First - the Classic Traveller Bundle of Holding is back, this time with supplements instead of adventures. CT had some pretty interesting features; if you already have Mongoose, it might be worth checking out for historical perspective and potential houserules. I may have to dig through the supplements on the upgraded tier.
Second, I stumbled across this very, very interesting article from an old scifi webzine discussing the inspiring works for Traveller. The author concludes that Traveller has always been hard science fiction noir, with a focus on the criminal and the political dissident, and that its two primary literary inspirations were the Dumarest Saga (which I'd never heard of before, but is evidently the source of low berth and the whole non-ship part of the game) and H. Beam Piper's Space Viking, which I've heard of but not read. I think the article makes a pretty convincing case, and also explains where a lot of the odd Travellerisms like mesh, blade, and feudal technocracy come from. Definitely worth a read, and not just because it supports my conclusions that Traveller is intended to be about cash-strapped antiheroes doing jobs of dubious morality to make the next payment. I suspect a clear understanding of where it comes from and why it made the design decisions that it did might be important for successfully upgrading Traveller.
Showing posts with label Bundle of Holding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bundle of Holding. Show all posts
Friday, June 26, 2015
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Freeport Bundle of Holding
The latest Bundle of Holding is Green Ronin's Freeport books! I have fond memories of Freeport from the Dragon Magazine adverts of my youth (I guess advertising does sort of work, at a decade's delay), and have stolen the name and flavor (pirate town full of monstrous cults) at least once. I look forward to consuming the original material.
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Bundle of Holding: Paranoia!
Damnit, BoH, now I'm halfway through both the Pendragon and Eclipse Phase core books and you're tempting me with more cheap, delicious games in support of good causes (EFF and Human Rights Watch this time).
And my coworkers have requested that I run Paranoia. This has been problematic in the past due to lack of Paranoia (well, in written / manual form, at least). But now it is remedied.
So much for having a monthly gaming budget... and next week is Steam Summer Sale, and this last week Civ5 came out for linux...
And good times were had by all.
Related: Eclipse Phase is a beautiful setting, and one which I think Jared and Matt at least would be moderate fans of. I'm a little concerned that with the body-switching and virtual reality and mind-bendy nanobots, things could get into Bodak Territory pretty easily, but it also feels like it would suit my style quite well.
Reddit would have me believe that one significant problem with the game is that you can stack too much armor, and then nothing is a threat. This is something that I would probably have to address, since backup/restore operations are sort of supposed to be a thing. I have also read that chargen is rather complex - am now curious if there's a good way to merge Trav-simplicity onto EP-setting. But that is a project for after I have properly read and evaluated EP's mechanics as-is.
And my coworkers have requested that I run Paranoia. This has been problematic in the past due to lack of Paranoia (well, in written / manual form, at least). But now it is remedied.
So much for having a monthly gaming budget... and next week is Steam Summer Sale, and this last week Civ5 came out for linux...
And good times were had by all.
Related: Eclipse Phase is a beautiful setting, and one which I think Jared and Matt at least would be moderate fans of. I'm a little concerned that with the body-switching and virtual reality and mind-bendy nanobots, things could get into Bodak Territory pretty easily, but it also feels like it would suit my style quite well.
- Immortalish demons with magic beyond mortal kenning - TITANs, exsurgent virus, exsurgent nanoswarms. Hell, they even have skull-taker bots that behead you for forced uploading to unknown purpose...
- Cults within cults, wheels within wheels - Shadow war between Firewall and TITAN cults (or other things that I just haven't read up to yet). Conspiracy abounds.
- PC death - A regular occurrence, but softened by re-downloading into a fresh "sleeve". Sanity loss is what permakills you (much like in ACKS, it's the resurrection side-effects that get you).
- The Dungeoncrawl / Hulkcrawl - Plenty of rightly-abandoned derelict habitats in orbit over Earth. Mind the killbots.
