Since I’m a gigantic douche, I failed to mention on here that my Mutants and Masterminds game ended over a year ago.  It just got way too out of hand.  It was to the point that no matter how bad-ass of a bad guy I threw at the party, they could just axe it.  It was so bad that people would have to roll natural 1′s to miss, and natural 1′s to die.  Super uber bad guy? Dead.  So to end the game, the bad guys agreed to join the good guys, and the entire game faded to black and credits rolled.  Yeah, I’m lame.

Then Dax decided to run a Pathfinder Adventure Path using D&D 3.5 rules (vs Pathfinder v3.9 rules).  I’m playing the most BROKEN MONK EVER.  This wont make sense to any of you unless you play D&D, but revel in my brokenness:

This is a Human Monk, with Vow of Poverty and Saint template (Out of Book of Exalted Deeds).  Its a copy/paste of the character archive thats present on our internal RPG wiki (because if you aren’t tabletopping with a wiki and forums, you’re in the dark ages) so the formatting might be a bit shitty.  That being said, bask in the brokenness!

Backround Information

• Name: Twofist Seagle
• Player: Frank Precissi
• Class/Level: Exalted Monk 9 (Saint 2)
• Race: Human (Shoanti)
• Alignment: LG
• Diety: Sun Totem
• Size: M
• Age: 25
• Gender: M
• Height: 5’10″
• Weight: 148
• Campaign: Pathfinder Rise of the RuneLords (Dax’s)

Racial Traits/Abilities

• +1 skill point/level
• All saves against special attacks +2 diff
• +1d6 against evil creatures / +1d8 against evil outsiders & undead
  • Any creature that attacks with natural weapons takes this damage
• DR 10/evil
• Fast healing 1/2 HD/round (Max 10)
• Immune to acid/cold/electricity/petrification attacks
• Low light vision + Darkvision 60′
• Free action 20′ nimbus of light (Magic Circle against evil & Lesser Globe of Invun)

Class Features/Abilities

• Flurry of Blows
• Unarmed Strike
• Evasion
• Fast Movement
• Still Mind
  • +2 on saves vs Enchantment
• Ki Strike (lawful) (Fists act as magical weapons)
• Slow Fall 30ft
• Purity of body (Immune to non-magical diseases)
• Wholeness of Body (Heal Lvl x 2 HP/day)
• Improved Evasion

Exalted Abilities

• Endure Elements
  • Immune to Cold (-40F) or Hot (140F) environments
• Exalted Strike (good) (+2 to hit/damage, fists act as magical weapons)
• Sustenance (Removes need to eat or drink)
• Mind Shielding (Immune to disern thoughts/lies/detect alignment)
• DR 5/magic (does not stack with DR from Saint)

Abilities

• Str: 12 (+1)
• Dex: 16 (+3)
• Con: 16 (+3)
• Int: 10
• Wis: 21 (+5)
• Cha: 12 (+1)

Speed

• Speed: 60

AC

• Total: 29
  • 10+
  • Dex: 3
  • Wis (Monk): 5
  • Bonus Monk: 2
  • Vow of Poverty (Exalted): 7
  • Vow of Poverty (Natural): 1
  • Vow of Poverty (Deflection): 1
• Touch: 26
• Flat Footed: 26

Hit Points

• Total HP: 67

Initative

• Total: 3
  • Dex Mod: 3

Saving Throws

• Fortitude: 11
  • Base: 7
  • Con Mod: 3
  • Exalted Mod: 1
    • +4 against Poisons/Drugs
    • +4 against Poison (Saint)
• Reflex: 12
  • Base: 7
  • Dex Mod: 3
  • Regional Feat Totem Spirit (Sklar-Quah): 1
  • Exalted mod: 1
• Will: 13
  • Base: 7
  • Wis Mod: 5
  • Exalted Mod: 1
    • +2 against Fear/Dispair
    • +2 against Enchantment

