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Swashbuckling over Lunch: Notes on trying to run a game at a game studio.
takyris
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I work at a video-game company. We've got a game coming out in March, and a lot of us are putting in pretty absurd hours and burning ourselves out. In the interest of sanity, I suggested running a simple, lighthearted game over lunch, so that people could have something other than our big damn game to think about. People have been pretty enthusiastic about it, and it looks like I'm running something once we all get back after Christmas.
It's been a few years since I've run a game, and all these folks are professional video-game writers, which means that it would be really good if said game doesn't suck. I've got the short-term goal and the long-term goal right now, and I'm working on the middle. This thread is for me to blab about what I'm planning, ask for advice from anyone who finds it interesting, and report on how the game is going.
(more to be cut-pasted in after I get email posts)
It's been a few years since I've run a game, and all these folks are professional video-game writers, which means that it would be really good if said game doesn't suck. I've got the short-term goal and the long-term goal right now, and I'm working on the middle. This thread is for me to blab about what I'm planning, ask for advice from anyone who finds it interesting, and report on how the game is going.
(more to be cut-pasted in after I get email posts)
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The World: Second-world, made-up kingdom, roughly at Renaissance tech, but with few to no firearms. Rapiers and daggers are more common than plate mail. Bows, crossbows, etc for most people. If firearms are there, it's because some fancy alchemist rigged up an item. Occasional rare bits of magic, on the order of "the palace has glowing crystals" rather than "this is a longsword +3 that I bought in the local market". Monsters in the woods, old rumors of orcs that most people assume are metaphors for the neighboring kingdom we don't like. All humans, but different cultures for the kingdom, which is a bit of a melting point because of geography and having been invaded a few times.
The Premise: You are special agents sent on deniable missions to investigate political problems for the king's spymaster. You're still mostly white hats -- you've been asked to report things or plant evidence, but when it's been done, it's resulted in people being exiled or politically shunted aside, not killed. If you've been asked to kill people, they are genuinely pretty terrible people who were doing pretty terrible things and really needed to be taken out, and sending in an army would've resulted in a bloodbath. You are essentially GOOD AGENTS. (You don't have to be good people, necessarily. You're just not eeeeevil.) You can think of yourselves as somewhere between Spectres and the team from Leverage.
The Game: Modified Mutants & Masterminds, using rules (from the Mastermind's Guide) that add in attacks of opportunity and some fun optional combat stuff to let this feel like swashbuckling fun. I'd like to avoid squares and maps, but maybe use figures on an improvised board when need be. This lets us still show where the heroes are relative to the bad guys and the innocent villagers, but doesn't require us to do a ton of tracking individual squares, which really slows things down over vidcon. The ruleset also speeds things up considerably and requires a lot less rolling. If you've played M&M, I'm thinking somewhere between PL6 and PL8 -- you're really good swashbucklers, easily a match for a street tough or a royal guardsman, but if anyone starts throwing fireballs, you are in oh-crap be-careful territory. Anyone see that not-great musketeer movie several years back that was done with wire-fu? Or "Brotherhood of the Wolf"? We're kinda living there.
I'll build characters for people (making, then getting approval) to keep things balanced. For each character, can you hit me with the following:
What's your melee/ranged preference -- mostly melee, mostly ranged, balanced?
What's your melee razor -- are you a sword-and-cloak duelist? A double-daggers rogue? A tricky whipmaster? A powerful claymore swinger? A martial artist?
What's your ranged razor -- throwing knives, smoke bombs, bolos, the rare firearms expert, expert bowman?
What's your balance between hitting hard and hitting often? (In M&M, you can be balanced, accurate-but-lighter-damage, or less-accurate-but-strong -- Batman hits all the time for a little damage, Superman hits less often for a lot more damage.)
What's your balance between dodging attacks and taking punishment? (Superman gets hit a lot and ignores a lot of it, Batman gets hit rarely but can't take many shots.)
(Bear in mind, you're swashbucklers and not superheroes, so if you want to be "Tough Person who Hits Hard", that's someone in armor with a big ol' sword, most likely.)
How do you add value to the team in terms of getting around places? Climber/acrobat? Practically invisible stealth expert? Tracker who can move silently through the woods?
How do you add value to the team in terms of advancing my precious precious plots? Educated scholar with a library for research? Rogue with contacts on the street? Politician who can call in favors? Con man who can lie your way into any room in the palace?
What else would be fun and neat for your character in terms of unique abilities, things that differentiate you?
If this all sounds too complex, just think of a fun concept, and we'll work it out from there.
Please bear in mind that most of this is because, frankly, I'm pretty lazy right now, so everything from the system to the world is based on "What makes this pretty easy for me to improvise as needed rather than devote a ton of time to planning?" Suggestions always welcome.
Politics: King at present. He's married, no children as of yet, which is cause for mild concern, but he's not yet old enough for it to be a big deal. Everything under a king is a lord -- no dukes, earls, barons, etc, just lord (and lady) and high lord (and lady). Lords are people of power and likely own land (although a few have titles to areas that no longer exist or exist only in some imagined conditional, like ,"You are the lord of these holdings, which are in another country we're at peace with, so you'll never actually see money from them"). High lords definitely own land and are a handful of people close to the throne. Succession is usually firstborn child, but can be any child in the line. If a direct child heir is impossible, things get ugly and infighty. Current king is Haeric (formerly High Lord Fisher). All noble houses have animal names or at least animal derivative names (Fisher is an animal, technically, or could be short for Kingfisher). High Lord and High Lady get shortened to Hilord and Hilady in direct address ("You see, Hilady, he was dead when I got there.")
Culture: Like I said, mostly a melting pot. A series of ugly wars centuries back left this kingdom as a hot zone -- it changed hands a lot of times, and at the end of an ugly nasty war, the kingdom was created by the few nobles and soldiers who'd seen the worst of it in the area, with backing from major powers (but not major powers nearby) who wanted to stop the area from being used as the pretext of so many wars. As a result, the area is inclusive, but fiercely independent. You want to come in and join the country? Great! You want us to do things the way you did it back in your country? Screw you. It's not perfect, but go with "melting pot" and you're pretty close.
Minimal to no sexism, because it's not as much fun. Assume that I thought up some awesome reason sexism absolutely doesn't work in a mostly Renaissance world and go with that. Nobles of both sexes are more constrained in what they get to do -- more power, but more social pressure to continue the line and maintain standards. Classism is alive and well, although it's not ironclad. There are things that nobles Don't Do (like work as merchants). People who succeed dramatically in their role are sometimes tapped and given one of those imaginary noble titles, with the exception of merchants and priests -- there's rarely an urge to smack down people who are rising above their station. The only exception is Guilds, which are starting to take power that the nobles like for themselves -- rights of patronage are being taken over by guild standing, and nobles are complaining that the sciences are being taken over by the lower classes instead of being sponsored by the nobility.
Religion: Present but not intrusive. A pantheon of dozens or even hundreds of small gods of very specific domains. Specificity can be geographic or conditional (the god of doorways and the god of hilltops could be called upon while standing in a doorway on a hilltop). Gods do not have names. They have evocative titles, like "the Iron Hand" for the goddess of blacksmiths or "the Wild Rider" for the god of horses. Gods are rarely if ever outright good or evil. They are all deities of competing interests and aspects that can either be in harmony or disharmony. Churches are nondenominational places for people to offer sacrifices and prayers or take part in social rituals (baptisms, weddings, last rites). Priests are scholars who have studied all the gods and are usually partial to one or more (so there's no church of the Iron Hand trying to go to war, although occasional cults have surfaced from time to time, and people like you have made sure they de-surfaced very very quickly).
Anyway, hopefully that gives you more to work with.
Intro Session: Smuggling Bust
Directive: Break up a smuggling delivery. Capture one lieutenant from the dealer and the receiver sides. Don't let this turn into a public spectacle, and don't be seen by the city watch.
Setup: A street about 20 feet across, with buildings 20 feet high on either side. Street ends in a T leading to other parts of town on one side. On the other, large ornamental fountain. The smugglers' wagon is heavily overloaded with barrels and sits in the middle of the street.
Still tuning enemy numbers, but I'm guessing two minions per PC per side, and two lieutenants for each side (so players can screw up and not be boned).
When the PCs attack, both sides (smuggler and receiver) assume the other is double-crossing them, and attack each other and the PCs. Both sides have minions stationed on the rooftops with bows.
Swashbuckling Opportunities:
Dueling on the fountain (still unclear what to do here, but guys balancing on fountain is kind of a trope)
Ladder to rooftops: can be used to push off from one rooftop and let people vault over to the other side, despite all evidence that this would never work.
Barrels: At some point, the rope holding the barrels is going to break, and it's gonna turn into a log-rolling contest for people, balancing on barrels as they roll. The first barrel breaks open immediately and reveals that it's expensive oil being smuggled. Some of the other rolling barrels are heading for street lamps and will break open and explode spectacularly upon impact.
If one barrel explodes, it's fun and excitement for anyone nearby, and the watch shows up in ten minutes or so. If something sets off all of them, huge inferno, and the watch is there in less than a minute.
One lieutenant from each side will try to run (one across rooftops, leaping from roof to roof, one by grabbing wagon and trying to ride out and lose everyone in the city).
So... what else would you throw in for a first "learning the rules" session?
Knowing who you work for (it's not like you hide it), the only advice I can give is this:
When you have extremely creative players, you have to sit back and let them ride. They'll feed you all the plot you could ever hope for, as well as enough noose to hang themselves with. If you are skilled at taking a few hundred plot points and weaving them into something that seems credible in retrospect, then it'll rock.
This doesn't mean they can't be led, or that you shouldn't have a strong story framework, oh no! Just be prepared for them to go off the rails.
Also, if you are playing over lunch breaks, be prepared to run fast and hot. That is something that easily gets lost, even in multi-hour games.
Also? You guys should totally poke your publishers' marketing department into making a pen and paper RPG for this game. Outside of Warhammer, there really aren't any strong franchises in that setting.
Edit: Oh man. You said Swashbuckling, my mind immediately went to 7th Sea. Rest in Peace, beautiful world!
You're pretty close to how I've run what my players have thought were my best sessions. You have a solid setpiece for them to work with, with a clear goal, but multiple ways to accomplish it. I never try to think ahead of time how they are going to solve a task, or how the steps will connect with each other - all of that will organically come together during the session. It sounds like you've worked a lot of variables into your encounter that may or may not come into play - it's fine to have things that never get discovered, just save them to use in a later session.
I don't know what sort of system you're planning on using, but I assume it's going to be something very light for taking place during a lunch break? I'm curious to know, but it's not as important as your setting, story, etc.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I'm aiming for PL6, although I'll check on how I'm doing once I build characters to see how far off I am. I want people to be at the comfortable wire-fu stage, doing near-impossible things with ease, but I don't want people throwing fireballs and flying. Given M&M's flexibility, it might be PL6, but more points than the norm for PL6, so people will have more room to play with skills and feats.
Right now, the four character concepts people have come up with:
Crossbow-focused stealth expert courtier -- kind of a ninja archer. I'll likely spec her for some kind of invisibility while in any kind of cover or concealment. and give her half concealment even when standing out in the open -- the "Your sword strike pierced my cloak, which I twirled while moving out of the way" effect. Lots of bow tricks (Green Arrow) and information gathering.
Classic swashbuckling duelist courtier -- the platonic ideal of a swashbuckler. Rapier and either a main-gauche or cape or something. All kinds of melee moves, along with acrobatic abilities. Socially, I'm guessing Bluff and Sense Motive, for working parties.
Acrobatic man-of-all-work badass -- unarmed, blue-collar, more at home in the stables than the ballroom. Can climb anything that isn't a sheer cliff, and has all kinds of unarmed combat tricks like disarming, tripping, throwing. etc. Probably the most tank-y of the group, a big tough guy who gets information from the working stiffs and the local urchins.
Crazy alchemist -- potions and unguents and salves and things that explode excitingly when thrown. I'll be working to make sure these bombs and acids don't feel overpowered compared to the rest of the group, but at this power level, she could very well be knocked out by a single hit, so it's not like she's going to dominate the group.
In D&D 4E terms, I've got what looks like a bow ranger, a two-weapon ranger, a fighter, and a wizard.
After the party breaks up the smuggling ring, they'll be called in (for the first real session) and asked to sort out a matter of dodgy taxes. A famous (and eccentric) mathematician was commissioned to do a study as a result of High Lord Stag's people's involvement in the smuggling operation, and it came out that according to this brilliant math guy, Lord Stag is bringing in less tax money for the kingdom than he should. Very few people understand the math prodigy's work, but few can argue with the results -- if he says that High Lord Stag is underpaying, then he's likely underpaying. But the king can't move based on the word of a crazy recluse. The party needs to find information that proves High Lord Stag is diverting money, hard information that the king can use to bring High Lord Stag to heel.
At this point, I kind of turn people loose. Options they might use:
- Attending a party where High Lord Stag's son or daughter is attending and use personal skill to find out more (Bluff/Diplomacy)
- Attending that same party and circulating among the courtiers for rumors (Gather Information)
- Looking for word on the street from the city thugs working in the smuggling ring, knocking a few heads together if necessary (Gather Information and possible Intimidate or combat)
- Going to talk to the mathematician and appealing to him as a fellow learned person (Diplomacy or Knowledge)
I'm pretty confident in being able to bluff anything along these lines. I might set up a 4E Skill Challenge, or I might base it more on pure roleplaying, depending on player preferences. Generally, I remember the appropriate DC for things in d20 Modern being about DC14+character level, so for PL6, a DC of 20 for things I'm thinking of as average difficulty might be about right. That might mean dealing with the prickly eccentric genius, negotiating a verbal fencing match with a minor lord, or walking into the toughest tavern in the city and convincing everyone in there to give you a name.
Success with any of these will yield either information about Mister Hind, High Lord Stag's trusted agent who does his dirty work (essentially, the players' opposite number) or the town of Twobridge, which seems to be the big example place where the money discrepancy is most obvious. (And if need be, if they only get intel on Mister Hind, they'll eventually learn that he was heading to Twobridge on business). Most likely, the mathematician and the courtiers will yield Twobridge by name, while the young Stags or the local smugglers will let Mister Hind's name slip.
At this point, I will also have checked how subtle the players were in getting the information. Maybe that's succeeding on a roll by 5 or more, or maybe it's purely subjective. If they tripped High Lord Stag's alerts, the party will be attacked by a group of mercenaries on the way to Twobridge. I'm imagining men on horseback attacking the players' coach, possibly with another coach that has archers firing flaming arrows. Insert stagecoach fight cliches! (And if the party was unsubtle but also did well in other areas, they might learn about the attack beforehand and get a chance to either avoid it or get the upper hand.)
So in a perfect world, assuming I can improvise as well as I remember, the party feels like it came up with Twobridge on its own, but is definitely heading there. (And if they decide to go yell at High Lord Stag themselves, well, I'm sure I'll come up at something.)
Given the parameters of my level of seriousness, the exploding barrel will set fire to the local orphanage and puppy farm.
I've got what feels like a pretty reasonable streamlined adventure. The heroes will investigate the town and find out about a) attacks on caravans and b) a missing local woman. Depending on whether the heroes head for either the cave where the bandits are rumored to have their victim or the site of the attacks, they'll end up in a similar fight, but on different ends of the battlefield. The hilltop cave is indeed where the victim is, but the bandits are attacking from treetop fortifications -- essentially, imagine the Ewok village, with wooden platforms and either rope bridges, ladders, or zip lines running from platform to platform.
If they hit the attack site first, they end up fighting all across the platforms (racing to stop the bad guy from reaching the girl in the cave, who has seen his face and needs to die). If they rescue the girl first, the revelation of the treetop platforms is a big surprise, and the heroes start out defending the cave from baddies ziplining in.
I've got complications laid out -- rope brides getting cut, support beams getting damaged so that platforms drop to a tilt and force heroes to hang on (and then swashbucklingly hang on to the platform, which is now essentially a hanging wall, and knock off bad guys).
So there will be much leaping and swinging.
Also, first character done -- the tank (who is the group's porter/man-of-all-work), who can lift 1600 pounds without breaking a sweat and punches through solid rock with his unarmed strikes. I'm imagining someone who lives in the cinematic space occupied by Andre the Giant in the Princess Bride, except that he moves like Jet Li. Or I don't know, the guy who serves as R'as al Ghul's muscle in the old BTAS series, Ubu? Or possibly a non-druggie-evil version of Bane.
So, everybody got back from break, we got our damn game shipped, and we've had time to start the sessions. Things I've seen so far.
One Hour is Nothing: Damn, I miss Game Night, when I'd get to my buddies' place at 6:00, gaming by 6:30 after we finished pizza/juice smoothie/whatever, finish up at 10:30 or 11:00. I have years of experience at that kind of game length, in addition to the epic "all day on the weekend" games of my youth.
As it is, we show up, get the vidcon working for the player in Montreal, get stuff set up, and it's 12:05. I've got 55 minutes to get shit done before we have to go back to work.
The first session was just people getting the mission and running Investigation checks to figure out where to hunt. One of the players was really new -- this was his first RPG session ever -- and there was a lot of "Okay, so how does this work?"
I tried to correct by quietly taking aside one of the more experienced players before the next session and asking if she could subtly move people more in a swashbuckling direction and not in a "planning and worrying" direction -- people were overplanning things and worrying about details and forgetting what their original goal was. I also opened the second session by recapping their goals, which were not to track the illegal smuggling shipment or find out who was taking the delivery or engage in covert espionage, but to a) Break up the delivery and b) capture one person from each side alive. The heroes went to a winehouse where the mercs who were going to receive the shipment were drinking -- well, some of them, anyway. The heroes' attempt at subterfuge went terribly terribly wrong, and quickly led into a bar fight.
One of the players, an experienced LARPer, really shone. His character is the swashbuckling swordsman, and he had his guy vaulting over tables, knocking out one thug, grabbing a pastry while knocking out another thug, throwing the pastry to a third thug, knocking him unconscious, and catching the pastry before it hit the ground. He set a really good tone for people.
The team ninja and the team tank both kind of learned how their abilities and powers worked. The team alchemist largely held back, while the team's Springpunk Iron Man accidentally blinded half of the party with a flare gun, then took advantage of the accident to steal the money that the thugs had in a large satchel to deliver to the smugglers when the smugglers arrived with the goods. The "ten thousand royals" quickly became "the seventy-five-hundred royals" as our morally dubious gadgeteer made a private withdrawal.
In the third session, the team took the thugs' outfits (black tabards, black hats) and headed out to the meeting with the 10,000 7500 royals replaced with a bag full of rocks. Most of them were in disguise, while the team tank headed up to the rooftops to keep watch. He quickly saw that both the thugs and the smugglers had archers on the rooftops in case the deal went sour. The tank passed this on to Springpunk Iron man (who had a spring-based listening device that let the tank pass information to him), and a plan was born.
The smugglers showed up with a wagon filled with barrels, and the heroes proceeded to make the deal, bluffing their way past the need for a sign and countersign and doing quite well -- until the smugglers opened the bag of "gold" and discovering the rocks, at which point the ninja attacked the leader on the ground while the tank started knocking people off the rooftops.
The thug archers, located on another rooftop, saw fighting break out between the smugglers and the thugs and assumed that the smugglers were betraying them. They opened fire on the smugglers, coming to the aid of their friends (who were actually the heroes, but in big black floppy hats and black tabards).
At this point, the party learned about GM Fiat and Hero Points, as one of the arrows hit the rope holding the barrels on the wagons. The barrels fell out, and one of them crashed open, revealing the highly flammable oil inside. Other barrels started rolling toward the nearby orphanage, the nearby puppy farm, and the nearby senior care center.
People rolled with things pretty gamely -- the team alchemist started firing out glue blasts to lock barrels in place and stop them from breaking open. The tank, kept knocking people off the rooftops, and I was called several bad names by one player (my wife) when GM Fiat declared that one of the smugglers fell fast enough and far enough to land on one of the barrels and ignite the oil inside with the force of his landing, or a spark he struck on the ground, or, you know, something. Fuck it. They got a hero point. I don't know what they were complaining about. Sure, the orphanage may have caught fire, but that's how shit rolls.
The team successfully took down the rest of the smugglers, and managed to chloroform the smuggler leader to capture him alive (the team ninja using the team alchemist's knockout poison) -- this was good, since the other smuggler lieutenant had been the guy who landed on the barrel and had suffered from a) falling three stories, b) landing on a barrel, c) being at ground zero at a barrel explosion, and d) being stuck to the ground in the glue that the alchemist used to stop that barrel from hitting the orphanage. Once all the smugglers were out of commission, the thug archers looked down from the rooftops expectantly, and the heroes casually shouted up, "Got it! Meet you back at the usual place!" and made an excellent Deception check. The team tank, an incredibly tough acrobat and man-of-all-work, vaulted off the rooftop and used his Animal Empathy to talk the horses on the smuggler's wagon into letting him drive the wagon over to the orphanage to rescue the kids.
All in all, complete party victory, and people have gotten to do dashing acrobatics, watch as things go completely wrong, and triumph through doing crazy shit -- pretty much the lessons I was hoping for them to pick up.
Next up, I'll start the REAL adventure, with the tax-evasion charges that lead to the town with the bandits.