Category Archives: talk

RPGs as Sports: Team Tracking Tools

It’s been a while since my last installment in my RPGs as Sports series, but while I was at SXSW Interactive last week a little cutie I met on a shuttle bus introduced me to a cool tool that got me thinking.

Gaming group management is a pain, and the few tools that exist to help with it suck.  I’ve used  Yahoo groups and other such things and that’s pretty much state of the art. But you know who has the exact same problems we do?  Sports teams, especially rec teams.  You need to keep up with a team roster, get info out to people (players and parents and whatnot) on games, share files, see who’s bringing snacks, even possibly collect dues. (I have a friend who manages a rec soccer team and getting the money out of the damn deadbeats for the ref fees is never ending.) Enter TeamSnap.  It’s designed for people putting together sports teams, but has pages on using it for clubs and other stuff.

I used to run the FORGE, the local gaming club in Memphis, and boy I wish this had been around then.  It does rosters, game scheduling, tracking player availability (scheduling games around our schedules is hard nowadays isn’t it old gaffers?), forums and messaging, player stats (think XP), photo and file sharing, payment collection, refreshment scheduling, shit it even has an iPhone app. Every bit of it is useful for a gaming group or organized play club. And it’s way slicker than anything aimed at the RPG sector specifically.

If you are having trouble scheduling games with your group, give it a try (most of the features are free) and see if it helps! I may try to talk my group into it…

Traveller iPhone MMORPG Coming

Greetings, faithful readers! It’s been quiet around here because for the last week I’ve been at SXSW Interactive, the most bad ass tech conference in the world, in the most bad ass city in the world, Austin, TX.

Most of my time was spent in Important Technology Pursuits Well Lubricated With Free Alcohol, but the geek in me came out as I wandered by a booth in the Screenburn Arcade featuring a new Traveller-based MMO for the iPhone, Traveller AR. (AR stands for Augmented Reality.) It’s got an old school hex map and both trading and combat, and is being done by a bunch of folks with fondness for the tabletop RPG.  In fact, who did I get to meet in their booth?  None other than Loren Wiseman! (Middle rear in the pic below.)

Traveller!

There are few people with more Traveller chops than him (really only one, Marc Miller himself). You can go sign up for the beta, but hurry, it begins in April.

Also, for some weird reason, Mayfair Games had a booth showing off Settlers of Catan and their new America version. Good to see the old school games representing in the new world!

Save Third Party D&D Publishers!

Aren’t third party D&D publishers doing fine?  No, we mean third party publishers for 4e.  So you can see the problem.

Chris Dias wrote this Open Letter to WotC: Save 3rd Party Dungeons and Dragons Publishers, asking WotC to do something, anything, to help out their third party business partners, please.

Of course, this reasonable request brought out the psychos of the Unpaid WotC Defense Brigade, who rebut Dias by telling him that he and his whole grey market sub-industry should consider themselves lucky to be suckling at Wizard’s teats. Bonus, one 3pp’s “lawyer” chimes in to give his opinion on how draconic business practices are the only way to go.

Surprisingly, I’m on WotC’s side on this one. Well, at least kinda. Let me explain.

Q: What do you tell a third party D&D 4e publisher with two black eyes?

A: Nothing, they obviously don’t listen.

Look, man.  Wizards has been making it clear for three years now that they would like every other company to die in a fire. They pulled all their licenses from third parties.  Then they abandoned the OGL, dragged their feet on putting out any kind of license, and then when they put out the GSL it had a “poison pill” clause saying you couldn’t use the new license if you were doing anything OGL. (They retracted that eventually in the face of a firestorm of criticism.) They don’t let 3pps into the DDI, they don’t promote them at all, they clearly see them as leeches upon their largess that they’re not even clear themselves why they tolerate.

So by continuing to try to publish for them, you’re really just getting into battered spouse syndrome.  “Hey maybe if you just beat me a little less I can really please you!” Why are these people still trying to do it?  “I know WotC still really loves us, even though they treat us so bad!”

Sorry, baby, they don’t love you. And they’re not gonna stop whupping on you. It’s time to go find yourself a new man/woman. Try Paizo and Pathfinder, they cheerfully promote their third party partners and those guys are creating large amounts of great content and selling it. Open Design, Rite Publishing, LPJ Designs, Adamant Entertainment, and many more.  Heck, I have personally bought Pathfinder stuff from those guys plus Green Ronin, Sagawork, and probably some others I’m forgetting. On RPGNow there’s 4x the number of third party products for Pathfinder than for 4e.

