Role-Playing-Onion ©

MOVING...

2009-12-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

MOVING MY BLOG... Now I'm going to have only one blog instead of the many that I have had up til now... The new location is http://jeffthomann.wordpress.com/

Golly...

2009-09-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

Gosh, it's been a while since I posted here. I will try to post more often when I get a chance. Easy to get too busy to blog... One way you can role play is by changing your looks. What better way to do that than buying a wig? My lovely wife is getting ready to start a new website all about that. It's going to be at http://www.buying-a-wig-is-easy.com/

Please pray for Jon

2008-06-27T12:22:00.001-07:00

My cousin Jon Thomann has been in the hospital the last week. He fell down a flight of concrete stairs and did some major damage to his head that required brain surgery. He has not fully become consious yet, but there are indications that he is becoming more active. This has been a trying time and has been hard on all of us.

Please pray for his recovery. If you would like to know more about his current situation, his girlfriend, parents and brother are keeping us all updated with this website/blog:

http://caringbridge.org/visit/jonthomann

If you would like to help out financially, there has been a new Support Fund recently set up. You may send checks to the

Jon Thomann and Family Support Fund
P.O. Box 1262
Columbia MO 65205-1262

For more information on the fund and its purpose, you may contact Cathi Harris at 573-220-6582.

Wraith Project

2008-06-20T20:21:00.000-07:00

Found a link to Wraith Project on wikipedia... looks like a cool site that expands the now defunct White Wolf Wraith Game.
http://cattail.nu/wraithproject/

Memories...

2007-08-09T00:15:00.000-07:00

Chris Mast, one of the buddies that I used to do some role playing with back in high school when I first got started in role playing (boy, am I starting to show my age) has a website with some of the stats on some of the older characters that he, my brother, and his brother used in our early days of playing a mixture of Palladium Books' Ninjas and Superspies, Beyond the Supernatural, Heroes Unlimited, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) (yes, TMNT wasn't always just a kids cartoon, and in the early days was a bit more gory).

Here's the link:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/8006/Heroes.html

If you use Wren & Dynostar in any of your story lines, one of their main ongoing enemies is a super mutant team that consists of Voltaic from Villians Unlimited, another Mutant that goes by the name Weasel, who has a negate super powers power, and also some nerdy mutant guy named See-All (aka Annoyance's gay lover with the same abilities as Annoyance) that hang out with the two of them that has just about every minor power related to sight, such as the abilities to see through things with x-rays, see things in the dark with infared vision, and a whole bunch of others. Wren and Dynostar hate See-All because he is gay and was always coming on to them and telling them how lovely their underwear was, giving a in-depth description of each pair they wore when he was around since he could see through their suits. Voltaic and Weasel keep See-All around since he's useful in some heists.

Wren and Dnyostar hate Weasel and Voltaic for a variety of reasons, but primarily they are fearful of them, especially as a team, since they have the ability to almost kill Wren and Dynostar by negating their powers and then frying them with electricity, especially since the electricity does damage to Wren even if he's intangible and his powers are still working. Weasel's real name is suspected to be Harold Giovanni Arnoldio Weasemly III, but he hates people using his real name, and very much prefers to use Weasel as his name since it's short and sweet. Weasel owns a Casino in Boonville, MO in the future that we played in, as well as several others in various other cities around the world (our setting was probably around the year 2050 or 3000 AD). In his casino, Weasel has a secret underground Colloseum style arena that he uses to pit various mutants against one another in death or near death matches. Weasel is actually a short black man (a little shorter than 5 foot tall) with a pretty powerful, stocky, strong build who is in to boxing, kick boxking, and a lot of other really athletic activies. He sort of looks like Evander Hollyfield in body build and in facial resemblence, and he's got a major addiction to gambling that he justifies since he owns several major casinos. He is careful not to go overboard with his addiction and only bets primarily on his own illegal arena fights whether they are cock figting, mutant fighting in his death arenas, or an a variety of sports that he knows the odds are pretty good for. In the rare situations when he does start to hurt financially, he uses some of his high ranking underground contacts to rig various sports that he bets on, or, in some rare cases, makes his casino slot machines stop paying out the amounts they legally are suppossed to pay out.

