Origins, GMing, and Stuff I Bought

Origins was last week (I didn't get to this before now because I'm working a summer session at the ol' day job). I'm not gonna do a detailed blow-by-blow, but I did want to talk about some of the games I played and how they came out.

First of all, I want to note that Origins' event reg system is crap, and that's having some effects on the kind of gaming I like. For example, this year the event reg system went up...and promptly crashed...and then went up again, but a full third to half of the events (including all of the IGDN ones) weren't there. They did eventually get added in, yes, but that means we lost out on those initial few hours, and who knows how many people said "screw it, I'll just use generics" in disgust?

Also (and this is deeply stupid), you can't search the database by game title. You can search by the name of the game session, but that means that if you were to log on and see if, for example, anyone was running Chill, you wouldn't see anything. You would have to search "High Tide" or "Cold Dark Earth", and why would you know the session titles?

The effect that this is having is that folks who are doing the kind of gaming I enjoy (that is, not D&D, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu or the other big-name games) are doing it at Games on Demand. Let's be clear, I love GoD and what they do, but it leads to a problem where the only way to get players for your indie game is to run it there, which means all the indie players wind up there, which just perpetuates the issue, and that room will sooner or later run out of space. If Origins events was a little more competent, I'd say they'll increase the space, but eh?

But in any case, I got to play more games this year than I usually do, so let's talk about them.

Thursday: Overlight. I backed Overlight on Kickstarter because I liked the art, which is rare for me. Kai was interested to play it, so we signed up for a session together. I'm happy to report that the game is a lot of fun. It's your basic fantasy game inasmuch as there's a bunch of history, things got borked, there are different races, etc., but I found the history and the races interesting and compelling, which is pretty uncommon for me. Also the system is interesting (usually you wind up rolling three dice for a stat, three for a skill, plus a d4 that does good things if it comes up 4), and intuitive enough that both Kai and I picked it up pretty quickly.

As for the GM: The game was well-run. I felt like he listened to the players and got enthused by what we did and how we interacted, and he backed off and let us roleplay a bit. He was a little too quick to suggest things for Kai to do, which is something a lot of adults do to younger players, but he was nice and attentive about it, which is better than it could be. My Grade: B+

Kai's character did not actually have tentacle fingers.

Friday: Bedlam Hall. I...backed this game on Kickstarter, too. It's PbtA and kind of Addams-family/gothic inspired, dark humor with very Downton Abbey sensibilities, so Michelle and I signed up to play. I hadn't had a chance to read the game first, which is a shame, but I read through it while playing, which should be a bit of a warning sign.

Bedlam Hall commits to its premise - it constantly apologizes that you've chosen to play or read it, reminds you what a horrible choice that is, and tells you about all the weird and terrible things that happen. That's fine. I've read a lot of PbtA games and I'm reading more all the time (as I'm writing my own), so what different games choose to include and what they don't is interesting to me. Bedlam Hall doesn't focus quite as heavily on the "this is a conversation" aspect of PbtA, nor does it make the players' agenda or principles clear up front (at least not that I saw, but again I didn't read it real carefully).

However, none of that matter in this particular case because the GM wasn't prepared to run a PbtA game. He was very much attempting to run it like he was introducing new players to a trad game - instead of the characters being the established house staff, we were all on our first day. That meant that we didn't get to answer the questions that rooted us in the house and with the family:

Which means that the GM was coming up with all of this stuff for us, which just further pushed us out of the moment. Add that to the fact that we were given no chance to establish our characters; the second any of us got together and started to roleplay, the GM jumped in with an NPC to start the next "plot point" or whatever. And the whole notion of "moves" was hard for him; more than once he treated them like actions in a standard RPG, which means he didn't engage what they were supposed to do, and made our choices invalid by doing whatever came into his head and running the game like it was, well, D&D. He seemed to like performing for us and doing silly voices, but gave us very little chance to be part of the story. He admitted that he was not familiar with the game, this particular scenario, or PbtA in general, and apologized for that, so that was good, at least. My Grade: D

Also Friday: Numenera: Hey, one for which I didn't back the Kickstarter! Michelle wanted to play this, so we signed up for a late-night session (look, for me 8PM-midnight is "late night"). We had a full table, so that was cool. The game itself was a lot of fun and I like the system; I like any system that's forgiving of the players and gives them resources to manage in order to succeed. I felt like in general there wasn't a lot of threat, but it could be that it was a simple scenario for beginning players, which would have been appropriate. In general, though, it's a game that encourages players to buff each other and share resources, which, again, very much my jam.

