The Monday Post

 

New arrivals and now this is my new band name: "KRAVEK MORNE AND THE MUTILATORS"!

RPG Numbers: What 's the Third Biggest RPG?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

40K Friday - Iron Warriors vs. Ultramarines

 

In addition to building some updated units for my chaos marines I managed to get a game in with them over the past weekend. This time was against Boom-Gun Brandon's Ultramarines.

The kid has been remarkably consistent with both his army and its composition - possibly because he only has the one army - but he has started building Tau and he's always free to borrow units from my marine forces so he has some options now and will have more in the future.

This was a 2000 point dawn of war deployment (start on the long sides of the table) with a "hold some objectives" type primary and the normal "draw some cards" secondary. I did not take as many pictures as I usually so I won't try to turn it into a battle report here but it was fun. 

The Ultras had Guilliman, Captain Titus, a squad of shooty terminators, a squad of assault terminators, some assault intercessors, two aggressor squads each led by a gravis captain, some bladeguard, then his heavy hitters: A Redemptor dread, a Balistus dread, and a Repulsor executioner.

My IWs went tank-heavy. The main reason was that I wanted this to be an all-painted force, up to date, etc, and all of my old infantry are still on 25s. So it was pretty ridiculous: 3 Predators, 3 Helbrutes, 2 Vindicators, a leviathan dread, a daemon prince, a Heldrake (I know, right?), and then a squad of chaos terminators led by a terminator chaos lord. So I was definitely outnumbered but certainly not outgunned.

HELLOOOO BAAAAYBY!
(BANG!)

I actually won the first turn and started working on his anti-tank units. The predators blew up the balistus and both the redemptor and the executioner were at half wounds or less when I was done. 

The Ultras moved around quite a bit including running the executioner right up near one of the vindicators and dumping out his intercessors + Titus. he didn't manage to kill anything - my vindicator just barely survived the assault after being blasted by the executioner's big laser  - but he was sitting on his home objective plus the center so he was in scoring position early. 

Hello there!

My second turn I rearranged a bit myself and then blew up the executioner and the redemptor. I managed to shoot down the primarch as well but he did stand back up - of course! During my rearrangement I managed to move out of range of my home objective so my scoring fell off of a cliff here.  

Ultras second turn saw the Heldrake chosen as his Oath of Moment target and thus saw most of his army shooting at it and it managed to survive this with a few wounds left. Granted he was missing most of his real anti-vehicle weapons but he had a lot of lesser guns left. He still scored more points though. He also dropped in his terminators this turn.

Third turn and onward we mostly shot up each others remaining infantry. I blew away both aggressor squads and one of the gravis captains. His assault termies failed to kill a predator that was all by its lonesome on an objective and my killing one of them on the way in meant that we were tied for OC so neither of us got credit for it. He did finally manage to kill the damaged vindicator and he was pretty happy about that. 

One wound left - I can still nail the dread!

He ended up winning on points but I had done a lot more damage to his force so I still felt alright about it. It was pretty low scoring as we both mismanaged our secondaries in a big way. 

In the end I was pretty happy with the game. I got to dust off an army I haven't played in years and finally play them in 10th edition. A few more notes:

• I did forget to Dark Pact a lot - the perils of not playing very often - which probably lowered my offensive output. It's a cool ability when you remember to us eit.
• I took the iron warriors detachment (Fellhammer Siege Host) and its signature ability is a -1 to wound when you get shot by a gun with a strength higher than your toughness. Well, with a mostly tank army it was useful for the first two turns then ... not so much a I had eliminated his big guns and was mostly getting hit by various types of bolter and punched in melee. I still like it though.
• The Leviathan Dreadnought ... man I love these things. It's been a long time since I took one and the double-stormcannon setup is basically 4 twin-linked versions of the Predator's turret autocannon. It is really nasty and I am hoping now it's Legends status at least makes the jump to 11th so I can continue. I have 6 or more of the things spread across a few armies so ... yeah ... it's in the list as long as I can take it.

This has also encouraged me to continue with the modernizing as all of the vehicles are up to date, terminators are still on 40mm bases, and so painting up some legionaries, chosen, possessed, and some havocs will give me an up-to-date infantry force to go with them. It's maybe 35 models total, so I should be able to knock it out fairly quickly.

