Playing Boot Hill again

The day before yesterday I once again played Boot Hill. It was a very old school experience. We had started an adventure, five years ago, and none of us remembered a thing. Our referee looked mystified at his notes while we players tried to decipher our scribblings on the character sheets. What were those abilities again? Finally we figured out what numbers meant we were good at shooting, and our referee rolled back time and we restarted the adventure.

You know how we all say over and over again that deadly systems often have very quick character generation systems? This is a game that should need a very, very quick character generation system! We sat in a cantina somewhere and in came some ruffians, and naturally a fight erupted. My character was a greenhorn and botched loading his musket, and was a sitting duck while the lead was heavy in the air. Finally I managed to get a shot off with my "appropriated" french revolver we had found on some guy during a big kerfuffle in Mexico City. Then a bullet struck my character in the head.

Luckily I survived, but did nothing more in the fight than turning over the table each time someone entered the room, to have some cover during the fight.

The system is really peculiar. You get increases in abilities, but you get bonuses at spaced out intervals. That is interesting, since you can get both the satisfaction of seeing the numbers increase, and the "stair" effect of a level based system. Also, you have stats for sight and hearing, gun accuracy and throwing accuracy. It's really a system where the stats play first fiddle, and the skills are something of an oddity tacked on.

From the reviews I've read, nobody seems to think very highly of the game and I agree that it lacks that something extra. Still, we had fun in a crazy way. My character has 100% speed, 06% in intelligence, 98% in sight and slightly bad of hearing. Naturally I just had to do whatever was the most stupid thing possible, while still trying to stay alive and instant hilarity is guaranteed. Extremes are always more fun when trying to roleplay.

Our GM have created a big pile of tables for weapons, extra rules, tabled and such from decades of playing the game. I'm trying to convince him to type it up for the world to see. Contrary to the deadliness correlation mentioned above, his variant is actually not that quick. But, thanks to all those tables you get to know what you did in the war, where your family is from and all that stuff. I love life path systems!

Maybe our next session will be sooner than another five years...

Using D&D modules with T&T

I found this nice table on my hard disk. No author or indication of where I got it from, sadly.

(edited to include the table as a picture so it fits the page. I really need to take some time to investigate another layout of this blog. Thanks for the heads up, Timeshadows!)

Now I am thinking that maybe this can be used to be able to convert monsters in Rappan Athuk to T&T on the fly. If, say, a 5 HD monster is called for, I look at the line for level and finding 5 I read out the MR in the column for Normal, or maybe Hard if the monster have class levels. How about that?

Every time I get back to a game I haven't run in a while I get this sense of dislocation before the old reflexes kick back in. Right now the feeling of how to gauge a fitting MR is really rusty.

Everything you wanted to know about Ron Edwards, and then some

Since everyone know that random tables are fun, talking about cthulhu or Ron Edwards makes your visitor statistics go through the roof, I just couldn't resist this randomly generated fact about Ron Edwards.

 There is no Ron but Ron!

Basically that site, Abulafia, is a boatload of random tables. I love tables and some of these are just wonderful. While there might not be any Slime Ladies or Mouldy Hieroglyphs I still think there are some true gems in there.

How about the adventures of the amazing super heroes The Canadianster and The Ebony Squidlass, and working against them are the Venomous Association of the Imperial Mountains that are political assassins, currently playing a deeper game than anyone realizes? A campaign just like that. Too bad I don't do superheroes.

I'll conclude with this random fact. Hilarious!

James Cameron wanted Chuck Norris to play the Terminator. However, upon reflection, he realized that would have turned his movie into a documentary, so he went with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Making interesting characters

I read a good blog post today, which got me thinking about how I generate the characters I play. Our Sunday Group have been playing different kind of New School, indie games, for a while now. Many of these games come from the movement to empower the player which can be said to have started at The Forge. In those games you usually focus a lot on the player characters, naturally. To then just roll the bones and play what you get is kind of antithetical to that idea. My problem is that rolling the bones is how I go about such things!

I was once very fond of GURPS. My love with that system ended when I tried to make some characters in that system. It's a great system in many respects, but it showed to me an aspect which I know about, but hadn't felt before. If you ask me about what kind of character I'd like to play in this or that game, I usually think a bit and then give a few words of the attitude I'm aiming for. When using GURPS that is usually where you have to start, but for me that is the end. Sitting down and actually design a character built upon that vague attitude and you'll find me flailing about indecisively. I don't design my characters. I play them, from the start.

Rolling the bones and making up something as you go along is my way of doing it. I have nothing against detailed concepts, but I suck a making them up on the spot. Using life path systems is something I love, since it gives me a character with a lot of interesting wrinkles and also helps me start imagining things. So, having a table like the one on bloodlines which Mike is working on is right up my alley. Something like this in the rulebook of my beloved T&T would make me happy. As far as I know, neither Flying Buffalo nor anyone else have every published anything like that. A new character could always use some polish, right?

Here's some rough sketches, and a few newly cut facets which shows the jewel beneath. Now, imagine the hell out of it!

Let's shake up combat!

I'm a sucker for tables. Tables where you roll some dice and read of something you never would have thought of, and suddenly your games takes a new turn. AEG Toolbox is one of my favourite game books of all time (Yes, I have the JG Ready Ref Sheets, I just haven't had time to look at them yet!).

This is a pearl I found. Random Combat Events. Go wild!