Morgan's KublaCon 2013 Excellent Adventures

Again another very good year for me at KublaCon.  The shuffler gods were very good to me and all the games I was in were excellent.

This time I'm going to talk about Great GMs and one of their particular strengths and what that brings to the table.

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D-Day, the Fifth of June

Game system	Godlike	Start time:	FRI, 6:00 PM
Category	RPG	Duration	8 Hours
Event ID	02007	Location	2071-A
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Gil Trevizo
Description	June 5, 1944: This day the soldiers of the First United States Army Group set upon a mighty endeavor, to storm the beaches of Calais, liberate occupied France from the yoke of Nazi tyranny, and begin the Allied invasion of Western Europe. As the main amphibious force crosses the narrow straits between Dover and Calais, you, the men and women of the Third Talent Assault Group are to join the American 9th and 21st Airborne Divisions to parachute deep behind enemy lines, take key positions, and hold them against the onslaught of German infantry, panzer, and SS-Überkommandogruppe that is certain to follow. History will forever remember this place and this moment: Calais, the Fifth of June. GODLIKE is a game of super-powered role-playing set during the Second World War. After the first superhuman appeared in 1936, over 150,000 “Talents” have since manifested across the globe by 1944. With their abilities, the Talents can overwhelm mundane enemy soldiers, but those same abilities make them vulnerable to other Talents, and even the most powerful Talent can be killed by a single lucky bullet. In GODLIKE, you play characters that are larger than life, but the war is always larger than you.

The amount of prep work and attention to detail for this game was amazing.  The combat system in Godlike is very deadly, so Gil pre-generated over 20 characters (I think he said 40). I've run Godlike before and I had to generate various NPCs with powers; It was a lot of work and requires a spreadsheet to keep track of the build points.  Well, in addition to that, Gil also photoshopped pictures for all the PCs and NPCs.  In my games, I just grab appropriate pictures from the internet for the character portraits.  Gil actually matched up period clothing to the correct portrait angles and color corrected the pictures.  That lead to a seamless portrait with nothing out of place.  I had run "Castle Bravo" and that didn't include character portraits, so I decided I wanted John Wayne, Peter Lorrie, Danny Kaye, Spencer Tracy, and Basil Rathbone in my game as PCs.  Well, I didn't find any with them in Navel uniform, so I had to photoshop them myself -- that took hours and I did a passing job; I found I could hide imperfections by zooming in and cropping out my errors.  Also no one noticed I mainly used the same navel hat several times.  Knowing this, I know that Gil spent days just doing the portraits.

Gil gave us period maps, complete list of equipment, and command hierarchy.   He had also done a lot of research on the D-Day invasion.

All this prep work immersed us in the time period.  What this buys the GM is the authority to tell the players, "Yes this is possible, No that is not possible."  The verisimilitude gives the GM the authority to dictate various things without argument from the players.

I really enjoyed the game.  My two favorite set pieces were the Sniper and the Beach where we had to make very difficult moral decisions.  "That's some really f*cked up shit." and that's a quote from my character.

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I think another hallmark of a good GM are the little deceptions and mental kickers they build into their game.  In Gil's game, we were only given choices between black characters and female characters.  This was not revealed in the game description.  I got to play Samuel L. Jackson, a veteran of WWI with 38 previous kills.

The Jackson character was a Zed, probably one of the least useful abilities in Godlike.  I wanted to play a Zed just to see how useful he would be.  In Godlike, Zeds can nullify another Talent's effect.  The only thing is that it is only useful after the Zed can see what the other Talent's ability is.  So if a Zed runs into a stranger Talent, he's going to get fried if the Talent decides to target the Zed first, since the Zed can't nullify the first use of the Talent.  The good news was that we ran into German fliers that were strafing civilians on the road.  Guess what happens when you nullify Flight?  Splat! and Splat! "That's 42 and 43, you Hun Motherf*ckers!"

In the Sniper scene, it was a Friendly that had gone crazy that was killing a French village, one person at a time.  We killed the Sniper, but then the Germans were coming and we had to decide if we were to help defend the French village or leave to complete our mission.  Volunteers stayed as a holding action as the rest of the team left to complete the mission.

On the Beach, we found that a little boy was holding off the German army with illusionary toy soldiers, but it was clear that we were doomed.  So, do you go against orders and save the boy, or hold out as long as you can? 

My favorite moment was when two characters grabbed the boy (after some Player vs Player conflict over the fate of the boy) and started swimming from Calais to Dover.  My character, torn between joining them and staying behind, stood on the beach and watched them swim away.  The good news was that the remaining group of characters were surrounded by Germans and needed saving, so I got back into the action because some Hun Motherf*ckers needed killin'.

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Fallen Sons

Game system	Unknown Armies	Start time:	SAT, 9:00 AM
Category	RPG	Duration	4 Hours
Event ID	22008	Location	2013-A
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Todd Furler
Description	This event is for mature players. A much-loved citizen of a small Kansas town has lost his life in the War on Terror. The players are townspeople who must, among other things, determine how to respond when a hate group announces that they will picket the soldier's funeral. Please note that players will be exposed to the rhetoric of a real-world hate group for part of this adventure.

Again amazing prep work.  Todd knows his characters backwards and forwards and sideways.  He gave us  pages of background information for our characters and a relationship map to show how we were connected to the other people in the town.  He also gave us real newsletters from the hate group.

But I'd like to focus on Todd's control over the game.  I've heard a lot of good things about Todd's GMing and I wanted to experience it firsthand.  First, he gives a very strong explanation of how he runs a game like a movie production.  This explanation really sets the tone and his authority as producer and director of the game, so when he decides to cut a scene and move on, there is no argument.  This is a great method to control pacing and game time.

It took about an hour to go over the game rules and our characters.  Though that left 3 hours of game time, we had a very satisfying and enjoyable game.  The reason for that was the tight control of scenes by Todd.

In another first, Todd was able to do a flash forward and then a flashback.  It takes a lot of finesse to do that as most players may have an issue with fait accompli.  With the flash forward, the fate of a character was set and then it was up to that player in the flashback to seamlessly merge the timeline.  I think with a more difficult player it might have been a complete disaster.

Todd also does some interesting things with the Fight, Flight, Freeze responses when your character loses control and he takes over.

I can see why Todd likes to run 4 hour games as that is enough to get a full story arc for his gaming style.  Most of us GMs take either 6 or 8 hours to do the same thing.  Bravo.

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In the flash forward, a NPC is dead and a PC is in the hospital.  So, when we flashback,  the PC can't save the NPC and must become severely injured.  Somehow Todd pulled this off.

As things unfold, people in the town are being sliced and diced by a crazy person with a magic sword.

The major reveal is that this was all the work of fallen angels or as they would like to put it, "Exiled, NOT Fallen."

As luck would have it, I picked one of the town's pastors as my character.  I volunteered my church as the final battle ground and during the final confrontation, I was able to banish Lucifer back to Hell.  Cool, huh?

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Our Little Town

Game system	Nemesis (One Roll Engine)	Start time:	SAT, 5:00 PM
Category	RPG	Duration	7 Hours
Event ID	42111	Location	2070-A
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Matthulhu Steele
Description	You wake up in a quaint hotel in a quaint little town. You don't remember checking into the hotel. You're trying to recall what happened before you arrived here. Hey, why is the door locked? Is there anybody out there? Hello? Our Little Town is a game of psychological horror among six strangers. These are normal, interesting and competent people who find themselves in an unusual situation. Nemesis uses the One Roll Engine from Wild Talents and Godlike, customized for horror.

Matt also did a lot of prep work.  In this game, we were only given character portraits to pick characters from, then he handed us multi-page character sheets with extensive backgrounds.

In this game, the six strangers never really stayed together.  Matt was a master of parallel action and scene switching.  Throughout the game, there were at least 2 to 3 groups separated from each other doing parallel actions and it all flowed together very well.

Matt had a really good feel for the right amount of screen time for each player, when to switch between groups, and how to keep the tension up.  In some games, I've seen other players get bored when it isn't their turn.  This doesn't happen in Matt's games.

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In Our Little Town, the game started a little bit slow as each character explored their escape proof hotel room.  The problem was that we were in separate rooms and there was little character interaction as we did each of our scenes.  So, when one player explored the room, the other players had to wait their turn.

But as we started pounding on the walls and screaming, we were able to communicate with each other and eventually escape.

One fun moment was when one of the characters escaped with a lamp (held like a baseball bat) and ran into another that had a gun.  Blam!   I think it was Matt's excellent sense of timing and scene switching that caused this to happen.  It was a great moment.

The deception Matt pulled on us was that this was a Cthulhu game and Cthulhu creatures did come out of the woodwork.  But shhhhhh, it's a secret.  You shouldn't be reading this spoiler section unless you've already played the game.

Another great moment was when a Cthulhu creature got pulled down out of the sky.  Through parallel actions we all got to the gazebo and got to act against it even though a fair number of characters were initially spread out in different parts of the town.  It was masterful.

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The Only Good Bug is a Dead Bug!

Game system	Nemesis/The One Roll Engine	Start time:	SUN, 10:00 AM
Category	RPG	Duration	6 Hours
Event ID	72004	Location	2062-A
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Morgan Hua
Description	Mars settlement went dark and your squad of Space Marines have been sent in to find out if Bugs have infested Mars. Your mission: find survivors, kill bugs, and get out alive. Solider, what else do you need to know? --- Would you like to know more? See below. --- The system is ORE which is a very deadly game system that uses up to 10d10. This is a mash-up of Starship Troopers and Aliens. As a Space Marine, you'll have state of the art weapons and armor, but if you bite it, you might have to play a Civilian. This is not a pure combat game. It will be part investigation and part combat as your squad tries to figure out what's really going on. If you don't, you might all just die.

The game went very well for me.  I incorporated feed back from my play test and those suggestions pushed the game up a notch.

In my games, I like to incorporate some video at the beginning as a shortcut to set the mood and setting.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  I've been in some games where the GM must take a lot of time explaining the world and society.  Two minutes of video can cut out half an hour of exposition.  In my Ghost in the Shell game, half the players never saw the Anime -- and I wasn't prepped for explaining the world to them.  I wished I had a short video segment where I could have shown them what the world was like.  So, that was a big fail.

This time, I had a video clip from Starship Troopers and I also created a video of Felix Baumgartner's supersonic jump from space.

This also helps in the case a player admits that they've never seen Starship Troopers nor Aliens -- which happened to be the case, this time with Jill S.

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Hell Rides For Delamar

Game system	Boneslingers	Start time:	SUN, 7:00 PM
Category	RPG	Duration	6 Hours
Event ID	Pickup Game	Location	Brdrm-2
# of Players:	6	GM / Judge	Duane O'Brien
Description	Getting by as an undead gunslinger is tough. You hope this job in Delamar will give you a chance to lift your burden. It's time to kill some bad men. Delamar was one of the most notorious towns in the old west. It was known as The Widowmaker. You're going to find out why. You'll be playing undead gunslingers in a setting called Boneslingers. If you've played The Putrescent Seven, this setting is an evolution of that game. Bad things will happen in this game.

The shuffler wasn't good to a large number of us on Sunday night, but Duane was nice enough to run a pickup game for us.

Again lots of prep work.  Maps, painted undead gunslinger minis, extensive character backgrounds, period poker cards, and a great looking GM screen that's a wooden period desk-set.

So far, I haven't been disappointed by any of the games that Duane has run.

I'll only go over one aspect of how Duane runs a game:  Character selection.

In the game The Island Of Misfortune, we were asked seemingly random questions and then characters were assigned to us.

In the game, Goblin Ninjas Flipping Out And Killing Like A Hundred Guys, we generated characters and then did our signature vignette.  And if during the course of play, we recreated it, we would gain bonus dice.

In this game, Duane made each player do a small vignette and asked pointed questions about the character we're playing.  He'd take notes and then through some magic, decides which character fits us. 

I think the refinement of doing a small vignette and asking us who we are in the scene worked much better than just asking questions and it made character selection a part of the game.

This method for character selection works really well.  So far, I haven't been disappointed.

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The two big reveals in this game was that the group of bandits were women and Delamar is a terrible, terrible place to live and die in.

Both were key reveals and totally turned the game on it's head for us.

Nice.

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TS Emulator V2.2

Game system	Paranoia XP	Start time:	MON, 10:00 AM
Category	RPG	Duration	6 Hours
Event ID	112004	Location	2044-A
# of Players:	5	GM / Judge	Matthulhu Steele
Description	Greetings Troubleshooters! On this mission you will be accompanied by the next generation of BotShooters - bots designed to replace Troubleshooters for those rare dangerous missions. Now with the upgraded Emulator V2.2 circuit installed, these bots will learn to act just like the Troubleshooter they are assigned to. Soon these new heroes of Alpha Complex will walk, talk, shoot and act like real Troubleshooters. Hail the Computer!

Again lots of prep work.  Multi-page character sheets.

Comedy requires perfect timing and perfect timing must be Matt's Talent.  I laughed so much in this game, I had to wipe the tears away.

Again, lots of split scenes and parallel action.  All the trouble shooters started out in different parts of Alpha Complex and had to get to the Briefing room.  Hilarity ensued.

Wilson Z. never played Paranoia before, but I think he was a natural.  If Wilson didn't have to leave early for his flight home, he would have won one of the prizes that were handed out.  Sorry, Wilson.

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Mateo C. got one of his clones killed before the game even started, by explaining one of the rules -- knowing the rules is treasonous and punishable by death.  :-)

I wonder how many other players ever made it into the Briefing Room.  The big reveal was when we got to the hallway to the Briefing Room, the corridor was painted Green, above our security clearance.

I think we spent more than half the game trying to get into the Briefing Room.

Once inside, we were to be Borged.  I was able to dance/maneuver my BotShooter into the Borging-booth in my stead.

Once briefed, we were to go to HAL Sector, but I don't want to spoil that ending...

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