Author Archives: mxyzplk

All Inclusive D&D 5e?

Posted on January 16, 2012 | 6 comments

Well, as you heard recently, D&D 5e (or “D&D Next,” as they are styling it) has been announced. There were hints about how it would be some kind of “includes every version everywhere RPG toolkit!” and Monte Cook confirms both that he’s been working on 5e and that that’s their intent.

The thing is, there’s ways in which I think that’s possible and ways in which I think it’s not. On the one hand, if they return to publishing real content in setting books and adventures, that is somewhat “cross editions” – one of the main weaknesses of the 4e products was that they were useless for anyone not playing 4e, whereas editions 1-3 tend to freely exchange adventures, setting info books, etc.

It is also possible to have different levels of complexity of the same rules.  I actually played around with a game system with three levels of granularity called “The Third Degree” a while back, it was inspired actually by the action movie RPG Feng Shui.  There you had cascaded stats – like you might have Body 5, but below that Str, Con, Mov, and Tgh of varying amounts. For mooks their stat blocks would just say “Bod 5,” and you would use 5 for any sub-stats that came up.  I realized you could maybe please everyone if you had three degrees of complexity of each mechanic. Where it fell down is that you essentially needed technology to be able to print a custom RPG book for each player in the game so that they’d know what level of everything a given campaign was using!

I mean, earlier D&Ds had all kinds of optional rules and also rules not marked as optional but that were so fiddly everyone ignored them (weapon speeds, weapon types vs. armor, declaring actions, and other such lameness). So that sounds difficult but not impossible.

What is impossible is actually unifying 1e, 2e, 3e, PF, and 4e as they stand into a single rules framework.  It just won’t work. There’s too much crufty little crap that is not just “levels of complexity” but “different.” And I think they know this; in Monte’s article he uses circumlocutions like “your 3E-style game”. In fact, he says a 1e-loving player can play in your 3e-style game and ignore the options they don’t like – I think that’s probably overreaching; just having the level of granularity be the campaign is probably about as much that’s achievable. And the GM is going to have to have control.  “You are all starving!” “I ignore the starvation rules, they don’t come in till 3e!” But the real question is, will this really bring the players back in?  “Here, you can play at this level that’s 1e…ish?”

I also worry that their attempt to pander to all versions will make them not really innovate with this game. If all they do is try to glue all the old versions together in some demented Multiverser kind of way, in the end is that compelling? Shouldn’t such a game include a new “5e” as well which is an actual improvement on the game?

Here’s a secret.  We grognards don’t love Pathfinder, and 2e, and 1e (in my preferred order) because they are perfect. There’s a lot of BS and cruft in them. Except for the total nostalgia whores who demand everything be as Gygax originally spit it out because they are into that, the reason we like those old games is the level of hassle they give or don’t give us and the mode of gameplay they promote.

Here’s what I like and dislike about all the editions, let’s see if they can include all the good and remove all the bad.

