We were missing a player tonight, or how to be awesome!

You'll read the word awesome a lot in this post, you've been warned.

So last night I was reading some blogs and trying to figure out how I might want todays game to shape up. For probably the fiftieth time I stopped in at Risus Monkey, but for the first time I really read what he was doing with the little gem Old School Hack, and I thought "self you need a little break from this quasi-epic campaign, the paladin's player isn't going to be there why not just have a good time with a quick pick-up game".  Super glad I did.  We had characters rolled, written up, and a quick rules primer done in under half an hour.  The players did a little role playing to get started, spent an hour or so dealing with one of the players adventuring goal.  They found a map to a "bandits lair" and headed out to explore.

If you haven't taken the twenty minutes to browse through the rules, the main crux of game is to be completely fraking awesome, and if your character does some thing awesome you get an awesome point, that anyone at the table can award.  Then the only way you get experience is to spend awesome points, an ingenious way to get players to think about what they are doing beyond "I hit it with my axe".  I've tried to introduce DFRPG style fate points in our game from the get go.  It has been less than a stellar success, in fact it's been a pretty big bust. No one including me really got it, so a few sessions ago I introduced hero points.  Basically do some thing cool or heroic and you get a hero point which can be used to add a d6 to any d20 roll, start with three and you can earn up to five.  Sounds simple enough, and the players spent a few when their backs against the wall.  They just never seemed to want to earn more ... probably my fault.

Driving over to the game I thought, how do I encourage them to use and earn these points ... if you  are not at least kind of interesting while you try to do some thing, and I figured it would come up in combat, then you are lame and all the enemies in the arena of your lameness get a free attack on you that automatically hits.  Of course I forgot tell anyone this until the violation had been committed and the punishment dolled out.  I had told them the point was to freaking awesome and cool, oops.  Three auto hits, three points of damage, and one sort of butt hurt player later everyone got it, I apologized he was cool about it.  Awesomeness followed, and it was cool.  Now hopefully they can translate it over to the C&C game, I have faith.