In which I literally read out a list of characters from Thunderbirds

Occasionally people (who are not, generally, British) say things like "I could listen to you reading the phone book", which is always bemusing to someone with a mildly deprecated regional accent that I was encouraged to lose at school. Admittedly I don't have as much of it as I did in those days. I've moved around a lot.

Anyway, here's me reading out the list of characters from Thunderbirds from the Fandom.com category. It's public domain, and hey, if this is for some reason the sort of thing that gets you going, nobody's ever going to know.

You might reasonably say "why", to which the answer is, broadly: over Christmas there was a question about Tin-Tin's name, which left me on the page, which I began reading out to my family. At the point where they begged me to stop (around F, I think) I decided this should be immortalised in digital form, for no very clear reason. Even more surprisingly, I actually got round to doing it.

Some tips for handling zombies

I wrote this ages ago for some reason and hey, why leave it in drafts forever?

Supplies

A lot of hardware shops and builders' yards will have reasonable supplies of very hard-wearing gloves, steel-toed boots, face masks and possible even welding masks. This is to say nothing of the huge amounts of building materials. Garden centres will be another good source of protective equipment, as will certain types of factory. Usefully, both the latter tend to be built in relatively isolated places.

Trolleys!

These and similar businesses also have trolleys of various kinds, which will be invaluable for transporting stuff. Forget cars.

This will probably sound silly, but supermarket trolleys are well worth acquiring in huge numbers; they are amazingly useful and flexible. You can store things in them. You can transport them easily. You can strip them for wheels and spare parts. As storage, they can protect valuable items from quite a few types of wild animals - dogs, foxes, sheep, basically anything than can't wriggle through, climb over or tip the trolley. Their slick metal frames are hard for many animals to climb, so even rats and cats will struggle to get through.

But that's not all! Grab every trolley in sight and and circle them into an instant zombie-proof fence! They should be able to slot together into a very large closed circle. They're far too tough to break with normal force. They don't tip easily (especially in a line, where the weight is multiplied and anchored at many points), and too high for zombies to simply blunder over. Only zombies intelligent enough to actively climb objects will get past these. If you're worried, pop padlocks, cable ties or just lots of string to link them on the inner side, so the zombies can't try to slide them apart and undo the circle.

You can transport kids in them safely, at least with a bit of adaptation, and they're also great if you get the chance to loot some poultry, or even the odd sheep or dog - it's potentially much faster than trying to lead animals along.

Dogs aren't a great bet for zombie-surviving, though. They need meat to eat. For watch purposes, you're probably far better off trying to keep poultry. Chickens can make plenty of noise, while geese are famously good sentries (ask Rome).

Other supplies

While you're at the builder's yard, grab pallets. In fact, grab everything. But pallets and their pallet-lifts are very useful in general. Get pipes, too. You can do an awful lot with pipes, valves and taps, in terms of making and fixing stuff. Rubber and other sealants? Yep. Glass? You betcha. With glass, pipes, rubber sheeting (or equivalent) and some containers, you have most of what you need to get water and grow crops. They might not be nice crops, but hey.

Did you know you can run basically self-contained aquaponics by combining crops with fish? Pop round to the pet store too.

There are some other, weirder options you might consider. If you have access to a very large supply of transparent plastic boxes - like those storage boxes for keeping things in the attic or under the bed - then fill 'em with sand or pebbles and you've got a pretty much impregnable wall (stacked two or three deep and six or seven high). Fill 'em with water mixed with strong bleach or something (to stop algae building up), and you've got a near-impregnable see-through wall. If you've got an opportunity to scavenge significant amounts of a town, you can probably find a decent number. Even rectangular ice cream tubs would do at a pinch.

Okay, near-impregnable with pummelling and general shoving. Obviously zombies intelligent enough to use implements can break the plastic.

Old tyre heap nearby? You can build something approaching a fortress out of tyres with earth rammed down inside them.

Allies

Despite the nonsense zombie stories like to suggest, there will be plenty of people surviving a conventional zombie-as-carrier outbreak, or even a waterborne one. Oil rigs and ships are full of people completely isolated from zombies, and many of those people have enormous expertise in the technical fields needed to rebuild society; there are also medics, geologists, and people with all kinds of interesting hobbies. Ocean survey ships, as well as any number of research stations, hold people with biological, ecological and agricultural training.

Zombies aren't like most other diseases, they require a bite to transmit the disease, which means lots of people in relatively isolated places are likely to be safe for a few days. And they don't have to be safe for longer than that, because of biology.

Zombiology

See, most zombies wouldn't last long at all. If they're rotting, they'll be devoured by insects. If they have any metabolic processes at all, they need water. Once water supplies shut down, zombies will mostly dessicate within a few days. Also, if they act as typically portrayed, they will accumulate untreated injuries and bleed out or succumb to secondary infections. If they don't have blood flow, they have no means of transporting oxygen to their cells, which means they cannot generate ATP to power cellular processes, such as the contraction of muscles, which means they cannot move at all. If they don't have any metabolic processes, they cannot physically move because that's how biology works and no, shut up, SCIENCE.

In other words, whether your zombies are living-but-mindless, or rotting-but-mobile, they won't last more than a week tops. And honestly, probably less, because they'll neglect important not-dying precautions like shelter.

You need only keep yourself alive for a week or so, and then venture out to reclaim the world, alongside large numbers of oil workers, ex-prisoners, the inhabitants of all those secret Antarctic research facilities, people attending spiritual retreats, quite a lot of islanders, and most of the population of North Korea.

If the zombie plague is insect-carriable, things are a little trickier. In this case, you will need to hide out long enough for all plague-bearing insects to have died. Most have quite short lifespans, so once all the zombies have rotted away and the insects' lifecycle is over, you should be fine. On the plus side, viruses and other pathogens are quite host-specific so only a few other species will carry the disease. That being said, in this scenario people living in high mountains and the poles, where insects won't reach, are really in with the best chance.

Supernatural zombies

Supernatural zombies are a different matter. These may be capable of remaining active and largely undecayed for indefinite periods because they contravene physical laws.

Supernatural zombies are amazingly useful .

If you have a creature capable of indefinite mobility without the need of metabolic inputs (such as water or a source of glucose), you can construct something approaching a perpetual motion machine. You should (once you have constructed a suitable facility) strive to acquire as many of these zombies as possible. The exact construction required will depend on the behaviour and capabilities of the zombies, but a simple welded steel treadmill, impregnable to most zombies and possible to make with relatively available materials, should do the trick. There are undoubtedly more sophisticated machines available to a trained physicist or engineer.

The infinite supply of free energy provided by your zombie generators will allow civilisation to rise again from the ashes, indeed with a new and brighter future offered by the end of entropy and the abolition of fossil fuels. Zombies save the world, and humanity!

Taking the Fifth: early thoughts on D&D 5e

So I've been playing 5th edition for a little while now, with a couple of different characters. I'm really enjoying it. It seems to make a very nice job of uniting things that were good about previous editions, improving game balance, and keeping everything flavoursome. Good job, WotC.

I just wanted to make a few observations based on my play so far. We've only hit levels 3 and 5 respectively in the campaigns, so it's early days yet. I don't claim particular expertise, and my notes will inevitably be coloured by my personal experience, as the stuff I've actually read in detail and thought hard about tends to be my own characters. I don't even own the DMG or Monster Manual.