  • Basic D&D – low hassle, low rules, low character customization (side note – comparing this new toolkit plan to BECMI is largely incorrect;  in BECMI you got newer higher levels added on and a couple rules, but the ruleset didn’t transform or anything.) Lightly handled all styles of play really. I just lump 0e into here because I can’t understand how anyone actually does still like 0e. Very rules light and dungeon/exploration focused.
    I love this edition because it gives you the basics and then gets out of your way and lets you go adventuring.
    I hate this edition because once you’ve played it a while you tend to “want more” though.
  • 1e AD&D – somewhat crufty and arcane, but usually not during combat itself. Low powered, you had to fight hard to stay alive, no level appropriate kid gloves. Exploration focus still. Not much character customization supported by the rules, mainly by personality plus whatever mutation White Plume Mountain inflicted on you. The golden age of the adventure module.
    I love this edition because it is very easy to write a diverse set of adventures for and to house rule.
    I hate this edition because there’s a charming level of wonkiness to the rules, but it’s underlaid by a not charming at all level of cruftiness you need to house rule away.
  • 2e AD&D – not all that different, more of a streamlined 1e (I like it better than 1e), but the supplements and adventures that came out for it promoted more of a storytelling and roleplaying experience. Not as much focus on the dungeon, but kinda like Basic had nods to wilderness, dungeon, city, planar, etc. You were a fraction tougher than in 1e but still weren’t a superhero. Lots more character customization via kits etc. (Those who say kits were unbalanced haven’t played subsequent games – “Oh lordy he gets a +1 to something!” was a big deal back then, but nowadays they all seem like short bus prestige classes.) NWPs provide a very, very loose skill system. (I actually added Perception and Luck stats to my 2e games.) The golden age of the boxed set. TSR adventures were not that good and were often retreads.
    I love this edition because it hits a great midpoint of rules complexity – it has the more rules content of 1e but via THAC0 and other streamlining, makes it less work than 1e to play, but more satisfying over a long time than Basic.
    I hate this edition – well, mainly for historical reasons.  Death of TSR, Lorraine Williams, giant space hamsters, Castle Greyhawk, bad adventures.
  • 3e AD&D – you start off a Billy Badass. 3.5e and Pathfinder cranked that up even more. Lots of character customization, arguably too much. Lots of helpful slash painful rules for everything.  3.0 core I actually really love, but am more ambivalent when you say 3.5 or PF with all the splatbooks. You stopped being able to house rule as much in this version because of how many rules they were and how much they interacted – you kinda had to just allow/disallow things and maybe if you spent a lot of time balancing it, introduce a new prestige class or whatever. Balance became a lot more of a concern in this edition, mainly because with the customization you could have wildly varying power levels at the same character level. More of a combat focus than 2e, especially with all the minis-requiring flanking/AoO/etc rules. The golden age of the adventure module come again, but from all those third party OGL folks. WotC adventures were not that good and often retreads.
    I love this edition because it lets you craft much more detailed and realistic characters, with the multiclassing and feats and all.
    I hate this edition because there are all these damn rules, and your players think it’s their place to grouse when you don’t use them or change them.
  • 4e AD&D – purely tactical combat. Less character customization choice but highly balanced. “I just like moving minis around and playing a board game.” There are actual good changes to the core ruleset in there, but then they layer goofy stuff all over it so that combats are a four hour long exercise in marking tokens with other tokens.
    I hate this edition because it removes nearly everything I enjoy in roleplaying.
    I love this edition because its flat reception has caused Wizards to pull their heads out of their asses and reassess what it is people liked out of D&D in the first place.

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Insomniac Monkeys On Crack

Posted on January 9, 2012 | 3 comments

Another issue came up in the last session of my Pathfinder campaign – chronic PC impatience.

It happens especially when they go to cities and between adventures. They go into a frenzy of trying to buy and sell and talk to everyone and do everything to the point where I have to start enforcing fatigue rules to get them to stop pounding on people’s doors at 3 AM demanding magic item sales.  Sometimes there is plot related time pressure but often there’s not.

In this campaign, I knew it was happening a lot. Heck, the last huge multisession fight they got into was initiated with Serpent going to visit the Cypher Lodge in the middle of the night and waking people up to demand magic item sales (with no idea that it had been taken over by the forces of evil… He found out quick though). So I tried to give them an out, a friendly (as such things go) local crime figure they’re aligned with (Saul Vancaskerkin from the Second Darkness Adventure Path) offered to take care of buying and selling and whatnot for them.  I reckoned that would get it off our play session plates and let us get to adventure. “Sure!” they said. And then they immediately went out to do it some more! They literally made that deal with Saul at 3 AM, went to bed, woke up, and then demanded of him immediately whether he’d gotten everything on their wishlists yet. When he hadn’t, it was out to kick down doors.

Serpent, and his player really, was getting frustrated. He keeps wanting to sell and or buy his stuff NOW.  Well, I run a fairly realistic game world.  If you want to sell something like that in a four hour span, then like in the real world you’re going to get pawn shop prices. And if you want some specific magic item, you’re not going to be able to find it in that span – especially if you have shitty Diplomacy/Knowledge: Local skills.  I also run fairly low magic so there’s not “magic shops”. I try to reward their persistence with some randomly generated magic stuff that some decent scavenging lets them find some gypsy selling or whatever, but this doesn’t sate their desire for to-spec items. It’s not just buying and selling, it’s anything they end up wanting to do in a city (Get information! Build a criminal empire!), but that’s a handy example I have that shows the syndrome. PC impatience vs. the realistic pace of the world.

Am I being hard-headed? I guess I feel like a lot of this, and I’ve said this out loud to the players, can be elided easily.  Say you are looking for X, let’s all say you loiter around in town for a week, and it’ll probably show up. It doesn’t have to take GAME time, it can be over with in one sentence. But for whatever reason, they don’t want to “let time pass” – every waking hour is spent in high activity mode. And in cases like this, it ends up making things take a lot more game time than a more relaxed approach would.

