Category: The Armchair Adventurers

An introduction to playing table top games online and a call for tips.

This weekend was the first ever Saturday Morning Grog Club. These are occasional online games that I’ll be running to help support the Podcast. They’re intended to help us refresh our memories about how the games work in play. This weekend was the turn STORMBRINGER, ready for the podcast due later in February, which I last played 33 years ago.

It also included my first ever meeting with @dailydwarf … I virtually know him now.

I’ll be reviving old school games online at irregular intervals. Look out for a ‘call for players’ on this site over the coming months. AD&D or Tunnels and Trolls is likely to be up next.

It’s all part the 2016 strategy of packing in as many sessions as possible into every hidden corner of the week. Since we revived our interest in the hobby five years ago, it has been frustrating attempting to find the time for us to be around the table. Every planned session has been foiled by the demands of ‘the toad’ work and family life: “sorry I can’ t do Wednesday, its parents’ evening … Etc.”

The availability of online platforms like Roll20 has increased the potential of playing more game sessions as it reduces the palaver of getting in the same physical place at the same time. On top of its convenience, it has many features to enhance the game-playing experience, including the facility to load maps and reveal them as places are explored and animated dice to recreate the full experience of rolling across the table. There are features on the application that we haven’t used yet, for example, we’ve been using off-line PDF character sheets, Roll 20 has the facility to create interactive character sheets which are more accessible during the run of play.

This month, we have managed to play an unprecedented four sessions, only one of them being face-to-face around a real table. Remarkable.

In addition to the extra sessions, the online game has introduced us to more players, with all the richness and excitement that bigger parties can inject into a game. There are only three of us usually, so we have to double up character sheets and scale down pre-written campaigns to suit smaller groups. Having 5 and 6 different players with different perspectives and experiences has enlivened our approach to the game.

Following the last two sessions however, I’ve been struck by a troubling realisation: I talk too much. When I’m GMing online, I feel a constant need to keep going, keep the pace up, fill in the gaps with wiffle and waffle.

My usual style of Games Mastering consists of throwing forward a situation, sitting back while the players explore their ideas, only adding the occasional dramatic poke when the momentum drops. I’ve realised that when I’m GMing online, I’m doing twice the amount of talking that I would normally do at the table. Why? Why does the online experience cause me to become so voluble?

THE CONDITION OF MUZAK

Some of this can be accounted for in the conditions imposed by playing in ‘stolen moments’. Our regular Traveller session is a continuing campaign (The Aramis: Traveller Adventure), but it is designed in an episodic nature, hopping from planet to planet, with an over-arching plot that seeps into the episodes. These are 2 hour sessions (we have been remarkably strict in sticking to this timescale too). I have tried to achieve the dramatic beats of a continuing TV drama, with the action packed into the final third, and some tantalising cliff-hangers.

We’ve managed to achieve a sense of rhythm in play and the recent session was a scene of riotous fun as a planned rescue of a crew member from a church where he was being held captive, turned from genius to ridiculous by turns.

Despite the fun we’ve had playing the individual episodes, I have no idea how much the players are engaging with the overarching plot. There’s a conspiratorial narrative in the background that they’ve touched on and it will become increasingly important as time moves on, but at this point, I don’t know whether they’ve picked up on the elements of story, or the whether they’re even interested in pursuing it further. This could be down to the design of the adventure itself as it is written with lots of exposition, which I’ve tried to translate into action. I can’t help feeling that if we were playing around a table, I would be able to judge it better. As a consequence, I feel like I’m trying to over-compensate with information outside of the game, usually lengthy write ups on the Roll 20 forums.

The Saturday morning game was an adapted version of THE FANG AND THE FOUNTAIN from THE PERILS OF THE YOUNG KINGDOMS for Stormbringer. The next couple of podcasts will be all about the game, so I won’t steal my own thunder here. The structure was adapted to suit a one-shot:

• Keep it simple
• Have a big opening and an even bigger finish that calls back to the opening
• Make sure the characters know their objectives and know why they’re there and their relationship to the others
• Start the action as late into the story as possible
• Make sure that every character has a chance to shine
• Don’t kill the action with rules

The session worked well, with dice ‘virtually’ rattling around the screen, with death and destruction and body horror and demons and everything … but, it was hard-work, too much like hard-work. I don’t think it was down to injecting the scenario with usual energy that’s needed for a one-shot/ convention-like game, I think it was down to the channel … I was over-compensating for something lacking in the online experience.