For reference, those characters are:

• a 3rd-level human fey pact warlock ex-wheelwright who just got his sprite familiar (with cloth cap and tiny, tiny fey whippets), primarily distinguished by rolling really poorly on spell attack rolls and astonishingly well on fey charm rolls.
• a 5th-level elven ranger/draconic sorcerer/monk Gap Decade traveller who talks his way into bizarre situations and then is deeply bemused about why he suddenly has to fight his way out of them, using the motley collection of skills he's picked up between National Service, natural elven affiliation for magic, and other cultures' amazingly authentic and deeply spiritual practices that also involve flying kicks.

In general the experience has been extremely good; inevitably that means my comments here will tend towards the critical, because it's really hard to pin down why I enjoyed stuff, but easy to spot the things that jarred on me.

Some thoughts on podcasts

So, since I tend to listen to a lot of Actual Play podcasts, I'm going to scrawl down some thoughts about doing this. Well... rants.

Since I occasionally post podcasts, let me begin by emphasising that I don't in any sense hold up my podcasts as an example of Doing It Right. In a perfect world, there are many things I'd do differently, and maybe I'll go into that later.

Inspirations: eldritch art

This bit of animated art seems very suited to a weird game: blink fast.

The shape of things to come in 2014

It's looking likely that things will get quiet around here over the next few months. This is for the simple reason that I'll be on a different continent from the rest of the L&L crew, and just as importantly, in a completely different timezone.

I'm hoping to maintain some sporadic contact in a couple of ways. One is play-by-email, which I'm thinking of trying out - some of my players seem like they'd fit quite well with less boisterous games, and I'm thinking of running some Cthulhu or general investigative stuff, but leaving out the gunfights and car chases. A more investigation-based, roleplay-heavy (in the sense of "talk about your character") game that doesn't require too many dice rolls that'll break up play by potentially several days apiece. Any tips welcome!

The other thing is that I worked out I can actually run short sessions over Skype, providing I start at 7am and everyone else is willing to play 10-11pm. We'll see! It'd do wonders for my efficiency, I'm sure.

Anyway! I do have a bit of a post backlog to work through, including some draft posts that'll never see the light of day, rather too many game ideas to play with, and several podcasts that need editing up. But you can probably expect things to dry up a lot here. The site will also drift yet further from its origins, as I will no longer be a librarian.

Delayed Deathwatch

How annoying.

I've spent the last couple of weeks hammering away at more Deathwatch in an attempt to cut down my backlog - not least because there's some recent content I'd like to get up in more-or-less timely fashion to discuss while it's fresh, but don't want to leave older recordings hanging around any longer. Anyway, hot rough Fisting action is all ready to go, but Archive.org is being a pain and I haven't been able to upload the files. As I'll be away this weekend, it's likely to be at least next week before I can change that. A shame, I was really hoping to start posting the game.

PNP v. CRPG

There are some pretty substantial differences between CRPG and PNP experiences, and because Shannon brought it up in passing, I wanted to have a quick think about them.

Time sinks

One pretty major discrepancy is how you spend time. The time taken for particular activities differs enormously because of differences in the media and their capabilities, most notably because one is a brilliant calculating engine and the other a brilliant language parser.

Here are some major contributors to time spent in CRPGs:

• Revealing the map and establishing what exists
• Walking from one place to another
• Killing monsters
• Looting
• Transporting loot to shops
• Finding a place where you are game-mechanically permitted to rest
• Working out what you need to do to continue with the game

Here are some major contributors to time spent in PNP:

• Searching rooms
• Questioning NPCs
• Arguing over tactics
• Killing monsters
• Checking rules queries
• Finding a safe place to rest
• Working out what you want to do

In a CRPG, you have to find out what's on the map by physically clicking around it, waiting for your character to move, looking at the things revealed, and deducing what you can about them. Interactible Object buttons may come into play. In a town, you frequently have to physically enter a building and talk to its inhabitants to find out anything about it. Because in CRPGs there's a general sense that whatever you encounter must be playable content of some kind, there's an urge to explore everything, go everywhere, and leave no stone unturned. You also can't entirely rely on the game being robust enough for you to continue if you've missed some content; journals are often inadequate, and there's very little way to get information about what you need to do to continue. Because all you can do is what the game permits, and progress is dependent on various flags being set by your actions, it's entirely possible to just get stuck. Games aren't yet clever enough to give hints, so if you missed one dialogue option with one NPC in a shack hidden under the trees a dozen areas ago, and as a result the rebel messenger isn't spawning to trigger the cutscene that begins the next phase of the game, there is no way for you to know. This encourages exhaustive searching. Also, of course, it's a pain to go back to an area you've visited already.

In a PNP game, none of this is a problem. The GM can sum up a town in a couple of sentences, taking seconds. You don't have to look the whole place over, but if you do, it takes very little time OOC. You can explain what you're interested in and just be told about the relevant stuff. You assume that most of a town is not relevant, just a bunch of houses, and there's no urge to wander into random homes. Because there's no reason to exhaustively search a town, and you're well aware that the GM is there to keep things ticking over, there's no concern about being unable to keep playing - the GM can drop hints, adjust NPC behaviour, change the adventure thread, and generally tinker about to ensure that the game isn't held up by a slight oversight on your part. They're also a better reminder system than a generic journal.

Assuming a D&D-like game, combat may take a similar amount of time in CRPG and PNP, although it depends rather on the edition used. However, the breakdown of that time differs enormously. In most CRPGs, the combat time is spend watching the results of battle against large numbers of monsters, while intervening to pick spells, heal, change targets and otherwise guide the battle - the actual resolution of actions is instant. In PNP, combats are generally against much smaller numbers of enemies for the same amount of adventure, and the bulk of the time is spent choosing and resolving actions. In a single area of Icewind Dale, you might easily battle twenty yeti and fifty shadows at 5th level; the PNP equivalent would be a mere handful. This is partly down to the computer's far greater calculating ability, but also because in PNP fighting the same enemies constantly gets boring very quickly and fighting is slow, so fights are occasional and different. In contrast, in CRPGs fights are pretty quick and they're the thing the game can do very well, whereas they're weak in other areas, so lots of fights are par for the course.

Travel in CRPGs breaks down into two types. There's movement around areas, which involves clicking where you want to go and then waiting until your character lumbers over there. Of course, if you haven't explored the area yet it's impossible, as you can only see about twenty yards in the typical game, even though real-life vision lets you see people moving about half a mile away, so you painstakingly move fraction by fraction. But in explored areas, you can usually just click, and then hope the pathfinding is halfway sensible. It's wise to keep an eye out, though, because a PC can easily stumble into a fight along the way and the party generally makes no attempt to stick together.

The other kind of CRPG travel is where you bampf instantaneously to another city, possibly with a random encounter along the way.

In PNP, all travel takes the same amount of time, which is however long the conversation takes. You can see as far as seems reasonable, and your pathfinding is entirely IC. If any trouble breaks out, there's zero risk of your PC being killed because you simply didn't notice (although traps, ambushes and so on are of course possible).

