Okay, I'll admit, that's a pretty obscure title for a post, but I really couldn't help it. Allow me to explain.
I've been watching a lot of Bones recently, and that song was mentioned in one of the episodes I saw a few days ago.
But, more importantly, for anyone unfamiliar with Chumbawumba's anthemic piece, it features the phenomenal line "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down".
Alright, why is this relevant to anything at all?
Well, I mentioned a few days ago that my Wednesday night RP group may be getting an extra player this week... and it looks like it is.
Alright, so what's so special about that?
Time for me to tell you all a little tale. Some of you may have heard this already, but please bear with me.
For the last 22 years, I've been friends with a great guy named Adam. He's pretty much the nicest person I've ever met... no, scratch that, he IS the nicest person I've ever met. He qualifies quite easily up there as one of the best friends I've ever had. He and another of my friends, Jim, were the Best Men at my wedding. The two of them come as a package deal.
On June 17 2007, very early in the morning, Adam was attacked on the driveway of his parent's home, where he lived. Not to put too fine a point on it, the attack was cowardly and vicious, and a clear attempt to murder Adam. I won't go into the details of why.
Adam suffered massive physical trauma, including severe cranial damage - a HUGE chunk of his skull was shattered. To get an idea, take your left hand and place it on the left side of the top of your head, with the heel of your hand on your hair line. The area covered by your hand (including your fingers), is what was destroyed.
It is only thanks to the quick action of the paramedics and the sterling work of the Neuro-trauma ward at the John Radcliffe in Oxford that saved his life. He was comatose for weeks, and has still not fully recovered.
Physically, at least.
Recently (at the end of February), Adam finally got his skull-plate installed. He just spent 18 months with only a partial skull, and now he has a titanium plate.
"Why, oh why is this relevant, Chem?", I hear you cry. Simple. The returning player is Adam. For the first time since the attack, he's coming back to roleplaying, and he's coming over tonight, too.
He got knocked down, but he got up again.
Tuesday 31 March 2009
Monday 30 March 2009
Make a grapple check!
Okay, I just completed my weekly catch-up with http://www.darthsanddroids.net/ and I couldn't help but be prompted by the notes-text in this issue: http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0233.html
Any GM in the world, ever, will recognise this sheer terror. For some reason grappling rules are horrendously complex (though, interestingly, they're not too bad in Rolemaster... but the complexity of that entire system means that they're ridiculously difficult, anyway).
As a GM, I actually wince whenever one of my players declares an action that will initiate the grappling rules. Out comes the relevant rulebook, and I follow the process, step-by-step.
Here's why, using the D&D 3.5E version of the grappling rules (which, bear in mind, are simplified):
1) Declare an action that will use the grappling rules.
2) Laugh at the GM as he effortlessly flips to the right page, cursing.
3) The target may make a free attack (the dreaded Attack of Opportunity) which, if successful, prevents the grapple attempt.
4) Snigger when the Attack of Opportunity misses.
5) Make a melee touch attack on the target to grab.
6) Crow victoriously as you effortlessly succeed at the easiest attack roll you have ever made.
7) Make an opposed grapple check, using a bonus that is never ever, ever used elsewhere in the game.
8) Grin at the GM because you made the grapple check and are now grappling.
9) Use any further itterative attacks your character may have to perform a series of bizzare and frustrating manoeuvres against an effectively helpless victim, preventing him from retaliating or performing any action other than attempting to free himself.
10) Repeat steps 7 through 9 until the victim breaks free or is knocked out.
Why? For the love of humanity, why does it have to be so complex? For a game that specifically states that the combat system is abstracted, why does the act of grabbing someone else on the battlefield have to be so damn confusing? For that matter, why are the rules utterly silent on the question "is he still grabbed if I fail that first grapple check?" How the hell should I know?! Even allowing for the seemingly unnecesary "Grapple Bonus", why could it not be "Declare action, Attack of Opportunity, Opposed Grapple Check"? That cuts at least 50% of the complexity from the rules.
It should be simple, like the rest of combat. The simpler it is, the more viable it becomes as an option in a fight. The more viable it is, the more likely it is to be used.
The only reason I can conceive of for the horrendous mish-mash of "action/counter-action/response/result" is to put people off trying. Well, it works. It makes me, as a GM, never want to initiate a grapple, even for those foes that get all sorts of bonuses when doing so.
The rules should be there to make it fun. Not to accurately portray the point and counterpoint of WWE-style wrestling contests. Not to confuse players and GMs alike into gibbering insensibility. Make it simple, clean, and abstract.
