13th Age - The Rest of the Game

Last week I waxed on about the Icons and Relationships element of the game and I really liked it. I like some of the other parts of the game as well and thought I would share those too.

• "One Unique Thing" - players declare one unique aspect of their characters at start. Maybe they are the only Klingon in Star Fleet or the Last Son of Krypton  - well, maybe not those in particular. Anyway the idea is to state something that makes the character unique. Now the old school side of me says "great, another special snowflake thing" but it doesn't really bother me that much. Heck, in the old days the idea that my magic-user wore red robes and was bald was about the only thing that made him different from a friend's magic user that wore blue robes and a pointy hat. Having something codified into the character building process to isn't automatically bad. Also, it comes across like a Fate Aspect, something that can be occasionally tapped in a social situation rather than a combat modifier so the power implications should be minimal. 

• "Backgrounds" - This is a new take on skills that is more retro than it first appears. Each class has a certain number of points to spend on backgrounds - moisture farmer, bush pilot, desert scout. The number of points spent becomes the skill modifier applied to any roll where that background might be relevant. So if I had 8 points to spend I might put 2 into moisture farmer, 2 into desert scout, and 4 into bush pilot. If I find myself trying to fly a ship later, I can use that bush pilot background for a +4 bonus on my skills to fly it. 
• This is a nice flavorful way of keeping a "skill check" mechanic in the game that stays away from detailed point management (like 4E did with "trained" or "untrained" skills and then goes beyond that to stay away from detailed skill management altogether. It's much more like the Secondary Skills of AD&D where a character used to be a farmer or hunter or something and could use that when discussing things with the DM. 
• It also gives the potential for some fun interaction ala Marvel Heroic as players attempt to justify including the bonus from their backgrounds in all kinds of unexpected situations. This on-the-fly development doesn't necessarily show up on the page but it does come out in play. The relevant ability is also something to be determined on the spot and that should add even more fun to the discussion. 
• The default assumption is a varying number of points per class but there is a note that that's primarily to honor previous editions and that giving all characters the same number of points isn't going to unbalance anything in this version of the game. That's probably the direction I would lean.
• There is no built-in advancement of the number of background points but there is the option to take a Feat that adds to them, so the option is there for players who want it. Nicely done.

• Gear is simplified in a lot of ways. Armor is heavy or light, no need to determine exactly what make it is except for flavor. Weapons are divided into a number of types like light/heavy and one or two handed and even that is an abstraction I am prepared to live with - it worked fine for Warhammer so it should be acceptable here. 

• Classes are less hard-coded as most pick from a menu of class talents and feats to determine their abilities rather than a fixed list. I like what I see though I expect playing would expose some favorites and some potential weaknesses. The designers are straight-up here, noting that a barbarian is much simpler to run than a wizard and describing the differences between each class is a solid way.

• Combat changes include general simplification, damage adjustments, and the escalation die.
• There are fewer modifiers, fewer defenses, fewer conditions, no grid requirement, and much less positioning and AoO tracking. Fighting in Spirit is a nice little rule allowing a downed character to throw a +1 on another character, chalking it up to inspiration or the force or past training.
• Damage is basically 1 die per level. If you use a sword for 1d8 at 1st level, you're doing 5d8 with it at 5th level. Ability modifiers double at 5th to keep them from becoming less relevant. This sounds similar to what Tunnels & Trolls does and I bet it works just fine.
• The Escalation Die is a mechanic I like - At the beginning of combat it is zero. As of round 2 put out a d6 set to "1" and move it up each round til it maxes at 6. This is a to-hit modifier for the PC's and a few special monsters. The idea is to speed up combat but it has some other interesting effects as well. Players are less likely to open with an alpha strike, instead waiting until hey have a solid bonus to add to their big blast. It also adds some dramatic tension to the fight as I suspect being at 0 or 1 is going to feel "down" to most players after they get used to the system. It also gives a nice mechanic to hook things on (like bloodied did for 4E) and some class abilities do tie in to the escalation die count. Also, there are monsters that can interfere with it as well. I think it has a ton of potential.

• Incremental advances are a way of smoothing out the leveling process. After each session, players can choose one part of the goodies form gaining a level (there is a list) and apply that to the character. This is a lot like the career advancement scheme from WFRP and I think it's a great idea. I don;t know that there are enough advances to gain one at the recommended rate, but I think it's something each group could figure out fairly quickly. 

