“Yes, but you didn’t!” – the failed redesign of Stunts in Exalted 3rd edition

Exalted 3rd edition is out in PDF form to backers and all over the internets for everyone else. It’s being poured over by fans of the game as well as people that were inspired by 2nd editions mess to make other games because the older systems were so fucked up–yet some things were platinum awesome about it. I’ve got a long post coming about the new version, but today I want to blather about the failure of the game to address one of the terrible problems with Stunting in the old edition and it’s not what you think–mote retrieval for stunting– but something fundamentally worse:

If the dice say it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.

Exalted stunting works like this: You say what you are going to try to do and if excites people at the table and titillates the GM, you will get bonus dice or bonus successes on the subsequent roll. In theory, this seems like it will work well: players describe what they hope their character will do and it leads to descriptive flair at the table. However, in actual play it works like this:

  1. Players tire of it. Combats are long and Exalted combats are the longest there is (in 2nd edition) in RPG gaming. Creative juices break down after awhile and stunts become impossible to really impress. Out of sympathy, the GM will start awarding 2 dice stunts on everything partially to help the players stay interested and partially to keep the fucking game going in session long combats. Players also complain a lot if their stunts don’t get ‘accepted’ so it’s easier to let them have the fucking dice. I’ve been this GM.
  2. Since the stunt description happens before the roll, the stunt itself can be a botch or a failure and this grand description that everyone now has floating on their minds DOES NOT HAPPEN. This leads faster to point 1 above– players throwing in the towel on stunting and phoning it in for the rest of the combat session.
  3. Because descriptions of stunts are before the roll of the dice, even when the attack and stunt fails, players may cognitively remember that that stunt actually HAPPENED in the game, even though all facts point that it did not. Players may need to be reminded at the next session about stunts that their characters failed the die roll for that they actually thought succeeded. This is terrible.

Stunting like this seemed cool back when it was done in Feng Shui and copied around to other games. Feng Shui 2 has fixed this problem while still incorporating stunts fully into the combat and chase systems. First, stunts happen AFTER dice are rolled when a big success happens to ask the GM for a special effect– not more damage, not anything completely defined by rules, but something that is decided at the table like punching a guy so hard (the punch HAPPENS because the dice say so first) that his limp body knocks down a row of motorcycles like dominoes and pisses off all the biker onlookers! Second, there is the option to ask for a special effect before dice are rolled, at which time the difficulty of the roll goes up– letting the player know that he is trying something that could more easily fail.  This is simple on paper and PLAYABLE.  Players aren’t going to get fucking bored off their ass because yet another 30 dice attack failed to even hit the big bad guy since he has seven shadows evasion every round…

Because Exalted is a min/max’ers, system junky style game with very little narrative freedom during fights (stunting always translates into raw mechanics) I guess they had no choice to make stunts like they did, but they were rubbish in play in 2nd Edition and not just because they gave motes back.

This beat

I’ve heard this on pandora a bunch but didn’t pay much attention to it, but then realized that THE BEAT IS SICKNESS ITSELF. And yes I’m man enough to like a song called “FALL IN LOVE.” I think.

Rebel Galaxy!

A few of the core members of Runic went off and made this while we were all still playing Torchlight 2.  Bad audio I know, but it gives you the FEEL of the game despite the incoherent babble:

 

It’s a lot like Privateer and you have to wonder if this small team was able to pull something like this off quickly, what will happen to STAR CITIZEN?

Into the Odd Session 2

Due to accidentally thinking I was running 13th Age Thursday rather than next week, I tried to haphazardly set up a session on the fly, which didn’t really work since the players had no idea it was happening.  Instead of throwing in the towel, I ran another session of Into the Odd, which is pretty much made for this sort of thing.

This session saw our heroic gentlemen, Cisero Collingham and Ancell Warner drunk in a tavern by the docks when they were interuptted by a stout woman named Mable Curmudgeon and strapping thug named Peter Selle (Fart Saddle in French) who required them to accompany them on a voyage to retrieve some of young Severin’s entertainers left in the underground.   Unfortunately for Ancell, he was the only one in the tavern at the time, so he was taken aboard a flatboat and headed into the sewers again.   The group saved some hungry kids dressed in lobster suits who were lost and starving.  Since they were just in the sewere,  they brought the kids back to the docks before continuing further.  Later they found a woman in a worm mask who begged to be taken aboard, she was an old whore named Gusta Sidebottom who complained about her crotch quite a bit.  Heading into a massive grotto, they found a barrel bumping against the boat that contained non other than Cicero Collingham and his mutt who had boasted about their adventure to the underground the day before and were stuffed into the barrel and thrown into the sewer for their eloquence.

