Guardians of the Vale - Session 4 - Into the Barrow of the Ogre King

Setting out from Loudwater the party follows a very obvious trail left by the goblin raiders. Moving almost directly south they soon come to an area of forest known as the Southwood. Soon enough they find the trail leads into an area of tumbled stone ruins. The work is clearly dwarven and the barrow is rumored to be part of the old dwarven kingdom of Ammarindar.

As they venture into the ruins Apollo (the Elf Ranger) notices that something doesn't look right about a large area ahead and warns the party to skirt around it. The Druid then spots a loose stone near where the tracks stop and moves it, revealing a ladder that descends into darkness. After a brief discussion the party climbs down.

At the bottom is a small dark room which seems to be a dead end but they soon feel a draft coming from one end and discover a secret door which they open. Ahead is a large rubble-choked room which slopes up to their right. There is some indirect light but the area is not well-lit. At the top of the slope stand 3 large dwarven statues. between those statues stand a pair of goblins who have not yet noticed the party. The group stealthily moves out and prepares to take out the guards

Charging forward the Dragonborn Paladin slices into the nearest goblin to open the battle. He strikes hard but the goblin does not fall - clearly these are not the rabble they fought back in Loudwater. The Elf begins firing in support while the Dwarf moves to engage and the the Druid begins casting storm spike. A vicious melee erupts as  more goblins move in from out of sight including some kind of wizard who blasts from a distance with stinging and blinding spells.This fight goes hard for the heroes as the Paladin goes down and the Elf is constantly fighting off blind spells, interfering with his archery. The dwarf takes a beating until he eventually goes down after using up his healing abilities (Inspiring word from dwarf to Paladin- "By the gods you suck! Get back in the fight!) and even the ranger drops at one point, leaving the bloodied druid in beast form trying to slay the last goblin warrior and drive off the wizard before he drops and his friends all die. After many exchanges (and much dodging of wizardly blasts) he  rips into the last armored goblin for one final time, slaying him, and causing the hexer to flee through a set of doors at the other end of the room. He quickly attends to his companions and they stagger to their feet, wondering if this was such a good idea after all.

DM Notes: This was another very long fight, 13 rounds, and was almost a TPK. Part of the problem was that the players last fight against goblins included some minions and this one did not. Plus it is intended for 5 PC's and we only have 4. Now that being said it's also intended for a level 1 party and ours is level 2. Either way it's a level 4 encounter which seems awfully tough for the second encounter of a new campaign. So it's higher level AND the party is outnumbered by 1 and there are no minions. The party was also reluctant to use their dailies because of the easier fight last time against the goblins - we don't need to use them they're just goblins! Of course by the time 3 of them were on the floor they were thinking a little differently but it was too late by then. Scouting this one out earlier I had not really thought this would be a super tough fight but the restricted terrain - there is really only 1 square clear for movement between each pair of dwarf statues so if the goblins block them the Goblin Hexer can stand back and blast pretty much at-will. He managed to keep the elf in enough distress that there was no return fire. The party's decision to fight in between the statues made a big difference here. It's an interesting but very dangerous tactical situation. Hopefully they are learning.

Next time - behind the big doors...

Motivational Monday

Slow Week

I'm pretty much taking this week off from my online activities - posting should resume next week.

Motivational Monday

Fantasy Books, Gaming Fiction and My Background in Them

I really just wanted a post on the blog that explains my background with fantasy literature as it might help someone get why I think a book is good or bad. This is that post.

I liked stories about knights and castles and such when I was a kid. In about the third grade our teacher read us the Hobbit in class and I completely fell for it. A short time later I saw a little animated movie called "The Hobbit" and heard that there was a follow up story called "The Lord of the Rings." During a discussion with an aunt who was into fantasy books I mentioned that I had heard of these books but I didn't know how to get them. She loaded me into the car and drove me to Waldenbooks in the mall and bought me all 4 of them. I read those books over the next week and read them many, many, times over the next 20+ years. Those books were my introduction to fantasy and in some ways are a high-water mark for fantasy lit.

In elementary school I also read The Chronicles of Prydain and was thrilled. These were written more for kids but they were very good stories and were still better written than a lot of the material that comes out today. I read them again a few years ago (reading them aloud to my kids before bedtime) and they still hold up very nicely.

I read a lot of World War II and Science Fiction stuff in elementary school too but since this is about my Fantasy background I will focus only on it.

I discovered D&D in 5th grade and beyond the game itself it provided a nice bibliography of fantasy books - remember this was way before the internet and it was sometimes hard to know what to look for at the library or the bookstore. Now I had a list...

In Junior High I read Sword of Shannara (thought it was kind of weak back then), The first Xanth trilogy (OK and kind of funny), a lot of comic books, and then we moved to Texas and the local library had the Conan books.