• Monsters have quite a few changes and I like pretty much all of them. There are rules for mook monsters which are somewhere between the swarm rules and the minion rules from 3rd & 4th edition. Damage from monsters is fixed but has some triggered effects based on to hit rolls which keep things interesting. There are also some that key off of the escalation die which is cool too. There is also some interesting adjustment to the usual save or die type attacks that looks like it could work well - something I'd really like to test in play.

• Setting: I skimmed it. I didn't see anything I hated about it, I'm just not that interested in another fantasy setting when I have so many already. Conversion and adaptation would be the main plan here.

Possible Escalation Die candidate? Especially for a Roman-themed game?

Alright so there are a lot of parts I liked. What would I do with it?

If I was starting up a new D&D type campaign in August or later I would give it a serious look. Maybe take an existing D&D adventure, do some light conversion work, run it and see how things went and whether my players liked it.

As a DM running an existing 4E game ... well, there are parts I could take but I'm not going to scrap my current rules for these unless my players suddenly mutinied and demanded it, and even then scaling down from 30 levels to 10 would be pretty tricky. I could layer the icons and relationships over 4E if I wanted to, and the escalation die might be fun but without monster abilities triggering off of that it might not be quite as complete. I'm going to think about it.

The main thing I worry about with a game like this is that although it's getting a ton of attention now where will it be in a year or two? Castles and Crusades was a big deal when it came out as a lighter, more old school flavor of 3E and how active is out for it now beyond occasional adventures? How many groups are playing it? I loved Arcana Unearthed and later Arcana Evolved and they had a good run for maybe 4 years and now there's not much support at all. Book of Iron Might was the same way. With everything from Numenera next month to the ramping up of "next" over the next year to the ongoing Pathfinder juggernaut, I'm not sure how well or how long it's going to be supported. Maybe in the age of the kickstarter this is no longer the problem it once was but I'm leery of buying into a game that's a new flavor of D&D without actually being D&D. Sure it worked for Pathfinder but I'm not sure we're going to see the same thing here. There's a cost there, partly financial and partly not, and I may wait awhile to see if it's worth going all-in. One bright side: at least there's no licensing issue like there was with MWP and Marvel.

Motivational Monday

40K Friday - Return of the Big Yellow Hammer

After experimenting with Chaos a week or two back it was time to get back on the Imperial side of things. Apprentice Red and I played two battles featuring his Necrons. In this first one I brought back the men in big yellow power armor, the mighty Imperial Fist Deathwing army!

This was a 1250 point fight which is about as much as Red can field without gold-plating his units. That's going to be a tight budget for an all-terminator army but I came up with something I could live with:

1 Belial (HQ) @ 190 Pts
     Deathwing Assault; Independent Character; Inner Circle; Marked for
     Retribution; Tactical Precision; Vengeful Strike; Warlord Trait: The Hunt;
     Terminator Armour; #Iron Halo; #Teleport Homer; Thunder Hm. & Storm Sh.;
     Warlord

1 Librarian (HQ) @ 130 Pts
     Independent Character; Inner Circle; Deathwing Assault; Vengeful Strike;
     Psyker (2); Terminator Armour; #Psychic Hood; Storm Bolter; Force Weapon

5 Deathwing Terminator Squad (Troops) @ 240 Pts
     Deathwing Assault; Inner Circle; Split Fire; Vengeful Strike; Terminator
     Armour; Storm B. & Power F. (x3); Storm B. & Power W.; Asslt. Can. & Power
     F.; Deathwing Terminator Sergeant (character)

5 Deathwing Terminator Squad (Troops) @ 270 Pts
     Deathwing Assault; Inner Circle; Split Fire; Vengeful Strike; Terminator
     Armour; Thunder Hm. & Storm Sh. (x5); Cyclone Missile Ln.; Deathwing
     Terminator Sergeant (character)

5 Deathwing Terminator Squad (Troops) @ 270 Pts
     Deathwing Assault; Inner Circle; Split Fire; Vengeful Strike; Terminator
     Armour; Thunder Hm. & Storm Sh. (x5); Cyclone Missile Ln.; Deathwing
     Terminator Sergeant (character)

2 Ravenwing Attack Squadron (Fast Attack) @ 155 Pts
     Bikes; ATSKNF; Grim Resolve (Stubborn); Hit & Run; Scouts; #Power Armour;
     #Teleport Homer; Bolt Pistol (x2); TL Bolter (x2); Meltagun (x2); Frag
     Grenades; Krak Grenades

     1 Ravenwing Attack Bike @ [55] Pts
          Bolt Pistol (x1); Multi-Melta (x1); TL Bolter (x1); Frag Grenades;
          Krak Grenades

     1 Ravenwing Sergeant @ [26] Pts
          (character); TL Bolters; Bolt Pistol

Models in Army: 21

We both went a few points over and so ended up at 1255.

