Starfinder

The big announcement over the weekend was Paizo's new game: Starfinder There's more information here. It's more than a year away (August 2017) but I have some early thoughts.

As a player/GM I am interested but not bowled over. A new game from Paizo is a big deal as they are one of the major players in the hobby and with the built-in player base this game will instantly be one of the bigger games in the hobby, but I am not sure I am looking for "D&D in space". Paizo isn't calling it that, but since it's still at least lightly tied to their Pathfinder setting and is supposed to be backwards compatible as far as monsters, I think they will have a hard time escaping that label at least.

As a long time gamer I have also seen this before. Mixing tech and D&D goes back to Gamma World and Boot Hill and the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide in the 70's. We played around with some of that way back when. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a well-known example too and was usually a pretty good time even after playing through it more than once. Starfinder seems to be a pretty close in concept to Dragonstar which was a d20 boom RPG from FFG that took all the elements of 3rd edition D&D and expanded them into space, including an empire ruled by dragons. We played a little bit of that and having wizards and elves running around with spaceships and robots using 3E mechanics was a little weird - but fun - even for a veteran of Shadowrun and Rifts.

People seem to be getting worked up over the mechanics assuming that it will either be straight-up Pathfinder as we know it or that it's a sneaky way to create a Pathfinder 2E without alienating the current player base. This aspect of the new game does interest me as so much of PF was constrained by legacy concerns. While I assume the base mechanic will still be "roll a d20 + mods, higher is better" the skills, feats, and class designs could be radically different. Seeing how they approach an alternate version of their core game will be interesting.

From a business perspective it does make a lot of sense. They are heavily dependent on Pathfinder as a universe or IP even with an RPG line, a miniatures line, and a card game line spreading things out a bit. Creating what is effectively a separate universe for a new game line potentially doubles their prospects even beyond the announced RPG. There's no reason we couldn't see a Starfinder card game or a miniatures line down the road too. Having a fantasy line and a sci-fi line that share some concepts and mechanics makes them look a little bit like Games Workshop in the late 80's and that worked out pretty well for them.

The potential downside is that there really hasn't been a dominant science fiction (and by that I mean spaceships, planets, robots, and lasers) rpg in a long time - really ever. Traveller was the big one for a time in the late 70's and early 80's because it was the only game out there. Star Frontiers, Star Trek, Space Opera, and Star Wars all popped up in the 80's to fragment things. Dragonstar was well supported for a year or two but was never one of the "big" games. Rifts does some of the same things but is a post-apocalyptic game largely focused on one damaged planet and even it is not as popular as it was years ago. I see two mitigating factors: 1) Having it tied in some way both mechanically and in setting to a game as popular as Pathfinder is a plus as D&D even at the height of its popularity never tried a direct connection like this and 2) The field is pretty open right now with FFG's Star Wars games the most popular from what I've seen. Star Wars is a very specific campaign compared to science fiction/science fantasy in general and there is an audience who has little to no interest in playing that game. Paizo is excellent at supporting material so in short order there will be a nice universe of adventures and supplements to focus on a campaign on different styles of play. I would bet that there will be cyberpunk, transhuman, and psionic supplements out fairly early in the game's life.

Best case scenario: it takes everything Shadowrun did well and adds the best of Traveller and Star Wars on top of that. That's probably aiming too high but it would be a great thing to see.

Worst case scenario: it takes enough resources to create and manage that it damages the main PF game, splits the player base, but is not successful enough to stand on it's own and fails a year or two out of the gate crippling Paizo and PF. I can't see the team at Paizo failing at this level but it is the worst case.

Personally I am interested but it's not an instant "awesome!" in the way that say Savage Rifts was.  I'm sure I'll pick up the initial core book when it arrives but I'm not planning any campaigns just yet. I'm not sure my players and I are looking for this game. The Iron Gods Adventure Path we plan to play at some point is probably enough to cover that for us, and if we want a more "pure" SF game I think Star Wars or Star Trek or Traveller will be on the list.

