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.
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….
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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:
