Taking the Fight out of Fighting Fantasy

My gaming group has been playing Advanced Fighting Fantasy for four sessions now and due to some scheduling problems, I found myself as the GM on short notice. It's like a convention, but with 24 hours prep time instead of 24 minutes.

I thought about the characters and the players in the group to figure out what kind of game they wanted and what kind of story to tell. Up to this point we had a group of mercenaries, playing out a tabletop version of WOW. Since a couple of players were new to tabletop gaming I took the opportunity to show them yet another style of gaming, but still within the boundaries of a familiar gaming system.

In the party that night was a war mage who was a loyal agent of the king, a mercenary elf archer, a dwarf mercenary and a paladin of the state religion. Nearly all the skills in the group were fighting skills, with a couple of sneaking or conning skills. The game is Advanced Fighting Fantasy after all. I decided to push a few character buttons in the form of questions.

• Where is the war mage's real loyalty; to his comrades or to the king or...?
• What will the paladin do if he was faced with a hard moral choice between conscience and duty?
• How will the elf react when the relationship between elves and humans is strained?

In the game these manifested around the idea that the city-state was more than a little human-supremacist. Non-humans are tolerated because they do the degrading jobs and can be skilled cannon-fodder in a fight. The short versions of the plot elements to match the questions I posed were these:

• Another paladin asked the war mage (king's agent) to spy on the PC paladin for being overly familiar with non-humans.
• The PC paladin heard about a race hate crime that left three elves dead in the street. No one was sent to investigate and the city guard dumped the bodies in the garbage outside the city.
• The elf was charged with a sacred oath to take vengeance on the killers, or on the city guard who allowed it to happen.

As you can imagine, this created loads of fantastic plot tension in the group. Our game became an investigation game, with plenty of opportunities to face down hostile elves without actually fighting. Only when some hired goons were sent to scare off the human sympathisers were swords drawn.

Now, none of this is to boast that I'm a real roleplayer or that AFF is TEH SUX0R!!!!!1! I used the system to support our game, and our game was about making stories that were relevant to the player characters and which were enjoyable to the players. In fact, I found that the system was flexible enough to let that happen in a meaningful way. It didn't get in the way and didn't feel like I'd shoehorned it into something strange. All we did was turn the fighting down from ten to three and fill the other space with character story. And this is what we found out about the characters.

• The war mage is loyal to the kingdom, or possibly his own career advancement. He's definitely not loyal to the paladin.
• The paladin has some significant moral disagreement with others in the order and in the city about how to treat non-humans, and is willing to kill for that cause. He's chosen conscience over duty.
• The elf will side with other elves and is willing to kill for them, although he's also willing to deceive them to solve a problem.

I enjoyed running this game, no question. We gave the characters some context and we created plot opportunities for later episodes. All in all, we put some story in our game. Win. Win. Win.

Lamara's character development

After the last session, and before tonight's session, I've written up some revised beliefs for Lamara. They're not quite refined yet, but I'm struggling a bit with the campaign situation.

1. Rich city folk are soft and undeserving of their comforts. I will restore the balance by emptying their treasure chests in the streets.
2. Nature rewards the strong. I will lead this group of adventurers by proving myself the strongest and most cunning.
3. The only defeat is total defeat. I will crush my enemies and will not accept defeat while there is strength in my limbs.

I'm tempted to change the second one into a belief about the paladin, Sir Boaz. Even though he's a strong warrior (as seen in the last session), I think Lamara still looks down on him for hiding behind the trappings of knighthood. Maybe I should just rewrite it as:

Sir Boaz is a powerful fighter but is limited by his rank. I will free him from this bondage so that he can be a true warrior.

That ought to drive a nice wedge into the party, in the nicest possible way, and get Sir Boaz to fight for his god rather than his king.

How To Have Fantastically Advanced Fights

Last post I said I was going to play Advanced Fighting Fantasy with a new group (hi guys!). I hadn't played it before but I've played a handful of the Fighting Fantasy books over the years. I think the additions in AFF were just enough to transition the game from solo game to group game. I can imagine a version of it without quite so many extras added, and still with loads of fun in the game. Perhaps not quite so bare as 3:16, but moving in that direction. I'd like to retain something of the character class concept that helps to make these fantasy adventure games what they are.

All in all, my brief experience with AFF shows that it's good fun for adventuring and dungeon crawling. If you ever like playing that kind of game, I hope you check it out.

Lamara

So I moved to Perth. All my gaming died for a little while so I could find a place to live and unpack boxes (especially boxes with gaming things in them). The PDFs on my iPad were cute for a while but it's nothing like a good tabletop. Tomorrow night, though, I'll be at a game of Advanced Fighting Fantasy with a few story gamers.

We're all playing pregenerated characters from the Arion Games website, but there's always customisation with a good pregen. I've gone with the barbarian and named her Lamara. I liked the Burning Wheel beliefs system when I was the GM for that game and have written up some beliefs for the character. Nathan Russell over at Here Be Gamers did the same for a D&D fighter and had a great result. It made his play experience more rounded and guided some decisions along the way. And unlike the cop-out of "but that's my alignment, of course I'm going to stab you in the back" the Burning Wheel beliefs are up for change regularly as a response to the events of the previous session.

It's been a while since I played a barbarian character and I don't want to fall back on the usual tropes of Conan. In some parts of the world a barbarian is simply someone who lives outside cities and/or civilisation. I heard a story somewhere that the name comes from the derogatory words used by ancient Greeks for the speech of non-Greeks: bar bar bar bar bar. Just noises, not "proper" language.

So, Lamara is going to be derived from images of the ancient world, as a mash-up of Amazonian, Trojan and possibly Hunnish influences, depending on the climate of the setting. Maybe she'll need to carry furs, or maybe it'll be too warm for that. Regardless, she's going to look fierce and practical. I imagine tattoos and paint on her skin, bare arms and legs for ease of movement, maybe some torso armour, a weapon and a shield, long hair tied in braids or perhaps very short hair except for a top knot.

Definitely not Red Sonja.

And since I went to the trouble of thinking what she looks like, here are the more important things: the beliefs.

• Rich city folk don't deserve their wealth. I'll gladly separate them from it, through hard work, and make sure it goes to someone deserving.
• Nature seeks harmony in body and spirit. I will strive to move with nature, not against it.
• I will defeat my enemies with same measure of honour they show in the fight.

As always, religion is everywhere in my games. She's an animist, but nothing yet to include as powerful as a belief. I could re-write the second one to explicitly include it. Let's see how the first session goes.