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...
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Railroading
If you know me, then you know my rant about railroading. But I've got a blog so why not post it again.
Railroading is when a GM puts an encounter or situation into the game which, no matter the course of action the players takes, cannot be changed or altered. As a player, it is one of my biggest pet peeves. I hate railroading. Because: a) most of the time, it's really transparent, b) it's kinda weak GMing and c) it makes me think: Why doesn't the GM just tell me what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
I'm just as guilty of railroading players as other GM's. I make no such claim that I have not done it. But I don't think I've been awful with it.
There are degrees of Railroading. I've seen all types. In the bigger pespective, some railroading is very forgivable. So long as it's not over done. These are minor tweaks to the dice rolls, encounter level and so forth where the GM already knows the outcome of the fight. It gives the illusion that you are not, in fact, railroading the party. I played a D&D game where our 8th level party encountered a bunch of devils who hit us with tons of Strength drain. This is the most forgivable form of railroading. We were captured, a big part of the plot was displayed, we were saved by other enemies and allowed to go on our merry way. The important thing here is that there was a reward for being railroaded. We were stuck in a boring dungeon anyway, so getting out of there was a blessing in disguise. Thus, nobody minded.
I've been in other games where the railroading was painful. I don't want to name names here. Suffice to say, I've felt like handing the GM my character sheet and, as above, saying, just tell me what my character does because I don't know what you want here. Obviously, that is a very bad form of railroading.
This becomes a tricky situation for a GM. To recognize and understand when he has a situation that has one possible outcome and when you've not given the players any options.
I'll try to give a few examples.
Example 1:
I played a superhero game in which the GM had a mad scientist shoot a giant laser at me. I was told to roll to dodge. I succeeded. He explained that the laser hit me and I was transported to another dimension. The entire point of the game was that I was transported to another dimension. There was no session without being hit by the giant laser. Hence the roll was entirely irrelivant. I recall saying: "It really didn't matter what I rolled...did it?" To which my GM smiled and told me flat out: "No."
Okay, smile and forgive. I would have rather the GM just said, "and this happens" because it was obvious that his plot was the basis of projecting us into this alternate dimension. So for plot, we had to be railroaded.
Example 2:
In a supernatural game, I was trying to shoot a creature. I was told to roll. I rolled realy well and shot it. Without marking down any damage the GM informed me that the creature started healing. It was clear to me that my roll was pointless. I had wasted my time and effort on thinking that I could hurt this monster and that the roll I had made, no matter what the outcome, would result in the same thing. I later learned that the monster HAD to be destroyed in a particular fashion. (I suspose, to some degree I must grin and bear it. But I didn't like it.) As far as I could tell there were no stats on the monster. The monster did not have the power of regeneration until I shot it will a killing blow. Then 'suddenly' it gained that ability.
Railroading is when a GM puts an encounter or situation into the game which, no matter the course of action the players takes, cannot be changed or altered. As a player, it is one of my biggest pet peeves. I hate railroading. Because: a) most of the time, it's really transparent, b) it's kinda weak GMing and c) it makes me think: Why doesn't the GM just tell me what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
I'm just as guilty of railroading players as other GM's. I make no such claim that I have not done it. But I don't think I've been awful with it.
There are degrees of Railroading. I've seen all types. In the bigger pespective, some railroading is very forgivable. So long as it's not over done. These are minor tweaks to the dice rolls, encounter level and so forth where the GM already knows the outcome of the fight. It gives the illusion that you are not, in fact, railroading the party. I played a D&D game where our 8th level party encountered a bunch of devils who hit us with tons of Strength drain. This is the most forgivable form of railroading. We were captured, a big part of the plot was displayed, we were saved by other enemies and allowed to go on our merry way. The important thing here is that there was a reward for being railroaded. We were stuck in a boring dungeon anyway, so getting out of there was a blessing in disguise. Thus, nobody minded.
I've been in other games where the railroading was painful. I don't want to name names here. Suffice to say, I've felt like handing the GM my character sheet and, as above, saying, just tell me what my character does because I don't know what you want here. Obviously, that is a very bad form of railroading.
This becomes a tricky situation for a GM. To recognize and understand when he has a situation that has one possible outcome and when you've not given the players any options.
I'll try to give a few examples.
Example 1:
I played a superhero game in which the GM had a mad scientist shoot a giant laser at me. I was told to roll to dodge. I succeeded. He explained that the laser hit me and I was transported to another dimension. The entire point of the game was that I was transported to another dimension. There was no session without being hit by the giant laser. Hence the roll was entirely irrelivant. I recall saying: "It really didn't matter what I rolled...did it?" To which my GM smiled and told me flat out: "No."
Okay, smile and forgive. I would have rather the GM just said, "and this happens" because it was obvious that his plot was the basis of projecting us into this alternate dimension. So for plot, we had to be railroaded.
Example 2:
In a supernatural game, I was trying to shoot a creature. I was told to roll. I rolled realy well and shot it. Without marking down any damage the GM informed me that the creature started healing. It was clear to me that my roll was pointless. I had wasted my time and effort on thinking that I could hurt this monster and that the roll I had made, no matter what the outcome, would result in the same thing. I later learned that the monster HAD to be destroyed in a particular fashion. (I suspose, to some degree I must grin and bear it. But I didn't like it.) As far as I could tell there were no stats on the monster. The monster did not have the power of regeneration until I shot it will a killing blow. Then 'suddenly' it gained that ability.
Example 3:
In a Heroes (Champions) game I played, I was a bard. I had a Fear spell. We encountered a group of jerky jerk for jerks on a road. They were getting difficult so I used my Fear spell. The leader fails his roll. So the GM explained that he ran away into forest, then returned after my spell finished. The Jerky jerks weren't attacking us but they were...I dunno...waiting around for their leader to return. We didn't want to fight them but they seemed like they didn't want us to leave. So instead of any normal reaction, we all just waited there for the leader to return. So my spell was pointless. It had worked and the GM largely ignored it's effects.
The scene continued and devolved further. One player did not want to play his character, a Lizard man, anymore. He wanted an excuse to play a new character. So this jerky jerk NPC leader did something to prove he was a better fighter than the Lizard man. The player surprised everybody by saying, "wonderful. I seek to train with you. I will abandon my group to travel with you." Perfect. No fuss, no muss. Except that the NPC wanted the lizard man to fight the other fighter in our party. Huh? So the lizardman took a couple of weak swings at the other fighter character and the scene just sorta...ended...cuz everybody thought it was dumb.
The GM in question is an excellent GM. He just seemed to have what would amount to a brain fart in this situation. This was accidently railroading, which is likely to be the most common form of it.
Example 4
My character's girlfriend was killed by my character's arch-enemy. The arch-enemy then fled the scene, with no possibility that I could get to him in time. I even had the power to heal people and I got to the girlfriend. Death itself appeared before me and told me that I couldn't save her. Wow...okay. Death itself, eh?
We were swaping GM's at the time, everybody took their turn at the head chair. This GM then had no intention of me fighting my arch-enemy. He just did this and then was handing things over to another. WTF?!
Moments like these can be very frustrating to a player.
It's sometimes hard for GM's to comprehend when they are railroading the players. Often times it is done with the best of intentions. The plan is to use the railroading to produce a very good scene. The problem is that the players can feel slighted. The degree of this irritation is what the GM has to consider. I've beaten the group in a Marvel game only to have them taken by Apocalypse. I gave them a very tough fight and was getting heavier handed because the fight took longer than I had hoped. But the plan was that they would be kidnapped. I really needed this to happen. I don't know how the players reacted to losing the fight. They escaped their plight later of course and got some nice revenge. But how unsatisfying was it for them to lose that fight?
And sometimes, railroading isn't always clear. What say, if I as a GM want to make a monster that cannot be killed except with a particular ritual. The characters don't know that. They encounter it and treat it like a standard monster and don't understand why it cannot die. Is that fair to them? Did I fail because I didn't make it clear before hand that this was a special monster? Did I fail because I ran combat as normal and didn't explain to them that they were doing no damage? I did not railroad the players. I presented them with a new challenge that requires something other than raw strength to beat, in the guise of something that could be beaten with raw strength. But I can see how, if my description of the scene and the monster was off, then it could appear as railroading.
Railroading, used correctly, is still not a great GM technique, IMO. But if it's done to set up a better scene, then it's forgivable.
Railroading, used poorly, will only hurt the trust between the GM and the players. When the situation has gone as far as the thought: "GM...just tell me what my character does." then you've crossed that border. That is often when players consider leaving the game and that's rarely a good thing.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Superhero RPGs
Superhero games are, IMO, one of the greatest challenges known to game design. An RPG tries to emulate, more or less, the entire world. From how a bullet interacts with one's stomach to how a detective solves a murder from the moment they walk onto the scene to the end where they catch their perp.
Most *co-all-ugh* game designers do not have real world experience in these areas. I've never been shot. I've never been framed for a murder I didn't commit. I'm ashamed to say it, but I've never even gotten into a high speed car chase. I'm so boring.
But we make presumptions. A lot of them. And we watch TV. From that wonderful resource, we draw conclusions. A lot of them. People don't like being shot with guns. People don't like being knifed with knives. In prison you always run the risk of being raped and having to choose sides. If you light a flame near any sprinkler ALL of them will go off. Etc, etc.
Okay, movies and TV that we often look to for inspiration in matters that we have no real experience in can be very fake. But we often rise up to the challenge, seperating the chaff from the wheat. Actually what we do is wait for those particular movies/shows that come on that seem to 'get it right' and make our presumptions from there.
More or less, we get it right or close enough that players can deal with it. Guns inflict damage on people. Skill + Stat roll to be perceptive enough to notice that evidence. Skill + Stat roll to intimidate the street scum. The mechanics vary but most people are fine with boiling things down in this way. Maybe it's not always correct. Shadowrun and Cyberpunk, for example, allowed you to be perforated with a lot of bullets before you were dropped. Shadowrun was possibly a more realistic simulation but there were a hell of a lot more rolling to determine that. I take some offence when system allows a character, such as in Top Secret/SI, to hold a grenade in their hand and let it explode. But whatever. You make due.
So...superheroes. Nobody...but nobody has ever had bullets bounce off their eye, torn metal doors from their hinges and leapt over skyscrappers (that aren't models) in a single bound. So truly we have an entirely fictional frame of reference. Further this is complicated because our frame of reference exists in comic form or a few movies/cartoons.
There are plenty of superhero games out there. Many of them have some really great elements to them. None of them have ever quite done it right. I almost think if you could steal from each one of them...you would have your Holy Grail of gaming. The best damn superhero game evar.
Let's review a few:
Mutants and Masterminds
A lot of pepole think this is the greatest supers game ever. Which only convinces me that people as a whole are really dumb. I tried to like this game. It's shining grace is that it's damage system is good in thought if not execution. You make a Damage 'Save' (like a Saving Throw). If you make your save, you're fine. If you fail it by a certain amount, you are hindered, stunned or even knocked out. The mechanic works in principle but in practice damage varied a lot. So you never really knew if you would drop a foe or not. And sometimes a 'tuff tank' would be taken out in the first hit that they took, just cuz it used a damn d20.
Champions
Also another game that many of us think foldly of. Ahh...Champions. I think somehow a lot of us fell in love with this game when we were young and...I dunno...could contribute a large portion of our brain to unlocking it's juicy mysteries. It is a game where, if your GM knows it inside and out, can sing and dance. But it requires a huge commitment to learning the rules. The complicated, math heavy rules. Character creation can be wildly unbalanced. But when Champions worked...it worked really well. This is a game that could use a huge over haul. They practically invented the point cost system which allowed you to do any god damn thing you wanted with your character. Want to shoot lasers from your toes that only affects enemies during the light of day but dogs are immune? There is a calculation for that. I also liked how you could figure out Body (lethal) damage when rolling Stun (bruising) attacks. I loved the idea that my villains could kick a Captain America type so hard so as to break a rib.
Champions created a lot of the mentallity for a lot of future superhero games. But it's shown it's age. It's much too complex to hold the interest of a lot of modern day players.
Savage Worlds ~ Necessary Evil
Savage Worlds is my game of choice for a quick/pulp style game. It has it's flaws but what game doesn't. It still works. Necessary Evil is their supervillains game but I just took the powers rules and ran it for two superheroes games.
Necessary Evil does one thing right. It decided that nobody cares if Spiderman or the Human Fly put more points into Wall Crawling. Because...really...c'mon. It's a crap power. But Marvel to Champions, there was a a power level attached to Wall Crawling (every power really). But at the end of the day, it truly does not matter. Thus Necessary Evil made Wall Crawling a very low cost power and based any rolls made on it against the Strength of the character. Done and done. Spiderman is stronger than the Human Fly, so he sticks 'good' to walls. Simple. Effective.
Necessary Evil needed much more work on all it's powers and there were a lot of powers that were missing. But it's a very good step in the right direction.
Marvel Saga
First off. I will not be talking about the classic Marvel (FaseRip) system. It worked back in the day. It's terrible now. No really...I tried it out a few months ago...it really sucks now.
The Saga system had terrible character creation but it used cards instead of dice. 5 suites (4 for the main stats and 1 for Doom!!!!) Your hand represented your Health and your 'attacks'. If you built a Strength based character you were hoping for Strength cards. If you played a Strength card you got to flip the top card of the deck and add those cards together. If you fliped a Strength card...you got to flip again and keep on adding. Somehow, this system just seemed far more exciting than rolling dice. Thus it wins for the superhero feeling. An exciting system makes for some exciting battles.
There were a few problems with healing and how the GM could make the battles challenging for the characters.
Marvel Universe
Still not talking about Classic Marvel. This is yet another Marvel game. They just keep trying and trying, don't they. The Marvel Universe game was a very unusual attempt. It's diceless. But it uses tokens where players allocate to their actions. The concept intrigues me. A lot. On paper it sounds like a delicious type of rule but in practice it fails to do super heroics justice.
