Highmoon's Ponderings

While I haven’t been blessed with children yet, I have been given four wonderful nephews, the oldest of which just turned 12 years old. I have been waiting for this day for quite a while now, and with the blowing of the candles (so to speak) the time has arrived for me to play a part of being the most awesome uncle that I have been preparing for all my life: with the arrival of his 12th birthday, I am now introducing my nephew to tabletop roleplaying games.

Why now? I think it’s just the simple fact that it was when I was 12 that I was introduced to roleplaying games during the 7th grade; I was able to grasp the concepts of the game perfectly well by that point, so I can reasonable assume that my nephew, who I believe to be smarter at his age than I was at that time, will do so as well. He’s grown playing videogames that emulate and in some cases are influenced/descended from D&D, so I think that by now he’ll be able to put all those strands together into one thread and see how it all comes together. Lastly, that’s the recommended age on the box and hey, why not trust it?

After making the decision that it was time to begin the indoctrination, I went to Amazon.com and ordered him the new D&D Starter Set aka. the new Red Box. Why did I choose this boxed set above any other introductory product, especially considering how I’ve gone gaga over the Dragon Age RPG? Surprisingly (even to myself, I discovered), I went through a whole thought process to reach this decision.

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I did it last year, so hey, let’s make it a tradition, shall we? First a look back at gaming in 2010, then gaming resolutions for 2011.

2010 Gaming Moments

With my going back to university this year, gaming took a backseat role in my life (that is, beyond what little gaming I was already doing to begin with). At the start of the year I finished the Lady Blackbird game I had been playing online via Skype (and I’m cheating here since this was included in my 2009 Gaming Moments recap). Then, there was nothing up until Gen Con in August, where I got to play Colonial Gothic and run a game of ICONS, as well as play a fair number of boardgames. After that? Fast forward to late December when I got to play a couple of games of Dragon Age and D&D 4th Edition.

So how did I do on my 2010 Gamer Resolutions?

• Play D&D 4e – Done! With just a couple days left in 2010, but done.
• Play any of the following games: Burning Wheel, Dogs in the Vineyard, Don’t Rest Your Head, Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, Colonial Gothic, Ribbon Drive, Savage Worlds – Done. I did say “any” and I got to play Colonial Gothic at Gen Con.
• Run a game for my wife – Fail. This just didn’t happen.
• Play with people face-to-face/find a gaming group – Fail. I got to play face-to-face with people but not forming a group of my own.
• Go to Gen Con – Done.
  • Corollary: Game with my Skype group in person and/or continue playing the Star Wars Primetime Adventures game from 2007-08 – Fail. Of the people involved in these groups, I was the only one at Gen Con.
• Work on Ierne – Fail/Done. I didn’t work on Ierne, but I did work on a new game for part of the year.
• Not feel guilty when I game - Work In Progress.

2011 Gamer Resolutions

I’ll shorten the list even more than last year to have an even better chance at accomplishing all.

• Play at least once a month - I know this one’s going to be hard to do because of classes, but I’ll include it to spur me to try. Face-to-face, online, one-shot, whatever.
• Go to Gen Con - I don’t assume making it to Gen Con is a given, so it gets included here so I can strive for it. Hopefully my friends will also make it as well.
• Run a game for my wife - I’m carrying this one over from last year. Hopefully we’ll be in a situation at some point where we can make this happen.
• Write/design game material - Be it Ierne, a new game that I’ve got in mind, gaming-related posts in my own blog, or keeping up the Dragon Age Oracle, I want to make sure I write game stuff during the year regularly, if only to carry me during the lulls in play.
• Not feel guilty when I game - Just like last year, this is a work in progress.

Five resolutions, and fairly general at that, so I have a good chance at achieving them.

Game on, 2011!

After trying for almost a week to find a time when we could get together online to play something, Tuesday night we finally managed to do it. Four of us jumped on Skype and ended up playing a short game of Fiasco: a roleplaying game of powerful ambitions and poor impulse control (aka The Coen Brothers RPG, as it has been described sometimes). The game has received some stellar reviews and great word-of-mouth recommendations, so it’s one I’ve been wanting to try out. That it can play out entirely in a couple of hours also made it very attractive to our rag-tag band of busy online gamers. At some point during the last year I learned of a Fiasco playset (think of it as a setting sketch) called Gen Con: The Worst Four Days in Gaming, and that’s the one I proposed we play.

We did . It was awesome. It went a bit slow, since of the four players, two of us had not played Fiasco (Rob and myself) and two had (Rich and JJ). We decided to roll our own characters and connections instead of using the suggested ones provided in the playset. The almost-45-minutes we spent doing this felt like its own little game-within-a-game and we laughed as much as we did once we actually started playing. We played two rounds of scenes. Each player, on their turn, gets to either frame the scene and let the other players choose the outcome, or lets the other players set the scene and he chooses the outcome. We had a good mix of the two options, which created some funny moments. Whoever chooses an outcome for the scene, picks either a white die (things turn out well) or a black die (things turn out poorly) from a dice pool rolled at the start of play. When we finished, there was only one white die on the table, the rest having been chosen to be poor resolutions to the scenes in question, all simply because poor resolutions make for funny moments and problems for the characters. And really, that’s what this is all about, making the characters’ lives hell for our amusement.

