What do you do when several players in your game group can’t make it to your regularly scheduled RPG game? One of my gamer buddies wrote a post about a game to play in such circumstances. Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars X Wing is an easy to play beer-and-pretzels game you can run as a backup game when you have cancellations. His experience was you could run two games in about two hours. Alternatively, you could run a game like this during a ‘buffer’ hour before your main game begins, or after the main RPG game for those who want to game longer. (Hat tip to +Steve Balog; also see pictures and an additional review from one of the games players).

Interesting perspective from one blogger:

Tabletop RPGs are a fusion between these two primal needs, human contact and imagination. By sitting across from another player and expressing self imagination (through the imagination invested in their character) and social imagination (through the imagination of a shared world) both needs are fulfilled. Source

Read the full article

This weekend I ran a game called ‘The Starship Rescue’ at Texicon in Fort Worth using the ENnie award Nominated Savage Worlds rules. Gamer and freelance writer Mark Chance did a  review of the game on his Spes Magna blog.

The game was well received with some players asking for a continuation of this game and setting at the next Texicon. I’m making plans to do just that. 🙂

Several folks have asked me how I created the visual props for the game.

I used both figure flats, starship schematic handouts and a nice starship map that were visually impressive and really helped set the tone of the game. Below is a list of resources to create your own ‘Starship Rescue’ type game — but really, any system set in a Sci Fi universe where you would like nice maps and inexpensive paper miniatures would benefit from these resources.

Read the full article over at DFWRoleplayers.

Technology for running traditional tabletop RPG games using online software has been around for a few years now, but I’ve noticed we seem to be reaching something akin to Critical Mass in the use of these tools to supplement face-to-face gaming. For example, this weekend in my game group we’re using Google+ to video conference in a distant player while the rest of our group game meets around a physical table. Kickstarter and online ‘virtual’ conventions also point to the surging interest in online virtual tabletops.

Kickstarter

There’s been a lot of buzz on Kickstarter regarding two very similar new tools: TabletopForge and Roll20. Both have had very succesful Kickstarters. Of the two, I’m more familiar with TabletopForge which has the promise of being perpetually free, with features like 3 D dice rolling in the works. Their Kickstarter metrics were as follows:

Roll20
1,580 BACKERS
$39,651 PLEDGED OF $5,000 GOAL

TabletopForge
1,926 BACKERS
$44,413 PLEDGED OF $5,000 GOAL

Virtual Conventions

Now comes online ‘virtual’ conventions. Of the five below, Indie+ and Aethercon seems to be the best organized and offers dozens of games over several days.

1. Indie+ July 9th – 15th, 2012
2. Fantasy Grounds Virtual Gaming Convention July 20-22, 2012
3. Concurrent Aug. 15-18, 2012
4. MonkeyCon October 19th and 20th
5. Aethercon Nov. 16-18, 2012

Have VTTs (virtual table tops) come of age? What has been your experience with virtual table tops? Are these tools beneficial to your game group?

Over the last year I’ve been focused on running ‘episodic’ games than have a clear story ending in 4 hours in my home and gamestore games. These same skills are very helpful if you want to run a 4 hour con-style game.

Here are my tips for running 4 hour games:

For all types of games, have a clear quest or goal so the character know exactly what their mission is, with the mission something achievable in 4 hours. (In campaign settings, I have the players be part of an organization which gives them missions).

In non-Dungeon games:

• Plan for 5 scenes, with at least 2 or 3 of those scenes involving combat.
• I like to have a red herring or twist be part of those stories, with a big reveal in the final Boss Fight scene.

In Dungeon games:

• Have 12-20 rooms prepared. Usually you’ll only cover 7 to 12 rooms total.
• Of the 7 to 12 rooms you’ll actually explore, 5 to 7 rooms will have combat or extensive roleplaying. The rest of the rooms (2 to 5 non-combat scenes) will be empty or have puzzles, traps or something minor to explore.
• Throw in a combat by the 1.5 hour mark if you haven’t already had one.
• Be prepared to move rooms around in the dungeon so they will always happen to get to the key parts of the dungeon (especially the Big Bad Boss at the end). Usually I just have 2 or 3 ‘key scenes’ which I will make sure they hit, with the rest being optional. This means you don’t give the players a map as you may change the map on the fly.

If you’re running a campaign in a home setting, I’ve found having the players have a ‘home base’  where they will be or will be en route to at the end of each session to be invaluable. This way when you have absent players you can explain that they didn’t come on this mission. If you have a society, have the society have bases in several key cities. If you running a space campaign or ship campaign, have the vessel dock to a port at the end of each game.