The good news: we have taken a few opportunities in our own way to continue to game.  We have had our D&D group together for a session just recently, which also coincided with Free Comic Book Day and an outing to see Thor (which was much better than I expected).  This day of epic nerdity helped to restoke the fires.  Stupid Ranger has been spending her spare time diving headlong into Dragon Age 2, and she has mentioned more than a few times that she wants to write a review up on that to tell you all of her experiences in Ferelden.  The point of mentioning all this is that you might see a bit of variety to our posts, reflecting the type of nerdy behavior that we’re able to participate in.

The bad news: I had to use most of my vacation time this year to welcome our new addition, so Stupid Ranger and I will not be able to attend Gen-Con this year.  But fear not!  Our very own Vanir will be attending and will be sure to bring his ultra-special roleplaying expertise to the convention center and the surrounding three mile radius.  We will be sure to share liberally his event schedule so you can meet up with him and receive your own free hair trimming to improve your gaming fortune.

Finally, I’d like to thank our loyal readers who have stuck around during this sabbatical.  With any luck we will return to a more frequent blogging schedule as things return to normal and our gaming resumes in earnest.  More soon!

Character Generation

As I postulated yesterday, character creation was a really fun aspect of the game.  We opted for the traditional no-holds-barred random character generation to excellent results.  Our party consisted of:

• A mind breaker / plant hybrid
• A highly intelligent yeti android with only three Charisma
• A human-sized felinoid / cockroach named Mittens St. Cloud
• A plant / gravity controller clad in cast-off street signs
• A rat swarm / empath named Thwack

Before character creation was even complete, the group was brainstorming ideas about how their characters would act.  “Can a length of highway guardrail be a heavy melee weapon?”  Absolutely.  Can my yeti android communicate by angry yelling even though he is Intelligent?” Sure he can!  “Can Mittens St. Cloud have a monocle?  Of course he can!  And so forth.  I didn’t even have a character to roll and I was already enjoying the carnage.

There were some confusing aspects, which were compounded by only two of us having the rulebooks from our box sets to go around.  There were some questions about whether we had healing surges or how that worked, and some digging around in the rules indicated that healing was stripped down even compared to 4e D&D (which was fine).  The skill bonuses were slightly confusing, with many wondering if they got BOTH skill bonuses from your origins or just one.  We worked that out fairly quickly, but the character sheet wasn’t extremely clear on some of those details.

Gameplay

Gameplay was very reminiscent of 4e D&D.  The provided adventure is a series of combat encounters (so far, we only made it through three combats) but the players made up several creative solutions.  No, they didn’t want to just open the locked tower doors… let’s have the android yeti ram their pickup truck into it while yelling furiously!  Naturally, that approach worked and they made quite an entrance into encounter number two.  The presence of largely improvised weaponry (outside of the Omega Tech) and random junk to use in their adventure lends a MacGuyver-esque quality to the game.  The players enjoyed finding random junk alongside their Omega Tech treasure, and made heavy use of their Alpha mutations to help them dispatch the angry band of mutant badger guards.

There has been some controversy around the trading card aspect of Gamma World.  I think they enhance the game, but are unnecessary to enjoy the game itself.  Matt, one of our players, generously donated each player (and myself) a Gamma World booster pack.  I matched this donation so each player could pull from their own Alpha mutation and Omega Tech deck, and I think they enjoyed having their own cards to use.  One player said “I’m attached to these mutations, so I sure hope you don’t want these cards back at the end!” so clearly there is some enjoyment to be had there.

First Impressions

In short, I am a Gamma World fan.  It breeds irreverent, fun, laugh-ridden game sessions with unique characters that change as much as the whims of our players.  It is fun to run, because of the creativity caused by random junk and the use of alpha mutations.  The rule system is lightweight and open to some interpretation which keeps the game light and enjoyable to everyone, there wasn’t a lot of digging around in the rulebook to figure out how things should behave (this was helped by the fact that most of our players were experienced in 4e).

I’ll be playing a LOT more Gamma World as the months tick by.  I hope that expansions for the game are plentiful, and it would be GREAT if we could buy the rulebook on its own for casual player characters to use during character creation.  I really want to play this game with Vanir, I can imagine that the fruits of his brain would lend themselves well to Gamma Terra.  In the meantime, you can check out the great Gamma World coverage over at Critical-Hits if you need more of a fix.

More soon!

This recent revival of the Gamma World game has been a very exciting happening here in Colorado, several of my cohorts ran out and bought the box set immediately but we haven’t had the collective time to actually sit down and play it.  I am a bit of a latecomer to the party, having only picked up the box set when it became apparent that the duties of actually running the game were going to fall to me.  I visited Black & Read (one of my friendly local gaming stores), grabbed the box, ripped into it and am excited that tomorrow is the big day to finally get to experience the joy, wonder, and hilarious mutations that makes Gamma World so unique.

