Back to School

  Has it really been a month since I've posted?  Looks like it.  My apologies to the two people who actually read my blog.  I have been quite busy finishing up the last of the foster care paperwork (am turning in photos of the house today) and getting ready to go back to school.

  As of this writing, I am now a student at American Military University, majoring in Military History.  I have ~60 hours to go on my Bachelor's, and then I'm going to roll into their Master's program with an eye toward teaching History at the college level.  Parenthood, studenthood, and game-masterhood are going to be an interesting juggle in 2011 but I'm sure they will be well worth it.  The whole package will help make of for some of the time I feel I've wasted marking time in my current job at my current education level.  Sometimes it takes a while for a person to build up the giveadamn to press on.  I think it took me way too long.

  So what have I been up to gaming-wise?  Lots of stuff.  I hope to elucidate a bit over the holidays, but snippets of fun that I've had recently-

• The discovery of a new video arcade here in Austin.  Check out http://www.pinballz.com/  Seriously.  This place was like stepping back into my childhood.  13,000sf of arcade awesome.  I played Centipede, DK Jr., Asteroids, Galaga, Tempest, Gyruss... and the pinball machines.  Sadly, when I tried to enlist in the K.I.S.S. Army, they declared me 4F. 
• The introduction of my younger brothers to Marvel Superheroes.  See, despite my being a bad brother and being 95% absent from their childhoods save the few holidays Dad managed to get them to Mammaw's, I'm making up for lost time by showing them some of the best hobbies in the world now that they're old enough to really enjoy them.  Upon arriving in East Texas for Thanksgiving, my oldest little brother Cody was wearing a Secret Wars shirt.  It was on.  Dustin, the younger of the two, commented on how the game system really made it vivid in his mind's eye, just like reading a comic book.  Damn, that was fun.
• My friend Cort got cast in a stage show about Dungeons and Dragons.  Problem is, she'd never played.  Her only GM has ever been our mutual buddy Andy, who is pretty much GURPS and Cyberpunk 2020 only.  So I got to introduce her to D&D.  We played a basic D&D game rolling 3d6 straight down, rolling for HP, the whole nine yards.  Two character deaths within 45 minutes, and that was just to Zombies and Kobolds.  FUN!  Her husband Jon and I waxed nostalgic with Clint and Dixie, the other players in this historical demo about "old school" D&D.  We explained about Orcus.  And the Temple of Elemental Evil.
• I continue to work on my Renegade Legion campaign idea.  I still want to do my game badly.  Thanks to C-in-C miniatures, I have some things to paint this holiday break.  A couple of Centuries of grav tanks, and two flights of Interceptors.  Oh, and I found a MIP Unseen Thunderbolt and Locust as well.

  That's what's going on with me at the moment.  I'll post more when I have time.

Millennium Con 12+1 : Sometimes the Old Games are Still the Best...

  Tired.  Sore.  Exhilarated.  Once again I have returned from that crosstime multiversal battlefield knows as Millennium Con in Round Rock.  Everything from the Zombie Apocalypse to Napoleonics to biplanes over the trenches to Nelson's fleet to the Word of Blake defense of Avalon City...  I raced chariots, drove in an AutoDuel, ran a gladiator arena...  God, I love gaming cons.

  As a future parent, I was heartwarmed to see the number of kids brought to the con by parents and grandparents.  Wargaming is increasingly a hobby for graybeards.  Advanced Squad Leader holds very little interest for the vast majority of the under-30 crowd when they can just play whatever the latest release of Call of Duty or Medal of Honor is on their XBox.  I looked around that room, and I knew this is one of the things I want to do with my kids when they get old enough.  After hearing about the bright-eyed little girl that won the chariot race in Circus Maximus, even after her Dad had tossed a bounty on her... I watched young teenagers and tweens learning about Napoleon and Nelson and Patton and Longtreet from wizened older gentlemen whose recollections of real conflicts in Korea or Vietnam (or WWII in a couple of cases!) they may never have heard.  Computer gaming and online gaming are great.  They're loads of fun, and I when I can participate in them, I do- but they will never replace the 'feel' and experience of tabletop gaming for me.  I suspect a lot of the players at Millennium Con feel the same way for a variety of reasons.

  The simplest argument for tabletop gaming is the social experience.  There are folks I see once a year at Millennium Con that greet me like an old friend (which I suppose I am!) and roll dice with me or against me all weekend.  These are Good People(TM).  I have a blast with them.  This year, I had three of the teenagers from our Battletech Club, the Royal Dragoon Guards, with me.  I was overjoyed to see how much fun these kids had playing with the graybeards, learning the games that were written before they were born and in some cases beating us at them.  I think gaming friends are somehow tighter than the average friendships out there.  While we're light years below the kinds of friends one makes in an actual conflict situation, like the ubiquitous "Army Buddies" of our father's and grandfather's generations, there is something to be said of any group that passes through an emotional crucible together.  Wether this is a rafting trip down the Rio Grande, playing on the same softball team, or taking an imaginary campaign with Prince Davion's armies against the Draconis Combine the bond forged in collective or competitive struggle is stronger in my mind than one without this element.  As we move into the age where virtual reality is just so yesterday and augmented reality is becoming an everyday addition to our lives the line between real and imaginary is becoming blurred in certain ways.  I used to think the Roleplaying hobby was pretty unique in our manner of speaking of imaginary events as if they actually happened - but I'm learning that the online RPG community, the online FPS community, the LARP community...  all of them have the same emphasis on events that happened, but never "really" happened.

  What is the emotional difference, if any, between the following three experiences:  A NASCAR fan being present when "his" driver wins at Talladega.  A Steelers fan leaping to her feet when Pittsburg wins the Superbowl.  A Dungeons and Dragons player rolling a natural 20 and slaying the Beholder that has been menacing the town.

  The answer is, not much.  In fact, it could be said that the impact of the D&D player might be a bit larger, since the player is in control of the event, not simply an observer.  I all the cases, the devotees carry away stories and experiences that drive them emotionally, and become lifelong memories in some cases. 

  So we build friendships, we build experiences.  That's the best part of our hobby, to me.  In addition, we learn.  We READ.  History is as much a part of what we do as fiction, past as much as future.  I kinda miss the days when RPGs came with bibliographies in the back of suggested reading.  I remember every TSR product of the early to mid eighties having a great list of books for further inspiration.  Star Frontiers introduced me to Starship Troopers a decade before the so-called film adaptation.  It's the thirst for knowledge that these games engender in many players that I consider to be another important part of our hobby.  If my children are to have a hobby - I hope it's one that engenders a search for more knowledge, more information.

  Some aspects of our hobby are extremely creative.  Looking at the massive WWI diorama used by the players of Canvas Eagles every year, I am floored.  It is a shadowbox model of the trenches of WWI, complete with hand-painted soldiers, tanks, puffs of smoke made of cotton... tiny lights for the flashes of gunfire and explosions...  Over this is a large plexiglass cover etched with the hexagons used to measure movement and range in so many wargames.  This gameboard, if you can minimalize it by calling it that, is a work of art.  The chariots for the Circus Maximus game, the intricately painted British soldiers for the Rorke's Drift game, the miniature BattleMech miniatures and three-masted sailing ships and the almost Christmas Village-like town for the zombie battle- all works of individual art.  The instant gratification of booting up a video game lacks the workmanship and pride of these hobbyists.  The pride of a well-painted miniature, or knowing that you made the hill your troops just took from scratch out of things you found at Michael's.  Modelbuilding and miniature painting are hobbies that teach patience and attention to detail.

  I want my kids to experience all these aspects of my hobby, and maybe they'll choose to take up the hobby themselves.  It would give us some great ground to bond over, and make family game nights a lot more than just monopoly or dominos.  I've known second-generation gamers like my friends Dixie and Jessica, both girls whose parents brought them up on hobby gaming.  They both speak fondly of learning to roll dice with their parents, and their parent's friends.  And it's a hobby they enjoy even now, and plan on sharing with their own children.

  Yeah, I could have spent the weekend playing Rock Band 3.  I love that game.  Or the new transformers one the kids got me to try.  But I got them to try some of the stuff that I played growing up in the 80s.  Car Wars - they loved it.  Melee - they loved it.  Sometimes, the age of a game has nothing to do with how much fun it is.  The old games are sometimes still the best.

