Greatest Hits #15 - Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?

Another art-related post ...

I think this question has come up before and my answer is always the same: Shadowrun. That single scene covers almost everything you do in Shadowrun and shows what makes it different: guy plugging in to computer, girl with a gun and some kind of magic effect, and then indian-painted guy with dual sub-machine guns, all in a dirty part fo town with a backdrop of skyscrapers and opposition - Yeah, that covers a lot of ground.

It's so perfect for the game that second edition kept the same cover - how often do you see that?

Later edition still have nice art but 3rd kind of lost it's purpose and became "generic action scene", 4th goes back to something similar to these covers (a step in the right direction), then 5th is so busy I can't tell what's going on.

My runner-up hasn't changed in a long time either:

Gamma World has had some incredibly evocative covers and this one really pushed my buttons as a kid when it was current - armed men going into a ruined, overgrown city - please tell me more! That is a whole bunch of what the game is about. Plus the whole style is pure 60's-70's sci-fi art and it really sets the tone.

Then with second edition we get this:

This is another winner with Giant Deadly Robot acting out against a human with a stone axe and some kind of mutant with an energy weapon - yep, that's pretty much Gamma World. The cover of the rulebook inside the box was pretty solid too:

Mutant with pistol and shield and another with a fusion gun against blaster guy on a horse? Yep, that's the game!

Honorable Mention:

It's not a rulebook but it is the origin of the legendary Stop Sign Shield! This picture, again, is totally in line with what a Gamma World adventure looks like.

In contrast ...

There are lots of good covers out there, and even more bad ones - static posed hero, static posed monster, symbol of something relevant to game + title of game = boring and non-evocative. They may be pretty at times but they are often just too plain. The covers for 5th edition D&D and for FFG Star Wars are usually pretty and well done technically but they don't tell me much about the game itself. Most Pathfinder rulebook covers have some kind of action happening and so in my mind are a step above. Look at Numenera or The Strange too - what do they tell you, visually, about the game or the setting? Even the new Trek game, for example, on the collector's edition has a cover picture that is a close up shot of a starship hull.

WHY? It's incredibly boring and tell you nothing about the game! At least the standard version has some characters doing something! It's a great example of "pretty but uninformative". People get excited about Star Trek ships, sure - but not hull textures. Not really.

It's an interesting question today and I ended up writing quite a bit more about it than I expected.

More tomorrow!

Day 5: Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?

I think this question has come up before and my answer is always the same: Shadowrun. That single scene covers almost everything you do in Shadowrun and shows what makes it different: guy plugging in to computer, girl with a gun and some kind of magic effect, and then indian-painted guy with dual sub-machine guns, all in a dirty part fo town with a backdrop of skyscrapers and opposition - Yeah, that covers a lot of ground.

It's so perfect for the game that second edition kept the same cover - how often do you see that?

Later edition still have nice art but 3rd kind of lost it's purpose and became "generic action scene", 4th goes back to something similar to these covers (a step in the right direction), then 5th is so busy I can't tell what's going on.

My runner-up hasn't changed in a long time either:

Gamma World has had some incredibly evocative covers and this one really pushed my buttons as a kid when it was current - armed men going into a ruined, overgrown city - please tell me more! That is a whole bunch of what the game is about. Plus the whole style is pure 60's-70's sci-fi art and it really sets the tone.

Then with second edition we get this:

This is another winner with Giant Deadly Robot acting out against a human with a stone axe and some kind of mutant with an energy weapon - yep, that's pretty much Gamma World. The cover of the rulebook inside the box was pretty solid too:

Mutant with pistol and shield and another with a fusion gun against blaster guy on a horse? Yep, that's the game!

Honorable Mention:

It's not a rulebook but it is the origin of the legendary Stop Sign Shield! This picture, again, is totally in line with what a Gamma World adventure looks like.

In contrast ...

There are lots of good covers out there, and even more bad ones - static posed hero, static posed monster, symbol of something relevant to game + title of game = boring and non-evocative. They may be pretty at times but they are often just too plain. The covers for 5th edition D&D and for FFG Star Wars are usually pretty and well done technically but they don't tell me much about the game itself. Most Pathfinder rulebook covers have some kind of action happening and so in my mind are a step above. Look at Numenera or The Strange too - what do they tell you, visually, about the game or the setting? Even the new Trek game, for example, on the collector's edition has a cover picture that is a close up shot of a starship hull.

WHY? It's incredibly boring and tell you nothing about the game! At least the standard version has some characters doing something! It's a great example of "pretty but uninformative". People get excited about Star Trek ships, sure - but not hull textures. Not really.

It's an interesting question today and I ended up writing quite a bit more about it than I expected.

More tomorrow!

This Looks a Bit Familiar: Bright

I don't pay a ton of attention to San Diego Comic Con anymore because it's turned into such a huge thing it's just a torrent of information - it's overload. I did see one thing over the weekend that caught my eye though:




I know "urban fantasy" is a wider genre these days but that looks a ton like a Shadowrun movie. Plus, Will Smith actually looks entertaining in this one, unlike some of his other recent appearances.

So color me interested in this one ...

Old Video: A Night's Work (Shadowrun promo, 1990)

Somehow I've never seen this before. Not that it's good. Now my year is complete.

Issues With Rules Complexity

Sometimes you have a feeling about something in your head that you know you want to post about but it just hasn't quite coalesced yet.

