After a couple of solid panels on Friday I was ready for the Saturday schedule and really wanted to dig in. There was a lot of great stuff lined up, starting with games.
Help Me Find a Game I Will Enjoy
Are you new to playing board games, card games, or party games? How can you tell if any particular game will be fun for you? Come to this panel to ask experienced gamers what you should try next based on your own likes and dislikes.
Finding a board game you like is partially about the game itself and partially about the people you’re playing with. Both parts matter.
Board games are by their very nature social. The single biggest challenge is finding a group, or a series of groups of people that you really, truly enjoy gaming with. The people are the key to it all.
As for the games themselves, part of that is learning the language of games. What IS a worker placement game vs. a party game vs. a resource management game? What kinds of those things do you enjoy?
How many people do you want the game to handle?
Do friends recommend the game?
Can you find a YouTube video on it (and do you trust that person’s opinion)?
The best part of this panel for me was the crowd participation. That normally isn’t true for me, but having my dear friend and serious game fan John right up front was really special for this one. Myself and the other panelists enjoyed a good discussion about all the things I listed above in my notes and then some. It was a really great start to the day.
Side note – I highly recommend digging up a board game and finding some folks to play.
Pre-pandemic, if you’d asked me about the Legend of Vox Machina I would have stared at you blankly. I had heard, vaguely, of Critical Role but that would be about it. The team producing the web hit Critical Role has certainly made a massive impact on media and the route things have to production.
I’ve talked in other places about something people are labeling “the Mercer effect” as it relates to the expectations of people when they play Dungeons and Dragons. The team at CR (and it IS a team, including a lot of production) create a drama that people can follow along with BUT it doesn’t meet the expectations of players when said players get to their own game tables. Most people don’t have a production team to help run their game, nor do they do it as part of their job so even regular old game / planning time is limited. A new players view of the game can be warped by production quality.
Now, take that same story with all the warping. Get professionals to set the script, trim the action, do the voices and then have crazy good animation and you get Vox Machina’s first season on Amazon video.
I have watched the whole season. I can say that I enjoyed it. It is a very well done animated series.
The criticism(s) I have for it revolve around that warping.
I don’t watch CR when they role play their campaign on YouTube. IF I have that many hours, I’m playing or I’m designing my own game for when I’m playing. It’s not a polished show and you’ve got to wade through it all to get to the good stuff. That’s the whole point I hear you saying, but really – I don’t have that kind of time. Am I maybe missing some Easter eggs or not understanding the ‘in’ jokes? Absolutely. Do I care? No. No I do not.
Having watched the show I get what people mean about expectations. They fight and kill a dragon in the first or second episode. I have NO idea what the actual level of the characters are in the CR game, but in MY world dragons are epic, boss level fights that don’t get resolved that quickly. Dragons are part of the name of the game and defeating them like some kind of minor winged reptile without the kind gravitas they deserve just doesn’t seem right to me. It set me off for the whole series. This is made worse by the fact that one of the main bad guys is (or appears to be) a vampire. That in NO WAY works out that way in my world. Are vampires exceptional and challenging monsters? You bet. Do they have more power than dragons? Never. So – my hang up on that one, but I think it ties in with expectations.
Percy has a gun. Yes, it’s demon related and possibly magical in nature, but it’s still a gun. This is not a chocolate in my peanut butter kind of situation. I don’t want guns in my swords and sorcery game. I play fantasy for a reason. IF I want guns I’ll play a role playing game with guns. This was an aspect of the show that clearly worked, but just took me out of the right head space.
Editing the story down to basically half hour episodes is both good and bad. It’s good, because the writers got to the meat of what’s going on without requiring me to wade through all the dice rolling and background decision making that goes with any good role playing game. I really appreciated being able to get through the shows in a timely manner. What they did while doing that is skipped past longer story arc development. I know – can’t have it both ways, but this is the expectation thing again. Part of the joy of the game is working up all those deep character backgrounds and having all the other players know and use that info. It’s that shared aspect that makes the game great. The animated show didn’t give the feeling of weight that all that stuff was in there. It’s not easy to describe that feeling when you don’t know all the backstory, but you KNOW all that backstory is there. You can feel it with little details.
