New Dark Heresy campaign begins tonight!

Just a quick note to say that my local group is about to start a new Dark Heresy campaign. I'll be the GM; we're making characters tonight at Chicagoland Games, our local game store.

It should be a lot of fun—Dark Heresy is super crunchy, far moreso than any game I've played in the last couple of years, but sometimes it's nice to sit back with a couple beers and thumb through a rulebook for 4 or 5 hours.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm from the crew at Chicagoland Games. Word on the street is that they're pretty ecstatic that we'll be making characters tonight, and they've set aside the big table for us. I'm not sure if we'll play there regularly, but it sounds like we'll get a warm welcome if we so choose. Game on!

We're All Human on the Inside

A couple days ago, Dice Monkey tossed out a few possible explanations as to why some players groove on playing nonhuman characters. I wrote this comment:

Here’s my take. In most RPGs, despite what we tell ourselves, we are essentially playing ourselves on some fundamental, id-versus-ego level. As such, we offer up our most frank, honest roleplaying moments when we’re playing a character that’s fairly near to our own selves.

I mean think about it: when the DM takes a moment and describes something stunning and/or magnificent in the game, you don’t automatically say “By Alrindel’s fair eyes!” if you’re playing an elf, or “Stroke my beard if that isn’t a wondrous sight” if you’re a dwarf. You say “Sweet! That’s awesome!” — and then you scramble to “get into character” and react the way you think your character would act.

That’s why humans are so appealing. They allow us to experience the game through familiar eyes. This in turn preserves the wonder and majesty of the game.

Definitely worth repeating here. I always play humans, and I tend to have a more satisfying time as GM when I’m running a group of human characters. The best moments, most sublime flashes of in-character inspiration, come when we’re confronting things that affect us on a human level. No amount of character immersion can replace the unfiltered utterances that slip out in the heat of the moment.

This, I think, is why OD&D had such a mythical quality attached to it. You were basically playing yourself. You had a spear and maybe some leather armor, or a couple minor spells — but mostly, you were playing a scrub adventurer trying to stay alive in an environment that wanted to kill you. To play a human in such a setting is to enter into a social contract with the game itself. The price of admission is participation.

Meet the magnificent bastards

For a long time, I resisted the idea of morally gray characters — those self-serving scoundrels who would just as soon ransack the crypt than save the curator, for example. To me, they were the crutch of unimaginative players. Twas infinitely better, I thought, to dig deeper into the game’s source material and craft a nuanced character festooned with plot hooks and ulterior motives — red meat for the GM, in other words.

Gradually, though, I’m coming to appreciate the idea of the “magnificent bastard” — the magnanimous, perpetual ego trip of a character whose only goal in life is to leave behind a handsome corpse in some lonely, forgotten dungeon. These adventurers have as much of a place in today’s fantasy gaming as the Tolkienesque Dwarf fighter and Elf ranger. Right now, at least, I'd like to see more of them.

Ultra-high-level roleplaying, and the perils thereof

A few quick hits from the weekend...

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We played our second session of Wild Talents on Sunday, and a few things became clear. We are — by choice — playing a very high-powered game, with each character being the head of some guild or private army or merchant union. This means, by extension, that our story involves very high-level, world-threatening themes. Again, this is cool. What we realized in our Sunday session, however, was that our very powerful characters were going to succeed in most die rolls put before them, so we had to figure out a way to keep the game challenging while we mobilized starfleets, influenced planetary law and rerouted energy shipments (all high-level stuff that went off without a hitch due to our insanely high stats). But failure — or the threat thereof — is a good thing, and we’ve made some changes to ensure that the dice still serve a purpose in our Wild Talents game.

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Black Sun Games’ official Web site is up and running, though most of the links don’t work. I’m continually impressed by these guys: By all accounts, they’re doing everything right as far as opening a successful, long-term game store in Chicago. Check out their banner...looks like some Flames of War minis in the background? I’ll have to check that game out.

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I joined Dark Reign, the Warhammer 40k RPG fan site, and was simply bowled over by the volume of fan-generated content on there. They’ve got GM aids, full-fledged sourcebooks, adventure hooks, random encounter tables and alternate rules. The best part is that (it appears) any member can contribute articles, which really has my creative gears turning. Shouldn’t be tough to find inspiration — I’m about 200 pages away from finishing up the massive Eisenhorn omnibus by Dan Abnett, which means I’ve been totally immersed in 40k for the last month or two.

Dr. Manhattan is naked, blue and perfect

I’ve never been so happy to see a naked man.

Wait, wait, let me explain. I’m referring to Dr. Manhattan’s appearance in the first Watchmen trailer, which blitzed the internets Thursday ahead of an official theatrical premiere before The Dark Knight.

