A 4th Edition Campaign based on Greek Mythology

I talked about this once before here. This is pretty much a straight dump of my outline for the campaign that I wrote up last fall.  I planned and ran (briefly) a game like this using Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved back during one of our 3E D&D breaks and my players did not go for it. I think I could have changed the rules or the setting but I probably should not have done both at the same time with a game system so close to 3E D&D.  Lesson learned, I'm going to try it with 4th edition as its own thing. Some form of this campaign would work using anything from GURPS to Savage Worlds but using 4E lets me cover two bases at once and keep some current system synergies up and going. I also do know about Mazes and Minotaurs but it's not really what I'm aiming at for this game, though I may steal some things from it. 

One of the interesting things about this kind of game as I was making my notes is that it's really more defined by what you cut out. Much of the flavoring comes from the removal of some standards and the pushing to the fore of some not-previously-spotlighted elements of the game - like minotaurs.

The Achaean League Campaign

4E D&D with a Greek Mythological Flavor

• Races
• Humans are most common race in the league
• Minotaurs rule the Fortress Island of Crete and do trade and are sort of friendly with the Achaens (think Klingons in later generation Trek) 
• Eladrin are strange and exotic beings of the woodlands (really nature spirits) and the feywild that do not spend time in the cities but are not hostile and have their own society apart from humanity
• Gnomes are semi-magical beings who live in the woodlands away from most large settlements
• Wilden are creatures of the wild places & the Feywild and tend to be solitary
• Some races do not exist in this world: Half Elves, Half Orcs, Goliaths, Devas, Tieflings Halflings, Elves, Genasi, Drow

• Affects power sources

o Martial is most common

§         Fighters, Warlords are common

§         Rangers, Rogues uncommon

o Divine is next most common

§         Clerics are common

§         Paladins dedicated to one god also common

§         Avengers, Invokers are uncommon and feared as everyone knows what they are - agents of divine wrath

o Arcane is least common

§         Wizards are the “normal” arcane type in Achaea, often thought of as learned scholars more than combat types – not a standard part of an army

§         Warlocks uncommon, regarded with some suspicion

§         Sorcerers uncommon, not widely known as a “type”

§         Swordmages more common among Minotaurs than anything else

o Primal (barbarians, druids, wardens, shaman) is not found in Civilized Achaea - Primal will be "unlocked" if the players end up traveling north into Europe and encountering the barbarian tribes, dwaves, elves, dark elves, and giants that dominate those lands. The Norse gods will probably come into play there as well. This might make a good path for Paragon Tier.

o Psionic (Ardent, Battlemind, Monk, Psion) is not found in Civilized Achaea - Psionic is down with the Egyptian culture to the south and will be discovered with the exploration of that area. Devas and Shifters (favored of Bast?) seem like appropriate races to feature here along with Shardminds and maybe half-orcs. Stuff from Dark Sun might work in here as well if it ever comes up. 

(Go far enough East and maybe Tieflings run Babylon? Dragonborn run Atlantis to the West? Genasi dwell in Hyperborea far to the north?)

• Affects monsters – no orcs or frost giants, lots of giant/dire animals, human opponents, spawn of classic greek beasties like Hydras and Harpies and of course Undead. Centaurs, Satyrs, Dryads and the like wander the countryside and forests and are not always friendly.  

• Affects Deities
• Zeus - Storm Warpriests
• Apollo - Sun Warpriests
• Artemis - Maybe a few longtooth shifters are "Favored of Artemis"? 
• Athena
• Ares
• Hephaestus
• Hera
• Aphrodite - Pacifist Clerics
• Posiedon - Storm Warpriests
• Hades
• Hestia
• Demeter
• Dionysus
• Hecate
• Hermes - popular with travellers and thieves
• Nike - popular with warlords
• Pan - demigod but popular in certain circles.
• Tyche - popular with travellers

Each god has an oracle and a main temple somewhere in the area to be discovered/consulted/restored. May associate one per major city - not really historical but could give more flavor.

• Various fluff/flavor changes
• Weapons and armor are bronze – no game effect but masterwork types should be bronze or iron, not steel. No change to available types
• Armor and weapons may look different
• No crossbows
• Spear/Javelin & sword are the main weapons of the typical warrior. A notable few use hammers or axes but are far less common.
• Magic arms and armor often created by temples so while not common are not always rare and exotic 
• Feywild is known, domain of Pan and Artemis
• Shadowfell is home to Hades

The concept of the campaign is to set it in the time after the first rush of heroes - Heracles, Jason, Perseus etc. - have passed on, when the cities of the Acheans have declined and turned inward while roads and trade and travel have declined as dark forces, no longer checked by the heroes of the previous age, encroach upon the lands. I think the power level of 4E and the general feel of it makes it especially suitable to following in the footsteps of these legends and creating a second golden age 

I don't have a particular big bad guy in mind right now, maybe use Ogremoch or Imix as a titan once imprisoned by Zeus that is breaking loose. The main goal if there is one I see would be to unite the cities of the Achaen League, perhaps in response to an outside threat, perhaps because it's just a good idea - I would probably let my players drive this one. The campaign would begin somewhere near Corinth as I have a ton of information on it from that older campaign. A lot of the early challenges would focus on travel to other cites and shrines and freeing sacred places from darkness and recovering artifacts from the earlier age to help reunite the league - or form it, I'm not sure there needs to have been an earlier one, maybe my pc's get to start it. 

There is also the threat of the older, pre-classical gods that no one speaks of anymore, and all Aberrant creatures are tied to this older pre-human age. Mind-flayers, Beholders, Grell, Aboleths - these are ancient terrors that can still be found in deep or hidden places of ancient power. The whole Far Realm story is out but the nasties are still useable.

For Paragon levels once the League is united then there could be an invasion from Atlantis or Persia (A Halfling empire? That would be different) and they might need the help of the Norse to fend it off. Could end with a nice big mass combat scene. This might involve a world-spanning quest of some kind to recover some truly exotic artifact or material or dead hero.

For Epic 4 titans (one of each element) could break loose and need to be destroyed, maybe with the PC's taking their place in the order of the universe as lords of that element. Maybe a final face-off against a 5th and more powerful Shadow Titan

I need to go back and look at some of the backgrounds and feats and flavor them with some more appropriate names and imagery as at least some of the apprentices will be looking for some kind of divine heritage ala Percy Jackson. I think it's doable. I'm also thinking about working up a custom character sheet and outlawing the character generator for this one but I haven't decided yet.

I'm curious if anyone else has tried this and if so how it went.

Campaign Dissonance

So I started off the year with a plan to get a little more out of my game time by focusing on just a few games for the year. This has worked alright to some degree but not 100% the way I had hoped.