Attacking/Weapons

• Base Attack Bonus: +14/+9 (+7/+2 (Monk BAB) + 5 (Exalted Feat Intuitive Attack) + 2 (Exalted Strike))
• Fist-O-Death
  • Damage: 1d10 + 3 (good) = (Exalted Strike + 2) + (Strength + 1)
• Flurry Fist-O-Death
  • Attack Bonus (+7/+7/+2) (+Intuitive Attack & Exalted Strike = +14/+14/+9)
  • Damage: 1d10 + 3 (good) = (Exalted Strike + 2) + (Strength + 1)
• Additional Damage of 1d6+1 against Evil / 1d4 + 1d8 against Evil Outsiders/Undead (Feat + Saint ability)

Grapple

• Total Grapple: 7
  • Base Attack Bonus: 6
  • Strength Mod: 1

Skills

• Total Skill Points:
  • Initial (Lev 1 Skill Points):
  • Per Level Skill Points: (4+Int+1) = 5

Skill List

• (Total = Ability + Ranks + Misc)
  • Balance: 7 = 3 + 4 + 0
  • Climb: 6 = 1 + 5 + 0
  • Diplomacy: 13 = 1 + 10 + 2
  • Escape Artist: 13 = 3 + 10 + 0
  • Hide: 8 = 3 + 5 + 0
  • Knowledge Arcana: 2 = 0 + 2 + 0
  • Knowledge Religion: 2 = 0 + 2 + 0
  • Listen: 7 = 3 + 4 + 0
  • Move Silently 8 = 3 + 5 + 0
  • Sense Motive: 8 = 4 + 4 + 0
  • Spot: 8 = 4 + 4 + 0
  • Tumble: 15 = 3 + 10 + 2

Feats

• Stunning Fist (PHB)
  • Monk level 1 class feat
• Improved Unarmed Strike (PHB)
  • Monk level 1 class feat
• Totem Spirit (Sklar-Quah) (Pathfinder Intro Text)
  • +1 Reflex Save / +2 Tumble
  • Free regional feat
• Sacred Vow (BED)
  • Prerequisite for Vow of Poverty: (BED: 40)
  • Level 1 Feat
• Vow of Poverty (BED)
  • See Book of Exalted Deeds page 35
  • Human bonus Feat
• Touch of Golden Ice (BED)
  • Unarmed attacks against evil creatures must make a Contact Fort Save DC 14. Initial is 1d6 Dex damage, Secondary is 2d6 Dex damage
  • Level 1 Vow of Poverty bonus feat
• Deflect Arrows (PHB)
  • Monk level 2 bonus feat
• Intuitive Attack (BED)
  • Add Wisdom modifier to unarmed attack rolls
  • Level 2 Vow of Poverty bonus feat
• Blind-Fighting
  • Reroll missed chance due to concealment, no AC penalty when attacked by invisible foe.
• Gift of Faith
  • +2 to saves against Fear/Despair
  • Level 4 Vow of Poverty bonus Feat
• Dodge
  • +1 AC against selected target
  • Level 6 feat
• Mobility
  • +4 AC against certain attacks of Op
  • Level 6 bonus monk feat
• Vow of Abstinence
  • +4 Fort save against drugs/poison
  • Level 6 Exalted Feat
• Sanctify Natural Attack
  • +1 Dmg against evil or +1d4 against evil undead/outsider
• Spring Attack
• Consecrate Spell-Like Ability (Saint Protective Aura)
  • Makes spells have the good descriptor

I haven’t really said much here about D&D 4th edition or what my feelings were about it.  I really wanted to get my hand on a book, and actually play a game before I blasted on how much it sucks like most of the other D&D players on the internet.  So have just gotten back from my first game, here is my $0.02.

