One-Shot at History

As I type this, I find myself in the midst of preparations for a one-shot: a single session game to entertain our group of miscreants for a single evening while our current GM conjures up the next branch of our main campaign. I'll be running a pre-written scenario and I had to ask the question of whether or not the PCs would be built by the players or pre-made by myself. For the most part, the players will get to make their own barring one or two people new to the system I'm using. This leads me to yet another question: If I'm going to make a character for another player, do I need to hand him a background for that character? Or more importantly, if the scenario is pre-written and it's only one session, does the background material really matter?

GenCon 2013

Just got home from Gen Con, Indy: The Best Four Days in Gaming. Probably one of the biggest gatherings of gamers in the world. This was my third trip to this magnificent convention and, despite some tragedy, I really enjoyed myself. If you haven't yet had the opportunity, it's a tremendous place to experience an awful lot of things and the city itself is very welcoming for this particular event. 

Drop Dead Simple

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” 

― Leonardo da Vinci

I have within the last twenty four hours acquired and played Vanillaware's latest endeavor, Dragon's Crown. It's a side-scrolling beat-em-up very much inspired by Capcom's Dungeons and Dragons arcade games: Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara. At about five hours into it, I can say I'm having a blast! It's even got me thinking of campaigns and my next turn at GMing again.

The premise is rather simple. A group of adventurers goes from dungeon to dungeon in search of the mythical Dragon's Crown, aka: the McGuffin. Sounds like a basic campaign to me. The details of the plot and all related events are a thinly woven excuse to get you from scene to scene. Still sounds like a campaign to me. Go from dungeon to dungeon, killing things and taking their stuff. Alright, it's an extremely basic campaign. That can still be fun, right? Let's analyze it a bit.

Make It Stronger

Recently, my Saturday group ended up in a rather interesting scenario: our GM humored me in designing an encounter for him to run. I gave him the bare-bones concept and some points of interest and he filled in the blanks and turned it into a really good session. Being an artist who is his own worst critic, I've already started looking at how I could have improved it. I'm not saying that our GM did a bad job. In fact he did incredibly well. On the other hand, I'm more looking at how he or I might improve our skills for the next time.

I can't emphasize this enough here, this is not for bragging rights or to belittle anything. This is entirely for analytical purposes. I want to turn a good scenario into a great scenario, not to reduce what was done. In picking this thing apart, you might find something you may use for your own game.

Good Question

Saturday's campaign, using the HERO System, our GM asked a very interesting question: How do I make it scary when you can hit everything?

Let's add some context. We have the latest chapter of an ongoing campaign with a major horror theme attached to it. Basically, anime-themed supernatural cops versus eldritch abominations. Admittedly, I went a little overboard conceptually, and made a character that was a tad on the broken side in combat. It's ridiculously hard for her to miss a shot. I've been doing my best to try to balance things out, going so far as to create opportunities for the GM to mess with her and not using everything she has at her disposal. Barring that little oversight, though, it is a good question to ask. 

Feeling Adventurous?

You know what time it is. Come on and grab your friends! One of the things that drew me to tabletop gaming was the idea of building a character and having them go on wild and crazy adventures. In order to do that, I guess it might be a good idea to figure out what and adventure really is. That may seem like a duh-thing at the outset, but keep in mind that not everyone's idea of a good time is the same. To emphasize the point, when I was a kid I thought that running around the back yard with an old broom handle, 'slaying' dragonflies and defending a pillow fort was an adventure. Not that I wouldn't do that now (or haven't), but my definition of adventure has expanded over time.

Back then, adventure was a thing of going on quests, slaying dragons and rescuing distressed (distressing?) damsels. It still is in some regards, but sometimes it also includes car chases. Sometimes it's purely political and dialogue driven. Other times it's purely about retrieving fat lutes from Windex-drinking mages, or silver monkey statues from hidden temples. So what really goes into adventure? I don't know, but I'm about to speculate. Or regulate? I don't know that one either...

What's In A Name?

Sunday's Fantasy Craft game has reached it's first mile marker, and concluded it's first arc. Our group has decided to take a break so the GM can pen up the next one, and so we move on to a bout of Shadowrun. I'm probably the least savvy in sci-fi, and my experience with Shadowrun 4e is minimal at best. Needless to say, coming up with a character concept is going to take me a bit longer than usual. As I begin to pour over options and story ideas, one element that sticks in my mind is a very important one. One that many people, myself included, often have trouble with. The name. 

Considering that this is Shadowrun, we're also talking about an alias. A nom de geurre to protect the actual identity of the criminal I happen to be designing. As much trouble as some people have coming up with a decent name, this particular case calls for two. As much as this is going to cause me no end to headaches, I do consider this an opportunity. As much as a rose by any other name stills smells like flowery plant matter, names do have power. The idea is to tap into that power.