Category Archives: talk

Gen Con Memories

Posted on August 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

I gamed some as a kid, but never got to the level where I went to Gen Con.  I broached the subject with my dad once when I was in high school, IIRC, and he was not at all about that, so pretty much it faded from mind, along with all gaming, in college.

But later on, when I had picked up gaming again, I decided to go.  I went to four in Milwaukee (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001), and then once for just a couple days to one in Indy  in 2003.  Since then none; being a single dad has crimped my “wander off for a week” opportunities.  I tried to get some guys here interested in 2008 for the D&D 4e launch; in retrospect I guess it’s good it didn’t happen as I would have been really pissed at paying about $1k to travel to a location to have WotC take a dump on my head.

Let’s see, checking my infinite email archives, here’s all my old Gen Con trip reports, if you care!  They’re in reverse chronological order.

Gen Con 2003 – First Time In Indy

This is the last year I went to Gen Con; it wasn’t as fun as the previous  years and I wasn’t there with any close buddies, which contributed.  And I had quit Living Greyhawk in disgust at how badly the RPGA runs things, so didn’t have duties to perform there.  But it was still decent.  Surprisingly, even with it being the most recent, I don’t remember a lot of it.

Had a lot of fun at the con.  Was only there for two days, so I didn’t get everything in I wanted to…

Game Highlights

  • Novus Ordo Saeclorum Cthulhu tournament, well staged and run, equivalent to the Cthulhu Masters tourneys I’ve played in the past.  The PCs were college kids on a “summer at sea” on a sailing vessel; we got shipwrecked on a tropical island, but it went from Castaway to Robinson Crusoe fast when the cannibals came – and got worse, Cthulhu style…
  • I played both Spycraft and d20 Modern…  I have both games, but actually getting to play them gives me a better ideas of their relative merits and flaws for a modern action game.  And taught me that if you play d20 Modern and don’t take the Improved Damage Threshold feat you’re an idiot.  (In d20 Modern, if you take damage equal or greater to your CON, you have to save or go to -1 hp immediately).  The Spycraft game flowed better and was more flavorful.  d20 Modern was OK but seemed to promote min-maxed specialization in a character rather than promoting a broader, more diverse character than Spycraft did.
  • Buffy!  I was in a very enjoyable Buffy game with a good GM and really good role-players.  The guy playing Xander had it down pat and the GM had written a perfectly Buffy-esque adventure.  This game is one of the few that truly generates a game session that emulates its source material well.
  • RPGA game mustering was even worse and more confusing that usual.  But that’s what I’ve come to expect from the RPGA.

Dealer Room Highlights

There wasn’t any single thing that was just huge this year.  Places with buzz were:
  • The Valar booth – makers of the “Book of Erotic Fantasy”, a sex supplement for D&D (coming in October). They had chainmail-clad babes out pulling in the masses…  They got a lot of press including spots on local TV out of the gig.  They had a 10-page preview of what will be a 192-page hardback.  The art was bondagey and naked, but other than that the contents weren’t as titillating as one might suspect – the sex part was prestige-class heavy (how many classes that use sex to power their abilities do you really need?) and segued quickly into childbirth issues and stuff like that.
  • Guardians of Order was selling their “dX” rulebook for $1 (normally $10); it describes their generic “dX system” based on Big Eyes, Small Mount and Silver Age Sentinels, and their licensing agreement (it’s not OGL…)  I got it and read it over, it’s fairly solid with only a couple questionable design decisions.
  • Mongoose Games had their new Babylon 5 RPG out, and had a large booth showing off their Judge Dredd, Slaine, and generic D&D lines…  They have gotten the Conan license and are coming out with that soon.  I bought and read their Slaine RPG (Celtic, based on a comic) and I was very impressed by its quality – most of their D&D stuff is shovelware.
Other than that, there weren’t many big releases.  Companies that were notable for having large Gen Con presences and big releases in previous years (PEG, Holistic) had calm booths with not much new.  No big release from White Wolf, either.  Wizards had D&D 3.5 but weren’t pushing it; it looked like they were getting ready to push D&D Miniatures but weren’t quite ready with them yet.  So they just pushed their standard assortment of card games.  Steve Jackson and Atlas had a combo booth, larger than usual, and though there wasn’t much fanfare they had a lot of small new products I hadn’t heard about, including a lot of new “Coriolis” entries (adventures dual-statted for d20 and Atlas games like Ars Magica, Unknown Armies, Rune, and Feng Shui).

City Highlights

Indianapolis was definitely an upgrade from Milwaukee for the con.  Huge convention center, with plenty of room.  The RPGA table area was never anywhere near full.  5 large hotels connected by skywalk to the convention center and a nearby mall.  Lots of nearby dining.  Hotels and parking weren’t all full up like they were in Milwaukee – and since it’s 15 minutes from the airport to the convention you could easily stay in the $40/night Motel 6 and commute rather than pay con hotel prices.
Overall, it was a fun Gen Con.  I have been to 3-4 before in Milwaukee, and usually get to stay all 4 days.  This was a quick stay, but it was definitely worth it.
Ah, my last Gen Con.  Hopefully not my last ever, but you never know.

Gen Con 2001 – Last Gasp In Milwaukee

This year, I was still working on Living Greyhawk so did a lot of RPGA/D&D 3e stuff; besides that, random games!  One of the best things about Gen Con, IMO, is the opportunity to play a bunch of games that you might not get to otherwise – even ones you have, but that you just can never get a group together, especially without you GMing.

