The Elder Sign

I haven't had a lot of time recently for either my regular gaming or solo games.  That's a depressing situation for me, since I enjoy gaming so much.  I had the opportunity to pick up a great board game designed for 1-8 players.  It's by Fantasy Flight Games and is called Elder Sign.  Follow the link to check it out.

In short, you play the part of an investigator who is attempting to prevent a breakthrough of the evil Old Ones by searching a museum for magical Elder Signs.  You have to accumulate a certain number of these signs before the Old One can manifest and destroy the world.  Not exactly Yahtzee, is it?

Veteran solo players are likely to have already played this game and know all about it.  But for the benefit of those who might not have heard about it, I'll make a few comments.

The Physical Game
The game uses lots of cards as both the playing field and as game pieces.  Special dice are key to the game.  Overall, the artwork on the cards is great and really has a cool, creepy feel needed for Lovecraftian horror.  The flavor text on the cards adds to the ambiance as well as creates a kind of narrative.  Overall, it looks great on your table.  It will take up a sizeable area when you lay it all out.

Game Play
The rule book was a bit confusing.  It's organized good.  But there's not an example of play and so the rules don't come together in your head.  At least not for me, anyway.  I tried stepping through with the book in order, and I had reasonable success.  I made some errors that made it too easy to win.

You will have lots of counters and stacks of small cards.  You should have cups or some other containers for all these pieces ready for when you play.  Keep your cats away from the small pieces.  As I learned, my cats turned them into toys and yours might do the same.

The basic mechanic is that you select an adventure card and complete the tasks on it.  To complete tasks you roll the dice and match them to what you see on the cards.  Sounds simple?  Not as simple as you would think.  The combinations of dice can get tricky, plus things can happen to your dice that make them unusable. Also, if you fail a task you can re-roll, but you have to throw out a die to do so.  That makes combos harder to hit.  If you fail an adventure, bad things happen.  That's the gist of the game.  

Solo play is not only possible, but it is built for it.  In fact, if you play with others, you are doing so cooperatively.  So this is not a game to "face off" against anything other than the Old One crashing into your museum.

What really topped things off for me is that Elder Sign Omen is now available for iPhone/iPad/iPod.  I immediately picked it up for my phone.  It plays beautifully, and I imagine playing on an iPad would be even better.  Nice thing is it automates rules and bookkeeping.  This helped me learn where I made mistakes in my rules interpretation.  There are some adjustments for online play, but it's still the same game. If you have an Apple product, I highly recommend the app.

So, there you have it.  That's my take on Elder Sign.  I'm picking up Gears of War next and it should be mailed to me soon.  I'll let you know how that goes.

GME as Plot Generator

I enjoy writing, and have been writing here and there since grade school.  After college I decided to revolutionize modern American fiction and set the literary world on fire.  I settled for publication in a few fanzines and gave it up.  Did I mention I don't have much of a frustration tolerance?  Also what has all this got to do with the GME?

I'm in the final stages of preparing an e-book for self publication on Amazon.com.  I hope to have it up before the Christmas shopping season, when everyone gets a new Kindle and wants to try out inexpensive e-books.  But even as I work out the details of this novel, it's time to get started on the next book in the series.  The aforementioned low frustration tolerance makes plotting a new novel from scratch a stop and start experience.  However, the GME came to the rescue.

My experiences with the story generating capabilities of the GME really got me excited about its possibilities.  In the text of the Mythic PDF, mention is made that the Fate Chart could be used for writing.  The story outlining section of the the Mythic Variations PDF helped show me how the Fate Chart could work with writing.  I decided that I had nothing to lose by testing out these suggestions.

I had an advantage in that characters and relationships carry over from the first book.  But I left that book with a fairly open future.  So I set about drafting a plot outline starting with these characters and a simple premise.  This is a story set in Viking Age Norway.  The starting thread is that the main character has a conflict with his neighboring "kingdom."   So the main story thread is that war with a neighboring king must be settled one way or the other. Once this is worked out, the story will be finished.

There are three viewpoint characters for the novel.  So I made each one a "PC" when it was their viewpoint scene.  I listed out "NPCs" for each VP character, which could include other VP characters (A and B are both VP characters; but when it's B's scene then A becomes an NPC, etc).   Then I listed out threads for each PC, being careful that each thread start with a verb (Save the princess; Find the treasure, etc).  Once these lists were prepared, I had everything ready for randomization when required.  I added and subtracted NPCs and threads after every scene just like running a regular RPG.

