What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

Great tips from dysjunct. Just take a game people are already invested in and give the players some more say over what goes on.

I was worried so much about everyone working out the twist early, especially since everyone kept referring to the EXACT movies listed as references in the adventure text.

I'm also annoyed that there wasn't more discussion when the Tarot cards from the reading started turning up in the same order in other places. Sandi and I worked out a simple 5 card force so that the reading itself would look random.

Avery, Frank...how about spilling the beans on this little adventure? It's not like any of us are going to go back in time, fly to Atlanta, and play in this session.

Spit it out.

Fine:

SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The adventure is almost a bog-standard CoC investigative adventure designed as a one-shot with pregenerated characters. The players play a wealthy industrialist, his daughter, his bodyguard, a friend of the daughter, and two P.I.s who go down to Haiti to try and rescue his son who has been helping his father sell arms to the Haitian rebels.

The son was kidnapped by a cult and is changing into a freak that will be sacrificed to bring an avatar of Nyarlathotep to Haiti. The sacrifice is set for Fet Gede (November 2nd, the Feast of the Dead. A sort of Haitian Dia de Los Muertos.)

The players found the cult site, and were ripped apart by a giant monster guarding the cult site. The lone survivor was driving insane.

Here's the amazing part: All of the above happened before the adventure starts.

The players wake up in a military hospital in Haiti with no idea why they were even going to Haiti, suffering from periodic blackouts. The real problem is that all but one of them are dead, but are ghosts haunting the lone survivor in kind of a form of Multiple Personality Disorder.

THEY think that they are a team of investigators, but everyone else sees them as a lone man. This leads to a ton of weird encounters, and people staring at this guy having conversations with himself. The real trick here is leaning to use the word "you" when talking to characters a lot--taking advantage of the fact that we use the same word for singular and plural.

I think my favorite moment was when the "team" was trying to get backup support for the raid from the US Military (who had been investigating the arms dealer.) As the arms dealer was vehemently denying selling arms to the rebels, one of the other personalities slid a note across the table offering to testify about the deals. The ONI officer decided he was dealing with a madman and threw him out after the two began arguing.

The movies referenced were Memento (and in fact Steve began keeping a journal to help insure that the blackouts didn't screw him up.) Angel Heart (The voodoo theme helped a lot there) and The Sixth Sense (duh.) Early on, there were an awful lot of comments about the first two of those movies, and a few ponderings about them being some kind of walking dead.

The actual adventure mostly ended up with them retracing their steps--much confused by their screwed-up state of being, and with blackouts every time the party split up in order to resolve the internal time differences. The final trek to the cult site ended with them finding their own bodies, and working out the whole situation right as Steve was storming the cultist site....alone.

The odd bit was the ONI officer who was following them. One of the ghosts immediately tried to take control of his body. I rolled my eyes, and had him roll percentiles: 01. After a "you are fucking kidding me", I gave him control of the ONI officer. He distracted the monster (going insane) long enough to give Steve one shot at the Host, which would have at least stopped the summoning. Fail, insanity and death ensued in rapid succession.

The adventure was pretty much guaranteed a 100% death rate. (It helps when 5/6 of the characters are dead to start with.) It would have been possible to stop the summoning in a few ways. But really, that wasn't the important part of the adventure. Like I said, it was a bog-standard Cthulhu. Except for the opening and final twists.

It was terrifying to run, however. I was trying to re-envision the party's actions in something that made sense in the real framework and provide responses just odd enough but without giving everything away.

For those F:AT'ers coming next week. I am plowing away at a story that I think will be fun...

MARK 13!!!! HARDWARE!!! FUCK YEAH!!! You have no idea how much I love that movie!

Anyway, I got the D&D Red Box from WotC yesterday. It really looks fun! I like that there's no rulebook or manual per se. You open the Player's Book, make a mini-character, and play a solo adventure to learn the game. Then, the DM Book continues that adventure with a series of small encounters to teach the game to others.

It's a really, really smart product. It is very boardgamey, with an actual map, tokens, cards, and so forth so it doesn't have that "OMG where is the board" onus they used to have to explain away to mass-market consumers. It does look heavily tactical, which is much more interesting to me than talking like an Elf.

Components are a little cheap and there's no minis, but I think this thing retails for under $20.

I'm going to try to get the Hellfire Club boys playing. They've never played D&D, which I think is kind of fucked up.

Michael Barnes wrote:

Anyway, I got the D&D Red Box from WotC yesterday. It really looks fun!

