All the Game Prep Ever

I'm running five games right now, plus occasional one-shots. If that seems nuts, well, it is. Let's take a moment to ruminate on that.

I've always dedicated a lot of time to running games (start the clock on "always" when I was about 18 or so; I ran games occasionally in high school, but my freshman year in college was when I started to meet a lot of other roleplayers and it wasn't uncommon for me to run games four nights a week). For a while it was mostly Chill, but I'd routinely buy other games and we'd try them out. So I'd run or play Shattered Dreams, Nightlife, Paranoia, Toon, Earthdawn, and lots of others I can't even think of right now. Sometimes we'd just play a game once and then gravitate back to stuff we liked more, and once 1994 rolled around and Wraith: The Oblivion came out, then it was down the rabbit-hole that was the World of Darkness.

World of Darkness, in both incarnations ("classic" and what's now called Chronicles of Darkness), was great for the GM who likes to run multiple games because they could all take place in the same universe. That was harder with OWoD, since the cosmologies weren't really designed to mesh, but it didn't get too crazy until Demon: The Fallen by which point I had pretty much stopped running connected games. It was nice, though, if I had a random group of people one night and folks wanted to play but we didn't have a group of characters for those particular players to be able to say "OK, make Mage characters and let's pick a city." And bam, new chronicle, another entry in the binder.

Now I don't run as much WoD, though. I'm not running any CofD games at all (for now, though we'll get back around to Promethean at some point), and I'm just running Changeling: The Dreaming as a playtest for the 20th anniversary edition. Since my priorities have shifted from "be an expert in WoD" to "play lots of different games to broaden my horizons as a designer," I'm running, at present, a Fate Core game (Atomic Robo), a PbtA game (Epyllion, or rather, the Epyllion ashcan, since the main game isn't out yet), a Gumshoe game (Night's Black Agents), and a lighter, beer-n-pretzels game (Feng Shui), in addition to Changeling.

Epyllion is nice because it's zero-prep. I wing it every session, and that's the way PbtA games work. But the rest of the games require varying degrees of prep. Feng Shui is simple enough in play, but it's got a lot of backstory and since it relies on combat, I have to have opponents statted. Night's Black Agents is Gumshoe, which is a heavy-prep game (though this particular game has been going long enough that I can wing it a little) because you have to know what clues are around for the PCs to find. Changeling, sadly, is more prep than I'd like. It used to be that I knew WoD so well that I could whip up stats off the top of my head, but even if we weren't doing a playtest with some revised rules, it's been so long since I ran an OWoD game (that last one was Demon, which wrapped in...jesus, late 2004, by the look of it?) and I largely (and deliberately) put the system out of my head when I started developing/writing for NWoD that it's weird to be running it. Doesn't help that the players, by and large, aren't familiar with it and, I think, would rather be playing it in NWoD/CofD. Atomic Robo is Fate, which means that I know the system, but it has several cool little subsystems I need to get familiar with.

And all of this is on top of the fact that the groups are very different. Atomic Robo is perfectly able to improvise and buy in with no trouble. Feng Shui has a bit more trouble with that. Night's Black Agents is finding their feet in the game, but it's taken three years and some switches in players and characters. And so on.

Time was that I had no trouble keeping up with game prep, but then again, time was that I a) had more energy and b) had more time, somehow. My day job used to afford me occasional opportunities to work on not-work, but it's gotten more intense this year, and it's sapping my energy. I'm getting older, too, which doesn't help, and then there's the freelance work.

What I am saying? I think what I need to do is set aside a day a month, to do some extensive game prep for what I'm running. One day may actually not be enough, but I have a day today (yesterday, really, but I was sick yesterday which totally pissed me off, and led to me taking today off work). In the interest of not making this post any longer, and in making it easier for players of the respective games to avoid the posts in question, I'm gonna make separate posts for each of the games (less Epyllion, because again, no prep).

First up, since I'm running it today: Changeling.

#RPGaDay2015

We're nearly the end...

Favorite Idea for Merging Two Games Into One: Ooh, I actually had one! I wanted to merge Shattered Dreams and Don't Rest Your Head, probably starting with the former and transitioning into the latter somehow. You could probably fold Exquisite Replicas in there, too, somehow.

Favorite Game You No Longer Play: Another easy one: Classic World of Darkness. I love it, I just don't play it because I work on so much NWoD stuff and the system there is so much better, and I don't want to confuse myself. But I'm gonna have to go back to CWoD when it comes time to playtest Changeling: The Dreaming 20th.

