I am looking at my new wall calendar that I’ve filled up with my schedules for the upcoming year. At this point, I know for certain about 30 game sessions I’m going to run and the approximate dates for them. The first of these sessions is on the 27th March, when I start running a campaign I could consider a worthy finale to my gaming career, if I manage to run it through and if I would end my gaming career to that.

Century game. The basic idea is a  campaign that runs for a Century in the game-time. With the world moving at a fast pace between game sessions and games being individual one-shots from the lives of these people. First of the games is set in April of 1912, on a boat called Titanic, and things move on a steady pace from there on.

By the end of the year, we should be around World War II. I’m quite hyped about all this.

I’ve been running my Summer D&D campaign for a while now, using the Fourth Edition ruleset, and even if the game does feel like playing MMO: The RPG at times, there are some things it does do really well that I will be importing to future D&D style games I’ll be running (using the Pathfinder system, not 4E)

Skill Challenges

The Skill Challenge system of 4E is brilliant in the simplicity. In a way, a well-designed skill challenge plays out like a combat encounter – everyone contributing by doing what they’re good at, without the situation sliding into a series of “I’ll do X!” “me too!” “I’ll try as well.” Each skill use moves that situation forwards, telling a part of a story how a goal is eventually reached, making each new use of skill interesting. Each failure has some consequences, but they rarely end up in a dead end (pretty much like combat rarely ends in the game ending). It’s a nice way to incorporate mechanics into roleplaying situations.

You’re tracking a killer in the city – You let the GM know that your character is using Diplomacy to ask around for possible clues. You roll – if you succeed in the roll, you gain info in the course of the scene and things move forward. If you fail, something else happens. Maybe you stir the wrong crowd or interrupt a group of thieves while asking around. Something cool still happens, even if you don’t make progress in the original plan to track the killer. Some other character then might use his Athletics check to frame a scene where he physically chases the man through the streets. Followed by someone tracking him using his appropriate skills. And so on. If your party fails too many times in total before finding the killer, he might have killed again, or prepared for your arrival. Succeed well enough and the heroes catch him off-guard.

Long term goals (A Skill Challenge might take days or week of in game-time), individual smaller scenes happening from player decisions, successes and failures that actually matter. Not just pre-planned encounters where no matter what the players do, things end up the way the plot demands. Or even if they do, there are at least a couple of different variations of how things happen depending on what they PCs do. Importing this into the 3rd edition isn’t any sort of a problem.

Enemies aren’t symmetrical with the PCs

In d20 system (that is, games like Pathfinder or D&D 3rd edition), everything is made using the same model – roughly you use same rules for player characters as you do for a goblin. If the enemy fighter uses a trick in combat, that same trick should be available to an equally tough player character. If he uses a move normally reserved for some other class, like a rogue, then he must have taken a level in rogue, which means he’s not as effective a fighter as he would be if he hadn’t. And so on. In 4E, the player characters are nothing like the rest of the things they come across in their adventures. An Orc from a certain tribe might use some strange combat move that fits the style he’s been described, even if it cannot be achieved by any of the normal combat tricks the players can buy their characters.

So when you come across a drow priestess who looks gleeful when you bring one of her soldiers to a near-death condition and on her next turn, she causes the poor henchman to explode into a million spiders, you accept this power. When the agile blade-master dances around you and counterattacks your counterattacks, it isn’t something you can buy with some feats or power choices. But you accept because it fits the enemy’s style, not wonder what levels of which character class he must have taken to get there.

Looking at the situation another way – the player characters are unique when it comes to levels and things like that. There aren’t any other 3rd Level Bards in the game, sure there might be some other people with similar abilities, but the only ones developing using the level scale are the players’ characters. An NPC’s skillset would be completely different, and expecting anything else would be a grave mistake.

There are also the Minions that are there to give even low-level characters the feeling of being powerful enough to fight a lot of monsters at a time. While I do appreciate the minion mechanic, it’s just not something that I’ll be using in the Pathfinder campaign. Importing the rest into the 3rd edition will be a huge effort, but hopefully pays off when the enemies become increasingly interesting to fight against.

Dynamic combat

The curse of the 3rd edition and variants is the fact that if you stand still and hit the other guy with your sword, you’re getting optimal results. Moving around is bad for your efficiency in battle. In 4E, the thing is to keep moving, gaining advantage from position, shifting, pushing, pulling, sliding your enemies or yourself. Using the terrain to your advantage… Heck, even swinging from one bookshelf to the other using a chandelier. Movement, movement, movement.

And there are these things happening around you – walls moving, rooms filling with water, giant boulders chasing you down narrow corridors. All while there is a countdown going on for a summoning ritual to complete that you have to stop or you’ll be in big trouble. While this all has been possible in 3rd Edition, it really became clear in the Fourth, where a normal combat encounter is really boring if you just keep hitting enemies with your powers.

