Misty – STUFFER SHACK

All-Star Player Characters, the making of

What is an All-Star Player Character? It’s a character that has all the tools needed to make him or her as interesting and fun to play as possible. It’s not necessarily an overload of information; just the right amount of information.

When a player writes up a character, it could be just a single sheet with a few numbers on it, several pages of a short story, or somewhere in between. What’s important is that a player gathers just enough information about their character to maximize their enjoyment. Too little information can make the character vanilla bland. Too much information can make the character too complicated to remember.

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Steal this Trap Encounter – Click-Click-Click…

The player characters are in an especially old dungeon or dwelling when one of them steps on a pressure plate!

The player characters are in an especially old dungeon or dwelling when one of them steps on a pressure plate! The plate depresses two inches, and then the players can hear a subtle “click-click-click…” behind the nearest wall. They also hear the rattling of chains overhead… when they look above them they see huge boulders hanging by chains, and there are about 20 of them. The boulders are as wide as the corridor, and spaced close together.

It’s obvious that the players have set off a trap and any moment the boulders will fall – and then two do fall. They are at the end of the hall, blocking their way out. Any sensible person would know that this trap is absolutely deadly, and with nowhere to go, the player characters must disable the trap before the rest of the boulders fall!

The ravages of time and water have affected the paneling on the walls and the pavers under their feet. It’s very easy for the player characters to pin-point the clicking sound and pull away the paneling. However, on the first try to disable the trap, the character fails automatically!

It doesn’t matter what they rolled, and they will fail no matter what! At this point, the player characters are free to attempt anything before the boulders inevitably fall. They may make another attempt to disarm, they may attack the trap, or they may try to squeak past the boulders that have already fallen. However, nothing works! It looks like the players are doomed!

The trap is so old or rotted that it no longer functions. The player character sets it off, but now it’s just broken spinning gears and cogs in the wall. It continues to turn and click for several more minutes until it breaks further and stops. The players were never in any danger, and may continue on.

My problem with Kickstarter

I’ve been a gamer for quite a while. I’ve played quite a few editions of quite a few games, and I’ve had the displeasure of watching the tabletop role-playing game industry flounder. My hometown had four friendly local gaming stores, and they flourished for years. They flourished right up until the industry took a dive, and all four of them had to close shop.

This unfortunate turn began right around the time zmuds became popular, and then really took a nose-dive when Asheron’s Call and World of Warcraft came out. Are these other geeky games responsible for the RPG industry’s downfall? I don’t know – I’m just noting a coincidence. Sure, some would say those geeky games actually acted as a gateway to RPGs, but I’m no industry oracle, I just know that I saw fewer and fewer people buying gaming books.

Ok, so Amazon started selling gaming books at a reduced rate. I get that, and maybe that has something to do with FLGSs closing down. Ok, so D&D 4e and Pathfinder came out, and maybe that actually helped the industry.

So who’s to say what’s happening with the industry? I don’t know, but I’ll give you $5 out of Tourq’s pocket if you can tell me for certain. But, regardless of all that, there’s one part of the industry that I really have a problem with, and that’s Kickstarter.

I mean, with all this crowd-funding, many role-playing games are being produced at an ever-increasing rate. It seems like anyone who’s ever had a cool idea for a role-playing game now gets to publish it. Just check out these Kickstarter RPG projects:

See what I mean? This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s plenty more there that I didn’t mention, and there’s even more getting ready for Kickstarter.

Thanks Kickstarter… thanks a lot.

Just when I finally came to peace with an uncertain RPG industry, you go ahead and revive it. Now, instead of having to choose between a finite number of games that I can play, you seem to have opened the floodgates, giving me a plethora of wonderful choices, and thereby knocking me out from pure gaming ecstasy.

Thank you, Kickstarter. Thank you very, very much.

Super Soldiers: The Female Form

As a sci-fi chick, girl gamer, and all-around nerd-bird, you could say that I’ve been there / done that. I’ve played five editions of D&D, three editions of Star Wars, three editions of ShadowRun, a bunch of Gurps, too much of the various incarnations of the Palladium ‘Verse, Toons, Top Secret, Cyberpunk, Elfquest, Super Babes, Conventions, festivals, and even some good old-fashioned vampiric LARP. Oh, and I’m not yet 30 years young. But I didn’t spend the time writing this paragraph for nostalgia or bragging purposes, I just want it to be clear that I’ve been around the block and seen a thing or two.

One of the great things about role-playing games is the ability to jump into the role of someone else – Or, at least the ability to play a beefed-up, more sexy version of yourself. That’s just the way it is: we all play larger-than-life heroes and heroines, battling bad guys and saving the day (whatever that means). Sometimes, we get out of our shell and play a character that is so not like our real selves, but most of the time we all play some version of our self ‘ala bells and whistles.

It’s quite unusual for us to play the downtrodden, weak, under-skilled, and underpowered character. After all, we want to play the hero, we want to play the cliche. And that’s totally cool, so long as we don’t embrace one cliche and outcast others.

What am I talking about?

Well, ask yourself this: How many times have you wanted to play the scrawny guy? Hardly ever. You usually want to play the guy that excels in his field. You want to play the guy that looks cool with his ripped muscles, shiny armor, and big huge axe. Us girls don’t want that. After all, we can’t wield the big huge axe, or march in that heavy plate mail (and good luck trying to mount a horse with that gear). Sure, mechanically we could do all that, but that’s just cheesy. Which leads me to the point…

I’m a chick. My heroines are naturally going to be sleek, slim and sexy. If I’m going to play a character with any sort of natural strength, I’ll be wielding weapons and wearing armor more suitable to my stature. I don’t want to play a fighter that is 6’2, 220 lbs. That’s cool for a guy, but not a girl. Put him in any kind of bulky armor and he looks cool. He looks good. Put a woman in that armor and she looks like a… man.

Well, I’m playing a woman, I want to look like a woman. I want to look sexy and sleek. I’m not a feminist; I’m a realist. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Men are brawny, women are sexy. That’s why it’s ok that my character looks sexy. That’s why it’s ok that any female character looks sexy. I know you guys out there like to look at sexy female characters, that’s part of what makes the image / art cool to look at. Same with male characters – testosterone simply makes male characters look sexy.

Think about all of the fantasy, sci-fi, and comic book images of characters. The guys look tough and the girls look sexy. That’s how it is, and that’s how it should be. I mean, look at She-Hulk. She’s the female version of THE HULK, and she’s drop-dead sexy. Same goes for Batgirl, Supergirl, Storm, She-Ra, Red Sonja, Psi-Lock, and on and on and on.

What I’m trying to say, after all this writing, is that we gamers (especially those of us who cry foul over some scantily-clad female caricature) need to relax. Females are sexy, and female characters simply take that theme and run with it. That’s just how it is. The tendency to draw / paint women warriors in the trend of sexy isn’t going away. Actually, we need to see more of it.