New Year, New Campaigns

Hope everyone has had a Happy New Year! As we turn the calendar to 2017, it's time to reflect on what we hope to accomplish in the new year. As RPG players, that can include what games to play this year. Being in the GM seat, that means what campaigns or one shots to play, and what systems to use.

If you're planning for campaign play, there's a few things to keep in mind. First and foremost is what you and the players want to be doing. It's good to try new systems, so you can see new mechanics and concepts and expand yourselves as gamers, but if no one wants to play the game, there's no point. It needs  to be a group consensus, as a lack of agreement can kill the campaign before it starts. What interests you as a GM? Is there a story concept that you've latched onto that can spill into a multi-session campaign, or a published campaign that everyone is interested in? For Road Trip, I had wanted to try the system, and had ideas for new legs and a new meta plot. After the rest of the cast agreed, I refined the legs and meta plot into written out notes so I was ready to play. Thus far, it's been a lot of fun and a huge success for us in the cast, and we hope you've been enjoying as well.

Part of that enjoyment has been learning a new system. I had never played a One Roll Engine system game before, much less run a campaign. While playing in familiar systems is not a problem, by playing in ORE I've learned more about stating enemies and planning. With Red Markets, the threats of the Casualties and the lethality of combat meant I focused more on planning the contracts. In Road Trip, I've been having to focus more on the characters I've created, both in terms of their personalities and their actual stat blocks, whereas in Red Markets most of the 'stats' were rolling for casualty hoards and the occasional NPC.

That planning is the final step in preparing for new campaigns. Some people are able to come up with stuff on the fly, while other GMs need more structure. I've heard of one person running a episodic campaign completely improvised with nothing but a map of the world he had created on the table. If you can improv like that, by all means, if the players are having fun. For myself, having even a couple paragraphs and the stat blocks ready gives me what I need to get the game sessions in motion. I still leave room for improv, letting the players interact and seeing their play informs my decisions to come up with stuff on the fly.

For me in the new year, I'm not planning stuff for the immediate future. Once we finish Road Trip we're planning to do an Eclipse Phase campaign run by Adam, and we're doing some cross overs with our friends at the Role Playing Exchange in Better Angel's campaign of No Soul Left Behind. As for me, after having run two big campaigns last year, I'm taking a little time off, but I've got some ideas. I have a seed for a Delta Green campaign (but do I have the viciousness to run it? We'll see...), and after hearing our friends at the Drunk and Ugly run Leverage I'd love to run that some day. But as for now, I'll be finishing Road Trip, then stepping back to let others shine with some new, wonderful campaigns.

Are there any campaigns you're planning for the new year? Is there anything that has helped you prepare

One Shots VS Campaign Play

Recently, we’ve had to set aside our campaign of Road Trip while we had absences, so many of our recent games have been one shots. Having played in more one shots, it helped to highlight the differences between the two. Both lengths of games provide aspects of gaming the other cannot, so it is important to do both.

One shots allow for an easier learning and for more experimentation. One shots are essential to learning a new system. They allow players to focus on understanding the overarching view of the game and tackle their questions bit by bit through encounters. After everyone is more comfortable with the system, one shots can provide players and GM with more ways to test and push the system. With characters in campaigns, players grow attached to them and don’t necessarily want them to die or change radically. In a one shot, players have a greater freedom to do things they wouldn’t necessarily do, and GMs can try new tactics and set pieces they wouldn’t pull in a campaign that they want to continue.

Campaign play provides more opportunities for characterization and customization. A character that only appears in one game will never have the foundation that a character that appears in two, five, 10, or more sessions will. In campaigns the players can get to know their characters and see who they are, and providing satisfying arcs between their play and the GM’s storytelling. Similarly, the character’s stats and abilities in a one shot may be tailored for that game, whereas in campaign play they can grow and gain greater rewards with play.

Somewhere in the middle are games with high lethality rates or games where characters can be set aside after a few sessions. In Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu, campaign play is easy, but PCs can and will die, so one player might play as multiple PCs throughout the campaign. Monster Hearts can end with a character levelling up so many times they break the system and need to be retired to balance game play. And in Red Markets getting your characters to a firm ending is the point, so if one character earns enough bounty to leave their player can start over with a new character.

There’s also games that cannot be played in multiple sessions of the same story. A Quiet Year, a game that involves making maps and telling about a group of people inhabiting the land, ends after the game is over, so campaign play isn’t possible. Games like Dread and Slasher Flick per their rules could be campaigns, but their play systems are so unique running more than one session is fairly hard.

Games of various lengths all provide something different to role playing. Experiencing that broad range can help players and GMs learn what works best for them and how to incorporate interesting bits from one type into another. Knowledge leads to better games and better games lead to having more fun in the hobby.

Tone

When planning for your games, what’s the first thing you think about? The plot? NPCs? Combat? Puzzles? All important aspects, but there’s one thing that encompasses all of them; Tone.

In a general sense, tone in writing refers to how serious the game is; a light game is more comedic and less dour, whereas a dark game covers heavier, more serious themes. You can have a light game of Delta Green or a dark game of Monsters and Other Childish Things, but in some ways you’d be missing the purpose of those rule sets. Per the lore and system, Delta Green games are generally dark because of the heavy themes of cosmic horror and the atrocities committed by mankind. Comedy can be found in the system, and you can certainly joke with your friends at the table, but DG is best suited when the plot of the game is something a little more serious and real, the combat lethal and dangerous, the NPCs unhelpful and cruel. Similarly, MAOCT is light and fun; it deals with being a kid. It can take darker stories as well, but with hard if not impossible to kill kids and monsters, it’s not advisable.

This doesn’t mean the tables should never be turned. One can always break the rules; however it generally works best when you understand the rules and know what the conventions are. Horror-Comedy works by keeping things tense but sometimes using a psych out and making the release a joke instead of a kill scene. In Delta Green, a well placed joke or gag can make a game. In MAOCT, if the players are willing, the kids and monsters can deal with heavier subjects, and yet still keep a lighter tone at other times.

Whether it’s following the rules or breaking them, the most important thing is to be open with everyone at the table. The GM may have prepared the game, and the players acting it out, but both roles work in conjunction. If the players don’t want to play a dark game, the game the GM prepared may not be suited for them if they didn’t know that ahead of time. Inversely, the group may have made an agreement, but if a player doesn’t adhere to that, the play may range from annoyance and anger at making jokes, to bringing up uncomfortable topics out the blue, both of which can break up gaming groups.

When I prepared Red Markets and Road Trip, I made sure to ask the players what they wanted in the game. I wanted to make sure we were all on the same page, and luckily we have been. I’ve taken trips to darker topics (like the child zombies in Red Markets), but generally I keep an even tone, settling in the middle for Red Markets and on the lighter side in Road Trip. It’s led to fun at the table.

Road Trip Remix: Two at a Time

For the moment we are shifting to two blog posts a month to be able to better provide timely posts.

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While doing my preparations for the next campaign for Technical Difficulties, I searched for advice on how to run games of Monsters and Other Childish Things. Although I have listened to this and many other games in the One Roll Engine family being played, I had never played in or run a game with it. Luckily, the cast of The Drunk and The Ugly are some of the most experienced with this game, so I asked questions on how to run the game and on running Road Trip using their forums.

As we talked, a few present and former members of their cast expressed interest in playing in it. Although this would increase my workload, I thought it would be an interesting prospect. While campaigns are designed to be run multiple times, I have never heard of someone running the same campaign for two groups at the same time. It would be interesting to see how the groups reacted to the same stimuli in real time and how that might affect my running of the campaigns.

Already this has borne fruit. I ran the first session for the other group before Technical Difficulties first session due to scheduling conflicts. By playing the other game first, I learned some of the weaknesses in how I had presented it.  One of the players brought up that when I described the monster the kids fought I only used the bare minimum of descriptive language to describe them. My intent was take make it more horrifying by leaving it up to the imagination, but since it is the theater of the mind, using more imagery gives it a unified image that makes the game more real.

While it wasn’t a complaint of theirs, they also flew through combat without a scratch. I feel that was more system mastery than the monsters, as they said that they felt right for a first session enemy. With their advice, I got a better feel of how the first session needed to go. While combat got a lot more crunchy with four PCs and six enemies, the Technical Difficulties crew has fun and had a challenging fight, as they took damage while fighting the creatures.

A new group was helpful to seeing these blind spots in my GM style. Laura had mentioned descriptiveness in the short story I had written, but once is an anomaly while twice is a pattern. I need to do better with description. It’s weird because the image is clear in my head and I can describe it well; perhaps I’m unnecessarily worried about dragging on in play, especially with Technical Difficulties’ scheduling. I just need to take the time to describe. And I know viciousness is not my strong suit, but in an RPG I need to know when to lay back and when to throw the hammer.

No matter what, all of the players across the sessions enjoyed the opening act. These are means of growth, not game breaking errors. Focus on fun at the table and be open to suggestion, and anyone can be a great GM.

GM's Corner 09: Road Trip Remix

As you may know, we are closing in on the final episodes of our Red Markets Beta campaign. I hope you’ve been enjoying The Reformers’ adventures and are tuning in for their final battle.

With one campaign drawing to a close, it comes time to plan for the next one. The next games you will be hearing will be a couple of one-shots, followed by our MonsterHearts campaign, a Powered by the Apocalypse setting. The campaign was run by Aaron, and I can’t wait for you to hear them.

The team had discussed what system to play next. I had always wanted to try out Monsters and Other Childish Things, a system where players play as a child and their monster friend. Having never played a game in the system, I suggested that I could run a pre-made campaign. Continuing with the theme of RPPR, one of the campaigns was written by the host himself, Ross Payton. Road Trip, a six adventure campaign, is available as a PDF and print product on DriveThruRPG.

Having read the campaign, I like Ross’ design of a set of places where the kids and creatures can have adventures throughout the country. However, his design is for a modular campaign where the kids can reach any of the destinations in any order outside of the ‘final boss’. This can work well for letting the GM design how they want to run the campaign.

The inspirations for Road Trip come from a variety of sources, both childish and adult. For example, the most famous leg, Sucrose Park, takes place in a Las Vegas theme park where the heroes fight a creature that kidnaps kids and replaces them with robots. The cited sources include Saturday Morning Cartoons, Theme Parks, and Stephen King’s Misery, though after reading I also see parts of Invasions of the Body Snatchers and a critique of consumerism, to say nothing of neglectful parenting.

As a child, I was taken on many road trips. Some of my happiest memories are of going places with my family to see the sights. As an adult, the road trips I’ve taken have still been fun but have also been marred with worries about my safety, how much money I can spend, and where I’ll stay and what I’ll do. I wanted to take inspiration from these memories, and from my own childhood fascinations and adult readings and anxieties. My plan is to move Road Trip from a choose your own adventure to a linear path, mixed in with custom legs of my own. To that end I’ve been reviewing some of my own childhood favorites, including superhero comics and cartoons, Nickelodeon classics, and interactions with family and friends. In keeping with Ross’ design, I want to use my own past to more fully evoke the sense of an actual road trip.

Road Trip Remix will take our kids and monsters on a wide spanning journey from California to Florida with a grandparent as they’ve been chosen to appear on their favorite kids game show, live at the studio in sunny Florida! However, as they see the sights on their way to fame and fortune they keep coming across situations where kids, monsters, or kids and monsters are being manipulated against one another and with plots against the greater world at large. Are these plans connected? Will they make it to Florida in one piece? And is TV glory the only thing waiting for them on set? Stay tuned. In a few months, Road Trip Remix will be your ticket to find out.

Greg