Hey Wizards of the Coast! What About Those of Us Who Have "Home Games?!"

I am glad that Wizards of the Coast is using their experiences running Magic: The Gathering events over the years to improve they way they run Dungeons and Dragons organized play. I even think that the D&D Encounters model, short adventures that can be run in two hours and tie into a larger campaign story, is an ideal structure to use in game store based play and to use in game store demos. It also gives me a sense that Hasbro is dedicated to promoting the hobby when they support endeavors like this -- that empower the hobby market and allow it to generate interest. I am certainly happy that they are making videos that show examples of what gaming really looks like:



What I am not excited about is that they seem to be limiting the D&D Encounters program to game stores alone and not offering the adventures (with their cool maps and supplies) to the gaming public at large -- after a delay to allow the game stores some exclusivity naturally.

You see...I am a bit of a completist. When I play a role playing game, I like to own all of the adventures and as many of the products for the game as I possibly can. This is especially true when the products come with well designed maps that I can use repeatedly.

By offering the Encounters adventures solely to the game store, Wizards is encouraging the eventual development of an underground market for these adventures and the merch that accompanies them. This is a bad thing, and ignores a potential revenue stream.

Not every gamer has 2 hours on a Wednesday that he/she can spend out of the house playing a game in a store. Some gamers are home bound and can only play in their own homes. They might be parents of small children. They might be married. They might have graduate school. They might have jobs that prevent them from going to stores during normal operating hours with any regularity.

What about these gamers Wizards?! What about those of us who would be willing to pay, and use, these products in our home games?

Sure, I'd be willing to wait 6 months -- or a year -- to wait for the whole Encounters storyline to be played out in the stores. This would give the stores a period of exclusivity that might encourage those who do have the time, but might not otherwise go to local stores (who are the lynchpin of the business) otherwise.

Thing is, I'd really like these to become available commercially at some point. Throw those of us who buy our stuff at FLGSs, but who are limited to gaming at home, a bone here!

We're the hobby too.

Fantasy Flight Games to Release "Space Hulk" Card Game

From the first publication of their flagship board game Twilight Imperium, Fantasy Flight Games have been succeeding at balancing the two most difficult tasks that game publishing companies face. There is often a tension between managing a company effectively -- actually treating the business as a business -- and the publication/creation of high quality games. If a company pays too much attention to making games that fit trends, and thus might sell well in the short term, they run the risk of alienating players due to the decreasing originality of their own products. If they ignore the financial aspects of the industry, they will slowly grind to a halt and fail to produce product that fans have eagerly awaited for years.

Fantasy Flight has done neither of these, much to their credit. They have a proper balance of pushing new creative envelopes in game design, and extending on great design ideas. A quick look at the history of the company shows that they have created some innovative games like Disk Wars and Twilight Imperium, but that they have been savvy enough to end a product line before it ended the company.

Ever since I first read that Fantasy Flight had been granted the license to create games based on Games Workshop intellectual properties, I have eagerly awaited each new entry produced by the company. Fantasy Flight have managed to release a nice balance of reprints/revisions of classic GW boxed games like Fury of Dracula and producing new games based on a previously used themes like their excellent Horus Heresy and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition games.

Last year, Games Workshop did a limited release of a revised edition of their classic Space Hulk tactical board game of Space Marines fighting sinister aliens. The new release, an update of the 1st edition of the game that ignored changes made during the second edition, was available for a very short time and is currently sells for somewhere between $100 and $150 on eBay (still fairly close to list price). $150 can seem a pretty steep price to pay for a tactical board game -- even one as high on replay value as Space Hulk -- and one sometimes finds oneself in the mood to play a game when there is no one available for a quick table top game or with more friends hanging out than the two required for Space Hulk. The movement rules in Space Hulk do allow for solo play, but the game is better with two players. For my money, I'll current play Dennis Sustare's Intruder over Space Hulk as a solitaire game -- it's more portable and plays quicker. This will likely change in the coming months.

Fantasy Flight Games has announced that they will be releasing a new cooperative card game, designed by Corey Konieczka, entitled Death Angel.

Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Card Game is a cooperative card game set in the grim darkness of Warhammer 40,000. Players must work together as an alien menace threatens to devour their hopes of survival. If all Space Marines perish, the players collectively lose. Likewise, if at least one of the surviving Space Marines completes the objective, the players all win!

Playable in under an hour, Death Angel takes 1-6 players straight into the action. Each player takes control of a combat team (or two combat teams if playing with less than four players). If playing solo, the single player controls three combat teams. Combat teams are made up of two unique Space Marines, each with their own flavor and style.

A quick playing cooperative card game that emulates the grim darkness of the 40k universe?

Yes please.

Is The Cup of Tears Already the Third Best Ninja Movie Ever Made?

Gary Shore's two-minute independently produced "trailer" The Cup of Tears has already led to him signing an agreement with Universal to direct a film based upon the trailer. The two-minute trailer combines Tibetan monks, Shaolin looking monks, Samurai, Ninjas, things that look like missiles shot in "bullet time," and space ships shooting at each other. Somehow it manages to do this with almost no similarity to Cowboy Bebop.

Looking at Shore's direction of the action sequences, I am almost tempted to say that this is the third best American made ninja movie ever produced.

The first two?

Ninja Assassin and Revenge of the Ninja

The lack of Sho Kosugi automatically removes Shore's film from the top two.

As for other films in the Top 10 American Produced ninja movies, they include in no particular order The Octogon, You Only Live Twice, American Ninja, The Challenge, and The Hunted.

