Tag Archives: Role-Playing

WIP-it Wednesday: July 26th, 2017

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

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Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

Cretaceous Queen –my epic tale of magical girls, superheroes, dinosaurs and giant alien robots–  is just shy of six thousand words as of today. I hadn’t expected the short story to get this long, figuring that it’d top-out at around five thousand last week. However, it’s been a lot of fun to write!

Putting this together has been satisfying on multiple levels. For my inner-child, it’s like I flipped over my toy box, picked up my favorite playthings, built a set piece with the other stuff, and started telling this wild story with it all. Conceptually, there are many disparate elements going into the piece… So as an adult writer I’ve had a nifty challenge weaving all of it together. It’s allowed me to get pretty creative with the unseen foundations, and with the actual characters of the piece.

And then there’s my inner teenage superhero fan.

There’s a couple ideas in Cretaceous Queen that are directly based off of superhero concepts I came up with way back when. Or ideas I was influenced by at that time and always wanted to see better developed or combined in different ways.

I created a lot of superheroes back in those days, mostly within the frameworks of role-playing games like the Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set that was a favorite of mine throughout the late 1980s and early 90s. That game was also popular in my circle of friends, so –as geeky teen boys that love superheroes are prone to do– we created many heroes and teams for tons of adventures.

There were other games, but none ever topped the good-old MSHAS. One of these was Palladium Books’s Heroes Unlimited that claimed to be a “thinking man’s” superhero game. Its focus was seemingly more grounded in street-level heroics with an absence of the demigods that dominate mainstream comics.

This appealed to me because, then as now, I enjoy the flavor of a Spider-Man-ish setup where the hero needs to make do with a limited budget and resources.  It helps to make them relatable: Wondering how they’ll pay the rent next week, or having anxiety about work, relationships or… science exams.

But the rules of this game… oh boy! They were wildly unbalanced and over-complicated, and character generation was so uneven and random that that every other player would end up with a character hard to do anything with but die. I never actually played or ran a game of Heroes Unlimited; the book only ever served me as a source of idea fodder.

This was actually a running theme with the Palladium games I owned: I used them as references and points of creative inspiration, but I very rarely if ever played them. I enjoyed many of their settings much more than Unlimited, for example Beyond the Supernatural and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness… which I still adore and smile acknowledging their influence on my work.

But MSHAS was still king. It was the gateway that exposed me to a vast amount of comic book lore and knowledge of the superhero genre. To this day my trivial knowledge of the Marvel Comics Universe of the 1980s remains pretty sharp thanks to all that exposure.

In my role-playing circle, I was particularly well known… or um, infamous… for my “weird” character ideas. Some of these were indeed downright unplayable after I tried them out, but as we tended to cycle though heroes and teams frequently that never was a particularly longstanding issue. However, a lot were perfectly fine characters that the other boys thought were “dumb” because I wasn’t trying to create supremely powerful heroes like they were. I was trying to make cool ones, and cool stories.

Inkjet, by Will Petrey

This was me playing with concepts I thought were interesting and that I wanted to explore story-wise. The trouble was that I really needed to be exploring them by writing stories and/or making my own comic books rather than trying to do this in the context of a game: Particularly so in games that were running plots and had backgrounds entirely different from what I wanted to do.

The result of all that was frustration for all. Eventually we moved on to other RPGs, but I never stopped making superheroes and plotting stories. And I pursued this in the worst possible way by continuing to create them within the frameworks of the games I loved, but was so discouraged by actually playing.

This would be the beginnings of my Nowhere Man years of 1994-2001 after high school, and the start of my stay in the Worldbuilding Dungeon as well that would last for many years longer. What I needed to do was write. Instead, just I kept using the games to create my characters and find worlds for them. Over and over again I did this, and the stories never left my head and notebooks. They never grew or developed. I never gave them a chance to live in anybody else, because I kept trying to refine them into that unattainable prize that is “perfection” before I dared write a story about them.

Why? Because of the simple but pervasive nemesis all creatives fear: Rejection.

Because I didn’t want my ideas and creations called “dumb” again as they were so often in the heyday of my teens.

It took me twenty years to fight my way out of the Worldbuilding Dungeon and finally start writing. Now it’s my passion like nothing else ever has been. I’ve used it to heal and make peace with the young man I was. And with Cretaceous Queen, I’ve been able to sit down and talk to that creative kid and tell him with experience and hindsight that his superheroic ideas were cool… and not “dumb”.

