Category: RPG

Darkest Dungeon – it’s ready now

I posted back in March about Darkest Dungeon and while still in ‘early access’ for a few more days, it’s ready to go I tell you, it’s ready to fucking go.  After playing a bunch in Spring, I got a bit bored with it, I just couldn’t get very far. I beat one of the bosses and kept losing parties and having people go insane.   The recent ‘patch’ apparently made the game much harder, so I had to go and try it again over the Xmas break and yeah, it’s a fantastic game and has really come together in the last 5 months.

BUT– it’s not a normal RPG, and it doesn’t say this to you on the box so you have to figure it out on your own (or by reading this more). While you do have a bunch of characters that have skills and weapons to upgrade and the like, these guys are not something to get attached to– in Darkest Dungeon, they are fucking tools.  In Torchlight, I get attached to my toons, in games like Dragon Age or Pillars of Eternity you are bound to get attached to your party and really love some of them for kicking ass or being cool.  Leave all that behind when you start Darkest Dungeon– all of it because every single character you get in the game is expendable, even your best guys with your best stuff– they will die or go totally insane soon and… you get new ones.

What’s the fun in that you say? Think of it as a sports team management game. You recruit players, they do well for a few seasons and some start to age or get injuries and you have to bench them and then cut them or play them in worthless games. Some just don’t work out in the positions that they have been assigned an they have to be moved or cut.  Your goal is to win the games and have a successful season, and if you are playing a soccer club sim, to make a bunch of money too so you can get your bird’s feedbags to the size she wants.

This video is a lie.

You do this by constantly recruiting.   You need to keep the poor murderhobos coming into your town as much as possible to get ground up in the dungeons.  While your overall goal may be heroic or noble (who can tell?), your means to get there– duping saps to come and explore the ruins, is all but.  As long as you have enough saps spilling in and you can keep your money above about 1500 gold, you are good to keep going!

Here are some tips:

  1. I like VESTAL > HELLION > HELLION > HELLION a lot.
  2. I like Bounty Hunters a lot
  3. Moving and stunning is more important than doing damage most of the time
  4. You can die from wounds and you can die from stress
  5. Some heroes are trash before you even hire them– read their skills/insanities first.
  6. You can do runs in total darkness.  Try it
  7. Even if all your heroes die and you run out of money, you still don’t need to start over.

So go get it so we can cry together about it.

Feng Shui 2: first play

fengheaderLast week we got in on some Feng Shui 2 action and it was pretty good.  Our heroes included a Killer, an Average Joe (aptly named John D.), a Private Eye, a Scrappy Kid (inadvertent Hit-Girl clone named XBat) and a Driver who had amnesia.

After everyone picked their archetype and wrote their melodramtic hook, it was off to the races.  The characters were all on a drunk bus headed back to the JW Marriot in Hong Kong when the driver took a detour to a warehouse where other buses of people were being unloaded onto bigger buses by Triads with lots of guns.   The Killer wasn’t having that, and the bloodbath ensued.  The fight involved the Killer and Driver characters destroying dozens of mooks between them, while the other characters took down a gaggle of named bad guys, mostly hired guns by the Triad.  Needless to say, the rest of the passengers didn’t fare too well, most being blown away in the crossfire.  One of the bad guys cheesed it (who would reappear later).  Most of the characters were unscathed, but the Killer took quite a few bullets and wasn’t in the best of shape coming out of it.  Between sessions characters heal up 100%, but between fights, characters have the option to drop their Toughness by 1 to reduce their wound level by 10.  Since our Killer had a death wish as his hook, he wasn’t having that either.

After the first fight, the characters found out where the large buses were going and faked their way in to a railway depot where the people on buses were loaded on to train cars!  This did not make them happy.   The Killer went into what looked like an office to talk to the head guys and faked his way pretty well until the bad guy that cheesed it before showed up and blew his cover.  Luckily the Driver was able to bust into the depot with another Mook-destroying car.

This fight was a bit more serious, with mooks constantly showing up and another gaggle of named characters– plus one really pissed off sorcerer!  The sorcerer blew the Killer away and he failed his first up check.   Next the Everyday hero went down in a hail of bullets.   The Private Eye, Scrappy Kid and Driver avenged them by downing the sorcerer before she could cheese it out of there as well as destroying the rest of the named characters.  Without the Killer though, the swarms of mooks presented a problem.

hitgirl

As the Everyday Hero and Killer passed into the afterlife (both failing death checks) the remaining characters noticed that while they were destroying the sorcerer and her goons, the rail cars had gotten away!  What will happen next?

System

Feng Shui 2 cleans up a lot of the dreck from Feng Shui 1, dreck players didn’t even notice when we last played in 1997, but yeah, it was there.  Before we played, I found a folder with all the old characters and thought: “oh I’ll convert these!” but there was no need, the only thing you need is a name and a melodramatic hook and the archtype is good to go.

