Tea & Crossbows is the name of our regular Saturday night game group here at Casa del Nerd. I borrowed it (okay, I stole it - happy?) from the name of the unpublished Watchers sourcebook for the Buffy The Vampire Slayer RPG. It fit us perfectly, partially because several of our favourite, most formative games used the Cinematic Unisystem that powers the Buffy and Angel games, and also because we often serve our guests an assortment of teas on game night.
Shortly after moving to Merrie Olde London, Ontario, my wife discovered a wonderful little tea shop at Covent Garden Market called The Tea Haus. They sold a wide variety of interesting loose teas, and Megan began exploring them -- in typically exacting Megan fashion, in alphabetical order. In the years we have been in London, we have sipped our way through the alphabet several times. (The Tea Haus is run by very nice people who also happen to do a large portion of their business via the Internet. Visit them here: http://www.theteahaus.com/)
Guests in our home are often offered a choice of teas as they come in the door (especially during typically cold Canadian weather, which is to say ten months of the year), and it's not uncommon for us to enjoy a pot of tea midway through our gaming evening, sometimes with dessert.
Tea is a very civilized drink. It warms and welcomes you. It greets you with a variety of delightful smells, tickling you with cinnamon or bergamot or lavender. Tea is a drink that requires you to be patient, slow down, take a moment and savour. It is the drink of conversations where we catch up on each others' lives, the sweet kick of caffeine that gives us the gusto to get dinner on the stove, the pause that brings us together halfway through the evening and lets us re-focus so the game can get into high gear.
Food is a big part of our gaming life. We often cook a meal (or, more accurately, our friend Colin usually cooks a meal and we ply his culinary talents with tea) as part of gaming night. Sharing food with our friends before we game is an important part of the social fabric of our group. A meal lets us come together around the table and get to know each other again, gives us a common baseline before we blast off for whatever roleplaying world the night has in store for us.
And all of that usually starts with tea.
Friday, 15 February 2013
Monday, 11 February 2013
Folie a Deux (Part Three)
A sequel to the game that got us started on the HTHD road, American Nightmare, is something that I've given a lot of thought over the years but only recently seriously considered. In that case, time has brought me around to a theme that interests me as much as the theme that rumbled under the surface of the original ("skeletons in the closet of the American Dream"). A contemporary American Nightmare game would have to ask the question "What is the state of the American Dream?"
Of course, a theme only gets you half-way there. Without characters that are as driven, as desperate, as urgent as the characters that made the original the game it was... it won't work. Or it won't amount to much.
So much of what a sequel is rests on the shoulders of the players, and the question of whether or not they really want what they're asking for when they say "How about we do another season of (x)". Do they really want to push those characters further? Or just wrap themselves in nostalgia?
At a certain point, have characters earned their happy ending or selfless sacrifice or ignominious fate?
And that is the problem at the heart of Year of the Dragon, a sequel to my well-received series Shadowrun: Disavowed. I haven't written about this game at length yet (but I will), but the short version is that it's a vision of the Shadowrun universe that would make most Shadowrun players weepy and irritable. We played a game that was heavy on character drama, angst, and straight-up soap opera, and short on mercenaries shooting up office buildings for cold hard cash.
After that game wrapped, I wrote a "trailer" for a second season that hinted at a series where the characters went on a rollicking Bourne-esque chase through Europe battling some familiar enemies from the first season and some old enemies from their days as company men. Not to mention a shadowy magickal conspiracy in the mix. It would be a lot of big stupid fun.
But is it necessary? In the end, is there a good enough reason for those characters who survived the first season to come out of retirement -- putting what happiness they've managed to scrape together on the line? At the end of season one, I said I wouldn't do another one unless the players could give me good reasons why their characters would do that.
At our table, we often tend to think of our games through the lens of TV series -- and that figures, when you see what a big shadow Primetime Adventures has cast over our collective gaming life. (Thanks, Rob.) There is a seductive logic to the idea that a sequel game makes perfect sense in the context of serialized television -- you're just doing another season, after all, and where's the harm in that?
