tabletop – Page 8 – Blue Ink Alchemy

Tag: tabletop (page 8 of 12)

Game Review: Maschine Zeit

Welcome to post #300. THIS! IS! ALCHEMY! *boots Edward Cullen into a bottomless pit*

I’ve written previously about a little game called Maschine Zeit. It’s about time I did up an official review of it, in the spirit of promoting it, and if I were to sum it up it one word, it’d be “atmospheric.”

In any form of horror-based narrative, any situation where we’re to be put on edge if not scared out of our minds, there needs to be the element of the unknown. We fear what we don’t understand, and we can’t understand what we don’t know, or can’t predict. Basically, effective horror uses the unexpected and springs it on us, whether it creeps across the floor inexorably with stringy hair across its eyes or latches onto us for a mouthful of brain as we round a corner. If we see it coming, it’s not scary.

Maschine Zeit gets that. Boy, does this game ever get that.

The year is 2110. The Machine Age has begun. Humanity is, for all intents and purposes, on its way out. A series of events have put the bulk of the population back on their heels, trying to get their bearings. A population control method, moving people to giant space platforms tethered to the Earth, has not worked as planned. Among the other disasters, gamma radiation bathed the stations and killed most of the people there. This ray burst had two other side effects now coming to the attention of the curious, the adventurous and the insane on the planet below. One, the radiation has changed some of the metal on the stations and given it almost supernatural properties. And two, rumors abound that the radiation has caused the stations to be haunted with strange bio-mechanical beings that were once human. This is the story of Maschine Zeit, the game of ghost stories on space stations.

A lot of tabletop games have one person laying down the tracks of the plot, while the players decide how quickly and with what sort of engine they’ll proceed down those tracks. It’s an effective method for telling collaborative stories, be that one person called a Dungeon Master or a Storyteller or what have you. In Maschine Zeit, the Director might have some plot ideas, but they are not in control of the story. More accurately, they have just as much control over the story as you would as a player. Its system supports ensemble work, a true collaboration of creative minds. No one character is more important than another, and the Director does not impose their ideas on the group.

The way the game is designed, every character has a goal, and achieving that goal leads to a moment in the spotlight. Instead of the timing and circumstances of those moments being entirely up to the Director, the players take steps along the way in their journey through still, decaying sci-fi environments inspired by Pandorum or Dead Space. Not everything will go as planned, of course, but when thing are at their darkest and most terrifying, there’s a chance, built into the game’s narrative structure itself, that a player in that situation will seize control of it by saving a fellow player or destroying the monster-thing with an ingenious trap or uncovering some forbidden truth or getting that bit of magical metal to do exactly what they need it to do. Arriving at those moments, taking the reigns of the narrative and watching the dice fall into place as fate agrees to allow that moment happen, is the very essence of Maschine Zeit.

It’s not a game for everyone. It requires thinking on the spot and its subject matter and atmosphere are not for the faint of heart. But if you find yourself interested in this vision of our future, drawn to the mystery of the stations or just curious about how exactly the aforementioned moments work, check out Maschine Zeit. It’s available today (6/22) on DriveThruStuff.com, bundled with an introductory adventure for a bargain price. You can do a hell of a lot worse if you want an experience that blends horror, science fiction, and tabletop gaming in a way that you will not soon forget.

Player versus Player – Who’s the Villain?

May 13, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 2 Comments

I’ve been accused, in the past, of being something of a care bear when it comes to PvP content in games. Thankfully, there’s help, even for someone like me. I’m slowly rediscovering what it means to take joy in the misery of other players, thanks to my return to Team Fortress 2. Along with a resurgence of a competitive nature that more often than not takes the form of a stream of expletives, as 2Fort is SRS BZNS*, it’s given me cause to think about what makes good and not-so-good PvP content in both tabletop and on-line games.

In single-player games, it’s good to have a single villain or a group of antagonists that clearly stand between the player and their objective. And straight-forward dungeon crawls often benefit from pitting multiple players against a single intelligence, be it a human GM or a programmed AI that respawns enemies as you click your way around the dark tunnels. As much as the Steam game Torchlight evokes the nostalgia of hours spent exploring the many and varied underground demon-guarded caches of loot in Diablo II, it misses the benefits of many people diving into the game to face more powerful enemies in the name of grabbing shinier equipment. But I’m wandering off my point, which is that in those cases, it’s good to have a single bad guy. But what happens when your potential player base expands beyond a handful of intrepid adventurers?

