Checking in on Warhammer+ with Kill Lupercal

 It's been awhile since I mentioned Warhammer+. GW's subscription service that includes a TVshow/animation app and a separate set of game tool type apps. Frankly, not much has changed. There are a few more animations than there were in 2022 - but not that many. In 2022 I noted there were 10 episodes of Hammer and Bolter, for example. That's their traditional animation series about various random topics. Some of them are really good. Now, 3 1/2 years later there are 16. Not exactly prolific there are they? There are some more lore shows - available for free on many YouTube channels these days, even if not "official" GW takes. The games have all moved to new editions since launch and the apps were suitably revised. So ... sure. It's fine.

The big new thing recently was "Kill Lupercal", a CGI animated "series" - all of 3 episodes - which was hyped up as this an awesome new production. Set near the end of the Horus Heresy it's all about a titan battle group that heads out in less than optimal condition and ends up on a mission to take out the Warmaster Horus Lupercal. The concept is fine and the animation looks good. The problem is the execution.

The whole thing is made up of three 15 minute segments:

• Part 1 is the extremely drawn-out build up of the titan being repaired and various discussions of it's condition and what can be fixed and the Mechanicus doing Mechanicus things ... it's a bunch of standing around and talking and it takes half of the episode before out titan actually walks. They get out of the hanger, shoot up some traitor marines, and then at the end they encounter a lone mysterious titan. That's it, that's 1/3 of our story done.
• Part 2 is a discussion with the mystery titan, getting the other tians in the group introduced and lined up, and then everyone heads off to kill Horus. There is a fight with some superheavy tanks and then more discussion about what they should do.
• Part 3 finally gets to the point of the exercise and we get a real fight against traitor titans and the resolution of the whole Horus thing. This one is pretty good.

This show is analogous to Warhammer+ as a whole: too little too slowly and often focused on the wrong things. 

While the individual shows are better about this, the multi-episode series tend to plod along, especially at the beginning. I'm usually a fan of the gearing-up sequence in a movie or show but there are limits. They also need to realize that most of the people paying for this service are already invested in the 40K universe - they're not newbies. You don't need to explain what sisters of battle, or titans, or for goodness sake Space Marines are - we know. We want to see them doing stuff, not a lore-dump about what they are supposed to be doing. Some of this stuff feels like a cutscene intro to a videogame we're never going to play - let's get to the point, especially if we're going to have less than an hour to work through this story! We don't need minutes and minutes of characters standing around talking about auspex readings and how bad things are and what the Emperor would want  - it's 40k! How about we have those conversations while we're jumping into the action?

Besides the shows being slow, their rate of production is terribly slow.  Under the "Animations" banner on the site there are 12 entries:

• Astartes existed before this was a thing so it doesn't really count as a W+ production
• Angels of Death was their first CGI series and is still the best. Extra points for Blood Angels. It's from 2021.
• Hammer and Bolter was also a year 1 effort and has actually added some new episodes over the years - not many, but some.
• The Exodite is another 3-part CGI series that takes a while to get going and runs 30-something minutes total. Again it looks good but there just isn't that much there. Points for being Tau vs. Eldar and Imperials. It's from 2022.
• Interrogator is a 9-part series using traditional animation that has 15-20 minute episodes and ends up being around an hour and a half total. It's black and white too and a pretty serious dive into the grim dark civilian life of 40K. It's decent and it's from 2022.
• Blacktalon is a 6-part series using traditional animation set in the Age of Sigmar worlds. There are 20+ minute episodes and so you get an actual story here. It's from 2023.
• Pariah Nexus is a 3-part CGI series from 2023 and is one of the better offerings. It ends up being a little over an hour of story.
• Iron Within is a 30-minute CGI one-shot with guard and dark eldar and chaos marines that's more buildup than action. I think it's supposed to be more "horror" than action but ... we all know what the dark eldar are about, and we all know what chaos marines are about so you're not going to surprise anyone with the various bad things that happen. Even the title spoils what could have been one interesting wrinkle. I was disappointed with this one. It's from 2023.
• Broken Lance is a 30-minute CGI one-shot about a knight household. Once it gets going it's not bad. It's from 2024.
• The Enemy Without is a 5-minute glorified CGI trailer about the deathwatch and I'm not even sure what the point of it really is. It does at least get right to the action, so there is that. This one is from 2024.
• The Tithes is a 3-part CGI series from 2024 that totals up to about an hour. There is some interesting variety here.
• Then Kill Lupercal is the lone entry from 2025

So the output has not been great. Nor has it been consistent with formats and story lengths jumping all over the place. Some of this stuff is interesting and even good but there is just not that much of it. Someone could subscribe for a month and watch everything without breaking a sweat.

I really like this one

The rest of the offerings are battle reports, painting guides, lore videos, and pretty much the kind of thing you can find all over YouTube and the rest of the internet. I would not pay a subscription fee for these.

I suspect that most people pay a sub here for the 40K and AoS apps - those are actually handy and useful for building an army and playing some games and encourage one to maintain it. There are alternatives there as well.

There is an annual miniature that's free to subscribers and those are usually pretty cool and this is the only way to get them. Not sure I would pay just for that but it's one benefit to sticking with it.

Also very cool

For now I will be continuing my own subscription here, despite my problems with the service. I do use the apps, I do like some of the shows, and I keep hoping it will get better. We will see.