As for the GM: Overall I thought he did really well. A little too over-reliant on reading shit off a page, but the real complaint I had was that he would ask what we wanted to do, half-listen to the answer, and then narrate for a full minute. This was actually something that the Bedlam Hall GM did, too, and you'll see this complaint again for the Saturday game. And like, I get it; you're pressed for time, you know what's going to happen next, you want to get into the plot.

But like...the players aren't here to watch you dance or listen to you talk. We're here to roleplay and be awesome, and that means you need to listen to us so you can respond to what we do. This is old, old, old, GMing advice, but you must be prepared to scrap your carefully-prepared plans in order for us to be awesome, or at least be able to fake that that's what you did.

Anyway, like I said, the game was fun and it definitely got on my list to buy (this was apparently a sneak-peek of the new edition, so I'll wait until that's out), and I'm being harsh but the GM was actually pretty good. My Grade: B-

Saturday: Trail of Cthulhu. This was the only game I played over the weekend that I was really familiar with; I ran it a few times and I've overall pretty solid on the Gumshoe system. I didn't notice when we (Michelle & I) signed up that it was based on a product called Cthulhu City, which takes the game and puts a Dark City kind of spin on it, but I'd have signed up anyway. The characters were pretty cool, and all of them had a couple of questions on the back about the strangeness of Arkham and how they'd encountered it; you chose one answer from an array of four for two questions.

The red flag, though, was that the GM didn't ask what we'd chosen. Here's a fact about GMing: If the GM doesn't know, it doesn't happen in-game. If the GM doesn't ask, it doesn't matter. So we all had these cool character bits that were actually pretty important, but they made no difference to the plot.

There were some tweaks to the system that I thought were pretty interesting, but honestly I remember very, very little about the game and I was falling asleep through a lot of it. That's bad. Now, some of that was because the group (4 players total) split up a bit (along gender lines ha ha, which turned out to be a problem), and the fella I was paired with was about as interesting as a wet sock; I tried to roleplay and he was giving me nothing back. But the larger issue was, again, the GM just kind of ignoring what the players did to keep the session going along its rails, and while he listened to me and the other guy, he all but completely ignored Michelle and the other woman at the table. (This, guys, is the sort of thing that women tell us happens but that we don't notice until we look for it, so look for it.)

Overall the game felt like it was an hour longer than it actually was, and the payoff at the end where Michelle's character sacrificed herself didn't have much impact because we'd never gotten to interact. My Grade: D

Sunday: Rockerboys & Vending Machines. You heard me. This is a hack of John Harper's Lasers & Feelings, run by Phil Vecchione of Encoded Designs and Gnome Stew. It's a cyberpunk game where you're playing a team of mercs/runners/whatever, and it's focused on the flash and the neon and the job. Michelle, Kai and I all signed up because we figured it would be a nice, light game for Sunday morning, and we were not wrong.

I remember more about this game than anything else I played all weekend. Granted, it's the kind of game that's built on player input, and so that helps, but Phil slowed it down, let us play with each other, let us talk, asked us what were doing and listened to the answer, and fit the events of the session around that, rather than trying to shoehorn our actions into his idea of what the session was. At the end of it all, we stole the Ultimate Meme from a corporation, defeated a rogue AI named Mark Anthony, and escaped (my character was an AI named MASHUP; I provided the soundtrack for my team looking awesome).

High praise: Kai was engaged enough that they asked everyone for a description so they could draw the characters later. My Grade: A

Stuff I Bought: Check it out!

Smaller haul than most years, because I'm strapped for money this year. I'm planning on buying more at GenCon, finances permitting, but I couldn't pass up a least a couple of purchases from the IGDN booth (gotta support my peeps), and the other two books were things I found at IPR that looked cooled. The board game is a legacy game about building a village that I showed to Michelle and she got bouncy, so that was that.