Sometimes, you just have to pit one group of adventurers against another. There are a few ways to do this.

1. Always Evil, All The Time

In the old World of Darkness, most notably in Vampre: The Masquerade, factions were a completely player-based thing. While the threat of the Antideluvians coming back to life and consuming their children in an orgy of blood-fueled Armageddon was an ever-constant threat, most of the night-to-night problems were caused by one group of vampires (the Camarilla) fighting against the other (the Sabbat). What was the cause of this conflict, you ask? The Sabbat’s evil.

Now, no vampire can really be described as 100% “good,” no matter what Team Edward might say. Even your most approachable and human-friendly blood-sucking fiend is still a blood-sucking fiend.
But if the Camarilla are vampires who talk nice to their cows before killing them in a humane way in order to carve them into delicious well-made marinated steaks, the Sabbat laugh as they kick the cows mooing into a giant meat grinder to churn out the greasiest, nastiest, cheapest “heart-attack-on-a-bun” burgers possible, selling them to the public at $10 US a pop as ‘classic American hamburgers’. There may or may not be babies in there, too. Baby cows, hopefully. Though I wouldn’t rule out kittens.

This conflict is built into the core game. There’s no ambiguity or much room for interpretation, one side’s less evil and more amenable towards humanity, while the other is thoroughly nasty and definitely not family-friendly. While it can be fun to be the bad guy every now and again, having your entire motivation be puppy-punting grandma-incinerating nastiness all day every day gets a bit old after a while. Which might be why that game ended.

Anyway, future iterations of the World of Darkness would see factions be more ambiguous in certain ways, and rather than saying “X and Y are locked into AN ETERNAL STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY UNTIL KINGDOM COME,” it’s much more “Here are some factions you guys can play in. Decide for yourselves how they get along. Have fun!”

2. Affably Evil, or Evilly Affable?

Team Fortress 2 is a bit like that. Neither RED nor BLU is clearly defined as being on one side or the other of the “Good/Evil” scale. Leaving aside the role the Announcer may or may not play in the conflict, the motivations of the teams pretty much boil down to healthy competition. With live ammunition and sharp objects. Not to mention explosives.

Anyway, the point is that it’s up to individual players to fill in the blanks. It’s a straightforward, simple system that works well in on-line shooters. It could almost be considered the polar opposite of the strict pigeonholing of the old World of Darkness. When you get into on-line games involving more than a few dozen players, though, things get a bit more complex.

3. The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy, Too

World of Warcraft and Aion have something in common. The players in these games select one of two factions, which are essentially flip sides of the same coin. They do fight each other, but larger external threats demand the attention of both sides and can sometimes lead to alliances of convenience (the Wrathgate in WoW for example). This allows players access to both PvP and PvE play styles, and interested parties can either strike a balance of time between both, or eschew one entirely in pursuit of excellence in the other. Or people can do what I used to do, which is fart around on dailies trying to earn enough money for a flying mount that’s only slightly faster than one I could build with my bare hands as an Engineer.

More on this when I discuss World of Warcraft more in-depth on Saturday. There’s change coming, and it might be good. Good enough to return to Azeroth? The jury’s still out.

Basically, when you want to engender player-versus-player conflict in your games, be it on the table or through the Intertubes, it’s best to let it grow on its own. Give players fields in which to compete and let them go at it. There’s really no need to give them motivations other than “they’re not on our side.” However, if you want to give the other side a nudge, just hit ’em with incriminating photos of a family member. Their mom, for instance.

*No, not really.

Ribs Without A Spine

May 12, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

I’ve been inspired to write the following due to Alex Macris’ latest Check for Traps feature on the Escapist. You can read it here. The Cliff’s Notes is basically that a GM in a tabletop RPG should be less of a directive storyteller, and more of an emergent one. That’s a great concept in theory, but it’s possible for some GMs to consider this an excuse to do no story work whatsoever and that, my friends, is a mistake.

Characters with no story to bring them together or drive them forward is like ribs without a spine. Now, as a food, ribs without a spine are mostly what you’re looking for. Lather those ribs in a delicious sauce and cook them just right so that the meat’s nice and moist rather than tough and dry, and you have yourself a delicacy for a discerning omnivore such as myself. But even in those ideal conditions, the end result’s a bit messy.

