Bottlecap Orcs - RPGs, Miniatures, and Terrain

 

Still have these guys today

I've been using miniatures in RPGs almost since I started playing them. We used tokens at first - boardgame pawns, chess pieces, monopoly tokens, bottlecaps, pieces of glass ... whatever we could find around the house. I had army-man type knights and cowboys and revolutionary war soldiers and space people and of course dinosaurs and some of the weirder monsters you'd get in those packages.* The problem was scale - these things were all wildly different sizes. So while these were games of imagination it's tricky when the PC miniatures vary in size from half an inch to 2 inches high and tend to come in bright primary colors.

So while we used whatever we had at hand getting into D&D (in particular) meant one became aware very quickly that there were miniature figures made that could be used with the game. They tended to come in sets so you could share them with your friends. Getting one of those was a big deal. And no, we didn't worry about painting them at all at first. I had been building models for years before this  - cars, planes, tanks, ships - but they were all plastic and larger. All I had were Testor's paints and brushes and anyone else from back then can tell you they were not well-suited for painting 25mm human figures. I mean, I did eventually try it and for the figures I tested them on it is pretty much still there to this day. It doesn't look good, but the paint is still there. The main draw was having some kind of fantasy-looking miniature to represent your guy as we lined up in 10' wide corridor formation. Henchmen and hirelings still got to be tokens and chess pieces. 

My first set of monsters

Monsters were trickier. There were so many different types! You needed multiples, not just one wizard or one fighter! We didn't really try too hard here. If someone had something close enough great! If not we didn't care. I'm pretty sure we fought the ogres of the feared "Eraser" tribe more than once alongside the Bottlecap Orcs and the Bouillon Cube Bandits, the M&M Goblins and Kobolds. Anything edible was iffy as someone not paying attention could seriously disrupt a fight by eating the reinforcements. Chocolate chips were the worst for this as on top of being edible they tended to melt at inconvenient times too. Despite these many challenges we managed to battle on as the point of the game was the scene and the environment and the conflict in your head - not the specific layout of the terrain or the kinds of minis being used. 

I mentioned much of the focus was on miniatures for the PC's. These served as a kind of anchor for your imagination - my guy looks like this, your guy looks like that ... the PCs are the one constant of the game so it helps to have them solidly represented. The rest might look like a storyboard, or nowadays an untextured 3D mesh - we kind of knew what was there but most of the color was added in our heads. Even the terrain - maybe "especially the terrain" - because we didn't have any. There were various dungeon tile sets even then to give some color and style to your 10' passageways but that was a)more money you might not want to spend on that kind of thing and b)often a thing that had to be cut apart by hand and then kept together in a box or bag and not lost between games. Most of the time in the early days we just sketched out a rough map - very rough -  on notebook paper and put our minis in the general area of where we wanted to be - over in that corner of the room, blocking this doorway, etc. We weren't counting squares. We didn't care about that level of precision. We had an idea of roughly how far apart things were and we had the DMG diagrams where 3 characters could fight side by side in a 10' wide space so we had a pretty good idea of who could fit where and it was enough.

At some point in the latter half of the 80's someone introduced us to Chessex Mats and that's when the square-counting began. They were a revelation at the time and the hexgrids were an especially welcome addition as it made playing Champions (and later GURPS) feel much more organized - keep in mind this was still fairly early on on a 50+ year old hobby. Overhead markers and a vinyl mat made us gods ... "see the water in this room is blue! The trees have a brown dot for a trunk and green squiggles around them for leaves! The lava flow is red!" I can't say much negative here - I still do a lot of this today for D&D type games. Even with this method it is just enough structure to trigger the imagination.

...still have this box too

The weird thing is that even as time went on (and many miniature wargames were acquired and many armies built) I never felt much of a call for detailed physical RPG terrain. The sketched out maps or just a good description pretty much handled it for me. Going further, I don't even really like dungeon tile type options. They feel limiting because you're constrained by the available tiles, they take time to assemble - though granted it can take time to draw the map too - and they can make your dungeons or towns or countryside feel all too "samey" because you're using the same pieces over and over. Now sure I can describe it as a rough and rocky unfinished floor but if we're all looking at cobblestones on the piece of cardboard sitting out there it's a disconnect. This isn't theoretical for me - I bought multiple sets of the boxed D&D city/country/dungeon tiles whenever they came out thinking I would up the production value here and the mix of annoyance at set mix limitations and players not really caring  led me to just set them aside.**

I feel the same - but more so - with physical terrain like Dwarven Forge years ago and now the infinite seas of 3D printing options available. It looks cool, sure, no argument there. But how much of it do I need to encompass the things my crew might run into? The answer is "a lot" and I already have another expensive and space-eating hobby called "miniature wargaming" - RPGs are supposed to be my less-expensive hobby. Plus people sitting around the table can't always see over the walls or trees, it takes time to set up and take down unless you're restricting the action to just what's on the table and that feel like volunteering for a straightjacket so no, absolutely not going to happen here. I have a 3D printer so I could do it but I just don't see much of a point. For a special big finale encounter, sure, I could see that. But online I see things like "I'm building a 28mm model of the Keep on the Borderlands for my players" and it just boggles the mind - why? If you're playing out a siege of the keep, ok that could be cool but otherwise how much are you going to use that? How long does it take to set up and take down? How are you going to store it? How is it better than a flat map when it comes to actually playing the game? It's a spectacle, no doubt about it, but what if we're really just trying to play through an adventure? 

I haven't printed it out yet but yes I have the files for this

I know there are die-hard fans of having a table full of terrain out there and if that's your thing then hey, go for it. It's a separate thing for me and more of an obstacle than a feature but I know not everyone feels the same. My latest attempt to be cool and trendy was to jump on the projector bandwagon where you have a computer or a phone hooked up to a small modern projector on a stick - a tripod or a microphone stand - and shine a nice colorful, possibly animated map down onto the table. I did research, bought a couple of projectors and some software packages and was all set up to use it for our Mutants & Masterminds game and ... it lasted about 3 sessions. My players just didn't see it as an improvement. Having the projector and stand up next to the table was kind of a hassle for moving around as it's a little tight around the table with a full crew and this extra equipment. A ceiling mounted rig might have helped but there is still some extra prep to be done, hardware issues to fight though at times, and while I'm sure it would have gotten easier with more experience I'm just not going to disrupt the game - you know, the actual reason we get together in the first place - to keep pushing it. So for now that stuff is in a closet and in the "maybe someday" file. I tried it, don't regret it, but it wasn't right for us.