I understand that’s easy to do in a game – it’s why in many computer games we set our character to “run” by default, why would you want to go somewhere slowly? But it does stretch my (and NPCs’, in my world) patience when the group is a nonstop tornado – trouble in any 24 hour period is practically guaranteed.

It’s not just this group either.  I always laugh when I see con game adventures that are time-based – the PCs arrive at the inn at 5:00, then dinner is at 6:00, the body is discovered at 6:30, and then this big list of things that are supposed to happen after the next 24 hours.  Here’s what really happens: from 6:30 to 7:00 the PCs (insisting on being in combat round time the whole time so that they get the most out of their buff spells) beat, intimidate, interrogate, tie up and/or kill everyone in the whole inn. That’s if they’re good characters and a murder is needed to provoke them of course; otherwise that happens from 5:00 to 5:30 instead.

Of course maybe I’m worrying about it too much – if they didn’t want to waste game screen time on it, they wouldn’t; they’re adults and I’ve explained all the above to them explicitly. And heck, I can’t really claim it’s unrealistic – adventurers in town is just like sailors or cowboys or whatnot; they have a short time to play hard before they head back out on the sea/trail/etc. But it seems to frustrate the players (well, especially the one) because he seems to think it’s unreasonable that he can’t get what he wants quickly.

Comments or ideas? I also posted this as a question on RPG Stack Exchange to see if it garners any good answers.

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D&D 5e is Coming!

Posted on January 9, 2012 | 14 comments

It’s official! It was obvious from all the Mearls/Cook noise from over there in WotC land, but now the New York Times is reporting that Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is planned to be announced by WotC today! They cite the MMO pressure and the split to Pathfinder and muse – as do we all – about whether WotC can bring D&D back together again.

If nothing else, despite its “dwindling market” it’s good news that the NYT considers this part of all the news that’s fit to print!

For those who consider this to be dubious news and part of the Great Media Conspiracy, Mike Mearls has responded on wizards.com to say it’s true and that they’re going to take a big hint from Paizo and do an open playtest of the new rules! You can sign up at that link.

This isn’t really surprising for those who have been watching. The Escapist recently published three articles on D&D’s past, present, & future that inform the landscape behind it very well.

Well, this is good news I think.  I’m one of the many who told WotC from the first steps of 4e that they were about to really mess up and fragment the hobby, and look, that’s exactly what happened. This is a big chance, and Mike Mearls and Monte Cook might be the right people, to un-screw up Wizards and D&D.  This is a hard task  given their corporate setup; here’s an interesting article on ENWorld from insider Ryan Dancey about how the Hasbro financial reporting structure and internal politics has really smacked D&D down hard and basically drove them to their ill-considered “let’s make it all depend on DDI and then not deliver” strategy.

Also, I like the open playtest idea.  Now, there are problems with open playtests – with Pathfinder, they got a lot of flack from some folks from not being willing to change too much despite fan feedback. D&D could fall into this trap too, and consider 4e (or 3e, depending how much they’re willing to admit their mistakes) too much of a must-have baseline. But if they take too much “fan input,” you get something designed by committee, which always sucks more than something designed by a small set of skilled artists. But the open playtest is no longer a rarity – Paizo has made sure of that; Goodman Games is using it for their Dungeon Crawl Classics, 6d6 does it routinely, and even those not doing truly open playtests seem to be doing more closed playtests (if the number of invites I get for such things is any guide).

ENWorld has three articles on the new edition: WotC Seeks Unity With a New Edition, The Day Wizards Showed Me 5th Edition, and Bet You Wish Your Workplace Looked Like Wizards of the Coast (this last is the most unlikely, unless you love being laid off). They are also keeping up a 5e Info Page with all reveals to date. Best quote so far is from former D&D Brand Manager Scott Rouse – “4e is broken as a game and business and it needs to go away.” The weirdest thing is all the news coverage it’s getting- from the Huffington Post to PerezHilton.com to HispanicBusiness.com.

Also, there’s an article on Forbes from a playtester – he got to play in an early draft of 5e and liked it.

