Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

Sunday night we got together to make up characters and talk a little more about the game. It started out a little slowly, but picked up speed as everybody saw how simple it was and people started offering suggestions to each other. We came out with the following protagonists:

Sam Holloway, the Oasis chief of security. Holloway is a workaholic dealing with a failed marriage, a violent temper, and a coke problem. His ex-wife, Juanita, didn’t show up in the pilot (which I’ll cover in another post) but almost certainly will appear soon. Holloway’s issue is Self-Destruction and is played by Rob.

Andrew Worcester, a roulette dealer in the casino. Andrew’s wife died about six months ago after a lingering illness that nearly bankrupted him and left him the sole parent of a 14-year-old daughter who resents having to move from the family home to a small apartment. Andrew has a degree in mathematics, but right now the Oasis is the best job he can manage. He’s trying to prove to himself and to his daughter that he can be a good father, so we classified his Issue as Self-Worth. Jake plays this protagonist.

Kitty Conway, a reporter for an as-yet-unspecified newspaper. Kitty lives in the shadow of her father, a veteran newspaperman in Las Vegas. She’s out to prove that she’s got what it takes to break big stories and doesn’t have to trade on the Conway name. Her Issue is also Self-Worth, and she’s played by Bonita.

Stone Thompson, an agent of the Nevada Gaming Commission assigned to the Oasis. Thompson is an anal-retentive, by-the-book, squeaky-clean, perfectionist control freak. He’s here to make sure that everything in this casino is on the level. He’s got an old military buddy on the police force who’s been compromised somehow by the mob, but Thompson’s loyal to his friends. His Issue is Control-Obsession, and Ryan insisted on the name “Stone.”

Rae Fannin is a fresh-faced, determined woman in her mid-20s. She is an agent employed by the Gaming Commission and has recently moved to Las Vegas for her first assignment: undercover as a cocktail waitress at the newly reopened Oasis. Her new job is her lifeline: the recent move and apparent choice of employment dismays her mother greatly, and although her on again/off again boyfriend (also a Gaming Commission employee) understands her situation entirely, he’s also been transferred to Atlantic City. Rae’s do-gooder nature is bound to cause her problems in the bureacracy of the system, as well as her on-site contact, Stone Thompson. Her issue is Ambition, and she’s played by Deirdra. [character blurb supplied by Deirdra. Thanks Deir!]

We established that the casino has been shut down for several months for some reason. We didn’t establish exactly what, but we tossed out some ideas. I think it’s going to come out in play that Something Big was behind the shutdown. The pilot episode starts with the casino Grand Reopening.

Rob pushed for every episode to either start with or include Holloway throwing somebody out of the casino. I love continuity stuff like that and everybody else thought it was good too, so we’re almost certain to throw that in.

We talked about sets that we’d use and had some trouble coming up with them. Rather than worry too much over it, we just threw out a few suggestions and decided we’d come up with the rest on the spot.

We’d originally struggled a little on The Big Idea for the show, but sometime last week I had a moment of inspiration that tied everything together. Unlike the Real Vegas, our Vegas is corrupt and the Mafia has a piece of every pie except this one, but they want in on the action. The Oasis is the one legitimate joint in a crooked town, but will it remain that way?

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

I plan on getting around to my history sooner or later. For now, my thoughts on our game-to-be.

When Matthew initially brought the basic game archetypes to my attention, I came to the realization that I had mostly played in games with a GM-centric, play-to-win, low-variable, “railroad” feel. Even my time playing SOLAR has mostly been within the confines of a given set of premeditated plot possibilities. I can only think of one character I’ve played who I was able to become during play—because I never needed to do it to achieve set goals.

Then we started discussing PTA and the appeal of a character-centric, conflict-based (as opposed to combat-based,) more freeform game really caught my interest.

When we got everyone together and sat down Saturday night, I got the feeling that Matthew was still trying to “sell” the game somewhat, but that passed as we started discussing the mechanics more in-depth. It really felt like everyone liked the system as well as I do, and were eager to get started.

Matthew came pre-armed with several brainstormed settings, including one that he and I discussed for a while that seemed like it would have a sort of Firefly-esque feel to it. Rob threw out one that really got the crowd’s attention. Several of the others he had were discussed, mostly in my absence, due to interruption by work.