Deadlands: Dark Ages Crowdfunding in September

 

So they have been talking about this one for a while now but Pinnacle made it official this week: the next setting for Deadlands is coming next month. Weirdly enough I have mixed feelings about this one. First, let's review what's out now:

• Deadlands: The Weird West - this is the original setting and the one where we met the whole concept of the Reckoners creeping in around the edges of reality, Servitors helping them do it in exchange for power, and a need for people to take a stand against them. It's one of the greatest settings in RPG-dom and one of my personal favorites. It gives a good set of reasons for cowboys and other old west types to fight monsters without having to transport them to a D&D campaign and it is brilliant. We've had original flavor, a second edition of that, a d20 version, a GURPS version, and then a couple of editions for Savage Worlds. There is a ton of supporting material, much of it with a regional focus so you can pick up the core book, figure out what area of the west speaks to you, grab something on that and get to rollin'. I've run multiple campaigns with it and will run more in the future.
• Deadlands: Hell on Earth  - The other original system game and the one that bumped Gamma World and Twilight 2000 aside as my favorite overall post-apocalyptic RPG setting. It was also ridiculously well-supported and made the jump to d20 and then Savage Worlds as well. I haven't run nearly as much of this as I have Weird West games but I want to. I suspect it has been overshadowed a bit these last few years by Rifts as the other big post-apoc setting that seems to get a lot more attention. I ran through the basics here, Reloaded here,  and then the supplements here, and here.
• Deadlands: Noir - In my opinion the first big misstep for Deadlands. It's the 1930's as the future of the Weird West setting which seems on the surface like a fairly rich vein with gangsters and weirdness (to start with) but from what I've seen it largely ignores the world-hopping Indiana Jones type options which would really amp it up. This is in keeping with the Deadlands games as a line being focused on America, particularly western America, and not really going beyond Canada or Mexico as the more distant parts of the setting. It makes sense in the prior two games but here we have a functioning society, the potential for international intrigue, and airplanes! This is the one setting book for Deadlands that I do not own as the concept just never clicked and never pushed my buttons for wanting to run a campaign - given the chance I'd rather run either of the two other games. There are only a few supporting products for it so I assume I am not the only one who felt the same about it. I remember thinking it sounded super-niche-y when they first announced it and I've seen nothing since to change my mind.
• Deadlands: Lost Colony - A spin-off from Hell on Earth that is set on a distant space colony that is dealing with ... a lot of the same problems we were dealing with in Weird West and the Wasted West. It's pretty self-contained as it's cut off from earth - it's more Weird West with lasers or tech guns instead of six-shooters and native aliens instead of native Americans, plus more Reckoner trouble. I appreciate it's potential for being the place where you finally finish off the Reckoners but I always saw it as more of a supplement for HOE than as a setting on it's own. I've never run this. I likely only would as the finale to a Wasted West campaign where you could really close things out. 

Such a great take on this genre

So there we have two great settings and two less-great settings in my eyes. Now we get the apparent awakening of the Reckoners in the new prequel where we're going back to Camelot to fight them:

From the Weird West to the Dark Ages

Dark magic rises in the time of kings and knights.

Ride with Merlin’s Paladins, battle Morgana’s minions, face the Great Wyrms, and confront horrors from beyond history. From Pictish undead to the Cult of Dagon, the Reckoners are stirring for the first time -- and Britain’s fate hangs in the balance.

Dynamic melee combat, legendary heroes, ancient ruins, and terrifying abominations await in Deadlands: Dark Ages, a brand-new setting for Savage Worlds from the creators of Deadlands, Deadlands: Noir, Deadlands: Hell on Earth, and Deadlands: Lost Colony.

Well, I am just not sure how to feel about this. Sure, it's a new Deadlands setting and there will probably be some cool stuff in it but ... it's a fantasy campaign. The very heart of tabletop RPGs! Calling it "saturated" is an understatement. My initial question is "what makes it different from all of the other fantasy rpg's out there and especially all of the other Savage Worlds fantasy games out there? Hellfrost, Beasts & Barbarians, and Shaintar are off the top of my head, not to mention Pinnacles own Pathfinder conversion line! I get that it's "Deadlands" so we will be fighting Reckoners and Servitors on some level but is that enough to really set this one apart?

I'm also not at all sure about that note on "Merlin's Paladins" - I don't think I've ever seen it phrased that way. Is this post-Camelot's fall? But it sounds suspiciously like a forced PC-aimed do-gooder organization which is something I am not a fan of in my games. Hopefully it's not "the PC organization" but we will see. 

Such a great update on the original

I know they've been working on and wanting to do this for a long time and Mordred does tie in to some other Deadlands history - don't ask, but it's a thing - so I get the need to get it out there. Speaking as a longtime fan of Deadlands and Savage Worlds too I'm just not all that fired up about this one. I'm also not lit up with anticipation for yet another Pinnacle crowdfunding effort - especially when I am still waiting on the last Deadlands campaign for "The Abominable Northwest" which was supposed to deliver books this month but has been delayed, and still waiting on "Rifts Europa" for Savage Worlds as well which is supposed to deliver in October. Then there is their about-to-complete Kickstarter for Doom Guard which I did not buy into but which is still being managed by this same team of people along with a couple of other efforts. I know crowdfunding is the way things work these days for small publishers but it still feels like there are a lot of balls in the air right now.

It's also up against the "if I decide to run a new Savage Worlds campaign am I going to run this over Deadlands, Hell on Earth, Rifts, Necessary Evil, or one of the other campaigns I already have on the shelf?" Not to mention other RPGs in general.

Maybe as some details emerge I will feel better about it. Time will tell.

Monsters, Challenge Ratings, and Encounter Balance in RPGs

 

It's a quirk of the modern RPG scene that there is so much concern over "Balance". It really falls into two areas - 1) Character Balance and 2) Encounter Balance. It's almost an obsession in some corners of the internet and while bouncing back and forth between various Supers RPG and running a D&D style campaign I thought it was worth discussing here. We did Characters yesterday so let's talk about Encounters.

Thinking back to the beginning early D&D didn't really care about encounter balance - the most we saw there was making sure a given dungeon level had monsters that matched that level which meant that it should be appropriate for characters of that level. Other early RPGs really didn't address much beyond this either. Runequest, Gamma World, Traveller, and Star Trek were all pretty light here. The idea mostly was "well, here is the setting, here are some potential opposing forces, drop your characters in and see what happens." There was also an assumption that your players knew to run when things got too hot and that might even require some extra effort like throwing out rations to distract pursuing monsters or having the chief engineer make some warp drive engineering roles to push the ship above it's normal maximum.

Later we get to D&D 3E and we first start to see encounter balance as a concept introducing challenge rating and encounter level as part of the game. I don't think this is a bad idea but I think it's doomed to  disappointment much of the time as one tries to codify a certain mix of hostile capabilities versus a generic player character power level. 

This is from the 3.5 DMG. Find the encounter level you want on the lefthand side, then decide how many creatures you want in the encounter moving to the right and it will show the CR you need to aim for to create a balanced encounter. Theoretically anyway.  

This is the Troll statblock from the 3.5 MM. Now trolls aren't particularly complex most of the time - though in this edition you could give them class levels and that could get weird fast. The only complication here is their regeneration - it's ignored by Fire and Acid. This version was a little more complicated but later editions have it so that taking any fire damage in a round shuts off the Trolls regeneration for that round - period. So if your party has a bunch of fire or acid type attacks then the troll's regen effectively does not exist. Challenge rating is affected by special defenses so the reason this guy is a "5" is at least partly because of that. Maybe if you ignore his regen he should only be a "4", maybe even a "3" which immediately wrecks the math, especially if you have a group of them. Considering in later editions wizards get fire bolt as a standard attack power, clerics get sacred flame, and flaming oil isn't hard to come by you can imagine this is not a particularly difficult thing to overcome. It's come up a lot in my current campaign and so I discount the rating for trolls a bit as they are effectively just like an ogre for the most part. Even one character landing a fire attack that round means all of the other characters normal attacks "stick" - just like any other monster. This is the kind of thing you have to do as a DM to keep these numbers relevant. 

I mean, he shouldn't be happy about this ...

This also ignores things like terrain, light conditions, weather, etc. There's a big difference between encountering something in a set of 10' wide corridors vs. out in the open country.

So taking these kinds of systems on faith is a mistake - if you really care about this stuff. I'd say 4E D&D did the best job with its math but even then I had to eyeball a fair amount of things. I did love the process of determining what kind of area this was, what kinds of encounters would be present, using the numbers to build an encounter and then tuning it up for my party - it was a great way to organize setting up a ruined city waiting to be plundered. 

Ultimate balance ...

But once you go outside of the D&D-O-Sphere there just isn't much like this approach. For point based systems (mostly supers for me) you could use the points but mostly you just use the power caps (active point limits/power levels) as a guideline. There's no larger framework though for calculating numbers for multiple opponents vs. party size. A few examples:

•    Looking at some superhero games there just isn't much math. 
• Icons is great talking about creating adventures and campaigns but doesn't burn any pages discussing encounter math.
• The Sentinel Comics RPG covers a lot of this as well and does talk about timing and challenges - the Green-Yellow-Red thing is important here - but it doesn't get into "enemy math" either.
• The M&M main book doesn't talk about numbers at all - it discusses encounters as part of an adventure or how they fit into a villainous plot. The Gamemaster Guide though, actually has a few paragraphs on balancing encounters and actually does mention power levels - every 2 PL increase means they are roughly twice as powerful so a PL12 villain is a good fight for two PL10 heroes. That's as far as the math goes.
• The Marvel Multiversal game is one of the newer entries and while it does have a page and a half on balancing encounters the only number advice in the entire section is to put your players up against opponents of the same tier - of which there are six. 
• Beyond strict superhero games entries like Savage Worlds have no real encounter guidelines. The only notes are that some creatures are wild cards but the game doesn't stick ratings on it's monsters beyond that.
• Star Wars!
• FFG Star Wars mentions that when using multiple opponents they should be a die or 2 lower on their abilities. That's about it.
• d20 Star Wars, Saga Edition specifically here assigns a challenge level number to every monster/npc entry in the game and this is used to determine both encounter balance and XP awards. Not terribly surprising with it being heavily 3E/4E based.
• d6 Star Wars - 2E Revised and Expanded in this case - has no time for encounter balance. The designing adventures section talks about pacing, different types of encounters, and "making it Star Wars" but does not put any numbers on opponents or award XP based on that kind of things. 
• The Trinity Continuum system has no encounter guidelines either. There are levels of threat as in minor-major-colossal, etc. and there are caps on their dice pools for each given level but there is no corresponding link to what level of character experience is an even match for that. There is a fair amount of material about adventure or story design but it's largely math-free.

I hope those are mostly minions ...

The one thing that many of these systems do is provide a two to three-tiered framework for opposition with normal opponents, minions or mooks, and then maybe some kind of master level opponent that is stronger than normal and possibly designed to take on multiple PC's. Mooks, almost universally, are designed as massed opponents that drop out of a fight with a single hit.  That can give a different flavor to a combat encounter and saves the GM a lot of work. Bosses tend to get extra actions or some kind of fate points to help them mitigate bad rolls or to guarantee success. Saving the complexity for the medium to boss level encounters helps a lot in running a game while letting the players feel like they are accomplishing something. 

Not a minion!

So this emphasis on encounter balance and the numbers associated with tracking and measuring that is pretty much a D&D thing. Other games don't worry about it much if at all. The only game that definitely has one on this list is the version of Star Wars published by the D&D people. Why don't more RPG's use this kind of approach? I will close with a paragraph from the M&M 3E Deluxe Gamemaster's Guide that I think sums up my feelings on it really well:

Character Balance in RPGs

 

It's a quirk of the modern RPG scene that there is so much concern over "Balance". It really falls into two areas - 1) Character Balance and 2) Encounter Balance. It's almost an obsession in some corners of the internet and while bouncing back and forth between various Supers RPG and running a D&D style campaign I thought it was worth discussing here so let's do Characters today and Encounters tomorrow.

Character Balance shows up in a couple of places and in a couple of ways.

First up I see a ton of discussion around this with D&D 5E-style games. Playtest classes for upcoming expansions, new classes for new games like Tales of the Valiant ... as soon as something comes out there will be immediate numerical breakdowns of damage per round and similar CharOp metrics at different levels and given certain feat or weapon choices and honestly these days it's just tiresome most of the time. It's not as important as you might think.

 This kind of thing mainly got going during D&D 3E and became it's own mini-industry for some people while completely ignoring the RP part of the RPG. This became especially evident in mid to late 3E when "experts" were recommending ridiculous combinations of classes and prestige classes as the "optimal" choice that were never going to happen in any real game with an actual DM trying run even a semi-coherent campaign. They were only even slightly likely to be achievable via one of the Adventurer's League type games where there was no central DM and no need to play out how your human fighter/cleric/ranger managed to join and train with the elves' arcane archers. You still see a degree of this even now with some of the multiclassing recommendations that get posted as the optimal build for today's games. Again, what DM is going to just let that happen in an ongoing campaign?

It also tends to ignore the non-combat abilities of a character and class and that's a huge miss in my opinion - it's not just about combat! We do other things too! At least 5E made some effort to categorize three areas of the game with combat, exploration, and socialization within the rules. Whether they succeeded is something people like to debate but they at least put it in the book and hopefully 5.5 is doing an even better job. If you are playing in an ongoing campaign, with a steady group of other players, in a setting that is supposed to be a "real" fantasy world with some internal logic, then DPR and other number-crunched metrics are one of the least important things to worry about. Because once in the game who cares which character does more damage by a few points here or there? Why does that matter? You're not competing with the rest of the internet and you aren't really competing with your own party members - you're supposed to be on the same side most of the time when a fight breaks out. Are you happy with what your character can do in a fight? Are you happy with what they can do outside of a fight? If so then you probably made a good choice - regardless of what the various forums, Discord channels, and social media groups say. 

Point-based games are kind of built around this concept - the points are mainly for the PCs. The DM doesn't have to use them at all. If all  the PCs are using the same points totals then they are all equal on some level within the game system. That said this type of game, even more than D&D style games, need DM supervision to reign in extreme character choices. Things like active point limits in Hero and power level limits in M&M help, but there are still ways to break things - with the great freedom that point-based games give you comes the need to work within the framework of the specific campaign. Not everything needs to be optimized. Not everything needs to be a variable power pool or a multipower or put in an array. With this type of game if one character does more damage than another that should be the result of deliberate choices on the part of those players and there is nothing wrong with that. 

If this stuff matters in your group it can be discussed in the good old session zero - "I really want to play a tank this time" or "I want to play a sneaky DPS guy" - I think most people get what this means now. My group still discusses classes and races (if applicable) when we start a new game and possible roles within the group if it's a less-structured game like Savage Worlds but it's done in a very open way and we don't really have anyone that thinks there can be only one of a type or class within the party or that wants to compare DPR numbers. They will find combos and they will absolutely break classes but it's not a competitive thing because they don't care who is the "best" most of the time. That said the cleric and the paladin in my current game trying to top each other's armor class has been pretty entertaining. 

Then of course there are games that absolutely do not care about balance between different classes or character types. Old school D&D doesn't care much at all, certainly not math-wise. Traveller doesn't care - one character might have 4 levels of "Bureaucracy" and "Pistol-0" if they're lucky while another may have Combat Rifleman - 5 and Cutlass - 3. Both are viable because combat isn't the only thing in the game - personal combat is only one of several options for combat - and it's a big universe with a lot of things to do. Getting your guns onto that  planet with law level 9 is going to take some Bureaucracy skill - probably some Bribery skill as well.

Really any game where random rolls are a major feature of character creation has an inherent lack of concern for character balance. If I end up with an 18 strength and you end up with an 8 we are headed in different directions with D&D combat. D&D, Traveller, Villains & Vigilantes, Cyberpunk, Gamma World, Runequest - all of these have random character generation, many beyond just determining ability scores, and yet we played them all, sometimes for years, and no one argued about this.

The game most openly, brazenly even,  unconcerned with balanced characters in my opinion is original recipe Rifts. Random stat generation then your race/class choice dictates everything else and on no level are they balanced. In a game where you could play a Glitter Boy, a more general robot or power armor pilot, a juicer, a wizard, or a dragon hatchling I have seen people choose to play the Rogue Scientist - sort of a post-apocalyptic Indiana Jones who's signature feature is that they get a lot of skills. No special combat abilities, no extra luck, no magic, no power armor, and the same standard equipment options everyone else gets. 

People make choices in these games, even when given obviously more powerful options, to play the things they want to play, the things that call out to them. My take on the "truth" of character balance is that as much as it's a feature of online discussion and debate it really doesn't matter all that much in actual play in an ongoing campaign. Sure, people will optimize or power game some things sometimes but they tend to do it with character types they are already interested in beyond whatever the numbers say. The prospect of living with the same character for months or years brings perspective that goes beyond the numbers.

The First Five RPGs I Played

I was thinking this could be a fun exercise for anyone who has made a hobby of RPG's, recent or not. For me it's not recent but it's good to revisit the classics occasionally, right? All the talk of new editions of things has me looking back a bit so here we go:

The book cover, not the box, because we used the book a whole lot more than the box

1. I started with Holmes Basic D&D, and over the next year or three moved into AD&D and Moldvay Basic and then Expert. I'm lumping them all into one item because that's how we played it. This is where it all started with hand-drawn character sheets on notebook paper and maps on graph paper with boardgame pawns or coins on pieces of paper to show locations for some fights. So many things we consider "essential" now from miniatures and Chessex mats to laptops, tablets, and the internet were either not a factor back then or didn't exist! Sometimes it's good to remember you don't actually need most of this stuff - just a game and some friends ... and probably some dice.
   
   
   

   

   Such a distinctive look with these

   
   
2. The next RPG I became aware of, bought, and ran was Traveller, the old 3-books-in-a-box edition. I had a friend at school that talked about it constantly an so I started looking at it in the local mall hobby shop and and ended up getting it. It's hard to express how much this expanded my horizons with a very different method of character generation, a skill system, no levels, ship construction, solar system generation ... it was incredibly eye-opening coming to it with D&D being my only other experience.
   
   
   

   

   Maybe the first big Elmore cover?

   
   
3. Following closely on my Traveller expansion was Star Frontiers which was a pretty big deal at the time but has mostly vanished into the mists of history these days. Sure, I still have my stuff and there are fans out there even now, but I don't think a lot of players coming in from the 90's on even know it existed. It had a very different approach from Traveller with a sort-of class system but still using skills but they were percentiles not a straight number like Traveller ... it was sci-fi but a different flavor of sci-fi. 
• The coolest thing about it was probably the poster maps and counters that came in the box that were used for a lot of other games for years in lieu of miniatures - including Traveller.
• The worst thing about it was the complete lack of spaceship rules. That was a terrible decision. I'm sure they thought it made sense at the time but I think it really hurt the game in the long run.
  
  

  

  I still love this cover.

  
  
4. The fourth RPG for me was Champions - I loved Champions. So eye-opening in so many ways. My first experience with point-build systems. My first superhero game. My first time to realize that we could do anything with these rules. I suspect a lot of us independently discovered the concept of running a fantasy game using Champions, running a  science fiction game using it, and as Champions II and Champions III came out it only made that more possible with rules for creating vehicles and then creating bases. It was the anything system! And it still is ...
   
   
   

   

   Loved that 1st edition ruined city cover art but this is where I started

   
   
5. The fifth RPG I dove into was Gamma World. My first post-apocalyptic setting with a system that was very much like D&D but with random powers and weird races mixed in. Growing up as cold war kids this kind of game really spoke to some of us, as did the realization that here was a game where you could have superpowers and modern to futuristic weapons with no alignment and no rules or responsibilities to limit how your character could act. Would you play a hero, even without rules? Would you be a warlord or a despot or a bandit? Or would you just be a simple man trying to make your way in the universe? Here the rules weren't really the big deal - it was the setting and all of the possibilities it enabled. 
• Also one of the few RPGs where I have used nuclear weapons, definitely the first of those, and that's something that sticks with you.

As a follow-on to these I believe my 6th would have been Boot Hill, rules-wise more of a miniatures game than what we would call an RPG today but we played it like an RPG for sure. The highest and best use of this game was to send your characters into a D&D module using the rules in the DMG and we loved that.

I mean it's not a Larry Elmore painting but that's still a pretty evocative cover

My 7th would have been the Star Trek RPG from FASA. So much here to love when the Trek universe was much smaller and less complicated and the only real setting switch was "are we using the animated series stuff?" which the FASA trek game did by default. Character generation was a little like Traveler but used percentiles for skills and the system used action points to resolve combat actions. Plus there was so much lore in one place! A super cool ship combat system with charts to run the main kinds of ships we knew about at that time! Deckplans! There was so much good stuff in this game! I'm sure to modern eyes it would look dated and limiting but it was just amazing and it was very playable. 

Iconic. What more needed to be said here?

On a final note I see posts online - a lot of them lately - where people are opining on the golden age of RPG's we live in and what an exciting time it is and then go on to cite six different flavors of D&D that either just came out or are about o come out this year and just wax on about how great it is. I don't want to rain on someone's joy and sure, I like my D&D variants too, but ... come on. Those 7 games I noted above all came out roughly 77-83 and they could not be more different and they were all popular at the time to some degree and there were a bunch of other games at the time that I was aware of but not playing. Out of those 7 three of them have dropped out pretty completely (Star Frontiers, Gamma World, and Boot Hill - notably all old TSR games) but the other 4 still have a current version in print today. Sure, some are very different, particularly the Trek game, but you could pick up an old campaign without a ton of effort for any of those. 

I also wonder, given some of the things I see (like the above) do people think that D&D and RPGs are a new thing? Do they get how long we've been doing this or how many different games have been published in all kinds of genres over the decades? Rifts, Shadowrun, and Vampire brought in the new wave of the 90's and those games were all wildly innovative on some level and decidedly not D&D and they're all over 30 years old at this point. For the early 2000's we had Savage Worlds and Cortex and FATE - what's the 2020 version of all of these? Maybe the Apocalypse World-based games? I get that your first game outside of D&D can be a huge experience especially given how dominant 5th Edition has been but a lot of the new doesn't really seem all that new if you've been exploring this hobby for a while. What's the big eye-opener for the new generation of players?

The 90's gave us this gem too - let's not forget that.

All of these games had a heavy influence on me very early on so I wanted to put them out there and acknowledge them and anyone who worked on them - you've given me a lifetime of entertainment with these. Thank you.

Enough rambling here. We can start looking forward again next time.

Not-40K Friday - The Old Chaos Army for Old World

 

I've had the 3D printer running this week to finish out the movement tray expanders for Old World. Something bit me and I got fired up to get the trays I needed done and I also decided to go back through and check figure-by-figure what kind of shape they were in after a decade of disuse.

Somewhat to my surprise they were in really good shape. I haven't used my chaos warriors "in anger" since the first few months of Age of Sigmar and I think the last time I talked about them here was right after the move. I played a lot of chaos armies back in 4th-5th-6th with 7th trailing off into not much by 8th. In the earlier days a chaos army was truly "Chaos" as it mixed warriors, daemons, and beastmen all together and as they were gradually separated in the rules I found myself without enough of any one part to make a real army. I decided to focus on the warrior branch of things and had a pretty solid army there painted up during 5th. That continued into 6th with many battles against my friends' Empire and Dwarf armies and people playing my High Elves.

The silver chaos warriors here are that first multi-part Warhammer regiments set they did in the 90's promising us that troop costs would be a lot more reasonable ... uh, yeah. I liked the rough metal look and so did most of the army this way, discovering that drybrushing silver over a black base coat went pretty quickly and looked pretty good. The banners in this army are paper, drawn up in Visio which was fairly new at the time, enahanced by some interesting fonts - an Ultima font among them - and then printed out, painted, and with some decals added on I thought they worked pretty well. They are still holding together 25+ years later so I can't really complain.

Old Two-Blades over there on the left has seen many hours on the table in both Warhammer and as a D&D character, maybe a GURPS character, and maybe even a Fantasy Hero character so he is well-loved here.

