GUMSHOE, from the other end of the table

I've been running a fair amount of GUMSHOE lately, but in two recent sessions at my weekly one-shot group, I finally got the opportunity to play the game. It was really neat to see the system from the other end of the table, and I think the experience has already improved my GMing of GUMSHOE.

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My most important advice for GMs new to GUMSHOE is this:

• Whenever possible, ask the players "Do you have any relevant skills?" or "Would you like to spend a point of something for a breakthrough?", instead of "Does anyone have a point of Anthropology?"

Phrasing it in the open-ended way engages the players better, coaxes them into problem-solving mode, and makes them more familiar with their characters.

Naming the skill, and phrasing it the "You need Skill X, does anyone have X?" way makes the game feel more stilted, and provides the appearance of railroading, even if there isn't any. It's a seemingly-minor presentation difference, but it has a fairly significant impact on the way it all comes off to the player.

Plus, by leaving it open for the players to pick the skill they think will work, it opens the door to the players coming up with something the GM hadn't even considered. If they have a cool idea for how to pump someone for information using First Aid, when the scenario called for Reassurance, everyone benefits from that improvisation.

In the case of the two-part scenario that John ran at Emerald City Game Feast recently, for the first session, he was using the "laundry list" approach, saying things like "Geology or Biology would be helpful here. Does anyone want to spend a point in them?" It was just okay, fun but not exceptional. In the second session, he was being more organic, less mechanical, and very flexible, and it really made the game come alive. I had great fun playing last night.

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My best advice for people designing GUMSHOE modules is this:

• Go back through your work, looking for every situation that might come up that where a Stability test or a Sense Trouble roll might come up. In each such situation, determine the difficulty of those rolls, and then put that information in a really obvious sidebar that is impossible for the GM to miss.

When you're in the middle of a scene, building tension or narrating action, it's really easy for the GM to completely forget those things (Stability tests, especially) and skip past them. As GM, you really don't want to break the scene to have to go look at a chart and make a judgment call. You need the information right at your finger tips, with a big box around it to make jump out of the page and get the GMs attention. The GUMSHOE rules are light on purpose to keep the narrative flowing. When you make the GM break open the rulebook to look up something obscure or hard-to-guesstimate, you undermine one of the strengths of the game.

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The module he ran was The Black Drop, a Trail of Cthulhu adventure set in a remote location, with a multi-national cast of PCs. If you're interested in reading my feedback comments intended for the module's author, follow this link. It has a few spoilers, though, so is probably not a good read if you plan to play the module.

Skype / MeBeam Gaming

I've been doing a lot of Skype gaming lately - which is to say, I've been running an RPG campaign via the free online conference call features of Skype.

What I really like about it is that it's allowing me to game with friends in other cities and states. Given how bad I am at keeping up with normal phone calls, email, and letters, Skype is a godsend.

Originally, there were 5 players, plus GM, and due to social implosions, it has consistently been down to 2 PCs + GM. Prior to this campaign, I'd played in a few other Skype sessions, running up to about 8 players. Having tried several permutation, I can now clearly say that the ideal number of players for a skype game is 3. The further you push above that, the more the dynamic breaks down. "At an exponential rate" is probably accurate. Gaming with a large group always takes a bit of patience, as you don't get as much spotlight time as you might like -- but on Skype, this is seriously magnified.

The reason that Skype doesn't work well with larger groups, is that when one person is talking, there's no good way to butt in. If you interrupt them, neither of you can be heard or understood - it's one big audial mess. More often than not, they won't even hear you, and will keep on rambling. Since you can't see them, there's no subtle visual clues to let them know you want to butt in. This then drives people to use Skype's instant chat functions. The instant messaging seems simple and helpful at first, but quickly gets out of hand. Especially with a large group, which is almost guaranteed to end up with at least 3 or 4 chats happening simultaneously as people try "secretly" messaging one-another. Your attention gets divided, and sub-divided, and then sub-divided again. Everybody starts missing things, and it's impossible to get a good interactive scene of actual role-playing going.

A very frustrating experience, and at first I thought the only way around it was for the GM to micro-manage and be draconian. It was almost enough to make me quit Skype gaming, but luckily one of my players discovered something that would fix it.

