The Logbook Project: Actual Play

Showing posts with label Actual Play. Show all posts

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Go Play NW 2015 Wrap-up

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Avatar World v1.61 Release!

I love the Hunger Games movies. Mockingjay Pt 1 was no exception.

Long time no see! Busy things happening. I have the LPA cover image still in progress, I'm working on the layout of the the new tSV draft. I've started an Avatar World long-form game locally, which means I'm now in the home stretch of the AvW design history. When this long-form wraps up I will likely go into final revision mode and finish it for good.
If you are interested in keeping up with my long-form game, I do regular reports on my session through Twitter and later Storify them. Here's the page for my AvW game, which I play Monday night and usually have updated by Tuesday night. https://storify.com/Logbook_Project/avatar-world-season-1

I recently (as in tonight) finished watching the last episode of Korra. I am stunned at the quality in the last two seasons. Seriously, they're amazing. Season 3 especially was just full of duels between bending masters, rather than the political games that filled the other seasons. The creativity with the bending powers and the expansion of what can be done is extraordinary.

Two things that became prominent in seasons 2 and 3 are now sub-playbooks, the Lavabender and the Spirit Medium. Those are the prominent additions in this release (hence why it is only a .01 advancement and not a full decimal), with other mild typography fixes as well.

Latest Version (v1.61) Download:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE GAME AS A ZIPPED ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE GAME'S FILES INDIVIDUALLY

I swear the other stuff won't take as long as the gap from the previous post until now.

Also, I've put up a Donate button on the right side of the page. Given that I can never charge for a download of Avatar World, if you get some enjoyment out of the game please consider making a donation, I've put a lot of hard work into this game. Thank you, and see you again soon!

End Recording,

Ego.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Actual Play: Monsterhearts Season 3

I have a pile of Halon songs that focused me for the game. This was a relatively late addition, but it's really appropriate to the character this season. Desperate, faithful, loving, pretty much Halon's defining features, minus a huge stash of buried anger.

If you pay any attention to my Twitter you know that I've been in a long-form game of Monsterhearts for, um, maybe six months now? A bit more? We've just wrapped up Season 3.
This season I've been keeping quite pretty good records of the sessions after each session on Twitter. Now that the season's over, I put it all together in case you were interested in an entire story. I'm really connected to these characters, so I hope you enjoy it.

https://storify.com/Logbook_Project/monsterhearts-season-3

If you're looking for more content stuff, I'm currently concentrating on LPA and tSV. I think I'll have a tSV post to share soon.

To Halon and Lilith!

End Recording,

Ego.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

PAX and Avatar World

So I was at PAX a week ago-ish and have been delaying my writeup, but here it is.

It was great! Let's hit the not-Games-on-Demand stuff first. I didn't play many video games that really caught my eye, but Miegakure (http://miegakure.com/) is a really bafflingly cool 4D puzzle platformer thing. Yeah, four dimensions. If that sounds bizarre to you, check out the site.
There was other cool stuff, but not much stood out.

Outside of Games on Demand (the volunteer service I was with to get my pass where I take a shift running games for a bunch of strangers who want to play a thing I am offering), I also played a co-op deckbuilding called Shadow Rift. It was pretty cool, but really needed a playmat or more diagrams or something to get it set up. I would totally play it again though.

Games on Demand:
So before I jump into the big triple feature Avatar World, my two other games I played at GoD.
~ I ran The Quiet Year for Ben, Dave, and Diana. I'd seen Dave before (I think he works with Gamma Ray), and Diana was around GoD with her husband a bunch of times through the weekend which was cool.

~ I played Monsterdraft, by Johnzo (aka John Aegard), with Ross and Robert and John himself. It's his new hyper-alpha thing that's a cool hex-crawl exploration game, meant not to craft a strong story experience but instead being a creativity-driven exploring game featuring monsters. He made this crazy cool oracle thing for generating ideas for both the environment of a hex as well as its denizens, and we drafted up a few elements from a couple decks that basically added up to (mechanically) a Lady Blackbird character. Creative stuff, but rough. Ross and Robert had just been at Twyla's Playtesting With Rigor panel, so they gave some pretty great feedback.

Okay, to the main event: I played a lot of Avatar World. Saturday evening, my first shift, I had out both of my sheets, for Monsterhearts and for Avatar World. After a little bit I had a signup for Avatar World, so I dropped the MH and waited for other players (and pitched aggressively). I got a lot of interested "wow, Avatar World? Is that what I think it is?" and "Is this running later this weekend at all?" which was nice. Even more surprising is that a lot of the interested parties actually came back to look a second time later in the weekend! I gave away a bunch of cards with the game's address.
Some of this had to do with THIS:

Drew printed and bound me two copies of the game. It's gorgeous - the pics don't do the material of the paper justice. I'm so crazy happy with it. <3 br="" drew="">

Within maybe a half hour, we kicked off with a three person group. We had Alex (another Games on Demand volunteer), Manu (another GoD, and fellow game designer - I played Finding Haven with him at GPNW and was a voice in his Cry of the Wilders), and Andrew (stranger). Everyone kicked ass. I offered both of my premises, the Red Mountain and the Festival of the Four. From my pitches they picked The Red Mountain, so this didn't get to be the test of the new premise.
Alex was The Earthbender, Andrew was The Waterbender, Manu was The Warrior. I had a really cool Sel this time, he was this Asian-inspired serpent dragon, blood-red scales and teeth and eyes of void, his true size masked by the Gate. Every time he needed to be more imposing, yet more of his body slithered out of the gate. He was coiled above them, towering and terrifying. They defeated the corrupt Master of the Monastery and his spirit tiger. We had what was essentially a puzzle fight (though I didn't enforce it that way), and it felt really cool. I played some games with them about when they should have their lights on and off.
Everyone felt really satisfied with all of the choices available to them, both in playbooks and moves. All the Basic Moves had play, including Act Dishonorably, which has proven a bit of a black sheep. All my adjustments, especially player Tags instead of harm, worked great.

~ Sunday evening I didn't even bother putting out my Monsterhearts sheet, I pulled it off the table immediately. I wanted to play Avatar World. And it took a little time but not very long to gather together Noah (stranger), Orion (fellow GoD and regular gaming buddy), Jeremy (Orion's brother, also a GoD and regular gaming buddy), and Alex again! It's super exciting to me that I got a repeat player two days in a row, and another GoD to boot. Orion's played before as well, at ECCC.
Because I'd used my Red Mountain sheets, I offered both but established that I'd prefer to play Festival of the Four, especially since Alex had already played the other. Also I wanted to test my new thing :/
It went great! The things I built it to do (be more lighthearted, more social-based, with lots of seeds) all worked the way I wanted it to. Noah was on the Aristocrat (worked so so much better now that Speak Honorably can Tag), Orion was ten-year-old Firebender orphan Fenfang, Jeremy was the Warrior, and Alex was the Waterbender this time.
This time the airbenders actually were responsible for earthbenders' disappearance. Everything was good.

~ Monday morning I walked up to the table at 10am and watched the host put down my AvW sheet, and 30 seconds later I had a full 4-player game with a fifth asking if I'd be capable of handling one more. I said sure - five isn't ideal because of the more distributed spotlight, but these cons are the time to get as many folks seeing the game as I can handle. It was Tim (fellow GoD), Ed Turner (fellow GoD, designer of games), Aaron (fellow GoD), Daniel (stranger), and Michael (stranger). Tim was the late addition btw.
I had a bit of an issue that I'd run out of a couple of the playbooks (I was going to print out a couple more at Kinkos, but forgot that it was Labor Day), so I erased Genki and Panaku from my first game and cleared off the Festival of the Four sheets after asking them to pick a premise. Tim was more interested in social stuff than the combat, so Fot4 (FotF? I haven't decided which abbreviation I like more) was more fitting. We had an Earthbender (Daniel), an Airbender (Michael), a Scholar (Ed), a Waterbender (Tim), and an Aristocrat (Aaron), meaning only the Monk wasn't played over the weekend. We also had some cool age ranges with the characters, with two 40-50 year old characters and two 16-18 year olds in this game, which is cool to see alongside the 10 year old in the previous game.
This time the firebenders and a corrupt fake-guard-force were responsible for the Earthbenders, and they were rescued!

Basically everything went great. I see no rules changes to make. I saw a bunch of typos and stuff I'll get to fixing, but I saw nothing that needed me to rewrite the game again. Everyone was super supportive of the art, even before learning that I did it all myself, which is a GREAT feeling cuz some of it I worked really hard on.
I'm already looking forward to running the game in the future, and when I do cons in the future I think I'll put my GoD games as AvW and tSV. That's the next one that needs field testing once I do the next revision.
I hope to play more soon. Also I have posting plans for a thing pretty soon so look out for that. (also I started classes again today so we'll see how fast that actually happen)
End Recording,
Ego.

