RPG's and TSA and Body Cavity Searches

 I had a decade when I traveled a lot for work. Airports and Hampton Inns were my life. It had its ups and downs, but mostly ups: a perverse, secret monkey inside me likes being lonely and guzzling beer and reading weird books in anonymous hotel rooms. And I wrote a ton of RPG stuff, working on maps and voluminous histories and obscure pantheons, burning through Coors Lights and #2 pencils. If I was digging into a new system, a work trip was a great way to dive deep and immerse myself. I remember one project, six months of trips back and forth to Pittsburgh, that were solid, neck-deep immersions into Savage Worlds. In hindsight, it was pretty great.

But then came the trip to Huntsville, Alabama and Zweihander. If you're unfamiliar with Zweihander, it's basically a Warhammer Fantasy RPG clone made as a labor of love by fans who missed the early editions of WHFRP and loathed the newer iterations. It's a voluminous, monstrous, sprawling system, full of both crunch and fluff, awesome maps, and gritty illustrations. I found it a little clunky in practice, but fell madly in love with the setting and style and illustrations and overall vibe.  And girth. Did I mention girth?

Zweihander has a "Starter Box Set" out now, but when I got into it, it was a single book. A BOOK. Six hundred and eighty-eight pages and (according to Amazon) 5.4 pounds. You read that right: 688 pages.

So I'm slogging through security at terminal B in Norfolk, Virginia, when the TSA agent waves me aside. My carry-on bag is in the middle of the x-ray machine. I notice the conveyor belt is stopped.

"Sir, do you have anything prohibited in your bag?"

Racking my brain...nope. But, you gotta understand, I'm the kind of guy with a weird, paranoid guilty instinct. I start panicking: did I somehow, in a dissociative fugue state, pack my Ruger? Did I sleepwalk into the garage and stick a chainsaw in my carry-on?

"I...don't...think so?"

"Step out of the line, please."

I step out, and I see Burly Dude come over from the main security desk. He and the other agent talk quietly, her explaining, him nodding, both glancing up at me every few seconds. I know in my heart that this burly dude is named Officer K.Y. Blueglove, and he's going to take me to a quiet room and stick his large finger in my butt. And I'm still frigging baffled. I glance back, and the X-ray conveyor is inching forward, then back, like they're scanning something mystifying.

Finally, Officer Blueglove motions me over to them and points to the X-ray screen. "Can you tell us what this object is, sir?" I see the ghostly overlays of the X-ray readout: gray-scale silhouettes of my toothbrush, a bottle of aspirin, all nestled in a cumulonimbus cloud of nearly-transparent jeans and t-shirts. But there, right in the middle, like the alien Monolith in 2001, is a solid black chunk: a rectangle of obsidian, something that eats X-rays and leaves nothing but a void in the screen. To security-minded TSA eyes, I'm sure it looked like a lead-lined box full of uranium

"Uhhhh...that's a book."

Officer Blueglove trundles my bag over on the conveyor belt. Looks at me. Slowly unzips my bag. Pulls out Zweihander 4th Edition (with an audible grunt of exerted biceps), all 688 pages. Gives me a look of utter what the ever-loving fuck is this? He holds it out with both hands, like it's an extremely heavy, extremely gross, dead animal.

"It's a book. For a game." Man, I was glad they hadn't dug out my Crown Royal bag full of dice.

Skeptical look, raised eyebrow, solid *thump* as he dropped it into the rat's nest of no-longer-neatly-folded t-shirts and underwear in my open bag.

I just shrugged, relieved that my nether regions would remain mostly inviolate. I grabbed my bag (with some effort), and sidled over to put my shoes back on. 

My flight didn't leave for an hour, so I went to the airport bar for an $8 beer, and imagined explaining to my Guantanamo cell-mate that I was doing time for smuggling RPG's on a plane. He'd look at me, all impressed, and be like, "Wow, like rocket grenade launchers?" and I'd be like, "No way, man. Books." And then I'd start an awesome Zweihander campaign for the other detainees and it would be really cool.

'Broken' PC? Awesome PC!

