Strontium Bitchings

Had terrific fun at Worldcon. Managed to avoid catching Covid, possibly because I was too tired in the evenings (side effect of medication) to bother hanging about in the bars and instead just went back to the hotel around 9pm each evening.

The local train with an "all the trains you can eat" ticket for £5 for 5 days worked well. Apart from one night when there was a 45 minute gap between trains, so me and an American couple shared a taxi instead of standing in the rain. 

Things they could have done better... there was no physical newsletter. And no physical newsletter office. I know - I went looking for it to give them some news. Ops sent me to the Media Office, who sent me to Information, who tried to send me back to the Media Office, then found someone who thought it was only on Discord (at which point I thanked them and gave up).

Things I went to see/did:
- Dune the Musical (awesome)
- Policing the High Frontier
- The Science, Fiction and Ethics of Terraforming
- The Lost Wonders of Science Fiction
- What lines should we cross when writing fanfic?
- Vegetables in space (one of my favourite panels)
- Ancient cultures and context
- Playing with gender and gender expectations in SFF
- Copaganda and the Judge Dredd conundrum 
- The Expanse: greatest SF TV series of the 21st century
- SF as a tool to increase STEM uptake
- The many legs of SF - creepy crawlies in space
- Women in military SF (interesting, but they talked mostly about fantasy in a panel specifically named SF!)
- played in a 2 hour Traveller RPG session which was fun
- Chemistry in SF: cavorite, coaxium and other fictions
- All the world's boos depend on the beancounter: economics in SFF
- The myth of the wilderness
- Has science ruined science fiction?
- Going up: space elevators as highways to the stars
- Strong female leads who don't kick ass
- Dr Who fans meet-up
- went to the art show... and bought a couple of prints.
- spent remarkably little money in the dealers room... having to lug everything to Mum's then home on the train rather tempered my impulse to buy large and/or heavy things! 

 Stabcon this year just hit the spot for me. I always enjoy it, but this year it de-stressed me nicely. 

Friday: I played the worker placement game Evil High Priest. Liked it a lot and may buy it. There was enough variety of stuff to do that I never felt I got stuck, or had to waste workers on pointless actions.

I then scooted off to run Vampire the Masquerade 5th ed. Only 2 players*, but that made little difference to the scenario. They steamed efficiently through the investigation, recruited some supernatural assistance and headed off for the big showdown. Lots of comments from one player about how he liked the new VTM5e system - hunger dice, 3 round combats and so on.

Saturday: In the morning, I ran Summerland 2nd ed, using the published Fire scenario. I was worried that the scenario was a bit rail-roady in places, so I'd added a few extra elements to diverge from the main thread, and I rolled with the flow and let the players invent a derelict Little Chef to pillage for supplies. While the 2nd ed system (Open d6) is far better than 1st ed, I'm not convinced it fits Summerland's mood. Twice Roger's character killed someone with one punch, which feels more martial arts/superhero genre than 'eerie post apocalypse with mystical elements'. 

In the afternoon I chatted with folk, but lack of sleep on the Friday night (too much caffeine, too much heat) meant I wilted mid afternoon and retreated to my room to grab an hour's sleep.

Saturday evening was the fantastic Valkyrie 9 adventure for The Cthulhu Hack, run by Simon Burley. We were all maintenance robots on a moonbase, wondering where all the humans had gone. This is hands down the most fun I've ever had in a Cthulhu adventure. 

Sunday: The morning session I ran United Earth Defence: You are the Resistance, with one no-show out of 5 players.**  I was worried that a resource based game mechanic (if you roll a dice it is spent) might be troublesome if the players didn't grok it and ran out of dice. However, they pounced on the opportunities to do tactical stuff and rack up bonuses before they rolled, so they made every spent dice count. Plus they scavenged for more supplies etc, to refresh some of their dice pools.

A lunchtime chat with one of my best friends, then I scooted off to play the military science fiction Operation Felix run by John Parr. I was the only player to turn up, so it ended up being a one on one game. I had a whole platoon to myself, so it played out as part RPG, part skirmish wargame, and was great fun.

I was staying the Sunday evening after the con was over, so I met up with Peter and we went to a local pub - the Puss in Boots - for an evening meal. Good food, nice staff and a nice chat about roleplaying, Ancient Greek mythology and a novel Peter is writing. 

I love Stabcon. The organisation is a well oiled machine. Michelle and Hammy who run it are lovely folks. A good pool of RPG players and a metric ton of boardgames to play if none of the RPGs take my fancy. The hotel delivers pub food with very generous portions to your gaming table and the staff are all great. 


*Lack of players seemed to be a feature of this year's Summer Stabcon - several RPG games with few or no players. Perhaps fewer RPGers are coming? I think it clashed with Volcon, so that might be a reason.

** No-one had signed up in the reserve slot, which again makes me think there were fewer RPGers than normal at Stabcon. 

Cross-posting a re-edited and expanded version from UK Roleplayers...

Cold And Dark Roleplaying game: a science fiction horror game from Modiphius/Wicked World Games
Did some pre-gens and ran a one off. Overall a decent game, but with some minor speed bumps (see below). I think my regular Monday group would like this game, and I'll run a tweaked version of the scenario at Summer Stabcon.

THE RULEBOOK
Pro: Atmospheric art.
Con: Bit too much boobplate for my liking, and there is one topless woman. However, as she fits into the 'mad as a sackful of stoats' category, with an axe-murderer vibe, it can sort of be forgiven. Sort of. Funny how it is never menopausal women with saggy tits who appear topless in RPG rulebooks?!

Pro: Generally a good layout. A few typos and a couple of things I'm putting down to translation errors. The in-game fiction is well-written and actually interesting! Bonus!
Con: They slacked off and went to the movies on the day they were supposed to be cross-referencing or making a decent index. For instance there is stuff you need know for combat in the skills chapter (what strategy does) and in the Health chapter (what a critical hit does). And it took me ages to find out where they’d hidden the base Durability stat for armour – it’s in the Gear chapter, but NOT as a stat for the different types of armour, or in the descriptions of the different designs of armoured suit. As a result of all this I’ve been pencilling in the margins and on the index, and have post-it notes scattered throughout the book to help me find all the stuff I need. Plus I did some cheat sheets.

Pro: Nice spread of character templates from social types to techy types to shooty, stabby types. There are even two different kinds of engineer, and a xeno-archaeologist. Character gen is simple points spend until...
Con: ...you get to the bit about all the gear and gadgets your environment suit (COG) contains. That requires constant flipping to and fro in the rulebook and would be a nightmare if you have lots of players and only one copy of the book. I’ll be racing to photocopy those pages if I ever run a campaign of Cold & Dark.

Neutral: Not sure why they decided to have so many stats (aptitudes) – there are 8. I was perpetually confused by the difference between Quickness and Reaction. Quickness is only for physical stuff (basically it is dexterity), whereas Reaction can be a speedy physical or mental response. But given that Gut Feeling (hunches and instinct) covers that speedy mental stuff and is also used for movie style crazy stunts or risk taking (e.g. Gut feeling + Driving would pretty much be the only skill used in a Fast & Furious movie), then I think Reaction is a bit superfluous. The other stats are Attention, Brains, Brawn, Clout and Cool.

Con: They really, really like their TLAs (three letter acronyms) in this rulebook. Thank grud there’s a glossary, as I was losing track at times of all the diseases, corporations, organisations and technobabble. One of my players asked why he had a skill in Greater London Council (GLC)! That’s Ghost Line Calculation, or as we mortals know it, hyperspace navigation.

