So, I tried to add another character that I just received tonight, and managed to delete my last post. Sorry, gang.
Anyway, here are the two characters for today:
Rowan Aurelian, Winnipeg’s wizarding celebutante, and
Amadan, a changeling who’s everybody’s best friend.
Tonight was the first supernatural character creation session. It went very well. I had four people attend this evening, and we came up with five characters. Two of the character concepts did not fit the structure of the Supernatural Stunts chapter, but they were both very easy to house-rule in. Took maybe five minutes of discussion, total. I like that sort of robustness in a system.
What were they? One was a ghost, which winds up with a 0 Refresh Rate after all the required stunts. Easy enough to make one of the stunts optional, giving the player a Refresh of 1, and therefor a playable character. The other was a ghoul, which necessitated creating a new permission and deciding what other powers he should have. Easy. Done.
The rules so far stick very close to canon, but have a flexibility that easily allows one to extrapolate and house-rule things. With a little bit of thought and comparison, it’s easy to fit pretty much any concept that fits in the Dresdenverse into the structure and build it for a PC.
So, as a treat for those of you who have been waiting, here’s the first supernatural character to be posted. It’s a supernatural remix of Crazy Tom, one of my mundane characters. I did this to see how the system handled it. I wound up with an interesting pair of characters – supernatural Crazy Tom is more powerful, but mundane Crazy Tom is more resourceful. I like it.
Have a look.
So, Friday night I ran the second half of the group through the conflicts to test the system. Now that I have no more secrets to keep from the players, I’ll give you some more detail on how things went.
For the Mental conflict, I chose trying a case before the Triumvirate of the Council of Ghosts. The set-up was that the ghost of a woman was released from the Vaughn Street Jail after evidence came to light that she was wrongly convicted of murdering her children back in the 1930’s. Citing this release as precedent, four other executed murderers were suing for release, with the aid of a ghost lawyer. The characters had certain knowledge that the four would take vengeance on the city, rather than move on as the woman had done, and so had to convince the Council not to release them.
For the Social conflict, I had five einharjar from Gimli come into town and start tearing up the local bar where the characters were gathered. The characters had to convince the einharjar to leave. Simple and straightforward.
And for the Physical conflict, I had the daughter of one of the lead detectives of Operation Clean Sweep kidnapped by the Mad Cowz, and held in a drug house guarded by a dozen gangbangers led by a hyena lycanthrope. Straightforward, but not so simple.
Because of time limitations, we only got to run two of the three conflicts with each group. For the first group last Monday, I ran the social and physical conflicts. For the Friday group, I ran the mental and physical conflicts.
We got off to a slow start, mainly because I had to teach the conflict rules to people in both groups. There was also the expected learning curve delays, as people tried to get their heads around some of the concepts and options they had available to them. Both those factors are to be expected in any system, so we knew they were going to crop up.
Once things got rolling, it was fun. Everyone got to try doing interesting things, and events flowed in a fairly interesting manner.
We did run into a bit of trouble because of the restrictions I put on each conflict, forcing players to stick to either mental, physical, or social tactics. Of course, in a real game, I wouldn’t restrict things this way, but the idea was to test the systems independently of each other.
Anyway, I’m compiling my impressions and reports from the players to send to the Evil Hat folks to let them know how things went. In the meantime, here are a couple of moments that really worked nicely:
All in all, we had a good time. The more we try the system, the better things look.
Here’s the final mundane character for your perusal.
Anne Carriere is a fireworks expert with a grudge against the faeries that elf-shot her twin sister.
Enjoy. The supernatural characters will start in a week or so.
A comment from one of the players in the session last night, referring specifically to the physical conflict:
“The fighting comes across as realistic – people get stunned, slashed, scared and confused. We all limp away from a fight, whether we won it or not.”
Sounds a lot like the Dresden Files books, doesn’t it?
And that’s a good thing.
Thanks, Sandy!
I don’t want to get into too much detail in this report; I still have another group of players to run through the conflicts. Some general observations:
On Friday, I’m running the conflicts with the rest of the group. Once I get everyone’s feedback and have consolidated it and forwarded it to Evil Hat, I’ll post a more specific report. I’m not sure how much detail I can include, but I’ll tell you what I can. I just don’t want to give away anything for the other group, or prejudice their comments too much.
So, tomorrow half my group comes over for our first test of the conflict system in the Dresden Files RPG. It’s very similar to the Spirit of the Century system, but with a couple of tweaks to add a little detail (like weapons and armor) and scale up the grit a bit. It looks like DFRPG conflict is going to be a little nastier than SotC, more of a noire feel than a pulp one.
Both systems allow for different types of conflict. There’s the common physical conflict system (i.e. combat), of course. But they also allow conflict in the mental and social arenas. So yeah, your character can lose an argument by using the mechanics. Or get embarrassed in public. Stuff like that. There are rules for your confidence and your reputation taking a hit and affecting you throughout the game. Or longer. Man, I love the Aspect system in this game. That’s where this kind of flexibility comes from.
