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Bachelor Party RPG!
2March 14, 2011
“Rick Gassko is settling down… But before he walks down the aisle with Debbie he’s having on last fling. Accompanied by his friends, some dice, the Necronomicon and his favorite game designer and wild party animal Ed “The Beard” Greenwood, Rick will have an adventure he will never forget. Literally… Bachelor Party RPG!”
No, I’m sorry to disappoint, this post is NOT about a role playing game based on the “classic” Tom Hanks movie Bachelor Party. This post is about something much more personal. On a recent post where I reminisced about Alternity, talked about gaming and how what we play becomes intertwined with what we are doing in real life and, at least for me, are part of the memories.’
When I got married I decided I wanted to do something special for my gaming group. After a botched “traditional” bachelor’s party, the day before the wedding I gathered up all of my friends and we drove out to the small local hotel up in the mountains where the wedding would be held. While family and friends got busy prepping for the next day’s celebration we took out our gaming books and die and sat around a table to role-play.
(Hey don’t look at me like that, it was my wedding… I was entitled to relax, have fun, and not work before the wedding!)
Fighting the good fight…
3February 22, 2011
I’ve written about Puerto Rico Role Players before, many times, and probably will some more. This is one such instance, so humor me if you please (if not there are some excellent posts down the page…)
(Still here? Good, let’s go on…) One of the reasons I became so active in the group was to give back something to the gaming community. Through it I have met innumerable acquaintances, forged lasting friendships both near and far, and enjoyed a hobby where I express my creativity and have fun doing it. I have seen the RPG community shrink and today I thought of us as a graying community. Sure there are younger players coming on board, but the majority of us seem to be at a certain age and precipitously approaching middle age.
Mind you I am not declaring the hobby dead, I think we are changing and have been a niche hobby for a while, but we can certainly continue enjoying what we do; and the new trends in publishing and distribution mean we can do this for a long time. All this doesn’t mean I don’t want to see the hobby grow, one the contrary I want to share the love of role playing with more people and I am a firm believer that when people get to experience an RPG many will like to play again.
The time I almost quit gaming!
3February 21, 2011
I guess we’ve all had it. That time where you get frustrated with gaming, throw your arms up and say forget this, I’m not playing anymore… Especially if you’ve been playing for a long time like me (close to 25 years soon) you might just have had that feeling more than once. Strangely enough I’ve only been about to quit once. So if you’ll indulge me I’ll tell you about that time of yore and reflect on how I dealt with it, there may be some learning involved for all of us…
In my senior year of high school I had already been playing RPGs four years. I had begun playing with my neighbors and the group eventually became too large (a common bane in my campaigns, but I’m getting off track here) and I switched groups and began playing with friends from high school. Those were fun times, we played all sorts of campaigns, tried out all types of games, and the only one that lasted was the Star Frontiers game we played during lunch in school. All others became a series of one shots or infrequently played campaigns.
The players fluctuated between four core players and a floating group of four or five occasional players. For some reason two of the core players, good friends to this day, became really antagonistic. They tried whatever crazy scheme they could come up with to sabotage adventures, and went out of their way to get me to lose my temper. They often succeeded…
I remember a Gamma World Adventure where they massacred the wise old man of a small village they visited. The locals in turn lynched them. A long running, but sporadic, AD&D campaign was derailed when the human ranger decided to pee on the dining table of the elven ambassador they were visiting. That and other misadventures cost the elven member of the party, who was a noble about to become the leader of his people, not only his title, but his family’s honors and lands.
Kobold adoptions going on right now! Free Kobold Quarterly #11…
0February 1, 2011
Kobolds! Some of those little humanoids, that went from being the pesky scaled doglike bane of 1st level PCs to dragon blooded opponents of the modern adventurer, so renowned that they have a publication named after them, need a home! The wonderful people at Open Game Design are putting issue #11 of Kobold Quarterly up for adoption; will you find a home for it?
Ok, enough with the melodrama, let’s get to the good part. Just like last year, you can download a free copy of Kobold Quarterly as a PDF, specifically issue #11, until February 9th. Michael has reviewed issues before, and I recently reviewed issue #16. This issue from the fall of 2009 is up to par with their usual quality, excellent layout, a great diversity of articles, and a format reminiscent of the bygone magazines of old. If you are a fan of D&D 4th edition there is a good spread of articles for you here covering insanity, wishes, and paragon paths for monstrous creatures. For D&D 3.5 fans, and I know there are many of you out there, you’ll find some gems like an alternate dwarf, playing were-creatures, and (my favorite article in the issue), the Ecology of the Vampire. There is little material for Pathfinder as this was back when the game was still coming out, but most of the material for D&D 3.5 are perfectly usable for Pathfinder fans.
