Gamma World Spotlight - Actual Play 2

Today was a wonderful day. Today, we played Gamma World again and OMG it was so fun. Can’t wait to tell you all about it.

So, a little bit of the background. The guy I had over last time to play Gamma World joined me again this time, but we were also visited by another one of the folks from our 4e D&D group, who had the time on a Monday afternoon/evening and was game to play. Our gathering began around 5 pm and we started rolling characters around 5:30.

We decided that instead of bringing back the characters from last time around, we would roll some new characters up this time and see how that went, but we decided to just pick up with the same levels and the same campaign from last time, the one that is included in the 4e box.

Character creation was a blast and continues to be really the funniest and most entertaining of the whole game. Each of the players rolled up 2 characters to start and leveled them up to level 2. Our characters for this game were: Seismic Electromancer, Felinoid Hawkoid, Hypercognitive Speedster, and a Mind Breaker Pyromancer. Good times to start. Lots of love there.

I have a rule for Gamma World; no player can roll the same origin whenever we play. We take turns rolling mutations and I have copies of each of the different mutations that I hand to a player when that origin mutation gets claimed. This really helped character creation random and fun. No overlap and also very little need to actually recopy everything from the Origins.

We got lots of awesome random junk during character creation. I always let my players have 1d6 rolls on the random junk table to start things off, which turns out to make for great bartering fun and roleplaying when the game actually begins.

This time around, we started off with some heavy roleplaying actually. Instead of just letting the campaign pick up from where we left off, I added an encounter to replace the first encounter of the adventure which my player had cleared last time around – I chose to plant an Orlen outside the castle keep and have him be essentially a merchant who picks up the random robot junk that comes out of the the ruins each day. My players wanted to get rid of some of their random junk so they tried bartering with the Orlen – wow. That. Was. So. Much. Fun. I did a British voice for each of the two heads (one higher, one lower) and had them bicker over what they wanted to trade and what they didn’t want to trade. The PC’s ended up bartering a tennis racket and a 9 Iron for an extra set of ammo (since one of the Orlen heads had a golf bag that he wanted to fill), but when they tried to make their way past him into the keep, he got in their way and combat ensued.

Combat was a lot of fun. 4 Level 2 PC’s against essentially just a level 4 brute was a truly outrageous fight. By the very end of the combat, all the PC’s were down pretty heavily, as was the BBEG; but, it got its special attack off and was able to kill 2 of the PC’s. That was met with roars of laughter and curses. The players ended up taking it out with just 2 of their PC’s by pushing it into a radioactive crater from which it could not escape.

So, the next thing that happened in game was the 2 remaining PC’s looting the corpses of their fallen friends then using their Radio Cell Phone’s (which they picked up through that wonderful random junk table) to call up a couple of their friends – so, out of the game, we took a short break to roll up a couple more PC’s, which didn’t take nearly as long as the first round, since we didn’t have to worry about all the equipment, which they just picked up off of their fallen comrades in arms. The two new PC’s that joined the party were a Giant Gravity Controller and a Cockroach Yeti. The meat-shields arrived to help the players.

After that, we just picked up the adventure. We rolled into the ruins and had a couple fast encounters before the night was over. S3, with the Badders proved almost fatal again, but some care and strategy on player’s side allowed our Pyromancer to live through the night.

In the last encounter of the night, S4, in which the players have to fight some flyers over a large pit, we had a terribly funny little event. After getting hit by a nasty ranged attack, The Giant used his alpha-mutation in order to switch places with the evil moth creature that blasted him with a radioactive beam; but, this switch ended up putting him dead center above the Pit, which he then fell straight into almost dying in the process. That encounter turned out to be a lot of fun and once again almost deadly on several accounts.

We ended the night by listening to R.A. Salvatore talk about his Wubba Wubba story on the WotC D&D podcast. Great times had by all. Can’t wait to get in another round of Gamma World and see if our players ever get to see that Iron King that they have been hearing all about.

Getting your inFAMOUS in my D&D

I talked a little while ago how I would love to see a version of Demon’s Souls made as a table top RPG that uses dice. Demon’s Souls has got to be one of my favorite games for PS3 period. But, lately, I have been playing some other stuff. One of these “other” games that I am playing right now is Infamous. That came out a couple years ago, but like everything else, I am pretty late to the scene. If you haven’t tried the game yet, but have a PS3, I strongly encourage you to go pick it up for $20. You won’t be disappointed. It isn’t a game that would make me want a PS3 just from playing it, like Demon’s Souls was, but it is a game definitely worth giving a try.

