Hollowpoint: Review & Some Thoughts

UP FRONT
I have a review of Hollowpoint up over at Diehard Gamefan. Of course I manage to screw up VCSA/VSCA in the header. It models violence between skilled parties carrying out specific objectives, and it is pretty amazing game. Hollowpoint sets itself a tight set of design objectives and meets those. The execution matches the ambition, which is more than I can say for a lot of games. It's worth mentioning how smartly the authors provide examples- copious but not overwhelming, providing answers to some of the corner cases of the system.

I've been thinking about how Hollowpoint could be used to do particularly visceral one-shot takes on my favorite "machine guns vs. the darkness" games- Delta Green and Conspiracy X. I have a couple of other thoughts I didn't put in the review...

HERDING MUNCHKINS?
There are places where I almost wonder if Hollowpoint is a parody- the smartest, most subtle parody of certain kinds of base gaming desires. Is it a comment on those games where the players all just want to be the coolest and sweetest ninjas flippin' out and chopping off heads without any consideration of morality or consequences? That's not power gaming, but more a power fantasy. I've seen campaigns devolve and collapse into that because of bad players, with World of Darkness games being particularly susceptible. Games where the players spend half of character creation picking out the most awesomest gun from the weapons manual. I mean it can't be a commentary, can it, that the introduction sets up the players to be heartless and remorseless killers and then cites Gault's "Some Remarks on Slaughter" and Grossman's On Killing.

Put that aside for the moment- there's an interesting double-bind the authors put the players in. They give them the coolest stuff, free access to anything, and the knowledge that their characters stand above the rabble. They rule. But then that's tied down and restricted. There's a mission. The mission must be completed. There's no questioning the validity of that mission- they have to take orders. They're superior, but their power and autonomy's still limited. They're lone wolves who have to work together- and even the mechanisms for going solo potentially cost themselves as much as their teammates. And betrayal's allowed- but only if as a swift exit from the game. Turn on your fellows and you move on. Fulfill the player's power fantasies and then take away their means of imposing that power on their peers. It's a brilliant little design element, and one that arises naturally from the game itself, rather than feeling like an artificial leash.

BY THE SKIN OF OUR GAME
So in the review I mention that my veteran rpg gamer wife liked the game but said she didn't want to play it. She described it as the same kind of admiration she had for an elegantly engineered fighter jet. Yes, she could agree it had been designed brilliantly, but she wouldn't want to fly it and blow things up. Needless to say we don't play first person shooters together. (Disclaimer: I suck at FPS games on the console and only marginally less on the PC so I don't play them that often...).

But aside from the focus on violence which didn't interest her, she also said that the structure of the game wasn't appealing. Hollowpoint offers the tight, compressed experience of a movie- she prefers the more extended (and digressive) pace of something like a novel. On the other hand, that's particularly what makes it work as a pick-up game. Hollowpoint suggests a session as a complete story- with characters lost throughout. So we talked about ways in which you might reskin the game to make it something she would want to play. And could that be done without making radical changes to the set up?

Any reskinning would have to function with the following assumptions- a group of peers both allied and with some personal agendas; a larger society those characters belong to; a set of well defined and agreed upon objectives; access to multiple characters if one gets removed; a clear opposition. With that in mind, we came up with three versions-

Ars Magica: In Ars Magica, players already control multiple characters (magus, custos and grogs). They belong to a Covenant. Magi are powerful, unique and decidedly independent. Yet at the same time, they rely on each other for support and safety. Even their custos are usually a cut above the ordinary folk. A version of Hollowpoint could be used to handle interesting situations in which the characters of the Covenant have to go out and negotiate. The most obvious of these would be the Grand Tribunals of the Hermetic Order. Players would be given a set of objectives to achieve at such a gathering, like ensuring a supply of Vis or gaining judgment over a particular disagreement. The opposition could be a rival Covenant within the same Tribunal. Players can choose to begin with their Magus or Custos, each with a slightly different ability. Later if they run through those they could bring in their grog. DIPLOMACY, CRAFT, GUILE, MAGIC-- for example could be used as skills. This approach could be used as a quick way of resolving in between season scenes if a GM doesn't want to play out a full session. It could also be used as a general introduction to the Ars world. Expeditions to other Covenants or dealing with the affairs of the "mundane" world could also be handled in this way. Instead of COOL, the desirable quality would probably be it's stodgy cousin PRESTIGE.

Staving off a Turkish invasion, anyone?

Changeling the Lost: Like the previous example, Changeling would also focus on a form of Courtly politics. The players would take the roles of members of a particular Court, trying to carry out operations against their rivals of the moment. If you were to do a series of these, those rivals could change from session to session. Perhaps the PC's Court want to foment a conflict, uncover a secret or gain a hidden alliance. Its actually a little more open for story possibilities than the Ars. Moving on in these stories would require the particular character to recuperate between sessions- it wouldn't necessarily have the finality of straight Hollowpoint. Characters might have skills like BARGAINING, CONTRACTS, SUBTERFUGE, CLARITY.

Samurai Clans: You could easily do a samurai or even Legend of the Five Rings game with Hollowpoint. I mentioned Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins in the review, others like Samurai Assassin, 47 Ronin, or Sword of the Beast might be done like this. On the other hand, you could broaden out the conflict types- as Hollowpoint does- to make for a game which might combine battles, intrigue, and courtly competition. You could use a version of John Wick's Blood & Honor mechanics to build a clan. Then the players would have to carry out the goals and ambitions of the clan at that moment, glad to sacrifice themselves to the greater cause. Skills might include SINCERITY, HONOR, WARFARE, and BLADE. A series of games might chart the advancement of the clan over generations. As a straight Hollowpoint alternative, consider doing some of the same things, but with sweet ninjas, like Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade sets up.

Goals in RPG Conflicts: RPG Modeling (Part One)

SETTING STAKES 

Hollowpoint was nominated for three ENnie awards this year. It’s a great game and one I’ve talked about before a couple of times. In the last couple of years I’ve read three games- Hollowpoint, Microscope, and FATE which impacted the way I’ve run. Or at the very least, they’ve made explicit for me some of the things I do or want to do at the table. In particular, Hollowpoint’s made me think about the way we go about defining concepts- actions, skills, powers, flaws- in tabletop games. In particular HP approaches any action as what you’re attempting to accomplish, paired with a narrative about the means you’re using to accomplish that. So instead of saying that you’re “take a shot at X,” you say you’re spraying the room with fire and trying to cut down the opposition to neutralize their effectiveness. Hollowpoint models actions and options at a higher level of detail and effect than most classic games.

In part that’s about objectives- and setting those out clearly for the players. Some versions of FATE put that clearly at the front of a conflict: what’s at stake? What goals do each side have primarily? I’ve certainly been in and run many combats over these years where players found themselves uncertain or even arguing about what they intended to accomplish in the fight. That’s great for certain kinds of games or situations perhaps- where chaos, uncertainty, or fog of war rule. But where that’s no important to the genre or story, these kinds of arguments can slow things down, waste actions, or lead to rw tension.

THE CO-OP QUESTION

There’s a parallel in boardgaming which might serve as a counter-example. I like co-op games, in theory. For example, I really dug Pandemic the first couple of times I played it. However, that game as with many co-op games lends itself to Player Leader problem- where a single player issues orders and the other players have to follow or things break down. You can go off the reservation, but might be blamed for losing. And, frankly, because you opt to head in another direction, you increase the chances that you’re going to blow things apart. The Player Leader problem drains a game of fun- and certainly Pandemic’s not a game I really want to play that often.

