40K Friday: Apocalypse

Not a lot to report this week so I thought I would give a nod to Apocalypse, the rules expansion of ridiculously huge battles.

I'm not a big apocalypse guy - I played Epic for about 10 years straight and those are far bigger battles than you're likely to see in an Apoc game, even some of the multi-day craziness*. I think the biggest game I ever ran was a con game in Dallas back in the 90's where I believe we had six players per side, Imperials vs. Orks, and everybody had at least one titan, usually more, plus superheavies etc. It was a big fight - we ran it on a 6x12 board, half city, half country. The turning point I recall was that about turn 3 the more agressive Emperor titan player rolled boxcars for his plasma counters, moved right out to the center of the board and unleashed everything - he blew up a mega-gargant, a great gargant, and a mekboy gargant, plus he tore up a slasher. I think we gave him an award for wrecking one of each type of gargant in one firing phase - it's like hitting for the cycle in baseball!

Waiting and watching ...

Anyway GW lost interest in the Epic games in the early 2000s and the closest thing to it that is actually supported is Apocalypse, which lets you use all of your 40K scale mini's. plus a bunch of stuff from Forgeworld and other places that can't really participate in a normal skirmish. It's the no-limits version of 40K where models come off the table by the handful and going second means that a bunch of stuff you packed up and brought to the battle will never get a chance to do anything.

The Apoc book originally came out for 4th edition, there was an update book for 5th edition, and now there is a brand new shiny version for 6th edition. No I don't own it and I may never own it. When I get the urge to go ridiculous I'd rather route that energy into dusting off the Epic stuff and giving that a go. I may change my mind but the Apprentices are still building their armies up for regular 40K so it's not like we have a crushing need to go even bigger.

Anyway, since I don't have any battles of my own to share here are some links to some guys who do. Crazy Canadians...

2010 - 80,000 points

2011 - 250,000 points

2012 - 500,000 points

2013 - ? It just happened last weekend, no big report yet. Here's the intro.



*Before someone starts telling me about their awesome armorcast titan force, for Epic I can drop four Emperor titans on the board just for starters, and on an Epic scale board you have enough room to see how truly devastating they can be. Plus at least a dozen painted Warlord titans, etc. etc. Remeber, in Epic the formation cards include things like 3 Phantom Titans. Apoc is cool, but Epic games are still an entirely different scale of fight, and they don't take a 3-day weekend to settle.

Go Fer Yer Gun

In the midst of "gigantic new release" season I thought I would squeeze in a look at a game that is neither new nor gigantic. It originally came out in 2005, but I only discovered it earlier this year so it's new enough to me. There was a mini-wave of western d20 games back then with "OGL Wild West" from Mongoose (great name for that one), Sidewinder Recoiled based on d20 Modern, Deadlands d20, and probably some others I am forgetting.

My background: Played a fair amount of Boot Hill back in the 80's, fooled around with a little Western Hero and GURPS Old West in college, Spent some time with Deadlands in the 90's (both original recipie and d20 flavors). Own Aces & Eights but have never run/played. The only old west fun we've had in recent years is with the Savage Worlds flavor of Deadlands.

First thing: It's a free PDF! Available here. I like free, free is good.

It's 70-off pages long about half of which is all about making characters. It uses the standard d20 set of attributes, scores, and modifiers. It does use what I believe is C&C's approach of 2 primary, 2 secondary, and 2 tertiary attributes for task resolution. Instead of having a long list of skills and DC's by level the base difficulty is 12 for a check involving a primary stat, 15 for a secondary, and 18 for a tertiary. You make a check by rolling a d20, adding the relevant attribute modifier and the character's level to beat the target number described above. There are other possible modifiers - an opponent's level for example - but that's the basic system. Your class determines one primary attribute and the player allocates the others as they see fit. I like this as it does allow a simple way of defining what your character is "good at" in a completely different way from class abilities. You could have multiple characters of the same class that play very differently using this system. Heck, this has me wanting to go back and look over Castles and Crusades again. In the context of a western game I think it has a lot of potential to liven up what sometimes turn into cardboard characters.