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What’s more, an old rotting monk was found clinging to the side of the boat and he was brought aboard babbling about the Smogfather and offering stinking ale.  No sight of the giant frogs with glowing eyes in the grotto this time…

Knowing that the  lost entertainers were in the bubbling cavern, and after the boat survived the drop, the group searched that area and found a body, badly boiled and dead for some time.  As they investigated further into the caverns a pack of horrible blood men assaulted them with poisonous millipedes and then charged with cruel axes.  Selle was hewn to the ground and Ancell took a horrible wound to the leg and both had to be dragged back to the boat while the punt men fired a cannon into the pack of howling savages.  Unable to continue the search, and sure that the remains of the entertainers were in some foul thing’s belly, they retreated back to the surface and found themselves popping out of a manhole cover covered in filth and coagulate gore on a busy market street on a sunny afternoon in July.

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Weeks later, the Elder Severin wanted to have a chat with them…

BLOOD RAGE – a pretty awesome CMON kickstarter

So this was one that I had to absolutely back on account of Studio McVey (miniatures) and Adrian Smith (art).  Regardless of the game design or how the fucker played, this was getting my cold, hard cash way up inside it.

Thankfully, after 3 plays, all of which I’ve lost badly, I can say that Blood Rage is a good game, I’m not going to say it’s great until I have near a dozen plays, but it’s good.  Certainly it’s on part with Chaos in the Old World, and while that has a solid appeal and hasn’t gotten played enough, the miniatures alone make Blood Rage a clear champion at the moment.

First, the miniatures are shocking to behold and fun to play with.  The plastic is tough and a bit bendy (not like say GW’s hard, easily paintable plastics) and I can’t imagine any of them breaking without something crazy happening.  It is most excellent to slap down one of the big ass monsters when you play their upgrade (or later, when you fuck people with the Troll or Fire Giant) because the miniatures are so damn meaty.  I finally opened all the monsters and with the exception of the wolf man, which is just OK, all of them are really awesome sculpts.

In terms of the clans, I have all but the Rams opened up.  I like the Wolves and the Ravens best.  Serpents (the female one) are also swell looking.   When on the board, it’s all about the silhouettes and that’s where I think the Boars and bears get a bit muddled.  Painted though, who knows, they will all look good.

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Gameplay.  This is the important bit as this could have just ended up as a game that sat on my shelf and looked good instead of something that got busted out frequently (as frequently as a game can with all the competition these days).   It’s a very tight game.  It feels very short, even though the games are just under 2 hours.  You will feel the Agricola pinch as you just can’t get everything done that you wanted to by the end of the game.  Battles are fast and decisive (first time you get your huge monster blown off to valhalla the same age you put them on the table is an eye opener and most importantly, can involve everyone in the game.  Taking turns is relatively fast, though there is some brain burn that comes in during the 2nd and 3rd ages.   In terms of turn-angst potential, I would say the draft part (that happens at the beginning of each age) will take the longest and with five players, it may be a very long drafting stage.

Strategically, I don’t have much to say yet.  My first game I just middled around to little effect.  The second game I went Loki as in, lose a lot, steal rage, steal honor, get points for your dead stuff and I still lost.  The third game I went Frigga/Tyr and just destroyed everyone in nearly all the battles I was in.  Yet I still lost!   What I think is important is the balance across all things. You need to win battles, you need to complete quests, you need to get your clan stats up to the VP levels (think tech in eclipse) and you need to draft so your opponents can’t bust out with tons of points.   Overall it’s a game that begs to be played, a lot.

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So the kickstarter came with a ton of stuff.  If you are buying this retail let me tell you straight that you won’t need anything except the base game to have tons of fun.  All the extra monsters are great, but most games you will only see about 4-7 monsters out of the whole group anyway.  The mystics are neat, but not essential.  The GODS expansion is one I may be playing without going forward (need to play it more).  Basically two of the gods occupy areas on the board and change the way battles are handled.  I’ve only had Tyr and Odin on so I can’t comment on it much but it seemed a bit unnecessary.  It may grow on me later though.   The five player expansion is only good if you consistently  have five.  For me, based on our gaming group attendance, it was mandatory to have.   The sixth clan, the boars, are simply extra, and you cannot play with 6 players with it (balanced at least) however the box comes with some neat minis that replace the counters in the game with the critical one being the token that shows where Ragnarok is going to hit next. This one is probably the least important to get.

All in all, it was one of the best kickstarters I’ve ever backed– I even followed the fucking boats as they made their way through the med into the atlantic and to Georgia…Blood Rage and those kickstarters like it, despite being almost pre orders, just prove that not everything is like Star Citizen or Exalted 3rd edition (ie – FUCKED).

Villains! (how to use villains without railroading)

Reoccurring bad guys are not essential to a good role-playing session, or even a good RPG campaign, and many times they are sight unseen as the players encounter only their catspaws.  However, a frustrating and nasty villain can be the difference between a mediocre campaign and a brilliant one, so if you’re going to have a big bad villain, it’s best to know how best to create and tease your players with them so much so that they are actually sad when they manage to defeat them.  I’m going to touch on a few points and then describe a specific villainous archetype I’ve used: the Concomitant.

When we were kids, the referee’s would usually have the red dragon fly away before he could be subdued, or the Death Knight would fireball a doorway to escape (which helped also because as kids, a TPK via said fireball was not an acceptable outcome most of the time). For The referee,  there wasn’t much to the Death Knight or the Red Dragon in the dungeon other than stats assigned to a room number, yet for some reason the referee thought that THAT was the villain he was going to make come back and really give anal re-threads to the players. We, as those re-threaded players, grew to hate that creature by virtue of the fact that we weren’t able to kill it the first time, or that Rangdal the Blue and Celestor were both killed fighting it the first time, or our horses and camp followers were all destroyed.  This villain came to life through play and discovery and not via 20 pages of backstory that only thereferee read and tried to boil down into a few sentences that no one was really paying attention to.  You don’t need much to start and your players will ride along and help create something viler to them than you could have possibly imagined.

First, take the concept of evil, put it in one of your high heels and shove it up your ass.  Toss out the 12 point alignment chart or draw a dot for your Mr. Villain right in the center of it and leave it there.  A good villain will have goals and a world view that they fully believe are for the good of their gang, existence, humanity, the environment or puritanical customer base, these goals can only be considered evil in context of people with other codes of ethics or conflicting goals.  Petty NPC’s, mere minnows, will steal for their own gain or kill and rob and rape for their momentary pleasure, as they are simply hyenas. A true fiend will have a goal in mind and will typically destroy themselves (or be willing to) in order to get there.

Think about two villains in semi-recent popular culture: Prince Arthas from Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne and the Lich King himself.  Now, I’m not up on my Warcraft Lore since 2004 or so, but the Lich King was your generic, distant ‘evil’ sorcerer, a bit of a Sauron-type with really nothing interesting about him except that he couldn’t move from his throne.   Arthas is a human prince who tries to protect his kingdom from the corruption of the undead. Because he started out ‘good’ and descended into madness and ‘evil’ for the sake of saving his kingdom from corruption, he is a far more compelling villain then the actual big bad.  His character arc moves from caring about the end result far more than the means and at his transformation into a servant of the Lich, he becomes largely apathetic to nearly everything.  We don’t look for redemption for Arthas as the story goes forward, because what we assumed was ‘good’ about him in the beginning wasn’t good at all: it was a paladin’s horrifying fanaticism.  The apathetic slave of the Lich King was far more palatable than the haughty, end-justifies-the-means prince. So what I want to concentrate on here is the Arthas and not the nearly immortal and ultimately boring Lich King.  The Arthas is what your players will be in conflict with the most, and the character they will remember most after they get in said conflict.

You need a compelling villain who isn’t evil: how do you create one?  Pick a goal first. Look at your campaign world or sandbox area.  Look at what a typical powerful entity might want in that area.  In my current campaign, the major NPC’s are all about becoming iron-fisted feudal lords.  They are not particularly ruthless in all cases to get to this goal, and some have been born into it and simply expect that they will be next in line to take on that mantle.  When the characters cause wrinkles in these NPC’s goals, they act accordingly: subdue, destroy or subvert, but in most cases messing with the characters has nothing to do with their actual goals (at least at first).  Since the characters in many cases may share this goal (amass wealth, kill stuff, build a castle, have serfs and kill more stuff), the villain may simply be in conflict with the characters for the same goal, and are likely further ahead down the same path.

Another way to generate a goal is to look at what the characters want which can range from saving the children to amassing wealth to simply killing everything nearby that isn’t human.  Take what you think are the collective goals for your characters and twist them into something absolutely awful (to the characters).  As the villain’s goal is memetic to theirs, discovering this will have a very disturbing effect on the characters as they uncover the villain’s plots not dissimilar to their own.   For example, Black Belt wants to defend the children from Viper’s attacks on Genricville and he hits Viper head on to defeat them.  Villain also wants to save the children from Viper, but his idea is that nowhere in Genericville are they safe, so he comes up with a plot to move all the children away from their parents and guardians into a giant self-sustaining vault where they will be safe forever and he doesn’t have to be afflicted with dreams of that kid on the swing next to him that got abducted and raped in ’77 anymore.  Viper just wants to intimidate the local government and rob banks and the children are just incidental casualties, the vault guy is the real bad guy.

Next it is absolutely critical to get the villain into an interaction with the players that is not combat oriented at some point.  Whether it’s only watching the villain do something villain-esque, or working together to defeat a common foe before the characters discover that the villains goals run counter to their own, or the typical (and likely unworkable in many classic RPG systems) getting the characters captured and soliloquized.

Later, when combat or a chase does happen, have your villain break one of the fundamental rules of the game.  In Tom McGrenery’s ‘Invincible Chi’ scenario for Feng Shui, the villain, Donny Wong, cannot be damaged by the players. They can hit him, kick him off roofs and punch him through forests destroy his clothing, but he cannot be hurt.  He’s not a fantastic fighter himself, so he’s unlikely to beat down the characters as long as they don’t fight him over a long period of time—plenty long for the players to figure out there’s something else going on, and if they don’t, they take a deserved whooping.  The God the Crawls has a similar set up with an entity that can take vast amounts of punishment, but doesn’t dish too much.  This thing that your villain does that breaks a rule cannot be duplicated by any other entity and is not a power that can be gained by the players.  In a way it is DM fiat, but really it’s just telling the players this is not just some monster scaled to their stats.

Another tactic from 13th Age to use is to not allow any characters to actually die unless they are in the presence of the villain himself.  While this may be on the railroad a bit, it allows the players to have their characters build up the hatred of the villain more than if there is a constant refresh of new characters on account of character death. They also know that any interaction with the villain is for all the marbles.

Now, a villainous archetype I’ve used (and am using right now in a Runequest 6 campaign), is the Concomitant.  You know those NPC’s that join up with the characters for a common goal for a short period and sort of fade into the background until there is a combat situation or their skills come into use?  The DM has them running with the group but may not have planned any personality for them and they’re just some sort of crappy camp follower like a linkboy or porter. The Concomitant is my name for that NPC that shortly after working with the characters, becomes a nemesis-level villain—and the knife turns in their backs all the more because this NPC knows them.

The critical bit is that the character’s actions while working with the Concomitant on their shared goal caused the NPC to not only dislike them, but actively try to destroy them from that point on.  It is best if this is not something done directly to the NPC, but to others at the hands of the characters in full view of the NPC.  This is surprisingly easy to pull off, since, when alone without other, non-friendly, NPC’s nearby, players tend to have their characters do reprehensible things; always with the torture of goblins or Bürgerfriedensmiliz back at camp or in a dim basement of a threshing barn, and especially apathetically leaving helpless people to die.  I cannot count how many times the players return to a scene and find the women and children of a caravan they abandoned torn apart by wolves or worse.

The best part about the Concomitant is that he or she (or it, it could even work as a horse or mule) is a sleeper plot device. You only start the Concomitant on his or her path of destruction when the players have taken actions that make sense to do so.  Meanwhile, that NPC will simply tag along and add boring and meaningless bits of dialog between being used as a meatsheet in fights.

From the point that the Concomitant gets away or is left behind by the characters, they fully dedicate all of their actions to destroying the characters, stealing from them, shaming them and so on.  This is not something they may be able to do overtly or directly.  Even in Runequest/ low level Classic fantasy, where a single hit can mean instant death, the PC’s are typically powerful individuals not to be trifled with.  Hence, the Concomitant will work around the edges as the characters pursue whatever degenerate or heroic goals they have going at the time; hounding them,  ruining their allies, poisoning the townsfolk against them, destroying supplies,  spreading rumors to the local Jarl, and so on.  This is not the big bad, this is not the global threat to humanity, it is a direct and insidious threat to the PC’s alone, born of their own terrifying ideas and actions.

Eventually the Concomitant will be caught in the act or confronted, and that’s when the fun begins.  If you feel your players are ready to have all that over with, by all means kill the Concomitant off, but if not, do have them escape a few times.  Even a Concomitant left for dead can easily come back as a horrifically maimed villain later (remember how much your PC’s love the torture for information tactic and imagine what they’ll do to someone that has soured their milk so many times).

Lastly, I highly recommend the 5th Edition D&D Dungeon Master’s guide random villain generator.  If you combine your ideals that flow from the random charts therein with some of the advice above, you can’t go wrong.

Into the Odd – First play

So, tonight Matt and Steve showed up on Roll 20 for a newish game I found called INTO THE ODD which is an uber rules light D20 game.  You don’t roll to hit, you have four stats and your equipment is randomly generated.  Character creation is moments of work which is great because, like Lamentations, character death is probably likely.  There are a lot of games like this out there, but I found this one to be very interesting on account of the setting and the adventure possibilities.

My poor players know that I’m a sucker for experimentation with new games (ones that don’t themselves suck most of the time).  In recent times, I dragged my group through the dubious FATE system with plays of Dresden Files, Atomic Robo and an abortive start with Bulldogs (which is still probably the best FATE game there is) being only character creation. I’ve dragged them through Marvel Heroic Roleplay and Carolina Death Crawl as well as a long run with Exalted 2e, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, DCC, 13th Age,  Numenera, Runequest and others I’ve probably forgot. Back in the day of course it was D&D to Gamma World to Star Frontiers to TMNT to Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu finally landing on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for many years.  Is the system hopping bad?  Not when you find ones like this that fill a certain niche.

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I ran a scenario (from start to finish in 2.25 hours, including character generation!) where the characters got on a punt boat and went into the sewers on a ‘tour’ under the city Bastion.  I hate to pull back the curtain a bit, since my players may read this, but the ENTIRE adventure was procedurally generated.  I had no idea what would actually happen when I sat down, and had to weave together all these elements from two to three word descriptions in the adventure text.  I made up a bunch of crap on my own to fill in the gaps– and it was awesome to do so.   Like Carcosa or Isle of the Unknown– what I call the minimalist modules, this adventure gave a ton of room for creativity– and things unfolded in a way that still made a lot of sense in the end.   So this is the absolute opposite of the ‘adventure path’ or ‘campaign book’ style of play where you and your players are on rails the entire time and even need to have specific classes to (like a cleric and paladin) to make it through to the end.

The question is, will they go back go save the people they left behind….

The New Star Wars just Came Out

No, not the movie, the DICE powered Battlefield style game just entered OPEN beta.  Maurice!Bastard is currently playing and I’ve started the download sequence.  I will fire up FRAPS and take some videos as soon as I can and then post them.   I really loved BF2042, Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3.  BF4 came out too soon after 3, so I never tried that and was hoping they would come out with a new BF2142– well, with the Star Wars license, this is going to be as close as we get in spirit to 2142 with walkers and shit like that.

Despite the fact that I have grown to hate the Star Wars hype and due to those terrible movies, the brand itself in some ways, I’m all in.  PEW FUCKING PEW PEW!

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Two UNFUCKED Kickstarters

Last week I posted about my fucked kickstarters— ones that got funded but have not delivered either anything (Exalted 3rd edition) or what they originally promised (Star Citizen).

The next day I got my doublesix dice so, while a bit late, that was a SOLID kickstarter. The dice, which are D12’s with D6 dots on them, are cool and should save the Talisman boards from the harsh pockmarks that my 2nd edition board has all over it (and other games). If these come out in stores, you should get some.

Secondly, after three years, my copy of Moongha Invaders suddenly arrived! Again, this is a Martin Wallace game, so I was looking forward to it but after so long, you sort of don’t know what will happen. It looks great and the box weighs a TON. It also came with a couple counters for STUDY IN EMERALD, which is now on the must buy list… dammit.

I must say that these two kickstarters had solid communication to the backers, not often, but whenever there was an update it was clear what the problems were (mostly quality and production problems) that had been going on and what the delay was, in addition, CLEAR statements about what was happening next and mitigation plans. While I feel a little pissed that part of the reason Moongha was late was because Wallace was moving to New Zealand, he told people that was what was happening and so I really can’t fault the man. The kickstarters for both of these likely started as a labor of love and then it was a terrible, terrible grind.

So great surprises!

Lastly, while I was putting up my short bit on Star Citizen, The Escapist was busy on a series of articles about not only how FUCKED people are thinking this kickstarter is, but quotes from ex and current employees who KNOW it’s fucked. In addition there is a rebuttal from the lead designer (the Wing Commander guy). I backed this thinking it would be a modern version of Freelancer, but alas they tried to do far, far too much.