Why I’m Not Interested in Seeing The Hobbit

Dec 19, 2012 by Stacy

(And why that kind of pisses me off.)

I’m dealing with some latent Geek issues lately. First, Disney bought Lucasfilms and everyone (or close to everyone) in the Geekmunity went apeshit bonkers over the chatter of three more films taken out of George’s wretched little hands and maybe given to someone who grew up on Star Wars instead of the guy who abused the franchise to death. Still, I wasn’t thrilled. Not a freaking little tingle of excitement spread through my obviously geeky little body. Nope. I just sat there and said, ‘Meh’.

Now, a couple of things are happening in conjunction. First, the new Star Trek trailer is going around:

Then, The Hobbit was released. Okay, maybe I got the order wrong (no idea), but that just underscores the deep feelings of apathy that I get when I look at all of these old franchises pushing more material in the same worlds that they’ve been pushing material in since I was a kid. Add on top of that all of the comic book movies, and, well, you have a recipe for my own, personal apathy.

Now, dear reader, please do not make the mistake some Google+ers did of assuming I’m talking about originality. I’m not. I know all of the old cliches about everything having already been done (but not by you). This apathy I’m feeling doesn’t go that deep. I could probably watch the same story play out in a million different new worlds in a million different styles with a million different characters and not find myself as hopelessly bored as I am with the same franchises that I was interested in as a kid. You know which ones they are. We all do. Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien, DC, Marvel, Harry Potter (which just drug on far too long – I never got past the third movie) and I’m sure there’s two or three that I missed stuck in there somewhere. We’re all Pavlov’s Dogs – trained to drool whenever a ginormous film studio poops out another big-budget sci-fi action film placed in one of the worlds that we’ve loved since we were children. As much as I want to drool, I find the whole experience getting more and more hollow with age. It was still novel when the first LOTR films were released. Now, it’s just stale and a little hollow. Like putting a coat of paint on my old toys and saying ‘Please, buy them again!’.

We’re adults, now. We might have grown up flying around model Enterprises and X-Wings made of Legos, but I’m more interested in seeing the new worlds and new strands of imagination those early periods of play created in the minds of young geeks who are now geeks in the prime of their lives, at the top of their careers, ready to show the world what they can do. I want to see all new toys. Worlds that have depth and life and interesting stories associated with them. Worlds that can turn into NEW franchises, franchises that my kids might get an opportunity to crush on in the same way I crushed on all of those older franchises. I feel like, by and large, we are stagnating… stuck in the worlds and with the stories that we were told when we were children.

When I posed this question on Google+, I got a mixture of reactions. Some were defensive about being allowed to like what they want to like (my opinions on how I feel about things are mine alone – I don’t expect others to share them, and I have no truck with people who don’t feel burnt out on these franchises). Some were in agreement, and others told me that the newest, most interesting stories are actually not being told on the big screen (unless you have a very large monitor) – they’re being told on the Internet… so now I have a whole slew of links to peruse to find the hidden, secret, yummy new stuff as opposed to the old, tired franchises.

So consider this my plea not just to movie studios, who will follow the dollar regardless of where it leads, but to the men and women who are writing those worlds, building those environments… those who are my age, who are in the prime of their lives and at the top of their careers, those creative people out there who, like me, grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek and Tolkien and everything in between…

…it’s okay. You can stop remaking the old stuff. Now that you’ve made it to the big time… can we see something new?

No comments on this blog, now! I’m handling it all via Google+! If you’d like to comment, jump to the G+ post here.

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More Event Banners for Your Hangout Games

Dec 16, 2012 by Stacy

While I was working on relaunching this blog, launching my new Tumblog, and various bits and pieces around the Social Media landscape, I took the opportunity to make more hangout banners!!! Enjoy!

Also, welcome to the new layout! I finally found something that I was pleased with mostly right out of the box so that I can focus on the actual blogging instead of the web development.

 

 

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How Stacy Preps Sessions: The Philosophy

Oct 15, 2012 by Stacy

Getting better at session prep … my observations.

