Three Cons, Old Friends, and a Boom

I have been busy as heck lately, and playing a lot of games.

Work sent me out to GenCon, were I ran demos of Shadows of Brimstone, Forbidden Fortress, Last Night On Earth, Fortune & Glory, and A Touch Of Evil. It was super fun and I love sharing and teaching many of my favorite games to total strangers... but it was also very exhausting because GenCon is a huge show with a million faces and a hundred thousand games.

In my off hours at the con, I played a couple of new games I hadn't tried before.

Incan Gold is a fun press-your-luck game that I reliably came in... well, certainly not winning, but not in last place, either, so I feel like I did okay for a newbie. The best part was that I got to play the game with my old friend Brendan Riley, who lives far away and I hadn't seen in several years, and my buddy Bill French. I never would have expected them to meet, given that they live in different states, but GenCon is a place of miracles.

Brendan's company Rattlebox Games is playtesting a game called Udder Chaos, the only competitive cow-milking game I've ever seen. It's fast and goofy and full of rhymes. It was light-hearted fun, and you'd be helping support a old friend of mine, so check it out if you get a chance.

One night at GenCon I played a party game called Buy The Rights, in which you get a random hand of high concepts and genres and have to make your best pitch about why producers should invest money with you. I hammed it up, basically role-playing as a different screenwriter or producer in each round, and it turns out that nonsense is a very successful strategy in this game.

The other fun new experience of this GenCon for me was Hellapagos, a party game that starts out fully cooperative and then suddenly very quickly descends into murder and sometimes cannibalism. It was a social game that really felt like the first season of Lost. Everyone was working together to build a raft and catch fish, except for a couple slackers who just raided the wreckage for personal treasures. Much fun was had by all, including those who died when suddenly everyone started scrambling for the limited space on the raft. I, as one of those horrible slackers who spent a lot of turns searching the wreck, found a decent supply of bullets, which I traded 1 at a time to the only person who had found a gun, in exchange for her using them on people other than myself. In the end, 3 of the 8 players, including myself, made it back to civilization to tell the story of how we were the sole survivors of the wreck. Just don't ask about the barbecue.


Shortly after getting back from GenCon, I packed my suitcase a second time and headed to my favorite little (~1,000 attendees) local gaming convention, Dragonflight. I had originally planned to just go for fun, but at the last minute agreed to volunteer to run the Story Games Lounge when the usual volunteer dropped out. As it turns out, volunteering to run the Story Games room is itself a lot of fun.


First day of Dragonflight Game Convention:

GM'd an awesome double-length Psi*Run for 7 players.

Explored an alien planet in The Quiet Year

Lost a game of Snake Oil to the dreaded Fraud card

Played "2 Rooms and a Boom" till my brains hurt. It's a great social-deduction game, kind of like "Are You A Werewolf?" except everyone gets to play the entire game and know one has to die until the last couple seconds.

Won a game of Jetpack Unicorn. Honestly, I'm not crazy about this game. I think Superfight does the same thing, but better.

Played some more 2 Rooms and a Boom. (Across 6 games I've now been on both teams a couple times, been the bomber and been an Ambassador.)

On Day 2 of Dragonflight:

 GM'd Og the caveman RPG for 5 players. No use big words play Og. The cavemen met The Doctor, and caused a regeneration.

GM'd another successful Psi*Run, for 4 new players. Hallucinatory madness derailed everything in a delightful way.

Hosted a giant marathon Microscope timeline for 6 players. It was epic! One of the best-developed, most fleshed-out microscope games I've ever seen. These new players really picked it up quickly and dove deep into the game.

That night, I got the band back together! Playing in Laura Mortensen's annual midnight Urchin game, as my recurring character, Rory Wanker of the formerly famous Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickers. We're making a comeback, if only in my mind.

Other games played in the Story Game Lounge included more Quiet Year, some Zombie Cinema, and a few escapades of esteemed Baron Munchausen.

Day 3 of Dragonflight:

Played in a delightful Lego and d20s game run by Tim Beach. Two of the 5 players were kids, and they kept the game light-hearted and unpredictable. Tim did an amazing job of making the game work on the kids level and not lose the adults to boredom. Nearly all of my GMing experience in the last 20 years is with adults, but I can only imagine GMing for kids takes extra creativity, patience, and panache. Well done, sir.