Television shows have a "best before" date too, though, and most of us would agree that a lot of shows tend to linger around long after they should have called it quits.
I'd rather have people remember a game like most fans remember Firefly: a brief, bright convergence of great writing, pitch-perfect casting, and high concept that was sweet and fleeting and left us wanting more.
Something that lives in your imagination and inspires you to do something new, something bold and fresh and dangerous.
That sounded convincing, didn't it?
...Didn't it?
Of course, a theme only gets you half-way there. Without characters that are as driven, as desperate, as urgent as the characters that made the original the game it was... it won't work. Or it won't amount to much.
So much of what a sequel is rests on the shoulders of the players, and the question of whether or not they really want what they're asking for when they say "How about we do another season of (x)". Do they really want to push those characters further? Or just wrap themselves in nostalgia?
At a certain point, have characters earned their happy ending or selfless sacrifice or ignominious fate?
And that is the problem at the heart of Year of the Dragon, a sequel to my well-received series Shadowrun: Disavowed. I haven't written about this game at length yet (but I will), but the short version is that it's a vision of the Shadowrun universe that would make most Shadowrun players weepy and irritable. We played a game that was heavy on character drama, angst, and straight-up soap opera, and short on mercenaries shooting up office buildings for cold hard cash.
After that game wrapped, I wrote a "trailer" for a second season that hinted at a series where the characters went on a rollicking Bourne-esque chase through Europe battling some familiar enemies from the first season and some old enemies from their days as company men. Not to mention a shadowy magickal conspiracy in the mix. It would be a lot of big stupid fun.
But is it necessary? In the end, is there a good enough reason for those characters who survived the first season to come out of retirement -- putting what happiness they've managed to scrape together on the line? At the end of season one, I said I wouldn't do another one unless the players could give me good reasons why their characters would do that.
At our table, we often tend to think of our games through the lens of TV series -- and that figures, when you see what a big shadow Primetime Adventures has cast over our collective gaming life. (Thanks, Rob.) There is a seductive logic to the idea that a sequel game makes perfect sense in the context of serialized television -- you're just doing another season, after all, and where's the harm in that?
Television shows have a "best before" date too, though, and most of us would agree that a lot of shows tend to linger around long after they should have called it quits.
I'd rather have people remember a game like most fans remember Firefly: a brief, bright convergence of great writing, pitch-perfect casting, and high concept that was sweet and fleeting and left us wanting more.
Something that lives in your imagination and inspires you to do something new, something bold and fresh and dangerous.
That sounded convincing, didn't it?
...Didn't it?
Thursday, 7 February 2013
Folie a Deux (Part Two)
I have written here about my adventures running an online game for some friends using the Roll20 platform. As I've said before, these players were once upon a time my most fanatically loyal players in a long-running Villains & Vigilantes game. So important were those formative adventures, almost 20 years ago, that the players made action figures of their own characters -- the better to keep the game alive during the long months that I was away at university.
During the time I was writing my first novel as my masters' thesis, I also wrote a novella featuring the characters from that game. I used it as writing practice, a fun thing that I did to get the gears turning while I spent those long hours alone in my parents' basement. The heroes of that game world sustained me during that long, lonely journey. They endure in our collective memory.
And now we're discussing reviving that game, nearly twenty years later.
When I first started seriously considering getting a Roll20 game into motion, a new game featuring The Allegiance was right at the top of my list. A lot of those guys are spread out across the country now, and most of them haven't gamed together in years. Now we're all nice middle-aged men with wives and children (all except me, I think -- the children part, not the nice part) and without the miracles of modern nerdery the chances of an Allegiance reunion would be very slim. The most we could hope for is to somehow all manage to be in the same city -- with time to kill -- during the all-too-short holiday season.
