Dungeon of the Endless is yet another game on steam with the word ‘Dungeon’ in it. The game is by the same team that did Endless Space (beautiful, but not great) and Endless Legend (an ok Civ clone). Dungeon of the Endless is their best game yet. DotE is a combination of base defense and an RPG, and it mixes those genres quite nicely.
The premise is that you are some prisoners that jettisoned/escaped onto another planet, but crashed into what appears to be some sort of bio-lab gone all sorts of wrong. You have to get to the top of the complex by bringing your power crystal to the exit elevator on various levels.
You have various prisoners that you command to open doors and fight (pretty much just that) and you can build resource bases and defenses with the stuff they find. Each door you open adds resources to your pool that you can spend (including on the extremely important levelling up of prisoners) so each level is ‘timed’ in that there are only so many doors to open and that’s it. If you waste your resources, you will become dead.
Each level builds up to the rush to the exit with the Power Crystal. As soon as a character picks up the crystal, all doors will open on the level and waves of monsters will attack (forever, please note this) until your prisoners are dead or exit. Simple premise, executed extremely well– except for the crashes.
The game crashes a lot. I’m sure in a few months this will not be so, but right now I’d say about half the time after level 5 the game will crash. It’s just one of those things.
Lastly, the game has multiplayer and I’ve tried it with Keneda. Both players get a single prisoner to use (can get more on the levels) and share what’s on the screen, but not backpacks or resources. We got fairly far and planned out our escapes quite well until, inevitably, the game crashed.
Plowing through all the indy/casual stream of shit on Steam for diamonds isn’t easy but this is one of them, burrs and all!
This is part 2 of a long ass post about the year of the most complext RPG’s. Here is the first bit. Below three RPG’s from 2009 that I want to discuss as testament to fulfilling player’s desire for maximum options, asymmetry and complexity. All three are fairly playable in their base format to some extent, but with their variable player powers, options, and therefore need of playtesting, all are considered behemoths in terms of system mastery. This is not to say that they were all released in 2009, but in the case of Exalted, it was at it’s maximum popularity at this time (as far as I can remember).
Was she really so bad? Or was it just the combat system?
Exalted. This tops the list of RPG’s that were popular in 2009 and …extremely complex. While the 2nd edition had been out since 2006, and frankly Jon Chung and that crew had broken the combat system already, 2008/2009 saw the release of a massive number of Exalted books, including what I consider the most complicated and confusing RPG publication I’ve encountered: Exalted the Fair Folk. This tome I just don’t get, and still have no idea how to create a Fair Folk character for my players to fight. The tough part about Exalted is that you, as a GM, are forced to make enemies with the same level of detail as the player characters (like Champions or Marvel Heroic RP). After a couple weeks of scratching my head, I just threw in the towel on this book, which was sad because the Fair Folk ARE the critical enemy in the Exalted universe. The book is beautiful and fun to read, but it’s fucking useless for gaming. Of these three games, Exalted was the game that I gave the most attention and play to, and while it was what brought me back to RPG’s after about a year drought, it was a harsh mistress. I probably ran 20-30 sessions over the years and most were extremely rules-heavy combat sequences. Many of which turned out quite awesome, but at what expense? Tons of dice, massive requirement of system mastery by the players and an UNGODLY amount of work creating balanced encounters and antagonists for me, the hapless fucking GM. And for all the complexity, so easily broken down into an optimum set of charms and powers to ensure 100% success rate against players or antagonists built the same way.
I think it was the fact that the core combat system had so many steps to each action that it just went berserk as charms (the character’s powers–and enemy’s) started messing with each of those steps in an almost Cosmic Encounter-like fashion. The designers probably thought– oh we haven’t had many charms that have dealt with X combat step yet, let’s throw some in. In addition, the setting was extremely tied to the mechanics giving rise to arguments crossing both on various forums. People would argue that X event could not have happened in the Exalted timeline if Chungian Combat was in place because Y Solar cannot conceivably have been killed by Z opponents…crazy fun but did make a good game to play? Some love, some love/hate. Once my players started defensively stunting, I was done with the game.