Sure, give grappling opponents some options they otherwise wouldn't, like throwing their foe around the battlefield, but by the sacred d20, make it simpler for them to actually have the option.
Any GM in the world, ever, will recognise this sheer terror. For some reason grappling rules are horrendously complex (though, interestingly, they're not too bad in Rolemaster... but the complexity of that entire system means that they're ridiculously difficult, anyway).
As a GM, I actually wince whenever one of my players declares an action that will initiate the grappling rules. Out comes the relevant rulebook, and I follow the process, step-by-step.
Here's why, using the D&D 3.5E version of the grappling rules (which, bear in mind, are simplified):
1) Declare an action that will use the grappling rules.
2) Laugh at the GM as he effortlessly flips to the right page, cursing.
3) The target may make a free attack (the dreaded Attack of Opportunity) which, if successful, prevents the grapple attempt.
4) Snigger when the Attack of Opportunity misses.
5) Make a melee touch attack on the target to grab.
6) Crow victoriously as you effortlessly succeed at the easiest attack roll you have ever made.
7) Make an opposed grapple check, using a bonus that is never ever, ever used elsewhere in the game.
8) Grin at the GM because you made the grapple check and are now grappling.
9) Use any further itterative attacks your character may have to perform a series of bizzare and frustrating manoeuvres against an effectively helpless victim, preventing him from retaliating or performing any action other than attempting to free himself.
10) Repeat steps 7 through 9 until the victim breaks free or is knocked out.
Why? For the love of humanity, why does it have to be so complex? For a game that specifically states that the combat system is abstracted, why does the act of grabbing someone else on the battlefield have to be so damn confusing? For that matter, why are the rules utterly silent on the question "is he still grabbed if I fail that first grapple check?" How the hell should I know?! Even allowing for the seemingly unnecesary "Grapple Bonus", why could it not be "Declare action, Attack of Opportunity, Opposed Grapple Check"? That cuts at least 50% of the complexity from the rules.
It should be simple, like the rest of combat. The simpler it is, the more viable it becomes as an option in a fight. The more viable it is, the more likely it is to be used.
The only reason I can conceive of for the horrendous mish-mash of "action/counter-action/response/result" is to put people off trying. Well, it works. It makes me, as a GM, never want to initiate a grapple, even for those foes that get all sorts of bonuses when doing so.
The rules should be there to make it fun. Not to accurately portray the point and counterpoint of WWE-style wrestling contests. Not to confuse players and GMs alike into gibbering insensibility. Make it simple, clean, and abstract.
Sure, give grappling opponents some options they otherwise wouldn't, like throwing their foe around the battlefield, but by the sacred d20, make it simpler for them to actually have the option.
Whatever happened to the weekend?
Well, that seems to be a damn good question.
For some reason I don't really feel like I had a weekend break, and as a result of that, I didn't run my Sunday night M&M game last night, so I'm afraid I don't have anything to say about it. As such what would have been a recap/update post has to turn into something else.
I'd be kidding if I said I knew what.
I guess it's a good time to waffle on a bit about how detrimental it can be to have a roleplaying session where the GM isn't in the spirit of things.
In all my years RPing, I've seen recalcitrant players, bored players, powergamers, deep-immersion storytellers, excited players, frustrated players, involved players... well, a lot of different types of players, really. But I know that the one thing that can utterly destroy a campaign is a GM who just isn't "into it".
Every once in a while I get struck by writer's block, unable to come up with even a half-decent storyline or plot idea. Usually I can get away with it by throwing a random event into a session, and feeding off the RP that comes out of that event to create a tangential storyline, but believe me, it doesn't always work.
The GM is one of the driving forces behind an RPG, and if the GM doesn't have the right "feel" for the session, the players will always pick up on it - they become despondent, lethargic, unenthusiastic. Nothing kills a game session faster than the GM giving off "I can't be arsed" vibes.
I've said before (in another blog, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) that I believe that no plot can ever survive contact with the players. It's a truism I've lived by as a GM for over 20 years, and I've never seen it proven wrong. Well... except where a GM tries to railroad the plot. That sucks, by the way.
It gets worse when the GM knows that no matter what he does, no matter how his carefully crafted plotline is prepared, the players will ignore it, focus on their own agenda, and rip the plot to shreds.
The whole point about RPing is what I refer to as "shared storytelling". I'm not strictly brilliant at it, because I tend to have firm opinions about the direction a plot or scene should take, and sometimes I get locked into that. It's all about learning to say "yes" to the players. Letting them get away with things that enhance the story, but might not fall strictly into the bounds of the rules of the game.