First Impressions

The box itself is really great, with a comic styled nuclear waste motif.  The rulebook is very concise, interesting, and lighthearted bringing a lot of the irreverent  flavor of Gamma World through.  At first look, character generation appears to be a BLAST.  In fact, it is one of the things I am looking forward to most tomorrow.  The possibilities, coupled with the urging that all character generation take place by randomly rolling on a chart is a great mechanic to me.  It seems as if it will keep the players from the urge to min/max their characters, and seems to be a very creative process.

The game takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth where several realities have collapsed into one.  This causes terrible, interesting, or hilarious mutations to occur on a regular basis and has caused the rise of both high technology and strange creatures (human-sized insane rabbits, anyone?).  The provided Alpha Mutation and Omega Tech cards provide the mutagenic variety to the play experience, and have the possibility of expansion by purchasing booster packs with new mutations and tech (this seems to be completely unnecessary, but could be fun).  Basically, it seems like this game was borne directly from the brain of our good buddy Vanir.

Gameplay is based strongly on D&D 4e and presented in a format similar to the D&D Essentials line.  The stat blocks are simplified, the box comes with both maps and tokens to represent both players and bad guys, and the whole thing just looks like a lot of fun.

Tomorrow we are going to descend on our game shop, roll up some mutants, and have at the game.  Check back soon for further impressions and stories from the front!

What I Planned

The progenitor of DM Revolution, Justin (of Wombat Cast) encouraged us to be creative and go outside the box to try new concepts.  I decided that I wanted to try to run a roleplaying heavy set of sessions that included primarily Skill Challenges in lieu of combat.  I primarily used the notion of branching skill challenges to set up my plotline for these short sessions.  For tonight’s game, I had a three sets of branching skill challenges that would allow the players to pursue different avenues and two nested skill challenges.  (You can find excellent examples of how to structure branching skill challenges and nested skill challenges can be found at At-Will.)

I have never run a session with a goal of using all Skill Challenges, nor did I know if the group would be receptive to this type of game.

The Way It Went Down

The group followed only two of the “hooks” to these skill challenges directly, however they ended up at two others in a roundabout fashion.  Most of these Skill Challenges were designed to disseminate information, and one of our characters even came up with a creative “off-script” skill to use that resulted in success.  The group readily dove into roleplay, and much of the session was them interacting with both my planned NPC characters and some impromptu NPCs that they chose to interact with.

That was the best part of this experience… the players helped to write the story.  It happened that I used the revised Skill Challenge chart to allow the group to make their own encounters as they interacted with people of their choosing.  In fact, they even went into a few encounters expecting to have to fight based on the information they received during partial successes.  Thanks to not going in guns-blazing, they were able to roleplay their way to most of the rest of the available information.

The session ended up with an opportunity for a Skill Challenge that I suspected would turn to combat and it did (bandits running away from a smash/grab job are too tempting to chase).  Just as the game shop was closing, the group defeated most of the bandits (leaving one alive for questioning).  This led them to an unexpected ending for this session, but it sets up nicely for what I have planned next week.

In Conclusion

Skill Challenges are great for encouraging roleplay.  Using branching and nested skill challenges helps to outline a plot nicely, but still allows the players for enough deviation as not to feel extremely “on rails.”  I suspect some of the players tired a little of all the roleplaying, which is why I strongly recommend having some Skill Challenges that can devolve into combat if the group wants that.

I feel like we had a session that was wildly successful with mostly Skill Challenges.  The roleplaying was fun, people were laughing and creatively using their abilities and the players helped me to write the story.  A man can’t ask for much more than that!  I will be continuing down this avenue for next week’s session, but I plan to up the ante.

• Our characters began at level 11 with a small treasure parcel of gear.
• Each DM gets to run two weeks of encounters, each 1.5 hours in length.
• Creativity is encouraged in encounter design.
• It’s open to everyone, players can circulate in and out as their schedules permit.

The Campaign So Far

The campaign started out with an escape from a prison, which was later revealed to be a floating fortress guarded by a young dragon.  After exiting the compound, we traded with some roving merchants that had docked a floating boat near the edge of the cloud fortress but before we could negotiate safe passage we were attacked by young giantlike creatures.

The merchants escaped largely unscathed, but didn’t stop to take our group with them.  After wandering around the desolate floating fortresses region and nearly starving, we came across another docked floating airship inhabited by savage traders that attempted to poison and then kill us.

We got the upper hand, and succeeded in boarding and then crashing the airship into a barn outside of Waterdeep.  Last week’s encounter thwarted the owner of the barn, which was breeding demon horses for a reason not fully known. (I missed this session, so the details are unclear).

Now it’s my turn…

Starting next Wednesday, it’s my turn to pick up this strange storyline and put my own twist on it.  Our group tends to be fairly combat heavy and I have heard some complaints that there is not enough roleplaying, so I think that I want to do something more roleplay centered and skill challenge based.  The group is a very funny, raucous group of people and I feel like they’d react well to a chance to really be in character and not have to just kill things to pass the sessions.

So let’s collaborate together!  If you’ve got an interesting plot idea based on the synopsis above or some recommendations for creating short and satisfying roleplaying encounters for a group of around 6 players chime in!  I’d love to get some creative input or some advice.

Luckily, there were a few great ones available in the first section of the Tomb of Horrors to try.  Despite my group’s penchant toward not getting started early, I found that the addition of the skill challenges really helped to make them feel accomplished.