• The ongoing Ruins of Adventure 4E game is cruising along just fine and getting back on schedule this week. After a few skips in the schedule to allow me to play in some one-shots for a change everyone is ready to finish off the tomb of the ogre king and explore the rest of the city.
• The old-school Basic D&D game is played intermittently but going well and we are all happy with it.
• I have restarted the Apprentices 4E campaign set in Impiltur and played one session so far, which they seemed pretty happy with at the time.
• We switched the Star Wars game over to Saga and launched it with a bang.
• Mutants and Masterminds started off with Atomic City Issue Zero as a playtest of the system and has gone precisely nowhere.

I'm happy with Phlan and with Star Wars but the rest is sort of in limbo for now. I had high hopes for Atomic City and I have one Apprentice that really wants to play it and the others are interested but not bugging me every time I see them. I also made some noise about running an AD&D 1E game and one of them is fired up about that. One of them would probably go for a Star Trek campaign too (down Bark!) but only that one, making it not really an option. That's nothing new - about half the time they don't want to eat the same food or watch the same shows either - but it's the first time it's spilled over into the gaming arena. All of them though have been talking about the Ancient Greece game I brought up a while back in an attempt to appeal to their Rick-Riordan fueled mania for gods and heroes. The problem is there's really not a slot for it on the schedule

Which is the real problem - you would think that having multiple kids in the house would make for an easy time getting a game together. I did. Part of it is that with 4 kids spread across elementary, junior high, and now high school, there are practices and homework and social occasions and programs at all kinds of times. Plus, being a blended family there are the usual schedule complications of who goes where when. We've recently ended up with several weekends where one set of kids is present but not the other, making it impossible to keep a party together. This kind of stuff happens but we've had a longer than usual stretch lately and it's really killed the momentum.

Plus I've spent way too much time at Ars Ludi re-reading the West Marches posts and trying to figure out how I could work a campaign like that in while also reading a bunch of posts at The Alexandrian on how he runs his Mega Dungeon and thinking I need to work that in as well. When the actual playing and running slows down the distractions start to creep in.

I was thinking that a commitment to focus on just a few games would let us get more out of them but what it really has done is make it sting even more when we can't stick to any kind of regular schedule. I have material, I have players, I just can't coordinate schedules enough to make things work.

So I'm going to talk to the apprentices tonight and see what they really want to play in March and beyond and try to get back on track.  It may turn out that one 4E campaign + Star Wars + occasional red box adventures is all we can really fit in, and that one 4E game may be Heroic Age Greece and not Impiltur. The Supers game may get set aside for a time until we can really spend some time with it, like this summer. 

I realize it's a good problem to have (as opposed to the typical teenaged sneer at anything mom or dad think is cool) so I'm not unhappy with it, just a little frustrated. 

I'll post up some of the Classical Greece concept tomorrow for ideas and comments.

Grounding Characters in the Campaign

We're not munchkins -we all took 4 ranks in Perform,  we just never use it.

Barking Alien had a thought-provoking post recentlly here.

(That's nothing new- I like the road he travels on that blog so he provokes a lot of thought here)

It got me to thinking - how "into" the game do I need my players to be? How :into" the game do I need to be? The short answer is "It depends" and the long answer is below.

A lot of what I play is D&D. D&D sets up a fair amount of character buy-in for you. Every edition of the game has Alignment, Classes, Races, and Ability Scores, and those 4 things give a player a pretty good start. Once you have them you have some idea what a character looks like, how they act, and what they do for a living. Even within a class this makes a difference -A Str 18, Con 16, Int 8 Fighter? The classic big dumb strong guy. A Str 13 Dex 16 Con 12 Fighter? More of a finesse guy. It's fairly easy to pick out an archetype or even a stereotype and run with it, like Scottish Dwarves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Legolas-type elven archers. Then mix in "Lawful" or Neutral" or "Chaotic Good" and you have a pretty solid picture of a character's broad traits, ready to be refined by violence and looting.

This is probably where my minimum buy-in falls: I need a name, a personality or hook, and preferably a place of origin somewhere in the campaign. If you have that much then I can work with it and the rest of your character will be defined by what happens in the game. A paragraph or two is fine. How you got your powers is fine. The name of your tribe and your father or best friend is fine. A sentence describing the reason why you went adventuring is fine. The name or type of your most hated enemy or most desired goal is fine if you have one.

What I don't need is pages of background story because in most games it has no bearing on things and none of the other players are going to care about your not-so-short story. They care that last session you scored a critical to bring down the red dragon or that you fumbled when you tried to bring down the dragon, not that your hometown was raided by gnolls when you were 6. To me its largely a waste of time and because I don't feel obligated to use any of it you're probably better off not doing it. Plus, if we decide that it matters later on down the road (like say in a supers campaign) then when we decide to cover your origin story and tie it to a major villain, I can't easily do anything with it because you went and wrote a novel before we ever started. If it's going to matter in the campaign then let's cover it during the campaign not before. Would Indy be cooler if he had explained why he was afraid of snakes in Raiders or was it cooler if it just came up a few times then we finally got to see why in the opening of Last Crusade?

Now some games encourage background development mechanically and that's very cool:

• Traveller and Star Trek and Cyberpunk and Mechwarrior 3E and Mekton all have a kind of lifepath system during character creation that will build a framework of a background by mapping out the character's professional development and usually include mechanical effects based on it, from your skills in Traveller to what kind of mech you start with in Mechewarrior.
• Hero and GURPS have advantages and (mostly) disadvantages that players can take for things like psychological issues (code of honor, bloodthirstiness, fear of snakes), dependent NPC's (Aunt May), to physical issues like missing limbs to enemies and allies actively hunting or assisting your character. It's probably a good idea to nail down some of how that came about but even then it's not required. If a set of blue-gloved ninjas ambushes your team a few times then your teammates will be a lot more interested in your story than they will if you bog down the first session with a long pre-written tale.
• Shadowrun has a system of Contacts and even if you have identical powers the character who starts with a bartender and a squatter as contacts clearly has a different story than the one with the Media Sensation and the Mayor as contacts. I don't need a 5-page story about it, just think about it, make a few notes and we will work it in.

Plus some games are just more character-centered. If we're playing the New Justice League then I might want to know more about your character to work in shared enemies or allies or that we need a hanger in the base to park your jet. If we're playing Keep on the Borderlands then all I really need to know is that you're a sword & board fighter or a magic-user who knows sleep and we're good to go..

