Games, Gaming & Gamers

I knew Oprah played GURPS!

2009-10-11T10:45:00.001-07:00

Dice Education

2009-07-03T01:30:00.000-07:00

I'm sliding you a little knowledge - right from the horse's mouth!

I know we talk a lot about dice out here, I have a fascination for the silly things. Our randomizers are an important element of the hobby. What fun would the hobby be without the element of surprise? The suspense of a roll of the bones?

So, who better to speak about dice than Lou Zocchi. "Lou Who," you say? Oh! Well, get thee to YouTube!

Okay, yes, he goes on a bit and maybe some of you don't care. But, he isn't wrong. Let's face it, the man invented and patented a die that's named after him - he's crazy about dice! I love him!

Rolling Dice

2009-06-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

I have a D&D game going with some friends. The DM asked us to do a little out-of-game shopping and dice rolling. I decided to video my rolls for the sake of fairness. Then I decided to add titles and sound effects for giggles! I thought I'd share. Enjoy!

Yo-yoing

2009-05-24T21:42:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you have heard of yo-yo diets. Well, I'm currently yo-yo gaming.

Two Sundays ago, I was invited to play Vampire. Got my junk together, showed up, but I was one of the few that did. The Storyteller decided not enough people showed. So, we didn't game.

A week ago Saturday, my Star Wars GM flaked out. So, no gaming there.

This past Tuesday night, I was invited to do something I cannot remember doing for the longest time: play D&D on a school night. It was fun and we had a good time.

Today - today was the anti-climax to about three weeks of mixed and missed signals. It's pretty obvious that I have some personal investment in seeing the role-playing hobby survive. So, when I was approached by an MIB from SJG to run a GURPS game at a FLGS - I was all "LOL! FTW!" :)

To make a long story short, I didn't make it on the schedule at the store - no one outside of the staff knew I would be there. So, I sat for three hours. Not that it was a bad thing. I put out a little sign practically begging people to talk to me. Many did. (Shout out to S and his son S - you know who you are! Thanks for entertaining me!) Others came by said hi and talked a bit. Most were more interested in my copy of The Red Dwarf RPG (not an SJG product) than the other GURPS items on my table. (Little hint for the licensing boys in Austin, no?)

The FLGS is correcting the scheduling problem and one of the D&D players that was in the store (they had a HUGE turn out - apparently that campaign has been going for a while) stated he was interested in playing GURPS - asked me if GURPS did fantasy? Yes, indeed!

So, in all, not a total loss. Certainly is breaking up my unemployment boredom.

Gaming in the Living Room

2009-04-02T09:52:00.000-07:00

I recently had a really good time at a friend's house. He has a "Man Room" with a huge TV, surround sound, big, comfortable leather couches (with built-in cup holders!) and, of course, an XBox.

So, there I was, sitting on the couch, wireless controller in my hand, playing Civilization Revolution. If you are a Civ fan and own a console, buy this game! It's awesome. I had a great time.

In the near future, I will be buying myself a large flat panel and I have been considering my options. You might remember a while back that I looked at my options for buying a Wii - but I decided I couldn't cost justify it. Well, after my recent experience, I was again thinking about a console and looking really hard at an XBox.

I went out to Amazon and to xbox.com and looked at all the available games. The only games I really wanted on the XBox 360 are Civ Revolution and Star Wars Force Unleashed.

I keep forgetting I'm not a shoot-em-up gamer. Essentially, the XBox as well as the PS2 & 3 focus on shooters and thin RPGs that are really just shooters. I like resource management and simulation. I like Civ and WarCraft and WoW and The Sims and I'm looking forward to Star Wars: The Old Republic. With the exception of Civ, none of that is available on the XBox, PS3 or Wii.

At retail, an XBox is only $200 less than a Mac Mini.

I was excited about being able to download movies on the XBox, until I looked at the limited selection of movies. I'll be able to download movies from my Netflix account to either a Mac Mini or an XBox. I can also rent movies from the iTunes Store on a Mac Mini.

I found a great wireless keyboard with a track pad from Logitech - meaning I'll be able to chat and surf from my couch.

I already own most of the games I like to play, upgrading to a more modern Mac will allow me to play even more. I might even be able to play WoW from my couch - I'm excited about that!

I won't get Civ Revolution, but I already own Civ IV for the Mac. I won't get Force Unleashed, but I have KoTOR and I should grab and play KoTOR II and eventually I'll have SW:TOR.

The Mac will have a web browser. My PSP has a web browser. I think the Wii has a web browser. The XBox? No browser. How can this $400, internet connected device not have a web browser? This thing is built by Microsoft - how does it not have Internet Explorer built in? MS slaps Exploiter on everything! They make watches with web browsers - how is it that XBox doesn't have a browser???

A Mac Mini will also be a media player - I could buy a terabyte of external storage (for cheap! Their $100!) and rip a good portion (if not all) of my DVDs to that.

I'm back to having a problem cost justifying a $400 device (even more with accessories) for two games.

Why is it that I can't buy a device that just works? Why? You go to look at a game, it's made for only one console. Or, worse, it's made for every console but the one you own. Why would a game manufacturer make a game for only one console, or make it for three consoles but not the fourth? For years I've fought the "The Game isn't made for the Mac" battle. And now that this battle is nearly over (Mac uses Intel processors and emulates Windows faster than some PCs can run Windows) - I find a whole new world of bull!

I want one device that will run Mac & PC software and play any game I shove into it! That would be an amazing device! Everyone would want one - but likely no one could afford one!

What Zines???

2009-03-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

The OGL is one of the coolest concepts ever in the field of role-playing games in my humble opinion. The fact that WotC is now messing with it blows my mind. I guess the corporate mindset finally made it to Renton, WA. Most likely, they got a shipment from Redmond, WA.

When d20 first came out, there was a ton of buzz and rightly so - it was one of the neatest things to happen to RPGs. Everyone and their brother put up a Zine with free content. Even Steve Jackson Games, one of my favs, got in on the act. They started a subscription based zine called d20 Weekly.

Don't go looking for it, it's just a holder page out there in the ether. (I could buy the domain if I wanted it. Tempting!) d20 Weekly was ended at SJG after a rather short run. They cited at the time that the zine was losing money. At the time I remember reading (can't find the reference) that it was losing money due to the fact that there were so many d20 zines offering free content, d20 Weekly just couldn't compete.

Today I decided to write an article on various free gaming zines. I figured a stroll through Google would deliver me hundreds and I could pick out a few to showcase.

I was shocked. Repeated Google searches brought me very few results. Frankly, there were no zines I wanted to point to directly.

It's amazing to me how this hobby has struggled. There are more games available now than there has ever been. There are dozens of FREE games. The hobby has died and come back more times than a Marvel super-villain. First, the religious right tried to kill it. It came back. Then, it just wasn't cool. It came back. Now, at a time when every person under the age of 25 owns a game system and millions of people play WoW - we're seeing the hobby again retreat.

I'm tempted to start my own gaming zine, with paid writers and artists, struggle for the next few years and then ride the next wave or two of popularity. It would probably make me rich, then poor, then rich then utterly broke - but it might be a fun ride!

Virtual Tables and Tools

2009-03-04T21:05:00.000-08:00

Like many people, I have friends in other cities. Friends I miss. Friends I would love to just hang out with and even game with.

However, I don't have the cash to buy a plane ticket for a weekend in another city for a couple of RPGs. I'm sure most of you don't, either.

In these days of powerful computers and broadband Internet access, there should be ways to do remote games, right? Well, I set out to see if there were.

I decided that I needed to come up with several tools. They should all be free or low cost. They should be readily available and they should be platform agnostic (I'm a Mac guy and I have friends that fall all over the OS spectrum).

To start with, I will need to communicate with my friends and they will need to communicate with each other. This need was going to be the easiest to fulfill. I have chat accounts on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Skype and Gmail. Most of those have conferencing capabilities and even voice & video chat. I prefer Yahoo. It shouldn't be difficult to get my friends into the same chat room.

Next, we'll need a common database. As a GM, I will want a way to give out information to my players and, in turn, I want a way to see their character sheets and what not. So far, I'm very impressed with Obsidian Portal (I wrote about them recently). I have had a lot of fun putting together my new campaign. The great thing about writing in this wiki format is that it is addictive. Every time I mark something as a link - it stays red until I write the page. (Maddening!!) I keep finding myself marking links, thus I have to write more pages! I think I'm going to write myself silly!

Not only that, but I can mark info as "GM Only", so I can write material on the wiki before it will be used in the game. So, when I am on a roll, I can just keep going! If something happens in the game that invalidates that material, I can simply update it or never remove the "GM Only" check-box or just delete it - the players never have to know that something they did made me change my mind on a bit of material but I recycled it later because I needed something and was out of writing time!

Next, I needed a "table" - a virtual table. A place where I could load and share a map. Where I could roll dice and see my player's dice rolls. There are a few tools out there, some are for pay, some are free but offer premium content. The first one I tried was RPTools. This is a set of five different tools, programmed in Java (very cross platform!) and ... FREE!

Their MapTool is impressive. It has an internal chat program and dice rolling capabilities. It has tools for drawing maps. Then, you can load up pictures to act as figures for the PCs & NPCs. The whole tool is game system agnostic, easy to use and easy on the eyes.

I was very excited about this tool. However, I've not been able to get it to work for me. The program requires you to set up one machine as a server. When I tried to do this, I could list my game on RP's site, but no one could join it. I'm a pretty tech savvy guy and I had other move savvy guys have a look and we couldn't figure out the issue. As far as we can tell, my ISP is blocking the port that I need. So, as impressive as the tool is, I cannot use it.

However, I have had a blast working with the TokenTool. I've decided to use that format for making the figure-replacements I will use in whatever game I run. I've even begun making similar tokens in Photoshop.

(Speaking of Photoshop, I have been drawing maps like a madman. I've got enough material for a whole other post - look for it soon!)

The next tool I tried is RPGtonight. It, is also Free, so already I'm in love! It's web based, so no messing around with my router or trying to set up a server or whatnot.

RPGtonight has similar functionality to RPTools. There isn't a map drawing tool (but, you probably already have MS Paint or can find something better. Have I mentioned how much time I've spent on Photoshop lately??) However, the rest of the expected functionality is there. You can store and share maps and figures/minis/icons/tokens. You can even choose from maps and tokens on the site! There is a dice rolling application and there is built in text and voice chat.

However, I wish I had found RPGtonight before I found RPTools. I'm a visual guy and RPGtonight is ... messy. They aimed themselves at D&D players and there are fake wood grains and other medieval touches, that, had they been done by a better artist, might not be so obtrusive. The size of maps and tokens that one can up-load is quite small as well. They give one PLENTY of room for uploaded content, but at 500k for maps and 25k for minis, well, it's been a challenge. (I built a large and detailed map in Photoshop, shrank it down to what I thought was a reasonable size, 1.5 MB, and tried to upload it. Of course it failed. All of my shrinking work has had less than desirable results. I will likely have to cut up this map and my maps in the future will be smaller.)

I haven't yet run a game with RPGtonight, but I will soon. For free, it's certainly not a bad deal - I'm willing to compromise and I hope things will improve as money rolls in for the owners.

I'm still looking for other tools. When I find them, I'll review them here.

Boom! I guess the game is over ...

2009-02-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

I have a cautionary tale for those of you thinking about allowing some of your players to play NPCs in a crucial point of your game ...

Many years ago, early in my role playing career, a friend of mine decided to introduce a group of us to the Star Trek RPG. I was certainly hip!

We all rolled up our Federation characters and chose a name for our ship: USS The Far Side. Wish I was kidding ...

The scenario went that before the Khitomer Accords, a Federation ship is sent to a planet in the Klingon Neutral Zone. The planet is about to explode and there are humans that need to be rescued. Unfortunately, the colony is illegal. To complicate matters, the Klingons also have an illegal colony on this planet. So, as the Federation ship arrives, it detects a Klingon ship.

Both ships establish communication and determine that they want to rescue their colonists but, of course, neither trusts the other. The GM decided to allow a couple of players to play the Klingons during this negotiation. I was one of the Klingons.

So, here's Klingon logic as I understood it: if my enemy is dead, there is nothing to fear, defend against or negotiate with. Sound about right?

In our negotiations, we "Friendly Klingons" (Sure!) bravely offered to risk one of our shuttles. We would fly over to the Federation ship, pick up the Federation representatives and pilot them down to the surface so that they could observe that all the colonists got off the planet. (Sun Tzu sez: "Never accept anything the enemy offers you.")

The Federation players bought this! Geez!!!

The shuttle landed in the bay on the USS The Far Side. A specially chosen warrior (we had LOTS of volunteers!) steps out from the shuttle. He holds up his arm, displaying the remote device he is holding and yells "For the Glory of the Empire!!" Then he presses the button. The shuttle is, of course, jam-packed with explosives. (Sun Tzu sez: "All warfare is based on deception.")

BOOM!

The Federation ship is no more and the Klingons pick up their colonists and a bunch of human slaves.

The End.

We could have rolled up new characters, but, it was late into the evening and we didn't. Nor did we ever get together to play Star Trek again. True, the GM was a bit of a prat, but it would have been nice to play a different scenario.

The lesson learned: unless you are willing for your game to go totally off the rails, be ready to counteract your player's actions to keep the game rolling.

Wiki Whack!

2009-02-18T09:19:00.000-08:00

I tripped over a newish cool thing: Obsidian Portal.

The concept is that you can have a wiki for your campaign. I've tried building web pages and entire sites for games previously - it can be time consuming. In just playing around with this, I have so far found it less time demanding. I haven't written up anything for a real game - just a concept game - but it has been simple and fairly fun.

There are already some cool, whiz-bang features - more if you pay for the service. My bet is that there will be more as they go along.

Neat stuff!

Adultitis

2009-02-09T08:55:00.001-08:00

Looks like the cast at Weregeek just had a random encounter with adultitis. It catches up to every gamer eventually. Roll a Fortitude Save, DC 40!

Lego Inspirations

2009-01-28T19:51:00.000-08:00

One of the earliest posts on this blog was about my use of Lego Minifigures in role playing games. That post has been a big hit! Many people have come from search engines to this blog because of that post. In fact, we had a request! A comment came in a couple of days ago on that year old post:

"Do you have any photos of your lego collection in action? It could be inspiring..."
Ace

Well, Ace, I am a man of the people and I am here to give my people what they want! Will I show off my Legos? That's like asking a mother at a baby beauty pageant to show off her kid! I'll have my Legos in makeup and a dress in a jiffy!

But, first, let's take a walk down memory lane. About the time I began building my Star Wars Lego collection, I was doing an online comic strip. You won't have a lot of luck finding Planet Zonk any more, but there are places you can see some of it. Anyway, I thought at the time that I could promote the strip by creating fan art for other web comics and stealing their readership. Didn't work for me, but I enjoyed doing the strips. It was a challenge to do a strip in the style of the original artist. I created one strip for Irregular Webcomic and two for Legostar Galactica. The work for LG led to the photo below:

I sent this photo to my players. They didn't respond! Hmmm ... ;)

Of course, that was three years ago. While it hasn't exactly exploded, my Imperial force has grown and even improved! I was able to update some of the caps on the officers and add a team of Shadow Troopers. Excellent!

