Comic Gong

Comic Gong is Wollongong's first comic convention, and was organised by the city library, seemingly in association with Free Comic Book Day. It was a short event - only three hours - and there were comments that this wouldn't make it attractive to people. But it was; attendance was excellent, with many people of all ages getting into costume. The event featured an artists' alley, of course, and stalls from King's Comics in Sydney and a company that did movie stuff. There were also artists workshops and lucky prize-draws throughout the event, and the obvious chance to mingle with other nerds of all ages.

The whole thing was excellently organised and (importantly) well-promoted.

I got some loot.

Some more Heroclix, of course:

And, to go with them, a pack of Fantastic Four playing cards; more appropriate for tracking initiative in 'Clobberin' Time' than the Sherlock Holmes ones I've been using up until now:

And, finally, some prints and a comic. The comic is 'Captain Kitty Hawk' by Judex Jones, whilst the prints are by Matt Lin (who rant the manga workshop my daughter did) and Marcelo Baez. Matt Lin's figure with the sword and pistol is apparently concept art for a forthcoming range of steampunk wargames miniatures.

Here's a few more pictures from the event.

Here's teh ladies from Circus Wow:

And here they are doing their stuff.

Marcelo and Rachel Baez.

The results of a cartooning workshop.

And the board at the end of Matt Lin's manga workshop.

Mild-mannered librarian becomes - Iron ... Lady.

Whilst another librarian becomes a shieldless Captain America.

It looks like Comic Gong was quite a success, which bodes well for it being held again next year. Let's hope so; the more events like this that Wollongong gets, the better.

Gladiators, Zombies and Elk

Victor came down from Sydney this evening, to play some gladiators. Since it uses a small space, we set up in the back-room. The setup involved a bean-bag for seating one of us, but initially it was already occupied.

On to the gladiators, using Munera Sine Missione v2.1. We played three bouts. In the first a Murmillo fought a barbarian.

The barbarian did OK initially, but fell to a lucky critical.

Victor gave his luckless Crupellarius a go, against my Thracian.

Another lucky critical saw the Crupellarius maintain his run of bad luck.

Finally an African Barbarian with a spear faced a Dimacherius.

The African danced around quite effectively, and got in some good thrusts. But he too fell to ... a lucky critical.

Lucky criticals aren't as common as these games suggest. really.

We switched to a couple of games of Zombie Dice. Victor got the brains, I just got shot.

Finally, Elchfest. It has wooden elk, and involves flicking stepping stones around to create a route across a river.

The end of the game ...

... my elk made it across the river to win.

And that was the evening gone. We discussed solo game mechanisms and the format of the next MOAB comp, and then it was time to Victor to head home.

England Expects ...

Ralph hosted last night's game, and we tried the 'Trafalgar' Napoleonic naval rules. It started out with geoff and I playing, and Ralph umpiring, but Peter turned up later and took a couple of ships.

Geoff had some rascally Dons - three 74s and a 110 first rate. I was the Royal Navy and ran three 74s plus a 100 gunner. Here's my ships heading towards Geoff:

The two lines approach each other, or so it seems. In fact the wind was against me and really i was just trying to keep station whilst Geoff moved towards me.

The Spanish home in on the rear of the British line.

The opening shots - The British 100 (Queen Charlotte) was engaged by the entire Spanish line.

It didn't end well. She caught fire.

Indeed everyone caught fire.

I didn't get any more pictures after that. the Queen Charlotte sank, as did the Spanish Santa Ana. Another Spanish 74 burned to the waterline, or sank. I can't remember which. Indeed all losses were either ships sinking, or burning away/exploding.

I did take one more shot, comparing an old-style Navwar 1/1200th 74 gun ship with a Langton one. There's quite a difference in size.

So, how did the rules work? First, a caveat. My comments are based on just playing one game, and not having actually read the rules. I understand there were a couple of house-rules in play. Bear that in mind when reading anything further.

I have to say that i wasn't thrilled. Perhaps I'm missing the point of the rules in some way, but I felt that there were areas missing or just not handled well. For example, weather changes were frequent and extreme - the wind shifted direction by a high degree turn by turn, and fog seemed to come and go with great regularity. Saying that, the wind didn't seem to make a lot of difference to the game. Unless you were caught aback by one of the frequent swings in direction, your attitude to it had very little effect on your speed - indeed whether you moved last turn had more of an influence than moving into a more favourable attitude. Crew quality and training had an influence on movement, but virtually no effect on firing, except at the longest ranges. I may be wrong, but in a straight fight between two ships of a roughly equal strength the clincher would generally be how quickly crews could fire and reload guns, with better training and experience giving the edge. 'Trafalgar' didn't reflect that; the poorest crews fight their guns as well as the elite ones.