Licensed games are also a little different here. You're playing a wookie? Cool, got it. A Klingon? Great, I know a fair amount you already just based on that one word. You're the Red Ranger? Noted. Cimmerian? I have a picture in my head. Browncoat? Awesome. Intelligent talking car that's impervious to damage and can superleap? I may know a bit about your background. Autobot? Nice. All of these words convey a wealth of images and information that take care of a bunch of the stuff that is typically associated with a character background.

History is valid here too for the same reasons: Spartan? Check. Roman? OK. Doughboy? Alright. Flapper? Sure.

Published game worlds fall into a similar category. "I'm from Cormyr" tells me something different than "I'm from Chult" if we're playing in the Forgotten Realms. In Greyhawk a Keolander and a Frost Barbarian will likely look and act differently from each other. In Shadowrun a Sioux Wolf Shaman is very different from a Sidhe Hermetic Mage.   In Traveller being from a TL 4 planet will shape a worldview quite a bit different from that of the character with the TL12 homeworld.  There won't always be mechanical effects for these, it's more of a look and an attitude and it's up to the player to decide how much to emphasize or use it.

So anyway, my point with all of this is that there are such widely varying levels of expected buy-in for the RPG's we play that it's probably worth bringing up before you start a new game. Everything from names to advantages/disadvantages to contacts can be affected by this. Is it a one-shot? Is this an ongoing campaign? Is it a sandbox or a limited or plotted campaign? That all matters too. Even with people I've known for years some of them won't assign a name until the character makes second level while others will write 3 pages of backstory before they roll any dice, and I've mostly been treating them the same way. It's something to think about before the next session to try and make the game that little bit better.

The Power Rangers Model of Campaign Design

Ha!, Bet you didn't see that coming! So what do I mean by this? First, let's look at Power Rangers.

Despite being a fan of Japanese giant rubber monsters I was not a huge Power Rangers guy when they first came out, mainly because it was kind of after my time. It was a pop-culture thing though so I was aware of it. Some years later though, after introducing the Apprentices to Godzilla and Robotech I noticed some form of PR was running on one of the cable channels and we started recording it. I watched it with them so I learned a lot about it - more than many might want to- and after coming across it again recently I started thinking that it's not a bad model for a campaign. So here are the important points:

1) Progression: Each season begins by introducing the characters, introduces the concept of the Power Rangers to the characters, then slowly escalates both their powers and the power of their enemies along the way to a final confrontation with the master villain that ends with a titanic battle that challenges them to the utmost, sometimes requiring great sacrifice to win.
This screams "LEVELLING!" to me. Having watched a few seasons of the show they start off inexperienced and need a lot of help from the mentor figure, but by the end they are confident and competent and taking on vastly more powerful foes than when they started. It wouldn't even have to be a strictly D&Dish form of levelling. In M&M it could be as simple as raising the power level at certain intervals.

2) Characters: Each season features 3-5 main characters including the young untried potential heroes and a master/mentor figure. During the season at least one new Ranger or non-ranger powered hero joins the team. There is typically one master villain with several lieutenants of varying power and competence and a whole lot of minions along with a few expendable villains of the week.
Hmmm, the main characters sound suspiciously like a typical party in most RPG's. The new character joins in and sometimes is someone they have known all along (NPC promoted to PC) or may want to work alone at first (the mysterious new PC) or may even be mistaken for a bad guy and end up fighting the other heroes in one of his first appearances in the finest comic book tradition.

3) Archetypes: The characters are individuals but the show doesn't lose sight of the focus - Action -  so they tend to be archetypes: the Jock, the Nerd, the Artist, the Surfer, the Daredevil, the Old Master, the Not-So-Old Master, and others.
I find this is an acceptable level of characterization in most games that fall in the "Action" end of the RPG spectrum - D&D, Shadowrun, Star Wars. At the very least it's a good starting point that can be modified or explored as the game progresses.

4) Environment: The heroes usually have a base area (often hidden and secret from the world) but lead otherwise normal lives in a typical society in a peaceful home town that is threatened by the enemy. There is not a lot of traveling, the story is usually centered around one region.
This really fits low-level D&D and Supers campaigns in my experience. Shadowrun can use it as well (Seattle) as can Gamma World and even Star Trek if you set it up that way.

5) Action - there are multiple levels of challenge in each episode. Sometimes they fight mooks and win easily then try to figure out what they were doing. Sometimes it's a single tough opponent that they cannot defeat as individuals. Sometimes several of those opponents team up to challenge them.  Sometimes it's a lieutenant trying to prove himself to the master villain. Sometimes the master will try to subvert one of the heroes in a more subtle attack but even then it usually leads to big fight at the end of the episode once the hero realizes what is going on. Regardless of the exact type of action, there is always conflict in each episode, often more than one scene's worth.
So this is like every version of D&D, many Pulp games, many Supers games and really most RPGs I have played. Drama, angst, and introspection have their place but this type of campaign is probably not best for them, at least not as the focus of the experience.

6) Closure - each season begins with a new group of heroes and a new villain in a new location. The show unfolds, the characters progress, and in the end there is a fight with a big bad which the Rangers win but give up their powers afterward or drop into the background. It has a beginning, a middle,and an end, telling a complete story.Someone coming in next season needs no knowledge of the previous season (or any previous season) to jump into the action. They may learn something about history along the way, but they don't need to know it to start.
This is something that makes it different than many campaigns - there is a definite end point. D&D 4E follows this model in this way but many earlier versions really did not - there was no end game. this type of campaign really depends on having one and it's one that is figured out in advance: you're going to fight Lord Zedd or Orcus or Lolth as they are the one behind all of the problems you've been facing.

7) Continuity - in spite of the closure mentioned above there is continuity. Often, one of the characters from the prior season will end up being part of the new team in the next season. One of the early season leaders ends up being the mentor for another team 10 years later! Plus, almost every season includes a crossover episode featuring the team from the previous season who join in and then together they handle some shared menace - either an unusual one-off threat or an alliance of bads from both seasons. One special episode featured the team leaders from the first 10 years of the show teaming up to defeat an old menace and even as an adult I thought that was cool and showed that the creators cared about what they were doing.
This softens the blow a bit from #6 - yes the campaign is over but your other games still happened! Throw in artifacts, news, NPC's, even guest appearances by PC's to connect THIS campaign to THAT campaign in some way and you are building a richer world than you might realize - it doesn't always have to be one long run with the same characters. Sometimes knowing that other groups are out there makes the story that much better and the world that much deeper.

I think this would be really appropriate for any level-based game but in particular it works for D&D and Supers campaigns. I also think it would work for Feng Shui, Mekton, Mechwarrior, and even Twilight 2000 with the right setup. I can see a Star Trek game working under this premise as they try to defend a particular sector from some new enemy (I might even say that DS9 follows this premise to an uncanny degree). That said, the more cinematic the game system the better as they tend to feature a more action-oriented play style and allow for rapid recovery between fights.