Most tabletop rpgs combats are, in many ways, simply a co-op game. Many systems shift scale and approach at this level- many build the game around these interactions. So why don’t I often see the Player Leader problem, with one player ordering the others to do X or Y? I’ve seen players assign a leader or a combat leader, but even then, the “orders” tend to be fairly open ended. Something, I suspect arises from what constitutes victory conditions. The players may have goals and stakes at the start of a conflict, but a good GM will shift and change that situation changing up the victory conditions. At least I try to do that- especially if the players have tightly defined what they want to accomplish. If they haven’t then, I take a more hands off approach- their own uncertainty and cross-purposes creates interesting problems. Another reason may be the number and types of variables operating in a situation. In a board game, you can usually reduce the information and choices to a discrete set easily. “We need X by Y turn,” in a good rpg combat, you may have several kinds of clocks and constraints operating. You have the level of social dynamic, the complexities of the player’s characters, the volume of opposition. The narrative and story level not only obscures the information, it creates its own set of needs and goals. Yes, they want to rescue the Princess, but they also want to look cool, have a chance to fight a named bad guy one-on-one, or reduce risk to the associated NPCs of the group.

APPLYING LESSONS

OK- so what does that mean? When I ran Hollowpoint, it felt strong in part because the game requires the GM and payers to define goals- and to state when a scene is about to deal with one of those goals. I want to try to be better about this. When I set up a conflict, I want to get the players to define their goals. I can set some of the stakes, but I want to get them to verbalize those before we go in- even if just the broadest approach. I need to make sure that I also define the circumstances well. If there are clocks ticking on a conflict those need to be clear. So to take an example from a game I ran last week: you want to capture these power armor dudes; they’re wrecking the docks and you want to stop that; some of them seem to be destroying particular targets; and there’s a fire burning in these two zones here. I also need to make clear what’s not at stake- for example, most of the dockworkers seem to have fled clear of the current combat zone.

Thanes of Whiterun: Skyrim via Hollowpoint

A couple of weeks ago I ran another session of Hollowpoint, this time using the world of Skyrim. My lovely wife volunteered to write up a session report and assessment which I present here in full...

Hollowpoint: Session: Thanes of Whiterun

I think it's illuminating to add some info on the personalities at the table. What happens at the table is always as much a function of those interactions as it is of the system.

GM:

Edige23: veteran GM of a thousand sessions, master of baiting players into unwise decisions. Before we even start, he tells us about his last Hollowpoint game, wherein he eliminated all but one player at the end because they were all taking hits for each other early in the game and couldn't take the last conflict. Mark my words when I tell you that he is an evil man.

Players:

• Patti: guest of honor, newish to RPGs having just started playing this year in a zombie campaign run by her fiancee; previous experience with gaming is primarily video games. Funny, infinitely adaptable and downright vivacious.
• Derek: careful, strategic thinker, Patti's fiancee & her usual GM, comes from a tradition of adversarial GM-ing but has mellowed in recent years
• Me: looking forward to playing Hollowpoint, exhausted from just this day finishing a six month project at work, usually a careful and strategic thinker. GM's wife.
• Steve: unfailingly polite
• Kali: enthusiastic punk-kid girl-geek niece—an 18 yr old among adults old enough to have been lying about their age for decades

So, we've got a couple classic gamers and a couple newbies who have yet to be indoctrinated into the roll-for-every-action mindset—and Steve. Steve defies categorization. That's only one of the reasons we all love Steve.

A Casing for Hollowpoint

The GM chose Skyrim as the thematic because all these players play it. Oddly—the GM was the only one who hadn't played Skyrim, so he researched by using the Official Game Guide for the video game and reading up on the internet memes.

He themes the basic Hollowpoint skills as follows:

• Warrior for [KILL]
• Thief for [TAKE]
• Barbarian for [TERROR]
• Bard for [CON]
• Scholar for [DIG]
• Noble for [COOL]
• and he adds Mage for [SORCERY]

We're all to be Thanes of Whiterun—agents for Jarl Balgruuf The Great in the years prior to the return of the Dragons. The Jarl seeks to maintain neutrality, choosing to side neither with Stormcloaks nor the Empire—and he enforces that neutrality in his demesne by whatever means necessary. Hence, we Thanes are called to act whenever the balance threatens to tip one way or the other.

Making Bullets

The character creation is a cinch—distribute proficiencies between the skills and come up with descriptive traits for your character. The proficiencies say how many dice we'll be rolling when we use those skills and the traits are 'scene moments' that explain why we get to add a couple dice here or there. The rest of the rules are on the back of our “character sheet”--one quarter of a standard sheet of paper.

Derek and I flip to the back to read the rules. Derek asks the GM what's the downside of the entire group all putting high proficiencies into the same skill. He's already running the same thought I am—and the GM mildly suggests that it narrows our options for problem-solving and that there are challenges where certain skills have to be used. Derek and I exchange a significant glance—and then notice that the rest of table has already finished allocating their proficiencies. Undone! Our munchkin moment for extreme group cohesion is blown apart by simple instructions! Oh well. We scribble in our proficiencies and traits—catching up while the others mull over possible names.

It's all over in under 10 minutes TOTAL—and we're dutifully introducing our characters to each other:

• Patti: Miriam, an Imperial who's all BARBARIAN first & WARRIOR second
• Derek: Hresveld, a Nord who's WARRIOR first and BARD second
• Me: Dwynn, a Nord who's NOBLE first and WARRIOR next
• Steve: Azeem, a Khajjit who's SORCERY first and THIEF second
• Kali: Fjora, a Nord who's BARD first and SCHOLAR second

So What's In The Cross-hairs?

Now the GM introduces the objectives—fulfilling the first means we win and fulfilling the second means we win BIG.

So Jarl Balgruuf calls us in:

1. The small city of Sifkinning, on the route of pilgrimage to High Hrothgar (and hence significant to the gossip of Skyrim), is beset by renewed violent feuding between two families—the Stormcloak-leaning Radroths and the Empire-loyal Tyash. This cannot be overlooked. This cannot be tolerated. The feud must be put down. Heads of the family are Sotte Tyash and Ulfgard Radroth. The jarl of the city, Onming Lernyer, is old and only marginally effective—but at least he stays on the fence and remains obedient, knowing his kin's fate remains in Balgruuf's hands. Lernyer and his people will stay out of our way.
2. Additionally, a mage named Inwold Kaers went missing in that area a few months ago—the College is looking for him, or more precisely, for items he had with him. Find those items—they must be powerful if the College is that interested.

Why Is Your Aim Off?

And then, for the last touch, having heard the objectives, the players are each are supposed to create a complication that ties the character into the objectives. If we somehow manage to “move on” during the game and make the complication tie in to our exit (be it death or leaving the mission), we “WIN”. These are secret and we certainly didn't speak of them at that point—but here's what everyone came up with.

• Patti: Inwold is Miriam's uncle—she knows he's in hiding.
• Derek: Hresveld 's grandfather was Sifkinning's jarl before Lernyer.
• Me: Dwynn is a follower of Mehrunes Dagon, Daedric God of Destruction; she took on his blessings to eliminate the rival family in a feud that killed Dwynn's own family
• Steve: Azeem stole his wavy dagger from Kaers at the Mage college
• Kali: Fjora is the former lover of Ulfgard Radroth's heir

Ski, ski, ski, shoot!

The GM, who is made of evil, reminds us that planning and uncontested information gathering are free. However, any conflict or skill check gives him more dice for the next conflict. We're still a little uncertain how these conflicts play out, but we recognize that “more dice” is not what we want in the hands of them GM.

