RPG – Page 18 – MRAAKTAGON

13th Age – first real session

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.

13th Age first session (not a) total disaster

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…

Happy 40th D&D!

Ye old blue book.... — Ye old blue 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…

The Gaming of 2013

ahhh… the unlucky ’13 year was quite a year for games– or, dare I say, it should have been. We had some MASSIVE releases last year with the culmination in some cases of decades of work for some development teams. Yet for all their glory, the massive budget games were not the ones that I played and enjoyed, with a few exceptions.

Let’s run down the releases I got to play. Now I’m an ancient person with familial and work duties so there’s no chance in a given year that I’ll be able to play even close to everything that’s good. I have to make choices– very difficult choices with my budget of TIME.

Here we have the list of stuff I played or was seriously considering in order:
Anarchy Reigns: This was the first game I bought in 2013 and it was…not great. The price tag was good at 25$ or so, but I couldn’t get through the single player and the multiplayer, while interesting, just didn’t hold my attention. The key issue was the core of the combat system– it just wasn’t all that great. Compared to the AMAZING Urban Reign for the PS2, which is quite similar, it was a vast disappointment and from the ex-Clover team, that was sad.

Crysis 3: I am a huge Far Cry fan and though it pissed in my mouth with Far Cry 2, I still like the original developers a lot and I picked up the original Crysis and it was great fun. I haven’t bitten on 2 or 3 yet but probably will in the future. I guess what did it for me was continued play of Battlefield 3. Crysis 3 just seemed redundant and I didn’t buy it.

Hotline Miami: The first indy game of the year I picked up. The ad campaign for this one was so incredible it was a must buy. I never finished it — to be truthful after the school shooting last year I just couldn’t play it anymore– but I got a long way into the game before moving on to other games. It was awesome.

Hear of the Swarm: Ok, for all it’s polish, Starcraft 2 is not fun for me to play. The single player is quite boring and the actual storyline EXECUTION is just shit (the ideas are really cool though, just executed poorly and all tongue and cheek with the shitty-accent space rednecks and trying to be serious at the same time plus romance? what a space pissery!), the multiplayer, the meat of the game, feels like a fucking chore to me. Plus, it’s a terrible annoyance to have to use Blizzard’s version of steam and ALWAYS BE ONLINE. I figured out finally that as much as I love RTS games and Warcraft 3, I’m just not a Starcraft player so I skipped this one and will likely never play Starcraft 2 in any form again because it’s jsut goddamn tiresome.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger: This was an impulse buy and I didn’t get through it but played it a bit and was impressed. It’s essentially a rail shooter with a CRAZY story integrating with just about every Old West hero in the late era (think Jesse James/Butch Cassidy). If this is cheap, pick it up, you won’t be disappointed even if you get like 3-4 hours of play only.

The Last of Us: Ok so this was a PS3 exclusive and I had no chance to play it. Apparently this is a great game for the story as it integrates stuff from the hugely influential THE ROAD into a zombie shooter. I just wanted to note that if this had come out on other consoles, it would have sold a LOT more copies, especially PC. Plus this has that short lady that’s in all the fucking movies these days that is always talking too much on screen.

Xcom: Enemy Within: This is a follow up to Xcom: Enemy Unknown from 2012 and I just didn’t bother with it despite my love for the first game. I hope this combat engine sees more life as it’s great. I will pick this up eventually…

Company of Heroes 2: Ok so here is a sequel to one of my favorite RTS games. COH, along with Warcraft 3, redefined what I wanted out of an RTS, and they did it in very different ways. Unfortunately, the ENTIRE COH team left Relic Games long before COH 2 was started and I read so many bad things about the game that I didn’t pick it up. The comments from Russians about the game is pretty crazy if you check metacritic– I guess they forgot that Stalin was a murderous dictator that was able to save the country from another murderous dictator?

Rogue Legacy: While I don’t have a controller to hook up to my PC, I gave this one a shot and it was pretty interesting. It’s not Battle Block Theater though.. no sir. Hence, I had problems playing it for very long.

Dota 2: 2013 IS the year of DOTA2, hands down. The game came out of beta and everyone was playing it before, and everyone and their MOTHER is playing it now. It is the best game of 2013, no question about it. Obviously it’s a game that doesn’t appeal to everyone and it’s a very very deep rabbit hole to get into (and you have to practice) but I think this was a huge release for the year. It’s tough to say it was the best when you want to give it to something new– since the game is getting close to 10 years old from it’s first incarnations, but DOTA 2 is by far the most important and best game of 2013.

Saints Row IV: I loved Saint’s Row 3. Loved it and played the shit out of it. IV is excellent— except I can’t play it anymore. Whether it’s my configuration (unlikely) or a patch I can’t tell, but the game will no longer run on my computer. I got 20 hours in and then simply had to stop playing after one of the patches hit. I uninstalled, reinstalled, check the interweb tubes for a solution which ended up being “wait for the next patch” which I don’t even think ever came. Sad that they didn’t take their PC users seriously this time around.

Diablo 3 (consoles): The monumental failure of a game that is Diablo 3 hit consoles in 2013 and they did a good job. Unfortunately, the game is fundamentally flawed and cannot be ‘fixed’ with the removal of the real money auction house. This is what happens when you spend 12 years and millions of dollars on what amounts to a PAY TO PLAY iPHONE GAME.

Total War Rome 2: How the mighty have fallen. This was my fucking BIGGEST disappointment of the year. I warned my wife and wee children that I would be huddled in the basement for MONTHS on this fucker, but I put in 40 hours of frustration and was done. Rome 1 was my second choice for game of the DECADE from 00 to 10 only second to the almighty Warcraft 3. What the fuck happened? 1) Too large of a budget 2) Too short of a timeline 3) crappy battle engine. This series is dead to me. Shogun 2’s battles sucked despite EVERYTHING else about the game being excellent. The design choices + the battles being shit tanked this game forever. Warhammer Fantasy Battle Total War will suck.

Path of Exile: Another Diablo 3 killer, I did not get a chance to play this and probably won’t. It’s been on my radar for a long time, but — I just want to keep playing Torchlight 2– like forever.

Battlefield 4: Why come out so soon? I still feel like I didn’t have the time to get into BF3 and ALREADY there’s a new BF game out? And it’s not an offshoot like Bad Company or 2142, it’s the full on thing… why? I just didn’t want this and saw no reason to buy it. This does not need to come out every 2 years…

And for all that– it’s still just the year of DOTA 2.

Torchlight 2 Mod: “Essentials”

Like Diablo 2 with the Zyel mod (a collation of other mods + an awesome crafting mod), we’ve been waiting for a definitive collation of good mods for Torchlight 2 and here it is in “Torchlight Essentials.” The issue with mods is 1) which to get, 2) making your friends get the same ones, 3) getting games where everyone has the same mod. Collections of mods in one package,in my opinion, are essential to reduce the insanity. We tried it out Friday night and it was superlative.

The mod has a new class that mixes the mage and a close in fighter, the official 8 player muiltiplayer mod, the two mods (Blanks and Extra Chunky) from the Runic developers and a host of other vetted mods. Highly Recommended.

Subscribe to the mod here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=138228035

Fair Folk

13th Age has FATE’s Chocolate in D20’s Peanut Butter

I have been holding off on this post because the 13th Age core book was maaaaaat’s Xmas present and didn’t want to spoil it, but now I can wax on and on about how I think this is the version of D&D that I will actually run. It’s got the D20 crunch and leveling with a lot of stuff from FATE and Feng Shui that I’ve grown to love over the years. The game is a product of the two developers of 3rd and 4th edition D&D and represents, as near as they can agree on, their homebrew D20 system– and it’s awesome.

I’ve watched D&D from afar for awhile now, the tactical triumph of 3rd edition and the massive resurgence of the genre with the 1-2 punch of the LOTR movies and 3rd edition, then the Descent-like 4th edition (which should have just been a huge box set with tons of miniatures instead of the big ass books), the B/X-OSR movement with Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess bringing it back to the Basic D&D books we actually played back in the day (pulling only monsters and spells from AD&D).

All that said, I threw in the towel on actually playing D&D in the mid 80’s for various reasons– first off it got pretty boring. Roll up a character, fight in a dungeon, get loot, etc. By ’86 or so there were many other options and settings. Paranoia, TMNT (don’t laugh, it was a fun game), Cthulhu and the game that killed D&D for me for pretty much forever: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

WFRP killed D&D for many reasons, first off it was badass visually. It’s like putting the Fiend Folio up against the Monsters Manual– the art in the latter, with the exception of Dave Trampier’s amazing work, PALES in comparison to everything in Fiend Folio. For the same reason WFRP’s art (and miniatures) were beyond compare in the late 80’s to everything else. Secondly, the game was mature and getting into the mid-teenage years, this was important, while 2nd edition D&D was artistically bland and took no chances at all with gore, WFRP was all about the goreplosions, insanity and corruption. You weren’t just going into dungeons and looting stuff for the sake of loot, you were committing crimes and murders in a fantasy setting (or rescuing bratty noble kids) within a backdrop of an absolutely dismal (yet magical) campaign world. Your patrons were always the shadiest of individuals and every adventure threw new things at the players that were not dungeon romps at all, especially the axiom that is so important to good adventure design these days: “no good deed goes unpunished.” Players weren’t plowing through hordes of over-used ‘non-humans,’ instead they were in deadly fights most of the time with humans or human-like mutants. Anytime you’re up against non-humans in WFRP, likely you were dead meat.*

Third, the career system in WFRP was excellent and a vast improvement over leveling up. While it’s just a set of skill and bonuses, the WFRP career system still makes me want to play the game every time I read it. Instead of a flat set of stats and weapons (that are all just bonuses to your stats) WFRP had a rich set of skills for players to acquire that allowed the fighter and thief to be as interesting as the Magic users with their spells. Finally, the adventures went into some very morally difficult ground. It goes without saying that the quest and campaign writers on WFRP back in the day were doing things no one else (maybe Cthulhu) would even touch.

So why play D&D/D20 at all? Why bother? There’s an itch that just can’t be scratched with the FATE/Cortex and that’s the dungeon romp and repeated monster smashing. While FATE and Cortex (and their ilk like Burning Wheel) are amazing for short narrative campaigns, the play is missing three key things that D&D/D20 offers: Dungeon crawling with lots of fights, leveling up and magic items. What’s more, combats in FATE/Cortex are so definitive and deadly that it’s never about the grind: in an even fight likely some of the characters are going to take serious consequences or be taken out entirely. Fights are always about story progression, and when playing FATE/Cortex, that’s awesome.

What 13th Age offers players and DM’s is the ability to have D20 style fights and levelling with some of the best parts of FATE/Cortex’s story driven elements. Combat and combat power is taken out of the narrative system by design. Whereas characters in 13th Age have ‘aspects’ (backgrounds) like FATE, they cannot be utilized in combat–but they are there for everything else to push the story forward.

So with the announcement of 5th edition D&D slating it for this summer and Pathfinder continuing on the grid-based, tactical version, I’m saying to my 2 readers that the new D&D is already here, and it’s 13th Age. It’s not the D20 for every group but it’s a great compromise between the level up crunch and the narrative.

Here are a couple of high points:

Classes are extremely different – though there are three fighter classes and three spell casters, they all play different.
No XP, GM determines leveling when he sees fit.
No skills, backgrounds (aspects) instead which define narrative as well as skills.
Ingrained character relationships with powerful entities in the world that push the story forward.
All the good stuff from 4th edition for the grindy battles (recoveries, class powers, etc.) but no-grid battles that can be done completely without miniatures
Feng Shui style mooks

*Unless you were a naked dwarf

Finished a game- Torchlight 2

Ah a rare thing, actually finishing a game…I finally beat TL2 on elite (not hardcore) vanilla. It took over 60 hours with a single character to win it… that was with just a bit of help from sensless with a couple of items that I could only use at the end of the game. Elite was very very difficult– I died about 500 times and probably could have died a lot more but just wanted to get it done. I know I could have farmed at lower difficulties or with other characters, but this was about being almost pure with Elite– going through the whole game from start to finish with nearly zero help. I finished the game at level 52 and I can say that most of my gear was about 10 levels lower, so I definitely hadn’t farmed up enough to really run the end game comfortably.

The next time I go through I can farm up with a higher level character and pass items down, potions, spells, everything because the elite hair on the chest has been grown…

The build
I used a berserker and focused on Shadow Dash/Wolfstrike with Frenzy Mastery and Blood Hunger as primary skills. All of this is for survivability rather than damage output. Essentially she would heal whenever she landed a critical and could shadow dash for insta heal and escape when she got in trouble. The key path is to stay on the edge of a mob and use your normal attacks to build your frenzy meter since when you are frenzied it’s all (well almost all) criticals. Once frenzied, you can stand toe to toe with any boss that cannot one shot you (which aren’t many!). For my primary weapon, I used a large mace that I placed the rift ember in (+10 Mana steal on hit) for max amount of DPS for my AOE’s (Wolfstrike/Shadow Dash) and then switched to two rather lackluster claw weapons when I was frenzied for any bosses– increasing my attack speed by triple or more. I just could never find any better claws by the time I finished the game.

In addition to the skills above, the berserker extra pet (via Wolf Shad) was huge and I maxed points whenever I could. The summon gives damage output increases, attacks stuff itself for mass damage and heals you when it does damage. I would say it’s the best skill in the game. However, I have this feeling that there was an XP drop when wolf was on the screen…like very little XP at all.

There’s a lot more to explore with the berserker, but I won’t be doing it on Elite unless it’s my Hardcore character who is the sole survivor of our early days hardcore elite group. With him I use very different tactics (sword and shield and a lot less gung ho). The end bosses of TL2 look extremely difficult on Hardcore elite so the farm up will be necessary. If I was to do it again, I would have started on Normal, finished the game and then passed items up to a character on Veteran who then passed items up to a character on Elite. This is tough to do on Hardcore since, well, your characters get croaked.