There is one aspect of that game that I think would be really cool to have in my D&D games. In Infamous, there is a collection mechanic which revolves around exploring the world and its tiniest minutia. In order to increase your total health and energy, you must travel around the world, exploring the city and collecting “blast shards”. What these shards are actually from is totally lost on me, but their purpose in the game is clear and two-fold: a) through them you are encourage to explore the sandbox, climbing buildings and exploring tunnels and b) they are there to help you and provide you a statistical, permanent bonus to your character.

This is a mechanic which I can get behind and I would encourage DM’s to do likewise if you have a big sandbox you want your players to actually explore. Looking at this mechanic, I went back to the old days in 3.5 D&D when you had all the tomes, which were crazy expensive, but when used, would permanently give you a bonus to one of your stat bonuses. These books were WAY more pricey than anything else in the game, but the benefit they provided could not be taken from you in any way, nor did it take up a slot on your body.

I am thinking that you could do something similar with these “blast shards” in D&D, Gamma World, or pretty much any other game out there. The key, I think, would be not to give it to the players all at once. In Infamous, you have to collect bucket loads of these shards in order to actually finally get that benefit, not only that, but the number of shards you have to collect goes up exponentially as you gather more. I think I have to get like 30ish more shards before I finally gain another energy bubble.

What I came up with for D&D, which may be stolen from an anime or something… I am sure I have heard about it before somewhere… is to have the players collecting pages of a book. Every time they complete a chapter of that book, i.e. collect a sufficient number of pages, they receive a boon. You could give the boon to everyone in the group and it wouldn’t matter all that much.

The problem that I see with this though is you don’t want to make these boons too powerful, or put too much emphasis on them for the story; if you do over-hype these pages, you risk the players ignoring your story in order to simply travel the world in search of all these pages (that might be a nice way to develop a major campaign, but not some minor quest which is simply a carrot to be waved in front of your adventurers in order to keep them moving and exploring a city or nation).

You could do something very similar with Gamma World. Hell, with Gamma World you could even leave them as blast shards and simply let them build up into gaining some new Omega Tech or some new Alpha Mutation.

TL;DR – provide your players interesting motivations for exploring your world by giving them a quest that offers a mechanical benefit, but don’t give that benefit to them all at once.

Review of Gamma World on Stargazer's World Now

In case you missed it, my recent product spotlight of Gamma World has ended with my Final Review. Rather than post it twice, It is now up for review on Stargazer's World. Go Check out post Review: Gamma World now! Hope you enjoy it.

Gamma World Spotlight - Actual Play

Remember when I said that I had not played Gamma World yet… well, that all changed yesterday when I ran my first game of Gamma World. It was a lot of fun. I’ll explain what we enjoyed about the experience below.

I will say first off that our experience with Gamma World was fairly non-traditional, because, I ran the game with only one player, and that one player ran three characters. So, right off the bat, things were a bit different than how most role playing games are played. I had hoped to have a few other people, from the group of English Teacher gamers in the area come over, but most of these teachers were either on a massive ski trip, planned by other teachers in the area, or were headed out on dates, to concerts. But, I did have one of my players from my semi-frequent D&D group express interest in coming over and trying out some type of new game.

The first thing we decided was that instead of having him play a single PC and then dumb down the fights intensely, he was going to run 3 PC’s and we were going to keep the fights exactly the same as usual.

I wasn’t sure if the game was going to happen or not, so I didn’t have time to do any prep, so we decided to just use the adventure that is included in the box, the “Steading of the Iron King.” But before we get into the adventure, and how we liked the first few encounters, I want to talk about character generation. Given that the same player was going to be running three characters, we thought that it might take a little bit of time, but actually, we were able to pound out three characters in 20 minutes – and most of that time was spent with him copying down everything about the Origins onto lined paper, since I didn’t want to have to thumb through the book during the game, trying to figure out how his powers worked, I thought this would work better than simply writing down power names onto the character sheets provided in the box (which I actually hate, but I will get to that later). One thing that occurred to me during this phase of the session was that simply making copies of the one page origins and then having them at the table would be a great way to speed right through things. You could simply hand a character his origin copy and be done with it. If somebody in the party happened to roll the same thing, I would just ask them to re-roll their origin in order to keep the party’s mutations varied and interesting.