When I was 19 and running games, I seldom wrote down anything that I planned to have happen. Games would go like this: Get paid. Run to gaming store. Use rent money to buy new books. Run home. Crack open book. Play until dawn. This often resulted in tons of fun and lots of cacophony, but there was never anything as cogent as a theme or a plot.

I sort of just made shit up as it happened. Much fun was had.

Later, I’d start to get plot ideas, and I’d just run them from my memory. I’d get an idea for a snippet of a scene, or a plot formation idea, and I’d run with that little kernel of whatever. The details, I’d make up as we went along. This resulted in a little more theme and plot, but not a whole lot as I found that my memory is just as fallible as any human’s. Consistency? Meh, who needs consistency?!

Lots of making shit up, but still … much fun was had.

Then, for YEARS I determined that in order to run a game, I had to have everything prepped from start to finish before we sat down to even the first session. I went from doing things with very little prep to believing that if I didn’t have every NPC statted down to the last one and every scene determined ahead of time (in a flowchart kinda way in case the players made other decisions), then I wasn’t being an effective GM, and should stop doing that.

I still ran, and I was never that prepared, but I believed that I just wasn’t prepared. I was too lazy, and, thus, a mediocre GM at best.

Then, Steam & Crumpets came along and I thought I’d have the perfect chance to be more than just a mediocre GM.

The first couple of sessions were extremely well prepared. I had floorplans and discussions all planned out, orders of events, details to read aloud about how things looked and felt and smelled, flowchart-style bullet points on what to do if the players did X or Y. I finally got to the point where I honestly thought I had achieved this golden status of ‘game prep’ that I’d been reaching for for so long …

…and it frustrated the fuck out of me.

Players don’t pay attention to flowcharts. A series of if/then statements about scenes only works if the only options available are the if/then statements in the flowchart. When a player goes off the reservation and/or comes to a situation where they make a decision decidedly not in that if/then box, the resulting confusion on my part as I try to sort out what should happen next is a momentum halter. Not to mention, there were enormous blocks of text that I had to wade through to find the answers to rather simple questions.

The choices available to me on how to deal with out-of-the-box thinking were limited thanks to the enormous amount of prep that I’d already done. The ideas, thoughts, and decisions that the characters made in the game were creative and interesting, but I had a tough time imagining how to fit them into the story that I’d written. A lot of the time, even though I had more work done for my games than I ever had done before in the 20+ years I’ve been running games, I felt like I was being hobbled by my own prep.

After a few sessions, I ran out of content that I’d pre-generated and didn’t have time to make more. I found myself frustrated because the players were circling around parts of the plot that were unimportant as if they were the most important things in the world. They kept coming back with empty results with their searches, and I could tell that some were getting frustrated at the wild goose chase that they were on. *I* was getting frustrated, too, because here I was with all of this well-planned story, and the players weren’t able to actually FIND the story.

So, quite on accident, I went back to running a session or two the way I used to – with heavy improv. So, I took some mental inventory, and after prepping in this way for the last 6-8 game sessions, I’ve found a way that works for me incredibly well. Now, I’m not saying here that this is the one and only true way. This is my way. Try it out if you like, and then tailor it to suit how you like to run games.

Stacy’s Game Prep Rules

• Do prep with bullet points, not paragraphs. Each one should take up no more than 1-2 lines. If you find that a bullet point is longer than that, split it up. Bullet points are easier to read in the middle of a game session than paragraphs.
• Don’t decide how the PLOT will go, decide how the actors driving the plot will behave. In other words, spend more time prepping NPCs and really getting into their heads, especially of your major antagonists than you do on anything else.
• Do give the NPCs goals, however. I find that those goals go much further to writing a plot (the NPCs end up writing it for you) than anything else.
• Don’t decide what your NPCs are going to do until you’re prepping for that session. This one is pretty important to me. Once I abandoned the idea that I make the plot and just let the NPCs drive the plot, I also realized that I shouldn’t decide things for the NPCs until they’re actually reacting to something. Thinking about how the NPC would react to further his or her goal (or save his or her ass) makes for some deeper, more interesting NPCs than just using them as automatons to fulfill the GM’s goals. The distinction is subtle, but to me it makes all the difference in the world.
• Don’t prep too much too far in advance. Things change all the time. If you do that, you’re going to find yourself with material that you’ll never use. Have enough prepped for the next two sessions, but leave out a lot of the extreme details for the latter part until the former is completed.
• Do prep what you’re bad at improvising. For me, that’s mainly names of both things and places. I like to think I do a pretty good job naming my characters, but only when I get the chance to actually think about those names. So, when a new NPC is about to make an appearance or just starts to exist in the world, I name them right away. That’s usually the first bullet point.

