I’m down on fantasy this week, so bring on the sci-fi! Maybe I’ll see if I can convert some of the local cardflippers. Which brings up the vital question: Trinity, Rogue Trader, or Traveller?

I still don’t care about 4e. And while I think it’s awesome that people like old-school D&D and have a whole revival going on, that’s not for me either. I want a new edition of Nobilis, damnit.

White Wolf is moving/has moved to an almost entirely PDF-driven business model, which may be fine for them, but I hate PDFs.

Actually, here’s something I can get a rant on about. Spotted in an Exalted thread on RPG.net about an alternate take on Cecelyne, the following from StephanLS:

No need for apologies! While I do aim to please, I don’t aim to please everyone, and expecting to would be silly of me. If this interpretation of Cecelyne doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work, nothing more needs to be said.

Fair enough. Just be aware that Mage taught me and a number of other prominent White Wolf posters that ideological division within a fan community creates poisonous social conflicts, and so we work to eradicate deviant takes on setting elements such as this to prevent them from causing long-standing arguments or, worse, leaking into canon via author persuasion or the elevation of fans to authorial positions. So it’s not a matter of “nothing more needs to be said” — my position is this take on Cecelyne is both bad in itself and potentially harmful to the Exalted fan community as a whole if allowed to gain any traction. By championing it, you set yourself as my enemy.

To quote QC: What the hell ass balls?

Arguing about Mage: The Ascension was the point of the game. (Tangent: You don’t prevent ascended fandom by telling anyone with an alternate take on the setting that they’re your Special Internet Mortal Foe, you do it by having a line developer that knows what he’s doing.) I love Mage arguments, and the fact that they still get traction over the painfully uninteresting Mage: Dudes from Atlantis reminds me why it’s my favorite tabletop game of all time.

A sign of a healthy setting is that it’s open to drift and discussion, and a sign of a good GM is drifting that setting to support the game they’re running.

• Under five minutes because non-combat stuff is more interesting.
• Under five minutes because our whole team are ninjas and we shivved everything during the surprise round.
• 10-20 minutes.
• 20-40 minutes.
• Most of a session.
• All of a session.
• Don’t touch the minis, we’ll finish next time.

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.

The official statement:

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.

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.

One notable moment, which taught me to read the monster entries a little better, involved a Gug. At first it was three Gugs. Then I noticed they had armor and integrity ratings, like a vehicle or mech, meaning handheld weapons weren’t very helpful. So I cut it to one Gug. Then I noticed it was also 22″ tall.

Right.

Fortunately, there were mechs to deal with it.

The element of the one-off I’m most ambivalent about was including mech pilots as characters. There were several long overland marching sequences (and if there’s a better soundtrack for giant robots and anime action heroes marching through a Cambodian swamp than the FF6 World of Ruin overland theme, I’d like to hear it), and pretty much anything that rumored of a fight could be handily demolished with the power of Applied Giant Robot. Managed a couple of good ones, but it wasn’t until the plot wound its way into an underground complex that everyone got to throw down on the same basis.

Probably should have had a third adversary in that fight, though; after a strong opening, one of them went down like a chump and the other barely escaped alive. She did escape, though. [cue dramatic music] Sequel hook! The Children of Chaos were the ‘B’ antagonists in this story, secondary to the main threat of the Disciples of the Unnameable trying to release the avatar of the Ruined King from Leng on to Earth, where he could break into peoples’ houses and wreck up the place. The only fight I begged off was a final confrontation with a Dhole, which I’d thrown in as a set piece to arrange for a convenient tunnel collapse and which the mech pilots seemed hell-bent on fighting. Being at that point we’d been playing for about seven hours, I straight-up warned them off and went into the final few scenes.

Overall, very happy with the scenario. Much love for the Cthulhutech setting, and hopefully I can find something else to do with it eventually. Less love for the system, which played better in practice than I’d expected to from reading it, but was very swingy and the jump in range between one skill level and the next higher is massive.

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.

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

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.