Zaving Zo: Playing with PDQ# at SCARAB 2011

A Night’s Gaming, Rescued

Last night at SCARAB, a few of us GM’s were rounding up wayward role-players and trying to fill some of our games since not all of our games were going to make.  We decided to fill up to games.  Tobes decided to run Ingenuous, a steampunk rpg, and Lizz gathered the remaining players, myself included, into Zorcerer of Zo.

Before I go into the game itself, I want to spend a few sentences on our GM.  Lizz runs the Kids’ Track at SCARAB.  This con’s kids’ track does not consist of babysitting while mischievous little munchkins color pictures.  Lizz doesn’t chase unruly children through the con venue while the big kids (AKA adults) play their games.  She doesn’t organize games of Candy Land or the Pokemon CCG.  Lizz gets these kids to role-play.  She gets them into games like Zorcerer of Zo and other RPG’s and they play all day until about 9pm.  They pay more attention in these games than I’ve seen kids older than them pay to just about anything.  They dive enthusiastically into the roles of fairies, elves, talking animals, sorcerers and valiant knights.  I don’t know how Lizz does it.  I do know that when the kids dispersed (for the most part, one of them played in our game, which started about 9pm and ran until about midnight), she was anxious to play a game with people closer to her age, though when one of the aforementioned kids wanted to play in our game, she asked us if it was okay and got him right into the game.  This kid had been gaming since about 8am, and kept going strong until our game ended.

Props to Liz.  Back to the game itself.

The Game Itself

Zorcerer of Zo is the creation of Chad Underkoffler and Atomic Sock Monkey Press.  It is a fairly freeform game that uses a resolution mechanic based on d6′s.  Lizz has made some variations to the game, so the version we played was mostly the PDQ# system, with some house-rule variants from Lizz’s home campaign.

We were summoned into Jade City to undertake a quest for the Zantabulous Zorcerer of Zo.  Notide that if you hold your laptop up to a mirror, Zo becomes Oz (which becomes Zo in the same mirror – this stuff blows my mind after being sleep-deprived by a con – it’s like infinity).  All similarities between Zo and any other fantasy land is purely coincidental, even if it is intentional.  The game we played was pretty tongue-in-cheek about the fantasy references, and I’m guessing that most adult games of ZoZ have that quality.  I’m guessing Jade City is only a short train ride from Emerald City, but it wasn’t on our maps.

Upon reacing Jade City, we quickly noticed that all wasn’t well.  The city was crumbling, its magic failing.  We were told that one of the magical eggs that gives the city its magic had been stolen by an evil mage and whisked away into another world.  We were tasked to recover the egg and to also find the girl who was sent to find it before us.

A whimsical, ancient, eternal child named Toby whisked us into his Hall of Doors and escorted us to a strange world filled with wondrous contraptions like “cars,” “elevators” and “ambulances.”  After some investigation, we learned that Ellie, the girl who originally went after the egg, was in a place called “Baptist Hospital” and we decided to go there and rescue her.  After our fearless bard caused the illusion of red lights to stop the “cars,” he caused a bit of a mess when he made the lights green, in all directions, so that the “cars” would move again.  We noticed that people were injured and, since we were going to the hospital anyway, we waited for our magical transportation when one of the injured people told us that these “ambulances” could take us there.

After convincing the ambulance-keeper to take us to this Baptist Hospital, we had to find out what room Ellie was being held prisoner in.  This was difficult and the strange woman behind the desk chastised us for trying to make her violate a hippo or something like that.  Eventually, we found Ellie and set her free.  With the girl in tow, we followed the trail of the egg once again.

After a climactic battle with the evil wizard who had stolen it, we rescued the magical jade ovoid and returned to Zo as heroes.

The PDQ# System

The PDQ# system is simple and easy-to-learn, but there are some subtleties and odd rules that I learned as we went along.  There are some eccentricities in the system regarding the number of dice you can roll and re-roll and the bonuses you can get from various things on the character sheet.  Thankfully, the other players with ZoZ experience (and Lizz herself) helped me figure things out.  I know, kids can do it, but I struggled a litle with some of the subtleties.  Shut up and GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

Combat is abstracted a bit, since when you take damage, you take it off of your attributes (you choose which ones) until they reach Zero.  When they are all at Zero, you are out of the fight.

Magic is especially free-form.  If you can describe it, the GM figures out a difficulty for the check and you can roll to try to make it happen.  Our “glass mage”(played by a neat kid named Balin) was able to pull off some neat magical tricks and our bard used his powers of illusion to accomplish some cool stuff as well.

ZoZ is an excellent system to introduce kids to role-playing (and I think the next step after games like that could be something that uses Dragon Age‘s AGE system, but with a world that isn’t as dark and gritty, or a kids version of Fiasco).  If you get a chance to try ZoZ, give it a shot.  It doesn’t seem like something I would want to play on a regular basis, but it could serves as a light break from heavier games, or a good game to play with kids.

Has anyone played Zorcerer?  Do you know any other games that are great for kids?  Do you have (or know) kids who play rpg’s?  What do they play?