Morrus from ENWorld seems to be the only one happy about publishing for 4e, he says “it’s great being a big fish in a small pond.”  I would hope you could sell SOME copies when you slather ads for your product over every single ENWorld page all the time. And I’m glad you’re happy with “a big slice of a small pie instead of a small slice of a big pie” – but that’s not really what real companies usually try for, and it certainly doesn’t breed innovation or excellence. Try using software written for a niche industry sometime; you’ll discover where all those Nazi scientists fled to and what they’re doing with their time – Gmail it’s generally not.

You’re left with two choices – embrace the indifference, mediocrity, and occasional ass-beatings, or break up with that abuser and find a new sugar daddy, one that’ll treat you right. Come on, baby.  We’ll give you what you need.

Salon on D&D

Check out this very lengthy Salon article, How “Dungeons & Dragons” Changed My Life.  Apparently it’s  hipstery for us old dudes to be playing D&D again.  Woot!  Keep doing something long enough and it’ll be cool again. Imagine my relief.

Reaver Character Updates

Our merry band of miscreants in my Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign have all leveled, as well as accumulated various distinguishing scars and marks. Check them out!

All these characters now bear a strange glyph on their bodies, like a tattoo, which appeared when a glyph-covered plaque the evil serpent man was using to open the Cyphergate exploded, embedding fragments in all those present. They are not sure of the significance of this, though the glyphs burn painfully at certain times.

PCs

Sindawe is a Bonuwat Mwangi skilled in unarmed combat. He became the party leader early on and earned the epithet “Woman-killer” for his complete lack of hesitation when it comes to taking down female enemies. He got a new snake tattoo when he became the lover of voodoo loa Mama Watanna, and a set of orca bite scars when he cheated on her with Hatshepsut, an Osirian monk/priestess of Ydersius they pulled out of suspended animation in Viperwall. He’s also a very skilled cartographer and has been learning the ancient tongue Aklo. His favorite weapon is a pair of cold iron brass knuckles he bought second hand with the letters “ELFPU” and “NCHER” engraved on the knuckles. A life goal is to find enough treasure to go back to the Mwangi Expanse, wipe out the clan that killed his family, and restore his own clan. Sindawe Narr, Monk 5

Tommy Blacktoes was just a halfling rogue from Cheliax with a penchant for nipple torture. But since coming to Riddleport, he’s become smitten with the tiefling whore Lavender Lil, taken on the geas of the ghost of Black Dog the pirate, and accepted the profane gift of a succubus agent of Nocticula. Finally he became an assassin and popped his cherry on a crazy derro who was in the middle of an autopsy. His Disable Device, Escape Artist, and Stealth skills are at a legendary level. A life goal is to murder Clegg Zincher, free Lavender Lil, and become a feared pirate. Tommy Blacktoes, Rogue 4/Assassin 1

Serpent, real name Ref Jorenson, is an oddly colored Ulfen man of uncertain parentage from the Land of the Linnorm Kings. He has a gigantic pet python named Saluthra. Serpent became romantically involved with Samaritha Beldusk, a half-elf aspiring Cyphermage. When it turned out she was really a serpent person in disguise, he decided “Eh… Snakes are my thing anyway.” He recently discovered that he may be related to Cyphermage Fenella Bromathan, right before he burned her alive on a pyre in accordance with Ulfen tradition. He is extremely nimble and can’t settle on a single character class, though by all accounts he’s good in the wilderness. His prized possession is a single Boot of Striding and Springing liberated from the chieftain of the goblin “Junk-Kicker” tribe. A life goal is to find out who his mother was. Serpent Jorenson, Druid 2/Ranger 2/Barbarian 1

Wogan is a portly, bearded cleric of Gozreh from Cheliax. He is most notable for his love of guns, a newfangled kind of invention that makes the others nervous. His religious vow of chastity has kept him out of a lot of the trouble that dogs the other Reavers – so why do they look on him with pity whenever it’s mentioned? Between his thundering trident, his firearms, and call lightning, this is a guy you hear coming a long ways off. He’s also a very skilled fisherman. A life goal is to drink more than anyone else in any place at any time. Wogan, Cleric 5

NPCs

Samaritha Beldusk appears to be a chirpy half-elven woman who aspires to become a Cyphermage. Really, though, she is a serpentfolk wizard. Perhaps even more surprisingly, she appears to not be the evil world-dominating type, and is in love with Serpent. She is a transmuter, but is quite fond of her wand of magic missiles, which can solve many a problem given enough time. She knows many things, which is a nice counterpoint to the PCs, who never met a Knowledge skill they liked. Samaritha, Wizard 4