• Character Creation
  • Coming from 2nd edition with zany math, and having that simplified to the 3.5ed rules, making a 4th ed character was quite a shock.  I got the feeling that I was making a computer-game character with “Here are your 2 choices for a Warlord”.  The skills have been cut down so far that you can’t have a rouge that is good as forgery, disguise, and spying; It’s all been lumped together into “thievery”.  You can’t have a character that cant spot anything in front of his face but find a needle in a haystack if he/she is putting his mind to it.  Major skills are all lumped together into these broad reaching categories that really kills it for me.
  • The powers.  You have your at-will powers, your daily powers, your encounter powers, and utility powers.  In fact, WotC makes these cute little cards you can /buy/ so you can have all of your powers right at your fingertips.  Thats right, your choices now short of movement and basic attack have resorted down to little cards.  Let me peg you into little holes now.  Oh, did I mention that no matter what character class you are, everyone follows the exact same progression as to how many at-will, daily, encounter and utility powers you get? Wizards get cantrips, and certain classes get a few speciality powers, but the majority of everything is flat across the board and level dependant.
  • 1/2 your level bullshit.  Most all saves and AC have a positive modifier of 1/2 your level.  Thats right, the wizard, rogue, and cleric all get the same bonus based upon 1/2 of their level.  Long gone are the days of the Cleric actually having a better Reflex save when they are flat footed (and denied their Dex bonus of -3 from full plate) than when they see it coming.  Everyone gets treated equally.
• Saving throws
  • I dislike this so much that it gets its own section
  • In the 3.5 days, you would get a collection of modifiers to your Fort/Reflex/Will saves.  They come from your ability scores, feats, armor, etc.  When someone casted a spell on you; you would roll a d20, add your modifiers, and if the resulting number was higher than the DC of the power being used on you then it had little to no effect.
  • In the 4.0 days, you have a number that is like 10 + 1/2 your level + ability modifier.  The attacker now rolls and determines if he/she succeeds.  Saving throws in 4th ed are like attack rolls in 3.5.  You have a set number that you cant change, you cant roll a 20 to resist, you cant have that uber-god roll a 1 and fail.
  • The whole 1/2 level flat-across-the-board really bugs me.  Before the bonuses to your saving throw was 100% dependant on your class, not just what level you are.  A level 20 rogue should not have the same bonuses to his will or fort save that a level 20 cleric does, and a level 20 wizard should have a reflex save even close to what a rogue has.  4th ed obviously thinks differently.
• Healing Surges
  • Mechanically I have no idea where they got the idea where characters can just spontaneously heal when the conditions are right.  Every character has these ‘healing surges’ where they recover 1/4 of their hitpoints when conditions are met.  Clerics don’t really have any “Healing Powers” anymore per se, they just allow people to use up their healing surges.  Paladins use their healing surges to heal others with ‘lay on hands’, warlords can command people to use their healing surges.  So really why do we have clerics when every other class out there seems to have a power that allows characters to spend /their/ own healing surges on themselves?   Don’t really care for that.  How can a fighter just spontaneously heal after a Warlord gives him a pep-talk?  Why do healing potions just allow you to use a healing surge instead of actually healing you.  If you drink a healing potion and you have used up your healing surges between rests, then you just wasted a potion!  Its a hackish way of getting around the age old problem of not being able to heal unless you had a Cleric, Paladin, or a Bard in your party (uh, boo hoo? Make someone play a Cleric!  You wouldn’t march into melee with a rogue and a wizard would you?)
• Its so easy any idiot can play!
  • This is what I have a big issue with.  Back in the 2nd ed and 3/3.5 days, playing D&D wasn’t the “cool” thing to do.  You were nerds, you got made fun of when you broke out your source book and leveled up your character between classes.  Now all of a sudden since WoW became famous everyone wants to play D&D.  We have our little nerd club, and because you got a level 80 computer game character you want to be a part of it? I’m sorry, it doesn’t work that way.   I’m one of those “walked up hill both ways, while calculating THAC0, and wondering why a save vs wand was different than a staff/stave.”
  • WotC made 4th ed so dumbed down that any idiot can play.  Just look on the internet how many people refuse to buy the 4th ed books, look at how many people are angry just like I am at how they have fed the rules lead-paint until they drool.
  • Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition obviously has a few extra chromosomes in its genome.
• No OGL
  • One of the huge awesome things about 3.5 was the Open Gaming License.  This Open Sourcing of the core d20 rules allowed other people who make rule books that were 100% compatible with D&D (or new games that used the exact same rules).  There were a TON of 3.5 books that were published by 3rd parties that were perfectly compatible with D&D 3.5 (The Book of Erotic Fantasy was a big seller. Yes, someone wrote rules to incorporate all the wierd sexual fetishes in your D&D campaign).  All the book needed was to just have the OGL printed somewhere in the book, and not use any proprietory D&D stuff (like inital character generation, so you had to buy the D&D main book, understandable)
  • 4th ed has no OGL.  It has some free/low-cost licensing but who knows if WotC is going to renig on that.  Its not open source one big, and Paizo refuses to publish anything under the 4th ed ruleset just for that reason.

