Saturday, December 15, 2012

Morgan's Dead of Winter 2012 Adventures

This year, Dead of Winter moved to Placerville or what used to be called Hangtown. You can tell from the boastful street signs -- nice, huh?  Placerville has a mixed population of young ski bums and old retirees.  The store fronts are old antique stores and leftovers from an era long ago.  Numerous restaurants fill the main street.  The hardware store celebrated its 160 anniversary and is the 2nd oldest running establishment in California and the oldest store west of the Mississippi.  The Cary House Hotel, where we played our games, has the 2nd oldest elevator in California.
Old Hangtown Street Sign
California Historical Landmark.  Nice, huh?

Historic Cary House Hotel
It took us 5 hours to get to Hangtown from the South Bay Area.  We took a local's recommended route and it was a bad decision.  Other people from the Bay Area took only 3-1/2 hours to get to Hangtown. The return trip to the Bay Area without recommended route took only 3 hours.

In this discussion of the games I was in, I'm going to focus on pacing.

I like to think of the games I run like a movie.  Where the GM is the director, setting up the scene, costumes, props, and plot.  The players are improv actors, making up their lines and action.

For me, pacing is defined by the tension level in the scene.  Generally, the more tension, the faster paced the scene; the less tension, the slower pace.  Tension also depends on the system used for the game.  For example, I playtested Mike G's With a Million Voices, it suffered from pacing problems because it was the first time Mike ran Dread.  One of the lessons of Dread is that the GM has to watch the tower very closely.  The GM can't just pay attention to the plot and characters.  In other traditional RPGs that use dice, the dice are random number generators, which the GM has no control over.  The GM can adjust the bonuses and such during the game in an effort to fudge the results, but the GM can't control the tower that way.  The only way the GM can control the tension level is to gauge its stability and throw "preset" encounters at the players to destabilize the tower as they reach a crisis so the scene becomes fraught with tension.  If the tower falls, the tension level suddenly drops and it is a bad time to have a boss battle or critical scene since every test becomes easy.  I mentioned this to Mike after the playtest and I heard that when he ran his game at DoW, it went very well.

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Saturday, December 8, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: Fear Itself / Unknown Armies
Scenario Title
: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
GM
: Morgan Hua
Power Level
: Varies
Number of Players
: 5
All Characters Provided
Description
: Scooby-Doo, Shaggy, Velma, Daphne, and Fred investigate the disappearance of a professor from Coolsville University.  The game starts as a standard Scooby-Doo episode, but things aren’t what they seem and events go very, very wrong.  As the characters “harden” we will switch to another gaming system to reflect the changes in characters and the world as it descends into darkness.

In The Misery Machine:
Jim M. (Scooby-Doo)
Wayne C. (Shaggy)
Nik G. (Fred)
Alicia H. (Daphne)
Elisabeth B. (Velma)

Matt contacted me and asked me to run a game.  I told him that I remembered that he told us "No Scooby-Doo games" but the only game I have that is new is a "Scooby-Doo" game.
"Really," he asked.
"Seriously, Scooby-Doo, for real," I replied.
I emailed him pictures of the setting and character concepts and I got the Matt S. seal of approval.
So, you can't run a Scooby-Doo game at DoW except if it is Scooby-Doo.  Matt S. accepts no imitations.  Disclaimer:  When Matt says, no "Scooby-Doo," he means a game with no supernatural elements and it's just a guy with a mask.

The game starts with the Scooby-Doo characters that we know and love.  I used Fear Itself for the starting system since the game starts off as a pure investigation.

My whole plan was to go through an investigation phase and then an escalating action phase.  One flaw with the Gumshoe system (Fear Itself, Trail of Cthulhu, etc), is that the combat system is dull and lacks drama.  Basically, combat sucks.   One of the better fixes for Gumshoe is Lorefinder where it uses Gumshoe investigation skills and Pathfinder combat skills.

I originally designed the game to be 3 acts with 3 game systems.  But due to time constraints and the difficulty of explaining 3 game systems in a six hour time slot, I decided to switch it to two acts with two systems, merging the 2nd and 3rd act into a single 2nd act.

Well, the players actually skipped a part of the investigation and finished the first act in 1-1/2 hours.  So, that meant that I could actually go with my original 3 act structure.  If I knew this would have happened, I would have brought the 3rd act Feng Shui character sheets and introduced them to Feng Shui.

They continued to gallop through my scenario at breakneck speed and when they went through the three acts, we were only at the 4th hour.  The good news was that they didn't reach a satisfactory ending with their solution to the 3rd act.  So, I added a 4th act (I re-purposed material and conflict from the 3rd act that they had handily avoided) and added an entirely new 5th act to the game.  We finally wrapped up at the 5-1/2 hour mark with a satisfying ending.

The game didn't really go as planned, the pacing felt a little dead in a few spots as the players struggled to figure out what to do next. At the end of the third and forth act, some players wondered whether that was the end of the game.  I asked them what they wanted to do next and that prompted them to come up with additional plans to save the world and thankfully, if it weren't for those meddling kids, we'd be up to our eyeballs in non-Euclidean zombies.

In the spoiler section is art work from the game, the game plot, and surprises from the playtest and the DoW game.




Saturday, December 8, 7PM – 1AM
Game System: Call of Cthulhu (d20)
Scenario Title
: MAD Men
GM
: Jim Mathews
Power Level
: Realistic (4th level characters)
Number of Players
: 6
All Characters Provided
Description
: The cold war may be over, but the shadows still linger, as your START team heads off into the dark, cold, northern reaches of Russia to inspect a decommissioned missile complex.

