#rwby tabletop

[baumguy]

I wanted to give a shoutout to @darkelfdice for these amazing dice sets! I’m sending them out to my players this weekend, and I know they’re going to love them. @darkelfdice’s very friendly service made it a joy to shop with them, and I even got a hand signed note with the dice thanking me for shopping with them. I’m definitely going to go back for all of my dice and other tabletop needs in the future!

[roll-for-stupidity]

An In-Depth Study On Iris Currently

During our RWBY session tonight, towards the end, the question was posed: is Iris really acting in character?

And at first I was worried. I do my best to play my characters as closely to how they would act as possible, but I know it's possible for my characterization to slip when something I would like my character to do comes my way that doesn't necessarily make sense for them to do.

But, after carefully reviewing Iris' behavior (especially during this session), as well as talking to some of the other players afterward, I think Iris has acted exactly as someone who has had her experiences might act in her given situation.

Here is a character, who grew up surrounded by close friends, and even someone she cared enough for to consider loving beyond a platonic manner, and then was forced to abandon her teammates to death or worse when they were captured in Mistral.

Then came the betrayal she felt by the Hunter Academy who refused to send a hunting party after her companions, driving her to leave the only home she'd ever known to try desperately to find the only family she'd ever had.

Then years of isolation. Iris searched for years alone looking for her friends, unable to find any trace of the group that took them, until finally she was approached by Verra.

Then things bigger than the small world she had constructed for herself began to take place, webs of fate being woven together driving her back into a group she wasn't sure she was ready to be a part of.

Finally, the feeling of helplessness at having her own free will compromised, potentially leaving the option open for her to hurt her new traveling companions, becoming unable to even trust her own self and mind, until finally she snapped.

She no longer cared. About her own life. About her goals and aspirations she once had. About happiness.

So she became reckless. Even more so than her chance-driven nature already caused her to be. She became more willing to draw herself into fights, to be the sacrificial pawn, to literally throw herself to the wolves if it just meant that all of this would just. Stop.

None of her friends would be hurt again. No one would be left behind. She'd be alone. But the people she cared for would be safe.

She is in a dangerous place mentally. And sometimes it's hard for my fellow players (and their characters) to understand. But I will faithfully follow Iris along her journey. To have it any other way would be to do the character a disservice.

I know this post is heavier than my usual fare, so I'll leave you all with a more lighthearted highlight:

Iris entered a salon, dyed her hair and tail black, gave herself the nickname Onyx and played the violin so well that she earned herself an adoring fan, who is definitely not named Cindi. Onyx and Sterling will (hopefully) have a concert when this is all over

[baumguy]

So the RWBY Vol5 Trailer is here, and that means my original theory was probably correct; we got a Ruby Trailer for Vol 4, Weiss and Blake for the officially longer-than-average Vol 5, and we’ll get Yang for Vol 6, which will be their last Volume in Mistral.

Also, a major plot point in my RWBY Tabletop Campaign is that Haven was deserted when the party got there, and it’s good to see I at least got one thing right for Vol 5 before the world I built tragically crumbles and makes way for actual canon!

[roll-for-stupidity]

RWBY Tabletop Episode 8: Lasting Consequences

(As this is the first session we’ve played since I’ve started this blog, you won’t find Episodes 1-7 anywhere on my blog, just read Iris’s backstory and the analysis in my last post to get a sense of what’s happened until now. This also isn’t the 8th session of the whole campaign, it’s just the 8th that Iris has been a part of, as our parties are currently split)

We took an L tonight. Iris took a big one.

For some backstory for those just joining us on this RWBY-based Tabletop adventure, Iris is in a group of Hunters who are trying to take down an evil force in the world, a man known only to the group as Ludus (or Lupus, if you’re Iris).

Ludus, as we have learned, has three Naturals (or Nasties, as our furry fox friend likes to call them), Ormo (Orlando), Demens (Desmond), and Bellua. Our team has taken down Ormo, then we split up to fight the other two, one cell taking down Demens in Vacuo, the other (Iris’ cell specifically) rushing off to fight Bellua in Mistral.

Through a series of five sessions of play, Iris, Wally, and Kaia learned not only of Bellua’s abilities and influence over the people of Mistral, but also of another player in the world, a White Fang leader named Zemo.

Bellua’s power is a parasitic aura that controls the minds of up to three individuals, bending them to her will. Zemo’s power is the sapping of the life force of those around him.

Bellua was able to take control of Iris by means of deception and a misguided follower of Zemo, causing Iris to believe that Zemo and Bellua were working together. But after an subsequent encounter with Zemo where Bellua used her influence to cause Iris to release Zemo from captivity after our team had captured him, Zemo’s ability seemed to release Iris from Bellua’s control, leading her to then believe that the two were in opposition.

Finally it came time for the final confrontation with Bellua, Iris’ headspace as mentioned in the previous post was in quite a dark place, but she dove into battle regardless, during which Bellua was knocked out in one solid hit by our resident dust farmer Wally’s sneak attack.

