My Dice Are Older Than You

Last Tuesday, I GMed a test run of my OwlCon Lucha Libre Hero round.  I got quite a bit out of it, all in all, both in terms of the story and the game system.

On the story front, it's mostly little tweaks.  I need to make the first scene more engaging for all the PCs and there's a fight in the middle that runs the risk o being irrelevant, but I've got some ideas on how to make that work.  Honestly, I was mainly concerned with playing out the combat encounters, and we only had three hours instead of the four I'll have at the con, so the story got short shrift anyway.

On the game system front, I'm making quite a few adjustments.  My original plan (which was, admittedly lazy) was to use some handy-dandy simplified write-ups of the heroic characters from the Lucha Libre Hero sourcebook.  The editor of the book had put some together for a convention and shared them online.  I figured that since this is a game for newbies as well as old hands, it was worth scaling down some aspects of the Hero System.

The problem was, I really didn't notice until two days before the game HOW much he'd scaled things down.  This is no criticism of his efforts, because it obviously worked for him, but some of the things he did were going to take this too far outside the scope of the game.  I made some quickly eyeballed fixes and, while I largely got them right, there were some glaring omissions.

The second problem I found was that this is billed as a Hero System 6th Edition game.  But LLH was one of the last 5th Edition Hero products out the door and while the editions are probably 90% compatible, that remaining 10% is different enough that any holdovers are all the more glaring.

So, I'm in the process of completely converting the sourcebook characters to Hero 6th.  Thankfully, I've got a copy of Hero Designer to do the heavy lifting.  In doing so, I have to seriously read over all of the character write-ups and I'm seeing places where the shortcut character really just doesn't cut it.  Which brings me to the biggest post-playtest revision I'm implementing:  I'm not going to simplify things so much.

My biggest concern going in on Tuesday was whether I could run a combat-heavy game in the allotted time-frame.  This proved to be a non-issue, even with two players who'd never played the Hero System before.  While I may be a little out of practice running the game (having not done so since last spring), I've been doing it a hell of a long time and I'm good at keeping things moving.  As a result, I'm going to give the players more complete (read traditional) character sheets, I'm not going to give all the characters the same Speed, and I'm going to count on my players to pick up the basics if they aren't familiar with it from the outset.  I still won't worry about Body Damage or Knockback, and I'm still not going to use a map, but everything else will be as by-the-book 6e as I can make it.

Also, that fight in Scene three will be more meaningful and midget-filled.

Of amusing mediocrity and failure.  Because those can be just as entertaining as tales of triumphal daring exploits.  I'll start!

A friend of mine ran a pulp one-shot.  The premise was that all the PCs were members of a traveling air circus working in Central America.  We were forced down by sky pirates and subjected to the whims of a crew of bad guys who'd adopted an Incans Reborn sort of theme, wearing the costumes and working out of the local pyramid, you know the drill.

Anyway, there we were.  After suffering many depredation in Durance Vile, we were dragged in chains before their almighty chief.  The GM described him sitting resplendent in a feathered cloak, upon a throne of gold and jade.

My PC (the group's weisenheimer), couldn't let the moment pass.  I said something snide.

The GM put on a gloriously affronted face, drew himself up (he was a big guy) pointed at me and said...

"HUSH!

You...

fellows..." he trailed off pathetically.

After we stopped laughing, we retconned the moment so that he actually said, "Silence, Dog!" but his moment to be impressive was lost forever, and "Hush, you fellows" became our rallying cry for those unintentional moments of fail.

Yesterday, I picked up the print edition of Barbarians of Lemuria (link goes to the cheaper PDF).  It's a tight little game that's specifically designed for running Sword & Sorcery adventures.  I'm still reading through it, but I'm very impressed with what I've found so far.  It looks like you can easily put together a character in under fifteen minutes, without falling victim to cookie-cutter syndrome.  The system uses only four stats and four combat ratings.  All other skills are rather ingeniously handled by "Careers," broad areas of experience with applicability to be determined by the GM.  Boons and Flaws based on a character's homeland further flesh out the abilities.

While the game is written for the S&S genre, with Careers, Boons, and Flaws appropriate to such a setting, re-skinning the game for another genre would be simplicity itself.  I understand there's an officially published post-apocalypse setting and I know of a publisher working on a 17th century France setting as well.  I definitely want to try it out sometime, probably with the Tuesday Night crew, once we get past OwlCon.