Classes run from levels 1-20 and there are 3 different experience tables - sigh. Each class has an attack bonus that increases per level, a defense bonus that increases per level, and a hit die progression that ends after a few levels. So the Brave gets d10's for hit points but only thru level 4 - after that they get +3 hit points per level. There is also a list of fairly specific powers for each class from combat and healing abilities to defining what they can do without needing to make a check. Classes include:

• Brave
• Doctor
• Drifter
• Gunslinger
• Maverick
• Mountain Man
• Muckraker
• Preacher
• Scout
• Wrangler
• Optional: Wandering Monk, in case you want to "wander the earth like Kane from Kung-Fu"

Multi-classing (two classes at the same time) and dual-classing (switching from one to another) are options. Fairly old school options, but they are in there.

The classes are an odd mix in some cases - the doctor is almost an alchemist with the ability to whip up all kinds of things given access to the right ingredients and tools. The gunslinger is a combat monster with ranged attacks. The mountain man is a beast in melee. The preacher can hand out bonus to allies, debuff opponents, and generally looks a lot like a 4E leader type class. Most class abilities are fairly specific so it's difficult to really judge them without getting in some actual play time. The damage capacity of a level 20 Mountain Man is far beyond anything resembling "realistic" given a heavy pistol's 2d6 damage, but hey, level 20 should be legendary in some ways.

Gear: there is a short gear section mostly focusing on weapons. If you're thinking about running a sustained campaign then a GURPS or Deadlands book would be a good resource to expand this.

Combat involves a d20+ attack bonus vs the target's defense class. There are modifiers for things like darkness or shooting from the back of a moving horse. It's lighter than typical d20 and is not tied to a grid. Characters can move and attack once per round or do one other action instead.

There is a section on NPC's, critters, and opponents that is a solid starting set but will be exhausted pretty quickly in regular play.

The book wraps up with some sample adventure ideas (no maps or statblocks here) based on some pretty standard western plots,

So to me, in the end, it's a relatively rules-light western game that has a lot of potential as a con game or a system for some one-offs, but I'm not sure I could run a sustained campaign with it. It benefits from being a d20 game so there is some familiarity on the part of almost any potential player. The task resolution is fast and flexible and so should be both manageable and fun even with a bunch of players who don't know each other. The class mechanics could be fun for a session or two but probably don't come frequently enough or have enough chrome to them to keep a lot of modern players interested - in that sense it is fairly old-school. It is also less cinematic than something like Savage Worlds as low level characters are fairly vulnerable to damage and there is nothing like bennies or hero points or action points to save one's bacon or allow for scene editing.

For a sustained campaign there is the standard question with a play-it-straight western game: what do you do? Sure bank robberies are fun, but are not particularly sustainable. Much like Traveller the PC's tend to slide towards criminal activity rather than heroism and given the state of medicine in the time that leads to a steady flow of dead characters. There's a reason stuff like Deadlands is more popular than any realistic western game - because the supernatural gives you some non-mundane character options and it gives you something to fight besides the law!

I do like the game and for a "pure" western game its particular combination of mechanics hits a sweet spot for me. Heck it's free, so if you're even slightly interested in old west RPG's go download it and take a look.

Shadowrun 5, Part 2 - Mechanics

Old Shadowrun Fistfight: My skill in dice vs. a target number of your skill, extra successes on my roll bumps up my damage. So my street samurai with armed combat 6 when fighting a ganger with armed combat 3 would roll 6 dice looking for 3's or better. When the ganger hit back he would roll 3 dice looking for 6's. Yes, a disparity in skills could get ugly in very short order.

A lot of the game worked like that - opposed rolls generally did. Even non-sentient stuff like matrix nodes had a rating and doing something to it meant rolling dice equal to your skill against a target of the rating. Modifiers generally changed the target number, and as you can imagine bumping things up past a "6" made it tough to succeed when rolling d6's. The system allowed for a roll of a 6 to explode, rolling the die again and adding to the previous roll. Figuring the odds gets a little weird under these mechanics, far more so than the typical d20 mechanics (a 6 is effectively a 7 for one thing), but that isn't everything. Knowing that was the base mechanic made it very easy to improvise in play. The probability may be all over the place but it was a very intuitive system and my crew loved it.

