Online Gaming with Mr. Insidious

Douglas Cole, author of Gaming Ballistic, has been trying to get the GURPS blogging community to talk about Virtual Table Top (VTT) roleplaying, and I figured I could at least share my $0.02.

My primary experience with VTT is the excellent Maptools by the folks over at RPGTools.net. It's a strong program with the capability to let you program in game mechanics to do nifty stuff. At the time, I was running D&D (4th Ed.), but if I were to go back, I'd gladly use Maptools if I could get my routing situation figured out. As it is currently, port forwarding doesn't work particularly well on my home network, which makes Maptools unusable.

I'm going to talk about gaming with a battlemat, map, VTT, board, or other media to help show positioning first, then talk about gaming over Skype, and then maybe get into VTT's specifically.


Pros of Using a Combat Map:

• There's little question if you're one, two, or three yards away from someone. People's positions are less ambiguous and it saves a great deal of time clarifying positioning with people. How many enemies left can be answered without asking the GM.
• Maps can be outright beautiful
• Lots of chances for player expression depending on the media (be it minis, pogs, avatars, whatever)
•  Maps can aid combat mechanics. Reach is the kind of thing that can be easily missed in GURPS by those not using a map of some kind.
• It can reduce the workload on the GM to describe rooms, layouts, strangely twisting passages and the like

Cons of Using a Combat Map:

• Can wreck immersion. This was my brother's primary complaint going from 2ed AD&D to D&D 4th Ed.
• Can be distracting to players with short attention spans. I've encountered this GMing for a group that ranges from 10-14 years of age. Fidgeting with minis, moving pieces around when waiting for their turn in combat, fighting over who gets which generic miniature to portray their character...
• Can serve as a crutch for newer players. I've also encountered this with the younger crowd, who don't want to hear "There's a guy five yards ahead of you and another guy 3 yards to the left of him." and would rather see it visually displayed.
• It can detract from storytelling. Having the board sitting there with the remnants of the last battle strewn about while talking about a jaunt back into town certainly distracts me.
• I absolutely suck at mapping. Anything hand-drawn is crappy, I end up using MS Paint for almost anything my players need a map for in Agency 17 (the most recent one is shown below with the name I saved it under after its creation).

"TownHallShittySketchIHateYouAllForMakingMeDrawYouAssholes.jpeg" - Yes I'm serious, that's its name

•  To compensate for my terrible mapping, I've ended up relying a lot on either image libraries (especially back when I was using Maptools), or a paid program called Tiamat. Tiamat is pretty cool, but paying for tiles sucks.
• Mapping takes time. Time I could be using to flesh out NPCs, organizations, plot, plans, or researching things like what the hell the National Intelligence Agency of Turkey is called. (I still have no clue, and I ran a 3-5 session long mission there.)
• Maps are even worse in person, because it's much harder to prepare them ahead of time, especially if you're a fan of wet-erase markers on a vinyl mat like I am.
• I also despise doing geological maps, cartography, and basically anything else associated with taking a layout of objects and putting them into visual form. I may just have Incompetence (Maps).

For Agency 17, I game online using Skype and nothing else. All in-character action takes place in the chat through text. We host a call so that me and the players can ask questions, chat, and generally enjoy each others' company during the session.
Pros of a Real-time Text Approach:

•  Players don't have to suffer my horrible voice acting
• Bad connections, audio, microphone issues and other technical malfunctions don't tend to mess with core interaction- the chat
• Text is usually clear and unambiguous.
• Strikes a middle ground between Play-By-Post/Play-By-Email (too slow for my tastes), and live tabletop (where I can't cop a bathroom break to look up blog posts about my preparations).
• Continual log helps aid both GM and Players to remember events, names, and details.
• You can grep a chatlog.

Cons of a Real-time Text Approach:

• Players don't get to suffer my horrible voice acting
• Can be slower than some players like (Agency 17 sessions frequently run between 3 and 6 hours.)
• Bad for those with slow typing speeds (They tend to end up becoming wallflowers as their replies get buried under faster responses), or those who dislike lots of typing
• Less chance for acting
• Cheapens note-taking to a degree, makes the Eidetic Memory advantage slightly weaker (anyone can just check the chat log).
• Anyone can grep the chatlog.
• Makes hiding things more difficult
• Makes hiding mistakes more difficult
• Often leads to more retcons by me

My group doesn't game using video. The group dynamics aren't the kind of deal where I know everyone's full name and living location.

