1987 - A Huge Year for Tabletop Games

 

You may remember 1987 from such films as ...

It was a big year for this hobby of ours but I'm going to focus in on 3 things. To set the scene properly remember a few things true about the time ...

• No internet. We got our niche news via magazines mainly, which of course were delivered on horseback, via steam locomotive, and by hot-air balloons. We also found out about new stuff quite often by walking into the local game store.
• Technology was just far less of a player when it came to this stuff. Sure, we all wrote a D&D character roller in BASIC programing class or something and we were playing computer RPGs but the most advanced thing for actual play was probably one of those electronic dice rollers with the LEDs. The biggest communication innovation at the time was probably still cordless phones. Character and campaign information was stored on paper. 
  
  

  

  The "Dragonbone"

• The dominant RPG at the time was AD&D - no bloody 2E, 3E, 3.5, 4, Next ... Much like today there were a ton of other games but there was no real competition for top dog.
• The other big fantasy RPGs were Runequest, Chivalry and Sorcery, Tunnels & Trolls, Warhammer FRP, Pendragon, Maybe even Fantasy Hero at this point. 
• Sci-Fi wise it was Traveller with maybe a little Space Opera. FASA's Star Trek was still rolling along although it was about to come to an abrupt end. Star Frontiers was fading but still around as well. Heck Mechwarrior might have been up there too.
• Post-Apocalyptic was still a real genre at this time with Gamma World, Twilight 2000,  and The Morrow Project all active.
• Horror was mainly Call of Cthulu with a helping of Chill and possibly a little Ghostbusters and Paranoia depending on how far you want to stretch the definition.
• Superheroes were strong with Champions, Marvel Super Heroes, DC Heroes, Villains & Vigilantes all on shelves.
• Westerns were ... not really a player. If you wanted to go Cowboy you were probably playing Boot Hill or homebrewing something. 

RPGs were flourishing and it was easily a "golden age" if you want to use that term. So what was new for 1987?

It was a good boxed set

First, this year saw the release of MegaTraveller. Now Traveller is not the force today that it was in the 80's but it was more dominant back then than any one SF RPG is right now. That's not to say everyone loved it, but if you wanted to play with spaceships, robots, and lasers, you were probably playing Traveller. It was the D&D of space games. After ten years and various printings and versions and presentations and a ton of expansions we got MegaTraveller - effectively a second edition of the game. It revised both the mechanics and the setting. 

Mechanics-wise MT unified and organized the whole task resolution system with a more formal approach to how it worked and to how things were presented in rulebooks and adventures. Skills were more tightly defined. Vehicle and ship construction was way more defined. A rough analogy might be original Traveller had a more loose approach to things, figuring out things as they published more like Original D&D did. MegaTraveller was the big new revised version like AD&D. At the time I thought the skill system was genius and the level of detail in the construction system lit my rivet-counting gearhead heart on fire. Other people though thought the whole thing was over-codified when it came to the rules and the approach in general. It didn't help that it turned out to have a massive amount of mistakes, typos, and errata but we didn't know that right away. 

This is not even from MT - this is from original set Book 2 I think. Traveller was always kinda like this.

Setting-wise MT made a lot of bold choices and many people hated them. The largely static Imperium in the background, existing mainly to justify common language, standardization, and interstellar trade - and as the hammer lurking in the background if your players got too stupid - suddenly had a rebellion and split into regional factions and had active war zones and such. Now I didn't hate the idea at the time but it took the setting from being a somewhat generic background where it was easy to focus on your players and tweak whatever you wanted to having an early metaplot situation with a moving timeline where other stuff is changing the map. I think it some ways trying to get by in the middle of an active civil war is a more interesting setting but it is also far more specific than it had been and people really did not like that. I also thought it was easy enough to ignore but when they keep mentioning it in the published products it's hard to forget. 

Looking back I would say MT was the beginning of the end of Traveller's big run. It had a lot of great support from GDW and from another group, DGP, and they would be publishing stuff for it for another 5-6 years but it fractured the community in a big way. Presumably that led to a faster wind-down than Classic Traveller and got us to The New Era and the collapse of both the Imperium in the game and GDW in reality. 

I know it's not as big a player as it was - I'd say Traveller today is "a" sci-fi game, not "the" sci-fi game but this was a pretty big thing at the time if you were active in RPGs. 

Second, 1987 saw the release of the first Star Wars RPG. yes, the West End Games d6 system version we all know and love and revere today. We got the Rulebook, the Sourcebook, and a bunch of adventures and some supporting boardgames and it was glorious. Besides the obvious - it's Star Wars! - the tone on this game was the complete opposite of Traveller and most of the SF RPGs at the time who tended to aim at realistic physics-based assumptions and this game did not care about that at all - at least not any more than the movies did. Instead of a detailed breakdown of modifiers and parameters for each task including how long it would take and how hard was it to try again if you failed Star Wars gave you a fistful of d6's  - roll 'em and get a total! Detailed charts for determining planetary characteristics? Tatooine! Hoth! Dagobah! The game was a revelation and a juggernaut both for what it actually was and for the possibilities it revealed. The system was easy to grasp and teach, and a blast to play. We all knew the setting and it was also great and focused on the Rebellion era and with no prequel or sequel trilogies at the time no one was ruining the thing by trying to be full-on Jedi - just some dabblers and wanna-be's here and there. 

The production values were another standout. Those first two books were not full color but they were two- color - lots of blue accents. They also had some full-color inserts which we really didn't see at the time and it helped that they were funny. They were also hardback books which outside of D&D was not really a thing yet either. The adventures had extra cardboard inserts, paper sections intended to be cut out, and started with a script your players could read out loud to set the tone of the typical "en media res" style they used. 

Lots of cool stuff in those old folders. Not quite the same in PDF.

In the end it was fun and popular and well-done and probably put the final nail in the coffin for Star Frontiers (last supplement published 1985), greatly damaged MegaTravller (Why play in that rebellion when you could play in the real Rebellion?), and may have helped finish off FASA Star Trek as well (license ended in 1989 as they tried to move into that new "Next Generation" thing). I know the FFG/Edge game line has gotten pretty quiet and Star Wars now is not Star Wars then but that D&D announcement got a lot of attention so I'd say it's still a factor even 40 years later.

To me this is still the defining image of 40K

Finally, going in the complete opposite direction of the Star Wars universe, 1987 also gave us the darkest, grimmest future setting of all with the release of Warhammer 40,000 - Rogue Trader. Not strictly an RPG but definitely aimed at campaign play where you accumulated stuff and troops and improved stats over time like the older wargames that inspired D&D. It was simply amazing, utterly unlike anything else we had back then. It out-post-apoc'd the post-apoc games because the apocalypse had happened long ago and never stopped - it just kept getting worse. 

System-wise it was an adaption of Warhammer (fantasy) 3rd edition's rules which were widely played at the time and had quickly become the most popular set of fantasy rules. I know I was seeing it played at conventions around DFW almost as much as Battletech by 1986 and that's saying something. It was easy to understand, detailed enough to make difference between units feel meaningful, and included characters in the same way most fantasy games did which is a big part of the appeal. It wasn't just a space marine army it was -your- space marine force with gear you had picked up, wounds and weirdness you had taken, and you had probably named your characters after a few fights. 

The art was also a huge factor here. Games Workshop had been tapping into a lot of wild and awesome fantasy art for years with Warhammer fantasy and this game gave them the chance to push out in all kinds of new directions. It's hard to emphasize to people who weren't there how NOTHING LOOKED LIKE THIS when it was released. They did a big multi-page ad in Dragon that put me over the top as far as committing to it and, well, it's been a few years and I still remember that ad and I'm still going at it. 

The concept also was so genius that you have to ask why no one else had tried it before. Someone had to be the first one to make it work, right? They just took all of your standard fantasy races and put them in a a sci-fi setting with guns and spaceships and a strong dislike of each other, with magic rebranded as "psychic" to keep wizards and weirdness in the game. GDW's Striker rules - Traveller miniature combat rules-  might have been the most popular single set of SF rules out there prior to this, depending on how you count Battletech and it's hexgrid map-based play. I'm guessing within a year or two that was no longer the case as 40K quickly surpassed other SF miniature games and within an edition or two even surpassed it's older sibling Warhammer Fantasy as far as sales and popularity. 

It became apparent quickly that while Warhammer had been popular before this was a whole new animal. I don't know that we quite realized the revolution it would be but we knew it was new and cool. It's far less new now but it still has some level of cool as they keep coming up with new interpretations of it with videogames, animations, and now maybe a live action show. There are even multiple RPGs for it in print right now! Clearly it strikes a chord with a lot of people. 

That's enough for now for 1987. This idea just hit me one day and spurred this post. I can think of other years that had some pretty big releases so I might go back and pick out a few of those for a similar write-up. Until next time ...

My RPG List Ten years On - 2016 vs. 2026

 

I keep track of my RPG and miniature purchases as I go each year and I have done this for more than a decade. I was updating my list for this year and it occurred to me I ought to go look at what I was buying and what I was playing and compare it to now plus mix in some hindsight.

What I was playing:

• The year started off with some Marvel Heroic
• Most of it was spent running my Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous campaign into the ground
• Lots of talk about the new Savage Worlds Rifts books that were getting Kickstarted back then. Lots of Savage Worlds talk in general from cards to using it with different settings.
• Managed to work in some Deadlands and some d6 Star Wars
• Later we managed to work in some FFG Star Wars
• Holiday time meant it was time for the Time of Crisis in Mutants & Masterminds!