For one-on-one calls, Skype has video, but the conference call function is audio-only. We quickly learned that you need video. Seeing the other players is how you know when someone else has something to add, and is bursting at the seams, but doesn't want to just rudely talk over you. It's how the GM knows if he's going overboard and boring the players at the peripheries of the scene. It's how you know you've lost someone's attention because their cat just vomited all over their desk, and that maybe you should pause the game for a moment while they clean up. Conveniently, there's a few easy video options out there. We've been using MeBeam. MeBeam is simple, and great for video. I've considered just switching over to it for the totality of the video-conferencing, because then we'd only have one program to worry about. The only thing stopping us is that sometimes mebeam audio ends up with excessive lag. Skype has less lag, but also crashes or disconnects more than MeBeam, so it's hard to say which is truly better. I'd say look into both (and maybe search the net for other options), and use whichever has the more consistent performance on your computers. But definitely use video of some sort, because the visual cues make it a much more nuanced and human experience.

Even with video, there's still some minor communication difficulties, as it is a little slower and more removed than actually gaming at the same table. I recommend using a very light rules system, and only gaming with people you trust. Now, honestly, I recommend that for in-person tabletop as well, so I may just have a personal bias. However, I've found that the technical hurdles of the various video conferencing programs make rules questions and arguments that much more annoying, so I try to use a system that minimizes them. Another option is to use a game system that has a solid online rules database. That way, since you're at a computer anyway, players can just bookmark the trickier bits and pop open a second browser window to look things up on the fly. Likewise, I'd choose a system with minimal die-rolling, so you don't have to worry about interfacing with some other die-rolling software, or rolling in front of the camera.

All this lead me to GUMSHOE for my online gaming. The system is transparent, almost invisible, during play, with rules questions almost never coming up. The few times that there is a rules question, they're generally about my Continuum-to-GUMSHOE conversion, not about the GUMSHOE core rules themselves. Die-rolling happens, but not with great frequency, and it's just a single d6 so repeated cheating would be easy to spot.

This post has gone on long enough, so I'll sign off for now, and return to the topic to talk about my specific campaign again at some future date.

Social Implosions

So, this place has been kinda quiet lately, and it's largely been because I've been unable to talk about my ongoing Continuum Campaign. Back in late December, there was a social implosion that cut the size of the play group in half. This is a gross over-simplification, but basically those 3 players are no longer on speaking terms with one-another. This put the status of the campaign in question for a while. I told the remaining two players that we would keep going while we waited for the fall-out to sort itself out.

It's nearly two months later, and none of the players have come back. Two of the three of them were playing characters who were siblings with intricately interwoven backstories, which makes them not interested in returning as the same characters. Who is on speaking terms with whom changes fairly frequently, as I understand it, so none of them are 100% comfortable coming back. It just wouldn't be fun for them to interact with each other. I find myself very wary about trying to encourage any of the players to return to the game, out of concern that I might be perceived as taking sides in the greater conflict between the people involved. It's pretty yucky.

The weird thing is, despite being down to just two players reliably, and the constant uncertainty of who else might show up week to week, the game has been really good. There's this unjustified awkwardness for the first ten minutes of every session as we all wonder who's going to show up this week. Unjustified, because despite people saying they plan to come back, no one has. Once that initial weirdness passes each week, the rest of the game is awesome. The plot has picked up speed, and I left with great cliffhangers the last two weeks. The sessions have been a great balance of action, humor, characterization, and exploration. I'd be happy to have 1 or more of those 3 missing players come back, but I'm also thrilled with the in-game dynamic as it stands. The two players/characters that we've got work really well together. It's a great campaign, but I almost feel guilty for enjoying it considering the social context of it all.

They said "Dinosaurs", not giant blooming Cockroaches!

At last night's weekly one-shot, my buddy Mark ran this awesome little Risus scenario inspired by a TV show Primeval. I'd never seen the show, but the premise is pretty simple: portals open up to the ancient past, dinosaurs pour out, and the PCs have to wrangle the monsters back in. Kill a dino and you might change history.

He said for player characters, we had basically four options.

1. Badass
2. Scientist
3. Badass Scientist
4. Some combination of 2 or more of the above.

That cracked me up.

My three Cliches (the Risus system's form of attributes) were:

• Croike! I'm like that crocodile hunter guy!
• Parkour traceur
• Chemistry Set

The team was rounded out with an ex-special forces commando, a quick-thinking facewoman, and multilayered inventor type. We built our characters to complement each other, and the group functioned great as a team.