Last but not least, Pros and Cons of Online Gaming:
Pros:

• Play with people not limited to your geographical area (great for those living in say, Maine)
• Much wider pool of available players
• Digital revolution has greased the wheels of making sure everyone has the source materials (Buy GURPS products. They deserve your monetary compensation for awesomeness. Seriously)
• Often easier to find players specifically interested in the game you want to run
• Easy to find fresh blood
• Finding an area to play isn't an issue (Although the Library I used during highschool missed our presence when we graduated and stopped going weekly)
• Various VTTs are present and present nice tools to do stuff.
• VTTs can aid in automation which is the biggest + to using them specifically.
• NO GM screen needed.
• Usually easier to look at source material or books as needed
• Play naked or in your boxers/undies, if you want

Cons:

• Time zones. Seriously, fuck timezones.
• Bribing the GM with food becomes problematic. Thankfully GURPS books and Steam Games can be sent and purchased online!
• Internet issues can affect attendance and quality of play. This is especially true if using a VTT.
• VTTs don't always play well with aging hardware, strange network setups, or parental settings (for the teens out there trying to game).
• Hard or impossible to verify player rolls, making 'fudging' much easier
• Players and GM are easily distracted (Hey, let's just open Reddit real quick while he's typing out that response...)
• As easy as it is to lure in new players, many will fall through immediately, some will be crazy, and some won't be up to your standards.
• No physical interaction is possible

 This has prompted a discussion among some of my players:

"Me: The fact that I got Egeman past you guys is my crowning achievement thus far"
"Virgil's Player: Only works once."
"Johnny's Player: Sly Bastard. Yeah, double checking ids from now on."
"Virgil's Player: Also, everyone knows IC that Virgil saw through that from the start"
"Johnny's Player: I saw that. Is that legit or was it just a joke?"

Hah. Only works once. Right. 

Action Report: Zombie One-Shot and Agency 17, Just Business

I'll start with the Zombie oneshot:

• Everyone died or got zombified
• One person crit-failed their first zombification check and immediately turned about fifteen minutes into play
• Molotovs ended the lives of multiple PCs. The player in question only plays one-shots as she lacks the attention span to play in long running games, which is why her forays into roleplaying become slaughterfests.
• My radiation system would be more interesting in a long-term campaign than a one-shot where record keeping became tedious.
• Besides the Armchair Republican and the Columbine copy-cat loner PCs, everyone was completely unprepared for the zombie apocalypse. Everyone played their roles well.
• The clown got a very limited form of Snatcher and abused it to good effect.

 Now onto Agency 17:

The Agents

Tobias Stöhner: Gray hat hacker and electronics whiz, Tobias makes computer security experts at the Pentagon break out into a cold sweat when he infiltrates their systems.
Virgil Cooke: A former CIA agent, Virgil is a master of acting a part and working the social aspects of covert ops. You probably should avoid windows if he wants you dead.
Jack Herman: Former SAS, Jack is the group's heavy muscle and military man. If the group needs his talents, it's inevitably because something went FUBAR and they need saving.
Nima Caspi: A former IDF combat medic, Nima is perfectly at home driving like a complete maniac and patching up complete maniacs who have taken a bullet or two.
Johnny Trang: Johnny Trang was too cool for LAPD officer school, so they put him into undercover work. Johnny Trang is perfectly at home infiltrating illegal racing rings or snooping on bad guys.

This session we had Matt (Virgil), Max (Johnny), Thomas (Tobias) and Ryan (Jack).

The agents spent two months in Switzerland recovering and relaxing. Johnny's doctors assure him that the colorblindness will fade- eventually. Virgil picks up some news that some guy in France wanted by Interpol was found hanging from a flagpole outside his hotel. Virgil's player doesn't piece it together- but Agency 17 has followed up on the safe deposit box in London and Natalia is following that lead.

Meanwhile, Logan updates the Agents on Project Olympus (Long story short: Natalia is an outlier and the program was highly inefficient and unreliable), as well as their next mission.

Rand and Charles Petroleum, a US Company, has attempted to start an oil drilling operation in the Amazon rainforest within Brazil. Working with a Private Military Contractor (Blue Leaf Company) to provide security and 'willing' labor, RCP's activities have pissed Agency 17 off.

Largely because RCP has been identified as a potential target for blackmail and extortion, especially if their most recent business proposition (The oil drilling in Brazil) fails. Agency 17 plans to apply leverage for their starting capital.

The Agents are only told about the forced working conditions. They're provided a guide, Gregori, to help them survive in the jungle conditions.

Tobias and Johnny are flown in early, and approach the town of Varzedos. Providing early reconnaissance, they determine that a man known as Sherman is in charge of the Blue Leaf Company, a woman named Connie is in charge of the drilling operation for RCP, and the local padre, Father Kline, is overheard talking with Sherman about the availability of laborers.

Tobias begins tracking down two men involved with trying to stop RCP's business in the area, meeting with Ernesto. Ernesto is an old grizzled man who gruffly tries to disillusion Tobias about the situation, but is generally helpful. Turns out Murchad, a particularly vocal critic of the drilling operation, threatened to involve outside interests in the situation.

