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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 31 Posted

Posted on October 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Thirty-First Session – The Lighthouse goes to Aegis, but the B Team goes to Oberon to help out Scrooge McDuck.  But it goes from The Italian Job to Aliens in one fell swoop.

In a welcome break from negotiating with endless waves of bureaucrats, our secondary characters head out to another system to recover what is supposed to be a huge wad of loot.  We conduct breakins, home invasions, abuse the homeless – we’re like an alien crime wave hitting the Oberon system.  But then when we go to the vault, it’s empty of loot but full – of KLICKS!

We had a lot of fun this session.  We’re at our best when we’re on the loose and scheming and innovating ways to get the answers we need.  We’re baaaaaaaaad men!  The best parts were when Peppin dressed as the “Miner ’49er” and psychically phased through the wall of the government building, to find himself in a rhodium mining exhibit, and then coming across the revolutionary vandal there.  The man threw his back out crapping himself in fear, apparently.  “A G-g-g-g-g-ghost!!!”  And when the man later, at the Tim Horton’s, said that he hadn’t eaten solid food in a while.  I don’t know why I found that so funny, but I was incapacitated with laughter for a long time.  I was like “What, do you live on Thunderbird and semen?”  Finally, the sweep and clear in the vault was bracing.

Taking a week off helped us get back into the swing of things, I think. Fun was had by all!

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Session Summary 25 Posted

Posted on October 11, 2010 | 4 comments

Twenty-fifth Session (8 page pdf) – “Return to Madness” – First, a bunch of goblins attacks our brave heroes’ genital regions.  Then, they sail back to Riddleport, where the re-dedication of the Riddleport Light is set to begin.  It’s into Black Dog’s caves and thence to the lighthouse!  But as you’d suspect, it’s not going to be that easy.  Thrill to this, the twenty-fifth session of our Pathfinder pirate campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate!

The “Junk-Kicker” tribe is from the Goodman Games/Wicked Fantasy Factory adventure Throwdown with the Arm-Ripper.  Strangely, in that adventure, they don’t actually kick anyone in the balls.  This is a significant oversight in my opinion, so I rectified it.  And a quick Google search for “goblins with big iron boots” got me this image I used for their chief, Krik Junk-Kick [pdf character sheet]:

His tribe surrounded the PCs like the natives surrounded Indy in Raiders of the Lost Ark; then half of them shrieked fiercely and kicked the other half in the balls as a show of force.  This made a big impression on the PCs.  And their “junk-kicking” attack even has a simple in-game implementation, the new “Dirty Trick” maneuver from the new Advanced Player’s Guide!  Yay Pathfinder!

(Careful readers will note that I foreshadowed this with the story the two doppleganger “girls” told the PCs when they met them in the dungeon, that all the men of their village were too scared to fight the Junk-Kicker goblins so they had to go.)

You’d think 30 goblins would be a challenge, but I know my PCs.  Sure, they’re fourth level, but I had confidence that it would be a pretty easy fight.  The most dangerous part, really, was that one goblin tried to run off with Sindawe’s thrown magic spear during the battle.  Threaten their gear, that’ll get them motivated!  And this encounter threatened their gear in several different ways, if you get my meaning.

After that, they sailed back to Riddleport.  I did up some random encounters on the way there using some of the tables in the also-new GameMastery Guide, including the stranded “Heartbreak” Hinsin, who immediately started to compete with Jaren the Jinx for the favor of Hatshepsut.  She didn’t really groove on either one, but was more favorable towards Jaren.  Although there’s a little episode that didn’t get into the summary; Jaren and Hatshepsut went ashore in Roderick’s Cove and he put some moves on her and she didn’t like it; she went back to the ship upset and Sindawe tried to figure out what was wrong and comfort her, in his own somewhat clumsy way.

Then they get into Black Dog’s Caves!  More about that next time, but they fight a tojanida, which just about takes out Sindawe – Hatshepsut comes to his rescue and lifeguards him to shore – and then a dread allip comes for them.

