With D&D 5 going free in PDF form others are following suit with free PDF’s. The king of fantasy BRP (basic role playing, which powers Cthulhu and Elric) RUNEQUEST in it’s 6th version has come out with it’s own set of rules in PDF format.
This is a great set of rules that I wish I had played more when I was young enough to play a ton… (i.e. 1984) and when it was heavily supported in White Dwarf. The character creation rules may be a bit longer than normal to get going with, but the combat system is something to experience.
We were looking at Dungeon Crawl Classics, Feng Shui 2, 13th Age and everything was instantly booked within 5 minutes. Is it because these things are pretty cool and a lot of the other events fucking suck? Sure, but within 5 minutes? Ridiculous.
That said I’ve hung up my Shadowfist cards for anything other than casual play and that’s freed me up for an ALL RPG GenCon weekend– All RPG if I can get in any games that is. A weekend of wandering around the main hall like a zombie being touched by all that fat flesh has it’s appeal, but I’d much rather get some serious butt-rot from sitting in a chair slinging the fucking poly’s after spending my budget in the main hall the first hour of the con.
Exalted 3 will someday come out. Gencon is looking impossible, but if you kickstarted the book you will have gotten a comic via drivethru to check out in the mean time. Since the lead developer is apparently not going to die (this was a consideration due to health issues), we will likely see this relatively soon, but Gencon: no.
The comic is good, it’s not GREAT, but it’s a good read and does not descend into some of the cheese that the Exalted COMIC book did (there was good stuff in there too). One thing of note is that people that kickstarted at a massive level to the new version got to contribute a character to the comic , so the writers/artists were dealing with some fanboy’s wet dream from the outset. Given that, it turned out really well compared to the horrible vanity shadowfist cards we’ve seen since Zman gave up the game.
I’m still excited for this fucker, but if it sucks, it’s only postponed my Exalted game using Marvel Heroic (cortex+) system.
Haven’t posted in a bit which is largely irrelevant but notable in that I’ve been busy with not only wounding my very soul trying to finish DARK SOULS before I start the second one but I also ran Lamentations of the Flame Princess on Wednesday night and 13th Age on Thursday night. This is good. Given the potential of burn out, I think it’s going to be tough for me to work on both at once but fuck all I’m going to try. I’m in an enviable position, at least from my view, that I get to run both these games and can compare them. 13th Age, of course, represents the ultimate in new-school design for D20 and D&D. It’s fundamentally based off 4th Edition but has a lot of things from Original D&D that infiltrate it, like not using miniatures for fights (we sort of do) and all that. The fact that there are no experience points is wonderful and it’s very very easy for me to make encounters that are balanced (and imbalances them when I want), so that’s sweet too. However, the game does not have very many adventures out for it and that’s sad for now. I look at the massive amount of OD&D, 4th and 3rd edition content created in just the last 5 years and it’s staggering. While most is absolute tripe, there are still some gems in each of those systems. I think anything 4th Edition could easily be converted to 13th Age, but given that it’s a miniatures battle game (and a very very good one) that’s not the type of game I want to run at the moment (nor my players want to play), so the adventures for that are really fight fight fight fight. 3rd Edition– what can I say, there’s a lot of shit out there for it, and some excellent modules. However the rules are not to my taste and the stuff is probably really tough to convert. That said, 13th Age is great, but as a lazy ass GM, I want modules to pull shit from and they do not yet exist.
In contrast, Lamentations of the Flame Princess simply has so much content available to it out there because it is essentially a super-tight version of the Basic D&D from 1981. For the one off I’m going to run next week, I made a list of adventures on a piece of paper that included modules from the late 70’s to pieces written in 2013 and had this one girl I sort of know pick the name she liked best as my groups demise. Stuff like Secret of Bone Hill (classic) and Anomalous Subsurface Environment (newschool megadungeon) were on the list in addition to the Lamentations stuff so I am just crushed with choices. She picked something appropriately terrifying (the Lamentations of the Flame Princess module names are hard to pass up).
Hot chick zapping shit 1981
In contrasting these two games I must note one key thing that Basic D&D does compared to 13th Age, something that the Lamentations author notes in his referee book: you focus on what your character is doing in the game rather than what your character can do. There isn’t a lot of fucking around with X at will daily power and this combo of powers with other players in Basic D&D. One of the players commented during the Lamentations game: “I’ve got one spell and a mace! I can’t do anything!” yet that certainly didn’t stop the gaming night from being pretty damn awesome. The constraint of limited powers (or none) helped focus the game to different things.
Hot chick zapping shit 2013.
What 13th Age does it does extremely well. My players are starting to learn some bread an butter character buff and debuff combos that will serve them very well in the more difficult fights to come. The magic item system is easy to use and the constraints by chakra I adore as a GM and while classes can be complex, they reward study and application in fights. I really want someone to roll up a Wizard one of these days because that class is what I would play if I could stand playing rather than DM’ing. There are spells where effects are made up EVERY SINGLE TIME they are cast, and that’s cooking with all sorts of rump gas. Battles are fast and the escalation die makes it so later in a fight players are GOING to hit the enemies–and when some monsters also use the escalation die, look out! So both of these game systems I say at this time I really like, but 13th Age is in it’s infancy for adventures. What’s more, 13th Age and Lamentations of the Flame Princess are great for the lazy DM for sure, which, despite running two games in two different systems the same week, I really really am. I promise.