'Outside interests' being eco-terrorists, criminal organizations, government oversight committees, and the like. The kind of organizations that RCP doesn't want to deal with, and the king the Blue Leaf Company really wishes would shut up.

Meanwhile, Virgil, Nima, Jack and Gregori skydive into the Amazon late at night. Barely surviving the trip through the canopy, they land and begin making camp.

Next morning, Virgil and Jack prepare their ghillie suits and recon the road being cut into the jungle to the site where drilling will commence. They find first BLC's barracks, followed by a large clearing where workers who have been forced into joining the project are forced to sleep. Connie and a few BLC members execute two workers who tried to escape, in full view of the hidden agents.

Meanwhile, Tobias still digs into finding locals who are against RCP, and Johnny tries to dig into any clues present at the local town hall...

Other campaign happenings 2

This post will be a small roundup of in game events that I want to keep track of for later. Most of these happen between sessions, and won't likely involve the players.
Unknown to the Players:

•  Xavier is approached by Arthur Bingham who is starting to dig into the identities of the Agents who apprehended him way back during the first mission. Xavier is subsequently placed under observation by Section 17 for possible recruitment.
• The decision is made to kidnap Arthur Bingham to induct him into Section 17. This will likely take place after the PC's mission in Brazil.
• Lorin's gun-running crew falls apart without Lorin. The members either assimilate, flee, or die. The PKK presence in the area experiences supply problems.
• Egeman Atalar ascends through the ranks of Agency 17 with surprising speed. I'm thinking he was a very early recruit planted within Turkish Intelligence.
• Robert Sampson discovers the death of his family. He becomes an alcoholic wreck, a breadcrumb that Arthur will later use to uncover the Mexico operation...
• NATO vehemently denies the existence of Project Olympus, placing the blame entirely upon Egeman Atalar. Turkey promises a full investigation, although all indications are that Egeman is a useful scapegoat for almost all involved parties.

Possibly Known to the Players: 

• Natalia is pressed into service almost immediately. The results are violent, bloody and conspicuously reported widely in international news.

 

Agency 17: Just business

The next mission will be taking place in the Amazon Rainforest- most likely in Brazil. Their goal is to stop a environmentally horrible company, Rand & Charles Petroleum (RCP) from opening up a new drilling operation within the rainforest.

Of course, Agency 17 has cloudy motives beyond environmental protection, most of them amounting to trying to curtail the RCP's presence in the area.

The band will be sent out with Gregori, Agency 17's premier survival expert. He should be extremely capable help when it comes to guiding them through the Amazon- a task none of the PCs are very prepared for.

To complicate things, RCP has been hiring private military contractor types to provide security and suppress local anti-drilling activities. These mercenaries are obviously not very nice people and will likely be trigger happy.

I'm thinking a drill site about five miles out from a town located by the only non-contaminated water supply for a large area, in deep jungle. That makes the town a population hub and constrains the area the PCs will have to worry about. It gives a locus for the events of the mission, providing angry locals, boisterous PMCs, and a place for evil corporate types to try and push or stop the drilling from beginning.

Maybe to spice things up an agent from Section 17 might make an appearance.

I'm running tomorrow's session more or less by the seat of my pants.

Gaming is a volatile environment for intrigue gaming

I've become pretty good at coming up with various stuff on the fly. Pocket contents, phone contact lists, how people fit into a company, weapon vault contents, I've placed it all without prior planning while at the table.

And boy will that sometimes back you into a corner. Sometimes you will have a character say that somebody is working for a specific company and later that turns out to be wrong or inconvenient. Maybe you slipped up and got the name of his organization switched with another. The goals for an NPC's growth or use could be restricted due to their attachment to the company the players now want to destroy from the ground.

Mistakes happen. It's also really easy to give out more information than intended. You're supposed to give the players enough rope to tie the noose you later hang them with, not reveal the incoming twists.

The volatility of tabletop gaming competes with the need for logical consistency and continuity that an intrigue game demands.

Three suggestions:

• Keep notes. Update them frequently. Write things down. If running an online campaign, having logs to go back to are extremely useful- for you and players alike. This does weaken Eidetic Memory, so beware.
• Don't be afraid to retcon things that you screwed up. Players appreciate having current and correct information more than making sure you said the right thing at 3AM in the morning while tired and still GMing because gaming is just that fun.
• Information should be murky in an intrigue game, and it's important to remember that NPCs are not all-knowing. Having NPCs capable of making mistakes makes the world more real and leads to very interesting plot possibilities- such as Logan not knowing that Egeman Atalar was Mr. X in Agency 17.

Zombie One-Shot Planning

The Mistborn Campaign I play in Tuesday nights will likely be on hiatus for a single week so the GM can plot, plan and machinate as he pleases, This frees me up to make use of GURPS Zombies, which I picked up for my birthday.