In the end, it was a fun ride. I found myself pointing and laughing on more than one occasion, remarking that actions / choices reminded me of our own game or that we’d had remarkably similar actions in our game. It’s relatable, but it’s just one version of how the game goes. It’s not MY version and maybe it’s not YOUR version either. It’s worth checking out. It’s fun. I look forward to the next season – just don’t expect to see a dragon defeated that easily in any game I run.
A starting point. I need some kind of warm up. Sitting and staring into a blank page is a genuine challenge – and one that will be overcome. Writing can be developed, just like any other ‘muscle’ so we’re stretching, then digging into a workout.
From time to time I check out a website called “Post Secret”. The idea of the project, if you’re not familiar with it, is that people write a secret on a post card and send it in to an address. This secret is then shared anonymously for others to see. Some are silly. Some are angry. Many, many secrets make connections and help other people see that they are not alone. I suspect my own life would be significantly different than it is today if something like this had been available when I was a kid.
I have spoken to friends and shared before that when I was in my pre- and early teens I was really into Dungeons & Dragons (I still am!). I started playing and gathering all things D&D very early on. This was also the time of the Satanic Panic. Other kids in my neighborhood were told not to associate with me because I played this game. Some kids didn’t get rules that applied to that degree, but their parents removed any and all chance of them owning anything related to D&D. The quote from one mom was, “We understand this is a game of imagination that only needs a paper and pencil. We know we can’t stop that, but we refuse to support it.”
That’s extremely rough when it’s aimed at somebody just developing social skills. Your friend group, likely already limited based on choices that didn’t necessarily fit the social norm of the time, being bent, battered and reduced because a swath of the adults in your life give you “we refuse to support it” as the answer to you wanting to play a game and be social.
I saw this postcard on the Post Secret site:
The person that sent it in is a little younger than I am, but likely caught the back end of that same panic. It also shows (to me) the deep, far reaching social nature of this game. The reason it endures. Fantastical, imaginative and connection creating. When you find ‘your people’ and they join the amazing journey into a place that doesn’t exist anywhere except your mind it is a powerful thing.
For many, many years I refused to share my passion about D&D. I’m not a professional author (clearly) and not a professional artist (witness my art) but I have played this game, and others like it, for the vast majority of my life. Having had all my early attempts to connect with others about it met with reactionary, panic based push back I was not interested in reaching out to get smacked down or insulted. It became habit.
Putting this out here in writing (again) I think is part of my process of getting past that. Yes, given the massive success and mainstream knowledge / understanding of D&D these days it doesn’t seem like a huge leap, but it feels that way to me. I am used to push back, insults, and demeaning nicknames. I’m not over that, but I’m working on it. I’m certainly not intimidated by any individual these days. Also, I know, intellectually, that people are aware of what I do and what I am interested in among my friends. I have recently started extending that awareness out to others, including people I am associated with professionally. I am still attempting to maintain a clear demarcation between work life and personal life (as my lovely wife likes to say, ‘don’t shit where you eat’) but I am not longer hiding things like the YouTube videos or the Twitch stream from them either.
I am who I am. I am passionate about my hobbies and enjoy sharing them. I love this stuff. Maybe not as much as sex, but this ‘secret’ was out there and did what it was supposed to do… it made a connection.
All that writing, and I didn’t even pull a muscle. Time to keep going. Maybe I’ll write up some adventures for the campaign I’m running…
I left out the discussion panels from my overall convention review earlier. I think the discussions had and the topics covered deserve attention of their own. I had four panels this year, two in the gaming track, one in the writing track and one in the fandom track. Two on Friday and two on Saturday made for an even pace, despite being scheduled against dinner and the masquerade. I always try to get ahead of the topics and do my homework on panel topics. I spend a fair amount of time planning and writing up notes. Hopefully I’ll get a few of those things out here with this post.
