When I GM’d BASH, I decided to give my players a sort of “works cited” page, that included the movies and comic books I was drawing on for inspiration (The Dark Knight, Ex Machina, Watchmen, and the new Batwoman run being prime examples).

As I run Dust Devils right now, it’s occurring to me that I probably should have done the same thing.

I think the main inspirations are Once Upon a Time in the West, from which I got the whole fight over a farm thing; Unforgiven, from which I got the gunfighters at the end of their career thing; Death Rides a Horse, from which I’m pulling some of the relationships from; and Keoma, from which I’m getting the whole big man quietly rules a town thing.

Visually, I’m drawing on the western ptotographs of Ansel Adams and Craig Varjabedian. If the game can feel how those photos look, then I’ve done my job.

Musically, we’re rocking Earth, the soundtrack to Red Dead Redemption, and a bunch of Ennio Morricone stuff while we play. I think it’s helping to keep everyone in the right frame of mind.

Either way, the point is that I kind of like this whole “works cited” thing, and I think I’ll keep using it for future games. I’m obviously drawing stuff from SOMEWHERE, so I might as well let the players in on it so we can all be on the same page.

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Holy crap is this insane. It’s like the entire A-List cast involved owed someone some kind of crazy favor.

Edit: I’m still watching it. It just gets worse. Everything about it is embarrassing. They combine CGI and regular animation in the most hamfisted way possible. It might be the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

I mean, look at this garbage.

Edit: HOLY CRAP! At the wedding scene at the end, it shows people making merry and all, and right at the front of the camera is a seriously old man making out with a seriously young girl. Then they cut back to it again. Thanks jerks. I needed that image.

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So Gencon is over. I didn’t make the whole thing because I’m buried under a metric ton of work which is sucking my will to live, but the con was, nonetheless, a blast. I played:

1) My Life With Master. Master (in this case, Mistress) won. Hardcore.
2) Misspent Youth, which was FANTASTIC. Expect more reviewing of it in the future.
3) Zombie Cinema, in which Timo and I both bit it spectacularly and satisfyingly.
4) Zombie Dice and Cthulu Dice. Both fun.
5) Something else… I swear. It will come to me.

Swag round up:

1) Labyrinths and Lycanthropes. Looks like a fun dungeon crawler.
2) Kagematsu. How pretty is this game?
3) Remember Tomorrow. If Gregor Hutton’s name on it, I’m sure it’s sweet.
4) Montsegur 1244. Right up my alley. Burning heretics. Sold.
5) Annalise. I mostly got this for my ladyfriend’s sister whose name is Annalise. It looks pretty sweet, having said that.
6) Apocalypse World, which is sweet looking. This is our next campaign.

Please click all above links. Anyone? What did you play and pick up?

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R.I.P. Brother Caleb Abernathy. (Absentee) father, (former) husband, Watchdog, and a real bastard.

In our Dogs game last night, my character Caleb Abernathy bit the dust in a most spectacular way. It’s hard to die in that game and I made a pretty unlucky roll to achieve such a fate.

Caleb might be one of my favorite characters I’ve ever created. He’s sort of a combination of El Topo, The Man With No Name, and Nathan Fillion’s creepy priest (also named Caleb) from the last season of BtVS. He’s actually a revamp of my character from APoWo cultist character who intentionally had his hand shot off and whom I never felt I got to fully explore. Caleb was more fully explored, but with his death it becomes quite apparent that the gaming gods don’t want me to explore zealotry as much as I want myself to.

I have mixed feelings about Caleb’s death. It sucks that he died because I really liked the character and I was looking forward to more fully exploring his zealotry, as well as seeing how his relationship with Rob and Reek’s characters unfolded. Rob’s character Brother Joshua an infinitely more gentle soul and I was interested in seeing where their relationship led.

Having said that, he sure went out in a cool way. After dispelling the two demons left in the town the Dogs were in, Caleb, with his last bit of will, burned the home where Brother Joshua’s sinful sister Ruth and her slothful husband Josea lived, something that Joshua would have never been able to do himself. All three died in the blaze. Brother Joshua tried to rescue Ruth, but had to give up to save his own life. After that, he could only watch as the house burned down.

How often do you get an ending like that, right?

