Message to video game sequels: Quit fucking up your games!

It's important, I would imagine, when creating a sequel to a game, that you want to stick with your strengths.  Presumably the game sold well enough on some of its merits.  So it's probably a good idea to figure out what those merits actually were.

Case in point, Disciples. 

The first 2 Disciples were put out by Strategy First (I believe).  They were pretty excellent turn based strategy games.  What made them different was the combat system. 

Combat was set on a grid of 6 squares (per side so 12 squares total).  Your had your Hero occupy one of those squares and they had a leadership value (3 to start) that would allow them to command up to three troops.  In most cases a single troop took up one square but some of the big beasties would take up 2 squares (and count as 2 troops). 

It's not genius but it worked damn well.  As you leveled up your hero you would be able to increase their leadership (slowly).  It was a big deal to reach a 4 leadership because a new troop would accompany you.  Sweet.  And 5 leadership meant that you were maxed out and could fill all 6 squares. 

The other important thing to know about the squares is that you had a front row and a back row. 

The troops themselves were quite balanced. 

• Soldier-types (the majority) could only attack to the closest row (which is to say they would typically be in the front row and attacked into the front row of their enemy). 
• Archer types could attack any of the 6 enemy squares but their damage was most often lower than a soldier type
• Wizard types (and big beasties like Dragons) could attack all 6 enemy squares.  But their damage was usually even lower and their initiative was total shit
• Finally you had esoteric magic types - The Banshee could frighten enemies and the Succubus could polymorph enemies.  The dwarves on the other hand could 'buff' the damage of their allies.  The humans could have priests to heal their allies.  

The combat system worked and damn well.  Each unit was clear on its role and what it could do.  Attacks typically had an 80% chance to hit and it listed it right there.  An experienced hero could have an 88%.  So there ya go.  No difficult math, just what you need.  Damage was straight up.  Starter troops could do 30 damage a hit.  Experienced troops could do 50 - 100 or even higher.

Troops had an interesting leveling trick to them.  You had to buy the correct building before you could level them up.  But buildings had a path, however.  You could generally only choose between two paths.  Your Warrior could become a Knight or an Inquisitor.  The former has more HP, the later has a Ward against some types of damage.  The choice is yours and only in a few rare cases the the choice hurt.  And that would only last for that scenario (everything but your Hero resets with each scenario).

So the new Disciples 3 came out.  I was very excited.  The graphics are awesome.  The lands are lush.  The environments are 3D.  The combat...is...

To be fair, the combat is not bad.  It's just that it's completely revamped to be pretty much Heroes of Might and Magic.  If you're not familiar, it's basically run your people around a board and attack each other.  Much like HoM&M, you now have way more 'stats', which are much harder to decipher.  Before, if you had a Healer the game was very clear on how much that healer could heal and...you know...that she IS a healer. 


The new game isn't clear at all.  You have an attack value, which I finally figured out to be your damage output.  The problem is, even healers appear to have an attack value.  Only...it isn't an attack value...it's their healing value.  You have to translate that if your damage type is Divine, that means you only heal with that troop. 

That's fine, I can figure that all out, but I shouldn't have to.  The original game was very clear on this.  And clarity is better. 

The elements are similar but the effect is completely lost.  The 6 square grid was different and fun.  It was like the Final Fantasy games only you had a second line behind to protect your archers and support troops.  Troop placement was simplistic but the game was still tactically very fun.  The goal of every fight was to figure out how best to eliminate the enemy troops and minimize the damage taken.  It hardly seems like there would be much tactics but there were.  Generally your front lines would bash each other but your back line was reserved for archers and mages.  And so was your enemy.  Can you somehow take out a key support of your enemies back lines through your archers?  If so, you could win an otherwise up-hill battle. 

What the game did not need was the re-vamped combat.  What made it unique was it's combat.  You merely improve that, not trash it and give it a entirely different type of combat system.  One thing lacking in the original combat was being able to shift your troops around, if say you had a very badly wounded front line warrior, the idea of shifting him to the back row might have been very interesting.  Criticals add a nice random element (which the new Disciples has).  But having some options for your troops would have added a lot (different types of attacks, for example). 

What's funny is that the company that made this (some Russian company) decided that the building and troops were sacred and so...they are all practically the same.  They look new and great but they function the same.  I for one was hoping that instead of say 2 branches for most units you could have 3 branches.  But no, none of that was touched.  It's the exact same units as the previous game. 

Sadly, what's done is done.  The new game is out.  There is nothing really wrong with the game, but it's not as good as what came before. 

Oh and the voice acting is absolutely terrible.  I mean...this is the worst voice acting I remember in a game ever. 

Clearly, not mistaken

What a flurry of larping.  I think 5 games in 3 days (one of which I ran) counts officially as a metric butt-load of games.

This ended up being one of the most enjoyable Slarpas.  Every game was fun.  That in and of itself is an achievement because, being perfectly honest, not every game is a complete success.

I like to look at systems of course.  They can add or subtract from my enjoyment of the game.  Sad but true.  I make no secrets about this.  Maybe it's a flaw.  I've no idea.

KC was the most rules heavy system of the weekend, and that makes me a little sad.  Don't get me wrong, I do like my own system.  But it suffers from trying to accommodate both good and bad gamers (or as Houses of the Blooded puts it: Wankers).  Wankers will min-max the shit outta something and find the flaws.  Vampire was as complicated as it was to try to fight the wankers, but it just wasn't a good enough system to do it.  I designed KC in respond to Vampire and that was my first mistake. 

What KC does well, I think, is dramatic combat.  It is fair and relatively quick and (hopefully) exciting.  This was important to me because KC is, in my head, an action movie.  I like combat and I like it to flow smoothly.

My game showed me that it does work, but Fray combat is still a bit painful.  Will I fix it?  I dunno at this point.

Anyway, the other systems were all more on the rules lite systems.  And most of them were more Conflict resolution vs. Task Resolution, meaning one challenge determines the results of the fight rather than a blow by blow (which KC does).

So we had two Cthulhu games this weekend, one using a slightly toned down system and the other using a normal Cthulhu live system.  Now the first one was a light hearted Cthulhu game so in that, the system was 'just right'. 

However, that being said, I have to say it (sorry Jill) but I fucking hate the Cthulhu Live system.  In fact, I happen to feel it is one of the absolutely worst larp systems out there. 

Now I know that I am terrible with algebra, but larp system should NOT make me have to every do STAT times Skill.  What's 14 x 3...it's irrelevant...why the fuck am I doing math in a HORROR GAME.  You know what is not scary?  Math!!!!  

The combat system is garbage.  It's most often extremely one sided and very boring.  One character gets to go first and murder you before you can act.  Good times...good times.  In fact, the combat system is so terrible because it does the opposite of what the world is trying to do, which is scare the players.  The combat system forces you to stop, break character, stand around, resolve it slowly, then role play the results.  Any tension or fear caused by the sight of the monster is utterly ruined when you have to resolve a fight with it.  Of course, I've also played it Cthulhu games where there was no resolution...if a monster got close to you...you automatically died.  Again...good times...good times.

Some might say that's appropriate to the Cthulhu world but I have two problems with that.  First, this should be a game...and as presented, it's not a fun game.  Second, I will go out here and say it...Cthulhu is not a very great world.  It's imaginative but it's one that works far better in books than in as a game.  In fact, I've played Cthulhu games for something like 15 years now I seriously, most of them are kinda the same. 

I'm not saying that the Cthulhu games I've played in are 'bad'.  All the games often have great fucking style.  Like 4 or 5 out of 5 for style consistently.  From Randy and Amy's giant fucking glowing worm, to Adam's giant steam-punk machine that you step into, to something as simple as Jill's beautifully acted Asylum game, these are games that are so cool to be a part of.

However, where virtually all Cthulhu games fall apart is the story itself.  I do not blame or attack an organizer here.  Cthulhu is just a bad world to run a game in because in the end, the main characters cannot fucking win.  Hell, even breaking even is usually unlikely.

Now, not winning is really not a problem for a larp or a story.  It's just that...I've played 15 years of not winning Cthulhu games.  They all end up being the same.  In fact, the world is pretty much designed for the main characters to be nothing more than observers of the plot.  In most cases, they cannot affect the plot in any way.  The plot (translated text, experiment gone wrong, etc) is in motion, often before the game itself.  And it cannot be stopped.  Like...at all.  MAYBE, in the rare game, there is a ritual that can stop the big bad IF you can find it filed in the sub-basement C past the horde of guards and fish monsters. 

Again, not an attack on the organizers of these games.  They are technically doing what the world was designed for, but after 15 years of playing the same sort of plot, it does get a little tiring. 

See the thing is, how do most Cthulhu games end?  During the wrap up, the organizer will state: "So...do you want to know what was going on?"  90% of the players are completely and utterly clueless so of course they want to know what the hell the plot was. I mean they did play the game but finding out what was going on is really difficult.

None of this means you cannot enjoy a Cthulhu game.  But you have to really accept that you're more of an observer to the game and not there to actually interact with the plot.  Look but don't touch. 

The other systems were more along the lines of a token transfer system.  A resource system.  The supervillain game was tons of fun but the system didn't wow me.  It was slightly convoluted in one way but pretty much amounted to the standard token transfer game.  Who wants the 'win' more in a situation?  That player ends up bidding more tokens and giving them to the other player.  What ends up happening here, whether intentional or unintentional is that you can rack up a TON of tokens.  Case in point, I was defeated 3 times in succession and all that failure filled me with tokens so I was nigh-unstoppable by the end of the game. 

Also the common problem is 'token dumping' in which a player just dumps all their tokens into a challenge right near the end of the game cuz...well...there isn't anything more than the end of the game so why the hell not. 

But then we come to Houses of the Blooded (Houses hereafter).  I had come across this game a year ago.  They had some neat stuff but the core book was a little too pricey and I couldn't see myself running it so I didn't get it (this was the tabletop).


I had told Wade (the organizer) that I had all but hit the historic fantasy wall and if he could just pick me a character.  I knew that this was the last game of Slarpa.  Everybody would be tired.  I could 'phone it in'. 

I had heard it was a nice and simple token transfer system. 

How delightful that it was that but so much more.  What a simple and excellent way to use something simple but oh so excellent.

Houses uses the token transfer idea but with a very neat twist.  When you want to challenge somebody (we'll not include combat here) you start with, "If I'm not mistaken..." and offer up 1 (or more) tokens.

"If I'm not mistaken, weren't we lovers before your husband died."
"If I'm not mistaken, didn't you murder my mistress a year ago." 
"If I'm not mistaken, are you not my uncle."

You might read this and wonder how this is different from other token transfer systems.  Well the devil is in the details, my friend.

See immediately, there is more role playing here.  You deliver your 'stakes' in a role playing fashion.  That's really neat.  The challenge (and tokens) can be accepted or declined.  If that happens you can insist (in which case it turns more into a standard try to outbid your opponent but that's neither here nor there).

But there is a fundamental difference here that I loved.  In other systems you immediately break character to do something called 'setting the stakes'.  This can be one sided (only the aggressor sets the stakes) or mutual (both characters set the stakes).  Setting the stakes has always felt clumsy and artificial.  They also often feel irrelevant.  Because setting the stakes sorts of games have 'clauses' to say that you can't kill another character or cause anything permanent to them.  So generally you slightly inconvenience another character for a few seconds to a few minutes. 

KC may have a rules glut but it's a harsh but fair system, compared to these 'polite' setting stakes games.  For stakes to have any meaning they really need to have some consequence.  I really didn't care that I was virused, knocked out and then dragged off by imps, in the supervillain game.  None of it had any real consequence.  I mean it was fun (and funny) but it ends up feeling entirely irrelevant.  It's more like a larping exercise than playing a larp itself.

So "If I'm not mistaken..." differs because, pretty much the only way you can deliver that statement is to have your 'stakes' introduce plot.  Yes, you can say "If I'm not mistaken, didn't I just punch you in the gut and take your sword." but hey...punching you and taking your sword will have consequences actually (especially given the setting). 

The statement used generates plot.  It is somewhat of a permission/bribe based system, however if you really want to, you can Insist, and go to a more aggressive 'cutthroat' bidding system.  I really like that if you accept he bribe you take the tokens but if you go to the cutthroat system all the tokens are lost.  That's a really neat way to differentiate between the polite and cutthroat. 

My main challenge in Houses was to Cindy.  In game I had killed her husband ten years ago.

"If I'm not mistaken, didn't we sleep together before I killed your husband." 

Good lord if that didn't change the entire dynamic between us.  Why did we sleep together?  Were we in love?  Why then, did I kill her husband?  Was I the jilted lover?  Did she cheat on him? 

None of these questions were answered and it was better for it.  Because the story was being developed by us, the players AND it was incredible organic.  It created tension between us, but at the same time, it created so many more unanswered questions.

I realized, that you could totally run a Lost game based on these rules.  Because that's exactly what it was.  Stay tuned and find out more between Cindy's character and I.  We (the actors and audience) don't know and in a future episode it will be revealed.  And what is brilliant about it all, is that we can transfer back and forth, who is the good and bad person. 

"If I'm not mistaken, YOU seduced me in a moment of weakness."  Immediately the dynamic is changed.  One of us is a manipulator.

"If I'm not mistaken, while I did use that opportunity to seduce you, I loved you from the moment I met you." and suddenly the seducer is redeemed in the eyes of the audience.

Simply brilliant.  It's one of those systems that makes a game designer super jealous...cuz I didn't think of anything as cool as that.  ;)

Houses has a great core system.  I didn't much care for the combat rules or much of it outside the core rules but I would have to try them again before I could fully decide.  The core rules were brilliant and the extended rules feel a bit tacked on.

Houses is a system that must be played with a mature audience.  Wankers could fuck with the system and the book completely accepts that and pretty much says, don't be wankers.

That's all well and good but then technically Cindy is a wanker.  And seriously anybody who knows Cindy knows she's she's a girl who loves the story and isn't out to ruin another person's game (outside of Catan that is).  But she did end up feeding tokens to an ally, which by the system does make her a wanker.  She would never do it again naturally and even she realized what she was doing after the game.  So calling a player a wanker because they did something that breaks the system doesn't always mean that that player intended to break the system.

It is also a system that I couldn't just accept as the One Ring.  I mean, it's excellent, do not get me wrong.  I would love to play it, I would love to run it, I would love to re-write KC with it.  However, it is a permission based system and I think it does not fit EVERY world out there.  A horror game wouldn't make for a great match for such a system.  So I loved it and feel a mental sigh of relief that I would not want to adopt this system for every game world out there. 

So anyway, that's my thoughts of Slarpa.  An excellent weekend, baring the stupid fucking beer festival at the hotel.  Seriously, Pilsner can go fuck themselves if they think that feeding non-stop beer to people at a bar and stuffing them into a hotel follows their BS ad requirements of "please drink responsibly". 

Summoning up a damn fine game

I promote clean rules over ‘messy’ rules any day. However, even when presented with a set of clean rules, even I have to do a double take sometimes.

Take Summoner Wars, a fantastic card game by Plaid Hat Games.

The rules are so clean, that only because people are so used to messy rules, is there any confusion.

In a game like Magic, you have so many timing issues and rules that it becomes somewhat confusing when a card can be played or whether one action triggers another card. In fact, I daresay, so many players have gotten use to multiple rule interpretation (i.e. how multiple people can interpret a rule differently) that it’s practically become the norm.

Summoner Wars has a lot of clean rules. They have very few exception based rules so it presents an odd challenge to a new player who reads an effect and is curious about how it works.

For example, several card effects say: At Any Time. We have been conditioned, by so many other games, that those three little words can often mean, at any time….during your activation…during your magic phase…during your butt scratching phase…whatever. But At Any Time can mean so many different things in so many different games.

Not so in Summoner Wars. At Any Time does mean just that. You can pretty much interrupt anything you want, except perhaps a dice roll itself, to use an ability or effect that says, At Any Time.

One figure says when touching ‘a wall’ they get a bonus. Does that mean any wall? My opponent’s walls? YES! The effect is very clear, but we are so used to mistakes, typos and other messy rules that we need clarification on really simple things.

Now then, Summoner Wars is a fantastic game, as I said. Why? In large part because it’s clean mechanics, but it’s also a smart mechanic.