We eventually came to a consensus to attempt a compromise between Rob’s and Matthew’s ideas and, through discussion, it was nearly abandoned, but then it was salvaged and evolved into something almost completely different from both, with some of the main thematic elemets of each intact.

Suggestions for the group: I really think it’d be a great idea for everyone if, in addition to the traits listed on the protagonist sheet, we also list which actor or actress would best portray our protagonist. (This idea is inspired by Dungeon Magesty) It’ll give the rest of us an idea of what the character’s like, physically, adding to the immersion factor.

Once we have our protagonists pulled together, we could make a “trailer” for the pilot.

Also, those of us who’re registered with the blog (hint, hint) can use the Pages feature to create Protagonist profiles, Episode summaries, etc.

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

Our group got together Saturday night to talk about what we wanted to do with our upcoming game. I’d already explained Primetime Adventures somewhat and we spent a little time going over how the game works in finer detail. Of course, since I haven’t actually read the game yet, everything I know about it has been drawn from exhaustive reading of reviews and the Dog Eared Designs and Actual Play forums over at The Forge. At first there was some general I-don’t-quite-get-it going around, but it cleared up pretty quickly and everybody seemed really positive about the whole idea. Moreso than I expected, actually.

I came ready with a list of game seed ideas that I’d been working on, but I made sure that everybody understood that these were just some things that I’d come up with and that their ideas were just as important as mine.

It took a long time to settle down on one story idea in particular, mostly because everybody seemed like they were hesitant to say “Yes, let’s play THAT,” and instead just kept saying “I’m okay with any of those, whatever you guys wanna do.” I think that this will probably get easier with more practice. We finally combined an idea that I’d had with an idea that Rob suggested, worked through a lot of ways that they could go together, then eventually started discarding story elements that seemed to be unnecessary to the the direction we were going.

We ended up with somewhat vague idea for show set in a small casino/hotel in downtown Las Vegas. We didn’t actually create protagonists as it was getting late and we were getting tired, but we kicked around ideas for who would be interesting and what players would want to do. The list is looking like this:

Jake – A dealer in the casino. Single father with a daughter.

Rob – Head of hotel/casino security. Rob had actually fallen asleep before we’d completely settled on the final show idea, so he may have other characters in mind now that the setting has changed somewhat.

Bonita – A reporter of some sort. We didn’t get into much elaboration.

Ryan – An agent for the Nevada Gaming Commission, or some other law enforcement agency. There was talk about this character being assigned to the casino and probably regularly butting heads with the security chief character.

Deirdra – A cocktail waitress working with the Gaming Commission agent. Alternately, an agent undercover as a cocktail waitress. I can’t quite recall which it was. Either way, I believe she was also putting herself through school toward a degree in casino management.

The name that we settled on for the show was Oasis, which is also the name of the hotel where it’s set. I have a feeling that with three law enforcement types and a reporter, it’s going to have a strong inclination towards a crime drama of some sort. We’ll hammer out the exact direction that we’ll be going when we get together again to flesh out the characters more.

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

Interjection: I just remembered a few more games from back in the day. One of the ever-popular fly-by-night games back in Oxford with my first gaming group was Shadowrun 2E, and my second group spent a few months on Battletech and a Mechwarrior game that eventually tapered off.

Back to the matter at hand. I wanted to run a game that was different in style and substance than everything I’d done before. I wanted Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Big Trouble In Little China. I wanted fast, flashy combat, like an action-movie. I didn’t want anything remotely tactical. I was tired of the miniatures-based combat from 3E. I was tired of the tedious character generation, the stacks of books and layers of system and subsystem and rules piling up to the ceiling. My friends tried to tell me that I could do whatever I liked with d20, because at that time, everybody insisted that d20 was the future of roleplaying and that eventually one day all games would be d20. I refused to be reasoned with and I hit rpg.net to find a game that would do what I wanted.

