So I have been remiss. I haven’t posted a blog post for several months. We have been playing, but I have been lazy. Well, I will rationalize “lazy” as spending my time reading books, painting minis and other such stuff instead of writing the blog post.
For me to prep for an adventure, I generally spend about the same amount of time reading or figuring out what I want to unfold on the party that next session as we end up spending playing. So if we play for 4 hours, I generally have about 4 hours of prep. Then to go back and write the blog, it takes about the same amount of time, another 4 hours to write the blog.
Now, in all fairness, if I spent less time ranting about marshmallows, or my distinct hatred of all things elven, my blog posts would probably take far less time, but, for some reason, I feel the need to use my bully pulpit to inform the readers on the Internet about how I feel about things, not just the action at the table.
That being said, I write the blog as an effort to continue my growth in communication. I am an engineer, who took many classes in math and science in high school and college. I took a lot of liberal arts classes, but nowhere near as many classes and work in the arts as sciences. They told us in engineering school that being able to communicate would be the most important thing to help in our career.
I learned how to write technical specifications, and technical reports with lots of numbers and analysis. What I did not learn, nor spend a lot of time trying to become good at is creative communications. I can write a performance specification, or a requirement for the construction of a thing, but writing about what is in my head is not native to me.
As I grew in my career, I found that people don’t care about how smart a person is, or want to read the 45 page email describing all of the technical details. They want something that is short and sweet and to the point.
I also found out that having technical skills, aptitude and abilities means nothing to managers. I had a manager who I worked for for over 10 years who decided that under no circumstances would I ever be an effective manager because I only talked with him about technical stuff. He was a true manager, and had no skills for the technical work, but he was able to work through the budgetary needs, people needs and deal with the political environment above him in the organization.
I was exceptionally frustrated because I had all of the technical skills and abilities to do my job, and this person didn’t give me the time of day or respect for my knowledge. My wife and I talked about it a lot, and eventually, she told me that this problem was my doing. I was essentially telling my manager that I could do my job, and I could also do his job, but he couldn’t do my job, and he was not dealing well with the knowledge that he had no ability to even start to understand the basics of what I was telling him. I was essentially undermining his ego every time we talked.
As an experiment, I spent two years where I chose to never engage him in any form of technical discussion. I literally spent 2 years with my supervisor, where every meeting and every discussion I had with him was to only talk about dogs, kids, hobbies and personal stuff.
If he engaged me about something technical, I would answer his questions in a sentence or two, then turn the conversation back to his hobbies or his new grandchildren.
At the end of the two years, he gave me exceptionally high evaluations and decided that I would indeed be a good manager, and supported me in my promotion to management.
I found this fascinating. I figured out that I needed to rethink my approach to communicating. I tried to make all work emails three sentences or less. In many cases, I would try to use as few words as possible with my responses like:
I agree.
Rob
or
Yes
Rob
or
Sounds good.
Rob
I also dropped my credentials from my email. I noticed that many of the managers just included their first name as the response, and didn’t include any of the fruit salad letter combinations for certifications, licenses etc. It turns out that people like the long technical explanation emails as much as they like seeing your long list of hard earned credentials.
Early in my career, I found that it wasn’t enough to meet in a contentious meeting and say “the law requires…”. That makes people upset. Why do I need to spend all of this extra money? So I figured out how to leave the law alone, since I am not a lawyer after all, and say “What I am concerned about is…” and describe the situation such that if you openly disagree with me, you sound like you are in favor of clubbing baby seals.
My brother was an excellent debater. He was the state champion expository debater for several years in a row in high school. He should have been an attorney. He is a genius (literally a true genius) and can spin an argument around so fast that you lose your balance arguing with him. I grew up with him in my face from day one with his logical / illogical arguments. Dealing with the barrage of a person who enjoys arguing, I learned how to spin an argument back. This has helped me in my career when I deal with difficult citizens where I learned to lay traps for them to walk into, then wait a little while and use their own words back on them.
But none of this helps with having the ability to write in an interesting way. It all pushes back to dealing with interrogatories, depositions, technical writing, specification writing etc.
I realized that people really don’t care about those skills. My friends really don’t care about these things either. I needed to learn how to communicate in a non-technical way.
Hence, the long story to get to the point. I started writing the blog as a way to get things out of my head onto paper (ok, digital media) as a way to improve my communications skills. Is it working? I don’t know. You be the judge.
By the way, don’t tell me if you thing my blather sucks. I really don’t care. You see, that is another thing that I have come to understand. All my life, I have been interested in things that were not “cool”
In high school, people were listening to pop music, I was listening to punk and goth. Kids were playing various ball games, I had no hand – eye coordination, and enjoyed reading science fiction and space fiction books and playing Dungeons and Dragons. I became an Eagle Scout… how geeky is that?
