Monthly Archives: January 2010

20 for 10

So, I’m not usually inclined to shill for a sale, but this one is worth noting. RPGNow is having their 20 for $10 in 2010 sale for the next few days, where they’re selling an array of genuinely fantastic PDFs of rpgs for $10 each. There are some first class winners on this list. If you’re uncertain about this whole PDF thing, this is a great opportunity to pick up a really good game at a really good price and see if it might work for you. I look at this list and break it into three categories.

While I’m familiar with or curious about a fair number of these, I try to be clear where my ignorance lies. Extra opinions on things that are worth getting (or avoiding) are entirely welcome.

Stuff I Have
Song of Ice & Fire RPG: I have this in hardcover and I’m still tempted to get the PDF for two reasons, one good and one not so good. The good reason is that the noble house creation rules in this game are awesome, maybe even better than Birthright. It’s good enough that it can be ported out of the setting if need be, but then the setting is so magnificent, would I want to? The less good reason is that the hardcover was extensively errata’d, and the PDF is (i presume, since GR is good about such things) updated, so you can skip the hassle.

Artesia: The worst thing I can say about this in PDF is that the book is even more lovely. Still, the book is also quite large and dense (and also quite good – it’s numerous Ennie nominations were no fluke) and probably crosses that invisible threshold where havign a PDF to reference really improves things. For me, the big takeaway from this game (besides the amazing art) was a really fantastic tarot-influenced system for character elements.

Battlestar Galactica: This one is worth noting as it’s a very good deal. MWP books tend to have very high production values and, in turn, pretty high price tags. At $10 bucks, this is a good way to satisfy your curiosity, and the Cortex system is light enough that the book is mostly setting. That said, it’s a tough sell: BSG is so much its own story that it’s really hard to come up with a meaningful story of your own within its context, and the RPG has to wrestle with that. There’s not quite enough information about the worlds of BSG for a pre-cylon game, but there’s too much for a post-cylon game, if that makes any sense. The level of data is tuned more towards what you’d need if you were going to do your own version of the series.

Demon Hunters: A somewhat tongue-in-cheek modern day monster hunting game, it really gets more points than anything else for both being quite funny and also quite playable.

Fading Suns: Holy crap, Fading Suns! I love Fading Suns! Er..ahem, I mean, that’s an excellent game to see on the list. It’s mashup of Dune and Warhammer 40k makes for a fantastic sci-fi-with-dark-but-not-Chthulu-overtones that’s possibly my favorite Sci-fi RPG ever. The mechanics are interesting, and occasionally inspired (the paired stats are brilliant) but it’s really all about the setting.

Geist: Totally worth it. The NWoD books just keep getting better, and Geist (the kind-of new Wraith) is mechanically clever (best powers system I’ve seen since the original idea for Mage/Ars) and with a very playable setting that steps away from a lot of familiar tropes while embracing others in ways you might not expect.

Grimm
: Confession – I bought this and still haven’t done more than skim it. I bought it purely on the strength of the REALLY, REALLY fantastic D20 minigame of the same name that this is based on. From flipping through, it has a fudge-like dice system, and it has much of the same dark fairy-tale wonder that I bought it for. I’ll say its worth it, just based on the amount I’ve seen, but take that with a suitable grain of salt.

Hero 6th Bundle: The PDF is totally worth it if only to avoid back strain. 6th is HUGE and, well, it’s Hero. If you don’t know whatthat means, then $10 is a good price to find out. If you do, then you already know if this is worth it or not. Edit: Fred set me straight; This isn’t the core (mankilling) books, but rather the basic and advanced books. On one hand, that’s a shame because it’ snto so huge, but on the other it may make it more practical for folks looking to dip their toes into Hero. The basic book is the streamlined core rules, and the advanced book is a collection of options that didn’t make it into the core. It’s also handy for Hero evangelists: the basic book is MUCH less daunting to a new player than the core rules.

Mouseguard: This is profoundly worth it. Not only is it a fantastic game, but because of its format (the game is square) the PDF is very screen readable.

Mutant & Masterminds, 2nd
: This is pretty much the modern standard for supers (HERO sort of having become more its own thing) and even though I own it in hardcover, it’s tempting to get a PDF just for reference.

Starblazers Adventures: Fate in space, but not just any space: Crazy, wahoo british comics space. Like Hero, this is a worthwhile PDf investment because the book is just so damn big.


Stuff I Want

Deadlands Reloaded: Ok, it’s Deadlands, and that’s kind of a selling point or not, simple as that. My brother’s a big fan, but I’ve never tried it before. Since this is the Savage Worlds version, I’m willing to make the plunge, if only because I’m also curious about the Savage Worlds part of it.