The blogosphere results are in and there’s a lot of dubiousness.  GeekDad from Wired’s article on the new edition is probably a good representative response. I have to admit I’m dubious but hopeful.  If they could carry off Pathfinder compatibility, that would be a coup. WotC needs to realize they’re not the 900 lb gorilla any more, Paizo’s been eating their lunch in sales for a year now and is expanding into novels, comics, minis, MMOs… If they could come up with some plan to merge the two instead of leaving them divided, then BOOM goes the dynamite! If they don’t… 5e would have to be super amazingly good to sway me from Pathfinder, and I don’t just mean the rules – all the good content people have (usually after being laid off my Wizards) gone to Paizo, which is why the 4e adventures have reportedly been largely tripe. We’ll see if they can really swallow their pride and unify…

Many people are chiming in with what they want 5e to be like but frankly most strike me as confused and sucky. I really like Zak’s (before the announcement!) ideas on what 5e should be like though…

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Pregnancy and Pirates

Posted on January 8, 2012 | 8 comments

Last Reavers game session, I suddenly found myself playing a new RPG of pregnancy and pirates, we’ll call it “P&P” for the time being… This is the kind of pickle you find yourself in as a GM when sex is a component of your gameplay.

As background, this Viking barbarian/serpent shaman druid PC named “Serpent” has become involved with a half elf wizard woman named Samaritha (an NPC). Or at first he thought she was a half elf, turns out she’s a serpentfolk in disguise (they can alter their form). As he is all snake themed anyway, this turned out to not be a dealbreaker and so they’re an item.

Anyway, it started innocuously enough – Serpent was just BSing with the other PCs as they were buying supplies about how “Samaritha talks all the time.” Another PC suggested getting her pregnant, and the rest all jumped onto that discussion mainly just to make Serpent uncomfortable (though oddly, they all took the assumption that a pregnant woman would talk less at face value… I’m the only one of the group with a kid so I had to restrain myself from pointing out the flaw in this cunning plan…). They then talked about it again later at a bar, while at the same time asking around trying to gather information on a female pirate they are chasing, which led to the novel rumor that the fled pirate is pregnant with Serpent’s love child and he’s tracking her down to make an honest woman of her. So I thought it was a joke and they were all just busting his balls about it.

But the idea took root with frightening swiftness. Given that he’s a human and she’s a serpentfolk it would seem to be a somewhat intractable problem but the other PCs were seriously going to look into fertility potions/magic and the like to help their buddy out! (This is all before Samaritha is consulted on this plan of course).

And next session, Serpent totally sat Samaritha down and had a “let’s have a baby” conversation with her. She reveals that serpentfolk aren’t able to reproduce any more, that’s a big problem with their race. They had found a serpentfolk egg in stasis back in a previous adventure (taken from the Green Ronin Freeport trilogy by the way) – I had been downplaying that, and she’d stashed it, but now they discussed raising it as a backup plan – but I was surprised how invested everyone was with really making a pregnancy happen. And it got even a little more complicated because all serpentfolk born after a long, long time ago are degenerate barbarian types and they thought about doing some divination to figure out how the baby might turn out, that is if they could even conceive in the first place… The rest of the PCs had long left the joke part of this around and were quite engaged in this whole discussion and wondering how to make it happen.

I’ve never had having a kid come up in a campaign before so I guess I’m looking for advice… Though there’s a lot of different layers here. How could it happen with a serpentfolk and a human, just technically? How’s pregnancy at sea on a pirate ship going to work (and I guess it’s not like a full pregnancy, but semi and then she’ll lay an egg or something)? The odds are all against it but PCs have a way of making “things that haven’t happened in millenia” happen… I do keep a half decent edge to my game world where the difficulty and brutality of medieval life is present… Will I get on a government watch list for Googling “serpentfolk reproduction?” I don’t know, thoughts?

I am gratified, though, by the work I’ve put into the NPCs and the realistic feel of the campaign, and the investment of the PCs in the game world and their own characters, that this would even come up. For them to see Samaritha not just as a faceless NPC or “arm candy” is great, and to be immersed in the world enough to care about things other than “killing things and taking their stuff” – well that’s what roleplaying is supposed to strive for in my opinion.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Seventeenth Session

Posted on January 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

Seventeenth Session (15 page pdf) – “Press Gang” – As usual, a little bit of time in port results in the PCs really tearing it up. A whole long session, and no real fights, but it’s not slow, with two beatings, several sexual escapades, organized crime activity, shopping, drinking, jail time…

First of all, sorry for getting behind.  Between the holidays and job hunting, I’ve been strapped.  I’ve got like four sessions of Reavers in the can as well as three of our new Jade Regent campaign.  Here’s getting to it!

