#RPGaDay2024 - 15 - Great Character Gear

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. Great Character Gear?

A. It’s complicated.

I can remember pouring over the AD&D equipment lists and all the cool items, especially the magic ones, in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. I can recall being super-excited by all the different assault, plasma, gauss and other paraphernalia in the 2300AD rules and linking them back to the Aliens movie and more in my head. The Cyberpunk 2020 gear books were also kind of cool.

These days, I find the whole equipment list thing tedious and boring. I much prefer the approach taken by games like Blades in the Dark, where you pick a load-out that may trigger a mechanical effect, but can select what gear you want as things go along, and perhaps use a flashback to make it credible if you want something outlandish. Alternatively, the GUMSHOE preparedness pool is your friend; a simple dice roll to get hold of something in the event that you really need it (an approach they extended to contacts in their spy game); if you really want it, you spend more of your pool to get it.

Chef’s kiss to Blades in the Dark for simplicity

I do like a good unique item, and I am fascinated but yet to be convinced on Cyphers in Numenera and beyond.

I have posted regularly on OSR games in this blog; they tend to be more mechanistic about this kind of thing, and I’ve actually ended up letting the players drive encumbrance and equipment, or adopted a simple system to manage it. Mausrítter has a lovely simple way of managing this kind of thing.

15 August 2024

#RPGaDay2024 - 14 - Compelling Characters

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. Compelling Characters?

A. City of Mist.

Again, a prompt rather than a question.

I think that you need one of two things to make a game strong; compelling characters or a compelling environment/situation where the characters can emerge. In a perfect world, you’d want both.

Compelling situations & environments are those that pull actions from the players to make their characters do things. For example, the classic D&D dungeon does that. You usually start with a rag-tag group of heroes who have somewhat tenuous reasons to be together, and the actions that they take against the (mostly) hostile environment help the players to explore and build the characters. In an OSR style environment, there’s also a sense of fragility and likelihood that death may strike at any time if your luck runs away. D&D 3e onwards is more about a heroic journey and death is much less of threat than its older siblings (but that’s a whole other discussion).

A lot of earlier games don’t really build compelling characters. I think that the first edition of King Arthur Pendragon was the first time I started to see mechanics being used in games to start to make characters more compelling; the paired personality traits and passions gave mechanics to drive character behaviour and make them more than just a set of numbers that determined how you could fight.

When I was more regularly writing material for gaming conventions, I’d spend around half the time on the character sheets, giving the characters a short backstory and reasons to engage with each other. These were hooks to drive engagement quickly.  I realised that if the players were having fun by riffing off each other, they tended to have a great time whether or not they succeeded at the story. This was all built on top of the core Traveller character sheet; a second page with table that gave the hooks on how they felt about or what they wanted from other characters along with a background to draw in.

These days, I tend to use games which will lend themselves to doing this with their mechanics. When I run Powered by the Apocalypse based games, a key part of this is completing the character playbooks at the table so people can build the interactions between their characters which are baked into the game engine. They create stronger signposts about how the GM should engage with their characters. This isn’t exclusive to PbtA; games like Numenera have really clear signposts when they describe a character as ‘I am an adjective noun who verbs’. Creating bonds and links between characters and motivations for the whole groupare at the core of modern game design.

A game that I particularly like that does this is City of Mist. Each character is a combination of four themes, each of which describes a core aspect of their identity or a mystery that they absolutely want to get to the bottom of. There are potential consequences if you fail to lean into these areas. There are also weaknesses that mean that the character can get into trouble but learn from it. At a group (Crew) level, there’s also a shared theme card for them as a whole. This is packaged with some glorious looking character sheets of you want to use them at the table, with great artwork and all the key mechanics showing on them. So I’ll choose City of Mist for this answer.

14 August 2024

City of Mist Character sheets

#RPGaDay2024 - 13 - Evocative Environments

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. Evocative Environments?

A. Traveller.

Well, that isn’t really a question, is it? 

A quick look at my iPad’s built in dictionary links gives me this.

EVOCATIVE
adjective
bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind: powerfully evocative lyrics / the building's cramped interiors are highly evocative of past centuries.

ORIGIN
mid 17th century: from Latin evocativus, from evocat- 'called forth', from the verb evocare.

Usually, I find that the setting itself has an impact on how evocative a roleplaying game is, but the prompt is calling out environments. I think that this really knocks out most of the games that are tied to third party IPs, because they are as much the settings and the plots that you’ve seen there. So that means games like Pelgrane Press’ The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game (which I’m re-reading at the moment), Star Wars, and most of Modiphius’ output are really not an option here. I also think that a lot of the Powered by the Apocalypse games are out, as the environment itself is usually a weak layer built on interaction prompts in playbooks.

Traveller always screamed ‘space’ at me, as it very well represented the kind of science fiction that I grew up with. The environments described by Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Andre Norton and CJ Cherryh all called out to me from the game’s writing and made me believe that you could play all those kinds of stories.

Twilight 2000 is another; there was a realistic feel to the environment that it described even though the truth of even a limited nuclear exchange was likely to me far more catastrophic; I was always interested in seeing how people would respond to that situation (although a lot of the follow on material printed seemed to veer of in different directions). The flavour it evoked for me was a reminder of the British Apocalypse type story, JG Ballard, John Wyndham and more. However, Hot War came along later and absolutely nailed this kind of feeling for me.

Blue Planet and some of the 2300AD planetary supplements like the Aurore Sourcebook evoked feeling of very different and alien worlds, but anchored in enough of our world’s environment to feel real and strange at the same time.

A|State gives this wonderfully evocatively strange city in some kind of weird setting but then completely ignores that to focus on a tiny corner and the struggles of a neighbourhood. I love the way that this is done, but sometimes I wonder if it’s missing something.

Some games seem to miss this; my initial skim read through the two newish Numenera core books (Discovery and Destiny) has left me excited by the characters, the way that they are described and the simplicity of the game engine, but I find some of the world building descriptions of the environments just a bit plain and mundane, almost a bit traditional D&D. I’m curious whether my view of this will change as I read them.

I’ve found books like The Ultraviolet Grasslands and The Vaults of Vaarn very evocative; they are very much about the setting (in both cases a post-apocalyptic feel world of plains and deserts). Acid Death Fantasy does this really well in the spaces between the character information. They all have the same vibe  and are adjacent to the feel of the Dying Earth.

So where do I end up? Ultimately, the answer I’ll give is Traveller, because if in doubt Traveller is always my answer. My first and enduring love as a roleplaying game, something that is definitive and evocative due to the science-fiction of my youth.

The truth is, the way Traveller is constructed, it has sub-systems that allow you to create an evocative setting which you’re invested it. You can design all the starships you want. You can create sectors of space to explore, and detail the star systems therein. You can dive deeper and create the creatures and environs that you explore. Traveller gives you procedural generation for your space adventures, with scaleable detail; you can gave a star-system described in a string of text by its UWP or dive into more detail with world maps and more. 

Traveller lets you build evocative environments with ease. One of my earliest writing projects that failed to see the light of day (as Marc Miller’s Traveller T4 ended) was taking a subsector in space with a list of UWPs and some of the future background material (as the original setting was a thousand years in the future) and then describing the star systems for a player to explore. It made me realise the flexibility of the game engine and how much you could draw from a simple set of data points created from the mechanics.

So Traveller it is.

13 August 2024

Playing catch up here due to work and preparing to go away for a few days.

#RPGaDay2024 - 12 - RPG with well supported campaigns?

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. RPG with well supported campaigns?

A. Spire

The easy, obvious choice for this is D&D 5e. There are multiple official campaigns and many more from third parties. Some are excellent, other less so. Brancalonia looks excellent, and the Historica Arcanum books also inspire me. Neverland is also well worth a look.

It's also worth calling out the many OSR supplements that are out there at the moment, all of which look excellent for campaigns. Personal favourites include Castle Xyntillan; the author also has a whole set of zines called Echoes from Fomalhaut which have an extended campaign world. I also think that Wulfwald, which I've just finished, will be right up there. It's a full Anglo-Saxon game world and hack for OSR style systems and looks excellent (review coming soon). The Ultraviolet Grasslands is also another OSR derived campaign I'd love to explore.

I also really like the way that the new edition of Blue Planet has multiple campaign frames to help you get your games underway. Red Sky Charters is excellent and several of the extra ones in the final book also make me want to run them. However, I called out Blue Planet in a previous post so I'll give another game an opportunity here.

However, I'm going to go with Spire. Spire is a game where you play Drow freedom fighters / terrorists in a megacity pushing back against Aelfir (light elf) oppression. There are a number of different campaign frames which I've read that inspire me. The Kings of Silver, where you run a Drow nightclub and gambling den, really called out to me, but there are others like Eidolon Sky and Blood & Dust that also looked great. The supplements Sin, Strata and the various related Kickstarter goodies are in my to-read pile as well with more opportunities for a campaign. There's a lot to draw on and I think you could get a great campaign from this.

12 August 2024

#RPGaDay2024 - 11 - RPG with well supported one-shots

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. RPG with well supported one-shots?

A. City of Mist.

I've run one or two games of City of Mist at Revelation and Furnace each year for the last few years. I've never written a scenario. Each scenario has been taken from the campaigns and adventures that have been released to support the game, ranging from the starter set, through to Nights of Payne Town (the epic campaign) and Local Legends (the about to be released supplement) and also some of the fan-created scenarios. 

The game is built around a supernatural-noir detective case format, which means that the adventures are pretty self-contained, even if they are in an arc. You don't usually need to know what has happened before to make them work. I've not had one go bad as yet from a GM's perspective, and I have had repeat customers at cons so it must land well with the players. 

Hence my choice is City of Mist.

11 August 2024

#RPGaDay2024 - 10 - RPG you'd like to see on TV

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. RPG you'd like to see on TV?

A. Blue Planet.

Much as my heart yearns for a decent Traveller-based TV series, I think that it would be difficult for it to really succeed and not just be seen as a Star Wars knock-off (even though they were both born around the same time). 

Blue Planet may work, with the right set up (for example the Red Sky Charters campaign in the new book) and it would look really good (beaches, islands, boats) with occasional moves into the super-high technology of spacecraft, the corporate operations and even cut-backs to Earth if you did the story right.

City of Mist would also work really well, mythic heroes solving crime, supernatural or normal. In fact, you could argue that the Marvel Defenders (aka Netflix Marvel already did this).

The Dracula Dossier (Night's Black Agents) would also work really well, almost an updated Ultraviolet TV series. A cross between le Carré for discovery and betrayal and Bourne for action.

10 August 2024

#RPGaDay2024 - 9 - An accessory you'd like to see?

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. An accessory you'd like to see?

A. An A1-sized rollable, dry-wipeable digital screen that's robust and liquid proof.

This is probably a pipe-dream but it would be a fantastic play surface for face-to-face games. It'd allow you to share maps, images, handouts. Imagine if it was interfaced to people's phones or tablets so they could bring things up on the surface to reference or share. I went A1 as I've found that a great size for convention games. The dry-wipe could be something like an EMR pen-stylus or Apple Pencil.

The truth is that the accessories I most use are dice-related. Dice rolls, dice trays and sometimes a dice-tower. I like screens as quick references but often have them flat (unless there's something to hide like a map). I'm comfortable with those, so would like something game changing.

9 August 2024

 

#RPGaDay2024 - 6 - RPG that's easy to use

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. RPG that's easy to use?

A. TRIPOD.

TRIPOD (formerly Wordplay) is a very simple and easy to use narrative engine which is really simple to use. You have three core attributes (body, mind, soul) and some associated traits. These all have numerical values which represents the number of D6s that you roll. Each D6 gives a failure on a 1-3, one success on 4-5 and two successes on a 6. You win by achieving more successes than your opponent and the margin of success determines the level of negative trait that they suffer in response.

It's a a doddle to use, and really easy to create and convert material from other games as you only have to identify descriptive traits and assign a competency rating to the NPC or opponent to get their dice pool. I talked about this on my post about converting Stormbringer into TRIPOD for LongCon. It works well in play and can either work by abstracting actions at a large scale or going toe-to-toe.

My favourite game engine (I'm biased of course, as I was heavily involved in play testing and also laid out both this edition and the previous one). It's available on DriveThruRPG.

TRIPOD's wonderful cover by Steph McAlea

#RPGaDay - PSA - getting ahead of myself

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. What happens when you are reading the prompts from the RPGaDay graphic thumbnail?

A. You manage to skip a line and go a day ahead after 'great writing'.

This is now being corrected and tomorrow's post will be 'RPG that's easy to use' which should have been the sixth prompt. I've edited titles on the blog but the permalinks remain the same for continuity.

Oops.

Hat tip to Tim Gray of Silver Branch Games who pointed this out to me.

7 August 2024