Monster/Antagonist stat blocks are huge indicators of difficulty/complexity for an RPG, especially for the hapless fucking GM. It’s not the only measure, but when I check out a new RPG, I always look at monster/fighter stat blocks second, after reading the combat section. As a base to compare the others, let’s look at a modern B/X stat block from the (amazing) Carcosa book circa 2011:
No Appearing: Unique Armor Class: 19 Hit Dice: 20 Move: 120′ Alignment: Chaotic
This god is a vaguely humanoid hulk, about 20′ tall and partially scaled. No one has ever clearly seen it since palpable darkness emanates from it’s body. It does 3 dice of damage in combat, plus everyone within 30′ of it takes 1 die of damage each round from the crushing feel of oppression that accompanies it.
This block, for one of the most powerful entities possible to encounter, tells us how hard it is to hit with a weapon, how easy it hits others (+20 to hit on a D20), how fast it moves and how much damage it does, plus a special ability– all in 9 lines or so. To me this is only missing Morale (which was the author’s choice not to include in the Carcosa supplement) but is otherwise complete and INCREDIBLY efficient at giving the GM the information he needs to run it at the table. 9 Lines– for a great old one!
Let’s look at a similarly powered entity from EXALTED.
Gervesin, the Greiving Lord Demon of the Second Circle, The messenger soul of the green sun
Charms: (these are in another book to find out what they all do): Commandeer, Essence bite, Essence plethora, Fruit of living essence, Hollow out the soul, Hoodwink, Hurry Home, Materialize, Meat of broken flesh, Ox body technique, Portal, Possession, Principle of Motion, Shapechange, Spirit Cutting technique, Stoke the Flame, First Integrity, Melee, resistance, thrown Excellency, Second Melee and Thrown Excellency, Third Integrity, Melee, Resistance, Thrown Excellency, Divine Melee, Thrown Subordination, Infinite Melee, Thrown Mastery.
Health Levels: -0/-1/-1/-1/-1/-1/-1/-1/-1/-2/-2/-2/-2/-2/-2/-4/Incapacitated
Dodge DV 7, Willpower 10, Essence 7, Essence pool 130,
Other Notes: None (thank god).
Well by the iridescent balls of the Unconquered Sun, this is an insane amount of information– and even looks simpler that it actually is. You can get the base attack dice from the stats, but you have to look into the charmset thoroughly to determine the essence cost for attacks that add more dice PLUS any charms that could be used at the various steps in the combat. The number of powers this guy has is not unusual at all– and is really a metric ton compared to the B/X creature.
Overburdened in Pathfinder means very little, in OD&D, it means laceration in the legs or feet, followed by a sharp blow to the head, followed by death.
Pathfinder: 2009 was the year Pathfinder, or D&D 3.75, was released. It is now literally a household name in RPG circles for maintaining the D&D 3.0 style of play. While extremely popular, which may preclude it from this list, I think Pathfinder gets off far too easy on the complication scale because it is so widely known (being the third iteration of D20) and the core concepts are fairly accepted. However, let’s face it, this version of D&D, while getting out of the 2nd edition doldrums back into a really good base ruleset, is needlessly complicated with simply a rule for everything, tons of classes and ridiculous system mastery for the GM. With rulebooks that have the smallest type I’ve seen, if this wasn’t considered the pinnacle of D&D to some, who likely bought the Pathfinder book as a new version of a system they were already using, I think this would be a hard sell to anyone, especially these days where the barrier to entry on this complex of a system won’t be mitigated by having a very different experimental D&D version concurrently on the shelves in 4th Edition. That is, think about if Pathfinder came out TODAY. Even when I was heavy into Exalted, I picked up the book at Gencon 2009, read about half a page in the combat section and set it aside. People love it, and it’s got some great adventures if you include all of 3.0/3.5, but give me nearly any OSR clone in existence to run them rather than this beast. It was good in video games though (Temple of Elemental Evil that is).