I told him he’d inspired me to write about a couple of heroes his own age, using some ideas of his, and some of mine. He’s been checking out the early drafts, and so far he thinks it’s pretty awesome. :-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! Take care!

WIP-it… Thursday? My PortCon 2017 Wrap-Up, Part II

29 Thursday Jun 2017

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Picking up where I left off yesterday, it was Friday and the first of the two full-days of the convention. PortCon is a four day event, but the first and last are half-days (one into the evening and on the last it closes up shop at 5 pm). Therefore, Friday and Saturday are the “Big Days” with lots going on.

After finishing up my modest shopping and grabbing some lunch, I headed over to the games arena and joined a game of fifth edition D&D. Ben runs great games, and I hadn’t been able to participate in one of his for several years, so this was a real treat! He pulled out all the stops, and the climax of the adventure turned out to be that we’d discovered none other than the infamous Hand of Vecna. This is something steeped in the lore of the Dungeons and Dragons game from its earliest days, so encountering it was super cool!

I had the good fortune to have picked a mallet wielding dwarven paladin that I named Diffin DirtRune, follower and teller of long-winded tales of Karrak the Mighty (who I just made up on the spot along with his lore). This was a great character for me to be playing as things came into focus and it became a question of what to do with an artifact of great evil. I think if I hadn’t played Diffin just so, the game would have been about the hand slowly destroying the party from within and not become a quest to destroy the evil artifact.

The game ended on a cliffhanger, the first of a two-part game that would continue Saturday. At the end of the game, I was sold and rearranged my plans for the next day to attend it. :-)

After some dinner, it was my turn to game master again. I was excited to run this one, as it was Chaos at Camp Changeling… A game taking place in the same setting as my novel, Vivian’s Last Cigarette.

To be honest, I wasn’t as happy with how the game ran as I could have been. This was in part because the players were very disjointed and failed to cooperate at several critical moments. In particular, there was a player who was very enthusiastic and involved, but their character ultimately lead the group on a wild goose chase. That killed story momentum and wasted time, and running out of time resulted in a downer ending to the session.

However, I think a bigger problem was how I’d structured the adventure. It didn’t have clear goals for the players to follow from the onset, so most of the blame is on myself if they got sidetracked. Things got clearer by mid-game, after they’d felt things through, but by then there wasn’t enough time to get to the cool stuff I had planned for the climax… even if they’d decided to come out of the room they’d barricaded themselves in.

But, live and learn. And the players seemingly ended-up having a good time regardless. After the arena closed, Kim and I got some sleep after a quick round of board games with Ian and CJ in our hotel room.

Saturday morning was uneventful, but things got into gear at noon when the second half of Ben’s two-part D&D game started. I and a number of players from the first game returned, and participated in a wild adventure to destroy the Hand of Vecna and keep it from a lich that already possessed Vecna’s equally infamous eye. Things came down to a pitched fight at the end, and I though Diffin would go down sacrificing himself to stop the big-bad. But that dwarf made it through with a single hit-point after the dust had settled, and the hand and eye were destroyed along with the lich. An epic conclusion, and most satisfying end to the game!

The evening found me running my Great Dragon Escape game. This session went much better than Chaos at Camp Changeling had the night before. There was a lot of humor in the game as the players took the roles of young dragons escaping from a (mostly) evil circus run by a witch. Early on they freed the Fantastopotamus, who followed them like a puppy singing anachronistic songs matching what they were doing and thwarting any of their attempts at stealth.

The game ended earlier than expected, but in a satisfying way when they cut to the chase and bumbled into a fight with the witch. This became a very funny fray, and they defeated her even after most of them were turned into newts temporarily… Yes, she was a very classic sort of witch. ;-)

After the con had closed that night, an RPG staff only game of Monsterhearts was run after midnight that I participated in. An 18+ game, it was both hilarious and horrifying. We had a huge group of thirteen staffers playing, which was the best part for me as I’d gamed with many of them individually, but never with all of them at once. This went on until after two in the morning and we all had to retire quite exhausted. Tired or not, it was a great time. We’re planning on doing another RPG staff-only game next year with better pre-planning, so we can start at 10:30 rather than after midnight. ;-)

Not surprisingly, Kim and I slept-in on Sunday… the last day of the convention. I wasn’t running my Godzilla: Invasion of Monsters game until one in the afternoon and Kim didn’t start her shift at the games arena info desk until 11. So we took our time, got things together and checked out of the hotel early.