Over the last three years I really have assembled quite the roleplaying toolbox of Lego parts. I have lots of figures, with tons of accessories. I have scenery and vehicles. And, I have been trying to keep it all in one portable box. Although, I may just upgrade the box eventually! I think the key is to buy things that are inexpensive, shop for the best bargains and wait for people to put the good stuff on sale. I still love eBay and Bricklink. Lego has also recently been doing more "Army Builder" type sets, allowing for more figures for less money.

In the earlier post, I talked about building a figure for a Star Wars game. This is he: Rey Venge. (Don't poke fun! Think about "Han Solo"!) As you can see I was able to find a purple turban from the Oriental Adventures sets, a head from the Extreme Sports sets, a black and purple shirt that belonged to Professor Snape in the Harry Potter sets, legs from a figure in the DinoAttack sets and a gun from the new Batman sets. I also added a sword from the Castle sets because he found a cool sword while adventuring. I probably spent $5 or so on him, but I don't think he could be much cooler! He's totally right on and completely custom. You just can't get that in any other format without a lot of work.

The GM who is running the game where I play Rey also wanted to introduce Imperial Knights. At the time he introduced them, I didn't have the right selections in my collection to make this look good. We got around it, but I knew it could be better and it was an excuse to buy more Legos! Thus, we end up with the rather impressive group we see above. The cone shaped helmets came from eBay, everything else came from BrickLink, but from about four different vendors on BrickLink. It was fun figuring out which bits actually existed, who had them and then waiting for them to show up piece by piece in the mail. For example, the sabers; in the materials, the Imperial Knights carry "Silver" light sabers. I hoped I could find a chromed bar for the actual blade. No luck, I don't think that Lego has ever made such a thing. I thought about a clear bar, but I didn't think it would have the right effect. In the end I settled for the light grey bars but made sure I didn't use chromed handles. I think they look great. I gave them helmets just for fun, the GM seemed to like all the trouble I went to. They really stand out on the board as well. I think the plain black and red head studs really do look like closed helmets! I think these really do show off the customization possibilities of Lego.

But, Lego isn't perfect. I have felt since I started using Lego that they sorely lacked in two places: aliens & droids. The Star Wars universe is full of both and Lego hasn't done the best job putting out figures that represent the wide and wild variety of possibilities for both. Also, when they do introduce an alien or a droid, they usually tuck it into a high priced set. As far as I'm concerned, Lego could produce sets of just figures and I would buy them by the cart! But, they are in the business of selling plastic bricks. Too bad. In that vein, we have the picture above, or what I like to call my "Instant Aliens". Since you don't always have the right figure for an alien, I keep this lot around. The guys in the front left are inexpensive bits I have cobbled together with Zam Wesell heads. The Tuskens in the background are the definition of what I have mentioned up to this point. I have not paid more that $.75 cents a figure for them, you can pay much more than that for them now. And, they make great targets for your Jedi!

And, again, with the droids, I have had to come up with various ways to make droids not represented in Lego or not available inexpensively. I do indeed have typical R2-D2s and R2-D4s, but I wanted to show off some of the less typical items of my collection. I'm proud to say that I used the claws that came out a while back to mount heads on Battle Droids to create IG-88 before Lego released their own IG-88 model. The IG-88 you see in the picture is actually IG-88D! How fan-boy is that??

Last but not least, my droid army! I'm pretty proud of these guys - although I'm also a bit frustrated. In taking this picture, I had the clip on the legs of three of the Super Battle Droids break, rendering them useless. I wouldn't have minded so much if it had been the cheaper gray ones, but one of the blue ones broke. I violated my rule when I bought the blue Super Battle droids. I paid $5 a head for them. I was running a game and really wanted to scare the players and those were the only Supers on the market. Now those droids are worth about $8 a head. And, yes, I see that I mounted the arms on the gray Supers upside down and totally forgot to mount arms on one of the front droids altogether. I think I was getting tired by the time this picture was taken! I have plenty of extra arms and bodies and even heads for the tan droids, but the legs are the rare commodity. At least at one time they were rare. I like to chage out the body and arms for different colored parts - give the droids the feeling that they were built from scrap parts or that they had seen a lot of action.

Well, that's a start. I have a lot more in that box and I took a ton of pictures but I don't want to bore you. Hopefully you can find inspiration here. Just because I have primarily Star Wars figures doesn't mean you couldn't use them for other games. Lego has a wide variety of sets in current production, not to mention what they have made in the past. Your minifigures are out there!

Geomorphs & Map Bitz

2009-01-11T18:35:00.000-08:00

TSR introduced Dungeon Geomorphs when I was a kid. They were parts of maps that could be interchangeably assembled to make dungeons. Neat concept, would have made for a fast map.

When I was running D&D, mapping a dungeon was a big part of the game. But, sitting there trying to tell someone else what to draw on a bit of graph paper was time consuming and annoying.

I couldn't afford the printed Geomorphs. By accident, I discovered that a certain pad of purple graph paper I owned reacted interestingly with Crayola markers: the purple grid repelled the black marker. Thus, I could draw a dungeon on the graph paper and the purple grid still stood out.

I loved this! I began making dungeon rooms, cut them out and reassembled them into new and different dungeons. I pinned the individual rooms to a piece of cardboard. Thus, the players got to see the dungeon unveiled room by room. It worked very well and only cost me a few dollars.

A few years back, I decided to do a web site - silly me, I keep thinking there's a way to make money on the internet! Anyway, I thought it would be cool to recreate my Geomorphs. I thought I'd publish a few geomorphs a week, maybe a few maps, give DMs a reason to come back every week. Where I fell apart was trying to recreate the geomorphs I made as a kid. I wanted my "clients" to be able to take what I published and easily manipulate them for their own use. I started off making with Photoshop. It was a bad idea - how many people own Photoshop?

The key was to use a simpler program ... and thus I had to lose some features and use a simpler file format. Files in .BMP and .GIF format are about as simple as it gets for the average user. Every PC out there has software that can use those file formats: Microsoft Paint. Most Macs could find something that would work - I figured I'd link to some freeware and shareware from the site.

I worked up the attached pictures. Simple, squared off rooms, the essential bits of a dungeon. I figured I'd keep building with them, creating new and more complex ones. I never did.

Why not? The idea was, unusual for me, too simple. The color scheme worked great when making square rooms, fell right apart when doing anything beyond a square. Making simple caverns shows this off immediately. I experimented with making the grid a third color and I wasn't happy with the results. I also began finding freeware mapping tools that did a better job. The idea seemed to die in my hands, as hundreds have done before.

Attached is a sample of the rooms, a black background just to make it easy for you and a full map. I used the map in the post-Gygax game I ran last year. Feel free to use anything here in your own games.

Not all Mecha are created equal!

2009-01-05T11:08:00.000-08:00

This site has seen a few recent walks down memory lane. Some comments on a previous entry brought up some old memories of a group I hadn't thought of in years. That group, more than anything, taught me many lessons on what NOT to do as a GM.

I ran Rifts for this group. I was a big fan of Palladium after having played Heroes Unlimited. I became more excited about Palladium because they were attempting to build a universal system; a system where one could play any genre without having to change rule sets. Later I would discover a product that did this much better: GURPS.

Rifts, for those that don't know, took the next step. Rifts brought all genres into one game. Sci-Fi Aliens and Demons existed next to Mutants with super powers, medieval warriors and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. I was impressed with the concept. I bought all the books as I could afford them; I bought many of them for the art alone. It was impressive stuff.

What wasn't impressive was the game system. For all intents and purposes, Palladium was the first D20 game; it was a reworking of the AD&D game rules and, frankly, not a very good one. But, I didn't know it at the time. At the time the only other game I had played was D&D. So, Palladium seemed normal, simple, easy to understand.

I got a group together and I began a game. I won't go into details of the game I put together, even though I am still impressed with myself for bits of it to this day. However, I would like to share some of the things I did wrong centered around one player.

I don't remember the guy's name. He was, as the rest of us were, a geek. Today, I would describe him as an "otaku" - he was very into anything Japanese. The guy was rail thin and tall, kept his hair long and bone straight. He wore only black. And, frequently, he walked around with a katana in his belt. He was quite a piece of work.

A member of the Rifts group was a friend of this Otaku and asked me if he could join. Sure, I said, no prob. The Otaku was of course interested in playing a Mecha Pilot from the Robotech game produced by Palladium. This was Rifts. A Mecha Pilot would fit right in, right? Wrong. My first mistake was not thinking "This character will have a huge war robot. No one else in the group is armed with a large war robot."

So, the Otaku rolled up his character and picked out a Mecha. His character arrived via one of the rifts local to the players. All was good.

I decided to make a challenge for the group. I sent in a mecha and two war robots. I honestly thought the group would take this threat without much trouble. My second mistake was not verifying this as fact. Had I bothered to read the Robotech book instead of just buying it and staring at the art, I would have seen that the best weapons in that game did half to a third of the damage done by Weapons in Rifts. And as to armor, well, there wasn't much!

So, most of the group went after the two war robots. The Otaku took the bait and went Mecha to Mecha. The shooting started, the Otaku got an early shot and hurt the mecha he was battling. A bit later, the bad mecha took his shot. I rolled for damage and gave the number to the Otaku. He looked at me in horror. I didn't understand what was wrong. He explained to me that the damage I just gave him was about double what was needed to destroy his mecha. Oops!

(Later, I bought the Rifts Conversion book. They state plainly that the mecha in Rifts were much tougher than the Robotech mecha. They recommended beefing up the numbers for the Robotech mecha to allow them to compete in Rifts. Wish I had this information sooner!!)

The Otaku made his roll and punched out of the mecha to relative safety. The rest of the party did its job and killed the other two war robots and I had the bad mecha retreat. However, when the dust settled, I had a mecha pilot without a mecha and all the replacement mecha were in another dimension!

So, the Mecha Pilot was running around without a mecha, which was frankly a bad deal for that character. The player, the Otaku, was a loud ass about the deal. He didn't take it in stride at all. I discovered as we went along that this was the core of this person: bitter, annoying, difficult to please. My third mistake was that I should have had some type of mecha fall into this character's hands. However, the guy was such a jerk, I remember thinking that maybe I didn't want him to have so much fire power. This was about the moment I looked at the rest of the group and realized my first mistake: no one else had a mecha.

Later, this and other issues brought this particular group to a screeching halt. But, the lessons I learned were: A) verify, don't assume, B) read the books, C) new players should come in at the same power as the current players, D) work around previously made mistakes.

There was some fun had in that group, but not as much as there could have been. There were a lot of battling egos and mine was not innocent. However, the lessons learned were valuable and I like to think I'm a better GM for having had that experience.

On Writing Styles ...

2008-12-31T01:28:00.000-08:00

Last post I remarked that when I began running D&D, about 20 years ago (Crom!!) - I often sat around and wrote up NPCs that were never used.

This led me to thinking about the various writing styles I have tried and rejected as I have gone along.

When I began, of course I had no idea what the heck I was doing. Thus, the PCs surfing through dungeons on magic ax heads with flails made of magic pearls, etc. I had no life outside my room, so I sat around rolling up characters just for the fun of it. Yes, I was a boring little geek who should have been learning something that would be useful later in life - like how to talk to a girl! Or how to play drums!

By the time high school came along, I still had no life. So, I spent many hours writing exhaustive notes. I'd start off with a yellow legal pad and fill in story lines and NPC stats for pages and pages. I used a .05 mechanical pencil and wrote four lines of text to every one college ruled line (try it - it's hard to read. I was an idiot.) And, of course, any night that I showed up with tons of notes and everything I wanted to do planned out - the group would decide to go off on a tangent and I was required to think on my feet.

This thinking on my feet thing seemed to happen more and more often. In certain groups, when I did have notes, I was accused of "strong arming" the group to follow what I had written. I'm sure the accusations were not far from wrong.

In college, I went the other way. Since I had a job and homework and classes that I sometimes attended (I even sometimes talked to girls!) I didn't have excessive time to write up game material. Instead of pages of notes, I'd have half a page of notes and winged the rest. Flying by the seat of one's pants can be fun. There are no restrictions for tangents and very little chance to "strong arm" a group. However, when I do fly without notes, I tend to give more stuff to the players. They walk away with bags of money and high powered items that later come back to haunt me. In one game I ran, I got around this by constantly dropping the players into a new game world every week, naked, JOB style. As you might imagine, the players hated this!

Since college, as my life has become busier and busier, I have had to refine what I do. Half of the enjoyment I get out of running and playing an RPG is writing up background material. A few of my games could easily have been expanded into novels and someday, a few might! I just don't have time to write entire legal pads full of material. My older, more sophisticated players know when I'm off my notes and exploit those moments to get more cool junk or quickly solve riddles or get rich.

There has to be a compromise. I do still write long histories of particular characters or events. Then, I take those histories and use them to make sketches of the main NPCs and add some stats. I don't waste time building full characters - my players will never care what the gardening skill of a given PC might be. They will want to know who they know? How rich they are? What information they might have access to? Super Powers? Et cetera. If during play it is required to know exactly what an NPC can or cannot do in a given area, I quickly decide and add that information to the NPC's sheet later.

I also commonly make NPC webs. Thus, we have NPC A - The Mentor. Almost every game I have ever run, I have used an NPC to mentor the PCs. He can be a teacher or a patron or a boss or what have you. NPC A has allies and enemies. I usually like to map out six to ten secondary NPCs. These NPCs also have allies and enemies, but I try not to map too far out - the players won't care unless I write a story line that makes them care.

Good players, IMHO, come to me with a background of their own. This is excellent fodder for NPC webbing. Certainly one of their friends or enemies knows or has crossed someone in my web. It doesn't take long to have a rich supporting cast, each with only a few notes on what they are best at.

Random NPCs that don't end up dead become reoccurring contacts for the PCs. That shop owner on planet Forgettable might become a connection to a local crime lord who has a connection to suppliers and pirates and mercenaries and scary cults that worship the inherit evil of the walnut! I think you can see my point: I allow the material I have already written to write material that will be used later on. With minor characters becoming contacts and sometimes major contacts, this adds a sense of continuity that I have found no other way to provide.

And, in the end, when I show up to a game with little or no notes, I am pretty good at the pants-flying routine. Those sessions are usually the best time to let the PCs have a shopping/gambling/bar room brawl trip while I sit back and sketch notes of the NPCs they meet/offend/assault for later use!

Mix up your writing style - you might find a useful tool!

Size Matters ....

2008-12-29T11:51:00.000-08:00

The first D&D game I ever ran was just myself and my cousin. I had received The Red Box for Xmas and I was eager to run. Needless to say, the game was insane and out of control. The main PC had a He-Man style breast plate with a removable double ax head that could be ridden like a surf board. Weird.

But, there were bigger problems than our unrestrained imaginations. It was only the two of us. I knew what was going on in the game and played all the NPCs. My cousin played his character. So, it came down to me trying to entertain him. Actually, I spent a lot of time not doing homework and rolling up NPCs that would never be used - but that's another story.

A few years later, I had graduated to AD&D. I ran a group of my high school friends and their friends and family. I've referred to this group before. At one point, I was DMing for at least eight regular players and another six to ten random drop ins and irregular no shows. One night, it was twelve players all at once. Ever play on a really slow WoW server? That's what combat felt like that night. Awful!