What they DO have for Pathfinder is the spell-less Ranger. This seems to be something fans always want, a ranger that casts no spells, like a certain ranger from a popular fantasy series… This was the selling point for me and the reason I got this issue on the first place when it came out. This has been part of the available classes for my Pathfinder game ever since I decided to switch my homebrew to that system. Besides what I just mentioned there are advice columns from some of the biggest names in game design, book reviews, and a city write up, with accompanying map.
If you are unsure whether to buy Kobold Quarterly, here is your chance to try it out for free. Download it, read it, I bet you’ll like it. Navigate your way to the KQ Store and use the coupon code KQ11Gift to download it. Once you read it, be sure to come back and let me know what you think. I’d like to know if my opinion matches those of our readers.
PS – I went through a few possible titles for this post before finally writing it down. The one that actually became the title and the caption accompanying the post are just two of them. Some of the other titles were:
Have Kobold, will download!
The good, the digital and the Kobold…
Wrestling History in the making… Kobold Mania #11
Kobold Evolution…
Making NPCs come alive!
1January 26, 2011
After bashing NPCs on a previous post I think this time around I’ll show them some love. I won’t claim the advice I’m going to give is wholly original. It’s the collected wisdom of many GMs that came before me, sprinkled with my own humble experience. If you are an experience GM some of this advice may seem basic, but it’s always good to get a refresher. And besides, there are always new players discovering the game and we hope some of them will stick around and become GMs, so I hope this is of use at least to them!
Wikipedia has a nice succinct definition of what NPCs are, so here it is! As I’ve said before, NPCs are what makes the world around your NPCs come alive. They populate the setting, sell goods, give hints, become romantic interests, captives and meat shields (all on one session!) and are the GMs best friend. If you make them believable and unique, your players will never forget them. There are numerous GM advice books, columns and blog posts that talk about NPCs so make sure you search them out. This is just what works for me.
1. Don’t overdo it! – That’s the first thing you need to internalize. Not every NPC will be memorable or recurring. There will be plenty or bartenders, innkeepers, space station customs officer and police detectives the players will never meet again. You don’t need to flesh out each and every one of them. Stating up every last NPC the PCs meet is a sure way to GM burnout. Know what role they will play and give each one something unique, an accent, a facial tick, describe some detail (Are they slovenly? Missing teeth?) unless they are simply a throw away name (“You go into Benny’s shop and get the supplies, let’s go…), in which case a name will suffice.
Even important NPCs and some minor antagonists don’t need to have full write ups. Most games have sample NPCS of varying levels or creature stats, it’s a simple matter of using those stats and simply describing their effect differently. Need the bodyguard of a noble to roll a save? Looks for the stats of the city guard captain and use that value. The PCs are fighting some militia members in a hostile planet, use the statistics for the alien enemies, and just describe them as the militia members. The wonders of re-skinning! Only work on the most crucial NPCs, the main antagonists, and you will save a lot of time.
Letting go of that NPC
3January 24, 2011
Attention: Slight rambling ahead, with a point to make about RPGs somewhere in there, you have been warned!
I recently finished reading the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (that’s the girl with the dragon tattoo, which then played with fire and ended up kicking the hornet’s nest). And in case you are wondering, yes I do read other stuff that is not RPG related. The novels are a satisfying, if little long, suspenseful page turner with an implausible plot. I’ve heard so many people say they were captured by the plot from the very beginning, but I was not. If I had not been reading the book for a book club I probably would have never gotten through the first hundred pages of first novel. After that threshold the book really became engrossing. On the third book I had a similar experience; it did not take off for me after page 113. What about book two? Well let’s just say I only got through it to get to book three!
In all honesty I am being a little facetious, the books are fun an entertaining. Not classics but better than a lot of other stuff out there. After finishing the third book and preparing for the upcoming book club meeting I began reflecting on the novel and realized that one of the reasons I enjoyed the 3rd one so much was because so much of the book had to do with secondary characters. The parts I enjoyed the most had NOTHING to do with the protagonists. In a way that’s a compliment on the author who managed to make secondary characters so memorable, but it’s really sad that by the end of the trilogy I had come to despise the main characters so much.
All this thinking made me ponder the characters we as Game Masters create to populate our games and ended up being a reflection on Non-Player Characters.