My only complaint is one of my own creation… if I would have read up on the challenges ahead of time I would have been able to come up with some additional flavor text so it wasn’t so repetitious and didn’t devolve into blatent statements of success or failure.  Despite the repetition, I found them fun to run and the players found the challenges at the very least interesting.

Maybe a bit of additional preparation next time will make them even better!

It is my custom to leave an “Out of Office” note on my whiteboard before leaving on vacation.  This time, I left a message indicating my out of office dates and a drawing of a d20 (on crit, naturally).  I also implored my office to “feel free to write something nerdy up here in my absence” expecting to get a random Star Wars quote or something to chuckle about upon my return.  Instead, my initial request was erased and replaced by… well… THIS.

As you can see, I work with a bunch of hyper-nerds.  My favorite: “For Sale: Unicorn, 5000 GP or Trade for Pictures of J. Alba”.

How I love my coworkers!

This is my second year participating and I found it interesting that there were common trends from last year. It seems that the social aspect of the game still perplexes many, and we fielded more questions that fell on the “people skills” side of the equation than anything else about how to run the game.

Speaking generally, nerds have been stereotyped as socially awkward and unable to manage normal social relationships. I think this is not explicitly true, but it is close. The thing that most people don’t latch on to is how loyal your average roleplaying group is to both gaming group and game itself. This seems to cause many to suffer “problem players” just because they are currently in your group, or even worse just because they have been a friend for a long time.

Ultimately, one has to ask what it is that one wants from their game. If it is purely a reason to get together and socialize, maybe you need to engineer some time for that before or after the game. If a “problem player” takes too much enjoyment away from the group (or from running the game) then you may need to have some unpleasant discussions with that person about how you expect folks to behave when playing the game. If no corrective action is taken by that person, you may have to ask them to leave the group. In our gaming groups, we work hard to ensure that others are brought into the group based on consensus, and the same goes for ejecting a player.

These topics are tough, but ultimately just as our characters can level up and learn new skills, so can we as players. Just work with your group to put a few more ranks in diplomacy! If this comes difficultly to you, don’t worry. Dealing with people is a tough.

Just as always, you can ask anything you want us to answer in the comments, and you may find your topic featured in a post soon! If public comments aren’t your thing, you can always contact us via email and we can give you some personal attention.

Among the other GenCon highlights was the GM’s Jam, where I joined Zack from RPG Blog 2, Jeff from Bonescroll, Mark (neglected to get his link, sadly), and DNAPhil from Gnome Stew for a Q&A style panel. We covered a myriad of topics, that seemed to focus much more on the social aspects of running a game moreso than game/plot design or DM mechanics. I will explore some interesting bits on this in an article next week.

We also attended Video Games Live, which I now consider compulsary for anyone that claims to love video games, grew up in the 80′s, or fancies themselves a nerd and enjoys orchestral music. I though Vanir was going to vibrate out of his chair when they did Lament of the Highborn from World of Warcraft and a medley involving Mega Man music from across the ages.

Last but certainly not least, was getting most of my old gaming group from home together for a reunion game. It was great adventuring with the old group together and to see Lumbar and Skythorn back in action. Unfortunately, that game ran quite late and we were all ready to crash immediately after it.

Another GenCon is past, but I am glad to report that thanks to some great friends and fellow bloggers I am fired up again! I have a ton of gaming material reviews to get through, so you will likely see one of those a week for awhile. We also have plenty of gaming opportunities in coming months, so that will afford us a plethora of new stuff to talk about.

Stupid Ranger will take the helm over the next week as I am out of town with my day job, but I will be back the following week.

I say look at the line because it became quickly apparent that 1) it was going to be a zoo and 2) waiting for the whole event to be over might compromise Stupid Ranger’s plan to get one of Wil’s limited edition chapbooks, so we headed to the sales floor to queue up for autographs.

We stood in line for about an hour to get autographs from members of The Guild, where we got to meet Sandeep Parikh, Jeff Lewis, Robin Thorsen, and the sublime Felicia Day. They were all really nice, and we got the opportunity to talk to Jeff and Robin for several minutes since there was some line congestion in front of us. Felicia was even so kind as to pose for a picture with us, which was really neat.

We opted to just cycle the line waiting for Wil to show up, and we ended up about 10 from the front. Stupid Ranger got the coveted chapbook #6, we talked to Wil for several minutes about his work, roleplaying blogs (including StupidRanger!), and the origin of our D&D dice that we brought to donate at his request.

After that lovely bit of nerdvana, we walked the sales floor for a bit. I spoke with James Wyatt for a few minutes (which was awesome), and then we headed to the 21 Days to a Novel session with Michael Stackpole. I decided at the last minute to attend that event and I am glad that I did. Michael’s method really creates great characters and interesting interactions, and I think that will help my adventure writing. The ability to create a really great character with real motivations is a topic that we have covered here before, this session really pumped me up to create some new stories.

As I write this, I am helping with a speed dating event that my friend e from GeeksDreamGirl.com is putting on.

More tomorrow!