Tonight the wizards came into their own.

Both full wizard characters were tweaked a bit after the first session, when their players were displeased with how they handled in game. Both are now ridiculous damage machines. In the combat this session they both were able to consistently deal stress in the mid-teens with their top-tier offensive spells. It was quite spectacular.

The players are still getting a feel for combat, but the fight moved along fairly well. The only time we really stalled was when one character asked if there were any little fey in the area with whom she could make a deal for protection (in the middle of the fight). In retrospect I probably should have charged her a fate point for the declaration, but it was cool enough that I'm happy with how the scene went. She made a deal with a bunch of fey rats: they would protect her in this fight and she would get them a wheel of cheese.

We had a bit of a shortened session, as it was a week-night, so not a whole lot of plot got covered, but they picked up a couple of more clues, though they may not have the context yet to fully understand them. Also, there was a fairly extended debate as to what constituted a violation of Accorded Neutral Territory and what the repercussions might be for such an act.

Hopefully the next session will find the players getting a good feel for what is going on, so they can start making plans to stay alive.

Last night I resolved an annoying problem that I discovered with the skills list I chose for Fly by Wire: there was no good skill to use for a social stress track.

The Dresden Files RPG uses Presence, which I dropped because I did not really like the way it worked in play. However, that left me with nothing to control the length of the social stress track - Resolve is used for the mental stress track, so doubling up on that skill would not be a good idea.

I was scanning through the various skill entries when I stumbled upon the Contacting entry that has a trapping called "Calling in a Marker", which granted your character a contacting stress track which he could tap to make a failed Contacting roll a success.

In addition to thinking "Hey, this is a really cool mechanic, when did I write this?", it also occurred to me that this is exactly the sort of thing that a social stress track is supposed to model: my character publishes a scathing article exposing your participation in a torrid sex scandal and suddenly people who used to be your "friends" stop returning your calls and find convenient excuses to cancel their lunch date with you.

Perfect! I have now found my skill for a social stress track and all I had to do was reword a couple of things in the Contacting entry.

This also separates a character's connectedness and the loyalty of their friends from their force of personality (which is what Presence was loosely supposed to represent). That makes it possible to have a character with a vast network of fairly loyal contacts who does not command a room as soon as he enters it: consider a character with Contacts at +5 v. Presence at +5.

It also highlights an important difference between a social attack and a mental attack. A mental attack (via intimidation, deceit, etc.) attacks a character directly. A social attack cuts a character off from their support network.

Now all I have to do is get the chapter on "How Things Work" done and it will be time to start thinking about beta testing (after a round of editing to make sure I don't contradict myself).

Last night I finished up adapting the City Creation chapter from the Dresden Files RPG for my cyberpunky purposes.

This took much more work than adapting the Aspects chapter (which I did a while ago), as it was not just changing some examples from urban fantasy flavored to cyberpunk: I had to change the scale from a single city to an entire solar system (albeit a small one). The DFRPG material has the advantage of being written for an existing cannon. The writers could assume that anyone planning on running a game would be at least vaguely familiar with the setting and were focused on creating a process by which the group "Dresdenified" an existing city.

I did not have that luxury, as Fly by Wire is not set in an existing setting, so I had to flesh things out a little bit, while still giving the players some room to make Trinity their own. My first take on this is to lay out the major powers in the system (i.e. - the megacorps: DydiMax and the Altosinno Foundation), what they are like at a very high level, and one event that is precipitating change in Trinity (a labor dispute that DydiMax handled ... poorly). I see this as basically giving the players a similar framework as the Dresden Files books.

Additionally, one of the really important factors in the DFRPG process is figuring out how the various supernatural entities and groups interact with your city and who in the city knows about the supernatural. Since there is no obvious corollary to the supernatural in cyberpunk I had to come up with some other divisive, secretive thing to use to differentiate NPCs and organizations.

The solution I came up with, which I think works quite well, is to have either the GM or the group come up with a high level conspiracy. The GM, obviously, will come up with most of the details, even if the other players help sketch it out at a high level. The conspiracy should be something that drives most of the big players in the game to take action of some kind. Some examples:

• One of the megacorps is doing experiments with giving AIs direct control over individual humans' bodies
• An AI that has executive power in one of the megacorps decides to end a labor dispute by cutting off the life-support to a striking station
• Shady media producers are placing subliminal messages in their products that actually work
• An underground movement of intelligent robots is planning to begin taking action to demand civil rights

The conspiracy is not meant to be the focus of every session. In fact, it should not be unless the PCs are a part of the conspiracy. However, it should be something large that will force several of the major factions to take action and break the status quo.

Over the weekend we had the first session of the DFRPG game that I am running. Things went very well. The combat went a little slow, as I expected, but the players seem to be picking up the system fairly quickly.

I threw four ghouls and two Red Court vamps (right out of Our Story) against the five PCs and one NPC (a White Court vampire). They had a lot more trouble than I thought they would inflicting damage on the bad guys. However, I think a great deal of that is unfamiliarity with their characters and lack of system knowledge when making the characters in the first place.

Both full wizards have substantially tweaked their characters and now will be much more capable in battle. For instance, one of them now has a Power 7 Fire attack as a rote, which is going to be awesome.

I also managed to get a player to concede. This is the first time in any FATE game I have ever run that I have been able to do that. I think that really gave the game a "Dresden Files" feel to it, as now the characters are a little beaten up (one more so than the others) and the players know that even something as boring as a ghoul can really trash a human if they are not careful.

As a note for future players of DFRPG, if you want your character to be deeply involved in whatever the GM has planned, give them an open obligation to the fae.

One of the characters owed two favors to Maeve due to some of her back story. This gave me an awesome opportunity to pull her (and the rest of the PCs) into the thick of things right away (and got her a couple of fate points, which she desperately needed). It also allowed for some fantastic role-playing right in the first scene, where one of the more naive characters started asking Maeve dangerous questions (such as "Where did you get those cat-eye contacts? How can I get some?).

All in all, a great session. Now that I have set the hook, I need to figure out how to complicate things.

I am starting prep work for the first play session in my Dresden Files RPG game and am statting up some of the NPCs that they will encounter and might have to fight.

Normally I would just wing some of this, but I do not yet have an intuitive feel for supernatural powers in this game and, since I am in the process of writing a FATE game of my own, I feel a little compelled to dig into the mechanics of things as written.

From the DFRPG one-shot I ran back in Auckland a couple of times, I know that PCs can easily overwhelm a single, more powerful opponent in just a couple of rounds. Apparently I completely forgot that in the DFRPG book there is a whole section dedicated specifically to making NPC opponents of an appropriate power level for your PCs.

It turns out I seriously under-powered the main villain in that game.

I am looking at the rules for creating a single NPC that would be "Equal Opposition" for the group and such a creature would have about -20 refresh worth of powers for my current group. Wow. That's a lot. A whole lot. I am actually having trouble spending that much refresh.

I can't wait until I get to design the big-bad of the first story arc: they will have about 30 refresh.

Update: I have the powers worked out for the big-bad. She's SCARY.