Jeremy "Bolthy" Zimmerman

This weekend I attended Go Play Northwest 2009. This is my recap. SRSLY. I am working on this in lieu of my novel, so I'm taking my life into my own hands.

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I've wanted to play this for... over a decade at least. I also learned a fun fact when I went to run it. Paranoia "5th" Edition, which is the only version I own, is apparently reviled by die-hard Paranoia fans. One of the players brought it up at the session, and Wikipedia confirms it. And if it's on Wikipedia, you know it's true. SRSLY. It seems that the absurdist, slapstick "kill each other because everyone is secretly a traitor" is not the original setup for the game. It was meant to be more of a dark humor game with complex satire.

I find this extra amusing because I have always loved the 5th Edition rules and it was what made me want to play Paranoia in the first place. Huh.

For reference, there was never a 3rd or 4th edition. I guess it was a joke. Ha. Ha.

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Next up is me on the hot seat again. I had a quick round of Instant Runoff Voting for our next game from a handful of options, and I'll be busting out some Blue Planet action. Whales! With guns! Before then I'm hoping to get some other posts written, commenting about the current state of my gaming and some game ideas I've been mulling around.

Hey, only took me a couple months.

April 16th-19th, I flew out with the special lady friend for four days of roleplaying at the 20th anniversary AmberCon US in beautiful, scenic Livonia, MI. For those who haven't attended one, these cons are relatively small (ACNW and ACUS have 80-100 attendees each year) and lack some of the features you see in larger cons. Like a sprawling dealer room and such. Instead, it's just solid gaming from Thursday night through Sunday night. And by gaming, I mostly mean "roleplaying." Like serious, immersionist, actor-stance, honest-to-Buddha roleplaying. There's a bit of indy gaming that goes on. Fringe weirdos like Amber players tends to have some overlap with the indy game crowd. But there's also some people who staunchly hate indy games. Especially the story game, roll-for-narrative control sorts of games.

The con definitely has a different feel from ACNW, which is the con I spend most of my time at. It was started by Erick Wujcik himself and has about seven years on ACNW. The median age often feels older. It seems like there are more ongoing campaigns than there are at ACNW, some of which may very well have started in the early years of the con. This is, and has been, the major stomping ground of many of the people I got to know through the old Amber Mailing List. When I think "Amber Community," I think of this place.

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Next up, I'll be recapping my Paranoia one-shot that I ran a few weeks ago.

Last of the horribly past due OHW posts before I do my AmberCon US recap. I'm only a couple months behind. Seriously. =P

For this one, we had a rousing session of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I'm not sure which edition the GM was using. I believe the newest.

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The next game we played was Paranoia. I was a little unexpectedly on the hot seat for this one. Before I get to that, I'm going to try and get my ACUS recap written.

Home with a nasty bug, figure I can at least work at catching up with this a bit.

The next OHW we did was Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds, the d20-derived superhero game.
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The next game we did was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Just one more of these posts and I can finally get to my ACUS recap!

I'm crazy behind on these. It wasn't much more than a couple months ago that I did my last one, and we've had three installments since then. Yikes. My life has gotten busy with work and a new girlfriend and starting a new campaign, so I've neglected typing this information up. But now I've got a post-con report for AmberCon to write, and I figure if I don't get these done before I get the con recap done, then these will never get done. Since our next One Hit Wonders is in just over a week, the heat is kinda on.

As mentioned before, this was game used the revised 2nd edition rules of the old d6 Star Wars system. This OHW covered two different things: Taking the old d6 system for a spin and seeing if I could play a roleplaying game without actually being able to communciate.

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The next game we did was Mutants and Masterminds with me in the hotseat.

One Hit Wonders: Wilderness of Mirrors

This is John Wick's simple story-game intended to emulate the spy genre, trying to fix what he felt was wrong in other spy games.

Unlike everything else we've had for our One Hit Wonders, I'd actually played this game before. A couple times, actually. Once at GoPlay Northwest 2007 and again about a year ago when I was considering using this system to try and do an Amber style game. I'd submitted it to the AmberCon US game book as "Wilderness of Princes," but no one signed up for it. But I did playtest it out to see how it worked, mainly to find that it didn't work the way I'd wanted it to.

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Next up is Star Wars, using the old d6 version from West End Games. It started when I mentioned that I'd always threatened to play a wookie diplomat in a game and spend the entire session "speaking" only in Shryiiwook (the wookie language), but could not in good conscience to do so in a game where I liked the GM. But when the time to pick the next game came, people clammored to play Star Wars so I could play this character. Another player has offered to be my protocol droid, "translating" for me during play. Most of the players refused to use the d20 rules, so we'll be going a little old school with this.

I've gotten way behind on writing these. Life has been a zoo lately. I feel particularly bad that we've had two games and I haven't done any updates. It's been a while since we played, so hopefully I get the details right. =P

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Next I'll cover our run of Wilderness of Mirrors. Hopefully I'll get it written before we play our next game.

Commentary about games I'm in right now. Thrilling!

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Only took me a month. I blame NaNoWriMo. And laziness. This will be relatively brief since time has faded the crazy high I left the convention with and I don't want this to be even later than it already is.

