First 5E Run Today

I'm actually going to be playing, not running, so this should be fun. I expect I'll have more to say next week.

New Games, Old Games, New Gamers, and Old Gamers

Barking Alien had a post yesterday inspired by a post from Monsters and Manuals last week that started some wheels turning for me. Rather than restrict it to a comment on those worthy blogs I decided to make it a post here as it goes to the heart of what I do with the hobby. So go read those really quick if you haven't then come back here for the next chapter.

Noisms uses the phrase "the tiresomeness of new systems". I sort of get that, but for me the "tiresomeness" usually comes in with new editions of games I already have that don't really change anything. Especially when they come out far too quickly. Truly "new" systems are interesting to me. For example:

• Third edition D&D was amazing at the time - such a radical revamp of the game that still felt like the game!
• I thought D&D 3.5 at only 3 years into the new system was an annoying money grab on many levels, even if there were some areas that could stand to be tuned up. 
• Pathfinder, 6+ years after that, with a stated goal of re-balancing and reexamining the whole system without completely changing it made sense to me, even if it wasn't completely new. 
• Fourth edition was so much change I hated it at first but I eventually came around and got to like it for its strengths and it definitely felt like a completely new game. 
• Fifth edition I am not settled on. There are innovations there, but there is a lot of change that I am not sure is an improvement. I need more time with it, but I enjoyed reading through it to see what had changed.

Did you miss this one?

There are other examples:

• After 20+ years of picking up Champions books I skipped the latest edition because I just didn't need another slightly tweaked set of Hero rules. 
• M&M 3E was a fairly significant revamp to M&M 2E - recognizable, but not instantly compatible.  
• ICONS was a very different approach to supers and I loved it. Mixing elements of Fate (which I did not have at the time) and Marvel Super Heroes (which I love) with an emphasis on simplicity and speed made a very entertaining mix and introduced me to some new ways of doing things.
• Marvel Heroic then came along and turned everything upside down with a radical new approach to Supers that I still think is one of the bigger innovations of the last ten years. It's completely different mechanically than the others I mention, but still feels at least as much like a superhero game as they do. 

There are many older games I like just fine. I prefer older versions of Gamma World, for example. If I wanted to play a "pure" cyberpunk game then CP2020 is what I would reach for on the shelf. For Star Wars I'm doing d6 or Saga Edition, not FFG's new stuff. One of the primary reasons may be that I almost never feel like I have exhausted the possibilities of any system that I like. Run a game for a year and I probably have a dozen new ideas for campaigns that I will never get to run. About the only reason I would skip an old game is if there's a version I think is truly better mechanically, to the point it's not worth the hassle of that older version.  

There are many newer games I prefer - Marvel is one example. I like Mongoose's edition of Traveller probably best of all. Newer is not always better, but it's almost always worth a look. Icons is better to me than Heroes Unlimited. 

Sure, there is some attraction to running a game that I already have, that's not being expanded every month by a publisher in the form of $35 hardbacks, and that I know like the back of my hand. I'd happily run that game, and I have.

However, I also like to see what's new, what someone is doing with an old setting that has new mechanics, or someone tweaking old mechanics to use with a new setting. Just, show me something innovative or interesting, don't just sell me the same old thing with a couple of tweaks (40K, I'm looking at you). Push me to the point I dislike it at first and that it takes a second or third reading to truly grasp it. Take a good setting and system and streamline it like Deadlands Classic vs. Deadlands Reloaded. Take an old setting and give it a new mechanical overlay like DC Heroes to DC Adventures. Do something completely different like Numenera. In short give me a reason to care, something new to chew on besides replacing d20 rolls with 2d10 rolls or changing up the skill list. 

As BA mentions in his post, it's an ongoing experience, a learning experience. I don't ever expect to find that one perfect game - I pretty much reject the concept - but I do think some games can just be flat out better than others and I acknowledge that someone may have a way  of looking at things game-wise that is awesome that I would never have come up with myself. That's part of what makes it fun.

Coda: The preference for existing systems is not restricted to the older generation:

• When FFG's Star Wars games came out I talked with them about getting a copy of the Beginner Set to try it out. "Why?" was the response. "We have Saga and it works just fine" - and this is coming from the then 14-year old. He didn't want to be bothered with learning the new system, he just wanted to play the one we already had. In contrast he hated d6 when we tried it because for him and his generation the prequel movies carry a lot of weight and the d6 system just is not good for that. Of course, neither is "Edge of the Empire" and that's probably at the heart of it. Saga best fits his vision of Star Wars and that's that.
• He likes pretty much every edition of D&D (and Pathfinder) but he's cautious about 5th and would just as soon play one of the older editions as spend time figuring out yet another version. 
• He will play pretty much any superhero game if he has the chance and recognizes that Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Heroic, M&M 3, and Icons all have a different feel and likes that he has so many options. 

Prismatic Spray

This is in the 5E PHB and I liked it:

I started thinking about it. To me, Prismatic Spray is one of those iconic D&D spells, but I don't think I've seen an illustration of it before. I also don't think I've had a character cast it since 1st or 2nd edition, partly because I haven't played as much, partly because I don't play a ton of wizards, and partly because it's a pretty high level spell. Can a 7th or 8th level spell be "iconic"? I'm not sure, but if it can be this is definitely one of them - hey, it's "death by rainbow". I also don't know the origin, or at least I don't remember coming across it, but I suspect it's from one of the Jack Vance dying earth novels. 

Anyway, it struck me and I thought I would share.

4E, 5E, and Pathfinder

So in the last few weeks I've been diving into several different games - skimming through 4E to shake the rust off in anticipation of finishing up Red Hand of Doom (finally!), keeping up with Pathfinder for my other ongoing campaign, and then reading all the new 5th Edition D&D material. There have been others too, but those three are basically different flavors of the same game and spurred some thoughts I wanted to get down. Sometime soon we will be deciding on our "main" campaign for next year and this kind of thing influences what I'm thinking.

 For cinematic fantasy combat, and I mean mechanically well-defined cinematic combat, not roll-high-and-we'll-describe-something-epic combat, 4E is the king to me. No other system comes close as far as having this kind of stuff built in to the mechanics of the game. Forced movement, reactions,  and interrupts force the whole party to pay attention even when it's not their turn. This does come at a price, as it does take some time to play out a battle but it pushes for a different kind of D&D experience - less emphasis on hacking through six rooms of grunts to get to the orc chieftain, and an idea that maybe there should be fewer, but more meaningful/interesting fights. It works with older style adventures - I've converted a few, pretty faithfully - but it did have me wondering about starting from a different set of assumptions.

More importantly, it rewards teamwork in some amazing ways, with powers and abilities that build on each other. Synergies can build between all 4-5 members of a party and let them do some very cool things. The downside here is that if one or two people can't make it on game night those benefits are lost and while it can be fun to look for some more focused ways to work together, it can be difficult to adjust expectations when those force multipliers disappear. In my experience, it was the least-forgiving edition when it came to working around missing party members. All of that niche protection and ability to grow your characters with complimentary abilities creates a sort of web between them that is damaged when you lose a member. In he end this became a bigger problem for our campaign than the length of combat. If we take it into Paragon Tier for 2015 then we're going to have to make some different assumptions about party size and composition to try and keep the game on a more regular schedule.

In contrast to 4th Edition, 5th Edition dials back the detail in a big way. Now I have not run it or played it yet, but I've made a character for a game coming up this weekend and there is just ... less there. I had no problem coming up with a concept and working the mechanics to fit it but the lessened game detail around races and skills, the change in how feats are used within the system, and the general de-emphasis on "numbers" and detail make it feel smaller. There's more detail than with, say, an old school Basic D&D character, but not as much as you might think.  I do expect it to play much faster than 4E when it comes to combat, and its looseness when it comes to non-combat activities should keep things moving too.  It's interesting, and we're going to explore it.

I've seen a  lot of interest in Backgrounds as one of 5E's new features. They are interesting, but 4E had a similar concept called ... Backgrounds! The Forgotten Realms alone had over 20 of them. Just like 5th they were a way to connect your character to the setting, whether by occupation, race, affiliation, or something else, and they included some kind of mechanical benefit like extra  skill choices. I was glad to see them carried over and given a more prominent place in 5th but the current options are pretty limited. I'm betting we see more before long.

I expect 5th will do just fine. Those tired of the mechanical complexities of other systems will see it as a breath of fresh air. I do think converting older adventures, especially 1st & 2nd edition adventures, will be pretty easy. I intend to find out myself at some point, but for now it's just speculation. I don't think it will be the ultimate answer for everyone as some people like a fair degree of crunch in their fantasy game.

Speaking of crunch, I've also spent a fair amount of time with Pathfinder over the past year and it has moved from being the "extra" game to feeling like home in a way. It's popular, so it's easy to bounce ideas off of other people. It's incredibly well supported so there are a tremendous number of adventures available and a lot of mechanical options as well.

As a player I find that between stats, race, class, archetype, skills, feats, and traits I can create a character for darn near any concept I can come up with. Traits are a little like Backgrounds, sharing the same purpose at least. Archetypes are an underrated element added to the prior framework by the Pathfinder team that allow for a tremendous degree of tweaking a class to fit a particular concept. Looking at Hero Lab, for Barbarian alone there are 21 archetypes, and I don't have all of them in my HL setup. Mix that in with all of the class options in the current game and I'm comfortable saying it's going to take an extraordinarily picky player who can't find something to match their concept.

As a DM it's become easy enough to run that I enjoy it, being able to focus mainly on the game and less on the overhead of executing the system. It's less involved in many ways than 4E combat, but more detailed than 5E, which leaves me in a place that I am pretty happy to inhabit. A few years ago I would not have believed that a close relative of 3E would be such a comfortable middle ground but that's how it feels right now. Just detailed enough, and yet still fast-moving enough, that it just fits.

So they each have their strengths. If we pick up Stonehell again I'd consider flipping it to 5th Edition just to give it some more flavor without getting too complex. For published adventures, I'm a fan of the Pathfinder Adventure Paths and plan to run those for the next few years, maybe as the consistent "backbone" of my RPG time. I'd love to focus on a more cinematic approach with 4E and if we decide to go that route as a group I will, with a mix of published material, homebrew stuff, and conversions of other adventures. Why limit yourself to just the one game?

Motivational Monday

More Fun With Amazon and 5E

So, this morning I decided to order the only other thing that is out for 5E right now, the first part of the big anti-dragon campaign. Jumped on Amazon, ordered placed, then I noticed this:

Hey now ... is that a glitch? We did decide to sign up for Amazon Prime a while back, but that's normally just 2-day shipping. There was an article I read that said DFW now has some same day delivery but could this be ...

Yep. So for $20 I picked out a full-color hardback adventure and had it delivered straight to the house the same day. I think that's pretty cool.

As for the adventure, well hopefully it's good and I can do something with it sometime soon. If not then I'll come complain about it on the internet like everyone else.

Thrifty Gamer Alert : Savage Worlds Sale

From Drive Thru RPG:

Savage September is here, folks, and that means great deals on all kinds of Savage Worlds titles starting tomorrow and lasting through till the end of the month.

Starting Monday, September 8, we'll have a huge list of Savage Worlds titles on sale for 15% off. You can check those out here starting Monday.

Then, every weekend this month, we'll also have some really great deals on core Savage Worlds titles from notable publishers.

This weekend, starting tomorrow, look for amazing bargains on Savage Worlds books from Savage Mojo!

Game on!

Sounds like a fun month for Savage Worlds players.

Quick Look at Traveller 5

Well, this arrived last week:

After some experience with the early playtest versions of T5 I have dropped in and out of the T5 discussions over the years and until recently had not really bothered to look into the status post-kickstarter etc. This copy was a good deal on eBay and as I page through it I'm beginning to understand why.

For one, it's huge:

It's thicker than the Pathfinder core rulebook, and that's one of the heftier ones on the shelf. To think this game started out with 3 little black books of 48 pages each ... this one is over 650 pages. Sure, there's a lot in there, but even Mongoose Traveller's core book is under 200 pages. I am not normally opposed to the single-rulebook approach but there is so much here I think it turns into a negative on some level. When you're talking options with someone who isn't as into RPG's, pulling out a rulebook that looks like a thick college textbook is not a strong selling point. It was a problem for Hero 5th edition and it's a problem here too, I suspect. Especially compared to some of the other options.

Second, it uses that !#@$#@^% dice mechanic that showed up either in 4th edition or in that early playtest of 5th. The basic idea is to roll under a target number which is typically stat + skill +/- modifiers. Picking a lock might involve Dex (8) + Intrusion (3) with a -1 for crappy tools, giving a target number of 10. To show varying levels of difficulty, we roll dice - an easy task would mean rolling 1D, while a difficult task might involve 3D or more. So on top of the already counter-intuitive roll-low system, now we add on a layer of "rolling more dice is bad" - gah!

I see some of the benefits of doing it this way - hey, your raw stat number really matters in this system - but I am not looking forward to trying to sell that to gamers who have been playing everything from a whole bunch of d20 games where roll high = good to games like Savage Worlds/Star Wars/Star Trek where dice explode and games like Hero where rolling more dice is always better!

Contrast this with classic Traveller and Mongoose Traveller where the basic system is roll an 8+ on 2d6, modified for stats, skills, and situational modifiers. That same lockpick check now is 2d6 +1 (Dex mod) + 3 (Skill mod) -1 (bad tools) to beat an 8+.

I'll post a more detailed look as I dig into the massive tome, but my initial reaction, and this is as a Traveller fan since about 1981, is that it's not great for new players and not all that great for old players either. MegaTraveller was my favorite version until Mongoose came out, and it had a lot more structure to checks and systems than Classic did, which I thought was a plus. Here that systemization is carried to the extreme with everything fitting into a neat little box to the point that even I think it's too much. I suspect those who like "game as art" will hate it but I also suspect Traveller was never their game anyway. Those who like "game as game" may find that it's turned into such a technical manual that the fun has dissipated right out of the game. I'm not kidding here - there are 9 pages of probability charts showing different numbers of dice and percentages vs target numbers. This begins on page 25. Character generation starts on page 59.

I know I'm going pretty negative here but the initial "hitting the high points" survey of the book left me here. A more in-depth exploration may change it but that's going to take more time and I'm not sure how quickly that's going to happen.

Honestly, if you like Traveller and are not particularly wedded to one of the prior editions, check out Mongoose Traveller. It's well-supported, has mechanics that make sense, and has a respect for the earlier versions that is a really nice touch. The main rulebook is comparable to the original 3 little black books and is plenty to get a campaign going.

More to come.

5E - The Starter Set Review

Yes, I  bought it. I felt like I should own a copy if I'm going to go on about it , and at the Amazon price it's lunch money.

Contents:

• Rule book
• Adventure book
• Pre-gen character sheets
• dice

No poster or maps, no tokens or mini's. The dice are decent, a far cry from the old TSR sets.

The worst part: I've said it before, no character creation rules. I know they take up space, I know there's a free PDF out there now, but the whole point of a roleplaying game is to play a character, traditionally one that you create. Cutting that out of the initial out-of-the-box experience is just the wrong call in my opinion. Maybe you lower the level range to 1-3 instead of 1-5, maybe you raise the price of the box $5, I don't know what the options might have been, but running pre-gens is not the heart of the RPG experience.  

The best part: the included adventure is pretty good.

• It has dungeons
• It has a dragon
• Many "monsters" have notes regarding goals and reasons they might talk to a party or respond with something other than violence. That's a nice touch and opens up a lot of possibilities.
• It's not over-mapped or over-described, so there's "room to breathe" here for the DM
• It's very MMO-like in that many NPCs are there specifically to give out quests. One town especially is a "quest hub" that I expect the party will be coming and going from quite a bit. There's a lot more individual detail but it's similar to the classic B2 style of base area with a lot going on around the countryside. The NPC's will hand out titles/membership in various Realms organizations as well if they like the PC's - that is an especially fun little addition.

Compared to the 4E red box it's very similar but I'll give the 5E set the nod because the adventure is quite a bit better.

Compared to the Pathfinder Beginner Box it is definitely a lesser product as the PF box has more complete rules including character generation, poster maps for the first adventure, and stand-up figures. Keep in mind the PF box is more expensive though.

It's not a terrible value, especially at a discount. The pre-gen approach is not my favorite, but the rest of the set works. If I was giving it to a kid I'd print out the PDF of the Basic Rules and give that to them at the same time for the best possible situation. 

Post-Holiday Update - DC, M&M, and Emerald City Begins!