One of the first awesome things that I realized about this with 4E was the new dragons, who at the moment they’re dropped to 50% hitpoints, roared in fury and hurled flames at the party in retaliation, even when it was not their turn to act. Then I noticed the goblins that move around when an attack missed them, literally ducking away from the blows to another spot. And soon it was apparent that the whole combat situation had moved from “I hit you, you hit me” fest into something where things were happening all the time and everyone was constantly moving. Another great discovery was the concept of marking enemies – you make the enemy want to attack you instead of the weaker, more vulnerable, target. This means that there is a mechanical reason why every enemy doesn’t attack the wizard first.

Transporting this feeling into Pathfinder will be harder, but doable – making the surroundings such that it becomes advantageous to notice what’s available to your use there, and forcing everyone to move around are a good start. And as I’ll be redoing most of the creatures and enemies anyways, I’ll have to add some forced movement into their special actions. Some are simple, like the goblin who moves whenever an attack misses or the ogre whose blows push the characters a couple of squares away from them. Other things will need some serious thought and planning, like marking or reactive powers for some monsters.

Encounters need objectives

Sort of close to the previous two. And really not something that’s anywhere near exclusive to the 4th Edition, but something that got really highlighted by it. Just hitting things with swords is really boring. But if you have to make sure you get past the enemies before the cave collapses, that’s completely another reason to fight them. Or there is a summoning ritual going on that needs to be stopped. Or you have to convince the enemies that you’re really not their enemies before they kill you – all while not damaging them.

Encounters that can be failed even if the player characters don’t end up dead are really that much more fun. They make doing the sword dance worthwhile time after time. Even if you fail, you’ve tried, and maybe have a better motivation to do better next time. It isn’t really much of a game, if the possible results from a fight are: a) players die, game ends or b) players survive, plot continues as the GM plans.

Since this one isn’t really about the system, but the attitude towards Encounter design, it’ll be the easiest to implement into a Pathfinder game. Just takes work to make every moment count.

With the sudden increase in RPGs that I actually play in (as opposed to run), and partly inspired by Navdi’s recent blog posts, I’ve started to wonder what on Earth do role-playing games offer me as a player. I know what I enjoy when I’m running a game, but what about playing? I’m not one of those people who really gets under his character’s skin – immersion might happen, but in a shallow capacity. I blame the endless years of GMing for this – I am constantly ready to hop out of my character’s shoes and into the shoes of another and willing to bend my character to suit the needs of the story. As a player, I don’t play games to solve mysteries and not really care about epic stories about the fates of the worlds because of the epic storyness of theirs. So, what do I like?

This applies to both being a GM and a player, but I love that social situation of gaming. Seeing friends, chatting with them, having fun. Gaming is pretty much the only opportunity I have to see some people these days (being over 30 is tough on schedules), so I cherish that. It’s not uncommon for a game session to start an hour or more later than originally planned because we’ve been trading rumors and just chit-chatting about our lives and the latest cat video on YouTube. The groups I’m a part of tend to have a very loose and casual atmosphere even after the gaming has begun- when something happens in the game that can be commented from the sidelines, it probably will be, either instantly or right after the scene has played out. No matter how serious the game gets, it’s not uncommon for people to step out of the situation, make a verbal footnote about what’s going on, and then return to whatever dreadful thing is happening. This might sound like we’re not taking the games seriously, but it maybe just the opposite – we’re paying attention to the details (and the intertextuality that’s common to our games – we do a lot of referencing) and being responsive on a different level. I can imagine it being highly disruptive to a person not used to the style, and feel a bit sorry towards those who have recently started playing in our regular group.

Sort of related to the previous point is the fact that I’m used to playing games. I’ve been running/playing RPGs two thirds of my life now. And I’m a creature of habit if nothing else. It’s something that we do, and have always been doing. And on some nights, that alone feels like a good enough reason to keep on doing it. Luckily, this is a feeling I get only quite rarely, but I admit, it’s still there.

When actually playing, I’ve noticed that I love three things – building my character’s story, playing (with) the system and observing others from the sidelines.

The first is probably the most important one. I might not immerse myself into my character, but he’s still the most important thing for me in the game. A good analogue might be likening it to the situation in a writer’s process where “the character starts to live a life of its own”, doing decisions that might surprise your own planning and the story starts to unfold on its own to directions you didn’t originally think of. To oversimplify – Inside the game world, I only care about what happens to my character and how his story plays out. I get a glitter of happiness in my eyes when my character faces situations where he has to make difficult choices, when he fails in things, when he is forced to come face to face with things that he has done. When he makes the wrong choices that I know as a player will come haunt him later on, when he is shown the error of his ways and given the opportunity to change. When he resists the temptations in front of him twice, only to succumb to them the third time, when the results might be the most catastrophic. These are things that allow me to build an interesting narrative about the character that can be told later.