I was amazed that all the guys have expressed interest in getting something going, although the practical realities of life and technology may have something to say about it. They were all eager to return to their superpowered alter-egos and see what new stories we could tell. I thought we might find that one or two players were simply unavailable or not interested in the project.
Our early conversations so far discussed what I saw as the three options we had for returning to the Allegiance:
How will those characters' lives differ from or reflect the lives of the players? What kind of dissonance could that create?
The Allegiance would follow in the footsteps of many fine comic books that examine the lives of older heroes returning to their duties when the world has all but forgotten them. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore's Watchmen, and Mark Waid & Alex Ross's Kingdom Come are just a few. And they are all exciting precisely because they are willing to cast the characters as older, fallible, changed and made uncertain by the stress of heroic lives.
What kind of heroes will the Allegiance be today?
And then there are the other sequels that lurk inside my hard drive, little time bombs of story waiting to go off...
To be continued...
During the time I was writing my first novel as my masters' thesis, I also wrote a novella featuring the characters from that game. I used it as writing practice, a fun thing that I did to get the gears turning while I spent those long hours alone in my parents' basement. The heroes of that game world sustained me during that long, lonely journey. They endure in our collective memory.
And now we're discussing reviving that game, nearly twenty years later.
When I first started seriously considering getting a Roll20 game into motion, a new game featuring The Allegiance was right at the top of my list. A lot of those guys are spread out across the country now, and most of them haven't gamed together in years. Now we're all nice middle-aged men with wives and children (all except me, I think -- the children part, not the nice part) and without the miracles of modern nerdery the chances of an Allegiance reunion would be very slim. The most we could hope for is to somehow all manage to be in the same city -- with time to kill -- during the all-too-short holiday season.
I was amazed that all the guys have expressed interest in getting something going, although the practical realities of life and technology may have something to say about it. They were all eager to return to their superpowered alter-egos and see what new stories we could tell. I thought we might find that one or two players were simply unavailable or not interested in the project.
Our early conversations so far discussed what I saw as the three options we had for returning to the Allegiance:
- Restart the campaign. We simply pick up from where we left off, twenty years ago. The characters remain who they were then, superheroic versions of my friends -- as teenagers.
- Reboot the campaign. We start over, treating the characters like comic book heroes who had been picked up by a new publisher or forced to endure one of the many tiresome retcons that plague comic books. This has the advantage of letting us change the characters in ways that make them more relevant to us today.
- Reunion. We continue the campaign with the characters having aged during the interval at the same rate as the players have. Like us, they would now be older, changed by their lives, and possibly with more problems and domestic ties than those characters had as young men.
How will those characters' lives differ from or reflect the lives of the players? What kind of dissonance could that create?
The Allegiance would follow in the footsteps of many fine comic books that examine the lives of older heroes returning to their duties when the world has all but forgotten them. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore's Watchmen, and Mark Waid & Alex Ross's Kingdom Come are just a few. And they are all exciting precisely because they are willing to cast the characters as older, fallible, changed and made uncertain by the stress of heroic lives.
What kind of heroes will the Allegiance be today?
And then there are the other sequels that lurk inside my hard drive, little time bombs of story waiting to go off...
To be continued...
Wednesday, 6 February 2013
Folie a Deux (Part One)
Part of the evolution of my GMing style that eventually brought me to HTHD was a decision to begin writing campaigns with a specific end point in mind. This decision was founded by heartbreak -- I had been involved with running one too many campaigns that I was forced to abandon, with no firm resolution or sense of closure in the players' minds.
It's a young man's idea that roleplaying games are meant to sprawl on forever, with no particular end point, an ever-increasing spiral of story and character that expands out to the corners of the universe. Adult gamers come to realize that gaming time is precious, and it's preferable to play in short, focused bursts that squeeze all the juice out of a game rather than take a leisurely pace which wanders its way toward an overall direction by serendipity.