In Summoner Wars (SW) you take the role of a Summoner who can…well…summon soldiers to fight and attack your opponent (who is also a Summoner). This isn’t Shakespeare here, but it’s un-similar to say, Magic: The Gathering (in which you play a ‘planeswalker’ who can summon monsters to kill other planeswalker).

In SW, however, you have a simple map, a grid, where your cards go. This adds a chess like aspect to the game as you move around the board. You get to Draw cards, Summon units, play Effect cards, Move up to 3 units, Attack with up to 3 units and then Build your Magic.

Now that last part is the trick to the game strategy. See you have a limited deck of cards. Your cards are either units (common troops or champions) OR effect cards (like spells from Magic: TG). You have maybe 25 unit cards and 9 effect cards. And that’s your deck for the entire game.

Once your deck is exhausted you cannot draw more cards.  You play with what you got on the board.

The key here is that Summoning…well it ain’t free. You need Magic (Mana if you will) to summon. Where does this Magic come from? Well, at the end of your round (in the Build Magic phase) you can discard any number of cards from your hand to build your Magic pool. Additionally when you kill an enemy unit you get to take that card and put it in your Magic pool. Then, in the following turn(s), you can spend that Magic to summon your units. Spending Magic puts it into the dicard pile and once there, it’s out of the game.

So your strategy is clear: What cards are you willing to put into your Magic pool? Throw away a cheap unit is fine, but once it’s in the Magic pool it’ll never be available for you to summon in that game. Do that too many times and you’ll run out of valuable units.

In this way the game features a Risk vs. Reward in which cards do you sacrifice to build your Magic. Throwing away too many units to allow you to summon an expensive Champion might be a good idea, but it might bite you in the ass if your opponent rolls over you (or butchers your champion).

The summoning of units leads to some interesting features itself. First, you have to summon next to a Wall. You get one Wall for free and there are three more in your deck available. Walls can be destroyed but in my experience, they are rarely worth the effort (except for the dwarves who have increased damage vs. Walls). Walls block movement and line of sight so they are highly useful both aggressively (so you can summon onto different parts of the board) and defensively.

Units do not suffer summoning sickness so they can be summoned, then move and attack. It can be quite disconcerting to wipe your opponent’s units from the board only to have new ones appear and do the same to you.

Combat is nice and simple. Units have attack values (ranging from 1 to 5) and you throw that many dice. On a 3+ you hit. That’s a 66% chance of success and a 33% chance of failure. I like that the odds favour success in this game. I consider that controlled luck.

Units can take from 1 to 9 points of damage but the bulk of units can take only 1 (maybe 2) so most common units are ‘johnny-born-to-die’). When you kill a unit you get to take that card and put it on your Magic pool (as mentioned before). This means you kinda need to play an aggressive game, because if you feed your opponent your own troops, you’re also giving him more Magic.

Now I’m mixed about the 3 Movement and 3 Attacks per round. It’s a solid rule and it’s simple, but I played a LOT of Wizkid’s stuff and was really (really) tired of the limited number of Actions in a round. It felt entirely artificial in that game and as the years rolled on, all Wizkid’s games just felt like chess games rather than wargames.

Having a limited number of Movement and Attacks in a round does at least allow the weaker player to have a continued chance. If an opponent has tons of units on the board, they will only be able to activate so many of them. It’s a balancing rule and I get that. But it will then always feel like a bit more abstract to me. More like you are playing a game rather than simulating summoners trying to kill each other. Therefore, clearly, this is a game first and not really a ‘simulation’.

There are four factions (currently) and each faction does in fact play differently from the others. Also each of the 4 factions is elemental based, however they do not come out and state that anywhere. But it’s a neat subtle touch.

• The dwarves (Earth) are tough (of course) and good at breaking down walls (of course).

• The elves (Fire) are good at forgoing the die rolls and causing automatic damage.

• The goblins (Air) are very cheap (like 0 cost) and have lots of extra movement and attack cards. Given a chance, they will swarm all over you.

• The orcs (Water albeit frozen) are the most luck based group with lots of units who get big bonuses IF they roll well. They also can put up weak Ice Wall and Freeze their opponents.

Each faction just ends up having different strategy to them and not just one strategy. I personally see how the Elves are the strongest faction and the Dwarves are the weakest and yet, on the forums, I can read how somebody has the opponent opinion. That’s not just two players being difficult – that’s us both seeing different strategies on how to play the game. I think even the game designer is surprised at how varied his game is.

Soon, there will be two new factions. Eventually, there will be merc cards to incorporate in your deck. Eventually, there might be more cards for each deck to allow for some deck building opportunities (currently you play with the starter deck and that’s it). This game has a LOT of potential. A couple of releases a year could allow for some real healthy re-playability.

To read about it will not do the game justice. It really needs to be played.

I’m very impressed with this game so far. My only problem with card games like this is the buy-in. While it’s very helpful to have set, limited decks, I find it hard to get other people that I know to play it enough times to challenge me. That statement isn’t as arrogant as you might first presume: If I teach 10 people to play it once, I’ve played the game 10 times and they’ve each played it once. I’ve likely played through all 4 decks while they’ve just played one. I know all their cards while they do not know mine. Regardless of my infamous luck, the advantage will be mine, until I can get other people to play it enough times to even our skill out.

Design Flaws

If you're a gamer then you're forced to use rules to govern your game.  At some point, you've probably come across a rule that was just a mistake on the part of the game designer.  I'm not talking about a typo or a See Page XX.  I'm talking that the game designer clearly made a mistake with something that takes away from your enjoyment of a product.

For my own part, I've found this only when a game based their product off of a license, such as Battlestar Galactica and Lord of the Rings. 

Say, speaking of which, those are my two recent beefs.  Funny how life works, huh?

The Cortex system got ahold of BSG the RPG and in it they have a blatant disregard for everybody's favorite Cylon: Model 6. 
If you've watched the show (trivial spoiler alert) # 6 can hold her own in a fight.  In fact, she actually tends to win every hand to hand fight we see her in.  In particular she beats the hell outta Starbuck who is awesomesauce at everything she does (heck she somehow manages to fight Apollo to a standstill...le sigh...ignoring that his bicep is as big as the actress' head...whatever that's another rant). 

Yet in Cortex, #6 is giving average human Strength, Agility and the near lowest Unarmed Fighting skill you can get (d2 being the lowest, she has d4).  WTF?  She barely lost a fight but she's absolute horribly by the game rules. 

Weak!

LotR put out a much beloved but now failed miniatures games.  Sabertooth games made it (god rest their gaming souls) and did a near perfect job on it.  It was one of my favorite minis games.  It did have a oddity (not a flaw) in that your forces would crash together...and after a blender of blood and hacking, you would wipe the board with tons of figures, leaving a handful of heroes. 

The game suffered a few other flaws but the one that truly killed me, like hurt my soul, was the Balrog.  Here was an awesome miniature (heh...it's like freaking huge!). 

Now the game is governed by d6's.  You get X number of attack dice and if you roll equal to or higher than the Toughness of the opponent, you score a wound!  So Toughness scores range from 1 (hurt by everything) to a 6 (hurt by very little)  Nice and simple. 

The only complexity is that if you roll a 1, you can spend an Action Point to convert that into a 6 (which again, will hurt everything in the game). 

So Tough figures like Aragon might have a 4 or 5.  The original version of Gimli was giving a 6. 

The Balrog?  The Balrog was given a 5.  Okay, for you math 'wiz's that means you have a 33% chance on any die of wounding the Balrog.  I mean a dude with an arrow who rolls 2 dice...on each die you have a 33% chance of wounding this ultimate beast.

...No wait...didn't I just say if you roll a 1 you can convert it into a 6.  Yes.  Yes I did.  And...it's the motherfracking Balrog.  Why would you NOT convert your 1's into 6's?!? 

So on a 1 (converted to a 6) and a natural 5 or 6 you wound the Balrog.  That's 50% of the dice thrown will wound the Balrog.  But not Gimli.  Remember he's tougher with a 6 (allowing only 16% of the hits to wound him or 33% if they are converted from a 1).

Is this the sissy version of the Balrog?  The Balrog in the back who didn't want to fight, who just wants to pick flowers and discuss women's fashion during bridge with its friends?   I'm pretty sure he's got a flaming sword and a whip and breaths fire...but the Balrog who does that is certainly not this uber expensive miniature who can get its ass handed to it but a bunch of Gondorians with steel blades and elves with wooden arrows. 