I don't consider Kill Bill a ninja film. It is too much an amalgam of all that is awesome in Eastern action cinema.

Nuff Said -- Prince of Persia Trailer as Performed by Legos

Raise your hand if you made stop motion action figure/lego figure movies, or dreamed of doing so, as a kid?

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

Nuff Said: Empire Strikes Back (1950) -- In Glorious 3D

The Invisible Gorrilla and Games -- Mystery Stories

In 1999, Daniel Simons did an experiment involving a person in a gorilla suit and people in different colored clothes passing a basketball to one another. The experiment was designed to see how we look at things and demonstrate how our perceptions can fail us. The basic finding of the experiment is that we fail to observe a lot of things that are going on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing out on so much. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris have written a book called The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Two of the things the book focuses on are how are intuitions often mislead us and how our perceptions aren't as keen as we believe them to be.

"What does this have to do with games," you ask? Nothing and everything.

How many times have you been running a roleplaying game session in which you have laid clues for the players to discover which will help them to solve a mystery of some sort?

Sometimes the clues are embedded in your verbal descriptions of scenes and events, and sometimes they are placed on a battle mat for the players to find. The clues might even have been incorporated into dialogue role played out.

Of these times, how often have the players completely missed the clue due to focusing on other objects in your presentation?

Sometimes this can lead adventures into fun new directions. If the player's become convinced that the 12 year-old witness you were acting out in dialogue is so creepy that he must be a shapeshifted Goblin in disguise and the real reason the children of Vandomeer have been disappearing, it might be better to follow the player's lead and ignore the fact that you had placed several clues that it was the kind Cleric of Pelor who had been driven to despair after the death of his daughter and was looking for parts to construct a replacement. In a case like this, there is no reason to shoehorn the players into your planned story even though they missed your -- to you -- obvious clues. A good GM knows that the goal of play is to satisfy your player's desires and making their wild guesses into fact is a great way to achieve this goal.

Sadly, improper leaps to conclusions aren't the typical result of missed clues. The most common result is that the mystery grinds to a halt as the players "keep searching." In a game like D&D, or any other system where skill rolls determine the results of actions, this can amount to players "rolling again and again" or "taking 20" at each 5 foot square of a room with you having to notify them of what they did or didn't find. In a game that is looser and more "acted out," you have to decide whether to keep repeating the clues you have already shared or make up newer -- more obvious -- clues to give the players. Giving the players too obvious a clue after they failed to understand the initial clues can lead to some serious dissatisfaction by the players. They'll feel foolish for missing the initial clues, and railroaded by your new ultra-obvious clue.

Robin Laws' Gumshoe system tries to address these problems by having an underlying gaming assumption that the players will find the necessary clues automatically and lets them "spend points" in order to get more information from the clues. The system doesn't guarantee that the players will "solve" the mystery that you presented to them, it only means that they will actually find the clue, but it does increase the likelihood that their speculations might lead the adventure into another direction from what you originally planned.

In real life, it can be tragic when some real clue is missed or misinterpreted. In a roleplaying game missing a clue can bring a game to a boring halt, but misinterpreting a clue might lead to a better story. In real life, our intuitions deceive us and lead us into foolish actions, but in games our deceptive intuitions can lead us into entertaining experiences.

Sometimes you can exploit the deceptive intuitions of your players to assist you in constructing your adventures.

Do you have any stories where mysteries have bogged down or where deceptive intuitions have led to great adventures?

Green Ronin, Mutants and Masterminds, and DC Adventures

I have to admit that I was a little less than excited when I first heard that Green Ronin was releasing a DC Superheroes role playing game using their Mutants and Masterminds rules set. Mayfair's DC Heroes role playing game is my all-time favorite superhero system, and I loved the first edition of Mutants and Masterminds because it reflected so many design influences from that great game. The first edition of M&M was quick and streamlined and used "acting values, opposing values, and effects" to calculate power costs in a way very reminiscent of Greg Gorden's remarkable DC Heroes system. At the time, I was a fairly regular visitor to the Green Ronin boards and eagerly read discussions about a revised 2nd edition.

I quickly soured on those 2nd edition conversations as the system seemed to be migrating away from a DC Heroes influenced system into a Hero/Champions influenced system. Champions is a great game, but it can also intimidate new gamers and has certain exploits that hard core Hero gamers like to use. These kinds of exploits were being inserted into M&M and I wasn't as pleased as I had hoped. The game transformed from rules light to Champions light, and that was a step backwards in my opinion.

I still purchased all of the products. For all that I didn't like the mechanics of the game, the campaign advice and writing of Green Ronin products is among the best in the industry and I gladly support them. I merely had an "anti-granular" rules nag in the back of my mind every time I opened a text.

So when I read that Green Ronin was doing DC ala M&M, I have to admit that my fear was that it would be DC "Champions Light" and lack a fast and easy system that might appeal to new players -- one of the key reasons to acquire a license in the first place. This was particularly upsetting given Green Ronin's recently demonstrated commitment neophyte friendly games like their amazing Dragon Age and it's AGE System. In fact, I would love to see a DC AGE game.

My fears were somewhat allayed yesterday when I read a press release that Green Ronin was releasing a 3rd edition of Mutants and Masterminds. The key quote for me was "We worked to simplify some elements of the system and fix known issues, while retaining the flexibility and fast-paced play fans have enjoyed." If only they can accomplish what DC Heroes did so well, and M&M 2nd failed to do as well as M&M 1st, and present a system where Batman and Superman are able to adventure together in a manner where both are effective.

Whether I am ecstatic or not about the mechanics one thing is certain, I will be buying DC Adventures on day 1.