Warlords Of Vornheim

In the grimdark chaos of post skeleton-invasion Vornheim there is, occasionally, war.

This team player-vs-player skirmish game will be run via Google + hangouts.

Recruit a 3-person team.

Get someone else to recruit a 3-person team.

Everybody grabs a D&D PC.

Teams get named.

You choose or flip a coin: one team attacks, one team defends a structure chosen by the GM such as this...

And we roll.
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Some rules:

Existing FLAILSNAILS PCs may be used in the game. Before the game each FLAILSNAILS  PC chooses the mode they are playing in:

Leisurely Mode--If you win you get no xp you just get any loot you can snag during the game, if you lose we assume you were just knocked unconscious and you can keep using that PC.

Hardcore Mode--Survivors on the winning team gain a level usable in any game! Losers die.

New PCs created just for the game automatically play in Hardcore Mode.

PCs that get knocked down to 0 hp can make (or grab) new PCs and keep playing on the same side.

Play continues until all three of the original PCs on one side are killed or captured.

Rules for new PCs

All new PCs on a given side (though not all PCs period on that side) must be mercenaries from the same part of the world. These PCs are generated as follows:

3d6 in order

Classes: Wizard, Fighter, Ranger, Paladin, Barbarian, Cleric, Thief, Druid

(You can use this thief, this ranger, or this fighter if you like.)

Use the 3.5/d20/Castles and Crusades system, for bonuses and penalties. Like if you have a 12 or 13 in a stat, you're +1 to things associated with that stat, if you have an 8 or 9, that's -1, 6 or 7 is -2, etc. Write the number next to the stat. That same link will tell you where your base melee mod, damage mod, missile mod, ac mod, save mod and con mod are. Or just ask me and I can hook you up.

Grab a melee weapon. 

Make a roll-under-charisma roll. If you make it you get a ranged weapon that does damage equal to whatever die is closest to the degree you made the roll by, d4, d6, or d8.

Likewise your AC equals your charisma or 10 whichever is higher, whatever armor that would be (add any dex bonus after that).

The existence of other equipment is decided by intelligence rolls. Like: do I have a rope? Roll under int. etc. Don't be a dick about this.

Casters start with 2 first level spells.

Pick a background for your mercenaries:

Goblins from Gaxen Kane: You are from the Goblin Empire or Cobalt Reach. Your team has access to one insane livestock-derived kamikaze goblin bioweapon (boar on fire, crow rigged to explode, etc). Submit it to the GM for approval

Dark Elves from Drownesia. You can, like any dark elf cause darkness in a 15' radius once per day. Being from drownesia also means you'll get a riding dinosaur (a small parasaur) if you survive your first battle on the winning side.

Vornheim natives or other local mercenaries (noble). You gain two pieces of standard equipment of your choice free.

Vornheim natives or other local mercenaries (rabble). You're viking-types. You may re roll any single one of:  strength, constitution or hit points. If you survive your first battle you get a horse.

Undead warriors from Deathfrost Mountain. You're skeletal undead with all the good and bad things that implies. Any non-undead in your party have clearly made some unholy pact with a necromancer to secure your loyalty.

White elves from Nornrik. You have cool creepy viking-elf warmasks that give you +1 AC but -1 to notice stuff visually with Wisdom rolls.

Chaos Warriors from the Wastelands of the Negatsar You're basically Warhammer chaos types from pseudoSlavia. Pick one mutation (don't be a dick) or randomly get 2 plus one more every time you level up.

Itinerant Knights from the Megafortress Returned from the Frontier Free horse and plate mail but you gotta be a paladin. No missile weapons.

Gray Elves from the Far Lands As Itinerant Knights above.

Pirates You're from all over the world, each member of the group may pick any of these backgrounds: the Harsh North (as Vornheim noble or rabble above), The Land of Naj: choose one piece of slightly anachronistic technology, The Exotic East: pick a Kung Fu number.  Pirates get leather armor only, everyone has a rope and grappling hook. ___









The first game will probably be today (Dec 14) at 5pm pacific ish but that's negotiable, sign up on Google+.