Mark did a wonderful job of handling the game, and it's mechanics. I've found that, despite being a light and simple system, the spiral of death inherent to Risus can really be a problem. Out of probably 8 games I've played of it, this was only one of 3 where the mechanics really shined, instead of hindered. It's a deceptively simple system, that takes a good GM to make it work - and Mark was up to the task, I'm happy to report.

To start the session off, we were called down to the Pike Market in Seattle, responding to an anomaly / gate that something had come through. We all had dinos on the brain, and as the clues amounted to some smaller critter, we assumed little compsognathses or the like.

Turns out they were trilobites, instead. This was a fact we discovered when I was dangling some bait over the hole in floorboards. Instead of a little lizard popping out, long exoskeletal tentacles lashed out and tried to pull me in. "Croiké! They said dinosaurs, not giant bloomin' cockroaches!" It was a great surprise, and really shook up our assumptions. Well done, Mark!

He did a series of short encounters, spread over several in-character days, as various gates opened. When all was said and done, we'd wrestled with trilobites, commandeered a DUKW from a tour group, swam with an apatosaurus, crashed an ATV into a smilodon, and exchanged trophies with primitive hominids. The plotline was simple, and largely an excuse for megafaunal havoc in the modern day, but it was a hoot. Great game, all around.

Even More Modding (Drives v3.0, plus a wiki)

More weird worlds modding this past week. It started with a tiny little update to Drives'R'Us, that was supposed to be just v2.2. And then, that snowballed into major changes so significant that if I didn't call it v3.0, nothing would ever qualify for that title. It's only been a little over 2 weeks since 2.0 went up, but I saw no reason to delay something that was a radical improvement in every way.

Here's a download link for Drives'R'Us version 3.0



Brief list of changes in 3.0

• Added 4 new mercenary / ally vessels.
• Radically improved graphics on all 6 of the custom ships from versions 1.11 and 2.0, and tweaks to the stats on most of them.
• 7 new items (on top of the 30 new ones from just 2 weeks ago), including the Shroud of Primordius, which is definitely my favorite of all the items I've ever added to the game.
• Miscellaneous minor tweaks to various graphics and game play elements. Very numerous, but none of them major.

I'm finding modding to be much easier than it was when I was doing it two years ago. Not sure what's changed, but I'm grokking all sorts of things that had been obfuscated from me before. And since I was having breakthroughs, I thought I'd share them with other modders. So I set up a wiki for Weird Worlds modding, and I'm giving myself a goal of adding at least one page to it every day from now until either it's exhaustive, or I'm exhausted. Hopefully, it'll encourage some more modding, as the community is a little slow and sparse these days.

Here's a link to the modding wiki. Should any Weird Worlds modders care to contribute, the secret code to signing up is "shrapnel and eel". You don't need to sign in to view it, but you do need the code to edit anything.

On a related note, I've been helping one of the other modders at the forums (ExplorerBob) debugg his mod. He's got a really neat set of quests that make the relations with various races unpredictable. So in one play, the Muktians might hate you from the start, and then next time you play they're friendly and amicable. It's pretty clever, and spices the game up a lot. I'm looking forward to his first real release, not just the partial beta test / debugging files he's given me.

Creeping up on sentries

We all make mistakes while gaming. I've made plenty. There are times where craziness happens, or where one mistake leads to another. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes all you can do about it is learn not to make the same mistakes next time.

Advice for the next time you're creeping up on the sentries around an enemy camp:

• Don't split up the party if you don't have to. If you do split up, don't get impatient and head away from your agreed rendezvous point without permission.
  
• If you happen to know that your groups Tank / Fighter is prone to wandering off and stirring up trouble, and you see him wander off, follow him. Don't do your own thing instead.
  
• If the sentries are of a race that has infravision, your stealth precautions need to be more significant than putting out your torch, and carrying the smouldering remains of it with you. This goes doubly so if the system in question doesn't put a limit on infravision range, it just says "Goblins and Orcs suffer no penalties for darkness".
• If you don't know the total numbers of the enemies at the camp, dispatch their sentries with something silent, like a knife or a bow, not an area-effect stunning spell.
• If you do use the area-affect stunning spell on the two sentries you can see, arrange the area-of-effect so that it includes both of them.
  
• After you use your area-affect stunning spell, and it alerts a huge crowd of orcs to chase after you, if you can cast it again, do so. Don't spend several actions standing around trying to make a persuasion roll against the two dozen orcs that are charging you. They're not listening.
• When the resulting chase lasts so long the GM asks for a Vigor roll to resist fatigue, AND you roll double-ones on it, use your last bennie to reroll that. Don't save it for "if things get really dire later". Double ones on your Fatigue-resisting roll when dozens of orcs are chasing you is dire.

