Rich Forest Game MASTER & SW Florida

[ryanmrich]

I remember back in the day playing street fighter, dark conspiracy, vampire and more games on the back porch. Working on one of his or our or Ben(Terry)s game ideas (which have never amounted to anything beside shotgun musashi [which i never played {or play tested}])

The mighty and best game master I have ever had the pleasure to play with.

Wish you'd get ahold of me, wondering if I shall ever see you at Gen Con again.

Its really really hard to find some roleplayers here in SW Florida, Bonita Springs, Fort Myers, Naples areas. Anyone?

RMR
7653193448

[Ron Edwards]

Hello Ryan,

Well, you've name-dropped the right guy. However, you aren't really according with the rules of this site, so let me give you a helping hand.

It's easy: talk about one of your sessions of play. What was it like? I've role-played with Rich, so I know he's excellent, but you're not just talking to me. Explain to everyone what happened, what he did, what you did, how the stuff with the character worked out, and anything else.

You'll be surprised how quickly a real discussion grows out of that. Check out some of the other threads to see how it works.

Best,
Ron

[ryanmrich]

Game: Dark Conspiracy
Scene: (don't remember- think Michigan somewhere)
Theme: Scared and Paranoid

The best game master i ever played with.

Making the game come out, conspiracy theories and paranoia. Rich could/can evoke the best of GMing with music and in depth descriptions of scenes and making us all scared by turning off lights at key times and... This guy is great. I would not sleep at night many weekends in a row feeling what he imagined, living out fantasies we envisioned. he has been the main source of my role playing life. I wait to see him again, wait to see what he has come up with in the last few years.


Game Street Fighter
Scene Shadoloo fortress
Theme fight off the evil minions of Balrog

getting into a fighting game RPG is the most ridiculous thing I think I have done. Getting into the game turned out easy with Rich running it. we ran a rotating GM thing some times (each of us running a week at a time) But always we got entrenched into Rich's games, no one told a story like this guy. He could get us all together, make us work as a team, get each of us involved. The key to GMing i suppose getting all the players together, working together. Even petty differences with the players never made a difference with the characters. The game was great, he made grandiose worlds researched with the real world, made us get into Martial Arts to see the styles and forms blend into the game world. expanded our knowledge with the creations he brought into the World of Darkness:Combat (Street Fighter:STG). I was so into StreetFighter from his influence I knew who Kylie Minouge was before she had songs.

[Trevis Martin]

Hey Ryan,

Rich sounds cool. What you have written so far has me interested.   Tell me a good story about playing with him.  I'd really like it if you could give us a play by play example.  Is there a particular scene that really stands out? Maybe from one of the games you just mentioned perhaps?  It would be great to hear  not only what happened moment to moment in the game but also the out of game stuff that happened between you, Rich and the other players.  I'm always interested in techniques that can help me have a cool experience so it would be awesome if you can explain what he did with you that made that experience so good.  Not in general terms, but what you can remember that he actually did in an actual scene that really made it work.

thanks,

Trevis

[Rich Forest]

Hi Ryan, nice to hear that you have good memories of those games – I do too. I think you're giving me far too much credit for the good stuff about the games, but I won't complain too much :-)

I'll see what I can do to help contribute, and we'll see what we can remember. Trevis, I'll try to get to some of your questions in the process. I will preface it with a bit of a disclaimer – some of these games we're talking about were about fifteen years ago, when we were in high school, so specifics may be hard to come by. That may prove to be an advantage in some ways, though, since the shreds and patches that do remain are probably among the things that were striking, important, or, well, memorable. So let's see.

I'll focus on Dark Conspiracy, for the time being, because I have too much to say about Street Fighter, which we played for far longer altogether (about seven years), and which we played with different mixes of people and different variations on the rules and different approaches and so on and so forth, and also perhaps because those Street Fighter games are more tied up in my identity, so they're more complicated. I do think they're interesting and worth talking about, but I'll tentatively say they're much too big for one thread, and they probably wouldn't share the spotlight well with Dark Conspiracy.