A less food-based example of what I’m talking about is Mass Effect 2.

For most of the game, you go from one hot spot in the galaxy to another, either picking up a new member of your crew or helping them with a personal matter to earn their undying loyalty (for the most part). This series of mini-stories is bookended with the whole Reapers/Collectors business, but the nature of the game leads one to believe that they’re more of a backdrop against which the characters grow, rather than being any sort of impetus for change or tension. If the plot had been more coherent or the threat more credible, we might have had a more full-bodied experience rather than a plate of (albeit tasty) character ribs.

When you have strong characters, the story holding them together should also be strong. However, it shouldn’t overwhelm the characters. I think that’s what Alex has been driving at in his last few articles. The guy behind the screen, the man behind the curtain, the puppeteer above the stage pulling the strings – it shouldn’t be all about them and the story they want to tell to the exclusion of everything else. Role-playing games involving more than one player should be collaborative experiences, with players bringing interesting characters to the table while the GM weaves their plots together and gives them something against which to struggle. That is unless you’re running a demo at a convention or something and just want to show off how cool this dungeon is or how that class works in comparison to that other class. Then you go straight for the mechanics and rules, and leave most of your story-telling and world-building and atmosphere-creating tools at home. I learned that one the hard way.

See what I mean here? Are you catching my drift? Or am I completely off my rocker because I told those kids to get off my lawn a bit too violently? Share your thoughts, Intertubes.

Creating Atmosphere

April 20, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

There is no drama without tension, so the saying goes. And there are very few things that build tension than a well-crafted atmosphere.

Considering how hectic my day’s been, I could just end the post there and be on my merry way, but I feel it’s necessary to elaborate for a variety of reasons. So, here goes.

There’s a part in the early stages of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines where you must enter a supposedly haunted hotel and retrieve an item of importance to both the local baron and to the spectre inhabiting the building. The sequence of events that take place in that hotel can only be described as “harrowing.” Between the music, sound design, lighting and use of the game engine, an atmosphere of sheer terror is built, infusing the scene with tension without a single shot needing to be fired and no dialog spoken above a whisper. To this day, the thought of going into that digital hotel gives me pause.

The bit I played through last night in Half-Life 2 Episode 2 applies. The antlion hive is just downright creepy. Eternal Darkness is another good example of a game building atmosphere, as is Silent Hill 2, part of a series of games based on the real-life town of Centralia right here in Pennsylvania. I’ve driven through that town on more than one occasion, folks, and let me tell you the most sensible thing to do is just keep on driving. This sort of setting is also the inspiration for many of the works in the World of Darkness, and Storytellers would be well-advised to rely upon such sources.

Conveying atmosphere in writing alone can be difficult. You have no way of relating the sight, sound or smell of something outside of words. And yet there are those who have proven themselves masters of printed palpable dread. Lovecraft, for example, and Stephen King to a lesser extent. Tolkien’s descriptions of the balrog and Shelob can be chilling, to say nothing of the reaction of millions of fans at the appearance of Voldemort in the books of Harry Potter.

Let’s have a few more examples. Who scares you, as a writer? What do you think about when you want to convey a certain atmosphere? How do you channel dread, or fear, or despair into a written work?

Go ahead and give me your thoughts. I’ll be waiting. Watching.

Maschine Zeit Update

April 10, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

There’s quite a bit going on over at Machine Age Productions you might want to know about. They have a shiny new website and, if you like unique and fun tabletop games with original concepts, you can get in on the ground floor of Maschine Zeit.

They’ve begun a kickstarter, a cool little way to make sure the game gets a print run. Any contribution you can make will help them get real, tangible copies into the hands of potential players and Directors, not to mention ensuring the game’s mastermind, David A Hill, show up at a convention in a cocktail dress. It’s just as awesome as it sounds.

If you’re still not sold on the idea, or are as yet unsure as to the game’s premise, look no further than this little promotional poster I put together:

The stations were meant to save us. Millions of us went there.

Millions of us died there.

Now the stations hold secrets; both miraculous and terrible. Intrepid explorers from all over the world are going up there to look for answers, or profit, or loved ones.
What they are finding, some say, are that dead men do, in fact, tell tales.

It’s time to tell yours.

A role-playing game of ghost stories on space stations.
Coming in May 2010 from Machine Age Productions
http://www.machineageproductions.com/