So, Finally managed to get the second game of Henryn viimeinen iso keikka played on Tuesday. I won’t do an actual play report or anything, but there were a few things that really worked quite nicely. I already know that when I’ll run another campaign of it, I’ll do some things differently, but some things would stay the same.

This was the spotlight game of Mikko’s character Johnny Smalls, who is a great conman, an expert womanizer, and 100% on top of his game, always. His aspects (important thingamobs that quite well define what he’s about) were “Stylized image”, “Non-violence” and “Lyonne Ritz – an heiress girlfriend” plus the two that all characters have “Health” and “Primary role”.

When a player is in a situation where he still wants to accomplish something in the scene with his character but he is out of chips (the mechanical way to track how much stuff the character can still do) he can trade in one of these aspects to get more chips. Now, Johnny-boy has been spending the past two games hanging out with a rap-star Puppy D and his crew of gang thugs to get Puppy as a pawn in his schemes. During this session, Johnny ended up with D’s gang on the desert, where the gang was doing drugs, shooting cans and drinking booze. For a while, everything is good, but then the drugs come in. Johnny declines taking any, and a moment later he won’t shoot beer cans with the guys (Johnny has a strict no guns policy). The thugs aren’t happy. I set up a challenge with two parts – “Stay good friends with Puppy D (3 chips)” and “Stay in terms with Puppy D’s crew (2 chips)”.

(I might remember the details wrong, but it went something like this) Mikko has one chip when he actually got to paying things off. He decided to use his Con Artist role to buy off the three chip part of staying friends with Puppy D, but that meant the crew would be left disgruntled. So, Mikko sacrifices Johnny’s “Stylized image”, and Johnny unbuttons his shirt, lowers his Armani pants to a ridiculously low gangsta-position and gets a scarf on his head and some bling-bling and a funny hat… and by lowering Johnny from the standards he’s set for the character, Mikko gets 3 chips, two of which he uses to get the gang-members to accept Johnny even if he doesn’t take their drugs or shoot their guns.

Now, why I think this was very nice test of that part of the system – until Mikko has a moment to take a break, and enough chips to buy the aspect back, it’s gone. This means that for the rest of the session, Johnny was never quite as sharp-looking as he’d like to be. He chose the wrong shoes for the suit, forgot his belt, that sort of stuff. And according to Mikko, when I talked with him after the game, it was something that really hit him bad. Since the aspects are character-defining things, loss of one feels like a loss. A blow to even an insignificant one like “Stylized image” can hurt like a bullet in the upper leg area.

Mikko also lost the “Lyonne Ritz” aspect during the game, to keep the FBI from realizing Johnny’s schemes and keep the secrets for a while longer, by what was probably the most horrible break-up I’ve ever seen or heard of in my life. Matti’s old Russian gentleman mastermind ended the game session as a short-tempered drunk who didn’t care if people got roughhoused around during a gig. Matijas and Maija on the other hand, survived with everything just fine. Such is gambling. When I say I’d do things differently on the second run, I’d make the gig a bit more personal – the fact they’re running other peoples’ errands makes it less about “what I want” and more about “what I have to do”.

But the greatest thing is that we got the damn game session played after 6 weeks of cancelations. Next session coming up maybe in a week, unless something goes wrong again

Spiritual awakening is a lei’d cat

Taken on my cameraphone, thus the excellent quality.

(Warning, post contains spoilers of the movies Feast and Beerfest, not that you’ll ever watch them anyways)

So, there you are with your traditional RPG group, with great ideas about what the campaign will be about – you manage to get the players to do a perfect mix of characters and know how you’ll make the plots personal to the characters. Or the other way around – the players make a great group of characters made with great plot ideas you intermingle with the core thoughts of your campaign. In either case, the Dark Prince and his Troop of interesting NPCs will be essential because one of the characters used to work for him, and the birds are singing as the day is perfect.

And then the character dies. You have spent some 10 game sessions building up things and everything has gone by so well, and now a blank hole is staring at your face. The respectable way is to look at the character sheet, shed a tear and roll another character. If you’re lucky, some of the personalized plots you’ve created are such that they can be salvaged and reused by changing a couple of names and details.

But a lot of things are now lost for good. And if you as a GM had built the game heavily on very personal involvement of the characters, you might be screwed. If you had built the Dark Prince and his Troopers to be the character’s old company, full of his old friends, offing this character turns these NPCs more or less into faceless thugs with maybe some interesting characteristics, but thugs still. The personal attachment is gone.

But hear ye, hear ye. I have seen the light, and I shall preach of the light. In the movie Beerfest, the protagonist group is made of essential individuals, who are personally invested in the plot. In particular, there is a character in the ensemble called Landfill, who is a key part of the team. And he dies in the film.

After his death, there is the typical pause to remember how good man he was, and the characters are at his funeral, wondering what to do. Without Landfill’s unique skills, everything is doomed and a couple of plot points are left dangling.

Insert Gil, a new character to the film, who is the identical twin brother of Landfill. When I mean identical, I am talking how he manages to fill the spot of his now-dead brother. He is described as being the person who taught Landfill everything he knew about beer, and is implied to be as good as, or better than, Landfill in every possible aspect of life. And to top things off, Gil asks to be called Landfill, to honor his brother’s memory. And the movie goes on as if the death had never really happened.

Wait. What?

In Beerfest, the death of the character isn’t essential, which is pretty uncommon thing – normally characters only die, when it is required by the plot to happen. In Beerfest, death just happens. Thus it quite well fits a typical RPG death where the character dies because of the rules of the game, not because of the reasons of the plot. The Risk/Reward thing that’s written in the rules usually require that there is the risk of death for the characters, and it rarely follows the needs of the plot. So, what can we learn from the untimely death of Landfill and how can we abuse it for our own games?

I’m claiming that by taking a look at your plots, you can convert some of them into viral plots that can transcend a single character. Of course, doing it the full Beerfest way and just making a carbon copy of all the plots and abilities on the next characters, will be just silly (Beerfest was a comedy, and comedy is hard). But it doesn’t mean that some of the plots cannot continue living past the character’s lifespan in other people.

One thing this will need is some added transparency between the GM and the players during the game. Once the basics are there – characters are ready and you, as a GM, have an idea where you want to take them, you’ll need to be honest. This means saying to the players that “Ok, looking at your group and your characters. You are all unique snowflakes that are needed to complete the story that will unfold. Should one of you die, these here are the skills, traits and plots that I want to keep in the group. So take a look at them, and think who would work as a backup for them should things go bad.”

And the players should then form minor connections that can serve as full-fledged anchors for the plots should the push come to shove. And if you can’t make the current characters fill the shoes of a dead character, plotwise, make sure their replacement will fill them.

So, best case scenario, when a character dies, his plots will get distributed amongst the other characters, or there will be a pre-visioned Landfill’s brother out there to fill the parts of the position that won’t be distributed amongst the survivors.

This all was done much better in the horror/comedy/monster movie Feast, where the characters are very much nameless stereotypes filling a very specific role in the plot. A role that is exploited very much is that of “The Hero”. In the beginning of the film, The Hero rushes into the bar, explains the situation and how if people listen to him and do as he says, they’ll stay alive. He then immediately gets killed by a monster. After this, The Hero’s wife (now introduced as The Heroine) takes charge and keeps the hope alive amongst the diminishing group of survivors.

When she eventually dies, there is a short transition scene where one of the minor characters of the movie looks at the Heroine’s stuff and finds the conviction she needs to take up the mantle, turning the character into “The Heroine 2″. Bascially, the character had the potential to become the one who keeps the hope alive and takes charge, but doesn’t do it before the need for such a character presents itself. This transition isn’t unbelieveable, and you can imagine the GM telling the players that “Ok, to make this work, there needs to be one character at all times who is willing to take charge. Think in which order this role gets passed on should the current Hero die.”

So, to return to the Dark Prince and his Troop of Named Minions, where the main plot point you want to keep alive might be that character #1 has been a part of the Troop in his past – and thus sees the Troop as something else than just a group of faceless thugs, eventually leading to the question of “are minions evil and is it ok for us to kill them?”. This is such a personal plot that it would normally die along the character, but creating a backup, should things go bad, will be worth it.

A player wants his personal plots to be personal. This means that when you make backups for the plots of the player’s characters, you should make it clear that they are just that, backups. They do not activate until the original character is unable to interact with them. It means that a new character joining the group should have his own personal plots, but the potential to take over the plot of some of the older characters. If in Beerfest, Gil had been previously introduced, he shouldn’t have been a person that didn’t have anything to do with beer. The fact he’s a beer-expert would come to play only when he needs to take the position. Nothing is as annoying to a player to realize that the personal thing he had going for himself was in fact just a huge consipiracy everyone was involved in.

And with character #1 and his backup #2, and their relation with the Dark Prince, One example could be to keep a certain Dark Trooper and #2 apart as long as #1 is alive, because they actually know each other. Should the need to pull #2 as #1s backup arise, just have the Trooper and #2 meet and develope their relationship on a humane level. The players know beforehand that there is a backup to the plot in the meeting, and will keep the characters apart until it is needed.

In summary. When you do a traditional game where your characters’ personal plots are in fact huge parts of the main plot, you should talk with your players and make sure that the vital plots can survive the death of that character. But also to be firm on the fact that the personal plots of the players stay personal as long as the character is alive.