This is the kind of thing I worry about when the kitchen sink DM gets carried away ...

I am sure this game will spend the next two years shaking up the hobby during the build-up and the initial release and will definitely be worth following during that time.

Batman vs. Captain America in the Age of Apocalypse

You know, we're not quite halfway through 2016 and the comic book movies have been pretty good:

• X-Men: Apocalypse is good and pretty thorough in covering that story. Serious stuff, action scenes, and enough humor to keep it lively.
• Civil War was great, a really well-done treatment of one of the better comic book stories of the last 20 years. 
• Deadpool was a revelation - a) he was a good choice for a movie and b) someone at Fox is up for something good beyond just the X-Men series. 
• Batman vs. Superman - well, 3 out of 4 ain't bad.

Now granted it is interesting that the "good ones" IMO are all Marvel-based while our problem child is once again the DC movie. I don't think it's the source material - I think it is based completely on how the studios have handled making the movies. Marvel has had a few missteps along the way too - remember the Hulk movies? Spiderman has had some trouble at Sony though we can hope that's over now, and the Fantastic Four haven't been handled well at Fox either. 

But 3 out of 4 is still something to be happy about if you like these kinds of things. 

Meme-tastic Monday

RPG Futurist for a Day

1984 - Actually used a variant of the color chart system that started in MSH

Sometimes it seems like there's nothing new and interesting in the RPG world. I'm not suffering from this right now with Savage Rifts and some other Kickstarter delivering soon, but my friend Barking Alien mentioned something about it on Facebook a while back. he was asking in one of the FB RPG groups "what is your newest RPG purchase" and there was a wide range of responses. The thing that struck me was how many of them were just a new iteration of a game that's been around for years. How much "new" are we really getting in RPG's these days? For example:

• D&D - 5th edition
• Pathfinder - another edition of D&D
• Star Wars - new system but it's covering the same ground (less ground in many ways) then the prior games on the subject
• Shadowrun - 5th edition here too
• Runequest - reprints of old rules, reprints of newer rules, and possibly a whole new system coming soon
• Call of Cthulu - 7th edition from a kickstarter
• Traveller - Mongoose is publishing their 2nd edition, which is at least the 7th version of rules for that game overall.
• Umpteen re-edits of the original D&D rules. Wheee.
• One Ring - it may be good but it's at least the 3rd version of a LOTR RP that I can think of.
• Conan - different mechanics but I've seen (and owned at some point) a TSR version, a GURPS version, two d20 versions, and now we have a new one coming out.
• Vampire the Requiem 2E is a 2nd edition of a 2nd edition. I think there's a sorcerer joke in there somewhere.

1989 - Played around with this one quite a bit at one time

Think about it - most of these games are updates of something that's been in print for 25+ years. As excited as I am for Savage Rifts its not all that new - Savage Worlds has been around since 2003 and Rifts came out in 1990.  I'm trying to think of genuinely "new" RPG's in the last few years and I'm not coming up with many.

• The Apocalypse World engine games like Dungeon World and Spirit of 77 have covered some new ground
• FATE while based on FUDGE is new-ish and has spawned some interesting new games. 
• The Warhammer 40,000 games by FFG were something that had been requested for years and were interesting but even those have started the circular motion with a 2nd edition of Dark Heresy.
• Monte Cook's Cypher System games seem to be getting something of a following and the mechanics and settings are unusual enough so far.

But I look at the What's New or Hottest Titles section  on DTRPG and it is dominated by very familiar names. There is some new and interesting stuff being done, especially in PDF-only form, but a very large percentage of the business is "game you already know next edition." I suspect some of that is that a fair number of games are created by Kickstarter now and new editions of old games seem to do very well on Kickstarter. Even without crowdfunding, a new edition of a known game is a more solid bet to sell books than something completely new. 

Another factor is that we can divide RPG's into two broad elements: Mechanics and Setting. While players tend to get wrapped up in mechanics, campaigns largely run on setting in my experience. As long as the mechanics don't badly violate the assumptions of the setting, you can get away with all kinds of system changes between editions and people will still buy your game if it's in the same setting. 