With 5th edition the system has changed quite a bit - maybe not from 4th, but definitely from the older editions. Now, stats actually contribute directly! A scenario like the one described above would instead be: Agility + Pistols in dice with a target number of 5+. The attribute and skill scale is the same with humans being a 1-6 so we're already rolling more dice, maybe twice as many. The fixed target number is a new wrinkle and it both makes it easier to figure the odds and eliminates the need for the exploding sixes. Modifiers change the number of dice in the pool, so a laser sight might add a couple of dice while bad lighting conditions might remove a few.  You're probably going to need more d6's. I get this now:

Apparently this was a problem with 4th edition, where characters could end up with 20-30 dice on rolls. As much fun as that is in Warhammer, an RPG table tends to be a little more crowded. To control this in 5th they have added a new mechanic called "Limit". The Limit is the maximum number of successes one can achieve on a roll. For the example above, the "limit" on a shooting roll is the accuracy of the gun used. So say I'm pretty handy with a pistol and have a 6 agility and a 6 pistol skill, and with some other favorable conditions I might be throwing 15 dice. My Ares Predator has an accuracy of 5, so even if I roll ten 6's, I still only scored 5 "hits". They call successes "hits" now so I'm trying to work in the lingo here. Note there's really no staging any more, so every hit has some kind of impact on the result.

There are a lot of places limits can come from but the most common one seems to be the gear, from guns, to cyberdecks, to vehicles. Driving 8 stuck in a car with Handling 2 - well, you're probably not going to be very happy in a chase. This also gives another angle for the gear to play with - that Ares Predator happens to have a built-in smartgun link so if my street sam is wired for it my accuracy goes up to 7.  Two pieces of gear might have the same basic functionality or rating but one might have a higher limit to represent better quality or materials without making it blatantly more powerful. I think it's a nice touch.

If the limits start to get in the way you can use "Edge" to surpass normal limits on a particular roll. It's an attribute, rated 1-6 like the rest, but it is effectively your hero point mechanic. There are other uses for Edge besides this but I can see this one coming up a lot.

Going back to resolution, with that shooting roll the target gets a defense roll, typically intuition + reaction (two attributes). So if this is an average joe type target they might be rolling 6 dice, looking for 5+ results. If they roll more hits than my shooter does, it's a miss. If they roll fewer, then it's a hit and we need to figure damage. Most opposed rolls work this way - I roll my stat + skill, you roll your stat + skill, and the one who scores more hits comes out on top.

For non-opposed rolls there is a "threshold" - the number of hits needed to succeed. "Easy" requires one hit, "Average" is two, "Hard" is four, "Very Hard" is 6, and then it gets into "Extreme" at 8-10. There are specific examples for a lot of skills and situations like combat, decking, magic, and chases but this is the general rule. If you want to get into probability it's nice to know that on average you need to throw 3 dice for every hit that's required.

Oh and defaults, when you don't have the skill but need to do something anyway, are attribute only -1 - and I thought the old skill web "add a +2 for each dot" approach was tough. Ouch.

Looking at the archetypes in the book it looks like most of them are throwing 10 or more dice in the things they are supposed to be good at so easy and average tasks are no sweat. Hard and very hard might be a little more tricky, especially "very" as you start to run into some limits there.

Damage: To wrap up this overview, weapons have a damage number and are noted as either physical or stun. - nothing really new there. Mr. Predator is rated "8P". Extra successes hits bump the damage up directly, so if I score 3 extra hits that damage rating is now 11P. The target rolls their body attribute and the number of hits reduces the damage number directly. So say an unarmoed Body 3 target gets lucky and rolls 2 hits - that drops the damage down to 9P and they get to fill in 9 boxes on their physical condition track. That's about a -3 modifier so that's going to make life quite a bit more difficult for them.

I'm going to have to play it, but I think this will work. It's definitely up to a Champions level of dice-throwing but there's nothing wrong with that. We did lose the intuitive skill vs. skill approach of the older editions but I don't think this one lacks flavor and the introduction of limits gives the players something to think about besides a simple "more dice!" approach.

Next post on this will talk about character creation, and then I may have one more to cover what I think are the highs and lows and then hopefully the next time I post about it will be some actual play stuff.

New Games, Old Games, and Lost Opportunities

My musings on the likelihood of future support for 13th Age at the end of this post seemed to stir up at least a few similar thoughts. It is a fairly big concern of mine when it comes to picking up a new RPG these days. There is some baggage that goes along with any RPG from cost to shelf-space to time. I don't feel a tremendous drive to add books to my shelves "just because" anymore. There's a little more of a method to it than there used to be.

