2012 in Game Stuff

Realized Secret Santicore was really good.
Speculated what 5e should look like.
Wrote a GM questionnaire, people answered it.
Saw my players fight ice monkeys.
Realized A Book of Beasts by TH White was really good.
Wrote an essay about people who love rules. Made people who love rules mad. Angry mail. Trolls.
Wrote random tables.
Told RPG companies to hire more women. At least one of them listened.
Played Dwimmermount with James Maliszewski. Fun.
Moebius died.
Thrown off Story-Games.com.
Got GMed by Satine. Twice.
Wrote a called shot mechanic.
Jeff stopped running his Wessex campaign. Everyone angry.
Wrote a superhero story game. It passed the time.
Wrote a Chill hack for Call of Cthulu consisting of one rule. It worked really well.
Wrote an essay about people who need rules. Made people who need rules mad. Angry mail. Trolls.
Got hired by WOTC. Angry mail. Trolls.
Explained that, no, really, I got hired by WOTC. Angry mail. Trolls.
Discovered blogger's Batmanalytic feature:

Wrote a story game using playing cards. Fun enough.

Had International Anklebiter Illustrator Day.

Got interviewed on some podcasts.

Half-bird ranger died in the home game.

Found an excellent RPG-thing carrying case at the antique mall in Medina, Ohio.

Realized the One Page Dungeons this year were really good.

Explained how 'GM Fiat' actually works. Angry mail. Trolls.

Wrote alternate fighters, rangers and thieves for old-style D&Ds.

Played Burning Wheel, had fun, wrote about it. Angry mail. Trolls.

Had an idea about a couple story-games and their connection to wargames. Angry mail. Trolls.

Interviewed author of one of those games. He said the idea made sense to him.

Interviewed authors of the old Marvel Superheroes game and the new one simultaneously.

Talked with people about Sword & Sorcery vs Anime Sci Fantasy. Angry mail. trolls.

Hello? Gammarauders?

Made that:

One year anniversary of ConstantCon.
Ran a lot of FASERIP games on-line. World partially saved. Northwest Russia annihilated.
Hired by LOTFP to write an Alice-In-Wonderland thing.
Realized that was going to be awesome.
Invented a PCs-in-the-middle-of-a-mass-battle mechanic (refining Pendragon).
Invented a PCs-crawling-on-big-monsters mechanic (refining Scrap Princess).
Party druid wrote an article about sexual harassment. Roundly lauded by people who'd previously claimed our game group appearing in the media was "bad for women".
Said Google + was becoming the best forum for talking about games. Angry mail. Trolls.
Wrote some notes on Dungeon World. Angry mail. Trolls.
Won a prize for game thing I wrote.
Went to video game conference about it. Got interviewed a lot.
Saved some FLAILSNAILS PCs from imprisonment in Castle Amber.
DMed for a college game design class.
Thoroughly enjoyed Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Played 4e for charity (again).
Made that:

Invented a sci fi storygame specifically designed to work in G+ hangouts. Passed the time.
Made the RPG Speedcyclopedia.
Hacked Deities and Demigods so you could use it at the table.
Hacked Carcosa so I could use it at my table.
Wrote about my favorite Adrian Smith picture.
Made a Random Villain Generator. Dave abulafia'd it.
Players faced a maximum age maximum size blue dragon. Survived.
Played Night's Black Agent's with Kenneth Hite. Fun.
Made up Murdermaze G+ game. Fun.
Made up Warlords of Vornheim G+ game. More fun.
Ran Cthulhu on Christmas.
Played in Vertique, Hill Cantons, Trash Planet, Cocanha, The Vats of Mazarin, The Malicrux Sector, HUSK, Aggravaina, Scrap Princess' game wherever that is, NGR Kazakhstan, Castle Nicodemus, The Caves of Myrddin, and Outland.
GMed my players from the Horrible Ice Monkey Cave across the sea to the Cobalt Reach and the Fortress of Ferox the Incinerator.
Saw the Goblin King of Gaxen Kane hire a gang of G+ FLAILSNAILERS to hunt down my home group.

