D20 Multiverse Game - Actual Play

[BabbageCliologic]

Hello All:

So my Friday Night group usually meets every other Friday. On one alternate Friday a month, I host a game where I invite people from my Friday group or from my other gaming friends.

For Friday, October 20th, I had invited Xtopher, Glenn, Phil, Geoff, Brendan, and Tom. Xtopher, Glenn, Phil, and Tom are in my Friday Night group. Geoff is from my now-defunct Tuesday group and Brendan is a friend who I gamed with in high school and college.

Phil, Geoff, Brendan and Tom said they'd make it but Brendan had a last minute co-worker leaving party and Tom had an opportunity to have an overnight babysitter so he took his wife out of town. Both obviously have a problem with taking gaming seriously ;) *kidding! just kidding* ;).

Phil and Geoff showed up and I said that I was going to try a new game: D20 Multiverse game, using 1 player character each from D20 Stargate SG-1 (AEG), D20 Farscape (AEG), D20 Star Wars (WotC), D20 Babylon 5 (Mongoose), D&D 3.5 (WotC), D20 Godlike (Arc Dream), D20 Modern (WotC) and D20 Mutants and Masterminds (Green Ronin).

I told them that they were all playing the same person from each of the different genres, that they were all 3rd level with all the same stats (STR 12, DEX 17, CON 15, INT 14, WIS 15, CHA 12) and that I had 4 of the PCs ready to play: Stargate (Human Marine Force Recon Pointman 3), Farscape (Sebacean Peacekeeper Commando 3), Star Wars (Cerean Jedi Consular 1/Jedi Guardian 2), and Babylon 5 (Human P8 Telepath 3).

Phil picked the Cerean Jedi and Geoff picked the Peacekeeper Commando. I asked them to choose a common current  American name, like David Johnson, that they could each modify to fit their PCs universe, like Deffid J'onzen the Jedi. They both agreed on Steve Austin, which Geoff translated to Stivis Tyn and Phil changed into Ste Vauteen.

I also asked them to each choose a quirk that each would have to incorporate into their characters. Phil chose Interest in other Races and Geoff chose Uses a Worry Stone. Each customized it a bit, with the Sebacean Peacekeeper interested in other races from a security/danger standpoint and the Jedi using his lightsaber as his worry stone.

I started the PCs in the middle of crises from their settings.
+ Geoff's Peacekeeper Stivis was on a growler attempting to board Moya with a squad of Peacekeeper Commandos and suddenly there was an explosion and Stivis passed out. Before he passed out, he saw a "doorway" open and saw a number of Greys aliens looking shocked that he saw them.

+ Phil's Jedi was fighting against Darth Vader and stormtroopers in Episode III when he was knocked down and out. Before he passed out, he saw a "doorway" open and saw a number of Greys aliens looking shocked that he saw them.

While both were unconscious they "heard" several voices talking. "We've been seen" "We can remove them from the game, with only a couple of points lost" that sort of thing.

They woke up off a small trail in a grassy area, surrounded by trees. They were surprised by each looking like the other but the Peacekeeper played it cool. They looked around and discovered that there were no tracks around where they were lying. The Jedi used his Sense Force skill to find out that something bad Force-wise had happened down the trail out of sight. THe Peacekeeper used his sensor to find out no power sources were within 100 klicks or so.

After discussing this, they proceeded down the garden path and found themselves in a park near a ruined city much like modern day New York. Entering the city they wandered around, looking for things of interest. The vehicles on the streets were old and rusted and they figured something had happened a long time ago. No people were anywhere. They decided to climb one of the skyscrapers and were only a few stories above the street when they heard a shriek from the street below. At the street, they saw a bunch of zombies walking towards them and they killed enough to get away. Unfortunately, Phil's rolls totally sucked and Geoff's were very good.

Fleeing the zombies and dodging any more they found later, they entered a bookstore and managed to figure out that the common language in this city was a bit Sebacean (nouns) and a bit Cerean (verbs). Using this, they found out that they were in Raccoon City and found a travel guide published by the Umbrella Corporation.

