Cthulhu Nerf - You Won't Need Dice, But You May Need To Increase Your Dodge Skill

Last Friday Chuck ran a Call of Cthulhu game full of paranoia and crazy people. It was a great little one-shot scenario. The four of us were thrown into a room not knowing what our true natures were or why we were in the room. The scenario, appropriately titled In Media Res, made for a really fun night of playing the monsters. We didn't necessarily have to be the bad guys, but it was hard to imagine how we weren't someone's nightmare in the end.

But of course, I'm burying the lead here. While Chuck did a fantastic job of running another Call of Cthulhu session (the system I think he runs better than any other), The reason I'm writing about it would have to be the little experiment he ran in game mechanics. My headline was a tiny bit misleading. You see, we still rolled dice a little bit (although it was pretty much assumed we would succeed as we were largely alone in a big house and had some time to explore), but more than anything we were shooting off our arsenal of nerf guns to test how well we actually shot. Keep reading, and you can see more pictures of how it worked and my thoughts on it at the end.

Dragon Age Story Update and the Wonders of Technology!

I had an awesome time gaming last night, I just want to get that out of the way in case anyone can't tell from the rest of this post. Basically I had two huge successes. The first success was was having an awesome first session of Dragon Age. I ran "The Curse" (calling it that since the real name gives a bit of plot away), the adventure provided in the first box set. You can read more about my general excitement about the game and our heroes' starting character hooks and backgrounds. There's a lot of things that went right last night and over the course of this past week to make this game a success. One of them, and also my second major success, was made possible through the use of my Droid X as a GM's tool.

Amethyst Play Experience: Is D&D 4th with guns worth giving a shot?

A couple of days ago I wrote about my experience building a character for Goodman Games' Amethyst. Amethyst is a campaign setting putting the characters in a futuristic America where the fantasy mixes quite thoroughly with the sci-fi. You've got elves, halflings, and vampires (a playable class!) thrown together with laser-guided rockets and mecha powered armor.

Character generation was a little rough. Part of this was because of how big a crutch the D&D Insider Character Builder (CB) software is. Sure, it's nice and conventient in that it does all the math and tells you exactly what you need to pick from. The CB can be handy, but it also makes you weak! 4th Ed. characters can be quite complex (and in fairness to the system, we were building level 16 characters in a new system from the ground-up - we've never built anything bigger than a level 9 character from scratch before).

Now that we've gotten a chance to play it for this past Friday's gaming night, what did I think? Keep reading to find out!

Prepping for a Local Con: What to Bring?

Someone famously asked "what's in the box?" not wanting to know the answer. Today I take a look at the question "what's in the bag?" and would love to share what I've got! You see, Chuck and I will be attending the Gaming Hoopla this weekend. It's a nice little local convention that focuses on board games. Chuck's going to be running Fiasco, Dread, and Call of Cthulhu (with my co-GM'ing Cthulhu) to try to inject some role-playing into the convention, but we have no idea how much of a turn out we're going to get.

With that in mind we're planning for some back-up games just in case. Since I was planning this out meticulously I thought I might as well write a little Friday post outlining what I'm throwing in my bag and why.

Friday Night Gaming 7/9/10 - Morg's Story

TheBro prepared Wizards' Free RPG Day adventure for Dark Sun. He reports that we've played through just half of it at this point (which is awesome since not only is the production value HUGE on this free adventure, but it's really two sessions worth!). I played Morg, the Mul (half-dwarf) Thunderborn Barbarian. It was my first experience playing a barbarian and as a melee striker - and it was a ton of fun. I got a very good understanding of the charge rules, and I was killing non-minions in one turn.

The adventure itself was very straight-forward, which is good if you want to bring new players in. There were four of us players last night, and our party was composed of myself as the only striker, an Elven Battlemind and Half-Giant (like the guy to the left here) Fighter as tanks, and a Thri-Kreen shaman as our healer. We opted out of playing either the wizard or warlock to avoid the whole issue with arcane characters in the Dark Sun world (in short, people hate arcane characters).

For some reason I decided to take a lot of pictures last night, so I'd like to do a blow-by-blow play report of the first half of this scenario. There will be spoilers ahead for the Free RPG Day Dark Sun scenario, so beware of that if you intend on playing it!

Roleplaying without Combat

In the Serenity game we just started last Friday, I play a Shepherd (priest/minister). I also happen to be the groups medic and a good shot with a pistol. In the town on the back end of the 'verse where we started, my character found an abandoned church and some very eager people with a desire for a Sunday service. I ended up role-playing in a separate scene from the rest of the group for a large portion of the session and I had a blast doing it. I usually enjoy combat while role-playing, especially considering my miniature game background. I was very surprised how much I took to the role of Shepherd and Medic. During the session, I used my medic ability on two NPCs: a drunk and a sick little girl, gave money to the little girl's family to escape the town, cleaned a church, planned a bank heist with the group and preached a Sunday sermon as a diversion before a high speed chase to end the session.

One reason that this session was so much fun for me without combat was the prep work by the GM. He worked hard on the terrain and other visuals, as you can see from the pictures posted live last Friday, and focused on the backgrounds and roles of the characters to the point where he worked a lot of the backgrounds into the storyline. The GM plans on running the next session in the series in about a month. This time period is a hard wait, but worth it since this effort takes time for high quality play. Providing my Shepherd with opportunities to both heal and preach via an interesting skill challenge where I received rewards (plot points in this system) made my play experience seem fresh and provided that feeling like when I first started to play RPGs. I can hardly wait for the next session to see how I can continue my pacifist ways.

Some other highlights from my "homily." We essentially had an Ocean's Eleven type mission where my character provided a distraction from a position of trust and authority/respect while the rest of the group broke into the bank. In order to keep distracting the town, I had to roleplay and pass increasingly difficult skill challenges. I was in contact with the group through an almost invisible ear piece communicator so I would know how long I had to delay. At one point, the other players needed a key code that only I wrote down. I decided that I would communicate the code by incorporating the numbers/words into the sermon. I quoted chapter 9 verse 20 of ... where the BROADSWORD of the Lord... This use of roleplaying was the highlight of the session for me and drew a number of chuckles from around the table.

Anyone out there ever play a character that was essentially for noncombat in a combat oriented game? I would love to hear some stories to help give me motivation and ideas for the future. Being a preacher and a medic should cover a lot of this roleplaying for this adventure, and I want to avoid combat for as long as possible. This type of roleplaying may come in handy for me as I will be playing a Dr. Who game at GenCon and I would like to be ready in case I don't have any real combat abilities. (If you have seen the show, you know that physical combat is often a last resort ranking far, far behind simply running away). Also, I know it is pretty easy to never have combat in Call of Cthulhu, but combat is not the main focus in that game as many things you try to fight will simply kill you. I am focusing on noncombat characters in combat oriented games.

Harpooned! Gotta cut the rope w/my combat knife while on horseback!

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Reavers are closing in!

Reavers! Evil ship on the stairs!

We found a mule in the barn!

Bar room brawl on planet Lilac! We're unarmed, so thank God for broken bottles and dronken aggressors!

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All's quiet on the small moon Lilac before our Serenity game begins!

The Power of the d12 (FNG - 6/25/10)

I think my group has a little bit of a fetish built up around the d12. The first game where we started to really use the d12 was in D&D 4th Edition. Our first game had me playing a warlock (striker) and my TheBro playing a dragonborn fighter (the tank) with some honking big two-handed axe. I was all excited because I had been playing World of Warcraft a lot at that point and my main character was a warlock. It was a perfect match, right?

Not really. I was all excited to be doing some super heavy damage with evil chaos bolts or something. The problem was, I was rolling d8's. Sure I got to roll multiple dice (my curse did an extra d6 I believe), but the dice were so modest. I found my character, on a really good day, only being able to muster about the same amount of damage as TheBro's average at-will attack. It was pathetic from my point of view. Sure my attacks did cool things like blind monsters or push them around, but the damage output is, for a striker, what what really matters. So what does this have to do with last Friday? Keep reading!

Friday Night Gaming 6/11/10 - A lesson learned with demons and zombies.

In my hubris shown in a previous post here, I got a little cocky with how well the first session of my Day After Ragnarok game, Operation Snakebite, was quickly developing into something awesome. After only one game, the caravan the players were a part of felt alive with real people interacting independently and in real-time. It was a living, breathing world with backstabbing, ambition, and dwarf killing - really the best kind of real world.

Unfortunately for me, I got a little ambitious. I learned two important lessons last night: 1. break up lots of talk, long-distance travel, and story development with a short encounter here or there and 2. I cannot run truly epic battles using the Savage Worlds scenario. Read more to see how I learned my lessons.

A Test of Character - Cassadore "Cass" Nine Feathers - 6/9/10

Earlier this week on Twitter I let loose that we're going to be playing a game of Serenity. This games has long been promised by one of our players, and I've been annoyingly asking, almost on a weekly basis, when he's going to get his game going for us. Luckily for the group, school is out, and our Serenity GM is off for the summer. He's got three months now to plan for our whole campaign. We'll be playing on Friday June 25th for our first session, and this Friday is our first real character generation time. In my excitement, I've kind of already developed my entire character with a degree of tweaking left open to make sure I can fill a couple of different roles amongst the crew if needed. Keep reading to see how Cass Nine Feathers was developed and for a first draft of his stats!

Friday Night Gaming 5/29/10 - Savage Ragnarok Edition.

Last night was the first session of Savage Worlds I've ran where I didn't use someone's map, scenario, or monsters. For a long time now I've been hoping to get Day After Ragnarok and Savage Worlds in general into the gaming rotation. We played a couple of one-shots taken directly off Pinnacle's website. These went fine, but Savage Worlds is a fairly complex to pick up and run, so even through yesterday we were working out the kinks in combat. Keep reading to find out how the guys did facing off against evil Soviet-allied dark dwarves!

You've never had so much fun with things going so very wrong - FNG 5/14/10

We played Fiasco for the second time Friday night. Our first time was a test run where we used the "Main Street" playset. It was extremely fun - the most fun role playing I'd ever had - and not having a GM was incredibly freeing. If you're interested in reading more about the premise and inspirations for Fiasco, go check out our interview with Jason Morningstar, the designer.

So this past Friday for game night, we did two things: we brought our first GM-less game to a group that predominatly plays D&D 4e, Savage Worlds, and other highly-tactical games, and we split the group up into two games. Because the little sister and the Gamer Wife were able to come, our numbers swelled to eight players. This is far too large for any normal game of Fiasco, so we split into two groups of four. Four is probably the sweet spot for Fiasco, but three to five is the recommended size. I really like four personally because it creates a good depth of plot while giving you enough players to play NPC's. Keep reading to find out why you have to play Fiasco.

The third Cylon is revealed! Yes, it's Baltar.

Cylon Leoben and Tyrol ressurecting from the resurrection ship! Also we're disco dancing the Robo-Boogie.

Battlestar Galactic w/Minimates instead of stand-up's.