Watchmen is easily my favorite graphic novel, but the beloved series has had a rough ride through Hollywood over the last dozen years or so. As such, I’ve been following the development of Zack Snyder’s adaptation very closely. At WizardWorld Chicago last month, I browsed a gallery of Watchmen toys and statuettes — noting with apprehension that Dr. Manhattan’s merchandise was conspicuously absent from the lineup. I asked a guy from DC Direct about this omission, and he told me he was sworn to secrecy about the visual look of Manhattan.

This was troubling to me. See, Dr. Manhattan’s most identifiable characteristic is that he spends most of the series naked. It’s not a fashion statement; rather, it’s meant to illustrate the fact that’s he’s so far beyond human comprehension that trivial things like clothing doesn’t concern him anymore. He watches quarks and muons flicker through subatomic nuclei; he walks on Mars and assembles microcomputers with his mind. He’s a being who has more in common with God than with humans, and clothing is simply an afterthought.

All this played through my head as I considered what Manhattan might look like — because clearly some decision had been made, otherwise why not show him along with the rest of the character photos that were released earlier this year? And now his toy is absent from an important merchandising lineup? I was worried, to say the least.

Then I saw the trailer. And I saw Manhattan, in all his blueberry-nude glory. And I rested easy that night, knowing that Watchmen — my Watchmen, thank you very much — is in good hands.

Starting a New Game

Over the past week, Pat and I got involved in a new game.  Both of us and one of our other gamer buddies each tapped a person who we knew and have played with at least once before - the aim was to put together a group that's fun and story oriented.  Early signs point to good things on the horizon.

We're using the Wild Talents system, and from what I can tell thus far, it looks cinematic and gritty at the same time (which is just what I'm looking for).  The system is for a supers game, but we're playing a science fiction game in the far flung future.  The 6 of us hashed out the setting over email, and I think it's pretty cool.  Maybe I'll post a more detailed description later, but the skinny of it is this: 3 known alien races with different goals, human upstarts with transhuman abilities, the threat of a scary alien invasion on the horizon, ancient artifacts and unknown planets, and weird physics.  I'm the GM, and I don't know yet exactly how all this is going to fit together.  But I do know that the setting is volatile and provides opportunity for politics, exploration, and all out war.   Seems like a good set up to me.

Character gen went pretty well.  I like the characters so far - they each have different powers and different goals.  Hopefully, we'll be able to knit all of them together with an overarching goal that they can all buy in to.  In fact, I think this is crucial after our Burning Wheel sessions.

So, in short, I like the player mix so far, I like the setting we've collaboratively made, and I like the level of excitement that seems to be there.  I'm hoping we can get a regular game going with some momentum, and at this point, I just want to play.  Theorizing about rpgs and discussing them is all well and good (and certainly amusing), but damn the torpedos!  I just want to roll some dice, blow some shit up, and put these new characters in some really tough situations.

Is it the players or the system?

I was having a discussion recently with Ben, a great friend and member of my local group here in Chicago, about the merits of gaming systems vs. gaming groups. Lately Ben's been on a ruleset kick; he's been buying PDFs of various games and monkeying around with different mechanics. I guess you could view this as something of a research project, since Ben is set on writing his own full-length RPG in the next year or two.

Anyway, we were discussing the recent rash of indie games that take narrative control out of the GM's hands and distribute it amongst the players. Games like Burning Wheel (whichn I'm currently playing) encourage players to base dice rolls around their more esoteric traits, rather than waiting for the GM to instruct them to. (Ex: Using "Nobleman's Son" to defuse a potential combat scenario rather than Persuasion or simple fighting. There's no stat attached to it, but the GM can react appropriately when the player asserts the trait.) This drives players to resolve encounters in a variety of ways, both social and combative.

Ben is really jazzed about systems that provide for this sort of character-driven interplay. I, on the other hand, have been playing devil's advocate a little and suggesting that the right gaming group doesn't need to be poked and prodded by a quirky ruleset. Roleplaying will just happen, without any sort of conditional system to encourage or refine it.

Case in point: the d20 system is the yardstick for measuring most new RPGs. It's fairly traditional, somewhat versatile and satisfies most rule-hungry gamers. It doesn't really promote roleplaying through written mechanics - but that hasn't been a problem in my D&D campaign. I'm playing Midnight, a fantastically dark setting by Jeff Barber, with a group of guys here in Chicago. We're all about the same age (late 20s to early 30s) and we're all remarkably on the same page as far as what we want out of our game.

As such, we don't have any problem engaging in some nice meaty roleplaying within the parameters of the d20 system. I'd point to this as evidence that the game group, not the system, ultimately determines how satisfied everyone is with the RPG experience.