#the difficulties of keeping a D&D/RPG group going

[runekeepershymnal]

Welp.

One of my D&D groups fell apart. Basically two players had to drop due to scheduling conflicts / IRL stuff, and the chemistry of the group after we brought new people in just didn't work. It's no one's fault, some people just don't vibe. I think the stress of the lack-of-vibes has contributed to one of my absolute favorite people needing a break, and I dunno if she'd be down for a future game or not. This group has existed in some incarnation since... damn. 2019, I think? Maybe 2018. Fuck. That's a long time. I get by with compartmentalizing, and this is a sadness that seems like it is not going to fit into a box for safekeeping. I just need it to not blow the lid off every other box.

[destronlok]

Old Dungeons and Dragons rules discussed #1

Here's a weird rule in the original edition of D&D. I've been wanting to write and ramble about this for ages.

This is always crazy to look at today, because the average D&D game typically would have only four people and would rarely go above 7-8 maybe 10 in exceptional cases.

But Fifty?

There is a reason for this, and his nothing to do with Gary Gygax's consumption of cocaine and marijuana at the time.

From all my readings, this is what I've concluded about this ruling.

D&D was not meant to be played with the same group week to week. It could be, but it was easier and more likely that you played with whoever was available at the time. Players would come in and out frequently and by the end of a long campaign, you might actually approach this number.

(Side note: I think fifty is based on the size of large wargaming groups in the 70s.)

So the DM would set up his campaign and just play with whoever was there, maybe even swapping roles with a player on account of that ratio.

Bear in mind as well that in this edition, the DM was meant to keep track of ability scores for each player so 1:20 is probably just them picking a number that was the most they were comfortable keeping track of.

Here's what I want to say: What can we learn from this when we play RPGs today? Well we can start thinking more broadly about how to accommodate a larger group of people.

The rules go on to explain more of this, but I can only agree with what's been said by others.

In D&D the DM made a setting, not a story. Players would explore that setting and stories would be generated dynamically.

So you could change players frequently, and if you couldn't fit all the characters into one of the stories or settings,

you'd just create more characters (and the other rules supported this idea) as there appears to be an expectation that players might have more than one character.

Since the players don't have to be the same each time, and the setting is consistent, if you played like this, you wouldn't have to worry about scheduling difficulties ever again, so long as you can meet a minimum number of players.

But also consider players who might want to only play one time, and not really commit to a whole story, this style of play is for them! These more casual players can help fill out your group numbers and no one has to worry about missing any future sessions (this is also supported by additional rules explained in AD&D) Thanks for reading up until this point, I might post more of these later, as there's so much to be learnt from the way the game was played in the past.

For further reading, please check out Questing Beast, Matt Colville and The Alexandrian's article

[rpgsandbox]

The Gaia Complex is a cyberpunk RPG set on earth in 2119. Towards the end of the 21st century, the third world war, which became known as the Resource War, pushed mankind to the brink of destruction and brought ruin to the Earth’s atmosphere. Small pockets of humanity survived this horrific conflict, eventually forming the eleven metropolises. These incredible mega-cities have since grown and prospered, largely due to developments in atmospheric processing and significant technological advancements. Now cut off from each other, these heaving urban landscapes must each face their own difficulties and hardships. The Gaia Complex focuses on the largest of these metropolises; New Europe, a single sprawling city that covers much of what we currently know as mainland Europe. New Europe is a world of street violence, corporate espionage, vampiric uprisings and an overzealous A.I., known as Gaia, which functions as the city’s governor and the protector of its citizens.

The Gaia Complex is a dystopian world of urban violence, exploring the age of cybernetic enhancement through a vision of Earth that is somehow ‘changed’. This vision of the future injects both vampires and a strange species of people known as ferals, who are able to enter the minds of animals. This is a game of conspiracy and brutality, where players take on the roles of Mercs; former police officers, hackers and street-savvy dealers who are hired to fight back against the system and ultimately unravel the secrets of The Gaia Complex.

Of course we'd love you to back this campaign and be a part of making The Gaia Complex a reality, but before you do, maybe you want to give it a whirl for yourself? Good news - you can do this right now.

While this campaign and the updates throughout will talk about the game setting and rules, our free (well, 'pay what you want', but please, enter £0 and just grab a copy!) 48-page Quick Start for The Gaia Complex is out right now and will allow you to read and play for yourselves. This PDF contains a huge amount of lore surrounding the game, offering an in-depth insight to the world of The Gaia Complex and what it means to be a Merc in 2119. In addition, the booklet is jammed full of gorgeous artwork and gives you a good idea of what to expect from the full core book.

Go and grab your copy of the Quick Start by clicking this link

                   The cast of playable characters from the Quick Start

The Gaia Complex core book will be 'at least' 256 pages of full-colour hardback beauty - take a look at the Quick Start for a general idea about how it will look. We say 'at least' as we have a whole host of extra content that we might just squeeze in, either through stretch goals, or because we end up deciding certain things just need to be there.

At the time of launch, the core book writing is roughly 90% complete and layout for final proof-reading has already been completed for some chapters - this is a significant strength for this project, having completed so much of the writing ahead of launch. Artwork at this point is around 40% complete and new art is in the pipeline to be finished (and shown off) during the campaign. The art direction for this book is very important and great care is being taken to ensure the visuals support the writing as closely as possible.

The structure of the book is split over 12 chapters, plus an NPC (non-player character) library at the end. We'll go into more detail about the chapters over the coming weeks via the campaign updates, sharing some key information as we go. Alongside the rules, background and resources for playing the game, the book also includes multiple pieces of short fiction that slowly unfold the real story behind The Gaia Complex. These stories, and the characters they describe, lay the foundation for the world in which the game is set and allow us to explore New Europe in 2119 in much more cinematic detail.

The engine behind The Gaia Complex is called 12.3 and can be taken for a test drive in our Quick Start by clicking HERE.

The basis of the system uses 2d12 (that's two twelve sided dice - but you're all roleplayers, so I'm sure you knew that!) to make the majority of tests on a 'roll under' basis. Whenever a test is required, the GM determines a potential difficulty for the test, ranging from 1 (easy for a child to accomplish) to 11 (impossibly hard). A character will compare the difficulty to their relevant statistic and if the stat is equal to or greater than the difficulty, the test is a success - There is an emphasis in the game on keeping the action flowing and not making tests unless they are really needed.

If the character's stat is less than the difficulty, a test is required: the player rolls 2d12, requiring a result that is equal to or less than their relevant stat. An 11 fails (without cybernetic enhancement) and a 12 is a Critical Failure. To pass, a character requires one or both d12s to succeed depending on whether they are skilled or unskilled - The Gaia Complex does not consider 'ranks' in various skills like the majority of RPGs, instead a character either possesses a skill or does not (though becoming a specialist in certain skills is possible).

During combat, d3s are also used to determine damage - you can use funky d3s like the ones available on this campaign, or simply use common d6. The engine for the game uses d3s to enable a more consistant result when rolling multiple dice together and to remove the chance of whiffing a result of a 1 in situations that should always achieve a minium degree of success (thus 3d3+3 damage represents a weapon with more consistent output than one that does 1d12 damage) .

Of course, the game includes many other rules - some core, some optional - covering a huge array of options, but at its root, the game falls back on 12.3 to keep it rolling (pun intended).

During the course of the campaign we'll dedicate a couple of updates to specific areas of the rules and give you a deep dive into them beyond what you can get your hands on in the Quick Start.

Characters in The Gaia Complex are known as Mercs. At their core, Mercs are citizens of New Europe who have chosen to rebel against the system and take up arms by making themselves available on the freelance market. The seedy clubs and bars of NeoMunich are the most common place to find Mercs and while their work is entirely illegal, there is enough anonymity that it isn't worth the expenditure of resources for Gaia or its police force to worry about shutting down the network.

Most Mercs are hired to run jobs against one of the many corporations in the metropolis. From hacking R&D servers to kidnapping, assassinating or Bio Hacking company execs; there are few limits when it comes to taking a job. Ironically, the primary employers are the corporations themselves, all looking to get a leg up over their rivals, employing Mercs to do the dirty work in order to maintain complete deniability. Of course, it's not just the heaving corporations that are the enemy; outsider vampires that lurk in the subway tunnels and outer fringes of the metropolis, the cybernetic police force controlled by the LE1 A.I. subsystem, or even Gaia itself - the all seeing ruler of the metropolis - everyone is a potential mark if the score looks big enough!

The core rules contains a detailed character creation process, allowing players to play either human or feral (a mysterious group of people who can enter the minds of the metropolis' animals) characters from one of ten varied roles, each with their own unique rules, benefits and style. Characters can choose from:

Operator - Former law enforcement, corporate security and guns-for-hire that pack the hottest weapon tech that the black market has to offer.

Core Hacker - Hackers and coders who live their lives in the digital pathways of The Core.

Bio Hacker - A new wave of hacker, dedicated to hacking the cybernetic brains of their targets and inducing 'forced servitude'.

ParaMed - Former TactaMed paramedics who have realised they can earn more money patching up Mercs by being one of them!

CyberDoc - Back-alley hackjob specialists and cybernetic installers. An often riskier, but cheaper approach, to main stream cybernetics clinics.

MilTech - Weapons techs, tinkerers and specialist drone pilots. MilTechs keep the team's gear working and provide invaluable technical support.

Mech - Drivers, pilots and expert mechanics. Mechs keep the metropolis rolling and give Merc teams much needed access to reliable transportation.

Tech Trader - Black market dealers, handling everything from illegal weapons and stolen cybernetics, to narcotics and false credentials.

Data Dealer - Information traffickers and dealers of stolen secrets. If there is something worth knowing, you can probably buy it... for a price.

Handler - Exclusive to ferals. Handlers have dedicated themselves to honing the feral's ability to step into the mind of an animal. This is the feral in their purest form.

We'll be taking a more in-depth look into each of these roles as the campaign unfolds.

Kickstarter campaign ends: Wed, October 7 2020 6:59 PM BST

Website: [The Gaia Complex] [facebook] [twitter]

[chongoblog]

ALRIGHT SO HERES MY LITTLE MINI LECTURE ON HOW TO MAKE ENCOUNTERS IN D&D OR ANY OTHER RPG MORE INTERESTING SO LISTEN UP FRICK FRACKERS

Now the first thing to note is the difficulty of the encounter! There’s a super helpful resource where you can put in player levels and monster levels to determine how difficult a fight might be that I use all the time. If you’re homebrewing monsters, then you can discern a challenge rating by finding a monster that’s somewhat similar.

Now once you have your monsters, there are a few things to keep in mind when creating your encounter.

1) The motives of the enemy. Most of the time the motive is going to be "RAWR KILL" (and that’s okay!) but if they fighting a set of monsters that perhaps received orders from a higher being, then they might be trying for something more complex than that. If they have an ulterior motive, then be sure to work that into the encounter. For instance, if they're there to get a magic gemstone, make sure the location of the gemstone is absolutely clear at all times and emphasize its importance, that way your players will have all the more motive to fight these monsters, and the actions they take can reflect other solutions to the problem at hand. Like in the gemstone example, instead of fighting they can try to take the gem for themselves, or they can fire a shot at the pedestal holding the gem and knock it off. Or another example is if they’re the hull of a ship trying to sink it from the inside, the enemy can attack the boat instead of the players and a wizard can spend his turn trying to fix the hole while the fighter’s priority is shifted to the enemy with a weapon that could more likely damage the hull.

2) Have the situation/environment complement the monster’s abilities if you want to add some challenge. If I learned anything from watching Joey Joey's Strange Escapades, it's that a lot of Stands probably wouldn't work as well as they do unless they're in specific situations. A way to give an encounter more depth is if the environment at hand cooperates with whatever makes the enemy special. Can the enemy climb up trees well? Set it in a tall forest. Are you deep inside a cramped cave? Worms would have an advantage. Are you in an open field? Don't use the worms. Does the enemy wear a gas mask? Make poison/sleeping gas a prevalent feature. (That makes two references from the SAME Realms episode what a blast)

3) The environment is your friend.  The more varied your environment is, the more complexity can come with your battle. Of course, this works both ways, as too much complexity can make the battle a cluttered mess, but something as simple as a single short wall goes a LONG way on a battlefield. And one trick I specifically remember learning from Matthew Mercer is that verticality is your friend. A bit of height, whether it be one character standing on a rock or floating in the air, can make the encounter all the more interesting. You can add any sort of environmental adjustment to make the battle more interesting, whether it be a river, a tree. I remember at one point for my irl friends I covered the ceiling with gems that, if knocked down, created a fiery explosion. Any part of the environment that can be interacted with adds to the depth of the battle, because now the players can interact with those things and find new ways to solve problems.

4) Have the environment CHANGE depending on the battle. This one doesn't have to be used as often, as it's pretty complex (especially if you're working with pencil/paper), but the fun of games come from the players' interaction with the world and its environment. And with battles, it's rare that the world just stops in its tracks (even though that’s the way it works in video games but they can’t compute every outcome). Every action, whether made by the player or by the NPC's, has repercussions either good, bad, or indifferent. Whether it's having a monster destroy a bridge, or having a player's Fire Bolt miss and burn down a small building (which the player can then push the monster into), a dynamic environment keeps the player engaged in the environment, reminds them that they can interact with the environment to their advantage (which gets them more connected to your world!), and, once again, adds depth to the encounter. This point kinda ties back into the ancient DM adage where you have to let the players do their thing. If the player decides "I'm gonna try to burn this bridge down!" then let em try it! Or if you have a plan of "oo I'm going to make the bad guy burn this bridge down" and the players do something to prevent that, you just gotta let it happen. It usually works out for the best because the players are the protagonists.