Sometimes while that is happening you wander down an internet rabbit hole and end up running across a post by someone else that expresses exactly what that feeling is about.

Sometimes it's to the point that trying to express the same feeling would feel like you were stealing their work, because it would be so similar.

So I'll just do it openly:

This is a post from 2014 by someone named Robot, or Grant, or possibly both and while it is specifically about one game it expresses my feelings about a lot of games nowadays.

Looks like it is "Grant". Good. Don't know him, never met him, just ran across the post this week.

It struck such a nerve with some people that it's still attracting comments as recently as this month Not from me of course - I'm just going to link to it.

A few observational points

• I can't understand why more game publishers don't look at the playability of their game. Not "is the math right" or "have I faithfully included ways to make every conceivable character from prior editions of this game" but "how much page flipping are people doing during play" and "how long does it take to resolve combat? to infiltrate an enemy outpost? to create a magic item? to make a character?" - things people might want to do who aren't sitting in the same room having it explained to them by the designer.
  
  Shadowrun at one point was a fairly intuitive game to grasp: roll your stat/skill rating in dice to meet or beat the other guy's opposing stat/skill. That was it! the core of the whole game! But  layer after layer has been piled on, typically in the name of "realism" - in a game with magic and fictional technology - to the point that it's just not that simple anymore. 

• Older games still have trouble integrating a lot of newer style ideas, even when it would make them obviously better. That "Dead Man's Trigger" example is a perfect illustration of this. The basic idea is very new school and would make Shadowrun a better game . Then there are a bunch of mechanical conditions the player has to jump through to use it. Why? Is there a balance concern here? What is the problem that those 3 extra rules solve?

• I don't get the commenters who keep equating 4E D&D with "easy" and SR5 in a "complexity" level with Rifts. Rifts! There are typically two types of "complexity" when it comes to games: 
• Games where the systems are complicated and involved. Shadowrun is in this bucket.
• Games where the core mechanics are simple but there's just a lot of stuff to sort through. This is Rifts. It's not a difficult game to understand mechanically - there's just 100+ books of options that you could pull from for a game. 

Anyway, there's an "easy way out" post for Tuesday!

Magic Systems

Because it had the WIld Mage, that's why

Confession: D&D's magic system is not my favorite. It works, and I'm comfortable with it, but there are other games that do a lot more with magic than any edition of D&D. Barking Alien had a post or two on this that sparked a fair amount of discussion and I wanted to expand on some of my comments there.

Magic is one of the distinguishing features of a fantasy game and to me there are two main elements of interest: mechanics and feel. Rather than go into a bunch of theory I'l talk about some specific games.

I'll use D&D as the baseline for my comparison - because it was the baseline for me. Mechanically magic is limited but 100% reliable: spells always go off, magic items always work. There are saving throws, but even then there is often some negative effect applied. At first this was fine but in comparison to to other approaches it doesn't feel especially "magical". It can feel more like science or superpowers at times

Example: a wand of fireballs typically has 50 charges. A 50 charge limitation is not much of a limitation in Champions, and that wand will always work and will always inflict some kind of damage unless you use it on a foe that's highly resistant to fire, specifically.

Now this saves a lot of player aggravation but magic in books and movies is often portrayed as risky business, not an infinitely-repeatable formula. It is also often shown as being draining or tiring to the magic-user - not so in D&D. Magical items are typically rare and wondrous, perhaps a relic of a past age - a wand of fireballs is something a medium level wizard can crank out every month if he wants.

Also in some sources wizardy types are portrayed as having more than just a spell list - they can sense magic, see things others can't see, and know arcane lore that others have no need to know. In the later versions of D&D you can give them some knowledge:arcane type skills but the closes they come to the rest of it is Read Magic and Detect Magic, which mechanically are the same as every other spell. They can't automatically see "magic" or tell that an item is magical just by touching it.

All that said I'm perfectly fine with D&D as-is, because at this point D&D is just expected to work a certain way and the tolerance for change is pretty narrow. Still, sometimes I'm in the mood for a different flavor of magic.

The first system I recall that felt really different to me was GURPS Magic. Now I had been exposed to Fantasy Hero and WFRP 1E before I ever played GURPS but those didn't register the way it did. Here was a system where magic was not going to wipe out an army but had far more utility type effects built in. Spells were learned as a special type of skill which meant even a starting wizard could have many of them and there was a chance they wouldn't work! Casting limits were determined by your skill and by your ability to handle the energy physically - go too far and it started causing fatigue! Go even farther and it could cause serious damage! Mechanically it fit with the rest of the game, and it felt like a completely different approach than D&D - wizards had broader abilities but  less powerful spells at an individual level and it felt much more personal. It also played more like art than science to me. Beyond the general "main" GURPS magic system there was room for different approaches such as Unlimited Mana. Magic items were also less powerful and less common than in most D&D campaigns.

Warhammer FRP, second edition, coming years later, had another great system. In Warhammer magic is inherently dangerous, tapping in to the power of chaos which has temptations similar to that of the Dark Side, and far more corrupting to those who succumb. It is tolerated as a necessary tool to fight the real threats coming from Chaos directly but it is not sure and not safe.In this system skill and experience help but there is always a chance that the winds of magic (flowing from the chaos wastes at the north and south poles of the world) will blow the wrong way at the wrong time and bad things will happen. Smaller effects are fairly safe but screwing up something big can result in anything from a physical mutation to daemonic possession. It's a "grim world of perilous adventure" and the magic system feels like it springs directly from that world.

