Monthly Archives: June 2009

[Tuesday Board Game Night] Introduction and Race for the Galaxy

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Tuesday night is board game night at the local game store, Quarterstaff Games. It has been for a year and a couple months now. In that time, the pool of players has grown precipitously and wonderfully. Precipitously in that the board game players occasionally outnumber the long-standing Heroclix set with which we share the space and wonderfully in that I’ve been part of the forming of a whole new social circle, which is pretty awesome.

Tonight, there were enough of us to spill out into Muddy Waters, the coffee shop down the block from Quarterstaff. I’m the one usually — if twice so far can be so to be usual — pushing to do this. Rather than set up a card table in the middle of the traffic lane in Quarterstaff’s game space, decamping to Muddy’s for its relaxed atmosphere and variety of refreshments, all infinitely preferable to the plain jane vending machines at Quarterstaff, seems a much better deal than cramming into an overcrowded game space, especially on humid summer nights.

At one table in Muddy’s, four folks played Agricola, while I and two others played Race for the Galaxy. This was my first time playing Race and despite having no idea what I was doing, I somehow managed to win by a lot. And by “no idea what I was doing,” I mean that I still don’t understand about half the game.

The other two players explained the first three phases of a turn — exploration, development and settle — well enough. It’s the consumption and production phases that I managed to completely ignore. I’d like to blame the graphic design for that; all the cards tell you what they do, but I didn’t find the iconography very intuitive. It took me almost the whole game to realize an eye next to the Phase I section of a card means you draw one extra card in that phase; as opposed to the hand holding a card in the Phase I section, which means you keep one extra card out of those you draw. In retrospect, I find myself comparing it to Dominion, another game about accumulating cards and spending them to accrue victory points; it’s so much easier to understand and while I have minor issues with its graphic design as well, Dominion is definitely more accessible to a first time player.

With more plays after a good long sit down with the rules and deck of cards to refer to, I think I could grow to like Race, but on levels considering the sensory and sense of gameplay experiences, I was disappointed by this first try.

WoAdWriMo 2009

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Jeff Rients, founder of World Adventure Writing Month, has opted not to lead the charge this year. It’s a shame, because I think it was a great way to encourage people to actively share gaming content.

While I never actually promulgated anything I wrote for WoAdWriMo, mostly because my GM prep style assumes there’s going to be a lot of improvising and winging it on my part during play, it was useful because last year, I had two convention adventures to write for OGC, which is the last weekend of July. That was perfect timing for WoAdWriMo to get me into the mindset of planning and writing out a structure of events and characters.

Even if the players take off running in a completely different direction than I anticipated — which is the case 90% of the time, like in Band on the Run, a goofy horror adventure I wrote for Carnage 11 — I still have material to be drawn on and adapted as necessary.

[Read ‘Em ‘Cause You Got ‘Em] GURPS Fantasy Bestiary

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The Read ‘Em ‘Cause You Got ‘Em series charts my attempt to read all the books in my gaming library that crept in over the years and went overlooked for too long.

I’m not one for bestiaries, generally, but I got this one because I thought it might be useful as a place to find stats and critter ideas quickly for customization to my own purposes. And it’s fine for that.

But given it’s a bestiary, it’s a snooze to read. I just skimmed the opening paragraphs of each animal’s entry. There’s a mix of historically mythical and out-right invented creatures, with an emphasis on those found in folklore. Taken out of their native contexts, a lot of these critters lose their resonance. Often, I only read through an entry because I already recognized the creature and was curious to see how the author decided to present it in GURPS terms.

A couple entries seemed like they might be handy for a low fantasy world like I’m envisioning Midgard to be in Highway to Niflheim. A number of creatures in GURPS Fantasy Bestiary are marked as coming from northern Native American cultures, particularly Iroquois. That’s handy for narrowing down what would fit well in the St. Lawrence River valley.

[Read ‘Em ‘Cause You Got ‘Em] Dark Ages: Europe

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The Read ‘Em ‘Cause You Got ‘Em series charts my attempt to read all the books in my gaming library that crept in over the years and went overlooked for too long.

Dark Ages: Europe came into my library for two reasons: I had fallen madly, impossibly in love with Dark Ages: Mage, a medieval World of Darkness fatsplat about the 13th century forerunners of the groups and philosophies of Mage: The Ascension, and because the FLGS, Quarterstaff Games, had an end of year sale where a lot of unpopular RPG books were going for $5 a pop.

Right off the bat, I was disappointed because I thought Dark Ages: Europe would be like the similarly-titled Dark Ages: British Isles, a catch-all grab bag of setting material spanning all the supernatural denizens of White Wolf’s Dark Medieval: vampires, mages, werewolves, faeries, inquisitors and such. Rather, Dark Ages: Europe is just about vampires. In fact, there’s an ad in the back advertising the coming publication of Dark Ages: Mage, so clearly I didn’t check hard enough when buying the book.

Once I found that out, I lost pretty all interest in reading the book. I gave it a very light skim, enough to realize there’s a ton of dense historical information in there presented in such a way as to make it more like a textbook than a banquet of mad ideas for GMs to pick and choose from when generating campaign and story arc ideas. A GM could draw inspiration from here, certainly, particularly with regard to vampires, but why bother? Surfing Wikipedia seems a lot easier and conducive to bizarre, yet occasionally inspiring tangents.

Case in point: the Cathar heresy. Dark Ages: Europe spends more time talking about how the crusades against the Albigensians affects politics and everyday life, giving only a couple paragraphs — that I spotted in an admittedly cursory glance, although I slowed down for this, because I’ve been intrigued by the Albigensians since reading David A. McIntee’s Sanctuary — to explain what the Cathars believed and why it was so repugnant to established Christianity.

