One Last Toss by Cayusa

So how is DMing in the Realms? Pretty good, not good like playing with old friends, but not a bad experience at all so far. I have had no real jerk players in any of my scenarios and the scenarios have been enjoyable to run. The limits I mentioned before are still there, the four hour slots are something you have pay attention to as a DM. Pacing is a key skill, but it works pretty well, there are rare tables that run long but most wrap up with plenty of time to get a lunch or a break between game sessions. The players have all been fine, I have been warned that there are some tricky ones out there but I expect that is no different from the miniatures games I run. Do they roleplay? Yes, about as much as in any other groups I have run over the years. There are players who really get into the roleplay and there are players who don’t, but the mix isn’t bad and the average player is by no means a min-maxing power gamer. They get a good mix of players, mostly guys as usual, but a wide range of ages and backgrounds. I am waiting for my first problem player, but not really nervous about it, I have faced down more than a few in the thirty years of running games so far I haven’t seen anyone as obnoxious as some I have had over the years.

So that brings it up to date on my RPGA experience, both as a player and a DM I enjoy myself. It has certainly made me sharper as a DM for my home game, I have a pretty solid grasp of the rules, certainly a much better grasp than I had after eight months play back in 1976. I have even tried some online play, which is a path I certainly wasn’t expecting to go down at all and I will talk about that in my next D&D post. Incidentally, today March 4th 2009 is the one year anniversary of Gary Gygax’s death. I respect the heck out of him and Dave Arneson for what they did, bringing about a fun new way of playing games, but the only story I have about Gary is about how he got thrown out of a hotel room, so I will save it for another day. Rest in peace Gary.

For game one we decided that I needed to refocus the campaign. The group is doing an investigation on Scintilla, the capital of the Calixis Sector and we realized we were suffering from both too much info and not enough clear result and it was leading the players to feel there were too many avenues to investigate. So, as the GM is ultimately responsible for delivering a fun framework for the players to build a good story in, I am doing a mild reset. I am moving the game on a couple of years after assuming the players have hit a wall in their investigation. This will allow me to flesh out the characters role on the planet, fill in some background to help guide the players along in the scenario. Hopefully this will allow the players to better connect into the world and the story and get us through the story.

The second game has had a much tighter story brief, it is a monthly game so I need to make sure every session has a good hook to it as bad game won’t get a chance to move on for at least another month. In addition both games are played on week nights so the sessions are short compared to the legendary all day sessions of old so for the monthly game so I often have the session tightly planned and while the players have a lot of choices the story line pushes them in more direct ways in the monthly game than it does for the regular session game. So after deciding that the regular game spent too much time investigating without clear results, I naturally had the second game spend all of last night doing an investigation.

To keep the investigation moving I used a technique stolen from 4th Edition D&D, the skill challenge. Now in 4th ed D&D it is somewhat controversial, it can be played like a formula and I am told bad D&D DMs are running these by saying ‘Ok this is a skill challenge, roll your skills and tell me if you crit.’ but I am stealing the idea of moving from player to player and challenging them to use their skills in the investigation by role playing their character. In practice I went around the table from player to player and asked them what they were investigating and what skills they felt were appropriate for that line of investigation. For instance the Priest used his skills to investigate Church contacts. He would tell me his question, point out a skill that he would be using as a base, make his roll and if information was available I would either give a brief answer or provide a quick character bit if an NPC was involved. This differs from our traditional methods of doing this sort of thing which is the entire group thinking as a committee and often circling around each other in that way committees tend to do. After each pass around the table I would allow the group to have a quick group pow wow, and I would check in with the Officer to see if he wanted to put any direction in, but I would then circle the table and work player to player again. As in D&D I counted successes and failures and opened up more clues as the challenge moved on based on the result checks. This could have been trouble, as you don’t want bad dice to completely derail the group so I set a minimum amount of info available that I thought should move them along, but as it happened they had hot dice and they got good info down one line of questioning they followed. I won’t say which one they did best on, but it was nice to be fairly free with clues in one area. I will certainly be using this technique again as I think it got us a much tighter result than we had been getting in the other group for investigations. You can see the results of the session from the Game Summary and get a feel for how it felt during the game.

So to sum up, a refocus is in the works for the the first campaign. This will force me as the Gm to tighten up and give the players more meat to bite into. This was our first group and we started pretty cold with it so I don’t feel too bad here, but it is sign that I didn’t have game as well focused as I should. Good that the players let me know their feelings before we came off the rails, but a reminder to me that even after thirty one years of GMing I am still far from an expert. The second game let me play with a different method of handing the non-combat elements of a Dark Heresy investigation and I think it worked well. It won’t always be the perfect method, there are times the group should be investigating as a group and the character interplay is critical, but I am happy with the steal and it let players who might have otherwise mostly sat out this sort of thing get involved and really contribute.

Cover to Warhammer Historical

Played my first game of Warhammer Historical’s Great War rules last night and enjoyed it. We played a skirmish between a mixed French and British force vs a German force made up of regulars and Stormtroops. The game uses 40k rules as a base the way that Warhammer Ancients uses Warhammer Fantasy Battle as a base, which means that the rules feel familiar, but that can often trip you up as the specific rules can be different than the rules the game is based on. We spent a bit of time in the rules digging about as we played, but it didn’t really slow us down and we played to a conclusion in a reasonable time.

The game objective was a hill in the center of the table and Jeff and Ed threw Todd and I a bit at first by throwing pretty strong forces up the flanks, which didn’t really help them in the end, but they realized what was happening in time for a mass assault on the hill for the last two turns of the game and they managed to pull off a win anyways.

All of the troops had good flavors to them. The French troops were very good, but in small units which meant their morale was fragile. The Brits were pretty good all round, I had some assault troops that did well, but they are also in smaller units than the germans and while my attacks did delay the Germans, the German Stormtroops are absolute murder. The Germans had solid troops and big units which means less morale check, so they are tough all around.

For special weapons I had some heavy machine guns, which take awhile to set up, but they can really pound targets when they get going. They felt right in game terms in how they affected the table. Todd had some French light machine guns and some mortars, which also worked about right. Jeff and Ed had Heavy Machine guns, some submachine guns, mortars and flame throwers. The flame throwers were thankfully never an issue, I dealt with the units that had them so they never deployed, probably the best I could have hoped for really. The Heavy Machine guns worked like ours did, as did their mortars. The submachine guns felt a bit over powered to me, they had a pretty long range for effective fire compared to rifle fire in my mind, but not so much that it made a difference.

Overall it was a good game. As usual with Warhammer Historicals stuff if you hate Games Workshop style rules (or are just a rabid GW hater) you won’t like these rules. They are dicey and play the way classic games play, but we turned out a pretty good little World War One game from a cold strat last night with little problem and everyone had an impact on the table and had a good time, for me that is a sign of a pretty good rule set.