#RPGaDAY2015, Day 4: Most Surprising Game

by ThomasNo Comments

The #RPGaDAY writing prompt for day number four is Most Surprising Game.

There’s a few ways to take that, but I’m going with the game that really made me realize that something else was going on, something that was so eye-opening it changed how I run games from that moment on.

EDN6010That game is Eden Studio’s Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

Before I get to the what in the game that really shook up how I approach games, I’d like to take an aside and mention how Buffy is the shining perfection of what licensed role-playing games aspire to be, because it is. The voice used in the book fits perfectly with the IP the game is based on, and I’m saying this as someone who worked on the Firefly RPG. ((With all of the -ing words dropping the g’s, Firefly is almost perfect, but Buffy was there first and really nails it across the book and all supplements.)) The tone, the graphics, the ads in the back of the book for non-RPG yet Buffy-related things? It is the finest marriage of license to product I’ve seen in role-playing games.

But to what really got me about Buffy was how the system worked for the GM. In Buffy, the GM doesn’t need to roll dice at all.

Wait, wait. That’s not it.

Shadowrun_Fourth_Edition_000001Here: I was coming over to it from Shadowrun, which is a huge mess of a game system. Just look at the fourth edition character sheets from the FanPro edition. Here, here, see? The attributes: there’s eight over here, broken up into four physical and four mental, some special attributes that you might have three or four of, and some other things that they just shoved in there to have a nice little four by four grid. Creating an NPC is awful: do those first eight attributes, adjust for race, derive some other attributes which would change by how much cyberwear one has and if they’re magically awakened or technologically awakened, then derive some more stuff and then oh god the skill list. Oh god.

This is only page one of four that the players at the table are filling out.

So here I am, like a chump, creating NPCs with the same skills and attributes that the player characters have and I’m reading Buffy. And Buffy’s white hat protagonists have two dozen skills and a handful of stats and a few signature moves and all this detail, detail, detail that characters in role-playing games have.

And the NPCs only have three stats.

I’m looking at an abbreviated statblock, I think. No. That’s it. There’s a handful of stats, but there’s only three in Buffy that you use: Muscle, Combat, and Brains. That’s it? That’s it.

And that’s when I realized something. Something nobody ever told me.

I didn’t have to be playing the same game the players were.

Back to Shadowrun with the 13, 14, 15 attributes. Back to the list of skills and specializions. Back to the gear and race modifiers. The players can have that. All I need for the NPCs were Muscle, Move, Brains, and Cool. That Troll ganger? Muscle of 9 dice. Is he doing something he should know how to do? +3 dice more. They’re playing Shadowrun. Me? I’m playing Ghostbusters.

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Buffy, the Vampire Slayer: one of the key games that changed my gaming.

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 3 – First RPG Purchased

by ThomasNo Comments

It’s the last of the pure reposts! I’m going over the writing prompts from last year, to see if my answers have changed at all. But I’m just doing reposts from my G+ feed for the first three entries as they’re just about the first games I encountered. We’ve already gone over the first game played and first one I GMed.

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 3: What was the first roleplaying game you purchased?

I’m going to skip past D&D because while I know that was the first one played, it was a gift. In those early days, we played a lot of D&D, but branched out and played quite a few other role-playing games like Rolemaster and Champions. I was also big into Car Wars, but… You know, it may have been Autoduel Champions. Or Villains & Vigilantes. Because it was so long ago, I’m not sure who owned what back then. (I recall AD&D books on the shelf, along with some Grimtooth’s Traps books.)

Instead, I’ll jump to when I moved overseas, because that’s when I definitely would have purchased my own stuff.

So Twilight: 2000 it is.

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When I picked this up, it was overseas, in West Germany (remember that?). In that game, the war against the Soviet Union went completely tits up with nuclear exchanges and an ongoing ground war, and we, the military kids on a US base, were sure the game was an accurate foretelling of the future.

We only played one session.

But oh, I loved that post-apocalyptic setting!

twilight2kFunny story. When I was getting into graphic design in the hobby games industry, I saw that someone had purchased the license for the game and were about to bring it out as Twilight: 2013. I inquired about laying out the book and didn’t get the job. But there was more to it than that.

The initial posting about T:2013 seemed to indicate that there was going to be a narrative-heavy “story game” version of play included. I inquired about that in the company’s forum and received a slightly negative reply from another fan of the company who hated, absolutely hated, games where players have any narrative control. No big deal. This Ed person seemed polite in his response, actually. He’s prominent on the message forum, so I look at his profile. Hey, there’s a link for people to come visit his LiveJournal (remember that?). So I do. And that’s where there was a full page of him calling me a “fucking little pansy” for liking games where players could make up things. “Shut the fuck up, bitch.” “Come back to my table when you grow a pair!” It reads like he was skipping out on taking his serious medication. (You can read his bizarre rant at http://ed-t.livejournal.com/61203.html. It’s all the more insane when you realize he’s railing against people being duplicitous in conversations, when his public response to me was rather courteous.) Reading other LJ posts of his reveal him to be a very, very angry person.

Meanwhile, I’m in talks with the two people at the company about layout. We’re sending emails back and forth. Right when I suggest that I actually be compensated for design work, I never hear from them again.

Also about that time, they publicly announce that they brought the angry guy on board.

Anyway, Twilight: 2000. Pretty cool game.

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 2 – First RPG GMed

by ThomasNo Comments

Revisiting the writing event from last year, I’m checking to see if my answers have changed at all. However, the first few entries in the month are all about the first game played or purchased and barring access to a time machine, they’re not gonna change. For these few, it’s a repost from my G+ feed from about this time last year.

#RPGaDAY

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 2: What was the first roleplaying game you GMed?

That’s answered a bit in Last Year’s Day 1 post, but I’d like to expand on it a bit.

The first adventure I GM’d was included in the D&D boxed set. I don’t remember too much of it, but I do remember the door maze. Something stupid huge like a 60’ x 80’ room divided into 10’x10’ rooms with doors on all four walls. I thought this was amazing! The players would be spending time mapping out the room, opening doors and there is an identical room with three more doors to go through! This was such a great idea for a dungeon that I included it in nearly every one I created over the next two years until I realized it was pretty stupid. Lost? We just leave the doors we walked through open. Or just mark all the doors. Or break them all. And what dungeon lord decided to purchase/build two hundred-odd doors and install them all in an oversized room?

Gods, that was dumb.

I ran that module several times. One time we had a large group of adventurers and they decided to split up right at the beginning of the dungeon, so I had to split my time between each half of the group. You know the phrase “never split up the party”? It’s not because the GM will kill off the characters, it’s because half of the people at the table aren’t playing for half of the game. And the GM will kill off the characters.

Advanced_Dungeons_and_Dragons_2nd_Edition_Players_Handbook1We played the heck out of that, but weren’t sure how to continue with D&D. The choices were very strange. We could play D&D, but then there was Basic D&D and Expert D&D and Advanced D&D… We didn’t understand what the deal was with those and that some were in a series, but hey, we were the smart kids. We could totally handle Advanced, so we skipped over Basic, Expert, and whatever came after that. We were better than Basic. We were Advanced.

AD&D 2nd Edition was the flavor of D&D for me. I played the heck out of that until I discovered Shadowrun, but that’s a tale for day five.