Bandwagon Blogging: #RPGaDay2015 in one go

I'm jumping on the bandwagon for the #RPGaDay2015 31 questions all in one day with another 14 added on top to make it all interesting. Here are my 45 RPG answers...

1. Forthcoming game you're most looking forward to? (Don't end sentences with a preposition kids - it's not cool!)

Break!! by Reynaldo Madriñan and Grey Wizard is something I'm looking forward to seeing in print. The concepts for action and the way they are adapting the anime genre to an RPG looks brilliant. The layout and design samples I've seen makes me think this one might be a game changer. If you want to know more check out their development blog.

2. Kickstarted game most pleased you backed?

For game I'd have to say the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Rules and Magic Book. The layout and design is fantastic! The rules are streamlined with some fine-tuned innovations that only add to adaptability of this version of the world's most popular roleplaying game. I've received piles of extras along with my beautiful rule books and I'm pretty damn happy with it all.

3. Favourite new game of the last 12 months?

The fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons is my favourite new game this past year. Wizards of the Coast hauled in the ENnies this year for a good reason. The new D&D is one of the best versions of the game to date. It takes advantage of 40 years of game design progress with a return to the spirit of play that launched it all. 

4. Most surprising game?

I can't really say. I don't know if any of them surprise me. That's not something I look for in a game. Maybe Numenera? It surprised me that Monte Cooke came up with a number of ideas that were damn close to the system I'm creating. When he was talking about the design choices for his game I was freaking out a little, but luckily when it came out it wasn't as close as I was afraid it might be. I also moved forward in different directions so it didn't really matter in the long run. By the time I'm finished playtesting the two games may have so little in common people will look at this post and wonder what the hell I was talking about. 

5. Most recent RPG purchase?

Chris Helton of the Dorkland Blog encouraged me to pick up Dyson Logos' Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts. Chris is planning on running Labyrinth Lord when our group gets back to fantasy D&D style play and he wants to use Dyson's book for the magic in our game. Since magic users are my favourite class to play I decided to pick up the PDF. I haven't had a chance to dig into it yet, but after a quick scan I'm happy with the purchase. It changes the flavour of magic in an old school game without major changes to the expectations of how things work. I'll give it a thorough read and possibly a review once we are closer to starting our game.

6. Most recent RPG played?

That's classic Traveller. I picked up the bundle of holding for the Little Black Books back when our Tuesday night group decided to give the old game a try. The PDFs print out well in booklet form on an office printer and aside from some terrible layout and a total lack of art it's a sweet little game. There's a tonne of flexibility there to play several styles of sci-fi adventures. I'm looking forward to seeing where Chris takes it. I know if I ran it I'd set it in the declining years of a vast empire with a crumbling communications network and an erosion of technological know-how. 

7. Favourite free RPG?

My favourite free RPG is Swords and Wizardry. It's a clean version of the classic D&D game and comes in three sets so you can play pure 0D&D or take it forward a few years. I don't know why I love S&W while LL leaves me cold. It might be little things like the single saving throw or bigger choices like the classic Jeff Dee art on the cover of the Complete version. I'm not surprised by the number of games that use S&W as their core rules. It's easy to make changes and bolt more rules on top of the basic core game that they published for free. You can even download a text file of the rules so you can slide your house-rules in where they belong with ease!

I'm looking forward to seeing what the new edition with updated art and layout has to offer!

8. Favourite appearance of an RPG in the media?

D&D is rarely portrayed well in the media because the writers usually haven't played and often those that have played try to distance themselves from the material by making fun of it. The first time I saw D&D in the media was in the beginning of the movie E.T. When Zak S and his group from "I Hit It With My Axe" fame appeared in Maxim Magazine I found out who the self-appointed gate-keepers of the online RPG community were. That was unpleasant, but useful in a way. The article itself was silly but at least gave a positive snapshot of the hobby. 

My favourite appearance of D&D in the media is a recent piece on vice.com about why D&D is still fun in the era of video games. It's also by Zak. I suppose his fame in other pursuits makes him a media darling and a natural for such crossover attention. His article is an honest appreciation for the game that I love, for many of the same reasons I love it.

9. Favourite media you wish were and RPG?

I'd love to see Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar in RPG form. I've blogged about the hollow earth as a setting before. What makes it a great choice for an RPG in its own right is the vastness of the world. With seven books of material there is plenty of flavour to begin with more uncharted territory to discover in play. 

(Frank Frazetta's cover for Savage Pellucidar)

What attracts me to Pellucidar is not that gonzo creatures or savage beauty of it. The constant "daytime" of the world has strange effects on time that would be interesting in play and would present a different kind of game than we usually see, especially for D&D players used to measuring out resources, actions and effects in time segments.

10. Favourite RPG publisher?

My favourite publisher is James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess. LotFP pushes the bar higher and higher in terms of adventure content and production values. Janes has put together a wild rogues gallery of writers and artists and he doesn't compromise on the vision of either. LotFP is where you will find the most innovative content in the OSR in hard copies that show the pride in the content. It's no exaggeration to say the Grindhouse boxed set brought me back into the hobby. It was exactly the thing I wanted to play at the time and finding it let me know I was not the only one. James continues to challenge the assumptions of the hobby and make new things that I can't help but buy. The majority of my RPG budget goes to purchasing hard copies of the LotFP adventures and setting books because I trust that they will be worth it. The four ENnies from this year's awards for the 2015 flagship release, A Red and Pleasant Land, should help spread the world about this small press bastion of creativity.

11. Favourite RPG writer?

There is a plethora of fantastic content coming out for RPGs right now. There's so much I can't keep up with it all. Picking one person as a favourite when there are all these awesome choices is ridiculous. I don't want to leave it blank though, so I'll go with Zzarchov Kowalski on this one.