That’s great for a Dark Ages: Vampire GM, where the game’s as much about politicking and influence as it is “superheroes with fangs,” but it doesn’t do me any real good, who’s more interested to know how the Albigensians and the Messianic Voices, say, interact.

In the end: skimmed it, snoozed.

Read ‘Em ‘Cause You Got ‘Em

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Since 2002, when I first got really interested in RPGs — as opposed to the two or three times beforehand, when I was only slightly interested — I have accumulated a number of game books well out of proportion to the use they see. As these things go, I haven’t yet gotten to reading a good portion of those books. Since March or so, I’ve been making a concerted effort to remedy that.

All my unread RPG books were pulled out to the shelf edge. Once they’re read, they’re pushed back to flush with the back of the shelf, so I have a visual way to gauge how many are to go. The total number was around sixty when I began. Now, I’ve read a lot of those since March. But I still have more to go. Read ‘Em ‘Cause You Got ‘Em will be an ongoing series where I share my thoughts on the books.  For books I read in the past that are added in here after the fact, it’ll probably just be whatever comments I made on the RPG.net Index. They’ll be added in as time goes by and I’m moved to catch up.

Other entries will be fresh, straight out of my brain after finishing the book. Like, say, the one for Dark Ages: Europe that I write immediately after posting this.

Behind the jump, you’ll find the list as it was when I began keeping track: Continue reading →

Planning for Carnage 12

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And once again, I have completely booked myself running games at Carnage this year, partly as a Man in Black for Steve Jackson Games and partly as staff for Northeast Wars.

This year, I am running:

  • Friday afternoon: Frag Gold, the good old FPS arena fighter with a component upgrade. Still fun.
  • Friday evening: GURPS Ghostbusters: The Lurker in the Limelight takes a cue from the recently released Ghostbusters video game and brings the boys in grey to Burlington.
  • Saturday morning: Revolution!, a new bidding type game from SJG. It’s a very European design, which is a different kind of thing for them to publish. Should get my copy in the next month or two.
  • Saturday afternoon: GURPS Infinite Worlds: Highway to Niflheim, in which the Infinity Cops travel to Midgard, where Viking societies cover the globe and an innocuous Homeline research station has gone missing.
  • Saturday evening: Arkham Horror, because I love that game and want to play it whenever I can. This is as Northeast Wars staff.
  • Sunday afternoon: Dungeoneer, again as Northeast Wars staff, because it’s a fairly light game for the end of the convention.

See how I cleverly left myself Sunday morning to recover from the Arkham game that will undoubtedly go long and get my crap out of the hotel room?

I really tried to get my head around the way to plan and execute a Boardgamegeek-style math trade for Carnage, but just couldn’t. Last year’s I pulled off by doing a lot of it by hand in a spreadsheet, which apparently some people didn’t care to deal with. I just can’t figure out the way to do it “properly,” despite the many threads and wiki pages on it at BGG. So it goes.

Free RPG Day 2009

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Yesterday was Free RPG Day. It’s a promotional effort not unlike Free Comic Book Day, where RPG publishers pool sample materials to be freely distributed at game stores across the land. In its third year, Free RPG Day seems to have garnered more participating companies than ever before.

In my own case, I went down to the local store, Quarterstaff Games to check out the action. In addition to picking up a mess of swag — listed below — I actually got to play something. This is a Free RPG Day first for me, since promotion and attendance has been rather haphazard in the past. (In fact, it was this year, as I had offered my services to run Geist: The Sin-Eaters and never heard back from the management, but as no one showed up jonesing for that game, I guess there was no harm.)

In all, there were two GMs, arranged beforehand by the store, and six players. So we split up into two groups. One played the Rogue Trader demo and the other an adventure for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Wanting the chance to finally give 4E a try, I got into the D&D game.

It was…a mixed experience. With only three players, we were horribly outclassed by the challenges, even with the GM removing critters from encounters. The first battle at the cave mouth literally ended in a total party kill. The GM declared a reset and we forged on, getting our clocks cleaned in a less abrupt fashion right until the last third of the penultimate encounter, when we lost a party member, the half-elf sorcerer. At that point, there was no hope of putting in a decent showing in the final battle, so we decided to call it quits.

So clearly, adventures for 4E are strongly balanced against a full five member party. I find that disappointing. I have to imagine there are methods for adjusting for smaller groups of characters, though. In our GM’s case, he came from a very deep D&D v3.5 background, so I suspect he was using rules of thumb for adjusting encounter difficulties that may not be very effective in 4th Edition.

On the roleplaying side, I think that was the most I’ve done to really get into the mindset of a character. It wasn’t deep or total, as I probably played a pretty stereotypical paladin, shouting “For the glory of Mumblemumble*!”, standing valiantly in the path of oncoming foes and refusing to wear unholy emblems of fell gods. Gotta start somewhere, though. (Fun fact: the first and only other time I played a paladin, it was in a convention scenario also set in Eberron.)

Still, in the long run, I think it was good to support Free RPG Day, even if the play experience wasn’t immensely satisfying. Next year, I hope, it will be better advertised and supported by the local store. The goal to beat is eight participants.
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Welcome

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Hi, everyone. I’ve decided to make a go of a gaming blog here on WordPress. My two main interests are roleplaying games and board games, so I’ll probably talk about those the most, along with all the peripheral topics that go with them, including roleplaying campaign premises that strike me, the process of developing RPG adventures and other delightful miscellany.

I’m a big enough fan of the community building that goes on at conventions that I help run the local con, Northeast Wars — and, previously, its less-regarded substitute, LoreCon. I’m in my fourth year working on cons, so I’ll probably be posting about that a bit.

That’s all I got for now. Stay tuned and please do add me to your RSS reader of choice, if you’re not a local WordPress user.