One of my first Kickstarters, pledged so long ago that I have forgotten what the game actually is about, Banner Saga has released to the public. When it came out on Steam this week I thought to myself– I backed this, how the heck do I get a copy of it?
Not only did I back it to get the game, I backed it to add a clan banner which of course I forgot to do and was really a total waste anyway.
Banner Saga is a turn based tactical fighting game with VIKINGS (see I knew there was a reason I backed this fucker) and I’m looking forward to spanning some times with it over this week, after which I will do my typical feeble and uninformed review.
…and RPG rules for it are typically tacked on to the main system and don’t do it justice (some hand wave it away completely–I’m looking at you 13th Age!) or SUCK.
Look at the following video from “Battle of the Nations” which features real armor and blunted weapons for combat. Granted they are not trying to kill each other (no stabbing), but I think a lot of what’s happening here is very close to what we’d see in a melee on the battlefield, or a fight between armored opponents in say D&D. Again–this is between armored opposition who use their weapons as clubs. A non armored opponent would have to be extremely good to beat someone in armor like this mano-y-mano (also because someone in medieval times would be extremely good to HAVE armor like this).
Think about the following factors:
1) It’s nearly impossible to breach the other guy’s armor with a strike from a weapon. You could knock him out or damage him (legs, arms, etc.) but you’re NOT going to land a killing blow unless you know exactly where there is a chink in the armor. Even then, the hit area would be tiny as to make it nearly impossible. Say in D&D you have hit points which do not indicate lethal damage (ever really), and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay wounds that represent your ablative-ness before you start taking critical wounds. Exalted/D10 acknowledges lethal and non lethal damage, and armor reduces both–usually lethal is HARDER for armor to reduce in these systems, but I would argue that lethal damage should be the easiest to buffer against (or soak). Essentially, armor should be far better than it is represented in these games based on the video above for stopping cutting/lethal damage.
2) Once you fall down, likely you’re dead, before you fall down, you can still fight if you’re not grappled.
3) If you’re grappled, your chances of harming your opponent is near to zero, but being in a grapple also reduces the chances of an opponent harming you, so it’s a viable defensive AND offensive tactic.
So look at how the medieval guys in the video fight. One guy gets close, exchanges blows as a DISTRACTION for the grapple, at which time a second comes along and whacks at the grappled opponent’s legs or head until he goes down. Once down the opponent is typically out of the fight and can be dealt with later if not killed outright.
How would OD&D model this? Not very well in the printed version but there is this super obscure rule that was never properly published that makes more sense. Modelling the video above, Fighter 1 would roll to hit with a D20. This represents a series of blows in D&D remember, not a single attack. If a hit happens (since it’s ‘harder’ to hit someone with armor on) then it will do some damage in terms of hit points. The opponent would attack back and then the third guy would come in with a grapple attack which starts with a successful hit (including modifiers like armor which should actually make it EASIER for someone to grapple you), then goes to an opposed roll, etc. The thing is, if you watch the movie above one notices that grapples happen EASILY all the time.
This is some serious grappling.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (2nd edition) has some rules for grappling that work well for the system– both the grappled and grappler have +20% for people to hit them and cannot block or dodge. The grappler can attempt to inflict unarmed damage during his or her turns and the grappled can attempt to escape and that’s it. It models what’s going on in the video above just fine though doesn’t model people being thrown to the ground nor the grappled being able to do damage (I would mod it to just say that he could attempt to do unarmed damage to the grappler just the same). 3rd Edition WFRP has– you guessed it! A card. As much as I wanted to write this and have it thoroughly researched– I just couldn’t be bothered to dig through all my 3rd edition cards to find it.
Despite it’s issue with Lethal/Non lethal soak of armor, Exalted’s grappling I would rate as good, mostly I think because White Wolf did the Street Fighter RPG (and Aberrant) and had to deal with this then, as well as the Vampires gripping each other in their pseudo sexual way. Grappling is an attack and the attacker, if successful, can pull an action (crush, throw, maintain) but each turn that comes up the grapple is contested, with each winner of that round able to crush, throw or maintain the grapple. Exalted does not let armor help you not be grappled (like D&D) which makes sense.
Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about Marvel Heroic Roleplaying/Cortex and FATE as they model it fairly well in both. In MHR, any grapple would be a complication die stuck to an opponent. So, if the THING is trying to grip Wolverine and got a D10 effect die, he would stick a D10 complication on Wolverine for everything he’s doing (as a negative die) and it would be a D10 that others could use to hit Wolverine when they attack. Invisible Woman could add a D10 to her (weak) punching of Wolverine and whenever Wolverine tried a non-opposed roll, he would have a D10 complication. Note that this D10 complication would be the same if the Thing punched Wolverine into a wall (and trapped him) or sat on him– the system doesn’t care what the type of complication is, except within a narrative context.
In FATE you are trying to create an advantage over your opponent by grappling using an opposed roll. You can give this advantage to another player, so it models fairly well after looking at the Battle of Nations video. However, the issue I have with both FATE and MHR is that the GRABBER should have some negative complications as well as the grabbed. Both are in a grip, and neither may be winning. If one can overpower the other he may be able to hold him in place long enough for another person to smash him over the head, but it’s possible that they may miss and hit their buddy. You can see how it’s a very complicated thing to model in any game (not just RPG’s).
I know this started out as a bit about armored combat, but it’s expanded a bit into a tirade about grappling in RPG systems. I think it’s an extremely important part of fighting, one that cannot be hand waved off and must be simulated, especially in combat with heavily armored foes who use their swords as clubs until the very end. Tactically, grappling is especially important when outnumbered– you better watch out because those Kobolds may drop like flies, but there are a lot of them and if they kobold-pile you, you may be skewered on a spit thrapple to anus before you know it.
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.
Big Death
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.
We’ve been seeing D&D Next stuff for a few years now and I would describe what I’ve seen (and what Matt has described) as ‘meh.’ In the light of the glow that Pathfinder has taken on in the last two years it’s going to be tough for WOTC to compete with Pathfinder on an even level–and do we need another PNP D&D? It looks like WOTC may think PNP is not enough based on the following:
“Players will be immersed in rich storytelling experiences across multiple gaming platforms as they face off against the most fearsome monster of all time.”
I would argue that we already have a D&D Next that’s not built to compete with Pathfinder, but fits far better into the adult PNP style of play– but that’s a post for another day.
You’d think after all my posts on this blog about Talisman expansions over the years I’d get sick of them or sick of Talisman. NO SIR. While the Dragon expansion was a bit much for me, I’ve picked up everything else (Dragons changes the game very drastically while everything else integrates into the main game together) and am HUNGRY FOR MORE. The City expansion we’ve only just started to explore and it’s fucking great. No more stacks of gold lying around for no reason– spend them to win the game in the City.
FF is delving into Arabian myth with the new one called Firelands and it looks pretty awesome— though like Dragons, it seems like it changes the game quite a bit by eating up spaces on the board. The four characters are the Warlord (like the Gladiator), the Jin Blooded (spellcaster), the Dervish (can’t tell) and a fourth one that looks like a female spellcaster of some type. This will be heating up the winter months it looks like.
Well it’s starting a day later than I thought, and I’ve got a bunch of work to do over the course of the week, but I can pretend that it’s Xmas vacation and that I’m de jure off work at least. I won’t have to sit on the bus and listen do a guy pretend to be on the phone and talk real loud to a pretend person about saving him a seat at the gambling table and then talking about their rendezvous location while stating loudly things like “four just got off on 21st street” nor will I have to sit through forty minutes of a ‘sermon’ about how white people are going to hell and are disgusting from some nutter in the back of the bus while I’m trying to read– also implying we’re privileged people not noticing that all of us are ON THE BUS TO WORK.
So what the hell am I going to do? First, no one else is off this week that I hang with so there’s going to be some waiting there. I will probably write some lengthy nonsense here on this terrible blog for one. I may try to dig up all the woodenmen.org files and FTP them to this site for perusal. I’ve had a ‘blog’ since 1996: long before someone came up with that fucking stupid name for someone’s mental masturbation on the internet. I remember hearing that for the first time in about 2001– I knew what the term was of course from READING it, but I never thought I’d hear anyone actually say it out loud. It was at some conference for marketing agencies that were on their last gasp trying to get a second wind populated by people that were unfortunately at an age where they didn’t feel the need to care about technology much (take for example a VP at a company that has everyone do everything for them except negotiation with other people with their same title) . A middle aged woman got up and started talking about the blogosphere– just generally about it with no clue how to monetize it or what it could be for business or marketing. All the time I’m thinking holy shit these people can’t even put 2 and 2 together: what am I doing here?
But I digress. My completely superficial goals for the vacation are to play some sort of PNP RPG, get a game in of Bolt Action and/or Warhammer Fantasy Battle, finish Torchlight on ELITE (not hardcore Elite), get as far as I can in Dark Souls (I just finished Sen’s Fortress and am getting close to the terrible two in Andor Londo) and try to paint some beastmen. I haven’t made a painting post for about a year or so but I have made progress! I finished my Bestigor and am working through a huge pile of Ungor. Once I have 30 I’ve enough for my mage bunker and can move on to either my Cygor or my Minotaurs.
I’m looking forward to Xmas day because I got the kids CUBE QUEST and that’s going to be the gift of the year I think. Of course it will be a catastrophic mess of cubes but over time, the flicking will become more and more precise until crokinole players’ assholes start to occlude across the entirety of Canadia.
Oh and read some comics. I’m trying NOT to read LOEG: Black Dossier again but it’s tough. Incredible book– just so much in there to read and reread. I will likely bust out some Groo to cure that though.
We’ve come a long way in the game since this night, but here’s 30 minutes of madness. Note– ridiculously, we have NO super powers at this time, which means we need to do a super powered video soon.