START Team:
Patrick I. (American #1, Team Lead)
Jack Y. (American #2, Nuclear Dude)
Gil T. (Russian #1, Guy in Charge)
Ben H. (Russian #2, Bureaucrat)
Tom I. (Russian #3, Security Officer)
Morgan H. (Russian #4, Driver)

Because of the title, and the descriptive words, "cold war," I thought the game was going to be set in the 1950's.  Now that I've re-read the game description carefully, it is clear that was going to be set in the modern day because "the cold war is over."  I was actually looking forward to some 1950's spy-fu.

In any case, when I saw the list of players, I knew we were going to have a lot of fun.  We randomly pulled characters and we wound up with 2 Americans and 4 Russians.  Our job was to accompany the Americans to three random decommissioned silos, so they can verify that Russia is in compliance with the START treaty.

We really got into our Russian accents and misconceptions about what America was like.  The back-and-forth was a lot of fun.  My character drove a piece-of-sh*t truck that was held together with spit and discarded pieces of wire.  I think we spent at least an hour f*ing around and having a good time in character before we even started on the road trip.

Then we got into the weirdness and being in character, we were wigged out and had to weigh completing our mission or leaving for better equipment and maybe never returning.  I think this is where things went wrong.  I knew the players and trusted them and I'm not sure our GM, Jim, did.  At the hint of us abandoning the scenario, Jim hit the GM panic button and launched the end game.  So, we went into full-on end game and we finished 2 hours early -- even with our 1 hour of f*ing around.

I had a lot of fun, but I would have liked to have more of a middle game and wished that Jim trusted us a bit more.  The game felt truncated as we went from slight creepiness to an adrenaline rush end game.

The highlight of the game was Gil's performance during the end game.  Details in the spoiler section.




Sunday, December 9, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: Cthulhu by Gaslight (1850)
Scenario Title
: The Golden Rule
GM
: Leon C Glover III
Power Level
: Moderate – some prior SAN losses, a few “odd” experiences
Number of Players
: 6
All Characters Provided
Description
:  Eureka! The gold rush is on in California!  Brought together by fortune and Wells Fargo, the gold country will test your fortitude and your ideals. Power and greed aren’t the only things that can corrupt a man’s soul.  Remember the Golden Rule – he who owns the gold makes the rules!

You are jumping off at the boom town, San Francisco, on your way to Hangtown/Placerville.  The “locals” will be very grateful to help you with anything you might need.

Would-be Rulers:
June G. (Mormon)
Josh C. (Franciscan Friar)
Frank F. (Madame)
Badger M. (Enforcer/Body Guard)
Basil B. (Calvary)
Morgan H. (East Coast City Guy)

We all started on a stage coach from San Francisco to Placerville.  Leon did a great job of invoking the setting.  I felt like I was in the TV show, Deadwood.

Unfortunately, we spent 4 hours building up our fortunes in Placerville.  I hate the Sims and I felt like I was playing the Sims and going through the motion of collecting gold.  Things didn't really happen until the last 2 hours.  It felt like we were just doing our own thing with no real danger or tension.  There weren't enough character motivation or interaction or weirdness or threat to make us want to figure out what was going on.

I think the game needed more interlocking character motivations and more events in town to make us act sooner.  4 hours of collecting gold was just too slow a pace for me.




Sunday, December 9, 7PM – 1AM - The Killer Session
Game System: Call of Cthulhu V6
Scenario Title: The Day the Whole World Went Away
GM
: Gil Trevizo
Power Level
: Average People
Number of Players
: 6
All Characters Provided
Description
: You wake up to the taste of ashes and the smell of dead flesh, surrounded by the freshly ruined landscape that was modern civilization not so long ago. You don’t know who you are or how this came to be, your dwindling cache of memory suppression drugs having kept your sanity intact in the face of the madness that has swallowed the rest of humanity. Now, as the stars come right and all men kill and revel in joy amidst a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom, even stranger things rise from dark depths to end the time of mankind. A number scrawled on your skin – “1121221121″ – and fragmented memories of impossible things will lead you through this day, when all of your world goes away.

1121221121:
Frank F. (Army Sniper)
Morgan H. (Jet Pilot)
Shannon M. (Psychologist?)
Michael G. (Geologist?)
June G. (Pharmacist?)

For me, this game was the highlight of DoW.  Gil showed us character portraits and we picked characters based solely on the pictures.  We then got blank character sheets to reflect our amnesia.  When we tried to figure out something, if we made our roll, Gil would tell us our real score.  A few years ago, Jeff Y. did the same thing, but used an invisible ink for your stats and you can wipe a marker over the invisible ink to reveal your stats.

The game was actually various scenes stitched together, with each scene having a time gap.  When we started a new scene, Gil would hand out new character sheets with additional information on them, then we would have to transfer what we learned from the previous character sheet.  I liked Jeff Y's method better; it was more efficient and had less down time.

The game worked very well because we went from scene to scene without any dead spots.  The scene shifts were also integral to the overall plot line.  Some scenes were cut short as Gil tried to finish before our 1am deadline.  Little did we know that the other late games ran over time, and we could have played longer.

Gil said he's not going to run this game again since he thinks the game teetered on disaster and the excellent quality of the players brought awesomeness to the game.  Gil knew us all and had trusted our ability as players.

My only small minor nit was the time spent on switching character sheets and us trying to figure out our skills.  There was some Metagaming as we tried various skills (sometimes for no reason at all) in order to figure out what we were good at.  One scene (with Mike) got cut short and I actually wanted the whole scene to play out and see how Mike's character would deal with the horror he had wrought.

Again, an excellent game and excellent players.

Just in case Gil changes his mind and runs this game again, I'm going to put spoilers in the spoiler section.

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