I just got back from the con.  The things I saw and bought were:
  • Weird War II: Blood on the Rhine.  From Pinnacle of Deadlands fame, this d20 game is like Deadlands but WWII – were-Nazis, etc.  d20 writeups for a bunch of WWII equipment etc.  Very nice.  New classes etc.  As a Deadlands fan and Nazi smasher I like it.
  • Little Fears by Key 20 Publishing.  A horror game where you play little children, who are beset by horrific happenings and indifferent adults.  I love RP challenges and trying to really play a small child as a character is a cool thing.
  • Rune hardback by Atlas Games.  Designed by Robin Laws of Feng Shui fame, this game is all about being a screaming Viking warrior hacking at things and dying as bloodily as you lived.  I also got the first adventure, “Crouching Wizard, Smashing Hammer.”  The system was a little more complicated than I’d anticipated but it’s fun and tongue-in-cheek look at Viking life is worthwhile.
  • In Your Face Again,  an adventure collection for Feng Shui also by Atlas Games.  10 scenarios – haven’t read them yet but FS adventures are always the greatest.
  • Maiden Voyage, an Atlas d20 adventure for characters L1-3.  Ship-based!  We’re running a piratical D&D game at home so I couldn’t resist.  The interior is very pretty, largely by addition of another color (blue) to many of the illustrations.  And I’ve liked all the Atlas d20 scenarios so far.
  • Hell in Freeport, a d20 adventure by Green Ronin Publishing – the Freeport series is one of the best d20 adventure series to date, and the fourth in the series is a big 88-pager for characters L10-12!  And it is HARD core.  Terrify your players with this series.
  • Denizens of Vecheron, by Mayfair Games – this addition to the old Demons series of products has too many demon princes and not enough creatures, as the rest do, but I love the Demons series and am completing it out.  Your PCs have never been properly faced by the demonic legions unless you use these supplements.
That’s it.  Usually I get more.  I looked at a number of things I decided not to pick up.  There were some interesting d20 supplements, like the AEG “Evil” book, but they failed the content-to-price ratio.  As did the Vorox supplement for Fading Suns – I love the Vorox, but a quick flip through the book pretty much gave me all I’ll get out of the supplement, so why blow another $20?
Exalted is a big new launch by White Wolf; it’s about the time of the Nephilim (see Genesis) pretty much and seems very different from their WoD games and interesting and anime-inspired – but I looked through it and saw another turgidly huge WW world in there, and decided to pass.
The Living Greyhawk – Yeomanry meeting at Gen Con was well received, with about 30 attendees from our and other interested regions.  We fielded questions and did a “state of the Union” Yeomanry address summing up what we’ve done and where we’re going in the next year.

Gen Con 2000 – Living Greyhawk All The Way

This was my biggest Gen Con.  As a Regional Triad for the Yeomanry region of Living Greyhawk, I had a galley of 3e and was prepared to run new Greyhawk adventures with its launch at the con.  And our Memphis gaming group, the FORGE, turned out in force and we joined the actual D&D tournament and came in third!

My FORGE Trip Report

Gen Con was a lot of fun.  I ran 4 slots worth of the new 3rd Edition D&D, and one of Feng Shui (a Hong Kong action game).  I am happy to announce that the FORGE won 3rd place in the RPGA D&D Team event!  Myself, Mike Seagrave, Collin Davenport, Alan Black, Angie Overstreet, and Mike O’Keefe entered and kicked ass…  We advanced to the finals and beat out a lot of other teams.
The 3e and Living Greyhawk launch went great.  I hope all of you have your D&D 3e Player’s Handbook already (it’s in stores).  We’ll be running LG events at FORGE functions.
A more detailed report will be given at the FORGE meeting – but the con was good, and we saw a lot of people from Memphis there.  Tip & Debbie Vaught, who some of you may remember from the FORGE’s early days, were there.

My Living Greyhawk Trip Report

The con went great.  I had the honor of meeting both August and Denis face to face, as well as a bunch of other Southern Realms people.I ran a bunch of slots of the Living Greyhawk Special “The Reckoning.”  It’s good, consider running it in your areas.

All the players I had were jazzed about 3e and Living Greyhawk.  I only had one table that didn’t have a good time, and that was because they just *so* did not click as players…  But the e-famous Stephane Tanguay was there, so all wasn’t lost…

I also ran a fun game of Feng Shui, and my team got 3rd place in the D&D Team event – beaten out by Clan Yeoman, from up in Kentucky!  Congrats to those folks.  It doesn’t make me feel too bad to be beaten by fellow Yeomen!  I did get first in a Living Verge event though.  So my first all-RPGA con went well.

On the drive home to Memphis, our gaming group argued out a number of 3e house rules (yes, already)…

So the launch went great, all the LG events were super-overstuffed, and now there’s a herd of 2nd level Greyhawkers out there…  So be careful!

Gen Con 1999 – Alternity

I was a big Alternity fan back then, so I played a lot of that.  And other stuff, but that’s all I had notes on.  If my memory serves, I did some Living City (RPGA 2e D&D) and then as much “other” – Fading Suns, Call of Cthulhu Master’s Tournament, etc. – as I could.