CRPG looting typically means individually selecting and clicking on enemies, manually choosing which items to transfer to inventories, juggling inventory space, and mousing over rooms to see what might be nickable. PNP looting typically means asking the GM what's valuable and then saying you take it, handling the whole looting phase as a single event. However, there's more scope than in CRPGs for actively searching rooms or taking unexpectedly useful mundane items.

Enough of that

I don't think there's much need to go over absolutely everything here... basically the point is that in a CRPG, you're reliant on going through the system provided by the programmers for accomplishing X, but that system calculates everything for you. In a PNP game, you can cut to the chase and specify to the GM exactly what you're after, ask direct questions, and handwave anything the group don't care about, but you have to do your own resolution.

Interaction

The other major category of difference is how interaction works.

In a CRPG, all possible interaction must be programmed in by the designers. There are two main types, emergent interaction and unique interaction. For example, a programmer can set up rules for faction membership, alignment, attitude to PCs, courage and martial skill; these can then determine how all NPCs react in a variety of encounters with the PCs and with each other. This is emergent. NPCs may attack one another, raise prices for PCs they dislike, respond with hostility to aggressive behaviour, run away from armed enemies, and so on, without needing all this behaviour to be individually and specifically programmed. Of course, sometimes this results in nonsensical behaviour, but such is programming. Similarly, dropped items can be picked up and sold, doors can be opened, locks picked, and so on.

Although to be honest, in a lot of CRPGs the number of doors you can actually lockpick is so tiny as to make the skill pointless. It's plot doors all the way down. This is something else that's much harder to get away with as a GM, and rightfully so.

Unique interactions are specifically designed. That pile of rubble actually contains a buried chest. This candlestick can be moved. This NPC has a complex dialogue tree to negotiate. These open up all kinds of new possibilities, but require an awful lot of individual work and testing to ensure they work as intended. Often, they still don't. Plot flags are a regular sticking point here, since often you simply can't get the dialogue options you want, even though your character is well aware of a topic and the NPC's relevance, because the flag is tied to one line of dialogue with some other NPC, or to holding the right item in your inventory, or opening the right door, or whatever. This is down to complexity; the more natural you want the conversations (or the presence of interactible options) to appear, the more flags are needed to track what you've already done, which leads to exponential(ish?) increases in the number of different combinations that need programming. Bearing in mind that games are large and there are huge amounts of possible player actions, it's inevitable that there will be some situations where unexpected actions or events (like NPCs dying) lead to broken interactions. Unsellable plot items and immortal NPCs are one attempt to deal with this problem.

Because of the need for programming and testing, there's a fairly small cap on what unique interactions can be created. There are only so many combinations of dialogue you can write and test within budget. You don't want to program in the possibility of breaking through walls, mining under buildings, rigging up elaborate traps or luring out monsters by buying a dozen goats and letting them loose in the dungeon. You can't create complex dialogue trees for every single peasant in the game, in case the PCs want to interrogate them about events, try to recruit them or use them as spies. You want to paint in backgrounds without accounting for PC decisions to turn the curtains into disguises or use the furniture as firewood.

In PNP, there's virtually no limit to interaction except patience and the social contract. If you want to disassemble a temple brick by brick, you can (it'll be slow and boring, but possible). You can say absolutely anything to an NPC and expect an appropriate reaction. You can perform actions on objects and expect predictable reactions. There are no "background objects" that are simply immune to your touch.

Another difference is that multi-location interactions are far more annoying on CRPGs than on PNP. This is partly because of greater PC control, and partly because of travel, as discussed above. In PNP, you can have conversations with four people in three locations, nipping back and forth as needed, in about the same time as one conversation with one person. In a CRPG, traipsing across maps and areas to do fetch and negotiation quests for NPCs is generally a tiresome chore forced on low-level characters by the need to grind for XP and gold; it's tedious because instead of saying "okay, we go and talk to the blacksmith", you need to click through the dialogue choices to extricate yourself from the woodcutter, then exit the building, walk your party across the map for a couple of minutes, go into the smithy, and click on the blacksmith.

Where's the fun?

In CRPGs, because it's much harder to have genuinely interesting conversations or act in creative ways, a lot of the fun comes from a sense of exploration and progression. It's enjoyable finding cool stuff, defeating enemies with cunning and tactical brilliance (or by finding entertaining AI glitches to exploit...), seeing interesting stuff that's been programmed for you, and so on. A lot of the time, the pre-programmed mysteries and conversations are only adequate entertainment rather than great, and new locations are interesting but the shortage of interaction detracts from that. Levelling and looting are pretty core to enjoying the game, and so the mechanical balance is crucial.

In PNP, most of the entertainment comes from the interactions between you and other participants. Working together to find creative ways around an obstacle or setback. In-character banter. Teasing out descriptions from the GM, or trying out small things just to see what happens - throwing pebbles into wells, knocking on doors, eavesdropping. OOC chat about the situation can be just as big a proportion, and simply isn't there in many CRPG playthroughs that are aimed at single players. Because mechanical actions are time-consuming to resolve, having an endless stream of action is, for many players, less enjoyable than in an RPG that handles everything for you. Mechanics remain important, but because a large part of the enjoyment is based on interactions, and because of the greater scope for creativity, balance is somewhat less of an issue.

---

As usual, no conclusions, just some rambling analysis. To be clear, I'm not saying here that CRPGs are bad, even though a lot of the above comes across as negative. There are some very definite disadvantages to CRPGs and things that they can't do well, but they are really pretty good for combat-based adventures and as a single-player experience. However, they are really quite different to the tabletop PNP experience in many ways, and I think it's worth paying attention to that.

One of our PCs is Missing: 20 reasons for absence

Daniel over at System Matters recently posted a list of 20 reasons why one of the PCs is missing. It's in German, but he generously agreed to let me post a translation here. Some are more flexible than others, some are more specific than others, but I think they're a pretty good starting point for handling this kind of situation if you don't just want to handwave it. You can either use them as a random explanation table, or just improvise around one of the suggestions below. Any credit is due to Daniel, any poor phrasing is undoubtedly my hurried translation.

Who doesn’t know the feeling: a game session with your mates and someone’s missing. Chiz chiz… what to do? Call it off? Pull out a board game? Play a one-shot? But what if you really want to charge ahead with your campaign, because everyone’s having a blast with it? How can I explain the PC’s absence? No problem, just roll on the table below for a quick and dirty explanation of why the character isn’t around today.

1. Note: Not guaranteed!

2. Note: You can find a discussion of this topic in Episode 6 of the podcast.

Also in German!

01 – The character has been kidnapped, and needs rescuing

02 – The character is hanging back as a rearguard, and if possible, has had a little adventure of their own that can be played through at the start of the next session.

03 – A personal commitment (audience with the king, a visit from the in-laws, an inheritance, accounting deadlines) has prevented them from participating.

04 – The classic: badly injured or knocked out, and left with no memory of what’s happened.

05 – The character wouldn’t be dragged into THIS adventure for ten thousand ducats… only to reappear during the next session, for after all, he can’t leave his friends in a scrape.

06 – A magical curse like Flesh to Stone or Imprisonment makes sure that the character’s out of the game for a spell.

07 – Just can’t shake this damned cough… and then the rheumatism too… it’s best that you go on without me for now… I’m sure to be back in form soon!

