Archive for the ‘Now Playing’ Category

[Now Playing] Remote Gaming

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

I’ve mentioned it on the front page here, and also in the Voice of the Revolution a couple of times, that I’m playing in a Legend of the Five Rings game with a friend currently living in Birmingham, England. We accomplish this feat using Skype, and this has worked reasonably well.

There’s a pretty brutal time difference (5 hours I think), so we start early and stop around 5:00 pm our time (US Eastern). So far it has worked out just fine. Scheduling in a single player remotely hasn’t really been any harder than getting folks together locally. The connection, via Skype video chat, works quite well, and is also free.

For dice rolling, our remote player has designated a local proxy who shakes the bones. The remote player does all of the bonus calculations and the like and just tells his proxy how many dice to roll and keep and what to add in, then we can all see the result.

The video function works quite well. Since we have five players on our end, we had to get a good wide-angle webcam, but our remote player has had no complaints. The only issue, and it is minor, is talking over one another, which happens from time to time, especially when I as a GM and dealing directly with the remote player. Side conversations can easily drown out the main conversation, both for him and for me, so I try to keep things at a dull roar when dealing one-on-one. Last weekend we had our first connectivity issues and the remote player had to drop out early, but he only lost about half an hour of game time.

Still, it’s been quite satisfying, and pretty cool, really, to be able to game with someone thousands of miles away. It inspired me to try another remote gaming experiment, this time with two friends farther west. One is in Denver, and the other Portland, Oregon. We had a successful character generation session so far, but haven’t run an actual game. I will report on any difficulties or lack thereof in this game once we start going in earnest.

This one will be a Spirit of the Century game, and I’m really looking forward to trying it out with these two gamers. The game is right up their alley and I have been wanting to run it for them for some time. Technology has finally caught up to my aspirations.

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[Now Playing] Fiasco by Jason Morningstar

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

Holy carp! This is a great, amazing, terrific, superlative-worthy game! There’s been a lot of buzz about Fiasco lately, and I can definitively say that it if well-deserved. I played a game at GenCon which was quite good. It was certainly good enough to make me want to play again. Last weekend, though, we played a game of Fiasco using the playset I just wrote, The Jersey Side. This game was amazing. It was, straight up, like a Coen brothers film, or as one of the players described it, an Elmore Leonard story. It was insanely fantastic and left me hankering for more.

Why was this one better than the game at GenCon? There are a couple of reasons, I think. I played at GenCon with Steve Segedy and three guys I didn’t know. While all these guys were great players, I think we weren’t as much on the same page. My home group consisted of my wife Krista, Jared Axelrod, and J.R. Blackwell. These are folks I know very well, and we had a strong rapport and really trusted each other.

Also, at GenCon we played the Touring Rock Band playset. This is amusing and a bit debauched, but there was more humor and showbiz superficiality going on in that one. The Jersey Side arose from a conversation I had with Kenneth Hite and Jason Morningstar at Origins. Ken was bragging about Chicago’s legendary corruption, and I pish-poshed him by saying I was from New Jersey. I don’t know if you remember, but there was a big organ smuggling scandal in New Jersey last year, involving over 40 arrests, including rabbis and local politicians. I suggested I should do a Fiasco playset based on the scandal, and Jason agreed.

Since I just finished up The Jersey Side, I thought I’d give it a shot with my friends. For this one, everyone really bought in immediately and completely. This group was humming. We were thinking bloody crime farce, and that’s what we got. When we sorted out relationships, I was playing an older Jewish cancer patient with a fatal diagnosis, Jared was a young Hasidic FBI agent, Krista was a doctor at City Hospital, and J.R. her organ-legging partner in crime, a young Hasidic woman.

I had a Need: Get Even with the Whole Fucking World and was informing on my doctor (Krista) to the FBI agent. Krista and J.R. were partners in crime, and J.R. and the Fed were in the same Hasidic community. We opened strong with me bringing the crimes to the attention of the Federal agent, and he immediately confronted Krista’s doctor. She and her partner in crime panicked and went to a couple of inept Israeli gangsters to get them to take care of the Fed. They botched a kidnapping attempt, and then the two smugglers decided to sell their hot merchandise to some Venezualan gangsters (a much more competent and dangerous crew).

It all came to a head after the Tilt when my character tipped off the Fed to the seedy motel where the smugglers were hiding their goods, and they plus the Israelis all arrived there while the Fed was waiting for them. One Israeli was shot in the leg by the Fed, then brutally murdered with a headshot by the Hasidic smuggler, while the doctor chased after the other Israeli and ran over him with her car. In the end, the Hasidic smuggler went to jail for everything when the doctor pled innocence and turned on her. My character ended up living a long time in miserable pain before the cancer finally did him in, and the Fed wound up jockeying a desk. The doctor had a happy ending and went right back to her life of crime.

Things that went right with this game:

  • We were all totally on board and in synch with the tone of the game. It played out just like a movie of this type.
  • Everyone was really good about incorporating the elements on the cards, and even looking in the playset to pull out new locations and objects as needed.
  • People were eager and able to jump in as NPCs when needed. And we created a couple of very compelling NPCs in the incompetent Israeli gangsters. They were just dangerous enough, and it was awesome to have some available NPCs for slaughtering in Phase Two.
  • We figured out pretty quick that the story was really about the two smugglers, and both Jared and I were happy to take a bit of a back seat with our characters. We were catalysts and reactive characters, which was just fine. That helped run the whole bus off the cliff.

Fiasco is a blast and I’d definitely play again. I think I might stick with more straight-up crime sagas, since that seems to be what I enjoy most in the game.