More to come ... 

Primarchs - still need to look both ways before crossing the street ...

40K Friday Off-Schedule Edition: Modernizing the Iron Warriors

 

The title pretty much says it - as I discussed here earlier I have quite a few chaos space marines painted up as Iron Warriors and a surprisingly large percentage of it is still the current production model. This is mostly the vehicles though - the infantry is all older and smaller.

The Helbrutes, Rhinos, Predators, and Vindicators (and the Heldrake!) are all still good. 

All of my actual marines though are the older style, aside from a few characters. 

Now I don't care that much about this state of affairs in general but unit options have changed too and the new hotness is building Chaos Marines for melee and almost all of mine are built for shooting so maybe it is actually ... finally ... time to look at upgrading things around here. At least I only need to consider the infantry, which is a plus. I do have some newer current stuff sitting in the IW box in a closet. I should probably start there. What I have is:

• Abaddon (we will get to him in a minute)
• The Hammer Lord on foot  (technically not the latest and greatest but still fairly recent)
• An unbuilt recently built Terminator Lord/Sorcerer kit (still technically current but likely to be replaced soon)
• A normal sorcerer (the current plastic kit)
• Fabius Bile
• A Master of Possession
• A Lord Discordant (how did I not build this guy already?)
• Some Daemon Princes ranging from the older metal kit to the now-older plastic kit (I loved that kit) to the newer plastic kit.
• Six of the newer monopose plastic Obliterators. I never got around to actually painting these. 
• A box of the newer Possessed
• 3 Venomcrawlers
• More Helbrutes
• A Defiler (now technically the Old Defiler since there's a new one coming out)

There's more - it's a bunch of stuff. There is however, precious little infantry in there. The MoP and the Possessed make a nice combo element but they aren't allowed in Rhinos anymore so what am I going to haul in those? Looks like I'm going to have to start with some legionaries!

That's cool - I like having "core troops" in my armies. I am not one of those "only the chrome" type army builders. If I build a box then I could make it into two 5-man squads with one going melee + chaos Lord and one going ranged + Sorcerer. There's a start. Of course I'm probably going to end up with at least 3 boxes but I'll try not to go for the crazy backlog right out of the gate. 

Then of course we have the other major modern infantry box - the Chosen. These are 5 to a box but have lots of equipment options and 3 wounds per trooper. I'm thinking this is where Fabius Bile comes in and leads a squad of these boys. This is a unit heavily slanted towards melee anyway so why not give them a buff character and put them in a Rhino too?

The other new kit I lack is the Havoc box. My existing Havocs are 3 or 4 squads of the old style marines like everything else and are all autocannons, missile launchers, or heavy bolters. Right now I would just blu-tac them to some 40mm bases but I think a box or two of these new-style troops are worthwhile down the road. Between all the tanks and helbrutes etc. I don't lack for heavy weapons but I think a Devastator squad equivalent has a place here somewhere. 

Mine are all from this era

I do also have 10 Terminators already. I think we are currently on the 3rd generation of plastic chaos terminators and mine are from the prior gen but they still look like Terminators so good enough.

So I believe this will be the core of my updated Iron Warriors. It is a lot of new kits but I'm not going to do it all in a week:

• 10-30 Legionaries (Picked up 10 this week)
• 5-10 Chosen 
• 5-10 Havocs
• 10 Terminators (Have 10 now)
• 5-10 Possessed (Have 5 now)
• 2-6 Obliterators (Have 6 now)
• Chaos Spawn (Have 5 now)
• A bunch of tanks and daemon engines (Have a bunch of these now)
• Add characters to taste (Have a bunch of these now too)

I have to figure out what to do with my Raptors and Bikes as they are technically current (though the Raptors just got a new kit in Kill Team) to add in some Fast Attack options (dating myself there). I like the idea of keeping a lot of my old stuff on their 25mm bases to use in old school games but the Raptors may have to join the modernized army for now. 

I think I have 4 of the old ones and I'm sure I will be adding at least one of the new ones down the road.

A side unit making occasional guest appearances would be Abaddon and a 5-man Terminator squad. I already have the termies and they are painted up as Black Legion so part of the work is already done. Could be a fun unit to add on for certain fights.