We ride into Sifkinning on tales of our killer horses and the cabbages we won from the intervening bandits. It's all good. Skyrim through and through. We set to figuring out who's who and what's what in Sifkinning. The Imperial legate in the city won't see Miriam. She goes straight to BARBARIAN, but we talk her down. No no no! We'll just see if we can figure out why he'd be so rude. For some reason, even though we know that Lernyer & his men will stay out of the way, Hresveld insists we go talk to him to get the lowdown and, apparently, squash his ego. Ooooookay. We come out not much wiser for the experience, except that everything started going to hell two months ago when their court sorcerer passed away. His apprentice was taken in by the Tyash. This corresponds with the time that Kaers went missing. Also about this time, the most eligible daughter of the Tyash broke off her engagement to a noble from a neighboring city. Fjora is anxious to use her BARDly skills to get info, but we keep pressing for other means. At her insistance, we do visit the skeeverhole taverns on the edge of town to get rumors about where the feud battles are going down and a few tales of disappearing pilgrims.

And then the Legate has the scion of the Tyash in for a visit and we still can't get in and the Tyash are strangely close-lipped. We can barely keep Miriam calm. Even if she never uses her BARBARIAN against our opponents, the rest of group is certainly impressed by the very threat of it. We decide to go see the Radroth—if the Tyash & the Imperials won't give us the time of day, certainly the Radroth will welcome a group of badasses like ourselves over to his side—and we're annoyed enough to offer our services.

Bullheaded. Stupid bull-headed Nords. We welcome the chance to actually go to dice when the Radroth are strangely resistant to our reasonable overtures. Except we don't want to use WARRIOR—so it's BARD and NOBLE and BARBARIAN (finally!). Dwynn's a natural—and I burn her trait 'infamous for killing entire rival family as vengeance'. We roll okay—but not as well as the GM, who takes all the teeth out of our attacks the first round. We're just trying to impress these backwoods yahoos—and they are so damned obstinate and...racist. The next round, we do even worse and the Talosian dimwits who are manning the door go all BARBARIAN on poor Azeem. We come to the first time when someone might be eliminated from the scene—the GM asks if anyone else will take the hit—and since it's the first fight, I say, 'well, let's see what happens if he goes out for the scene'.

Ugh. Let's say, losing a set of dice hurts. The snarl at the door leaves us seething and without our sorcerer. We finally get in and we're a little smarter about how conflict resolution works, and all the more leery to leap right back into it. Our conversation with Radroth convinces us that his understanding of the situation is perhaps a little worse than our own—he doesn't seem to know what's going on, but he and his bravo son Thoronor are strangely overconfident. His other son, Snodmir, is ill and not attending court. Radroth finally admits that the Tyash have some powerful magics—that the Tyash keep recovering from injuries that ought to have killed them. This makes the Radroth overconfidence more confusing. Eventually, he offers us a price for every Tyash head and we take the offer.

We'd Get Back to the Biathlon But the Course has Gone Hazy...

Now we're suspecting that Kaer's gear has something to do with the regenerative powers of the Tyash. Maybe we can lure them out with rumors of a more powerful artifact located in a dangerous nearby barrow. Collectors of power like to, you know, collect more. In Skyrim, there's always a Draugr-filled barrow nearby. Fjora explodes with excitement—finally she can use her BARD to help the group. No one can bear to stomp on her glee. She succeeds nicely and doesn't notice the GM's very pleased transfer of another two dice to his pile. We tip off the Radroth so our trap doesn't catch dumb puppy Thoronor.

Nothing happens, except that a few adventurers get out there and end up taking an arrow to the knee. So we've created more city guards, but not lured out a single Tyash.

Miriam is full of furious. We have to do something quick or she is going to warhammer down the Legate's door. We're not entirely unsympathetic but it seems like the Tyash may have more secrets. The GM's veteran players are a little stumped—typically we would have had a little glimmer of a clue by now, so whatever it is that is going on must be causing this non-reaction to both the bait and the overtures. We know that—but we haven't figured out what it could be. Azeem volunteers to go poking around the Tyash's estate—and we decide to escalate it to a full-on assault on their security—creating distractions to give him optimal conditions.

...And Then It's All Black And White

We start the distractions out with a fight in the street that escalates so that the front of the estate is under a hail of arrow fire—Azeem goes in a back window. While we're enjoying ourselves with ever-more obnoxious and nonsensical distractions for the Tyash houseguards, Azeem creeps through an eerily quiet Tyash household. No one's on the top floors. On the ground floor—no one, but the kitchen is a fright—blood splattered everywhere. Our rolls are going awesomely—the GM is rolling long but fewer runs, so while he can chip away at a few of our assaults, we're tagging him all over the place. Azeem has no trouble hitting the requirements for the catches. He secures the Tyash secret—a cache of human limbs and pilgrims' remains in an ice room in the cellar—and a glimpse of one of the guards watching the street—unbreathing and clearly undead and with strange stitching. He skitters out to give us the news—taking a quick check around for anything that might be the source of the necromancy first. He finds the cut-up corpse of the court wizard's apprentice, but other than that, he finds nothing.

It's been a fun little romp. The players were tossing out traits and having cool scenes throughout the distraction. We didn't even have to worry about washes.

This Is No Sport...

With the news of unsavory necromancy deeds, we resolved to burn down the Tyash estate—but first, we'd draw that Imperial Legate out to the place and see how he was involved. Knowing what to look for, we identified him as another undead as he scurried over to the Tyash estate upon getting our message that they were under attack. We started the rain of fire—SORCERY and WARRIOR and COOL (for impressive pyrotechnics)--and ran right into our first encounter with a Principal. The GM has to split his dice pool—but he ends up with more chances to act—and we have to clear threats off in a particular order. But we were rolling hot and spending traits and we just shouted out our runs and chewed through everything the GM had to throw at us. The Tyash estate and the Legate were ash—and we had only a few smacks between us.

On to the Radroth—we'd all gotten a bad feeling about that sick son of his and that strange overconfidence. We burst in demanding our fee for the heads of the Tyash—nasty undead heads—and at the mention of us wanting to see his son, Ulgard went all Principal on us. He was a much tougher fight—we weren't rolling quite so well. Fjora ran through the crowd of guards, taking nasty wounds but distracting them so that we could finish our work. She kept running, found Thoronor and they eloped right then and there. [Here, Kali WINS, by getting taken out but perfectly tying back in her complication. The kid had her eyes on the prize the whole time.]

We decimated the Radroth loyals who defied us, checked on the ill son—who turned out to be a were-Skeever. The Radroth were creating an “elite” group of these things to stalk the Tyash—and using Snodmir as the blood donor for conversion. Thoronor was not a very nice brother... Poor ol' Snodmir got put out of his misery.

We've Done Some Killing

We still haven't found the source of the necromancy so we head to the Legate's office. His notes are mundane—too mundane. We note that he made one entry about 2 months ago and then copied that same entry over and over. That entry mentioned investigating the disappearance of a pilgrim. We step out of the office, into the smoke and ash drifting over from the Tyash estate and see a crowd of townsfolk coming at us with hoes and shovels. It's an easy fight—but we're unnerved to discover they're all undead too. The necromancer is around and still ordering his minions about—and close. We note the stitches—and decide to go see the town alchemist.

Arriving there, we see a crowd gathered around the shop—some of them guards from the Tyash estate that we didn't bother to behead, others who had ended up with burns from putting out the fire...many of them undead, but not all of them...completely. The shop was ringed by the zombies and the wounded trying to get in for treatment—apparently some sort of compulsion.

We figured the necromancer was inside—and questioning one of the townsfolk heading there, not as undead as the others, found out the Alchemist's name was Ridmad Ghaeck. Definitely sounded like an evil necromancer. There was no way to get in except through the roof—so we jumped right up there, tossed the shingles down unto the crowd below and took on our next Principle & Minions conflict. This one was tougher. Kali rejoined the group as an adventurer who was caught up in events and decided to join with us—name of Khald. He's all WARRIOR and BARBARIAN. We burn through the last of our traits, slicing through the zombies Ridmad cowers behind and finally putting him down with a great twinned warhammer to the head from Miriam and fiery whosh from Azeem. Thankfully, the artifact, some nasty box of necromancy energy, is there—we get it shut and take it.

There's a denouement where Hresveld dishes out another verbal rib-kicking for old Lernyer, we sum the situation up for him and leave him trying to figure out how to recover from having a good half of his population put down in one evening.

Forensics

Post-Game: there's evidence all over the place. Lovely snacks had been prepared—and went forgotten. There was excited chatter about the complications—which got played out and which didn't...what scenes they'd envisioned when selecting them and where they might have inserted them if they'd been quicker on their feet. You heard “Next time” and “when we play this again...” and“now I wish I'd...”.

We'll play again.

The characters were strongly defined and easy to grasp—the use of the traits provided excellent character-defining cinematic moments. The conflict system was fast—and while it was quick to resolve, it's not easily 'figured out'. The GM can almost always do some pain—but if they do, they will usually end up having their baddies go down fast. The group interactivity—with the mechanics for asking for help (and being assisted or having the request refused) are very fun!

The true genius of Hollowpoint lies in the complications. After the objectives are stated, each player has a chance to write themselves a deeper role in the story. Every one of the players was envisioning a scene, a revelation—a way things might play out—and the game was shaped from the first second by those things. Hresveld was pushing for a fight from Lernyer, Miriam was doing her best to distract us from the Inwold Kaers investigation—and I was trying to provoke the feuding wherever I could. Chips on our shoulders, secrets to keep hidden...and they're all immediately brought to bear.

Derek and I kicked ourselves for reflexively declaring actions rather than narrating scenes—it was one of the things that makes me determined to play again. I want to get better at that. This system really does lend itself to descriptive play—you can risk anything and you can interpret your dice whether you fail or succeed. It's a story game where the dice are the adjudicators—but the player is the one who determines what those successes or failures look like.

Kali was ecstatic that she won the game. She really did too. Nailed it perfectly. She ends up with the character who successfully changes and moves on. That's a great nod to real story-telling—the iconic characters keep slogging away or expire unchanged, but the dramatic hero hits the crisis and has a chance to change things. They move on. Brilliant.

I can't wrap my brain around using Hollowpoint for campaigns, though my husband has some ideas for that. Hollowpoint seems strongest as a one-shot and could probably work as a short series of one-shots, like movies and their sequels.

Hollowpoint would also be brilliant within a campaign for a special interlude. I could envision using it when the PCs send a group of NPCs off to accomplish a mission—and then they play that mission as the NPCs. There's no need for a ridiculous detailed write-up of each of the agents. With Hollowpoint, it takes just 15 minutes of each player sketching out that NPC and investing their little fictional hearts into the goal via the complication and you've got one heck of a memorable “and meanwhile...” session--one with a rather high possibility of going horribly terribly awry.

Character Creation: Work, Labor or Craft?

I read an interesting geeklist- Games that make character creation fun! -by Bazin and sparked a couple of thoughts about the process. I don't revel in character creation like I used to. When I first started playing D&D, I remember discovering that the game store had pads of character sheets on 4x6 heavy stock paper. I used to burn through those rolling people up; when the horrible orange-sheet books for AD&D came out, I bought those and did the same thing. But at some point, perhaps when "rolling up a toon" became more involved or actually required real work and thinking I stopped just doing character roll-ups for fun. Some that was the process, but more of it came from investing time and wanting to actually play the characters I created. Now I sublimate that desire through NPC creation- making up batches by randomizing elements, putting those together and coming up with stories that fit them. At least I know I can always get these characters out on the table.

OTHER FUN/INTERESTING CC SYSTEMS
I'd add a few other games to Bazin's list-

Hollowpoint's another game that adds a twist to character creation- a fairly simple process. On the one hand player's get to come up with a set of crazy "traits" based on oddball questions ("That one time in Utah you took took a souvenir, it was this..."). These traits establish background, but act as a generic resource to get spent for effect later in the game. The trick is how to integrate those traits into the story. But Hollowpoint also asks each character to create a complication- a statement about the mission that makes it personal for them, provides a twist, or will create havoc later. That's a nice mechanism; because everyone's had to do this, you know there's a time-bomb under each player's seat.

Dread also uses questions (as do many other games), but unlike most games where the questions help you refine the rest of the process- the questions are the process. But the trick is that each player gets a distinct set of questions to build their character from. You can see an example of that here in a questions I put together for my horror version of The Hangover. In Dread each player fills in their questions and then if you can bring something from those answers into play, the GM may let you not have to make a test...which can be a significant advantage. The game makes for an amusing, Mad-Libs character creation process

The list includes the new Gamma World Roleplaying Game, which I'd be interested in if I wasn't gunshy about the 4e Engine. But I have many fond memories of rolling up exceptionally awful and non-sensical characters from the first Gamma World. Any of the classic "roll for random stuff" games could be great fun. The first two editions of Villains & Vigilantes had random super-power tables. The randomness made sense in GW, but for V&V half the struggle was trying to figure out how the bizarre mix of things actually made a character concept. Or you'd cheat and fudge the rolls. Even some classic fantasy games had elements that required some jiggering and adjustment. Old Empire of the Petal Throne made you roll for your background profession. The one time I got to roll up a character for that, I ended up with a baker. Stormbringer, the earliest of the Elric-setting rpgs, had players randomly for nationality. That then significantly affected their stats and limited what professions they could get...from the random profession table.

WALKING THE PATH
Having some randomness in character creation can be fun, but having rolls so absolutely determine a character's direction- I'm not sure I'm cool with that. Of course that leads into Old-School question of rolling and keeping the stats in order or actually placing them as you choose. Ideally, I want a balance between randomness and my ability to determine the role I want in the group. One approach I recall fondly is the use of Life Paths.

Classic Traveller's the best representation of this. That was another game where I loved making up characters- because while you sometimes got what you wanted, you often added in a lot of extra strangeness, depending on the supplements you used. Picking your career track and rolling for each year offered interesting benefits and the irritation of getting yet another free High Passage on a space freighter. Of course there was always the risk of getting your character killed in the process, which meant starting again from the beginning. I mentioned awhile back finding my old FASA Star Trek character sheet for the Klingons game I played. It pretty much stole the same process from Traveler. It was fun and I like that it put all those rolls on the front of the sheet.

Cyberpunk 2020 was the next game I remember offering a detailed background rolling system built into character creation. It was a fun system that they expanded in the various sourcebooks and in the Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads!!!! supplement which added extra angst to your life. And, of course, there were generic supplements like Central Casting: Heroes for Tomorrow and Central Casting: Heroes of Legend (First Edition), intended to help players flesh out their characters in any game. Looking at those rules, I wonder if mechanics like these couldn't be used as a better way to get a player invested in a new setting. If the specific details and concepts of these kinds of tables couldn't be filled with material specific to that game world and even that campaign? It might be a tool to consider using.

NOT ENOUGH POINTS!!!
One thing I've been thinking about is how scarcity might be used as a focus in character creation. Scarcity can change the value of a thing. We're used to GM's increasing some kinds of scarcity: fewer magic items, less treasure, rarer magical healing. Disadvantage systems offer a form of this- taking penalties to offset costs. But what about character creation and play systems that have built in scarcity?

For example, AMBER Diceless Role-Playing has a bidding system for the four stats, plus bonus stuff depending on the game. The GM runs a hidden bid auction, talking about how important a stat is (Strength, Warfare, Psyche, Endurance). The player who bids highest will be the best in that among the group- hands down. Then the other players get ranked below that according to their bids. Bottom line: their can be only one at the top. In a recent Fallout-inspired campaign, the GM made up lists of "Perks," from the VG to use as advantages. The trick was that any particular perk could only be taken by two players; after that no one else could buy it. He made that choose even tougher by dealing out experience in play with cards which could be traded. Some cards offered a special one-use bennie, some offered a new skill, some a new perk, some a stat raise and so on. For our homebrew, Action Cards, players have individually tailored decks for their characters. Normally they get to assign values, but for short-run campaigns, we've used a draft mechanic for making characters- which makes each card scarce.