It's funny that it took me ten years to finally finish Time of Crisis - at least it was with a couple of those same players! Otherwise this year it's been playing DCC and then hopefully in a bit it will be back to some Savage Worlds. I do have some consistency I guess even a decade later.

Miniatures-wise it was Eldar ... so much Eldar. This was the year I built what is still the core of my Eldar army.

What I was picking up:

• Perhaps not surprisingly it was a lot of Savage Worlds stuff
• There was also quite a bit of Pathfinder
• A fair amount of d6 Star Wars
• A little FFG Star Wars - they were still putting out new material then
• Some Mutants & Masterminds books
• Some DCC books and dice
• A few 5th edition items

It is good to see that most of what I was adding was being driven by what I was playing or thinking about playing. This year was effectively the end of that Pathfinder campaign as it just ran out of gas after 3 + years. I officially ended it in January 0f 2017.  Both Star Wars games and M&M and Deadlands remained intermittent occasional games for years.

For 2026 so far it's been a few DCC books, catching up on some 5.5 D&D books, and then weirdly picking up some old GURPS books. I don't know exactly what bit me there other than some long talks with Blaster about old school non-D&D grittier systems where I mentioned GURPS as a very different flavor of fantasy campaign compared to modern D&D. I then went to look for it on my shelf and at some point, maybe in a move, I lost half of my old GURPS books - I didn't even have an old 3rd edition core book anymore. So I went on a tear for a bit here recently filling in some of that stuff - you know Magic, The Grimoire, High Tech, Ultra Tech, Supers, a core book or two. They are not particularly pricey especially if you can find several of them in a lot and I wanted them back on the shelf.

Considering how much of what I am doing now is similar to (or the same damn thing) I was doing then I guess I can claim a "consistency" medal. Some might whisper "stuck in a rut"* but I prefer to think of it as being at a point in my life where I know what I like and I prefer to spend my time there. I still do a little exploring now and then. We try new games via one-shots or short limited campaigns, get a consensus on them, and then either put them aside or consider them for a bigger campaign down the road. I see people online struggling to find people and places to play - well, I have time, a place, and a group of friends that are interested so let's spend most of that time playing stuff we like. It makes sense to me, anyway.

* Considering the number of games I've run and played over the last few years it's a pretty wide rut.

Monsters, Challenge Ratings, and Encounter Balance in RPGs

 

It's a quirk of the modern RPG scene that there is so much concern over "Balance". It really falls into two areas - 1) Character Balance and 2) Encounter Balance. It's almost an obsession in some corners of the internet and while bouncing back and forth between various Supers RPG and running a D&D style campaign I thought it was worth discussing here. We did Characters yesterday so let's talk about Encounters.

Thinking back to the beginning early D&D didn't really care about encounter balance - the most we saw there was making sure a given dungeon level had monsters that matched that level which meant that it should be appropriate for characters of that level. Other early RPGs really didn't address much beyond this either. Runequest, Gamma World, Traveller, and Star Trek were all pretty light here. The idea mostly was "well, here is the setting, here are some potential opposing forces, drop your characters in and see what happens." There was also an assumption that your players knew to run when things got too hot and that might even require some extra effort like throwing out rations to distract pursuing monsters or having the chief engineer make some warp drive engineering roles to push the ship above it's normal maximum.

Later we get to D&D 3E and we first start to see encounter balance as a concept introducing challenge rating and encounter level as part of the game. I don't think this is a bad idea but I think it's doomed to  disappointment much of the time as one tries to codify a certain mix of hostile capabilities versus a generic player character power level. 

This is from the 3.5 DMG. Find the encounter level you want on the lefthand side, then decide how many creatures you want in the encounter moving to the right and it will show the CR you need to aim for to create a balanced encounter. Theoretically anyway.  

This is the Troll statblock from the 3.5 MM. Now trolls aren't particularly complex most of the time - though in this edition you could give them class levels and that could get weird fast. The only complication here is their regeneration - it's ignored by Fire and Acid. This version was a little more complicated but later editions have it so that taking any fire damage in a round shuts off the Trolls regeneration for that round - period. So if your party has a bunch of fire or acid type attacks then the troll's regen effectively does not exist. Challenge rating is affected by special defenses so the reason this guy is a "5" is at least partly because of that. Maybe if you ignore his regen he should only be a "4", maybe even a "3" which immediately wrecks the math, especially if you have a group of them. Considering in later editions wizards get fire bolt as a standard attack power, clerics get sacred flame, and flaming oil isn't hard to come by you can imagine this is not a particularly difficult thing to overcome. It's come up a lot in my current campaign and so I discount the rating for trolls a bit as they are effectively just like an ogre for the most part. Even one character landing a fire attack that round means all of the other characters normal attacks "stick" - just like any other monster. This is the kind of thing you have to do as a DM to keep these numbers relevant. 

I mean, he shouldn't be happy about this ...

This also ignores things like terrain, light conditions, weather, etc. There's a big difference between encountering something in a set of 10' wide corridors vs. out in the open country.

So taking these kinds of systems on faith is a mistake - if you really care about this stuff. I'd say 4E D&D did the best job with its math but even then I had to eyeball a fair amount of things. I did love the process of determining what kind of area this was, what kinds of encounters would be present, using the numbers to build an encounter and then tuning it up for my party - it was a great way to organize setting up a ruined city waiting to be plundered. 

Ultimate balance ...

But once you go outside of the D&D-O-Sphere there just isn't much like this approach. For point based systems (mostly supers for me) you could use the points but mostly you just use the power caps (active point limits/power levels) as a guideline. There's no larger framework though for calculating numbers for multiple opponents vs. party size. A few examples:

•    Looking at some superhero games there just isn't much math. 
• Icons is great talking about creating adventures and campaigns but doesn't burn any pages discussing encounter math.
• The Sentinel Comics RPG covers a lot of this as well and does talk about timing and challenges - the Green-Yellow-Red thing is important here - but it doesn't get into "enemy math" either.
• The M&M main book doesn't talk about numbers at all - it discusses encounters as part of an adventure or how they fit into a villainous plot. The Gamemaster Guide though, actually has a few paragraphs on balancing encounters and actually does mention power levels - every 2 PL increase means they are roughly twice as powerful so a PL12 villain is a good fight for two PL10 heroes. That's as far as the math goes.
• The Marvel Multiversal game is one of the newer entries and while it does have a page and a half on balancing encounters the only number advice in the entire section is to put your players up against opponents of the same tier - of which there are six. 
• Beyond strict superhero games entries like Savage Worlds have no real encounter guidelines. The only notes are that some creatures are wild cards but the game doesn't stick ratings on it's monsters beyond that.
• Star Wars!
• FFG Star Wars mentions that when using multiple opponents they should be a die or 2 lower on their abilities. That's about it.
• d20 Star Wars, Saga Edition specifically here assigns a challenge level number to every monster/npc entry in the game and this is used to determine both encounter balance and XP awards. Not terribly surprising with it being heavily 3E/4E based.
• d6 Star Wars - 2E Revised and Expanded in this case - has no time for encounter balance. The designing adventures section talks about pacing, different types of encounters, and "making it Star Wars" but does not put any numbers on opponents or award XP based on that kind of things. 
• The Trinity Continuum system has no encounter guidelines either. There are levels of threat as in minor-major-colossal, etc. and there are caps on their dice pools for each given level but there is no corresponding link to what level of character experience is an even match for that. There is a fair amount of material about adventure or story design but it's largely math-free.

I hope those are mostly minions ...

The one thing that many of these systems do is provide a two to three-tiered framework for opposition with normal opponents, minions or mooks, and then maybe some kind of master level opponent that is stronger than normal and possibly designed to take on multiple PC's. Mooks, almost universally, are designed as massed opponents that drop out of a fight with a single hit.  That can give a different flavor to a combat encounter and saves the GM a lot of work. Bosses tend to get extra actions or some kind of fate points to help them mitigate bad rolls or to guarantee success. Saving the complexity for the medium to boss level encounters helps a lot in running a game while letting the players feel like they are accomplishing something. 

Not a minion!

So this emphasis on encounter balance and the numbers associated with tracking and measuring that is pretty much a D&D thing. Other games don't worry about it much if at all. The only game that definitely has one on this list is the version of Star Wars published by the D&D people. Why don't more RPG's use this kind of approach? I will close with a paragraph from the M&M 3E Deluxe Gamemaster's Guide that I think sums up my feelings on it really well:

Book Review - Defining a Galaxy

 

I only became aware of this book  a year or two ago, picked it up last year, and finally read it this summer. Bill Slavicsek is one of the names that jumps out at me when I see it on a game because he has worked on some that I really like. He is mainly known for working on the d6 Star Wars RPG - the first one - and that alone would be enough to earn a spot in my personal RPG hall of fame so the chance to read his memoirs, in effect, of working on that one and the subsequent Star Wars games was an easy sell here.

I will go ahead and say it: I was a little bit disappointed with this one. I was expecting or at least hoping for a fair amount of detail on the process of developing that first set of rules and the first sourcebook - which set a pretty high standard and influenced everything that came afterward from names and locations and Star Wars lore in general. It's hard to over-state the impact that sourcebook had on the Star Wars universe we came to know and it's hard to overstate the eye-opening impact those first d6 rules had on RPGs. In this retrospective though I think we suffer from it being written 30 years after the fact - a lot of the details get fuzzy after that much time and I totally understand that but it was a little less than I  had hoped. There's a fair amount of "what" but I was hoping for more "why".

That said this is still definitely worth a read if you're at all interested in d6 Star Wars the game, West End Games,  or in the history of RPGs in general. The stuff about how the game to be, the licensing effort, the ads, and Greg Costikyan working through versions of the rules are still quite interesting. There was time pressure to get a certain amount of material out during the tenth anniversary year of 1987 which is something people may not think about decades after the fact but deadlines always have an impact on creative works like these. 

The research process for the Sourcebook is pretty well laid out and he  does call out how this was before the internet so a lot of it was  physical in-person work at Skywalker Ranch which is also interesting.  There is a long chapter about the various  sections and entries in the book and this is probably the author's greatest contribution to the setting so this is where we get the most information. 

There is some discussion of the early adventures and the Galaxy Guides and this is also rewarding for the true fan. 

Then we move into other work at West End - including Torg - and eventually we get into a move to WOTC and the new license for a new Star Wars RPG. I played a fair amount of d20 Star Wars so this was interesting to me as well. This part of the book runs up until about 2011 and then we close with some notes about subsequent Star Wars  things including Bill's tweaks to the d6 system he made for a con game he ran in 2017!

So there is a lot of good information here. It has a generally positive tone and doesn't spend much time with any personal axe-grinding or disparaging other designers or co-workers - it's a pretty upbeat  account of a career tied very much to Star Wars in various ways. 

I was hoping for a little more but it's definitely worth your time if you're a fan.

Meme-ish Monday

 

Meme-ish Monday

 

Meme-ish Monday

 

Meme-ish Monday

 

What's Going On in February

 

In recent weeks I've managed to run two sessions of FFG Star Wars and two sessions of Deadlands. It feels good to be back on track. The Deadlands campaign has now hit 19 sessions and this weekend will be the first "real" session of the new Star Wars campaign. 

For Deadlands I am running "The Flood" and it has gone pretty well even with some player turnover. I had 6 players at one point and we've lost two of those but added one new so we are still running with 5. This means we've had a ton of consistency and in a somewhat more "plotted " campaign that means a lot. Since it is a published run with a definite end I expect we will finish this one up later this year. The players have been really good about respecting "niches" and some of them have created some very memorable personalities. Lately they've been getting into some fun stuff like blowing up an ironclad and participating in the Shan Fan Kumite martial arts tournament. I really do need to put those session summaries together ...

For Star Wars I used the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game - which I had somehow never run, despite owning it for years -  to test out the system with my current group of players. It went over quite well even though the dice are hard to find right now. At the end of that run (which stretched over two sessions because we get sidetracked a lot and were learning a new system) we have a party with some experience and a ship of their own which had traveled to Bothawui - because that's where one of them is from. There will be some party shuffling as some of the characters were pre-gens and I expect those to be altered or outright replaced before we begin but we decided to continue onward from this point instead of starting completely new. I was fine with this as it gives them some grounding in the universe and a potential known adversary for Obligation purposes in Teemo the Hutt if they want to use him.

These guys look more and more like Traveller Aslan to me - anyone else see that?

The challenge here is that we decided to stay with mainly an Edge of the Empire type campaign where most of the campaign ideas I had written up in the past were more rebel-centric or set in the Clone Wars era and Jedi-centric. Right now we have no force users and the preference was to start right around the end of the republic. So, sketchy parts of galactic society right as the empire takes off ... yeah I have nothing written up specifically for that. So a big part of the RPG think-time these past couple of weeks has been how to start things off, where things could go down the road, and what places and groups are significant in this time period. I've spent more time on Wookiepedia this week than I have maybe ever and I have to admit it's been fun. I'll post more on the campaign planning later.

So yes it's been a pretty active January and February and it feels like we are finally rolling consistently again and everyone is invested in keeping it that way. It's a good place to be.

Meme-ish Monday

 

Meme-ish Monday

 

The New Star Wars Campaign

 

Well I mentioned something about Star Wars a while back and that did turn into something though not quite what I was thinking at the time. Given our other schedule issues we've restructured things and so for our first non-Deadlands weekend I ended up running the Edge of the Empire Beginner Box ... which I had somehow never run before. 

My thinking was that I wanted to give FFG Star Wars another try but given its very different approach with the dice and all I wanted to try it out with my current group of players before committing to a longer run. So we did exactly that - a tryout! I had 5 players. Two of them used pre-gens from the box, two brought in PC's they had from a prior EotE run, and one had a character from some other campaign. 

It's very railroady as you might expect from a starter adventure and it introduces the major elements of the game system along the way which is what I wanted. I already know we like Star Wars - what I wanted to test out was the system. I haven't managed to run more than about 5 sessions of this one in a row so I really want to see if I can get a sustained campaign going.

I have to say that despite it being about 5 years since I last ran this game it came back very quickly and it felt even easier than before. Maybe I've read and played more games since then or something but I really felt like I grasped it right from the start. The adventure covers skill checks, personal combat, and even some space combat in the finale and all of them ran well which was very encouraging. I used no miniatures and no maps until the very end when I pulled some X-Wing minis off the shelf to show relative positions and add a little flair to things. Some TIE fighters vs. a YT-1300 is a pretty classic moment and afterwards comments were made that it felt very much like Star Wars.

So, test successful! 

Many options were discussed but it was decided afterwards to continue on with some of these same characters in an Edge-style campaign. No definite connections to the Rebellion and no definite force users at this time. We are setting it back before Ep IV in the Rise of the Empire era so that will keep things interesting. 

Definitely more to come.

Interesting Times

 

One of the side effects of the OGL Hubbub has been the explosion of "there are other games like D&D that are not D&D" discussions online. Forums, blogs, YouTube ... I've seen a bunch of them and even though it probably shouldn't it still kind of surprised me. I still assume to some degree that other people are at least somewhat aware that D&D is not a unique thing. We have 45+ years of other RPG's (you know, "it's like D&D but...) and they are easier to find than ever in electronic form, yet so many people seem unaware of them. How?

I get it ... we have a ton of people now who came into the hobby through 5th Edition D&D. It's the only game they've played and it's the one their friends play so it seems like its own thing. I wonder what that percentage is? Say, of all the people who will roll dice for a combat or skill check this month, how many of them would have their minds blown to find out there is a <gasp> Star Wars "like D&D" game? What about Lord of the Rings? Marvel and Marvel-like properties? Is it half? I'm not even saying "played" another game or bought a book or a PDF - I'm just talking about awareness. 

I always thought the big franchises would bring new players in at a significant rate - Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTR, you know the list. When the MCU started being referred to as "The MCU" I thought it had achieved a big enough status to bring new people in there but apparently not. Who knew the hottest ticket for bringing in new RPG players would be ... the oldest RPG ... again. 

Now that the boat has been rocked there seems to be a lot of interest in broadening the horizons of these neo-gamers. I'm still not sure if it's truly new players showing a real interest or grizzled veterans like me desperately hoping we can break some of them away from the Forgotten Realms and into some of the other awesome options out there. Hopefully at least some of the less-involved are discovering that these exist. 

What's the easiest "other" RPG to drag 5E-only gamers into? The easy answer is something very similar to D&D like Pathfinder or one of the OSR games but I think that's misleading because if it's more swords and spells you're going to get asked at some point "why don't we just play D&D"? My best candidate is Star Wars - pretty much everybody knows at least some of it and it can accommodate a wide variety of campaign styles. Maybe the FFG funky dice edition isn't your favorite but there is plenty of support for d6 still out there and it's pretty easy to grasp and there is still material for the d20 versions if you want to go class and level with it. 

I don't know that I have more conclusions than questions here. It's just been an interesting thing to watch. 

The New Backup Game

 

We just recently restarted the Deadlands campaign that I've been running for the past year. Everyone is excited and the new place adds something to it too. So we mapped out a schedule that worked for everyone - tricky heading into the holidays - and then sure enough someone couldn't make it to the next session. With some advance warning we decided to do something else on purpose as we are really trying to ensure 100% attendance as the campaign heats up. 

So then of course the debate begins - what shall we play? Originally I was thinking boardgames ...  or maybe start a Frostgrave campaign to make things easy for whoever could make it. RPG-wise I tosdsed out the usual suspects for one-off type sessions: ICONS, Marvel Heroic, or DCC. I also threw out Stars Without Number as I wanted to try it out. I have ready-to-go-material for most of those but with no consensus as Saturday arrived it was going to be a challenge to run anything coherent so I decided to just see how things felt once we actually got together. Normally I really really prefer to know what I'm going to run at least a few days in advance but I decided to embrace the chaos and just wing it.  Having experience and a decent library of games this should not be all that difficult ... right?

As it turns out it was not, really. We debated for roughly an hour and somehow ended up on Star Wars, specifically d6 Star Wars. No, it had not been discussed in advance, no I had nothing specific prepared, and no I haven't run it in about 5 years. Great! It is easy enough to jump in and make characters and one of my players has extensive experience with it so he could help with character creation while I scrambled around gathering materials. It's tricky when you have a lot of good ideas but they are scattered across three different systems and the associated binders and computer folders. 

I did not want to just run Tatooine Manhunt again though that would have been an easy answer. I didn't want to run Starfall again either though that's another solid campaign starter. So I ended up falling back on an old idea I've discussed before using an old adventure published for another game which I originally converted to Saga edition but which I later converted to FFG's rules about two years ago. Had I converted it to d6? Of course not! So naturally that's what I chose! This was mostly a feel thing as I feel it works really well for Star Wars and figured it was worth the hassle of not having any mechanical details prepped.

These days I don't need a ton to run most games - a starting situation, opposition stats, and an idea of where things could go - even though I prefer some prep time this is really enough to run a fun game. FFG has printed several nice decks of NPC/monster cards that have all the stats on one side and then some notes on traits and gear on the other and it makes winging things really easy. I have some examples of similar things for d6 but not nearly as comprehensive so adaptations were made. One of the strengths of the system is that it's pretty easy to wing it given the difficulty chart, the standardization of weapons in the Star Wars universe, and the way stats and skills work. 

Despite the rust and the lack of planning we pulled something coherent together and ran for a few hours and everyone was happy with it. We started on a ship under attack and the characters fought their way through the ship to the bridge and then to the escape pods, saving crew people and dispatching space pirates along the way. We ended with them gathering their supplies as a new day dawns on an unfamiliar planet. So now this is officially The Backup Game. If anyone misses then the game switches to Star Wars. Considering a whole swarm of escape pods just ejected it will be easy enough to add new players - they can literally fall out of the sky for a while!  

It was a ton of fun and I am looking forward to how good it will be when I have some time to actually prepare!

Andor - A Longer Take

 

I know it's not been doing well in the ratings but I decided I was hearting enough good things about Andor to take a look and I'm glad I did. There's a proven principle in box office analysis that a sequel movie's opening weekend is heavily impacted by the quality of the prior entry. A good movie can have a bad opening if the previous film was bad, and a bad movie can open well if the prior entry was strong. Word of mouth will have some mitigating effect over future weeks - particularly on a bad entry, which is why you see some movies open strong and then fall off of a cliff thereafter.

I say this because I think this is what is happening to Andor: it's a good show but it follows two series with a mixed reception at best - Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi. Plus it faces the basic question of "who asked for this?" which is something I was asking myself when they first announced this one. Who was out there saying "wow I wish I knew more about this Cassian Andor guy" after watching Rogue One? I love Rogue One but even I never thought we needed a follow prequel series for anything in that movie. I also think that Star Wars fatigue is a real thing and having a near-constant flow of Star Wars shows runs a real risk of making them less special, especially when some of them are just not that good. 

So why is Andor an exception to this? Or, why should it be? Why was I pleasantly surprised?

First up, it is a story about the formation of the Rebellion. Now maybe not everyone cares about that but it's a pretty significant event in  the overall story of Star Wars and 40+ years in it feels like that's something we could spend some time exploring - surely there are some good stories to be told there and some interesting characters to meet along the way. Andor himself gets involved at the lowest level but we also see one of the main agents (who recruits him) and high level subterfuge as Mon Mothma tries to get support from various entities. We also see the lack of cohesion among the various sub-factions such as Saw Gerrera's band and some others that are mentioned. So it's a more complex situation than just "hey we're the rebels" and that could keep things interesting down the road.

Second it's a good look at the Empire taking power. The gradual imposition of restrictions on imperial society. The growing fear and unease among normal citizens. The unfairness of it all shows up in trials and sentencing and the revision of those sentences after the fact. This might be our first good on-screen look at the ISB which was a pretty regular opponent in a lot of early Star Wars RPG campaigns. People are uncertain at best about the Empire as the show begins and it only gets worse as it goes on.

Third it's an interesting look at normal life and normal people in the Star Wars universe. We see corporate security in action and some of what their life is like. We see criminal activity. We see a guy looking for a job. We see a guy dealing with his mother's expectations and concern for his career. We see relationships pushed in different directions both through individual actions and because of Imperial crackdowns. We see some prison life. There's a fair amount of people trying to go about their normal daily business as events unfold around them. It's just an interesting element that has not come up a lot in prior Star Wars media.

The downside is that it does move a little slow for a Star Wars show. There is a lot of setup and while the payoffs are solid there is not a ton of action - early on it's a heist, not a space assault. There are no Skywalkers and no lightsabers and no mention of the force at all. It's much more of a thriller than an action movie. 

I loved Rogue One and it had some similarities so if you hated that movie I suspect you will have a hard time liking this show, but if you liked it then you should give this one a look - it's worth your time. 

Andor Short Take

 

X-Wing - Take 2

 

Our first dive into the X-Wing miniatures game was, uh, a -few- years ago ... and it stuck around as an every-once-in-a-while game for the apprentices and myself but it petered out eventually and the announcement of a 2nd edition in 2019 was a perfect reason to wash my hands of it for the foreseeable future. I'm not usually looking to spend money on a game nobody around here wants to play. 

Until now! I was reconnecting with an old friend and he's been digging in to Star Wars Legions over the past year and that started some old wheels to turning so I decided to check out the current state of Star Wars spaceship games. 

X-Wing is still in its 2nd edition  - current rules etc. are here. FFG was bought out by Asmodee who has moved all of the miniature games over to a different sub-company Atomic Mass Games who do the Marvel game and the various Star Wars miniatures games, including X-Wing. That's all fine as long as they keep making it and right now it looks like it's mostly been in a holding pattern - continuing production of the existing line without much new. That's also fine and word is that some new stuff from The Mandalorian should be coming along any time now so they are looking to the future. 