Now what I do like about D&D 4th ed, is that the books seem to be colorful. and nicely laid out.  Uh, it allows me to hang out with my friends (some of which who do like D&D 4th ed).  Some of the new classes are kinda neat.

Dax said it best.  The system is solid, and would be a winner if they wouldn’t have put the D&D name on it.

So I havent wrote about the M&M game much over the past weeks.  Here is a recap:

I had the players go into this time-warp alternate-reality where the world (as they saw it) had been destroyed by an alien force.  They wake up without powers.  I wrote this awesome script to take everyone’s powers, randomize them, then assign them back to the players, so as time progressed, “random” powers started to manifest.  My original intent was to make them realize that sometimes throwing powers at a problem was not the only way to solve a problem.  Plus I was curious to see how the players would cope with not having the safety blanket of their powers at their immediate disposal.

Well, party morale seemed to drop considerably after that happened.  So this last game they did some events that allowed them to regain their powers again.  It was an interesting experiment, however I think my delivery was sub-par and really ruined (or didn’t get the message across) the experience.  Oh well, live and learn.

This last game however things started slow, but towards the end we ended up running past the allotted time of midnight to get to an ending point.  I think that the party could of ran for another hour or two but I had to cut it short due to myself having to work in the morning.  There was an obvious morale improvement as the powers were regained which made me happy.

As random things happen for random times, as I was at Starbucks with a player who is home on summer break (and thereby an active player yet again), we met a starbucks employee who is a UOP grad and what seems to be a die-hard tabletopper.  I shot him an email to see if he wants to jump into the M&M fun, so we’ll see how that turns out.  He recently graduated UOP with a degree in physics, so it would be a welcome addition to get another hard-science major in the gaming group vs all of the fruity soft-science (yes, that means you Brandon) majors that we have.

Last Sunday (yeah, I’m a slacker), was my first game as the Mutants and Masterminds storyteller.

I must say, it went rather well.

There is one aspect that I got a taste of when I ran Shadowrun that I really see now.  No matter how concrete you think your story outline is.  No matter how much you have prepared for the game thinking of all of the possible sidetracking your players will go on, they will always think of something that you didn’t.  We spent most of the game ignoring the fact that all of the superheros of the world went missing (except the ones in Stockton) instead on trying to balance the budget of California so the Stockton Arena wouldn’t get shut down.

Yeah.  My players wanted to move the prision system to another dimension to save California money.  Yeah, I’m at a loss too.  It wasn’t until I made something very dear to them go missing did they get back on track.  Wow, screwing over the rest of the world to save the Stockton Arena and California.  Never saw that coming.

Other than that, keeping my fingers crossed for another good game.

After over a year of running the Mutants and Masterminds (MaM) game, our Storyteller Sky has decided that he has had enough.  He wants to play for a change so he put his game up for grabs to whomever wishes to continue it.

Needless to say, after my latest Shadowrun game exploding and collapsing, I was a bit hesitant to take the torch.  However, most of the Shadowrun players (some who play in the MaM game as well) told me that running the MaM game would be an excellent experience for me, so I gave it some serious thought.  After discussing time issues with Tiffany (whom if I was not running MaM, I would be there playing anyways), you are looking at the new Storyteller of the Mutants and Masterminds game.  Uh, yay?