If Gnarg the Barbarian wants to pick up the table in the tavern and charge the brawling patrons with it, the GM can require that he makes a Strength check to lift the table, and apply all the appropriate modifiers for using an improvised weapon as part of a charging bull-rush... almost certainly causing the attempt to fail, if Gnarg is only 1st level, but otherwise being a trivial task for him... so why bother rolling? It makes for a good scene, it makes for an entertaining interlude, and unless it's an important scene for the plot (and how often has the tavern brawl actually been important to the plot?), then I see no reason for Gnarg to fail. After all, he's the hero of the piece, being one of the PCs. Sure, let the agile assassin dance out of the way as the table rushes in, but Gnarg is going to squash a number of people with that table, and there is no good reason for a GM to deny the player a memorable moment.
The story always wins. It's something that sets excellent GMs apart from adequate ones. It's worth pointing out that the plot and the story are not the same thing. The plot is the carefully crafted series of events and encounters that the GM has decided to throw at the PCs. The story is what actually happens once that plot meets the players... and the plot will not survive. But that's okay - because the story is what matters, not the plot.
Any GM who thinks that the plot matters more than the shared storytelling experience should just go away and write a novel - because their players will end up feeling like they have no impact, no control over their characters' destinies, which will ruin any RP campaign or adventure. The GM's job isn't to "run the game", despite what it might say in a dozen guides and rulebooks. The role of the GM in a roleplaying game is basically to start the ball rolling. Create that plot that he knows is going to be ripped to shreds inside of five minutes. Describe the scenario, and then sit back and watch the players have fun.
I've met some GMs who seem to believe that GMing is "them vs. me" regarding the players. These GMs should play wargames, where their competitiveness can be allowed a good outlet. I have never grown so attached to an NPC I've created or used that I would get upset if the PCs managed to do him in "early". What's the point? An NPC isn't really a character - it's a tool to enable the players to have fun. It's a plot-device to help drive the story... and plots don't survive contact with players.
Wow. This post ended up in a totally different place than I was expecting. But that's not a bad thing, I guess.
For some reason I don't really feel like I had a weekend break, and as a result of that, I didn't run my Sunday night M&M game last night, so I'm afraid I don't have anything to say about it. As such what would have been a recap/update post has to turn into something else.
I'd be kidding if I said I knew what.
I guess it's a good time to waffle on a bit about how detrimental it can be to have a roleplaying session where the GM isn't in the spirit of things.
In all my years RPing, I've seen recalcitrant players, bored players, powergamers, deep-immersion storytellers, excited players, frustrated players, involved players... well, a lot of different types of players, really. But I know that the one thing that can utterly destroy a campaign is a GM who just isn't "into it".
Every once in a while I get struck by writer's block, unable to come up with even a half-decent storyline or plot idea. Usually I can get away with it by throwing a random event into a session, and feeding off the RP that comes out of that event to create a tangential storyline, but believe me, it doesn't always work.
The GM is one of the driving forces behind an RPG, and if the GM doesn't have the right "feel" for the session, the players will always pick up on it - they become despondent, lethargic, unenthusiastic. Nothing kills a game session faster than the GM giving off "I can't be arsed" vibes.
I've said before (in another blog, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) that I believe that no plot can ever survive contact with the players. It's a truism I've lived by as a GM for over 20 years, and I've never seen it proven wrong. Well... except where a GM tries to railroad the plot. That sucks, by the way.
It gets worse when the GM knows that no matter what he does, no matter how his carefully crafted plotline is prepared, the players will ignore it, focus on their own agenda, and rip the plot to shreds.
The whole point about RPing is what I refer to as "shared storytelling". I'm not strictly brilliant at it, because I tend to have firm opinions about the direction a plot or scene should take, and sometimes I get locked into that. It's all about learning to say "yes" to the players. Letting them get away with things that enhance the story, but might not fall strictly into the bounds of the rules of the game.
If Gnarg the Barbarian wants to pick up the table in the tavern and charge the brawling patrons with it, the GM can require that he makes a Strength check to lift the table, and apply all the appropriate modifiers for using an improvised weapon as part of a charging bull-rush... almost certainly causing the attempt to fail, if Gnarg is only 1st level, but otherwise being a trivial task for him... so why bother rolling? It makes for a good scene, it makes for an entertaining interlude, and unless it's an important scene for the plot (and how often has the tavern brawl actually been important to the plot?), then I see no reason for Gnarg to fail. After all, he's the hero of the piece, being one of the PCs. Sure, let the agile assassin dance out of the way as the table rushes in, but Gnarg is going to squash a number of people with that table, and there is no good reason for a GM to deny the player a memorable moment.