Favorite RPG Website: RPG.Net. Sure, you get people who are bitter about being banned complaining about how the mod staff is a "junta," but seriously, it's a site with a lot of traffic where you can talk about games and not get called any number of homophobic slurs, and it's stable enough that I can put my actual plays there.

Character Creation: Shattered Dreams

Never not gonna put this song in my head.

The Game: Shattered Dreams
The publisher: Apex Publications, now gone..
Degree of familiarity: Some. Jon ran it back in the day.
Books required: Just the Shattered Dreams book. The back page of the book advertises a bunch of sourcebooks, but I have no idea how many actually got made.

Shattered Dreams is a cool concept. You play Dreamwalkers, folks who can zip in and out of others' dreams. Nightmares - monsters from God Knows Where - are trying to infiltrate humanity's sleeping minds, but Dreamwalkers can seal dreams against them, at least for a time. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this game. It's very much a product of its time (mid-90s), and that's both a good thing and a bad thing.

See, the mechanics suck. They're hard to explain. Based on your score in a given trait, you get a certain number of "success numbers." When you roll, you roll a d12 and if what comes up matches one of your chosen success numbers, you succeed. You're rolling both a skill and attribute die, and the GM is rolling a Dream Die as well (if you're in a dream at the time).

It's not too far off Edge of Midnight, as far as you're making two checks and can potentially fail one and succeed on the other. But the probabilities are weird, as is the whole notion of picking what numbers on the die succeed (seems like a headache in play).

Plus, the game kinda gets up its own ass a bit. Lots of talk about "roll-playing" vs. "role-playing" (it's so embarrassing that the NWoD core does that - I had nothing to do with it, I promise). A little bit of gratuitous violence and extremity. Reads a little like a poor cousin to a Vampire: The Masquerade book.

All of that said, I think that if you took this game, Don't Rest Your Head and Exquisite Replicas and smooshed them together, you'd have a fucking excellent head trip game. I just haven't done it yet, but I will someday.

For now, let's get started. First step, I generate attributes. I already know I'm going to want some entropy for this, so I'll open a tab for random.org now.

We've got six mental attributes: Command, Imagination, Intellect, Perception, Sanity and Stability (hey, didn't I just do a character with those last two?). Four physical attributes: Agility, Attractiveness, Endurance and Strength.

Have I mentioned that I hate systems that make physical appearance a trait? It's also defined in the book as "the character's physical looks and appearance." Little redundant.

Anyway, I can either roll randomly for each attribute, or roll for a total and distribute the points. Hmm. I can either roll 2d6 for each one, or 12d6 for mental attributes and 8d6 for physical. Think I'll do that last one. I get 49 and 24, respectively.

Now, I could think a little about concept, but there are lifepath thingies that I roll later, so maybe I'll just keep it general right now. I think I want someone with a high Command, Sanity and Stability. Physically, I dunno yet. Anyway, 2 is deficient and 12 is near perfection, but like I said, the probabilities in this game are whack-a-ding-hoy.

Command 8
Imagination 6
Intellect 7
Perception 8
Sanity 10
Stability 10

Agility 6
Attractiveness 6
Endurance 6
Strength 6

I just go middle of the road, across the board with physical ones. And then we move on to Aspect.

Argh. They only give us snapshots here, but don't give us a page number for the in-depth stuff. Sigh. Anyway, the three aspects are subconscious, conscious and overconscious. I think I played a conscious once before. Anyway, I'm picturing my character as being kind of a rock - someone you can depend on to keep you afloat. Based on the description, sounds overconscious to me. Being overconscious adds 1 to my Command and Imagination, 3 to my Sanity and 2 to my Stability. Awesome.

And now, derived traits. Man, this whole "put the derived traits in the middle of chargen" really is epidemic, innit? Anyway, my Psyche (how well I can exert my mind, will or spirit) is 20. My Shock (resilience in the dream world) is 24. My Health (resilience in the real world) is 12.

Insight is knowledge and stuff I've seen. It's a random roll, so I slide back to that site and get a 9. Checking that on the Dreamwalker Experience table, I get..."Been Around." I get 3 Insights and 6 Experience. I have full command of my Aspect powers, which is awesome.

