Lacking Natural Simplicity (Posts about toon)https://tkurtbond.github.io/categories/toon.atom2024-01-23T18:49:42ZT. Kurt BondNikolaTurkey Day Toonhttps://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2009/11/26/turkey-day-toon-2009/2009-11-26T10:00:00-05:002009-11-26T10:00:00-05:00T. Kurt Bond<p>L.B. decided she wanted to play <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/pages/roleplaying-games-played-with-the-kids/#toon">Toon</a> so much that she was willing to
be the Animator and run the game for <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/categories/cat_gaming/actual-play/the-kids/">the kids</a>; She came up the
idea of a holiday-themed adventure and pre-generated characters, and I
helped her with some of the game system details. She came up with a
scenario: a premise, a list of locations, and obstacles at each.</p>
<section id="attending">
<h2>Attending</h2>
<p>Clockwise starting with the Animator:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>L.B. — the Animator</p></li>
<li><p>E.A. — Rachel Rabbit</p></li>
<li><p>M.A. — Pete Pig</p></li>
<li><p>T.A. — Chris the Chicken</p></li>
<li><p>T.K.B. & D.B. — Pat the Pilgrim</p></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="actual-play">
<h2>Actual Play</h2>
<p>E.A., M.A., and T.A. came over to play Thanksgiving morning to play
before heading next door to the holiday meal at Grandma's.</p>
<p>Not long after we started D.B. arrived, looking for his cousins, and
since we were playing, I bowed out and handed Pat the Pilgrim over to
Dan.</p>
<p>The kids all seemed to be having fun, and L.B. said she enjoyed
running the game, although she did say that playing was more fun.</p>
</section>Toon: Car Blazers!, Session #2https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2009/03/29/toon-car-blazers-session-2/2009-03-29T13:30:00-05:002009-03-29T13:30:00-05:00T. Kurt Bond<p>On Sunday the kids came over after lunch to play <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/pages/roleplaying-games-played-with-the-kids/#toon">Toon</a> again.</p>
<aside class="admonition admonition-spoilers">
<p class="admonition-title">Spoilers!</p>
<p>“Car Blazers”, <em>Toon</em>, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.sjgames.com/">Steve Jackson Games</a></p>
</aside>
<section id="attending">
<h2>Attending</h2>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>T.A. played Nektar</p></li>
<li><p>E.A. played Betheny</p></li>
<li><p>L.B. played Erica</p></li>
<li><p>M.A. played Gorge (pronounced “George”)</p></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="actual-play">
<h2>Actual Play</h2>
<p>The characters followed the Teleks to the <em>Tooth Decay</em>, where Nektar
kept trying to keep them away from the ship. Luckily by the time the
others caught on they were too close and got snagged by the arm.
Inside they wasted no time aggravating Bob, so when Torgo told them
he'd be sending troops to imprison them Bob dumped them out of the
<em>Tomato</em> and told them they were contractually obligated to foil
Torgo's fiendish plans. They went out into the corridor and were
immediately run over by the robot car carrying fruits, and were
riding it back to the source when a ragged dentist spotted them and
jumped and grabbed Bethany off Erica's back, tucking and rolling into
a nearby bubble. The others followed quickly, and soon everyone found
themshelves the targets of primitive dentists. At one point everybody
was being dragged by one or more dentist toward dilapidated dentist
chairs of one unpleasant sort or another, but in the end only Betheny
ended up in a chair and had her teeth drilled — after being
anesthetized, of course! It was at this point that a terrible noise
was heard in the distance and the dentists and their chairs and even
some of the trees ran off.</p>
<p>And that's where we left them for the time being.</p>
</section>
<section id="aftermath">
<h2>Aftermath</h2>
<p>As usual I found <em>Toon</em> to be very tiring to run, but worth it.</p>
</section>Toon: Car Blazers!, Session #1https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2009/03/28/toon-car-blazers-session-1/2009-03-28T22:00:00-05:002009-03-28T22:00:00-05:00T. Kurt Bond<aside class="admonition admonition-spoilers">
<p class="admonition-title">Spoilers!</p>
<p>“Car Blazers”, <em>Toon</em>, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.sjgames.com/">Steve Jackson Games</a></p>
</aside>
<p>L.B. <em>really</em> wanted to play <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/pages/roleplaying-games-played-with-the-kids/#toon">Toon</a> again, but I wanted to try
