Planet Irish Gaming

Itzacon 2012 (9th – 11th) of March
Location: NUI Galway will be held in the Aras na Maclaeinn building beside the collage bar
Main Website:http://www.itzacon.com/

Details on accommodation can be found here:http://www.itzacon.com/content/accommodation-information

The 40k event will be a 1850 point tournament
with 5 games over the Saturday and Sunday
Timetable below

Day one Saturday
Player Registration from 9am
First Dice rolls at 10am
10:00 -12:30 game 1
12:30-1:30 Lunch
1:30-4:00 game 2
4:00-4:30 break
4:30-7:00 game 3 (play till end of game)

Day two Sunday
11:00-1:30 game 4
1:30-2:30 Lunch
2:30-5:00 game 5

Question #22: Describe the worst game you've ever played in. What made it so bad? Did your fellow players help, or make it worse?

It was Gaelcon. 1995 or so. D&D. I was running it. There were six players. One of them couldn't string a sentence together, and seemed to hope that by rolling the dice, he'd convey his intentions. One of them drew on the paper tablecloth - drew very well, I might add - throughout the session, not really participating otherwise. And two of them appeared to know the entirety of Monty Python by heart, and took every single sentence I managed to get in as a cue to quote something, both of them in near perfect unison. Further, any time anyone mentioned horses, they'd sit there pretending to knock coconut halves together, and making clip-clop noises.

I didn't run a game at a convention for about a decade after that.

To their credit, the other two players tried hard, and one of them said he'd have bought me a stiff drink if Kilmainham had a bar.

There is a silly streak in gaming. I don't mind it, as long as it's kept behind closed doors and doesn't bother the horses. Personally, I don't get it. I can see how Paranoia, for instance, is a funny sort of situation, but it's always struck me as a Cold War-era form of desperate comedy in the face of an incomprehensible threat. Much like the more modern Laundry game, although the Laundry is more existential and less daft. And if you're inclined toward silly games, interruptions, and not being able to get a word in edgeways, well, on you go. Just keep it away from me.

Which is not to say that I don't use any elements of comedy, or that my games are all serious. There have been plenty of segments, events and characters that were surreal, comedic, or just plain bizarre enough to make people laugh. But they've never been silly. Silly is cheap.

Further, the particular kind of silly that leads to non-stop Monty Python quoting, well, it isn't funny. It's vaguely amusing if you know the exact thing that's being quoted, but otherwise it's an out-of-context quote of something that depends on good delivery to be funny. So it's just frustrating for everyone else, and I can't honestly see the enjoyment in it for the quoter, either.

But it happens a lot, even if not to that degree. Gamers absorb references and pop culture like few other subcultures do, and can often reproduce them at a moments notice, even if they're decades old. The plots of episodes of Firefly get redone in games worldwide, over and over and over. I know of one gamer who can be relied up on bring up Gilligan's Island at any opportunity. I'm not sure if Gilligan's Island was ever aired in Ireland, so the references are pretty lost on the rest of us. And in latter years, Community and Big Bang Theory get quoted, and they're strong enough in the geek zeitgeist that many people don't quite seem to understand that I've never seen them.

Maybe it's because I don't watch much TV, and maybe because even then I will very, very rarely watch something more than once. I think there are two New Who episodes I've watched twice, and one of them was because a downloaded episode was of extraordinarily poor quality. So I don't end up memorising sections of dialogue.

These days, with the added gravitas and confidence of a further 17 years in gaming, I reckon I'd tell those players to either shut up or push off. It might be rude, but it wouldn't have been such a mess of a game.

Question #21: What's the best bribe you've ever given (or received as) a GM? What did you get (give) for it?

My players don't really tend to attempt to bribe me. Or if they do so, they're subtle enough that I don't notice, or else they just say "Oi, Drew, I want more of this in the game", and then we get into the long discussion about what "this" is, which never seems to go quite right.

It is, however, a well-established fact that if you want something to happen in my games, give me some content to shape it around, and I'll happily do just that. This does mean that players from whom I get more material - be it character background, world material, or whatever - get more of what they want in the game, but that's as much a return on investment as anything else, so I don't feel bad about it.

The discussions about what people want in the game go odd in interesting ways, though. Often, my first response is to point out the ways in which what they're looking for is already appearing. For some reason, this isn't generally seen as satisfactory. The problem lies in the thorny area of how explicit to make the information in the game.