and a monster stat block for Pathfinder around the same level as Gervisin and the B/X Great Old One stat block:
Cthulhu CR 30
XP 9,830,400 CE Colossal aberration (chaotic, evil, Great Old One) Init +15; Senses darkvision 60 ft., true seeing; Perception +52 Aura unspeakable presence (300 ft., DC 40)
DEFENSE AC 49, touch 29, flat-footed 44 (+12 deflection, +5 Dex, +10 insight, +20 natural, –8 size) hp 774 (36d8+612); fast healing 30 Fort +29, Ref +29, Will +33 Defensive Abilities freedom of movement, immortality, insanity (DC 40), non-euclidean; DR 20/epic and lawful; Immune ability damage, ability drain, aging, cold, death effects, disease, energy drain, mind-affecting effects, paralysis, and petrification; Resist acid 30, electricity 30, fire 30, sonic 30; SR 41
DEFENSE Speed 60 ft., fly 200 ft. (average), swim 60 ft. Melee 2 claws +42 (4d6+23/19–20 plus grab), 4 tentacles +42 (2d10+34/19–20 plus grab) Space 40 ft.; Reach 40 ft. Special Attacks cleaving claws, constrict (3d6+23), dreams of madness, Mythic Power (10/day, Surge +1d12), powerful blows (tentacle), tentacles, trample (2d8+30, DC 51) Spell-Like Abilities (CL 30th; concentration +42)
Constant—freedom of movement, true seeing At will—astral projection, control weatherM, dreamM, greater dispel magic, greater teleport, insanity (DC 29), nightmareM (DC 29), sendingM 3/day—antipathy (DC 30), demand (DC 30), quickened feeblemind, gate, weird (DC 31) 1/day—implosion (DC 31), summon (level 9, 2d4 star-spawn of Cthulhu 100%), symbol of insanity (DC 30), wish M
STATISTICS Str 56, Dex 21, Con 45, Int 31, Wis 36, Cha 34 Base Atk +27; CMB +58 (+60 bull rush, +62 grapple or sunder); CMD 97 (99 vs. bull rush or sunder) Feats Ability Focus (nightmare), Awesome Blow, Combat Reflexes, Craft Wondrous Item, Critical Focus, Flyby Attack, Greater Sunder, Greater Vital Strike, Hover, Improved Bull Rush, Improved Critical (claw), Improved Critical (tentacle), Improved Sunder, Improved Vital Strike, Power Attack, Quicken Spell-Like Ability (feeblemind), Staggering Critical, Vital Strike Skills Fly +36, Knowledge (arcana) +49, Knowledge (dungeoneering, engineering, geography, history, nature, planes, religion) +46, Perception +52, Sense Motive +49, Spellcraft +49, Swim +70, Use Magic Device +48 Languages Aklo; telepathy 300 ft. SQ compression, greater starflight, otherworldly insight
SPECIAL ABILITIES Cleaving Claws (Ex)
A single attack from one of Cthulhu’s claws can target all creatures in a 10-foot square. Make one attack roll; any creature in the area whose AC is equal to or lower than the result takes damage from the claw.
Dreams of Madness (Su)
When Cthulhu uses his nightmare spell-like ability on a creature with one or more ranks in a Craft or Perform skill, he also afflicts the creature with maddening dreams. In addition to the effect of nightmare, the target must succeed at a DC 40 Will save or contract a random insanity. This is a mind-affecting effect. A creature that already has an insanity is immune to this ability. The save DC is Charisma-based.
Greater Starflight (Su)
Cthulhu can survive in the void of outer space, and flies through outer space at incredible speeds. Although the exact travel time will vary from one trip to the next, a trip within a solar system normally takes Cthulhu 2d6 hours, and a trip beyond normally takes 2d6 days (or more, at the GM’s discretion).
Immortality (Ex)
If Cthulhu is killed, his body immediately fades away into a noxious cloud of otherworldly vapor that fills an area out to his reach. This cloud blocks vision as obscuring mist, but can’t be dispersed by any amount of wind. Any creature in this area must succeed at a DC 45 Fortitude save or be nauseated for as long as it remains in the cloud and for an additional 1d10 rounds after it leaves the area. Cthulhu returns to life after 2d6 rounds, manifesting from the cloud and restored to life via true resurrection, but is staggered for 2d6 rounds (nothing can remove this staggered effect). If slain again while he is staggered from this effect, Cthulhu reverts to vapor form again and his essence fades away after 2d6 rounds, returning to his tomb in R’lyeh until he is released again. The save DC is Constitution-based.