Interested? Read on…
Fortune Cards, my two cents…
6January 11, 2011
There’s been a storm in the Twitterverse and the Blogosphere, a storm of FORTUNE! (Fate would have sounded much cooler, thanks designers at WotC for ruining my opening line; you are the cause of all evil!) Well that does seem a little bit extreme, but I had NO idea what the D&D Fortune Cards until I started reading tweets about them. So I went to the Internet to find out what they were and found this.
I don’t play D&D 4th edition anymore and have only marginally kept up with the newest incarnation of Gamma World where similar cards seem to come from. I try not to write about D&D much since I don’t play, and my last rant on 4th edition was a little angry. So I’ll follow Newbie DMs advice oven on Twitter and take a deep breath.
The thing is, I don’t think the idea of the Fortune Cards is bad per se. I recently wrote a post about Paizo’s Plot Twist Cards and the use of that sort of tools in the game. From what I read, and the two samples posted in the webpage, Fortune Cards are aimed at enhancing combat. I think circumscribing them to just combat is a missed opportunity. Other similar tools like the Plot Twist Cards, the Swashbuckling Cards, or the old TORG Drama Deck, are designed to enhance combat and role-playing, they engage the player in the storytelling.
Making the cards combat oriented also reinforces the view that D&D is a combat game and not a true role-playing game. I don’t agree with that statement, you can role-play with any rule system, even a combat heavy one. And besides I think they are gearing their product to their target audience, obviously if you are playing D&D 4th edition you enjoy the way the game is nowadays. Will the idea of Fortune Cards slow down combat? I have no way of knowing, but from using similar products I don’t believe they would be a major complication to players used to the system.
Which brings me to another point Newbie DM made that I agree with (and I paraphrase here) Wizard of the Coast produces D&D to make money, just like all other game companies, and they have the right to make money of their products as best they see fit. I recently read a column by Javier Grillo-Marxuach on his year without Star Wars which only tangentially has to do with what I’m writing about (and happens to be a great read), but makes the point that as attached as we might be to something the owner/creator can do with it as they please. We have NO say about WotC does with D&D; all we can do is play the games we like and support the companies that produce the games we enjoy.
Having said all that (and can you believe all that was a disclaimer so I could finally rant!) I think there is one thing WotC may be doing wrong. Well two… First of all making the cards collectible, i.e. random, and having different levels of rarity. I guess there must be some crossover market between role-players and collectible card gamers, but I don’t think every single D&D player is a CCG collector or vice versa. I’ve played the collectible game before, with CCG in the distant past and with the D&D miniatures recently. With the minis at first I did not mind, heck copies of extra minis just expanded my collection, but it came to a point where I could no longer rationalize getting 10 pig carrying peasants searching for a beholder, so I gave up.
From the echoes out there in the Internet I gather many D&D fans are not too keen on the collectible aspect, of the miniatures in the past and the upcoming Fortune Cards. WotC must have other data; after all they are still in the CCG business. But they did drop the completely random minis and tried another strategy, which apparently did not work as well either. Still the collectible Fortune Cards are a smaller investment, is not a requisite for playing and they believe it can enhance a players enjoyment so more power to them if they can sell it to the fans.
The one thing that did bother me was this quote from the Fortune Cards page: “For some Wizards Play Network programs aimed at experienced players, Fortune Card purchase will be a requirement to participate, but our broadly-appealing programs like D&D Encounters will feature their use without such a requirement.” How will dealing with random Fortune Cards challenge experienced role-players? I can understand this for CCG, but for an RPG? It just seems to be a way to make a quick buck, the cost of playing built into the buying of cards. Again they have the right to make money, but the rationale here, without further information on how it will works seems strange.
Still I don’t think the current economic environment supports this type of strategy. I can understand the need for a company to create a revenue stream and find new ways to sell their merchandise, but I believe the RPG market is better served by quality products, exciting rules and new ideas, not bells and whistles. I can’t wish them ill, I agree with the idea that a healthy D&D brand is good for the RPG business, that may be changing, but so many still associate D&D with RPGs in general that I hope them all the best.
But what do I know… I can’t blame them for trying to try new things, they want to entice new players to try out the game and I know that younger gamers may have different expectations. What do I know I’m just a grognard.
That’s my opinion, your may be different, and I would sure love to hear it!
PS – A big thanks to Newbie DM, I learned of the Fortune Cards from his tweets and he made some excellent points, even if I don’t agree with all of them. ¡Gracias!
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