Sometimes a game is only available as a single, relatively inexpensive book or PDF. Those are easy. The Explorer's Editions of Savage Worlds are a great example. Heck ICONS is a pretty good example - it's regularly available at a similar price. Stars Without Number was like this too. There's not a lot of expense, it takes up little to no shelf space, it ties in to a subject or a system I already like and own - those are the easy ones.

Then you have examples from Pathfinder to Pendragon to Dark Heresy: detailed mechanical systems, big expensive books, dense text, massive amounts of supporting material, a lot of background to dig into to really get into the game. With these I have to ask:

• Is this something I really want to run? This is me attempting to filter out new shiny for new shiny's sake. For Pendragon it was yes. For Pathfinder it was probably. For Dark Heresy it was no - I needed to wait for the Space Marine game. In many ways I've punched through the "collector" mentality and pretty much any game I still own I'd like to run or at least play.

• Will I really have the opportunity to run it? This is largely dependent on time and players. For Pendragon so far it's been a no, and I knew that going in. I just wanted to have a copy on the shelf  for "someday". For Pathfinder, it's still a maybe. For Dark Heresy it doesn't matter because I didn't get it but for it's replacement, Deathwatch, the answer is I thought I would but it hasn't happened yet.

• Am I willing to pick up all of the supporting stuff that goes along with it? For Pendragon I have only picked up a few extra books. I know I'm not likely to get to run it anytime soon so these are more targets of opportunity than any deliberate plan. For Pathfinder I stopped at the core book, but if we started playing it regularly I would go ahead and get more as it was needed. For Deathwatch  I picked up the GM's Kit as I knew it would get used from session 1 onward. There's a ton more stuff for that game and much like PF if we start playing it I will start adding it.

Now these guidelines have developed over the last fifteen years or so and I'm pretty comfortable with them. Along the way though a lot of game companies showed up with something cool, then disappeared, leaving an unfinished game behind, or let's say, the promise of a particular game unfulfilled. So recently I've started asking myself "What's this game going to look like in a year or two? Supplement overload? New edition? Dead and gone?" because as much as I'd like it to not be true, there is an impact when a games goes dead or out of print. There's less discussion of it online, fewer resources, and players are less interested in playing it - possibly related to those first two issues. Interestingly between the OSR and the WOTC reprints, the older editions of D&D are effectively "in print", while 4E limps off into the sunset with a hopefully temporary stigma of being a failed game that no one wants to play anymore. It's not a critical factor but all things being equal I'd rather run a game that's being supported than one that's not.

• For Pendragon I think my book is an edition behind but I don't care because there is a version in print and much like Call of Cthulu, it doesn't change a great deal from one edition to the next. For Pathfinder I've circled around and come out the other end of this question: when is the next edition coming? I don't really want to go whole hog and spend a bunch of time and money getting this started only to find out we're going to get PF second edition in 2015. No, they haven't said anything but I'm a little gun-shy on this. For Deathwatch I don't think it's an issue as there is a lot of stuff out for it - but they did just announce a second edition for Dark Heresy so who knows. 

Now why would I feel this way? Allow me to share some examples:

The most recent example of trust being burned. I should probably add a sub-question to that last one "Is there a license involved?". I was ready to go all-in on this one and even bought some new dice just to support it and BAM - lots and lots of potential lost. We had just over a year of support and then poof - players can't even buy the PDF's anymore, another downside of licensed games.

Going back a bit we had a promising system and ... oh look another license. Hmmm. I picked up TNG and TOS and while I skipped some of the supporting material I was really looking forward to the Spacedock books that were going to be all about the spaceships. As productive as this company was they didn't even make it past year 3. 

Hey remember this one? Yeah ... I do: I bought a copy. Because I liked the setting and mechanics. This came out in 2005, around the same time as Eberron for D&D and had a similar pulp fantasy thing going on. They came out with one supplement, one of those "bunch of stuff we cut out of the main rulebook" type of supplements that was fairly common in the 90's & 00's and then they were eaten by a black hole. By 2006 there was nothing happening on this game anymore. Not too many people played it apparently, and not many remember it now. My lesson here was not to be fooled by the cool. Brand new settings with brand new mechanics from publishers you've never heard of should set off caution signs at least, even if they come in shiny hardbacks.