The story always wins. It's something that sets excellent GMs apart from adequate ones. It's worth pointing out that the plot and the story are not the same thing. The plot is the carefully crafted series of events and encounters that the GM has decided to throw at the PCs. The story is what actually happens once that plot meets the players... and the plot will not survive. But that's okay - because the story is what matters, not the plot.
Any GM who thinks that the plot matters more than the shared storytelling experience should just go away and write a novel - because their players will end up feeling like they have no impact, no control over their characters' destinies, which will ruin any RP campaign or adventure. The GM's job isn't to "run the game", despite what it might say in a dozen guides and rulebooks. The role of the GM in a roleplaying game is basically to start the ball rolling. Create that plot that he knows is going to be ripped to shreds inside of five minutes. Describe the scenario, and then sit back and watch the players have fun.
I've met some GMs who seem to believe that GMing is "them vs. me" regarding the players. These GMs should play wargames, where their competitiveness can be allowed a good outlet. I have never grown so attached to an NPC I've created or used that I would get upset if the PCs managed to do him in "early". What's the point? An NPC isn't really a character - it's a tool to enable the players to have fun. It's a plot-device to help drive the story... and plots don't survive contact with players.
Wow. This post ended up in a totally different place than I was expecting. But that's not a bad thing, I guess.
Friday 27 March 2009
Currently, at chez Chem
Right, I figure that since I'm going to be blogging a bit about what's happening in my RP-life, I ought to give a little background.
Dungeons and Dragons
I recently (well, a couple of months ago, probably) started "running" a 4E D&D game with my regular Wednesday night group at my home. Up until that point I'd played around with the system a bit, and had a good grasp of low level characters, and the sort of power and opportunities available in the Heroic Tier of the game (that's levels 1-10), but I know my players, and I know that they tend to like a bit of powergaming, so I was curious as to what the Paragon Tier has to offer. But, because it's a new system, I didn't want to just start everyone off at 11th level. We needed a better grounding in what the characters were capable of, so we "speed-levelled". For a few weeks, I ran a series of combat encounters (fully aware that character development would be stunted in the meantime) with only the vaguest of plots, and ignored XP. The rule was simple - 3 encounters and you level up. The characters got to 7th level before everyone was heartily bored of that, and so we jumped to 11th level, and I started to run the Wizards of the Coast published adventure P1 - King of the Trollhaunt Warrens.
So far, it's gone quite well. One of my absent players has returned to the group, and next week should see the return of another (I have my fingers crossed). The party (which consists of a dwarven fighter, a tiefling warlord, an eladrin ranger, a human wizard and a half-elf warlock) have defeated a group of trolls who were snacking on a horse, fought a group of hags, gone into the town of Moonstair and chatted to several of the locals, set up a training regime for the local militia, and set off for the Trollhaunt Warrens, seeking Skalmad, a troll with delusions of grandeur.
I tend to allow my players a lot of creative license in descriptions, so when they told me that they were trying to bluff their way into the troll lair by claiming that the King's pizza had been delivered, I mentally rewrote that in my head as a... more suitable claim, and let the dice fall as they would. Once inside, a troglodyte ran off to find the king, and the party then slaughtered the door guards.
Moving swiftly (they don't know how long they have until Skalmad arrives), they followed their "standard dungeon-crawling technique", which is to follow the left-hand wall.
They avoided the insane troll muttering away to a pile of skulls (I'm sure it has some significance to the adventure, but they avoided that, too...), and continued on, which led them to a door in the tunnel wall.
Being the ever-curious folks that they are, and not wanting to risk leaving any/many trolls at their backs, they opened the door and snuck inside. Well, stomped inside, really.
Which the black dragon, Gloomfang, found heartily amusing, as he lurked in the chamber beyond.
Whenever there's a choice between talking and fighting, my players tend to go for the direct route, which almost always involves the dwarf fighter bundling straight in at the enemy.
Cue one big fight, with daily powers aplenty being used, and severe risk of death and destruction to the PCs.
Needless to say, they won the battle, and came out of it quite well, discovering the magical bastard sword that the Warlord promptly snatched, since he's the only one that would use it.
That's where it was left... we'll have to wait until next week to see what comes after that.
Mutants & Masterminds
Background - The most famous heroes of Freedom City have dissappeared. No one is entirely sure where they might be. When a new group of supervillains starts a campaign of terror in Freedom City, someone must step up to save the day...
This adventure/campaign is in my notes as "Zodiac". Prior to running it, I wrote a short foreshadowing snippet of prose and then leapt into the adventure.