Anyway, these tests aren’t going to be a full-on game, just a stress test of the system. I’m coming up with one of each type of conflict, and we’re going to play through it, and see how it goes. Postmortem on the play, then maybe run them again to see if different choices in play make a big difference in the outcome or if the stats and skills on the character sheets determine winner. Depends on how much time we have.
All this means that, today, I’m trying to come up with one of each type of conflict to play through, based on the Magical Winnipeg setting and the characters we’ve created. The physical one is easy: I figure a bunch of Mad Cowz led by a hyena lycanthrope. I’m struggling a little with the mental and social conflicts, though. I’ve got a number of options, and I’m trying to work out which ones will work best for a group. Here’s what I’m toying with:
Mental
Social
Now, all these things are doable with the system (and how great is that?), but some are going to be more interesting than others. I’ve got to put together encounters where everyone has a chance to contribute, and not everything hinges on a single roll, or a single skill. While things like that might work in a normal game, it doesn’t fairly test the system, which is the point of all this. So, I’m thinking.
I’ll let you know what I come up with, and how people handle it.
Just want to let you folks know the status of things, and our plans for the playtest over the next couple of weeks.
First, a couple of days ago, Evil Hat sent us two background chapters on the Dresdenverse. One is a Who’s Who of characters from the books, and the other is sort of a monster chapter – info on the types of bad guys that might come up. I’ve distributed those to my playtesters, and we’re currently reading through them. They were written by Chad Underkoffler, who also used to write for Unknown Armies, so I know they’re going to be solid stuff.
Second, just tonight, Evil Hat sent us the chapter on supernatural stunts. There’s still the chapter on spellcasting and the one on artifacts to come, but this really puts us in a good position to start seeing how the magic works in the game.
Now, my plans.
Next week, I’m running a couple of sessions using only the mundane characters that have been created. It’s just a test of the conflict system – not a full game. So, I’m going to try to run one physical, one mental, and one social conflict in each session. If possible, we’ll rerun one or two of them, to see what effect different choices make.
A week or two after that, we’re going to get together and create supernatural characters, using the new rules.
Once that’s done, we’re actually going to run a couple of games – maybe two or three session arcs, seeing how the whole thing fits together. That’s the part I’m really looking forward to.
So, that’s what you can expect to see about the DFRPG over the next little while.
Oh, and I’ll continue posting characters as I receive them from my playtesters. I know it’s tough to wait, but it can be even tougher to get them to send them to me.
So. I’ve started a blog. I guess.
See, I managed to get my gaming group in on the early alpha playtest of the Dresden Files RPG, by the folks at Evil Hat Productions. They do good games over there; check ’em out if you haven’t. It uses their FATE system, which they also used in Spirit of the Century, which is probably the smoothest, coolest, most true-to-the-source pulp game I have ever seen.
Lemme back up a bit.
The Dresden Files are a series of modern fantasy novels by Jim Butcher. They deal with Harry Dresden, a Chicago wizard who advertises in the yellow pages. Hilarity ensues. They’re fun books; Jim has really struck a balance between an updated noire detective story and an urban fantasy world worthy of Charles de Lint or Emma Bull. There are currently nine books in the series, with a tenth due out in April of this year. If the idea of a modern Phillip Marlowe battling the forces of darkness appeals to you at all, I say pick ’em up.
The novels also spawned a TV series that lasted a season. It wasn’t without its charm, but it wasn’t as well done as the books.
Anyway, I found out that the rpg license for the series had been bought by a little company called Evil Hat Productions. This worried me. Licensed properties are always kind of shaky in the rpg world, and I had never heard of Evil Hat prior to this. But they also advertised this cool pulp game called Spirit of the Century, so I decided to buy it and see what kind of chops they had.
Wow.
Blew me away. Completely.
After a single reading of the Spirit of the Century rules, I went from worried to ecstatic. These guys knew their stuff. Their thinking about game design, about what made for fun mechanics, about how mechanics fueled story, all of it: rock solid. Much of it even brilliant. Some of it revolutionary.
So, when I ran into Fred Hicks and Leonard Balsera at GenCon this year (Aaah, who am I kidding? I deliberately went looking for them!) and begged them to tell me when Dresden Files would be released, they took pity on me and told me to contact them later about playtesting.
Now, I’ve done playtesting before. I’ve even written and sold a fair amount of game material for D&D and Unknown Armies. So I leaped at the chance, and they decided that they would like input from me and my game group.
There’s a bit of a catch, though: instead of a Non-Disclosure Agreement, I had to sign a Disclosure Pledge, saying that I would talk about the game, and some of the stuff I see, in public, on the web, etc. They want me (and all the other early alpha playtesters) to talk about our experiences with the playtest, so that people start to see the way the game is shaping up and get excited.
And there’s some neat stuff to get excited about, lemme tell you.
So, over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to talk about the playtest here. Keep an eye out for some tidbits that have come out of our experiences, and for some general comments about the game and the process.
I’m not going to post the playtest documents, of course; they don’t belong to me and they’re not finished.
But there’s still some neat stuff I can show you.
Stay tuned.