Zzarchov, of Unofficial Games, has written as a freelancer and self-published some of the most innovative content in the OSR. His adventures invariably have a fresh take on the source material. I'm particularly happy with my purchase of his Lovecraft adventure generator with weird time effects, an insidious cult and a collection of mundane yet nasty bastards, called Scenic Dunnsmouth. It is compatible with most of the OSR rulesets. In fact, I plan on using it in a science fiction game.

12. Favourite RPG illustration?

Despite all the amazing art coming out for RPGs these days and the wondrous variety, I don't have any trouble choosing my favourite RPG illustration. I am certain. It's "Throne-Crypt of the Blessed Afflictor" from Death Frost Doom by Jez Gordon.

("Throne-Crypt of the Blessed Afflictor" from Death Frost Doom by Jez Gordon)

Your players' characters' enter the room and you show them this image. They know they are in trouble. They know in an instant that it is time for the A-game or they are all rolling up new characters. He did all the interior art for the updated release of Death Frost Doom and he was the perfect choice. His style of heavy blacks embraced the infamous dungeon crawl and draped it in a new height of macabre tension.

It is impossible to overstate the talent of Jez Gordon. I love this piece because it is an example of quintessential Jez art. His ability to convey mood and texture with full-contrast black and white is amazing! His grasp of the interplay between light and shadow on any surface is nothing short of Mozart-level genius. Jez can reveal character while maintaining an iconic quality in a portrait that encourages player immersion. These two things are in conflict and should not be possible.

The fact that he is a top-notch graphic designer means if you don't love him you should hate him with all the jealousy your shrivelled little heart can hold. I want to work with Jez. I just need to write something good enough to deserve it.

(Random Jez Gordon image from Scenic Dunnsmouth for anyone who still needs convincing)

13. Favourite RPG Podcast?

I used to listen to a lot of these while I post-produced photos. Now that I've retired from the photography biz I've cut down my podcasts in a big way. My favourite is one of the few that made the cut. Fear the Boot has a long history, their own Con and an active forum because they put out a great quality cast. The interplay between the hosts is natural, the insights are solid and the sound quality is excellent. I don't always agree, but I'm nearly always entertained.

14. Favourite RPG accessory?

Google+ Hangouts are (is?) my favourite RPG accessory. Without it I would be lucky to play once per month. With it I can play as often as twice a week when my schedule allows for it. The ease at which I can attend a game after my kids go to bed is a game changer for me in the hobby.

15. Longest campaign played?

I think the Swords & Wizardry campaign that started our Tuesday night hangout game was the longest campaign I have ever played. I think we played if for approximately two years before our gamer ADD got the better of us and we started rolling through other systems and campaigns. We started playing it as a broadcast hangout around the six month mark and, aside from when we playtested A Red & Pleasant Land, broadcast our actual play nearly to the end of the campaign. It featured the creation of the "Lawful Brothel" to combat Chaos on every front, the transformation of a love seat into a holy relic and other shenanigans.

I think it lasted as long as it did because Chris likes to GM. Before that I don't think anyone I played with (including myself) managed to go more than a year before getting tired of running the game and passing the reigns to someone else.

16. Longest game session ever played?

Back in university we played though a long weekend once or twice running on enthusiasm, take-out and caffeine. All-nighters and two-day games were common on the long weekends as well since the laws in Ontario back then meant everything was closed on all Sundays and the Mondays of the long weekend. If the weather was bad we buckled down for some gaming goodness.

17. Favourite fantasy RPG?

Dungeons and Dragons is still my favourite fantasy RPG. There are different editions, versions and clones of it but it's all D&D* to me. I love it. It was my gateway into the hobby and I always return to it knowing it will be a good time.

(*In the spirit of full disclosure I have to say my exception to this statement is 4th edition D&D which never felt like D&D. I know it's a great game that many people enjoy. It should be called something else.)

18. Favourite Sci-fi RPG?

I loved Star Frontiers as a kid and later played the hell out of GURPS Space, but my favourite in the SF genre is the West End Games D6 Star Wars. The way the system supports the crazy, cinematic action is brilliant and fun to play. Star Wars is more science fantasy than science fiction but it's close enough for jazz.

We just started playing a Classic Traveller campaign on Tuesday nights but I don't have enough of a feel for the system to make any kind of definitive statement about it. I'm sure I'll let you know in a month or two. It has potential to be the favourite.

19. Favourite supers RPG?

I've played all kinds of these, but my favourite remains the old Marvel FASERIP game from the 80s. I prefer the advanced game and loved the improvements from the Ultimate Powers Book but I'm happy to play any way someone will run it. There's pile of material out there for it and the PDFs of the actual game books are available for free at Classic Marvel Forever!

The old game captures comic book action and four-colour morality in a great way. I wish I had bought a physical copy of this thing when I had the chance. A bunch of my friends had it though, so I basically had access to it any time I wanted when we were playing.

20. Favourite horror RPG?

Lamentations of the Flame Princess borrows enough from the horror genre that I'm going to use it as my favourite horror RPG. It also qualifies as a version of D&D so it's hitting my list a few times.

I've played Call of Cthulhu, I simply prefer LotFP.

21. Favourite RPG setting?

The setting for the Talislanta RPG is my favourite. I love the rich, imaginative world full of intrigue and danger with a wide variety of people and creatures to interact with. I enjoy the homages to Vance and Bakshi and the straight up nose-thumbing at tolkienesque vanilla fantasy. I love the weird cities, the crumbling, faded and/or conquered empires. The vast rainbow of fantasy races and cultures creates so many possibilities! I love that even though there is a large library of free PDF materials adding wonderful detail to this world (like sentient snails who will talk your ear off) it is still a vast sandbox with huge continent for any group of players to explore and create with their own adventures for years. I love its long and sordid history spanning the creation, rise and fall of the different peoples of Talislanta. I love the airships and floating cities. I love the wild magic that permeates the world to the point that it is everywhere but is still merely a limited shadow of the ancient art that basically made Talislanta what it is.