So yes, after 40+ years of doing this we do play with a lot of miniatures in our RPGs, both PCs and monsters, but we mostly do it on the flat terrain of a tabletop, or a battle mat, or scribbled sketch maps on paper. That's jut what works for us.

Yeah these too, multiples

*Yes I remember having things like the original Rust Monster and Bulette inspirational figures. They were all lost to time and various sandboxes spread across Kansas, Tennessee, and Florida though, before D&D really came along for me. 

** The only dungeon tiles I've ever found really useful are the Star Wars ones WOTC put out back when they had the Star Wars RPG license. Considering most Imperial architecture looks the same everywhere it actually reinforces the setting by having base interiors, star destroyer interiors, and imperial prison interiors all look the same. It just works.

A Quick Anecdote on AD&D 2E and the 1993 Origins Convention

 

Mike Mearls posted an article today referring back to his introduction to AD&D 2nd Edition and it triggered a memory I do not think I have shared here before. 

As far as 2E goes my friends and I at the time thought it was pretty good - yes it changed up some things from what we had before but some of those we knew were going to be changing (thank you satanic panic) and we liked a lot of the rest. The Dragon Magazine preview booklet had given us time to digest some of the new before it officially arrived. We rolled up new characters, translated a few, and made the jump without much angst or drama. We played it a lot through the 90's.

Right, that one

The memory deals with the '93 Origins Game Fair which was held in Fort Worth that year. I had heard of Origins for many years at that point but had never been to one. We had a bunch of smaller local/state cons in Dallas and occasionally one in Ft. Worth but this was going to be a big one. I played in the Star Fleet Battles tournament - briefly. I went with my best friend at the time and I believe we also played in a big Battletech game and a decent sized Warhammer Fantasy fight. The dealer's room was a big draw of course and I spent a fair amount of time at the GDW booth as Traveller: The New Era was a big new thing in our world at the time and I was interested to see what was coming next. 

This one is probably worth another post.

The most relevant part to this memory spark was later in the con when the live auction hit. There was a lot of cool stuff - remember we didn't have eBay available at the tap of an app back then - and I don't think I won any of it. Near the end though the 1st edition AD&D books started to show up - pretty much an avalanche of 1E books I would say. Lot after lot - and no one was buying them! 

Dominating - in 1993 anyway

I saw PHBs, DMGS, MMs, and all of the later hardbacks - in all of the various covers and in everything from "perfect" to "run over by a cement truck in a rainstorm" condition - showing up with opening bids set at 1$ and even lower, stacking up at the auction table as book after book came up with no takers. Every once in a while someone would drop 50 cents on one, but no one was paying significant money for any of them. 

Some were pristine, some were far rougher than this. Ripped, torn, chewed, submerged at some point ... 

I know a lot of the retro crowd likes to make a big deal out of people who never stopped playing AD&D but standing in that room at that con it was very evident that the time of 1E was over. At last as far as the people at the convention were concerned. I assume a lot of people held onto their books - I know I did - either out of nostalgia or sure, maybe thinking they might run it again someday, but 4 years in Second Edition was the version people cared about. It was a shock to see how things had turned around where books that were such a huge part of our lives were now effectively worthless. Edition changes were still somewhat new then. How that has changed!

The Water Gardens, right next door to the convention center.
"You may remember me from such films as "Logan's Run" ...

Postscript: Yes it did occur to me years later that I could have made some money if I had jumped in and bought up some of those books.

Post-postscript: That said, even circa 2010 when I was outfitting the boys with the full set of Basic/Expert/AD&D/AD&D 2E/D&D 3E player books* it was not difficult to find examples of all of those online or in used bookstores nor were they priced like a "collectible". So I would have been waiting for a few more years to make my fortune with the "Origins Haul".

*We were playing 4th at the time after playing a lot of Basic D&D and I wanted them to be able to join any game they ran across with friends or whoever. Hey, they were interested and I had the chance to do it so why not?

RPG Numbers: What 's the Third Biggest RPG?

There was a decent discussion on EN World over the past week about indie RPGs - and it seems anything outside of WOTC or Paizo qualifies as "indie" to some - and the conversation turned to numbers, as in "what are the biggest games out there?" This got some wheels turning and turned into this post. 

First up I will say that if you're running a tabletop game with your friends none of this probably matters. If I am running say Mongoose Traveller or FFG Star Wars or 2d20 Star Trek then sales figures or popularity numbers of those games or any others really don't matter and they aren't going to affect what I do each week. People seem to be very interested in scoring or ranking these kinds of things but it really has very little impact on playing and running games*. 

When people get to discussing this aspect of the hobby I think it is very important to distinguish two things:

• There is the biggest selling game at any given time.
• There is the most played game at any given time.

It is completely possible, and I would say likely, that there are two different answers to those. Well, aside from "D&D" which tends to dominate both regardless, followed by "Pathfinder". The other part of the question is "how do we measure either of those?" How do we come up with numbers on what people are playing and how do we truly know what's selling?

People in the business side of the hobby are probably more concerned with the sales question but the problem is that no one really knows. Individual game companies know what they are selling. Individual game stores know what is selling for them. Amazon knows what's selling. There is no industry-wide reporting with any real data. 

I know about ICV2 and their quarterly reports. They've been around for decades and they've been cited as some kind of industry standard for a long time but their data is so flawed and incomplete that I feel it's incredibly misleading to draw major conclusions from it. The two biggest players in the RPG market are WOTC and Paizo and both of them have significant direct sales to consumers - heck Paizo built their core business model on it. None of that data is included in those reports. Amazon sales are not a part of those reports. I believe DTRPG is also not included in their data. Their miniature game reporting has a similar flaw in that Games Workshop does significant direct sales and maintains their own chain of retail stores around the world yet none of that data is included in ICV2 reporting. When a major chunk of sales for the biggest players in the industry are not covered that's a major flaw. That's just the start of my problems with that data and that reporting.