I found two. Hong Kong Action Theater! and Feng Shui. Reading review after review, I eventually decided that FS was the one for me, had my Friendly Local Game Store guy order it for me, and chewed my nails until it came in. It was perfect. I had to drop the stock setting and work out some ideas for how vampires would work, but it was a cakewalk. I pulled my stalwart hunters together and I got my game going. It was, for me, a whole different outlook on how a game should play, and I started revising my ideas on what was Good about rpgs.

Around this time, I got involved in a sporadic Shadowrun 3E game with some of my Feng Shui players and some other folks I’d never played with before. It was a lot of fun, despite everything Shadowrun could do to kill a good time. We also made a quick side-trip to try out Hackmaster, which was probably the worst system I could imagine, especially after running Feng Shui.

I ran that FS Vampire Hunters game for about a year or so, continually revising what I was doing and how I was doing it, learning what I liked and what seemed to work. My players gave me good feedback and I tried to act on it, and everybody seemed engaged and excited by each game. I made some mistakes, but the end result was pretty positive. One technique that I came across that seemed to work really well for me was to treat each session like an episode of a TV show. I’m not sure whether I came up with the idea or whether I swiped it from somebody, but just that little change in attitude made a world of difference for me. We wrapped up the “first season” of the game with the intent of taking a couple of months off and coming back fresh. Unfortunately, we never did.

One of folks in my VH game took an interest in FS and between us, we worked out a slight modification to the sorcery system to allow it to function more easily like D&D fantasy magic. He started up a new Feng Shui fantasy game that I played in for a few months, but I just couldn’t get a good feel for it and eventually dropped out.

I played in several short-lived games run by my roommate, including a D&D mafia game, a Swashbuckling Adventures d20 game, and one rather fun straight-up D&D game that lasted for quite a long time, comparatively. Eventually all of them tapered off and died. I sat out on more than a few games, looking for something different. I was getting tired of d20 in general and D&D specifically, but that’s about all I could find. I eventually buckled and joined a new campaign starting up with a GM I’d never played under before. It promised to be different and fun, and for quite a long while, it really was. Eventually the things I didn’t like about it started to outweigh the things I did like, and I wasn’t sad when it came to a convenient close.

During all this time, I’d occasionally run a Feng Shui one-shot, mostly for people who’d never played it before. I wanted to show gamers what it was like to play something completely different from D&D, and everybody who did had a big ole blast. I think my favorite one-shot was probably the all-girl group. They all commented on how much fun it was to play with so many other women, and I had fun showing off my favorite system. All these one-shots were pretty standard A-B-C clue-chain mysteries, but I think they were pretty satisfying despite that.

I’d come to the conclusion that I just didn’t want to play D&D anymore. I was over and done with it, and I wanted something different. It didn’t matter what, as long as it wasn’t D&D. I’m not smart, though, so I reluctantly agreed to take one more shot at a D&D game. It was with some people I’d never played with before and it was supposed to be a whole different experience. For one thing, the GM was planning on a big Middle Earth thing and he made it sound pretty good.

It wasn’t. It was terrible. It was a by-the-book Greyhawk module and the GM’s style was circa early 2nd Ed. AD&D. He read the flavor text boxes verbatim. He grew confused when we tried to talk to NPCs rather than just killing them. I played the three or four sessions I’d originally agreed to, then ran.

Right afterwards, I got into a fun little Alternity game with another group of folks that I’d never gotten to play with before. It was different and interesting, but ultimately it didn’t last. I realized that I’d come to really dislike a lot of the stuff about the system that I’d once thought was so great.

That pretty much brings me to the present. I’ve been on a gaming dry spell for quite a long time, but lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking and now I’ve got a new game coming up. I’m excited about it. It’s going to be different from all the stuff I’ve done before, and I think it’ll be good.

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

It was about this time that the Oxford larp players decided that it was time for new leadership. There was a large faction that wasn’t pleased with the Storyteller and wanted a replacement. By a slim margin, I was picked to replace him. I agreed to take the job, but with the rider that I would only hold it for six months. I felt that part of the problem with the DbN Storyteller network was stagnation and that everyone would benefit if the position had a set term length. They went for it, so I stepped up. I think I did a pretty good job, though looking back I wish I’d known then what I know now. We could have made some very simple, common-sense changes that would have benefitted the game tremendously.