So, Dark Conspiracy. I was probably around fifteen to sixteen at the time. I can roughly peg it at that because it was relatively soon after I met Ryan, and I met him in driver's ed because he had Ben's Megatraveller books with him and was reading them outside the school after the driver's ed classes. Ryan, were you driving over to my house to game by the time we started playing Dark Conspiracy? If so, then I know Ryan would have been sixteen. Anyway, around that age. I think as far as regular players in the game at that time, it was me, Ryan, and Ben (all around the same age), and my younger brother Rob and his friend Greg (they'd have been thirteen to fourteen). I think Dark Conspiracy was the first game I personally played for very long after moving from playing Marvel Superheroes, Basic D&D (Mentzer version) and AD&D 2nd edition with my brother and another friend. (Maybe we'd played some Shadowrun in between, actually – Ryan, was that the first game we played as a group much?)

I remember a few of the techniques Ryan mentioned, though they seem a lot more hodge-podge in my memory, maybe because from a time management perspective, I always felt like I was changing CDs or dimming lights in a sort of clunky fashion. I wanted it to be smooth, since I didn't want to mess up immersion – that was kind of the whole point of using the music and the dim lights, so doing it clumsily would defeat the purpose. As for the specifics of the music, that part will be easier to remember – I used the music I had, which means it would have been mainly a soundtrack made up of Slayer, Pantera, White Zombie, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Danzig... and various metal and industrial of the time. Luckily, Dark Conspiracy could certainly work well style-wise with that background music. The whole background music, dim lighting thing was related to something I did the same day I bought the Dark Conspiracy rulebook – I also bought the Vampire: The Masquerade rulebook. Both were new games at the time – I'd read reviews of both of them in the same issue of "Dragon Magazine," and when I made it to Waldenbooks in the mall the next time, they were both there, and I bought them and read them more or less side by side. So those specific techniques were inspired by stuff from the first edition Vampire rulebook. Dark Conspiracy was probably the first time I'd used those techniques, and to this day I still like to have music playing in the background and slightly dim lights regardless of the game. Force of habit.

We were playing Dark Conspiracy because I'd shown both Dark Conspiracy and Vampire to the guys and they'd been more interested in Dark Conspiracy. At the time, nobody but me seemed particularly interested in Vampire, to my initial dismay, but I had liked Dark Conspiracy too so I wasn't overly bothered by it. I kept fishing it around and after Dark Conspiracy one night when things had sort of come to a head and lots of characters had died in a spectacular climax involving some kind of demonic entity from the book (I couldn't tell you which), a lot of fire, a barn on a friend's property (I'll get back to this), and a total party kill or very nearly one, Ben and Ryan ended up picking up Vampire and making characters. There was a sort of natural sense of closure about Dark Conspiracy that night, for me anyway, and I think maybe for them as well. But Vampire, like Street Fighter, is a whole 'nother story.

Returning to Dark Conspiracy, one thing I remember clearly was that I hadn't liked a number of things about the system the first time I'd read it, and so (I don't know to what extent the players really grokked this – Ryan?), when we played it we didn't use large chunks of it. Well, not much in action resolution, anyway. We did generate characters using the full rules from the Dark Conspiracy book, which I had loved. But upon reading the combat rules (the GDW house system from Twilight 2000, which may or may not have had a name as a system), and looking at the damage of monsters and weapons, I had thought it didn't seem very deadly for a horror game. So, since the system was based on a 1-10 scale, I grabbed my favorite set of rules that used a 1-10 scale for action resolution – "Friday Night Firefight" and skill resolution from Cyberpunk 2020, which certainly was deadly enough. Interestingly, the character creation in Dark Conspiracy nicely complemented the resolution system of Cyberpunk – it used lifepaths of a sort that made it very difficult to max out or even get reasonably high scores in anything, especially combat related skills, so avoided the whole "maxed out firearms skills for starting characters" thing that Cyberpunk character creation allowed by the book. (On a side note, I did the same thing later when we played Kult (using the first English language edition) -- character creation by the book, action by Pondsmith).