Of course, when I said that only my character’s story matters in the game world, it doesn’t mean that I’m some sort of an island or a lone wolf – in games with groups of characters, the most important people in my character’s story are the other players’ characters. And enabling them to play out their stories helps me play out mine. Also if the game’s story is about epic heroes saving all of creation from the threats from beyond, then that is a part of the character’s story as well. But like I said from the start, the epic story itself isn’t something that I look for in games. Its the personal story of which the epic might be a part of. Same goes with solving mysteries of the universe – if the characters solve that mystery and my character learns something about himself while they do that, it’s great. Solving mysteries for mysteries’ sake isn’t really interesting.

One of the best old game sessions I remember playing was a Marvel Superheroes game where our characters were debating for most of the game session about what they were going to do next. My character was mostly just sitting in his chair, listening, through the long long discussion. And then at some point just flies away, not saying a word, not actually coming back to the game for a few game sessions. Might have looked like nothing much for the other players, but there was a lot going on – the character had just fought his father, defeating him. The rest of the group was discussing things that riffed with that part of his story quite awesomely. And the decision to get the hell away from them was very good step for the character’s development, and it was a very cool game session for me. Even if my character didn’t really get to “do anything”. It’s not far from immersion, but not the same thing.

The second thing I love in game situations comes from my engineering background I guess. I like mechanical aspects of the systems. I can play freeform and get a lot from it, but if someone gives me a 600 page rulebook, I’ll embrace that and become a rules lawyer if necessary. I know what you’re thinking – “God, he’s a munchkin…” but it’s not really that. If the game has set some rules about how things work, I like to use the system to build a character the way I want it to play out. If I want to play a character who is really scary, I use the system to make my character that. Or if I want to create a fighter who jumps around and does all sorts of Errol Flynn stuff, I’ll choose things from the mechanics that allow me to do that. And I when I say I can become a rules lawyer, it is usually to protect the vision I have of what the character can do.

A sad example of such a behavior on my part comes from our old d20 Future game, where I played a grizzled heavy weapons expert who was augmented with “cybernetic stuff” (that’s a technical term) and thus near impossible to bring down without actually killing him. Game mechanics-wise he had a lot of powers that allowed him to keep on going even when affected by various negative conditions (to keep him going), carry stuff (I had this vision of him carrying his wounded comrades from battle while the firefights was still going on), etc. And when the GM tried to keep the story flowing into the direction he wanted to while it conflicted what I wanted from the character, I could get pretty annoying to protect what my character was.

As the previous example shows, what I seem to be incredibly bad at, is communicating my intentions of what I want to do with my character to the GMs. I guess in part that is because I start to realize it myself only after playing a few games and getting to know the character myself. The character really builds only after he’s had to made some decisions and shown some personality, not immediately after I step in his shoes or create his statistics..

Also, worth mentioning is that sometimes the things that I emphasize in the system system side aren’t the things that I actually use in the game. I’m one of those strange people who get a kick out of playing the character who is the greatest swordsman of all times, but has sworn never to unsheathe his sword again. When you have to consider a decision to draw it or not just makes every armed conflict more interesting.

The third enjoyable in-game thing for me is that I like watching other people play. I’ve been running games for such a long time that it’s my second nature to lean back and look what the others are doing and how they’re having fun. Hard to really expand on this beyond just that basic idea. Looking at people playing is fun. I’ve been in games where my character has died halfway through the session so I haven’t had a chance to play for the rest. I’ve been to games where I haven’t had a character – I’ve just come in to sit and observe. Anything can be a spectator sport if you like it enough. Even RPGs.

So, that’s me and some thoughts what I’m getting out of gaming. I would like to ask you what do you get out of playing RPGs? Why do you do it? What’s cool about it? If you’re a player in one of my game groups, I’m especially interested.

Apparently, the GWave is the new thing for online role-playing. Swore that I wouldn’t post link-lists, but that sort of promises are made to be broken.

http://spiritsofeden.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/playing-online-google-wave/

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/10/google-wave-we-came-we-saw-we-played-dd.ars

http://gameplaywright.net/?p=1019

This is the second time this year that I’m actually intrigued by the possibilities of online environment for role-playing. First was when I got my webcam and discovered how it helped with direct online communication, and now this. I may have to accept that my plans to get a game session or two of Century being played online will actually come true.

Being a week in a situation without TV, made me think of what I’m watching these days and why.

House M.D., Grey’s Anatomy – “The good old series.” Both are medical series, but this is more a coincidence than something to do with my love for the genre. In fact, before these two I don’t really remember watching any medical drama at all. They’re old series that have managed to stay interesting enough throughout the years – the cases in individual episodes are interesting enough and the interpersonal relationships in them keep the long-term commitment easy. And they are the two that I really look forward to each week. Sad but true.

