Templates vs. Free Build

Like I said in my last post I'm in the middle of writing a setting book for my gaming group to play GURPS from. I'm going to be including all the basic stuff (attributes, characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, etc) though in a much shorter format than is actually in the Basic Set and the other books I decide to take stuff from. This is partially because I only own one set of the books and I'm not going to make my players buy a game that they aren't sure about, and partially because the last time I tried to run GURPS I set the stack of books down and no matter how much I said "Don't worry, we aren't using much from any of these for actual play," they couldn't get over just how many books are available. So I figure if I can link them a pdf or word document with bare bones write ups and page references to the actual books they may be able to swallow it a bit better.

This leads me to my first conundrum though. Whether I should provide them all with templates from Dungeon Fantasy and make them stick to those templates, or if I should have the players do free build their characters with my help. Both have pros and cons though, and I'm going to list them out for my own benefit at least.

Templates
Pros:

• Easier character building
• More independence when building characters
• Niche protection
• Easier identification of character types; frex: "Oh you're a wizard and I'm a thief, we need a healer and a fighter then..."

Cons:

• DF doesn't allow for much in the way of social skills, advantages, or disadvantages and since I want an almost completely open sandbox that may cause some issues
• Power level might be too high for the kind of game I want to run and using the low point total 
• Could induce not just niche protection but the idea that you have to stay inside your role 100%, which isn't what I want. (One of the reasons I want to run with GURPS is I want my mage's player to decide it's bullshit that he can't use a sword and spend the points to learn how, or the fighter to do the same thing but the other way around.)
• Allowing for non human PCs is trickier. Not impossible though, obviously.

Free Build

Pros:

• More freedom in character building
• Gives me a bit more room to define the power level as far as how many points I give the players to use
• "Cross classing" will almost definitely be a thing, who doesn't want to be a good fighter that casts spells, can sneak, and track, etc.
• Allowing for non human PCs is much easier.
• Easier to introduce social skills, advantages, and disadvantages; they're there from the beginning!

Cons:

• No "class" templates means more hand holding on my part and more likely that my players (all new to GURPS) will build underpowered or "useless" characters. It also means much more time spent making the characters as everyone reads over all the skills, advantages, and disadvantages and agonizes over their decisions.
• The almost certainty of "cross class" characters might also mean that PCs end up stepping on each other's toes a lot.
• They may also end up with a fairly glaring hole in their capabilities, hopefully I'll be able to spot it before play started but there's no guarantee

So there we go. I'd like to run a good game for these guys and one of the biggest things I want out of GURPS (and why I want to run with this system instead of ACKS like I'd originally planned) is I want the flexibility and openness of the system and I'm afraid I won't get that if I run straight Dungeon Fantasy despite the fact that that would probably be the easiest option. Especially since all my players are brand new to the system. I'll have to think on this more and discuss it with my group a bit. 

A Quick Visit

So I'm back after too many months for me to like thinking about. While this post won't be terribly long I'll try to give a quick update on the various goings on since my last post as far as it relates to my gaming. Basically everything can be boiled down to "not enough". My group hasn't been meeting regularly basically since my last post, we haven't even actually managed to have a game since September and I can't remember the last time we managed to get two games run on two consecutive weeks. The rapidly approaching holidays aren't promoting any hope in me that we'll manage to get together more than twice more this year either. Which isn't the end of the world but it does make me somewhat desperate to game. Unfortunately because I work 2nd shift it's hard to even join an online game since the majority of people are free evenings when I'm working.

Anyway, other updates: I've done a bit of work on all but the Traveller game out of the projects I listed in my last post. The World of Darkness game and the GURPS hexcrawl are getting the most attention though because in theory I'm going to be running them sometime in the near future. Currently I'm working on an outline for a GURPS "game book" for the hexcrawl, putting together a list of templates, allowed advantages and disadvantages, skills, and equipment for the world is proving to be interesting. In theory it'll help me get a better handle on the system and it will make building characters easier for my group since none of them have played GURPS before.

Hopefully I'll get together some more content heavy posts soon rather than these one off "Here's a quick update of my gaming life" things that I've been doing. Maybe I should start up one of those gaming blog writing challenge things to get me in the swing of writing...

Quickly, Before I Pass Out

Quick post before I pass out since it's almost 3am, I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night and I've been up since 7am or so. Basically this is just an update to declare my intentions of returning to this and hopefully make a better go of it. It's also going to be very stream of consciousness so it might not make a whole lot of coherent sense.

One of my players (temporarily my GM) is running an IKRPG game for the group. When we started out we had a large Protectorate of Menoth paladin, a dwarven arcane mechanic and his "pet" Warjack, and an inquisitive sharpshooter from a merc company full of pirates. Because I thought of something a bit more in-line with the game premise I switched from my pseudo-Arabic paladin to a commando working for Cygnar's intelligence organization. The guy playing the dwarf switch to an ogrun (think civilized orc/ogre that hails from dwarven lands) because I jokingly told him his character had heroically sacrificed himself in battle to save the lives of myself and the other PC. He thought I was serious and erased his character sheet and started making his ogrun ironhead.

Of course now that we're starting to get in the swing of things the guy running the game switched positions at the school we work at and he's now working weekends. Hopefully this won't interfere with game too much. As it stands though game's on indefinite hiatus until he gets used to his new schedule and figures out if and when he's going to be working past five on Saturdays since that's our optimal start time.

On the plus side a friend of ours messaged me saying he had more free time so he could start gaming again. This unfortunately is because him and his wife are splitting up however so I'm very conflicted about how happy to be about this news. I really need to actually take the time to grab lunch with him at some point.

I'm now planning on using this blog (I know, I've said that before) to help me plan out games I want to run. When and if I ever get to run them who knows but at least I'll have something down in case. So, really quick without any real explanation:

• RuneQuest 6 translation of 2nd edition era Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with some influences pulled from 1st WFRP and early editions of the wargame
• GURPS Fantasy hexcrawl set in my own home brew setting
• further defining my "Ithaca by Night" setting thing for new World of Darkness (That's Ithaca New York not Ithaca Greece. Sorry all you Grecophiles out there. Also does anyone call it the "new" World of Darkness anymore except people that played in "old/classic" World of Darkness?)
• translate Forgotten Realms to ACKS, with most of the work going into custom divine casters and other classes though defining either the Sea of Fallen Stars or The Sword Coast with the economic rules in ACKS sounds interesting.
• Mapping out a few sectors for Mongoose Traveller.
• Further defining the collaborative map my gaming group made for a Burning Wheel game a few years back.

There I think that's all of it. I'm supposed to be planning something for some out of town friends for when they're here at some point. Only problem is I don't know when "at some point" is so it's hard to build up the drive to start planning. I'm thinking I might print off the D&D 5e starter rules and run the two people left in my group through something basic though to fill up time while our GM settles into his schedule. 

I'm Back?

I know it's been awhile and to be honest part of why is the inertia of just not posting. I'm not sure if other people have this problem but the longer I go without a post on a blog, the harder it is for me to start back up again. I need to try to post at least once a week though I'd like to get it up to twice or three times.

Anyway, I'm writing this because I've started a new game. Well technically since the Numenera game I think this'll make the second or third. What's exciting about this is that I'm not running. Which in and of itself is something amazing. I've been running for this group (and I define the group kinda loosly) off and on since high school without anyone else running anything. I've played a couple times during this period (I was involved in a multi-year Vampire: the Masquerade elders game over Skype for example) but only with other groups. So this is very nice. [fake edit- I just went back and looked at my previous posts, turns out I ran a Warhammer Fantasy game using RuneQuest 6...honestly I completely forgot about it. I guess it was successful. :-P]

Death and Rebirth

So, after two months and not nearly as many games as you'd think we've switched systems and worlds away from Numenera. Happened mostly because we didn't play for more than a month and during that time I started doing a ridiculous amount of overtime at work which killed my momentum and inspiration for the game. Honestly it was hard for my to build up inspiration for the setting as well. I felt like I was constantly struggling to make things weird enough for the Ninth World setting and yet keep it familiar enough for play to still happen. The other wall I ran into conceptually was the fact that it was an explicit rule set out in the core book and in a couple of the head designer's blogs was the fact that you weren't supposed to connect it to the modern world at all. I know it's my game and I can just change what I want to but having it said explicitly made me struggle with it. Silly I know but there you go. Anyway, on to the new game.

Now, as of about two weeks ago, I'm running a sandbox Warhammer Fantasy game. The catch is that we're using Runequest 6 for the game. So far we've had two games, one was character creation and the second was finishing up characters and starting the first adventure. I'm starting them off with the adventure in the core WFRP 2e book because of the group two of my players are pretty much completely unfamiliar with it and the other two are only passingly familiar with it. Both of them are fairly conversant in 40k though so I'm hoping it'll translate over to some degree.

Everyone's characters are complete as it stands, though one of my players went out of town for a couple games so I need to finalize things with him. The characters are currently:

Orzad, a dwarven machinist and engineer obsessed with clockwork and automata. He was "suggested" to join the army to help deal with the Chaos incursion that became known as the Storm of Chaos as a battle engineer. Is a good shot with his rifle and is near constantly fiddling with it and other bits of machinery. Technically a member of the dwarven gentry he's lost much of his influence since his departure. Still one of the richest and best equipped members of the party.

Hannah, a high born priestess of Shallya. Doesn't quite get the whole adventuring thing and is still carrying some baggage from her birth in terms of how she expects people to act and react to her. A passable combatant and the second best off member of the party what she really offers is the social graces and the miracles of Shallya she can call upon. Is currently on a pilgrimage to learn humility and got caught up helping refugees from the Storm.

Torendil, an elven commoner and apprentice magus. Is currently a student of Aqushy, or the Bright Wind of magic, the use of which is used to burn things mostly in a variety of fun and interesting ways. Has little to nothing in the way interpersonal skills and is about as arrogant as it's possible for an elf to get. In fact even other asur have taken offense to his attitude and it was his teacher who sent him on a mission to "prove his mastery of magic" in the human dominated Empire which he took up with great relish to show the humans a thing or two. Hopefully his magic is enough to keep him alive because his skill at arms is very poor.

The last character still needs to be fleshed out some, he doesn't even have a name currently. All I really know is that he's a former slave who killed his master and is now travelling to seek his honorable death as a dwarven slayer.

And now I have to head off to work, I'll pick this back up later (maybe tonight but probably tomorrow). At the point I'll go into how I've been having them make their characters and go a little into what subsystems we're using from Runequest and what I'm porting over from Warhammer.

Boss Fight

[Quick write-up so it's here, I might expand on it later.]

We had the second game a few days ago. We began with them breaking camp and returning to the road after a brief discussion on if they should do that or circumvent it and cut through the woods to the Pit. They decided that they'd already slaughtered a dozen or so margr (one with a hunting horn) so they figured if they hadn't been attacked in their sleep they'd be fine for now. As they entered the woods Wemm and Mag spotted a couple of scouts. When they did Mag started shouting at them and they ran much to the chagrin of the others. When they knew they'd been spotted they ran off, presumably to warn the rest.

The group was then ambushed at the edge of the woods by a group of four margr, two regular hunters and a pair of mutants. They dealt with theses quickly, though one of the mutants had 4 mental armor so when Xavier hit it with a mental Onslaught it just shrugged it off and stabbed Wemm which made them pause for a minute. The noise of combat also drew the attention of the chieftain and his remaining lieutenant (both mutants as well) and the five remaining warriors at their encampment. As they were discussing what to do next a volley of 8 inch long, barbed quills flew by Vash's head. Which a yelp from him and a bellow from the chieftain combat ensued. Charging at the group were the margr chief (a brute standing head and shoulders above the rest of it's kin, so about 9' tall, covered in heavy armor and bristling with the above mentioned quills), his lieutenant (who was covered in armadillo plates instead of fur), and the five normal warriors. In a turn of events I hadn't forseen Mag threw a cypher which randomly rearranged the molecules of whatever it caught within it's blast radius. The chief and lieutenant were too fast but the five normals were alternately liquefied, vitrified, turned inside out, turned into a pile of maggots and I think there was just physically shredded as well; all randomly and not all at once. After this, decidedly not pretty, turn of events the two mutants attacked. Wemm was forced to pick up a staff (actually a spear he broke the head off of), his first weapon of the game even! It was a little desperate for a minute but they managed to kill those as well.

In the aftermath of the fight Vash, with the help of Mag and Xavier, dissected the chieftain to find a cypher had grown inside it's brain. Presumably a side effect of whatever had caused it to mutate the cypher could be taken as a pill to increase intelligence.

Margr Pit Tribe

Game's tomorrow night and I figured I should get some more game planning out of the way. I decided earlier in the week that the margr tribe that the group has been hunting down has been mutated by an artifact they discovered at some previous point. The tribe's leader and his three lieutenants have gotten mutations from the tables in the core book from this.

The tribe has set up their camp a respectful distance from the Pit's western entrance/path. In the camp are a grouping of tents, enough for about 40 margr, and some slave pens holding 18 people. Most of them are a traveling merchant caravan one of the tribe's raiding parties ambushed a week back, killing all 10 of the guards in the attack. Since then another 5 of their number have been butchered for meals along with all of the group's aneen. Five of the living captives are a group of prospectors that the tribe captured coming out of the Pit. They're kept in a slightly better pen (there's a roof for example) and are given a slightly higher quality of gruel. This is because they've managed to pass themselves off as priests from the Pit and showed the margr chieftain how to operate the artifact/show reverence to the god of the Pit. The merchants offer the PCs 250 shins (but will go up to 500, all they have assuming the group raids the chieftain's tent) for an escort back to town. The prospectors will give the group half their haul of cyphers (up to 3/4) for the same thing.

If the group goes back they'll be created by the headman, the clave's high priest and an Angucan knight. All are greatful to see the group return to town and the knight offers to take news of their actions back to the baron and the deacon.