The other interesting part of Chaos Marine armies now is the whole sub-codex of cultists, weirder cultists, beastmen, traitor guardsmen and just a bunch of mortal infantry that feel like an entirely separate army. I have a couple of units of cultists left from the old 6th edition boxed set which I might add in at some point but I've just never been excited about adding in a bunch of weaker, unarmored troops to my glorious power armor & tanks force. It has gotten interesting now with all of the units they've added in (a traitor Comissar and his Ogryn Bodyguard? Really?) but I would lean towards it being a separate force most of the time. At least that's how I feel right now.  We will see once I get the IW's tuned up and finished out. 

Enough rambling for now - more chaos later.

40K Friday: In Which the Writer Loses All Focus

 

It's Spring and the miniature ADHD goes into full bloom! Oh Lord what have I done? Several factors at work here:

• Boom-Gun Brandon wants to play every time he comes into town now
• Some of the rest of the crew has started building 40K armies 
• 10th edition is in the wind-down phase now so what you have is what you're going to have as far as rules and datasheets and FAQs
• 11th edition is coming this summer which tends to ramp the energy levels up - and also increases anxiety over which units will be replaced or removed in the new edition

So this recent energy burst started up by looking at all my chaos armies and shifted into me mostly working on Grey Knights about a month ago and that continued for a couple of weeks. Then I started feeling some Firstborn Anxiety - the feeling and wondering mentioned above that I expect the next edition to pretty much finish off the older styled marines as they exist now, outside of Rhinos and Land Raiders. 

The smaller-guys replacement is just about complete with Chaos Marines as all of the major groups of units have been upscaled over the last 5-ish years. They won't get rid of the Rhino here - they may make a new kit but the Rhino as primary Chaos transport will live on and I expect the Land Raider to continue on as well. 

For loyalists, as much as a certain segment of players wants to see the marines go all grav-vehicle I think the Rhino and the Land Raider are just too iconic and too much a part of the game and the lore to drop. New models? Sure, maybe even "likely" at this point as these are 20+ year old kits. I wouldn't be upset if they just rolled the Horus Heresy kits into mainline 40K as those look great but I doubt they will do that for a variety of reasons. The bikes and speeders have been replaced already and they did not go retro with those. Anyway I am not as concerned about the vehicles here - it's mainly the infantry.

I have a lot of firstborn stuff. Some of it makes up a big chunk of my marine armies but I have a lot of unfinished projects, half-built units, squads on the sprue, stuff still in boxes ... it all was part of a plan at some point but right now it looks like kind of a mess. I should be focused on updating armies with some of the newer units but I'd really like to get some of the old stuff finished up too. 

So...

I spent over a week with all of my firstborn stuff pulled out on to the big game table and started going through it and figuring out what I actually had and who could use what parts. For example my Crimson Fists are pretty close to one old version of a Space Marine Battle Company so they need some more assault marines and some devastator marines and I can check that little box that's been in the back of my mind for a while. Predators and Vindicators are still totally useful and allowed (non-legended) in current 40K so let me count up how many parts and sprues and hulls I have and see if I can get those built and field-able. 

I am at well over 50 Rhino hulls of various types and marks at this point. Most of them are even painted. This is not something I set out to do.

Then it gets a little more complicated. Some of the infantry I have needs to be rebased if I'm going to stay current, mainly 25mm to 32mm. I've done it on several armies and it's not terribly enjoyable. While the rules could change down the road Rhinos and Razorbacks are not seeing a ton of use right now as Primaris marines can't ride in them - one of the few remaining separation type rules in the codexes. So I should probably keep them in my older armies but how many Rhinos do I need for one army? This is also true of something like a tactical squad - I have at least six of them (various editions and styles) sitting around unfinished but I don't really need all of those added to one army.  

