Author Archives: mxyzplk

FFG Gets Star Wars License!

Posted on August 3, 2011 | 2 comments

WotC lost/dropped the Star Wars license some time ago. Their Star Wars RPG effort wasn’t as good as the old West End Games one, but it was something. Well, the license is out of limbo – Fantasy Flight Games, producers of Warhammer Fantasy 3e and the Warhammer 40k RPGs (Dark Heresy, Deathwatch, Rogue Trader) have announced they have the rights to make all sorts of card, roleplaying, and miniatures games set in the Star Wars universe.

They are doing a good job with Warhammer, which is a licensed property, so there’s every reason to believe they’ll do well with Star Wars.  Their first games are a tactical x-wing game and a card game, but ideally a RPG is in the offing.  Hopefully it’ll be less trinket intensive than Warhammer Fantasy and be more like the 40k series (not necessarily the same rules… Maybe… I’ll have to think about that).

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New Pathfinder Prepainted Miniatures

Posted on August 2, 2011 | 4 comments

Paizo has announced Pathfinder Battles, a new line of randomized prepainted miniatures much like the D&D Miniatures that WotC discontinued back in January. These are different from the non-random prepaints they announced in May.

There’s a good bit of glee and consternation over the news.  To break it down:

  • Again, Paizo does it better than Wizards.  Ha ha ha ha haaaaaa.
  • The minis are randomized, though a normal booster has just one Medium creature in it. I don’t mind the randomization, it’s kinda required to make the economics work.
  • The normal booster price is $3.99, which is steep for one mini. If they put them in boxes of multiple minis, wouldn’t that help keep per mini price down (and waste a lot less packaging)?
  • The scuplts look good, but I am frankly dubious about the paint jobs.  The rat’s fur and the gnome’s hair, for example, use very unnatural simple colors.

So good on Paizo.  I’ll probably buy some, assuming they look good when they come out, but a better per mini price would make me a lot more bullish about it.

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Pathfinder Tales – Plague of Shadows and Prince of Wolves

Posted on July 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

In the second in my series of book reports from my vacation in Bulgaria, I thought I’d review the two Pathfinder Tales novels I managed to lay my hands on.  These things must be popular because I’ve been waiting for them to show up at Half Price Books and it’s taken a long time.  (I don’t buy paperbacks at full price…)

I’m a big Pathfinder and world of Golarion fan, so I wanted to see how the novels treat it. I enjoyed them both.  Neither is going to become part of the Western canon or anything, but they were better than, say, every Greyhawk novel ever. (Rose Estes is the worst RPG novel author ever, and Gary Gygax, God love him, isn’t as bad as she is but he isn’t the best either.)

Prince of Wolves, by Dave Gross, covers the adventures of Pathfinder and Chelish nobleman Varian Jeggare and his erstwhile tiefling companion Radovan wandering about in Ustalav.

Plague of Shadows, by Howard Andrew Jones, details the attept by elf-raised-by-humans Elyana to save her old adventuring buddy/lover, the now-married and now-Lord Stefan.

The Good

Prince of Wolves had an interesting conceit, where the chapters alternated being from the perspective of Jeggare and Radovan respectively. They get separated early (well, the book jumps back and forth in timeline a little) and then go about their own solo adventures till they join back up about 2/3 of the way through. In general the action progressed nicely, though there were some repetitive parts. It was well written and engaging in general.

Plague of Shadows was a little weaker in the writing department. I was feeling “meh” about halfway through but then there were some big twists and I was interested through the end. I liked the initial setup where it was an adventuring group that had grown apart and was coming together much later, and not all as friends. I had a 2e campaign that was like that, and it gives a feeling of a lot of rich history.

Both novels used Golarion to good effect.  Plague of Shadows did a lot with Galt and the French Terror-esque revolution there, and Prince of Wolves used the gothic nation of Ustalav and the gypsy-like Sczarni. They illuminated the world nicely.