Communities Suck At Describing Games They Don't Play

Once upon a time, Vincent Baker, author of many independent games, wrote this about The Forge, the gaming community that spawned many of the fans of his games....
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Vincent Baker Nov 11, 2012 - Public

We can argue about what the crucial failure of rpg design at the Forge was, but the crucial failure of rpg design at the Forge was the abandonment of concrete imagery as the medium and product of play.

......
(And then I wrote this:)
.....

Zak SmithNov 11, 2012 (edited)

+8

As I understand it, the Forge succeeded at many things for the people who were into it but failed at:
1. Being correct all the time about all kinds of games it talked about (which it didn't need to be because the people involved weren't actually making all kinds of games)
2. Promoting a culture open to all kinds of games and gamers (which it didn't need to be because those other gamers picked up the slack themselves)
In other words, the Forge served its constituency fairly well, it just failed to have much coherent to offer the rest of us and thus be an expansionist force.

And the weird thing about that thing I wrote is the little "+8" next to it.

I don't often get "+8" when I am talking in a place where everyone's favorite game is my least favorite. But I'm not here to Forgebash strictly on the strength of a handful of people agreeing with me.

Because what I'm thinking is that this is not really just a weakness of the Forge, it's a weakness of every single RPG community:

They are really good at analyzing the kinds of games their members want to play and they totally fucking suck at analyzing games their members do not want to play.

(Likewise people suck at describing the function of art they don't want to look at. I would've turned the word "suck" into a link to that gamerconservative blog that attacked Hyun Tae Kim but they don't deserve the traffic.)

Everyone there has either never played the hated game, or played it, disliked the experience, and moved away from it and is eager to tell everyone all about that all the time.

And while their criticisms may be valid, in a game (as in anything) you are always trading some inconveniences for some reward and it is that reward that you will have a hard time understanding or appreciating the value of if you don't like the game.

You know, like they say: a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Example: me.

Despite having it described to me many times and read the book and heard AP reports, I have no real clue what the payoff of playing Dogs In The Vineyard is really supposed to be, really. Like whatever emotions it appeals to are ones I don't have. I can't judge it except in terms of the cost, not the value. It's not my kinda thing. People insisting it is universally good have thus far been inarticulate on that score. Not their fault. They are trying to describe the color blue to a blind person.

(And from what I've read it seems its author is ok with that. Which is good. Some people don't get why anyone wouldn't want to play their game. Those people suck.)

Again:
Although it's not my D&D of choice, I play and have enjoyed playing 4e, but I freely admit (and this thread demonstrates) I have no fucking clue (or had no fucking clue) what the average internet-talking 4e fan considered the strengths of that system.

I have a great friend here in LA who's decided 4e is his favorite D&D. I still don't know why, but I know that for whatever alchemy goes into his brain when he is putting together an adventure it is the one that meshes best with his internal list of "wanna deal withs" and "don't wanna deal withs". I'd have to get far deeper into his brain than I ever have to figure it out.

Or I could just play and enjoy it, which I do. P.S. Darren when are you running a game?

Etc etc.

What would make me suck even more is if I tried to describe it without knowing that I had no idea what I was talking about or without even having played it or after only having played it with a bunch of psychotic jerks that I hated.

If that sounds like a fun thing to read, you can read it pretty much anywhere on the gaming internet: just go to a forum devoted to any game and then look for them talking about the opposite of that game.

This goes for every other RPG community.

And if you belong to that community, and trust the taste of the people there because you have played and talked together, and want to find out about a game or an idea outside that community's wheelhouse, what do you do?

Try to find someone who likes that game and have them make their best argument.

And if you are outside a thing and have an idea about it. Find someone inside and ask them.

The costs (all the reasons the people in your Vampire group don't play Cthulhu instead) are always easy to find.