At some point I realized that I didn’t give a flying fuck what people think. I wasn’t cool, and would never be one of the popular people.
This blog is for my benefit. If you enjoy it, or find it mildly interesting, good. If not, good.
So what happened?
We played several sessions of Mutant Crawl Classics that were not written up in the blog. Things went very badly in the first session. It was a zero level funnel. People were meant to not make it.
I won’t go into a lot of detail on those adventures. But a little explanation may be needed for those not familiar with a funnel adventure.
In Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics by Goodman Games, the first adventure for the players is supposed to be a zero level adventure where each of the players rolls up four randomly generated characters. You don’t get to pick the type, you simply go through the process and create four really puny weak characters.
In DCC, all of the zero level characters are typical townspeople who are bakers, ditch digger or some such thing who keep watching adventurers come in from adventures with treasure to spend. These currently wealthy adventurers are spending money like there is no end to the riches, and the zero level characters think “I could do that”, and go on an adventure with whatever they have as weapons, a pitchfork, a rolling pin, or some some such thing.
In MCC, the PC’s are all part of a tribe, and in the example zero level funnel modules I have seen so far the clan needs the teenager adventure wanna be’s to go out and do something epic and heroic to become awesome. Things are tough for the wanna be adventurers. In the MCC game, the player characters have a loin cloth, a bag, maybe a spear, but likely something not useful like a bag of sea shells or maybe a conch shell.
The reason why each player has four zero level PC’s is that the PC’s are disposable. It is pretty awful. Things happen and the PC’s just get wiped out. After the end of the first adventure, if any of the characters survive, the player then promotes one of the PC’s to first level and starts generating a real character. After the zero level funnel, DCC is just a twitchy D&D retro clone. It is a really fun and cool retro clone, but it is still twitchy.
MCC has the same basic zero level mechanic. Here is the problem with zero level funnels. If you have a TPK, you want to run another funnel, but don’t want to run the PC’s through the same funnel. When we played our first game of MCC, there are exactly 2 zero level funnels available. One was in the book, the other was a single module provided as part of the MCC Kickstarter.
So why is this a problem, you ask? Well, if you have a TPK on the first zero level funnel module, you don’t want to run new PC’s through the same module. So if you have two TPK’s in a row with two sets of PC’s, what the hell does a DM do?
The first game was a TPK. It wasn’t that I was screwing the players, they simply died. The died in droves. It was really cool.
For instance, whenever you try out technology in MCC, you have to make a roll and add / subtract some characteristic numbers including the level of the tech. In one case, Shari was trying to use a maser pistol for the first time. She rolled a natural 1. That is “bad” as in for the character, but the player can still revel in the failure. Shari then rolled again to determine what happened with the failure of the technology test. Now things on a failure can range from whatever you did, you just busted the thing, to… well, it explodes, dealing 1d6 damage to everyone within 10 ft of the user. When the PC’s have between 1 and 4 hit points apiece, rolling a 1d6 has a good chance of really ruining their day. It did. Shari’s rolls ended up killing off five characters.
Another time during the adventure, Collin’s character tried using a swipe card on a card key slot. He rolled the same way as Shari, and ended up killing off 6 total PC’s. I still don’t know how you swipe a card and kill off six of your friends. I remember hearing stories about how Navy SEAL’s could kill a person 12 different ways with a credit card… Maybe Collin’s zero level PC should have chosen another career.
There were several other travesties. Maybe tragedies. The wind kicked up at one point early in the first MCC session, and ended up blowing people around, killing several of the players. When the wind started, the party was in a forest with exceptionally tall trees. I asked what they were going to do. All of Eric’s characters decided to climb a tree. Several others tried to hold on to each other. Some tied themselves to trees. Tying your self to the tree was the appropriate answer. People were blown around by the gale force winds and glicked into the other trees, and made into mincemeat.
Once again, having 1 hit point is a bad thing when any dice roll will kill you.
There were other horrors thrust upon the party. They investigated an underground monorail. That went about as well as could be hoped for. Thankfully, no one died on that. Surprisingly, it could have killed a bunch of people. One key consideration was that there were only 20 seats in the monorail, and to start with, there were 28 characters. Enough characters had died previously in the adventure that everyone had a seat on the monorail, which meant that no one took bludgeoning damage when the monorail accelerated or decelerated. Sometimes, it is the simple things in life that make live worth living. A seat on the monorail.
Things were going pretty OK. The party was attacked by a deranged robot gardener. Mike ended up surviving that encounter by using the corpse of another member as a shield.
That encounter also included a nice little tip of the hat to the Jetsons, where the party had to enter the main area of the encounter via the equivalent of the Jetson’s dog walking path.