"Those who are wise in matters of the Demon Planes may claim that they know the natures of those who dwell therein; yet when one consults The Book of Presences, The Scroll of Bringing Forth the Unnameable, or indeed any of the other writings of the masters of the past, one is struck by the many and diverse descriptions of the Demon Prince of the land of Qélem, great Lord Rü'ütlánesh. It is known that this mighty Prince rules the Southwest Quadrant of the Demon Planes, that he [the manuscript uses the Engsvanyáli pronoun for "he" throughout, yet adds both the determinative ideographs for "female" and for "neuter" --?], that he comes forth in reply to those who summon him with appropriate litanies and sacrifices, and that he gives many boons, though of perverse sorts. Yet no one can speak with authority of his form, nor can one say what is this Demon's true nature. The rune by which this Prince is known includes elements of sensuality and alliance with the principles of the Emerald Ladies [probably the Goddess Dlamélish and her Cohort, Lady Hriháyal], although devotees of other Deities (including some of the more daring of the priests of the Lords of Stability) may call upon him.

-- From possibly the greatest pure-fluff RPG sourcebook of all time.

I'm still alive, but this writing a novel thing has completely taken over my thought processes and imagination.  As a result, I'm barely even thinking about gaming at the moment.  It's oddly liberating.

Today was the second go-round of Kids and Dads playing D&D.  Overall, it went well.  I ran two encounters with some investigation/roleplay in between and left them on a mild cliffhanger.

By far, the best moment came from Andy's son E.  He is eleven, extremely enthusiastic, and already has his father's knack for absorbing and retaining information.  In the first session, his father had to caution him about broadcasting his memorized information about monster stats.  Which brings us to today's choice exchange.

Andy:  You pretty much need to roll at least a 10 to hit all the time.

E:  Well, actually, a camel only has a Willpower of 9.

The look on Andy's face was utterly glorious.

(First off, a disclaimer:  No game is truly dead unless no one plays it.  That having been said, when a title is long out of print, the license has lapsed, and even the old mailing list archives are lost to the aether, it's a pretty near thing.)

Lately, I've been delving into my stack of superhero games.  I'm still only about 100 pages into Hero 6th, but my overall familiarity with the system is bogging me down.  It's a problem I have when I'm reading rules that cover ground I've trod many times before: I start glossing over because it's all so familiar.  Mutants & Masterminds keeps trying to convince me to take another serious crack at it.  The rules-light games like Truth & Justice and Supergang cry out for actual play.  Heck, the other night, I got my Marvel Universe RPG books out of the garage, because I realized I'd never really given them an honest read-through.

But the game I spent the most time looking at this weekend was Mayfair's DC Heroes.  In doing so, I'm struck by two things:  First, how slick the system is.  Yes, it's table-based and granularity is definitely not its strong suit, but it does what it does and it does it well.  The second, is how frustrating it is to read across the editions.

The first edition of the game (1985) had all sorts of problems, mostly in the gadget rules, but also in that the game was written prior to DC Comics' massive "Crisis on Infinite Earths" reboot, which altered the power scale in the DCU quite substantially.  But mostly, it was the gadget rules.  They sucked.  Still, the first edition box was so chock full of goodies (beautiful maps of the Titans tower, character stand-ups, tons of character write-ups), that it's easy to overlook this just for the cool stuff value.  Besides, most of my frustrations have to do with the second and third editions of the game.

The second edition (1989) was magnificently put together.  It came in a larger/heavier box than the first edition, with three books (Rules, Character Creation, and Background/Roster) and tons of cards with character write-ups on them.  I think the game included stats on something like 200 characters all in all.  There was also a neat and cheesy calculator wheel to use for quickly handling task resolution.  I'm pretty sure today we'd just knock out an Excel macro, but it's fun to play with.

The second edition also made significant changes to character creation and completely revamped the gadgets rules.  But best of all, it presented the information in a clear and clean fashion.  The rules are simple, and the elaborations make sense.  It's a little light on complete examples, and there's an alarming late 80s use of he/she instead of a less clumsy personal pronoun, but the overall writing style and organization is wonderfully clear while conveying enthusiasm for the game.  Quite simply, it makes me want to play this game.

Then there's the third edition (1993), which is, in my opinion, rather a bit of let-down.  The changes it incorporates from second edition are quite small, largely incorporating material from second edition supplements and altering a few other bits here and there.  The summary of changes I found on the internet doesn't even fill two complete pages.  This is all well and good.  My issue with the book (and it's just a book, not a boxed set like before), is how poorly it is organized and how stingy it is with supplemental information.  To me, the bigger issue is the first.  Rather than following the very efficient model of second edition, it's like the editors of the third simply pulled out the individual chapters and slapped them together at random.  Why else would you get the rather involved and lengthy character creation section before the rules?  Granted, there is a decent ten page introductory chapter right at the beginning, but this is followed by 65 pages of character creation rules.  It just seems like a very unfriendly way to organize the product.

As to stinginess, that's largely in terms of character write-ups.  Unlike the earlier versions of the game that spilled the beans on hundreds of published characters, third edition gave us twenty nine.  And four of those were the alternate Supermen from "The Death of Superman" storyline.  And only four such characters were female (Wonder Woman, Starfire, Blackfire, and Catwoman).  When you consider a DC Heroes character can be written up in the space of a playing card, it's a terribly paltry selection.