Non-Euclidean (Ex)
Cthulhu does not exist wholly in the physical world, and space and time strain against his presence. This grants Cthulhu a deflection bonus to AC and a racial bonus on Reflex saves equal to his Charisma modifier (+12). His apparent and actual position are never quite the same, granting him a 50% miss chance against all attacks. True seeing can defeat this miss chance, but any creature that looks upon Cthulhu while under the effects of true seeing must succeed at a DC 40 Will save or be afflicted by a random insanity (this is a mind-affecting effect). The save DC is Charisma-based.
Tentacles (Ex)
Cthulhu’s tentacles are a primary attack.
Unspeakable Presence (Su)
Failing a DC 40 Will save against Cthulhu’s unspeakable presence causes the victim to immediately die of fright. This is a death and fear effect. A creature immune to fear that fails its save against Cthulhu’s unspeakable presence is staggered for 1d6 rounds instead of killed. The save DC is Charisma-based.
Woah. Holy shit– for a D20 that’s an insane stat block. Powers, all these stats, all these acronyms too. While a ton of information given in order to use this monster, this one is still less complicated than the Exalted block by quite a bit. At least the powers are all right there in the description. What’s more this is a monster you would rarely encounter and the Exalted block would be defeated by STARTING Exalted characters…
A character sheet, and cards… and tokens…
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition: I’m not sure which of these games is the most complex, but WFRP 3rd certainly takes at least 2nd. 3rd Edition WFRP’s core concept isn’t extremely complicated or difficult to understand: one builds a pool of dice, rolls them and judges the outcome by the roll, but the layer upon layer upon layer of chits and wound tokens and cards and distance markers and party cards and wound cards and stance markers and spell cards and action cards made the learning curve ridiculous, and when you got over the hump after a few plays, really didn’t add much overall and took up a FUCK ALL ton of table space to boot. The combat also, like Exalted and Pathfinder, takes FOREVER. In comparison, the Cortex-based Marvel Heroic Roleplaying does essentially the same thing in terms of the dice pool mechanic with tiny character sheets and only ONE type of token and BAM! POW! ZAP! and combat is done. Add to this that since there were chits and counters for everything, specific NPC’s, power cards for monsters, location cards, most adventures were directly on rails, no sandboxing for you young sewer jack and rat catcher! Making one of the best parts of WFRP go missing entire.
Let’s look at a monster stat block for WFRP 3…
I’m going to Nurgle out with this one for a Greater Demon of Nurgle.
fatty
Great Unclean One
ST 7(8)
T 10(6)
Ag 5(4)
Int 6
Wp 8
Fel 6
A/C/E 10/6/8
Wounds 40
Stance: C4 (green)
Plaguefather
A great unclean one has four ranks of resilience and two ranks of training in spell craft, It favors spells with the Nurgle or chaos traits and does not need to channel or spend power to fuel it’s spells
Vile Progeny
a great unclean one’s actions gain CHAOS STAR a henchmen group of nurglings bursts forth from the great unclean one’s pustules and appear engaged with the daemon.
Card Attacks:
Purulent Attack – these are all on handy cards– I’m not going to type these in! but it goes like [Demonic, Nurgles Weapons skill vs target defense, used by: Greater Demon engaged with target with a cost] and then lists each die roll possibility (hammers, stars, comet, skulls, etc. and the effect.
Bubonic Assault
Stream of Bile
Tally of Pestilence
That’s a lot of stuff– but it is a boss monster and the cards do help. The WFRP3 one is seems to me to be the least complex of the three games listed, but still quite a bit to remember and it takes up a shitload of space all over every table in the house. At least, unlike Exalted with all it’s charms in a myriad of books (and errata– don’t forget the essential erratta!) WFRP3 has the cards that you could refer to for powers. I know I printed up a bunch of Exalted charm cards back in the day (in 2009 that is) to some good effect.
Yeah– holy shit…
What came next is what we all started with.
There’s my list of 2009’s mass complex RPG’s. Due to unprotected sex, I’m not up on all the games that came out in 2009 and there may be another year that both the desire and the releases were more complex, but I really think looking back, 2009 was the year that really sparked people to swing the complexity pendulum back to the simple side with games since like Marvel Heroic, Numenera, all the OSR clones (except the shitty, pointless AD&D ones.. and 2nd edition? you sicko fuckers), D&D 5, 13th Age, FATE, and even though I think it sucks, Dungeonworld. In addition, I think the crumbling of Exalted over 2007-2009 influenced people to try to make games that captured the FEEL of Exalted, without the insanely crunch, vastly complex rules but that’s an article for another day.