The Gen Con playset turns out some bizarre situations that oddly enough feel like they’d be right at home in the real Gen Con! I think it captures the weirdness of Gen Con well, while adding the slapstick crime element to the mix in a perfect fashion. Seriously, you’ve probably never thought of Gen Con this way, but it isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibilities that some of the stories that can emerge from this playset could really happen during the best four days in gaming. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse, to be honest.

I could write a recap of the events that transpired but that’d be like telling you about my character and our adventure: it’s only interesting if you were there. I can, however, offer you a glimpse of the madness that went on.

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It’s been months since my last entry in this series, since the last time I dedicated serious mental space to the topic of vampires and to the game that began to emerge from these ruminations. I am here to put the proverbial nail in the coffin, or more appropriate, the stake in the undead heart. Sunrise has come; this series is now over.

When I started what would eventually turn into the Rebuilding Vampire series, I was simply gushing enthusiastically about a game that still holds a special place in my heart, Vampire: The Masquerade. From there, I went on to deconstruct certain elements of the vampire myth that I felt VtM was underserving and found myself designing the beginning of a new game, one centered on the issues of the vampire’s story that I found most appealing, namely: the struggle with the beast within, the certainty of the fall into the abyss, and the struggle of how to best live during the inevitable fall. I can tell you that those are still items that are of essential interest to me and to my enjoyment of the vampire myth.

The problem, as it were, lies in what this developing game latched onto within me as I worked on it. In 2009 I lost my mother to cancer, and it affected me in ways which I refused to acknowledge, even as they drove me down into a deep dark pit and affected every other relationship in my life. Working on the vampire game, this game that I eventually came to call When The Fall, became a way to tap into that darkness within towards some productive goal. It worked, it focused the pain I felt and helped it move out of me, but at a great mental and spiritual cost at times. If use the word drained please don’t think it’s merely a clever pun.

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It was one of my Gaming Resolutions for 2010 and I am getting to it with just a couple days to spare, but finally it is done. I am talking about playing Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, which I finally got to do last night thanks to Wizards’ D&D Encounters program.

I went down to one of our local game store, Sunshine Adventure Gaming, where I knew the Encounters program was running. There was only one table of Encounters running and they had space for this new player. I used a pre-generated character one of the guys had, a level 2 Dragonborn Cleric named Suntor Robe. I’ve never played a cleric and of the new 4e races, the Dragonborn always called my attention, so it was certainly a night of firsts all around. Dice in hand, Coke at my side, we set off to play the storyarc of The Keep on the Borderlands.

There were three players in addition to myself, including a father and his 7-year-old son; it was just awesome seeing this kid playing alongside the grown-ups and getting right into the game with the aid of his father. Makes me very happy and hopeful for the future of our hobby. The party consisted of my cleric, a knight, a rogue and a ranger; not a bad mix at all. During tonight’s encounter we explored a cave behind a waterfall, battled some pesky little kobolds, investigated what seemed to be some sort of temple, then faced off against more kobolds alongside another dragonborn and a wyrmling dragon. After the second fight, we stopped for the night, the whole thing taking up about 2 1/2 hours, give or take.

So, what did I think of it?

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Since playing Dragon Age last week, I’ve been wanting to do it more, but my GM, Enrique, is out of town for the holidays. I was sitting at home, very bored, on Saturday night, eating Chinese food (National Jews Eat Chinese Food Day) when I decided to run an impromptu game of Dragon Age online. I got a few takers but having never hosted an online virtual tabletop, I eventually decided to move it to Sunday night. Sunday during the day I sent out invites to a few people who had expressed an interest, and managed to get four players. At 11 PM EST (and with players literally all across the US), we got on Skype to play The Dalish Curse, the introductory adventure included in the Dragon Age Game Master’s Guide (no spoilers below).

As I mentioned, I have never hosted a game via an online virtual tabletop (VTT); I have played in games that have used MapTool, but someone else has done all the heavy lifting and I simply connected and played. I spent a good chunk of Sunday downloading both MapTool and Gametable, and fiddling with all their infinite nifty features — and there are a ton of them, nifties that would’ve made the game very attractive visually — but eventually realized that I’d been wasting hours trying to set up something that was way more complicated than what I needed it to be for a one-shot game. So eventually I scrapped the VTT idea and decided to use good ole Skype coupled with Google Docs for maps and info reference. I pulled the maps from the PDF copy of the GM’s Guide I have, pasted them onto individual Google Docs, and put together a Stunts reference sheet for the players, then shared the folder with everyone. For dice , we used an online dice rolled found at Catch Your Hare, which is especially neat as it displays the dice results graphically and by die, as opposed to the sum of all dice rolled. Each player picks a color for their dice, and I ruled that the middle die is always the Dragon Die, making it easy to see how many Stunt Points were generated on a roll of doubles. Easy peasy.

My four players were Tamara Deeny, Thomas Deeny, Ryan Macklin and Brennen Reece, and all four signed up for the game via my post on Twitter. We used When Is Good? to figure out a time when we could all play, and jumped on Skype at the appointed time for some dark fantasy adventuring. To save time, I had the players choose from the pre-generated characters available on the Dragon Age RPG website. The party consisted of Masarian, a Dalish Elf apostate mage (Ryan); Ackley, a Ferelden Freeman rogue (Thomas); Kedwalla, a Surface Dwarf warrior (Tamara); and Shinasha, a City Elf rogue (Brennen). We played using the rules in Set 1, though I added the Exploration and Roleplaying Stunts available on the Set 2 Playtest document so we could take them out for a spin.

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