While there’s a lot less ticky tacky stuff to the characters, and this simplicity makes the game even more playable, they did add a new DEFENSE statistic that splits how good a character is at HITTING from how good they are at not BEING HIT.   This was an issue in Feng Shui 1 where the AV was ALL THINGS and it got pretty boring when pretty much everything was one stat (we didn’t play long enough back in the day to figure this out though).   Certain characters hit really hard sometimes, but can’t dodge attacks well and others, like the aforementioned Scrappy Kid, can’t dish a lot of damage but rarely get hit.   While there aren’t a lot of stats to differentiate characters, FS2 has archtypes that all feel very different from each other.  There are quite a few ‘GUNS’ characters and in this session we had three– the Driver, the Killer and the Private Eye, yet none of them felt samey.  Each of them had different stuff they did in fights and felt different to the players I’m sure.

That said, characters in this version have nearly zero options when they select an archtype and I see this as a good thing, while your 4E and Pathfinder players may not.  Get started quick, invest little and get some cool tricks if your character survives.  There are a few archtype options though, and it’s also possible with some of the archtypes to rework them nearly completely if you are an experienced player, especially the martial artist and supernatural creature types.   Fundamentally though you don’t want to waste time on that type of jiggering until after the characters have made it through a few sessions at least.

Lastly, and I’ll post more when we have another session, is how much I liked the Up-check /Mark of Death system.   Basically characters have to test if you can keep going when you hit a certain number of wounds.  If you pass the check you can voluntarily bow out with only one ‘mark of death’, or keep going, possibly having to take more checks.  With each up-check you have to take, you have to take a death check at the end of the fight with a better chance of your character taking the dirt nap the more marks of death you got.  We had two characters get smoked this session, which I think is a bit of a rarity, but since the villains they were facing were out to kill (and let’s face it, what Hong Kong style villain isn’t?) and both characters took tons of bullets into their bodies, it was likely inevitable at least one would go down.  Having a boss-level villain in one of the fights was also a key contributor.

Steam Xmas Sale 2015

Obligatory posts on the WALLET RAPE that steam provides.  My goal is to purchase only a single game per day that is under or around 5$.  So if I go 6$ on one day, I have to go lower than 5$ the next.  Since my wishlist is now over 80 items, I don’t even remember most of the stuff that’s on there, and in some cases WHY it’s on there.  However, it’s much better to make drunk Steam wishlist additions than drunk Amazon or Steam PURCHASES.

pic2553264

Yesterday’s purchase, while sober, was CHROMA SQUAD which is a turn based power ranger spoof.  I’ve had my eye on it for awhile and just had to do it at the price.  I haven’t fired it up yet, but it looks pretty BOSS.

Today I’m mulling over a lot of possibilities, but pretty much have to go with LISA.

lisa

We’ll see what 5$ can get tomorrow!

Yeah, I’m off for XMAS

Xmas is the absolute worst time of the year to take a couple weeks off work, but fuck it, here it is.  Today is my second day off.

I saw STAR WARS a couple of times so far and yep, it’s great.  Worth the hype and I can’t wait for the next one.  Pulp fantasy /sci fi and let’s hope it ushers in a WAVE of cheesy clones like it did in the 70’s and 80’s a la MESSAGE FROM SPACE and STARCRASH.

SHINOBIGAMI!
SHINOBIGAMI!

I broke down and backed this fucker after saying NO MORE kickstarters.   While I’m not an anime freak and am certainly not all that into the whole schoolgirl ninja thing,  after reading the rules and how this plays, it seems like a lighter, shorter TENRA BANSHO ZERO.  From the description, it can be played in an evening on say a board game night as a one shot– and I’m all about the one shots.  I can do the Ninja school girl thing for a one shot!  As soon as I get the playtest/beta test packet, we’re playing this fucker.

lamentations

Over this holiday, if I get any time to myself at all, I’m going to finish up my random equipment tables for Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  I finished a draft of the fighter table last week and worked a smidge on the cleric.  Whether anyone else uses them,  it will speed up play for us a lot ditching the shopping mess during char gen.

bodyguard

 

Tonight is my first go at Feng Shui 2.  I haven’t run a game since 1997 so let’s see how it goes.  They fixed a lot of the annoying stuff in FS2 and while I think the backstory and fluff have gotten weaker, the rules are a lot better.

Degenisis
Degenesis

The above pic is from a Polish RPG called Degenesis.  It’s a horrifying post-apocalyptic world where earth is basically fucked forever.  I’ve been really impressed with the art and there are two excellent trailer videos for it as well.  Lookee here.

No more Pathfinder for me… ever

Saturday night was the 42 Ale House’s D&D&D where the last D is, naturally, drinking. This was the second or third event of this type there, where people get together and try to form groups to play RPG’s, either long term or right on the spot. I heard about it from a guy on the bus named Russ. We got down there and there were about 25 people there in various states of nerdery and inebriation. The initial bit was a lecture on good play, both for a GM and players which was excellent. While the speaker was definitely in the ‘storyteller’ camp of RPG play where the system itself tries to ‘force’ drama via rules rather than have it just happen in play like with the OSR styles, it was worth hearing. There were a lot of good points made but the main thing for GM’s was ‘don’t waste time on boring stuff‘ and for players was ‘help the GM do some of his work for him.’

