Breakout 2018 Convention Debrief (Part Three)

Day three! The final, bleary-eyed day of the con! (If you missed the first two parts, you can find them here and here.)

After a late night of horror playing BLUEBEARD'S BRIDE, we were ready for something a little lighter, and luckily, we had just the game. We were lucky enough to have Epidiah Ravachol on hand to run a traditional Sunday morning game of SWORDS WITHOUT MASTER, his very clever swords-and-sorcery storytelling game.

Breakout 2018 Convention Debrief (Part Two)

Today I'm writing about our big day Saturday at Breakout. (If you missed Part One, it's here.)

I didn't get a great night's sleep on Friday, which is pretty normal for me in a strange bed, but especially after a day of great games. I had the momentum from playing ROSENSTRASSE to carry me through the low-energy bits.

Breakout 2018 Convention Debrief (Part One)

It's been a while since I've written in these pages regularly, but every once in a while you just have to gush a bit about something awesome. In this case, it's our second trip to Breakout, a gaming convention in Toronto.

We had a really great time with our first visit to Breakout, where we got to play great games with wonderful designers and enthusiastic players, so our expectations were high going into this year's con. Megan said she was trying not to get her hopes too high, in case it wasn't quite as good, but we were both delighted to find that this year's convention was better than ever. Two of the organizers warmly welcomed us with a hug in the first few minutes we were there, taking in the swanky new digs in the Sheraton Toronto. That kind of warm atmosphere was what we loved about Breakout 2017, and this year's model was the same thing in a bigger space.

Maybe We Haunt Ourselves: NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE

Strathclyde House. Whatever walked there, walked alone.

Last week, we finished my haunted house campaign NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE. It was a strong finish to a game that had a lot of powerful stuff in it.

Everything about this game was an experiment, really, and it's probably lucky that it came out as well as it did, but I had great players and good tools to play with. The objective of the game was to play something that was focused on going deeper, playing harder than we had for a while, even in games that had a lot of good stuff in them. We were playing with a slightly smaller group, three players and a GM, which had important implications for play down the line. As far as mechanics go, we were using the dramatic petitioner-granter rules from DRAMASYSTEM, with the 2d6+Trait mechanic from Powered-by-the-Apocalypse games to serve as our procedural rules.

First There is No Mountain

This is going to sound weird, probably, but it's one of those internal contradictions that make human beings so interesting. I've mentioned in these pages my Twin Peaks-inspired game, LOST PINES, and the game I wrote for Game Chef a couple of years ago, THE LONG SLEEP. I'm unreasonably proud of both of those games, despite the fact that neither one of them have been published or widely distributed. LP is a dramatic game in the style of soap opera, where everyone plays a part in the main cast. TLS is a meditative, internal game that's set in dreams, a kind of free-flowing improvisation on a theme. Neither one of those games has a GM role.

But I'm actually not a fan of games with no GM.

Review: MONSTERHEARTS 2

I was a latecomer to the Kickstarter game, mostly because cash is often tight for us, and sometimes a Kickstarter is a dodgy prospect. Eventually, my love of games (and desire to support the people who create them) got me to dip my toes in. MONSTERHEARTS 2 was one of the first products I ponied up the dough for, and I did so without hesitation. The first edition of Avery Alder's now-classic game of supernatural romance was the text that opened up my mind to the world of Powered-by-the-Apocalypse, thanks to Avery's lucid writing and tight focus on dramatic play. Getting the finished text via e-mail recently was like gaming Christmas.

Review: THE VEIL

I was a teenager when I got my first taste of cyberpunk: Mike Pondsmith's CYBERPUNK, to be precise, a "Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future" that sunk its hooks into me deep. I was at exactly the right age for Mike's heady mix of violence, loud music, black leather, and style over substance, and we played the hell out of that game for a few years. I sought out Neuromancer to get a sense of the source material, and I loved it profoundly, but felt a little cheated. There was so much more to cyberpunk than CYBERPUNK actually brought to the table.

Later games like SHADOWRUN also got a lot of play, but the problem was always the same. Cyberpunk roleplaying games always seemed to get the trappings of the genre, but not the ideas that were its beating heart. Style over substance was the ethos, but it had become a kind of trap, leading us to game after game that was basically a dungeon crawl with guns and grenades.

Almost thirty years later, I've finally found a cyberpunk game that wants more than that.

Have a Game Plan

Roleplaying games are all about spontaneity, and usually that's a good thing. A high-functioning group is able to improvise an experience that's much richer and more interesting than a pre-planned adventure packaged and run by a GM.

In dramatic play, this can be a problem, however. A lot of times, players will find themselves in a two-person scene where no one has a strong need to push for something right now. Sometimes this is out of a feeling that "it's too early" in the story for characters to have a big conflict, or out of an misguided sense that it's interesting just to place two characters in a scene together "just to see what happens". Usually, without a conflict, the answer to that question is "nothing".

BreakOut 2017 Convention Debrief

Whew. After a long weekend of gaming, we're back in Merrie Olde London Towne. And BreakOut Con Toronto, even for a Canadian convention only in its second year of operation, did not disappoint.

Into the Breach

This weekend, Megan and I are going to our first gaming convention. It's Breakout Con in Toronto, and we're pretty excited about it.

Sure, we've been to small gaming conventions put on by the local game club at Western University, but this is a whole other level. It's three days of games, with industry professionals there to run games and sit on panels about the hobby, and maybe, if we're lucky, let us fans buy them a drink or two.

Role With It

Most of the time, I write here in my capacity as a GM, an occasional game designer, and fan with his nose in a lot of games (specifically, with an intention to steal anything that isn't nailed down for his own games). Lately, I haven't spent as much time in the Big Chair as usual, so I thought I'd talk about what's going on in my life as a player. My last post was about the formative (pre-formative) moments I go through as a GM when I'm getting ready for a new game, so this is kind of a companion piece about getting ready to play a new game from the player side.

We play a lot of games at our table that are focused on character, so there is always an extra level of pressure on players when a new game starts to come to the table with some character ideas in hand. Sometimes we play games like APOCALYPSE WORLD or its many cousins, which really demand that you generate a character and decide on details on the fly (which is fair enough, because it asks the same commitment from the GM), but often we will go into a game with a lot more ability to create the character we want to play. I think both methods have their virtues, but since HTHD play demands a certain level of commitment and creative investment from the player, it makes sense that they should have the maximum level of freedom to put their stamp on the game. If you're going to be playing a game for 8-12 sessions and reaching for deep emotional places, you need to want it.

Zero to One

"The distance from zero to one hundred is nothing compared to the distance from zero to one." That's a mangled paraphrasing of the great science fiction writer Spider Robinson, who clearly knows a little something about starting up a new roleplaying game.

We've been in a roleplaying hiatus here in Merrie Olde London Towne since October, with occasional bursts of one shots and social gatherings since then. My friend Rob is about to start a TIMEWATCH game, using a hack of the Cortex Plus rules, and I'm super eager to start that game -- especially since Rob has set it in the Weird 70s a la In Search Of.

But I'm a GM at heart, and I'm never happier than when I've got a game of my own to put my creative energies into. So I've been thinking a lot about getting my own game running, and lately my tastes have been running towards running an old-school fantasy game via CASTLES & CRUSADES. I wrote a while back about wanting to go back to the roots of the hobby and see what I can do by bringing 21st century HTHD ideas and indie gaming technology to the party, and that idea still appeals to me. It's everything else that's been driving me crazy.

The Past Is Prologue

A lot of blogs are in a reflective mode, this time of year, and I thought New Years Eve was as good a time at any to share this particular look back on ten years of gaming.