I mention "adds depth" in, like, every point. And like I said earlier on, depth isn't the metric of quality, as too much can be harmful. The point is that it's not very interesting going into a featureless room and swinging a sword at a goblin until it dies. And on the flipside if you're in a room with 5 arrows timed in different successions against three goblins, each of which contain three parts of a whole shape and if the goblins come together they unleash a powerful attack but if two of them come together they release a somewhat powerful attack, also on the floor is a 5x5 grid of panels all with the number 20 on it and every time you or a goblin steps on it, it goes down one number and when it reaches zero it creates a small creature that has the capabilities to use the last spell used in the room unless the arrow for that row of tiles has fired in the last turn, then it simply fires an arrow, and also the goblins have a goal to attack the main protagonist and use a ritual that can send some of their magical energy to the Big Bad, holy crap you’re still reading this, anyway and if the ritual begins then a shield appears around them with 30 HP and you have to destroy it in 2 turns or else the protagonist's base HP is cut in half...........

...........then you’ve made something a little bit too complex and parsing all that knowledge is going to be a mess

You want to make sure that your encounters are interesting and memorable, and simple encounters are nice for beginner characters who are just figuring things out, but adding just a hint of depth can really go a long way.

Anyway this is mostly copypasted from when I sent it to a group of friends a couple months ago, with some small changes. Hope this helps

[deck16]

Good Bad Ugly - Pillars of Eternity

I’m writing this to get some closure. This game has set up an embargo in my brain, and I need to write this to put it behind me so I can move on.

Pillars of Eternity is a spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate games of the 1990’s.

I have a love-hate relationship with the game. It seems the world at large doesn’t, with a score of 89 on Metacritic. Read on for what I think…

I didn’t get too far into the game. Made it to Defiance Bay, and did a number of quests there. Is that far enough to get a good idea of the game? I think so.

One nifty feature is the ability to add your own character art. I stole mine from Deviant Art. Before you click the link... can you guess which one is mine (as opposed to the rest, which are in-game characters)?

The Good

Spot-On Spiritual Successor. It is a good remake of the Baldur’s Gate games. It updates the look and feel but keeps the spirit alive.

Engaging Characters. I liked most of the party members. Some were endearing enough that I wanted to keep them around. Some had story things going on that I really wanted to uncover. I truly did enjoy talking to them, following their stories, and listening to their voice acting. (Except Durance. He seemed like the person from D&D who plays “Chaotic Neutral”. You can stay on the crossroads, Durance, and find yourself some other party.)

Pretty and Polished. It’s technically limited but I don’t hold that against a game born of Kickstarter. The environments are pretty and the user interface is pleasant. The combat goes above and beyond with some pretty effects.

Difficulty Options. Lots of options to fiddle with difficulty. Want to have hard combat but no restrictions on accessing your global inventory stash? You can do that.

Pew, pew! Many of the spells have pyrotechnic flair.

The Bad

Normally, with these, I use dot-points to keep myself on-track and terse. Forgive me, I’m departing from that for the first point.

Real-Time With Pause

Real-time with pause is a means of controlling your characters where everything happens simultaneously (like it does in reality) but you can pause at any time to plan and action things carefully. This is opposed to turn-based where characters take turns, either individually or as a group. Pillars only supports real-time with pause.

Which is better? It’s a matter of taste, of course, and it’s controversial.

As for me? I hate real-time with pause.

Actually, let me walk that back a little. I hate it unless the game gives you a flexible AI system for “programming” your characters. Like Dragon Age did (to my approval).

Pillars sort-of has AI options. But they’re rubbish. Choose your poison: turn it on and correct the dumb things it does, or turn it off and do every little thing yourself.

But that’s not fair, is it, saying I have to “do every little thing” myself? After all, isn’t that literally what happens in a turn-based game? So it’s not as simple as that. For some reason I get pissed off when the fighter doesn’t take two steps to the left to attack an enemy really close to him in Pillars, but I don’t get angry when I have to do much the same in Divinity: Original Sin.

I think it has something to do with irritation and interruption. I can’t concentrate on one thing in a real-time with pause game. I have to constantly be watching. Is the fighter close enough? Has the archer stopped firing because she killed her last target? Is the wizard about to be attacked in melee? If so: pause, fix, resume.

In a turn-based game my concentration is on one thing at a time. Sure, I have a grander strategy in my head. But when I’m creeping my rogue up for a sneaky flanking attack I don’t have to keep an eye on whether the fighter needs a healing potion or the chanter has charged up enough song-power to cast a decent spell. That can wait.

I found myself dreading combat in Pillars. That’s not a good sign. Contrast with the Divinity: Original Sin Games, where I loved to lose because it meant I could re-try the same combat again.

The old “bottleneck-in-the-door” trick eh? Tried and true.

And now back to bullet-points for the other Bad things:

Obscure Rules System. Obviously they couldn’t pinch D&D’s RPG system, so they cooked up their own. I only vaguely understood it. Is (for example) “Accuracy (+10) vs. Reflex” is good or mediocre? No idea. I’m picking equipment and character level-up perks based on loose guesses. Now this might be mostly because real-time with pause smears combat into an unintelligible soup. Maybe I would’ve gotten a better sense of things if I could see things happen action-by-action?

A Load of Lackluster Lore. The game’s lore is cliché, it’s boring, and it’s waved in your face. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t rise above mediocre.

The Ugly

There’s only one Ugly thing, but it’s a big one!

Bad Backer Bunkum

Pillars was a Kickstarter game, and so they added extra pledge tiers to entice bigger donations. That’s fair enough in and of itself. But they took it too far.

Pledge US$ 1,000 or more: NAME AND DESIGN AN NPC (Non-Player Character). Help us design PROJECT ETERNITY! We will send you a PROJECT ETERNITY NPC character sheet for you to fill out for our design team. We will turn your personalized character design, with your name, class, and race into an NPC in the shipped game (within reason of course)

I don’t care about the price levels. Caveat emptor. What I care about is seeing masturbatory fan-fiction spread across the game world! It was everywhere.

The gravestones and memorials, carved with idiot memes and smug in-jokes, I could at least ignore.

The backer NPCs were harder to ignore. They looked like rejects from an anime game, standing on street corners and crowding out the locals at the village tavern.

If I accidentally clicked on one – thinking it might be an actually-important NPC – I was presented with a bit of donor-supplied fan-fiction.

I know I didn’t have to read them… but how could I look away? Even after being cleaned up by Obsidian for spelling, grammar, and continuity sins they are awful, edgy, Mary Sue yarns. There’s a drinking game in these.

(Though sometimes I was surprised. I remember enjoying a wholesome one about a character buying an old tavern and getting to work on renovations while dreaming of running a new business.)

Conclusion

Right at the start I mentioned I was partially writing this so I can leave this game unfinished. It’s not an awful game. I wanted to play through it just to enrich playing its (reportedly better) sequel. But I can’t bare to baby-sit my brain-dead party through a hundred more combats. Nor would I want to turn on Story Mode and play a game like this just for its mixed-quality story.

I’ve got a few turn-based palette-cleansers in mind. Here’s hoping they’re good.

Pillars of Eternity II, patched to include turn-based mode

Pathfinder Kingmaker, with this mod which apparently works well

Battletech

As for Pillars of Eternity itself?

Rated Ordinary ★★☆☆

An otherwise-decent game ruined (in my humble opinion) by real-time with pause combat coupled with poor party-member AI. If you are tolerant of real-time with pause, you might fare a lot better.

[gamersonthego]

Matt Giguere’s Top 10 Handheld Games of 2019

Handheld gaming is in a weird spot. Beyond the plethora of mobile devices running iOS or Android and the app store fronts they offer; the handheld market has now been distilled down to one major device in 2019. Lo and behold, Nintendo, once again sits alone on the hill. While the Switch has seen great gains in maintaining a constant flow of software on its platform, the vast majority of their releases are either mobile ports or older games from generations past. It is amazing on how much has been released so far, but what makes a handheld game a “handheld game” now anyway? When your choice can be a small bite sized game like BOXBOY! + BOXGIRL! or a massive single player game like Tales of Vesperia, there really isn’t much of a difference what a handheld platform can offer compared to the home consoles for the types of games that can be played. As the Nintendo 3DS and Sony PlayStation Vita sunset into their legacy years, there seems to be a wider line on what can be considered a handheld game.

Nintendo did release a portable only version of the Switch this year, dubbed the SwitchLite. Considering that most of my playtime has been in handheld mode, I picked one up shortly after release. After a few months of playtesting, I think this will be my go-to system for the foreseeable future. I adore the form factor size. The original Switch still works great for quick pick up and play in my home, but I find the new model easier to hold in my hands and store away when I’m travelling. The dedicated directional pad, as opposed to separate buttons because of the nature of the detachable joy-cons, is a big selling point for the myriad of 2D platformers now on the system. I sometimes miss the “HD Rumble” feedback that had to be cut, but that is a small gripe. If you don’t care for playing games on the big screen in a higher resolution and varying framerate, I highly recommend picking this dedicated handheld up.

Admittedly, a lot on my best of 2019 list are games that can be enjoyed on the big screen, especially with the convenience of the Switch’s hardware. Of the games I played this year, I think this smattering represents a healthy dose of what managed to present a case that gaming on the go is still well alive and ever changing.

Top 10 of 2019 or the Hollow Knight Memorial List*

*Sometimes when making a top list our favorite thing came out in a different year or is so clearly ahead it is a lock of number 1 across every critic. This year Hollow Knight from Team Cherry captivated me like nothing else that released this year. Alas, this game came out in 2017. So instead of placing it on my official list for 2019, it takes the honor of being my list’s name. This Metroidvania style exploration platformer is full of surprises, sometimes subverting my expectations when I thought there wasn’t anything left to uncover. If you have a Switch, I highly recommend checking out one of my favorite games in the genre since Metroid: Fusion.

10. My Friend Pedro (Switch, Xbox One, PC)

An action, score-based shooter that I’ve had my eye on for years since seeing the gif put out by publisher Devolver Digital and developer Dead Toast Entertainment. The nature of this very tricky to pull off and even harder to master game lies in its focus on style. Moving across short levels on a 2-D plane, you must, roll, spin, flip, kick, skate, and, of course, kill combo as many enemies to place a high score and a top rank. While there is a story to keep the drive of the game moving forward, I wouldn’t say that should be the guiding factor to check this out. Rather, I found the quick get up and quick play of a level or two perfect for on the go gaming. Once the controls click, this game really delivers on its promised “Bananas” style.

9. Untitled Goose Game (Switch, Xbox One, PS4, PC)

“What if Hitman, but a Goose?” is probably the most quoted pitch heard for this small, but very charming game by developer House House. In it you play as, well, a goose who terrorizes a small town from every front. From untying shoes so people trip to locking helpless victims in garages, no one is safe from this feathered menace! Okay, so the Hitman comparison is apt, minus the extreme brutality, for this sandbox-lite adventure. The best I can compare it to is an interactive toy; one that is unique in how the player can approach a situation and explore the possibilities of what can and will happen within the rules of the program. It might not have the deep experimentation of a larger game of its kind, but I found its calm and lighthearted nature makes this a very stress-free experience, especially when you are the one dealing out all the harassment.

8. SteamWorld Quest (Switch, PC)

I don’t normally go for card-based RPGs, but when Image & Form provide a new adventure in the SteamWorld universe, I had to check it out. This might be the one that changed my mind, because after several turns, I was hooked. The adventure itself keeps things relatively jovial with plenty of jokes and wit to keep the story moving forward. It can be easy to stick to one group of characters, a limit of three per battle, but I find more enjoyment in the battle system when different combinations are put into play. The battle system also provides linked combos that offer bonuses and stringing cards together in a row also adds more to the strategy. Building a potent strategy is where I found the most engagement in this RPG, and all the trappings around the edges made this one stand out in my mind. A good starting point in the genre for those curious.

7. Baba Is You (Switch, PC)

A tough logic puzzler I think goes the extra mile with its charm and style. You play as Baba. Or, rather, Baba is you, or a wall, or section of water, or a skull, or... well you get the point. The goal in each stage is to reach the “Win.” What is the “Win?” Most of the time it is a flag, but really it can be anything. Using a simple push function mechanic that many top-down puzzlers have used before, the twist comes in that you can have these sentence blocks to push around and affect the game’s logic. For example, if the winning object is out of reach by a wall that forces you stop (“Wall is Stop”) you can push one of the sentence blocks away so you can pass through the wall. Even making a sentence to “You is Win” will also result in a victory. The difficulty can be a bit stiff, but I would often find myself just thinking about a stuck puzzle while out and about and think of the solution as a sort of epiphany. Even when getting stuck on a tricky brain teaser, the game offers multiple paths so you can keep progressing through. Certainly, Baba Is You has been on my mind since first playing it.

6. What The Golf? (Apple Arcade, PC, Switch TBD)

If Desert Golf is the pinnacle zen of the golf sport genre, What The Golf? embodies its “party mindset.” Yes, it is golf, and yet, it becomes something more than just golf. Sometimes you will find yourself having to hop across a very familiar level. Other times you will have to coordinate trick shots while being an exploding barrel. And sometimes, there’s just good old-fashioned bowling. What The Golf? will keep you on your toes, especially if you are fond of video games released prior to this. I won’t spoil some of the surprises in store, but some of them had me in stitches from laughing so hard. It would be nice to fully outright buy this game on the iOS App Store, but for now, a subscription to Apple Arcade is the only way to play this on the go.