Character gen went great. My player ended up playing a Radioactive Hawkoid, named Mr. Flibbles (you Red Dwarf fans out there might recognize the name) – Mr. Flibbles was a giant radioactive Emperor penguin, who, through his radioactive mutation, gained the ability to fly, separating him from most of his flightless Emperor penguin brethren. His other two characters, a Cockroach Android, dubbed Mecha Mothra, and Piles (as in … of leaves), a Swarm of Bio-Matter, rounded out this little motley mutant crew.

If there weren’t enough laughs had during the random selection of Origins, there were quite a few when we got down to finding out what random junk he was carrying around – included among the three characters were: 2 Horses, one draft horse and one riding; a wagon; three canoes; 2 water purifiers; and a partridge in a pear tree (actually more like an Emperor Penguin riding in a canoe inside a wagon).

I wouldn’t say that I particularly liked the adventure in the book, but I won’t say it was bad either. The first two encounters ran very smoothly and there were some interesting surprises, especially in encounter 2. One of the big failing of that adventure had to do with the total absence of plot hooks or description of the outside village, which leads into the 8 encounter delve. As soon as I started the game, my player was wanting to know about the village and I had to make up some stuff on the fly, turning the village into a make-shift refugee camp inside the ruins of an old high school (gotta go with what you know right?).

One of the things that I would like to call out as being very, very awesome were the Alpha Mutation and Omega Tech cards. I was skeptical at first, but it turned out that they worked really, really well. One of the things that gets discounted a lot is that it would be just as nice having random tables for this type of loot; but honestly, that could really slow down the game, especially when you have to constantly write down new powers and erase old ones. I think, during the game, my player ended up having at least 3 Alpha Mutations per PC, due to Alpha Flux. The cards kept the pacing up and prevented the game from slowing down. Loved it. Also, when his PC’s searched around and found Omega Tech loot lying around, it was really easy to just hand him a card and say, “This is what you found.” I didn’t have to look up anything, and he didn’t have to fill in anything on his character sheets. Awesome.

Also, the speed of the game worked out really well. After just two encounters, with three PC’s, you get dangerously close to hitting L.2. After our second encounter, it was nearing time for him to head home, so I just had him level up and head back into the village to take an Extended Rest and barter using some of the random junk he found in the ruins.

There were a few negative things that I have to say about the game though. As we played, there were numerous times that I caught myself thinking, “Is this the same as in D&D 4e or not…” So, I had to go through the rule book and try to remember if that rule had been changed, thrown out, or left the same. I still haven’t been able to find out how standing from prone works in GW. We also had some problems finding out about healing, surges (there are none btw), and using a Second wind, which doesn’t work the same in 4e at all. Also, it was very unclear whether or not you add any ability score modifiers to damage with basic attacks (I think we found out that you don’t). The reason that this was such a pain was that the index for the book is EXTREMELY LACKING. It is only about half a page and it leaves out a lot of valuable information.

However, other than what I said above, the entire play experience was entirely enjoyable. With the general speed of leveling being fairly quick, it seems like you could pretty easily make it to the top without spending too much time; if I did, I would just start running paragon tier monsters from the other D&D books for my players and homebrew them some new powers.

We also shared some interesting thoughts on how we could see running Gamma World over the long run. My player didn’t have much of a connection to his characters, so he remarked that he didn’t really care if they died or not, and actually admitted that he would have loved for one of his character to die in order to bring in a new one. We both could see running a GW game using a party of PC’s which are drawn from an organization of some kind, then have the players play new characters, from that organization, alternating the characters played each session. We also thought it would be interesting if the players were actually rolled up 2 characters each, and then have them play two opposite factions trying to vie for the same hoard of omega tech; in the final battle, the GM would take control of one set of characters and the players would play the other, winner take all.

