User:Bill/Shinobi/Session Notes

Preliminary Meeting Group A - 2 July 2009

Though I had put a significant amount of work into creating the rules necessary to run Shinobi, I wasn't married to the idea. I presented it along with several other options to Mary's Thursday group and between their ambivalence towards all of the ideas and Miles' enthusiasm for playing a game based on Naruto, it won out. So, for the next several weeks, I'll be running this.

Once the decision to play Shinobi had been finalized, we discussed character concepts and decided on which hidden village the players would owe their allegiance to. Naturally the Village Hidden in the Sound was immediately tabled as an option. I was willing to go that route if it was really what the players wanted, but after everyone present had settled on a particular power theme it didn't seem like a good fit; not enough mutations and no sonic attacks at all. The only village that I put completely off limits was The Village Hidden in the Leaves; it is simply too detailed out in my opinion and therefor too easy to fall into traps where we violate canon. Ultimately, the group settled on The Village Hidden in the Clouds. The Cloud Village has had very little screen time in the anime or manga, making it a perfect choice in my opinion. Less than a dozen cloud ninja have names; the Kazekage not being among them.

Here's what's known about the Cloud village:

• Ten years ago they attempted to kidnap Heuga Hinata to gain the Byakugan; violating a treaty with the Land of Fire in the process
• The Cloud village is currently on good terms with the Land of Fire
• The Cloud village has two jinchuriki
• Cloud ninja frequently favor swords over other weapons
• Dark skintones seem to be more common among the Cloud ninja than other villages

We're making up everything else as we go.

So far the group composition is looking pretty good. Mary will be playing a girl with partially controlled intangibility. Chief will be playing a boy capable of slowing or stopping the passage of time for a single target. Mike has elected to focus his character on swordsmanship. And Miles will be playing a character with telekinetic hair. Though not physically present, Brad communicated his desire to play a character capable of manipulating his own blood to create solid weapons and other objects. By my estimation that gives me two melée characters, one short range attacker, one support character, and one infiltrator. We expect to be joined by one more player, either one of Miles' coworkers or my girlfriend. I am inclined to recommend that he or she make a long-range specialist of some sort. At this stage the characters are very much defined by their abilities, but I expect that will change as everyone has time to develop their back-stories.

Due to the background team organization, six players gives me two teams. I could look at that as a major pain in the ass because I have to write two jonin level NPCs to act as team leaders and come up with twice as many missions, but I'm going to try and see the potential for friendly competition between the teams and the chance to deliver some more complex plots.

Preliminary Meeting Group B - 6 July 2009

I am faced with a connundrum. More people wish to play Shinobi than I had necessarily expected. Miles has a couple friends from work interested in playing and, rather than turn them away, I have elected to run a second session on Tuesdays. So far participants for the Tuesday session include Miles and John; though another friend of his, James, may be joining us after resolving some domestic issues. My girlfriend has also expressed interest in playing Tuesdays rather than Thursdays. Her ability to do so is dependent on a thrd party though and she may only have the ability to play on Thursday.

Regardless of how it works out, I am both excited and nervous about running two sessions of the same game per week. I have run two sessions of different games in a week before, but I haven't tried running the same game for two different groups. I think it will work out well because I can recycle a lot of material, but at the same time it presents some logistical problems in that I'll have to put off session notes for the week until Friday and I may face premature burnout. Fortunately I am only running these games for about a month each. After that I have to return to Klamath falls and someone else will need to take the reigns if the players wish to continue.

Miles will be sticking with his previously discussed concept. John has elected for his character to be the host for a poisonous symbiotic vine that grants him the ability to entangle his foes with an incapacitating tendril of vegitable matter. Shannon is still struggling with her character concept. She has only played D&D and is not familiar with either Naruto or superheroes in general. This has made it tough for her to choose what direction she wants her character to go in.

Session One Group B - 7 July 2009

Miles and John arrived later than the agreed upon start time. While playing at a store I have called games for this, but since we're playing at a house and I was expecting to go until midnight, it wasn't a problem. The early part of the evening was taken up with completing characters and working out the specifics of their abilities. I attribute the majority of the time spent on this to John's discomfort with playing a character that isn't all together competent and Miles' habit of making his characters unnecessarily elaborate.

When presented with the option of diving directly into an action scenario or playing a more conspiracy oriented game, both players immediately agreed that they wanted an action game. I improvised a fairly simple game that included a brief mystery and the kidnapping of the team's NPC member, Seisho Ona. John and Miles appeared to have enjoyed themselves. The plot overall included a lot more elements of the supernatural than a typical episode of Naruto, more on a par with a filler arc story.

Overall, I was pleased with the progress of the game. The John's character's ability was far more effective than I expected, though part of that can be attributed to my failure to apply the special dice cancel rule. I strongly suspect that his power will fall off in effectiveness when I do. The only aspect of the game that I found less than enjoyable was dealing with John's behavior in real life. In my opinion, he is not very respectful. He drank too much during the session and he was consistently digs for more information than I'm willing to give. He is also way too insecure and condescending. Fortunately, I don't mind working with people on personality problems. I will enforce some boundaries, and if he doesn't want to continue it's up to him.