Remembering a Trek Campaign

Barking Alien has been talking Trek this month and I've mostly kept my comments there but he hit a pressure point with this post and as my typing continued I decided that it belonged as a full-blown post here more than as a simple comment there.

I was fortunate enough to have the experience described in his entry - pretty much everything we did in the FASA Trek RPG was one long campaign. I rolled up a command officer and pretty quickly took command of the U.S.S. Lexington NCC-1709. That was pretty soon after the game was released, so call it 1982. We ran all over the Federation dealing with everything from Gorns to Orions to Klingons. We played through a few published adventures but it was mostly the GM's own ideas. We might go for several months without playing Trek, and then come back to it, then move on. Our friends made characters, lost characters, brought in new ones - looking back it was a lot like what I think that kind of life would be. My character was about the only constant, though our Vulcan chief engineer was around for most of the campaign too.

Eventually The Lex was used to test out an experimental sensor system which included fire control system upgrades as well. I think the original intent was to be more effective against Romulan cloaked ships (this was before Klingons were cloaking all the time) but we didn't go that route. We ended up in a tremendous fight against a Klingon task force - I don't remember the reason behind the fight but it was a big deal in the campaign universe - and though she survived the ship was in bad shape ("damn - we lived but look at this damage!") and was going to need a complete refit. This meant an upgrade to Enterprise class ("Yes!") and during the refit time  we were sent out on some intelligence type missions using a Mission class courier (that was in the basic game, I think).

The Mission was a fun little ship, more like a runabout than a "real" ship, but we focused on sneaky planetary adventures and had some fun. I'm pretty sure we were captured at least twice and had to escape. We knew the ship was temporary and our lack of attachment to it should be evident from my inability to remember its name.

We were all thrilled when the Lexington went back into service and our first mission, much like our first one ever, was to deal with a Gorn problem and the Lex quickly showed a couple of Gorn Battleships exactly what the pecking order was in this part of the galaxy. We later got involved with the Romulans and had to deal with competition more on our own level.

That campaign ran from about 1982 to about 1988 or so and the ship was always a big part of the "status" - ship good then "party" good. Ship torn up then there's a bunch of tension in the air. Awesome ship in drydock to get even more awesome = happy but stuck with crappy temp ship - no more smack-talking the local D-7 captains. Several of us were serious gear-heads back then so ship stats were something we pretty much had memorized anyway so keeping the hardware together was a high priority.

I have to say that looking back I was as happy with this campaign style, and this ship, and this arrangement for player participation as I have been with any of them. There was no set schedule and no set group of players. The GM came up with an idea, figured out who could play and when, and off we went. If you had a character, they were there. If you did not, then roll one up and they were newly-assigned to the ship. Prominent characters whose players were not available were working on other things or might even be on shore leave.

As far as the campaign itself we never decided that we were going to do things that way - it was just assumed that if we played Trek it was as the crew of the Lexington. The game wasn't tied to a particular character, or a particular group of specific characters. It wasn't even the 430 crewmen of the Lexington, because some of them might have moved on and some new ones might have joined since the last adventure, but setting it on a ship somehow gave the whole thing a continuity that a lot of other games lack.

I think it's a model that would work very well in the modern grown-ups-with-kids-and-jobs environment that many of us find ourselves in now. There's a touch of the open-table approach in there as well and it would be easy to make that a formal part of it without going to a full West Marches sandbox campaign, keeping the more traditional mission/episode style approach but still being able to accommodate a random-access player base and having a sense of continuity that makes it a memorable campaign years later.

Thanks for walking me down this road again BA, it's been awhile since I've thought about this aspect of it.

New Star Wars RPG?

Apparently it looks like this:

It's from Fantasy Flight

It's a Beta test.

It's $29.95.

Don't believe me? Take a look here.

Seriously. When did it become OK to charge people for beta testing? There used to be some kind of reward for being a PC game beta tester. Is this some kind of riff on the privilege of early access, like with an MMO game?