I start in 3-4 weeks.  Melinda wants to try to run the game for 3 weeks as a transitional ST while I get some things prepared, but I think i’m capable of starting as soon as tomorrow night with some preliminary story/tying up loose threads from Sky’s game.  Everyone is keeping their same characters, time will just march on under my compassionate hand instead of Sky’s.

However the million dollar question is that I’ve been handed this running game of ambitious, good natures, fun-loving players who really dig their characters.  A part of me wants to turn the game from less zany/comic-bookish into a darker mood game.  Like turning  Adam West Batman into The Dark Knight movies.  I setup a quick survey on our internal gaming website, a few want a change, but the majority was right in the middle (and not everyone has submitted one yet).

Do I make this game darker, give the players more realistic challenges, more evil villains, and have them actually make planned decisions  as to what course of action they will take?  Or do I keep the same zany, wacky, no-real-fear-of-dying that we have had for the past year.  I can do the scientific way and make the game dark until people start to bitch, then back off 10%.  Not sure if there is a good way to do this that will make everyone happy.

I think I need to take a serious look as to why I like to play in the MaM game and what makes it fun for me.   I think I’m going to start writing about the MaM game more here to document how things panned out.

Many of you have asked “What is this Mutants and Masterminds game you always tweet about?”

Its a role-playing game that I play every Sunday with a group of people.  Its a game where you play a comic bookish superhero.  The rule books have every single power from every superhero in existence and allows you to pick and choose ones to fit your character.  The rules are quite ambiguous and at times outright confusing, however we make the best of it.

A really dark form of the Mutants and Masterminds genre can be seen on the TV show “Heros” where ordinary people get super-human powers.  Our game is no where near that serious/dark but more slapstick, goofy and funny.  The setting takes place in modern day Stockton, and we are to play ‘ourselves’ but with superhero powers.  Needless to say, this gets quite interesting.

I play ‘Dr Gizmo‘, a pharmacist exposed to a unique mixture of drugs during a pharmacy “incident” which gave him super-human powers.  Dr Gizmo’s power is ‘Gadgets’ meaning that he can create pretty much a gadget or gizmo that does anything.  To keep in the pharmacy paradigm, his gadgets must be explainable in medicinal terms (an injection to allow water breathing, or bandages to heal otherwise lethal wounds).  Yeah, I’m basically Inspector Gadget but a ton cooler.  Did I mention that Dr Gizmo has to wear his underwear on the outside of his pants for his powers to work? Its true, all superheros have their underwear on the outside of their pants.

Dax plays “Apollo”, a half-god of (you guessed it) Apollo.  Dr Gizmo’s theory is that he’s just delusional, and he got his powers not from a “God” but from some silly dental accident involving the x-ray machine.

Brandon plays “Brenden”, an “Alien” that has the ability to self-replicate.  His character is the most zany and absolutely psychotic in the whole game.  We have done everything to a Brenden replicate, cooking, launching, shooting, zapping, experimenting on, etc.  Crazy. Dr Gizmo thinks that he’s just a regular guy with some delusion of being an alien from another planet, although having a crashed space-ship on the moon as a base isn’t jiving with the ‘regular guy’ theory.

Other people play, but I really have no attention span at this moment to list -everyone- and their powers.  Maybe later.

Last night I concluded my shadowrun game.  The ending wasn’t as exciting as I imagined it in my head, however my players were tolerant and were really good sports.

I did however, realize how much Shadowrun is a very binary genre.  People either love it, or hate it.  One of my players loved it, 2 of them hated it, and one was meso-meso.  I think it really takes a lot out of/kills a game if the players don’t care about the setting that the game is in.

