Tag Archives: RPG

Gamer TV 2

Posted on March 2, 2011 | 8 comments

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?

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Sinister Adventures – Looks Like It’s Finally Dead

Posted on March 1, 2011 | 24 comments

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.

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XCrawl Is Coming… To Pathfinder

Posted on February 28, 2011 | 1 comment

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].

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Terror Is Coming… To Pathfinder

Posted on February 28, 2011 | 3 comments

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.

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GUMSHOE Is Coming… To Pathfinder

Posted on February 26, 2011 | 4 comments

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!

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

Posted on February 23, 2011 | 5 comments

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…

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Call of Cthulhu News

Posted on February 22, 2011 | 1 comment

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.

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The Two Ultimate Pathfinder Links

Posted on February 21, 2011 | 12 comments

As a public service, I thought I’d reiterate the two links you need if you are playing Pathfinder (besides paizo.com and this blog of course!).  Apparently not everyone knows about them, and one has moved!

The Pathfinder SRD, which has all the OGL rules from Paizo (pretty much all of it) and a variety of third parties. If you need to look up a rule, here you go! It’s always kept super up to date, even new beta playtest stuff shows up here ASAP, as well as sometimes links to useful rulings from the Paizo boards, etc.

The Pathfinder Wiki, which has a primer on the entire setting of Golarion.  Beware – it moved without warning and the old site is still up! If you are using a wikia.com address, stop, switch to pathfinderwiki.com. Up until today even I have been misrouting people in my blogroll. I have tried to figure out how to contribute a couple times and have run away, tail between my legs – I couldn’t even figure out how to leave a forum post saying “set up a redirect or something guys” in their system.  But it’s a great place to search for that mostly-forgotten reference or link your players to in order to get them briefed on a country or something.

Oh, heck, here’s a third link.  No, not the Pathfinder Database, for fan created content, which I wish well and all but there’s just not a lot of quality content there so I don’t use it. But this is my #3 go to for Pathfinder…

Hero Lab, the best character builder tool for Pathfinder, many hands down.  I don’t build NPCs above 3rd level without it.  I’ve tried PCGen and RPGXplorer but IMO those weren’t any more helpful than doing it myself.  Now, it’s for pay, and they’ll charge you for each additional bit of rules they add from the various Paizo stuff, but they’re “official” so they do have it all. I wish all the NPCs from the APs were downloadable from somewhere, that would be a huge time saver. One of our players even uses it at the table to roll and apply conditions to his PC.

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E6 – Because The First Six Levels Are The Best Anyway

Posted on February 16, 2011 | 7 comments

This is old news, but I just came across a D&D 3e variant called E6 which is really clever, and is inspired by the classic Dragon Mag piece “Gandalf Was Only A Fifth Level Magic-User.”  Basically, it recognizes that a lot of the fun in D&D is at low levels and that the larger level spread causes a bunch of problems.  It works kinda like levels did back in 1e, where once you reach top level (6 in this case) you stop getting levels per se, but just more feats – so the power range always stays within a manageable band. The mightiest men are indeed total badasses compared to level one guys but can’t kill a whole country with impunity. I might have been tempted to do it up to level 9 or so instead, but it is a variant that I think would create a very interesting game that really executes on some modes of play much better.  Frankly I don’t like 3.5e/PF gameplay above level 10 myself. And come to think of it, the sixth level PCs in my Reavers campaign have ACs up to like 24 and can dole out 30+ points of damage a around – is there really a compelling reason to go up further from there?

He explains “why E6” better than I could in the post, you can also download the rules in PDF from the ENWorld thread or the E6 wiki.

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Paizo RPG Superstar 2011 Hits Final Eight

Posted on February 15, 2011 | 1 comment

If you’re not following Paizo’s RPG Superstar 2011 contest  you should be, if only because you get loads of really high quality game content for free out of it. So far it’s 32 wondrous items, something less than 32 archtypes, 16 villains, and soon 8 Golarion locations and 4 adventure plots.

As always props to Paizo for their openness and customer engagement!

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Weaning Players Off Being Rules Lawyers

Posted on February 15, 2011 | 10 comments

I have a lively question running at RPG Stack Exchange on “How do you help players not focus on the rules?” I and my group tend towards a more old school “rulings not rules” approach when it comes to the game, and some of “the kids nowadays” who have come up on 4e or even 3e are very, very gamist and expect the rules to be God. You have to get them out of that mindset to achieve simulationist (and ideally immersive) play.  I’ve had some good answers to the question, as well as a small set of “Oh that’s evil,” which I expect I guess. And a subset that insist you have to change the rules system and use a indie storygame or something if you don’t want rules lawyering, which I think is silly because people have managed to play D&D and other crunchy games in a non-gamist way for thirty years, I guess 4e has warped everyone’s default expectations so much that they can’t conceive of that.

Anyway, chime in here with good ways to help someone who is trying to get out of their “the game is about the rules” rut and enjoy “the game is about a ‘real’ fictional world” play.  If you don’t like that style of play, fine, move on, I’m happy for you but don’t want to hear it.

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

Posted on February 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

Sixth Session (10 page pdf) – “Race for the Devil” – Elias Tammerhawk’s ship has been sighted at the Devil’s Elbow, and a pirate crew has retrieved some interesting artifacts from the site. Everyone wants to get there, but Riddleport’s mighty short on boats. The PCs decide to gamble on a one way ticket – but a one way ticket to where?

This time, we get started on the second chapter in the Second Darkness adventure path, Children of the Void, or at least my heavily modded version of it. Beware spoilers.

Like many sessions kicking off a new plot arc, this one was mostly wandering around in town – information gathering, buying and selling, talking to NPCs. Serpent went and talked to Fenella Bromathan, new Speaker of the Order of Cyphers. He noticed her a while back, and her super pale skin and dark hair is the same kind of odd coloration that he has – and he doesn’t know his mother, who he suspects was a witch or fey from Irrisen. He can’t find a good way of coming out and asking her about it, though.

Then the race was on to Devil’s Elbow. The PCs were bound and determined to get out there ASAP, and after the dwarves left heading that direction and Morgan Baumann (who Freeport fans will recognize) turned them down, they decided “what the hell” – they used Wogan’s swan boat feather token to head out there even though they would have no way back, reasoning that they’d be able to beg, borrow, or steal a ship once they reached the island.

And that plan would have worked, except that Mama Watanna was angry. The water goddess had made love to Sindawe and blessed him, contingent on him being faithful to her – but then last time, he and Hatshepsut made love. She often sends an orca to watch over Sindawe on his travels – and lo and behold, once they’re two-thirds of the way to the island, I roll a random encounter of 5 orcas. That’s fate right there, so I knew those orca were Mama Watanna payback. They attacked the ship and managed to breach its hull – the party probably could have killed them all, but Sindawe allowed himself to be carried off by one of the killer whales. Hatshepsut refused to let him go gently into that good night, and clung to the back of the beast as they dove into the ocean depths.  I figured that was good enough to summon the goddess herself. He had to spend an Infamy Point to convince Mama Watanna that he wasn’t really cheating on her because Hatshepsut is, like, basically one of her priestesses. In earlier sessions, before I knew whether Sindawe and Hatshepsut would fall for each other, I had considered whether Mama would possess her to be with Sindawe because she is about the closest thing Avistan has to a proper mambo, so this wasn’t totally off base.

In the end, most of the party was left clinging to a rock in the middle of the sea, thinking that the two monks might be lost, while Sindawe was really having more goddess/Hatshepsut sex deep underwater.

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