This is a fucking awesome thing. It turns anything you want on a web page into a TABLE and you can roll it. Say some of you sit there GM’ing with your laptop and need some random shit. or on Roll20. You look up 16th Century Male Marginalism and find some table of randy tart names– you can use the plug in to roll it right there and give a result. This tiny little thing I just find awesome.
Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments PT 2. It’s an EP, but wtf. Awesome.
THIS is supposedly a track from it. There is a point early where you will say …. hmm– nah. But then about a minute later (especially if you have listened to Syro constantly for the last couple months) it will become obvious.
I was pondering my own desire for a Great Simplification in my RPG playing and GM’ing over the last few years and it lead down a path of wondering what year was the height of RPG complexity across the board? Now, sitting in 2015, the OSR is going strong, Numenera’s cypher system is still rolling forward (and the Strange) and has some very simple mechanics, 13th Age has stripped away the grid of 4th Edition and created an extremely playable D20, people are swinging off the nuts of the extremely simplified, deconstructionist spoof of D&D: Dungeon World. What’s more, Hasbro’s D&D v5 released last year, and while still fairly complex compared to the latter three versions, it has also undergone a great simplification compared especially to the two previous iterations. The pendulum has swung to the simple, but when was it at it’s apex of complexity that gave the current trend momentum?
The year I feel people were playing (and had an appetite for) the most complicated RPG’s in the history of the hobby is 2009. Since that year, I gut-feel (I ain’t going to track down sources) like the RPG community, as well as myself has been yearning for a simpler style of play, one that invokes more imagination and less about mechanics and OPTIONS. Yet, in the early 2000’s, I firmly believe that myself and many other people wanted nearly infinite complexity in our RPG games, and anything less was ‘just fucking shit we played as kids.’
Where did this desire for complexity come from in the first place? Why did we need so many character/monster/spell options and all this minutiae? People designed and produced these complex games hoping they would sell, and there was obviously a market for each being as complex as possible. But why?
I’d like to divide RPG players into two (overly) broad groups. First, the 70’s set– people that were born in the 70’s and played OD&D when it was actually published. These are the Holmes, Moldvay, Metzner kids. The second group (again this is broad) are the Lord of the Rings kids that played or started playing D&D 3.0 when the LoTR movies came out. The boost of those films to D&D and RPG’s as a whole was simply huge and there is an entire generation of people that jumped into the hobby, starting again with fantasy, during this time. What were these two groups both influenced by to make them want exceedingly complex games in 2009? How did D&D 3.0, designed by the same guy that did Everway and 13th Age, end up being so complicated and by extension– all these other complex games!
Magic the Gathering. MTG had a huge effect on all gaming everywhere from 1993 on. I would say MTG had as big an effect as the creation and propagation of Dungeons and Dragons itself. What MTG did for gamers and game designers is to create a desire and acceptance of a vast array of asymmetric powers. A MTG deck is essentially a collection of powers that players need to know, memorize and combo. Not only do they need to know their own deck, they need to know as much about all the other cards in the game that may be played against them as well. Roleplaying games hence started having massive amounts of variable powers– especially Exalted and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (who even had all the player skills on cards). MTG primed gamers minds for mass asymmetry and a desire for the same in their RPG’s.
CONFORT–with 71 credits…
Anime, and fighting games. Especially Ninja Scroll for starters and EVERYTHING else since and by extension ALL Japanese fighting games. I spent food money in college playing Virtua Fighter and Samurai Shodown 2 and the adoration of those games culminating in Guilty Gear and Virtua Fighter 4/5 created an appetite for a system where your character fighting opponents gave the players tons of options, tons of character styles and special powers, conditions, everything. I believe fully that Anime and Fighting games were extremely responsible for the rise in complexity over the course of the 90’s and 2000’s. People eschewed the muddy murderhobos crawling around in dungeons for scraps with just a few stats and a single damage rating– they wanted heroes that could SHIN SHORYUKEN!!! Combat, never a strong point or focus of old D&D (despite how we played as kids) became absolutely critical to RPG system design. Once you understood what was going on in the fighting engine of King of Fighters or Samurai Shodown, it was hard to look at your PNP RPG combats the same way. Reinforcing the trend from D&D 2nd edition– anime propagated that characters should be ‘heroes’ and not just some git with a sword and some rope stealing stuff from a tomb or abandoned dwelling.