2004 - There was an "Atlantean Edition" (second edition) of this one too

That said there are a surprising (to me) number of RPGers who play a very limited number of games and are not terribly interested in picking up more. These are the guys who have been playing the same AD&D campaign for 30 years and have maybe played some Call of Cthulu years ago. They aren't like some of us who are always interested in the Coming Thing - they are happy with what they have and that's what they play. I admire that. I can't do it, but I admire it. To them, new editions are a hassle, not an innovation and it takes a lot for something "new" to get their attention.

Over the last 10-15 years boardgames have undergone tremendous changes with the influx of euro-style games, Board wargames, one of the more dusty corners of gaming have gone from hex and counter games (usually with single-color counters featuring simple black NATO symbols) with lots of charts to more graphically interesting presentations featuring blocks or miniature-like pieces and specialized dice or card-driven mechanics. Even miniature wargaming has seen a surge with the new approach and sudden popularity of X-Wing which features pre-painted (well-done pre-painted) miniatures in individual packs at a relatively low price point for a game that uses special dice and cards and gameplay that's interesting but takes less than an hour most of the time. 

I have yet to see the same "revolution" in RPG's. 

There has been a move back towards simpler mechanics: from D&D 5th edition to recent Supers games Icons, Supers, and BASH (a genre known for comprehensive rules) there is definitely a trend, but I don't think it's a revolution just yet. The FFG Star Wars games and their special dice mechanics are a step in this direction but they way they are handling the games holds them back from "revolutionary" status I think.  

What are the main constraints to a tabletop RPG? 

• Big rulebooks that take time to read and can be expensive. 
• Complex rules that often get in the way of a good time
• Need for multiple players to get together in person for hours at a time on some kind of regular schedule

How do we mitigate these barriers?

• We're already seeing simpler rules systems as a trend and PDFs are usually a more budget friendly option
• Some kind of a system where the rules are just built in to the medium of the game, whether everything you need to know is on your character sheet - period - or  there is technology involved. Have you seen the manuals for MMORPGs? They have complex mechanics behind the scenes but they do not publish 300 page rulebooks.
•  There has to be a way to let people participate in a meaningful way that doesn't require 4-10 hours around a table per week or month.   

2016:Latest and greatest?

I'm not sure what it will be but I think we will some kind of major change in the next few years, probably with some major upheaval among the major game companies. Some kind of confluence between physical mechanics, settings, presentation, conceptual approach, and maybe even technology like smartphones + augmented reality will combine to give us something new. Imagine if a GM could set up encounters through an augmented reality app ranging from monsters to chatty NPC's that players could encounter away from a table, while going through their daily routine. With some kind of integrated and persistent chat/skype you could theoretically have a game going on "in the background" all the time and then have specified times to gather as a group to focus on major milestones in the game. This would require a GM with a vision for a campaign, an app that could handle this kind of game including visual assets and a rules structure - or a means to insert them,  players looking for something new, and it can't cost $1000 per player to set it up. 

Of course, it may well use an existing setting. Maybe Star Wars. Driving in to work when your phone pings that there's a Mandaloran on your six could make things quite a bit more fun.

It's definitely a different kind of campaign than our traditional books-around-the-table exercise. It's not LARP. It's not an MMORPG. That said it is playing a character with your friends in a setting and hopefully doing some fun and interesting things. It's a moderated "let's pretend" and "what if this happened", and isn't that a big part of why we do what we do?

Traditional "book" games will still exist for us old-timers but I think a lot of good could come from an infusion of new approaches and new thinking as lifestyles and technology change and a new generation comes of age.

I admit some of this thinking comes as my daughter graduates this weekend so I'm having more past-future thoughts than usual. Our oldest son started running his own Pathfinder game last year and I have a second kid who is now running his own game with friends too. 

(#doingmyparttogetthenextgenerationgoing)  

They all grew up with the internet all around them. Between texting, social media, skype, and smartphones in general they are as connected to their friends as they want to be at any given time. With xbox live and mobile apps they don't have to gather around a table to play games with their friends and doing that is an unusual occurrence, a special occasion, not something they do every day. What kinds of games will they be playing when they are my age? Will it be retro-cool to meet up and play King of Tokyo at a friend's table? Will they be playing some kind of Everquest Hologram Dream Park run from the comfort of their own home's holo-set? Will they look at Dad's shelves and shelves of game books the way we would look at a storage room full of vaccum tubes?  I don't know, but I hope I'm around long enough to see where it goes next. 

Pandemic

We (finally!) managed to play pandemic for the first time (I know!) over the weekend! I thought it looked like fun and I can now confirm - it is fun! On the surface, to me, a game about fighting diseases sounds pretty dull but remarkably it is not. Lots of exclamation points here but it's a rare thing to find a modern boardgame that adds something new and clever and yet is interesting enough that the whole family gets interested and it becomes a member of our (admittedly very slow) rotation. King of Tokyo did that for us last year and this year it's Pandemic.

The coolest thing about it is that it's cooperative, so we're playing as a team. That's cool, especially for "family game night". Each player gets a "role" which lets them deviate from the standard rules in some way - typically doing things faster or at a lower cost than other players. There are 8 roles so with 4 players there is a different mix of abilities in every game which changes up how you might tackle the problem. This plus the random nature of the card decks keeps it interesting and it's a lot trickier to come up with a "standard" solution compared to something like Axis and Allies. The roles also make it feel a little like an RPG as you're playing a character to some degree and people do seem to get into it.

I am convinced that this framework could be used in a superhero themed boardgame with the roles being replaced by superhero archetypes, the diseases representing criminal outbreaks or organizations, and research centers being replaced by super-team bases. I need to think about how to add more super-themed options to it but I think it could be done.

If you're wondering about the game there's a good episode of Tabletop that explains it more entertainingly than I can here. Take a look - if you have friends and especially kids it's an interesting option. We failed our first game yet everyone had a good time and agreed that we need to play it more.

Meme-tastic Monday

Savage Rifts Kickstarter Ends Today

If anyone is still thinking about getting in the Rifts Savage Worlds conversion Kickstarter ends tonight, around 9pm Central. I backed it because I am interested in both the Rifts setting and using Savage Worlds to run it and I believe the answer to my "Will I ever run this?" question is a definite yes!

Anyway, just a PSA for anyone interested but not yet committed.

Meme-tatsic Monday

Side Quests - Star Trek Online goes Backwards and Sideways

Backwards:

Star Trek Online has had two big announcements this week. The first was news of a new expansion coming this summer that is all about the Original Series. The intro video is here and I think it looks great, but that is coming from a guy who runs a full set of retro-blue phasers on my Galaxy-X. So in general I think it's cool.

I have to say though that even with the 50th anniversary of TOS I am not sure a federation-centric TOS expansion is what the game really needs. There is already a whole story arc dealing with time travel to the TOS era. It's one of my favorites, but the whole game is set in the Next Gen era and devoting a whole expansion to going backwards seems a little off, a dead-end in a lot of ways. I know a lot of people would like to see something more like the Cardassians added as a playable faction - something more focused around the action in the 2400s. I'm not going to be a naysayer just yet but I've had 5 years to get used to the TOS era being referenced in but not focused on in the game and I don't feel like it's a missing piece of the game. It could be a lot of fun though, so I will wait and see.  



Sideways:

I'd say this one is a pretty big deal too. Being available on the two big consoles in free to play form means a ton of new business. Plus, those who might have been interested before but didn't have a PC capable of running the game now have a great option, especially if they (or the kids) already have a console. new expansion or not this would be pretty big news on its own. There's a video for it too here. The Odysseys are very pretty ships.

Anyway, that's a lot of news for online games recently. It's an interesting time for sure.

Meme-tastic Monday