5. Sayonara Wild Hearts (Switch, Apple Arcade, PS4, PC)

Another Apple Arcade exclusive for mobile (you can also buy it on the Switch at this time), this one showcasing music and style. If there is one thing that counts in making an impression on me, it’s presentation. Sayonara Wild Hearts is described as a pop album video game; one you experience as much as you listen to. The format seems simple at first. Guide your character along the track and collect different items for points to rank a high score while also dodging obstacles. Soon though, things start to mix up as fast as the soundtrack’s BPMs start to pump up. While the touch controls are adequate, I think for certain spots, a physical controller would have been nice. However, there are movements that are far easier to pull off using a touch interface, such as time hits reminiscent of music games like Elite Beat Agents. This gem of a game needs to be experienced at least once, not only for the wonderful soundtrack, composed by Daniel Olsen and Jonathan Eng and featuring Linnea Olsson on vocals, but also to see the twists and turns the game takes. This little game surprised the hell out of me, and I think it will be one that I will revisit again based on its production.

4. Ape Out (Switch, PC)

Sometimes we all need to get out. Especially when you are an ape stuck in a cage. That’s the conceit of the top-down, twin stick, hyper violent, and super stylized game, Ape Out. There is one goal: Be the ape and get the hell out! The concept is very rudimentary which I feel allows the game to shine. You will have to run, dodge, grab and toss enemies to reach the exit while the only advantage is being able to take three hits before going down. Enemies have guns that the player can’t use in the typical way. Instead, grabbing a foe allows one immediate shot to be fired from the grappled target. Used strategically, it can get you out of a lot of close calls. Other enemies can have bombs or body armor to keep this from being too repetitive and thanks to the game’s art style, they all look distinct so there’s no confusion on who you are fighting. Levels are procedurally generated as well, so even thinking on memorizing enemy patterns doesn’t always work. The fluorescent color palette and very minimalist style, like that of a Saul Bass movie poster, highlights the chaos and violence without making it too gross or unappealing. Even the soundtrack is minimalistic, utilizing only jazz percussion that plays out dynamically as the action plays out in real time. A feast for the eyes and a challenge on the thumbs.

3. Katana Zero (Switch, PC)

Taking a page from one hit kill action games like Hotline Miami, Katana Zero plays out at first like a typical note from the genre, right down to its ‘80s aesthetic. You clear room after room of enemies, slashing with your katana, wall jumping to high points, and focusing time to slow down and either dodge or reflect projectiles. A lot of this game is a throwback thanks to its choice of graphics, 2D platforming and story points from movies like Drive and Leon: The Professional. It is thanks to the presentation that makes this game shine for me. The story, music, graphics and gameplay presentation are what makes Katana Zero so high on my list. Clearing rooms is fast paced and quick, with messing up only taking several seconds to get back into the fray. While the loop of the game can get a bit repetitive, there are plenty of surprises that change up the standard formula of the game as you progress. The story does a nice job of not only driving things forward, but also tying in gameplay concepts into the narrative. The music is a healthy blend of synthwave and some very heavy and experimental electronic tunes (one that I’ve had on repeat most of the year). The overall games is fairly short and ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but there are speedrunning modes and secrets to uncover from replaying. Katana Zero stands as one of the best independent games this year.

2. Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)

There was a time when Fire Emblem was on the ropes, becoming a lagging franchise that was not connecting with strategy enthusiasts on the home consoles. Then in 2013, things changed with the release of Fire Emblem: Awakening on the 3DS. Nintendo and Intelligent Systems had intended that game to be the last in the series. Instead, we got another 3 (and 1/2) games released on the 3DS this past decade. Now it’s time to pass the torch onto the Switch and boy did they deliver on a packed adventure! Instead of just following one or two paths like most FE campaigns, Three Houses offer up to four different story playthroughs that each roughly takes about 50 hours or more to complete. There is also a vast amount of customization thanks to the setting being centered around a military school and teaching classes. If you love watching meters and bars fill up, there are tons of those to be had in Three Houses. Even though not every aspect is well thought out (the amiibo gazebo comes to mind, even though it is the best named mechanic), the cast of characters and support conversations (all fully voice acted) provide some rich storytelling from a character development standpoint. Do check out this game as it is one of the best in the series.

1. Tetris 99 (Switch)

“Where are we dropping, Blocks?” In a personal first for me, a multiplayer game has taken my number one spot. Tetris 99 is just that. Tetris. However, it’s you versus 98 other players in a battle royal style completion. Released as a free download to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, it now has multiple versions that can be bought as well. Thanks to constant updates and weekend tournaments, the online community is still strong, so finding matches is quick and painless. Playing against such a wide number of challengers turns the typical Tetris strategy on its head. Racking up combos instead of quickly clearing lines, for example, is one way to secure victory, but leaving too many gaps and holes can prove disastrous if you suddenly become the target of a handful of players. Even though I have yet to secure a 1st place finish, the nature of Tetris keeps me coming back for more. Whether it’s facing against bots, friends, marathoning solo or playing the featured battle royal, this is a fun version of Tetris to be had.

[tabletopinfinities]

Mage: the Ascension

Reality is a lie. The truth is magic. Open your eyes and Awaken.

What’s the premise?

It’s our modern world, but magic is real. Technology is just a different form of magic. Other forms of magic were driven underground and are harder to conjure up, because consensus belief shapes reality, and people these days find it easier to believe in, say, cars and guns than they do fireballs or flying carpets. Oh, and also there’s a war on for control over reality itself.

You see, a long time ago (circa the 13th century to be precise), a group of mages got tired of wizards being able to throw fireballs willy-nilly, summon up demons, and generally make life a pain for everyone. They wanted to bring order to the world and tame and control magic for the good of all. Of course, they would be the ones in charge of this new world order. These guys would become the Technocracy, the all-seeing, all-powerful architects of consensus reality. Using advanced hypertechnology beyond mundane comprehension, they’re trying to wipe out magic for good and make the world safe for Sleepers - the mundane masses that have no idea that magic even exists.

Fighting on the side of magical freedom is the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions. Formed in response to the Technocracy, each Tradition represents a particular form of magical practice. In brief, they are: wizards, druids, priests, shamans, martial artists, hippies, assassins, mad scientists, and hackers. They don’t always get along with each other, but they band together to fight the Technocracy and try and bring “real” magic back into the world. So far, they’re still losing, but the fight is far from over.

In between these guys are a wide range of other independent magical societies and solo mages, everything from goths (well, it is a White Wolf game) to ancient African sorcerer-kings. There’s also the Nephandi, who are evil mages who serve demons and other beings beyond our world. They just want to drag the world down into Hell (and they might be the ones truly winning, in the end). There’s the Marauders, who are mages who’ve lost their grip on reality so bad that they actually warp reality around themselves. And there are whole other realms of supernatural weirdness to explore, including crossing over with the other World of Darkness games (Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Wraith: the Oblivion, etc).

You’d like it if you’re into: Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Magicians, The Invisibles, Mr. Robot

Why do you recommend it?

Lots of games have you playing as magic-users and casting spells. This one lets you do it however you want to. The magic system is almost totally freeform, meaning that rather than being locked to a list of spells you figure out what you want your spell to do and how you want that effect to appear. This means you can make whatever kind of character you want, from the classic wizard archetype to cyberpunk technomancers to priestesses of forgotten goddesses whose sacred gun shoots bullets that sprout into roses. The only limit is your imagination (and your dice rolls).

The setting reflects that limitlessness. It’s a clash between high tech and high magic that can fit all your wild ideas inside it. If you want to have a journey through the realms of faerie one session and then invade an orbital cyborg factory the next, you can do that all with the same characters. I love settings that let you pit genres against each other like that, and Mage is among the most flexible of them.

Finally - Mage is a game about personal discovery that encourages you to make your own personal discoveries. It asks you to explore what it really means to control reality - and maybe see if you can apply that to your own reality. Especially with the 20th Anniversary Edition, which is one of the most welcoming, hopeful RPG sourcebooks I’ve ever read.

What are the rules like?

The Storyteller System that powers the World of Darkness games is pretty straightforward - roll a bunch of d10s, see how many dice beat the difficulty number, subtract the number of 1s you rolled from that, and the result is the number of successes you got, which tells you how well you did at what you were trying to do. Roll too many 1s and you get a critical failure. It lets you describe a more evocative set of outcomes than systems like D&D where you simply succeed or fail.

Combat is fairly realistic, with guns and all being about as lethal as you’d expect - although of course there are various magical weapons and defenses to complicate things.

The bulk of the system rules is devoted, of course, to magic. Here’s where the game both shines and gets bogged down. You get to come up with spells for your character with effects based on how skilled they are in the various spheres of magic, with flavor filtered through their particular magical style. It’s a twist that really lets you feel like you’re working with reality-changing magic. Want to cast a basic fireball? Sure. Want to represent that as an Atlantean plasma gun or God smiting your enemies with a pillar of flame? Go for it. Want to use magic to grow a snail to giant size and then send it an hour into the past to destroy your enemies before they caught up with you? That is definitely something you can try and do in this game, although that one might require a lot of successes.

The catch is that if you don’t do what consensus reality expects, e.g., growing a snail to giant size in front of a street full of onlookers, the universe is likely to smack you down with the force of Paradox. That’s what keeps reality cohesive and stops mages from battling it out in the streets. Push the universe too far and it starts pushing back, in the form of bad luck, spontaneous human combustion, or, in extreme cases, popping you out of reality altogether for a little bit (or maybe forever). Paradox might even manifest as a physical spirit to haunt you. This applies to Technocrats as much as it does to Tradition mages, because the masses aren’t ready to accept giant robots or cyber-tooth tigers just yet. In fact, there might be pockets of reality where magic works and technology doesn’t… go to an Amish community and heal them with laying on hands versus a fancy tricorder and see which one attracts more Paradox.

The tradeoff for such flexibility is that it becomes a bit time-consuming to figure out what your character’s capable of, how well they’ll have to roll to pull it off, and what it looks like within the rules. Most complicated spells require proficiency in a few different spheres, e.g., Correspondence to do stuff at long range, Prime to create something out of nothing, or Time to bind a spell to a certain duration. Once you’ve got a firmer grasp on the systems and a few standardized “rote” spells in your pocket you start to get the hang of it though.

What’s my character like?

Starting as a neophyte mage, you’ll be capable of basic spells in a couple of Spheres, but you won’t be able to change reality in major ways. You get to choose whether you’re better at Physical, Social, or Mental attributes, and put points into different skills. You’ll get some Backgrounds, which represent the resources your character has - allies, a familiar, access to arcane libraries, magic artifacts, etc. You’ll also decide what your character’s exterior Demeanor and inner Nature are, as well as the Essence of their enlightened soul. These are, sort of, your character’s alignment, and roleplaying in accordance with them will let you regain Willpower, which you can use to reroll dice (among other things). Finally, you’ll decide what the trappings of your character’s magic are and what instruments and rituals they use as foci for their different Spheres.

Those spheres of magic, in case you were wondering, are Mind, Prime (manipulating Quintessence, the raw force of magic), Time, Spirit, Entropy (which covers both death and probability), Forces (fire, wind, energy, etc.), Matter, Life, and Correspondence (travel, distance, and connection).

Most characters also belong to some particular faction, which shapes what Spheres they’re skilled in. Each of the Traditions corresponds to one of the nine Spheres, but most factions get a choice between two or three appropriate Spheres to receive a bonus. I’m listing the factions out in the 20th Anniversary Edition; there are a few other factions from older editions lurking in the corners of the world, but these are the big players.

Traditions:

Akashic Brotherhood (Mind): Asian martial artists and spiritualists devoted to mastery of the self and harmony with the universe. They practice Do, which is the primal martial art from which all others descend.

Celestial Chorus (Prime): Monotheists who believe that all should be harmonized under the pure unity of the One and its beautiful Song.

Cult of Ecstasy (Time): Hedonistic hippies who embrace altered consciousness through drugs, sex, meditation, music, pain, dance, and all that other good stuff.

Dreamspeakers (Spirit): African and Native American spirit-talkers and medicine men who, honestly, sort of got folded together by the rest of the Traditions so they could put all the brown-skinned mages in one place. They’re dedicated to restoring the health of the spirit world and thus also our own.

Euthanatos (Entropy): Ancient Greek and Indian (and elsewhere) cultists devoted to maintaining the great wheel of reincarnation by ensuring that everything dies at its proper time. Essentially, they’re death-worshipping assassins with a strict moral code.

Order of Hermes (Forces): These are they guys who probably come to mind when you think of a mage, all complicated spell components and dusty books and Enochian incantations. Haughty and pedantic, and sort of the de facto leadership of the Traditions. They’re the ones who founded the whole thing, after all.

Sons of Ether (Matter): Mad scientists, steampunks, and pulp explorers, each with their own crackpot theories that they vigorously defend. Formerly a part of the Technocracy, they got kicked out for clinging to outmoded forms of science. But they’ll show them all.

Verbena (Life): Pagan, druid, and witch types who believe in the power of nature and the old ways. They think technology has made the modern world too soft and that struggle and sacrifice are part of the natural order - sometimes very literal sacrifice.

Virtual Adepts (Correspondence): The newest members of the Traditions, this bunch of hackers left the Technocracy to go their own way - spurred on by one of their founders, Alan Turing, martyring himself to create the Internet (really!). Anarchists and tricksters who can hack reality as well as they can hack computers, the Adepts spend a lot of time hanging out in the Digital Web, the magical version of cyberspace.