With a 3-day weekend and all of the Apprentices coming home for at least a day I planned absolutely nothing and paid the price. Red wanted to play 40K, Blaster wanted to play Deadlands, Who wanted to play something with Superheroes, and I was thinking about trying out 5E. Great - no consensus at all! We finally settled on superheroes, but I had done zero prep for anything supers this week. I decided to start the Emerald City Knights adventures for M&M, but they wanted to play in the DC universe ... alright ... the first part isn't really going to change anyway but I'm going to have some homework to do for future sessions. Also ... characters:

• Who took Arsenal, formerly Speedy, Green Arrows old sidekick - who has also had some addiction problems over the years. He was a little disappointed to find out after the fact that he doesn't have a bow in this writeup! We decided he was moving out to the west coast to get away from his old problems and in the wake of the death of a family member.
• Blaster took Batman Beyond - clearly this is some kind of "next generation" campaign in the DCU - and since I didn't have a Hero Lab file for him ended up running him out of the book itself. He's in town running down a case that is honestly pretty vague right now.  
• Red made up his own hero named "Archangel" who is a winged mentalist. No, he hasn't read a ton of X-Men so I don't care about the name - besides, this is DC! As it turns out he didn't recall the finer points of character creation even though Hero Lab declared it legit and this caused a few problems later. He's a local who has been genetically modified by someone into his current state.

Emerald City is a quiet city on the west coast up around Seattle/Tacoma. It hasn't ever had a significant or long-lasting hero presence - but that's about to change. The characters are all downtown when there's an explosion and a silvery cloud whips through downtown, moving on its own with no regard for the wind and blasting out blue bolts of lightning, bringing havoc and devastation to an otherwise nice afternoon. It dissipates as quickly as it appeared but there is a great deal of damage, numerous injured citizens, and some people have ... changed.

After leaping into action to help pull people from damaged cars and clear the rubble from a partially collapsed building (to many thanks), the heroes notice that one of the victims has multiple rubbery arms and is throwing other survivors around. Another is hovering over the area near the center of the destruction and pulling pieces of cars and signs towards her. One more victim is glowing, rotating through the colors of the spectrum, while one more is crumpled on the ground, surrounded by swirling black shapes.  

Of course a fight breaks out - what kind of jerk mugs people during a disaster? - but it's a tough one for our heroes. The octo-man fights BB to a standstill until he and Arsenal bring the mutant down together. The light-guy and the darkness-guy take a few shots and then disappear. Magnetic-girl blows Archangel out of the sky after he takes a few shots at her and his attempts to mind-control her come to nothing. At the end, three battered heroes stand amidst the damaged downtown with an unconscious octo-man as the police and fire finally begin to push past the traffic jams and rubble. Their intent is to ask the "villain" a few questions then turn him over to the authorities but that will have to wait until next time...

DM Notes: The word of the day is "rust" as in it felt like I had never run this game before. Between the character scrambles, the last-minute setting changes, and not having read the rules in months, I was really sloppy and really slow. This is a fairly simple game to run but you wouldn't have known it if you were watching me today. We only spent a few hours doing this and some of that was set-up time, but that's as "off" as I have felt in a long time. I maybe should have run ICONS but we really didn't even consider that option. Some points:

• One was running from the book, two were running from Hero Lab sheets so just the basic "where is this stuff" was a little different between the two, slowing things down
• I'm trying to run 4-5 separate villains with completely different types of powers with no prior review  - that's not a good place to be. Advantages, maneuvers, different action types - it really slowed me down as I realized I don't know what the powers do by sight like I do with say, Champions so I spent some time flipping through books to figure out exactly how some things work. 
• Red was not really thinking about power limits when he made his character and so was not really running at a full PL10, with lots of things like attack 10, effect 5, shorting himself when it came time to roll dice. 
• I'm still not great at managing the transition to M&M's damage system, and it's the one part of the game I think might be hardest for my players to handle, so I need to make it work. That whole resistance roll mechanic with bruised/dazed/staggered/out is not as visceral or intuitive for us as "I did 37 points with my greatsword" and that's hard to embellish when I'm struggling to work the rules and the villain tactics and the players are just as raw as I am. 

Anyway it went alright and they are interested in playing more. It will be a while before we play again and I will have time to refresh myself on the mechanics. I've been so focused on Pathfinder and 5E the last couple of weeks that it's tricky to keep all of the details for all of the games in my head but I think i'll be fine with a re-read when I'm not actually trying to run a game.

The fun part will be re skinning this adventure to fit into the DC Universe. I had started working on this a few months back and then put it aside as we played other games. Looks like it's time to put that back on the front burner. As a campaign it has some railroad in it, but that's a plus if we're going to have some breaks between sessions anyway. I kind of like the idea of time-shifting it forward too, where the sidekicks and younger heroes are taking a place in front, and some of the older heroes are semi-retired. I'm not sure I'm going to stay with that, but I'll be chewing on it for a while. I expect some familiar faces will be dropping in and out regardless.