Moving on. My Luck is a d12 roll on another chart. Ooh, got a 12! I'm Really Lucky! Which means what? My Luck score is 1d8. OK, then.

I have another trait called Sanity, this time measuring how my Sanity fluxes during play. Argh. And it says I determine this using the chart "above," but they really mean "below." S'okay, guys. I "roll" a 6 this time, meaning my Sanity is average. It ranges from 40 to 74, and apparently it starts off at 5d6+40. I roll a measly 10, so I start with 50.

Jeez. OK, now Skills. I start off with "Intellect plus Imagination all times 6", which is an absurd way to write that (seriously, did this people not take pre-Algebra?). Anyway, that's 84 points for me. 20% of those points (so, 16 or so) have to be spent on occupational skills, meaning I need to pick an occupation.

This is really fucking jumbled. Wow. OK, I haven't determined anything about this guy yet that would lead me to an occupation. I just know a little about his personality, and I've been avoiding doing much else since I want to do the lifepath thing at the end of chargen (it's optional, but hell, it's there). Oh, wait, there's a chart for that, too. OK, sure, why not? I get an 11, which is Entrepreneur. Hrm. OK, I can cope with that.

I think my character is doing something much like Will Smith's character in The Pursuit of Happyness was; selling something he got stuck selling by getting taken in. He's selling a weird sleep-aid setup; basically you hook these things up in your room, and they induce restful sleep somehow (the science is fuzzy). They work about as well as any other placebo, but they're expensive, and my character has six more to sell off before he's out from under.

With that in mind, let's do some Skills. Oh, wait, one more bit of weirdness. If you take a Dream skill (like Dream Fighting), you get half that score in Real Skill (like Real Fighting). You then pick one or the other to be the default, so as to avoid the feedback loop of raising one and then the other. Mercifully, after chargen these are fixed in place, so raising one doesn't affect (or "effect," as the Shattered Dreams book says) the other.

Administration 3
Bargain 3
Charisma 6
Interview 3
Bureaucracy 3
Business 3
High School Education 3
College Education 3
Computer Use 3
Mechanics 3
Occult 3
Alertness 3
Empathy 6
Judge Character 6
Dream Acrobatics 3
Dream Climbing 3
Dream Dodge 3
Dream Fighting 6
Dream Hide 3
Dream Stealth 3
Dream Weapons (Large Blades) 3
Dream Weapons (Handguns) 3
Meditation 6

Meaning I also get:
Real Acrobatics 1
Real Climbing 1
Real Dodge 1
Real Fighting 3
Real Hide 1
Real Stealth 1
Real Weapons (Large Blades) 1
Real Weapons (Handguns) 1

Oy. OK, explain to me who benefits from having Hide and Stealth as distinct skills? Jumped up Jesus on a pogo stick.

Anyway, I'll leave that for the moment. For now, I do Aspect powers. I get 20 points to divide up, but otherwise they're like Skills. I get At A Glance for free (telepathic contact with other Dreamwalkers). I'll put two points into each of the following: Know Thine Enemy (gives a general impression of Nightmare activity in a dream), Pierce the Nightmare (opens a hole in the Shroud so I can get out of a dream), Psycheleech (suck Psyche from the universal unconscious, or from a Nightmare), Sanity Wall (protects a sleeping dreamer) and Unmask (reveals any Nightmares in the area for what they are).

OK, now I get to pick two of four possible "packages" to customize my character a little. I'll take a 2-point boost to my Aspect powers total, and I'll take it twice, so I get 4 extra points. I put two of those points into Sanity Wall, one into Psycheleech and one into Unmask.

Right. Now the lifepath stuff, though it's called "Adding Flesh" in the book. It's basically charts up the ass.

Step One: Build. My build is "wiry." OK, fine. My character is used to eating ramen and other junk, and walks a lot.

Step Two: Personality Traits. Oh, lord. OK, I roll twice. Shit. I get "confident" and "hateful."

Right. Confident, sure. My character is confident in his abilities as a Dreamwalker. He's mad at the world, though, for forcing him into this shitty job and not letting him get out from under. He was just about ready to trash these stupid machines when he figured out that he was a Dreamwalker, and now he doesn't feel like he can walk away from a job that points him to Nightmares so easily. Still. It just pisses him off. For all that, though, his hate is a slow burn. He has no desire to die or burn out. He wants things to improve, for him and everyone.

