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.

The Runequest 6 Viking campaign continues

Combine a hot day with people that have never played together with a lot of beer, smart phones with more important stuff than reality on them, Jack Daniels and incessant gas and you have an evening that is not conducive to any type of roleplaying whatsoever. About 1/3rd of the way through I was thinking about how I could double Henderson the entire fucking thing and throw in the towel. However, we made it through that session and after a couple of months, we got together again in a larger room with less farting and most importantly, non of the DEVIL’s OWN whiskey. Before I got there, I was thinking of any reason to not do it, which has never happened to me with an RPG session on a weekend (Week night sessions can get fucked from work). Could I have a flat tire? Could I get lost and just say I couldn’t find the place? What if I actually ate at Mcdonalds and got the drizzlin shits? Alas I showed up and while not the smoothest session, we got through it and may do it again and I even left it at a bit of a cliffhanger.

During the the first full group session, the characters, after fighting off an ambush of picts, came upon a ruined village with a lot of dead villagers about. The searched around and found a few living villagers scared out of their wits while the rest of their caravan buried the remains of the rest. They were not killed by the Picts as the bodies were torn and partially devoured. As night fell, the party split off from the main group holed up in the trading post, one group to hide in an empty house and a lone person, the Pictish THEIST: Brinna, to sleep in the chapel. Well the THING was on the roof of the chapel the whole time, resting from it’s gorge earlier that day and observing. It started to stalk the theist and pounced on her, destroying her leg and knocking her unconscious. That was the end of the whisky-fart session. One dead and three to go with a likely TPK on the horizon.

The session last night started with a new character joining the party (a Danish scout) which unfortunately didn’t work out well at all for the group. They couldn’t keep up their suspension of disbelief and it all pretty much broke down with complaining that he couldn’t get in on the action (a scout does scouting). I just would rather not have characters simply appear in the midst or step out of the woods and say “Hi, I’m now your best friend,” so whatever. While I don’t care about this in Lamentations (since it’s usually a meatgrinder style of play) in RQ character building has a bit more importance from the outset.

After some shenanigans the group actually were able to take down the THING without anyone being killed, mostly thanks to some good perception rolls. They had to hack it to fucking pieces due to very, very high physical stats and endurance, evade, etc., but once it got a major wound to the head, the fight was a forgone conclusion. I tried to have it break off and run away, but the dice didn’t fall that way. The coup de grace was from the Byzantine sorcery smacking it on the head with his quarterstaff for a stun location special effect. After that, they went to tear it to pieces and got a rather nasty surprise that is a hook into new problems…

Needless to say, what started as a straight Viking game has descended naturally into Vikingthulu, which, with a Byzantine sorcerer and a Pictish follower of Arawn (god of the dead) in the party, I was like fuck it we’re going weird from time to time.

I’m new to Runequest, so there were a few things of note in how I handled stuff, and a few rules clarifications I need to figure out for next time I run it.

Passions: I need to work with these more. At first I thought these were a stick to beat the players into doing stuff, a bit like alignment, and that certainly could happen, but I have yet to tell the players that they can use their passions to augment their skills. In some of the published adventures, NPC’s fighters have passions like “love to fight 75%” and this I do not like at all and think it’s a bit beardy if a player character did something like that. “Raging bloodlust” would be fine because it could be used in different ways.

Prone, Leap, general statuses within combat – I was not totally sure how Leap worked– knocked prone vs free ‘natural weapon’ attack with no parry or evade allowed so I just did both! Being prone SUCKS, but you can still attack and parry, just at what penalty? You’re really going to be hurting if you don’t have any friends around. There are a few other statuses that I am not sure on. RQ is not codified like 13th Age or D&D 5 with conditions (confused, dazed, hampered, stuck, vulnerable..) that have very specific effects to them, it’s more loose in that regard. For instance what happens when you take a major wound to the head? What happens when you take a stunning blow to the head (via the special effect)?

Ranged weapons, like nearly all other games, suck to use because of their reload times. As an archer, you are sitting outside of battle picking off stragglers while the fighters get all the fun stuff with hacking off arms (and getting eviscerated themselves of course). This is smart, but with 3 action points per shot (I think) it can get pretty boring in fights.