Now this is a heavily plotted campaign - it is the opposite of a sandbox or West Marches type game as it has both a scheduled end point (Session #X), possibly a calendar endpoint (December 31st 2011) , and a plot climax (the PC's face off against Iuz in the ruins of his capital as the armies of Nyrond surge into the city). This is (weirdly enough) almost required for some groups and anathema to others, so know your players! Telling a lot of D&D players that you're not going to track XP's is going to cause some eyes to bug while telling a Mechwarrior or T2K player he doesn't have to worry about tracking ammo between fights is likely to bring tears of joy.

Say you decided at the end of 2010 to run a new D&D campaign in Greyhawk and the concept is that you are fighting Iuz to free the Shield Lands from oppression. You let everyone know you're going to run it for one year, twice per month (so 24 sessions) and that you're not going to worry about XP - leveling will happen as certain tasks are completed or enemies defeated and it will pretty much be once per session so that at the end the group will be 20th level for the final confrontation. I would sketch out what the major opposition would be for each session, come up with some villain plots that are being carried out, then roll with it! Let the players go and see what happens. There are some hurdles here that the show does not have to deal with:

• What if somebody dies? Well most games have a raise dead mechanic - use it. if not then the new character joins in as an experienced member of "that other team you've been hearing about" - you were dropping hints of another team right? or an envoy from a distant ally "The King of Nyrond has sent us his best knight to aid us in our struggle". Give him a nice entrance and move on.

• What if the PC's lose a big fight? Well, they say you learn more from failure than success so let them level up anyway then give them a challenging Plan B to make things right. They couldn't stop the enemy agents from recovering the magic crystal? Let them raid the enemy fortress where the crystal-bearer has stopped for the night. Let them go after the anti-crystal hidden in ancient shrine at the top of the world
• What if they lose the big fight? Then the badguy wins and you have the plot for your next campaign, possibly featuring a crippled survivor from the previous PC team as a mentor.

So my initial idea was that this show makes for an interesting framework for a limited campaign (something I've discussed before) and might help someone get the idea of how these non-traditional campaigns would work. I think it also shows that you do not have to give up many of the good points of those campaigns just by doing this. The biggest difference from my previous manifesto is that this style of game doesn't blow up the world - the heroes saved it, so it's going to be around for the next campaign. This let's you build those stories up over time The whole point is to have a complete campaign in  a finite number of session (or episodes, or issues) so that you can move on and do another one later.

In a Trek game,maybe it's the story of the Federation in the 23rd century as they struggle to hold off first an ambitious and ruthless new Klingon Warlord, then are challenged by a new Romulan faction then maybe even a mutant Gorn who rises to power among his people and sends the whole race off on a crusade against the non-reptilian races of the quadrant. Maybe the admiral who takes command of the starbase featured in the Gorn campaign was a PC captain during the Klingon campaign, or maybe one of the enemy captains from it is an ally in this new one.

 In a Mechwarrior game you could be loyal House Davion troops holding back an invasion by a ruthless Kurita noble bent on conquering your duty planet and in the end you face off against him and his personal bodyguard. Or maybe the other way around. Or maybe you're a merc unit made up of gladiators from Solaris 7 caught in the invasion. Or maybe it's a civil war. Maybe some of those come later. Then you all get caught in the clan invasion and get to deal with that, fighting alongside your old Kurita opponents.

In a Mekton campaign...you're a group of teenagers entrusted with incredible ninja powers and a set of powerful giant robots that you use to fight off an evil alien bent on conquering the Earth...

 One final note: "Plotted" does not have to mean "Railroad" - it means I have an outline of what the bad guys are going to do, leading to their ultimate victory. It's the players' job to change that. If your players decide to go on the offensive and attack an enemy outpost but you didn't have that written up it doesn't have to be a disaster. Get a feel for what they are thinking at the end of each session, try to spur some conversation between sessions, and adapt the outline to what they do. Some groups are fine being led though a fairly tightly plotted game, others will not and all you can do is hit the high points as "plot points" and let them take control in between. In that case, if you make the bad guy bad enough, or annoying enough, and powerful enough, then by the end of the campaign they will want to face off with him, and it's not railroading if the PC's go after him because they want to - it's a satisfying climax.

 I'm actually thinking about retooling my Atomic City Supers campaign to better fit this model, making the focus more on one long term enemy than the somewhat scattered plan I had before.  I'll let you all know how that turns out.

Weekend Update

Well the long weekend game is over and we survived. It was much like the old days - Much junk food was consumed. arguments were had, actions were debated, babies were entertained (that one is not like the old days) and in the end a dragon was slain and the threat to the people of Urnst was ended.

This 20 hour plus run also confirmed for me that running for 8 players in 4E is just a bad idea for  an ongoing campaign. For a one-off it can be managed but trying to do that every week or every other week while balancing things and keeping everyone involved is going to turn into work pretty quickly, and that's not why I do this. In a mechanically simpler game like Basic D&D or Labyrinth Lord I can see it happening, but not 4E.

At points it did run slow but everyone was having fun and that's the main objective. With D&D being the Common Tongue of RPG's it's probably the only game that could have pulled in that kind of turnout (although I think a supers game would have been a blast too).. Even so, some players were not especially familiar with the rules and everyone was playing new characters so it took some time to work out how the group should work together. I won't claim it was smooth by the end of the run but it was better than when we started.

Lady Blacksteel's character and mine did work pretty well together. Our knock-em-down-then-stab-them-on-the-ground team inflicted serious damage and meant that at least we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do when a fight broke out. The Goliath Warden and I worked well too and spent a fair share of the time taking our beatings from the enemy to help make our team look good.  Playing my first defender type in 4E was enlightening and it is very different than fighters in earlier versions. Many powers key off of the actions that others take so that I had to constantly pay attention to what was happening to see if I had a chance to inflict punishment on an unwise enemy - many thanks to my spotters at the far end of the table who caught things I might have missed. I also discovered that Orc archers can be extremely nasty when left unmolested and with the party bunched up - next time we're going after them first.

The only arguments that really sprang up happened because of  the only real recurring issue I've seen with 4E: Powers and effects are given names and flavor text to describe their mechanical effect. Sometime people get too focused on the description or the name and expect things to work mechanically different because of that. Stealth, Superior Cover provided by arrow slits, the Prone condition, and a few others generated some spirited discussion and I wasn't concerned until the magic words "but in the real world..." were uttered but we shut things down pretty quickly after that. That particular phrase is a peeve of mine when gaming and I'm glad it didn't drag out.

We fought a black dragon at the end and he had a hard time of it facing off against 8 characters. At one point he was Marked, Quarried, Knocked Prone, Slowed, Immobilized, and Bloodied, was inside at least 2 magical zone effects and was also flanked by at least two characters and that with him fighting from water against characters on a bridge and ledge! His rider didn't fare much better  caught in the storm of area blasting magic that came down on the dragon he proved to be far less durable and went down almost as an afterthought

It's probably been 20 years since I've done anything like that and I had a really good time. Now I'm thinking it should at least be an annual occurrence.  I'd be tempted to make it the same characters but use different versions of D&D every year, but I'm not running it and that's probably better for everyone. Thanks to my friends for running it and for hosting it and to everyone else for showing up and sticking with it. I'm looking forward to next time.

Motivational Monday

Special Saturday Post - The Weekender

So today a good friend of mine is celebrating his birthday by running an all-weekend D&D game. We're playing from around lunchtime Saturday up til about midnight, then gathering again tomorrow and running until later than we probably should on what is a work night for many of us. The game is 4th Edition D&D and he has worked up his own adventure for us. We have all built brand-new 4th level characters and are ready to go. There are 8 players, so it's going to be interesting to watch how things work out. This group of players has never played together as a team before, so that should be fun too.

The group consists of a Bard, a Cleric, a Bow Ranger, an Invoker, a Dragon Sorcerer, a Warden and then Lady Blacksteel's Rogue and my Fighter. I like to have a theme for my characters - on the rare times I get to play one, anyway - so I went with a fairly easy one this time:

Marcellus Maximus, former gladiator in the Great Kingdom, now a special agent of the County of Urnst

Original? No. Easy for other players to grasp? Yes. Another new wrinkle that I wanted to try was making characters that were intended to work together most of the time, so Lady Blacksteel's character ended up as a gladiator-themed Rogue - she's the hammer, I'm the anvil. We are former arena fighters from the Great Kingdom of Aerdy (this one is set in Greyhawk) who eventually left (or maybe escaped or maybe won their freedom -it's not something they talk about a lot) and ended up in one of the Urnst states and eventually put their talents to work for the ruler.

Mechanically the trick is that rogues can add extra damage to one hit per round when they have combat advantage (this is the current version of the Backstab from 1E). So how does one achieve "combat advantage" one might ask. The traditional way is through flanking, or positioning two characters on opposite sides of an opponent, and reams of data have been discussed on the internet about how to achieve this. One interesting note as well is that a prone opponent  also grants combat advantage to a melee attacker. This is where I decided to add some focus.

The Rogue and the Fighter have both been created in a way to allow them some ability to reposition even if they are in melee. There are a lot of powers and feats built around this idea so it's not terribly difficult. Fighters though have some powers that let them knock an opponent prone and I took as many of them as I could. There is also a feat which gives me a +5 to damage rolls against a prone opponent. Lady B's Rogue gets her sneak attack damage against a prone opponent as well so if I can knock someone down and keep them there, they will not last long.  There are some other tricks in there too but that 's the main theme of this pair - I set her up and she knocks them down, and if they're still breathing I can knock them down some more. 

Anyway it should be fun. I spoke with the Warden too, the other "front line guy" and talked a little bit about how to work together so we should be in good shape. Kids are foisted off on other family members, junk food and drinks are secured, and dice are gathered. I believe we are ready.

Some Love for the Multiversal / Cross-Genre Game

I'm not sure what the official title for this type of game but I know it when I see it. Forerunners to this concept include Lords of Creation and maybe even Well of Souls in that they included concepts for characters and environments that were previously considered separate. Starting in 1988 we had moved a step closer with GURPS third edition which got very popular and touted as one of its selling points the ability to mix genres - Magic, Fantasy, Space, Supers, etc. There wasn't any particular book telling you how to do this but it was discussed among players and DM's quite a bit.

Hero System went to a 4th edition in 1989 with the express purpose of making this kind of mixing and matching possible. Pretty soon we had a new Fantasy Hero, Star Hero, and Ninja Hero written as supplements to the main rules instead of as separate games by themselves.

Both games however remained a sort of framework on which you could hang multiple genres if you choose to do so but most actual campaigns were straight-up Fantasy or Sci-Fi or a Supers or a conversion of some other game to these rules. "Universal" is not the same as "Multiversal".

The next logical step was to do this crossover thing as a part of the game setting from the start. This gave us some really cool games that took this idea in wildly different directions.

Shadowrun launched in 1989 and was really the first - "D&D with Guns" was one way to put it. The whole cyberpunk setting with traditional fantasy elements dropped in was a revelation as it did not really reflect any particular novel or movie or comic book that was popular at the time - even though it borrowed from a bunch of existing stuff it truly felt unique among RPG's and pretty much everything else. It had unique mechanics to go with it and they were pretty cool in play too. There was a second edition in 1992 that fixed a lot of small problems with the game, a 3rd edition in 1998 that was still pretty similar, and then a 4th edition in 2004 that went in a somewhat different direction mechanically. I stayed with it from 1st to 3rd, playing and running in multiple campaigns. I know in local circles at least this was maybe the closest to D&D in the ease of getting a game together as everyone could find something to play - magic-user, shaman, ranged combat guy, close-in combat guy, primitive, hi-tech, stealth expert, vehicle pilot- it covered a lot of ground and I never had a problem with a player finding something they wanted to play.

The background (which I assume most people know by now) is a baseline cyberpunk society recovering from a worldwide internet crash when the world is suddenly invaded by the Player's Handbook. Suddenly walking around town with a katana makes sense, especially if you have wired reflexes, body plating, and a friendly mage nearby to heal you. You can get claws like Wolverine, guns like Neo, and throw spells like Dr Strange, although probably not all in one character as magic and cyberware tend to not get along.

It used a dice pool mechanic, the "System of the 90's" much like percentiles were the "System of the 80's" and it worked, although it drove math people crazy trying to calculate probabilities. It was unique and flavorful and really seemed to fit the universe, kind of like the d6 Star wars game seemed to really fit the universe.

In 1990 we got Torg from West End Games which used a system similar to DC Heroes (a good start for this kind of game) which got fairly popular at first due to the spectrum of options and some innovative mechanics but it seemed to fizzle out (locally at least) by the mid-90's

The background was a baseline modern earth that was invaded by other dimensions that would then impose their own laws of reality on part of the earth. North America went Stone Age + Dinosaurs, England went High Fantasy, Japan and Italy went Cyberpunk (2 flavors), and Egypt went 30's Pulp. There were other zones too but you get the idea - if there was a genre that you liked there was probably a place for it in Torg Earth. PC's had a special rule that separated them from normal people in that they could resist the reality-warping effects of the different zones so that the cyberguy's guns would still work in England and magic would still work in the Cyberpapacy.

The mechanics innovation was twofold - something similar to the MEGS system of interchangeable units for time/distance/weight/etc. and the Drama Deck. The deck was pretty cool and dropped random conditions into encounters and could also be used by the players to change things up, sort of like a hero point mechanic.

Now I never played a lot of Torg but I played a few one-offs and liked it enough to pick up some of the game later on. Most of my players never tried it and have no interest in doing so now so I may never run it or play it again but it has a degree of cool that still differentiates it from other games. The flood of supplements turned a lot of people off as they were frequent, sometimes badly edited, and full of changes to the base rules - kind of a triple-whammy when it comes to expansion material.

Also in 1990 we got a pretty heavy hitter in RIFTS. Few can deny the coolness of Rifts' setting and concepts, but even fewer will defend its mechanics as they are ...quirky... to put it kindly. It's the Palladium system which is to say it's a hodge-podge of D&D mechanics (3-18 ability scores, d20 combat resolution), percentile skill system similar to RQ, T2K, and Star Trek, and a point system for magic and psionic powers. Let's just say the mechanics are at least familiar to most players. The background and setting though is all new and incredibly rich.

The baseline is a future-tech earth, similar to early Gamma World, say 100-200 years in the future with the expected technological advances - robots, energy weapons, power armor, cybernetics, biological enhancements, brain implants, etc. Despite these advances someone starts a shooting war and things quickly escalate. As millions die in minutes due to nuclear and other weapon exchanges the psychic energy released rushes around the world reactivating ancient energy pathways (circuits in a way) that circle the earth and where these lines cross they begin to tear open doorways to other dimensions - the RIFTS of the title - and hostile creatures and weird energies come rushing in, killing even more people. Things do eventually stabilize but the population is maybe 10% of what it was and after what is basically a human sacrifice on a planetary scale the earth is supercharged with mystic energy and is now a dimensional nexus unique in the cosmos and things begin to come a callin'. One hundred years later, man's civillization is cast in ruins and a new world rises from the old...

One major city survives in North America and becomes home to a human-supremacist anti-mutant hi-tech power and their skull-themed vehicles and uniforms figured prominently in the artwork and ads for the game and it was pretty cool. The early supplements included Vampire Kingdoms (Mexico is full of vampires) and Atlantis (a fantasy-fest magitech city run by evil alien intelligences who have magical power armor and rune weapons and all kinds of cool stuff. Triax was another early good one featuring Germany as a corporate state using power armor and vehicles to fight off a gargoyle invasion (gargoyles are a type of lesser demon in Rifts).

A potential weakness that only fully came to light later was that every possible thing a character could do is written up as a separate class and there is no multi-classing! However the classes are not a rigid list of powers like D&D but more of a list of bonuses, a few abilities, and a selection of skills followed up by a gear allowance. So they aren't terribly restrictive and the good thing is that every time I have seen it in action every player had a hard time choosing one type of character to run as there are a lot of cool choices. Not many other games cover the range of character types that Rifts does - Dragon Hatchling, Power Armor Pilot, 3 kinds of mage, 3 kinds of psyker, cyborg soldier, crazy (chip-enhanced ninja type), juicer (super-steroid soldier type), Cyber-Knight (Jedi), and Rogue Scientist (Indiana Jones) are just a part of it and each book adds more. The game also allows for the use of their other games to make characters - Ninja Turtles and Superheroes fit in pretty easily as do Palladium Fantasy characters and even Robotech if you have that book and have run out of Zentradi to shoot.

The biggest mechanical problem with the game for some people is the lack of balance between classes, powers, and gear. Compared to something like D&D 3E where balance is a goal and D&D 4E where balance is required, it's jarring - "Who would play a Rogue Scientist or a Wilderness Scout when they can play a Glitter Boy (super power armor with giant gun) as a starting character/" For those of us raised in an earlier era this is not a deal-breaker (most of the time) but it was an issue from Day 1 and it still is as Rifts is using the same system today that it did in 1990 and makes no apologies for it. It adheres to the earlier concept that role-play limitations can balance mechanical advantages that is rejected in most current game systems. If you can live with that, Rifts can be a lot of fun. If not it's an exercise in frustration.

Rifts has rolled on for over 20 years with a steady stream of new material, not all of it good, in the same 2-column black and white softbound format. They occasionally revise an old supplement or put out a compilation of something, but someone who had not looked at the game in 10 years can pick up a new book and understand it just fine. While sometimes derided as a munchkin game, it was very popular in the 90's  and has outlasted a lot of other more "mature" or "elegant" games. It is a throwback in some ways to the early days of D&D/AD&D as any ongoing game is guaranteed to have house rules, shared conventions, and possibly even misunderstandings unique to that group - it's the most old-school game still in production today and I admit I have a huge soft spot for it even now.

Since 1990 there really hasn't been another new multiversal game published. I think they are an artifact of the time but I'm not sure why.  Underground was a sort of Supers-Cyberpunk combination. Vampire got popular during this time and sucked some of the life out of everything else. I think a lot of people home-brewed it with Hero and GURPS. Maybe the idea was just never that attractive to as many players as it seemed at the time, at least once the initial "Cool!" wore off. Maybe the initial concept that allows the mixing of genres also tends to limit them in some way (it's hard to mix cyber and magic in Shadowrun even if a player really wants to do it) so that it turns off some people who are interested in the idea and they go off and make their own. I'm still not sure it's juts odd to me that while 2 of these 3 games are still going 20 years later the genre of "multigenre" seems almost as dead as the PA and Cyberpunk genres: A few supported games mostly played by the same people that were playing them 10 years ago and not much new in either products or players coming along.

Some Love for the Western Game

This one is going to be somewhat shorter than my last two posts

Someone finally brought Boot Hill to our little group about 1983 and we played it a lot. I ended up with this cover (below) but the contents were the same

This was a fun if limited game focused mainly on shootouts. You could do whatever you wanted but most of the rules centered around gunfights. We quickly grew tired of this and used the conversion rules in the DM's Guide to mix it with D&D as that was a LOT more exciting. I spent more time in the Lost Cavenrs of Tsojcanth with a group of bank robbers running from the law than I ever did with a regular D&D party. Hostile elves (er, "Funny Lookin' Indians)? Gatling gun. Angry hill giants? Dynamite. It's fun and I recommend it to everyone at least once.

That was the majority of my cowboy gaming for a long time. There have been a few others over the years - GURPS Old West, Western Hero were both nice treatments of the historical aspects but didn't add much. Aces and Eights is a really nice game that actually lets you run a real western campaign without mixing in D&D with rules for ranching and cattle drives and a cool combat system but I've never been able to talk anyone into playing it. It's unfortunate but true as it's a really well done game.