Before I left STL, I was in a group of about six that played in multiple games. This was a pretty tight group and we functioned rather smoothly. This seemed like a rather perfect size. Not too small and none too large.

My current Star Wars group is right at that magical number with five total people. Again, we function rather well and we've taken turns GMing. None too big or small. One can miss a session and the group can continue. We could probably add a player or two, but the attention we get out of the various GMs has been rather lavish.

I'm involved in a World of Darkness game and I warned the Storyteller early on that he was dicing with an unfriendly random encounter table. First, he is mixing the whole of the WoD together. For anyone that has ever tried to move their Vampire into a game of Werewolf or any permutation possible within the WoD, they will quickly discover that White Wolf has built several quality games, but, they have not built a consistent, cohesive universal system such as d20 or GURPS. So, strike one there.

Strike two comes from the fact that he has a group of seven including himself and has talked about adding extra players. He's right at the point of having too large of a group. Add in all the issues of running a game of Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/World of Weirdness - he's bitten off quite a chunk. To his credit, he is doing a pretty good job chewing what he doth bite. But, I have seen the beginnings of problems. I don't blame him, it's a lot to handle. He has a large group of creative players who all want attention. We're a bunch of brainy puppies, chasing each other's tails and tromping all over this poor Storyteller. I hope he yet proves that he is the exception to the rule.

So, to sum up, if your group is starting to drown in its own success, think about pruning it down. Two groups of five, in my opinion, will do better than one group of ten.

To involve the players ... or not?!

2008-12-23T12:13:00.001-08:00

The last post is something of an object lesson.

A lesson I will never learn.

In the last post I asked for feedback from my readers. I know I don't have many readers. I have a couple of ways of measuring my readership and they all tell me that I don't really have a readership. Mostly, I have a few friends who check this site because they are bored or the RSS feed tells them there is something new or a search engine brings me yet another hapless victim.

But, I asked for feedback anyway. In eleven days I got a total of one reader, my best friend, Max, telling me he reads the site. That's it. The other 5 to 10 of my readers couldn't be bothered to put up a "Me, too." It's the holidays and this isn't the most popular site in the world. So, I got about what I expected.

But what the smeg does this have to do with gaming?

Aha! You didn't think I could pull this back to topic, did you? Never underestimate my power to follow a trail of bread crumbs in the exact direction I want it to go!

Several times in the past I have made the same mistake. Either I am starting a game or am already running a game, and I turn to my players and say: what would you like to see in the game? Where would you like the game to go? I can run just about anything (except Super Heroes) here are dozens of options, choose what you want.

In nearly every case, my players looked back at me with blank stares. They had no clue. Wasn't I, as the GM/DM, supposed to do all this creative stuff? They were in no way prepared to add to my creation, other than to play it.

Now, none of my players were stupid. Most were highly creative people. But, it seems like most of us see RPGs as entertainment and we are all so used to having our entertainment pushed to us, from the page or the monitor or the screen, that we feel we have no creative bond to the work in front of us.

I have a very large collection of game books. Most are GURPS, but there are several others and it grows every year. A few years ago, we got a group together. The thought was to play D&D, but, it was agreed that we would entertain other ideas. I showed up, laid down a GURPS Basic Book and about twenty different, wild and interesting world books. I said I would happily run any of those worlds, or any combo of those worlds. No picked up a book, even to just look at its cover. The group opted for D&D. It ended up being a great game, but it just amazed me what a grip the known has on us. Everybody knows D&D. No one was prepared for me to run GURPS Ice Age Mecha!

Yet, I have been able to get groups to play other games, things that were not D&D. But, my trick was that I showed up with a game already ready already. No input from the players.

What happens to us? We had this co-creative ability as children. I have seen many people compare playing RPGs to playing that classic children's game "Let's Pretend". I disagree. In Let's Pretend, the game was about co-creation. Everyone involved added to the world. Sure, it was disorganized, the rules changed at a whim, but it was fun to see where it went. A game might start out as Astronauts in the Planet of the Sand Box, change to Astronauts at War and end up as Astronauts in the ER. But everyone participated.

So, my goal these days is to show up with a game in hand and give the players only limited creative room. If you play in a well known setting, say Star Wars, you don't have to give the players much creative room at all.

And, yet, with all of this in mind, I recently found myself plotting a possible Star Wars game, giving the players a ton of options up front. I can't seem to learn the lesson: players want to be entertained via push. Anything else is a waste of the GM's time.

So, I didn't really want or need your feedback. I will do with this blog as I wish and I hope to entertain you all. I also encourage you to go out and find new games, new worlds and every now and then, go out of your way to entertain your GM!

Helloooo - oooo - ooo! Echo - ooo - oo!

2008-12-12T11:39:00.000-08:00

So, this little blog has been around for a bit over a year and I have gotten around to writing less than *cough*30*cough* entries.

At this time of year, one is often led to look back over the last year and measure one's achievements.

I enjoy writing out here, I plan to keep writing out here. I want to write more often. I have several ideas for things I can put out here.

However - I'd love to know one thing:

Is anyone reading this blog?

Just curious. Is anyone using the materials I've presented? Have you been inspired by anything you read out here? Do you like what you see? Would you like to see anything else?

Talk to me! Comment!

I need the feedback ... obviously. ;)

Dice filled with Dice!

2008-11-25T13:40:00.000-08:00

My dice collection has grown!

When I saw these, I knew I would have to have one!

Games Workshop introduced these dice within dice packages recently. Someone should have thought of this long ago!

I bought a set of the black ones. At $6 it was pricey for some dice - but over priced is a hallmark of Games Workshop.

Of course, I tried rolling the full thing; I don't advise it. It is a fairly cheap plastic case, I doubt it will stand up to much torture. However, it did roll better unloaded than loaded. I think it might make a decent dice cup in a pinch.

However, as the catalog listing says, it can be used as a turn counter. I think this would be it's best secondary use, after keeping your dice tidy in your game bag. It's third use will be making your friends say "What a dork! He spent $6 for $2 worth of dice!"

Gaming on the Fringe

2008-10-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

Anyone noticing a pattern this TV season? Could we have a few more cop dramas?

We have, what, two Law & Order spin offs? There are at least two CSIs, The Closer, Saving Grace, Monk, Pysche, then The Mentalist and Fringe. Might as well toss in Raising the Bar and Boston Legal. So, either they are trying to be Law & Order or X-Files - or both.

Nearly a decade ago, I ran an X-Files-like game. I think it was one of the best things I ever ran. My group seemed to like it, one of my old players still talks about it.

It worked great - until the players found the truth ...

I started with, frankly, the perfect game system for it: GURPS. Simple, easy GURPS. I supplemented this with a great book - Delta Green. DG is a supplement for modern Call of Cthulhu, worth the cover price as a horror novel in its own right. (They have recently released it for d20 - Get It!) On top of this, I had the excellent GURPS supplement Cthulhupunk.

I started the game by sending all the potential players a real-life snail mail. Envelopes, stamps, the whole bit. (From the beginning, this campaign exercised my love of props.) The letter was from then president Bill Clinton, inviting the player to a meeting at the White House. The letter named the time and date. Most of the players were smart enough to get that the time and date were actually at my apartment.

In separate emails, I informed the players to show up with a character concept for an "investigator" type character. The night of the game, the players and I worked on their characters. We pulled info directly out of the Delta Green book. I passed it around and let them all look at it. (This will be important later.)

One of the best parts of the Delta Green book is the HUGE list of US government agencies with an investigative wing. Most would think of the FBI, the DoJ and a few might think about Treasury, but there are dozens of agencies. In our group, over the course of the campaign, we had FBI, CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Government Accountability Office and a Marshal from the Treasury department. And that just scratches the surface!

The fun thing about using members from all of these agencies is that they have to be secret! In real life, this kind of inter-agency co-operation would require Congressional oversight. Doing it without oversight and getting caught will get you jail time at least and shot for treason at most. So, you might consider doing it with oversight, until you think about how much red tape that might throw up.

Oversight was also taken off the table by the situation. After character creation, the PCs attended their meeting at the White House, or more precisely, a few dozen floors below the White House. When they arrived for the meeting, they witnessed a man talking to, could it be? President Clinton himself? "Clinton" left the room leaving the gentleman behind. He explained to the group that there was something going on, and that the group needed to explore it. Whatever was going on was highly unusual. He wanted them to keep their eyes open for the truly strange - even supernatural. But, most importantly, to report only to him and stay quiet about it - they were doing the bidding of the President.

The supernatural aspect of the game at this point was aided by our Air Force Lieutenant Colonel from the DIA, who had recently come off project Stargate. She was a Remote Viewer. In reality, many would say Remote Viewing is pseudoscience, however, in this campaign, RV was working technology. Every game needs a mage, right?

The game got weirder from there. Right away the group is investigating a murder and a series of seemingly disconnected events; the delivery of a clay vessel of rice from a archaeological site to the wrong museum in Illinois, a group of drug smugglers moving a load of africanized (killer) bees in Miami, mushroom pickers in the Pacific Northwest and several people walking around with old Chinese coins. In the end, the connection was to a cult, trying to assemble an ancient diet that would grant them immortality. In their attempts to gain immortality, they managed to steal, smuggle and even murder. Fun group.

As the PCs liberated or arrested or killed each member of the cult, the remaining members became more desperate. It was revealed that the leader had changed tactics and now wanted to build himself a jade coffin to somehow grant him immortality. The group found out the cult leader would be attending a raw jade auction. The group showed and saw that the leader was indeed present. But, he never bid on the jade. Eventually, the auction ended and the leader managed to avoid observation as he left.

The jade was transfered to a truck and the PCs involved themselves as security for the shipment. Sure enough, the shipment was attacked in a coordinated fashion. In the end, the attackers used a 007-esque vehicle to get under the truck while it was moving, open a hole in the bottom of the trailer, remove the jade and then high-tail it into the desert. The group had lost the leader and the jade. They later found the leader again and he was again able to elude them a second before they closed in on him by use of a sky-hook.

This whole "Jade Cult" story line ran over the course of more than a year. (Two years?) We played two or three times a month. I also ran other stories in the process. I tried to use X-Files creator Chris Carter's theories. Carter would write stories that were either "Monster of the Week" or "Mythos". The "MoW" episodes were just strange things that might never be explained. The "Mythos" episodes extended the longer running story arcs, sometimes connecting them. Carter explained that sometimes the Monsters of the Week came back to become part of the Mythos. I liked this idea a lot. We had a group of whacks killing people by driving "shillelaghs" through their hearts. We had people infested with symbiotic worms that granted them certain powers. The Knights Templar, The Masons, Nazis and a computer hacker that fed the PCs information whether the group wanted it or not. Et cetera, et cetera.

One of my favorite sessions was Project Peach Crate. (I have tried to write this up for Pyramid or some other magazine and I just can get whatever it was that made this so much fun on paper.) "Peach Crate" was a group who had split off from the DIA, built sensory deprivation tanks, used various drugs and performed remote viewing. They used an oil supertanker to move around. They had papers that showed that one side of the boat was not seaworthy to carry oil, but was filled with gravel ballast, when in actuality it was filled with freaky remote viewers! My favorite part of this was that I gave one of the players a map. As I said, I loves me some props. So, I mailed the map to her. But, this wouldn't be fun if it was that easy. The map had been shredded!! So, this poor player had to take scotch tape and rebuild this document. The worst part about this is that I didn't own a shredder. I was working at Boeing at the time, I used theirs. I walked out of a government contractor's building with a shredded document. Thank the gods this was before 9/11!

If the above "sensory deprivation tanks and drugs" sounds like a recent episode of Fringe, you should have seen our reaction to the first X-Files movie! The campaign had been going on for a while before the first X-Files movie came out. The player with the Remote Viewing PC and I went to see the movie together. There were about three things that seemed to be pulled directly out of my game - including the bees! I was convinced for a week that Chris Carter and I shared a brain!

But, all good things must come to an end. As the PCs got deeper into their plight and moved further out of the control of the US Government (and the conspiracy that had brought them together that night under the White House), they needed a base to work from. Their hacker friend found them just the spot - a banana plantation for cheap in Brazil. At this point, I went for broke and finally turned on the Cthulhu full blast. The local villagers and plantation workers worshiped a statue of Ol'Tentacle Face himself. The group found a Book of Knowledge Man was Not Meant to Know in the mansion house library, etc. For well over a year, I had been running Call of Cthulhu, but had never gotten them this deep into the mythos. Unbeknown to the players, the cult leader had been talking to one of the Great Old Ones - that's where he was getting his knowledge. The group had several brushes with the mythos, but nothing this direct.

The players were completely shocked at this revelation. They were not keen on playing characters that would slowly go mad. The thing that bugged me was that I hadn't realized I had done this good of a job hiding what I was doing. I sat with two Cthulhu related books next to my chair, prominently displayed, every game session. We had pulled material out of both books. I thought it was pretty obvious.

My players were not impressed and the game broke down. I had folders of information and pictures I would never use. The cult leader remains at large to this day. And, somewhere in my apartment, I have an envelope of old, Chinese coins and a terracotta pot filled with rice, both purchased at Cost Plus.

With the advent of all these cop dramas and the reemergence of X-Files-like shows on the TV, I'd love to run or play in a game like this again. I keep thinking something a little less global, more local. Maybe a "paranormal task force" in a large metropolitan police force, I think Chicago might be perfect, but New York, LA or even Seattle would work. It would be easy to blend old world mysticism and Cthulhu mythos with modern tabloid urban legend. Maybe one of the cops is psychic or they work with a psychic NPC. Throw in some interference from the Feds, especially Homeland Security and it would be as frustrating and fun as Law & Order meets The X-Files.

In the words of Dr. Bishop: "Excellent! Now let's make some LSD!"

An Embarassment of Games.

2008-09-29T16:13:00.000-07:00

For years I have been begging friends and strangers to game more.

Now, I am faced with too many games! Quite the dilemma!

As you are aware, I have been in a long running Star Wars campaign. You are also aware from previous posts that I started up a D&D game. And, from my most recent post on dice shopping, you are aware that a friend invited me to play in a World of Darkness campaign.

I wouldn't say my D&D game is dead. I still want to run it, or maybe start again with a different idea, since I'm not too impressed with my use of Undead in that game. However, one of the players in that game is also in the new World of Darkness game and both games have been primarily concentrated on her residence as the place to play - so I foresee conflicts. I want to revive this game and march on somehow, I just haven't figured that out yet.

The WoD game has been interesting. The GM had set a large task before himself. He has a large group, and those can be unwieldy. He is also combining Vampire, Werewolf and Mage into one large World of Darkness scenario. At the very least this is ... well, unwieldy! It's ambitious, but he is pulling it off so far. The group has had three sessions and I have only been able to attend one. However, the group does a lot of in-character-email and blogging and what not. So, I've been able to miss two thirds of the games and still feel like I'm part of the deal.

I missed playing in the WoD game this week because I got to play with my Star Wars group. Our Star Wars game had not gotten together for three months! Both the WoD and SW groups wanted to play at the same time on Sunday. I don't like playing on Sundays. But, both groups are filled with busy adults and Sunday is becoming popular. I would certainly rather play than not play, Sunday or not. Hopefully they won't overlap too much as we go along.