Hatshepsut is of Osirian descent and was the priestess of Ydersius in a large temple that is now the ruins of Viperwall. She was trapped in a magical mirror when her temple fell and kept in suspended animation for many centuries until the PCs let her out. They then tried to kill her, and then took her prisoner, but eventually they became fond of her vicious “serpent strike” punches that cause continual bleeding. She is very taciturn, and mostly only speaks Aklo, though has been working on learning Common. She is very standoffish and is known to unload on someone for violating whatever archaic system of etiquette she subscribes to. Sindawe befriended her and they fought side by side for a long time. Recently, after a violent bout of sparring, she and Sindawe had a violent bout of lovemaking. This annoyed his goddess lover and the fallout is still in progress. Hatshepsut, Monk 4/Cleric 4

Both Samaritha and Hatshepsut worship Ydersius, who they claim was a lawful deity before the Azlanti cut his head off. No one is sure of the truth behind this claim.

P.S. The great pics of the PCs are by Paul (Serpent), we use them on paper standups for the characters too.

Gamer TV 2

Well, I decided since a year has passed, it’s time for a refresh posting of Gamer TV, a poll I did for my gaming group as to what TV shows they’re watching.

In my last Gamer TV poll, there was a lot of unity around a number of shows.  However, now, not as much. A lot of good shows many of us watch are on hiatus (or cancelled, who can ever tell) – Walking Dead, V, Stargate: Universe, Psych, Warehouse 13, Sons of Anarchy, Burn Notice, Metalocalypse… And what’s left isn’t that compelling, especially in the SF/fantasy/horror/geekitude arena. Here’s the poll results, sorted by number of votes and rough level of enthusiasm (some respondents provided categories of enjoyment).

Gamer Approved TV

  • 30 Rock x3
  • Supernatural x3
  • Tosh.0 x3
  • Being Human (US) x3
  • Being Human (British) x2
  • Castle x2
  • Daily Show x2
  • Chuck x2
  • Sons of Guns x2
  • How I Met Your Mother x2
  • S#*t My Dad Says x2
  • Doctor Who x2
  • Archer x2
  • Big Bang Theory x2
  • Fringe x2
  • House x2

Random Might-Be-Interesting TV

  • Southland
  • Gold Rush Alaska
  • Lights Out
  • Modern Family
  • Traffic Light
  • Community
  • Perfect Couples
  • Modern Family
  • Covert Affairs
  • White Collar
  • Glee
  • Kitchen Nightmares
  • No Ordinary Family
  • Simpsons
  • Mythbusters
  • Eagleheart
  • Justified
  • The Middle
  • Raising Hope
  • Better with You
  • Fringe
  • Avengers
  • Young Justice
  • Family Guy
  • Rules of Engagement
  • Shameless (British)
  • Detroit 187
  • Mr Sunshine
  • Outsourced
  • Onion
  • Primeval
  • Bob’s Burgers
  • Robot Chicken
  • The Cape
  • Kitchen Impossible
  • Renovation Realities
  • Kill It Cook It Eat It
  • House
  • Bizarre Foods
  • Bitchin Kitchen
  • The Colony
  • Top Chef Allstars
  • Chopped Allstars
  • Kathy Griffin Life on the D List

The thing that struck me about this was the wide variety. Some of the picks (like the cooking shows) are from our groupies, not the gamers per se. Yes, it’s odd, our gaming group has groupies. But there’s a lot of diversity even taking those out of the lineup. Six respondents, only 3 votes for any single show. Last time, nearly everyone watched Dollhouse, for instance.

Volume varied a lot, too.  One guy only watches three shows.  One submitted thirty-three! (I only watch seven, not counting all the ones on hiatus.)

The biggest change is that Big Bang Theory used to be quite popular but has  dropped way down the list. I know I used to watch it and don’t any more, it got boring.

Being Human, Doctor Who, Fringe, and Supernatural are the only “genre” shows making the cut for us right now.  Note to the networks, we don’t love SF or whatever so much we’ll watch the shit you shovel out. In fact, all the Fringe watchers say that it is on its way down hard and they only watch it out of habit now (Heroes/Lost syndrome).

What about you?  Anything we missed, that you think has wide gamer appeal?

Sinister Adventures – Looks Like It’s Finally Dead

Well. Many of us have been waiting, waiting, waiting for Nick Logue’s Sinister Adventures imprint to publish Razor Coast.  He took pre-orders and said it was “close” in 2008. It wasn’t. Then he took a new job and effectively disappeared.