For the present I was aware there was a conversion kit for 2.0 for each faction back when it released. I did take a look at them and they seemed pretty pricey at the time for a game we were not playing and that's when I decided to let the game go. Looking around now though I was able to find them for a much more reasonable price and that certainly helped. Also I figured that I only needed the rebel and the empire sets as the other factions have flown off as some of the apprentices have moved on. The other upside was that they come with updates for ships I do not have and many 1st edition ships are fairly inexpensive online making future expansion of the squadrons fairly easy. 

So I ordered the two conversion sets and a few more ships and that first picture up top is the current state of things. I have a ridiculous pile of cards and cardboard so I also added some binders to hold the cards at least. I'm still looking at options for the ship tokens and the rest. I'm also looking over the X-Wing app which is where all the points are now kept instead of on the cards. I've heard mixed things about it but I'm going to give it a try. And no, I haven't played it yet - this is all getting it into shape and ready to play and I expect we will get a game in fairly soon. 

After re-acquainting myself with the game I'd say it still has the 3 big advantages I noted years ago:

• It's Star Wars! This is something we all would have killed to have as kids and now that we're all adults we don't have to scrape together allowances or lunch money to play x-wings shooting at tie fighters with the Millennium Falcon!
• It has a relatively short play time. The games we played ... I don't think we ever went over an hour. That's important as it makes it much easier to get a game in when you don't have to devote an entire evening or a whole day to playing it.
• It's pre-painted! It's well-painted! That means it doesn't add to the backlog for all of those other games I play! This doesn't mean I won't ever paint one of these ships - it just means I don't have to. I now have a pair of Firesprays so at least one of them will be getting some custom colors.

So I'm pretty happy to be opening up the hangar again. I hate having whole sets of painted mini's sitting around gathering dust for years so it feels good to shake that off. I'll post more once we have a game or three under our belts. 

Yeah, something like that ...

The Last Month of the First Half of 2020

...hopefully we're almost done with all that ...

Where to begin? Such a weird year. I was actually running and playing in games again and then ... POW! Nope!

Two college kids doing school from home full time, one working more (delivery), one working a lot less (retail).

Friends isolating so the only way we see each other is online. Tabletop simulator is interesting, Lords of Waterdeep is a really good group game, and we've played a lot less of the MMORPG option than I thought we would - even City of Heroes. Thank god for Steam sales, GOG sales, and the Total War series of games, especially Warhammer 1 & 2. I might be a little obsessed these days.

Working from home full time ... I worked from home a few days a week already so all I really did was slide that control over to "max" and have more time to do whatever I wanted to do. It was not a tough situation here, especially compared to a lot of other people.

RPG Talk:

As all of this hit and shut everything down I had decided it was time to push the Pathfinder 2E tryout campaign into something real. I had been running it using Frostgrave as a model for the setting and while everyone was having fun it was not all that conducive to a long term campaign - it's kind of limiting as far as social activity and general downtime fun when you're in a giant uninhabited frozen ruined city and the nearest outpost of civilization is a village like the one  in "Hardhome" in that great episode of Game of Thrones.

I had high hopes for it but quickly realized that by fairly strictly following the structure of the miniatures game's background I had crippled the potential in a lot of ways. Even worse, when I thought through what I could do to improve things it quickly turned into my Phlan campaign with more snow being the main distinction. What can I say? I kind of have a template for running a ruined city D&D game and I didn't really want to repeat myself just yet.

So I poked through the stacks and realized there was a fairly obvious thing to try: What if it's not a ruined city? What if it's a living breathing city full of interesting situations? now I've thought for a long time the next time I ran a city campaign it would be Waterdeep and all of those nice supplements they've put out covering it over the last 30 years. Nope!

They ran a kickstarter a month or three back for a D&D 5E version  of it but if I'm running it for Pathfinder 2E then I don't really need that do I? I can convert from the book that's been sitting on my shelf for 10+ years now just as easily!

So that's the plan for the Big Fantasy Game that I always seem to be running ... well, once the restrictions lift and everybody feels comfortable gathering again. More on this later.

The plan is to run a game weekly but sometimes that's not schedule-friendly so to allow some of my players to lighten the load I'm considering running two games, alternating weeks. For the second game I presented a few options but we settled on Star Wars, FFG-funky-dice-Star-Wars because I want to give it a real test. I'm adapting one of my old ideas so the actual work is small and feels like a lot of fun as I look back through it. Setitng it in the Clone Wars era opens up a nice set of options, including active Jedi types, and with official FFG support material it's pretty damn easy to put together.

Oh and now there's a 9th edition of 40K coming soon too - I'll save that for Friday.