If you have a passing interest in the Old School D&D scene/’community’, I can’t recommend this blog enough. They basically say everything is absolute shit, so if they say something is good, which they do from time to time, it’s REALLY good. The blog also does trainspotting on some of the human trainwrecks barreling down the D&D nerd express (and most importantly, blogging about it) with shit like this amazing gemstone:
The fighter says, “I press her down to the sand. I’m very careful not to push to [sic] hard, not to hurry. I want her to understand that this is not sex, this is me caring for her.”
With Dark Souls 2 out in a few days, players are lamenting the end of Dark Souls 1 as the video above is probably just the first of many tributes. Now this is strange because it’s a single player game primarily? Correct, however there is a massive multiplayer component to the game that some people may never experience (with the exception of the computer invasions that mimic when another player invades). Since many people will be immediately switching to Dark Souls 2, they have to say goodbye to their characters and such, so it’s truly bitter sweet since the new game has already been reviewed and found AWESOME.
What caught me on this video is that it references the dragon archers I mentioned in an earlier post. The money shot is at 2:12.
I get so little time to play games and Dark Souls is one that you really have to take seriously, especially when it’s trying to emotionally maim you at every turn. The last few days I have been stuck in one single area and yesterday I almost threw in the towel on the game for good.
The situation is that you have to fight through some fairly tough enemies only to have to then walk up a series of ledges while under fire from some archers who have GIANT dragon killing arrows that will knock you off the ledge if you get hit (whether you block or not). You are forced to run between them so while one is shooting you from the front, another is shooting you in the back. Then you must engage one of them in close combat without falling off the ledge. All told, I think I tried this 50 times before making it through. At try 45 I was like–fuck this game forever. My last ‘stuck’ point was the first Capra Daemon which is understandable for me since it’s a boss and all. Those are SUPPOSED to be difficult. This is just… some area in the game. Praise the fucking Sun I got through it and on to what I’ve heard is the most difficult boss fight in the game…
I picked up the beautiful Banner Saga as part of the Kickstarter, as well as the very indy but so far pretty awesome Inquisitor and am switching between them both with a little Torchlight 2 and Chivalry in between.
The issue I’m having is that Banner Saga and Inquisitor are both READING games. There is just so much text on screen to read in both games (especially Inquisitor) that it’s like reading a novel on the computer– and that’s tough to stomach after Skyrim. Of course no indy shop is going to be able to do the sort of VAST voice acting work of Skyrim or Oblivion– we take that shit for granted at this point. However, these indy RPG’s (including Eschelon and Avalon the Black Fortress) are excellent games with really good writing but… it’s still writing on the screen, and I’m finding it quite a bit of a slog, especially with two games like at once. I get the urge after about half an hour to blow shit up instead.
So how are these games? Banner Saga is unfortunately really boring, but awful pretty. The combat system, compared to Disgaea, Phantom Brave, Final Fantasy Tactics, etc. is not up to par. I’ve been in 10 or so battles and they all are on a flat plane with the same enemies over and over again. With Disgaea and the like, I am excited to get into a fight– with Banner Saga it’s zzzzz….. Frankly, I’m never going to finish it. Other people are liking it so the kickstarter was worth supporting, but I’m not a fan of the game. People have just done that this of game so much better. Aesthetically, it’s amazing to look at though.
This is how you will feel during the combat in the game– sleepy and bored but you do feel pretty.
Inquisitor is VERY Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. You spend your time dealing with NPC’s and reading their responses and accusations of each other. I do enjoy it but it’s been a LOT of reading. Compared to Eschelon you don’t do much exploring (at first) as you start in a pretty big village. The combat is just fine for this type of game– what’s misleading is that it looks a bit LIKE Diablo 2 so you expect the game to play that way in combat, but it doesn’t, not at all. So, if you like Eschelon and finish 3 quick, Inquisitor is worth looking at. I really like the plot lines so far. There was a battle with bandits early on where they run away after a few go down–that was the moment that I knew this game was a keeper.
We still had communication problems, but were able to eek out a few hour session of 13th Age last night. I really like Roll20 for facilitating online play, despite the crappy voice chat, the rest of it is fucking top drawer. I mostly hate it when people describe what actually happens in a PnP session so I won’t bore you with the details around what happened, but rather stuff about what it’s like to GM the game.
Encounter
There was a short fight in the session, and it went fairly fast– slower due to communication problems than it should, not because of the game. I built the antagonists for this encounter in about 10 minutes and could have been faster but I wanted some sort of weird power for the caster so did a bit more searching. Balance wise it was exactly perfect for what I was trying to go for, the characters took some damage (two of them were at their staggered level) but the enemies went down quick, since this was a bit of an interlude from the main plot. There’s a lot of stuff that 4th Edition D&D did right, and the encounter building was one of them and it’s even better in 13th Age because only the most ungodly powerful monsters have the mega stat-lines that 4th Edition has. So, I don’t feel like I have to build out mass stats for, say, an Exalted enemy (making the 10 or so that I did took hours and hours) and yet I can have enemies with interesting powers that sometimes don’t come into play during a single fight since they may not proc. Surprise for next time!
