J is for Jim, I Laugh With a Tear

I originally wanted to write a post about juxtaposition of ideas or goals in gaming but I couldn't get this out of my head. I will post my thoughts on the original subject another time.




Thanks to F. Douglas Wall for directing me to this amazing tribute, Tom Smith, the 'World's Fastest Filker' for the song itself and Jim for everything.

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Barking Alien

P.S. Also want to give a shout out to my friend Shway (it's her Birthday) and Yuri Gagarin for being the first man in space and all.

I is for Inclusion, The Gang's All Here

It's nice to be included.

It stinks to be left out of the fun.

Check these scenarios if you would...

Scenario 1

Last session your party finally located the hidden chamber containing the accused magic item you need to destroy. Unfortunately, it is guarded by a monstrous, y'know, monster of some kind. Big one too. Fifteen minutes into this session, two party members are dead. Now, as those two players gripe, cuss and make up new characters, the rest of the group slays the big baddie and now has to destroy the item and get out of the dungeon. Thing is, what will take longer; the party getting out of the underground labyrinth it took two or three sessions to navigate so they can meet the new characters or the players finishing their characters in time before the session ends and you've all got to go home?

Scenario 2

Street-level, detective type hero figures out that all the crimes and villains fought so far lead back to a mastermind villain whose base in on the moon. It appears he has a killer giant robot ally. So, while flying, super strong, space travel capable members of the superteam head to Luna for the final battle, skilled archer guy, detective guy and acrobatic girl go get some coffee.

Scenario 3

Starfleet Captain assigns his first officer, the ship's doctor, security chief and some NPCs (one more security guy, a botanist and a geologist) down to the surface of weird planet Gamma. Meanwhile, he sit in orbit with the other 294 NPCs and waits. And waits. You could have the ship get attacked in orbit but...really? Again?

***

Role playing games are fun to watch sometimes but rest assured I think we'll all agree they're more fun to play. So, many years ago in the earliest times of our hobby, when Humanity first crawled out from caves and rolled dice and ate Taco flavor Doritos, we instituted the don't split the party rule. In addition to safety in numbers, it kept everyone playing. No one had to sit on the sidelines and wait while the other half of the group was active.

Personally, I love splitting the party, so I needed another solution.

My friend William first introduced this idea to me in a serious way in his awe-inspiringly epic Champions campaign. Will ran a single Champions campaign from the game's release in 1981 until about about 1996-97. When I played in the campaign in high school, there were over 15 active players.

At one point in the campaign we has a near Crisis on Infinite Earths situation, where the heroes of three Earths had to team up to thwart the combined efforts of three Darkseid level villains, one from each reality. Will made sure that some of the adventure was a crazy big fight, some of it was figuring out what they were up to and how to stop it and some of it was saving the civillians as the merging of the three Earths was causing hurricanes, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, you name it.

Now, while all 15 players didn't necessarily play at the same time and at the same table every time, you would eventually end up with sequences where your character was not the right gal or guy for the situation at hand but you (the player) was available. So we each had more than one character. We never played them at the same time however. We had alts.

For those unfamiliar with the term 'Alt', an alt is a secondary character you use from time to time instead of your main character. The term alt means alternate or alternative character and comes from the Massive Multiplayer Online RPG community. People who play World of Warcraft for example, often have one favorite or main character and a number of alts. This worked incredibly well in Champions. While my alien powerhouse Starguard was off in space battling one of the three villains directly, S.I.M.O.N., my android with a human brain saved people from natural disasters. Meanwhile, the New Yorker, woefully out of his league since he has no powers at all, battled rioting crowds while covering the Batman-like Nightforce so the latter could get to the bottom of how to stop the big bads.

After that, Will would periodically say something like, "A siren blares in the distance as the rain picks up. Your street level heroes are on the roof looking down at a crime scene. Another body was found, same acidic burns as the last three." And so, we all reached into our character folders and instead of pulling our Starguard, Omni, The Pulse and Fusion, we went with The New Yorker, Nightforce, The Pulse and Straight Arrow. Wait? The Pulse's player doesn't have an alt? Sure he does, but the Cyan Super Speedster is his street level detective guy.

This idea works great for Star Trek. Having lower ranked, specialty skill alts means you can beam down with the rest of the landing party or stay on the ship or both.

In D&D...well, the way I would do it would be to make up two or three characters at the start of the campaign. Figure out which one is your favorite and start with that one. If he or she dies you have a ready made new character who can join in right away.