Vampire and the D10 system. This is called the storyteller system but compared to story games these days (Hillfolk, Fate, et al.) this was really a ‘universal mechanic’ RPG more than anything. The really awesome thing about Vampire, which no one had done before well, were the variable player powers based on caste/clan. Suddenly players were able to take a fairly straight forward (and broken until the Trinity version of the game fixed it) difficulty/successes system and layer in THEIR characters variable powers, and see how the whole mess worked together. As much as I am not a fan of the vaguely gay (remember it was still only the early 90’s–it couldn’t be blatantly gay which would have been much better!) vampire soap opera stuff myself, I, like many other, viewed the system with some sort of awe, but just wanted it to be turned loose on a genre that wasn’t so…. goth and metaphor for being a closeted gay dude. (this ended up being Trinity/Aberrant and Exalted). Because the system was easy to add options to–they did– so much…
Warhammer 40k/Fantasy: Especially the 70’s gamers started spending MASS cash on 40K and Warhammer stuff in general in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. The game was extremely pervasive in game stores, being the bread and butter of many stores along with MTG. Warhammer is all about army/unit asymmetry and tons of variable powers for everything, with customizable characters to the nth degree (we rip on “herohammer,” but that shit is fun both on and off the table as long as it’s balanced). Since D&D was derived from miniatures games, 40K has a similar root. Warhammer is the natural hardcore extension of Swords and Spells and Chaimail, both of which are awful in comparison.
Now, there have been many complicated RPG’s before 2009, especially in the realm of ‘universal’ systems such as GURPS and the HERO system (starting with Champions) as well as, arguably, TMNT (actually a really good game for it’s time!) and Rifts which really wasn’t that complicated except for all the character options and SDC/MDC bullshit (and mass addons). Phoenix Command, Twilight 2000, Rolemaster from back in the day were all COMICALLY complicated simulationist style RPG’s. These last three are games that, if you accidentally buy at a gaming flea market for a couple bucks, end up not on a shelf or drawer for later ‘research’ fodder or toilet reading, but get fired directly into the recycle bin. Yet, these games came out of an era where I think no one knew jack shit about how to design an RPG in general, the medium being all so new after all, so you have to give them a bit of a break unplayable as they were compared to (most) games of today.
Somehow, I convinced a pack of my knuckleheads (and my brother, who has little choice) to try out Runequest 6 last week with good results. To be self-critical from the outset, I fucked up a lot of the rules, but my only real fudging of the dice to favor a player (I play with a GM screen still…) was probably one out of 20 or so where I accidentally let the player’s off the hook when they should have been chopped meats. Making life hard on myself with RPG experiments as I tend to do, I converted a Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure (Thulian Echoes) to Runequest 6 — not the easiest thing. In this adventure, the characters find a book that details some people going to an Island about 1000 years before, but instead of reading the book or giving them the information, the players actually play through the ‘diary’ as the original peoples. They are absolutely encouraged to cheese it up as much as possible to help the future visitors (which maybe them… maybe not) to the island if they can. Needless to say, the Island is a fucking meatgrinder for the poor peoples of 1000 years ago.
I set the original party in 1605 England (summer, before the 5th of November…), where they were non-liveried members of the Mercers guild (read: street thugs) and just happened upon the diary while doing some shopcrastin and the like. My plan was to start off easy to get the players some familiarity with the combat system, the skills system is so intuitive these days that it really does not need much explaining. The first combat against a near set of mooks (though anyone can kill you in Runequest really) went well and things that are quite different from most RPG’s like weapon size, action points, differential rolls, special effects were pretty easily understood– I think. The selfish thing is, as the GM, I have had a lot of fun running Runequest combat so far because every dice roll matters– much like Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. There’s no D20/WFRP: “CLATTER -oh, I missed again” going on. The players picked some fairly varied character builds, one was a 2 Action point beefsteak and the others were mostly rat-faced snipes who were more likely to toss a brickbat and then run then fight face to face.
