Motivational Monday

For some reason this one popped into my head at Disney a few times so here it is to start the new year off right.

Operation: Mousetrip Begins

About the time this post goes up we will be hitting the road and taking the kids to Disneyworld as a big Christmas present. They found out Friday afternoon and we leave Saturday morning.

The whole blended family thing can be challenging at times with schedules and all of those complications (that lead to things like doing the family Xmas on the 27th instead of the 25th) on top of the usual school and time off issues and the teenage-specific weather of jobs, school projects, girlfriends/boyfriends, and general unpredictability of moods. We started planning this a year ago, after the kids all took off for the "other half" of that Christmas and it was just Lady Blacksteel and myself, and it has finally all worked out. The whole Disney thing still has enough magic to make all of the teenagers walk around with a big grin, overcoming all of those other potential obstacles. It was a surprise to them, a good one, and they didn't even complain about the short notice. The prospect of their first trip to WDW, including new year's eve at the park, seems to have shaved about 10 years off of all of their ages - for today at least.

As you might guess posting will be sparse this week. Beyond the Disney thing it was a 40K Christmas here when it comes to gaming as there's really nothing new in the RPG rotation of 4E/Pathfinder/Next that they needed. They were pretty excited about their new 40K stuff but the trip means it won't be hitting the table for a week or more  and we're all OK with that.

Anyway, Happy New Year! Posting resumes in 2014!

40K Friday: A Short Guide to Used Mini's

About as pro-painted as you can get - from the GW site

New miniatures, especially Games Workshop miniatures, are expensive. Fortunately there are many channels out there to buy used miniatures which can be far less expensive to acquire. I've been doing that for quite a while and I thought I would share my experiences.

In most ways the best avenue is buying them in-person from another gamer or store - you can see what you're getting up close and from all angles which should cut down on the unpleasant surprises. There's also usually some haggling involved too. This might not even be a financial transaction - I've traded units and armies for other units and other armies with no cash changing hands. It can be a lot of fun.

The most common channel though is online. The three main ones I know of are specialized miniatures trading sites, craigslist, and ebay. Most of my experience has been with ebay so I will focus on that in particular.

The biggest danger when trading online is paying for something you didn't actually want. Pictures are key here - I would not buy any used miniature without seeing a picture first, preferably several of them from different angles.

All that said here is my handy dandy guide to descriptions of miniatures online:

"NIB" - new in box/new in blister pack - this is pretty easy to see and it's pretty much a yes/no as there are really no degrees of "new". For a current game these are usually discounted as you can otherwise just go buy them at a store. For an old out of print game they can be more expensive, as it's the only way to get pristine copies to work your own magic upon.

"Primed" - this usually means one spray coat of black, gray, or white. Hopefully a lighter coat rather than a heavier coat. People are pretty honest about this one.

"Basecoated" - well for space marines this usually means "sprayed in a chapter color" and not much else. For other armies it's pretty much the identifier for "primer + one color". As long as it's the right color it's not bad.

"Painted" - usually a true statement, though one with a thousand degrees of sub-classification. The basic statement itself here though is pretty much another binary thing - either there is paint on the mini or there is not. This is not nearly as useful or complete as NIB though - see below.

Old 2E Tyranid Warriors - to me that's at least a "tabletop Quality" job! 

"Hand-Painted" - well yes, there aren't really any machines or trained gerbils doing this sort of thing yet so this is a red herring in many ways - it sounds better to the uninitiated and means nothing. It seems to mostly be used by people selling something they don't understand or deal with regularly.
"Well-Painted" - ah, here we have our first truly subjective rating. My "well painted" may be your "tabletop quality" or worse. This is an instant "look at the picture" for me (most of these descriptions are, truly) and again tells you almost nothing. I've seen many a figure described as "well painted" that makes me want to know what kind of curve they were grading on.