Chris didn't ever have my character's stats since I was usually the GM, and was super possessive of my character sheets and took them off to college with me. I'm not sure if I still have them... I'll need to look around in some boxes in the basement someday and see what if I can find some stats on some of my old characters like Arson-Al, the weapons guy that had a whole semi full of powerful and deadly weapons that Wren stole the first time Al ever was introduced in to a story line, Ran Parstrobe, the magician that was sort of similar in some ways to Dr. Strange, Wifinil - the teleporting magician that was stuck in a space-time continum problem that kept him showing up as an old man one second and a teenager the next in his various run-ins with SeeinDee Corporation (sometimes abbreviated C&D since no one really ever knew that the C&D really wasn't a C&D but was a SeeinDee in game but started out in real life as a a C&D since it stood for Chris and Danny since those were the two players that made up the corporation using organization rules from Ninajas and superspies - in game it's run by a secret society that no one knows much about that probably has some ties to a European Mafia family by the name Seein and a Chicago mafia family with the last name Dee), Dr. Darkcloak - a mysterious gadgeteer that always wore a black bandana around his face and dark clothing that eventually found the cure for Dim Mak and a special strain of it that was developed to just work on mutants, or some of the hundreds of other characters I've made over the years. If I can't find them, I may re-create some the characters and post them on this blog eventually.

Cause and Effect. Be careful what you wish for.

2007-07-12T10:36:00.001-07:00

PCs are not the center of the universe, even though they may think they are. As a game master, you need to have your NPCs do stuff that is in their character to do. Give NPCs an in depth backstory and sequence of events that they've done to get up to the present time when the PCs are in game... and let NPCs do things they do - set them up with a set of actions that they are planning to do. If PCs happen to stumble on to NPCs in game and cause the NPCs plan of future actions to be altered, let the NPC act naturally. Also remember that sometimes, the best NPCs aren't necessarily "on screen" so to speak... in movies a lot of the best villians ever never are seen on screen, or aren't revealed until the last few minutes of the movie, or could possibly never be revealed until late in the action and then it's discovered that the NPC villian is really a PC or NPC Hero who's been leading a double identity behind the scenes... In Ninjas and Superspies theres one section focused on character backgrounds, and it lets characters be double agents, or even triple agents. This sort of stuff happens in real life all the time, so let it happen in game sometimes... let the layers of the onion slowly be revealed...

Many times when I used to GM a lot in SDC world - which is what I call a mix of Ninjas and Superspies + Heroes Unlimited + TMNT + Beyond the Supernatural all played in the same game, I would have an entire city's NPC's politics and many of the NPC's course of past and future actions figured out way before even introducing the PCs in to the game. That way the city seemed alive and villians could become freinds, etc. and characters more or less had free reign, sort of like players in video role playing games like Grand Theft Auto do... there's plot hooks I could put in there, but for the most par, I just letting PC characters run around and do their thing... they chose where to be and when to be there. I let the actions that the NPCs do get done and if the PCs found an interest in interacting with the NPC's course of actions, I let it happen... The key in setting up this sort of campaign is to make sure that you, as a game master, have a solid idea of everything that's going on in your world, and a pretty good grasp of the timeline you have things happening in... and that you have multiple NPCs taking major actions silmultaneously in different places, which may or may not affect one another... that style of play was awesome for the gaming we did since all the PCs were a part of a major crime fighting organization, sort of like a super powered police or FBI, but run by a private organization.

I had mafia members robbing people on street allies, bank robberies going on, newfound illegal drugs that could invoke superpowers or psychic powers being created and sold all over the place, all taking place while across town there were Mutants fighting one another in illegal cage matches that were being run in a secret basement complex under a Casino... People that didn't know about it upstairs didn't need to know about the cage matches, and the sounds of the Casino kept them busy and drowned out the yelling downstairs...

There were some supernatural mystics and magicians playing behind the scenes secretly influencing some, but not all of the actions going on... sort of like WoD does with older vampires in Masquarade, but this was all before I had any idea of what WoD was... Some otherworldly magicians and other supernatural powers that they had associated themselves with needed the illegal superpower creating drugs to be created so that they would be able to influence the weak willpower of the hallucinating duggies and use them as pawns to do their bidding or force them in to doing what they wanted so that they could get more of the dope, etc.

Some mutants who had just found their powers were dragged in to the cage matches so that they could be killed or made to kill like old Roman Colloseum Gladiators or video game street fighters or like animals in cock fights... so those betting on which side would win could get richer..

There were certain actions that influential NPCs would take, whether or whether not they crossed paths with PCs. Some of those actions would cause a chain of events that might or might not cause the PC's worlds to be massively crushed as their stocks crumbled or went through the roof and made them millionares...

The entire world was nicely worked out like a Soap Opera. The PCs were a part of the action and could do what they wanted to, and sometimes it had a big impact... somtimes maybe not.

Also, there should be real consequences if players get too greedy just like there are in real life if a gambling addict keeps going to a casino too much... or alcoholic insists on drinking and not taking steps to overcome that fatal character flaw.

My style of game mastering is based on cause and effect.

One time one PC made a pact with a demon that was partly responsible for some of the main things going on in this absurd reality of a city that I'd created, and as a result that PC paid for it... before he knew it he was going unconcious only to wake up finding himself declothed standing over murder victims with a bloody knife, or standing on 20 story tall buildings on a ledge while nearby police had guns aimed at him.

On the other hand, that pact let him have some amazing powers that he didn't have access to prior to making the pact...

Eventually the act of accepting that pact led him to be in conflict with other PCs... I did let him lose that possession eventually, but it took a lot of work to get to that point, just like it'll take an alcoholic quite a bit of work to overcome their addiction...

Some game masters would say I stepped over the line by allowing a PC to get possessed, but in Beyond the Supernatural there are rules for possession, and things of that nature, so I think I was game mastering well inside of the rules... in many ways this was sort of like a fatal flaw that some characters in WoD games have, only I was making it all up on the fly before I had been introduced to that sort of idea in a game...

Patterns of Speech

2007-07-12T08:50:00.001-07:00

If you can give your character consistent patterns of speech, especially if you are a Game Master or Storyteller, or what have you, you can give certain characters certain patterns of speech, so when they enter the stage and the Player Characters (PCs) come across them they will be immediately recognizable, even if you are only one person acting as storyteller playing hundreds of NPCs (Non Player Characters). You can pick up speech intonations by studying real world speech... Some people have naselly sounds in their speeches... some have higher or lower pitched voices. Don't go overboard with this, unless you want to... no need to hurt your real world vocal cords just to play a game.. raspy voices in acting is usually associated with some sexy talking lady or some mafia sort of guy... you can use this sort of stuff in game... so too can you use venacular language, foul language (or substitutes like Friggin Fraggin Fraggle Rock instead of Fu__), etc. and other parts of speech. One thing I used to do a lot with one character that popped in on occassion as an NPC was to use positive and negative and neutral additions to his language... for instance if he asked a question, it'd go something like this, "What are you talking about, huh?" If he'd say something positive or negative or neutral, he'd always add a yep, nope, yes, no, huh, or some other similar one or more word backup to his speech... it'd be like, "Look at that over there. Yep. She shouldn't be doing that, nope. How about that? Eh?.. I think I'm going to go over there to that bar and have me a beer. Yesiree.. Do you want one too? Huh? You out of money? Huh? I'll buy this time. Yep. Maybe next time you can pay... Perhaps."

Crossovers and Acting...

2007-07-12T08:28:00.001-07:00

When combining worlds, as listed in the previous post, it may be a good idea to read up on information on the world or type of world you are trying to portray. Read a lot as a game master/storyteller/umpire or whatever you want to call it... Knowledge is power!

If one of your players knows more about some of the fantasy world(s) than you do their thoughts may be just ideas that are wrong in your reality in your game or maybe they know too much and you need to change some fundamental themes or concepts in order to make them not think they know all things... making up your own new characters to fill your stories is a good idea... anytime you make up a new character that's plays a major role in the game(s), please think about their history, motives, speech patterns, and other things. In an acting class that I had to take in college for my theater minor, we were usually asked to make up at least 2 pages of background info on each main character we tried to portray so that we could use that to "become" the character. It's useful. If you read novels a lot of background info is known as the author gives it to you. If you watch movies or plays, that info isn't immediately available to the viewer, just as it wouldn't be to a PC playing your RPG... so you need to give them those sorts of ideas and backgrounds, and it is very useful if you do so in "role playing" this through speech intonations, and things... When making up a history think about stuff like maybe what this NPC's regular daily activities include... what sort of stuff would they eat for breakfast? Do they go after cold cereal or do they need gormet ham and eggs served by a maid? What did they do yesterday that may affect their actions today, what about last week. When I used to do a lot of game mastering, I usually made up in depth background stories, more or less as complex as soap opera plots, or star trek plots (space opera is just like soap operas in some ways... just in a different setting)... If I had two main NPCs fighting one another, I'd figure out why, and what they had done up to that point.. when the PCs enter the action in the game, they are really not going to know much of this background info and I needed to bring it to their attention in various ways.. there's a lot of work in doing this background stuff, but it will pay off...

When it comes to doing crossovers like mentioned in the last post, you may want to think about looking at other RPGs too... for instance there is a Star Wars RPG out there... so you may be able to gleen some ideas about it by browsing it at a bookstore or library, and/or buying it yourself...

Most table top rpg and even non-table top rpg characters and items can be used in other rpgs with just a little tweaking. If you know enough about the system(s) involved in the game, you can have multiple books from different systems and use different items or characters from them in the other systems... For instance, I used to use WoD characters in SDC World based games like Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Superspies a lot.. just figure out the conversion rules... in this case, SDC system used HP and SDC to figure character's health. WoD used Dots. After figuring out how many dots were an average amount and how many SDC most normal characters had, I decided to use a 5 to 1 rule.. so 1 dot = roughly 5 SDC... when it came to skills, SDC game was percentage based and WoD is dot based... with 5 dots being almost perfect... so I just did some math and figured that 1 dot = roughly 20%... that made things pretty easy to figure out how to convert. You may use different conversion rules, but this conversion factor seemed to work fine for us.

Resources: Maps

2007-07-12T06:50:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, fantasy worlds can be useful in role playing... especially if you play with multiple universe games like Rifts or WoD or nWoD... in WoD, Arcadia is suppossed to be made up of realms created by human dreams... In Beyond the Supernatural's Nightbane, Beyond the Supernatural, and Rifts, Rifts can lead to anywhere, at any time in any world in the megaverse... and Dreams can actually be worlds in the astral and dream realms. Some of the Nightbane supplements actually have character classes that go in depth about gaming possibilities in dream realms and masters of those realms... sort of like Freddy Krueger was in Nightmare on Elmstreet, but able to be taken in all sorts of different directions...

what more unified human dreams could there be than fantasy worlds like those found in Star Wars, Piers Anthony Xanth and Adept Series Books, JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth described in the Hobbit, Wonderland from Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz, Narnia in CS Lewis's The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, the land in Grimm's Fairy Tales, or just about any made up realm or world from any work of fiction ever created in the history of mankind.

Here's some more wikipedia links for you. I use wikipedia a lot as it's an amazing reference source for this sort of stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5b/Middle-earth.svg/500px-Middle-earth.svg.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Oz

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6d/Oz-and-surrounding-countrie.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_Fairy_Tales

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Anthony

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprentice_Adept

http://www.writing-world.com/sf/world.shtml

What's nice about megaversal type rpgs is that you don't have to always play in one location, one one world, or even on one dimension! You can draw inspirations for your gameplay from myths, history, legends, fantasy, or just about anything else. You probably do want a consistant mood in your games.. no need to have your James Bond Characters always trying to outwit one of the Wicked Witches in Oz as she is about to set up a plan do destroy the yellow brick road, but what's neat about it is that if you want, you could do just that!

Role Playing is about character development. Just as you and I daydream on occassion, our characters in rpgs may actually enter in their own daydreams and you can play them out if you need or want to... Studying real world history, fantasy, psychology, and many other things can give you gaming inspiration... even reading the local newspaper can... there are stories all around us. Use them! :)

Old WoD nWoD

2007-07-11T19:54:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a bit about the Old and New World of Darkness Role Playing Games by White Wolf over at wikipedia the last few days...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_darkness

There's a ton of new changes and a whole new system. I won't be updating anything since I don't really role play anymore and haven't really for many years... I have a lot of the Old WoD books, and the occult and mythological stories and tie ins in that setting is part of what drove me to the system in the first place back in college... I understand the reasons why they moved away from all of that in the nWoD but think it's kind of a sad manuever since they had put so much work in the old system and so many old timers like myself got to love it.

For the most part, it seems White Wolf did away with the old ideas and mythological cosmology to untie their system from Ars Magica that they used to own but no longer do, and to allow more un-Christian and Jewish origin ideas in... in essence they undid some of the base themes and ideas that drew me a and a lot of other people back in the day towords their games...

Prior to WoD games the most RPGs that I had played were from Palladium Book's SDC wolrds of Beyond the Supernatural, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas & Superspies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT)... back in Highschool, a friend up the street, Chris Mast, bought Heroes Unlimited after seeing an ad for it in a comic book. He was a comic book fanatic, and still is for the most part... especially X-Men related comics... After he did that, and he got me and my Brother in to it, I bought Beyond the Supernatural and Heroes Unlimited and did some heavy modifications on some rules in it to balance it out with Heroes Unlimited... finally I think his brother bought TMNT and Chris bought Rifts and we were role playing almost every other night or so for a while back then...

we sucked at it back then. We power gamed, and I was fine with that since I let the players, usually my brother and Chris's Brother, get really powerful Player Characters, and I and Chris would usually swap as Game Master back and forth, letting one another play as a PC when the other GM'ed... to balance out the power gaming pcs we just made npcs even more powerful. I think once I had lots of level 15 Ninjas kicking the characters butts by having about 20 attacks per mellee (APM) more than each pc, so he could do all sorts of stuff after they burned their APMs... including but not limited to pulling down their pants around their ankles and lightly spanking them on the hiney doing 1 sdc damage before doing a jig... didn't want to kill them off right then, just give them a taste of powerful npcs that could get them irritated more than anything...

Anyways, Rifts, and Palladium never went in depth about character histories and tie ins to real world literature, history or anything like that... and the Palladium books allowed you to more or less play anything at any time and just gave you a system to roll dice to figure out what actions worked, etc. in any place at any time in the entire Megaverse that you chose. I think the nWoD is starting to take White Wolf RPGs in that direction, which makes everything more generic and less world specific... which isn't necessarily a good thing... :(

Hi there.

2007-07-11T14:53:00.000-07:00

I've been a role player and game master for nearly all of my life... actually I didn't realize it in early childhood. Back then I just used my imagination a lot to create virtual realms in my mind and play in them and things... and they were worlds that had a lot more rules and cosmological makeup than most kids that don't use their imaginations a lot get in to... I didn't really start role playing until highschool, but back in elementary school, I remember making up little action figures out of twigs and grass and things and taking them on journeys through various lands, which were really just the school playground, but it was really cool. Back then I also had some He-Man action figures and some Marvel Universe Secret Wars Action figures and lots of other toys. My brother and I used to team the "good guys" against the "bad guys." I usually ended up playing the "bad guys" since I had Dr. Doom, Skeletor, and all the baddies and he had Captain America, Castle Grey Skull, and a lot of various heroes... I'll go in to detail on all of them eventually... anyways, he usually always left the headquarters as was... I usually always added tons of mazes to the bad guys layers using blankets, lincoln logs, and tons of other things... usually expanding Skeltor's layer to take up a half a room, with mazes under beds, labrinths leading to extra dimensional palaces on the top of a bunk bed and even higher realms above that, forests in my mom's plants in the living room, and lots of other things... Back then I used to always draw up mazes on paper and all sorts of things... I enjoy making things that most think should be simple in to a fairly complex rules based world or set of worlds... I plan to use this blog to explain some of my RPG ideas, explain storytelling ideas, and other things. I haven't really played a table top RPG in a long while but still have tons of books from back in high school and college, and read things online all the time... I used to play online in Diablo II a lot a few years back, but now I play in Entropia Universe a lot nowadays.. it's not a real "rpg world" in the old fashioned sense, but does have some elements... and is a descent game in some ways, although kinda boring in a lot of aspects... and pretty pricey to play..

Oh yeah, almost forgot... the reason I named this the role-playing-onion blog is because it's a name I was pretty sure no one else had used for a blog name before. It's a reference to the old RPG theme and idea that as players are let known more and more about their rpg world that they are playing in over the course of time by a skilled gamesmaster, storyteller, or whatever you want to call the umpire guy/gal it's like they are peeling off the layers of an onion... there's some translucency to the underlying layers when you first look, but as you uncover more and more, you discover whole new aspects of the story that you never first envisioned. Plots gain lots of twists and turns, enemies become friends, allies become enemies, and it's possible that we are all pawns on a metaphysical chessboard, but at the same time may end up being Kings of our own little worlds and learn to be more than we thought we could be, etc. as characters develop over the course of time...

I'll post more here over time... stay tuned.