- Non-aversion to divination - Useful here, since there's pervasive surveillance (sousveillance via nanite) and any half-sensible PC will probably just check the meshnet as their first source. Not a good setting for murder mysteries (though resleeving makes me really want to run a murder mystery game, where the PCs are both the victims and the investigators. But if you really want to assassinate someone in EP, you take out the backups first...).
Reddit would have me believe that one significant problem with the game is that you can stack too much armor, and then nothing is a threat. This is something that I would probably have to address, since backup/restore operations are sort of supposed to be a thing. I have also read that chargen is rather complex - am now curious if there's a good way to merge Trav-simplicity onto EP-setting. But that is a project for after I have properly read and evaluated EP's mechanics as-is.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Bundle of Holding: Pendragon Review
I read the introduction, and was enthused. My take-away from the front matter was "Oh, this is going to be like Legend of the Five Rings, but with names I can pronounce, no weird animu wizards, and dynastic character replacement! And nobody's going to expect me to fall on my sword if (when) I fuck up. Awesome!"
As I work my way through the rest of the book, my enthusiasm is waning a little (at this point I'm about halfway through). There are definitely some things going on that I'm not the biggest fan of. First off, the organization is pretty bad. Like, Stargrunt bad, at least. They don't actually explain the core action-resolution mechanic until 90 pages into the 240-page book. The entire skills section comes before it, and references various degrees of success repeatedly, as well as providing modifiers. Reading the skills, I was almost entirely lost. Just how bad is a -6 penalty? Your guess is as good as mine. There have definitely been other counter-intuitive forward-references, like using Evasion to disengage in chapter five, while Evasion is only defined near the end of chapter six. I wasn't sure if Evasion was a skill whose description I skipped, or something else entirely. I'm sure I'll find more things like this as I go along.
The editing is also pretty bad, which I find amusing for such a literary-styled game. I haven't been tracking these diligently. It's not as bad as a late-era Mongoose Traveller splatbook, but it is annoying.
Moving on to gameplay concerns. The personality trait and passion system is an interesting idea. I think it could work very well for the right group of players, but man, I could see having a PC be forced to act in a particular way based on bad luck going over poorly, especially when the bar for "having to check a Passion frequently" is at 16. Most player knights start with like four passions at 15 (Hospitality, Loyalty to Lord, Family, and Honor). If any of those hit 16, you're in danger of having to make frequent rolls against it. Frequent passion rolls are liable to drive you mad (although you can get some sweet lunatic-strength out of 'em first through inspiration, hopefully). Hazardous!
The authors do not understand conditional probability, as evidenced by the sidebar on page 121. Rolling exactly equal to your skill is always a critical success, while rolling under your skill is just a normal success. As a result, a guy with skill 1 always scores critical successes when he succeeds. Which is... weird. As they note, a critical success only happens 5% of the time, and it happens at that rate for anyone (well, anyone with a skill under 20). But what they fail to perceive is that the conditional probability of critical success given success is all screwed up; a guy with skill 3 is five times as likely to score a crit, given that he scored a success, than a guy with skill 15. It's just statistically sort of unreasonable, you know?
Fumbles operate much the same way. sigh. What more can be said of fumbles, in any system?
Glory allocation looks pretty arbitrary. It's a very fuzzy-wuzzy "when the GM feels like it" sort of business, which is troubling since it scales on orders of magnitude (ie, an Ordinary glory award is 10 glory, while a Heroic one is 100 and an Extraordinary one is 1000) and also basically operates as XP (in that your progression in abilities is derived from it).
Things seem very focused on recreating and playing through the Arthurian myths, rather than on borrowing the milieu and assumptions of Arthurian legend without actually going and statting up Merlin (Merlin and Uther's stats on pages 11-12 were when I started to get sad). Basically always a faux pas, to stat up mythological figures that probably aren't for killing.
I just realized that they reused art between chapters one and six. I don't think I mind this that much, though - it's a nice piece.