Around the time Ziran disappeared this one became the new hotness. I didn't buy it in 2006, but I wanted to! I was worried that I would end up buying a fairly pricey book just for the setting and using Savage Worlds to actually run it, which seemed like a waste. This was one of the more memorable times where I held off buying it and sure enough there was a grand total of one supplement and a DM screen and that was it - in 7 years! Can't complain about overloading the channels there, can we? Again this was all over the place winning awards and garnering hype for a year or so but by 2009 who was playing it? 

Again, not every game needs a ton of support and lord knows I get tired of the "core book - monthly supplements for 5 years - new edition"  treadmill as much as anyone but it would be nice to have a middle ground. A lot of games manage to pull this off and I'd like to see it happen more.

Kickstarter is a bit of a wild card though. Take 13th Age - the original game was announced around last year and there has been a beta program and then there was a kickstarter for the first supplement which included this quote:

Rob, Jonathan, Lee and Aaron want nothing more than to keep working together and create the first expansion book for 13th Age. But they need your help to do it. That's where the 13 True Ways Kickstarter comes in.

If this campaign meets its funding goal, they can cheerfully turn down other rent-paying freelance projects and focus on what they love best: designing and illustrating more great monsters, magic items, locations and NPCs for you to use either with 13th Age, or adapt to your favorite fantasy RPG.

So what we have here is effectively "we will keep supporting the game if we get paid" and that's a refreshingly honest approach. That said this looks a lot like one of those books of stuff leftover from the core type initial supplements I mentioned above rather than a really focused book. 

This sort of direct-to-the-customer approach with supplemental books makes even more sense than funding core books in some ways - you want more? Pay for it in advance and you can have it! This could easily become the wave of the future even for existing games. Want Hollow Earth Expeditions Australia supplement? Maybe it eventually comes out via KS.

My question here though is how often can this happen? Would players support one KS per year for a particular game? Two? Quarterly drives? I'm not sure. What if one of them fails? Does that mean no more support ever or just moving on to the next one on the list? At least when a company started publishing a big new game you could count on them to be committed for a year or two - well, you used to anyway - but with KS the commitment might only be as strong as the next funding drive. There's that risk of draining too much from your customers too with the growing number of gold-plated-leatherbound-signed-by-the-creators special limited edition funding levels on RPG kickstarters of late. Sure, if you can make money go for it but I suspect it's a short-term gain at the expense of a longer run. Not every game needs to be Ptolus-level in it's presentation, especially a new game.

Now there are all the failed KS projects, so it's not a guaranteed thing but it's at least an option in between "monthly books" and "dead game line". Dwimmermount, the dwarf game, and some others all remind us of the worst possible outcome - it funds and then you still don't get any support, at least not without some kind of drawn-out fiasco. 

Motivational Monday

Triple Shot!

40K Friday - 40K Football! with the Crimson Fists!

The second battle in our 40K weekend fun saw Apprentice Red's Necrons taking on my Crmson Fists - a very different army in what turned out to be a very different game. My force:


1 Chapter Master Pedro Kantor (HQ) @ 175 Pts
     #Dorn's Arrow; #Iron Halo; Power Armour; Power Fist; Frag Grenades; Krak
     Grenades; Warlord

4 Sternguard Veteran Squad (Elites) @ 210 Pts
     Power Armour; Special Issue Ammunition; Bolt Pistol (x4); Combi-Melta
     (x4); Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades

     1 Space Marine Sergeant @ [50] Pts
          Power Armour; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades; Melta Bombs; Combi-Melta
          (x1); Lightning Claw

     1 Razorback @ [40] Pts
          #Searchlight; #Smoke Launchers; TL Heavy Bolters

9 Tactical Squad (Troops) @ 220 Pts
     Combat Squads; Power Armour; Bolt Pistol (x9); Bolter (x7); Missile
     Launcher; Flamer; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades

     1 Space Marine Sergeant @ [41] Pts
          Power Armour; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades; Power Weapon (x1); Bolter

     1 Rhino @ [35] Pts
          Vehicle (Tank, Transport); Capacity: 10; Fire Points: 2; Access
          Points: 3; Repair; #Searchlight; #Smoke Launchers; Repair; Storm
          Bolter

