RPGaDay Day 28: What makes an RPG book special in your eyes?

I have chosen an alternative question today as I had no real answer to the default question and I didn’t want to do that two days running.

It is also relevant to the regulars here on the blog. We are all heavily leaning towards publishing, have published, are waiting to publish or want to publish.

I have two answers to this. First up I like books or more rightly the companions that make you think that the content should have been core right from the start. Books that solve so many problems or things you have had to wing during a session and finally you have an answer for. Players will always try to push the limits and one of the first things they will always want to do is swing two swords not one, pull two pistols not one or fire some machine gun from the hip. They do it in the movies so PCs should be able to do it in game. Books that make those problems go away are the special ones.

Answer two is more about book and page layout. Some books just make using them so incredibly easy. I don’t like the game system FATE but for book design I have seen very few to beat it. I have put an example below. The chapter tab on the side of the page makes thumbing through to find the right chapter easy, the cross references are obvious and and not buried deep in the text. The page contains no art but remains attractive to the eye by breaking up large blocks of text. I have held this book up as an example of great page layout and it does make the book a joy to reference even if the game is dreadful (IMHO).

RPGaDay2018 Day 27: Share a great stream or actual play

I cannot answer this one. I have never watched a stream of a RPG and I have only watched 5 minutes of an actual play on youtube. You know that feeling where you think that is 5 minutes of my life I will never get back.

I kind of feel that watching other people role play should be a way of getting ideas, hints, tips and inspiration but the reality for me it feels like the square peg and round hole. I sat there and thought ‘my group wouldn’t act like that’ or ‘my players wouldn’t go for that’. I think we maybe are too set in our ways.

If I had time to sit there and watch a live steam of other people role playing I would rather spend that time doing something more productive or actually role playing myself.

I suppose the whole issue of streams and actual plays is the same as with TV in general. I don’t watch TV as it feels too passive and the very thought of watching someone else role play but not having a character in the game is simply too passive for me. I would need to be doing something.

So it is a case of haven’t done, don’t want to do, can’t see the point.

Hmm, that is unusually negative for me isn’t it?

RPGaDay2018 Day 26: My gaming ambition for this year

I suppose my ambitions all centre around my wild west game. This is the first game I have paid a professional writer to create content for. I am also looking at buying in professional art and it will be my first kickstarter project.

I spent some time this afternoon auditioning music clips for the promotional videos to go along with it as well. There are two videos I would like, one for the quickstart version and one for the full game.

In many respects it feels like this game has crossed a certain threshold or reached a new level in production quality.

The nice thing is that it hasn’t really cost me that much money and even if the kickstarter fails, when I get around to launching it, it is really of little consequence. Freelance writers are shockingly underpaid as are artists without an established reputation.

One of the cornerstones of a successful kickstarter apparently is to have your game virtually finished before you even start the kickstarter campaign. This means that whatever happens you can deliver a playable game to your supporters. That is where I want to be. The easy bit of writing the core mechanics is done. All the content for setting and background is being professionally written and is being delivered daily.

This week I have been writing the quickstart. The condensed rules is done and I am writing the starting adventure now. I then just need the pre-gen characters to complete the content for that document.

All the playtest documents are written and ready to be released but they need the quickstart to complete the download package.

The last piece I need for the quickstart is a great piece of cover art. I have never commissioned art before so there is a first time for everything!

Off the page there is a forum all ready for any play testers to share their findings and make suggestions.

This is a game where there is significantly more in the ticked off list than the to do list. It has also been a really fun learning experience.

So to put it neatly my ambition for the coming year is to successfully launch my Wild West role playing game.

Land of the Blind

So I thought I would write an adventure that would put player characters under a bit of stress. One relatively easy way to do that is make them go blind. Without line of sight then a lot of magic is stuffed, fighters generally don’t like fighting blind either. So that is the basic premise of Land of the Blind and this weeks 50in50 adventure.

