Heroclix, possibly the ultimate beer and pretzels game

We had all the fixings of a great evening last weekend: beer, ribs cooking in the oven, potato salad in the refrigerator — and 300 assorted Heroclix figures, kindly donated by my friend Bob.

I had invited six friends (a mix of tabletop and console gamers) over to feast on ribs and play Heroclix into the wee hours. I had to get rid of those Heroclix, and fast — the boxes and bags were piled all over my man room, so the idea was that I would let the players comb over the figures and put together an assortment of heroes and villains, which they would then take home and keep.

Anyway, the night was a rousing success. Four of the players had never played Heroclix before (which for the uninitiated is the click-base miniatures game from WizKids). You play the game on a grid map, and each character has a "combat dial" representing various super powers, most of which make perfect sense from a comics perspective. For example, Wolverine has a claws, Rhino can charge into combat, and Hulk gets more powerful as he takes damage.

The games were great, with a lot of the zany, laugh-out-loud moments I remember from playing Heroclix in college. It's a simple game with a lot of depth; all the different powers mean that it's possible to chain up various effects in the game. Plus there are objects on the board that you can use to smash other characters (like the classic example last weekend of Rhino smashing Beta Ray Bill with a dumpster, ouch).

I used to play Heroclix a lot in college (and a lot of my buddies were even more "into" the game than me, often playing in weekly tournaments for prizes, etc). Since I moved to Chicago it's become just one of the games on my shelf when we get together for game nights. But now that I've successfully distributed Bob's old collection, I'm expecting to play a lot more frequently this summer.

Let's hear it for low-level PCs

For our Wild Talents game, our group consciously decided to reach for the stars and play ultra-high-level characters: trade envoys, planetary ambassadors, billionaire playboys and super-scientists. Good stuff, yes, but it's got me thinking about the other end of the spectrum, the low-level characters who have to scramble for every gold piece and make hard decisions about whether or not to leave the two-handed broadsword back at camp because it might put them over their carry capacity.

Part of the fun of low-level roleplaying is that little successes are amplified a hundredfold in the scope of the game -- and what's more, players tend to shoehorn these minor victories into the campaign itself, with admirable results. Bob over at The Dice Bag puts it nicely.

That was until the 3rd or 4th session we played. We’d picked up a mission in The Yawning Portal to help out some local merchants who were being pushed out of the market after refusing to pay protection money to a local gang. After a few hours of gaming we came across a building that used to be a brewery that just happened to be where the gang had set up shop. After a rather successful battle I came up with a bright idea to use the equipment to make up some homebrew. It certainly wasn’t easy to set up but within a few levels I had a rather successful business venture going on.

Dude started brewing up his own dwarven grog with little more than a throwaway skill and a generous DM. It doesn't get much sweeter than that.

Scoring a Game

When I troll around rpg message boards (which is unsettlingly often), I'll see a thread on music pop up every so often. Folks will ask for music recommendations for certain kinds of games, and the response will often be something like, "Check out this site or this video game soundtrack, because it has great ambient tavern sounds. Clink clink. The voice of an old man in the back ground offering 5 strangers a bag of gold to save a princess. Etc." And then there are those who like movie soundtracks (but always shy away from known songs, like the Indiana Jones theme, because that would be gauche).

I love music when I'm playing and actively scoring a game, but I don't like either of these strategies. Some of my best game experiences have involved the kind of music I actively listened to at the time. In a Star Wars game, our seedy crew of a dilapidated starship flew through space and descended through the atmosphere to the sounds of Beck - funky, spacey, zany, with a drop of cowboy music. In a pulpy game built around kinetic action and fighting Nazis (of course), the drum and bass of the Propellerheads drove the action. If you like hip hop, I can attest that it fits in a huge range of scenes beyond the club.

The point is that many of my most fun game moments include the bobbing of the head. No matter how elegant the rules are or how robust the setting is, it's about being social with a bunch of friends imagining the same thing. Good music is one of the most underrated game aids in this respect.

And beer doesn't hurt either.