The Bad

Both of the novels suffered from D&D.  Or from Pathfinder.  Mainly the magic system.  They use the game system’s rules too obviously in their fiction. “Time to rest to regain my spells!” “I don’t have that memorized today!” Suck. And they kinda went that way with the magic items too, though Shadows was a little more clumsy about that than Wolves. The mechanical wonkiness of D&D spells do not good storytelling make – Jack Vance used it but these guys are no Jack Vance. At least these authors don’t do like Gygax does in his Greyhawk novels where his storytelling is dictated by the combat rules too (seriously, Gord got 3 attacks every 2 rounds, and he let you know it), but the D&D magic system – for all its in-game merits – invariably comes off as lame in fiction.

And a small nit – I didn’t like the big Golarion glossary in the back. If your writing doesn’t stand on its own, definitions aren’t going to help you. I think it’s much more interesting to wonder about parenthetical references than have them defined for you – hell, that’s how Lovecraft and Howard and those guys’ prose captured the imagination. I am sure they’re trying to help, but cut that out of future novels please.

Conclusion

Both were better than most gaming fiction. I’d give Wolves 4/5 and Shadows 3/5, maybe. Fans of Golarion will enjoy them because of how they showcase the world, and normal fantasy fans should find them diverting enough. I definitely plan to hunt down the rest (though am not inspired enough to start paying full price for them).

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Book Reports

Posted on July 28, 2011 | 10 comments

Ah, I’m back from two weeks of hanging out on the beach in Bulgaria.  Didn’t know there were good beaches in Bulgaria?  There are!


I got a lot of book reading in.  I read scarily fast, so I went through 11  books by my count. As with everything else in life, I mine the books I read for RPG related insights, so I thought I’d report in and give you some thoughts.

A Game of Thrones

First off, I read A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, books two and three in the Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones, as you might know it).  I’d read the first book but hadn’t picked up the others till now. I was lucky to find them at Half Price Books, the HBO series has emptied the shelves pretty well.  Each one is 1000 pages of murder and betrayal.

Game of Thrones has some interesting similarities to RPG campaigns.  The resolutions of plotlines, and life or death of major characters, does seem like it’s at the whims of fate – some characters that seem like “made men” get murderized like the lesser men. Some people feel that character death in RPGs “ruins the story.”  These novels are an object lesson in that not being the case.

Also, the story does drag on like many a fantasy campaign I’ve been in (and run, to be honest).  Things do keep happening, but sometimes you want to say “Yes yes, could we progress a little bit more here please?” I’ve tried to take that to heart, because even though session after session might be engaging, there is such a thing as too slow of a pace at a high level.

The books also highlight how prudish the RPG community is. Every deviant behavior you can think of is in these books, from incest to dwarf sex to rape to torture to slavery. There’s not even a warning label on them, gasp.  But in the RPG realm, when people start talking about “should sex be in an RPG” or “how much is over the line and ‘squicky'” they seem to be using some kind of 1950’s neo-Victorian standard that other art forms aren’t subject to – these aren’t fringe works, this is the most popular fantasy series in the world and has spawned a TV series.  Get your head out of your ass, RPG community.

Dresden Files

I wanted to pick up some of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books and some of Charles Stross’ Laundry novels, but all I could get from three Half Price Books was Fool Moon, book 2 of the Dresden Files.

It was pretty good.  I assume you all know the general setup – Harry Dresden, modern day wizard/detective. I read some of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels recently and this definitely owes them a debt. This one had everything from werewolves to bikers to chronically naked chicks to dream sequences.

Anyway, these novels have good insight into how to run a supernatural-in-the-modern-world game (like any of the White Wolf oeuvre).It’s funny, most of those games stress the active hiding of the supernatural.  In Dresden’s world, he’s really open about being a wizard, just no one believes him. The supernatural is a small enough part of the world that it’s just not all that relevant to  Joe Sixpack.

The hard part is that Dresden (like Marlowe) spends large portions of the story totally beat to shit. But he rallies and does stuff.  This is hard to model in most RPGs, especially ones like the DFRPG where you get progressively large minuses to do anything when you’re hurt (the “death spiral”). Having Harry powerless for a bunch of the story is OK, but when it’s your character it tends to be less enjoyable. Heck, the couple times I had villains beat up on the heroes in a supers campaign I ran, even though it was genre appropriate, the players went into open rebellion.

Next time – Pathfinder Tales! And then, the wonderful world of travel writing.

