Wiki Whack!

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!

Lego Inspirations

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

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!

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.

Size Matters ....

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.

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

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!