With all that out of the way - on to the good!
First off - everyone is fighters. Guess which class my players like to play? Yeah. Fighters. And the whole psychological modelling thing makes more sense in this light - everybody's going to be fairly similar in terms of skills and talents, so you do need an extra dimension to mix characters up.
Chargen is point-buy, but family generation is more Traveller-style. Kinda neat. Also a ready source of replacement characters.
And you may well need replacement characters. Combat looks pretty straightforward and also reasonably deadly. Once you actually manage to read all the relevant rules, spread out over several sections, it turns out almost everything is d20, roll under your skill. Modifiers aren't little +1s and +2s, they're big fat +5s and -10s and such, which is nice! Circumstance modifiers dominate luck. Natural healing is slow, it's possible to die of infection, and you can also further injure yourself if you're badly wounded and insist on continuing to fight. Or ride a horse, or dance, or "romance", for that matter (yes, romance is a thing, because that family has to come from somewhere. Turns out you also get a bunch of glory points for getting married, too).
I love that Pagan knights are an option. I can have "Generous, Energetic, Honest, Lustful, and Proud" as my religious virtues? Sign me up! None of this Chastity and Modesty and Forgiveness crap... These are virtues I can work with! "Tell me, Sir Conan (actually a Breton-ish name - Conan II de Rennes was a duke of Brittany, and a rival of William the Conqueror), what is best in life?" "To crush your enemies without delay or trickery, to provide well for their widows and make love to their daughters, and to have your victories immortalized in ballad and song!" Devout pagan knights also get a +2 bonus to healing rate, which is excellent (Devout British Christian knights get +2 damage and +3 HP, Roman Catholic knights get +6 HP. But a typical starter knight has 27 HP and does 4d6 damage, and only has a healing rate of 3 HP/week! So +2 healing per week is pretty serious - when deterioration due to unsanitary conditions is a d6 of damage per week, 3 healing is a death sentence while 5 is a probable recovery).
Related: what I have seen so far suggests that religion is a moderately-serious topic, but it's handled more through actions than words. You get the "religious knight" bonuses not for having a high Piety trait (which is a thing), but for having high scores in your religion's favored virtues (necessarily acquired through behaving in accordance with those virtues throughout play), of which Piety is not one! It's about living the creed while getting out there and stabbing some Saxons and Picts in the face - religion for the vital warrior-nobility. And certainly not flame strikes and cure light wounds...
This game is extremely well-structured for episodic play (in keeping with its sources!). Knights spend most of their time patrolling their lord's lands and administering uninteresting justice. You only have free time to go on about one real group adventure a year, plus maybe one solo adventure, and then you handle XP, aging, domain income, courtly intrigue, wooing unmarried noblewomen, wooing married noblewomen, and such over the winter. The scope is sufficient that you could conceivably play the whole reign of Arthur and three generations of PC knights in a year or so of weekly sessions, if I have things figured right. And if somebody misses a session, it's not a huge deal - you just make it up as a solo adventure at some point, or let them have an uneventful year managing their fief. They can still earn glory from their incomes and sire children to further the line, and yeah they might age a little, but they also didn't run the risk of dying or being driven insane. They didn't miss out on the magic sword or the wish-gold (probably), and everyone else is aging out too so it's not like in D&D where if you fall behind a level you're screwed (skill progression being much more organic - a point here, a point there). I think this would work itself out, up to a point (especially since as knights die, you're stuck playing the unlanded nephews and illegitimate sons until your heir proper comes of age. Young characters lack skill, old characters suffer aging. A perpetually "mixed-level" party seems likely after the initial group of young starter knights ablates a bit).
Finally, I could not help but think that this would make a very reasonable system for a Game of Thrones-ier game, with characters who are actually a little bit crazy. Also, fighters. I do not think most of my players would go straight for Maester in such a situation. No, it's all about the fighters. (Also, a courtier-style knight with high Deceitfulness, Appearance, and Courtesy would be highly entertaining).
Aaaaaah god damn you bundle of holding an Eclipse Phase bundle? I haven't even gotten through the core rulebook of the last bundle! And it's going to EFF? Welp, guess I better support a cause I care about while also getting a thing I already wanted for less than I wanted to pay for it...
This, ladies and gentlemen, is post-scarcity economics in action.
As I work my way through the rest of the book, my enthusiasm is waning a little (at this point I'm about halfway through). There are definitely some things going on that I'm not the biggest fan of. First off, the organization is pretty bad. Like, Stargrunt bad, at least. They don't actually explain the core action-resolution mechanic until 90 pages into the 240-page book. The entire skills section comes before it, and references various degrees of success repeatedly, as well as providing modifiers. Reading the skills, I was almost entirely lost. Just how bad is a -6 penalty? Your guess is as good as mine. There have definitely been other counter-intuitive forward-references, like using Evasion to disengage in chapter five, while Evasion is only defined near the end of chapter six. I wasn't sure if Evasion was a skill whose description I skipped, or something else entirely. I'm sure I'll find more things like this as I go along.
The editing is also pretty bad, which I find amusing for such a literary-styled game. I haven't been tracking these diligently. It's not as bad as a late-era Mongoose Traveller splatbook, but it is annoying.
Moving on to gameplay concerns. The personality trait and passion system is an interesting idea. I think it could work very well for the right group of players, but man, I could see having a PC be forced to act in a particular way based on bad luck going over poorly, especially when the bar for "having to check a Passion frequently" is at 16. Most player knights start with like four passions at 15 (Hospitality, Loyalty to Lord, Family, and Honor). If any of those hit 16, you're in danger of having to make frequent rolls against it. Frequent passion rolls are liable to drive you mad (although you can get some sweet lunatic-strength out of 'em first through inspiration, hopefully). Hazardous!
The authors do not understand conditional probability, as evidenced by the sidebar on page 121. Rolling exactly equal to your skill is always a critical success, while rolling under your skill is just a normal success. As a result, a guy with skill 1 always scores critical successes when he succeeds. Which is... weird. As they note, a critical success only happens 5% of the time, and it happens at that rate for anyone (well, anyone with a skill under 20). But what they fail to perceive is that the conditional probability of critical success given success is all screwed up; a guy with skill 3 is five times as likely to score a crit, given that he scored a success, than a guy with skill 15. It's just statistically sort of unreasonable, you know?
Fumbles operate much the same way. sigh. What more can be said of fumbles, in any system?
Glory allocation looks pretty arbitrary. It's a very fuzzy-wuzzy "when the GM feels like it" sort of business, which is troubling since it scales on orders of magnitude (ie, an Ordinary glory award is 10 glory, while a Heroic one is 100 and an Extraordinary one is 1000) and also basically operates as XP (in that your progression in abilities is derived from it).
Things seem very focused on recreating and playing through the Arthurian myths, rather than on borrowing the milieu and assumptions of Arthurian legend without actually going and statting up Merlin (Merlin and Uther's stats on pages 11-12 were when I started to get sad). Basically always a faux pas, to stat up mythological figures that probably aren't for killing.
I just realized that they reused art between chapters one and six. I don't think I mind this that much, though - it's a nice piece.
With all that out of the way - on to the good!
First off - everyone is fighters. Guess which class my players like to play? Yeah. Fighters. And the whole psychological modelling thing makes more sense in this light - everybody's going to be fairly similar in terms of skills and talents, so you do need an extra dimension to mix characters up.
Chargen is point-buy, but family generation is more Traveller-style. Kinda neat. Also a ready source of replacement characters.
