I’m running Freemarket, a post-singularity science fiction game that takes place in a space station near Saturn. This is not your rayguns & rockets sci-fi.

You don’t need a fancy, special computer, usually just Skype and a web browser, maybe the ability to run Java (The Freemarket game needs a free program running to make the cards work).

Games being run

• Technoir
• Freemarket
• Call of Cthulhu
• Searchers of the Unknown
• All Flesh Must Be Eaten
• Dogs in the Vineyard

So head over to http://ryvencon.omnivangelist.net/ – take a look at the schedule, sign up for a game and do something different this weekend!

Spirit of the Century is a pickup pulp RPG made by Evil Hat Productions. It’s pretty awesome in my opinion, so there’s that.

It’ll take place in the 30′s. If you have a holiday themed character concept, that’s cool, if not, that’ll be fine too.

Anyone who wants to play is welcome (at least until we run into the limits of a skype call). If you’re interested, please drop me a note (LWaSH crew – I’m assuming you’re playing unless you’ve told me otherwise)

We will be generating characters on the fly, and you don’t need to have played Spirit of the Century before.

Happy Holidays!

I’m talking about the erosion of the mechanical impact of alignment. In the old days, the if a player didn’t play to their alignment, if their actions drifted too far from their alignment, DM’s were encouraged to change it on them, and dock them XP till their character either atoned or got acclimated to their new alignment.

A lot of other things have changed in D&D since then. XP has morphed from a reward mechanic (points for finding gold for example) to more of a pacing mechanic, 10 average encounters or so, everyone levels.

For the record, I feel that both of those changes are for the good. Using alignment as a stick to beat players with never set well with me, and XP as a ‘score’ brings its own set of problems (penalties are often subjective, and the game begins to break when players get too far seperated in level)

What does one thing have to do with the other? I’m not sure, but here’s what I’m thinking.

In 4e, your level measures a couple of things. Competence of course, but also reputation. At the risk of adding a fun-killing amount of bookkeeping to the game, what if players were evaluated by what alignment their behavior warranted on a encounter per encounter basis?

Over time, this ‘score’ could do some things. With the notion of experience representing (among other things) how much of a reputation the character has, what if it also ganged what their reputation was. Someone who plays their alignment faithfully would be known as a man of his word, one who doesn’t, a hypocrite. There’s something about the notion of the character who believes in his heart that he’s doing good work, but from the point of view of ‘the people’ he’s become a monster.

I’m thinking about house-ruling this into my D&D game when it picks up again in the fall, but in the meantime, I’m curious what people’s thoughts are on the matter.

[Edit: If you do something different, let me know. If you think I'm could do it better, let me know. I'm doing this to improve, so I want to hear what you do, and what you don't like about how I currently do it.]

I usually start by making a list of the characters, both player and non player, and think about what they want, looking for something ‘grabby’. This gave me some missions for the PC’s (I’m a bit of a jerk, so I made sure that doing either one well would make the other harder)

At this point, I hit the area map. We’re playing in the Nentir Vale from the DMG, and after I found out what a Fen was (it’s a swamp), I had a bit of a flood of set-pieces I wanted to see.

After looking through my monster manuals, pulling out monsters that would be appropriate for both the setting and the adventure level, I started adding some meat to these encounters. For example, I wanted something to happen at a site that was used as a mass grave (fallen soldiers from some battle), so, skeletons fit the bill.

Be aware, at this point, my ‘mission’ was pretty much, this guy wants this maguffin from this place.

As the combat encounter ideas fill out, I was able to put together a story of what happened here, letting me fill out some details a to what the job is, and also sprinkle some new twists.

About now, I start thinking about skill challenges. How this mission could be made easier or harder depending on character competence. I made the exact location unknown, and the challenge be a research project/journey, with the outcome hinge on whether that have to wander around in the swamp looking, or can piece together the location of this ‘lost’ outpost (I didn’t know it was lost until now, at this stage, I try real hard to hold ideas loosely)

From there, I switch to thinking more about numbers than story, set encounter levels, and exactly who’s fighting where and why. XP budgets and all that jazz.

I iterated from these two approaches until I felt I had a fight pacing that felt good, and a story that made sense
Playing by the book, I checked what treasure parcels were due to be dropped, put them in a pile, and sprinkled them throughout the module based on what makes sense and when the items will be most useful for the characters. (I take the advice saying it’s okay to combine parcels a a pass to split parcels as well)

Being an outdoor adventure (mostly), I didn’t bother doing encounter maps till the last minute, aside from noting features I wanted. I’m pretty lo-fi about that sort of thing, so maps are quick work.

That’s about it. Bounce around till I find something to grab onto, come up with some scenes and how they link up, work the numbers and wing it.

