The 2025 Busan Tabletop Gaming Con Was a Success

Last Sunday, November 30, was our first game con. I picked up Justin around 9am, and we arrived at the cafe just a little before 9:30. Richard was already waiting, as well as Jonathan (Kojaq) who I only had interacted with online before this. We got everything set up, and most players, and Peter the other morning GM, made it there by 10am when we were scheduled to start. But Kurt, the cafe owner, didn't show up until around 11 so we had to make due with water or drinks people brought in from outside for a bit. Kurt had given me the door code so we could get in early, if you're wondering. 

In the morning session, I ran Classic D&D, using the same dungeon from the previous Online Summer Con arranged by Amae's Seoul group. This party followed the same route at first, but had a TPK in their first encounter. Four carrion crawlers took out a party of five 6th to 8th level PCs. As they can, especially if the party only has a cleric as a caster. The players got new PCs from the pre-gen pile and set out again in a different route. They didn't have time to make it to the dragon, but they had a great time anyway. 

Just before the thief misses on a backstab and everyone fails their saves (the Dwarf is already down).

Richard's Call of Cthulhu game only had one character death, but that PC died, was brought back, and died again. 

Richard brought his King in Yellow robes.

 

I didn't hear of any PC deaths in Peter's Black Sword Hack game, but everyone said they had a great game. 

Justin's BSH character sheet

We took a lunch break, and more people arrived for the afternoon games. A couple of people also went home (or elsewhere, anyway) after the morning games. I was a player in Keith's Cyberpunk Red game, which was a lot of fun. I got to play the Solo (combat character), which is always nice. But our new player David (who played his first RPG ever in my morning D&D game) was the star of the show. Of course, Richard's PC managed to shoot Peter's PC in the back...twice! None of us died, though several gang-bangers and scumbags died at our hands. 

The start of the game, in our gang's alley base, dealing with druggies

Jonathan's Mothership game was really good, too, from what I heard. There were definitely some PC deaths as well. 

An alien gestated inside one of the PCs. You'll never believe what happened next~!

Both Scott's 5E game and Elyse's Pathfinder game went over time, but this is something they'd planned for, and the players were aware of this. Scott did have one PC death. Elyse runs a more story-forward sort of game, so no PC deaths in her game. She did a think where players started with blank, or nearly blank character sheets, and had to discover who their PCs were as they played. 

Scott's got a lot of style when he runs a game. We could hear lots of laughing and some shouting from them.

Elyse's players were all really intent on the story that unfolded. 

Then it was the dinner break time. Most folks went home (or elsewhere), but a stalwart few soldiered on through into the night. Peter, Richard, Elyse, Jada, Justin, and I were there the whole day. Keith and his partner CC stayed for evening games, too, but they weren't here for the morning session. 
 

Justin had his group (Jada, CC, Elyse) play board games including Whitehall Mysteries. They also played a few smaller games. Justin had planned to play 1775, a tactical wargame of the Revolutionary War, but I guess they never broke that one out. 

London was scoured for clues.

 

My evening game was Gamma World. Richard, Keith and Peter chose their mutants and set off to explore a ruined tower. They dealt with crumbling infrastructure, hungry mutants, friendly mutants, and at the top of the tower androids intent on capturing Richard's mutated ape PC. Keith dropped to negative HP twice, and Peter once. At the end of the game, Richard escaped with his companions' bodies, evading the androids to survive the horrors of Gamma Terra. We had a blast. 

Peter's altered human scout is down thanks to poisonous two-headed bat mutants. The espers are about to meet the androids. 

It was a long day, but very much worth it. And we plan to do it again sometime soon. Scott wants to do the next event in May. I'll be back home for my son's high school graduation that weekend, but I'll probably help with the organizational side of things as best I can. 
 

 

 

Emergent Characters vs. Bespoke Characters

When people create an RPG character these days, I'd say it's most common for folks to come up with their character concept first, then roll dice & arrange, or assign a standard array, or do point buy to try and 'build' that character. But back in the day, we mostly rolled ability scores first, then figured out what sort of character this one would be. Both have their place, and this post will discuss the merits of both methods.