Henderson ver Henderson
Henderson ver Henderson

Iphone Puzzler of note: SPL-T

Puzzle games are mostly boring shite.  Suduko, Candy Crush, crossword puzzles, all that crap bores the piss out of me to even think about (though I do like Bubble Bobble and Super Puzzle Fighter).  There are a mess of puzzle games on the iphone, since it’s a device that has such a small screen it’s a good form factor for that type of entertainment.

One that’s come out recently that is of note is SPL-T.  It’s a game that involves splitting your iphone screen in half vertically and horizontally until you no longer can. You score points in ways I still don’t fully grasp, but seem to get more and more the more splits you make.  Until yesterday, the high score (just over 7K) I had was from the first time I played the game– playing completely randomly with no idea what was going on!  This was only beaten when my wife tried the game and played randomly and beat my score.  At that point I had to figure out what the hell was going on and I finally got an over 11K score shortly after. That said, it’s quite a good little game you can pick up and play fast, or think about it a lot and play slow.

 

The return of a VERY badass military

After getting nuked twice and having the USA act as the external military for over 50 years, Japan has voted to begin re-militarization in the face of looming external threats.  This means a couple things to me.  1) Japan’s near threats, like North Korea and China, have been pressuring them and they need to react.  2) The United States is no longer in a position to guarantee the safety of Japan in the face of their mounting external threats.  While the second one seems scarier, likely it is a combination of both.   Since the US fights in the Middle East (an area that should have been put under complete Allied control and colonization after WW2 and remained that way forever–instead they just have Israel), it’s unlikely they could fire up another major theater of war in the East and do much with Japan only fielding 75,000 in their local defense force.

Needless to say, this is the end of an era and an historic shift in power balance in the East.

yamato

My Kickstarter failures – 2015 Fuckstarters

There are many, many flagrant kickstarter horror stories and scams (look up “Ken Whitman” and you’ll get a fuckin face full with just one guy), but there are many that are much, much more subtle in their failure that people don’t really bitch about, because they only sort of suck, or only sort of failed to deliver the goods.  Here is a list of failed kickstarters for me and some of these are real questionable —but not overtly failures. Have they failed so far to deliver on time? Fuck yes.  Are they scams? Possibly.  This does not include a list of kickstarters I backed and then never even used the games or stuff yet (like Bulldogs!, Wasteland 2, Planetary Annihilation (the pre-titan version) as those are MY fault and not the fault of the creators.

Double Six dice roller, estimated delivery: August 2014

This kickstarter was 10$ for a set of D12’s that have D6 dots on them, or have the FATE +/- on them.  This kickstarter still has not delivered and has been so long in coming that, since I don’t even play FATE and likely never will again, I don’t even want the dice I ordered.  FATE does not suck for some people, so I have friends I can give them away to at least.  Using them for other games is a possibility.  Apparently this will ship at some point?  Fucked.

Journey Wrath of Demons, estimated delivery: July 2014

All I wanted was to follow this because the mini’s looked cool and get a T-shirt.  It never came.  What’s more, when I tried to set my order for one as a backer, they only had SMALL sizes left.  Since this kickstarter looks like it failed for all of it’s backers, why would they care about a little thing like a tshirt…

Exalted 3rd Edition:  Estimated delivery: December 2013

This is incredibly late and so far a failure, but apparently this too will get delivered some day in the far future because otherwise it looks like a huge fucking scam to me.  They had a debacle early on with one of the developers having health problems, but as a the producers of the product, you give that guy a rest and move to another developer who can deliver, which even after months and months stretched into years, doesn’t look like it happened.  It’s so incredibly late that the market for this type of game is gone.  I got a beta version of the rules on the internet (not even sent to backers!!!!) and I can say for sure I will never, ever play this except goofing around (and who has time for that when there are so many other good RPG’s to play?).  2nd edition Exalted captured the imagination certainly, but the rules were just a horrible, horrible mess.  3rd Edition looks like a slight step up, but why would anyone want to bother with something this grossly complex in 2015?  After reading the rules, I commented that stunt descriptions BEFORE the die roll is a horrible design decision that has since been changed in other stunting games, but was shouted down by the fan boys.  You can imagine what sort of lickspittles are surrounding the designers when you get this sort of jagoffery from just internet fansies.

