Printable Minis are an Underappreciated RPG Resource. #RPGaDay 23, 24, and 25

Another day, another couple of days missed #RPGaDay and a catch up post.

Day 23 -- Which RPG has the Most Jaw Dropping Layout?

I know that this is going to be a really controversial opinion, especially with how beautiful the new Starfinder book looks and how amazing every book Monte Cook has been putting out lately looks, but in my opinion the D&D Essentials Player's Books had the most jaw dropping layout.

No, they weren't as artistically beautiful as the books I just mentioned or Symbaroum, DC Adventures, or Tales from the Loop. Those books are all stunningly beautiful works of art, but jaw dropping layout isn't about the illustrations (though they matter). For me, what matters most about layout is how it leads the user through the information. It's a matter of design and not art and when it comes to design, the D&D Essentials duo are stunning.

These two books break the rules down into consumable chunks that are clear and concise, must like the Moldvay/Cook B/X D&D rules, but their real beauty is in how they guide players through the character advancement process. If you open up to the Fighter: Slayer section, it is broken up by level and tells you what choices you need to make at every level. You don't have to flip between sections of the book, the options are clearly articulated there and presented in a manner that aids the learner through the process.

Day 24 -- Share a PWYW Publisher Who Should be Charging More.

There are a lot of great publishers offering Pay What You Want (PWYW) products on RPGNow/DriveThruRPG and I have more than taken advantage of the products available. Sometimes I pay more than the "recommended price," and other times I'll pay as low as $0. I usually feel very guilty when I don't pay any money because the truth is that what I want to pay is more than that. We all have limited funds and it's great that some publishers are able to offer some of their products as PWYW as loss leaders for their other products. A lot of other people have promoted pro-groups like Evil Hat Productions, and they are a big PWYW publisher with professional quality books, but I'm going to focus on a small segment of the hobby that can make all of our games better at very low cost. That segment is the printable miniatures segment and it features some great PWYW publishers.

One of the publishers I really like is Kev's Lounge which has a really nice balance of PWYW and pay a small fee for miniatures bundles. There are some very strong illustrations in the series and they print out very nicely. Marshall Short, who runs the excellent Patreon Printable Heroes, uses patronage to fund some fantastic miniatures. I'll add one last publisher, who's work isn't free but is wonderful, with Jess Jennings. Jess' line of Trash Mob Minis are perfect for gaming with grownups and kids. The cartoony style is fantastic and the characterizations are really fun.

Day 25 -- What is the Best Way to Thank Your DM?

Single malt scotch.

Okay, as great as single malt scotch is, there is one better way to thank your DM. It's actually pretty simple. Come to your sessions on a regular basis, come prepared to play and without looking at your phone every five minutes, and be respectful of your DM's time and energy. We put a lot of work into DM-ing and some of us really like to do it. We can only do it if you show up, and we want you to show up because we really like having you as players.

The Marvel SAGA RPG is the Easiest Game in the World to Run and Play! #RPGaDay 22

Image Source Wayne's Books

I love super hero role playing games. There was a time, before the digital explosion, that I could claim that I owned every super hero rpg that had been published. They run the gamut from highly complex games like Champions to abstract and indie games like With Great Power. You might think that my love of these games stems from the fact that I'm a HUGE comic book geek, and that's true, but I also love them for another reason. It's a reason that also answers today's #RPGaDay question.

Day 22 -- Which RPGs are the Easiest for You to Run?

Super hero role playing games are the easiest of any role playing game for me to run for a wide variety of reasons. First and foremost among these reasons is that they are the most accessible games for people to play. "Accessible," you say, "but aren't Champions and Mutants and Masterminds tremendously complex when it comes to character creation?" Yes, they can be mechanically complex, but all superhero games are more accessible than fantasy role playing games because they have more shared qualities.

When I run a fantasy role playing game set in a fantasy world, there is always a learning curve regarding the nature of the setting. If I play in an Eberron campaign I need to know certain things about the setting that are completely different than if I'm in Dark Sun, Oerth, Mystara, Westeros, or a million other worlds. But it most superhero campaigns, all I need to say is "you will be playing a superhero team based in Los Angeles" and everyone is in a similar imaginary landscape. While I need to worry that the "magic system" of a fantasy setting fits the setting, comic books don't care about such things. Doctor Fate's cosmic scale mysticism stands side by side with John Constantine's arcane rituals, Amethyst's crystal magic, and Arion's Atlantean magic.

