Do Androids Dream of Board Games?

I have always been fascinated with Cyberpunk, primarily because, if you didn’t already know it, Blade Runner is my absolute favourite movie, and nothing has ever budged it from that spot.
What I liked about Blade Runner is almost ephemeral, but to try to put it into words, it was the dystopian, noir setting mixed with a protagonist and antagonist who were both mixtures of grey. While the Blade Runner is the hunter, the replicant in the prey, the roles are reversed by the end of the movie. I find Roy a particularly fascinating villain, because he toys with Deckard in the final hunt. Roy is dying, yet he plays the game one last time because he was built for combat. He shows how he is not a product of his engineering but something much more by saving Deckard in the end. Because at the end of his life, he finally was able to understand how precious life was.
I’ve run a number of Cyperpunk RPG’s and, while fun, they were pretty much fluff. It was D&D in the future, where cyberwear replaced magic. You ran a mission, you got paid, you got more cyberwear. Later the creators of the game would go on to state that that wasn’t their original intention. That you were supposed to be brave street soldiers who fought against the ‘system’. But of course, absolutely nothing was presented in the main book to play like that (with the possible inclusion of the Rockerboy character class, which was an odd choice for somebody to play as a ‘edge runner’).
The problem, it would seem with cyber RPG’s is that when you have cyber equipment, you are generally superior to somebody without cyber equipment and since cyber equipment just costs money and sometimes a small bit of humanity loss (or Essence cost in Shadowrun) there is very little reason not to do it.
Looking to another supers game call Underworld, I think that game had it right. See, in Underworld all supers were engineered with science. So all superpowers where genetic, cyber or whatnot. In Underworld, you had to not only buy the power you wanted, but the doctor who was going to install all this stuff and the therapist who was going to help you out with it afterwards. While odd for a supers game, what a brilliant mechanic to introduce for a cybers game.
And yet, neither of the major two cybers game did just that. Both had a bland $X will get you X bonus.
The reason I think about Blade Runner and the Cyberpunk RPG is because of a new board game, called Android. While I have not yet played Android I own it and have read it over. It is a game which is complex. Overly complex in fact, to the point that it will overwhelm some players. But it is a very deep and quite logical game. But it does one thing in spades, which is atmosphere. It is dripping with atmosphere which is quite interesting for a board game to accomplish.
In Android, there is a murder. And that murder hints at a bigger conspiracy going on. Now unlike say, Clue, the murderer and conspiracy are not predetermined. You are not trying to guess who did it (which I think I would have preferred but the game works almost as well without it). There are a number of suspects and you are given two ‘hunches’. One is your guilty hunch and one is your innocent hunch. If your guilty hunch turns out to be the murderer, you get a nice victory point bonus at the end of the game. So, you go around collecting evidence of the murder or the conspiracy and you can place that evidence on any suspect you desire (i.e. usually the suspect you have your guilty hunch about). Whether or not you see this as actually finding real evidence or manufacturing evidence, that’s up to you. The conspiracy works much the same. You place pieces on a puzzle which, if they link up to a person or organization, give you certain victory point bonuses at the end of the game.
But like Blade Runner, the murder isn’t the important thing here. It’s the vessel which drives the game but the story is about the hunter. Or in the case of Android, the investigators. There are 5 such characters and each are unique. Like RPG level unique.
Each of the 5 investigators comes with a back story and a unique set of problems. One is a corrupt cop. One is a bioroid (android) who has directives that he must obey. One is a detective with a bucketload of bad memories. One is a psychic clone who must avoid going insane. And finally one is a bounty hunter who is bad with money.
Each investigator has a set of unique goals and unique plots which affect them. They can ignore those plots in favour of trying to ‘solve’ the case or they can focus on them to try to get a ‘happy’ ending from the plot. Getting happy endings results in victory points. ‘Happy’ for the bounty hunter means she ends with lots of money. ‘Happy’ for the clone means not going insane.
The victory points comes from three areas. ‘Solving’ the murder/conspiracy. Getting favour tokens (which is the ‘money’ of the game). And resolving your personal plots in a ‘happy’ way. In their example, the player who completely failed to solve the murder but resolved their personal plots very successfully ‘won’ the game. I guess the idea is that while other character successfully solved the murder, their life was so fucked up as a result of it, that it wasn’t worth it in the end.
Again, dripping in atmosphere. I haven’t really seen this type of game play in any other board game before. And atmosphere can be ignored, certainly. You can just treat the plots you get as text on a card. Corrupt cop is loosing his wife. Get enough good ‘baggage’ to ‘succeed’ in the plot and she stays. Get too much bad ‘baggage’ to ‘fail’ and she leaves you. The first one gives a victory point bonus so that’s the ideal one, right? Sure, but this is a game where, if you like, you can really get into the life of your investigator. It’s not role playing but it’s far more involved than any other board game would normally attempt.
During the course of the game you spend your time getting some form of token. There are lots in the game and fortunately, it’s reasonably logical if not somewhat convoluted. Again, this is not a simple game and it’s hard to get your head around what is needed to be done to accomplish anything. But once you do, the logic appears.
In order to solve the ‘crime’ you need to hunt down one of three types of clues that are on the board. When you move to a location with a clue, you get to investigate it which gives you evidence to place on a suspect or a conspiracy piece (again, you can pretend this is actual evidence/conspiracy or you can be manufacturing it to fit what will give you the win).
While not tracking down evidence, you spend the game getting those aforementioned tokens. There are plenty of different types of tokens and they are confusing but again, they eventually follow a logical understanding.
1) Favor tokens are the game’s currency. This is the tricky part to the game. Knowing where to go to get the favour that will open up what you want. The favour tokens are: street, corp, society and political. Generally favour tokens do very little on their own (they are worth a small amount of victory points) but usually they are used to buy other tokens which are more useful.
2) There are baggage tokens, which are used to affect your/another players plots. You want to put good baggage on your plots and bad baggage on another player’s plots. The concept behind good baggage is that you’re actively trying to resolve your plot in a good way, rather than a immoral way. You’re pretty much responsible for putting good baggage on your plots while other players are responsible for putting bad baggage on your plots. You need favour tokens to buy baggage tokens. As a fine example, you can use street tokens to buy baggage tokens at the local bar/brothel. Hopefully the logic begins to appear (favors from lowlifes can be exchanged for goods and services which will make your miserable life slightly better).
3) Some places are restricted. You can go there but it takes a bunch of your time to get through the ‘front door’. As a way around that, especially if you plan to visit that locale a few times in the game, you can go get a warrant. But warrants require political favour tokens.
4) Interestingly enough, if you really want to help or hinder the suspects, there are expensive places on the board which can aid you. There is one place where you can ‘buy’ an alibi for a suspect that you obviously want to be innocent. There is another place where you can buy a ‘hit’ to be put onto a suspect. Three ‘hits’ and that suspect dies. It’s expensive, but it’s a good way to get rid of a suspect that you don’t want to be guilty or innocent. And are you manufacturing this or uncovering the truth? You get to decide.

There is logic to the game but it wont’ be entirely obvious to players what they should be doing on a particular turn. If you’re close to some Street Favors, you might as well snatch up a few of those in hopes that later, you can use them. But unless you know that you will want a warrant on one of the major corporations later in the game, you might not think it wise to get the political favours that are required to get the warrant in the first place. It’s not a game that lends itself well to the first time players. Strategy will be hard to build until the game is very familiar.
But the game has enough beauty and feel that I’m fascinated with it. Just like I am with Blade Runner. I dunno if it’ll be the best board game of all time. I’ll have to play it to see. A game can’t just be all style and no substance, afterall. I dunno if it’s quite as innovative as the designers will claim it is, still, I have to respect the design behind the game. They put a lot of love into this one and I hope it pays off for them.