Most fun game to GM: Mmmmm...maybe this one?

This one had its charm, too.

Most fun game to GM on G+: Warlords of Vornheim. (Session 1, Joe's maxed out FLAILSNAILS wizard gets killed by a catapult crit in round 1.) Close second to Chill of Cthulhu.

Most fun game to be a player in in real life: NBA with Kenneth Hite or 4e with Satine.

Most fun game to be a player in on G+: It's very close, but Jeff's Wessex games or the Murdermaze games Scrap and Joey ran. Though it's a reallll close run thing with a lot of other games.

Warlords of Vornheim Is Really Fun To GM

(Redundant history lesson part you can skip)

Satine Phoenix, our recently resurrected rogue, is in Time Magazine talking about D&D this week and that's a keen transitiom because this D&D story starts with her.

Because a year and a half ago, she told me "Have you seen Google +? It's got free multiperson videochat on there!"

So then we started playing games.

Then the gentleman known in gaming circles as Calithena had this idea and he told me and Jeff:

Why not use these hangout games like the old games at the very beginning of the RPG hobby, when players carried their characters from game to game, wherever they could find a dungeon master?

So we got together and talked about it and I came up with a stupid acronym and FLAILSNAILS was born.

So people started running campaigns on G+--oftent he same worlds they were running at home--and characters have been traveling from dungeon to dungeon and GM to GM (and ruleset to ruleset) for a year and a half/

It's been fun. A couple personal favorite FLAILSNAILS moments:

-A whole party getting killed captured in Arcadayn's Castle Amber game and then sending out the call across Google+ on a Sunday morning to get together an all star team of PCs from all over the world to come rescue them (successful).

-Playing a dungeon in Ckutalik's Tekumel game and seeing a dead adventurer, then using Speak With Dead to talk to the dead PC from his real-life game in Texas and ask him where the traps were.

So FLAILSNAILS is one fun thing.

(End of history lesson.)
____


A second fun thing was that Deathmaze player-vs-player game I ran the other day.

I have no idea how much it resembled actual early D&D or Chainmail but it certainly seemed like every theoretically boring element of the early version of the game suddenly made more sense than it ever had in that format. All those 10x10 rooms with nothing but one monster and one treasure...

Putting a few simple elements together with players out to kill each other resulted in a frantically complex and exciting game without even trying.

-Didn't need a lot of rules because players knew the GM was making it up as he went along and trying to be fair.

-Didn't need complex tricks or traps in the dungeon because the enemies themselves and the crowdedness of the dungeon made each encounter complex in itself.

-Didn't need varied "moves" for PCs because directly attacking someone was only one of a few things you could do and was always a crapshoot no matter who you were.

-Only being able to use an effect/spell once was fine because it made a huge difference overall.

-Fighters' slightly better hit points and to hit bonus kept them in a fight consistently a few rounds longer than a thief and modified their tactics in obvious ways.

-Simply having items lying there alone in a room made sense and was useful. You grab it and move to the next room as soon as possible.

-Ranges didn't matter because range is always "across the room".

-Didn't need monsters or NPCs because the players were the monsters and NPCs.

-Sketchy room descriptions encouraged desperate characters to ask questions about the rooms when they were running out of ideas but let the room just be a room when they were feeling ok and moving fast at the start of the game.

-And mapping was fun and exciting because it could keep you alive nearly every round

In other words: I got a lot of interaction and intercoonectedness out of very little prep. Kind of the holy grail of GMing.

____

So then after the second Deathmaze game I stuck the two together:
player-vs-player plus experienced FLAILSNAILS PCs in Warlords of Vornheim.

And, man was it fun.

No prep. Just map and set the PCs loose in two teams...

First round:

Ian hauls out a catapult from behind a building to attack Joe.

Joe's PC, who has picked up 5 levels in three different classes over the past year, fireballs Ian. 

Ian survives, the catapult makes its save, and Ian rolls a natural 20 to hit Joe with it. 42 points of damage. Joe's long lived PC is gone, instantly.

And that's the first round.