The value, though, that's a thing you may have to go outside your comfort zone to get.

The Cutting Edge of Cocking About

"This has never been done before."

"Yes. We are in fact on the cutting edge of cocking about." 

-Top Gear

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So I ran the player-vs-player sci fi deathmaze. It was beautiful.

So 6 guys in a maze, right?

Rey's robot samurai is on one side of a door, he knows Joey's robot is on the other and vice versa.

Rey's robot samurai guy charges through a door with a sword, stabs his fellow robot, gets knocked to the floor almost immediately by a stun pistol, the other robot is ripping him apart, he's hovering on the edge of death, the corridor fills with someone's smoke bomb, the smoke bomb guy (a hobbit) stabs Joey in the back, Joey dies, Rey cannibalizes Joey's robot for spare parts.

Joey makes a new goblin PC who then stabs the hobbit in the back while he's trying to kill Rey (who is still on the floor and has been all game) then the hobbit is slain trying to flee, Joey's goblin runs off, then...

Joey's goblin is on one side of a door, he knows Rey's robot samurai is on the other side of the door and vice versa.

The same door.

Joey charges in. They grapple.

And here comes Han Solo. Because Ian died in another part of the complex earlier and made a new guy fast and so he made Han Solo.

Solo fires wildly into the smoky corridor and hits Joey. Joey dies.

Rey pulls a black bomb grenade off the goblin, tosses it into the room Solo's in.

Solo is blind, after some edge-of-seat back and forth with the crit chart, Rey kills Solo.

Now...

...this man, this fellow who has seen 3 foes slain on top of him without standing up, then cannibalize done's body to cold himself together, then stole their weapons and killed Han Solo after starting the game with nothing but a sword limps down the stairs, one-eyed, one arm smashed, one leg shattered, to kill the last surviving 1st-generation PC from the first round....

This man--this warrior--he howls for the coward's blood. And what happens?

It's so horrible, I can't bear to even type it out. Grisly details here.

___

Anyway...

"

Ian Johnson8:33 PM

+6

This is the best game, and I hope to play again and I want this to become an insane trend and I want to run a league and I think +Zak Smith 's huge brain is amazing because this is so much fun.

"

I'd call that a successful playtest.

Sign up.

Oh and for Ken's take on that Night's Black Agent's game from last weekend go here.

Welcome To The Gigastructure

I'll run a 40k/Gigacrawler/RIFTSy 4-person player-vs-player sci-fi deathmaze hangout game tonight.

11 pacific time. Or maybe earlier if that's better for everyone. Ask.

Sign up on G+ if you're into it tonight or another night.

*Murdermaze PC rules* 

Any race you can think of or invent so long as you are roughly human size. Cyborgs, hybrids aliens and mutants are totally ok.

6 D&D stats roll 3d6 in order

EXCEPT: Charisma is replaced with Racial stat: this represents the powerfulness of any stat associated with your race (night vision, claws, robot stuff, cyborg parts. etc)

Pick a class:
Soldier- +1 to hit EDIT: Soldiers roll 2 d8s and pick the highest for hp
Thief- Backstab and other thief functions based on dex rolls d6hp
Psionic- Pick 2 spells from any basic D&D d4hp
Techy- Pick EDIT: 2 extra objects , d6 hp

Pick any two objects to carry, they have to be smaller than a breadbox, subject to GM approval, do not be a dick. EDIT: You can have any nonpowered melee weapon as one of your items, even if it is longer than a breadbox.

Constitution modifies HP as in 3.5 or Castles and Crusades:
3=-4
4-5=-3
6-7=-2
8-9=-1
10-11= no mod
12-13=+1
14-15=+2
etc.

Players will start in different parts of the complex, the complex contains various useful items.

Play goes until only one PC is left standing.

Being the last PC standing lets you keep the same PC next time. You can switch out equipment or spells if you have them and add class hp (without your constitution bonus) to whatever total you have when the fight ends.