Last time, everyone finally leveled to level 6.  I am all about the low level play and slow progression; they got 5th in February I believe. So they all showed up with kewl new powers to use. But as usual, we kicked right back in seconds after the last session ended.

They took the first part of the session recapping and trying to assimilate new knowledge into what the overall deal is with the Cyphergate and orichalcum and serpentmen and portals and phantom creatures. It’s inevitable that PCs get a little confused about what’s up even with reasonably simple plots because of the long time between games and the somewhat distractable nature of any given PC. So if you have orichalcum glyph pieces embedded in people and orichalcum plates taken from a portal seal, people get them confused. So I helped walk them through a solid statement of “what we know so far.”

Next, I had one of their NPCs mess with them. Last time, you will note how Pirro the pirate got the short end of the stick on healing. Well, they came away from the fight with four magical treasures, so he’s due one, right? He wakes up early, takes one of the items (a magical mithral axe), and goes down to the casino to put it on pledge to get some gamblin’ money. Naturally he loses badly (I rolled for it fair and square), and this causes the PCs a little consternation. I liked this scene because it let me reinforce that the PCs’ pirate crew are by no means mindless minions, and in fact the nature of being a pirate means they are unruly and like it that way.

Next, two things happen that deserve blog posts of their own.  The first is the unexpected and sudden “Hey, Serpent needs to get Samaritha pregnant!” plan that emerged to surprisingly unanimous support. See Pregnancy & Pirates for more. The second is the sheer impatience of Serpent wanting to get magic items sold and bought – he literally goes from place to place till 2 AM in the morning desperately trying to swing deals. More on that in Insomniac Monkeys on Crack.

What this demanded of me was a large amount of improv. Urban adventuring is challenging because it’s not like a dungeon or wilderness where there’s a limited amount of stuff that can be going on.  A big lawless city like Riddleport is guaranteed to liven up quick if you go through the wrong door at the wrong time. So they kept wandering around and I kept coming up with stuff that I hoped wouldn’t get me into real trouble.

I generally like to use the dice as a general determinant of “is this going to go real well or real badly.” For some reason the PCs were rolling really poorly this session. So when Sindawe goes to the House of the Silken Veil trying to find a Mwangi (African) hooker that might have fertility drugs or magic (I am not sure it ever occurs to the PCs to look anywhere but in bars or whorehouses for anything in this game), the roll comes up really low, so instead he gets a Garundi woman dressed up like some far northerner’s idea of a Mwangi witch doctor for the fetishist market. Heh. Also they’ve gotten on the bad side of Madame Pamodae; they are remarkably unconcerned about this given that she’s a priestess of a deity of revenge.

Then they recruit new shipmates! First it’s the traditional “set up a table in a bar” method, where they try to figure out what’s wrong with the people applying. As it’s a pirate ship, they find plenty wrong but decide”what the hell” with all of them but the last guy. This was a shout out to a previous player who was always an obstreperous muffinhead, and one day in a SF game came in with a new character that we were interviewing for a position on our tramp freighter.  Since he was a new PC we were just trying to get any kind of excuse to hire him but his response to every single question was vague “I do… things!” crap. We left him on the planet and in fact he got disinvited from the group (last straw syndrome). This explains Sindawe’s overly violent reaction. (Knowing how to push your players’ buttons and not just the characters’ is a good GM technique.) They also invite their girlfriends Samaritha and Hatshepsut and Lavender Lil along! And they shanghai the hated Bojask, a guy who works for Saul and they’ve never gotten along with.

Also, they make a couple runs at trying to extort a local new bar for protection money. They were hilariously shy about it really. I based the friendly but yelling owner/bartender off a male cheerleading coach in a horrible Comedy Central movie that was on while I was prepping that morning.

Part of this game is definitely the crew control.  I rolled for each crewmember’s shore leave. Basically 1 is something SUPER bad and 20 SUPER good; 2 means trouble the PCs can’t fix, 3 means trouble they can fix, and everything in between is general levels of doing well versus doing poorly. There were a lot of 4’s, including Pirro, which basically means “all money gone and got a good beating in the process.” The only bad result was a 3, where Goat got arrested for murder; some guys in a bar hassled him about being a tiefling and they turned up dead later. The PCs went and bailed him out in a remarkably civilized fashion; I liked their sudden realization about “Hey, wasn’t Slasher Jim washing blood off his knife back on the ship?” Turns out Slasher Jim also used to be on Morgan Baumann’s (their new quarry) crew. Big Mike got a 20 so I figured he parlayed into part ownership of the new bar – good for him, and a complication for the PCs’ protection racket!

The one place where the PCs rolled well was around the House of the Silken Veil – Pamodae has it out for them once she found out they killed her pirate ally, and they went back twice; both visits were sexy and hilarious in turn but they didn’t degenerate into murder, and let’s just say that was an unlikely result. It ended with Sindawe bluffing his way past a guard by playing the race card.

And FINALLY they get on their ship and underway!  Whew!  I thought it would never happen.  I think I run pretty fun urban scenes and (properly!) depict cities as full of people and stuff and places and whatnot, so PCs seem to get drawn into doing random things there even when they planned to go do something else.

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Belated Christmas Presents

Posted on January 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

Here’s some random fun free things that have come my way lately.  Check them out!

Secret Santicore, a 100+ page collection of cool stuff targeted somewhat towards OSR D&D but there’s interesting stuff in there for everyone.

Wayfinder #6, the free high quality Pathfinder fanzine just released its sixth issue! A bit fanfic-heavy for my tastes, but still nice.

Paizo’s RPG Superstar 2012, this contest always generates a heaping helping of cool new magic items, villains, and whatnot.

Abulafia Random Generators.  If you don’t know about this, use it!  If you use it, many generators have been added since you last checked, guaranteed. “Today at Sea” is my go-to for waterborne encounters.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Beta Rules. Into weird OSR-like things and Goodman Games? Well, open playtest of their new RPG.

Anything else new cool and free we should all know about?  Add it in the comments!

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State of the RPG Union: Wizards of the Coast

Posted on December 23, 2011 | 5 comments

Well, Wizards of the Coast is still plugging along, but it’s not looking good.

They have performed their traditional annual Christmas layoffs, this time tossing super-veterans Rich Baker (read his goodbye on the Wizards forums) and Steve Winter.

Rich had been with TSR/WotC more than 20 years and worked on Alternity, Spelljammer, Birthright, Forgotten Realms, Axis & Allies,and much more.

Steve had been with TSR/WotC for 30 years!!! He worked on Marvel Super Heroes, Star Frontiers (my first RPG), the 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set (my favorite setting), Pool of Radiance…

Of course long tenure and loyalty mean nothing to Hasbro, they are happy to fire people right before Christmas (it’s good for them financially since it’s their end of fiscal year) even when they’ve been there 20 or 30 years.  Stay classy, guys. Of course older employees make more money, so clear them out for young guys you can get to work for half the amount.

As everyone no doubt knows, they’ve hired Monte Cook and signs point to him and Mike Mearls working on D&D 5e, possibly for a 2013 release. Which I guess could be good since Mearls has been trying to make conciliatory noises at the “alienated by 4e” crowd. However, I see two bad signs.  One, Monte’s columns so far have been – strangely lackluster.  As in “fourth grade reading level” lackluster.  I don’t know why, he’s more talented than that, I wonder if there’s some strange restriction in place, but they really have been drivel.

But from what him and Mearls seem to be saying – instead of one well-designed game, it seems like they want to try to make everyone happy by making a “make your own D&D kit” instead of just making one D&D.  Which worked out so well for FUDGE. I think accommodating DIY and house rulers is great – but just be careful not to require it, guys. D&D has gone from a nice simple streamlined game in early D&D days to a hideous 500 page beast – cut that shit back. Someone should be able to play the game – not some dumbed down “beginner’s” version, but the real game – without a law degree. I like Pathfinder but the diarrhea of the rules there is getting me down too.

Also, they just got done suing Atari to get the rights back for D&D computer games, despite Atari being the best thing that’s happened to them since the Gold Box games.

Has anyone else noticed that when they go to wizards.com, the popdown at the top even says “Brands” now?  Not “Games.”  Not even “Products.”  Just “Brands.” How shit-tastic. That doesn’t bode well.

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State of the RPG Union: Mongoose Publishing

Posted on December 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

Mongoose Publishing has published their annual State of the Mongoose article where they go into depth on last year’s results and next year’s plans.

You can go read the article yourself, but the important bits are:

  • Hard times in the RPG market, but they think it’s bottomed out
  • They predict D&D 5e in 2013
  • Mongoose left Rebellion in mid-2010 and that hurt some
  • Mongoose is still doing well despite tough times, no layoffs
  • Traveller and Legend are their big RPGs they’re getting results from
  • They are doing a lot more minis, and moving to resin from metal for cost
  • A Call To Arms: Star Fleet, A Call To Arms: Noble Armada, Judge Dredd and Victory at Sea are the minis games doing well for them

It’s good they’re chugging along – they’re the success story you hear less about over here (they are bigger in the UK), but them, FFG, and Paizo are really the big RPG houses now it seems like.

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Open Design Pathfinder Projects

Posted on December 14, 2011 | 5 comments

Well, sadly it appears that the Open Design project I signed up for, Dark Deeds in Freeport, is dead and soon to be refunded.  That’s sad because I want more Freeport stuff. Ah well maybe Green Ronin will get off their licensed-properties ass sometime soon and do it themselves. (Update: the author has turned something in, it might be on again after all!)

In better news, there’s a new Pathfinder Open Design project on Kickstarter called Journeys To The West: A Pathfinder RPG Voyage. As I am running a nautical campaign in general this sounds good, and I’m planning a voyage out Azlant/Arcadia way and this seems like that with the serial numbers filed off. I’m already using their great From Shore To Sea and Sunken Empires. And it seems like it has a lot of momentum – it’s more than doubled its initial commitment number and there’s a lot of cool extras that will be included now. But hurry, you have only 4 days to sign up before the kickstart closes!

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Simulation and Immersion

Posted on December 6, 2011 | 6 comments

There’s a new series of articles going up on RPG.net about my favorite gaming topics – simulation and immersion. I don’t read the Big Purple much any more but that got my attention!

What the heck are “simulation” and “immersion?” Ignoring whatever demented things Ron Edwards of the FORGE tried to redefine them as, here’s what they mean.

simulation – the job of the GM and game world is to simulate an authentic fictional reality. Events unfold according to in-world physics and realistic behavior of the actors in that universe (and not a preconception of story). The game’s rules are meant to simulate that world and not metagame concerns. See A Simulationist Manifesto. Simulation is generally a good first step to enabling immersion.

immersion – the practice of taking on your character’s personality in the game and trying to experience the fictional world through their eyes and make decisions entirely from their viewpoint. Similar in nature to method acting. See Fundamental Elements of Simulationist-Immersive Roleplaying.

I find this to be the most enjoyable form of gaming. It’s rare – most groups role-play very lightly, even when they are generally simulationist. And a lot of recent game design seriously pushes games in other directions – focus on the game rules as a good in and of themselves and/or on story production/enforcement mechanics have even hit D&D in Fourth Edition. People talk about “story immersion” but it’s really a fundamentally different thing that just means “engrossing.”

However, I’ve played in and run some truly deep in character games and they are really awesome experiences. I hope the series really delves into the topic!

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RPG Superstar 2012 Is Here

Posted on December 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

Another year, another RPG Superstar contest!  As they have the last four years, Paizo Publishing is having an open-to-all design contest. It consists of a number of rounds where the candidate pool gets culled down by experienced RPG designer judges.  The winner gets a module deal; even folks placing often get offers to do work with various gaming companies. So it’s a great opportunity to get your name out there!

Luckily you have like a month for the first round, because I haven’t been struck by the magic item inspiration fairy yet. Let me see what I can come up with…

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Pathfinder MMO Is Coming!

Posted on November 22, 2011 | 2 comments

What should I just get in my inbox but the big news that Paizo has decided to license a Pathfinder MMO!  And by license, I mean license to a new company partly owned by the same person as Paizo. Here’s the announcement!

The new company is GoblinWorks and is composed of Lisa Stevens, Paizo CEO, notable RPG hellion Ryan Dancey, who liberated gaming with the OGL (haters can zip it) and worked on the EVE Online MMO, and Mark Kalmes, who’s worked for Microsoft, Cryptic, and CCP.

Normally I’d figure an RPG company getting into MMOs is just buying themselves one big cluster-you-know-what, since even WotC bollixes that up all the time, but this seems like a clever melding of talent.  I hope it doesn’t detract effort from the pen-and-paper RPG, but I’m really interested in what they come up with!

Apparently it’s going to be vaguely Kingmaker-themed, and players will be trying to adventure and actually build kingdoms in the River Kingdoms.  Neat!

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