Well, I just got back from Gen Con where I played in three of the four Alternity Living Verge events (missed the last one, darn it).  Some random observations:
  • The first adventure, Whirlwind Tour, was average.  Some crashing in a ship, some combat, some problem-solving – OK, not inspiring.  The second, You Can Pick Your Friends, sucked soooo hard.  The party is accosted by killer robots that look like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.  It was really violent and deadly and was silly and pointless.  The third, whose name I forget (Busy Night?), was a very engaging murder mystery where the party had to solve a businessman’s demise – there was a very complex web of activities surrounding it.  It was cool and very realistic, the plot didn’t come by with laser pistols to urge you towards the pre-set resolution…
  • There were not enough Combat Specs.  I was one of two in most parties, and except for that third adventure they felt obligated to put in lots of shooting.  (Way too much in the Pac-Man adventure).
  • The people playing Werens were always real quiet for some reason.  And nonviolent.  Strange. There were lots of Mechalus.
  • It was pretty disorganized for a Living campaign – no certing or anything, and lots of people didn’t have characters ready.  I don’t mind that per se, but I worry that when they decide it’s needed those of us with experienced characters will get screwed (sorry, no documentation on those advancement points, you lose ’em).
  • It was fun though!  My Thuldan Warlion got to pound down a weren in a single combat round, one of his goals… ;-)
  • Fighting robots sucks.  We were attacked by these (ridiculous) combat robots that weren’t stunnable.  Lots of people choose stutter weapons etc. and basically we all nearly died.  Need to find a good anti-robot weapon.
  • The one time I was really worried was in the Busy Night when two of the characters were “Boss H’ass” and “Bar Bar Jinks”, both T’sa… Fortunately they were good roleplayers and tempered their antics very well.
I was in the Cthulhu Masters Tournament a couple years, so I’m not sure if it was this year – but I think it was, that there was an awesome postapocalyptic scenario.  CMT always got a room of its own and used props and semi-LARP techniques.  New York was half under water, and we went through its ruins into a computer room and used a decryption disk taken from a cultist who was telling us the stars were coming right… When the projected computer screen went from random encrypted Matrix-style gibberish to the bold, blinking words “UPLOAD SACRIFICE” I about shit myself.  The CMT always delivered, boy.

Gen Con 1998 – HK Action and Horror and Religion

My first Gen Con!  And I really enjoyed it.  Mainly I wanted to play Call of Cthulhu/Deadlands and Feng Shui/Hong Kong Action Theater types of games.  Also, I was publications director for the Christian Gamer’s Guild, so the trip report I found in my email focused on religious elements in gaming.  Avert your eyes if you’re one of those tarot-licking types that finds that scary or offensive.

Well, I just got back from Gen Con, and thought I’d give a report. The con was very enjoyable, and I was scheduled for an aggressive set of events.  I noticed that religious characters are becoming a standard set of people to include in any tournament scenario, which gives Christians a chance to show people a more realistic depiction of faith.  For example, here’s a list of some of the games I was in and religious characters included:
  1. Call of Cthulhu “Travelers in the Hebrides” – had one Dominican Inquisitor and one nun, was set in late 1500s.  I played a Dutch boat pilot who had been converted from Protestantism by threat of torture by the Spaniards.
  2. Feng Shui “The New Twilight Sanction” – was a kinda Ghostbusters-meets-HK action event.  It had a Catholic street preacher who works in the projects, played by yours truly.  He busted demons, preached Scripture, and teased the Indian character (“Did one of your six-armed gods tell you that?”).
  3. Deadlands “Everyone Loves Zombies” – had a pair of crazy nuns.  Nuns are great characters in Deadlands!  One was a lush though.
  4. Call of Cthulhu “Sandstorm at Rail’s End” – had a Baptist preacher, played a little tongue-in-cheek (“Sorry lord, I didn’t know she was a Presbyterian!”).
  5. Fading Suns “Demo” – had an Urth Orthodox (futuristic universalist Catholicism) priest.  And lots of Avestite (Inquisitor) NPCs.
  6. And of course all AD&D scenarios have a cleric in them.
Except for the Marvel Super Heroes game and the Hong Kong Action Theater games, everything I played in had some kind of religious figure, usually real-world Christianity-based.  That is an excellent opportunity for Christians playing in these games to demonstrate something besides being a “holy ass-kicker” (though that’s good too, don’t get me wrong).  Many people always play these characters as hypocritical or just silly, and it can be nice to show an alternative to that.
I got a couple religiously-oriented RPG supplements I hope to review for the e-zine: Fire & Brimstone for Deadlands, and Priests of the Celestial Sun for Fading Suns.  I won a supplement for “Providence” for my RPing in the Feng Shui game, not sure yet exactly what that game’s deal is.
The con was great, for those who are going next year I definitely recommend preregistering to the hilt to ensure everything goes according to plan.
Some other notes in retrospect-  the HKAT! “Burning City” game was just awesome.  We were all OCTB agents trying to stop Cthulhu cultists, and there was a great scene where we were taking Zodiac boats out to an island and everyone had geared up, and we went around to have everyone describe themselves.  They were all set up to be badass to the hilt – there was the guy in full riot gear with huge heavy weapons, the guy in the thousand dollar suit and sunglasses with all the automatics, the chick in a catsuit with two MP5s and throwing knives, etc; all totally uber.  My turn was last.  I was the lieutenant, so my description was, “He’s wearing tan Chinos and an OCTB windbreaker, and waves his snubnosed .38 with a pensive but determined look on his face.”  I got high fives.

Leave a comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , , , ,

Pathfinder Sweeps the ENnies!

Posted on August 6, 2010 | 2 comments

Well, it’s gratifying to see most of you voted like you were told.    Paizo is liveblogging the awards and they are winning and winning and winning.

  • d20pfsrd – silver for Best Website.
  • Kobold Quarterly – gold for Best Blog.  (They’re half Pathfinder!)
  • Pathfinder Bestiary – gold for Best Cover Art.
  • Pathfinder Core Rulebook – gold for Best Interior Art.
  • Pathfinder Chronicles City Map Folio – gold for Best Cartography.
  • Pathfinder Core Rulebook – gold for Best Production Values.
  • Pathfinder APG Playtest – gold for Best Free Product.
  • Great City Players Guide – gold for Best Electronic Book, it’s for Pathfinder by 0one Games.
  • PFS #29, The Devil We Know – silver for Best Electronic Book.
  • Pathfinder GM Screen – gold for Best Aid or Accessory.
  • Pathfinder 31 – gold for Best Adventure.
  • Pathfinder Bestiary – gold for Best Monster/Adversary.
  • Classic Monsters Revisited – silver for Best Monster/Adversary!
  • Pathfinder RPG – gold for Best Game!
  • Pathfinder RPG – gold for Product of the Year!
  • Paizo – gold for Best Publisher!