CSI, CSI:New York – The CSIs. CSI: Miami fell off my list at some point by being just damn bad, the two others are managing to stay a bit better. Police procedurals, murder of the week, all that. Easy, watchable, flows by like a river. Doesn’t matter if you do something else while watching them, you’ll still get to find out who did it.

Castle – I’m offering this week’s episode as an example why I’m watching this. 3 minutes into the episode and there has been already a Buffy, Firefly and Underworld references in it. The plots aren’t that imaginative, but character writing is good, plus the actors are great. So, watching it.

Glee, Mercy – The newcomers. Two new series this year that actually are good. Well, Glee is good, Mercy is entertaining. Glee is something like High School Musical, for the people who understand darker comedy. And the music is good.

30 Rock, Fringe, How I Met Your Mother, Dollhouse, NCIS, Greek, Lie to Me, Dexter, Heroes – “They’re not what they used to be.” Things that I’ve enjoyed in the past, but are failing in various ways this year (or maybe even in most of the previous ones, in the case of Heroes). Somehow there are shows that just don’t manage to keep up the pace. These are shows that I might watch if I have the spare time, but most likely just skip them.

All in all, it’s a bit crappy year for me TV-wise. None of the new scifi stuff really got me hooked, a lot of the old has gone down. Did I forget something? And should I be watching something that I’m not?

Some Century -related picture material

Century wikisite. At the moment, only in Finnish, will add summary in English later. To get username/password to edit, let me know.

(thanks to mekanismi)

Yesterday another RPG campaign ended – this time it was our Changeling: The Lost game that we’ve been struggling with all summer (scheduling is hell).

Changeling is a game of “beautiful madness” according to the official tagline – Our version was about walking the thin line between the beautiful madness and the harsh reality. The fantastic elements of the game were surreal, mythical, fairy tale-like and quite separate from the real life elements of the game, only clashing in few occasions, when outsiders (such as the police) got involved in the mythical situations. The best game moments for me rose from this contrast – when the Changelings of the Miami Courts were preparing for war in a grand, supernatural, glamorous gesture, one of the player characters needed to restore some of her Glamour (best done by going to humans with strong emotions and soaking those), so she went to a nearby meeting of breast cancer patients, and listened to their stories for a while to do that. The reality of that moment really sunk in because there was absolutely nothing fantastic about it, as opposed to the scene just moment before.

The Changeling setting provides a good solid story for the players to walk through. Just by going through the motions that are provided in the basic book, you can get an interesting story where you pretty much know where you’re going all the time. The escape from your captors, the return to a world no-longer your own, realization that it has managed quite well without you, the meeting of those who were a part of your life before, the meeting of those who are like you and so on. It’s a very good, wide path that borderlines on railroading the story. But even with the clear steps you take, there is enough leeway to make those scenes original for each character.

Another thing learned from the game was that the system needs to be understood by the players before the game starts fully. I’ve been so spoiled by the freeform games I’ve been running to think that the system is a secondary thing, but it’s critical to make sure the players understand what they’re getting into and what their choices mean. Spikey’s character ended up really odd on the technical side because his interaction with the system was done partly uninformed.

And then of course there were the scheduling problems that led to the campaign ending quite fast as people (mostly me) were tearing their hair out as we never got to play the game. Changeling would benefit from more games, each one focusing on one single thing and theme, explored from both the fairy tale and the real world perspective. Not games where you have to rush through two or three big things in one session so you can finally end the game at some point.

The downside of Changeling is that because of the damn good path for the story, I don’t feel like running it again. With the old Vampire: The Masquerade, there wasn’t that clear a way it works well, so there was a lot of replay value – Lots of things you’d like to do and try with it. While I could run a chronicle about Court intrigue or hunting in the Hedge, it wouldn’t be the thing I found cool about Changeling in the first place. A shame really. I could run another chronicle at some point to different people and go through the same motions in a different light, but that’s unlikely as well.

All in all, it’s a good game. It’s a great setting. Possibly the favorite one from World of Darkness stuff for me. Fond memories came from it.

Also, as a bonus, the spotify playlists we used for the game:

• Neon Lights and Car Sounds
• Fairy Tales
• Normality
• Arcadia
• Semiautomagic
• Court – Winter
• Court – Spring
• Court – Autumn
• Court – Summer
• Darkest Days (Penultimate game soundtrack)
• Finale (Not actually used in the Finale, but played before the last game session began)

We also used Chris Vrenna’s American McGee’s Alice soundtrack in the finale, but that’s not available on spotify in Finland, so had to use the CD.

Transhumanism popped up a couple of times in front of me today. First of all, been looking into Eclipse Phase, which looks like a nice game. You can read a nice interview about it over at hp+.

And then there’s Aimee Mullins @ TED, which is about the same thing, but skipping the scifi part and bringing it to our time and day.