This whole process ended up leading to a few conclusions:

• A lot of the old-school infantry  and vehicles are going to finish out whatever thoughts/plans/dreams I have for my Crimson Fists and Blood Angels. A few things are going to the Black Templars but I never really  prioritized them as a firstborn army so they get a smaller share. 
• My Dark Angels are definitely one of my retro armies - way too much old stuff there - but I am also bringing them out of mothballs and into active service, mainly via the Ravenwing/Deathwing options. I've picked up a few missing pieces, I will spray those this weekend, and suddenly I have a 2000 point Ravenwing army with options for Deathwing drop-in support. This should be fun.
• This still leaves me with a lot of uncommitted stuff so I am indulging in an old dream and building a Space Wolf Army! Specifically a 3rd to 6th edition type Space Wolf army - no primaris. I always wanted a Wolf army and I had collected some pieces way back but when Blaster got into 40K he immediately focused on the Wolves so I gave him what I had and sensibly stopped adding more space marine armies to focus on what I already had immediately started modernizing and expanding my Blood Angels. Well, he's been out of the house for a few years now so I wouldn't be stepping on his toes anymore. I'll talk more about Project Wolf in another post but I'm pretty happy to have a place to put my strays and orphans. Of course I did need some wolf components so I immediately went out and hunted down some of the now out of print 5th edition era space wolf kits ... some things never change. At least I know what my problem is. "It's like a free army because it's stuff I already had that I wasn't using" ... well, except for the new (old) stuff I went out and bought to really fill it out. 

Project initiated ...

I do feel good about getting all of it organized. Much like building my Tyranids, it's good to realize it's finite and to be able to see the boundaries of the firstborn stuff. It will be finished at some point. 

An unexpected side note to this as I looked through my stuff started when I realized Terminators new and old still pretty much look the same and that I could add a Redemptor or two to my Imperial Fists Deathwing army. Since dreads are considered Deathwing too they are a legitimate part of it lore-wise and it would give me some extra oomph in that force. So yeah, reversing the point of the entire effort there is one currently all-firstborn army that's jumping to effectively primaris. Miracles happen every day!  

More to come as I sort this out ...

Mutants & Masterminds Campaign Catch-Up

 

The M&M campaign is still going, I have just been slow to post about it here. We have six sessions in the books and are about halfway through the Time of Crisis. I will say the system familiarity does start to come back faster as we play more so I'm feeling way less rusty in sessions 5 & 6 than I was in the first few. I am really enjoying it and I think my players are too.

I am also feeling way more proficient with Hero Lab. This has been helpful with both running the game and with helping my players tune up their characters and spend their power points. This is the only game where I use Hero Lab since the demise of our Pathfinder campaigns years ago so if we are not playing M&M the rust accumulates. Coming at it with fresher eyes I do see where some of the complaints about it come from as it is not a modern "app" - the way powers are listed is not really intuitive in-play and sussing out what a power actually does can be a little tricky if you have no descriptive text. I will also say the tool tips help in some circumstances yet add very little in others. A lot of these issues come from them presenting generic, standard game information not a customized description based on the powers and modifiers particular to this character, but I suspect that kind of dynamic information would have been tough to do when this version of Hero Lab was created. Regardless, I can work with it and it does help me run the game better than if I did not have it.

We have had to miss a few weekends so beyond a massive 40K effort (I'll discuss it in a separate post) I have been trying to catch up on other RPG books that have piled up over the last six months or so. It's a weird habit but I do tend to pick up multiple large rulebooks at once and then let them sit on the shelf for months while I read other things. Then I look at the shelf full of unread rules for different systems and decide I need to read them all at once. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I do not as the drive to dive into a game I am not running, especially a dedicated rulebook and not an adventure, dwindles. I've added the Tales of the Valiant Player Core 2, some of the D&D 5.5 books, a couple of Pathfinder 2E books, some stuff from Savage Worlds, and then various Kickstarter tomes. What I need to be doing is going back through some of my M&M 3E books to brush up on those - since that's what we are actually playing - and I have been ... some. At times I do feel pulled in so many directions that it's tough to focus in on something long enough to knock it out but I am working on them. 

On a final note the M&M 4th Edition Kickstarter did wrap up with over $300,000 taken in. I'd say that's an encouraging number. It is a reminder of how niche the whole superhero RPG market is - the million dollar kickstarters are big D&D-related projects or have a well-known author behind them. The Deadlands kickstarter running at the same time took in a similar amount so I suppose I like the niche games. M&M had twice as many backers for a very similar amount of money which is interesting. Maybe I can take a look at that in a future post. I'm happy these both funded. The downside is that I don't want to look at any more 4th edition M&M rules stuff as it causes edition bleed for me as I try to "expert up" on 3rd edition. When the physical books come out months from now and we are well into our campaign then it might be time to look again. 

Campaign reports will resume soon ...

40K Friday - Continuing Distractions with Grey Knights

 

Not a lot of progress on the Tyranids or Praetorians these past two weeks as I've really been pulled towards finishing/updating some already substantial and mostly finished armies.

For the Grey Knights I've moved 20-odd figures into the "done" cabinet with more coming close behind - hopefully this weekend. All of these are already painted to some level. It's mainly sorting them back into squads, fixing any broken parts, a final clear coat and then re-doing the bases. This includes a few more marine squads and the dreadnoughts and dread knights . I also have to finish up my Rhinos/Razorbacks that I started a few years ago and a Stormraven & Land Raider  as well. This may all happen in stages as I jump around to different projects. The pull here is that this army is this close to being done-done, which is a good - if rare -  place for me to be on an army. 

Please ignore the Chaos Knights lurking below ...

Once I am  through these I will have some "from scratch" work to do as I need a big squad of Purifiers which I lack right now. I do have the newer Crowe model to go with them so that will be one effort. Then I also want to do a big squad of Paladins with all of the bling. 

The only new acquisition recently was the new upgrade sprue for one of the Dreadknights. I do want to finish up building and painting what I have but the only thing I might want more of would be the full-kit Dreadknights as everything else I've mentioned I already have. I think I'm OK with 1 grand master and the 3 regular DKs as I do have the Land Raider and Stormraven to bring big guns and take up a lot of points if I want to go that direction. 

I also expect much of this army, the infantry at least and probably the dreadnoughts, to be replaced in the next 3 years so I am not really feeling a need to spend more money on expanding it right now. One more new Dreadknight (to be able to field all of the cool new stuff) is about the only temptation and despite the new upgrade sprue those could get replaced as well so who knows? It's already more points than I could ever really field outside of an apocalypse game so it's not like I need more of anything.

So yes, the goal is to finish up the easily-finished stuff, take a look at the rest and maybe advance one chunk of that and then switch to one of this year's other efforts. 

40K Friday - 3-Day Weekend Distraction Edition

 I did make some good progress last week with the Tyranids. That's 9 Von Ryan's Leapers in the one tray and a pair of Neurotyrants and their little gribblies in the other. At this point I have a bunch of 'gants left to do and the Norn and then I am completely built ... 5000+ points of the 'Nids. Yes there are some units I do not have but I'm probably not going to push very hard to get more as I need to start painting these things. I do have a scheme mostly figured out but I need to start getting more of them going beyond a base coat of Wraithbone.

I had thought about working on more of the Guard this weekend. I try to break things up into chunks as I go so I don't burn out or get bored with what I'm doing which means I am usually working on at least two armies at any given time. This weekend though something came out of left field and bit into me hard.

That's right for some reason I went down the rabbit hole on Grey Knights. It's been a while since I posted about them here - that was 9th Edition 40K and here's where I started talking about them for 8th Edition and they have been an army here ever since those days but for some reason I took them off the shelves and put them in a box after the move and just let them sit. 

Now the distraction started while I was looking at my Iron Warriors and thinking I needed to do some updates as I have added parts and pieces the last few years but I haven't really sat down and hammered away on them. A lot of my stuff is old-school, my marines are mostly still on 25mm bases, and I haven't really finished out even the new stuff that I have added. So I was thinking I should put in some effort on them as I wrap up the Tyranids as there has been a lot of "new" for Chaos Marines recently and their rules seem to work pretty well so I should get some games in before 10th goes away - or at least modernize them a bit going in to 11th. 

While doing this I decided to make a "Conclave of Chaos" on the big table and drag out all of my other chaos stuff too - World Eaters, Death Guard, some of the daemon stuff - to see if I had things loosely assigned to one army that I could use in another. 

While doing that I had to move my Grey Knights Holding Facility (a big cardboard box) and while looking down into it I realized I had been ignoring them this entire edition and they were far more "modern" than the IW's. Well, they're at least on the right size bases. The path of distraction is insidious ...