The approach meant that only one PC could get to this location at a time. Several characters didn’t think to start running when the machine went to high speed, and were flung off the conveyor belt and fell about 150 feet to their death.
To be fair, I should have rolled 15d6 to determine the damage done to the PC’s, since it is 1d6 per 10 ft of falling.
Eventually the PC’s got into the area where they needed to find something good. By this time, just about everyone was down to one or two PC’s, and several of the players had generated all new PC’s because all four had already died.
Inside the compound they had lots of problems, dealing with robots, 6-ft cockroaches, and even a kid who was cyberntically linked to a video game. That one killed off Collin in no time flat.
In the end, the party killed themselves by trying to fly the hover car. It was not a pretty thing. Collin said “I got this”, and rolled very poorly, causing the car to crash killing everyone.
Now, MCC is a lot of fun. It isn’t as much fun (as a game system) as DCC. I like the ideas, but after comparing it with some books that I have for Gamma World, 4th Edition, the game appears to be a fun GW clone. It isn’t as over the top as 7th Edition Gamma World, but it is still a lot like GW 4th Ed. Is that bad? No. I loved Gamma World way back when. I love over the top games, and truly appreciate MCC. However, It seems to fall a little flat in some things. The monsters are badass, but not too much fun, compared to other post apocalypse games. Mutant Epoch has amazing ideas that can be brought into MCC to make MCC more fun.
The main difference I see between Gamma World (6th Edition and older) compared to Mutant Crawl Classics, is that GW (except 7th Ed) can all be played as straight up horror post apocalypse, or over the top weird shit post apocalypse. If you wanted to play Gamma World as straight up post apocalypse, you could easily add in stuff from The Morrow Project, Aftermath or even Rifts. I even brought in some Twilight 2000 into Gamma World when I was younger.
Gamma World allows the adventure to be serious or over the top.
Mutant Crawl Classics is only over the top. That is not a bad thing. Over the top PA is fun. But depending on the group, it may not be what they are looking for.
The other thing that I found with MCC is that while the funnel adventure is cute and fun, the overall game doesn’t have the same feel for the technology use (as compared to magic in DCC). The tech feels… forced? Tech usually feels forced in games. I guess magic is kind of the same thing, where it can make things seem unbalanced.
D&D has oscillated over the versions about how powerful the magic is, where magic users can be very weak and easy to kill to magic users being totally OP. Also many fantasy games have mages being easy kills until they reach a higher level then they are stupidly powerful and problematic for the rest of the party. When I say problematic, I mean that everyone else has to pick up the pieces after the mage pops off a decent high level spell and there isn’t much else to do for the rest of the party.
Players can have a lot to do with this. If the player engineers the character in almost any class then the character is likely going to be overpowered. Some players counter this by role playing.
An example of this was in a recent Savage Worlds game where we were in zombieland. Mike’s luchador was in dire straits. Eric’s priest had a magical ability to essentially turn undead, which would have very likely saved Mike. The party was being swarmed. The party shot at zombies, climbed into vehicles and got the hell out of Dodge.
Mike missed jumping onto a vehicle and was being swarmed. Eric on his turn could have turned a large number of undead, but instead chose to shoot his gun at one zombie, and missed. Mike became a happy meal for the zombies.
Like I said, the player characters can really help improve the play by making sure that their abilities that could save the day, or help others survive never get used.
Now back to some descriptions about MCC.
After the TPK, the players decided to try again, with the 2nd of two zero level funnel modules. This one was “Children of the Fallen Sun”.
In this adventure, the PC’s are all members of a tribe who see a large shooting star go directly overhead and crash to the planet on the horizon. Curious, the village sends the young adults who are wanting to become full members of the tribe off to investigate to learn happened and come back with something useful.
So the party heads out. Shit gets bad as the party is attacked by large creatures, small creatures, falls into sinkholes and are irradiated by nastiness in the void.
Long story short the party finds that the shooting star is actually a ship, as in a space ship that crashed on the planet surface. The party knows nothing about ships, or space ships, but they are game to go aboard and try to figure out how to get something useful out of this situation.
As the party approaches the ship, they see that there are two sets of beings fighting over who gets to enter the ship. On the left is a tribe of porcupine men and on the right is a tribe of huge brained people. The porcupine people shoot porcupine quills and the braniacs use some sort of mind weapon to scramble the brains of their enemies.
The remaining party members decide to side with the porcupine people, massacre the braniacs and then kill off the porcupine people. It wasn’t pretty, but no party member died.
The entrance to the ship wasn’t easy to get into. The party found several glowing things that they eventually sussed out that they needed to change one glowing box that was leaking with another glowing box that was not leaking. Once that happened, and they pushed some buttons, the door to the inside of the ship went from cracked open to opening freely.