Last Friday, when I logged on to Discord for our CoC "session 0" (third round), I had a bit of interesting discussion with Richard (the Keeper). Although he's decided CoC is his game that he wants to stick with for most of his gaming, he was reading up on Original D&D, and was curious about some of the methods and the rationale behind the methods in those rules. We will, schedule permitting, get together and just chat about that hopefully some day soon. 

One of the things we did talk about last Friday was relevant to the task at hand. We were generating characters. Richard prefers rolling dice to see what you get, and then crafting a character based on those rolls. I'm partial to that method myself, so we all did that. In the first adventure Richard ran, he just had us use standard array since that speeds up the process and we players were mostly new to the system. My previous Cthulhu experience was under the 3E d20 rules (which didn't really fit the bill). When that adventure was complete, one of the players, Brady, took a turn as Keeper, so we had to make new PCs. Some of the players used the standard array, but Richard and I rolled the dice. This time, Richard is back as Keeper, and everyone tried die rolling. 

Even though we rolled randomly for our abilities, the other three players all had ideas for their character that they modified slightly to the rolls they received. Mostly, though, since CoC is so heavily skill based, the background chosen was more important to their character concept than what abilities they rolled. 

My case was different. I rolled without any real preconception of what the character would be. I had briefly considered trying to remake my old d20 CoC character, a young seminarian convinced that all the eldritch horror was the work of The Devil, but had changed my mind on that before I started rolling. I looked at my scores (pretty poor ones for the most part), and decided that this would be a desk-jockey type analyst for the FBI-like government agency we would be working for on this adventure. He's the stereotypical nerd. Very poor physical stats and appearance (and luck, and power). Lots of 35s. But Education is very good (75 from the roll, bumped up to 84 by lucky die rolls for being in my early 30s), and Dexterity and Intelligence are both around 50. So a weakling, but full of useful skills. I think he'll be fun to play. 

And so, Richard and I spent part of the session discussing the merits of rolling first then crafting the character's class/role and description/personality around those rolls. I'm calling this an Emergent Character. This works best when rolling in order, of course. Any sort of adjustment, including the OD&D through RC version of trading for Prime Requisite, or the BECMI suggestion to swap the highest die roll for the desired PR, move the process closer to the Bespoke Character, where the player comes up with the concept first, then tries to fit the concept around the game rules. 

Honestly, as a veteran gamer, I understand well the allure of the Bespoke PC. Players with experience know what they like, or know what might be a fun new novel challenge for them, and like to come up with concepts first. I often do that myself. Especially in systems where there are point buy abilities, or even point buy skills, this makes sense. If you have to select all of your skills/abilities from a big old list of possibilities (like in WEG d6, GURPS or Palladium games), it speeds things up immensely to have an idea of what you want to play. Yeah, Palladium is technically a class & level system, but with so many sourcebooks and so many skills on top of the copious number of classes to choose from (some with just very minor differences...looking at you, Ninjas & Superspies), it might as well be a carte blanche skill purchase system. 

Class & Level games obviously lend themselves better to a roll-first Emergent Character creation process. And the funny thing is, this method is both better for beginner players who don't really know much about the system, and for experienced veterans who are in for a challenge. The Emergent PC needs to be created on the spot, to reflect the rolls. This makes it easy for a new player. You have them roll, then you can advise them on the best class options for that set of rolls. Granted, sometimes the rolls might be best for a difficult class to play as a newbie, but often jumping into the fire feet first can be a good initiation to the game. And as I mentioned, for the jaded veteran who's tried it all, being able to roll randomly and THEN figure out who this weirdo adventurer is can be both fun and challenging. 

Quite often, when I try to join a new game on RPOL.net, the GM wants players to submit their character concept in advance. This can be hard for me, as I don't always have a concept...or rather, I probably have many potential concepts that I'd like to play. For example, I've been hoping to join a d6 Star Wars game. But if I'm accepted, I'm not sure if I'd like to play a "wandering space cowboy" or a "Jawa scavenger" or a "Guardian of the Whills" type character. All three sound fun to me. Of course, in d6 Star Wars, you don't roll for stats so I could pick any of these that I like. So it makes sense for the GM to vett players by their concept(s) before they're added to the game. Bespoke is the way to go.