Another kind of scarcity comes from limits or benefits imposed by the system itself. For example, in the Dead of Night rpg, players have four pairs of traits. You have points to spend on each pair- meaning that you have to consider the balance between them. So if you have a high Assault, you'll have a low Protect. Most GUMSHOE-system games determine points for CC based on the number of players. The rules specifically suggest that the group consult with one another to make sure all of the necessary investigation skills have been covered. Orpheus from White Wolf doesn't force the choice of roles on players- but the system instead rewards good behavior. Players can combine powers in play to get new and more interesting effects. In a way, the game uses incentives to reward diversity in the character creation process. That could extend over to games like D&D 4e where successful play at the table requires some specific builds with a group....

WHERE THE RULES FALL
Finally, there's the question of complexity. I've always believed that character creation's where the bulk of the complex rules for a game ought to fall. You only have to go through that process once (usually) and so you can afford to make that a little more time intensive. The rest of the system ought to be easier and less fiddly than character creation. But of course that gets in the way of pick-up game sunless you use pre-gen characters. And a complex character creation system can act as a barrier for entry to a system. I read a game recently that I really liked, but I had a seriously hard time wrapping my head around how to make a PC. In recent years I've seen CC as a process to "get through" to move on to the story. But Bazin's list and comments make me think- how can we make the CC process as much fun, as connected to the story, and as constructive to the group bonds as the rest of the campaign?

The Path to 750: Gamer Reflexivity

So this is my 750^th post. Let’s hear it for arbitrary celebrational benchmarks.

BEFORE I BEGIN

I will be participating in a panel for ConTessa, the free online gaming convention by women for everyone. That runs this weekend, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, go and look here. The panel is called “Collaborative World-Building and Gaming.” Here’s the blurb:

Harness the power of the group to make better games. Collaborative gaming doesn’t necessarily mean a GM giving up power. Instead it can serve as a tool to draw players in, create novel settings, and provide engaging experiences. The panel will discuss ideas and practical applications. We’re excited to announced our scheduled participants: Meguey Baker (A Thousand and One Nights: A Game of Enticing Stories, Psi*Run), Brad Murray (Diaspora, Hollowpoint), and Ben Robbins (Microscope, Kingdom).

I’m there purely as the voice of a GM who has moved to more of these shared-world technqiues over the last several years. The panel takes place this Saturday at 2PM. It will be recorded as a YouTube video, so you’ll have a chance to check it out after the fact.

SCHEDULES

This week’s an odd one for me. For my tabletop campaigns, I run on alternate weeks. For online, I run weekly. This normally would be my heavy week- running Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. But of the middle three, two have been bumped due to player schedule conflicts and the third is on break until mid-July. I’ll admit that I’m always a little thrown when the schedule opens up like that. If I’m smart I’ll have planned some things- like nights of painting minis or boardgaming. If not, I end up on the PS3 or with some Steam Game I bought on sale but still haven’t really played.

Late in the Fight: Pity the Dead

OVERGAMER

I GM a lot. I’m primarily a gamemaster- when I do play I try to only play in a single campaign at a time. Right now I’m in a fantasy game using Mongoose’s Legend system. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the mechanics of that. It has been years (GURPS 3e) since I played a game with a roll-under mechanic instead of one aiming at # of successes or beating target numbers. I was running six campaigns recently until I finally wrapped up my f2f Changeling the Lost campaign after a little over four years of play. The three of the five ongoing campaigns are tabletop: Libri Vidicos, a magic steampunk school game in a long running fantasy setting (begun Feb of ’07); Last Fleet, a fantasy riff on Battlestar Galactica (started June of ’11); and New Dragons, an L5R family campaign with homebrew rules (begun last November). I have two online campaigns. Changeling Lost Vegas which uses straight G+ Hangouts (begun last Dec  and has a YouTube Playlist) and First Wave Series Two, the second arc of a Mutants & Masterminds 2e game using Roll20 & Skype (begun last June and has a wiki). I also have a wuxia campaign- White Mountain, Black River- which is on hiatus but we will eventually finish. Two of the f2f games- Libri Vidicos and Last Fleet will wrap this year- and First Wave will do one more series and then will finish.

DEFINE YOUR GAMING

Like many veteran gamemasters, I’ve run using many, many systems. Too many. For those who see GMing as a calling, there’s a weird push to get the perfect game- the game which does everything right. So we critique when we read new games, we run something and then discard it in favor of another game, we go back to old models, we tweak new ones. We hunt for the Holy Grail even when we’re running campaigns that keep humming along. Dissatisfaction rules. Or maybe that’s just me. So I’ve run V&V, D&D, M&M, Champions, DC Heroes, James Bond 007, Vampire the Masquerade, Mage the Ascension, Call of Cthulhu, Mutant City Blues, True20, Rolemaster Classic, Rolemaster Standard System, GURPS, BRP, FATE, Ars Magica, Hollowpoint, d20, Fading Suns, Dying Earth, AFMBE, Conspiracy X, Ghostbusters, Paranoia, Hero System, MERP, Storyteller, Scion, Exalted, World of Darkness, Savage Worlds, Armageddon, and blah, blah and more blah.

What I learned is that I prefer simple systems. At the same time I want some chrome and some choice. I want that to be mostly on the player side. I don’t mind complexity and variety in character creation, so long as that doesn’t bog down or slow things when we get to actual play. So the powers, abilities, feats, and everything like that should be easy for players to remember and use. We shouldn’t have to go back to be book too much during the session. I tend to strip off the rough corners and edges of the games I do play. If you watch any of the YouTube videos of my Changeling sessions you can see how I move through those things. I aim to reduce complexity- and funky edge case rules often get dropped. Some of that’s my desire for speed and efficiency- we only have two hour sessions for that. Some of that’s my system mastery- I’ve only been running nWoD since last November. I don’t think it makes for a bad game, but I imagine players who enjoy crunch and like digging into the depth of the mechanics might find my games less fun for them- I might not be able to offer them the game style they want. I’ll admit that keeps me from really wanting to run more online with new people. My group’s pretty settled and used to my style. They go with it. Some of them play Pathfinder which satisfies a different itch of rule-heavy material. But in the back of my mind I’m worried I’ll be pointed out as a fraud if I try to run something more complicated on G+.

The South Wall of the Game Room

REALLY DEFINE IT

For tabletop gaming, I run a homebrew system we’ve been playing for about 13 years. It has gone through several iterations and multiple campaigns (ten I think). I’ve written about that homebrew, Action Cards, before. It began as an idea for card-based resolution with each player having a unique deck. I wanted a game with more room for narrative and easier core mechanics. Over the years I’ve stripped out complexities from the mechanics (point spend actions and initiative, overly elaborate magic systems), changed out various basic concepts, and borrowed ideas from games I’ve enjoyed- trying to tweak the game to make it work with the campaigns we’ve played and make the play feel more involved and interesting. I’ve borrowed some ideas from FATE and ended up putting dice back in the game purely for damage- because people like rolling damage. But at heart Action Cards offers simple resolution, with players able to narrate moments if they can get the right cards and effects.

I don’t know exactly why it works but it does- and for a group that’s played across a lot of systems, with including players who would probably go with Pathfinder or Champions as a second choice. It is a group which as a rule loathes FATE for one primary reason: they hate the dice. They hate, hate, hate them. I’ve tried to run FATE straight with the dice and the players have enjoyed the ideas and concepts and hated the play for the dice. Despite that, my f2f group (ten distinct players across three games), likes Action Cards. The primary benefit AC offers is a sense of ownership- with unique decks and cards players can mark up and modify. Imagine being able to mark and modify a unique set of dice for your character. 

HOW WE PLAY

We play narrative-focused games, with stories but hugely freedom of choice. I try to provide incidents and have the players choose which way they want to head. But I also try to come up with interesting incidents and scenes- and often these will be turning points (like the current coronation the players are at where a forest has begun to swallow the world and the church is surrounded by a legion of vampires). We often have whole sessions of “once-arounds” where individual players follow up on their own stories and interact with NPCs. These push the character’s own stories forward and I often lay the groundwork for other interesting events in these. We have combats on average once every three sessions. That can accelerate when the hit the third act of a campaign. Often we use miniatures and maps but I abstract distances and have now moved to having zones rather than squares. I still use terrain and scenic because many of the group really enjoy that tactical feel and don’t like just having aspects defining things. So I have to mix that up. My sessions run three+ hours, longer if we have something important happening. My players are more apt to spend resources on planning, status, and social interactions rather than in combat. They trust that investments in those areas will pay off in the long term. As a GM I try to track and remember those actions and reward players for that kind of creative thinking and preparation. NPCs they were good to return to help them, reputations gain them advantages, financial investments come back to them, the house they built offers them a sanctuary, etc. I try to balance a focus on rules, environment, and character story- but I’ll admit that my attentions often more on the last two than the first.

Train Fight with Cake and Detached Car

WHAT ELSE SHOULD READERS KNOW?

I’m a freelancer still hunting for short-term and part-time work in writing and editing. The environment’s tough and that’s something I usually avoid talking about too much. If you’re looking for someone consider this blog; my DramaSystem piece for Pelgrane Press “A War on Christmas”; or my entry for the 24-Hour RPG Contest, Arclight Revelation Tianmar as examples. I’m comics you can see stories I did in Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard Volume 1 or Rocketeer Adventures Volume 1. I also scripted and co-plotted Flashpoint: Project Superman for DC. 

Currently I have a board game design, Right of Succession, that I’ve been shopping around and will be sending out for some more testing. I have a couple of other BGs that I’m sketching once I get that to a finished place. Art Lyon and I have been working on some independent comics pitches, a couple of which are in final stages and we’re beginning to hunt for artists. Eventually I plan to put Action Cards together as a product and at risk of being a cliché, I will likely Kickstart that. I’ve been thinking of how to expand and develop the “History of X RPGs” project into a larger volume- perhaps with interviews and some more value-added details. I’ve also been using Scrivener to put together a concrete version of the most interesting stuff from this blog. In doing so I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the number of useful pieces out of the 750 posts, but there’s also some serious dross to trim.

I plan to be at GenCon for a couple of days this year, so I hope to run into some of the really creative gamers I’ve followed online.

THANKS

So thanks to anyone who reads this blog- I hope I provide some interesting insights. This is one of those self-indulgent posts, the kind I often skim through on other people’s sites. I’ve you read to down here, then a double thanks for your attention.

I always welcome requests, comments, questions, suggestions, review copies, and criticisms. I get decent hits and I hope people find the time to check things out. The variety of sites and choices available means every comment's a rare and precious thing. I need to be better at that myself. Anyway- I hope whatever kinds of games you run or play in, that you have awesome fun, always.  

750 posts. That probably means I can time it to get to 1000 at the end of 2014. 

The Fire This Time: Hollowpoint

TEASER TAG
This week I had the chance to run another one-shot session of Hollowpoint. My friend Nick had asked to see the game. He’s running for "Games on Demand" at GenCon and wondered about adding it to his arsenal. I love Hollowpoint as a one-shot engine, so I agreed. I waited until the day of the game to come up with a concept- I wanted to see how long it took me from start to finish. I ended up going with a riff on Delta Green. However, these DG agents wouldn’t be paranoid and desperate agents, but instead fully-sanctioned bad-asses devoted to putting bullets in cultists and keeping a lid on Mythos weirdness.

I modified the toe-tag character sheets available from VSCA, substituting OCCULT for CON. I rolled “talking” approaches into COOL. I opted for OCCULT as the term over Mythos as HP aims for active use skills. I ran through the basic rules and gave them the mission:

Background: Six hours ago, DG lost contact with the secure agency facility in Chicago. That location isn’t an operational team, but instead an archive and holding center for dangerous materials and hazardous volumes. There had been some previous weirdness over the previous month in the area. Cultists had been dropping off the radar- with some suspicion of a cultist turf war. The Chicago team had been contacted by a highly placed cultist, Carlos Augustino, who’d offered to trade info on what was going on in exchange for protection. The Chicago office had been told not to take up the offer since they weren’t an ops team. The request would be routed to higher ups.

Objectives:
1. Investigate the local DG Archive and Vault.
2. Alarms indicated that the facility had been breached. Any stolen materials must be retrieved and the perpetrators neutralized.

The group came up with five characters after some discussion. They opted to spread out their specialties, with each person taking one skill as their “5”:

• Walter: KILL specialist (Complication: Short Man Syndrome) 
• Amiga: DIG focus (Complication: Diabetic)
• Antoine: TAKE focus (Complication: Addicted to hallucinogens through which the mythos touches him)
• Kurt Johansen: OCCULT expert (Complication: Wishes to steal Mythos artifacts)
• Richard Andrew Andrews: TERROR expert (Complication: Description matches that of a suspect in a Chicago-area serial murder investigation).

EPISODE
Scene One: I gave the group time to ask some questions about the situation and gather some background details. I laid out the basics- a small team of personnel on site, lack of contact, deadly stuff present, weird shit going down in Chicago generally, the possibility of cultist or MJ12 opposition. They made a DIG check to get further information on the site and the potentially dangerous materials there. That success gave them confidence that if they entered they could quickly used the RFID tags to figure out what had been taken.

Scene Two: They arrived on an early Sunday morning, with Chicago gripped by a heatwave and jammed up due to a festival (“Taste of Chicago”) happening downtown. The DG archive had the cover of a postal sorting facility. On site they found the security systems taken down professionally. Inside the secure doors remained closed. Instead the attacked had managed to burn a hole down into the facility, cutting through concrete and steel. The group opted to go in via the normal route.

Inside they began exploring and immediately came into conflict with a set of Fire Vampires left behind. The group had to take the opposition down quickly. The Fire Vampires heat would could destroy records and possibly bring down the roof. The group used a variety of skills, but managed to dispatch the bad guys quickly- with a mix of distraction, occult knowledge and fire extinguishers. Andrews took a KILL hit- his face and hands severely burned. (14 Dice)

Scene Three: The group worked through several lines of investigation. Most of this we handled via back and forth questioning, but we had two skill checks in the process, upping the conflict dice. The skill and professionalism of the break-in made the team suspect it hadn’t been cultic, but might have been MJ12 or a like group. They confirmed one item had been taken, The Testament of Carnamagus, an ancient volume with references to the Elder fire god Cthuga. They did some further checks to see if they could find any other important places or times associated with the deity. A check through the facility revealed that all the agents had been killed, with one exception, the Section Chief Agent Danafer.

GM Sidebar: I’d sketched out my notes and plot pretty openly. I had at least three different directions I figured they could go at this point: a hard lean on the Mythos stuff and occult research; tracing the cultic underground; or pursuing the agent leads. I’d come up with a couple of scenes for those cases- mostly names, conflict settings, and leads. The time span I had for the session meant that once they went down one path, I tried not to throw in too many tangents or red herrings.

They tracked back on the missing agent- finding that he’d been doing some off the books investigations. That led to some other leads- most importantly, that he’d be black-bagged and grabbed up about an hour before the break in. Terrifyingly competent hobos provided the next clue- with a camera phone image of the snatch vehicle. The group tracked all of that back to a private shooting range which seemed to be used to supply weapons and equipment to black ops groups.

