The Great Allegheny Case Race Steeple Chase II

I can't recall with any certainty where the original idea was born.  Eric and I had talked about it as an excuse to have a good time.  We did not even know if it was possible for two people to consume a case of Yuengling in a sitting.  It was decided that we would acquire said case of Yuengling and after we finished working our shift at the bar downtown, last 4th of July, we would abscond back to his house and give it a shot. 

"Worst-case-scenario, we have a great time." -EJB

In theory, on paper, it all sounded great.  

Unfortunately, on July 3rd I made a number of bad decisions that ended with me drinking the last of a six pack of malt liquor while two of my other friends emptied their portions of the swill back onto the banks of the Allegheny River around 4am.  Cackling to myself, I called them amateurs until doing exactly the same the next morning. 

This bad decision is the first point of contention between EJB and myself.

I was broken with hangover when I got to work for the 4th.  The prospect of closing the bar with the amount of business we were getting for the holiday bent my soul to the point of danger. Eventually, however, we managed to get out of there and back to his place - stopping only once to burgle some black bean burgers from the freezer at my apartment on the way.

And then it started. It started with Eric's roommate asking if he could buy one of the beers in the case off of us...  It sounded debaucherous and silly when he said it then, but looking back his explanation that we really needed all twenty-four of those beers was fantastic. 

We drank Yuengling by the bottle.  We took turns playing Call of Duty: Black Ops on his little TV, sitting right on the coffee table.  We made a good effort of it.  The sun came up.  We wavered.  Getting close to 6am I had to call it.  

The final tally?  Eric had consumed 11 of his twelve beers.  Me?  A paltry 9 of twelve beers drunk.  Now for the second point of contention - Eric tends to leave a finger or two in the bottoms of his bottles.  Understandably, the last sips are the least appetizing.  Yet when you are Racing Cases and Chasing Steeples, these little amounts matter.  Who can tell how many last swigs went wasted?  One full beer?  One and a half?  We will never know.  Then there is the matter of the spilling of a beer. Half of a beer on the kitchen floor as we sat there drinking.  These two seemingly trivial matters can amount to a lot when you consider the difference in our totals.  It has been a huge point of contention for the last year.

Contention aside - Eric and I agreed that one of the most important requirements of participating in a CRSC is that the person(s) you are doing it with should be ones you would not mind engaging in embittered munchkining for at least a year concerning the accumulation of warm backwash or malt liquor mistakes on the sides of rivers.  

That said - Tuesday night we are going at it again.  We are going at it again and this time we are bringing friends. 

Jay (@crippledvulture), Rob, Eric (@lifeasavirus) and myself, Ryan (@rsreed) are going to hide in the squalored chambers of Starship Kegasus while my lady goes out of town and we are going to try and consume two cases of Yuengling in a night. While doing so we are going to play four player Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 1 or Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

When discussing strategy, Eric is aiming for slow and steady.  "You don't race the clock, you race the man."  He is going to try and hit his pace and hold to it.  Jay on the other hand believes that he has a secret super-power that will enable him to finish first.  "My strategy rests pretty much entirely on my great thirst," says Jay.  "People at work marvel at how much water I consume during a shift.  I just seem to be able to put away vast quantities of liquid..."  Pacing-wise, Jay just wants to set himself up one beer ahead of Eric, ready for the haul.  I am aiming for a three hour case race.  If I can put away a bottle every 15 minutes I think that I will be fine. I am purposely not drinking tonight and I am going to eat early in the day tomorrow so that belly-room and discomfort never become an issue. At the time of publication, Rob could not be reached for what I am sure are obvious reasons.

Rob - Full Time Wrangler, Part Time Blogger. 

So stay tuned to our various channels tomorrow evening around 10:30pm as we will be live updating/tweeting the entire event.  It is sure to get silly. 

www.twitter.com/KegasusSwords

www.twitter.com/crippledvulture

www.twitter.com/lifeasavirus

www.twitter.com/rsreed

Starsystems and Stormtroopers

Well that was something.

I've been dungeonmastering and storytelling tabletop games for over a decade, on and off. I knew the turnout would be substantial when we decided to play a Star Wars D20 game, and I was not disappointed. Nine players is a lot to handle, and will presumably involve a degree of cat-herding.

Cats don't rip your arms out of their sockets when they lose.

I spent the previous week worrying about how to wrangle everyone into the story and ultimately on to the same ship. I'll leave the telling of our tale to Ryan for now because I want to focus on the nuts and bolts of running a game this big. Everyone appeared to leave happy, but I'm going to assume for the purpose of this writing that they were mostly just being nice because there were some major flaws in the execution.