Let me backtrack on that a bit: I have a terrible tendency to lecture. Show a combination of ignorance and interest on any topic I know about, and I will talk your ear off for a few hours, send you links by email, and generally make you wish you'd never brought it up. This is an inherited tendency, I hasten to add; my father does the same. In social situations, I've no particular fear of this; glazed eyes will give me the hint after only an hour, in most cases.

But in a game, I don't want players chasing off after irrelevant details, so I tend to outline rather than lecture. If the type of rock the buildings are made of is relevant, I'll mention it. If it's not, I'll just say "stone" and keep going. And in principle, that's fine. The issue is that "relevant" is a very movable line.

For instance, if I say that the walls are granite, and go on to note that there are coal fires burning, then it is perfectly obvious that the coal is very likely imported, and whoever has the coal fire is therefore rich. Coal is a metamorphic rock, and if you have granite at the surface, you won't have much access to coal. Obvious, right?

Likewise, if I note ornate clothing, or frequent changes of clothing in a pre-industrial setting, well, it's clear that there's a massive underclass in this society, right? You can't have ornate clothes without weeks of work, and if someone has been working for weeks on one garment, and you have lots of them, clearly there's a low-paid level of society there.

These are two examples of things I was using, and I was blind to the fact that they're utterly incomprehensible if you don't have a background in geology or pre-industrial economics. Needless to say, none of my players have either. On the other hand, I'm not the best in the world at body language, so I tend to over-describe that when it comes up, making it often much too obvious that there's a Clue there.

So getting through my own knowledge filters to know what to show and not show is hard, and it's often something I have to stop and think about, which isn't a thing I can do mid-game. I am, I think, getting better at this over time, but the requests for "can we have more of this thing in the game" and my blithe response of "it's there already!" works to show where the gaps are. It's not a particularly satisfactory exchange, though, and I'd like to improve that.

Failing all of the above, of course, buying me new game supplements, dice, tokens, stationery and beer will work wonders.

Con: Podcasting follows common law, and that means precedent. I'd like to quote the case of Shane Vs. Not Posting Any Links Because He Had Been Drinking. We discuss Warpcon.

And now because I'm a good boy, here are some links:

• Starship Traveller
• LOTR LCG
• Frag Gold
• Werewolf
• L5R
• Leprecon Kotei
• Siege of the Citadel
• Eclipse
• Munchkin Apocalypse
• Terror Australis
• TimeLords
• Exalted: War for the Throne
• Changeling
• Camarilla
• A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying

Discuss this episode on irishgaming.com

I run long campaigns. I didn't think I ran long campaigns until well after I got online; the letters pages of Dragon convinced me early on that the average campaign was about ten years, and that assumption stuck with me for a long time. And if you look at the levelling rules for, say 2nd Ed AD&D, you'll see that unless you go completely mad, you'll be playing for about two years once a week to get characters from 1st to 20th level. So, I felt, the rules supported this, even if I was on a schedule more like a game a month.

It wasn't, I think, until I saw a poll on rpg.net about campaign length with the "1-3 months" option way ahead of everything else that I realised I was doing something different.

Part of this is personal preference, of course. Having put the work into a campaign setting, I'm not going to waste it by running six sessions and calling it done. And I'm physically incapable of not developing a campaign setting once I get started. But I also suffer from some confusion around the topic. Players are barely getting to know a character after, say, ten sessions. As the GM, I'm only getting a grasp on what they really want out of the game at that stage. How could you run anything shorter and have it turn out well?

So my campaigns tend to take years to complete, and to have enough plot threads to fill that span of time. My instinct isn't actually to have an end at all; my simulationist soul claims that endings are a narrativist trick, and not worthy of attention. I'd simply have the player characters continue through interesting lives for ever, given the chance - pursuing their own interests, and uncovering a conspiracy here, a small war there, a jaunt off into the planes for whatever reason, and have the return of old nemeses happen occasionally and organically. Players, however, demand coherent plot, and plot demands resolution.

At some point, I think I'd like to run the kind of game my instincts demand. It would need player buy-in from the beginning, of course, and no expectation of a resolution that won't be coming, nor indeed an expectation of an over-arching plot. It would also need characters carefully designed for it, with clear ambitions from the start which they can work toward over the very long run - and they should also be the kind of characters who generate a "things to do" list as they go, so that when that initial ambition is completed, they've more to get on with. And it would probably need to be run in a different area of my own cosmology, rather than on the main campaign world, because by its very nature, it would develop tendrils of story that would interfere with everything else. But I think all of those are surmountable.

I've an article brewing on the practicalities of "How to Run a Long RPG Campaign", or thereabouts, but it is - appropriately - taking a while to put together.

Question #20: What was the most memorable character death you've ever experienced? What makes it stick with you?

This, I think, is where the D&D rules and I parted ways. Character death - player character death, at least - is not usually interesting. There are two ways it happens: either the player is tired of the character, and opts to have them leave the campaign by dying, or the dice come out badly, and the character runs out of hit points. In the first case, all the interest is moving toward the new character that player will have, and in the second, well... there just ISN'T any interest.

The principal difference between a tactical game (wargames, ccgs, whatever) and a role-playing game is that of story, and an abrupt end of "and then she was hit really hard by the bad guy's second subsidiary minion's sister in law, and died" is... not a good story. "She almost died, and here's what happened next..." is far, far better.

This ties back to the notion, which comes up again and again, even in such tactical games as 4th Ed D&D, of making failure interesting. And certainly, there has to be a risk, or the whole structure of the game, whatever the characters are striving for, becomes meaningless. And if a player insists on having their character do something absolutely stupid, then death is on the cards. My players, however, tend to be a lot smarter than average, so this doesn't arise.

"Failure should be interesting" is one of the things that, in my mind, distinguishes modern games from the old-school kind. The old-school games go: You don't find the secret door in the first level of the dungeon? Tough, the other nine levels remain inaccessible. You rolled six ones in a row, and now your 21st level character is dead? Tough, roll a new one. You can see how that's not interesting. Even "this door is locked" can be a show-stopper if the party's only rogue fails the "pick locks" roll, and the party are left standing outside a locked door. The failure has to do something; events have to have another fork to follow.

So, I don't have memorable character deaths because I'm not interested in them. One of the major, major advantages of the Fate system, for me, is the "taken out" result at the end of combat. Sure, that can be "dead". But it can also be kidnapped, injured, missing... all of those are far more interesting, and lead to more story.

New year, new venue.

As some of you know HRTA which has been the home of Midway since its inception back in 2010 has been shut down and is no longer operating. While this is unfortunate it hasn't and won't stop us. 

Our next event is going to be on Feb 17th and we'll be heading out to Red Barn for this one. 

We'll post more details like bus times etc in the coming days but we wanted to get the word out as soon as possible.

See you all on the 17th. 

What a way to start the weekend for all you war machine fans, 3 huge announcements from Privateer Press.

First up COLOSSALS!!!

PP announce their next BIG expansion for war machine, called Colossals, which introduces Massive new warjacks to the system. These warlocks will sit on battle engine bases & are 3 times the size of normal warjacks.

Check out the video

Next up is Iron Kingdoms

“It is a land like no other, a place where steam power and gunpowder meet sword and sorcery.

The Iron Kingdoms possess a rich history—and a tumultuous future—full of unique monsters, deities, heroes, and villains. Immerse yourself in the detailed world of gritty conflict and sorcery with the Iron Kingdoms RPG. Unleash the power of mechanika, the fusion of magic and machine. Take on the persona of unique character classes, like the gun mage who combines powerful magic with a deadly acumen for firearms or the steamjack-commanding warcaster. Travel through a fantastic world that takes classic fantasy concepts and gives them a new twist with a high-octane rush of steam power and industrial engineering.

Prepare yourself for an experience like no other.

The world of the Iron Kingdoms awaits!”

The role playing game that spawned Warmachine and Hordes, is relaunching this summer with a whole new rule set, based on 2d6 mechanic similar to whats used in the tabletop game. I for one can’t wait for this, there will be plenty of powder kegs for all!!!

Check out the video

Last but not least, War Room

PP’s new war machine app for building lists, tracking damage & keeping up to date with rule changes

• Army Creation Workshop: Players can select their faction and game size and then choose their warcasters and warlocks, warjacks or warbeasts, units, solos, and battle engines to create valid lists, all within the War Room application.
• Full Card Display: Model stat cards are shown exactly as they are printed, so players can reference them easily and with the same confidence as printed cards.
• In-Game Status Tracking: In-game damage and status tracking will give players immediate and easily accessible information on every fighting model in their command.
• In-Game List Sharing: Lists will be sharable between every player using War Room in the same game so they can quickly access each other’s model status and abilities, allowing players to keep their focus on the tabletop action.
• Turn Clock: This optional player-initiated feature allows players to keep individual turns fast but fairly apportioned.

The base app is a free download and contains cards from all current WARMACHINE and HORDES starter products.

Full faction decks for both WARMACHINE and HORDES will be available as additional downloads for $6.99. Every deck will include all currently released stat cards for that faction as well as new model updates for the life of the current rules set.

Very interesting idea about instant update to rules & errata! Cant wait to check it out

Check out the Video

An Infinity tournament will be run on the Sunday at the University College Dublin RetCon games convention.

Details below.

For anybody who might be interested and doesn’t know, 250 points is a 30 euro starter box, plus two of the higher point value 9 euro blisters . So it can be reasonably done for 50 euro if you want. Here’s a guide to starting Infinity for anybody considering it - http://infinity-ireland.org/node/13

All available from Gamers World on Jervis street of course.

Quozl

RETCON Infinity tournament – Sunday April 1st.

2nd member tournament of the 2012 All-Ireland Infinity Cup.

Free to enter – however you need to pay in to the convention, 7 euro for the day or 10 euro for the weekend.
250 points.
5 SWC.
Beginner friendly.
Scenario based.
Painting NOT required – minor bonus for fully painted forces of +1 to willpower for starting roll.
Space for 12 players – maybe more, TBC.

Rules are as per the Infinity cup rules – available here http://www.dragonslayers.org.uk/images/files/infinity%20cup%20rules.pdf

With two minor changes:
Sign-up email address is ‘events at infinity-ireland dot org’ (replace at with @, and dot with .)
Players can sign-up on the day as well as in advance. Spaces will only be held for those who have signed up beforehand until official tournament start time.

Question #19: What's the weirdest character you've ever played? How did you end up with him/her/it?

I've played many strange characters from behind the screen. At this stage, I don't really think about how weird or not they are, just about how they think.

One of my campaign world's central notions is that it has a very deep history. It's had sentient life for about three and a half billion years. There's also the possibility of immortality. So over that span of time, quite a few creatures have become immortal. Immortals are weird anyway, but some of them are downright alien.

Davonian life is varied. Hundreds of different body-plans have been tried by evolution over time, aided by magic, psionics, and other, wilder effects. Not all of these forms reach intelligence, but many do. So there are immortals out there who aren't just alien by way of culture - they're tri-symmetrical, or arachnoid, or insectile, or aquatic, or shaped like starfish, or use chlorophyll.

Davonian life is fecund. Species, as Linnean taxonomy usually uses the term, don't quite work. It's not the case that anything can crossbreed with anything, quite. Dragons can, though, and once a few of them have, normal processes will carry some of that capability down through successive generations. So anything that had an ancestor intelligent enough to appeal to a dragon has a chance of having some draconic blood, however small a fraction. And fiends and celestials, of course, have the same capability. So many of the immortals are of mixed blood.

The upshot of this is that there's a creature out there who has lived for two billion years, will never die, and is half-dragon, one quarter coral-starfish, and one quarter intelligent tree. He's lived long enough that remnants of his birth culture's artworks are turning up in igneous rocks. Every intelligent thing on the planet younger than him is probably a descendant. How do you play something like that?

I've done a lot of thinking about this, and arrived at the idea that any immortal who is out and about, rather than dormant, hiding, or in stasis of some kind, has self-selected for the ability to deal with and understand the world as it is. So while they're alien, they're at least used to getting on with humans, or their immediate ancestor species. That makes it one step easier.

Fiends, celestials, and the like are easier to play in many ways. They have aims that are more or less comprehensible to humans, and they're busily getting on with them.

Second, I don't completely have to understand them to depict them, any more than an actor playing, say, Winston Churchill, needs to understand everything of Churchill's life and thinking. And in a lot of cases, one or two strange habits of mind can account for a lot of alien-ness.

For instance, there was one relatively recent race who left very little trace in the world, called the Siroose. They left little trace because they did very little; their major cultures valued indolence, cowardice, and efficiency above all else. That alone makes for a very alien creature from our point of view; a paranoid couch-potato who occasionally acts very swiftly and decisively in order to ensure it can go on being paranoid and stationary. Playing a Siroose is therefore weird.

A lot of my thinking on the immortals - and indeed, deep history as a concept - comes from Vernor Vinge's books, A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness In The Sky. The interactions between different species there, and the communications between them on what looks very like usenet have been a massive influence.

And I take a certain comfort in thinking that even in the selection of weird creatures I've played, I still have things as peculiar as the Tines and the Skrode-riders to reach for.