A Time of FATE?

So, I have this Battletech club and roleplaying campaign. We've not touched the 'Mechs in months, as the RP has taken a front seat. We're doing Third Succession War on the FedSuns/Combine border and a lot of our roleplaying concerns the Houses Minor of the planet Royal's Landsraad.

Our original characters were created with Catalyst's A Time of War RPG. One thing we ran into immediately was the fact that the official rules for factions, units and governments won't be out until Interstellar Operations comes out - someday. Running a merc unit or other small unit has been a staple of Battletech since the first Mercenary's Handbook hit shelves back in the 80s. Why they saved this morsel of info for the last damn book in the six-corebook series, I have no idea. So we kludged. We ported the system from A Song of Ice and Fire to handle the Houses.

At that moment we kinda torpedoed the whole reason we decided to use AToW in the first place. We'd chosen it because it was the "official" Battletech RPG and would therefore be compatible with the new core set, and all future releases. Well, now we'd violated that since the rules we needed hadn't been printed yet. Grrr... Add to this the fact that the system pretty much needs a spreadsheet to keep track of characters, and the whole thing got a little unwieldy from the get-go.

Enter Strands of FATE. Two of my players are huge Dresden Files fans. They kept telling me about FATE, and how cool it was. I myself owned Starblazer Adventures, and rather liked how it seemed to work. So I dropped the $10 for the Strands of FATE corebook, had it printed out, and bound at Office Max. After just a few minutes of reading... I had some ideas. So I got my two Dresden players together, who are also fellow GMs, and one of our mutual friends and players who we consider to be one of the better story-driven roleplayers in the group. Together we started brainstorming, and came up with the idea to do Battletech in the FATE system. We started jokingly calling it A Time of FATE.

Our discussion ran for over five hours, as we furiously wrote down notes, ideas, played with character generation to see how three of our established characters would look in FATE, and looked at how we'd integrate it with Battletech for when the big stompy robots DID come out. That got to be a pretty in-depth discussion, because Battletech is crunchy, and FATE is not. So here's what we are playing with:

Battletech skill target for Pilot/Gunner = 12-Agility-(Perception or Reasoning depending on skill)-MechWarrior Expert Advantage. So Joe Average, with 2s across the board and no training, would have target numbers of 8s when attempting to do anything on a Battletech field. This is using 2D6, not 4DF, since we'd still be playing Battletech once we were in the 'Mechs. Someone above average, like someone likely to be in MechWarrior training with 3s in the relevant places and the Green MechWarrior expert advantage would need 5s, which is just about right for a green MechWarrior in the BT universe (Normally 6 Pilot, 5 Gunner).

We made expert advantages called Green MechWarrior, Regular MechWarrior, Veteran MechWarrior, Elite MechWarrior and Legendary MechWarrior, each one costing 1 point of Advantage and each one requiring the purchase of the one before it, with a limitation of Regular at character creation. Each of these subtracts its total cost from the formula above to find the Battletech skill target.

Pilot Damage will be handled as physical stress, and we'll probably go with something like 2 stress per head hit. We're allowing Heroic advantages to gain a +1 with a class of 'Mech weapons, like a ballistic specialist or a laser specialist. A couple of our AToW characters have the Natural Aptitude ability, which lets them roll 3d6 and keep the best 2, and they'd like to keep that, so we're discussing how much that would cost as a FATE ability. Personally, I'm leaning toward 3 Advantage points- IE- considering it a power of sorts.

After all of this discussion, we ended up coming up with the concept that 'Mechs themselves might have aspects to be tagged, invoked or compelled. Just looking at the fluff from the original Technical Readout : 3025 gives a host of ideas. The Marauder's weak cannon linkage, and the Javelin's instability are aspects that could be compelled by an opponent. Likewise, the Rifleman's anti-air suitability or the particularly accurate medium lasers of the Spider are aspects that could be invoked. Hell, even the Atlas and it's Death's Head Visage would be awesome for intimidation purposes.

As far as character generation went, we found that Strands allowed us much more leeway to make the kinds of characters people wanted. For instance, in A Time of War, you must pay points to own a BattleMech, plus points to have a noble title, plus points for owning land, plus points for income, etc... In Strands, you could simply make your defining aspect "Young MechWarrior Heir to the House of Dencourt", and that becomes an aspect you can invoke to cover any of the situations noted above.

We're going to have another brainstorming session tonight, and to be honest I'm really in squee mode about it. Not only do I think we're onto something that will really help get the story moving with our players... but I think we've finally got more than one brain working behind the scenes to supercharge our campaign.

Time gets away from you.

  So here we are, having spent every Saturday and Sunday, and even a few weeknights in Foster Parent Training.  Here's the part of the blog where I talk about parenthood for a moment.  I think they're trying to scare off the folks who aren't dedicated to becoming foster parents, because a lot of what you hear are worst-case scenarios.  Developmentally abnormal, taking psychotropic drugs to control mental issues, associative or cognitive disorders...  Sometimes you have to take a step back and remember that this is precisely why these are the kids that need a good, loving home to call their own.

  That said, I am tired.  Exhausted.  Weekends are classes and mandatory bonus fun, since the only way I seem to be able to unwind and relax is gaming with friends.  This means very little downtime - and we've been hit with some pretty strong emotional punches in this last few days.  Two weeks ago, my wife's cousin took his own life.  This was followed by my oldest uncle going into the hospital for cancer surgery.  Then my wife lost her job to a layoff, along with many of her work friends.  This was then followed up with finding out that my uncle's test results had come back, and he's been diagnosed with stage four cancer.  The worlds 'pallative care' still make me shudder.

  If there's anyone at all out there in internet land who reads this, I apologise first off for not updating in two weeks.  Second, I'm sorry this one is such a downer.  It's not all bad, though.  I'm still rolling dice here and there, and doing some maneuvering and planning to get in some of the game ideas I'd really love to see played out.  My MechWarrior campaign has shed about half its players, leaving me with The Nine - players who are not only excited to be involved, but are now having an amazing time since I'm no longer experiencing GM overload.  Having a large, well-organized club centered around an RPG is still an idea I want to explore in the future - but for now, we're going to lay the real groundworh with The Nine, and see where it goes from there.  At the very least, we've got some amazing roleplaying to do.

  My Space Romans game, blogged about earlier, needs to happen someday.  Likewise my Robotech II : The Sentinels treatment, and an as-yet-undefined fantasy campaign.  I've finally run into how frustrating it must be to have myself in a game situation, in that now that I've found that I actually like Dungeons and Dragons Essentials, I seem to be unable to convince one of my best players to give it a shot.  As my gaming has become more and more like work, and less like fun, I've been giving some real thought of what to cut and what to keep, and what players I want in whatever part I keep going post-parenthood etc.  I have a "Dream Team" in my head, the problem is getting them all together in the same room regularly.

  I'm going to try and do a post soon on Strands of FATE, as I've gotten the PDF and it looks brilliant.  We'll see where time and mood have me over these next few days.  As my mental health deteriorates from all this stress and worry, I've asked my boss for two days of vacation, and he's agreed.  So tomorrow, and Friday I'm off work.  Mental Health Days, here I come.

A Grognard's Conundrum : To Crunch or Not To Crunch

  This week's installment of ODB - have my tastes in game systems begun to swing completely the opposite direction?

  I cut my teeth on Mentzer D&D back in 1985.  This was followed in rapid succession by Marverl Superheroes, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Palladium Fantasy, TMNT and Robotech, Traveller...  Coupla years down the road we added Call of Cthulhy, the original Cyberpunk boxed set, 2300 AD, Top Secret/S.I...

  Traditionally, I like a nice, crunchy system.  I had a geek-gasm when I first laid eyes on Millennium's End.  MERP and Rolemaster/Spacemaster were things of beauty.  BRP Runequest was aweseome because it tracked armor by hit location and had fatigue points.  Aftermath!  The Morrow Project...  crunch.  Systems that were complex, and to my younger mind 'realistic'.  I loved the much-maligned system Leading Edge used in their RPGs, which was basically a streamlined version of the overcomplicated Phoenix Command rules set.  It was just crunch enough to do something like Aliens, and it scratched that itch that made gun combat relentlessly deadly.

