New Month, New Games

 

I see a few new Kickstarters of interest popping up so I thought I would share them here.

13th Age Second Edition

I thought 13th Age had some interesting ideas but I admit I've never run it or played it because it was always squeezed out by something else. I like it but I couldn't get a consensus to run it at the table. Now it's been a while since we've had a fantasy game as our main thing and with a shiny new edition coming along it might be time to finally give it a chance. 

Some of my earlier takes on the system are here and here. How has it been over a decade since I wrote those?

The most significant line from the publisher link above is that "The Kickstarter campaign begins on May 7th and runs until June 6th." if you are interested.

D6 System Second Edition

The article on ENWorld mentions a coming Kickstarter campaign and discusses the plans for the game in some detail. It sounds like a good approach and it is good to see someone making an effort to get this wonderful system back in print and in the public eye. It's a legendary system that's been left by the side of the road for years in my opinion. 

I'll say the same thing I've said for a while now - a generic system needs a compelling setting to really make it stick, both as a draw to new players and as an example of what can be done with the game. Savage Worlds has this with Deadlands and a fistful of additional options from Pathfinder to Rifts to Necessary Evil to 50 Fathoms and has been thriving for the last decade. I feel that d6 as a system should be doing at least as well but its two best settings were licensed and when the license ran out the game just died. I know they tried to make it generic in the early 2000's but it felt directionless and just never took off. Honestly it was probably too soon because most people knew it as the Star Wars system as that's what it had been for more than a decade. Now maybe they have a chance to make a fresh start with a newer audience and establish as its own thing.

Heroic The Roleplaying Game

This is a superhero RPG that takes the old FASERIP system and adds some interesting things to it - namely things from the MWP Marvel Heroic system of a decade ago, in particular the Milestone system. This was originally done in Astonishing Super Heroes and has been carried over here - with the blessing of that author - where it is the "Calling" system. You pick a "calling" at character generation which is a set of conditions or action that can grant Karma - an example:

Beast Within – Your hero has a savage side that must be kept in check. He or she must struggle to control these feelings or give in and lose control.

• +5 Karma when you first declare a character as your emotional ally, and when you assist or gain assistance from them.

• +5 Karma when you power creates unforeseen consequences.

• +5 Karma when you first describe losing control in a scene.

• +10 Karma when you start trouble by punching a bad guy in the face or inflict Stress on a hero who is over-thinking his problems to convince them to get over it.

• +10 Karma when you do something in the presence of your emotional ally that you already know they do not approve of.

• +15 Karma when you decide that your emotional ally has helped you all that they can, or you believe they have rejected you in terror, and either way you move on from this stage of the relationship.

I like the potential for this mix. 

Another important change is that Karma is strictly the Bennie/Fate Chip/Force Point mechanic. Advancement is handled via a separate system which on first glance looks workable. 

The rest of the system is very much the system you remember with percentile dice rolled against a particular column looking at color-coded results with column shifts as modifiers and specific outcomes often tied to achieving a specific color result. It works.

It's interesting that all of the games catching my eye at the moment are updates of older systems - but not all of them. D&D 5.5 (or whatever we're going to end up calling it) doesn't really excite me yet and Star Trek Adventures v2.0 doesn't either. Regardless, I'll keep an eye out for The Coming Thing and probably talk about it here. 

13th Age SRD

Well I'm not really doing anything with it right now but there is an open version of it out there.

Original (downloadable documents) version is here.

Nifty online hyperlinked version is here.

One of these days I'll probably take a serious run at a campaign with it but for now 4E, Pathfinder, and Next have filled in the fantasy RPG space at the table.

13th Age - The Rest of the Game

Last week I waxed on about the Icons and Relationships element of the game and I really liked it. I like some of the other parts of the game as well and thought I would share those too.

• "One Unique Thing" - players declare one unique aspect of their characters at start. Maybe they are the only Klingon in Star Fleet or the Last Son of Krypton  - well, maybe not those in particular. Anyway the idea is to state something that makes the character unique. Now the old school side of me says "great, another special snowflake thing" but it doesn't really bother me that much. Heck, in the old days the idea that my magic-user wore red robes and was bald was about the only thing that made him different from a friend's magic user that wore blue robes and a pointy hat. Having something codified into the character building process to isn't automatically bad. Also, it comes across like a Fate Aspect, something that can be occasionally tapped in a social situation rather than a combat modifier so the power implications should be minimal. 

• "Backgrounds" - This is a new take on skills that is more retro than it first appears. Each class has a certain number of points to spend on backgrounds - moisture farmer, bush pilot, desert scout. The number of points spent becomes the skill modifier applied to any roll where that background might be relevant. So if I had 8 points to spend I might put 2 into moisture farmer, 2 into desert scout, and 4 into bush pilot. If I find myself trying to fly a ship later, I can use that bush pilot background for a +4 bonus on my skills to fly it. 
• This is a nice flavorful way of keeping a "skill check" mechanic in the game that stays away from detailed point management (like 4E did with "trained" or "untrained" skills and then goes beyond that to stay away from detailed skill management altogether. It's much more like the Secondary Skills of AD&D where a character used to be a farmer or hunter or something and could use that when discussing things with the DM. 
• It also gives the potential for some fun interaction ala Marvel Heroic as players attempt to justify including the bonus from their backgrounds in all kinds of unexpected situations. This on-the-fly development doesn't necessarily show up on the page but it does come out in play. The relevant ability is also something to be determined on the spot and that should add even more fun to the discussion. 
• The default assumption is a varying number of points per class but there is a note that that's primarily to honor previous editions and that giving all characters the same number of points isn't going to unbalance anything in this version of the game. That's probably the direction I would lean.
• There is no built-in advancement of the number of background points but there is the option to take a Feat that adds to them, so the option is there for players who want it. Nicely done.

• Gear is simplified in a lot of ways. Armor is heavy or light, no need to determine exactly what make it is except for flavor. Weapons are divided into a number of types like light/heavy and one or two handed and even that is an abstraction I am prepared to live with - it worked fine for Warhammer so it should be acceptable here. 

• Classes are less hard-coded as most pick from a menu of class talents and feats to determine their abilities rather than a fixed list. I like what I see though I expect playing would expose some favorites and some potential weaknesses. The designers are straight-up here, noting that a barbarian is much simpler to run than a wizard and describing the differences between each class is a solid way.

• Combat changes include general simplification, damage adjustments, and the escalation die.
• There are fewer modifiers, fewer defenses, fewer conditions, no grid requirement, and much less positioning and AoO tracking. Fighting in Spirit is a nice little rule allowing a downed character to throw a +1 on another character, chalking it up to inspiration or the force or past training.
• Damage is basically 1 die per level. If you use a sword for 1d8 at 1st level, you're doing 5d8 with it at 5th level. Ability modifiers double at 5th to keep them from becoming less relevant. This sounds similar to what Tunnels & Trolls does and I bet it works just fine.
• The Escalation Die is a mechanic I like - At the beginning of combat it is zero. As of round 2 put out a d6 set to "1" and move it up each round til it maxes at 6. This is a to-hit modifier for the PC's and a few special monsters. The idea is to speed up combat but it has some other interesting effects as well. Players are less likely to open with an alpha strike, instead waiting until hey have a solid bonus to add to their big blast. It also adds some dramatic tension to the fight as I suspect being at 0 or 1 is going to feel "down" to most players after they get used to the system. It also gives a nice mechanic to hook things on (like bloodied did for 4E) and some class abilities do tie in to the escalation die count. Also, there are monsters that can interfere with it as well. I think it has a ton of potential.

• Incremental advances are a way of smoothing out the leveling process. After each session, players can choose one part of the goodies form gaining a level (there is a list) and apply that to the character. This is a lot like the career advancement scheme from WFRP and I think it's a great idea. I don;t know that there are enough advances to gain one at the recommended rate, but I think it's something each group could figure out fairly quickly. 

• Monsters have quite a few changes and I like pretty much all of them. There are rules for mook monsters which are somewhere between the swarm rules and the minion rules from 3rd & 4th edition. Damage from monsters is fixed but has some triggered effects based on to hit rolls which keep things interesting. There are also some that key off of the escalation die which is cool too. There is also some interesting adjustment to the usual save or die type attacks that looks like it could work well - something I'd really like to test in play.

• Setting: I skimmed it. I didn't see anything I hated about it, I'm just not that interested in another fantasy setting when I have so many already. Conversion and adaptation would be the main plan here.

Possible Escalation Die candidate? Especially for a Roman-themed game?

Alright so there are a lot of parts I liked. What would I do with it?

If I was starting up a new D&D type campaign in August or later I would give it a serious look. Maybe take an existing D&D adventure, do some light conversion work, run it and see how things went and whether my players liked it.

As a DM running an existing 4E game ... well, there are parts I could take but I'm not going to scrap my current rules for these unless my players suddenly mutinied and demanded it, and even then scaling down from 30 levels to 10 would be pretty tricky. I could layer the icons and relationships over 4E if I wanted to, and the escalation die might be fun but without monster abilities triggering off of that it might not be quite as complete. I'm going to think about it.

The main thing I worry about with a game like this is that although it's getting a ton of attention now where will it be in a year or two? Castles and Crusades was a big deal when it came out as a lighter, more old school flavor of 3E and how active is out for it now beyond occasional adventures? How many groups are playing it? I loved Arcana Unearthed and later Arcana Evolved and they had a good run for maybe 4 years and now there's not much support at all. Book of Iron Might was the same way. With everything from Numenera next month to the ramping up of "next" over the next year to the ongoing Pathfinder juggernaut, I'm not sure how well or how long it's going to be supported. Maybe in the age of the kickstarter this is no longer the problem it once was but I'm leery of buying into a game that's a new flavor of D&D without actually being D&D. Sure it worked for Pathfinder but I'm not sure we're going to see the same thing here. There's a cost there, partly financial and partly not, and I may wait awhile to see if it's worth going all-in. One bright side: at least there's no licensing issue like there was with MWP and Marvel.

The Obligatory 13th Age Post - Icons and Relationships

Well,  this is the hot new thing among the D&D Alternatives. The big release (like so many others) is next month.  I've glanced in on it a few times over the past year but was not in on the playtest and haven't played any of it. Now I have picked up a copy of the playtest rules and reading through them I am interested.

Mechanically it seems like a pretty good mix of traditional D&D stuff with most of it tied to 3E or 4E type resolution. But it clears away a lot of the 3E clutter while moving sideways from 4E in other places. Keeping races, classes, a skill system of some kind, feats, and the general d20 + modifier seems almost essential. Dropping the grid-based assumptions clears a lot of the mechanical complications away, and less rigidity on the balance front lets some of the flavor that 4E gave up (consciously) come back in. I'm going to spend a few posts looking at some of the aspects of the game that caught my eye and started some thinking here.

The Icons and the relationships with them is a great idea, codifying something that's been floating around in some other games but never really incorporated into D&D. The idea is that there is a set list of powerful entities in the campaign and a character has a few points to spend to identify relationships with those entities. These are categorized as "heroic", "ambiguous', or "villainous" and a character could have a "positive", "negative", or "conflicted" relationship with their chosen icons. Specifically a starting character gets 3 points to spend here and they could concentrate on a single icon or spread them around. The mechanical effect is that when desired a character can roll a d6 for each point and each "6" indicates some kind of benefit from the relationship and a 5 indicates a benefit with a complication.

The "High Druid" - one from the book

I won't get into the specific Icons used in the book because to me they are heavily setting-dependent and I'm more interested in some existing settings than the one included with the game. For a Greyhawk campaign this would let players define relationships with say, the Grandfather of Assassins, The Overking of Aerdy, The Circle of Eight, etc. with an actual mechanical effect which could liven up sessions in a fun way. It would work for the Realms as well, and could be very effective in a Dragonlance or Dark Sun game.

In the rules these examples are specifically powerful individuals, leaders and rulers of nations and races. I can see experimenting with using this with organizations, though I think making the focus the leader of an organization keeping it more personal. I can also see adding a layer for the gods, or their high priests or temples to help bring out the religious elements of the campaign world.

As an old Champions player this looks like a simplified Hunted/Rival/Ally/Sidekick system which is a good thing for any game! It's not as mechanically involved as that but it accomplishes similar goals in helping the players tie their characters to the world and tell the DM what kinds of friends and foes they want to see in the game.

I can see some fun with a system that expands by level/tier - starting out the "icons" might be the ruler of the local town, the head of a local temple, the leader of the local elf kingdom, the head of the merchants guild - keeping the focus more local and keeping things more in line with the way a lot of old school campaigns run at low levels. At the next tier that might expand to national figures, then finally to world/planar figures like the king of the fire giants or the princes of elemental evil. Mechanically it might be handled by giving a new pool of points at each tier to define relationships with the new group of icons.

The "Lich King" from the book

Now I can see this whole idea being out of step with some old school principles, mainly that it assumes a starting adventurer is important enough to have come to the notice of the movers and shakers of the world before the game begins. That's not how it worked in the old days - you were a nobody and had to earn your way to fame and hobnobbing with the powers of the campaign world. I've been slowly moving away from this view myself but I do understand it. I think this system still has a place though. I would just adjust it so that instead of having a pool of points at 1st level I would award one when hitting certain levels - maybe one at 3rd, one at 5th, then one at 7th (this game only goes to 10th level so the range is compressed a bit compared to classic D&D). This would keep the characters as relative nobodies at the lowest levels and let them gradually come to the notice of the bigger fish as they earn it by leveling up during the game.

This approach would reverse one important element though: selecting these relationships during character creation lets the players drive some of the campaign focus right from the beginning. Choosing them during the level up process means that the campaign will be driving the choices as I suspect players will spend their points on the icons that are already a factor in the game rather than trying to drive the campaign in a direction of their choice. It shifts things from a proactive approach to a reactive approach, from the player perspective. That may be a desired result for some groups but  it's worth considering before implementation.

I do think there needs to be a set list of icons for the campaign and it needs to be a fairly small number. In the rulebook there are 13 and I think that's a good number to target. If you expand it too much or leave it open-ended and let players choose whatever they want then it dilutes the focus and lessens the impact. This is where the DM gets to lay out the potential focus of the campaign by deciding what's on "the list" and the players get to narrow it down with their choices from that list.

Other Uses

• Star Wars: The middle version of WOTC's Star Wars d20 game had a Reputation system that let the DM track player relationships with a bunch of organizations from the Empire to Black Sun. This kind of thing seems tailor made for a Star Wars game and would be easy to add on to any version of the rules, from d6 to Saga. I think a list of icons would be easy enough to generate and off you go.

• Star Trek: Maybe not as obvious but I can still see a niche for it. Star Fleet Intelligence, The Klingon Chancellor, Section 31, Q - just watch the show and the possibilities bloom. This would give the players a nice hook beyond career history and current assignment and explain why they keep getting certain kinds of missions...

• Marvel/DC: SHIELD, the President, Congress, Stark Industries - I might take a more organization-based approach here but you could certainly make it personal - start with the illuminate and work down a list of powerful individuals,. DC would be similar. It's a looser alternative to the Champions approach and lets relationships have a mechanical impact outside of the usual powers found in a superhero game.

So it's a cool idea that works outside of the D&D style game as well. I think that's a strong indicator of goodness. I have some desire to link this to Dawn of Worlds to build a brand new campaign world from the ground up with my players. It would be an interesting exercise at least, nailing down the icons for the RPG campaign during the world-building game.