I can't think of a time since I moved to Seattle, maybe ever, when I had too many gaming opportunities. Especially not where I'm playing more than GMing. It's a new world!

Dice Shopping

2008-08-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

As many of you are aware, I'm a dice collector. One of the most fun portions of the hobby for me are the shiny, colored bits of plastic and other materials. I loves me some dice!

A friend of a friend put together a Vampire game and I was invited. I couldn't make it due to a cold, but that's another story.

I have in the past had trouble playing Vampire and other World of Darkness games. Why? Not enough dice! Specifically, d10s. The Storyteller game system is d10 based. For whatever reason, I'm always short on d10s.

A few years ago, someone wanted to play Vampire. I raided my Black & White dice set and came up with ... four d10s. Sure, I could have gotten away with just one, just lots of re-rolling. But, it's better to have some extras.

At this point, dice were rare in this town. Wizard's of the Coast had just closed down their gaming shops. When WotC opened their shops, they drove most of the little mom & pop shops out of business and there were no shops on-line. I finally went to Barnes and Noble - I found a set of brown dice branded for Werewolf. That was the one and only set of dice they had. I just couldn't buy brown dice - I have a color coordination thing about dice. I'm a freak, yes.

I finally managed to find ten d10s in speckled blue. They were okay, but they were not my thing. They have sat on a shelf for years and I will probably donate them to the group once I get to play with them.

So, with this recent game, I looked around my dice again. I still have the blue d10s. I think I have fewer d10s in my Black & White set now than then. I then broke into my Purple set. How many d10s do I have? Five. Five!

Actually, I had 10, but they were matched sets of d10s and dTENS (numbered 10 to 00). So, either I was going to have to buy more d10s for one of my sets or .... !

I bought a ring a while back, it was delivered in a small, velvet drawstring bag. The smallest dice bag ever! In my Purple set, I have some mini (12mm) pearl dice. They are so cool, tiny and easy to carry and use. It occurred to me, I bet they make d10s in this size!

Of course they do! Good luck finding them!

My search began at an online dice shop that I found a while back and fell in love with: Advancing Hordes. They had a beautiful little shop and I loved their set up. However, by the time I had found them online, Uncle's Games had begun opening stores in the area, and they usually have a decent selection of dice. If you click on the AH link you will see the first stumbling block in my quest for the mini dice - Advancing Hordes is gone. I never bought a thing from them and now I almost feel responsible. I wish it hadn't been so.

As much as I regret the loss of a store I never shopped at, I still didn't have the dice. I went scouting around the Internet. I quickly remembered Dice Pool. They had the pearl minis! Yea! They didn't have the purple d10s! D'oh! I nearly bought the white ones and called it good.

I spent a whole night looking all over the place and came up snake eyes. The next day, I called Uncle's to see if they had any in stock. They didn't. Could they order for me - I had a number from the manufacturer's catalog (I just LOVE the Internet!). They said they would try to get something from their distributor and give me a call back.

Time passed. No call from Uncle's and it had been nearly two weeks. The game finally had a first date and I hadn't caught my cold yet so I wanted to have the dice before the game. I called Uncle's, but, to coin a phrase, no dice! They were just too rare to get from their distributors.

On a whim, I rechecked Dice Pool. They claimed to get new inventory about once a week. They had them!! I was hoping to buy 20, fill that little bag. They only had one set - so I bought another set of polyhedrals.

The dice arrived very quickly. I was totally impressed. Lots of email confirmations to let me know everything was going well - from order to shipping. In short, Dice Pool was great to work with and I would totally buy from them again.

I now have a bonsai dice set! It's very cool! I'll get a pic of it up soon.

For my birthday, I want metal dice!

Editorial Update:

I decided to alert DicePool that I had done a blog post about my satisfaction with their service. This is the email I recieved in return:

Date: Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: A Question About dicepool.com

Jericho,

I've been meaning to reply to your email, but we've been really busy.

Thanks for your positive feedback. Right now we're in the middle of
relaunching our store with a new set of features. We're down right
now, but we'll be back today or tomorrow. I just wanted to let you
know that if you or anyone else need dice that we're out of stock or
low on, let us know. We can even make special orders if you need
larger quantities that we normally stock, or we can tell you when the
dice you're looking for are back on our shelves.

Jack
dicepool.com

The Burden of the Undead.

2008-08-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting weekend. Three friends and I spent the weekend in a camper watching geeky movies (Real Genius, Legend and Ghostbusters) and playing D&D. It was a blast.

Where I ran aground was the subject matter of the D&D game. Early in the game it was clear what was going on. The town we met up in was being attacked by skeletons and zombies. We went to the local cemetery to discover a cleric conducting necromantic rituals.

This isn't a bad scenario, however, it's starting to get a little common. One of the guys with us this weekend ran a D&D game that we played a few years ago. He started the game in a small town with a big set of catacombs. Lots of undead. We didn't stay in those catacombs for long, some doofus cleric destroyed the catacombs. I was the doof, but that's a story for another day.

A while back, I got nostalgic about D&D, right after Gary Gygax died. I started running a game. My game is, wait for it, a small town with a near-by necromancer cleric sending undead to attack the small town.

With a few minor differences, the scenario my friend ran this weekend and my scenario were basically the same. He and I played in the Catacombs mentioned above, but he didn't play in my Small-Town-Undead-Panic game.

Where I'm going with this is that the undead thing seems to be a very common theme and maybe it pops into people's minds a little too easily. I feel like I let my group down and maybe that's why, yet again, interest has waned on a game I was running.

Last night when all of this came to me, I was running around in WoW - I was playing a quest involving creatures that were essentially plants that grew from seeds. It occurred to me that that would be a cool way to transport an army. Show up near a town, scatter your seeds, call up a storm, then call up some sun - maybe even sun that lasted into the night! Then, blam! Little, violent plant guys running around eating each other and growing more powerful by the second! Cast some spell that allows you to control plants and you have a hell of a magic army that only required one wizard and a cart of plant seed.

SO, the point of this post: the next time you decide to run a game, let the dead rest. Try something a little different.

Plots are us!

2008-08-05T10:09:00.001-07:00

One of you asked for it! (Thanks HollyKing!) This is Throw Away Plot #3!

Previously I threw away a plot for Star Wars and for Star Trek.

This time around, I want to throw away a plot with a Super Hero theme. This summer has been all about the Comic Book Movie. We have Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk and Batman movies dancing around our heads. In the past few years we have seen the rise of the Comic Book Movie with Spider Man, X Men, Fantastic Four and others ka-blaming through our local cineplexes. With teases at the end of some of these movies suggesting sequels and trailers for The Watchmen in the theaters - this trend will not end any time soon.

I have a spectacularly bad history with running Super Power games. I played in a great game while I lived in STL - but I should have taken a clue. While everyone else was running around in skin-tight suits, whomping people with mutant super-powers, my character had a Mac 10, a computer in his skull and shark cartilage armor. "Jakker" was more suited to a game of Shadowrun than a Supers game.

I played in a second supers game with the same GM. The game had a B-Movie feel to it - I think the GM had grabbed a copy of GURPS Supers and GURPS Atomic Horror and ran with it! The game was short lived but brilliant!

So, there I am, thinking, huh! I could run a Supers game!

I've never read comic books - I always thought they were over priced wastes of money. I would buy the omnibuses now and then - at $12 to $20 bucks, even in black and white - they were great ways to get some comic book into my life. But, really, I don't have a stack of omnibuses, just a few.

It boils down to the fact that I really don't get comic books. When I think super powers, for some reason my mind runs toward science fiction: powers would have some plausible explanation. In truth, comic books are pure fantasy. They are ancient myths with a modern spin. Superman would have been a god in another era. Spiderman is an animal avatar if there ever was one, same with Wolverine. Bruce Banner is a man possessed by a demon! The comic books have even pulled directly from myth, Thor and Hercules are still running around in pulp pages.

Yet, I have repeatedly managed to miss the point. I've run at least three Super Powered games - all failed. Proof that watching a few movies does not a good Supers GM make. The last was the most successful. It more resembled a Stephen King novel than something by Lee & Kirby and it lasted less than six months.

However, a while back I came up with an idea that I thought would be fun. It's almost Super Powers.

The story goes like this: NASA's SOHO probe detects a solar flare. The flare is pretty bad - so bad it burns out portions of the probe. The flare hits Earth and does lots of damage to the telecommunications system.

In the end, nothing is unrecoverable - the result is a day of interrupted communications but something that could have been MUCH worse. Life goes on and people have some great stories.

The NASA researches begin seeing some anomalies. First, the strength of the flare burned out the SOHO probe, why were the communication satellites not more damaged? Further, light travels from the Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes. Yet, the flare hit Earth in under four. The leading edge of the flare touched Earth before the much closer probe's information reached Earth. The particles in the flare were traveling much faster than the speed of light!

The NASA information is largely ignored as vital info from NASA often is (but I'm not bitter!)

A few days after the flare, some strange things begin happening. Odd, unexplained accidents. Persons vanishing, appearing elsewhere, not knowing how they got there. A series of cat burglaries where nothing of real value goes missing.

Finally, a reporter pulls the threads together. His story begins with a string of beads that were stolen from the Heathrow airport. They were on display in the concourse. While digging an underground elevator shaft, a "kitchen midden" was discovered; essentially an ancient garbage dump. Archaeologists were called out to preserve what they could - they found some interesting pottery shards, bones indicating the local cuisine at the time and some other broken artifacts, including a broken string of glass beads. One of the beads was green glass and a bird had been cut into it. The burglar stole just the beads, worth no more than a few hundred pounds to a collector. A gold ring displayed next to the beads was left behind.

A 12 car accident in Chicago resulted in three deaths and dozens of injuries. However, one young lady walked away untouched. The reporter interviewed her and noticed a bead she wore on a silk cord, she found the brown, unglazed bead in an antique shop. The bead had been carved into the shape of a turtle. When the bead was carbon-dated, it was more than 3000 years old. The reporter goes on and on, detailing several incidents surrounding these beads.

In game terms, each bead gives some gift to the wearer; a power or some advantage. The beads can be any shape or size, made of any substance. Beads have been dated as far back as 10k years, but none newer that 2000 years. The beads often appear as a simple bead with a engraved design, some are cast into very complex and intricate designs, others are just a wooden bead with a painted on animal or pictograph.

Once the reporter comes forward, the race is on! It's about this point that I would bring in the players. Each player has a bead. The bead should be interesting but not super powered. Say, "underwater breathing", not "immune to bullets". Almost immediately, I imagine that the players would discover that they can easily trade the beads and the power follows the bead. They could also discover that the beads work together, so if a player had a bead that made him grow larger, and he put on a bead from his teammate that gave him fur and claws, he'd look like a werewolf! If he put on another bead, he could shoot lightning from his claws, etc.

Once this is revealed, the players are going to want more beads. So is everyone else on the planet! They will want to talk to archaeologists, collectors and antique shops to find more beads. Imagine buying super-powers, not to mention super fakes, on eBay!

We can then begin connecting all kinds of fun, historic, pseudo science and conspiracy. From crop circles to ley lines to Stone Henge to the Nasca lines to Atlantis. Where did the beads come from? Who made them? Why did they make them? Why did they reactivate? Will they be more powerful at a place of power, say an Aztec temple or Easter Island? Are they more powerful on a clear night with the whole Milky Way showering them with star dust?

Of course there are some, like our cat burglar, who got a jump on everyone else. "Scorpio", as she likes to be called, has the Heathrow Beads, as well as others she has stolen. She begins going after those that own beads, either buying, intimidating or killing them to get to her goal. Soon, she has a rather impressive necklace, not to mention an impressive collection of powers. She will be quite a challenge for the players.

I thought it might be fun to keep the astrological and astronomical associations going, introducing other villains with zodiological names like Pisces and Cancer. Even Aries and Mars could walk the Earth, and, for fun, Betelgeuse.

The great thing about beating a foe in this game: his powers now go to the group. The group increases in beads and thus power with each success. The group can also trade amongst themselves, changing and improving their powers as they go. I figured that eventually, certain beads would show up that enhance other beads or even protect them. Beads with just about any power imaginable could appear. Combining them could make whole new powers. One could even have "sets" of beads, each has a power, but as more of the set are brought together, other powers are unlocked. With the whole set, a large power is unlocked. There could also be beads that add no benefit to the user, but give benefits to the party, etc.

How do you control the power level of this game? A guy with a vest of beads will be darn near invincible and maybe without weakness. First, control the number of beads. There were only so many made, only so many can be around. Next, the beads are destroyable. Thus, in a fight, players might lose beads - but so might the bad guys! (This keeps guns and sharp-shooters in play!) In the end, I think a game like this could get very out of control unless the GM ran it with an iron hand.

Eventually, someone (player, NPC, villain) is going to try to make a new bead. They will likely destroy several to discover the technology, maybe dozens, even hundreds. Will they succeed? Will they create an even more powerful bead? Will their bead fail catastrophically? That's up to the GM and some rolls on "Craft: Bead".

The coolest part of this for me: props! I'm a GM that believes in props. In this game, each player could actually wear their beads! A bag of cheap wooden beads can be purchased at any big box craft store. A few minutes with these beads and a Sharpie or a paint pen and you would have some decent props. String them on some hemp or silk cord and BINGO! Cool props for your players!

I've thought several times of writing this up in detail and trying to get it published. I still reserve that right!

Gaming Daters?

2008-07-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

Been two months since my last post? I'm getting WORSE at this! :)

Anyway, I have recently discovered a new way to find other gamers in your area. Do you have a profile on a social networking site or dating site? Use your favorite game as a search keyword and see if there is anyone in your area playing your game. Ask them if you can join whatever game they are playing or offer to GM for them and their friends.

It's a great way to meet new people. Most dating sites or social networking sites are free. And, better, you get more gaming in your life! Go try it out and tell us what you discover.

Another throw away plot.

2008-05-05T16:01:00.000-07:00

You all might remember that I gave away a good plot a few months back - well, at least I thought it was a good plot. You can read that here.

Well, I have another one for you. My Star Wars group is talking about switching to the new Saga rules for the Star Wars RPG. Might be cool. We're still talking. I won't have to buy any books as I got my books for Xmas.

See, a friend of mine got a discounted core rulebook, got excited and wanted to play. As you can tell from my entry there in November, I was hot to play anything. So, I told the guy, I'll run anything you want after Xmas - I'll put the books on my list with high priority. My wife feels pretty safe buying me gaming books - especially if I point them out on Amazon. Cool. He wants to play something before the movies, something like Knights of the Old Republic and he wanted to play a Wookie Jedi.

Oh! Was I ever hip to that?! I dove into Wookiepedia head first! Before I knew it, I had floods of great ideas.

I told him to build a first level Wookie, best to be a Fringer type or a Scoundrel. (I hear the classes are different now, I didn't know that then.) But, I didn't want him to actually be a Jedi yet, just be Force Sensitive. And that's all I told him, other than the fact that I was setting the game before KotOR.

Matter of fact, I intended to set it WAY before KotOR! Something like 20,000 years before KotOR!