So we don't have a real big picture view of RPG industry sales. We have a lot of anecdotal stuff and we have companies mentioning that, as a fictional example, 2025 was the best year ever for Deadlands! Great! What does that mean? It tells us nothing in comparison to other games. 

Then you get into the how we would differentiate the games even if we had more data. Do we track everything for Savage Worlds and rank that? Do we break it into the various game lines like Deadlands, Savage Pathfinder, Savage Rifts? What about 3rd party products - do they add on to the  total for the whole game or do they count separately? Do all of the Free League's games count together? Are the Year Zero engine games grouped up separately from say Dragonbane? It's tricky. You might get a significant number of people playing Year Zero, or Savage Worlds, or 2d20 as systems but the individual games might be too small rank very high. There's a lot to consider, even if you had complete information, when it comes to "what is the number 3 best selling RPG right now?".

And again, how relevant or important this really is to anyone other than those trying to sell them is debatable.

Then we get to the question of what people are playing right now - which I think is regularly very different than what people are buying right now. A fair number of RPG players tend to be wrapped up in ongoing campaigns of varying lengths which means a book that you buy today may not hit the table for weeks or months or even years. 

A personal example: I added the Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide 2 to my shelf recently. I ran Tales for a year and a half but it ended in November. I'm not sure when I will run it again. I'm happy about the purchase but I'm not playing that game right now. Conversely I am running Mutants and Masterminds right now and will be for at least a little while longer, maybe the rest of the year. I haven't bought a book for it in quite a while ... looks like since the Kickstarter for the Reprint Extravaganza which was summer 2023. Astonihsing Adventures Assembled was that same summer so either way that was my last pick-up. I did back the 4th Edition Kickstarter so maybe that should count - we're back to "how do we count these?" with various editions of a game now entering the mix. 

This also touches on Kickstarters - there's a potential built-in delay there too as it often takes time for the rules to come out, even PDFs with some games. Even once it funds it might be weeks or months before anyone can even try to play it and not everyone will do that. 

People do try to look at online play platforms to see what's popular but many of those cater to certain games more than others and there are still a whole lot of people who do not play online so at best you're getting another limited snapshot of what's being played. 

I've seen others bring up convention numbers - what games are being offered? What games are filling up?  It's another limited data point. For example if I went to a convention this weekend I suppose I might sign up for an M&M game, but if I signed up for 3 games over the course of a weekend I am 100% sure that the other two would be something else, and at least one might well be something new that I have not played before. Does a one-off count as "playing"? It should count for something as that means interest and engagement but it's not exactly the same as a game being used in a running campaign.

So I have far more questions than answers here and a lot more obstacles than solutions. For a relatively small industry it is very challenging to draw any useful conclusions from the available information. 

*I do wonder if some of this is driven by people who don't have a current game but want to sound informed about the scene so they need to be able to say "Hey did you know XYZ is the 3rd biggest RPG right now"? Maybe it's something else but my preferred response there is "And ...? What do you play?". 

The "Barriers" to Old and Out of Print RPGs.

 

Thought I would put an AD&D PHB cover here didn't you?

This post was spurred by a couple of things:

1. A post asking why anyone would choose to play AD&D (1E) over another game
2. A post discussing the best ways to get players to try a new game where one of the responses was that a game needed to have merch, like T-shirts, because that helped get players interested.
3. Discussions on "when is an RPG dead?" and "what a successful RPG looks like"

So let's discuss ...

First up - Why would one choose to play an "old" game? Or at least an old edition of a game with newer editions? "Because I like them better" is all the answer anyone needs to give. RPG's are not technology. Newer is not automatically better - which is not even true of technology but that's how people tend to see it. RPGs are art, not science, and don't let anyone tell you different. Are there innovations in game design from time to time? Sure. Does that make a game that uses them "better" than one that does not? No.

Innovative but not a replacement for many

Let's talk about an example: Advantage/Disadvantage as described in 5E D&D. It's a solid mechanic. It simplifies a lot of what used to be separate modifiers, often found in charts, and lets the game play faster. It can be included in new games (and should be in some) and is pretty easy to retrofit to existing games, even non-d20 games like Traveller. But ... some people like granularity. Some people don't mind checking multiple modifiers for range, light levels, target movement, attacker movement, etc. That adds to the fun or immersion or realism for them, and abstracting it into advantage/disadvantage just feels less good. Sometimes this could vary by genre or specific game for the same person. Sometimes speed of play or simplicity is not the ultimate goal but that's where a lot of recent game design trends have been headed. "People don't have time to play games with complex rules" - maybe you don't. Maybe I do. Maybe I want to count every bullet in my Twilight 2000 game and not really worry about it in my Star Wars game.

Also nostalgia should not be discounted. I suspect that for many people the edition of D&D that you first played, or the one that "clicked" for you is what D&D is for you and that person would always be open to giving it another try. I started when AD&D was still coming out and we played it (and the various Basic, B/X, BECMI sets too) for a decade+ and so while clunky in places we know it is eminently playable and it feels like home to some degree. To someone else it may well look clunky, needlessly complex, and just old. That's fine. No one can make you play a game you don't want to play.

As someone who has taught multiple members of the Next Generation to play RPGs I can tell you they have been interested in some old games because they are good, not because of any nostalgia. Moldvay Basic, Runequest, and Warhammer FRP are all old at this point and all feel very different and the younger set liked all of them when they got the chance to play. RQ 1-2-3 in particular is not like any modern RPG and has a whole different feel to it. It's nostalgic for me to run these - it's  just cool and different to them to play them. Heck Blaster started out loving d20 Saga Edition Star Wars and then after playing just a few sessions became a d6 Star Wars Die Hard and refuses to play any other version - and this is a game that published its last supplement the year before he was born.

For the second part let's just combine those other two entries- "merch" and the current state of a game:

Right up front I will say I don't care about either of these things when it comes to RPG's.

Merch? Seriously? Does having a t-shirt for Game X make it a better game? A more interesting game? Does it make playing it more fun? I suspect this is the mark of some of the newer type of player we see that is more interested in tying themselves to a thing than in actually playing a game. I really don't understand this mindset when there are so many other hobbies out there one could join. It's the same with "does it have a YouTube following" or some other social media presence - who cares? Why does it matter? Does any of that make the game better?  How did we survive before these things existed? This kind of stuff is really satisfying something else as it has no bearing on actually running or playing the game.