GAME MECHANIC
Pro: I like the core mechanic – it’s simple and has some nice twists. It’s a d8 dice pool system with 7 and 8 as a success. 1 success lets you do the thing you intended. Extra successes are amazingly worthwhile in combat (extra damage) or in time critical tasks (cracking the safe before the security guy turns up) but don’t really do anything in most other situations. There are 2 mechanisms for an automatic success – spending a story point (called a Save point) or having a dice pool of 7 or more in a non-stress situation.

Pro: Cold & Dark also gets over the buckets of dice problem that many dice pool games have, by saying you never roll more than 8 dice, no matter what your pool size is. So if you have 10d8 in your pool, you roll 8 of them and the 9th and 10th dice count as two extra successes if you make the dice roll. I really like that mechanic.

SKILL ROLLS IN ACTUAL PLAY
Pro: No-one failed a non-combat dice roll in my trial scenario. Even Brian, whose dice traditionally hate him and do their best to fumble in every game he plays. If the PC is doing the thing they are good at (e.g. the medic is doing first aid), they’ll likely have about 6 (or more) dice in their pool and the probability of rolling a fail is small. If they do fail, then they have 3 Save points to spend to retcon the failures. Or they can spend the save point in advance and not even bother rolling, and instead narrate how they succeeded. On top of this, every character template has a skill which you’ll get bonuses for and which you cannot botch.

I’m totally happy with the above. But one of my players (not Brian) was complaining that he’d never failed a roll! It takes all sorts, I suppose!

Neutral: The never failing thing also applied to Cool rolls, which are the sanity mechanic, earning you first Cold points, then Dark points. The rules read as if the game should be constantly chipping away at your stiff upper lip (Cold), and eventually tip you over into paranoia and delusions (Dark). However, since:
(a) All it takes to make the roll is a single success,
(b) Mr Average will have a dice pool of 4d8, and
(c) Your character can get Cold points back by spending 5 minutes in a safe place...
...then I think this must be a campaign thing, not a CoC going stark raving bonkers in a 3 hour, one-off, con-game thing. For con-games I might house rule that you roll against Cool, not against Cool x 2, as is normal for an attribute roll.

As a side note, a large source of sanity rolls in my scenario was when one of the players decided to systematically murder everyone in the colony on the grounds that they might be infected with chestburster type aliens… despite the fact that the Medic had a tricorder/scanner which could instantly prove the NPCs were/weren’t infected!

COMBAT
Pro: Is quick and fun. We only did really did firearms combat in the scenario I ran, with a smidgen of alien creatures pouncing on people. It did become clear that the standard stats for NPC human beings makes them waaaaaaay tougher than some of the alien gribbly things. Mainly because they have oodles of hit points (14 + Brawn score, so Mrs Average is 16), and take no dice penalties until they’ve taken 8 points of damage. Some of the gribblies, wolves and big cats only have 12 hit points, and most of the PCs take dice penalties at 6 points of damage. I guess the critical hit rule – you can do an instant kill if you do 10+ damage in one hit – is the way they get around slowly whittling down the HP. Some of the gribblies have the special ability that they are immune to critical hits.

So if it had come down to a knife fight or bar-room brawl, I think combat would be more of a grind. It certainly took several shots with a pistol to kill unarmoured NPCs. If you want to kill the Queen Alien from Aliens, bring anti-tank weapons with you!

Con: One discovery was that it doesn’t take much armour to render most pistols and knives (almost) useless. This is because of the damage mechanic – getting 1 success does base damage (e.g. 2 for a wimpy pistol, 4 or 5 for a heavy pistol), and then each extra success would add +1 or +2 to that. So the marine PC who had armour value of 5 requires 6 damage to actually hurt. That means you need 5 successes with a wimpy pistol. Since the marine’s defence subtracts from the attacker’s dice pool, Mr Wimpy Pistol Owner needs a minimum dice pool of 7 to damage the marine… and in reality the probabilities mean that Mr Wimpy Pistol requires 10+ in their dice pool. My players quickly switched to fully automatic and using unfeasibly large amounts of explosives!