There's only one other Western game worth mentioning in my opinion:

One of my favorite games that I've never played and only run a bit is Deadlands. It's everything cool about westerns + some D&D types stuff + alternate history + interesting mechanical systems - a home run on every level. There was a ton of supplementary material released for it from short story collections to a miniatures game to adventures and regional supplements. The whole thing is great and while it's not a truly historical or realistic old west game (there are mad scientists and magic-users) it is the coolest one by a mile.

If you don't like the original, occasionally clunky system then you are in luck as there is a GURPS conversion. a d20 version, and a Savage Worlds version. I'm a big fan of the original system but I would probably run the Savage Worlds version nowadays - it sacrifices some detail but it works really well. I thought the d20 version was fine but lost a little flavor and the GURPS version is...well...GURPS. It's the same concept expressed in a very different mechanical way and one that might lean a little too far towards "realism" to truly reflect the atmosphere of the original. If you can find a way to work in the cards and poker chips of the original into your system of choice then you are that much closer to capturing it.

As much as I love it I've only run it a few times and all of those were one-off's. Even in Texas (or maybe because we live in Texas*) no one I know has ever wanted to play a long-term western game as the primary or even a secondary game.   It's a hard sell it seems and I don't know what it would take to change it if the coolness of this game can't break through the barrier.

I know there are some other western games out there but these are the one's I've played and love so I can't say much about the rest.   If you think there's one that's contributed to the genre then let me know in the comments.

*yes I own 4 pairs of boots, no I don't own a hat or a duster (come close a few times though) and no I don't own any cows or oil wells - just to get that straight.

Some Love for the Science Fiction Game

I know I have posted some sci-fi stuff but it's mostly been Star Wars so I thought I would spend a post on other non-Star Wars RPG's that I have liked over the years.

Traveller was my first non-D&D RPG and I encountered the "3 books in a box" back in  1981. I never ran much original Traveller but I spent hours and hours generating subsector maps and planets, rolling up characters, and designing spaceships. The fun toolkit aspect of it cannot be overstated and I spent much time at the library photocopier ensuring I would have the proper sheets to record my experiments. There wasn't a lot of "chrome" or fluff back then, just hard-science mechanics and economics. I doubt many kids are asking their parents what "amortization" means at the age of 13 but if you got into Traveller it was important to know. It's not only Hard Science in the Traveller universe, it's Hard Economics too. We played through some of the original adventures and there was a fair amount of support in Dragon as well - remember, it wasn't always a WOTC house organ. There was an article on robots around issue 64 that I used far more than the official supplement.

Megatraveller came out in 1987 and it was huge - finally Traveller had a unified task system and full vehicle construction rules and even more detail on planets and systems and I ate it up. I ran and played a lot of Megatraveller and had a blast. It was backwards-compatible too, similar to how 2E D&D games could easily use 1E modules with about zero changes. This is the version I have played the most over the years. Despite having some interesting adventure material published for it, we pretty much always played our own campaigns, albeit set in the Spinward Marches. It was very much the classic "Merchants and Merenaries" type gaming that has been used with Traveller since the early days. Most memorable character was Sonny Crockett, former space detective (Hey they had a "Law Enforcer" career that was interesting and gave some good skills like Stealth, Intrusion, and Pistol.)

Then Traveller the New Era came out about 1993 and crashed hard - people hated the background, people hated the new mechanics (it was completely incompatible, mechanically, with the 15 years of prior material). I liked it as an environment and I had already seen the mechanics in Twilight 2000 2E so I still thought it was a good game it just wasn't Traveller as we knew it.  We played it a little but if anyone brought up "Traveller" in this period it  pretty much meant "Mega" not "New Era".

Traveller 4 came out some time after this and sucked. Ugly books, pointless changes to the mechanics, the worst editing I've ever seen across an entire product line - there was just nothing good about it. There were some interesting ideas like the Pocket Empires supplement that let players run a space empire (kind of like the dominion rules in the D&D Cyclopedia) but the execution was so bad that no one wanted to give them a try. T4 was so bad that it has the distinction of being one of the few games I have completely disposed of after purchasing. I got it, picked up most of the supplements, realized it was a dog, and dumped it. Bleah.

GURPS Traveller was another version that overlapped with TNE and T4 and if you like GURPS it's a cool game, using the technology and background of Traveller with the mechanics of GURPS. I've played it briefly and while I like GURPS fine for many things, it has a different feel than the original Traveller mechanics which puts it in a position similar to TNE - some people like Traveller for the system and if that's the case then you're not going to care for GURPS. My crew was never all that into GURPS so when I suggested it one time the response was that we could just play Mega and not bother with yet another system.

Eventually Mongoose Traveller came out and I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the quality - it went back to much of what made the original popular, smoothed out the system from the original books but didn't get as detailed as MegaTraveller and found that magic balance in the center of simplicity, elegance, familiarity, speed, and effectiveness that is so rare among game systems. It has a unified mechanic of 2d6 + skill or stat vs. a target number of 8 - that's it! There might be some modifiers to fix the maneuver drive if you're under fire and venting atmosphere, but the core mechanic is darned simple and works well. It brought back semi-random character generation and much of the good stuff from he original version without focusing solely on the Third Imperium universe. I've only played it a few times and I have not run it but it rally impressed me and I hope they keep making it for a good long time.

The second sci-fi game I picked up was Star Frontiers and it was very much the "light science" counterpart to Traveller. More playable alien races, more weapons (but still oddly fixated on current tech like Jetcopters and ATV's and bullet-guns) it was more Star-Warsy in feel but still went for some level of realism. The original box was packed with basic rules, advanced rules, a two-sided poster map, counters scaled for the map, and a starter adventure that was good enough that I am using it to kick off my Star Wars campaign 30 years later. It was awesome and much time was spent one summer fighting off the escaped hydra and chasing down smugglers on the big city map. It didn't have the subsystems like Traveller did, but it had its own kind of cool.

A year or so later the spaceship expansion came out, Knighthawks, and it was pretty cool too since there were no space rules in the original game. There was a whole series of adventure modules too, many of which didn't suck. SF as a whole continued to receive really good support in Dragon magazine as well, including a set of vehicle combat rules that we adopted instantly and never let go.

After about a 4 year run Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space came out, tried to convert the whole thing to a color chart system ala Marvel Super Heroes and Gamma World 3E and pretty much killed the whole thing. TSR was under new management and went off after Buck Rogers as their new space game. We never used Zeb's guide and we didn't think much of Buck Rogers either.

