Hitting the Bricks

So the game ad continues to gather interest for the PbP. Seems to have gathered more interest this time around than the last two game ads combined. No complaints on that. Given though I made decent use of images and tables that I didnt do before. A professional look that looks like I know what I’m doing  I guess pays off.   I’m probably going to lock down a closing date for that after the new year. Way to much still going on to keep me distracted to focus 100% like I want on the game. It’s certainly better than it was a week ago with Christmas looming but its still not a forgiving work schedule.

In other none PbP news, LEGO is finally trying to get my love back. As many are probably aware several years back they released LEGO Batman both as a video game as well as a number of actual sets. Much to my anger and wrath they pulled the sets after only maybe a year or so on the shelves, maybe a little longer. Even when I’m making a ton of overtime, I have a mortgage payment and other bills so I couldn’t just slam down $80+ dollars on a set. So I wasn’t able to get them all.  Trying to find them on eBay or Amazon is nearly grounds for selling a kidney on the black market.  This month however kicked off the new Super Heroes line of LEGO toys. Batman of course being the dominate feature amid them. The licence now however seems to be a full DC Universe toy line, as it will now include Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern likely amid others. It also looks like LEGO has gotten a Marvel license as well as a Marvel line will be following later in the year of 2012. Personally I’m not overly impressed on the images I’ve seen on the Marvel ones yet that surfaced at Comic Con. I would imagine though there are still like 5-6 months before the Marvel release to get things cleaned up. As for the DC side of the coin, I think a large number of the minifigs are improved from before in design.  I’m not liking the change to my boy Two-Face though.

The black and white suit was great. Now its some weird ass purple/orange mix.  I know the image its taken from in the comics, that doesnt make it *good* though.  The new Robin design however makes up for it.  I might just have to try and find a old Two-Face mini that I can find cheap… …cheap on eBay seems to equal around 20-30 bucks.  bleck…  Hopefully they bring back all the original minifigs as well as some new ones.

Moving along

So the PbP stays strong, and I hope to fuel some new blood into it once again.  I’ve posted a new recruitment ad on Myth-Weavers, so we’ll see what I can rustle up in terms of quality players.  Hopefully I will be able to start posting in here a little more often as well too.  I’d like to dedicate some time to developing some things for others to do games for themselves in the Gotham City setting.  So besides the originally planned topics of Bruce and Gotham City itself that were planned oh so many months ago I’m likely going to invest some time into focusing on some of the other colorful characters of the Batman-Universe.

I also want to say that I just got a early Christmas present from my wife.  The Batman Files by by Mathew K. Manning. This book is beautiful and extremely in depth. Sadly a lot of the photos used inside it are reused from various other material, so the original images are a bit limited.  Still though as a collection of computer files, news articles, crime scene photos, blueprints, schematics, and actual maps taken to be done by the caped crusaded himself its a incredible piece.  If you can find it cheaper than the typically marked $100 price tag its worth the money as a incredible collector piece.

The Living Breathing City

Once my schedule here begins to calm down some, I am looking to delve into a bit more of a in depth look at Gotham City itself. As a character itself, as well as the characters that reside within its streets that make it what it is. With its gothic architecture and spanning skyline, Gotham City by itself is a entity all its own and like no other.  Combining that with characters like Bruce Wayne himself, James Gordon, and all the others that make the city and surrounding their home it truly becomes a creature all its own.

I’ll be using the City section of things to discuss various elements and locations around the city. Some of the most notable of course are locations like Arkham Asylum, which I will likely begin with, as the infamous insane asylum alone will likely serve to cover a number of articles all its own. On the character front I’ll likely take some time to discuss Bruce Wayne/Batman before moving into a few villains.

Bruce as a whole from my earlier posts has gone through some various chances in the way I’ve tried to utilize him in the game(s). Of course anyone that chooses to use him in their game as well will have to take a long consideration on how to do so.  The character of Batman is so dominating that he can quickly overshadow the PCs in a game if used to heavily. Removing him completely can also in turn dramatically change the atmosphere of the game. I’ll be discussing different scenarios over the course of the In-Depth look at Bruce Wayne.

Character Sheet

Chris, AKA Mr. Gone of White-Wolf notoriety was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to talk to me the other day.  After a bit of back and forth he agreed to make a personalized sheet for my Gotham’s Finest game.  The full 4-page interactive sheet can be now found on his personal website. http://mrgone.rocksolidshells.com/  The sheet is located under Misc. Sheets and looks awesome! He was even kind enough to post up a link to the game’s Wiki page. My many thanks go out to “Mr. Gone” once again.