Later that night:
I went to a birthday party at Zulu's game cafe. While there, we played a game of Dark Gothic. We all lost when the Shadows filled up in a sudden hurry. Quite the shame, as I was super close to winning, and probably could have done so in one to two more turns.


The next weekend:

Battlestar Galactica board game with old friends I hadn't seen in forever: Andy Collins, Gwen Kestrel, and Greg Collins (and their friend Ben). I was a frakking toaster the whole time, and I successfully destroyed the pathetic human fleet by breaking their morale. It was a solid game, and the humans came very close to winning. Possibly the closest game I've ever played of BSG. 

After that, we played Between Two Cities, which is a very clever cooperative drafting and tile-placement game where you're building a city together with the player on your right and simultaneously building another city together with the player on your left. I didn't do so good at this, coming in 4th out of 5th place. I love the entire-cooperative nature of the mechanics, and how that's counter-weighted by the scoring. It's a game that exists in a very unique head space. I want the players adjacent to me to do well, and any other players to do poorly, but I don't really have a way cause that second part. There's probably some deeper strategy I'm not seeing yet, but I can at least admire the novelty of this truly unique game.

We followed that up with Royal Turf. It's a Knizia game about horse racing and betting on horse racing. In the abstract the topic doesn't sound interesting to me at all, like if you said "want to play a game about racetrack betting?" I'd reply with "not unless it's Royal Turf". Every time I play it I feel like a) I'm really not very good at it,  and b) the game is surprisingly fun and enjoyable despite all that.

Then the wonderful Bobbie Hyde showed up to pick me up and we talked her into playing a round of Decrypto. It's a team code-guessing game, and we both really enjoyed it. If I didn't already own Codenames Duet, I would immediately rush out and by Decrypto. I feel Decrypto is a much better game than normal Codenames, but that makes it about equal with Codenames Duet (which is closer to codenames, but also generally a vastly improved version of Codenames itself).

So, it's been a summer cavalcade of new games and old friends. Pretty damn cool way to spend the days. And it ain't over yet. This weekend is PAX West! I will once again be running demos of Flying Frog adventure games. Sleep is for the weak.

Dragonflight game highlights

Last weekend I went to a local gaming convention, Dragonflight. It was a ton of fun. Because of my work and sporadic volunteering, this was the first game convention I'd attended in something like 5 years where I was actually off-the-clock and free to sign up for a full event schedule. Man, it was nice. I played the following games, including quite a few that were new to me:

• Night's Black Agents - The first of 2 different NBA sessions I played in, each set in a non-typical era for this RPG. Usually, it's a game of burned superspies hunting vampires in the modern day. Instead, this scenario was set in 1870 in the Ottoman Empire, with everyone playing real-life historical figures instead of modern superspies. I played George Stoker, surgeon, officer, and younger brother of the author of Dracula. 
• The Captain is Dead - a brightly colored cooperative board game about everything going wrong on a space ship all at once. The game was really solid. I have some minor concerns about replayability because there are card decks where every card in the deck gets played every session of the game... but I'm still probably going to buy The Captain is Dead in a paycheck or two.
• Prime 20 - Tim Beach's ultra-streamlined version of the d20 system, GM'd by Tim Beach himself. He did something fun for character creation: we built Lego minifigs from a big bag of Lego parts, and then quickly stat-ed those minifigs in Prime 20 mechanics. The adventure was a rescue mission that evolved into diplomacy when we learned the "abducted" villager had actually eloped.
• Thanos Rising - The first of many pick-up games of this Marvel-themed cooperative dicefest that I played this week. OMG, I played so much Thanos Rising. Every hole in my event schedule was filled with a round of Thanos.
• Night's Black Agents - My second NBA session of the weekend. This one was set within 24 hours of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We had a pretty cool chase/combat scene in a Berlin subway station.
• Cthulhu 7th - The new rules features in Cthulhu 7th Edition were enjoyable and meshed well with my gaming style and tastes. It seems like a more forgiving version of the game. That said, the GM had the Phobia Deck handy for when I found myself face-to-face with mind-bending horror. I drew the outburst of Violence card, and it colored the rest of the session. Pretty cool.
• Urchin - A recurring staple of my Dragonflight experience is the Saturday Midnight Urchin game. All those years when I was a volunteer or board member for Dragonflight, the midnight Urchin was the one game I'd make sure I always got to play. As is my tradition, I re-curred my favorite Urchin character, an outrageous over-the-top musician name Rory Wanker, who is forever chasing his (imaginary?) former glory in the music industry. I'm getting the band back together!
• Thanos Rising - So much Thanos Rising. Seriously, this game has no right being this good. It's a movie-tie-in by USAopoly that came out right after the movie did. That could have easily been a design disaster. How on earth did it end up being such a solid game? Shut up and hand me the dice.
• Dr Who: Time of the Daleks - This is a semi-cooperative dice game with some card and board game elements. It really nails the theme. If I had played it for the first time maybe half a year ago, I probably would have fallen in love with it. Unfortunately for the good Doctor, it's mechanics kind of scratch the same itch that Thanos does, but you can finish three games of Thanos in the duration of one Time of the Daleks, and Thanos is easier to teach to new players. Given all that, I just don't see myself buying Time of the Daleks.
• Gaslands - This game is everything I ever wanted Car Wars to be, but more elegant and much faster-paced. Our introductory death-race ended in a three-car-pile-up and massive explosion, in under and hour. I foresee myself buying and modding a bunch of Hot Wheels and Matchbox Cars in the near future.
• Thanos Rising - And we closed out the Con with another nail-biting Thanos struggle.

That was a fun weekend.

Urchin Character Sheets

Doing a bit of spring cleaning today, I stumbled across some old Urchin character sheets. The character creation rules for the Urchin RPG require you to use a piece of trash for your character sheet, which is why these are on egg cartons, dog food packages, tin foil from left-overs, and old holey socks. In the game you play crazy people living in the rail and steam tunnels under New York City. Each character starts with 3 Talents, which are defined by the player. These talents are very open-ended, and tend to be both humorous and bizarre. Here's a photo of the party:

As part of my ongoing efforts to de-clutter my home and life, I am now going to return these character sheets to the trash from whence they were born.

Second-Fiddle to the Urchins

The Urchin RPG is weird. It’s not just because you’re playing crazy homeless people living in the tunnels beneath New York. The mechanics of the game upend the usual power-structures, leaving the GM the person at the table with the least control of the plot and world.

A week and a half ago, I played Urchin during one of the midnight time slots at the Dragonflight convention in Bellevue, WA. Two days ago, I GM’d urchin for a group of 6 that included 4 new gamers with very little (1 to 5 sessions each) previous RPG experience. Seeing it from both sides of the GM screen in such a short time has convinced me Urchin is a game where the GM has the least interesting job, and the least narrative power. The GM is at best second-fiddle to the urchins, but even that probably over-estimates the GM’s importance in this game.

At the game where I was a player, I absolutely dominated (and created from whole cloth) the plot. At the game I GM’d, I couldn’t make my pet plotline materialize no matter how hard I tried to push it.

Band On The Run, aka Let Me Tell You About My Character:

At Dragonflight, I played a has-been failed punk-rocker with dreams of getting his band back together.

In the real world, I (the player) once (many years ago) met a friend of a friend who claimed that they’d accidentally left a diary at a bus stop and a year later one of the poems they’d written in that lost journal was now a top 40 pop song. I was skeptical, but, whatever, the truth of their story is beside the point. The idea at least has dramatic potential. I’ve always kinda wanted to use that notion in a character (in an RPG or a piece of fiction) but never got around to it… until the game at Dragonflight.

My character, Rory Wanker (of the once-almost-famous “Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickahs”) took that diary story and dialed it up to 11. He also had serious psychopathic delusions, and was convinced that he had previously killed Sir Paul McCartney four times and They just kept replacing the blighter with clones. I was basically claiming to have written the lyrics to every Lennon-McCartney song ever, and also claiming to be the cause of the “Paul is Dead” meme. I just riffed off that nonsense all night long.

Every time it was my turn, I pushed the rest of the our group of punks and bums towards tracking down Sir Clone McCartney and offing him again. As a group, we raised the Kill Cartney Count up from 4 to 6 over the course of the session. At least one of those two kills was deliberate misdirection from my fellow PCs, but who was I to quibble over the identity of the body they’d shivved? So our characters invaded the random hotel that I, in my delusion, insisted was where Sir Clone McSongthief was staying while he was in town.

So there’s this major player-driven plotline that served as the backbone of the session. About the only decision left for the GM was whether Paul McCartney was actually staying at that hotel - but from my crazed perspective it was irrelevant because no matter who was in that penthouse, I would fill in the connection to make them part of the Clone McCartney conspiracy. That’s kinda the point of playing a crazy person.

Long story short, I jump off the roof of the pent-house where we just killed McCartney #6. I did this at the end of somebody else’s scene that I happened to be present for. I chose my timing because I’d get to Kick the next scene:

Fade to black. Fade in to a fancy office with a huge desk, and framed gold records on the wall. Rory is there with his agent. “And that’s how the concept album ends, hence the name ‘Paul is Dead’. I’ve got most of the songs written, I’m ready to go to the recording studio.”

That’s a complete dick move, right there, narrating that the session only existed in my character’s album pitch. I tell myself it’s okay because my character is nuts enough that if anyone has an issue with my ending, they can just write it off as the crazy thing running through my head as I fall 20 stories. I was being a bad player, grandstanding and spotlight-hogging, then invoking my own Deus Ex Machina after I made a bone-headed suicidal move. That's totally the sort of nonsense I engage in as a player, especially in a rules-light "hippy game" like Urchin.

In any normal RPG, it’d be appropriate at that point for the GM to say “No, you’ve jumped off the roof, and now you’re dead.” Or at least roll damage or call for a saving throw vs falling or something.

Mechanical Failure:

Urchin’s mechanics aren’t really set up that way. PCs don’t die unless the player wants them to. Instead they end up “in the gutter”, which is just this unfun quantum state where your turns are skipped until a fellow PC brings you food, then you’re magically all okay. With the rules as written, the only way your PC can die against your will is if all the PCs end up in the gutter at the same time… or if all your fellow PCs hate you so much that no one will bring you a candy bar to save your life. You are expressly granted the narrative control to set your scene where-ever you want, and the GM’s main job is say “yes” repeatedly.

I feel urchin is broken. The rules are flawed. Every time I enjoy the game (and I usually do) I feel simultaneously guilty and lucky. The game is a house of cards that could topple over at any moment, but more often than not we get to the end of the session without bumping the metaphorical table.

In Urchin, players go around that table taking turns. Turns are entire scenes that could last anywhere between 10 seconds and 10 minutes. You can either “kick” a scene, or “grab” a scene. Kicking a scene is where the player narrates the situation and what their character is trying to do, and the GM just adjudicates the rules (and maybe sets the difficulty and results if the player chose to do something that’s not covered by the rules). When you Kick, you as player are usurping at least 80% of the power a GM normally has. A good game of Urchin is one with colorful PCs who take the initiative to do interesting things.

The other option is Grabbing a scene. Grabbing frees up the GM to narrate and frame the scene (giving them back the power most other games assume they always have). The rulebook also provides a chart the GM can roll on if no obvious scenes spring to mind. The Scene Grabbing Chart ranges from absolutely devastatingly terrible (attacked by multiple bad guys that each individually outclass you), to just mildly better than the average turn. Once the players have been bitten by that chart once or twice, they’ll stop grabbing and start kicking hard.

There’s only three ways a session of Urchin can end:

1. Agharta — Someone raises Mind up to 10 via the Blessing, receives a quest, and follows that to fabled hobo heaven. This is the intended ending the rulebook sets you up for.
2. Total Party Kill - Usually the result of failing to pay the light bill. Sometimes the lights are covered, but you still get a TPK when somebody grabs a scene after they or other players have stirred up the sort of trouble that could logically draw a police response.
3. Fizzle — The party splits and rambles, having some good flavorful scenes but never really engaging in anything that smells of plot. You eventually call the game because you’re getting tired and the game is growing old.

Of the three ways the game can end, two are generally undesirable. The occasional TPK or plotless rambling can be fun, but more often than not most players prefer some sort of dramatic arc and some chance of success. If you’re actually getting a group to play Urchin a second time within a few months of the first, there’s a good chance they’ll be on-task for the whole Mind 10 trip to Agharta thing.

Sadly, the path to Agharta is mathematically solvable. Each time around the table, one scummer needs to collect money to pay the lights. Everyone else can focus on the Blessing. You can scavenge for the raw materials, which you’re guaranteed to find, and if you’re willing to Push you can even ensure nothing bad (other than Mind Rot) happens while you’re searching. So Scummer A finds the components, and passes them off to Scummer B. Scummer B brews a few hits of the drug, pushing the roll if needed, and possibly suffering some Mind Rot. They pass the finished blessing to Scummer C who sells it to meatheads for 2 to 3 cash tokens per hit. In a four (or more) player game that can be done in one round. In the second round (or the same round if you’ve got a lot of players) you spend the cash buying more blessing from NPCs, and then selling it to other NPCs. It’s a goofy loophole that lets you, once you’ve got the initial investment capital, generate a feedback loop that slowly inches towards infinite blessing. Even if the GM plugs that rules-hole (and they might not want to, as being able to buy the blessing from NPCs is a nice safety net for low-mind PCs struggling with Madness), it’s still pretty easy for a 4-scummer circle to generate large amounts of blessing in just a couple low-risk rounds. Ultimately, Blessing is easy to come by.

Lots of blessing = lots of money and a high mind score = the lights never go out, and somebody becomes Captain. So if you’re concerned about winning the game, and willing to cooperate like a normal RPG party instead of struggling like scummer nutjobs, “winning” the game becomes a trivial exercise. The only thing that can trip up a coordinated party is rolling a 3 or a 5 on the Quest chart (but even that can be solved by aiming the blessing machine at a second player to generate a new Captain and a new Quest in the next round).

About the lights and turn order: 

It’s vital that the turn order get shaken up from time to time (don’t always start the round with the same player) or else the player at the end of the line usually gets stuck having to chase Cash Tokens every single turn. That player is left feeling like they have no freedom (as their only choice is whether to panhandle or mug from turn to turn), and probably won’t enjoy the game as much as the others. They may be tempted to not pay the light bill. The Lights Out Table is certainly fun, but it has at least a 1 in 3 chance of producing a TPK. I'm happy when that table gets action on in any Urchin game I'm involved in, but I can understand how it may not be some scummer's cup of tea.

The more I play the game, the more strongly I feel that Urchin desperately needs a 4th ending scenario. It could really use a little more narrative structure in case the players scatter, but that would require rules revisions, since the rules-as-written keep the GM from introducing any sort of plot at all.

Curse of the Were-Gator:

When I was GMing Urchin on Sunday, I tried to work in this oddball subplot about a were-alligator in the tunnels. In a five-hour game with 6 scummers, they Grabbed a scene exactly twice. Every time I could get away with narrating a background detail in somebody else’s scene, I mentioned the beast howling in the distance or causing problems with the subways, but nearly every time the players Kicked a scene they (wisely) narrated themselves far away from my were-villain. Most of the group individually chased after the Blessing right away, but weren’t very cooperative or coordinated about it early on, so they doubled-up on redundant steps and never actually got enough of the drug to boost someone to Captain status. Along the way, they mugged a rich person just outside an opera house, and drew police attention. Immediately afterwards they neglected to pay the light bill and rolled a Meathead Invasion that resulted in a (police-based) TPK that had nothing to do with my alligatanthropic monster.

The one time I got people to interact with my were-gator, the player Kicked his next scene by narrating that he was searching for ricotta cheese. Because “everyone knows” that ricotta is like wolvesbane for were-crocodiles. In a normal game, the GM would have control of whether or not this ludicrous notion was valid or just going to endanger you further… but in urchin searching for a piece of gear that gives you +1 die on rolls vs the crocogator is an automatic success and the player gets to narrate what that found gear is. In later turns they can even DIY themselves a better version of the object (maybe a cross-shaped cheese-log?) that gives even more dice. That’s cool. Bizarreness like this is at the heart of Urchin, but it does illustrate what I’ve been saying about the GM having very little power. I leaned hard on my big threat, and all it got me was one player spending one action to invent it’s weakness while everyone else just steered clear.

Everybody had fun playing weirdo nutjob scummers, so it all worked out for the best despite the relative lack of plot and the the TPFM (Total Party Ferguson, Missouri-ing) ending. Urchin is broken, but it’s not unplayable. It’s like the first edition of Og - you can run it as a one-shot and have a lot of fun, but consecutive plays in a short time frame are less fun and become increasingly focused on the mechanical failings. Urchin could really use a revision with the same goals as Robin Law’s “Unearthed Edition” of Og (which is to say a rewrite that preserves all the best bits of the current game but fixes core mechanics and gives you more reason to play a second time). I’ve got a couple ideas towards rebalancing it, and I may type them up in a future blog post, but for today I’ve probably rambled on long enough. There's blessing to brew, and somebody's gotta pay the lights around here.