Entries Tagged as 'Roleplaying'

Roleplaying: Rifts TGE Act 1 Session 1 Summary

I ran the first part of the Rifts TGE game tonight. We only had a couple of hours to play due to starting late. There are four in the group:

  • A Crazy who left his farm for a better life as a borg, but who got suckered into become a Crazy.
  • A mutant 4 foot tall pigeon trained in military espionage and combat.
  • A Cyber Knight with a penchant for being a complete rule stickler.
  • A wizard who got sucked through from another world to the world of Rifts and who is looking to get back home.

I started the game by having the players having flashes of darkness, pain and bursting light before being able to hear other voices in their head. After this happened a couple of times, they woke up in a lab, all of them strapped to tables and being introduced to a Coalition scientist who told them they have been "acquired" for a mission, or at least phase 1 of it. Special nanotechnology had been used to insert a microtransmitter/bomb in their brains which allowed them to communicate non-verbally. The bomb was tamper-proof and set to go off if the nanotech was interfered with at all. The group was required to perform a mission for the Coalition: to go through a rift and retrieve a specific artifact. They were given special wrist computers that included a tracking device as well as a mini encyclopedia about the world they were being sent to. (Yes, it’s railroading, but it’s going to serve an important part of the arc later.) They have 7 days to complete the mission or the nanotech will allow the bombs in their heads to go off. Any interference with the bombs would trigger them. If they failed to return with the Crux Malefactant, then they were dead men.

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Tags: Roleplaying by Teh Bagder
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Roleplay: Rifts TGE & Recycling Universes

Many moons ago, I had grandiose plans to write and publish a number of RPG game products. A lot of things happened to stop that happening, but a lot of the material for the game worlds was material that was going to be used for stories and novels. Some of them have had work done on them, some haven’t. I’ve decided to integrate some of the settings into the game of Rifts that I’m about to run. This way I get to use the setting material and have some fun with it.

I want to say more about the campaign, but don’t want to say too much until the game is underway just in case any of the players stumble upon this. Suffice to say that there will be massive sprinklings of spaceships, demons, aliens, vampires, manitous, super heroes, cybertechnology, alternate dimensions, special items, nanotechnology, and a very short time frame before the players go Big Badda Boom. Unless they succeed. But they might just go boom anyway.

I’ll most likely post details of the campaign after each session. Watch this space.

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Tags: Roleplaying by Teh Bagder
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Roleplay: Rifts TGE Campaign

The gaming group that I just joined up with have accepted me as a regular player, and we’re going to have three games running at the same time, with one game being played each week over a 3 week rotation every Sunday night. I’ve been suckered into running a Rifts game, which we’ll start next week.

None of the guys have ever played Rifts, but one of them has been champing at the bit for a while to play it. We’ll roll characters next week, and I’m going to allow characters from any Palladium setting to be involved in the game. Sounds like a bad idea, and it could be, but I’ve got a very specific story arc in mind for us to play to, and multi-dimensionality is going to be playing an active part in it.Which makes sense, because it’s Rifts, right? Well, I’m going to be turning the game concept on its head a little and messing with a bunch of stuff, so this isn’t going to be your normal game of Rifts. I’m incorporating aspects of a story concept I had many years ago, as well as some other stuff I’ve worked on in the past. The players are going to be dealing with rifts that access many different spacetimes and realities, and they’re going to have to deal with one major problem: if they don’t do what they’re told, then they’ll die. It’s not exactly railroading, as it’s important to the story arc I’m putting together, and it’s much bigger than just the players. Of course, they won’t know that, but they’ll probably work it out. The general idea is that there will be five acts, with one per game session, meaning it will take about 3 months to get the entire campaign out of the way. That’s a good timeframe because it will finish before the start of the next quarter, and before I have to get back into schoolwork. It also means that when that game has run its campaign course, I can run a different game for the next block.

The codename for the game is TGE. What does that stand for? You’ll just have to wait and read the updates I’m going to post to find out. Assuming the players figure it out during the campaign…

Best get back to reading back up on the game so I don’t look like an idiot when I run it. Ah, but it does feel damn good to be gaming again!