My thought was this: a Rakatan ship carrying wookie slaves crash landed on a planet in the middle of no-where. The ship was never found. The wookies freed themselves, and the Rakatan technology got loose and did to this planet what it did to Kashyyyk; namely, terraformed it.

A few thousand years later, the wooks were happy, healthy and unaware that their planet lay between Hutt space and Xim the Despot's empire. Xim and the Hutts fought a terrible war - and I thought it would be fun the make this poor little wookie planet one of the battle fields. I could just see Xim's giant battle droids taking on Klatoonian soldiers and Hutt droid tanks! All the while the PC would be in the middle, trying to save his home world. How epic is that?

I figured I would give the PC a phrik Rakatan sword. Sure, it pulsed with the Dark Side, but if the PC pumped enough Light Side energy into it, the weapon would change and become as good as a light saber in many ways, maybe even better. I thought I might get a Force ghost to act as the PC's mentor on the ways of the Jedi and the Force. I also figured there might be a Rakatan Star Map lying around that would point the PC to a non-hyperdrive fighter, like, oh, this one!

In the end, the guy in question was just too busy. He never even finished making his character. Too bad - I think this could have been a fun game. As before, it's yours to use - enjoy!

Bought a PSP

2008-05-04T20:11:00.000-07:00

As my long time readers are aware, I have been looking at console games recently. If you aren't aware but want to be, read this post.

In that post I talked mostly about buying a a Nintendo Wii. The Wii is still a rare system, Nintendo is having a lot of trouble keeping up with demand. I guess that's good for them.

I was recently at a friend's house and was shown a copy of Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron, which is only available on the Sony PSP. I really hadn't seen much on the PSP. I'll admit that consoles are new to me, except for my venerable GBA SP. The PSP was quite light, bright and impressive for such a small device.

A couple of days ago I tripped over a "new" game: Warhammer 40k: Squad Command. Well ... I thought it was new. The videos of it out on YouTube had me under the impression that it wasn't even released in the States yet. It pays to look at the date a video was published on YouTube and to do a little further research. Turns out the game was released here last fall. It can now be had for $20. I've long been in love with the Warhammer 40k universe and the video games released for it have often been quite good.

So, between these two games, I was drooling!

I talked with the wife. I still hadn't bought a console and have been talking about it since Xmas. We went out and bought me a PSP last night.

I've been having fun with it. One of the things I love is that the games are cheap to begin with. The newest games aren't $60, they're $40. Plus, there is a whole line of "Greatest Hits" games that are $15 to $20 bucks! Last night I didn't buy SWB:RS, it's $40. I did buy Star Wars Battlefront II and Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories. Those two games cost me less than the one Star Wars game. I haven't played either of these games, so it's all new fun territory for me.

I do plan to follow up these purchases with the Warhammer 40k game and with Dungeons & Dragons Tactics - also $20 bucks!

Loving My Gaming Life.

2008-04-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

You have a family life. You have a private life. Some of you might even have a sex life. I have a gaming life.

I've got two good gaming groups. I played D&D this past Sunday and the group is working with the 3.5E rules like a well oiled machine. We need a few more PHBs, I might have to break down and buy a few new ones, but that seems to be the only problem.

The week before my other group played Star Wars. We had a great time. That group is a race car!

I'm totally in love. I don't think I've had this much gaming in my life since I first moved out to Seattle. At that time I got about one game every week or two. So I'm about tied. It's not as good as the last nine months I spent in St. Louis - but this time I have a job. So I got that going for me.

In between games I'm playing a ton of WoW and having a great time there, too.

How will this benefit you? Are you surprised that I want to benefit my readers? Don't be! This site is about making our gaming lives better for all! When I get a chance, I plan to publish the materials I'm producing. Either on this site or professionally. So, keep your eyes on this site for more features to come!

Actually Gaming!

2008-03-28T10:20:00.000-07:00

It's like I woke up in Bizarro world! I'm actually gaming!

I write a gaming blog, shouldn't I be gaming all the time? Well, the truth of the matter is that I work a day job and I have a wife. I love my wife (I simply HATE my job) and these things take up a lot of my time. My friends all have jobs and significant others and obligations of every sort. So, getting games together is darned difficult. I call this unfortunate state of being "adultitis" - I have used the term on this site before but I don't know if I have ever defined it. Adultitis is the condition where a busy adult does not have the time for playing games like they had when they were younger.

Having said that, I'm excited to announce that I am gaming way more than usual. I have been playing d20 Star Wars with a group of friends for a while. I started the game about, oh, three years ago. We played for a bit over a year. Then, we ran another game for a while - a less than successful GURPS Super Heroes game. There is nothing wrong with GURPS. It's me. I have tried to run Supers in the past and failed. Well, I failed again. I should know better, I know NOTHING about comic books. A couple of X-Men movies doesn't make me an expert!

One of the members of the group took pity on me and decided to start running Star Wars again and we all jumped back in - that has been going for about six months. I guess I did something of a good job with my SW game - as the new GM has introduced several story elements I created. Very cool!

Anyway, we have been regularly playing about once a month. We have a game scheduled in a week or so. We pretty much play every three to five weeks.

The day after Gary Gygax died, I got a severe case of nostalgia. I'm sure a lot of you did. You can see it in the post I made on this site. So, I sent out an email to all of my friends. I got almost no response to that email. One sent a funny music video - his only response. One said he couldn't as he is planning to go back to school - understandable. Others said they were busy; severe, inflamed adultitis - also understandable.

But I didn't hear from two people that have been begging to game, especially D&D. I found that odd.

Well, then, days later, these two are all excited! Sure they want to game! So, we settled on D&D 2nd Ed. since we had books from a game we played years ago.

Then, they wanted to invite a family member and his wife and their kid. I had no problem with the kid coming, but I don't get along well with the kid's parents (the kid could use a break from the parents, anyway!)

One of them wanted to invite their ex-spouse. Fine. They invited this person and that person's new spouse decided they were invited, too. I didn't really know this person, but I wasn't informed until day of the game that they were coming. No sweat.

Well, we had a group of six - plenty! And, frankly, we had a great time. Everyone was cool and we had good group chemistry. I think this is going to be a good game with a fun group. The best part is that they want to play often! We gamed on the 15th of March, we're gaming again this Sunday and we are looking to game again on April 13th!

The only problem this group ran into was 2nd Ed. (2E) D&D. I haven't played those rules in years, and I've gotten used to playing d20 by playing Star Wars. However, I didn't want to make people buy books, and at first, it was only going to be three of us. I had a book, they had a book - we could relearn the rules together.

This didn't work so hot when the group doubled in size. Worse, some of the players were real D&D grognards and brought what books they had: 1st Ed. AD&D books! So people start making characters with combinations of 1E and 2E books! I had totally lost control!

We got through the day and, as I said, had a pretty good time. I have spent the time since last game convincing the group to go with the 3.5E d20 rules. You can download them for free, and with 4E about to hit the market, 3.5E books are going to flood the books stores for cheap! Part of me wishes I had gone with 3E - the used book stores are swamped with those books now. But, we wouldn't have had the download option. A good portion of the group is young people with limited cash flow. As it is, I have spent about $100 on new books - got some pretty good values at Amazon, but it's still a lot of money.

So, I have ended up with a second great group and I'm having a bitchin' time learning new rules from brand new (they cracked when I opened them!) gaming books! What could be better?

How about a third group?

That's right. When it rains, it pours! I have a whole different group of friends who have been talking about putting together a game of Unhallowed Metropolis. Until they started talking about it, I had never heard of the game. But, now I have and I have been introduced to a new term: gas-mask chic. It's an interesting game concept. I haven't bought the book yet - I'm not sure the group is actually going to form up, much less form the Blazing Sword - if you know what I mean. We'll see.

Thank you, holy spirit of The Gygax - you have blessed me with an abundance of gaming. My cup runneth over!

Web Games

2008-03-13T12:03:00.000-07:00

As any long time reader of this site can tell you - I loves me some freebies!

There are a few good web games growing up that you should be aware of. Both of the following games are free to play, but they have pay options as well. They both have some graphical elements, but are not heavily reliant on those. And, they are both a ton of fun.

First, we have TinyWarz. TW has grown and grown since I started over a year ago. They have just gone through a serious improvement to the graphical elements of the game. In TinyWarz you build an army, then take that army out to fight off bandits and other players in a real time, turn based environment. It's a heck of a lot of fun. There are hundreds of vehicles and 'mechs to research, build and add to your army. You can join guilds, chat in real time and socialize on the boards. In short a lot of fun for very little to no monetary investment. However, investing some cash does have its rewards and there are several ways to get that cash - check out the RewardGamer section in-game.

Recently, I have found Travian. As far as I can tell, this game is hosted out of Europe somewhere - I apologize for my ignorance. I've spent too much time playing the game and not enough time researching it! This idea is a little more old school. You choose a race - I like the Romans. Then you begin growing your village. You increase the number and efficiency of your production facilities, then you add buildings and eventually you raise an army. Along the line you can start other villages or take over villages from other players. It's like a fast, lite version of Civ. It's my hope that they will add more elements to the game as demand grows.

Get out there and have a good time on the web!

The Dungeon Master is Dead ...

2008-03-05T11:38:00.000-08:00

For those of you that don't know, yesterday, March 4th, Gary Gygax died.

I've been a Role Playing Gamer for many years. I started off in 7th or 8th grade, some twenty two or so years ago. I've been a gamer for two thirds of my life. My first game, like most role players, was Dungeons & Dragons. My mom bought me the red D&D box for Xmas after I had begged for over a year. Funny, to this day when I think of the intrepid adventurer facing the imposing red dragon standing on top of a pile of gold coins, the image that adorned that boxed set - it still gives me a zing of excitement.

Gygax was not the only person responsible for D&D, but he is the one most associate with it. He worked very hard to see his vision continue in the right direction. Because of his work and his vision, I have had hours and hours, probably months of hours, of fun. Time spent thinking, conjuring up entire worlds out of pure imagination. Then, I got to share those worlds with my friends. Instead of going out and drinking or partying with my friends and then regretting my excesses the next day, I sat around a table with my friends and enjoyed their company and helped them help me tell a great story of adventure and action and excitement. I cannot think of a single night of gaming I regretting the next day. Gygax is in part responsible for that.

I slipped away from D&D to play other games. As did many gamers. Eventually I even came to criticize the game. Now, looking back, reading what happened at TSR and what happened to Gygax, I see some of the reasons that I criticized the game were valid. And, maybe, had TSR and, later, Wizards of the Coast, listened to Gygax, maybe the game would have been better. Now, we will never know.

No matter. We gamers have all lost something irreplaceable. I and many gamers like me owe a good portion of the fun we have had in our lives to men like Gygax, Steve Jackson and Kevin Siembieda.

Gary, we will miss you. Good Journey.

(This post will be cross posted on my other blog: IrateWeirdos.com)

Wii Feel Xboxed

2008-02-18T19:43:00.000-08:00

No one can find a Wii to buy - and for me, that might be a good thing.

So, before Xmas and after the first of the year, I worked a truckload of overtime. At one point (thus, the lack of posts to this blog!). My wife sought to reward me for being a very good boy and killing myself for a job I'm not entirely in love with. She said I should buy myself something really nice. I had gotten some great stuff for Xmas. I was really tired. Between those two facts I couldn't really think of anything I wanted.

My wife, the sworn non-gamer, says to me: "Why don't you buy yourself a Wii?"

Ding!

This was a great idea. I had long been looking at the Nintendo Wii. The Wii is less expensive than the other systems, it's backwards compatible - able to play Game Cube games and the philosophy behind the controller and the system is much more casual, group oriented and - let's face it - fun!

I started doing a little research. It's not just backwards compatible to the Game Cube, you can also download lots of games from older systems. That's very cool. And, I didn't realize how many Star Wars themed games I had missed - that was very cool. There are also two new games I was very interested in: MySims - a Sims game aimed at kids and Star Trek: Conquest - wow! Awesome looking game. I was impressed.

Of course, I have been trying to find a Wii at normal price. They sold out at Xmas and no one has had one since - at least not any I have been able to find.

While I'm looking for a Wii, another brilliant fact comes to light. Now, since I have never owned a console, I usually don't pay attention to what console is getting what game and when. I also just figure that I won't buy a game until it has been out for more than a year - because I refuse to pay $60 for a game. Remember, I'm terribly cheap.

However, I have been very excited by a game project that has been in the news for quite a while. And, then I saw that indeed this game was going to be released for the Wii. That's right, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, will be released for the Wii! For the first time in my life, I was ready to plunk down full price for a pre-order! Totally new feeling for me!

Then the bad news.

One of the reasons that the Wii is smaller in size and less expensive is that it isn't as capable as the Xbox 360 and PS2. Have a look at this Vanity Fair article for system details and details on why Force Unleashed is such an awesome game. The executive summary: the game will be released on the Wii, but in a modified, not nearly as cool form.

This I'm used to. For years, even when they released games for the Mac, they were not as good. That doesn't happen as much these days. The only real console I've ever owned is the Game Boy. They often release games for Game Boy with the same names that are way less capable or cool - no shock as this is a hand-held system.

Do I want to spend $250 for a pre-crippled system? Do I want to spend nearly $500 dollars for a "normal" game system? I mean, I just bought a new laptop for $499. I can't bring myself to spend that much money for just a console. I can't bring myself to buy a system that's less capable than others on the market. I mean, seriously, I can buy a brand new Game Cube for $100 if I want a lesser system. I can upgrade my Game Boy from an SP to a DS for less than the price of a Wii.

I just can't do it.

So, I'll be waiting for the Mac version of the Force Unleashed … but I won't be holding my breath.

WarZone 2100

2007-11-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

As I have mentioned before, I am cheap. I don't like to spend money.

Don't get me wrong, I can spend money - I'm a Mac owner after-all! But, if I can get away with it, I like to keep my money in the bank.

Gaming, in all it's forms, is a great hobby. But, it can be a downright expensive one. Since role playing companies have gone back to the idea of hard bound books, a new gaming book can run $50 or more - it's silly.

Computer games are worse. A game you might play for a month or two can also run you $50 or $60 new. When I think about computer games, I think about two things a) how much play will I get for my money and b) do I need to buy it now? How soon will it be in the bargain bin for $15.

When I buy a game, I want to be able to play it for years. Games like The Sims and SimCity and Civilization are nearly infinitely replayable. Heck, I played Civ II on the Mac up until Civ IV for the Mac came out. I wish they would com out with a newer version of Tropico - if I play my current one anymore, the disc will melt!

On the PC side, I'm big on waiting a year to pick up "the latest games". I picked up Warhammer 40k Dawn of War and it's first expansion six months ago for $20. When those came out, they were $60 each.

Often, I prefer free or low cost online games. If you look at my Project Wonderful ads, you might spy a button for TinyWarz. Very cool, you can play for free, check it out! I consider my monthly payment to World of Warcraft to be pretty low cost. I think it's silly that they charge anything for their supplements - much less what they actually charge! But, they are making money on it. I think we will see a day when MORPGs will be entirely free to download and play, they will find other ways to support themselves. To a degree, we are already seeing this with Second Life and other games.

