Rule of the Dice

About 6 months ago I read through all of JS Morin's Black Ocean series.  These are short novellas, episodic in nature and feel a lot like the TV show Firefly where a crew of a ship gets up to silly hi-jinx while always looking for the next job, the next score, or the next get rich quick scheme. The whole time I was reading the series, I felt like there was potential for a  RPG to be based on this setting.  It has all the essentials - an easy to sum up background, potential for fun quirky characters, and a familiar enough feel to get the uninitiated in to it.  Keep this last point in mind while I tell this next part... Yep, this gets complicated.... A group of 6 or 7 of us have been playing a D6 Star Wars adventure fairly regularly for the past 4 months or so - typically meeting on Skype twice a month.  While not everyone can make it every time, we've managed to keep a fun adventure going with different characters popping in and out as available.  to ...

Anyone who is a regular reader of this blog (there are at least 2 or 3 of you, right??) will notice a distinct lack of posts over the last 3 months or so.  If I were getting paid for this, I'm sure I would have been fired by now.  Between the holidays, work, and some other hobbies , I haven't had time to write.  In fact I haven't even had time to play any games.  So this brings up the point of this post: How do you find time to play? A couple of posts ago I talked about my new PBEM game.  It fell apart soon after that post.  I take a huge part of the blame for it, as I  tried to build intrigue and world events before I built any reason for the players to care for their characters.  I also didn't introduce the combat mechanics soon enough, so I think the players weren't sure how to react to events as they didn't know how easily they could die.  Beyond these issues though, was also just a lack of time on everyone's part.  At first eve...

Hmmm, that title doesn't quite sound right.  Oh well.      Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the wedding of Alex and Emily, two of the people in my current table top gaming group.  They play with us a lot less often than I'd like, but that's only because they currently live in the UK and can only play when they come back to Canada for a visit. Ironically, the first visit back from England that we played at, they introduced us to Great Fire of London:1666 .  At the wedding, another from our group, the brilliant  Kathryn K  gave one of the most impressive wedding speeches I've ever heard.  Here it is in all of its unabashed glory: Kathryn and the Astronaut "Friends and family,  3 years ago I met Alex and Emily working at St. Michael's College School and it was the greatest things about working there.... that and meeting Chris Hadfield, that was pretty great- Alex and Emily are a very close second to Chris Hadfield. ...

As I posted about here , I had been toying with GMing a new game.  Well it has come to fruition.  My group has started a PBEM (play by e-mail) game, set in the world of Robin Hobb's Farseer books . We've only been going for about 2 weeks now, which isn't very long in PBEM time, but I'm already having doubts.  The problem is, I can't tell if my players are having any fun. The start of an adventure is always tedious.  Players aren't sure who the other PC's are, or where they are supposed to fit in.  As GM, I never know how much infomation to give.  So far my adventure is pretty open.  The King has given the party a task, but how they go about it, and what they discover along the way is up to them.  I do have a general story in mind, but if they take a left turn, I'm happy to adjust and improvise.  And as a PBEM, that's much easier for me as I have time to think about any changes. Where I think I might be going wrong is that I haven...

Since it's Halloweek , we decided that our last game of the night should be thematically appropriate. I had just bought last night on earth, so we opened it up and got cracking.  Here are my thoughts on the game: 1) Packaging.  The box has tons of room, but the interior plastic trays are poorly thought out.  When the game is new and all the tokens are still in their cardboard frame, it fits beautifully.  Once you punch out all the markers, there's no good place to put them where they won't slide around in the box. If the "card" areas had been made deeper, all the other bits would have fit perfectly.  Not the end of the world (though that's the theme of the game), but something that could be improved. 2) Gimmicks.  The game comes with a CD for background mood music.  The music is fine, but the CD is too short to last a full game.  Especially a first full game where you are stopping to look up rules and figure out strategies. 3) Speaking o...

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 tha...

I've been considering running a couple of new RPG games, one as a PBEM , and one with a live group.  I've mentioned in the past that I know I'm better at running PBEM's than live games, but I'm hoping they both work well.  But that's putting the cart ahead of the horse.  What I need to do first  is find a system, a world setting, and a campaign. While I have a bunch of 2e and 3.5e adventure modules, I know I prefer unique worlds in the games I play.  My usual GM has an extensive world he has created and sets most of his games in it, which I really enjoy.  I hope to be able to give my players a similarly satisfying experience.  I know I don't want to go the extreme route of creating my own system the way C.D. has with Splatter-Elf .  However I am considering adapting one of the systems I know well to a unique world. Likely the system will be 2e or Advanced Labyrinth Lord  (hooray for free!), or with a bit more work, I can make my ide...

Simple has worked for Vin Diesel - this is some of his best acting. I've been introduced to some new games in the last little while that I've really enjoyed, and they have one thing in common - They are incredibly simple.  Rather than a lot of the Euro style games, that are already quite accessible with rules like "Do 1 of 4 things on each turn" these come down to "play a card, pick a card."  With such simple instructions, they are great for introducing new players to the world of gaming, yet they are detailed enough within each move to hold the interest of seasoned players. The first game I'll mention is Guillotine .  12 "nobles" are lined up to be beheaded, and players try to collect the more valuable cards.  Using rules on the cards themselves, and on the cards in their hands, they play with the order of the line to aid their own score, or to try to prevent other players from getting a good score.  After 3 rounds, the points are tota...

Up here in the Southern Ontario portion of Canada we have a tradition called "cottaging".  It's very different then what the urban dictionary says it is .  What we do is pack up the car on a Friday, drive 2 to 5 hours in extreme traffic, hang out in a small building with limited amenities, and then drive home in the same ridiculous traffic 48 hours later.  Sounds crazy, right? But there are some up sides.  Most of the time you are in a beautiful setting on the water somewhere, with lots of toys to play with, and with lots of fun friends and family.  And in the evenings, there's not much to do besides play games. So here are some of the classics that come up often with my friends and family at the cottage. Sorry, wrong Bauer... 1) Euchre. This is a trick collecting card game with 24 cards, which can be made from any standard 52 card deck.  It is most often played by 4 players in pairs, though there are 2, 3 and 6 player variants. Trump is called by a ...

With internet shows like @TableTop and websites like Boargamegeek , tabletop gaming has had a huge resurgence in the last few years.   Damn you Wheaton!!! Game publishers are jumping on this to try to capitalize while the market is hot, and so there are a plethora of new games released in a constant stream these days.  On top of that, funding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo , and easy distribution through places like DriveThruCards are allowing more and more amateur game designers to get their work made and distributed.  So this is all great, right? That's a LOT of shitty games. Well, not really.  As with anything in life, board games run the full spectrum of awesome to terrible.  And in this spectrum, there is the typical bell curve of distribution.  So based on that, only 4% of the games released will be awesome.  Some 7% will be really good.  Another 12% will be Ok.  The rest are going to s...

If you are reading this blog, you're probably a gamer. You may have been playing for years, or this may be a new hobby (obsession) for you. What usually stands out is what first drew us into this world. I flirted with RPGs for a while as a kid. My first attempt was in grade 4; a friend said: "Let's play d&d." And I said "play what?" We had no clue what we were doing, no rule books, and no story.  What we did have was imagination and a drive to play.  My friend drew a map and made up a reason for me to get through it. I would try creative ways to get past the obstacles he described. To see how well I did, we'd roll d6's and compare opposing rolls (All we knew was d&d needed dice...). My next exposure was when my sister, who is 8 years older than me, would let me tag along with her when she went to play with her high school friends. She would have been about 17 or 18, and I was 9 or 10.  Most of the time I would just watch them play, but...

Today's post is about a mechanic I really enjoy: Simultaneous Action Selection.  You know, I'm not quite sure why I just capitalized that...  Anyway, there are a bunch of games that use this mechanic, but I'll stick to just 2 as examples, and the slightly different strategies they evoke. B-Wing movement options The wheels when assembled The first is a game I've talked about before ; Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game .  You can read about the basic premise here.  Today I'll focus specifically on the movement and initiative portion of the game.  Each pilot / ship has an initiative number.  The lower initiative moves first, but shoots last. This is something really important to keep in mind as the main point of the game is to get other ships in range within your firing arc, or to get out of range or firing arc of the enemy (typical dog-fight tactics).  The way movement works in this game is that all players lock in their chosen movemen...

On May 12th I had the pleasure of joining a great conversation about cooperative games run by @boardgamehour on twitter.  It got me thinking about how many co-op games I've played recently and just how much I enjoy them.  First, let's see what can fall in to the co-op category.  There are true co-op games where everyone plays together to beat the game, like Castle Panic , Pandemic , and Forbidden Island / Desert .  Then there are "traitor" games where everyone works together until someone turns on the others, like Battle Star Galactica and Betrayal at House on the Hill .  Finally there are team games like The Resistance , MTG Two-Headed Giant , or 1812: The Invasion of Canada . Today I will focus on the true co-op games, because I think the Traitor mechanic deserves a post of its own.  We'll talk about this some other time. Co-ops can be great fun. With everyone working together they can be a great way to introduce new gamers...

I've decided to write a series of  posts that deal with some of my favourite table top game mechanics.  To start, I'm going to go back to one of my favourite things about DnD: The dice.   They're just so sexy! There's always been something thrilling about rolling polyhedral dice other than d6's.  Maybe it was my little rebellious streak as a kid, or just a fascination with shapes other than cubes, but I really like funky dice.  So this leads to the first game mechanic to discuss: Custom dice. There have been a lot of games in the last few years that have custom dice.  While these games could be played with regular d6, and then have you convert the number to some other meaning, the games tend to be... slicker with the customized ones. My first example is King of Tokyo . The dice are rolled three times each turn . After each throw you choose whether to keep or discard each of the six special dice (a la Yahtzee).  Triples o...