Scene Four: The group arrived on the site of Sharktooth Security. They’re able to ascertain that the grab van’s on site, along with a team of agents and the company’s security staff. We do one round of conflict in which I’m trying to get a couple of DIG hits on them in order to detect them. The group uses a combination of TAKE, DIG, and COOL to gather further information. I did this as a single dice pool. That transitions quickly into a much more aggressive approach once they’ve confirmed the numbers on site and Danafer’s death. (20 dice)

I consider the second round part of the same conflict and don’t raise the dice. However, it includes a named adversary, so I split my pool after adding two dice. (22 dice, split). The group does a decent job mowing through the opposition- burning traits and starting to use teamwork. I get single hits on several people. Amiga, the hacker, takes off after a single kill hit. And by take off, I mean rolls away in his advanced scooter since he’s just shy of 400 pounds. All the group hears is the sound beeping as he reverses away from the fight.

The team, despite some hits, clears the area. They find out that this is only half of the bad guys. They turn out to be renegade Delta Green Agents. They plan to use the Testament to create a Mythos-based 9/11, to bring the fight against the monsters out into the open. They hope to make that war an even larger priority than that against Terrorists. To that end, they’re going to brief summon Cthuga at the Art Institute in downtown Chicago and allow him to feast on everyone at the nearby outdoor festival.

Scene Five: The group heads downtown, cutting through traffic and driving on sidewalks. Attempts to contact the museum fail. Clearly the enemy team’s already on site. They pull up maps and decide the most likely spot for the ceremony will be a new Persian exhibit. At this point, the group has two choices: a) take the longer rear way into the facility, allowing them a better chance of concealment and ambush or b) head in through the front doors in a quicker and riskier approach. They opt for B. Inside they meet immediate resistance- with the enemy striking with KILL to bring them to a stop. They burn yet more traits and empty the teamwork pool further. I place several more single hits on the group. (22 dice)

GM Sidebar: Here I should have had a retaliation for the last scene, but I wanted to move things on. So folded that into this conflict. If they’d gone in via the long route, I would have skipped this fight and instead significantly upped the catch in the next scene.

Scene Six: Past the first wave of opposition that charged into the ceremony. They found ex-DG Agent Krieger leading the occult operations. Krieger worked with COOL to attempt to convince the group of the wisdom of his actions and convert them to his side. The rest of the bully boys used KILL in an attempt to stop them. (26 dice, split). I made disabling the actual ceremony into an OCCULT catch of four dice. This went through several rounds- and I managed to deal single hits to several of the group. Johansen ended up with single hits on four different areas. The group burned through nearly all of their traits, emptied the teamwork pool, and used their Agent talent (taking the hit) several times. In the end they managed to stop the ceremony and take down Krieger and his goons.

I enjoyed myself and I think the players had a good time. This is the first time no one died. Two of the players had played before; three had not. I started about 8pm with character creation and wrapped the whole thing by 10:30pm.

CODA
I should note that this set-up veers a little away from the structure I’ve used before. I knew I’d have a tight timetable, and I wanted to keep the adventure under two hours, plus time for rules explanation and character creation. When I ran this before I came up with a simple formula- a cheat sheet you can easily use to structure the adventure.

Keep in mind the set up frame needs to allow the players to be bad-asses, without having to worry about the reaction and influence of outside authority figures. That means they have to be part of the authority, have enough pull to avoid serious repercussions, or have co-opted those structures. MiB’s have this through the brain-wipes and fake IDs; a Thieves Guild might have high-level corruption; or the adventurers might operate at the behest of a distant ruler.

Each operation is structured around two clear goals- concrete, but with enough openness to give the group room to come up with solutions. One problem shouldn’t necessarily nest within another- i.e. they ought to be related, but not “two birds with one stone” solvable. My cheat structure is this- the first of the two problems is solving/stopping/fixing a conflict between two groups. The players have to figure out what’s going on and put an end to it. Those solutions can range from soft to hardball. Second, the players have to retrieve or find something: a lost book, an agent who went missing, a hostage, or the like. That McGuffin’s in the hands of one of the two groups.

From there, coming up with everything else is pretty easy. What’s the conflict and who is behind it; what secrets/weirdness does each side have; where is each group based (the cooler the fight location, the better); and where’s the McGuffin & why? Develop a list of names and you’re good to go. That’s all.

Here’s another thing I noticed and we talked about briefly after the session- if you’re going to emulate a genre or existing setting, go big and go for something you know they players will know intimately. You don’t really want to be describing the rules of the premise except in the sketchiest terms. So go for Star Wars and make it truly over the top. They’re Commandos in the Old Republic, taking care of missions and problems the Jedi Council can’t or won’t take care of. Of come forward to the movie era and they’re agents of the Empire- perhaps even with a dark Jedi or two in their midst (with Force as a skill) hunting down rebels.      

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Vampires: Hollowpoint

This Saturday I finally had the chance to run Hollowpoint. We had a break between campaigns, so I wanted to do a one-shot with something pretty distinct. Last time we’d done Dread, another game with a pretty central and different mechanical system.

Here’s the info I gave them ahead of time:

LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING VAMPIRES
In the near future, monsters are real. That discovery by various secret organizations put them in a difficult position: pull back the curtain and cause panic and an all-out war or find a way to create quiet balance between the monsters and humanity. You belong to one of those organizations, dedicated to enforcing the rules and keeping things under wraps.

That agency is simply known as The Balance. It employs deadly and expert agents, called Exarchs, to carry out missions. It fights against the Vampires, Werewolves and other creatures of darkness who act as a supernatural mafia. The Balance allows the creatures to carry on, but within limits. When the beasts go out outside those limits they send in the Exarchs.

They send in you.

To the basic set of six skills, I added OCCULT- presenting magical knowledge and the use of sorcerous powers. The two effect stages would be Cursed and then Soulless. I did up little 4x6 two-sided character sheets, with a quick outline of the conflict mechanism on the back. At the table I walked through the game, stressing the broad approach to actions. They made up their characters pretty quickly, with a couple focusing on KILL, one on TERROR, one on COOL and the other on OCCULT. There were some interesting traits chosen as well and I pretty much let anything fly there.

I got down to brass tacks and described the mission. Their agency, the Balance, keeps the existence of monsters quiet and maintains balance between groups. In Chicago, that balance has gotten skewed. Vampires, in their ongoing war with the Lycan Werewolves, have gained the upper hand.

• Objective One: Restore parity between the Vampires and Werewolves in Chicago.

Though is isn’t clear if it has a role in the current imbalance between the two forces, an important magical artifact has surfaced in the Windy City, the Tome of Asmodeus. It is likely in the hands of the Vampires.

• Objective Two: Locate and retrieve or destroy the Tome of Asmodeus.

They wrote up complications. I made a mistake and didn’t stress that those should connect themselves to the mission objectives. A couple of people, in a more Microscope-y, way wrote up more general complications for the story. Those were great and I might have to use that as a technique in the future. But I had them revise those to make them more personal.

SCENE ONE: CONFLICT ONE
I moved the players on to the scene, allowing them the choice of where and how they wanted to hit things. I stressed again that each conflict meant that later conflicts would be tougher. The players also noted that they wanted to avoid a wash. They did some research- I allowed them to make a skill check. The Hollowpoint rules suggest successful skill checks count as successes for later scenes- adding more dice. I opted to only apply that raise once. I wanted players to have some ability to choose actions and roll even during the discussion sequence.

They got the basics on the Vampires. I borrowed from classic WoD, so we had a Giovanni family in control of the city, with mafia contacts. Cantor Giovanni was the patriarch, with son Petreus Giovanni as a right hand-man and warlord. His other son Michael Giovanni didn’t seem as involved with the current conflict. There were indications of smaller rival vamp families, a detail not used.

On the werewolf side, the tribe of the Silver Fangs was led by a Lord Steelbane. They got less information on them, except that they had a street gang of weak-blooded werewolves (metis) known as the Born-Broken. They seemed like a good point of engagement. The group also researched the book and discovered it had rituals relating to the powers of various monsters and rituals for enhancing them.

The group opted to use the gang as an entry point. Three went into the club to roust them, using COOL and TERROR. Two others worked on DIG (looking for evidence in backrooms) and OCCULT (reading the wards and magic around the area). It took a couple of rounds, with the group taking a couple of effects (Terror, Dig) before they finally cowed the gang leader Angor Sept. The players started to get their feet under them, and we had one trait burn in that conflict.

SCENE TWO
The PCs forced Angor Sept to set up a meeting with the werewolf lord, Steelbane. They met at an abandoned amusement park. Lord Steelbane had some of his pack with him, along with his second, Viska Sloane and his daughter, Selena Holt. The PCs suggested that they shared a mutual interest in hitting the Vampires hard. There was some agreement. They found out that the vampires victories had been more due to strategic intelligence and ambushes than anything else. Steelbane suspected some magic, since he’d vetted and checked his own people for a leak. Viska reacted oddly to this comment, but the group let that pass for the moment.

They pressed Steelbane for where they could locate Petreus Giovanni, if they wanted to send a message. He suggested the vamp-only stronghold of the Succubus Club. The PCs departed.

SCENE THREE: CONFLICT TWO
The group headed for the Succubus Club, intending to approach with a mix of skills- half the group playing hardball while the others went more quietly in. However, they drove into an ambush on the street outside the building. Someone had tipped off the Vampires. They raked the PCs vehicles with gunfire. The opposition included Petreus Giovanni, allowing me to split my dice pool.

The group responded by going full KILL for everything, intending to simply eliminate any and all opposition on the street. They burned traits and asked each other for help- piling up dice in two-three persons (of five) each round. My group’s pretty focused on cooperation, so despite the attraction of saying FU, they went with a united front to start. They quickly made a mess of the opposition- dealing a second stage effect to the general Vampire group, and a first stage effect to Petreus- at which point I had him withdraw. I did manage to couple of solid KILL hits on one of the PCs, but the players began what would be the key strategy for the evening. If anyone took a second-stage effect, the other players quickly distributed that using their Agent ability.

SCENE FOUR: CONFLICT THREE
Having successfully dispatched the Vampires, the players opted to immediately continue and escalate the situation- driving straight through the doors of the Succubus Club. The group split between KILL and TERROR, with one player using COOL. Once again, dice consolidated in players hands through the teamwork mechanic. I didn’t have a split dice pool (no protagonist) so I ended up with some big numbers that went fast but left me with little. I dealt a couple of effects, but nothing awesome. The team set the Club ablaze, until finally they dealt a second stage COOL effect- forcing a Vampire to beg them for rescue in exchange for information.

SCENE FIVE
The group drew information from the nameless vampire. He indicated that Petreus had been told that some kind of enemy would be coming to the club, and so set up the ambush. The nameless vamp suggested that the information had come from Michael Giovanni, narrowing down the source of the leak in the werewolf community.

One of the players (“Jake Boswell”) burned a trait, Flashbacks, to establish that he had a previous relationship with the werewolf second in command, Viska Sloane. I let him make a roll based on his CON 2. He ended up with two sets on four dice so I let it fly. Viska indicated that the Lord’s search for leaks hadn’t included his own family. She offered the group the location of the ambitious Selena Holt, the lord’s daughter.

SCENE SIX: CONFLICT FOUR
The group breaks in to the abandoned warehouse where Selena Holt and her packmates doss down. They use a mix of skills, but the focus is clearly on KILL. The group has begun to really see how the effect stack- and they try to coordinate their work, rather than hitting the opposition on all fronts. The net result is that they finish things with a second stage KILL effect, which leaves Selena Holt dead- and unable to answer questions. However they uncover evidence linking Selena Holt and Michael Giovanni. The pair wanted to get ahold of the Tome of Asmodeus, which Cantor Giovanni keeps in his vault on his fortified estate. They planned to use the book’s rituals to empower themselves. They got some strategic information on the estate as well.

SCENE SEVEN: CONFLICT FIVE
The group wanted more information on the book, and the potential magical safeguards as well as confirmation of the book’s presence. They wanted to check in with occult sources in Chicago. I offered two options: take time and make an Occult skill check to get some details OR go and kick in the doors of the various amateur warlocks and witches in the city, full conflict style to get the answers fast. The group opted for the latter. Despite the pretty huge pool of dice I had, they ran roughshod over the occultists pretty quickly. I distributed a couple more effects, players burned traits, and we had some dice finally taken from the teamwork pool. The group coordinated their FU’s to get at that. They got some more details- most importantly that most of the arcane protections were to keep monsters out. The party decided to take the fight to the fortified Giovanni estate.

SCENE EIGHT: CONFLICT SIX
The group came in with a two pronged attack: TERROR to offer a distraction and TAKE to crack the safe & security. I established that TAKE would have to be used in this final conflict if they wanted to get at the book. I also established a three die Catch which could be dealt with by any skill, it represented the magical wards and protections being closed down. I rolled a 1, 2 and 3 for that- which ended up being pretty bad for them. The Catch needs to be cleared by dice of those set values. Since sets get cleared from lowest to highest in a conflict, when it came around to them, I’d often already knocked out those sets. (Note: it was pointed out to me that you actually knock out shortest, highest sets first, so this would have been easier- but at least I applied the rule the same way across the session)

Once again, the group traded off support and assistance, with everyone pretty much burning all of their traits. They all also used their agent abilities to take various hits for one another.

But I had 26 dice, split among two pools (12 for five players + GM, 10 for five previous conflict successes, 2 for their various skill checks, and 2 for a protagonist on site- Cantor Giovanni).

The group worked through, getting a couple of effects and managing to clear the catch when everything went pear-shaped. I finally managed to take down on player with a second stage KILL effect on one round. No one had any room left to take his hits on sets or skills. That lost them his dice. The next round they took from the teamwork pool but I managed to overwhelm them- I hit three more with KILL effects. They’d already take stage one hits for others before that so suddenly they dropped like flies.

The final player, who’d supported on that round with his COOL- coordinating from outside in the van—watched as each monitor went dead. He briefly considered going out in a blaze of glory. Instead he turned the key in the ignition and drove off. He’d see at least two of his team in the future; both had complications that they wanted to be vampires…

But that day was in the future, and they’d managed to accomplish at least one of the missions.

FINAL THOUGHTS  

1. With a new group, I suspect you’ll find yourself dealing with the mechanical side of things on your first session. We ended up with less narrative in this game. I think that would be different if people knew the system and were ready for it.  
2. If you’re like me and usually try to rush through combat/conflicts to keep the energy up, you’ll need to slow yourself down. Take the time to describe and narrate the moments.  
3. It is easy to forget about complications early on. Or at least I did.  
4. I would stress players’ ability to withdraw from scenes earlier- and that doing that doesn’t raise the stakes for the next conflict. OOH player’s don’t like to withdraw.  
5. More importantly, I would point out that “moving on” allows the player to come in with a fresh and clean character. Because they’d used their Agent abilities to take hits for one another to keep them in the game early on, they were all hugely vulnerable in the final conflict.  
6. Players will learn and figure out the dice system- what works best and what doesn’t- as they play. I didn’t give any advice on this, except that long rolls went fast but wasted a lot of dice to do it. They probably wouldn't have gone to the dice with the Occultists if they'd more familiarity with the system.  
7. I enjoyed it, I think the players did, and we would certainly play this again. I think all told, even with a pizza break of about a half hour, we managed to do this in 3 ½ hours total.