Technocracy:

Iteration X: The engineers and efficiency experts of the Technocracy, Iteration X believes in a grand vision of mechanized perfection. They specialize in robotics, weapons, and cybernetics. Ultimately, they want to merge man with machine - even if that doesn’t align with the goals of the rest of the Technocracy.

New World Order: The NWO are the ones running the Technocracy - and thus the world. Illuminati and panopticon rolled into one, their legions of men in black specialize in surveillance, media manipulation, and “social conditioning,” all of which they use to advance their vision of a controlled and productive reality.

Progenitors: The biologists. Cloning, genetic engineering, and controlled evolution are all at their command. They research new medicine and biotechnology for the benefit of all mankind, though sometimes their methodology is a little extreme.

Syndicate: The money men. Actually, they literally invented money. A healthy mix of thugs and Gordon Gekko types, the Syndicate controls the world’s corporations (and quite a few extralegal organizations) to fund the rest of the Technocracy and get rich in the process. Their “magic” focuses on self-discipline, psychology, and manipulating the raw Primal Utility of the universe like an Econ textbook come to life.

Void Engineers: Exploring the worlds beyond ours - and defending humanity from the threats that live there. The Void Engineers are the most out-there (literally) Convention of the Technocracy, the most unorthodox and also the most willing to work with mages and other “reality deviants” as necessary. They specialize in Spirit magic - although to them, it’s “Dimensional Science.” Their spaceships scout the outer reaches of the universe and beyond, carrying contingents of power-armored marines ready to blast anything dangerous.

The Disparate Alliance:

Once scattered, separate magical traditions and organizations, in recent times these “disparates” have banded together to maintain power separate from the Traditions or the Technocracy.

Ahl-i-Batin: Once a part of the Traditions, sitting where the Virtual Adepts do now on the seat of Correspondence, the “subtle ones” believe in a grand unity of all things, influenced by Islamic mysticism. These days they work in secret, observing and acting only when necessary. They hold a particular hatred of the Nephandi and will always act to stop them.

Bata’a: Vodouists and other African-diaspora Loa worshippers who derive their magic from respectful agreement with the spirits. Largely an informal group, they have a wide membership across the world.

Children of Knowledge: The descendants of the Solificati, an ancient group of alchemists that was once a Tradition, the Children of Knowledge use their alchemical knowledge to purify base souls into golden souls. Sometimes that process involves designer psychotropic drugs - the Children actually invented LSD.

Hollow Ones: A ragtag group of goths, punks, and other weirdos and misfits who seek to bring capital-R Romance back to the world, a la the era of Shelley and Byron. They spend a lot of time looking fashionable in the club scene, but also sheltering other mages who don’t have a place to belong. Their magic tends to be a patchwork of various styles and tools.

Kopa Loei: The descendants of Hawaiian and other Polynesian wizard-priests, dedicated to preserving their arts and native lands against the predations of ha’ole influence.

Ngoma: Powerful wizards of ancient Africa who took offense to being lumped in en masse with the Dreamspeakers at the first meeting of the Traditions, and went their own way. Decimated by imperialism and slavery that nearly destroyed their ancient ways, the surviving Ngoma seek out positions of power and respect in mortal society while also establishing schools to revive their art.

Orphans: A catch-all term for any mage that doesn’t belong to a particular faction, this can include deeply idiosyncratic self-taught mages, small groups who follow a particular paradigm together, or even defectors from one of the major factions. Quite often, they might not even be aware of larger magical society.

Sisters of Hippolyta: Tracing their descent from the ancient Amazons, the Hippolytoi largely live in separate enclaves from the rest of society. They dedicate themselves to worshipping the Divine Feminine, striving towards world peace, and liberating oppressed peoples of all types. Their magic focuses around pagan medicine-work.

Taftani: Middle Eastern mages who are masters of creating magical artifacts, as well as binding djinni to their will. They believe in a dualistic universe of Truth and Lies, and that working vulgar magic and exposing people to the Truth that magic is real is a moral good.

Templar Knights: Yes, those Templars, now existing as a secretive paramilitary order. Formerly (and largely still) male-only, the Templars fight evil and await the return of Christ, when they will become His army.

Wu Lung: Ancient Chinese sorcerers (and longstanding enemies of the Akashic Brotherhood) who wielded great wealth and power before the Cultural Revolution drove them out of China. Having adapted to the modern world, they seek to regain their power and lead a rebirth of traditional Chinese magic and culture.

What’s the campaign like?

Most games focus on mages of different Traditions coming together as a cabal (or Technocratic Conventions as an Amalgam), but where it goes from there is up to you. Really, it could be like anything you can imagine. You could be trying to use your magic to change the world for the better while avoiding the attention of the Technocracy, playing as the Technocracy trying to stop mages who are using their powers carelessly, dealing with magical politics, or even ignoring all of that and going on mystical quests in otherworldly realms (or, for technomancers, exploring strange dimensions in your spaceship).

Cabals can pool their resources into making a magical Sanctum that serves as a base of power, a place to safely work magic, and a source of Quintessence for magical fuel. You can upgrade it in numerous ways, from defenses to libraries, and maintaining a sanctum and its role in the local magical community can be a storyline in its own right.

As your characters increase their magical skills, they’ll be guided along spiritual journeys by their Avatar - the Awakened essence of their soul that allows them to perform magic. One by one, they cast aside their tools and embrace the truth that it is they themselves that are the source of magic. Eventually, they might even achieve Ascension - whatever that is.

The classic Mage campaign strikes a balance between the magical and the mundane, high fantasy and sci-fi action contrasted against personal dramas and worldly problems. The central themes of the game are power, morality, and belief. As a mage, you can change reality to suit your will. What do you do with that power? What if reality doesn’t want to be changed? Is it right to force your viewpoint on others? Despite all your power, you’re still just one person, and the universe is stacked against you. What do you do?

What books should I get?

The 20th Anniversary Edition, or M20, is the edition I’d recommend, published in recent years as the result of a Kickstarter (which, full disclosure, I backed, although it’s not as though I get anything out of promoting it). It advances the timeline past the apocalyptic Revised setting into something brighter and more hopeful - while also providing tools and advice to play with other eras or flavors of Mage if you want. Getting physical copies of it can be a little pricey though, so if you want something physical on a budget you might look at getting used copies of the other editions - they float around pretty frequently for about $10-$40. PDFs and print-on-demand copies of most books are available on Drivethrurpg as well. Each of the older editions are fine in their own right (although be advised that the further back you go, the less balanced the magic system is). 1st Edition is very clear-cut good Traditions versus evil Technocracy. 2nd Edition muddies that morality and fleshes out the Technocracy and other factions. Revised Edition does away with a lot of the weirder elements of prior editions and presents a grimmer vision of the world where the Technocracy has more or less won, Paradox is a much harsher force, the other worlds are mostly cut off and very difficult to travel to, and the world in general is plunging towards apocalypse (and the end of the original game line). There’s also Mage: the Sorcerer’s Crusade, which presents the world in a medieval/Renaissance setting at the beginning of the Ascension War, and Dark Ages: Mage, which takes the setting into medieval times.

M20 has a separate book going into further detail on the magic system. It’s called, appropriately enough, How Do You DO That? and I’d recommend it if you’re looking to get into M20, as it provides rules guidelines for a wide range of common spell effects that goes more in-depth than the core rules. There are two other M20 books published to date. The Book of Secrets contains more character options, expanded rules (including creating magical items), a closer look at magical paradigms, and other assorted information. Gods and Monsters has an assortment of NPCs, spirits, and, well, monsters.

The Tradition/Convention books detail each of the respective factions and were reprinted for multiple eras (note that all the Revised Convention Books except for Iteration X were PDF-only though). For Revised, there were also the Guides to the Traditions/Technocracy. If you’re thinking about focusing your campaign around a particular faction or playing a character of that faction, I’d recommend picking one of those books up for more detail and inspiration. The various Disparate Crafts never got their own dedicated books for the most part, but some of them are detailed in various sourcebooks across editions, such as the Book of Crafts.

The Book of Worlds and Horizon present the different Umbral realms and otherworldly magical/technological sanctuaries you can travel to. Much of these setting details have been superseded (or in the case of Horizon, destroyed entirely), but if you want your campaign to lean on the weirder high fantasy end it’ll give you a lot to play with.

Ascension was the book that ended the old product line, presenting several different world-ending scenarios - one of which is pretty much the canon ending to the Mage story (at least until M20 came along) and the others being alternate ways to cap out a chronicle, like the Nephandi winning, aliens showing up to drain magic from the world, or just a giant asteroid hitting Earth. While you probably don’t want to start your campaign out that way, it’s an interesting read that gives ideas for an epic campaign ending.

Note that Mage: the Awakening, while very similar, is a completely separate game that’s part of the new World of Darkness (now also known as the Chronicles of Darkness) that rebooted the product line with a different setting.

What equipment do I need?

As with all Storyteller games, Mage uses d10s exclusively. About 6 per character is the most you’ll need on average to start out with. Having extra space beyond the character sheet to write down spells is a good idea.

[antheiaaesthetic]

Today is my birthday, for all that's worth at 41. I figure I should share what's going on behind the scenes, if nothing else that's what social media is for, right? I honestly am not sure anymore. 

The process of withdrawing from (prescribed medication) has been occupying altogether too much of my attention, especially in combination with the existing conditions they were meant to symptomatically treat. I see how high that hill is going to be, and I've been through some of this before -- it helped precipitate a lot of social isolation in Boston. Which, as it turned out was good for me in terms of having a space to actually start dealing with my shit. Other people's problems can keep you occupied for a lifetime. Anyhow, I know I'm up for it, in the end, but I'm not at all happy about how it's yet again fucking with those necessary parts of establishing/maintaining some semblance of a career, or social life for that matter. I don't really want to go back in the hole -- at least not entirely. (Some amount of isolation is requisite for being a writer / artist, I think... or it is for me, for certain). 

My middle ground right now seems to be D&D 5e, of all things. And of course thinking through the FallenCycle.com RPG... which I'll get to in a moment. On the one hand, it's purely a recreational distraction from feeling nauseous and tired 24 hours a day. On the other, it's a place for me to workshop skills that I've let go. Even when I don't have the energy to roleplay as much or as well as I'd like, between sessions it's started to unlock... what I can only describe as "creative energy" in areas that have started feeling quite stiff and well... Adult. 

I know that's hardly a huge reveal in terms of originality, but when I consider how this connects long term with the Fallen Cycle (as I explained earlier, it began through the integration of RP and "real life" in various ways), I can tell this is the direction I should be going. It also at the same time feels fucking absurd, and I'm very much enjoying the irony of "Will the Wise" & etc re: Stranger Things, now that his entire motivation the first half of season 3 seems to be "no one will play D&D with me". I feel both sides of that joke pretty strongly right now. 

It's also part of why I'm likely to be mostly talking about roleplaying. Me culpa. Obsession is part of an artist's MO anyhow, of course. I'm not sure yet who the first roster of players is going to be for the first Fallen Cycle game -- whoever in the Philly area is willing to help me start playtesting an RPG I suppose. The overall strategy with www.fallencycle.com is that we're continuing to produce novels, fiction podcasts, comics etc etc in the world as we develop a system that intends to sort of reverse engineer how those books were written -- it allows a direct point of entry into the "world", to the extent that any group represents a unique instance of the same process. 

Part of what I'm thinking about is how hard I want to invest in the OGL strategy. From a trad business perspective you're pretty well fucking yourself if you allow people to produce media within your world, but all the years I've spent at Cons on both sides of the booth has shown me that the real difficulty is in establishing the mindshare of established characters. Mythology has a benefit in that there's no trademark infringement involved in "Dionysus" etc. However, the challenge of making it relevant to "modern times" is another part of the puzzle I've wrestled with for years in various ways. 

My theory now is... well, the reason that we're doubling down on our own specific aesthetic take on #mythpunk I know they say to not show how the sausage is made, but ... oh well. I've invested half my life in developing this project, at this point, I may as well see it through. Hopefully see you there.

[multiplayingorg]

Dungeon Crawler Review

| Repost: Originally posted by Todd "Winin" Edwards on August 4, 2011

I started playing adventure games when I was 8 or 9 with Basic D&D; (yeah, I'm old). I've read many fantasy books over the years, and exploring the secrets of a dungeon is what I think of when I think of fantasy. You know, Conan escaping the hounds and getting his sword from the skeletal fingers of an ancient king. Tanis Half-Elf escaping the draconians and, um, getting his sword from the skeletal fingers of an ancient king. Well, there are lots of other examples too.

When computers arrived, I played many dungeon crawl games. Rogue, Tunnels of Doom, Wizardry, Diablo (much later), and it all culminated with Everquest. I loved grouping with my friends and crawling through all the unique dungeons in Norrath. Sadly, future MMOs haven’t had the sheer square footage of EQ dungeons.

Over the years, my gaming time has dwindled, and I’ve run out of friends interested in pen and paper RPGS, so I’ve been searching for a solo game to fill that void. I’ve tried to recreate the dungeon exploration experience with other games; notably Magic the Gathering for raw battle and 2 Hour Wargames (tabletop miniature rulesets that can be played solo) for the tactical battles. I’ve thought of trying dungeon games like Descent, but they are a tad intimidating and not likely to be played by my gaming friends (i.e. a waste of money). Heroscape (D&D edition) is another great dungeon crawl game, but it takes up a lot of room and isn’t designed to be played solo. Also, games that use miniatures take up too much room to be portable (can’t take them on vacations or work trips).