So would I play 'Trafalgar' again? Yes, certainly. You can't judge a set of rules by one game, especially one where most people are learning the ropes. But I've played a few Napoleonic naval sets over the years, and I didn't find that 'Trafalgar' had anything in it that wasn't done better elsewhere. It was said that a lot of stuff could be tweaked with house-rules, though, so it might be worth looking at that.

To end on a positive note, those Spanish ships are Ralph's, and don't they look great? The sea-mat is one he bought, and looks pretty spectacular as well; it really added to the game.

How Hard Can It Be?

I had a little play with RPGsolo today, and ran a simple Supercrew scene through it. It worked very well, and I have only a few minor quibbles with it, mostly do do with incorporating various bits of trackable information via the tool.

One thing I use when running Supercrew is the system of Villain Points developed by a member of RPG.net. These allow you to set a challenge, be it a gang of thugs, a super-villain, and earthquake or simply finding a place to park, at a particular level scaled to the number of players. A GM can decide on the difficulty of the challenge, and put together the opposition then and there. It's very easy to do this on the fly.

When playing solo it can be obvious when a challenge arrives. The difficulty comes in getting the 'automated' GM to set an appropriate level. This is the system I use.

Using RPGSolo The game is run by means of a series of Yes/No questions - basically the questions a player or players would ask a live GM. The answers can be as follows:

Yes, And ... - This means the answer is yes, and there's some bonus as well ('Yes, there is a door, and it's unlocked!')
Yes - Exactly what it says.
Yes, But ... - This is an affirmative answer, but there is a negative rider of some kind.
No, But ... - The opposite of the above; the answer is No, but it's qualified in a way that is slightly positive to  the players.
No - No means No.
No, And ... - This is bad - the answer's No, and there's more. Usually not good.

The probability of getting a 'Yes' answer is given a likelihood, and this will weight the responses accordingly. The probabilities range as follows:

Sure Thing
Very Likely
Likely
Somewhat Likely
50/50
Somewhat Unlikely
Unlikely
Very Unlikely
Almost Impossible

When determining the difficulty of a challenge I ask the question 'Is the Challenge Easy?'. Always. What varies is the likelihood that it will be easy. I will start of by assuming that it's Likely or Somewhat Likely that the first challenge will be easy, because you don't want things to get too tricky straight off. The system takes over from there. This is how I read the results:

Yes, And ... - The challenge is Easy, and there is no change in probability.
Yes - The challenge is Easy, but the likelihood that the next one will be goes down one level.
Yes, But ... - The challenge is Easy, but the likelihood that the next one will be goes down two levels.
No, But ... - The challenge is Standard, but the likelihood of the next one being Easy goes up one level.
No - The challenge is Standard. There is no change in the likelihood that the next one will be Easy.
No, And ... - The challenge is Hard, but the likelihood of the next one being Easy goes up one level.

It looks complex, but isn't. Here's an example:

Our Hero encounters a challenge. I ask 'Is it Easy?' and decide that it's Likely. I get 'Yes, But' as the answer. So the challenge is, indeed, Easy. Buy the likelihood that the next one will be Easy goes from Likely to 50/50.

The next time our Hero encounters a challenge I ask 'Is it Easy?'. It's now 50/50, and I get 'No'. This means that the challenge is Standard, and the likelihood that the next one will be Easy stays at 50/50.

A third challenge arises. Again I ask 'Is it Easy?', and this time I get 'No, But'. So again it's a Standard challenge, but the likelihood of the next one being Easy improves from 50/50 to Somewhat Likely.

So basically the more Easy challenges you get, the more chance there is of getting one that's Standard or Hard.

Needles to say I haven't fully tested this yet, but it's worked out OK so far.

Playing With Yourself

I like role-playing games, but lack the time, energy and (it has to be said) the imagination to come up with interesting plots. I also lack the players - my family will play sometimes, but I'm not sure that we're always looking for the same thing in a game. And I prefer to play rather than run the game - as do they.

So I love tools that will act the role of a GM - providing me with prompts to drive the adventure and the adventure itself, whilst leaving me free to play the character. And, whilst it's not new, I got hold of another one today:

RPG Solo

Like any tool, there is almost certainly a knack to using it effectively, but it's more in creatively interpreting small things and building them into a developing plotline and the setting you have chosen for the game, rather than having to have large amounts of plot and characters worked out before hand.

What's nice about this tool is that it has an attached forum to discuss ideas and changes, ask questions and, of course, post example adventures.

A mobile-friendly version is promised. It's things like that make me keen to get an iPad.

Update: In case anyone is wondering how a solo RPG works, or what the point of playing one is*, then there's an excellent post (with some example mechanisms that are no in the tool I linked to) at Tiny Solitary Soldiers.

*Even if you plan to run a game with players, one use is that it gives you a chance to try out the game first, before inflicting it on others.