Ravenous Role Playing

Back in the early 1990s, one of my roommates, Jason, went on an extended vacation for 6 weeks. My other roommate and I decided to see what kind of RPG we could make in the time he was gone. We worked day and night on the system and unveiled “Legends” to Jason upon his return. We played the game for close to a year and continually refined the system to where it was less laughable (the system itself, not the scenarios I cooked up) and ran much more smoothly than the original dice system we came up with.

Many years later, I pulled out the Word Perfect document, converted it to Word and started working on it some more… only to shelve it for lack of time.

Every few months, I get a wild hair to jump back into Legends and see what I can make of it. I think it’s a great system and has real promise at being successful. There are a few rough edges to the system that I need to work out, but just don’t have the time. Maybe, someday, hopefully, with luck, I’ll finish college and be able to devote some more time and energy to finishing off the game.

Wish me luck.

Pomek was my D&D 3.0 Elven Monk. He was the highest level character I’ve ever had. I managed to get him to 13th level before the “great domination” by an evil spellcaster brought the campaign to a screeching halt. I have quite a few stories about the hapless monk and his friends, but I’ll just share one with you today.

While roaming through goblinoid-infested woods, we were ambushed by some hobgoblins. The leader had some boots of speed on and used them to great effect during the fight. We ended up killing all but the leader, and he cowardly (and intelligently) ran away. Even with his boots of speed, he couldn’t out pace Pomek. My unlucky Monk caught up to the vile creature and the one-on-one fight ensued along with lots and lots of bad die rolling. I had hasted myself through a potion, and the hobgoblin used the haste power from his boots. Between his dual wielding and my flurry of blows, we were throwing enough attacks to bring down a small village in seconds… if we could only hit!

The fight drew to a close when I fumbled, rolled on the fumble chart, and critically hit myself in the head, knocking myself out. About that time the rest of the party closed in on the scene of the fight and the hobgoblin ran off into the woods to never be seen again. I finally came to with the comment, “Damn, that hobgob was good!” After that fight, Pomek decided hastes threw off his perfectly timed and well trained attacks. He forwent hastes from that point on… to much greater success.

Back in high school, I ran a Top Secret S/I campaign that lasted a reasonable amount of time. It started during the middle of summer vacation and ran almost until the end of my Freshman year. The game went very well for it being a new system to everyone. The game system had just been out a year, and there were already a decent number of supplements (which I now have all of them in my collection!) My players had a great time playing ORION agents working against the evil WEB organization. I decided to throw in some fantastical elements into the game. This was before I managed to get my hands on the source book that introduced psionics and what-not to the game, so I was totally winging it.

My plan was to have the players come to the final culmination of the campaign against the evil mastermind in his lair where he had setup a rig to inject psionic and superhuman abilities into himself. The machine wasn’t quite ready yet, and the mastermind (I forget what name I had given him) ran delaying tactics against the group until the machine finally came online. In the end, the players burst into the room and started blazing away with their guns. After many missed shots, Mike, bless his dice, hit with a critical to the head on the Bad Guy. He went down like a lump of wet meat and that was pretty much the end of the game. To wrap up, I decided the minions would surrender since their leader had been blown to bits.

I described the room to everyone, including the nefarious device of Dr. So-And-So (the evil masterminds always seem to be doctors, right?). I did my best to include details on stray wires, shooting sparks and made it sound like the device, which had a piece of head gear attached to it, held a great deal of danger and unknown features. As dutiful players, they listened to my description and before I could finish asking, “What do you do now?” Mark (Mike’s brother) jumped from his chair, knocking it over, and exalted, “I hook myself up!”

Damn.

I hadn’t planned on that eventuality. I figured they would dismantle the device, or rig it to blow or bring in ORION scientists to study it. I never, not even once, considered that a player would stick the gear on his head and flip the switch. It goes to show that no matter how many eventualities and contingencies you plan on, the players will always think of something radically different, yet totally logical.

So Mark jumped into the chair at the base of the machine, strapped in and flipped the switch.

What did I do?

The only thing I could do and be fair about it.

I gave him psionic and supernatural powers.

It may sound like it would unbalance his character, but it didn’t really. The powers weren’t all that great and not all that reliable. We didn’t play for very many more sessions before we moved on to something else, but for the few games Mark had his powers, we all had a hoot with them. I don’t regret allowing it to happen one bit, but I did learn a valuable lesson: Don’t let the Bad Guy’s uber-powerful munchkin-like toys fall into the hands of the Good Guys.

Back in high school, I encountered one of the best GMs of my day. He ran three games: Paranoia, Hero Fantasy and Champions. Buddy was an amazing GM because he knew the rules inside and out. He reached savant-level knowledge of point costs, build outs, rules adjudication and every other aspect of the game. I aspire to be like Buddy some day when it comes to those systems.

When I first came across Buddy he was running a Champions game at the FLGS, and it happened in the time slot just before my regular AD&D game. I had time to spare, so I asked (rather shyly, I might add) if I could join his game. He opened me with welcome arms, and said he would gladly make me a character during the week, and I could join in the next Saturday. To keep things simple, he asked me to pick a comic book character that I would like to play, and he would build me out a PC. I was on a Silver Surfer kick at the time (and he’s still my favorite comic book character), so I picked that character to go with. He asked me for a name, and I totally blanked. I didn’t want to just go with “Silver Surfer” because that name was already taken. I figured I would go original, and I spluttered out, “Silva.”

He was happy with the name, so I figured I hadn’t committed a faux pas early on in the game. He created my character during the week, and I joined in the group the following Saturday. I had an absolute blast with Silva. I’d swoop all over the place. One session I learned, the hard way, what an OAF (obvious accessible focus) really meant in Champions nomenclature. A Bad Guy took away my surf board, and I was reduced to walking/running everywhere for the rest of the game. I bemoaned my pathetic fate of being bound by gravity and played it up quite well. I still had my ranged blast, though, and no one could take that away from me. Life was good.

I still miss gaming with Buddy. Moving away from my home state was a hard thing to do, and leaving behind Buddy, Mike, Tiffany, Chris, Jason and the rest of the gang was the hardest part of moving away. I try to get a good Champions/Hero game going from time-to-time, but it rarely gets beyond the character generation phase of things. Everyone seems to love making characters, but doesn’t delve too deeply into the system when it come to gaming. *sigh*

A former roommate of mine and a friend of his from back in his home state of Illinois came up with an RPG of their own called Wasted World. The game was brutal. The setting was fierce. Characters died left and right, and it was rare to go through less than three characters in a night. This wasn’t much of a big deal because it took all of 8 minutes flat to create a new character and jump back into the action. The first few times I died, I lamented the loss of the characters and the loving backgrounds I had constructed in my head, but had not yet had time to write down. Then I realized that the characters were nothing more than a set of stats, some armor and a gun or three to use against everyone else, including the other characters.

I distinctly remember a particular purple d20 the GM would pull out when he needed a 20. In the game system, if you wanted to make a called shot, you had to roll a natural 20. Fair enough. Called shots to the head were almost always killing blows. When a particular character was really whipping up on the Bad Guys, the GM would pull out his special purple d20, declare the called shot to the head and roll in front of everyone. Nine out of ten times he’d roll a 20. Damn.

After a while, I decided that it would be cool to publish Wasted World. It was the ultimate post-apocalyptic, hack-and-slash game I had ever come across. I haggled with the GM, and bought the game, and his damn d20, for a grand total of $25. A few months later, he decided he wanted to run the game for some other friends and asked to borrow Wasted World (there was a single copy in existence, and still is as far as I know) to run. I got stupid and loaned him the game never to see it again. He soon afterwards moved back to Illinois with the game. Damn.

That’s OK. I still have his d20 and I use it for Paranoia these days. Muahahahaah.

More years ago than I want to consider, I ran a fairly long-term Cyberpunk 2020 (CP2020) game for my roommates and a few friends. We were all single, working at “The Slut” and had more time than money. We’d play CP2020 for hours and hours, and it was a blast. Justin went through more characters than anyone else, but Vince and J.J. managed to hold on to their characters for the length of the game. J.J.’s solo finally went cyberpsycho (on purpose) when he decided to bow out of the game and became a recurring bad guy in the campaign. Vince’s character was a rockerboy named Genghis that managed to survive machine gun emplacements, falling from an AV-7 from a fairly decent height and managed to shoot down a helicopter with a single shot from his pistol. The rockerboy was such an incredibly lucky S.O.B. that it made me sick to run the game. There were even a few times I put him in situations I knew he’d never get out of, and he always managed to do so.

There was a scenario (I think from the back of the main CP2020 book) that they were running through to rescue a scientist captured by a megacorp. The daughter of the scientist was a groupie of the rockerboy and emplored him to get his bodyguards to free her father from imprisonment and she’d be his faithfully and forever. The rockerboy conceeded, but refused to send his bodyguards (the other characters) where he wouldn’t go himself. In the end they made their way through the compound, and got to the scientist. On the way out, however, they set off all sorts of alarms and triggered an armed response by the remaining guards. Something the PCs didn’t know was that when this happened the helicopter on the roof took to the air and began searching the grounds of the compound. I kept a mental track of where the helicopter was just in case they chose to exit the main building when the ‘copter was across the compound from them.

As it turns out, Genghis the rockerboy burst from the building right in front of the flying death machine. The ‘copter’s pilot won initiative and unleashed the Wrath of God on Genghis in the form of a .50 caliber nose-mounted mini gun. I just knew that I was about to paste Vince’s character, and in CP2020, I don’t pull punches. Ever. In the end, I rolled halfway decent to hit him, and then started rolling damage. I never rolled more 1′s and 2′s in my entire life as I did during that set of die rolls. The end result? 2 points of damage got through Genghis’s Metal Gear (which was his affectation as a rockerboy, so he wore it everywhere, even on stage.) I did tear his Metal Gear all to shreds and dented the crap out of it. It was still serviceable, and Vince declared the pock marks, scorches and dents added character to the armor, and he never did repair it.

Oh. and the single shot to take down the helicopter? Yeah. Vince rolled a 10 on his d10 roll for his to-hit. Which in the CP2020 system meant he got to roll another d10 and add the result and continue to do so until he was done rolling 10s. I forget the number of 10s that he rolled in a row, but the grand total of the to hit roll was a 57. I remember that number now and always will. 57. Fifty-f’ing-Seven. It was such an insanely high roll (“impossible” ranks at about 30 in the CP2020 system) that I declared he shot the pilot square in the face with his attack and killed him instantly. The ‘copter went down in a heap and exploded into flames that lit the night sky while the group (with scientist in tow) ran away back to Night City and the safety of their hotel rooms.

Now that I’ve typed this up, I find that I miss playing CP2020. I can’t see to find anyone these days that wants to play the game. Ah well… I still have my Tales from the Table.

A former player/roommate of mine would only play elves. Period. No exceptions. Unfortunately for me (and fortunately for him) he moved away while I was in the middle of planning an all dwarf campaign. The campaign sounded like a blast to me, but I knew he would hate it and would probably commit suicide as soon as he reached elven lands, just so he could play an elf.

It’s not much of a story, I’ll admit, but there’s a moral to the story that is longer than the story itself. I’m not Aesop, but here’s the reason for my tale.

As a player, be flexible, try different things, experiment and have fun. Sure, I love elves just as much as the next guy. My first D&D character was an elf, and I love him dearly. However, in the 26 years I’ve been gaming, I’ve branched out and played every “normal” race and quite a few others than are not normal. In real life, I’m always going to be a human of average looks, average height, average weight and more than average careers. However, when I sit down at the gaming table, I want to become more. More what? More than average. If I have sucky stats due to poor dice rolls during character creation, so be it. I’ll hype up the weaknesses and make a great character trait or three out of the numbers. If I have great stats (which is more rare than the lower sets of stats), then I’ll find some character traits to hang on the numbers and play that up as well. I guess the moral of my story for the players is to be more than you could normally be through the act of role playing.

As a GM, be generous. Allow your players to stretch their personal boundaries by allowing them to play characters that let them be someone totally different. I also highly recommend that you push your players when they appear to be in a rut and playing the same character over and over. Perhaps start up a new campaign where you’ve written up character backgrounds and hand them out “at random” but make sure the right players get the right backgrounds to help them find more out about themselves than they would have on their own. I’ve never actually tried this because most of my players push themselves to be bigger, better, faster and more. However, if I see this happening, I won’t hesitate to break out my creativity on their behalf.

Remember, elves are awesome and cool, but they are never awesome and cool 100% of the time. Try something new!

Quite a few years ago I was running a D&D 3.0 game with a great group of gamers. I was running Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil by Monte Cook, and we were having a hoot with the adventure. Partway through the module, a Dragon article came out (I think it was Dragon…) that had a crazy idea in it: retreat forward. The concept goes like this:

If you are sure to win the current fight and most of the enemies are down, there’s no sense in the entire party dogging on the remaining 2-3 enemies. A fighter-type should take on the remainders and the rest of the party should go ahead and open up the next door to see what’s there and move into it to take on the next challenge.

Sounds crazy, right? Well, in a way it is because you really don’t know what’s through the next door. However, if the group is powerful enough to handle the next door (or two, or three) then it really speeds up the rate at which the group can move through a dungeon.

In this case, the party took the idea to heart. If memory serves there were a series of five rooms with #1 leading to #2 and #3, and #2 leading to #4 and #5. I’d draw you a map if I had time. The group blasted through room #1 and before the last of the undead fell, they opened the doors to room #2 and #3 and assaulted the undead and the evil clerics waiting for them. I gave them a full round of surprise since the Bad Guys didn’t have a chance to hear and react to the combat on the other side of the doors. Before room #2 was cleared, they opened the doors to #4 and #5 as well and “invited” the Bad Guys in those rooms to join the fray. About this time room #1 was totally cleared and the fighter was able to join the fight in room #3.

So now, I had two combats going on in the party. Room #3 was in full melee, and room #2 contained all of the Bad Guys from rooms #2, #4 and #5. Room #3 fell quickly, and the characters in that room raced around the corner to join the fun in room #2. The large battle in room #2 was pure chaos, but the party eventually prevailed. It seemed that the Bad Guys really were hog-tied by the mass of bodies. They couldn’t let loose with their area affect spells for fear of hitting their own people and the party had many targets of opportunity (not attacks of opportunity, mind you) because of the large crush of bodies arrayed before them.

This sounds like a major headache for any GM. I suppose it could be if the GM were not prepared for the actions and didn’t know what was behind the next doors. Shame on the GM if he’s not prepared and hasn’t read the next several sections of his adventure that he has in hand.

How did I handle this as GM? Quite easily it turned out. As new doors were opened and new Bad Guys entered the fray, I rolled their initiative and added them the to order in the right spot. We marched through the initiative order and everything went well. It really helped that I was prepared and knew the stat blocks of all of the Bad Guys well, and the players knew their character’s abilities inside and out. There was very little delay as new Bad Guys were added to the order, and the character’s were scattered through the initiative well enough that I didn’t have to do 3-4 Bad Guys in a row before it was another player’s turn. This allowed me a small breather as each player came up to plan for the next door to be opened and pull up the proper stat blocks in my photocopied notes.

Another thing that helped was that I had read the Dragon article as well, and had been warned via email by several of the players that they were going to do this. Had they sprung it on me without warning, I may have been in deeper water, but I think I would have handled it fairly well in the end.

One final note: We had a blast that night! Not only did the group clear out five rooms in the span of thirty minutes, they had a great haul of loot to go with it. Due to the speed at which they “retreated forward” we cleared Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil in about six months of weekly game play. Not too bad.

Back in 1990-1991, I ran a Lankhmar campaign in which I required everyone to dual-class as a thief/SOMETHING or just play a plain old thief. I felt it met the mood of the game. Since this was 2nd Edition AD&D, humans could not dual-class, though they could change to a different class, and multi-class (or do I have the terms dual-class and multi-class mixed up?) Anway, I bent the rules, as is my right as the GM, and allowed humans to go the route of demi-humans.

The game was a hoot as the group of thieves wandered the city streets thinking up all sorts of wonderful trouble to get into, including selling a boat they didn’t own.

Part of this game was Matt R.’s character, who was a heavily muscled gnome thief/fighter. He had maxed out his strength with some lucky dice rolls and played it to a ‘T’. He disdained armor as it hid his “beautiful physique”. He would constantly go around flexing and prancing to anyone that would pay attention. Being a gnome, this was not many people, but when he did catch someone’s eye, it was quite impressive. One especially gratifying role playing encounter was when the group was trying to get hired on as caravan guards. They had need of traveling a great distance and didn’t feel like footing the bill themselves. Instead, they figured they could get paid for the trip by hiring on as guards. Seems fairly logical except when you have a gnome and a halfling in your group that the caravan master wants nothing to do with as guards.

That’s when the gnome (I wish I could remember the character’s name!) hauled off and gut punched the halfing on the spot. Without missing a beat, the Mike B. declared that he used his Ring of Jumping to leap backwards over a nearby building with arms flailing like the gnome really had caused him to fly over the building. Now, a Ring of Jumping isn’t quite that powerful, but in the interest of a good story for all involved, I allowed it to happen. We all laughed over the way things unfolded as the caravan master agreed to hire the powerfully built gnome, but not the halfing. That’s when Matt R. declared that he needed a punching bag to work out on, and that the caravan’s oxen and cattle would do in place of the halfing. The sweaty and nervous caravan master hastily agreed to bring on the halfing in exchange for the gnome staying away from the beasts of burden.

All-in-all, not one die was rolled, but the role playing experience was one of my favorite ones. I still remember the entire campaign, and that day’s events, with great fondness.

What tales from around the table do you have? Please share them in the comments.