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Viewing 1 - 7 out of 7 Blogs.
This week in the Robotech game I play in at the Game Castle, my plan for character obsolescence finally came to fruition. Let me start at the beginning… When I first thought of a character concept for the game, which was taking place during the Invid Invasion, I had a plan to play a civilian. In this case, the civilian was a scientist, specifically a doctor of physics. This is a bit of a stretch for me since I tend to be the butt kicker type of player. Sure, I like story, and sure I like to stay in character, but I want a character that isn’t a total wimp. My final creation was Dr. Augusta Weatherspoon, a high energy physicist of impeccable caliber. Prior to the arrival of the Invid, she was the president of a major corporation working out of Oslo. Augusta was brilliant, somewhat irrational, and had a really bad temper and a habit of punching people in the face/head. I also figured I would make a backup character due to the potential for painful, fiery, burning death at the hands of the GM. Thus her twin brother James was born. James was everything Augusta was not; he was intuitive, quick on his feet, strong and a highly trained soldier. James is also incredibly polite, even to his enemies and an all around good guy. Augusta was far from a bad person but also far from a good person. She took care of herself and the few “friends” she had but in the end she looked after herself first. So after two seasons of play, Augusta was retired from play to live on the island of Hawaii with millions of dollars in her pockets. The whole story is VERY long and is detailed in Banzai’s blogs. Augusta is obviously known as the "good" Doctor. James is heavily influenced by Michael Westen from the show Burn Notice. James has certain abilities that let him not only figure out how people tick, he can also perform minor “script” rewrites. I used this last ability to pull out a pair of night vision goggles while sneaking around trying to find on of the other PCs, who somehow eluded me. He can also beat up someone with a Cat Fancy magazine or any other improvised weapon laying around. All in all I really enjoyed playing him; he was a nice change of pace from his rather selfish sister and honestly a string of characters lately that have not been the nicest people.
Tags: Robotech Invid Invasion RPG
Well we completed an upgrade of the forums today, which may fix some problems that we've seen over the last few months. So let us know how the changes went through :)
Tags: OMG Site Down Ninjas Rule
Today was our first day attending Origins in wonderful Columbus, OH and here is all the juicy bits. The hosts of the convention were wonderful and accomadating. John Kaufeld deserves serious kudos for guiding two Origins newbies through the paces. I had a chance to meet Jolly Blackburn, who not only possesses the coolest name EVAR, but he also authored some really good Kingdoms of Kalamar books. While he is not the most prolific author, I've seen his name on some really good material and I was pleased to meet him. I saw a very well put together wargame, called Armored Predators which used Flames of War miniatures and a large section of floor to play out World War II era battles. The game had 10+ players and rolled along nicely. Everyone appeared to have a good time playing. The game system was written by a John Reynolds of Walnut, CA. I was too tired to give it a shot, but I read the quick play rules (one single sided sheet of paper), and it seemed pretty quick to play. KillerDM interviewed Anthony Gallela, who is the Executive Director of Orgins. The interview went really well. We have some more interviews planned for tomrrow but I need to get some sleep now :)
Well it looks like RPGBOMB will be attending Origins this weekend. KillerDM and I are leaving from New Hampshire late Friday night and driving all night to get to Columbus by noon or so on Saturday. Then we will spend most of the remaining afternoon handing out buttons and interviewing people. Sunday will be pretty much the same thing, then its the long drive home. If anyone is going to be there, let us know and we can meet up, grab a drink and talk game stuff. I really want to meet all of the cool people who use this little site of ours.
Today I had a chance to run a quick demo (two encounters) using a store copy of Keep on the Shadowfell, the first 4th Edition D&D module. The module comes with 5 ready to play characters, 3 double sided maps, a quick start set of rules and the adventure.