My first two panels on Friday were both on the gaming track.
Up first – Setting the Scene: Ambiance for Gms.
I’ve had panels run by the moderator of this panel before. I think Andy and I work well together for the purposes of con panels. The audience was small. This is typical for a Friday night at a con, but it was exaggerated this year I think. We covered a fair amount of ground and I got one or two laughs. All in all I think it went well. I’m not going to dive deep into the things we talked about ~ if you want to hear me delve deep on this subject you can check out the video I did with Jon on this exact topic. It was an easy prep and easy to talk about panel for me.
The second panel up was Writing Branching Narratives for Game Play.
This panel was more of a challenge for me. While I have notes, indexes, files, outlines and plans for all my writing projects, when it comes to gaming I tend to do much more flying by the seat of my pants. Thankfully Andy was running this panel as well, and we were joined by a very creative gamer and designer named Joan. Our audience was slightly larger and the folks attending seemed into what we were saying. Both Andy and Joan had excellent points and we agreed on a number of items. Here are a few things from my notes:
Running any kind of role playing game is a challenge. It’s not easy to stay ahead of a group of clever and engaged players. You are a story teller, but you are not THE story teller. As the GM you guide the narrative, but you don’t control everything. The players and how they view the world are crucial to making a game succeed. Players must have agency. If they feel like you’re forcing them or bending their actions just to meet your story needs they will rebel. At best they will try to break your story, at worst they will leave to go to other games where they have more input. Allowing certain parts of your game to morph and change based on others is part of making an RPG really work.
Players must also understand that allowing them narrative freedom does NOT mean they are free of consequences. Sure, the first level warrior can seek out the dragon and throw down a challenge. That is part of allowing that freedom. There will be consequences to that action – likely swift and severe. It’s also important to keep a list of places, contacts and how the players and NPCs interact. So long as you have a few clear notes about who people are, the world takes on depth and a more realistic feel. NPCs will remember how the party treated them. As the players grow in power they will also grow in reputation… so how do they want to be seen? Are they heroic or are they the villains of the piece?
Big points stay the same. There are a lot of things I do actually write down for my games. These are the larger events that will happen in the world. These things will happen even if the players don’t get there to see them. Sometimes the players will create change that moves or adjusts these points, but this list of things will happen – and if the players are off side questing, so be it. IF the players fail a mission or ignore a clear path of clues you’ve set for them, how will they get the news about what happened when they didn’t meet the goal? Will it change how they act moving forward? This is another small thing that helps to give a world depth and makes the players wonder what’s just around the next corner.
What if there’s supposed to be a monster around the next corner, and they go the other way? Compartmentalizing certain encounters can be a great way to keep things exciting. Andy called this the quantum ogre. The ogre exists in every time line, at various locations until he is observed. Once observed, the monster becomes real and interacts with the player. This is particularly helpful in keeping things exciting and keeping the GM from pulling out hair in frustration. IF the location makes sense, grab your monster up from where the players missed him before and drop him into the new place.
Know your players. Gaming is an intensely social activity. You get to know the people you’re gaming with and the sort of quirks each of you have. Give them the same thing with your world. Give them an organization to struggle against. Give them secrets to track down. It’s more than simple missions, it’s how they feel when they start to learn what’s going on and you start to learn what sort of bread crumbs you can lay out in order to get them to follow along. One of my favorite recent gaming moments came from a long time player. She’s played in my home brew campaign world for years. She knows certain aspects of the world quite well. During this game session she encountered one of the secret cults I have planted throughout the game world, the Crimson Crescent. The moment she figured out it was them she said, “I hate the Crimson Crescent! Those guys suck!”. If you’re laying out parts of your narrative for the players to see, they will get to know the parts just as well as you do. That sort of reaction is what you really hope for – you know you’ve got their attention, now give them the rest of the boss monster fight you’ve got ready because they’ll be all in.