Which leads me to my point: I’m a big fan of games in which the death and dying mechanics allow the characters to frame their own deaths. Dust Devils has a similar mechanic, in which a character isn’t forced to “die,” but is removed from the game, at their own discretion, and allowed to narrate how they leave, given the circumstances. This certainly can be a dramatic death scene, or it can be something quiet and thoughtful, or, if the circumstances allow, it can be some mega-happy ending. Just as long as the character is retired, somehow.

I feel this mechanic can also be brought into games where it’s not intended. Who’s to say that when you hit 0 hit points in D&D (or negative 10, or whatever) you don’t get to decide how your character goes out? As a GM I would be quite sympathetic to a player saying they take some villain, or something, with them if they could think of a super-cool way to do it.

Either way, we’ll all be seeing Caleb in RPG character hell. He’ll be the one preaching about sin to a room full of powergame barbarians looking confused.

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So Lost is over, and without getting too far into spoiler territory, I would say it was a highly emotionally satisfying ending, without being a particularly intellectually satisfying ending.

In other words, it was the exact opposite of the ending to, say, The Dark Tower series.

That got me thinking about what the difference is, and what works best in an R.P. situation. In some ways, it’s the difference between having your character “win,” or something like that, at the end of a campaign, versus having the thing that makes sense happen to your character. Do you like to end the campaign with that flawed, interesting character of yours succumbing to those faults, or are you only happy if you slay the dragon, rescue the princess, and get crowed new king of Awestometonia forever and ever, Amen.

Granted, that’s a false dichotomy. It’s really more of a continuum, and emotionally satisfying and intellectually satisfying can certainly co-exist, but walk with me here, for a minute, in black and white world.

It occurred to me, after watching the finale, that I almost always like the often rough, intellectually satisfying stuff to happen to my character. I like it when characters die, I’m happy when they drown in their own hubris, etc.

Having said that, I liked the ending of Lost a great deal. I don’t think they needed to explain everything. One word: midichlorians. Mysteries are cooler than explanations, almost always. If I was PLAYING Lost, however, and that was how my character wound up, I think I would have been pretty bummed out. I think on some level it demonstrates the way I think about R.P. For me, gaming is much more of an intellectual and creative output than an emotional one. I’m not a “power fantasy” type gamer. I’ve never bragged about my sword or gun. As such, I could care less if I kill the dragon. If getting killed by the dragon can bring some more pathos to the story, then that’s great.

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A friend of mine sent me this.

I actually really appreciated that story. I sometimes struggle with what it is that makes someone a “good role player.” I don’t think that characters HAVE to keep things that characters wouldn’t know secret from the other players, as in the story, but the reveal there would have so thoroughly blown my mind that it would have been worth it for me.

Either way, cool story, huh?

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Via Topless Robot.

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As you’ve probably heard, Dio died yesterday at 67 years young. This is actually probably the saddest I’ve ever been about a celebrity dying, to be honest. When you’re a nerdy sixth grader into music and fantasy and you flip on the TV and see this you’re sold forever.

I had the pleasure of seeing Heaven and Hell two summers ago and they were fantastic. Dio was a tiny, Italian, one man rock machine. He also came off like a really nice guy on stage. There was almost nothing stereotypically rock star about him. He didn’t make the audience chant or yell stuff. He just introduced songs and talked about how happy he was to be touring and playing music, and he came off real genuine about the whole thing.

So this week, as you get ready to do your dungeon crawling, raise the horns for Dio one last time. He was probably a bigger geek than any of us, and he did it all while singing with that ridiculously incredible voice and rocking the most presentable skullet on anyone whose name doesn’t begin with “Hulk” and end with “Hogan.”

As we said a few episodes ago- Dio is at the gaming table with you.

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So a week or so ago I ran a game of 3:16 at the store. If you don’t know anything about 3:16, it’s basically Starship Troopers the RPG with a real stripped down rules system. Here are my thoughts on the game:

1) It was super fun. 3:16 is a really streamlined system designed to create an ass-kicking good time.

2) I ran a one-shot, but it’s definitely designed for campaign play. The flashback mechanic simply can’t work in a one-shot, and the boards on the website aren’t particularly helpful in that regard (the advice is basically not to run a one-shot). I basically stripped down the flashback rules so that they did a lot less. I wasn’t thrilled about this, but without doing that, they could have just used a strength per combat and ran straight through the mission.