22. Perfect gaming environment?

I have played RPGs in some odd places. A friend of mine worked as a janitor in his church so we would play there at one of the large tables and then give him a hand moving chairs around on a Sunday evening. The pentecostal church was not a bad place to play spooky Ravenloft games. We only ran into the pastor once. He was fine with it. He was probably thankful Mike was not out dancing, drinking and doing drugs like everyone else.

I like gaming in boardrooms. We had access to them for games back in university and college and now that I'm a real adult boardrooms are even easier to come by. The typical boardroom table is always a good size for even a large group to sit around and still have room for everyone's books, dice and other crap. It will usually accommodate a vinyl battle map too. The chairs are always comfortable. There are usually multiple bathrooms available. There is usually an LCD projector for sharing maps and images and in a pinch a white board is a great tool to clarify a complex situation.

The best feature of a boardroom is I don't have to clean up my house ahead of the game. I have two daughters. My house is a disaster.

23. Perfect game for me?

Nowadays I like a fast, rules-light game. I want to get to the stuff where we interact with the world and find new stuff.

I like rolling dice because the uncertainty creates an awesome tension. I need risk to make the successes meaningful. I don't like rolling dice more than once to resolve one action. This whole thing with the roll to hit, roll for damage, defender rolls dodge/soak/saving throw... Blargh! It should be player describes the awesome they want, rolls dice, GM describes outcome based on roll and on to the next thing!

The perfect game is flexible! With room for anything to happen! difficulty is on a reasonable curve that makes adjudication of any hair-brained scheme fair, fast and consistent.

I want depth of possibility with pulpy action and quiet intrigue in the same game. I want a game that can make combat, gritty, dangerous, brutal and short but still accommodate battle with creatures of an entirely different scale such as a dragon or giant.

I want a game with an open, fluid magic system. One that allows players to take advantage of their imaginations but still has reasonable limits on what it can do to protect the setting/campaign from world-breaking shenanigans.

I want all these things and more in one game. Since I haven't found it, I'm writing it. I'm hoping to have a playtest document for the basic system in the next few weeks so I can start ironing out the kinks, one piece at a time this fall.

24. Favourite house rule?

Back when we played 2e D&D we did initiative on a D10. Every round was split into ten segments and the casting time for spells was also measured in segments. We played it that when a caster rolled initiative they would start casting on the segment on the die and casting would last however many segments the casting time of the spell listed and go off on that last segment. The house rule part was you had to damage a caster during the actual casting segments to interrupt a spell before it activated. If a caster rolled a 6 on the initiative die and cast a 3-segment casting spell, the spell would go off on segment 9. The same spell could only be interrupted on segment 6, 7 or 8.

The rule made it harder to wreck spells in casting unless you held action waiting for them or simply became lucky. It also made low-level and short-casting-time spells like magic missile more useful since they were so hard to interrupt. We ruled the power words impossible to interrupt which only made them that much more scary. Spell casting foes demanded a whole new level of strategy for how to best use the initiative. It also meant the PCs could be careful how they used their own spells to make certain they were effective. It was pretty awesome.

25. Favourite revolutionary game mechanic?

It's a toss up between the Boon mechanic of Barbarians of Lemuria and the Advantage mechanic of D&D 5e. I can't decide because they are effectively the same thing but enter the game in slightly different ways. With BoL you get a bonus D6 when doing something your character is particularly suited to and can suffer the opposite when doing something within a special weakness. The 5e system of rolling two D20s and picking the highest with advantage and the lowest with disadvantage has essentially the same effect. The 5e is typically a situational bonus that a character can take by jumping on a table for the high ground or something but can also be a class feature or result of a feat like the BoL Boons. I suppose a BoL GM could assign situational Boons if s/he wanted to as well.

What I like about these two mechanics is the effect shifts the curve of probability to either a positive or negative outcome. It's not a set value so it adds an extra element that can make for some heroic success or epic failure. That's fun! It's also simple to adjudicate so there's no arguing over how much bonus a certain cation gives you. The advantage is the advantage and that is all. Roll and move on!

I know I said earlier that I don't like rolling extra dice for a single action but this method works for me because the dice are rolled together, adding no real extra time to the process.

26. Favourite inspiration for your game?

I take inspiration from so many places. Old pulp stories I've read and re-read, novels, movies (good and bad, often the best stuff comes from the bad ones), TV shows, comics, crazy stories that come from shooting the shit with people, real-life news-type events, history, religion, myth, RPG adventures/settings/books, and art.

My favourite RPG inspiration is art. The fantastic scenes of a good artist always inspire me. I enter their weird worlds with my mind and explore out-of-view locales, adding to what they've shown me and travelling deeper into it. With great art as a starting point I could end up anywhere. So as far as inspiration goes art works as the first step on a journey I didn't know I wanted to take until it showed me the door.

There's no style that holds me either. I mentioned Jez Gordon in no uncertain terms above but I also like everything from the dreamlike, exotic paintings of Frank Frazetta, to the stylized realities of Larry Elmore and Kieth Parkinson, to the hyper-reality of Jason Rainville.

(Cover image: "The Magnificent Joop Van Ooms" by Jason Rainville)

27. Favourite idea for merging two games into one?

I've done a lot of this sort of thing over the years. Taking the best bits from multiple systems and hooking them together to get a better overall experience. Often it's worked, especially if it's using space combat from one game and RP from another. Other times it hasn't.

Games are crafted better now than they used to be though. I haven't seen a need for this kind of thing in any major way. Mixing and matching elements of different OSR games doesn't count because they are too close together mechanically to be called a mashup and the base rules are crying out for more stuff to be bolted on anyway.