Feeling like I had found the holy grail of fantasy fiction (beyond LOTR) I dived in and read all 12 Ace edition Conan books over my 8th grade year and it set the new high mark. They are different from LOTR but they are equally powerful in their own way. I've read them many many times since then as well as the new un-pastiched director's cut versions that came out a few years ago and I still rank them at the top.

Next I found the Elric books and I pored through those as well - different than Conan or LOTR but kind of a weird middle ground. Violent like Conan but also baroque and fantastic like LOTR. I loved them and still do. I tracked down Moorcock's other works and devoured them as well and all together they make a very nice block of Fantasy reading with a distinct feel to it.

In some ways that's my Triangle of Fantasy Greatness - LOTR/Hobbit, Conan, and Elric. Maybe that dates me but that's the core of it to me. If you want to include the classical trilogy of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid then you might have a second "center of greatness" that I think has an impact on the earlier works of fantasy at least.

Other classic works that I like include The Worm Ouroboros, The Compleat Enchanter, and Burrough's Martian stories. I am also a fan of Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories though I do not rank them quite as highly as some old-schoolers do. They are very good though and very much tied into the core of what led to D&D. Along that same line Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson is clearly the genesis of the D&D paladin and the D&D troll and has a good dose of fey/faerie too.

The 80's - In the remainder of the 80's I read Fred Saberhagan's Swords trilogy and thought it was decent enough though I think I like the Empire of the East series that precedes it a little better. They're both good reads. Laurence Watt-Evans Lure of the Basilisk series is a good set of tales with a non-human point of view. Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook is a good set of stories - I don't see it as the major work that some others do but I do think they're good. The Guardians of the Flame by Joel Rosenberg is one of the early "gamers transported into a fantasy world" stories but after the first trilogy that tends to show up less and less as new characters fully tied to the fantasy world take over. It's a good series and covers 2 or 3 generations now.  There were two other major fantasy series in the 80's that I think bear mentioning:

1) Thieves' World - these books were very popular and were by far the grittiest, nastiest set of thing I had ever read, at least by the middle to end of the series. If you think Conan or even the Black Company stories focus in on the low fantasy end of the spectrum take a look at these. Technically the first one was published in 1978 but they came out about one a year all through the 80's until the final volume was published in 1989. They get nastier as the series goes on and after seeing the same trend in Wild Cards I wonder if it's a trait of shared world novels as the writers try to outdo each other. In any case if you are interested in low-fantasy with a wide variety of characters it should be on your list.

2) Dragonlance - this was the real beginning of the D&D fiction avalanche. At first it was just a trilogy and a bunch of game support material but soon it would open the floodgates and we would see everything from Greyhawk novels to Forgotten Realms novels to books focusing on the gully dwarves of Krynn. This also indirectly opend up 2 other types of fiction - the non-D&D gaming fiction series such as the Battletech novels and later the Shadowrun, Vampire, and Wwarhammer/Warhammer 40K novels. It also opened up the "trilogy based on a guy's D&D campaign" series of books - more on those later. These were the first and they are decent stories. Re-reading them as an adult I see some things I do not like as much now but there is some fairly grown-up material in there. The death of Sturm is one. The unrepentant selfishness of Kitara the former friend is another. The whole character of Raistlin and the strain between family, friends, and the desire for power is pretty well done though it does play a bigger role in the Twins trilogy that came after. Those are all well done and the world is painted well and feels like a D&D world. It's not LOTR, but it's not garbage either and it was a major work at the time and still is now if partially for what it represents. I can tell you that my 11-year old reading it this summer for the first time thought it was as awesome as I did back when I read it for the first time and I think that says something.

There have been some other "big" fantasy books that have come out in the last 20 years:

David Drake has written some fantasy and as much as I love his military science fiction I am not as big on his fantasy. Lord of the Isles and the sequels are interesting but not my favorites.

Robert Jordan wrote a  huge pile of words about something and I have yet to read any of them. I do have the first two on my bookshelf and they have been there for several years now. I just have not been able to bring myself to start down that road as every book in the series is ridiculously long and there are way too many of them - there's no work of fiction that should take 5000 pages. History of Rome from 500 BC to 500 AD at 1 book per century? OK, 10 volumes sounds fine. History of made-up world and characters in 10+ volumes of 600+ pages? Ridiculously overwritten.  I may get to it someday but it won't be soon.

L.E. Modesett wrote a bunch of stuff about a world called Recluce and it's pretty good.  Looking at the list there are 16 of them now covering around 2000 years of history. Alright that's more than I expected but each one is much smaller than a Wheel of Time novel so it evens out. They describe an interesting world and a very interesting magic system, one of the more detailed ones I have seen as far as describing how magic works and how it feels to be a magic-user. I like them a lot though I confess I haven't read the last wave of them.
 