First, I needed a theme and tone. I've long been a fan of the old Battlestar Galactica slash Voyager slash Macross "community on the run" sort of story. Sure, it's a bit over-utilized, but it has a lot to offer a game like ours. We have ten characters with different backgrounds and motives. You can get a group of four or so to set aside their differences and work together on something but the process of negotiating that whole alliance between so many characters could take all night.

This story format forces the issue by presenting the characters with an existential crisis - in this case, a hostile takeover of the space station they all live on. They must work together because the options for escape are limited and the alternative is capture or death.

That element seemed to work pretty well. Once it was clear that the station would soon be crawling with stormtroopers, the players started working together to escape - though they disagreed on the best way to abscond.

As a funny little aside, Ryan spent a lot of time working on his character's story, and with it the story and layout of the remote station where the game began. In the weeks before we sat down to play, I could see him getting attached to the place, but I couldn't tell him I planned to drive them out of it.

Since these games can take a while, I chose a pretty simple (or so I thought) three act format that I hoped we could complete in a reasonable amount of time.

We got close enough.

After the obligatory character introductions, I leaned over our sweet graphed-out chalkboard table and said, "now roll initiative." Rather than spend an hour and a half leading everyone to the first battle, I decided to throw them right into the middle of it. The first act involved three combats run simultaneously in different locations. Pirates and saboteurs probing the doomed station for weakness.

That was a good call. The foes were relatively weak, but desperate. Not enough to really menace the characters, but sufficient to send a message. "This station is a mess," our wookie player commented. Exactly.

The second act was where my plan started to become bogged down. This is where I wanted the players to investigate the invaders and determine that they were not mere scoundrels, but pawns in an Imperial plot to take over.

It took much longer than it should have. I don't mean to suggest that the players weren't smart enough, but rather that I should have been able to lead them to the proper conclusion through more than just the couple of channels I prepared ahead of time. I've always felt that my ability to think on my feet as a DM was one of my skills - indeed I've run games entirely from the top of my head - but I just wasn't fast enough.

Victory in a situation like that - figuring out what's going on - would not have been cheapened by making it a little easier. In fact, as we found out directly afterward, the players themselves will provide the additional challenge and drama. They immediately disagreed on how exactly to escape the station, and whether or not to help the other denizens get away, or blow it up on the way out.

I have always liked these. Hence, I put the group on one.

That discussion, and the logistical challenges presented by the players' conclusions was where that second act's time should have been spent. I think that is the second lesson from this game - keep it simple and let the players provide the color and moral quandaries. In a group that big, they're going to do it anyway.

By the time the third act had begun, fatigue and drunkenness were setting in, and I had to end things quickly. I allowed them to escape the Star Destroyer without much of a fight with their stolen flotilla. I had planned a scene in which the fighter pilot characters would need to defend the ship from TIEs while the rest of them escorted the tech-savvy Sullustan to engineering - fighting through a stormtrooper boarding party - in order to restore the hyperdrive.

It would have been cool, but maybe next time.

Don't get me wrong, I think it was a good game. The fact that we reached the intended end point and set the characters off on their adventure is enough for me. I think it will help me improve my DMing as well. It was a very different beast from the kind of thing we usually do. It was more akin to the webcomic writing I've done than I expected (my forum-adventure comic, A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe). You have to switch off your targeting computer. Let go. Set some waypoints in the story but let the group dynamic carry it as much as possible. With so many people, there's enough material that will just manifest itself and the whole story will be richer for it, I think.

We plan to switch up the DM role, so I'm looking forward to seeing where we go from here. That, and playing my B2 Battle Droid Tech Specialist.

j!

Character Building - The Star Wars RPG for Sunday Dinner and Gaming

Since the Swords of the Kegasus began gathering over a year ago, we have talked about a casual, monthly game with little obligation and lots of people. We were looking for a place for folks who were interested in trying out a roleplaying game (specifically our brand of rules-light, not taking ourselves too seriously gaming).  Our playtesting of DND Next got us started in a pretty good way.  Though Carly was the one who vocalized it, we had all wanted to play the Star Wars D20 RPG at some level.  It was unofficially settled pretty quickly. 

Ever since I was made aware of a Star Wars role-playing game (all the way back to the D6 pre-Wizards of the Coast versions) I have wanted to play a Slicer.  Not a Jedi, not a Smuggler, but a Slicer.   I have wanted to play a character that new almost nothing about shooting a blaster or using the force, but could work magic and wonders with a datapad and a computer terminal.  I guess now is my chance. 