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Roleplay: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Entrophia

Shortly, I’ll be heading out the door to meet up with some guys from Ohio State who have allowed me to join their gaming group. I’ve only played with them once before, but it was a lot of fun. Today I get to join in a long-running campaign that one of the guys has been running. I’m about 10 sessions late, so a lot has happened, so I get to get thrown in media res. The setting can be summed up as D&D Supers in some ways. I decided that I wanted to have a character that would allow me to grow into, and used the concept of having a tabula rasa John Doe character to play. The character has a severe lack of memory after waking up on board a sailing ship as a press-ganged crew member. He has since escaped from the ship and is stuck on a new continent and has been moving around for the past year or so trying to work out who he is, why he can’t remember his past, and how to get home. I’ve got some of the details of his character worked out, but I’ll be adding to it as I go. In short, he’s a rogue who knows how to fight well, and is pretty eagle-eyed and observant. He’s also pretty knowledgeable about the world and seems to be able to meld into any group of people without any trouble. He’s also pretty handy with swords and daggers and has shown footpads and others who have thought to prey on him the error of their ways.

I used the excellent freeware PCGen software to create the character, and it’s a pretty neat tool. The latest version 5.16.2 adds support for 4e sources too.

I am so stoked to be gaming again! Today is going to be a lot of fun. More to report once the game is over.

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Star Wars Episode V.I: The Google Wave

I love West End Games’ Star Wars D6 game. It’s always been a firm favorite of mine, and I’ve got many fond memories of playing it with friends during high school. Most of the time I’d run the games, as I prefer to be a GM, but I’d also get a kick out of playing the game, particularly if it was run by my buddy Steve. Now that I’m getting back into roleplaying, I want to recapture how it felt to play those games. I’ve found a gaming group at Ohio State University, and have played a game of D20 Future with a couple of guys there, and I’m hoping to run some Star Wars with them. That won’t be until next year when some of the guys get back from Crimble break.

Luckily, I’ve started running a game via Google Wave, jumping on the bandwagon as many other gamers already have. There’s a slew of tools starting to become available for gameplay, including maps and dice rollers, so there’s a great deal of potential for Google Wave to work well for running games. There are already online tools to play games, but as I tend to like strong narrative-based games, and the group of players I’ve gather for this game are spread out throughout the country, Google Wave should be a good medium for running the game. It’s not without its technical issues, but I think those can be worked around.

We’re just about to run a Prelude, where all of the players get together and form the main party. As the game unfolds, I’ll post details here so that others can read what’s happening. That’s one of the benefits of Google Wave: everything gets archived, so you can have historical playback of gameplay so that you know exactly what’s gone on in the past. We’re still waiting for all of the players to choose characters and for us to start the Prelude proper, but it’s going to be fun when they do. It’s been years since I’ve really ran a game, but as we put all this together and get ready to play, I’m reminded of how much fun it is to not only play games, but to run them as a GM. I’ve always preferred being a GM to being a player. There’s more of a challenge in being a GM, and a lot more responsibility in shaping and directing the story so that everyone has a good time.

Why the heck has it taken me so long to get back to this? Oh, yeah. Life got in the way. Well, as Master Yoda says "Do, or do not. There is no try". I guess that also applies to roleplaying as well as developing awesome Force powers.

Check out this awesome article on the Millenium Falcon on the StarWars.com website. It’s where I snagged the above image from.

Yes, I know. I am such a Star Wars geek.

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Tags: Roleplaying, Tabletop by Teh Bagder
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Dungeons & Dragons Party Composition

In the past few days I’ve had a chance to look through some of the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Player’s Handbook. RPG rulebooks aren’t the type of thing that you can usually sit down and read through from cover to cover, although there are some good books out there that make it easy to do so. So far, it’s been an enjoyable read, apart from one major thing.

Party composition.