The world of the adult gamer is uncertain; we never know where the fickle demands of work or family or fate will take us next, and how far we might be separated from the fictional lives that nurture us. And there are so many games to be played, so many worlds to visit and explore, so many lives to be lived outside the borders of the merely real.
This is one of the reasons that I generally prefer a game with a specific ending (even if I haven't charted the details of that ending in great detail) and why I have generally avoided running games that are sequels.
Although over the years I have had many requests for sequels to games that ran to completion, I have rarely returned to material once explored to a successful conclusion. To do so would be a huge risk, I've said, because firstly you're hoping that there are still deep waters out there to explore -- if you did your job right the first time, you've said everything that needed to be said. If there isn't anything new to say about a group of characters, if their story isn't more urgent and the stakes higher than ever in your sequel, then why do it? Secondly, you risk damaging the happy memories that people have of a campaign that's run to completion.
Players might not be willing to see serious changes and challenges to characters that have achieved a place among the pantheon of favourites. And maybe that is not a wrong instinct. Neil Gaiman once wrote that any story that goes on long enough ends in death; so it is for player characters, and so it is for their worlds.
Nostalgia is a poor substitute for substance, in my mind, leading people to the kind of dissatisfaction that I see hanging like a black cloud over the Star Wars prequels. Perhaps there were ways to approach that material again that would have seemed relevant and exciting, but it seems to me that people were setting themselves up for disappointment. Of course no prequel thirty years on could re-bottle the magic of youth. How could it? And you run the same risk in gaming. Returning to a once-beloved game world to revisit old characters and storylines is an excellent recipe for dissatisfaction, with players left wondering why the beloved old stomping grounds no longer feel like home.
Better to tell new stories than wander around a series of dusty old rooms looking for something that's no longer there.
Which is why I find myself in the most uncomfortable position of contemplating not one but several sequels to games that have been very important to me...
To be continued...
It's a young man's idea that roleplaying games are meant to sprawl on forever, with no particular end point, an ever-increasing spiral of story and character that expands out to the corners of the universe. Adult gamers come to realize that gaming time is precious, and it's preferable to play in short, focused bursts that squeeze all the juice out of a game rather than take a leisurely pace which wanders its way toward an overall direction by serendipity.
The world of the adult gamer is uncertain; we never know where the fickle demands of work or family or fate will take us next, and how far we might be separated from the fictional lives that nurture us. And there are so many games to be played, so many worlds to visit and explore, so many lives to be lived outside the borders of the merely real.
This is one of the reasons that I generally prefer a game with a specific ending (even if I haven't charted the details of that ending in great detail) and why I have generally avoided running games that are sequels.
Although over the years I have had many requests for sequels to games that ran to completion, I have rarely returned to material once explored to a successful conclusion. To do so would be a huge risk, I've said, because firstly you're hoping that there are still deep waters out there to explore -- if you did your job right the first time, you've said everything that needed to be said. If there isn't anything new to say about a group of characters, if their story isn't more urgent and the stakes higher than ever in your sequel, then why do it? Secondly, you risk damaging the happy memories that people have of a campaign that's run to completion.
Players might not be willing to see serious changes and challenges to characters that have achieved a place among the pantheon of favourites. And maybe that is not a wrong instinct. Neil Gaiman once wrote that any story that goes on long enough ends in death; so it is for player characters, and so it is for their worlds.
Nostalgia is a poor substitute for substance, in my mind, leading people to the kind of dissatisfaction that I see hanging like a black cloud over the Star Wars prequels. Perhaps there were ways to approach that material again that would have seemed relevant and exciting, but it seems to me that people were setting themselves up for disappointment. Of course no prequel thirty years on could re-bottle the magic of youth. How could it? And you run the same risk in gaming. Returning to a once-beloved game world to revisit old characters and storylines is an excellent recipe for dissatisfaction, with players left wondering why the beloved old stomping grounds no longer feel like home.
Better to tell new stories than wander around a series of dusty old rooms looking for something that's no longer there.
Which is why I find myself in the most uncomfortable position of contemplating not one but several sequels to games that have been very important to me...
To be continued...
Tuesday, 5 February 2013
Blood Money - Session One
So last night was the first episode of the new Roll20 western game, Blood Money. We had a good time overall, but not without some bumps.
First impressions:
Some positive stuff:
Some things for next time:
First impressions:
- The most common complaint about online gaming is correct: things move very slowly. I prepared what I thought was a very modest adventure -- an overland map, plus four more detailed "scenes" where the players have a chance to take down their bounty. It took us more than an hour to play through one of those short scenes. On the GM side, this may actually be a plus, because it takes a little longer to set up something like this where you have to build maps, etc. On the down side, if you don't like tactical combat, this drags it out even more. Some of the time factor is unfamiliarity on all of our parts, both with the interface and with the rules / expectations of play on the players part. I think it will improve with time.
- The other common complaint about online games is that it's difficult to get people to commit. That also seems to be true. I have six players, and two of them didn't show for this session. That actually worked out fine, because even four players is a lot in this interface, with everyone learning the system. It may be a reality of playing in this format that you're going to have to work in "episodic" mode where characters drop in and out.
- Technical issues are a real pain in the bollocks, especially when you're just trying to get going. We agreed to a slightly later start, last night, which was fine - but technical glitches slowed down getting everyone up and functional just as we were about to start. This may have something to do with the amount of traffic on the site, or on Google Hangouts, I'm not sure. The lesson here may be "start early", so that you can iron out those problems and get on with the gaming.
- I realized that I'd been doing something dumb myself all evening, and hadn't flipped a toggle which makes all of your characters' skills appear at the bottom of the screen as buttons - easy to press and keep track of. It is a pain in the butt to flip back and forth with the various digital character sheets, which could be better.
Some positive stuff:
- Notwithstanding the technical issues, we actually did have fun with the session. The audio chat makes the kind of table talk that makes roleplaying memorable quite easy. When people spoke in character, it really was quite effective - because without the other player's face behind that voice, you felt a very direct connection to the character.
- The GM-side tools that allow the GM to control what the players see on the game screen are really nifty. The ability to "pull" the players' view to a particular point on a map and to be able to place tokens on a map layer the players can't see -- so that you can "pop them in" at an appropriate moment -- was cool. There was at least one audible gasp when a token appeared somewhere unexpected.
- It's very slick to have the computer manage all the die-rolling parts of the mechanics. Having the ability to click one button and have all of your various rolls finished and tallied immediately is fabulous, especially in a system like Savage Worlds where there can be a lot of re-rolling. I worried that it wouldn't feel the same as dice, but it's actually way better to roll dice in the chat window than to use the 3D dice -- they are, as I'd been told, nifty but slow to animate.
Some things for next time:
- I forgot to try out the streaming music during the game last night. During the playtest, people found it was disruptive and hard to hear, but it might still work as a quiet background note. Or sound effects might pep up combat a bit.
- I need to work on providing more in-character play, to develop the HTHD side of the game experience, but I'm taking a "baby steps" approach overall. Once the scene management stuff has fallen into place, I can work more on experimenting with presenting compelling scenes, music, that kind of "polish" and depth that moves a game from the realm of the acceptable and entertaining to the memorable and challenging.
Monday, 4 February 2013
Something Old, Something New...
As I've previously described, I'm starting up a new semi-regular game in a format I've never tried before: online play, using a virtual tabletop program called Roll20.
This is an exciting opportunity for me, because it allows me to gather together a group of players that I haven't gamed with in almost twenty years. Like most of us, they have been scattered across the country by the passage of time and the acquisition of careers and families. Some of them probably haven't been able to sit down for a regular gaming group in a long, long time.
Back in the day, I ran them through a Villains & Vigilantes campaign that they were hugely, fanatically dedicated to. (V&V used to be my go-to supers game all through high school and university, basically until the first edition of Mutants & Masterminds came along and surpassed it in every way.) We played it for years, on and off, and when the guys weren't playing, they were doing other creative things -- writing stories, creating artwork, even making action figures -- to keep the game in the forefront of their minds.
Remember that this was a long time ago, and although there probably wasn't a lot of deep roleplaying going on in this game (they were playing the standard character concept in V&V, which was "yourself - but with super powers!") it gave me a glimpse of what a gaming group with truly passionate, dedicated players looked like. Together, we followed the adventures of those characters from a convenience store robbery in small town Ontario to the far side of the galaxy.
This is my first time at bat using the Roll20 platform, and we've had some technical issues to manage as I learn the system and what it expects of GMs and players. Although the site does a good job of giving you a feel for game play with their instructional videos, sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to figure out how you're expected to set things up. I had initially planned to manage my bad guys on file cards, simply plugging whatever rolls I needed into the chat interface as we played - but it seems the system prefers that I work with fully-statted out bad guys inside the system. Once you figure that out, you can copy and alter existing pages to quickly bolster out your cast of bad guys, but I literally didn't figure it out until we were online doing some playtesting.
The audio/video chat feature on the site itself also seems to drop out unexpectedly, but it seems to function well alongside Google+ Hangouts, which can run in the background to manage audio chat. (The Google+ Hangouts also seems to have much less lag time than the Roll20 A/V chat.)
Note that although the site is glitchy sometimes, it's still in Beta testing and so far is free to use. I'm not complaining about it - far from it, this seems a huge boon to gamers everywhere - just telling you my experiences. Like early editions of tabletop games, it's got issues but lots of promise.
I was lucky enough to find a recommendation from someone who used the site to acquire a free tool called Token Tool which helps you easily produce virtual game tokens for use on the site. Useful, as the selection of Old West tokens on the site is limited. Now I have hundreds of gunfighters and banditos and buffalo hunters at my disposal with the touch of a button.
Of course, most of the virtual tabletop setup is designed to give you tools for tactical combat on your screen -- the better to explore your dungeons and battle your dragons, squire. I admit that this has little appeal for me, but I'm interested to see what else I can use it for in terms of presenting dramatic scenes. The first adventure I've produced for it is a straight-up Western bounty hunter game called Blood Money that has the players hunting down the members of a notorious gang of bank robbers. I've used a variety of scenes for the players to game through, including a title page which can also serve as a "transition" card, an overland map we can move the players through, and various close-up tactical maps focused around the various gang members. I hope that I've set it up in such a way that the players can approach the scenes with a variety of strategies and succeed. They could go in shooting, or sneak their way through, or try to coast through on charm.
The game system I'm using the first time out is Savage Worlds, which is reasonably crunchy but should feel relatively straightforward to the players - especially since Roll20 does most of the work for us. It works well enough, but I'm thinking that in future I'm going to use systems that only require rolls on the player side of things -- less work for me that way, and it gives me more time to concentrate on what the players are doing. ICONS (or some hack of same) seems a natural fit for a reunion of our long-ago superhero characters, when we get to that (it was agreed that would be a long-term project as we got more comfortable with the system). The next thing is supposed to be a Ghostbusters game powered by FATE CORE. Assuming we could sustain the massive size of it, we could use this medium to play through the massive Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign for Call of Cthulhu.
Questions I'm most interested in at this point are whether the electronic / virtual tabletop can be leveraged for playing deep, character-driven stories in the HTHD style, and how that might be achieved...
This is an exciting opportunity for me, because it allows me to gather together a group of players that I haven't gamed with in almost twenty years. Like most of us, they have been scattered across the country by the passage of time and the acquisition of careers and families. Some of them probably haven't been able to sit down for a regular gaming group in a long, long time.
Back in the day, I ran them through a Villains & Vigilantes campaign that they were hugely, fanatically dedicated to. (V&V used to be my go-to supers game all through high school and university, basically until the first edition of Mutants & Masterminds came along and surpassed it in every way.) We played it for years, on and off, and when the guys weren't playing, they were doing other creative things -- writing stories, creating artwork, even making action figures -- to keep the game in the forefront of their minds.
Remember that this was a long time ago, and although there probably wasn't a lot of deep roleplaying going on in this game (they were playing the standard character concept in V&V, which was "yourself - but with super powers!") it gave me a glimpse of what a gaming group with truly passionate, dedicated players looked like. Together, we followed the adventures of those characters from a convenience store robbery in small town Ontario to the far side of the galaxy.
This is my first time at bat using the Roll20 platform, and we've had some technical issues to manage as I learn the system and what it expects of GMs and players. Although the site does a good job of giving you a feel for game play with their instructional videos, sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to figure out how you're expected to set things up. I had initially planned to manage my bad guys on file cards, simply plugging whatever rolls I needed into the chat interface as we played - but it seems the system prefers that I work with fully-statted out bad guys inside the system. Once you figure that out, you can copy and alter existing pages to quickly bolster out your cast of bad guys, but I literally didn't figure it out until we were online doing some playtesting.
The audio/video chat feature on the site itself also seems to drop out unexpectedly, but it seems to function well alongside Google+ Hangouts, which can run in the background to manage audio chat. (The Google+ Hangouts also seems to have much less lag time than the Roll20 A/V chat.)
Note that although the site is glitchy sometimes, it's still in Beta testing and so far is free to use. I'm not complaining about it - far from it, this seems a huge boon to gamers everywhere - just telling you my experiences. Like early editions of tabletop games, it's got issues but lots of promise.
I was lucky enough to find a recommendation from someone who used the site to acquire a free tool called Token Tool which helps you easily produce virtual game tokens for use on the site. Useful, as the selection of Old West tokens on the site is limited. Now I have hundreds of gunfighters and banditos and buffalo hunters at my disposal with the touch of a button.
Of course, most of the virtual tabletop setup is designed to give you tools for tactical combat on your screen -- the better to explore your dungeons and battle your dragons, squire. I admit that this has little appeal for me, but I'm interested to see what else I can use it for in terms of presenting dramatic scenes. The first adventure I've produced for it is a straight-up Western bounty hunter game called Blood Money that has the players hunting down the members of a notorious gang of bank robbers. I've used a variety of scenes for the players to game through, including a title page which can also serve as a "transition" card, an overland map we can move the players through, and various close-up tactical maps focused around the various gang members. I hope that I've set it up in such a way that the players can approach the scenes with a variety of strategies and succeed. They could go in shooting, or sneak their way through, or try to coast through on charm.
The game system I'm using the first time out is Savage Worlds, which is reasonably crunchy but should feel relatively straightforward to the players - especially since Roll20 does most of the work for us. It works well enough, but I'm thinking that in future I'm going to use systems that only require rolls on the player side of things -- less work for me that way, and it gives me more time to concentrate on what the players are doing. ICONS (or some hack of same) seems a natural fit for a reunion of our long-ago superhero characters, when we get to that (it was agreed that would be a long-term project as we got more comfortable with the system). The next thing is supposed to be a Ghostbusters game powered by FATE CORE. Assuming we could sustain the massive size of it, we could use this medium to play through the massive Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign for Call of Cthulhu.
Questions I'm most interested in at this point are whether the electronic / virtual tabletop can be leveraged for playing deep, character-driven stories in the HTHD style, and how that might be achieved...
Sunday, 3 February 2013
Tales from the Table: Firefly (Part Five)
Sorry for the long gap there, I've finally gotten down with the funk that's been laying the entire city low for the past month or so. Ugh. Slowly improving.
So, how did the players handle the interrogations? Each in their own way. This is an excellent case study in why High Trust, High Drama play demands players who are willing to go above and beyond. And what a player can do to take play to the next level.
One last moment from that episode:
Tess realized that the hysterical inmate in the cell opposite hers in the prison block -- Sandoval, a gambler who had previously shipped out on the Fandango, but clearly owed Lao Feng too much money -- might hold the key to her escape. But first she needed to talk him down.
When Sandoval -- convinced they would be executed any minute -- began to sing "Amazing Grace" hysterically to himself, Amanda (as Tess) hit a home run by picking up the song and singing it to him in comforting tones. That was a powerful moment.
"My, my momma use to sing that to me," he choked, after she finished. "When I'd get scared."
Sandoval managed to jimmy the locks on both cells, and the escape was on...
When the dust had settled and we talked about the episode, the players were I think exhilarated and exhausted. We had taken the HTHD jalopy up to full speed and shot it across the Snake River Canyon to see what happened. And landed safely on the other side.
Megan summed it up:
"That was amazing and tough, and let's not do anything like that again for a while, okay?"
So, how did the players handle the interrogations? Each in their own way. This is an excellent case study in why High Trust, High Drama play demands players who are willing to go above and beyond. And what a player can do to take play to the next level.
- Colin, as his pregnant war criminal Carmen, saw the arc of his character as trying to redeem her family honour somehow through her actions. He was not willing to accept the gangster's offer, even if it would have provided him with power and security. (Also, I remember that Colin definitely used my "safe word" protocol -- signalling "This is too heavy, need a break from this scene" at least once. Others may have also done so, but I'm mentioning it here just as an important case-in-point -- remember to leave yourself a "safety valve" when you put the pressure this high.)
- Amanda, as captain Tess, had probably the longest conversation with the gangster, and perhaps the level of civility between the two of them stayed the most "friendly". Lao Feng told Tess about his several wives and their gifts, one of whom had grown both the tea they were drinking and the poison used to drug the crew into unconsciousness. But when the gangster threatened to use her ship, the Fandango, as a drug-running scow, Tess managed to strike the only blow against the bad guys this day -- she grabbed her tea and threw it in Lao Feng's face. Note that this was the only overt act of violence in the entire episode. (Sticks and stones are for sissies -- words cause permanent damage.)
- Megan, as the Quaker "conductor" on the Underground Railroad Lena, chose a complex path. She decided that giving the gangster anything -- anything at all -- would be the beginning of the end. She chose to passively resist, refusing to respond to anything he said. I had to push harder and harder, of course, to try for some reaction out of her, and said some pretty damned evil and cruel things. Lena didn't buckle under intimidation, but Megan told me later, it had been incredibly hard and painful to endure that sort of attack without resisting. And also taught her something about the power of passive resistance. I even had Lao Feng toy with her by putting a loaded gun in front of her on the table, and sending Eden his assassin away -- Lena could free her friends and escape, but to do so she would have to abandon her principles utterly. She refused. (Her fellow players actually audibly gasped during this exchange.)
One last moment from that episode:
Tess realized that the hysterical inmate in the cell opposite hers in the prison block -- Sandoval, a gambler who had previously shipped out on the Fandango, but clearly owed Lao Feng too much money -- might hold the key to her escape. But first she needed to talk him down.
When Sandoval -- convinced they would be executed any minute -- began to sing "Amazing Grace" hysterically to himself, Amanda (as Tess) hit a home run by picking up the song and singing it to him in comforting tones. That was a powerful moment.
"My, my momma use to sing that to me," he choked, after she finished. "When I'd get scared."
Sandoval managed to jimmy the locks on both cells, and the escape was on...
When the dust had settled and we talked about the episode, the players were I think exhilarated and exhausted. We had taken the HTHD jalopy up to full speed and shot it across the Snake River Canyon to see what happened. And landed safely on the other side.
Megan summed it up:
"That was amazing and tough, and let's not do anything like that again for a while, okay?"
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