The stories also fall into place. How do the characters get together as a team? I'll just borrow the classic get the team together through misunderstanding and melee that made me fall in love with Marvel's The Champions or the first issue of The Avengers. This misunderstanding melee meetup provides a perfect opportunity to teach the players the rules of the game, build personalities, and introduce villains who will be used throughout the campaign.

One of the absolute best super hero games is TSR's Marvel Superheroes Adventure Game. It's simple card-driven system and game balance allow for every player in a combat to matter. Captain America is always an important contributor, and unlike in the new Defenders TV series, so is Iron Fist. The character sheets are easy to read. And my favorite part? The cards have enough information on them that by drawing about 5 from the deck, you can come up with an adventure on the fly with location, motivation, and villain determined at a quick glance.

Wildlings Does a Lot with Very Little, but Could Do More. #RPGaDay2017 Day 21

Day 20 -- What RPG Does the Most with the Least Words?

I've played a lot of role playing games over the years and am always on the lookout for a game that can combine setting, rules, and accessibility in a manner that can be picked up and played within 10 minutes of starting to read the game. It's one of the great curses of some excellent role playing games that they require hours of homework, if not weeks, before one can fully understand the setting and rules sufficiently to play a game.

Take Runequest for example. The game's basic mechanic is very intuitive. Ray Turney and Steve Perrin were quite smart to have basic skill and combat rolls be based on percentile rolls. While it may take a moment to describe how to read percentile dice, most people understand the sentence "You have a 78% chance to hit it." It means what it means and it's very clear. The Battle Magic, Rune Magic, Rank/Intiative system, and the Glorantha setting, take a little bit longer to understand. Add to that the fact that your 78% chance to hit isn't really a 78% chance to hit, it's a 78% to hit them if they fail their parry or dodge roll, and you add some non-intuitive elements to the system. Though those elements can add to the realism of game play.

On the other end of the spectrum is Champions. While it uses six-sided dice for its randomizer, the system isn't intuitive. To hit someone, you have to know your Offensive Combat Value (determined by dividing your DEX by 3 and adding modifiers for maneuvers and "combat levels") and add that number to 11. You then subtract your opponent's Defensive Combat Value (determined by their DEX divided by 3 and modified by past combat maneuvers and "combat levels"). You then need to roll this number or less on a roll of 3 six-sided dice. Never mind the complicated system, though it elegantly incorporates the "parry" and "dodge" rolls of a Runequest style game into one roll, what's not intuitive here is that most people don't know what the odds of rolling a 14 or less are off the top of their head (it's about 90.72%). Add to this a character creation system that is a tremendous amount of fun, but takes a lot of homework and practice to get familiar with, and you don't have a pick up and play game.

jim pinto (he uses lower case) has designed a number of games intended to be pick up and play in his GMZero and Protocol series of games. There are some great entries in this series, and I almost picked them as my selection for today's post. I highly recommend The Death of Ulfstater and Home. These games provide enough background detail to launch a rich and interesting game and have a pretty quick to learn system that is easy enough that it expects everyone to take a "director" moment in game play.

But my pick for this week is John Harper's very interesting proto-game The Wildlings. In very few words John Harper perfectly captures the setting:

You Have Been Chosen
The men and women warriors of your clan are far away
across the dark sea, raiding. You are a young warrior—a
Wildling—not yet tested in the Trials.
Two nights ago, a foul thing crept from the ruins beyond
the old forest into the village and carried away two sheep,
a barrel of lard, and a small child: Rylka, daughter of Yuri
Red Hand.
The wise women have met in council and decreed that
something must be done. The People of the Stone Spire are
not to be preyed upon. Though the child might be eaten
by now, a rescue must nevertheless be undertaken.
You have been chosen for this task. Take up your arms and
steel your courage. The time has come to do your duty.