The Evolution Part5

So the most recent version of the Gotham City Project has been Gotham’s Finest. The characters are police officers, detectives, possible other employees within the structure of the Gotham Police Department.  The choice of putting the players in this position now had several different reasons.

—

1) I work for the police department in real life. Knowing how the structure of a police agency works as well as seeing and hearing real calls in action gave me a great backing to pull real life experience from. Some stuff is just so crazy you can’t make it up. Now add in a twist from a bit of DC Universe flavor and you have an awesome realistic scenario.

2) The nature of PbP gaming tends to have people randomly vanish from time to time. As such I now had a valid reason to explain away character disappearance with injury, transfer, personal leave, etc. It also gave a much easier way to explain PCs into the game for many of the same reasons being a transfer, promotion, etc.

3) A valid and legal way to give the PCs weapons, including firearms without shoving a direct connection with Batman in their face. I’d try killing Bruce off before and it just seemed like there was a element missing in more ways than one. Bruce being injured wouldn’t stop him from his purpose. He would find a way to still make a difference even if he couldn’t put on the cape and cowl himself anymore.

4) Again, a more valid and legal way to allow for the PCs to investigate and gather information needed to stop and arrest the criminals they would be facing. The Citizen’s Patrol concept seemed to force the PCs to rely to heavily on the NPC police officers that would have been attached with the patrol. I wanted to avoid the NPCs becoming to much like Storyteller controlled PCs. Also removing those type of NPCs, would force at least one or two of the players into making a character with a profession with certain security clearances or force them to purchase of Allies/Contacts with said clearance.  That becomes counter productive when the whole premise was “average joe citizen rises up to fight the good fight”. There is also a bit more satisfaction of slapping on a pair of cuffs yourself than handing them off to a NPC to do for you.

5) A workable mixture of sandbox play and disguised railroading.  Patrol officers can be allowed to roam around the city as they choose, or be directed via dispatched calls. Either way it feels like they are always doing something and being proactive. Likewise the detectives I allowed a bit of leeway in picking their cases while their division has a few open ones. Otherwise when the need arises I can have them respond to calls from crimes committed.

—

So as it stands I’m nearing almost a full year of active game with Gotham’s Finest.  The one year anniversary will be in July. Its also currently one of the top 5 longest running nWoD games on Myth-Weavers.com. Now of course I’ve gone through two official application recruitment processes and several word of mouth recruitments but I’ve managed to continue to push the game forward and still maintain a continually active and working set of plots. I currently have over 200+ NPCs stated out in various degrees all pulled from different DC Universe sources. I have a ever growing and expanding interactive city for the players to move within and happily a slowly expanding Rogue Gallery being born. I’m also happy to say that despite a long and grueling road the PCs finally caught their first BIG baddie with the Mad Hatter. The skys the limit now.

The Evolution Part4

So the Gotham City: Taking Back the Night approach with the Neighborhood Watch idea ended up starting off with a rather decent group. (I thought so at the time anyways) I also got some feedback for the first time outside of my own players on the concept of my chronicle idea having some merit. For those that are familiar with the Darker Days Podcast, dealing with both old and new World of Darkness, it was one of the original hosts. Sadly I don’t believe Vince is attached with the podcast anymore.  I know there are still updates with the podcast but they dont seem to be as regular and I know the website that had finally feel off the grid a little while ago. Neverless I ended up talking with the people over on the Darker Days boards and with very little arm twisting and the potential to actually get my ideas across to some people that cashed a paycheck from White-Wolf I ended up running two similar games at the same time.

So like so many PbP games I ended up with a common frustration of unreliable players. It seems that the anonymity of the internet has served to make players online feel unresponsible to actually maintain communications with fellow players or the person running their game. Now of course I wasn’t necessarily a stranger to this. This wasn’t my first PbP attempt by any means. I’d been in my fair share of games as a player where half the other players or even the gamemaster had gone and vanished without word. Real life happens,  we all get that. However it seems that getting people to treat a game online with the same respect they would a table game is a bit harder to come by. Modern technology makes the excuse of “my computer died” a bit harder to swallow, that you couldn’t find some other means to get a hold of email. Hell, I had a player leave on vacation for two weeks and couldn’t have even given me the common courtesy as a heads up for waiting on them in the game. Needless to say, coming back acting like nothing was wrong was not a valid option once I found out the cause of his apparent disappearance.

