People who aren’t Heterodynes: the Gaslamp Melodrama PCs

With the rules in place the players cobbled together their PCs

Rachel already had a PC –Rachel’s a big fan of Barbra Bain and has that sort of smart and sexy spy as her default archetype. In this case she’s adding combat skills but Nadia seduces people for information, has information from people she’s already seduced and has former conquests as allies. Rachel added some background secrets, a missing eye, eyepatch and casting as Angelina Jolie from Sky Captain to get more points. Nadia is an Ally level character since she’s focused mostly away from combat and invention.

Diane was playing the young heiress and therefore took a lot of levels of Spark and a background as the local tailor’s daughter. Elena has a broad array of all the science skills from her spark levels, she’s very smart, very tough but not strong, combat savvy or worldly. This works great on some levels in that her lack of combat skill and life experience means she needs allies, but is not the same niche as a BtVS Hero’s physical superhumanity.

Since Asha was the other regular player (Emily was heading off to college and Jim and I will be trading off on GMing) she claimed the second Hero level character. Bella is a beautiful if slightly mad Parisian pastry chef with some Spark in her (likely because Chemistry is Cooking). The visual image is Catherine Zeta-Jones from Without Reservations. She’s a genius with chemistry, has an insanely keen nose, near superhuman reflexes and crazy knife skills. This takes us a little closer to the idea of the Hero PCs being superhman, but she’s still not in Buffy territory.

Emily opted for a Clockwork Girl Thief. You may recall that I debated outright denying Clank PCs because they don’t appear in the source material. I don’t know if it’s a drive to special snowflaking or just the desire to do something new, but someone’s asked for it both times. The Clockwork Girl, Katarina, has damaged memory cylinders and remembers notion prior to waking up in a burn mark in an empty field (she also has linguistic ticks: she knows synonyms for primary colors but not the actual primary color words). She has superhuman reflexes and sight and is very much optimized towards acrobatics and crime, but remains an Ally level character.

Jim is playing Lt. Anton Adler, a young soldier in the Junta’s army destined to rebel against them for the love of the fair Elena. He’s the commander of the 1101 sanitation inspection platoon and therefor has a cadre of 5 scruffy soldiers under his command as they tract disease vectors, make notes on superior waste elimination designs and have an uncanny knowledge sewer systems. An ally level character he’s upright, downright, forthright and square, and while he’s a capable soldier he’s still young and not at superhuman prowess.

I’m playing Jahn Pava, a member of the low nobility driven out by the Junta and living in his family estates just outside of Turduckenstan, the country in question. A funder of the resistance movement that employs Nadia to protect Elena, Jahn is also the survivor of an experiment (he was vivisected, kept alive and reassembled, and therefore has a fear of surgeons and a hatred of the Junta’s sparks) that gave him superhuman strength. An ally level hero he brings money, physical power and gothic brooding to the team. Like Anton he has Love for Elena on his character sheet, but Jahn’s is Tragic Love (and actual BtVS quality), so we know who Elena ends up with.

Next – How well these worked

To Angst or nor to Angst: Drama Points in Gaslamp Melodrama

The biggest change Jim and I made to the BtVS system for Girl Genius involved the drama point economy.

To explain, the heart of the long term BtVS game is how Drama Points are apportioned between the hero PCs (who have high skills and stats and therefore can reliably make heroic rolls in physical/combat actions) and white hat PCs (who have modest skills and stats and therefore have a higher risk of failure and their successes are not as impressive. Both have access to Drama Points, which let the player increase their roll, increase their damage, increase both in righteous fury, or summon a convenient coincidence. White Hats start with twice as many Drama Points as Heroes, can purchase them at half the cost and are more likely to earn them in play.

In short White Hats have a higher variability in their success levels than the Heroes. These Drama Points one of the mechanisms BtVS uses to balance the Heroes to the White Hats. Another is how Heroes (directed by the heroic qualities) are more powerful in combat but not in research, magic or other areas. Heroes are physically superior but mentally equal to and probably slightly less skilled in intellectual pursuits; hence the white hats have non-combat ways to shine. Finally Heroes usually get Drama Points from personal Angst generation (which reduces their abilities when they’re angsty) and White Hats share in that when they help the heroes overcome that angst.

This whole structure is designed for the heroes and white hats to likely balance out in hero points by the end of a 22 session season. This means tracking the drama points session by session.

Not all of this fits for Girl Genius: yes, the Sparks have lots of angst and their allies (our term for white hats) help keep them sane. Yes, the allies have bursts of competency. But the allies are usually reliably heroically competent in one or two areas, and the Sparks are not just physically competent but also brilliant. Finally for what we knew was going to be our player base would not want to track drama points session by session.

Our solution was to remove the long term Drama Point economy and simply state that Heroes start each session with 2 Drama Points and Allies start with 5. They can earn points by heroic sacrifice, angst and angst recovery but those points are ‘use or lose’ before next session. The idea was that this removes some of the ability to store and use points over the season but gained us a lot by way of simplicity and kept the allies as relying way more on Drama Points than the Heroes.

As I’ll get to, we didn’t see all the downstream effects of these changes.

Musings: Into the Forgotten Realms for 5E

So I have the upcoming D&D 5E Game and the players requested that I run it in the Realms. Now, I know the two adult players have read realms related stuff but none of them have ever played in it, and while I own the AD&D boxed set, some 2E guidebooks, the Ruins of Undermountain, the 3E hardcover and Larry Elmore’s Forgotten Realms book I’ve never actually run anything explicitly in the Realms, nor had much desire to do so. (I do at least have the advantage of having played in a couple of Realms based games run by the illustrious Chris Mansfield back in the 80’s and 90’s, so that’s something.)

Part of my concern is that the Realms are just so damn big – it’s like saying “I’m running my game set in Eurasia and Northern Africa”. The landscape is huge. It’s also filled with not just history but fast moving recent history – from that AD&D boxed set to the current 5E discussions of the Realms we have had 25+ years of continuous play full of huge upheavals around every new edition, so I don’t know what’s canon now and what’s not, and I’m not sure I should care. In my normal way of doing things I’d just define my own campaign setting (probably something more science fantasy/pulpy than the Realms high fantasy adventure based on my Old School Renaissance readings of late) and then I know I’d be comfortable with everything in it.

Our campaign frame is that the PCs are escaped cargo from a slaver ship operating in the Sea of Fallen Stars, which gives the PCs an excuse to be from nearly anywhere while giving them a reason to trust one another and work together. Especially since in the first session everyone is going to define one or two awesome things their characters did to facilitate their escape and then they’ll be washing up on an abandoned shore and having to survive. Here we immediately run into some problems because both Zhentiel Keep and Thay, the two big slavery powers in the area, are on downward trajectories due to heroic action in the Living Forgotten Realms setting. I’ll be ignoring that, or at least setting it before that. I don’t know if it will matter, if the campaign will last anywhere near long enough for the PCs to interact on that scale, but it’s that sort of thing that worries me.

I’ll have more commentary later on the design decisions surrounding the initial adventure (which I am changing up quite a bit) at a later date.

Various Ways of Making Things Go Boom in Gaslamp Melodrama

In the discussion of system mechanics, first off combat: I instituted a bit more of an initiative system than was recommended in the ‘whenever it makes sense people go’ structure of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – people with the Fast Reaction Time quality go first, then everybody else; inside of that we count down by Dexterity, and break ties by whether the action is guns, moving or punching. It felt like it would move quickly enough.

I then cut out a lot of the fiddly martial arts moves from BtVS since the expectations were different – people playing BtVS likely wanted that degree of granularity but I didn't see it for Girl Genius. I also had to reverse engineer the logic of the attack system (what gave a penalty to hit for more damage or different effect? How much damage to various weapons do? What doubles damage and what doesn't?) and figure out how to work in high energy weapons, which do about as much damage as fully automatic weapons. The Buffy Universe doesn't truck much with firearms since they don’t work well on Vamps, so I had some concerns there.

That being finished I had to tackle the Inventing rules. This meant bastardizing the BtVS Magic Rules and adding a lot of fiddly bits specific to both the needs of inventing, having multiple people working on a problem, how powerful Sparks can be and the nature of the Girl Genius universe to raise both tension and humor via interruption. My idea was that the biggest limiting factors were time and skill, and if the project takes too long the PCs will doubtless be interrupted and need to engage in side issues while trying to keep the original invention going. My hope is that this will keep the madcap nature of the source material in place and give ways for people not involved in the invention to have something to do.

This ended up being a bit of a mini game. That’s game design speak for a set of sub rules inside the main rules that are used when a particular action set comes into play. Early D&D was really just a set of overlapping mini-games (the rules for combat used different dice and mechanics than the ones for exploring, which had a subset of different rules for Thieves, and neither used the same mechanics social interaction). I figured anyone who wanted to play a Spark would be willing to go through the extra effort to learn and master the mini game, which at least had some of the same dice concepts as the rest of play.

One last things about the BtVS rules is that they’re completely player facing – the NPCs have a very small stat set (Muscle, Brains, Combat) and the players always roll against those. NPCs don’t make stealth rolls, the PCs make notice rolls. NPCs don’t make notice rolls, the PCs make stealth rolls. When I’ve run BtVS my palms end up itching to roll some dine, but I can survive. 

Turning Buffy into Agatha (without using a corset) 2 - Qualities

Qualities are a key component in the Unisystem – encompassing both advantages and drawbacks they are either distinct character traits (such as an acute sense, or fast reaction time) or bundles of other qualities, skill bonuses and stat bonuses.

They’re nice in that they’re evocative of the setting and make some things quick – BtVS has Vampire, Slayer, Initiative Command and Watcher as qualities, where you just have to buy that and know that you’ve hit the minimum qualification for that type. They have some problems in that they let you spend from point pool C on things that raise scores in Point Pool A (stats) and Point Pool B (skills) so there’s a bit of system mastery advantage taking that can go on, but by and large they’re functional.

I obviously stripped out all of the Buffy specific qualities and replaced them with Girl Genius focused ones like Spark, Construct and Spark Experiment. In my first draft I specifically excluded characters playing clanks because unless you really want to stretch things for Dingbot Prime there aren’t any such figures in the source material, but I decided not to write in such an exclusion in favor of seeing what happened.

I then changed pretty much all of the other bundled qualities for being too specific to the high school setting and replaced them with professional careers. For reasons that made sense at the time I built Tinker (engineers and scientists who might not be sparky), Tailor (any small businessman), Soldier, Sailor (which included battle clank or airship drivers), Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief and Spy. That set a certain tone that was not quite jokey but also nailed down part of the industrial revolution Victoriana feel of the setting. Any one of these gave a point of two of skills, a point or two of stats and some other minor advantage.

Jim and I batted the rigid Contact, Social Standing, Military Rank and Resources levels before deciding to streamline them into more freeform numbers, with the rule of thumb being that a PC spending 1-2 points was asking for a minor advantage every few sessions, 3-4 was a major advantage that came up every session and 5+ was a major flagging to the GM that the player wanted character defining social advantages from this. That’s really all we needed to know.

Next time I’ll discuss how I changed up parts of combat, and then sparkiness and inventing.