They found a map and it looked like Manhattan, with bridges and tunnels of the island into more city. They decided to make for a nearby bridge (Brooklyn) and stopped by a police station to see if they could find anything useful, but instead found a whole bunch of zombies, civilian zombies and cop zombies (in blue uniforms), and old signs of a battle at the police station. They avoided the zombies and went to a nearby military armory with the same situation: civilian zombies and army zombies (in green uniforms). They sniped a couple of zombies and saw that the zombies ignored each other until they were finally dead, then the other zombies ate the dead bodies.

That's were we stopped for the night. I awarded some good story awards and we talked a bit.

O

[BabbageCliologic]

Oops, sorry, I hit the wrong button and posted before I was done.

Anyways, on the whole, I think everyone had a good time. We spent some intitial time getting everyone familiar with skills and abilities so that they knew what each of the bits meant, as neither had played the D20 Star Wars or D20 Farscape.

They liked the touch of Raccoon City and the zombies, that leant a bit more of the "Multiverse" scene to it. Also, I think that each of them choosing a quirk that the other also had to play was good, as they included them in describing what they did.

Any thoughts on this? I hope to have another post on this game in a month when we meet again. Also, hopefully we can get a few more players, to play the Stargate PC, Babylon 5 PC and the D&D Forgotten Realms PC, at the very least.

Any thoughts, sirs?

Did I do Actual Play right?

/BC

[Andrew Cooper]

BC,

I have a couple of questions.

How did the players react to having pregen PC's?  Is this normal in your group or a deviation?  Many gamers I know don't mind pregen for Convention games but shy away from that in their normal groups.  This seems to be especially true in many d20 games, where building the character is actually part of playing well.

Also, how much of the plot is/was prepped by you, the GM?  Did you have specific scenes already prepped and lead the players from scene to scene or did you simply dump the players into a situation and just react to whatever their actions were?  I'm not saying that one is bad and the other good here, I'm just curious.  I get the feeling from my first read through that you prepped a good bit (maybe even most) of the story but I don't want to jump to conclusions.

Did the Quirks you had the players add to the characters actually have any mechanical effect?  I would consider gaining XP for working the Quirk into narration a mechanical effect, by the way.

[BabbageCliologic]

BC,

I have a couple of questions.

Hello Mr. Cooper.

How did the players react to having pregen PC's? Is this normal in your group or a deviation? Many gamers I know don't mind pregen for Convention games but shy away from that in their normal groups. This seems to be especially true in many d20 games, where building the character is actually part of playing well.

For my regular friday night game group, pregens are usually the way to go. If I had to trust to players showing up with complete characters, the games would not start. Not to say that my players are lazy, they just are very busy people and some of them aren't interested in the nuances of character design. Often if you are GMing my group, you provide characters with enough leeway to customize them.

I ran a long GURPS Aftermath: Operation Morpheus game and generated all but one character. The players were on the whole happy with the PCs that I provided.

As a result of past experience, I provided pregenerated PCs as I didn't want to spend too much time making characters and the players agreed with that. Several people more were going to show up and spending all night making PCs would have been a waste of time in our opinion.

Also, how much of the plot is/was prepped by you, the GM? Did you have specific scenes already prepped and lead the players from scene to scene or did you simply dump the players into a situation and just react to whatever their actions were? I'm not saying that one is bad and the other good here, I'm just curious. I get the feeling from my first read through that you prepped a good bit (maybe even most) of the story but I don't want to jump to conclusions.

The plot was pretty sketchy. I thought of them all being the same person from different universes and used the Homeward Bounders (by Diana Wynne Jones) plot (sorta) to get them together. I pulled Raccoon City out of my head because I had been talking about it recently with a friend.

THen I let them sort of lead me where to go, with prompts from my side to get the action moving. I asked a lot of questions and told them to roll skills that I thought would be good. THen I said "Hey, you found this  . . . blah, blah, blah."

Did the Quirks you had the players add to the characters actually have any mechanical effect? I would consider gaining XP for working the Quirk into narration a mechanical effect, by the way.

It worked pretty good. They both put the quirks into the narration of their PCs pretty well. I think that working together they can make good characters that are very similar.

Any more questions?

/BC

[Callan S.]

Good account, BC! Do you have any questions about the play itself that you'd like to hear some answers on?