Sure, there's a chance your wizard may go insane but there's enough mind-bending stuff in the world that everyone else has a pretty good chance of losing it too if they go poking into ruins and tomes of forbidden lore. They might also end up maimed, mutated, or dead as well so the risks are a part of the lifestyle. It's a pretty fair cross between D&D and Call of Cthulu. Notably, magic items are closer to D&D style - most are potent and many are permanent, though you're not going to be cranking out magic swords or fireball wands in this game.

Beyond the mechanics there is a lot of atmosphere tied to magic as well - much of it is secret, there is always more to learn, and there is a price for learning it too quickly. Plus if word gets out that a PC is delving too deeply into the secrets of chaos it's a pretty good bet there will be witchunters on his trail, something unlikely to happen to magic types in most other fantasy games.

Finally the other game I wanted to mention came out in between those first two - Shadowrun. Playing a magic type in Shadowrun feels more complete than any other game I have played.  Sure, they know spells, and they are often quite potent, but they are so much more. Summoning elementals or spirits is built right in to the mechanics and explained very well in the "fluff". Basic spellcasting works about like a skill and is not a sure thing all of the time. Casters have to resist fatigue similar to GURPS and can push themselves into taking physical damage if they go to far. They can create temporary magical effects tied to an item. They can use items as a focus to increase their casting power. There are permanent items but the powerful ones are fairly rare and typically only good to the magically aware.

Spirits are a big part of the game and are far more than meatshields. Summoning a spirit lets you use them for that of course, but they can also be asked to perform various services, used for combat effects (like armor),  or even be used to power spells! The whole spirit/elemental subsystem is very well done and makes it feel like an integral part of how magic works.

The biggest differentiation for me though is astral space. Being magically active automatically ties you to the astral plane. You can feel magic and if you "asense" you can see into the astral plane and see what a magical person/place/object is and gain some information about them. You can see a spell or a spirit coming. If seeing isn't enough you can fully shift over to the astral plane, basically moving to another layer of reality to deal with threats that way. It's a cool concept and it works well within the game and it feels "right" for what mages are about in this universe. Mages are aware of and vulnerable/exposed to things that mundanes never have to deal with, and it makes the whole system something special.

There are other little touches as well - centering, initiation, lodges, totems, "background count", and all of the little things that mages can dig into.

And that's only one type of character in the game!

Getting back to D&D, I have mostly played clerics in my limited playing time, and for them I think the D&D system works just fine - calling on your personal relationship with a deity to power magical effects, well, it should be pretty reliable. For wizard types though I lean more towards introducing some risks and that's probably why I favor the Wild Mage. They were big in second edition and there was some crazy stuff they could pull off (and some horrible accidents too). I think there was a prestige class for them in 3E but I never saw one in play and that seems like a reduction anyway - let me play it from 1st level! They came back in 4E as a type of sorcerer and while not as over the top as the 2E versions they still have that random element that I enjoy so much. I hope they will make a return in some expansion for Next to help keep things lively. It's not always about mechanics, sometimes it's just about feel.

Shadowrun 5, Part 2 - Mechanics

Old Shadowrun Fistfight: My skill in dice vs. a target number of your skill, extra successes on my roll bumps up my damage. So my street samurai with armed combat 6 when fighting a ganger with armed combat 3 would roll 6 dice looking for 3's or better. When the ganger hit back he would roll 3 dice looking for 6's. Yes, a disparity in skills could get ugly in very short order.

A lot of the game worked like that - opposed rolls generally did. Even non-sentient stuff like matrix nodes had a rating and doing something to it meant rolling dice equal to your skill against a target of the rating. Modifiers generally changed the target number, and as you can imagine bumping things up past a "6" made it tough to succeed when rolling d6's. The system allowed for a roll of a 6 to explode, rolling the die again and adding to the previous roll. Figuring the odds gets a little weird under these mechanics, far more so than the typical d20 mechanics (a 6 is effectively a 7 for one thing), but that isn't everything. Knowing that was the base mechanic made it very easy to improvise in play. The probability may be all over the place but it was a very intuitive system and my crew loved it.

With 5th edition the system has changed quite a bit - maybe not from 4th, but definitely from the older editions. Now, stats actually contribute directly! A scenario like the one described above would instead be: Agility + Pistols in dice with a target number of 5+. The attribute and skill scale is the same with humans being a 1-6 so we're already rolling more dice, maybe twice as many. The fixed target number is a new wrinkle and it both makes it easier to figure the odds and eliminates the need for the exploding sixes. Modifiers change the number of dice in the pool, so a laser sight might add a couple of dice while bad lighting conditions might remove a few.  You're probably going to need more d6's. I get this now:

Apparently this was a problem with 4th edition, where characters could end up with 20-30 dice on rolls. As much fun as that is in Warhammer, an RPG table tends to be a little more crowded. To control this in 5th they have added a new mechanic called "Limit". The Limit is the maximum number of successes one can achieve on a roll. For the example above, the "limit" on a shooting roll is the accuracy of the gun used. So say I'm pretty handy with a pistol and have a 6 agility and a 6 pistol skill, and with some other favorable conditions I might be throwing 15 dice. My Ares Predator has an accuracy of 5, so even if I roll ten 6's, I still only scored 5 "hits". They call successes "hits" now so I'm trying to work in the lingo here. Note there's really no staging any more, so every hit has some kind of impact on the result.

There are a lot of places limits can come from but the most common one seems to be the gear, from guns, to cyberdecks, to vehicles. Driving 8 stuck in a car with Handling 2 - well, you're probably not going to be very happy in a chase. This also gives another angle for the gear to play with - that Ares Predator happens to have a built-in smartgun link so if my street sam is wired for it my accuracy goes up to 7.  Two pieces of gear might have the same basic functionality or rating but one might have a higher limit to represent better quality or materials without making it blatantly more powerful. I think it's a nice touch.

If the limits start to get in the way you can use "Edge" to surpass normal limits on a particular roll. It's an attribute, rated 1-6 like the rest, but it is effectively your hero point mechanic. There are other uses for Edge besides this but I can see this one coming up a lot.

Going back to resolution, with that shooting roll the target gets a defense roll, typically intuition + reaction (two attributes). So if this is an average joe type target they might be rolling 6 dice, looking for 5+ results. If they roll more hits than my shooter does, it's a miss. If they roll fewer, then it's a hit and we need to figure damage. Most opposed rolls work this way - I roll my stat + skill, you roll your stat + skill, and the one who scores more hits comes out on top.

For non-opposed rolls there is a "threshold" - the number of hits needed to succeed. "Easy" requires one hit, "Average" is two, "Hard" is four, "Very Hard" is 6, and then it gets into "Extreme" at 8-10. There are specific examples for a lot of skills and situations like combat, decking, magic, and chases but this is the general rule. If you want to get into probability it's nice to know that on average you need to throw 3 dice for every hit that's required.

Oh and defaults, when you don't have the skill but need to do something anyway, are attribute only -1 - and I thought the old skill web "add a +2 for each dot" approach was tough. Ouch.

Looking at the archetypes in the book it looks like most of them are throwing 10 or more dice in the things they are supposed to be good at so easy and average tasks are no sweat. Hard and very hard might be a little more tricky, especially "very" as you start to run into some limits there.

Damage: To wrap up this overview, weapons have a damage number and are noted as either physical or stun. - nothing really new there. Mr. Predator is rated "8P". Extra successes hits bump the damage up directly, so if I score 3 extra hits that damage rating is now 11P. The target rolls their body attribute and the number of hits reduces the damage number directly. So say an unarmoed Body 3 target gets lucky and rolls 2 hits - that drops the damage down to 9P and they get to fill in 9 boxes on their physical condition track. That's about a -3 modifier so that's going to make life quite a bit more difficult for them.

I'm going to have to play it, but I think this will work. It's definitely up to a Champions level of dice-throwing but there's nothing wrong with that. We did lose the intuitive skill vs. skill approach of the older editions but I don't think this one lacks flavor and the introduction of limits gives the players something to think about besides a simple "more dice!" approach.

Next post on this will talk about character creation, and then I may have one more to cover what I think are the highs and lows and then hopefully the next time I post about it will be some actual play stuff.

Shadowrun 5, Part 1 - The Setting

It's funny coming back to a game after skipping an edition. It's a rare thing for me, I can only think of a few games where it's happened, and none of them were games I spent as much time with as Shadowrun. I picked up 1st edition around the time it came out, 2nd edition when it came out, and 3rd when it came out, and played and ran at least a short campaign in each one. We had a blast and over time I have picked up every book published for those three editions. I was a pretty solid fan and it was one of our main games of the 90's. Then in 2004 the 4th edition came out and changed a lot of the core setting and mechanics of the game and I skipped it - never bought a single book, did not run or play a single session of it. But that was then and this is now.

Nine years later the 5th edition is out and is supposed to be bringing back some elements of the older editions (you know a lot of this sounds familiar, what is it with 4th & 5th editions of RPG's?) and I decided to give it a look. Since it's a futuristic game I decided to go high tech and get the PDF instead of the printed version. This is written from the point of view of a long time fan who hasn't paid attention since 3rd edition but is willing to give the new stuff a chance. I'm breaking it into at least two parts - setting and mechanics.

If you're not familiar with the game, allow me to quote myself from an earlier post:

The background (which I assume most people know by now) is a baseline cyberpunk society recovering from a worldwide internet crash when the world is unexpectedly invaded by the Player's Handbook. Suddenly walking around town with a katana makes sense, especially if you have wired reflexes, body plating, and a friendly mage nearby to heal you. You can get claws like Wolverine, guns like Neo, and throw spells like Dr Strange, although probably not all in one character as magic and cyberware tend to not get along.

That's the basics.

This will probably always be the definitive cover for me

I've decided against doing an exhaustive page by page review - there is a lot of book here -  so let me hit the high points as a returning player/GM:

• There is a lot of short fiction in here, at the beginning and spread throughout the book. Normally I think a little goes a long way when it comes to this kind of thing but so far it hasn't annoyed me.  I think SR is unusual in that the stories do closely reflect how the game typically works for most groups, and they effectively communicate how it's supposed to feel. So I'm OK with this approach.
• Early in the book there's a page of the slang used in SR and after skipping most of the past 9 years I still knew what almost all of them meant. It felt like a familiar place after reading through that and realizing I was not as out of touch as I had feared. This is another atmospheric touch that I liked.
• There is a section on what is effectively the "theme" of the game: that everything has a price. This section breaks it down from the "price" of magic to cyberware to the corps to the shadows - very nice and again, setting up a consistent feel for the game.
• There is a short overview of the world and who runs each part of it. Brief but effective in highlighting that some of it is familiar and some of it is completely different.
• Then we get to a more detailed focus on a typical character with several sections including "A day in your life", "what you might be doing", and "The Opposition" which focuses on the megacorps of 2075, organized crime, and the other groups you might encounter violently.

Now all of this is in the first 40-something pages of the book. The rest of the 400+ pages is general rules, combat rules, sections on each "power source" from magic to the matrix and the rest, a bunch of gear, and a pretty hefty gamemaster section. I haven't finished reading all of that yet, and it looks pretty heavy, but old SR was pretty intuitive so I'm hoping this is as well. Also, it seems to have more illustrations than the 3rd edition books at least so I'm not staring at multi-page walls of text describing gear with no visuals as in that edition - that's a good thing.

Although this new cover has grown on me

As a returning player/GM I will say so far, so good - I like what I'm reading. The timeline has moved up from the 2060-something I remember to 2075 so there are some changes but at the same time there are a lot of familiar names and places. The default setting is back to Seattle but other options are mentioned. The gear and guns seem familiar enough and the full-VR Matrix has a role again in addition to the wireless augmented reality Matrix that came along in 4th edition. Magic is magic and most of the old stuff seems to be accounted for as well. There's a very familiar feel about it, from the language to the world, to how tings work, to the outlines of the shadowrunning life. I am very optimistic about this one.

Motivational Monday

The Year of Shadowrun

I saw this announcement a while back and I haven't seen a ton of comment on it so I thought I would throw out my own thoughts on it. The short version: The whole Mayan Apocalypse thing was something I first heard of back in 1989 when Shadowrun came out and used that as the date that things went really different from the real world, as magic returned and brought back dragons and elves and stuff. Apparently the passing of that date has spurred a reboot of the entire Shadowrun product line for 2013.

They're starting off with a collectible card game. Those are not really my thing anymore, so no strong opinion here other than some surprise that enough money can still be made at these to make it worthwhile. Magic, sure. Everything else seems like really small potatoes.

Then this summer we get 5th Edition of the RPG. I suppose it's about time since we're about 8 years into 4th edition. The bullet points:

• Grittier and Deadlier - I don't know, our games always seemed pretty deadly. Were players asking for more of this?
• Streamlined Matrix - I think this phrase is required for every edition. Maybe it is this time.
• Increased gear options - I have at least 3 feet of Shadowrun books and I'm sure that almost every one of them has some kind of gear in it. At some point don't we just get to "Nanotech" and the real world effectively becomes the same as the Matrix in the older editions where you can move/look/fight however you wish?
• Faster Character Creation and More Player Aids - sure, OK. I never thought character building was all that tedious in the first 3 editions but maybe I'm old school now. Wasn't that what the archetypes were for?

I don't want to come across as being down on the game, and I probably did up there. I've played and run a ton of Shadowrun but I sat out 4th edition because I just didn't feel the need. Now the older Apprentices are getting interested in the idea and here comes a new shiny edition - I probably won't be sitting this one out. It may be time to get sucked into this game one more time.

In the fall we get a tactical miniatures game, because we need a new one about every 3 years to rise, fall, and hit the discount bins as warhammer keeps on chugging along. I'm probably more interested in this than the card game but mini's are pricey, take time to paint, and take up space afterwards, so my interest level is "skeptical".

Spring of 2014 - a Euro style board game - not my thing either.

"Shadowrun Returns" a PC RPG ... set in 2054 ... OK I'm interested. A Shadowrun that approaches Skyrim/Fallout 3 levels of immersion? I could go for that. Summer 2013 ... I'll be watching.

"Shadowrun Online" - a Shadowrun MMO? Not sure those are my thing anymore but I will probably at least look this one over.

Shadowrun.com and Jackpoint.com - apparently some sort of in-universe web page similar to the Traveller News Service in the old days of The Journal ... only online ... for Shadowrun. Not sure how this adds anything to the game or the universe but OK.

Shadowruntabletop.com - possibly overkill at this point but the video is kinda cool

Anyway, that's a lot of stuff! I'm glad to see a game (and a setting) I like gearing up and jumping back into the fray in a big way - If they succeed than it's great and i they fail then they fail in a big way and at least no one can say they didn't try.

The 7 Games You've Run the Most

This article over at Gnome Stew got me to thinking about this, and I thought it was interesting enough to do myself. Anyone who has been reading the blog for any length of time can probably figure out most of them but I wanted to go through it myself and see if there were any surprises. I did the played yesterday so today is "DM'd"

The 7 Games I've Run the Most: 

1 - D&D 3rd Edition - There's no doubt about this one. I started running it in late 2000 and barring a few short gaps over the years I ran it almost continuously until the end of 2009. It's easily my longest urn as a DM and the greatest number of hours spent on any one game. It was during this time that I shifted into being pretty much a full-time DM, playing a lot less than I had in the past. Most of his was one large group that stayed together for the entire time. Settings included Greyhawk (return to the Temple of Elemental Evil), Kalamar (various published adventures), and the Scarred Lands (lots of Necromancer Games and Goodman Games adventures) as interests came and went and various TPK's occurred. It was a good long run and it's been long enough now that I could probably enjoy running it again.

2 - D&D 4th Edition - The most recent edition didn't get rolling until late 2009 for me as I initially disliked it a lot. Once it got going though, I've been running it for most of the last 3 years with a few gaps here and there for two different groups. I really like it but I and skeptical that it will dethrone the one above as the all-time most-run. I've talked about these on the blog but I've been doing a lot of conversions of older material to the new game and it's been a lot of fun.

3 - Rifts - Yeah, this surprised me a bit too. I've run about 2 years worth of Rifts, most of it in one 18-month campaign back in the 90's. Somewhere between "Masochist" and "Most awesome DM ever" lies the guy who says "I'll run Rifts" and sticks with it for more than a year. That was me. Not sure I would do it again but you never know. This is all homebrew stuff,  and the majority centered around a quest across a ruined America.

4 - AD&D 2nd Edition - I ran some of this but I played more. Most of my game was set in Greyhawk, partly because I like it and partly to distinguish it from my friend's Realms campaign. We spent a lot of time around the Nyr Dyv moving between the City of Greyhawk and Dyvers, from capturing a dragon to intervening in a gang war. This covered about 2 years of sessions, though somewhat spread out.

5 - Shadowrun - Including 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Edition I have run multiple short campaigns since the game came out, the longest lasting about 6 months. These were always set in Seattle to take advantage of the numerous resources published for that city. I ran a few published adventure, I think DNA/DOA was the first thing I ran in the game after Food Fight, and it's always been fun. I'm not sure I'm in much of cyberpunk mood these days but lord knows I have enough material for it. 

6 - Star Wars (d20) - one several month campaign, one short follow-up, then a couple of short Saga edition games and that's all I've run for Star Wars, but some of the moments were pretty memorable. I've detailed most of them on the blog.

7 - Savage Worlds - I've only run a few different games in this system but I think it still adds up to more time than some of my other candidates. Most of it was Necessary Evil, but I've done some Deadlands and some 50 Fathoms as well. 

After this we get into a lot of games where I've run one medium-length campaign or a few short runs over the years: Fantasy Hero, Champions, Deadlands, Deadlands HOE, AD&D, B/X D&D, Traveller, Warhammer, FRP, Babylon 5, Twilight 2000, Dark Conspiracy, and probably others I am forgetting.  As I noted yesterday, this batch is even more evidence that there is always a D&D game, and then there are the other games. Fortunately I now get to run more stuff than I used to. Having a captive audience helps.

ICONS and M&M are the two candidates likely to overtake the lower elements of this list. Icons I've only had ICONS for about a year and a half and though we've played it quite a bit the sessions tend to be shorter than other games. M&M has only recently become part of the rotation but I expect we will play more of it over the next year too. I'm happy that the top items in this list are the thing I run now and the thing I ran before what I run now, with some newer stuff moving into the lower ranks. I think that's a pretty good mix.

Planting the Seed - A DM's Tool

Barking Alien had a post last week that touched on something I have noticed all week. I'm going to take a slightly different tack on it. Let's call it the art of using someone's imagination against them.

"Ah! Theatricality!"

Well no, not exactly. BA noted that the kids he runs for tend to take things as they are while his older players tend to make all kinds of assumptions even when given very little real information. I have noticed the same thing - it's difficult to drop hints with the younger set because they don't have the experiences that drive the kinds of reactions you can get from adults.

Mainly they don't have the paranoia that can make planting a few seeds a lot of fun. You don't drop threats, you give them information - tantalizingly incomplete information that makes them want more - again,you are planting seeds that will be watered by the imagination of your players, for good or ill.

In the real world this is a skill often practiced when dealing with Ex-Wives - well, for some of us anyway.

In a gaming sense, it's the art of dropping just the right name, or artifact, or mysterious signal that sets off all kinds of alarm bells in the players heads or ignites their curiosity and as a result has an impact on character actions inside the game. Now you have to know your players to do this at a fine level with a subtle touch. In a lot of D&D games it's not something that is used a great deal. In games like Shadowrun though, it's a lot of fun. A mysterious katana that falls in their laps ... a strange program ... a shadowy opponent they just cannot catch - how does it all tie together? Does it tie together? Does it mean something?

Done right, it can drive your players crazy and have them thinking about the game in between sessions like you've never seen. It can lead to some really great things.

Done poorly and they will hole up in a safehouse for a year and refuse to come out. You won't win them all ...

It's often walking the fine line between curiosity, greed, and fear, tempting your players with just that extra bit of something that makes them want to extend their characters just that tiny bit more.

One of my best Shadowrun arcs involved a simple mission: drive a truck from point A to point B, wait 24 hours, then drive to point C and walk away, partial payment up front at the pickup site, the rest upon completion. It got more interesting from there:

• Starting point - the crew guarding the truck says "good luck - snort" as they walk away - immediate paranoia kicks in for some players. What do these guys know?
• The tuck is towing a flatbed trailer with something under a tarp. The patron's instructions were to not look under the tarp. This practically guarantees that someone is going to look under the tarp.
• A peek underneath reveals that it looks like some kind of missile ... with a glowing green substance dripping from a crack in the nose ...  which is radioactive ... tension escalates rather severely with each additional piece of information.
• The patron does not call with the new destination after the 24 hour wait - tension escalates some more. All kinds of scenarios are discussed.
• All along the way multiple groups have attempted to ambush the truck, helped to stop ambushes of the truck, and offered to purchase the truck and its cargo. The party is not talking to anyone at this point.

Eventually the tension gets to be too much and they end up driving the truck, cargo and all, off of a pier into Puget Sound and walking away from the whole thing. Note that I never confirmed it was a nuclear weapon on the truck - they got there very quickly and upped the tension of situation in a big way completely on their own. Of course, I never denied it either ...

There's also a benefit to the DM in that sometimes your players will put together something more fantastic than you were planning yourself, and if it makes sense to them then you have a green flag to run with it all the way to the conclusion.

Now this almost always goes somewhere interesting with older players, but with kids I have found they just don't care. A simple mystery is fine but they don't care about deep, layered conspiracies or really even gray areas and betrayals - they want to play the Avengers, or the Autobots, or GI Joe, or Aragorn and Legolas - not the X-Files, or the newer Battlestar Galactica, or the Sopranos - save that for later. The tweens-to-teens group in my experience is looking for a pretty clear division of good and evil and a clear opponent to deal with. The closest you might get to the mysterious campaign is in exploring a new environment - wrecked space travellers or fantasy heroes or the like - OR - a Secret Invasion Lite type approach which they were at least exposed to while watching the Avengers cartoon. To me this isn't a problem to be solved - it's a preference to be enjoyed while it lasts!

The Goal

So anyway, there's my thoughts on this particular tool in the GM Toolkit. The different ages do have clearly different preferences in my experience but aside form this different groups have different preference mixes - and tolerance mixes. With my main group too much fuzziness just annoys them, and there is an implied promise that most of it will be revealed in the end to get them to go along with the secrets. It's good to know your group and how they will handle these kinds of shenanigans, but then again, the best way to discover that is start doing it and see where the game goes.

Some Love for the Multiversal / Cross-Genre Game

I'm not sure what the official title for this type of game but I know it when I see it. Forerunners to this concept include Lords of Creation and maybe even Well of Souls in that they included concepts for characters and environments that were previously considered separate. Starting in 1988 we had moved a step closer with GURPS third edition which got very popular and touted as one of its selling points the ability to mix genres - Magic, Fantasy, Space, Supers, etc. There wasn't any particular book telling you how to do this but it was discussed among players and DM's quite a bit.

Hero System went to a 4th edition in 1989 with the express purpose of making this kind of mixing and matching possible. Pretty soon we had a new Fantasy Hero, Star Hero, and Ninja Hero written as supplements to the main rules instead of as separate games by themselves.

Both games however remained a sort of framework on which you could hang multiple genres if you choose to do so but most actual campaigns were straight-up Fantasy or Sci-Fi or a Supers or a conversion of some other game to these rules. "Universal" is not the same as "Multiversal".

The next logical step was to do this crossover thing as a part of the game setting from the start. This gave us some really cool games that took this idea in wildly different directions.

Shadowrun launched in 1989 and was really the first - "D&D with Guns" was one way to put it. The whole cyberpunk setting with traditional fantasy elements dropped in was a revelation as it did not really reflect any particular novel or movie or comic book that was popular at the time - even though it borrowed from a bunch of existing stuff it truly felt unique among RPG's and pretty much everything else. It had unique mechanics to go with it and they were pretty cool in play too. There was a second edition in 1992 that fixed a lot of small problems with the game, a 3rd edition in 1998 that was still pretty similar, and then a 4th edition in 2004 that went in a somewhat different direction mechanically. I stayed with it from 1st to 3rd, playing and running in multiple campaigns. I know in local circles at least this was maybe the closest to D&D in the ease of getting a game together as everyone could find something to play - magic-user, shaman, ranged combat guy, close-in combat guy, primitive, hi-tech, stealth expert, vehicle pilot- it covered a lot of ground and I never had a problem with a player finding something they wanted to play.

The background (which I assume most people know by now) is a baseline cyberpunk society recovering from a worldwide internet crash when the world is suddenly invaded by the Player's Handbook. Suddenly walking around town with a katana makes sense, especially if you have wired reflexes, body plating, and a friendly mage nearby to heal you. You can get claws like Wolverine, guns like Neo, and throw spells like Dr Strange, although probably not all in one character as magic and cyberware tend to not get along.

It used a dice pool mechanic, the "System of the 90's" much like percentiles were the "System of the 80's" and it worked, although it drove math people crazy trying to calculate probabilities. It was unique and flavorful and really seemed to fit the universe, kind of like the d6 Star wars game seemed to really fit the universe.

In 1990 we got Torg from West End Games which used a system similar to DC Heroes (a good start for this kind of game) which got fairly popular at first due to the spectrum of options and some innovative mechanics but it seemed to fizzle out (locally at least) by the mid-90's

The background was a baseline modern earth that was invaded by other dimensions that would then impose their own laws of reality on part of the earth. North America went Stone Age + Dinosaurs, England went High Fantasy, Japan and Italy went Cyberpunk (2 flavors), and Egypt went 30's Pulp. There were other zones too but you get the idea - if there was a genre that you liked there was probably a place for it in Torg Earth. PC's had a special rule that separated them from normal people in that they could resist the reality-warping effects of the different zones so that the cyberguy's guns would still work in England and magic would still work in the Cyberpapacy.

The mechanics innovation was twofold - something similar to the MEGS system of interchangeable units for time/distance/weight/etc. and the Drama Deck. The deck was pretty cool and dropped random conditions into encounters and could also be used by the players to change things up, sort of like a hero point mechanic.