It ended with them finding the fake treasure room.  The dialogue there isn’t made up; when Sindawe and Tommy scouted ahead and saw all those treasure chests, Sindawe immediately started shouting, “Don’t come in here!  We’re having gay sex!  Really gay sex!  We’ll be out in a while!”  Of course, that caused the rest of them to come running.

Next time – Reavers turns one year old!

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 30 Posted

Posted on October 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

Thirtieth Session – In the latest installment of our Alternity campaign The Lighthouse, it’s off to Corrivale to get all the factions there on board with the Verge Alliance. Then it’s hot Pict on Sesheyan action as we perform some extreme rendition.

Not only that, but Captain Takashi has started to channel his LOLcat making skills into war propaganda!  Witness his cautionary tale of the N’sss, the jellyfish aliens T’sa believe to be demons:

Also, Peppin tries really, really hard to get the sesheyan shamans into the anti-alien battle.  Eventually they have to fess up that their magic isn’t, you know, real in that sense.

Thrills!  Chills!  Pills!  And more!  It’s session number thirty, and we’re feeling fine.

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Reexamining the Dungeon?

Posted on October 10, 2010 | 4 comments

There’s an interesting post from Robert Schwalb about the rut 4e adventure design has gotten itself into.  The comments are pretty interesting, too.

I hated the ‘delve’ format when it came out for 3.5e.  I read one adventure using it, said “WTF,” and just ran out of Dungeon after that.   And now I realize why!  System matters, and format and presentation matter.  These things encourage specific behaviors, and Rob seems to somewhat understand this – hence his post in the first place, he sees that the stultifying encounter description format is in practice encouraging frighteningly homogeneous slogs of encounters; it even influences larger dungeon design and cuts out page count and time for other secondary concerns like “story.”

But then of course Rob gets all offended at Landon saying in the comments that 4e’s mechanized approach has sacrificed organic feel and story at the altar of artificiality and predictability.  Rob says “Well but there was wealth by level, and CRs, in 3e!”  Yes, but (almost) no one used those as more than a suggestion. Formalizing that into “treasure parcels” and “XP budgets” is another huge step – rather than just having a guideline to help you understand “how much is this encounter likely to kick your PC’s asses” or “about how much loot will adventures and whatnot assume the PCs have” it is a lot different than having a mandatory prescription for it.  And 4e in general is much more hostile to “just throw that rule out if you don’t like it” – you can say you can do that, but the book certainly doesn’t encourage it, and a tightly interlocking set of rules like that makes it difficult.  When you read 4e, it clearly implies “You will do it this way.”  Sure, apparently in later 4e books there are “alternate options” that are less rigid, but the game has set the general tone already.  Just the statement that you need a supplement to give you an option for randomized treasure to replace the treasure parcel rule is fundamentally demented and indicative of the obsessive-compulsive lawyer mindset that 4e has become.  In previous editions, whether there was a rule for it in a book or not, there was more of an understanding that “these are suggestions, use them if it makes your life easier as a DM.”  They’ve done away with that, and now they get all surprised when story content shrinks and combat is seen as mandatory.  You reap what you sow.  If you present your game as a set of law books, then everyone starts acting like lawyers.  Designers in most fields understand this.

I’m sure it’s not their intention for that to happen – but it’s the natural conclusion of how 4e is framed.  There’s some bad natural conclusions to how 3e is framed too.  But for me – I play for the story, for the inter-character interaction, for the immersion – and so I see that 4e is a hostile environment to that.  4e lovers will pop out of the woodwork and say “NO IT’S NOT I ROLEPLAY IN IT” but you have a lot of articles like this by actual 4e designers that recognize this is happening and are even starting to understand the reasons.  You “can” create a story in 4e, but its nature is slowly discouraging that in players, play groups, adventure writers, and eventually that vicious circle spreads like a cancer through the hobby.  If I was more into the combat part of D&D, and the new version downplayed combat and had sloppy rules for it and was presented in a fashion that would encourage less and less combat encounters over time, I’d be similarly upset.