something different from the one-shots we'd been doing, so I looked
through the rulebook and found a cartoon series that looked fun: “Car
Blazers!”.</p>
<section id="attending">
<h2>Attending</h2>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>T.A.</p></li>
<li><p>E.A.</p></li>
<li><p>M.A.</p></li>
<li><p>L.B.</p></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="character-creation">
<h2>Character Creation</h2>
<p>For some reason Toon and Buggin' are the games we've done
character creation in the most. (For the <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/pages/roleplaying-games-played-with-the-kids/#savage-worlds">Savage Worlds</a> games I've
been letting them choose from pregenerated characters, probably
because most of them have been one-shots.)</p>
<p>We spent most of the evening doing character creation, and
everybody ended up with neat characters.</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>T.A. created Nektar, a three foot tall blue alien with golden eyes
and antennae like Shrek's who was kidnapped and forced to join the
Car Blazers and who just wants to escape.</p></li>
<li><p>E.A. created Betheny, a 2 inch tall mini-me with wings who always has
to be in the middle of things and joined the Car Blazers because she
didn't like the orphanage, and who with a Muscle of 3 ended up the
strongest character!</p></li>
<li><p>L.B. created Erica, a bunny with a jetpack who was in it for the
carrots, belives everybody should have a special blankie, and who
has the urge to defeat villans and protect friends and their
possessions.</p></li>
<li><p>M.A. created Gorge (pronounced “George”), an alien from the sun, a
humanoid solar flare with a belt with two holsters and flame guns
who joined the Car Blazers to get to burn things.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>E.A. started the orphanage idea, and when every single last one of
them rolled a 3+6=9 for Hit Points, I decided that they must have all
been orphans from different orphanages that the routine medical workup
on joining the Car Blazers proved conclusively that they were
quadruplets separated at birth!</p>
<p>I got the kids to laugh uproariously even before character generation
was over. E.A. kept going on about how horrible the orphanage had
been, and everytime she did an orphanage matron would pop out of
nowhere, show evidence that the orphanage had actually been a great
place, and then disappear. E.A. kept making up things that were more
and more difficult to disprove, and the orphanage matron would go to
more and more absurd lengths to disprove them, pulling the younger
Betheny out of pictures of luxury and comparing DNA from her blood to
that of the older Betheny, etc. This was really fun, and helped keep
character generation from dragging too much.</p>
<p>T.A., an alien, wanted to make sure that the Car Blazers' unbreakable 5-year
contract used normal-length years — which made me laugh sinisterly.</p>
</section>
<section id="actual-play">
<h2>Actual Play</h2>
<p>After character creation we only had 45 minutes to play, but we went
ahead and started on the “Car Blazers” Series Pilot. They got
introduced to the Teleks and eventually blew two of their battleships
to pieces, and then spotted two other Telek ships leaving the system,
and that's where we left them for that evening.</p>
</section>Toon: The Tomb of Throckmorton P. Ruddygorehttps://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2009/01/02/toon-the-tomb-of-throckmorton-p-ruddygore/2009-01-02T20:00:00-05:002009-01-02T20:00:00-05:00T. Kurt Bond<p>So, one of the things L.B. really wanted to do this winter vacation
was play <a class="reference external" href="http://sjgames.com/toon/"><em>Toon</em></a> with the <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/categories/cat_gaming/actual-play/the-kids/">kids</a>. Unfortunately, since I'd been so bad
about getting things prepared and even worse getting things scheduled,
we almost didn't get to play. We did get to play a short <em>Toon</em>
session, though, while visiting C.P.B., my older brother, and his
family.</p>
<p>The roster was:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>L.B., I think playing a chocolate loving bear</p></li>
<li><p>C.P.B. and M.B., playing an elf named Ralph</p></li>
<li><p>D.B., playing a hovering suit of plate armor</p></li>
</ul>
<p><em>Toon</em>, as an inherently comic game, is hard for me to prepare and run.
