Vale Greg Stafford (1948 - 2018)

The Grand Shaman of Gaming as he was called passed away this month and it is appropriate to make a brief mark of respect here in this tome.

As gamers we are often blissfully ignorant of the many trailblazers who are responsible for the millions of hours of play across an entire globe of adventurers. We revel in immersive game play across often decades of memorable moments and Greg Stafford would have been responsible for a large proportion of them. Founder of Chaosium in 1975, arguably one of the greatest contributions to the industry was their reimagining of H P Lovecraft's work embodied in Call of Cthulu now in its 7th incarnation. If you have never played it then it's highly likely you know someone who has. A classic to the point of a formative work, the system is emblematic of Victorian mythology and the horrors still lurking at the edges of a pre industrial mind, though the Lovecraftian Mythos narrative has detail and world building that rivals even Tolkien's legacy.

In addition you may well be aware of his Glorantha novels as well as HeroQuest but as for myself, it was the RuneQuest system which has absorbed several years of my life set within the Glorantha world. As a percentile system I always found it quite accessible though it was always teased over specific hit point locations which technically meant a reasonable probability of having arms and legs lopped off.

Overall its hard to imagine other gamers who have made a larger contribution to role playing but as with all of the greatest works, his creations will outlive him for years to come. Here is a brief inspirational  clip from one of his workshops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etbo_ZFwi9A

Humble Fumble

So do you make your own luck is the question ? Having played poker for many years I sort of get the statistical approach to good fortune - make a hundred correct probabilistic decisions and you'll tend to win more often than not over time; the long run as it is called. Yes there are swings in fortune and intuition where gut feelings are concerned but being able to interpret the details of peoples behaviour will also result in calling more bluffs and avoiding traps. Fundamentally then, discipline and common sense does seem to keep people alive for the most part given that you have to take some knocks on the chin.

Whilst some of the current 5e players are new to role-playing, and I have been very sensitive to this, even I almost wiped them out using nothing more than a simple corridor. Investigating a keymaster's residence, a long thin building, a portal opened at the end of a very narrow corridor - enter stage left a Barbed Devil shrouded in mist.  First down the corridor is the Mage entering hand to hand combat. Brilliant. Next is the cleric, followed by the ranger, fighter and thief at the back. Merrily chomping away with my Devil, the entire combat basically involved people shuffling back and forth in a queue like a new iPhone release on black Friday.

Whilst I could have merrily got carried away PacMan style it was conversely the case that the devil would not have survived trying to fight through half a dozen characters one by one, which sort of resulted in a retreat by both sides, but it was basically an hilarious session akin to playing twister on an aeroplane. Its easy to judge of course but its all part of the learning experience.

In the flesh

 

Hacking ones own role playing game can be a weird experience. Whilst perusing the monster manual looking for the most disgusting creature to ambush the Planescape party with I had to somehow lever it into a running game in a way that doesn't violate the rules of the environment. To be honest, this isn't a particularly difficult problem in principal but as they are in Sigil, one has to respect certain unwritten rules, though ironically the rules are very precisely written down in the module guides of course but nevertheless, lateral thinking was required. A bit like the finery on the interior of a garment, it can never be appreciated by the casual passer by but its crucial for holding the experience together. 

So the D&D lot were investigating the disappearance of another party and I decided to send them down into the world of the Dabus; the caretakers of Sigil. Diligent and industrious yet autonomous and troglodyte, the Dabus clean the streets, maintain the buildings and cut back the razor vine. They are the silent servants of the Lady of Pain and enjoy her protection. Their warrens are generally off limits to the inhabitants of Sigil who never become aware of the gigantic service mazes below their feet.

The party were in fact invited down to the warren as the Dabus were having a problem disposing of a body, a solemn and grisly duty they share with the Dustmen's Guild but as the gates to their world are magically protected how was I to get an enemy down there to engage the party ? Well, the answer of course is to send it down there in pieces. Introducing the Flesh Golem, a master stroke of modular manufacture - bits of body scattered about a Dabus Gate will be dutifully taken down below for disposal but using a variant regeneration rule, the golem could slowly re-assemble itself before engaging on its grisly task. With a challenge rating of 5 and 2D8+4 slam damage we came quite close to taking out a couple of players. Like I say, no more Mr Nice guy.