Inside the first room, they found stuff scattered all over the floor, including one dead crew member several hard things, several squishy soft things and other materials. There was also a large eyeball mounted on the ceiling that kept looking around at the party.
The dead person on the ground was a rust colored human in a leather coverall suit. Of course Collin stripped her of her clothes. She had several small puncture wounds that had blood that was not dry. She also had a tattoo of a man with hair and a beard. The head was in profile. The woman was completely hairless with rust colored skin.
The party members picked up things that would help as weapons. The found several clubs that looked like this:
They also found several squishy things that looked like
The party wasn’t sure how these things should be used, but they were pretty sure that the long hard object would make a good club.
So the party kept going. They found an area that had lots of drawers. After opening several of the drawers, Mike and Collin found some amazing clothing that they decided to wear.
Collin found a suit of armor that had amazing effects, mostly to his charisma.
Mike found a suit of armor that was almost as good looking, but not quite, unless you like purple.
Mike was convinced that the large lapels would help catch any arrows that were shot at him.
Now it may be important to explain a little bit about the group I play with. The players that play on Thursday are all about the role play. They don’t want to die, and they don’t want to be massacred with no reason, however, they are mature enough to revel in failure. Rarely do I present them with an impossible challenge that kills them off. Instead, they act as though they are not seasoned warriors with predetermined knowledge. They play a zero level or first level character as though they truly are low level characters. This means that they will stick their finger into the hole to see if something bites them. They will attack when they should run away. They roll poorly sometimes, and they revel in it.
So giving some ’70’s swag clothing to a couple of the characters makes them almost as happy as though I had given them a +1 magical sword. I even made it better for the two of them by giving them some awesome jewelry, where Mike got a gold chain with a 3-in sun disk, and Collin got a gold chain with a 4-in yin / yang symbol.
So where was I? Oh yeah, the party was making their way through the space ship.
The party entered a room that appeared to be the sleeping quarters for the ship’s crew. They found a food vend-o-mat that spewed out a variety of concoctions. Shari drank some of the green goo that gave her intense “gastronomical distress”, or in other words, she kept shitting herself and farting with a spray. Things got really kind of nasty, but Shari was good with the RP for that.
Other players had good things come from drinking different color goo’s that came from the spigot. Mike and Collin got several hit points back from previous injuries. Now, to be fair, I should have flipped this paragraph and the paragraph before it.
Shari saw Mike and Collin get a benefit from the goo, and assumed that she would also get some benefit. Not so much. Now to be fair, the goo type was selected by a random roll on a table. Shari rolled like Shari, as in, a way to make the character have the most interesting outcome possible. To her credit, Shari was perfectly OK with this, and seemed to revel in the pooperific outcome.
They continued into a room where there were a dozen or so large clear tubes, each with a being inside of it. Two had blue men, several had what looked like typical beings on the planet they were on, along with several monsters. Not content to leave things alone, Shari tried to push some jeweled buttons on the wall, and ended up first causing one of the cylinders to freeze solid in about 2 seconds. Well, there were a dozen beings, now there were 11.
Not happy with her freezing technology, Shari then opened up all of the cylinders. And things went bad fast. Two of the monsters proceeded to attack and start eating several of the other beings. The party ended up saving a sentient giant beaver. The beaver escaped, but was killed by some of the other locals prior to exiting the ship. Now, the party did promise the beaver that it would be safe through the ship. The party didn’t say anything about what happened when the beaver left the ship. It was not pretty. The beaver was gutted and filleted so that someone would have a nice fresh meal.
The two blue men were not happy with the situation. Communication was not easy, but it was pretty easy to understand that the Blue men were trying to figure out how to take control of the situation again.
The party went on and continued to check out the ship. They found a bed that had a variety of surgical instruments over it. Several of the party members went onto the table and tried their luck at gene manipulation. Collin and Mike got some permanent strength boots. Eric went onto the table, or actually, Eric was not at that session, so the party “convinced” Eric’s character to go onto the table and he ended up with gills and the AI Thrall mutation.
The party also found an interesting room. There was one room that had a wall with a bunch of gems on it. Next to that, there was a spherical mirrored room. Collin went in and the room became a tilt-a-whirl, spinning him around and trying to kill him by centripetal acceleration. Collin came out and told everyone about how awesome this room was.
Eric was back for this session, and when he went in, his personality was replaced with another being, He is now Yuri Vasilev, a cosmonaut who perished eons ago during an early Terran space-flight experiment. Given the specters’ prolonged exposure within the astral plane, they have become vulnerable to fire and loud sounds which inflict double damage.
At the end of the session, the party finds Jatatao, a dehydrated rust man, who somehow is the thickness of a sheet of paper. The party decides to roll him up and move on.
More to follow…
robrpg 