Martin Wallace’s Moongha Invaders, estimated delivery July, 2013.

This was a game that had 500 copies made a mess of years ago and the kickstarter was going to bring it back to the masses.  As a Wallace game, it had high marks all around, but so far, it has never come and now it’s ridiculously late.

Tabletop Forge

This tanked and the guys said so.  However, we got FREE memberships and assets to Roll20, so they hooked up backers solid.  Can’t complain about this one really.

Star Citizen, Estimated delivery: Nov 2014.

This is the big one– so far this is the big scam that has THOUSANDS of people on the hook for what looks like vaporware.   There is tons of ‘content’ for this game: ship designs, 3d models, a semi-playable combat engine (didn’t work when I installed it), info on planets and trading but this game is nearing a full year late–and I really don’t think it’s ever going to actually come out.  Every time I see a youtube video or read a kickstarter backer post I think more and more that while this turned out to be a scam, they didn’t mean it to be in the beginning.  Something is very, very wrong with whatever this team is doing.  It’s constant press about nothing–in a way much like Master of Orion 3 was.  Maybe someday this will deliver, but it’s not looking good.  When you back a game that hasn’t started development, be VERY wary.  For example while Banner Saga shipped and looked great, but is one of the worst games I’ve ever played, with some of the worst sound design imaginable–that was 50$ blown.  I think Star Citizen will be case in point why you do not just give people a bunch of money to do whatever they want with it before there’s anything. Since they already have your money, they will do as they will and won’t focus on shipping a product to compete in the marketplace.  While I think this group is working on something, it’s obvious more and more from every single update or youtube video that it’s far off the rails and a fuckstarter.

From the Porn D&D essay contest

This is not mine, but this is golden stuff:

“Gygax didn’t intend to create a kind of ultraviolent medieval comedy. He was emulating Tolkien, who is the opposite of that. But the potential for ultraviolent medieval comedy is built into his work and modern OSR games are about extracting that and distilling it to its essence until whoops, murderhobos.”

Go here and read and vote.

Haunchieville Heroes!

I played in a modified Pathfinder game this past weekend and while it was fun despite the clunky rules, it reaffirmed my hatred of the overuse of demi-human and non-human characters, especially flipping to this from running Runequest Vikings and Lamentations of the Flame Princess more recently. The entire group, with the exception of my character, were short people– one dwarf, one halfling and shockingly one of the players actually agreed to play a gnome(!?) which I still find unbelievable. The issue with this type of party is that the stories your are going to be telling, regardless of the module or adventure, are going to be akin to cartoon D&D stories with nearly all the characters being comic relief, which is exactly what it turned out to be. What’s more, with this many shorties, the adventure should be an entirely short-person story, like the fight of the haunchy’s vs their larger oppressors; sort of like playing as Ewoks in a Star Wars campaign vs the evil storm troopers rather than anything bog standard– because the party is magical short people and not made up of regular murder hobos.

The reason for playing Demi-humans in some modern versions of D20 (3.5 and 4th for example) is primarily one of optimization. Examples (which may not be accurate): Dark Elves have X trait that combos with Y class to make an uber-powered character once they hit 5th level, Halflings are ALWAYS the best thieves so why would you ever take any other race with that class, and due to their racial abilities, why would you ever play a non-High Elf magic user? D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder are solely about character progression and optimization: this is their core appeal. Since XP in those versions comes from fighting, most of the optimizations are for combat only and you get into the trap of: ‘I need XP from fighting, and I have to get that XP as rapidly as I can so I need to optimize and if I don’t optimize, other optimization-freaks in the party will castigate me.’

Now, I’m not ripping on gonzo or heroic fantasy per se, non-humans have their place (except for gnomes of course who need to stay in the fucking garden), but look at our party in 13th Age: one Human Paladin, one Wood Elf ranger, one High Elf Sorceress, one Halfling bard and a Human Barbarian. The original group had a Dark Elf cleric as well. When you are a GM and you create stories for this type of group, they are demi-human stories. The first adventure was a mission that the elves were on for the Elf Queen, and the humans were ancillary characters (at first). Since 13th Age is like the Feng Shui of D20 games, that is: mega gonzo, with cities on the backs of behemoths and armies of demons invading everywhere, this is not out of sorts. At the lowest levels you are thrown into fights with Dragons and hordes of trolls, etc. so it feels more natural to have ‘magical’ beings around from the outset, but even then you are in danger of your party becoming a ‘comic relief’ party instead of something people take seriously. The difference in 13th Age for the XP optimization trap is that the GM determines when the level up happens– there is no XP. While this seems subtle, this is a huge motivation for characters to do things outside of combat to advance their campaign goals and nothing, NOTHING is on an on-rails adventure path where fights must happen to garner the characters enough XP to advance the story.

I guess in my experience with the comedy races/classes: Halflings are always hammed up, barbarians and the oft-maligned Bards (of any race) are also usually played a bit hammy. Elves are for the most part very serious and humans can run the gamut from serious to HAM. Teiflings, really just a different type of Dark Elf but they seem less serious. Gnomes– just should never be played or included in any fantasy setting with the exception of this. Unless you are looking to play cartoon D&D.

If you have too much Ham in your races and classes (note the Bard and Barbarian are both dangerous in this regard because you could double up with a barbarian halfling or a Dragonborn Bard…), your game is going to descend into HAM regardless of the seriousness of the material you bring to the table as a GM.  While it’s certainly personal taste, I just want my games more like this:

oldhammered

Rather than this:

gnomefucks

“It’s a time in this country to never vote or think about voting for a republican”

This is probably the first ever political post on this blog.  The header for this post was from Matt and the rest is a guest post by Burger who scored the Republican debate, which means he sat through ALL OF THE TALK FROM THESE FUCKING KOOKS!!!!!  Take it away:

I got through it….I don’t know why.
After watching, I have rated the candidates on several categories, those being:

    1. Foreign Policy

2. Immigration

3. Taxes/domestic policies (includes education, taxes, marijuana, transportation, etc…)

4. religion/separation of church/state (gay marriage, abortion, religious freedom to not follow the constitution, etc…)

The candidates earned a 1-10 in each category, for a max possible 40 points:

11. Ted Cruz 0/40 (horrible in every possible category, believer in no amnesty whatsoever for illegal immigrants, horrible religious nut, believes we should attack every country ’cause some radicals said they’d kill people in America for shitting on the Koran, etc….Says on day one he would do alot of impossible things, like rip up the Iran agreement, cancel ObamaCare, get rid of the supreme court justices that ruled in favor of allowing gay marriage, and pre-emptively attack Iran, Syria, and Russia….a busy first day to say the least.)

10. Mike Huckabee 2/40 (worse than Ted Cruz in every category and by far the craziest, except showed some compassion for poor immigrants and would not immediately kick them all out. Unbelievable nutcase on foreign policy, believes in no taxes on income whatsoever, positions on religion, gay marriage, abortion are the worst in US history–he’s ok with federal employees not following the law because of their own religious ideology….again, believes in selectively abiding by the constitution. Can I do that?)

9. Scott Walker 5/40 (he seems reasonable compared to the first two bozos…..yet you can’t find any possible thing about him that is not terrible except his packer fandom….and I even question that! His goal for this debate was to be less silent than the first debate, and perhaps he accomplished that. I guess I give him credit for calling Trump out a few times.)

8. Ben Carson 9/40 (I think I gave him points for being a brain surgeon somehow. He seemed willing to at least consult with people on immigration, he was in favor of raising the minimum wage, although he said he would only do it once forever? His foreign policy is nuts, he defers answers to god for a disurbingly high percentage of his answers, he believes in a flat 10% tax…The fact that no one knows what he could or would do is probably bad rather than good.)