The other space RPG of my "Big 3" is Star Trek the RPG, mainly the FASA version. From 1982 on thorough the rest of the 1980's this was Trek for me. It had great production values, the system felt like it fit the universe, and it was well supported with adventures, a starship combat came, miniatures, and magazine articles.  When a new movie came out, we got a new supplement describing it. It made Klingons (and later the Romulans too) interesting and multi-faceted characters instead of orcs in space. People used to rave about Trollpak for Runequest as an example of a home-run monster supplement, but my standard has always been the Klingon supplement this set. I played it with my Captain character for years either in a party or even solo if no one else wanted to play sticking with the same ship and some of the same crew throughout that time.

It's the only game I can remember where "Luck" was a stat. It served as a sort of hero point mechanic in that you could take a luck roll at times as substitute or a backup for a bad roll or a low skill. humans were the only race that did not have a negative modifier to their Luck stat, which explained quite a bit of their success as trusting to your luck was actually viable for many human characters, unlike many aliens.

Combat used an action point system, counters, and a grid map and could be very nasty - as it should be when you can disintegrate opponents in one shot. Ship combat had several levels of detail and used counters on a hex grid plus the very cool control panel approach. In combat each character (running a bridge crew member presumably) ran a different panel - engineering for power allocation, navigation for shields, helm for weapons and movement, etc so that each player had something to do during space battles. This is something many space games have struggled with yet this effective system was published 30 years ago!

At the end of the 80's Next generation was the cool new thing and FASA lost the license. Eventually Last Uncorn came out wit ha new Trek game and I just didn't like. Decipher came out with one a few years later and I do like it, but I've never run or played it. I have all the books for it and they sit on the shelf and await their baptism of fire. If I had a choice to run a Trek game I'd go for Fasa first, then the Decipher version.

There was also "Prime Directive" - I played a whole lot of Star Fleet Battles and I know the universe pretty well and would love to play in it, but PD has been cursed with bad mechanics since it firat appeared in the 90's. The GURPS version isn't bad but I would probably go Savage Worlds for mechanics. Heck, Mongoose Traveller might work too with some customization.That's an interesting idea.

The last entry in this list is Mechwarrior, or the Battletech RPG. The 1st edition came out in 1986 just as BT was getting popular and we jumped on it right away. It was a fairly limited RPG as it was totally focused on having the players play the guys who drive the giant fighting robots used by various noble houses in an almost post-apocalyptic universe 1000 years in the future. If you were into the premise then it was awesome. if not, well, you probably didn't like Battletech either. There was a 2nd edition in 1990 and a 3rd edition in 1998 and all were heavily supported with regional supplements, unit supplements, and of course books of new mechs and other vehicles.

The problem with Mechwarrior was that most of the RPG rules kind of sucked. It's not even so much that the rules were bad it was that they were very narrowly focused and pretty clunky. Sure, we played them as they were the official game at the time, but we also converted them to GURPS (with one group anyway) and experimented with other systems too. Today I would probably use Savage Worlds (I know that's a real surprise to anyone who reads the blog regularly). Sooner or later I will be introducing the apprentices to this game but not just yet.

Campaign-wise we usually played mercenaries - less interference that way. We usually started out with 4-6 characters with 1 mech apiece and built our unit up over time - or died horribly, depending  on how the battle went. When the Clan invasion happened we stayed with the inner sphere and slowly built up our tech whenever possible.  Most memorable character: Wolf Blitzer the XXVIII rd "reporting to you live with the famous Atlas-Cam during our orbital drop on Galtor" -yeah I made him a freelance combat reporter. With an assault mech. He was fun.


Some of the others:

Babylon 5 - a mechanically dull d20 game with a ton of background from an awesome show. Had it, never played it or ran it, eventually dumped it.I had hopes for the Traveller version but it was so full of errors that I skipped it entirely.

Shatterzone - kind of cool from West End Games that kept the card mechanic from Torg. Never ran it, never played it, still have it.

Space Opera - friend had it, tried to run  it, gave up and went back to Traveller as it was complicated for no good reason. Had some interesting ideas but that was about it. This is one I've never bothered to pick up.

Star Hero - I like the Hero System, I like sci-fi games, but I've never played or run it

GURPS Space - played some, but weapons get very deadly and GURPS out of the box is not particularly cinematic or forgiving of severe injuries. If you want gritty in space, GURPS works very well.

Robotech - the game where Mega-Damage first appeared and where it was a good idea. We played around with this a little bit and it was a lot of fun. This and TMNT were my introductions to the Palladium System and I thought it worked just fine at this level. It never took off here as we were a Battletech group but we didn't hate it and broke it out every once in a while for short scenarios.

Anyway, there's a bit more background on my gaming past- it hasn't ALL been D&D. It is funny though how the focus has narrowed over the years. In the 80's I would say Traveller not something we played much more than Trek or Mechwarrior but since then it's been the only consistent sci-fi game in our rotation. Even then, it doesn't get played a ton. These days I can't get anyone interested in Star Trek (I thought the new movie would help there -nope) and Babylon 5 was a non-starter even though a) everyone I know liked the show and b) everyone liked d20 games. I'm not sure why.

I would say maybe we don't like playing in other people's universes, but Star Wars has made a few appearances over the years. I would think maybe it's not playing in places where the main story has already been told but again - Star Wars always has at least some interest. Maybe it's the action element that makes the difference, but B5 was pretty much about a war and didn't lack for action. With Trek I blame the Next gen to some degree - back when all we had was Original Trek there was a fair amount of butt-kicking going on but then the later version got all righteous and decided that meetings were the best way to resolve conflicts. I'm pretty sure FASA Trek didn't have Facilitation or Presentation in the skill list so maybe that killed it for my guys. I suspect the later versions of the show also started to look like playing a Paladin in D&D - there are a bunch of rules you're supposed to follow and to many that equals unwelcome restrictions on what they can do. There's enough of that in real life so they would rather play something where they can cut loose like D&D. I think it's the biggest brake on Jedi players in a Star Wars game too - some don't want to deal with the Jedi Code anymore than they want to hear about the Prime Directive, so they will take a smuggler with an old beat-up ship and a 100,000 Credit debt over cool powers if they are likely to get lectured about them.

So maybe that's my insight from thinking through all of this: People (my people anyway) want to play games where they have a great deal of freedom of action and potentially important choices, even moral choices - they just don't want to be harangued or lectured or berated by NPC's for those choices. The restrictions should come from the player's head, not from fear of (or the hassle of) NPC disapproval. 

I've never really broken that down in quite that way but it does fit the pattern over the years.  Now I have to figure out how to use it. I knew this was a good idea!

Anyway if you have a thought or an insight here, or if you spent time with one of these games, post it down below.