However, back to the games. I got pummeled from two fronts with player disappearance at the same time now. Its bad enough when it happens with one game, but when its two… especially something that I had dropped so much time and research into constructing it was heart breaking. So that now combined with money issues and work related stress I got a rather sick taste in my mouth for awhile. I ended up needing to separate myself from gaming for a bit to clear my head.  By about this time it was April 2010.

So I took about two months off, maybe a little bit longer. Needless to say it was much needed and was very helpful in giving me new focus. I hit the drawing board once again in June, and by mid July I was ready to go again with a yet another new spin…  Gotham’s Finest.

The Evolution Part3

So I stated batting around ideas for a serious game late in 2008. Hunter the Vigil had come out by then and seriously given me the concept and mechanical ideas I needed to use to get something more concrete on paper. My first attempt of course was on a PbP, since that had become my only real access to a gaming group of any kind. It was a modest attempt on a old Proboards site I had made. I tried to wrangle a couple people over from my Mage Awakening game. I think I had two of them come cover to try. It didnt have much structure at the time as I really just wanted to try out a couple ideas. There wasnt anything to really have the PCs work together either, so things were kinda running more as just solo games for each of them.  Needless to say it didnt work very well. Of course a rather nasty disagreement with one of the players on a completely separate matter didnt help things either.  Long story short it died shortly out of the gate. So it was back to the drawing board.

A few months later I moved over to a much more structured PbP site, rather than trying to maintain my own site and go around to various places fishing for players. It seemed a bit easier, and allowed me to find more games to play myself outside of just running games.  So the next attempt at things had a been more structure but again seemed to be a random splattering of PCs from all walks of life. However the premise had everyone at the same location when a major event occurred. The idea was to have everyone brought together by a life-changing event. The various PCs pooling all their different contacts and skills from various occupations to work together to try and change Gotham City.

Well things dont always go as planned. Needless to say I had a couple players take the “D&D approach” to the situation. They charged forward expecting to be able to “beat down the baddies and loot the corpses”.  Well when the Joker says he’s planted a bomb in the bank with hostages its more than likely he’s not bluffing. Well the two players of the six person group opened fire at the goons and well the bomb in the bank was detonated. Now of course, then seemed to cause some friction as one of the players didnt want to seem to take responsibility for anything that happened, either IC or OOC.  The character got arrested and several arguments followed.  It also ended up with a major PvP issue as another player was playing a Gotham police officer.  The other one that opened fire on the crooks ended up running from the scene that resulted in a major man hunt or a suspect in the bank incident.  Well things went okay enough for awhile for the rest of the group. However like many PbP games I had players vanish on me without any notification. Eventually my motivation with things kinda died in frustration as well and I pulled the plug on it.

A couple months later after a few more ideas being batted around I went ahead and gave things another go. This time I went and tried to structure things a bit more. I still wanted to try and have all the players be random citizens that couldnt take the crime and corruption of Gotham City anymore. I ended up setting things up that everyone was part of a citizen watch group created by James Gordon. I also went and started trying to utilize a few more know characters like Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon working them into things. This now gave the characters some NPCs to interact with and would function as a means to connect them back to Batman later down the line. I’d also like to mention this was the first version of the game that I actually left Bruce Wayne alive, though I still had taken him out of the fray by having him crippled from another event that happened prior to the game.

The Evolution Part2

So for the last several years due to the rather small amount of public support for the gaming community in my area I’ve become a major player using play-by-post to satisfy my role-playing needs. My current work schedule also makes my availability extremely limited, as I end up working evenings and most of the weekend. That aside however, PbP gaming has become greatly more popular over the last several years as it allows people to find groups and play with a much more flexible scheduling. Sure the pace is a bit slower than some might like, however finding the right group of people can keep a decent flowing game. It also can cut down on the “forced group by default” I’ve seen had to happen at local gaming stores when the gamer pool is slim to none, unless you already have a established group you’ve had for years.  Its hard to avoid taking “boB the Fish Malk” (if you dont get the reference – Google it) unless you dont want a full group at the local shop, however when you have 20 people wanting to join a PbP game its a bit easier to avoid the easily identified problematic player/character.