Red ran 3 units of warriors, a unit of destroyers, a unit of wraiths, and a monolith, all led by a tooled up Overlord.

Those poor old battered trees!

The setup was "Emperor's Will" so only two objectives on the table and we got the long setup. Having only 3 scoring units in my force I realized I was going to have to focus on defending my own objective with maybe some chance of knocking him off of his with my bikes. I setup Belial and the shooty terminators on the objective (that star thing), put the Ravenwing squad behind the ruin, reserved the attack bike, and delayed my Deathwing assault until Turn 2. I was going second so I wanted to give my small force a chance to survive. If things are going my way I'll drop a hammer squad on his objective and try to take/dispute it but they will probably help secure my own.

Turn 1
Turn 1 was fairly quiet with some moving and minimal shooting. Score is 3-3.

Turn 2
Then we get to Turn 2 and his monolith drops in - looks like we'll be fighting this one in my half of the board! It shoots up the gun termies as the wraiths close in. The Deathwing units drop in on target (thanks tp homers!) and we have a party now! Still 3-3.

 

Turn 2

Turn 3
I'm seeing a trap about to close here but my troops are really tough - challenge accepted! One squad for the wraiths, the other for the destroyers, and bikes for the monolith.

• The termies handle the wraiths fairly well, killing them all and giving me first blood.
• The monolith teleports a warrior unit with the lord right into the gap between the ruins and the forest. There's a lot of shooting and I end up charging them on my turn with hammernators and the bikes. The bike sergeant challenges and the warlord accepts. The sergeant survives his close encounter with a 200+ point leader while the rest of the Fists wipe out the warriors who break and are run down, including the lord who fails his get back up roll! The bikers start doing donuts on the metal carcasses a bit too soon though. Fists now up 5-3.

Turn 4

Turn 4
The Monollith opens up the gateway of infinity and sucks in the bikers - revenge! -  and there is another ton of shooting and one hammer unit dies as does Belial. That means we both have Slay the Warlord I am still holding my objective though, as is he. Now up 5-4.

Turn 5
The monolith drops another unit of warriors then parks right on the edge of the woods.. The last two THSS terminators walk over and destroy the destroyers. I am up 5-4 and the game continues.

Turn 6
There is a lot of shooting and the attack bike dies but the termies hang on and back away from that stupid gateway. Still up 5-4 the game ends on Turn 6.

Conclusions
This was a tense game and I felt like I was on my back foot for most of it. The monolith deep strike followed by warrior-dumping was an unexpected and tough challenge for my too-small force. I was never a threat to his objective. Some of that is the nature of the army I chose - terminator armies are always going to be smaller than most opponents. Some of it though was just a very aggressive plan on Red's part and it almost worked. He thought that his monolith counted for linebreaker and that he had a tie, but it turns out you have to have a scoring unit in the enemy deployment zone, and after I wiped his destroyers out he backed up that other unit of warriors to just outside of the zone! That one miss took him from a tie to a loss. Lessson: Know The Victory Conditions!

Fun stuff
The divination librarian was pretty effective in helping with re-rolls,  The hammers proved just as effective as expected, wiping out units in a single round of combat.

Aggrevations

• The bikes did all of one hull point to the monolith. This is sub-par for them. I was sure that a 2-melta bike squad and a multi-melta attack bike would be enough to break it but that dd not happen. I'll have to think about that the next time.
• I rolled a lot of 1's. I don't normally complain about luck but it was ridiculous, and it was worse in the next game.
• That teleport gate on the monolith really bumps up the mobility of the otherwise footslogging warrior army. Deep striking something that can beam your troops all the way across the board every turn is pretty handy, especially when it's armor 14. 
• Red was pretty annoyed that his 2+/3++ lord could be taken off the board without failing anything. That's what happens when he's with a bad HTH unit...

And a general note: does everything in the Necron army have to be different? Most armies have at least some standard gear but I swear, the Necron units and wargear and special abilities all have to have some funky thing that doesn't work like anything else. We spent a lot of time looking their stuff up in the codex and working out what it meant.