As for the conspiracies within conspiracies that Ryan has mentioned, that's actually largely to the credit of Ryan and the players because I didn't really know what was going on either. I was already very skilled at acting like I'd spent lots of time prepping backstory because I thought that was what you were supposed to do, but I never really actually did prep backstory much. I mostly improvised based on what the players did. I couldn't have wrapped it all up into a nice set of "this is what's really going on" if I'd tried, though I always pretended I knew (and I was never sure how convincing I was). I did spend a lot of time reading the book, and I remember that the game had a system for pulling from a deck of cards to determine NPC attitudes as well as a set of little "events" or "encounters" that could be thrown into various setting types (like "On the road," etc.), and I basically used those two tools to generate stuff, along with any ideas I would get when the guys said they wanted to do this or that, or when I was put on the spot – someone would succeed in some kind of investigation roll and I'd have to say something, so I would, or I'd go put a popcorn in the microwave or grab a snack or get a glass of water or change the CD that was playing or mess with the lights or otherwise do something to stall for a few seconds while I thought of something.

But there was no real, coherent conspiratorial plot in the sense of something I'd planned ahead for. Sometimes I had a flash of insight about the connections between some things, or sometimes the guys would be doing that thing of talking in character about what could be going on and someone would say something I thought made total sense. Often I didn't come up with anything at that moment so I just sort of arbitrarily put something in, something a little vague or a little weird or a little disconnected, and I hoped that someone (maybe even me!) would figure out something before the next "clue" had to be revealed. I spent a lot of time thinking about gaming back then, but it was more often spent making characters or fiddling with the rules than "prepping a game" in the sense I led people to believe I was prepping a game.

None of this was particularly purposeful -- while I did read GM advice sections from various games and try to incorporate things that seemed to make sense, I was not particularly analytical about game sessions. There was, I think, a lot of "thrashing around" on my part as far as play was concerned, and I didn't feel that I had clear techniques that worked consistently. It's almost deceptive to phrase it that way, though, because it never even would have occurred to me to think about it in those terms. 

But I always, always pretended I knew what was going on. Because the GM is supposed to know what's going on, right? That's certainly what my game books were telling me, anyway. And I had no reason not to believe it.

Now as for specifics – as far as scenes go, I personally only remember shreds and patches. What I do remember is that each player's first character was himself. In the future of Dark Conspiracy. And we ran the game in our own home town. In the future of Dark Conspiracy. (This idea was inspired by some stuff in the Marvel Superheroes supplement "Avengers Assembled," which had offered a similar idea for playing your own "West Coast Avengers" type of Avengers franchise, in your home town.) 

Also, our future self analogs were all dead, dead, dead within the first or second adventure. I had at the time been in the habit of GMing while also having a PC, because before that I had often played D&D with only my brother, and one character does not an adventuring party make. I mostly lost that habit when we were playing Vampire, but I still had it when we played Dark Conspiracy. I think I killed my future self analog PC off with some monster in the first adventure, I think in the town library – maybe it involved falling down an elevator shaft (was that my me analog, or someone else's analog? One of us got it there.) You're probably going to want to hear more about our future self analog PCs, but I honestly only remember very little – I do remember that we mostly all put our player character selves right into the military for a few careers during character creation because, well, that was basically the only way to get much in the way of firearms and other fighting skills in that character creation system, and those seemed important. I don't remember anyone being particularly attached to their future self characters, and I don't remember anyone being particularly bothered when they got killed by some monster and needed a new character. As we got used to the game, and started to see that character turnover was pretty fast, some people had a couple characters ready to go ahead of time in case their PC was offed and needed a replacement mid-game session. We also took great joy in writing causes of death on the character sheets and keeping them all together in a kind of PC graveyard collection of character sheets. I'm sure I still have them somewhere.