Luckily, it has a very useful “Adventure Generator”, and I had used it
earlier to get some general ideas, and I wrote a few paragraphs in my
notebook about them and picked and adapted some characters from the many
NPCs in the <em>Toon</em> rulebook. When we finally got around to playing we
didn't have time to create new PCs, so I just passed out some old
character sheets, and they all picked toons they'd created in earlier
sessions, and away we went. I pretty much improvised on the stuff
from my notebooks, and the kids seemed to have fun.</p>Gaming Weekend: 2008/07/20: Toon & Savage Worlds: Reflectionshttps://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/07/20/gaming-weekend-2008-07-20-part2/2008-07-20T00:00:03-05:002008-07-20T00:00:03-05:00T. Kurt Bond<section id="reflections">
<h2>Reflections</h2>
<p>I was trying out some new technology (for me): using printable
PDF tiles from <a class="reference external" href="http://www.skeletonkeygames.com/">Skeleton Key Games</a> (SKG) for the battle mats. I
especially like the SKG tiles for a couple of reasons. First, the
tile graphics in the PDF files can be easily extracted (just
right-click and choose copy) and munged to produce custom tiles.
Secondly, the tile sets include thumbnail catalogs of the tiles, which
can easily be extracted and added to the tilesets of programs like
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.dungeonmapping.com/df/public_html/">DungeonForge</a>. This makes it a lot easier to design the map layouts
to begin with (virtual tile flipping replaces physical tile flipping)
and makes it easy to produce small scale maps for reference for laying
out the tiles on the table by exporting the maps from DungeonForge as
<code class="docutils literal">.PNG</code> files and adding labels with the tile numbers with the GIMP.
(This is especially useful when using wilderness tiles!) On the
printed tiles I wrote the tile number on the back, again to make
things easier when laying them out on the table.</p>
<p>Overall the tiles worked pretty well. The worst problem was that the
tiles tended to curve up at the edges, a common problem with cardstock
printed on inkjet printers: as the large surface area of ink dries the
edges curl up. This didn't prevent their use, and curling them in the
opposite direction before laying them out helped, but I think I'll try
laminating them and see if that helps. My first map designs using the
tiles were not as interesting as I wanted, but the tiles themselves
looked good and worked pretty well. The <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/categories/cat_gaming/actual-play/the-kids/">kids</a> occasionally dislodged
the tiles a little, but that was easily fixed, and once while dealing
initiative cards I accidently slide one under the tiles, which got a
laugh.</p>
<p>After we played I redesigned the maps to give a more dynamic
environment, since I'm planning on running “The Eternal Nazi” for
another other gaming group. I got a couple more of the SKG sets, and
used GIMP to make three custom tiles. This let me make a much more
interesting environment. Part of the problem I had with designing the
map in the first place was inexperience with the tiles, but part was
because the tile sets I had were heavily slanted towards fantasy, and
I was constructing something more out of the “lost race” pulp
adventure stories, set in the 1940s.</p>
<p>One thing that I'd like to see is a bunch of tiles with items that
could be dropped on top of other tiles, like piles of metal barrels
and so forth.</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://www.dungeonmapping.com/df/public_html/">DungeonForge</a> has a couple of annoying bugs, but it's free and works
well enough, as long as I remember to save often and not put tiles
against the edges of the map.</p>
<aside class="admonition note">
<p class="admonition-title">Note</p>
<p>Todo: I'll try to edit more actual play details into this post when I've got a
moment and my notes are handy.</p>
</aside>
</section>Gaming Weekend: 2008/07/20: Toonhttps://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/07/20/gaming-weekend-2008-07-20-toon/2008-07-20T00:00:00-05:002008-07-20T00:00:00-05:00T. Kurt Bond<section id="toon">
<h2>Toon</h2>