David Eddings put out a bunch of stuff in the 80's and the 90's and a lot of it was over-padded crap. To me this is the start of the "fantasy bloat" we are still living with today. If a trilogy is good, what's better? A 5-book series! Of course! So he wrote two of them! About the same characters! Pretty much doing the same thing! And they are very slow! He eventually wised up and wrote 2 trilogies about a totally different world and character after this and those were actually pretty good. So my insight from reading these was that if you, as a writer, think that you have a good story for a trilogy, try making it a single novel. If you  think you have a good story for a 5-book series try making it a trilogy. If you have the brilliant idea to write a 10-book series about a fictional fantasy world please don't - try writing one book and let's see what happens. The Belgariad and The Mallorean were some of the first series I read and came away thinking they were just not that good and had me wondering why 5 books was better than 3 when the story clearly wasn't there. I should credit them as they did open my eyes that not everything publishers issued was great or even good.There's a good story in these books somewhere but it's a shorter story than what was published.

Raymond Feist put out a pair of books that were very good (I thought) and they soon grew into an ongoing ad-hoc series  that's up to around 20 books now - in other words it's another runaway case of sequel-itis. There were in some way based on the author's D&D campaign so at this point we've come full circle to where D&D, inspired by fantasy fiction, is now inspiring fantasy fiction in a new generation of authors.   Now I liked the first book -or two depending on when you read it - and thought it was really good. I thought the first trilogy was good, but then things started to decline for me from there. It is cool to follow along as a character that was a child in the first book grows up and is eventually an old man 10 or os books in but there has to be a limit somewhere. I suppose as long as people keep buying them that "the franchise" must go on and the generational thing does keep the characters on a limited rotation but even that wears thin after a time. I would really like to see experienced successful authors experiment a little more - write a new series set in a different world or try some historical fiction or try some horror or post-apocalyptic book - something other than "the 27th novel in the Riftwar Saga". Good stories deserve a good ending and too many nowadays never get one.

The next-to-last major work I want to mention is one I am just starting - George RR Martin's Game of Thrones. series. I have all 4 of them now but I've been waiting to read them until I know I'm going to be able to do it in large chunks. With the HBO series coming out next year I have more incentive to cover them soon. I have not read them but I have heard nothing but good things about them so I am looking forward to it. Hopefully they rise above a lot of what passes for fantasy these days.

The place of honor at the end of my ramblings here goes to the Discworld novels. I've been reading these since the late 80's and thinking about them now they are the fourth leg of my "triangle of fantasy greatness" that  I mentioned above, which is somehow appropriate. They can be read in almost any order but I have a soft spot for those initial Rincewind books, Mort, and Reaper Man. They are the fantasy equivalent of the Hitchiker's Guide (another major work in my developmental period) and if you like that style of humor you will appreciate them but if you liked that AND have read a bunch of fantasy novels good and bad over the years you will feel like you finally found a home when you start reading those. As a fantasy world the Discworld is better described than most serious fantasy novels. The characters and organizations have more internal consistency than a lot of them too so they meet the real test of quality - they aren't just funny they're good. If you haven't read one then find one at a used bookstore and work it in to your schedule - they're short so it won't take long. I'm betting if you're reading this blog you will probably end up liking it and looking for more.

Anyway that's a chunk of my fantasy lit background  and my view of some of the peaks and valleys of the genre over the last 30 years. The biggest problems I see are that the books are too long, too many authors write sequel after sequel because they can and not because the story demands it, and that much of fantasy has been colored by the assumptions of D&D  as a generation of authors grew up playing it and another generation grew up reading it. These are not universal issues - there are good books out there - but I do hope we see a return to shorter works, self contained novels or trilogies at most. In today's short-attention-span world it seems like it would be a natural path to follow. I hope it comes about.

Gaming Fiction Review - Corsair

This is the second book in the "Blades of the Moonsea" trilogy by Richard Baker which are some of the first books set in the 4E timejumped version of the Forgotten Realms. I reviewed Swordmage, the first book in the series here so you can look that over if you are interested. In short, I liked it and was looking forward to the next book.

Headline: This is another good story with a slightly different flavor than the last

As in the first book I found the writing level to be a step up from most D&D novels. Maybe it's just this author, maybe it's a deliberate move with this series, but for whatever reason it is refreshing.

The main character is again Geran Hulmaster and he is supported by his halfling friend and a tiefling warlock met in the prior book. The characters are not especially deep but Geran is reasonably well drawn for a fantasy protagonist. I would like more motivational insight and less of the "what he has done" type of internal discussion but this is a very minor nitpick. He is mainly motivated by a desire to preserve his family's holding and his friends' safety which is good enough. His friend Hamil is a classic loyal sidekick and not much more while Sarth the tiefling warlock is enigmatic at best, speaking little and revealing less. I would like to see a little more of Sarth's background in the next book or in a completely separate book about him.

The story in this one begins soon after the end of Swordmage. In Swordmage the main character returns home after a long absence, discovers some trouble at home, then discovers even more trouble at home, and manages to resolve both by the end of the book, telling a complete story. I'm being vague to avoid spoilers, but the general arc is that in the end he has resolved the immediate threats to his home but other threats and loose ends remain.In this book, the rising threat is piracy, in particular one group of pirates. Another more subtle threat develops in the background and comes to prominence at the end of the story and will presumably be the focus of book 3. The anti-piracy story however is the main focus of the book and it is a good one. Duels on deck, chases at sea, journeys to a weird new land, ramming speed, and haunted ruins all make an appearance. The latter third of the book in particular felt a lot like some of the 70's era fantasy involving "weird" fantasy ala Elric and some of the stranger places he visited, and I mean that in a good way. I really liked this element and it's the first time I've felt that way about a D&D novel.

The villains both old and new are interesting and have realistic enough motivations in that what they do makes sense. They also are not stupid and do not constantly fail - it's nice to see some of the badguys' plotting actually work out as intended. There are 3 main villains and unlike in some novels they are all distinct and I don't think the reader will have any trouble keeping track of who is who - I felt it was worth mentioning as this is not always the case where evil wizards or priests pile up interchangeably over the course of a novel. This is not the case here.

The resolution of the story is satisfying and has an almost Empire Strikes Back feel to it - major goals are accomplished but significant setbacks are also in place, kind of like Empire. This is also the middle part of a trilogy, like Empire. This is not a bad thing, just an observation. The third book should be interesting.

This is a D&D novel so how does that part work? In short it's good. I like to nitpick game-based novels that don't follow the rules of their own universe but I don't see any of that here. It feels like a high-heroic to low paragon level type adventure. There are no super-powered magic items, no weird powers coming out of nowhere, and monsters behave the way they should according to what we know of them from the monster manuals. Also, let me repeat what I said in the first review:

 What's refreshing is what it's not: It's also not a Zhent plot, not a Bane plot, not some weird new supervillain-esque shape-changing creature from another plane, it's not Cyric attempting to subvert the goddess of magic or Nethereese or Red Wizards or Drow or any of the other overused meta-plot bad guys from the swirling vortex of bad Forgotten Realms novels. There are no harpers. Elves have only a minimal influence on the story - primarily the training of the title character as Swordmages are an Elven thing. No Elminster. No Dracoliches. No Seven Sisters. No personal appearances by gods of any kind.

I really like that this has continued. It shows that there are other things going on in the wide world of the Forgotten Realms besides the standard villain groups and the heroes that oppose them. More books like these can only improve the Realms as a vast, diverse world where anything can happen and it doesn't always require a deity or an epic-level hero to start it or end it.

So, this is a good story about a hero and his companions taking care of business and expanding their horizons a bit as they try to protect their friends and family from danger within and without and it's one of the best D&D novels out there.  I am really looking forward to the next book.

Motivational Monday

The Disposable Campaign - A Manifesto

In the early days of RPG's, most players I know and most articles I read assumed that a "Campaign" was a long-term thing. Many articles were written on world design, making it real, making it coherent, making sure your player's had something to do in it, crafting NPC's they will know for years, etc.

In practice, most campaigns were short-lived mish-mashes of published adventure modules, stuff out of dragon, and homebrewed material. I doubt most of them lasted more than a school year as most of the players and DM's were in school in those days.

So much effort was expended in creating a thing which was almost never going to be allowed to fully flower.  Vast colored and detailed hex-paper maps, graph-paper maps of cities and towns on a 1 square = 10' scale, NPC's with back stories, personalities, and families of their own, magic schools, temple hierarchies, noble houses' family trees detailed out over several sheets of notebook paper - all of these were lovingly created and I would guess 75% of them ended up languishing in a notebook or a box somewhere for years before eventually being tossed out in the trash. Such a waste...

I was a part of this too. Before all of the boxed campaign worlds became so popular most people wrote their own world. The '81 D&D Expert set in particular was a crime against DM's as it included a country and a world-scale hex map as examples of campaign design and a bunch of mapping symbols to be used on  hex paper when mapping your own. To this day a black triangle inside a hexagon screams "mountain" to me and any hex map I do ends up looking a lot like those old D&D maps. Maps speak powerfully to some people and I am one of them. Gamers in particular seem to have it more often than the general population. This combination of examples and tools set off a storm of creativity and the sad thing is much of it was never used because the campaigns never got off the ground or lasted very long if they did.

Now I have no statistical evidence of this. I see campaign sites on the web where people have outlined the campaign they have been running for 30 years. I think those are by far the exception rather than  the rule, and if you look closer many times the group in question gets together once a year or twice a year to play their old characters - they haven't been running weekly or biweekly games since 1985 in most cases.

So something occurred to me about 5 years ago, has been slowly building since then and crystallized for me really this year: Role-playing campaigns have traditionally been treated as permanent or long-term things when they really should be treated as expendable and consumable. Building and running a campaign shouldn't be comparable to buying a house  - it's buying a computer. Something you expect to use a lot for a few years at most and then replace.