One example the speaker used that I had umbrage with was the thief picking a lock and failing over and over and over again and how that’s boring, which is certainly true if you are playing story type games.  In FATE, players can succeed in anything at a cost (incurring a complication), but let’s face it, FATE was never really a rule system in the end, it’s just a bunch of people handwaving in storytime makebelieve land.

The contrast to this is in any OSR, each fail is 10 minutes of time / one turn. The player can opt to keep trying to open the lock over and over, but every game turn (10 minutes) is a wandering monster/event roll. The thief may get into the lock or not, OSR doesn’t care because it’s designed that that die roll and the character’s skill at picking locks determines what happens. In story games or ones where the threat (and I mean REAL threat, not just a 2 hour combat with stuff that can’t even hurt the characters because that’s how the module is balanced) doesn’t come from wandering monsters, it’s OK to let them pick the lock even if they fail, but in the OSR, each failure risks the entire party’s lives as SOMETHING will eventually wander in and do some killing or drain the party’s scant resources opening them up for being killed later.  And if you are a Fighter in one of those parties where the thief is burning turn after turn on a lock, which means you are likely dead if there is any combat, you may just kill that thief yourself!

After the speaker,the GM’s pitched their games. Most were D&D 5E, one was Rifts (?!), another Numenera and the last one was a dude practicing for Iron GM running… fucking Pathfinder. The 5E games filled up instantly, and since we knew the iron GM dude a bit from Gen Con, we bit the bullet and played in his one-shot, totally off the cuff game. The group and the GM were good to play with, and did and said a lot of silly things (a few players were focusing on the final D a lot) however the system, as always, got in the way of PLAY and it was so fucking annoying I could barely stand it.

Here’s some stuff about it:

  •  Apparently, players have to start at level 4-6 for it to even be worthwhile to run for a Pathfinder GM. We had to make or were given 6 level characters all for a 3 hour pick up game.
  • The character sheets were 4 pages long. The pregen I got, a simple fighter, had a page of all his ‘powers’ and 4-5 weapons, some magical. Of course, I didn’t read any of it because again–a 3 hour pick up game.
  • Combat was, of course, the shittiest version of D20 combat there is, but at least the GM didn’t fuck shit up by using miniatures. As much as I hated this session of play from a system and rules perspective, I have to hand it to the GM that he didn’t bust out a stupid map and minis.
  • No one was hit or damaged the entire session, in two fights, one being quite large. My character, a warforged fighter, had 56 hit points and 24 AC. I was never touched during the session. Remember, pathfinder is built to be a stroke-my-gaming-cock-to-my-leveled-up-character type of game, so no characters are ever meant to actually die.
  • Generic monsters are were still lame and generic. The GM used the beastiary and everyone knew what everything was instantly as well as the mechanics to each. There was no sense of wonder at all because ‘oh that’s a vampire, it has X HD’ and ‘oh, a basilisk, 3HD right?” What’s more in pathfinder, a Basilisks blood CURES being turned to stone, so not only do players have the ability to save vs the stoning, their buddies that kill the Basilisk can just turn him back to flesh instantly.  It’s not like the creature does much damage on a hit either, so why did we even have that encounter?
  • Rolling the dice constantly for every goddamn perception/spot check is incredibly lame. As a GM, I want characters that are looking for stuff to find stuff so we can have an adventure happen.  Spot ‘checks’ that will whittle down the number of characters that spot something should be special and not par for the course.

I’ve played Pathfinder maybe 8 sessions now, and once for an entire weekend solid so I’ve given it the good college try, but this is now too much.   I’d like to say that Pathfinder feels like playing ‘old tech,’ like busting out your Sega 32X with all addons just to play DOOM when you could just fire up your PC and play far more easily and without all the bullshit cables everywhere.  However, I play and really like the core design of some older games (namely Moldvay D&D), so it’s not that it’s old,  it’s that Pathfinder is just a shit game.  13th Age, Basic (ones that don’t use THACO that is), 5E are simply better games.

A big ha ha haunted house

Zzarchov Kowalski in the preface to his work-in-progress module “the price of evil”:

This adventure toolkit presumes you want to have a game
(or series of games) where the players attempt to survive
and solve a haunted house without resorting to arson. I
understand that is a big if as there is something satisfying
about the moment when the players around the table look
at one another and silently vote that the time for interacting
with the horror filled creation of your imagination has
ended and the time for fire has begun.

EDIT: I forgot to put a link to where you can buy this module.  If you have seen/ read Scenic Dunsmouth, you will have some idea of what Kowalski is shooting for with this one.

summerwind

“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.

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?