6. (tie) Jeb Bush 11/40 (his answers are terrible on everything, he refuses to acknowledge that the second Iraq war was a mistake. His immigration policy is not the worst and he’d be somewhat practical maybe, he is more well spoken than the rest of the field, and earns points in that we would ultimately be better off with him than some of the crazy people. I don’t think he would do as terrible of damage as many of the other candidates, and, although terrible, was definitely not the worst on religion. I give him some credit for being able to speak Spanish.)

6. (tie) Carly Fiorina 11/40 (a smooth talker, she was battling Trump most of the time. She talked like a hard-liner, basically saying she’d build a huge fleet and air force, quoting a bunch of phantom statistics, to make the world safe through force somehow….wait, how did I give her this high of a rating? Se falls into the category of, “I’m a former CEO, therefore I must be real smart and accomplished and can solve any problem in government.” I guess her lack of much record in politics can be appealing to some people, but I’m not sure that highly questionable tenures at Lucent and Hewlet Packard qualify her for anything.)

5. Marco Rubio 13/40 (he’s terrible, but would probably just extend the status quo and not make things radically worse. Basically, his comments were not the worst on immigration and his comments were slightly less crazy and terrible than the candidates above. i.e., he was not quite as distinguished in his terribleness, but maybe he just wasn’t well spoken enough in his canned U-rah speeches to reach the absolute bottom….he was reading off a script all night, and it was dreadfully apparent.)

4. Chris Christie 14/40 (he’s corrupt, he vows to prosecute all marijuana users in Colorado in one breath and preaches states rights in the other, yet he has some practical experience and has survived in a very blue state, meaning he has some ability to compromise. I think some of his comments were banter and conservative platitudes so as not to make himself unpalatable to the tea party base. He’s probably the first or second best choice among this field to actually be president in this country)

3. Donald Trump 16/40 (he says many things that lots of Americans will like, although it was mostly bullshit. His tax policy and domestic policies as he states them now with no detail whatsoever don’t sound too bad. His immigration policy is beyond lunacy-cancel birthright citizenship, round up all immigrants in the first week and send them to mexico, build an enormous wall between mexico and the US, then go to mexico and bring back the good immigrants….hmmmm. Trump also said no one would talk about immigration if he hadn’t brought it up. He effectively pounded his own drum all night and drowned out the other candidates. He said he’d be friends with Putin cause everyone likes him, and he’d get Putin to do what he wants. I still can’t consider him a real candidate, but his campiness and free-flowing snappy comebacks are something that Palin lovers will like, and he is much more well spoken than her…..however, the connection between “successful” business person and leader of the country is questionable at best….billionaires with a singular angle have the assets and maneuverability to exploit laws for their own benefit, like declaring bankruptcy, etc….would any of that work for a country?)

2. John Kasik 18/40 (he seems like a consensus maker to some degree. Other candidates seem to respect him, his record in Ohio has some good points, although he’s a union breaker as well. His immigration policy is on the higher side for this bunch, domestic policies seemed at least somewhat reasonable, he’s too religious for my liking but it doesn’t interfere nearly as bad with his ideology as the ones a the top. He wouldn’t be the most ruinous president)

1. Rand Paul (21/40) (his ideology is by far the most palatable to me of any of these candidates. He believes in consensus building with our allies, staying out of unwinnable conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afganistan, etc….He backed Trump on a weird interpretation of the 14th amendment applying to whether birthright citizenship is valid, and overall, his immigration policy is one of his weakest points. Also his flat tax structure of 14.4% to everyone….? Other than that, he was reasonable on domestic things, he’s anti-religion, he’s in favor of no marijuana prosecution in states that have legalized….I think libertarian viewpoints are defensible as ideologies because they are based in logic. All this being said, he’d be a disaster if he became president, as 90% of all Americans would HATE him, and he’d be politically crucified from day one by both parties)

In general, the infusion of Trump and Fiorina and their success in the polls to this point may be forcing the more core republican candidates to be more vocal than they’d like to be at this point. Notice how little Mitt Romney spoke last time with those wackaloons in 2012 on stage stealing the show(Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry)! The difference is that none of those candidates made any dent as far as ratings.