It all started at the mall (I wonder if the mall is as ubiquitous to modern-genre games as the tavern is to fantasy settings), where "coincidentally" all of the characters happened to be one Saturday afternoon. A loud explosion alerted them to danger, and they proceeded to investigate. That turns out to have been a good decision, as they found themselves fighting a group of criminal types in an underground loading-bay... with explosives attached to the mall's concrete support pillars. Once those crooks were defeated, several clues led them to a warehouse, where they met several more people to beat the snot out of.
The trail of clues thus found has so far led them to speak to a newspaper magnate, traipse through the sewers, rescue a young policeman being tortured, engage in a flying battle with a superpowered villain with electrical powers, spy on a sea-life centre, battle some exceptionally well-equipped crooks who were trying to steal something from said sea-life centre, discover an aquatic woman wrapped in some sort of stasis-inducing pressure membrane, and head to a museum where a theft was taking place. Phew. These are some busy heroes.
Obviously, not all of that has happened in one or two sessions. This is the result of several weeks worth of RP, and thanks to the medium being used for it, anything even remotely resembling a fight takes an age to resolve.
The culmination of the museum scene, where they fought a villainess calling herself "Virgo" (the party have already crossed the path of "Pisces"), resulted in them obtaining a magically enchanted ring, which they hope to use to bring Ms. Freezer (the aquatic woman in the membrane) out of stasis.
All the party know right now is that everything to do with these new villains has links to an ancient civilisation of snake-people that once ruled the world.
As they discussed various of their findings, one of the heroes - the paragon of American justice, liberty and truth, Liberty Belle - received a phone call telling her that her alter-ego's children had been kidnapped from school.
The group - unaware of Liberty Belle's link to the missing children - rushed to the school to offer any assistance they could.
During the course of their discussions, the FBI agent who was leading the investigation into the kidnapping got a call to let him know that the kidnappers' black SUV had been spotted... and so the heroes gave chase.
That's where that one is, now. I'll give more details on the characters in this campaign in a later post.
Why bother blogging?
Okay, one thing you'll undoubtedly have noticed about me is that so far my immersion in the blogosphere has been limited to comments about other people's posts.
Generally speaking, my creativity doesn't expand to "things I can just waffle about for hours" - I tend to need a little bit of prompting, which is why Rockjaw's blog has frequently ended up with me writing more stuff than he does.
Topics I'll discuss until the cows come home, though, are Roleplaying (well, duh!), City of Heroes, and Dungeons & Dragons.
I've never been shy about the fact that I have spent several thousand shiny English Pounds on RP books. It was a point of pride for me many moons ago that I knew the entire AD&D2E ruleset by heart.
I've waffled a lot elsewhere about my feelings regarding what D&D 4E is and isn't, and how it compares to 3.5E, which holds the number-one spot for me in the RP-stakes right now. I'll undoubtedly do so again, and I'll probably do it here.
I'll also review my weekly gaming sessions, when I remember to (and if I get the chance), as well as putting up thoughts about the different RP experiences I'm currently having.
For anyone who doesn't know, then, here's a brief look at my current RP commitments:
Wednesday nights: D&D night. Currently playing a 4E published adventure. I'm still learning the game, so I don't know how my feelings will change.
Sunday nights: Online Mutants & Masterminds. This is a homegrown adventure/campaign arc following a group of heroes in the pre-published Freedom City setting. It's being played using IRC, and you'll undoubtedly be hearing a lot about my thoughts on that, too.
Other nights: Whenever I'm not doing something else with my lovely wife Pix (don't ask, I won't tell), I can usually be found hanging around the Galaxy Girl statue in the MMO City of Heroes. If I'm not there, I'm probably RPing with a friend over MSN (or Windows Live, or whatever it's called these days).
So, right now things are pretty open. If anyone has anything they think I should blog about, let me know. If not, I'll just blog what I can, when I can.
Random Thoughts of a Random Roleplayer
Okay, I'm pretty new to this blogging malarky, so I'm bound to either screw up hugely or not post much all that often.
This particular blog is basically about me, my experiences, my roleplaying and my thoughts on all of the above.
My name is, variously, Chemlak (when I'm talking about Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games) or Shadowe (in City of Heroes). Sure, I have a real name, but I don't tend to advertise it all that much.
Anyway, this blog is going to be about all of the things I mention above. It came about because I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time making huge posts on http://totheblogmobile.com where Stephen "Rockjaw" Reid hangs his hat, and he suggested that I have a blog of my own.
Well, this is it.
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