Since I was the ST in Oxford, I couldn’t play play there. Aside from the obvious conflict of interest, I just didn’t have the time. Being a Storyteller was a full-time job. I still got to play my character in other cities, but I didn’t have much of a crew to run with. Character deaths, politics, and various other things combined to leave me mostly running solo. It was mostly through luck that I didn’t get myself killed. There were several times that I came pretty close.

Anyway. Up until this point, the tabletop group I played with regularly was pretty tenuous. I had a couple of roommates, my girlfriend, half a dozen or so friends who would come and go in various games. Nothing we played ever got long term or well-established. Games would start up at the drop of a hat and would get put aside just as quickly. That’s how it went until my roommates found a place of their own and our regular gaming drifted apart. Some folks moved away. One even joined the Navy. I was left without a group to play tabletop.

Time passed, my six-month term ended, and I was just a player in Oxford again, but my connections were all gone. I’d learned that a solo vampire is practically a dead vampire, so I started digging up some new allies, and that lead to new out-of-play friendships as well. I got invited to play in a new tabletop game, an AD&D campaign. We started out at first level, and that game ended up running for over two years. It was without reservation the best tabletop experience I’d had up to that point. Nothing else came close.

Meanwhile, we played Vampire. We played hard and often, but as time went on, we were growing tired and dissatisfied. We saw players cheating, Storytellers showing favoritism, and worst of all, a propagation of bad rules. In DbN we’d made a lot of changes to the stock Mind’s Eye Theater system and had improved on it significantly, but the documentation of the changes was pretty terrible. A lot of people capitalized on that to advance their own interests. Nearly everybody was dissatisfied with the way that the game was devolving. There was nothing but discontent on the DbN email list.

Eventually, my friends and I decided that the game that something had to be done. We bit the bullet and pulled the plug on the email list, saying that we’d give everybody a quiet weekend to think about the game and that we could come back to talk about how to fix it. I think that was the stroke that broke Dixie’s back.

The games sputtered on for a few more months before shutting down completely, but by that time, we’d done our grieving and moved on. We’d found something different and new. We’d found SOLAR.

Well, it wasn’t really new, but it was new for us. Live action fantasy roleplaying, with live combat using boffer weapons. It’s a whole different style of play from the Vampire larp that we were used to. Sure, we’d heard of it before, but we’d always turned our noses up at the notion. “Swinging foam weapons? How is that roleplaying?” I wonder now if we were just afraid of getting hit.

What we found was that live combat larping can be a lot more immersive than theater-style combat. When it’s going well, it’s miles more intense. It was a completely different feel than Dixie, and it was exactly what we were looking for.

Meanwhile we kept playing that AD&D campaign. It was fun and engaging, despite the difficulties in the system. It was all we really knew, though, and we didn’t really question it. We made a few side trips to try out other stuff. Deadlands got a good reception, but it didn’t hold our interest. We played one session of a supers game and I hated hated hated the system. It was either Hero or Champions, though I don’t recall which. We played a game or to of L5R, but I never got into it much, mainly because the setting didn’t appeal to me. Rifts would pop up now and then. Sometimes I look back and wonder why my entire roleplaying career has been plagued by Rifts. I ran a one-shot AD&D game using a module from Shadis magazine and it was a big hit with all the folks who played. That felt pretty good, but I didn’t feel any desire to run anything else. I was content to just keep playing in that same old campaign.

Eventually it came to a conclusion and we took a break for a little while, until our GM came up with a new idea and we all climbed back on the AD&D horse. The new campaign felt a lot like the old one, though I did enjoy the opportunity to stretch my legs with a new character. This was my first attempt at playing a Paladin and I got really into it. Looking back now, I think that this was the point where I learned to love getting into a character’s head. There was a particular point where my character had a crisis of faith, stumbled from his path, and had to work through how to deal with it. It was very emotional and engaging, and while I felt like the game was very linear and railroad-ish overall, that part of it was powerful for me. We wrapped up that game in less than a year, and then my roommate and I moved to Jackson.