Yet the second combat, once they had their new characters 1000 years previous, was a doozy, which ended up unfortunately being the remainder of the session, and absolute beast to run. Four player characters + friendly NPC’s vs twelve Animated Statues is not a combat a new GM or group to Runequest should try to run. While the players may not have noticed, a lot was forgotten and missed by this hapless GM. I forgot when people had been wounded, I forgot when enemies had been over-pressed, forgot that some of the statues had spears, some had swords, some had shields as well, and I forgot to take into account weapon reach. Someone with a spear can hold off an opponent until they can close range. Again being self-critical first and foremost , I don’t think the players noticed much and had a good time because the MEAT of Runequest 6 is the combat and damn if it wasn’t fun despite the fuck ups (I did get the nearly obligatory “Chris is trying to cheat math” note that is often given to any of our group’s GM’s though). Both of the main fighters went down (one out, one down with a leg wound), the sorcerer ran out of magic points after 5-6 castings of wrack and ran off, and the Pict was nearly killed multiple times before they were able to drop the last statue–and nearly all had to spend all of their luck points to do it. Whew. I was imagining while playing what the combat would have been like in LotFP– these were 3HD monsters– so at least 12hp each, likely 15+ and weapons do half damage. 12 of these is a LONG fight.
Why I like the RQ combat In the D20’s, characters just roll a die and do hit points of damage. It’s effective when hit points are low across the board, and is fundamentally a timing mechanism for how long something can stay in the fight, but it’s so abstracted the characters in combat don’t make many choices, everything is a medium attack to no specific location. This works when shit is getting cleaved to the ground quickly, but vs high HD monsters, players often want to try something other than a medium attack to no specific location.
Contrast to D20’s, in Exalted, Fate, Feng Shui, and games that focus on the narrative stunting, the players have to create an idea in their head for what they are trying to do before any dice hit the table. It’s fine to say “I flip [there is always some sort of flip in stunting descriptions] over the table and straddle the first guard’s neck between my thighs and then slice off the top of the second guard’s head with my cestus before I fire out my poison vaginal dart onto the first guard’s neck,” but what if it fails? What if the subsequently rolled dice say that that stunt absolutely does not happen— what happens then? Runequest solves both the ‘a medium attack to no specific location’ problem that many RPG’s (and all D20’s) have and the pre-‘Stunting before dice hit the table’ by making the player roll the dice first, then there is an opponent reaction (if possible) and the results are applied– from this the narrative can be derived. How does the system do this? First, hit locations. Your character knows what part of the enemy they have hit, and what degree of damage. This adds a ton to the visceral aspect of combat. Second, special effects. Combat special effects happen extremely often– rarely was there an attack/successful parry for no damage (though this did happen), usually either the attacker or the parry-er failed or rolled a critical and one of the various combat special effects were applied. This not only drives the narrative, but has specific system effects. Unlike the free-form ‘consequences’ in FATE and Marvel Heroic, these are codefied completely– so players that lack in the imagination department (whether through fatigue or drink) can let the dice do their work for them, pick a mechanical effect that best suits their needs and let the narrative be derived. As a GM, I think this is quite awesome.
I could go on and on about the game (and I will eventually) but suffice to say that Runequest 6 is really badass and after making about 9 characters for the session and converting a variety of NPC’s and beasties, I can make characters in a VERY short time– my biggest gripe about the system really is that you have to have your players spend 300 points(!?) on skills (just like Call of Cthulhu) before they can get to buying equipment. I’d rather it be like WFRP where you choose a class (say, fighter) then roll what career you were before becoming that class, and take the skills from that career. The magic system requires a lot of GM pre-work which I was not a fan of for this session, but a small quibble since RQ6 is a toolkit system after all. Would I convert another LotFP module? Maybe one of the big campaigns yes, but for the 2-5 session ones, likely not except for one I will not mention since one of the players sees this blog– I think there’s definitely a place for both Runequest and LotFP (and 13th Age as well) and I don’t want to try to change any of them to be more like the other– such as setting 13th Age (gonzo D20) in pre-modern Europe or adding hit locations to LotFP. I will probably write more posts about RQ, but likely I won’t get a chance to run a game for a long time.
For the second time in slightly more than two years, we’ve hosted a New Years Day Cosmic Encounter party– this involves recovering from hangovers by drinking and playing Cosmic Encounter as many times as possible. In both cases, this year was no exception.