Overall, Origins was a good time. I know it looks like I complain about GMs a lot, and I do, but that's because I'm interested to watch other GMs work, so even when it's not awesome, it's still interesting. Plus the con was bookended with fun games, so overall it's a win.

Information Wants to Be Free

One of the greatest challenges to a GM is giving the players enough information that they can resolve the conflict of a story, but not so much that they have detailed instructions on how to go about it. This problem leads to some of the most frustrating tropes I’ve seen in roleplaying games, and can result in the players feeling helpless within the context of the story and in the GM looking rather like a jerk. In this essay, we’re going to examine some ways of disseminating information to the players (and thus their characters), both good and bad, and the consequences of those methods.

Let’s begin with the bad ideas.

Three Common Informative Mistakes

• Infodump: This method involves long, long explanations, usually delivered straight from a book and not in-character. Typically, this covers information the characters “would already know,” and that’s fine. The problem is that listening to people read from books is boring, and that the players aren’t likely to retain the information (especially if you ask them to engage different parts of their brains — i.e., playing their characters — after the infodump is over). Infodumps can happen in character, as well, and this presents problems of its own (see next point).

• The Jive-Talking Wizard: I saw this term on Beth Kinderman’s website, and I think it’s pretty appropriate. It refers to the all-powerful being who appears in order to get the characters together and set them on the right track, but won’t, for reasons only known to himself, impart enough information to do the job well. When asked for details or more helpful information, he typically simpers, changes the subject, vanishes, thunders “That’s not for you to know!” or otherwise says “Screw you” to the players. I’ve seen him as a god of humor, an actual wizard (Gandalf is almost a literary example of this tactic, but Gandalf also takes personal risks and gets down and dirty in battle, too, so he doesn’t really count), a computer, a Sidereal Exalt, and mentors and rulers of all kinds.

As is probably obvious, the Wizard is a bad way to dispense information for several reasons. First, it puts the characters in an obviously subservient role. That’s sometimes appropriate, depending on the game in question, but it chafes a lot of players, especially when it’s so apparent. Second, it flies in the face of logic: Why does this guy need the characters as pawns? Why can’t he just handle things himself? Why is he being so stingy with information if he wants the characters to succeed? (The answer to these questions, of course, is that having too much information would make things too easy on the characters (this is a fallacy, but I’ll cover that later), and the GM wants things to be challenging. The Wizard makes things less challenging and more annoying, though.) Finally, the Wizard does nothing to engender any kind of interest in the storyline. In fact, he does the opposite: The players feel like they’re being ordered around, not told what they need to know, not given control over their lives, and generally treated like machines. Most of us get that kind of treatment at our jobs, and we don’t want it during an escapist hobby.

• File and Forget: Most GMs, myself included, make up most of the happenings in their stories on the spot. That’s fine. Some of the best storylines I’ve come up with involved me taking a flippant comment from a player and running with it. The problem comes not when GMs make up information on the spot, but when that information doesn’t remain consistent. If you give the players a juicy clue that wasn’t part of your original plan, write it down. Information that turns out to be false because the players interpreted it incorrectly or didn’t cross-check their facts (I’m amazed at how often players assume that anything out of the mouth of a sympathetic NPC is unassailable truth, but that’s a separate issue), that’s fine. If the information turns out to be false or irrelevant because you forgot what you told the players, that’s a failing on your part.

Informing Players and Making them Happy

With all of the above in mind, how do you, as GM, give your players the information they require without teasing them, annoying them, misleading them or inundating them? Here are some suggestions:

• Use the Supporting Cast: Having NPCs tell the players what’s going on is fine. Just remember a few simple principles.

First, the NPCs are not omniscient. A character’s mentor might be truly wise and powerful, but said mentor has a limited scope of knowledge. Asking for information outside of that scope results in no information, or, worse yet, misleading information. I recommend always mixing in something useful with misleading or useless information. After all, a game session only lasts so long and every hour spent chasing false leads is another hour that players will remember as pointless.