I had put the most work into Godzilla: Invasion of Monsters, but I had a hard time getting enough players to run it. This was a big game and by the time we started, it was an hour behind schedule. Things went well for the most part initially, but we lost a player (turns out they were just killing time waiting for another game to start) in an already small group after 90 minutes. This made progressing even harder, and the game ended only halfway to the climax. It was disappointing, but for what was able to be done, the players had a good time.

If I run this game again, I’ll do it as a two-parter and make sure there is enough time to run the scenario.

After that, Kim and I chipped-in to help close the game arena space, pick-up and pack the con stuff, and clean. We joined most of the PortCon staff at a local IHOP for an after convention meal thereafter, said our goodbyes… and that was it.

What a great time. :-)

I’m already making plans for next year, which has a theme of “Spoooooooky” that will offer a lot more leeway on game designs than 2017’s theme of “Carnival”. I’ve also learned a few things during my second year game mastering at the convention.

The first is that allowing the players to create their characters in a con setting, even partially, was well intentioned but a mistake. I won’t be doing that again because even though the system was pretty basic, it still cut into play time. When you only have a four hour block, loosing a half an hour or more is a big deal and I honestly didn’t think that it would eat-up that much time. This became a critical problem in the Godzilla game. So, nope, not doing that again.

Second, I’ll be designing my own RPG rules for my games next year that will be basic, easy to learn, but not as simplistic as the Five by Five system I’ve used this year and last. I think I can come-up with a rules set that’s a bit more serviceable and just as quick. This would also have the advantage of allowing me to publish the games I create as wholly my own intellectually property.

Alright, so that’s my long rundown of my PortCon experience this year. Now it’s time for me FINISH WRITING MY BOOK! Take care, and things will be getting back to normal on the blog next week. :-)

WIP-it Wednesday: June 28th, 2017

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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What a week! The month leading up to it was a real rollercoaster, but I had a tremendously fun time at PortConMaine all the same! By the end of it, I was exhausted –conventions and back to back gaming and game-mastering are rarely restful– but it was a good kind of exhausted as I came home late Sunday night. I was really glad that I had Monday off to recover… I slept until 8 am, and I haven’t done that in ages! ;-)

This was my second year as convention RPG staff and my wife Kimberly’s first after being regular attendees for several years. One wouldn’t think that working as a volunteers (PortCon is all volunteer staff) for half of your long weekend and vacation would be such a fantastic time. And yet it is. It’s not only great fun, but an honor to be active parts of an event that provides so much to so many.

In a world that seems to go out of its way lately to beat our spirits down, we created an oasis for others and ourselves in which those same spirits could find shelter and renewal. That’s worthy and good work, and I’m proud to be part of it.

So what went down? Things actually started last Wednesday night before the start of the con, when my friend Ian came down to my house and spent the night with fellow staffer Patrick. Ian is the Staff Chair of the RPG section of the convention, and one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. This was the second year we were able to entertain him as a guest and the first where we got to do the same for Patrick. We all sat around and had some great conversations about games old and new, and quite a bit of talk was given to my upcoming novel, Vivian’s Last Cigarette.

Thursday morning came, and our guests departed early to attend to the last preparations for PortCon’s 4 pm opening. Kim and I got ourselves packed for the three night stay in a staff room in the hotel, then stopped at the local copy shop to print off colored game handouts. We got to the event, registered, checked into the hotel and had just enough time to settle in before I ran my Toys Against Darkness game at 6 pm.

Toys went really well, and the players were able achieve the best possible ending. Everyone left the table satisfied. :-) A pair of players I had from last year joined in, and would return for two more of the games I would run that weekend. They said I ran some of the best games at the con, and that really meant a lot to me. :-)

After that, the game arena closed, and Kim and I returned to the hotel room we were sharing with Ian and another staffer named CJ whom we became friends with over the course of this year’s convention. Ian was in a bit of a jam as he had forgotten to bring the player characters needed to run his RPG session the next morning, so we assembled a group of RPG staffers in our room and helped him create a worthy batch! This was a great exercise in collaborative creation and storytelling, as we didn’t just create characters but also their relationships to one another and even the story setting and scenario. I loved it, and was up far too late enjoying the process. ;-)

Portcon 2017, day two!