Midnight

So far, my Midnight D&D game has been going very well. The first session and ½ were all cut-scenes of the backgrounds of the characters. Then came the character creation during the later half of the 2nd session.
We had our first official game before, and while it was good, I’m still establishing many things.
This weeks session was…different. I have, if I may boast, a great deal of experience in GMing but little in D&D. D&D is new territory for me and that comes with it’s ups and downs.
I am not a big fan of D&D combat. At least from the book. I find that too many fights become: “I attack.” Over and over again. Because D&D, while tactical, tried to keep things ‘fast’ by limiting the form of attacks. Smashy characters can use Feats to mix things up, but not until they take those Feats during their character. And the Feats out of the main book are pretty simple. Power Attack is the most common one, allowing you to take a negative to hit and a bonus to damage. Not what I would call exciting.
What I noted in the combat was that I managed to give just enough choices for the players. Armour in my Midnight game doesn’t make it harder to hit you but makes it harder to hurt you. And while that allows the heroes to hit the enemies more often, they do a bit less damage. But…there is a way to take a negative to hit to circumvent some or all of that armour. So ultimately you can either chip away at your enemy bit by bit (hitting frequently but doing a bit less damage than normal) or you can choose to hit less frequently and do ‘normal’ damage. The choice, however, is up to the player. And I like that.
Another change is the use of Vitality and Wounds (from the Unearthed Arcana). I love, love, love this much better than Hit Points. They function in nearly the same capacity but the flavour is different and important. I would use this for any D&D campaign I ever run (but I announce my retirement here and now, cuz I can’t see myself running anther D&D game after this one).
Vitality are equal to HP’s. It’s your level times your Hit Die. Pretty standard there, but again, it’s the flavour. HP’s are a combination of taking damage, being tired and getting lucky. It’s the luck part that I never understood because how does a healing spell ‘cure’ your luck. Anyway, Vitality represents, more or less, your fatigue level. D&D still has the Fatigue and Exhausted conditions, but Vitality represents a character’s natural energy levels. When you chip away at Vitality you are not really being hit. You’re blocking, dodging and using all your effort to avoid the attacks. And with each narrow miss, you are getting more tired. And this is a very visual thing for me as a GM who insists on seeing their combatants sweaty and tired after a fight, with aches and pains, pulled muscles but still alive.
Vitality returns quickly, much more than HP’s do, 1 per hour (so long as you’re not doing strenuous things). So healing, which happens to be limited in Midnight, isn’t always necessary.
Now Vitality by itself isn’t much more of a HP like mechanic. So why do I love it so? Because I’ve added rules to it (shocker, I know). What I’ve added is that characters can push themselves harder, making a Surge as it’s called. They can get a bonus to hit and/or damage. And this can be done before or after the dice roll. But each Surge requires the player to spend a random amount of their Vitality (1d6 all the way up to 2d10).
Now I am a huge fan of putting the choices of the characters in the players hands. The d20 mechanic is horrifically random and I’ve spent many a combat where I miss all my attacks and wait, kinda bored, often reading until my next action. I am so limited in what I can do as a player, in a standard D&D game, which is why I have limits on how much I enjoy D&D combat. So here, I’ve developed a way for players to decide for themselves when something is important and when they can just ‘let it go’. They can spend their own Vitality to do better in combat. And I like that because as a pile of HP’s, it’s just a static pool (only affected by the enemy hitting you). But if you can use Surges that spend your own, it’s now dynamic. Both you and your opponent can chip into your Vitality (oh and just wait until I start doing that back to the players). Now I can see combat very clearly in my head. The exhaustion that comes from whirling around your opponent, from pulling a muscle to avoid that sword swing and then to push yourself beyond your normal limits to delivery a killing blow. Love it.
After Vitality all characters (who have classes or are semi-important monsters) have Wound points. Wound points are equal to the Constitution of the character. And these are WOUNDS. When I start getting into a character’s Wound points, they are cut and bleeding and badly damaged. Wound points heal very slowly naturally and with limited healing in Midnight, this makes things pretty brutal. After a character chips away at all their Vitality and starts taking Wound points, I can still see the visual clearly. The character is just too tired to get out of the way. They are just too slow to block it properly. Or even they blocked the shot, but the bruise under their shield splits open finally and blood starts to ooze from their fresh gash.
Oh and Criticals? Well attacks that Critical bypass Vitality and go straight to Wounds. Criticals are brutal in this system and I love it. Even at 15th level, the Rogue is only going to have 12 Wounds (unless he raises his Constitution). Even at 15th level, every hero and villain is vulnerable. Which requires both sides to think things differently. Regular D&D gives you the benefit that you’ve got your meatshield who can take the front line attacks. My own Ravenloft character has 71 HP at current. I have the confidence, while walking into combat, that nothing can ‘one-shot’ me. I would expect nothing more than 50 HP in a single round, inflicted upon me. But with Wounds? There’s always that unlikely chance that it would be possible to take any character out.
Combat was very good. I enjoyed it, and I didn’t think I would. The last time I ran D&D was 4th edition and I was bored stupid by the combat. The players had lots of stuff to do but the monsters I was using was boring to the extreme, no matter how many powers they had). I enjoyed running the monsters (undead orcs) and they were quite simple. They didn’t use their Feats, shields, tactics and had no wounds, so they found without performing Surges. And yet, I was quite satisfied with them.
The players got around 3 Critical hits, which outright killed three of the undead orcs. Very nice. The others had the standard chip away at their ‘HP’ (again, Vitality in this case). The party released quickly that it was easy to hit them but scoring much damage was harder because of the scale mail that the orcs wore. So many of them resorted to using a combination of circumventing the armour (taking a negative to hit) and Surges. The damage Surge was used to great effect, especially by the Pact Mage (wizard type) in the group who was able to use Burning Hands on three of them. She only rolled 1 point of damage but because of the Surge, she inflicted +5 to each for a total of 6. (This might come to bite me on the ass later but we’ll see).
For my part, I critical one character (and confirmed that critical). Now we got to try out something that I was eager to see. Because I’ve altered Criticals to allow players to inflict ‘special effects’. Think of cinematic things done in combat. In this case, I choose the Pin option, so the Rogue was pinned by one of the orcs. Again, very easy to see an orc bashing down their opponent and then thrusting his sword to pierce and pin their opponent. It was a moment of real worry for the party. The rogue had no Vitality left and was down to about 2 Wound points…it was a dangerous and potentially bad situation. But he was aided and saved.
The party, was beaten to shit by the encounter and that was perfect. By D&D standards, a party should exhaust 40% of their resources on an equal level encounter (I shit you not, it’s in the book). This is nonsense as any good GM knows. A standard CR 1 creature should be an equal level encounter for a party. Now granted I’ve done a lot of changes, but I hit them with 7 CR 1 creatures. They were in peril, spending more than 40% of their resources, but it was a good fight. I feel very good about the flow and that I didn’t completely overwhelm them. The point of Midnight is that the enemy has won and you’re in occupied territory. I’ve failed the moment combat is blasé and orcs are just XP train rides.
So only because I used a lot of optional rules, do I feel good about my budding D&D campaign. It fits my GM style more because it’s gritty and brutal. More than I was finding the Warhammer RPG (with it’s loosy goosy healing rules).
Here’s to a great start and a long future.

Is it Just Me?

I liked Halo 3. I love Gears of War 2. But, is it just me or did these games both take a million years to come out with…absolutely nothing new.
Now I understand in the case of Halo 3. The previous Halo was on the Xbox, not the 360, so I’m sure a new engine had to be created. And yeah, the graphics were better. Very crisp and clean visuals. But the game play is pretty much exactly the same.
Gears of War 1(GoW1) was made on the Xbox 360, so Gears of War 2 (GoW2) and received a token graphical update but pretty much looks and plays like GoW1.
Now I get it. If you have a franchise that works and works well you don’t fuck with it. Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill have skirted the line of changing things around and both have been caught between various degrees of success and epic fail!
But what I don’t get is why it took so damn long for both Halo 3 and GoW2 to come out. Both games are, ridiculously short. I could have finished Halo 3 in a single day. GoW2 seems a bit longer but I think I could have had it beat in 2 days. Fortunately the online play gives both games considerable survivability. But I still can’t get my head around why it’ll take so long to construct these games.
I presume that level design is an important feature and takes a long time to make. I remember Doom 3, a FPS and the game was HUGE compared to these games. I suppose Doom 3 has a lot of endless corridors which help pad the levels considerably, but still, it took me weeks to almost finish that one. Dead Space took me only 13 hours to complete if the clock is to be believed but it took me days and days to finish because I had to move at a more careful pace and died a lot.
What I guess I find funny is that Halo and GoW are acclaimed for their storytelling. But…these are really basic stories. They are exciting in that you really like the main characters. Master Chief and Marcus are both tuff guys and you get into the role because these are just two soldiers who absolutely refuse to die (despite the fact that both really should have many times over). The Halo series is a very simply constructed story, at least after the first game. And the GoW series introduces so many little plot threads that never get explained, it comes across as sloppy writing rather than what I think that they are trying to do, which is, sell more games in the future with promises of explaining themselves. But I can’t help but think, if GoW had better storytelling in the first place, they wouldn’t need to tie up loose ends. Good storytelling makes a reader/player invested in the story in the first place.
To give an example of the frayed storytelling (look a metaphor, I think), you start GoW1 in the middle of the war. Without any explanation in game as to why this war is being fought. It just is. You look awful human to me, so we presume you are human…but who actually knows. It really wouldn’t be the first time a game tries to trick you. As you fight people talk about the Locust Invasion. You quickly learn, more through osmosis than clear storytelling, that this doesn’t mean that the crops are in trouble. The Locust are aliens. Okay, fine. You start fighting them and while some of them are yelling you realize that a) they are speaking English and b) they are using guns not unsimilar to your own. Is this a story thread? After two games, I don’t think it is but it could be. Oh and they are talking about cities that I’ve never heard of so I have to conclude, we aren’t on Earth.
Since this is all super confusing, maybe it’s time to pause the game and watch the intro movie for explanation. They talk about E Day (Emergence Day) on Sera (which is the planet), the day that the Locust first showed up. Now there is war. That’s about the entirety of the short, opening cut scene.
So you are thrust into GoW with a shaken understanding of what it is your exactly you’re fighting for other than to avoid extinction. It’s a very private tight story focused on Marcus and his squad of Gears (soldiers with cool armour and cooler weapons). And while they all remain a mixture of charming and dicks, you can immerse yourself in their individual plight but I found it extremely hard, from what the game delivered, to figure out the setting (seriously, why are the enemy speaking English). I mean sure, I should care about them not dying but I couldn’t figure out why, if these are humans, they can’t just abandon their planet on spaceships, since they must have used them to get on the planet in the first place. In fact, the Locust feature no space ships themselves making it…another unresolved plot thread.
Since the storytelling in GoW 2 isn’t very deep (although it’s very well acting, IMO) it’s a surprise to me that it took so long to put out. I’ve seen some screenshots between GoW1 and 2 and yeah, 2 looks a lot better. But GoW1 looked great. So I’m a bit disappointed that GoW 2 didn’t bother making their story better.
That being said, a big part of their story involved the secondary character, Dominic, where Marcus plays the role of witness to the tragedy going on in Dom’s life. That was a bit of a surprise although kinda refreshing. It’s a bold maneuver that I think pays off. If it happened to Marcus then you’ve got a character in which the world revolves around. So that was a very good touch.
Halo, storywise seems to have the opposite problem that GoW has. The first game was reasonably deep, with a story that was clear and concise. Halo 2 had an alright story that ending in a big screw you to the players. Halo 3 had a very vapid, forgettable story which had it seem like there wasn’t really a story at all. Something about the Death Star being rebuilt and somebody trying to use it. So I get that the time it took between Halo 2 and 3 was to port it over to the power of the 360 but you think they could have spent some time on the story. I don’t mind the story that they choose but the framework seemed weak. You are location A. You discover that you need to do C. Suddenly you’re at the location of B so it’s just a hop-skip and a jump to get to C and get your objective, where you find out that you need objective E. Suddenly, you’re at location D and it’s just a hop-skip and a jump to get to objective E. Wash, rinse, repeat and you’re done. It really seems that they could have done a better job with the story.
Fortunately for both games, you like the main characters. Marcus is seriously bad ass and has such a great emotive voice that you have to like him. If I were him I would have punched out one member of the Delta squad a long time ago, but Marcus is the leader and keeps professional. More than any of them, he keeps his eye on the ball. Nobody appointed him the protector of the human race, and he wouldn’t even admit it, but he’s the most focused to winning the war. Master Chief seemed more bad ass at the start when you find that you’re a cyborg and soldiers are cheering when you approach to help them fight but as the story goes on…I wonder…did anybody else think that he had the hots for that tiny woman A.I. that he was always saving? I mean, it’s kinda cool if they did something with it, unrequited love and all. Regardless, Master Chief is given the weight of the world because he’s a cyborg and thus, he can do things that others cannot. To me, that’s an entirely more believable synopsis than a single human soldier who can wade through bullets and being eaten twice (in GoW 2). But who cares cuz it’s just a game.
I cannot believe that Halo or GoW is done. So I will look forward to next time when both, I hope, have a better story to go along with all that intense high octane action.