Mount & Blade: Banner Lord

Oh yeah. September gave us the announcement of a new Mount & Blade (and one without fucking guns in it) — and it’s an update to the Warbands version, which is going to be open-ass awesome. It still amazes me that a game made by just a couple guys has turned into such an exemplary series (except for the one with guns that is).

Ah… I guess I hate generic RPG system books

I hopped on both the Fate Core 3 and Cortex Hackers Guide kickstarters earlier in the year with no regrets and while this is NOT a review or discussion of the systems included in these books, nor the layout, nor the art or anything content wise by any means, I don’t like either of them and here’s why: they are generic RPG books and little did I know– I can’t fucking stand them! There’s really nothing more boring than a system without a reason to use it and while I really like both Cortex and FATE, the ownership of these books is fundamentally useless to me– and I can’t even get through reading them….at all. Imagine trying to learn Advanced Squad Leader or Mystic Realm (both very difficult games to learn) without having a strong affinity to the gaming theme they represent. Could you get through such rules? I thought I could, but I can’t. Not ever.

Let’s take Lamentations of the Flame Princess as an example of a similar game to the of the books above in that it still presents a sort of generic system for running Fantasy RPG’s first off. Lamentations uses the most generic and nearly universally familiar OD&D system (Moldavy Basic essentially), changes a couple of things (like only fighters get +1 to hit at levels) and then tells you how to run a Fantasy game with it. There is a (very strange) adventure in the back, but other than that there is no description of the Lamentation’s world at all– just about what survival Fantasy Horror gaming should be like. Yet, while the system is one most of us are intimately familiar with (being the basis of all D20 play ever anon), Lamentations, while not including much in the way of a world, has a very clear Swords and Sorcery /Survival Horror focus for the game, the art and writing; a setting that makes what you are getting into with the game extremely clear. It is not a base rule set for any genre it is a base rule set for Swords and Sorcery. Of course we know from the years gone by that D20 has been used for everything under the sun with some incredibly weighty systems (Pathfinder, 3.5, etc.), but that’s not what Lamentations is doing. Instead it’s laying out a well-known set of rules within a specific paradigm even WITHOUT a massive world-spanning gazetter included in the base package. I love Lamentations and it will be my go-to D&D game if I ever give that a whirl again, and who can deny modules like The God the Crawls or FUCK FOR SATAN to boot? Most importantly, I was able to get through the text of the rules, the GM advice (which is amazing and goes far beyond anything I’ve ever read for running an actual group of players) and the supplemental materials. Why?

Let’s talk about Cortex and Fate– both excellent rule-sets. At the moment I prefer Cortex a bit more because, those of us that love Exalted want to play high powered crazy fights in less than 8 hours a piece. While I really enjoy exploring a new RPG system, what I don’t like, and this is a recent discovery, are these tool-kit only rulebooks. While clearly laying out what can be done with the system and the system itself (in the case of FATE 3), there’s absolutely no hook at all saying to me as a GM, i.e.: the person that will have to put all the work into the game for the most part, that I should try to make stories for this. It’s more like saying: ok you as a person should make an RPG out of this– and if you have time for that type of thing you are in a completely different demographic. Even the awesome Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, whose setting I really have no interest in at all (apart from Guardians of the Galaxy) gave myself and my players some framework to WANT to play. When I pick up FATE 3 and peruse the Hackers Guide for Cortex… I fall asleep, LITERALLY. There’s just nothing there but laying out an RPG system which, while incredibly important that it’s not pure shit (I’m looking at you Twilight 2000), it’s extremely boring when extracted from any sort of genre framework to spark the imaginations. It’s like one side of the brain is satisfied while the other one just sits there, bored off it’s ass.

Then, there's Exalted. — Then, there’s Exalted.

Dresden Files (FATE 2), while not that fun to play as any sort of Wizard, are essential books for my RPG library as a basis around how to create that TYPE of game (modern Wizardry) with FATE. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (CORTEX), again while not a specific world I am interested in playing in was yet another awakening to what is possible for handling high powered, superheroic RPG’s. Even very difficult systems like Legends of Wuilin (which will likely never see print) Strange Fate (FATE 2 on crack) are extremely interesting books because they weave the stories you are going to tell in with the system it’s presenting. While you are reading the SYSTEM you are also beginning to create the stories that you will tell together with your group–and I think this is absolutely key. Sure some people that want to make a FATE or CORTEX game may love the generic system books, but for me, it’s just a waste.