For those keeping track, they won gold or silver (or both) every category they were nominated in.

And it’s well deserved.  I do kinda hate to see anyone win it all, but if there’s a single game company that deserves it, both in a cosmic sense and because of the unflagging high quality and volume of product, and customer support – it’s Paizo and Pathfinder.  It really is great, among the very top handful of RPGs ever.  D&D 3.0 itself was the only previous game that hit my gaming groups with anything near this amount of excitement.  It’s a game meant to be played, supported by the best adventures since 1e AD&D.

And it’s great that other companies publishing for Pathfinder won too; yay third party ecosystem!

If you haven’t tried Pathfinder yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.  It really is great.

Here’s the full list of winners, now that it’s available!  Congrats to all of them.

2 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , , , ,

Google Wave Dead

Posted on August 5, 2010 | 6 comments

Worth of mention here since I know a lot of RPG folks use it – but Google Wave has been end-of-lifed.  Read about it here.  Sorry guys.  You have through the end of the year.

That’s pretty hardcore – Google lets a lot of marginal junk twiddle around out there, they seldom actually kill something off, but there you go.  They talk about the decision on the official Google blog.

How many of you were using Wave?  What made it better than a Google group, blog, or something like Obsidian Portal?  Will you miss it?

6 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , ,

Adventure Time!

Posted on August 5, 2010 | 1 comment

For those of you with kids or who are young at heart…  There’s a new cartoon on Cartoon Network called “Adventure Time” that is a kinda young, demented version of D&D.

It stars a kid named Finn who is a self-described “adventurer” always on a quest, and his intelligent transforming animal companion Jake, a dog who can grow big and stretch, who often serves as a mount.  Finn calls himself a “paladin” in one episode, and when asked to kill a “Neutral ant” without provocation, responds “No way man, that’s against my alignment.” They are fighting a Wall of Flesh in a dark, evil forest even as I write.  If you want to get your kid interested in D&D, there are worse places to start!

Forget misguided attempts to get kids into gaming with dumbed-down-but-still-complex-D&D-variants – this is custom made.  An “Adventure Time Adventure Game” with simple rules would be a huge win for kiddos RP’ing.

1 Comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , ,

Destroy All Monsters

Posted on August 1, 2010 | 3 comments

Some of you may already have read it, but I came across a pretty interesting magazine article on D&D called Destroy All Monsters by Paul La Farge from the September 2006 Believer magazine.  It’s a pretty good “real journalist” look at D&D from someone who had played it as a kid.  As part of the article, they travel to Lake Geneva and play D&D with Gary Gygax!

Especially interesting is their look into Gygax – if you remove the blind hero worship that most D&D-types apply to him, you get a pretty interesting and complex character.  He delves into the sordid history of the rise and fall of TSR as part of the article, and gets quotes from the Blumes and Lorraine Williams too, and he’s pretty good about pointing out things he thinks are more self-serving than true coming from all involved.  You don’ t usually get things on D&D from an informed but professional point of view, so I found the article a really good read.

3 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , ,

And Don’t Forget The Indie RPG Awards

Posted on July 23, 2010 | 1 comment

Sure, the ENnies are all well and good, but what if you’re not stuck in the D&D Ghetto and want to take a walk on the wild side?  Well, there’s a thousand games out there and many of them are small, daring enterprises known as “indie” RPGs.

The Indie RPG Awards are taking a look at the best games of 2009.  Some of them you saw in the ENnies list, like diaspora, Escape from Tentacle City, Atomic Highway, and Lady Blackbird. Others you may not have heard of.  Many of them are interesting departures from the traditional RPG format, and some sport features like no GM, no prep, collaborative storytelling, weird resolution mechanics…  Settings from the prosaic to the esoteric.  here’s some little sniblets to tempt your interest.

“Montsegur 1244 – A story game about burning for your belief.”

“In Ribbon Drive, we collectively create a story about a road trip.”

“Misery Bubblegum… helps you tell the stories of strong, sympathetic young teens dealing with the incredible difficulties of relationships and identity.

“DAWG is the role-playing game that lets you unleash the full canine experience. Here you can learn what it truly is to be the pinnacle of evolution that is dog.”

Yes, everything from zombie survival horror in Shotgun Diaries to the refugee experience in Last Train Out Of Warsaw to being a bad, bad schoolgirl in Hellcats and Hockeysticks.  Some of them are even free, like Ocean, 44, and Lady Blackbird, so check them out.

Playing some very different games, even if you return in the end to good old D&D, really helps your game.  You get to see all the different ways you can do things, and realize that some things you always thought “must be” that way aren’t.

1 Comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , , ,

The Correct Choices for ENnies 2010 Voting

Posted on July 18, 2010 | 17 comments

Like my fellow bloggers, I encourage everyone to vote for the 2010 ENnie awards!  Mad Brew and others only told you how they voted, but I will go one step further and tell you how to vote!  You are all commanded to adhere to this right thinking agenda without deviation.

I’ll start by just noting that I’ve disqualified Catalyst and Shadowrun this year due to their adoption of “criminal conspiracy” as their new business plan.  Once the men responsible are rotting in unmarked graves, Shadowrun can win an award again.  Till then, I’m not going to bother even mentioning them below.

P.S. The nominees page has links to more info on all the products, I’m not gonna bother to link the products here.

1.  Best Cover Art

Ah, an interesting field.  I am not in love with any of them even though they’re all technically decent – Pathfinder art is usually excellent but I don’t think the Bestiary cover is the best example of it, going over the line into a bit cartoony/goofy.  Rogue Trader’s is a decent example of that style but strikes me as a bit too “staged.”  I really don’t like the style they use on Gathering Storm; I’ve seen that style (or even the artist, who knows) on novels and some other game products and it seems too busy for me.  “I got a deal on wisps!”