Monday, June 30, 2014

Post-Go Play Northwest Post

Souleye and his VVVVVV soundtrack redone by FamilyJules7x? Count me in, forever. This is a really kickass album.

Hey there! Everything was amazing. The three best days in gaming. I love you all, Go Players. Sorry that I couldn't see the few people who were held up by sickness or timing - I hope to catch up with you soon! This includes Gary M, Johnzo, Jess, Ogre, and anyone else I couldn't see this weekend.

This weekend was a lot of work. I'm not a social person, and dense interaction is a really draining experience, but after a relatively solitary first-year experience at GPNW I try to push myself to my social limits now. Decided to step it up this year by not just spending my time with people the whole time but by trying to reach out and meet all the new people I didn't know, especially those who looked on their own or like new first-years. This meant a lot of "Hey, I don't think we've met, I'm Max, what's you name?" and "Do you want some company?" and "So what've you been playing?" and if you know me, stuff like that is basically my weak spot. But it payed off, and at least one of the people I introduced myself to I ended up hanging out with most of the weekend. New friends!

But you're reading here to figure out what I played, right? Let's break it down.

Robert ran Monsterhearts on Friday. Friday feels really far away - Jeremy Tidwell played with us, but I don't remember the last player's name (which I still feels quite ashamed about)! I was a Mortal, and the others were a Cuckoo and a Selkie. I was in love with the Cuckoo, and he was truly sociopathic. It was awful for all the characters. Oddly enough, each character came to the end of their arc by the end of the session - the Selkie got her pelt at the very end and was scared off of land living and turned away from humans entirely, I finally went through enough to break free of the Cuckoo, and the Cuckoo found out who his father was: completely ordinary, and he was left with no answers for all his hatred and manipulation. I liked the Mortal - I'll definitely play one again.

Saturday morning was Spirits of the Wild. SotW is Orion Canning's Game Chef game, which was a game only in the loosest of terms. It took the form of a video, showing words that were spraypainted onto a tunnel wall with glow-in-the-dark paint, which is really really cool but not a great means of communicating how to play. I played with Matthew Sullivan-Barrett, Julia, Karen, and of course Orion.
HERE'S THE VIDEO
We did a lot of conversation about how to interpret that as a game, and came up with each starting with a phrase of our existing understanding of the Dark Future and then went around the con building (which was a five floor tower, which is an awesome environment for this sort of thing) taping up drawings of our current understanding of things trying to communicate them with no words at all. Others find them and try to interpret them in light of their own understanding of the Dark Future, and then try to communicate that new understanding through more pictures. We don't know which pictures are from who, or how old any given picture might be, so it made it pretty interesting. I got really into the cave painting-esque style of things. Common motifs were gender disharmony, transformation into monstrousness, bleeding hearts, and clocks. We then all met and shared what we came up with as our understanding of what happened. It was really interesting to see that we all came up with different things that definitely held elements of each others' initial understandings and elements, but were definitely unique depending on which drawings we actually noticed and in what order we found them.

On Saturday afternoon I ran Avatar World: The Red Mountain with a full roster. I'd made a silly mistake coming to the con - I carried my materials from my last game, but had forgotten to refresh them. As such, I had characters written on four of the sheets and no Earthbender. I also was missing the Red Mountain insert for the Waterbender though that wasn't a huge deal. I erased the old characters and didn't have any trouble with it in-game, thankfully.
The game was really good. It was also really long. Using The Red Mountain cuts down on the time issue and it still ran 4 and a half hours in a 4 hour slot. It was me running it, Joe on the Airbender, Andy on the Warrior, Kingston on the Monk, and Jay on the Aristocrat, all of which worked admirably. I had a couple of notes I made during the story's climb up the Red Mountain, surprise confrontation with a dethroned Sel, and final conflict with the Spirit Parasite Teres.
1) Harm on PCs is in the firing line. It's simply boring compared to Tags. On the other hand, Harm offers a degree of protection that narrative harm doesn't - I simply cannot kill you until I burn through all that Harm. I've not made a decision, but PC Harm is on the chopping block and the axe is in my hand.
2) This game is NOT meant for PvP, but that's absolutely what happened. I knew if I played it enough it would happen eventually, but now I know what it looks like. The imbalance between Tags and Harm is a concern, as is the extreme power of Commit Open Violence's Tags.
Kingston made mention of the possibility of requiring a certain number of Tags before something can be declared "out of the fight" but I've resisted that intentionally. It's bookkeeping, and some things really can be handled that fast. I may give players a buffer though, or maybe even an escape clause to death in the vein of Monsterhearts' going Darkest Self to avoid death.
3) Commit Open Violence's options are getting retooled. I had the seed of how to fix it and Jay solidified it, this one's a done deal. The "Deal little harm" option, which makes no sense anyway, is now "You don't impose a Tag," which also resolves a complication in the wording of the main text.
4) Joe played the Airbender a lot like a show Airbender! This sounds awesome until one discovers that the other players wound up on a slightly more serious tact because of the way the Red Mountain is set up. I'm not picking on Joe - "like the show" should be an entirely legitimate way to play an Airbender and I gave no prefacing of the tone of The Red Mountain (as I hadn't noticed it). Instead it showed me something necessary: I need to write a much sillier set of quickstart letters for a second premise that is more like the show's tone. Having both would give me a much better handling of the spectrum of ways an Avatar game could go. I don't have my seed yet, but I know I need one, and am excited to figure out what I'll be doing.

I should also mention that I'll be doing a new draft of the whole document sometime soon. Want to do some rewrites. Avatar World is getting up there!

Saturday evening I was able to be a part of a game of Anima Prime! Drew (aka Gray Pawn) was running, and our player crew was Kingston, Joe, Mike, Reagan, Tom (of Role Playing Public Radio fame) and myself. It was in Drew's setting for Anima Prime, the Ember Core, and it was really cool. It was a basic scenario called Until Death, inspired by the FFX wedding scene (which is entirely expected given Christian's love of FFX), and we were all super awesome. I was EVO, a bioaugmentation experiment subject who was used as a guinea pig for basically all new types of biomods, so when I finally broke free I quested to destroy the Helix Corporation for it. When I finally leapt into battle I'd already built up a bunch of strike dice, so when I hurtled into the doctor in charge of my experiments I shredded him to death in a single action. It was crazy. As I was the only player who'd played before I got to make my own character instead of using a mostly-completed pregen (because Drew only had 5).
Anime Prime is easily one of my favorite games. You may not get a ton of stuff done in a single session, but every single action makes you feel like you're this amazingly awesome hero.

Sunday morning I was going to skip out to go get breakfast but instead got into an ad-hoc game of Planarch Codex run by Jackson and played with Orion, Hanna(h?), and Daniel Wood. It was a really cool thing even though we basically did some roleplayed chargen and ran out of time. It was a great experience, even if there was no real rolling. I'd totally play again.

In the afternoon I played Finding Haven with Manu (it was his Game Chef game last year). I wanted to play this last year so am glad I could this year. Manu ran it for me, Julia, and Joe. We were earthbound rebels against the Demosians whose leader had been captured and taken for interrogation and Thought Therapy Re-Education. We rescued him and felt like awesome heroes doing it.
The system took some adapting to, but definitely worked. We had some feedback for modification, and all around it felt very productive and enjoyable. And since I did voice work for his Game Chef game this year (Cry of the Wilders) I got a shirt!

The last slot was Dungeon World, run by Drew. I hadn't known what I was going to do and was standing waiting for the Donut to begin when Drew pops by, asks if I'm doing anything, and when I tell him no immediately co-ops me into the game. I'm glad he did, because it was hilarious. Drew was running, and players were me, Kingston, Jay, John Powell, and John's nephew Warren. We played with original playbooks, Inverse World playbooks, and Grim World playbooks simultaneously. I'd never even seen the Grim World playbooks before! I played the Walker from Inverse World. It was definitely a bit broken, as Jay had warned the table, but I tried not to abuse it and it was really fun. The other playbooks were a Wizard, a Druid, a Channeler, and a Mecha.
It was funny how many references were stuffed into the Inverse World ones. I'm very glad Warren and his Mecha playbook both got my Gurren Lagann references. I did, however, have to check around the table if anyone knew the reference Irina was making for the Walker - they didn't, and neither did I, so that worked. I didn't want to be Croft or Ezio because that makes images in people's heads. I know now that Irina is either Irina Spalko for the Indiana Jones reference or Irina Mikitenko, a German Olympic runner and one of the best runners in the world. I was appalled that neither "Nathan" nor "Drake" was on the name list though.
The gonzo meter was kinda tipping in the entire time. That's to be expected of Sunday-03 though. So much giggly laughter.

And those were the games I played! I think I'll mention my food though - when I'm travelling, and specifically when I'm staying somewhere that is not home, I try and go to places that I haven't done before or are local specialties or are new experiences for me. I had three not-cafteria meals, and they were all great and new.
I had Vostok Russian Dumplings as dinner on Saturday with Kingston and Joe and Jay and Andy. I've never had Russian dumplings before, they were really good actually! Thank you Andy for taking us there.
I had a burger at The Lost Lake in the middle of Pride-chaos at midnight on Saturday with Avery and Jay and Joe. Thanks to Evan for pointing us there!
I had a burger at the Luna Park Cafe with Andy and Drew and Joe and Jay (I guess I ate with Jay and Joe lot!). Thank you very much Jay for suggesting it!

Thank you everyone for my best Go Play yet! I'm excited by all the excitement I felt for Avatar World and for the next time I can see you all. I'll be at PAX, and am considering both Dragonflight and GeekGirlCon (GGC is complicated - that's my birthday weekend). If anyone knows what's happening with Technicolor Dreams this year I'd love to know.

Later y'all.
End Recording,
Ego.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

ECCC: The Avatar World Playtest (and other things)

Sure, a little more Metric. Lovin' this song. It's because of the indie music bent of the series and Envy Adams' design (and the movie's song of course) but they make great music for Bryan Lee O'Malley's stuff. I'm stoked for Seconds, which will hopefully come out when he's finally done releasing the Color Editions.

So I wanted to talk about what I learned this weekend in my game of Avatar World. First, let me real quick set the stage for this.
I had three players. Jackson is a game designer and from Olympia who hasn't played Avatar World. Orion is also a designer and friend from Olympia who HAS played Avatar World once before, though that session was a bit of an anomaly (I'd been ready to play ApW that day, and the MC Robert and I both- well, mostly me I guess- kinda ended up pushing a darker style than the usual kid-friendliness of Avatar). Mark is a gamer I met at ECCC the previous night when I played Mouse Guard with him. None of them has significant experience with Avatar, basically at the premise of elemental-magic kung-fu action, which is all that's needed to play anyway. They had snippets of ideas from canon such as elements segregating into their own nations and airbenders being monk-like, but not much more. Jackson was an Airbender, Orion was an Aristocrat, and Mark was a Firebender.

The game had a political bent, with 14-year-old Princess Linmal the Aristocrat visiting the Fire Nation's (not the show country, just used the name) capital using Caes the Airbender and her friend Phil the Firebender as a bridge and local guide, respectively. What exactly happened is mostly irrelevant to my discussion today, but the central idea is that we spent the whole session in the city.

Here's the problem: Downtime exploring the city is completely outside the mechanics on its own. I found buttons where I could to give Linmal a thing to do because she felt she had a strong goal and I had an idea of where to push, a distant cousin from the branch families who was there to make sure she didn't cause trouble and was secretly there to assassinate her to take his place as heir to the Air Nation throne. The attempt didn't quite happen, which is fine but I probably should have accelerated that scene a little further.
But Linmal wasn't the problem. Caes and Phil did their own little thing that, while it felt Avatar-y, wasn't particularly engaging in mechanical terms. Phil didn't roll dice until the final encounter when they got into trouble with the Fire King. Now, there might have been opportunity and Mark got went past it (Mouse Guard the night before was the most story-game he'd done, so AvW was probably some of the most personal agency over his actions he'd experienced), but that also falls on me for poor spotlight control.

This is why I can't decide if the bulk of my issues are motivated by game issues or MC-skill issues. Among other things, one particular concept that's already in the book that I've always known but barely really understood is here:

You get to make a move whenever the players fail a roll, or when they look at you with expectation in their eyes.

I play a lot of Monsterhearts, and my other main *-world games are classic ApW and Sagas, all of which operate with the same safety net for me: the players will shove off each other very easily. In those games, I'm really more in control of situation than action, as the action is primarily powered by the characters being in conflict rather than aligned with each other. I rarely make moves without someone failing a roll because no one's really sitting around doing nothing.
Avatar World wants to be a little more like Dungeon World, where player characters might be uneasy or upset with each other but are rarely outright opposed. Personally, this is cause for concern: I'm really bad at running Dungeon World for exactly that reason. I need to be aggressive, and I'm very passive in that regard.
In looking back, I see a lot of places I could have started pushing harder, places where it was obvious that people weren't sure what to do narratively and I should have started making moves. I really feel bad about this situation in particular because this is not the first time downtime-exploring-in-the-city has shown this very problem for me - it happened in the very first game too. Its crazy - two thirds of Korra takes place in the middle of a metropolis, you'd think I could figure out how that show makes things exciting.

Another thing I want to potentially work on is some additional structure for starting up the game, forging the world and group. It took a LONG time, and the simplicity of playbooks helps but figuring out situation is hard so I'm gonna look into seeing if I can support that.

The Chi mechanic overall worked quite well! No Chi was spent on boosting moves, but it felt like a real option at least. Caes almost Improved too. However, one thing was a noticeable issue: we were running into situations where people wanted to be able to use their Chi but had no Tags available. This isn't an issue in combat, but in a talk-heavy session (we rolled Speak Honorably a LOT) it doesn't leave much room for Tags. I have four main options related to that: link Speak Honorably to the tag system, link Act Dishonorably to the tag system, confirm and emphasize Move With Intention's ability to be used as social positioning, and or weaken the requirement of Tags for the Chi system to function (which is the worst option and actually requires complicating the system further).

The flexibility of Tags combined with their binding nature was well-liked! Also, Orion basically liked all the moves the Aristocrat had to offer, though we found by the end that Mastermind might have a more interesting mechanic if it behaved a little differently ("when does it trigger, and how do I do it given that I'm not a mastermind myself" were the identified points of issue). After discussion, I'm considering a retroactive contingency thing. Orion had been torn between the aristocrat and the earthbender but chose against the EB because it had no real social-focus moves. This is not surprising to me as the earthbender continues to be a huge pain in the ass.
Jackson chose Redirection and kinda felt like the Airbender's moves were in the same boat as the MH Vampire, where only a couple moves are interesting to the point of overwhelming the others (namely Redirection and Soundbending). I mostly agree (with a caveat I'll get to in a moment), so I'll keep watching for any interesting ideas for Airbender moves.
Mark pretty quickly migrated to Sunsoul on the Firebender. In case you're not familiar with the playbook, that's the +1 Hot move. That's fine of course - it's a valid move, and I think it's helpful. EXCEPT: this is part of a trend I see in the *-World games when I play 'em with people who've never used the system before. Those +1 Stat moves are often very tempting to new players and completely ignored by folks who know how the system works - it's especially true if the player is new-ish to story games or even just plays trad games a lot too (using those words in the loosest sense). I think it's cuz the ability to be better at what you do is usually a great idea in trad games, whereas the *-world systems tend to shine brightest when you diversify your options and give yourself more opportunities to work with the mechanics, which is approximately the same reason I'm leery of stat-substitution moves (though not opposed, as I see those as significantly more useful). The +1 Stat moves are important for making the benders and the scholar really feel like the most natural, the hottest, the keenest, etc (as without those moves no one can reach a +3 stat) but I think they're not really the best thing in 1-shots. For that reason, I think when I put the playbooks on the table for a 1-shot con game or whatever I'm gonna cross out the +1 Stat moves. Besides, those are basically the least-needing of playtest feedback anyway.

So I learned a lot! Jackson and Orion talked with me some more afterward and had some good thoughts, as did Robert from his previous looks at the text (having run the game twice already).

Hey, while I'm here I might as well give the debrief on the rest of the con.
Games played:
Avatar World: Described above.
Fedora Noir: This unreleased game by Morgan Stinson is the best noir game you'll ever play. It's truly brilliant. I was The Detective, and it was so cool. Ask and I'll tell you the whole pitch. Orion was facilitating.
Mouse Guard: Played to fill a spot, this was my second experience with some variety of Burning Wheel, the other being a game of Torchbearer. BW's relatives are definitely a bit crunchy for me, and I don't know the comics, but it's cool.
Fiasco: I ran this off-menu at the drop of a hat on Sunday afternoon. Played the Tales From Suburbia playset with gamers who only had a bit of experience with Pathfinder but really wanted to see what this Fiasco thing was all about. It went really well - it moved swiftly, chaotically, satisfyingly, and with everyone getting into framing (which is the best, I love when new folks also do the framing - so often they fall back on the Resolve like a crutch).

Things Bought:

Lost At Sea is the original graphic novel by the guy who would go on to do Scott Pilgrim. It's a gorgeous book released really recently as a 10-Year Anniversary Edition. I almost got this the weekend before when I was in Portland at Powell's, but scoffed at the $25 price tag. Well, the price was the same but I'd been regretting not getting it all week so this was the one thing I came to the con knowing I would purchase.
It's still one of my absolute favorite comics ever. If you've not read it, go pick it up.

The Evil Editions of the Scott Pilgrim books are only available at cons and feature a higher price tag with the only major difference being the Evil Ex on the cover instead of one of the heroes. I don't own any other Evil Editions and had completely forgotten they even existed (as I read the comics for the first time AFTER PAX last year and haven't seen the Evils since), but the colourist was sellin' 'em and I wanted my absolute favorite one in the special edition and signed. Volume 4 is easily my favorite Scott Pilgrim book, which is in turn easily my favorite comic series (with second place going to Saga right now - I decided against buying Saga Volume 3 while there, but it was a serious consideration). Volume 4 has Lisa Miller and Knives' dad and Roxy and Scott and Ramona having troubles but getting past it and Scott actually taking the first major steps at growing up. It's my biggest issue with the movie that Scott doesn't learn anything at all and continues to be a huge dumb self-absorbed jerk (who is lovable) through the whole thing, while in the comics he actually displays, you know, growth of character. Volume 4 is where everything comes together in a perfect storm.

I've been considering getting Tony Dowler's Seattle Doomsday Map since it first came out, and I love it. It's gorgeous and smart and Tony's an awesome guy. I also got a microdungeon!

I confess: I haven't the slightest idea what to do with Avery's new thing. It's really nice feeling and sturdy and the font and text is beautiful and yet it's held together with a binder clip and I think you're supposed to color right on the pages? So can it only be used once completely? Do I photocopy it? Is there a PDF or something? I haven't read it enough to know if it's even something I would play, it's just a part of the collection. But like I said, it's a really pretty assembly thing.

These are just the autographs I got from the three webcomics folks I read on a daily basis, Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content), David Willis (Dumbing of Age, Shortpacked!), and Danielle Corsetto (Girls With Slingshots). I mostly post this image as an excuse to also talk about the crazy thing Orion did: have you ever played Broken Telephone or Exquisite Corpse or any of a dozen other names that game has? On a sheet of paper you write a description, the next person draws that thing, then you fold over the description and the next person tries to describe the picture, and the next person draws that, etc. Well, Orion went around Artist Alley on Sunday and had the actual artists playing off each other in sequence (and he had two simultaneous games going so every person did a drawing on one game and a description on the other). The end result was really funny and interesting, and there was some cool art in there. I'll post that up here on the blog too once Orion scans it in cuz it's so cool.

Anyway, I think that's it for actually getting. I photographed a ton of comics and artists I wanted to check out cuz they looked cool but couldn't buy their stuff. Some of this was just based on the covers, others were from experience with the premise. Here, if you want to know what I found interesting:
Rust by Royden Lepp.
Tale of Sand by Jim Henson.
Polarity by Max Bemis. I've already read the first volume of this one, it's pretty awesome.
The Midas Flesh by Ryan North. (WHAT? It's seriously by Ryan North?! Rad. Explains the velociraptor in a spacesuit picture I guess)
Dragon Age: The World of Thedas Volume 1 Art Book by Dark Horse. It's good, I've looked through it before.
The Last of Us Art Book by Dark Horse. Also excellent. Dark Horse makes really great art books, I own the Mass Effect one and the Assassin's Creed IV one.
EVE Source Art Book by Dark Horse. Holy shit, this looks awesome for a game that is ultimately kinda banal to me.
Dream Thief by Jan Nitz.
The Legend of Korra Art of the Animated Series Book One by Dark Horse.
Avatar The Last Airbender Art of the Animated Series by Dark Horse. Better than the Korra one even, and they're both really great.
Hinges: Book 1 Clockwork City by Meredith McClaren.
Prophet by Brandon Graham. Morgan bought the third volume and said it was a super great series.
Pax Romana by Jonathan Hickman.
The Red Wing by Jonathan Hickman.
The Manhattan Proects by Jonathan Hickman.
Red Mass For Mars by Jonathan Hickman. All these Hickman comics just had great covers.
Change by Ales Kot.
Mind the Gap by Jim McCann.
Zero Illustrations 07-09 by JM Ken Niimura.
The Activity by Nathan Edmonson.
Snapshot by Andy Diggle.
Planetoid by Ken Garing.
The Nightly News by Jonathan Hickman.
ATGO Transhuman by Jonathan Hickman.
Spontaneous by Joe Harris.
The Coldest City by Antony Johnston.
Wasteland by Antony Johnston.
Minor Acts of Heroism.
The Art of Isaac Hannaford.
Joshua Hale Fialkov.
reMind by Jason Brubaker.

If you check any of those out tell me what you think!
Later folks.
End Recording,
Ego.

Friday, January 10, 2014

Monsterhearts Actual Play: End of the Year Hiking Trip

Linkin Park is one of those go-to angsty teenager bands, which is why they get to be in my Monsterhearts playlist. Other stuff includes Ke$ha, Halestorm, and The Birthday Massacre (the difference is I actually really like those three; Linkin Park is less popular on my playlist by a lot). I don't dislike Linkin Park, I just don't care for it all that much.
Unless I'm psyching up to some Monsterhearts, in which case it's perfect. I picked Breaking the Habit because musically it's still kind of enjoyable and "habit" made me think of drugs, of which there were a lot here.
What do you use for a Monsterhearts playlist? I'm considering grabbing some Green Day to toss in there as well.

Before I get into the meat of the post, I have something to ask.
Jackson Tegu, Monsterhearts superstar who's doing the Second Skins, kickstarted last year, is a good friend of mine and of many in the Story Games community. A couple days ago, he revealed that his mother Gayle Bates has recieved her pre-diagnosis of breast cancer. As a single, self-employed woman, she's run into financial difficulty. She has basic medical, but while she's undergoing treatment can't pay for the expenses of living, including groceries and mortgage.
They've put up a GoFundMe page to ask for donations. So please, give a few dollars, anything helps - I'd be giving more if I could. She deserves it, and really needs your help.
Thanks. Now on to the actual play!

So tonight I went down to Olympia for the weekly Story Games meetup. I go pretty often, but this week I didn't take anything to run or anything. We had two main pitches out, a game of Sundered Land and a game of Monsterhearts, but the guy who was pitching Monsterhearts actually wanted to play Sundered Land, so I decided to do the MH game.

Real quick, what is Monsterhearts: Monsterhearts is a game by Joe Mcdaldno, about high schoolers who are also probably monsters. It's based on the Apocalypse World engine, but is a fairly comprehensive hack made to do action like in Buffy, Vampire Diaries, Twilight, and the rest of the high school sex and monsters genre. Each player picks a Skin, which is a playbook (read: self-contained character sheet formatted as a series of choices from lists) of a type of monster. The trick is that each type of monster is really a metaphor for some kind of facet of being a teenager - the Ghoul is about obsession, the Infernal is about addiction, the Fae is about promises, the Werewolf is about anger management, etc.
It's a great game. I run and play it all the time, and wrote a Skin for it myself called the Doppleganger.

Alright, back to tonight. I didn't need to to do any real explaining during character creation because all three of my players are Monsterhearts veterans (Morgan, Becca, Henry).
We had:

Rowen the Selkie, played by Morgan! Unlike most Selkies, Rowen doesn't turn into a seal when he puts on his pelt - he's an otter instead! He has mussed hair and deep eyes, and was enticed from the sea by art, specifically electronica/EDM as well as the rave scene in general. Also unlike most Selkies Rowen is a dude. I don't know why people always play the Selkie as female, but this is my first male selkie in about a half-dozen total selkies I've been in games with. Rowen had Hot 0 (highlighted), Cold 1 (highlighted), Volatile -1, and Dark 1, and took the move Catch of the Day. He wore a black coat with fur around the neck (fluorescent-colored, as the raver nature demands), and industry-quality headphones around his neck and all that jazz. His pelt isn't, like, a literal otter pelt (that's pretty tiny...) but is like an otter-fur hat. Like a coonskin hat, but made of otter fur. From what I understand, otter fur is totally bristly, I can't imagine it's very comfortable.
Also, as a raver, Rowen is kind of an ecstasy junkie.

Robin the Mortal, played by Henry! Robin is 'displaced' and has 'human eyes,' and is your barista. Robin is displaced because of the way her family pairs off - there's her parents, and her mostly-identical but technically-fraternal twin brother and sister, Frank and Frank (technically Francis and Francisca; her parents are huge trolls apparently), who are like one year under her. She had Hot 2 (highlighted), Cold -1, Volatile -1, and Dark 1 (highlighted). The moves Henry chose were Excuses Are My Armour and Down the Rabbit Hole. Robin is fairly regular looking, and is a huge math nerd. Not really in that totally uncool nerdy mold, she just found what she really loves doing. Her lover is Rowen! Gosh, that doesn't go well at all... As we discover through the game, Robin doesn't really have morals, just her own set of rules of things she should and should not do, and that list is a bit malleable.

Emilie the Vampire, played by Becca! With hungry eyes and a predatory nature, she was taken this century, specifically in the 80s, which she never really left. She's been feeding on teenagers all these years, and drinking down all that hormone-laden blood has kinda prevented her from mentally getting past the high school level. She's totally goth-y, weird, with this hoodie she wears to keep the sun off of her. She can stand the sun for a couple minutes, but after about a half hour she'd be bursting out in blisters and stuff. She's vulnerable to crosses and can't enter places uninvited, but managed to get over the running-water thing. She had Hot 2 (highlighted - yup, everyone's Hot tonight!), Cold 1, Volatile -1 (highlighted), Dark -1, with the moves Invited and The Feeding.

Robin and Emilie are kind of friends, and Robin once saved Emilie's (un)life. Rowen and Robin are lovers, which means that Rowen is Robin's obsession (as that's the mortal's schtick). Rowen once watched Robin swimming while in otter form and wasn't recognized. Emilie, well, she knows what Rowen is and stole his pelt! And she wears it, in public, just to spite him. We learn what she wants very early on.

Now, tonight's game took on a bit of a different premise from the usual Monsterhearts one-shot. I didn't feel like doing the usual school thing, and I'd seen Jackson Tegu mention one of his Skeletons (pre-built not-the-usual-school-things) in the latest update of the Second Skins kickstarter: End of the year hiking trip. I liked that so I just ran with it, even though I didn't actually have the Skeleton or anything, I just stole the premise. So this was a big hiking trip by a large amount of the schools to the approximately-the-coast of northern British Columbia, Canada. My seating chart was two rows of tents (one male one female) across from each other, four tents per row, two people per most tents. We only named a few NPCs though.
On the guy side, we had a tent from Rowen and Frank (Robin's brother, who is an ecstasy dealer - Rowen's dealer, in fact!), and Davide (pronounced dah-vid-ay) and Samuel. Davide is a stoner, and Samuel is a goth (with the trenchcoat and fedora thing goin' on) who Emilie finds cute in a real way, not necessarily in an I-want-to-devour-your-blood way.
On the girl side, we had Emilie and Carey, a ditzy blonde. You know, the sort who asks where they can plug in their hair dryer while on a a hiking trip. She's annoying. Another tent had Deirdre (a total gossiper) and Frankie (which, for purposes of this AP, is how I'm going to refer to Frank-the-girl). In between those two tents was Robin, who had a tent to herself.
Down at the end was Mr. Tona (Toh-nah), an older tenured teacher who is not a very good chaperone at all. So basically the kids love him, because he just goes to bed and leaves them be.

The whole game took place starting at 9:00pm, with Mr. Tona already asleep, as well as some of the other kids. Rowen went over to Robin's tent, which he could still see light in, expecting that she was up waiting for him. It wasn't the case, as he popped in and tried to Turn Her On and failed right away - she was studying her math textbook and was under the impression that he'd come to get some help with the math stuff. He stayed for a little bit but left fairly quick.
On the way out, Rowen noticed Emilie sitting over at the fire built between the two rows of tents, wearing his pelt. As he approached she rapidly pulled up her hood snugly around her head so he couldn't grab it, and Rowen demanded she give it back. She told him that they'd talk about it if maybe when Rowen and the Franks and Davide went out into the woods later if he could convince Samuel to come too, and bring her along as well. Rowen agreed.
Rowen went over to Davide and Samuel's tent to let Davide know they were going soon, and invited Samuel. Samuel asked if Frankie was gonna be there, which Rowen confirmed. The group left.

While they were organizing things Robin came out and sat by the fire, just staring into it and thinking about Rowen and kinda upset about how he just left and stuff. She Gazed Into The Abyss, and as the flames crackled, the brighter sparks and the shadows of the wood and the licks of the flames started to paint images in the fire - images of Frank and Frankie and Davide and Samuel walking into the forest, and Rowen walking into the forest, pulling Emilie along by the hand, smiling. (the roll was a failure, I was sowing seeds of distrust that didn't exist) When Robin finally blinked out of her reverie, the group was already gone.

The group had been in the woods for a bit and had gotten to this waterfalls area, where they were taking their E and feeling the high. Despite it having no effect, Emilie took a bunch anyway to fit in before Rowen pulled her aside, demanding that now she had to give back the pelt. Nope! Emilie refused, telling him first to get Frankie out of the way, who Samuel was chatting up. Rowen protested, but Emilie stood firm.

Robin snuck into Emilie's tent while Carey was over with Deirdre and rifled through her stuff. She found all sorts of fun things, like some old music, and this small vial full of red liquid, and a yearbook from many years ago with Emilie's picture in it. Getting a decent picture, but in a bit of a panic / rage, she took the yearbook and tossed it into the fire. She kept the blood with her.
Robin got together with Carey and Deirdre, suggesting they take their own walk into the woods. As a motive? "I hear they're talking about all sorts of stuff out there in the woods... don't you want to know what?" which Deirdre fell all over. Carey's kind of a follower, so she just went along.

To get Frankie out of the picture, Rowen went and pulled both of the Franks away, along with Davide, to go ditch these newcomers and get really high out a bit further, which they were cool with - Samuel may have wanted Frankie, but the feeling wasn't really mutual. Thanks to a successful Turn On attempt by Emilie, Samuel and them were all over each other once the others were gone, during which Emilie fed on Samuel. Not lethally, though Samuel fell unconscious.
Emilie was pulling away, blood all over her mouth with an unconscious Samuel on the ground, when Robin and the girls showed up. Carey and Deirdre immediately screamed - anyone looking could see a bunch more flashlight beams lighting up back near where camp was: the authorities were on their way. Emilie (who already didn't like Carey) grabbed her to try to get her to stop screaming - Lash Out Physically, fail. She grabbed her all right, but with the amped-up power of post-feeding, she knocked over Carey, who stumbled and fell back, cracking her head on a rock. Deirdre was screaming even louder, and Robin had drawn the pocket knife she'd grabbed from Frankie's stuff. Robin threw the knife at Emilie, but she's a bad shot and it landed wedged between a couple of rocks near the river. Davide came out toward the action (the Franks and Rowen behind him, having returned at hearing the screams) and Davide is one of those people who just passes out at the sight of blood, so he just conks out upon seeing Carey - conks out and falls leg-first onto the knife. This whole thing is getting out of control, and Rowen tries to Run Away with Robin, and, uh, fucks up. Again. (seriously, we had more failures than successes, and maybe only two 10+s maximum) Oh, Rowen got away, but instead of grabbing Robin, he grabbed Emilie, and they ran. It takes Rowen a bit to realize his mistake.

Trying to clean up the sudden huge mess, Robin got with her siblings (who were trying to figure out how to help Davide) and explained her plan. Their story was that Deirdre got super high but had a bad trip and freaked out. To explain her fingerprints on the knife, Robin pulled the knife out of Davide and put pressure on the wound while Frank went over and offered Deirdre something that would "help her deal with this whole situation."
That's when the teachers showed up.

Out in the woods, Rowen finally realized his mistake and stopped. He demanded once more that Emilie return the pelt, and she again refused. This time though, Rowen made her agree to give it to Robin to hold on to, ensuring that Emilie held up her end this time. They were about to head back when it dawned on them that they couldn't see the lights of the teachers or the smoke of the campfire. They were lost, deep in the woods.

And that's the game! We wrapped there. A little earlier than usual, but we'd definitely struck the climax.

It was a great game! Super fun. Tons of drama everywhere, along with a lot of incompetence (and a bit of overcompetence!). For creating a very small number of NPCs, just about everyone was important and tied together, and there were some great triangles. The woods made for a really interesting change of pace, and we talked about how doing a series of games as the 7 days of camp, or maybe the events of a couple years of camp could be really interesting. I definitely want to do more with unconventional premises for the students.
On a personal note, I was stumped one time with coming up with a hard move (actually, coming up with a 7-9 for Manipulate an NPC - I suppose I should mention that we were using an altered version of the basic moves), but only once. Some of my other hard moves felt really nice - killing Carey was pretty vicious, as was taking Emilie into the woods instead of Robin, and I think the fire-gazing would have great pay-off in a longer term situation, especially given Rowen running off with Emilie instead. He'll say it was an accident, but would she believe him...? (probably, she's the Mortal after all).

A good, tight, satisfying Monsterhearts game. I feel great, especially given that I hadn't planned to do it and wasn't all the way psyched into the right mindset for the first few minutes. Doing the unconventional thing really helped alleviate that.

Anyway, this wasn't going to be my post today, but I couldn't help but write it up. The other post I was gonna do will come soon.
End Recording,
Ego.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Avatar World: The First Three Playtests

Been enjoying The Eevee EP. Especially this song.

Well, I'm aware I've been very light on the posting these past couple weeks. Sorry. about that. Figured I kinda owed you an explanation.

1) First and foremost, I'm in school again. It is managing to devour my time.
2) I'm convention-going for past little bit. I did PAX, and I was just at Technicolor Dreams, and I had the Gamerati Game Day two weeks before that. Those dominate my weekends, and my weekends are when I actually have a chance to do good work. It's been doing a good job supplying Actual Play fuel, but I've been having trouble bringing myself to actually write it.
3) I, you know, finished Avatar World for the moment. I've been playing, but not much to talk about here aside from what I'm bringing with me today.
4) The Old World, which has not been officially discussed here, will continue to not be discussed here until I have more.
5) Superlite Heroes! got a PDF on S-G but it's still kind of a flawed game. It's also just a side-thing, not working on it heavily.
6) I don't even know if I've mentioned the Mass Effect ApW hack work. Inspired directly by JasonT's S-G thread and half-built as just a pile of inspiration material, it's made a fun distraction. I should talk about that some time. If you're interested right now, I post about it on Twitter regularly. I've written, uh, all but one of the basic moves, and I'll probably make a real post when I have the last one.
7) I've been playing some video games, but nothing that has been at all worth talking about at length. I have more game design philosophizing half-done, but no complete thoughts.
Heck, that's the real trend here: lots of thoughts, none of them complete. Hopefully I can finish something up soon.

Alright, to Avatar World. If you read S-G, you saw this already.
I haven't written new material as I wanted to do a couple of playtests to see how things were working, what I liked, what I didn't. I've now played three games with this ruleset. The first game, at PAX, I detailed above, and it exposed a number of things I didn't feel great about, but that was tempered by an unease with how I was running it as well. We had all four benders played.
I wasn't able to play on the day I released it, but the following week I played in a game that someone else ran. I was The Aristocrat, and we also had a Waterbender and a Scholar (who was fairly monkish). It was excellent. Lots of really cool scenery and drama. I would totally watch this show.
I played again at Technicolor Dreams on Saturday. I ran the game for two people; fewer than I recommend, but it worked better than I would have expected. For this game, I ran the con scenario in the love letters, The Red Mountain. It was awesome. I know I set up The Red Mountain to highlight what I like personally, but I think they felt it pretty excellent too. This one was more movie-style, and definitely ended concretely. We had a Scholar and an Earthbender, and the Scholar basically ended up becoming the Owl from the episode The Library (library included!), and the Earthbender was given the power of dragons to forever watch over the gate, with Sel banished. It was cool with some great encounters, and some definite dramatic stuff. I would totally run the game with the scenario again. I also felt much better about the way we ran the game. It's easier to bind two characters together in a group than four, but I think it wouldn't have been too hard even with more.

So what did I learn about the rules? Well, here's the biggest things: Managing Chi feels a tad fiddly, especially any MC chi. Tags are significantly uncommon and only keying the Chi off of them makes it a rare thing. Reorganizing that system is top priority. An idea tossed around after the first game and tossed around to a much larger degree after the second game (they shared a person, Robert was a player in the first and ran the second) was the idea of bringing in a larger role for the Chakras. Specifically, people were interested in the idea of the Chakras in play butting up against each other, not in an antagonistic way but in that bickering way, were people get upset with each other and stay angry for a bit but then reconcile, which was more or less a constant thing in the show.
I need to re-write oaths. The general system feels decent; but the specific oaths need fine-tuning to more properly set-up a dramatic situation with good relations. Some parts need more structure, some just need more focused stuff.
So far, the most popular playbooks are the Scholar (2 games, both times the reading type), the Waterbender, and the Earthbender.
The Waterbender was generally fine, but I think I ought to redraw the actual playbook layout a bit on the moves sheet to make the Water pool very clear.
The Scholar was also generally fine, with both players choosing the Large Book For Bludgeoning and being really creative with it, which is awesome. I'd make it the only option, but it can add some silliness to the game, and not necessarily everyone who wants to play a scholar wants to be silly. (plus the inventor-type wouldn't have as obvious a reason for the book). The thing that popped out at me about the Scholar was that I had to manually explain the idea of "Always Prepared" to both people, so I'm gonna go in and see if I can't streamline the phrasing any.
The Earthbender worked great, with the existing issue that Earthbending (the move) isn't always a great supporter of the player in returning the result to the fiction, mostly because Earthbending is so broad in scope. I'm considering narrowing it, and leaning hard on the idea that bending moves don't always trigger when you just bend element, sometimes the thing you're doing is more like one of the basic moves. That's a potential direction, we'll see if I actually make anything of that.

All in all, I'm unbelievably happy so far. Nothing has mechanically cracked and shattered in play, I don't seem to have any gaping holes, and play is fun and exciting. Robert seemed to not have any obvious trouble running it, or at least none he brought up, but he's also a very experienced MC. I'm just really excited about how everything has been going. If anyone is interested in doing a game over G+ or something, I'd be up for running a round sometime. Otherwise, let me know if you play it yourself, or find me at cons - I can't say no to running the game

End Recording,
Ego.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Gamerati: The Absurdity of 11-Player Drop-In Drop-Out Lasers & Feelings

This was one of the ending songs in Psycho Pass, though I've heard it also was used in Guilty Crown. It is a good song, though it is also a very anime song.

This image probably best sums up the casual-ness of this session.

I'm on the right, in the hat, mostly obscured. This is about 2/3 of the people we had participate over the course of things. But gaming on couches, rolling dice on a cushion-y ottoman, lounging about.

So yesterday was the Gamerati Game Day @ PLU. Things weren't perfect as far as getting games together worked; rooms were split up, RPG'ers were at the far back, etc. I ended up playing in a pair of the 13th Age games Ash ran, which were decent, and basically what I expected of 13th Age. I try to push my narrative angle as far as possible (and I think I was pretty funny with my dialogue in the latter game, given that I was mind-blowingly incompetent, which was only a little bit my fault). My first game I was a Wood Elf Ranger named Stalista who was born under the Sacred Tree on the night of the blue moon and was thus granted the ability to commune with, and at times control, plants. The second game, I was Arrran (yup, three Rs), a Dwarf Cleric of Sorpoth, the Lord of Wealth, who had given me crackled stony skin and liquid ruby for blood. He was, uh, unduly violent (but didn't believe it) and excessively incompetent (which was, of course, "never his fault"). After all, he'd held the line alone against an orc horde, and slain Narmac the Red Terror of the Diabolist's personal guard - with accomplishments like those, how could he possibly be THIS incapable?

But I'm not here to talk about 13th Age. I'm here to talk about Lasers. I'm also here to talk about Feelings. I just might be here to talk about what happens when you put the two together in a new one-page RPG released by John Harper at PAX as a tribute to The Doubleclicks and to space adventure media like Star Trek and Farscape.

It was possibly the craziest thing I've ever tried to run. Not by virtue of the game's rules; that was very VERY easy to understand and use. No, my attempted structure was the most absurd thing. I certainly didn't think I'd be doing it.

So here's the setup: I didn't come to the day planning to run L&F. I wasn't even planning to offer it. But I was setting my potential games on the table when I noticed I still had it in my binder (which I'd brought to PAX) so I took it out just to read it while I wait. That's when Joe England walked by and was all excited by it and wanted to play it, so I took it out and started looking for players.

This might surprise you, but at a day featuring wargamers, Pathfinder players, and Magic the Gathering, pitching a game called Lasers & Feelings was less than successful. Around 6pm, we camped out a spot up front where the registration tables had been, and Ed and Joe and I recruited one more. And we started making characters!
That sounds normal-ish, right? Well, we'd finished character creation in a fit in giggling because our character concepts were awesome (Binary Tangent the holographic android doctor with a number of 2, meaning it sucked at Lasers aka tech stuff, which is pretty required for a doctor to do actual medicine, and Blaster Wolf, about who I had several hilarious Metal Gear Rising jokes that no one but me understood, but I assure you, they were hilarious), when some other folks walked past and we invited 'em in, and they sat down and we made them some characters.
And as things were happening, we just kept adding people. The game doesn't actually list how many players it wants; I'd started with the assumption of 3-5 players + GM, but ended up using the lack of a list as an excuse to get more people in. More, and more people. In the end, we had at least 8 characters (as that's how many of people's character notecards I brought home, if there were more they're escaping me), me running it, and multiple spectators who were given the glorious ability of being able to end whatever scene we were in, whenever. Basically they were the "...and NOW we cut this scene!" that I'm still learning to do. I mean, seriously, this game had SPECTATORS. Do you understand how boring watching people play RPGs can be, especially without proper editing (which is how Actual Play podcasts and Tabletop are good)? A game has to be something particularly special to be watchable from the outside.

Here's the characters I had:
* Blaster Wolf, Hot-Shot (in his mind) Envoy, number 2 (great at feelings, bad at lasers)
* Binary Tangent, (holographic) Android Doctor, number 2,
* Stella Stargazer the Savvy Scientist, number 5 (great at lasers, bad at feelings),
* Tachyon Ted, the Sexy Pilot, number 4 (slightly better at Lasers),
* Sexy Sally Systems, the Engineer, number 4,
* Question Afterthought the Indefinitely Prolonged, an Alien Envoy with a number of 5,
* Bittorrent the (not-holographic) Android Soldier, number 4,
* Jack Plasma, Dangerous Explorer, number 3.
The Raptor, our ship, was Fast with Fightercraft, with Horrible Circuit Breakers.

Some highlights were an attempt to redirect the ship to a star base for treatment of Captain Darcy (rather than going directly to the Hive Armada's base with the Star Dreadnought), jumping directly under the Star Dreadnought's hanger to beam the away team in, Sally and Stella loading up Binary Tangent onto one of the phone-communicator-things which Bittorrent brought with him on the mission, Jack and Bittorrent crossing the phase batteries of the pistols with the quantum batteries of the communicators to create a mini-signularity to consume the blast doors of the bridge, and Question Afterthought waking up Darcy and the Something Else, having a discussion with the psychic thing, killing it and Darcy, killing the pilot, and fleeing the battle, leaving the away team to die (having blown up the Dreadnought and completing their mission).

People entered the story whenever, people had to go and their characters were just suddenly unimportant and we were pretty much constantly breaking for a few moments to giggle incessently. It was the funniest, craziest experience I think I've had with RPGs. I don't think I could do this with a normal game, but the sort of light weight of Lasers & Feelings, it's fabulously simple chargen, and its self-evident tone and wealth of relatable references (everyone saw something in it; Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, Firefly, Mass Effect) made it easy to induct players into it and easy to just push along. I'm not sure we put the game through its fair paces (it was a bit too disjointed for that; we weren't really paying attention to actually doing the space adventure), so I'd like to play again in a bit more focused group, but it was exactly the silly antidote that I needed last night. Thanks to everyone; John Harper for writing, Joe for bringing it up, Ed for helping round out the original critical mass so our play could start attracting others, all of the players (whose names I can not all remember; I know Sion and Gary were there, and I remember folks from throughout the day, but names are foggy in all the alliterative character name silliness). It was quite the experience.

I recommend playing this crazy game! It is HERE: LASERS & FEELINGS

End Recording,
Ego.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

PAX Roundup!

This is from the Raichu Fandisc, a thing by Salvation By Faith Records. It's pretty good. I snagged a whole bunch of SBF stuff, so this is a good one.

PAX Roundup.

This was my very first PAX. It was kind of mindblowing. Let's hit some stuff and summarize my adventures:

GAMES ON DEMAND:
So I had myself a 4-Day pass! Except, well, I didn't pay for it. No, Games On Demand provided me with a pass, given the stipulation that I run games in three four-hour slots. After an initial brief period of hesitation, I jumped at it, because shit, I was probably going to do that anyway.
And do it I did! And far, far, more.
Let's be very clear about this: I spent a whole two thirds of the con in the GoD rooms. I ran games in and out of my schedule, and played multiple games. Let's narrow this down:

* Friday morning I got in on a Dungeon World game! I played Theseus the Good Ranger and his companion Gar'On the bear in The Frozen South (using the dungeon starter of the same name). I, uh, murdered the fuck out of everything with lots of arrows and a fucking BEAR. Being a Good Ranger means hunting down unnatural threats, so a Frost Giant baby is unnatural, right? Snow elves are really unnatural, right? I hope so, I killed like 12 of them in their sleep. I kept acing Volley rolls and dealing around 10 damage per attack - nothing survived me. This game also had the lovely innovation of the Cuddle Puddle!

* Friday evening a guy named Don wearing a VIP badge came around looking at games, and was interested in The Quiet Year, which wasn't on anyone's menu at the time. so I decided to jump in and run the game for him. It ended up a 1-on-1 affair, and it was the fastest Quiet Year I've ever played by a lot at an hour and forty minutes. The game was by a river, and was full of ghosts and weirdness. I'm the first to admit that I seriously go for the freaky supernatural stuff in my Quiet Years.

* Saturday I showed up at 2:00 and asked for my session to be moved up to then instead of 6, because of a storm of players who wanted to play Monsterhearts and a lack of MCs, so I decided to go for it. It was a full-up five player game (which I keep being warned against at these cons and keep running with pretty good results)! We had a Fae named Aislyn who was exiled to the human world by Perseph of the Faerie Court, a Witch named Brianna whose family was all witches, and she had a Book of Shadows that let her be the toughest one there, with a Sanctuary in the library. We had Brendan the Werewofl whose wolf was almost entirely mental, like a mind-state change that makes him feral and wild, which was super intense, since he went Darkest Self. His family also knew what he was. We had Burton the Queen and his gang of Sammy, Gina, and Rasputin. Burton was a drug dealer whose supplier was his dad, and all of the security officer, math teacher, and principal we had in the game were all buyers, it was great. We had Iggy the Ghoul, whose father had killed him and his fraternal twin sister, composed them into one person, and reanimated them, with Iggy as the dominant mind. Iggy hungered for chaos. Iggy had a bit harder of a time fitting into a lot of the action since Alex (the player) was very tired, but he came up to me today and apologized (unnecessarily, it wasn't a problem) for being tired and said that it was an incredibly fun time, plus offered to put me up when I'm going down to Portland at the beginning of October for Technicolor Dreams. The game ended with Perseph manifesting physically in Daria's sanctuary due to her meddling, Aislyn and Brendan and Iggy showing up, and Perseph dragging the whole sanctuary into the Faerie Realm, with Burton coming across the empty secret room with Aislyn's backpack outside it. Also Brendan hospitalized a Gina in full view of a ton of people while The Wolf was in control.
Saturday night I spent prepping the not-so-Secret-Idea document.

* Sunday morning I showed up bright and early for my slot to find that Secret Idea would have to wait since I was already signed up for Monsterhearts! This time I had only three players. The first was Cassidy ("Cass") the Werewolf, a cross-country runner who had been mauled by a wolf and hospitalized last year, which was pretty public. He may be an alpha jock, but he's got a pretty plain-looking brainy girlfriend Tiffany (why do I not suggest boy/girlfriends more often?!). Daria is a witch, using hodgepodge magic learned from a ton of sources, who once threw a hex that overextended and turned the former cheerleader Ashley into a quadriplegic. She has a crush on Troy, the cross-country captain. Rowan is a Selkie whose pelt was stolen by Cass, though he doesn't know it was a pelt. He was curious to a point of recklessness, without caution, and is super unaware of how people act. Rowan has a bunch of fangirls, led by Cass's younger sister Brittany, cuz he's super hot it seems. Cass got in a huge fight with Troy then had a big fight with Tiffany about it. Daria got over Troy and ended up nearly killing him, with Rowan stopping her. By the end, Rowan went Darkest Self and was going to drown the world, but Daria brought him back with love, and Daria helped put Troy and Cass back together. It was a much more uplifting ending, and felt like the story could have been left there, no major cliffhanger.

* Sunday afternoon I played Monsterhearts, run by Robert. I got to play The Doppleganger, the skin I wrote, for the very first time (after running maybe five one-shots for it at various time). Taylor functioned exactly as I wanted it to. Taylor admired Drake's confidence and social prowess. Mouse was a Sasquatch (a skin from Jackson Tegu's Second Skins), who didn't understand how people worked, and faded into the background a lot. We were pretty similar, and Taylor kinda liked her. Drake was a Queen, and a drug-connected leader. The game didn't take place at school, but afterward, as the lead-up and action of a huge party Drake threw. Taylor set up a drug deal as Drake that went bad and he was stabbed and had a knife at his throat, but managed to get out and accidentally killed him, immediately taking the form of Drake. He brought an enormous bag of weed to the party (as Drake, since Drake was incapacitated by his own super-drug), and was hitting on Mouse (which real-Drake had done earlier too) when she gave me a love potion and we had, uh, it was basically spiritual sex. We didn't really decide if it was also real sex because we didn't need to, but I'm kinda thinking it wasn't, it's less weird and rape-y that way. I mean, it's still a little under-false-pretenses, but Mouse did drug Taylor into it. In the end, Drake was taken away by the police for lots and lots of drugs and soon will be up for murder, and stole the super-drug from his dad (and put some in my pocket), and I was at 3 harm. It was crazy and suspenseful - I would watch the show that this was a pilot for.

* Sunday evening, before I went to dinner, I played a game by Ed Turner called Synanthropes Lite. A very short game about talking animals post-Humanity. It was a 15-minute experience. I really liked it and I want to play the full version!
This is Ed's blog!
This is Synanthropes!
This is Synanthropes Lite! (business-card sized!)
I played a Gecko named Cah-Rul, and Ed played a Raccoon named Audi, and we were having a debate about this mysterious human artifact (actually a can opener Ed pulled out). Audi, as a Raccoon who loves technology, thought it was a key or component of some kind of machine and wanted to take it back and study it, and was adamant that humans never ever hurt each other. As a gecko, I consider human technology dangerous, so I was sure that it was used as a weapon - geckos love their fingers, and the handles were were crushing fingers, with the cogs for grinding them through them.
It was really fun. check it out, Ed's got something sweet going on!

* And Sunday night, the Secret Idea manifested: I ran Avatar World. Saturday night I'd compiled the playbooks into really loose documents and there were folks really excited to try it, so knowing it was going to probably be a bumpy ride, we went for it. We played in a world not-quite like the world of avatar, but quite similar. The four characters were Haa, a female airbender tired of monotonous life at the temple, Flamio, a poor teenaged Firebender who had accidentally burned down a bunch of the city years ago, and wants to be super famous, Kai, an older earthbender who has taken some responsibility for Flamio's wellbeing, and a nomadic Waterbender named Bokonnon who wants to claim a piece of land for his family (as the Water Tribe lives on an armada of ships). I don't think Eric realized I totally know where the name came from, as a huge Vonnegut fan. The game was in the capital during the Spirit Festival, which is ruled by the Phoenix King. I totally forgot that's what Ozai called himself! In this case the name was more about the immortality of the emperor rather than the fire. No one knows what bending he has, as rumors abound of all of them, but no one has ever spoken to someone who has personally seen him bend. His second, the Phoenix Prince, is an annually selected role based on a tournament to defeat the not-current but previous Prince, and is always a firebender. The group decided to go to the Holy Mountain to gain the treasure and fame from defeating the great beasts there and claiming the treasure, but they get lost and wind up in the festival, where Flamio is put into the tournament by Haa and he fights and defeats the older Prince. He is then publicly and personally addressed by the Phoenix King, a very rare event, to task him as the first Questing Prince in many, many years. He is to go and restore the balance of the Mountain, and re-establishing the Phoenix as the dominant spirit.
There were a lot of flaws in the game! I have holes to fix up, but a LOT of the issues came from the way I presented everything. I need to learn to GM it better. the main thing is to come up with and even script the way I intro the game and build the world and stuff. I also need to examine the Basic Moves and figure out how to make them work for significant non-combat as well. A big one is I want is we tried a stealth-type thing and I should at least have some way of sneakily moving around inside of Move With Intention. A lot of the moves and most of the Oaths could use more support dictating what happens in the fiction - Robert thinks it would be better to narrow down a lot of the things into main categories rather than leaving them open-ended, and I'm inclined to agree. Also, the Airbender (which he was playing)'s moves could use some more direct link to the fiction.
I definitely need to find a good way to explain Chi.
Basically, huge learning experience, and everyone said it was really fun.
I will not be making the PAX Edition document available immediately. I want to do a bit of repairs, and then compile it into something a bit more pretty than two dozen sheets of paper covered in plain-text Times New Roman. Soon though! The goal is still to have a full document around by the Gamerati Game Day on the 21st.

* Monday morning I ran more Monsterhearts! As Jay said, I was kind of a Monsterhearts-running-machine. This time we started with four players (though one had to go a bit early), and two of them were the same people who played Daria and Rowan the day before! I had introduced them to the game, they played again later, and then came back for another game I was running this morning, so I feel pretty damn good about that. This game had an even crazier relationship map than the others. We had Mara, the flesh-hungry Ghoul, awake for only a week, living in a cemetary. I started this one off well, with a burst of action, of Mara waking up on the day and the groundskeeper coming, and she hadn't eaten since the first day. She ended up tearing him apart and it was a visceral opener. We had Abel the Infernal, minion of Hastur, and a really optimistic guy who just wants to help everyone. We had Bethany the Queen, with her gang of Cody, Annie, and AJ, and they deal drugs. She likes Cody cuz he's hot and has the best car. And lastly we had Kard, the Hollow. Give me a sec here.
Let's talk for a moment about a way I feel like I failed as an MC right here. I consistently forgot to give the Veil conversation until just before play started, and in this case, Kard was the product of a wish - a wish by middle-age Todd who wanted a hot young girlfriend, but she came out imperfect; physically, she's everything he wanted, but lacks completely the personality he wants. And there's definitely some sexual abuse going on - and the moment the player said that, my brain skipped a step and I realized triggering content had gotten its way into the game before I brought up the Veil. Everyone seemed okay with it, but I still think it's a bit of a failure on my part that it even got through, because there could have been an issue. Not everyone has the Veil already to keep the game safe. In the future, I'm gonna make it a hard and fast rule that I say the Three Things About Storygames before every game with any people I don't already know and have gamed with, regardless of the game.
Anyway, can I mention that it was actually pretty uncomfortable territory for me? Not for personal reasons, but of course I run a lot of nasty people as MC, but this one definitely made me feel the most uncomfortable. It was really strong material and I wanted to do it, and we never had any negative personal encounters with Todd, but his influence was a constant in Kard's Gazes Into The Abyss, feeling his clammy hands all over her, not gentle like they used to be... It was fucking disturbing. I feel messed up having played it. But I think it was really good material and made the story that much better. It's just an early experience for me of really pushing my villains into dark territory. Anyway, this game ended with Hastur swallowing up Mara, Abel, and like a dozen NPCs.

So to summarize: Dungeon World, Quiet Year, Monsterhearts, Monsterhearts, Monsterhearts, Synanthropes Lite, Avatar World, Monsterhearts. Sounds like a party! I loved it. I nearly doubled my required slots. The Doppleganger worked exactly how I wanted, and Avatar World was a very fun learning experience (or so I was told, I spent the whole thing with my mind spinning a million miles an hour managing and often panicking - I probably could have been even better by just relaxing).

Monday night all the GoD folks got together at the Capitol Club to debrief and discuss what went well and what needed work, and we got some good ideas coming out.

Long story short: this was a fantastic experience, thanks so much to Morgan for offering the spot to me, and I will 100% be doing this next year, and hopefully also at ECCC, and also at anything else in range of me. Hell, this thing has actually boosted my confidence in GMing by quite a bit, and I already was getting used to running in public at Story Games Olympia!

THE COOL SHIT I LOOKED AROUND AT:
I saw some cool shit. I can make a rare claim: I stood in no lines! That basically means I skipped anything from a major developer other than Nintendo (whose lines were pleasantly short for everything but Wind Waker HD thanks to a large array of devices being used for the demos - even Pokemon X & Y had super-tiny waits). I did, however, really enjoy the Indie Megabooth! Lots of really cool stuff and brand new folks! I only actually demo'd a couple games, but there was a lot of really cool stuff. Here's some of them!
* Always Sometimes Monsters is a non-combat rpg. It looks like a bold direction to take things, and seems strongly character driven.
* Audiosurf 2 (of course) looks brilliant. I'm a huge fan of the original. I really hope Pedro Macedo Camacho is back to do the themes again.
* Barkley 2! Barkley 2 is fucking crazy, and it's going to be both amazing and gorgeous, with the pixel art done by Francis Coulombe, aka Frankiesmileshow, who is simply a brilliant artist.
* Bit.Trip Runner 2 is just great. I just talked about that like a week ago!
* Crypt of the Necrodancer is insane. Move through a dungeon to the rhythm for more points, also you're doing it on a DDR pad and fighting monsters and collecting treasure! I mean, you can do it on the computer, but fuck, why would you?
* My bro bought Electronic Super Joy and its soundtrack, which looks like a wicked hard rhythm-based platformer. Mashing up rhythm into other genres seems to be a thing.
* Even The Ocean was one I demo'd, and I was really impressed. It's tough, but has the sliding scale two-sided health bar that's a really smart idea.
* Christine Love had her visual novels Analogue: A Hate Story and its "sequel" (really more expansion apparently) Hate <3 and="" been="" befor="" both.="" bought="" bundle="" couple="" d="" ei="" first="" good.="" i="" it="" just="" lp="" lparchive.org="" night="" of="" on="" p="" plus="" reading="" really="" screenshot="" so="" that="" the="" them="" up="" updates="" was="" went="">* Ironclad Tactics, by Zachtronics (the SpaceChem guys!), looks to be just as tough and interesting as its predecessor, this time built like a deck-building action real-time board game.
* Legend of Dungeon looked simply gorgeous, with visuals very reminiscent of Sword & Sworcery to me. It's not the Superbrothers, but it looks great still.
* I didn't stay around to check much about Tengami, but it looked neat.
* Same deal with The Stanley Parable.
* I bought They Bleed Pixels pretty much immediately. I've been telling myself to buy the damn game for months.

Outside of the Indie Megabooth, I spent a lot of time just looking and browsing. I bought a Mew-Genics shirt from Team Meat, and Tommy Refenes signed it! I'm actually really proud of that, weirdly. Edmund wasn't there though. Next time! My bro tried the Oculus Rift and said it was basically life-changing, that it was easily the coolest thing at the show.

My one let-down: I had ONE game in mind that I wanted to buy at PAX, but Monte Cook and Shanna Germain was nowhere to be found! Damn.

Overall, PAX was just super super fun and I'm ready to sleep. I start classes in a week, I have the Gamerati Game Day on the 21st, and Technicolor Dreams on the 5th and 6th of October. Things are moving!
Later folks.

End Recording,
Ego.

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