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!

This blog is not dead. Also I am a winner, so there

One could be forgiven for thinking that this blog and my 13th Age game had died.

However, neither is true.  The hiatus has lasted much longer that I would have liked, but it turns out teenagers are really busy, which makes me, as their father, also really busy.

Nonetheless, we will play again, and you will read about it here.

In the meantime, I wrote a little something and the kind people over at the Iconic Podcast recognized my entry about how the Wizard King (before he became the Lich King in 13th Age's Dragon Empire) came to kill and enthrall the lich of the White Dragon Icon as the First Place winner.

I have already spent the money, so they can't take it back.

I read the other entries that placed (and I look forward to making time to read the other entries as well), and I have to say that there are so many creative minds out there, and I would have just been glad to compete.  But I am glad to have been selected this time around as the winner, and you can read my entry here.

My life with RPGs: a few thoughts

I am very close to resurrecting my life with RPGs, and I could not be more happy.  This is not to say that I have not been maintaining my interest and study of RPGs in the last few years (okay, it might actually be DECADES), but I have not played regularly in a very long time.

Now, I am about to return, with baby steps, through the magic of 13th Age.  I have also been running some pick up games using Marvel Heroic Role Playing, and that has done wonders for my confidence as a game master.

As I step (or stumble) towards this new opportunity, I am feeling a bit introspective, and I think back to how it all began.

It really began with The Hobbit.  My mother read The Hobbit to me when I was quite young, probably as a Kindergardener and first grader.  That sort of sunk into my DNA, but then was really sparked again by, of all things, the animated Hobbit movie from 1977.  I was actually allowed to watch it on TV, and even though there were many flaws with it, when I was 10 (and it premiered right after my birthday that year), it seemed pretty awesome, and even to this day, John Huston's voice as Gandalf as well as the art design for Smaug and Elrond, are pretty awesome things.  Shortly thereafter, I re-read the book and found it superior in every way to the movie.  However, I was ever thankful that the movie spurred me to read the book again.

I then proceeded to wade into the Lord of the Rings for the first time.

And then a friend (who was about 3 grades ahead of me, but whose dad worked with my dad) introduced me to D&D.  That would have been probably late 1977 (we probably went to Yosemite with that family for some winter cabin camping, if I recall correctly) and early 1978.  My friend, David, took me through character creation and some little adventures, that I don't really remember well.  He and his older friends had a game, but I was too young to be invited to that.  I had to content myself with some solo adventures with him as the Dungeon Master.

At some point around 1978/9, I acquired the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (and I think I still have one or two dice that remain from that box), and I tried running things for my friends.  I still had only a rudimentary understanding of the game, but I was hooked.

Then came the next real turning point.  When I was in Sixth grade (1978-79), my mother actually enrolled me in a "class" for Dungeons and Dragons.  I grew up near Monterey, California, and there was an educational enrichment organization called the Lyceum (still going strong), and my mom signed me up for all sorts of things, from caligraphy to opera appreciation.  But this time, she really went to bat for me.  She knew I was getting obsessed with D&D, but had no real outlet.  So, even though I did not meet the age/grade requirements, she argued that I was an advanced student and mature for my age and got me in the "class."

One evening a week for eight, ten, twelve weeks, I'm not really sure, I got taken into town, and I got to play the NEW Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.  Tim and Bart and Valerie ran the game.  The game world was Tim's, but Bart did a lot of the DMing and Valerie subbed in a couple of times (I think; this was 34 years ago).  Tim was a rancher in Carmel Valley and Bart was, I think, some kind of engineer/IT (to the degree there was IT in 1978) guy and I think Valerie was some kind of scientist as well, though I have to admit I don't really know (spoiler alert, of them all, I have only kept in touch with Tim).  They were all in a gaming club called The Myth Masters which met every Sunday down in Monterey.

They were amazing storytellers.  It took me a very long time to internalize all of the things that they taught us by playing the game (and I may still not have them mastered) but they really did a great job.

The first night, we made characters of course.  I was in there with a bunch of other guys (and yes, it was all guys) who were in high school, but they all treated me pretty well.

So, my first ever real AD&D character, whose scrawled character sheet I have to this day, was a fighter; Ged (yes, I had just read the Earthsea books by Ursula K. LeGuin).

Here is how he statted out:

Human, Male, 1st Level Fighter, Neutral Good alignment
Strength 11
Intelligence 10
Wisdom 6
Dexterity 6
Constitution 14
Charisma 6
Hit Points 7

[The really amazing thing I saw when I looked again at this character sheet, was that Ged had the same birth date as my first child (in real life!) just by coincidence.]

So, Ged has terrible stats.  Most of us would just roll up a new character (or use a point buy, where it would be impossible to get such crummy scores nowadays).  But this was a play them as you roll them time in the life of RPGs, and I have to say, Ged was always fun to play.

We lived in The Vale, in a small village that was cut off from the larger world.  The Vale was surrounded by a terrifying mist that no one crossed.  Our village was beset by a legendary evil, the Shadow Hound, which had recently risen again to stalk and kill inhabitants from the village.  This was a spectral half hound half human monster that seemed unstoppable.

So, the village trained and equipped the eldest sons of the village (I was the miller's son), to go into the wilds (though not beyond the Mist) to find the source of the Shadow Hound, and to destroy it if we could.  We did a lot of dungeon crawling thereafter and while I have forgotten most of the details, I do remember that we adopted a pet Goblin, named Snarg, and my character lasted until the last session, when a fumble by one of my fellow players got me killed (he hit me with his two handed sword, which the DM had clearly told him would endanger me).  When Ged died (still first level, just before the climactic battle with the Shadow Hound), I was no longer the "mature" kid.  I cried and had to be told to get a hold of myself.

I sat through the rest of the adventure.  I think everyone was first level, except maybe one or two characters.  We had one magic sword, wielded by our leader (who was Snarg's "master").  The Shadow Hound killed every one.  It was probably a three or four hit dice monster, but immune to normal weapons.  It cut everyone down, though our leader was the last and put in some hits with the magic sword.  Then Snarg actually took up the sword and killed the Shadow Hound. 

Unfortuntely, that just caused the Hound to rise, taking over the soul of its last victim, which was our dead leader.  Unfortunately, Snarg then died screaming, "no master, no!"

It was amazing.  Even though we all died (my first TPK), we all had a fun time, and even though I lost my cool, I got invited to join the Myth Masters.  Tim, who was just the nicest guy ever and a real live cowboy, lived not far from me, and he agreed to take me in to do marathon, all day AD&D every Sunday.  That was a wonderful and amazing time for about a year and a half.  I had many characters, played in several campaigns, and learned to get along with working adults, college students, army guys, and high schoolers, all of whom were included in the weekly games.

From then on, I never looked back.  I had to leave the Myth Masters in Eighth Grade, because my family relocated for a year while my dad was a visiting professor (in Philadelphia).  I continued to play some Ad&D there, and also got into games like Ogre and other Steve Jackson goodness (and amazingly, that guy is still making stuff my son loves (Muchkin to the max)).  However, when I came back and went to high school, I really found my peers to play with.  I played and ran AD&D and Gamma World, I was introduced to RuneQuest, Traveler, Top Secret, and FASA Star Trek and Call of Cthulhu.  Into college and grad school I would add Twilight 2000, Stormbringer, Cyberpunk 2013 (ha!), Paranoia, Star Wars (D6), Vampire:TM, Superworld, and GURPS. 

For many years how, I have been on hiatus from regular gaming (really since 1993), though I have had a pick up here and there, and I continue to collect read and follow systems (principally FATE, PDQ#, Cortex+ and D20 of late, but various others as well).  I have really missed a regular game, but as a guy with a wife, children, a house payment, a full time job and a (very) part time job, it is hard to fit regular game play in.

I loved RPGs.  In the end, it was always less about the systems and more about the characters and the stories.  It has been a great road to travel.  And I am about to hit the road again!

It all started with the Hobbit, and now, with the latest film iteration, I begin again with what I hope is a new birth of playing RPGs as a regular part of my life.

Watch this space for further reports.

Go play!

Bending Breakout: Marvel Heroic Role Playing Actual Play

Marvel Heroic Role Playing has been the first game that I have felt comfortable running for a while.  I have been out of the game master game for a long while, and while my son and I valiantly tried to get me to get a D&D 4th Edition game off the ground, I felt there that I had lost my mojo.

However, MHRP has really allowed me to find my way back into mastering a game.  I have published one actual play account already and this is a second.  So far, this has all been one-shot stuff.  But it has been fun, and has made me think that running one-shots is a pretty good way to flex those long dormant muscles, as well as being a lot of fun.

This time around, I ran the game for some old role playing friends that I visited on the West Coast and one new person I had not met, but who was taking a break from another game happening in the house.  I decided to run the shell of the Breakout event, though I knew we would perhaps get through just the first few scenes of the first Act.  I have an idea to mix up Breakout with The Hammer Falls, with a few ideas taken from the Fear Itself arc from Thunderbolts to really mix up a What If? scenario.  However, this was not the time to try to do that.  This was the time to let people rifle through the big stack of official and fan made datafiles and take some heroes for a spin.  We ended up with Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, and Firestar (from Marvel Plot Points; but played with a twist, since we were in a "What If? scenario, Firestar in this reality was a guy and not a gal).

I played the intro pretty straight, though I took on the additional "What If?" of Bruce Banner being held at the Raft instead of Sentry.  Thor was coming to see Banner; Black Widow had SHIELD VIP minder duty.  Captain America was on a helicopter on the way back from Washington, DC, and Firestar was out flying patrol over the city.

All heck breaks loose, the lights go out, and things start happening.  Widow and Thor are in an elevator, momentarily stuck.  Cap's air transport is going down, and he is working with the pilot to get it safely into the drink as close to the Raft as possible.  Firestar sees figures riding the lightning out of the Raft, but makes the decision to tackle the bigger problem of the villains left in the prison, rather than chasing the figures seeming to make a break for it.

Widow quickly acrobats her way out of the top of the elevator and gets the access to the hallway above open.  Thor is about to squeeze through when something (or someone) blasts through the elevator like a missile, leaving Thor surprised.  Cap gets himself and his pilot to safety.  Firestar sees Count Nefaria blast out of an elevator shaft and pause to hover above the raft.  Then stuff really starts happening.

Firestar, true to his name, decides that the Count needs more fire in his life and starts raining down fiery blasts down on him.  This gets the Count's attention, but does not seriously inconvenience him.  Captain America then steps up and, with the SHIELD pilot providing some covering fire, throws his shield, making it ricochet to strike Nefaria from an unexpected angle.  Cap did well and manages to inflict some physical stress on Nefaria.  Then Cap chose Nefaria to go next so that Black Widow and Thor would have plenty of time to bat cleanup in the round.  Nefaria lets loose with just about everything, attempting to fry Cap, Firestar and the SHIELD pilot all at once.  Firestar takes some physical stress, Cap manages to get himself and his shield between the agent and the blasts, keeping them both safe.  Black Widow then on her turn starts sniping with her widow's sting from down in the elevator shaft.  Her goal was not to cause direct damage, but rather to set Nefaria up to be disoriented for Thor's attack.  This she does exceptionally well with a d10 complication.  Finally, Thor blindly blasts his way out of the elevator with Mjolner leading and finishes off Nefaria in a one hit strike.

The heroes then gathered into a single team to determine the next course of action.  On the one hand, they knew that Bruce Banner was trapped down in the Raft with scads of supervillains who had just been released from their restraints.  Also, they knew that there had been some "leaders" (at least the first ones out) in the breakout.  However, they determined that Banner/Hulk could care of himself while they tried to get the prison under control.  Since that was their goal, they knew they needed to get power back up and take control of the control room.  They determined Black Widow was the natural leader for the mission since the had the SHIELD access and knowledge of Raft operations.  Widow then determined that rather than going through the direct route where they might have to fight through dozens of villains, they would take a more indirect route through the belly of the raft and come up through the main service conduits to the power plant and the operations center.

On the one hand, this meant getting through a series of dropped security bulkheads.  On the other hand, they had a THOR.  So this was proving easy.  Then Thor's player had to step away from the table.  So, I spent a Doom Pool die to make it official, and had Widow, Cap and Firestar trapped between two armored doors while Thor got dropped out of the raft and into the river by a trap set up by Typhoid Mary, Vermin, Zzzax and Hydro-Man.  They would have had to face the first three if they had gone back to check on Thor, but they were focused on going forward.  So, Hydro-Man tried to take them out by himself.  He did a major area attack and got lucky, taking Firestar to d12 physical stress.  Widow got herself to the ceiling with her swing line, and Cap is an Olympic level swimmer, etc. and was fine.

Widow then turned to attack and dealt some stress to the overconfident (and quite dumb) Hydro-Man.  Cap swam to the bottom of the quickly filling section of tunnel and recovered Firestar and rolled a recovery action on the stricken hero.  This brought Firestar back up enough to focus, and Cap then pointed him at Hydro-Man, whom Firestar quickly flamed into oblivion. 

Having stressed out the bad guy, the water started to recede.  Black Widow then started in on the far bulkhead door and pulled a MacGyver, using power from her bracelets to jump the mechanism to raise the door.  Low and  behold, there was Thor, who (by a little of Bullpen fiat) had transported himself back with Mjolner.  They then proceeded onward until they had to choose between the control room and the power plant.  They decided to split up.

Cap led a team consisting of Firestar (whose scientific know how was needed to deal with the generators) and Thor, whereas Black Widow split off to take the control room on her own, as she had the necessary access and resources to take it, or so they thought.

