RPGaDay 2018, Week 3

Wow, week 3 already? Huh.

Anyhow, I've done a lot better at the post-a-day schedule this past week, with only one alternate question. So here we go!

Day 15: Describe a tricky RPG experience you enjoyed

Honestly, I'm really having to rack my brain for this one, because I've had so many experiences I'd consider 'tricky,' and nailing down one that I enjoyed enough to want to talk about is actually kind of rough. Especially if we're talking experiences I look back fondly on, and not just ones where I was happy to get past it at the time.

That said, one does come to mind.

So many years ago, I ran a 'season' of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. That one had some particular challenges, some of which I think I've mentioned before, but there was a session I'm particularly proud of to this day.

So in the time between the Buffy Season 8 comics becoming a thing and the Angel comics becoming a thing, there was a lot of stuff up in the air regarding certain characters. I'd already established I was incorporating the Season 8 material (I had a character who was one of the newly-activated Slayers from the TV series finale who hadn't been snatched up for Buffy's army yet), but we didn't know the disposition of any of the characters from the Angel series.

I mention this, because I improvised and had Lorne show up in a session. In my canon, he'd managed to escape LA right before the Senior Partners dragged it to Hell in the series finale, and was wandering the country, parleying his brief Vegas fame into hosting karaoke parties as a cover to track down and help small bands of heroes scattered around. And I'd like to think that I played him as close to perfect as I could have, given the circumstances. But he provided guidance to my heroes, some of which was useful and heeded -- our group's robot, who was tricky for Lorne as the robot didn't have an aura -- and some of it... less so... Y'see, our group's Slayer, whose player wanted a vampire boyfriend and promised she wouldn't do 'the Buffy and Angel thing,' was trying to do 'the Buffy and Angel thing,' and Lorne tried to warn her away from it. He pointed out that Angel did more emotional damage to the people around him with a soul than without one, it wasn't worth the hassle, but the advice just didn't register. That got awkward down the line.

But for that session, playing the character accurately, trying to take it beyond a fun little cameo of vocal tics, was tricky as hell but I pulled it off and I'm pretty proud of how it came out. Even if our Slayer didn't take the hint.


Day 16: Describe your plans for your next game

This is gonna be a little slim, but I don't feel like reaching for an alt question because I do have an answer.

So once my Chronicles game wraps up, I'm planning to take a break from doing any <Whatever> of Darkness stuff for a little bit. I'm gonna pitch a couple of different game options -- primarily Fate and Apocalypse Engine stuff -- and work out with the players what we're going to do next.

When Starfinder wraps up, that'll likely get followed up with another Starfinder adventure path, but we'll see what happens there depending on what options are available.


Day 17: Describe the best compliment you’ve had gaming

Honestly, I just get (and content myself with) the occasional "tonight's game was really good" or some such. Nothing really particular comes to mind other than that. (As someone who writes and posts fiction to the internet, I've developed a really low bar for feedback to my creative endeavors.)


Day 18: Art that inspires your game

This is kind of an easy one: All of it. I keep an eye/ear out for pretty much anything interesting that floats around in my sphere of influence. Art, writing, TV shows -- anything can inspire, regardless of genre. I almost never go out of my way to specifically look at or look for any one thing for ideas. I take in any possible sources of inspiration I can, whether they seem immediately fruitful or not. Some of it winds up in my writing, some of it winds up in my gaming. But all of it's inspirational, and all of it's useful at some point.


Day 19: Music that enhances your game

Admittedly, I don't normally incorporate music into my game. I keep thinking I'm going to try using Syrinscape for my Pathfinder and Starfinder games. However, as I already use both my iPad and phone for managing PDFs and taking notes and what have you and Syrinscape can't be run in the background, anything I could do to incorporate it would just be one more gadget to keep track of. Since I play in a house where I could easily have music playing in the background, I've thought of just having a playlist or something for my Whatever of Darkness stuff but I worry it's going to be a distraction so I talk myself out of it.