I really didn't know where to start.  So I got things going with a random event.  That led to one idea which lead to others.  Before I knew it, a complex story full of twists and turns evolved.  I used chaos factors, and tried to keep these consistent with each VP character.  Though honestly, a chaos factor over 5 starts to generate strange things.  I used straight GME rules for the first two thirds of the plot.  By the end, I had a solid handle on how I wanted the story to go and just dropped the GME.

Overall this was an easy way to generate a plot.  It honestly was like playing a game, just no rules and no character record sheets.  I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to do when I started.  But now I have a much better picture, and it took a little less than two weeks to complete it.  After writing thirty pages and 16,000 words, I can say I have the basics of a draft in hand.  Now the hard part of writing begins.  There's no guarantee that any of this outlining will survive the first draft.  But at least I'm not starting out without a destination in mind.

If you are a writer, I definitely recommend investigating how Mythic's GME can help you either generate story ideas or embellish an existing story.

Solo Gaming Set Up

A few posts back I was asked how I set up for a solo RPG session.  I'll address that in this post and hope someone finds it useful.  I'll also talk a little about my experiences with the GME.

I've only completed one full story arc thus far.  So as far as story generation goes, I'm still developing.  I've got the excellent adventure generators from Adamant Entertainment.  These seem to have a ton of possibilities, not only for RPGs but for story-driven miniatures games as well.  The link I provided goes to the Space Opera generator; but there are others for different genres such as fantasy, military, and pulp adventure.  As for my first solo RPG games, I started with a simple premise and asked questions of the GME to get things moving.  The story evolved from there.

In terms of setting up my physical space, I have a wide office desk.  I set up my Asus netbook to use for typing the session.  I keep the main rulebook to one side and all my character sheets and the GME on the other side. Dice are needed, of course, as well as a pad of scratch paper.  From here out, it's like writing a story only I pause to consult character sheets, rulebooks, and of course the GME.  I try to keep sessions to one hour, as that's about all the free time I get for this hobby.

However, for the few Pathfinder sessions I've run, I've been able to keep things entirely on the PC.  I did this by using PDF rule books exclusively.  Also, I bought Lone Wolf's Hero Lab which not only allows me to keep character sheets on the PC but also has a tactical combat tab.  This tab lets you import monsters or other NPCs and keep track of the fights and all the details.  It's really slick.  I use an online dice roller as well.  Lastly, for the completely paper free experience, I use Mythic Apprentice that you can download from the Mythic Yahoo group.  So everything is on the PC and I can just type directly into Mythic Apprentice.


That's about the extent of my solo gaming set up.  While I love having hefty, full color rulebooks, I think they're not very efficient for solo games.  I've started getting all the Dark Heresy supplements as PDFs, and definitely all Pathfinder books as PDF.  Electronic books are easier to search and bookmark, and they don't suffer from wear and tear.  Definitely stay electronic if you can!

As for using the GME, I admit I was hugely surprised by what it can do.  I think as long as you have a well designed setting (like the WH40K universe or Pathfinder's Inner Sea), you can easily interpret the results you get from the GME.  If you don't have such a setting, as long as you have a good hunch for what would make a good story then you are still fine.  I think if you didn't know anything about the setting, you'd have a tough time with it.  You'd have to ask GME everything!

I will say that the best addition to the GME is the Mythic Variations book.  While you can live without it, it has a lot of clarifications and customization options.  The complex questions section increased the power and usefulness of the GME charts tremendously.

Working with the GME charts was a learning experience.  I learned chaos factor adjustments figure hugely into how things will go.* The rule to either raise or lower the chaos factor after each scene really wasn't working for me.  There were plenty of times where the scene wasn't getting out of control but wasn't letting up either.  So to me that meant it should stay unchanged.  Besides, GME needs a higher chaos factor to be more entertaining.  Without interrupts, altered scenes, and random events you could just as well day dream rather than play out a scene. 

The one big thing I learned is that you have to ask a lot of questions to get things moving.  Without questions, GME doesn't work.  As I worked through the sessions, I realized I sometimes had to ask questions just to generate a random event.  I guess I could insert a random event when I wanted; but then that's not really using GME and just becomes fiction writing.  So I asked a lot of questions and coaxed out events that way.

Finally, how you ask the question is paramount.  Here's where it's easy to fudge things and maybe even subconsciously cheat the system.  If the chaos factor is low, and you assign a low probability, you can almost guarantee you will not get a yes answer to your question.  "Is the main antagonist a Daemon Prince of Khorne?"  Chaos Factor: 3, Odds: Very Unlikely.  Even rolling 9% the answer is still no.  So if you feared meeting such a Daemon Prince, asking this question under these conditions almost -- but not definitely -- guarantees you won't run into that bad boy.  The main GME book talks about cheating and asking silly questions like "Do I find one million gold pieces right now?"  But it doesn't address that you can manipulate things without realizing just by phrasing the questions differently or asking under certain conditions.  I guess it probably can't be helped, and might even be desirable.  But I realized I was doing things like that to manipulate my story at points, and I took back those questions where ever I found them.