And, although I shouldn't admit it here, I have been a pirate from time to time. Being cheap means I will go to some extraordinary lengths. This doesn't mean I have a hard drive full of warez - quite the opposite. I have gone out and downloaded some abandonware here and there. Abandonware is such a funny thing. It's illegal to download the game, yet, if I was given the original disk by a friend, it would be legal. If I paid a quarter for the disk at a used shop - it would be legal. Silly. I want to play the old games, the copyright holders don't make them available, so I have to break the law to play them. Go figure.

However, I like that a few companies have gotten smart. Nearly 10 years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a game called WarZone 2100. Fun game. I didn't buy a copy at the time - I didn't own a PC so there was no reason. I did however do a review of the game for Epinions, I hope that made up in karma what I didn't pay in dollars.

A few days ago, I looked back at that review. I think someone had linked to my blog from that review and I caught it on the site monitoring software. I decided to Google WarZone to see if maybe someone had it on eBay or ... who knows?

Google gave me a gift in the first link: The WarZone 2100 Resurrection Project! Apparently, the copyright holder, Eidos-Interactive, made the game open source on the GNU license. So, a group of geeks are rebuilding the game - they even put out a release for the Mac!

I downloaded it and played it. The game is still awesome! Yes, the graphics are simple and look at least 10 years old - who cares? Most chessmen don't have a kung-fu grip, either! This is what all companies should do with their old games! Allow the gaming community to rebuild their games as we wish and allow me to download them for free!

Role-playing companies should take a cue here. Wizards has already come up with open source gaming with their d20 product. Why not release old games as a .PDF - this would promote the new games and bring more people into playing those games. I would love to be able to download old modules and source books instead of trying to scrounge them up in used book stores. My game shelf at home would be a lot cleaner if I could! Even charging a buck for an old supplement would be better than that material just fading away. Or, release it to the public domain and let the players do great things with those materials.

In this day, it's too easy to make an illegal copy. Instead of making interested players into criminals, make them into customers. Game-makers, what do you have to lose?

Must be jonesing ...

2007-11-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I have played a game. This time of year, adultitis kicks in and all my gaming buddies begin to have a lot of work and family obligations that deeply cut into game time.

Today, I bought a pot pie for lunch in the cafe' at work. I began cutting little hex maps in the landscape of the pie crust with my fork!

I'm currently reading Betrayal (Star Wars: Legacy of the Force, Book 1). I'm spending most of the time I'm reading with thoughts like "Hmm! That's a neat Jedi trick!" and "Oh! I'll have to use that move in my next starship dog fight!"

It's very sad how a gamer can be reduced this low - all from lack of playing!

The adultitis has gotten so bad that I proposed putting together a game with a group of friends - most of whom don't have a regular group. They had to be jonesing worse than I!

They didn't seem very interested. I thought it was a fun idea. So, I thought I would share with you all - feel free to steal.

I gave the group a tease along these lines:

The Federation lost 40 ships at Wolf 359 to the Borg cube.

Eleven thousand crew were presumed dead or assimilated.

What if a few crew survived?

If you are a fan of Star Trek the Next Generation and a Role Player - I figured this would get you ready to stand up and cheer. No such reaction from my would-be players!

My thought was that the players would have been masked from the Borg, and later the Enterprise, by warp core breeches or radiation or some such. Eventually, the players could reestablish contact with each other and begin to rescue one another and gather someplace they could establish life support.

At this stage, pirates would show up to raid the remains of the fallen ships - some good hand-to-hand combat would follow. *Cue Amok Music!*

Next, the PCs would probably try to resume communications with Star Fleet. Between the radiation from the wreckage and other issues - they would have no luck.

I was figuring that someone would start looking at the fact that they were not going to get rescued - but, there might be enough bits and parts in the field of wrecked ships to allow them to assemble a ship and escape.

I was willing to give them all the time in the world to do this. I came up with a list of bits; saucers, nacelles, engineering sections, etc. I figured I would make up a set of funky photo copied pieces and allow the players to puzzle together what ship they wanted. All the the bits have strengths and weaknesses, one saucer had a working computer core but non-functioning phasers, etc. Some of the bits also had surprises. A few bits had deactivated Borg who were there to gather intel and act as booby traps. One computer core had gone insane - all kinds of fun!

I figured the next challenge would be to drop some Ferengi into the area. They would want the salvage rights to the ruined ships - even if they had to take it by force. If the crew had built a simple ship, they could choose to fight or simply warp out. A more complex or heavier ship would have to rely on whatever it had ready to go at that moment to defeat the Ferengi - who probably wouldn't put up much of a fight anyway.

Once the ship was finished, or finished enough, they could warp to a new area and call Star Fleet. Star Fleet would inform them that they had been declared dead. They would also tell them that they didn't trust them to not be a trick by the Borg. If pushed far enough, Star Fleet would tell them that their signal was corrupted and looked like a Borg comm signal. The only way they could prove they were not dead would be to show up in person for a full medical exam.

At this point, the players could choose to do as the Federation requests or go rogue. I imagine they would stay with the Fed just because it's easier. But, I'd leave the option open.

Next, I'd drop a couple of Klingon Birds of Prey on them. The Klingons think they are Borg. The group will either have to talk their way out or fight.

Once they get to a Fed base, they are checked out and confirmed to be alive and they are reinstated with promotions all around. They will need those promotions as they will be given back they're refitted "Wolf Class" starship and given missions appropriate to that ship's capabilities.

Not a bad little plot, eh? Well, it's your plot now - my potential players didn't bite!

Dice Stacking?

2007-10-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, I know we have been on a dice kick for a while with only a brief interruption, but I just had to show these off!

Do that the next time someone wants you to roll 4d6!!!

Hit Team

2007-10-15T10:13:00.000-07:00

I used to think of myself as a budding gaming writer. That was a few years back. I'd like to get back to that at some point, I'm hoping this blog will push me in that direction.

Back then, I wrote a few articles for Steve Jackson Games that were published in Pyramid magazine - both the print and on-line versions. Two articles were chosen as Sample articles to attract new readers to the on-line version. I hope that means those articles were so good they wanted to show off the quality of the magazine with them. Either way, you can find Dr. Harry Hill and Ash Grey on-line for free. There are two other articles, one that's only in the print version so far and one is in the Pyramid archives - subscribers should search for "Jericho Brown".

I look back at these articles now and then - especially Ash. They are good articles, I think I did a good job.

However, there was a fifth article. I wrote it, thinking it was good. Not great but good. They rejected it - they want great and I don't blame them. I haven't written anything for Pyramid or any professional publication since. The rejection didn't crush my ego or anything so melodramatic. My life just changed and it hasn't been the same since.

However, there's no reason the article need to hide on my hard drive forever. Just because it wasn't extraordinary enough for Pyramid doesn't mean it couldn't help any GMs reading this blog.

I present to you Hit Team GAMMA. I'd write the article differently today, but it has its points. The stats are based on GURPS 3rd ed. You are free to use this material but not republish it - duh!

Hit Team GAMMA
By Jason “Jericho” Brown

It’s a tough world out there.
Everybody has business that needs to be taken care of. If you are a crime boss, a corporate developer or the CIA, sometimes you need someone to do the dirty work for you, someone to protect your interests. A “wet work” team – a Hit Team.
Teams like the following exist everywhere, and this one could exist anywhere in the modern world. But, this group works primarily on the West Coast of the U.S.
This group works through several fences and can be contacted via classified ads and the Internet – if you know where to look.
Team GAMMA was assembled by its leader, Jones. Jones demands that everyone in the team go by a call sign. Members of GAMMA hold their true identity secret. Jones only works for the highest paying, most discreet employers. If you want to hire GAMMA, you will pay big bucks and you will keep your mouth shut. Or else, their next target will be you.
If they are coming after you, well, say your prayers and keep running. You probably did something to tick someone off, now you’re paying the price. You won’t be able to negotiate your way out. They won’t listen. You may be able to out fight them, but the odds are against you. Just run!

Jones
(a.k.a. Michael Harmon)

ST:15 IQ:15 Speed:8.25
DX:16 HT:17 Move:8
Dodge:8 Parry: 9(Spear/M-16)

Second Chance Hardcorps vest (PD2, DR18), no encumbrance

Point Total:470

Advantages

Toughness (DR2).

Disadvantages

Addiction: Tobacco (Cigars); Age; Secret.

Quirks

Only smokes Cuban cigars; Will fulfill a contract or die trying; Will not ask his people to do something he isn’t prepared to do; Will not leave a fallen comrade; Will eat anything that he has killed himself – people included.

Skills

Administration – 15; Blowpipe – 14; Camouflage – 17; Climbing – 18; Detect Lies – 15; Drive Car – 20; First Aid – 17; Gunner: Machine Gun – 16; Guns: Auto Pistol – 18; Guns: Rifle – 21; Intelligence Analysis – 15; Interrogation – 17; Karate – 16; Knife – 18; Knife Throwing – 18; Leadership – 19; Motorcycle – 16; Navigation – 15; Parachuting – 18; Pilot: Helicopter – 19; Shadowing – 15; Shortsword – 18; Spear – 18; Staff – 18; Stealth – 20; Strategy – 18; Survival: Jungle – 19; Survival: Urban – 15; Survival: Desert – 14; Tactics – 18; Tracking – 15.

Weapons

Glock 17: 2d+2 crushing; M-16: 5d crushing; Bayonet, unmounted: 2d-1 cutting, 1d+1 impaling; Mounted Bayonet: 1d+4 impaling (use Spear skill); Gun Butt: 1d+3 crushing (use Staff skill)

Story

The old man of the group at 54, Jones is a Vietnam vet. He “pulled the pin” on the Green Berets in 1972 and lived in LA for 9 years. In the early 80’s, he began answering Soldier of Fortune ads and started mercing in Central America. He got dragged into some trouble in Asia, notably Korea, in the late 80’s and early 90’s. In ‘92, Jones met up with Smith. They began laying the plans for putting together GAMMA.
Jones has headed up GAMMA since ‘93. The team respects him. He has lead them into Hell and back out. Frankly, they have all seen some awful stuff. Somehow, Jones has kept morale high and everybody’s mind on the job.

Quotes

“I’m old – not dead!”
“Watch it! I was kicking little punks like you around before you were born!”
“We’ll take the job. Do you have the cash?”

Smith
(a.k.a. James Washington)

ST:17 IQ:13 Speed:8.25
DX:20 HT:16 Move:8
Dodge:8 Parry:14 (Karate), 10 (Knife)

Second Chance Hardcorps vest (PD2, DR16), no encumbrance

Point Total:500

Advantages

Ambidexterity; Appearance: Handsome; High Pain Threshold; Secret.

Disadvantages

Addiction: Cocaine (very expensive, totally addictive); Overconfidence.

Quirks

Melodramatic; Sarcastic; Verbally rips his friends apart in front of their faces just to see if they can take it; Always touching or cleaning his nose; Neat to the point of distraction.

Skills

Acrobatics – 20; Boating – 20; Breath Control – 16; Camouflage – 18; Climbing – 20; Demolition – 18; Electronics Operation: Communications – 14; Escape – 18; Fast Talk – 17; Guns: Submachine Gun – 22; Guns: Auto Pistol – 22; Jumping – 20; Karate – 22; Knife – 20; Motorcycle – 20; Parachuting – 20; Powerboat – 20; Scuba – 18; Shortsword – 20; Stealth – 20; Survival: Beach/Island – 17; Survival: Arctic – 17; Swimming 23; Underwater Demolition – 17.

Weapons

Karate punch (Sap Glove): 1d+2; Karate kick (Steel Toe Boot): 1d+3; Knife: 3d-3 cutting, 1d+2 impaling; Mac 10: 3d+1 crushing; Glock 17: 2d+2 crushing.

Story

Smith was a SEAL and got busted on drug charges. He did his time at San Quentin. When he was released he was young, sober, a convict and unemployed.
Smith did the same thing that many ex-special forces types do – he became a mercenary. Soon, he was working in Columbia for a major drug lord. When that drug lord got tired of Smith dipping his hands into the product, he fired him.
Smith took work in Korea and immediately met Jones. They hit it off and started talking about going into business for themselves. They went back to the states and started asking around. It wasn’t long before the Mafia had work for them. They met Klein while he was investigating them, and they talked him into working for them.
He is the martial artist of the group. With his looks and martial arts talent, his friends keep telling him he should go to Hollywood and kick some butt in the movies. He likes the idea of being a real-life action hero.
Smith is still a maverick and does too much cocaine for anyone’s comfort; most of his money goes up his nose. However, he manages to keep it all in check when the job is up.

Quotes

“Alive and in the flesh!”
“Pal, you have got to be faster than that!”
“Flash, cash and stash – that’s what life is all about!”

Klein
(a.k.a. Frank Dobovich)

ST:16 IQ:18 Speed:7.25
DX:12 HT:17 Move:7
Dodge:7 Parry: 10 (Brawling)

Second Chance Hardcorps vest (PD2, DR17), no encumbrance

Point Total:455

Advantages

Night Vision; Toughness (DR1).

Disadvantages

Addiction: Tobacco; Addiction: Alcohol; Bloodlust; Secret.

Quirks

Quotes song lyrics in regular speech; Rubs a silver dollar for luck; Chews a toothpick when nervous; Sleeps whenever possible; Never drinks alone.

Skills

Brawling – 15; Computer Operation – 20; Computer Programming – 18; Computer Hacking – 18; Criminology – 18; Detect Lies – 18; Diplomacy – 16; Driving: Car – 16; Forensics – 20; Forgery – 18; Guns: Auto Pistol – 20; Guns: Submachine Gun – 19; Interrogation – 18; Lockpicking – 20; Motorcycle – 16; Poisons – 16; Research – 18; Scrounging – 18; Shadowing – 18; Shortsword – 14; Stealth – 16; Survival: Urban – 20; Tracking – 18.

Languages

Mandarin – 17; Japanese – 17.

Weapons

Glock 17: 2d+2 crushing; MP5: 3d-1 crushing

Story

Klein started off as a beat cop in San Francisco. He worked up to detective quickly and ended up on a task force examining West Coast Gang and Organized Crime. He applied to the FBI and got in with no sweat. Once again he was working with West Coast Organized Crime.
Klein got into a project investigating Chinese Tong and Yakuza affairs in the U.S. and on the West Coast especially. He followed who had it in for whom and the flow of valuables and drugs. Soon, he was the senior project man and the expert everyone turned to.
Klein ran across Lee and busted her after her various run ins with the FBI and local police. He personally arrested her, chased her down in an alley in San Francisco. They had a good laugh about it later, but Lee still went to jail.
Klein tracked down Jones and Smith after a rather successful hit on a major crime lord’s son. Klein fully intended to bust both of them, but Smith started talking and didn’t stop until he got Klein’s attention. Klein wanted to give a little payback to the people he had been pursuing for the past several years. Jones and Smith promised him that revenge, not to mention some big cash.
Klein dove into the computer, erased as much of his personal file as he could. He then planted fake evidence that would get Lee’s charges dropped. He exported all his important files on criminal activity in the area to a safe place. Then, he resigned. He faked his own death with Lee’s help. Klein had gotten pretty good at making crime scenes look the way he wanted them to look. So, he made it look like a Chinese gang out for revenge had murdered him.

