Opinion poll. In an Unspecified Medievalesque Fantasy RPG, an average combat encounter (not including large set-pieces or arc-ending showdowns) is best when it lasts:
Busy looking at apartments, getting moving quotes, etc. Not a lot of time for games at the moment.
But was thinking earlier about ways to combine CCG concepts of mana curve and tempo with RPG gameplay; something like a D&D prepared spellcaster combined with a ramp-up mechanic.
More on this to follow.
Catalyst Game Labs, who currently license the Shadowrun and Battletech IP, and additionally publish Eclipse Phase and CthulhuTech, are having some problems.
The result was that business funds had been co-mingled with the personal funds of one of the owners. We believe the missing funds were the result of bad habits that began alongside the creation of the company, which was initially a small hobby group. Upon further investigation, in which the owner has willingly participated, the owner in question now owes the company a significant balance and is working to help rectify the situation.
This hit RPG.net and Dumpshock last night via this post, which painted a considerably darker picture, and cited the missing funds as totaling $850,000.
It’s not good news either way, but hopefully they stay open and the freelancers get paid.
Sunday I ran a Cthulhutech one-off titled “Fear and Loathing on the Plateau of Leng”. It’s something of a last hurrah for me, almost certainly the last chance I’ll have to run a game here before I move in May. Also one of the larger games I’ve run in a while, with seven players, and certainly the longest single session I’ve GMed in quite a few years.
CT is a sci-fi game with Lovecraft trappings — humanity and its Giant Anime Robots vs. Migou space invaders vs. Things That Should Not Be (and their cultists). There’s a lot of truly shameless theft/homage (depending on how charitably you read it) from a few well-known anime series, though most of them are cited, so you can’t say you don’t know what you’re getting into. Macross + Evangelion + Guyver vs. Cthulhu actually turns out to be a fairly workable setting, at least at the level we were playing at, where I threw out all the rules I couldn’t remember and ran the game like an action movie.
Read the rest of ‘Cthulhutech Report’ »
I’ve been playing more board/card-y games than RPGs lately, so I’m going to chat about that for a while. More RPG stuff will come. Cthulhutech one-off this Sunday that I’m really looking forward to running, for example.
Anyway, I’ll get my two current favorites out of the way first, and those are Dominion and Race to the Galaxy. Both are fairly straightforward games (Race has a lot of icons but is simple in execution once you know them) that can be played very, very quickly by (notionally 2-6 but for best experience I’d say 3-5) experienced players. I’ve burned through a Dominion game in 15 minutes, and Race in 20, but they usually take more like 30-45; I’m just very impatient.
Great games to have, love them to bits, now let’s talk about Twilight Imperium. This isn’t a review so much as it’s a musing.
TI is a wargame, so block off 5-8 hours for a game right off the bat. While the rules are straightforward, if numerous, the set-up and “furniture” of the game is pretty complex. Also, it has a shitton of plastic spaceships and I am always pro- that. I’ve played it three times now, with 6, 4, and 3 people.
Based on that, I’d say with 4-6 people who all know the game, it’s awesome. Would play again, probably beats out Arkham Horror as my favorite board-game-related way to kill a lot of hours with a bunch of people, though AH is also pretty awesome. With 3 people, there are some scaling issues. Political strategies become disproportionately powerful as it’s harder to build opposition against votes that advantage one person; the “Imperial” strategy (which grants 2 VPs, with 10 VPs required to win, and therefore puts a clock on the game) goes around the table too quickly, giving a notable, though not insurmountable, advantage to whoever went first; the game ends before very many of the Public Objective cards have been revealed, which removes another clock element and leaves players fewer options to secure VPs; and some racial abilities are obviously better in smaller games.
So I probably wouldn’t play 3 again, or if I did, it would be with the alternate Imperial strategy (which has a slower clock).
I am a fan of the races, some more than others. Each has a couple of distinct powers that vary in usefulness and scope, and which are also balanced by their starting positions (some races with crappy powers get high-resource homeworlds and/or better starting fleets). There are a few that could stand to be tuned slightly, but they all play distinctively, which is nice. I’m definitely a fan of the Naalu, who get better fighters (and therefore tend to go with a fighter/carrier strategy), can always retreat from battles (which I should have used to picket my borders more effectively, but didn’t), and always act first in the round regardless of the initiative value of their strategy card (which is fantastic).
Last week I had the Mentek, who have fantastic cruisers and get to steal trade goods. The primary effect of that was that everyone spent their trade goods as soon as possible so I never got to steal any. PS: I still hate you all. But they get a really nice home system and a relatively decent starting fleet.
I didn’t really grok the game the first time I played, so eventually I’ll have to go back and try the L1z1x, who are apparently galaxy-crushing cyberzombies despite the fact that I ended up getting rolled by a bunch of brains in jars.
As with Arkham Horror, I don’t have time to play TI every week, but unlike AH, I probably would if I did.
Things that I can’t get out of my head.
Magic: The Gathering + Everway
Exalted + Traveller
OD&D + Dark Tower
oMage + Shadowrun
Most games start small, and get big.
Not all. Some cut straight to the big fight, the galactic scale, empires and civilizations. Some stay tightly-focused on the character issues and the street-level problems.
But most don’t. Scale increases over time; the party starts out dealing with small issues, gradually these become larger issues; and eventually the players are battling the forces of Eternity on the edge of Oblivion for the Fate of All Time And Space.
Number of Significant Capital Letters, I’ve found, also increases over time.
Managing that transition properly, I’ve found, is one of my biggest flaws as a GM, and it’s because I am addicted to the “big beat reveal”. I love, love, love the moment where some new element throws the entire plot so far into a new context, in which all of it adds up to a much larger threat/problem/situation than the players expected. What they thought was just an X is, in fact, Y, and Y is something to be very scared of.
Building this in a believable way is hard enough, if you’re going to play fair with the group. It’s hard to be subtle with foreshadowing, because anything you mention automatically calls attention to itself by the mere fact that you mention it. Talk about what music is playing on the radio, or the name of the apartment building, and you’ve made it, if not interesting, than at least important. Possibly a holdover from lecture halls — It’s assumed that anything I say may be on the test.
The other issue is springing it too early. For it to really work, it needs to simmer for a bit, and I am not known for my patience.
Just some thoughts.
Honestly, I’ve been a bit down on tabletop RPGs lately. Just haven’t gotten many sessions in (December is never a good month for weekly games) and it’s kinda thrown me off.
Been playing a lot of video games, as usual. World of Warcraft, and somehow I got suckered back into Eve Online, plus Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed 2, and soon Mass Effect 2; they’ve all just bit into my writing and gaming time.
And the industry isn’t really thrilling me, to be honest. After some strong hits, I haven’t gotten too excited about any of the recent Exalted releases, though I need to pick them up to round out my collection. The word is that White Wolf is refocusing on more digital products, which may be a good decision from their perspective, but makes me a sad panda. I like dead trees at my gaming table, whereas I’ve banned laptops from it in the past.
D&D 4e continues to fail to hook me, for reasons documented exhaustively elsewhere. Rogue Trader is very nifty and I’d love to do something with it. WFRP 3e has caused a truly hilarious amount of furor elsewhere on the ‘net, but I haven’t tried it yet.
Also, I’ll be moving across the country some time in the next few months, so I’m rather reluctant to invest time in building a campaign at the moment. And that has its own set of challenges.
Do you name your campaigns?
I do. It’s a major part of campaign building for me. Coming up with something suitably descriptive and evocative — and I’m not above stealing. My original Mage game was “Between the Candle and the Star”, intentionally referencing Babylon 5’s Grey Council and hitting themes of light, darkness, and an epic scope. A short-lived Orpheus game was called “A Very Small Boat”, a reference to Dante’s Paradiso. A more recent Mage game (which I may still go back and do something with) called “Where Murphy Rules”. I think of it as a bit of free flavor for the game, setting a note right off the bat.
It’s also worth noting I’m easily entertained by little things.
The Shadowrun campaign I’m half-working on has recently acquired the title “Penumbral Emanations”, which probably sounds extra-stupid, unless you find dubiously-relevant quips about 4th Amendment case law as amusing as I do.
A lot of fantasy games, particularly older-style D&D games, just go straight for a place or event name that tells you fairly unambiguously where you’re going and what you’re going to do when you get there: “Tomb of Horrors”, “Keep on the Borderlands”, or the much- (deservedly-so) maligned “Faction War”. Other genres like horror (“Masks of Nyarlathotep”) or sci-fi (WW’s various Trinity modules) seem to be a little less concrete, though you get some of those in fantasy as well (WFRP’s “The Enemy Within”).
I’m not sure this actually amounts to anything meaningful, but it seemed like an interesting point of distinction between games that are more location-based vs. those that are more plot-oriented. Plus, naming things is fun.
The more SR4 I play, the more I really like the system. It has a rather nasty learning curve — the book is incredibly difficult to navigate at the table, and it’s complex enough that for quite a few sessions, there’s a lot of dead time while people flip through muttering “I swear, I saw that rule in there just last week, where did it go?”. But that issue is slowly going away and I’m getting very impressed with the game in other respects.
The published Matrix rules have… issues (we’re using a rather extensive drop-in replacement). I now suspect a lot of those can be resolved with minor tweaks to the IC rules and getting rid of Agents rather than going for a wholesale overhaul, but that’s a matter of preference.
Watching Leverage while building and playing a Shadowrun character causes a rather large amount of concept drift. I apologize for nothing.
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