I’m going to talk about campaign prep again today, but from the other side of the screen. This week started a game being run by a friend of mine, Werewolf 20th Anniversary Edition rules (with heavy house ruling she is telling us, but I am really not knowledgeable enough in the rules to be able to really tell what the house ruling is yet) in a semi-original setting. The part about being on the other side of the screen isn’t the complete truth…but we will talk more about that as I go along.
Regardless, prep for a player is a lot different from GMing prep. This is my second time having ever played the game, the previous (also with my friend GMing) was a one shot that we recorded for the online convention Contessa last summer. That gave me enough interest in the game to keep pestering her to run it for us again…until she did.
I always wanted to play in the World of Darkness, but the closest that I ever came was a couple of GURPS games that I ran with the conversion rules back in the day. The GURPS Mage rules were some of the best magic rules for the game, and I used those a lot, even outside of World of Darkness games. I have always been interested in the setting, the time when Vampire: The Masquerade came out was the height of my “goth phase,” so I was definitely in that demographic. The Vampire game just didn’t grab me at the time, mostly because I was bored with vampires at the time.
Even though I wasn’t the fan of things wolfy that I am now, I think that Werewolf: The Apocalypse could have been my entry into the vastness of the World of Darkness, but it was not meant to be until now.
Going at the rules now, there’s a lot more complexity than I would like in a game, but we had fun with our one shot so I am willing to give them a go. The book is big, weighing in at 552 pages according to the RPGNow page. That’s a lot of game.
At the core, Werewolf is fairly simple, just attributes plus modifiers plus dice rolling equals results number. Most of us are sticking to focusing on the rules that make things happen for our characters, rather than worrying about system mastery. I think that this is the best way to handle games with a higher complexity. It is hard to let go of that desire to know everything about the game, in case that you need the exploits, but since we don’t game in a method where the players and the GM are antagonistic, that element of system mastery shouldn’t be needed by the players. Of course, I am sure that, as time passes, there will be a certain level of mastery achieved. Right now, we are just looking to the story and letting the GM smooth over the rough edges from where what we want to do and the rules may bump into each other.
The setting of Werewolf is mostly dispensed with in our game. The one shot was loosely based in the worlds of Patricia Briggs’ Mercedes Thompson books, rather than the default setting of the World of Darkness. This was mostly because Stacy, the GM, is a fan of the books. It is an interesting world, one that turns a lot of the concepts of the paranormal romance/urban fantasy genre inside out. In her books, Briggs does away (mostly) with the “secret supernaturals” idea that the World of Darkness, and many other supernaturally inspired role-playing games, tend to thrive upon. Not all supernatural creatures are public, but a number of them are, and the supernatural creatures revealed tend to be chosen because they are more “stable” and less scary than a number of supernaturals. Vampires, or course, are still hidden away in her world, because it is really difficult to put a positive spin on creatures who live by draining the blood of others.
Our group is going to be playing “troubleshooters” who help to make sure that the few things that the supernaturals want to be kept secret remain that way.
My character is our new game is a variant on the one that I played in our one shot. She was a good character, but she was definitely written with being played once in mind. If you watched the video linked above, you would see that I played her as a Hipster with a short attention span, with a love for pop music and a fairly superficial façade of a personality. I’d like to say that I was “usurping the paradigms of play” or “playing with the ideas of the game,” or some other much deeper sounding idea, but honestly I wanted a character who was as close to the opposite of what I could think was a “World of Darkness” character and went with that. My current version of the character isn’t that far away from my original ideas, only with a bit more background depth sketched out to give me more of an idea who she is as a character.
I am excited to play her, and I am excited about the game, which is a good thing.
At the beginning of this I mentioned that my being on the other side of the GM screen wasn’t completely true, so here is the spoiler for that. Stacy and I are running alternating games that are set in more or less the same collaborative world. Where Stacy’s game is going to be about werewolves in Bellingham, Washington, mine is going to be about witches in the swamps of Florida. Oh, and I am going to be using Kyle Simons’ excellent super-hero hack of the Apocalypse Engine called Worlds in Peril. Worlds in Peril is the best new super-hero role-playing game of 2015. So, of course, I am going to use it for an urban fantasy/paranormal romance game.
The handling of the Apocalypse Engine in World in Peril is very much like Fate. The damage system of using conditions could have been inspired directly by the Fate rules. The rules are precise and very clearly written, and the author takes plenty of time to explain everything. Some might feel that the game is over-explained, but I think that Simons found just the right balance. It was in those explanations of the rules that I was able to connect with the game. Maybe it was because I am more of a comics fan than I am a fantasy fiction fan, and what was needed for me to “get” the rules was something that I was interested in playing. But, regardless, I picked a super-hero game to run a campaign about witches.
Here is the meat for this column. Stacy and I are running our games in more or less the same world, despite different game systems. There probably won’t be any cross-over between our games (because of those very different systems), but we’ve said since the beginning that they would share a world. One of the interesting wrinkles in developing the setting, and our campaigns, is that each of us is playing in the other’s game so we can’t do too much in tandem without ruining things for each other. I won’t go into too much detail here, either, because I don’t want to spoil things.
Much of the “crossover” of our worlds comes in the “physics” or Cosmology of the setting. We’ve developed some ideas on the underpinning “physics” (for lack of a better word) of how magic works, and come up with a general idea of how wolves fit into all of this. Stacy is fleshing out things on the wolf side of the world, and will likely share any of the broad strokes that I might need for my game. I, in turn, am fleshing out how all of this impacts the Witches in our world. Since we have the idea, from Briggs as mentioned earlier, that supernaturals are semi-public in our world, we decided upon an overarching ruling body that determines things like who goes public, and who doesn’t. Wolves and Witches (making a fine RPG name with its alliterative title) will both be mostly public. “Stealing” from Kelley Armstrong’s books, I am going to make Witches only be women. The male magic-using equivalent will end up with a name to be determined later.
Things that happen in either game are fair territory for the other GM to pick up and run with in their own. We will talk about those things, when they come up, on the off chance that either of us has more depth to the element than we’ve revealed. Or maybe we’ll tell the other that we have plans for that element, so to use something different.
I have described our experiment as being akin to Marvel Comics, because there aren’t a lot of points of reference in gaming for this (or if there are, we just don’t know about them yet). The idea is that the Marvel Universe is a big place, and a lot of different stories take place against that backdrop. While Howard The Duck and The Avengers may be set in the same universe as each other, and draw upon some common plot elements, or even characters, they are still two different stories being told without much concern for what happens in the other story. This is the idea for our Paranormal Mondays campaigns. One world with underlying commonality that may have elements crossover, but ultimately the world is just a tool for us to use as game masters.
It also means that we each get to spread out some of the work of developing the setting, thereby taking some of the work off of each of us. Stacy and I are each fans of emergent play in RPGs, where you start with a enough broad concepts to get a world and the characters going and then the details themselves come out in play. This makes prep easier for the GM who doesn’t have a lot of free time for developing, and it prioritizes the things that players make important during play. Plus, no matter how much you plan a setting out, the players will always take their characters into a different direction. Rather than pushing the characters back into the plot, you can use the ideas of the players to fill in the gaps.
We’re saying that the two campaigns will switch off weekly, but in actuality the switch will probably be every couple of weeks, so that we can both run games and they won’t be choppy…or having the players get disappointed because every time we get to an interesting point we switch. There are challenges to all of this approach, and we will see how they go. Once things get rolling we could all decide that we don’t like switching back and forth, and we end up sticking to just one of the two games. A lot of things can still happen.
This approach isn’t going to be for everyone, but with running two games (one weekly and one semi-weekly) and playing in another, my time for thinking deep gaming thoughts is going to be at a minimum. This means that all of the short cuts that can still give the group an interesting, enjoyable experience are appreciated.
Regardless, prep for a player is a lot different from GMing prep. This is my second time having ever played the game, the previous (also with my friend GMing) was a one shot that we recorded for the online convention Contessa last summer. That gave me enough interest in the game to keep pestering her to run it for us again…until she did.
I always wanted to play in the World of Darkness, but the closest that I ever came was a couple of GURPS games that I ran with the conversion rules back in the day. The GURPS Mage rules were some of the best magic rules for the game, and I used those a lot, even outside of World of Darkness games. I have always been interested in the setting, the time when Vampire: The Masquerade came out was the height of my “goth phase,” so I was definitely in that demographic. The Vampire game just didn’t grab me at the time, mostly because I was bored with vampires at the time.
Even though I wasn’t the fan of things wolfy that I am now, I think that Werewolf: The Apocalypse could have been my entry into the vastness of the World of Darkness, but it was not meant to be until now.
Going at the rules now, there’s a lot more complexity than I would like in a game, but we had fun with our one shot so I am willing to give them a go. The book is big, weighing in at 552 pages according to the RPGNow page. That’s a lot of game.
At the core, Werewolf is fairly simple, just attributes plus modifiers plus dice rolling equals results number. Most of us are sticking to focusing on the rules that make things happen for our characters, rather than worrying about system mastery. I think that this is the best way to handle games with a higher complexity. It is hard to let go of that desire to know everything about the game, in case that you need the exploits, but since we don’t game in a method where the players and the GM are antagonistic, that element of system mastery shouldn’t be needed by the players. Of course, I am sure that, as time passes, there will be a certain level of mastery achieved. Right now, we are just looking to the story and letting the GM smooth over the rough edges from where what we want to do and the rules may bump into each other.
The setting of Werewolf is mostly dispensed with in our game. The one shot was loosely based in the worlds of Patricia Briggs’ Mercedes Thompson books, rather than the default setting of the World of Darkness. This was mostly because Stacy, the GM, is a fan of the books. It is an interesting world, one that turns a lot of the concepts of the paranormal romance/urban fantasy genre inside out. In her books, Briggs does away (mostly) with the “secret supernaturals” idea that the World of Darkness, and many other supernaturally inspired role-playing games, tend to thrive upon. Not all supernatural creatures are public, but a number of them are, and the supernatural creatures revealed tend to be chosen because they are more “stable” and less scary than a number of supernaturals. Vampires, or course, are still hidden away in her world, because it is really difficult to put a positive spin on creatures who live by draining the blood of others.
Our group is going to be playing “troubleshooters” who help to make sure that the few things that the supernaturals want to be kept secret remain that way.
My character is our new game is a variant on the one that I played in our one shot. She was a good character, but she was definitely written with being played once in mind. If you watched the video linked above, you would see that I played her as a Hipster with a short attention span, with a love for pop music and a fairly superficial façade of a personality. I’d like to say that I was “usurping the paradigms of play” or “playing with the ideas of the game,” or some other much deeper sounding idea, but honestly I wanted a character who was as close to the opposite of what I could think was a “World of Darkness” character and went with that. My current version of the character isn’t that far away from my original ideas, only with a bit more background depth sketched out to give me more of an idea who she is as a character.
I am excited to play her, and I am excited about the game, which is a good thing.
At the beginning of this I mentioned that my being on the other side of the GM screen wasn’t completely true, so here is the spoiler for that. Stacy and I are running alternating games that are set in more or less the same collaborative world. Where Stacy’s game is going to be about werewolves in Bellingham, Washington, mine is going to be about witches in the swamps of Florida. Oh, and I am going to be using Kyle Simons’ excellent super-hero hack of the Apocalypse Engine called Worlds in Peril. Worlds in Peril is the best new super-hero role-playing game of 2015. So, of course, I am going to use it for an urban fantasy/paranormal romance game.
The handling of the Apocalypse Engine in World in Peril is very much like Fate. The damage system of using conditions could have been inspired directly by the Fate rules. The rules are precise and very clearly written, and the author takes plenty of time to explain everything. Some might feel that the game is over-explained, but I think that Simons found just the right balance. It was in those explanations of the rules that I was able to connect with the game. Maybe it was because I am more of a comics fan than I am a fantasy fiction fan, and what was needed for me to “get” the rules was something that I was interested in playing. But, regardless, I picked a super-hero game to run a campaign about witches.
Here is the meat for this column. Stacy and I are running our games in more or less the same world, despite different game systems. There probably won’t be any cross-over between our games (because of those very different systems), but we’ve said since the beginning that they would share a world. One of the interesting wrinkles in developing the setting, and our campaigns, is that each of us is playing in the other’s game so we can’t do too much in tandem without ruining things for each other. I won’t go into too much detail here, either, because I don’t want to spoil things.
Much of the “crossover” of our worlds comes in the “physics” or Cosmology of the setting. We’ve developed some ideas on the underpinning “physics” (for lack of a better word) of how magic works, and come up with a general idea of how wolves fit into all of this. Stacy is fleshing out things on the wolf side of the world, and will likely share any of the broad strokes that I might need for my game. I, in turn, am fleshing out how all of this impacts the Witches in our world. Since we have the idea, from Briggs as mentioned earlier, that supernaturals are semi-public in our world, we decided upon an overarching ruling body that determines things like who goes public, and who doesn’t. Wolves and Witches (making a fine RPG name with its alliterative title) will both be mostly public. “Stealing” from Kelley Armstrong’s books, I am going to make Witches only be women. The male magic-using equivalent will end up with a name to be determined later.
Things that happen in either game are fair territory for the other GM to pick up and run with in their own. We will talk about those things, when they come up, on the off chance that either of us has more depth to the element than we’ve revealed. Or maybe we’ll tell the other that we have plans for that element, so to use something different.
I have described our experiment as being akin to Marvel Comics, because there aren’t a lot of points of reference in gaming for this (or if there are, we just don’t know about them yet). The idea is that the Marvel Universe is a big place, and a lot of different stories take place against that backdrop. While Howard The Duck and The Avengers may be set in the same universe as each other, and draw upon some common plot elements, or even characters, they are still two different stories being told without much concern for what happens in the other story. This is the idea for our Paranormal Mondays campaigns. One world with underlying commonality that may have elements crossover, but ultimately the world is just a tool for us to use as game masters.
It also means that we each get to spread out some of the work of developing the setting, thereby taking some of the work off of each of us. Stacy and I are each fans of emergent play in RPGs, where you start with a enough broad concepts to get a world and the characters going and then the details themselves come out in play. This makes prep easier for the GM who doesn’t have a lot of free time for developing, and it prioritizes the things that players make important during play. Plus, no matter how much you plan a setting out, the players will always take their characters into a different direction. Rather than pushing the characters back into the plot, you can use the ideas of the players to fill in the gaps.
We’re saying that the two campaigns will switch off weekly, but in actuality the switch will probably be every couple of weeks, so that we can both run games and they won’t be choppy…or having the players get disappointed because every time we get to an interesting point we switch. There are challenges to all of this approach, and we will see how they go. Once things get rolling we could all decide that we don’t like switching back and forth, and we end up sticking to just one of the two games. A lot of things can still happen.
This approach isn’t going to be for everyone, but with running two games (one weekly and one semi-weekly) and playing in another, my time for thinking deep gaming thoughts is going to be at a minimum. This means that all of the short cuts that can still give the group an interesting, enjoyable experience are appreciated.
