It's a Trap Tuesday!

Pathfinder Beginner Box: Session 2

So we had our second Pathfinder Beginner Box session today! It went a lot better than last time. This week we split the group into two. We now have an all girls group and a all boys group. It will be interesting to see how the two groups approach the game as I plan on running them through the same scenarios. Todays group was the boys, with five players and me GMing. Time was of the essence so I had to burn through the adventure, which I took out of the Game Masters Guide. We played for about an hour an a half. I would have liked to have a little more time but I'll take what I can get. All in all everyone seemed to have a lot of fun. I really enjoyed myself this time. Best of all everyone came with their own set of dice! My buddy picked up a GIANT d20 with skull inside from Montreal Comic Con. It was WAY rad, though as you can see below the picture doesn't really do it justice. I take the buying of dice as a good sign that I'm doing something right. Below you can see some photos I snapped from today. The next session will probably be in a month due to busy schedules and will be with the second group of all girls. I'll tell you one thing, gaming with kids isn't any easier on the scheduling issue that faces us adults. If anything it seems like its worse.  

It's a Trap Tuesday

Not much to blog about. I did manage to pick up a few PDF's recently from RPG Drive Thru during the savage september sale. My purchases included Weird War II, Thrilling Tales (savage worlds version), Shaintar, and Streets of Bedlam. Of course in honour of  It's a Trap Tuesday I found this article on the origins of the voice actor behind Admiral Ackbar on io9. Thought I'd share it to shake things up for a change.

It's a Trap Tuesday

Pathfinder With Kids

It's been a while on the blog front. Truth be told theres been pretty much nil on the game table in the past many months. Looking to change that situation I decided to start a table top rpg club with my kids and some of their friends.

I agonized for some time about how to go about doing this. In the end I bought the Pathfinder Beginner Box. I have to say that this is a solid product to start beginners off with. The production values are Paizo's typical high standards, and theres enough material plus web extras to provide a solid base before moving on to the core book.

This past afternoon was the big day and while I feel like everyone had fun, I was a victim of my own success.I had two other inexperienced dads helping me out. Along with nine kids ranging from 7 to 10 years old! That was just too many people. I also once again made the mistake of starting off making characters. I should have gone the pregen route. Now that characters are made the next session in two weeks should go better.

After character creation we had a rumble in the town square of Sandpoint with a band of goblins who decided to crash the annual festival. Everyone had fun bringing the smack down on the goblins. It was during actual play that everyone started to gel with what roleplaying was all about. Or at least the possibilities of adventures to come. It's occurred to me that roleplaying is kinda like the Matrix. No one can tell you what it is, you need to experience it for yourself. As for the future of the game I've been giving some serious thought to maybe breaking the group up into two groups that alternate every week. But I guess I'll see how many kids decide to show up at the next session.

Till then Im just happy to be rolling the dice again, and introducing a new generation to our amazing hobby.

The Hitch Hikers Guide to Alternity

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
                                                                                 -Isaac Asimov

I managed to get a good bit of reading done over the Easter weekend. During that time I had this strange compulsion to take a fresh look at some of the older gaming books in my library. I guess that makes me some sort of RPG antiquarian.

So as you can probably figure out already this post is about the Alternity game line. TSR's now defunct generic modern/science fiction RPG came out in 1998 about the same year I got into gaming. I remember seeing the ads for it in Dragon Magazine and thinking it was a pretty neat looking game. There was a handful of reasons I never played this game.

Primarily I think this was because despite Star*Drive and Dark*Matter settings it seemed to try and push it's generic nature as its primary asset. Personally I had never read/watched a lot of sci-fi to figure out what to do with all that freedom. For some reason that I still don’t quite understand theres just something about fantasy and D&D that is just intuitive. Modern/Sci-fi gaming seems to suffer from this inherent weakness of expectations of how to satisfactorily play shit out. This is probably the reason why fantasy rpgs have always, and will continue to always dominant over modern/science fiction ones.

Secondly the rules seemed fairly intimidating to me at the time. In fact D&D 2e was already pushing my comfort level as far as rules went. Which is to say I had very little to none. If it had not been for people who already new how to play, I never would have figured this shit out. Not to mention fantasy was the bread and butter of my gaming group at the time. Meaning that if we were ever going to play Alternity it would be incumbent upon me to learn the rules and run a game.

Then in 2000 the d20 system and D&D 3e took the world by storm and swept me along with it. Strike three your out Alternity. For a long time my interest in almost any other rpg with the exception of maybe Heavy Gear or Call of Cthulhu was next to nil. In fact it was really only the arrival of D&D 4e that snapped me out of my misguided and stubborn love for all things d20.

At roughly the same period in time that Wizards of the Coasts acquired TSR they also picked up the license for Star Wars. This was pretty much the death knell for the Alternity game system and Star*Drive. As for Dar*Matter I'm sure the d20 version of Call of Cthulhu had a hand in making sure that line got the axe as well. Essentially the philosophy was that if it didn’t help sell the core d20 books it wasn’t sold by WotC. Additionally WotC didn’t want another space opera setting competing with Star Wars sales. I mean its just good business sense.

So 15 years later I've gone back to these books. Mostly I was looking for material I might be able to steal or adapt for the mythical Digital Dark Age campaign I hope to run one day. Part of it was as I said previously this strange nostalgic urge to revisit something from my gamer past. A chance to visit fleeting memories of that time in my life when things were just a little more simple than they are now.

The end result was that I came away inspired by much of what I read. No longer did I see an overly complicated game system. Though perhaps not as streamlined or as intuitive as d20, there are some innovative and interesting mechanics none the less. A Skill based system, degrees of success, and a neat way of going about handling modifiers. I'm sort of amazed that this game hasnt had a retro clone based off of it.

The Star*Drive campaign setting was also pretty interesting to read. Where as before I saw a boring generic space opera setting I could now instantly see a the possibilities for a campaigns that could be set there. Now I find myself wishing that I had collected all the books for this campaign setting a little bit at a time while I had the opportunity and spare cash to do so. Alas, hind sight, as they say is 20/20.

My prediction is after D&D 5e is finally released, combined with the lack of attention that d20 Modern got during the 4e era and the dumping of the Star Wars rpg license we may just see a new version of Alternity down the pipeline. Or at the very least a repackaging of Star*Drive and/or Dark*Matter.

It's A Trap Tuesday