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I'm hoping to do a general "state of my gaming" post soon. I've had some thoughts about some of the systems I've been playing with lately.

After a bit of a delay, we finally had another edition of One Hit Wonders, this time with Unknown Armies. I've wanted to play UA for a long, long time and I was glad I finally had the chance. Sorry it took so long to get this up. ACNW, combined with a busy work schedule and NaNoWriMo, meant my life has been a zoo.

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In a few weeks, I'll be back on the hotseat running a one-shot of Army of Darkness, put out by Eden Studios and using the simplified version of their Unisystem. This is the same mechanic used in their Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer games. The recurring term that players seem to be using for this is "groovy."

And now I have a long overdue post-ACNW recap to write.

I have another post I'm working on, but thought I'd make a quick post about this.

Played in the second session of both the hack-and-slash Exalted game and the Werewolf: The Wild West game. Not much worth commenting on in W:tWW. It was fun. My Creole accent is really bad.

The Exalted game was also fun, but I had sort of a horrible realization: The game is even more fun once you give up any pretense of serious roleplay. This isn't to say that no roleplaying occured. We spent some time gathering information, interacting with NPCs in sort of a Diablo-esque fashion. But we had two big combats in the five or so hours we played, dropping charms, stunting, etc. And it worked.

A common problem I've had with games that have an involved combat system (like Exalted, D&D or 7th Sea) is that (a) combat takes up a big chunk of a session, (b) this is not helped when you're running a roleplaying oriented game for people who don't necessarily understand the rules, (c) not all players are typically present for a given combat and (d) I've had bad experiences in the past where the entire session is basically one combat with a light garnish of plot on either side.

Typically my solution has been to minimize combat, sometimes abstracting it a bit when success is a foregone conclusion. This unfortunately means that neither I nor my players get really familiar with the system making combat that much more onerous.

I've had luke warm experiences with games that try to go with the route "You are badasses! You can change the face of Creation!" I've had a lot of fun in a frankly dungeon crawl driven scenario. Hell, I've been inclined to try and make some of my own combos.

While this doesn't sell me on the "system matters" dogma, it certainly leads me to think that I should reconsider how I approach games in the future. Especially ones where I'm less familiar with the rules.

I have a post or three brewing, but for now, a link to Delta Green co-creator Dennis Dettweiler's blog, in which he describes how he himself runs Delta Green. The money quote for me, which I recommend to anyone who has had the good fortune to meet Scott Glancy face to face, is:

In one memorable game, this lead Delta Green co-creator Scott Glancy to utter in despair “I don’t like A-Cell”.

The thought of Scott Glancy knowing despair fills me with cold chills.

This last weekend I picked up a couple of game books. My intro got long, so I'm putting the whole damn thing behind a cut. What's behind the cut? A couple mini reviews and some commentary on baggage with roleplaying games.

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Exalted didn't happen this last weekend due to a last minute cancellation. Werewolf isn't for another week. But I did have the first session of the new "kids' game". I'm not sure that it should still be called the "kids'game" now that most of them are 18, but there's still a 15+ year age gap between us, so perhaps the term still applies for now.

Overall it was overwhelming. We had 8 kids show up. I really only thought we'd have 6, but 8 actually showed up. It was loud and a little overwhelming, especially when I had two players who were new and two players who were anything but new but were not prepared to play when they showed up. I tried some new stuff this game, so here's my thoughts on how it went behind the cut.


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Anyway, that's about it. No gaming for me this weekend since the wife was in town. I'll have maybe Exalted and definitely Werewolf next Saturday. Weekend after that I'll be schilling T-shirts and candles at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival.

This last Sunday we did a one-shot of Dark*Matter, the modern fantasy/horror/conspiracy setting for the Alternity system. The game didn't end up being very system heavy so I don't have much to comment on, so this will be a comparatively short after-action report.

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Next up: Unknown Armies. And I'm still not running. Totally excited.

A few game related thoughts I'd had since my last post. One continuing my thoughts on random encounters, one regarding an idea I'm poaching from tatterdamelion for the kids game (which the random encounter thoughts reminded me of) and one regarding a quote from the White Wolf team on game design.

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This Saturday I had my crazy double feature of gaming: dungeon crawl style Exalted followed by Werewolf: The Wild West. Commentary behind the cut.

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[I'm made of dumb. I originally friends locked this. D'oh. Force of habit.]

Some thoughts on the first session of D&D, plus thoughts on the upcoming Werewolf: Wild West and Exalted games.

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After my post a couple weeks ago about, among other things, my need to play more and GM less, I've gotten invited to play in three games. ZOMG. One is the D&D 4e game I mentioned previously. Another is Werewolf: The Wild West and the third is Exalted. Additionally, the kids game has rebooted rather than combusted.

I've been frantically working on characters since the first session of D&D is today and the first sessions of the other two games are the following weekend. This work has brought up a number of thoughts. I'll try not to let this devolve into, "Lemme tell you about my character." I'd hoped to cover all three games in this post, but in the time it's taken me to write up just the thoughts on D&D, I've kinda run out of time. I'll try and post about character creation thoughts about Werewolf and Exalted within the next week.

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