When I design a location/adventure encounter, do you know what I put in it?

Whatever the fuck I want to.

See, isn’t that easy?

It makes me sad that these otherwise talented adventure writers are trying so hard to innovate within the bizarre restricted environment that the tactical encounter format dictates.  “Maybe if we reorganize each tightly budgeted room as sectors…”  No one is putting the restriction on you but yourselves!  Rise up and cast off your chains!

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Pathfinder and 4e Tied In Sales!

Posted on October 7, 2010 | 7 comments

ICv2’s latest sales channel reports indicate something very surprising – that Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder are tied for #1 in hobby sales!  They’re followed by Warhammer Fantasy, Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader, and Dresden Files.

That’s pretty amazing, that a small company could rise to rival the historical keeper of D&D in such a short amount of time, and it’s a testament to the super hard work and high quality Paizo puts into their Pathfinder releases, and that they “get” what makes D&D great – it’s the adventures, stupid.

Of course these numbers aren’t based on unobtainable internal numbers and don’t include a variety of channels, it’s hobby stores/distributors only – DDI and Paizo’s subscriptions wouldn’t be included, for example – but it’s extremely notable.

Not only this, but hobby game sales are on the rise even while video game sales slump.

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Mike Mearls Admits D&D 4e Blows

Posted on September 15, 2010 | 41 comments

The Escapist has quite a roundup of D&D articles this week, spurred by the D&D Essentials “Red Box” release.

The most notable is this interview with D&D R&D Group Manager Mike Mearls.  In it, he acknowledges that 4e turned out a lot of previous D&D fans – “Look, no one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said ‘Let’s get rid of all of our fans and replace them.’ That was never the intent.”  But it’s an implicit acknowledgment that that’s what happened.  They also discuss the mechanics of 4e being too dissociated from reality and making it very difficult to immerse with it.  None of this surprises me, because it’s exactly what I said about 4e when it came out:

Though I’ve bagged on Mearls for some of the 4e design decisions, I had heard he’d been playing around with older school D&D and he appears to have gotten an understanding of the major lacks of 4e and how to get it back on track as really being D&D again.  Wait, here, let him tell you…

“If you are a disgruntled D&D fan, there’s nothing I can say to you that undoes whatever happened two years ago or a year ago that made you disgruntled – but what I can do, what’s within my power, is that going forward, I can make products, I can design game material, I can listen to what you’re saying, and I can do what I can do with design to make you happy again; to get back to that core of what makes D&D, D&D; to what made people fall in love with it the first time, whether it was the Red Box in ’83, the original three booklets back in ’74 or ’75 or even 3rd Edition in 2004, whenever that happened, to get back to what drew you into D&D in the first place and give that back to you.”

So congrats to Mearls and props for admitting that 4e had gone outside the lines of what many of us wanted in D&D, and that they’re actively going to try to do something about it.  Good news for 5e!

And that’s really what I wanted.  My critique of 4e hasn’t been “edition war for the sake of edition war” or general grousing – I knew that if people said loudly and clearly what they wanted out of D&D, that eventually someone would listen (changes of the guard happen frequently over at ol’ WotC).  It’s all about wanting D&D to return to a game someone can use to simulate a game world and immerse in a character, without being tossed out into board-game mode.

All the 4e lovers are in a tizzy over it, claiming that the article must be a wildly biased hackjob because no one could ever admit any flaws in 4e, but they’ll get over it, as they lap up whatever Wizards does without discretion.  So, it’s a win-win.

It may be too early to roll out the “Mission Accomplished” banner, but it seems we have the terrorists on the run!  And that’s why Mike Mearls is my…

Alpha Dog Of The Week

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Session Summary 24 Posted

Posted on September 15, 2010 | 3 comments

Twenty-fourth Session (9 page pdf) – “Throwdown With the Arm-Ripper” – The party works their way through the ruined complex to an ancient druidic shrine, only to meet two of Jaren’s old friends – a witch and the Arm-Ripper!  Is Jaren’s missing arm a coincidence?  Hint: no!