One way to keep in mind what a given NPCs knows is to stat that character. I’m not as stringent about statting everybody in the world as I was 10 years ago, but important supporting characters still get write-ups in my notebook. If I know, for instance, that Dr. Jones has a high rating in Archeology but nothing at all in Occult, his information about the Dread Book of Niffugcam is going to be skewed appropriately. Having NPCs with limited bases of knowledge serves a number of purposes. In addition to avoiding the Jive-Talking Wizard problem (since the NPC doesn’t withhold information, he just doesn’t know everything the players need to find out), it also helps the players see the NPCs as individuals. Once they know that Dr. Jones can help them translate Sanskrit, but that he doesn’t know a thing about art, they won’t bother going to him to help them identify which artist drew the prints found in the Dread Book.

Second, the NPCs have their own agendas, but you need to know what those agendas are. Sometimes, a character’s agenda lets him work closely with the players’ characters, and sometimes it involves keeping information hidden. By way of example, consider Orpheus. In case you don’t know, Orpheus is a game in which the characters work for a company that solves ghost-related problems, and the company has a somewhat…checkered past. In the chronicle I ran some years back (that I unfortunately did not log, or I'd link to it), the characters’ boss was obviously uncomfortable with some of the goings-on at the Orpheus Group, but wasn’t ready to share everything with the characters for fear of endangering them. As such, he told them what he could when he could. They suspected him of being a villain a couple of times, but when the chips came down, he was unequivocally on their side. The bottom line here: Know what your NPCs want as well as what they know, and have their behavior reflect both.

Third, pay attention to what the players ask. If they ask the wrong questions, give them the wrong answers. I’m not talking about letting them discuss how to translate the Dread Book with Dr. Jones in the room and then later having them find out that Jones could have helped translate it, but didn’t speak up because the players didn’t ask. That kind of nonsense (always followed by a simper and a “tee-hee”) is comparable to the Jive-Talking Wizard in its irritation level. What I mean is, don’t allow the NPCs to be psychic. An example: The characters come across a body mauled by an animal and find wolf-prints nearby. They immediately start asking poor overworked Dr. Jones about werewolves. Now, in fact, the creature responsible was a were-coyote, which has very different implications for the story, but the players have jumped to a conclusion (admittedly, it’s a pretty easy one to jump to) and so Dr. Jones can’t really correct them.

• Let them learn gradually: A way to avoid the infodump problem is to let the players find out crucial information over a period of time. It’s been my experience that groups often split up during investigation or information-gathering phases (“OK, I’ll hit the library, you go talk to Dr. Jones, and you get on the Internet”), and this is a golden opportunity for you as GM. By letting each of the players find a nugget of information, you aren’t asking all of the players to remember pages worth of data. The players can put everything they’ve learned together and analyze it as a group. This also plays directly into my next point…

• Let them earn the info: …which is, nothing’s free. The characters should have to work to find out what they need to know, even if the only work involved is deciding whom to ask. Note, though, that it’s incumbent upon you as GM to present more than one avenue of approach for investigation, or, at the very least, to avoid shutting the players down if they come up with something that you didn’t think of. I’ve played in games where the GM had very specific ideas about how problems should be solved, how the players should go about getting from point A to point B, and what the players should know at various stages of the game. I accept that sort of thing in computer “role-playing” games, because the computer program has to proceed in a specific way. As a human being, however, you are above this sort of linear progression, and can allow players to learn from whatever sources they can think of. (And this really all goes back to a point I’ve made before: Players like it when their ideas pan out. They don’t like it when they try something clever and the response from the GM is “That’s clever, but I didn’t think of it first, so it won’t work.”)

• Give ‘em what they want: I played in a World of Darkness game once many years ago in which our characters found it necessary to infiltrate a Technocracy base. For those who didn’t play Mage: The Ascension, that’s a bit like infiltrating the Death Star, only the Stormtroopers can shoot straight, don’t all carry master keys, and generally aren’t complete idiots. It’s walking into the meat grinder, we knew, so we wanted to be prepared. So, calling in our contacts and a lot of favors, we got a complete readout of the base, a schedule for the guards, technical data on how everything worked, and lists of staff and their capabilities (from a scientific/magical standpoint). Far from making it too easy on us, we discovered exactly how screwed we were. Having the information gave us the possibility of victory; without, we’d have been dead. To take a cinematic example, consider The Usual Suspects. The characters know that the job they are being forced to do is a suicide mission, but they know everything they need to know to pull it off.

My point, here, is that if the characters go into a situation blind, they can justifiably blame you if things go wrong, especially if you’ve been coy or downright misleading up to that point. If they know everything they could have known (or if they skimped on their research), they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.

This isn’t to say, of course, that things can’t go wrong or that the enemy can’t have tricks up its collective sleeve that the characters couldn’t foresee. Such surprises are very much in-genre for most of the settings of role-playing games. The point is that there’s a difference between information the characters could not possibly have known and information they should have known, but you wouldn’t tell them.

An example: Against my better judgment, I played in a Dungeons and Dragons game run by a first-time GM. She had her story all planned out, she said (which should have been a big warning sign). I played a druid, one of the other players made a duelist character, which is some jumped-up form of fighter that uses two weapons or something (I don’t like the d20 system and I don’t keep abreast of the 1.4 billion prestige classes currently available). Anyway, his character and mine walked into a bar and got jumped by a lot of toughs. The duelist hit one of them with a blow that should have killed him, and the player, quickly doing the math, figured that the “bar brawler” had to be a high-level fighter to survive. Turns out all of those brawlers were high-level fighters.

Ignoring the cliché of a bar fight breaking out in a D&D game (I'm not opposed to the classics), the GM really should have given the duelist’s player some kind of check to notice that these guys were all armed, that they carried themselves like professional fighters, that they look battle-hardened, etc. Instead, she chose to lure the player into a sucker bet. That’s not a good way to get people excited about playing in your game.

• Don’t tell them everything: The more you reveal to your players, the less they’ll fill in the blanks. I love it when players come up with explanations for what’s going on. Sometimes I even replace my actual plots with player-inspired lunacy. It’s a question (like most of Storytelling) of balance — give them as much information as they need, but not so much that they don’t need to find out how the story ends.

Four Simple Tricks to Avoid Under-Informed Players

• Know what there is to know: When I write scenarios and settings for game companies, I tend to spend a lot of work count on an area’s history and what has come before the players arrive. That’s because if the GM knows what’s happened, he’ll know what the players can potentially discover. I can’t predict, as a writer (or as a GM, for that matter) what the players are going to do, so the best I can do is know what information the players can find and let them find it. In my opinion, writing down the history of your setting or events is more important than statting out your antagonists. You can make up stats on the fly or use characters out of a book. Making up history and keeping it consistent is much trickier.

• Some Information is Crucial: One of my guiding principles as a GM is that I don't ask for rolls if I'm not prepared for the result. This principle is especially true in the information-gathering phase of a story, and I tend to run highly investigation and mystery-focused games, so I have to be conscious of what the players know and how they can find out the truth. In any given investigation-focused scene, thinking about what information the characters must walk away with. I'd even advise giving players the same information in a couple of different ways; it allows for confirmation and nuance. For example, a group of characters are looking into the disappearance of a local high schooler. Her parents think that she was a model teenager, but investigating her online presence (avenue of investigation #1) reveals chat logs and a browsing history of a decidedly more prurient nature. Discussion with her friends at school (avenue of investigation #2) reveals that she had an "older boyfriend," but that she had been "caught behind the bleachers" early in the school year. Same information - the girl was secretly sexually active and engaging in risky behaviors - but two points of reference and several opportunities for follow-up investigation.

For further consideration, have a look at the GUMSHOE system. I haven't played it yet, sadly, but I've read Trail of Cthulu, which uses GUMSHOE. The basic idea is that rather than rolling dice to have your characters obtain clues, you spend points. As such, you'll never miss a clue or a plot point due to a failed roll. You can spend points based on different investigative skills, though, so you'll get different information depending on how your character goes about it.

