Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Morgan's KublaCon 2019 Excellent Adventures


The shuffler changed this year to a pre-shuffle before the convention. It worked out very well for me as I got into 5 games with the shuffler, crashed one game, and ran one game. Knowing my schedule, I was also able to get into two seminars: one on Alternate History for RPGs and another by the War College on First Blood at Bull Run.

I had an excellent KublaCon, one of the best, if not the best, in many years.

This year, I'm going to focus on what Players bring to a game and how they can affect it.

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Friday 10am (4 hrs)

The Tearing of the Veil
System: Unknown Armies, 3rd Ed.
GM: Todd Furler
Players: 6 (Dovi A, Gil T, Matt S, Martin C, Patrick R, Morgan Hua)
A small town experiences more than its share of violence. Random chance? Or something sinister, just out of sight? Weave together stories separated by three decades to find the answers.
I really enjoy Todd's games because he shoves a 6 to 8 hr game into 4 hrs. He runs cinematic games, explaining things with cinematic nomenclature such as what does the audience see, the camera angle, sometimes explaining the purpose of a scene with minimal direction. He knows when to cut a scene and when to let it run it's course.

The game jumps between the past and present day to bring everything to a climax.

This was a well done game and a lot of fun.

Some people like Todd's GMing style and some do not. He has tight table control and those who do not want to go with his flow will not like his style and feel too constrained. Luckily, our table were full of Todd veterans and we knew what was expected. It was a good table of RPGers who brought this game to life.

An excellent game.




Friday 2pm (1 hr)

Alternate History in RPG Settings
Seminar
Panel: Darren Watts (Moderator), Jess Nevins, Nick Cole
What if Hitler and the Third Reich won World War II? What if the USSR landed on the moon first? What if Nero was never a Roman Emperor?
Our panelist discuss alternate timelines and how those can be woven into a roleplaying game.
It was an interesting discussion with only 4 people in the audience, so it was more of a round table discussion than a presentation.

Some takeaways:

It's better to decide your endpoint and what you want that is cool, such as Kaiju during WW2 and work what needs to change to have it happen vs working your way forward with a what if Hitler was raised to be not Anti-Semitic. e.g. it's easier to work backward ripples vs forward ripples in building out your world.

Be watchful of sensitivity issues which is prevalent these days which can lead to blowback such as labeling who is evil. This devolved into an argument about killing Orcs in Tolkien = Nazis. Who is EVIL. Good vs Evil and shades of grey. Tolerance. Beware of blanket statements. Klingons used to be evil, but not anymore.


Friday 6pm (6 hrs)

To Write Thine Own Doom
System: Call of Cthulhu, 7th Ed.
GM: Arthur Wallis
Players: 6 (full table with Matt S, Morgan Hua)
England, 1085 A.D., King William's peace endures, and he wishes to survey his realm. For the task of the census of Manchester, he has assigned a Noble Knight, who along with his retinue shall compile information on the local farms and hamlets etcetera. 
These great works will be compiled into the liber de wintonia. The Doomsday book. 
Unfortunately, there are old things awakening in Northern England. Things which remember the Romans, and even a time before. Things which consider the region very much theirs, and mean to reclaim it...
An interesting game, but slightly ruined by a infamous bad player - who crashed the game. This player was difficult, arguing with other players, spouting nonsense, using up screen time on pointless tasks.

The game was chock full of scenes and interesting events, but the distraction by the bad player really derailed the game. We didn't get to the 3rd act of the game and basically the world ended. Arthur said he play tested this many times and we were the very first group not to get to the 3rd act.

Without this player, we would have had a much better experience.

Arthur will put this scenario on KickStarter soon.



Sat 10am (6 hrs)

The Forcing Move
System: Call of Cthulhu, 7th Ed.
GM: Morgan Hua
Players: 6 (full table with Cro M)
Cold War Cthulhu: You work for MI6 and covertly for Section 46, a secret group fighting the "Other Enemy" (Mythos entities). 
Date/Location: 1972 at the World Chess Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland. 
MI6 mission: Prevent a Russian double-agent from defecting. 
Section 46 mission: Assess and neutralize the Other Enemy's influence on Bobby Fischer. Do NOT terminate Bobby Fischer.
I had a good table of players and enjoyed running this game. What makes this interesting is that PCs are given two missions, sometimes the missions intersect, sometimes not, sometimes the two missions may be contrary to each other, so agents have to choose between loyalty to their agency or to Section 46.