The Jersey Side will be coming out in the Spring as a Playset-of-the-Month, so look for it then. Or track me down at NeonCon or Dreamation and ask me to run it.

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[Now Playing] Agon by John Harper

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

My gaming lately has certainly been Harperrific! My Wednesday group has started another one of Harper’s games, Agon. Agon is a game of mythological Greek heroes in the style of the Illiad or the Odyssey. I missed the first session where everyone made up characters and exchanged oaths, but it was relatively easy to make up a character for the game. Agon uses a die-step system, where your skills/abilities range from d4 to d12.

One of the places the game really uses the ancient Greek color is in the character names. The book has a big list of sample names, but each character also has a “heroic trait.” The heroic trait is a short phrase that describes your character, such as Strong Limbed, Honey Tongued, or Far Aiming. If you’ve ever read even an excerpt from the ancient Greek oral poems, these phrases are used to describe people over and over. For me, just this little touch brought a lot of setting flavor to the characters. The excellent thing about these heroic traits is that they also add mechanical benefits to your character. For example, my character, Strong Limbed Aias, son of Ares, gains a bonus to Might and Wrestle due to his heroic trait.

In play, I quite enjoyed it. I have a familiarity and appreciation of the source material, so I got into the role-play a lot. Part of the game is calling for conflicts, called agon in the game. Participating in agon is the only way to advance and succeed, and you are in competition with your fellow players as well. Everyone rolls to overcome the GM’s adversity while simultaneously trying to achieve the highest roll. Success gives you glory, but beating your peers gives you even more glory.

We did many non-combat struggles during our session and achieved 3 out of 4 of our quest objectives (finding out what these objectives are is part of the game). We didn’t get to a combat, so I will discuss how that works in the next post on this. Our characters, returning from the Trojan War, lost our fleet at sea, and the single ship we had was visited by Poseidon who gave us a quest to visit the island of Anaphe and sacrifice the tallest thing that walks on the island at the highest point of the island. Poseidon told us this would appease the gods and allow us to return home.

On the island, we quickly determined that we needed to speak to the king, King Tychogenes, and we hiked to his palace. His chief palace guard, Aristokles, turned out to be a giant of a man, and we considered briefly whether this man was meant to be the sacrifice. Luckily, it turned out that the tallest living thing on the island was the Great Red Swan, unfortunately a favorite of both the king and Apollo. We did manage to convince Tychogenes to allow us to hunt it without angering him, though he had doubts about our future success. The king’s daughter Lucoria came to us and told us a secret about the swan that will help us capture it for sacrifice, and that’s where we had to stop playing. Our next agon is likely to be the fight with the swan’s guardian, Cygnophylox.

One of our players seemed to have a bit of trouble and it would probably be good to check in with him before we play again to see if he wasn’t having fun and what me might be able to to do about it. He really had the worst luck possible, only succeeding in about two rolls over the course of the evening. Participating in every check is important, and the non-combat struggles we were performing were definitely not this player’s character’s strong suit. I think pure bad luck played a role as well. One of the other players also commented that they didn’t quite get the competitive aspect of the game at first, either. I think it will be interesting to see how everyone settles in as we play into multiple sessions.

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[Now Playing] Lady Blackbird by John Harper

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

This post is to inaugurate a recurring series for the blog: Now Playing. I’ll be posting a bit about games that I’m playing with my own groups and our experiences with them. There will be a little bit of story, and more about how the games work mechanically and also within our social group.

First up, Lady Blackbird by John Harper. This is a cool internet freebie game which recently won a Silver ENnie Award for Best Free Product. John is a talented game designer as well as graphic designer, so the game is incredibly beautiful for a 9-page free PDF. Briefly, the PDF includes a quick in media res setup, a one-page summary of the game world, a one-page summary of the heroes’ ship, The Owl, and five player character write-ups with the game rules taking up half the page on each. There is also a GM tip sheet.

My Friday night group currently consists of me, my wife Krista, and one other player named Markus. We decided on Lady Blackbird to start up a new game. Krista prefers long-term play, so even though Lady Blackbird works great as a single session game, we are planning on playing for a while.

I suggested Lady Blackbird for a couple of reasons. The world, although only teased in the rules, is interesting and seems fun to explore. It’s a steampunk sky-sailing setting, with little rocks orbiting a sun, all floating above a thick blanket of caustic clouds. The initial setup is a small crew of smugglers carrying a fugitive noblewoman to meet her pirate lover. They are captured by an Imperial cruiser and begin trapped in the brig of the Hand of Sorrow.

Krista and Markus picked two of the five pregenerated characters. Krista chose Snargle, the goblin pilot of The Owl, and Markus chose Kale Arkam, first mate and mechanic of The Owl. They are playing the crew of The Owl, and the captain and the passengers remain as NPCs.

Our first session went well, but it was very action-oriented. They spent the entire session attempting to break free from their imprisonment, being chased around the Imperial vessel, captured and reimprisoned, and escaping again to make good their escape aboard The Owl, only to discover that they are dangerously low on fuel. All in all, pretty rousing action but not entirely satisfying to everyone involved. There was very little character interaction that went on, mostly a series of rolls for moving around and attempting to escape the ship.

I think this is a bit of a symptom of the beginning setup of the game which demands immediate player action. Also, we only had two players, so there was a bit less character interaction than if all five characters were being played. Nonetheless, I think we will be able to slow things down a bit next session and get in more personal interaction and character development. All of the action in the first session did an excellent job familiarizing us all with the rules. We are pretty well-versed in how they work at this point, and I have a good grasp of the ebb and flow of the bonus pools, which is pretty important for me to understand as the GM.

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