"Pro-Painted" - now theoretically a pro is a professional, someone who gets paid to paint miniatures. This does not guarantee any level of quality at all, but from the way it is used you'd think it did. I will say that it's far more rare to see a bad "pro-painted" mini than it is most others, so there is that. But I've seen painted mini's for $30 that are far more intricately painted than some I've seen for $130, so the actual quality and cost varies wildly. Then there are the various painting services that do have a track record and lots of pictures to browse, versus the one man operation that doesn't even have a web site beyond ebay. It doesn't mean they don't do good work, it's just harder to see samples. Of course a lot of times "pro-painted" means "painted by someone other than the person selling the figure" and they have no idea who did paint it. Again, all you really have to go by are the pictures.

Perfectly tabletop-ready. I'd do a little more with the bases but those are fine otherwise.

"Tabletop Quality Paint Job" - This is another description that varies wildly - again my "tabletop" may be very different from yours. That's not a snobbery thing, that's covering a range form "dipped in melted crayon then clear-coated for good measure" to  "better than most pro-painted stuff". It also may cover everything from "bases not painted" to "custom bases with detailed paint jobs" so there's a lot of variance. In general I find these aren't too bad, but you do want to look the pictures over carefully.

"Badly Painted" - well you don't see it a lot but I have seen it a few times and none of them were wrong. Should be used a lot more than it is. When you let the 8-year old try painting for the first time, then he decides he doesn't like the game so you decide to sell the stuff on ebay to make some of the money back here's a hint: this is where those figures belong, not in "painted", not in "hand painted", and not in tabletop painted either. Right.Here.

More Nid Warriors from 2E and these are not so good

One other consideration:  Bases. If you're adding to an existing army, don't forget to check the bases and see how much work it's going to be to blend them in with the rest of your army. If you're buying a whole army this is not really a problem, but if you're adding figures or units to a pile of stuff you already have it can be. Note: Spaceships usually do not have this problem!

One Final Consideration: Is it a paintjob you can match?  Sure, those neon purple and green Nurgle Terminators look awesome, but there are only 3 of them. What if you want to add a few more? What if you want to swap out a weapon? Can you match it yourself? Can you find other painted figures that will fit into the unit?  Even known paint schemes (marine chapters in 40k for example) have some variation in shading and unit insignia. They are easier to manage though. Pretty much any Space Wolf squad or vehicle will at least look like it's in the same neighborhood as another Space Wolf unit. At the opposite extreme, with some armies it barely matters - chaos daemon armies probably shouldn't look alike, and orks are a ramshackle enough bunch that it's OK there too. Heck, bringing in units painted by someone else can help diversify the look of your army, making it even more characterful in these cases.

Merry Christmas!

Trek Tuesday - Christmas Eve Edition

Motivational Monday

40K Friday - Holiday Wishes

This is the last day of school for the kids before the holiday break. We haven't had a chance to play this week - somehow being off for a while means a bunch of extra work to prepare for being off for a while, and of course the schools have to cram in every possible activity too so the evenings are packed as well - but they have asked for some 40K stuff for Christmas and I thought I would talk a little bit about that.

Blaster wants some more terminators for his Space Wolves. He's interested in trying out a "Loganwing" army in the aftermath of yet another Deathwing beatdown. The kid has a pretty solid Wolf army already so now he's getting into that next level of play - adding a unit or two that will let you totally change up your approach. I'm just glad that they haven't been totally forgotten in his rush to the Eldar.

Regarding Eldar he has been playing them most of the time lately and asked for more Dire Avengers. All the cool exotic stuff in that book and he wants ... troop choices. I admit he's doing it right - make sure you have solid troop choices then build up to the fancy stuff. I'm pretty sure a wraith knight is going to be on his birthday list in a few months so maybe we'll deal with that then. He's still refining his army, playing a lot of "bring what you have" as his army is still fairly new. I say new, but he's pushing towards 2000 points of stuff so it's not exactly small. Now to get it all painted ...

Red is looking to add to both his armies. For his Necrons he's decided to build the world's first Necron Waaagh by taking something like 80 warriors in 4-5 groups with lords of some kind in each plus his wraiths and some other weird necron stuff I don't worry about until I need to shoot it. It's not a conventional strategy and it's not a cheap one, though it is cheaper than some as warriors are not terribly expensive second-hand. He's only about halfway to his goal so we'll have to see how that turns out.