More Human Than Human (Drugs in Games)

Dice roll Modifiers: To reward players we heap on bonuses. To punish players we give them negatives. This is one of the reasons that drugs in games don’t often work.
Shadowrun was always a game of prissy elves and sterilized technology, so having cybernetics that always worked and having drugs that were entirely forgettable, was fine. Shadowrun is gritty-lite.
But Cyberpunk really tried to go for a much dirty game and therefore, I blame them entirely for these same failures.
Very quickly: cyberwear was much too clean in Cyberpunk. There was never a chance that it was installed poorly, that it could wear, that it could fail or screw up and become more of a problem that it was worth. It was always superior to have cyberwear over not having it. Cyberpunk’s mechanic to avoid too much tech was a fairly weak mechanic that would lower your Empathy and once it was gone, your character was a raving lunatic (and you lose your character). The mechanic is entirely weak because the player can roll their dice for how much of a loss they take and then judge whether or not their character can take more. Once the roll was done, there was never any adjusting it. Once I hide the character’s rolls but then, a player took too much cyberwear and I was stuck. They didn’t want any more stuff but I rolled and their character became a cyberpyscho and was done for. They were the central character. So what to do? In the end, I ultimately ignored it and told the player not to take any more cyberstuff and he was perfectly happy with that.
Games that try to go for the gritty seem to also lack any moral or ethical system. I guess in the grim future, it’s become perfectly acceptable to shoot low paid security guards in the face and be fine with it later. A good player may take it upon themselves to have a moment of feeling awful, but they’ll get over it (often forgotten about by the next session).
Because of a lack of moral/ethical rules or even rules for stress, a character has no need for things that we use everyday to counter stress. Everybody in this world has a way to escape their lives (many of us pretend that we’re other people). And so too should a good and layered character has those outs. Although a lot of players tend to rely on some arguable ‘weak’ methods of escape: “My character sure does love to clean. Yes sir, after a day of murdering security guards and getting nearly killed, there really isn’t anything I like better than going home and doing something entirely safe and without consequence.”
I’m not saying that every character needs to turn to drugs, but to get into the mindset of the character, living on the gritty streets of Night City, drugs would be everywhere and they would be cheap. All your friends are doing it. People look at you like you’re a damn narc if you don’t take. But most importantly, it fits with the genre that you’ve chosen to game within.
The problem isn’t the world or the genre. It’s the players and how drugs are handled in the game. Recreational drugs almost always give some trivial bonus to skills that won’t come up and give hefty negatives to skills that are important to the game (often combat skills). And of course, right after that, the player gets to read the addition difficulty value and most of them say ‘No dice. My character is living clean.”
Ignoring the fact that booze and smokes are actually addicting drugs (but they’re legal and hence cool and can’t harm anybody), unless the system has a mechanic that handles something as ephemeral as stress, there will never be a reason or a need for a character to take recreational drugs. Games like Cyperpunk try to promote heavy combat and in combat, things that give you the aforementioned negative modifiers, especially when they are optional to begin with.
I believe that hard lives demands hard play. Part of a great Cyberpunk journey, at least the books that started the genre, was about the human part, not the cyber. Sure for the RPG they introduced more corporate hiring of street mercs to pull local black ops, but they completely dropped the ball on making their gritty world…well gritty. The Cyberpunk RPG wasn’t a journey to watch your soul slip away due to cybernetics, bad moral choices, loosing people close to you or even losing yourself into the violent world of gangs and drugs. It was D&D with guns.
In order to make these things compelling, you have to make them compelling to the type of player who wants to play Cyberpunk. You then have to construct rules that say, if you sell this piece of your soul, you get this benefit. Then you have to have the negative be there, but not completely outweigh the benefit and still have some relevance to the game. Players, after all are nothing if not efficient. The street solo (fighter) is completely willing to sacrifice all their social skills to become the bestest killer evar. And it’s all the more apparent in an RPG, because often the player never has to deal with the character on a non-adventure level (heck, nobody would ever want to live the life of this bad-ass machine who goes home and sits on his bed, waiting in quiet until the next time he’s called…it would be boring in the extreme). And furthermore you have another play handle all that ‘sort of thing’. The ‘face’ of the group who gets the contracts and the like. And this is always handled poorly and always handled in true min-maxer capacity. First there is the Face who gets the job and then the corp meets with the group. All the players address the corp equally and questions are answered. But really, you don’t think that the corp wouldn’t turn to the cybermachine character and tell him he’s not talking to a fucking toaster and then only address the ‘face’. I wish I had pulled that one of the characters. The second thing, that I *hate* is when one player shops for everybody else. Really? That’s absolutely, without a doubt, utter crap. Pick five friends. Now go do all their shopping for a month. Fuck that. It just won’t happen. Shopping for others is boring and entirely unrealistic and yet if the Charisma high character can get a price discount on stuff, everybody will take advantage of it.
Now back to my point, the killing machine with no empathy, what if you introduced an abstract system of friends and contacts. And your inhuman character no longer has people outside the group to call a friend. Without friends you have nothing to keep, say…your character’s Aspiration Stat afloat, because it’s constantly dwindling like your ammo supply. One cheap way to put your Aspiration stat above zero is to take drugs. Well now, you may have just used game mechanics to enforce the genre, but why not. We have Charisma stats to let us understand how well our character interacts with the world. I think it would be a bold system to have a stat something that represents the core motivation of a character (you say Willpower, I say Aspiration) and that with more cyber, you have less reasons to care about anything. You are dying inside and the only way to make you feel anything is through a drug.
That sounds like a damn fine story potential to me. So instead of making a D&D rip-off, why don’t game designers tailor the rules to their genre more? I wish I knew.

Tactical Role Playing

With the arrival of D&D 4th edition we witness a new system that is a blend of video game action (primarily Massively Multiplayer Online games, hereafter MMO) and miniatures combat.
What D&D 4th edition does, it does well, as I've expressed previous. It handles combat in better fashion than ever. Maybe I should explain why:

All games give you the ability to make 'an attack'. Some games might even vary that up a little, as previous editions of D&D did. You might have a Bull's Rush (shoving your opponent), a Power Attack (less accuracy and increased damage) or a Trip attack. But often, these variations, which are meant to lead to more interesting combat, just add filler rather than anything interesting.
You bull rush your opponent...inflicting no damage but shoving them back a square. Unless they are next to a pit, there is little point to this maneuver.
You power attack, which is just an application of math. I remove 5 from my chance to hit for the chance of +5 damage. It's not very engaging.
You trip attack, which, without the correct Feat, allows your opponent to hit you first. If you trip them then they are on the butt. They can stand next round but you can make a free attack on them. What did this net you? You could have attacked them outright instead of caused the
slowdown. Now with the Feat, you can attack without fear of a counter-attack and can take a free shot on them if you succeed. You need a lot more rolls to pull this maneuver off (roll to hit, roll Strength check, roll to hit again). The net gain is okay.

Now the interesting thing about the last maneuver in D&D 3rd edition is that with the Feat and the right weapon, you can pull this Trip attack every round. Making it your standard form of attack, in which it now becomes a triffle boring. You just Trip over and over and over again,
having to make 3 rolls to pull it off. I've almost built a character like this but then you realize that there will be creatures immune to your trip. I didn't see the point.

So to fix all this, 4th edition gave a character a number of interesting attacks but with one bonus and one limit. The bonus is that, built right into a new attack are all the 'extras and effects'. Instead of being able to 'tack' a Trip onto your standard attack, you will now have an
exploit that is called "Spinning Sweep" which, if it hits, inflicts damage and knocks your target prone. One roll to determine all that. It's a simple system where you will have a power that will inflict a) scads of damage, b) moderate damage and a good 'extra effect' or c) light damage and
a powerful 'extra effect'. It's a simple but very good system.
Now there is a limit on these powers, but it's a good one from both a DM point of view and a game design point of view. Attacks are limited by how many times in a day they can be used. There are only three classifications: At-Will, Encounter and Daily. At-Will is just like it sounds. You can use this attack every round if you like. These are pretty basic and every character gets two. That's not a lot but it allows you to switch things up a bit. A Fighter could take Cleave and Tide of Iron. Cleave is great for fighting multiple foes. Tide of Iron allows you to shove your enemy around the battlefield. Again, this is in addition to inflicting damage.
Encounter powers are an excellent concept. You can use this attack once per encounter. So you have to rest and it resets, ready to go for the next fight that day. This was done because the previous edition of D&D had a lot of situations where you would blow all your cool powers in the first fight and be 'spent' (more often for your magical types than your fighter types). So...you had little other choice than to stop and go back to sleep. Which was kinda dumb and stagnanted the flow of a dungeon crawl. An Encounter power is better than your standard At-Will powers.
Daily powers are just that. They can be used once per day. They are, of course, the most powerful abilities that you will get. These are the times where you have to make an important choice. Will a fight require you to use your Daily power? Or will you save it in case there is another fight around that dark corner.

D&D 4th edition has improved combat. But it seems to have done so at the expense of role playing.

There is a fine argument to be made that there is nothing in a rules set alone, that limits me from role playing. If I want to play an axe wielding dwarf, a fighter is the best class for me. If I want to play a two weapon wielding Dragonborn, taking a Ranger is probably the right thing
to do. And if two players choose to be an axe wielding character, then it becomes more important to role play my dwarf different from your character. It was the same thing that might have happened had two players in 3rd edition played Fighters in the same campaign.
The problem occurs: what if I want to play a spy? What if I want to play a person who is a tracker and good in the outdoors but is more of a mystic who doesn't perform magic but speaks with spirits? What if I want to play a cleric who is all about healing and buffing the group?
In 3rd edition: For the spy, I could easily take a rogue and focus their skills and Feats to be all about manipulating people with my words and perception and stealth based. I couldn't entirely get away from the fact that rogues aren't that bad in combat but I could look for a feat to trade off my Sneak Attack for something more spy based. Eventually I could even work my way up to a Spy Prestige class.
For the outdoor mystic, I could probably take a Druid. Maybe I could focus it on summoning spirits. I could also take a look through the millions of books and find a class that gave me what I wanted.
For the cleric, I could easily pick the spells that focused me on healing and buffing.
The options are no longer there. D&D clearly defines the roles that all players MUST conform to (and I use the term players, not characters) and all characters must be good in combat. There isn't even an option to be less useful in combat. The Rogue is a combat monster now. He doesn't
even get much for 'thief' abilites until some paltry tricks at 2nd level (many of which are more useful during combat than out of combat).
The Druid is gone for a year, until then next book comes out, but we can already see what is in store. A combatant that uses the power source of Primal, rather than Exploits, Prayers or Magic. And you know what: Primal will result in the same type of powers that I've listed above. High damage and no effect, moderate damage and moderate effect, or low damage and high effect.
The healer/buffing cleric: gone. Clerics can heal but there is barely any reason to focus on it. All clerics are battle clerics. A number of their abilites boost others ONLY if they fight. You can build a cleric who uses melee weapons (to attack) or their holy implements (to attack) but gone are the days of giving Bull's Strength to the fighter or Cat's Grace to the Rogue. These spells no longer exist. It's all about inflicting damage.

D&D is truly just a tactical combat game with some role playing elements. You no longer have the option to play a character who isn't a combatant. You have to be an combatant and on top of that you can do your best to inject some character and give yourself a reason to role play.
Is it possible to have a game that can blend tactical combat and role playing? Actually, yes. I have a game called Cadwallen. It is produced by a company that is better known for their miniatures game: Confrontation (and AT-43 if you care). Cadwallen touts itself as a tactical role playing game and was released about a year before D&D 4th edition. And it gives you all the options and a lot of flavor while primarily being a game about combat.
Cadwallen is a game about combat. You are supposed to buy a miniature and the DM uses a map. But there is a lot more meat there. It's combat system isn't quite on the same level as 4th edition is, but it's actually quite good. And it already differentiated the fighters through it's skill system. Combat in Cadwallen is skill based. So you have Bash as a skill. You also have Slice as a skill. You might have Trick as a skill. Bash might use your Pugnacity stat (it means how aggressive your character is). Slice might use the Sleight stat. Trick would use the Opportunity stat.
It was quite easy to build a character who fit your view. In D&D 3rd edition, I am currently playing along side with a Paladin who is very un-Paladin. He has trades his spells and his mount for other features. He has taken feats that allow him to be adept in acrobatics and he wears light armour. It's an interesting character and the system fought the player every step of the way but he manage to pull it off and make it work. He even uses only a dagger in combat.
In 3rd edition, if you wanted to play a Rogue you were still stuck with the concept that Strength was the defining stat for hitting and damaging. You could take a Feat to allow you to switch to Dexterity for hitting but nothing that would help your damage. It was still strength based. 4th Edition fixes that.
In the only edition of Cadwallen, if you wanted to play a Wolfen warrior you can focus on your Pugnacity stat and the Bash and Pummel (and other type of attack skills) skills. If you wanted to play a Goblin warrior, you were in luck. You could effectively rely on your Pugnacity but instead could focus on the Opportunity stat and the Trick and Back Stab skills. The Wolfen might be a more effecient killer but the Goblin could get the job done and allowed for an interesting diversion.
If you wanted to play a human explorer, that option was there as well. Not a great fighter at all but you could notice all the hidden treasure when it came time for it. And of course, you could mix and match professions quite easily.
Every character started with three 'tours of duty'. Want to play the best warrior: start with three combat 'tours'. Want to play a rogue who can fight and explore? Take one fighter tour, one rogue tour and one explorer tour.
With Cadwallen's system you could make nearly anything you could imagine. The combat ended up a bit dry as your Wolfen had no reason to ever change things up and not rely on Pugnacity and Bash (same with your Goblin trickster fighter). But it was a step in the right direction, and really, it was only as 'dry' as 3rd edition combat, which really isn't that bad. The important thing is that the system barely limited the character concept. You can do what you want and how you want it.
This simply isn't true with 4th edition. You are stuck in a role. This role limits a character more than it helps. Two fighters will look awfully the same and I can have an elborate backstory, hunting down my father because he was murdered by a demon, and you can be Ted the fighter.
My backstory will amount for nothing. Our powers may be different, our skills may be different but we will have the same number of attacks in a fight and the same number of skills. There isn't any real variation. Two fighters will function in the same role and there isn't anything that helps support my background.
And my concept could have been grander. I might have really wanted to have some good exploration skills, be a real outdoors type. But I like the idea that my character is a defender of others. The former part would insist that I'm a Ranger. The later part would put me in the role of a Fighter. Without some (very weak) multiclass feats, I can't really pull off this concept. I have to make my concept fit into the roles the game has given me. And it really shouldn't be that way.

I still like D&D 4th edition, despite what I say. But it has really relegated itself into a tactical combat game with some role playing. Combat will always be the most important and overwhelming part of D&D now. Where in my current game that I play in, my character worries about when the Rogue and the Druid wander off because they aren't quite as capable in
combat as my character might be (both a rule and a role playing thing), this wouldn't be true in 4th edition. Both would kick ass without exception and both would have a large number of hit points so I wouldn't have to fret about them in combat.
Thus D&D truly has become a game about kicking open the door, killing the monsters and looting them for treasure. Nobody is saying that's a bad thing. It fact, it's a hell of a lot of fun. But that's all D&D 4th edition promotes now. It does not promote diverse characters and you can't make your concept always fit.
I guess that the sad part is, given how the classes and powers are laid out, there isn't much hope that expansion books will do anything different. The Martial Exploits book will be coming out in a few months. Now instead of 12 pages of Fighter attack powers...I might have 30.
Weee....
The best thing that this new book could do is showcase Exploits that any Martial character can take (possibly allowing your Fighter to do more than just hit things with Strength) and if they had a ton of Utility (non combat) Exploits, that would be great as well. Again, if they didn't force them to be of a certain class that would be great. Thus your Fighter could take a Martial Utility Exploit that made him more useful outside of combat. Now you could build the diversity that we saw in D&D 3rd edition. They could fix it, but sadly all signs point do not point to yes.

Ah to have the power to blend gaming systems. The character building options and stats/skills of Cadwallen and the combat powers from D&D. Maybe that would too good of a combination and thus limit any future Tactical Role playing games from hitting the market? Well, I can dream, can't I? =)

D&D 4th is here

So gaming as we know it has changed. TSR --> Wizards of the Coast --> Hasbro has graced us with Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition.

I've taken a long look at it. Not a crappy preview look but a good hard look.

And I'm a bit torn.

I like a LOT of what I see. I really do. I will certainly enjoy the fights and the encounters in D&D 4th edition more than any other D&D. What they do, they do tremendously well. This will likely be the closest thing to playing a scripted video game fight scene. I'll give you an example: There are creatures and classes that have very cool 'interrupts' that occur and certain times in the fight. Typically when they are Bloodied, which has at 1/2 their HP's. For example, a high level wizard might explode with crackling lightning that blasts all nearby foes or a dragon might be able to immediately interrupt the action to breath fire. Stuff like that.

So what part am I torn on? Equality.

I remember a long time ago, I believe a much earlier edition of D&D had different stats for the different sexes. Male characters got an increase in Strength, while women often got an increase in Constitution and likely Charisma, if memory serves. That division didn't last long as newer games told the bold concept of making men and women equal and there were no changes in the stats. I'm not saying focusing on the difference between men and women is a good or bad thing but it's a realistic thing. I mean, I am not a big fella, but I know very few female friends who can outwrestle me. It's just how the human body was made. Things are not equal.

Well...D&D 4th edition is. Wow did they ever work tremendously hard to ensure that everybody is equal.

Let's look at D&D 3. This was not a game built on equality. And I've flip-flopped many times to thinking that was wrong to that was good. The obvious negative of a lack of equality is that somebody is getting the shaft. I remember one of my favorite games had me as a Fighter and another player playing a Halfling Bard. I seem to recall that the player specifically went out of his way to try playing the weakest character he could. He succeeded. In case you wondered, a Halfling Bard is the weakest thing you can play in D&D. From 1st level to 14th level he did 1d8 damage. And he sang giving us all that 'precious' +1 bonus to hit. Woot...

Some classes in D&D 3 sucked. Some sucked at the start and didn't come into their own until much later. Nobody is going to claim that their 1st level Wizard is going to be able to beat the 1st level party fighter. It just doesn't happen. You don't play a Wizard because he's awesome. You play him because one day...he will be. It matters not whether your character is going to reach the coveted 20th level, just the promise that you could have been the overpowered time-stopping 'nuke that no good bully fighter from orbit' (meteor swarm) ubercharacter is good enough. You start as a wimp. One day you could be a tiny god.

Oh and druids suck. That's for you DD.