I’m grooming my kids to play Heroscape with me, but that will take a few years. I needed something to hold me until then. Enter Dungeon Crawler.

Dungeon Crawler is a card-based dungeon crawl game from indie game publisher Gifted Vision (and you know I love indies). I heard about in from a Fathergeek review (http://fathergeek.com/reviews/dungeon-crawler/) which featured the fact that it is a good game to play both solo and with kids (extra bonus). Fathergeek and the Dungeon Crawler site cover the rule details pretty well, so I’ll speak from a bigger picture standpoint. If I pique your interest, you can check those links for more. I’ve only played in solo mode, but there are co-op and competitive modes as well. I have the base game and two “delve” packs, which have more of all types of cards. There are 3 more delve packs that I haven’t gotten, yet. Adding packs lets you fine tune the game even more to fit your play style, or to give broader variety.

Dungeon Crawler is a lot like Magic the Gathering meets Diablo. All the action is done with cards and counters (Magic style), but the game is a crawl through a randomized dungeon complete with a “boss” monster. Since you build the dungeon deck, you know what to expect (like each time you go into a Diablo dungeon), but you don’t know when the different creatures (which range from yard trash to the nasty boss), events, traps, or terrain will come up. And you don’t know what combinations of cards you’ll encounter. That keeps it fresh. In addition to the dungeon deck, you also have a crawler deck with all your spells, equipment, tactics and skills. Kind of like Diablo where you know there are scrolls you can learn and gear you can find, but you don’t know if you’ll have a particular bit of loot when you run into the level boss. Those two decks give all the randomness I need to keep me playing.

But wait, there’s more. You also get to choose your party of four adventurers. Depending on who you choose, you’re adventure will play out differently. Oh, and you get to pick different quests. Quests are task that you have to accomplish. You pick three, and have to complete one, two, or three (depending on difficulty) to win the game.

During the game, you have to manage your hand (drawn from the crawler deck) and decide whether to use or save your tricks. Your party members will take wounds and possibly die, which can change your ability to play your crawler cards. So during each encounter (which is kind of like a room in the dungeon), you have to decide to use resources to get by unscathed, or save the powerful tricks for later and suck up a wound or two. Check out the flash demos here to get a better idea of what’s going on during a game.

I do have some criticism. The rules are not simple and easy, and the rule book can be daunting. There can be a lot of information to digest in each encounter. My first playthrough was pretty rough, and I couldn’t figure out what a few of the rules meant. I just picked an interpretation and went with it. Fortunately, the rules seem robust enough to handle my flawed interpretation and still provide a fun game. My second game went much smoother. After playing twice to get a feel for the game, I reread the rules and FAQs. The third game was as smooth as silk. I recommend playing and not stressing about getting the rules just right on your first few go throughs. The rulebook makes a lot more sense after you’ve played a few games. The website also has a lot of good explanations, FAQ, etc. And the devs are extremely good about answering questions on twitter. Follow @dungeoncrawler and @Greenknee to see what I mean.

On the plus side, the wide variety of rules and special abilities leads to some interesting encounters that would have been bland if the rules were much simpler. I like variety and unpredictability, so I didn’t mind the learning curve.

One minor quibble is that the adventurers are given generic names (gypsy rogue, dwarf fighter-ish sorts of titles). I would have preferred real names, in order to feel more attached to the characters. A minor thing, but it is made more noticeable because the dungeon boss has a name and a lot of personality. Too bad the heroes don’t. I’ll have to make up my own and write on the cards.

I expect to play solo for the most part, but I’d like the game to have some fun pvp (like Magic the Gathering) for times when I can talk my friends into playing. Unfortunately, the pvp mode boils down to double solo mode. I play against the dungeon you made, and you play against the dungeon I made. There are some cards that you can play against the other person, but it isn’t head to head fighting.If you want to play head to head pvp, you might be disappointed. Although… I’ve got some ideas for how to do it. One player would be the Dungeon Master. Hmmm…

Along that same line, Dungeon Crawler looks fairly easy to modify. There is one boss mob included in the current game. Since I make games as a hobby, I like games that are amenable to tinkering. I’m planning to make my own bosses in order to change the flavor of the dungeon. I can also see making some new adventurers and quests without breaking the game. But if my ambitions outpace my free time, I needn’t worry; Gifted Vision has an expansion coming soon that will have a new boss and some new flavor.

The bottom line is that Dungeon Crawler is a fun, portable, solo dungeon crawling game. Each game only takes about an hour, so it is perfect for playing after the kiddos go to bed, in the hotel when I’m on work travel, etc. If you are interested in that sort of thing, then you’ll like this game. The biggest problem is that I got busy and forgot to order the rest of the delve packs when they had their free shipping sale.

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Todd "Winin" Edwards: When he's not playing games, Todd also writes and illustrates geeky stories for kids. For more info or to buy a book, visit: www.nerniandfriends.com

[ryuspike]

An Upsetting DnD Story

Alright.  So I am DMing for a group of me and my friends.  4 players in a setting of my own creation.  The player characters are a Forest Gnome Druid, a Mountain Dwarf Fighter, an Aasimar Paladin, and a Tiefling Monk.  They are all level 4 and about ready to enter their first real big dungeon where a red dragon is said to be sealed inside.  They went to a city to acquire the password in order to enter said dungeon.  Simple enough.

This is were things get complicated.

I am a fan of Adventure Zone and wanted to implement a magic item roulette at certain points in the campaign.  It gives out rewards of varied quality with the best stuff being the rarest.  Each list of items is unique for each player and I even threw in homebrewed items from D&D Beyond for added flavor.  I figured that this would be a fun way to make our adventures more exciting.

As expected, everybody gotten useful, yet practical items that is appropriate for their character’s skill level.  The party’s paladin, gotten Holy Avenger on her first try.  DM mistake #1: The sword was a longsword and the Paladin has the Duelist Fighting Style.  This made her attack bonus INSANE and her damage output way too high for creatures of CR 1 or lower to last very long.

At first, it wasn’t so bad.  It allowed me to use some stronger monsters which gave out more experience points so the party could reach level 3 a lot faster.  They can fight stronger monsters and still feel like they are being challenged.  Then the second random item giveaway came along.  Everybody else gotten some very interesting items that will make battles more interesting.  The Paladin gets Adamantine Armor.  DM mistake #2: The armor was Plate Mail instead of something like Half-Plate or Chainmail.  This Paladin has an AC 18 with a bonus +2 from her shield, and is not invulnerable to critical hits.

So in no time at all, I had created an unkillable murder machine out of this paladin.  She has become so OP that she was able to easily defeat almost everything in her path with very little damage.  It gotten to the point that the other players felt bad for the other side and have been constantly trying to detour from fighting to protect the them from dying.  Seeing the mistakes I had made, I knew what I must do.

Now nerfing my player outright would be pretty bad since I was the one who gave who these awesome items.  So I devised a plan.  First, before going into that dungeon I mentioned earlier, I will remove the NPC I had traveling with my party.  Reducing their group’s size will help increase the difficulty.  Step two, I will create a character that will serve as a trap for my paladin.  She is very devoted to her god.  Sometimes to the point that she can be a bit too trigger happy with her sword.  Since she serves under the Oath of Devotion, two of her tenants is Honor and Compassion.  If she were to attack this character for some petty reason then she will lose her Paladin powers until she can find a church to pray at.

Step three is combining steps one and two.  This character is an NPC from the Feywild who was entrusted with the password a long time ago.  She, however, refuses to give up the password unless she was given something in return.  In this case, it was the party Tabaxi Bard.  This is the ultimate goal.  As a way to protect this NPC from being killed off by my players, I made her to be a VERY powerful fey creature.  I had her speak in a very coy manner and made it pretty clear that she is the type of being that does what she pleases.  But most importantly, I had her have the power to basically instant kill any one of my players if they fail a Dex save.  I, however, gave her the power to resurrect the killed player.  But for a price.

The plan was simple.  Have this fey being make cutting remarks about the paladin and her god.  This was to be a test of her character.  If she fails it, she will lose her paladin powers.  NPC presents offer for password with Tabaxi Bard as payment.  If this fey woman was attacked, she will use her inhuman speed to make an extremely swift and deadly attack.  If player fails the DEX save, they die.  Succeed, and they are only wounded with a weapon poised in a life threatening position.  Fey being will renegotiate deal at this point.  In exchange for this player’s life (whether at swordpoint or by resurrection) and the password, they will give her the Tabaxi Bard and something of extreme value (either Holy Avenger or Adamantine Plate Armor).

This was a well constructed trap that works with the narrative on a level of fairness based on my players’ decisions.  And this is how I committed DM mistake #3: Creating an ultimatum meant for one player that another player can trigger.  And boy, this game is going to haunt me...

It was finally that golden moment.  I had everything set up just right.  My NPC played her role well.  The Aasimar Paladin resisted the temptation of attacking her, which meant that she passed her test of character.  When presented the offer, the party refuses and began to leave.  I asked, through my NPC, where did they think they are going.  Our Druid says that she is going to go gather an army of gnomes (a group that is affected negatively by the dragon sealed near their home about to burst free) and return to force the password from her.

Firstly, I was thinking “What the heck!  When did the team’s healer get so dark?” then I was thinking that I really don’t want to go through another session of these guys gathering an army just to get a password that they can easily get tonight.  So I executed phase two of my master plan.  I had the Druid roll for dexterity and she failed.  Instant death.  I, however, reassured the player that it wasn’t over for her yet.  I presented my ultimatum.  All was going as planned.  Then the unexpected happened.

The Aasimar Paladin offered to take the Tabaxi NPC’s place.  This left me, and everybody else at the table, flabbergasted.  I tried my very damnest to try and sway her from her decision.  Her player was DETERMINED to take her place.  So, I had her roll for persuasion.  She won.  At this point, I was impressed.  She was making by far the most noblest sacrifice that I had ever witnessed in a game of D&D in my life.  By this point, I was willing to let her do it.  This trap was made to nerf her character after all.

This is where mistake #3 comes in.  While all this was happening, our Gnome Druid was taking this pretty hard.  She felt responsible our friend losing her character because of a mistake she made.  And when she said those words...  I knew right away... I fucked up.  For the very first time, I had DMed a game where I actually made one of my players cried.  And not in a good way.

Everybody at the table tried to reassure her that it is okay, but to very little avail.  For the rest of evening, we had to calm her down and come to a compromise.  The player wasn’t happy with the direction her character was going.  She felt like more of an attacker than a healer and didn’t want to play as her Gnome Druid anymore.  So we agreed on that once her Druid was revived, she insisted that she be taken instead on the premise that it was her fault that their group had to make such a sacrifice because of her actions.  The NPC agrees and the deal was complete.  I didn’t even take anything from the paladin cause we went through enough as it is.

So, what can we conclude from this?  Well, I learned that players are not the only ones that face consequences from their actions.  This scene I created was meant to be dramatic, but I had failed to consider that one of my players might not have been able to emotionally handle such a tough choice in the way that it was presented.  Although everybody, including the gnome player, keep insisting that they are not upset with me or blame me for the situation, I still feel bad about it.  I feel bad for making one of my friends feel like she failed the team because of a mistake she made.

What can you take from this story?  If you are ever DMing for any table top rpg, try to learn from my mistakes.  If you are ever going to do a magic item lotto, don’t add in any powerful items.  Not even if it is super rare to get it.  It’ll happen.  Trust me.  Start off with weaker magic gear then add in stronger ones as you go.  And most importantly, if you want to make an ultimatum in one of your games, be very careful on how you handle it.  Try to make it a group fail or something completely unfair.  Try to avoid a case where an ultimatum happens because of the actions of a single player.

[kfdirector]

What to Learn From Every RPG Campaign I’ve GMed* or Played In

(All campaigns that lasted more than three sessions that I’ve ever played in, in chronological order; marked by a * were me as GM.  All others were me as player.)

Denver Arcana (0*)  (d20 Modern, Urban Arcana, Extensive Supplements and Homebrew, Kitchen Sink Urban Fantasy)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Self-insert PCs are perfectly doable, but don’t include other real-life people as NPCs.  Especially if any PC IRL has a thing for any of the NPCs.  Double-especially if the GM kinda does too.

Clyde Lake (d20 Modern, pure, contemporary horror)

LESSON FOR THE GM:  Before launching a horror game, have a pretty good idea what the source of the horror actually is.

Plaguelands (D&D 3.5e, classic fantasy with Oriental Adventures influences)

LESSON FOR THE GM: If you get a guy who ALWAYS TAKES THE BAIT, knowingly and gladly, great!  Just…have a plan for when he takes the bait.  A plan that lets the campaign keep going, maybe?

LESSON FOR THE PLAYER: When using illusions to persuade people, consider the audience.  Maybe consider very carefully whether your choice of illusion, while persuasive to your target, might also cause a wave of panic and mass suicide.

 d20 Tropico* (d20 Modern, pure, action-adventure)

LESSON FOR THE GM: A little more research is needed for setting a campaign in a war-torn Caribbean island nation than just…playing Tropico.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYER: If you play an INT 5 bruiser and the campaign is not 100% combat, you’re going to be locked out of a lot of playing.

 Thaumapunk*  (d20 Modern, Extensive supplements and homebrew, kitchen sink sci-fi/magitech)

LESSON FOR MY PLAYERS: I am not afraid to TPK your asses.