And GMs, find a way to let them join. Stop all this, "They can meet up with your new character once they trek out of the dungeon which it only took 6 hours of real time to transverse." That's silly and no fun. There, I said it. Maybe the new PC(or PCs) have been lost down here for a while themselves. What? You think you're the only group in the country who thought about raiding this particular dungeon? Maybe they're stuck in a trap or a cell (dungeons, as I understand it, used to be used to hold prisoners before they became apartment complexes for monsters*).

It's also possible that at some later point the PCs may develop a base of operations. Then the alts could be introduced as followers or henchmen or something of that sort.

This being a Monday and Muppet Mondays being a feature I'm planning, I'll say that all this relates to why I thought of the Muppet RPG as a troupe play game. It's best to have different Muppet characters so you have a chance of having an appropriate Muppet for any given scene or sketch.

Anyway, I'll end with this, 'the more the merrier', so if at all possible - having more characters to use is better then having none to use. After all, you all came to game.

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*Dungeons as Apartment Complexes for Monsters is SOOO Muppets. WOW! I love this idea for a series premise. What do you guys think? It's a little Sesame Street, a little Fraggle Rock and yet sounds like it would focus on the more adult appreciate humor of the Muppet Show or Land of Gorch. Damn I like this. Like Monsters! Monsters! meets the Muppets RPG as a sitcom. Ooh!


 

H is for Hero, Redefining The Bold

We call them heroes, these characters of ours. Not every one of us and surely not every character but the term 'Hero' was at one time nearly synonymous with Play Character.

I've mentioned many times that I entered the hobby of role playing games from a love of comic books and fantastic films and TV. I wanted to be a hero and fight evil villains and rescue the innocent and all that jazz. Obtaining magic items and gold were an aside, necessary for my character to have some sort of income but the real benefit was that they let him pursue his goal, ridding the world of darkness.

In my earliest years with Basic and Advanced D&D we would go two or three adventures without ever finding more than a few gold pieces. It didn't occur to my friends and I to include a lot of treasure. It didn't make sense. Captain American doesn't loot the bodies.

As I got older and was exposed to more players and play styles I got the idea but I also found other games, most notably Villains and Vigilantes and Star Trek. Superheroes and Star Trek style Sci-Fi doesn't really reinforce that drive to kill all your enemies and then steal from their homes the way most old school games and especially D&D did (and does).

Fast forward to the modern day and I'm still running games where being a hero is more then calling yourself one. At least in my Superhero, Star Trek, and my D&D-for-those-who-don't-like-D&D campaigns you'll get just as many if not more experience points for an act of selfless heroism than you will for stabbing an Orc in the back.

Now I'm not saying the hack-and-slash, kill the monsters-take their stuff approach is 'badwrong' but I don't feel it's heroic IMHO. When was the last time you or one of your players tried to stop a hurricane from destroying a peaceful fishing village or rescued the injured after it did? Have they saved an explorer who fell off a cliff? Removed people from a burning or crumbing building? Did any of these without the specific abilities or defenses that would protect the PC from harm? 

To me that's just a lot more heroic then gutting your opponent with a +2 sword and then making off with their belongings. Heck a goblin can do that. When was the last time the PCs in your campaign fought the monsters for some loftier goal then trying to get a few gems and a potion of healing? Even that would be awesome.

So, in conclusion, I hope I made a least one person think and possibly inspired them to bring back the Hero.

We could all use some new ones.

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G is For Gnome, A New Take on the Old

A-to-Z Challenge - G


I love Gnomes.

 

Man it's amazing how much dislike there appears to be on the gaming blogosphere for the non-Human races of D&D's various incarnations. It all seems to me to make the game less magical. Don't like Elves, don't like Dwarves and certainly don't like Gnomes...

Pity.

Well, while the curmudgeons are off playing Humans & Holes in the Ground, I'm off on my latest crazy idea. Two words. Gnome Guard!

See, my love of the Gnome comes not from any game or related sourcebook but from the 1976 book by Wil Huygen and artist Rien Poortvliet. The incredibly well illustrated book, now celebrating its 35 anniversary with a new edition, details down to the smallest elements the ins and outs of the Gnome people, their culture and their society. These are not Tinker Gnomes or Illusionist Gnomes but the tiny, pointy capped woodland folk who help animals and somehow fend off some of the coolest looking trolls I've ever seen.

I love the concept and application of scale in stories and games. The idea of the tiny being or the giant and how they relate to the world and vice versa. So I got to thinking, what about a game where you play these miniature defenders of the forest and live in a world sized for Humans but a sort of secret one that mankind is unaware of. How would you handle their skill with constructing and fixing things, their magic that isn't magic so much as common sense and the way they deal with the other woodland inhabitants. Then it hit me...

Mouse Guard.

