Rule of the Dice

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...

We tried the Walking Dead -style Funnel last Friday and I think it went really well. It was a welcome change after my recent GM-related negativity  - I personally had a ton of fun running it, and I hope the players did to. The best part of it, that I didn't even think about when I came up with the idea, is the freedom it gave the players to try weird things and to play out horror-movie style tropes to full effect. See, I had assumed that the game would just be the characters lining up to be ground into paste, played for laughs as we described the gruesome ways they were torn to pieces as their dice betrayed them. While that certainly did happen, the coolest side effect of playing 4 "disposable" characters was that players developed scenes and situations that they don't normally get into during regular games. I don't know about you, but most people I play with tend to be cautious, careful and calculating in their games. They have a strong connection ...

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 am terrible at ending campaigns . To be fair, this one did have a pretty good bang before the whimper. For reference, this is what I had as an outline for our final adventure (which I didn't know at the time would be our final adventure): 1. The party has to protect the actor during the performance. Hopefully some of them have to get on stage and take part. 2. The will be attacked by assassins trying to kill the actor, and wild mountain men on the way to the performance. 3. After the performance when they leave with their pay they will be attacked by pirates. That was it. I thought it would take a couple of weeks of real-time and be a short and hopefully fun little scenario. I had no idea it would blow up into the huge drama that it did. It turned into a major political insurgence. A king was killed, a princess kidnapped, a religious revolution instigated. Lost family members returned. One of the party betrayed his friends, and another died trying to be a hero. Ye...

Splatterday Night was an illustrious moment in the history of Splatter-Elf the RPG . For the first time ever, the Godfather of Splat himself, Philip Overby , joined us live via satellite from Yokohama, Japan to sit in on a play-test session of the game. We hoped to learn great things from the man who coined the term "Splatter-Elf" and basically invented the genre , but sadly the biggest thing we learned is that Google Hangouts hates people that live in Japan. (Your hear that, Google? I hope one of your bots scans that and you fix your stupid software.) Anyway, after an hour of fiddling with Google+... and Roll20... and Skype, we eventually got a usable work-around and we were off and running! This time around we had a dwarf Sanguine Sorcerer (note: he was a "midget" human, not a dwarf-dwarf - an important distinction that he loved to remind everyone about), a Hunter-Killer (a new build, basically a ranger/brigand) and Mr Overby played a Bloodlust Berserker wi...

The first group finally made it to the end of the first Splatter-Elf adventure, and it was glorious. Whether or not the rules or the game system worked (more on that later), I have to say this was the most fun I've had running a game in a long time. Everything moved at a reasonable pace, everyone clicked and seemed to have fun, and there was plenty of goofy weirdness that I always see as a staple of a good game. We had the same Soldier of Slaughter and Uff from the previous session , though our Cutthroat player was replaced by a different guy running a Detritus Dwarf. It took him a few minutes to understand why he carried around a giant sack of garbage and filth like an insane hobo, but he was eventually cool with it. Some wild fighting took place as the players tried every trick they could come up to gain an advantage in a fight with a group of pistol-wielding cattle rustlers. After much swearing and threatening and climbing through windows and hiding behind doors and t...

A few weeks ago I shared a story of my game leading up to the climax of the adventure - a big theatrical performance where the player characters would become part of the show as they fought to keep the star alive whilst he was being attacked onstage by assassins, all without letting the audience in on what was happening. It kinda worked. On the one hand, a few of the players stepped up and performed some songs to keep the show going in spite of it all falling apart around them. A few others had some good plans to keep themselves alive (and other bad plans, like murdering a bunch of priestesses). The problem was that, being PBEM (Play-By-E-Mail), we were at the mercy of how quickly people responded and added to the story to keep the game going. I don't like forcing arbitrary deadlines because while I know it would push the game along, a lot of my players are busy and they just do this for fun - it's not meant to be a big commitment. I'm sometimes late myself. Anyway...

Last week, appropriately enough on Friday the 13th, we played the second-ever session of SPLATTER-ELF: The RPG . I had a new group of three completely different players from the first session, which works out well to get new perspectives on the game. It was also great for me because I got to reuse the same adventure! In the first session we had three people who game just for fun and didn't really care about the rules. They had a good laugh though, and really enjoyed hacking the shit out of everything they ran into and accidentally choking out enemies with their own intestines. The second session had two guys who were more familiar with and comfortable with game mechanics so they went out of their way to try different things, which from a testing perspective was very helpful. The third guy hadn't gamed in years so he was just having fun being there. It was interesting to see how the two groups reacted to the same situations. In some instances they did the exact same thi...

My players were tasked with protecting a particularly sleazy and obnoxious actor to get him to (and through) an important performance. If the show did not go off according to plan it would bring great shame and dishonour to several important and powerful nobles. People might even die if this performance was ruined. Unfortunately the actor owed many evil people large sums of money, not to mention pissed off several unsavory organizations, so he and the players have been hounded by assassins at every step. They eventually made it to the theatre and were trying to come up with a plan to protect the actor through the performance when I mentioned - repeatedly - that there were a number of veiled and masked priestesses performing rituals to cleanse the theatre of evil spirits. I also mentioned - repeatedly - that the priestesses faces were hidden and that they seemed a little suspicious. Two of the player characters even found and killed another assassin, and discovered one of the priest...

Saturday night was the world premiere of Splatter-Elf: The Role-Playing Game . I recruited three players (my wife, her sister and her husband) to run them through a short adventure to get a feel for the rules and the setting. I learned many things from this session about the game, my skills as a game master and the nature of human behaviour. I was slightly disappointed by two of those three topics. Seriously though, overall it went pretty well. Let's get right down to business.First the Fun Stuff. No game is complete without some ridiculous stories, so I had to share a few: 1. Lepers, Aggressive The group killed alot of lepers. Like, alot alot. I established that the town was plagued by violently aggressive leprous beggars, but rather than just give them a few coins and scare them off, the party fought them to the death. Every. Time. Whenever one of the group left the town they kept getting assailed by more and more lepers until they were swarmed by a pack of fifteen of t...