2021 Gaming Plans

Happy New Year to all. May this year be better for everyone!

So, this year -- what's gaming going to be like?

When we last left off (last year when the pandemic had yielded strange combination of free time and cabin fever that drove me to reconnect with friends online interested in gaming), I was going to work on a Star Hero Tactics series of posts. Still working on that one after some detours -- it's just that a science fiction setting has many, many, many attractions that can detract from your focus.

However, I'm also now running a PBTA game called Monster of the Week. Great for working on a sort of evolving meta-setting for a bunch of monster hunter adventures. I'll post some of my session reports for this one as we get a few more done.

Lastly, I'm also co-GMing a Cyberpunk RED campaign with a friend. As we are liberally using screencaps from the much-maligned but fantastically realized computer game Cyberpunk 2077, it should make for a great cyberpunk game with a very distinct visual and musical identity as we push their edgerunners to their limits.

Star Hero: Terran Empire Tactics

Rather than diving headlong into my gaming group's homebrew campaign, I decided to make a quick visit to one of the official Star Hero settings -- closest to what we're playing, I guess -- the Terran Empire!

The reason -- I don't really want to go into the details as to how we built our own weapons and our own races and so on. At least if you're already an owner of this book (or want to pick it up for $10 on DriveThruRPG), you can follow on your own and come up with your own scenarios & tactics.

Initial Framework

We'll need to establish a squad comprised of several characters (therefore, character sheets are needed), and put in the general logic of the build of the characters (alien race and various MOS packages, plus extras) and the composition of the team in terms of 'roles'.

Then we go into the three components of each scenario -- the opposition, the terrain, and of course the equipment you've been assigned! Now there's a standard loadout (we're going for a military group that gets standard equipment), but can request for specialized equipment as well, depending on organizational pull of the team's leadership and the nature of mission itself.

And then we'll talk about how the combination of these might play out in a given situation; how to make decision making and running combat smoother without sacrificing the combat options, and so on.

Hero System as a Gaming Engine

Been playing a lot of Star Hero, and with some other new Hero System campaigns potentially spinning out of that regular play -- it's time to capture some thoughts about the system.

We're fond of playing in a mixture of roleplaying scenes and some hardcore, dangerous combat situations -- currently under the flavor of a principled, militarily influential, star nation in another galaxy.

The Hero System is really something akin to a computer game's physics engine. Not only does it handle a lot of environmental effects with internal consistency, it also allows you to model almost any effect you want (given its roots in a system that attempted to simulate the bonkers physics of a super-heroic universe). And like any toolkit, there's usually more than one way to build something.

We've used it to create a reality where more militaristic, but no less powerful "jedi" run through the battlefield wielding beam sabers (Old Imperial tech). Their weapons do massive damage, and make for interesting combat against hordes of crazed HTH aliens AND impossibly powerful powered armor suits with area effect weaponry.

Multi-armed aliens with infantry training wield squad support weapons and HTH weapons when fighting off crazed hive-mind drones. Crystal-shaped telepaths (with telekinetically controlled 'hands') wield standard issue military rifles.

Drones zip ahead of the squads, and the team's combat armor allows for active sensor arrays to gather intelligence on their opponents -- who may just have the right combat tech to counter ours.

So, I suppose I'll be generating a series of posts that highlight some combat tactics that we like to follow (based on our training packages and our equipment) to showcase the capabilities of the Hero System -- to reward combat tactics with more than just simple bonuses to hit or cover. It really has a depth that rewards teamwork, planning, using the environment to your advantage, and so on, without abstracting to a simple advantage or disadvantage to a roll.

A Month of Online RPGaming

Due to a cinematic inciting incident (a pandemic) that has become a grim reality, I have surprisingly found myself logging more RPG playtime than I have in a while. Gametime has been split between two systems and settings:

Star Hero: Tales of the Confederation Starfleet (Hero System 5E)

The last time I played in this campaign was decades ago, one with lensmen, clan sentinels (think slightly more militant, and more combat savvy jedi), and a host of different military branches of the principled Confederation, carrying out missions in an intrigue-ridden galaxy populated by the the profit-motivated Alliance, the expansionist Second Empire, the militant religious Unity, and other stellar nations.

Our recent adventures have taken us on a variety of missions, including:

• stopping a reactivated 20 mile long, 5 mile wide colony ship from impacting on a inhabited world;
• enforcing a quarantine on the aforementioned world, where a bio-engineered plague that irreversibly converts victims into powerful, fast, and deadly units of a hive mind;
• traveling to an ice planet within New Imperial territory where a number of Alliance companies have apparently carried out similar biological experiments with the plague;
• using a surprising cache of Old Imperial technology, gating to a planet deep within Alliance territory to escape the tactical nuclear detonation in booby-trapped underwater research base;
• surviving on an Alliance hunting preserve with some of the galaxy's deadliest creatures long enough for a secretly chartered vessel to rescue them;
• surviving a short-lived battle against an Imperial Admiral in powered armor, in order to negotiate an information-sharing agreement regarding the bioplague;
• investigating a low-tech, feral planet for the source of the bioplague's key components to help in combating its use in future warfare.

Seems like we were making up for lost time!

Challengers of the Lost Mine (D&D 5E on Roll20)

Because some old classmates wanted to try out D&D gaming (some with their kids), I volunteered to DM for them the intro module to D&D: Lost Mine of Phandelver.

