Tag: Jeff Johnston

Last year when I ran The Crucible (Solid Steel Wrestling’s version of the Royal Rumble) it was pretty fun, but the…

Last year when I ran The Crucible (Solid Steel Wrestling’s version of the Royal Rumble) it was pretty fun, but the…

Last year when I ran The Crucible (Solid Steel Wrestling’s version of the Royal Rumble) it was pretty fun, but the usual tactic of “wait for momentum to run down before revealing the winner” didn’t work. My guys were working the system hard to gain momentum to keep themselves in the ring, because they didn’t know who was scheduled to win.

So this year, when we ran The Foundry (Solid Steel’s Elimination Chamber), I decided to try something different. While the characters knew who was scheduled to win, I wanted to preserve some mystery for the players. Here’s what I did:

Everyone got a tri-folded index card with their name on the front.

Opening the first fold revealed the order that their unbreakable iron portcullis would rise and they would be allowed into the cage. Some of them also included helpful hints or swerves.

The wrestling worked as normal, except that rolling a 10+ on your Wrestling move had an additional option: try for a Finisher. Someone choosing that option would get to roll their Finisher and apply the effects, but (just like the Indy/Spotfest matches from WWW:II) the victim would be able to pay Momentum to interrupt and kick out.

However, the first time someone got hit by a finisher, they opened up the second fold in their card, which revealed a set of circumstances that would prevent them from spending momentum to save themselves.

So, for example, the first fold on the Monster’s card said that he would be entering 4th, but also reminded him that breaking the “unbreakable” iron portcullis was a feat of strength.

The second fold revealed that he could spend Momentum to avoid being eliminated until everyone active in the ring had hit him with a Finisher. (The idea here was to do the spot where the big guy enters and wrecks face and everyone has to work together to take him down.)

Other conditions were things like “after one last double-team with your old partner” (for a tag team that was ending) and “when the Monster puts you down”.

In testing, it seemed to work pretty well! The players all appeared to get into it, and it was fun watching them hit finishers, study each other’s reactions, and slowly start to figure out how the match was booked.

If anyone else is inspired to try this or something similar, I’d love to hear how it goes.

(Thanks to JohnManfried Hill, Edward Burke, Wayne Wyant, T.J. Tague, and Jason Blankenship who tested this out for me.)

I had the pleasure of kicking off our new WWW RPG game on Saturday at a friend’s party, co-GMing with Wayne Wyant.

I had the pleasure of kicking off our new WWW RPG game on Saturday at a friend’s party, co-GMing with Wayne Wyant.

I had the pleasure of kicking off our new WWW RPG game on Saturday at a friend’s party, co-GMing with Wayne Wyant. Here’s the results!

Following is a partial transcript of the 6/14 edition of the “Chairshot!” wrestling podcast, hosted by Scott Ramsey and Gordon Wallis.

WALLIS: …which is the only time a steel chair has ever been declared a special referee. I looked it up.

RAMSEY: Amazing. And now it’s time to see what is happening with the indies! The internet is on fire about the Tacocon PPV from Solid Steel Wrestling last night, and, uh, well, it’s the Internet so we managed to find ourselves a copy of the show to watch, and…wow. I haven’t been following this promotion before now, but I think I better start, if only to see what happens in response to what the Internet Wrestling Community is calling “the Anvil Drop”. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I had a Skype call with a fan who was at the show. Here’s what he had to say about the dark match:

FAN: The dark match was pretty good, Mike St. James verse a local guy called Detroit Dynamite. Mike don’t get a lot of credit anymore but the guy’s a former champion, it was good to see him win for a change even if it was against a local. I thought for sure they were going to have him job to the DD when he got hit with a powerbomb, but he kicked out of the cover and actually came back with a burning hammer for the win!

WALLIS: I doubt that was a Kobashi-style Burning Hammer, nobody lets their wrestlers do that anymore for safety reasons, but it sounds like a hell of a match.

RAMSEY: It sure got the crowd pumped up for the first actual match of the show: Mick Fatu, the Samoan Superman vs. a relative newcomer calling himself “Mr. Showtime”.

WALLIS: Fatu’s got a lot of experience in the ring- he was a sure thing to be on the Olympic team for American Samoa in 2012 before his injury – but this Showtime kid has got the look and the attitude to make a great heel. You could practically see the arrogance coming off of him.

RAMSEY: The highlight of the match was this series of amazing suplexes, three in a row. I can’t believe anyone walked away from that, let alone be able to deliver an elbow drop later. Fatu powered out of that and managed to pull the match out at the last minute. But what about afterwards? He offers Showtime a hand, and Showtime pulls him into a reverse lungblower!

WALLIS: He should have pulled that out a little earlier in the match, it might have turned the tide.

RAMSEY: Next up was The Tarantula versus H.P. Bonecrunch. Let me tell you, Bonecrunch is an absolute monster. I thought he was going to destroy that little guy.

WALLIS: He did.

RAMSEY: Well, Wallis blew the end of the match, but Tarantula put up a hell of a fight. He was more like one of those…what’s the ones that can jump?

WALLIS: Wolf spiders.

RAMSEY: Those. The match was fought under blacklight, and there was some kind of glowing slime covering the ropes, but he didn’t let it stop him. The big guy wasn’t fast enough to keep up with his ranas, the tornado DDT…Tarantula spent most of the match in the air.

WALLIS: Especially when Bonecrunch unleashed the “Pound of Tindalos” on him. Brutal. Absolutely brutal.

RAMSEY: We also got to see Mr. Showtime again, with this podcast’s favorite move:

BOTH: CHAIRSHOT! (SFX: steel chair impact)

RAMSEY: He dropped Tarantula, took some cheap shots at the local crowd, and then teamed up with Bonecrunch for a—what would you call that? a flying stunner?

WALLIS: Flying stunner, midair stunner. Bonecrunch threw Tarantula at the kid and Showtime pulled him right out of the air.

RAMSEY: Pretty sure that was the beginning of the end for the bug.

WALLIS: A Tarantula’s not a bug, it’s an arachnid.

RAMSEY: Up next was the ladies’ division…

*   *   *

WALLIS: …I just think that Nash should focus more on his wrestling instead of on looking like the cover for a cowboy romance novel.

RAMSEY: Well, the female fans seem to like it, even if Nash and Axton weren’t able to capture the tag team title from the Mighty Andersons.

WALLIS: Now is it time?

RAMSEY: Yeah. It’s time to talk about the main event. Fans are calling this “the Anvil drop”. Gordie, you did some research on this, right?

WALLIS: Yeah. It seems like Solid Steel Champion Joe “The Anvil” Pasternak’s contract is about to expire, and he doesn’t want to stay with the company anymore.

RAMSEY: He’s had quite a reign, hasn’t he?

WALLIS: 588 days, which is a record for this promotion and pretty impressive overall for the modern era. And of course this isn’t the first time he’s held the title either. Anyway, everyone expected the title to pass to John Drake, the #1 contender, before Pasternak put him out of the ring and onto a stretcher and had this to say to the fans, the rest of locker room, and the new management:

PASTERNAK: You know, I’ve held on to this title for five hundred and eighty eight days. I’ve defended it fourteen times against punks like John Drake who thought they were good enough to win against the Anvil. They were all wrong. And now that my contract is ending, I don’t see anyone that’s even close to good enough to beat me. I’m not going to lay down and swallow my pride and let some no-talent schmuck take this away. So guess what, Mr. New Management? I think I’m going to take this title with me. And since your #1 contender is being wheeled out of here on a stretcher, there’s not a whole lot you can do to stop me.

RAMSEY: Wow. According to rumor sites, Pasternak’s contract stipulates that he can only lose the title in a match, so they can’t even strip him of it by executive action. It has to be in a singles match, and of course as a championship it has to be by pinfall or submission.

WALLIS: He’s been with the promotion for years, so that’s some impressive foresight. I wonder just how long he’s been planning this?

RAMSEY: Well, I’m not sure how they’re going to keep the title inside the promotion, but we’ll keep you up to date with what’s going on with Solid Steel Wrestling and all the other indies, right here on Chairshot! (SFX: steel chair impact)

WALLIS: Don’t forget to subscribe at http colon slash slash chairshot dot…

More Real World Examples?

More Real World Examples?

More Real World Examples?

I have a post saved from here a while back that had a couple of real world examples for each of the gimmicks—but most of them were from well past the time when I was actively watching wrestling, Anyone have a similar list for the 80s?

And for those of you who have been watching Lucha Underground, how do you see the Gimmicks falling out there?

Basic Moves 2.0

Basic Moves 2.0

Basic Moves 2.0

Oh man, these are hot.

In order to get experience you have to mess around with every faction, generating plot? Excellent.

New debt stuff? Way clearer. And the refuse to honor a debt is going to make players squirm.

The only thing I’m not sure about is the way your faction scores go up and down. First, I think you should explicitly cap it at some point— max +3 seems logical. Second, UF protagonists tend to collect knowledge, pull and influence almost as quickly as they collect magical powerups. I feel like there ought to be some way to increase one without decreasing others. Maybe that’ll be handled in the playbooks?

Musings on Debt.

Musings on Debt.

Musings on Debt.

Something about the way Debts are phrased seems to confuse me, because it’s nothing like how we talk about owing people. I think things like “If you cash in a Debt you have with them” would be clearer if they said “If you cash in a Debt they owe you”.

“Take a Debt against X” is even less clear. It seems to mean “X owes you a Debt” but it’s a really awkward construction.

There’s a couple of specific instances where I’m not clear on the intent, though.

If you get mixed up in another PC’s affairs, you can cash in a Debt to get a 10+ (and give them a +1 or a -2). I can see the rationale for cashing in a debt to give someone a penalty: “I don’t owe you anything, you nearly got me killed back there!” But if I decide to help them out instead, they still wind up owing me less? I’m not sure how that is supposed to work in the fiction or the rules.

Another debt question, from The Hunter: “When you reset your Mortality Faction score, take a Debt against all Mortals in play (if any), otherwise mark experience.” 

Since NPCs can be mortal and owe you a Debt I’m not 100% sure what “in play” covers. Active as PCs? Major NPCs? Is this one Debt that can be used against any Mortal, or do you get a debt against each Mortal?