We finished up with my randomly generated dungeon and kicked into Throwdown with the Arm-Ripper.  I have a soft spot for those Wicked Fantasy Factory adventures – they need work, but they shine in the setpieces.

Before that, they ran across a sleeping cave bear.  “We’ll sneak up on it and kill it,” they declared.  I took a look at the dire bear stats and shuddered.  Even with the sleeping perception penalty, there was a real good chance that with three PCs sneaking up, one of them would be heard, and if that thing woke up in close quarters with the three PCs, someone was going to get ripped to bits.  But they all snuck up successfully and all executed coup de graces.  The bear was tough, and it rolled TWO natural 20’s on its Fort saves – but luckily, it failed its third.

The interaction with Gilmy the ettin was entertaining.  They thought he was maybe some druidic guardian, and that his forehead scars were maybe lobotomy scars – they weren’t, they were a plot point, and he had been turned from a human into a mutated ettin by Mythra and the altar (also used the same way to make the Arm-Ripper).

And then it was The Big Fight.  A freaky altar!  An Arm-Ripper!  A witch (druid, really)!  A wolf!  The Arm-Ripper and Mythra weren’t all that hard per se, but the altar goes nuts when there’s violence and strong emotions going on and it kept affecting the environment, raising and/or animating dead foes, etc.

In the end, it resurrected Mythra but everyone else was dead and she didn’t have the starch to keep fighting.  She surrendered and helped them regrow Jaren’s arm and make the dragon helm (it’s probably for the best that they didn’t have to rely on their Knowledge skills).

So, mission successful!  Now it’s back to Riddleport for the grand finale of the first main plot arc.

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Indie Games as a Sub-Game?

Posted on September 14, 2010 | 4 comments

I have a soft spot for indie games.  They have cool ideas.  But often those cool ideas are more one-shot-worthy, and aren’t really full of enough stuff to maintain a campaign.

But what about using one as a kind of minigame within an existing campaign?  I was actually thinking about this recently. I was wanting to beef up rules concerning relationships in my Pathfinder campaign, and I know a variety of indie games have strong stuff there, so I asked on RPG Stack Exchange about if there were any good mechanics I could steal to use in it (I had the ones from the dead in mind).

I just bought a copy of Blowback, an indie RPG designed to model the TV show Burn Notice.  My gaming group talked about doing a one shot of it but it would interfere with our Alternity campaign.

But then I was surfing forums for entertainment and found this post on storygames from someone who used an indie game, Hell 4 Leather, as an adjunct to his D&D campaign.  I started thinking.  You know, a lot of the subplots we’re doing with the “B Team” characters in the Alternity campaign are kinda similar to Burn Notice.  In the main plot, our military characters are fending off an alien war fleet, but our secondary characters tend to be “helping the NPC of the week.” Would it make sense to use Blowback for that part of the game?  It’s somewhat attractive to me – thirty sessions of Alternity rules have gotten a little stale and they don’t support some activities well.

I’m not the GM for that campaign so it probably won’t happen, but it’s an interesting thing to think about.  Has anyone done something like that?

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Game Chef 2010 – Do It Now!

Posted on September 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

Hey, I just saw that the 2010 Game Chef competition is underway!  You still have a couple days to throw together a complete RPG and submit it.  It stretches from Sept. 11 to Sept. 19 and the rules are here.  Best RPG put together in short order wins!  Not as short order as the “24 Hour RPG” contest, but short.  Even if you don’t enter, a lot of time the entries become freely available and are cool!

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Free Downloads From Paizo

Posted on September 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

Did you know Paizo has a link to get to all the various free PDF products people have listed in their store?  Neither did I.  But here it is!  There’s some good stuff in there, for various game systems.