In a D&D game, though, most DMs still require potential players to pitch their character before they're allowed to roll the dice. There are a few DMs I play under who will allow a change if the die rolls don't go the way you wanted, but mostly they want you to stick with your concept, even if the rolls don't really allow for that (of course, many want players to use a standard array, or point buy, so you can get your Bespoke PC). Sometimes, the dice fail to cooperate. I pitched an idea for a human paladin Champion of Kord, a consummate athlete turned adventurer. Then the my highest die roll for ability scores was a 14. My other scores were 12, 11, 9, 9, 9. Since this is 5E, I used variant human, and got the 11 up to a 12 and one of the 9s to a 10 so there wouldn't be a penalty, and snagged a feat. So my "amazing athlete" character had a middling Strength (14), just slightly above average Constitution (12), and an average Dexterity (10, because the other 12 went to Charisma), and below average Int and Wis. Not at all the character I'd pitched. 

So I had to rework the idea into a young up-and-coming teen devoted to Kord, hoping to become that amazing athlete some day, rather than having that as the backstory to his adventuring. Honestly, I can't imagine the character giving up adventuring for sports, but that was what the rolls gave me. 

While there is that down-side to Emergent PC creation, Bespoke PCs of course tend to fall prey to either the cookie-cutter effect, or the twinked-out CharOpBoards effect. System mastery tends to suggest certain builds for certain types of characters, and if you have full control (or nearly so) of the character's mechanics, it's easy to just go for the basic builds, and every PC trying to fill a certain niche will look pretty similar to the others in the same niche. And at the extreme end, you get the players trying to find the exploits in the system, designing the "ultimate" PC for whatever purpose, or the game breaking Pun-Pun the Kobold build. 

Both Emergent and Bespoke PCs have their merits and their drawbacks. I tend to prefer the challenge of rolling the dice first and then fitting a character to the rolls. It's annoying to have to come up with all that first, just to have to rework it like my Champion of Kord. But I do also enjoy the dedicated Bespoke PC options in games from time to time. That is also a sort of challenge, trying to create a certain archetype or idea out of the elements allowed for that game.

Taking Unusual Skills

In our recent Call of Cthulhu campaign, the main Keeper, Richard, took a break for a few sessions to let his friend Brady try his hand at being a game master. For Brady's game, I rolled up a jazz drummer named Theo. He's running a module that requires all the players to have mob connections, so my jazz man is way in debt for lots of booze, drugs, and women. 

In the session last week (the third session of Brady's run), our investigators have become trapped in the boarding house where the thief we're trying to track down lives. There are all sorts of weird things happening in the house. In one of the rooms, there was a young girl playing violin, and my PC and the mob hitman ended up in that room while other players investigated other rooms. The music she was playing was strange, and the hitman checked the bedroom to find the girl's parents dead with blood pouring from their ears. 

It wasn't hard to put two and two together. As the girl (ghost? demon?) started to play again, my PC decided to instruct her on the finer points of jazz rhythms. After a bit of discussion, Brady had me roll my Arts: Jazz skill, and I got a hard success (less than 50% of my chance to succeed). So Brady decided that instead of the 2 minute performance she was supposed to give -- at which time bad things would happen -- my rhythm lesson sped up her performance and since it was over in only one minute, we were able to escape the room unharmed. 

Yes, that's right. I was able to avoid catastrophe with jazz. 

Never let a min-maxer tell you you're wasting your time selecting non-optimal skills or a non-optimal background. You never know when those oddball skills/proficiencies/knowledge may come in handy!

Back to the Grind, Plus Gamma World and Call of Cthulhu!