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Off to Bulgaria…

Posted on July 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

The blog’s going to be quiet for two weeks while I go on vacation to Bulgaria! We’ll be close to Varna, which I mainly know as the place Dracula’s ship set out from for America in the Bram Stoker novel. I’m going with a friend who’s from there, his wife, and my daughter – it should be a good time.

Between vampires, gypsies, and loose Russian women I should have some gaming fodder to relate to you upon my return.  In the interim, fight amongst yourselves!

 

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Buccaneers!

Posted on July 8, 2011 | 2 comments

Interested in pirate gaming?  Looking forward to Paizo’s new pirate AP, Skull and Shackles? Enjoy following our Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign?

Well, happy news.  Green Ronin has just released a Web enhancement to their Buccaneers of Freeport book with stats for many pirate captains! It’s available in 3.5e and True20 variants.

Buccaneers of Freeport and Cults of Freeport were odd book choices – they were statless.  This was during the Mass D&D Confusion around the 4e launch.  For Cults, that was kinda OK, but with Buccaneers it really hurt- character backdrops for a bunch of cool pirate captains, but no stats.  Well, they have now published the stats, for free! Oh, and the stats for Cults, earlier on.

Download the stats, then consider getting Buccaneers and Cults as they are fine books (and often quite on sale…).  Get cranked up for the pirate holocaust that will come soon with the S&S AP!  All the Freeport stuff is great to mix with Golarion, in Reavers I used the entire Freeport Trilogy mashed up with Second Darkness to good effect.

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2011 ENNie Award Nominees Announced

Posted on July 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

The 2011 ENNie Award nominee list is up! Winners will be announced at Gen Con.

There’s some really good competition this year.  Sometimes it’s an obvious blowout in the offing. But you have interesting compares, like ICONS, Dresden Files, M&M 3e, and  The Laundry for Best Game.  Wizards and Paizo are represented but not overwhelmingly so – there’s a lot of indie stuff and solid showing by the midrange guys like Pelgrane, Evil Hat, Pinnacle, etc. Even better, I don’t read the list and think “WTF are all these I’ve never heard of them” like in some past years. All worthy nominees, and it’ll be interesting to see who comes out on top.  Good luck all!

 

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My Little Pony: The RPG

Posted on July 7, 2011 | 12 comments

My Little Pony and RPGs – a perfect match?

Friend of the blog Erin Palette has been running a series on the My Little Ponies done up in D&D stats.Right after I saw that, I ran across a storygames thread about “MLP” that, among random indie silliness, pointed at a really good Savage Worlds MLP mod.  And that in turn mentions “My Little d20”, a d20 MLP RPG.

Of course, this made me think of the 2006 WotC April Fool’s joke about – a My Little Pony RPG!

Even at the time, it pissed me off.  It pissed me off that such an obviously good idea, an idea that would result in a pretty darn popular game, was regarded as a joke by Wizards. I still remember this article unfondly, 5 years later. Now there’s so much demand on the heels of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series (which I somehow haven’t seen, despite having a nine year old daughter) that it is clearly just plain stupid that they haven’t done something like this.

Imaginative play is at a high premium with kids!  Parents pay a lot for things to promote it.  If they resisted the urge to make a rules-heavy abomination like D&D the engine behind it, a My Little Pony RPG (or “Adventure Game”) could be huge.

I put some thought into this when my daughter was younger.  You could quite easily make a commodity RPG based on, for example, Dora the Explorer.  Those episodes are very rote, the girl is on a quest and has to pass three different obstacles.  You print up some “adventure sheets” with three to-do things, and a harried parent can “run the game” while doing housework.  “Here, to get by the rhyming troll you have to write down a poem!  Work one out together, Dora, Nora, and Whoever-you-are!  Back in 5! Remember to play pretend!” It can be made appropriate down to a very young age. That article came out when my girl was 4 and I easily specced out some kid-compatible mechanics (who rolled higher on a d6 + arts & crafts!).

Of course, this is hard for most RPG companies to do.  It’s not like they’re part of a huge corporation that owns the rights to a bunch of children’s properties! Oh, wait…

It’s pretty sad that we want to get a new generation into the hobby, but the most obvious and high value things that could do that are despised, and instead we think all we need is yet another 300 page rulebook slaughterfest game. Get a child psychologist, combine simple to-dos with pony figures, run a TV spot during the show (retask some of the money being flushed down the toiled advertising Green Lantern toys), and voila, the My Little Pony Adventure Game has more people playing it than every other extant RPG within weeks.