In bursts Zemo and Clar, another one of Bellua’s mind-puppets, who begin fighting our team as well as the royal guard who had by then turned on Zemo and the White Fang members after Wally released the Mayor from Bellua’s control, the Mayor commanding his guards to take on the White Fang.

Iris, already feeling an unstable, clashing mix of emotions from her past encounters with Zemo, lets out a roaring question, “Why?” to which Zemo responds with a grin that causes Iris to fall to her knees, the emotions overtaking her and causing a few tears to slip down her cheeks.

After the adrenaline from combat kicks in however, she composes herself and zeroes in on Zemo, trying time and time again to put a dent in his seemingly untouchable armor, and time and time again failing, her desperation building to a fever pitch that culminates in her literally jumping out of a window and falling sixty feet to pursue him as he attempted to escape.

In chasing him down the mountain, she called out to him desperately, trying to understand, but received only cryptic answers to her emotionally charged questions until finally she revealed that she knew he was to blame for the riots that ensued on an island called Nausse, causing most of this conflict in the first place.

To this, he simply replied that he couldn’t allow her to live with that knowledge. Iris fought desperately against him, but wasn’t able to do anything, and was ultimately taken down.

Searches ensued for her body, but nothing was found, until Kaia entered the tavern at which the party stayed for a brief time, and was told that she had a visitor upstairs. Kaia raced to the room in which we had stayed and found an old friend-turned enemy-turned friend again, standing in the corner of the room, Iris loosely wrapped in a bloody blanket on the bed.

When the blanket was removed, Iris was missing an arm and a leg.

She was eventually stabilized by medical staff, but currently remains in a stasis chamber in a coma as the three of us fly towards Atlas, the rendezvous point for our two teams.

Atlas has the greatest medical technology in the world, so prosthetics aren’t off the table. But I do worry for Iris’ soul. Before this she didn’t care if she lived or died if it meant taking out the enemy. Now she might not want to live at all.

These are dark, heavy themes for a campaign that I never expected to become so serious. But I will do my faithful duty to this character and continue to see her to the end of her story, wherever or whatever that might be.

[roll-for-stupidity]

[baumguy]

RWBY GM Ramblings Part 2: The "Railroad" Effect

Welp, here I am, back at it again with another installment of the hit series “Newb GM has no idea what he’s talking about, but by golly, he’s trying!” Today, I want to pontificate about the “Railroad” effect in tabletop gaming, and how tight of a hold a GM should have on a story.

For those of you who aren’t in the know, “railroading” is what happens when the GM has a very tight grip on the story, and has usually planned out the whole thing ahead of time. The opposite would be like what Matt Mercer is doing in Critical Role; creating a huge sandbox world and letting the players run around in it, and having their actions and choices create the plot, which doesn’t necessarily ever have to end. As a new GM, that’s a terrifyingly stressful idea. A TON of planning has to go into making a sandbox world, and while my first game isn’t sandbox-y, I’d like to do one like that… Eventually.

I guess if I’m gonna talk about railroading, I should talk about my game; I chose RWBY Tabletop (it’s actually called that, more details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rwbytabletop/comments/6kbubf/the_unofficial_rwby_tabletop_rpg_update_62917/) because, for one, it was an intuitive yet simple system I could easily wrap my head around, two, I had a group of friends I was already hosting board game nights for and I wanted to take it to the next level, and lastly (and most significantly, as far as this post is concerned), I really love the thematic cohesion and aesthetic of the RWBY Universe. It’s got a ton of tightly knit ideas I could use and mine from; I really wanted to tell a story set in that world.

Because RWBY is such a tightly knit story, it makes sense that the story I wanted to tell would involve railroading the players to a certain extent; if they decided they didn’t want to go after the mysterious Ludus (the BBEG of my campaign, that even after eight sessions they still don’t know a ton about), that’d be it. I wouldn’t have my story. But, I don’t want to always railroad the players in everything they do; that just wouldn’t be fun. So I’ve created a faux sandbox system via Roll20, in that I give them a world or city map, set out a handful of locations, and let them visit and discover those locations as they see fit. Then, I just have an “all roads lead to” scenario in mind for the end of that “chapter” of the story. But, depending on the player’s choices and where they visit and when, that end scenario could be WILDLY different. It’ll still involve Big Bad X and Shocking Reveal Y, but everything else is up to the players. One of my favorite parts is the collaborative storytelling aspect; picking up what the players are giving me.

But inevitably, you have a day like today. We had a session that I personally wasn’t the proudest of; I had an entire city of stuff for the players to choose from, but I felt like I did a bad job in actually making them want to explore it. Basically, there was a lot of me railroading the campaign because the players, for whatever reason, weren’t giving me a whole lot of input. They fought the giant monster they were asked to kill last session, went straight to the quest giver, and dropped off their proof of kill; they went straight to a local inn for an early night’s sleep, passing by the opportunity to talk to a rookie thief who wanted help catching a big score, and most frustratingly, when they were interacting with NPC’s, I felt like I was doing all of the talking. This was probably a combo of a few things; tonight was a weird night at a weird time, right in the middle of the day between everyone’s shifts (4pm to 7:30pm). The night started off halfway through a battle from two weeks ago because we had work interrupt it. And I was doing a bad job making the world interesting enough for them to interact with. Because of that, I basically railroaded them into a fight they shouldn’t have had; I had designed it to be the first fight they had in Vacuo, but last time, they surprised me and went off the rails; that’s what started the side quest to kill the giant monster. Instead, a mercenary group and that mission was their intro.