• Consider the characters’ avenue of approach: If you’ve got a group full of combat-ready characters who can barely read, they aren’t likely to spend days in the library looking through hoary old tomes. They’re more likely to go beating people up for information. Look over the character sheets, pay attention to how the players like to do things, and structure the information and the vectors of the information accordingly (players, this also means you need to play your characters appropriately — your hulking barbarian with no idea which way to hold a book probably shouldn’t suggest going to the local scribe and asking to poke through scrolls, though he might well suggest poking the scribe with sticks until he finds the information for the party).

• Everything is fluid: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Be ready to scrap a plan, a fact, a character or a plot point the second your players come up with something better, especially if they have all the information and come to a completely logical conclusion that just happens to be miles away from what you came up with. You’ll usually find that tweaking a few details makes all the difference, and that you don’t need to change everything, just enough.

In closing, remember that you aren’t telling the story to the players, you’re telling the story with the players. They should be informing you just as you inform them.

Character Creation: Trail of Cthulhu

I think it'd be a trail of saltwater and eyeballs.

The Game: Trail of Cthulhu
The publisher: Pelgrane Press
Degree of familiarity: None. Just read the book is all. Oh, and I've played a lot of Arkham Horror.
Books required: Just the Trail of Cthulhu book. 

 

See what I did there?

Anyway, on we go. First thing I should do is talk to the Keeper, but I ain't got one.

So I go on to choosing an Occupation. There's a handy list in the book.

It's very tempting to make an alienist. I read the novel of the same name (by Caleb Carr, and I highly recommend it), and one of the things I really liked was how the investigators were trying things that didn't work because they were experimental and untested (like the whole "last thing a dead dude sees is burned into the eyeball," which shows up in Wild Wild West and is probably the least absurd thing in the movie). But I don't want to make a character too much like the one in the novel.

Hmm. I like the idea of a man from Vienna who did some work wit Freud. The game is set mid 1930s; Freud and his family left Vienna for London in 1938 due to persecution from the Nazis. My character left before that, when Hitler came to power in 1933. He asked Freud to come to America with him, but Freud had family ties, not to mention health issues, keeping him in Europe.

My character, Doctor Ludwig Fuchs, came to America in 1933, and went back to his research. Never comfortable with face-to-face conversations, he is better able to size up a person when observing their interactions with others. As such, his initial idea was to treat mental disorders by employing others to do the actual talking and coaxing information from patients, while he would handle the analysis. He's had trouble getting that started, however.

OK, moving on, I do Drive. This is what motivates Ludwig to investigate the Mythos, once it comes to that. It'd be easy to say that he wants to the know the truth about the deep dark fears of the human psyche, blah blah. But honestly, the bit I keep coming back to is that he saw something bad on the horizon when Adolf Hitler rose to power, and it's that fear and fatalism that I see driving him. There's not really a Drive like that among those listed in the book, so I'm going to call it a nuanced form of Duty - it's not that Ludwig wants to know, it's that he figures someone should.

Now I spend build points on my Abilities. How many points I get for Investigative skills varies based on how many people are in the group. If I were to play this game, odds are there would be at least four players, so let's assume that. That gives me 16 points for Investigative skills and 65 for General Abilities. My Occupational Abilities cost half what other Abilities do. I note those, and I get to pick two Interpersonal Abilities to be Occupational for me. I pick Oral History and Bureaucracy.

OK, let's do Investigative first. The book says it's better to spread out points than hyper-specialize, and I'll believe it. I put one point into Language, making me fluent in English and Latin (and my native German); actually, I'll put one point more in and assume I speak French and Greek, too. I'll put two points each into Oral History, Medicine, Assess Honesty, Biology. I put one point into Library Use, Bureaucracy (those get ratings of 2 because they're Occupational), Anthropology, History, Occult and Interrogation.

Now General Abilities. These are different; instead of getting a pool of points based on the rating, I'll actually be rolling on these traits. So, what've we got?

I put 6 points into Psychoanalysis for a rating of 12. I'll put 5 into Athletics (nice to be able to climb into unholy caverns safely), 8 into First Aid (for dressing wounds), 6 into Fleeing (duh), 9 into Health (I picture Ludwig as a pretty hardy guy), 8 into Sanity and 10 into Stability (just in case I feel like learning magic whee-hoo-hoo!), 3 into Scuffling (not a fighter, but he's got one good punch in him), 8 into Sense Trouble and 2 into Shadowing.