So I made some room next to The Conclave and started sorting through my Knights of Titan and discovered things I had picked up in the last round of GK interest and never finished and some things that were - I have a painted Kaldor Draigo! Of course it turns out they took him out of the latest codex! But I have a Draigo! Also more normal powered armor guys, more termies/paladins, and more characters than I remembered. I also have 4 dreadnoughts ... not sure why I went to 4 but OK. I have an unbuilt Dreadknight which syncs up perfectly with the one new model the Grey Knights got for 10th which is an upgrade kit to more readily distinguish a Grand Master Nemesis Dreadknight from the regular Nemesis Dreadknight. 

The main thing though is that there are a couple of thousand points worth of painted GK's that just need to be sorted out. I am fixing some of their bases along the way - I painted for several hours this weekend and it was all snow base updates. They were not super-unified before but they will be now. The vehicles need more work as there are a lot of "well it's silver at least" vehicles right now but it shouldn't be terribly hard to improve on that. Right now the plan is to tune up what's done/almost done and then based on what that looks like get some of the other stuff finished. I did manage to pick up the codex for 10th and read through it and I have ordered the dreadknight upgrade sprue so I am fired up about it all. 

The downside of all this is twofold:

• This army has not done particularly well in 10th edition and the way they work now is *significantly* different than what they did in earlier editions. They used to be the all-psychic space marine force where each squad had powers and each character had powers and I can tell you the cognitive load of running them in 8th or 9th was massive. It was challenging, it was fun, but it was the most complex army in-play that I have ever tried to run. They had potentially 5 different melee weapons in each squad, plus a choice of 3 different support weapons at 1 or 2 per squad, and then each squad could pick from at least 1 psychic power out of 6, then the characters had a different set of powers to choose from ... it was a lot. But it fit the lore!
  
  Fast-forward to 10th and all of that has gone away. They do still have the 3 support weapons to pick from but all of the melee options are now "Nemesis Force Weapons" and have a single statline. The psychic phase is gone and the various abilities are just pre-set per unit as a special ability if they have one at all. The psychic down-tune is a general 10th edition thing but it hit the psychic-focused armies pretty hard. The GK's signature feature now is teleporting - every unit has deep strike, they can pick some units up off of the table during the opponents turn, and there are ways to jump on and off and around the board more than any other army in the game. Hey, mobility is a huge thing in this kind of game and they have a ton of it but it is a very different thing than what they used to be. A lot of long-time Grey Knight players are not happy with this take on the force and have pulled back from playing & building and talking about Grey Knights. It's a shame but that's where a lot of people are these days.
• Secondly there have been rumors for some time that the GKs are getting a full refresh in 11th edition - that's models, not rules. So I am diving in and building/painting/prepping a bunch of models that are going to be "obsolete" in a year or two. I will be sad to see them go because I absolutely love these things. They are just about the coolest of the firstborn era plastic marines with their awesome helmets and inscriptions and weapons and the GK color scheme just lends itself to making these things look amazing. That said they are from 5th edition, circa 2010, and a lot of that stuff is getting replaced now. They do look tiny compared to all of the primaris stuff and the new scale for marines but to me that doesn't mean they look bad - they just look small. Also, scaling has never been a strong suit for 40K, right from the start, even among the same army, so it really doesn't bother me. 
  
  So sure, we will see all-new models for the Grey Knights in the next few years. OK. Right now I have a pretty nice pile of the current ones, and I have rules to play them, so that's what I'm going to do. I am hoping that when the update comes they don't change the structure of the army a whole lot so that what I have will still work and I can keep playing with what I have while I contemplate if/how/when I want to upgrade to the newer stuff.
  
  They might not! They might turn it completely upside down! If they do, well, Blaster has been making some noise about how strong Eldar were in 5th Edition so we might have to have a retro showdown and see if they were really all that tough. 

More to come.

Mutants & Masterminds - Converting Between Editions

 

A lot of the stretch goals with the new M&M Kickstarter are 4th edition conversions of 3rd edition adventures. I get why they are doing this - it's easy to do and they're already written so, sure, and you're getting them for free but they're only 6$ PDFs anyway so ... I don't know. 

Back to that "easy" part - how easy is it to convert something between editions of this game? Well ... most of the time it's pretty straightforward. One key item: the difficulty chart is the same for every edition of the game!

This one is taken from the 4th edition playtest document but it is the same for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and now 4th edition:

• 1st edition: Page 147
• 2nd edition: Page 7
• 3rd edition: Page 13 (Deluxe Hero's Handbook)
• 4th edition: Page 15 (Playtest Origin Edition)

Outside of combat and individual character powers that chart up there has the numbers you need and the amazing thing is that regardless of edition you don't have to update them! 

So you might go through the text, find anywhere that "DC" is mentioned, and check what it's referring to - typically a skill, possibly an ability. These do change from edition to edition but most of the time it's pretty obvious what you need to change to. A DC25 "Computers" check in a 2E adventure becomes a DC 25 "Technology" check in 3E or 4E. In 1E it would likely have been a Computers or Repair. In some editions the right "Expertise" skill is a good substitute, at least when I'm running. 

The abilities do change with every edition but they are always centered around the six D&D type abilities and they are on the standard d20 scale that we've been using for the last 25+ years, sometimes with a score, sometimes with just the modifier, but an 18 in 1st edition is still a +4 in 4th. 

Attacks and Damage work pretty consistently across editions so there's not usually much to worry about there.  

The area with the most effort required should be translating characters. Assuming we are talking about the NPCs from an adventure or some setting guide then it's not really that bad. The biggest thing here is the Powers - those change every edition, sometimes dramatically, from how they are built to how they work in-game. You might get a character with a complicated build that relies on mechanical tricks that don't translate to a different edition. If you want to stay consistent with what the character used to do then you may have to rebuild it from the ground up, possibly using a completely different power to achieve a similar effect. If you run into this a lot it could eat up some time but there are alternatives:

• Assuming it's an NPC villain of some kind, well, despite the edition change this guy's powers work like they did in the other version - here's his hit bonus with it, here's the target # to resist it, have at it! It's not the most elegant solution but sometimes it's the best solution and since the mechanics of the game system are so similar across editions it can still work. 
• Look at the general effect of what the character does in that edition - don't worry about all the tricky details and add-ons, just look at the main impact it has on the game. Find a power in your edition of choice that does something similar - it may not be as complicated, it may not be as flashy as the old version, but if it let's Think Tank mind control innocent bystanders then you're good even if it doesn't specifically account for some of those details. As you work through it in the new version you might find some new tricks that are still cool and fun for the GM to impose.
• Archetypes: I see Chimpanzoom has a writeup in 1st edition Time of Crisis. I see he has one in 2nd edition ToC. To run it in 3rd I could go back through one or both of those and try to re-create him as closely as possible ... or I could just grab the Speedster Archetype, maybe tweak it a little in some way to make him a little different, and run that instead. Remember that the mechanics give you the numbers but the way the character acts, speaks, and reacts are largely outside of those. You were going to have to decide on those anyway regardless of edition. Whether he has a 14 or a 15 Dodge isn't nearly as important as the personality and the look. 

These guys know ...

When translating also keep in mind that the points don't matter. It's good to have a Power Level in mind for your character - maybe it's the same as the other version, maybe it's not depending on what you want to do - but the points are more for PC's than NPCs. Archetypes are an incredibly useful tool for anything like this. 

So yes, it's not difficult to modify things to work in different editions with this game. That's part of why I'm a little disappointed with this part of the Kickstarter. The first four were all this kind of thing and there are two more down the road if it keeps going. The latest achieved goal is the Earth Prime Gazetteer which is at least not a simple update of an existing thing ... wait ...

Ah ... right. Now Steve Kenson has said they are revising the setting with this edition - the Freedom City setting specifically. That's probably smart after 20+ years of building it out and advancing the timeline so I don't have a problem with that plan and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do. Buuuut ... this is still an intro type document for the world, not a new version of the complete thing. So it's better than the adventures at least, to me, because it is going to cover some new ground. 

The next goal is a new character record folio. It's a big character sheet. Once a new builder is out these won't see much use and let's be honest here, "Character Sheet" as a crowdfunding stretch goal is ... well it might be a new low as far as effort required. These are things that are typically a free download on the company website or at DTRPG. No one should be particularly excited about this.