There is another type of inequality that existed in D&D 3. The fact that it was very possible to make a character who did not use that awesome-sauce feat or spell and thus be entirely inferior to another character who built their character around it. Did you know about that Feat? Did you buy the Spell Compendium to discover that totally 'broken' spell? I remember flipping through the player's guide and giving our party cleric her two best spells. She would have survived without them but with them, she was so much better and more efficient.

So the fine people at Wizards looked at these disparaging differences and wiped them out of their game. Now...everybody is equal. Not the same, but equal. There is a difference.

The way that they've done it is through Powers. Everybody gets Powers now. Fighters, Rogues, Rangers & Warlords get martial powers (called Exploits) that are basically tricks in combat. Clerics and Paladins get divine powers (called Prayers) that are basically tricks in combat/magic. Wizards and Warlocks get arcane powers (called Spells) and I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. Everybody now has stacks of phat powers.

And, to make sure that everybody is equal....everybody gets the exact same number of powers. (That is not 100% true but it's like 90% true). Every class earns the same number of powers. It's possible to get an 1 extra power here or there from races or a class or a feat but generally, you're going to have roughly the same number.

The benefit of this may or may not be obvious. NOBODY sucks in 4th edition. While there aren't anymore bards, even a Halfling fighter is going to be a terror in combat now. As much of a terror as that Half-Elf Rogue. And exactly as powerful as that Dragonborn Wizard. Yep...you're all equally awesome.

And I guess that's where I'm torn. Gone are the days where Wizards would one day become tiny gods. You now start as powerful as a Fighter and/or Paladin and/or and you will remain just as powerful as they will. Spells are now just 'powers'. Just like the fighter's exploits. I'm afraid to report that fireball does 3d6 damage. That's it. If you want ti inflict more damage, you get a more powerful spell (one that is sufficiently in tune with the power of the fighters more powerful exploit).

Now this is not to say that all classes inflict the exact same amount of damage. You have to read the finer powers of powers for it to all make sense. Suffice to say that fighters will inflict some really good damage. Clerics will inflict decent damage but they give buffs and heals to their party WHILE fighting. Wizards inflict moderate damage but to a lot of opponents. Rangers and rogues get lots of movement in addition to their smashing. So I'm not trying to say that at the end of the game, everybody does Xd6 damage. But the powers all scale with each other so that no one class has becomes the Wizard of 3.5. Nobody surges ahead in the 'end game'.

And the impressive nature of spells is now relegated to being 'just a power'.

You see, back in the day, when a monster designer wanted to jack the power of a monster up...you would add the final, brutal, evil component: the ability to cast spells. Your dragon...sure...he's tough. Great AC. Lots of HP's. Lots of attacks. Tough fight. But oh god, you add spells and a DM who know their stuff...and you are on the verge of an epic fight.

But now...adding 'spell casting' to a monster is irrelevant. It's irrelevant because saying that a monster can cast spells as a 10th level Wizard is now comparable as saying it can use Exploits as a 10th level Ranger. The result is kinda the same.

All is not entirely lost. Wizards lost a lot in spells being cool and gain Rituals. Rituals are where your long term magic comes from. Anything that lasts for moments is a spell. Anything that lasts for a long time is a Ritual. The only fault is that they could only fit so many rituals in the first book. So the rituals do not really have the same flair as spells did before.

D&D 3.5 had 123 pages (of 317 page book) dedicated to spells. 4th edition has about 10 pages in each class dedicated to their powers (so that's about 10 pages of Wizard Spells and 10 pages of Cleric spells, sorry, Prayers). They have 15 pages of Rituals for players (both Wizards and Clerics) to use. Rituals, while very cool as a concept, really have yet to come into their own. They aid the adventurers in many ways but I can't see any of them turning the tide of any encounter.

I don't think D&D 4th is bad. It's just a different beast. I think most players had gotten used to some things sucking and some things being more powerful. Spell casters were a mixed bag. On some adventures, with the wrong spells...they weren't very helpful. In other adventures, when they had the right spell for the right situation, they defused the fight without too many problems. Maybe that was a sticking point for Wizards of the Coast? Maybe they couldn't stand the idea that some encounters to too hard while others were too easy. While I understand their concerns, this does end up allowing encounters to not get boring because you never quite knew how something would turn out. Would the flying Drow hidden in darkness fuck the party hard because the Wizard used up all their Dispel Magic?

Now, based on my impression (because I haven't had time to play it) the Wizard will provide the exact benefit that having the Warlord and the Fighter and the Rogue (etc, etc) will to the party. Each members provides their powers. No more, no less.

Conformity and equality. Will this make for a better game overall? Yeah, I guess, probably. Had we not played with the inequalities of the past, the push to make everybody equal wouldn't be so transparent.

So welcome to D&D 4th edition. The system is cleaner and smoother. It is simple but has depth. Everybody is awesome in their own way, and there are no classes that are wildly unbalanced. And I for one can't wait for the new books to come out and throw in a TON of new powers to unbalance things and shake things up. =)

I. Am. Iron Man

Don't panic. This is not an Iron Man spoiler.

Among my group of friends it is no argument that I am the biggest Iron Man fan. I just saw the film. I loved it.

It brought up some interesting questions in my head, and please forgive me because I'm departing from the game stuff for a moment and just examining some superhero movies.

We have Batman Begins, Superman Returns, 3 X-men, 3 Spiderman and now Iron Man. Oh and Daredevil...but...the less we talk about that, the better.

Did I like Iron Man better than all of those films? It's a very hard question for me. I don't think I'll be able to resolve it.

Batman Begins was an instant love. It was a great film. Superman Returns...I didn't like it in the theatre much but I began to love it after I thought about it more. I liked all three of the X-men films, or should I say the Wolverine films guest staring the X-men. They fucked up Rogue big time but there is no turning back. Spiderman films were fine. Good in fact, but I hate Toby and felt he gave a pretty boring, wooden performance.

So...Iron Man. I love him. I love the suit and the tragic history of Tony Stark (alcoholic, playboy, hero). But...would other people like him? I liked Tony Stark for reasons which will become obvious quickly. He was a very, very smart man (like my dad), he was a bit older than your Peter Parker/Captain America type (like my dad), he was an recovering alcoholic (like my dad). Notice a theme here? When I was young I very much associated Tony Stark and my dad. So I had an instant connection with Tony. And I loved the idea that a person, a man, could build a suit of armour that could make him a global hero. (One of the Avengers, doncha know).

After seeing it, I think, hands down, Iron Man is THE most entertaining superhero film. I will not say that best superhero film...people will make their own judgment on that. But it is the most entertaining. There were almost zero scenes where your mind wanders off and you wonder where this scene is going and could that actor overact just a little more...

Iron Man is entertaining due in no small part to Downey Jr.'s excellent performance. In the comics: I cared about Tony Stark but...I realize that I didn't really like him. I liked his story but he wasn't all that...I dunno...interesting? It's hard to write a character and make him compelling. Tony had his dark side. He struggled with a lot of personal demons. Tony was alright....but I really just read the comics to watch Iron Man kick ass. He was always more interesting, as with many superheros, with the mask on.

However, Robert Downey Jr. performance as Tony was excellent. Because Robert has what Mr. Stark is missing. Charisma. Downey Jr. has a ton of Charisma. You quickly grow to like and care about Tony Stark because of the charisma the actor portrays. And suddenly, Iron Man becomes a lot more likable as well.

Christian Bale did a fine job as Batman and an okay job as Bruce Wayne. But nobody cares about Bruce Wayne. You're just waiting for him to grab some two bit criminal and yell out: "I'm Batman!" That's the interesting parts of the movie.

I loved the actor who played Superman...does anybody know his name. Clark Kent was cute and funny, but Superman doesn't wear a mask. He's always Superman. The actor did a fine job.

But Tony Stark was awesome in this film. And as such, Iron Man, the hero, became a more interesting character to watch. And thus Iron Man the film becomes the most entertaining superhero flick around.

I'm very glad. Cuz they owed me for Daredevil...

Descent – Part 2

I’m finding it very odd, perhaps considering my previous ‘Storyteller’ interest in the game of Descent, that there is a very odd debate on the forums for the game. Actually not one but two debates. Debates…arguments…overreaction…take your pick.

It seems, that with the new campaign system there is a way for the hero players to manipulate the game by out running the clock so to speak. Thing of Descent as a video game in that there are many video game mechanics. One of these mechanics is that the heroes can return to the main town in the middle of a dungeon run. During this trip to town they can receive some quick healing, buy some potions and return. The game it would seem presumes that at least one hero is remaining in the dungeon to kick some ass and take some names. But by the rules, all of the heroes can technically leave the dungeon, go shopping for any length of time, and return.

During such an extend shopping trip the Overlord is free to fill the dungeon with countless monsters, so the heroes would return with an uphill battle. Thus it’s quite foolish for the players to wait in town for any real length of time. Part of the strategy of the game comes from the idea that players will need to minimize their trips to the ‘mall’.

But the loophole in the campaign rules is two fold. First, while on a dungeon run, both sides have the ability to earn Conquest tokens (think of it like XP). The heroes earn Conquest tokens by exploring, looting and murdering the inhabitants of the dungeon (sweet!). The Overlord earns Conquest tokens from murdering the Heroes, with said inhabitants, and by cycling through his evil Overlord deck of cards (which is a timer for the Heroes to speed things up). Second, the game is forced into a confrontation conclusion when the total Conquest tokens (earned by both the Heroes and the Overlord) reaches 600 tokens.

Thus, some crafty (rules lawyers) players have figured out that if they are loosing badly, they can just enter a dungeon, all ‘port to town, announce to the Overlord that they are waiting for 600 turns or so to go by at which point the game hits 600 Conquest tokens (cuz the Overlord is cycling endlessly through his deck and earning Conquest) and the Heroes are magically transported to the Overlord’s Keep and battle with the Overlord’s Avatar begins. Ta da!

No, no…it gets better.