That brings it down to Rough Magicks and Eclipse Phase.  I really like them both, especially the audacity of the Rough Magicks cover.  In the end it seems a little too Photoshopped to me though, so I give lead honors to Eclipse Phase – even though their cover art doesn’t cover all that much of their cover, which seems like a bit of a waste.  Anyway, Magicks is at #2, then the rest.

2.  Best Interior Art

Here, it’s no shame to anyone else, but the Pathfinder Core Rulebook internal art is just super.  Copious and excellent.  Why, I can tell that Seoni the sorceress wants me just by her depiction in the book.  They clearly get my #1.  (And yours!  No exceptions!)

Rogue Trader and Warhammer have good if varying internal art – Rogue Trader goes from really good to “blobule-derived” in places.

And a surprise nominee from “so indie I haven’t heard of it” land, Escape from Tentacle City, with a striking stylized black and white approach.  I give it #2 for not making me say “meh!”

3.  Best Cartography

The Paizo maps are all awesome.  In fact, I figured this was a total sweep until I saw the Maps of Mastery – those are shockingly bad ass.    Apparently that guy used to do the good maps in Dungeon and now has his own thing.  I will allow you to choose freely between the two for top honors, as I am magnanimous.  I chose the Paizo Pathfinder City Map Folio maps though as that extra “it’s directly relevant and useful to me” factor overcame the sheer technical niceness (though see the Minis category below).

4.  Best Writing

I really like the Eclipse Phase writing.  Top billing.  I haven’t read Kerberos or Victoriana, but “oh another pulp or steampunk game” doesn’t thrill me at this point – about a hundred of them have come out over the last couple years.  I’ve leafed through FantasyCraft and its writing isn’t what comes to mind, seems like a strange nomination, would be better in Best Rules.  And I’ve leafed through the Native American game too and it’s pretty good but not as good as Eclipse Phase.

5.  Best Production Values

This one’s hard.  This year saw a lot of great produced games, and they’re all on here.  Give it to Warhammer because of all the gewgaws they shipped with the game?  Hmm.  In the end I interpret “best” not as “most expensive” but “makes the game reading/using experience really nice” so I’ll have to go with Pathfinder, but that may be my “prefer less board game in my RPG” aesthetic talking.  If you vote for Warhammer I won’t excommunicate you (but don’t think I’m getting soft).

6.  Best Rules

Hmm, another hard one.  Many of these rulesets aren’t new per se but are variants on previous ones.  Hero – I had a brief fling with it but it’s just too much rules for me.  BASH is very nice, but sometimes I think maybe that’s too little rules for me.  Voting for Diaspora is really a vote for FATE and a vote for Wild Talents is really a vote for ORE, both of which are fine systems.  The v6 engine of Atomic Highway didn’t seem that notable to me when I read it; I mean, it’s fine, but I wouldn’t have selected it for a rules nomination over the 100 other games around.  On the balance, I guess BASH#1 and ORE #2 but I feel conflicted about that.  And do I really like BASH more than FATE, or is that “FATE burnout” talking?

7.  Best Adventure

You can’t beat the Pathfinder APs in the adventure category.  Just can’t be done.  However, The Grinding Gear has made the old college try at it, coming in with #2.  And a really honorable mention for the Armitage Files, that’s great too.  Ah, I love that adventures are back to their rightful place of primacy in RPG products, having emerged from the decade-plus of “mouth breathers what love their rules supplements” ghetto.  Keep up the good work, all of you.

8.  Best Monster or Adversary

A lot of good stuff here.  I really like the Aces & Eights offering, and it’s extremely helpful for a more “subtle” game (not monsters, just all Wild West people, so it can get stale without great NPC ideas) and the Pathfinder and Hellfrost books are good too.  I’ll have to give a tough #1 to the Classic Horrors Revisited though – it’s more than just “here’s a bunch of monsters,” it takes its time on how to use each of them.

9.  Best Setting

Although Ken Hite has been known to turn me off (I find Suppressed Transmission’s “schiophrenic consipracy theorist gobbledygook” approach grating rather than charming), The Day After Ragnarok is the best setting this year.  Audacious and entertaining.  Kerberos Club suffers from being pulp game #20 over the last 2 years; Judge Dredd is entertaining but I’ve read it before; I don’t believe in awards for a second edition.  The Rome setting looks really interesting; I haven’t read it though, same with Goblin Markets.

10.  Best Supplement

Lucha Libre Hero is great stuff.  Usually Hero is way too rules heavy for me, but I have played it on occasion, and this supplement excited me the first time I heard about it.  I’ve got a soft spot for psychotronic stuff.  I also like Hollow Earth Expedition – though pulp in general has gotten overexposed, something with a specific focus like this still gets me.  I’m not sure why the Rebellion Era product is a “supplement” and not a “setting”…  I don’t know much about the rest of the field here.

11.  Best Aid or Accessory

This is another category where “they’re all good.”  My top billing has to go to Hero Labs though – I did a roundup of char creation software earlier this year and it was way better than its competition (PCGen, RPGXplorer) and was so good I bought it, and it’s come in very useful.  Second is the Pathfinder screen – it’s the highest quality screen ever!  Textbook-cover thick.  I like the idea of the Gaming Paper, and it’s cheap – the problem is, no one here has it, and buying it from the Paizo store doubles its price once shipping & handling is added on.  The Battlegraph dry erase “puzzle pieces” are nice and avoid the “have to erase that because we’re moving off the table” problem.  And I like the idea of the Campaign Coins, I really wanted coins to use in my campaign for Infamy Points and ended up having to go with plastic party favors, but I wish that in execution they had gone more “historical” than “looks like what a WoW gold piece would resemble.”

12.  Best Miniatures Product

I don’t have the patience for elaborate metal mini construction and painting any more, so I’m not interested in the Alkemy, and the D&D minis used to be better but look like a first grade art project nowadays.  I’ll give this one to Maps of Mystery to compensate for their whisker-thin second in Cartography.