I'll just answer this one with my favourite merging of rules with a setting that doesn't fit it to make something new. I've mentioned LotFP in the Old West before, but my favourite of these is Dogs in the Vineyard used to play a Doctor Who campaign.

28. Favourite game I no longer play?

With everything I have to choose from in games I no longer play my favourite is not terribly exciting. It might have something to do with the internet finding me all kinds of people to play nearly any game. I've even played RIFTs in the last year!

Second Edition D&D is my favourite RPG I no longer play. I can't see myself playing it again either.

Part of what made it great is how I knew it so well I could adjudicate player actions on the fly using comparable rules as framework to keep everything consistent and fair. The kit system supplied PC variety without bogging down character generation. There were so many spells! I love spells! People complain it was a scrubbed up version of D&D but it wasn't hard to put the demons and devils back in. We still had the fiend folio after all. Assassins were a kit. The complete humanoids book brought back the half-orc PC and doubled down with more evil races for player characters. It was certainly the best supported system of D&D with so much supplemental material produced the game became a beautiful mosaic of possible play and the Planescape setting became the bridge to bring them all together.

I also ran a strongly house-ruled version of 2e D&D so it could take months to figure out how to play it the fun way again. That makes starting over an unattractive prospect.

The last reason I no longer play is I gave all my 2e books away before moving out of my home city 20 years ago. I don't like playing from a PDF and I do not have the means to replace what was hundreds of dollars of books then and may amount to thousands on eBay now (with shipping and scarcity factored in).

I wish I still had those books. Not to play, but as a souvenir of the years of good fun I had with some wonderful people. And to mine for ideas.

29. Favourite RPG website or blog?

Three years ago James Maliszewski was chased off the internet for a kickstarter gone wrong. In the end he bowed out as gracefully as he could under the circumstances and everyone eventually got the thing that matched their contribution so I'm not interested in reopening that drama. The real cost of the Dwimmermount debacle was my favourite RPG blog: Grognardia. James wrote a compelling and entertaining blog about games with detail and careful thought at a rate that boggles my mind. They are some great blogs out there now with tonnes of excellent, game-able content, but I still miss the way Grognardia connected what was happening in gaming at the moment to the history that spawned it all. It offered a kind of context that I found useful as I re-entered the hobby and, above all, it made me feel welcome.

Others who have caused far more lasting harm than James have received a pass from the online hobby community. It would be nice if he could get the same forgiveness.

30. Favourite RPG playing celebrity?

I like how Vin Diesel gets excited when he talks about D&D. His contagious enthusiasm and A-list celebrity status makes him a great ambassador for the hobby. Wil Wheton on the other hand is actively trying to make RPGs more accessible to more people through the leverage of his nerd-culture celebrity. With his well-produced actual plays I have to give the top spot to Wil Wheton.

31. Favourite non-RPG thing to come out of RPGs?

This hobby has brought me into contact with some of the most talented, creative, brilliant and compassionate people I have had the pleasure to call my friends. I don't know if it is the mix of traits needed to project yourself into an imaginary person's experience that makes the friends I've made through the hobby so amazing or I am simply lucky beyond words. I don't care.

The lasting friendships I've made thanks to these silly games is the single greatest thing to come out of them and a value that has made and continues to make my life better.

I know I promised the full 45, but I think I'll post the original 31 for now and follow up with the rest of the questions in a second post.

Wargaming in 3D

Dissatisfaction with the current state of tabletop wargames is something of a recurring theme on the internet. People complain about how they don't like the new rules, the obsolescence of their minis, the necessity of buying the latest spat books, how constrictive the splat books are, and other ways the hobby is set up to milk gamers for cash. A recent Google+ thread rehashed all these issues and more.

Every time the conversation starts up I'm taken back to my beginning in the hobby in the 1980s. Back then, the only thing we needed to play was the rulebook. One rulebook full of options for building armies and manoeuvring them on the battlefield for epic battles.

I started playing with the third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle from Games Workshop that my friends and I picked up at the local comic store. It wasn't long before the owner of the store was playing with us and then adding tables with terrain. Tabletop wargaming has only grown in Sudbury through the years since then.

When we started there were no restrictions on minis for "official play" or any of that nonsense. Any mini was a potential combatant. We used the GW minis because they were often the best available at the time but most armies included minis from Grenadier, Ral Partha and others. About the only thing holding the rag-tag forces together were fantasy race themes and uniform colours.

For our first games we didn't even use miniatures. We started out with coloured cardstock cut into bases. Even after we embraced the painting and modifying miniatures part of the hobby, it was still normal to see to cardstock minis with pictures or descriptions written on them fielded along side painted and unpainted miniatures.

Those early games were pretty wild. There were high elf armies fielding huge trebuchets, mixed forces that made no sense, and a list of other things that violated our assumptions about the fantasy setting the battles took place in. That all changed with the release of the Armies book in 1988. 

The Armies book had lists of troops that fit the theme of each race and rules for allied forces and hiring mercenaries. The flavour of the setting informed 

the rosters without throwing everything out of balance. For example, elves didn't have access to heavy artillery but they did have dragons. The restrictions gave each army its own specialities and strong points. It made the choice of forces more interesting than before. It did not stop us from using non-GW minis. If anything, our needs for cheap masses of things like wood-elf spearmen only increased with Armies book. As a joke I even fielded a tree from a train set with googly eyes stuck on it as a treeman miniature.

It feels like there were less rules back then and it made for more fun. The only real problem was the magic system. It was so random. There were spells in the lists that were battle-winners. The "Vorpal Hurricane of Chaos" could devastate an army and make it impossible to fight with anything other than long range missile weapons. 

The rules have changed over the editions. There have been so many editions of WFB and 40K, the biggest challenge when I play is remembering which of the rules in my head apply to the current game. The rules have improved a little but mainly it has tweaked things such as shifting focus back and forth from missile combat to melee combat. 