I haven’t completely mastered my own rules, yet. For example, I’m still feeling around as to what makes up about two sessions worth of prep. I usually prep too much, thinking that the players will drive through more content in theory than they actually do in practice. That ends up being a waste of time as it can often change.

However, preparing for games has become much, MUCH simpler, and much, MUCH less time-consuming. Also, more enjoyable. The games have become more enjoyable, too. The worlds are becoming more and more an echo of the people who play them than they are my own vision, and as a Storyteller/GM, that’s like gamer’s crack. I still have players coming to me and apologizing for their zany ideas of off-the-wall requests, but honestly … I don’t mind them, I relish them and enjoy them for the creativity they represent … and I’m no longer prepping myself into corners where those ideas represent a threat to the chronicle/campaign/story/etc…

My NPCs are diligently going about their days and living their lives, even if my players don’t interact with them for weeks and months at a time. They’re not just robots there to give the players clues or new quests, they’re people they interact with on a regular basis. I want the players to connect with the NPCs so that if/when those NPCs die, they really feel something, even if that something is a grudging respect for an antagonist that’s been plaguing them for who knows how long. When I sit down to do game prep, the first thing I ask myself now is, “What have all the NPCs been doing in the meantime?” Then, THEY tell me what the next session is going to be like.

YMMV, of course. I don’t think there’s one perfect way to prep for a game. What each person needs in game prep tends to differ by quite a bit. I’ll detail the tools I use and maybe even share some game prep notes of mine for past games in a future post (if there’s interest).

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The Ultimate Fansourced Vampire: The Masquerade Playlist

Sep 29, 2012 by Stacy

Through an interesting set of circumstances (and the awesome power of the awesome that is the Google+ RPG universe – see Zak Smith if you doubt me), I’m running a Vampire: The Masquerade game for Mark Rein-Hagen, the game’s creator, and a group of five other guys. I thought it might be utterly disturbing and terribly interesting to run a game for a group of characters who are child vampires. A roving band of terrifying children that feed off of the blood of mortals.

So, it’s been a looooong time since I’ve played Vampire: The Masquerade. Back in the day, I lived Vampire – on MUSHes, in LARPs… I lived and breathed that shit. It was fantastic. I was a struggling young tech wannabe in San Francisco at the height of the Vampire era, drinking it all up like crazy. Vampire was my escape from the mundane world of trying to make it in a tech world that was juuuuust becoming visible. I was always broke, but somehow usually managed to find just enough money for new gaming books…

I haven’t run Vampire in probably fifteen  years. It’s marvelous to go back through the old books again. I realy feel like RPGs each have a certain personality to them given to them by the layout and the type of artwork that’s shown. So, opening that book again was kind of like reacquainting myself with an old friend.

I’m looking forward to running this game. Our first session is tomorrow morning, in just a little over ten hours, now. We’ll be airing the episodes live and I’ll be posting here about the games.

The above is a labor of love. I polled a bunch of G+ gamers and asked them to tell me what music they listened to when playing Vampire THEN, and what music they’d listen to when playing Vampire NOW. This is the result. I spent five hours doing YouTube searches and listening to a whole ton of really truly awesome music. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have a request to add to the list, just tweet to me, @StacyRex.