In the months preceeding the move, I’d started putting a lot of thought into new and different games since our DM (my roommate’s fiancee) was staying in Oxford for another year to finish law school. One game in particular caught my attention: Alternity. I was especially interested in the Dark*Matter sourcebook. In my opinion at the time it was one of the best rpg books I had ever read and I started working on ideas for a campaign to run once we got to Jackson. I ran a one-shot Alternity game before we left, using a module, but it just didn’t go very well. I blamed my own inexperience and ignored it.

Once we got to Jackson, I had trouble getting my group together. I knew plenty of people from my larping days, but I just couldn’t get the game off the ground. Interest tapered off, and I set it aside. Months passed, and then something new dawned. It was August of 2000, and D&D 3E hit the shelves.

We snapped it up the day it came in and tried it out at the first opportunity. Our DM drove down from Oxford and ran a little trial one-shot and it was good. It was decidedly different, but it sure was smooth compared to clunky old AD&D 2nd Ed. We liked it, and immediately we started on a old-skool dungeon-crawl campaign to test the limits of this new system and for the next year or so, we mapped halls and killed stuff.

It was around then, I think, that I decided it was time for a break from SOLAR. In that time off I realized that I while I loved the immersiveness of live combat, I just wasn’t having fun with it anymore. There were too many players cheating and too many staff members just looking the other way. Even worse, I felt like the game just wasn’t giving me what I wanted out of my roleplaying. I never went back.

A few months later, I got roped into running a demo of the new D&D at Hubcon for a few old Solar friends. I’m not sure why I did it, but it demonstrated to me that A) D&D 3E is a really easy system to run and B) it takes more than just a good system to create a story. I didn’t have what it takes to just come up with a one-shot on the fly. The players were all going in different directions and antagonizing each other. Something was wrong, but I chalked it up to trying to do too much with too little preparation and playing with new and weird people.

The good news was that I got started thinking about those old Dark Sun books sitting on my shelf. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to convert all that stuff to 3E. I got started immediately.

It took months to come up with enough material to get started on a game. We had long finished our year-long weekly dungeon-crawl game (just to learn the new system) by the time I was ready. I pulled together a group with some of the old dungeon crawler crew along with some new faces and we played us some Dark Sun. I had lots of fun coming up with stuff to show them as they travelled around on Athas and we played for nearly a year or so. Eventually, though, it just lagged and dragged and finally I called a halt. I’d come up with a new idea, inspired by a TV show I’d just discovered that I liked, and I wanted a new way to play. I was ready to kick some vampire ass. I just didn’t have any idea how to go about it.

Next up: Feng Shui

Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

My first brush with roleplaying was coming across some polyhedral dice in the back of a desk drawer at my father’s house. His girlfriend told me that they had belonged to her son and that they were used for ‘fortune-telling.’

A year or so later, I bought the AD&D Player’s Handbook (against the advisement of my father’s girlfriend, though I didn’t make the connection with the dice at that time). Not that it did anything for me, since I didn’t really understand what to do with it. I was pretty sure that I needed other people to play and it never even occurred to me to try to rope in any of my friends. Now I wonder if I might not have gotten together a group, but at the time I just shelved my PHB and forgot about it.

When I was a junior in high school, I started dating a girl who had a brother, Patrick, a couple of years younger than us. To my surprise I discovered that Patrick was into something called GURPS. He’d only gotten to play it once or twice, but he knew some people who were into roleplaying and we might be able to get a game together. Eventually we found another guy, Big Ed, who had a cousin visiting from Texas for the summer. Ed’s cousin was a huge fan of Rifts and was more than happy to run a game for us. We were free to pick whatever we wanted to play out of the immense stack of books that he’d brought with him.

I remember that I played a Tech Ninja from the Rifts Japan book and Patrick played a Dragon Juicer out of the Juicers book. I don’t recall what Ed played, but I have very clear memories of the Negavampire NPC that his cousin stuck us with. I recall that we ended up fighting vampires in Texas, and that Patrick got some SAMAS powerarmor and I got some sort of plasma powerarmor from the South America book. It was a fun time, but I wasn’t really satisfied. I felt like there must be something else that I wasn’t getting. The game only lasted until the end of the summer, though, and Ed’s cousin went back to Texas.

