November 24, 2006
Kid Stuff Redux
My playtest review of The Princes' Kingdom is up on RPG.Net as of this morning. I give it a 4/4 in RPG.Net's somewhat sketchy ranking system. No one will be able to deny the review's . . . length.
UPDATE: Some fellow named Sergio hates the version of my review written by the demons in his head.
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February 12, 2006
The Court of the Empress: Playtest Report
Last night we were missing one of Nine Worlds players, so we playtested The Court of the Empress.
Short version: The sucker works, pretty much exactly the way I hoped it would.
Longer version:
We ran the game three times, with three different players playing the Empress. Each game ran for three rounds, with three (one time, four) players playing courtiers.
At the start of the session, I wrote all of the key phrases on a blackboard, so that we could easily have them all in one place. This was Alex's idea, and it was very good.
The first time through, I played the Empress, and the other three players played the courtiers. We were feeling our way a little, and I deliberately limited myself to one death per cycle (the minimum pace) to ensure that I could hit all of the mechanical bits. Laura joined for the last round of my my turn playing the Empress. I asked the players what their favorite play was, and Alex managed a fantastic save against Laura after she totally proved he was unfit to live -- he pointed out that her condemnation of him revealed a familiarity with a banned play (which had gotten Nick's courtier killed).
The second run was with Alex. He has a tendency to undercut himself in conversation, so he had to stretch himself a bit in order to be properly imperious and demanding. And he did get better as we played more rounds. He was also responsible for my funniest death; I played a strongman visiting the court, and I tried to impress him by lifting men on my shoulders. He ordered imperial guardsmen leap onto my back until I couldn't bear any more weight, and then had me killed for lying when I boasted I could bear the whole court on my shoulders. My gasping, gurgling death was a hit.
There was another neat round when Alex started executing courtiers for saying inadvertently sexist things. Laura then picked up on it, and they had a wonderful back-and-forth before Alex had her PC executed too. I was very happy to see that come up, because I made the Empress female and the courtiers male on purpose. Basically, the setting evokes a decadent, antique past, and that makes it really easy and tempting for your narration -- which has to fit that flavor -- to fall into using sexist tropes. That is likely to piss off the Empress, who then kills your character. So the courtier players are put just a little more off-balance.
Alex thought that he thought that the point total for a successful favor might be a bit too high. I don't know if I agree, but there's surely no harm in knocking the reward down to 4.
On the last run, Laura ran. She was a wicked awesome Empress; she was heartless, fickle and unpredictable, and gleefully killed off her courtiers -- her first act was to kill us all on the first round, just to let us know she meant business. At the same time, she still showed off enough consistency that you were sure that if you hit just the right mix of mature self-respect and sycophantic flattery you could live. I died immediately in the first round, lasted a second cycle into the second ("that makes sense, but I just don't like you!"), and just barely won the third -- in the last one, she demanded that I convince her why she shouldn't reward me in order to receive a reward, which is just a wonderfully cruel demand. I was successful, so she decided that I receive nothing!
Nick also had a hilarious run as the representative of the island nation of Canada, which he reported had been defeated by the Imperial Armada in under two minutes of battle. He had all of the players cracking up, including both Canadians at the table.
Each a round of play tended to take somewhere between five and fifteen minutes of play, with 3 or 4 players. Laura observed that the rounds took longer each time through each time, because the players got noticeably better at figuring out what kinds of sycophantic flattery worked.
We did have a rules mix-up in the last round of play. Laura couldn't decide whether to kill my character or Alex's, and had us compete. She had forgotten she could kill us both, and the competition between Alex and me meant that Nick didn't get to talk as much. Moral: turn taking works, and messing with it can sideline a player for too long. Another thing I liked was the rule against table talk during a round. This had two big benefits. First, the rounds went by much more quickly, and second, the fact that one person had the stage at a time meant that they could go further without interruption, which meant that they were usually much funnier.
The whole thing -- 3 Empresses running 3 rounds each -- took two and a half hours, with around 90 minutes spent actually in the round structure. The rest of it was spent in table talk and general social chatg works, and messing with it can sideline a player for too long. Another thing I liked was the rule against table talk during a round. This had two big benefits. First, the rounds went by much more quickly, and second, the fact that one person had the stage at a time meant that they could go further without interruption, which meant that they were usually much funnier.