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Steam & Crumpets Episodes 7 & 8: Adventure at the Crystal Palace

Sep 29, 2012 by Stacy

I still can’t get used to the way my voice sounds. Ah, well, human foibles. :)

I think I can keep up with ongoing session reports if I limit myself to writing about the completion of individual stories rather than writing about each and every night. I’d like to write more, the the reality is that I’m running at 90 mph as it is and something’s gotta give!

These two episodes largely comprise the goings on at the Crystal Palace. This whole leg of the adventure was something I didn’t plan for. I expected the changelings to eventually go there, but by eventually I mean in a few weeks time in-character, when the Goblin Market is in town.

The changelings were looking to a key that they’d need to fit into a door that they would have to create to close up and lock the Trod that was under their former Freehold (the one that was destroyed by an enormous, brass steam octopus during the first session). In some of the old Freehold texts, the changelings found that the portal has traveled with the changeling Freehold as it moved about town while London was growing. Prior to being at the Hobgoblin Pub, it was at the site where the Crystal Palace is presently built.

Well, I think I oversold the Crystal Palace. I put a couple of posts up on G+ about it, and chatted with some folks about the other places the Crystal Palace has shown up, so when I said ‘The Crystal Palace’, all most of the players could see was neat shinies that they wanted to go and look at because I’d already teased them with it.

WHY I didn’t expect that is completely beyond me, but once the characters were in the palace, I couldn’t very well have nothing happen. For the record, I LOVE it when things I don’t expect to happen happen. I do my best thinking when I suddenly have to create something new for someplace I wasn’t even thinking about.

I kept the info light, doing even LESS prep than I have for the last few games before that. I’m improvising more and more as the world spreads out into my mind’s eye. I know that sounds hopelessly corny, but it’s the truth. The less i seem to prepare, the more the characters get through and the more fun we have. I don’t know why that’s the case and I don’t care. So long as it works, it works!

I’m focusing on the things that I know I have the hardest time NOT improvising. NPC names and possibly a smidgen about their description or personality. I actually like it better when I let the personality and voice come to me on the spot rather than trying to play to whatever I’ve written out before hand. Much of the rest of it, I’m leaving to what happens on the spot.

The last two sessions I ran (one Steam & Crumpets, one Steam Francisco) had less than one page of session notes each. Now, Steam & Crumpets already had a backlog of notes I’ve been creating as we’re going, so that half page of notes was literally just refresher little things for this particular game and notes about things I wanted to foreshadow and stuff like that. That foundation I set up in the first place with a few random encounter tables, and a variety of faerie-like monsters all statted up is what’s making it easier, more efficient, and all around better for me to improvise all of the other details.

That backlog of monsters and their stats is particularly important. The Steam Imps have now shown up in Steam & Crumpets sister game, Steam Francisco, in a slightly different shape. I’ve also got a large handful of other things statted that haven’t even shown up in the game yet, and I’m adding new things all the time. My Secret Santicore project is even going to serve a dual purpose and add even MORE to that foundation. So, my learnings boil down to one phrase, really: Build a strong foundation and go from there.

That said, I need to devote some more time to strengthening my foundation. Especially with the things that are coming up next on my mind. I’m extraordinarily thrilled about the upcoming sessions. At the end of these two episodes, I did a small tease scene into the next leg of the story, which is an old school dungeon crawl changeling style.

Ahhh, yes.

Poking around for Victorian things online, I found several sets of blueprints for things like Victorian row houses. Row mansions, really. This thing is enormous. When I made the decision to start off the Chronicle with destroying the other Freehold and leaving these guys the only changelings in the city, I had already planned to give them an opportunity – through the course of the game – to get a new, even better Freehold that the motley could truly make their own. After earning it, of course.

The actual plot is based off of this incredibly creepy book that I read when I was in middle school. Of course, without the PG rating, that is. I’m not even sure what dislodged the memory enough for me to decide that it should absolutely be a plot element, but I’m loving the idea. I’ve got a lot of rooms to write up for this one, but I’m really looking forward to getting to tell the story.

Well, that’s all I’ve really got for now. Keep an eye out for my games on Google+. I’m now running three Hangout games, all of which are being broadcast via YouTube.

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