Anyway, I'll just end my rant with: Greatest.  Tragedy.  Evar.  (In.  A.  Miniatures.  Game.)

Top Ten Games

Ignoring games of my own creation, which would be obvious choices for me (I liked them cuz I wrote them), I thought I would list my top ten games. Of course, this a lot harder than one would think. What do you base your favourite game on?

For me I guess it’s a mix. The system has to be at least functional and the setting has to be good. However, more and more, I realize that I like the mechanics of many of my favourite games less. I mean, they were functional back in the day. But every game has it’s flaws.

#11 - Tunnels and Trolls

Rules: ???

Setting: ???

Fun Factor: 5/5



I place T&T here only because it was my first. You never forget your first, do you.



T&T wasn’t a great system. I barely remember it, but it was made magical by my father who drew out the dungeon map onto a very large card stock paper and then hid it with sheets of paper. As we progressed into the dungeon, he would reveal sections of it, as much as our torches could reveal.



I was ten and played with my two sisters and one of my dad’s friends. And so, the obsession began.



#10 Cyberpunk 2013 & 2020

Rules: 2/5

Setting: 3/5

Fun Factor: 3/5



I had a lot of fun with Cyberpunk, despite its rules. The rule system was a little drab. Combat was supposed to be fast and deadly but it suffered from the Too Much Armour syndrome, which allows a player to pack way too much armour to make themselves bullet proof.



Still, I ran it for years, so it has to make the list for nostalgias sake. It wasn’t much more than D&D but in the future. Most of the game (and cyberwear) revolved around combat. What would have made this game great (instead of good) would be attention to the stress and pain of the dystopian future that they presented. There was a vague humanity system but it was just an ON/OFF switch. You were either fine (albeit crappy at social rolls) or insane (Cyberpsychosis). Where they really should have focused was the dirty and gritty nature of life on the streets. They talks a lot about chop shops putting on an arm but never really gave you rules that governed low grade cyberwear or that dirty filthy doctor who infects your wounds. Instead, cyberwear was shiny and guns were big and you killed anybody who looked at you wrong and there wasn’t much that the cops could do about it.



#9 Vampire

Rules: 3/5

Setting: 5/5

Fun Factor: 4/5



The original Vampire does hold a special place in my heart. It was one of the first games that I experience where you didn’t really dish out XP for killin’ monsters but for the story.



I ran quite a few stories with this game and they really were stories, more than adventures. The original setting was top notch. Truly brilliant design where you had a lot of vampire ‘class’ that opened up and got better over the years.



The rules were okay and showed their wild randomness over the years (and you can note as the years went by, the default difficulty that started at 6+ on a d10 became 7+ and then 8+, which is funny because they actually should have gone the opposite way, making earning Successes easier, not harder).



This became my true beef with the system. The setting suggested you could do things that you simply could not do with the system, such as a group of Sabbat taking out and destroying a Methuselah (the rules for higher Gens were so ridiculously disproportioned that it would have been impossible to make this true).



As the game progressed, the bloat of setting (including all the other games in the World of Darkness) began to really weigh the system and setting down. Still, showed me that games were about stories and not about home invasion and monster killing.



#8 Shadowrun/Earthdawn

Rules: 3/5

Setting: 5/5

Fun Factor: 3/5



I probably shouldn’t put both games here but they are both special in their own way.



Shadowrun came out first and I played the hell outta it. The rules were very complex (by today’s standards) but quite solid. You did have your wildly random rolls every once in a while but this was ameliorated by the fact that you could get very large dice pools. A single shot could take quite a bit of dice rolling. I would never go for this sort of game now, because it’s just too much math.



I found Earthdawn to be a more enjoyable game of the two, rules wise. I used dice steps: Step 1 was a d4, Step 2 was a d6, etc, etc. Beyond D20 you would add another d4. The slight flaw of the system was that it is far better to roll more dice to hit your averages than to roll larger dice, such as the D20. Dice would explode, meaning if you rolled the highest result on the dice, you could roll again. Rolling a d6 then allows a 16% chance to roll again where rolling a d20 allows a 5% chance of rolling again. It seemed unfair to roll the d20 sometimes, especially when you’re like me and roll pretty tepid. It was far better for my orc warrior to hold back some of his strength to get a better combo of dice than the d20+d4. Absurd that holding back would amount to better averages of damage, but that was the system.



That being said, Shadowrun and Earthdawn introduced some amazing stuff for magic.



Shadowrun had a complex but rewarding system. They made sure that magic had as much depth as guns. If you could pimp out your guns and gear, you could pimp out your mage as well. Talismans and spirits could be used to bolster your mage to make them every bit the equal of a street samurai. Another neat feature that Shadowrun brought to the table was Drain. Instead of the D&D X number of spells per day, each spell could just rob you of some of your Endurance. If that theft was too overwhelming the spell could physically harm the mage. Due to the spell pool, you could decide how many extra dice you wanted to throw into your spell and how many you wanted to reserve for fighting off the drain. A smart mage could find a good balance between the two and fling fireballs until the cows came home.



Earthdawn, on the other hand, introduced something called Willforce, a power which created the underlying strength of your spells. Your 1st Circle spells were never useless because you could always increase your Willforce. Earthdawn also introduced the connect that magic was connected and thus you would tie threads to a spell to make it function. This tying of threads carried through to mean that making a magic item required the spell caster to tie a thread to the item permanently. It would mean that they were connected to the item for all time. That allowed magic items to be both rare and more interesting and also to grow over time (because you could make the item more and more powerful of the years). Additionally, the neat thing is that particularly powerful creatures and other wizards could see those threads and use them to launch spells down the line to the original mage. Solid gold.



Like Vampire, the fun in both games was strong but the rules tended to get in the way just a bit. It was less apparent with Earthdawn, but in Shadowrun, there wasn’t always a good balance. Trolls for example were wildly more powerful than humans, at least physically. You could literally shoot a troll in the face and have it do absolutely nothing. Not cool.



I’ve heard a lot of bashing of 3rd edition Shadowrun and I’m not really sure why. The original was pretty complex, which was okay in the hands of a good GM. The new one looks fine to me. *shrugs*



#7 Sla Industries

Rules: 3/5

Setting: 4/5

Fun Factor: ???



Before I start this, I will admit, I’ve never run a Sla Industries game. I’ve wanted to, but the setting is just elusive enough that…well…I wouldn’t know how to do it justice.



Sla Industries presents itself to be nothing more than a gun bunny game. You get the biggest armour you can afford and the biggest gun and you try to make a name for yourself as a corporate shill, known as an Operative (Op for short) for Sla Industries. It’s a world where violence is not just the answer for everything, it’s the worlds biggest entertainment industry. You can compete in gladiatorial games and if you’re good enough, you’ll get a sponsor and go on TV.



Sla Industries (the corporation, not the game) promises that you can have everything you want. The only price for this is not to ask questions.



But…wait…what questions are there to ask? I mean, what is the question to ask about this ultra violent bleak dystopian world? And that was the hook for this game. The company owns absolutely everybody, so what the hell are the secrets behind it that you could be murdered in your sleep by even asking? I mean what is the question to even ask?



The concept is a bit far fetched and after much searching I finally discovered the Truth behind Sla Industries and it is ridiculous to the extreme (it is not uninteresting but it does not share the right theme of Sla Industries and breaks some serious rules of universe building). This is why I’ve only given it a 4/5 for setting.



The problem I’ve always had with Sla Industries is that I have no clue how to run it. I mean, as the GM you kinda have to be a mega douche bag in a number of ways to run it well. The people who are hunting anybody who asks questions are way too powerful and as such, if the GM wants the campaign to last longer than the first character posing a question against Sla Industries, they will have to end up saving the characters with mega powerful allies.



But some part of me is still in love with the style over substance that is presented in Sla Industries. It has a metric ton of potential which I don’t think it fully capitalized on.



Savage Sla is a PDF that some fine bloke created which uses the rules of Savage Worlds (see later) and the setting of Sla Industries. And it’s good. I would probably use Savage Sla before restoring to the Sla Industries rules. Not that the actual rules are bad, but they do focus on some trivial details which I, as a GM, no longer care about (such as recoil modifiers for your guns and the like). Also, they don’t try to be balanced, so a Stormer character (giant grey hulk) will pretty much win every close combat fight (but the creature is stupid and I cannot imagine the simplistic role playing that you would be forced into).





#6 Ars Magika

Rules: 2/5

Setting: 4/5

Fun Factor: 4/5



I make it no secret, I love magic systems. Ars Magika does not have a great magic system. Don’t get me wrong, it’s well thought out and has some neat designs to it, but at the end of the day their spontaneous magic system is: Figure out what the player wants to do, go through this list of 400 spells and find one that is comparable. There’s your target number. WTF?



What Ars Magika did well however was introduce a plausible troupe style system and a setting where the characters were encouraged not to go adventuring but to hunker down and create a living breathing home, called a Chantry.



The Chantry was as much a character as the players were and if you could get the players to really buy into their home, it could be quite excellent. Adventures could be to go get some rare books for their library (i.e. increase the value of their library which would in turn allow them to research more powerful spells in the downtime).



Ars Magika was a slow paced game, moving in seasons of time. A very interesting and different approach, made possible, in part, by the troupe style of play.



You see, you didn’t make 1 character but at least 3. One wizard, one companion and at least 1 grog (a servant). The GM had the luxury of running a session for any combination of the group. Maybe there is a dragon that requires all the wizards to come out and play. Or maybe one Wizard has to make a journey and the other players are expected to play their companions or grogs. Maybe you want to see how the grogs do in the village bar one evening. You have a lot of great options with this game.





#5 - Champions

Rules: 1 & 5/5

Setting: 1/5

Fun Factor: 4/5



Ahhh, Champions. The Hero System. One of the best and worst systems out there.



Champions boasted that you could make any superhero, evar. And it gave you a system to do exactly that! I’ve not found a character that I could not re-create with the Champions points buy system.



And is it fair? Well of course it is. Not. Which is why I give it both a 1 and a 5 for Rules. The system is convoluted and it allows some of the most horrific min-maxing known to nerdom. It’s a system that allows you to do advanced math to squeeze points of your ass to build a character who is not unlike a god. At the same time, if you don’t know the system well or desire to design a more down to earth character, you can easily be outclassed.



So it gets a 5 for versatility. You really, truly can build any hero (super or otherwise) with the system. And a 1 because there is no good way to create a check and balance system for it.



It has a terrible setting, the world of Champions. Wooo. With such award winning heroes and Defender and…well that’s the only character I know from the world (it was that memorable). I even played Champions Online and can’t remember any of the characters there.



The world is forgettable and weak. But I don’t know anybody who used it. You use your own world or just put everybody into the DC or Marvel universe and…go!



The fun factor is pretty high because if you CAN get a good group working and your GM knows their stuff (as I once, long ago did) you can make the system sing, dance and strut its stuff. You can knock off superhero fights like there is no tomorrow.



My common complaint about Champions is a simple one: Like most other systems, other than the occasional knock-back there is no reason to move once you’ve engaged in combat with a foe. A superhero system is one that begs to have large amounts of movement, where movement is encouraged by complimenting combat.



#5.1 – Marvel Super Heroes – Saga system

Rules: 5/5

Setting: 5/5

Fun: 5/5



Damn, I’m already cheating (well again). Champions is my classic game, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Marvel Super heroes using the Saga system.

The Saga system appeared for a Dragonlance setting and Marvel Super heroes. It’s fine if you haven’t heard of it: by and large it failed. However, it was, without a doubt, one of the best superhero systems out there.

Basically there are four stats and everything you do has to be linked to one of those stats (the D&D version had 8 stats). There are 5 suites of cards, 4 of which are linked to the stat and one of which is the GM’s suite (in this case the Doom cards).

You would throw down a card and add your stat plus the card value. If you could match your stat with your cards, you could flip the top card over and add that value as well. If that one match you could do it again (and again).

To add some brilliance to the design, when you got hurt you would have to give up cards from your hand. When you did this, you would have to give up a value of cards equal to the damage. Simple but it gets better: When you discard a card for damage, you lower your hand size. So your hand size represents not just your health but your options. Characters like the Hulk were brutally tough (very high damage resistance) but only standard experience level (4 cards) but characters like Captain America had tons of experience and so he would have 6 cards (the highest number of cards you could have).

Losing cards in this fashion limited your options, but it doesn’t make you particularly weaker (you could still have a great card in your hard to hit the baddy with).

Ultimately the Saga system is great for a more lite game. It would be possible, for example, for any hero to be able to strike and harm anything in the Marvel universe if they kept getting the top card to match their stat. It may have only happened once in all the games I ran or played it, but one player got high enough to actually harm Galactis (not buy much but any amount of damage for this character, who threw feathers, would be silly).

The Saga system had one thing going for it over die: It was fun. It’s a lot of fun to pick the right card for the right situation and get to flip the top card on the deck and see if you can pull off some high numbers.



#4 - Kult

Rules: 2/5

Setting: 5/5

Fun Factor: 4/5



This was a real treat from the Sweds who are, as far as I can tell, pretty fucked up. The original Kult had misdirection when it had it’s rules. The world begged for a brutal and simply system but the rules were just one shade too convoluted for it.



At it’s core, it was a simple d20 system. The damage was very random but most weapons had an auto chance of killing a human which was effectively brutal. Mind you a lot of what you fought could take multiple Mortal wounds, so things that would kill a human wouldn’t stop these horrors.



The world of Kult was one that I will always love. I can’t even compare it to the better known Cthluthu because I find the later to be much of a joke. In Cthluthu there is no real hope. You can’t win. You can stave off the inevitable but I say, why bother? It’s like Japanese Horror movies: If there was no chance of beating the evil in the first place, what was the point of it all.



Kult was a much more robust world. Death, as they say, was only the beginning. That is both true and false. It is false because in most campaigns, once your character is dead, you have to do the traditional: make a new character. But it is also true in that, there is an entire aspect of the game which deals with life, death and rebirth. It would be possible for a GM to explore the death and soul of a character and their journey in the hereafter, but it’s not entirely encouraged.



What goes on behind the scenes is ultimately fascinating. This is a well written, vibrant and fiercely dark world. There is a huge lie going on (and it would be criminal of me to just reveal it here) and the players can try to find the truth of not. The difference between Kult and Sla Industries, where the Truth lies, is that in Sla Industries there is nobody to ask the questions of which doesn’t immediately incriminate you. The moment you ask the question, what the frak is going on, is the moment you’re on the radar and your life is over. In Kult, while there are titanic forces at work…there are sources that can answer the question for you which doesn’t always put you on the radar to so speak. In fact, a character can go insane (or find somebody who is insane) and glean some clues to reality. The bad guys want to stop you but they are totally and completely self involved in their own affairs and they are not prone to working well together so they might send one horrible creature after you and presume that everything went according to plan.



Kult is a powerful world, better I believe than the Cthluthu one because ultimately, mankind has a very powerful role in things and all the monsters can’t take that away from them. They can kill a human but they cannot snuff out it’s soul, so in the big cosmos, they have less power than you might think. Mind you, they still ‘ended you’ and so you generally ‘lost’ to them this time, but it’s very neat to be able to realize that, well, death is only the beginning.



Above all else, Kult features a host of bizarre, flesh wrapped monstrosities that are borderline stolen from Cenobites of Clive Barker’s mind. And c’mon now, who doesn’t love Pinhead and his buddies. Ignoring the convoluted and awful movies, Kult has that same feel, where the boundaries of life and death, passion and madness are a little too close to each other.



While I’ll never stoop to using the archaic rules system of Kult, I love the world and will use that in a heartbeat.





#3 - Savage Worlds/Cortex

Rules: 4/5

Setting: ???

Fun Factor: 4/5



Two, two, two systems in one. Well maybe not. How about, one system, Savage Worlds comes out and uses many decent ideas. Then another system comes out, Cortex, and practically steals most of the ideas but tweaks them.



Both system are without setting. SW tends to promote pulp style of play while Cortex is a bit more gritty (primarily so only because it’s damage system is a bit more brutal).



Both systems feature a dice ladder, which is similar to the one used in Earthdawn. A stat or skill is defined as a die type, often starting at d4 and increasing from there. Thus a character might have a d6 Strength or d10 Intellect.



One difference lies in the fact that SW’s skills are limited by the associated stat but when you roll you roll either Stat OR skill. Cortex does not link skills to stats and when you roll you roll the Stat die and the skill die and add them together.



In both cases, the average difficulty is based on giving the d6 a 50% chance. Thus in the single roll system (SW) your base difficulty is 4, giving a single d6 and 50% chance of generating a success. Cortex, using two dice, puts their difficulty at 7 (the average of 2d6).



Multiple dice create a bell curve that that is more attractive to me.



Still, in both system luck plays a huge factor. So to combat this SW has Bennies and Cortex has Plot Points. Bennies generally let you re-roll. Plot Points let you add more to your roll and can be used before the roll (giving a higher potential bonus) or after the roll (giving a flat bonus). Re-rolls are better for crap rolls whereas Plot Points are better if you just miss your target number but a smidge.



Ultimately, both systems set out what they aim to do. They make a system that is versatile and fast. It’s really easy to adjudicate situations in both games (albeit it’s a touch easier in SW because they really have 1 core difficulty of 4, whereas Cortex has like 8 difficulty levels). Games like D&D turned me off because there is a rule for everything and you have to check up how much you can add to your jump distance with a successful roll and all that. SW/Cortex is just roll and go.



The combat system is quite similar but Cortex wins 2 out of 3 areas. First their attack and defense system is better. In SW, characters have a pretty crappy static defense. In Cortex, you can accept your crappy static defense or use an action to make your defense an opposed rolls. Aces for opposed rolls in combat.



The damage system in SW is convoluted. They really tried to get away from Hit Points (bless their hearts) but in doing so they created a system where you have a lot of hitting but nothing happening because your damage roll has to be pretty high to hurt some of your opponents. Cortex wins here too, reverting to Life points (co-HP-ugh!) but splitting up the damage to Stun and Wound. Damage is the difference between your attack-defense and then you roll your weapon die on top of that. It’s just enough crunch to make things interestin’.



What SW did introduce was the concept of Shaken. This is a generic effect that can be caused by pretty much anything, such as a kick to the nads, to being distracted by the pretty lights to being pinned under fire. Shaken is such a great addition to the game because you have generic non-attacks called Tricks that can be used to cause the Shaken effect. Tricks are unexpected things that allow you to rattle your opponent. A Shaken opponent cannot act until they recover from being Shaken. It’s a neat way to at least affect an opponent who might otherwise be too tough. In fact it carries through because if you Shake an opponent twice, they are wounded (the restriction here is that you cannot shake somebody with a Trick twice to wound them, but you use a Trick to shake them and then hit them somewhat lightly to Shake them again and viola, you’ve wounded an otherwise tough opponent). The theory is sound but in gameplay I’ve never seen it come up.



SW has always been my go-to system but I’m going to give Cortex a good long try. I suspect, because the damage system is cleaner and easier and it has a bell curve, I will enjoy it more.



#2 - Warhammer Fantasy Role-play (3rd edition)

Rules: 5/5

Setting: 5/5

Fun Factor: 4/5



I’ve made it no secret that I love the new Warhammer (WFR). The previous editions had the Warhammer world going for it but used a very flat percentile system for the mechanics. I’ve worked with percentile systems a fair bit over the years and they bore me to death. Unless you alter the rules, it’s pretty much on/off. You either succeed or fail and there are no degrees by which you do either. So you can pretty much parry an Ogre’s attack as easily as a Skaven’s attack because the system doesn’t take into account the Ogre’s massive strength. Mind you, Ogres are 8 foot tall walls of muscle, but they are only slightly stronger than a human (I mean by their stats) so I guess I was fooling myself by looking at their pictures. Oh yes, and all their stat lines may have been fucked.



Ever since D&D and Warhammer both came out, both of which are games that focus heavily on combat, you’ve gotten into the “I attack” combat situations. For a long time there was little more than the player announcing that “attack” and rolling a die. It’s been a lot of fun over the years but it’s a bit tired.



D&D was smart enough to realize this and came out with their Powers based system, where you all but abandon basic attacks and everything has flavour. It was a step in the right direction but one which ultimately still ends up returning to its roots because the players end up using their small pool of powers over and over again so they become about as rote as “I attack”.



Warhammer tried a slightly different direction, using Action cards. Every player gets a number of Action cards which depicts basic or advanced attacks. Instead of limited how many times per fight or day that you can use these Actions cards (aka D&D), your Action cards have a recharge rate which determines how many rounds must pass before using your Action card again. It is a bit complex, especially at first, to be tracking so many cards but it does allow for some very neat and more importantly, very visual combat. You can actually build a fighting style for your character.



They have a neat defense system, where your Action cards can Parry (if you have a weapon), Dodge or Block (if you have a shield) and then advanced and better versions of each of those but with higher requirements. When attacked, you’re free to react with a defense card which will make your opponent’s attack slightly harder. The trick is, your defense cards have a Recharge rate, so if you throw out a Parry against the first Beastman, you will not have it ready for the second, instead having to rely on a Dodge or Block reaction. As a GM I really appreciate this because I can visualize this very well and it gives a player good control over their defense without making them invulnerable.



There is nothing to say, however, that you could just end up taking a set of cards with a 1 Recharge value and using them every round, thus it’s still possible to get into a “I attack” syndrome. Players are notorious for finding and utilizing the ‘best’ attack, which makes sense from a game perspective. If two weapon fighting nets you a bonus over a basic attack and only has a trivial risk associated to it, then you use the two weapon fighting card ad nauseam.



The dice mechanic in WFR is new, fresh and bold. Instead of numbers they use symbols and you use those symbols to interpret the results. Lots of ‘hit’ symbols results in a stronger hit. Lots of Boon symbols results in a bonus that happens which doesn’t necessarily translate into damage (such as knocking an opponent on their ass with a hammer weapon). Consequently there are plenty of symbols, none of which (on their own) are hard to interpret. But a single roll could take a fair bit more ‘handling’ time than most games, because with every action you have to build a dice pool, then roll, then interpret the results based on the card used and the GM input (where Banes – which are bad things – are rolled).



That being said, the bit of playtesting I’ve done with it showed some remarkable results. In one case, the party heard the braying of quickly closing beastmen, and were forced to make a Willpower roll to avoid stress. The dwarf made his roll successfully, but received a couple of Banes. The environment card that was out suggested that 2 Banes while performing physical activity would result in a character twisting their ankle, but I decided to allow that in this instance, because it was dare cool. The dwarf didn’t necessarily lose his cool, but the braying made him nervous enough that he took a step back, onto a piece of rock that was clearing unbalanced and he tumbled backwards, twisting his ankle.



They say that the dice can tell a story and in many ways they can. That was an excellent example of how the dice helped conjure up a perfect image in my head and the rules helped promote that random incident. In other games, if a character made his roll, it might be unfair or railroading if I were to then say, “well you aren’t really scared but you trip anyway.”. But here, I’m allowed to interpret some of the results of the player’s rolls.



WFR has a lot of tools at the GM’s hands as well. Monsters have basic stats but they also have bonus dice that the GM can use on any roll that they wish. No more do I need a massive list of skills that Orc A possesses. Are they putting an Aggression, Cunning or Expertise towards this roll? If so, then I can see if they have an additional dice that I’m allowed to add.



Finally, the monsters in the book are, final-fucking-ly, appropriately tough for, well, being monsters. The various races have their flavour and Orcs, who have biceps as large as my chest, have appropriately high Strength stats.



By and large, the whole game seems to ‘fit’ right. The game is not what I would call rules light but it does have a lot of stuff that is wide and open for GM interpretation. This is very good in the hands of a good GM and bad in the hands of a poor GM.



I only don’t give it the number 1 spot because I know that with such drastic rules (action cards, interpretive dice, etc) that there are the usual host of problems that will occur with the system. It’s a system that promotes a high success rate which means that the players will enjoy succeeding at most actions that they do. Characters can end up getting massive dice pools which leads to more handling time. Also there will be times where the imagination engine (GM’s brain) runs dry when trying to interpret Boons and Banes for a heavy rolling game.



Furthermore, whereas most games come out and are reasonably complete, Warhammer 3rd edition is not. I mean you can play it, but it’s missing the higher levels of Magic (both Wizards and Priests). The monster list is pretty small. There are no Halflings in the game (not that I care but some people will). This game needs a lot of expansions and they are coming, but very slowly. For the ideas that I have, I couldn’t even run this without a few more books that are coming out this year (2010).





#1 - Fate

Rules: 3/5

Setting: ???

Fun Factor: 3/5



The astute might have noticed that I’ve not assigned Fate particularly high scores in rules and fun factor. This is because Fate brings something entirely different to the table.



First the bad: Fate’s core mechanic is based on a very simple principle. Skill + dice roll. Simple enough, but the dice are proprietary and have only 3 results on them. A negative, a blank and a positive (2 of each). What this means is that you can have a bonus that swings from +4 to – 4 (or an 8 point swing) with an average of zero bonus or negative assigned to your skill. But there is a way to get an automatic +2 to a roll and a way to re-roll a particularly bad throw, thus, I found that in general, a character will gain some sort of bonus to their skill.



Factor in that skill values start as high as 4 or 5 and that the default difficulty for a lot of actions should be 1, you’ve got a system that will see players pass their skills rolls rather casually.



It isn’t a bad system but it doesn’t bring to the table all the crunchy bits that the new Warhammer does. Really it’s just a pass or fail system. The GM can make it easier or hard by assigning a difficulty and that’s about it.



What Fate brings to the table, is something entirely different: Aspects. Instead of a hardline set of stats/attributes, the game attempts a more literary interpretation. It presumes that your character is baseline (average) unless you tell it. Therefore Aspects are your own personal description and they tell the story what is important about the character. If your character is very strong, then you are free to buy that as an Aspect. The brilliant thing about this is that it brings us one step closer to books and movies. Take any character from a show or book. Now build that character in a standard system. Let’s see, John Mclane from the Die Hard films. Well, he’s slightly above average in strength (good pipes on Bruce Willis), ummm, I guess he’s probably a bit smarter than your average bear, is he more charismatic? I dunno, probably not? Oh but he certain has a great constitution or would he just have a lot of hit points?



I feel that we play games to image ourselves in fantastic settings, as displayed or told in movies/TV and books. But we use complex rules to define our characters primarily because RPG’s have their firm roots in war games. It’s something that we by and large, refuse to get away from. Fate brings us one step closer to the movies or books.



The point being, unless the author mentions that John Mclane has fantastic physical strength, then it doesn’t matter to the book and thus it doesn’t matter to Fate.



The Aspects can then be used to define unique traits or items, things that are more powerful than the norm but cannot be used all the time. This is a bit of a tricky situation as this is a very literary concept. To give you the best example, think of Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility. He uses it, maybe 2-4 times in the book, whereas a real person would use it…like…24/7 to solve all their problems. Harry doesn’t because the author is smart enough to realize that the cloak is plot device and should not always be used to solve the plot. It would make for a dull climax if Harry just walked up to somebody at the end of the book and blasted them with a surprise attack cuz he was invisible.



Unique traits or items in Fate are purchased like Aspects but they fall into a more nebulous area. You gain a very cool ability, such as the cloak, a One True Sword, a spaceship or whatever you want with this. Then you gain a number of uses per story. Simple. Basically you can use this item to help make a situation easier to solve. But you can only use it so many times per game. This is where we as players can get a little stuck in our old ways. “It makes no sense that I can’t use the cloak again!” The idea here is that you have to make up a reason why you can’t use the cloak again. You forgot it at home. You did put it on, but the werewolf could smell you and pounces on you knocking the cloak off. It begins to rain which disrupts the flow of the cloak and so you resign yourself to taking it off, since it’s not helping.



Fate’s Aspects are such a massive step in the right direction for games that it propels this to my number 1 game, because I feel that this holds the best potential for rules-lite games. In a Fate game, I put down my character sheet and I role play. The sheet is an aid but the character isn’t defined by stats. It was defined by me. That’s such an excellent and exciting direction for games, that I can’t wait to see it implemented more.

Do I Get a Say?

When a video game company makes their new Action or RPG game, they must at some point make a vital decision: Who will the main character be and will they be a character of the designers construction or the players?


The decision needs to be based on how much emotional investment you want from the player. Video games as a form of art is becoming more and more popular and for that to happen, you need to silicate emotions from your players.

I remember playing Dead Space (Xbox 360) a while back and while the game was fun enough, it never drew me in. The reason for this was very obvious (but two fold): The main character never uttered a single line. The only time he made a sound was when he was choking (the voice acting on that was very well done). There were other characters in the game which spoke to you but you never responded to them. You even had a girlfriend aboard this space station of horror and never spoke any fond words to her (Ripley when back for her damn cat, in Alien...and you don't even have one kind word to say to your girlfriend...damn that's cold).

This for me was a killer. While the gameplay was fun, I could not at all get invested in my character and because I was never invested, it was hard to get the emotional response which the game was trying to looking, in this case fear. My character had zero personality and (the other prong of the two fold problem) did not reaction in any way to his environment (other than breathing heavy during the outdoor space scenes and low oxygen moments). But giant monsters leap down at him and…he reacts not at all.

When your character has no reactions and no voice, it is downright near impossible for me, as a player, to invest any emotion into them. Dead Space was pretty, fun and had some cheap scares. And that’s it.

But then we come to the conflict: Dragon Age vs. Heavy Rain (the former of which I’ve finished, the later of which I’m only ½ through).

Dragon Age does not feature a full voice actor for your main character but it does feature a character creation system. Heavy Rain has 1 main character and 3 other (almost equally important) characters that you play.

Near the end of Dragon Age, though, I couldn’t help but feel a little distanced from my character. Here I was, in an otherwise intense scene with the ‘main’ bad guy and the dickwad who killed my parents and while my text options can imply that I can be emotional here, my character does not actually deliver these (or any) lines in the game. There is no emotional outpouring from my character, yet the characters around me have the emotion and the voice acting to go along with it. This scene really frustrated me because when the camera was on my character, she was stoic and blank faced (pretty much like she had been throughout the game). My enemies could sneer, scoff and yell at me, but I could not react, except with harsh text options.

Now playing through Heavy Rain, with pre-set characters, it would take a very hardened player not to become emotionally invested with the main character. He is well voice acted but also as importantly, the characters ‘acts’. When he goes through pain, whether physical or emotional, he really reacts to it. I feel very sorry for him and the awful situations he is put through. Half way through the game and he’s been put through physical hell and I can really feel it. The actor gets the emotion across.

So, in my books, Heavy Rain succeeds at drawing me in, far more than Dead Space and somewhat more than Dragon Age.

The reason I’m torn is because Dragon Age did create a level of emotional investment, but it wasn’t as strong as it has been during Heavy Rain. In Dragon Age, all the emotion needs to come from two places: The NPC’s (who are free to emote and are voice acted) and the player’s own mind. Without a actor/voice actor for your character, you the player are supposed to ‘edit’ in your own emotional content and your text selection is provided as an outlet, to display that in game.

There was some emotional investment that I felt near the end of the game. There are some great scenes with your companions give you a stiff upper lip scene about how you’re probably all going to die but maybe you’ll survive this. That scene was very touching as was the end scene that I choose. However all this emotion was again, portrayed exclusively by the NPC’s. The character I played in that game was wooden and for that, I could pretty much care less about her. The NPC’s lives meant more to me at the end than my ‘main’ character.

After playing Heavy Rain, there is something immensely different about playing a stoic, voiceless character choosing a text option and a playing a person actually crying over trying to find his son.

Also, Heavy Rain has been one of the first games that actually rattled me, the player, during a scene. The scene was one where an ally was in danger and I had a gun in my hand. First, they do a fantastic job of realizing when the character is nervous and as such, all your options become jittery and hard to quickly process and read. So clearly in this situation all my options were very jittery. Second, the scene does not pause at all. The bad guy here was yelling and freaking out and my ally was asking me for help. So, I as the player, being drawn into this well acted scene, was just as nerve wracked as my character was. With all the jittery text floating around his head, I saw only one thing that didn’t fit: R1 (the others were literally text like Negotiate or Calm, or something). But I focused on the simplest text I could see: R1. Hmmm, what does that do…

BLAM!!! Holy fuck, did I just shoot that NPC in the head?!? Yes…yes I did. R1 must have meant: to shoot. All the other options were to try to talk him down, but the scene was frantic and I, as the player, was drawn entirely into the scene and oh my god, I just shot the guy.

And that’s when I knew that Heavy Rain was art. People will critic the gameplay (which is really just a series of quicktime events, which I happen to love and other’s happen to hate) and the short playtime (it’s probably only 10 hours long) but I’ve never, ever been drawn into a game where I feel the emotional roller coaster of these people’s lives. I felt earnestly bad about giving into the frantic scene and shooting that guy but how glorious it all was that it managed to pull me in so completely. (What’s worse is that the guy I killed, while a bit loco is pretty much innocent).

I think, however, that this will come down to a potato potatoe debate. Some players probably feel a disconnect when they are ‘forced’ to play a pre constructed character and many will prefer to have a voiceless character in the Bioware style games because any voice acting just wouldn’t be their voice. (Let’s not ignore the fact that you would have to hire at several voice actors to deliver the same lines, at least 1 male and 1 female and if you didn’t have one for your human, dwarf and your elf, the nerd rage would be overwhelming. So that’s a minimum of 6 more voice actors and you would still have some nerd be annoyed because they didn’t like the particular voice actor).

But I’ve come to realize, for me, I cannot be invested in a character that I play unless they have their own voice and are free to emote. I don’t need to play Trent the Barbarian if Trent has no personality in the game. I am much more eager to play Ethan Mars, the guy who has the shittiest life in the world of Heavy Rain and when in pain, cries out to be heard.

Board Game Design

I have only a passing desire to ever design a board game. There is a lot of work and it seems like something that most definately requires a team.

There is a two fold reason why board game design occurs to me. First, I do have a game in mind. I have the concept but not the mechanics (or much). I doubt very much whether this will even see any work on my part beyond the concept but who knows.

The idea was to create a semi co-op game that could be played with 4-8 players. Players pair up with a partner, one of which is the monach of a country, the other which is a Archon of a god. The land as a whole is under siege from the forces of darkness, which is represented entirely by the game itself (much in the way that Shadows over Camalot runs it's evil). The idea is that you must lead your nation to victory.

The concept was a way to bridge a bunch of ideas. First, boys like to play with little army men, but when you have them in a game, the lady-folk often dismiss the idea of playing. So I would see that the monach would typically appeal to the lads. That would leave the role of the Archon to be focused to the hands of the women-folk. This leads into what the role of the Archon serves in the game.

The bad guy of the game would be undead and their undeadness causes some sort of blight. This blight plagues the lands and spreads from the central area. This blight can only be fought directly by the Archon who can clean it up. Now I know this is a generalization but it's been brought to my attention (a few times from a few of the ladies) that girls tend to like the war stuff less and but the 'cleaning up' part more. It's not meant to be sexist so much as appeal to a psychological desire. Women do not like to clean any more than men do. But I think women appreciate a clean place way more than men do in general. Therefore the idea of contributing, fixing, repairing, etc allows the women to feel like they are making a significant contribution to the game. The role of the Archon would be more involved but their general power lies not in fighting but in acts of divinity and cleansing.

The only other idea that I've worked out is that, if you work together, your nations will have an okay chance to win, if you manage to conquer other nations first, you will stand a better chance to beat the evil at the end. Do you work with or against the other players? I would want the option to be yours.

One of the reasons to make this type of game is because I've found that there are not enough games that support up to 8 players. Another reason is to have a game that supports and encourages boys and girls to play a stategy game together.

Why am I struck with all these board game thoughts? Marvel Heroes board game (MHBG).

See, the MHBG is an example of a convoluted and poorly balanced game. MH is a 4 player team based game where you take the role of one of the teams of super heroes and battle villains that are controlled by another player in the game. The poor balance occurs when one of those teams, particularly the Fantastic Four, is so much better than the other three teams. Partially because their villain (Dr. Doom) is such a puss compared to the other villains. So efficient team + weak Archvillain = Big advantage. Fortunately this is not to say that they will always win. Luck plays a HUGE factor in this game.

When I look at MH I see so much potential. I also see a totally different game hidden within. I see a semi co-op game, where up to 4 players take on the role of a single hero (not a team) against another player who runs the villain. Have 1 Arch Villain and have all the villains run by the villain player. How could this not be an awesome game?

So I set out to modify MH to this co-op style. And this is where I've come to realize just how frakin' hard board game design is. Now keeping in mind my goal was to utilize everything in the game (and not make changes to how card text was written) so maybe I shot myself in the foot. But damn! It's all but impossible.

The game does not seem complex to me, until you look at it from a game design point of view. Then you start asking all sorts of questions: Why did they do movement like that, why did they have Ready vs. Support actions, why did they have Story cards, etc?

It makes me start to wonder how you ever design a board game in the first place. Why is this handled with a card? Why this rule has a token used when another does not? Why the icons on the dice were chosen?

I'm sure board game design is like other type of game design. You start at one place and work your way from there. So maybe it's much harder to reverse engineer a game out of the tools that are available with MH? But I still can't help but wonder where they started and why they ended up with MH, a middle of the road board game.

Can I ever 'fix' MH? I've no idea. It's a interesting challenge but one I may never have time for. Which is sad because it's a really great piece of IP that I would hate seeing it go to waste.

Misunderstood

I could just say that larpers are misunderstood and leave it at that. Because it’s true. So very true.

But this rant has more of a point to it.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched the few and far between media articles done about role playing games and theatre style larping. And they never go over well.

And after watching a 70 minute Star Wars: Phantom Menace review, I think I realized why the media never quite ‘gets’ us. And never quite will.

The media is, by and large, filled with mundane people. Mundane people are not like ‘us’. We are much more elitist than I think we even acknowledge.

You see, there is something about the ‘gamer’ that leaps a boundary and just accepts worlds, settings and plots that are too bizarre or foreign to the mundane. In fact, it is so ingrained in us to cross their boundary, we no longer even see it.

You see, the typical story, as you might know, requires a protagonist. The protagonist is, and I’m quoting wikipedia here: the main character (the central or primary personal figure) of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, video game, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to share the most empathy.

Okay, that’s a bit (lot) more highbrow than I care to be. But there is a critical point there. The main character of a story is the person whom the audience is intended to share the most empathy.

Ahh, there we have it. The boundary that gamers completely ignore. For something to appeal to a large audience (the masses as it were) the audience needs to identify with and care for the main character. Because normal people are, well, normal, the easiest path to that is to have your main character share ‘normal’ traits.

Let’s take Luke Skywalker for a moment. At his start, he is an extremely normal boy. Stuck on a ranch, with dreams of adventure but being held back for whatever reason. The audience can identify with him immediately. Whether you loved or hated Luke, it’s still possible for your average person to identify with him. Hopefully through the course of the story, you can empathize with him. When his aunt and uncle die, he is torn up and so should the audience be, simply because all of us have had family members die. We understand the loss causes, thus we empathize.

Now then, the other goal of the main character is to lead the audience through the story. Because we identify with Luke, we can accept that there are these Jedi and wookies and while that’s all weird, we built a connection with the mundane character who is Luke and thus are willing to accept his wild ride into the world of Star Wars.

So I say again, there we have it. It’s that boundary that gamers forget. We do not require a mundane main character. We most often ignore it and opt to play fantastical characters in a fantastical setting and just go with it. And what’s ‘worse’ is that often you’ll have 20+ players who are all ‘out there’. In fact, the more fantastic the characters/setting the more you require a mundane protagonist.

Certainly to us, we have traits which we identify with which are aspects, often mundane, that we like to explore. But when a mundane person comes in and tries to grasp the setting, they are immediately thrown off. There is no connection that they can find. It often doesn’t matter if it’s Kingdom Come or World of Darkness (in a world like ours but just a bit different). The mundane person fails to identify with anything and thus will never ‘get it’.

To give you a very good example, take Neil Gaimon’s Neverwhere. I am not a fan of Neil Gaimon’s fiction, but for the reason that I often dislike his main characters. However, I realize that he’s recognized the critical importance of having a main character who is the guide to the mundane person who moves through the story. To me, I criticize the main character for effectively sleep-walking through the story and barely making any decisions (except finally doing something of interest near the end). But to the average reader, the main character is probably required to be very normal, as the setting is “so bizarre”.

Thus my hypothesis/epiphany of why the media always portrays us in an confusing if not offensive view. They cannot ‘get it’ so how can they explain it to others.