See, this is where my brain breaks, because I come from the school of thought of "Play what you want and we’ll work around it and have fun". D&D 4e consolidates a number of concepts presented in earlier editions but not fully coalesced and has you consider the combat roles of characters as one of four distinct roles. This is partly why D&D 4e gets labeled with being MMO-influenced, because the roles are very similar to the roles that you would find in an MMO. These roles are Leader, Striker, Defender and Controller. Each character class that we’re accustomed to falls into one or more of these roles during play, with each of them being better at one role more than another. Some are specific, but others can play multiple roles. A brief breakdown of the roles are:

  • Leaders are focused on support roles such as buffing and healing.
  • Strikers attack specific targets.
  • Defenders block attacks and take the brunt of combat.
  • Controllers attack multiple targets.

It’s easy to see where the comparison to MMO comes in: Tanks, DPS and Healers are standard roles in games. I’ve played in many games where we’ve had parties built around these concepts, either at party inception or simply through evolution of play. Even single player games, such as the original Baldur’s Gate games usually have these roles in play. So I’ve got no problem with these roles being in a game.

Where my brain breaks is designing a party based on these roles being a guiding principle of what characters are needed for a party. This is mostly because I’ve approached building a party from a narrative perspective, rather than a tactical perspective, which is what seems to be the case with the latest iteration of D&D.

That’s part of the reason why I’ve never really been deep into D&D in the past. Every group I ever saw play it used miniatures extensively. That seemed a lot at the time to cart around to people’s houses. I ended up settling on Rolemaster 2nd Edition, which was more in tune with the type of gaming that we wanted to play as it was highly narrative and allowed for great flexibility in character development beyond the structured class system of D&D. I’ve bought a lot of 3.0 and 3.5 stuff on clearance because I want to give D&D a chance. A lot of people are playing it, and if I want to get in some gaming, then i guess I need to play it too.

I guess I need to play a few games to see if my impressions are changed. More soon.

(Yes, I know the image in this post talks about 3.5, but it’s from an interesting article on the WOTC website regarding handling party composition.)

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Tags: Roleplaying, Tabletop by Teh Bagder
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Web Wednesday: Facebook Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventures

FacebookDungeons&Dragons

I’ve found myself addicted to playing the new Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventures that’s available on Facebook. I tend to leave it running in the background while I do other thins on the Interwebs, flipping back to its tab to check my current quest status. It’s absolutely nothing like sitting around a table with your friends, but it’s fun in a online Tunnels & Trolls-type way. You can help to buff your friends in their quests, but it’s really missing a multi-player component, even if that component is just multiple people going on the quest together and playing through turns. It’d also be improved if you could trade items with other players, because I end up selling a lot of stuff that I’ve got duplicates of. Still, it’s a lot of fun, and keeps me amused while sitting at work, at least, when the servers aren’t crashing because there’s too many people playing it.

Tags: Free Games, Roleplaying, Tabletop, Web, Web Wednesday by Teh Bagder
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Tabletop: The Horde Has Landed!

WOWHordeLanded

We don’t play World of Warcraft here in the Bagder household, but we’ve always enjoyed things of a Warcraft nature. There have been many nights that we’ve loaded up Warcraft II and Wacraft III and had a Battle Royale of sorts. I’ve also had my eye on the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game for some time, but just couldn’t justify getting around to buying starter decks and lots of other booster packs so that we could really enjoy the game. Being the Bagder I am, I hit eBay. 

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Tags: Roleplaying, Tabletop by Teh Bagder
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Freebie: Free Star Wars PocketModel Sample

It seems that Wizkids are offering free samples of the Star Wars PocketModel ships at various retailers. If you visit this part of their site and input your zip code, it’ll tell you the retailers that are giving away free models. You’ll have to print off the coupon that’s on the next page and take it with you. Each Sample Kit contains 3 ships and 2 cards. US only I’m afraid.

Links 

 

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Tags: Free Games, Roleplaying by Teh Bagder
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Tabletop: Paper AT-ATs

 
Image courtesty of BigLobe.

What could be cooler than an AT-AT? How about plans to build your own papercraft AT-AT. Yes, the site and instructions are in Japanese, but it’s fairly easy to work out what to do.  Just print out the PDFs on card stop and use the master guider to attached the number parts, and your done. I think I’ve found my weekend project.

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