XP
This is another area where this game shines. After last night’s session there was no diddling around with XP since…there’s no XP at all! It’s just slowly dawned on me after the last two sessions how awesome this is for me as a GM. I get to decide when the players level up– when it’s best for the STORY and I feel like they’ve earned it. It removes all the fiddly crap since people aren’t writing large numbers on their character sheets, erasing it over and over, using a calculator and then messing around with trying to get into fights with barmaids to try to milk out 5XP for the next level. None of that shit is in 13th Age and I don’t think anyone will miss it at all. I do favor the per-session XP of WFRP as an alternative to no XP, but that is as about as detailed as I want to get.
Characters
I frankly don’t know what all the characters can do yet. I’ve read through the classes, but my retention is low– I really leave it up to the players to let me know what their class powers and talents do so far. A couple of the dudes do not have the book, so the fact that they put out an SRD for the game is fucking AWESOME. Really a player just needs a character sheet and the 5-8 pages for their class info and that’s it.
Adventure
I’m running the first adventure out of the back of the book, it’s no Oldenhaller Contract, but works fine. The players could read it, sure, but with the Icon Rolls and other stuff going on, it’s likely going to be very different than what it’s written as. I have written a custom 5-6 session adventure for the group, if they choose to continue so we’ll be hitting that next.
I wanted this post to be about how I am digging GM’ing 13th Age, but we had serious issues for our first session. The trouble with RPG sessions usually center around people not showing up rather than any sorts of technical problems, which is what we had last night with our first session. To give you perspective, we started things off at 8PM and called it at 10:45PM or so; a good 2.5 hours plus– and we were playing online– NEVER a good idea if you can help it. We can’t so there we were.
First, we were using Roll20 and whatever voice chat system they implemented– it simply doesn’t work or in the hour or so spent with it, it didn’t. We switched to Steamchat with voice but could not get everyone to hear each other — as in one person could hear everyone, another person could hear everyone but one person and so on. It was a complete communication mess.
One option in Roll20 is to use Google Hangouts, and I know that shit works– however, the account that I use with Roll20 has been BANNED by Google for not adhering to their names policy. Since we are Google’s product, we’re not a sufficient product unless we use a real name on our account… but I have MANY google accounts and only one uses my real name so I don’t know what the issue is there. You think I want to use my real name for all this shit? Am I some attention whoring millennial?
In terms of game played, it was just terrible progress. I had to work on some characters a bit but to give you some perspective of how little game we actually got to play: at the start of each session of 13th Age, you roll Icon relationship dice to see what Icons are somehow involved in the session– , this is a roll of 3 dice per player and I wrote down the results, this was the ONLY thing we were able to get done in terms of the adventure proper.
In terms of planning, I figured we would get through the ENTIRE included adventure in the back of the book…
Wow. If I was to point to one single thing that influenced me more than anything else, it would be D&D, both playing it as a kid, trying not to play it as a teenager (to be cool) and then moving on to better games as an adult (better being Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for the most part) and just all around gaming– D&D was the gateway drug! I’ve spent some of my tiny amount of leisure time this week going through some of my old RPG shit and trying to ID the path I took through the hobby. I think it’s this (bold means I feel it was a huge influence):
D&D Basic (blue book) > Moldvay Basic (boxed sets) > AD&D (sort of, since it really fucking sucked and we just used the Basic rules with the AD&D monsters) > Gamma World (ahem…shoplifted copy I shamefully admit..)> Champions > Star Frontiers > Paranoia > Call of Cthulhu > Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles > Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (this lasted all through college and beyond) > Werewolf > Feng Shui > Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition > Exalted (this got me back into RPG’s seriously around 2006) > Dresden Files/FATE > Marvel Heroic Roleplaying > Carolina Death Crawl > ???
Now, of course, it’s all about the narrative style games and I haven’t played a D20 in years. 13th Age will be the first delve into a modern D20 since a single session of Pathfinder about 4 years ago. Of course, 13th Age IS a mash up of narrative and D20 crunch, so we’ll see how it plays vs FATE and vs 3.5.
That said, there have been many awesome RPG’s that came out in the last couple years and even just last year besides 13th Age: Fate Core, Numenera, Fiasco, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Carolina Death Crawl are all huge additions to the genre that are moving the ball forward– it’s really tough to pick what to even run!
Looking forward to 2014, we’ll have D&D Next, Exalted 3 and what looks like a crazy interactive game by Robin D. Laws: HillFolk. While I feel the new version of D&D is already out and it’s called 13th Age, I’m interested to see what D&D Next is able to do. Let’s face it, Pathfinder has the ‘miniature heavy’ version of the game locked so Next will either bring it back towards the OD&D versions already handled by Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess or try to take Pathfinder head on (which is sort of 4th edition after all).
I know some of you have already been roped into many of my experimental games (playtest of fate core, carolina death crawl for example) and it will continue…
