Category: RPG

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

Interesting ass article on D&D 5 and why they weren’t at Gencon

There was a WTF with everyone I mentioned it to that there was no TSR-style castle for D&D at Gencon, and yet there were many books around and certainly people were playing it.  Needless to say, people are playing it outside of gencon a great deal.  There’s going to be a point soon where people stop calling it 5E, and just call it D&D.

We’ve stayed away from the march of the splat books, the new character classes, new spells, all that stuff. It’s thrown some people for a loop. But what we’ve seen is a very strong response to the game overall. People seem happy with it. That’s always good.

That said, read this and you can see the tactical decision not to be there.  I still question it, but it makes sense.

Ampersand on Black

 

Gencon 2015 summation

Well it was busy and fairly drunk with a lot of Lamentations of the Flame Princess played.  I’m tired as shit this evening on account of steve’s snoring Sunday morning. My god it was like a constant fart noise for 2 hours from his fucking MOUTH.  We should bring a portable CPAP machine to stick on people that fucking snore during gencon– there is SO LITTLE TIME TO SLEEP in the first place.  Since it was all burgers and sugar and beer and lack of sleep I’m going to need that XXXXXXL they are always sold out of.

I liked this year’s con.  I had all the homies there, though so many that I didn’t get to game with all of them unfortunately, but it was great to see Dan at the Cool Mini or Not line 10 minutes into the con.  Overall, it was very crowded, and for sure I want to hit Gameholecon and some of the other mid-west ones as a contrast this year.  I’ve always had a lot of fun at Plattecon and that’s TINY.  The overcrowding filled my fucking 3DS with PALICOS, which can only help the Monster Hunting right?

Lots of ‘news’ this year of you give a flying fuck about this sort of stuff.

First, the Zak S win of ennies for best writing, art, and another one for Red and Pleasant Land. D&D5 won about everything else, because D&D5 is very well designed and the books have top drawer production values.  Apparently, in absentia, the Red and Pleasant Land guy was heckled by people when the win was announced and apparently it was one of the writers on the Marvel Heroic RP game(!?).   Also, read this.   People in gaming, no doubt about it, have the tendency to have a lot of social problems.  GENCON with it’s sights and smells is case in point. When I can watch two fat dudes with pants 10″ too tight with their bone-white bellies hanging OUT below their tshirts by 2-3 inches and not bat and eye (and not have them constantly pointed at and laughed at by others, which would sadly or rightly would be the norm) or have someone who stinks like a cesspool walking around and not be phased (nor have other people make fun of that person openly by throwing soap at them, as would sadly be the norm), gamers are both an accepting and really, really socially struggling group of people.  I won’t say our group isn’t terrible (which you will see from the coming pictures) and since the late 80’s we’ve built up a set of pictures that would send Richard Simmons into a fit.  There was a day where we were playing Legends of the Five Rings or something CCG in about 1995/6 and there was a man that was as wide as three people with dirty sweat pants leaning over a massive FORTRESS EUROPA table.  He farted there with his belly pressed over the table for hours until we couldn’t smell his ass-breath anymore.  We took grainy pictures on a small camera and from that day on, a hobby was born.

Second, Games Workshop was actually at the con this year, and this is the first time I remember them being there for maybe a decade? What I saw on shelves were MASS amounts of boxes of Age of Sigmar all over the con both at the GW booth and retailers.  The amounts of these boxes did not change and I never saw anyone with a box.  I did see people buying shitloads of 40K stuff as normal.  The diorama with minatures was nice looking, but I just can’t get past the shitty rules to even consider it.  AoS might not tank, but certainly it’s core demographic was not at Gencon this year.

Third, Runequest was rolled back into Chaosium announced at the Con, pretty near when we were playing our game with Lawrence Whitaker of Design Mechanism.  I noticed all the RQ guys I saw wearing Chaosium tshirts and was like: huh? However, based on the press release I think this is a good thing for the game, though if you have the big ass beautiful RQ6 book, HANG ON TO IT.  We may not see it’s like again.

Fourth, where was WOTC? There was no TSResque castle that I saw, no D&D booth in the main hall, no MTG lines all over the place.  D&D 5E has taken the reigns and just needs to ride.

Last, was the Ken Whitman drama over the Knights of the Dinner Table live action stuff.  I saw what I think was one of the actors standing around outside a booth wearing a strange red wig for awhile.  I think a core issue there is that, despite the costume, he looked like 15% of the crowd.  Basically this guy was supposed to make some live action Knights of the Dinner table shorts, got kickstarter money and was supposed to have a filming of the shows at Gencon.  Seems normal, but apparently people doubted the films would be done at all, and everything was sketchy as hell.  I’m not seeing any info on what happened, but something to keep tabs on likely here.

While I just went there to game– there was too much internet kerfuffle to not pay just a small bit of attention to this crazy ass stuff.

Here is my fucking loot picture.

2015loots
Heroes of Normandie, Monster Island, Junta, 2 boxes of EMPIRE OF EVIL, Strangling sea, a custom DM screen and a bunch of EPIC40K Orks!