From the site:


This limited edition, 224-page softcover rulebook provides you a chance to lead these galactic explorers. This is a complete and playable version of Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and (compared to the final version) it excludes only art and certain thematic material.

So it's not really a test version? But then they have a section on submitting feedback, so it appears that maybe it is. After Pathfinder and D&D Next I would think that some kind of open beta would be the new hotness but I guess not. For a serious playtest effort though why make it a physical book and not a PDF? There can't be much of a secrecy element to it because once you pay for a book I don't think they can stick an NDA on top of it. It's a strange approach but who knows, maybe it will work for them.

It's also set in the Rebellion Era and will be in 3 books according to the description - one for smuggler types and the Rim, one about the war, and one about the Jedi. This independent-but-combinable approach is the same one they have taken with the 40K RPG system they publish and I suppose that's fine. I think the people most likely to play a new Star Wars RPG are the ones who played previous Star Wars RPG's and those games pretty much covered all possible character types right from the start, so this approach seems kind of limiting. At least that's my initial reaction to what I see on the screen.

Oh, last but not least - custom dice. Wonderful. Is the final game going to come in a box with those dice? Will there be enough for more than 1 player? If you're wondering what I mean then take a look at this - I assume WFRP is at least a partial template to what they're thinking. Core set at $99.95 including custom dice and cards that are required for play. I'm trying to stay open minded about this but it's very difficult. I have games that use custom dice - Heroquest, Memoir 44, and Command and Colors Ancients to name a few. All of them come in a box and none of them are truly RPG's. Remember d6 Star Wars? All I needed was a set of d6's. Remember d20 Star Wars? Even there all I needed was a standard set of RPG dice. Savage Worlds uses normal RPG dice and adds in a deck of normal playing cards - I'm all for trying out new mechanics but we're not talking d14's from Goodman Games here - they're likely special dice made only for this game. Plus, aren't we moving towards lighter mechanics in games? Less fiddly bits, more fast & furious? Just looking at M&M/DCA, ICONS, and Marvel Heroic as recent launches in one typically over-complicated genre I would say "YES", and if any game seemed to cry out for that type of mechanical approach isn't it Star Wars? Again I would say "YES"! That does not appear to be where this is headed though.


I'm sure more information will come out but I'm feeling disappointed about this. I'm still a little interested but I won't be lining up for a pay-access beta version of a game book, and I'm not thrilled by what I know right now about the approach. I guess we will see where it goes.

Some New Old Champions Stuff

Continuing the Super RPG theme:

An eBay pickup, this one has duplicates of a few thing but that's the price you pay with these grab-bag type lots. The main initial attraction was another copy of the 4th edition Champions rules -  you can never have too many copies of the core rules floating around the table. There are some other tasty nuggets though:

• On the right is the 2E Gamemaster's Screen. I didn't even know they made one of those until about a year ago, and they don't turn up all that often. I doubt I'll be running 2E any time soon so I suppose this is more of a collector type thing, which is a path I really do not need to tread. Probably too late now though. It's two 2-panel screens with things like the speed chart and a list of powers and skills and most of those charts that were all over that rulebook printed on both sides. I really could have used this about 1983 when Draco and Solar Flare and Titan were rolling full-force against Gladiator, Lobsterback, and all those bads from the rulebook and Enemies 1 & 2. It's still kind of cool even now.

• The Island of Dr. Destroyer : I've seen it online but I did not own a copy - now I do! This is the first published Champions adventure and it is comparable to some of those ICONS adventures I keep downloading from DriveThruRPG. You have a supervillian threatening the world from his fortified island base and the heroes have to go in and stop him - simple and straightforward, if a little more James Bond-ish than comic-bookish. It has pretty detailed maps of the island and the base, notes and stats for the defenses and the patrols and the vehicles that are involved, and an outline of the plan - it's ready-to-run. I think it would make a nice not-first adventure, as there should be some reason that the heroes are called in to stop Destroyer and a group of brand-new heroes seems like an unlikely choice to do that. It might make a good climax or penultimate adventure for Season 1 if you were running a campaign in seasons like a TV series.