LESSON FOR THE GM: A bad ending goes down so much smoother with a hastily-written sequel hook in the epilogue that makes the players think that at least everything they did didn’t amount to a complete waste of time.

 Apocalypse Arcana* (D&D 3,5e, mostly official supplements, post-apocalyptic North America fantasy)

LESSON FOR THE GM: It’s okay to fudge things if you misestimate an encounter.  But consider being more subtle than having all the henchdemons announce that it’s time for their union-mandated lunch break and quit the field, leaving only their boss to fight the party.

LESSON FOR EVERYONE: If someone accidentally plays a furry when they’re vehemently not a furry, never, ever, let them live it down.  (Real actual furries get a pass in my book; y’all do you.)

 Denver Arcana (I, II, III) (d20 Modern, Urban Arcana, few supplements, kitchen sink urban fantasy)

LESSON FOR THE PLAYER: Characters really are fun when they’re actually characters, not just self-inserts or piles of stats for launching fireballs!  Make sure the campaign is going to last before commissioning artwork of them, though. Or else you’ll wonder if you’ve got your money’s worth.

LESSON FOR THE GM: If you continually reboot a campaign at low levels because you don’t know how to cope with your PCs once they reach high levels – don’t be surprised if they start finding level-independent ways to fuck with your shit.

 Thaumapunk X* (d20 Modern, extensive supplements, a bit less homebrew, better-thought-out kitchen sink sci-fi/magitech)

LESSON FOR THE PLAYER: If the GM interrupts your convoluted attempts at planning with an alien invasion, that means he disapproved of something.  Possibly that you were taking two hours to plan something unimportant.

LESSON FOR THE GM: It’s okay if the players know who the final boss is in advance (because he’s the guy who TPKed them last time), but they’ll understand if his stats aren’t identical to what they were centuries before.  They’ll accept the change if it means you don’t feel compelled to spring the final boss on them 75% of the way through the apparent story because you realized that it wouldn’t be a challenge for their over-optimized builds if things ran their course.

 Strangeworld (D&D 3.5e, mostly official supplements, weird primal-feeling fantasy that turned out to have huge space-fantasy elements just out of view for most of the game)

LESSON FOR THE GM: What would be awesome in twenty or thirty sessions will be a soul-sucking mess if it takes eighty.

 Diaspora* (D&D 3.5e, mostly official supplements, rapidly escalating to fight mythological-class threats and thwart a multi-pantheon plot to unmake the world, which somehow entailed overthrowing a powerful dwarven nation to build a giant-ass steampunk cannon to launch yourself to the moon so you could fight the Chariot of All Evil before it could bring its terrible power too close to the world’s many doomsday cults)

LESSON FOR THE GM: If there’s a chance that one player will realize that he doesn’t like the epilogue that he’s on track for, give him a heads up in advance.  So you’re not re-writing the ending at very moment that the ending is happening.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYER: If you gaining demigod status as your retirement plan depends on the cooperation of the rest of the party, clear everything with them 100% first.  Explain any possible hang-ups to the satisfaction of the Paladin  before the moment of truth.

 Braveworld (D&D 3.5e, mostly official supplements, standard medieval western fantasy)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Players say they just want a normal campaign as a breather after a crazy one, but they lie.  Boredom sets in fast, and that deprives you of the critical enthusiasm needed to overcome repeated scheduling problems or player conflicts.

 Magnum Opus* (d20 Modern, massive supplements, a crossover involving every previous campaign on this list and others that never got off the drawing board, starting with the PCs on their first day of high school and culminating in them saving literally every universe)

LESSON FOR THE GM: You get to push a system to its maximum extent until it pretty much burns out everyone’s desire to play it because there’s nothing else to accomplish, once.  Make it worth it!

OTHER LESSON FOR THE GM: If you set plot-critical rolls with a difficulty so high that they’re mathematically unachievable without extra measures, remember to hint at those other measures to the player in question.  He might not be firing on all cylinders tonight and if he gets literally every party member killed (even if temporarily) because as far as he could tell you wanted him to roll a 22 on a 20-sided dice, you’re getting the blame for that.

OTHER, OTHER LESSON FOR THE GM: No player ever needs a ring of three wishes.  Not even with a single wish left on it.  If there’s any charges left on that sucker it will fuck up your epilogue right good.

 Omoikane (D&D 3.5e, very Oriental-Adventures-themed, lots of demigod-tier enemies running around)

LESSON FOR THE GM: If a player seems to fundamentally misunderstand how a rule works, and seems to have built his character around that misunderstanding, correct him early.  At a critical moment when he’s trying to save the entire party based on a heroic effort he thinks the rules let him do is a bit too late.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: If the way you play a character is so effective that future GMs ban the entire class for the rest of time, you’ve mostly cheated yourself out of something cool.

 The Low Road (D&D 3.5e, standard medieval western fantasy but the PCs are evil and in pursuit of cosmic power; culminating in one character [uh, mine] becoming the replacement source of all evil in the world after his original plan fell through due to his god not existing)

LESSON FOR THE GM: “An Evil campaign” means different things to different players.  You’re not going to get a consistent vision of how to proceed with an evil scheme if your only criteria is “make an evil PC”.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: Evil cultist PCs planning to betray their parties at the last moment to further their eldritch-horror-patron’s plans should probably first verify that their patron exists.

 Swoboda (Early Pathfinder, campaign was supposed to be based on a fantasy version of WW2, with the PCs Fantasy!Polish volunteers in the Fantasy!Spanish Civil War with the meta-game expectation that we’d later be leading the resistance against the Fantasy!Nazi invasion of Fantasy!Poland).

LESSON FOR THE GM: Maybe don’t make the second session of the game a mission to commit atrocities against civilians, even if you are going for a “horrors of war” theme.

LESSON FOR THE GM: And maybe have a plan to continue the game if the PCs refuse orders.

 Sullapolis Survivor* (GURPS, zombie-horror but with extradimensional monsters rather than actual zombies, in a contemporary fictional city)

LESSON FOR MY PLAYERS:  No, seriously, I will TPK you if you fuck around in the finale.

LESSON FOR THE GM: Keep your conspiratorial horror a little more straightforward.  Too many elements just leaves the players unfocused and uninterested.

 The Dark Lords Errand (D&D 3.5e, classic medieval fantasy)

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: I’m not the only GM in the group willing to TPK us if we’re idiots.

LESSON FOR THE GM: It can be hard to communicate to players the difference between a situation where a heroic stand is demanded and where subterfuge and feigned acquiescence is called for.  But it’s worth making the extra effort if you liked the campaign.

 Orc Quest (D&D 3.5e, orcish tribes crusading against the law and the light)

SEE RECAP HERE.  

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: If you can’t be useful, be entertaining.

LESSON FOR THE GM: If one of the players has cheesed the rules so effectively as to tame the Tarrasque at level 8, and you let this happen, it’s barely your campaign any more – you’re just as much along for the ride as everyone not playing a Tarrasque-tamer.

 Saviors of Camden (GURPS; low-point value, basically playing the Boondock Saints)

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: Don’t build characters who have to be persuaded into the basic concept of the campaign.

LESSON FOR THE GM: If you planned a “kill ‘em all” epilogue, be prepared for the possibility of one PC cheating death.  Surround the skyscraper with cops?  Someone might critically succeed on a parasailing roll…

 Living in Darkness (D&D 3.5e, mixed supplements, classic fantasy that seemed to take place in the centuries-later aftermath of The Low Road)

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: If your GM’s style is best described as “Homestuck narrator”, you’re gonna have a bad time.

LESSON FOR THE GM: “How to keep an enemy mage in custody” should be a solved problem on most worlds.  Tell your players the accepted protocol.  Don’t make them invent it on their own and then have NPCs criticize them for unnecessary abuse after the fact.

LESSON FOR THE GM: You’re running a tabletop campaign, not narrating a satirical text adventure game.  Or if you are, you need to advertise that shit first.

 Valos IV (d20 Modern, Future, and then GURPS, involuntary pioneers sent by a tyrannical Earth government to an alien planet)

LESSON FOR THE GM: It’s a rare campaign that can survive a change in game systems.

 Adlera* (D&D 3.5e, Fantasy!Roman Republican PCs help Fantasy!Caesar invade Fantasy!India by killing any of the thousands of local demigods that get in the way of the Fantasy!Roman Legions, only to clash with an invading Fantasy!China, deal with backstabbing intrigue from home, and deal with the ancient techno-magical-biological prison for ten billion souls in a way that kept them from either reincarnating into an evil god or a horde of angry demons)

LESSON FOR THE GM: If when some PCs excel at what they do it’s regarded as heroic, and when others excel it’s regarded as a war crime, that leads to resentment.  Just be aware of that.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: Read the lore. If it says something only really weird could justify X in this setting, and you make X an explicit part of your character, don’t be surprised if you get dragged into some really weird shit.  Like having Fantasy!Samuel L. Jackson be your reincarnated boss, throughout all eternity, and locking you out of the epilogue that all the other players get because get back to work, bitch!

 Twenty Twenty Five* (GURPS, post-apocalypse based on an alternate history, like if Fallout was based on the late-80s/early-90s instead of the 50s, and also all the PCs were alive before the fall and woke up from a coma after the fall)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Do not allow any player to take Secret: Largely Responsible for the Apocalypse.  The campaign then becomes About That Player, no matter who else was in the party or what else you had going.

 The Sands of Mars (d20 Modern, Future, space opera with no psi or magic set on a Mars that has been cut off from Earth centuries after a robot rebellion or something)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Don’t pitch a sandbox game if you aren’t running a sandbox game. If there’s a main plot players are expected to participate in, don’t be coy about it in the pitch.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: If your character hates lying and you as a player don’t grok the concept of lying by omission, maybe don’t be the only one to take ranks in Bluff.

 Embracing Defeat (I, II)* (GURPS, martial arts/kinda-dieselpunk world where the PCs are the scions of nobility in a crushed and occupied country, trying to restore the honor of their defeated nation)

LESSON FOR THE GM: If someone keeps pitching character concepts that seem to really not quite fit the campaign, that means they probably don’t get what the campaign is going to be and you should explain it better so the character they eventually make doesn’t turn out completely useless.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: Maybe don’t pick a fight with an entire regiment of retired combat veterans at once if only one of you knows which end of a sword goes in the other guy.

LESSON FOR THE GM: A promising concept can be revived with new players if you write things properly.  But you still need a new plan for the story after nearly-TPKing the first set of characters and their associated stories.

 The Wheel (D&D 3.5e, a sequel to The Dark Lord’s Errand, the Low Road, Living in Darkness – every ten sessions or so the campaign world would change dramatically as one world ended and another was born, the heroes reincarnated into new but similar forms in a mecha setting, a post-apoc setting, a dark low fantasy, etc.)

LESSON FOR THE GM: You may have been planning this one for eight years, but that’s no excuse to drag the game itself on for three years.  PACING! No story worth telling requires 82 four-hour-average sessions.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: Clearly communicate to the GM your expectations for the game.  For instance, tell him politely, but firmly, which plot twists will result in you making a road trip across America to hang him with the strings of his own dice bag.  When threats are credible, this improves the game for everyone.

 The Firm* (GURPS, high-action, players are stylized GTA-type mafia guys taking over a fictional contemporary American city)

LESSON FOR THE GM: You make a game that calls for dick player characters, they’re going to do dick things.  You give them a high point value, they’re going to be good at doing dick things.  Be psychologically prepared for that.

 Valdeer no Senshi (GURPS, Magical Girls in a frankly awesome alt-history city that goes miles to justify the San-Fransokyo blend of West Coast and Japanese culture)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Less time writing Japanese characters that don’t display on most people’s US-layout IRC clients, more time writing awesome set piece battles and hilarious anime-inspired scenes.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: A group of mostly twenty-something dudes is either going to barely bother to roleplay a teenage girl or way too good at it.  Gaming is more productive when it’s the former; memories are made when it’s the latter.  There is no such thing as a happy medium.

 The Great Heathen Army* (Pathfinder; Fantasy!Vikings invade Fantasy!England, each PC having their own noble house and army, carving out their respective kingdoms as they conquer the land and fight both the natives and each other)

LESSON FOR THE GM: There is a maximum number of spreadsheets you can use to run a game after which there is no way it will be fun. Try to work out that number ahead of time.

LESSON FOR THE GM: If you have a hard time imagining what would cause an actual tabletop session to be needed to advance the game, you have not actually designed a D&D-style campaign but a play-by-post strategy with cobbled-together-rules.  And if those rules kind of suck, wow you have wasted a lot of time.

 Harbingers of Justice (Pathfinder with all kinds of homebrew, modern superheroes in a contemporary fictional setting)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Don’t run a superhero campaign if you actually hate superheroes.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: Don’t build an Elvis-themed superhero if you have no interest and little knowledge of Elvis

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: The most effective way for a level 3 rogue to do damage in a battle on a city street is a Disable Device check to hotwire the nearest car and drive it into an enemy.

 Knights of the Stag* (GURPS, Infinite Worlds world-hopping beginning with the wizard attendees at a magical college in England in the days of Richard the Lionheart)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Don’t base a campaign on cool alternate-history ideas if you’re the only one in your group who reads or cares about history.  You’ll burn out long before you can get to the finish if you don’t have the positive feedback from people who get the references.

LESSON FOR THE GM: GURPS makes the better system when you need to learn new languages, know hundreds of utility spells, and solve problems in crazy creative ways.  D&D makes the better system when you want to throw dragons at the party.  Both are pretty doable when the opposition is Evil Time Nazis, though.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYER: Do the assigned reading. Don’t be the idiot claiming to be an English noble in 11th Century England who speaks only…English.