I wasn't as involved in internet doings when DCH 3e came out, so I don't know how it was received by the fans.  I remember looking at it and feeling like the fun had been stripped out of the game in some intangible way.  Reading over it now, I still can't quite put my finger on it and it may just be that my feelings about comics in general were pretty much at an all-time low during that period and it wouldn't be until '96 or so that I started getting my old enthusiasm back.

Which leads to the biggest frustration of dead games: the loss of resources.  Even a bit of cursory searching shows there was once a flourishing online fanbase for this game.  But where vast depositories of character write-ups and rules clarifications once dwelt, there is only 404 errors.  'Tis a cruel fate for such a noble system.

(And don't get me started on the ignominy of "Blood of Heroes."  The less said of that abomination, the better.)

But this is more about the joys of rediscovering this old gem of a game.  I only remember playing DCH a handful of times, but I bought the supplements religiously because they shed so much light on the DC Universe.  I'm sorely tempted to slight all the other games in my library to give it a shot, maybe creating my own fourth season of "Justice League Unlimited" or something.  I think the game would handle the animated DCU quite well.

Now, how to go about selling it to my player base?

While it does a few things I'm occasionally dubious about, the one place where I can't throw a single stone is in the area of game prep.  Between my handy copy of Dungeon Delve, Dungeon Tiles, and Adventure Tools from DDI, it took me less than an hour to prepare all the encounters for Saturday's game.

I also bought the Fiery Dragon Counter Collection, which had counters for everything I'm throwing at the kids this weekend.

At this point, I'm just about ready to go.  I've got a little bit of mission briefing to write up, but that's it.

All in all, the game went pretty well, especially when you consider I'd not played Cinematic Unisystem in three or four years and I'd never actually run it.  Of course, I've been playing with this crew for a couple of years now and we generally get along at the table, so I wasn't sweating rules issues overmuch.  Still, I'm happy with the way things came together and will happily run it again, should the opportunity arise.

One interesting thing I noticed as the game progressed was how much shorter my game notes got from week to week.  While I think some of that was due to familiarity with the PCs and the way the players approached them, I think a lot of it was also just a general loosening up my improv skills from week to week.  The beauty of Cinematic Unisystem is that you can get away with fairly low prep GMing and I took full advantage of that fact.

The one place where I felt I fell a bit flat was in gauging appropriate levels of opposition in combat encounters.  I generally just ran with canned critters, but it was sometimes hard to tell what was too much or too little for them to face.  Which is, I suppose, a trade-off for a low prep sort of game.

Anyway, I'm now beginning my work in earnest on the D&D With Kids game, mostly making sure I've got the visual tools to make it interesting and fun.  I've also got a 12-pack of Jones Soda's D&D flavors to share with the table.

It's still months away (February 19-21), but it's already grabbing my creative attention.  For the uninitiated, OwlCon is Rice University's annual gaming convention.  It's also my annual chance to break out an GM different games for (usually) a bunch of strangers and have a grand old time doing it.  Also, also, if you GM at least two session, you get in for free and get a t-shirt.  Bonus.

For the past two years, my mainstay has been "Heroes of the New Wave," a "Neo-Pulp 80s" game that takes the rock-star scientist vibe of "Buckaroo Banzai" and mashes it up with every Duran Duran video ever made.  The first session had our heroes square off against the Terrible Mr. Tolhurst.  Last year, they learned that "Nobody Walks In LA."  This year's adventure is called "Save a Prayer," and honestly, that's all I've got at the moment.  This is pretty much par for the course, but I know I'll have it figured out by the time the con rolls around.  The one thing I'm looking to change this year is the game system.  In the past, I've run it with a slightly modified version of Feng Shui, but this year I'm leaning towards either the Ubiquity System from Hollow Earth Expedition or Cinematic Unisystem, as seen in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel RPGs.  Either one would run great.  I'm leaning towards the former simply because the game is still being supported and the HEX folks were really nice to me at Gen Con.

The other game is more certain.  It will be Lucha Libre Hero, "Los Miraculos Contra La Hija de Franquestein," a title I'm happily swiping from one of the guys on the Hero Games Boards.  LLH is possibly the greatest single supplement for The HERO System's fifth edition.  It is gleefully, gloriously psychotronic, a labor of love that grabs the reader, puts him in a headlock, tosses him with an El Hurracan to the mat, pins him and demands to be played.

I don't even particularly care for professional wrestling and I'm still compelled to run it.

I may try to run a third as yet to be determined game.  Even though I only have to run two and that seriously cuts into my ability to actually play anything, I've found that I really prefer GMing to playing, even if it does completely wear me out.

As always, if any out-of-towners want to come to Houston for the con, we've got lots of crash space