It's the same for "is a game dead?" or "is the game still in print?" - why does it matter? A good local game store will have a used game section, there are online used game sellers like Noble Knight, even Amazon sells quite a few old games, and eBay is basically the world's attic or garage where you can find the most obscure stuff for pretty reasonable prices most of the time. That doesn't even get into PDF's which are widely available for the more known games, legally and not. So the question can't be a concern about availability.

Definitely on the TBD list

Is it about finding players? It's not on store shelves or it's not widely discussed on the socials so someone thinks finding players might be more difficult? I mean, it might be, but isn't everything outside of 5E a bit challenging now? maybe your players have never heard of Lords of Creation - if you want to run it then it's time to make a pitch*. You really only need 3 players for a fun time with most RPG's, maybe as few as two, so this is not an insurmountable obstacle. 

* You are talking about running it right? Otherwise you're going to have a hard time with any slightly obscure game. 

I'd be happy to run this tomorrow if someone asked

A fair chunk of the games I've run over the last 20 years were out of print, sometimes drastically so, at the time I ran them. The aforementioned d6 Star Wars, RQ2, WFRP 2E, Mechwarrior 3E, Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, B/X D&D, 4E  D&D ... the publication state of a game means very little in reality. If you have the core book for any RPG I can think of you could run a campaign for years with no outside support if you have interested players. Maybe you need to spark that interest at the beginning but that's often the GM's job, regardless of how current the game is. There's really no reason to not pull out that old game you've been thinking about running and make your pitch - take the grognards home and take the noobs somewhere interesting.

40K Friday - The Practical Side of 3D Printing

 

He's upset about being resized

I know the dream of 3D printing is "I can print all the miniatures I want for almost free" with a side order of "any time I want them" and to a point this is true. It's more true with a resin printer than a filament printer in many ways but I am happy starting out with the melted plastic option. One of the reasons I feel that way is because I already have too damn many miniatures - what I need is more time to play them. Barring a terrible physics accident that alters the flow of time (and hopefully grants some cool superpowers) one of the areas a 3D printer can help with is the supplementary stuff that you will use -with- all of those miniatures that you already have.

One of the big ones is Terrain with a capital T. I have a lot of plastic ruined buildings - because that's kind of a 40K thing. I do not have as much Fantasy/Medieval type terrain - because those fights tend to happen more in open fields like the historical fights of the medieval era did. I don't have a lot of building type terrain that isn't "blasted Imperial gothic architecture" because that's what GW sells and what GW used to show in White Dwarf and what 3rd party makers think everyone wants based on what's in all the GW photos and artwork.  I don't have a lot of WW2-appropriate terrain. As it turns out a lot of terrain is perfectly amenable to FDM printers as the occasional layer line doesn't really get in the way or ruin the look compared to how it would impact an elf face for example. 

I have some spaceship corridors. I bought two sets of the stuff GW put out a couple of years ago for that whole Boarding Action thing they did with Kill Team and for 40K. It's cool. I can see using it for all kinds of things. I'd like more but I'm not buying another one of those sets. As it turns out there are a lot of people making those kinds of things and putting the STLs out online at very reasonable prices. 

People and companies run kickstarters for big sets of terrain and the costs there are pretty affordable with those as well. You can acquire models for an entire table's worth of whatever you like and make extras of the parts you really like at almost no additional cost once you own the files. It's great. It can work for RPGs too - if you thought the Dwarven Forge stuff was cool, well, you should see what's out there now that you can print yourself.

MiniWargaming did a Kickstarter recently for this set of interesting stuff.
"The Ruins of Drakenfell"

The other side of supplementary materials here include my personal nemesis: Base Expanders. These have been a pain for a very long time. The main culprit here is once again Games Workshop. The triggering incident is when they decide that a certain army, most of whom have been on 25mm round bases for decades, really look better on 32mm round bases. So all of the new units now come on 32's, the sure-to-be-coming-upscaled-new-versions-of-old-units will come on 32's, and random strangers whether at a store or at a con assume that all of your fully painted armies should be on 32mm bases the day after this is noticed - because they don't actually announce something like this. They just start putting new bases in all of the boxes and let people discover it on their own. 

Yeah, it's a sore spot.

You could say "but if you play with friends they probably won't care. Sure. But if I go outside the friend circle it's tricky and I also do not like to see one marine army on 25s and then my other marine army on 32s. Or mixing in Ork boyz on various differently-sized bases - that's not a good look.

Guess the main two armies this has happened to? Guess which are two armies I have tons of? Bonus if you can guess which are two of my oldest armies and thus more likely to be on 25mm bases?

Somewhere around 2017 GW started shipping new marine boxes with 32s in them. I noticed it with the new Blood Angel sets first but I don't know for sure they were the first offenders overall. Then in 2018 we got the new Primaris Marines and we all saw why they really went to 32mm bases - bigger figures need bigger bases!

Somewhat later -  it might have been earlier but I noticed it later - they decided to do this with Orks as well. Now I have a lot of marines across multiple armies but I have 120 2nd edition Goff Ork boyz in just one Ork force - so you can imagine I was not pleased to see this change. People also get a lot twitchier about orks being on smaller bases than they do marines as it means you can pack more of them into melee where they are a lot more dangerous than a tac marine.

So what does one do when one's old classic 40K figures are deemed to be on too small of a base? Well I did write a post about this a few years ago that has pictures of the base expander options I had found at that time. I have used all of those at some point but some of those were very unsatisfying as I dug into them more. The silver half-ring things gave me a lot of trouble trying to line them up straight and level. The wooden rings were definitely the cheapest and I was planning to use them on my Orks but ... I hate the way they look once they are on. The cup-style are the best looking and the least trouble in my experience but were also the most expensive. Not stupidly expensive, but when you're buying them 100 at a time you start to think about how much you are spending on stuff for your miniatures that is not actually a miniature. I had a bunch of orks, a bunch of loyalist marines, and a bunch of chaos marines that all needed this treatment. In my head, at least.

I've been trying to finish up the Goff boy updates this year and then I acquired a 3D printer ... and one night while putting the new shoes on the boyz it occurred to me that I had bought 3D printed versions on eBay - maybe I could just print them myself! As it turns out I could! You can too! I poked around various sites and found several styles of the things including some that looked pretty much like the ones I had been using. 

