Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to All!

Wishing good games and good rolls to everyone for 2016!

Looking back on 2015

Looking over at the side there I had about half as many blog entries in 2015 as I did in 2011-12-13-14. It was a busy year for other things so the blog became a bit less important than it had been. I'm not going anywhere and hopefully it will be a little more active in 2016.

RPG Stuff

• I ran 9 sessions of Wrath of the Righteous and finally - finally! - finished book 2! Book 3 kicks off in a few weeks and I am hopeful that we can plow through book 3 (remember, there are six in a Pathfinder adventure path) before the end of 2016. I say finally but the campaign has been a lot of fun and everyone is still enjoying it. Red even got to make a return appearance for a session or two. Book 3 kicks off in a few weeks.
• My friend Steve ran 8 sessions of Kingmaker and I was there for 7 of them. He had some interruptions too. It hasn't been a peak year for the gaming stuff for any of us but when we do get together we are having a blast. Hopefully 2016 is a little less challenging when it comes to schedules. 
• Savage Worlds is probably still in the #2 spot for games I run here, after Pathfinder. I ran a short-lived City of Heroes/Necessary Evil campaign. Stuff-wise I added the third Deadlands campaign book (via the Kickstarter), got the hard copies of Hell on Earth from the Kickstarter campaign, and added the first two big Deadlands campaign books, Necropolis 2350 and Slipstream to the shelf.
• I got to run a session of Marvel Heroic again and will be running another one this weekend to close out the first arc of a campaign we started in 2013. I don't know that I could run it continuously for years but as a single session or "burst" campaign it's a lot of fun. I do wish it was still being produced but I have enough material and ideas that I can play with it for quite a while.
• I also got to run some Mutants and Masterminds with "Battle on the Bay Bridge" to potentially kick off an occasional side campaign.
• We had our first session of the FFG Star Wars and it was good. Not sure I want to invest in the whole line just yet but the boys liked it and I can see some potential in the system.
• Other stuff : 
• I added some supplements and dice for Fate though I didn't run it at all
• I didn't run it even once, but I did get the hardcopy of Spirit of '77. I need to prep the Apprentices with a viewing of Smokey and the Bandit and then I think we'll be good to go.
• I added books to my LUG Star Trek collection, Mekton.
• The main target for "acquisitions" was Pathfinder - running one and playing in another for the long term meant I felt like I needed to be more informed and aware of the whole system. I averaged more than a book a month for the year and now have all but a few of the hardbacks and all of the smaller books I consider relevant for the current campaigns. That's a good place to be. 

Miniatures and Boardgames

• We did get into more boardgames this year with King of Tokyo, Imperial Assault, and Relic all getting some time. I'm hoping to work in a few more before we all head back to school and work.
• We tried Age of Sigmar once. It's OK but no where near what Warhammer used to be as far as drawing me in for a fight. When it comes to our limited time I would rather play 40K.
• Warhammer 40,000 continues to be our main game. It had peaks and valleys through the year but here at the end we've played a couple of more games and had a lot of fun so Apprentices' Red and Blaster and I have spent some more time building and painting to get ready for the next round. 

Oh you'd like that wouldn't you?

Looking back at least year's "looking ahead":

RPG:

• We did play some superheroes but could not sustain them as a regular scheduled thing
• We did play some Savage Worlds
• All of the rest pretty much went out the window as just keeping our main games going proved to be a challenge. D&D 5th edition is just not really grabbing anyone in my group.

Miniatures: 

• 40K - yes!
• Bolt Action - No!
• I did look into the Robotech miniatures game, Star Wars Armada, and Dropzone Commander, but none of them really grabbed me enough to take the plunge.
• X-Wing and Attack Wing both fell off of the radar. The boys just were not as interested in either one, even with the new movie coming out. It's a shame as both are good games, fast to play, and not terribly expensive to get into. Ah well, neither appears to be going anywhere so maybe they will pop back up next year.

Hopes for the new year tomorrow!

Around the Tower

We've spent a lot of time getting ready for Christmas this year and work is still a daily thing until Christmas weekend so there have not been a ton of updates this month.