And… other pictures.

stevegunt
find the gunt.

look1 look2

Runequest Vikings!

Ah…. the camping trip RPG sessions.  Trapped people in the tent in the rain at whoever agrees to GM’s mercy forced to try yet another new RPG system… and usually it works out despite the drunkenness and chaos and insects and general darkness despite everyone having a headlamp.

After playing in Steve’s Lamentations game last year, where my thief nearly died from one of his own traps, I was on deck run something while in the wilderness.  I thought long and hard about sticking with Lamentations again this year, since it is easy to grasp and easy to roll up characters when they die.   In addition there’s just a shit ton of adventures from DCC to any of the TSR stuff to the LotFP originals available to run, you can just pull one off the shelf and  go go go. However, since we only had three players this year, I took a chance and busted out Runequest 6.  While I am a stalwart fan of the system, it’s been mostly via reading as I’ve only run it about 3 times, and only once with a big group of players.  It worked really well so far, but I am still very inexperienced with it, despite a couple years of Call of Cthulhu under my belt as a youth.  I was a bit nervous doing this on the camping trip. Was it too involved with all the skills? Will it be OK without player-mastery of the combat special effects?  Animism?  uhhhh…

I meant to run the start of the new Mythic Britain campaign, but the initial part of that campaign is very…political.  Not exactly what you want to lay down as an intro to the system on a camping trip mostly sober.  That left either Early Modern (1600’s) or VIKINGS.   Vikings are easy right?  I started prepping a couple months ago armed with both Mythic Britain (which takes place during the Saxon invasion but has a ton of info on England and it’s petty kingdoms) and Runequest 2’s Viking sourcebook, which is excellent.  What adventures to run?  Things get pretty violent and I didn’t want to run any big raids (yet) or mass battles (yet) for the weekend, so worked up a mash up of a few ideas I had and a part of a module.  Frankly, I didn’t know if it would work and procrastinated a bit on getting the playing started and was sad that I did as it turned out I had to help make two characters. That took a really really long time in comparison to a lot of RPG’s, so if you are going to play RQ, it goes without saying either have pregens or have characters all made first.

Since characters have to go through three steps of adding points to skills (Culture, Career, Bonus) they may mull it over too much, or not enough and then they want to change it around later.   And it’s 300-350 points to skills…  As an alternative, I was thinking instead of choosing Culture, then assigning skills then picking a Career, etc.,  a player would simply choose a class (like Ranger, Fighter, Magic User, Rogue) and then roll on a table associated with that class for your ‘career’ to get 200 points of skills auto added (like rat catcher), then you just worry about your 100-150 bonus points, which at 15 points max per skill should not take to long or break anything in the game.  Look familiar? Yeah that’s the way WFRP 1 and 2 handled it.  Then you can jump in quick without all the mulling over 300+ points to assign.  While Runequest is a very deep game with a lot of potential customization, I would rather hit fast with a quick start.

So what happened?   The characters got invited to hunt an elk by their Jarl with a gold armband around it’s horn.  In a shocking stroke of luck, they actually found it before the other teams of hunters and after expending all of their ranged weapon ammo (axes and spears) they were able to take it down.    While lucky, they were able to get close to the thing because it was moving away from another hunter towards them, so that helped.  The first hit with a throwing axe would have toppled it, but it hit it’s horns and didn’t strike home.   Dragging the elk through the snow, they got ambushed on the way back by some of Matt’s character’s enemies, but talked their way out of it.  Back at the meadhall they had a big feast and their pseudo-Skald critically succeeded a storytelling/oration roll to describe the hunt and so that will have some repercussions throughout the land as it will be on the lips of the nearby viking villages for some time.   Trouble was brewing with Matt’s character’s enemies, so his mother suggested strongly a vacation.  The characters then headed out to the western shore of Britain to assist with a trade caravan going inland from the coast (a real rarity for vikings who do their business on the shore only, so strange).  Turns out Matt’s character’s mother sent them on this errand to unwittingly send a message to his father who was off fighting in Northumbria somewhere.  Whether the characters are there to protect the caravan or the caravan to protect them to get across the island, who can tell?

The group got into one big fight with some rather crappy thugs and there was some splitting of heads with a Dane Axe and we had our first full decapitation (11 points of damage to an unarmored head will do it). Matt (the noble) had himself disarmed by one of the shitbirds, so that will be one to grow on.  This part of the session illustrated what happens when a person with no action points or taken unaware gets hit by a dane axe.   I urged the guys that every fight can be terribly dangerous, and I think that some of the normal murderhoboish tendencies were abated, certainly a lot more than your standard 3.5 or Pathfinder player who wades right into any fight knowing that the adventure path they are in wouldn’t dare have a TPK.

It was a fine set of sessions for me for practice, and I am fond of the RQ 6 system for this type of game.  The Viking era seemed a bit limiting at first, but then you realize that’s where all this D&D stuff came from in the first place and matched with some of the Lovecraftian weird and some of the historical maelstrom, it’s cooking with gas!