We really enjoyed our Gamma World session. All in all, it only took 3 hours to: Explain the rules, do character generation, explain the setting, explain the adventure setup, explore the adventure setting, and run 2 encounters. This is a game that you can do a lot with in not a lot of time; I like that. It works perfectly for my schedule. By the end of the game, we both agreed that we prefer GW using the 4e rules to actual 4e itself. That is a BIG DEAL. I am not entirely sure how I will cope with that in all honesty… is there a GSL for Gamma World??

Gamma World Review Pt. 3 - Alpha Mutations and Omega Tech

For my 3rd and final post for Gamma World spotlight week, I want to talk about Alpha Mutations and Omecha Tech, two very important parts to this new edition of Gamma World. If you aren’t familiar, these two mechanics come physically in the form of cards. A touchy subject now, just as it was a couple months ago, especially with the coming of D&D fortune cards, the new CCG element to D&D 4e (I swore I wouldn’t bring that up… oh well, you won’t find a rant here though).


Inside the core GW box, you get a deck with a grip of both Alpha Mutations and Omega tech, as well as a booster pack of random cards as well. Alpha Mutations are random mutations that your character goes through, which grant some really interesting/cool/weird powers to your character. Omega Tech is essentially GW’s way of taking on magic items and special equipment. Inside the player’s book, you really don’t get a lot of equipment past the very mundane and ordinary. There is no guide for buying anything either, essentially, everything that you find in GW is going to be something that you pick up in your adventures around Gamma Terra. One of the first issues with these is balance. Both of these types of cards are meant to be used for all levels of characters, so they are going to cover PC’s from levels 1 to 10. Some of them can be quite a bit more powerful than others, so that might cause balance issues at the table, but as long as you keep the cards coming in and going out, that balance issue shouldn’t last too long (you also always have the option of holding out extremely powerful cards and giving them to players only in certain special situations).


Alpha Mutations have a few interesting mechanics that go along with them which give your characters new mutations, trading out old ones. My favorite mechanic in pretty much all of GW is the idea of Alpha Flux, which essentially equates to a critical failure mechanic. When you roll a natural 1 on any d20 roll, you trade out one of your Alpha Mutations for a new one. This makes rolling a natural 1 something interesting and potentially sad, but not game breaking or a pain. I like the weapon break mechanic that is presented in 4e Dark Sun, but I like this mechanic a lot more. It keeps the game random and active and makes rolling those critical failures a potential upgrade to your character, rather than something that simply gets in their way.


Omega tech on the other hand, seems a bit more bland. I like the idea that you can overcharge certain Omega tech in order to get more than one use out of a particular piece of gear in a turn, but at the same time, I think that temptation will most of the time go unnoticed. I don’t know many people who would risk losing their Omega tech in order to use it more than once in an encounter. I could see myself using a piece of really awesome Omega tech in emergency situations in order to bring a creature down that in one turn might kill my character, but other than those situations, I wouldn’t want to lose my Hypno Ray, just because I want to stun a couple more creatures. Did I forget to mention that some of these cards are pretty broken?


One of the problems I see with these cards is the idea of stacking your deck. You don’t have to have many cards in a single deck of Alpha Mutations or Omega tech, so allowing your players to build their own tiny deck of stuff, then draw from that, will see your characters gaining the same kind of stuff over and over again, if they are so inclined to do so. The reason this is probably suggested is to encourage players to go out and buy more cards for themselves (WotC has to make money off of this after all). I understand the business decisions behind this and the new fortune cards and I don’t really have anything to say about it other than, good luck and I hope it helps you make a profit.


I say all this and I can say that WotC will probably be getting someo f my money for GW cards. One of the ways that these can also be implemented is through the use of a DM deck, which is most likely something I will want to put together for my gaming group. I like that idea a lot better. Having one giant deck of Alpha Mutations and Omega tech, then drawing from that much more randomized deck and giving these cards to your players to use, is much more appealing and balanced in my opinion. Since to run GW you really need the gear to keep it interesting and keep it going, I will probably pick up a fair number of these packs to build a complete deck with all the cards and then use that for my games; I can justify that because I won’t be spending money on stuff like Adventurer’s vault, or other magic item based books, which in terms of GW plays essentially the same role. I might even call on my players for a few dollars to buy some more to enhance the game.