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Paizo Copyright Flap

Posted on July 6, 2011 | 22 comments

Apparently Paizo somehow contacted Obsidian Portal and complained about a bunch of Item Card images being on a popular campaign writeup hosted there. This led to a takedown and some scuffling on ENWorld that Erik Mona chimed in on.

Paizo is “within their rights” but I’m not sure why they needed to do it, is the bottom line. They’re clearly not publishing them in a way that they hurt Paizo – the guy scanned cards he bought that he gave out to players in  his game so they could be added to the campaign record.  I am not a big fan of the current strain of IP law that says I can’t film myself playing a video game or holding a can of Coke without paying somebody. The DM was legally in the wrong but ethically is doing nothing wrong – so why hassle him? All the typical “you have to defend your copyrights” blather, but to what end?  What is it gonna get you? Someone’s going to steal your picture of a boot for some publication and then claim it’s OK because you let someone post it on an Actual Play, and this will put you out… More than the time you’ve already wasted thinking about it?

I’m sure there are all kinds of horror scenarios people can pose about the collapse of Western civilization if someone’s allowed to use something they bought and record it in some way, but you know what?  Fuck it. Most IP law is bullshit and most of it has been created whole cloth in the last 50 years, and we got along fine without it before then.

My advice to Paizo and other publishers – make real damn sure you have a very compelling reason to need to hassle your customers before you do so. And some esoteric legal point isn’t it. Will this really cost you money?  Really?  If not, sack up and move along, being happy that someone cares about your stuff enough to promote it.

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Minimalist D&D 5e?

Posted on July 6, 2011 | 17 comments

Mike Mearls makes another good Legends & Lore post, in which he discusses a stripped-down D&D that just uses the ability scores and doesn’t fret with as many other mechanics. It’s interesting reading especially given the obvious lead-up to a D&D 5e in the offing.

I laud thinking about stripping down D&D more.  3.5e/Pathfinder is too complex IMO. The more books they put out for it the more disgruntled I get, especially as a DM. And 4e sucks; they tried to fix the problems in the exact wrong way. I keep going back to 2e as the happy medium between the more rules light like Basic and the later stuff.  Even 3e with just the PHB/DMG was OK, but it went crazy fast. And yeah, a lot of it was going to the open ended “infinite plusses vs a DC” model rather than the closed “stat rolls against itself” model.

The only problem with his pure-stats approach, though, is that ability scores are one of the most min-maxable attributes out there.  In early D&D, ability scores didn’t mean much, so everyone just rolled them.  As they got more and more of a part of the action – that high STR doubles your damage now instead of just adding 10% – we went to point buy and stat fiddling became de rigeur.  Going to “all stat,” unless it’s joined to “pure rolling” (which I wouldn’t mind, it’s retro) or “standard array” (which is unacceptable, but I fear would be the 4e+ way) will result in more of the colossal min-maxing we see today.

Maybe.  I mean, it does work for GURPS and such, but they have more careful stat balancing in general and tend to not promote “all combat monsters” as characters.  With D&D, now that everyone has to be a damage dealer (so the game theory goes) it becomes an exercise in high STR, except for the one guy with the abusively high CHA who automatically gets 40+ Bluff checks…

I’m not against the concept of getting rid of a lot of the rules cruft and just using stats as the base – but I have trouble believing they’d implement that right.  The temptation to layer yet more cruft on top in the new computer-gamer-uber-power world is too much.  Oh sure, I just roll DEX for archery or to avoid a fireball… But I add my level and half my buddy’s aura and feat bonuses and synergy and +2 for my class and +1 from magic and and…  Even if you managed to go back and limit stats to 3-18 instead of to 362 or whatever they go to nowadays (and then how do you reflect giants etc…?), then a simple +2 in cheese bonuses makes you auto succeed right? You would have to be very, very disciplined about removing nearly all bonuses and not letting things stack.  GURPS has this discipline – see my high level duelist character, he is very very experienced and very focused on fencing but a 16 is the very best he can do on an attack roll ever. Can D&D have this discipline, when everyone’s used to the “+3 sword?” Unlikely.