 Resistance* (d20 Modern; entirely fictional setting; no science fiction or magic; ROTC students try to organize a resistance after a surprise coup and invasion of their country, Red Dawn style)

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: If it’s an explicitly modern-military themed game, and absolutely every single enemy is going to have at least an assault rifle…this probably isn’t the game to run your expert boxer who specializes in doing unarmed nonlethal damage, especially given d20 Modern’s heavy nerfs to nonlethal damage.

 Angels of Ashtabula (GURPS, sequel to Saviors of Camden, only set in the Rust Belt)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Don’t let someone take Anonymous as an 18-pt contact.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: Don’t take Anonymous as an 18-pt contact.

  The New World (D&D 5e, standard medieval western fantasy kingdoms colonize fantasy!North America)

LESSON FOR THE GM: If the (white colonialist) sponsors are all assholes, and the indigenous peoples are all sympathetic, it should be expected that eventually the PCs are going to stop wanting to work for the colonialists.

LESSON FOR THE OTHER PLAYERS: If you didn’t want me negotiating with the lich, leading to efforts of mutual translation and me telling the lich how to take advantage of our own laws and the Paladin’s code of honor to get treated as a sovereign nation rather than a monster, maybe y’all should have just attacked instead of waiting for it to make the first move and then it waiting for us to make the first move and an awkward silence ensuing that I decided to insert myself into as the SOCIAL JUSTICE ROGUE.

  Journey to Svalbard (GURPS; post-apocalypse; survivors from Edmonton, Canada, make their way across the ruins of Canada and then the Atlantic to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault to restart agriculture, ongoing)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Eight players is probably more than comfortably fit into an RPG group at once.  It’s definitely more than fit comfortably into the bush plane at once.

LESSON FOR THE GM: If the only NPCs who get physical descriptions are the ones who turn out to be the key to saving the world, it’s kind of hard to keep the mystery going.

LESSON FOR THE PLAYERS: If the GM keeps dropping hints, someone should probably take notes, yeah?

 Journey from Everfree* (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy; class of modern high school students thrust into fantasy setting)

LESSON FOR THE GM: You should probably take some notes yourself, asshole.

 Heroes of Applewood Heights* (Genesys, Superheroes, contemporary, ongoing)

LESSON FOR THE GM: Whatever it is, I haven’t learned it yet.

[dmsden]

Chronicles of Ember – an RPG Review

Hullo, Gentle Readers. As many of you know, in addition to being a gamer, I’m also a furry. Through a furry artist named Temiree (http://temiree.tumblr.com/), I became aware of an RPG project called Chronicles of Ember. I reached out to its author, Alan Wortman, to express my interest in possibly reviewing the game, and he was kind enough to provide me with an early copy. Out of respect for his requests, I’ve held off on writing this review until now, as his plan is to offer the book as of March 31.

I’m going to hold off on reviewing the rules as a whole. A lot of them (character attributes, character classes, the alignment system, the planes of reality, the saving throws, etc.) seem to be very directly taken from AD&D 2nd edition, and, in my conversation with Mr. Wortman, he agreed that 2nd Edition AD&D informed a lot of his game design when putting Ember together. I’m not sure if this will cause him any difficulties with Wizards of the Coast down the line, but I hope not.

Instead, I prefer to concentrate on the world itself. The setting is a very interesting one, being a kind of fantasy post-apocalyptic world. Ember is set in a frigid ice age, where various races are struggling to keep the fire of civilization alive. I love these kinds of settings, and I feel they immediately create plenty of drama and ideas for adventures. In a setting like this, the environment is as much of a challenge as any monster a party of adventurers might face. There are extensive rules for dealing with such an environment, and I can imagine many adventures are going to be influenced by this. In a setting of this nature, a magic-item like a stone that constantly offers fire and warmth could be a greater treasure than a +5 vorpal sword, and I like the direction this takes things.

Where the game really finds its unique voice, in my opinion, is in the section on races. There are few standard fantasy races here like dwarves, elves, and halflings. Humans, half-orcs, and minotaurs can be found, but they’re joined with the very alien alvani, a number of anthropomorphic animal races (boar, cat, dog, elk, otter, and bear, to name some), the warforged-like preservers, and the curious semi-human trollborn. Each race is given an extensive treatment of their personalities, cultures, religious beliefs, and the regions they inhabit.

The game’s writing and design has a very retro feeling to it. Most modern games go out of their way to put aside the dense detail and writing of 1st & 2nd edition AD&D type games in favor of accessibility for new players. This game reminded me of wading through some of those old games, and, for every section that I found enjoyable to read thoroughly (such as the sections on the gods and the environment), another section would be something I felt okay with skimming over instead. There is, for example, an incredibly detailed section on non-combat skills that takes up over 60 pages of the book and extensive descriptions of the different weapons and armor. It’s clear the author has a very specific vision of what the game should be and takes pains to inform the reader of this. I could understand how this could be off-putting to some players, especially if they’re new to RPGs in general.

One place where the game shines, however, is in what attracted my attention in the first place – its art. Besides the aforementioned Temiree, there are 14 other artists, including the author, who contributed to the game’s interior art. It does an excellent job of portraying the setting, as well as the various races who inhabit it.

One thing that surprised me once I started reading through the book – this is not a complete game. There’s very little in the way of tools that the GameMaster would need to run the game. There are no monster stats, magic-items, sections of GM advice, or even a world map, despite references to various nations. Mr. Wortman did warn me that the copy he was giving me was incomplete, however, so much of this might change by the time the game is published. There are also (and this I did find surprising) no spell lists for the various classes, although the game does reference many familiar spell names, such as fireball. I asked the author and he agreed that they’d be more likely to appear in a later book for GMs, so that the GM could dole them out as a kind of treasure, rather than giving players access to them all upfront. He also mentioned that most players have been using the dynamic spell rules in the book. This is one major point in which this game does veer away from 2nd edition AD&D to be sure.

In summary, if you’re looking for a game that will give you unique races to play while evoking a very old school game feel in a harsh and unforgiving setting, this game may be perfect for you. It’s not likely to woo me away from D&D 5e, which I prefer to AD&D 2nd edition, but it was still an interesting read, and it did make me want to know more about its setting. You can find more by joining the game’s Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/143175016239066/

[agnesgoesadventuring-blog]

I tried to edit in what didn’t get in to this post and accidentally deleted it. So... repost, with the stuff that for some reason got cut off added.

Looking through Twitter this morning, I discovered a great many posts discussing gatekeeping in the D&D community. I had seen some tweets earlier this week where people were talking about how Critical Role and similar shows were "objectively bad" because of some nonsense idea that they're "fake" and not as good or valid as actually playing and that the discourage people from DMing. The stuff from yesterday/today seems to be even more blatant gatekeeping, an unambiguous claim that you can only be a part of the D&D and roleplaying community if you're actually playing.

To this I can only say... no. As in all types of activities and hobbies, there are different ways to engage. When it comes to sports, some people enjoy actually playing the sport, some enjoy merely watching the games on television, some prefer to see the games live in-person, some like to take part in the "fantasy" games for the sport, some get really into the stats and the numbers. When it comes to something like theater, some actually participate in productions, whether they're performing in shows, directing them, or doing something behind the scenes like stage crew or set design and construction. Some prefer to simply watch the shows and plays. For some that means going to the theater and seeing the performances live, and for some that means watching recorded versions of shows. Some people experience musical theater mostly through listening to the cast albums. Every hobby, every form of entertainment has different types of levels of engagement, none more or less valid than the other.

With Dungeons and Dragons, and other roleplaying games, there have always been different types of engagement, even from the earliest days. While some people liked to play as PCs, others preferred to DM. Some people liked to do both. Some people were happy to write adventures and make homebrews for other people to play rather than playing themselves. Some people found the game interesting and would read the books but, for whatever reason, not play. As technology has developed, new ways to engage with the hobby have been introduced. Now people can play online rather than "in person" if they so wish. There's a larger, more in touch community that has led to more involved homebrew creations. The internet has made the content of the  books more widely available for those who wish to read them. And people broadcast their games online, whether through live streaming or putting up a pre-filmed and edited version, for people to see, follow, and fall in love with, and for some people their engagement of D&D and other roleplaying games lies in their enjoyment of those stories. These advancements in the hobby have led to a lot more people becoming players, having interest in the game, and just taking part of the community. Unfortunately, it also means that there's been a lot more gatekeeping, people claiming that there's a certain way to enjoy the hobby, and if you don't meet that criteria, you're not a part of the community.

That's simply not true, and their inability to evolve with the rest of the community, and the world in general, is their own problem. The can try to push others out with all of their might and will, but the "might" is minuscule, especially in comparison to the amount of people in these communities who welcome everyone interested in the hobby, regardless of how you engage with it. At the end of the day, hobbies and communities are always evolving, always bringing in new ways to engage and new people who engage in those ways, and the only people who are going to pushed out are the gatekeepers. And that pushing out is going to be of their own doing.

There are a million reasons people might not actually play the games, or might not be able to. Some people have busy lives, with responsibilities like work, family, and all kinds of other things that simply do not allow them the time to play. Some people can't find a group in their area and don't have the kind of access to the internet that would allow them to play regularly (and that adds a whole level of classism to this whole gatekeeping thing). Some people have social anxieties and other mental illnesses that make it difficult to engage with other people in the way one would have to in order to play. Some people have mental illnesses or difficulties that make the gameplay difficult. The pace, the amount of things one has to keep track of, the unexpected nature of the game, and many other things can be a barrier to people with those issues that can make it difficult for them to play, or that would make playing an unenjoyable experience, or that would even make it so they can't play. There are all kinds of reasons that people might not want to play or won't be able to play, and they're all perfectly valid and none of them makes their engagement with the hobby invalid.

Now, there have been criticisms of these RPG and D&D streams, particularly Critical Role, that are just absurd. There has always been the claim from those angry few that the show, and others like it, are "scripted", and was a particular criticism in this specific instance. The idea that these shows are scripted makes me sad for the people making the claims, because if they think these kinds of stories can only happen if they're scripted, then they haven't had very good D&D games. Some groups are focused heavily on the narrative, and those games tend to be very similar in the way stories and characters develop and different themes and ideas are explored to Critical Role. Perhaps they looks at the fact that Matt and other DMs will sometime clearly have speeches for NPCs planned out, or introductions to character or places written, and use that to make the claim that it's scripted. But this is something a lot of DMs do. It's better to have these things on hand so you don't forget anything important and so that you can make sure things have the most emotional impact they can have. A DM having a few pre-planned speeches or descriptions does not make these shows "scripted", and it's a common practice for a lot of what these people are calling "real games".

One of the more absurd criticisms is the notion of these shows being "reality shows", that people who watch these shows but don't play the game aren't actually interested in the game but in "reality show" drama. One has to wonder about the grasp these people have on what the term "reality show" really means, because something like Critical Role, or The Adventure Zone, or any number of RPG shows, that craft a narrative with fictional characters and locations, and that don't purport themselves to be anything but fiction, isn't a reality show. The only thing that could remotely be classified as such is stuff like the openings of Critical Role, where the announcements and ads are made, but nobody who watches the show is actually invested in those parts. They're invested in the story. The narrative. Which is not and can in no way be classified as a "reality show". Being invested in the story is no different than being invested in any other form of narrative, like television shows, movies, and books. And the investment in that story is very much like the reason a lot of people actually play D&D. They're invested in the story.

There have always been claims that the players on Critical Role are "fake", that they weren't really D&D fans, that they don't have a history with the game. This barely even deserves a response because there's tangible proof that they played the game, the first campaign, for years before they started broadcasting it. There are videos on youtube. Some of the cast have talked about that game being the first they ever played, but others have talked at length about their history with the game and other RPGs, and in a way that anyone who knows anything about the hobby would know is honest.

All of these things, these attempts to exclude people from the community, the different rationalizations for hating certain forms of engagement, these all come from a gatekeeping mentality that based in a person's personal issues. Gatekeepers want to keep people out so they can keep a community feeling "exclusive" because it makes them feel special. They need that feeling of being special, of being a part of something "exclusive", to feel better about themselves. They need to be able to elevate themselves above others, so they can feel like they're better than others, because they get to be a part of this exclusive group, because they get to like something they can tell themselves others don't "get", so they can feel like they're engaging in the "right" way while other are doing it in the "wrong" way. It's all about trying to place themselves above everybody else so that they can feel special. Because nothing else does. It's amazing how often this happens in groups and communities that are made up of people who have been excluded themselves. You see it so much in groups where people are generally considered to be social "outsiders". Video games, comics, sci fi and fantasy, role playing, and similar things all have a lot of people who were bullied, or excluded, who were considered to be "geeks" and "nerds" and weren't accepted. You would think, or at least hope, that being excluded in those ways would help them understand and not want to do that to others, but a lot of the time it just makes people do the same thing in the groups they take part in, because it's the thing that finally makes them feel like they're the ones with the power. There are also matters of things like misogyny and racism that come into play here for similar reasons.

The thing is, though, that regardless of their desperate attempts to make themselves more "special" than everyone else, they're not actually the ones who have the power. Communities evolve. They always do. And those evolutions allow for more means of engagement and more people taking part in the community. The more people who enter through these ways means that the ratio of people who want to gatekeep gets lower and lower and they're vastly in the minority. Ultimately, the only people they'll succeed in pushing out of the community is themselves. They can spout off about who is a "real fan" and who's allowed in the community and what's a valid form of engagement all they want, but they don't have any power to make anything out of it. They don't actually have any power to keep anyone out. They're just as impotent as they're so scared of being.