A few weeks ago, a friend at our gaming table mentioned in an online post that he was having difficulty remembering all of the games we'd played over the past few years, and nudged me toward the idea of making a comprehensive list. I did, and it was both a humbling and invigorating experience looking back at all the games we'd played at our table over the past decade in London, Ontario. I sometimes say that as an adult gamer, I've played the best games of my life in the last few years, and here was actual proof.

Hello Greyhawk, My Old Friend...

My 2016 reincarnation drama NOT FADE AWAY is wrapped up, at last, and that means I'm thinking about the next campaign I want to run. I generally have a lot of games in my back pocket as possibilities for "the next thing", but at the moment there's one idea that's taking up a lot of mental real estate. I've been wanting to run an old-school fantasy game for a while, using CASTLES & CRUSADES as my rules engine. It's modern, but with enough of the flavour of ADVANCED D&D, the formative game of my generation, that it captures something special in my imagination.

I want to use it to run Greyhawk.

Into The Great Beyond: NOT FADE AWAY

This past Saturday night, we wrapped up NOT FADE AWAY, a game I'd been running at my table since February of last year. As with all games that have any longevity at all, I have complicated feelings about it, but I'll try to talk about our experience here with as much objectivity as I can.

Can Anything Fill the Portable Hole In Your Heart?

Here's a random idea I had the other day that I will probably never use, but maybe you can get some mileage out of it.

Not a big fan of dungeon adventures at this stage of my life. Why? Because dungeon adventures tend to spend a lot of time on the things I like least about the hobby. Long combats. Managing supplies. Traps. Players trying to make accurate maps. Players spending all their spells then calling the action to a halt until they get them back. Keeping track of arrows and how far you can see with torchlight and how much treasure you can carry and...

It's just exhausting. And it seldom has any emphasis on character development and drama, the things that I come back to the table week after week to enjoy and explore.

Spelunky and Roleplaying, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Always Get The Jetpack

Last week, after a year and a half and many thousands of games, I finally beat Spelunky.

Just in case you've never played it, Spelunky is a video game that combines old-school, brutally unforgiving platforming with modern procedurally-generated design. If you grew up in the 1980s, just imagine one of those old timey games where you jump on monsters and try not to fall in pits, except that this game never has the same exact level layout.

Yes. You are right to shudder.

Pokemon Go Home (Part Two)

Just in case you didn't already read the first part, that was a rant about how loud, judgemental, and awful nerd culture has become lately. You don't need to read it to understand this bit, but there was some fairly awesome swearing in it, if you like that kind of thing, and a message I wish more people were willing to hear. TLDR: Other people are allowed to like things that aren't for you. Let them.

So, what can roleplaying gamers learn from the worldwide phenomenon that is Pokemon Go?

Pokemon Go Home (Part One)

I will say this for nerds: they're consistent. 

Every so often, something new will come along that will cause a real sensation. In the 90s, it was Magic cards and vampire LARPs. As soon as that New Thing finds its audience and they're enjoying it, the assholes crawl out of their caves and go to work. This New Thing sucks, is stupid, is lame, and anyone who enjoys it (god forbid someone enjoy something that is not approved by the overcouncil of the Nerd Orthodoxy) is sucky, stupid, and lame too. 

Bring the Thunder

A recent session at my table made me realize that a lot of players need to up their game, myself included. 

We talk a lot in roleplaying circles about having "proactive" players who drive play, helping to move us away from a more traditional model where the players were reacting to stimuli introduced by the GM, or worse, where the players were looking to the GM to provide the evening's entertainment while they passively follow along. 

At our table, play is focused on the player characters and what they decide to do, and often, what their interactions with each other look like. This is a fine model for dramatic play, and I often think of myself as GM as providing more of a "moving scrim" for those elements -- a colourful backdrop, but ultimately just set dressing for the really important moments. Sometimes I apply a little pressure here and there, creating situations where player character conflicts can be brought into sharp focus. Since players at our table often call for their own scenes, this is a responsibility that is shared by everyone who plays in our games.