13.  Best Regalia

I hate this category.  It means “other geek shit they sell as impulse buys in gaming stores, that isn’t really a game or mini.”  Kinda.  Though Grind is just a board game/minis game isn’t it?  If they want a board game category they should sack up and have one.  Similarly, two of these are fiction books – have a fiction category or forget it, how’s someone supposed to rate “random crap” against each other?  It’s ridiculous.  But for lack of anything better to do, vote for Lost Tales of Pine Box, Texas, as I encourage settings based in Texas, greatest nation on the Earth.

14.  Best Electronic Book

The only product I’m familiar with here is The Devil We Know Part 1: Shipyard Rats, an excellent Pathfinder adventure.  The others are probably lovely, though…  There are literally thousands of electronic products so it’s really hard to do them as a popular vote kind of thing – if they were popular they would be in print 😛  By their nature there’s going to be a small minority of gamers that have been exposed to any one of them.

15.  Best Free Product

I have to give it to Wayfinder #1 – call me a Paizo fanboy, but that fact that this is a fan publication is impressive as hell.  It’s fun (Ask a Shoanti is a hoot); my only complaint is it’s a little fiction-heavy for my tastes.  Lady Blackbird is a nice little one-shot game in a box, with great art too, and gets my silver nod.  The Pathfinder APG Playtest – is that really a “free product?”  I guess it was semi polished,and Paizo’s dedication to public betas that are as good as full free product is impressive, but it doesn’t get my vote.  I’m not totally sure what to make of the Warrior Cats game; I appreciate games being aimed at kids but I kinda feel like the practice of just using a normal traditional-but-somewhat-stripped-down RPG for it is lazy and never going to work out well.  And I have to say – I am one of those “4e haters” that doesn’t like it’s “WoWiness,” so  I wasn’t sure what to think of Combat Advantage’s “lets make D&D more video gamey!” approach. Initially I thought it would make me incontinent with rage, but after reading it I kinda like the boldness of them owning it and saying “Well… Let’s pretend we are not trying to be a realistic game at all, and just making an interesting variant.”

16.  Best Website

Interesting.  The two Pathfinder contenders are the d20PFSRD.org and the Pathfinder Wiki.  d20PFSRD has all the rules, but way more than the old d20SRD site – they get everything up there in moments after it’s posted (beta stuff too); they have value added info, “Labs” stuff for house rules, etc.  I use it all the time and it’s awesome.  The Pathfinder Wiki is its counterpart that has all the setting info.  It’s awesome that a company doesn’t mind this – it has more setting info that anything I’ve ever seen online.  I do wish it had a little more comprehensive editing, but it’s good too. I have to give #1 to d20PFSRD.org, though.

Obsidian Portal and Epic Words are different takes on campaign Web sites.  Epic Words is newer and has a slightly better design but it looks like Obsidian Portal still has the functionality edge; I do wonder why they are better than any other blog or Google group or whatever for the purpose, however.  I guess there is the “community” aspect to it, though from going and surfing the sites it seems like if you wanted others to read you’d still have to go post updates in Story Hour forums and whatnot, they don’t really do a great job of surfacing active campaigns to casual readers.  I’ve looked at Obsidian Portal from time to time but always return to just posting my campaign stuff on WordPress.

Pen & Paper Games seems OK, but I’m not sure why it’s not “just another” RPG.net/ENWorld “here’s some forums” RPG site.  I mean, it might be; pretty much one forum site is like another, it’s about getting a critical mass of people there and then not having the moderation be a big self serving cliquey mess of goons, so it wouldn’t be hard to beat out RPG.net or ENWorld if you can just get the critical mass…

17.  Best Podcast

I don’t listen to podcasts, so I have no basis from which to judge.  I’m trying to start, but my limited time (and short commute) means reading is a much more concise way for me to consume content.

18.  Best Blog

They’re all good, but in the end Critical Hits is the one I read the most especially since it joined several big blogs into one.  I like Kobold Quarterly too but it needs some navigation help.  I read the others from time to time too.  Gnome Stew is in my blogroll and I slandered them by saying they had gotten 4e-focused and lost my interest, but upon further review that’s not true. Maybe I was thinking of another one of them.  Anyway, all the RPG bloggers are great, and helping further the community of gamers.

The big thing missing here is any OSR blog.  I’ll be honest, though I don’t play the retro-clones I find a lot of the discussion in the grognard circles to be more interesting and useful than the big mainstream ones, which seem to often have very short articles with about one little takeaway in them – “Did you know you could make your game more interesting by spicing up… <random roll> X in your game?  Well you can!  OK, thanks for reading…”  As an experienced player and GM, I appreciate longer articles with more complexity to them.

19.  Best Game

Pathfinder baby!  It’s brilliant, I love it, my whole extended gaming group loves it.  Best thing to happen to D&D since the launch of 3e and the OGL.  The others are nice, but this one is awesome.

20.  Product of the Year

Hmm, is it Pathfinder again?  There’s some strong stuff here…  Warhammer was a daring but controversial new direction for the franchise.  Dragon Age is a computer game tie-in with a lot of promise.  Eclipse Phase, with the “free but you can buy it if you want” approach, is innovative in business model and the game setting itself.  I have to say, it’s a close run between Eclipse Phase and Pathfinder for me but in the end… Pathfinder is more of a major industry changer (spawning its own third party ecosystem, etc.)

21.  Fan Award for Best Publisher

Paizo‘s the obvious choice for #1, but a lot of these companies are very good – open, innovative, good at communicating with and supporting their customers.  I think Pelgrane Press and their games are underrated.  Posthuman, Green Ronin, Cubicle 7, and many more – all good guys.  There’s a couple high profile dumbasses in the industry – Catalyst, Outlaw, Palladium – but there’s a lot of people out there working hard and advancing the gaming community.