The tan-ish ones are the expanders I purchased a year or two back (sprayed with Zandri Dust). The black ones (and the white one) I printed myself this week. I stuck one of my Evil Sunz boyz in one to do a test fit and then printed the rest. This will save me some money, even more time, and just makes things a lot easier going forward as I don't have to worry about  buying more of them, shipping them here, or keeping some on hand for future acquisitions of old miniatures - if I need some I can print some. Case closed.

There are other practical benefits. You can print custom bases too, not just expanders! You can print objective markers and banners and nifty score-keeping things and a bunch of other stuff that you might have a use for in a particular game. Spell or area effect templates and other measuring devices seem to be a popular option. 

A lot of rank-n-flank games like Warhammer Fantasy and Kings of War use blocks of figures moving around the table. Movement trays are a way to facilitate this and have been in use for many years but before you had to make them out of plastic sheet or wood or something that took at least a little effort. Now you can just print them - do search, pick the correct size, and off you go.

The crowning jewel of this is the "Movement Tray Adapter" which combines the powers of a movement try AND a base expander into one handy option. Behold:

GW brought back old school fantasy in the form of The Old World (yay) but decided to bump all of the bases up a notch (boo) so all the old humans and elves that were on 20mm squares are now on 25s and the orcs and chaos warriors that were on 25s are now on 30s  <sigh> because that's just what they do. But, by using one of these beauties you can keep your figures on their old bases but still have them take up the correct amount of space on the table. It's a triumph of human ingenuity.

Anyway much like base expanders vs. actual miniatures, here's a 40K Friday post that's not really about 40K very much. Sometimes it's not a hobby - it's a lifestyle choice.

 

The First 2023 RPG Challenge - Scheduling!

 

Similar to last year I don't have a lot of hard, set goals for this year. Last year was interrupted by the big move but this year should be steady - I do not need to do that again! - and is mainly about getting back in a rhythm in my mind. 

Assuming I can keep the Deadlands game on track then that is the RPG priority for the year - until we wrap it up. I've done pretty well maintaining focus on it and not trying to work in side games or getting distracted with the "next" game on the roadmap. That said given some recent schedule complications I am changing my approach for '23 ...

For several years now my approach to scheduling has been to keep it very short-term: Sometime during this session, we pause and schedule the next session. That's it - no advance planning, just a conversation while everyone consults their phone calendars. Occasionally we scout out a whole month and plan two sessions, but the basic goal is to set the next gathering date. This has worked pretty well but trying to get the train rolling again post-move we have hit a lot of blockers. November & December are always challenging but now even January has been bad. Combine this with my own (and the group's) desire to have everyone present for each session and we would not be playing at all for Q1 2023. That's just not viable.

So I talked to the crew and pointed out the complications we've been having and now we are going back to a fixed schedule like we have used previously. I'm aiming for two sessions of Deadlands and then 1 each of a couple of other games which I am still in the process of determining - I'd like to work in a Superhero game on a regular basis and then maybe a Star Wars or one of several other options. It's all TBD for now. 

Of course this also means we have to let go of the Full Attendance mandate so people are going to miss some sessions. It's not great but we are hardly the only group to encounter it and it's not like this is the first time it's come up.

It's one of the regular challenges when managing an RPG campaign, especially as the adult players get busier. I've tried various approaches before, including pretty much this same thing, and they worked well for a while but I also had some built-in players at home back then which made the Agile thing work and I do not anymore, so, time for a new plan.

I did think at one point having a backup game for when everyone couldn't show would solve the issue but right now I would end up running the "backup" game more than my primary game for the next few months so that wasn't going to work.

Committing to every weekend is optimistic but it's an offer, not a promise. I will have conflicts and have to cancel occasionally but doing this means that theoretically we can run something every week regardless of who is available and I think that getting that momentum going will improve all of our games. Plus it may allow me to rotate through some short runs in systems I might not otherwise get to run and expose my guys to something they want to explore further without taking away from the Deadlands campaign.

Dating myself here, oof ...

So anyway there's the first dilemma of the year. Hopefully this sorts out and I'll have some decent stories to tell here down the road. 

Translocation Complete

 

Well the trip is finally complete! It took way too long ... apparently I have a lot of stuff ... but it's finished now and we are fully transported to the new estate. We've integrated Fred the Yard Panther into the routine as well so we are one big happy family including Ranger the bulldog (on patrol up there) and Rockstar the House Tiger.  The new game room is a big step up from what I had before and the painting room might just be able to hold everything I need it to hold. There is still some stuff in boxes but not all that much - should be able to finish that up this month. Overall it's been an amazing refresher on what you can accomplish when you're teamed up with someone and have similar goals and priorities.

The crew comes for a first visit this weekend where we should hammer out our plans for the next few months and into next year. We need to get back on the Deadlands train that was rolling along quite nicely before I complicated things. Paladin Steve has been talking about running the new Dragonlance campaign for 5E so we need to talk through that and who knows what other options might come up?

As things settle down and we develop an actual routine I should be posting here again so stay tuned! 

The Summer Update

 

Well it has been a while since I posted anything but that up there is not a direct commentary on the blog. That said it feels like it's time for a general update at least. 

It's been a busier than usual year. The apprentices have finished up the college run and are making their ways out into the world - I suppose I'll have to pick a new title for them at some point. I've officially picked up a new co-pilot. We lost one of the canine companions. Mostly ups with a few downs. The Deadlands campaign has been steady though it has been on pause for a bit because of the annual convention obligations of some of my players and also because the Tower is preparing to translocate!

After ten years at the current location it's time for some new scenery and preparations have been underway for a while now and this kind of thing definitely interferes with keeping a regular schedule and with regular blog updates too as it turns out. Once we are settled at the new site I expect things to pick back up again. Right now minis are being packed, not painted. Dice are being stored not rolled. I've packed 46 boxes of RPG books and boxes and binders alone (U-Haul "small") and I'm not quite finished with that yet. My friends have said several times over the years "man if you ever have to move all this ..." - yes, well, that time has come and no I'm not asking them to help 😀

With it down to just me and my in-house editor and the animal companions there was an opportunity to make some changes ... so we are. 