First off, I  like playing characters that many would consider 'broken'. I'm never the guy who uses the concept of the 'dump stat' at character creation. It's tempting to give your dwarf fighter maxed out Strength and Constitution at the expense of Intelligence, Charisma or whatever (I'm using D&D stats, just because they're familiar to everybody), then you just kind of hand-wave the fact that you've created a functional moron who exists only to chop things up and take damage.

But if you were to actually role-play this kind of character, he'd be almost pitiful: he'd be noticeably stupid, or horrifically inept with people, depending on what you picked as your dump-stat. Easily tricked, quickly confused, total avatar of derpitude. I know when I see the kids down at my FLGS rolling up the XP-machines they call characters, they don't see them as these moronic meat-head axe-swingers; then again, I don't think they even see them as stalwart Gimli-types, or Conan, or Kull, or whatever. I think they see them as XP-machines, with only the fuzziest of concepts behind them.

That's annoying. That's what you do in video games, where your character is, even in the best of them, still mostly pre-defined.

INTRUSIVE NOTE: links have died since I wrote this back in the day. This post is a near-nothing. But I still believe in the basic premise, so I'm updating it a bit.

If you're gaming to kill shit and accrue experience points, go ahead and click off right now. But if you're looking to make collaborative stories that you'll remember for years, stick around.

All I'm saying is this: play to your character's weaknesses. One thing I absolutely adore is the Savage Worlds mechanic of writing weaknesses and faults into your character, and getting role-play hooks for doing it. Go ahead and roll up a character that's seventy years old: she might be shaky in a fight, but she'll be wise...and, most importantly, that's a hook you can use to play that role. Lean into it. It's a gift, I promise.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: don't gimp yourself in whatever your role is. Don't be a wizard with low intelligence, or a fighter with low strength. Be good at your role. If you do that, you're just boning the rest of the adventuring party (your fellow players). But take that 'dump stat' and use it for playing a role in the story, for standing out from the crowd. Don't be an XP machine. If you max Strength at the expense of Charisma, play an awkward, socially inept meat-mountain. 

This is old advice, and wasted on them what most needs to hear it, but remember: you're playing a character, not an optimized machine. Play to strengths and weaknesses, and you'll end up with stories that'll have you laughing years down the road, "holy shit, you remember that one time?" stories that make the hobby more than just leveling up and killing monsters.

Get Thee Behind Me, Satan! And Facebook! And Kardashians!

For all my writing-type bros and sistahs, I have a scenario you might know:
Scenario the First: You get settled in to write, but maybe not 100% feeling it, so you jump on the old Facebooks (just for a second) to see how your cousin Edna is doing after her hernia surgery, and then you see that funny Donald Trump as Grumpy Cat picture, and you're like, "damn, that's funny, gots ta repost that!" and you do, and then you refresh the page twenty times to see notifications of everybody enjoying your faux-funniness as reposter of somebody else's humor, and then...
Oh yeah. Then something pops up, and you just pissed away that writing time. You look up, and it's been over an hour. Pissed away. On Donald Trump as Grumpy Cat.
Scenario the Second: You're actually writing. You're in the groove. But you hit a paragraph, a line, a word, that just...ain't...right. It's a dead thud in your symphony of words. So you edit. And then you go back and rewrite that whole paragraph to fit your edit. Then...dammit. Now you're in a special place called Edit Hell.

So, what's a writer like me, a writer with the attention span of a ferret on Adderal, supposed to do? How do I ensure that, when I sit down to write, I actually write, and not:

• wind up admiring some random Kardashian's butt in yoga pants.
• edit myself into a death-spiral of perfectionism and procrastination?

Meet my little friend, the Alphasmart Neo:

I'm adorable, but I'm a dominatrix at keeping you on-task.

It's a keyboard, and a tiny little screen. Five, maybe six lines of text. Very limited editing tools.
Period.
No browser. No hi-def. No Netflix. A tiny, monochrome LCD screen with a nice, clacky keyboard.

The one I got basically stores keystroke data. You write until you're done writing. Then you USB this bad boy to your laptop/desktop/tablet/skynet and open the text program of your choosing, Word, Libre, Scribus, whatever. Get your cursor blinking like you're about to start writing, and then hit 'SEND' on your little buddy Alpha and -- bloop! --magic writing as Alpha shits out everything you just wrote to the document. Save that doc just like any other, because it is just like any other. Except you wrote it, instead of surfing the interwebs for an hour. Now you have a chunk of written work.  