  Here we are twentyish years later.  I've found myself playing games like Remember Tomorrow and 3:16.  I've found myself looking over the spreadsheets I use to keep XP and character info for my 17-player MechWarrior campaign, and I start to wonder to myself "Why didn't you use a simpler system?"  I find myself more and more concerned for the story and the plot than I am for encumbrance totals and strict XP expendatures.  Now, one might think this was a sign that I'm going soft in my old age, losing my love for overly crunchy systems.  Well, if only it were that simple.

  At the same time I'm having all these thoughts about the plot-smithing bliss of system-light storygames, I still have the urge to play games like a Star Wars campaign using Star Warriors for ship combat, or Legionnaire with Interceptor/Centurion.  I want to play a game that tracks fatigue points so my players have a fuel gauge to tell when and how much their PC is tiring, because so many of them have the action hero mentality that their PCs are the Energizer Bunny and require no food, sleep or rest of any kind.  I like the complex endeavor of playing a Shadowrun decker and designing my own Cyberdeck.  I like the adventure spelled out by the need to get a chip burner, the proc, the other raw materials and artifice my deck from the components up.  Maybe one of our runs will be specifically to steal this drek-hot chip that I need to build my deck!

  So here I am, completely at odds with myself.  I've begun to stop worrying and love storygaming, but I still have a yearning for some of those overly-fiddly subsystems that help pull a player into a game.  One of the things I have been told is that these sorts of things pull players OUT of the game by making them think about game mechanics.  I guess it depends on the kind of player.  I've seen players who would love to use Star Warriors in a Star Wars game, because choosing the bank, roll and jink options before rolling their pilot dice helps them visualize what's going on with the battle.  Alternately, I've had players who just want to roll their dice pool and see who came out on top.  I have D&D players who love the mini-centric 3e and 4e games, and feel that being able to see the location of the monsters is a good thing, and feel satisfied when their burst-2 attack pushes a throng of minis away from their caster.  Alternately, I have players who feel that using minis and counting squares robs them of the cinema of the mind, because their imaginations paint the battles so much better than maps and minis ever could.

  It will be interesting to see which direction I go when I get my next campaign organized.  Crunchy, or storygame.  Is Retrogaming a mixture of both?  Just enough crunchy rules for combat, but make up the rest as you go?  Hmmm...

Renegade Legion Reboot

    Renegade Legion was one of FASA's in-house properties, the one that got less love over the years than Battletech.  I had a LOT of fun with this game world, back in the day.  There's a great summary of the History in-game at Kannik's Renegade Legion page, one which was one of my frequent stops back when I first got my own dial-up access.  For a history of the game line itself, check out the Wikipedia page on it.

  Recently, I've pulled out some of my RL books, partially due to a player spotting the Interceptor boxed set and asking about it, and partially because I'm looking back over games I had a lot of fun with in the 80s and 90s.  I started working up some campaign pitches for the RL universe, and the more I worked on it, the more ideas I had.  The clinching moment was last night, when we were at a local theater production of Julius Caesar, in which one of my more talented players had the title role, and the whole Roman thing clicked.  So, without further adieu, here's my tweaks and ruminations and stuff about running the Renegade Legion campaign I'm wanting to run.

  Hopefully, those of you interested in hearing my thoughts already took a quick look over the history I linked to.  What I'm going to suggest is a tweak to the established canon to set up this particular campaign.  The idea is to have the story set in the very last days of the Terran Republic, just before the assassination of First Consul Kershaw and most of the Senate, and the subsequent ascention of Ivanolo Buntari to the position of Caesar and the declaration of the Overlord state.  To do this, the inception dates of a lot of equipment from the fluff will be changed.  Why?  Because unlike the Battletech line, we do not have 300 years worth of technical readouts to tell us what the front-line equipment was in those days.  A lot of the ground tanks in the Centurion Vehicle Guide were around then, and we'll roll with most of that.  We'll also roll with the idea that the grav tank, while not a new concept, is a hideously expensive one.  They're not rare, as such, but there's a lot more conventional armor than grav armor out there.

  The next canon change will be the sheer scale of the setting.  While most players of the Battletech game have scoffed at star empires with over a hundred worlds whose militaries amount to less than a hundred regiments of 'Mechs, the opposite is true here.  When General Constantine defects to form the Renegade Legions in the official canon, he leaves with 150,000 Battleship groups.  Not Battleships, Battleship groups.  Even assuming a BB group is a single Battleship with cruisers, destroyers etc. as escorts, that's still a staggering number of ships.  Remember that each of these vessels is either nearly or more than a kilometer long.  For those of you who have been aboard the USS Texas with us, this means even Frigates and Destroyers are THREE TIMES the length of the WWI Battleship we stayed aboard.  Their Battleships are more than double that length, 1.2km long and up.  My fellow GM and old-time Renegade Legion player Andy did some quick calculations in his head and came up with a figure that had something like 12 billion Legionnairres under arms- not counting the TOG Navy.  Against such numbers, how does one make the PCs matter?  How do you not succumb to the hopeless nature of your situation?  So we scale things DOWN.  Way down.  Less worlds, less forces - make the sandbox somewhere that's not quite so crushingly large.

  The final changes are in the times of certain world-defining events.  The standard RenLeg game starts out well after the defection of the Legions to the Commonwealth.  I think it would be much more interesting to start the story as the Republic begins to come apart, and Buntari rises to become the first Caesar.  It gives an opportunity to immerse the players in the game world, show them by action why the TOG is the "bad guys", rather than just telling them the TOG is the "bad guys".  Imagine this setup:

  The PCs begin the game as loyal sons and daughters of the Republic.  Perhaps they're on the KessRith front.  Let's put them in a situation where they will have some prominence in the storyline.  The RenLeg universe has single-squadron 'pocket' carriers, like the Pharetra.  So we're going to build the opening scenes around a convoy action.  We'll choose a planet near the action, this will actually be the homeworld of a lot of the PCs and NPCs invovled for reasons we'll discuss later.  Perhaps one PC is the captain of an armed freighter.  To make it more interesting, I'd like this PC if possible to be a female.  A sibling of this PC is in the Republic military, and happens to be assigned to the escort forces.  If the players want to get this detailed, let's posit that due to the VAST nature of the Republic, while capital ship crews in the regular Navy are comprised of people from all over the Republic, local units and lighter vessels that can be constructed at less than a full-on kilometers-long shipyard are generally crewed by personnel from the planet that constructed them.  This explains the "home guard" feel of the escorts.  As a side note, when my Great Grandad served on the USS Napa (APA-157) during WWII, most of the enlisted men who came aboard as newly trained seamen came from around La Grange, Hallettsville, and points nearby in Texas.  It was easier to round them up, send them to boot camp, and assign them to a ship in a big lot.  So the conciet holds.

  We open the story with the convoy delivering supplies and ammunition to a Republic battlegroup licking its wounds a system or so away from 'home'.  We let the players get the feel for the operations of the Navy, have the freighters conduct UNREP while the fighter pilots in the campaign join in the Fleet CAP, and give a feel of the humdrum activities of day-to-day Navy and merchant sailor life behind the lines.  During this visit, they start hearing news about First Consul Kershaw's reforms, and news of Ivanolo Buntari's debacle.  In fact, it could be inferred that the convoy was placed in danger due to incompetent orders from General Buntari.

  On the way back "home", the convoy is jumped by a KessRith fighter squadron, and must defend itself.  This gives our players the opportunity to bond as a fighting  unit, as even the merchant sailors will have a change to man some guns, raise some shields, and try to help fend off the KessRith marauders.  After all, these are the bastards that enslaved Earth, the Republic still owes them for that.  Play up the nationalistic propaganda that paints the KessRith as monstrous, inhuman things that would eat your grandma's liver with fava beans and a nice chianti if given hald the chance.  Think WWII propaganda posters, etc.  In this case, the enemy really isn't human, so it makes it easier to pull off.

  In the first few sessions of the campaign, you continue with the convoy operations and the team building, but you hit the following points as you do so...