I'm in the final week of summer vacation. As a professor, I get a nice long summer vacation, but I'm actually usually busier during the vacation than during the semester. So I'm looking forward to things slowing down a little. Not too much, though. I've got a couple of composition (academic writing) classes this semester, plus a study I'm hoping to finish up by October for fingers crossed publication in December. But despite that, my schedule, and my boys' schedules, will be regular, so gaming should be more or less back on track. 

My TS&R Jade game has been going well. Yesterday, my boys and Denis were the only players, and they followed up on a rumor that took them to a location just beyond their abilities (if other players had been there, it likely would have been fine). But with some good strategy, a bit of luck, and negotiation, they managed to complete their objective (rescuing 3 kidnapped children from monsters) and only lost one henchman in the process. 

I haven't run Star Wars in a while. Steven, my younger son, has been asking when I will. And with the new Ahsoka series on Disney+ now, I'll likely fire up those Star Wars creative neurons and get something worked out soon. I need to get on the players, though. I gave them a bunch of leads after the last session, but the only feedback I've gotten so far was one player saying, "Yeah, any of those look fine." Gonna have to pester them a bit more.

Richard, a friend who played in my West Marches game back when I first started it up (as a 5E game), and who I've played with a bit in some of Dean's games, is starting up a new Call of Cthulhu game. We had a session 0 last Friday, and the first game will be this coming Friday. I rolled up a rum runner with a boat and skill at driving a car, so I'll be the party's wheels. We've also got a prizefighting boxer, an Italian anti-mafia spy, and an investigative radio reporter as our party. Should be fun!

On the play-by-post website I use (RPOL.net), I made a Gamma World game last October, but it's just been sitting there unused. I made a few last minute updates and changes (I'm running 1992 4th edition, but with some house rules and mutations from other editions/games, including some of the house rules I used in GamMarvel World a few years back) and opened it up for players. So far, I've had five players ask to join. Two of them are already rolling up their characters: a mutant webspinner (an insect) and a mutant armadillo. I'm hoping to recruit around 10 or 12 players, since RPOL games have a high attrition rate.

Oh, and my boys are still working on their airplane simulator! They've been working on 3D models this past week. If you want to support their efforts, please check out their GoFundMe page! Thank  you!

Drunk-call of Cthulhu

 Last Sunday, early in the morning, maybe around 3 or 4am, my wife woke up and was fairly disturbed. It was raining fairly hard that night, but she could hear the sound of chanting coming from the mini park just in front of our apartment building.

Why would anyone be out in a little park, in the rain, at that time of night? My first thought was that they must have been drunk, figured the "stars were right" and were trying to summon Cthulhu or Hastur or Nyarlathotep. Them being drunk and unable to see the stars may have saved us all.

My wife, not having read Lovecraft, had the impression that they were summoning a demon or devil, like Satanists in some old 80's movie. Too bad she didn't wake me up to hear it. Instead she just closed the windows and went back to bed.

Either way, weird and potentially worthy of use as a hook in an RPG game some day.

Shadows over Ebisu (March Madness Day 13)

13 What horror RPG have you enjoyed most? Why?

In my limited repertoire of games, it's probably no surprise that the only dedicated horror RPG I've played is Call of Cthulhu (d20 version, this was with the Ebisu group and we were big into the d20 system). Of course, I've worked horror themes into other RPGs I've run, and played in a couple as well, but CoC pretty much rules the roost when it comes to horror RPGs.

Picture by Steve Burg

I'd like to try the original CoC, since d20 is really a system about level advancement, and CoC is not a game about level advancement.  At least, we didn't advance when we played it, and had no hopes that our PCs would survive or remain sane.  That's sort of the whole point of playing CoC, isn't it?  Seeing how your PC goes out of commission.

I remember doing a playtest of my friend Steve's narrative system with a zombie/alien survival setting. I don't really remember much about how it turned out, though. I wrote up a report for Steve, which I still have on my hard drive and just looked over. We had some fun with it, but in the end being new to “narrativist” style Forge-inspired gaming, we didn't make the most of the game. In the end it seemed to be a bit more aggravating than fun. One of the main reasons I tend to avoid “story” games these days.