All right, you have your marching orders… Go vote!

17 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , ,

I’m Back!

Posted on July 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

OK, convention and vacation are over, and I have four more session summaries in the can waiting for me to edit and post them.  When time gets short, the blogging goes but the gaming stays!  I’m relaxed after a week of downtime, so even though it’s crunch time now at work I’m ready to get caught up on gaming stuff – this blog, and doing some editing work for Sinister and writing for Louis Porter.

I could bring up all the goonery I’ve seen in forums and blogs the early part of this week – an unnamed ex-TSR guy ragging on an unnamed Scandinavian, more legalistic game rules frenzy from the Paizo boards – but eh; I’m in a good mood.  On to the content!

Leave a comment

Posted in talk

Tagged ,

Gone Fishin’

Posted on July 2, 2010 | 2 comments

It’s vacation time!  More industry exposes and tales of awesome gaming in, oh, about two weeks.  Till then, it may be quiet around here…

2 Comments

Posted in talk

Free RPG Day Swag

Posted on June 24, 2010 | 1 comment

Thanks to my FLGS, Rogue’s Gallery, for participating in Free RPG Day!  I got two items – it was one per person, but my daughter was with me, so we were two!  (And it worked out well for them, because she successfully wheedled me into getting a cute plush Cthulhu doll for her.  This led to a later argument about whether Cthulhu pees and poos or not – she insists yes, but I think no.)

Anyway, the first thing I got was the thing I was specifically wanting, the Pathfinder module Master of the Fallen Fortress.  They’ll be putting up the PDF for free later so don’t weep too bad if you didn’t get one of these.

It’s a super short level 1 dungeon crawl (arguably 10 pages of adventure in the 16 page piece), glossy full color with Paizo’s standard high production values.  The more notable part of it was the full page writeups of the new iconics representing classes from the upcoming Advanced Player’s Guide – Damiel the elven alchemist, Alain the cavalier, Imrijka the half-orc inquisitor, Alhazra the blind oracle, Balazar the gnomish summoner, and Feiya the witch (who is smoking hot by the way).  These give good insight into the new classes – although I was a little disappointed that they didn’t have any personality or background writeup at all.  They all seem very interesting and a little additional personality would make them valuable NPCs/better convention or fast-play PCs.  So in the end, it’s near and VERY pretty, but I’m not sure how much use I’ll get out of it – even as an “here let me introduce you to Pathfinder” adventure, it would last about an hour.  But – it’s free!

There were a lot of choices for item #2.  I considered the Goodman Games Cthulhu adventure, but finally went with the Deathwatch: Final Sanction, and intro to Space Marine roleplaying in the Warhammer 40k universe.  It’s fat – 36 real pages – and full color.  You get 4 pregen Space Marines, one from each major chapter (Dark Angels, Blood Angels, Space Wolves, and Ultramarines).  Because their stats aren’t all that complicated, they actually have a brief history and demeanour section in addition to the numbers in their one-page writeups.  Then there’s six pages of quickstart rules that don’t differ in any immediately obvious way from the other WH40k RPGs.  Next is two pages of “Horde” rules, which adds a bit of the “3:16 – Carnage Among The Stars” aspect to this – a horde is a mass of attackers you get to mow down en masse.  They also talk about the Demeanours, which aren’t just role-playing – you can leverage them by triggering them via roleplaying, but they then give you the effects of a Fate Point.  Nice!

Next is weapons and gear, and then a 17 page adventure, complete with location writeups and NPCs.  It’s quite a value for $0 – hell, people try to sell something of this size nowadays for $10 or more!

I never played any Warhammer 40k.  I got their first RPG, Dark Heresy, about Inquisitors, it was vaguely amusing but not moving.  I didn’t get Rogue Trader because it seems lame to me.  But even being a WH40k noob I know about space marines and orks.  There’s a lack of good space marine games.  Bughunters was good and is REALLY old, Aliens was not, Starship Troopers was OK, and 3:16 is good but all indie and super rules light and all.  If you want to shoot the shit out of hordes of aliens, this seems like a good bet!

1 Comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , , , ,

My RPG DNA, Part 2: The Early Memphis Years

Posted on June 19, 2010 | 3 comments

Last time, I talked about my early gaming experiences in junior high/high school in Texas in the ’80s.  Star Frontiers, Red Box D&D, and AD&D, almost always DM, with some diceless, PvP, and single player action mixed in there.  College, nothing except about two nights of a Basic game (oh, and one visit to OwlCon, where I played in an extremely amusing Paranoia game – one of the other players was such a twerp that when the Computer asked us all who the traitor was, the entire rest of the table pointed at him without hesitation).

Part 2: The (Early) Memphis Years

After college, I moved to Memphis, Tennessee for a job with FedEx corporate IT.  At first, I didn’t know anyone at all (let alone gamers) and Memphis wasn’t exactly a happening gaming mecca.  In fact, it took me a little while to get used to Memphis in general – I came from the Houston area where there were all kinds of people, but in Memphis at the time there were pretty much two kinds, black and white, and to my horror there were seriously billboards up saying things like “say no to racial violence.”  I remember wanting a specific classical CD (this was the era of huge music stores, before Amazon, you whippersnappers) so I opened up the Yellow Pages and found the biggest ad for a music store, a Sound Warehouse.  I called them up, and I knew whatever clerk I got wouldn’t be able to tell me if they had what I wanted (Karl Orff’s De Temporum Fine Comedia, for the record; I was in a production of Carmina Burana in college and was looking for more stuff by the guy) so I just asked “Hey, do you have a separate classical music room?”  Many of the big music stores of the time had a separate little classical room where the whatever they were playing in the main store didn’t penetrate.  The clerk on the phone paused a moment, and finally said, “You’re not from here, are you?”  So suffice to say, “geek stuff”, along with most things associated with “book learnin’,” were in short supply.