There are a couple of converted chaos wizards in the back and then a unit of marauder horsemen after I mostly got over my "I don't need puny skirmishers" phase. At the very least they are good for soaking up those goblin fanatics before they hit my real units. 

Here in the center is the real heart of the army. The red-armored warriors were my Chosen of Khorne - yes kids there was a time when "chosen" were a paint job, not a special model. The kits at the time only had weapon & shield, then later they added a halberd option - in metal. But in the rules we had an option for two weapons and with Khorne's frenzy rules you can bet I wanted that two weapon option. So, I hand-drilled all of those left hands and added in weapons from various other kits, including 40K Ork melee weapons from Gorka-Morka I believe. The unit leader has a pair of spiked maces and a big cape and he has served as an RPG character more than once too.

On the left middle is my first converted mounted hero - he's one of the metal champions of Khorne (he has a bloodletter-y head) that I cut in half at the waist and mounted up I think using a rough rider of Attila lower half. He usually ended up with a magic sword and then for a long time my favorite thing to put on him was the Chaos Runeshield. Unfortunately his shield has gone missing but I remember what it looked like and I am going to have to recreate it and get him back on the table.

On the right in the middle is my usual warlord for my later games, the metal mounted chaos lord that came out a little later than the rest. He has a huge axe, a decent-looking shield, and is on a nicely sculpted horse. Smaller fights were led by the bloodletter-head guy above but any bigger fight from probably 6th edition on was led by the Horned King there. 

Then in the back we have my beloved chaos knights - no. no one really needs a block of ten chaos knights but it is the hammer of all hammers if you do use the full unit. Shoot them, fireball them, drop a cannonball on them - they can lose half the unit and still blow almost anything off of the board with a charge. They were usually led by the Horned King or Bloodletter-Head which just made them nastier. Granted, for many fights I just took 5 or 6 of them and I'm sure I broke them into two units a few times but the back rank is mostly fill-in guys (including some plastic Battlemasters chaos knights) so I didn't really like fielding them separately.

Almost every force selection started with these two units and one or both of these leaders.

The righthand section of the army has another big block of chaos warriors and these are the earlier chunky monopose versions that I think originally came out with Heroquest but were later sold as a straight-up Warhammer unit. I ended up with a bunch of them through trades and such and decided to make another regiment. I liked the irony of a unit of "chaos" warriors made up of identical models. I used the metal 4th edition era command trio for them, did the same drybrush look as the other unit, and painted up their shields to add some nice contrast. They've been used as guards and evil fighters in many RPGs as well.

Next to them is one of my favorite character models for chaos that I used as a wizard. he has a staff, and has a helmet with no face, but his raised hand has what could be an eye in the middle of it - very strong on the creepy to weird chaos scale.

Then in the back we have a unit of chaos knights from about 3rd edition, with weirder poses, proportions, and looks than the later ones. It's good to mix in some older units into your army when you can - especially a chaos army.

Yeah, these guys. I like mine better but they definitely have a look.

So there is the army that's intact after 25+ years and getting ready to get back on the table. I do have some additional units of similar vintage that I either never quite finished or took a beating in a move at some point, or that my kids got a hold of when they were toddlers - never leave your army out on the table overnight if you have toddlers! -  so I have some additions to make and I am really looking forward to working on them again. 

Old World-wise my next-most-finished army is my High Elves so they will be getting some attention this weekend, then I have a huge pile of orcs & goblins to go through, some Undead to assemble, the Beastmen I finally caved and converted over to Sigmar bases two years ago only to see them eliminated and returned to the Old World line ... sigh ... and then that shiny box of Bretonians guilting me from the shelf. 

More to come for sure.

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Playtest - Combat Discussion

 

Initial discussion in the previous post.

OK let's look at some of these new combat interactions. First up the general Degree of Success chart:

A critical hit here (Nat 20) adds one degree of success
A critical miss (Nat 1) adds a degree of failure

• Hits and misses are determined using a d20 + your relevant attack bonus vs. a DC of 10 + your Defense score. As long as you get a success - meet or exceed the target DC - you have scored a hit on the target and now you need to check for damage.
• An extra success here adds 5 to the Effect rank
• An extra failure here, if it somehow still hits, gives the target a +5 on their Resistance check
  
  
• Damage is handled by rolling the d20 + your toughness rank vs a target of 10+ damage rank. That's a change from the 15 + damage of 3E. Then Degrees of Success enter the fray:
• Success (two or more degrees): If the target has Hardened, Impervious, or Impenetrable resistance against the attack and this degree of success, they receive no damage conditions. Otherwise, this is the same as one degree of success.
• Success (one degree): The target receives the Hit condition. For each Hit condition, apply a –1 penalty to the character’s further resistance checks against Damage.
  
• Failure (one degree): The target receives a Hit condition, and the Dazed condition. If the target already has the Dazed condition, it becomes Stunned instead.
  Compared to 3E this adds Dazed - in 3E this was just a -1 to future Toughness checks
• Failure (two degrees): The target receives a Hit condition, the Stunned condition, plus the Staggered condition.
  In 3E this was just Dazed & a -1
• Failure (three degrees): The target receives the Hit and Staggered conditions, plus the Incapacitated condition. If an Incapacitated character fails a Damage resistance check, their condition becomes Dying. If a Dying character fails a Damage resistance check by any degree, they are Dead.
  In 3E this was just Staggered and a -1, and an additional Staggered result went to Incapacitated which could then go to Dying and then to Dead in the same way.
  
  Some significant changes here: From 3E the target number has dropped by 5, but the table has bumped everything up a notch for starters. Then we add in Hits being cumulative so even resisting the damage to a degree means they are still piling up. I like this as it puts more of a clock on the combat. 3E had a similar condition but it was only applied on a failure. Now with it applying to at least some successful saves it will accumulate that much faster. It also adds a benefit to doing really well on a Toughness check as you avoid this cumulative penalty. Players tend to be disappointed when they roll really well and there is no additional benefit to it so this feeds right into the drama of each roll. 
  