In the end, all the PCs survived, but extricating themselves from the situations this caused took over 6 more hours of play, and a lot of die rolls. It was ugly.

Daybreak as an RPG

My wife and I recently Netflixed a TV show called Daybreak. It's sort of like if Groundhog Day were a serious Detective show. The lead character is living the same day over and over again, and it's a heck of a day, with murders and conspiracy aplenty.

The show could inspire a really awesome RPG campaign, especially for a single-player campaign. You'd set up two or three mysteries, all happening on the same day, all with serious consequences for the PC if they were left unattended. In the background, you probably set up an additional mystery of a more sci-fi variety, that explains why the character is stuck in time.

The PC experiences each day over and over again, with things happening on a particular course if they do nothing. They need to solve all the mysteries, and then figure out how to resolve them all positively on the same day that they undo the time loop. You'd have a campaign with a definite end-goal in sight from the start.

There'd be a big burden on the GM, and I'd say you'd want to run it with a laptop at the ready, so you could have instant access to a lengthy timeline of where every NPC is at every minute of the day.

I'd run GUMSHOE for it. Both because I really like Gumshoe, but also because it has really easy mechanics to repeat actions again and again. When something comes up that goes poorly, you can spend a point to make it work out better next time. If you get a version you're happy with, a simple point spend ensures repeat performance when you try it again the next day. Very little dice karma to complicate things.

I'd have the PCs point pools refresh at the start of every day, so they had a limited supply of points to juggle for overcoming the obstacles. Experience would be tricky - as the cyclical nature suggests you'd never get to level up. However, if you watch the show, he does find ways to change things over time, and that might result in bonus dedicated pool points in GUMSHOE.

And I'd definitely use Daybreak's precedent for damage. Your whole body is doing the time loop, so if you're shot, you wake up with a bullet hole the next morning. Health and Stability would NOT refresh daily, so getting medical and psychiatric care may prove important if things go badly early on. That helps keeps the tension, and prevents certain Bill Murray style antics.


A tiny bit more about the show: Daybreak ran for less than a season. One season's worth of episodes were made though, and the last episode was clearly crafted knowing that they weren't gonna get picked up for a season two. It wraps up the plot neat-and-tidy, including several things that would have made a killer second season. It's really sad it got canceled, 'cause it's 5-star material, IMHO. Great acting, intelligent scripts, and plenty of unexpected twists. It's 58% mystery / detective, 40% action / adventure, with 1% humor and 1% sci-fi. If you've got netflix, it's well worth the rental.

Mods 'R' Us

I put up another Mod for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.

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This one is the 2.1 version of my Drives 'R' Us Mod.

Changes from the 1.11 version (which I'd made almost 2 years ago) include:

• Recalibrated prices on everything. I did extensive testing and number-crunching to arrive at more-accurate values for almost every item in the game.
• Technology items are now split into Civilian Tech and Military Tech. The Military mission focuses on military tech, and the Science mission gives a little bit of emphasis on civilian tech.
• Changed the starting equipment for all Terran ships, and what spawns on Hope.
• Over 30 new items!
  • 9 New Weapons
  • 3 New Drives
  • 2 New Sensors
  • 1 New ECM
  • 4 New Combat Computers
  • 5 New Repair Systems
  • 5 New Thrusters
  • 2 New Shields
• Miscellaneous tweaks to various systems and weapons.
• Added a couple new ship variants. Should mix up the fights a bit.
  
• Bloodfang is very different from the main game, and better balanced than he was in version 2.0.
  
• Removed all the Superweapon KEYS. The sheer quantity of items in this mod makes it unlikely you'll get a large stockpile of so-called superweapons.
  
• Tweaked the Civil War event. It's now a little more unpredictable (there's two versions), and no longer claims to be a supernova after the fact. I'm much happier with it now.
  

If you're thinking I jumped from 1.11 to 2.1, I didn't. There was a 2.0 version that I forget to link to from here, but it was only up for 3 days before I found some minor issues that I fixed in todays version.

Here's the download link: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=35857&page=

Have fun!

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I also updated Tech Transparency 2.1 to v2.1.1.
It's just a small fix concerning the text on the repair units.
Download link: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44512

Savage Boomerang

I have a player in my irregular Savage Worlds fantasy campaign whose character uses a boomerang. Just for flavor reasons, the boomerang is her main weapon. I think it's rather cool, in a Road Warrior sort of way.

