how I might take that on.
Wrote myself through another lunch, so, here's to blogging, unfounded opinions, and forceful statements without analysis.
Thanks for reading.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
The shadow of the past
So, before this blog becomes merely a vehicle for me to trumpet each issue of the Punisher as it comes out (next issue on Wednesday, Feb 1!), I want to do a bit more on my genealogical revelations of late.
I have been working off and on, rather obsessively, on learning about all I can of my family history since the Fall. I have been blessed with receiving a great deal of help from people who have worked on this before me and continue to work it, like my wife, my dad, and my wife's parents. Also, I stand on the shoulders of generations before me who have collected information before they passed on, notably my great uncle and my grandmother. I have been aided too by incredibly generous distant relatives I never knew I had who have seen my work on Ancestry.com or whose work I have come across. The generosity of distant kin continues stagger me as I peel back the layers.
So, there is a lot of information that I have found or organized (lots more of "organization" of previous work than original work, actually). Making sense of it and coming to terms with it is a longer and harder process.
One of the things that solidly hits me is my ancestors' involvement in slavery.
Given the times and places where some of my ancestors ended up on the North American continent, contact with slavery as an institution was inevitable. I am far from being able to catalog the entire extent, but I have seen enough to know that not only did my relatives have contact; they were extremely enmeshed in it. The record is stark with wills, property documents, and even news items such as one ancestor serving as High Sheriff and working to capture runaways. It is a difficult realization that generations of African Americans began and lived their American story enslaved to members of my family. Further, from general information that is known about the practice of slavery in the U.S., it seems likely that some of the descendents of slaves are also descendents of my family, whether they have the family name or not. This is a hidden genealogy, and I don't know even how I might access it.
And I don't know how such possible truth might be received. Race in America is still an issue. Perhaps it is not THE issue as it was in my parents' generation and before, but it continues to be a very strong question about identity, justice, truth, history, fairness and honesty in our society. Somewhere out there, I think I must have distant relatives whose story I would like to know, but whose lives I may not even be able to fathom. It is something I think should be explored by me, on the list of many genealogical projects I want to take on. I just don't know where I will find the resources (time, patience, and perhaps courage).
But, I guess I am laying down a marker here to say I am putting it on the "to do" list.
My family, and all the historic, genetic, and cultural streams that run into it, deserves study, and revelation and truth. I may not get far, but then I have gotten farther than I ever imagined. Branches of the family helped at every stage o this country and have lived the goods and evils of our history. I want my children and their children to have as many stories as I can find to know where they come from, and learn the lessons from our past.
I think that is one way I can make the issues of our nation live and breath.
Because we are connected.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
A new leaf
This is my second regular blog. The first, though I had a few good posts here and there in the last years (especially my narrative about my anniversary trip to Paris last year) it has become hard to manage, especially since it is blocked at my work place (like I am expected to work at work; who knew?).
Anyway, I might get a luchtime post in here and there with a blog with better access, so, I am launching this somewhat pretentious sounding blog now. I hope it turns out well enough.
My first topic is going to be a playtest of a card game in development that I am participating in for Evil Hat Productions (http://www.evilhat.com/). This is a non-collectable card game with a fun Pulp Fiction theme: Zeppelins!
More in my next post.
Anyway, I might get a luchtime post in here and there with a blog with better access, so, I am launching this somewhat pretentious sounding blog now. I hope it turns out well enough.
My first topic is going to be a playtest of a card game in development that I am participating in for Evil Hat Productions (http://www.evilhat.com/). This is a non-collectable card game with a fun Pulp Fiction theme: Zeppelins!
More in my next post.
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