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Experience Points #6: Board Games

Posted on May 22, 2008 under Experience Points | 2 Comments

I’m going to go off in a different direction for this post - I’m going to talk about Board Games. I’m certainly no expert on the subject, but I find several different titles quite enjoyable.

I don’t know alot about what goes into designing a board game (of course, by extension, one could argue that I don’t know anything about RPG design either, which isn’t stopping me). What I do know is what I like - which is what I’m going to focus on in this post.

Here’s a few board games you should check out.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy was introduced to me by a very close friend. The draw that Diplomacy has to me is that chance is not a factor to the outcome of the game (unlike Risk or Axis and Allies). Personally, I really disliked Risk because of a few games that burned me due to die rolls screwing me over. Axis and Allies had a bit more strategy involved, but it was still possible to watch a single infantry unit eliminate a vastly superior force.

Originally, Diplomacy was designed to simulate the dealings of the major powers prior to World War I. The players take up the helm of one of: England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungry, Russia and Turkey. Each turn, the nations confer with each other, looking to make alliances and determine strategy. Orders are submitted and executed simultaneously. This is where the fun begins. Who kept their word? Who didn’t?

Diplomacy is an excellent study of game theory, which in itself, is a very interesting subject. This could be why I enjoy the game so much.

Players worldwide have developed many different variants. Some simply modify the basic board (changing the starting units, modifying the layout of supply centers) and some develop entirely new boards to reflect different areas (and times) of the world. Articles on strategy are abundant.

Diplomacy is an excellent game, especially when played with a number of skilled players.

Settlers of Catan

I really don’t know what to say about Settlers. I really like this game. I’ve only played a few times and I’m sure that I haven’t even scratched the surface of the strategy and awesomeness of the game.

Settlers also has several expansions that add new rules and change the experience. I’ve yet to give any of these a try, but they look cool.

Just play it. You’ll understand.

Arkham Horror

I had the opportunity to play Arkham Horror for the first time this past weekend. I quite enjoyed how the game played, even though we lost. It definately is a game for ‘gamers’. It’s also co-operative, which is pretty different.

There’s several expansions available, which changes how the game plays, with more on the way, to make sure each play is vastly different than the previous play session. I’d like to play again to get a better grasp on the rules, but overall, It was very fun.

So, obviously, the recommendations this month are:

Diplomacy
Settlers of Catan
Arkham Horror

If you like board games, at least one of those games will suit you just fine.

Experience Points #5: My Take on Character Creation

Posted on Apr 01, 2008 under Experience Points | No Comment

Every game basically starts the same way - you make a character. For me, character creation has always been one of the hardest things to do, mostly because of the various GMs I had played for requiring an extremely large backstory. Since I think of myself as fairly uncreative, I usually had fairly cookie cutter backgrounds, followed by some fairly exciting stories about my characters in the game. This realization helped me to discover my philosophy on character creation.

Simply put, for MOST games, I believe characters are/should be be relatively uninteresting at the start. Sure, if you’re not starting at level 1, then maybe a more intensive backstory is required (but not always!), but I think the real interesting things about a character is what happens to him/her IN THE GAME. My view is you aren’t a hero until the game starts - then you start developing your true character.

This isn’t to say that you should sit down at the table with just your stats. You need to develop a personality. Where did you grow up? What was your family situation? You need to have some sense of what your character’s worldview is, so yes, you do still need a backstory. I’m just saying it doesn’t need to be long.

Dark Heresy’s character generation chapter has a great outline of what you need to do after you’ve finished the stats for your character. Spirit of the Century’s character generation phases offers several key questions to answer with regards to your character (keep in mind that SotC characters actually are heroic prior to the game begining, by design), but has the goal of keeping your overall story short.

I could continue to discuss this topic, but I think I’ve passed my point along. Its not the right way to do things, its just the way I like the best.

Game Recommendations

As promised, here’s a group of indie games worth a look.

Cold City - Monster Hunting in 1950s Berlin.
Burning Wheel - There’s several settings already produced for the Burning Wheel system. Character creation sounds quite interesting.
Piledrivers and Powerbombs - Pro wrestling without the spandex!

Experience Points #4.5: Cold City First Impressions

Posted on Mar 14, 2008 under Experience Points | 1 Comment

[Author’s Note: I posted this originally on my personal blog, (joshbazin.com) but I felt that it was worthwhile to post it here as well. As this isn’t a regular post, I’ve numbered it as such and will not be providing game recommendations!]

I’ve been buying alot of games recently, which is great, especially since I’ve actually started playing tabletop again. I’m really wondering why it took me so long to get back into it. My most recent purchase included Cold City, A|State, Don’t Rest Your Head, and Piledrivers and Powerbombs. I purchased everything from IPR, and I was quite impressed with the shipping time (from the time I clicked to the time I had the product wasn’t the best, but that was due to the order date). I also had the opportunity to run Spirit of the Century a few weekends ago, but I’d like to run another game before I put up a review (but so far, it’s double-plus-good).

Cold City is published by Contested Ground Studios out of the United Kingdom. The softcover book itself is very compact, measuring 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, with a mere 128 pages. When I first held the book, I thought to myself “Is this it???”. Don’t let the size of the book fool you. There’s tons here. Opening the matte black cover (complete with blood droplets!) brings you directly into the meat of the game.

The premise of the game is that you’re a agent of the Reserve Police Agency (RPA) in 1950s Berlin. Each player is a different nationality and must consider a variety of issues in their actions. These varying viewpoints must come together to fight the monsters developed by the Nazis, living in the forgotten areas of Berlin.

The layout of the book is wonderful and the type is easy to read. Character generation sounds like alot of fun, and extremely simple. First, you pick a nationality. No two characters can have the same nationality. You’ll select your name and your draw (how you became involved with the Reserve Police Agency), then you’ll begin your stats. Each character has 3 attributes:

Action - To do physical things
Influence - To do things like intimidate, seduce, etc.
Reason - To use thought, willpower, etc.

After assigning values to these (between 1-5), you’ll begin to develop traits. Your character has at least 5 traits, 3 positive and 2 negative. These traits will come into play during conflict resolution. You’ll pick your hidden agendas and finally, you’ll assign trust to the other agents. I won’t get into alot of detail because I want to see it in action first (this is just first impressions you know)!

The conflict resolution mechanics are also quite simple (in my mind, at least). You create dice pools from your attributes, traits, hidden agendas and trust. Before rolling, each side must state their desired outcome from the roll, then the conflict resolution process begins. You roll a number of d10s equal to the size of your pool, which is then compared to the opponents roll. Successes are measured by how many dice beat the best result of your opponents pool. So for example,

Ricky has a dicepool of 4. He rolls and the dice come up: 4, 6, 8, 9. The GM rolls the opponent’s dicepool of 3, resulting in: 5, 7, 10. The GM succeeds with one success.

The really cool thing about this game is that whomever wins a particular conflict gets to narrate what happens. It sounds cool, so I’m excited to see how it plays in practice. The other thing I like is that the book tells GMs to only roll dice when dramatically important.

My first impression of the book is hugely positive. I love pretty much everything about it (some of the art could be better, but really, its a minor thing) and I’m really excited about running a session, just to give the tires a kicking. The book does leave alot of setting to personal imagination, which I like. You’re given enough to see the basic idea, but you’re not confined to anything hugely specific.

On a personal note, I’m quite disapointed that I didn’t decide to buy the Dossier or the Companion - but I’m confident I’ll end up buying them in the future. These books give some new areas to put in your games as well as adventure hooks.

If you like what you hear so far, check out Contested Ground Studios for previews of the product, or just buy the game from IPR.

Experience Points #4: Brief Game Master Pointers

Posted on Mar 03, 2008 under Experience Points | 1 Comment

Sorry folks, I’m a bit late on composing this one. I just hope that I don’t get myself fired for it!

I’ve got a few administrative items to pass along this month that I’ll pass along before we get to the meat and potatoes. Firstly, I’m going to add something to the end of my columns - a few game recommendations. These titles are likely going to be games I’ve never played and have barely read through, but something about them caught my eye. I hope some of these turn out to be gems in your collection. The second item is to blatantly self promote - if you’ve never RPed before, or if you just haven’t been able to find a group, be sure to check out the Edmonton Gamers’ Association. You can check them out on Meetup, which will tell you about all the events they have planned (There’s one this weekend, March 8th!).

With that taken care of…here’s a few pointers for new Game Masters.

Game Master Tips

The first two pieces of advice I’d give to new GMs are:

Plan out your session beforehand. Know where you plan on taking the adventure.
Don’t plan out your session beforehand.

Of course, I’m sure you realize these points contradict each other. Let me explain what I mean in a bit more detail. For most GMs, just making stuff up as they go just does not work, you’ll end up forgetting something and your players will call you on it. You need to have an idea of what the goal of the adventure is. Know some of the details of how the characters go from point A to point B. But…don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Players hate ‘box canyons’ with one direction of travel. They will find a way to break your intended path. So, don’t plan everything. Make multiple-plan ideas. Think of one or two alternate paths that can be chosen to get to the end goal. Sometimes, they’ll think of something you never thought of. You’ll have to make that up - but take personal notes of what you’re telling players. It will help you later on.

Ask for feedback.

If you’re playing a game with friends, you should be playing to have fun and hang out. Ask your players for feedback on the game. Find out what they like and what they dislike. Add more of what they like, take out what they dislike. Sure, you might want something different from a game than your players, so if you’re a Narrativist stuck in a game with a bunch of Gamists (GNS Theory is a topic for another article), you might have a problem. Or maybe you don’t. As long as everyone is having fun, the game is a success.

Lay out ground (house) rules with your players.

You’re the GM. You make the final say on the rules - make sure your players understand how you plan on interpreting them. Discuss with your players any modifications to the core rules you intend to be using. For example, Star Wars: Saga doesn’t contemplate the kneeling position - I developed a set of rules that I will use in those situations. Make sure your players understand them. Maybe you don’t want to look a rule up in the middle of play - ensure your players know this is how you will approach the game (and make sure you make the same ruling throughout the game!!). Maybe you want everyone to turn their cell phones off during the game. There’s multitudes of house rules, make sure you and your players understand them.

Learn from your mistakes

Face it - you’ll make a mistake at some point. When you do, its easiest to own up to it, apologize, and learn from it.

Make notes/keep a notebook

While you are playing the game, make notes on what happened. It will help your next adventure, especially if you plan on running a longer campaign. When you aren’t playing, keep a notebook with you because you never know when you’ll think of something or see something that will trigger an idea in your head for your game. Use the everyday for inspiration, you’d be surprised how much is there.

This short list is by no means exhaustive. It is meant as a starting point and to be fairly general. There’s many people who have different views on gaming and on game mastering. Find one that fits you and follow that advice - or blaze your own path.

Game Recommendations

I’ve got quite a few games that deserve a mention this month.

Dark Heresy - this game is set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Characters are under the charge of an Inquisitor, searching out heretics and other threats to mankind in the 41st Millennium.
Spirit of the Century - an awesome looking pulp pickup game using the revolutionary FATE 3.0 system.
Don’t Rest Your Head - surreal setting based on works such as Dark City and Neverwhere.
Star Wars: Saga - in case it wasn’t obvious from my review last month.

Next month, I’ll be giving an all indie lineup.

Experience Points #3: Star Wars Saga Edition

Posted on Jan 25, 2008 under Experience Points | 1 Comment

My roleplaying experience has pretty much revolved exclusively around Star Wars. My first game was the West End Games 2nd Edition Star Wars RPG, which I played for many years. When I joined the SWRPGA, the d6 rules were still going strong. When WotC published the d20 Version of the Star Wars rules, the club pushed back quite severely, myself included. In hindsight, it was rebellion for the sake of rebellion rather than a real aversion to the new take on the rules. Eventually, the senior members of the club realized that we had to embrace the new rules so that the new players didn’t feel outcast. As for myself, I didn’t pick up the d20 rulebook for many years, as I tried to focus more on storytelling than gameplay mechanics. Eventually, I found a copy of the first edition rulebook at a used bookstore, so I decided to purchase it. By that time, the Revised Core Rules had been out for a while, but the changes weren’t so significant for the mechanics I wanted to utilize, so I didn’t care that much. Shortly thereafter, I burned myself out trying to run the SWRPGA - and I wanted to spread my wings, so to speak. I started a new site, d6d20, originally dedicated to ‘anything but Star Wars’ and passed the torch at the SWRPGA. Fast forward a year or so - and the Star Wars Saga Edition was announced. I didn’t give it much thought, but as the release neared, I became excited. Coupled with a new-rekindling of my love of Star Wars, I bought the book. I was very impressed with the rules - and I lifted the ‘ban’ on Star Wars at d6d20, which has resulted in a number of Saga games popping up.

While I had a bit of mechanical play-through with my group of players in the Dawn of Defiance campaign provided by Wizards. I also had the opportunity to run a scenario of Saga at the EGA’s RPGCon. This gave me a few more insights into the system to write a better review of the game (it also gave me another experience - Running a Con Game).

The one main goal of the Star Wars Saga Edition is to capture the cinematic nature of the source material. Ultimately, I think they’ve succeeded.

Character creation is quicker than your standard d20 game. The first stages are the same - attribute generation, species selection, class selection. There are no surprises in the attributes they are still Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, and Cha. The core book contains a good smattering of the species from the Star Wars universe (Humans, Bothans, Cereans, Twi’leks, Gungans and Zabraks, to name a few), each have their own advantages and disadvantages, and I think that the species are fairly balanced against each other. Once you have your attributes and species selected, you move onto class selection. In Saga, there are five base classes: Jedi, Noble, Scoundrel, Scout, and Soldier. As with other d20 systems, your class gives you particular abilities and access to certain feats. Your class also determines your class bonuses to a new somewhat concept - your defenses.

In Saga, instead of Saving Throws, you have static ‘defenses’ that improve as you level (by one point every other level). The three defenses are familiar terms: Reflex, Fortitude, and Willpower. Doing away with saving throws lowers the amount of rolling done by the players and speeds combat up significantly. As an example - when attacking, the attacker rolls his attack. If his attack roll (including bonuses) is equal to or higher than the defender’s defense (in this case, Reflex), the attack succeeds, then damage is rolled. An interesting side effect of the way your defenses improve is that armor becomes less helpful, as you have the option to either wear armor and take its benefits or take one half your character’s level. As what I would consider to be common armor at best gives you a +4 to your Reflex Defense (and no bonus to your others), you would quickly want to shed your armor. I feel this mechanic (intended or unintended) really helps drive the ‘feel’ of the Star Wars Universe. When you watch the movies, the heroes don’t wear armor, so it makes sense that the game mimics that.

Another addition to the classes are talent trees, an idea obviously taken from d20 Modern. It is a welcome addition and gives players an opportunity to specialize their characters in their class. Having certain talents also ends up being a requirements for some of the Prestige classes in later levels. Also, characters are granted feats. Feats are the same as they were before - no comments to be made there.

The truly interesting concept in Saga is the reformed skills. Not only has the number of skills been reduced (albiet, only slightly), but the way they are used has changed too. Even if untrained, your skills improve over time, by one half your character level (rounded down) - which means, no clumsy skill rank system. Each class is given a number of class skills which they can train in (each class is given a particular number of skills they can train in initally, plus their INT modifier). Training in a skill grants you a +5 bonus to all checks relating to that skill. Some uses of a skill require training, but the basic uses do not. In addition, you can train in new skills through the Skill Training Feat, or improve your Training in a Skill with the Skill Focus Feat (which grants another +5 bonus). As one of my online group member’s put it: “you’re unskilled, skilled or have a masters degree”. I haven’t played with the system at higher levels, so we’ll see how having everyone with a +5 (or more) to their skills just because they have 10 levels goes when I get there. Overall, I like the mechanic.

Force powers seem to work well. As a Jedi, you are able to train and get a set of powers, which you can use - once per training in that power in a situation. If you rest for a minute, you regain all spent powers. Its a simple mechanic (it involves the Use the Force skill) and in my experience is alot easier to administer than the d6 counterpart.

The only other additions to combat is the condition track and damage threshold. The damage threshold is a number that is generally your FORT defense (plus any modifiers) that represents how many points of damage you can take before moving down the condition track. So, if you take damage equal to your damage threshold and you still have hitpoints, you move down the track by one square. The condition track has 5 steps (-1, -2, -5, -10, helpless) and represents how wounded you are. As you move down, the greater the penalties you incur when performing tasks. It works nicely and like everything else, its pretty simple.

A problem we encountered at the Con game was that according to the rules, you cannot grapple an opponent without having certain feats, and in general, the unarmed combat rules were lacking. We worked around that in our game as a quick fix, but if I was running something longer term, I’m going to need to develop some new house rules.

Online, there has been a number of debates about the rule mechanics of kneeling. The rules seem to contemplate only two stances: Prone and Not-Prone. I felt this did not fit the game well, so I made a ruling that basically halves the bonuses (and penalties) for being Prone. I think this fixes that ‘hole’ to my satisfaction.

Another comment I had regarding the book was its lack of vehicles. From my understanding, the Starships of the Galaxy sourcebok is almost entirely stats for starships, but the land vehicle area still is lacking somewhat. A fellow Con-goer, commented on the lack of ‘fluff’ or setting in the book. Personally, I felt that most people picking up the game were already quite familiar with the Star Wars Universe, so it wasn’t required. The information the book does provide covers all 6 movies and provides a bit of information regarding some major Expanded Universe happenings. I see his point, but for my style of GMing, what is there is good enough.

I think that Saga is an excellent addition to my library and anyone with an interest in any former edition of the Star Wars RPG would find this system easy to learn. The rules are set up for fast-paced action (assuming you set up your encounters correctly), with a low amount of dice rolling, and a real sense of character advancement.

Experience Points #2: Challenges Facing Roleplayers

Posted on Dec 27, 2007 under Experience Points | No Comment

There’s a number of challenges that face roleplayers these days. The lack of time, the lack of ‘new blood’, getting/keeping a gaming group alive are just a few of the things that we find ourselves dealing with. And that only covers face-to-face!

As primarily a play-by-post roleplayer, I find the time excuse (generally) to be moot. With that said, it is easy to become overwhelmed if you join/run too many games. But if you know what your limits are, you can organize your day to put in the 10-20 minutes to put up a post or a flurry of posts in a game or two. The problem with play-by-post is the time. Things aren’t always as fast as you’d like them to move. For instance, I just ran a sample Star Wars Saga combat session, which took almost a month. Granted, I did let the players ‘take their time’ because I was writing exams. In both of my games, I’m trying to get a posting rate of 3 times a week, which I’m having difficulties achieving due to my players, when I really should just post without them if they are unable to notify me of their absences.

When trying to get new people to play, some common responses are:

RPGs are too complicated (”I don’t know all the rules” / “I can’t create a character” / etc.)
RPGs are too boring (”It’s just a bunch of people sitting around a table munching snacks?”)
RPGs are too time consuming (”It’s going to take hours, and we still won’t have gotten anywhere!”)

Yes, time is always a factor - but if its something you enjoy doing, you’ll find time for it. Of course, if this is someone who’s never played before, you might want to introduce them into a one-shot in the system you’d like to play in or play a pick-up game that is designed for one-session play. The point being - you can get somewhere in just a few hours. Then, if you liked the one-shot/short-session game, try a multiple-session game. Going back to my original statement - if you like it, you’ll find time to do it.

RPGs are boring…well, I guess I can’t provide an argument to that. If you don’t like it, that’s fine - you don’t have to do it. But really, how is ’sitting around a table eating snacks’ any different than any other thing you do with your friends?

Finally - the game is too complicated. I won’t deny that many games are very complex. There are some that aren’t. Even with that said, once you learn one system, you generally can run pretty much any sort of game you’d like (to varying degrees of success). If you learn the d20 system, you’ve got D&D, Modern, Mutants and Masterminds, and Star Wars pretty much covered. Sure, each have their own ‘tweeks’, but the basic mechanics are the same. The same goes for the World of Darkness games - you’ve got the full supernatural spectrum covered. So, once you’ve learned something, you can play a range of games. Of course, if you’ve never played, it can take some time to learn. Personally, I think the best way to learn is to just start playing. If you’re trying to introduce someone to gaming, help them to make them a character (ask questions like, what do you want to be good at, etc), or have the GM give them a character skeleton (allow the new person to customize by providing the personality and background).

These are just a few ideas to help introduce new people to games. I certainly don’t know how to solve all the problems. Hopefully, the gaming community can continue to discuss how to introduce new players to our hobby of tabletop gaming.

Archive for Experience Points

Experience Points #6: Board Games

Experience Points #5: My Take on Character Creation

Experience Points #4.5: Cold City First Impressions

Experience Points #4: Brief Game Master Pointers

Experience Points #3: Star Wars Saga Edition

Experience Points #2: Challenges Facing Roleplayers

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