The Overlords have discovered their own rules manipulation. This is less of a rules loophole and more of a jack ass thing that Overlords who are playing to win can do.

Imagine that the focus of the game is for the Heroes to go through about 12-15 Dungeons, where both sides increase their power slowly. The Overlord puts pressure on the heroes and has a few ways to win the game premature to the heroes confronting the Avatar. The heroes need to make some tough choices and if they make the right ones, the heroes will thwart the plans of the Overlord. This should take roughly 80 hours of game play.

Or….the Overlord can teleport one of their Lieutenants to the main city of Tamalir and siege it. Once the city of Tamalir is razed (taking about 4-6 turns) the game ends. The reason why this works is because a starting Lieutenant is more than a match for the heroes. It’s expected that the heroes go through a couple of dungeons before they face a fearsome Lieutenant. But if they do go through a few dungeons first (getting the much needed loot and magic items to defeat the Lieutenant), a vicious Overlord can earn enough Conquest tokens himself to upgrade the minions of the Lieutenant so that as a whole the Lieutenant and his minions are once again too strong for the players to face. Thus they lose horribly and cannot stop Tamalir from being sieged and the Overlord wins the game.

Far be it from me to judge these Overlords or Heroes who play a game like this. But I will anyway.

To the Heroes…well…their tactic is just stupid. An Overlord should just say ‘no’. At some point the deck cycling should end or the town should kick the heroes back into the dungeon or the dungeon portal should close. It’s exploiting the build it timer of the game.

To the Overlords…okay what do they think they are playing here? If they want to use the rules to manipulate the game so that they win a game in hours which is supposed to take weeks to months to play…who are they fooling? How much of a titanic loser do you have to be to not only steal the hero’s thunder by not even giving them a chance, let alone a fair chance, but to use a cheap rules combo to win the game before the heroes can react properly to it. What is the point of ever playing with a person like this? Is this player proving something to themselves? Will they gloat that they won in record time? Will they gloat about how they crushed the other players so badly?

After reading these exploits, I feel so much better about my stance to be both a Storyguide and an Overlord in these games. I no longer think it’s an option. It should be required.

If the Overlord is being a dink, then I would encourage the hero exploit being using to trump the Overlord exploit, however. Because there is some great comedy to it. You see: when a hero teleports from a dungeon to go shopping, they go to Tamalir. The very city that the Overlord can siege (and raze) to prematurely end the game.

We enter a narrative on week (turn) 4 of the new campaign:

Citizen: Woe is us! The Overlord sends his minions to attack us. The siege is blocking our food, our water and our hope. Woe is us. Will no one help?!

2nd Citizen: No, there is no one. The Heroes are weeks away and I heard that they just entered a dungeon. Even once they leave, they will not be strong enough or experienced enough to save our city. No one can help!



1st Citizen: Can you save us?!? Can you help us?!?! Please, you must!

Heroes: Oh yeah. No worries.

2nd Citizen: Nay, they cannot help. They are in the middle of a dungeon run. And even once they are done, they still won’t be strong enough to fight the evil that sieges our city.

Heroes: Whatever. We got it covered.



1st Citizen: Pray good sirs, what are you doing.
Heroes: I said, we got things covered.

2nd Citizen: But the siege engines will not stop. We are but a week away from the walls failing.

Heroes: Trust me. This’ll work.



Heroes: That’s us.



Both Citizens: I can’t believe that worked…

Descent

I’ve been fascinated for a while with a board game called Descent: Journey into the Dark. I think that they called it that because the name Dungeons and Dragons is already used somewhere else.
Descent is a game that pits 1 player, known as the Overlord, against up to 4 other players, known…er…as the players. The players take a character and their goal is to fight they way through the dungeon to defeat the evil that lies within. There is treasure and magic items that are placed along the way. Naturally, the closer to the big evil you get (we’ll call him the end boss) the better the magic items are. Naturally. Cuz I guess…the end bosses always keep powerful health-threatening magic items close to them, packed in chests, often right outside their own personal lair. I guess all the monsters in the world are quite keen on giving the would-be heroes a sporting chance.

Regardless, the game plays out quite well. I’m surprised that I like it because I played it’s predecessor, Doom (based on the video game), a long time ago and was completely unimpressed. I don’t even remember getting that far in Doom before disliking the game. But games like Doom and Descent should have been right up my alley. Lots of little plastic figures, well designed scenarios and fun gameplay.

A game like Descent, however, seems to create two interesting schools of thought. Some people look at it like a board game and nothing more. It’s a board game where there are 4 players verses 1 player. The Overlord player can play the game to win. He uses his monsters and cards without mercy to defeat the heroes until they have lost enough conquest tokens. The Overlord wins. Muahahaha, I guess.

But there are lots of people who will look at Descent as a game that strips away the role playing from D&D and is just a straight out dungeon crawl. It is a tactical game, more so than D&D is, but it still has the fun that a D&D dungeon crawl can have. Actually, for people my age, it’s probably better. Old sckool D&D would take many sessions to perform a dungeon crawl. When I was a kid, we could play once a week if not more. So a dungeon crawl could take 1-2 months. Now, I play 1-2 per month. So a big ol’ D&D dungeon crawl could take 2-4 months of actual time. That’s boring. Descent makes it fun. It’s different, but fun.

I am most definitely a person who feels that the Overlord is there to run the dungeon but not focus too much on winning. The point is not to let the players walk through the dungeon but it’s also not to brutalize them. I’ll be honest with you, I’ve run about 12 games of Descent so far and I probably could have won 11 of them.

In the first 11 cases, I ‘fudged’ the dice. Which in this case means, I didn’t throw everything in my hand at the heroes. In most of the games I was winning anyway and I didn’t feel there was a point to making the game unfun for the players. One I was beaten quite badly and had no hope of winning but that was great because we all had fun.

I guess that’s the difference in mentality. I don’t believe that the people I invite to play this game would have fun with it, if we treated it purely like a board game. Me vs. them. Instead I think after playing it, we all realize that we play the game to have collective fun, not competitive fun. I don’t consider myself, as the Overlord, a loser in the game when the players defeat the end boss. In fact, I find it very odd that some other people online do. They have lost the game. I guess they have, if they define the victory of the game as win/lose. I find it amusing that I never once thought that’s how the game was supposed to be played. I always figured that I was there to make the players have a good time. That I was their guide as much as I was their adversary. That to win, we all have fun.

I remember playing Doom and I don’t remember all of it, but I think we were getting pounded on at the beginning and I recall that I wasn’t enjoying that part. I seem to recall that we did get further in and did make some headway but I think we were beaten in the end. I don’t really remember. I just remember that parts of it were unfun. I don’t blame the Overlord in that game, he was just as new to it as I was at my first game of running Descent. But had my initial experience to the game be more positive, like we did some serious kicking ass and felt a bit awesome, I might have liked it a lot more.

In retrospect, I’m very glad that the players I managed to wrangle into playing Descent with me stuck with it. Now everybody I play it with finds it a fun game. And I find myself careful to pace the adventure based on their success or lack thereof. A bit of bad luck on their part could allow me to easily ‘win’ the game. But I realized that I’m not running Descent to win. I’m actually running it to lose. I want the heroes to win in the end. I want it to be a very close game and one that is hard fought. But one the few games that I have won, I feel like all of us have lost. Isn’t that funny?

I now have a campaign system to work with Descent, where the players get to play the same heroes over and over again and watch them grow. I’m quick to offer my suggestions and opinions and helpful advice. I guess I could offer them nothing but hard times and win the game by playing it like a jerk. But I just can’t see the fun in that. And I doubt either would my players.

My players. That’s how I see Descent. That’s how I see most games that I introduce my friends to. Like a RPG, the people I introduce to the game are my responsibility to take care of. To give them a positive experience with for that crucial first time. Once they start having fun with it, I can try to focus on the win. But if a player is having a bad time at a game, they likely won’t enjoy it and then they won’t want to play it again. So I guess helping the players in a game is as much for me as it is for them. I’m helping them enjoy the game so that I can catch their interest in the future when I want to run games. It must be the gamemaster in me. I like to run games for other people. Descent seem to be no different, despite it’s pretence of being a board game.

Scion

I picked up White Wolf’s latest creation: Scion. They are released it in three stages: Hero, Demi-God and God. As might be gleaned from the riddle that is their title, this game is about playing the child of a god, who, if they gain enough legend, might one day achieve god-hood.

The concept is pretty sound and that’s very good…because this game only has a concept. There is virtually no follow through.

I remember a while ago being excited about another game, called Sorcerer. It was something about controlling demons via magic to do…stuff. Sweet. Sounds great. Had a friend pick it up from Gencon for me.

I got it and was entirely disappointed. It had some pretty barebones rules, some GM stuff and some essays about gaming (if you can believe that) and no setting whatsoever. In fact, the point of the game was for me, the GM, to make the setting. That was a total cop out. I don’t buy games to create the world. I buy them for the world. I most certainly don’t buy them for the weak rules, because I can create far better ones than a lot of games out there.

So I think you know where I might be heading with Scion. At least, Scion has a better concept. The Titans have awakened. The gods are in peril. The world is in peril. The gods have no time to save the world so it’s up to their kids to do it.

I love this concept. Sure do love that concept. I couldn’t wait to dive into the book and consume the juicy details within. Only problem is, they were missing.

I have to wonder if the fact that this game lacks a true setting/world because they wanted to do something very much the opposite of their bread and butter games in the World of Darkness line.

Oh you can figure out the setting and the world, more or less. There is a 40 page story at the beginning of the book that is the usual blah that most games produce. There is a lengthy 1st Adventure that is including in the back of the book, some parts of which pretty much contradict the fiction in the front. But I really am not paying good money so that I can extrapolate your setting. I am paying good money so that I can go to the GM section and read the juicy secrets. I will choose what I want and what I don’t want. But at least give me some world to use or discard.

There are the basics, given out in brief point form which one would presume is for the players. But instead I must use it as a GM to build my world from. I really find this shoddy work.