I would like to see a simple, OPEN, stripped down D&D core that removes a lot of the pain that 3e/4e have given us. Rules Cyclopedia/2e level of complexity max. That’d get me into a 5e…

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Pathfinder iPhone Apps Ship

Posted on July 6, 2011 | 9 comments

Two official iPhone apps for Pathfinder have hit the App Store.  iCrit is their Critical Hit Deck in app form, and iFumble is the same for their Critical Fumble Deck. Both are $1.99.

On the one hand, our group uses the critical hit deck and it’s convenient to have it in app form.  On the other hand, these are overpriced – $1.99 each as separate apps? For what is simply a fortune cookie random generator app? Combining them into one “deck app” that they’d release more content for later, or doing $.99 each, would be more reasonable. And also, I think it’s safe to say everyone had been expecting more out of the app launch. It was talked about first what, more than a  year ago? And the talk of technical delays – I hope that’s some other app and not these, because these are a weekend’s work for any Objective C programmer.

Not having used it, the UI also concerns me – though at first glance it looks just like the deck, it looks like it might take more than one touch to draw cards, which would make me sad – I don’t want to select things then hit “clear,” I just want to touch the screen to get a draw, touch again to get a draw, etc. I wonder if it supports their rules like “Weapon Focus gets to draw two and pick best.” Not that it has to, but if I have to draw a card, clear it, and draw another to look at two and pick then it’s already harder to use than the physical deck.

I was waiting for what I thought the iPhone apps would be… But I don’t think I’m going to spend $2 for an app form of a deck I already own with zero functionality other than randomly drawing a card, and similarly that’s too high for “well I’m not sold on fumbles but it might be interesting…” My phone is app-cluttered enough, if their model is going to be “one little app per product” I am not sure how relevant they will be to me.

 

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 49

Posted on June 27, 2011 | 1 comment

Forty-ninth Session – An I’krl ambassador comes insystem suing for peace. We ignore this obvious ruse and send the fleet to lift the siege of Tendril while the B Team takes the Red Queen to figure out what the hell the problem is with Algemron.

Admiral Takashi, my A Team character, enjoyed declaring VoidCorp enemies of humanity.  Those guys have been douches consistently throughout the entire campaign and clearly any ginger handling of them will just come back to bite us. So it’s internment camps for them. We interrogated the VoidCorp admiral who had been passing the Externals our battle plans, and he was ridiculously unhelpful. “Never, I love my new alien masters!” So it was time for roofies and psychic interrogation.

The External ambassador showing up and wanting a cease-fire was also clearly a diversion so that they can regroup after their unexpected defeats at our hands. The Admiral decided he was just there to jerk us off, so after a bit of a chat we sent some diplomats in to waste each others’ time for a couple months while we go to liberate some systems!

After some planned, we decided that the Tendril system, being besieged by an External fortress ship, should get the A Team, the Lighthouse and a big Verge Alliance fleet dispatched for its liberation.

Algemron is a bit knottier. The two planets there, Alitar and Galvin, have been at each other for decades. We have heard rumors about a new drug, whitespike, coming from there with what sounds like gardhyi enforcers, rumors of teln infestation of Galvin leadership, and all kinds of other weird stuff. Galvin has a pretty good fleet. Both systems are ignoring the rest of the Verge while locked in their death grapple. We decided to send the Red Queen, stealthed, with the B Team and a squad of Recon Marines to figure out what is going on and, probably, shoot it.

Interestingly, Markus, my B Team character, was talking with this fraal smuggler on Wreathe, Kiara Mantel, trying to get the lay of the land, and they really started vibing on each other (a routine Personality check to see whether she would deal with him resulted in a critical success). We’ll see what happens when we get back from the weapons drop – when we return, she’s supposed to give us a contact in the resistance on Galvin. Markus isn’t a ladies’ man, and love isn’t a primary motivation for him – as a mutant, he generally feels somewhat alienated from normal peoples’ goings-on. He’s only had two relationships in the campaign, a short unfulfilling one with an unemotional Thuldan engineer and then a more “party sex” one with infamous pirate Captain Cassoval. Upon further reflection, a fraal smuggler does somewhat split the difference between those two. A gruff muscled warlion and a sly frail psychic seems like an odd match, but I guess it worked for Arnold and Maria (well, until recent unfortunate events).

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