The final other type of stretch goal that we know about right now are Alternate Archetypes. Now I was excited about this when I saw the name as I was a huge fan of the Archetype Archives and Instant Superheroes in 2nd Edition that added new archetypes and more options to the existing ones. They were great for GMs and for players too. Well, it's not that. It's the archetypes in the game at PL8 and the other one is at PL12. I am assuming there will not be radical re-conceptualizing of each concept and that this will mainly be a math exercise. Well ... OK. I mean I can use them - the PL12 versions will make for handy drop-in villains but in Hero Lab for 3rd edition that's two clicks on "Scale Up" or "Scale Down" for the basics and then some tweaking on what else I want to enhance or downgrade. It's not a whole lot of effort if that's all that it is. 

So yeah, I love Mutants & Masterminds - I'm running it right now! I think the people working on it are good at what they do and I hope the KS hits a million dollars. I know there are constraints on what they can do right now with the Diamond situation. I'm just a little disappointed at the low effort on the stretch goals for this one. That said I am looking forward to the new edition even if I'm not going to run it until next year at least, after we get through a nice long run with 3rd which will no doubt end with another Crisis of some kind and turn things upside down for a new era and edition.

Mutants & Masterminds - New Edition Ups and Downs

 The Kickstarter appears to be going very well (over 1,000 backers, over 100K $ as I write this) which is a good thing for the game and its future and I am glad for that. 

It's a little weird that there are a fair number of questions that are asking if one can do various things in the game or will be included in the game that are already in 3E M&M so yes, I think it's safe to assume powers and options included in the current edition will be included in the new one. I'm guessing a lot of the people asking don't play the current game but I don't know. Since they announced the new edition a few months ago there have been all kinds of helpful suggestions made including things like "you should add in a hit point system" which ... yeah, I don't know. How has no one thought of that in the prior 20+ years of the system? "No hit points" is a feature of the game, not a miss that needs to be corrected.

That does lead into another point I see made: "It's easy for D&D players to learn because it uses a d20 for everything like combat and skill checks". That is, in my experience, really not the case. Sure, the Abilities are mostly similar, skill checks and hit rolls are familiar, but for people coming over from D&D 5E there are 3 massive hills to climb:

• Power Level in M&M is not the same as Levels in D&D. They're just not, experience points do not work the same way and "levelling" is just not a thing here, or in most superhero games. This is a pretty big shift. I wouldn't change it, it's just a thing new players have to work through.
• Powers and the construction thereof just blow people's minds. It's not intuitive if you're coming over from D&D. Explaining effects-based power design is a challenge and while many people can pick it up quickly once you've walked them through it using known examples of superheroes there are a lot of people that have a really hard time making that jump. A lot of combat ability comes from either the "Damage" effect or the "Affliction" effect and while they are extremely flexible getting this through to a new player is a lot tougher than sword/bow/axe/magic missile. 
• Finally there is the damage system: it's a huge change from any version of D&D and a lot of D&D-only players hate it as soon as they see it. Some will come around if you can get them to persevere, but in my experience it is the single biggest deal-breaker for new recruits. I would never want them to change it, but it is the biggest obstacle I see. Sometimes that's just the way it is. It's a different game, parts of it are going to work differently, and that's a good thing, not a negative. Not everything needs to use the same mechanics. 
  (It's also very similar to Savage Worlds' damage system and between the two I've played enough that I like them better than hit points for a lot of games but it's an issue for new players there too.)

Other regular requests include a new character creator and a VTT. I agree on the character creator - it makes things a lot easier for the GM to track, build, and update. The VTT ... well, sure, but while maps are still useful in a superhero game tactical grid maps are ... less so. I am using the combat manager option from Hero Lab quite a bit in our game but that's mainly because I can see all the opposition's powers and drop conditions on everyone with a click here and a click there. If a VTT module includes something like that then I'm more interested. If someone thinks they're going to get special effects like visuals and sound effects for everything you can think up for a superhero game I just don't see that happening quickly and a partial effort is just going to be frustrating. 

How about we let them get the core book out the door before we start piling on the requests? I mean I am not really looking forward to having all of those wonderful 3E books (and Hero Lab files) pushed into the "old category" anytime soon so no need to rush this. Take your time, make it good, minimize the errata, get it out, and I'm sure the support and the tools will come.