• The convoy meets the aging captain of an escort or frigate, massive compared to the convoy but not at all a ship-of-the-line in the capital sense.  Dwarfed by the cruisers and battleships, it in turn dwarfs the ships of the convoy.  He's competent, genial, and it should seem entirely odd that such a professional naval officer's career should stall with so minor a command.
• The convoy stops planetside to deliver some equipment to a ground-based Legion.  They witness firsthand the brutality of the Legionnairres against the KessRith enemies.  We play with the player's morals a bit here.  Play up the inhuman brutality on both sides.
• The players hear of the Senate explosion, and the death of First Consul Kershaw.
• The war effort seems to stall a bit, due to the decapitation of the government.  News of General Constantine's 'issues' regarding censure or execution of General Buntari reach the players.
• A KessRith fleet emerges at "home", and is only scarcely driven off by the Republic Navy.  During this time, preparations are made to evacuate the upper-class citizens in the avialble ships (the government/Navy may try to appropriate the PC-owned merchantman for this).  Make it clear the government is making no effort to save those of the lower classes.  To make it even better, be clear that the bureaucrats invovled see no malice in these actions, they are simply prioritizing the way they have been instructed by the Senate in case of invasion.  Nothing personal, and certainly those with the most worth to the war effort will be the first ones evacuated.  Those who contribtute nothing but a drain on state resources are so far to the bottom of the queue as to not be on it.
• Invasion averted, the evacuation plans are cancelled, and the PCs have the opportunity to spend more time with their Captain friend, who is terribly relieved his family, who live near Rome, have messaged him of their safety that they were not among those killed in the senate blast.
• Ivanolo Buntari is named Caesar.  Offensive actions against the KessRith resume immediately.
• Another convoy mission, this one recklessly far into KessRith space to keep up with forces pushing rapidly forward.  The convoy is placed in grave danger, and is saved through the quick arrival and action of the Escort/Frigate captain they've befriended.
• Buntari releases his news that he's found the diaries of Alexander Trajan, and will be working to make the Republic more like what Trajan "intended".
• Wartime missions continue.
• Buntari declares the TOG, announces the Overlords, and reverses Kershaw's civil reforms.
• The convoy is called to the site of a major KessRith offensive, and sees the fallout from the KessRith brutality.  They find evidence that the KessRith have been inflamed by the treatement of prisoners on the Republic's part, and never violated their version of the Geneva Convention until AFTER these Republic atrocities started to occur.
• The Patria Protestus is issued.  This should cause some MAJOR interesting fallout for the characters.  Female military personnel will be limited in rank.  If a female PC owns one of the merchantmen, it will be stripped from her.  Let the fallout begin.
• News comes that General Constantine has been branded a traitor.  The PCs hear from their escort captain friend that Constantine is making a run for the Commonwealth.  (Idea- maybe Senator Novick travels with the PCs on his way out to General Constantine, and they get to meet him and hear about how awesome Kershaw is, and how he's trying to reform the Republic into a kinder, gentler gov't and seek a peace with the KessRith.  Then, when Novick is blamed for the senate explosion, and Constatine implicated... they can have a personal interest in matters).
• Word arrives that a Buntari-loyalist group is on their way to the 'home' system to impose TOG order and it is carrying orders to replace all female commanders and purge anyone showing disloyalty to the new Caesar.

  Now, the ongoing, BSG-esque part of the campaign is set up.  The PCs have the opportunity to stay and serve the TOG, stay and face the overwhelming TOG battlegroup, or strike out for the Commonwealth across KessRith and TOG-held space to link up with General Constantine and Senator Novick (who I am keeping around as the figurehead of the Republic-in-exile government).  The latter will probably be the choice of the PCs.  As their convoy, laden with dependents and families, gets underway - the TOG battlegroup arrives.  Their captain friend, who cannot go with them because he and most of his crew still have family on Earth, make a suicide run to hold off the TOG units long enough for the convoy to jump to T-Space.

  Now, the Ragtag Fugitive Fleet of Neo-Romans has a whole campaign ahead of them of running from both the TOG and the KessRith.

  I'm  reading GURPS Imperial Rome and some other sources to get some atmosphere and feel for the neo-Roman setting, but one thing that's interesting to think about is that this isn't Rome in space...  it's Alexander Trajan's version of Rome in space.  Trajan's father was a professor of history with a specialty in the Roman Empire, but Trajan himself was a soldier.  It is possible that between the two of them what they came up with was a rose-colored glasses of a devotee, possibly with some well-meaning social engineering to smooth out the historical bumps.  See, Trajan, as a soldier, used the glories of Rome to inspire the population to rebellion, so naturally the initial push of the movement was for the glorious martial traditions of Rome.  This emphasis survived the war, and became ingrained in the populace.  What was accepted as 'necessary' for the war effort became facts of life, and anything resembling even a restricted freedom seemed like total liberation after the KessRith were kicked offplanet.  It's like a kid having the choice between being totally grounded, or having a six PM curfiew.  The latter sucks, but it's infinitely better than the former.  With the current events of our own time, we've seen how slippery the slope of privacy and freedom can be when curtailed or revoked in the name of security in the face of external threat.  These were a people totally conquered, in the heady moments of liberation who is to say they didn't move straight into the more fascist or militantly nationalistic facets of the Terran Republic without even noticing what they were doing?  It's not that hard of a mental leap.

  So what we've got are folks who have been indoctrinated to be more Roman than the Romans were.  They probably even use the so-called "Roman Salute" even though the Romans themselves most likely didn't.  It was popularized through paintings and media long after the fall of the Roman Empire, but today it is equated with Fascist Italy and Ancient Rome, though it was only really practiced by the former.  We'll hear a lot of Roman and faux-Roman names.  Military Hardware is named in Latin, specifically names of weapons and armor of the Roman Empire.  The symbolism is everywhere, and new examples of 'period' artwork are all over the Republic.  It's a concerted propaganda effort to put a single view of the national character into every citizen's mind, so we end up with the Romans that never were.  The idealized, stereotyped, optimized-to-be-spacefaring-Romans folk of the Republic and later TOG aren't Romans at all - but rather the twisted perception of Romans.  Kinda like Battletech's House Kurita are feudal Japanese turned up to 11, because some Coordinator somewhere thought life was really like a Kurosawa samurai movie.

  So there's my campaign idea for Renegade Legion.  The PCs can have prominent positions in a small operation like this.  I can see fighter pilots, merchant captains, perhaps the CO of the pocket carrier or one of the two corvette escorts...  Have one of the transports carrying a century or two of grav armor and an infantry cohort, and you'll have some ground forces to do planetside 'episodes' based on answering distress calls, gathering supplies, etc.  I think this game could b really kickass, given the chance...

Remember Tomorrow : A Playtest

  Tonight I ran a trial of Gregor Hutton's Remember Tomorrow for some folks here at the Ogre.  RT is a cyberpunk game, but it's certainly not Cyberpunk 2020 or Cyberspace or Shadowrun...  See, I'm kinda a crunch guy.  I'm the guy that loves Shadowrun 1e and 2e.  I love MERP/Rolemaster.  Runequest.  I even like running Palladium Fantasy and AD&D 1e.  One of the first comments I got from one of my long-term players was "Would you really run THAT?", referring to my love of rolling dice, math and subsystems.  So, after trying and loving 3:16 I started looking at some more if these so-called Indy Games.

  RT is cyberpunk in design, but don't expect pages of nifty gear.  In fact, there's a direct shot at both Cyberpunk and Shadowrun in the text, poking a bit of fun at the traditional way most folks play these games.  First of all, the name of the game in RT is concept.  You choose to have a Cyberpunk archetype, but there's no mechanical value in it.  In fact, we had someone who conceptualized as a hacker, but ended up more of a razorguy ('torpedo' is the term used in RT).  Was this a problem?  No.  Character gen boils down to a concept and name, choosing an archetype which is really more of a way to solidify the concept in your head, choosing a motivation, and dividing points between Ready, Willing and Able.

  That's right, sports fans.  Like 3:16 with its Fighting Ability and Non-Fighting Ability, this game has three stats.  No STR, INT, etc. to be seen.  These stats range from 1-9, with 4 being average.  They can and will change, sometimes dramatically, during the course of the game.  The die mechanic is a simple roll-under, but the twist is that you toss 3 (sometimes 4) d10s, and assign them to RWA to make successess.  Successes then allow you to either succeed or fail a scene, and sometimes allow you to raise attributes, buy positive traits, get rid of negative traits, or tick goals- which is, well, your goal.