9 Tactical Squad (Troops) @ 220 Pts
     Combat Squads; Power Armour; Bolt Pistol (x9); Bolter (x7); Multi-Melta;
     Flamer; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades

     1 Space Marine Sergeant @ [41] Pts
          Power Armour; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades; Power Weapon (x1); Bolter

     1 Rhino @ [35] Pts
          Vehicle (Tank, Transport); Capacity: 10; Fire Points: 2; Access
          Points: 3; Repair; #Searchlight; #Smoke Launchers; Repair; Storm
          Bolter

4 Scout Squad (Troops) @ 90 Pts
     Scout Armour; Bolt Pistol (x4); Sniper Rifle (x3); Heavy Bolter w/Hellfire
     Rounds; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades

     1 Scout Sergeant @ [28] Pts
          Scout Armour; Bolt Pistol; Sniper Rifle; Frag Grenades; Krak
          Grenades; Melta Bombs

1 Predator (Heavy Support) @ 85 Pts
     #Searchlight; #Smoke Launchers; 2 Spons. Hvy Bolters; Turret Autocannon

1 Predator (Heavy Support) @ 165 Pts
     #Searchlight; #Smoke Launchers; 2 Sponson Lascannon; Turret TL Lascannons

1 Whirlwind (Heavy Support) @ 85 Pts
     #Searchlight; #Smoke Launchers; Whirlwind Multiple ML

Models in Army: 37

Total Army Cost: 1250

Almost twice as many models as the previous battle and a bunch of vehicles! Now I may regret taking a mechanized force against Necrons but I wanted to get a decent chunk of my Fists on the table for a game in at least a somewhat similar fashion to the way I intend to field them at higher point levels, so that's what I did. The core concept of this army is Tacs in Rhinos + Pedro & scoring Sterngard in either Razorbacks or Drop Pods with Predators/Vindicators/Whirlwinds as heavy support. Termies or Dreads fill out the elites. Fast attack at the moment is a speeder - yeah we're a little light there after donating the assault squad to the new Blood Angels army across the room.

The Setup

We ended up with "The Relic", probably the most controversial mission in 40K 6E as it's a single objective that is movable, and some armies are far more mobile than others (hello Eldar jet bikes!), giving them an instant advantage. Neither of us had an especially mobile army so we went with it as-is. We had the diagonal setup too, which is fine for variation but it's a pain to figure over a terrain-filled board.

Speaking of terrain we are working on a themed-terrain setup and I wanted to get some prototypes on the table so those Mountain Dew cans showed up. Hopefully in their next appearance they will be fully dressed as "fuel storage tanks". I also wanted some LOS blocking terrain on the table for a change, especially since I had that Whirlwind.

The plan was to use the sterngard and tac marines as my retrieval force, possibly sacrificing one of them to protect another. The whirlwind, scouts, razorback, and dakka pred would concentrate on thinning the warrior squads while the annihilator pred would focus on blowing up the monolith when it arrived. I was really worried about how to deal with it as it's tough, deadly, and can teleport his troops around the board.  The sterngard had combi-meltas especially for dealing with it, as did the one tac squad with the multi-melta, and the other sergeants had melta bombs if things got desperate. Between these and the lascannon pred I hoped I had enough to handle it.

End of Turn 1

Turn 1 was fairly quiet as we both closed in on the Relic. With no monolith to shoot the laser predator shot up the destroyers and the last one was killed by a storm bolter shot from the rhino - first blood to the marines. Marines and the dakka pred shot up the wraiths, cutting them down to one. Red took a hull point off of the rhino and that was about it.

End of Turn 2

 Turn 2 - enter the monolith! My rhino and the combat squad are blown away. The other rhino is blown up and the tac squad inside dismounts with no casualties. The warriors move up to surround the objective.

The Necrons move in

I was not terribly concerned yet but I realized most of my melta was on the opposite side of the field from the monolith and out of range, so the predator was going to have to do the heavy lifting. Also the whirlwind wasn't hitting !#$@ after two shots. The sterngard can't get into the ruins so they park on the edge and shoot what they can.

Turn 3

Turn 3 continued the slow amping up of tension. I blew a hull point of the monolith and shot up the warrior squad on the objective.

Turn 4

Turn 4 the necrons shoot up my missile launcher combat squad who break and flee the woods. They also take a hull point off of the predator, while I take another one off of the monolith.

However, the warriors on the Relic are looking mighty thin ...

Turn 5

Turn 5 is one of mixed emotions - his secondary leader charges in and destroys my laser predator while his other unit of warriors move into the woods vacated by the missile squad and then shoot them off of the table. The monolith teleports his 3rd unit of warriors in front of the dakka predator and they blow it away with gauss fire. But ...

...my tac squad and sterngard move in on the objective after wiping out the last of the warriors holding it. So it's a rough turn, but now I'm holding the only objective AND if he wants to come park that monolith next to a bunch of melta shots I'm happy to accommodate him!

End of game die roll is high and the game continues.

Turn 6

He only has one unit close enough to intervene and I charge them with Pedro and the sterngard while the tac squad moves off with their prize.

Pedro shouts "remember the mission" as he beats down multiple necrons. The rest of the sterngard are lost but the tactical marines move safely away and the game ends! Crimson Fists win with objective + first blood vs. nothing!

Conclusions
The main difference here is that I remembered the victory conditions and Red started acting like we were playing for killpoints about halfway through the game. Sidetracked with blowing up my tanks, he didn't have enough units in the right place to pull out a win. More than any skill issues or army list issues that's what really determined the outcome here. Sometimes that's all it is.

The whirlwind did very little but I'm not giving up on it yet. I did like the ability to get tac marines into the center of the field by turn 2 so I think there is still a place for the mechanized marine force in 6th edition, despite the lessening of vehicles. I also really like scoring sterngard, so Pedro has found a home.

It's that time of year - The Crush!

BOOK BOOK BOOK BOOK
(Hey, it came up under "Gen Con Cosplay" - how could I not use them?)

It's that time of year when new games come out at a blistering pace. We've already seen Shadowrun's new edition and Edge of the Empire in the last few weeks DC Universe is shipping in book form. 13th Age is shipping now. Numenera releases in a few weeks. Stark City for ICONS and the M&M Anniversary Edition rulebook are due out next month. Pathfinder has the usual torrent of stuff. WOTC has a fair amount of Gen Con specialness for Next. I'm sure there are releases for everything from Rifts to Doctor Who as well. It's a firehose of game books!

I can't help but wonder if this hurts game companies on some level as there's only so much disposable income to go around within a certain time period and if someone is travelling to Gen Con it seems logical that they would have less money to spend on books than if they were at home doing their usual routine. Regardless, it's been the model for so long now I can't see it changing on its own but I wonder if the continuing popularity of kickstarter will have an impact? Good ideas and organizing a KS can happen year-round. Will that be the next trend - timing your kickstarter to enable having a product to sell at Gen Con? I'm just wondering out loud but I can see some experienced KS users making that a consideration on their next effort.

It's also interesting to watch the tactical maneuvering around Gen Con as well. If you release a new game at the con then you can post up a video of the design team opening up the game with a cheering crowd - not a bad way to promote the game. There is a risk though of being lost in the flood of other releases at the con as several days of cool new things bury your story. I know it seems like there are cool new things announced or released there every year that I manage to miss in the wave of news that washes over the web that week.

Some companies want some spotlight time all to themselves and release a few weeks to a month prior to the big con. This gives them a certain window of buzz as the only big news of the week. I think this is what we saw with Edge of the Empire and Shadowrun and it seems to be working alright for them. I wonder if it hurts sales though - if some hot new game is released in mid-July am I really going to wait a month to pick it up at the con? Maybe having a second product - a new adventure, a DM screen - maybe that's the trick to mitigating that and keeping the buzz going.

Star Wars is an odd case - they were in production almost continuously from 1987 on, then finally petered out in 2010. Then we went through 2011 with noting new. Last year saw the announcement and I believe they had the beta rulebook available and now this year we have the finished core book. I'm betting with FFG behind them now and with a core book out the door that we will be seeing a lot of Star Wars over the next few years. I'm taking their 40K line as a guide and if that holds up there will not be a lack of material.

With DC complete and Marvel cancelled there are no new comic book RPG releases for this one. Any bets on how long that will last? With almost quarterly releases of superhero movies you would think someone could figure out how to sustain a game for a few years but no one has in quite a while.

We haven't had any new Star Trek for years either. Again, there have been a couple of fairly popular movies in recent years, but no new RPG. I wonder if anyone has even tried for the license recently? Oh well, one of these years Traveller Prime Directive will get finished and I'm still interested in trying that. Maybe next year.

Finally, for the second year in a row, no new D&D stuff.  Sure, there's been some old D&D stuff coming out, and there are some Next adventures or documents being passed out there, but no "Complete Book of Modrons" or "Player's Handbook VI" or anything like that. There's a fair amount of hubbub around their new Forgotten Realms update kickoff as well. I suspect this will be the last year 4th edition is even mentioned. Next year though ... next year will be a massive August for D&D as whatever the new edition turns out to be will be released and it will be THE thing for Gen Con. Hopefully it's worth the hype.

Shadowrun 5, Part 1 - The Setting

It's funny coming back to a game after skipping an edition. It's a rare thing for me, I can only think of a few games where it's happened, and none of them were games I spent as much time with as Shadowrun. I picked up 1st edition around the time it came out, 2nd edition when it came out, and 3rd when it came out, and played and ran at least a short campaign in each one. We had a blast and over time I have picked up every book published for those three editions. I was a pretty solid fan and it was one of our main games of the 90's. Then in 2004 the 4th edition came out and changed a lot of the core setting and mechanics of the game and I skipped it - never bought a single book, did not run or play a single session of it. But that was then and this is now.

Nine years later the 5th edition is out and is supposed to be bringing back some elements of the older editions (you know a lot of this sounds familiar, what is it with 4th & 5th editions of RPG's?) and I decided to give it a look. Since it's a futuristic game I decided to go high tech and get the PDF instead of the printed version. This is written from the point of view of a long time fan who hasn't paid attention since 3rd edition but is willing to give the new stuff a chance. I'm breaking it into at least two parts - setting and mechanics.

If you're not familiar with the game, allow me to quote myself from an earlier post:

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 unexpectedly 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.

That's the basics.

This will probably always be the definitive cover for me

I've decided against doing an exhaustive page by page review - there is a lot of book here -  so let me hit the high points as a returning player/GM:

• There is a lot of short fiction in here, at the beginning and spread throughout the book. Normally I think a little goes a long way when it comes to this kind of thing but so far it hasn't annoyed me.  I think SR is unusual in that the stories do closely reflect how the game typically works for most groups, and they effectively communicate how it's supposed to feel. So I'm OK with this approach.
• Early in the book there's a page of the slang used in SR and after skipping most of the past 9 years I still knew what almost all of them meant. It felt like a familiar place after reading through that and realizing I was not as out of touch as I had feared. This is another atmospheric touch that I liked.
• There is a section on what is effectively the "theme" of the game: that everything has a price. This section breaks it down from the "price" of magic to cyberware to the corps to the shadows - very nice and again, setting up a consistent feel for the game.
• There is a short overview of the world and who runs each part of it. Brief but effective in highlighting that some of it is familiar and some of it is completely different.
• Then we get to a more detailed focus on a typical character with several sections including "A day in your life", "what you might be doing", and "The Opposition" which focuses on the megacorps of 2075, organized crime, and the other groups you might encounter violently.

Now all of this is in the first 40-something pages of the book. The rest of the 400+ pages is general rules, combat rules, sections on each "power source" from magic to the matrix and the rest, a bunch of gear, and a pretty hefty gamemaster section. I haven't finished reading all of that yet, and it looks pretty heavy, but old SR was pretty intuitive so I'm hoping this is as well. Also, it seems to have more illustrations than the 3rd edition books at least so I'm not staring at multi-page walls of text describing gear with no visuals as in that edition - that's a good thing.

Although this new cover has grown on me

As a returning player/GM I will say so far, so good - I like what I'm reading. The timeline has moved up from the 2060-something I remember to 2075 so there are some changes but at the same time there are a lot of familiar names and places. The default setting is back to Seattle but other options are mentioned. The gear and guns seem familiar enough and the full-VR Matrix has a role again in addition to the wireless augmented reality Matrix that came along in 4th edition. Magic is magic and most of the old stuff seems to be accounted for as well. There's a very familiar feel about it, from the language to the world, to how tings work, to the outlines of the shadowrunning life. I am very optimistic about this one.

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