“CAN YOU HEAR ME? …”

I don’t blame my players for this lack of engagement, they’re all intelligent, love RPGs, witty and want to get the best from the experience as possible. My incessant talking comes from the limitations of the online experience.

Firstly, even the reliable Roll20 can be a glitchy experience, because you are depending on many factors: the speed of broadband, individual wifi arrangements, the processing speed of your computer and the performance of the servers. If this is multiplied across 6 people, there are many opportunities for it to fail.

This usually manifests as warble from the sound, or a player web-cam disappearing momentarily.

Secondly, most people tend to stare blankly at the screen.

Combine these two elements and it results in me becoming like Lee Evans on speed. My internal monologue is going like this: “Have they heard me?” “Has the screen frozen again … he hasn’t moved for 5 minutes” “If I keep repeating the same thing … they’ll get it … I’ll say it again just in case”

In the last Traveller session, the conditions worked well because the party had split and were talking to each other by communicators. However, there was a point on Saturday, where I described a scene where a man was ringing a bell. A mist emerging over the beach, with children running towards the sea, the bell ringing intensified … the children screamed within the mist!”

Players confer, followed by … “We’ll go and talk to the man and ask why he’s ringing the bell.”

but … “The children are SCREAMING!”

As I say, I don’t blame the the players, it’s something to do with online playing. It’s the strange way that staring at each other in little inch by inch windows on computer screens, renders normal human discourse inert.

It’s really difficult to encourage players to engage with each other. Normally, around the table, there are visual clues of when to take a turn to speak, or gestures of encouragement when someone has had a good idea. Online play seems to eliminate these clues of interaction that we take for granted.

ROLL 20 20 VISION

Online tabletop games are a relatively new phenomena and I’m new to it, so like anything involved with RPGs, it will improve through playing more and players sharing tips and experiences with each other. I’ll get better at it as I do more of it because I’ll naturally want to get better.

I’m really enjoying the online gaming experience. I’ve really enjoyed meeting new players and had loads of fun during the sessions so far, but I know that it will get to the point where I’ll want more … I’ll want more of an engaging experience … more role-playing and discussion between players.

I’ll just want to stop hearing my own voice.

Good day to re-visit this from Roof-Dirk from my other life.

I recently acquired the Numenera core rules. I’d heard a lot about it and it thought that maybe an old grognard like me should enter the 21st century or, to be more precise, the ninth age, the time in earth’s future when Numenera is set. The ninth age is a billion years into earth’s future and while the setting is essentially pseudo medieval fantasy (humanity has slipped back to that kind of era) there have been eight great civilizations that have risen and fallen. These civilisations are mysterious and unclear in their nature. However, some weren’t human and some had interstellar and even inter-dimensional travel. This means that there’s lots of technology lying about to be found and used by the human population. Moreover there are strange and mysterious energies in the atmosphere that some humans (Nanos) can harness and use rather like magic. That’s the basic setting but it’s important not to think of this as some post holocaust RPG – Aftermath or Gamma World. Yes, there will have been holocausts perhaps that brought down the previous great civilizations but this isn’t some post nuclear primitive world where the players will unearth a machine gun or an old iphone. It’s much stranger than that and much more like science fantasy. In literary terms I think the creators of the game have mentioned Gene Wolfe’s book of the new sun series. Another comparison could be Moorcock’s Hawkmoon books.

When I first got into RPGs in the early 80s one of the great advertising lines of RPG publisher’s was that to run fantastic adventures for your friends, “All you need is this book.” But it was never quite true. Dungeons and Dragons meant you had to buy three rule books at least (Player’s Handbook, DM’s Guide and Monster Manual), Runequest meant you really needed at least Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror. But with Numenera it really is the case that you only need the core rules. There’s masses of background for the setting, lists of artefacts, and monsters, all with full colour illustrations. Yes, you’ll want to buy the supplements (I’ve already bought the Ninth World Bestiary) but you don’t have to. I honestly think you could play regularly for several years with just the core rules.

The rules to Numenera are pretty straightforward and slick, deliberately so given that the game wants to encourage action and story rather than crunchy simulationist stuff. For a BRP grognard like me, I was pleasantly surprised by the simplicity and logic of the central concept. In the same way that BRP reduces every action and task to a percentage, Numenera reduces it down to a score out of 10. Sometimes the score is determined by the rules (monster and NPC combat being the best example) or by the GM. What’s appealing is that it’s easy to conceptualise degrees of difficulty. How difficult something is on a score out of ten isn’t far removed from the way people think in ordinary life. For example, the players have to climb a rock face. The GM says it’s pretty difficult and gives it a 5 out of 10. The 5 is then multiplied by 3 and to climb the rock face, the players must each roll a 15 or more on a d20. Now I imagine that some of you are ahead of me at this point and have seen the obvious problem with such a system – anything given a difficulty level of 7 or more is literally impossible if multiplied by 3 and rolled on a d20. Well, yes it is because tasks like that are pretty difficult. For example, suppose that rock face had been made from some strange alien glass and covered with ice. The GM may have said it’s a 8. So a 24 or more on a d20. This is where skills, artifacts and stats come in. Your character might have a climbing skill and so he/she can reduce the difficulty  two grades (now a 6) and then spend some points from their agility stat poll (more on that later) to reduce it by another grade (now a 5). So the roll to climb is now a 15 or more. Now difficult but do-able.

For grognards like me and my group, the most unsettling thing about Numenera is the stat pools or “spend system” element of the game. I know these type of systems are out there and nothing new these days but old timers like me are used to stats  (STR, INT, DEX etc) being fixed and the only stat that goes up and down is hit points or maybe power in Runequest or SAN in Call of Cuthulhu. Numenera has three statistics – Strength, Agility and Intellect. As described above, the player’s use these stats as points to spend to achieve certain tasks or combat rolls. To go back to the example above of climbing the sheer glass wall. To reduce that 8, your character can spend three points from, for example, an agility of 12 to knock the difficulty down. Thier agility is now 9. Points replenish throughout the game, but it’s an odd concept on first reading when you’re used to fixed stats that give bonuses or penalties. I think this is the element my group might struggle with, especially when you consider that the stat pools also operate as hit points. It’s a big leap to ask players to consider using points they might need to soak up damage later to achieve tasks.

That said, I can see how the spend system ties into the idea of a more narrative form of RPG, which is one of the things Numenera wants to achieve. Imagine a point in the game where the villain raises his sacrificial dagger to strike and your character wants to knock it from his hand with a well placed arrow. A difficult shot but wouldn’t it look great in the film? Spend some stat pool points and you have a better chance of achieving it. The spend system allows the players to influence that narrative and events in a more dramatic way.

There are other elements of the system that also play into the idea of narrative and giving everyone the things they want from the game. There’s the idea of GM “Intrusions.” these are points in the game when the GM can offer experience points for giving the players a chance to accept a challenge. For example, maybe the players go into some ruins and have a map of the area. The GM may suggest that the map turns out to be wrong and useless. The players can accept this intrusion and earn experience points. It’s possibly the strangest element of the game and it remains to be seen how it will work out when we play. However, I can see how it could be the GM’s equivalent of a stat pool. While the stat pool’s allow the players to decide what they think is important to achieve, intrusions allow the GM to develop the story in ways that they players will enjoy. Moreover, the intrusions idea taps into another key these in the design of Numenera and that is that everyone should have fun and play the kind of game and character they want to play. The character creation system is a good example of this. Rather than roll dice, you describe your character in a phrase from a list of words in the rules. So for example you may choose to say your character  is a Clever Glaive (fighter) to fights with two weapons. This then generates points and skills in line with the chosen words. Worth noting as well that that’s one of the more pedestrian descriptions available. You can be a shape changer who “howls at the moon” or a mutant with a “halo of fire.”

Again, for us grognards this seems a bit odd. But ask yourself this – how many times have you wanted to play a strong warrior and rolled a low STR score? Or a clever thief and rolled a low INT? That can be dissatisfying and resolving the problem by allocating points can lead to power gaming and min/maxing. Numenera offers players the chance to be what they want but without allowing them to power game the stats.

There are lots of other interesting elements of the system. The idea that the GM never rolls a dice is a very unusual idea. The monster and NPC stats are very easy to create on the hoof, which give the GM lots of flexibility.

It remains to be seen how Numenera will work in play. I’m still wading through the detailed setting. I think my group will find it a challenge in some ways but not in a bad way. If things get tricky when I’m running it I may just have to spend some intellect points and lower the level.

BLYTHY