• ChattyDM pimping one of SarahDarkmagic’s encounters over brunch in the PRU food court
• Not being able to play in the Dark Sun preview, so voulenteering to DM it on Sunday.
• Dinner, Drinks and D&D at the Asguard Pub with the RPG Blogger crew, and the WotC crew that was working PAX. I didn’t even know that places let you play games in public, the waitress was awesome, and I had a blast.
• Trying (and failing) to score a Saturday pass.
• Talking games for the better part of Saturday with Quinn from At-Will, at whose house I was crashing for the weekend.
• Running the Dark Sun Preview, which is one of the best written short adventures I’ve seen, kudos to Chris Tulach (Seriously, if you get a chance to play this, do it because it is awesome.)
• Getting to bend Luke Crane’s ear a bit about Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, and Freemarket. He was extremely tolerant.

Which brings me to something. Everyone I met at PAX East was classy, friendly, and eager to make the weekend awesome. We gamers should do stuff together more.

On thing. I didn’t see any of the events. No keynote, no panels, no screenings, no concerts. I’m a little disappointed by this, but I wouldn’t trade what I did get to do for anything, so I guess it’s all good.

Either way, I’m looking forward to my next con (ConnectiCon), and trying to find more opportunities to play in public in the meantime.

I’ve been wanting to try running some games on Google Wave, and I think I will start with a short term Traveller game. Greywulf over at Greywulf’s Lair set up some waves showing the sort of thing you can do to set up a game, and I plan on taking what I like from his setup and apply it for my game.

Here’s what I’m thinking – A sandbox style game, taking place in the Traveller Universe. Maybe traders on a ship, maybe hired guns, depending on the players. While I’ll probably want to continue it beyond this, I only want to commit to one job or episode for now.
The game would mostly run as a play by post over Wave, though I also want to try at least one session scheduled realtime (possibly with a skype call going at the same time).

For at least the first chapter, you’ll have to be on Wave. Once I’ve got the “Try Wave Out” bug out of my system, I may be open to playing using more mature online gaming tools.
Let me know if you’re interested in playing (I’d be shooting for at least one post per day, and one live session, to see how that works)

I’ll probably get a recruiting thread up on Wave tomorrow. [Update: Recuitment/Discussion Thread now active]

Image courtesy of Traveller 3D

http://at-will.omnivangelist.net/2009/11/the-waves-the-thing-looking-for-gamemasters/

Submissions close this Wednesday, (the 11th), so if you’re interested, post your pitch on At-Will (100 words or less) and take a shot. (There are a bunch of waves pledged, so there are going to be multiple winners)

On Wave and mode.

You’re not really supposed to be able to edit a gadget in while viewing a blip, and with Fighty, I’ve learned why. If someone’s dragging the map around, and someone else is working with markers, they get really messed up. Also, the playback feature and the new items feature is practically useless, because every time someone pans the map, or zooms out, that’s a new change.

So, what I’ve done is made the map static most of the time. Here’s how it’s gonna work (for now)

Of you’re editing the blip containing the map (you can tell because you have text formatting buttons up top), everything works the way it always had. You can drag, add and delete markers, and they get updated everywhere. If you pan or zoom, they get updated for everyone in view mode.

If you’re in view (or any other) mode, you can watch. You’re able to pan around, you can zoom in or out, but someone in edit can recenter your map, or change the zoom level. You lose the add marker button. And you can look all you want, without triggering a wave update.

If this is horrible, let me know, this is the best way I can come up with addressing this issue, and it gets what to me seems to be a big usability problem taken care of, so I can focus on fun stuff (like getting icons to work), and maybe even some gaming.

A friend of mine set up a D&D 4E game on Wave, based on Revenge of the Giants, which I was lucky to signup in time to play. This has already been discussed enough by the DM, gamefiend (see previous link) and one of the other players, Wyatt, so I’m not going to add anything there.

I’ve been spending a lot of time filling in one of the gaps that wave doesn’t do well yet, and given the nature D&D 4E, I feel is important. The battlemat.

So, Fighty is born. It’s a gadget for Google Wave, which uses a custom map from Maplib.Net. It’s a bit of a hack, as I’m not the greatest programmer in the world, but it’s just getting to the point where it is useful.

Let me know what you think.

When d20/3E came out, I was so far away from Fantasy role-play, and set enough in my ways, that I wasn’t impressed with the changes (a gamer not likeing a new edition of D&D, never!). I didn’t really dig into the system till 3.5 came out. I was in the group that was mad that miniatures were listed as required, I mean this is D&D isn’t it? All you should need is dice, paper, and your books…

And I moved on. The funny thing is, sometime between when I stopped playing 2E, and now, traditional RPG’s became a thing that required minis to work. I know this isn’t really true, because I remember playing and having a blast without battlemaps and whatnot.

Just recently, I pulled out my old 1e core books from storage, and went through it. Best I can figure is I either ignored or winged tracking who was and wasn’t in melee, how tough it would be for someone to engage/disengage, and flanking/terrain advantages.

I mostly play 4E these days, and I’ve always so far used counters & maps/tiles to track combat location. What I wonder is, how tough would it be do hold all that stuff in your head, and would it make things more fun?

Are miniatures no different from initiative trackers, power cards, and hit point tracks? Just tools that take some of the cognitive load off the players? And does the clear representation of the battlefield that they provide impair the narrative of an encounter?

Comments welcome.