Anyway, another victory for the Imperial Fists! Tomorrow: The Crimson Fists get their chance!

The Obligatory 13th Age Post - Icons and Relationships

Well,  this is the hot new thing among the D&D Alternatives. The big release (like so many others) is next month.  I've glanced in on it a few times over the past year but was not in on the playtest and haven't played any of it. Now I have picked up a copy of the playtest rules and reading through them I am interested.

Mechanically it seems like a pretty good mix of traditional D&D stuff with most of it tied to 3E or 4E type resolution. But it clears away a lot of the 3E clutter while moving sideways from 4E in other places. Keeping races, classes, a skill system of some kind, feats, and the general d20 + modifier seems almost essential. Dropping the grid-based assumptions clears a lot of the mechanical complications away, and less rigidity on the balance front lets some of the flavor that 4E gave up (consciously) come back in. I'm going to spend a few posts looking at some of the aspects of the game that caught my eye and started some thinking here.

The Icons and the relationships with them is a great idea, codifying something that's been floating around in some other games but never really incorporated into D&D. The idea is that there is a set list of powerful entities in the campaign and a character has a few points to spend to identify relationships with those entities. These are categorized as "heroic", "ambiguous', or "villainous" and a character could have a "positive", "negative", or "conflicted" relationship with their chosen icons. Specifically a starting character gets 3 points to spend here and they could concentrate on a single icon or spread them around. The mechanical effect is that when desired a character can roll a d6 for each point and each "6" indicates some kind of benefit from the relationship and a 5 indicates a benefit with a complication.

The "High Druid" - one from the book

I won't get into the specific Icons used in the book because to me they are heavily setting-dependent and I'm more interested in some existing settings than the one included with the game. For a Greyhawk campaign this would let players define relationships with say, the Grandfather of Assassins, The Overking of Aerdy, The Circle of Eight, etc. with an actual mechanical effect which could liven up sessions in a fun way. It would work for the Realms as well, and could be very effective in a Dragonlance or Dark Sun game.

In the rules these examples are specifically powerful individuals, leaders and rulers of nations and races. I can see experimenting with using this with organizations, though I think making the focus the leader of an organization keeping it more personal. I can also see adding a layer for the gods, or their high priests or temples to help bring out the religious elements of the campaign world.

As an old Champions player this looks like a simplified Hunted/Rival/Ally/Sidekick system which is a good thing for any game! It's not as mechanically involved as that but it accomplishes similar goals in helping the players tie their characters to the world and tell the DM what kinds of friends and foes they want to see in the game.

I can see some fun with a system that expands by level/tier - starting out the "icons" might be the ruler of the local town, the head of a local temple, the leader of the local elf kingdom, the head of the merchants guild - keeping the focus more local and keeping things more in line with the way a lot of old school campaigns run at low levels. At the next tier that might expand to national figures, then finally to world/planar figures like the king of the fire giants or the princes of elemental evil. Mechanically it might be handled by giving a new pool of points at each tier to define relationships with the new group of icons.

The "Lich King" from the book

Now I can see this whole idea being out of step with some old school principles, mainly that it assumes a starting adventurer is important enough to have come to the notice of the movers and shakers of the world before the game begins. That's not how it worked in the old days - you were a nobody and had to earn your way to fame and hobnobbing with the powers of the campaign world. I've been slowly moving away from this view myself but I do understand it. I think this system still has a place though. I would just adjust it so that instead of having a pool of points at 1st level I would award one when hitting certain levels - maybe one at 3rd, one at 5th, then one at 7th (this game only goes to 10th level so the range is compressed a bit compared to classic D&D). This would keep the characters as relative nobodies at the lowest levels and let them gradually come to the notice of the bigger fish as they earn it by leveling up during the game.

This approach would reverse one important element though: selecting these relationships during character creation lets the players drive some of the campaign focus right from the beginning. Choosing them during the level up process means that the campaign will be driving the choices as I suspect players will spend their points on the icons that are already a factor in the game rather than trying to drive the campaign in a direction of their choice. It shifts things from a proactive approach to a reactive approach, from the player perspective. That may be a desired result for some groups but  it's worth considering before implementation.