Things should be settled by late September or early October and getting back to normal. In the mean time this seems like an opportunity to maybe possibly catch up on posting about the Deadlands campaign when my back is tired of packing and lifting and moving things so there might even be some updates here over the next few weeks. 

Anyway there's the news of the day/week/month/year. As always, more to come ...

 

How it Started versus How it's Going

 

Barking Alien had a great post about those games we started with and which ones we still play. It's been awhile since I've gone down this road but let's see ...

I started with Holmes Basic D&D. Still have my copy though it is in rough shape from major use. This was 1979-1980. It was pretty much just D&D for the next few years though I did start writing up my own game with Jedi and Cylons and things in there too. Lots of graph paper was consumed as I dove into AD&D and the new Basic Set and then the new Expert Set and Dragon magazine. 

By the summer of 1982 I added Traveller. That was the second game I really dove into. So many cool things - character generation, ship construction, star system generation - so much in those 3 little books.  

I had been aware of the other TSR games for some time but had not acquired any of them. Later that year I had picked up Star Frontiers and it was not all that much like Traveller but it had its own attractions - the maps! The counters! An interesting take on actions and combat and races and gear - I really liked playing it. 

During 1983 things really exploded as I added Gamma World, Star Trek (FASA), Top Secret, Boot Hill, and Champions. 

The 80's were a great time for RPG's as by the end of the decade I had jumped into Marvel and DC supers games, Twilight 2000, Star Wars, Warhammer Fantasy, Ninja Turtles, Runequest, GURPS, Mechwarrior, and Shadowrun. There were new editions of various games in there as well plus starting up a miniatures hobby with Warhammer, 40K, and Battletech.

Out of those first few let's see ... I do still play and run D&D. Not that same version but I have run Labyrinth Lord (briefly) in the last 3 years. I'd like to do more as it does feel different than "normal" D&D now but schedules are such a constraint we are lucky to keep one game going steadily these days. 

Traveller is one I have taken off the shelf and considered but I haven't run it in at least ten years. Another one I would love to run but it just gets squeezed out every time.

I haven't run Star Frontiers since the 80's but I do still have everything and I do still love a lot of things about that system and setting. Nowadays it mainly serves as a source of inspiration for a potential Star Wars campaign - the adventures in particular. 

As far as the batch from 1983 ... 

• Gamma World is another of the want-to's but I haven't run it in ... 20 years at least? I really should put together a short run at least.
• Star Trek - I haven't run FASA Trek since maybe the 90's but I still have all of that material ... and the LUG Trek stuff ... and Decipher Trek ... and I just picked up the Klingon book for Modiphius Trek. So the systems have rotated over the decades but the setting is definitely still a player. Just have to convince at least two of my players to give it a shot. 
• Top Secret - another box unused since the 80's. I did do the kickstarter a few years ago for a new version from the original creator but it is not a good game. These days when I get the itch for a spy game I'd say Spycraft comes to mind the most but it's just not a genre my guys care a whole lot about. Odds are this will keep gathering dust on the shelf. 
• Boot Hill was a lot of fun back when but has since been rendered obsolete by Deadlands. Considering we had the most fun with Boot Hill crossing it over with D&D anyway this was not really a surprise. I usually hate "tech" analogies when it comes to RPGs but this is the best case for one that I can think of - everything we wanted to do in Boot Hill can be done easier, faster, and better in Deadlands ... any version of Deadlands. 
• Then there is Champions ... so good and yet so long since I've actually run a game with it. I still love the system even if it's been bumped aside by M&M a lot over the last 20 years when a superhero game is discussed among the crew. I would still like to run it again so I picked up the lean and mean version and then earlier this year I grabbed the full double-textbook version. It may take a little while but it's on my radar and it will happen eventually.

So most of those early games are not major players for me these days. The oldest thing I've run aside from a D&D game with some regularity these last few years is probably d6 Star Wars and that will continue - it almost became the new game I'm running now. 

BA asks a good question about how people play only one game and for so long and I admit I have no idea. I love the bubbling concoction that is RPG design where new and innovative things emerge and change the way we look at things. D&D is a nice constant in some ways but there are so many other things to do out there that I cannot imagine sticking to one game only and ignoring everything else.  

Campaign Length

I'm looking at campaign options for when the current situation winds down and we can begin gathering again. This means I'm poring through old binders and spirals looking at what I've done before and I thought I would share some numbers from the last 20 years:

• 3E Seas of Kalamar campaign - 34 sessions
  This was set in Kalamar and combined the original Freeport trilogy (which we finished) and the Savage Tide adventure path from Dungeon magazine (which we did not). This was my last 3rd edition campaign.

• 3E Scarred Lands campaign - no fancy name here - 54 sessions
  This was set on Ghelspad in the Scarred Lands and covered quite a bit of territory from Vesh and Mithril out to the Blood Sea and eventually spent a bunch of time in the city of Amalthea. I used a lot of Necromancer Games and Goodman Games modules in this one - Seroent Amphora, The Wizard's Amulet, Idylls of the Rat King, The Dragonfiend Pact, Tomb of Abysthor, Bloody Jack's Gold, White Plume Mountain, The Blackguard's Revenge, and Iron Crypt of the Heretics, where the whole thing ended in a TPK around 11th level.

• 4E Return to the Ruins of Adventure - 30 sessions
  Yes it's Phlan,from the AD&D Ruins of Adventure module and the Pool of Radiance computer game! It was a lot of fun.

• 4E Savage Swords of Impiltur - 30 sessions
  Most of this campaign was following the Red Hand of Doom mega-adventure from D&D 3.5. I had heard good things about it, never ran it in 3E, so I converted it to 4th and we got very close to finishing it but not quite. 

• 4E Temple of Elemental Evil - 11 sessions
  This was a side campaign I ran for the boys in between other games. It didn;t last as long as the others but they did explore Hommlett, cleared ourt the Moathouse, and cleared the ruins of the Temple. We just didn't dive into the dungeon beneath as other things took priority.

• Pathfinder  Wrath of the Righteous - 38 sessions
  I've written about it, particularly why it ended, elsewhere on the blog but it was fun most of the time. We've discussed picking it up with PF2E but we all want more experience with that system before we try to go high-level with it. 

• 5E Cormyr Classics - 21 sessions so far
  This is set in Cormyr and has included conversions of Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread and is ongoing though it's been a few months since we last played.

I ran an earlier 3E campaign set in Greyhawk but I didn't keep notes like I did with later games. It ended in a self-inflicted TPK in the middle of the crater ridge mines in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. There have been various other one-off, short runs, and faded campaigns with other games over the years but I'd say these are the "core", longer-running games I've had.

Seems like 30-50 sessions is my sweet spot - should I consider this in planning a campaign? No more epic adventure path type runs? Maybe shorter ones? Or should I go for it - buckle down and aim for a full level 1-20 progression, even if it takes 100+ sessions?

Something to think about.

Catching Up - RPG Burnout

There are a variety of reasons for the blog going silent last year. I wasn't playing as much tabletop gaming and I wasn't playing as much online either (I burned out on City of Heroes after about 4 months) so I did not have as much to say. The single biggest reason though was that for the first time in 40 years of playing RPGs I ... burned out.

This was a new experience. I've never gone more than a few months without playing or running something, and I've usually also worked in some prep work or some board or miniatures gaming even in those gaps. This time I let almost all of it go for roughly six months.

The last couple of years I've mostly been running 5th Edition D&D and playing in a Pathfinder campaign and a Savage Worlds 50 Fathoms campaign. There have been some smaller runs and one-offs with other games mixed in there but those 3 have been the core.

The 50 Fathoms game has been steady but hits bumps sometimes. We aim for weekly and sustain that for a bit and then hit stretches where we're lucky to play once a month. It's a weeknight game so it's especially vulnerable to schedule issues. It was frustrating at times but it's been a lot of fun and we should wrap that one up later this year.

The Pathfinder campaign had been running for over 5 years, theoretically once a month, but had gotten really spotty over the past year and 2019 was not really going any better. We had 5 players and it seemed as though it just was not a priority for any of them. After months of rescheduling without actually playing a couple of us finally told the DM it was time to let it go and he eventually agreed. It was not the way any of us wanted it to go, but that's just how it worked out. Regardless, I felt bad about how that went.

My campaign ... let's talk about that. I had been running Keep on the Borderlands intermittently with several players as our intro to 5th Edition. I've run it in every edition of the game so why not keep that going? A few years back with some variation in player availability I started running Storm King's Thunder as the "other" 5E campaign and scheduling sort of depended on who was available on any particular weekend. The SKT game was eventually sidelined as we regrouped and everyone decided to focus on the Old School game. I picked up Goodman Games "Into the Borderlands" super-version of B2 and used some of that material and then we moved into Isle of Dread - also guided by Goodman Games new-at-the-time-super-hardback-edition.

Things went well at first - enthusiasm and attendance were high and it felt like we were really accomplishing something. Then in the second half of 2019 it felt like we hit a wall. We were playing every other Friday, I had six players in the campaign, and vowed to run as long as 4 of them were available. Well ... pretty soon we were regularly having 3 or more unavailable. This jammed up the schedule, frustration grew for all of us, and I finally threw up my hands and said I was done even trying to run thru the end of the year. This was one big reason for the burnout - running a campaign as an adult means facing schedule conflicts and I've been doing it for years but last year it just exploded and all of our games were getting kneecapped by scheduling issues.

The other major thing was that some of the shine came off of 5th Edition D&D for me. I've been a fan of simpler rulesets for RPGs for a long time now but 5E is maybe too simple. After 20 years of 3E, 4E, and Pathfinder I've come to expect a certain level of crunch in my fantasy RPGs. While it does play faster than those other versions it is ... really really simple. I know it's super popular and tons of people have come back to the game this edition and I've not been a system mastery snob for a very long time but ... there's just not a whole lot there mechanically.

Character progression is really simple - you have a lot of choices those first 3 levels but once you've chosen your sub-class at 3rd most of your choices have been made. About the only customization you have left is the option to pick a feat at 4-8-12-16-19 but the game recommends you just stay with the stat boosts - how boring is that?

Monsters are mostly bags of hit points with 1 or 2 ways of doing damage and that's it - there are very few interesting monsters in the published book. In interesting here meaning they give the DM something to do besides roll a d20 and tell you how much damage you took. After 4E and Pathfinder I expect more - inflicting various conditions ... forced movement ... team-up abilities ... there are so many ways to challenge players in interesting ways beyond "The ogre hits you for 10 points". I'm pondering a post to illustrate this in more detail but for now most of the 5E monsters feel like a let step down from what we've seen before.

Bonus negative thing: I realized I am tired of running other people's material. My 4E stuff was almost all loose homebrew conversions of older material and I was very happy with it. My Pathfinder and 5E campaigns have all been published stuff and it is time to get back to writing up my own adventures.

So yes, the combination of disrupted schedules in all of our games, to the point of permanently ending one, plus the lowered enthusiasm about the main game, plus just a general frustration with the whole thing led me to "cancel the season" last fall and set the whole RPG hobby aside for months. I've gotten better since then, played some more, and even run a few sessions of  Pathfinder Second Edition to see if that satisfies that mechanical need - and so far it does seem promising. Now of course we have Ultimate Virus Lockdown as a worldwide status effect and that is this year's schedule killer.

Despite that, I'm planning to get some things moving. Interest has returned and as the year moves along I expect a return to at least one regularly scheduled campaign. I will also be getting back to keeping up the blog on some kind of regular schedule as well.

It's time to get back to work ...

He must be ...

.... working on a new campaign ...

Greatest Hits #22 - "Unplayable" RPG's

An opinion piece but still relevant as I still hear this today ...

I've been listening to a podcast that talks about old RPG's and it's been pretty entertaining both with games I know well and games I passed by. I'll talk more about them later but one thing that comes up in some of the conversations is "unplayable". I'm not going to pick on them specifically because I hear it all over the place. The recent listening just brought it to top of mind and I decided to discuss it in a post.

A strong "get off my lawn rant" advisory is now in effect. 

First, let's talk about what people mean when they describe a game this way. To me it really breaks down into two categories:

• Literally, mechanically unplayable - I mostly hear this from younger gamers describing older games. I suspect it's more "I looked at it and looked too complicated for me to enjoy so I went no further with it" or "I've heard stories about it". I personally have yet to find a game that is literally "unplayable".
• Complicated to the point that it's not worth playing, especially when there are alternative games available that cover a similar niche - this is far more common and it's how I feel about quite a few games out there. Really, it's more "not as enjoyable" rather than "unplayable". 