So what do they have in place for a GM? Well they have this handy dandy section on how to be a Storyteller with many tips on what makes these Epic stories different from other things you may have run. Okay…I can see this being of some value. But only to a select few. To be honest you really will end up with two types of GM’s here. Inexperienced GM’s, who will not ‘get’ what this type of section has to say or experienced GM’s who ignore this section in favour of flipping to the “Adventure Seeds” section (which naturally does not exist in this book). Because experienced GM’s know their trade or are too stuck in their routine/rut to re-read what they think they already know. What they really want to know is what this world is about so they can let it sit and gel in their mind’s eye and develop into a story that they need to run.

The rest of the book is filled with character creation, powers and rules. I won’t say it’s the worst set or rules I’ve seen. I’m sure I’ve purged the Palladium system out of my head. But it is not good.

White Wolf has a formula. Stat plus skill as a pool of dice, normally totalling between 3 and 10 dice. When this was compared to all the d20 games at the time, it was new and innovative. Now it’s pretty darn common. There is nothing wrong with this mechanic, however. When it first hit Vampire, each die that rolled a 6 or better (their standard difficulty) yielded a success. So successes were plentiful. As you watched WW games over the years, you got to witness as each one in turn slimmed down on the successes. The default difficulty became 7 with Aeon Trinity. Now the success number is 8 or better. We’ve gone from a 50% chance per dice to get a success to a 30% chance for a success per dice.

Some math nerd better than I could tell me I’m full of it, but I certainly have seen that trying to get an 8+ provides a player with wildly random results. After building a character in Vampire with 11 or higher dice to roll for their Dominate, a few lucky dice rolls from opponents with less than half my dice pool and I was beginning to think that my poor vampire was only fooling himself into believing that he could control people’s minds.

But I could live with the 30% chance per dice. If the rest of the system wasn’t so bad.

Scion uses a very close system to another popular WW game, Exalted. I never got into Exalted but it looks neat (think crazy martial art action in a fictional world). But it looks like the creators of Scion tried to tighten up the system here and there. In combat, Exalted has an opposed dice roll (where I roll for attack and you roll for defense). In Scion there is a just a defense value (DV). Okay, nice and simple. But I guess this didn’t feel like 2nd Edition D&D enough for them so they decided to have multiple DV’s for every character (Parry & Dodge and a third one which amounts to None). Sorry, I should say poorly defined multiple DV’s because there is no reason to rely on anything other than your best one unless there is an attack that denied you the right to use that DV. What are those attacks? I wish I knew because they give you some vague examples that are confusing and really just amount to the fact that you still will want to rely on your higher DV.
Oh and those DV’s change the second your character takes any action other than standing around looking bored. So the DV’s constantly get adjusted while combat progresses. Fine. Stupid…but fine. I know it makes sense. If you extend yourself with a fierce attack, you’re easier to hit. But it’s a serious pain to deal with in the thick of combat.
They also made a Soak value, which means you take less damage from things when hit. No real problems with that. Until you actually try to use the system.
See the system might work fine until you factor in the Epic stats. Supernatural stats that overwhelm and break the system. This wouldn’t be so bad if some extra thought and playtesting went into it, but…I don’t think it did.
Epic stats give you automatic successes tacked on top of what you roll. The problem doesn’t like in the Epic stat itself. The problem occurs when one character as the Epic stat and the other character does not have the Epic stat to counter.
If I hit your character and you have Epic Stamina…but I do not have Epic Strength…the vast majority of my attacks will simply not hurt you. Likewise if I don’t have Epic Dex but you do, I will never hit you in combat, while you will always hit me in combat. The moral of this story might be: Make a well balanced character, but in practice it really does mean: Everybody be the same. Everybody take Epic Strength, Dex and Stamina. And that isn’t fun.
Their sample characters are not balanced. The chick from the Asian gods can pretty much beat all the rest 9 times out of 10, because she is impossible to hit and can always hit them. She has everything put into Dex, Epic Dex. Her Epic Dex allows her to hit so accurately that her excess to hit successes can translate into damage so she may even be able to circumvent Epic Stamina.
So…basically…in the WW world: Dexterity is god. If you don’t take Epic Dex, you’ve all but crippled your character.
So…whatever. I don’t like the system. Maybe it could work better on practice than it does on paper? The answer to that is a resounding no. The system is criminal.
It is slow.
It is dull.
It is painful.
Two of these are bad enough. But this has all three . It takes a long time to conclude one attack (slow), that takes a bunch of math to figure out (painful) and ultimately, it just comes down to “I attack.” (dull) with little variation. Exalted worked because you had half a dozen bad ass maneuvers you could pull off. Scion is just…bad.
So...a great concept, a poorly executed setting and a god awful system. Scion is a titanic failure, as far as I’m concerned. I will run a game, but I gutted the system and even after one session of playing it, I’m gleeful at the possibilities (more on that in the future). Without much of a setting, I guess I am free to do whatever the hell I want. But I didn’t need to pay money to do that…seriously. As a GM, I can always do whatever the hell I want. But if I’m going to do that, I’ll use the far superior Fate system.
So I can’t recommend Scion to anybody. I will run it and then never pick it up again. Not for ideas or brainstorming. It adds nothing helpful to the world of gaming.
I guess I should say something nice: the covers are very pretty.

4th Edition D&D Races

When D&D published the campaign setting Eberron I had to groan. They included the addition of a new race known as the Warforged.
The Warforged are player character constructs. There are constructs in the D&D world. I love the concept of infusing a soul into a construct. It’s been used in other games, most notably in Warhammer 40K (The Eldar infuse their Dreadnaughts with Eldar souls) and Starcraft the video game (Dragoons were infused with Protoss souls).
But the Warforged…they just came across as an uber-nerd’s wet dream. I’m not saying that Warforged are horribly imbalanced. I’m just saying that they are kinda lame. If for no other reason than they represent the type of gaming that I used to do (aka Power Gaming) when I was like, 15.
Enter D&D 4th Edition preview. While Warforged are mentioned, thankfully they are contained in the Eberron book which will be published at a later time. I skipped Eberron 3.5…I think I can manage to skip it again.
But wait…enter a new race. One that we’ve almost never encountered before…the Dragonborn!
I am so torn about the Dragonborn. And yes, they are dragon men. Horns, giant bodies, tails, scaly skin. The works.
I have always loved worlds where ‘monsters’ are not all evil. Where ‘monsters’ have their own societies and sometimes, those societies function along side or within humanity. Mageknight, the collectable miniatures game, did this a great deal, for example, and I really liked that. Trolls were part of the Elemental Faction and worked along side with elves and tree constructs. I really like that feel. Shadowrun has their Trolls and Orcs. Earthdawn (which is kinda the same world as Shadowrun) has their Obsidian Men (and their orcs).
So…why am I torn about the Dragonborn? Well…cuz they are the Warforged of the new D&D world. Regardless of their stats and benefits, they are just another uber-nerd’s wet dream. I know I love dragon men. I know that there were Draconium in the D&D world already. But I never played one. Why? Cuz I would feel dirty. I would feel like I’m being so cheap and twinkish for playing one.
So I think that the Dragonborn are kinda…nerdy and lame. Thrown in because somebody decided that they were cool. No really, that’s listed in the book as the Short Answer reason. Dragonborn are twinkish.
But god do I want to play one. I wanna play a Wizard Dragonborn or maybe a kick ass Dragonborn Fighter! Oooh…maybe a Warlock Dragonborn!!! Sweet!
And…I feel like I’m 15 again.
I’ve gamed for a lotta years. I’ve never played a Halfling. Or a gnome. I’ve played maybe 2 dwarves. 1 Elf, for a short lived campaign. Shouldn’t playing a Dragonborn be like getting a driver’s license? Shouldn’t you have to do the probationary period where you play other races so you can learn how to respect the ‘regular’ races, before you are allowed to try out a Dragonborn?
I just don’t know. I wanna play a Dragonborn. But I don’t want my friends looking at me like I’m just taking one to min-max my character. I can already hear one of my friends in his deep voice: shame...

Random Characters

A friend of mine recently said that she liked random stats (in reference to D&D). I confess that I've loved the idea of rolling up those great stats as well. Notice I said great stats. Nobody likes rolling up a GAP employee. Lousy GAP employees...hate them so much...but I digress. In a Ravenloft game I've rolled up the best stats that I ever have and ever will. So I'm tempted to retire from D&D here and now, just to keep that legacy alive.

With this in mind and my recent comments about Classic Marvel I remember that there was another system that had very random character creation.


Top Secret. Not the 'updated' S.I. Nope...the original one.


Okay, if you've no idea, Top Secret is about playing...gasp...spies. It was obviously inspired by the James Bond movies of the past and the various other 70's Spies TV shows. Anybody who played it would be hard pressed to say bad things about it. I will, only cuz "I'm that guy."


Only in retrospect is the system bad. It's percentile...kinda. I know that sounds odd but really...it was...a very...ahem...unique system. I mean...it was very common for players to have 75% in a skill that they were okay in and 120% in skills that they were great in. There were a lot of modifiers to help bring you down.


And the combat system was just messed up. We didn't care at the time. It didn't matter that the gun combat used percentile and that the hand to hand combat system was...actually a chart based system with zero dice rolls. And the two systems did not mesh at all. It also didn't matter that if you wanted to shot 10 bullets at an opponent you had to roll your first bullet with a 0% modifier, the 2nd bullet with a -10% mod, the 3rd bullet with a -20%, etc, etc. We did not care. We loved it. Well...we were kinda young and impressable and willing to put in the calculations to roll 10 times to shoot 10 bullets.


This is a game that had their first module named: Operation: Sprechenhaltestelle. I played that module several times and even read it. I have no idea today what the hell a Sprechenhaltestelle is, but it was damn cool! Here was a game that was not going to dumb things down, even if they thought about it, they should have. But no sir, not for all us pimply faced losers who played it. You wanted to know what the hell a Sprechenhaltestelle was...you had to go to the library to find out...or ask a German kid...or maybe it was somewhere in the damn module. I don't remember. I don't even care. The word itself just became something iconic. You could be failing math but you would be pretty damn proud of yourself if you could even pronounce this module. It gave you nerd cred.