But the early stuff on Razor Coast looked AWESOME. Finally Lou Agresta and some volunteers (including yours truly) pitched in to try to the the manuscript completed, proofread, etc.  Lou did a great job of taking something half finished and pulling it all together. A complete manuscript got handed over to Nick a couple months ago. You can see a bit of the three years of trauma on this Paizo.com thread. You could see it on Sinister Adventures’ site, but as of now the domain name expired and it’s down. Probably for good.

Which is probably for the best.  The forums were overtaken by spammers, which Nick didn’t bother to do anything about (heck, or give the forum mod password to any of the people that would have been happy to do it for him). He dropped in on his own forums once every three to six months to say something chirpy and then disappear again. No answers to most emails. No meaningful updates or responses to customer queries.

Will Razor Coast eventually emerge?  No. No, despite it being completed except for layout and printing, Logue has shown that he really doesn’t care enough to do anything to complete the work required to get it out. Even though e.g. Louis Porter has offered to pick it up, even though I’m sure a quick layout job and then PDFing it would at least get it out there.

Nick Logue really dropped the ball in a completely negligent manner on this whole thing. I don’t think anyone has any legitimate expectation that this product will see the light of day. At least I hear he’s still giving refunds to those who can somehow find him to do so.

Nick – there’s no excuse for how you handled this. If you’re not going to do it, send everyone’s money back and close up shop. If you’re going to do it, then how much work does it take to go make a forum post once every two fucking weeks? Britain may be a shithole but they do have the Internet there and you work at a university. I guarantee you can send emails and access the Internet.  But people who invested in you apparently weren’t worth 15 minutes of your time every couple weeks – or, indeed, every couple months.  With the way you’ve handled this, you’ve effectively been saying “Fuck you” to a bunch of people that liked your work and believed in you, to the point of pre-ordering, a somewhat psychotic thing to do in the incompetence-riddled RPG industry.

Your work for Paizo was great and bought you some apparently ill-deserved credibility, and it’s unfortunate that this reflects back on them as well. Next guy that tries to spin off their own side thing from Paizo, I won’t be able to trust them one single fucking second just because they got stuff out there while working there. You’ve reflected poorly on yourself and degraded confidence in other Paizoites and the industry in general. You’ve reaffirmed that any given RPG company is probably incompetent and you should never give them money in advance, and that the rare exceptions like Open Design are probably just a temporary aberration. You have squandered more good will than most people in the industry ever. Solid work.

XCrawl Is Coming… To Pathfinder

I just ran across this post on the Goodman Games forum – the new version of XCrawl will be powered by Pathfinder!

I ran my first game of XCrawl recently and found it to be a lot of fun.  Here’s the play report. It’s like a kinda modern day game where dungeon crawling is the most popular professional (blood)sport.

They considered using 4e, but WotC’s cunning plan to have their license say you can’t use a modern setting with real world place names makes it impossible.  As one forum poster said, “Oh well, Happy accident then.  suck it WOTC” [sic].

Terror Is Coming… To Pathfinder

Waiting for just that right time to get in on the Paizo Adventure Path subscriptions?  Well this might be it. They are about to begin their newest Adventure Path, called Carrion Crown, and it’s going to be a big ol’ Ravenloft-esque Gothic horror fest. Its blurb:

“The Cult of the Whispering Way weaves a wide-ranging conspiracy throughout the horror-tinged lands of Ustalav aimed at freeing the Lich King Tar-Baphon, better known as the Whispering Tyrant, from his eternal prison in the dungeon of Gallowspire. Their debased rites and malicious schemes set werewolf against vampire, ghost against terror from beyond time and space in a thrilling campaign that touches upon themes of classic horror and dark swords and sorcery!”

You can go download the free Player’s Guide and see what you’ll be getting into. Subscribe now and they’ll ship  you each installment as soon as it drops, you’ll get a 30% discount, and you’ll get the PDFs free.

GUMSHOE Is Coming… To Pathfinder

I came across a very interesting post on the Pelgrane Press site today, where they are soliciting playtesters for “Pathshoe,” a Pathfinder supplement that incorporates the GUMSHOE rules for investigation into the Pathfinder RPG.Apparently I missed this tidbit buried down at the very bottom of the Pelgrane state of the union I reported on just a couple days ago! I need to learn to read better or something.