Dragon Warriors: I never played the original, but I did read a lot of the very enthusiastic gushing when this came out. I guess it’s new-old-school or something? Honestly, I’m nto totally cure, but it inspires enough passion that I’m curious.

Legend of the 5 Rings, 3rd ed: So, there’s some loyalty here. I’ve always liked L5R, but I walked away after picking up Second edition and feeling like I got something dirty on my hands. That’s left me hesitant to pick up 3rd because on one hand, the game really did need revising, but on the other, if it was more revisions along the line of 2nd, then that would be worse than nothing. But the books were pretty, very very pretty, and at this price point I think I’ll finally take the risk.

Mutant City Blues
: Superheroic police procedural using gumshoe? Hard to say no.

Pirates of the Spanish Main
: Pirates in Savage Worlds. I really have no further explanations except to say those are two great tastes that taste great together.

Curious
Dark Conspiracy: Oh, man, there’s a blast from the past. I remember the adds for this when it came out. For some reason I even remember reading an adventure for it. Modern day conspiracy and magic in the shadows. Classic stuff, though I’m not sure what it offers beyond nostalgia at this point.

Etherscope: I’ve seen this game around from time to time, and it looks full of steampunkey goodness, but I’ve never had a reason to quite make the leap to pick it up. I still don’t, but at this price point I’m curious.

Heavy Gear: Man, I have always been curious about heavy gear. It promises fun, fast mech combat, and the brains behind it have demonstrated an ability to come up with really neat, interesting ideas, but It’s never been quite enough to grab me.

Iron Kingdom’s Character’s Guide: I’m torn on this. I really DESPISED the Witchfire Trilogy, the d20 adventures that introduced this setting, but the art and setting information was all pretty neat and darkly steampunky + D&D. Friends have spoken well of it, but that initial hatred was pretty strong. Hmm.

Judge Dredd: So, it’s Judge Dredd. That’s one of those selling points that either ha already made the sale, or lost it. admit, for me, it’s lost it, but that’s not reflection on the product.

Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved: I don’t doubt this book is worth the price, but it’s like being offered a computer that’s a few years out of date. It’s a great deal, but will you use it? I probably won’t.

Twilight 2000
and Twilight 2013: Another nostalgia trip. The Durham 3 piqued my curiosity by digging this one out for some actual play, but i think I’ll let this particular sleeping dog lie.

The City of Brass: On one hand, I love planar cities. On the other, I have enough Planescape material to crush a cat. I’m not really sure what this offers, bu tit definitely looks interesting.

No Freaking Clue
Cooper’s Compendium of Corrected Creatures (Bundle): I got nothing.
DragonMech: Cool title, certainly
Dungeon Crawl Classics #51: Castle Whiterock:My keen deductive skills suggest this is an adventure.
Megatraveller bundle, Mark Miller’s Traveller and TNE-0302 Traveller: THE New Era DELUXE Package: I’m not a Traveller guy, but if I was, I imagine this would be pretty sweet.
RunePunk: Another cool title
Ultramodern Firearms d20: Something to do with guns, I presume

Dragon Age Actual Play

Yeah, it’s Monday, but I’ve been itching for this one, so I’ll break my usual order of things.

I ran a game of Dragon Age tabletop on New Years Day, and it went quite well. The positives I expected were there (as were the negatives) but I still ended up pleasantly surprised.

Random chargen started out interestingly as one of my players nailed an 18 on the first roll, in plain sight of everyone. At ten end, the final distribution was a little unkind, with respective total bonuses of 12, 10 and 7. I let #2 and #1 at 1 and 2 points to their total respectively – this was entirely outside the scope of the rules, but I’m ok with that.[1] They ended up going mage, fighter and rogue.

We had 2 city elves and an apostate elf, so we decided they were cousins, the apostate having gone off to find the dalish and learn their magic for a while. Since I couldn’t immediately find the recommended name list, they ended up going with italiante names(Bruno, Vinnie & Luccia). While this started a little tongue in cheek, it actually gelled nicely, since there is an Italian equivalent (Antiva) with elves, and one of the established bts of setting is that marriages are often arranged between alienage (elf ghettos) in different cities to keep the community connected. So their uncle Guido (Luccia’s father) had come to Denerim (the big city of the setting) for an arranged marriage after things went bad enough in Antiva that it killed both his brothers, so he brought the kids along with him, so they grew up in the Denerim alienage.

Now, I don’t mention this to get my shakespeare on, rather, I hold it up as an example of the strength of the setting. As I noted, it’s very generic on the surface, but there’s some decent depth behind it. I felt this was a good illustration of that in practice. It was easy to find a fairly generic idea to start with, and the setting gave me just enough material to flesh it out.

The plot of play was simple enough. A shipment of lyrium powder (magic stuff) is going form a mage to a templar, but for the duration of transit will be protected by neither. The players know where the delivery is happening, and can arrange to jump it. I actually stole a page from the CRPG and used one of the locations in Denerim where you get ambushed, using an old portcullis, except with the PCs as the attackers.

The fight that followed was straightforward enough. 3 PCs from ambush with 4 guards (2 trapped behind the portcullis initially) the cart’s driver and their advance scout (who the Player’s dubbed “The Cool Customer” because he kept making perception rolls to stay on top of the situation). To remove any suspense, the players won, but it was a surprisingly near thing. That out of the way, lots of observations on the fight:

  • We used minis, but no grid, just using the minis to show relative position. This worked out pretty well, since it kept certain features (like the portcullis control) in mind. For a fair part of the fight, the rogue was fighting off his opponent with one hand and trying to jam things in the controls with the other.
  • In combat, you get one major action (standard action, basically), and one minor action (which includes movement). The major/minor action split worked mostly smoothly. There were a few oddities, like whether or not you could draw a weapon while moving or if you are considered to have readied an arrow when you switch weapons to a bow, or if you also need to reload. It’s one of the areas where you can feel the trade off between simplicity and complexity, but it works out.
  • In many ways, combat reminded me of D&D before attacks of opportunity. There’s nothing keeping people from disengaging so things are much more free wheeling. Paradoxically, this can also mean things are more static: If you find an optimal position, you tend to stay there and just do the same thing every turn.[2]
  • Thankfully, the solution to this ended up being the stunt system. it works like this: if you roll doubles on your 3d6, check the value on your dragon die (your off-colored d6). You now have that many “stunt points” to add some english onto your attack. There’s a little list of them on the reference sheet, and it’s stuff like knocking someone back 2 yards costs 1 point, doing an extra d6 damage is 2 points, making another attack is 4 and so on (There’s a similar list for spells). Not only does this make for one of the most fun critical hit systems I’ve ever seen, it can make the fight change up. As an example, our fighter started in an elevated position, sniping with his bow, and it looked like he’d be there for the whole fight. Then the driver got him with a shot that disarmed him, dropping his bow down into the fight, forcing him to follow. Felt nicely dynamic.[3]
  • Our fighter had a better dexterity than strength, so he and the rogue were both armed with dexterity-based weapons. This ended up being educational because the benefits of dexterity in the game are HUGE, but they’re not quite as huge as they looked. The small damage output of dex-based weapons doesn’t look like too big a gap on paper, but in practice they’re total pea shooters. The way armor works is that even negligible armor tends to undercut most of your first die of damage. When the Driver pulled out a two-handed sword and rolled 3d6 for damage, the swearing around the table was impressive.
  • The mage was terrifying. Like, terrifying enough that at the end of the fight, everyone suddenly felt like the Templars and the Circle made complete and total sense as setting elements. I think it was the spell Walking Bomb that really just scared the crap out of everyone. Now, the mage was the one who’d rolled the 18, that combined with background bonuses to give him a +5 magic modifier, which is pretty crazily high, so maybe he was scarier than normal, but I’m not so sure of that. On the other hand, he was a total glass cannon – he got knocked down to 2 or 3 health twice, and he was totally out of mana by the end of the fight. Things had gone a little less well, he’d have gotten laid out pretty hard.
  • I was flying by the seat of my pants a bit in balancing the encounter, reminding me of my Warhammer 3 experience. But unlike WH3, It took only one or two rounds before I had a firm enough grasp of combat that I now feel comfortable making up adversaries. Enough so that I think the adversary rules are actually too complicated, or at least the statblocks are. They look like character sheets, so I can see the logic of a unified vision, but odds are good I’ll just be putting this particular element up on blocks to tune up.

After the fight, we had some good non-fighty stuff. We leveled up, jsut to see how it worked (very quickly and easily, it turns out). The guys found more than they expected in the wagon, tried to fence it[4], and found themselves fleeing from The Pearl (a high class brothel) from a posse of angry looking templar. The flight involved ropes, falling, cross dressing and no small amount of alcohol, so I was good with that. We wrapped up with them paying most of their money on hand for passage on a smuggler’s ship, and pulling away from the docks.

All in all, we had a lot of fun, and final thoughts include:

  • The character sheet needs more space for details. I had to print extra copies of the classes so the rogue and mage had their class abilities on hand, and I ended up just handing the mage the printout of the magic chapter because it was easier than trying to write them down. There were other things (like, it would be nice if there was a quick way to note known weapon groups, and I’d love it if the stunts were on the character sheet) and I’m hopeful that the 2 page character sheet from Green Ronin will address these. Otherwise, I’ll just make my own.
  • Very, very few choices in chargen. This is pleasantly speedy, but makes it a little bit rough to serve a concept. If you’re comfortable using chargen as inspiration, it’s fine, but if you have an idea you want to support, it’s a crapshoot.
  • I love stunts. They’re just fun. My sole regret is that they don’t kick in out of combat (or even in combat if you’re doing something besides an attack). My players definitely were feeling like that was a gap. The counterargument is that this would make them too common, and that might be true.
  • I’m not sure if you’re allowed to upgrade gear during chargen (rather than buying it outright). I allowed it (so the fighter turned in his class-granted armor for a discount on better armor) but I’ve got no idea if that’s legit.
  • If we keep playing this (and it’s a tempting choice fro more-or-less pickup play) then I’m worried that we’d clear level 5 before the second box set comes out. Not that that’s a terrible problem to have, but it’ll be aggravating if it happens. I’m also curious about advancement past level 5 – specifically you get a bonus point to your primary stat every other level (you can spread it around, but nothing makes you do so) and if there’s nothing encouraging/forcing distribution, then the stat spread is going to start looking really weird by level 10 or so.

Anyway, while there were definitely some weird bits, they ended up causing far fewer problems than I expected, and the whole thing was just quick and easy to play. That’s a measure I’m pretty good with.

1 – In fact, I’m explicitly ok with it. I’m running this with Red Box in my heart, so by god I will embrace opportunities to house rule. This game was written for someone with less experience than me, and it will work for them just fine, but the point of having more experience is the ability to tune it. On some level, this is a lot like buying one of the less-expensive cars explicitly to soup it up.

2 – 4e solves this problem with flanking and the grid, and that ability to keep fights from getting static is the reason I am willing to deal with that many maps and minis. Because of that, it was exceptionally interesting to me to see other solutions to the problem.

3 – I had been concerned that the stunts would feel a bit too much like a speedbump as you stop to look things up, but that didn’t bear out. There are a few options, but not so many that you don’t have to deal with decision paralysis. This means that while the mechanical range is only so diverse, that’s only part of the equation. Stunt events are also cues to put some thought into the description of play, and that’s really very handy.

4 – The mage also did a line of Lyrium, which suited the sensibilities of things quite well.

Bow to Your Partner

So, New Years Eve was geeky indeed. Three games of Pandemic (2 wins, 1 loss) followed by extensive and satisfying geeking with Fred and Fuzz. This is always a magnificent thing, and we ended up getting onto winning and losing on MUSH.

So, I’m mostly channeling Fred here, since the key idea was his, but it was awesome enough that it deserves some broadcast.

A lot of the problems with conflict on MUSH come down to the fact that most peopel really suck at winning. This means a lot of things, but the big one is that people tend to be very bad at findign ways to win which remains respectful of the loser. For the most part, if we win, we don’t want to respect the loser, we are focused on getting them to respect us. This cuts to the heart of most issues: people aren’t afraid of most bad things, they are concerned that they’re not being respected. When every party feels that way, it’s hard for an atmosphere of trust to ever be established, and things get and stay toxic.

This is where Fred’s idea comes up. He proposes a ritual element to conflict where the first thing you do is to ask the other party what they desire you to respect. The example used is someone gettign in a swordfight with Benedict (the swordfighting badass of Amber). If Bob asks that Benedict respect that he’s good with the sword, and Benedict asks that Bob respect Benedicts higher social role, and they both agree, that sets the ground rules for the fight in a non-intrusive way that allows both players to steer things towards what they want.

This is not an idea that needs any mechanical support (though maybe some code support to publicize these boundaries would be useful), and that’s part of the point. See, while the information about the boundaries is useful and can shape the fight in fun ways, it is arguably even more important to have asked the question. That moment of stopping to think about it, like saluting an opponent, is a moment to focus on the sport and how to go about it. In my experience, most people mean well, but they need a nudge to be reminded of behaviors they support on paper.

Obviously this won’t always work. There will be disagreements about what should or shouldn’t be respected. There will be passive-aggressive, snarky social nonsense. Edges will blur and people will get indignant. But all that happens already. I am optimistic enough to think that a moment of reflection and respect can go a long way towards improving it.