Time to Play Tournament

   I now realize how much Gen Con got it right back in ’74 (literally from the start) with Tournament Play, and participants who often didn’t know each other. Because, let’s face it: time wasted is one of the main afflictions – if not the main affliction – in tabletop RPGs; and why, I ask, do players waste time? Two reasons:

   Reason #1. Players waste time because they’re in no hurry. If they don’t get to the evil sorcerer’s lair tonight, they’ll get there next month, or in three months, when they play their next game session. There is no deadline: why rush in? Tournament play solves that completely. “Here’s the situation. This is happening, and these goblins over there are digging something up in the crevasse, and that warlock begun his ritual to summon up something nasty... You guys have six hours. It starts now. What do you want to do?”

   Reason #2. Players waste time because they all know each other. They’ve all been friends since ’84 or so. They are glad to see each other. They’re fired up. They brought wine. They’re thirsty. They start talking about Windows 8. Then they talk about Cuba and going south in January. Then someone says the word “Linux”, and that’s another hour vanishing... Tournament play solves that, too. The players sit down, introduce themselves, let the DM have a look at their character record sheets, and start gaming almost immediately.

   It’s still very cool to play with your old gaming buddies, though. Sometimes I’ll put someone new in the lineup – one of my cousins, or a coworker – but at its core, it stays mostly my old friends. I couldn’t really solve that time wasting aspect of the game, so I’ve decided to definitely solve the other: I now give each scenario a time limit. Forget long mods like Tsojcanth. Now it’s mini-games, playable in under 8 hours. A beginning, a middle, and an end – all in the same game session. If it’s a dungeon crawl, there’s gonna be less than 10 rooms to explore, and only between 3 and 5 fight scenes. Still, if they don’t have enough time to “finish” the dungeon, that’s that, and it’s just too bad.

   November 29, I ran my second game of AD&D in 28 years. I talked about the first session in a previous post, and the results were dismal. Now, there’s improvement. But there is room for further improvement – as always.

   After years and years of multisession adventures, it’s hard to pick up the pace. We were accustomed to extensive analysis and brainstorming; we even invented a new word for it: metagaming. This is when players are out of character, discussing the difficulties / challenges / technical aspects of a particular scenario. It’s annoying sometimes, because real medieval warriors wouldn’t think that much, but that’s the world we live in: what can you expect when every one of your friends is a network programmer or a teacher? If you hate the OOC shit, just get yourself a bunch of actor friends – theater majors, that kind of people. They will really play the Elf or the wizard or the monk. Meanwhile, work with what you have, and what you have is metagaming, which we also called tobyism, because of Tobias who really did it a lot.

   But now that I want to switch us back to good old tournament play – i.e. with a time limit –, the guys need to reacquaint themselves with the forgotten arts of “winging it” and “going in blind” and other brands of instant decision-making. I was asking myself: why do I always cringe, and not them? Because they don’t know the rooms still left to explore, but I do. It gave me an idea...

   What about if I handed the players a complete map of the dungeon right at the beginning, with all the rooms, but no clues regarding monsters or traps? They’d have a visual reference as the game progresses, and they’d be able to see all that’s still unexplored.

   Like I wrote four months ago, it’s a question of identifying the “profitable” part of any sandbox-ish scenario. Where is the good stuff stashed away? In this case, the good stuff waited in three pocket dimensions accessible through a magical stone slab in the mansion’s basement. But THEY DIDN’T GO of course – except for the bard who entered one of these dimensions alone, but am I gonna bust the lich and his five mummies just for one PC? (Huge exaggeration here about the monsters, but you got my whiff.)

   Tournament is definitely the way, but I think there ought to be some visual aid for the players – a sort of “Dungeon Completion Chart”. Nine main rooms, plus a number of corridors and stairwells and possibly traps. We’re already two hours in, and we only cleared two main rooms out of nine. We’re behind schedule, guys!

   I’m sure there is some way to integrate this in the story.