When I was young and the trailer of Ghost in the Shell had just leaked into the internet (and internet was still quite a new thing to me as well), I watched it, saved it onto a disc and took it home (didn’t have such high-powered internet at home back then, so did all this at a friend, who had a father who for some reason I can’t remember needed a faster connection). And I listened to the music of that trailer a lot. When they eventually released the soundtrack to the anime, I was a bit disappointed in the fact the trailer music wasn’t on the soundtrack. I was so disappointed in fact that I never did buy the soundtrack.

Now, some yegawds years later, they released the Ghost in the Shell 2.0 and along with it, they released a new version of the soundtrack. And on that soundtrack, they finally have the trailer track. I think I finally can get myself to buy that soundtrack.

So, new year begins. During the holidays, we had a heated discussion amongst the gaming group about our lackluster ways of starting and abandoning projects. Thus, I’m setting a preliminary plan for the games I’ll be GM’ing this year, here and now.

Henryn viimeinen iso keikka – The current heist mini-campaign I’m running. It’s only 7 games + prologue and epilogue, so I should very well be able to make it happen. The band of thieves have now set their sights on their score and are about to pull it off. Considering we have 6 games and the epilogue to go, and we hopefully manage to do a couple of sessions per months, I’d say this one will be completed somewhere between April and May. I will run a second game of it with fewer game sessions after I’ve completed the first one, and possibly a couple of one-shots, followed by it hopefully giving me a free pass to RoPeCon with a couple of gaming runs. At that point, I also hope I have a nice PDF version ready to show the internets.

College of War – The fourth incarnation of the campaign should continue soonish. University Drama. Magical theory as a science. It’s a lighthearted campaign. Something of a Fantasy Heartbreaker. And most of all, it’s a campaign that I love a lot. And that has been the stage for various stories in the past years. The CoW has something like at least 20-40 game sessions left in it, so barring any players leaving the country (which caused the current pause the campaign is on), we should have more than enough for the whole year.

Sneak:run – This is a campaign that almost got started, and one that I would still like to run. The previous try to start it got horribly mangled by people having ideas and me not having enough preparation to bring to the table a basic proposition what I wanted the campaign to be. Basically it’s a dualistic campaign – two player groups with similar goals but different means. I’ll probably start this campaign after Henry’s is done.

One-shots and playtests – apart from the previously-mentioned Henry-oneshots, I’ll try to have a couple of other small games that aren’t related to things. I’m still rooting to get the play group to try out The Shab-al-Hiri Roach at some point as well as run a game of either Burning Empires or Mouse Guard to them. Also we’re doing playtesting for the Tokyo Rain RPG, so we’ll probably continue doing those playtest runs as long as they’re needed.

After a cellphoneless holidays, my phone is back on. What I have learned is that a cellphone always present greatly increases my stress levels and that I should do something about my cellphone habits. Returning to a landline might not be an impossible thing either. I think things were much simpler when we weren’t available all of the time.

Just a friendly reminder-list for myself that I can check upon the next time I’m at a record store without a clue what I was supposed to be buying.

Soundtracks:

• 28 weeks later
• Casino Royale
• Dead Man
• Eastern Promises
• Layer Cake
• 3:10 to Yuma

Normal stuff:

• Bat for Lashes – Fur and Gold
• Chris Cornel – Carry On
• Client – City
• Cobra Starship – While The City Sleeps, We Rule The Streets
• Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
• Daft Punk – Alive 2007
• Gorillaz – Demon Days
• Emiliana Torrini – Me and Armini
• Emiliana Torrini – Love in the Time of Science
• Hercules & Love Affair – Hercules & Love Affair
• Save Ferris – It Means Everything
• Juli – Es ist Juli
• Justice – Cross
• Kerli – Love Is Dead
• Ladytron – Witching Hour
• Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand
• Rogue Traders – Here Come The Drums
• Sophie Ellis-Bextor – Trip The Light Fantastic
• Scala & Kolacny Brothers – Respire
• The Kooks – Inside In, Inside Out
• The Ting Tings – We Started Nothing
• Metallica – Death Magnetic
• Bootsy Collins – Play With Bootsy

And some others. (updated late February)

Welcome back to the good old the-cow.net.

I finally installed Wordpress instead of the personally created system, just because I didn’t bother to fix it after they fixed my server about a year ago. So all old posts are at least temporarily gone. And new ones will be put here with this new thingamob.

I’ll probably talk a lot more about role playing related stuff here this time, interlaced with some personal posts. Well, at least semi-personal. As with the previous version of the blog, everything written here is a lie, or at least only a partial truth. But should offer enough insight on the real issues.

I also hope I managed to install the plugins correctly so that pictures will work correctly on the template. But that’ll be seen once I get this on it’s place and start/continue blogging.