• The Great Supervillain Contest - I don't think I like this one as much as IoDD but I didn't have a copy before. If nothing else it's a framework for a certain kind of campaign and it does have some maps of a secret base and some new villains in the back.

• Enemies III - Known of it for some time, have never owned a copy. I'll be scouring this one for Unfortunate Characters this week. The format is a little different than the first two but I see some likely candidates right there on the cover.

Rediscovering DC Heroes

I never really grokked DC Heroes. I remember when it came out about a year or so after Marvel Super Heroes. One of my friends got it we looked at it, played around with making a character or two, and then we pretty much let it go. People then and now have varying opinions on the system but in my view it had three major problems: Champions, MSH, and AD&D.

Regardless of the mechanics we already had Champions and liked it for our "serious" superhero game which mainly consisted of us making up new characters and then running around beating up Viper agents and villains from the Enemies books - there was not a lot of plot in our games back then.

MSH was still pretty new but it had a lot of support and that system was a lot of fun mechanically. It was easy to just jump in and start playing with a pre-made hero and making your own - while not the sub-game that was Champions character creation - was pretty fun too with random rolls and a lot of on-the-fly imagination required.

Then there was the fact that most of our RPG time went to AD&D anyway. That's just how it was back then. A day off from school meant scraping together some money, cutting a Domino's Pizza coupon out of the back of the phone book, arguing over what to order, and hours and hours of AD&D most of the time - at least we had some focus back then! We also had a lot more time, but it took a lot for a game to break into our regular rotation. DCH never did.

Additional considerations: I was more into Marvel comics - between the Avengers and the X-Men I was not at all interested in Superman and Batman. Also, Teen Titans? I hated that name and I was unfamiliar with the characters, instant turn-off - they should have focused on the Justice League.

Later in college when the 2nd Edition came out one of that group tried to fire it up - this was around the time of the big Keaton Batman movie - and got all of one session out of it. I remember hating it and wanting to get back to our regular games. We played a lot of GURPS in that group and compared to that it was not intuitive. We also played a lot of Champions which also had a bright new edition about that same time and became our standard set of rules for the next couple of years.

The funny thing looking back is that the rules are not any more complicated than Champs or AD&D or even GURPS. Even MSH isn't necessarily in a different class other than one key area: MSH used one big bright colored table. DCH used two tables, with a lot of numbers in them, and no real color. I think that was a bigger factor than I like to admit, and likely not just for me. Rolling up success and degree of success into a single roll made the game feel like it was an order of magnitude simpler when it was up against the to-hit roll/damage roll mechanic of most other RPG's at the time. Even though DCH still only used one actual die roll, you had to check two tables, and I think that really held it back. Plus colors are friendlier than numbers when you're going to have a whole table of them. Compare:

Find your stat, roll your dice, tell me what color you get.

Find your stat, find their stat, roll your dice, check for column shifts, now look at the second table and find your other stat, find their other stat, look at the number, shift up or down, now tell me your final result. 

I think this was one of the barriers to DCH becoming more popular - it looked like a more serious game (yes back in the 80's more charts = more serious game)  and most people did not take superheroes as a "serious" game. Now I know it had to have some success as there was quite a bit of material for it but I still think Marvel was the more popular game for most of its run. I know it was locally - didn't know anyone who played it regularly during high school and college. Even at local conventions you might see a Marvel or Champions game but I don't recall seeing any DC games.

Regardless of this prior experience, I have somehow ended up with copies of all 3 editions of the game. I decided to give it another look and started with the 1st edition. I have to say I think it's a pretty good game, and after my comments above I think we can rule out nostalgia as a factor here. I think the mechanics work well and of course the one thing everyone says about the system is that it handles a massive range of powers - I see that and agree. I think it shares a quality with Champions in that it looks complicated when looking over the rulebook but in play it's really not all that complex. I'm going to try it out with the Apprentices in the very near future to test this theory and I expect to be proven right.

Also, this was a damn fine boxed set: intro booklet that actually shows the mechanics - player book with the system and character creation rules - DM book with advice, a universe guide, maps to bases and cities, lists of gear and gadgets, and a big batch of character stats - a striking and well-done 3 panel DM screen - cards with character stats for a bunch of DC heroes - and stand-up counters for all of these same heroes - that's a huge batch of awesome in one box! How did I not like this? I wonder how much something like this would cost now? I'm guessing it would have to come from Fantasy Flight and would cost a lot. Just flipping through it makes me want to put the kids in front of the TV for a Justice League DVD viewing followed by a multi-hour session of this game!

The stats for the game were elegant as well. Physical/Mental/Spiritual on the horizontal, Action/Effect/Resistance on the vertical - that may be the finest way of doing these things that I can remember. It's intuitive, it helps the player remember what these stats mean, and it looks good on the page. Also, I was a fan of the Tri-Stat system's concepts, and I have no doubt that here we see some of its origin. 

Now I am sure there are some clunky bits in there somewhere. I'v heard some negative things about the gadget rules, and actual play tends to reveal the sharp edges of any system, but it looks much better than I remember as I read through it 20+ years later.  Plus I do have Second Edition, and Third if I need to start tinkering.

A lot of the fun to me in a DC or Marvel game is in being able to play the iconic heroes. Sure, I like making my own just as much as anyone, but I have Champions/ICONS/V&V etc etc for that. Sure, I could play the Amazing Aluminum Man in Marvel New York and have him join the Avengers, but why not just play Iron Man? If I'm going to have all of the background (or baggage) of Metropolis or the Watchtower then let's play the characters who belong there! A long-term campaign might be different but for the games we tend to play I think the brand-name heroes will work just fine. Plus there is the appeal of handing out the cards - "here, you're Superman, you're Batman, and you're Green Lantern - let's go."   

I've run on quite a bit here but the net result is this: we're going to give it a try, and of course I will report back when we do.

Motivational Monday

Overreaction Saturday

It's been a while since I spent some time on D&D - it's time to rectify that, and there's plenty of material to work with!

• Future of D&D video from Gen Con is here. I like a lot of what I hear - see below.

• Every product for every edition and every setting is going to be available electronically. No timetable yet,  but this is exactly what they should be doing both from a financial sense - you have something people will pay for and can make it available at a low cost to the business - and from a customer satisfaction sense -different people like different parts of D&D - give it to them!

•  I was a little disappointed that so much time was spent on "The Sundering" which is a) not a game product and b) not ready to be discussed in any detail at all.

• They also mention that they expect the playtest process to take two years total, so we're looking at 2014 for an official new edition. 

• New playtest packet is here if you haven't already downloaded it. Yes I have it. No I have not yet finished reading it or trying it out.

Things I wonder about: 

• Reprints of core rulebooks for older editions combined with PDF's of supporting material for those editions mean I could flip through my DMG at the table while reading the adventure off of an iPad. This could lead to a resurgence like we have not seen before - but will the easy availability of OSR material like Labyrinth Lord lessen the impact? Do the people who really care about playing older versions of D&D already have the material they want? Does the "D&D Brand" really carry that much weight? The convergence here of hobby, technology, and business really interests me and I do not have a good feeling for how this might go.

• The 2-year gap before Next  left me wondering what the heck they intent to sell during that time to stay in business - obviously the PDF's will be a big part of bridging that gap, and possibly the reprints - is that all? Can WOTC flourish through 6-8 quarters of not selling new rulebooks every month? That has to cause chaos in the cash flow and I wonder how they intend to manage it.

• Pathfinder: How does this impact players and Paizo? It does give them a nice window of being the closest thing to D&D in print, but it could disrupt even that if 3E PDF's go live soon. Do Pathfinder players still care whether it's "D&D" branded or not? Time for Pathfinder 2E in 2015? 

• Finally, 4th Edition - will people still be playing it a year from now as the bustle of Next grows? Is it considered "done" and the player base will drift off to Pathfinder or something else? So much of it was tied to D&D Insider, will those subs lapse as people decide to stop paying for support for a "dead" game? Conversely will they stop playing if they don't want to pay for DDI anymore? I might be ringing the bell early but it is Gen Con 2012 this weekend and WOTC has nothing to say about 4E as far as I can tell. Outside of the RPGA events there's nothing about it  coming from WOTC - lots of stuff about Next though. Ah well, I suppose it had to be this way once they made the announcement but it's still disappointing.

Lack of Focus seems to be the Theme for 2012

So far in 2012 we've played Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Mutants and Masterminds 3E, ICONS, Savage Worlds, D&D 4E, and Pathfinder. That's about a game a month, which is a nice survey of options but it's not allowing for any kind of sustained campaign.

(This is all with the Apprentices - the main 4E campaign has been steadily moving along and will continue to do so, resuming shortly after a brief interruption for the move)

As much as I would like to run a longer format campaign with them I also really like introducing them to different games and seeing how they approach them. I've been trying to reconcile these two interests during our move time and I think the answer is to run some mini-campaigns of 1-3 adventures in several different systems and see how they go.

 Right before the move I started them off in a modern ICONS adventure and I have planned out an arc of 3 adventures that will see them go from nobodies to some-bodies in Atomic City.

After that I may do something with Savage Worlds because as much as I like that system I have done almost nothing with it in the past year and that's really a shame. Between D&D and Superheroes there is a lot of room and Savage Worlds handles most of it in a way I like.

I also have organized those Vigilance Press WW2 adventures I picked up into something like coherent arcs and will probably run those too.

There is also the Emerald City Knights arc for M&M.

I've also been working on a mini-campaign for MSH that sprung from what I think is a good idea.

I also rediscovered V&V and DC Heroes during the move and have been contemplating some short arcs for them.

Uh-Oh I'm doing it again. Packing and unpacking The Library has seriously ignited the Gamer ADD in me. Having it all out in the open on the shelves again is not helping either.

Maybe what I need is "D&D Night" and "Supers Night" and then "Boardgame/Miniatures Night". It's not like I lack material for these things. Maybe I have too much of a good thing?

Hmmmm.

The start of school in a few weeks is going to seriously disrupt our schedule anyway, not to mention we're not finished unpacking yet - it would be nice to be able to put at least one car in the garage.

I think for now we will finish out the ICONS stuff and then see where we go from there.

Back to Action!

Well the move is complete - we're still pulling things out of boxes but not things we need every day. My off-time is over so we're getting into a routine with new routes to work and a new location for the kids. One of the cooler things is that in the new place I actually have room to keep pretty much all of the RPG's/Boardgames/Wargames on shelves ready to go at will, instead of half of it being shelved or boxed in the garage. I also have the table and the space to leave games out for a few days while we finish them, which is a long time goal of mine and the current re-introductory game of old school Battletech is serving as a fine test run for this concept. It's a very cool thing to have the library all right there out in the open in its own (air-conditioned) space and I'm very happy about it.

At one point I thought about making August a themed month for posts (kind of like Barking Alien is doing - check it out, it's good stuff) and I was thinking that the theme would be session reports. The problem there is that I am tired by the end of the day, with all of the normal work stuff topped off with all the physical action of moving, unpacking, and rearranging, especially with furniture, boxes of books, and stairs involved. Writing those reports can turn into work - I like to get them right - and I'm just not going to commit to that now. So no "Session Report Month" this month. Other than that stuff I posted over the last two weeks.

So I have no grand plan for the rest of the month. I did rediscover quite a few things in this process so those things might show up in some posts. The ICONS game continues and that might show up. As I mentioned above we're giving Battletech some time so that might show up. Being offline for the most part for a week reminded me that while there are some things I care enough to post about, paradoxically there are some that I do not, yet I may post about that too. I'm feeling a lot of "fresh start-itis" these days and with my 3rd anniversary of starting the blog coming up it may be a good time to set some new directions.

In the interests of providing some actual useful content in this post here's the Green Ronin schedule for the rest of the year. Some thoughts in no particular order:

• Threat Report - I have it in PDF form so I'm not interested in the print copy but it's a good addition to the line. If any type of book lends itself to the printing of a page as-needed it's a "monster book" so that's on I am perfectly happy keeping in PDF.
• DC Universe book in November - this could be pretty cool, but I don;t intend to run anything in the actual DC Universe. I'll keep an eye on it anyway
• Emerald City in November? Awwww, I was hoping to see this sooner. I'm looking at running the adventure series for the Apprentices in the near future and it would have been nice to have the box for that. Ah well.
• Supernatural Handbook in October? I just don't know about this one. Is there a popular subgenre of comics that combines supers and horror? There was a magic supplement for M&M 2E (which I own) but this sounds like Super Call of Cthulu in the description and I have to wonder how many people are waiting for that book - or more importantly how many people are willing to pay 20-30-40$ for that book?

Also, Monte Cook has a new RPG in the works. I'm not sure about this one. It's sort of post-apocalyptic fantasy but it's so far in the future that you lose a lot of the tropes of the traditional post-apocalyptic genre as far as culture and artifacts and if the science then becomes interchangeable with magic then what's the point? Pretty much every D&D campaign is based on making your way amidst the ruins of a bunch of past civilizations with magic taking the place of technology. So I'll be watching it with some interest, though I'm not sure how interested I'm going to stay. Also, my Dragonport campaign uses some of the same concepts and it's really just a Basic D&D campaign, so I'm not sure the setting he's developing strikes me as all that special based on what we know now. Anyway, it's something to watch.

That's all for now - more to come.

Motivational Monday

Savage Tides of Kalamar - Epilogue

So that last session was dated January of 2009 and we played into October - I'm sure we hit at least 30 sessions in this campaign. Somewhere between March and October we had the greatest adventure finale I've ever been a part of with the climax of the original Freeport Trilogy which became a ferocious running fight up the giant lighthouse in Freeport's harbor and ended with all but one member of the party dead or dying, and that last member was unconscious and at zero hit points but they managed to slay all of the evil cultists and traitors behind the grand plan to summon the serpent god - it was Epic and one of the great confluences of roleplay, mechanics, and die rolls in my gaming history where everything seemed to work out in the most dramatic way possible.

Also during this time Lady Blacksteel and I got married and she joined the campaign (her first time to try this thing of ours) in time to be a part of that epic conclusion, which was cool. The married thing has worked well too. Hi honey, glad to see you're reading the blog.

After the Freeport Finale we moved into playing through the Savage Tide adventure path as the sole focus of the campaign and it seemed to decline for a variety of reasons. I liked that set of adventures but by the time we were making our way across the Isle of Dread I was burning out on 3rd Edition, Kalamar, and my then-current group. Running 3E for 7-8 players at a time was a pretty big load even with a published adventure. With that many players I think the published adventure has some downside as that level of options and resources completely destroys many basic assumptions about encounters and balance, requiring a fair amount of rework to present a reasonable challenge. It would probably have been better to take the concepts and the high points of the adventure and just rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up (kind of like I later did with my 4E Ruins of Adventure campaign) rather than trying to use some version of what was presented. Ah, well ...

So, while some lessons were learned in hindsight we never made it past the Isle of Dread, roughly halfway through the campaign. It would be six months before I ran anything again and that would be Necessary Evil, a completely different kind of game, and then eventually D&D 4th Edition.

I still like both sets of adventures and I think they work well together, intermingled into a single campaign. Maybe Pathfinder, maybe Next - my 4E plate is full for quite a while, thanks - or maybe a non-D&D system altogether will be the framework for the next attempt at them - we will see.