I do think there needs to be a set list of icons for the campaign and it needs to be a fairly small number. In the rulebook there are 13 and I think that's a good number to target. If you expand it too much or leave it open-ended and let players choose whatever they want then it dilutes the focus and lessens the impact. This is where the DM gets to lay out the potential focus of the campaign by deciding what's on "the list" and the players get to narrow it down with their choices from that list.

Other Uses

• Star Wars: The middle version of WOTC's Star Wars d20 game had a Reputation system that let the DM track player relationships with a bunch of organizations from the Empire to Black Sun. This kind of thing seems tailor made for a Star Wars game and would be easy to add on to any version of the rules, from d6 to Saga. I think a list of icons would be easy enough to generate and off you go.

• Star Trek: Maybe not as obvious but I can still see a niche for it. Star Fleet Intelligence, The Klingon Chancellor, Section 31, Q - just watch the show and the possibilities bloom. This would give the players a nice hook beyond career history and current assignment and explain why they keep getting certain kinds of missions...

• Marvel/DC: SHIELD, the President, Congress, Stark Industries - I might take a more organization-based approach here but you could certainly make it personal - start with the illuminate and work down a list of powerful individuals,. DC would be similar. It's a looser alternative to the Champions approach and lets relationships have a mechanical impact outside of the usual powers found in a superhero game.

So it's a cool idea that works outside of the D&D style game as well. I think that's a strong indicator of goodness. I have some desire to link this to Dawn of Worlds to build a brand new campaign world from the ground up with my players. It would be an interesting exercise at least, nailing down the icons for the RPG campaign during the world-building game.

Motivational Monday

40K Friday - Calling up the Reserves

I've been working on my Chaos Marines, even after the beatings I took previously. I figure the bikers and other things will change the force up enough that I can make a better showing. I'll show more on them next week.

While building them - you know building Chaos Marines takes a lot longer than building regular marines. There are so many choices about how to arm them, how many to put in a squad, whether to mark them, how to tool up the champion ... loyalist marines it's pretty much 10 guys, missile launcher + flamer + maybe another extra guy with a different weapon. The only thought goes into the sergeant and that's still not much compared to an aspiring chaos champion. It took me a long time to build out two CSM squads and the biker squad and I'm still working on the terminators.

The old reliable Arm Sprue ...

Anyway, while building them I ran out of arms! I've been building marines for 25 years now, and I doubt I have bought an actual marine box in 10 years, other than starter sets, and I have never thought twice about arms - now I'm out! Those old 2E/3E blister packs came with (typically) two metal guys and 4-5 pairs of marine arms (so lots of spares), and I bought a LOT of those packages. Now, sadly, they are all gone. I actually had to break down and pick up a batch of marine arms (thanks eBay!) to finish them up. The loyal marines burned up those "under the bolter" left arms, and the chaos forces finished off the "holding something" left arms.

While ransacking the house for arms, I made another discovery. I have a lot of spare marines sitting around waiting to be drafted into one of my armies. In particular there are a lot of old metal and RT era guys that I was planning on *someday* adding to my RT-era Howling Griffons. Some of them have been "pending" for a very long time (longer than my kids have been around). I realized that it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to go back and do a significant expansion to that army. It is what it is, and while I do take it out and use it every once in a while it's mostly "retired". The Crimson Fists are my current vanilla marine army and my Ravenwing/Deathwing armies let me abuse that other codex. So what to do with that reserve force scattered from the garage to the display case?

Spray 'em red! Old school vindicator, dread, 2 squads of assault marines, a death company squad of old RT plastic bare-head guys, Mephiston, some librarians, some chaplains, and two squads of RT terminators (1 assault, 1 shooty) - instant Blood Angel force! It's somewhere around 1500 points depending on characters and gear - plenty to start with and adding a unit of sanguinary guard or some older Baal Predators or Vindicators will be simple enough.

Rather than adding to an old army I've built a whole new one without adding any new figures! They will be using the new arms, since I'm out of those, and I did pick up a used Codex, but that's pretty cheap for spawning a whole new force. No, I probably didn't need yet another power armor army but these guys were just sitting around - at least now there is a chance they will get to see some action.

Now of course the temptation is to become the "marine guy" - I have to Codex forces, two Dark Angel based forces, and now a BA force, and Chaos marines too. All I need is to build up some Gray Knights and some Space Wolves and I'l have the complete set, pending the future of the Black Templars as a separate codex.

When will I use them? Hard to say, but I am supposed to play a game with Apprentice Red tonight. If he can tolerate armless marines they may see the table then. More on that next week.