Friday morning began the first full day of the convention. I took in a panel at 11 am called “So You Want to be an Author?” being given by a trio of experienced writers from the Quantum Muse eZine. This was an excellent “101” writing-publishing talk with very practical, sound and no-nonsense advice. These guys have decades of experience and know their stuff. I can’t say that I learned much from the panel I didn’t already know, but I did get a lot of affirmation that what I’m currently doing are tactics they’ve employed and recommend.

What was most instructive for me was getting to talk to the presenters afterwards. I thanked them for their talk, and asked them some more “202” type writing questions about critiquing and editing that they were more than happy to answer. I took note of their advice, and it really put me at ease with what I’m doing so far with the editing of my novel. I bought a few of their printed anthologies, and I’m thinking about submitting some work to Quantum Muse in the future. :-)

Not long after that conversation, I met indie author Melissa Walshe selling her books Autumn’s Daughter and Autumn’s Sister. Her back cover blurb immediately sold me on Autumn’s Daughter, and I ended up having a lovely fifteen minute chat with her and her husband after buying a copy of that first book of her trilogy. Really nice folks. I’m looking forward to getting into her story once I find a moment to start enjoying it!

I finished my shopping with a stop at artist Melissa McCommon’s booth. Melissa is the creator of the Epic Chaos! webomic, and we had a nice conversation. She’s really talented, and had come all the way from California to Maine to vend at PortCon while visiting family… on her birthday! And she also had these awesome fantasy, RPG-ish buttons that I just had to add to my collection!

This one in particular I wore for the rest of the convention:

These were all really cool people to run into, and that’s one of my favorite things that happens regularly at PortCon. :-)

This blog is getting long, so I’m breaking it into two-parts. Tune in tomorrow for part two! Take care!  

WIP-it Wednesday: June 21st, 2017

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

It’s been a packed week.

Leading up to it, my old cat became very sick and then passed away. And prior and post to that sad event I had bookended weekends that required me to work on my house and it’s grounds. All of this prevented me from putting as much effort as I wanted into preparing the sixteen hours of roleplaying games that I’ll be running at this year’s PortCon, which starts Thursday.

It shoved the majority of what needed to be done all into the last weekend before the con. Most of my fellow writers out there should know that means it was deadline and crunch time. I tapped my reserves and chugged caffeine like Popeye downs spinach. And, by gum, even though that last weekend wasn’t enough to get it all finished… I pounded out and completed the last two games this Monday and Tuesday!

Aside from printing the color handouts Thursday morning, the games are ready with a day to spare.

However, this victory came at the expense of the time I usually devote to maintaining my social media thoughtfully, and other stuff… like sleeping. ;-) I apologize if my presence has been lacking, or my posting slapdash. Starting next week, I hope to not only return to working on my novel, but also to getting the blog back on track and regular again.

As I write this, I’m exhausted. This was a lot of effort compressed into a small amount of time while I was also working and commuting to a full-time day-job. But now I’ve met this part of my responsibilities, and once my work is done today, I even have an evening to rest-up with before my vacation and the convention starts.

So I hope you can forgive me if I cut this short, and bid you adieu. I’m going to have fun over the next four days, and you’ll hear all about it next week. :-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! a good night’s rest! Take care!

WIP-it Wednesday: June 7th, 2017

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

As I mentioned in my last update, the month of June in general will find me shifting my focus away from Vivian’s Last Cigarette for the next few weeks. Instead, I’m working on and finishing the RPG sessions I’ll be running for PortCon, which takes place from June 22nd to the 25th.

It is creative work, not unlike assembling ideas for a story outlines. But thereafter, crafting role-playing sessions and scenarios is different than settling down and writing fiction. Role-play is collaborative storytelling. Unlike a you-and-your-story situation, you need to leave a lot open in the scenario to allow the other people playing to craft the unfolding tale with you.

You’ve got to make your players active participants, because if they are instead passive observers the game isn’t going to be very fun. If folks want a passive entertainment experience, a good book, movie or something similar will whip the pants off of me standing around and acting out a story from start to finish for several hours.