Around this same time period, Patrick and I got into CCGs, starting with Jyhad, then discarding that for Magic. We got pretty heavy into that, pulling in about a dozen or so of our friends to greater and lesser degrees. At Ed’s urging, we took a side trip into Spellfire. The cards were incredibly cheap, so we snapped up several boxes and Ed taught us how to play. It wasn’t until a couple of months later that we realized that he’d just been making up rules and that what we were doing was completely different from the actual Spellfire rules. It was also a lot more fun, which won’t come as a surprise if you’ve ever played Spellfire.

Time passed, we played Magic and Spellfire, talked about how much fun it would be if we could get a regular rpg going, and eventually I graduated high school and went off to Ole Miss. It wasn’t long before I spotted a flyer for the campus roleplaying association.

I had no idea what to expect at the first meeting. It was at the Union and there were a whole lot of people talking about games, but I didn’t really see anybody looking for players. Especially players who had no real clue. One thing kept getting brought up, though. Something called “The Masque.” The people who seemed to be running the show seemed to be annoyed by that, though, and kept pushing the topic aside. The masque people seemed to be okay with that and murmured something about sticking around to talk about it after the rpg association meeting. I decided I’d stick around too. I was curious.

It was live action Vampire: The Masquerade that they were so hyped about. Oxford had just recently joined a multi-city game calling itself Dixie By Night, with chapters in Jackson, Vicksburg, Hattiesburg, and Starkville. I signed up on the spot, even though I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into. It sounded exciting, though.

The rest of that school year, I played in the monthly Oxford game. Once I even went to a Vicksburg game. I had a Ventrue and I tried to work my way into local politics, but I wasn’t a big participant. I didn’t hit enough games to become any sort of powerhouse player. I ended up running with a bad crowd of Tremere and their cronies. They pulled my ass out of the fire a few times and I did my best to advance their interests. Eventually, though, the game started getting hectic. Disciplines like Thaumaturgy and Viscissitude had gotten out to just about everybody. The powers that be decided that it had gone too far, so the whole game rebooted. Start fresh.

My fresh start was a Gangrel nobody. Somehow I ended up as Oxford’s Sheriff in the very first game, but that didn’t last long. The old Oxford Storyteller got ousted and a new ST was voted in. He’d had problems with a lot of the people in charge of the game and he wanted some radical changes, stuff that the rest of DbN wouldn’t stand for. He was fine with that, though, and broke ranks, taking Oxford solo. Later, this period of time was called the Oxford Crash.

I’d never wanted to split from Dixie. The single-city game just wasn’t as fun, and I didn’t like a lot of the stuff that got put into play, so I just dropped out of the scene.
I had a couple of roommates that continued to play, but I wasn’t really interested. Too much out-of-game politicking, not enough in-game fun.

Several months later, that new ST got replaced again and his replacement smoothed over the rough patches and brought Oxford back into the DbN fold. My roommates convinced me to come back and give it a try and I enjoyed it so much that I started playing harder than ever. Memphis came into the game around then, so we had six cities to choose from. We’d hit at least one game every weekend.

At the same time, I started getting into tabletop games. They were always secondary to the larping, but we played a little Rifts, some Vampire tabletop, some Mage, some Werewolf, some West End Games Star Wars d6, a GURPS Vampire game, and I finally got some use out of my old 2nd edition AD&D Players Handbook. None of these games were particularly satisfying for me. Oh, they were plenty of fun, but it just wasn’t quite right. It always felt a little hollow. In some cases, I could see problems, like when a GM would make the game all about his ultra-powerful NPC (who used to be his own character in the games of his youth) and we were just there to see what “his guy” could do. For the most part, I played as much as I could, enjoyed what I could, and put up with the rest.

It was around this time that I first tried my hand at running a game. First was Rifts, since that was what I had the most experience with. That was pretty laughable, and I don’t really want to think about it. Let’s just say that I had no idea what I was doing and leave it at that.

Second up was Dark Sun AD&D. I’d read a bunch of the DS novels and I’d gotten the boxed set and I just luuuuuurved Dark Sun. I ran one game that lasted for three or four sessions, and maybe a couple of other one-shot games, I don’t really recall. Tabletop games were really just a way to pass the time during the week, though. Weekends were for larping, and that’s what we all lived for.

Next up: My first real long-term tabletop campaign.