A Hovering Dungeon

Click to enlarge...

Player's point-and-plan Pic

Key

James Bond's Taxi, Night's Black Agents and a QUIZ!

Logic A)

The man with the plutonium is getting away. James Bond needs a cab now. Does he get one?

In a James Bond movie, this is usually a function of two variables:

How awesome is James Bond at getting cabs? (Pretty awesome.)

How late in the movie are we?

If it's late in the movie, Bond's own awesomeness might be cancelled out by the desperateness of the plot.  Bond looks left, Bond looks right. No cab. He has to improvise. Oh fuck now he's running across the tops of the cars in midtown traffic!

If it isn't late in the movie, if Bond really wants a cab and fails to get it, it risks making him look like a different guy. Not like James Bond, but like some other non-cab-getting not-ominiversally-in-touch spy.

The goals here being served are:

James Bond gets to keep being James Bond. His visible integrity as a character (defined only by what we get to see him do) is not threatened by external things off screen.

The movie gets to keep feeling like a movie. Its Beginning/Middle/Climactic Desperate Ending structure is unthreatened.

________
Logic B)

The man with the plutonium is getting away. A PC in my game needs a cab now. Does he get one?

In my usual game this is a function of one variable:

How likely is it that I think there'd be a cab in the next round (6 seconds) in that place at that time that would stop for that person?

(If it was Call of Cthulhu, it'd be a function of PC luck.)

If it turns out there's a cab, it's my job as GM to make sure the immediate consequences of that are as interesting as possible while still keeping the sense in the player that causes in the fiction reliably have plausible effects in the fiction (which keeps the campaign interesting overall).

If it turns out there's not a cab, it's my job as GM to make sure the immediate consequences of that are as interesting as possible too, with the same conditions and for the same reasons.

The goals here being served are:

The player gets to keep feeling like their PC is in a puzzling but knowable world which will respond substantially differently to different decisions on the players' part.

The player worries a lot about making the right decisions and worries about the results of the die rolls.
________

(It should go without saying that in many situations both of these sets of goals are served. But this is about where priorities lie, not "what could or usually happens".)

________

The Cab Question came up this weekend because I (a guy who runs things on Logic B) was running Night's Black Agents--a system designed to serve Logic A.

I know it runs on Logic A because it pretty much says that in the book and because the designer, Kenneth Hite, was sitting on my couch and he was one of my players.

So Adam (not James Bond, but still, locally speaking, a very good spy in a spy thriller game) goes around the corner near the end of the game and needs a cab now.

I am running the game but I haven't really read the rules all the way through so I am kind of seat-of-my-pantsing it based on watching Ken run it the day before.

Me: "Is there a luck stat in this game?"

Ken: "Usually if someone is trying to get a cab I just have them spend a point of Urban Survival."

(Note here: a game is not just the game design but a game is also how the GM runs it. When Ken runs his own game we have the extremely unusual situation of game and game design being nearly identical.)

Me: "I've tried to get a moving cab in this neighborhood at exactly this time of night on a weekend and I'd say no matter what it's a crapshoot."

(This is me hybridizing whatever the hell my game design goal in my head is with the separate game design goal the game has. That results in a slightly different game. Everybody's cool with that. I roll a d6, high roll = cab. There's a cab.)

________

So a few things about the games:

--95% of the time I'd say this difference in GMing style resulted in almost no practical differences of any consequence at the table.

--It's a fun game. It was fun to play when Ken ran it the first night, it was fun to run when I ran it the second night.

--Many of the differences in the two ways of running the game may have been minimized by the fact that we were both running one-shots. The difference between the first kind of logic and the second is probably way more clear if you play a one-shot cinematic game next to a session of a long haul worldbuildy campaign. In both my game and Ken's, the point was to have it all wrapped up a few hours after it started, so even though I had a little less devotion to a cinematic arc than Ken did, in practice, a solvable series of puzzles that can be solved in 4 hours feels a lot like a cinematic arc meant to last 4 hours.

--Another reasons the differences in style were minimized is most people playing weren't used to the system, so there were fewer things we knew would work or knew wouldn't work or knew didn't matter. If you don't know the degree to which the ticking time bomb obeys plot-logic instead of clock logic, you treat it like a real ticking time bomb, just in case.

--Another style contrast: at the beginning of my game I actually physically handed the players a physical book with actual clues actually in it. In this case, they could either find the clues or, if they didn't, spend points of Notice and Cryptography (which, it being the beginning of the session, they were flush with) to have them pointed out. This, I realize now and Ken kinda pointed out, goes totally against the design goal of making players feel like badasses: if they decide to spend the points, they're kinda admitting defeat. It went alright though, since I think my players are used to D&D games where everything is some involuted Gotham villain logic and sometimes you just do not give a fuck. The point of the GUMSHOE system on which Night's Black Agents is the players aren't Sherlock Holmes. The point of the way I run stuff is: well, if you want a shot at trying to be Sherlock Holmes you can have it.

-A good game (I don't mean the thing coming out of the rulebook, I mean the thing that happens at the table that's created by the intersection of that plus a GM plus an adventure plus a group) gives players opportunities to invent things and situations only they could've invented. Pretty much everybody got to do that both times, so that was pretty cool.

____

NOW A QUIZ!

Match the player to what they did during the two sessions...

(Questions 1 and 2) In each game, one player eventually decided to throw caution to the wind and charge right toward the climax and got all shot up:

1. One was under a department store and spent all their points in Network (or was it Cover?) to reveal they were in real good with the mall cops hoping they'd be rescued. Unfortunately the mall cops were too far away and this person died. Which one?

2. One kicked open a door and got shot up to negative 8 Health or something. They then spent all their points on Preparedness to have a flash bang grenade and pulled the pin and it worked and they lived. Which one?

3. Who played a French paratrooper maximized for shooting?

4. Who played a Catholic Hungarian who killed the vampire at the end?

5. One of the two GMs ran a game where the overall structure was: there's a sort of heist-type situation that you can spend a few days scoping out and finding out clues to who the targets are.  You don't actually perform until a counterheist (triggered by decisions unrelated to the PCs actions in the fiction) begins. On the metalevel the trigger event is meant to occur once the PCs discover a few of the most important things about the target. Which one?

6. The other GM started with a fight and then a breadcrumb trail to a non-time-sensitive open location situation which was just very dense with clues to the (changing) whereabouts of the villain.  Which one?

7. Who played a tired sneaky Czech?

8. Who played a blonde German hacker?

9. One GM's adventure included a casino in Bratislava. Which?

10. One GM's adventure included Pollock's Toy Museum in London. Which?

11. Who played an investigator with Polish cop name?

12. Who played an unobtrusive British hardware specialist/mechanic?

13. Which GM decided one NPC's escape plan included an e-type Jag in a hidden tunnel?

14. Who decided the CIA guy who hired the players was actually a vampire?

15. Who keeps thinking this is definitely the direction he'd take NBA if he was running a campaign right now?

P.S. Ken's take (with a few quiz spoilers) here.

Night's Black Agents And Carcosa Cheat Sheets

First:
Night's Black Agents (spies and spylike individuals vs vampires) character generation is dead simple but for some reason it is not designed in such a way as to make that readily apparent.

For GMs and players I have made this here cheat sheet which gives you everything you need to make a basic thriller-mode NBA PC, click to enlarge:

and here's a fixed up character sheet.....

Also in the "If you're not doing it, I guess I will" department, I had my pdf reader search the words "castle" and "citadel" in my copy of Carcosa and then drew in on the map where the castles are (blue) and where the citadels are (orange).

This is helpful if you're running a political or warfare-oriented game or if you just want to know where the wandering monsters came from. Click to enlarge...