We had 11 people this year so split into two tables of 5 and 6. One group played with a base set and one expansion (the one with the Hazards) and the second group played with nearly everything except tech and space ports. We had some cracking games, but my first game was the very first time I’d seen the Entropy Beast in action– it devours planets based on number of ships and a draw of a special card from the destiny deck. Once one player is down to 2 planets, the game is over and everyone loses. In most games that are player vs player, the fact that the board would suddenly ‘win’ the game would normally be a bit shite, but in Cosmic Encounter it’s really just par for the course.
Cosmic, again, shows it’s mettle as the best multiplayer board game in existence. We had at least three people that had never played before and they were able to jump right in among the mimosas.
…a giant battle nearly from start to finish. I’d like to coin this as the John Woo Hobbit film. I’m not sure if I liked the movie, but it did not suck goblin schwang like the second film did. Stretching a small book into three films (though including a bunch of stuff from the Silmarillion) was a tough job but in this one the writers had no choice but to grease up and get fucking.
Stuff I liked:
Huge battle with lots of crap going on everywhere. There were scenes where dwarves, men, elves and orcs were all fighting like crazy. For a fan of Warhammer Fantasy Battle and all that stuff since I was a little kid, it was sort of a fantasy battle orgasm, and it should have been. Despite the original author’s rather denuded account of the battle in the book, it was a big show down in Middle Earth, one that had far reaching consequences for the LOTR wars. This was much better than the cartoon movie…
While the tiny parts with Dol Guldor and the Necromancer were really well done, this should have been a MUCH larger part of the second film and had a massive battle going on to finish up– THEN deal with the dragon. Really since it was three films, the Necromancer parts could have been the justification for the vast length– and really it didn’t amount to all that much in the third film. Seeing Saurman and the two elder elf characters destroying the ring wraiths was pretty awesome though, but did they just come alone? Pretty odd that.
I liked the 1 on 1 battles that evolved during the fighting. Since EVERY character had the power and skill of Legolas, it was neat to see the superheroic battles between the main characters. By this film, I knew going in that every goddamn thing was going to be way over the top wuxia so what the hell…
Stuff I didn’t like:
Not enough about Beorn and the bear– that guy should have had more screen time kicking ass. Just one tiny scene? That’s it??
Everyone was Legolas– this was pretty ridiculous throughout the three films that all the dwarves were as spritely and had the combat prowess of legolas… but they decided to go with the superheroic version of the Hobbit, and there we have it. If they hadn’t would we have been bored? I don’t know. This is all part of the ‘if everything is fantastic, nothing is’ issue with many fantasy films.
The armored orks. gone are the rabble-like hordes of orcs from LOTR that looked great, in the hobbit you basically had a generic but FULLY armored ork “bred for war” going on. They had little to no character compared to the LOTR versions, and it was unbelievable that human RABBLE and completely unarmored Dwarves should be able to cut a swath through them.
The dwarf/elf love story. This is was preposterous to me. Despite the fact that Evangeline Lilly is pretty and could just hog all the screen time between fight scenes for all I care, this was stretching the source material too far. A human? Yes, or another elf that dies in the battle (like NOT have Legolas there, but another male elf).
No cool Gandalf spells. He did few spells in the movies overall, I would have liked to see something other than him whipping his sword and staff around. It’s not like the film of the Hobbit fits into the low-magic Sword and Sorcery genre with all the running up falling bricks and Aerial lycanthrope transformations…
No thrush–where was the bird?
This is really on the second film– the meeting of Bilbo and the Dragon was BETTER in the old cartoon movie than the new one! How did that happen?
What this has inspired me to do is eventually have a marathon and watch the LOTR films back to back. However I may skip over the last 40 minutes of the last film– if there is any point where people look to where the seed of these Hobbit films inevitably going to shit it was the last 40 minutes of LOTR.
I survived the steam Xmas sale until this morning when I saw Dominions 4 on sale for 9$. This is well worth the scratch if you like strategery. I have not delved in to 4, but I have spend oodles and oodles of hours on 2 and 3. It’s a super deep game, but what’s awesome is that the multiplayer ACTUALLY WORKS since it’s tick based rather than everyone sitting around on one machine like Matt and Steve and John on HOMM 3.
Don’t let the graphics fool you, this is an awesome game.