Only two sessions so far, with most of them playing D&D for the first time (all of them playing 5E for the first time). As for me, it's been my first time running a game on Roll 20 (and Zoom for the audio), so I've been learning quite a lot about the features of Roll 20, and the special customizations for D&D 5E. And trying to get my player acclimated to playing with both D&D and Roll20.

However, it's been a lot of fun as I try to impart the fun of TTRPG play and maximize the digital toolsets to tell the story and impact the tactical challenges of the adventure. Added challenge: some of the players are limited by devices and bandwidth when playing.

So, it 's been great being able to reconnect with very old friends, and meeting the kids of my former classmates. Here's to maintaining this brave new world of gaming behavior as we emerge from the pandemic and adjust to our new lives under its influence.

  

Roll20, Star Hero, and the Return of the Confederation's Finest

I mentioned in a prior post that we had returned to a decades old campaign through the magic of Roll20, teleconferencing, and a hunger for some old school science fiction gaming.

The Setup: In the world of the Shattered Empire, a squad of Confederation Starfleet marines, along with a handful of warriors from other Starfleet military branches, are called to investigate an anomalous object threatening an unaligned planet along the Confederation-Alliance border. It seems a once-innocuous object in this lightly explored area of the galaxy has suddenly begun moving outside normal parameters -- changing course and moving at relativistic speeds towards the unaligned, inhabited planet. The object is a cylinder roughly 20 miles in length and 5 miles wide. Lifesigns have been detected on it.

The Mission: send a team in to take control of the cylinder's engines, and save the lives of the inhabitants of the imperiled planet -- and the lives of those on the cylinder itself!

Current Situation: Much as already happened, but more is still to be revealed. Above is a screenshot from the last encounter of the last session. At the bottom of the map, we see the three members of the Starfleet team who were invited to meet with the leaders of one of the towns inside the cylinder -- hoping to find out more clues about who has been controlling the engines. However, the three members, separated from the main group at the top of the map, are suddenly ambushed by the security droids that had been dogging their every attempt to take control of the cylinder (they were waiting on the roofs and jumped down when the trio reached the intersection). Close combat brawlers, they've already KOd one of us, and stunned (but didn't KO) my character. Only one character, the Clan Sentinel, was able to wipe the floor with all of them (whew).

A return to Star Hero, at long last

So, the last time I actually played with my old Hero Systems gaming group was in the late 1990's.

Very early this Sunday morning, fifteen gamers finally played together again after a long time via a combination of technologies (Zoom, and Roll20).

The game: Star Hero, in a home brew setting.
The setup: On a slow boat to somewhere, a team of Marines and a handful of Confederation Starfleet military types from various races and branches are called into sudden active operations, as they're the only ones near enough to respond. A huge cylindrical object, suspected to be an O'Neill colony, once in stable orbit is suddenly kicked into relativistic speeds towards an unaligned planet along the Confederation / Alliance border. Life signs have been detected on board, so it's up to the hastily assembled crew to save the lives of  those on the cylinder and the planet!

It's really amazing how in-sync everyone still is after all these years. Despite the size of the group, folks took efforts to avoid talking over each other, procedures for communicating over the channels were proposed, refined, and implemented. And we had a blast.

Looking forward to the next one.

Some Games I'd Run

Following up my last post, here's a list of some of the games I'd be interested in running:

Fading Suns

No surprise there, I've posted a lot on the attraction of this kitchen sink setting.

It also allows me a fair amount of latitude in terms of the types of game sessions I can run, and gives me any number of excuses to take away high technology away from the players when I need to have the isolated, out of touch, and without any wonderful tech devices.

It also grants some rationale for a Science Fantasy campaign where swords and guns can be used.

D&D (of some kind)

Whether it's Labyrinth Lord (or one of the retro-clones), D&D 3E or one of the D20 spin-offs (like True20), or one of the neoclones like Castles & Crusades, I'd be up for running a short campaign of around 3 months or so.

It'd be one part exploration of dungeons, one part exploration of the world, and one part killing monsters. I wouldn't really take it too much in the direction of a city-based adventure, as my knowledge of medieval technology and life is somewhat challenged; I would do what I feel D&D excels at: helping players -- through their PCs -- explore the unknown, kill the nasty monsters that inhabit it, and claim the best of that dark wilderness (below or above ground) for their own.

Star Hero

I've not mentioned this at all, but I'm quite fond of Star Hero. I'd probably run a military-based campaign rather than a trader-oriented one. Missions, politics, espionage, and a heavy amount of combat. It's the kind of thing that I feel the Hero System excels in -- a set of flexible tactical options that can handle a wide variety of special effects.

Like the campaign that inspired it, I'd have players make two characters -- one for the ground forces and one for the space-based battles -- and let the discoveries and progress of the campaign unfold from those two vantage points.

For ship-to-ship combat, I might use the rules for Starmada: Admiralty Edition.

Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition / DC Adventures

Yeah, I know I'm expected to say Champions given my history with the Hero System. But the sad fact is that there aren't that many players who are willing to tinker with the system themselves and build new characters. Hence the Mutants & Masterminds ruleset which is similar enough to the rulesets most of them know (D20) and a lot of templated archetypes to get started quickly.

If there were some like-minded Hero players, I'd run Champions though.

Or give alternative supers rule systems like Icons or G-Core a try. I think BASH! is another system I'd take a look at, although the classics like Mayfair's DC Heroes and the TSR Marvel Super-Heroes RPG would also spark my interest.