May 15

May 2014 Blog Carnival: Star Wars

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May 2014 Blog Carnival: Star Wars

Welcome to my first hosted blog carnival and its about a subject dear to my heart; Star Wars.

I could rattle on about the whole background but I’ll save that for my post, suffice to say I want to hear what Star Wars means to you; whether it is a particular rules set or maybe even something funny that happened at the table.

So please feel free to contribute to this months carnival in the usual way by writing a blog post, link back to this page before dropping a note in the comments below.

At the end of the month I’ll do a final wrap-up post.

So, without further ado “May the force be with you” 🙂

Category: RPG | 6 Comments on May 2014 Blog Carnival: Star Wars
May 15

Blogger commenting

Since joining the RPGBA I’ve seen some really good blogs but I have been stymied when I try to comment on them, like this one entitled “Five Ways Roll20 Is a PITA” .

The stumbling block appears to be the Blogger platform and the fact I can’t create a Google+ profile with my email address; the issue appears to stem from the fact it starts with General which appears to be against Google’s naming convention.

So I implore those good bloggers using Blogger please check your comments settings so we can use Open Id for example as another method of signing in to leave our thoughts on your blog.

 

Category: RPG | 2 Comments on Blogger commenting
May 14

Top 10 RPG list – number 6

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st Edition

I first encountered WHFRP not long after its release and sort of fell in love with the peculiar background; The Old World with its very different fantasy tropes and unusual humour.  White Dwarf carried a number of pre-release adverts before the games release and had a teaser pull-out an issue or two before it was finally available from Games Workshop.  The book was originally published as a hard-cover with colour plates inside and contained all the rules required to play; with the exception of the upcoming magic book Realms Of Sorcery as it took several years before this book was finally  published by Hogshead Publishing.  To round things off there was even a short and very deadly adventure in the back of the book.

The game is known for the dark brooding setting, the use of humour especially puns and wordplay throughout the books; some of which are blatantly obvious if you happen to speak German.  It was also popular because of the critical hit charts which enabled you to describe the gory demise of your adversary.

Character creation.

One of the best parts of the game is the character creation system which had a myriad of character careers rolled from a collection of tables and this determined what your current career is, an advance scheme, initial skills and  some meagre equipment.  Some careers were better than others; for example the Wizard’s apprentice and some were a little underwhelming; for example the jailer.  By and large they were all were fun to play and really gave you an idea of why you decided to take up adventuring.

Advance scheme.

The career also gave you an advance scheme which allowed you to improve your character by giving you the ability to incrementally increase your stats in either +10 or +1 steps depending on whether the attributes were a percentage number or just a plain 0-9 value.  Once you had purchased a single +10 advance, if you wanted to get better you had to locate a career with a +20 advance and so forth until you had managed to get the full +40 allowed.  Upon completion of the advance scheme you would then move on to a new career either by picking a career exit or spending more experience points to select a new career.

Skills.

The game also had a very broad, diverse and somewhat unusual skill list.  Unlike most fantasy worlds of that era in WHFRP most of the Old World is illiterate, so if you were very lucky your character could posses Read / Write and be slightly ahead of the rest of the world.

Equipment.

The final piece of the equation was your starting gear, some careers gave you access to exotic weapons and armour or if you were unlucky a flask of herbal tea or a bunch of keys.  A quirk of the game was that you had to obtain the trappings of the next career you wanted to advance into once you had finished with your current career, this was great if all you needed was a collection of hats and bottles of coloured sand; not so good if you had to acquire a ship or a mercenary band.

Races.

The game also had the usual bunch of stereotypical races to play; Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling and an issue of White Dwarf introduced the Gnome as am additional playable race, if you didn’t have that issue of White Dwarf it was later reprinted in a collection of WHFRP material.   The bestiary had the standard monsters as well as a few creatures unique to the game as adversaries.

Background.

The setting is the Old World, a place where magic is a strange force be wielded by trained wizards and the forces of chaos run wild around the forests of the Empire; the Empire is very much like an early renaissance Germany with primitive black powder weapons which certain careers require before you could advance into it.   There is quite a detailed gazetteer and history of the planet in the book mostly using material found in Warhammer Fantasy Battles 3rd edition.

Supplements.

There were a few supplements released for the game including the long-awaited Realms of Sorcery but Games Workshop also released a few adventures for it.  There were a couple of geographical source books, and a compilation of articles that had appeared in White Dwarf, including the aforementioned Gnome.

Honourable mention.

Runequest third edition.

Runequest was the other fantasy game I got hold of another fantasy world with its own unique world: Glorantha. At the time Games Workshop had managed to secure the rights to print licensed editions of other companies games and it was the Games Workshop version I had.  The version that Games Workshop published under license was the third edition which spanned  three separate slim hardcover editions unlike the single volume of WHFRP.

I was also a little disappointed that Runequest third edition used a fantasy Europe as a setting rather than Glorantha which was prevalent in the first and second editions.  Many of the printed adventures and source-books still out there used Glorantha and not the new default world and not having access to the earlier editions I was a little confused.  I later found out that this may have been that Avalon Hill had purchased the rights to use Runequest and the name but not the world of Glorantha.

Runequest used percentile dice to resolve actions and could be just as bloody as WHFRP since each limb had separate hit point totals and your arms or legs could be hacked off in battle or if you were unfortunate you could hack your own legs off if you fumbled.

 

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May 11

EXTREME EARTH: A dystopian superhero setting – update

There are only five days left to go to this rather interesting Kickstarter, so if you want to seen a multi-system campaign world appear for your favourite system pop over to the project page and pledge.

I’m passing the word on as the project does look very interesting and I would to see it happen.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jaerdaph/extreme-earth-a-dystopian-superhero-campaign-setti

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May 9

RPGBA

RPGBA

Not long after starting this blog I joined the RPGBA; a collective of other RPG writer’s and commentators with a common theme. I did this as a way of promoting my writing and  trying to share my wit and wisdom of 20 years of games mastery.

The moderators of the forum also encourage further collaboration in the form of the Blog Carnival,  I participated in last months carnival which was the Game Masters Binder.

Benefits?

Since I joining I have noticed an increase of traffic and comments being left, the downside is that many of the comments are spam and mainly for  weight loss products; whether this is common spam or trying to perpetuate the myth that gamers are overweight I leave that as an exercise for you the reader to determine 🙂

If you want to know more about the alliance then either click on the link to the right or you can view the live RSS feed at the bottom of the links page.

Have fun and may your dice roll true.

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May 5

Top 10 RPG list – number 7

Torg.

 

Torg was the first game I encountered that allowed the party to play a mixed group of characters from a list of genres; so you could have a lost world hero rubbing shoulders with a cybernetically enhanced ninja. It was through a series of teaser adverts in Dragon that piqued my interest and it soon became a hot topic when I talked to other gamers at the local games shop.

In the beginning:

The story was that Earth had been invaded by High Lords from different realms and realities  who wish to strip the Earth of the living energy of the planet.  Each High Lord brings with them a chunk of their own reality and converts their conquered region to their reality.

Inside the box.

The core game came in a boxed set containing three books, an Infiniverse campaign newsletter, a 156 card drama deck and a possibility shard or 1d20 if you prefer 🙂

Storm Knights

In the game the player characters are Storm Knights and they have the ability to control their fates by expending possibility energy which enabled the character to do extraordainary things including re-reolling the die if the result was unfavourable. Posibilites are a great idea and its good to see that the core of this mechanic has been carried onto other games but are called Fate Points or Bennies or something of that ilk.  As the line expanded so did the meta-plot and things like a guild of Storm Knights appeared.

Infiniverse

The game also had a meta-plot running through it and by sending the results back of how your group handled certain adventures you could influence how the overall War for Reality would play out.  This was a great idea and I had never seen such a thing ever proposed, the idea that thousands of gamers worldwide had the chance to shape the overall plot arc was just mind blowing.  West End Games did publish three campaign updates based upon the results of the global Infiniverse campaign and the idea seemed to work.  It would be a very different thing to do today as the internet could make submission and compilation of campaign data much easier.

Drama Deck.

This was something else I loved the idea of using the special Drama Deck to govern initiative and also to define that if certain combat manoeuvres were used the player could be rewarded with additional cards from the Drama Deck; it would also set various combat conditions that could hinder or provide you with  bonuses depending on the cards.  Plus there were the “special cards” that players could use in any situation, cards that would allow you to define an ally or contact that you knew in the area and could call upon for help or advice when you needed it.  Apart from West End Games other system Masterbook I have yet to see anything similar to this.

Cosms.

Cosms is how the invading realities were referred to in the book. Each Cosm had their own world laws and different axiom levels.   If your character found themselves outside of their own Cosm and you failed a roll then you could find yourself disconnected from your home reality and instead become part of the invaders reality.

  • The invading Cosms were initailly the following realms:
  • Core Earth — “our” Earth, the base reality.
  • Living Land—a primitive, Lost World-style jungle.
  • Aysle—a magical, low-technology realm.
  • The Cyberpapacy—this realm which was initially a repressive, medieval theocracy.
  • Nippon Tech—an ultracapitalist nightmare society.
  • The New Nile Empire — this realm combined a restored Ancient Egypt with pulp trappings.
  • Orrorsh—a Gothic horror realm.

As the game supplements kept being released new Cosms were added to the list:

  • Land Below—not a realm but a pocket dimension involving the mixture of Living Lands and the Nile Empire.
  • Space Gods—a high-technology, space faring society very much in the style of Chariots of the Gods
  • Tharkold—home of a race of magic and technology-using demons.
  • Terra—not an invading realm but the home Cosm of the invaders from the Nile Empire.

As the game line progressed it started to become somewhat unwieldy to play as a visiting games master unless you could drive, each book added extra weight to the bags.

Templates.

The game also enabled you to get the game going with templated characters and by adding a few skill packages to the template you could be up and running in no time.  I always got the suspicion that templates found in later books  appeared to much cooler than the ones in the boxed set and each exotic template could only be found in that specific book.

There was a lot to make the game interesting and special but I think the growing number of books required to play coupled with the somewhat bizarre characters that appeared in the books; for example Skippy  , did make me wonder what was going on at West End Games HQ.

How do I do?

The game also used a universal chart for doing things which allegedly enabled you to convert from time to weight just by reading a different line.  I say allegedly as  I could never really figure it out and tended to fudge it when rolls had to be made.

When you came to take an action that required a success roll; you would roll the d2o and consult the success table on the bottom of the character sheet, then you add that bonus value to your skill roll for the action total and this is the final number that had to beat the target number of the gamesmaster.

 

The good news is that there is a revised and expanded version of Torg available if you want to play in the wars once more. and there is still a lot of good stuff to be had in the book.

If I was to play Torg these days I would use the background provided but use a different system like Savage Worlds as the two games do share several common features.

Honourable mention:

Rifts.

The other game dealing with multiple genre action Rifts takes a different slant on things and I had many fun hours playing this game.  It has been criticised by several parties about power creep and I agree the game does have some issues when playing with some of the later books but I have always said you can use the main rulebook and the books for the region we’re going to be playing in.

 

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May 3

Roll20 macros

Better automation through macros

So I’ve spent the best part of a day unlearning some bad habits when I set up the Roll20 sheets for my players.  I wish I’d spent some more time getting to grips with the documentation before I set down to create but I realise the campaign was based upon one of my first fumbling attempts at getting Roll20 to behave how I wanted.

Why Macros?

A macro is a statement that tells Roll20 to execute a string and in my case I had defined attack macros, dodge macros and damage macros.  What I forgot is that you can create a central pool of macros for all to use rather than creating them individually in each characters journal.  When I set the journals up I used the former method rather then the latter.  The downside was that as I read the documentation I learned more about how to write an effective macro and I was faced with the realisation that I would have to change it for each character that had a journal entry.

Why Change?

I changed because my players deserved better than me saying “Ah, I haven’t set that macro up yet on that character” and since I had some free time this weekend I did just that.  I scrapped the individual macros and harnessing the power of the language I re-wrote the macros while taking the time to improve them into something more functional.

Example:

So I present to you an example macro from the library that my players have access to, a simple ranged combat macro:

/em @{selected|token_name} fires my handgun!
/roll 1d10 +@{selected|Dexterity} + @{selected|Guns (Handgun)}  
+ ?{Additional Attack Bonus/Penalty?|0}
!ammo Pistol ammo

I also created them as token specific which means that you have to have a token highlighted before it will correctly execute.

The first line has the token announce the name of the token and what its doing.  The second line rolls a d10, adds the values of Dexterity and the handgun skill together before popping up a dialogue box asking if there are any other miscellaneous modifiers to add to the roll; say a situational modifier for someone that has been aiming long enough to obtain a bonus or if they are using a scope.

The final line calls a script which decreases the value of an attribute called Pistol ammo by one.  This way the player can see how much ammo they are going through as I used one of Roll20s radial buttons for this task.

There are more things to be done, but I hope that my players will see the benefits of a well written macro.

 

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May 1

Old habits

So for the first time in a while I find myself playing in a game and its pretty good to roll the dice as a player. The game is Call of Cthulhu using the Achtung Cthulhu books and set in the early stages of the war.

Something has been playing on my mind though, despite having reasonably competent skill ratings  I seem to be failing to make skill checks; perhaps this is to be expected or maybe I have failed to live up to my tradition when starting a new game.  So I have taken steps to rectify this situation by buying a new set of dice; this time I’m going old school and have ordered a set of white inked red Gamescience precision dice.  I know its a silly superstition but you never know these dice may live up to the hype.

I shall let you know in due course if my new dice do indeed roll true and are better luck than the ones I’m currently using.

 

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April 28

Top 10 RPG list – number 8

Cyberpunk 2020.

I encountered the first edition of Cyberpunk at my local Games Workshop in Hammersmith back in the day when Games Workshop sold more than just their own products.

I was intrigued by the line-art on the box and the blurb on the back really gripped me as I had seen no other game where you could play someone who could hack into satellites to play music they liked.

While I liked the system, it did seem to be a little unbalanced in places especially in the way it handled combat as the combat system Friday Night Firefight had rifles that do enough bullet damage to vaporise an un-armoured person.

So I put the game aside after running it a couple of times and thought no more of it.

It was a few years later that I purchased the second edition titled 2020 and it is this edition that I used to run several campaigns with.

I was surprised to find that very little had changed from the original version, some things were simplified and the combat system had been given an overhaul.  Best of all my favourite part of the game remained intact:  The lifepath.

I have mentioned before how I like systems that give you a background for the character and this not only did that but it would also give you plot hooks galore as well as allies, lovers, friends and enemies.  Fitting in with the dystopian hedonism that certain cyberpunk books had the lifepath could as a result of a few dice rolls dictate that your character could be straight, bi or homosexual.  Of course I never made a player accept any result that made them feel uncomfortable with.  The lifepath was such fun I had one player try to make his character as old as possible so that they could play this mini game for as long as they could.

The game was also resplendent with chrome and had all sorts of stuff that a player could desire; whereas some games publish veritable arms catalogues as supplements, the four Chromebooks are a futuristic lifestyle magazine the products within are presented as fake advertisements.  It looks like the design team took some cues from the film Robocop and the Chromebooks added a much needed touch of polish and some great 21st century ideas for household living.

Cyberwear was a big part of the game and you could implant all sorts of gadgets into your body.  Cyerbarms and legs were par for the course and owing to the lessened lethality of the combat system which meant you no longer turned into red mist you could instead find your arm or leg being destroyed.

Honourable mention.

Shadowrun.

I think I picked Shadowrun 1st edition up after Cyberpunk as I was drawn to the evocative cover painting on the hardback and I although found the system a bit wonky in places it was good fun to play.

It was touted as fusion of cyberpunk and fantasy, it had the classic fantasy races; humans, orcs, elves and dwarves.  The lack of an integrated lifepath system also irked me but the archetypes made up for it.

This was one of the first games I encountered to use an archetype based character creation system and the archetypes where just that a standard character you could pick up and with a small amount of customisation play.

There was also a full blown character creation system but that to me is where the system started to break down;  a lack of guidance on how to handle to priority system led to some incorrect characters which were naturally more powerful than the archetypes by several orders of magnitude.

Second edition tried to simplify the system which it did but the creep of the splatbooks didn’t help either as it appeared to me that each book was trying to outdo the previous ones.  By the time the bioware book came out things were tottering on the edge of collapse.  This one volume gave your character several implants that could function with cyberwear and having this book at character creation you could turn out some very potent characters.

My personal favorite was Rockwell the troll who was the very epitome of a meta-human tank.  I sank all I the attribute points and cybernetic enhancements I could into his Body stat which ended up at a mind boggling 17!  He once endured three rounds of hand to hand combat with a dragon and got away with nothing more than a moderate wound; it was at that point the GM cheated and decided that the dragon would use magic against him, something that Rockwell couldn’t cope with and he dropped like a stone after one mana bolt later.

Wonky rules aside, Shadowrun did have a meta-plot which runs through the supplements and the comments in the sidebars and footers of the books are very witty and add to the feel of the expanded universe.

I’ve discussed two books which rode the coattails of the popularity of the cyberpunk genre, Cyberpunk 2020 for me is best when it comes to Style but Shadowrun has the edge when it comes to substance.

 

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