And you may well need replacement characters. Combat looks pretty straightforward and also reasonably deadly. Once you actually manage to read all the relevant rules, spread out over several sections, it turns out almost everything is d20, roll under your skill. Modifiers aren't little +1s and +2s, they're big fat +5s and -10s and such, which is nice! Circumstance modifiers dominate luck. Natural healing is slow, it's possible to die of infection, and you can also further injure yourself if you're badly wounded and insist on continuing to fight. Or ride a horse, or dance, or "romance", for that matter (yes, romance is a thing, because that family has to come from somewhere. Turns out you also get a bunch of glory points for getting married, too).
I love that Pagan knights are an option. I can have "Generous, Energetic, Honest, Lustful, and Proud" as my religious virtues? Sign me up! None of this Chastity and Modesty and Forgiveness crap... These are virtues I can work with! "Tell me, Sir Conan (actually a Breton-ish name - Conan II de Rennes was a duke of Brittany, and a rival of William the Conqueror), what is best in life?" "To crush your enemies without delay or trickery, to provide well for their widows and make love to their daughters, and to have your victories immortalized in ballad and song!" Devout pagan knights also get a +2 bonus to healing rate, which is excellent (Devout British Christian knights get +2 damage and +3 HP, Roman Catholic knights get +6 HP. But a typical starter knight has 27 HP and does 4d6 damage, and only has a healing rate of 3 HP/week! So +2 healing per week is pretty serious - when deterioration due to unsanitary conditions is a d6 of damage per week, 3 healing is a death sentence while 5 is a probable recovery).
Related: what I have seen so far suggests that religion is a moderately-serious topic, but it's handled more through actions than words. You get the "religious knight" bonuses not for having a high Piety trait (which is a thing), but for having high scores in your religion's favored virtues (necessarily acquired through behaving in accordance with those virtues throughout play), of which Piety is not one! It's about living the creed while getting out there and stabbing some Saxons and Picts in the face - religion for the vital warrior-nobility. And certainly not flame strikes and cure light wounds...
This game is extremely well-structured for episodic play (in keeping with its sources!). Knights spend most of their time patrolling their lord's lands and administering uninteresting justice. You only have free time to go on about one real group adventure a year, plus maybe one solo adventure, and then you handle XP, aging, domain income, courtly intrigue, wooing unmarried noblewomen, wooing married noblewomen, and such over the winter. The scope is sufficient that you could conceivably play the whole reign of Arthur and three generations of PC knights in a year or so of weekly sessions, if I have things figured right. And if somebody misses a session, it's not a huge deal - you just make it up as a solo adventure at some point, or let them have an uneventful year managing their fief. They can still earn glory from their incomes and sire children to further the line, and yeah they might age a little, but they also didn't run the risk of dying or being driven insane. They didn't miss out on the magic sword or the wish-gold (probably), and everyone else is aging out too so it's not like in D&D where if you fall behind a level you're screwed (skill progression being much more organic - a point here, a point there). I think this would work itself out, up to a point (especially since as knights die, you're stuck playing the unlanded nephews and illegitimate sons until your heir proper comes of age. Young characters lack skill, old characters suffer aging. A perpetually "mixed-level" party seems likely after the initial group of young starter knights ablates a bit).
Finally, I could not help but think that this would make a very reasonable system for a Game of Thrones-ier game, with characters who are actually a little bit crazy. Also, fighters. I do not think most of my players would go straight for Maester in such a situation. No, it's all about the fighters. (Also, a courtier-style knight with high Deceitfulness, Appearance, and Courtesy would be highly entertaining).
Aaaaaah god damn you bundle of holding an Eclipse Phase bundle? I haven't even gotten through the core rulebook of the last bundle! And it's going to EFF? Welp, guess I better support a cause I care about while also getting a thing I already wanted for less than I wanted to pay for it...
This, ladies and gentlemen, is post-scarcity economics in action.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Bundle of Holding - Classic Traveller
By way of Tenkar, a Bundle of Holding that might be of interest to some folks in these parts. I think I'm going to pass on this, since I picked up the CT Core on RPGnow and have little use for adventures in general, but if there's interest in a Classic Traveller Revival, this is a great way to start it off.
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