That said, I used to build soundtracks for my Aberrant games that I played back in the day. I'd not only just have ambient music in the background but I'd have specific tracks for specific scenes and planned events. This was the early 00's, before MP3 players were casually a thing, so I actually had a minidisc player with a remote that I could set up and plug into speakers, set across the room. I'd have custom discs for different sessions and stories, each track intended for something specific. I got a lot of mileage out of video game soundtracks and movie scores, stuff meant to sit well in the background and/or loop over and over.

Also, when I ran my Doctor Who game, I'd begin each session playing the Doctor Who theme. If the characters were meddling in a specific Doctor's chunk of the setting or guest-starring a Doctor -- a UNIT story that overlaps with the Fourth Doctor's era, or going on an adventure with the Seventh Doctor -- I would play that specific Doctor's version of the theme. For the group's own independent adventures, I'd play the arrangement from "The Light at the End," a Big Finish audio drama featuring the first eight Doctors (with 4-8 played by the original actors with recast cameos for 1-3). I thought that would help set the mood and tone of the episode, and I kept a private playlist on Youtube so I could dial a specific one up as needed. Also, if the game had gone on, it would have been a fun little 'prepare for a surprise' thing when I would start playing a different theme than they're used to.


Day 20: Which game mechanic inspires your play the most?

I'll be honest, I'm not sure there's any one mechanic that consistently 'inspires' me gaming-wise. To me, game mechanics are tools to be applied to various situations. As I don't even have an interesting non-answer for this, I'm gonna hit up the alt questions list.

Alt Question: Share playing a “temporary” character

So I've never quite done this myself, unless you count one-shot player characters at convention games. And as I don't normally get to play, myself, any story I've got about this actually involves someone playing such a character at my games. And two instances come to mind.

The first was in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG I mentioned a few days ago. One of my players, Sean, was playing a robot. The characters, at one point, passed through a portal into history, stuff happened, and they found out about a True Demon that died in the spot where the city was now. Sean insisted that his character stay behind to keep an eye on the place and catch up with the group back in the present, like that episode of Star Trek TNG with Mark Twain or the Area 51 episode of Futurama.

Now, while he'd planned to be waiting for the group on the other side of the portal when they returned, things didn't go according to plan. So his now-ancient robot body was in the hands of the Bid Bad of the season, a vampire mobster, and the group had to get him back. But as for Sean, so he'd have someone to play, I dug him up an NPC. And, if I recall correctly (and I'm not conflating two separate incidents in that game in my mind), I had the Groosalugg in the area, and I think I let Sean play him until they reacquired and reactivated his robot.

Also, a couple of years ago, I was running the Carrion Crown adventure path for Pathfinder, and late in the second module a combat went badly and one of my players -- Sean again, coincidentally -- lost his character. Rather than make him sit out or handwave a way for a new character to catch up with them as deep as they were into the castle they were exploring, I let him take over an NPC who  was supposed to get involved with the final encounter anyways -- the Beast of Lepidstadt, a Frankenstein's monster-like flesh golem (we were tracking down his creator and another monster of said creator's who'd gotten loose) and semi-major NPC in the setting. And so that served as a decent way to wrap up that module, until the group could meet Sean's new character at the beginning of the next.


Day 21: Which dice mechanic appeals to you?

Okay, so this is an... interesting one. Namely because I'm a big fan of the notion of different games having different needs and dice mechanics that serve those needs.

That said, in general, I'm enjoying the growing trend of mechanics that allow for success at a cost on a failure, or are even focused on making things more interesting when a roll goes badly rather than just 'you fail and the thing doesn't work.' If you're going to include dice as a randomizing factor, then a failure needs to be a bump in the road, not something that stops the vehicle. Even something as mild as Storypath's 'gain momentum on a failure' still means you get something if a roll doesn't go the players' way.


And that's it for week 3! As I usually do, I'm going to post the rest all at once at the end of the month, rather than do a week 4 and then a 'last few days' post. See you then!