Thanksgiving 2009

When I first came to the Netherlands, I quickly began to miss many of the wonderful things of home, and few more than Thanksgiving. There's something wonderful about sitting at a table with friends and family, and getting completely stuffed on wonderful home cooking. I mean, there are other, better holidays out there, but the Netherlands celebrates them too. But Thanksgiving is uniquely American, and I missed it.

Well, Bee couldn't let her pooh be said in November, so she made it her mission to bring me Thanksgiving, and we've celebrated it every year, and our friends always pester us to know when they'll be receiving their invitation.

Bee always does the turkey, and she's managed to roast it every year with stuffing, and never undercook it or dry it out. She wraps it in bacon, and after it's done cooking, we take all the bacon/turkey grease, and make a great gravy out of it (with chicken broth, garlic and lots of black pepper). I've added candied yams to the list, which went over very well this year, and macaroni and cheese at the request of a friend. Bee finally mastered jello salad, and I quit enjoyed it myself. We also had mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, coleslaw, stuffing, and cranberry sauce.

For desert, home made pumpkin pie (again, all Bee), homemade chocolate cake (Bee) and apple pie (store bought, alas).

So here's some shots of pretty food, friends and family:

Vampire House Rules

In preparation for our vampire game, I've placed our "official" house rules over at the website.

Idle Military Sci-Fi GURPS thoughts

So, as often happens with my brain, while I'm in the midst of prepping for and thinking about Wuxia and Vampire, space opera stuff pops into my head.

Mostly, I've been thinking about the climactic battle where Walter laid down loads of artillery fire, very successfully wiping out the enemy. After discussing it (peripherally) with some friends online, something occured to me: Why didn't the Quetzali infiltrators jam Walter's communications?

Seems like the reasonable thing to do. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole Electronic Supremacy that seems to dominate the Ultra Tech battlefield. I grasped fairly early on that in a battle where "I see it, it dies" is the rule, not being seen is how you survive. But putting this into effect has been an another thing entirely.

I simplified alot of the Forward Observer rules in the last fight. Next time, I think, I'm going to make the following changes:

• Artillery is always an option. With orbiting warships and massive, mobile railguns that can easily fire over the horizon at enormous speeds, the players should be able to call down Artillery no matter where they are. A force that is so beaten it no longer has access to artillery generally surrenders (or goes guerilla)
• Forward Observer rules work as normal, so it takes a very long time for the shot to land. But artillery is much more powerful: either a single 100ml Thermobaric charge, or 1d6 64mm Thermobarics, or one really big beam blast or kinetic kill missile from orbit (which comes down really fast). This are more like fight-finishers than a supplement for the characters' own fighting.
• Getting that Forward Observer roll off requires control of the electronic battlefield. In normal cases, this might be no problem, but when electronic warriors are on the field (infiltrators), they'll automatically try to jam your comms (just like they jam your radar). The "battle" then becomes about rooting out the infiltrators and/or defeating their jamming so you can call in your artillery strike before they do.

I suspect this will add a new layer, the sort of multi-dimensional conflict that I think should epitomize UT combat. The officer struggles to beat the jamming while the soldiers struggle to root out the infiltrators, while the heavy infantry wades through the artillery barrage to try to take down the officer before he can call another.

It needs more work, but it's coming together.

Leviathans

An interesting new mini game by Catalyst Game Labs. Like Eclipse Phase, this is Creative Commons, so if you wanted to download it off a torrent, it's legal to do so.

Experiments in Setting Design: Districts, Families and Sandboxes

I'm not a fan of sandbox game design. In my experience, most people who do this either create nothing and sort of hope the players will come up with something, or design gobs and gobs of stuff that quickly overwhelms the players. I vastly prefer "quest" directed gameplay, where I give you, you know, something to do, and you get to figure out what the world is like by having it run up and hit you in the face.

But after playing things like Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto, I kinda wonder if I can't do it another way. They create huge worlds, and then point you in a direction. Wherever you go, there are interesting possibilities, and even if you go flying off the rails, the world remains fascinating. Vampire seems ideally suited to this style of play, as does any urban fantasy game. You create the city and players just... play in it. I give a strong, starting "quest," and then let players sort of get involved from there. My typical story involves bringing players to an interesting spot, letting them do what they want, and then wrapping up and moving on when they've "played enough." This could work the same way, only on a much larger scale.

It's not like I lack material. Weapons of the Gods had more than 50 NPCs (at least 50 fully statted holy cow). In a horror game where characters can die (and even have the players killing them off), it makes sense to try to have even more. So I'm trying an interesting experiment: Families.

Damnation City suggests designing a city in terms of Districts and Sites. You create an over-reaching district (say, Chinatown) and then design sites within it (Say, a dojo, a brothel, an occult book store). This makes it easier to figure out how to come up with an entire city worth of sites, because they're broken down into districts.

So, why not do the same for NPCs? You come up with families of NPCs. Perhaps there's a group of NPCs from Chinatown, chinese who descend from some immigrants back in the 1860s when people were building the rails, and now are quite Americanized. Come up with 5 specific NPCs per family, design 10 or so families. Now, it's easier to design 50 NPCs and each NPC comes with prewritten attachements. Got a thing for the cute asian girl who keeps showing up at the night clubs? Did you know her younger sister is in school? Or her aunt is a hardcore detective? Or that a boy from the other chinatown family has opinions about the daughters of this family and who they should be with? Suddenly, there's a whole web of relationships for your character to explore and, should he choose, screw up.