   Tournament is not logical. “Why do we only have six hours to do this?” Well, why not? Dungeon crawls aren’t logical anyway. You go on myth-weavers.com and click “generate dungeon”, but what is this damned dungeon exactly? Who built it, and why? Wanting to go logical in D&D is a slippery slope indeed. Like I used to say: everybody killed Drelnza, and then met in a tavern to swap stories about how they killed her...

   Please check your logic at the door.

   If at least one of your friends is an adept of vaping, and if he brought his e-cigarette (you know he did), then you have access to amazing special effects during your combat scenes, like in this photo: mansion’s on fire and they’re all fighting the evil intruders in a thick cloud of smoke!

Batman Cthulhu vs Mickey Thor

   Been many years now since that weird Arkham / Gotham merger occurred, and to celebrate it (and the elegant absurdity of it), here is the Dark Knight’s investigator card for Arkham Horror – next game, trust me, I’m using it!

   Arkham is now a district of Gotham City, nothing more. They kept the Asylum, sure, but not the Miskatonic River nor the University, nor the Witch House and other cool eerie spots. HPL’s Arkham is just plain gone, and it makes me very sad.

   It’s like saying that the Dragon Isle of Melniboné and the Isle of Númenor are one and the same – or that Camelot is in Lankhmar – but wait till it is Public Domain, though! Why do you think there are so many versions of the same stories in Greek mythology or Arthurian mythos? It’s because writers constantly rip off previous writers. Vergil cannot leave Homer alone, so he tells a different story of the same damn Achilles. Malory cannot leave Chrétien de Troyes alone, so he spins a different tale of the same damn Lancelot... Five hundred years from now, our own pop culture will also be a huge mess, perhaps even bigger: Hastur the Unspeakable will be the Joker’s BFF, and together they’ll plot the destruction of the Klingon High Jedi Council of Minas Tirith...

   Who invented Gotham City anyway? Is it Bill Finger? Is it Herron & Kirby? We know that Lovecraft created Arkham in 1920. Gotham City is first mentioned in a 1940 issue of Batman. So, is Arkham older than Gotham, then? But wait, Washington Irving made use of the name “Gotham” back in 1807, didn’t he? Borrowed from someone who borrowed it from someone else who borrowed it from... where?

   Both names are Public Domain – because both Irving and Lovecraft died such a long time ago. If I decide to write a Cthulhu novella set in Arkham, with “Gotham City” being the name of the outskirts of Arkham, north of the Miskatonic, nobody in the world could say anything, right? The name Gotham doesn’t belong to DC Comics.

   Today’s TV could be called the Public Domain Media. Elementary, Sherlock, Grimm, Dracula, Once Upon A Time... Who’s falling into Public Domain next? Orwell? You can bet there are three TV shows already in the works, then... Big Brother is watching you, Public Domain, and he wants to make money without paying any money.

   I refuse to do any research about Disney. What I’ve heard is that they now own every Marvel superhero, just like they own everything Star Wars. Is that so, or just a truckload of crap? I don’t really give a rat’s ass. So, hypothetically, Disney owns all of Marvel’s characters, but not Marvel Studios proper? And Marvel Studios now produce Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which is set in the same “Marvel Universe”, but you never actually see the Hulk, Iron Man, or Thor – although they are mentioned from time to time... Eighty-seven lawyers brokered this lucrative deal? It’s almost creepy. Armies of suits square off against each other in order to get their filthy hands on our geek dollars.

   Someone else told me that Spider-Man still belongs to Marvel – as long as they keep releasing new material every two years or so; if they stop the flow of new Spidey material, Spidey then becomes Disney’s property. Is that yet another truckload of bullshit? I don’t know, and I honestly don’t care researching any of that. It’s too depressing. Even a half-minute Google search is too big a waste of my time when it comes to Disney. Consider this my #DisneySide.