So this bringing me to where this all started.  Its spring of ’08. The Dark Knight is a few months off still and I’m fiendish for the movie.  I also had several PbP games I was playing in tank.  Needless to say I was in a serious need for a fix with my nerd factor.  I started working on a major Mage Awakening game at that point and had decent success as a ST with that game. However I wasnt playing in anything still of major significance, so my mind was left to wander. Somewhere along the line in all of this I remember having a discussion on the new Batman movies and how much more realistic they were and how dark and gritty the world was portrayed.  Meanwhile gaming wise I started trying to run another 3.5 D&D game. I wanted something a bit edgier though, compared to a basic dungeon crawl. I had my own homebrew world but the amount of house rules I needed to drop on the system was just making it more cumbersome that in was worth. Then the wires seemed to connect, and the beginnings of nWoD: Gotham City were formed.

The Evolution Part1

So I’m going to bore you with one or three more of these posts of rambling probably before I start getting into the meat and potatoes of things. I’ve slowly been plugging away at building this chronicle setting since the spring of 2008. As such I feel I’ve earned the right to talk about my “baby” in a little detail. Its been a bit of a morphing process over time to get to the current form its at, and I dont doubt it will morph again, if not several times before I consider it finished. Its had four attempts as a play-by-post game and in a little over a month I’ll be giving it the first run as a official tabletop setting for a game at my local gaming store.

So like every good red-blooded American male, I am a major Batman fan. I’m also a bit of a Green Arrow junkie, but thats besides the point. I’m also a bit of a nerd and damn proud of it. Being almost thirty now, I can honestly say I’ve been gaming around half my life.  My first gaming console was a Atari and I cut my teeth on 2nd Edition AD&D with Planescape. I read comics and looked forward to the end of every school day for shows like Batman: The Animated Series. Time of course marched forward and so did I with my gaming and other hobbies. My consoles moved into Nintendo and Sega Genesis, and has continued to the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 that have homes in my houses’ entertainment center now. Likewise my table gaming changed as well. 2nd Edition became 3e and then 3.5 then Pathfinder. I also along the way of my D&D gaming was introduced to a large array of other systems.  Vampire: The Masquerade and the other World of Darkness lines, Deadlands, Legend of the 5 Rings, and a dozen more over the years. The White-wolf books leaving the most lasting impression of them all.

Sadly however with all good things, there are also those that are not so good. The group that I had started all those years ago while still in high school slowly faded apart. Life and careers take priority over gaming and eventually my gaming friends faded away into nothing more but memories of the past. Also the gaming industry, in terms of the paper and pen variety, isnt the same as it once was. Many of the family gaming stores have gone under, unable to make the profit against the economy. Wizards of the Coast, who use to have their own chain of stores in every mall, closed them all up. Another Universe was another one I remember in my local area that had to go belly up. Technology has transformed the hobby and is still continuing to do so. While the days of people gathering around a table to play have lessened slightly, its also given way to people sitting at their computers and playing with like minded people half way across the county, or even the globe.  Gaming over things like OpenRPG or Skype are more common for live gaming and given birth to the Play-by-Post crowd.

DC and The WoD

Now one of the biggest concerns I’ve had people asking about doing this kinda game is the fact that I am using stuff from the DC Universe. DC as a whole is much more than just Batman and his personal Rogue Gallery, its a rich comic universe spanning several decades of history. Taking the Nolan approach to things however works for the most part in keeping things a little less over the top, but being a RPG can allow you a little more wiggle room to still give certain characters the true flavor they would lose if *everything* was kept truly realistic.

The World of Darkness setting however developed by White Wolf Inc, and the current Storytelling system does a excellent job of crafting the dark and gritty world that Batman moves within. The combat system is unforgiving and far harder to powergame or “muchkin” than certain other games on the market that involve a certain twenty sided die.  The new World of Darkness setting unlike older adaptions also gives a much easier option of creating mortal based characters. Its also dramatically more flexible and easier to customize. Recently released toolkit books such as the Armory: Reloaded and the Mirrors supplement show just how much the system can be modified for just about any desired style of play.

Now of course World of Darkness isnt the only system thats taken a crack at the  DC Universe in some fashion. Smallville currently has a book out using the Cortex system by Margaret Weiss Production’s. I’ll leave my own personal feelings about Smallville itself for another time. DC Adventures hit the market a few months back with Green Ronin’s third edition of Mutants and Masterminds. I highly recommend DC Adventures if you want to go the route of playing your superheroes in a much more over the top environment. West End Games even got a crack at the DC Universe back in 1999 with the Legend system.

As such though, I will be using this board in the upcoming weeks to give a overview of the last several years of play-by-post game testing I’ve done, as well as give a weekly review of the first attempt at running this as a real tabletop game. In between all of that I’ll be posting ways of using the system with various characters and the city of Gotham itself.