All that glitters

https://www.theskiff.org/

There is a somewhat spit and sawdust feel to our club, a sort of dusty comfort one associates with an old battered leather sofa. Indeed the Belmont is probably the least pretentious place on the entire planet sporting original bar billiards, a fake baize pool table, somewhat dangerous darts and a glitter ball of unknown origin. Pre industrial beer is dispensed with occasional medieval service and what once passed for a selection of mostly defrosted pies has been quietly dealt with.

But there is a dilemma if  truth be told. Whilst we enjoy extremely cheap beer and an unusually large social area, the rooms that we have for gaming are boarder line acceptable. I don't mind wobbly tables and retired chairs as such but the damp is particularly bad downstairs and some furnishings have suffered from years of biological warfare.

So last Friday Jules kindly invited me to "The Skiff", a laid back set of hot desking tech offices in Blackburn St - a possible alternative venue. After leaving I was struck with a number of conflicting feelings. Whilst you couldn't ask for a cleaner and more laid back designer environment re-pleat with comfortable playing spaces, large high quality tables, loungy sofas and even a glitter ball in the kitchen, it did at the end of the day feel a bit professional; a bit like visiting a google office.

I do feel for new visitors to the club sometimes with its occasionally dreadful rooms but what the Belmont loses in hygiene, it sort of makes up with character. Not sure I got that feeling from the Skiff and re-tasking a well established club would be very painful but perhaps we would take our character with us. As always, time will tell but we have to face the reality of an expanding club at some point.

In the beginning

A curious but rewarding experience of club life is guiding the first steps of new role players, after all, each of us rolled a dice for the first time at some point. Whilst it must seem like a whole jumble of numbers, narratives, rules and pictures the first thing I try to do is keep the character sheets away from the players as much as possible for their first go and get their attention. Everyone has a character sheet in front of them of course but I take ownership when I run the session as strictly speaking they are primarily there for the GM to resolve mechanics - yes there is all the character based stuff but that can be just ignored for the first few goes.

It is interesting to see how the brain fills in the blanks though; small teams of people do start to cooperate instinctively and when challenged with simple tasks new players will tend to brainstorm naturally just like a project team at work, and occasionally individuals do try things out. In the DnD for example, the party did spend a lot of time trying to open a city gate -but to be fair they didn't really know what the consequences or rules were but if confidence doesn't spur someone on then boredom will - simply climbing over the gate and unlocking it from the other side would not normally be a lengthy affair. But when presented with an alien game it can be a slow realization that you can actually manipulate things in the same way as you can in real life.

Things of course began to click quickly after that and the players really started looking around, investigating their environment and had their first fairly passive encounter, albeit with a mad person. With a brief introduction to a strong but innocuous personality, the penny starts to drop and the players wandered confidently into a city tavern rich with atmosphere and bustling with adventure and intrigue. The party weren't quite delegating tasks properly as they were all sort of wandering around together as a single entity but given a couple of small combats, emphasis starts to differentiate their roles and subsequently I introduced some simple choices for the players as a first step to handing them their own responsibility and destiny - choices after all have consequences and it will be time for some tough love soon enough.

It will be interesting to see at what point their individual characters begin to dictate actions in opposition to both the group dynamic as well as against their personal opinions, which is sort of the end game of a role playing beginning. The real real trick though  is not just to stay alive in any given situation but to avoid being at each others throats when things really get dicey.

Lawful Good sandwiches

It was about a eighteen months ago that wanderers abruptly began to tell me that it was the Meetups website that pointed them in our general direction and no longer this venerable tome. For almost a decade, blogger has been the crumbling path in the fog that has guided role players to the Railway Club and given the usual stresses in routinely rotating games I had been thinking whether we should be levering it as our primary mechanism for bringing order to the chaos.

What's interesting about recently starting a 4th game advertised on Meetups, is that it's already pretty much full within a fortnight. This poses some fundamental questions, not only of the call for 5th game but its also worth considering where we might be headed with all this. More interestingly are we actually witnessing something much bigger,  a new post social media renaissance no less ? It's amazing that home computers which forced people back into their homes for decades are now rebounding with equal force through the ether and pushing the curious out. Perhaps VR will swing us back the other way but for now, whilst bigger is busier, it's not necessarily better, I'm not exactly sure how we will sustain the welcoming and familiar feeling as a growing club in this respect.

But of course it may be an illusory issue; where people of good character are concerned it shouldn't be a problem as I suspect that we will continue to thrive in our passions despite having more members as it's fundamentally as much to do with who we are as what we do. There are many ways to slice bread and whilst there is a bitter and burnt dark side to any piece of toast there will always be a lighter more golden side.

D4

We are now underway for the autumn and all the new games are up and running. As expected our newer membership can't actually fit into any of the existing games easily so we have dutifully wheeled out a fourth. Props to the GMs though as each of them has said they could entertain a guest for an evening if push comes to shove but with the best of intentions packing a busy game with additional characters often just slows things down and can result in a skewed experience for the beginner which is not great encouragement for a new hobby.

Conversely as we have only just tipped the scales for a fourth there are only two or three players to make a party. Whilst I don't wish to steal players from another game, one cant actually steal people as such, so prisoners of conscience are my preferred weapon and as far as role playing characters can teach you things about real people,  encouraging others to offer the consideration that they were shown when they first arrived is often all that is required to drop into a conversation.

Nevertheless, social engineering aside, I always pack a game and my current interest in the Planescape content of 2nd Ed means I have something to motivate me as well as the ability to portal players in and out of a game conveniently. I have also advertised the game on meetups so we'll see if we'll get additional interest or just the usual Russian hackers.

Darkness

The great wheel turns once again and the photons dance ever earlier in the ember evenings preparing for their great migration over the coming months. Whilst we wish them well on their journey it is a time where we tend to see more travellers coming in from the cold. Perhaps its the holiday season closing or maybe the more embarrassing tan lines have faded, either way we are likely to get additional players tempted to test their fates.

New members notwithstanding, it was good to see Crish last week. I describe him as one of the Great Old ones and whilst he does test the sanity from time to time, I did spend the evening catching up with him and we may well have the pleasure of his presence on a few more occasions before the end of the year. It always nice to get revisits from role players who have been away for many years as it lends the club an ambience of heritage and I am reminded that this digital tome itself is fast approaching a decade old.

In game news GM Bill's D&D prequel to my own Planescape has concluded at a grisly portal alter of a snake cult; this will now roll over to GM Jamie's Stars Without Number. GM Dylan's Starfinder has begun as well as GM Mike's homebrew system.  A fourth game is imminent I feel as the internet is telling me we have yet more incoming so we'd better find additional dimensions to squeeze them into before things get out of hand.

Who are you ?

 

I'm not sure whether you call it a bug or a feature but from time to time we have had the conversation regarding translating characters between systems. This is not an unusual way of spicing up game play and campaigns that have been run for a very long time. It's also a really fun thing to try out as its a sort of cooking by numbers when you are actually missing some of the digits. Some systems, such as the recent Strange, actually revolve around swapping universes but the same can be done in principal by using any two systems, so by simply hacking at the respective RPG character rules and rolling up an equivalent using adjusted mechanics you should be able to migrate a personality. Ok, there may be issues drawing up a droid in Deadlands so some creativity may be required but I have always seen it sort of work albeit with some compromises.

However, my memory is cast back about 30 years when we passed a fun evening using the old Timelords system. Not to be confused with Doctor Who, the narrative begins at the end of time with a race called the Designers who have to invent a temporal matrix in order to survive - time paradoxes were "solved" by jumping to another universe. However the system includes mechanics for rolling up oneself; reality being just another system of course.

I don't remember much of the details other than holding out a weight for as long as I could to generate my strength stat. There was an IQ test for Int, or you could use your school qualifications if available, and also I remember a weird balancing act to determine Dex. The list of skills is almost directly drawn from professional abilities and hobbies. I didn't have a pet at the time, so no familiar but oddly enough roleplaying was a skill I had to add to my own roleplaying character sheet - the number of years spent within an interest or capability determined the in game rank. Nevertheless after a drunken evening I remember being pleased with the result but overall I was less surprised to find out that as a party, we were all a bit crap. Well I guess students start at first level, but as a wizened master now I would be keen to try this again as my miserable old git score would be off the charts.

Finders keepers

So the deals are done and our new GMs are beginning to scratch their heads as players begin to roll up their characters and ask annoying questions. As if space wasn't big enough, Stars Without Number has acquired quite a large group of players now and GM Mike's home brew system has intrigued enough characters to commit in force at the end of the month. There definitely seems strong interest in going slightly off road compared to some of our more standard offerings historically and for my part I have signed up for GM Dylan's Starfinder.

As I did get lost among the AD&D tomes for twenty years it wasn't just the versions three and four that passed me by. I had also completely missed the birth of the Pathfinder community although I have always been dimly aware its success. At the time of writing, Paizo's website is down  but I am unaware if Starfinder itself is being uplifted alongside their primary system although it could be just be a matter of one flowing naturally from the other. Either way, I never had the opportunity to play Pathfinder so the next few months will be a chance to give a nod of respect to a parallel system. I have no idea what races or constructs will be available but I already have an idea brewing...

In the broader scheme of things, as the holiday season is drawing to a close, we traditionally get a rise in interest as the evenings darken. If our more recent members also become regulars and we continue to draw in wanderers then we'll just have to find another universe for them to jump into.

What do you want ?

As we are on course to rotate games shortly there has been the usual foray into peoples opinions and preferences as to how this should be done. There are a number of issues, partly the time of year doesn't help as with a few players on holiday as it takes two or three weeks just to see everyone and get some feedback. I am still of the opinion that as we are a club of no more than twenty players of an evening that we should in principal be able to sort ourselves out by the good old fashioned method of chinwagging. But to be fair as we welcome random wanderers, regular part timers and the die hards its just not possible to satisfy everyone's parameters, including those who want to GM.

As fun as a social melting pot is I have been thinking about opening up another role-playing evening for a while now, partly because Thursdays is at capacity but also because it would be a chance to test out the meetups function. Whilst this effectively makes each game an isolated experience, it is scaleable and provides a level playing field for everyone. More importantly GMs don't have to battle each other for players - they simply post and see what interest is like. I have always been concerned that splitting up a casual club into formal games would fragment the community spirit but this is certainly not the case at the Craft Beer Co as there are a core of at least a dozen players who meet regularly and we chat at their quarterly Entmoots; at the end of the day, players will migrate to the games they want to play so a formal meetup post for 4 players lets say would leave each GM with 2  back pocket flexi slots for visitors and those who want to change their minds after starting.

Like many things in life it a case of suck it and see.

Stars Without Number

By Jupiter, I do believe we have a plan. So it seems that formal notice has been given for the end of August and GMs have actually offered a number of systems albeit after the holiday season. Personally I don't know why one would feel the need to leave a perfectly respectable fantasy world by taking a break in the real one. After an initial subdued response, a number of heralds have started trumpeting; akin to a snow globe, it seems like we just needed a bit of a shake before the magic happened. Alternatively, one can think of our members as a creative pinata that just needs a good beating from time to time with a large spikey club.

Nevertheless, GM Mike is offering another instalment of his personal system which will be most excellent if his previous sessions are anything to go by, GM Jack has offered a Savage Worlds for which I have a particular soft spot, GM Fade has offered the next chapter of his D&D and I have heard that one of our newer members is interested in running a thing about something, so more on this in our next post. Also GM Jamie, who is renowned for bringing along some of his extensive board game collection from time to time, will be running Stars Without Number. 

A new one on my radar, SWN is a Kevin Crawford/ Sine Nomine OSR (old school revival) system based around Space Exploration, but in this case the mechanics are built from the bottom up as a sandbox toolset rather than a narrative and its GM and player instructions are simplified very thoughtfully. In this regard the system can be easily adapted to any particular universe. Here is an excellent overview by Questing Beast

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53s3rAbz0-8

And if you like free stuff, currently there is a 250 page free version on Drivethrough !

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/230009/Stars-Without-Number-Revised-Edition-Free-Version

Classic

To say we've played a lot of games over the years is to make quite the understatement. The genres have spanned civilisations, the narratives have traversed the planes and there have been experiences from transhuman existentialism to medieval infighting. Alongside the weird and wonderful worlds we have inhabited are the even weirder though not necessarily wonderful characters that we have played. What I find interesting is that there doesn't seem to be any particular convergent set of characteristics or classes that can be said to be optimal. In other words, there is no win button.

This is a testament to healthy games and good GMs but oddly enough we now seem to have come full circle in the D&D5e stopgap currently being run by GM Bill as it turns out that drawing a couple of characters out of a hat and another couple out of the players brains we have neatly settled onto the archetypal Warrior, Rogue, Wizard, Thief. A timeless formula up there with Classic Coke, Fish and Chips and Country and Western. Its just like Stranger Things, but less strange.

In terms of stopgap games, the call has gone out to the next set of GMs but the response seems ominously quiet at present. Ordinarily RPG clubs have regular problems finding GMs but we have been lucky so far over the years and always had a glut of people wanting to try various things. This may be changing now but I suppose its equally possible people are just stuck in Netflix somewhere..