But back to the Random Characters. This game had it all. Nothing will beat it (not entirely true but there are some games that just made a joke out of it). You had to roll for everything. Everything. What sex your character was. Your stats. Your skills (as in, which ones did you have and how good were you). Your languages. Which hand you were proficent with. In the expansion (that everybody used...duh) you could roll for such glorious and important things as your blood type, your retinal ID code, your fingerprint ID. There were some calculations too, based on your random rolls. You could figure out whether you were endomorphic, mesomorphic or ectomorphic. I had no fucking clue what the hell these were but I figured out one meant fat, one meant skinny and one meant stocky. I think. I didn't take biology and I didn't care. This was rad.


Classic Marvel was just as wonderfully random. It's randomness was magnified if you got the Ultimate Powers book. At least Top Secret was reasonably fair. Everybody played a human...you were only so tough or strong or smart. You could have sucked in all departments but you did have some good skills that could be (hopefully) useful under the right circumstances.


But Marvel...Marvel said fuck fairness. To be painfully crass, I think it skull fucked fairness and then dated it's sister.


No, seriously, it's the only game I've seen where I can roll up a well trained human with no real superpowers and you can roll up a god, while Jim over there rolls up a living plant. Oh and totally random powers. But of course my human gets random powers at low power levels and the god gets his totally random powers and at very high levels. And then the living plant guy is totally random powers at random power levels, such as getting Feeble (2) Storm Control (can make it sorta, kinda windy) and an Unearthly (100) ability to meld with cork or something. Oh and teleportation and laser eye beams. Why not. He's a plant afterall.


Rifts may rival Classic Marvel for inappropriate power levels but only Classic Marvel made it random. It was kinda fun to roll up something totally wild. When I was a kid. I tried it recently...and...yeah...it's pretty awful. A random character creates a role in which you are forced into playing. It is not 'fun', IMO. It's a bit of a lark and silly but it's not a long term thing. You have zero investment in it. And if you can't get invested in your character, then you're just rolling dice.

At the end, I'm a bit more of a fan of a points buy system. I don't want all characters to be equal. But I'm keen to not have anybody outclassed by random character generation. I think it's obvious that the Top Secret and Marvel systems were rather silly. No control over character creation is wrong. There was some joy in watching a character unfold before your eyes but now, I've been unable to find any ability to invest myself in a random character. I would rather build a character the way that I want. To suit whatever music is going on it my head at the time. I think that the industries obviously has adopted this as well, since I can't remember the last time I've even seen an random system. Other than, of course Warhammer. Hmmm...maybe that's why the players had trouble getting into their characters? I dunno.

Warhammer - Final Nod

So...after two years, I brought my Warhammer game to an end last night.

I felt that some words needed to be said about Warhammer.

The original Warhammer game hit sometime in 1986. I don't remember exactly when I started to play it. Must have been in the late eighties, early nineties. I really liked the world. D&D was entrenched but I've never quite been sold on the setting, which D&D kinda has a lack of. D&D, even at the time, felt like they were going for something unspecific in their setting. It was a melting pot for monsters and magic. This rarely detered any GM I knew.

Warhammer was different. It had a finite setting, but one which could easily act as a sandbox. It had years of history that you could read and buy into. It had plenty of monsters but many monsters were 'feature' monsters: The orc (greenskin), the daemon, the beastman. It had a very high quotent of zealots. It was also very low magic, both mages and items. It was definitely different than D&D.

I remember enjoying Warhammer a great deal, both playing and running it. I remember my campaign got rather out of control but the players enjoyed it. I just remember my friend Jason's unstoppable Dwarf who slaugthered every Chaos Warrior he met in some grisly fashion. He quite enjoyed writting down every gruesome way that he butchered one.

In the game that I played in, I remember my first actual...well...role playing. Where the story started becoming more important than the stats on my character sheet. Golly. How did that happen...

Good players helped. I remember that, Steve tried out a female rogue. I was a bodyguard and started protecting her. We could see a romance forming between the two and that was neat and different. And kinda odd because...well...we are both straight males...so...it was just weird. But we both got into the roles.

Dave played some pale Outrider character, who, as it turns out, had quite a bit of plot associated to him. He became a follower of Morr (the god of death) because he had been the only survivor of a massive war. We later questioned whether he had survived that battle or if Chaos had given him some fortune.

As the campaign progressed, we found out that Dave's follower of Morr began to see strange things. We uncovered a plot to overthrow a high ranking member of the Empire. We met with some lizard creature who was giving us information, when the GM handed Dave a note. Dave murdered the NPC before our eyes, believing it to be a heretic. We had watched Dave's character get slowly worse at this point and we crossed swords for the first time. We didn't fight...just crossed swords. Dave's character was so tough that he could beat any one else in the party one on one...except me. I was had the 'strong' to beat through his 'tough'. So it was a very tense sense. And we were like teens here, so it became all the more intense.

I told him that he had to leave the party. And he did but he was filled with sorrow for doing it and I for telling him.

I later decided that I needed to busy my character's time because I didn't want to think about what had just happened so I would go on a quest to get a magic sword. The GM had not given us any magic items at that point but felt that if we were to seek one out, that would be an excellent way to introduce one. I got a quest about a sword broken in half. Sounded pretty epic.

Then Dave's character returned. He sat down and revealed that he had already learned of my quest and he presented me with the haft of the sword. Then he hit me with the bombshell. Probably the first incident where I could really understand what role playing was all about. He entered into this speech, explaining that my character was his only friend. And that he was haunted with darkness. That he may be a servant of Chaos. And that he could only trust me to kill him if he turned over to the darkness.

Solid. Gold.

Naturally, I could never let my friend perish in such an awful way. I told him that we would find him some cure. That I would never give up on him. He made me promise me that if we couldn't find a way to cure the darkness in his heart, that I would kill him.

I say again: Solid. Gold.

Without saying it, the GM, myself and Dave all knew that there was no cure. There would never be a cure. There might be a false cure, a quest for a cure or some other such nonsense. But my best friend was turning to darkness...and one day we would cross swords again...and one day we would find out who was stronger. Light or Darkness.

I am said to say that the campaign ended before this could ever get resolved. The GM was moving to Vancouver. I am always a proponent of good so allow me to bring it to a conclusion. We cross swords. We fight and we are well matched, but my heart isn't in it. He gains the upper hand. I beg him to remember some shred of who he used to be. He has a momentary lapse of conscience and pleads with me one last time. He raised his sword to finish me off and I finish him off instead. I fade off into the sunset, never to be seen or heard from again.

Regardless of the lack of true resolution, Warhammer will be the first game where I remember what true role playing could be like. That having uber stats are great, but it's just a sheet. Getting into the role could be more rewarding.

So I was eager to try the new Warhammer. Like trying to play the Classic Marvel Superheroes again...it just didn't quite have that magic. The combat system tried to steal too much from D&D, with full actions and half actions. The magic system was much better but that also meant much more abusive. I didn't quite like the percentiles, having experienced a newer generation of superior mechanics. Still quite liked the world so I dived into it.

I'm glad that it's over. I was very keen on it at the beginning, but I've come to realize that anything that last so long does lose it's steam after a while. The characters were powerhouses at the end. I was generous on XP and magic items at the end but I threw up a creature that said in the book: Characters cannot possibly manage to beat such a creature. These are plot devices at best. Well my Greater Daemon WAS a plot device and I gave them enough magic boost to beat it. I suppose without those, they might have failed. But I suspect, even without a magic boost, they could have beaten it. No big deal but it's the one thing that was never 'fixed'. Their monsters are wimps. I know, there is a template that you're supposed to add to monsters to make them tougher but I really would have rather had a book that gave you the Newbie, Expereienced and Tuff guy versions of each monster.

I saw a lot of potential in the Warhammer RPG but it never quite achieved what it could have. It has the same problem that I have with Cyberpunk 2020. In both cases, they built this world to be grim and dirty. Then their rules don't quite follow through with it. In Warhamemr you have Luck Charms which are great in concept...but they have nothing to do with luck. They have a 1 shot use where you can avoid taking damage. What?! Where's the luck? How do you recognize a luck charm? Etc, etc. Luck Charms should have been a 50% chance that they work, for example (and been much cheaper). (Cyberpunk 2020 has a clearer example of what I mean: It's a grim/dirty world...but Cybernetics cost $X.XX amount and get installed without any problems, ever, and there are no grade of doctors or anything. For a grim world it had a pretty clean system to handle getting Cybernetics).

Warhammer was a grim world but most of their mechanics were too clean. They did have their critical hits tables and that lead my party to lose eyes, ears, toes, fingers, etc. And that was grim and dirty. But their disease rules were a little weak. And their healing rules were too easy. When my group found out that Healing Poultices were 1 penny apiece...well...they laughed and then cleaned out every store they could find. Again, no chance that those Healing Poultices would ever be bad. Not for 1 whole penny!

Anyway, I really would have liked to have seen a world where it was a bit more dirty, where not everything worked the way it should have. Where the rules matches the fiction. It's grimmer than regular D&D and other fantasy settings, so that's something at least.

One last observation about Warhammer and D&D. With the new 4th Edition D&D that, again, I think will be a very fun game. But it will now be infused to the core with magic, as first level characters can now produce magic shields, teleport short distances and the like. That's fine for D&D but it will now create a bigger distinction between Warhammer. D&D looks like it'll be much harder to have a low magic campaing without excluding some classes. Warhammer may well become the fantasy game of choice for low magic fantasy gaming.

Oh...who and I kidding...most people won't even remember Warhammer when the new D&D comes out. I guess I will and the first time I was walked down a campaign in which the worse enemy of the adventuring group was my best friend and one of our own. The Enemy Within. That's was Warhammer was all about. I may never touch it again but I hope that it does well.