The Lone Ranger - A View From Texas

So a heavily-promoted movie came out and is failing. I did go see it and thought I would share a bit.

The Good

• It was reportedly an expensive movie and the money is up there on the screen. Big sets, big crowds of people, lots of stunts and set-pieces
• Johnny Depp does fine as Tonto though he's not quite as funny as the pirate.
• There's a fair amount of setup and origin but it doesn't all come at you at once, in order. There's a framing device and a lot of non-sequential storytelling that mix things up

The Bad

• It's way over the top when it comes to stunts and physics. I'd almost call it a Wuxia Western but it's not as cool as that would imply. This weakens the whole movie.
• The Ranger himself is a neophyte, not an experienced, mature, tough Texas Ranger as one might expect. His motivations are solid enough, but his experience and manner are just off compared to earlier incarnations of the character
• As others have noted, the plot is pretty much the same as the Antonio Banderas Mask of Zorro movie (of which I am a fan) so if you've seen that then you already know how this is going to go.
• The framing device I mentioned above is overused and becomes intrusive by the later stages of the film. It worked in Princess Bride but that was mainly a comedy. This is mainly and action movie and it does not work as well here.
• About 5% of the film actually looks like Texas, the rest of it looks like Arizona or New Mexico, despite it being set 100% in Texas. This was a problem with a lot of older westerns but I thought we were past it now - apparently not.
• It's just not funny enough nor is it serious enough, like it can't decide what it wants to be

Outside of these I think the biggest meta-problem is that this was made by the same team that made Pirates of the Caribbean and in that there was a heavy mystical element right from the start whereas here there is none. There is a lot of alluding to Indian mysticism, but there's no actual payoff.  This limits what they can do character-wise and plot-wise and was probably a mistake. Either go totally real and gritty and make a modern Lone Ranger that way, or let some mysterious stuff happen, similar to the Indiana Jones movies, and don't try to explain it.

Spoiler: When they started talking "Wendigo" and Silver Bullets I thought we were about to get this kind of movie - then it pretty much fizzled out like a wet firecracker.

I also didn't like the two-faced attitude towards the source material. They're making a big-budget movie based on something and when the classic overture kicks in as the big finale starts up (the first time in the movie that it is heard) I admit it felt pretty good. But making the hero a bumbling greenhorn was not a good choice, putting it almost to the level of Big Trouble in Little China's hero-as-sidekick as Tonto's competence and general savvy (heh) overshadows him. Plus, at the very end of the movie, there's a slam on a classic Lone Ranger bit that seems like a pointless cheap shot at the original and I didn't like that either. "we'll take the mask, the copanion, the silver bullets, and the theme, but this other part is dumb so we'll just make fun of it instead" - bad move.

In the end I didn't hate it but I was disappointed with it. A new western franchise that was as much fun as the Pirate movies would have been a very cool thing to have over the next few years, but that's not likely now. I will say if you want to watch a good actor play a quirky, interesting character in a western, you can skip this and go watch "Tombstone" and have a better time.

You're a daisy if you do...

Overreaction Tuesday

Paizo announces one of the worst titles in recent RPG history. I'm not offended by it, I just think it's an odd choice. I also think it would be cool for a gritty low-level adventure or a novel with a similar take, but as the name of a supplement it made me laugh.

Some good stuff about Aspects in ICONS from Steve K himself. I think they are one of the things that elevates it from a simple numbers game to a real RPG.

D&D:

• Stuff about the planes in Next. Basically it's the kitchen sink approach - "we're including everything from every edition. Except Spelljammer." Whee. It's probably the smartest approach when it comes to inclusiveness. I think the Feywild and the Shadowfell are some of the best additions (and most useful in play) to the cosmology to come out of 4E so I'm glad to see them making the cut.
• Stuff about monsters in Next. I don;t have a problem with anything I'm reading here. I NEED the stats to run the thing, anything more than that is gravy. Look at what we did with the one-paragraph entries in the old Basic sets - lack of official information didn't hold us back then, it won't hurt us now. If a few extra notes about something like an Ettercap or a Lamia gets some creative juices flowing then that's all good.
• Stuff about adventures and style of play vs. rules. This is from a couple of weeks ago but I never dug into it here and it's among the most important things in updating the game IMO:

A debate we had in R&D a few weeks back brought this topic to light. Someone made the point that running low on spells and hit points while in the middle of the dungeon was irritating. Putting the adventure on pause to return to town was disappointing.