In Land of the Blind the characters are in a small village that has been targeted by a group of bandits. Rather than having to fight to steal everything from the village, the bandits have decided to ensure that everyone is blind first. The characters may be affected by this, temporary, blindness as well, which will make matters much more difficult for them. One of the bandits also has a grudge against elves, and will torment and kill any elves or half-elves he finds.

RPGaDay2018 Day 25: Name a game that had an impact on your in the last year

For me the answer has to be Ghost Ops. The reason is that up until that point I had always thought of these FUDGE and FATE sorts of games as flesh creepily ill defined. Do you know that feeling when someone has taken political correctness too far and won’t let you use the phrase Brainstorm in case you offend someone with epilepsy and wants you to use Thought Shower instead.

I have yet to meet anyone with epilepsy who found Brainstorm offensive but plenty who found the idea that they would be offended offensive.

Ghost Ops changed that as it has a really tightly defined setting, really solid character creation with loads of options but without complexity. It was skills based and you could customise your characters to your liking. It really changed my who perception of FUDGE so much so that I periodically check RPGnow looking for a decent fantasy FUDGE game to download. I have looked at a couple so far an not found exactly what I am looking for. There is always the option of configuring one myself and that is an idea I have on a back burner.

So although I really like FUDGE it is the Ghost Ops game in particular that I credit with the being the game that really made the impact. Ghost Ops is now my system of choice for modern day games.

Here is something else that has made the game stand out in my mind. When I first looked at Ghost Ops, I only had access to the free quickstart rules. The publisher contacted me after my first blog post about the game. They not only answered the questions I had about the game they also sent me the (not free) extended quickstart as that edition explained some of the things I was struggling to grasp from the quickstart rules. The failing being my lack of experience with FUDGE. Furthermore that contacted me again later after I had told them I was going to play through the sample adventure to see how I got on and then most recently they sent me the full game upon its release. They didn’t need to do that, they didn’t need to invest that much time and effort in me. After all I hadn’t spent a single dime on their game, I had just downloaded the free version.

Contrast this with ICE this week…

I made the suggestion of using yesterday’s RPGaDay post to put Rolemaster into the spotlight a bit. I saw that Nicholas was on the boards shortly after I posted that but it got no response. I followed up by pointing them to a blog where I had done what I suggested and promoted RM as a game deserving more recognition and I got a positive response from the blogger who said they would have to check it out again sometime. I went back to the ICE forums and suggested that they send the blogger a complimentary copy of the RMFRP book. If the guy is prepared to take a fresh look then for god sake make it easy for them, earn a bit of goodwill and maybe get a bit of free publicity out of it. I think someone, maybe Brian pointed out that the ICE forums are on a bit of autopilot right now. It certainly seems that there is noone at the helm that is for sure. Obviously I got no response to my suggestion and an opportunity to promote RM is lost.

OK, so this opportunity may appear small, but it was one person reaching out to one blogger and getting one positive response. In marketing that is a 100% success rate.

ICE could have used RPGaDay on several days to raise the profile of RM.

Day 3: What gives a game staying power? Well RM has been around for 4 decades I am pretty sure you could have used that to comment on all these blogs taking part.

Day 16: Describe your plans for your next game? Well ICE’s next game is RMU, or even why not suggest to bloggers that there next game becomes a RMU playtest? You could easily gather all the JDale changes into a single PDF (I have done this myself for my RMU game) and send it and the Beta2 pdfs to any bloggers that respond.

Day 21: What dice mechanic, they could be commenting and describing the Open Ended d100 roll or the 66 critical. These both put the RM name and brand in front of people.

Day 23: What game do you hope to play again? Pose the question when was the last time they had played Rolemaster? You may get responses about rulesmaster/chartmaster but it is easy to compare RM to PF and RM is tiny by comparison.

Including day 24 there were five days in which either one or many RM fans could have pushed out the ‘give RM a fresh look’ message. It is just a pity that no one took the opportunity. The contrast of course is that Feral Games had already won the goodwill of this blogger and gets a mention with out having to do anything.