Step Three: Likes and Dislikes. I like Status and work actively to attain it, but I dislike Money and don't much bother with it. Explains a lot. My character wants position and respect, but doesn't see that as being tied to money.

Step Four: Prejudices. Hrm. I'm not crazy about this one. Well, I rolled a 3 and a 12, so I put the 12 into the Prejudices table and I get "Different Profession." I'll say my guy has a problem with Doctors. More specifically, he's against the doctors that really just shill for drug companies, and leap for the pharmacy rather than trying to help patients.

Step Five: Fears. Another two rolls. He's afraid of open areas, and it's noticeable. He grew up in the city (which city? Dunno), and is used to apartments and close, tight, snug areas. Open areas freak him right out.

Step Six: Realization. That is, how I became a Dreamwalker. The power wasn't inborn, but he learned to do it while still in high school. In that case, the power to be a Dreamwalker informed his decision to start selling these stupid machines, rather than vice versa. Someone bilked him good.

Step Seven: Family. This requires five rolls and a lot of juggling. OK. I'm close with my family. Good start. One of my parents died by assault or murder. I've got four siblings, one brother and three sisters. My brother is older, but the three girls are younger. My brother and I exchange emails, but we live far apart and don't see each other much, but my sisters and I are all close. But my second-youngest sister is my favorite, and she looks up to me.

Fuck me, let's do some names. My character's name is Elwin James Taft, "LJ" to his friends and associates. He's 25. His older brother's name is Michael Taft, Jr. (named after their deceased father, who died in the line of duty - he was a cop). His brother is 28, and followed in dad's footsteps. His sisters are Shelly Taft (23, now in grad school), Annie Holden (21 and recently divorced, working in a record store) and Roberta Taft (18, freshman in college). LJ gets on fine with his siblings and his mom (his mother's name is Mina Taft), but he and Annie have a bond. They both made really stupid decisions and are paying for it, and the rest of the family kind of sees them as screw-ups. Annie is also the only one of the family that LJ ever told about his power to dreamwalk.

Step Eight: Friends. Seriously? Shit. OK, I've got 2 close friends. Both guys, both my age. Well, heck. LJ worked for a building site just out of college (he's got a liberal arts degree of some kind), and two of the guys who worked with him stayed in touch when he left to sell "hypno-rays." Those guys, named Keith Osmond and Sean Pacewicz, know that something's eating LJ lately, but he's never said what. They've offered to steal the machines for him, and he almost let them, but then something happened. Let's see what.

Step Nine: Life Events. I roll once on this massive table for every 10 years of life, rounding up, so three times.

OMG, these suck. Not just the ones I rolled, but the whole table. Check it out: I rolled 38, 100 and 18. In order:

35-39: You witnessed a truly great or truly horrible event.

98-100: Strange event that effected you [sic], caused possibly by the Nightmares. For instance, you thought some vampyre monsters came after you.

15-18: You had a fairly bad experience or were defeated in pursuit of a goal. For instance, someone of respectability telling you that you suck.

Not all of them are that general, but jesus. Anyway. I think the "fairly bad experience" was pretty obviously the whole "buying into the crappy machines" scam. Didn't earn him any points with his family, and he's still living it down. The "truly great/horrible event," well, let's tie that in to his dad's death. His dad lingered on life support after being shot, and LJ, already a Dreamwalker by then, entered his dream to try and help him. He saw the dreams of the comatose, and he learned then about the universal unconscious on a level he can't explain.

Finally, the "strange event" that "effected" me. LJ was going to get rid of the machines. And then he discovered that if they're tuned to the right settings, they can attract Nightmares. He hasn't destroyed them yet (mostly because he's trying to find a way to reverse that process), but he can't bear to sell them, either. He's actually thinking about stealing them back from the other buyers, but it does make him wonder about the manufacturer...

Step Ten: Personal Information. Geez, ain't that enough? No? OK.

LJ is about 6' tall, thin and wiry. He has dad's blue eyes and mom's thick brown hair. He's got two tattoos, one a barbed wire dealie on his right arm, and the other a replica of his father's badge on his left. He carries pictures of his family in his wallet, but rarely any money. He's happy to take you up on that lunch you offered him.

LJ is also solid. He's dependable and brutally honest, and in dream-land, other 'Walkers call him "the Wall."

Occurs to me, though, that most of my scores are pretty low. Ah, well. Ain't going back and changing stuff now.