Now you can sink yourself into Edit Hell, because you actually have something there to edit.

It runs on AA batteries; some flavors are rechargeable while others take the kind I buy by the crate at the Dollar Store to keep multiple X-box controllers functional at my house. As long as the batteries have juice, your magnum opus is safe (so go ahead and transfer it right away if you buy cheap batteries like me).

With shipping, mine ran $40 on Amazon.
AlphaNeo on Amazon

Totally Immature, Childish GM's. Literally.

I have done my job well. I have two sons, both of whom navigate the seas of geekery with expertise and cool aplomb, and neither of them are burdened with the lingering self-conscious nerd-shame my generation was cursed with. I could end up living in a six-by-six cell under Guantanamo, and still consider myself a successful father for that alone. They like what they like, and be damned the nay-sayers.
My firstest-bornedest is sixteen, and, while not a role player, takes all of ten minutes to quit bitching about "having to play another one of Dad's stupid playtests" and totally gets into the game. He's the one that wants to keep going after four hours, and he's the one that will drive a totally dice-less session of Savage Worlds. My secondest is eleven, and he's my gamer. He plays in anything I make, along with a weekly group at his school. He paints minis and knows what a bec de corbin looks like. And he's wanted to GM since he was six.

These Nerds are tasty. Almost as tasty as
your character's slow and painful death.

THE EVOLUTION OF A GAME-MASTER
Of course, he started with wanting to push minis around on a dry-erase game mat. What the hell, he was six, right? We'd lay out a handful of the old plastic D&D minis and break out the markers and go to town. When a particular mini didn't fit the bill, out came the Lego dudes. That's Stage One: chaos on a table-top.

 "You kick open the door and there are eight Beholders!"
"Eight?"
"Yeah, I saw them in your book and they look cool."
"I run away."
"You can't. Uhh...the door shuts and locks behind you."
"Can I talk to them?"
"No. The first one floats up to you and turns you to stone with his eye attack!" (cackling laughter)

Stage One is rules. His rules. And accessories. What I realized during this phase, was that the kid was story-telling, but he wanted rules to enforce his plot idea. We'd spend hours with him basically telling me what I did and what happened. When anything deviated from what he had in mind, he'd throw monsters at me and fake-roll dice to tell me how everything magically got back on track.

Worship me, children. With dice.

I've played games with adult GM's who still live in Stage One.
Stage Two was "I love X/Y/Z and want to make a game about it". This is where the kid got infatuated with a particular IP, be it Halo or Fire Emblem or Pokemon, and saw a tabletop RPG as a way to get more of whatever it is. Again, lots of arbitrary rules, but not to rail-road his idea of a story; instead, he was actually designing rules, with increasing consistency, all geared toward capturing elements and flavor of his obsession du jour. This stage is all about detail, tons of detail, and the whole point of playing is to recreate the IP.
I've played with adult GM's who do this. Hell, sometimes I do this. Almost every futuristic military campaign I've ever written is an attempt to game-ify James Cameron's Aliens Colonial Marines.

Stage Three arrived this year. That's where it all starts to come together, and Actually Fun to Play becomes a real consideration. He surprised me with a zombie-apocalypse game that grew out of Call of Duty Nazi Zombies, and ended up being a RP-light mostly-board game that was shockingly fun to play.

Disclaimer: don't get me wrong. It's fun playing with your kids. Better than fun. It's part of the tapestry of them growing up that you'll look back on when you are old and crusty and incontinent and it's absolutely frigging priceless. They do silly things, and it's fun to watch their little brains work. But, in the early stages...let's be honest: if it wasn't my kid I was playing with, it would have been excruciating. Which brings me (finally) to my point:
Pretty much every stage in the kid's gaming career is a legitimate way to game. The kid was on track with what a lot of adults pass off as gaming. The big difference between the kid and the adult is two fold: first, fun for players wasn't a concern when he first started. He was having fun, and of course that means it's fun for everybody, right?

Except this guy.
He thought the combat mechanics sucked.

The second thing that made his early games 'immature' was strictly that: he was immature. He lacked experience, and (most especially) the tool-box that a good GM brings to the table. A good GM can rail-road a game just as egregiously as any six year-old, but she has the back-log of plots, stories and situations to camouflage the rail-roading. A good GM can artfully lay out options that really aren't options, and can gently nudge the random actions of players back on story-track.

So I guess my advice to any dual-class parent/gamers out there is to let the little monsters have fun. Let them run amok and run rough-shod over the concepts of rules and balance. Let them trap you in a room with eight Beholders.

Because what I've discovered is that kids don't really need much teaching when it comes to gaming. They already have it figured out. They just need practice, and to build that story-telling tool-box. And the best way to encourage that is to keep having fun.

April Cheap-Ass Games

The less I spend on new games, the more money I have for cigarettes, liquor and mean women. Since April is my wife's birthday month, I guess I'll spend less on mean women in general, and more on my special mean woman who lives in my house. That means I'm playing cheap games this month, the cheapest I can find. How about free?

This month, let's start out with the cheapest game on Xbox, the first Free With Gold selection for April: Hitman Absolution. How'd I miss this series? I'd seen Hitman games on the shelves at Gamestop, but nothing about them ever really caught my attention. I guess it's the bald guy on the front, and the name. "Hitman" makes me think of Mafia, low-life thugs in 1930's Chicago whose only salutary feature is their fashion sense (hard to argue with a man wearing a sharp fedora). But I was wrong, I tell ya, dead wrong. Hitman Absolution isn't Mafia; it's Splinter Cell wearing a sharp black suit and a red tie.
The basics: you are Agent 47, a dude with a number for a name and a bitchin' spitshine hair-do. Big plot, serious plot, betrayal, redemption, good stuff. More importantly, this game pulls off the "cinematic" aspect pretty well. The voice acting is good. The plot hangs together as well as anything in Hollywood these days. But the actual gameplay is fun. You sneak. You kill dudes in interesting ways, and then hide the bodies so nobody clues in on your presence. You wear disguises and infiltrate places and, if you have patience and skill, you kill the bad guy and nobody else, clean and cool.
These mechanics actually work pretty well. The third-person, over-the-shoulder movement reminds me of Red Dead Redemption in that you can get wonky button-mashing prompts if you move too close to a target or off to the side a little, but really it's not that big a deal. You can push guards off balconies, poison a coke-head's stash, snipe from a window...it's a rail-road mission, but a sand-box as far as how you go about it.
One serious stand-out is the Contracts mode. In Contracts, you go total sand-box on one of several maps. You wander around, doing stuff, checking out the map, and mark your targets from among the random crowd, up to a total of three. Then you kill 'em, in whatever way seems bitchin'. Then you have to escape. If it turns out cool, you can save it as a Contract scenario, and it's posted online for others to play. They have to replicate your technique, from disguises worn to weapons to if anybody gets alerted to your presence. It's damned clever, in that you create missions for other people (and can play theirs), but you can only create something if you're capable of doing it yourself. You create by playing, and that's a cool twist.

I'll kill ya with this mop. I ain't proud.

Did I mention it's free for another week? You can't beat that price. Be warned, though: it's damned near 8GB, using a proprietary engine for all those pretty graphics.

Free is awesome, but I want to mention a game near and dear to my heart, one that got not much love and is now less than sixteen bucks on Amazon. It's Fuse, and it's cool, and you should buy a copy and love it.

Rag-tag and plucky.

Story-wise, it's fairly derivative stuff: the Fedrul Gubment got it's hands on alien technology, and weaponized it (of course). Now a paramilitary group has stolen it (of course). And only our plucky band of four rag-tag agents can stop them (of course). But what stands out, at least for me, are two things: first, the game takes tired concepts and does them well. Sure, the characters are nothing particularly new, but they're presented with personality and some measure of flair. Same with the story: Fuse presents a standard story, but mixes up the tropes and throws the occasional curve-ball.
Mechanically, the game is really solid. It controls much like Gears of War, and it's basically a cover-based shooter game. But the controls are fluid, the animations smooth, and it rarely feels like you're having to thread a needle to take cover (I'm looking at you, original Mass Effect).
One nice twist that Fuse brings to the table is what they call the LEAP feature. It allows you to seamlessly swap from one character to another in-game, to take advantage of each one's special abilities. You can only swap to un-used characters, so if you have a buddy playing as Izzy the medic/hacker and you need a revive, you're stuck; but, overall, it's useful and doesn't intrude.

Surprisingly, these two hotties pass the Bechdel test with ease.

Multiplayer is nice. Again, like Gears of War, Fuse goes for the Horde-mode co-op, fighting waves of bad guys. Unlike Gears, each wave has a semi-random objective that complicates matters. Boss waves come at random with a single High Value Target that has to be taken down quickly to max out bonuses. One particular objective requires you to lug a Fuse container from one end of the map to another, under heavy opposition. It's hard, and damned near suicidal unless you have friends playing with you. The AI team-mates are pretty good, overall, but not up for anything quite that demanding. Sadly, this game is old enough that the public servers are a wasteland of nobody and nothin', but you can always enlist some sucker for split-screen co-op story mode or multiplayer mode.
Sixteen bucks on Amazon, probably considerably less if you find it used at Gamestop.

That's it for now. Go play some cheap-ass games, and help show EA and Activision that we aren't slavishly running out to buy the new AAA titles the minute they're released. There's good stuff out there, underappreciated and rotting in the bins at Gamestop, just looking for a happy home.
And did I mention, cheap?

Bizarre Love Triangle

I'm in the middle of a nasty love triangle, and it's getting out of hand. On one hand, I have a love who lets me be who I want to be. She doesn't confine me nor define me. She's open to whatever I'm in the mood for, and she just makes everything fun. But, on the other side, I have a new love, and she really reminds me of a junior high infatuation, but all grown up and infinitely sexier. What's a guy to do?


My quandary. Except I'm a dude. With a beard.
Otherwise, very similar.

So right now, I'm trying the John Ritter Three's Company strategy: I flit between the two, trying to balance one with the other so nobody gets hurt (especially me). But it's starting to get out of hand, and I feel this stupid urge to commit to one or the other.
My lovely ladies:





Hippie Chick.

 Savage Worlds is the one who never seeks to constrain me or tie me down. With Savage Worlds, I can whip up a Ghost Busters campaign, a Wild West campaign, a Star Wars campaign, Cthulhu (yeah, lots of Cthulhu)...hell, players have even revamped the Battletech RPG so it's actually playable...all from a single, fairly thin book. At this moment, Savage Worlds GM's are adapting every imaginable IP into slick, smooth-running games. And if you don't want to use someone else's setting or idea, write your own: it's easy with Savage Worlds. Really, really easy. Even better, the system has tons (literally tons) of licensed settings, ranging from the Weird West of Deadlands to the awesomely grim Saxon-inflected desperation of Hellfrost. 
The flexibility of Savage Worlds springs largely from it's generic framework. It's not GURPS, but it relies on character creation and rules mechanics that are common to any setting. Shooting skill is shooting skill: if you're in Mad Max, it's a gun, but if you're playing Doctor Strange versus Cthulhu, it may be arcane energy squirting out of your eyeballs. Regardless, it's aiming something at a target, and you adapt it as needed by the setting and common sense. Likewise with magic/powers/etc. A magic missile and a ray of frost are pretty much like Gambit's ability to shoot plasmicated playing cards at bad guys; the rules provide a trappings concept that customizes the framework to make it fit the application. It sounds clunky, but it sho ain't. It's smooth, and damned near effortless.

Adolescent crush. Grown up.

  But the we have my other new love: 13th Age is everything I ever loved about Dungeons & Dragons but revamped for maximum playability and fun, the love of my adolescence all grown up and made over. Unlike Savage Worlds, 13th Age is straight fantasy, and mechanically tied into an implied setting; but that setting is pretty awesome, so I'm not complaining.
It's the love-child of Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo, of D&D 3rd and 4th edition fame, respectively. According to the foreword, they got together to make a game that combines everything good about both editions, and dumps everything else into the garbage. Not only are the rules pared down, there are actual mechanics in place to encourage player agency and kicking ass: for example, you don't level up by killing little XP nuggets in the form of monsters. Instead, you fight, you play, you carry on in the face of adversity, and, after a big fight or two, you get an incremental advance to the next level. One of my favorite tweaks is discarding the voluminous skill lists for your character. Rather than picking a load of specific skills, you pick backgrounds, and you use those backgrounds to role-play why your character has specific skills. If your character has the 'wharf rat' background, you just tell the GM, "Of course I know how to mend a net, I grew up on the mean docks of Blehtown" and it's up to you to sell it to the GM and the group. You make up your backgrounds, you determine whether or not they apply, and the GM and other players are there to throw a bullshit flag as needed.
Tweet and Heinsoo also differentiate the character classes: some are mechanics light, allowing a new player to roll dice and slay kobolds without a lot of overhead, while others are heavy on the crunch, allowing an experienced player to use specific rules to really tailor their characters abilities and skills.
That being said, every rule in 13th Age is geared toward maximizing the collaborative story-telling aspect of the game, without resorting to the diceless, 'story game' extreme. It's still dice-rolling, but with a lot of player collaboration, all in the service of story. This is a massive positive, but can also be a problem. When I tried out 13th Age at the table, my group was a little overwhelmed. It can take a while to break habits of "DM presents, DM describes, I react, roll dice, DM interprets". This game heavily relies on players taking charge of their actions and story, and that requires some adjustment from some players. It is definitely not for lazy players.



So here I am, with two very different, very attractive games pulling me in two directions. My gaming time is limited, and I have a group that doesn't switch easily...but it's whiny of me to complain. There are definitely worse problems to have. We'll figure it out somehow.

Just so long as they don't hook up behind my back.



You Have My Heartfelt Thanks, Dave.

David A. Trampier, known to a generation of d20-rollers as DAT, died last week. He was 59, but most of us who keep up with such things assumed he'd been dead for years. He literally dropped off the radar after an ugly spat with TSR back in the 80's, only resurfacing recently by accident, star of a college newspaper's drive-along with local cab drivers. Yep, David Trampier, he who formed my vision of Greyhawk, was driving a cab in an Illinois suburb.
That kind of sucks, but I respect his decision. I'll never understand it, but I respect it. I owe him that much; he gave me Emirikol the Chaotic, back in the day.

Is the a Ray of Frost or a Magic Missile he's shooting at the hapless town militia? Who knows? Who gives a shit? He's kicking major ass. Is he evil? All we know is that he's not only chaotic, he's totally the chaotic.

I guess I'm bummed about Trampier's passing because so much of what sucked me into AD&D was the illustrations. Seeing his work, or Jeff Dee's iconic bell-bottomed badasses, or Errol Otus's strangely helmeted characters, they all immediately put me back in seventh grade, sucking down Mountain Dew and eating Twizzlers and burning through page after page of graph paper and #2 pencils. These guys supplied visions of another world, and their visions were the springboard for my own imagination.


So here's my question: how much of a game's impact is flavored by the art? Would I still look back on the original Tunnels & Trolls with such affection if it weren't for Liz Danforth's art? How much of Steve Jackson's early success was based on Denis Loubet's art? I can tell you for a no-shit, I loved TSR's Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Queen of the Demonweb Pits in large part for the separate books of illustrations. Would Tomb of Horrors suffer if you didn't have an illustration of a leering, open-mouthed demon to show your players right before they died without even getting a saving throw? I'm thinking not.


Conversely, sometimes no art makes a game. I was a HUGE fan of the old GDW Traveler, the famous Little Black Books. They were practically devoid of art. Even the books themselves were plain black books. Occasionally you'd get a single illustration, usually of some mundane object like a laser rifle or the ubiquitous grav sled. You never got pictures of aliens, or space battles. And maybe that was part of the draw. Traveler was written by Marc Miller, son of an admiral, and was grounded in engineering as much as it was science fiction. I mean, we're talking about a game that used hexadecimal notation for character stats and ship ratings. Miller threw out displacement tonnage like it was common knowledge, and be damned if you had to look the terms up. God knows I did, back in 1982.


Okay, end of rambling reminiscence. I guess I just wanted to draw some attention to the impact that art has on our hobby, and how maybe, sometimes, we take for granted the doors these people open in our collective imagination. Now I'm bummed out, and I'm going to have to drink beer and read some old AD&D modules until I get over my funk. But I'll leave you with something upbeat, something from one of my favorite artists of the era (and still kicking ass these days), the incomparable Phil Foglio: