Redshirt, Game Session I

And so the game itself began. Sorry, I said to Marty and Jonny, I'd like to do a sandbox-style campaign, but for this session I'm going to have to railroad you because I came all sorts of unprepared.

Which is true. And I would, normally, love to do a West-Marches open-ended style of campaign. But see, those campaigns take preparation. Quite a lot of it on the part of the GM. Which is something that I simply didn't have. Preparation, I mean. Completely unprepared, and if the reader will remember from the last post, I had exactly four lines written on a sheet of paper: Rusty Vaginas; Coldstream; Grayhair; and Security. The security line wasn't even accurate. It turned out to be more of a bounty-hunting, scalp them all kind of thing. But whatever.

Guys, I said at one point before the game started, I need a gang name.

Rusty Vaginas, said Jonny.

Sweet, said I, and walked away.

Then followed some minor investigation, a big combat, and a suspenseful twist at the end. And repercussions. Oh man are there going to be consequences for the characters' actions. For instance, I had put forward a go-to guy for them to seek out for their information. Look for Frank, I told them, at Frank's Place. He knows everything. That's a quote. He knows everything. A little bit later Frank is lying on the floor of his home bloodied and bruised and tortured for information. I guess Frank-Who-Knows-Everything isn't going to be a regular supporter of the cause. In fact, I'd say he downright despises the PCs at this point.

And then, in the course of bagging-and-tagging the Rusty Vaginas (a gang) for the bounties that the local PD had put on their heads, the PCs beat the ever-living crap out of a family that just happens to live next door to the Bonsai, the local dive that the gang hangs out at.

Eventually the PCs do manage to get into the bar, by taking down the three sentries standing at the door (and not doing it at all quietly) and then rushing into the bar from two directions, the front and the back. In the process of which one of Jonny's midgets took a crossbow bolt to the chest and stumbled back into the street from the doorway, knocked out of the fight. That was the only time the crossbow-wielding greyhair hit anything, even though he rolled something like four or five times. Which is good for Marty and Jonny, because man that crossbow puts out some damage.

So there were 7 PCs vs. 7 RVs. Granted, one PC (Marty's noble) stayed outside and didn't do anything. And I thought that the fight should have been hard, but it turns out it wasn't really, and two of Marty's characters went and held their own even though they were fighting with crutches (yes, you read that right. Crutches. They had gone and thrown their weapons, see, and couldn't get them back, and so were left with the only thing they had on hand: the beggar's crutches). Just when the PCs were about to triumph, in rush 8 more people, who demand the fighting to stop and everybody throw down their weapons. Jonny at this point groaned and said, You're trying to kill us, aren't you? But the PCs joined forces with the RVs and fought the newcomers, who within a couple of turns were routed and running away.

The end result of the fight? Another of Jonny's midgets went down. 7 RVs dead or dying, 2 RVs and 1 RV lieutenant surrendered, 4 Coldstream employees dead or dying, and 1 Coldstream employee surrendered (the rest of the Coldstream employees ran like little sissy-boys). Total loot tally, after bounty payment: 12gp, 10 Shortswords, 4 Longswords, and a single winch-action crossbow.

Now what to do with the two employees who went down? I decided, rather than simply have them as dead, that we really need a Death & Dismemberment Table. Who knows? Maybe they don't die. Maybe one of them gets a nasty scar instead, or loses an eye. All I know is it'll be fun. And random. Because random is, by definition, fun.

Tally of potential consequences: Frank despises them. Beat up an innocent family and potentially killed 1 member. Coldstream is now aware of a competing company (and is probably pissed about losing money/people on a job because of them). The Rusty Vaginas will probably be pissed that their best bar was raided (come on. Any decent gang has to have more than 10 members. Methinks this is not the last that the Company will hear from them).

So, all in all, a good game. Especially considering how woefully unprepared I was, and that I right away made mistakes (leaving out the social combat that I was looking forward to in this system and just having the players make a simple die-roll).

Redshirt, Game Session I Pregame

Not only was this the first time we, as a group, had met in three weeks, but this was also the first time that we took our homebrew rules out for a spin. And let me tell you, what a spin it was.

I was personally thrown for a loop right from the word go. We all met at Mayhem on the west side (our usual gaming haunt, which on Tuesday nights just happens to be populated mostly by Pokemon playing twelve year olds) and I set about rolling up the first of four characters, like we had discussed the last time we met. Except Marty said, What are you doing? You're running the adventure.

I didn't know how to take that, and figured he was pulling my leg, so I continued rolling up my chars. And Marty continued, No seriously. I'm rolling up characters. You're running the game.

I am?

Yep. You said that last time we met, that you'd take care of it.

Jonny chimed in, I don't remember this, but then again, we were pretty drunk.

Which is true. We were. I remember it fondly. But it left me in something of a predicament, because I didn't remember doing that at all. And it was obvious that Marty hadn't come prepared with an adventure, and so after some bitching and moaning I took a piece of paper and a pen and a drink and went outside to smoke and think about coming up with a quick adventure, using never-before-tested rules, while Jonny and Marty rolled up their four characters each.

And I did. By God, I did. And it included quite a bit, actually: some minor investigative/social interactions, a big fight, and a tension-building twist right at the end. Oh man, good stuff. And it took all of four lines on my piece of paper.

So the idea is, in our system, that the players do not play characters, per se. That is to say, they do play the characters, but they aren't actually the characters. You see what I'm getting at? They are, rather, the faceless corporation, the slave-drivers, the decision-makers. They each have a stable of characters, which they can pick and choose from for any particular mission. And so they rolled up their starting stable of characters, using our proprietary twelve-stat system, and rolled a background (which was, admittedly, taken from another game. We'll use it until we come up with our own background chart) I'm seriously liking this random background thing. It provides depth to a character right from the beginning. It's a springboard for character development, without being too constricting.

I was surprised at how long it took them to roll up four characters each, actually. I think it turned out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 30 minutes (I wasn't really paying attention. I just remember being surprised when I came back in after thinking about the scenario and they weren't finished). But then again, thinking about it, a great deal of that time was probably spent on remembering what the attributes were and writing them down on sheets by hand (I, being unprepared, hadn't come up with character sheets yet). So it'll probably get faster once everybody knows what they're doing.

Redshirt is a primarily d6 system. d6 are used in the actual gaming, while d10s are used in random table lookups, because d100 charts are by far the best. There are no other dice. So characters could probably get away with only bringing d6s, so long as the GM had some d10s for those occasions when they're needed, which aren't many.

There are 6 Primary Attributes, so far: Strength, Agility, Intuition, Reason, Guile, and Charisma. The player rolls 3d6 and compares the result to a standard Gygaxian attribute table: 3=-3, 4-5=-2, 6-8=-1, 9-12=0,13-15=1, 16-17=2, 18=3. The result is their score. So the character doesn't have a Strength of 7. He has a Strength of -1. 0 can be considered the human average.

There are additionally 6 Secondary Attributes: Health, Reaction, Morale, Willpower, Cool, and Presence. These are determined by simply adding 10 to their corresponding Primary Attribute. So a character with a -1 Strength would have a 9 Health. &c.

Then the characters roll on a background chart (d100 this time). Jonny got an Elven Sage, a Halfling Vagrant, a Dwarven Herder, and a Dwarven Blacksmith. Now, like I said before, we were using a table from a different game, and this raised some issues, because there are no demi-humans in the City. They're all just human. We took the results to mean that he had 3 height-challenged fellows (midgets) and a tall gangly skinny awkward guy. Sort of giantish, even. A natural basketball player. Which meant that his stable somewhat resembled a carnival. But whatever, that's cool.

Marty rolled a Beggar, a Blacksmith, a Woodcutter, and a Noble. Interesting. The beggar, as it turns out, was about the only person to have halfway-decent attributes, and that in his Guile and Charisma. Everybody else was pretty much average (0s in their scores). Note also that each character came with starting equipment as well, which was determined by their backgrounds. So the Herder had a Staff and a Sow. The Noble had a Longsword and a valuable Ring. &c.

And game on, baby.