I make this distinction because every so often I hear a game dispatched as "unplayable", sometimes with a bonus of sneering attitude to go with it, which happens to be a game I've played or run for an extended period of time. This of course immediately puts the lie to the "unplayable" description. 

Somewhere along the internet's lifespan theoryhammer/theorycrafting became in some people's minds as valid a set of thoughts about a game as actual experience. Someone looks at the math of the game and declares it unworkable. Someone finds a rule with some kind of logic flaw in it and declares the entire game invalid as a result. 

It's bullshit.

RPG's have never been "here's a book - do everything exactly as it is written here." Never. Different people have interpreted things differently, modified rules into something they liked better, and added new rules to cover something they felt was missing or underrepresented. 

A typical response to this from the non-players is something like "well sure if you start changing the rules it works" - no! It probably "worked" just fine before! I'm changing the rules because I think it works better!

Another common cry: "Why should I pay for it if I have to modify the rules to make them work". If that's your attitude you probably shouldn't! In fact if that's your attitude I'm not sure you should be playing RPG's at all! I don't say that to be some kind of snob - I say it because it's a just part of what people do with  these kinds of games!

Let's get into some specifics:

• Rifts - I regularly hear when the game comes up about how it's "unplayable". I ran a game for over a year, pretty much by the book. Core book plus whatever add-ons struck our fancy. yes, the rules are clunky and sometimes inconsistent. Yes I think the new Savage Worlds version is going to be a much better experience for most people. By no means though is it "unplayable".
• Shadowrun: one of the things 4th edition SR touted was the new "better" task resolution system that made it much easier to figure the odds of success compared to the older editions where it was "almost unplayable". Seriously? One of the most popular RPG's of the 90's was "almost unplayable". I played in and ran multiple campaigns through 1st, 2nd, and 3rd editions and we typically thought the system was damned innovative at the time. 
• Twilight 2000: I was surprised when I ran across "unplayable" applied to this game online last year. When games like Aftermath exist? T2K 1st and 2nd are fairly simple games really. 1E is a percentile skills system not unlike BRP games and 2E simplifies it down from ratings of 1-100 to 1-10. Sure, you'd better like playing with military hardware as that's one of the attractions of the game, but there's nothing particularly complex about either one. Again I have played and run multiple campaigns in both versions so it's completely playable if you're interested.
• Champions: "Combat takes so long, characters are so complicated, it's just unplayable" - one of the pillars of superhero gaming, something we played a bunch when we were 13 years old and  somehow figured out even though we didn't have the internet to explain things to us is now described by people at times as "unplayable". Please. 
• GURPS: I actually saw GURPS described as "unplayable" online in the last month. It's not my favorite game anymore but "unplayable"? Sure you have a lot of choices when making a character but once your character is finished the game mechanics are pretty simple. It's 3d6 roll low! For almost everything! I assume this is mostly because it has a bunch of thick hardbacks for rules, despite the fact that you won't be using more than a few of them in most campaigns. 
• Aftermath: Exhibit A for the classic over-complicated games of the 80's. I own it  - it's playable, it just not much fun IMO. Heck, it has a flowchart to show you how the mechanics work! Actually it has several of them. "Not something I want to play" is not "unplayable.

Even AD&D gets this nowdays - "This game is a mess, how did anyone play this?" - well, we read it, used our brains, and figured it out. 

"Weapon speeds?" - not in first edition.

"Grappling?" - not usually. We used some replacement system form an issue of Dragon.

"Level limits" - sure. Multiclassing was cool.

"AH-HA! So you just ignored the parts of the game that didn't work!" - Pretty much. We still do. There are parts of ICONS that I mostly ignore, and that's a pretty simple very modern system. That doesn't make it a bad game or, god forbid, "unplayable". It means we modify something we already like to make it better in our eyes. Like people do with clothes. Like people do with cars.  Why is this so shocking to some people? Are they under the impression there's a trophy for following the book as written? Have you seen the errata documents for most big RPG books?

Does this really look all that complicated?
Boring, sure, but complicated?

This usually happens though after we have played the game as written a few times.  Not before we ever play a game. Not after we play it once. After 3 or 4 sessions though you have a fair idea of how your group works with a game and what might be better for your group. The games I discuss on this blog are almost always a game I am running, a game I have run in the past, or a game I am about to run - there's a reason for that. I'm not terribly interested in opinions about a game from someone that's never played or run it so I try not to do that. I'm much more interested in practical experiences. 

As one example Savage Worlds suffers from the "let's change stuff after reading the rules once" problem quite a bit.  It mainly seems to happen with people whose only other experience is with some form of D&D, but that's not a strict rule. Someone comes into a forum or a Facebook group and announces how much they like the game and they have a couple of genius changes that they're going to use. Inevitably they've played once and something fluky happened or they haven't actually played at all yet. SW players tend to be a friendly lot but the usual response is "OK, but you may want to try it by the book rule a little longer before you change it." You want to know why? because the game has been around with only minor changes for 15 years now and it works. It works very well for fast playing pulpy RPG campaigns. There may  be a genre-specific thing someone is trying to do and that's cool but there isn't much that needs to be tweaked in the core rules. A more common problem is people not understanding the rules and trying to make changes based on a misunderstanding but there are parts that are tricky to explain purely on a page so that's not always the reader's fault.  Someday Pinnacle will find the perfect way to explain the Shaken rule and we will enter a new golden age I am sure, but until then a little conversation helps explain it much easier. 

Maybe it's the guns that make all of these "unplayable"?

My closing take: no game is "unplayable". Some are harder, some are easier, some will be less fun for your group than others, and that's how it's all supposed to work! I don't have any interest in playing or running Rolemaster but I know groups that have played it for years - clearly it's not unplayable. There was a Kickstarter last year for an updated rulebook for original Deadlands and it blew my mind - why would anyone play that when Reloaded is available? Apparently quite a few people because it funded quickly and went way over the goal. 

Oops! - Nope, that's not it!

I suppose I could re-title this "a word I don't like" because that's what it boils down to. I think we can do better.