Certainly magic has gotten better since those crazy games in the 80s. I think the best version of magic was the one that used the card decks for the different kinds of magic and a power deck to represent the ebb and flow of magic on the battlefield. It made magic an important part to any strategy without allowing the game to turn on it. Almost all of the handful of spells available to a wizard would be useful. It was random without being stupid. 

Still, with the army splat books pushing the envelope farther with each release the special rules appear to escalate in a vicious circle. The last few editions have been less about improving the rules and more about wiping the slate clean to re-establish balance between the available forces.

The love affair with splat books probably came out of the success of the two Realms of Chaos books. These books are notorious for the amazing art and over-the-top craziness for content. Not buying these is my one regret from those days. I picked up Warhammer Siege which we ended up using well into the later editions, but the Realms of Chaos were something that Games Workshop never did again. They never pushed as far or as high as it did with those books. My friend had them and I read through their copies but didn't buy my own because I didn't play Chaos. Sadly, I had no idea what a rare thing it was to have dark fantasy explored so deeply and so well in game form. I could write pages about the art but it's all been said before elsewhere on the gaming blogosphere.

Despite all of the complaining, tabletop wargaming appears to be in something of a resurgence. There are more games to choose from now, with War Machine in particular taking some serious ground in the hobby. I even seen some reports of people playing H.G. Wells' Little Wars. I hear doom and gloom about Games Workshop, but the local store still sells a tonne of it and hosts multiple game nights filling all the tables so even the complainers are still playing it.

For me, what I really want is the excitement of those early games where the rules helped us have crazy fights on four by eight foot areas of carpet blocked off in chalk and covered in a mishmash of train set and fantasy terrain. I miss those loose games where fielding a model like a dragon could be a critical hard point in the battle line or an awful waste of points depending on how things came out with the tactics and dice.  I don't want to play the old game though. I still have the books but I don't want to use them because years of play has taught me a thing or two about how rules shake out at the table. My involvement with the OSR for RPGs has also convinced me that sometimes stepping back to earlier editions and then stepping forward in a new direction with the benefit of years of development can yield some awesome results.

The first time I encountered the complaining about GW was three or four years ago. I decided I could do better so I spent a few months designing a new wargame. I built in the flexibility to use a wide variety of miniatures and settings, from gonzo steampunk fantasy to historical re-enactment. That recent thread on G+ brought it back to me as something others might enjoy too. The first time I shared the playtest document I didn't have the blog as a reference point for development of it and it basically petered out as I became busy with other things.

For the dice mechanic it uses a variant of my 3D System. I always found the rolling of one die per mini (to hit and another to wound and then another for an armour save...) to be tedious. I understand that the large number of dice made chance less of an issue since the odds would wash out with more dice, but it makes for a slow game with unit fights taking too long. It means battles had to be fought between limited numbers of units if the players had any hope of finishing. To fix that I used rolls of three six-sided-dice totalled with all modifiers for each unit. One throw per side, per turn for each unit in combat speeds everything up and still mitigates the luck factor with the results curved on the three dice.

I've tested it a bit and the point spreads seem balanced so far. The rules have worked well enough for me but I haven't had much feedback from others on how their games went with it. I'm still not sure about the rules for flying creatures so I'd like to hear about how that's worked out in play for others. The magic system is pretty basic, but fits the rules-light system well. The magic makes the wizard models a flexible tactical piece that can affect the battle without turning the game in to a wizard's duel. Success seems a little difficult for larger effects though so I'm toying with lowering/removing some of the modifiers or dropping down the base target numbers for success. Again, any feedback about how it goes in play would be appreciated.

I'm attaching the link to the original playtest document. The game hasn't changed much from this original version. There's about 12 pages of actual rules here. The first page you can ignore. It's old text explaining what I was trying to accomplish with the game and contact info for feedback. The rest of it is a rough draft of the Open War Fantasy Battle game. Give it a try. Let me know about any holes or things that don't work in your games. I'm aware of the typos but I'd like know if the language is difficult to understand in any way. I had originally envisioned a pocket mod version of the game, but I don't see that happening ever. Too much detail would be lost.

So give the alpha version of Open War Fantasy Battle a whirl and let me know how it works out!

Thanks!

Playing Boardgames Wrong!

Last week I went out to an evening with friends that revolved around playing some boardgames. There was great food, drink and a couple of copies of Settlers of Catan.

Settlers of Catan is a popular board game, largely because its design keeps almost everyone at the table in the running for the win until the last turn. It's often a close win, keeping tensions high and making it exciting to play. I love it for these things as well as the multiple levels of strategy that allow a nimble thinker to change direction and pull off a win even when it looks like all is lost. Dog-piling on the front-runner is rare, since you never can be sure who the points-leader actually is. The players tend to need each other so the game is cordial and burning someone is something to be entered into carefully.

The place where Settlers is lacking is the instructions. They are pretty terrible. There are on-line resources that are useful but you need to be careful about whether those are official rules or interpretations. The rules in the box are not helpful. My friends who hosted the evening played their first game of Catan with my wife and I. They fell in love with the game, bought their own copy and immediately introduced it to more people. What they didn't do is read the rules. They had played with us and thought they knew them. The people they taught to play learned from them so almost everyone at the party was "cheating."

It would be more accurate to say they were all playing with the same house rule. As a player of Table-top RPGs I am used to and comfortable with house-rules so after teasing them a bit for being cheaters I accepted their method and we started the game. While we were playing I was observing the mechanics of the game and thinking about how the change disrupted the balance of play. In an RPG balance is not terribly important because the lack of structure allows so many variables into the play that balance is largely irrelevant. In a board game, the structure of play is fixed. All of the options are proscribed under the rules and flow of play. The variables allowed are strictly controlled features like die rolls or card draws. The trading element of Catan is another variable, but even it has specific rules. The board is also random but its set-up is still carefully structured.

In the set-up phase of Catan where players are placing their pieces they will collect resource cards only from the second (and last) settlement piece they place. On Wednesday, players were collecting resource cards from both settlements. I resisted this cheaty method of starting the game, but couldn't form a compelling argument against their logic that this was more fun and accelerated game play.

It certainly accelerates game play, but it gives the people playing first and second a huge advantage. The regular rules temper the advantage of placing settlement pieces first by making the first players choose the territory that gets them their resources last. It also tempers the advantage of playing earlier by making certain that first couple of players have fewer resources to work with. The cheaty resources for the everything house-rule disrupts this balance completely.

Sadly, I didn't understand the effect of the rule completely until after I had won the game. At the time I was excited that I had one in spite of the house rule, but now I realise I likely won because of it since I went second.

What I've taken away from this experience is a new appreciation for the elegant design of one of my favourite boardgames. Settlers of Catan is a well-crafted experience for any group that I would heartily recommend. It is balanced and fair. Chances are when I play over at their place they'll want to play their way so all this musing only serves to increase my appreciation for the magic of the game design. I doubt it will change anyone's mind about how they play.

I've never considered board game design before. It presents some interesting challenges. Who knows? Maybe this look behind the curtain of Catan will inspire me to follow though on some crazy idea for a board game if the muse ever strikes me.

RPG Adventures in Space and Time or, Dogs in the TARDIS

It never ceases to amaze me the depth of creation in the world of RPGs. There are rules and  systems created for virtually every kind of play and to cover every eventuality and possibility at the table somewhere. The result doesn't always match the intention and sometimes you get the perfect system to play one game already completed in another.

Licensed properties are a special case because every time a new company acquires them they need to update the rules system to be consistent with their own brand, differentiate it from an older version of game or capture an aspect of the intellectual property the new designers think is more important than others who have worked with the same fiction.

Few intellectual properties exemplify all of these circumstances better than Doctor Who. There are a host of games out there for it with Cubical 7's version as the currently available, award winning choice. I haven't played Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space but I've heard some great things about it. The fact is I live in Canada and it's produced in the UK. Between the high price of everything in the UK and the cost of shipping from there to here the total cost of the thing is just too much for me. Lucky for me I already have a set of rules on my hard drive that will work with Doctor Who quite well.

"Doctor Who Space Travel" by David Hoffricther

D. Vincent Baker released Dogs in the Vineyard back in 2004. Since then countless people have used it to play religious cowboys going from town to town to root out evil and get into gunfights with sinners. Baker says he created the conflict resolution mechanics to create tension in social situations because, as a GM, he felt he was allowing his NPCs (non-player-characters) to agree with player character requests far too often. His solution to that problem gave us a game that fits the feel of the conflict you would find in a typical episode of Doctor Who.

Conflict in Doctor Who usually involves talking, running and getting captured. The running in particular has drawn attention over the years but in the newer series it is something writers have embraced and really, well, run with.

Cubical 7 uses initiative to encourage talking and roleplay over going straight to violence. The order of action places weapons use last and talking first so weapons are downplayed as a tool for players and allow the better play to keep the players one step ahead of the violent, oafish NPCs. It fits the feel of the series well as characters always have a chance to say something or run away before they are killed by the bad guys. It also explains why Captain Jack never actually uses his wonderful sonic pistol and Leela never gets to stab anyone.

Despite the fact that Cubical 7 clearly has a good handle on Doctor Who as an RPG, there's a few reasons why I think Baker's game is well suited to play a Doctor Who style RPG campaign. Dogs in the Vineyard's conflict resolution system works on a process of escalation that typically also begins with talking and moves upward as characters resort to other means to add to their dicepool in order to win the conflict. The emphasis on talking to open any interaction compliments the material the same way as Cubical 7's initiative system, but it's the way the conflict can end that really works. The dice pools are added to the conflict two at a time until someone has to use more than two to match the opponent's score (and suffers consequence because of it) or someone decides to Give.

The Give mechanic allows the character to avoid the consequences by accepting a loss of whatever was at stake. Accepting this loss allows the character to hold onto the highest die in the pool to use in the next conflict. In a Doctor Who game, Giving probably results in capture but that extra die is helpful in getting the big bad to explain the master plan and/or escaping.

"Yes, that sounds like a great plan. It's a good thing you didn't tell anyone about it."

A typical scenario would feature the Doctor uncovering an area in the basement that has a technology far beyond the period and locale the episode is set in. He starts prowling through the high-tech lair and is confronted by a Sontaran. That's bad news for the Doctor as he just figured out it was Sontaran technology and he has no way of warning his companions upstairs. The player knows talking is his strong suit but the Sontarans have a habit of escalating to violence so he just runs for it so he can warn the others and come up with a plan.

The conflict becomes a chase through the corridors of the secret base with the Sontaran shooting its big, honking space gun to get some extra dice. The Doctor is quickly outclassed in this conflict so he pulls out his Sonic Screwdriver to try to close and lock a door behind him and add 2d10 to his pool for this wonderful little item. The player locks the door well but holds his best roll (a 7) back in case the Sontaran has any tricks of his own. Turns out the Sontaran has a big, excellent explosive device in its equipment and makes short work of the door. The Doctor immediately Gives so he can keep his best roll (the 7) and have the advantage in the coming interrogation with the Sontaran commander of the secret base so he can find out what is going on and hopefully get away back to his companions upstairs.

Giving certainly fits in well with Doctor Who, but what about the consequences mentioned earlier when the stakes are too high to stop? That tends to happen quite a bit in the new series. The Fallout could be the loss of an important item. NPCs can fall into that category and we can see a high body count in the odd episode where the stakes are particularly high. If things get too rough the Doctor might be injured and forced to regenerate. That means new character generation and maybe a conflict of its own. For a Companion maybe it means being left behind or traumatized to the point they can't travel with the Doctor any more.

The raise and see conflict resolution with escalation is a great system for a Doctor Who RPG, but what about the rest of the game? The premise of Dogs in the Vineyard is a group of people wandering from town to town uncovering demonic influence and sorting out trouble. There's a system for town creation in the rules that helps keep things interesting and allows the GM to easily present a variety of challenges.

A game about a group of people wandering through time and space uncovering alien incursions and sorting out trouble is a pretty good description of Doctor Who. The actual locales that any given episode is set in is usually no bigger than a town so that's not a problem. The town-creation system would need some tweaks to make it fit Doctor Who but with all of time and space to choose from it should be easy to come up with an exciting variety of challenges to keep a campaign rolling for years.

For character generation all the cultural stuff from the game can be tossed out but relationships certainly continue to be useful. Family seems to get dragged into conflict in the new series often enough and certainly the relationship between the Doctor and the Companions should be worth some big dice. The Doctor is at his most dangerous when one of his companions is in mortal danger and certainly they have been full of surprises when he needs help.

Character creation in Dogs in the Vineyard also includes playing out a conflict as part of the character's background. I'd modify this conflict to always be about how the companion met the Doctor. For the Doctor it should be the theft of the TARDIS.

For my campaign I'd likely have another renegade Timelord, like the Doctor, as the PC that drives the TARDIS and gathers the rest of the party, rather than have the players playing the actual Doctor and his companions. A "Doctor's" name is as menaingless as the Doctor's so it makes sense for them all to take a title such as Head, Traveller, Professor, Elder, Inspector or even Doctor (just not that Doctor).

Honestly, it fits so well I'm surprised I haven't seen a Dogs in the TARDIS hack before now. It's not like there aren't a good number of Dogs in the Vineyard Hacks to use as guides. I'll have to put this on my list. Message me if you do it or find another one first!

Birtwhistle's Portal of Temporal Convenience #raggisrejects

A while back James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess fame put a call out for magic items that fit the particular feel of the LotFP universe. Most of them were rejected for one reason or another and people are posting them to the web under the tag #raggisrejects

The following is my reject, Birtwhistle's Portal of Temporal Convenience:

This door appears to be of ordinary size and made of a hard, red wood. Whether the red is its natural colour or it is stained that way is a mystery. Tiny, shallow carvings of arcane symbols cover both facings of the door and seem to swirl around the ornate, silver doorknob.

If this door is placed in a doorway it will swell or shrink to fit the door frame within 1d12 rounds. Once it fits the door its silver hinges will attach themselves to the door jamb within another 1d6 rounds unless someone takes action to do it themselves first. Once the door is hanging and closed the magic activates.

Opening the door converts the room beyond into a temporal anomaly. Anyone entering the room before it is closed will share the same time travel experience and be able to perceive each other. If the door is closed and opened again subsequent people entering the room will see the room as empty and have a different time travel experience requiring its own roll. The door remains for 8 hours after the first time someone uses it to enter the room and then disappears until the occupants exit the room.

To use the Portal of Temporal Convenience a person needs only to open the door, enter the room beyond and close the door. Once inside the person must remain there for 8 hours (the same as the door remains). If anyone opens the door and leaves before the allotted time has passed within the room, they will exit at the same moment they enter. The collision of two versions of the same person will cause a paradox, resulting in a catastrophic implosion sucking everything within the blast radius out of time and existence. To find the blast radius simply multiply the height, width and depth of the room to which the door leads.

If the occupant or occupants of the room remain there for at least eight hours before leaving roll a D30. The result is the number of days forward in time they have travelled. If a one is rolled the Referee must roll 1D6, two D12s, Percentile Dice (D100) and another D30. The D6 indicates the direction in time the party moves: 1 or 2 indicates they will go backward in time and a 3 through 6 indicates they move forward through time. The D12s indicate the month of the year the party arrives in. Choose the result on the die that is closest to the spring. The result of the Percentile Dice indicates how many years the party has travelled. The D30 indicates which day of the month they arrive.

If the door is removed from the outside during the 1D6 hours it exists after the party enters or it is removed by someone else who has used it for a temporal experience that ends before the party inside, the door simply will not open for the remaining party. They can try to exit the room through another door or window but that will result in the same mishap as rolling a one on the D30. The magic of the door makes the doorway safe. Travelling through an untreated portal is dangerous. Any person doing so will take 1D6 damage for every 10 years or part thereof travelled. The only advantage is another portal can be used as an exit before the eight hours has elapsed with no chance of a time paradox implosion.

It is possible that the door will open in a time where the room does not exist. The door frame and the room beyond it will exist as long as the door is open or until eight hours have past. The room can be seen and even returned to through the doorway while it exists. Once the door closes or after the eight hours have past, the door frame disappears and the door falls to the ground.

Edgar Birtwhistle was a wizard whose hatred of winter was only matched by his disgust with travel and foreigners. To solve his problem he spent decades researching and experimenting with forbidden magics and time manipulation before finally creating his Portal of Temporal Convenience. Exactly when the door was created and even when Birtwhistle lived is a mystery as his life is scattered throughout three different centuries. It is believed he lost possession of the door and disappeared out of time when it was removed from its frame by a disgruntled apprentice sometime in the 16th century. The current physical and temporal location of Birtwhistle’s Portal of Temporal Convenience is unknown.

Time Travel and Explaining Your Character is a Super Hero

Our Marvel Super Heroes game is into its fifth week now and we've already run into a serious problem with time travel.

(Inspector Spacetime by Graffitihead)

Our characters travelled back to 1963 to find out who really killed JFK. The reasons for this move are somewhat obscure and possibly not very good. It started well as our invisible super hero team set up to observe, but things unravelled almost immediately. Player Characters should not be allowed anywhere near actual history. If there is a historical event that players can derail and just plain mess up, things will go badly for history. This is the lesson our group learned on Tuesday when we foiled the assassination of JFK.

I haven't run a game featuring time travel yet, but I've been planning an adaptation of an RPG to make it work as an episodic time travel game for a while now (that post is still half done). In an historical setting or time travel game I think the history should be interacted with on a small, personal level. There are people who live there who are affected by the normal progress of history who can also be affected by the presence of the characters. Cool things can happen when those two forces interact.

Having the players derail the major events of the historical setting causes so much trouble for the GM! The effects turn into this awful butterfly wings chain of events, turning everything on its head. I don't know what our GM, Chris, is going to do now that we stopped the JFK assassination. We can only hope that the failed first attempt will force whoever is behind it to show their hand on a second attempt so we can figure out who did it and get back to our own time. Otherwise, our party is doing exactly the wrong thing and will never see our home time again.

One fun problem with time travel is interacting with people outside of your timeline who know about you and drop weird hints with their questions about where the character is in his or her timestream: "Are you married yet?" That's one of those small scale interactions that can be a lot of fun.

Another problem we encountered that was specific to our Supers game is the need to explain what we are since there are no supers in the time we've entered. Thanks to that situation, "I'm a super-hero, bitch!" might become the catch phrase for our campaign.

It will be interesting to see where we take it from here. We've committed to playing the Marvel FASERIP game for 6 months, so if we can't make it work in the alternate timeline we've created we may be rolling up characters again soon.

Our Marvelous Adventures are broadcast over youtube as we play in google+ hangouts, so they are easy to find if you want to check out our super-powered shenanighans in detail.

New Class for LotFP: the Monk

Last post I was talking about moving LotFP forward from the Early Modern Era to a Weird Wild West setting. One trope that is often revisited is the idea of the oriental monk in the old west. There's no reason not to have a Monk Class in the Early Modern Era since travel between continents is viable and cultures are mixing through trade. The main inspiration for the class as I have it here is the monk travelling the old west.

I've been pretty disappointed with the Monk Class in the past. It's often a half-assed thief with super fighty powers bolted on top. The beauty of the LotFP system is the point system for skills is more flexible than the percentages for thief skills so there is no reason to feel bound by any of that stuff. The Lamentations adventure Qelong has the Lotus Monk but it's for NPCs only and is basically a mystical fighter with magic powers. It is not a great fit to make a player character in the old west.

LotFP has a system in place to avoid power creep and protect the Fighter's place amongst the classes. The only class that increases in attack bonus is the Fighter, all the others have the +1 attack bonus they start with. I don't think the Monk Class needs an attack bonus to still have the flavour of a mystic/unstoppable warrior.

Monks are incredible athletes, performing amazing feats of balance and withstanding terrible punishment that would drop lesser people. Taking that into account, the best LotFP class to use as the base for the Monk is the Dwarf. The Monk would use the Dwarf experience table and saving throws. The Architecture Skill would be replaced by both Climb and Stealth. None of the other Dwarf abilities would apply and the Monk would use the D8 hit die of the Fighter and use the Fighter minimum hit points for first level to represent their physical resilience. At tenth level the Monk uses a +3 and no constitution modifier instead of additional hit dice.

(The Climb skill for the Monk Class)

Climb is not the careful scaling of sheer walls the Specialist would do but more of a leaping, acrobatic bouncing from surface to surface to ascend bare walls. Stealth is an obvious choice for a monk.

Despite the obvious vitality of monks the Constitution modifier the Dwarf gets is not entirely appropriate. Much of the monk's abilities come from a greater connection to the world and their training is centred around that. The Monk Class gets a +1 Wisdom Modifier.

To embrace the mystical aspect of the monk, add the total wisdom modifier to Open Doors rolls to show how their connection to the world around them gives them power over it and allows them to punch through doors and whatnot. The Referee can apply any necessary modifiers for different materials but I would likely let the Monk PCs break harder and harder materials as they level up.

The monk in Qelong adds level to AC, attack bonus and so on. With this setup, the Qelong monk becomes absolutely ridiculous around level 8. The LotFP Rules are designed to avoid power creep so I think the standard +1 attack bonus is sufficient and no AC improvement ladder is necessary.

I like the monk as a fast, difficult to hit character in tune with the space surrounding him or her and able to use that connection to the world to fight with a preternatural speed.

Wisdom is a huge factor in the Monk's ability to attack and defend. When not wearing armour the monk adds the total wisdom modifier to Armour Class. This bonus is usable with a shield, while making use of cover and in addition to any modifier from dexterity. As long as the monk is only lightly encumbered s/he adds wisdom to his/her attack bonus in addition to any other modifier. These combinations make the monk pretty bad-ass out of the gates at first level, but if you are using the normal roll-three-in-order character generation it should not imbalance the game.

Monks are experts at evasion and grappling. When wrestling they add their level to the D20 roll instead of their attack bonus. A monk may also substitute the wisdom modifier for the strength modifier. Monks can use either wisdom or strength when wrestling, not both. You can fight smart or strong, but not both at once.

Monks are renowned for their ability to fight with and without weapons. The precision and speed of their strikes defy reason. To represent the flurry of of strikes landing in a single round and the improvement that only experience can bring, the Monk's hand-to-hand damage is determined by level rather than the weapon used. This starts at 1D4 at first level. It increases to 1D6 at second level. At fifth level it increases to 1D8. It increases to 1D10 at eighth level and finally to 1D12 at tenth level.

As a warrior of exceptional training, like the fighter, the monk can use the martial manoeuvres: Press and Defensive Fighting.

That sums it up. A simple version of the monk with a framework of rules that should allow a player to roll to do cool monk-like stuff without making and of the other classes redundant. The focus on the physical suits a more modern setting and will work well with the Weird Old West.