I'll try it. We'll see how well it works.

The Crimson Fists March to War: My First Battle Report

So, after alot of painting, I finally brought my Crimson Fists to the table and went to battle against the Dark Eldar, as played by a buddy of mine, Rene.

Sergeant Stein breathed deeply into his respirator as he looked over the broken, debris-scattered field with his Force Commander. The cold wind tugged at the astonishingly young Captain's hair, and spatters of rain lined the crags of his face.

"We don't have much time." Captain Nihilus growled, his long, crimson cape fluttering behind him as he turned away from the carnage. "The Dark Eldar are already on their way to scavenge what the brave Imperial Guard left behind in their defeat. We will see to it that they take nothing ." Drawing his huge, crackling relic blade, he shouted his orders to his iron-clad soldiers, who stoically trod onto the broken ruins of the battle-wracked city, intent on recovering the dead and the supplies of their fallen comrades before the Xeno scum took it from them

Alas, my camera skills leave much to be desired, but a shot of the table:


It at least gives you an idea of how everything was set up. I only had 500 points, so it was a relatively small battle. I had a single tac squad (Missile launcher, flamer, split into combat squads) and a single scout squad (a melee combat squad and a sniper combat squad with a heavy bolter) and my Force Commander. He had two raiders with raiding squads, a Homonculous, "wyld hounds" (or something similar) with a beast master, and wytches. Snipers and missile launcher were on my left flank, force commander and the other half of my tac squad on my right flank, and my melee scout squad in the central building. He had all his forces clustered on my right flank, out of sight of my missile launcher.

He stole initiative from me (dammit! >.<) and then proceeded to chase off my two scout squads (the snipers managed to do some damage before they got wiped out to a man) while my missile launcher and my tac squads laid down a withering hail of fire, but nothing seemed to slow the Dark Eldar assault. Starting with four points, I lost one and gave up another.

I couldn't really "charge his wytches before they charged me" as the wyld hounds up front effectively screened them, so I decided to lay in fire instead. We weathered the charge with an astonishing number of 1s and 2s on armor saves (take three wounds, only save once? Wow) and after about two turns of fighting, my Force Commander and Sergeant managed to beat them back and slaughter every last one of them when they tried to run. Meanwhile, the Homonculous's raider zoomed in (not sure why he did that) and out of a desire for revenge, Sergeant Tenebrous (the Scout sergeant, only scout left standing), blasts it with Meltabombs, leaving only the homonculous standing.



Who charged my force commander and died. Without even getting an attack off. I imagine he just threw himself on my sword or something, dunno.

So, then my force commander and sergeant charged his dark eldar warriors, firing like mad (good ol' storm bolters) and actually managed to chase off a unit with nothing but a single turn of firing. He unloads a warrior unit from a raider to protect his final point and zooms his raider to where the scout sergeant is holding his point and...

If we had ended at that turn, I would have one: He had one unit protecting a point, and I had two. Alas, we had another turn, his raider moved close enough to my point to contest it, and I rolled poorly for taking the central point (had to move through "difficult terrain" and only got a 3), but in one more turn, I would have taken my third point, winning the game, except then the game ended. And so, we tied.

"I was Dice Hosed!"

I don't think you could claim otherwise. I lost initiative at the worst possible time. My missile launcher, in 5 turns, only hit once. I lost approximately half of my armor saves, rather than the expected 1/3, and if the game had lasted one turn less or one turn more, I would have won. Instead, the dice perfectly favored him.

But I hate it when people say that. You should play the game in such a way that the dice matter as little as possible. A tie is a perfectly respectable result, but I learned a few things:

First, my melee scout squad was designed to take down low-mobility Heavy Support guys, like artillery-style tanks or Devastator squads. Dark Eldar have nothing like that, so I sorta just sat around with them, doing nothing. A unit that picks its nose is a unit that isn't killing people. If I had brought them to bear more, or supported them better with my snipers, I might have changed the shape of the battlefield. I probably should have put both in the building, giving the camo-cloaked scouts a 3+ save, which might have let them last longer. Instead, I was too greedy and "took all the points I could" right off the bat. Just because you can use infiltrate to be all over the battlefield doesn't mean it's a good idea. Second, I hung back with my Force commander and tactical squads "to protect the points." I don't think I really needed too. If they had moved forward, they would have been charged earlier, but little else. Thereafter, they would have been in a better position to start scaring away the rest of the Dark Eldar, and maybe sit on that central point, rather than force the weaker scouts to try to protect it.

It's hard to play a 500 point battle "wrong," so I don't know if I'm being too hard on myself, I just feel thinking "it's the dice's fault" tends to result in a player who doesn't grow. I did learn, once again, to trust my Space Marines. I tend to forget how tough they really are. Not invincible, of course, but more than capable of taking care of themselves, and that the numerical superiority of the enemy tends to mean nothing. You can see from turn one, I was practically overwhelmed, but by the end, I had almost half my army left standing, but he was down to (basically) a single unit and its transport vehicle.

Next time, I'll find a way to exploit that.

Wierd Wikipedia

Finally, after months of collecting, I wanted to offer my "weird wikipedia." Try not to read it in the dark (Because, you know, it's hard to read stuff without a light on)