Lastly, world building. This should really be firstly and lastly, but it’s last up in the order for this discussion. The more you know about your world, the easier it is to give out the little details that hook the players. Yes, there’s a need for improv and flexibility, but that will flow far easier with a solid knowledge of what’s out there. Do you need to name everyone in every village? No, of course not. Do you need to write down the ones that become people of interest? You bet. Use a baby naming book (or website) to help give your names a consistent feel. Learn what makes an area tick. Who lives there and why.
Those are the little things that add together with all the other little things to create a the sort of game that players really buy into and the tweaks that will keep them coming back for more.
That’s it for the first two panels of the weekend for me. I’ll post up the last two panels soon.
I’m wondering about the scale of my lack of focus. I don’t think it’s ADD or ADHD or whatever initials that particular diagnosis have been changed to lately. I am looking at the pattern of my postings here and seeing that they tend to cluster when I have certain things going on and thin way out when I have other things going on. There is nothing consistent about what I’m doing.
Having said that, I realize that there IS consistency, just at a larger scale. The general things I am interested in, and the things I work on are in certain channels, but those channels tend to cycle. There will be times when I am working on art pieces, times when I am crafting, times when I’m writing and struggling along with that and times when I’m reaching out with other creative endeavors.
Lately my energy is being spent on one of those ‘other’ creative endeavors. Gaming. I have posted before about being a player in a role playing game that was streaming on Twitch and YouTube. That game hit a snag ~ the snag of course being that we are adults with lives and responsibilities. Schedule has killed yet another game… OR has it?
I asked my friend if he minded that I step in and take over running a game. He was agreeable and so were the folks playing the game. Since then I’ve shifted gears and dropped back into my Dungeon Master ways. I’m producing art, but it’s generally for the game or the video channel. I’m writing, but it’s centered around the next adventure. I’ve dropped off the crafting and painting a bit simply because we’re running this game virtually across 2 time zones.
In the end, playing Dungeons & Dragons has resurfaced as my hobby of choice. I’m having a great time creating the world and working with the players as they move through various parts of their adventures. We’re still on the Ether Network channel, just under a different “show” title. IF you’re into the story, you should check it out over on Twitch or YouTube:
It’s been a while since I’ve run a D&D game. The schedules of adults combined with a pandemic crushed that creative bit of things for a long time. I’ve posted on here about being invited to play. The game turned from fantasy to horror and that’s not exactly ‘my jam’ as a friend would say. Yes it was fun and there are memorable stories from the few sessions we’ve run. Once again, the schedule of adults looked to wreck that gaming chance. I volunteered to step in and attempt this long distance gaming thing as the game master.
I’m glad I volunteered. The rest of the players seemed to be on board with the idea. All I needed to do was figure out how 5e worked compared to what I knew, work with everyone on character creation, design the adventure, tailor it to the characters, figure out how the online tools were going to work and THEN actually run the game. Easy peasy, right?
Oy. I must have forgotten how much work it is to stay ahead of a handful of very sharp players. I was (and am) glad that I did this. We had a couple of bumpy patches in our first session. A couple of communication errors (mostly on me) and some adjustment to the online environment, but all in all I think it went as well as could be expected.
The best part was that we’ve already come up with a bit of story that’s going to stick with us. A gift that will keep on giving as this party of intrepid adventurers continues to move through the game world. Fear the grain shortage and buy your bread now! You should watch:
We cruised into a second episode for our Beyond The Supernatural role playing game. It was a fun week, even if I struggled with move forward with my character. I made one spectacularly bad roll and earned a new nickname behind the scenes. I am now Mr. 114, however briefly.
If you’re into checking out the game, we’re live on Twitch when we play and then the videos get posted up to the YouTube channel. You can check out the latest episode here:
I’m still sitting clearly in the amateur section when it comes to my miniatures and crafting hobbies. It has taken me longer than it really should to make any sort of tangible progress, but I am in fact making progress. I’m also learning and enjoying finally digging into my giant pile of shame (all those unpainted minis that have been sitting around for sooooo long).
