Characters Can Be Crazy

Most of my posts here are about board games, but in the last couple of weeks I've had two new RPG's start, one as a PBEM and one as a live on-line experience.  This has me in an RPG frame of mind, so today I'm all about that bass our last live gaming session.

We played in google hangout, and the system and world are home-brew D&D knock-offs created by +John Williams.  A couple of weeks ago he sent us a slimmed down rule book, some world background info, and let us make our characters.  The rules have a lot of random generation tables, and all 3 of us PC's used those to a fairly large degree. 

This, in my mind is point #1 where things started to go really right. Whenever I've made a character in the past, it has involved things like "What does the party need?" and "What's something really cool I can do?"  This isn't a terrible way to make a character, but it does lead to me often making similar characters with similar traits that all play in a similar manner.  Using the tables here gave me something I never would have come up with on my own - and that's a great thing.  It allowed me to break out of the mould I had been in for a long time, and forced to me really think about how my character will react in different situations.

How my character
spent the game
The second thing that lead to this being a great session is also a character creation tidbit. This game requires you to pck or generate things like background occupations, medical conditions, psychological traits, personality traits, and quirks.  Having some of this decided for me (again, by random table) set a base for me to build my character around.  It turns out I was a nervous person with a nervous little laugh, and a pyrophobe.

Part 3 of kick-ass game night was our GM.  +John Williams set a simple scene for us with almost no NPC's to worry about.  Instead the action centered on the relationship between us 3 PC's (myself, +C.D. Gallant-King and +Dave Geno).  We had just been thrown together and had to figure out how to deal with the scary things happening to us, all while not knowing how the other PC's may react. 

This is my legacy.
A few highlights of that interaction: +Dave Geno's character had a bit of a foul mouth and foul temper, and it irked my high-strung nerves.  I *MAY* have pushed him down the stairs in to the cellar where he *MAY* have put his hand through a putrefied corpse.  Later, after being hounded by a ghost, my character thought that burning the bones we found would be a sure-fire (pun intended) way to get rid of it.  Being a pyrophobe, I didn't have any experience on how best to accomplish this safely.  So I doused to place in oil, struck a spark, then fled while screaming at the top of my lungs.  I will admit that in hindsight this did very little to help ingratiate me with the rest of the party.  There were some harsh words as we stood out in the rain and watched the only shelter for miles around crumble in a smoking heap of rubble.

Now the real question is "What happens next time?"  I think I might have to watch my back, as I'm not so sure my friends will actually be friendly.

Greatest Hits

Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaign

Image
There are many bands out there who like to play loud, ass-kicking, speaker-bursting music with thrashing guitars and pounding drums. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, most of them are total geeks. They may look like hard-ass biker leather fetishists, but in reality they're just D&D and Lord of the Rings nerds who hope that if they sing about dwarves and elves loud enough, people will think they're tough and not pick on them anymore. He was almost cool. Then he opened his mouth. Although I'm sure we could list thousands of bands that could fall into the genre, I'm just going to list The Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaigns. Actually, they're just my 4 favourites, but whatever. 4. Iron Maiden Seriously, how many kids back in the 80s ran home after school to play D&D and listen to Iron Maiden? Well, probably not THAT many, but if you're reading a blog about role-playing games and you're over 30 years old, you know what I&#
Read more

10 More Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

Image
Last year I shared a list of 10 Random Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios based on my ad-hoc zombie survival/horror game (which is kinda like a DCC Funnel but set in the modern world, and with zombies). It was actually one of the most popular posts I ever wrote on this site (people still really seem to like zombies , go figure) so I thought it was time for a sequel. Last time the set-ups were pretty standard fare. Scenarios you've seen in many zombie movies, games and books. A rag-tag bunch of strangers, thrown together in an every day situation (a crashed bus, locked in a mall, hiding in a cabin in the woods) and they must survive the overwhelming onslaught of the undead. Death is rampant and expected (each player begins with four 0-level characters), and only the best (or more likely luckiest) will survive. This time a few of the scenarios are quite a bit weirder and may take some more prep work. If you don't want them, don't pick them, or if you roll them randomly,
Read more

The Walking Dead Role-Playing Game

Image
The Season 5 premiere is not until late October, but news broke this week that The Walking Dead has just starting filming the upcoming season. In a few short months our favourite band of post-apocalyptic undead-fighting misfits will once again grace our TV screens, but until then we have to entertain ourselves somehow. And since going around pretending people are zombies and stabbing them in the head is frowned upon (for some reason), we'll have to find some other way to get our zombie-killing fix. Why isn't there a role-playing version of The Walking Dead yet?  There are numerous board games, none of which are very good . The video game by Telltale is excellent and very story- and RP-based, but it's one-player and pretty linear (Don't kid yourself - the multiple-path narrative is just an illusion. It always ends the same). A property like The Walking Dead is simply begging for an open-world, sandbox-style RPG. You have a group of survivors working together
Read more

10 Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

Image
Can you smell Halloween on the air? Smells like non-toxic face paint and burnt pumpkins. In case you weren't aware, I've been playing around with a zombie/horror game based on the Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel system - basically you send in a gang of 0-level schlubs, hoping that at least one survies to become a level 1 character in an on-going post-apocalyptic survival game. It uses basic d20 rules that everyone is pretty familiar with. To keep the game as chaotic as possible, in our first playthrough I just rolled the scenario out randomly as we went along - determining encounters, locales, etc purely by a toss of the dice - and I plan to continue doing the same thing. Partly this is to keep my prep work down, partly it's to keep the tension and suspense high as the party never knows what to expect. Sometimes the group meets 1d4 stray dogs, sometimes they meet 1d4+1x100 roaming zombies. I've been using the many tables in Palladium's DEAD REIGN ™®© books (a
Read more