It was like playing Magic: The Gathering with all the insane magic items GMs have been handing out to their players in different campaigns all year long. I counter your flaming sword from with....dragonscale armor!

But way more than that, there was this great level of incidental detail and history you got from bringing all these characters together from all these different worlds.

There's a warhorse and it's from somewhere and it has a name and it's done stuff and there's a magic cat and it's from somewhere else and it does something else and there's a guy with a laser and the laser's from somewhere else and the PCs know each other from doing this and doing that all over the world(s). There was wyvern poison from Castle Nicodemus and armor from Castle Zagyg and godawful monty haul crap from TSR modules and probably even some stuff from one of my dungeons. I think Jason's guy got shot with a gun he gave someone as treasure...

(I didn't have to invent any monsters or traps to run this game but I did have to use 3 different rulebooks from 3 different games plus someone had to call another GM midgame to figure out what their chaos venom did. )

And a lot of the "story" isn't just in the games but between them. Everyone constantly playing makes this weird kind of community of PCs...

+Trent B I think we have a classic "Power Trio" if we add in Manning. Sort of like "Star Trek" if Spock was a heroic-evil murder elf.

ZachM5:34 AM

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This sounds like a hilarious and great idea.

Trent B5:35 AM

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I uh... I love the interactions between our dudes... Manning is evil but pretending to be good, malice is good but pretending to be evil, and ward is good but keeps working toward evil ends.

Being a little loose with 'evil', but it sounds more dramatic than 'selfish'.

Trent B5:36 AM

Also I'm not comfortable with 'power trio'. Sounds too much like we need to wear uniforms. Colourful uniforms.

Trent B5:37 AM

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Ok fine. Lets wear uniforms.

Zach M5:47 AM (edited)

The really unanswerable question is: what fools could possibly be brave enough to fight us?

Trent B5:50 AM

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I think Manning and Ward share the honour of being the worst jousters in the multiverse....

So I guess, to answer your question, anyone with a horse.

Joe6:22 AM

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Oh wow. Just read the actual rules. I thought it was a murdermaze variant but its flailsnails! Sir the Fist is back! 

I think in every single RPG a big part of the fun is everyone playing gets to write part of a story and then just gets to sit back and watch it finish writing itself. I've never seen that happen as efficiently as tonight.

People who make narrative games often talk about trying to make a game feel like a great movie.

This kind of extended, overlapping, centreless story with a million characters thing FLAILSNAILS does is making the G+ universe feel like a TV series. A really good one. On HBO. That you can't shut up about.

Zach M

8:40 PM  

I would like to declare Malice Aforethought--Cutthroat, Wyvernsbane, Slayer of the Eye Tyrant, Strategos of the Mauve Legion and Lord of Murder--the undefeated heavyweight champion of Warlords of Vornheim and the FLAILSNAILS universe.

Thanks to my fellow Lords of Murder. I couldn't have done it without your characters, your next characters, your characters after that and the zombies my cat made out of them. You were a true asset to the team, and essential in the victory we've all won.

Warlords of Vornheim, look out: we're in the top spot right now. Vorn's city lies undefended before our chaos horde, and we're gonna run things just how we like. Stay out of our way.

You've been warned.

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4 comments

Joe 9:11 PM

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until thursday motherfucker!

jason 9:17 PM

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You only beat me due to your cowardly hiding in the shadows. I fought like a true man and you fought like a sneaky show hiding terrorist. Depending upon waves and waves of commie sympathizers. Socialists like yourself are always looking for handouts and you had lots of back up. Gimmli and I fought to the end while you used your evil minions to lay siege upon true patriots, you jerkhole. You only defeated the Sir The FIST OF JUSTICE by a cowardly attack. As Teddy Roosevelt as my witness I will make sure this treacherous and unsanctimoniousness will be remembered.

I have seen true evil and its name is assassin.

Zak Smith9:29 PM (edited)Edit

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The Council of Vornheim insists the Civil Defense Subcontracting Office is doing "a heck of a job"

If only they'd stop fucking up my setting--they're almost as bad as my players at home. Don't these people know I'm trying to sell books here?  

Sign up.

Or, better yet, run a game so I can play.