You know exactly what is going on and what your supposed to do. It's three short paragraphs, but it frames a society and and adventure. Very elegant. The rules are also equally easy to learn and adapt and are narrative in form. The more successful you are, the more positive adjectives you get to add to your action.

But...there is one problem. Without StupidGremlin's expansion of the rules, it isn't quite playable out of the box. An experienced GM can run it out of Harper's player's kit pdf, but an inexperienced one is left with no aid on how to resolve conflicts other than the adjectives. How much must a player succeed by to "win" at a conflict. With the tightness of the earlier prose, I'm pretty sure that John could have done it in two pages or less, and with great graphic design.

Tom Moldvay Basic: Why It's Great and Where to Find it. #RPGaDay 2017

It's time to catch up on my #RPGaDay writing again. This time the questions seemed initially unrelated, but once I found my answer to the first question it became clear that they should be combined into one post. The role playing game that I believe features the best writing in long out of print and therefore someone interested in finding it might need advice on a good source for out-of-print RPGs.

Day 19 -- Which RPG Features the Best Writing?

I can imagine a lot of bloggers answering this question by waxing poetic on how this or that meta-narrative game has the best writing. I can almost see them typing away to praise Vampire the Masquerade for its evocative text, or Pendragon for its ability to capture the tone of courtly love. Both these statements are true, but neither of these games captures the best writing I've read in a role playing game. That honor falls squarely on Tom Moldvay's Basic Dungeons and Dragons.

Never before, and never since, has there been a role playing game rule book as well written as this edition of D&D. It was the first edition of the rules that the average person could pick up, read in an hour or two, and play the game. Holmes' first Basic set was a huge step in this direction, and was the first edition of D&D that was actually written with playable rules that didn't require too much interpretation, but it didn't quite capture it. Steve Perrin and Ray Turney's Runequest is very well written and clear, but isn't quite as approachable to the new gamer as Tom Moldvay's work.

Tom Moldvay did something quite challenging. He addressed not only how to play D&D mechanically, but how to play it socially as well. By including an "example of play" and answering questions as simple as how to read a four-sided die when you roll it, he made role playing more accessible than it had been up until that time. Later writers focused on getting more evocative in their world descriptions and providing interstitial prose that seemed straight out of a novel or short story, often very well written, but they forgot that they were writing a game too. Or at least they seemed to forget they were writing a game. Many "storytelling" and "less crunchy" games have rules far more sophisticated than D&D, and when they have even simpler rules - as is the case with Cortex+, FATE, or Apocalypse World - they often get too caught up in their jargon and end up obscuring what are wonderful gems.

Well written role playing game rule book doesn't require you to "see it played to learn it." A well written role playing game is playable out of the box, and Moldvay's is a perfect example of how do to it.

Day 20 -- What is the best source for out-of-print RPGs?

No long answer here. The best places to find out-of-print RPGs Noble Knight Games, Board Game Geek, and eBay. That's it. The important thing isn't the "source," it's your level of patience. You have to be willing to pass by offers that are too expensive on eBay or Noble Knight and wait for the right offering. You also need to decide whether you are collecting to collect as artifacts, or whether you are collecting to play. I collect to play, so I don't buy the most expensive copies. I am not collecting to resell as an investment. I want to play and to have future generations play. To that end, I peruse these sites for deals.

The Game I've Longed to Play and the Game I've Played the Most #RPGaDAY

So far, I've been able to keep up with all the necessary #RPGaDAY posts without getting so far behind that I quit due to the dread of having to write 10 or more posts at once. One of the reasons for that is that this year's set of questions have been good prompts, and the other is that I've decided to make a concerted effort to post more often.

I missed yesterday's prompt, but it and today's are very much related in them and I'll be combining them into one post.

 

Day 17 - Which RPG have you owned the longest and not played?

I own a lot of role playing games. I'm not saying I own "the most" role playing games, as that claim would be absurd, but I own a lot. Over 500 a lot. Probably more than that. I own more role playing games that I've cared to enter on RPG Geek because it just takes too long. I should update them on a database, but I've got work and research etc. and I just don't have the will to do it. Besides, a lot of my games are in a storage unit I've converted into a gaming library. Needless to say, it's a lot of games.

Some of those games I bought just to read and see how they did things. Cosmic Enforcers comes to mind as one of these kinds of games. It's a super hero role playing game and given that I've already got my favorites in that category it was doomed to be mere reference material. But there are some games that I bought because I really want to play them, even if most of my friends probably won't. I buy them in the hopes that one day I'll be able to experience at least a one-shot of the game. I bought Scion: Hero and Tour of Darkness for this reason. 

The game that I own the longest and have not played falls into the "I really want to play it" category. Back in the days before the "Sweet Pickles Bus Wars" a friend of mine got a copy of Star Frontiers. I loved the illustrations and I loved the setting. I desperately wanted to play and I soon got my own copy. I read through the rules and made up several Basic and Advanced characters. I talked about the game with my friends and we planned a sleepover gaming night...then the "Sweet Pickles Bus Wars" began and I had to put off playing it. Years later, another of my friends expressed an interest in playing and had even written up a campaign to run us through, but that was never to happen.

I've owned the game a very long time and have not played it once. It's a game from a different era of play and I would love to get a chance to play it some day, even if only for one session that is followed by a campaign in the Federation using Savage Worlds rules.

Day 18 - Which RPG have you played the most in your life?

When the Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition Player's Handbook came out, I hadn't gamed for a few years. I'd spent the couple of years before the release finishing my undergraduate education and didn't have much time for RPGs. My wife and I had just moved to Los Angeles and didn't know a lot of people. I'm the kind of person who needs a circle of friends to help me recharge from the stresses of day to day toil and struggle, and gaming is the perfect hobby for that. It didn't take long for me to find a group of players, most of whom are still my good friends today, and kick up a campaign.

That 3.x campaign ran from 2000 to 2008 and we played almost weekly for a good chunk of that time. I saw characters go from first level adventurers struggling to survive in the Sunless Citadel to 20+ level paragons who battled against a living fragment of Tharizdun that was was destroying the Feywild, the Elven Pantheon, and all the Elves on Oerth. After years of adventure, the campaign came to an end and the world of Oerth was changed forever as many of the old gods (not Old Gods) perished in Tharizdun's wake and were replaced by a new Pantheon. Oerth's elven population was significantly reduced as the corruption of Tharizdun's influence in the Feywild manifested as a wasting disease that killed 90% of that world's elves.

It was a blast...and it exhausted me. I was ready for a new game system and that's around when 4e came out. It was too early for many, but it was at exactly the right time for me.

Learning to DM, Thoughts on Campaigns, House Rules, and Rules as Written. #RPGaDay Megapost 2, Days 13-16.

Overall, I've really been enjoying this year's #RPGaDay question line up and am trying to give each question more than a single sentence answer. I love the RPG hobby and questions like these are a time to share thoughts an memories as well as to answer questions.

That's another way of saying, "give me an inch to talk and I'll take 50 miles."

Day 13 - Describe a game experience that changed how you play.

I imagine that for a lot of gamers, this is the kind of question that evokes a tale of the "best gaming session ever." In such a tale, the author would wax poetic about how having a DM of Matt Mercer quality changed their life forever and made them a better gamer. That is not my tale. Mine is a tale of abject failure and learning from that failure.

I'm at a point in my life where I think I'm a pretty darn good DM. My gaming groups tell me they have a good time and there tends to be great energy at my tables and our stories often go off in wild directions. Heck, my groups have even developed their own sayings over the years. My favorite is the famous Drow saying, "It's as easy as shooting a dwarf in a well." I'm not saying I'm on the same level as a GM as Tom Lommel, Jordan Caves-Callarman, David Crennan (America's DM), or Satine Phoenix, but I am proud of the sessions I run. And the reason I am a good DM today, is that I was once a terrible one.

The interesting thing is that I didn't start terrible. I was inexperienced, sure, but the early games that my friend Sean McPhail and I put together had narrative qualities to them and our characters had personality. In my late Elementary school days, I was heading in the right direction. Then came my first experience being a DM for someone who'd never played. (Dun...dun...dun...)

A friend of mine in Middle School, not the one from the Sweet Pickles Bus Wars, saw me with some of my D&D books on campus and wanted to learn to play. We arranged a sleepover at his house with a couple of friends and we did our best all-nighter Stranger Things impersonation. Except it wasn't that cool at all. I had done ZERO preparation and didn't want to use one of the modules I was familiar with. I wanted to run my own adventure to teach these folks the game. So what was my adventure? I don't remember the particulars, and I'm pretty sure that I've suppressed them because it was so bad, but suffice it to say that it started in a tavern, had a fight with goblins, and ended with the PCs going down to Hell and killing Tiamat. They would have slaughtered all the levels of Hell if we hadn't gotten so tired.

That was all in ONE night. From 1st level to high enough to kill Tiamat. It was awful. I knew it was awful at the time. I was essentially opening to random pages in the Monster Manual and having them fight the monsters on the page.

As bad as it was, and as HORRIBLE as I was, it was still fun. It was at that point that I knew the game was better than I was as a DM and this was a good thing. I wanted to aspire to be a DM who improved the quality of the game instead of one who was "saved" by the quality of the game. That night changed my approach to the hobby and I'm grateful to the friends who endured the evening and were kind enough to wait years before mocking me for it.

Day 14 - Which RPG do you prefer for open ended-campaign play?

For me, the most important quality for open ended play is that the characters start out as great at what they do and stay that way. For a game to be truly open-ended, it cannot have class levels where characters start as inexperienced and work their way up to demi-god status. That makes for a great campaign, but not open-ended gaming that can be picked up at any time and place. In my mind, and this may be different for you, open-ended play is like a never ending soap opera. And I mean that as a complement. Good soap operas tell compelling stories for decades, but they don't tend to have people go from newb to l33t. If someone is l33t, they stay that way.

Games like D&D and with its levels, or Runequest with it's path to Rune Lord, don't fit that bill for me. They are fantastic games, but not open-ended in the way I'm interpreting this question. Surprisingly, Call of Cthulhu isn't either. I've heard too many stories of players with skill ratings in the implausible range, or even with enough power to fight the Elder Gods (can you imagine? That's like my D&D story above), to think that Call of Cthulhu fits the bill.

The best role playing games for open-ended action are super hero role playing games. The characters all start out highly capable, they are super heroes after all, and in most systems the character improvement curve is very shallow depending on how you run the game. In Champions, as Aaron Allston pointed out in Strike Force, characters tend to learn new things rather than get increasingly better at the things they do. This is especially true if you are enforcing campaign wide Damage Class restrictions. Mutants and Masterminds has a similar phenomenon. But the best two games for this kind of action are Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP) and DC Heroes (MEGS), and of these two I have a deep love of DC's system.

What both of these systems share is that they use experience as an expendable resource. In Marvel it's Karma and in DC it's Hero Points. In both cases, the points can be spent to have an effect on outcomes. Why is Spider-Man able to hang out with Thor in fights? Because he spends a lot of Karma in those battles. Why doesn't Thor get even more Godlike? Because increases at his capabilities are super expensive and it's easier to learn to do new tricks with your powers. Why is Batman able to hang with the Justice League, I mean seriously? Because he blows through Hero Points like nobody's business. He's constantly going for "Devastating Blows" and Pushing attacks all day. Sure, his devastating blows are in the form of "exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents" rather than haymakers, but that's the mechanic.

Batman and Spider-Man's player can play for years and only increase in power by an increment, or choose to get better at a lot of things. The stories though, never get stale. This is because the challenges are at a fixed level an stay there.

I imagine that D&D could work that way if you started at 5th level or so and just told stories at that challenge rating, but that fails to take advantage of the "I'm getting better calculus" that underlies the game. The calculus underlying Marvel and DC is "I just did something normally not possible at my power level" and that's why it feels satisfying for very long periods of time.

Your mileage may very, but that's the kind of gaming I like for open-ended campaigns.

Day 15 -- Which RPG do you enjoy adapting the most?

Image by Andrew Asplund

 

Given my love of the Savage Worlds gaming system, one might expect that I'd drop that one down right here. Nope. Not that I run it "as is," though I mostly do, but it's not the one I'm always wondering what I could do with it. Though to be honest, I have yet to see anything it can't do with a little tweaking. The game I enjoy adapting the most is 4th Edition D&D, in particular it's Gamma World variation.

Shocking! I know.

It's just that the game can do pretty much EVERYTHING. It makes the basis of a very good super hero game. It's easy as pie to make Rocket Raccoon using the rules. You can be the characters from freakin' Phoenix Wright!

For what it's worth, I find that the Gamma World iteration and Essentials are all you really need. Once you realize that the game is really an effects based game and that you can rename powers whatever you want, it opens up endless possibilities. Coming from a super hero background, as I do, reskinning powers has never been an issue for me and I think this game can do anything...at least in a one shot setting.

Day 16 - Which RPG do you enjoy using as is?

Truth be told, I play most games "as is." I don't have a lot of time to spend creating house rules for games I'm playing and changing them up. I'd rather write adventures than tweaks to a magic system. This isn't to say that I don't do any house ruling, but I do tend to try to give the designers respect when I sit down to play. For example, a lot of people feel uncomfortable with Savage Worlds' initiative system when they first read about it. "You mean it uses CARDS? And you reshuffle a lot?" But the fact is that it's a fast, furious, and fun way of handling initiative that has a lot more give and take that it might seem just reading the rules.

Clearly from my previous statement about reskinning 4e like crazy, 4e isn't the game I play "as is." No, that honor goes to Champions 4th Edition...still the best edition in my mind. The fact is that Champions is extremely well designed and well balanced and any tinkering I want to do is filled up with making characters and not house rules. The 4th edition of the game stretched the rules to as granular a level as I like to play. 5th edition got a little too "engineering" based for me and the players I gamed with started to fall too much into the "if it's not on your page and paid for, you can't do it" camp for my liking and that seemed to be a trend with 5th edition. The 4th edition started down that path, but was only beginning. Like GURPS and 3.x/Pathfinder, this is a rules set that tries to have a rule for everything to ensure that you have a fair and consistent answer for every question. The underlying math is sound in the game, though Wayne Shaw did make an argument for a change in the skill system on my Geekerati podcast that I agree with.

If only I had 4 weeks to teach people how to play and make characters before starting up a campaign. I really miss playing this game, but it's not one that's easy for players to pick up and play. There is an initial learning curve, particularly if you are making your own characters. But God is it a great game.

Steve Jackson's OGRE is Coming. Can You Protect the Command Center?

In 1977, Metagaming Concepts released Microgame #1. Metagaming's Microgame series was an attempt to bring to market complex and playable wargames that had limited components and a low price point and the line was a runaway success. A large reason for that success is the high quality and amazing replayability of Microgame #1, or as it is better known OGRE.

Image Source wtrollkin2000 at Board Game Geek

The $2.95 price point of the game made it extremely affordable, and interestingly up until recently you could once again buy a copy of the basic game for $2.95, but what made it a classic was its easy to understand rules and how well they fit the game's fictional concept. It's a concept that is instantly intelligible the moment one looks at the game's cover illustration. It is the struggle of multiple small units against a nigh invulnerable towering giant. It is army vs. Kaiju, village vs. giant, weak vs. strong. Can the weaker force prevail, or will they fall before THE OGRE?

The giant tank rumbles toward its target . . . its guns are destroyed, its movement crippled, but only a few defenders are left. Will they stop the robot juggernaut, or will it crush the Command Post beneath its gigantic treads?

The game's success led to more Microgames, some of which expanded the Ogreverse and others like Melee and Wizard formed the foundation for complex and fan adored role playing games. When Steve Jackson left Metagaming, he made sure to bring OGRE with him and it helped launch his new company's success as did a continuation of Microgame style games including Car Wars and Battlesuit. Eventually Steve Jackson Games moved on to other ventures like GURPS and Munchkin, but when an OGRE Kickstarter raised almost a million dollars in revenue it proved that there was still demand for battle in the Ogreverse. That Kickstarter has led to a revival of the OGRE line, the return of Car Wars, and now an upcoming video game release on October 5th. The game has been developed by Auroch Digital, who's earlier adaption of Games Workshop's classic Chainsaw Warrior demonstrated their ability to do quality adaptations of classic table top games.

Here is a look at what Auroch will be bringing us this October.