08 – The character knows someone in this adventure that he’d really rather not run into again: an old flame, an old enemy he couldn’t handle, an old friend he ended up hurting, etc.

09 – The character wanted to make the meeting, but something got in the way: the plane wouldn’t start, his horse threw a shoe, the caravan made slower progress than expected, the weather’s unfavourable…

10 – The other characters’ message didn’t reach its destination: the host of the “Prancing Pony” didn’t send on the letter, a messenger was shot, the letter went to the wrong address, etc.

11 – The character got the job of rustling up some important stuff. The potions of fire protection for the dragon-slaying, the excavation papers for the local authorities, the military support for a siege, etc.

12 – The character was badly wounded before the adventure, and during the adventure something can be found to heal him, such as the Grail, a hermit with magical powers, Athelas, etc.

13 – Wine, women and song have left their mark. The character has simply slept too late to make the meeting punctually. This also works if one forgets to dust the mantelpiece after an evening with a bunch of greedy dwarves (see 10)

14 – Professional obligations! The Professor has lectures booked, the Lord is required to sit in the Upper House, the soldier is needed in battle, the farmer has a field to prepare, etc.

15 – The character is a persona non grata in this district. He’s on a wanted list, hasn’t paid his debts or is considered a troublemaker.

16 – The character doesn’t want to be dragged into this matter. His situation or status forbids it. A priest in the Castle of Maidens! The heir to the throne in the City of Thieves! A Cambridge professor in the University of Oxford!*

17 – The character is scared of getting involved in the adventure, because of a prophecy predicting that it will be the death of him.

18 – A strange power has taken control of the character! A Stygian wizard with mind-controlling charms, an Insect from Shaggai, an elven sorcerer or the power of a god leads the character doing extraordinary things. Use with caution!

19 – A messenger appears and hands the character a message; he rushes off at once. Perfect for starting a new adventure next time, and seeing what sort of a mess the character’s got himself into.

20 – The character slips ahead to reconnoitre. He should have been back ages ago… what’s happened to him? Has he been discovered? Has he found a secret passage whose door closed behind him? Is he in the treasury, stuffing his pockets? Has he found a friend in an unexpected place? Or is he *gulp* dead?

*Note: this is, indeed, in the original German version.

Mouse Guard seems interesting

Sorry for lack of posts. There are a few in the pipeline but in no shape to publish. I've just got an awful lot of IRL stuff going on at the moment and not much energy for writing anything interesting. Definitely not for further Monitors development, which is frustrating because it's tantalisingly close to alpha-playtestable.

Recently I've listened to several Mouse Guard APs and despite finding it rather alien (I've never played Burning Wheel, and my only experience with storygames was not a great success, although I don't think it's a storygame per se but has a few influences that way maybe? I dunno. I'm not the RPG theory guy. It's a bit different from D&D or Call of Cthulhu is what I'm saying.

Anyway, these APs - specifically The Walking Eye and Roo Sack Gamers archives APs - have tickled my interest and stirred a quiet desire to give the game a try. But I've got a few games stacked up not yet played, so let's not get too carried away.

I kind of like some of the ideas in it, like mechanics for stuff you care about and possibly the way conflicts get handled, although without actually knowing the rules it's a bit hard to be sure. It also seems like a way to find out about Burning Wheel, which everything I've heard suggests is notoriously complicated and drawn-out to start playing, without actually playing Burning Wheel. Mostly, in all honesty, I like the idea of playing heroic mice. I'm currently hunting for more APs because it's grabbed my interest and APs are effectively my sports viewing.

Who Are Heavy Laden

I’m quite possibly the only person in the world this bothers, and me only in passing, but it’s always seemed weird to me the way carrying capacity works in d20 games, and particularly the way it interacts with combat.

It’s probably reasonable to assume I’m the average Str 10 NPC, which means I’m unencumbered when carrying a toddler (33lb.), slightly slower (but still able to run!) when carrying two toddlers, and still slightly dextrous and moving pretty rapidly when carrying three toddlers. Well, okay. Dramatic licence and all that, plus you want chracters to be able to transport significant amounts of stuff (including fallen comrades and massive piles of gold), so damping down the effects of heavy stuff seems okay.

However, the rules also allow me to fight at full effectiveness when carrying three toddlers. That’s right. I may be slow, unstealthy, and off-balance, but I can duck, weave, thrust, parry, spin and hack as much as I like regardless of how much I have strapped to my back. This isn’t just a question of weight, but one of balance. I very much doubt my camping rucksack approaches 100lb (internet suggests an army pack is around 50-70lb), but the idea of fighting in it is ludicrous – even turning around quickly is difficult. Soldiers use special packs with quick release straps to drop them if a fight breaks out, but it’s never implied that adventurers do anything similar. Adventurers typically cart all kinds of potentially fragile materials around, but their luggage never gets damaged in combat, as you’d expect if they’re brawling with bears. Blades and maws don’t seem to rip canvas and spill contents, missed attacks never stab into packs and stick, or shatter potions.

So, what if (hypothetically) we wanted things to be more realistic here? My suggestion would be to have encumbrance – but not armour, which is already dealt with by armour proficiencies and feats – apply its check penalty to attack rolls and to AC. It’s simple enough. The same applies to large and bulky items that would cause significant inconvenience, regardless of their weight - ever try carrying a big pile of styrofoam?

Adventurers of increasing level will find the penalty much less of a problem, which reasonably reflects increasing familiarity with fighting encumbered. Those wanting to avoid the penalty need to adopt tactics other than simply strapping everything to their backs: using pack animals, leaving non-essential gear outside when exploring, or dropping packs when they expect trouble. These are all realistic solutions to the issue.

Dropping a pack should realistically require a move action (medium encumbrance) or a standard action (heavy encumbrance). This is potentially risky if you’re carrying fragile items or fighting in awkward environments. Stowing a pack (or carried object) with extra care, so it won’t drop into an acid pool or off a walkway, may require an additional action.

For anyone worried by the penalty, there’s a simple option of offering feats:

Encumbered Proficiency (Medium) [General]

Benefit: You treat your encumbrance as one step lighter for the purposes of determining attack and Armour Class penalties.

Encumbered Proficiency (Heavy) [General]

Benefit: You treat your encumbrance as two steps lighter for the purposes of determining attack and Armour Class penalties.

Battle Porter [General]

Benefit: You can drop a pack as a swift action, or carefully stow a pack as a move action.

Normal: Dropping a medium load requires a move action, and dropping a heavy load requires a standard action. Stowing a pack carefully requires an additional move action.

This approach might encourage players to think more carefully about what they would realistically tend to carry on their person in pouches and pockets (thieves’ kit), what would be in an adventuring pack they take with them (50’ of rope), and what might be brought along on journeys but typically left at campsites unless they expect to need it (portable forge, 500 arrows). Most of the time this won’t be an issue – they can nip back to collect bulky items if they’re needed – but occasionally it will limit their options, hopefully in interesting ways.

So yeah, just an idle thought I felt like fleshing out, really.

The Loneliness of the Melée Distance Fighter

As both Arthur and Dan have recently posted, we just finished playing through A Stony Sleep from The Emperor Protects, which is a Deathwatch scenario. If you are baffled by this sentence, you may want to move on. If you are worried about spoilers, this is not the post you're looking for. Somewhat oddly, if you want a post about the scenario, it turns out not to be this one either. I didn't realise when I started writing it.

Consider this a spoiler-averting image...

I had a lot of fun with it, which I'm adding in at the start as pre-cushioning for some negative comments I will probably make (I tend to write blogposts stream-of-consciousness, so I don't actually know yet).

So a quick précis of the scenario:

• Inquisitor calls you into investigate another missing inquisitor and the underwater city he was looking into
• Foil trap set for inquisitor (or don't)
• Discover xeno-cultists under old shrine
• Attack other xeno-cultist base to retrieve stolen submarine
• Travel to underwater city
• Defeat enemies
• Blow up McGuffin and run away

Those of you (ahem) who have been following our exploits will remember that my character is the dashingly handsome Brother Nikolai, played by Antonio Banderas and now featuring a Terminator-style glowing red eye after an unfortunate encounter with an Orc Warboss and his power claw.

The Eyes Don't Have It

Before we go any further, let me gripe about that eye. See, the level of bionics you can get depends on your Renown rating. I decided that getting my head bashed in really cried out for an obvious aftereffect, and also bionics are something I quite like about 40K, so I declared that my injury was bad enough that a bionic eye was needed. This cost a certain amount of Requisition points (gp) despite that fact that low-tier bionics don't actually do anything. They are exactly as good as a normal eye.

What we didn't spot at the time was that bionics - even in the Space Marine-focused rulebook that is Deathwatch - are literally exactly as good as a normal, non-Space Marine eye. Space Marines have an array of anatomical upgrades that allow them heightened senses, night vision and various other things not connected to eyes. Strictly by the rules, my character's vision should actually have decreased as a result of this entirely self-inflicted, points-costing "upgrade".

I'd been quite excited about getting to the next level of Renown on completing this mission, because then I'd be able to buy up to an enhanced bionic, which would give me some actual benefits. After completing A Stony Sleep, we looked at the rules for enhanced bionics. Turns out, an enhanced bionic eye (requiring level 2 Renown and a sizeable investment of Requistion) is exactly as good as a normal Space Marine's eyes except in one specific situation that I can't quite remember. Ah, wait, you can incorporate a single ranged weapon sight! That's great. For my Assault Marine.

I can from one angle appreciate that it makes sense for bionics not to actually be better than your existing senses, to discourage unnecessary bionicising, and also to fit into the technophobic 40K universe. Presumably, the idea is that you lose a limb or organ as a result of some critical injury damage, and then can keep your character playable via bionics, while still suffering the long-term effects of your injury until you become powerful enough to overcome them. I have to assume that it didn't occur to the designers that players would inflict them on themselves for roleplaying reasons.

The others asked if I wanted to retcon the bionic after our discovery, but that felt like a cop-out. I'll keep it. I'm just a bit miffed. It looks like it'll be quite a few more missions before I might be able to get a bionic eye that actually seems to have any kind of game-mechanical effect, which is kind of the same thing as not having a bionic eye at all.

A Stony Sleep features several battles, a couple of which we apparently skipped because our scheduling lends itself to two-shot missions every few months rather than dragging things out. As far as I can tell Arthur just allowed us to fight only two mobs of Necron cultists rather than three or four, which is kind of fine by me. In a slower-paced campaign I'd have quite happily played through some of the investigations and maybe worked with the other Imperial groups to put down the rebellion, but that's not how we're playing this campaign and Deathwatch isn't exactly built for investigation.

Oh hey, another tangent!

Investment Advice

This is, in some respects, another part of the system that I find quite odd. The Deathwatch character sheets include a vast swathe of social and investigative skills that Space Marines do not have, such as Blather, Barter, Deceive, Disguise, Lip Reading, Inquiry, Shadowing... Some of these can be bought as skill upgrades with your nice XP, but this seems like a particularly bad choice.

The first and most obvious reason is that it's very unlikely your Space Marines are going to be doing any socialising or investigating. They are not renowned for their social graces, and if they get invited to parties it's only as part of some honour to the Emperor. 99% of the Imperium's inhabitants are going to be so nervous around a Space Marine that it will be impossible to hold a conversation with them, and if you are suspicious of them for some reason, Space Marines have so much authority (and are so damn scary) that you can either legally drag them off to be tortured and mind-probed, or nobody is likely to stop you anyway. Looking at the other investigative skills, Space Marines aren't likely to be called in to any cases requiring forensic or research skills, while the idea of them doing PI work is preposterous - it's really hard to be surreptitious when you're a seven-foot godlike entity who most of the population will run screaming from or fall to their knees before.

The second reason is a nasty metagame one. In general, Space Marine skillsets are limited to combaty stuff. There have been a few occasions where we asked about something and Arthur pointed out that our characters simply didn't have the training to do it. However, quite a lot of the time, if we don't have a relevant skill but something should in theory be doable, Arthur has offered a way for us to try something we're interested in doing - which is one of the things I like about his GMing. For example, in The Price of Hubris, we used a simple random roll to see whether I could bring down a tunnel with a grenade, since I didn't have any Demolition skill.

However! If a game system explicitly provides a skill for doing something, and somebody actually invests in that skill, the GM will generally feel obliged to use that skill as the resolution mechanic. That is entirely fair. The likely result is twofold. Firstly, by taking an unusual skill, you are quite likely preventing other characters from being able to do those things. Whereas before the GM might have offered an alternative way of doing things, with the tacit understanding that your combat-oriented characters were not expected to invest heavily in unusual skills, it feels wrong to have the one character use their actual skill while offering an alternative to the others, because it seems to devalue that investment. Secondly, in a game like Deathwatch with relatively low (30-40%) base chances in skills, it is entirely possible that the one character who does have the skill will end up with a lower chance of succeeding at it.

I'll say that again, because I think it's an interesting aspect of how people do stuff: by spending your XP on Moustache Waxing instead of Shoot Things Even Better, you may well end up with a worse chance of successfully waxing moustaches than you had previously. When nobody has the skill, the GM might simply call for a random die roll, and people tend to give relatively generous odds on those kinds of things. Even on a relatively ungenerous call, you may well end up with a 10% chance of success for no investment at all. In contrast, if you spent those points on Moustache Waxing, you will have perhaps a 40% chance of success at this one obscure task - which still isn't very good odds - and you've passed up the chance to get Shoot Things Even Better, which would have enhanced a skill you use all the time and are already good at.

I don't think this is a GMing problem, I just think it's an interesting feature of the tacit understandings groups tend to establish around how they like to play. It's a shame in some ways, because I really like dabbling in unusual skills, but Deathwatch just isn't that sort of game really.

Fight Club

Where were we? Oh yes, battles. The battles are, as I remember:

• Fight a horde of cultists
• Fight another horde of cultists, some with Gauss weapons
• Fight a small group of Chaos Marines
• Fight a Necron boss

I'm trying to find a way to say this which doesn't sound like griping at the other players, or about the game, and I can't, but rest assured that isn't my intention... perhaps the most noticeable thing for me as player of Brother Nikolai was how effective I wasn't.

• In the first battle, Nikolai confronted the cult leader while the others aimed weapons at the mob. When they refused to surrender, he snatched the leader away while the rest were mown down by heavy bolter fire in seconds.
• In the second battle, Iakomo blew apart the cult leader's xenotech-wielding bodyguards in a single round, then was obliged to switch to a bolt pistol because Nikolai was in the way and still killed several more cultists. Erec annihilated the cult leader and sixteen points of horde with one psychic blast - very nearly taking Nikolai with them. Nikolai, with four attacks and a trait that inflicts additional damage on hordes, killed a mighty seven points of horde.
• In the third battle, Nikolai got pumped full of bolt shells when he stuck his head round a corner. Erec blew apart the entire squad with a psychic blast.
• In the fourth battle, two rounds of heavy bolter fire tore apart the Necron, although Nikolai's missed entirely.

In the entire scenario, Nikolai's fighting contribution was to kill six cultists, successfully grab someone, and leave a grenade on a timer to blow something up. A fair bit of it is down to bad luck - I got unlucky on initiative most of the time, and rolled poorly during my single round of melée combat. I can't help feeling, though, that it seems to be easier for the other characters to fight well. The heavy bolter is partly responsible for that, of course, and psychic powers are very powerful because of the (in theory) balancing chance of getting your brain eaten by a demon.

A heavy bolter tends to inflict around 20 points of damage per hit, and generally inflicts multiple hits, making it insanely good for blowing apart individual targets, demolishing armoured squads or ripping apart hordes (it seemed to do about 9 damage to hordes). Smite inflicts 7+1d10 damage to hordes and 7d10 damage to individuals within a 7-metre, which will ruin most creatures' day. A chainsword - the only melée weapon available to a low-level assault marine - does 1d10+4 damage per hit; a good to-hit roll puts a lower cap on that but doesn't allow additional hits or increase damage. Allowing for the tearing power to pick the best of two d10s, you're looking at about 11 damage per hit - this should actually be 23 with a Strength bonus, which I keep forgetting, but thankfully I don't think it was relevant in this mission. With a full array of traits, the assault marine can look at getting four attacks, and a +d10 bonus for a single round when charging a horde while in Squad Mode.

In short, the decked-out assault marine can just about manage to inflict the same damage on a single target that Smite does to a 7-metre radius, or about half what a heavy bolter is likely to inflict. To do so, he must rush into combat, isolating himself, leaving him vulnerable to counterattacks (unlike shooters, he can't use cover) and blocking line-of-fire for his far more effective brethren.

Against a magnitude 30 horde, the heavy bolter does about 9 damage. Smite inflicts an average of 12 damage. The assault marine is likely to get three hits inflicting about 6 damage, and for one round may be able to get the extra average 5 damage.

What I really can't work out is what it is assault marines are actually good at. There are certainly situations where he'll do better - if the entire party is forced into melée combat - but there doesn't seem to be any type of battle where where he can be more effective than someone else with a heavy bolter would.

In fact: let's go back to that magnitude 30 horde. Nikolai's BS of 34, plus +20 for Full Auto, plus a +30 magnitude bonus to hit, gives him 84 to hit, which means he will tend to get get three degrees of success. This will translate into 5 hits (1 + 3 DOS + 1 Explosive). This is only slightly less than he can expect in melée, can be done at enormous range, from cover, does not expose him to melée attacks (particularly relevant to the many creatures with nothing else) and does not impede his brothers' ability to attack effectively. It is, in fact, almost certainly a more sensible option given the choice.

In other words, unless I'm completely missing something, it seems like at least a low-level assault marines can fight most effectively by buying a heavy bolter and shooting things from a long way away. Had Nikolai invested his XP in Ballistic Skill upgrades and traits rather than in assault-appropriate ones, the distinction would be even sharper.

Don't get me wrong. I love Brother Nikolai. I have a lot of fun with him. I just... don't understand. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, or whether I'm doing something fundamentally wrong mechanically.

I've achieved a fair amount with Nikolai, but most of that has been by using him either as a courier or a tank. He retrieved civilians from inaccessible places. He can kidnap cult leaders and fly off. He's spent quite a lot of time being the point man who soaks up damage for the rest of the team. He's picked up a few esoteric skills that I just occasionally manage to pass my rolls on. He's (in my view) a great success for roleplaying, but he's frankly a bit ineffectual when it comes to his actual job.

Opposing Elements

One of the traits of 40K tabletop, which I suspect applies in the RPGs too, is that you should ignore cinematic logic. We have seen repeatedly that if you are confronted by a melée-specialised enemy, the absolute last thing you should do is engage them in melée. Nikolai's experiences with a genestealer, a dark eldar archon and an ork warboss have drilled that idea fairly thoroughly into my head. Melée enemies, you shoot.

In theory, the opposite applies to shooty enemies. By engaging them in melée, you can rob them of their greatest strength.

I don't know if this actually works yet, because so far I really don't think we've seen much in the way of shooty enemies. It's possible that the Chaos Marines met that description, but they got blown up. I suspect we also won't see much in that line, because practically speaking an assault marine with a jump pack is the only one that can reliably approach rapidly to get into melée without being shot to pieces, and scenario writers aren't likely to want to make that assumption; whereas absolutely everyone has ranged weapons.

Even then, it presents some problems that aren't there in tabletop. As an assault marine, you really have to be extremely confident to lead a one-man charge on a heavy weapons battery because if anyone is on overwatch, or if it turns out to be possible for them to fire into melée, or if there turns out to be a scary melée opponent amongst the shooters, then you have a good chance of ending up dead.

The Loneliness of the Melée Distance Fighter

So that's life for Brother Nikolai, doomed to be slightly less effective at everything than everyone else. But perhaps one day - if he curbs his enthusiasm for ending up in single combat with the universe's most effective killing machines enough to live that long - his time will come.

Gang Aft Agley

I had planned to spend some time this weekend thrashing out the vexed issue of spells and tech, hoping to come up with some concrete proposals for a dozen or so of each to give that cyber-sorcerer feel. As luck would have it, I have mostly spent Saturday not on long (and Monitors-productive) bus journeys to visit friends and family, but slumped on a settee surrounded by tissues and Lemsip, doing nothing more taxing than listening to podcasts with my eyes shut or shuffling across the road to buy milk. My brain isn't really functional enough for any complicated thinking on account of the alien goop that appears to have filled my skull cavity and whose faint, lullabetic humming leaves me nodding drowsily and composing blogposts that sound like I'm on something illegal. With my eyes shut. At least all those years of typing practice are paying off, eh?

Perhaps I'll be feeling better tomorrow. Or perhaps whatever otherwordly entity is currently coccooning in my feeble frame will develop a strong desire to write a silly reptile-based RPG before putting its world-domination plans into motion. Only time will tell.

Musing on Maths

I have been running quite a lot of maths recently to try and work out whether different combat models would work in Monitors, let alone what numbers to use. And this has given me a huge amount of sympathy for people faced with doing this sort of thing professionally.

The thing is, it's relatively simple (by which I mean to say, very complicated) to do calculations for what would happen (on average, of course) if hero X and enemy Y stand still in an enemy room with no features whatsoever and shoot or stab at each other. You can, if you want, tweak the numbers to produce different results, or different distributions - maybe you want pretty reliable combat, perhaps you prefer it dramatically swingy. You might introduce a complicating layer of different attacks, or perhaps multiple combatants, but while these make things even more difficult it's still possible to see how you model it with maths, even if the execution is a pain.

The problem really comes about when you try to introduce other stuff. That is, anything that allows combat to be remotely interesting.

In combat, we want heroes to use cunning and stealth and tactics. They take cover, launch surprise attacks, use suppressing fire. People don't fire endlessly at static targets, but duck and crouch and move around for perceived advantage. Large groups try to encircle smaller groups, while the smaller groups try to use terrain and technology to create bottlenecks, allowing them to face only a few enemies at a time.

How much of an advantage can the hero gain by doing this? Exactly how much do we want the hero to do it - or any particular heroic archetype? Should they be taking cover frequently for a small bonus, occasionally for a large one? How successfully should they be able to bottleneck enemies, and how does that relate to different enemy types? How effective is that suppressing fire?

Very quickly, you end up in the situation where you'd have to picture the whole fight in your head in detail in order to work out exactly what kinds of factors you want to come in and how effective you want them to be. You end up with an unmanageable number of things to take into account, and potentially with a massively-spiralling set of rules to handle it all. Or else you resort to alpha-testing each possible set of rules in detail, each time having to decide not only what effects you care about, but the numbers that should be attached to them. Real game designers have my sincere sympathy. I have no idea how they handle this stuff.

Which is to say nothing of Grapple rules.

Investigating Offices

Inspired (once again) by Shannon, I had a mental look around my offices past and present, to see what clues people might find. Some are more clue-like than others.

Contact lists:

My current office actually has a massive directory of people by department and by name, with phone numbers and emails. There’s also a cribsheet inside the stationery cupboard door (because it’s a convenient unused surface) with numbers for the cleaning company, the security team, the emergency maintenance team, a few very senior staff, and personal numbers for all the staff in our office (to check up on them if they don't come in). That’s pretty hefty stuff. With someone's home number, you can get their address fairly easily, even if that's not written down somewhere in the office too.

Timetables:

As we run shifts, we have two weeks of shifts pinned to the cupboard, plus an actual calendar featuring bigger events. Between these you can work out (with a bit of deduction and ability to match initials with names) who’s doing what shifts, (and therefore when they won’t be at home). You can also find out a lot of appointments, especially meetings, but also things like dental and medical appointments. If you spend time to look at paperwork or read a few emails, you can also work out what the meetings actually are, since most are known by acronyms. This information will tell you who else is likely to go from other parts of the company, which tells you when their offices will be empty. Plus, you can work out which meeting rooms to bug.

Procedures:

Bosses love protocols and procedures, and in our case also love physical paper. This means we have two huge ringbinders of protocols, listing exactly how we’re supposed to handle particular issues, as well as (in some cases) the passwords for computers or bits of software.

Keys:

Bosses like things to be locked, but in a shared office it’s usually not practical for everyone to have the keys, nor for a keyholder to always be around when needed. This means keys are often tucked away somewhere out of sight, but if you have the time to check cupboards and boxes, and try any keys you find, you can probably get into most things.

Personal lockers:

Plenty of offices have personal drawers, lockers or cupboards where staff members can stash their bags, shopping, lunchtime reading, favourite herbal tea, etc. These often also contain bits of miscellaneous paperwork (particularly in offices with hotdesking), and especially paperwork that’s private: job application forms, say, or notes for a meeting where they plan to disagree with their boss. As well as offering some insight into company politics, these can tell you something about individual staff members. On the downside, people tend to take the keys with them; on the plus side, in a lot of offices nobody bothers to lock them in the first place.

Food and drink:

A lot of people have favourite mugs, personal coffee and tea supplies, as well as maybe biscuits, protein shakes, fruit, peanuts or whatever other snacks they like. If you’re burgling the place and planning to come back later, you could quite easily spike some of the supplies with something that’ll send people home sick. This might be a good prelude to turning up imitating health inspectors (or paramedics), or simply taking advantange of the boss being ill to browbeat the junior staff into letting you in. More harmlessly, you could find out what people like, and use that to help befriend them.

Stationery:

Most offices have all kinds of stationery lying around, which might provide some clues. Pre-printed envelopes or labels are pretty common, and give you some idea where things are being sent. Invoices, credit slips and other order details are often not locked away, but just stashed in a tray until they’re dealt with; these can tell you a lot about the flow of money in a company, especially if they’ve been processed and now contain things like budget codes and authorisation signatures. In some cases you might spot dubious uses of company money – I’ve seen a few of those myself – and thse might be handy for blackmail, or for understanding how someone ticks. What do they like? Are they likely to accept a ‘gift’? Can you sweeten them up over time and get some favours? Again, if you know what companies the office has dealt with, and have order numbers and so on, you’re in a strong position to impersonate someone from that company to “fix the photocopier” or “show off some new products”.

Of course, stationery is also handy if you want to forge paperwork from the company. Letterhead stationery, official stamps and other goodies are often just left lying around, because people use them a lot. You can likely also get a look at senior staff’s signatures to fake those.

Printers and copiers:

It’s not that unusual for people to send a load of print jobs, but not pick them up for a long time, especially if they get distracted. You might find both official and personal printouts sitting around in the open, because often a shared printer is still the only place to send private information. In older settings, a typing pool or longhand secretary might produce and deliver a whole load of documents that the boss hasn’t had time to read, and they’re just lying in a tray.

Devices:

Things like phones, laptops and tablets are pretty common, though in shared offices (and especially on junior staff) they’re often frowned on. On the other hand, in a tech company or in a boss’ office you’re likely to see them lying around. As many people don’t bother locking them when not in use, this gives a good opportunity to check contact lists and call histories, read email (it’s likely that Gmail, Facebook and so on will still be logged in even if they’re not open, because they’re tenacious like that), copy whole chunks of data, or even install software for later hacking. This is quite likely a more reliable way to get at email than a desktop would be, as people tend to lock them or shut them down. Emails can get you all kinds of information on appointments, contacts, upcoming events (fire drills are a great chance to spend ten minutes looting the place) and personal lives.

Applications and personnel forms:

There's a fair chance any sizeable office will have some job applications lying around; in most cases it's strictly against policy to leave them lying around in public, but happens nevertheless. As well as anything you can learn about goings-on at the company, the comments they leave on application forms can tell you a lot about people.

Possibly more useful are things like annual review forms and performance reviews. These will tell you a lot about what individuals do, how well they're seen to be performing, and their aspirations. Depending on what the department does, you may be able to use these to find out who was involved with a particular project.

Photo boards:

In sizeable organisations, it's pretty common to have some kind of photo board. It might be official company photos with names under each one, showing the company hierarchy. On the other hand, it could be a collection of staff trip photos, newspaper clippings showing them doing charity work, and "morale-boosting" images of senior staff opening new buildings or talking to lowly underlings.

Meta: Christmas rush?

I got a faint shock today when I opened Blogger.

Got to say, I'm mildly curious about the sudden rush of visitors (hey, in my world 30+ pageviews is a rush). I'm guessing some are Yoggies lured here by my tome-based posts, but then those don't seem especially inundated with pageviews. I'm be interested to know, if anyone cares to comment.

#7 #6RPGs

Arthur has just drawn my attention to the 7rpgs and #7rpgsrun thing, which seems mildly interesting.

Sadly, my own lists don't even hit seven in total.

Most Played:
1) Neverwinter Nights as a DM'd system for D&D 3.5
=2) Call of Cthulhu, Deathwatch
=4) After Sundown, Monstertown, Dying Earth

Most Run:
1) D&D 4E
2) Call of Cthulhu
3) D&D 3.5 / Pathfinder
4) Hellcats & Hockeysticks

It's worth noting that's a lot less gaming than it may look like. Neverwinter Nights has probably had, oh, thirty sessions over the last couple of years. The joint second Most Played tabletop games reach, I think, five sessions apiece. The others got a single session of play. For what it's worth, After Sundown was a playtest with some mates, and Monstertown was an ad-hoc test of a work-in-progress. So I can't really count any of those as games I've really got the measure of; in fact it seems a bit cheeky including them at all.

Meanwhile, I've run not quite an entire 4E D&D module, three Call of Cthulhu scenarios and two in PF/3.5, and playtested H&H once. So it's not like I stick rigidly to a couple of old favourites, I just haven't actually done much gaming.

The dearth of games isn't for want of interest, as the fact that I have two gaming blogs might suggest. A mixture of major scheduling problems, extreme busyness, players moving away and health problems has ended both the D&D campaigns, and put two ongoing Cthulhu games on indefinite hiatus. Deathwatch is technically still underway, though. Thankfully, NWN has provided a reasonably steady dose of gaming, with a nice mix of modules, though it's not quite the same as tabletop.

I'm hoping that next year things will even out, though as I'm likely to be looking for a new job, it may be a forlorn hope. I'm still quite invested in the Cthulhu campaign I'd started, I want to see how Dan's Cthulhu game ends up, there's a lot of orks in need of the Emperor's wrath, and there's so much stuff out there I haven't even tried...

I might have to see if we can get something cheerful and light-hearted going. Between Cthulhu, Deathwatch and some slightly downbeat Pathfinder it's been a little bit grim in tone. Lots of comedy moments along the way, of course, but something deliberately optimistic and brightly coloured might be fun, if I can think of anything...

Indie Press Revolution

I just wanted to quickly share a shopping story. It's okay, shopping is unlikely to become a major feature of this blog.

I went to Indie Press Revolution to pick up a couple of game PDFs. Specifically Maid and Dinosaurs in Spaaace!, as I've been looking for potential light relief games to run, something maybe easier to get going than the Cthulhu and Pathfinder stuff that's recently ground to a halt. I heard reasonable things about both games, and while I've got some reservations about Maid, it sounds to me like I could probably at least hack up something from the system, even if we don't want to play it RAW.

Trying to set up an account with IPR, I spotted a problem: there's a glitch with their address data, so it includes some UK counties that no longer exist, and is missing a few extant ones. At it happens, I wasn't able to give my address correctly, so I dropped them a line mentioning the issue; I didn't like to set up an inaccurate address, as I've no idea what the legal issues might be for them or me. Overnight, an email came back from the general manager, no less. I won't quote it as I haven't asked permission, but I'll paraphrase.

Don't worry about the website; what can I do for you? He attached a spreadsheet of the current catalogue, in case I was having trouble using the website.

I told him what I was looking for, and that I was quite happy to set up an account if that was okay by him.

No problem, it'll cost this much; you can pay by PayPal or card and I'll set up a Dropbox link.

I agreed.

Here's a link to the files. Here's another link to pay by PayPal.

Everything went smoothly, and I got my games. I was particularly pleased by his sending the file link at the same time as PayPal, which showed a lot of good faith. Okay, it wasn't much money to risk and it'd be a bit of a rubbish scam, but still, nice gesture and it sped up matters for me too. Given that companies (in general) can be a bit inclined to treat customers with suspicion, I appreciate that.

So sure, there was a slight problem with their website, but I'm well impressed with their customer service.

Orphan Blog

So it looks like Librarians and Leviathans has become an orphan.

As I've mentioned before, this started out as a place to track progress of our D&D/Pathfinder campaign, a easier-maintenance version of the website I used for an earlier ill-fated 4E campaign. That campaign was substantially a way for a couple of friends to try out roleplaying, and for a couple of my 4E group to get another dose of it. They had a reasonable time with the first adventure (a basic dungeon exploration), and were keen enough to progress to a looser follow-up that I'd carefully set things up for just in case. This more free-form style of play seemed more popular, though it was still fairly rigid on the whole, as I wasn't keen to dive too far into improv with all of us so inexperienced.

After the second adventure, we slid into the deadly hiatus, largely due to some health issues on my part that, coupled with a completely mad few months at work, meant planning and running games was just not viable. More recently, I've talked to them about reviving the campaign as things are going better. However, one player has moved to another city, and another (one of the two veterans of the original L&L group) is now too busy to commit to a game. That leaves us with two players, both fairly busy, and both playing spellcasters. The players don't seem particularly interested in ambient gameplay, and would prefer having some kind of group objectives to work towards, but weren't that keen on dungeon-crawling.

It might be just about viable to run a sociopolitical, investigative, low-combat game. I was already looking along those lines when I considered reviving the campaign, as the party was already caster-heavy. The problem with that is, it places an awful lot of pressure on the GM. For one thing, pregen scenarios that aren't either dungeon crawls are few and far between, and most of those that I've seen are (naturally enough, perhaps) closely tied into a particular campaign world or set of events that wouldn't sit comfortably with what we've established. That means I'd have to come up with all the content myself - with suggestions and input from the players, certainly, but fundamentally coming up with mysteries or interesting situations is down to the GM. Tied into that is the problem that given D&D's proclivities, coming up with interesting low-combat scenarios is significantly more awkward than creating your own dungeons.

Barring extreme enthusiasm on the part of my players, the effort of creating entirely new scenarios suitable for a pair of career-minded spellcasters with zero combat ability seems like too much to deal with. At present, I don't know any other potential players who might round out the party a bit and make it easier to find or create suitable scenarios. So basically, I think we're stuck.

So sadly (although perhaps inevitably) this campaign blog for a specific group of players has more or less fully transformed into a purely theoretical blog about generic RPG matters, with little or no relevance to the Pathfinder campaign. So it goes.

Random RPG Generator

During a recent very silly conversation with (inevitably) Dan and Arthur, inspired by random character trait rolling in The Dying Earth, I brought up the idea of an RPG where everything was randomly generated. It's very simple. You just start from scratch, considering and randomly determining each element of the game.

This is a very, very simple version of that. There's plenty of scope for extension; one of the reasons it's still so simple is I got into philosophical quandaries about exactly what category of feature things fell into. Is "mystery" a game genre or sub-genre? Is "sci-fi" a genre or an aesthetic wrapper?

One thing I'd vaguely like to have - but which would be quite a lot of work - is to generate antagonists and approximate goals (or at least, activities) for the game, and have various fields linked so they couldn't produce logically contradictory results. But that would be more work, and maybe a completely random one is more entertaining (and more inspirational). Anyway, have a go and make suggestions. I might expand on it one day.

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