RPGaDay2018 Day 24: Which RPG do you think deserves greater recognition?

There only can be one answer to this and it is of course Rolemaster. The great injustice is of course the name calling, chartmaster, rulemaster and so on. The total failure of the greater RPG community to differentiate between all the optional rules that are available and the actual rules one needs to play.

And lets face it, compared to Pathfinder Rolemaster is positively lightweight. 

Rolemaster always said it considered itself an ‘advanced’ system. You shouldn’t grab the Advanced books if you want something simple. I know I did but I was hooked on RM and then wanted something simple. It is just a testament to the adaptability of Rolemaster that actually I could carve out my simplified, rules light Rolemaster and have it work seamlessly with all the standard monster stats and the few RM native adventures I have.

Customisation does not have to mean complexity. The core RM structure is so robust that you can hack it any way you want and it remains recognisably Rolemaster.

What Rolemaster needs is for the community to honestly hold up Pathfinder or D&D (in any of its recent incarnations) in one hand and Rolemaster in the other give them a fair comparison. Drop the prejudices formed 40 years ago and look with fresh and more mature eyes.

Rolemaster is not FATE and it never will be. If you lean that way then RM is not for you but RM is, in my opinion, more robust than D&D 5e and more than capable of  being tailored to your style of play whatever that style of play is. What ever you want to do with it, there will be an option for it. Just pick the options that you need and no more.

RPGaDay2018 Day23: Which Game Do You Hope to Play Again?

There are two games I have not played for years now but would jump at the chance to play again. The first is not strictly an RPG but we role played it anyway and that is Car Wars and the second is Champions, now known as Hero System.

Funnily enough I noticed on the forums Hero System got mentioned again recently in one of the Shadow World threads so it is nice to see that it is still hanging on. There are more Champions games on rpol.net than there are Rolemaster so the game does have a following still.

In fact just thinking about champions makes me want to play even more!  I cannot actually remember what version we played, it must have been 1985 or maybe 1986 we were really into Supers role playing.

There would also be the dilemma of do I buy into Champions or Hero System? It looks like Hero System is the one being updated the most frequently but although the basic rules are just $15 the complete game is $50 which if I probably will never get to play is a bit of a waste. Champions complete is just $20 and is almost worth it just for the nostalgia factor.

I think CarWars is available as a free PDF direct from Steve Jackson. What you don’t get is the millions of counters you need to play the game. I have this somewhere and I printed it all out. It actually prints out in that stupidly tiny page size of the original plastic box. I then had to print and cut out the turning key as that was essential kit as well.

There is much more chance of me running CarWars from my group as an board game substitute than as an RPG. The only thing stopping me is that there are so many alpha males in our group that any sort of death match arena is going to end up with some very disgruntled people. (I love the word disgruntled. It is one of those negatives for which there is no positive version. There are many days when I am sure I am entirely gruntled, if only that was an option!)

RPGaDay2018 Day22: Which Non-Dice System Appeals To You?

So non-dice systems.

For me the greatest non-dice random number generator of all time has to be the basic pack of playing cards. These are incredibly flexible from an RPG perspective. If you ditch the kings for example you have in your hand fore distinct d12s.

If you use the just the number cards then you have 4d10 but there is so much more you can do with the deck. You can assign meaning the the suits with the red being relating to magic, Diamonds to Essence and Hearts to Channeling, you can make Clubs strength based and Spades Quickness or Agility.

Then of course there is the classic Deck of Many Things, a real pack of cards is the perfect prop for that magic item.

There are some games that eschew dice in favour of cards as a core mechanic. Ken Wickham has his ABS12 game, in fact he has over 50 supplements he had released now and they nearly all work using 1d12 or 2d12 or with a deck of cards without the kings.

My wild west game “Devil’s Staircase Wild West Role Playing” is the first of a series of games that uses no dice at all. You are dealt a hand of cards and you pretty much play your card and add your skill to the face value. The intention is to create that poker game feel that sits quite well the Old West setting. The deck of cards is so central to the game engine that the system’s name is a reference to the cards. The devil’s staircase is a slang name for a fanned deck of cards and an allusion to playing cards being a route to vice and degradation.

In the Devil’s Staircase system the Joker plays an active role and is the games equivalent to open ended roll on the attack or the 66 on our critical tables.

The d100 may be the most granular dice for regular play but the deck of cards with 13 faces, two colours and four suits plus two jokers packs a lot of options into a very common household object.

And finally of course if your character gets killed at the start of the big fight you can still build a house out of the cards or play solitaire, that is easier than trying to play Yahtzee with d10s.

RPGaDay2018 Day 21: What Dice Mechanic Appeals To You?

So I should probably have discussed the d100 l talked about yesterday today. So you know that I like the open ended roll system so I am going to pick something different today.

I am going to the Solo rules yes/no system.

This is mechanic has two elements, the dice roll and the likelihood factor.

So we have a very simple scale from “No And” which means that what you hoped for isn’t true and in fact it is even worse for you to “Yes And” which means what you hoped for is true and there is even better news. You must all know this by now as I have discussed it many times before.

The element that stops this dice roll being completely random is how likely you think something is going to be. The more likely you think it is the bigger the bonus you add to the dice roll, the less likely then the bigger the penalty. The only limitation is that the extremes of the bonus or penalty never completely eliminate the possibility of the opposite result. Nothing is ever a guaranteed yes or guaranteed no although it can be an extremely unlikely.

So with that simple specification this dice mechanic is completely dice independent. Anything that gives a range of high to low will work.

For the Game Designer the same mechanic gives a lot of choice in granularity. I have seen yes to no scales include ‘Maybe, If’, ‘Maybe, But’, ‘No and…’, ‘No but…’, ‘Yes and’ and ‘Yes but’ in addition to simple yes/no answers.

These solo systems can just as easily be used in a random adventure way with a real GM letting the dice control the adventure and interpreting the results in an improv sort of way as they can be in a true solo game. The secret is, as with all improv and solo play, to take the result and move the story forward.

It is that last bit of ‘moving the story forward’ that makes this the greatest dice mechanic of all. Using just this mechanic one could create an entire world and run an entire campaign with no prep and not knowing what the central plot is.

You could start with world building questions like “Is this a fantasy setting?” then get your answer, then “Is there magic?” get your answer. If the first answer was a No you have options for modern day or scifi. You could get really strange combinations like a modern day setting but in answer to ‘is there magic?’ you get ‘Maybe, if…’ as and answer. What does that inspire in you as GM?

Regarding prep, you just don’t need it as long as you can pull in stock monsters and NPCs. It is much more important to keep a record of loose threads. Imagine a player says “Is the innkeeper pleased to see us?” and the answer comes up ‘No’, why is that? This dice mechanic is literally driving better role playing and in that example better NPCs right down to the ‘little people’, the innkeepers, shop owners and everyone and anyone the players notice. Why isn’t the innkeeper pleased to see the player characters? Is he scared, angry? what is the next follow up question? eventually nearly every one of these becomes an adventure hook if the characters focus their attention on it but it is all driven by the interaction of the players and the same simple dice mechanic.

So my answer is the basic solo yes/no engine.

RPGaDay2018 Day 20: Which Game Mechanic Inspires Your Play The Most?

It has to be the Roll d100 and add something then prey for an Open Ended.

That is the basic core mechanic of RM in all its flavours and it is just so flexible that it can be applied to just about every situation, skilled or not and has that little bit of excitement about the open ended roll.

I really try and avoid D100 rolls that are not OE as they seem a bit flat to me, I think the only real use for them is stats and criticals and I like point buy stats. It is the magic 66 result that adds the same sort of excitement to the critical roll.

So it is the simplicity of the Rolemaster core mechanic that I like the most and it is also the one that is chartless/table-less and the one we use the most.