First, the price tag was 29.99, which seemed a bit expensive, until I had a chance to look at the maps, which are pretty decent. Overall I like this adventure much better than the others WotC has put out in the past, since it was pretty much plug and play. I found some counters and miniatures, threw the map down and ran. Easy as pie. The format of the adventure is a good compromise between a boxed set and a soft cover adventure. As for game play, we had may son Ethan (16) and Joel (10), along with "thegoblin" and KillerDM. Overall I enjoyed running the game but there were a couple of sore spots. One was getting used to asking for which defense was being attacked. When I run D&D, I am so used to saying, 22 and having the player understand that I am speaking about Armor Class. Not a fault of the system, I just need to wrap my head around the new defenses. Another problem that I noticed, which I expected, was marking. While the idea of marking is good, it is hard to track. Now for players, marking is great. They only need to remember who they marked and remind me. For monsters which mark on successful hits, things get a little harder. Since you can only have a single mark on you at a time, this isn't a huge problem but it got confusing after a bit and I stopped having the monsters mark anyone. I liked the resiliency of the characters, while they appear unstoppable, are not. It was nice to be able to beat the dwarven fighter down and watch him stand up, wipe the blood off his face and keep fighting after the cleric healed him. I love the way that the cleric can contribute to the combat without having to spend all of his actions healing others. He can take an action and give up a healing word to really pump up his allies, or use the healing strike (I'm not sure of the name) to hit an enemy and also heal a nearby ally as well. For the youngest player at the table, Joel, I think the system was MUCH to complex, but I feel the same way about 3rd Edition as well. Joel is just now starting to grasp how his Star Wars character works, by watching how other people do things, but I worry that 4th Edition will be harder for him because every class is different. As for running the game, I think that the GM can come to game with less preparation but will need more organization during play. There were lots of conditions, ongoing spell effects, and people on fire, all at the same time. Basically there is lots of stuff happening and both players and GM need to keep track of them all. All in all, I had a great time, the system feels faster, you can have loads of monsters attacking the group and every type of monster is different, kobolds move around the battle field, orcs gain inspiration (HP) from hurting others, etc. I really like the exceptions based designs WotC is using and I'm looking forward to June 6th :)
Tags: 4E D&D
During this week's Star Wars game, the young Padawans (actually most of them have reached the title of Knight, but I digress) set out to stop the fighting on Kashyyyk. Kashyyyk is the forest planet where the honorable race of Wookies live. Kashyyyk has been ravaged harshly during the Clone Wars and another evil is going to befall them. During the rise of the Empire, Wookies are forced into slavery by their long time enemies, the Trandoshans (the lizard like aliens). Of course the Jedi don't do well with slavery and have begun freeing as many Wookies as possible. On top of that, one of the players in the game, my son Joel, is playing a Wookie bad ass. His character literally cuts enemies in half all day long. Joel is a crit rolling machine during the game. Overall its pretty impressive. Joel's character Nawtalon is looking for his parents and he finds that is father has been taken by slavers. The game session starts with the party planning an ambush and rolling initiative. The enemies are numerous, several Trandoshan slavers, wielding neurolashes. One "slave driver", who is a high leveled Trandoshan with a flamethrower (fire is good against Jedi), some sick hand to hand moves and a special ability that lets him gain bonuses when others are in pain. Throw in some stormtroopers and a couple of mercenaries and it made for an interesting encounter. The "slave driver", as mentioned before, had a special ability I called Surrounded by Pain and Misery. Basically every time someone within 6 squares was hit and brought down the condition track by a Neurolash, he gained a +1 bonus until the end of his next turn. This is similar to the exceptions based game design which is used by 4th Edition D&D. I also gave him a disadvantage, where he would flee if his slaver minions were killed off too quickly. In this combat I learned something interesting, Stun Batons in Star Wars stink. They don't do alot of damage (which is good) but they also don't stun anyone. The damage of the weapon is too low for it to have the effect of stunning anyone. Since I based the neurolash off of a stun baton, the lash was kind of lame. So the party wails on the "slave driver" basically anihilating him where he stood. He tried to run but Joel's wookie cut him in half before he could get too far. With a victory in sight, I hand waved the end of the conflict, which is something I suggest happen in any game where it takes time to mop up the remaining badguys. If its a foregone conclusion that the PCs win, then just let them. Move on with the game :) After some hacking, by uplinking to some orbiting Star Destoryers and gaining back door access to the Imperial Military Holonet, the Jedi learn that Nawtalon's father is not even on the planet anymore. Also to make matters worse, some guy named Darth Vader is headed there to eliminate a major problem (the PCs), so they decide to get out of dodge but free some more slaves first.
The only problem is...no one wants to tell Nawtalon (the super strong and tough Wookie) that his father is gone. In the end, after a battle with a slave transport and someone shooting a speeder bike pilot, then jumping onto the moving bike, tossing the dead pilot into a tree and taking control. Now they need to get off the planet to find Nawtalon's father. Lessons Learned: - Random name generators are silly; Lowdik is not a good name for a Wookie!
- Crit happens.
- Stun batons are lame (my fix is to make them do 2d6 damage, stun only. Neurolashes are exotic weapons, which inflict 2d8 damage, stun only, with a reach of 2 hexes).
- Even if you have a cool name for a character, someone will come up with a more catchier one. The picture for Nawtalon's father is a wookie with an eye patch. Immediately he was dubbed Patches and like all good names, it stuck.
That is all I have to report from my Star Wars game this week.
Tags: Star Wars Wookie Neurolash Patches
Overall Status:  Well the cloak of secrecy is off finally and I can talk about RPGBOMB to anyone now. What a complete pain in the butt an NDAs can be, especially when you have talented people around you that would love to see a site like this exist.
We squished some significant bugs last night and are hunting for more. If you see anything odd or that you don’t like, let us know in the Bug Hunt thread here: Bug Hunt
As for me personally, I am headed to Anime Boston this weekend. My lovely wife Lisa and I run Another Anime Convention. I’ll be at the booth all weekend, seeing friends from far away and cruising the gaming room as well.
Finally, in my Star Wars game, which will be detailed later, had its first (and hopefully only) character fall to the dark side. The character Essaja is played by True Blue. Her rapid decent was planned since day one and went off flawlessly. This is a good testimony to how well the new Star Wars Saga system works. It's absolutely brilliant 
That is all for now. I'll put up some more stuff after this weekend. I plan to begin a series of articles for running Robotech using the Mekton/Fuzion hybrid system that True Blue and I wrote.
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