The major critique that I have with these cards is that they all have the same back. If your alpha mutations should happen to get mixed in with your Omega Tech, you are going to have to shuffle through these to find out which is which. I would have loved it if they had used a green Back for one kind of card and a red back for another, since there is really no place in the game where you are going to be getting a random Alpha Mutation or Omega Tech; every situation in the game has you drawing randomly from one of these separate decks. If they had used different back sides to these cards, it would have saved me from spending money on card sleeves for these. There isn’t anything rare about any of these cards, from what I can tell, so I don’t really feel any need to protect them, but being able to keep them apart and not have to sort through them before the beginning of a game is a major pain.


However, one way you can take advantage of putting these cards into sleeves is the DIY side of Alpha Mutations and Omega Tech. Because these are cards, you could easily make your own Alpha Mutation or Omega Tech cards, and throw them into the same colored sleeves and now your DIY cards fit in perfectly with all the other cards that you might have in that deck. I will probably do something when I run GW in order to have a much fattier stack of random goodness to roll with.


One of my final little notes has to do with opening booster packs. I tried to play this game with my wife and what she enjoyed the most was opening the single booster pack that came in the box. I find that a lot of people who aren’t really into gaming at all, still really like the thrill of opening packs and seeing what is inside those packs. However, her joy was quickly stifled by the fact that none of the cards were shiny or had any art. After opening the pack, her first remark was, “I like opening the MtG packs better.” So WotC, if you want to bank on the human emotional surge when opening packs of CCG cards, you might want to put something on those cards that is pretty or fun to look at. These cards are just visually boring. There isn’t any art, there isn’t anything shiny, so if anything, the “I want to open booster packs emotion” is just going to direct people to MtG and not to GW. My wife wanted to play more Magic after I let her handle the cards for a while… then again, maybe that is what you want people to do…. Crafty WotC.

Gamma World Review Pt. 2 - Running Gamma World

I must say that I haven't had a chance to run a game of Gamma World yet.  Living in Japan has its perks, but getting a gaming group together is a lot harder.  I tried to set up a session while I was in Canada, with my family on vacation, but we never got past character creation (distractions and what not due to trying to play on New Years Eve).  However, running this edition of GW should not be much harder than running a game of 4e.  The rules are very, very similar, which makes learning this system a whole lot easier.

The book that is included in the first box contains a modest chapter on how to run the game, covering content such as world exploration and adventure building.  The book also dedicates about 30 pages (about 20% of the book) to monsters which range from levels 1-10 (following the same limitation put on characters in GW).  Finally, the book dedicates another 30ish pages to an adventure called Steading of the Iron King; this adventure covers 8 encounters and is designed for level 1 players. 

I gave the adventure a read and the encounters seem to be fairly well balanced, but there aren't a whole lot of adventure hooks to go along with the adventure, so you might have to figure out how you want to implement this yourself.

I have heard a lot of talk about this edition of GW being used only for one-off games; this may very well be true.  I could probably see myself running a campaign of GW, but it definitely would not be as long lasting as a D&D game.  However, I think you could run small campaigns pretty easily.  I don't necessarily think that GW would get stale after only 2 sessions, but I don't think you are going to be doing a session a week in GW either.  Just by looking at the level cap for the game, the number of creatures in the box, and the depth of each origins powers, it is pretty obvious that things are going to get old pretty quickly.  I would recommend that if you are going to attempt to run a game of GW using this edition of the rules that you make leveling up fast and furious and you do not hesitate to try and kill your players.  In fact, character death and bringing new characters into the game might be the very thing that keeps this game new and fresh.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that character death should be an incentive to play the game, but I would say that you might want to give a players a way to change one, or both, of their character origins, or even play using three of them instead of 2.

Gamma World Review Pt. 1 - Character Generation

If you haven’t heard about Gamma World, I assume you have been living in a Gaming Void for the last year or so. The Gamma World roleplaying game hit shelves in mid-October of 2010, but living in Japan, I wasn’t able to pick it up right at release, so this review is coming a bit late. There are a lot of people who have already caught on to how awesome Gamma World is, since the game goes back quite a long time in terms of editions, but this new version which uses some of the D&D 4e rules, which is what I want to talk about today.