  See, this is where my players brains started to break.  It got worse when I told them we would be taking turns GMing.  Heresy!  But bear with me... they did.  The trick to this game is that players take turns being the Controller (GM).  Here's a very basic overview of how this game works.  Each player has a "Held PC", which is what we'd recognize as a normal PC.  Each player also creates a faction, which can be a person, a group of people, a corporation, and army... pretty much anything.  What's neat is that as play goes on, a player may use their turn to introduce a new PC or another faction.  It's an exercise in communal world-building, and it became a lot of fun for us as we tried this out.  Each faction adds depth and detail to the game world.

  The first thing that happens in the game is that each player sets a introduction scene for their character.  They toss the dice and use the outcome to help guide that scene, which may result in an improvement of situation for that PC.  After each player has tried this, another round is made as all the factions are introduced in the same fashion.  At this point, we had information on our characters, and details on the world were starting to come out.

  Our first PC was Cortez, a former merc from South-Am who drove a Datsun 960Z to the bad part of town, where he encountered some toughs who wanted his ride.  He killed one, and chased the others off.  This scene established that there was a bad part of town, brazen gangs, lots of rain, and a semi-recent South American conflict.  Also established a bar, which we called the Forlorn Hope in homage to CP2020.

  Our next player introduced Suzanne, her Private Investigator, who was at a high-class social event following an unfaithful husband.  This established the Walker Hotel and the presence of the well-to-dos in the still unnamed city.  Unfortunately, the dice rolled poorly for Suzanne, and she lost her target in the crowd.

  Arizona was next, rolling across the wastes in search of... what?  He's a fixer of some sort, and says he's making a delivery.  He checks out some deserted locations, an abandoned delivery van and a gas station.  He's attacked by wild animals (Zebras, he says), and fends them off, heading on toward the city.  This tells us that the spaces between the cities can be deserted, or some kind of wasteland...

  309 is next.  His scene begins atop the tallest skyscraper in the city, where eleven humans are suspended in some kind of medical equipment.  They apparently form a living computer network that is plotting... something.  309 is part of them, their servant.  His cybermods allow him limited antigrav, and he leaps from the building to do the bidding of his master-things.  Now, I have to stop here and say the player for 309 surprised us all with his creativity, but moreso with the gonzo nature of his declarations.  It's perfectly all right in RT to tell a player his ideas are a little too crazy for the game, but we rolled with it just to see where he'd go.  See the "bullshit" rule for more on this.

  Our final character was Paul Yamamoto, an activist trying to shine the light of truth on the decrepit and corrupt Dome Pollution Service.  This established that the city was under a dome- which made us all fanwank a bit to explain how all the rain that showed up in the previous scenes happened... but OK, dome it is.

  Now we've finished introductions of the PCs, we go around the table again and introduce factions.

  The Xanatos Corporation (which is exactly what it sounds  like) introduces is to Corwin Xanatos, who is hoping to discredit the governor of the city and run against him in the next election.

  The Walker Hotel becomes its own entity as a faction, as it survives a local earthquake and shows that there is more to this pre-dome building than meets the eye.

  We are then introduced to Bablo, a client of Arizona's, who allows him entry to the city once he's been paid off with "this week's shipment".  We find out here that entry to the city is restricted, and the city is defended by walls and other passive defenses.

  The Council of 11 is fleshed out, and we find out they are seeking to control the subterranean powerplants that run the city.  This establishes the underworld beneath the streets.

  Last, we meet Vladimir Green, CEO of the Dome Pollution Service and bitter rival of Corwin Xanatos.  Green, too, wants to live in the Governor's mansion.

  So, we've each had two turns at this point, and we've now got a pretty good handle on the place we're playing in.  Somewhere along the line, one of the player started sketching a rough city map, and the city acquired a name - Santo Cuchillo - and a location - the California coast.  The current coast, you know, the new one sice a lot of Western Cali dropped into the Pacific.

  Here's where I think the game stumbled a bit for us.  It was very difficult to break the players of the habit of trying to play their PCs, all the time.  When it is your turn as controller, you can set up scenes involving any faction or PC.  The tendency here was to involve one's own PC and either another PC or a faction.  I don't think this is the wrong way to play, but the rulebook does seem to infer that you should involve others, and play your Held PC when another Controller involves you.

  As we went around the table again, we had the Xanatos Corp hire Suzanne to find the organizer of the anti-DPS rally that helped to discredit the Governor and the DPS.  This was a "Deal" scene.  Next, we had a "Face Off" scene involving Suzanne versus Paul Yamato, with her trying to find him, and him trying to remain hidden.  He stays hidden, but she tags his "Humiliated" negative trait to reduce his margin of success.  In the next scene, Arizona does some wheeling and dealing, achieving his first goal.  This is followed by 309 showing us the zombies living beneath the surface of the city.

  Wait... zombies?  Yeah, this is where we *could* have called bullshit.  But we didn't.  We wanted to see where this goes.  It is important for me to mention that there is a certain amount of veto power the whole group has.  If we wanted to stick to non-supernatural Cyberpunk... we could have.  But, what the hell, right?  It's a test-run.  Now I will admit that at this point things started to get wierd when 309's player started to add some more Shadowrunny-elements that may not be to the taste of everyone at the table.

  We went around the table twice more, and were surprised to see Paul Yamato achieve his first goal, and get written out for the game.  See, when you achieve your goal for the episode, your character is written out until the next episode.  Other players, when acting as Controller, can challenge you with setbacks and other fun situations.  It's just that, being unfamiliar with the game, nobody did.  At that point we decided to stop and debrief about the game.

  The consensus was that the team-based world-building was FUN!  So was sharing the GM duties.  The light, almost transparent system was a lot of fun and never got in the way.  We never had looooong shopping trips or had to worry about how many nuyen we had in the account.  All in all, it was a BLAST and well worth the price of the PDF.  I've gotta say this surprised me just as much as 3:16 did.  It was a story-game, light on system and heavy on roleplay.  Now, my wife disagrees with me here.  Not that she didn't have a good time, but she does draw the line between storytelling and role-playing.  It seems that because we spent a lot of our time narrarating scenes with our own PCs in them, it felt more like storytelling than traditional RP.  I get the feeling that this would morph into more familiar RP once we all got the hang of being a controller without playing our own PCs while controlling.

  We're going to try this again with a different group mix and see if it's just as much fun next time.  I really recommend giving this game a whirl if you've got any players at all that use the phrase "...but it's good for the story..."

Role-Playing on Eternia?

  Just had a conversation about basing a D&D dungeon crawl on The Fortress of Fangs since I've also been thinking about doing 4e writeups of all the action figures as 1st-level characters.  During this discussion, I brought up other toy, cartoon and comic-based fortresses that would be fun in a role-playing context.  Of course, Castle Grayskull came up.

  Here's the pitch for a game that spontaneously erupted from my brain (Transcribed from Yahoo IM Chat):
I also always dug Castle Grayskull.
I've always thought there's cool room for play in the He-Man world, too.
I like the way it seems to mesh sorcery and science.
You'd have to do it in an age either before or after the Eternia we all know from the shows and comics, though.
But I can well imagine a band of adventurers, weary from being harried by beastmen and marauders of all description...
Starving, out of water, beaten by relentless sandstorms in the cruel Eternian desert...
They hear the piercing cry of a falcon, and looking up into the sand-swept sky they make out the form of a bird of prey, circling.
At first they take it for a common vulture, waiting to pick their bones after they succumb to thirst and the storm...
But then they realize it's circling ever so slowly away, almost as if it is leading them.
As the storm breaks, they find themselves standing on a craggy expanse of alternating rock and salt flat, staring across a wide-open plane at the center of which stands an ominous fortress with a skull visage staring eyelessly in their direction.
The falcon flies to the grim castle and lights on one of the towers, watching the weary travellers expectantly...

The First Pebbles : A Campaign Concept

  Last weekend Cory Matt asked me to run Renegade Legion : Interceptor for my evening Game Day slot.  Now, for reasons of family I didn't get to actually run  my evening slot, but it made me pull out my Renegade Legion books and start reading.  As so often happens, I started to get a campaign concept running in my head.

  For those of you who aren't familiar with Battletech's lesser-known sibling, the Renegade Legion game world takes place in the 69th century.  Earth was conquered by a race of centauroid-reptilian creatures known as the KessRith, and reduced to slavery.  During this period, they placated their slaves by allowing bloodsports for their entertainment.  One of the gladiators, Alexander Trajan, managed to amass some contraband weapons and use the ruse of gladiator training to form a resistance that cast off the KessRith in a bloody war.  Since the rhetoric and rabble-rousing Trajan used to incite the rebellion was based on the glories of ancient Rome, and Trajan's father was a professor of history, he formed his new Terran Republic around an idealized Roman empire.

  This, of course, was doomed to not go well.  After Trajan's death, the Republic became corrupt under the leadership of Ivanolo Bunatri, who claimed the title Caesar for himself.  He created a social class of Overlords, responsible only to the Caesar, to help him govern the realm he now called the Terran Overlord Government.  A small percentage of the Republic's military under Admiral Constantin rejected these changes and went rogue - or Renegade - and made for the Commonwealth, a smaller and less powerful star empire that was more open and egalitarian than the new TOG would ever be.  Thus began the emnity between the TOG and the Renegade Legions and their Commonwealth allies.

  The above is, of course, a drastic simplification.  FASA created a great groundwork for this series of games that, if successful, would probably have become as detailed as Battletech's history and fluff.  As it is, what can be gleaned from the rulebooks and the Legionnaire RPG are enough for a lot of adventures to be told.  Why FASA bothered to come up with such detailed and interesting backgrounds to set their boardgames in is anyone's guess, but it was a good move.  Many a player has gotten emotionally invested in this faction or that due to good fluff, novels and sourcebooks.  Renegade Legion still has some die-hard fans out there on the web, myself included.  I own almost everything produced for the line, and have looked for a reason to run it for years.  Maybe someday soon I will, thanks to this recent campaign concept I came up with.

  My idea focuses on a modified version of the official RenLeg continuity.  Mostly, to scale things down by at least a factor of 10.  The TOG Navy has 150,000 Battleship GROUPS?  That's almost an unfathomable number of vessels, fighters and spacers.  The Legions alone number troops in the billions, which is nearly beyond my ability to wrap my head around.  So, we go with a more compact RenLeg universe, keeping the relative sizes of the powers invovled and scaling them all down.  We then modify the current situation to have the Renegades either newly arrived in Commonwealth space and licking their wounds from the initial defection, or having pulled back after an unsuccessful thrust into Shannedam County.  Either way, the border has been at an uneasy peace for years, not through any loss of hatred on either side, but simply due to the fatigue in both militaries over ongoing hostilities.  I may have to have something else threaten TOG to keep them from using their overwhelming numbers to simply steamroller the Renegades and the Commonwealth, but we'll see.
 
  Into this stalemate we introduce the players.  The basic take on this campaign could be played like BSG with a fighter squadron on a carrier.  (OOH!  Playing a carrier group escorting civilians out of the TOG during the initial defection would be AMAZING...)  My more focused thoughts, though, are to a resistance group that is disheartened by the unwillingness of the Commonwealth and the Renegades to commit to liberating their world, and hatch a plan to force a confrontation.  They recruit the players, who have some space skills due to being commercial or merchant pilots, or perhaps militia etc. to take the six old TOG fighters they've managed to misappropriate from mothballs and use them to attack and destroy the corvette that is covertly bringing an Overlord to this world on a fact-finding mission prior to renewing hostilities on the border. 

  The PCs must attack and destroy the Cingulum-class Corvette and its two Spiculum escorts before they can reach the small TOG base on the planet, and they attempt to do so by posing as escort - their fighters being the same outdated make deployed around this world.  If they are successful, the death of an Overlord causes the TOG military to suddenly rememeber that small piece of the border and mobilize fleet assets, which causes the Renegades to move to counter with their own and Commonwealth vessels.  In effect, the PCs are the pebbles that start the avalanche, for better or worse.  The actions of a few heroic individuals will set into motion events that will shape the future of the sector.

  This idea came to me whilst we were discussing the primary problem with the RenLeg universe - that it is so damn big, no PC can ever possibly have a lasting effect on the game world.  Even if your PCs manage to destroy a squadron of Battleships and their escorts, there's still apparently 149,999 more at least before the TOG runs out of navy...

  Of course, now that I'm thinking about all of this, the BSG-style ragtag run for the border sounds like a great campaign idea, too.  Maybe a beleaguered old Admiral cut from the cloth of Gloval or Adama (either one) decides that he does n't like Ivanolo Buntari declaring himself Caesar any more than many of his troops do, and declares that he's joining up with Constantine in the Commonwealth.  So his older, battered Battleship group (1 BB, some CAs and Figs and Cans) begins escorting liners, freighters and more filled with citizens that feel the same way- and there's a long road ahead through occupied space as the loyalists try to stop them.

  Damn, I wish I had more time to game.

Crappy Weekend and Melancholic Musings

Good day, eh?

  So, this weekend was supposed to be the grand shiny that was Region Three Game Day, hosted by R3 with the assistance of their friends, the Royal Dragoon Guards.  Well, the RDG totally failed to show up in force, and R3 showed just enough to break even.  The folks that were there had fun, to be sure, but I myself had to leave early for a family emergency.  One of my wife's cousins sadly committed suicide, and the family found out about it the morning of game day in a less than pleasant manner.  This tragedy colored the rest of the weekend, and damaged my calm to the point that I called in sick Monday due to lack of sleep.  Out of respect for the family, that's all the detail I'm going to go into on this subject.

  I have to say I feel a bit melancholy about this event.  It is, in most likelihood, the last hurrah of the USS Ark Angel.  For those of you who don't know, the Ark Angel is the name of the chapter of STARFLEET, the International Star Trek Fan Association that I founded along with my close friends back in 1999.  My wife, my best friend and myself have all been CO at times.  In the early days we were a tight group of good friends dedicated to gaming and living life.  Slowly, as time went on, the Ark Angel and our involvement with STARFLEET changed into something a lot less fun.  We became, victims of our own shiny, the rescue force and event backbone.  Color guards, planning committees, moving details.  We even originated Game Day as a mini-convention to spread the gaming hobby amongst our fellow geeks.  The problem was, the events became our primary reason for existence, and the gaming tapered off because we were all to busy with the events.  Good people got burned the hell out because we were leaned heavily upon half the time, and ignored or forgotten the rest.  The populace of the Region certainly respected and appreciated us, but the leadership I think found our energy to be a bit too much.  I know at least one muckety-muck who seemed to think we made them look bad by comparison - and by gum, we did.  I regret that I wasn't able to take my dream team and run the region as I'd wanted to do.  Sadly - that could never occur now because two of the people I wanted in supporting positions never want to have anything to do with Fleet ever again.  THAT's how badly burned we all were in the end.

  So now, I'm looking at what might be the final days of the chapter I poured a decade of my life into.  But her spirit is broken, her original crew gone, all that's left is her name.  I realize this in my head, but my heart is still more than a bit sad at her passing.  I can't help but feel there was more adventure waiting for the USS Ark Angel with her original crew, and that it was somehow my fault that I let us get so distracted by being the Ark Angel crew we forgot that the adventure tales are what brought us together in the first place.

  I'm making myself a promise that should the Royal Dragoon Guards carry on, that I will not let myself or the RDG forget that we are first and foremost a club about gaming.  When you stop having fun, you're doing it wrong.

A little something I've been tinkering with.

OK, so D&D Essentials is supposed to evoke an older school feel, right?  Or at least, the Red Box is supposed to.  In that vein, I give you - this.  The Old Dragoon's Essentials Character Sheet

Inspection Success, Gamer Diets and Crunchy Rules.

Hoi, chummers.

  Well, our fire inspection was a success.  Thanks to Lieutenant Mike Heard of the RRFD for the inspection, conversation, and encouragement.  Now, Mary and I have to go back to school - parenting school.  We have Behavior Modification class Wednesday night.  I'll abide by the rules the State of Texas lays down as a licensed foster parent... but I don't have to agree with it.  Personally, I think since the dawn of kinder, gentler parenting that each generation of kids has gotten increasingly less and less able to cope and socialize.  They don't have the opportunity to fail anymore, and thus they don't learn how to deal with it.  They're spoon-fed their education by frustrated educators who have to "teach to the test" rather than TEACH.  Why is 30 the new 20?  Because these kids don't find a direction, or in some cases a will to get out of the house until they're 30.

  Sorry to digress, but in our game group we've got several twentysomethings.  One of them has done 4 years in the service.  One of them barely passed High School.  The third is quite successful as a computer technician making more than I do because I'm in higher ed and he's working for a medical firm.  They all recently moved in together to an apartment.  Prior Service is living off GI Bill and a %25 disability for hearing loss.  Barely-Passed has no job.  Computer Tech is bringing in all the bacon.  They asked me several times why they are not treated like adults and respected as such within the group.  The simple reason?  Read their facebooks.  "Beer pong"  "Keg party"  "Got soooo drunk"  "Beer pong"  "Kegs at the lake"  etc.  Not a running car between them, and some of them have gone months without a cel phone.  30 is certainly the new 20.  The friggin TEENAGERS make fun of them for getting drunk all the time and being generally irresponsible and undependable.  I personally feel for Computer Tech, he's smart, has a good job, but has the fatal character flaw (which I share, doubly so when I was his age) in believing that the best thing he can do is do right by his friends.  Sometimes you can swim with the millstone... sometimes it drags you to the bottom. 

  Back to the update stuff in this post.  I got back on WiiFit after 44 days.  Yeah, sue me.  Anyway, it says I'm 9.5lbs lighter than I was last time.  My jaw dropped.  See, people are telling me they can see that I've lost weight, but I don't see it in the mirror and I definitely don't feel it.  In fact, some days I feel heavier.  But my clothes are fitting more loosely, and I nearly lost my wedding ring doing dishes the other day.  Low-Carb is working for me.  Dunno about Mary, she doesn't ever do the WiiFit thing either, but we're starting to change that today. 

  Now, on to the interesting musing part.  This weekend we had a small group of us talking about gaming, and I brought up the excellent "Prime Time Adventures" indy game by Matt Wilson.  Upon describing it's uber-simple mechanics, one of my long-time players blinked at me and asked "Are you OK?  I mean, *you* would actually run that?"  By this she meant that my tastes generally run toward crunchier games - or at least I thought they did.  I love games with some crunch.  Rolemaster, Palladium, 2300 AD, Twilight:2000, Battletech, etc.  Why then would I be extoling the virtues of this almost rules-less game?  Well, perhaps it's because as I've gotten more seasoned in my gaming I've learned that it's more about the story and less about the system.  Now, to be honest my jury is still out about this one, and here's why.

  I like systems that allow for a certain amount of simulationism.  Abstraction is part of role-playing, but too much abstraction can actually dull the sense of being immersed in the story.  On the other hand, too much detail can also have the same effect.  See, I like things like fatigue points and CON checks.  Why?  Because most players will decide their character can carry a full combat pack for a week through the desert with no water without sleeping.  When there's a pool of fatigue points steadily draining, it's a mental fuel gauge letting the players know how exhausted their character feels.  I like that sort of data being in game systems, as it helps to make the characters more 'real' and vulnerable.  I like wound penalties, so that characters don't just fight like they're fresh and rested until they hit 0HP and then drop like a sack of rocks.  Problem is, all these things can - if not used correctly - slow the game down to a crawl, and turn more into an accountancy course than a role-playing game.

  Too much abstraction seems to make the game more like a game and less like a story.  I think D&D 4e has a bit of an issue with this, as game mechanics worm their way into player's decision making processes before dice ever hit the table.  It's no longer just a matter of putting your high stats where they'll matter, but the correct 'build', choice of feats, weapons, powers...  And once on the battlefield, players know there are minion enemies out there, and will ask the DM which ones they are so they don't waste a precious daily or encounter resource on them.  This sort of meta-gaming takes you right out of the story and reminds you you're playing a game.

  So too much abstraction is bad.  Too much simulation is bad.  Not enough of either is bad.  So what's a GM to do?  There's the question.  I'll be trying to find out over the course of... oh, the rest of my gaming life...

Fire Inspection Day and WWD&DGD

  Working a half day today, as I have to go pick up our fire extinguishers from the safety equipment company, then head home to meet the nice lieutenant from the Round Rock Fire Department for our fire inspection.  The health inspection went swimmingly, now we've got to get past the fire inspection as well.  Smoke detectors in every room - check.  No extension cords in use - check.  Fire extinguisher mounted near or in kitchen - check.  The list goes on.  I'm just hoping everything goes according to plan and this will be one more completed step on our path toward parenthood.  Huzzah.

  Tomorrow is Worldwide D&D Game Day, and I've got my Red Box ready and I've studied the module.  I even test-ran it, but I won't post the results until after D&D game day has passed.  Don't want to spoil anything, and besides - I want to see if the outcome of my test-run was anomalous.

  Having now played Dungeons and Dragons Essentials, I can say that I enjoy the new 'builds' of the classes presented thus far.  The Rogue (Thief) plays very much like Thief should, with the addition of the Backstab power once per encounter to emulate the old Backstab mechanics - but with the additional bonus that it's easier by leaps and bounds to pull it off.  The Cleric feels a lot like an older edition Cleric, with limited healing but heavy armor and quite a bit of ass-whoopage ability.  My sole complaint about the sample Cleric included for Sunderpeak Temple, Korzon, is that he carries a blade rather than a mace.  If you're going to go retro, you aughta go whole-hog and have a mace or hammer-wielding Cleric.

  I'm going to be honest, here.  Lately, my tastes in gaming have been turning toward small groups of roleplayers.  I have this overwhelming urge to grab a group of 4-5, and run Mentzer D&D.  Or Star Frontiers, or Cyberpunk 2012, or Gamma World, or Top Secret S/I...  Gaming is my stress release and my hobby, but many of the games I'm involved in feel too much like work, and I'm engaged in watching one of the clubs I had a hand in creating that was in its inception all about the gaming and the camaraderie begin to circle the drain.  It lost its way, and stopped being about the gaming.  That doesn't make it any easier to watch something that you spent the better part of a decade on dying in a particularly slow and ingominous way.  It's really taken away a lot of the enthusiasm I once had for large-group gaming.  Add to that the dynamics of drama you get even in a small group and multiply it in an exponential fashion for any group larger than that...  I'm tired.  I want my gaming to get back to my enjoyment zone.  If this is going to be my main source of entertainment, socialization and stress-relase it has to be fun, not work.  Sadly, the only game session I haven't looked for a way to postpone or just out-and-out dreaded lately is the upcoming Worldwide D&D Game Day.  Something about that shiny Red Box and the idea of a nice, old-school dungeon crawl gets my creativity rolling.  So, here's hoping this Saturday rocks, both with the Worldwide Game Day, and the Royal Dragoon Guards game to follow.

Friday Afternoon - A parting thought...

  OK, folks, I'm out for the weekend.  Computers imaged, printers moved, it's time to forget everything I know about being a mundane computer tech and get prepped for a weekend of die rolling and monster bashing with the new Red Box (Oh, and some Shadowrun tonight for flavor...).  I leave you with this, which I hadn't seen before, but found kind of funny.

Click here for The Beholder...

Red Box Is Mine!

  I put myself in such a mood yesterday blogging about how there are more important things than gaming that I didn't actually OPEN my Red Box until about 2130.  I grocery shopped, made dinner (Atkins-friendly salad with carnitas, boiled eggs and cheese), shared the couch with my lovely wife for three episodes of Babylon 5 season two ensuring that she got her "us time", scrubbed the pans I've been avoiding, vacuumed the floor in the Ogre, cleaned the catbox, cut my hair, showered, shaved, and once I had my chores done and felt nice and clean and human I FINALLY took the shrink wrap off the Dungeons and Dragons Fantasy Role-Playing Game Starter Set and snuggled up in bed with the wife to begin reading.

  And of course, Misa decided to curl up in the boxtop as soon as it hit the bed, but that's what keetooms are for, isn't it?  First impressions - SHINY.  However, the booklets lack the nice cardstock covers the originals had, that's my first quibbble.  Reading through the Player's Book, the choose-your-own adventure style of character creation is actually kind of brilliant.  Yes, yes, I know there's already errata, but still - it's a VERY nifty way to take a player through character creation.  Reminds me of the same concept in the Mentzer boxed set, save that you can end up any of the four classes, and you can be any race or gender.  Having said that, I would have really liked a more convetional character generation summary for the more experienced of us to whip up Red Box characters.  I know this is coming in Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, but it would have been nice to have out of the box.

  The introductory adventure is suitably old-school in feel.  There's a villain, and some goblins, and caves...  Now, before anyone says anything about 4e not having support for Roleplay - I will agree that there isn't much RULES wise, true.  But in the BECMI sets, there weren't a lot of rules for it, either.  We made it up.  We RP'd it out.  We made a CHA check, or a WIS check...  So I am going to have to wait to bitch about this until I've given Essentials a test-drive and determined wether or not it's an actual issue.  It wasn't back in '85.  We used rules for combat, and freeformed everything else with ability checks or saving throws.  Much like The Keep on the Borderlands, which everyone considers to be a classic, a LOT of this module is hack-and-slash.  It's Old School, but for some reason it feels Old School this time.  Maybe it's because the Rogue is more Theif-y.   The Fighter more Fighter-y and not so 'Defender'-y.  I dunno.  I'm going to take it for a spin this weekend and see if it plays like it looks.

  The cards...  Well, I like the cards, to be honest.  I have a player who I love dearly who hated the cards in 4e, but then proceeded to use the Wizard Spell Cards I provided for a 2e campaign without batting an eye.  I think the cards - when used properly - can help keep track of things.  That said, I *love* the introductory character cards for Worldwide D&D Game Day with the powers explained on the back and checkboxes to use with Vis-a-Vis pens.  I think I may emulate this approach when creating custom sheets for my Essentials campaigns, albeit on full letter-sized paper.  Anyway, for new players and old alike, they're useful.  Wish they were on playing card material, maybe even coated or laminated, but WoTC was wise to keep the price point of the boxed set at $19.99.  The maps and tokens are awesome as well, as 4e does require them for play.  I like that the DM Kit and Monster Vault will likewise have tons o tokens for use.  I think minis LOOK better, but they are more expensive and a lot bulkier to transport.

  The character sheets are nice and clean, and I like that the skills are listed under the abilities.  All the math has been taken off she sheet, and that makes it a much less cluttered affair.  Unfortunately, they missed a spot for passive perception and insight.  Oops.  Not that terrible a mistake, save that you are instructed to write both down during the choose-your-own...  I might just tinker with a retro version for my own campaigns...  Or maybe we'll get lucky and this version will be an optional output from the Character Builder in DDI.

  All in all, I'm loving this box.  The Dungeon Master book sums up the rules succinctly, has a few less monsters than I would like (being biased by the Moldvay and Mentzer boxed sets) but is adequate for levels 1-2.  Level 3 would have been very nice, to hold to the same standard as the original boxed sets...

  This weekend, I shall attempt to run this puppy.  Will speak more on this after I've taken some players through some Red Box goodness.

 

 

 

Today I get my new Red Box. Also - parenthood.

  Today I'm going down to Rogue's Gallery to purchase my D&D Red Box.  It's been on the shelf for days, but I waited until 1 September, because I had promised Mary and myself that August would be a no-gaming-spending month.  We got our Health Department inspection done for our foster care license, and we're in the home stretch, so this was my contribution to our attempt to get our budget under control.  Next stop: Fire Department inspection.

  So, those of you who know me know that my wife and I are working to become Foster Parents.  To those of you who don't - here's a bit of background.  My wife found out in the early 2000s that the intense pain she suffered every month wasn't her imagination, as her mother and grandmother and aunts were told, or just part of being a woman, as those same women told her.  She found out she had a condition called endometriosis.  This condition is, basically, when the tissue buildup normal to the reproductive cycle builds up outside the uterus- on more or less everything.  It's painful, it's hard to detect unless you're looking for it, and it can cause severe issues with childbearing.  In our case, it caused a miscarriage, and then the need for a total hysterectomy.

  In the years since, we have looked into various foster and adoptive programs, as Mary is simply wired to be a mom.  I've never seen anyone so immediately warmed to by children, even ones tagged as 'difficult'.  Mary just needs to be a mom, and I think she'll make a wonderful one.  As for me, I've always felt that fatherhood was simply a part of growing up and starting a family.  Well, I was married, I had a house (another story), and now it was time to start trying to have kids.  The miscarriage was a severe blow, and I will readily admit that I will never know the depth of hurt it caused Mary.  To me, it was sad, and unfortunate.  The real tragedy of it didn't hit me until much later.  But as I have learned since going through the emotional wringer of endometriosis and then hysterectomy with Mary, there are things that seem rather cut-and-dried to the male mind that are profoundly life-altering to a woman.  I think men don't appreciate the sense of loss that comes with a hysterectomy.  To be frank, I think it's because a woman post-hysterectomy is still physically capable of sex.  That is, men don't automatically equate it with the sense of loss it comes with.  In fact, some men thing "Great!  I can't get her pregnant!" without realizing that the severe emotional trauma caused by the procedure is just as great or greater that if we had our manly bits cut off, because, hey, she's still got the gear to get it on, right? 

  See, I know this is how guys think - because before it happened to my wife, it happened a long time ago to my aunt, and I thought it was no big deal.  Simple operation, she was home a couple of days later, and oh- she couldn't have any more children, but she already had three, so that was ok.  Menfolk - it's NOT ok.  Having lived through this with Mary has given me a new appreciation for what women go through, how they're wired, and yes, what it's like to live with a woman in menopause.  Cuz guess what, chummers - I get to do this twice.  Now, I know it's a hundred times worse for poor Mary, who actually gets to undergo the hot flashes and the mood swings and the hormonal changes of menopause once for the shock of the hysterectomy, and again when she reaches the chronological age of menopause.  But folks, it ain't easy for the husband, either...  I suddenly sympathize with all my upper-middle-age relatives and friends.  Ugh.

  So I've been pining and complaining about my own decision to wait - in this case, only a few days - to pick up a new RPG product that is admittedly about 30% content and 70% nostalgia.  It pains me, makes me crazy.  I am just as eager, if not moreso, than the average geek to get their hands on this latest offering from WoTC.  And I don't even really *like* Fourth Edition.  I wants it, My Precious.  It tasks me, and I shall have it.  And then I remember what I made this "no gaming spending for a month" promise for.  And I remember WHY we're on this path.  And I remember that Mary's pain when we lost our baby- so much more than mine will ever be, even though I've shed tears quietly to myself when our friends children go back to school and I muse that our daughter (I think of the baby as such) would have been starting fourth grade this year.  It effects me, but it effects Mary so much more than I'll ever be able to fully appreciate.

  So, later today, I'm going to Rogue's Gallery, and I'm picking up Dungeons and Dragons Essentails Red Box.  And I'll enjoy it.  But after thinking about it... VERY hard...  There are more important things in life than gaming, contrary to popular belief.  There, I said it.

  Now folks, if you made it through this post, thank you.  I promise my future posts will not be so... emotional.  Just a thought that occurred to me as we move closer to our endgame and get our actual foster care license.  I had intended this blog to be my feelings about gaming and hobbies, but today I'm feeling Real Life(TM) and I wanted you all to bear with me.  I'm hoping my next post will be more about gaming or geekery.  Thanks for reading.

The Old Dragoon : Black on Goldenrod is my mood today.

  Greetings, programs for my first post to this, the blog where I will be musing on pretty much anything that crosses my mind- which more or less means gaming, media, and general life.  I'm mildly annoyed that there's no Korinna font for this thing.  See, I'm in a particular mood - an old school mood.  You'll see that a lot, I think, unless the alien overlords steal my brain.

  Anyway, I hate to say it, but I think Wizards Of The Coast has enticed me to drink the kool-aid and purchase the new Red Box and give 4e one... more... try.  But to do so they created the new Red Box, complete with Larry Elmore artwork and a revision of 4e some are calling "4.5" or "3.75", which has more of what I considered the D&D feel than 4e did at launch.  I just downloaded the new character sheets for the Red Box Game Day, and they're on goldenrod paper with old Elmore and Easley art.  Tugs at my grognard heartstrings.

  Over the course of this blog, you'll probably hear a lot of my thoughts on gaming.  Past, present, future.  It's kind of what defines me, so it's what I'll be writing a lot about.  I hope my future posts will be more interesting, and longer - but it's time to go home on a Friday, and well, I'm getting the hell outta here.  Clear skies!