The hardest part so far in the creation of the character has been trying to decide what race I should play.  I always start down this road with grand and noble ideas. For instance, I wanted to play a Rodian - because, lets be honest, they are one of the coolest races next to Wookies on a purely aesthetic scale. Then I start to think about that bonus feat that Humans receive at first level.  The Mon Calamari, with that +2 to INT seems like a much wiser choice of race over the Rodian +2 DEX.  Then there are Sullustians - again, cool as shit - Bothans.  It gets frustrating fast.

So in a way to balance all this problem solving, I have decided to roll my character stats first and then see how I can fit them into the races that I want to play.  The Mon Calamari is just a tech powerhouse.  It’s hard not to just pick them.  With the INT and the bonuses to craft, its just plain difficult not to go ahead and play one.  I am going to roll the stats and then look at what it is I can do with what I get.  I secretly hope that I don’t succumb to the Calamari - but they are pretty damn sweet.  Let’s roll some dice.

First roll out of the gate is a 15, which is a pretty sweet and strong start. Then a 14. Then an 8.  Ouch.  That is going to be pretty damn painful no matter where I choose to put it. Followed by a 7?!?  What the fuck random.org?  This character already has some serious flaws no matter how I try and spin it. Then 11. And for the last one...8.  Jesus Christ. 15, 14, 8, 7, 11, 8.  Nope.  There is no way that I can spin three scores in the minuses and still play a fun character. Now don’t get me wrong, I love a low ability score.  There is something inside me, some narrative engine, that loves to look at a low score and weave that into a story.  But that is a lot of low score.

Let’s try this again. 12, 16,  6, 17, 12, 10.  Ok this is something a bit more workable.  The six is super low and its going to be a handicap, but a single handicap is a fun and interesting thing to build a character around.  That sixteen and seventeen are pretty sweet as well.  With the sixteen and seventeen I think that I am going to steer away from the Mon Calamari - as tempting as it is, I think I want to take a crack at one of the other three races that seemed like a bit of fun. Initial placement is going to look like this:

STR - 6
DEX - 16
CON - 12
INT - 17
WIS - 10
CHR - 12

I like this - I am already starting to figure out some ideas for how I want to play this guy. Now I am considering making my character an older one, which would bump my intelligence up to 18, which is awesome, at the cost of dropping my strength to a 5.  A 5.    That is a -3.  I would be shit at climbing and jumping. I could not swing a punch to save my life. But I would be fast, and I would be smart.  The fast part not so much.  All rodian, Bothan, and Sullustians get +2 DEX, so starting out at adult as opposed to middle age would give me an 18 DEX.  I would be fast, quick, and hard to hit, while missing out on that 18 INT which is the bread and butter of my entire character.  Fuck it.  I am not making this guy to dodge shit.  He is going to pretty much be a genius, lets ditch min/maxing for some good story elements and the fact that I historically like to play older characters. Let’s apply the age modifiers before finalizing a race:

STR - 5
DEX - 15
CON - 11
INT - 18
WIS - 11
CHR - 13

That is what my un-racial character looks like at middle age.  It’s time that I am going to have to settle on a race, to choose between Rodian, Bothan, or Sullustian.

Bothan could be fun - being older with that terrible STR could mean that I was a skilled member of the SpyNet that was crippled somehow.  Ulterior motives and old connections could make for some fun playing. 

The super hunter nature of the Rodians really doesnt give me much to work with.  Likewise the subterranean Sullustan only sort of lends itself to the idea of working in a small dark room as a hacker. No Rodian.  Sullustan or Bothan.  I think that I am going to go with a Bothan.  A crippled Bothan ex-SpyNetter.  So lets apply those racial ability adjustments.  Then I hear that Rob is going to play a Bothan.  Perhaps its something silly in my play style, but I prefer to be “the” Bothan rather than “a” Bothan.  I guess I finally have my excuse to play my Sullustan.  Upper echelons of the SoroSuub Corporation tech facilities gone wrong makes for a nice beginning as well.

STR - 5 (-3)
DEX - 17 (+3)
CON - 9 (-1)
INT - 18 (+4)
WIS - 11 (+0)
CHR - 13 (+1)

That strength really hurts, and I was not expecting the minuses to the constitution after the racial modifiers. I am going to stay with it, however, it adds well to my idea of a cripple.  He is quick, but very, very weak.  That weakness will make for a decent backstory.

Bauxton Sree is born.  I will spare our loyal audience the methodical and calculating distribution of skill points into pedantic and erudite knowledges for the sake of a game played with very little attention to explosions or experience points.

Now it is just a matter of talking with the other guys, getting some story leads, and weaving a thick background that Jay and Eric can use in their storytelling.  Look out for more to come.