I had no idea this product was available until I saw it on a shelf at Target. I did a double-take and almost bought the thing for nostalgia's sake. I resisted but after reading your thoughts on the game I may have to pick it up anyway.

Good luck and have fun, Michael.

Green Lantern wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote:

Anyway, I got the D&D Red Box from WotC yesterday. It really looks fun!

I had no idea this product was available until I saw it on a shelf at Target. I did a double-take and almost bought the thing for nostalgia's sake. I resisted but after reading your thoughts on the game I may have to pick it up anyway.

A heads up. The Red Box is on the shelf next to all the collectible card games near the front of your local Target. It is _not_ in the boardgame section. Though Settlers is.

Frank, that session sounds incredible. I'd hate to be the gm that has to run a session following yours...

Chapel, can't wait! Awesome.

I've been larping an overworked and underpaid slave to the man.

Chapel wrote:

For those F:AT'ers coming next week. I am plowing away at a story that I think will be fun...

You may have me sold on this with your invite alone. I'll have to discuss with the Mrs.

So last night I GMed Dogs In the Vineyardp for six people who have a varying amount of RPG experience in mostly a traditional mold. It was a mixed experience but mostly good.

The Game: DITV is one of those snooty indie RPGs where the rules are focused on the story instead of on accurately simulating how many times per second your dark elf ranger/assassin can impale someone. It is a fantasy version of early Mormon history: religious group springs up in pre-Civil War Eastern US, gets persecuted, escapes to a frontier territory to get out from under the thumb of The Man. The PCs are young true belivers, called to travel around the territory and make sure people are on the straight and narrow. The game is interesting because the mechanics are very focused on the intersection of:
(a) the NPCs' desires. E.g. Brother Jordan is cheating on his wife because his wife is withholding sex because she thinks he needs to make more money for their kids. Who is right?
(b) the PCs' authority. They speak for God, basically. So the NPCs looks to the PCs to solve dilemmas like the one in (a).
(c) the players' modern sensibilities. Because almost all players react negatively towards even in-game depictions of fundamentalism of any kind.

All this is to say that, essentially, DITV is the game of trying to goad PCs into shooting their moms in the face.

The Players; All over the map.
#1: Old school. Playing since the mid-70s, still DMs Arduin Grimoire every other week. Adaptedly surprisingly well and quickly, recognizing that the rules for driving conflict are story-focused and not task-focused like old-school D&D.
#2: Old school as well, also playing since the mid-70s; had trouble with the increased authority of narrative-style RPGs. Often seemed lost when asked to actively contribute to the story instead of just reacting to what the GM threw out.
#3: Young but old-school in approach. Utterly lost when asked to actively contribute.
#4: Old-school but enthusiastic about trying new things. Easily saw the fun and value of having his character fail horribly at things.
$5: Creative, mostly GMs. Instantly took to contributing via conflicts and driving towards interesting scenes.
$6: Like #5 except I don't think he GMs as much. Drove towards conflict, fun to bounce ideas off of.

The Experience:
Mostly positive. For the people who'd GMed before, it was a revelation, and I think that this was the key distinction. For people who have the GM itch -- i.e. you want to throw stuff out and have other people react to it -- then this game is awesome as a player, because that is what it gives you the opportunity to do. But if you are used to sitting back and barely participating, then this game will pass you by and leave you wondering what the deal is.

Players 5 and 6, apparently, talked until the wee hours about alternate hacks for the system and different ways it could be used to make great stories.

We're meeting next Saturday to continue the scenario. Hopefully someone's mom will get shot.

Last night, we had a session of Dark Heresy. I'm really enjoying the old school feel of the system, so asymmetric, so deadly, so fun. Nothing feels better than unloading a clip into a spawn of chaos only to roll 10 after 10 after 10.

innocence proves nothing.

We are dabbling in Shadowrun 4e. I'm kind of a Shadowrun fanboy because the old system while a bit bloated was very well done. I'm not a big fan of fantasy meets cyberpunk, but if you look at just the cyberpunk elements it was really on the mark.

4e is streamlined and while it is a bit more restrictive, the flow of combat is improved (or at least it will be once everyone gets up to speed on the rules.)

Steve"Gun Fu"Avery

Man, I cut my teeth on Shadowrun so that brings back memories. Keep us posted, Stephen. I would love to hear more of your 4e impressions.

I'm not a fan of what they did with Shadowrun 4e. For me the complexity was part of the charm - not just for complexity's sake but also because it often was in the service of making combat more tactically interesting. Bigger than that, though, I really don't like the direction they took world events.