Anyway, through work I met some geeks, and after about a year someone heard about this new card game, Magic: The Gathering.  We all got into it about Fallen Empires time and started to play and amass cards.  (I just found my big ol’ boxes of cards in my garage, actually, if anyone’s buying!)  Then, a British contractor we were hanging out with (“Mind if I kip on your floor?”  “Uh…  Will that leave a stain?”) decided he wanted to run some Runequest for us.  We all readily assented;  the Indian contractors kept making us play cricket and it was a welcome change. In true UK fashion the games were short and brutal.  But that planted the seed.  A little while later, while we were all playing Magic, I got fed up and said, “We’re spending enough time and money on this we might as well be doing REAL roleplaying and not this card game crap!  Who’s with me?” And they were.

Back Into Gaming

I had made a network of IT friends through work and a network of medical student friends through my roommate, a med student I had known from Rice.  A quick canvas revealed that a lot of these folks had either gamed before or were up for it.  Big Mike, Kevin, and Tim came from one side of the family and Robert, Suzanne, and Little Mike came from the other side.  They were the mainstays, but there were other visitors (Jason, Joy, “sweating out the mushrooms” guy…)  And we were off to the races.  I was still mostly the DM.  We played Second Edition AD&D, and we found it cool.  More coherent than the brilliant but fragmented “Here’s some harlots!” approach of AD&D 1e, and with more meat to it than Basic, we played the heck out of some 2e (although 1e adventures were often drafted into service with little or no conversion, since the 2e adventures kinda sucked).

We all played Second Edition for a while, mostly at my Midtown apartment, and it was good.  But the best was yet to come.  Memphis was getting better – I got more used to it, and it’s definitely a place that is much better if you know the scene, but also it was growing and becoming more diverse and advanced.  And also, I made a great new friend, Hal!  Hal knew Robert and had just moved to town; he needed a roommate and Robert, my previous roommate, married Suzanne, so we moved in together and fell in geek love.  We got into anime, Hong Kong movies, roleplaying, et cetera in spades.  We went to Gen Cons, Tenncons, and MidSouthCons.  Spending so much free time doing that stuff, we really began to branch out, and one of the first things we did was to escape the “D&D Ghetto.”

Out of the D&D Ghetto

Second Edition was getting long in the tooth and the stuff coming out for it was increasingly bizarre.  And it’s not like I hadn’t played other games before, but of course D&D was always the common denominator that you could find people to play.  But with two of us, we went nuts, and luckily there was a whole wave of stuff coming out at the same time.  Fading Suns, Feng Shui, Alternity, Call of Cthulhu (5e), and dozens more.  We hit Half Price Books, game auctions, etc. and my bookcase swelled with different games in every genre.  I was positively indiscriminate.  It was great, being exposed to all kinds of different games, modes of play, etc.  Somehow I didn’t ever get into the other “big” second string games like GURPS, Palladium, or World of Darkness (well, a little; I have a playtester credit in Wraith: The Great War in the strength of playing it at a Tenncon), which was probably best because it meant we moved from game to game a lot.

But the best was yet to come.  So we had a bunch of gamers, a lot of games (and a lot of spare money and free time).  All the raw materials were together, and the spark was lit.  Next time, Night Below, the FORGE, and Living Greyhawk, Freeport, and 3e!

3 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I Hate the RAW

Posted on June 19, 2010 | 41 comments

OK, so a lot of things are getting my goat this week.  Anyway, the mentality among some D&D  players about “the rules are God” is starting to drive me crazy.  This thread and this thread on the Paizo forums are great examples as they fret and fret about the RAW (rules as written).  Both are lightning rods for people obsessed with rule minutiae above making any kind of common sense rulings or modifications.  I’ve griped about this recently but here we go again.

In the second thread, it’s even funnier – the person doesn’t want to change a published adventure.  Not one bit.  They’ve read it all, they know there will be problems with it – but the written word is so holy they can’t conceive of even modifying an adventure to fit their PCs.

In the first, it’s a stealth/hide in plain sight/etc thread.  without getting into those specific details, it’s a whole hive of stuff that the rules just don’t define with lawyerlike precision.  Any real DM just makes calls that seem right to them.  That’s right, I said it.  If I think true seeing should cut through a shadowdancer’s supernatural shadow hidey ability – then it’s going to, in my game, no complex rule lawyering required – hell, I don’t even care if you find something in the books, or some thought from an “official game person” on a messageboard that semi-clearly implies that it doesn’t.  Now it does, suck it.  There’s a nearly infinite number of pedants that just can’t stand that the interaction of those things with tremorsense and magic and incorporeality and 200 other things aren’t 100% spelled out and by God a game designer needs to get their ass in that thread right now and spell it out for them.

Is it a lack of “imaginative play” as kids that is making these people require their rules-pablum spoon-fed to them?  A demented worship of the far away game gods and a familiar contempt for their own game master (or in the case of the guy in those two forum threads, he IS the DM, which makes it just so pathetically sad).

This is why D&D is no longer streamlined and brilliant and more like Microlite20 but instead requires 400 pages of law school shit to play, scaring away new players.

If James Jacobs or Mike Mearls or whoever is going to come run your games for you, then you can care what the fucking  game designer thinks.  But I’m the one spending 10 hours a week prepping and then 6 running the game so you can have fun, so what I say goes.  Don’t like it, find another game.  I run some pretty good games and have never had a problem getting players, so I’m not concerned that you fucking off will make me die old and lonely.

You know what?  It’s time to bring back some of the pejorative terms of gaming 20 years ago.

Rules lawyers.  Munchkins.  Power gamers.  Monty Haulers.  You’re on notice.  Somehow your filthy habits have become mainstreamed, over Gary Gygax’s dead body apparently.  But you’re not welcome, around here at least.

41 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , ,