RPGaDay 2016 #7 What Aspect of Roleplaying Has Had the Biggest Impact on You?

At long last, a question I can answer.

I think the biggest impact of gaming on my life is that it has forced me to be social. I am an introvert by nature. Even via the internet, it takes some effort to put myself out there.

But it is also important to note that no one is an island. When looking for a job, one of the things  they tell you to do is "network." The process of dating and romance is all about putting yourself out there.

Gaming helps me be social in a couple of ways. First of all, games don't pay themselves. If I'm going to play any of the games on my shelf, I'm going to have to find other people to play them with. Secondly, games make great icebreakers. Once you're at the table, conversation comes very naturally. And if you run out of things to talk about or the topic gets awkward, you can simply direct everyone's attention to the game.

So that's how an introverted guy like me has a decent sized network of friends and a very lovely wife. And so can you!

RPGaDay 2016 #6

Again, the new operators of the RPGaDay blogfest have given me a topic that I have nothing to say about. So I'm going back to last year's list. Most recent RPG played.

The most recent RPG session I participated in was running my Pathfinder megadungeon campaign. It was actually kind of unusual because I had a pretty full table. I've run the campaign in sort of a "catch as catch can" sort of way with whatever players show up for a particular session. Lately, it's been a fairly small core group. This week we had two players who had kind of faded away come back.

We took some time at the start of the session to flesh out what happened during the time they had  been gone. I'm using the downtime rules from the Ultimate Campaign book for this sort of thing, which even allows characters to earn a small amount of XP during downtime so they aren't as underleveled when they return to play.

This session also marked the introduction of a new player. His character is a first level dwarven ranger. All characters begin at first level. Pathfinder actually has rules for building more advanced characters, unlike the old school rules I was using in my previous campaign. But for players that aren't up on Pathfinder (and on me, since this is my first Pathfinder campaign), a first level character has fewer moving parts and is easier to build and to use.

To make sure that my core group doesn't have too much of an advantage over these n00bs, they used their lower level characters. The old school campaign really taught me how to manage each player having multiple characters, though there is slightly less call for it in Pathfinder. One of those circumstances is the introduction of a new player or character.

RPGaDay 2016 #5

Again, I'm breaking from the list of topics because I have nothing to say on it. I don't have enough character stories to sustain a month of them.

So I'll take an alternate topic and tell you about the game with my favorite character improvement rules.


I like rules that encourage different styles of play, creating incentives to do play into a genre or to be active rather than reactive. And what you award experience points for can be one of those things.

While D&D gets a lot of guff as the Lowest Common Denominator of gaming, its well-worn "XP for monster kills" is very much this type of rule. It incentivizes a certain style of play. In fact, while some games may use in-game mechanisms like fate points to reward players, very few systems use experience and advancement to support their genre and playstyle.

One exception to that is the Apocalypse Engine, the rules behind Apocalypse World, Dungeon World and Monsterhearts. Most of the awards in these games are either relationships and connections or experience points.

But I think my favorite character improvement rules are the ones that add to a character's flexibility without necessarily giving them bigger and bigger numbers. I first encountered this sort of rule in Pokethulhu. Only it's not really a rule so much as an assumption. There are no character improvement rules at all in that game. Your character will never be a better thulhu trainer than they are at the moment they enter play. What really makes your character is the monsters that they are able to tame and battle with. So even though your character sheet will never change, you are still growing more powerful by collecting all the pokethulhu critters.

I was so impressed with this idea that I incorporated it into my own design, Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road. Though instead of collecting monsters, adventurers in Oz collect friends that increase the variety of benefits you can get when you spend an Oz Point.

RPGaDay 2016 #4 Proudest Moment of Someone Else's Character

On this blog, I think I've mentioned what I think of Kris Newton as a GM and as a podcaster. What you haven't heard are his exploits as a player. While we were gaming together, we were the primary GMs, trading off whenever we needed a break. He ran a megadungeon in D&D 3.5, while I ran some shiny new system each time.

But my first story is from an era before we had that sort of rhythm. The girl who is now my wife ran a D&D session where Kris played a gnome paladin. One of the other player was a girl who always played the same sort of character. Whatever class or career or whatever it was that she chose, she was always better than you. Not that she was a great optimizer or anything. She just roleplayed every character with the same sort of haughty, snotty attitude.

This time she was an elven necromancer. Her snotty abrasiveness was getting in the way of everyone else's fun and threatening to derail the adventure. So Kris' gnome paladin decided to intervene. He purchased a love potion and put it into a bottle of wine. He then shared this bottle of wine with the necromancer.

At first, I think everyone there was a little shocked when he did this. He just more or less mind-controlled a fellow PC. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw it as a master stroke of roleplaying that specific character. It had the prankish nature of the gnome. It brought the group into stronger harmony, making it a lawful act. And he at least mitigated the evil aspect of the act by sharing the bottle and therefore the potion, making the love magic mutual. (The two players were also romantically involved as well, so it wasn't creepy gamer drama.)

My next story is from a good while later when we were a bit more established as a group. While Kris and I were the most frequent GMs for the group, another player occasionally ran one-shots, typically D&D modules. For one of these, Kris constructed a gnome wizard named The Mystery of Inky Strange. (It's like A Tribe Called Quest. You say the whole thing.)

What really made The Mystery of Inky Strange memorable even though he only appeared once was his use of the shrink object spell. He kept on his person a 10 foot by 10 foot cube of solid stone, shrunk down to the size of a die. Nobody knew this until he threw it and it landed full sized on some huge monster, crushing it to death.

The entire table was stunned and impressed. Including the guy who was running the game. There was some question regarding whether the stunt would work, but after a little discussion and page flipping, it was allowed to stand. Though the GM did say that it was the sort of trick that would only work once. But for a one shot game, that's all that was needed.

Before I make myself into too much of a Kris Newton fanboy, my final story is of a different player and a truly awesome heroic sacrifice.

The system was Cartoon Action Hour. The campaign was a mashup of my own devising. Centuries ago, psychics insects from Mars came to invade the techno-magical paradise of Atlantis. The Atlanteans and the Martians both lost. Atlantean civilization fell just as they crippled the Martian war machines (though no names were named and no public domain sources were harmed in the course of this campaign).

The campaign begins with the alien homeworld sending reinforcements as well as the greatest general in their history, whose mind was preserved in a psychic crystal and then given a crystal body in order to live again. The party was a ragtag bunch who came together when the bar they were patronizing blew up (one of my several attempts to redeem/justify the old "You all meet in a tavern" bit).

One of the characters was a Martian named Scout, because that was his role in his hive. When he reported to his queen that the homeworld was trying to restart the war, she told him to stop it by any means necessary. The economy of the hive was too intertwined with that of the local human towns. Killing and conquering the humans would be too disruptive to the hive and there's no guarantee that the long term trade- off would be worth it.

So they make it to the final confrontation with the great general himself. I gave the players a lot of leeway and freedom to describe how this whole thing goes down. So Scout hijacks a flying saucer and pilots it with his telekinesis. Rather than strafing the general with the ship's telekinetically powered force beams, Scout proceeds to crash the ship directly into the General himself.

The funny thing is this was actually the first character death I've ever had to deal with. I had been running games for quite some time before this, but whether I'm just too nice or don't calibrate my opposition well enough for my players, this was the first time that a character had actually died on my watch. But at the same time, this this was a clear player choice. I was running the session very loosely, so there was no rolling for damage or anything like that. I gave him the choice to bail out of the ship at the last second and he said no.

On the plus side, he did take the Big Bad of the campaign down with him. It was a sufficiently dramatic moment that I played The Touch in honor of his sacrifice.

RPGaDay 2016 #3 Proudest Character Moment (or not)

This is one of the tricky questions this year. As someone who's been the GM more often than not, I don't have a lot of experience playing a character. Which means that I don't have a lot of Crowning Moment of Awesome-type stories. In fact, I told all my good character stories 2 years ago, and haven't picked up any new ones since.

So instead of that, I'm going to bring back the Day 3 topic from last year: Favorite new game of the last 12 months.

This year, I would have to say that my favorite new game would be the new Star Wars games from Fantasy Flight Games. They released 3 separate core books, each with a focus on a different aspect of the Star Wars universe. Edge of the Empire (smugglers and bounty hunters), Age of Rebellion (The Rebel Alliance), and Force and Destiny (Jedi and Force users).

I actually liked the three distinct core books. As I've said on my blog previously, a successful game is one that addresses the campaign level, where players and GMs decide what goes on at the table. So the fact that they've those three big campaign foci of the Star Wars setting and gave them each room to breathe is a plus in my book.

Keeping Jedi and the Force off to one side is also a good thing. One of the complaints of previous Star Wars RPGs was that the Force was frequently imbalanced compared to other abilities and character types. While I believe that they addressed this pretty well, at least in part by giving every other character type cool abilities, GMs who don't want to deal with the Force don't have to.

Long time readers may remember the demo game I played at DunDraCon a number of years back with the wacky dice that gave out too much information for the GM to deal with. The main thing that brought me around on the concept of the dice was listening to the One Shot podcast play it. They actually took the time to use all of the information the dice gave out and made a very entertaining show of it.

RPGaDay 2016 #2 Best Session of the Past Year

Over the past year, only 2 sessions I've run have been particularly memorable. Neither of which were in my current campaign.

One of them was a session of Fiasco, using the Fallout playset. The setup was that my character had discovered the last of the green plants somewhere in the wasteland and I was going to offer that opportunity to the only other two people I cared about. The other two characters were a married couple who had a farmstead whose neighbor, Old Man Henderson, was digging up pre-apocalypse relics on his land.

The wife decided to use my character as a hitman, but I refused. I wound up making friends with Old Man Henderson. He even gave me an air rifle to shoot radroaches with.

It all went to hell when I was doing some target practice with my air rifle while hanging out with my buddy, Old Man Henderson. One of the bottles I shot was full of either fuel or bathtub hooch that was so volatile that it ignited when I shot it. Flaming liquid fell on Old Man Henderson. With some cleverness and some of the cool stuff in Mr. Henderson's shed, I put the fire out, but not before he was burned to a crisp.

So I went and told the wife that Old Man Henderson was dead like she wanted. but I did so in front of her husband. Which really upset him, since he was also friendly with their now-deceased neighbor. so he kicked her out of the home and I took over the Henderson property.

It sounds like a messed up story, and it is. But it is exactly the kind of story that Fiasco is intended to create, so I consider it a rousing success. I don't know if all of the other players were as excited as I was, which my be why that was the last time I played Fiasco.

My other great session was slightly more traditional and a bit more traditionally fun. It was the second session I ran of Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road at DunDraCon.

It was a larger group than the first time and there were more Oz fans in the group, which always makes for more fun. The plot of the new adventure is more linear and directed, but still encourages open-ended problem solving. For example, at one point, the party must figure out a way to reach the floating city of Umbre-La. In this particular run, the Scarecrow spent an Oz Point to declare that the Wizard had a balloon that could take them there.

Since I knew this was a magical balloon, I wanted to think up a cool feature for it. I decided that the Wizard's Tiny Piglets were the ship's pilots. As I was looking up illustrations online, I spotted an illustration that Skottie Young had done for the Marvel Oz comics that showed the Piglets in tiny fezzes. So I decided that the balloon was more or less the TARDIS. Its control room was bigger than the outside would suggest and the Piglets flew it via control panels set in a radius around a central column.

Overall a fun session, but that was my favorite part.

RPGaDay 2016 #1: Dice

While this blog is generally pretty slow these days, there has been the somewhat regular spurt of activity that is the RPGaDay blogfest.

This year promises to be slightly different. I think someone else wrote the questions and the focus of the blogfest has changed. Previous years have let me geek out about the various things on my gaming shelf and sometimes even things that I wish were on it. This year, the questions are much more focused on play experience, which is a much smaller subset of my gaming life.

The first question this year is about dice. Do I prefer physical dice or some variety of virtual dice? The answer is simple. Physical dice. I even have one set that I have kept together for longer than I've owned my current laptop. I don't have a smartphone yet, so "There's an app for that." is a punchline for me rather than a practical statement.

While I could talk about technology encroaching into my gaming life, there's another question later on that will give me the opportunity to expound upon that.

I can actually remember the first gaming die I ever bought. It was a 30-sided die from a bin of random dice at The Last Grenadier in Burbank, California. I had been browsing there long enough that I felt it rude not to buy anything, but I don't think I had even a dollar in my pocket. I was not an actual gamer at the time (I had the interest, but not the experience), so I just piked a random die from the bin without any idea of what I would use it for.

Little did I know at the time, but there are astonishingly few uses for a d30. I don't think I've ever rolled it in a game session. I do still have it, though.