Quotes

“Well – a bang, bang, bang – and down they go!”
“Too legit to quit!”
Zzzzzzzzzz …

Lee
(a.k.a. Carmen Ng)

ST:14 IQ:20 Speed:6.5
DX:12 HT:14 Move:6
Dodge:6 Parry:

Second Chance Hardcorps vest (PD2, DR16), no encumbrance

Point Total:320

Advantages

Mathematical Ability.

Disadvantages

Bad Temper; Secret; Skinny.

Quirks

Always making something; Likes making her teammates try out her new inventions; Sets goofy traps for her friends; Plays Japanese Rap CD’s very loudly; Keeps Mantises and Crickets in cages around her work rooms and bed room.

Skills

Biochemistry – 20; Botany – 20; Chemistry – 20; Computer Operation – 23; Demolition – 20; Electronics – 20; Engineer: Bombs and Traps – 20; Engineer: Electrical Work – 20; Guns: Submachine Gun – 17; Mathematics – 23; Motorcycle – 16; Physics – 23; Poisons – 20; Research – 20; Streetwise – 20; Traps – 20.

Languages

Mandarin – 20; Japanese – 20; Korean – 20.

Weapons

Mac 10: 3d+1 crushing

Story

Lee started off life honest enough. In high school she excelled at Math and Science. In college, she was on the Dean’s List, and tutored Chemistry and Biology.
When she left school, she found it was difficult to find work. A college buddy of hers asked her to make some LSD for him and his friends. She whipped up an incredible batch and didn’t charge him anything for it. He came back later with $2500 dollars. He told her he had sold it at a concert, the money was her share and could she make some more?
From there it just got worse. Soon she was working in her own illegal drug lab, then she went to work for a Korean gang because they threatened to kill her. After she poisoned all of them to death, she went to work for their rivals making more drugs and other useful things, like explosives.
Lee was in her lab one night when the San Francisco Police raided it. The SFPD SWAT team stormed the premises and Lee ran for it. She was chased into the kitchen of the restaurant that served as their front operation. She had enough time to leave a little surprise for the police in pursuit. Her hastily made device consisted of a can of oven cleaner, 5 pounds of flour, a disposable lighter and an egg timer. Four police officers died and several were badly burned by what she whipped up in the kitchen!
The SFPD turned to Klein to track Lee down and bring her to justice. He knew of her and had a thick file on her. He tracked her down and again she ran. He chased her down and arrested her. In the squad car, taking her to be booked, Lee and Klein ended up laughing about some of Lee’s exploits. They struck a strange friendship.
After Jones and Smith recruited Klein, he let them in on the gem he had locked up. They were intrigued. Klein entered the false evidence that placed Lee at a different place when the explosive went off killing the SWAT team members. Lee’s charges were dropped not long after that, and she helped Klein fake his own death.

Quotes

“Look what I made!”
“How did you get all taped up to that wall? Do the feathers tickle?”
“Whoever touched my Diet Cola is *!$#%@&# DEAD!!!”

Notes

Hit Team GAMMA comes to 1745 points total – this is not a team of amateurs or beginners. These people are incredible even for ex-Special Forces, ex-FBI and Criminals – they are the best of the worst. If this team is placed against PC’s, the PC’s should be up to the challenge.

The savvy reader might notice that we have 2 ex-Special Forces officers who seem to be missing a great deal of skills from the templates presented in GURPS Special Ops. The simple explanation is that both have been away from the constant grind and training given to Special Forces troops. In short, without the enforced discipline Jones and Smith have gotten lazy. They are only practicing skills that are consistently useful to them.

Adventure Seeds

The PC’s set out to investigate the deaths of several small time drug dealers only to find a common thread leading to GAMMA.

GAMMA is stumped and needs help finding their victim. Will they be able to dupe the PC’s into helping them commit one or more murders?

The PC’s need the help of some heavy hitters and get word of GAMMA. Jones is agreeable, but he needs a favor in return. He would like the PC’s help covering up the evidence from their last contract. Will the PC’s help?

Too much time on Ebay!

2007-10-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

We've been on a dice kick for a few posts. We'll cover other topics soon, I swear.

Now, I've shown you most of my dice collection. So, I guess that makes me a dice collector - but not like this guy!

Kevin Cook has held the Guinness Book record for the largest dice collection. He has just about every die you can imagine. Dice made of stone, bone, metal, precious stones, one of a kind prototypes, Roman era dice and just about everything else.

So, now I know what happened to all the dice I lost!

Dice Part 2 ...

2007-10-11T07:29:00.000-07:00

I want to make this a regular segment! I love dice! I want to see pictures of your dice. Please take a (really good) picture of your collection. Put it up somewhere I can have a look at it, a web site, MySpace, LJ, Yahoo Briefcase or whatever. Leave a comment below telling us where to find the picture and a little about your collection. I'll put the best pictures here on the site.

Today, we'll be looking at my new Purple collection.

No die in this collection is more than 5 years old. The collection started with the mini-dice. I bought this set several years ago as I was about to start gaming with a new group. I had never met them, ran into one of them on-line somehow. They invited me to play D&D.

I bought a (very) used 2nd edition DMG and PH. All I had was those two books and a notebook. Normally when I go gaming, I'm the GM, and I arrive with ten books, a huge bag of dice and pencils and paper for everyone. So, since I had such a small load, I thought a new set of tiny dice would be great. I was right. It was easy having just the dice I needed.

Unfortunately, the group and I differed on gaming styles. Week one, we wrote up characters for D&D. Week two, we began to set up characters for a game system one of the players was writing, but instead we watched Dogma. Week three, they decided they wanted to play Mage - I went out and bought more used books. We didn't get through character creation before a couple of guys in the group started fighting. Old friends! I don't remember week four - I may not have gone over. And, well, that was that. I like character creation as much as the next player - but then I like to PLAY those characters.

This dice set has something of a curse in that direction. This set grew up about a year ago. A friend decided to run the Serenity role playing game. I took my wife (a non-gamer) to several different game shops, looking for the book, hoping to avoid the wait for delivery. No book. However, as I said last post, I like to buy a little something if I go into a game shop. By the time I was done, I had two sets of polyhedrals, three sets of d6s and a dice bag - all from different stores. In the end, I bought the book from Amazon, paid $13 less than cover, paid no shipping and it arrived in about three days. And we all wonder why the Friendly Local Game Shop is vanishing from the landscape?

I got prop crazy with that game. I found a site with prop Serenity money. So, I printed out hundreds of thousands of credits - in color no less! Then we decided that we needed coins to represent what was traded outside the Federation. So I went on a quest for plastic coins. In the end, I had a zip-top freezer bag filled with silver Mardi Gras "throws" and gold Chinese New Year throws from two different on-line stores and some gold "pirate chest filler" coins from a local party store.

That group got together twice. I showed up with a character fully written up with pages of back story. I was the only one. The rest of the group began writing. The next time we got together, the rest of the group was still writing. This was the week I showed up with the printed cash and a couple of cheap poker sets (for the poker chips) - we also decided that week we should have the coins. We got in about an hour of gaming, maybe.

In the year since, that group hasn't figured out how to get back together. I still have the zip-top bag of coins. I think I may take them out this coming Marti Gras and throw them at random people. Might as well get some fun out of them ...

Dice!

2007-10-09T09:59:00.000-07:00

The title of the site is Dusty Dice, right? So, I thought I'd show off my dusty collection! I've always thought of myself as something of a collector. Being a dice collector was the inspiration for the site's name.

Anyway, we'll start off with my "Black and White" set.

These are my second oldest set of dice. My oldest set are the multiple colored, old school dice that came with my D&D boxes. Those dice are still buried in my stuff at my parent's place. Maybe someday I'll find a way to show those off here.

The Black and White set was slowly collected between 1988 to just a few years ago. I have probably lost more dice than I have retained. Where do all the dice we gamers lose end up???

I always felt that if I walked into a game store - I had to buy something. Even if it was just a single die. So, I made it easy on myself. Everyone sells black and white dice.

Why two bags? I had been using a subset of this collection for gaming, those went into the purple bag. The black bag is a bag I bought in the early 90's to support my collecting habit. These dice would completely fill one of those bags.

On top of the bags we have some over sized d6s and a huge d20. That d20 is about the size of a racket ball. Those are all fairly new. Just to the right of those is a d34. Why a d34? Why not? I bought it at a game shop in West Seattle not long after moving out here, probably '97 or so. It serves no purpose.

To the right of that is four d30s. One of those is actually smoke, not black, white or clear. I have a set of translucent smoke mini-dice that didn't get into the picture. If you have clear dice in a black and white set, you can have trans-black, too, right?

To the right of that are some pipped d10s - don't see those too often. A pair of blank dice to the right of that. Those are fun to use with a dry erase marker or if you are using a GM screen, and you want your players to think you rolled for something when you didn't, they make a good noise. Plus, they make your players worry about your sanity.

Speaking of worrying your players ... I play a lot of GURPS, usually as the GM. If you are GMing a game where you use a lot of d6s, buy some with skulls on them. In GURPS, a 3 is a critical success. Nothing like rolling three skulls and smiling at the player you just turned into paste!

Just to the left of the skulls are some d3s. These do have a use. I have used them often. I found those in a Milton Bradley board game I bought on the clearance rack about the time Top Gun was in the theaters (the game was jet fighter based) - the game sucked by the dice have been useful.

Between the d20s and d12s is a spherical d6. I used to have three of those. It works, it's a little hard to read. I keep it around more as a funny than anything else. Below that is one of those old school d6s, I bought it in the very late 80s. It still has the white crayon I wiped over the numbers to "paint" them - very old school! Those old school dice are very popular again.

Speaking of old school, to the right is a white d10x10, aka a Deckaider. That was the first Deckaider on the market. It, too, still has the black crayon I rubbed on it. That die has gotten a lot of use. I was so happy when this die came out, no more having to declare which die was the 10s and which was the 1s. This die is still on the market, albeit with ink.

Just below that are six off-white pipped d6s. They are actually light green - they glow in the dark. I bought them a few Halloweens back for a laugh.

I'm just amazed by how many dice I have bought and only these few remain. Oh well! Just means I need to buy more!

Next time I'll show off my Purples!

WoW Unethical?

2007-09-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

Independent game designer Johnathan Blow has an interesting opinion. I heartily agree.

Mr. Blow says:

"It's considered best practice: schedule rewards for your player so that they don't get bored and give up on your game. That's actually exploitation."

He feels that games like World of Warcraft string players along with minor rewards through terrible game play. He feels this exploits the player - who is paying for this after all.

This is true. If I were approached by a GM who told me he wanted me to run around collecting leather and animal body parts to get random minor upgrades to my character - I would politely excuse myself and run for the horizon! Yet, I pay $15 a month to sit in front of my computer and do just that.

Early on in RPGs, this problem was encountered and, in my opinion, conquered. Players complained that games were basically running around a dungeon, killing monsters, taking their stuff and gaining levels. This was handled by making games more complex. Giving players more options. Opening up new game worlds like horror, sci-fi, espionage, etc. also gave depth to player options. Now, a game is as simple or as complex as a GM and players want it to be. It can be simple hack and slash, high fantasy, galaxy spanning space opera or anything else players desire.

Massively Multi-player games need to take a page from RPGs. Current schemes will work for a while, but gamers will get bored. Game designers who add new ways to play to their games will attract players who are bored with other games. This happened in the RPG world. Dungeons and Dragons was called boring more than once. Other games flourished from players looking for something new and different. D&D survived as a property to this day by updating their structure, broadening the game's scope and building a strong community. Today, D&D is a leader in the gaming world.

WoW will need to find new ways for gamers to play if they want to remain on the market. Constantly bumping up the level cap will only work for so long. I am already seeing chinks in the armor - Blizzard is now offering free play time to players who bring other players back to the game.

Blizzard is making in-roads to building new ways to play and form community. They have just released a patch to allow voice chat, thus improving the social aspect of the game. The next major release will add new game features.

However, I don't feel this is enough. Blizzard needs to add depth to the game. Find ways to have more player driven adventure - perhaps allowing individual players hire NPCs to raid local towns. Allowing players to build farms and other buildings. Allow players to set up shops in unused buildings. Allowing players to play more than a handful of races, classes and professions. I feel they need to do this sooner rather than later.

As an example, I have found a flash game that allowed a player to play a Murloc in a very WoW-like environment. After playing that - I wanted to connect to WoW and set up a mighty Murloc warrior!

WoW and the MassMOG world are in their infancy. They will go through the same or similar growing pains as the RPG industry has experienced. My hope is that someday, Massively Multi-player games will be as rich and deep as any current table top RPG. This way, I will be able to stop writing for my friends and just play!

The End of the Industry?

2007-09-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

The debate has waged for decades, maybe since the industry came to be.

Every few years, sales of Role Playing games dies off. Then, something comes along to reinvigorate the industry. When I was in college, it seemed like the industry was in its last days. Then along came a little company from the Pacific Northwest with a little card game. Magic the Gathering players moved from collecting cards to collecting RPG books and the industry was alive again.

When I was a kid, the industry revolved around D&D. The media and people on the Religious Right set D&D as the main target of their agendas. TSR suffered, it probably never recovered. Many thought role playing would die off. I remember having conversations with people older than I at that time. I was just getting into the hobby and I wondered how others felt about it. I ran into several young adults who claimed to have played D&D once or twice. They were almost embarrassed to admit it in the light of all the media hubbub. I meet young adults now who admit they played a game or two of Magic. They, too, seem almost embarrassed.

Up until just recently, I usually explained to people that I was a role player almost as if I was making my own apology. "Yeah, I'm one of those D&D playing freaks" I would say, even though it had been years since I picked up a d20. D&D was the only RPG the masses knew, thanks to the bad press in the 80s and 90s.

These days, things are a little different. Everyone I know, including family members who looked at me funny for playing D&D, plays World of Warcraft! Okay, not everyone, but huge numbers of people. In my day, WoW would have been dismissed as hack and slash and not worth a gamer's time. So many people own Xboxes and Play Stations - if they aren't playing WoW, they are home playing Halo. Let's face it, Halo is just more hack and slash - but with guns.

Today, it's almost as if I have come out of the closet. I admit in, well, mixed company, if you will, that I am a role player. I likes me some GURPS! People still look at me funny, so I have to explain that it's like WoW or Halo except with paper, pencils and dice. Sometimes I have to go so far as to explain it's like D&D - that usually gets them to nod their heads. But, I don't get the same reaction I got when I was 25. At that age, it almost seemed liked people were sniffing me to see if I had recently showered, or they looked at what I was wearing, expecting Doritos stained tee shirts or something. I didn't live in my parent's basement, playing D&D by candle light - that came later! But people really did have an image: cultist. That image has changed a bit.

Many still think the industry is on the out. I don't think so. Geekly hobbies have been a growing trend for the last decade or more. As video games become more like paper RPGs and as table top gaming becomes more like video games, I think we will see new players. Players who want to do more than shoot at their friends and run around looking for ore and troll ears.

Already, Wizards has announced new electronic features for D&D 4th edition. If you haven't yet, click on our link to Dungeons and Dragons there on the right. You will see links off their main page about the new features in 4th ed. It's an hour well spent for those of us concerned about the future of the hobby.

