TPK AOK

So today was session 2 of my UltraForce Omega d20 Modern campaign. I had six players: my nephews, 2 of their friends, Michael McKinney and his friend Cody. That's four new guys, of which two were absolute newbies and one had minimal experience. So what did I do? I managed to kill the entire friggin' party. Fortunately, the session was not a complete wash. I think everybody had some fun and I fully expect at least 4 of the players to be back for session 3. One of the highlights of the day was a fierce car chase sequence, for which I adapted Savage Worlds' excellent chase rules. Also the final fight with the dinosaurs, although a loss for the PCs, was intense and in fact a really close fight. The last of the four dinos was down to one hit point when it finished off the last PC. One die roll going the other way in any of the three last round would have resulted in a PC victory and at least 3 of the good guy's surviving.

Oh well, back the drawing board. I wonder what I'll be doing for the next adventure with a new batch of 1st level PCs?

Happy GM's Day!

Some rpg marketing wonk somewhere decided that March Fourth was GM's Day. In celebration of this august scheme RPGnow and DriveThru are having some sales. DriveThru has tons of stuff at 20% off. Sadly, the DriveThru items I really want (All the World's Monsters volumes 2 and 3 from Chaosium and Pocket Empires from GDW) have yet to be converted from DRM to digital watermarking. And the Chaosium hasn't even jumped on the watermarking bandwagon yet. Maybe I should send them an email. I suppose if I flipped through DriveThru long enough I could find stuff that would interest me, maybe Under the Storm Giant's Castle from Judge's Guild or Star Riders from Dream Pod 9. Neither of which are as cool as All the World's Monsters.

I did get some stuff from RPGnow. It'll be waiting for me to download when I get home. For my d20 Modern campaign I picked up Seeds: Modern (4 pages of adventure seeds) and the Big Bang Sampler (one of those gun fetish products) and issue Modern Dispatch #25 (outlining the Japanese maglev bullet train as an adventure location). All three were cheap and if they work out I'll probably get more stuff from their respective product lines. For future Castles & Crusades dungeoneering I also got Goodman Games' Dungeon Geomorphs. I'm crossing my fingers that these geomorphs are generally compatible with and at the same scale as the old TSR set, which I already own as a PDF. I took a pass at getting three other products I had been eyeing for d20 Modern. The Versatile Hero basic class and the Junk Man advanced class would've been nice to get if I were a player in a d20M game. But since I'm the GM and cannot forsee my players wanting to use them, buying those two items will have to wait. I also considered getting the paper mini set called Paper Violence, but the demo didn't print out very well. The actual product may be sharper, but what's the demo for if not to pre-judge the real thing?

RPG Shop, a vendor of non-electronic products, is supposed to be running a one-day everything-15%-off sale as well, but I'll be damned if I can find a product that's actually marked down from yesterday's prices. Too bad. I like doing business with these guys. Among other things, a small cut of each sale is donated to RPGnet. And they've got several things I want to buy: Green Ronin's d20 Modern screen, that Carcassone expansion my sister got, a new card game called Empyrean, Inc (with art by Phil Foglio), and several other goodies. RPG Shop also has a great dice selection. Maybe the sale prices will be up later.

Anyway, happy faux holiday and remember to consume!

Update, damn you!

No new Penny Arcade today? No new StrongBad email this week? No Bob the Angry Flower today? (Oh, wait. A new Bob is there now.) Where's the free entertainment I've come to know and love from this crazy thing we call teh intarweb? Dance for me, my monkeys! Dance!

At least SomethingAwful has a new PhotoShop Friday. And it looks like two chicks are about to have an unscheduled lesbian encounter over at Wapsi Square. It'll probably amount to nothing, but they still managed to hook me.

An Epiphany

Within the last two years I've purchased and sold both Exalted and Arcana Unearthed. And not just the core books either. For Exalted I also got ahold of the Dragonblooded fatsplat and a half-dozen other supps. At one point I actually owned the entire AU line: the corebook, both published modules, the GM screen, the setting gazetteer, even the official cardstock counters. I came real close to getting an AU game going, but at the first hint of trouble I aborted. But now that I've got more points of contact with the local game community, I've been experience pangs of regret over selling my Exalted and AU stuff. I keep thinking that maybe I could get a game going of either of these now that I know so many more local gamers. I've been telling myself "Maybe I could just use the Exalted corebook and not go supplement crazy." And I alternated between "With the new Arcana Evolved edition coming out, the old version of the game ought to be cheap to get" and "Hey, you could get in on the ground floor of the new edition and just pretend you didn't waste all that money on the original!"

But it occurred to me today why I'm really interested in these two games (and maybe Blue Rose too, for that matter). I want to play these games. I want to be a player, not a GM. Moreso than most any other game I've encountered, these games speak to me as a player. The combination of crunchy rules, high action, and ubercool setting makes me to fill in a charsheet and go nuts. As a GM, that trifecta scares the crap out of me. I can handle any one of them and on a good day I can keep two of them in the air, but I just can't juggle all three of them at the same time. It took me a long time to figure out why I've had this complicated attraction/repulsion reaction to these games, probably because I've so long been a GM first and foremost that it just never occurred to me that I might have player preferences that diverge from my GMing preferences.

So now that I know what's going on inside my own noggin, what can I do about it? Is there something more pro-active I can do other than laying in wait and keeping a keen eye out for new campaigns for these games? I dunno. But at least I won't be blowing any money on the rules in the meantime.

Buffy-style Drama Points

Some of the d20 Modern fans on RPG.net have been importing Drama Points from Eden's Buffy RPG, instead of the Action Point system native to d20M. For a summary of the Buffy Drama Point mechanic, click here. I'm tempted to use this system in my UltraForce Omega campaign. Action Points as written are clunky and less fun than many other similar mechanics.

New Game Links

Just added several new links to the lefthand side of the page.

I'm driving myself nuts!

All day today I've had something on the tip of my brain, lingering just out of cognitive reach. When I got to work today there was something I wanted to research on Google, but I can't for the life of me remember what subject interested me. I had it at one point today, but a simultaneous phonecall from a customer and dumb question from the new guy in the office managed to push back into unconsciousness. I hate that.

Last night was boardgame night. We got in three games: Traders of Genoa, Ticket to Ride, and Bohnanza (the bean game). I had a pretty good night, getting second place in Traders and Bohnanza and winning Ticket to Ride. Although my confidence was shaky when I first started playing with this group, I seem to be doing a lot better. In all three games I was able to identify some good plays. I was particularly satisfied by my strategy in Ticket to Ride. For one thing, I had a strategy. For another thing, it was an unorthodox hybrid of two strategies I've seen others in my playgroup employ. And in Bohnanza I made at least one weird but decent-scoring play that I wouldn't have even considered a month or two ago.

I've developed a new method for indulging my game-buying habit while simultaneously improving my health. See, I normally visit the vending machine in the breakroom at work at least once, usually twice a day. I almost always get nutrition-free, high-calorie junkfood. So hear's the deal I've made with myself: on any week I can get from Monday to Friday without spending money at the vending machine, I get to buy some goodies from RPGnow or DriveThruRPG. This week, if I can exercise sufficient self-control, I'll be getting something for my d20 modern campaign. Maybe I'll get the Big Bang Sampler, just to see if I like the Big Bang line of gun books. Several of the full-blown Big Bang products look interesting. I've also been eyeing the Modern Dispatch line. Issue #25, about the Japanese bullet-train, is on sale for 75 cents. I'm finding it frustrating that many of the d20M adventures available are not tagged for what level PCs can tackle them. To meet the min order size to save myself the 35 cent fee for tiny orders, I may go ahead and finally buy Bruce Baugh's A Fistful of Plot Devices. I'm hoping that'll help me set up at least one exciting adventure for my Home Team campaign.

I'm getting a bit of the wargaming bug again, World War One flying aces in particular. Maybe this Sunday we could finally play Dawn Patrol. Who 'we' is at this point, I don't know. Probably Pat, maybe Loren and/or Dave and/or Joe. I dunno. Maybe Jim and the boys. I've also been looking once again into getting Blue Max or Richthofen's War. Jim mentioned Monday night that he used to enjoy playing the Richthofen game back in the day and that Avalon Hill went on to publish another game covering the same material, Knights of the Air. I think WWI plane games interest me for much the same reasons that BattleTech and Starmada trip my trigger: each piece represents a single object and more than two people can get in on playing. That one-to-one scaling is the place where wargames, skirmish mini games, and rpgs can meet. That's why I don't scoff at the notion that Dawn Patrol or Car Wars or BattleTech are really a form of role-playing game. You can play 'your guy' over a series of sessions, following his ups and downs. These characters can take on a narrative life of thier own. How is that not role-playing?