This started to get easier when 3rd Edition D&D introduced the concept of the level cap: Characters max out at 20th level and then retire. Prior to this character advancement was open ended with no defined limit (other than racial limits) so no thought was given to "when does the campaign end" and this was despite the fact that I only ever got one character up to 20th level - and that was insanely powerful when a 9th level fighter was considered "high level". Now 4th edition D&D goes a step further and breaks it down into Tiers and sketches out what a typical adventuring party is doing at each tier (Heroic = local problems, Paragon = national problems, Epic = world problems).

This is also expedited by the vast number of campaign worlds published over the last 30 years. Is someone really going to look at all of the options out there (plus the option of making their own) and pick one with the idea that "that's it - I'm going to run Eberron for all of my D&D from now on?" Why limit yourself?

Do yourself a favor. Next time you start up a new RPG campaign, put a limit on it. Say to your group that you're going to run it for the next year and you're assuming that you will play twice a month, so that's 24 sessions. Alternatively pick a level limit - say that everyone is going to start at 10th and the goal of the campaign is to get to 20th. After that it's time for a new game.

This also frees you from the tyranny of canon. One of the upsides of published campaign settings is that there is usually a considerable amount of history and lore to delve into - it makes for a richer world and lets your players dig in if they like that kind of thing. The downside is trying to make sure your world stays in line with the published material if it's still being actively published. Stop worrying about that! It doesn't affect your campaign because it's YOUR campaign - not the company's! Pick a starting year in your published world, say everything up to now in canon is good, but what happens from here on out is up to the PC's not some pre-scripted list in a book somewhere.

Now if you like a particular campaign world or if you have crafted your own, this doesn't mean you have to toss that world out. When this campaign is over, you can set the next one in  the same world but you have a whole new set of choices. Last game set in Cormyr? Start this one in Waterdeep. Last campaign was a rebellion era free-trader game? Make the new one a clone-wars era Jedi + special forces game.  Did one of your PC's become king of a nation? Start the next game 20 years later as the throne is threatened by an invasion or take a real jump and move it up 100 years, change up a few things but leave in a lot of the familiar and have a blast with it!

Designing your own world? Focus on where your PC's will be, not on indexing an entire civilization. The old bullseye approach is good here - detail a starting town and the surrounding countryside. Sketch out the kingdom it exists within. Make a few notes on other nations of the world. Add to it when the PC's move in that direction. Heck, let the PC's define some of it. If one player is running a dwarf and you don't have a unique vision of how dwarf society works in this world then let your PC have some say in it -they may surprise you. Don't worry about elven birthday customs unless someone decides it's their birthday and they're an elf. If it's not something you plan to use in the next month or two of running the game then it's not worth nailing down as your PC's may never get to it. Plus you may have a better idea by then anyway so it saves you the mental anguish of erasing what you have already written and replacing ii with new material.  Don't try to make this your Magnum Opus - you don't need it. you just need a world your players like to play in.  Most of us DM's have a sort of masterwork in us somewhere - a grand campaign, a super-detailed world or setting, or a homebrew set of rules that will cover everything the way we want it to be covered. My Philosopher's Stone is a systems with all the gonzo awesomeness of a Rifts for background, character concepts, and art but with a mechanically reasonable and balanced mechanical system like Hero or 4E to run it with. The thing it, you don't have to have that to have a good time, so don't overkill.

By looking at the campaign as a finite thing, a consumable good rather than a durable good, you free up your game to go wherever you and your players want it to go. Campaign guides are not Bibles - they are material to be consumed for your game, not something to be preserved for future generations in an untouched state. Forget beating Drizzt or shooting down Vader - if your players wreck Waterdeep fighting off the tarrasque that's an epic story and the Realms will be just fine. You are not responsible for keeping the world safe from your players - it's there for your players! Blow stuff up! Shock your players! Let them know the world is wide open and let them impress you!

My Personal Gaming Epiphany for 2010

 
While putting yesterday's post together I realized I needed to share one of my realizations that  really only came about this year. 
I realized a while back that different games had the "fun" in them distributed differently. When I was running 3rd edition D&D most of my fun as the DM came in the prep work while the actual playing of the game was kind of a chore a lot of the time. Call it 75-25 in favor of prep.

When I ran D20 Star Wars it was about 50-50 as the players really broke out of their box and had fun with it.

With most Super Hero RPG's it's been about 50-50 as it's fun to design villains and plots and it's fun to see what the PC's do with those. It's a strong 50-50

Then I finally got to run a Savage Worlds campaign and it went to 25-75 and it was a revelation - prep was very light and was mainly the "good parts" - characters and plots - without a lot of mechanical grind. Even combat, usually the most complicated part of a typical RPG, plays very quickly and is not the time sink that it is in almost every other game.

Then I went to D&D 4 and I found the same thing. I had heard that prep was easier with with 4E but I didn't see how until I had actually run a few sessions and designed a campaign. Lessening both the prep time and complication for the DM combined with smoothing out combat and task resolution makes the game much more fun to play and much more rewarding. This has been a huge revelation for me in 2010 and has revitalized my interest in maintaining multiple campaigns in a big way. It's the main reason 4E has become the main game for me when it comes to actual playing time.

The funny thing is that I then discovered the same thing with the Basic D&D campaign. It's easy to prep for and easy to run as combat is simple and it leaves a fair amount up to the DM by leaving out a skill system. I know this feature is a part of the old-school manifesto but it's worth testifying - it does exist and it is real. It encourages a more fast and loose playstyle that fits well with the uncomplicated combat system. Which is the other "feature" of old-school D&D - combat is over in a hurry, at least at low levels.

I have discovered that having fast-playing combat rounds makes a big difference. With Basic D&D you really only have a few options and no multiple attacks, so each player's turn goes quickly which means each round goes quickly. Savage Worlds has a similar speed because the action system is simple and clear and also because most opponents are mooks - one wound puts them down and out of combat, leaving the climactic parts of the fight to a few "wild cards" who can take multiple wounds. D&D 4E took a page from this with the minion rules where one hit point puts them out of the fight. Another part of this is systems that use opposed rolls  where a combatant is either in or out of the fight which eliminates the potential grind of chewing through a mass of hit points. Mutants and Masterminds and even d6 Star Wars use a similar kind of system.

Now there is one important difference. with 4E; It does not feature opposed rolls - it embraces a massive hit point system for PC's and for many opponents. Normally that should lead to longer combats and often it does but 4E offsets this with minions and by giving each PC a nice clean action system (similar to Savage Worlds) while also giving them more choices within those rounds. Character-specific At-Will, Encounter, and Daily powers combined with a list of maneuvers anyone can do means that each class has many choices during combat but the organization of the power cards means that those choices are easily referenced during play. Combat does take longer than a fight in Basic D&D or Savage Worlds but it's typically more interesting per-round than those games and each player's turn still typically takes less time than in say D&D 3E. Eliminating multiple attacks per round made a huge difference there.

Now I'm a crunch guy going way back. I mapped out many a dungeon on graph paper way back when. I built vehicles for GURPS. I built ships and tanks and guns using Fire, Fusion, and Steel for both Traveller New Era and Traveller 4. I still have hundreds of variant mech designs for Mechwarrior and Battletech campaigns. I still have Champions Heros and Villains from 25 years ago (complete with magic-marker costume designs) because I might need them again some day. I've been playing rules-heavy simulationist tactical RPG's for 30 years where facing, cover, armor values, penetrations values, and fractional accounting all mattered and I've had a ton of fun with them. But it has gotten harder over the years to work in those games as jobs and kids and girlfriends or wives have soaked up a larger fraction of my time. Software tools have made some of that easier to do, from mapping software to spreadsheets but it's still an issue of prep time vs. play time. Plus, when a fair chunk of your game prep requires a spreadsheet, then it's starting to look suspiciously like work instead of fun.
 
A slight digression: I've owned and played SFB and ASL for many years. They are massive, heavily detailed boardgames intended to simulate reality in exhausting detail. It can take an hour or more to resolve one turn. I spent many years playing them and I still have a pile of stuff for them in my garage but I haven't played either one in 10 years. It takes a lot of time to learn the rules, a lot of time to set up a scenario, and a lot of time to play the game even after you get past the learning stage. I have also found that a lot of times winning the game comes down to who can find a situation where they know the rules better than the opponent and can take advantage of it - it turns into a game of "gotcha" won when a player discovers he can pull obscure rule A212.51 where Russian conscripts in a wooden building hex in december of 1941 or 42 will refuse to fire at an opponent more than 2 hexes away as they are busy setting up a still rather than watching for enemy troops. It's not really tied to player skill, it's tied to player memorization capability.

As boardgames got more and more complicated a "light game" movement started in the 90's and has led to the Euro Games revolution and the popularity they enjoy now. Wargames finally saw some of this especially in the last 5 years with Command and Colors and Combat Commander and similar games that cover traditional wargame subjects but use things like block pieces and cards for combat resolution and to handle details rather than 500 pages of rules and a bunch of tables. The level of historical results tends to be similar to the older way of doing things but a turn takes 5 minutes instead of an hour. There are also usually only 5-10 pages of rules to learn, lowering the barrier to entry for teaching the game. Both of these are huge wins and make for a much better game overall. There is a place for a game with 5,000 1/2 inch counters on an 8' X 6' map of the Eastern Front but it's not something you can set up and finish in an evening. With the newer boardgame designs I can and isn't that why we buy games? To play them and have fun? Preferably with friends and not alone in a basement trying to refight D-Day solo because no one else wants to learn the rules or put up with kids and cats knocking over stacks of counters? It's a design revolution and it's a good one in just about every way.

RPG's are undergoing a similar change as what board wargames have been doing for the last 5 years. Sure, there will still be some old-school rules-heavy unique subsystem games - I wouldn't have it any other way. But more and more I think you will see one of two approaches:

1) The rules light fast to play and fun to play systems like Savage Worlds where speed of play trumps realism. There is room here for debate over how much detail to include vs. how much to skip to streamline play. The main advantage here is that you can get a lot more done in an evening of play than you can with an older more detailed ruleset. Comparing original flavor Deadlands to SW Deadlands Reloaded there is much less detail in the newer version and fewer unique mechanics for different characters which is a loss, but combat and task resolution is so much quicker in play now that a group can move through a lot more adventure in a set period of time than they could  in the old one. Combat is still interesting and exciting but it takes a tenth of the time it used to. Plus with less focus on details it encourages players to come up with interesting actions rather than looking up the rules for doing everything and encourages DM's to do the same - less book-flipping at the table is a good thing IMO and it makes a huge difference in how time is spent. Mongoose Traveller is this type of game as are Castles and Crusades and maybe the Cinematic Unisystem. Heck, D&D Basic from 1981 follows much of this philosophy and we didn't really even realize it at the time.

2) The still rules heavy game that still plays more cleanly while retaining interesting options in-game approach that is 4th edition D&D. It's not a "lite" game by any means but there is clearly a "system" here and it's easy to figure out how something should work even if there's not specifically a rule for it. It's a "system" and not "a list of stuff you can do" which is what some previous versions of D&D (and other games) felt like. Presentation is a big thing here too as "powers" and "power cards" are much easier to manage in play than 10 pages of 1st level M-U spells and their descriptions, especially when the insidious character builder automatically sticks the modifiers in right there on the card. I believe Shadowrun 4 moved in this design direction, Hackmaster Basic moves in this direction, and DC Adventures/MnM 3E move in this direction. There is detail in the game but it's applied specifically where it will do the most good and not all over where it will bog down the whole game.

These "new design philosophy" games have made prep quicker and easier than some of the more complicated games of the recent past. They also make it easier and quicker to play without losing much detail and without giving up meaningful choices during play. They are effectively more bang for your limited playing time buck and for those of us who still have dreams of playing like we did back in those summers between school years it's a huge win and a very welcome change in design philosophy. It lets me get more done and have more fun than I have in a long time and to me that's really the point of the whole thing anyway.

I noticed this shift after my first session of Savage Worlds. I saw it again when I broke out Basic D&D and then was pleasantly surprised when going through the 320 page 4E Player's Handbook that "hey, this is really pretty simple". I realized that I was getting a lot more out of each session than I had been when running my 3E games. I'm not trying to run down 3E -I had a lot of fun running it for 9 years - but it's just a different feel. Between the design goals, the mechanics of these newer-style games, and the presentation of them, I feel like there is a real improvement in the way they play vs many games of the past or ones with different design philosophies. I used to come out of game sessions drained, worn-out, ready to go to bed and not wanting to look at the game for a day or two. Now I am energized before, during, and after and kind of sorry when the time comes to stop - there's so much more we can do! My players seem happier too. It makes it a lot easier to run multiple games over a weekend - kind of like when we were 13 and that was normal for us. It's a good thing and I hope it continues for a long time to come.

It's the End-of-October Gaming Update

Well I thought I would take a break from the usual updates and reviews to collect my thoughts about where my gaming situation stands. These are the kind of working DM posts I like to see on messageboards so hopefully someone else likes them too.

D&D 4E is the hot interest for me right now. It's taken over the majority of my actual playing time plus most of my planning time as well. Something just clicked for me when re-reading it in the spring and now I have 2 active campaigns and binders of ideas and outlines for about 4 more piling up on a bookshelf nearby. I have a few issues with how a few things changed and a few issues with why things changed but the main feature is that it just works. It has my creative juices flowing again and it has my players trying different approaches to things far more than they have in the last 5 years. Heck, least session they actually avoided a frontal assault on a defended position by using skills and succeeding at a skill challenge! That has not happened for a long time in a D&D campaign (and has ended a campaign or two as a result) and was pretty amazing to watch. I expect 4E to be the main game for our group for quite some time to come - maybe even long enough to run all of those campaigns I'm thinking up.

The Phlan campaign is up to Session 11 and Session 12 will happen tonight so I have some writeups to post.  It's going well and the middle of the heroic tier has really crystallized over the last few weeks as far as what I want to include. I had a vision of the beginning and the end points since before we started but the middle had a fair amount of blank space and that's really coming together now. We've been playing almost weekly recently so it's humming along nicely. The party is at 3rd now and will soon hit 4th.

The Gray Vale campaign had session 3 a week or so back and may work in session 4 this weekend but Halloween may cut it short too. It's on an every other weekend schedule at best so progress is a little slower but they are at 2nd level and headed to 3rd.

D&D Basic is still on the radar. The recent flurry of excitement and disappointment over the new red box has kept this spark alive, plus I like the little campaign area I came up with for it. We at least need to finish up B1 or B2 before I let the dust gather on it again, though I would like to work in Isle of Dread too. We'll see what time allows. It's definitely second priority behind the apprentices 4E campaign but it will progress again soon. The party here is at 2nd or 3rd except for the Elf who is still at 1st though he is very close.

AD&D is still in my head too, but is probably on the back burner for now. I still want to do the Temple-Giants-Drow-Demonweb campaign but I'm having a tough time finding a consistent place to fit it in on the schedule. There isn't a lot of rules overhead with this as I have acquired PHB's for everyone it's just a matter of finding a good regular time that people can make. I was thinking Sundays but with football season in full swing I don't necessarily want to give that up and Sunday afternoons are also when I sometimes fit in the apprentice campaigns. now the plan is to let them play in this one too, but it would come at the expense of the Basic game and maybe some of the 4E campaign too. With busy kids Sunday afternoons are about the only time we don't have some kind of commitment to something. Plus some of my other players just aren't available Sunday afternoons. I will figure it out eventually but for now it's hanging out there in space waiting to begin.

Star Wars d6 - a really fun game that can be run quite well with just a rulebook and one adventure - though of course I do have a shelf full of supplements for it. We haven't played in a while because I have all 3 apprentices playing in it and that means I have 4 schedules to sync up - tricky. It may get worked in this weekend, we'll just have to see.

Necessary Evil has been squeezed out to a degree because 4E is the cool new kid and because I only have my 4 original players in it. With the D&D group expanded to 6, the idea was that we would play NE on those nights when only part of the group was available. The problem is that almost everyone has been available almost every time, so we aren't having to fall back on it. This is not a terrible problem to have but it does mean that NE has been quiet for a while. I do love the system -it's the opposite of D&D in many ways - and it will be played more in the future.

Potential additions:

I've been thinking about working in one more RPG to accommodate one last combination of available apprentices and I'm leaning towards superheroes. I thought about more D&D but one of them is younger and might not quite be ready for all of it yet. I thought about Star Wars Saga edition but I don't want to run two different versions of Star Wars at the same time. I'm really leaning towards Marvel Superheroes because the characters are familiar, the color chart thing makes it pretty easy to adjudicate, and I have lots of stuff for it including maps and counters and heroclix figures. I want it to be low-maintenance and high-fun in actual play and I think that system might just do the trick. I'm not 100% just yet but I'm looking at material and figuring out what we might do. Savage Worlds is another option but I'm not sure what to run for them with it. Deadlands might be a little much but Pirates could be fun. My other thought is to pull out Heroquest or Warhamer Quest and let them fight their way through a truly boardgame version of D&D.

All of these Apprentice games might seem like they are competing for space but they really aren't - at any given time I typically only have 3 of them at home with only 2 of them interested in playing a game, so one challenge is to have a sort of standing option ready to play with whichever combination of kids is available. Progress may be slow but as long as they're having a good time then it's time well-spent.

Other Random Thoughts:

I really like Hero System but it usually takes a while for a new player to learn it well and it can look intimidating too. I do like it though. Maybe down the road a bit.

The new 4E-based Gamma World is out now and it looks interesting. I have every version of GW published to date and it's a game I really have become attached too over the decades but I'm not sure when I would work it in. I will probably pick it up soon but I wouldn't mind firing up a 2nd edition game of it right now and the only reason I can't is time and Apprentice availability.

I've though about switching over whole-hog to d20 games for all of my campaigns and shelving everything else for now to build on that whole similar-system-synergy and make it easier for new players. D&D 4E, Star Wars Saga, and Mutants and Masterminds (2E -I haven't gotten in to 3E yet) would cover enough cool things that I could run for years and be just fine and the players would have some serious system knowledge after just a short time. There are some differences (powers vs. talents vs...powers?) but I don;t think that would be a huge issue. The problem is I really like some of my other systems.

Traveller is a great classic game that is in a real renaissance now with the Mongoose edition but I think that with kids at least it will always lose out to Star Wars when it comes down to "we have 2 hours - which game do you want to play" so it will be awhile before it gets used again.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is another great game and is really not for kids so it will have to wait until the grown-up group comes up with serious extra time or decides that D&D sucks - so it will be awhile here too.

Rifts - ah Rifts. The kids would probably be all over it if I showed them all the books.The system is a cluster-f nightmare of 80's heartbreaker design but it does work to a point. It's just ugly and largely makes no sense. I think after the clean design of 4e and the elegant simplicity of Savage Worlds and Star Wars d6 that I may lack the ability to fight through this anymore.  A Hero conversion is a possibility but it would take some work and I'm not sure it's worth it when I have a half-dozen other games I can run and have a bunch of fun with a tenth of the preparation.

Anyway I have one more "thought" post in me and then the session summaries will resume next week so stay tuned.