Gaming – Peter M. Ball

Gaming

The Dice Goblin Gains A New Dice Bag

My dad wore a tie to work almost every day of his adult life, and still had a vast collection when he passed away in 2019. My mum asked if I’d be interested in them, but a) I wear a tie for job interviews approximately once every three or four years, and b) I don’t have a lot of storage in my flat. Ergo, I took an old Phantom tie my father loved (for sentimental reasons) and passed on the rest. Rather than give the ties to goodwill, my mum partnered with a crafty friend to give the surplus new life. They transformed some into cushions, which my sister and I received as Christmas gifts, but there was still plenty of tie fabric left over. My sister elected to get another cushion, but I have about as much need for cushions as I have a need for neckties, so I passed on that as well. Instead, we had a quick

PeterMBall 22/02/2023

Gaming

Current Gamer Kit

I’ve spent the last five or six years running Marvel Heroic at our weekly game sessions, which usually meant carting around a buttload of dice and ten years worth of game notes every time we had a session. When that campaign ended last month, we transitioned to John Harper’s Blades in the Dark–a game about gangs of scoundrels in a pressure-cooker fantasy city where every bit of turf needs to be fought for with a scrap. The group built themselves around the conceit of being a a cult devoted to an ancient cat goddess, the three core members consisting of an immigrant lawyer dealing in ghost rights, an immigrant academic who is basically Indiana Jones with feline features, and an immigrant locksmith whose turned into the crime-savvy burglar of the crew. In the space of three sessions they’ve got involved in a gang war, pissed off a local consulate, found themselves embroiled in the affairs of several vengeful ghosts, and

PeterMBall 13/12/2019

Gaming

Putting the Gamer Hat Back On

We recently dug out the big box o’ board games here in Casa Del Brain Jar, separating out everything that we can rock with two players and working our way through them. I haven’t played board games regularly in about six or seven years—not since my primary board-gaming friends decamped for Melbourne for good—and I have a bad tendency towards playing other people’s games when I do. Then we spent a week playing Zombies!!! and Killer Bunnies and my partner’s copy of the pirate-themed card game Splice, and my brain started poking at board games I might want to pick up soon. My partner started researching games and identifying those that looked interesting. At the same time, I’ve been poking at new RPG systems for the first time since 2011. Getting familiar with the Blades in the Dark system so we can pick it up in place of our now-completed-after-nine-years Thursday Night Superhero Campaign. Kicking the tyres on a Shadowrun

PeterMBall 05/11/2019

Gaming

Almost Done: Some Thoughts After the Penultimate Session of a Very Long RPG Campaign

The most read posts on this website, year after year, are Thirteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions Of Mutants And Masterminds and its follow-up Fifteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero RPGs After Running 150 Sessions of My Campaign. They’re both RPG-centric posts about an ongoing superhero game I’ve been running since early 2011. Last night I ran session 199, and when we convene for session 200 last week it will be the last game of the campaign as it exists in its current format. One of the original players is moving interstate, and we’re hitting the end-point of plot elements originally set up somewhere in issue 20. The heroes just beat-up the Herald of a world-devouring galactic horror, and next week they’ll fight the ancient robot from the dawn of time trying to bring that galactic horror to earth. Which is not bad for a group of heroes that got their start chasing down escaped

PeterMBall 25/10/2019

Gaming

SMAX #174: Breaking the Broan

The most recent session of our Superhero RPG was an interesting one in terms of seeing the gap between our style and the nature of the system we’re using. With this in mind, I’m going to quote from the player notes Adam keeps from session to session on his gaming wiki: We have a terrible plan to get inside the spaceshipThis is true pretty much regardless which of our plans we use Crow Road Campaigns, SMAX #174 notes At the same time, this was the session where I started implementing some of the more narrative-oriented rules from the Cortex Prime draft. This assumes a lot of player control over the narrative–perhaps more than we’re used too–and a default assumption borrowed from the Leverage RPG that whatever plan they come up with is the right plan. In narrative terms, the heist is built around planning only so the viewer knows how things have gone wrong when they do. Executing a plan

PeterMBall 20/09/2018

Gaming

SMAX #173: Panic on Earth-Adrift

I was a GM before I was an writer, which means I occasionally awful affliction that many gamers suffer from where I get all Let me tell you about my game. I’m also a GM who’s had a few recurring items on my to-do lis like run better sessions, do better prep, and test drive rules from the upcoming Cortex Prime set that may do things better than the Marvel Cortex rules. Since I’ve been running a superhero campaign on Thursdays for…gods, years now…I figure I may as well combine the above with that note on my to-do list that says write regular blog posts and start thinking about ongoing series of posts. With that in mind, I’m going to experiment with doing post-game reports here on the blog–giving myself a chance to reflect on what’s worked, and what doesn’t. Think through my thoughts about superhero gaming outside of the every-hundred-sessions-or-so list post (which, weirdly, continue to be the most read posts on this site).

PeterMBall 13/09/2018

Gaming

15 Things Learned About Superhero RPGs After Running 150 Sessions Of My Campaign

So back in 2012 I wrote up a list of 13 things I’d learned running a Superhero RPG campaign for thirty sessions, and it quickly became one of the most read posts I’ve ever done. Now, six years later, we’ve just played session #150 of the same campaign, which definitely makes this one of the longest RPG campaigns I’ve ever run. Over the last six years we’ve switched systems, going from 3rd Edition Mutants and Masterminds to Cortex’s Marvel Heroic RPG system, and accumulated three additional players (although session-by-session attendance varies). In game, the duo of Shock & Awesome have grown to a full-fledged superhero team dubbed SMAX. The two original characters have gone on hiatus so the players can bring in new heroes, and the team now includes an alien circuit acrobat, a rogue winged monkey from the parasitic demi-plane known as Oz, and a Mexican speedster/shadow-sorcerer whose powers stem from a number of gods. This post is a

PeterMBall 08/01/2018

Gaming

Superhero RPGs and XP Systems

I ran session 108 of my ongoing Superhero campaign last night. That’s rather a lot, for a campaign that started while the players were in their thirties, and I finally did something I probably should have done in session one: throw out the XP system. I’ve always hesitated to do this because XP is one of those fundamental bedrocks of RPG systems going back to Dungeons and Dragons. The theory is simple: you go out, you do things, and you get better because of it. Pretty much every Superhero RPG system I’ve come across will have some method of doing exactly that, allowing characters to inch their way forward in incremental steps, or save up the points to make big, wholesale changes and additions to their power. And because most superhero systems view character creation as a range of options built up of points – an energy blast that will cut through a tank will cost you this much, while one that

PeterMBall 19/02/2016

Gaming

Some Thoughts on Disconnection and Narrative in Marvel Heroic

I’ve been running a superhero campaign for a few years now, and tonight we hit ninety-seven sessions. In contrast to our usual approach, this one was dice heavy – the heroes raided the compound of an demonic ninja cult, fighting lots of guys in black outfits along with mystically endowed sumo-wrestlers, shadow-warriors, claw-wielding pretty-boys, and evil spirits possessing the body of a stone-and-iron golem. I spend a lot of time thinking about the system after sessions like this. We started the campaign using Mutants and Masterminds, back when the third edition was released. We shifted over to the Marvel Heroic RPG about nine months back, largely because it added a more dynamic element for folks who didn’t want to build their powers around hitting things, and it’s been… Well. It’s been great, and it’s been slightly nightmarish in equal measure. The Marvel RPG has a lot of moving parts, compared to the Mutants and Masterminds system. It handles comic-style action pretty

PeterMBall 03/07/2015

Gaming

Three Uses for Splash Pages in Superhero RPGs

So the last time I blogged about Supers gaming, I was in the middle of putting together a list of things I could use to streamline my preparation for games. This is still a work-in-progress – despite my efforts, I came to our last session with fairly minimal prep work outside of NPC stats and an overview of the plot – but even the beginnings of the process has been fairly useful. For starters, actually writing down the post-game debrief after every session, even after two or three sessions, is already starting to clarify the kinds of habits/tropes I want to make sure I hit every session. One of those, which I’m starting to put on my session planning sheet, is the notion of an in-game splash page. It’s one of those habits I picked up somewhere along the line – if anyone can remember the RPG sourcebook that explained it, please let me know – and I’ve used it

PeterMBall 30/11/2012

Gaming

Post-Session Notes from Last Night’s Game

So we ended our Mutants and Masterminds hiatus last night, although in retrospect I wish I’d waited an extra week or two – working a whole bunch of weekends in a row means I don’t get a lot of time to prep sessions and, man, I really wish I’d had time to do a little more prep work on this one. On the other hand, while the lack of prep hurt the session, the counter-argument is that the holidays are coming and there’s usually disruptions to gaming schedules anyway. Getting back into the groove of regular gaming is probably more important than running a perfect game session at this point. In either case, what’s done is done, and I’m sitting here doing my post-session debrief, trying to figure out what worked, what didn’t, and how the campaign world is destined to change in the coming sessions. This is something that I’ve always done fairly informally and in a free-form kind

PeterMBall 16/11/2012

Gaming

5 Tips When Returning From a Campaign Hiatus

It’s been five days since we wrapped up GenreCon and, well, I’m yet to bounce back to my normal self. Cons are mentally and physically exhausting, doubly so when you’re running them, and you always have to pay your body back for the sleep debt and three days you spend operating on adrenaline and caffeine. Net result: another short hiatus for my Mutants and Masterminds campaign while I regroup, catch up on sleep, and rediscover the mental capacity for after-work activities that aren’t marathon games of Masters of Orion II on Shifty Silas the laptop. All of which put me in mind of the following topic for this Friday Superhero Gaming Post: 5 TIPS WHEN RETURNING FROM A CAMPAIGN HIATUS 1) START WITH A BANG It’s easy to lose track of things during a hiatus: hot subplots grow a little dusty, character traits get forgotten through lack of use, and long-term plots are harder to follow when you’re not engaging with them regularly.

PeterMBall 09/11/2012

Category: Gaming

The Dice Goblin Gains A New Dice Bag

Current Gamer Kit

Putting the Gamer Hat Back On

Almost Done: Some Thoughts After the Penultimate Session of a Very Long RPG Campaign

SMAX #174: Breaking the Broan

SMAX #173: Panic on Earth-Adrift

15 Things Learned About Superhero RPGs After Running 150 Sessions Of My Campaign

Superhero RPGs and XP Systems

Some Thoughts on Disconnection and Narrative in Marvel Heroic

Three Uses for Splash Pages in Superhero RPGs

Post-Session Notes from Last Night’s Game

5 Tips When Returning From a Campaign Hiatus

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