<p>First, by request, I ran a session of <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/pages/roleplaying-games-played-with-the-kids/#toon">Toon</a>.</p>
<aside class="admonition note">
<p class="admonition-title">Note</p>
<p>I ought to see if I can find my notes for this and see who
was here.</p>
</aside>
</section>
<section id="actual-play">
<h2>Actual Play</h2>
<p>I set it in the “Old West in Space” and the toons had to rescue the
kidnapped daughter of the richest toon in town from the bandit
chieftan Big Ape, the “Fastest Banana in Space”, and his bandit gang
of monkeys, who were hiding out in an abandoned asteroid mine still
inhabited by mining robots.</p>
</section>Gaming Weekend: 2008/07/20: Toon & Savage Worldshttps://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/07/20/gaming-weekend-2008-07-20-part1/2008-07-20T00:00:00-05:002008-07-20T00:00:00-05:00T. Kurt Bond<p>On Sunday we continuing the weekend of gaming, with L.B., D.B., T.A.,
E.A., and M.A. attending again.</p>Actual Play: Toonhttps://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/06/21/toon-2008-06-21/2008-06-21T18:41:17-05:002008-06-21T18:41:17-05:00T. Kurt Bond<p>We got to play <a class="reference external" href="http://www.sjgames.com/toon/">Toon</a> a week before the July 4th holiday week.</p>
<section id="part-1-character-creation">
<h2>Part 1: Character Creation</h2>
<p>On Staturday the <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/categories/cat_gaming/actual-play/the-kids/">kids</a> made characters while I used one of the <em>Toon</em>
Adventure Generators to generate some adventure ideas and looked for
interesting NPCs in the <em>Toon</em> books. T.A. created a helpful ghost
named Jim and took ghostbusters as his natural enemies. I'd rolled the
location to be a haunted house, so I told L.B. and E.A. they were
ghostbusters and gave them a ghost trap and proton guns, and told
T.A. that he was one of the ghosts haunting the house, a former
sailor, “Salty Jim the Ghost” <a class="footnote-reference brackets" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/06/21/toon-2008-06-21/#only-temporary" id="footnote-reference-1" role="doc-noteref"><span class="fn-bracket">[</span>1<span class="fn-bracket">]</span></a>. T.A. was worried
that L.B. and E.A. would spend the whole time ganing up on him
<a class="footnote-reference brackets" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/06/21/toon-2008-06-21/#hacknslash" id="footnote-reference-2" role="doc-noteref"><span class="fn-bracket">[</span>2<span class="fn-bracket">]</span></a>, so I told him that they would initially be at odds,
but later they would have to cooperate. E.A. created Tanny the Ballet
Bunny and took gardeners as her natural enemy, so I added a garden and
gardener/caretaker to the haunted mansion, although they didn't get
used very much. L.B. created Nicole the Chameleon. I decided they be
facing an alien invasion and the Dough Boys would be the minions of
the aliens.</p>
</section>
<section id="part-2-the-haunted-mansion">
<h2>Part 2: The Haunted Mansion</h2>
<p>On Sunday we actually got to play. The ghost and the ghost busters
spent some time trying to make each other fall down, destroying much
of the foyer of the haunted mansion and turning up a plaque holding
the spirit of Prof Winterbottom, the missing owner of the mansion, who
in the course of a world spanning career had collected an enormous
collection of weird items from all over the globe and then disappeared
mysteriously. Once the initial player-vs-player slapstick had wound
down I had a delivery truck crash through the front porch
<a class="footnote-reference brackets" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/06/21/toon-2008-06-21/#man-w-a-gun" id="footnote-reference-3" role="doc-noteref"><span class="fn-bracket">[</span>3<span class="fn-bracket">]</span></a> and dump a load of cylinders of bread dough through
the front door of the house, which burst and combined into <em>Dough
Boys</em> from the <em>Toon</em> rulebook. The PCs then fled down a long
corridor (on roller skates?) and crashed down the steps into the
basement. I decided that the aliens would be extra-dimensional
octopus-faced Cthulhuoid monsters called “pluggoths” named for their
odd special effect of squeezing through any aperture (doors, mystic
portals, etc.) as if it were a plughole only an inch in diameter.