   My nephew is six years old and now totally loves Star Wars. Six, that’s how old I was in ’77. Accordingly, the little guy was amazed when he saw that I knew these characters inside and out. And of course he wanted to show me his toys... This is when I realized how Star Wars nowadays is not exactly – not at all – the thing I used to know and love. There are Jedi Angry Birds and Sith Little Pigs and Star Wars Angry Birds video games, and Star Wars Lego webisodes and video games, and it’s impossible to keep track of everything in there. Luke Skywalker in on Naboo. Jar Jar goes to Tatooine. Han Solo meets Boss Nass. Darth Maul builds the Death Star. It’s an incredible, intractable, invincible mess.

   Disney / Hasbro / Lego / Rovio / Retoy: an orgy of cash, that’s what it is.

   But I did something fantastic, something I’m very proud of: I never said anything in front of my nephew. Let him have his Star Wars trip, right here in 2014, just like I had mine in ’79. Why should I even bother, since there’s absolutely nothing I can do about any of this... Angry Bird General Grievous now helps Lego Lando Calrissian in his fierce battle against some cheese-like substance...

   Why do we write? What’s the goal of it? To create interesting characters, right? But if you create an interesting enough character, it turns to crap for sure – sooner or later. So what’s the answer? What should we do? Never get attached to any character, ever? Not the ones you create, nor those created by others.

   For example, right now, I’m getting attached to Reese and Finch and Shaw, and I shouldn’t, because they’re bound to be turned into crap. It’s not a question of if, it’s just a question of when. It can take some time indeed. With the Star Wars characters, it took more than 20 years. For Mulder and Scully, it didn’t happen yet – but it will, mark my words. Disney or some other shit factory will acquire the rights to The X-Files, and that will be it. Goodbye. Sayonara. Ciao.

   I call this phenomenon “the great wood chipper”. We throw everything we have in it, every piece of our culture. Scott Fitzgerald, Victor Hugo, Alan Moore, Tolkien, Conan Doyle... We even throw our previous crap in that crap-maker to make it crappier still – Carrie, Total Recall, Robocop...

   Making money is the only virtue in our society; Hollywood and Disney succeed thoroughly. Sometimes, someone tries to grab the bonus audience of an adjacent fanbase, like DC did when they included Arkham and its infamous Asylum: they try to lure in the Lovecraft fans.

   Or am I insane?

  

Pirates & Plunder

   Don’t mess with Texas – even in tabletop gaming! Yes: I love Yaquinto Publications, and still have a lot of fond memories about Pirates & Plunder, which I ran from 1996 to ’99, and it was the only “fantasy” game I ran with absolutely no magic in the entire campaign – very refreshing. Everything else I ever ran had magic in it, except for one or two short sci-fi or James Bond campaigns. But not having to bother with magic is truly like a DM’s paid vacation...

    One player tackled the role of young Captain Joshua Tew, a (fictional) brother of the infamous Thomas Tew of the Amity. Josh Tew’s own ship was the Marmaduke, with a crew of 38 ruthless sailors, mostly Englishmen from the Bahamas, with some French outlaws thrown into the mix... Captain Tew was a good leader, bold, charismatic, just sneaky enough, and not as insane as most (if not all) of the other PCs.

   Second player was a crazy Quaker priest obsessed with converting Indians and Pirates alike to the True Religion – his own. He wasn’t a coward, though, and took an active part in every battle, slashing around with his sabre, and jumping like a madman right in the midst of Spanish soldiers whenever he had the chance. Sometimes he even went bananas and drew his blade during non-fight scenes, like at a dinner party in Tobago with some rich tobacco farmers and their families...

   Third player was a young chap who never seemed to own enough gunpowder and weapons and muskets and pistols and sabres and rapiers and knives. He was a fifteen-year-old walking arsenal, and never wasted a single round recharging any gun. He just lined them up along the railing prior to a fight, twenty or twenty-five loaded guns, and nobody else would dare touch ‘em, and he was all set then – because, honestly, what RPG fight scene ever lasted twenty-five rounds?