RPGNow has a similar link which is super easy to find, but Paizo’s store is a little more cryptic, so it’s my Gamer Tech Tip Of the Day!

Download them, read them, use them – and if you like them, review them on the site.  Publishers give freebies so people can see the quality of their work; if you use a freebie that’s good, say so!  It encourages people to buy their stuff and then encourages more freebie giving to you.

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 29 Posted

Posted on September 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

Twenty-ninth Session – After we lay Rokk to rest, we go mess with the remaining Lucullan factions.  Most are kittycats, except for the insane and violent Picts.  But they’re not as insane and violent as we are!

Chris had a new character since Rokk got Thunderholed last time – Drest Talorgin, a Pict subchief.  So in good faith, we tried to set things up so that he’d confront the Pict chief, King Steel, a psycho cyborg weren.  We planned to hijack Steel’s cyber gear and then Dreth would take him out in combat.

Well, Taveer and Lenny managed to put a virus in Steel’s cyber maintenance gear, and it gave him a 2 step penalty to everything…  But he was so insanely ripped out that didn’t matter.  When as planned the fight broke out in the Pict assembly during the negotiations, King Steel totally tore Drest to bits, and then our own weren, Haggernak, jumped in, and Steel tore him to bits too.

As a player, I really didn’t want to steal their thunder.  So Markus tried to just ask for Haggernak and Drest’s lives (he was willing to settle for Haggernak) but Steel attacked him as well.  Well, Markus doesn’t tolerate primitive screwheads putting their mitts on him, so he executed the huge Pict with his chainsword.  The whole assembly fell silent; you could have heard a pin drop.  So Markus used one of my favorite Conan quotes – “Enough talk!” and issued a call to arms.  I have to admit, it was entertaining to be a Conan-style barbarian chieftain for a week.  And we got a Pict horde out of the deal; we gave them a camp in a cargo ship Lambert Fulson owns that’s docked with the Lighthouse.

We finished up in Lucullus.  The subplots in drivespace were fun.  Rokk Tressor’s ghost returned to haunt Peppin.  Degenerate gambler Marlok Taneer showed up and wanted Markus to get him “variable density bio-gel,” which I immediately realized he was going to use to load dice with.  Which was fine with me, as long as it wasn’t in my casino, and as long as I was getting a cut.

Then a human woman took a liking to our big weren Haggernak.  Easter egg: Paul was casting about for a name for the woman and I insisted she be named “Satine”, after Satine Phoenix, one of the stars of I Hit It With My Axe.  If you’re familiar with her work, you’ll know why.

And then we took Peppin’s miscreant cousin and forced him to be a steward on the ship we’re keeping our Pict hordes in.  WELCOME TO OZ, BITCH!!!

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 28 Posted

Posted on September 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Twenty-eighth Session – The Jamaicans must fall under our sway!  And for some reason this means we have to go white water rafting.  In the end, brave CIB agent Rokk Tressor gets Thunderholed.

I missed this session, but to hear the other players talk, that’s probably not a bad thing.  They got roped into white water rafting, and the rules being used meant that pretty much everyone was guaranteed to die – since “boating” isn’t high on the list of skills for spacemen and the Alternity system is unforgiving to the untrained (roll d20!  On a 1-3, you don’t die!)

And then another super hard target fight.  We feel somewhat torn about how the combats are going.  Every fight is against extremely high grade opponents – awesome skills, armor, etc. – and often require heavy weapons to best.  The GM pretty much lets us take heavy weapons anywhere, the resistance is more from our sense of realism.  “Really?  Should I really be carrying a duffel full of rocket launchers everywhere I go?  And a quantum minigun?”  That’s not very Star Trek/Babylon 5 so the sense of genre appropriateness inclines us not to do it, but when we don’t, people get killed.  And that’s what happened to Rokk.  He spent all his Last Resort points to survive the whitewater, so then when an uber-NPC got in a lucky shot on him, he was straight up dead.

Since I wasn’t there, you’ll have to get more details from the session summary.  Go click it now!

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