Various AP capsule reviews

Untitled Vampire Game with Martin. Martin played a refugee and orphan from a civil war between rival ethnic groups in a small east African country. I played a charismatic older boy assembling a gang of child soldiers among the refugee. Despite the oppressive subject matter, play was in a sense relaxed; we didn't drive towards any climax or conflicts, we simply narrated events as they struck us. In the end, the boy survived the gang, but his overall odds look grim, and I doubt he'll live much longer.

I have complicated feelings about the ending of the game. It worked, as in, it felt right, that the boy should escape the gang by jumping off a bridge, and in the process breaking his leg. But I don't want things to be up whim like this in general; the chance of wimping out and pulling punches is too high. I want a resolution method with teeth. My current thought is that the Vampire should add a die whenever they take steps to feed on the Victim, and the Victim should get a die whenever they take steps to escape the Vampire/renounce their status as a victim. At the end of the game, you roll all the dice. If the Vampire is trying to feed, if they have the high die, they succeed. If the Victim is trying to escape, if they have the low die, they succeed. Maybe. Something isn't right here, but I don't often have the emotional capacity to run UVG to test it, so I won't know for a while.

Tales of the Round Table with Adam, Jay, and Eric. Some difficulty with switching characters rapidly and maintaining the form of the game; everybody wants to say more than their allotted 1 to 3 sentences. It's difficult to express your character's opinion in an argument, and easy to present a debunking as the antagonist. Protagonist arguments tended to be scattershot, while antagonist defenses were laser-focused.

Shock: Social Science Fiction with Adam, Jay, and Eric. Hyper-capitalism on the moon, and its discontents. I played a GM-ish role, adding details and summarizing events through everybody else's turns. My own character was kind of shit; it turned out I just wasn't interested in his struggles, and we skipped one of my turns at my suggestion.

I was surprised to see how quickly the scope of the game expanded, to the point that the original antagonists felt irrelevant. I wonder if it's player skill to limit your actions to the reach of the antagonists, or if it's bad game design to require a fixed antagonist up front.

I was also surprised to see how the abstract conflict resolution encouraged me skip over tons of details I consider important. This is player skill, and also game design. Something like Dogs in the Vineyard forces you to be concrete about what you're doing before you can make a roll. In Shock:, on the other hand, rolls had very little connection with events in the fiction; I would say that something had happened, but never bother to think about how or why, except that the dice had turned out a certain way.

Tales of the Round Table with Misha and Divya. As with the last Round Table session, it's easier to play the opposition than the protagonist. Clearer creation of theme here. Misha often looks at me and asks, "Is that alright?" after making a move. I have to keep saying that it's not my place to judge if her moves are good or bad, just if they are legal or illegal. That's not quite true, since we're making a work of art together and the whole work can be judged, but it's a lot closer to the truth than "Canyon is the arbiter of good and bad, and should approve of my decisions when I play".

Swyvers with Jay and another guy, maybe two. Urban space as hexcrawl and dungeon. I continue to be hard-headed about making specific plans for specific treasure, which surprises others. Wish I remembered more details, but I was feeling ill, and left early

Coup Etrange with Jay and Andrew. Using Simon's Under the City. We built up a really nice setting together, a crusader state with plenty of useful, concrete details. Andrew's magician had 2 Sleep spells and cast them both in the space of two rounds. They took out 14 HD of enemies like this without a scratch. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, if your entire strategy is "win initiative so I can cast Sleep before they hit me" you are going to lose half of your fights, and maybe that'll encourage you to make a better plan. On the other hand, I simply dislike the idea that any fight could be decided by the first die roll, leaving the rest entirely pro-forma.

After that session, I decided to adopt Coup de Main's spell timing rules; see here for details. It's still possible to win a fight in the first round by casting Sleep, but you have to commit to it in advance.

Second session here.

Coup Basic with Chris, Tschesae, and Tommi. Chris's first time running Coup, plus an on-the-fly conversion of a Pathfinder module. An admirable showing, much much better than my early efforts. When every player has mastery of the rules and resolution, and the GM only has to worry about running the opforce, the job gets a lot easier! At one point I told Chris what modifiers I wanted to use on a Charisma check.

Pathfinder's dungeonpunk aesthetic threw our danger sensors for a loop; we thought a certain creature was probably 5 HD or more, because of how tough it looked in the art, but it was only 3 HD.

OD&D with Diogenes and another guy. A simple dungeoncrawl in a mid-level dungeon that got to the operational heart of the game with decisions like "stay", "go", "flee", "engage", and so on. Rulings were clear but probably too easy. I'm curious what longer-term play is like with him, as the other player seemed to have very limited doctrine -- he had reached level 4 but never thought to bring an advance scout!

Coup de Main with the Finns. Two sessions. I dropped into the middle of their urban intrigue adventure and it turned out one of my seeds (an assassin, the nephew of the head of the Greyhawk Assassins' Guild, the subject of some magical bio-hacking) fit perfectly into place. They had a hook to stop the ill-favored son of a retired gangster from doing some kind of magical sacrifice in 3 days' time. They found his hidden hunting lodge where he keeps his sacrifices and magical bio-hacking experiments -- people getting turned into dogs -- and raided the place like a dungeon. They knew they had hurt his plans, but not what exactly those plans were, or if he could recover. All this happened before I came in, I didn't know about any of it. I heard we were trying to sneak into a gangster's house and look around for some sort of ritual space, so I volunteered Fauntleroy, my seed. With a few good Charisma checks (and +4 from smalltalk/etiquette skills, +2 from title/relationship) he got into the house, ingratiated himself with the retired gangster, got an audience with the ill-favored son, and found out about the son's entire plan. It turned out the son was in very similar social circumstances as my player, which opened up the possibility of a romance/friendship and a bit of PvP. Ultimately the playgroup voted not to allow PvP; it is normally disallowed in this game, they would have had to make an exception in this case, and they opted not to. Fauntleroy learned a good deal about the son's motives and plan, but it didn't seem like a good idea, however nice of a guy he was, so Fauntleroy betrayed him to the party. The other players took Fauntleroy's information and some evidence from the hunting lodge and presented it to the retired gangster, who was disappointed in his son. He would have killed the son, but Fauntleroy offered to take him under his wing and return to Greyhawk with him.

I have focused on my own exploits here but other players were in fact maneuvering; two others infiltrated the gangster's house, and at least one other guy was doing surveillance on a different location at the same time. Still, it's worth noting how fictional positioning, high stats, and good rolls essentially solved the scenario with very little personal risk.

The playgroup is going to try PvP starting next week. We'll see how it goes.