A Confession about GenCon

This year, as Nykki mentioned in her previous post, we decided relatively last-minute to be GMs at Games on Demand through Indie Games Explosion.. Thursday night, I got there late because I was being chauffeur for our youngest, missing my scheduled block. I helped at the table for about an hour and then ran a session of Hollowpoint at 8.

The next day, we got there for our 10 am sessions after running the youngest back to daycare. There's a line already out the door by the time we're there. I sorted out our prep materials when I heard Nykki calling over to me asking if I'm up for running Dungeon World. I said sure, as apparently there were already multiple tables for it filling up. I grabbed my materials and head over to my assigned table, diving right into a game. I ended up running it for the rest of my sessions at GenCon.

I loved how easily Dungeon World runs. I have played and run Dungeons and Dragons since high school in its various incarnations (2nd ed, Skills and Powers, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, Pathfinder). I have a lot of experience in the genre, which I'm sure helped me out. Even so, the system and its inclusion of the players in the creation of the world really opened up new ways of playing. I have become enamored. That said, I have something of a confession to make.

Before my 10 am Friday session at GenCon, I had never run or played in a Dungeon World game.

Even finding the system is a bit of a set of random circumstances. It all started from Nykki's Kickstarter trawling. To be fair, I don't think she just randomly searched for Kickstarters to back, yet there have been a number of them that I have no idea how she found. Sometime in the last year or so, we backed Monsterhearts. It's a RPG/story game about monsters in high school using the system from Apocalypse World. I think it was the setting that got us to back Monsterhearts, originally. The Kickstarter had finished, we'd gotten the softcover, and it was put up on the shelf with other small-publisher RPGs, likely to be read when one of us had the time.

I am a PhD student. This leaves me with virtually no time for extra reading during the fall and spring semesters, but my summers are far less structured. At some point this summer, I decided to take a break from academic reading and pulled down some of the games. It took one read through of Monsterhearts and I was sold on the system. The group character gen, the far more spontaneous GM'ing, the ability for players to interact with the world in ways not done in D&D/Pathfinder; all of these fascinated me. However, we don't exactly have a very regular gaming group, so play-testing was likely not very likely. I put it on the list of games to run at the annual New Year's gaming party we go to, which is where we usually break in small-publisher systems.

Meanwhile, several of the gamers in my G+ stream had been pushing this Kickstarter for Dungeon World. All I had seen on it was that it was "old school style and modern rules," but hadn't really explored what this "modern system" was. After I had read the Monsterhearts book and poked around a bit with the Apocalypse World site, one of these Dungeon World posts wandered by and something clicked in my head. I went poking around the Dungeon World site. Oh, it's that system, my brain thought. Boom. Kickstartered. And I started trolling the Dungeon World forums (discovering the dozens of different hacks out there).

I had no idea how many games I might be called upon to run at GenCon, so I started prepping something in every system I had that wasn't 4.0 or Pathfinder: Hollowpoint, Homcidal Transients, Hollow Earth, Monsterhearts. Dungeon World was on the list I planned to prep, but I didn't have much of a scenario in mind (which is OK, since the book tells me not to prep too much for the first session). But I still hadn't played it or Monsterhearts.

One night, the week before GenCon, our online weekly group offered to hold off on running our actual Pathfinder Adventure Path and I could run something. We ended up with Monsterhearts. I got them through character creation and about an hour or so of them role-playing home room before it was time for several of us to go to bed, due to it being Thursday night. But, I had a lot of good feedback on teaching the system and character creation (mostly: pre-gen them), so I thought I had a handle on the game/system.

And then it was GenCon.

The players were all awesome. The groups worked well together. The biggest problem I ran into was keeping track of 6 players when there were 11 other tables running in the same room. (Which means that the biggest problem was the success of Games on Demand, so I'm not really complaining here.) There was such demand for Dungeon World that I would finish one game and I'd have a new table waiting in the wings. The system drew the players in very early in and there was very minimal need to explain the rules. The players very quickly got interested in what was going on, which in turn got me even more invested in the game. I'm glad I could get some exposure for this great game out into the gaming world. I am very pleased with the game and am eagerly awaiting the actual finalized book/pdf to show up.

GenCon 2012: Nykki GM’s with GoD

I don't remember who started it.  

Either Angel or I at some point said "Hey, why don't we run some games at GenCon this year with Indie Games on Demand?"  And the other person said "Sure, that sounds like fun."  So we emailed the Games on Demand folks (who are awesome), and after some back and forth we were given the opportunity to trade up to GM badges for running just 7 2-hour sessions each.   In a fit of "We've got two whole days without the kids" we said sure, why not? 

About twenty-four hours later I realized that I'd just signed up to spend fourteen hours running games for people I'd never met before at a Gaming Con, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown.  But I'd said I would do it, and I'm always super excited about running Hollowpoint, and I had a pretty good handle on Homicidal Transients (it's not a complicated system), so I buckled down and got to work dreaming up some scenarios that I thought I could play out in ninety minutes (reserving half an hour for character generation, rules explanation, and getting people rounded up).  And all the while the imposter syndrome reel was playing out in my head: What makes you think you're going to be any good at this?  You’re not ready to deal with the jerk players who try to break things. Your narrative is going to fall flat.  Do you really know the rules that well?

I've been playing RPG's since I was rather awkwardly introduced to the concept with a D&D 2e Skills and Powers campaign in college (I was the awkward one), playing a twinked-out bow ranger with a pacifist hangup.  I've run D&D from second ed through fourth and abandoned it for Pathfinder in mid-campaign, and my players always come back.  I know in my mind that I'm a decent GM, or at least the kind of GM that gets repeat players – at least, in a fantasy setting with rules for everything that everyone has to look up that I've been playing for fifteen years.   And the imposter syndrome reel continues to play.

I've run fast-paced con-style games every year at a New Year's party we frequent, but it's in the company of friends and a number of folks who only game once a year, and it's always been B-Movie, (which qualifies as an Indie RPG in the small-publisher sense, but not so much in the "you can buy it and support small publisher" sense, since after I bought the game and three adventures in 2002 I've never seen another peep out of Guildhall Press ever).  So I didn't feel like I could bring B-Movie, and the scenarios I use there really aren't the sort of thing I wanted to bring to a con.  I've run Hollowpoint more than once before to general success – generally always with the same steampunk Western scenario, although once at a party in a drunken haze I did try to run a Star Wars ripoff that never got off the ground.

Maybe it was just the memory of that Star Wars attempt that haunted me, but the imposter syndrome reel is a hard thing to ignore: it taints everything with hints of defeatism, and I probably had a hundred good ideas that never got past the "what if I..." phase before the voice-over cut in with "and then everyone will wonder how they got the Worst Game Ever".  It took exhaustion and desperation combined with a particularly tedious work-related conference lecture after a night of hard drinking to shut the whole thing up long enough to whip out two simple Hollowpoint scenarios that I wrote down (in pen, in a notebook I was taking home) before they could get discarded too.  I showed them to Angel, without telling him that I was pretty sure they were going to be the Worst Ideas Ever, and he started chuckling before I'd gotten past the first encounter.

Hollowpoint is supposed to involve about half an hour of referee prep, and under normal circumstances that's about right; for me it involved two weeks of intense self-doubt and soul-searching followed by half an hour of referee prep and ten sessions of revising my referee prep until I wound up with exactly the same thing I started with.  Also, I was growing steadily more terrified of running this game at GenCon for total strangers who were, I was completely convinced, going to think I was the Worst GM Ever.   I had dreams about standing up in front of a group of players and forgetting how to play.

I had dreams about being That Girl GM.  I had dreams about having my qualifications challenged and I had dreams about coming to the table and being ignored and I had dreams about being the one who reinforces every stereotype someone has ever heard about women in gaming (I got into RPG's because of a boy, whom I later married).  And the imposter syndrome reel, in the background, got nominated for an Oscar and I apologized to Steve from Indie Games for being late to the GM party and having to move the schedule (I made Angel write that note) because we couldn't both take a Saturday slot at the same time because Someone Has to Watch the Kids!  And all the time I watched people around me on Google+ and Facebook and blogs talking about gaming and running games and getting excited while I was waiting – getting emotionally prepared – to fail.

So what actually happened was this:

We dropped our stuff off before Games on Demand opened at 10 am on Thursday and hung around until everyone showed up around 9:45 to get set up.  In the meantime, we unpacked the whiteboard and made a lot of introductions and then played a game of Snapshot:1969, which I may talk about in more detail later, but which has some amazing art and was a lot of fun.  Then we took off and did Con Stuff until Angel had to take off and do Kid Transport, shortly before my first session time.  By this point I had found a set of Agency dice (little yellow dice, because asking for help makes you a Little Yellow Coward), lost my prep cards for my Homicidal Transients setup, frantically made backup plans for Homicidal Transients, talked myself out of reworking Hollowpoint yet again, walked around GenCon all by myself, and the imposter syndrome reel had me so nervous I was practically shaking. 

It didn't help that when Steve asked what I was prepared to run and I said "Hollowpoint or Homicidal Transients", I had the shortest list of games on the board.  It didn't help that some GM's brought an entire list of gaming systems, complete with their cell phones and Twitter handles, and left sheets on the table in case folks wanted to get a pickup game together.  It didn't help that there was a line halfway out the door by a quarter to game time. 

What did help was that when I unabashedly admitted to a woman I'd just met standing behind the table that I was terrified, she said "You're going to be fine.  It's lots of fun."  What really helped was that I told my first group that I'd never GM'd at a convention before and got "That's okay, we've never played at a convention before" from at least three members of the group.  And then I started talking, and we started rolling dice, and wild over-the-top ideas started coming out of people's mouths, and it was Hollowpoint just like it always has been, only this time it was fedoras and Mouseketeers with Tommy guns and a power-hungry tyrant instead of steam-powered flying horses and railroad trains and the Johnson Gang. 

Hollowpoint was up for three ENnies this year, and some people came looking to play specifically.  Some people just showed up to see what games they could get into.  Every Hollowpoint table was full, even when I expanded them to five people solid instead of "four, maybe five".  Everyone seemed to be having fun.  And somewhere on Friday, between the moments where I was frantically making up answers to questions I hadn't expected and inventing complications to take on players who ignored blatant hints in order to go their own way, I forgot about being afraid. 

I gave out coupons for discounts at the Indie Press Revolution booth.  I stopped by IPR – an acronym which makes me think of PBR, and gaming hipsters, and wonder if you can play RPG's ironically – and watched the stack of Hollowpoint books slowly getting shorter and shorter.  And then, Saturday afternoon as I was weaving through a line of prospective players that stretched halfway through the elevators (amazing success for Games on Demand!), I was stopped by a frantically waving man.  "I have to tell you!"  He was obviously excited about something, and I recognized him from Friday's table, so I waited.  "We are still talking about your game!  That was so awesome!"

How much better can it possibly get?

Everybody’s Doing it: GM Questionnaire

Zach S. over at Playing D&D with Porn Stars posted a GM questionnaire that we thought it might be fun to answer in tandem.  So Matt will take the plain text and Nykki will take the italics, and we’ll see what happens.

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?

It’s not an invention, per se, but I’m pretty proud of the Meadow.  There’s something about knowing that experienced parties will go hundreds of miles out of their way to avoid a prairieland that is immensely satisfying.

For my case, I think I would have to pick something that required a lot of player participation to pull off. I got one of our players to play a lawful good cleric of the sun god in my world. The campaign revolved around demonic influences in his church. I got Nykki to play a spy (half-demon) following the party on their journey. The players did most of the actual implementation, and each played their part brilliantly. The half-demon needed to eat a sentient being once a week, mostly as a balance requirement (Since she was following the LG cleric, this means she had to keep it hidden.) Months into the campaign, the party did not suspect that she was the cause of the terror that would pop up every time they stopped somewhere. Theories ranged from “she’s a werewolf” to “she is being stalked.” In the end, at the great reveal, she had managed to get the LG cleric to promise to protect her before she told him she killed his wife (which happened in the first session). I did the setup for it, but it really played out so well because of my players, so I suppose I can’t claim all the credit.

I don’t know – I think your greatest accomplishment was as a player, when you rallied the goblins to follow your halfling and turned him into a god.  You invented a whole religion that time.

Well, yes, I am proud of that one, too. The Lightning-bringer will yet raise up the goblins to join civil society!

2. When was the last time you GMed?

Since we had to cancel the last session of my campaign due to player emergencies?  New Year’s Eve.
Last night, actually.

3. When was the last time you played?

Last night, actually.
Night before last, in the Homicidal Transients hangout.

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.

Have you seen the brief TV series Jericho? I have a modern (or perhaps Victorian Era Steampunk) game based basically around being members of a small town who witness the nuclear destruction of virtually every major city (US in modern, Europe in Victorian Steampunk). Originally, I was thinking of using the nWOD Mage system, the characters awakening all at once as the bombs go off. If I did Victorian Steampunk, I’d likely run it in the Hollow Earth/Ubiquity system.

That’s not one sentence.

Details. Then just stick with “Have you seen the brief TV series Jericho?” if you’re going to get technical with me.

Mine: The king is dead, and the army is gone.  It’s up to the common folk to decide: will you be heroes or slaves?

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?

Look up rules, sometimes – try to get my monsters statted up.  Browse the news if it is getting particularly long.  Write down what they’re saying.

Prod my players to do things. Recap what happened. If it’s an online game, I skim news/blogs.

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?

With live sessions, it varies a lot, really depending on what was brought. Whoever’s place we’re at has usually provided lunch/dinner. There’s not really one snack “just” for gaming.
I haven’t got anything to add.

7. Do you find GMing physically exhausting?

Physically? Not except that we sometimes stay up ridiculously late.  Mentally, it’s sometimes a battle.

Not really. I tend to end up energized, usually, afterwards. Unless we’re up super late.

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?

I have a character in the current party who has some dragon blood and breathes acid.  He tends to do this without regard for who is in the splash zone.  He took out 2 of the 3 NPC escorts in the current dungeon singlehandedly.  Almost a shame it was too dark to tell at the time.

One of the more amusing incidents involved what was supposed to be a fairly tough fight with a dragon. There was a halfling fighter in the party out to prove that halflings were not all sneaky thieves, but could be actual fighters. He had engaged the dragon in some verbal banter before we got to Initiative. Then, he beat the dragon on init when combat started. His action? Set his spear against a charge and use his racial Taunt ability to make the dragon charge him. Despite what physics might have said, the dragon impaled itself, taking massive amounts of damage in the process. I am uncertain if it one-shot killed it or just really wounded it, but either way it took a lot of chutzpah.

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?

My players, and my settings, are kind of a mix: we have high drama and total ludicrosity in varying amounts.   I have had good luck with keeping my serious games mostly serious and my light games fluffy. 

My players have always known when it is time for High Drama and when they can be silly. While I have had some players that were on the loonier side of things, they almost never interrupted something serious happening. While my long term games tend to be Serious Business, my one-shots and shorter adventures tend to move quickly in silly-territory.

10. What do you do with goblins?

I talk circles around them until either they give up and start stabbing me or give up and do what I was trying to tell them to do. This is how my halfling wizard got the goblins to follow a Chaotic Good religion (focused around him, but, well, these things start somewhere).

As a GM, I have organized all of the traditionally Chaotic Small races into a hierarchy of the Small, which starts with Kobolds as the kings of the Small and ends with goblins and hobgoblins as the Least of the Small.   This means, of course, that since kobolds are so naturally superior that they have to follow all the rules of anyone in the Small who is taller than them.  Goblins only have to follow goblin rules. 
Goblins also have a complex family and societal tribal structure, which involves a rule of retribution by ten’s: if you defeat a goblin and his family learns of it, his ten nearest relatives are obligated to come and take revenge for his death.  Parties usually figure out that not killing all of the goblins is a bad idea about the second combat.

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?

New Year’s: game system is RPG-13 (B-Movie); this year I borrowed characters from Firefly and Star Trek and put them on a spaceship with a homicidal Siri-9000 computer.  Hilarity ensued.

Not sure here. Several of my names for characters come from languages that I’m studying (I’m a PhD student). I’ve an idea for a game based off Jericho. I don’t always trace where some of my ideas come from, so I’m sure there’s something in my current game that wasn’t lifted whole-hog from a “game” source.

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?

The New Year’s game I ran this year was Hollowpoint in your Standard Fantasy RPG-World. The first group I ran through created Sesame Street-inspired characters. Yeah, and it wasn’t that late at night yet.

B-Movie a few years back: I was a lazy GM and just rolled up stats for the pregen characters without paying attention to what they actually were.  As a result the Stoner wound up with a Clumsiness of 4.  B-Movie requires you to roll over your flaw on 2d6 to accomplish anything, while the opponent needs to roll under or equal to.  The setting was every Evil Dead inspired movie ever, and as the zombie hordes (attack penalty of 2) rolled in, the Stoner got the munchies.  The climactic final battle took place with a spatula at the grill in between burger flips.  The stoner won. 

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?

Jade Regent: Brinewall Legacy.  I’m planning to run an online campaign for some friends, and we’re going to work off of that adventure path.  If we’re talking about things I am not running at all, then it was probably Toypocalypse, which I am scanning over because I hear it’s fun.

The last book I read was Homicidal Transients, which is short. It’s an interesting satire of the fantasy-adventurer trope in RPGs. (Though, at first glance, it looks like you’re playing mentally disturbed hobos.) If you count things I’ve been flipping through for character gen, it might be also Ultimate Magic.

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?

I’m afraid I don’t know many current RPG illustrators. At least, not by name.
Stumped here, sorry.

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?

Good question.  I think I’ve creeped them out a few times (vampire kittens, little girls in faux distress) but I don’t know about genuinely afraid…although apparently my GladOS voice one year had players treading very very carefully.

I know I have disturbed them. (Fountain in the castle of the villian, shaped like a hero pierced with spears, water flowing from the wounds. The water was iron-heavy and tinted itself and the statue red.) As far as scared? I don’t know, I’d have to poll my players.

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)

I’m not sure here, as I usually run my own adventures. There have been a few times we intended to run a pre-made, but I’m not sure it stayed on the rails well enough or if we ever actually got started.

D&D 3rd edition came with a little intro adventure.  I has a group of tipsy college roleplayers who wanted to run through it.  It didn’t stay on the rails, but we had a blast storming the castle.

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?

No budget constraints?  I want a GeekChic table with a Surface built into it for maps so we don’t ever have to set up or tear down or draw out the dungeon.  I want it to have its own room, with a sound system.  I need wifi; I can’t GM effectively without a computer any more.  I want big comfy chairs.

See above. Also, with a separate (but monitored) room for the kids to play in while we game.

Oh, yeah. Kids.

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?

The two most disparate games… I think might be anything White Wolf (where RP is Serious Business) and HOL (Human Occupied Landfill – you play convicts sentenced to a planet of garbage).

B-movie is sort of the bottom of the barrel when it comes to serious, as noted above; I would probably contrast that with Vampire, where I once made an angst-resistant Toreador and almost got booted out of the game for it.  I’m with Matt on the White Wolf stuff, especially the LARPing.

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?

As for influences, I suspect they would be things from my schoolwork (Ancient Israel, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt) and modern TV series. I’m pretty sure bits of everything get merged together, as I tend to put my players (and my characters) into moral dilemmas that I don’t have a clear answer for either. The dilemmas tend to come from anywhere, though, source wise.

 I come from a long line of draft-dodging hippies, which has definitely influenced my game world and the societal structure therein – there’s a lot of puzzle and conflict resolution.  On the other end of the spectrum, I’m fascinated by human psychology, and I love turning the “good guys” into homicidal agents of evil.  I find it very interesting to watch the interplay when you have a good roleplayer or two with an evil character in a party.

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?

I want players who are there for the story and the interactions; people who understand that not all rewards are tangible.  I want folks who are willing to let the rules be bent on occasion, but who understand what kind of occasion that is.  I want people who also realize that real life sometimes trumps the best of plans.  I want people who blue book and let me watch, who write character journals and session summaries so I don’t have to.

I want players who are invested in the story we’re creating. While I want them to remember it’s a game and they should be having fun, I want players who are completely fine with, say, selling their souls to a demoness to free their friends or loading up on everything explosive the party has and jumping into the mouth of a dragon. So, I want them to respect the story we’re trying to tell while at the same time being all right with taking things a bit less-than-seriously.

Okay, the explosives-into-the-mouth-of-a-dragon was an awesome player moment, I will grant that.  I just don’t want them getting the idea that’s the best way to beat a dragon.

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?

The one that comes to mind for me would be having a character go through becoming a father. While I’m not sure how close his experience and mine were (I didn’t have healing magic to help my wife give birth), I would like to think my own experiences at becoming a father informed how I approached it with my character.

I would have liked healing magic.  That would have been extra cool.  For me, I don’t know that I’ve taken a lot of real life experiences to game terms – other than Matt and I always having to negotiate our characters’ relationships beforehand.

And that doesn’t always mean “are we already lovers/married.” Since our characters usually end up allying with each other, we have to establish how they know each other already: are they siblings, friends, what have you. And then we have to work out where we think things will go.

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?

Beyond an affordable Microsoft Surface table? I’d like a way to use my xBox’s fancy Kinect and the TV it’s attached to for remote gaming. More of my “table top” sessions are ending up in the computer these days, so I’d like to use the technology we have to do cool things.

I’m with that.  Also: I want dice that you can roll physically on a table that transmit the rolls to a computer server/program.  There’s something about dice – physical dice – that I just can’t give up (it’s like books), but the more Internet resources we use for gaming the more we rely on virtual dice.  It’s so unsatisfying.

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?

Everyone in my profession?  Once in residency I embarrassedly confessed to an orthopedic surgeon that for Father’s Day I got our D&D group together as a present to Matt.  He got so excited: “You play D&D?!?!”  We had a great time ever after.  Most of the time, though, I just have gotten the reputation for being a nerd: my office staff all thinks cosplaying and gaming tournaments are sort of cute.  My teenage patients can relate, though.

I don’t have much chance to, sadly. While at school I don’t often have time to talk much gaming, though there are a few fellow students who are nerds with me. Most of that conversation revolves around Dr. Who and other sources, though. Gaming conversations, when they do happen, are usually brief and go well enough.

Gaming for Grownups: Homicidal Transients

We backed a Kickstarter a while ago for a new little RPG called Homicidal Transients.  Despite a name that seems designed to engender a sort of shocked and somewhat self-conscious amusement, the premise is heroic fantasy roleplaying distilled down to its finest and most basic element: You and your friends are roaming the countryside, killing people to get stuff.  The actual setting of this really doesn’t matter.  While the game as it’s flavored lends itself to a “railroad barons and dust bowls” sort of feel, there’s nothing laid down to say that’s how it has to be. 

I’d flipped through the game rules (13 pages, including table of contents and acknowledgments) a few times, trying to piece things together on my own.  The layout is fantastic: all sticky notes and index cards, with headings like “Watch out this stuff will eat you” and “Who the hell are ya?”.  The text is sparse but adequate to explain the effects of skills and abilities; there’s no wasted fluff talking about how to think or how to play in Homicidal Transients.  This is a game made for people who know all about roleplaying games and have played enough of them to recognize a certain basic symmetry. 

I frequently refer to myself as “having a steep learning curve” with regard to rules: after playing D&D for years I am still frequently out-lawyered by my players, and I regard all new systems with a certain trepidation.  I flipped through the rules, and back through the rules, and I thought I had a feel for how to make my character, but I really didn’t feel very confident about it.  The rules are terse and self-explanatory, but for someone accustomed to the “Pick race.  Roll stats.  Pick Class.  Pick Select X items from Y skills” chapters on character generation, it felt like there ought to be something else that I was doing – something I was yet missing. 

Turns out, I had it all right, right off the bat.  Characters, like the rules, like the game itself, are distilled versions of Ye Olde Hero – so there’s really not much to them.  There’s your Homicide style, which is the specialized way you kill things; there’s your Transient style, which is the specialized way you interact with everything not immediately capable of being killed.  One of them is primary – either you are a killer or a talker – which determines the order in which you are going to receive bonuses to your abilities.  There’s your Health, which is always at full at the beginning of combat, and then there are your skills.  There are no random stats in Homicidal Transients; everything is reduced to the skill list, which reads like a list of everything that most adventurers do in any case: Drudge (for when you need muscle), Impetus, Talky Bits, Tamper, and Scrounge.  

Once I actually made a character, the creation process crystallized, but it is not quite intuitively obvious from the rules as they stand how to put everything together.  I understand the principle behind the way Homicidal Transients is arranged: it strips out all of the “how to roleplay” fluff and limits itself to just the rules.  It just doesn’t work for me as well as I think it could.  The biggest help for me in clarifying this would have been a character sheet, which would make the simplicity of the design just a little more evident.  During last night’s game, I mocked one up which met with Creator Miles’s approval, so hopefully that will help with future newcomers to Homicidal Transients.

We live in the middle of nowhere, so getting a gaming group together for playtesting is always a difficulty affair.  Fortunately, as part of the New Year, New Game initiative, Creator Miles hosted a game over Google Hangouts and we had a chance to participate.  Despite an issue with my sound drivers which resulted in me only hearing about half of the game, we had a great time.

Gameplay – another thing I wasn’t certain I understood – is as simple as it sounds.   You use one die (any size, as long as everyone has the same size) and roll, add half your level (round down) and any bonuses.  Your opponent does likewise.  High roll wins.  Ties go to the defender.  Uncontested rolls are against a target, difficulty anywhere between “Very Easy” and “Very Hard”.  The mechanics are simple enough to stay out of the way of the narrative, which is really what it’s about anyway.

Speaking of narrative, it went a little something like this:

In a fantasy world – no, wait,the height of the Dust Bowl – no wait, someone said Sweeney Todd, let’s do neo-Victorian (“I can totally rock those fingerless gloves”), three (and occasionally four) raggedy semi-protagonists escaped from a factory and wound up on the docks in front of a would-be press gang.  After a little discussion, mainly involving the name of the press gang’s employer so as to know where we could find work, we went at the other gang with broken two-by-four and stolen knife and hobo stick.  By the end of the combat we had one dead transient (that would be me, forgetting to Defend), a name, a plan for getting some money and stuff, a set of goggles (+1 Scrounge!) and a couple of eyeballs on a stick (“That’s a proper Mangle, that is”). 

We picked up the only mostly-dead transient (“You get one pass”); the goggles went to Matt, who was a Bum Slayer type and therefore good at Scrounging, and off we went to find Frank the press gang leader and get a job as shanghai artists.  Along the way, we encountered a toff in nice shoes but no cane and no cape, by which we were to know he was only sort of a rich toff.  He offered us a job.  This engendered some more discussion, seeing as how the words “Job” and “Transient” are somewhat exclusive in nature, but it was finally decided that as long as it was an odd job that we would be willing. 

It was a very odd job indeed.  We were sent to find Tom, who was not at his home, and return with either the man or – failing that – with proof of his demise.  We started at his home, despite – or perhaps because – he was not going to be there, which is where we Scrounged up a diary.  There was some discussion at that point about whether or not we could, in fact, read at all (“We’re transients!  Who needs to read?”  “You can if you want to be able to…”) which resulted in everyone looking at the guy in the goggles.  “He’s got glasses.  He can read.  That only makes sense.” 

So the Professor read the diary, which told us that there were two choices for what to do next: go seek out the pirates that Tom had traveled with, or go to the library.  That led to basically no discussion at all; off we went to see the pirates.   They didn’t know where Tom was, but they knew where he’d been: here and there and everywhere with the pirate captain, all around the world.  Forget Tom.  Let’s be pirates.  It appealed to the homicidal and to the transient among us.  Problem was, the pirates weren’t hiring, not even if we killed off three of the less-necessary crew members.    Not even if we killed off three of the more-necessary crew members.

We went off to the library, instead.  They also didn’t know where Tom was, but they did have his collection – which we couldn’t see.  And they wouldn’t tell us anything at all, really, and as we were facing off against some kind of library sub-administrator with bloody 2x4 and eyeball on a stick and resurrected knife-bearing Slaughter Grifter, someone mentioned “You know, we really haven’t done any homicide lately.”

There wasn’t much stuff to be gained by killing the sub-administrator, so the conversation naturally drifted back to pirating.  See the world, they said.  Kill people and take their stuff, they said.  It really did feel like an occupation custom-designed for a bunch of homicidal transients.  It was decided that the best way to get around the hiring freeze on pirates was to kill some extra pirates and take their ship, then press gang ourselves a crew. 

It was unfortunately about this point when real life attacked: midnight in the Midwest combined with gamers who have kids (I told you it was terrible, getting older) meant the subsequent carnage will have to remain in the strictly theoretical realm.  Despite the shortened session, we had a good group and great fun.

Overall impression: This is a streamlined system that, despite the surface appearance, is fairly setting-agnostic.   The game rules could be easily adapted from trains and hobo camps to almost any locale, with minimal changes in the names of things.  It’s all about paring down roleplaying to its roots: killing things, getting stuff, and moving on. 

The rules are completely free of fluff and laid out in a nonstandard fashion, which makes them a little intimidating at first read and can lead to some confusion about their implementation.  Don’t give this book to someone who isn’t very familiar with roleplaying games – it’s not for beginners.  In stark contrast to initial impressions, though, actually playing the rules was intuitive, and there was little to no interruption of gameplay for clarifying questions.  This is a game that is, in its current format, best understood by just grabbing some dice and playing.

It is also a portable RPG that could be played, for example, in the ludicrously long will-call lines at your Favorite Gaming Con.  The core rules cover only five pages of the PDF (the rest is setting, bestiary, and loot suggestions); your character will fit on a sticky note (I made six character sheets on a page, comfortably); and the group could make do with just one die if need be.  Character generation is quick and painless – no rolling up stats, no purchasing gear – and leveling is by GM fiat, which is just the way I like it. 

In short, this is a game for when half your gaming group bails on you, or for when you’re sitting around drinking and get the urge to roll dice (this is always a dangerous combination), or – as was decided last night – if you’re running a bit of a fever but it’s not quite high enough to see purple elephants.  It’s quick and brutal and pared down to the barest bones: not a system that I would want in a campaign, but a lot of explosively violent fun on its own merits. 

Fantastic Adventures in Hollowpoint

At the annual New Year's Eve Eve role-playing party, I ran Hollowpoint. This particular party has been going on for over a couple decades now, and the spouse and I have been attending for over a decade. December 30, we meet for RPGs of all colors and sizes and usually run it con-style these years: GMs prepare a short (~4 hour) adventure and characters if the system requires any sort of elaborate character gen. Then the players are divvied up among the GMs and then circulate, with some of the GMs swapping in and out as needed. When we were young, we might have managed 3-4 sessions a night (starting around 6-7 pm) but these days we usually manage two, maybe three if one of the GMs is feeling punchy and not quite unconscious.

This year, as I said, I ran Hollowpoint using a very basic skin. I set it in a Forgotten Realms type fantasy RPG setting. Rather than reskin the skills, I had each player pick a fantasy character archetype (Fighter, Paladin, Wizard, Rogue, etc.) and then their skills related to the abilities that archetype might typically have (Kill for a Fighter might be a greatsword, for the Rogue, poisons and daggers, for the Wizard, fireballs, etc.). The characters were all adventurers with the Agency, which contracted with clients to resolve problems they were having.

The mission for both session I ran was that the Town of Northhaven had contracted with the Agency to deal with a necromancer who had moved in, started robbing the local graveyard, and caused zombies to show up and attack the town.

The first session went off the rails the instant I had them name their characters. The first person to speak named his character Elmo and immediately adopted the appropriate voice. The others all jumped on this and soon I had Elmo the kleptomaniac rogue, Snufalupagus the dual-wielding warrior, Charlie the sneaking Rogue, and Big Bird the Bard. (Later, after Charlie bought it, the Count joined us as the undercover agent.)

When we got to town, I also realized this was the Agency you only called once. (This theme carried over to the second group as well.) The mayor led the party into the Inn where they were getting rooms and introduced him to Larry, the town drunk who first saw the zombies. What was supposed to be a simple conflict with the NPCs trying to Con the party into leaving immediately to deal with the issue, culminated with Snuffy slamming her swords into the bar and demanding an ale, Big Bird singing completely random campfire songs in order to confuse everyone, and Elmo bodily throwing poor Larry along the bar into cellar and announcing that “Everyone needs to get in the *$*% basement or lose a *%&*$ ear.”

Leaving the mayor and the others locked in the cellar of the Inn, the party leaves and encounters a cadre of zombies wandering into down at sunset. After briefly considering luring the zombies into the Inn (and setting it on fire), they decided they would likely not get paid if the mayor died in the conflagration. So, instead, they took the bells off the door into the Inn and Elmo strung them onto the zombies. Meanwhile, Charlie found most of his long-lost family among the zombies (his Complication), Snuffy started mowing some of them down, and Big Bird played Pied Piper and led them into Town Hall. Which was promptly locked and set on fire. Just before the building burned down and the last of the zombies bought it, they opened the door and let the few remaining ones out, which started immediately retreating toward the necromancer's home, bells ringing along the way. (See? The bells were not completely random...)

Arriving at the necromancer's tomb, they were met with a mess of skeletons setting up palisade and a Death Knight (Snuffy's newly raised father, her Complication) leading. Meanwhile, there are yet more relatives of Charlie among these undead and the undead that come streaming out of the tomb in retaliation. The party handles the Death Knight and his minions well enough, Big Bird continuing her ongoing attempts to confuse the enemies with random camp song lyrics. Charlie does succumb to the onslaught of the undead retaliation to be replaced with the Count, who has been serving as an undercover operative in the necromancer's army.

The party descends into the tomb and there encounters the flesh golem (Frankenstein's monster for the non-D&D'ers). However they also see the necromancer disappearing into a door at the far end, yelling about having to give chase or save the mayor's son. At this point, they see the mayor's son hanging by a quickly dissolving rope over a vat of acid (the conflict's Catch).

Combat ensues, with Big Bird's continued Con assaulting the monster while Elmo rigs his security blanket (a Trait) into a lasso and saves the boy, just before the rope snaps. The monster ends up with whatever was left of it's brain fried into dysfunction by the ever sung lyrics.

Beginning the final confrontation with the necromancer, the party marches into his laboratory. He is busy casting a really bad-ass spell (Cool) while his collection of ghosts turn their Terrorizing assault on the party. Elmo begins randomly Taking vials and bottles from the necromancer's lab and mixing them together, before throwing them at the ghosts. Snuffy is in her usual bladed fury and Big Bird continues her aural assault. The party eventually slays the necromancer and his ghosts and the muppets return home to their well-earned money.

The second session of the evening fared a little worse. Rather than homicidal muppets, this party consisted of a necromancer (a former colleague of the enemy one), his grave robber, his “corpse creation specialist” assassin, a pair of rogues and a warrior. (I think, this session started at something like 11 pm, so it's a bit more fuzzy for me.)

The plot progressed through a similar set of scenes, though this group manged to kill everyone in the inn without really getting information out of them. (Though the party's necromancer raised them all, so they still had what they needed, I guess...) They also simply slaughtered the zombies that came in, rather try to corral them. Of course, their necromancer then raised the newly re-corpsed into their own growing army.

This was the groups modus operandi for the night: kill everything and then make it into their own undead. The necromancer then used his own in-conflict successes to have his army soak hits for the others as needed (Agent special ability). There were two fatalities in this one, one being replaced with a cleric, the other with a similar rogue (as I recall). The cleric used Turn Undead (Terror) quite efficiently.

Overall, Hollowpoint worked well for this one-shot style of fantasy RPG, however the trappings of the genre hindered it a bit. A good number of my players were used to D&D, Pathfinder, etc. and the weight those games place on spending much time crafting a well balanced character and careful resource management during an adventure. Since characters (and thus their Traits) are supposed to be expendable, my veteran RPG players were slightly less willing to embrace spending often and freely, until the final combat. This left some of them feeling a little frustrated early on, as even in their best skills they could not match the length of runs I as GM would manage. This cleared up as they began to realize that making a new character was not the time sink it would have been in D&D/Pathfinder. Additionally, I had to overcome my own reluctance to assault the weakest player in each round. However, after the first round or two in each session, play began moving much more freely. Everyone certainly seemed to enjoy the free-form chaos that ensued.

Hollowpoint: Wild Wild West

Got folks together the other weekend to play Hollowpoint and see if I enjoyed GMing it as much as I liked playing it.  Threw out the invitation to the winds and got back an OK from two of our Pathfinder regulars, my husband, an old friend recently returned from Places Southwest, and a couple whom we do not get to do RPG's with very often.  It was a big group.  I got to count out a LOT of dice.

Skin: Steampunk Western.  
Mission: (1) Rescue Mister Banks's daughter from the Pinkertons.  (2) Get the deed to the Lucky Star out of the train's lockbox before the Dawson Gang does.

We took a few minutes to get everyone settled - used the toe tag character sheets which amused the hell out of my players - and ran them all through character gen in about twenty minutes, counting chasing kids and asking questions.  There were Complications from almost every player, which definitely made things more interesting.   There were also a lot of questions starting with “can we have…” from my D&D-based group, who were almost obscenely pleased with the idea that they could  in fact have whatever it was they were asking for.

Several of the players took low to nothing in Kill, so they schmoozed their way past the engineer  (Complication: I am the engineer’s daughter) and the Pinkertons before settling into the real meat of the adventure.  There was a lot of throwing people out of train windows.  There was a lot of Terror and Dig and Cool being used, with the occasional gunfire battle.  There were Pinkertons hiding in the restrooms and using earpiece microphones to transmit information down the train.  There were traits being burned in new and interesting ways as the players realized that a scene was headed for a Wash or that they just needed One More Hit in Terror to make things happen.

I was surprised at how much the players had to do with creating the scenes; I almost didn’t need to be there except to roll handfuls of dice and watch them get torn apart.  But the best part for me was setting up a Retribution. 

They had Miss Banks in friendly custody after Terrorizing the Pinkerton agent holding her hostage (Complication: I rescued Miss Banks from a brothel in Juarez once).  They had successfully Conned some of the Dawson Gang into watching her for them (Complication: I left the Dawson Gang under friendly circumstances).   And then the rest of the gang showed up, on flying steel horses, and shot the hell out of Agent Jayne.  “It was like they were gunning for him or something.”  Chalk one up to Complication: I left the Dawson Gang under unfriendly circumstances, and bring in an Operative loaded on Cool to help finish out the show. 

Jeffery Dawson learned an important lesson about being out-Cooled (do not stick a deed down your pants to keep it away from an Operative) and an Agent learned about getting Conned by a fast-talking pretty boy, right up until he got his deed taken away anyway.  Everyone got to play a role: Operative Sylvia may have been the one doing the crotch-grab, but she couldn’t do it without backup – and backup was provided in full.

Everyone left the table feeling satisfied, accomplished, and having thoroughly enjoyed themselves.  My quiet players opened up with very little prompting, and as promised the scenes pretty much ran without my guidance.  I still very much enjoy the dice mechanic for making scenes flow smoothly, and it was clear and easy for the players as well.  “Not so much math” was the main take-home comment.

We did notice that unless I am splitting my dice pool for a Principal or a Catch that I will never have more than 6 actions (one per side), so the massive dice pool of the GM tends to lend itself to longer runs which means I get to go first most of the time.  However, once the players get a turn they are likely to wipe out everything I have left, so it evens out.  I’m not attached to NPCs because I haven’t spent more than twenty seconds statting them up by deciding how many dice they get, so I don’t get as defensive when they get out-cooled because my investment is low.  As a GM, my biggest hurdle is getting over my fear of killing PC’s in mundane ways.  Shooting the hell out of Agent Jayne was, in fact, extremely satisfying for all of us and Operative Sylvia was statted up by the time the scene was completed. 

Still love this system and the next time we are looking for a one-nighter it will probably be the first off the shelf.

Split Personalities

When I was in college, we experimented with playing Shadowrun instead of our usual D&D game (2nd Edition, Skills and Powers, for those who are keeping track).  Our GM, who is a fantasy writer by trade and a phenomenal storyteller, learned enough of the rules to manage the game, and we set out to raid a corporate stronghold – a decker or two, a mage, a street sam, a rigger, and a couple of other supporting cast whose classes are lost in the mists of time. 
The raid went well, relatively speaking; as well as a Shadowrun ever goes, really.  We all got out alive.  The base was still standing.  The Matrix was fantasy-themed with kobolds for guard programs and dungeons for data storage, but that was sort of nice flavor.  When we were done, none of the electronics worked and something horrible had happened to the guard bots and most of the employees of the stronghold, and I do remember taking over a security cannon at one point and just opening fire randomly while I worked out the controls, but we got what we had come for and got out alive again.  We were expecting to get paid – maybe we did get paid – and we bought new things with our hard-earned cash: cyberware and new deck parts and explosives and such. 
And then Bad Things started happening.  Deck parts were booby-trapped.  Cyberware blew up.  Explosives did.  Our net for the entire Shadowrun was negative.  And we as players complained: we had bought these things with our reward money.  Why were they being taken away?  And our GM shook his head and said “I can’t reward you for what you did.  It’s just not right.”
Lesson learned: When playing under someone with an epic fantasy background and a strongly developed sense of literary justice, stick to epic fantasy.  Don’t be bad guys, because bad guys will get it in the end.
Compare this with the conscientious amorality of Hollowpoint (“Bad people killing bad people for bad reasons.”) and its positive delight in antisocial mayhem of all kinds, and it got me thinking about my own tabletop game (Pathfinder, for those keeping score) and the interplay between player and character morality.  It’s an ongoing game, and I know I have players who read the blog, so I’m not going to spoiler anything that shouldn’t already be adequately clear, but the current campaign arc deals primarily with big questions regarding alignment, actions, and their effects on one’s character.
My players are old friends: many of us have known each other for more than a decade, and some of us have been gaming together that long.  Some of us are married, and several of us have children, so our sessions are planned around work and graduate school and babysitting duties.  Many of us attend church together, so Sunday afternoons when everyone is in the same place anyway are an ideal time to game.  These days instead of pizza and Mountain Dew, we potluck or put things in the crockpot; we drink homebrewed beer or IBC from the bottle.  We have dice trays that were hand-turned by one of our players.  They are my friends: people who I know spend their time teaching youth and making families and working for social justice and being Good People. 
And they are playing characters whose moral spectrum rages from Vengeful Crusader to Ravening Sociopath.  Case in point: Party reaches next destination along the path to their end goal.  They discover that the inn in question has been burned to the ground and its inhabitants butchered; the scene is designed to engender maximum outrage.  I know my players pretty well by now, so filled with outrage they head off to the nearest town to track down the perpetrators of this particular heinous deed.
Turns out that the perpetrators in question are a frighteningly zealous cult purporting to follow the Lawful Good god, and one of the main instigators is the high priest.  He’s arrogant and obnoxious and unlikable and claims he’s doing his moral duty by exterminating evildoers in the realm.  He is absolutely certain – and even states he’s found proof – that the philanthropic organization the party is working for is actually a nest of evil.  So the party kills him, raids the treasure chest, pillages his memories and sets out to mop up the rest of the raiders. 
One of the party members has one of those one-off artifacts that get thrown into campaigns because it seems like a good idea at the time.  This particular one siphons memories: the last hour before death.  It is an evil thing and a corrupting thing which I give to parties periodically just to see what they will do with it.  Sometimes they destroy it.  This party, or at least the party member who has it, uses it – and frequently – to serve in lieu of interrogation.  At one point, he sat down next to a prisoner, tied and bound, and just rambled off all the keywords he knew of for twenty minutes or so before performing a coup de grâce on the poor man and then taking the next twenty minutes to sift through the information provided. 
Thus armed with information that once again indicated that the Zenith firmly believes the Phoenix Dawn is an agent of evil, and in possession of actual holy symbols of evil taken from the destroyed inn, the party proceeded to hunt down and exterminate all of the ringleaders of the raid, one at a time, in a night of terror.  Their only concession to justice was to ask a teenaged boy whether he regretted what he’d done before cutting him down.  When I mentioned that there was an infant child in one house they were plotting to burn down, I was treated to actual groans of irritation from my players that I’d dared to stand in the way of their fun. 
They stopped about two-thirds of the way down their list because they were running out of nighttime, hijacked a boat, and took the captain out onto the lake.  There was some debate about how far out to sail before dumping him overboard, at least, but the faction that wanted almost too far to swim seemed to win out.  As I was narrating the poor man’s swim back to shore, I was interrupted: “I cast Daze on him before he’s out of range.”  Very thorough, this band of vigilantes. 
This is probably the sort of behavior I am not supposed to condone.  But this sort of behavior is so very interesting to see, which is probably why the campaign is built around grey moral areas and dilemmas with no good answer, and why I let them run rampant without artificially imposing the rule of law on them.  After all, there is a curious symmetry to what the party have done to the Zenith, in light of what the Zenith did in the first place.  It’s more dramatic to let them figure that out all by themselves than to make someone explain it to them.
Besides, they were having so much fun.

GenCon Update: Hollow Earth Expedition

We've played the Hollow Earth Expedition/Ubiquity game system before in a few of their sample adventures which we enjoyed, and I have been watching Doctor Who since I was a child, so when it happened that the two coincided here at GenCon we signed up for slots.  A good time was had by all.  This is a little review of the Ubiquity/HEX system game Doctor Who: Is There a Doctor In the House?and mostly a review of the system itself.  There will be spoilers for Doctor Who in this review, I can't help it.  Feel free to skip the Game Specifics section if that bothers you.

Game Specifics: GM Scott had pregenerated Companion character sheets ranging across the time spectrum; it so happened that we selected our sheets so they were arrayed around the table in chronological Companion order - from Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart to Sarah Jane Smith to K-9 Mark III to Ace to Captain Jack Harkness to Amy to Rory.  GM Scott had done something interesting with the characters: on the back of the sheets was the timeline reference for that particular character, as well as some keynotes to remind what precisely each character knew. Sarah Jane had not yet met K-9.  Jack was placed shortly after the events of The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, well prior to gaining immortality.  Rory (wearing centurion gear, of course) had the entire span of his very long memory available to him, but Amy was taken from the time shortly after Rory had been erased in Cold Blood and so effectively did not know who he was.  We spent a few minutes figuring out how up-to-date everyone was on the current season so as not to spoiler anything on accident, and then the action rolled.
In short: timey-wimey stuff happened and the companions were all dropped onto the fields of an 1860's British isle. The Doctor was trapped.  The Tardis wasn't working.  It had all the makings of an episode, and GM Scott did an excellent job keeping the action moving.  There was the Brigadier heroically facing down a very large tree-person with his service revolver.  There was Sarah Jane being handed a robotic dog and told to "aim the nose."  There was a can of Nitro-9 and a successful check to get the fuse mostly right.  There was Captain Jack informing Rory that there was no need to get period-appropriate garb as "I like you just fine in that."  There was a lot of Rory protecting Amy against her will, and Amy stomping off on her own affairs.  There were gadgets and gizmos with odd names and blinking lights.  There was a Sonic Screwdriver and a lot of pointing it at things and waving it hopefully.  There was also, as always, a last-minute wrapup just as things seemed to be running out of time to end happily.
I walked away from the session very satisfied and entertained, also wondering where four hours had gone so quickly.  We had a great time and I think that thanks for that are due both to GM Scott's prior playtesting and careful preparation and to the players he got, who made their characters really come to life.  High marks for the game!

Second Round:  Later that night we picked up a handful of our gaming friends and a few six-packs of cider and craft beer.  Flush with new Ubiquity system toys we decided to give another sample adventure a try, using the pregenerated sample characters (HEX actually comes with a lot of pregenerated characters - downloadable here if you are interested - which serve both to save time for playing with first-timers and to demonstrate well-built characters with a lot of variety.)  The results were no less spectacular despite only about fifteen minutes' worth of prep time on GM Matt's part: when our plane went down through a rift in the sky and landed in the Hollow Earth, there was larceny and gunslinging and giant moving steamer trunks with fangs (Flaw: Poor Vision and Perception 6, played with an exquisitely humorous touch).  Much like the Doctor Who game, the story is in the story - a collective narrative formed that sometimes threatened to take on a life of its own and leave without worrying about any silly GM adjucation.   We got through the scenario in 2-3 hours with adventure to spare.

Gameplay: This was my first time under an experienced Hollow Earth GM, and I am no less a fan of the system because of it.  The flexibility of Ubiquity at base makes it fairly setting-agnostic: characters are a collection of stats and traits that can be customized to fit your particular needs.  This is a system in which the character sheet describes the character rather than defining it, allowing you to craft a character whose stats actually add depth and personality.  Furthermore, the Ubiquity system deliberately rewards good roleplay with tangible effects.
There are motivations and flaws: playing either well (For example: Amy's obstinacy causing the party trouble; Rory doing something foolishly heroic for love) results in gaining Style Points, which can be traded in down the road to either gain extra dice on a roll or to soak damage.  Exile Games actually makes physical Style Points, which look a lot like repurposed poker chips, and GM Scott had a pile of them to fling at players as the game progressed.  We gained a lot of them.  We spent them just as freely, whenever a little more oomph was required to keep a suitably epic feel to the action - or, in the case of the Brig, whenever his service revolver failed to stop the advancing tree-people.  On my part, having a pile of Style Points in front of me gave me more leeway to send Amy charging headlong into danger despite my player's inclination to protect the character, which lent itself to more accurate roleplaying.

Mechanics: This session was advertised as "no experience needed" and we got some players who had never heard of HEX/Ubiquity before.  Explaining the character sheets and game mechanics took perhaps ten or fifteen minutes at most, and some of that was repeating it as players trickled in.  There's not much roll playing in the system at all.  The die system in Ubiquity is a stripped-down dice pool mechanic: you take your rating in a skill, if you have it, a number based on an appropriate attribute if you don't; you apply any bonuses or penalties from your character sheet or special circumstances; you roll that many dice and you count successes.  Each die has a 50-50 chance of success or failure; you choose your mechanic.  I use evens.  Rory switched from evens to odds halfway through the game after failing repeatedly.  Some people use high-low, but that's too much math for me.  If you really don't relish the idea of rolling a handful of dice and picking through them you can just take the average: use half of your die pool as your number of successes, flipping a coin if your dice pool is an odd number.  Compare your successes to a target number.  It's quick and easy and I still get to roll whole handfuls of dice, which I find to be extremely satisfying.

Combat: Taking out the tree-people the first time was smooth and juicy, aided by K-9's nose laser and Captain Jack's 14-die sonic blaster.  We lost two players to family obligations before the next combat, which did showcase the downside of the Ubiquity mechanic: combat can drag.  It's up to the players and the GM to keep things interesting  as you roll a handful of dice, and the GM rolls a handful of dice, and you cancel out your defense successes against their attack successes and take some generic damage or not, and then do the whole thing again.  The Brig had an inspiring stream of orders going which did give us extra dice, but we were far less well-armed than the first encounter and I suspect the plant people were stronger as well; it began to turn into an endurance test after a few rounds.  Thankfully, this did not go unnoticed: GM Scott had the insight and skill to gracefully wind down the combat several rounds before it probably should have ended, and handwave aside several guards later in the adventure to spare us another slug-fest.
I believe that combat should be an integral part of an adventure, not an interruption in its flow: too long and players are exhausted and lose the sense of high epic drama; too short and it's hardly worth doing.  Our first encounter was scary and satisfying, the second not so much so.  I'd estimate that for me Ubiquity gets three, maybe four rounds before there is a definite need to add spice to avoid the endurance test factor; this is a little too short for my tastes but your mileage may vary.
There are some built-in mechanics for making boss fights palatable: a flanking mechanic means you are subtracting defense dice every time you add an additional attacker against a single target.  I have not looked at the magic supplement yet so there may be spice aplenty in that as well.  It may be that Amy's single weapon was a dead tree branch and so there wasn't much variety I could work with.  Regardless, I am far more satisfied with the Ubiquity mechanics as they relate to actual roleplaying than I was with the combat in the system. It's far from terrible, but it is definitely designed to be an underpinning to some epic narrative skills rather than stand on its own.

Replayability: The characters in Ubiquity are designed as people rather than collections of statistics: they have goals and motivations and hopes and dreams and histories.  The system revolves around playing those out, and I sense a high campaign quotient out of it.  Character advancement is done through an XP purchase system rather than leveling, allowing players to customize how their characters grow and change.  The sample adventures that HEX provides are all keyed toward trapping characters in the Hollow Earth itself, with a goal toward a sustained campaign arc - probably of moderate to epic length; there are endless possibilities for what happens inside - partly dependent on how or whether the party gets out. 

Verdict: We already had the HEX core rulebook, and so the decision being made was whether to invest more money in the system.  Both Matt and I tend to run games more focused on roleplaying than combat, and we were satisfied enough that we picked up the GM screen, an Enny-nominated module, and the Secrets of the Surface World expansion (sorcery, psychic powers, and weird science).  It's the best GM screen I've ever seen: sturdy enough to stun a rabid lemur with and loaded with four pages of useful information.  I haven't read through the expansion or the module yet.

If you are a GM with a heavy storytelling focus and you want to run an adventure or a campaign with a lot of character development and high pulp drama, I'm happy to recommend HEX/Ubiquity despite the combat - just plan ahead and read some good old-fashioned pulp novels (Ian Fleming's James Bond books are also a good resource) to get your "bam" and "pow" up to speed.
If you depend on the game mechanics - magic items and skills and powers and weapons - to keep things interesting, this may not be the system for you.  Shame, though.  I still recommend some pulp novels.

GenCon Update: Hollowpoint

GM Jeremy offered to run a Hollowpoint session at GenCon.  Here's the review.


Short version: Rules-light, action heavy. The mechanics are nicely tuned to accomplish precisely what the game is aimed to do, which is get through problems with brutal efficiency. It is *not* all about killing everything in sight (I went Con and Dig heavy), although I will admit to a real enjoyment of being able to take down a helicopter with a set of brass testicles.


Long version: Had a great time with a group of strangers - we took about ten minutes to go over basic mechanics and character creation, threw together our notecards, and hit the ground. As has been previously mentioned, the speed of character gen had me worried I was not going to make a character I could connect with, but the Traits really add depth and nuance and personality very quickly. 

Three players, one GM. Only two of us have ever played together before, but we had a rhythm going by the end of the first scene. It just fell into place, which was very satisfying. 

We hit the ground running and didn't stop until we locked down the research base and mowed down a bunch of innocent bystanders just for tagging along. There were interrogation sessions with brandy and gunpoint. There were unfortunate episodes with C4. There was the bit where Steve got tired of negotiating and just shot the schmuck with the car we wanted in full view of the security guards at the gate, and realizing I had just enough pairs left in Con to keep them thinking we were Special Ops. There were a lot of oh s**t moments and fast thinking to get out of them. There was the bit where Matt ran out of Cool and slid the car sideways into the defense perimeter after it got closed to us. There was trying to figure out how to keep in the storyline and burn your traits (hence: brass testicles). There was a lot of killing innocent bystanders and not a lot of comparing hit points or armor class or mucking around with special abilities. This is a streamlined game that is as efficient as the professionals you are playing.

It's interesting how knowing you can just toss your character aside when they become useless to you makes you willing to do all sorts of silly high-risk things. There's some strategy to gaming the game mechanics - particularly when it comes to asking for help from others and whether you want to give it to them or whether you want to deny them for more dice. There's a definite advantage in teamwork, which is really nice to find. 

It's a game for grownups: for mature roleplayers who know what roleplaying is about and are comfortable with playing ruthlessly efficient people who do not worry about scruples or morals. It's a game for experienced people: this is probably not the game to start out someone new to gaming with (unless they have a lot of improv experience), since so much of the story is player-driven and requires audience participation, and because there are so many dice being thrown around that I can see a complete newcomer being overwhelmed. On the other hand, I have a pretty steep learning curve for rules systems, and by the end of the first scene I felt comfortable and competent at what was going on, so either GM Jeremy is a stellar teacher or the rules are slick and easy to learn - or maybe a little of both. 

Do not plan to be running a long-term epic campaign in Hollowpoint. That's not what it seems to be designed for. It is a fast-paced bloodbath where one faceless agent replaces another at need: you do not need to be too attached to your character because there isn't a lot to be attached to and you may have to toss them aside for the good of the team. I can see setting up a campaign, but it would have to be more about story than about characters, which is not how I normally think as a GM, and I wonder whether the heavy action focus and cycling of characters would get exhausting over the long term. 

On the other hand, there is something immensely satisfying about finding a system that seems custom-built for a one-night one-off playdate, or for those times when you are waiting in a 90-minute line at GenCon for your Will Call tickets and need something to do. There is mayhem and humor and action, and the players have a lot of control over the situation, which leads invariably to Complications. There isn't a lot of that out there, and especially not with the sort of setting-agnostic flexibility that Hollowpoint displays.

Final verdict: Gritty, gory, full of stories and for grownups only. Hollowpoint is the kind of game that will create "remember when you..." moments, and lots of them. Absolutely loved it and absolutely recommend it.