I wanted to give the class creation system in Adventurer Conquerer King a spin, so I cranked out a Warlord class. This is untested.
Category: Gaming
Part of my unemployment regime is making sure I do something creative for a few hours every day. I’ve got the time, so I should use it wisely. Here’s Zombie Apocalypse (PDF), a Fiasco playset I wrote with Susan last week. We playtested it over the weekend and it went pretty well.
As one does, I wrote up my old superhero PC Emoticon in the hot new superhero RPG. This time, it’s Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. MHRP character writeups are tied to specific versions of the characters, both in powers and in XP Milestones, so I decided to do this writeup as the youthful, optimistic Emoticon. In actual play he went all the way through the Weight of Responsibility Milestone, but I don’t think he ever finished up the True Teen Love Milestone.
I’m not sure how I’d add the martial arts he picked up later — actually, he had a bit of it early on, too. But that’d be a third Power Set, which is a bit more spread out than typical MHRP characters. You could drop it into the Projective Empathy Power Set, but the Limit doesn’t make sense.
There are a couple of small tricks in the original Champions UN PEACE gear package that I skipped. Flash Defense never came up, so you could represent it with a stunt, and the radio headsets are most easily handwaved.
Oh, and I added a Social Specialty, because it’s missing and there clearly ought to be one. Cite: Johnny Storm, socialite extraordinaire, with no particular business acumen at all. Emma Frost might also fit in that category.
A while back I promised I think Adam Jury and Fred Hicks a post on Creative Commons, the Open Gaming License, why I think the OGL has problems, why Creative Commons licenses don’t always work for tabletop gaming publishers, and so on. This is too much for a single post, so I’ll start with my technique for emulating the OGL using Creative Commons licenses. It has the virtue of being productive thought as opposed to criticism, and it seems more useful to lead with something someone might actually use some day.
Prompts courtesy of Atlas Games.
I have gamed with kids a little bit. I ran a mini-campaign which included a friend’s… 10 year old? I think? It was fine; I played to his needs a bit more than I usually do and his dad helped him on the rare occasions he needed help with dice or advice on what to do. It wasn’t his first experience with the game. I am probably not a great choice for teaching someone how to game; I’m not super-experienced with kids and appropriate educational techniques. But if the kid knows the game, I like making it fun for her or him. You get better
Dear Reverb Gamers: nope. I work in computer games, which makes it very easy to be out without consequence. It’s actually a career bonus to be a tabletop gamer, despite the fact that my day job is unrelated to game design. Even before I got into computer games, the Silicon Valley dot-com was a pretty friendly place for geeks of all stripes.
Even if I went into something more conservative, I’d still keep a D20 keychain ornament on my shoulder bag, though.
I’m going to the old 1999 WotC survey for this one, because I kind of like it when types are developed via research than just out of a fevered gamer brain. (But I’m an Method Actor with a side of Tactician, as one may have guessed from the previous post in this series.) That said, on the WotC chart I live on the tactical side of the strategy/tactics line. I generate strategy by improvisation, which is no strategy at all, but sometimes I make it look good enough to pass. Between story and combat, I lean strongly towards story. That’s a less important division to me; I think tactics over strategy matters more.
Prompt courtesy of Atlas Games again.
“What is it about gaming that you enjoy the most? Why do you game? Is it the adrenaline rush, the social aspect, or something else?”
I think it comes down to the fantasizing. When I’m actually gaming, I love roleplaying and immersing and speaking in my character’s voice. When I’m not sitting at the table, I’m still having fun thinking about what the world’s going to be like or how those NPCs are going to act or how my character might develop. I read sourcebooks because I like things that trigger my imagination.
There is also a hefty side order of strategy here. I like moving pieces around, which is why I like card games as well as roleplaying games. Although let’s be honest here: I like feeling smart, and strategizing feeds that desire. At the tender age of 41, I have more or less gotten away from the need to win, as long as I feel like I’ve done smart things. (Sometimes I slip up there. Sorry about those twin TPKs, guys.) Other people will also do smart things, and that’s okay; losing cause someone else is also smart is fine.
It’s mostly about fantasizing, anyhow. Shadowfist was my CCG of choice because it’s the one with the resonant world.
Prompts courtesy of Atlas Games.
I was, I’m not sure. 14? 15? Something like that. We were living up in New Hampshire. There were these family friends, who we met I don’t know how; probably one of those hippie connections we were rich with in those days. Teo was four years older than I was. Huge Rastafarian. If I remember right, his family’s lore said they were related to Haile Selassie? Seems unlikely, but who knows.
I was over at their place one day: a little apartment, filled with tapestries and rugs, and Teo dragged out this book. I was pretty weirded out, since he wasn’t much of a reader. It was Tunnels & Trolls, with a couple of solitaire adventures. He showed me how to play, sort of, and I was totally hooked. I extracted all available information about where you could get this stuff and went home with a head full of wonders.
Next Thursday — I know it was Thursday, because Thursdays were mall days — I hit the hobby store in the Mall of New Hampshire. It’s not still there, although the Mall is. They had the old line of Steve Jackson Microgames, and Traveler (whoa), and miniatures, and Dungeons & Dragons, but most important T&T. Fifth edition, great stuff. I do still have my copy. I also have a bunch of the old solos, and the Dungeon of the Bear, and Uncle Ugly’s Underground. The dungeons were three hole punched for inclusion in a binder.
I didn’t play in groups till I hit college. I was insufficiently social to get a group going, and my school was too small to have one already. I played a lot of solo adventures, though. I suspect I could still find my way through Naked Doom and City of Terrors from memory.
A bunch of random games I’d like to run that could be campaigns of whatever length, in no particular order.
- Bookhounds of London, in Arabesque style. This itches my GUMSHOE urges. Fortunately Night’s Black Agents won’t be out for a while so there’s little competition for that chunk of my brain.
- Ashen Stars is also tempting, but a bit less so. I’d probably rather play this than run it. A bit of space opera would be fun.
- Some kind of superheroes maybe. Also more something I’d like to play. Icons, DC Adventures, not Champions probably. I keep wanting to do an emergent superhero world.
- Barbarians of Lemuria for sword and sorcery. Simple system, looks fun. I don’t even have a world in mind — I think you could probably just ad lib one.
- Day After Ragnarok, speaking of sword and sorcery. It’d also be nice to give Savage Worlds a good workout.
- That old Warren Zevon Buffy game I always wanted to run but never did.
- Nostalgiapire, now that I have Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition. I can’t imagine that it’d take more than four or five sessions to get the nostalgia out.
- The further adventures of The Black Library, my Dark Heresy conceit in which the Inquisitor is the guy who holds onto all the dangerous books. Which is to say most books. In this story arc, he is trying to retake his library from the dangerous Chaos servants who were his last set of agents.
- My fairly politicized not yet written up D&D 4e setting. Sort of Eberron in flavor, but with universities as another power axis and not so much of the magitech goop.
- Smallville, probably without the DC Universe trappings. I just wanna try the relationship maps.
If I think of anything else I’ll add it. I’m sure there’s something I want to use Reign for.