Now I define my Pillars of Sanity. I get one for every 3 full points in Sanity, which gives me 4 (I start with 4 points of Sanity and I added 8). I choose value of intellect (the world is valuable to us only insofar as we can understand it), scientific reality (which we can), human strength and decency (although we're then obliged to use that knowledge correctly and for the good of mankind), and the quest of knowledge (and this cycle repeats).

I also get three Sources of Stability. These are people that help me get through my experiences. You know, fuck it. I'm naming Freud as one. We still write letters back and forth to each other (though I know that Freud dies in 1939 of a morphine overdose, administered by a friend to end his pain; cancer, you see). I'll name a local sanitarium administrator, Dr. Stanley Weiss as a close friend; I knew his family in Vienna. And, finally, I play chess with a strange fellow named Spiro down by the docks. He doesn't speak English, but Ludwig knows enough Greek to talk with him, and he's been all over the world and has a million stories.

And that actually finishes me up. I think playing Ludwig would be fun; he'd encourage the other characters to actually do the talking and then spend Oral History and Assess Honesty to form a profile of them. And, of course, there's the whole "Freud's pen pal" thing, which I kind of like.

Origins 2009 - A GM's Report Card, Pt. 4

And now, the exciting conclusion.

So, Friday night, we sang, other people danced, we went to bed. Saturday, we woke up, and headed downstairs for more gaming!

Saturday morning, my 10AM game was Edge of Midnight, the second of the games that I ran. I've been running a chronicle of this particular game since December 2008, and I'm really enjoying it. Partly, that's because I've run little else than World of Darkness games for a long time and it's nice to keep the dark but play with a new setting and genre (noir), and partly that's because Edge of Midnight is just an awesome game and it's a hell of a lot of fun. So getting some new people to play it was a good plan, I thought.

The scenario was a murder mystery. Basically, prominent citizen dies at a club, and the PCs have until sunset to figure it out or else the victim's fans are going to riot. Oh, and the victim (and said fans) are gaunts, and a riot would tear the city apart. The characters got a chance to play with magic, investigation, learn about the city of Terminus (much like New Orleans, which is where my ongoing chronicle is set, too) and generally a good time was had by all. If I have one regret, it's that I didn't find a way to work in a more involved fight, but I hadn't set up the scenario to include combat and I didn't want it to feel forced (no orcs, thanks). I think the players dug it, though.

Following the game, Michelle and I headed to the dealer's room again. I scooped up a copy of Ars Magica, Fourth Edition for all of four bucks, and I finally bit the bullet and bought Unhallowed Metropolis. I've played UnMet a couple of times, I've really enjoyed it, and it's the sort of game I should own. And I've got players that I think would really get into it.

[redacted]

And that game was...Hollow Earth Expedition. Last tabletop game of the con, and the one I had the highest hopes for.

See, Hollow Earth Expedition is a pulp game, but unlike Spirit of the Century, it gives you a very specific setting - the Earth is hollow (bet you figured that, yeah?) and there are natives, dinosaurs, Amazons, the whole bit. I bought and read the game last year following GenCon, and I've been very keen to play it ever since. This particular game had a blurb that involved dinosaurs and capturing a tar pit. Awesome.

Warning sign right off: The GM hadn't made characters for the scenario, but had just photocopied the pre-gens from the book, put them in plastic sheets (OK, this is maybe just me, but I think it's cheap when players can't at least keep character sheets from con games), and handed us a great big stack. I picked on at random (the Big Game Hunter), and we started out on our airship in Hollow Earth.

Yep, just like that. No attempt at backstory or group cohesion. No explanation for why these characters were together. Just, here we are, on our airship, and then the air pirates attacked.