The Rules for Gamma World are a bit different from the rules of traditional 4e. Although they follow the general guide, the rules used in GW are much more streamlined and simple. The rules in GW for character generation are much simpler than in baseline 4e. Instead of choosing a class, a build, skills, powers, etc., you start with 2 different Character Origins which range from cockroaches to androids. These Origins give you everything you need for your character, except for gear. [As mentioned by Dyson Logos in the comments here, in the subsequent expansion packs there are another 28 total other origins, bringing the origin total to 48]

Gear in GW is also a lot different than in 4e; instead of a host of different weapons which you choose from, instead, you pick a type of weapon, one handed, two handed, light, heavy, all of which have a standard damage range. What is really great about this system is it allows you to customize and play around with what weapon you are actually wielding. You could be wielding a giant two-handed Tuna, or a monkey wrench. It really comes up to personal imagination and role-playing when it comes to deciding what you are going to use as your own personal beating stick.

The other cool part of equipment is all the random junk that you pick up in the world. When you make your character, you get to start the game with a weapon or two as well as a bunch of stuff that you pick up along your journey in Gamma Terra. This stuff ranges from things like pack animals to generators. Figuring out what you start with in Gamma World is a lot of fun. Randomly selecting character origins, skills, and starting gear makes GW a very unique character building experience, which is remarkably similar to the enjoyment that I got from building characters in Classic Traveler. They have an interactive character sheet which makes this process much faster, but honestly, you don’t really need it. Making characters in GW is not all that hard and doing it at the game table is a lot of fun, not just for you, but for everyone at the table.

Gamma World - First Looks

This Christmas turned out to be a really good one for everyone in my family. We had a great trip to Vancouver. My son got lots of great new toys and clothes, my wife got lots of new clothes as well, and I got a BUNCH of games, both role playing and video. Among these wonderful presents to myself was the new edition Gamma World Box Set. Given how big of a fanboy I am of 4e, and D&D in general, I felt that it was necessary to give this product a chance since it uses the 4th Edition D&D rules as a baseline.

Let me preface all of this by saying that I have never played Gamma World before. I haven't played it in any of its versions, and have yet to play it in this one as well. I generally don't play mutant style games, not really out of choice mind you, I have never had anything against them, I just never had a group who would want to give one of them a try. But, now that I have a small group of people in the area that like 4e and are willing to play it, I thought that Gamma World might be the perfect game to finally give this genre a try.

So, this post kicks off my week long look at Gamma World. I hope you will enjoy learning about the game with me. From what I can tell so far, it looks like it might be a whole new world of fun. Gamma Terra here I come.

Expanding My Horizons - New Game Coverage on the Way

I have been reexamining my goals for this website over the last few days now that I have finally hit 200 posts. It has been a long ride, but I am really happy with how the site has progressed, but, looking at my goals for this site, I realized that I have gotten a bit off track.

At the outset, I hadn't really intended for this site to be completely concerned with 4th Edition D&D. However, that is exactly what it has become. I have been covering Wizards of the Coast and 4e almost exclusively over the last 2 years mostly because this is the only game that I have really had the chance to play recently.

Living in Japan doesn't really give me the chance to play too many different games, but I have finally convinced my wife to give some Role Playing a Try. However, I don't really anticipate any long campaigns to come out of this immidiately. What I have talked with her about is exploring a variety of new games and settings in order to find one that we can play together and enjoy. So... I now have an excuse to begin expanding my RPG collection.

Some of the games which I have picked up, or will be picking up in the near future include:

Pathfinder
Deathwatch
Savage Worlds
Mouse Guard
Gamma World

and lastly, L5R. L5R looks like it is going to be our starting point. The fact that my wife is Japanese, I live in Japan, and play games with my wife in Japanese, this just seems to be the logical starting point. I have the L5R Core Rule Book on order and I will be picking it up around Christmas when I make my annual trip back to the US. Now, I am going over the free RPG day adventures and quick start and I have to say, I am really impressed with the 4e style of the game. Can't wait to give it a try.

Look forward to a vast variety of new game coverage, news, and homebrew covering not only 4e, but also a variety of other sources as well.

Finally, as I am planning a fairly large expansion to this site, I am looking for other people who would like to join me in writing on any of these, or other games. If you would like to be a guest poster here, please e-mail me! you can find my contact information at the top of this page.

Thanks for your continuing support!