At this point, I'm willing to bet that about half the people reading this agree with that statement. The rest of you are likely already making the counterargument. Running out of resources in the dungeon is a challenge to be overcome through strategy and planning. The adventure doesn't pause at that point. Escaping the dungeon with only a few hit points, spells, and potions is part of the adventure.

I think for the majority of D&D's history it has been built around the "counter-argument" mentioned above and I think that's really a big part of the "classic" D&D experience. To remove that from the game is a huge thing. It may move the game towards what players prefer today but I don't see how it reflects any kind of classic, core, or iconic elements of playing D&D.

Let's take alignment as an example. A good number of DMs prefer to leave it out of their campaigns. On the other hand, it's a big part of D&D's identity. We've all seen charts that try to fit different characters from a TV or comic series into the nine alignments. For that reason, we've included alignment as a default part of the game, but we're also committed to severing its ties to any mechanics. For instance, a paladin detects the presence of supernatural creatures rather than whether a creature has an evil alignment.

So they're keeping alignment in but removing it from any mechanics? This is a case where compromise yields nothing - For 30 years Paladins detected Evil. Despite this record and the repeated emphasis on tradition in the Next communications the decisions has been made to change this. Now I can see a case for making this change in a design sense (having a class feature of "detect monster type" could be good for different flavors of paladin and for rangers as well) and in a modern tastes sense (since a lot of modern players seem to dislike the inclusion of absolutes of good and evil). Again, however, it is a definite change from "classic D&D".

These collisions while serving the two masters of "modern" vs "uniting the editions under the banner of classic D&D" makes me wonder if they've made a bad decision as those two things are going to collide a lot and every decision made in favor of one or the other - and then highlighted in a web article - is going to annoy some segment of the population. I think every new edition of D&D should reflect what that design team thinks is the best D&D game they can make, with tradition being a secondary concern. If you want to include classic material in a new edition then publish a version of it for that new edition! Otherwise the DM's and players who care enough to make that effort will take care of it themselves and those who don't won't have to worry about it.

Summer Slowdown and Star Wars

I think that may be the first time I've had two Motivational Monday posts with nothing in between. With the Apprentices busy for the first part of the summer and the main group having schedule difficulties it's been pretty slow here for the past few weeks when it comes to RPG's. I've been playing more online games and spending some time on building up armies and terrain for 40K  With the camps and rehearsals and practices wrapping up I hope that next week yields more fun-time for all of us.

Among the requests have been D&D, Supers, likely Marvel, and Star Wars. SW is a little tricky as Apprentice Blaster and I spent some time last week digging into The Old Republic as Jedi and he would like any tabletop time we get to allow him similar options.  This pretty much means "I want to play a Jedi that can do some interesting stuff right from the get-go and not feel like an old-school first level D&D wizard."

The d6 game has never really catered to starting out as an aspiring Jedi badass. Even if I talked them into trying it again I'm not sure it's going to give them what they want. I might start with 1st edition + some extra skill points but even then I'm not sure it's right.

Saga actually comes the closest, allowing combat-competent Jedi types right from 1st level. We do have a campaign that's been underway for a long time - maybe this is a good place to start. Plus it has a lot of support for the KOTOR era and the Clone Wars era which are the sweet spots for them right now.

Then there is also the new thing, the FFG Edge of the Empire. The custom dice have kept me away from it, plus the seeming focus on Rebellion-era fringer play - I did that back in the d6 edition and I'm not really eager to do that all over again with new mechanics. However, the reviews I keep reading have me thinking that it may work out similar to the MWP Marvel game with all of the narrative dice-pool building fun and less emphasis on grids and physics. If it comes close to that then it would definitely be worth a look. A different mechanical approach plus the challenge of using it for an Old Republic game if we go that direction makes it interesting.

That said I watched this video with Blaster and he was unimpressed with the force approach. At one point they mention that you can start off as a newbie force user in Edge, then train up through the rebellion book that's coming down the road, then go full Jedi in the third book coming after that. His comment was "that seems like a lot of work when I could just start off as a Jedi in the one we already have."  and to a point I agree with him. I do like the idea of getting in at the start of a game that I know will be well-supported and growing with it but this would be Yet Another Star Wars game to some degree and I do have some of those already.

I may look into the beginner box as a one-shot and see where things go. If it's not a hit then Saga or a Savage Worlds adaptation is the next step.

Motivational Monday