For those of you looking for a way to make a mint off the Internet and gaming in general - there has to be a way to take the 3D gaming environment being proposed and use it more generically. As in, what if I want to play in a sci-fi or supers game? Setting up an SF street scene or the lair of an mad scientist would be great! If someone can come up with that and not restrict it to one game system - they will make the big dollars!

I think a lot of this can be done already. There are plenty of ways to chat on the Internet and there are ways to make electronic copies of character sheets and there are ways to share documents. A devoted enough group could set up an online game and I think they could have a great time. It would take some work, but I think it could be done. Give it a try and let us know what happened.

An Unholy Union

2007-09-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think people are running out of ideas.

I, like many gamers in my generation, started off playing D&D. I watched it evolve, albeit slowly. I was shocked by d20 - open source role playing. Intriguing. But, in all honesty, a long time player can look at d20 and see the layers. You see where D&D began and you can see where they added elements on top of the out-dated system. It may be true that d20 is the most popular system out there, but that's like saying Intel is the most popular computer chip. Both are the best sellers - but they are not the best on the market, merely the most used.

I've played plenty of other games, used plenty of other systems. I have my favorites. When I started playing White Wolf's Story Teller system, I didn't get it. It was too lite. I got that they wanted the players to worry more about role playing and less about rules - but I felt that the rules were just, well, not there. Now I get it - the rules were "not there" on purpose. If you were not acting as a rules lawyer, you had more time to think about the actions and motivations of your character. After playing for a while, I usually just stashed my character sheet and role played - really role played. It was quite liberating.

I see now that White Wolf has produced a version of the World of Darkness (WoD) for the d20 system: Monte Cook's World of Darkness.

This I do not get at all! White Wolf already has a working system. d20 already has plenty of books that you could use to run a WoD-like game. Do they really think the average person is going to shell out $50 for this book?

Okay, I want it understood that I haven't actually seen a copy of this book. I only found out about it a few days ago and I only have the advertising copy to go by - but I already have lots of doubt. Let's start with said copy:

"Dead souls returned to claim living bodies, creating blood-drinking undead fiends: vampires. Bestial spirits came as well, to create werewolves, and demons formed bodies from worldly matter. Magic crashed back into the world, and mages wield its power for whatever purpose suits them. Humans called the Awakened unknowingly keep the darkness at bay. These supernatural creatures struggle against each other and clash in the shadows ..."

Shadows ... you mean like Shadowrun? It's vampires and demons instead of trolls and dragons! Am I the only one seeing that? Instead of porting over the immensely rich World of Darkness to d20 - it sounds to me like they are reinventing the wheel and failing in the process.

For $50 bucks, I think you could do a lot more with your money. For example, if you must have d20 - and there's nothing wrong with that - hit eBay or Amazon or Half Price Books and buy a used copy of d20 Modern. I see it for about $20, which leaves room for a d20 Monster book - at less than $10 bucks used. There, I just saved you $10 to $15 even after shipping. Heck, grab d20 Call of Cthulhu and drive your characters insane! It's $50 and it, too, is written by Monte Cook!

I personally think you would do better with new or used copies of the WoD books. Amazon has the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem hardcovers, new, for $40, you will qualify for free shipping, too. Your local used shop will have them even cheaper.

If you want my favorite, or if you just have to have lots of rules to lawyer over, you'll need to look a little harder. Start with the GURPS Basic Set, 3rd Edition or 4th Edition - whichever you prefer. Then, go looking for GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade. It's out of print, but you can find plenty of used copies out there. There are a few other GURPS/White Wolf books, but I leave it as an exercise for the reader to go find them. I bet you could put together quite the collection of used GURPS books for $50!

I guess you could also just wait a year for this $50 book to hit the shelves of your local used book store. It might almost be worth $25 bucks at Half Price books.

To sum up, I think the RPG industry, if it's going to survive, will need to do more than take a well known brand, affix it to a questionable premise, bolt that to a kludgey rule set and then over charge for the package.

QC rolls a natural 20 on a d12!

2007-09-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of web comics a.k.a. womics. I have a whole load I read daily. One of the reasons I am using Project Wonderful for advertising is that it's big in the web comics community. I'd rather give ad space to something I like and believe in than just any old thing Google throws at me.

Questionable Content is one of my favorite womics. Especially when they do the odd gaming joke.

Love me some QC!

Killer GM ... or not so much ...

2007-09-02T12:32:00.000-07:00

For whatever reason, I have ended up doing the DM/GM thing for most of my gaming career. I rarely get to play. Right now is one of the few exceptions - I am a player in a Star Wars d20 game that a friend is running. But, that's coming off about two and a half years of my running games for that group.

I am not the world's best Game Master. I have played with several better GMs. I think it comes down to supply and demand. My friends have a demand: they wanna play! I'm willing to supply my humble talents. In the end, we usually have fun.

However, I know I have two weaknesses.

My first weakness is that I always underpower my enemy NPCs. The mooks I throw at the players are REAL mooks - a waste of time, easily disposed. The actual bad guys are usually just as easy to foil. Heck, half the time the PCs turn the bad guys into allies. It's no wonder I nearly stand up and cheer when I can get the PCs to run from a fight! I do believe my players have run from a few fights they could have won just to soothe my ego!

My second weakness is nearly as bad. I can't kill player characters. Can't do it. My players put a ton of work into their characters, I give them XP incentives for back story and good role playing, so I know they are invested. I can not just throw that work away - it's a waste of time. Maybe this is why I make the adversaries so underpowered.

I ran an AD&D game in high school. One of the players, Jess, was a complete ass! Okay, I'm a geek and I surround myself with geeks. Most of my geeky friends are computer nerds who get along better with machines than people. But, there is a certain type of geek - he is born with no social graces what-so-ever. This was Jess. We all liked the guy. He was our annoying little brother, even if he was older than some of us. But, there was many a night that playing began with the words "Shut up, Jess!" spoken in unison by the entire group.

Jess played an infuriating fighter character, I think its name was Brak. Between Jess' lack of social graces and his skills as a rules lawyer - Brak was nigh invulnerable. I so wanted to kill his character. Perhaps it would be enough to piss him off and then he would leave the group. I wasn't brave enough or mean enough to tell him to just go away. (I can do that now - this was the valuable lesson Jess taught me. Thank you!)

For example; Brak and the group got into a fight with an entire heap of goblins. As per usual, the group more than bested the underpowered little whelps. Jess, as Brak, decided to teach the goblin chief a lesson. He strapped the poor thing to his shield. Brak then finished the rest of the dungeon, feeding the goblin just enough healing potion to keep it alive. I came up with some stupid way for the goblin to escape when the adventure was over. I needed Brak to die!

I decided finally to grow a spine and wipe out Brak - and the rest of the party if need be! I set up a trap. The group found an injured ogre, but, unbeknownst to the group, the ogre wasn't alone. I sprung the trap! Ogres fell out of the nearby trees and jumped out of camouflaged holes! They were armed with huge cross bows and mancatchers! They fought well, but, in the end, I had the group!

Of course no one died! Are you kidding?

The ogres rounded up the group. Brak shouts out a challenge! He will best any one of them in one-on-one combat for the freedom of the group. I had him! I could kill off Brak and allow the rest of the group to live - perfect! I was so happy, stupidly happy! The ogres allowed Brak to choose weapons. Brak, being Jess, chose the most annoying thing he could:

A belching contest.

Beer was produced from saddle bags and backpacks. Both Brak and the Ogre Champion drank far too much. Brak made his Constitution roll - he was able to drink one more mug than the Ogre. Jess was pleased, the group was amused, so far so good. Finally, it was time. The ogre strode forward, aimed himself at a tree and let loose! I rolled. The ogre rolled quite well, better than Jess could ever hope to roll with Brak. I said that the ogre did so well, burped so loudly, he shook the mighty tree and scared all the birds away. Jess was DIS-pleased, the group was amused, so far ... so good!

Brak stood and aimed himself at the tree. I told Jess that the only way he could win was to throw a natural 20. He argued that he had more beer, thus more ammunition. I told him, no matter, the ogre had rolled that well. Roll a 20 or lose. Lose and you forfeit your life!

Jess warmed up his die and let fly ...

Brak let go such a walloping burp, it not only moved the tree, it uprooted it, scaring away a group of raccoons burrowed underneath. Further more, in places some of the bark was missing along with half the leaves.

Jess had been lucky and played the game well. I try to be a fair GM, so I relented and admitted utter, ego bursting, brain frying defeat! Foiled by the biggest dufus I knew! Brak had won the belching contest on an epic scale! The ogres fell about, laughing their fool heads off - even the defeated champion was laughing uncontrollably. The group stealthed away while the ogres were busy laughing and retelling the event they had all just witnessed.

Brak lived to fight - and annoy - another day.

To this day I can't kill off characters. Maybe it is a waste to throw away all that work. Or, maybe I fear being humiliated in another burping contest-like incident.

Maybe someday I will find a way to clear away the horror of Jess & Brak and become a Killer GM!

RPG Legos?

2007-09-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

We all know that miniatures make gaming easier. Having that visual element while trying to figure out a fire fight is just so helpful. Plus, looking down at the board and seeing your character facing off against a bunch of foes is darned exciting. I think most of us love minis.

However, this is Dusty Dice - we adults don't have time to paint a bunch of pewter and plastic, not to mention the cost. While the new pre-painted figures that are coming out for several games are great, they, too, are pricey and they just don't have the variety of paint'em yourself minis - although they are getting better.

So, what's a time and cash strapped gamer to do?

A few years ago, when my friends and I started playing d20 Star Wars, I had to figure out this very problem. The books were expensive enough! The pre-painted figures were not on the market yet. There were no new metal figures out (because they were about to release the pre-painted figures - but I didn't know this). Finding old metal figures on eBay would have taken forever and would have been super expensive. The d20 Star Wars Core Rule book suggested using Star Wars action figures. At the time, I thought this was a pretty expensive and limited idea.

Now what?

I decided to go with Lego minifigures. Lego had been producing Star Wars sets for years. There was a pretty wide variety of figures, and at the time they had released several sets that widened that variety. No painting involved and for the most part a single figure only runs a few dollars. Plus, we're talking about Legos here. How many times have you rolled dice and knocked over all the minis on the table? Lego makes large grey and green base plates - the figures move around much less. Add to that that you can build walls and scenery with Lego bricks and there are dozens of pre-built bits already out there - it became something of a no brainer.

We stopped playing Star Wars and began a Super Heroes game a few years later. Instantly the Legos came out. With all the Legos that have been produced, you are sure to find minifigures and scenery to fit your game. We recently started a new Star Wars campaign - my character comes from a planet where the men wear turbans. I was able to find a purple turban from the Oriental Adventures sets, a head from the Extreme Sports sets, a black and purple shirt that belonged to Professor Snape in the Harry Potter sets, legs from a figure in the DinoAttack sets and a gun from the new Batman sets! Sure, it cost me a few bucks - but my figure looks awesome!

There are some pitfalls to this and you have to know where to look. Lego sets are not inexpensive, especially if all you wants are the minifigures and a few bricks. Lego does produce sets that are heavy on the figures - these are sometimes called Army Builder sets by those that use them for role playing and war gaming. Currently, Lego has two sets from Star Wars Episode 3, one of battle droids and one of clone troopers. If you are playing Star Wars - these sets, several of these sets!, are must haves. Watching your player's faces as you line up a couple of dozen battle droids is pure Game Master joy!

There are also ways to buy just figures. eBay is the most widely used source. A search for Legos or minifigures will bring up hundreds of hits. I have a few resellers that I like and that I stick with - I'm sure it won't take long for you to develop those relations as well. Then, there is my favorite: Bricklink. Bricklink is a Lego collector's paradise. If Lego ever made it, chances are someone is selling it on Bricklink.

As I said above, a minifig can be had for a few dollars. I use the $2 rule. I feel any Star Wars related mini is over priced if it is above $2, I try not to pay higher than that. I have bought several Star Wars minis for well below $2. I have bought Tusken Raiders for $.75 cents each when they were in an inexpensive set. I have bought battle droids for less than a dollar each even before this new army builder set came out.

There are times when you just don't have an alternative. Lego has a bad habit of putting out rare figures in expensive sets. For example, I have paid less than a dollar for an R2-D2 when there was an inexpensive set newly on the market. Currently, the low price for a domestic R2 (there are cheaper international prices - but that's before shipping) is $4.00. Lego produces a $100.00 set that has a black R2, R2-D5 - its current low price is $10 - that's down from $20 when the set came out. I can buy an R2-D4 (the red one) for about $5. And, Lego has just introduced a set with a green R2, R2-R7, which you can buy for about $30 on Bricklink, which is a third of the $90 price for the whole set!

Will I fork out $20 for a minifigure - Nope! I'll come on here and complain about it, but I won't fork up the cash! Lego often reintroduces popular minifigures in different sets and makes them less expensive. Lego has just released a set called Hoth Rebel Base. The set is $50 and features a white 3PO figure, K-3PO. However, this set also has two Snow Troopers, two Pilot Rebels and two Hoth Rebels. On Bricklink I would have to pay $65 before shipping from several different resellers - and I wouldn't get any of the cool bricks that come with the set.

I could put out $40 for an original Princess Leia, I could buy a rare Princess Leia for $20, I could buy an updated Leia for about $10, or I could scrounge around the site and put together something close for about $3 -it's all up to you.

By combining the strengths of eBay and Bricklink, I have built myself a respectable Lego RPG collection for a couple hundred dollars. It rivals what any pewter and plastic collector would have at that price and I didn't have to paint anything and I have all the advantages of using Legos. Give it a shot!

That's Better!

2007-09-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

I've made a few modifications to the template. The all important ads are up.

She looks pretty good, doesn't she?

I swear the content will get better! :)

Pardon Our Dust!

2007-08-30T22:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Dusty Dice!

What are we doing here? Good Question! Dusty Dice is a site for role playing games and gamers. We'll look for the best things the industry and the Internet have to offer. We'll talk about new games, new offerings, old games, war stories and anything else that tickles our fancy.

Who am I? I'm Jericho Brown. I've been playing role playing games since I was in 8th grade. I won't tell you how many decades ago, but let's just say my first D&D set came in a red box. The grognards reading this will know how long ago that is! I've played D&D, Paladium, GURPS, White Wolf, d20 and lots of other stuff along the way. I've even done a little professional writing - although not as much I have wanted to - this site is intended to encourage me (and you!) to write more. If we don't keep the hobby alive and lively - we'll all be bored, playing World of Warcraft!

Why do I call the site "Dusty Dice"? As I have gotten older, I have done less and less gaming and way less writing. With all the responsibilities of job, family and friends, I feel like I can never get any gaming time. I'm lucky if I play one game a month. So, it seems like every time I go to pick up my dice bag, there is a layer of dust. That dust seems to just get thicker and thicker.

But, hey, maybe because of this site, I'll come up with new gaming opportunities and maybe so will you. This site is going to do a lot of growing over the next few weeks. We'll be adding a ton of advertising - bandwidth ain't free! But, feel free to chime in on the comments, look around, make yourself at home annnd ...

Let's Roll!