• Movies:
• I saw Force Awakens last week and I'm still trying to decide how much  I like it. No spoilers here - I'll likely post about it next week while I am off.
• New trailer for Batman vs. Superman - Well that is a new wrinkle. Still not feeling Affleck as Bruce Wayne but I did like the snarky comeback in his conversation with Clark. Call me old school but I am also not thrilled about this interpretation of Lex Luthor either. I like Jesse Eisenberg but I am not liking what I see so far of the character.
• X-Men Apocalypse - Like what I see so far. 
• Independence Day - no idea. I liked the first one, not sure what this one is going to be but the trailer didn't really give me a "wow" feeling like the blowing up landmarks trailer of the original movie did.
• Star Trek Beyond - Looks like we lose the ship right off the bat - great. Then we have Kirk or someone jumping a motorcycle - great. Lots of jumping in general - it's the X-games edition of Trek! And as much as I like the Beastie Boys I will say I never expected to hear them as the backing music in a trailer for a Star Trek anything! Very mixed feelings about the next Trek movie.

• Games
• Next session of Wrath of the Righteous will happen in January so all quiet there
• Played another session in Paladin Steve's Kingmaker campaign - still having fun with that
• Will be running another sesison of Marvel Heroic after new years to hopefully close out the arc we started a couple of years ago in this very occasional campaign. 
• I've been focusing on 40K in the meantime so I will probably have some posts about that in the near future too.

• Kickstarters
• I was one of the many backers of the MST3K Kickstarter. I pretty much had to be as that was one of the mainstays of the 1990's for me. I'm glad that it did well and hopeful we will see something awesome out of it. Reality check: Yes, I will be watching everything they send me, old or new.
• I backed the Battletech computer game Kickstarter and I am hopeful that we get something out of that's awesome as well. More 80's -90's nostalgia there too but the computer games were usually pretty fun and the guys doing this one have some experience and the right leadership to make it happen. Reality check: Yes, I will be playing this.
• I backed the 1$ mystery RPG project Kickstarter  because ... what the heck - it's a dollar! I am curious to see what comes out of it - no specific hopes or wants on it, I am just intrigued enough to follow it. Reality check: Whether I play it or not really depends on what kind of game the creator makes. Regardless, I only spent a dollar, so even if he makes a game about nuns doing chores around the nunnery I won't feel too bad.
• Finally, I joined the Runequest Classic Edition Kickstarter, partly out of nostalgia, partly out of collector-itis, and partly to keep a good thing going. I played a fair amount of Runequest in the 80's and into the early 90's and while I was never one of the fanatics about it I did think it was a good game with an interesting and original mythology paired up with mechanics that were just different enough from D&D to keep it lively. I sold off my last copy of RQ3 years ago so the opportunity to pick up a hardback copy of RQ2 and some supporting material at a reasonable cost was very attractive. I also like that the plan is to keep the game in print and supported and even though it's not my "main" game and never has been, I like it and respect it enough to help out there too.

That's it for now - more to come!

Trek Tuesday (on Wednesday) - DS9 for TNG

After finishing Battlestar Galactica the week of Thanksgiving Apprentice Blaster and I talked about what we might watch next - Star Trek? X-Files? Original BSG? As it turns out he's been in a Trek mood lately - he's even reading Vanguard! He read the first book in less than a week and took the second and third with him when he left last time. To give him some additional background we watched "Amok Time" and "The Tholian Web" and I figure that should give him some familiarity  with those elements when he runs across them in the books. All of this pretty much made it a foregone conclusion that we were going to go with a Trek show,

We've watched individual episodes of the Original Series and Next Generation and we've watched all of the movies but we haven't really tried to work through an entire Trek series yet. I thought about TOS but he's seen enough of those to get it. We talked about TNG but he's seen a fair number of those too. Enterprise and Voyager came up too but what I thought was the best option - and he agreed after some discussion - was Deep Space Nine.

Why? Well, for one thing I haven't watched much of it  since it was on the air the first time and I wasn't religious about it then, so for me it's a nice combination of interest and broad familiarity but not deep deep experience as it would be with TOS and TNG where I've seen every episode multiple times. For another the man behind the newer BSG (Ron Moore) was also a major player on DS9, so there may be some familiar themes showing up. At the very least there's a very strong serial factor.much like BSG. Finally, the later seasons do get into a war story that I remember thinking was pretty good and I know he will like it. Of course we have to get there first and I told him the shows builds up nicely, pays off on what it promises, and has a pretty decent finale too.

So we have started the first season of DS9. So far we've watched the two-episode pilot and the first two regular episodes. There's no Worf, no Defiant, no Great Link, no Dominion, and Dax is still Jadzia not Ezri - writing that list just reminds me how much this show builds/changes/grows during its run. The Cardassians are the designated bad guys, the Klingons have shown up once in the form of the Duras sisters, and Quark is not as sympathetic a figure as he will eventually become. I don't think any other Trek series shows this kind of "evolution" over the seasons. TNG gave us many of the important elements at work here, but DS9 is where we get to really dig into them. For example TNG gave us the Ferengi but DS9 is where they turn into an interesting, nuanced race.

I am really looking forward to making this journey again - this time with one of my kids. We have a sort of bet on whether we can make it through all 7 seasons by the end of 2016. I think we can, he's not so sure. Either way it will be fun to look back at this time next year to see how far we have progressed.

Chaos on the Bridge

I watched this new Star Trek documentary earlier this week. It's a recent add to Netflix - that's where I found it, anyway -  and thought it was interesting so I am sharing.

Chaos on the Bridge is a look at the first 3 years of the making of Star Trek the Next Generation. This is mainly done through a series of interviews with some of the major players from that time - cast, writers, studio executives, producers, etc. I think we all know those first couple of seasons are pretty hit and miss but I've never really dug into any of the "why" before. Now I have some insight.

A lot of those major players, including everyone from Gene Roddenberry to the various lawyers and writers and actors and executives, come out of it with some of their less-than-finest-moments recalled, but it does bring home that this was business, show business, and that for the people doing it is a job, not just a visionary creative exercise.

Now I admit there were times when it felt a little bit ... gossipy ... but it wasn't really venomous, just more insider talk than we usually hear openly discussed.

Also, it's hosted and narrated by William Shatner. I felt like he was probably smirking offscreen during most of the show but I didn't mind. I expect it's nice for him to be on the other side of some "expose" type talk about Star Trek that doesn't involve recalling how Captain Kirk really treated his crew.

Overall I thought it was pretty informative as to what was going on, how people felt about it at the time, and what they were trying to do. I liked it. If you have Netflix and you're interested in Star Trek, especially if you were interested in this show, I'd say check it out.

A Week of Finishing

I took a week off last week - from work, from the blog, from as much as possible. We had all of the kids(they were all out of school), so I didn't get to stop being a grown up, but they are old enough now to make being off even more fun.

It's amazing how much you can get done when you have a nice block of mostly unscheduled time, some goals, and some determination.

• In a manner of speaking we "finished off" my own personal miniatures and boardgame drought that's been on for a few months by playing a couple of rounds of King of Tokyo, getting in our first game of Relic (40K Talisman), and starting and finishing a game of 40K. We also worked in a session of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying for the first time in two years, breaking that drought as well! Its a lot easier to justify the shelf space these things take up when we're actually playing them and doing that made me pretty damn happy.

• Early in the week we finished up the Hunger Games movies. Since this was the last one, I took a crash course in the story by watching the first 3 movies with Apprentice Twilight over the last couple of weeks and then the whole family went and saw the finale together. Nice. I feel that much more informed on a pop culture thing and something all of my kids have enjoyed. This month ... it's my turn (cue John  Williams theme).

• Later I managed to finish reading the Star Trek Vanguard series. It took my quite a while as I worked in a few other books (and a lot of other rule books) in between. I really liked it, and it's by far the best set of Trek books I've read in maybe ... ever. I like the setting, I like many of the characters, I like the plot, and I like the authors (there are several) approach to the whole thing. I read a lot of trek books in the 80's and then got out of it for a long time. I tried getting back in a few years ago with some of the better-regarded book series but none of them grabbed me. This one did and I was very happy to discover there is a sort of sequel series set in the same area with some of the same characters - that's next year's read. 

Still an awesome episode

• I have been watching Battlestar Galactica (the newer series) with Apprentice Blaster for much of this year and we were down to the "final season" of about 10 episodes at the beginning of the break and I asked him if he wanted to try and finish it up while we were off - "sure!"- so off we went with most days ending late at night with an episode or two knocked out. We finally finished up the finale about 2am one night and then talked about it for another hour. It was a lot of fun and we're already talking about what show to do next - Deep Space Nine has been mentioned.
  As far as BSG ... after watching it a second time much closer together than the 5 or 6 years it took to watch it live, I still like it a lot and hate the finale less - though it is still terribly flawed. It's easier to see the groundwork for some of the mystical stuff being laid if you know to look for it. Of course it's also easier to see the jump the shark moment which for me is when a certain Viper explodes somewhat unexpectedly. Those last few episodes are still really good though and the first half of the finale is just awesome. It does say something about the type of show it is when Gaius Baltar finally gets the girl he's been after since the very first episode while loyal Lee Adama ends up abandoned by his dad, his wife, and the girl he's loved all along. For all of its flaws I still really like the show. Now to convince Lady Blacksteel to give it a try ...

• After 31 sessions, 18 of them in this book alone, we have finally finished The Sword of Valor, adventure #2 of Wrath of the Righteous! The campaign started in September of 2013 and we started Book 2 in June 2014. We had a lot of gaps, sometimes for months as life intervened, and it has taken way longer than it should have considering we aim for 2 sessions a month. We should be hitting session 50 or so, instead we just hit the 30's - but I can't complain too much. Having 3 consistent players running two mythic characters each (and with occasional guest appearances by other players) it's already pretty ridiculous when it comes to their ability to break the game - but we're all having a blast with it, so we will continue. I hope to achieve a more consistent pattern of playing next year and maybe we can crack 50 by this time next year, because at a year per book it's going to take 4 more years to finish this one up and Apprentice Blaster will be close to finishing college ...

• Finally, the biggest wrap-up was Apprentice Twilight, my daughter, turning 18. The kid that originally moved me to "Dad" status is now a legal adult, is about to graduate and is headed off to college in less than a year. My kid can vote in that election next year. Time is a funny thing - some days I think about it and I can feel every single day since the day she arrived. Other days it feels like it has been a blur and I wonder when she stopped liking Barbies and where all of this, uh, "silver" hair came from. She had a happy birthday with the whole family around, and the rest of us were pretty happy too.

It was a very good week! More to come!


Bonus Finish: I also managed to finish up Season One of Agents of Shield last week and I finally like that show again. On to Season Two!

11-30-2015

Gundalf the Grey welcomes you ...

Today is the 3rd anniversary of the shutdown of City of Heroes. That's not a good thing - well, other than that I am here to remember it.

THE PHURIOUS PHAROAH BOWS TO NO MAN! NO BEAST! NO THING FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION!

Since the shutdown I've spent a fair amount of time in Federation Space with Star Trek Online and some in The Old Republic as well.

Captain Shamrock after a particularly exotic night out.

They are both fine, good-looking games and can be a lot of fun to play but there's still nothing out right now quite like the ridiculous versatility of City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Blue Aluminum Man - prepare to put it back in deep freeze!

One of these days something very close to it will come along I don't expect anything to perfectly capture the combination of fun, quality, atmosphere, and general good-natured-ness and awesome that was this game.

All good things ...

Rifts House Rules - My Combat Cheatsheet Part 3 - 2015 Edition

Most of this page is taken up with the two critical hit tables - one for humanoid, one for vehicles. I spent a lot of time working these out and tried to come up with some concrete effects that could be fun in the game and give players a chance to decide when enough was enough and it was time to retreat. It also gave a parallel path for driving off NPC bad guys beyond just mowing through hundreds of MDC and many minutes of playing time. If you can blow out the power plant or kill the fire control or the main weapon systems, then the fight may well be over. It also gives a chance for some characters to shine by getting damaged systems back online - "Scotty I need warp power in 3 mniutes or we're all dead" just made the fight that much more interesting than yet another session of shaving down 500 MDC on that Northern Gun Explorer Bot.



The E-clip section is there because I don't like the pricing structure in the main book. I also wanted options for bad things to happen in combat and some specificity in charging up e-clips in the field.

The Armor Goop is my own creation from back in my first campaign in the early 90's. In a mega-damage world, your body armor effectively becomes your hit points, as no normal character can withstand even a single point of MD. Considering that a typical rifle does 4d6 MD per attack and a fairly standard set of MD Body armor has 50 points, with 80 being a "heavy" suit, it only takes one firefight to shred your armor. The armor repair rules in the book are limited and ridiculous and make no sense as far as field repairs so I decided we needed a "healing potion" for body armor, ala D&D. Thus, armor goop: It comes in a 1-meter tube (like a toothpaste tube)  about 6 inches in diameter and there's a spreading tool attached to the cap. After opening the cap the user can squeeze out the goop and spread it around with the tool. It takes about an hour to fix one suit of armor and the goop sets in about 4 hours. It fixes all but 1d6 of the damage to the armor, so the 50-point suit will have from 44-49 points after being "gooped" If it's gooped again before being repaired in a shop, it loses another d6.

The whole point of this is to allow players to have more than one combat before heading back to town to buy new armor, or having to haul around multiple sets of it. It does still put a clock on the players in that it's not a 100% fix, so they will eventually have to get some work done, but it prevents the momentum-killing post-combat regroup and retreat - instead the party just patches up overnight then continues.

Anyway that's the end of the Rifts bit for now. If anyone is interested I can put them up on a file site if they need a better copy. As you might guess I really do like a lot of the ideas in Rifts I just don't like the mechanical execution and expression of some of those ideas. Even when I'm not running or playing it, the ideas never stop for long. I've recently been re-reading the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG (FASERIP) thinking about using it as the introductory supers game for the apprentices, and it struck me that it might  be worth a shot at converting RIFTS to FASERIP. I'll let you know how that goes.

PDF link is here.

2015 Notes

I was pretty proud of "armor goop" when I thought of it. It solved a lot of problems.

The critical hit system is one more element aimed at making combat more than just an auction of people shouting numbers and throwing dice. It gives crits a meaning beyond "hey I did double damage" or something similar. Plus it can make a situation that looks like foregone conclusion a lot more interesting when the enemy's fire control is blown out due to a lucky shot. It can require some interpretation in some cases, but that's part of the fun, right? I would probably have refined it more given more time but it was a solid starting point.  

I also might have tried a fate point/force point/bennie like system that (among other things) would let players invoke a crit automatically - or fix one if they needed to. It would take some tinkering to get it right but it would help offset the worst  parts of the random side of the game. 

Rifts House Rules - My Combat Cheet Sheet Part 2 - 2015 Edition

Page 2 of the Cheatsheet covers the ranged attack modifiers, size modifiers (something else Rifts really needed), then the Defense and Damage process and tables.  So someone shooting will mainly look at page 1 while someone being shot will mainly look at page 2 - the goal was to not have to flip back and forth a whole lot.

A lot of this is purely my own addition to the game, and it can look like a lot but it's really not bad once a player has been through the sequence one time. Plus it's a lot more organized compared to the by-the-book system. Additionally my players like to know where they hit that giant robot - cockpit, gun, arm, leg. I have also found that hit location sometimes helps a fairly lethal game - it's better to lose an arm than the whole character most of the time, and in a world of magic and super-tech replacing it isn't all that hard. 

I will say that looking at it now that the DR/armor piercing thing might be a little more detail than I would want if I started a new campaign tomorrow. It is cool, but it is one more step in resolving combat that might be better left out. I wanted vehicles and robots to have more to them than a big gun and a 500 MDC main body, so detail was what I was looking for at the time - it might not be everyone's cup of tea. 

There's also the system damage section it makes more sense with page 3 which has the crit charts. More on that tomorrow.

PDF link is here.

2015 Notes

By section:

• Ranged Modifiers - these are from the d20 SRD
• Size Modifiers - also from d20
• Defenses - mostly from Rifts with some details added in
• Damage - Rifts + an Armor Penetration system. These used to be a fairly common mod for Rifts but I don't see them as much anymore.  
• Hit Locations - mostly Battletech
• System Damage - mostly homebrew with elements of multiple space combat games as inspiration

The AP system does add a level of complication to the game but I wanted to give certain weapons a reason for being "better" than a comparable weapon that did the same or more damage. Now there is a reason why railguns and plasma cannons are so widely referred to as "heavy weapons" in the game. Also, it makes magic and psi  that much better than the standard game and in my experience they needed some help. 

The System Damage ... system came about in an effort to make combat more interesting than just blowing off chunks of MDC. That makes for a boring fight. it is more to keep track of and it can get hairy for the DM if he has multiple vehicles and bots in play but that's what tracking sheets are for! This lets opponents knock out weapons and sensors and propulsion systems the way things happen in modern sci-fi shows and movies where people need to "get things back online" in the middle of a fight. It makes all those system, engineering, and repair skills useful in combat. It forces interesting decisions - if the robot's big gun is knocked out do you a) stay back and concentrate on fixing it, b) retreat, or c) stop worrying about it and charge in with giant robot fists? That's much more fun than "there's another 75 MDC". 

Main sources here: d20 SRD, Battletech, various Traveller space combat systems, and Rifts Ultimate Edition.

Mid-November Superhero TV Update

• I finally have had a chance to start catching up on Agents of Shield Season 1 and I can report that everyone else was right - it does get quite a bit better! Episode 13 is where it took off for me and started feeling both as smart as it should have from the start and like it was trying to get somewhere - like it had a point. I'm looking forward to finishing it and moving on to Season 2 now.

• The Flash is continuing to be good - really good - and before watching tonight's episode, or any future episodes I am going to predict that Zoom will turn out to be Barry's dad or mirror-dad. Not sure why, and I've never read much Flash, but that's my shot in the dark speculation.

• Supergirl - Like it so far, hope it continues to arc upwards. The main actress is growing on me and now seems to really fit the part. It has a lot of promise, but a crossover with Flash would blow the whole thing wide open and make the show a thousand times better. Fingers crossed. 

• Ash vs. Evil Dead - What can I say? this is a show that looks like a game I would run! Maybe some games that I _have_ run! I have no criticisms so far. It's Ash! The Boomstick! Deadites! On movie-cable TV! Just the fact that it exists makes me happy.