Beginnings..

Hi all.
So to set the background, having been away from the roleplaying scene for about 15 years, in 2013 I met up with a small group of gamers. Simon was the resident games master and roleplay expert having a wealth of experience in running numerous types of games. Then there was Marco and Amy who were the players. So we played a few games but didn't have much time to really get a regular game night organised. Over 7 months go by without a game and then we arranged to meet up and play something new, Kuro.

This is a japanese cyberpunk role playing game with more than a smattering of horror. To compare it to films, think a cross between Bladerunner and The Ring. There a few reviews of the game out on the web
https://www.geeknative.com/35055/kuro-review/ this one for example which explains a bit more about it. It uses a d6 mechanic and is very easy to pick up.

Simon ran the first game having just got hold of the rules, and so we were all new and fresh and played a short fast paced scenario over one evening. We got to learn quite quickly how the basic mechanics worked, and this first adventure concentrated on skill use and combat and left out the horror aspect of the game. For the second game, which happened last night, I volunteered my services as games master, which gave our resident GM a chance to play a character and me a chance to explore some of the more detailed mechanics of combat as well as trying out a ghostly encounter.

Horror in Kuro is all about the roleplay, there is very little game mechanics behind it - no insanity rules such as in Cthulu and unless characters have certain skills based on religions, occult knowledge or similar, they are pretty clueless and helpless against such opponents. Some supernatural creatures are offered in the rule book with typical powers such as fear, possession etc. The game is pretty open ended and therefore offers a lot of scope to flesh out encounters and individual powers and provide suitable methods of attack and defense but again it is all based on the characters skills, and this sort of leads to the games strength and also its weakness.

There is such a wide range of skills and specializations available that unless the gamesmaster knows what every players character can do you can be stumped in providing options for that player to do something.

We had one character with knowledge of Shinto rituals and Japanese legends who in many ways lead the assault against the ghost in the game I ran. The private detective, who had been very proactive in the previous game with his investigative skills and martial arts was mere cannon fodder in this scenario and didn't manage to inflict a single wound, not even on the reanimated teddy bears that attacked the party.

This can make it fun if you enjoy the sense of helplessness and desperation, but because even newly created characters can have 10 to 15 skills/specializations to choose from (this is small compared to the number available) a player needs to be proactive in trying to see what they can use in any given situation. Kuro allows for some great versatility in this - for example a character with firearms skill can shoot a gun using that with their Dexterity as a base, but can also use their Intelligence with their skill to identify a weapon.

Last night we had a Fixer character with some computer hacking skills who was able to lead the start of the occult investigation. The lines between technology and the occult are easy to blend as holograms, robotics and AI can often make it uncertain if its buggy hacked software or something more sinister afoot. The players fed off this well, reacting to power black outs at first with typical nonchalance until it became more evident this was more than a simple electrical failure.

The game scenario was kept very 'in the dark' the players only found out 3 or 4 hints as to why the ghost was there and never really discovered its true motives or reason for being. The finale escalated quickly meaning that the players only had time to react rather than plan a strategy. But they did save the victim which I didn't expect, a good bit of team work and good ol grappling.

The game was set in a house and I made it very difficult (almost impossible) for them to escape until the finale, this was more for my benefit to simplify the scenario and give it some focus but they could have escaped in a car quite early on in which case it would have been a driving adventure instead. It was merely a case that the players didn't fully explore the house as well as them focusing on the creepy stuff going on around them, that meant they didn't go into the garage until the option was made more clear.
There are numerous examples in film and book where a character as if by chance discovers a way out of a seemingly impossible situation and it was this hook that I was able to throw in. In this way the party as a team were able to face down the ghost and finish it off.

It was a good way to learn how teamwork and pooling skills is a great advantage in this game. If the shinto schoolgirl and the retired race driver had investigated the garage and the car early on in the game it would have been a completely different encounter, and you have to be prepared for that sort of curveball. It never occurred to me that they would try to cleans a sword of evil spirits but it happened which was quite a fun little escapade in itself.

One thing that is clear is that at the start (and this is due to the way the d6 rules work) characters can be heavily underpowered if their abilities are low. A character with  Dex of 1 and no melee weapon skills has about a 2% chance of hitting an average target with a kitchen knife as an improvised weapon unless they have knife skills. In comparison the same character with a Dex of 2 would have about a 16% chance. This is a massive increase, and can lead to players who find their characters in awkward situations being at a massive disadvantage to even try basic combat techniques, which can easily lead to frustration.

With a new game comes experimentation and I found that there were a lot of times when I needed to go back to the book to try and resolve situations within the rules, but as a GM knows sometimes you have to put the rules aside to try and keep things moving. I think that was the hardest part of the game which is understandable considering the lack of experience with the system and also the length of time I have been away from the chair, and then there was the critical gaze of the resident GM, who did a good job of not being a backseat driver and focused instead on being a player. So hopefully as a guest GM I did ok, everyone seemed to have fun which is the point in the end.