As far as using a future home area as the base, that made improvising all the easier. We all knew the area. The final climactic thing with the fire and the barn was on Greg's family's property,  and I think that was part of what gave a sense of closure to the campaign – whatever the bad guy demonic entity thing was that showed up there, it was the source of all evil in the county, and it was sort of radiating out from his property. Yes, the source of all evil in the county was hiding in Greg's basement. That was a nod to Greg and my brother, who were always talking about some spooky corner of his house that they said was haunted. I remember I didn't buy it, even at that age, but I did think it would be cool to use to get some real "spooky aura," so I decided to have the demonic entity holed up in his basement. I didn't come up with the idea until the same night we played the adventure, and I don't think I realized until after the game that night that things seemed kind of wrapped up, a realization that may only have really dawned on me when Ben and Ryan started talking about making characters for Vampire. We're pretty close to the realm of speculation, at this point, and the whole thing at the end there seems a little too neat to me, really. I know enough about memory not to put any particular trust in any one person's, even my own, but the above stuff does feel right. Maybe Ryan or other players remember things differently? It would be interesting to know.

There's surely more, but those are the most prominent of my own memories of our Dark Conspiracy play. Maybe with proper cues, I could dredge up (or construct) some more.

Rich

[ryanmrich]

How can I compare with the 53 pg biopic from this guy.

First things first. The unnamed gamer friend Rich had played D&D and Marvel (Which is another story- like Vampire, to be discussed later.) is J N right.? I had great memories of Mr. N and Ben still sees him semi frequently. We played Marvel, Shadowrun, D&D, StreetFighter and a few other games with him, he abhored Vampire and me thinks that is why we in part started with Dark Conspiracy. (good seque to the game?)

Our future selves came from Marvel West Coast Avengers like he sed but I think this vampire snippet was more a source. "I am Legend" molded ourselves as characters. I just looked into the Vampire Storytellers Handbook 1st edition at the self as characters rules or adventure(what ever that 1 page character creation thingee is called.) None of us playing had any military promises so stretching was needed. We lasted maybe 4 days in game time. If I remember Rob (Rich's bro) never did die, but was 'retired'. Someone did fall down an elevator or stairs and died, don't know who that was exactly. Maybe a disembowlment by some demon-dog. Theme lighting and lightning helped alot to set our moods in the world. Being where our characters were and seeing in life what they 'saw' really solidified our focus on the game. I wanna say something with Fire in the title by Metallica was playing as Greg's familys home burned to the ground in the game. (gaming mood music represented here on The forge?) I suppose that fudging rules for playability was done but I don't have Dark Conspiracy and didn't read the whole book anyhow so I couldn't say whether I knew we were fudging or not. Rich as were most of us into 'gothy' music, Skinny Puppy, Danzig and any album with a black or real dark cover probably passed thru our hands when playing in the demonic future. Filter's "Hey Man, Nice Shot" seems to come to mind, even if it never got played. Rich mentioned something about having more characters around to fill in when we were killed, bet I had 4 at one time. I think lots of gamers have piles of crap characters used and unused, maps piled 4 feet high that we only looked at 1 time. Anyone have a room full of the stuff (I bet Rich still does.) Always a dim light on the desk, main lights turned off, music going. Even creepy flashlight effects on Rich's face come to mind.

The fumbling with A&W Cream soda with marachino cherries was a great cover for this genius GM thinking up ideas on the spot, they all duped me. I never would have had a clue to his having to get up and go across the room to turn the overhead light off and his desk lamp on being a stall for time and a lightbulb to go on if he hadn't just told me.

Being big into conspiracy theories anyway really put my mind to work on coming up with my own theories. What if ...?

Unfortunately we never played the afore mentioned MegaTraveller we became friends on account of. Wish we had... (the next post)

I don't think that GDW's system had a name other than GDW's "House" system. I think Shadowrun was our first game. And I need more sleep before I give Rich more clues to our actual gaming.