Barking Alien's What are you good at? GM Challenge!

Barking Alien posited a list of questions for GMs, and I shall answer the challenge. The questions (and answers for me) are:

What genres, settings or games in general do you GM best? Which do you think totally rock?

Top Five:

Dungeons & Dragons - It sort of goes without saying...

Basic Roleplaying - I don't run this as often as I'd like, but every game is memorable.

GURPS Horror - I've used GURPS for some really strange horror games.

GURPS Space (not often, but always an experience when I do)

DC Heroes (MEGS edition) RPG - may never happen again, but still the best campaign and system I ever ran in the 90's.

Which games could you use work on? That is, if your group wants to play one of these games, you yourself would probably recommend different GM.

Bottom Three:

World of Darkness - I can't abide the core conceit of this universe, and would do it no justice. My version of this universe ends with a stake in the heart or silver bullet of every vampire and lycanthrope.

FATE (any version) - I spent a long time trying to discern how it worked, and when FATE Core came along I finally figured it out and was severely underwhelmed. An RPG for a different breed of gamer.

Hero System - despite owning all of it and being endlessly intrigued the actual process of pulling the trigger on this monstrosity is beyond me. My one attempt to run a Space Hero campaign was thwarted by my players who much preferred GURPS anyway.

What elements of gamemastering do you do best? What aspects do you nail more often than not?

Top Five:

World Building - d'uh.

Descriptive narration - I have been accused of making every orc's death meaningful and every chamber pot interesting.

Player Accomplishment - it's more art than science but I think I've got a generally harmonious balance between "difficulty of the job" and "wow we pulled this off" in my games, such that the players do feel genuinely rewarded when they figure stuff out. This is why I never really understand the core conceit of a system like Gumshoe...it's for GMs who don't know how to get what's needed to the players, basically.

Consistency - I show up 99% of the time every wednesday or try to make sure there is a sub GM if I can't make it. (Less consistent on Saturdays, but gotta slack somewhere!) Honestly, if you like this hobby, the best way to engage with it is to find a spot where you guarantee you will be present and running a game for 4-5 hours a week, every time. People will show, and soon you will have a loyal gang of players who appreciate you.

Agency - I work hard to imbue players with sense of agency and reinforce it. This makes everyone much more invested in the experience.

Which elements are still a work in progress? Name some things that you don't do as well as you like.

Bottom Three:

Keeping the Party Together - I am great at providing incentive for them to split up, terrible at getting them back together. Even when I use death as a motivator.

Wandering Eye - I sometimes get horribly distracted by whatever fancy thing is attracting me at the moment, which takes time away from whatever game I should be prepping for. This blog is almost like a clinical diagnosis of what my wife calls my "gamer ADD."

Love D&D Too Much - I really would like to run more space, horror, zombie apocalypse and planetary romance genre games, but D&D is just too seductive for me to escape. Even when I am feeling burnt out and need a break, I can't escape!

Friday Blaaaaaaaaaghhhhhh! Rift and stuff

Well, I feel I earned a well-deserved break for a few days from the tumultuous October blog-o-thon I put myself through. This was a busy week for me, with work ramping up dramatically and calling for a lot of overtime, and of course that whole election thing (and regardless of party affiliation I think we can all comfortably be happy that the victories were decisive and that we won't spend weeks or months watching this get resolved in recounts, recalls and the courts. Yay for democracy!)

I've played Rift like a murderous fiend for the last six or so weeks. Raptr terrifies me with its numbers as I realize that it is still realistically possible to immerse one's self in a MMORPG even with huge work and family commitments, if you can keep yourself to a firm schedule. On the other hand a reasonable chunk of my play time is really "Kalitherios or Alidastra standing around in Sanctuary while their all-seeing god-controller CPU is AFK managing his 11 month old." Which is to say, I have sometimes logged on at 8 AM and then noticed I was still logged on a few hours later. Oddly, I rarely get kicked from the game for being AFK.

Rift has really sucked me in, though. I look forward to relaxing a bit on my playtime, as most of my effort was focused on getting one character to level 50....and by Jove I did! Kalitherios, ascended Guardian on the Faeblight RP server is now level 50. I was a bit nonplussed (and excited) to learn that there was an entirely new leveling system that kicks in then, involving souls, shards and an achievment point concept that is a bit reminiscent of what D&D Online's rank bonuses are like, except all end-loaded for the endgame. There's a ton of instanced content I have yet to scratch the surface on, and I will need to look to grouping to do much of it. Fortunately Rift makes this trivial and bearable.

Rift is one of the new generation of MMOs that tries to actively build easy grouping (or as I like to call it automatic grouping) into the play experience. It does not assume you must talk to people and be nice to them to get into a group....it does not assume you need to communicate at all; it just happens. This really is a good thing for those of us who like our MMOs like we like real life. Journey through your typical day and figure out how often you willingly engage random strangers in conversation, then proceed to invite them on your shopping or work quest (extroverts leave the room for this question, please!) Doesn't happen all that often, does it? I've always wondered why our MMOs naturally assumed we all wanted to talk to strangers voluntarily, when in truth much of your average MMO's content should be looked at as more like the kind of shared experience you get when you go to a theater, or drive a car on the freeway. We all are cooperating to get the job or experience done, and while we might have friends in the car or at the theater with us, 99.9% of the time we're not engaging total strangers in conversation while we're at it. And yes that does mean I'm equating bad PUGs to a car wreck or that talkative person in the theater!

In the meantime, since I suffer from alt-itis (and have 10 active characters in Rift) the Storm Legion prelude quests and instant adventures are happening all over the place and are clearly clever mechanisms by Trion to help aspiring or slow levelers boost their XP to level up characters. You can join an instant adventure in Sanctuary or Meridian and pretty much guarantee going from level 10 to 25 in about five hours. You can reasonably expect to jump 2 or 3 levels per hour afterward if you remain dedicated. Don't try to join a raid group and go AFK though (the temptation will be there, since you accrue raid group XP regardless of effort) or the "work for your share" crowd will kick you out. I've been more than working for my share, and all my alts are now somewhere in the mid to late 20's in level. I think these massive Storm Legion assault adventures won't end until next year, so there's a couple months yet to take advantage of them.



Rift is even creeping into my tabletop experience. My latest plot line (any of my players stop reading here!*) for the Wednesday group involves an eradariin (red elf-the bad elves in my setting) sorceress who intends to use an ancient fey relic called the Heart of the Wood to corrupt a planar gate to the realm of Arborea; she plans to force the gate open using an Astral Tether which will let the Heart of the Wood pass through. When this happens, Arborea will begin to transform into a new feywild.

The reason for this is simple: in the Realms of Chirak the feywild was destroyed, the entire faerie realm the first victim of the apocalypse that wiped out the gods and almost destroyed the world. The plane of the feywild was eaten entirely by Ga'thon the destroyer god, who shortly thereafter perished when he was slain by the protector gods in a Pyrrhic victory. Ga'Thon's corpse formed an entire mountain range, and within that range is the expulsion of detritus that was the feywild, a great wall of stone in which is frozen the terror-stricken, petrified remains of the feyfolk that were annihilated in this destruction. It had lasting ramifications, as many of the feyfolk that survived in the mortal plane were driven mad by the loss, and the feywild, a heaven-like place to which fey souls could travel for reincarnation after death, meant that there was no longer a fey afterworld, either; now, when elves and faeries and other kin die, they are likely to return as terrifying undead of different sorts if precautions are not taken.

Arborea: where the REAL eladrin roam

So this sorceress actually feels she is doing a good thing, but her motivations are cruel; she knows she can't just corrupt an entire godly plane like Arborea, but it has the "essence" necessary to jumpstart the process. So she intends to force the portal open, to allow her artifact to pass through, which will start a subtle change (thing magical strangelets) in Arborea; and while they will be stopped eventually in the planar realm by divine forces, will still channel unchecked** into the mortal world through the open portal, causing an inevitable shift in the mortal plane into a new feywild. Which may very well be bad for all sorts of odd reasons, not the least of which is the adverse effect the laws of the fey realms have on simple mortals, who cannot readily handle the weird time effects of the feywild, among other things.

So yes....some of this was brewing for a while as an idea for a future plot, but my obsession with Rift and the idea of planar invasions made it percolate into reality. I may toy more with the idea; Chirak has for many years now been assumed to be a world where reality is only loosely held together due to the severe damage of the near-apocalypse, and there are supposed to be many, many planar rifts across the land, caused by this fraying of reality. In the past the biggest rift tale I integrated into a campaign incolved the Abyssal Rift off the southwestern coast of Espanea, but I have only really focused on a few minor permanent rifts since then. This new campaign arc may well see an effort at expanding the concept.

Okay, I think I've blathered on enough. Maybe I'll finally do a review of the Leon Kennedy campaign from Resident Evil 6 next week (working on Chris Redfield's campaign now). I may also talk more about Tera soon, which I am slowly but surely playing more of (I love its combat, and its world has a different enough feel from Rift that I still want to explore it). Tera is going F2P through level 28 soon, for those interested and not keen to commit any money.

Impractical armor is impractical

* I don't normally post current game lore/plots on the blog to avoid spoilers, so this is a rare exception

** In Chirak all the old gods are dead and the young avatars and demiurges are too weak and still mortal, thus lacking the ability to protect the realm against such a catastrophe.

Brainstorming Things to Blog About

My expression of Burnout is not as bad as the clinical diagnosis, nor is it specifically about gaming in general...I know that behind this I am experiencing a lot of problems with work, and the slow but methodical fashion in which my professional career is unhinging in slow motion. A side effect of this, I think, is that the sense that I am just going through the motions with some of my hobbies, and not experiencing real satisfaction or stress relief from them is a byproduct of bigger issues I'm dealing with.

That said, in thinking about stuff I could use to maintain creative focus while also getting out of the rut I feel I am in creatively, I came up with a few interesting ideas. Starting this week and next I hope to expand on some of them.

Blogs are a weird thing. They're fairly personal (or can be), enough so that it's easy to write for yourself and if you develop a following it can be entirely incidental to the personal intent of the author. There's a whole different sort of blog, the one designed for promotion of the author or the author's ideas, goals or focus. Then, of course, there's the professional blog...where the author is perhaps one of many voices and the blog itself is a medium for the expansion or focus on another entity entirely.

I've treated this blog as I intended when I started it out early last year: as a means of motivating myself to write and stay focused on writing. As such I have written what whimsy prompted me to do, rather than perhaps what was best to generate hits. I've also kept this blog away from advertisements and generally (for the most part) ignored metrics. So what this means is, if I feel like writing weird stuff for it, I feel no compulsion to do otherwise. 

Anyway, the ideas I have are as follows:

1. I'm going to do "thirty one days of horror" starting October 1st, and carrying through until the end of the month. The goal is to focus on one horror film, book or game each day as a tribute to my appreciation for the genre and also because...you know...Halloween.

2. I think I need a D&D break, for a bit. I've actually been on burnout mode for a long time, but this weekend was one more reminder of it. The reasons are complex, ranging from the fact that I've been engaging in RPGs as a hobby for too long, I feel like I'm in a creative rut, that "special something" I used to feel for D&D in particular has been absent for a while now, and my sense of community with the hobby has been badly eroded by the internet.

A break from D&D does not mean a break from gaming entirely, though. I am not sure how I'd fill my time without gaming. I have other RPGs I'd really like to devote the time to exploring. Chief on the list are The Mutant Epoch and Conspiracy X, followed by my old favorite, Call of Cthulhu. I'd love to get into some other RPGs again as well, more interesting and unconventional genres that could be supported by BRP, Savage Worlds or GURPS. I need to try this, for my own sake of enjoyment.

3. I haven't posted much this year on my other hobbies and interests, namely archaeology and astronomy. I really feel like I should focus more on this. I hardly ever read fiction anymore; all of my interests as a reader center around non-fiction and science. I have also developed a keen fascination for cold war history, would like to talk more about stuff like this. It takes a bit more effort than the typical ramblings of a blog, but I feel it would be worth it.

So if you see a wider range of interest percolating through the blog soon, this is why! D&D probably isn't going away as a topic for me....I do enjoy it....I just feel I need to diversify my focus a bit, to keep from eroding my interest in the game. We'll see how it goes.