Sat 6pm (6 hrs)

Indiana Jones And The City of Impossible Angles
System: Call of Cthulhu, Pulp Cthulhu.
GM: William Lee
Players: 6 (full table with Gil T, Cro M, Morgan Hua)
The year is 1940. The Nazis are masters of Europe, and they may soon be masters of the world. There are terrifying rumors that the Nazis have discovered clues to the location of an ancient Nameless City filled with lost technologies so wondrous that they defy the understanding of modern science. With the eldritch secrets they could loot from the Nameless City, the Nazis would be unstoppable.
Now, Indiana Jones and his friends must beat the Nazis to the Nameless City before unspeakable horrors are unleashed upon the world!
INDIANA JONES AND THE CITY OF IMPOSSIBLE ANGLES is a Call of Cthulhu 7th edition adventure using the Pulp Cthulhu supplement published by Chaosium. The players will step into the roles of Indiana Jones, Marion Ravenwood, Sallah, Marcus, Short Round, Willie Scott, and Dr. Henry Jones, Sr. and embark on a sanity-blasting, Nazi-punching adventure to save the world! 
My favorite game for this convention.

A very cinematic game. William controls the table not as tightly as Todd Furler, but still uses cinematic tropes (but not as much), so there's more freedom to envision the pulp action your own way.

Gil's Marcus with his antics with Henry Jones were a big highlight of this game. I got to also get my Short Round in. "Doctor Jones, Save Us!"

And no surprise, the big set piece is The City of Impossible Angles. 😀

An excellent game.



Sun 10am (5 hrs)

Life in the Shadows
System: Breakdown
GM: Wilson Zorn
Players: 4 (2 players: Thomas and Morgan Hua)
This is a game about people on the edge, protagonists striving to do some kind of good in a painful, mad world, swimming against the increasing tide of man's inhumanity to fellow man. Life in the Shadows portrays the struggle of individuals in an increasingly Orwellian state. You play a spy, refugee, student, or such desperately seeking something. Please note this is a playtest. 
As a highly competent protagonist, you will engage your compassion or dispassion, each with attendant risks, to succeed. You must also learn to trust others, but always with a risk of betrayal.  
Useful references and inspirations include the lyrics to the Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime," the movie Brazil, news stories around the NSA and Snowden (especially through the lenses of insiders and those on the fringe), and (in a non-comedic vein) the RPG Paranoia.  
FYI the rules system is significantly informed by Don't Rest Your Head, with a little bit of Mountain Witch.
In this game, only one other player showed up, so imagine a storytelling game with only two players. The other player was young and an avowed D&D player. To my surprise he was very good and I had a very good time playing this game.




Sun 6pm (6 hrs)

When did that prop get tentacles?
System: Call of Cthulhu, 7th Ed.
GM: Alicia Hansen
Players: 6 (full table with Cro M, Morgan Hua)
It's 1992. You’ve been working at GYRO's World of Terror for a few years now and everyone knows the stories of the “ghostly whispers” at one end of the mall. But the new stories of the weird stuff happening in the creature shop are intriguing. And when someone claimed one of the fake bodies was replaced with a real one last night you laughed it off. But Alix hasn’t shown up tonight and she has never missed a shift. After all, she wouldn’t want anyone to dethrone her as Chainsaw Queen.
GM's note: This haunt really existed and so did the characters and the rumors it was actually haunted.
This is Alicia's first time GMing a convention game and also with a game she designed. She did an amazing job.

Alicia had actually worked at GYRO's World of Terror, so we were getting an insider's view of that world. She took stories and rumors from her work to build out this game.

The infamous bad player also crashed this game. Luckily, for some unknown reason, he decided to sideline himself throughout the whole game, hiding out in safety and doing mostly nothing.

A good solid game with interesting surprises - and not derailed by a bad player.



Mon 11am (6 hrs)

Criminal Gaiety
System: Call of Cthulhu, 5th Ed.
GM: dan pradanamus
Players: 6 (4 players: Chris F, Henry P, Morgan ?, Morgan Hua)
They were warned last year to stop. Once again it appears that revelry is in progress. 
It seems like when the weather gets good the problems start. Meanwhile, your family's been hungry for months.
OMG, here's a horrible game rescued by good players. When I showed up, the GM said, "I had hoped no one would show up." It was soon clear that the GM was only running this game to get a free badge.

He had no characters prepared. So, we spent 1/2 hour generating characters.

The game lasted 1-1/2 hours. It was supposed to be a 6 hr game.

The setting was 1628 Plymouth. We were sent to Merrymouth, our neighboring trading post to shutdown their May celebrations. They were in good with the natives, were prosperous, noisy, and not good Christians.

We soon realized that we 4 PCs (a leader of a prominent family - a face character, a butcher, a tracker, and a print shop worker)  probably had done something wrong and we were being sent on a suicide mission.

I was the face character and I asked if we had any native support. The response was "You've pissed them off, they don't like you."

