For our thirty-eighth mashup we’ll go with an absolute classic of British television, The Sandbaggers. If you like espionage at all, I strongly recommend it. It was all kinds of tense and thoughtful; lots of each episode takes place in the offices of British Intelligence, where people are arguing about the ethics and practicality and safety of missions. And plenty of each episode takes place out in the field, where intelligence agents are not supermen.
Category: Gaming
For the record, I spent most of Saturday having a pleasant Mother’s Day celebration with my family.
Sunday was the day I spent mesmerized by City of Heroes. And there is a screenshot album, which will keep getting updated as long as updating it amuses me. “Some villains do not wish to end their lives of crime. The Teleonaut uses his mystical shadow powers to reason with them.”
Any MMORPG in which I can create a big bruiser wearing a green suit and a sleek black shirt, with a wrestling mask to match? That’s an MMORPG which is perfectly OK by me. I had a refreshing evening of beating up thugs and muggers, during which I looked a lot like this (click the thumbnail for the big picture):
Now, that’s what I call entertainment.
This week’s mashup is another xiombarg suggestion, Full Metal Jacket. Seems timely.
Justin suggested the Titanic as a mashup subject, and that seemed like a pretty good idea to me. I’m not going to use the movie as source material, since I’ve never seen it, but don’t let that stop you.
Mention Count: 2.
In Angel, characters have Drama Points, which can be used for a number of quasi-narrative purposes. PCs get either 10 or 20 at the start of the game, depending on how powerful they are otherwise. (Think of the difference between Angel or Buffy on the one hand and Xander or Wesley on the other hand.) They have five uses, as follows:
Heroic Feat, which gives you a +10 bonus on any one roll; I Think I’m OK, which instantly heals half the damage a character has taken to the point it’s used; Plot Twist, which creates a “lucky break” for the characters; Righteous Fury, which costs 2 Drama Points and gives a +5 bonus for all rolls for one fight; and Back From The Dead, which allows a character to come back from death.
You can get more Drama Points by trading in experience points or — more interestingly — acting in a number of ways which reinforce the genre. For example, self-sacrificing heroic actions earn Drama Points. The GM also has the option to give out Drama Points when he takes over narrative control of a situation. For example, if he narrates that a PC is knocked out without warning, said PC gets a few Drama Points in exchange.
Since Life and Death on Winter Hill is a short-term game, I don’t think it makes sense to hand out experience points. I’d cut out the middle-man and just grant 4 or 2 Drama Points per session, depending once more on the power level of the character.
What are the genre conventions I want to encourage? I do actively want this to take place in the Whedonverse, so I think giving out Drama Points for witty lines makes sense. Drama Points for angst doesn’t make as much sense. Loyalty, on the other hand, is fairly important. Perhaps 2 Drama Points every time someone makes a difficult decision involving loyalty? I’m not sure exactly how to codify that. Possibly Loyalty should be an disadvantage in character generation, much the same way as Honorable is in the base rules.
I’m also thinking about other ways to use Drama Points as narrative currency. I want to give players narrative control over NPCs, both because I like making players do my work for me and because I think I can leverage that control for more emotional involvement. (More on that in a later post.) It seems like you should be able to invent an NPC for 1 Drama Point, and take over long-term control of an NPC for something like 3-5 Drama Points.
WISH #92 asks:
Have you ever gotten burned out as a gamer? What did you do to combat burnout? Which things you tried helped, and which ones didn’t? Which ones would you recommend to a gamer with burnout?
I actually feel a little burned out right now — not a lot, but a bit — so good timing. Hm.
I think that burnout is a life phenomenon for me, not a gaming-specific phenomenon. My work is keeping me too busy to think about gaming as much as I’d like, and there’re a bunch of other things swirling around, and I have trouble working up the enthusiasm to generate characters or think about GMing or anything. Which saddens me. (Yes, this is a typical symptom of depression; yes, I know.)
Mostly I just nudge myself to press on regardless. I don’t skip gaming even if I want to. I grind out character descriptions no matter how I feel about them, because I know they’re better than I give myself credit for. I read gaming material that’s given me joy in the past. I spent a while this week transcribing NPCs from Classic Organizations into Hero Designer, just to get myself back in the groove of thinking about HERO. And all that works pretty well.
“You wanna know what it takes to write mashups? It takes brass balls to write mashups.”
Yeah, it’s all about Glengarry Glen Ross this week, and don’t you forget it. It’s a movie about desperation. It’s really brutal. It’s really good. I’m gonna mash it up. It’s not gonna be exactly work-safe.
WISH #90 asks:
What do you think about system updates (Paranoia XP, Amber 2.0, DnD 3.0/3.5) and conversions (d20 Silver Age Sentinels, GURPS Traveller)? What about world/setting updates that result in system reboots (the end of the Age of Darkness)? Do you buy them, run them, or use them for resources? Why or why not?
I don’t have a generic answer. I really liked the D&D 3.0 update. I didn’t much care about the D&D 3.5 update. Many of the Traveller updates sucked. The Hero 5th Edition update was great. The Vampire Revised update was quite good, for entirely different reasons. Etc.
I like it when an update is a chance to fix real rules problems or to tighten up the setting. Otherwise I don’t like them. Vampire Revised did a brilliant job at making the setting better without invalidating a lot of old play. Hero Fifth fixed several rules problems and vastly improved the presentation of the rules.
I look forward to World of Darkness 2.0, or whatever it’s officially called, because I think they will do a good rules revamp with the example of the Aeon Trinity system and because I think the new setting may rock. If the new setting doesn’t rock, I will probably not so much care about the rules revamps, though — my interest in WoD is primarily setting-driven.
Our mashup subject today comes to us care of Ginger, whose own gaming meme I have shamefully neglected. She put forth the divine M — not Bette Midler, but Madonna. You can use any incarnation, or you can use her ever-changing nature to concoct a rich gaming stew.
Don’t think too hard about that last metaphor.