   Fourth player was an old hand: an experienced French sailor who never wore any armor. His Constitution / Toughness score was so damn high that his (hairy) bare chest was less likely to suffer a wound than the Captain’s with his leather brigandine and silk shirt. Old Jacquot owned two weapons – a regular sword, and a seventy-year-old musket with a slightly bent barrel. A cask of rum once fell onto the gun, and Old Jacquot kept it and patiently trained himself to aim with that bent barrel. After a few years, he’d mastered “the bend” and could fire his musket with a normal hit probability – but anybody else suffered a -30 penalty if they ever tried to shoot with this particular gun, and Jacquot himself had a -25 penalty when aiming with any firearm other than his own.

   They played long adventures on the Mosquito Coast, in the Bahamas, in Jamaica, Tobago, Maracaibo, and on more than a few tiny islands and cays. One time, they completely destroyed the small port of Matthew Town in the Bahamas – an operation that required almost three hours of sustained cannon fire, along with thirty powder kegs stashed in advance near city hall, the church, and the jailhouse! And all of that was just because one guy they needed to kill was hiding somewhere in town, and they couldn’t find him...

   I’ve heard quite a few Dungeon Masters talk about running the “best game of their life”. They think about it, they plan on it, talk about it... but is it going to happen? Or maybe the question should be: has it already happened?

   If you took up DMing at age fifteen, by the time you hit thirty you already have way more experience than EGG himself when he was running that legendary Greyhawk campaign in the early seventies. Here’s a little equation to measure that. You take the year you first started DMing, add fifteen to it, and that’s your “DMing Peak”. Now, what were you running right around that time? Look it up.

          Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

Which RPG is the best?

   If I were to pick pieces and parts of various role-playing games and then put them back together to fashion one “perfect” RPG, this is what my little Frankenstein’s Monster would look like.

   From the get-go, D&D gave us very good “To Hit” mechanics: this is a kind of simplicity I like. With one die roll, you know. Monster’s Armor Class, and there – you need 15. And the hit location doesn’t matter. Head or toe? Don’t waste any time rolling for that crap – the amount of damage you deal gives you a fairly good idea of where you struck your opponent, and that’s enough. In the White Wolf system, it’s much more complicated. Attacker rolls his seven, eight, or nine dice, says “four successes”, and then the defender rolls his Parry or Dodge, seven more dice, and says “three successes, you got me”, and now the attacker rolls his nine damage dice, says “five”, and the defender rolls his four or five Soak dice, says “two”, and registers three points of damage on his character record sheet (five Hits minus two Soaks). So, fourteen dice were rolled before any damage was dealt, as opposed to the one die with D&D. And that’s just one sword swing, mind you. Imagine the dice-rolling extravaganza if four player characters square off against six bloodthirsty scimitar-wielding ghouls! (When I’m gonna lay on my deathbed, at age 90, I’m gonna be able to say: “Well, one cumulative full year out of those ninety was spent rolling 10-sided dice!”)

   D&D also gave us the “levels” mechanics – and this is the kind of simplicity I don’t like. Players can’t spend XP where they want to, because all XP are automatically funnelled into levelling up. New spells, improved skills, augmented Hit Points, it’s all bundled up together. Too generic. All sixth level thieves are identical: they all have 45% in Remove Traps and 92% in Climb Walls, unless they’re Halfling, in which case they have 50% and 77% respectively.

   Level is the big impediment, here. Without it, you can have “spendable” XP, but you cannot have a one-die “To Hit” roll, because one-die To Hit is based on the monster’s (or opponent’s) Armor Class, and the character’s level. So if there are levels, you’ve got that easy breezy beautiful one-die To Hit, but won’t be able so spend your hard-earned XP as you see fit – they’re all gonna go straight into levelling up... Unless your To Hit is simply made into a skill (a skill you can therefore improve with XP).