Now, at this point it's pretty clear we've into beer-n-pretzels, and that's disappointing, but OK. I co-opt Jonathan's Hyde's character from Jumanji to inform my portrayal of Col. Stanley Admunson (I promptly get a style point for naming my character, which encourages everyone else to do the same) and we get down to the business of killing air pirates. We win, but our ship is damaged badly, so the Fortune Hunter (played by a 16-year-old boy, who seems to have the emotional maturity of, say, 13) puts the ship down. The rest of us don parachutes and bail the heck out.

Splitting the party is fine; I do it all the time. But five to one isn't a split I like, because it puts too much focus on one dude, and that's especially true if the one dude is being...well, a fishmalk. So while the five of us are fighting a T-Rex, he's met a tribe of crazy Amazons (led by a woman named Sinestra) and patching the hole in the blimp with a bag of monkeys.

Things, clearly, are getting out of hand.

Eventually, we meet up with the other tribe of Amazons (at which point the GM makes it a point to tell us that some Amazons remove one breast, but not these Amazons...sigh). The gamer OMG GIRLZ is getting a little thick, especially for Michelle. I remind the 16-year-old that there is, indeed, a woman present and maybe he should be quite so juvenile, but his dad (also playing) is encouraging it a bit. We keep things on track, more or less, fix our blimp and land in New York City with a crew of Amazons (this is a shift from the GM's original intent, but it was the ending we liked).

Now, a little GMing theory: If you've reached the end, stop. We landed in NYC, the blimp burst through the subway tunnels, we're given applause and fame, awesome. That's the end of the story. Except, just then, not only did the Amazons reveal themselves to be the bad Amazons, but the freaking T-Rex jumped out of the hole and attacked. It had been tracking us. From the ground.

GMs, not every game has to end in a fight, even at a con. Here, consider this episode of Dexter's Laboratory.

Note that when DD runs the game, she keeps things exciting, she pays attention to what the players want for their characters, and she doesn't waste words or events? That's good GMing. (Yeah, she needs to learn the rules, but that'll come in time.)

Thoughts on the game: Pre-gens, cookie-cutter story, villains that show up once and never again (what happened to those ors, er, pirates?), gratuitous breast references, and an overdone ending scene? Man, it could have been so much cooler. My grade: D+

After that, I had to rush downstairs to play Rising! Only I didn't really have to rush, because the 10PM game didn't have any players but me. So I arranged to play in the 11PM game, which was a VIP event (and turned out to be all kinds of fun), went back upstairs for a while to watch Michelle sing karaoke. I didn't get to sing; the rotation was insane at that point.

Then, back downstairs for Rising. The VIP event involved them handcuffing us, blindfolding us, and letting us fight our way out of the lab that was doing experiments on us. They even took our pictures and did up little dossiers (apparently, my previous occupation was "cartoonist", which is funny if you've ever seen me try to draw). I played an engineer, which means I got to solve puzzles, and I discovered, now having played all four classes, that I'm happiest with Marksman. Engineer's fun, but I don't really solve puzzles under pressure all that well. Hunter isn't bad, but I like guns. Doctor's OK, but then you can't fight as well and you rely on other folks for protection. Nah, gimme guns.

Thoughts on the game: Rising isn't strictly an RPG. It's a LASH (Live Action Survival Horror), and mostly you don't really play a role as much as play yourself with some weird skills and rules with zombies trying to eat you. That said, Zombie Buddy Productions went the extra mile on the game, so RPG or not, it was bloody awesome. My grade: A

So the scenario ended, I survived, got my swag bag (awesome), and headed the heck to bed.

Sunday: We got up, got packed, took our stuff downstairs, and hit the dealer's room one last time. We (Michelle and I) had originally been scheduled for a game of Eclipse Phase, but that got canceled, and our other choice just didn't happen. So we wandered a bit, played some demos, did some more shopping. I picked up a copy of Agone for $2 (even if it sucks, that's less than a cup of coffee some places) and a copy of Trail of Chthulu, which I'm informed doesn't suck. That brings the total of new RPGs to five; that sounds good. Also bought a cool board game called Gemlok, which Heather enjoyed and wanted to grab.

All in all, lots of fun this year at Origins. Definitely got me in the mood to start serious essay writing about GMing again, so I'll get right on that.

Meantime, next con is GenCon, even if only overnight. We'll see how the grades fall out there.