Having said that, it’s kind of sad, because the game makes a GREAT one-shot. Character generation is quick, easy, and fun. GM planet generation is quick, easy, and fun. There’s not specific mechanics to do a lot of things. The mechanics exist predominantly to kill aliens. This, to me, means that the mechanics run out of steam for lots of things, unless you want to be clever.

Generally, I do want to be clever. However, given that the only stat for doing things which aren’t killing is “NFA” or “Non-Fighting Ability,” you are entirely reliant on your imagination for what your character can do, and have one basic stat to cover all of it.

There’s a way that this is cool- you can do anything, all with one stat. Neat.

There’s a way that this is crazy- so are driving, first-aid, cooking, speaking other languages, singing, and philosophizing all the same stat? Answer: yes.

Mechanically, it seems like this is designed to be a sort of dungeon crawl in space: here are monsters, if you kill them all, you get experience. Ta-da.

It occurred to me, though, that the simple mechanics could also be useful for a really interesting story campaign, where you spent a lot of time with the characters RPing the difficulties of being a soldier out in space, away from home, having relationships with other people in your squad, etc. More BSG than Starship Troopers.

It seems like the flexibility of the system, therefore, can either be a limitation because of how little it enables you to do, or an enhancement based on how little it stops you from doing, depending on how crunchy your group is and how much they need mechanics to drive them towards how they interact with the game world and each other. Plenty of story games have slim mechanics. Now most people wouldn’t consider 3:16 a story game (I certainly wouldn’t), but the mechanic actually leaves a lot of room for storytelling.

3) I used a lot of music and sound effects in the game. I had jungle sound effects for when they were sneaking around (they were on a jungle island on a mostly water planet). I also had some cool instrumental metal queued up for the fight scenes. I actually thought it went pretty well. It was a little scary to put it out there, but I think I’m going to try to do that for more games I run now. I felt like it enhanced what I was trying to create fairly well. I kept it pretty quiet and unobtrusive, but the jungle sounds definitely helped for some of the creeping around not knowing when aliens were going to jump out.

So to sum up:

-3:16 is fun.
-It’s good for one shot play, with some mods.
-It’s good for campaign play if you have a group who just wants to blow stuff up or who is really good at exploring characters in a difficult circumstance.
-Music/sound helped.

-Todd

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Sweet?

I like the Angel comic, even though it often looks like it was drawn by someone attempting to make fun of the actors on the show. Man do they look goofy and deformed. Overall, though, the plots and story arcs have been interesting.

Having said that, the sheer ability of anyone to fuck up a “D&D” comic book is off the charts. I’m not even a huge “D&D” fan (the last time I played, “AD&D” was the current system), but I’d be real jazzed if they pulled this off and real bummed if they didn’t.

The biggest problem is that “D&D” doesn’t have a plot, in the typical sense of the word, unless they want to just make a comic book out of any of the novelizations. As such, “D&D” licensed stuff winds up being one of two, equally craptastic, things:

1) The “we’ll call this ‘D&D’ and then just make any old fantasy story which has nothing to do with ‘D&D’ and may even contradict basic things about it,” or…

2) The “our script writer’s job was to cram as many in-jokes and references in there (‘Look, it’s a beholder! I’ll use my magic missile! I feel more experienced after that fight!’) without bothering to ever, you know, squeeze a plot in between the totally flat game-mechanics reference checklist.”

Really, for something like this, the question comes down to whether or not the people adapting it actually love and respect both “D&D” and role-playing or just want a name they think might be bankable to slap on a project. I truly believe that people who love to source material could probably do something really cool, but stuff like this always makes me picture some fat guy with a cigar in an office saying “nerds like the dragons and the dungeons, eh? Buy the name! And get one of those failed novelists we have on retainer to have a script on my desk by 9:00 A.M. tomorrow! We’ll give those nerds some do-hickeys and drag asses they’ll eat up with a spoon!”

Having said that, Dark Sun? Nice. That was always my favorite setting, and I think it loans itself well to a comic book. Even if the comic winds up being meh, I’ll probably buy it just to gawk at how sweet that setting is.

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