Now I never played a lot of Torg but I played a few one-offs and liked it enough to pick up some of the game later on. Most of my players never tried it and have no interest in doing so now so I may never run it or play it again but it has a degree of cool that still differentiates it from other games. The flood of supplements turned a lot of people off as they were frequent, sometimes badly edited, and full of changes to the base rules - kind of a triple-whammy when it comes to expansion material.

Also in 1990 we got a pretty heavy hitter in RIFTS. Few can deny the coolness of Rifts' setting and concepts, but even fewer will defend its mechanics as they are ...quirky... to put it kindly. It's the Palladium system which is to say it's a hodge-podge of D&D mechanics (3-18 ability scores, d20 combat resolution), percentile skill system similar to RQ, T2K, and Star Trek, and a point system for magic and psionic powers. Let's just say the mechanics are at least familiar to most players. The background and setting though is all new and incredibly rich.

The baseline is a future-tech earth, similar to early Gamma World, say 100-200 years in the future with the expected technological advances - robots, energy weapons, power armor, cybernetics, biological enhancements, brain implants, etc. Despite these advances someone starts a shooting war and things quickly escalate. As millions die in minutes due to nuclear and other weapon exchanges the psychic energy released rushes around the world reactivating ancient energy pathways (circuits in a way) that circle the earth and where these lines cross they begin to tear open doorways to other dimensions - the RIFTS of the title - and hostile creatures and weird energies come rushing in, killing even more people. Things do eventually stabilize but the population is maybe 10% of what it was and after what is basically a human sacrifice on a planetary scale the earth is supercharged with mystic energy and is now a dimensional nexus unique in the cosmos and things begin to come a callin'. One hundred years later, man's civillization is cast in ruins and a new world rises from the old...

One major city survives in North America and becomes home to a human-supremacist anti-mutant hi-tech power and their skull-themed vehicles and uniforms figured prominently in the artwork and ads for the game and it was pretty cool. The early supplements included Vampire Kingdoms (Mexico is full of vampires) and Atlantis (a fantasy-fest magitech city run by evil alien intelligences who have magical power armor and rune weapons and all kinds of cool stuff. Triax was another early good one featuring Germany as a corporate state using power armor and vehicles to fight off a gargoyle invasion (gargoyles are a type of lesser demon in Rifts).

A potential weakness that only fully came to light later was that every possible thing a character could do is written up as a separate class and there is no multi-classing! However the classes are not a rigid list of powers like D&D but more of a list of bonuses, a few abilities, and a selection of skills followed up by a gear allowance. So they aren't terribly restrictive and the good thing is that every time I have seen it in action every player had a hard time choosing one type of character to run as there are a lot of cool choices. Not many other games cover the range of character types that Rifts does - Dragon Hatchling, Power Armor Pilot, 3 kinds of mage, 3 kinds of psyker, cyborg soldier, crazy (chip-enhanced ninja type), juicer (super-steroid soldier type), Cyber-Knight (Jedi), and Rogue Scientist (Indiana Jones) are just a part of it and each book adds more. The game also allows for the use of their other games to make characters - Ninja Turtles and Superheroes fit in pretty easily as do Palladium Fantasy characters and even Robotech if you have that book and have run out of Zentradi to shoot.

The biggest mechanical problem with the game for some people is the lack of balance between classes, powers, and gear. Compared to something like D&D 3E where balance is a goal and D&D 4E where balance is required, it's jarring - "Who would play a Rogue Scientist or a Wilderness Scout when they can play a Glitter Boy (super power armor with giant gun) as a starting character/" For those of us raised in an earlier era this is not a deal-breaker (most of the time) but it was an issue from Day 1 and it still is as Rifts is using the same system today that it did in 1990 and makes no apologies for it. It adheres to the earlier concept that role-play limitations can balance mechanical advantages that is rejected in most current game systems. If you can live with that, Rifts can be a lot of fun. If not it's an exercise in frustration.

Rifts has rolled on for over 20 years with a steady stream of new material, not all of it good, in the same 2-column black and white softbound format. They occasionally revise an old supplement or put out a compilation of something, but someone who had not looked at the game in 10 years can pick up a new book and understand it just fine. While sometimes derided as a munchkin game, it was very popular in the 90's  and has outlasted a lot of other more "mature" or "elegant" games. It is a throwback in some ways to the early days of D&D/AD&D as any ongoing game is guaranteed to have house rules, shared conventions, and possibly even misunderstandings unique to that group - it's the most old-school game still in production today and I admit I have a huge soft spot for it even now.

Since 1990 there really hasn't been another new multiversal game published. I think they are an artifact of the time but I'm not sure why.  Underground was a sort of Supers-Cyberpunk combination. Vampire got popular during this time and sucked some of the life out of everything else. I think a lot of people home-brewed it with Hero and GURPS. Maybe the idea was just never that attractive to as many players as it seemed at the time, at least once the initial "Cool!" wore off. Maybe the initial concept that allows the mixing of genres also tends to limit them in some way (it's hard to mix cyber and magic in Shadowrun even if a player really wants to do it) so that it turns off some people who are interested in the idea and they go off and make their own. I'm still not sure it's juts odd to me that while 2 of these 3 games are still going 20 years later the genre of "multigenre" seems almost as dead as the PA and Cyberpunk genres: A few supported games mostly played by the same people that were playing them 10 years ago and not much new in either products or players coming along.