   I prefer XP to be spendable separately and anywhere. Get a new useful spell, or boost Dexterity by one point? Increase your Drive Cart and Orientation skills, or get three more Hit Points?

   With Games Workshop things were certainly less monolithic, but Chaosium and White Wolf really unbundled the XP and it was great. “Increased Toughness can wait until the end of the next adventure, but I really need to improve Perception – for Initiative – and Missile Weapons – to defend our new stronghold from wandering goblins.” This way, each PC is totally unique and original.

   Skills are important, but AD&D had very few of them. What’s the roll if you’re trying to hear guards whispering in the next room? What’s the roll if you’re trying to remember which narrow alley you came out of when you escaped from those haunted sewers five nights ago? With Oriental Adventures, AD&D included “non-weapon proficiencies”, which are basically Skills. Newer editions of D&D added things like Perception and Will. You need those. Can’t play without those.

   Now, the magic system – that’s a headache. Oddly enough, I think the best magic system was the one found in Star Wars: the role-playing game. You only had three things there, called Sense, Control, and Alter. That is what you do with magic, isn’t it? You “sense” someone or something, you “control” natural or supernatural phenomena (a wound, a ghost, whatever), or you “alter” mundane or magical stuff. In the very good Ars Magica system, that would translate into Intellego (sense), Rego (control), and Muto (alter) – the other two forms, Creo and Perdo, being different combos of Control and Alter.

   That is a fine, simple system. And it also gives you a dice roll to see if you cast the spell correctly – a thing gravely lacking in D&D. And last but not least, to get a perfectly good magic system, you need Magic Points (thank you, Chaosium). To hell with that “cast and forget” thing; just consider how many Magic Points you’ve got, and you manage from there. Need to cast three fireballs in four rounds? Go right ahead, Quick Ben, but it’ll cost you thrice the Magic Points, of course. But it’s your spell. You know it. You’ve spent weeks studying it – not just the words, but all the inner workings of that particular sorcery. You won’t forget it every time you cast it. That’d be annoying. And what about magic-users learning a spell twice? How can you know by heart the lyrics to a song twice? It makes no sense.

   Magic Points, definitely. And when you level up (or spend enough XP), you add more to your base score. Easy. Like Hit Points. And those magic-user players will still need to “rest” often, not to relearn the same spell for the hundredth time, but to replenish Magic Points.

   To sum it up, the best RPG system would have:

• A one-die “To Hit” roll.
• No hit location.
• Skills.
• “Spendable” XP.
• No experience levels.
• Magic Points, and a spell casting dice roll.

   Some games came close, indeed, but I’ve not yet encountered the one with 6 out of those 6 specificities.

Game Ideas: Snakes Monastery

   When you read Dante, you get a lot of footnotes, and one of these copious notes mentions the existence of a small fourteenth century monastery just outside Vada (Tuscany), that had to be completely abandoned because of a massive snake infestation. The note says nothing else. Just that. But it’s enough. You can imagine the rest, and a wicked series of games inside that doomed monastery. The PCs play some of the last remaining monks, shortly before the final “evacuation”. It can be both dreadful and hilarious, if it’s done just the right way.

   First game: Guests. A group of Greek monks led by a famous Hegumen arrive at the monastery on their way to Genoa, and want to spend the night. They are, of course, blissfully unaware of the snake situation, and the PCs must keep them happy and safe all night long. If the Hegumen dies, it’ll put the Church – and all of Italy – to utter shame.

   Second game: Relics. Before they abandon the monastery forever, the monks need to retrieve the holy bones of eight previous Abbots buried in the deep crypts underneath the main chapel. The current Father Abbot sends the PCs (of course) down in the crypts with torches, shovels, and a list of all the skulls and femurs and knucklebones he wants to preserve...

   “Brothers,” says one senior monk, “the crypts are a bad place, be very careful: this is possibly where the nests are.”

   “Let’s burn them!” says another monk.

   “If we can find them,” says a third monk.

   “They may be inside the walls,” says a fourth monk.

   “Ow! Snake bit me!” cries a fifth monk.

   “I told you to be extra cautious,” says the senior monk. “You, take this Brother upstairs to the infirmary. The others, follow me.”

   “Father, there is no one available to treat him at the infirmary!”

   “What about Brother Claudio?”

   “Dead. He was bitten yesterday.”

   “Damn these snakes.”

   “So, what should we do now?”

   “First tomb is right there, see it? We’ll just grab the skull of Father Bonifacio, our Founder, and then let’s get out of this place...”

   “Got the shovel, Father!”

   “Let’s go, then.”

   “Ow! Snake bit me!”

   “Where? Ow!”

   “Whole bunch of them... Ow!”

   Third game: Ceremony. Two days before the official evacuation, the Bishop of Livorno himself comes over to perform the important “desanctification” of the chapel. After that, the monks will be free to leave. But the chapel, alas, is full of snakes...

   “Your Eminence, we’re gonna have to hurry up.”

   “Repeat after me, all of you. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti...”

   “In nomine patris et… Ow! That one bit me!”

   “In nomine... Ow! Sonofabitch!”

   “Watch your tongue, Brother! Ow!”

Game Ideas: Battlestar Cro-Magnon

   Lee Adama lived to be 98 years old, and when he finally croaked, he was the very last of the “non-natives” to be buried. But of course he had had ample time to teach his sons how to maintain and pilot the Colonial Raptor: that last remaining ship could prove very useful someday if there was a big flood or some other natural disaster and lots of helpless villagers needed quick evacuation.

   It is now eighty-three years after the arrival of the Galactica crew on Earth, and a ruthless tribe comes to kill the last surviving Son of Adama. Evil Warleader Kuhm takes the Raptor and then tortures two of Lee’s grandsons until they teach him how to fly the Raptor... Let’s say generator life on these things is more than eighty years, right? Just play along.

   So, Warleader Kuhm uses the Raptor to subdue many, many other tribes, and becomes some sort of cruel Caveman God-King.

   The PCs are a bunch of great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of other Galactica crew members (they can choose which ones), and with the help of their domesticated saber-toothed cat named Gaius, they decide to go and steal back the Raptor that’s rightfully theirs. It’s a perilous mission indeed; when not airborne, the ship is constantly guarded by a hundred warriors of Kuhm’s own tribe. But at least the Raptor’s guns and Gatling cannons cannot be fired anymore (those ran out of ammo years ago)...

   Other plot hook: Cylons come back! They have laser blasters. PCs have spears. Stay positive, guys – and good luck!!!

Game Ideas: Cthulhu Bariloche

   Hitler’s number two guy, the Vice President of the Third Reich, Martin Bormann, is the single most important Nazi top brass never to be caught. If he was still alive today, he’d be 114 years old. It is rumoured that he spent years in Bariloche, Argentina, under a false name – and still tried to get a Fourth Reich going with the help of Mengele and Axmann and a few other “escaped” SS officers.

   In Bariloche, there is also the legend of a monster lurking in the depths of a huge lake stretching north of the city. This legend is totally unrelated to the Escaped Nazis legend... but why not combine the two?

   There you have it: my next game project. A low key 1950s Call of Cthulhu set in and around San Carlos de Bariloche, with Reichsleiter Bormann as the elusive major villain, one Chthonian or Shoggoth loose in Lake Nahuel Huapí, and Mengele as a necromancer of Yog-Sothoth! There’s even a “Suppressed Transmissions” feel to this shit...

   I’m gonna use the minis from Mansions of Madness, and the cool “Heather House” map from Ravenloft II that I don’t remember using, ever! Another six months of work. Yup.

   If it was written somewhere that I would die of natural causes at the age of 45, then I can only work on four more games. Not run them, no – that’s another story completely. But prepare them. Photoshop and Word for six months. You know.