For his Orks Red needs more shoota boyz, a sensible choice in this edition. I also pointed him in the direction of nob bikers since he is building his orks as Evil Sunz and we will see where that goes too. He does like Ghazghkull and his battlewagons full of boyz and nobz so the bikes may not be a priority for a while. He did ask for some Kans too and that might be an interesting option with his already vehicle-heavy army. He and I are both waiting for the new Ork codex to really crank things up.

Apprentice Who has finally shown some real interest in 40K as well. He is younger, so I haven't really pushed him on - we have plenty of superhero stuff to talk about so we don't really need to force the Grim Darkness on him until he's ready for it - but he's been hanging around and asking questions during games and announced he's interested in playing something with "big monsters". The Helbrute from the Dark Vengeance set keeps catching his eye. In light of that I let him look at old and new codexes and battle reports for the Chaos Marines, Chaos Daemons, and Tyranids. He seems to like the new marine stuff like the mauler fiends and forge fiends, and the daemon princes are pretty slick looking too.

This of course leads to the potentially awkward scenario on Christmas:

"Hey grandson what did you get for Christmas?"

"Hey grandma I got a Bloodthirster of Khorne! He fights for the blood god!"

This kind of thing comes with the territory of being the dad who's into this kind of stuff but it's a fair step from action figures and Pokemon to shouts of "blood for the blood god" on Xmas morning. The family has mostly learned to deal with it but it's still a little uncomfortable at times when it comes up around the uninitiated. As long as the kid's happy though it's worth it.

As for me I picked up a few deals on things to try and whip my Blood Angels army into shape. I know they aren't in great shape mechanics-wise right now but they're cool, I have mini's I can use for them, and they will be getting a new codex one of these days. Phase 1 of my plan is to get the infantry part settled out. This is mainly assault squads, terminator squads, HQ's, and the death company. Phase 2 will be the vehicles - a Rhino or two, Baal Predators, Vindicators, Dreadnoughts, and Storm Ravens. That part won't be cheap, so I want the core grunt force figured out first. Phase 1 is now mostly handled, Phase 2 will happen next year.

My other more recent add-on is building an Iyanden wraith army. I've seen a lot of Eldar armies with the new book but I haven't seen many old-style ghost armies. I've liked the idea since the Craftworld codex brought it in as an option back in 3rd edition, but I never tried to build one. Now I am going to. Going this route also keeps me from stepping on Blaster's toes as he's going for more of an "everything" build with a tendency towards footdar.

One other consideration is that so many of my armies contain older models - and I like them plenty - but it would be nice to have an all-new army: no legacy models that I have to identify to kids younger than they are, no old paintjobs from the 80's-90's, just shiny clean new models with new paintjobs that match. Every army I have includes mini's going back to the Rogue Trader days - only my Imperial Fists Deathwing army does not but I didn't really build or paint that one, though admittedly that was kind of the point. This one will be built ground-up by me and while I might be open to a few pre-painted units I want the bulk of that work to be mine as well.

So in lieu of a battle report there's a different kind of report - Happy Holidays!

New D&D Officially "Next Summer"

Other good things about summer

There's a nice broad range for you. I'm guessing Gen Con or right before Gen Con.

Press release, En World comments etc. here.

Notable line:

Players will be immersed in rich storytelling experiences across multiple gaming platforms as they face off against the most fearsome monster of all time.

Say what? Vecna? Tharizdun? The Tarrasque? Typos? Overly corporate cross-platform-marketing-schemes?

The Winter Fantasy con is in February and I expect we'll see some actual dates announced there.

My take is ... I don't know ... there were things I liked in Next and things I didn't it's difficult to tell from all the versions of the rules we saw, plus their weekly Q&A, plus various interviews, what we're really going to get when the dust settles.   I'm having a hard time getting excited about it. Just not that amped-up at the prospect of buying the PHB-DMG-MM all over again, not to mention the inevitable fighter book, wizard book, Forgotten Realms book, Eberron book, special combat rules book, and all the rest. The editions may change, but the marketing plan does not.

Between the 4th Edition stuff I still have to finish, the Pathfinder stuff I am running, and the occasional foray into Labyrinth Lord I'm going to need more than "Hey it's new D&D" to get energized about this one.