So there are my thoughts on my first time solo RPG sessions.  I'm brewing up a few other ideas, and will get started this week.  I think I'll keep the same characters and see where things go next.

*EDIT Added 9/20:  One thing I wanted to add but forgot to mention in my post is that the Chaos factor tends to feed on itself.  By this, I mean once you raise or lower the chaos factor it tends to keep rising or lowering.  This only makes sense, given that if the chaos factor is dropped then less random stuff happens.  Therefore the next scene will have a lower chaos factor, etc., and vice versa for raising it.  That's why I felt it was important to have a situation where the chaos factor stays the same.  Just be aware of this tendency, as the story can get crazy in short order once you move to a level 7 chaos factor!

Why Play a Multiplayer Game as a Solo Game?

I think this is a question for which most people have an answer.  A quick Internet search will show that some people think it's anti-social, shameful, and somehow destroying the fabric of society.  Let's put those people into the misguided bucket for now.  The rest of your search results should've yielded a variety of blogs and forum posts ranging from curiosity to advocacy of the solo gaming experience.  These people all have their reasons for playing a multiplayer game by themselves.   I'm certain you have your own reasons as well.
 

I can't answer the question posed in the subject of this post, not in a universal way.  All I can answer is why I personally play solo, and what I choose to play solo.   I think that makes a solid topic for my first post on this blog.  Let's see where this goes.

To being with, the games I play solo are table top miniature games and role playing games (RPGs).  The miniatures games probably didn't raise any eyebrows.  But I'm sure the RPG game play is already coming under suspicion.  I've been doing solo miniatures games on and off in some form for years.   However, the RPG solo games are new territory for me.  In fact, the solo RPG experience is the genesis for this blog.  But I'll get to that in a moment. 

Table top miniature games are probably the easiest games to play solo.  At the most elemental level, you line up opposing armies and run them at each other.  The game mechanics take care of just about everything else.  Back in the late 1990s when I started assembling  the starter box content of Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy Battles, this was how I played.  My Empire army was on one side and my Orc army was on the other.  I rolled dice until one side collapsed, usually the Orcs.  This was not very fulfilling, to say the least.

I now actively play many different miniatures games with a great group of friends.  However, I still do a lot of solo miniatures gaming.  Not everyone wants to play the game I want to play.  Not everyone has the time to play when I'm free.  Additionally, solo games allow for events or scenarios not strictly covered in the rules.  I don't get that out of regular games with friends.  I'm not even sure I want that, to be honest.  My solo miniatures gaming has evolved from running Orcs to their deaths to trying to evolve a story from game to game.  This is a theme I hope to cover in this blog.

Now to consider the RPG.  I've been an RPG gamer all my life.  I found Dungeons and Dragons back in 1979 and became an addict.  I played multiple times a week, straight until the day I graduated college.  After that, I played White Wolf's World of Darkness RPGs up until my son was born in the late 90's.  But probably unlike a lot of other people, I mostly played with a single DM (also my best friend) who filled out the party with an NPC or two.  When I relocated across country, we still kept our game sessions going via chat rooms or even the telephone!  (That got costly, let me tell you.  It was the days before unlimited long distance.)

After my son was born, I went on a 14 year hiatus from RPGs.  This hasn't really been my preferred choice.  I still wanted to play RPGs.  For years I refused to look at the cool new books, read the blogs, look at the pretty pictures, etc.  However, quite by accident, I started to find people on the Internet who play RPGs as solo games.  I was amazed and immediately interested.  I gave it a shot, and found it can be done.  Now I feel myself coming back to my roots.

A few paragraphs ago I mentioned solo RPG game play as the genesis for this blog.  I want to play my games, but I also want to share them with someone.  I don't care if I have an audience of one person.  I enjoy creating the story, and want to have a venue to share it.  In many ways it's like painting.  I can create a painting and put it in my closet.  It was fun to do, but if it was any good wouldn't it be better to hang it where someone might see it?   

This community of solo gamers seems fairly small to me, especially solo RPGers.  So more sharing of information and ideas can't be far off from a good thing.   I'll be putting up both my miniature and RPG solo game reports and techniques I've used to realize a good solo experience.  In many ways, you will become my gaming group.  Welcome to the table!