Posts in Category: Games
D&D Begone, my take on things
There’s a lot of churn and chop in the TTRPG industry thanks to Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro trying to change the foundation of the Open Game License. There’s a lot of coverage on lots of web sites about this. If you need more background, check out the Youtuber DndShorts at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4kGMsZSdbY
My opinion:
The game Dungeons and Dragons has been in a toilet spiral since the fourth edition and WotC is still trying to migrate the TTRPG game to a video-game style of play. 5e was an attempt to stifle Paizo and other companies who were trying to fill the space of table top, paper and pencil, printed book games. Now in the 2020s WotC thinks they can try this again with software (video-game engine VTT with AI DMs) and XboxLive/PSN style subscription fee for pdf over printed books. In order to make this transition complete WotC/Hasbro needs to make the traditional TTRPG market place undesirable and that means doing away with 3rd party content and making home-brew content difficult to use in the new setting.
My prediction:
How will this all play out? Badly for Hasbro. There is already an entire industry pushing out solo role playing experiences using video-game engines. There’s another entire industry pushing out team based playing experiences. Assassin’s Creed to Horizon Zero Dawn, Grand Theft Auto to World of Warcraft. In fact some of those video games produce paper and pencil TTRPGs. Why make a TTRPG out of Sea of Thieves or add a Conan Exiles source book to the Conan TTRPG?
Because people WANT to sit around a table (physically or virtually) with other people and IMAGINE. They want to tell their own stories using an intellectual property that they love.
In Conan Exiles you cannot talk to the dragons on the map. They just bite you. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a chat with them and find out why they sit in ruins at a bottom of a hole in the desert surrounded by undead hyenas? Perhaps they are lonely and doubtless annoyed with all the yowling dogs.
The silver lining
Just like the birth of Paizo during the 4e idiocy we will see a birth of something new as a result of this OGL/One D&D idiocy. Some of the vendors who are committed to printed books and paper and pencil will gain market share. Games that should be household names (7th Sea, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Savage Worlds, etc) will fill the void left when DnD becomes as half-assed quasi-MMO with no player agency and stifling IP rules and the players just wander off.
That’s WotC/Hasbro’s silver lining here. The public outcry is a gift. If they had just rolled out One DnD they have just faded into obscurity with other niche MMOs. WotC/Hasbro here’s your chance not to suck…
Vermont scifi & fantasy expo
Gamemeisters is proud to sponsor Red Hoodie Games at the Vermont scifi & fantasy expo this weekend (23-24 April) head over to the Champlain Valley expo and see Red Hoodie content and play a scene from The Painter & the Pirate.
Pieces of Soul
A kidnapping and a chase brings the heroes to the dark and mystical mountains of Eisen where they must confront an ancient horror. Can they rescue the victim? Can they stop the evil plot of a creature who’s lived for centuries?
You and your 7th Sea second edition group can find out. This is the last installment of the Tale of Art, Love, and Fear story arc now available for purchase at www.drivethrurpg.com
Running X2: Castle Amber again after 40 years
It’s been almost 40 years since I first brought a group of friends into The Castle Amber. Last night the grey mists swept in and the party awoke in an elegant foyer. Their hirelings and pack animals are waiting outside in the thin band of grass between the walls of the chateaux and lethal fog.
Rather than running this as a B/X we are using DCC for the mechanics and that has been a complete blast. The off the wall encounters and strangeness of the Amber family makes this such a fun adventure.
Why not break the boredom of centuries ensconced in a mansion by watching some unexpected guests wander around and get into trouble. Perhaps some family squabbles will be set aside (or resolved at sword point) by presence of these interlopers. At least it’s something new for the inhabitants.
For the adventures: adventures, riches, and really wild times. So far they’ve boxed, been blinded, and fought deadly slimes and oozes. I can’t wait to see what they do after lunch.
The Faux Marquess
The second adventure in my A Tale of Art, Love, and Fear is now available for purchase on drivethrurpg.com here https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354526/The-Faux-Marquess
This second 5-7 step story for 7th Sea second edition is a follow on adventure from The Painter and the Pirate, also for sale at drivethrurpg.com. The heroes attempt to find a woman that everyone thought had perished in a storm at sea. She’s very much alive, looks like a missing marquess, and has amnesia.
This second adventure offers more chances for fighting and chasing as the heroes work with or against one or both villains to help the “Marquess”
Traveller T5 first impressions
The PDF files for the recently concluded Traveller T5 3 big black books have been released to backers via drivethrurpg. I’ve read through Book 1 and here are my initial impressions:
Wow. It feels like the little black book. These PDFs are visually similar with a simple black and white presentation and a writing style that is concise and focused. For modern RPG people this will be a very different experience from the glossy full color pages with rules explained in great detail in multiple sections. I have started on Book 2 and the same feel and style are consistent.
One of the reasons I’m a fan of Traveller is that the game is imbued with science. The science fiction theme is an obvious reason, but the game system uses a base 33 numbering system (Original aka Classic Traveller uses hexidecimal) to represent stats for players, monsters, planets, and vehicles. The rules include mechanics for things like item quality and durability. Something lacking in most other RPGs. I’m D&D I can just wander around stabbing and slashing with my short sword adventure after adventure and never wonder about it breaking or needing to be sharpened. If I wander into a town and the blacksmith is making swords there’s no reason to upgrade from what I have because a short sword is a short sword is a short sword in D&D.
In Traveller that’s not the case. I have a cutlass that I’m using in an adventure and I stop in at a space port with a higher tech level than the planet where I bought my cutlass I can compare QREBS scores and see that the new carbon fiber aluminium cutlass is lighter and more reliable that my old steel one. QREBS includes quality, reliability, ease of use, bulk, and safety. Objects get a score and the referee and players can use this value to determine what equipment is good and if you have to use that chainsaw with the low QREBS score what may happen to you…
Having metrics and mechanics for things like planetary composition, item quality, and space travel that are based on physics and realism creates the impression of a science based game for me. I’m sure others may find the system overly nit-picky.
Book 1 does not have a lot of fluff and feels like a series of tables connected together with prose and examples in key places, but in general the book does not do a good job of explaining some basic rules clearly. I could not find character death rules in the book. In the combat chapter somewhere near the assigning damage rules you would expect to find a sentence or two about how to handle character death. There isn’t one. There is a rule for assigning damage and then a rule for assigning massive damage (nuclear explosion, decompression, vehicle impacts) and then a mention that if all stats are reduced to zero you die. I felt like that should have had its own paragraph.
As I continue working through the PDFs I find myself thinking about writing software to implement some of the tables and help with the game mechanics. I find this very thematic and yet another reason while Traveller is my favorite Sci-Fi game. I can see how that sort of mathy experience could be off putting to people used to some of the more modern RPGs.
New Pathfinder ACG Core set
The new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game core set arrived at the house yesterday. I broke it open and read the rules. The rule book has an excellent section for those of us who have played this game a bunch to highlight the new rules and some of the changed terminology.
Tonight I tried the starter adventure a few times with one character and it did not go well. These are some of the changes:
- Locations that have small, medium, and large deck settings that controls how many cards are at each location.
- Blessings have specific powers vs the generic give me an extra die on this roll.
- Cards have a numeric level value that maps roughly to the old basic or expert text
One thing I was hoping to change was the text size. The art is good and the boarders and colors are nice, but for a card game that is text heavy using a larger font would have been extremely helpful. I have had one friend say they will pass on the game due to the small text size.
Traveller vs Starfinder
Sci-fi role playing games have been around for a long time and I have been a fan since I first found the Traveller box set in the 1980s. A few decades later I found myself caught up in the Starfinder release by Paizo and ran a year of Starfinder Society play. I found that both systems had strengths and weaknesses and may appeal to different groups of players.
Starfinder is a science-fantasy RPG that is based in the Pathfinder universe. The game is very much a mixture of science fiction and fantasy. There is magic in this game and hi-tech. It’s a neat game with many interesting stories. I found it to be a little too fantasy and the rules seemed to be focused more on role playing and less on depicting sci-fi worlds. The planets descriptions don’t include gravitation constant or air pressure or atmospheric composition. I think this stems from the Pathfinder roots of the game where fantasy characters don’t leave the planet and never have to contend with three times normal gravity or an atmosphere that’s mostly ammonia. If you like role playing in a futuristic setting using a familiar ruleset that isn’t over loaded with science then Starfinder is a game for you.
Traveller is a much more realistic sci-fi role play game with actual physic equations in the book for interplanetary travel. The rules support all the realities that Starfinder glosses over. There is no fantasy, no magic, and no pantheon of semi involved deities. I think the challenge for new players is the dearth of materials and editions and meta-plots. I tend to play RPGs in localized settings and situations and original Traveller lends itself to this as well. The Imperium is always a large impenitrable backdrop in my games that players don’t interact with directly unless they are dealing with government issues. Akin to how I deal with the the DMV in real life. The universe in Traveller is giant, but since communications travel at the speed of spacecraft you can have local and isolated places that follow their own rules and social norms.
I like both systems. I enjoy Starinder when want to play Pathfinder in space and when I need a more crunchy science fiction adventure I head for Traveller.
Photosythesis – a review
The abstract tree growing and harvesting game from Blue Orange is not something that I would have normally picked up. It’s a game about growning trees. Every once in a while I find a game that is outside my normal fare (pirates, Cthulhu, space conquest, fantasy combat) that I find fun and fresh. Photosythensis is in this club.
GenCon 50
This year was the 50th anniversary of GenCon and it was a large and amazing trip. We went out for all four days and managed to try some new things. I played my first convention RPG session, the Starfinder test game. It was not bad but it did feel a bit off. We played a much more mechanical combat mission. With the mat and miniatures it felt more like a board-game than a true RPG experience. It was hard for me to build rapport with stranger so that I could play my character’s personality beyond the archetype.
Another new experience this trip was eating from the food trucks and drinking in the beer tent. In years past we’ve had minors in tow and it was difficult to try these things. The Sun King beer was very good and the wait for dinner was not terrible. The people in line were friendly and the food was very tasty.
The expanded exhibit hall was still very cramped. It could have been the record attendance but the experience matched years past with being bumped and jostled and slowly wading through people to get anywhere. The stadium display of GenCon’s history was very well done and I hope GenCon continues to move more things into the stadium in future years.