Black Widow easily made it through the access tunnels to the Control Room.  There she found former SHIELD agent and Raft Inmate Mentallo using a mysteriously powered control panel to direct confederates to take possession of a momentarily subdued Bruce Banner.

In the meantime, Cap's team entered the power plant to find a villain with his hands in the reactor core, muttering about burning the drugs out of his system.  The villain turned, showing himself as Graviton.

As Rob Donoghue would say, it was then On Like Donkey Kong!

Black Widow acted first in the action order.  She blasted the monitor in front of Mentallo to disrupt whatever control he was exercising over the other goons and/or Banner.  He was taken unawares,  but was soon threatening terrible vengeance on Widow.  Widow then chose Thor to go next.

Thor advanced swinging mighty Mjolner to subdue Graviton.  Graviton simply pointed at Mjolner and Thor found himself humbled on his knees, momentarily unable to even lift his mighty hammer.  Thor picked Graviton to go next, deciding to try to get the worst of it over while other heroes would have time to act.  Graviton fired a mighty blast of force at Thor, staggering, but not disabling the mighty son of Asgard.  Graviton picked Mentallo to go next.

Mentallo put a great deal of thought into trying to immobilize Widow, trying to regress her mind back to her time in the Red Room, under painful and shocking training.  Widow, however, shrugged off the mental stress with that self-same Red Room training and a handy plot point.  Mentallo chose Firestar to go next.

Firestar summoned his most powerful energy blast to go full force, toe to toe with the master of gravity.  Graviton easily captured the energy and began to convert the molten globe of plasma to his own uses.  Firestar picked Captain America to go next.  The Sentinel of Liberty threw his shield into center of the energy fields Graviton was manipulating in order to disrupt his planned attack.  He managed two effects, both robbing Graviton of his stunt die, and inflicting some severe Emotional Stress on the villain.

For the next round, Cap chooses Thor to go first.  Thor again struck with Mjolner, this time overwhelming Graviton's defenses, inflicting physical stress on the villain.  Thor chose Graviton to go again, and Graviton unleashed a brutal multi-target attack.  Thor, however, used his Anti-Force SFX and reflected the d12 of physical stress back on Graviton, taking him out.  Graviton chose Mentallo to go next.

Mentallo continued his relentless mental assault on the Widow, showing her scenes of her friends dying, of her efforts failing.  Widow put almost all of her Plot Points into resisting, and then, activated a counter attack, kicking Mentallo into unconsciousness.  Widow chose Firestar to go next.

Firestar flew to the power controls and quickly managed to restore enough power for Widow to start locking up the prison, isolating inmates and regaining control.  Reacquiring a view into Banner's cell, she saw the Hulk just finishing mopping up the cell with the goons who had been trying to kidnap Banner while he was incapacitated.  She contacted Captain America on what to do.

Cap said, "Let him go."  So, Widow cleared a path for the Hulk, and he left the Raft and headed to New Jersey.

And, we were out of time.  The session was a lot of fun.  I am still quite a rookie at running and explaining the system.  The basics are easy,  but elaborating how to make Opportunities, Assets, Stunts, and counterattacks work are still a work in progress.  Also, Milestones have not yet played a big part.  Mostly, this is because I have run limited one-shots that have not been to coherent as far as short or long term story goals.  Mostly they are just slugfests.  These are fun, but I need to flex some other "Watcher" muscles.

With a little more planning, I would like to develop some short act/action scene milestones and unlockables that could bring those into play even for a one-shot.  The issue, as always, is time.

I was very grateful to find the materials on StufferShack.com which will make writing up and producing custom Datafiles extremely easy.  The resources on the web for this game are amazing.

So, after a third play, with a second time being a Watcher, I am ever more a firm lover of this game and the system.  The best thing is that I am still just scratching the surface, and more and more interesting and helpful materials, official and unofficial, keep coming out.  Thus, it is easy to have a very rich play experience with relatively low investment, and without even too much prep. 

Thanks to everyone out there making with the awesome on this.  It's great!

Finished "Alpha"

I was able to finish Greg Rucka's "Alpha" yesterday.  It was a painful eight days, not because of reading the book, but rather all the time I had to NOT read the book.  This is easily a book you can sit down to read a chapter or two and find yourself reading all afternoon and into the night.  Rucka has always written terrific page turners and this book is no exception.

So, after putting down the book each day with regret that I was going to have to wait to pick it up again, I finished yesterday.

All the good things have been said already about the book, but I will say them again.  The book is a classic character driven piece.  Yes, there is a BIG ACTION plot.  But what happens in the book is not dictated by the flow of the plot from point A to point B.  Instead, the action is driven by the decisions of the characters, big and small.  Rucka puts us in the perspective of several protagaonists and antagonists so that we see who they are, how they thing and we understand why they are doing what they are doing (and we see at what costs).  The book is compelling because the characters are compelling, not because it is about the possibility of a dirty bomb going off at a major American amusement park.

The writing is very taught.  The action builds and builds, and each chapter end demands that you turn to the subsequent chapter. 

The hero is a flawed paragon.  Jad Bell is someone you want on your side, but he is complicated, and may not be the best friend, husband or relative to have.  He chose early on what was most important, and it is the duty to his service and his country, and when it comes to personal relationships, that can be pretty brutal.

Jad has the most complicated relationships with his teenage daughter, who happens to be deaf, and his estranged ex-wife.  Both characters are fully realized and even though you are on Jad's "side" as he does his job, you can see why the choices he has made destroyed his marriage and make his daughter really mad at him (more than your usual teenage daughter).  The relationships are earned and painful.  They are not just there for "feel good" moments, like some sentimental relief.  They are there because they throw into sharp contrasts the contradictions of our hero and legitimately up the ante on the events of the plot.

Finally, the rest of the supporting cast is amazing.  This is one of Rucka's most cinematic books (like I said, BIG ACTION), but everytime you see a character and, based on your experience perhaps with action movies, you say, oh, I know who this character is, it turns out that you are wrong.  There are no cardboard villans, spies, corporate jerks, military guys.  There are characters who are believable and complex, even if they only have slight "screen time."  You don't even think that you are dealing with some idiot from central casting who could not really do the role he or she is portraying and who only exists as some kind of straw person or foil.  For a BIG ACTION book, this is a true study in characters.  And the characters are smart and competent.  Everyone makes mistakes and has imperfections, but no one is portrayed as an idiot just to make Jad look good.  The twists and turns of the book are sharp and earned through the logical actions, sacrifices and gambles of three dimensional characters.

It is a pleasure to read.

I highly recommend it.  It would be a great way to spend a summer day or two.

Justin Peniston also has some interesting things to say about Alpha and Rucka as a writer in general.  I recommend checking out what he has to say (and he has two great web comics, so you could check those out as well!)

What I saw at the 28th Science Olympiad

Before this last year, I only had the vaguest notion about the kinds of scientific competitions that happen for school age kids around the country.  This year, I got quite an education.

In particular, my son, whom we have homeschooled the last two years, joined a Middle School aged Science Olympiad team this last fall.  We have been homeschooling because of particular educational needs that my son had, both in being able to self-pace his work (some things he could do very fast, and others veeeery slooow), and in terms of being able to focus on things he really needed to have ready for high school.  Science is one thing that can be quite challenging at home, since outside of kitchen science, you rarely have safe lab space or equipment.  So, when we learned about this team, it seemed like another way to make sure my son got exposure to a lot of scientific knowledge and concepts.

Somewhat ironically, and at variance from the stereotype, this was a seriously Christian homeschooling team, lead and taught by folks from the local Mennonite Church (where the meetings were held).  We were and had always been quite secular in our approach and certainly were not homeschooling for any kind of religious purpose.  So, there goes my highly smart, highly skeptical, secular positivist agnostic kid into study and preparation for competition in the Science Olympiad with a diverse group of very religious Christian kids (though not just Mennonite, but from several denominations).  It was certainly going to give him lots of experience and knowledge, and not just about science. 

The group, Pilgrimage Homeschool, was only together for its second year.  It had competed in the state of Maryland the year before and done respectably well, but there were big schools from well to do communities which had built track records in the competition.  I had no expectations except that we would participate in the regional competition, and might go on to state (because nearly everyone in our small state with only 40 teams does). 

It was, however, going to be a surprising year.

A few words about the structure of the Olympiad.  In most states, they compete in 23 events.  Each event takes a small group (2-3 students) for the competition.  The concepts behind the events might be biology, forensics or thermodynamics, and the events themselves usually have clever names like "Keep the Heat" or "Disease Detective."  Some events require building devices ahead of time, some require knowledge for a test, some require preparations to do a lab, and some require some combination of all three.  These events are really challenging, and I have to say I was completely impressed with the kids who competed, and with the teachers, coaches, parents, and volunteers who very generously gave of their time to prepare the kids for the competition.  Every team that manages to get to a competition stands on a bedrock of people who are helping and pushing the kids to achieve.

My son started with three events.  Often this can change as schedules and the needs of the team shift, and so it was for us.  But going into the Central Maryland regional competition, he had prepared for one lab/building event ("Keep the Heat"); one pure building event, based on simple machines ("Mission Possible"), and one knowledge event ("Forestry").  For two events he had a partner, and for one he was part of a group of three.  No one achieves things alone in the competition, you always are depending on your team mates, which provides a pretty good model for research science and engineering it seems to me.

So, about February we head to the regional competition, held at the University of Maryland in College Park.  We spent a whole Saturday there, and I nervously escorted him from event to event.  Some things went better than others.  In Keep the Heat, a ruling on the device he and his partner made knocked them out of contention (later it was reversed, but not such that they placed).  The ruling came before they started doing the lab and 50 question thermodynamics test and I think they were both upset and did not do as well as they could.  Forestry seemed to go well, but he and his partner had a little difficulty working together optimally.  Finally, Mission Possible just did not work the way we had hoped (curse you Rube Goldberg!) and so, I thought that was pretty much it.  What a great opportunity and learning experience.  Now we can wind down.

Well, then there was the awards ceremony.  Pilgrimage was winning a lot of medals.  My son and his partner won a third place for Forestry.  The other kids had done really well.  Also, the way the points are counted, every finish is totaled, so that the places add up to a score (e.g. 23 first places would be a score of 23; 23 third places would be a score of 69, etc.).  Unexpectedly, our little homeschool group beat the Central Maryland Division powerhouse, North Bethesda Middle School.  We were division champions, and suddenly there were expectations on our state competition, where we would face North Bethesda as well as other past state champion schools (North Bethesda had gone to nationals in 2010 and 2011).

The coach rebalanced the team and took Ian off of Forestry and contemplated moving him off Keep the Heat.  We had some tense moments.  I won't say that this level of competition always allows for pleasant interactions, and sometimes interests, intentions, and perceptions add up to a toxic mix.  We all got through it, because it is about the kids and trying to do what is right not just for the individuals, but for the team as a whole.  In the end, Ian competed Keep the Heat and Mission Possible at State.  Despite the challenge, what happened next has to be credited to the teaching and coaching that had been given tirelessly and voluntarily all year.

We went to state at the end of March, and those kids competed their hearts out.  Ian's two events with his groups went very well.  We had a heady expectation of winning some medals.  We competed on the Baltimore campus of Johns Hopkins University.  It was a nice day, and the energy was very positive.

Of course we knew in the back of our heads that the two teams from North Bethesda who had competed at Regionals had been combined, so that the best students from both teams were competing for State.  They had the experience and a lot of talent.  We wanted to make a respectable showing and keep Pilgrimage growing.

At the awards ceremony, we did indeed do well.  Ian and his partner received a first place for Keep the Heat, and his group received a second place for Mission Possible.  I thought those were great validations and what a wonderful way to end the season.  While we garnered medals, North Bethesda clearly had more first places than us.  However, for final scores, it all depends on how well you do overall.  One disastrous finish in an event can seriously damage your ability to win.

In the end, it came down to one point.  One point between us and the powerhouse of Maryland.

And we won.

And that was kind of a "oh no" moment for us in many ways.  We had not really ever expected to become Maryland State Champions.

And now we were. 

We had to carry the program for Maryland forward, we had to represent and do our best.  And we had to get us and our stuff to the national competition.

In Florida.

In May.

We had no sponsorships (hadn't considered them), no plan, no organization and no experience to do any of this.

And yet, in six weeks, we pulled it off again.  Some people flew and carried precious equipment with them.  Others generously drove and carried big machines and devices packed between the luggage.

A generous anonymous donor provided enough money for the kids to have team shirts so that they could appear in uniform during the opening ceremonies and on competition day.  A state senator provided us with a flag.  Our team created a beautiful banner, hand sewed and embroidered by some of the young women of the team.

Also, we had to prepare an extra event.  Often the Olympiad will announce a "pilot" event that it is testing.  It does not count in the main competition, but it is scored and medals are awarded.  Some teams skip it (15 middle school teams did so this year), but we added a new team member and she took the lead in competing in Egg Drop Helicopter.

And, so it was, just a week ago my son and I flew down to Orlando, Florida.  The competition was to be held at University of Central Florida.  My parents generously helped us defray the costs, and my father met us in Orlando to help participate and observe.  It was hot and sticky when we arrived, and prone to raining buckets at the drop of a hat too.

But we had made it.

Nationals, of the 28th Science Olympiad; I could not have been prouder.

Friday was opening ceremony day.  In the arena, they had the teams in sections.  Parents and other observers had to organize their own seating in the non-assigned seats.  My dad and I managed to snag a whole row for our team parents.  The ceremonies were somewhere between a rock show (lights, VERY LOUD MUSIC, videos, etc.), an advertisement of UCF (hey, after all, they were providing all the facilities and had a captive audience), and a graduation ceremony with lots of inspiring speeches (particularly from sponsor Progress Energy (who had to sub their speaker in at the last minute, and he was really good); the Director of the Kennedy Space Center; and Dr. G (Jan C. Garavaglia), the Chief Medical Examiner for Orange-Osceola (who has her own show on medical forensics on Discovery Health)).  Some of it was sublime, some a bit silly.  Some of our more conservative parents were offended by some content which I had not even thought about. 

Nonetheless, a couple things really stood out, besides the motivational speeches.  First, when our kids came down the aisle carrying our state flag and the big banner some of our kids had made with their own hands, it was pretty special.  Next, the Olympiad, which competes both Middle School and High School teams, had an "Ambassador" high school team from Japan.  Now, when all the other teams had marched in, the people of that school or that state cheered enthusiastically (we sure did) and others would applaud politely or sit quietly.  However, for the guest team, the entire arena erupted in enthusiastic cheers and applause of welcome.  Further, after the team representative bowed, the students from all the state teams spontaneously stood to give a standing ovation, and this brought the entire arena to its feet.  As the Japanese students walked down the aisle, the students on the end of the chair rows gave them enthusiastic high fives.

I felt proud then, not just of my child, or my child's team or state.  I felt proud of the children of the United States.  Somehow, despite all that goes wrong, these kids were coming up all right.  I felt a deep and profound hope for the future in that moment.  It was a good moment.

So, even though then it would have been best to get the kids to bed and prepared for the next day's competition, instead they had a "swap meet."  Each child had been encouraged to bring at least ten things to trade, hopefully something from the home state.  This was to be fun, to get kids circulating and at least seeing the other middle and high school kids, and maybe having some exchange between the various state teams.

It started as TOTAL BEDLAM. 

I mean, 2000 kids suddenly released and sent into the corridor that rings the arena to try and find trading areas, and another several thousand parents, siblings, teachers, coaches, et al, just trying to find a quiet spot and not be run over.  My first thoughts were "this is a disaster!"

Concerned for my child, I looked for him in the crowd.

I was not prepared for what I saw.

There was my son, wearing a pink plastic fedora (where he got that, I will never know) and bargaining like a fishwife.  He had 11 Maryland themed magnets, and he quickly parlayed them into any number of wonderful things like license plates, state pins, pencils, gum, Doctor Who notepads, etc.  He started at the team table, and then suddenly took off and circled to all the other tables, around and around and doubling back.  Everywhere he was trading (soon the pink hat was gone (at least I have pictures)), and he would have traded ALL NIGHT LONG.  He was not like the kids trying to get a stack of pins, or license plates, or hats.  He was in it for the DEAL.  If he could not get one person to trade, he found another person, traded with them, and went back to the first person and made the trade.  I only saw him hit one wall.  He could not talk this one girl out of her hat, as much as he tried.

Still, my wife and I are considering putting in charge of our retirement account, because, hey, how could we do worse than what has happened in the last few years?

In any case, pumped up and wide awake, my dad and I took my son back to the hotel and tried to get him settled in, because we were going to have a very early rise, and he was competing in one of the earliest time slots.

Morning was not fun.  He complained of not sleeping a wink (in that plaintive voice that only a boy with his voice changing can achieve).  He got not sympathy, but tough love.  Up, into the shower, GET DRESSED!

Once he got moving, it was all okay.  He had three donuts at breakfast.

We delivered one of the competition devices to "impound" and then checked in at the team room.  Then, from there, it was to the Keep the Heat competition.  My dad and I dropped him, they closed him and his partner in the room with the other teams in that time slot, and off we went for an hour.

One fun fact: I saw a high school kid out on campus with a red fez made of duct tape.  Some of you will be impressed.  I got a photo of that too.

After an hour, we picked up my son.  Things seemed to have gone well.  We had to take equipment back to the team room and pack it up.  We had to make phone calls.  We had to have lunch (one thing Science Olympiad and UCF did not do well (among many things they did well) was organize and price the box lunches; total waste).  We also got to see some of the competitions (Bottle Rocket, Egg Drop Helicopter).  Everywhere we went, we met nice people.  Nice kids, nice coaches, nice parents.  I am not an extrovert at all.  I am rather socially shy.  I can go to a function and not talk to anybody, and that is sometimes just fine with me.  All this to say, I could have met a lot more people and liked them, because as far as I could tell, there just was a great positive energy over the whole competition.  Just a lot of great kids and lovely, smart, dedicated people.  At least, that is what I saw.

Then, finally, it was off to Mission Possible.  The competition was a little rocky for us, and we definitely came in as a lightweight, whereas others had trained for this as a heavyweight division.  Still, we did not embarrass ourselves and the device, with some prompting (under the rules) completed its task.

We were done.  All over but the crying, as they say.

So, we got cleaned up off campus and then came back for dinner and the award ceremony.

Though Science Olympiad has been around for almost three decades, it is still a growing program, and there are radically different levels of participation in different states, as well as different links between school’s curriculums and the competition.  The states that field the most state teams get to send two teams to the national competition.  States with less participation only send one.  For the last four years, there have been 60 teams that compete at the national level, from the 50 states (Washington, DC has not sent a team recently and is still growing into participating).  In 2009, the Maryland team that went to nationals placed 60^th out of 60 teams.  In 2010, Maryland placed 51^st out of 60.  Last year, in 2011, the first year our homeschooling group participated at the state level, the Maryland team (not ours, a team from North Bethesda Middle School that went to nationals (also the 2010 MD State Champs) placed 36^th out of 60.  Their highest place event was 3^rd, and their lowest was 58^th, with a score of 749.  They placed twice in the top 10 (a 3^rd and 6^th place) and four in the top 20 (a 15^th and a 19^th in addition to the two top ten scores).

With that history, here is how the Maryland State Team did and how my son figured into it.  We had a team of 15 middle school students with an alternate who participated in the optional extra event which not all states competed and which did not count in the final score.  We placed 38^th overall in the nation out of the 60 teams.  Our highest placed event was 2^nd (Awesome Aquifer) and our lowest was 59^th (Meteorology).  Our total score was 765.  We had two top 10 finishes (2^nd and 8^th) and seven top 20 finishes (an 11^th, two 12ths, a 13^th and 18^th as well as the two top ten).  Also, in the optional event (Egg Drop Helicopter), we placed 15^th out of a field of 45.  I was incredibly impressed with the team, which is overall quite young and probably has a great future in the competition.

So this was my son's first and last year with the team.  He will be going into high school at a public magnet next year.  His two events dealt with thermodynamics and engineering called Keep the Heat and with simple machines and physics (through the medium of building a Rube Goldberg device) called Mission Possible.  All the events were small group events, so he did nothing alone.  For Keep the Heat he had one partner and for Mission Possible he had two. 

In Mission Possible, the team finished 43^rd out of 60 teams.  The always twitchy set of machines did not work quite as planned, but it did complete it’s task, and everyone I met from different states constantly talked about how hard an event it is.  We got outclassed, but, the kids did great.

In Keep the Heat, which requires two things: first, designing and building a box that will insulate a beaker of water, then mapping its properties so you can predict how the device will work under certain conditions, and second, taking a high level test on thermodynamics, Ian and his partner scored 8^th place out of 60 teams.  Let’s just say that I could not be prouder.  He and his partner worked incredibly hard and probably know more about thermodynamics than most college graduates.  While they did not mount the stage to be presented with a medal, they did the state of Maryland proud and I am so glad that Ian got this opportunity to compete at this level.

So that was it.  I got to see some of the best and brightest kids from all over the United States.  And I got to see my own child as one of those kids.  And I got to do this with my father, who turned 75 this year.  It was an awesome and humbling experience.  It was hard and required a lot of work and sacrifice to do it, but I certainly could not have planned for things to go better as an experience and example for my child.

Whatever the future holds, I know, despite ups and downs, my son is going to go out in the world, and he is going to do really great things.  They might be quiet or they might be loud, but I know that he will see their value, I will see their value, and the kids and parents and coaches and people like them out in the world will see and understand their value too.  And even though this experience and homeschooling was never about religion, the gift it has given to me is faith, in humanity, for my country and in my children's future.

That is a rare gift.

And that is what I saw at the 28th Science Olympiad.

Some Comics are Good

At my old blog, I once did a short post on trying to get back into reading comics, that was titled something like "Some Comics are Bad."  Brilliant, I know.  Not sure why Pulitzer hasn't called yet.

Still, the issue was that, with the totally unscientific sample of books I had been able to grab off the shelf of my local library, I found precious little from either DC or Marvel, that was worth the time it took to read.  Thus, I largely pulled back in and read only what I could get of work by my friends Greg Rucka and Jen Van Meter.  This kept me largely away from Marvel and often put me in the Indie Comics world with stories that I really enjoyed.  Based on that limited view, I knew that comics could be very good, but I doubted much could be found, particularly at Marvel.

Why so down on Marvel?  Well, even though there are a ton of characters that I love from Marvel, I often find the universe and the editorial management of it pretty awful.  I could cite a lot of things, but the crazy, messed up storyline that resulted in eliminating Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane really exemplified the kinds of style without substance that I perceived working at Marvel.  Trying to read Civil War in trades (again, yay library) also reinfoced that.  Here we had a mega event, with tons of talented people working at it, and yet I found the storyline just bad (my opinion, doesn't have to be anybody elses, but I'll say again, it was BAD).  What stuck with me was the event was extremely plot driven and the organic development of or reactions by the characters were subordinated to the plot.  For me, that is never good.  The characters in many cases came off as cardboard pieces on a big game board, rather than interesting and complex individuals.  Since Marvel was doing one of these plot driven monsters pretty often, it just seemed like, even where you had a solid creator behind a title, it was likely going to be hijacked and the characters would start doing really stupid out of character things to advance the plot.

So, I stayed away, read my Rucka and Van Meter stuff, and dove into the past getting trades of the old Question, Justice League International, and Walt Simonson's run on Thor. 

Two things made me reconsider.  One, Greg started writing The Punisher.  Now, while The Punisher has been a long established and somewhat interesting character from time to time in Marvel, mostly I considered him kind of a bad joke.  Hey, let's have a superhero whose power is, wait for it, GUNS!  In general, not my thing, and not, I would have thought, Greg's thing.

Ah, but the power of a good editor and a writer given a chance to write a character (a bunch actually), that, I had not counted on.  Now, I just have to say, thank you Stephen Wacker, I think you are the best!  Suddenly I was pulled into the Marvel Universe by a character I had scant given consideration to.  Great writing and great editorial changed my mind.  Still, I was not that interested in going deeper in.

Then, Margaret Weis Productions new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game came out, and it is really fun.  It set me on a path back to exploring Marvel, and suddenly, I found out that, despite all the things wrong with Marvel (and I still maintain they are many), there are some really terrific writers who have written some fantastic books in the last 10 to 15 years.  So, while you know I am totally biased towards Greg Rucka, here are some other writers I am really happy to know.

Ed Brubaker (Secret Avengers, Captain America, Daredevil, Winter Soldier)  I know, you all are saying "duh!"  He wrote Gotham Central with Rucka, and that was amazing.  How hard was it to find him?  Well, I have to admit the heresy of not liking Criminal very much and while I enjoyed his reunion with Rucka on an arc of Daredevil, I was just kind of avoiding Marvel comics in general.  But dang, Secret Avengers!  Those totally rock.  The other stuff then follows and there is no doubt he is a terrific writer.  I have been reading what I can get my hands on (on a limited budget).

Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente (Incredible Hercules, Prince of Power, Chaos War)  OMG!  Hercules was this B-list character, a foil for Thor.  Not ANY MORE!  These guys reinvented Hercules and gave us Amadeus Cho.  The world will never be the same.

Mark Waid (Daredevil [and a million other things I am going to discover])  Mr. Waid is poised to win a number of Eisners, and despite my rabid Ruck bias (who was not even nominated darn it), I have to say he is really deserving.  The current run of Daredevil is astounding.  And, he handles both sides of the character right.  A lot of writers really don't understand what Matt Murdock does as a lawyer.  However, that is a really important part of the character.  Waid gives a lot of time to it, and he does it right.  I am really, really impressed.  I know he is a long time player in the comic book world, and I am looking for more stuff to read, especially some Fantastic Four stuff, becuase I hear that is great.

Brian Michael Bendis (New Avengers, Moon Knight, and like a gazillion other things)  Okay, I know, "DUH!!"  Clearly, he has changed a great deal about Marvel.  Mostly for the good.  Now, I have to qualify my love for Bendis.  He does some great character work, and I think nobody does Spider-Man like him.  He also did some really intersting things with Moon Knight and I am sorry they have cancelled the title.  However, he does have a terrible habit of having characters go on, and on, and on, in rambling di/monologue.  You can get used to it, but sometimes he has a story really humming along and you hit a page that is just a person talking, talking, talking, for like six, eight panels, all down the page, and it is like hitting a traffic jam.  Still, he writes good characters and gets to do things no one else has done at Marvel.

Jeff Parker (Agents of Atlas, Gorilla Man) Okay, another OMG moment.  I love Agents of Atlas.  I can't say that Marvel didn't try to make them work.  Maybe they didn't do it the right way, maybe some other plan would have made the first or second ongoing survive.  It's hard to know.  All I can say is, thank you for the time we had with Atlas, because it was really good.  Now I have to seach out other stuff Parker has done.

Paul Cornell (Young Avengers, Captain Britain & M.I. 13) Captain Britain & M.I. 13 was another series that did not last, but the writing, for me, was top notch.  I didn't love every element of the first arc of Young Avengers, but in general it was good.  Must see what else Cornell is doing for Marvel.

Matt Fraction (Defenders, and lots of other stuff)  Just "discovered" Fraction's Defender stuff.  It is gonzo fun.  Hope to read more by him.

Honorable metion: Joss Whedon (Astonishing X-Men)  Yeah, super-"DUH!"  Don't have to look for his comic work though.  Whedon had a very solid run on Astonishing X-Men.  He really hit great character notes.  Some of the plot stuff did not wow me, but he inherited a lot of it.  I more appreciated that he really understood the characters and even in plots I disdained, I enjoyed the characters, because he understood how they would act and react.  Now, he is (hopefully) going to be making many insanely popular bockbuster movies, and punctuating that with little side projects, and he probably won't write comics for a long time if ever again.

On the horizon: Kelly Sue DeConnick (Captain Marvel (2012)) I have not read a word by her in comics yet, but she is pioneering the latest effort to get a female flagship hero into the stable of Marvel Comics.  I want that to happen, and so, how can I not start buying.  Captain Marvel is slated for release in July 2012 and I have my preorder in at my local comic book shop (Beyond Comics, yay!).

So, that is my growing list of authors for whom I will search.  Marvel, I have a love hate relationship with a lot that you do, but you have employed some terrific writers, and I am going to do better about finding and following them.

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!

A few more words about the Marvel Heroic Role Playing game

So, I am continuing to speak about the new Marvel RPG from a first impressions point of view.  I will get a good playtest run this weekend when I attend the launch party at Labyrinth Games on Sunday.  But, since I have the PDF I have wanted to give my pre-play impressions of the game.

Sequentially, the book does not talk about character creation right at the beginning.  There are a lot of basic concepts in the game discussed first as well as detailed explorations of how various game mechanics work, how the game is played through action scenes and transition scenes (the game really gives the feel of creating a comic book story) and how to take actions in those scenes.

However, the way I flip through things is different than going to cover to cover.  I keep a bookmark slowly progressing through the book, but I'm constantly jumping around to see other interesting things.  So, as I mentioned yesterday, I jumped to the end to see the 23 Marvel heroes statted out in the basic book. 

While that is a solid and representative sample, and plenty to play through the "Event" included with the book (perhaps I can post later on how the "adventure/module" structure for the game is structured around these "events"), everyone is going to be missing one or more of their favorite heroes.  Also, plenty of people will want to create their own heroes and strike off in quite unofficial/"What If" directions.

The game well provides for both contingencies.  On the one hand, Margaret Weis Productions has a fairly aggressive production schedule for their "Events" planing to bring out Civil War, Annihilation, and Age of Apocalypse.  Each of those are likely to be packed with character write ups.  In part this is because the game aims to satisfy those individuals who always wanted to play their favorite hero.  So, if you want to be Hawkeye, or Nightcrawler, or The Silver Surfer, all of those official write ups are coming this year.

On the other hand, the game makes it reasonably easy to create your own character, or to come up with a playable version of your favorite, but unreleased, character following the rules and models provided.  Hero characters are defined by five key traits: Affiliations, Distinctions, Power Sets, Specialties, and Milestones.  Combined, these build a character that is complex, versitile, and very role play ready.

In brief, these traits act in the following manner:

Affiliations tell you if the person works best alone, as a buddy, or in a team.  Then, based on how the hero is acting in a scene he or she has a better or worse die to roll in their dice pool (a set of dice you build out of your traits to accomplish actions or to react to things in scenes).  These are not immutable traits and can change and shift over time.  So, for example, Captain America, at the start of the Avenger's Disassembled Arc, operates best as part of a team and lest well on his own.  His peak performance has been trained to operate working with the Avengers, and when they disband, he has a real game incentive to try and get them, or some team, back together.  On the other hand, heroes like Wolverine and Daredevil have their peak performace solo, and operate less well as a member of a team.  Marvel Team Up veteran Spiderman is best as a buddy.  So, by ordering your affiliations, you already know a lot about your hero and it has a very Marvel feel.

Distinctions are pieces of information, catch phrases, titles, or other words or phrases that describe the essence of the hero.  Depending on a given situation, they may count for or against the hero.  When they are a positive influence, they add a "good" die (d8 in a system that goes from d4 to d12) to the dice pool, when they have a potentially negative influence, they add a d4, but also give the hero a Plot Point (which is the action currency of the game that allows heroes to really shine when it counts).  For example, Captain America has as his three distinctions "Lead by Example", "Man Out of Time", and "Sentinel of Liberty."  These traits add flavor to the hero and give flexible and interesting in-game mechanics that help shape play and allow character rewards for making in-character choices that a player would avoid if merely playing the "game."

Power Sets are the heart of the super hero identity as they represent inherent powers, technological or magical equipment, or whatever else (training, alien physiology, etc.) that makes the hero powerful.  The game suggests that you should be able to stat out a hero with no more than two Power Sets.  As I have thought through various Marvel heroes and seen how they did the 23 for the basic game, I have to say they seem to have done a good job with their rule of thumb.  Within a power set can be a number of individual powers that are somehow linked (using Captain America again, he has Super-Soldier Program as one set, and his Vibranium-Alloy Shield as his other).  The powers that make up the Power Set are each rated at a die level from d6 (ho hum, but allowing something a regular person can't do) to d12 (Godlike).  Generally, for any action, only one die from any given Power Set can go in the dice pool.  So, if you have two sets, you can general apply more powers in a roll.  On the other hand, each power set also includes one or more special effects that help customize the powers, and also limits which may interrupt or prevent the use of the power (e.g. Cap can lose his shield) until some condition is met.  The game gives good guidelines for describing and using powers that would appear to easily handle anything you have ever seen in the Marvel Universe, and if it not there, there are clear guidelines for developing new things to go in Power Sets.

On the one hand, the power curve seems a bit flat, with only 4 levels of powers possible (ho hum, Enhanced, Superhuman, Godlike).  However, the combinations, addition of special effects, and combination with other traits really allows this simple spread of power levels to describe a very diverse set of heroes without the need to have every possible attribute statted out in dozens or hundreds of gradiated levels.  The point is not to try to figure out the physics of superheroes and model that, but to model the way that things work in comic book stories.  The play reports I have seen and my own impression of the simple elegance of the system support that MHRP does just that.

After Power Sets are Specialties.  Theses are the "skills" of the game.  They are few in number and broadly defined.  You get a die if you are an Expert (d8) or a Master (d10) at something important.  There are, at my count, 13 skill Specialties offered in the game.  The focus is on things that come up in comic books, things like Crime, Science, Combat, Tech, Medical, etc.  The focus is on relevant playability, not modeling a complex real world inventory of what people can do.  It is possible that some other specialties could come into play at some point, but really, these do the job of handling your Marvel character.  They also allow for interesting interactions with powers and other traits to flexibly deal with challenges in the game. 

Finally, there are Milestones, which are triggering events that provide the hero with experience.  This is one of the more innovative parts of the character description.  These are not unique, as they have appeared in earlier games (the one that I am familiar with is the Lady Blackbird steampunk scenario where experience "keys" are similarly described).  However, using these milestones to describe possible story arcs and rewards for characters is new as far as the Marvel Universe.  Each Milestone is described by a 1xp, 3xp and 10xp level.  The 1xp level could be a thing that can happen often and the character can gain xp frequently by meeting the terms of that level.  Cap has two milestones (again, a hero may have one or two) and his first one is, for the included scenario, "Mentor the Hero."  If he chooses to aid a speficic hero he gets 1xp the first time he does it.  But there are lots of heroes to help, so he can pick up a fair amount of xp by being helpful.  The 3 xp is a once per scene trigger.  It is a bigger, scene defining moment.  One of Caps is to earn 3 xp when he ais a stressed-out (i.e. out of commission due to physical, emotional or mental stress) hero in recovery.  The 10xp is a defining decision by the hero and may be hit only once per Act.  For Cap, one of his is to get 10xp when he either gives leadership of th team to your chose hero or to force your chosen hero to resign or step down from the team. 

For me, these Milestones are really powerful role playing tools.  The xp rewards allow for purchase of advantages along the arc of an Event, so they have real game implications for success or failure, and they shape the character's behavior to deal with certain issues along the path of the overall story.  While all of the heroes in the book come with predefined Milestones, it is clear that each new important stage of a game/campaign, should be marked with the GM (called The Watcher) and the players coming up with Milestones for all the characters that make sense to the story they plan to tell together. 

Taken together, I see the character system as innovative, comprehensive, flexible and fun.  It is also demanding on a certain level, in that it requires real thought and collaboration between the players and The Watcher to make things like the Milestones and Distinctions work.  However, I think the collaboration it demands builds a better, more trusting and richer play experience.

If I have time, more tomorrow.

A Few Words on the Marvel Heroic Role Playing game

There is a lot to say about this great game and the company that produced it, and I can only speak to a fraction of it at the moment.  However, I wanted to get some thoughts down before I get to actually play the game (which will happen at the previously mentioned Taste of Marvel at the wonderful Labyrinth Games) and then give some more impressions after I get to experience it in play.

So, I am actually buying the hard copy book from Labyrinth and picking it up at the event this weekend.  However, since I prepaid, I received a prompt and efficient e-mailed link and coupon code for a free download of the PDF so that I could start looking at the game last week.  MWP was prompt and the download on Drive ThruRPG was easy.  This is the second game I have bought from MWP (I pre-ordered Leverage for a friend), and this interaction confirms my initial impression, that they do good work and are very competent with their customer care.

I have not read the game itself cover to cover yet.  As is my usual, I have done a combination of flipping through, looking things up (good index and TOC) and then started slowly moving the bookmark (so to speak with a PDF) through the volume.

Everything that I have seen so far impresses me. 

First, they have a foreward by Jeff Grubb who helped bring us the original Marvel Super Heroes game from TSR.  It is a nice piece, and it is classy to have him, in effect, hand the torch to the new game.  Despite many criticisms I have written here about the old MSH game, I have a great fondness for and terrific memories of playing it.  From the first pages, I get the feeling that MHRP will similarly gain a solid place in my RPG repetoir.

The look of the book is great.  The layout is clean and clear.  The art is well selected from a back catelogue probably hundreds of thousands of images in the Marvel library.  But the selected art fits with the themes of the sections they adorn and are not just randomly assigned.  The feel is very professional, very comfortable and it communicates well as the system is described bit by bit.  Right up front they have a breakdown of what things make up a character and a summary of what they mean, using Captain America's sheet as an example.  Then you can dive into the details of the rules immediately following.

Of course, before digesting all the nitty gritty of the rules, the first thing to do is to flip to the back and check out the official stats for the included heroes!

There are 23 super heroes fully statted out and ready to play in the "Mini Event" included in the book.  They include a good representative group from Mavel's popular teams: all of the Fantasitc Four, important members of the Avengers and X-Men, and of course a number of popular "unaffiliated" (at least before the Avengers Disassembled story arc) heroes like Spiderman and Daredevil.  I have no complaints about the initial group of heroes, though I do have some observations.

The group is very representative of the marvel Universe and should satisfy most Marvel fans as a first round of official stats. 

What is disatisfying for me, which is not the game's fault, is the lack of representativeness of the Marvel Universe. 

In this group of heroes, we have 8 women heroes and 15 men.  Marvel suffers from a lack of solid and interesting female heroes, and has never developed any female hero iconic as DC has in Wonder Woman (and even if she is constantly treated as a distant third behind Batman and Superman, no matter what DC does, it has been unable to not have her in that big three).  Here we have Armor, Black Widow, Emma Frost, Invisible Woman, Ms. Marvel, Shadowcat, Spider-Woman and Storm.  These are all solid heroes, but given the almost 2 to 1 ratio of male heroes to female, I hope that somehow the game can overcome the inherent gender issues in the Marvel Universe to get girls and women to the gaming table with the game.  Because I like it a lot.

Looking through the vector of race/ethnicity, there is a starker contrast.  19 of the heroes are white/caucasian background, with other racial/ethnic groups represented by two black Africans, an African American and an Asian (Japanese) character. 

Gaming should know no boundaries, and imagination should admit everyone.  Marvel, along with mainstream comics everywhere, has definitely got some major gaps in how representative its heroes are.  While Marvel has established an imaginary world where there are 9000 significant characters, many from all over the world and from all kinds of backgrounds, the most popular, the most promoted, and the most famous tend to be white and tend to be guys.  This game is not going to fix the industry.  However, going into the game and making the Marvel Universe your own to game in, one has to understand that the way things play out in character selection for the write-ups is pretty reflective of the Official Universe. 

The nice thing about it is that, if you don't like it, in the game, you can change it.

Hopefully, MWP can find some way to tap into those players who maybe don't see themselves in the "top tier" of Marvel heroes and nonetheless get them interested in the game.  With luck, that may bring in some more readers who may be able to exert some market forces for change in the official universe to balance out its cast.

As it is the rules make creation of heroes or statting up of your favorite (but as yet not officially released) hero fairly easy.

I'll have to talk about that tomorrow, as I am out of time to write today.

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.