The whole thing -- 3 Empresses running 3 rounds each -- took two and a half hours, with around 90 minutes spent actually in the round structure. The rest of it was spent in table talk and general social chat.
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February 03, 2005
Comedy is Easy, PTA is Hard
As some of you know, I’m running a game of Primetime Adventures called Dungeon Majesty. We’re three “episodes” (game sessions) in to what will be a six episode “season,” and we’ll be playing again next week. So I’m doing some thinking about what has been, from my point of view, a terrific and funny and interesting game.
PTA is the much-talked about, much-praised game where you create an episodic television series. The premise of our particular game, which I think I’ve made a point of not committing to print or screen before this very moment, is that some amalgam of the hip “new school” screenwriters and directors—people like Paul Thomas Anderson (note his initials!), Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, David O. Russell—produced a six episode TV series about an oddly mixed group of unhappy people who come together every week to play a classic dungeon-crawly role-playing game called Dungeon Majesty. So it’s a real game about a fake TV series about a fake game, named after a real TV series about a different real game. Still with me?
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December 05, 2004
Wuthering Heights Roleplay
Last Monday, we were missing one of the players for my Revenge of the Jedi Star Wars game, and so I printed out a copy of Phillip Tromeur's Wuthering Heights Roleplay, printed out a list of Victorian names from Christopher Pound's name generator page and we started to play.
We had one heck of a lot of fun.
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October 02, 2004
The Engle Matrix Game: Playtest
Three weeks ago, I ran an Engle Matrix game, and I just finished my review, which you can read by clicking on the continuation link below. The bottom line is that this is a cool little game and you should definitely buy it.
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September 09, 2004
Nine Worlds?
Hey, has anyone been playing Matt Snyder's Nine Worlds? I haven't picked it up mainly because I just finished a Nobilis game and am sated on the cosmic-power-and-myth thematics, but one day my appetite for that will return, and I want to have an informed opinion about it in preparation for that day. If you've played or read it, please post your thoughts in the comments section!
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April 24, 2004
Review: Wyrd Is Bond
Tom and I had a pretty good time during our brief Wyrd is Bond test-run today, and then I went out to bask in the beautiful spring day and wrote up a review. It goes a little like this.
Either the concept of street-level rap singers and graffiti artists using magic as readily as they use turntables and spray paint turns you on or it doesn't. Wyrd is Bond is exceedingly high concept, and it gets the concept right. The setting is evocative and convincing, but the mechanics could have used some polish.
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April 12, 2004
Where Dungeons and Dragons Fail Video Games
Today's editorial on kuro5hin is How Dungeons and Dragons Fails Video Games. While it's very much on the computer side of the topic and much too short for my tastes, it's still a nifty read.
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February 17, 2004
Review: Office Publisher 2003 + PDFCreator
I paid the right price for this software: free. I did not steal it; Microsoft sent it to me along with the rest of Office 2003 as a promotion. I was surprised to see it suddenly appear on my machine. And who doesn't like free stuff as long as it's not malware?
Theoretically, I would install Publisher, use it, and then tell my friends how great it is. So here I am, fulfilling my duty.
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February 13, 2004
Review: Dead Inside
Dead Inside
Atomic Sock Monkey Press
128 pages; $13.95 (PDF) / $25.00 (print)
Written by Chad Underkoffler; art by Chris Cooper
You've lost your soul. You want it back. That's the premise in a nutshell. How'd you lose it? That's up to the players and the GM. How do you get it back? Probably by doing good deeds, resisting your Vice, and paying attention to your Virtue -- but there's some flexibility there as well.
In 128 pages, you get the following things: a solid cosmology, a simple robust system, some cool powers, a nifty world, a good set of mechanics for moral consequences, and an adventure which could easily be a complete campaign. In fact, it's really a campaign in a box, which is a great concept. A lot of roleplaying books are toolkits designed to provide the GM with tools to make a campaign. Dead Inside, like My Life With Master or the Savage Worlds campaign books, is more of a game than a toolkit. The GM has a lot of flexibility -- it's by no means a straight-jacket -- but if you want to just run a quick pickup game, or possibly a quick pickup campaign, you're getting exactly the tools you need.
I ran one session of the game, using a PDF copy, from which I draw the impressions that follow. (Full disclosure: I talked Chad into giving me a free copy in exchange for a review here. Same deal's available to other smart self-promoters, of course.) This review overlaps and hopefully complements Rob's review.