  (Also, this is starting to look like Savage Worlds' system a bit - "Hit", or "Hit and a Raise to add damage", failing the save by more causes a worse effect, etc. Lot of parallels there.)

Let's talk about Conditions real quick. Beyond "Hits" the damage table can make you:

• Dazed - One standard action, no reactions, still get free actions. 
• Stunned - No actions at all and Dodge rank is halved. I'm wondering if this is correct or if it's supposed to affect Defense scores as well? In 3E it was just the "no actions" part so I don't know. 
• Staggered - Dazed and Hindered (that means half movement speed)
• Incapacitated - Stunned, Unaware, Defenseless, and usually Prone. This is the KO you're looking for in a fight.
• Dying - Incapacitated and making death saves ala D&D 5E. 

Characters might be Resistant to a particular attack - that means they cut the effect ranks in half before making the roll. Immunity means you make no roll at all - so you won't be accumulating hits from those attacks. Susceptible means you have a penalty to resistance checks of half the incoming effect rank. Weakness is that plus your best result is one degree of failure on the check.

With the basics out of the way, let's say our Battlesuit faces off against their evil twin - how does that go?

• Evil Battlesuit flies up and blasts Justice Battlesuit:
•  Evil shoots with a d20+8 (Their Attack of 8 is the modifier here) against a Defense Class of 18 (the target's Defense of 8 + the basic 10). Needing an 18, an average roll will get them a 10-11 and so they hit!
• To resist damage Justice will be rolling a d20 + 12 (their Toughness) with a target of 22 (base 10 + 12 for the Rank 12 Force Beams). Another average 10-11 roll here will match that target for a success and while it is Hardened it is Rank 11 while the force beams are Rank 12 so no extra roll and Justice will take a Hit even with the success. 

This could go on for a while but at least those -1's will be piling up until someone gets lucky.

Let's say Justice has been rendered Vulnerable by some other attack or event. The Vulnerable condition reduces Defense by half so he would be a DC14 to hit - you just need an slightly better average roll of 11 + 8 (Attack Bonus) = 19 which is 5 over and so an added success on an attack check which increases the Blast Effect by 5.

Now the resistance target will be 27 (base 10 + 12 + 5) and an average roll for Justice will give us 11 + 12 (Toughness) = 23. That's a failure so he will be Hit + Dazed.

Clearly Vulnerable is a good thing to have on your side and outside of any powers it comes up when one is Surprised: "A surprised character is Stunned and Vulnerable, caught off-guard and unable to act. Surprised normally only lasts for one round." So there's one way to set things up in your favor.

It looks to me like combat could go on a bit but with those Hits stacking up on most attacks it should go quicker than 3E's combat. I do wonder about the effect of numbers now, both with a team of PC's attacking a single villain and with a group of mooks ganging up on one PC, and will that make for a significant impact in a fight.

Final point for today: One of the long time debates in 3E is over Defense versus Toughness. Many players thought Toughness was just better, as far as game effectiveness in 3E, and while that's not everything it did come up fairly frequently. Here's why: 

• Toughness is not reduced by Vulnerable or Defenseless Conditions
• Toughness is not ignored by Perception or Area Effects
• Toughness increase is 1/2 the PP cost of Dodge/Parry increase 

Most of these are still true. The only exception is that while an overall Defense is still 2 pts to Protection's 1 pt, you could raise either ranged or close defense for 1 pt per level. Despite this list remaining true I feel like the other adjustments to the way damage works alongside the Defensive Roll update should help balance this out. Against area effect attacks the 4E version of Evasion gives a +5 to avoid with 1 rank and "no damage on a success" with 2 ranks so there's another way to mitigate that. 

Defenseless is just bad for everyone, and Vulnerable is still mainly bad for Defense-shifted characters. The other consideration is that Vulnerable is still a first degree condition for the Affliction power so it's not too hard to land on someone. I'd say until I see a problem in-game that it's just something you need to be aware of.

That's all for now but I do want to try out some more combat examples. Look for that down the road a bit. Please feel free to check my math and thinking here too and let me know if you see something off.

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Playtest - First Impressions

 

Alright I've read it. I haven't tried to run it yet or make a new character, I just compared some old ones and looked at possible changes but I need to dig in a little more and have some of my players update their old characters too, just to give it a workout. My short take is: it's an evolution, not a revolution.

It's more like 3E in my opinion than 3E was to 2E. I was thinking the loss of the Fighting and Dexterity stats was an indicator of larger changes but I don't feel like it turned out that way. There are a lot of smaller changes and adjustments and tweaks but the basic structure of the game and of characters is very similar. 

4th Edition Battlesuit Archetype

3rd Edition Battlesuit Archetype

Comparing the two you can see that it works pretty much the same way - both provide enhanced Protection , flight via boot jets, life support, radio comms, a sensor suite, some combat computer enhancements, and then a two-power array to throw power into either blaster beams or enhanced strength. Many of the point costs are quite similar and many of the ability scores are the same (and if you're wondering the number after the slash is the "out of the suit" number). The game is still a d20 + modifiers vs a target DC or a contest of rolls so the basic framework of the game is the same as well. You still have power levels and there are still limits related to it like Defense & Toughness needing to add up to PLx2. 