Most RPG players are looking for that active experience. The key thing about RPG game mastering is to give it to them, but that can be harder than you think.

As a writer, I personally LOVE telling stories. I start thinking about characters and have a blast working out their backgrounds and personalities. Then I start envisioning story scenarios –Who’s going to do this and when, and how antagonist X will react and how events are impacted from there– This is a great strength for me to have as a writer, but as Game Master it’s a serious flaw: It makes it easy for me to have tons of preconceived assumptions and desires about how a game will play out, and how its players will act using the characters I have worked hard to craft and embellish for them.

As you can imagine, having a mindset like that doesn’t set-up an experience that is likely to be a satisfying role-playing for the players. With everything pre-plotted in my brain, they feel railroaded and like their choices and input doesn’t matter to the ultimate outcome of the game’s story.

Three out of the four games I ran at last year’s PortCon featured characters I’d spent many tens of hours envisioning and writing. I wrote over 40,000 words of material for the con, most of that for player handouts with detailed character rundowns. However, that work was a wasted effort because it was vastly ignored.

The games were still fun all the same, because I designed them as open-ended and without preconceived conclusions. I did that as a safeguard, being conscious of my plotting tendencies, and I’m so glad that I did. Doing that salvaged those situations quite well combined with a positive mindset.

The one game where I let the players generate their own characters with a quick system turned out to be the best. All I did for my part was run the rest off a few pages of essential notes and lots of improvisation. I’d done it that way only because I was running low on time and couldn’t finish what I had planned initially… but it taught me a valuable lesson.

Players generating their own characters is defiantly the best way to get them invested in in a game. It also prevents me from making assumptions about how the characters will act or react to events… because I have no idea who the characters will be. ;-)

The downside is that this can eat-up valuable time when you only have four hours to play. Depending on the game, character creation can be lengthy and complicated. Fortunately, I’m using the Five by Five rules system for all my games this year. It’s a simple, versatile and understandable system that can be taught with 5 – 10 minutes. In it, characters only consist of five “traits” and one “trouble trait” that’s used as a roleplay aid. I have found 5×5 perfectly suited to the “pick-up” style of play found at PortCon, where players of all skill levels might be found at my table.

However, even simple and quick systems can get bogged down if the players don’t know what they want to play. In addition, players often don’t have a good grasp before the game starts of what character traits will be fun and useful in the scenario. This can result in characters that don’t get to do much, like a scuba expert in a desert based adventure. It can also create unbalanced parties with a massive excess of ability in one area (making some challenges too easy), and a great or total deficit in another (making other challenges nigh-impossible).

So this year what I’ve done in all my games is to let the players select their characters from a pool of partially completed ones:

Each character has an illustration to give a player an at-a-glance impression of what they could be like. In addition, in most of the games I have 1 to 3 of the five character traits pre-selected as well. These pre-selected traits are useful to the scenario I’m going to run, thus ensuring that some basics needed for the game will be in the group of players.

Unchosen trait slots get to be selected by the player as electives, off a chart of options that is unique to each game. This allows some player customization, enforces setting flavor, and ensures trait usefulness. Each individual trait is also removed from the available selection pool as they are chosen, ensuring each character has a unique set of abilities.

The one exception to this is my Godzilla: Invasion of Monsters game. In that scenario, ALL of the character’s traits are electives chosen by the players, allowing total customization… from a variety of useful traits.

No specific background or roleplaying guidelines are presented for any characters in the games. I leave those for the players to dream up in play, and they get a head start on that by selecting a role-play related “trouble trait” from a list much as their other elective traits were chosen.

As a game master, my job is to keep the story moving, judge rules, describe events, and portray every character that isn’t controlled by a player. And I’ve found that as my players are given more freedom to tell and influence the story, I am freed as well. Instead of making the game “just so”, I instead can focus on my antagonists acting appropriately for their goals and knowledge. I improvise and let them react to the world the players are influencing. I can focus on making every member of my supporting cast of non-player characters being memorable, and simply having as much fun as the players are.

I’m a reformed, formerly bad, game master now. It just took me realizing that if I wanted to make a game “just so”… I needed to write it as a story instead. ;-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! RPGs! Take care!