In practice, it's very tactical. There would be a steep learning curve. As Daredevil...how many tokens do you allocate to leaping down a building acrobatic style? Also, once you figured out if something worked, you could just do that every single time. For example, I figured out that Captain America could simple 'win' against Sabertooth everytime by putting a lot into Defense and little into attack. Sabertooth simply couldn't hurt Captain America. There was no variable to tell whether Cap could manage to get his shield in the way every round. Likewise, Gambit would lose most of the time to the Blob, unless he put everything into his blast attack, in which case he would beat the Blob every time.
It was a weird system and too on/off for me. But with some work, that could be a real gem. If the was a good reason to divide your resources up (like some into movement, attack, defense, perception, etc) and some risk vs. reward...then maybe it would be a system that would be cooking with gas. But too much resource management is bad. So...let's just say it would be delicate to handle.
Truth and Justice
Okay, nobody has heard of this one. It's by an indie company called Atomic Sock Monkey. They have a core mechanic which is charming and works very well for one shot games. The idea is that you have a bunch of traits, like: Brave, Spiderman, Aunt May, Works at Daily Bugle, etc. When you are attacked and would take damage, you can cross off any trait, even if it's not physical. The GM can interprete this in any capacity. If you crossed off Aunt May, maybe you were thinking about her and it's disrupting your fight. Or maybe she shows up at the scene, thus causing you problems. Or maybe still, because you used her trait, it's going to have
It is, a great concept, which fails only because one would presume that you would want to use your heroes more than twice. The obvious problem is that the player is inclined to use/abuse their Aunt May traits while keeping their Porportial Strength of a Spider traits. After a while, it's gotta get kinda annoying to bring Aunt May in every freakin' comic. Of course maybe this explains all those awful storylines where Doc Ock wants to marry Aunt May or where she became a herald of Galactus. No really...this sorta crap did happen.
Godlike
This was a very neat attempt at making a WWII Supers game. They had an interesting dice mechanic which worked reasonable well. The system itself was unclear in places, however. All powers required 'activation' and weren't, by default, always on. So if you built your hero in a particular way you were, godlike, but only for like 1-2 fights. After that you're out of juice. Powers were a points buy. Kinda awkward all told.
???? (Can't remember the damn name!!)
There is another game, whose name I cannot remember. But it was very distinctive and the concepts stick with me until today. It's a Supers game set in a crazy, crazy cyberpunk future. The governments use Science!!! to build Supers. But almost all of them go bat fuck crazy, so they figure out when building them, if you put them into a VR (Virtual Reality) for a while before hand, a VR where they are good and noble and people give them apple pie and they save kittens from trees). After the VR training they are reasonable well adjusted (i.e. NOT baby-eating) heroes who fight for a world gone wrong.
What was really well done was a innovative character creation system. It was not the first of it's kind but it was better than most. Basically, you started your character...as the government planning on building him/her. You have, if I recall, 5 areas where you have to divide your money into. You have your core person, the training of your core person, the Powers that you're going to infuse him with and the doctor who is going to install these Cybernetic/Bionic powers, and the psychologist who is going to help your character afterwards. It was one of the more interesting systems out there. It's like saying...we have 6 million dollars to build this guy. Do you start with a very fit person? And/or a soldier with a lot of training already (you don't want a pizza delivery guy with superpowers, now do ya?). Oh and how much money are you going to allocate for the parts to put into this guy? Running out of money are we? Well...maybe we could just skimp on the doctor, get one of those 2nd rate, 3rd world country doctors. Hmmm...maybe we should consider that pizza guy...cuz the money is getting tigher...). It was one of the very few 'fun' character creation systems.
Those are all the Supers games that I played. I never got to play DC Heroes (which Black Industries is re-making) nor Villains and Vigilantes which sounds just a bit too lame for me to try.
In every Supers game there is one key element, one thing that make it different from, say, Cyberpunk or D&D. One element that made it 'super'. If you could just...what's the word I'm looking for...steal! that element from each game...would you create the greatest superhero game evar?!? Well...I dunno. I've been trying. But not very successfully. Cuz if I had, you would be banging down my door to play it. ;)
But I'm not giving up hope. One day...one day...
Most *co-all-ugh* game designers do not have real world experience in these areas. I've never been shot. I've never been framed for a murder I didn't commit. I'm ashamed to say it, but I've never even gotten into a high speed car chase. I'm so boring.
But we make presumptions. A lot of them. And we watch TV. From that wonderful resource, we draw conclusions. A lot of them. People don't like being shot with guns. People don't like being knifed with knives. In prison you always run the risk of being raped and having to choose sides. If you light a flame near any sprinkler ALL of them will go off. Etc, etc.
Okay, movies and TV that we often look to for inspiration in matters that we have no real experience in can be very fake. But we often rise up to the challenge, seperating the chaff from the wheat. Actually what we do is wait for those particular movies/shows that come on that seem to 'get it right' and make our presumptions from there.
More or less, we get it right or close enough that players can deal with it. Guns inflict damage on people. Skill + Stat roll to be perceptive enough to notice that evidence. Skill + Stat roll to intimidate the street scum. The mechanics vary but most people are fine with boiling things down in this way. Maybe it's not always correct. Shadowrun and Cyberpunk, for example, allowed you to be perforated with a lot of bullets before you were dropped. Shadowrun was possibly a more realistic simulation but there were a hell of a lot more rolling to determine that. I take some offence when system allows a character, such as in Top Secret/SI, to hold a grenade in their hand and let it explode. But whatever. You make due.
So...superheroes. Nobody...but nobody has ever had bullets bounce off their eye, torn metal doors from their hinges and leapt over skyscrappers (that aren't models) in a single bound. So truly we have an entirely fictional frame of reference. Further this is complicated because our frame of reference exists in comic form or a few movies/cartoons.
There are plenty of superhero games out there. Many of them have some really great elements to them. None of them have ever quite done it right. I almost think if you could steal from each one of them...you would have your Holy Grail of gaming. The best damn superhero game evar.
Let's review a few:
Mutants and Masterminds
A lot of pepole think this is the greatest supers game ever. Which only convinces me that people as a whole are really dumb. I tried to like this game. It's shining grace is that it's damage system is good in thought if not execution. You make a Damage 'Save' (like a Saving Throw). If you make your save, you're fine. If you fail it by a certain amount, you are hindered, stunned or even knocked out. The mechanic works in principle but in practice damage varied a lot. So you never really knew if you would drop a foe or not. And sometimes a 'tuff tank' would be taken out in the first hit that they took, just cuz it used a damn d20.
Champions
Also another game that many of us think foldly of. Ahh...Champions. I think somehow a lot of us fell in love with this game when we were young and...I dunno...could contribute a large portion of our brain to unlocking it's juicy mysteries. It is a game where, if your GM knows it inside and out, can sing and dance. But it requires a huge commitment to learning the rules. The complicated, math heavy rules. Character creation can be wildly unbalanced. But when Champions worked...it worked really well. This is a game that could use a huge over haul. They practically invented the point cost system which allowed you to do any god damn thing you wanted with your character. Want to shoot lasers from your toes that only affects enemies during the light of day but dogs are immune? There is a calculation for that. I also liked how you could figure out Body (lethal) damage when rolling Stun (bruising) attacks. I loved the idea that my villains could kick a Captain America type so hard so as to break a rib.
Champions created a lot of the mentallity for a lot of future superhero games. But it's shown it's age. It's much too complex to hold the interest of a lot of modern day players.
Savage Worlds ~ Necessary Evil
Savage Worlds is my game of choice for a quick/pulp style game. It has it's flaws but what game doesn't. It still works. Necessary Evil is their supervillains game but I just took the powers rules and ran it for two superheroes games.
Necessary Evil does one thing right. It decided that nobody cares if Spiderman or the Human Fly put more points into Wall Crawling. Because...really...c'mon. It's a crap power. But Marvel to Champions, there was a a power level attached to Wall Crawling (every power really). But at the end of the day, it truly does not matter. Thus Necessary Evil made Wall Crawling a very low cost power and based any rolls made on it against the Strength of the character. Done and done. Spiderman is stronger than the Human Fly, so he sticks 'good' to walls. Simple. Effective.
Necessary Evil needed much more work on all it's powers and there were a lot of powers that were missing. But it's a very good step in the right direction.
Marvel Saga
First off. I will not be talking about the classic Marvel (FaseRip) system. It worked back in the day. It's terrible now. No really...I tried it out a few months ago...it really sucks now.
The Saga system had terrible character creation but it used cards instead of dice. 5 suites (4 for the main stats and 1 for Doom!!!!) Your hand represented your Health and your 'attacks'. If you built a Strength based character you were hoping for Strength cards. If you played a Strength card you got to flip the top card of the deck and add those cards together. If you fliped a Strength card...you got to flip again and keep on adding. Somehow, this system just seemed far more exciting than rolling dice. Thus it wins for the superhero feeling. An exciting system makes for some exciting battles.
There were a few problems with healing and how the GM could make the battles challenging for the characters.
Marvel Universe
Still not talking about Classic Marvel. This is yet another Marvel game. They just keep trying and trying, don't they. The Marvel Universe game was a very unusual attempt. It's diceless. But it uses tokens where players allocate to their actions. The concept intrigues me. A lot. On paper it sounds like a delicious type of rule but in practice it fails to do super heroics justice.
In practice, it's very tactical. There would be a steep learning curve. As Daredevil...how many tokens do you allocate to leaping down a building acrobatic style? Also, once you figured out if something worked, you could just do that every single time. For example, I figured out that Captain America could simple 'win' against Sabertooth everytime by putting a lot into Defense and little into attack. Sabertooth simply couldn't hurt Captain America. There was no variable to tell whether Cap could manage to get his shield in the way every round. Likewise, Gambit would lose most of the time to the Blob, unless he put everything into his blast attack, in which case he would beat the Blob every time.
It was a weird system and too on/off for me. But with some work, that could be a real gem. If the was a good reason to divide your resources up (like some into movement, attack, defense, perception, etc) and some risk vs. reward...then maybe it would be a system that would be cooking with gas. But too much resource management is bad. So...let's just say it would be delicate to handle.
Truth and Justice
Okay, nobody has heard of this one. It's by an indie company called Atomic Sock Monkey. They have a core mechanic which is charming and works very well for one shot games. The idea is that you have a bunch of traits, like: Brave, Spiderman, Aunt May, Works at Daily Bugle, etc. When you are attacked and would take damage, you can cross off any trait, even if it's not physical. The GM can interprete this in any capacity. If you crossed off Aunt May, maybe you were thinking about her and it's disrupting your fight. Or maybe she shows up at the scene, thus causing you problems. Or maybe still, because you used her trait, it's going to have
It is, a great concept, which fails only because one would presume that you would want to use your heroes more than twice. The obvious problem is that the player is inclined to use/abuse their Aunt May traits while keeping their Porportial Strength of a Spider traits. After a while, it's gotta get kinda annoying to bring Aunt May in every freakin' comic. Of course maybe this explains all those awful storylines where Doc Ock wants to marry Aunt May or where she became a herald of Galactus. No really...this sorta crap did happen.
Godlike
This was a very neat attempt at making a WWII Supers game. They had an interesting dice mechanic which worked reasonable well. The system itself was unclear in places, however. All powers required 'activation' and weren't, by default, always on. So if you built your hero in a particular way you were, godlike, but only for like 1-2 fights. After that you're out of juice. Powers were a points buy. Kinda awkward all told.
???? (Can't remember the damn name!!)
There is another game, whose name I cannot remember. But it was very distinctive and the concepts stick with me until today. It's a Supers game set in a crazy, crazy cyberpunk future. The governments use Science!!! to build Supers. But almost all of them go bat fuck crazy, so they figure out when building them, if you put them into a VR (Virtual Reality) for a while before hand, a VR where they are good and noble and people give them apple pie and they save kittens from trees). After the VR training they are reasonable well adjusted (i.e. NOT baby-eating) heroes who fight for a world gone wrong.
What was really well done was a innovative character creation system. It was not the first of it's kind but it was better than most. Basically, you started your character...as the government planning on building him/her. You have, if I recall, 5 areas where you have to divide your money into. You have your core person, the training of your core person, the Powers that you're going to infuse him with and the doctor who is going to install these Cybernetic/Bionic powers, and the psychologist who is going to help your character afterwards. It was one of the more interesting systems out there. It's like saying...we have 6 million dollars to build this guy. Do you start with a very fit person? And/or a soldier with a lot of training already (you don't want a pizza delivery guy with superpowers, now do ya?). Oh and how much money are you going to allocate for the parts to put into this guy? Running out of money are we? Well...maybe we could just skimp on the doctor, get one of those 2nd rate, 3rd world country doctors. Hmmm...maybe we should consider that pizza guy...cuz the money is getting tigher...). It was one of the very few 'fun' character creation systems.
Those are all the Supers games that I played. I never got to play DC Heroes (which Black Industries is re-making) nor Villains and Vigilantes which sounds just a bit too lame for me to try.
In every Supers game there is one key element, one thing that make it different from, say, Cyberpunk or D&D. One element that made it 'super'. If you could just...what's the word I'm looking for...steal! that element from each game...would you create the greatest superhero game evar?!? Well...I dunno. I've been trying. But not very successfully. Cuz if I had, you would be banging down my door to play it. ;)
But I'm not giving up hope. One day...one day...
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Percentile - Bad
With the arrival of Warhammer 40K the RPG (no...not the miniature game), I've had to accept that I really can't handle another system that uses percentiles as their core mechanic.
I've run two games in recent memory that use percentiles (Maelstrom - a tiny game published by Penguin publishing) and Warhammer Fantasy Role playing. And...well...percentiles suck.
It's a reasonably clean mechanic. If I have a 45% change to hit you...well...45 out of every 100 attacks should hit you. Mechanically...there are no flaws.
But...but...well...they just suck. I can't speak about statistics because my players are always anomalies. One guy I had in the Maelstrom game had a 50% attack value...hit almost every single time. One girl in my Warhammer game had a 65% attack value...she missed more often than she should have. Look people...follow the rules of clearly defined statistics OR ELSE!
I dislike this wild probability that percentile systems bring to the table. I, as a player, want to minimize the randomness.
"So why the fuck do you play these games, Trent?" That's the thought forming in your mind. I know. I am psychic.
I've run two games in recent memory that use percentiles (Maelstrom - a tiny game published by Penguin publishing) and Warhammer Fantasy Role playing. And...well...percentiles suck.
It's a reasonably clean mechanic. If I have a 45% change to hit you...well...45 out of every 100 attacks should hit you. Mechanically...there are no flaws.
But...but...well...they just suck. I can't speak about statistics because my players are always anomalies. One guy I had in the Maelstrom game had a 50% attack value...hit almost every single time. One girl in my Warhammer game had a 65% attack value...she missed more often than she should have. Look people...follow the rules of clearly defined statistics OR ELSE!
I dislike this wild probability that percentile systems bring to the table. I, as a player, want to minimize the randomness.
"So why the fuck do you play these games, Trent?" That's the thought forming in your mind. I know. I am psychic.
There is a space between complete randomness and complete determination that is my happy space. Complete randomness would be flipping a coin for every action with no 're-rolls' (re-flips?). 50% chance you succeed, 50% chance you fail. Clearly very boring. Complete determination is that the GM or the players as a group decide whether every action succeeds or fail without any dice rolls at all. There are some people who would call me an elitist as far as gaming goes. I call the people who play deterministic systems elitists. Mainly cuz, I don't get it. You're not really playing a game at that point...you're just telling a communal story.
I cannot (get) stand deterministic systems. Therefore I understand and require some sort of randonmess in my games. But what I don't have to accept is utter and complete randomness. The percentile (and the d20 for that matter) will produce more randomness in a game than a system that used a d6. It's as simple as that.
Therefore, I much prefer a tighter, less random system. Games like Maelstrom and Warhammer cannot manufacturer that. Games like Savage Worlds sits around the middle ground. It sometimes works but due to exploding dice, it can get very random. The Unisystem (Buffy, Witchcraft, etc) has a simple and tight system. Some randomness but if your character is competent in an area, it really shows.
It is a shame, then, that the new Warhammer 40K RPG is percentile. Of course they mirrored their Warhammer Fantasy system almost word for word. The flaws with the Warhammer system have become apparant after running it for almost 2 years. Your character seems either incompetent, relying on luck to save the day or your character is too competent and you cannot fail so there is little reason to roll the dice. It rarely feels like there is middle ground.
To give an example, it was my desire, at one point, to ambush the characters with a group of Skaven (rat men if ya don't know). I actually wanted to have the Skaven pepper the group with poison darts, leaving them unconscious. Then I thought about the rules...and other than telling the characters this is what happened (which isn't really fair in most cases) I realized that there was no way for this to actually happen, rules wise. At least, in the Warhammer system.
I tried to think about this example from both side. It is clearly not fair to just hit the party with an attack with no roll. So it would make sense that a Perception roll would be due. But having a Perception roll and then saying you're attack anyway is just a slap in the face. No, a successful Perception roll should mean that that party member noticed something and has stopped just shy of the ideal spot. Okay, if that's what I feel comfortable with...I now realize that I have 6 players. One of those players has a Perception through the roof. Something like 80% at the time. So...he's gonna make it. He's gonna make it even if I tack on a -30 to his Perception test. And if he makes it, there is a very likely chance that 1 other party member will also make it...cuz it's percentiles and they are all over the place.
So...I presume that two of the characters make it. If one of them makes their roll by a considerable deal then maybe they noticed the ambush well before the entire party walks in. That's only fair. So the Skaven are competant enough to realize that their abmush has failed...they attack...combat begins.
Now poison in the world works with Toughness tests. And I have to hit. I'm not one of those GM's who just says my NPC's always succeed (that'll be a rant for the future). So between the hits of the Skaven, piercing their armour and the Toughness tests of my party...would any of them actually fall? I doubt it. Regardless of the fluff about Skaven being master assassins and using poison because it's very effective...the rules do not support this. Because the laws that seem to govern precentile would suggest that my party will do a tremendous amount of dice rolling, just to find out that they could probably murder those 20 Skaven. I'm not saying that the party would come out smelling like roses afterwards. Some would be dropped. And then those players would get the glorious fun of sitting around waiting for the other characters who were tougher, better armoured or luckier than them, to finish the damn combat.
In the end, I realize that the numbers wouldn't work. So it was far better to just drop the ambush (which might have worked at the beginning of the campaign) and just have the Skaven talk to the party. That was the original point. I just wanted a confrontation between the two. My first way was to capture the party (never works outside of a superhero game) to force a meeting between the Skaven and the party. Instead, I just cut out the headache of the painful dice rolls, which would have likely failed to produce the results I was hoping for in the first place.
Bottom line: I don't like precentile systems. They are too random for my tastes. They cannot produce the desired effect that I like when running games. By the same token, I cannot stand deterministic systems. Some randomness is required in a game. Just not as much as precentile brings to the table.
D&D 4th Edition - Part 4
I can’t tell you whether D&D 4th edition will be good.
I can tell you that when it was first announced, everybody hated it. The forums were and still are full of people saying that they will not touch it. Now I question whether these are the same people who said the same thing about D&D 3rd edition or not.
I don’t know anybody who still plays D&D 2nd edition. Maybe people just realized that for all it’s faults 3rd edition was a cleaner system than 2nd edition. And 4th edition is newer and revised still. So all these nay-sayers will eventually jump aboard the 4th edition train. It’s just inevitable. If you continue to play D&D, you will play 4th edition and likely, the pros will outweigh the cons. And then you won’t run into the awkward problem of chatting and coming into conflict with other gamers about your 3.5 game verses their 4th edition game.
The truth is, there is something in the human psyche that has a desire to be ‘current’. Maybe it's the old 'keeping up with the Jones' mentality. I'm sure somebody smarter than me could tell you that there is in fact a psychological need to remain with the 'pack'. We all want to make sure that we are using the most current, up to date version of the rules. People who are heretical and resist the conversion to 4th edition will eventually be swayed by it. One of their players will play in a 4th edition game and babble endlessly about it. Or there will be an overheard conversation at the local gaming store where some titanic nerd will be boring the clerk to death about their new 15th level Fighter and all the kewl Exploits that they have. But regardless, something about the new version will be so intriguing to the resistant DM that they will pick up a copy. And they will like what they see. Or they won't like what they see but will cave under the pressure of all the kewl new stuff that is coming out.
Regardless, all these people who claim that they'll keep all their 3.5 stuff and not convert are filthy liars. Well...they might keep their 3.5 stuff. But they'll convert. WotC isn't going to be hurting. Slavering fans will be buying 4th edition the day it comes out. And if you play D&D, you will be too. Whether you stay with the 'pack' or you actually like the new rules, you will buy it. You might as well ear mark that $45 right now for your copy, cuz that money is already spent.
I can tell you that when it was first announced, everybody hated it. The forums were and still are full of people saying that they will not touch it. Now I question whether these are the same people who said the same thing about D&D 3rd edition or not.
I don’t know anybody who still plays D&D 2nd edition. Maybe people just realized that for all it’s faults 3rd edition was a cleaner system than 2nd edition. And 4th edition is newer and revised still. So all these nay-sayers will eventually jump aboard the 4th edition train. It’s just inevitable. If you continue to play D&D, you will play 4th edition and likely, the pros will outweigh the cons. And then you won’t run into the awkward problem of chatting and coming into conflict with other gamers about your 3.5 game verses their 4th edition game.
The truth is, there is something in the human psyche that has a desire to be ‘current’. Maybe it's the old 'keeping up with the Jones' mentality. I'm sure somebody smarter than me could tell you that there is in fact a psychological need to remain with the 'pack'. We all want to make sure that we are using the most current, up to date version of the rules. People who are heretical and resist the conversion to 4th edition will eventually be swayed by it. One of their players will play in a 4th edition game and babble endlessly about it. Or there will be an overheard conversation at the local gaming store where some titanic nerd will be boring the clerk to death about their new 15th level Fighter and all the kewl Exploits that they have. But regardless, something about the new version will be so intriguing to the resistant DM that they will pick up a copy. And they will like what they see. Or they won't like what they see but will cave under the pressure of all the kewl new stuff that is coming out.
Regardless, all these people who claim that they'll keep all their 3.5 stuff and not convert are filthy liars. Well...they might keep their 3.5 stuff. But they'll convert. WotC isn't going to be hurting. Slavering fans will be buying 4th edition the day it comes out. And if you play D&D, you will be too. Whether you stay with the 'pack' or you actually like the new rules, you will buy it. You might as well ear mark that $45 right now for your copy, cuz that money is already spent.
D&D 4th Edition - Part 3
I’m sure that not everything new in 4th edition will come across smelling like roses. They’ve got a lot more options now but some of the elements are such a strong departure from the game that many of us have played for the past few years now, that it’s going to be very hard to get used to.
They have taken (currently unknown but suggested upon) steps to decrease the number of magic items in the game. Whatever. There will be nerds out there who will heap treasure upon their party regardless of what the books says. But even with the decrease in magic items, the magic is still very much there.
I'll give you an example right from one of the sample characters:
"A translucent golden shield forms in front of a nearby ally as you attack with your weapon."
This is a new Paladin Attack called Shielding Smite. This is a 1st level ability. So we've gone from 3.5 where Paladins weren't really magical until a few levels in (one could argue that they had to earn their powers from their gods) to 'anime video game graphic' power!
Don't get me completely wrong here. I like that the Paladin can do cool things and I like that even at 1st level they can do cool things. I'm a big fan of the characters being heroes. But let's not kid ourselves here, 1st level warrior types forming translucent golden shields around other people is pretty over the top. Before it's concievable that a Paladin might have to explain their good intention to a group of townsfolk. Nope...not any more. "See...I can produce a translucent golden shield. I'm a freakin' Paladin. Can't argue with that now, can you?!"
Again, this isn't bad. But it's a big departure from the D&D of the past. It's very modern and very video game. Is that a bad thing? At the end of the day, I will say no. Because despite it being over the top, it does mean that the Paladin (and all classes) will have various ways to contribute to every combat situation without running out of spells, or being too weak to hurt the enemy, or taking an 'Aid Action'.
So what else is weird (to get used to).
Well another huge departure will be the number of times you can use certain actions/spells. There is now At-Will, Encounter and Daily actions/spells.
At-Will means you can use it once per round. Many special attacks (Fighter, Paladin, Ranger) are At-Will actions. Great, so they can use them once per round. Very nice. But forget about them, because lo and behold the Wizard...aka the low level party gimp, finally, after 20 years of gaming, gets Magic Missile At-Will. In 10 years time when we old timers crack jokes about how our 1st level wizard cast magic missile and then told the party, 'come see me in 24 hours if you want another display of my arcane might.", young nerds will look at us like we are George-Lucas crazy.
At-Will Magic Missile (and other spells) allows the Wizard to throw as many 2d4 damage attacks as Ryu/Ken could launch Fireballs. Will this make your Wizard not suck at 1st level? Well...I dunno yet. But finally they can blast away for the length of the fight. This folks, is the end of an era. Seriously.
Encounter actions/spells means once per encounter you can pull off this move. I like it. It's artificial but I like it a lot. Artificial tends to happen for game balance and I'm all for that.
Daily means that once per...well...c'mon...it's once per day. Again...artificial when the fighter can only use his x3 damage attack once per day but great for game balance, so it'll get a thumbs up from me.
Oh...but wait...this is still D&D. And D&D needs exceptions. So on the sample characters the cleric's Healing Prayer is Encounter based, meaning he should only be able to use it once per Encounter. Except that there is an exception that he can use it 2 times per Encounter. I suspect that there will be a lot of these Encounter exceptions.
There is one problem with how At-Will actions and Basic attacks work. Intuitive is a word that you'll hear a lot here, presuming you weren't entirely bored and/or forgot that I even have a blog. Some rules are Intuitive, meaning: when you visualize the action you see how well the rule allows you to re-create that action in the game. Now I read the word: Basic attacks and, like most people, assume that you will use basic attacks for the bulk of combat and your other 'kewl' attacks when is appropriate. Nope. Not really. Your Basic attacks are so boring that they've even advised you not to use them. Wha-? You are expected/supposed to use your At-Will attacks all the time. Thus the point of the Basic attack is...well...I guess their example is for Opportunity attacks. (Did I just mean Attacks of Opporunity? No. They are Opportunity attacks now...for some reason.)
I get why you have basic attacks and At-Will attacks (which are also called Exploits, by the way). A basic attack is needed to help define what your Exploits will do. All an Exploit is, at the end of the day is your basic attack with a special effect tacked onto it. So the Fighter's Cleave Exploit allows him to make 'a basic attack' and ALSO inflict 3 points of damage on an adjacent foe. So I get it. They needed some baseline from which all your Exploits will work with. But to have the suggestion to never use your basic attacks...that is what I call not-Intuitive.
I already hear the conversation in my head:
Cindiloohoo: "I make an attack. I use my sword. It's...a basic attack."
Me: "No, no...use an Exploit. They are much better."
Cindiloohoo: "But...I have a basic attack on my sheet right here."
Me: "But on the other sheet you have Exploits. Seriously, they are cooler. And you can use them all the time."
Cindiloohoo: "But...but...why??"
Me: "Ummm...cuz...umm...just do what I say."
They have taken (currently unknown but suggested upon) steps to decrease the number of magic items in the game. Whatever. There will be nerds out there who will heap treasure upon their party regardless of what the books says. But even with the decrease in magic items, the magic is still very much there.
I'll give you an example right from one of the sample characters:
"A translucent golden shield forms in front of a nearby ally as you attack with your weapon."
This is a new Paladin Attack called Shielding Smite. This is a 1st level ability. So we've gone from 3.5 where Paladins weren't really magical until a few levels in (one could argue that they had to earn their powers from their gods) to 'anime video game graphic' power!
Don't get me completely wrong here. I like that the Paladin can do cool things and I like that even at 1st level they can do cool things. I'm a big fan of the characters being heroes. But let's not kid ourselves here, 1st level warrior types forming translucent golden shields around other people is pretty over the top. Before it's concievable that a Paladin might have to explain their good intention to a group of townsfolk. Nope...not any more. "See...I can produce a translucent golden shield. I'm a freakin' Paladin. Can't argue with that now, can you?!"
Again, this isn't bad. But it's a big departure from the D&D of the past. It's very modern and very video game. Is that a bad thing? At the end of the day, I will say no. Because despite it being over the top, it does mean that the Paladin (and all classes) will have various ways to contribute to every combat situation without running out of spells, or being too weak to hurt the enemy, or taking an 'Aid Action'.
So what else is weird (to get used to).
Well another huge departure will be the number of times you can use certain actions/spells. There is now At-Will, Encounter and Daily actions/spells.
At-Will means you can use it once per round. Many special attacks (Fighter, Paladin, Ranger) are At-Will actions. Great, so they can use them once per round. Very nice. But forget about them, because lo and behold the Wizard...aka the low level party gimp, finally, after 20 years of gaming, gets Magic Missile At-Will. In 10 years time when we old timers crack jokes about how our 1st level wizard cast magic missile and then told the party, 'come see me in 24 hours if you want another display of my arcane might.", young nerds will look at us like we are George-Lucas crazy.
At-Will Magic Missile (and other spells) allows the Wizard to throw as many 2d4 damage attacks as Ryu/Ken could launch Fireballs. Will this make your Wizard not suck at 1st level? Well...I dunno yet. But finally they can blast away for the length of the fight. This folks, is the end of an era. Seriously.
Encounter actions/spells means once per encounter you can pull off this move. I like it. It's artificial but I like it a lot. Artificial tends to happen for game balance and I'm all for that.
Daily means that once per...well...c'mon...it's once per day. Again...artificial when the fighter can only use his x3 damage attack once per day but great for game balance, so it'll get a thumbs up from me.
Oh...but wait...this is still D&D. And D&D needs exceptions. So on the sample characters the cleric's Healing Prayer is Encounter based, meaning he should only be able to use it once per Encounter. Except that there is an exception that he can use it 2 times per Encounter. I suspect that there will be a lot of these Encounter exceptions.
There is one problem with how At-Will actions and Basic attacks work. Intuitive is a word that you'll hear a lot here, presuming you weren't entirely bored and/or forgot that I even have a blog. Some rules are Intuitive, meaning: when you visualize the action you see how well the rule allows you to re-create that action in the game. Now I read the word: Basic attacks and, like most people, assume that you will use basic attacks for the bulk of combat and your other 'kewl' attacks when is appropriate. Nope. Not really. Your Basic attacks are so boring that they've even advised you not to use them. Wha-? You are expected/supposed to use your At-Will attacks all the time. Thus the point of the Basic attack is...well...I guess their example is for Opportunity attacks. (Did I just mean Attacks of Opporunity? No. They are Opportunity attacks now...for some reason.)
I get why you have basic attacks and At-Will attacks (which are also called Exploits, by the way). A basic attack is needed to help define what your Exploits will do. All an Exploit is, at the end of the day is your basic attack with a special effect tacked onto it. So the Fighter's Cleave Exploit allows him to make 'a basic attack' and ALSO inflict 3 points of damage on an adjacent foe. So I get it. They needed some baseline from which all your Exploits will work with. But to have the suggestion to never use your basic attacks...that is what I call not-Intuitive.
I already hear the conversation in my head:
Cindiloohoo: "I make an attack. I use my sword. It's...a basic attack."
Me: "No, no...use an Exploit. They are much better."
Cindiloohoo: "But...I have a basic attack on my sheet right here."
Me: "But on the other sheet you have Exploits. Seriously, they are cooler. And you can use them all the time."
Cindiloohoo: "But...but...why??"
Me: "Ummm...cuz...umm...just do what I say."
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
D&D 4th Edition - Part 2
So onto the good about D&D 4th Edition.
I really like how they’ve realized that a cleric (aka the Heal-bot) was really fun to play if you just cast spells for yourself and didn't focus on the healing but kinda boring if you just spent all your time being the Heal-bot (i.e. keeping the party alive). I’ve seen some players do the Heal-bot thing and they never complained (nor did anybody complain about them) but c'mon, it has got to get awfully boring.
Say what you will about 4th Edition, but it solves that problem very well it would seem. You now have Standard actions and Minor action (in addition to the tacked on Move action). It looks like, from the sample characters posted elsewhere, that healing (whether the cleric’s Prayer or the Paladin’s Lay on Hands) is a Minor action. Therefore, they can do something interesting like attack AND throw off a heal. Very nice.
So the Heal-bot, er, cleric was just an example of the new doors that are open. They’ve committed themselves to creating a game where nobody sits around doing nothing. There is always something that each party member can contribute, not just the “Aid action” (i.e. The Halfing action).
If you're curious about the 'new' healing in D&D, it works very differently from old school D&D (aka 3.5 and lower). All characters now get something called a Healing Surge. You have X number of Healing Surges per day and each time one is used it gives you X number of HP's back. When you have a short rest (like a few minutes) you can use a Healing Surge. So between combat you can use a Healing Surge (or two/three/etc? that part isn't clear) to get your HP's back.
Additionally, once per combat you can use 1 Healing Surge. But that's your standard action. So every character across the board can get back a number of HP's during combat, without resorting to a potion.
Lay On Hands and the Heal-bot, er, Cleric's Prayers of Healing work with Healing Surges. The Paladin will now tick off one of their own Healing Surges and another character gets to heal some HP's (based on their own amount). The Cleric's Prayer allows them to make a target check off their own Healing Surge and even get an extra 1d6+X HP's back.
Why have I ranted about healing and HP's? Because this was one of my most hated points about D&D. Hit Points, suggests that you can physical take so many cuts, lacerations, burns, etc before you perish. In their actually description for HP's, they backpedal and claim, oh no...it represents luck and skill (to avoid blows) and the ability to shrug off minor wounds. Okay...I can totally buy that HP's represent more of a 'luck' system, where eventually your luck runs out and you are actually skewered by a sword or roasted by that Dragon's breath. However if that's how HP's work...then why healing spells? Do you 'heal' luck? Is that how that's supposed to work?
Now, however, it is clear that sitting down, resting and getting some of your composure will give you some HP's back. Okay...I can accept that. Healing Prayers can represent giving you some of your composure back, removing some of your exhaustion and mending some of the cuts you might have gotten. Okay...finally I can visualize and accept how 'healing' and HP's work.
That being said, Healing Surges and HP's are now rather...gamey. When you watch Aragorn fight in Lord of the Rings, you don't say to yourself, "gosh, he's avoiding all those blows, gotten a few cuts and looks winded...he clearly is low on Hit Points." But since I bring action movies into the fold, I will accept that Healing Surges and HP's are very much in the same style as an action movie. John Maclane can get shot or run on glass and be fine in the next scene. So of course our D&D characters should be able to as well.
I really like how they’ve realized that a cleric (aka the Heal-bot) was really fun to play if you just cast spells for yourself and didn't focus on the healing but kinda boring if you just spent all your time being the Heal-bot (i.e. keeping the party alive). I’ve seen some players do the Heal-bot thing and they never complained (nor did anybody complain about them) but c'mon, it has got to get awfully boring.
Say what you will about 4th Edition, but it solves that problem very well it would seem. You now have Standard actions and Minor action (in addition to the tacked on Move action). It looks like, from the sample characters posted elsewhere, that healing (whether the cleric’s Prayer or the Paladin’s Lay on Hands) is a Minor action. Therefore, they can do something interesting like attack AND throw off a heal. Very nice.
So the Heal-bot, er, cleric was just an example of the new doors that are open. They’ve committed themselves to creating a game where nobody sits around doing nothing. There is always something that each party member can contribute, not just the “Aid action” (i.e. The Halfing action).
If you're curious about the 'new' healing in D&D, it works very differently from old school D&D (aka 3.5 and lower). All characters now get something called a Healing Surge. You have X number of Healing Surges per day and each time one is used it gives you X number of HP's back. When you have a short rest (like a few minutes) you can use a Healing Surge. So between combat you can use a Healing Surge (or two/three/etc? that part isn't clear) to get your HP's back.
Additionally, once per combat you can use 1 Healing Surge. But that's your standard action. So every character across the board can get back a number of HP's during combat, without resorting to a potion.
Lay On Hands and the Heal-bot, er, Cleric's Prayers of Healing work with Healing Surges. The Paladin will now tick off one of their own Healing Surges and another character gets to heal some HP's (based on their own amount). The Cleric's Prayer allows them to make a target check off their own Healing Surge and even get an extra 1d6+X HP's back.
Why have I ranted about healing and HP's? Because this was one of my most hated points about D&D. Hit Points, suggests that you can physical take so many cuts, lacerations, burns, etc before you perish. In their actually description for HP's, they backpedal and claim, oh no...it represents luck and skill (to avoid blows) and the ability to shrug off minor wounds. Okay...I can totally buy that HP's represent more of a 'luck' system, where eventually your luck runs out and you are actually skewered by a sword or roasted by that Dragon's breath. However if that's how HP's work...then why healing spells? Do you 'heal' luck? Is that how that's supposed to work?
Now, however, it is clear that sitting down, resting and getting some of your composure will give you some HP's back. Okay...I can accept that. Healing Prayers can represent giving you some of your composure back, removing some of your exhaustion and mending some of the cuts you might have gotten. Okay...finally I can visualize and accept how 'healing' and HP's work.
That being said, Healing Surges and HP's are now rather...gamey. When you watch Aragorn fight in Lord of the Rings, you don't say to yourself, "gosh, he's avoiding all those blows, gotten a few cuts and looks winded...he clearly is low on Hit Points." But since I bring action movies into the fold, I will accept that Healing Surges and HP's are very much in the same style as an action movie. John Maclane can get shot or run on glass and be fine in the next scene. So of course our D&D characters should be able to as well.
D&D 4th Edition
Okay, time for my first rant. P.S. Not all rants are a bad thing.
D&D 4th edition seems like a very good place to start.
To preface, I’ve not read the new book. I’ve read only what other people have online.
I might as well start with what I hate about 4th edition: Any and all Massively Multiplayer (MMO) references. The game didn’t need this. It really didn’t need things like Striker, Tank, Controller, etc. I see a reference to recharge rates and I cringe. It’s too late now, they are firmly entrenched. But why god why did they have to use the actual terms. Why couldn’t they just use it for development and then not disclose this to the public.
Why do I hate MMO references? Because despite what MMO’s do successfully (i.e. create an engaging, addictive gaming experience) it also comes with all the baggage of what they don’t do well. Which is to say, create a community devoid or role players and put players on the level grind.
MMO’s are pretty notorious for a complete lack or role players. Some people try and I respect that. But eventually, people have to give in to the concept that role playing in an MMO is entirely inefficient. Whether picking a class or a power/spell that ‘sux’ because if fits your character or not giving into the massive losers who send messages on broadcast, role playing on MMO’s is rarely productive. You ain’t getting XP for all that awesome role playing. So the bulk of players don’t kid themselves. They pick the uber spells, farm for the best item drops or slot their powers with the best enhancements. So when *I* think of MMO’s I think of that sort of thing. I don’t role play. I play them to game. So when I hear that D&D is using MMO terminology, I cringe and wonder whether I’ll be forced to ‘slot the best enhancements’ on my Fighter or Wizard.
The level grind is also what I think of when I think of MMO’s but fortunately, D&D practically invented the level grind. I want to say that they did for sure but I know in 1.5 years down the road some titanic nerd will come and explain that some other game that predates D&D did it first. I really don’t care. The point being, level grinding is part and parcel for D&D.
What do I like about the new D&D? Well…a great deal actually. I think it’ll be a very good but very different game. But I will probably save this for a separate rant. =)
D&D 4th edition seems like a very good place to start.
To preface, I’ve not read the new book. I’ve read only what other people have online.
I might as well start with what I hate about 4th edition: Any and all Massively Multiplayer (MMO) references. The game didn’t need this. It really didn’t need things like Striker, Tank, Controller, etc. I see a reference to recharge rates and I cringe. It’s too late now, they are firmly entrenched. But why god why did they have to use the actual terms. Why couldn’t they just use it for development and then not disclose this to the public.
Why do I hate MMO references? Because despite what MMO’s do successfully (i.e. create an engaging, addictive gaming experience) it also comes with all the baggage of what they don’t do well. Which is to say, create a community devoid or role players and put players on the level grind.
MMO’s are pretty notorious for a complete lack or role players. Some people try and I respect that. But eventually, people have to give in to the concept that role playing in an MMO is entirely inefficient. Whether picking a class or a power/spell that ‘sux’ because if fits your character or not giving into the massive losers who send messages on broadcast, role playing on MMO’s is rarely productive. You ain’t getting XP for all that awesome role playing. So the bulk of players don’t kid themselves. They pick the uber spells, farm for the best item drops or slot their powers with the best enhancements. So when *I* think of MMO’s I think of that sort of thing. I don’t role play. I play them to game. So when I hear that D&D is using MMO terminology, I cringe and wonder whether I’ll be forced to ‘slot the best enhancements’ on my Fighter or Wizard.
The level grind is also what I think of when I think of MMO’s but fortunately, D&D practically invented the level grind. I want to say that they did for sure but I know in 1.5 years down the road some titanic nerd will come and explain that some other game that predates D&D did it first. I really don’t care. The point being, level grinding is part and parcel for D&D.
What do I like about the new D&D? Well…a great deal actually. I think it’ll be a very good but very different game. But I will probably save this for a separate rant. =)
First Post
Hello world (or the 2-3 friends who bother to read this).
I realized that I have a lot to say about games. And that I like to rant. And sometimes, people even like to hear me talk endless about various game stuff. So...here I go. Into the vast world of blogging. I will try to be entertaining but I can't promise the moon.
I realized that I have a lot to say about games. And that I like to rant. And sometimes, people even like to hear me talk endless about various game stuff. So...here I go. Into the vast world of blogging. I will try to be entertaining but I can't promise the moon.
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