Shadowrun v4 all-in-all is a very complex system to the point of being annoyingly complex.  Unless everyone is a die-hard cyberpunk fan (and knows the rules to the game inside and out) the game grinds to a halt the moment the stats are involved.  Complex dice rolls for everything, and a lot of things make sense to people who are (in real life) computer literate, but no sense to people who have no idea how the internet/computer work (like certain hacking related rolls are 100% based upon your comlink, no character stats are involved).

It was a fun experiment to do, the backend I wrote (although nobody used it) was a good experience, and short of all the arguing and drama over this game I really had a good time running it.  Of course I say that now rather than last night when I wanted to murder some of my players.

Running a good tabletop game (to me) is something that can be explained in 1000 books, yet all of which give you no useful information. It is one of those skills that has to be fumbled around through trial and error. Since I am crotch-deep in this Shadowrun game that I’ve been running for the past 3 months, there are some things that I have realized and decide to share (in case anyone else reads this and has the urge to run a tabletop game).

My players are the hard-core types.  They wish to have character development off-of the sheet.  They are not a big fan of Experience Points to add dots or ranks to their characters.  Usually dice aren’t rolled unless they are doing something great or has a great deal of ‘can fail’.  These players tend to enjoy to see their characters evolve, like to see their backgrounds (which all of them wrote) incorporated into the story, and really have their characters be actual ‘people’.

Thats not to say that the game is 100% serious-face with no laughing.  There is plenty of antics, off-the-wall plans, etc.  Its just ‘realistic’ off-the-wall plans.  We have an zany-antic game thats seperate from this one that a few of us play in for crazyness.

Now I’ve played (as a player) in tons of RPG Tabletop games.  Boring ones to exciting ones.  However I’ve never really ran one of this caliber.   It was a new system with a bunch of die-hard players.  Die hard in the way that the’ll expect a ton out of me, but also will ride out any storms due to my inexperience.

Helpful tips for some new ST’s that might be reading this and want to run a game:

• Get your shit together before game.  Know the system inside and out (especially Shadowrun, the most complex and poorly written (see page 123) book (see page 13) ever (see page 56 subtable on page 57) written).
• Get a feel for what your players want.  If they want zany then ninja-clowns and unpossible feats (which in turn are very much possible) so be it.  However if they want dark and serious and pseudo-depressing, then be prepared for that.
• Always roll dice.  I made this huge mistake when the story-running NPC first came into play.  He had so much dice ahead of the players that I didn’t bother rolling.  Always roll, even if what your NPC does is scripted.  Not only does this give the player a sense of actually having a part in his/her fate, but also gives you colorful ammo in case they horribly fail/botch the roll.  That snowball may roll 4 dice against hell’s 4000, but what happens when the snowball fails horribly?
• Give small victories.  You may wish your game to have the Blade Running doom-and-gloom, but pay attention early on what your players wish they can get, and if the game is turning too dark, throw them that bone.  It’ll improve player morale.
• The players have to win.  They may not win in the fashon they want, nor their definition of ‘win’ might not be the same as yours.  However having them show up to your game week in and week out to have them ultimately fail (unless they were being total dumbasses) is going to leave a bad taste for future games.
• Don’t fall into the rocked NPC trap.  Sure, its fun to play a totally butch bad-guy NPC with tons of stuff you would never -ever- get as a player, but always have a key weakness.  The weakness might be known but not obtainable yet, or may be something stupid but unknown.

Last and not least

• No matter how hard you plan, no matter how much track you lay down to railroad your players into a direction you want the story go to, they will ALWAYS find a way to derail your story and make it their own.

So I’ve been working on this backend for this Shadowrun RPG game that I’m planning to run in September. It’ll handle stuff like gear shopping, online inventory, individual vs group bank acounts, automatic job generation, etc.

If you are interesting in helping, its 100% php/mysql backend and I’ll accept any help I can get. Its a bit rough to post publically right this very moment, but if you’re interested let me know and i’ll shove the SVN repo somewhere for everyone to nab once I get it somewhat stable.

The OWBN Hour of Power is the funniest shit I have ever heard.