This fine fellow will likely be raging out of the earth during some Dungeons & Dragons campaign in the near future:
I was super happy to be part of another Attack Of Opportunity! It was a great time taking a movie apart and turning it into an adventure for a D&D game. I had a number of things to say about it, and you can check out the video here:
When I was getting ready for this video I (maybe) went a little overboard with things. I had this feeling that we were telling people to be inspired by movies, but what precisely does that mean? I’m inspired, what do I do with that? So I sat down and really dove into doing what we were suggesting. I mean, we’re talking about a fantasy classic here – but can I actually use it?
Most of the time I wouldn’t lift whole plots, characters or concepts. I like having complete control over my creations and the ability to use them across multiple media formats. Stuff I’ve snatched from other people does NOT fit into that category. I will however be inspired by many and varied things, lifting bits and pieces out for my use. Even the things that get lifted are mashed, molded and ultimately adjusted to be a good fit with the story and the rules of the world I am working with.
If you’re grabbing parts from a movie be sure to tweak things just enough that the players don’t immediately recognize it. It can be a total bummer when one of the players recognizes exactly where you got something from. It’s a bummer, that is, IF you haven’t prepared. If you’ve prepared then you rejoice. Seriously. The player thinks they know and that’s a fantastic tool to use against them. If the player “just knows” that the lead villain keeps his pet monster in the pit and therefore they don’t climb down there, move the pet. It’s a super easy fix that will have them second guess choices like that. The can overhear the guards say something like, “Oh, it’s Reggie’s day out again…” or “I’m really glad I’m not on cleaning detail now that they’ve moved Reggie…”. Take that sort of knowledge and use it to your favor.
For folks that really wanted to dig in, here’s a short list of some of the things I thought needed some prep ahead of time.
NPCs: King (Osric), Doom, high level warrior/priests, witch/oracle
Political groups: religious cult, rival kingdom, slave market / pit fighters
Treasures: Atlantian Sword, cult gem (eye of the serpent), jade medallion, father’s sword, assassin’s dagger, snake arrows, random bowl of gems
Maps: City w/ cult location, cult tower interior, battleground near stone monuments, temple w/ great stair and fountain, and of course – cultist HQ with orgy room, kitchen and secret cave entrance.
The map part has always been something that has driven me in the past. I’m a very visual person. I really went after trying to create what I would need to make this an adventure. We didn’t have much of a chance to see these on screen during the video (and some weren’t really there at the time) so I wanted to post a few of them here. YOUR game does NOT need to have all this stuff. You should make the game your own and use your own talents to create the amazing world your party will adventure in.
Here are a few of the things I put together for maps / visualization.
Started with good old graph paper and just sketched stuff.
After the sketch I made the map “fancy”
Past what you see in the film, you’ll have to make some of the spaces up for the party
This is where I started to go off the rails. I modeled the whole tower in 3D
How’s the view from the top or YOUR cult’s tower?
Whatever level of detail you’re willing to dive into, make it yours. In the end your passion and joy for the story will make the game great. What other movies would you break down like this? What are the best concepts you’ve used in a game (or had used against you) before?
A few days ago I posted about how great it felt to be gearing up to be a player in a Dungeons and Dragons game again. It was a really cool feeling I haven’t had for quite some time.
About that game… turns out that less than half of us really *know* 5th Edition rules. I was digging into the PHB and working hard at catching up when there was a choice made. That choice was to switch to a different game that others had a level of comfort with. We were assured this was not a bait and switch, but a temporary move to avoid losing the momentum our game had picked up.
Suddenly I spun about and landed in a supernatural horror game set in the modern day, albeit and alternate (darker if you can believe that) version of today’s world. The twist on this game for me? We live streamed the game while we were playing. We’re on a Twitch channel. When the games are finished, they live on Twitch for a while and then are moved over to a YouTube channel. It was a new and fun thing. IF you’re at all interested, hop on over and check out the video:
