More New Purchases

I obtained a number of old school games made by Parker Brothers and Waddingtons recently.

These games were designed by masters of the form, usually complex enough to hold the attention of an adult while being easy enough to play to allow for children to join in (or possibly the adults post Christmas Dinner c/w copious quantities of alcohol). Waddingtons' Formula One was a purchase that was voted a damn good waste of time at my local friendly game store three months ago, and I just picked up copies of Waddingtons' Blast Off, a Space Race game I had played in the early 1970s which was in excellent condition, and Parker Brothers' Masterpiece which is an art collector game where the object is to collect works of art that are highly prized while dumping your acquired forgeries on the other players. Each artwork card is a reproduction of an actual painting, and gets assigned a random value known only to the owner as it is drawn. A very clever mechanic and a game I've wanted to play since I was an older kid. Never knew anyone who had it though.

I also picked up a copy of Waddingtons' Spy Ring, which I had played at university in the mid-1970s but it turns out there are two different iterations of the game. The one I had played was the original. The one I bought turned out to have a different game-play and objective while using many of the same pieces. Sadly, the one I want to play is the other one. Oh well.

Can't wait to get a crowd together for some old-school gaming.

New Purchases

More new purchases, courtesy of eBay.

I've long been wanting to get a look at the Avalon Hill old chestnut Outdoor Survival, pretty much since it was suggested as a resource in the last few pages of Wilderness Adventures, the third booklet that came in the box that held the original version of Dungeons and Dragons. Gary Gygax suggested using the Outdoor Survival map board as a campaign map for D&D, retasking the various features on the board as castles, baronies etc.

When the chance came to buy the game I jumped at it, and scored a copy that by the looks of it had never been played. I, of course, plan to ruin the collectibility of the thing by punching the counters from the sheet and actually playing the game. It looks to be an odd beast, where the players are actually playing however many simultaneous games but not actually doing much in the way of co-operating. The conceit is that players are lost in the Great American Outdoors and must survive and navigate their way to safety. To simulate being lost in confusing territory while at the same time having a bird's eye view of the whole terrain, the players do not have complete freedom of movement, but must move in straight lines largely in accordance with instructions randomly determined according to how dilapidated the player characters are. If a counter crosses a trail, the player may decide to follow it instead of beating through the bush, but that's about all the discretionary movement one is allowed if my cursory reading of the rules is right.

The different counters show the same characters in steadily decreasing state of health, from striding along confidently to staggering and even crawling desperately. It is all very amusing, in a life-or-death way.

The game came with an actual wilderness survival booklet too, the game having aspirations to be a teaching tool as well as a good way to kill a couple of hours on a rainy day.

Looks like fun.

New Purchases

I just successfully bid on three Avalon Hill boxed wargames from the golden age of games, when people weren't afraid of rulebooks.

The first was an almost complete "Tactics II", arguably the game that jump-started the market for Avalon Hill wargames. I've wanted to try this for years and a copy was available for the Buy it Now price of 20 bux plus postage, so around 35 bux in total. Not bad for a game missing a couple of counters¹.

The second and third came as a single deal in one auction. "Panzer Blitz" and "Panzer Leader" were games I remember seeing and scheduling for my shelves but money wasn't endless and I had other games that were fun and ... well, the time when these were available new passed when Avalon Hill collapsed and became a boutique name for Wizards of the Coast.

These days it is almost impossible to find people in the same locale as me who are willing to invest the time and effort in playing simulation games like these. The games are designed to recreate the actual physics of driving tanks and shooting at things. Things are intuitive once you get the designer's basic take on what is important, and certain standards were used in just about all wargame-type games so picking up a new one wasn't a steep learning curve usually and things were designed to work the way you expected them to.

The rules are also written in what is called the "Case System" which groups rules in increasing amounts of specialty. You look up whatever you want to do in general terms, then the special conditions that apply as and when you need them. It is a sort of hyperlinking. The key concept is that the players are never expected to be "off book" while playing, so the rules ware exhaustive and easy to navigate. ².

I was feeling nostalgic and decided to chance the condition and component count³ but these seemed in good condition.

I expected to get sniped to be honest and placed my bid in such a way to foil the manual snipers, but there's nothing you can do against software designed to up the bids incrementally before a human can type a counter offer. But after a brief flurry of activity by one inexperienced bidder and a halfhearted bid by someone not really interested I took the prize for around 50 bux. Twenty five dollars per game, not bad.

So I'm looking forward to receiving these blasts from the past⁴. Even now I am picturing the Panzer games in the window of Dungeons and Starships on Summer Row, my not-so local friendly game store of choice in 1981.

Now if only I can find an opponent ...

1. Which can be replaced easily enough by printing replacements from counter sheet images on the web↑
2. Contrast this to game rulebooks today which typically adhere to the RPG standard where it is assumed that the players will figure a way of winging it when (not if) things get confusing or they hit something not covered. The result is often a disorganized mess. Fantasy Flight Games, I am looking at you↑
3. the options for both these games were not great and nobody was doing a component count on the various offerings↑
4. The ancient past in the case of Tactics II, which dates from 1958 I think.↑

Savage New Acquisitions

As people may of may not know I am greatly invested in the Savage Worlds game engine, which I fell in love with after one game of Deadlands:Reloaded, a game that gave me more enjoyment as a player than any other I've played in for over 20 years.

Characters are built using points to buy "die types" for basic attributes like strength and agility, skills like fighting or swimming and edges like Quick Draw and Charismatic. Points are strictly limited and in short supply, so the opportunity to get more by taking on hindrances like Short Sighted or Mean is a welcome feature of the game. This gives Savage Worlds a similar character build to GURPS without the need for a degree in tax accountancy or a spreadsheet program (and, of course, without the richness that system provides).

It has its problems like any RPG rules engine does, most notably when it comes to the magic system, that many feel lacks the "oomph" of a proper High Fantasy setting.

There is some justification for this. The spell lists are deliberately foreshortened compared to other systems, and presented in a generic format intended to be padded out with "trappings" to give individual iterations of a given generic spell special feel and side-effects. One can, for example, easily imagine the difference in feel between an area-effect spell with an electrical trapping (call it "ball lightning") and one with a nuclear trapping (call it "ridiculously broken").

The spells are also of less over-the-topness than other systems, which means that problems can arise when it comes to player expectations. My gaming friend Will grumbles that a Deadlands:Reloaded Mad Scientist cannot make an ornithopter that would fly for more than a minute or so, and he's right unless the GM imports a certain "edge" from the Slipstream setting (or invents one of his/her own to do the job).

There is also the problem that in combats the game tends to be one of invincible players right up to the point the mulligan points ("Bennies") run out, at which point it can very easily become TPK time.

The GM must be aware of and cater for these shortcomings in the system.

What makes that worthwhile is the sheer number of settings that this engine has been pointed at. Deadlands was perhaps the first and remains the flagship setting, but one can also game in the Space 1889 steampunk setting, the Rippers gothic horror setting, pirate settings both with and without high fantasy elements, 1930s Saturday Space Serial settings, any number of fantasy settings. The list goes on.

Most recently, Pinnacle Entertainment have released a Lankhmar sourcebook and a book of adventures for that setting. Lankhmar is, of course, the city in which Fafhard and The Grey Mouser met and had so many adventures in the short stories and (one I think) novel by Fritz Leiber. I loved the books and so could not resist picking up these offerings in the hope that one day I can get the apathetic youth I'm surrounded with to play in that urban setting.

The books are lavish affairs, as so many of the Savage World books are. At least, they look like they should be lavish affairs. This represents one of the first times I've bought electronic only, having realized my house can hold no more books

And anyway, I usually do most of the referencing of my game books while on my interminable commute, which means reading e-versions on my laptop. I often need to synthesize an adventure from two or more books, and the lack of space while traveling makes using paper books impractical even before the extra weight they represent is considered.

Besides which, I have a tendency to start regarding the books as a treasure to be kept from the hands of others, who will handle the glossy-paper with grease smeared hands without a thought. I realize this is a problem, a minor obsession, but I can't do anything about it. I often make up player manuals with copied pages in greaseproof plastic sleeves for the players if they need such a beast. The players can paw that without triggering my "book anxiety".

I also took the chance to obtain electronic copies of The Path of Kane and The Savage Foes of Solomon Kane, adjuncts to the excellent Solomon Kane RPG (also based on Savage Worlds) that provide adventures and NPCs to star in them and which I already owned in hardback. The chance to run Solly Kane has come up and the price was right. I've been looking for these books for some time in an affordable e-package. I bought an e-copy of the rulebook years ago. Now I'm champing at the bit to get a Solly Kane game up and running.

I also chose to obtain a copy of the second edition of the One Ring rulebook.

One Ring is set in the time between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, mostly in Rhovanion. It aims to provide a different sort of game experience to D&D and its fantasy clones, concentrating on roleplaying and highlighting the difficulties of going from A to B over long distances in the wilderness. It is, in other words, what Wilderness Adventures should have been in White Box D&D.

I've agonized in the past over how to represent the epic levels of privation expeditions int The Wild should have without the need for soul-destroying shopping lists and endless Constitution tests. Well, the people at Cubicle 7 have engineered that into One Ring very neatly, taking a cue from old school wargames by using the concept of attrition and melding it all very nicely into an RPG that to me has a very "Tolkienesque" feel to the whole approach of adventuring. No "kick in the door and steal the treasure" game this.

Naturally, I can't get anyone interested in playing.

The game originally came as a player manual, a GM manual, a couple of maps (one for the players, much like the one that came in the back of The Lord of the Rings, and an identical one with a hex grid and a key for the GM to calculate actual distances) and some dice in a slipcase. The second edition, tidied up a little and somewhat re-arranged, now comes in a single book. If your taste runs to a less adrenaline-powered RPG you might like this game too.

You can download these and many, many other titles from DriveThroughRPG.com, my e-seller of choice these days. Paper copies can be had through your LFGS for the asking.

Resources:

One Ring RPG A system for playing epic adventures in The Wild
The Savage Worlds of Solomon Kane The core rulebook (does not require the purchase of Savage Worlds)
The Path of Kane Adventures for Solomon Kane
The Savage Foes of Solomon Kane Major foes for your SK game, and adventures in which to showcase them.
Lankhmar sourcebook for Savage Worlds (requires the Savage Worlds core rulebook to play
Savage Tales of the Thieves GuildFourteen adventures for Lankhmar-based campaigns

New Purchases

So I've kicked into two new projects over at Kickstarter.com.

The first is the Planet Mercenary RPG, a role playing game set in the universe of Schlock Mercenary, something I was toying with doing myself using Savage Worlds and a home-brewed sourcebook. The art has been upgraded from the Schlock Mercenary webcomic standard, which I felt was unnecessary. One can hope that the webcomic sensibilities survive the translation process too.

The second game is The Fall of Magic which I was directed to by fellow gamer and author-in-training Dunx. The Fall of Magic is a board-come-rpg game in which the players move across a printed map (the gimmick is that the map is arranged as a scroll that is only unrolled as much as is needed at the time in play) and extemporize a narrative for their character as to what is happening and why. It looks to be similar in general terms to Fiasco¹, and intrigued me enough to kick in at the Fall of Magic Kickstarter project.

I've also acquired two games through more traditional means.

Pandemic is a traditional board game in which players cooperate as medical teams to eradicate diseases as they bloom and spread across the world. The materials are well made and attractive to look at (very important in a board game) and the game play is straightforward. I've watched it played numerous times and everyone seems to have a blast. I'm looking forward to playing with people who haven't seen it before.

The second, Mars Attacks, is a dice and card game, superficially similar to Elder Sign in that dice are rolled and cards claimed by achieving dice scores "Yahtzee" style. The conceit here is that the players are Martians trying to collect buildings, artifacts and so forth by the sorts of shenanigans depicted in the movie. A simple game that looks like a lot of fun.

1. Just about the most fun you can have with your clothes on↑

New Purchases - Numenera

So let's have a decko at some of the stuff I've picked up in recent weeks in the game line.

Numenera, the new Monte Cook RPG.

Set in the Ninth Age, with eight previous world-spanning civilizations dead and buried, nanotech loose in the world and the people living in the period when civilization is just getting restarted. Sounded like a great idea (I'm a sucker for Dying Earth settings and this screams Dying Earth from the description, no?).

The rulebook is lavish. Full color, with lots of maps. Two major geographical areas are fairly well described, the Steadfast, where civilization has a toehold again and The Beyond which is a tad less organized.

Sadly, it all starts to get a bit mundane on further reading.

Firstly, the game system uses three stats to describe characters (which allows for a rather nice damage scheme) and has an inherently un-griddable tactical description model. The GM gets no dice at all, the players are the only people who roll. So they attack, then they defend against fixed values using a D20.

The GM sets a difficulty for any task (including combat) between 1 and 10. Various factors lower or raise this number but it is essentially arbitrary in that the original value is GM selected. The final number is multiplied by three to give the score that the players must equal or beat to succeed.

So not that radical really.

XP get earned the usual way but also for allowing GM intrusions into the story. The GM suggests an intrusion and everybody affected gets to decide if they want to have it. If so, two XP are handed out, one of which must be given to someone else. This whole process makes me cringe to be honest. If I wanted to play FATE I'd play FATE, which does not encumber itself with XP and leveling.

For yes, Numenera is a leveling game.

There are only three (as yet) character classes. This does not worry me because this what what we had in White Box D&D and EPT in the old days. We have Glaives (fighters), Nanos (Magic Users) and Jacks (Rogues). Why this was necessary as opposed to (say) a completely class-free advancement scheme is beyond me.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of the whole thing is that when all is said and done, this is really just another Bronze Age fantasy adventuring game with little of substance to separate it from Tekumel (which has a richer background) or Pathfinder (which has a mature game system and very few misprints).

The background has a lot of potential but there is so little meat on the bones when it comes to the state of Ninth Age civilisation that you could take the setting in almost any direction. Except that there are suppositions built into the published material - and these will also be in any expansions - that hint that the writers have a very definite idea on how it all fits together, they just aren't telling.

The character backgrounds offer three different ways that each character type could become the super post-humans they so obviously are and progress through the tiers (Numeneraspeak for levels). The issue is the overall Bronze Age level of the setting compared to the extremely sophisticated bionics suggested in the character progression.

Now I can get this to work, and do it in a satisfying way for me and,, I think, anyone playing a game. Like I said, I love Dying Earth settings and Empire of the Petal Throne had the same centuries lost tech-as-magic mcguffin and that is my all-time favorite world to adventure in). But when I play in someone else's Numenera game that structure won't be there and that will be a pain in everyone's ass.

Maybe I just take this sort of thing too seriously.

The game was crowdsourced, and it kind of shows because there are some really nifty misprints. One of my favorites is the missing special term in the Glaive and Nano character sections. Each section wants to talk about feats, but also needs to change the name so we aren't playing D&D or Pathfinder, right? Only thing is, the author obviously hadn't decided on a term yet and so just left it blank. The result is a sentence that paraphrases as "as you progress you gain inherent abilities called ." It can all be figured out, but it shows that the proofreading was probably limited to people familiar with the material which is the worst way to approach the task.

And, surprisingly for such a mature worker in the field, the writing is not great. The color story at the start of the book is execrably bad, toothache-inducing. For the second edition this should be erased and a replacement farmed out to an established fantasy author.

I'm actually keen to try this out and will be doing so in a couple of weeks. The setting has lots and lots of potential and the game system could be a winner despite everyone's fear of the unknown (many reviewers of the game were obviously expecting a D&D clone).

I'll post more on this later when I have time and am more read in the material.

Resources:

Numenera Web Site

FATE Intervenes In My Life Again

The Dresden Files RPG game I ran a couple of years ago was a bit different to all my other prefered games in that the DFRPG character generation system incorporates that tooth-achingly awful part of a GM's life, player backstories, and so the group needs to meet just to get that sorted out¹ but there is also a touchy-feely phase where the players get to decide what the world should look like. I see the point but my players then decided they wouldn't share the load of administering it which was counter to the DFRPG rulebook guidelines and a bugger for me to manage due to the information load that had to be acquired just to run the game.

So I came to distrust the FATE system on the basis of what I had experienced. While I believe that FATE can deliver a rich experience for everyone, and that DFRPG in particular may do so in a robust fashion under challenging ground rules³, I never did understand the so-called Fate Point Economy and neither did anyone who tried to explain it to me⁴.

Fate points are a way in which the GM can intervene in the PC's lives, and by which the players can intervene in the NPCs machinations and intentions. There are various problems for me in this system, chiefly that the way wounds work hinges on players spending Fate Points to make the wounds hurt, and what happens when the players have inflicted grevious wounds on a Bad Guy but have spent all their Fate Points to make that happen? It is now down to my sense of fair play to make a crippling wound actually cripple the antagonist because according to the strict letter of the rules the players cannot switch on the hurty wounds because they lack the coin.

There's an actual example of the set-up to this situation in the DFRPG rulebook, taken from the Dresden Files fiction, in which an insanely powerful Black Court Vampire has been wounded and rendered "extra crispy" (Fate games are powered by adjectives). The example stops there, but should have gone on to discuss the most likely scenario in an actual game in which making the Vampire "extra crispy" had drained the players' Fate Point bank of its last red cent. I should add that every player would get one and only one free "tag" of the "extra crispy" Aspect⁵ to make the Vampire slow down, limp, go "argh" etc., but once that one round is over Mr V. Ampire straightens up and strides from the room as if unwounded. It's all very counter-intuitive for me, having cut my teeth on systems that have wound management as part of the wounded character's liabilities.


Now obviously I wouldn't allow the baddie to just ignore his crippling wounds like that on a normal day, I'd role play the singédness to the hilt, but what if I'm feeling mean on account of player intransigence and not in the mood to throw them a bone? What if they've been dbleeping around all game and I'm not their friend right now? Where is my incentive to screw with the rules of the game and give 'em a freebie when they've unwisely spent all their Fate Points before the Job Is Done?

Normally I'd just walk away from something for which I have such a demonstrably poor connect, but the thing is I can see how powerful the DFRPG system is (and by extension the FATE system from which it was carved). I want to understand DFRPG's engine, and the people who claim they do are not able to explain it in the context of the rules in the book - which leaves me wondering if they understand it any better than I do. I can just wing it like anyone can, but I don't want to do that because, speaking personally, I like to understand what an author was getting at with a given rule before I toss it⁶, and this has me going back to the well probably too often. Sometimes you should just walk away.

But then again.

One of the least useful bits of "advice" I've been given with respect to DFRPG has been to "study the FATE core rules"⁷, which are free to download, or were last time I checked and downloaded them⁸ just before I read DFRPG. DFRPG may have started as a FATE system, but the various mechanics used to mung physics in Dresden Land bear little resemblance to the parent material. I usually throw anyone who says this into the "parroting Everyone Knows™ but doesn't own or play the game" box.

Harsh, me.

But I was at my LFGS on Sunday⁹ and spotted my good gaming buddy Will running a game in one of the rooms. Will runs FATE (amongst other indie-heavy game systems) and I saw a rather nice hardback FATE rulebook on the table. I have twice sat in on one of Will's FATE games; one "heist" scenario of his own devising and one DFRPG session, and both were enjoyable experiences (that did nothing to answer my questions, oddly.

Long story short, I picked up a copy of this new FATE rulebook myself. For $25 is was a bargain. Hard covers faced in a robust colored material with an almost rubbery feel to it. Glossy white pages with black printing. Large enough font to read with ease. All in a package about the size of a novel (smaller if you allow for marketing idiocy), about half the frontal form factor of your usual game book. It is rare to get such quality for such a low price these days. This is a book one could tote to games easily and expect it to last for years if you don't let clods who think greasy foods mix with paper products get their pizza-smeared fingers on it. Yes, you can probably still get free versions, but a wad of printed pdf pages does not have the robustness or gravitas of a proper bound book for me.
The contents purport to be a more streamlined version of previous editions.

 Maybe this time's the charm and I'll finally understand what the designers were getting at. Stranger things have happened. If not, well I can sell it or gift it or leave it on the shelf since it is a good-looking product.

If a highly improvisational RP game framework is what you are looking for, you should take a look yourself.

Resources:
Evil Hat Productions

1. Actually it doesn't. The whole thing can be done over e-mail if the players are adult about it but the one time I tried to get this done in a game in which I had the chance to sit on the other side of the equation I was subjected to whining from the GM who threatened to quit the game he wasn't yet running. I didn't feel that was fair to the others, so I quit, and was then bad-mouthed by this Big Girl's Blouse and another prospective player who has made a habit of bad-mouthing me when I'm not around to hear²↑
2. Because he dumped a game of mine without notice and didn't like that I flagged him for doing so in payment for us holding the game for an hour in case he showed up↑
3. Namely, that if a player does what Dresden does under the same conditions he does, the same result should be the most likely outcome↑
4. Explanations converged on "give out more Fate Points" which means the damned things are worthless rather than a resource that should be valuable, meaning challenge is ever, when you get down to it, challenging↑
5. Key FATE word there↑
6. Everyone Knows™ that D20 is a system that results in unkillable Godlike PCs, and that even a point blank shot to the head of even a minor character is not a guaranteed kill, except there are rules in the system that make both those things not true. It's just that most people turn those rules off without a second thought - only to start whining six months into their campaign about Godlike characters and ineffective pistols↑
7. Both FATE and DFRPG are Evil Hat products↑
8. Version 3↑
9. For the MM&L character generation session↑