It resulted in a very forced confrontation because I wasn’t sure what to do, and in hindsight, I should have re-introduced a certain character I’ve been hyping, and it would have fixed all of my problems. They wouldn’t have gotten the story as I had originally planned it, and they wouldn’t have gotten all of the details, but that would have just meant they could continue to figure them out later.

The more I think about it, the more I think I should have scrapped my original plan for Vacuo and supported them in what the players were deciding. I did have huge story reveals that I was super excited to give out, but they would have gotten them eventually, anyways. I was too gung ho about a certain scenario, even though it no longer made sense, either thematically, or as part of the plot.

Obviously, I’m still trying to find a nice balance, but I’ll get there. I do think these posts are gonna help me get better, because it forces me to critically think about what I’ve been doing and where I went wrong. But anyways, I’ve rambled enough for now; thanks for actually putting up with all of this. Here’s another cookie, just for you (::)

[baumguy]

RWBY GM Ramblings Part 1: Soundscaping

So for the last few months I've been GM'ing a RWBY Tabletop Adventure, and it's been quite a wild ride. I'm gonna start posting my "previously on RWBY Tabletop..." recaps and some random GM thoughts I've been having, just because I actually need to get back in the habit of posting stuff I write, because if I post it, I'll actually put in effort and get better at it, and I'll be able to look back at it for future reference, yadda yadda, etc. In the meantime, you're stuck with my latest experimentation: Finding believable soundscapes, and (most importantly) actually remembering to use them! So far, my relation with soundscapes has been rocky at best. For example, my original idea of combat music was originally just putting an instrumental version of "Caffeine" from the RWBY Soundtrack on repeat for the duration. For those of you who know, please forgive me, it was my first GM session ever. For those of you who don't, let me tell you why that's a TERRIBLE idea. First off, it's a three minute song. Second off, combats can last, like, multiple hours. After hearing the same song thirty times in one combat, no matter how badass the song is (and trust me, Caffeine is THAT badass), it gets on everyone's nerves. Not only that, but Caffeine isn't MADE for Tabletop gaming. This is the essence of what I'm really just starting to wrap my head around now. Good tabletop soundscapes can't just be any music; most music produced today has hooks, attention grabbers. It wants you to pay attention to it. But in a tabletop game, you don't want your players to be paying attention to your music choice; yoi want them to be focusing on their character and the world we've created around them, not the music itself. Tabletop audio needs to be supplementive, it needs to work on a subconcious level to help settle the characters into their surroundings. Caffeine doesn't fit that at all. Not only that, but when I first started out playing with soundscapes (Disclaimer, I'm doing all of this via Roll20.net's Jukebox now), I'd have a relatively good one picked out for the first area... And then the party would move on, and I'd totally forget to update it, and usually just turn it off and forget about soundscapes for rest of the game. I've had eight sessions now, and I'm still struggling to remember to add in my now slightly better tham before soundscapes when we change areas. Actually, I just realized I can write GM Notes on each map, and I'm totally gonna write myself remimders to do that! Huzzah, I had a productive thought just now! So, how am I gonna do better this next session? A combo of three things: Getting better at picking out music from Roll20's Jukebox, picking out music specifically made for Tabletop gaming from independent artists (Kevin Macleod of Incompetech.com, and Jeremiah George and his incredible orchestral RWBY battle remixes on Youtube, seriously, check him out right now: https://youtu.be/UAAGe0OogjI), and straight up stealing some of the stuff Matt Mercer uses for Critical Role. That dude is a better GM than I will ever be, so copying ideas from him while I'm still a newb is an A+ strategy. Also, I found an INCREDIBLE app called Syrinscape (syrinscape.com) which uses computer generation to create realistic and intuitive soundscapes based off of moods and essences. I cannot explain it to it's full glory, and I've only just now started playing with it myself, but I'm really looking forward to spending more time with it moving forward. Anyways, these have been my random ramblings and the first of what I hope to be many posts detailing my journey as a GM. I've also got a lot of thoughts on the "On the rails vs. Flying by the seat of your pants" spectrum (basically how linear vs. open world the campaign is) and finding that sweet spot between combat and world building (hint: all combat all the time is a bad idea, mmmkay). And a lot of this might be super basic, but I've played like two sessions of DND in my whole life, and I'm suddenly GM'ing for six people. There's a learning curve, and these posts will be my attempt at staying on top of it. Anyways, you made it this far through this wild audio adventure, so you know what? Here's a cookie for you: (::) And, shhhh, don't tell anyone, but you're my favorite. Yeah, really. Thanks for reading (and sorry again, I've already gotten China's call, they'll have their wall back soon enough)!