[9:40:20 PM] Virgil's Player: Oh god, once a week classes. Half the time those are night classes that are creepy as fuck even without zombies.
[9:40:37 PM] Me: It totally should be college night classes
[9:40:41 PM] Me: just for the vision penalties

 I'm probably going to run things with a heavy modification of the Whisperer template (pg 103, GURPS Zombies):

•  Secondary Characteristic Modifiers: Basic Move +1 [5]
• Advantages: Acute Hearing 2 [4]; Doesn't Sleep [20]; Indomitable [15]; Single-Minded [5];
• Perks: Penetrating Voice
• Disadvantages: Asocial [-56]; Hidebound [-5]; Zombie Motivation (Spread the Mind Virus) [-15];
• Quirks: Involuntary Utterance [-1]; Doesn't Raise Voice/Yell [-1]

Whisperers are fun because the zombie virus is spread by zombies infecting you with a mind virus.
 
The behavior of the zombies is simple- they gang up on those who are not affected by the virus and beat them up until they can be held down and whispered to. They are more or less as functional as a human being when it comes to intelligence, although all social capability seems to have been removed.  The zombies are capable of running, manipulating simple objects (door knobs), climbing (ladders too) and avoiding obvious hazards (fire).

The zombies only attack with hands and fists, in an attempt to prevent killing potential hosts for the virus. When among only their own kind, they act much like robotic automatons attempting to act human- albeit constantly chattering in the unique language of the virus.

I'm ditching the Memetic Zombification listed for the template in favor of trying to cobble together a Zombie Radiation scale (zRads) to reflect the mind virus' effect on my victims.

• Instead of HT checks, all checks will be done using Will.

• Radiation effect A is replaced with acquiring the disadvantage Chummy, Chummy turning to Gregarious for characters that already have it, and Loners losing the Loner disadvantage. This is representing the initial exposure of the Mind Virus prepping victims to more easily finish spreading to them.
• Radiation effect B is replaced with gaining Light Sleeper and suffering -1 to IQ for at least a day. They get one Will check per day to see if they ditch the penalty.
• Radiation effect C is replaced with gain the Chronic Depression disadvantage (Control Rating 12), and also gain the Involuntary Utterance quirk. At this point the person is now actively spreading the mind virus, although if they are isolated from other sources of the mind virus they will eventually recover and stop spreading it. Of course, they're not going to be very proactive about getting clear of the zombies... This stage represents the continuing rewiring done by the virus.
• Radiation effect D is the first point where I take over PC control and rule that they've become a zombie. Upon reaching this stage, the character gains Neurological Disorder (Cripling) for fifteen minutes, turning Severe for another ten minutes, and then being Mild for five minutes after which it disappears and the Zombie is fully functional.
• Radiation effect E represents an immediate snap into a Zombie without the delaying effects of D.

Action	zRads Inflicted
Listening to someone at Radiation Exposure C for 1 Hour	10 zRads
Listening to a turned Zombie for 1 Second	1 zRads
Zombie grapples a character and whispers directly into their ear	100 zRads/second

There's a lot of various protection factors to take into account:

• Deafness: You're immune
• Hard of Hearing: PF 5
• Headphones, Loud Music, Earplugs, stuffing cotton into ears, pillow over the head, etc: PF 2
• White noise, falling rain, water trickling and other 'random' noise: PF 3
• Sleeping: PF 2
• Chanting/Singing/Shouting Cadences: PF 2
• Distance: PF 2 at distances of more than 5 yards from small groups (5 or less individuals) of zombies.
• Complete sound Muffling: Complete negation of zRads. (IE: Locking a zombie in a walk-in freezer)

zRads Effects Table:

a

Dose	Effects	Will Penalty
40-79 zRads	-/-/A/B	0
80-159 zRads	-/A/B/C	0
160-320 zRads	A/B/C/D	0
321-640 zRads	B/C/D/E	-1
641-1281 zRads	B/C/D/E	-3
1282-2563 zRads	C/D/E/E	-4

Some scenarios:

• Dave's roommate, Jake, has progressed to Stage C. They share a bunk bed, and thus, Dave can hear Jake mumbling. Assuming Dave sleeps for 8 hours, he would take 80 zRads, modified by the protection afforded by being asleep, reducing it by half to 40. If Dave succeeded his Will check he'd suffer no bad effects- if he failed he would find himself becoming Chummy or operating at reduced IQ.
• Anita is grabbed by a zombie, who spends two seconds muttering in her ear before she escapes. Anita has taken in 200 zRads and much immediately make a Will check to see if she starts spreading the virus herself!

I'd really appreciate feedback on this one guys- this is my first real foray into attempting to tinker with the GURPS system on a mechanical level.