:Kill the Wizard First

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.

Posted by James to Analysis and Review | 4 comments | show comments » | « hide comments

Things that I can’t get out of my head.

Magic: The Gathering + Everway
Exalted + Traveller
OD&D + Dark Tower
oMage + Shadowrun

Posted by James to Bits of Shiny | add a comment

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.

Posted by James to Theory and Practice | add a comment

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.

Posted by James to Just Chatter | 1 comment | show comment » | « hide comment

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.

Posted by James to Theory and Practice | 2 comments | show comments » | « hide comments

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.

Posted by James to Tabletop Dispatches | add a comment

Currently, the only active game I’m in is a Shadowrun game, a pretty cinematic take on the genre. Enjoying the hell out of it. The SR4 book is not without flaw, but the Anniversary edition is much easier to navigate, and I’m really digging the system once I grokked some of the odder combat interactions.

Work on both “Filioque” and “Jade and Iron” is ongoing. Both are well past the “put the concepts on the page” level and are in the detail-filling stage, which tends to take me a super long time because I have a very short attention span, and am also terrible at NPC names.

Picked up Magic Burner, and it’s pretty great. It’s pushed me into basing Filioque on Burning Wheel, which does add to the prep (writing up life paths), but also lets me use a system I’ve been eyeing for a while anyway.

Rumors on the wind of another impending Exalted game being run by someone other than me, which is good news, because I always love me some Exalted.

Other than that, I’m not too fired up about anything right now. Neither WOD 2 nor D&D 4 particularly inspire me, and there’s not a lot of other product I’m seeing. What’s exciting these days?

Posted by James to Just Chatter | 1 comment | show comment » | « hide comment

Via Grognardia: Dark Sun is coming back!

Very cool news. 4e isn’t so much my bag, but I’d be willing to give it another shot if the book is well put together. More than that, if they manage to keep the atmosphere and tension of the original setting, it gives me hope that they can manage to strike the right mood with others.

In particular, of course, I want me some Planescape like a fat kid wants cake.

Posted by James to Bits of Shiny | 4 comments | show comments » | « hide comments

Instead of digging deeply into a new setting, I’m going to throw out a couple of roundup ideas. Trying more to throw a few thoughts into the air and see which ones fly. Any thoughts and feedback are welcome. These are all potentially the basis of a short (4-8 session) game, though some could easily support campaign play as well. Some are tied to a published system/setting, some aren’t.

Filioque: Detailed extensively here, but the short version — long-suppressed regional disagreements give rise to theological schism in a world where true knowledge leads directly to true power. Emphasis on belief and faith, cultural clash, and political maneuvering.

Jade and Iron: “Doktor Sleepless” meets “Weapons of the Gods” — wuxia-style trappings and adventure on the threshold of a technological apocalypse. Action-heavy, with a good dose of comic book intrigue and weird science.

Dragon Trials: Terrestrial (non-Realm) Exalted as Knights-Errant, sent out to do something useful with their lives at least once before settling into indolent nobility. Power level to be determined. Potential campaign.

Valhalla: The BDO exploration story where I steal shamelessly from Norse myth. Mysterious giant tower appears from nowhere. PCs are some combination of bystanders, investigators, and Official-Type Disaster Guys. Not quite horror, but definitely channeling Lovecraftian themes of the insignificance of man and the blind indifference of the universe.

Neon Babylon: Comic book/cyberpunk adventure game. Stolen power armor, evil corporations, mysterious technology of mystery. Major notes of stealing things and/or blowing them up. Collateral damage a plus.

Clockwork Jungle: Steampunk exploration and adventure, side order of post-apocalyptica. The vanguard of an attempt to establish human survival in a hostile mechanical environment. High levels of resource management, lots of threats, constant danger. This one feels more campaign-ish than the others.

Tetragrammaton: Nobilis, gods help me. The Power of Names is missing or in hiding, which sparks off suspicion, paranoia, politics, and plenty of people calling for something to be done, preferably by someone else. Very much an experiment — Nobilis has not been kind to me in the past.

It’s Dark In Here: My excuse to pick up the Rules Cyclopedia and make people suffer. OD&D and I don’t usually get along, but I think I can get into the mood for a few sessions, provided the mood in question is rampant sadism. Putting a plot and setting around this seems redundant, really: adventurers, treasure, abandoned subterranean temple complex. Figure it out.

Posted by James to Theory and Practice | 1 comment | show comment » | « hide comment

Last time, we had some gods. Today, we have some magic.

I’ve finally settled on a few things. I’m okay with magic being a bit “flash and bang” — these will be clearly magical effects. There’s still a strong whiff of Gnosticism in the setting, but it’s not a primary theme. I want to focus the game more on the politics of theology than on theology itself, so I’m going to go with a fairly “scientific” magic that will do its thing and get out of my way. Players who want to play scholar-mages will get some cool tricks that hopefully won’t overshadow anyone else.

If it seems that I’m backing away from some of the major magical elements, well, that’s true. The more elaborate things get, the greater the risk that it’ll become too heavyweight and detailed to get across to players — they have a finite number of things they’re capable of remembering and caring about, and I’d rather have them focus on the plot elements and political factors than tie up conceptual space in playing Mage: The Ascension Redux.

So what do we have in terms of possible effects? Domonic magi, as mentioned, are focused primarily on effects of the physical world: manipulation of the elements. In PM IV, I mentioned they might have effects that impact the body or mind directly, but I’ve decided to ditch that for a number of reasons. So, for example, Domonists with the right knowledge can strengthen or weaken metal or stone, hurl flame, shape the wind into blades, or cleanse or foul water. They can’t heal wounds, control thoughts, bind or unbind souls, or blow up your kidney.

I’m treating this is a vitalist paradigm — a living body is a “whole thing”, not a collection of base elements. The soul makes it so. So you can explode un-souled flesh with magic, but to explode a person, you have to throw something explosive at them. Except for Kai necromancers, who know how souls actually work and can punch your life force or turn off your empathy. From the Domonist perspective, Kai are scary because they can do things Domonists can’t. Of course, the Kai can’t set an entire battlefield on fire, so exactly the same is true from the other perspective.

Obviously, the question is asked — could they learn each others’ magic? The answer is possibly, but probably not. Each magic is founded in more than just factual knowledge. It’s based in cultural experience, shared assumptions, idiom, habit, ritual, and tradition. To embrace fully both cultures would be… rare.

And here we get into something interesting — each magic is also self-reinforcing, in some sense. Domon “discovered” true magic by writing down truths not only about the world, but about himself and his people. Those who understood those truths and built on them shaped the civilization around them as well, making these things “more” true, more foundational. The same is true of the Kai tradition — hence, both sides grow just a bit more powerful with each passing generation.

Not sure what next time will be. Probably going to concentrate on the political side for the next few posts.

Posted by James to Worldbuilding | add a comment