[megaweapon]

Let me throw in a second recommendation for Genesys. In terms of a system that really turns a roll into a story, it’s one of the best I’ve come by so far. In addition to succeeding and failing at things, you also have conditional modifiers that can make things better, or make things worse--sometimes at the same time! Parsing the results of a roll can slow gameplay down a little, but in my experience, it usually ends up involving multiple players throwing down multiple ideas and is fantastic for the “collaborative storytelling” style of game.

The Genesys system is super easily adaptable to existing settings and new settings. The Star Wars Fantasy Flight Games tabletop also runs off the Genesys system, and has a lot in the way of core and supplementary material.

Even more in that vein is Fiasco. Fiasco has some very few bare mechanics, but it’s mostly an improv game with a few stakes here and there. It’s hard to describe outside of being it’s a round-robin game where the entire group builds the scenario and character relationships at the beginning and rolls with it--there’s no “GM” in Fiasco. I’d suggest checking it out, it’s a lot of fun, most suited to one-shots.

Wu Shu is another game system in that similar vein, revolving mainly around storytelling with light mechanics. It’s also one of the few games I’ve played that actively rewards players for describing what they’re doing in as much cool detail as possible as a game mechanic. Again, mostly suited to one-shots in my experience.

Also going to second Call of Cthulhu. It’s a percentile system, very easy to parse, and the difficulty of the game is vastly different between modules/campaigns/the GM’s whims. If you want to get a group of newbies into the game I highly, highly recommend the Horror on the Orient Express campaign. It has a structure that moves the game along while still giving wiggle room for shenanigans at each stop--but be advised there is a lot of reading and prep work required of the GM. For a more advanced sandbox experience, Masks of Nyarlathotep is a lot of fun! My caveat is in all my years of playing, I’ve never actually completed Masks--it’s massive, but a great challenge.

Eclipse Phase is an absolutely excellent science fiction tabletop setting that runs on a similar percentile system. They just released the second edition, which I haven’t taken for a spin, but which seems to play very similarly to first ed. Eclipse Phase leans heavily on the themes of transhumanism and hyper-advanced space cyberpunk, and the setting is enormously expansive with a wide variety of types of campaign you can play. It’s one of my favorite campaign settings ever, full stop.

Another super cool thing about Eclipse Phase is that the publisher has specifically released it under the Creative Common License. The books are public domain, and very high quality!

Some honorable mentions: I’ve had a lot of fun with Exile Studios’ Hollow Earth Expedition, Feng Shui (still has one of my absolute favorite initiative systems of all time), The GUMSHOE system (a wild variety of settings, but I played Timewatch), Lasers and Liches (it runs on a 5e system but is a robust and fun custom setting with new mechanics--think, if someone made Kung Fury a tabletop setting), Pathfinder (I haven't played Starfinder yet but I love the setting) and D&D 4E. Fourth ed was actually my intro to D&D, and is... a bit odd compared to the others, but excellent for folks who like to actually strategize and position on a battle grid, it feels more like a war game than anything else.

Keep an eye out on kickstarter, a lot of fun, small tabletop rpg projects have come from there, and some have even grown into bigger ones! There’s a whole lot out there to experience.

Also while i'm here; go play something besides 5e. Broaden your horizons. Try something new. Hell, even older editions of D&D would be good. Try Basic/Expert, try AD&D- learn about THAC0 and exploration turns. Just do something besides 5e and see what other games have to offer, you might find a new favorite system.

[tapwrites]

RPG Design Adventures: Gifted

This time, on RPG Design Adventures~~... I’ll be going through the evolution of Gifted, my first “full” RPG. It’s gone through many iterations so far--each with a differently conusing name. At each stage, I’ve posted it to forums online to get feedback from other RPG designers.

I’ve only playtested it a few times in total throughout the process, but each time has yielded a lot of insights regarding what to work on for next time--often prompting entirely new drafts of the game!

Version 1: Structure

Okay, so this name is probably the worst. But at the same time, I didn’t really know what the RPG was at this point. All I had were some half-baked notions of hacking FAE apart (the only RPG I’ve GMed), taking what I liked and growing on those ideas.

From the start, the Motives idea was in there--a simple system of 2 freeform “stats” that brought out the character in the character, rather than what weapon they used and how they best interacted with the environment. At the moment, though, there was no name for these stats; they were just events that positively (for a rolled stat of 4-6) or negatively (1-3) impacted their life. Then they were condensed into a single word for “ease of play.”

It was hard to narrow down what kind of word to use, however. During play, the idea was the player would add detail to the inciting event to explain how it eventually helped them to perform the action in the moment. But again, this is really fiddly in trying to figure out which stat to use. And coming up with more backstory every time--while interesting from a narrative standpoint--made everything slow to a crawl at the table.

Another thing it introduced was the “M.I.C.E. Quotient”--a principle regarding the structure of story. As a GM-less game, this mechanic helped the players come up with new story arcs and scenes to play through next--all the while keeping a satisfying structure to the whole thing as if it were a novel.

I quite liked this aspect of the game. It tapped into my love of writing and made structuring a story more like a game. I even started playing it solo to write a story, using the mechanics to tell me what happens and what kind of scenes to write next.

Version 2: Past is Prologue

Here, the rules were the biggest barrier to entry. I wrote them in a very logical, chronological manner, with one massive list with many levels of nested list therein. It was very hard to understand to people who weren’t me--though they detailed every rule exactly as they worked.

Some of the mechanical ideas developed well, though. Now, you’d roll to select which stats (here called “Words”) would be used for the next scene--as well as what type of scene it would be, just as in version 1.

This worked fine, though the restrictive formatting of one great long list made it difficult to explain how this might work in practise.

The current viewpoint player would roll up what the next scene was about... and just sort of stare at those prompts until something came to mind. They had the freedom to word-associate from those prompts, and use characters’ associated backstory to bring in new elements to the story. But as it was GM-less, and zero-prep, everything was done in the moment and at the table.

This slowed things down considerably. I played this version with a couple of my gaming group. And while I think I did a great job considering it was my first time doing it, and I hadn’t had any time beforehand to prepare... it sucked for the players.

They’d just sit there wondering what to do while I frantically brainstormed in the corner by myself. They felt uncertain about the whole thing. They they wanted to play an actual story rather that something open-ended that just went on forever.

This was interesting feedback, and I didn’t fully understand it for a time. To me, everything the GM does is made up. They just tend to make it up before they get to the table. And most games are open-ended. Most often people play whole campaigns, a story that could go on forever. And there, the GM doesn’t have planned out from the start either!

But from a psychological standpoint, it makes sense. They don’t get the benefit of seeing a “final product” of sorts. They see behind the curtain. And that spoiled the grand illusion for them somewhat.

Character development was randomly generated--though we didn’t really get to that in the play session. You’d basically roll to see if a Word would get higher or lower, with things weighted such that a higher Word would trend downward and a lower Word would trend upward. I still don’t know if this would work for actual play.

I have something similar but a lot more controlled ready for when the time comes in the latest version of Gifted. So we’ll see if it works at all some way down the line.

Version 3: Prompt

The next version actually had a rules document that looked and read more like a rules document. Some mechanics and explanations still confused people, but it was readable at least.

It basically just expanded on everything--giving GM advice and example on how mechanics are used, adding mechanics like “Event” generation with variable countdowns, and some rules about how to create obstacles in the world for the characters.

There was still a lot of structure to the narrative though. And this would still slow down play at the table. And using the mechanic for prep beforehand was a bit awkward.

I actually ran a game with this version. I did roll to select aspects of the “main character” for that session, but I completely ignored the structural side of things. I think it’s still useful for inspiration, but it shouldn’t be a “rule” as such.

The stats were called “Frames”--as in, “frame of mind.” The logic behind what they are, how they are used, and how to come up with the most useful words for them were cleared up a lot in this version.

Version 4: Gifted

Right after that one session of Prompt, I redrafted the game from the ground up.

Now there are no structural rules at all. When you’re working session-to-session, it’s hard to create scenes ahead of time using those structures. If you stick to your plans, the players will feel railroaded. And if you don’t, then what’s the point of those being rules in the first place?

The rules themselves are more understandable, and better formatted for easy demarcation of examples and options and rules. There were a lot fewer questions where entire mechanics were confusing or misunderstood. And the ones that were, were easily fixed.

The character creation was more nuanced, and so the characters are too. In the first draft, stat generation was a bit overly complex, but I’ve simplified it with the help of some of the people giving feedback.

Now, those stats have become “Motives”--still not exactly right for what they represent, but way, way closer, and a lot easier to understand by just calling them “Motives.” There are positive motives, and negative motives (something that causes a character to hold back instead of act).

One of the things the players gave feedback on was the difficulty in selecting which Frame they were in in the moment. Sometimes none of them really fit. They were just jumping over a wall, not acting on their “Saviour” impulse.

So in Gifted, while the Motives are still there and have a big impact on gameplay, there are more regular Ability stats: Mind, Heart (social), Body. These are added to rolls just as Motives are. But to keep things interesting, each character has a “Gift” in each category. So you may have +3 Mind (Calculation). For each Gift that applies, you basically get more D&D advantage on that roll--though the specifics are a little more complicated than that.

That’s one of the things I’ll be interested in finding out, actually. While a roll used to look like: “1d6 + Frame”... now it looks like “1d6 (disadvantage for negative Motives, advantage for Gifts) + Ability stat + positive Motives.” This gives a nice array of aspects that all roll into a single roll, but only playing will answer the question of if it’s just too much work to figure out what to roll each time.

A quick update, as I post this: I’m in the process of tweaking how things work. Abilities are more flexible, and the roll mechanic itself is being shifted to be more intuitive for the players--at least, that’s my hope.

I’ll post again after we play next, and let you know the particulars. Until then, thanks for reading. I hope it was useful, or at least interesting, to see into some of the thought processes behind designing an RPG from the ground up.

[rannadylin]

How about some knitting goals/plans for 2018?

First up, the WIPs, as pictured above. I would love to see all of these finished this year.

Critical Role Blanket

https://rannadylin.tumblr.com/tagged/cr-blanket

This has been in progress since November 2016, i.e. back when I was also writing a bunch of Perc’ahlia fic. :-) Why is it stalled? Well, for one, I got distracted by other projects; but mainly because I’ve knitted up all the panels I had charted and run out of things to chart. I wanted to make a Taryon panel and a Tiberius panel but the original set of character logos I was charting didn’t include those and I have yet to come up with a chartable idea for what they should look like. (Suggestions are welcome… :-D) Then I thought about making panels for NPCs/Villains to round out the blanket but…same issue, starting from scratch to chart a panel is a lot more complicated than when I have suitable artwork to start with.

I’m thinking now I might just chart out panels with individual letters spelling out VOX MACHINA and arrange those with the character panels. Would really like to get this thing done at long last.

Heroes of Yarnia RPG Knit-along

https://rannadylin.tumblr.com/tagged/heroes-of-yarnia

Well, it’s long past the actual knitting along stage (they’re starting the third in this series of scarves now I think?) but I would like to finish this double-knitted scarf! It’s another one that got put aside when other projects distracted me; I have no other excuse.

Heroes of Yarnia – The Grand Quest Blanket RPG Knit-along

https://rannadylin.tumblr.com/tagged/blankets

I’ll probably finish this one before the scarf! Same reason for stalling on it – other projects got bumped to the top of the queue. But I have the yarn and the patterns and no reason not to finish it this year.

Gloves of Missile Snaring

https://rannadylin.tumblr.com/tagged/gloves-of-missile-snaring

Technically the first pair of gloves is done; but I was working on a second pair in order to fix some fit issues and also get the pattern written out to share. The difficulty is in sizing it for different sized hands and so this, too, got put aside in favor of other projects at some point.

There are some other WIPs, like the pair of socks I keep at school to work on (it’s almost finished and will soon be replaced by another pair on the needles, so that’s no big issue), a Winterberry sweater that, like most of these WIPs, got set aside for other projects, and a Kelmscott that just needs seaming and has just needed seaming for years, why am I like this? I would like to finish those but am not as in love with them as the fandom projects. Which brings us to the NEW projects I’d like to make this year…

More Pillars of Eternity Dolls!

Dolloth (https://rannadylin.tumblr.com/tagged/aloth-doll) needs a Dollegina and an Edóll to keep him company, don’t you think? I’d be glad to also do more custom Watcher dolls for commissions, and I’ll probably do dolls of my own Watchers at some point. Time to find orlan-appropriate fun fur yarn for Violet, I guess? I already have Lenneth’s hair color yarn ready to go so I should start with her, I guess!

Vox Machina Hat

I was working on a prototype/pattern for a Fair Isle Critical Role hat to do a knit-along in the Knit ‘n’ Crit Ravelry group, and my charted designs were just not turning out so that went back to the drawing board. I’m thinking I could chart silhouettes of the characters? Maybe? Eventually I’ll figure this out. (I also have vague ideas for Sox Machina patterns…) Of course, with the new campaign starting, maybe I should chart THOSE silhouettes…

Pillars of Eternity Blanket Panels

As if I don’t have enough of these double-knit blanket projects to finish (cf. the WIP list above), I’d like to start charting panels for a PoE blanket. This post has a bunch of symbols related to PoE 2 that would work splendidly for charting, plus the rest of the gods’ symbols in the guidebook would be pretty straightforward to chart. Who knows what inspiration Deadfire will add…