This is a very interesting concept. If you’re not familiar with GUMSHOE, it’s Robin Laws’ newest game system and was designed to fix the chronic problems with investigative scenarios in RPGs. Most trad game skill systems make it so there’s a lot to go wrong with them – you plant a clue and give some DC skill check to find it.  But what if the character with the right skill isn’t around?  What if he fails? Well, you have to either say bye bye to your investigation or build layers and layers of clues in so that they end up being pulled back on track. It especially haunts investigation-centric games like Call of Cthulhu (which is why the GUMSHOE-based Trails of Cthulhu is their biggest line). What GUMSHOE does is make it so that the “core clues,” the ones PCs must have to proceed along the plot, are always found, but skill checks indicate how much useful additional info you get from them.

Pathfinder has this problem too, as it focuses on exploration and investigation in equal share with combat in its normal mode of employ. I was contemplating this problem just this week reading the new Paizo adventure Cult of the Ebon Destroyers, where the PCs are tracking down an assassin cult in Jalmeray. The whole first part of the adventure is a careful dance to provide clues but if the clues fail basically have someone run up and blurt out the next step. If only bad guy organizations would stop sending understrength incompetent hit squads with notes in their pockets indicating where they’re from against every PC party in their area of operations, they’d get away with a lot more shenanigans! I’m not knocking Ebon Destroyers, it’s good, but this is a problem that is very tricky to solve in most scenarios.

I’m really interested to see how they plan to add the GUMSHOE concept seamlessly to Pathfinder!

Steve Jackson, Posthuman, Pelgrane, Green Ronin States of the Union

Steve Jackson Games’ annual report says they’re doing well, and it’s all Munchkin all the time. No new RPGs and GURPS gets a small part of the overall update. Ah well, we still have one GURPS diehard in our gaming group that still gets the stuff.

Posthuman Studios’ annual report says they’re doing real well!  Releasing Eclipse Phase as a Creative Commons product (free on BitTorrent!) has, as usual, proved the “Piracy Kills!” crowd wrong as their sales are brisk. The only fly in the ointment has been fallout from leaving Catalyst Games, whose embezzlement scandal is well documented (I’ve been ignoring it lately, I assume there’s no big news there). Several people in our group are interested in Eclipse Phase but we have a bit of a “where do we start?” problem.

Pelgrane Press was worried about 2010 and is fretting about print but it seems to have worked out well for them, a lot of GUMSHOE out and more on the way including the slick-looking Ashen Stars.  Hint – keep publishing those adventures!  Whenever I buy some weird  high concept game, the thing I want right after it is adventures – that’s why Hard Helix sold 50% of the Mutant City Blues run.  I got it, and I got Little Girl Lost for Esoterrorists. And I see you have adventures coming hard on the heels of Ashen Stars, which is absolutely the right thing to do.

Green Ronin’s Message from the President indicates that they’re doing well, but the subtext is disturbing – they’re not doing much with their own games (True20, Freeport) and are focusing on the licensed properties – DC Adventures, Dragon Age, and Song of Ice and Fire.  But they note that those properties are tough because the licenseholders often dick them around (my translation).  I’m worried about such a large part of their product strategy being tied up with stuff like that; it seems like it would only take one of those deals going real bad to send them into a death spiral. Hopefully they’re sufficiently spread out. M&M Third Edition hopefully will bloom a lot – right now most of what’s for it is DC but that line seems somewhat unsatisfying in that it’ll be “four books then done…” I liked the original Marvel Super Heroes because of the adventure support…

Call of Cthulhu News

Seems like the hoary old tome is still squirming – news is that a Call of Cthulhu Seventh Edition is coming out, maybe in time for GenCon! As usual it won’t be that different from previous eds. but may have some innovations.

And this is cool coming on the heels of the new The Laundry RPG, which is based on some Charles Stross novels where a British buraeucracy tries to combat Lovecraftian horror and budget cuts. Dark horror/comedy, and BRP-based like CoC is.

What is it about Cthulhu games and shitty Web sites?  Cubicle 7’s main site doesn’t even mention The Laundry and Chaosium’s site hasn’t mentioned jack in ages.

I just bought a couple of the new third party licensed Call of Cthulhu modules myself, Murder of Crows and The Doom From Below by Stan! of Super Genius Games – and their Web site actually lists the products, so that’s a leg up right there. And they’re decent – not awe-inspiring, but serviceable Cthulhu adventures, and linked together to boot. I might just have to dust off my old Scooby Doo Cthulhu characters and take these for a drive.

In non-BRP Cthulhu news, Trail of Cthulhu has a dizzying number of supplements published now and there are more on the way. Shadows of Cthulhu (True20) and Realms of Cthulhu (Savage Worlds) don’t seem to be doing much, though they promise some adventures for Realms soon.