Now there are some differences:

•  Right up front Fighting and Dexterity have been shifted over into a different set of stats: Attack and Defense. Instead of a built-in split between Melee and Ranged capabilities here the default is now that you have one number for both. You can certainly split those up through various means to have a lower default and then a bonus on either Ranged or Melee or unarmed or a specific weapon type to have more of a focus for your character, but you don't have to. I actually do like this change as it will be simpler for someone new to see and I think it's just a clearer label overall. Who knew you could have a superhero game with one Offensive Combat Value and one Defensive Combat Value? 
• The defensive numbers are rearranged a bit. Toughness is still your damage save, and Fortitude/Dodge/Will are now strictly your other "saves". Parry goes away as you just use your Defense for your to-be-hit target now.
• Advantages have changed in many places too. 
• There are more types of advantages and each type can have some limitations or conditions. For example Heroic is a new class of Advantage and characters are limited to half Power Level in ranks of these - because they are more powerful.
• In 3E there was a set of combat maneuvers one could do - Accurate Attack to trade damage down to increase attack bonus, All-Out Attack to trade Defense for an attack bonus, its opposite Defensive Attack to trade hit bonus for improved defense, etc. - and these gave a +/-2, but if you took the related Advantage gave a +/-5.
  In 4E these maneuvers now just grant a straight-up +/-5, no Advantage needed, so these moves will be more consequential. Note that this is "up to +/-5", not automatically the maximum bonus. So the maneuvers are better and the Advantages related to them are gone.
• Defensive Roll is better now as it still adds +1 Toughness per rank but also gives the "no effects with a 2+ degrees of success" like Hardened (see below). You lose that extra when Vulnerable or Defenseless but keep the Toughness - unlike 3E. You do lose all of it when Stunned though so it's not a perfect replacement for pure Toughness which makes sense.
• Finally let's talk about Improvised Effect. This is a new one that is really the gateway to the variable power effects so many players love and so many GM's hate. The description is innocent enough: You can use a technical skill to prepare and use Improvised Effects. Now it's tied to one skill like Technology or Magic but you can take it more than once to cover more skills. This is a Heroic advantage so it is limited by PL but this is your gadget pool or magic crafting ability right here. Looking it over again I don't believe it requires any additional power points, like a pool, but it does calculate the points required and that does affect the skill roll needed to create and use the effect, plus they are only good for one scene, so this might be OK after all. That said, it's potentially a lot of flexibility for a highly skilled character for all of one point.
  
  

  

  Absolutely love this artwork

  
  
• For Powers the degree of change depends on the power. Some changed a great deal, some barely changed at all. You can see here that even the point costs are very similar for most of this character's powers. One significant change is with Protection and the options one can apply, so let's look at that one more closely:
• Protection itself is still a Permanent Defense so the default assumption is "armor" of some kind and it's +1 Toughness per rank. You can make it sustained instead if you want a more force-fieldy power, etc. But for Extras we now have Hardened, Impervious, and Impenetrable.
• Hardened: If the damage coming in is at or below your ranks of Hardened resistance then you roll two dice and take the highest - so basically our Battlesuit here in 4E has advantage on damage saves at rank 11 or less. I like that this is now an option. There is a second clause though: If you get two or more degrees of success on the save then you take no damage conditions including Hits, which is a new thing I will discuss below. I like this though -  something better than standard protection but not immune to a bunch of stuff.
• Impervious: This continues much like it did before where a character is just immune to incoming damage at or below their Impervious Protection rank. Note that last part - equal to or less than ... not half! Now it is capped at Power Level and it does cost 2 per rank instead of 1, but ridiculously resistant Bricks are certainly back! This one also has the "no effects with a 2+ degrees of success" like Hardened.
• Impenetrable: This is the same as Impervious but ignores Penetrating. Alright, let's look at that.
• There are several levels of defense in M&M. One of those is "Resistant" which means you take half of the damaging effect. "Fire Blast 10" is effectively "Fire Blast 5" to a Fire Resistant target.
• "Immune" means you are unaffected by attacks based on whatever you are immune to. If you are Immune to fire then "Fire Blast Whatever" means nothing to you.
• Except ... ranks of "Penetrating" ignore some of this. If our Battlesuit with Force Beams 12  shoots them at Dr. Impervious (Impervious Protection 15) he does nothing. If he upgrades to Force Beams 12 with 6 ranks of Penetrating and hits then Doc Impervious is going to be rolling to resist rank 6 damage - so a DC16 Toughness check. Penetrating doesn't add anything to your attack - it just ensures some of it gets through. Unless the target is Impenetrable  - then you are out of luck.
  
  You can add these modifiers on to your normal Toughness too -  you don't have to buy Protection to unlock them.
  
  Now you're not going to take all 3 of them on one character as they overlap. If our Battlesuit took Impervious 11 on their Protection then Hardness becomes redundant as it's giving you Advantage on a roll you're never going to make. Same with Impenetrable - it's the highest level of defense.
  
  Now you might take more than one to represent some kind of layered defense. Say, Protection 11 with Impervious for 6 ranks and then Hardened for 11 - that would mean you don't even have to roll against the smaller stuff, then you get Advantage up through the remaining ranks. I don't know that it's cost effective but it would still help against Penetrating attacks with the extra roll. Say you get hit with a Blast 5 (Penetrating 3). The Impervious 6 would normally stop it but Pen 3 means you have to roll against a DC13. Hardened would give you the extra d20 for that.
  
  By wording it would also give you the "2+ degrees of success = no damage conditions) as Penetrating specifically mentions negating only Resistance and Impervious but I'm not sure that's the intent.
  
  It's interesting. I suspect my Battlesuit player will be digging into all of this a lot.
  
  

  

  No not him ...

  
  
• Regeneration is one I've seen people complain about with 3E and in 4E it's a lot simpler. There is a table that lists what it does for each rank and I do really really like the clarity:
• Rank 1 is "Recover your least Severe Damage Condition every 10 rounds". 
• This improves by 1 round per rank until at Rank 10 you're dropping one every round, then it goes to multiple conditions removed per rank.
• Then at 15 you start recovering from being Dead in ever-decreasing increments of time up to Rank 20 where you recover from everything every turn. Nicely done Green Ronin! 
• Yes there is still a Variable Power, there are about two pages of discussion on it, and the described way of handling it is excellent. Unlike the Advantage this one is based on a pool of points. That said I will leave this one with the last sentence in the sidebar discussion for this power: In short, Variable is a “last resort” in power design, and the GM should treat it as such.

So lots of interesting changes without too much being drastically different. I do want to check on the Defense-is-inferior-to-Toughness debate as I'm still not sure about that one so let's work through a combat example tomorrow and see how it works now.