When we arrived at Merrymouth, we saw people in various stages of undress dancing around a maypole, intermixed with natives, drummers, and people cavorting and having an orgy in the open. A den of sin. We lost SAN.

I rode up to the drummers, lined them up, and opened fire with my blunderbuss, taking all three of them out in one shot. What? Did you think I was going to talk to them? We gained SAN for killing them. 👿 I then called out for their town leader: "Thomas Morton! We are here to speak with you!" He never showed up. I reloaded as I kept on trying to goad him to show up.

We basically murder-hoboed Merrymouth.

In the end, the last to die were a threesome: Two Deep Ones shagging a human female in a hay cart. I blunderbusted them; only the woman died. My compatriots killed one Deep One, and I rode down the other one as it tried to escape.

We also set fire to the town and rescued all the abandoned goods from the trading post.

Before we left, I carved a message on a burnt shingle and attached it to the burned down maypole:
Thomas Morton
Thou hast been cast out
What saved the game? The players. We were making jokes throughout the game, about cannibalism, righteous fury, and inappropriate verses from the Bible. We were laughing as we burned down houses and bludgeoned people to death. We were horrible people. 👿
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Thursday, May 23, 2019

Call of Cthulhu - Thoughts on Social Skills

Who's On First - Fast Talk

There's four social skills (plus one) in CoC 7th in order to get a NPC to give up information or do something for the PC in a short time frame:
  • Fast Talk (lying)
    • “My cousin is the Head Librarian and he said it was ok for me to get into the restricted stacks because I’m an eminent and respected scholar. (All lies).”
  • Persuade (telling the truth, appealing to logic)
    • “Lives depend on us getting this information. Do you want to be the guy who caused thousands of people to die? You can come with us and watch us if you’re afraid we’re going to steal your books. We're honest citizens: an antiquarian, a private eye, and a librarian. You can check our references. (All true).”
  • Charm (seduction or friendliness, appealing to emotion)
    • "You know when I first saw you, I knew you could be trusted. I'm in a bind here. Can you be a pal and just let us in?"
  • Intimidate (threatening harm or torturing)
    • "Look we're getting in no matter what. We can do this the easy way or the hard way." Crowbar slaps into palm of hand.
  • Credit Rating (bribing)
    • "Is this enough to buy access to the restricted stacks?"
Most players spend build points in Fast Talk and Persuade because they can be used in most situations; Charm and Intimidate are the ugly step children because they apply in fewer situations.

I GM social skills in one of two ways: either see what tact the PC uses and then ask them to roll the specific skill, or just have them declare "I'm going to use my charm and charm them into helping me look up stuff in the library." Sometimes the player suddenly says, "Oh shit, my Fast Talk is 5%, can I use my 50% Persuade instead?" I generally give them one Mulligan, but I won't let them do that repeatedly. This generally happens with a new PC (where the player is not familiar with the PC's skills) and early in an investigation.

Also if they can't roleplay Charm (and don't feel like doing a meta by saying "I'm going to use my charm") or rather roleplay Fast Talk or Persuade, I'd let them move the skill % (amount above the skill default) to the other social skill permanently.

There's always this argument as to whether:
  • (A) a Player with good social skills playing a PC with lousy social skills be allowed to roleplay out of bad situations
or
  • (B) a Player with bad social skills playing a PC with good social skills be allowed to just roll dice to get out of a bad situation (or get a NPC to react in a specific way).
The problem is that if you allow (A) then for that Player those skills become dump scores because they know they can role play out of any situation no matter what skill % they have. So, I generally force the Player to roll their social skill % no matter how great an argument they present. e.g. if for instance the PC has a 5% in Fast Talk and when we play, the lie sounds very convincing from the Player, I still make the Player roll their Fast Talk, because if they don't make their 5%, the lie sounds unconvincing, the PC is not convincing because the PC's a lousy liar and is stuttering, staring at his feet, shuffling them, hemming and hawing, not looking at the NPC in the eye, hiding a smirk, etc..

For (B), if the Player knows he can't role play the social skill, I'll let them just say "I use my [Fast Talk, Persuade, Charm, Intimidate] skill to convince them to help us." I'm actually good with that (and after the skill roll, I would tell the Player what they did that would have worked, making it a learning experience for the Player), but if the Player actually tries to role play first and says some horrible whopper or something the NPC knows isn't true, I have the PC roll their skill, but I would now require a hard or extreme result (depending on how bad that gaff was) to succeed.

Also, I consider the skill roll not just an indication of how well the PC used the social skill but also a measure of factors outside of the PC's control. For example, a PC makes a very convincing argument to a NPC (Persuade skill 65%). On a success, the NPC was convinced and does as the PC wants. On a failure, maybe the argument was completely rational, but due to reasons out of the PC's control, for instance the NPC is angry about his wife leaving him and just doesn't want to do anything for anybody at the moment, so the persuasive argument fails.

Fast Talk failure: NPC sees through the con or bad lie or bad delivery. "Yeah, that's the ticket. My cousin, I mean my brother, now I remember, it was my father's best friend's twice removed's cat. I get so confused these days. Anyway, I need to get into the restricted section because I saw the cat slip into an open window in the reserve section and I need to get in there and get the cat before it uses your books as toilet paper. Oh shit, that sounded so much smoother in my head. Did I just say that out loud? That didn't work, huh?"

Persuade failure: NPC not convinced or still has doubts or has another reason to not comply (see above example). "Just go away and leave me alone. I don't gotta do nothing for nobody."

Charm failure: NPC sees through your charm offensive or has another reason to not comply. "You're such a snake charmer. I bet you say that to all the gals."

Intimidate failure: NPC doesn't feel threatened or think PC is bluffing or has another reason to not comply. "Go ahead, do your worst. I'll never talk."

Credit Rating failure: NPC wants more money or not bribable or has another reason to not comply. "Sir? Who do you think I am? I cannot be bought."

Also a good Fast Talker can spot another Fast Talker (e.g. a bullshitter can always spot another bullshitter), so a Fast Talker skill roll is against the target's Psychology or Fast Talk skill, whichever is higher. Actually a rule on p.64 Keeper Rulebook.

Same for Charm and Intimidate. Charm is against the target's Psychology or Charm skill, whichever is higher (p.59 Keeper Rulebook). Intimidate is against the target's Psychology or Intimidate skill, whichever is higher (p.66 Keeper Rulebook).

This doesn't seem to apply to Persuade though (p.71 Keeper Rulebook). No other opposing skill is explicitly called out as in the other 3 social skills. Actually no opposing skill is called out at all, but under Psychology (p.73 Keeper Rulebook), Persuade is explicitly called out, so Persuade is against the target's Psychology.

Note that on p.71 Keeper Rulebook, that "Persuade may be employed without reference to truth." e.g. you can persuade someone to act against their own best interests by convincing them of some falsehood. "The world is better off without you." "I'm the best person to be the executor of your will." But this requires long term manipulation and consistent arguments. A very different use of the Persuade skill than running into a NPC and getting them to do something in a short time frame. I assume this is used multiple times over long time periods to adjust a NPC's frame of mind by building up a framework of faulty logic or feeding the NPC consistent lies that are hard to discredit.

So, that's my take on social skills.



Q: If a Player switches skills after a failure is it a Pushed roll? For example a PC tries Charm and then switches to Persuade?

A: If the goal is still the same, such as gaining info or a clue, any switch in tactics or rerolls are Pushed rolls.

For social skills: Intimidate, Charm, Persuade, Fast Talk. Any switch in tactics or rerolls are Pushed rolls, even by a different PC. This prevents Players from doing the following: PC 1 tries Charm, failed. PC 2 tries Fast Talk, failed. PC 3 tries Persuade, failed. PC 4 tries Intimidate, failed. Then PC with highest social skill tries a Pushed roll. Yeah, this is an extreme example, but I think you get why this shouldn't be allowed.

I consider any re-try even with a different social skill a Pushed roll because it's really fishy if someone tried to Charm you to get past the door, then moments later, either the same person or their friend tries to Fast Talk through the door. I tell the players that if you do that, that's a Push and if you fail, the doorman gets pissed off and decides to teach you a lesson. e.g. it'll be a combat situation. Of course, if they beat him down, they'll get past him.

As an aside, if you fail a Locksmith (lock pick) and then kick the door in, the STR test for kicking in the door is NOT a Pushed roll as the consequence is that it's noisy and obvious someone broke in. And the original point of trying Locksmith was to quietly and unobtrusively get through the door.


Q: It seems overpowerful that a PC who makes their social skill roll can make a NPC do anything.

A: I think within reason.

Trying to persuade an NPC you've just met to shoot themselves in the head won't work, even if you rolled an 01, a Critical Success.

In my games, the Player has an idea as to what the PC wants the NPC to do. Generally, the Player would say, "I want the NPC to let me in his house, so I can search it. I ask them if I can use the bathroom." Even if the Fast Talk works, there could be strings attached such as "You can, but the NPC's butler or thug will keep an eye on you, so there's no funny business." Then the PC would need to Stealth out of the bathroom to do a Spot Hidden.

If it's to borrow the MacGuffin, which is the key to the whole scenario, I wouldn't just hand it to the PCs. If it's important, there should be strings attached such as they might have to leave a hostage in exchange or there's threat of violence if the McGuffin isn't returned or they can't have it, but they can see it (then they'd have to steal it or fight for it).
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