Trek Tuesday - Decipher Trek

Getting back to the big glossy editions of Trek RPG's, it's time to talk about the Decipher years. The genesis of this one is a little strange. Last Unicorn had been publishing their edition of the game for a couple of years when in 2000 the announcement came out that they had been purchased by WOTC. Within a few months WOTC/LUG lost the Trek license, supposedly because there was a clause against the same company having both the Star Trek and Star Wars licenses which WOTC now had.

Regardless of the details a new Trek game appeared in 2002 (roughly a one-year gap) from Decipher of all companies. Decipher had been known only for card games up to this point, so it was a surprise. Considering they already had the Trek license for card games, it did make some sense. One interesting thing was that quite a bit of the design team from Last Unicorn made the jump to the new edition - take a look at the credit pages below:

Last Unicorn credits page

Decipher credits page

There is a lot of overlap there. So you might think "lots of continuity there" right? Well, not so much. Despite having invented a whole new system and written multiple books on Trek just within the last 5 years, the design appears to have looked more at a different system that was popular at the time.

The stats shift to six familiar-looking basic attributes plus some others. Task resolution also looks familiar (and I don;t mean Traveller) being 2d6 + modifiers (lots and lots of modifiers) to beat a target number set by the difficulty of the task. It's shifted down about 5 points from the d20 difficulty numbers but it looks very familiar. This was during the height of the d20 boom and the system for stats, skills, and task resolution is very similar to d20.

Characters have a Species which modifies attributes and grants some special abilities. They also choose a Profession which designates some skills as professional skills and grants some special abilities. There are also Elite Professions which can be taken after meeting certain criteria.

Action Rounds are 6 seconds long and characters can take movement actions, combat actions, free actions, and full-round actions - not really trying to hide it at this point were they?

There is a some chrome here. There are Traits which are like Advantages/Disadvantages, there is a hero point mechanic and a reputation mechanic, combat uses a damage track as well as simple hit point type damage to introduce some damage effects,  and of course there is star ship combat as well.

So it's very much a d20-styled Trek game. You might think that would have taken off bigtime in that particular time. Well it didn't. They produced very nice full-color hardback books, six of them and a narrator's screen from 2002-2003 and then it got quiet. Considering the ready availability of these books in bargain bins and overstock deals circa 2005 I think it's safe to say this did not do well. It's not hard to see why:

• First, despite having the same design team this is a very different game, mechanically, and having spent significant money to acquire the previous rules, there was not a huge incentive to turn around and spend money all over again a few years later.
• Second, I don't think fans of LUG Trek felt that the system had run its course and so there was no great outcry for a revision or new mechanics and Decipher's version didn't cover any new ground that the prior version had not.
• Thirdly, while it was like d20 it was not actually d20. This closed it off from the exploding ecosystem of d20 games that were cross-compatible to a degree, and from gamers who were extremely d20-focused.
• Finally, there is timing - when this was released Voyager had just ended, Enterprise had just started, and Nemesis released and was not particularly well received. Trek was petering out in a lot of ways. I suspect that among casual players and fans there was not a lot of interest in starting up a new game and the die-hard fans already had FASA or LUG Trek (or one of the many, many homebrews) and were not terribly interested in something new. Contrast this with Star Wars which was in the middle of the new trilogy after a long gap and was all over the place.

Looking back I think if the design team had taken this as a chance to refine the ICON system, or if they had gone full-on d20 system, then it probably would have sold better as at least there would have been some built-in audience for the new game. Given the timing of its release I'm not sure it would have mattered but I can't help but think it would have helped in some way.

Personally I've never run a game of it. I tried - twice. We never got past character generation in either one. I tried selling it to my group once many years ago and it never took off. I tried it a bit later online and that never got off the ground either. I don't blame the system for those but that is the extent of my experience with it. Hey, I tried ...

If I was going to start up a campaign now I suspect Decipher's game would be several notches down the list even though I have the complete pile of stuff. It's fine and has plenty of material in the books to support a campaign, but so do most other Trek RPG's (official and unofficial). I see stuff in the other versions that I like better. I don't see much support for it online and I suspect it's just not as popular even now as the other options.

That's about all I have to say on Decipher Trek. Next week we will see what else is out there.

Motivational Monday