The pluggoths were using The Dough Boys to open a portal to to Earth
in the basement of Winterbottom's mansion, since it was the only
building with the necessary density of weirdness, and planning to
launch their invasion using the house as a base. Luckily the PCs were
hiding in the basement, and after the aliens did their inevitable
gloating and explanation of there plans to conquer the world and suck
out everybody's brains, it was up to the PCs to foil their schemes and
save the world. After some entertaining efforts by T.A.'s Salty Jim
using bottles from the wine cellar as simultaneously triggered
cork-guns and playing on the octopus-faced pluggoths' fear of
fishermen things moved on to a climax. E.A.'s Tanny the Ballet Bunny
had, unbeknownst to me, taken <strong>dynamite</strong> one of her possessions and
in a move echoing all those desperate <em>Call of Cthulhu</em> characters
proceeded to set an explosive trap for the pluggoths and the Dough
Boys. Unfortunately, she failed her <em>Set/Disarm Trap</em> roll and the
resulting explosion completely destroyed the entire mansion, flinging
the PCs and Prof. Winterbottom's plaque high into the air. Luckily
the pluggoths and their extra-dimensional portal did not survive the
blast. All the PCs <em>Fell Down</em>, and Tanny fell down out of the sky
through the Gardener's chimney and right into his stewpot. The End.</p>
</section>
<section id="remarks">
<h2>Remarks</h2>
<p>I find <em>Toon</em> to be difficult to run: I feel a lot of pressure to keep
up the wacky slapstick humor we're familiar with from Bugs Bunny, the
Roadrunner, or Tom and Jerry, and frankly that's hard. Moreover, I
find it hard to think up things to do. Thank goodness <em>Toon</em> has a
number of “Adventure Generators”; they really help me come up with
ideas. In any case, this episode became more and more a slapstick
Bugs Bunny cartoon Call of Cthulhu episode as it went on, with creepy
voices and noises and villains whose ambitions were only overmatched
by their slapstick weaknesses: I worked hard to keep things at a
Scooby Doo <a class="footnote-reference brackets" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/06/21/toon-2008-06-21/#first-three-seasons-only" id="footnote-reference-4" role="doc-noteref"><span class="fn-bracket">[</span>4<span class="fn-bracket">]</span></a> level of creepiness, saving
only that the monsters weren't people in disguise but silly cartoon
creatures. I was aiming at Bugs Bunny visuals and Scooby Doo
creepyness factor, but not forgetting the Tom and Jerry slapstick and
the Scooby Doo chase scene goofiness.</p>
<p>I wonder if <em>Toon</em> would be easier or harder with adult players?</p>
<aside class="admonition note">
<p class="admonition-title">Note</p>
<p>This is a <a class="reference external" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/categories/cat_gaming/actual-play/the-kids/">timewarp</a> post.</p>
</aside>
<aside class="footnote-list brackets">
<aside class="footnote brackets" id="only-temporary" role="doc-footnote">
<span class="label"><span class="fn-bracket">[</span><a role="doc-backlink" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/06/21/toon-2008-06-21/#footnote-reference-1">1</a><span class="fn-bracket">]</span></span>
<p>T.A. wanted to make sure that his character
could be other kinds of ghosts in other games, which I thought fit
in well with the many examples of recurring cartoon characters
taking on different roles in different episodes, so I assured him
that the “Salty” part of “Salty Jim the Ghost” was only for this
episode. I also gave him some temporary <em>Shticks</em> to help his
ghost role.</p>
</aside>
<aside class="footnote brackets" id="hacknslash" role="doc-footnote">
<span class="label"><span class="fn-bracket">[</span><a role="doc-backlink" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/06/21/toon-2008-06-21/#footnote-reference-2">2</a><span class="fn-bracket">]</span></span>
<p>T.A.'s very much into hack-n-slash and kill the
monsters, and like the other kids hasn't internalized Toon's
Tom-and-Jerry-like “conflict between players is fun” attitude, yet.</p>
</aside>
<aside class="footnote brackets" id="man-w-a-gun" role="doc-footnote">
<span class="label"><span class="fn-bracket">[</span><a role="doc-backlink" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/06/21/toon-2008-06-21/#footnote-reference-3">3</a><span class="fn-bracket">]</span></span>
<p>Who needs a man with a gun to burst through a
door, when you can have a whole truckload of bread dough cylinders
burst through and explode?</p>
</aside>
<aside class="footnote brackets" id="first-three-seasons-only" role="doc-footnote">
<span class="label"><span class="fn-bracket">[</span><a role="doc-backlink" href="https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2008/06/21/toon-2008-06-21/#footnote-reference-4">4</a><span class="fn-bracket">]</span></span>
<p>The first three seasons of Scooby
Doo only, thank you.</p>
</aside>
</aside>
</section>