In the previous session, in which she made the character on-the-spot and dove right in to the game-in-progress, I just used the same stats as a throwing knife. Which, not surprisingly, is a little wimpy. Chances are, those stats will result in her feeling underpowered, and eventually swapping to a better ranged weapon, like a bow. That would be a shame.

She's a new player, with no previous tabletop experience, so rewarding her flavorful decisions is the right thing to do. My hope is that it will encourage her to experiment and invent, and overcome any shyness or awkwardness about the game. It's always best to make someone's first couple of gaming experiences positive and welcoming, so I've spent a tiny bit of energy figuring out ways to make it a feasible weapon choice in the long run.

First, I'm pumping up the range to match that of a sling: 4/8/16 (instead of a daggers 3/6/12). That's a pretty minor boost, and something I can do without any worries about balance, but of course it still makes it inferior to a bow.

So, to pump it up a notch, I made up the following edge for her.

Boomerang (Combat Edge)
Requirements: Agility d8, Notice d8
When you make a Throwing attack with a Boomerang (the weapon), you may pick a secondary target, which must be a different character than the primary one. If your attack misses against the primary target, you may immediately make another attack roll against the second target. Only one target can be hit per round - if you hit against the primary target, you do not roll against the secondary one. You're only throwing one boomerang per action, but the circular flight path "buzzes" past more than one target.

It's not terribly realistic, admittedly, but it catches the proper cinematic feel of someone using a boomerang weapon. More importantly, the the second attack roll will help compensate for the low damage rating, making it a good mook-killing weapon even in the later stages of the campaign. The secondary attack will take some of the sting out of bad dice rolls, which is something that can be very frustrating for new players.

Advanced A Touch Of Evil

I played several more games of A Touch Of Evil over the recent holiday. We broke out the advanced rules and added them in.

With all those Advanced Abilities on the villain, I thought for sure it was going to boost up the difficulty a lot. To my surprise, we're still winning the cooperative game just as often as we had been when using the basic rules instead of advanced. The villain's Advanced Abilities are basically watered down by the additional Secrets cards, that make treachery less likely.

In fact, we've only lost the game twice total, once to the scarecrow on Basic, and once to the Dellion Dryad (a "web extra" downloadable villain) on Advanced. That's out of more than a dozen plays. We've had a few close scrapes, but as long as you get to the showdown, it seems the PCs are almost certain to win out in a cooperative game. The villains just aren't as powerful as you imagine them to be. We've decided, starting with our next play, to start using the Optional Showdown Chart to spice it up and add to the difficulty. I'm really glad they provided that chart, because as you get better at the game, it needs a little boost to the tension.

Now that we've transitioned to the Advanced rules, I'm really glad we're playing the cooperative version. If not, I think my opinion of the game may have suffered when we hit Advanced.

In particular, the new Secrets cards have an annoying amount of "gray area". I'm specifically talking about "Hero of the People" and "On The Hunt". In our most recent game, the Lair was in the Fields. Those two secrets cards had assigned one town elder to the PC who was about to encounter the Lair, and another town elder to the Fields space. Both those cards allow the PC to use the town elder's stats in interesting ways. Problem is, neither the cards, nor the rules, nor the FAQ at the manufacturer's website, explain if those interesting abilities apply during a Showdown or not. They also don't indicate whether the elder being with you or at the site of the Lair includes them in the Showdown / Hunting Party, and whether or not you can still bring along other elders in the Hunting Party.

Since it was a cooperative game, this was no big deal, we made a ruling based on objective play balance and variety of play experience. But if we'd been playing competitively, this would have been ugly. In this specific situation, how you interpret it would mean the difference between the PC having +2 dice or +9 dice on the fight, whether the villain split his dice between 3 targets or 5, and whether or not we had to take our chances on revealing the secrets of 2 more town elders. That compiled list of differences is pretty huge, and I could see where that would result in an otherwise enjoyable game ending in a rules argument. Glad we dodged that bullet.

Similarly, we also had a situation in another recent game where a card had resulted in a town elder having 2 secrets. When they were revealed later, that one elder had both "Hero of the People" and "On the Hunt". There were no clear rules in the game to dictate which card takes precedence, and whether the elder ends up in a space or attached to a player. Hopefully, Flying Frog will issue some errata or clarifications about those two cards.