 



 
Here is a simple, relatively rules lite game of small creature who are portrayed as Humans but not Human in a setting appropriate to the Gnomes of the book. Importing Gnomes into Mouse Guard, thus Gnome Guard, should be a snap. The key element would be determining the Nature of Gnomes.

In Mouse Guard, the Nature of a species effects the way you perform certain actions and activities. Drawing on your Nature can help you but sometimes you need to go against your nature to achieve things which can be taxing and involve added risks. Mice for example has as part of their Nature Climbing, Escaping, Hiding and Foraging. Fighting a snake to protect a friend is very difficult for a Mouse but a key element of those who serve as their guardians. Interesting no?

So if you look closely at Gnomes I could see tradition, family and that sort of thing being in their Nature but their desire and need to help animals is so strong it can potentially put them in dangerous situations.

Developing the nature of Trolls and other denizens of this world would be a very fun excercise I would think. Anyway, I need to get some rest but I don't think this is the last time you'll hear about this idea. This thing has some serious potential if I can lock down the particulars. Guess I'll be rereading the Gnomes books for the 100th time...

Oh, speaking of a hundred...100 Followers!!! Holy Heck on a Highwire! Can you believe it? I am so excited I could burst. Not a pansy burst either, a real 'Destruction of the Death Star' kind of thing with ILM effects and maybe that ring thing from the Special Edition. Maybe. Not a big Special Edition fan but I do like the ring effect.

Special celebration something coming soon.

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F is for Feeling, Ya Gotta Have Heart

A-to-Z Challenge - F

First (hey that starts with 'F' too! I'm on a roll...), I want to thank Deidre E. Coppel for my Best Sci-Fi Award. Check out her site for some interesting interviews and a type of fantasy fiction a bit different from what ye of the Conan/Elric/Fafrd and Gray Mouser set might be used to.

Following that (see what I did there? FFFollowing.) I've received a number of additional followers recently and I wanted to thank them for dropping by and staying for a spell. Will I reach the 100 mark soon? Only time will tell but I intend to celebrate if I do. I haven't decided how to celebrate though so I guess we'll find out together.

So what's this about 'Feeling' eh? A simple word that is not so simple when applied to RPGs. I'll begin by focusing on the feel of a setting or feeling you get when playing in a particular setting. I've mentioned before, atmosphere and 'feel' in my campaigns is nearly as important if not as important as NPCs, locations, challenge, treasure and plot, largely because it effects all of these elements.

Before introducing a major NPCs, I take a look at him or her (or it in some cases) and ask myself, "Does this character fit the feel of the game." 'Mr. Moneypants' may not be right for a grimdark Shadowrun game but may fit a normal one. Likewise, a murderous outlaw bent on revenge is not quite the tone I want to set for a comical Supers game though it could be with adjustments. The bottom line is I spend a lot of time and mental effort getting the feel of the campaign right so players can just walk down a street and know the mood for the adventure.

Now another use of the world feeling is emotion and I'd like to briefy touch on that subject in gaming because I rarely see it mentioned much. Granted much of the gaming blogs you encounter these days are OSR related and emotion of the sort I'm talking about probably isn't a major concern. I would wager it isn't good form to have tender heartstrings when your major source of entertainment is busting into a dungeon, cold bloodedly slaying its inhabitants and stealing their things.

That said, familial and romantic relationships have been a staple in my campaigns since the mid-80's, especially in D&D, Star Trek and Superhero games. My campaigns are inspired by what I saw and read. Superheroes flirt with and date each other, especially in the books that were among my favorites (Teen Titans and Legion of Superheroes).Ladyhawke

is one heck of a D&D movie, except that it really isn't in my opinion. It's an Ars Magica movie. As for Star Trek, well just watch the shows and you'll see it all the time. Love, fear, sorrow and angry are the motivatiors of nearly every major character is literature, yet the only motivations we see in most games are two-dimensional things like revenge or to get more gold and be rich. Wow. Deep.

Now granted, some don't want their gaming deep and that's cool but I for one like a little extra texture to my adventures, characters and plots. I've also (and bare with me as this is not exactly the commentary you think it's going to be) had a lot of female players in my groups over the years. Now, we know (at least the enlightened among us) that women can be cruel asskickers just as much as the next male player (sometimes more if Zak's group is in any way typical).

However, I have noticed that plots that leave out the possibility of any sort of angst, romance, regret or the like, don't often have enough depth for my gals (except Rebecca. Rebecca is there to kick ass). It's not to say female players need a romance novel. Not at all. What I've encountered is that they need a little more meaning in their plots. A little more purpose and character development. In this, I tend to agree.

So open your mind, think with your heart, reap the rewards and pay for it dearly. Now that's adventure!

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Barking Alien