It's funny that, looking back at my original post about ACKS, I was interested in it as an alternative / "for comparison with" Fields of Blood, but I never got around to writing such a comparison.
Fields of Blood is an old 3.x supplement that basically did the Domain Game. Looking back, it did some things well and some things poorly, and there are definitely lessons to be learned and good ideas to be stolen from it.
A systematic review:
The introduction is unusually long at three pages, providing a glossary, a simple example of the core combat mechanics, and a brief rundown of the contents of the following chapters. I think this is clever; you may not fully grok the meaning of each term without context, but skimming them here "loads" them for later comprehension and memory.
Realms are discussed next. Realms have a species, a sort of "tech level" ranging from Nomadic to Civilized, and a government style. These aren't particularly well-considered or historically justified; they're at a similar level of accuracy to civilization and government traits in the Civ games (which is to say "minimal / inspired by"). Nomads in particular are beautifully overpowered, and the government types are really amusing to read, but they're sort of fun to play around with. Next up is terrain; hexes are 12 miles across and each is classified into one of eight terrain types. Mixed-terrain provinces are permitted, but basically just give the owner their choice of which to use. The production of each province is determined by the race occupying it and the size of the province's settlement; no distinction is made between rural and urban incomes, with the settlement size taken to be representative of the whole population of the area. While the economics of the game are frankly rather broken, going beyond 3.x's usual lack of concern and out into the realms of "buggy in play" / potential exploits, I think this merger of domain and settlement is an abstraction worth stealing for ease of use, as well as elimination of tracking population down on the level of individual families.
There is a list of improvements you can build in your settlements, including temples, thieves' guilds, wizards' guilds, economic improvements like irrigation systems and marketplaces, and of course fortifications. The presentation of the fortifications is notably superior to ACKS', in that it includes cost and combat statistics both on one table. They also use the same toughness/wounds damage abstraction for structures as they do for units, whereas ACKS has distinct structural hit points. More generally, I believe that these sort of upgrade-structures would do well in ACKS. ACKS' economic model is consistent enough that we can do the math and figure out how much it would cost to assemble and retain an Alchemist's Guild to produce Greek fire at scale, for example. It's just a matter of taking the economic numbers and turning them into easier-to-use quantized "upgrades" that alter the availability of goods in the market so you don't have to figure out how much it costs to commission a hundred kilolitres of military oil every time you need to burn a city to the ground.
Chapter the third covers the process of realm play. Realm actions happen on the scale of seasons, while military actions happen on the scale of weeks. Taxes, upkeep, and random events occur per season, with season-specific event tables. You get two regent actions and two realm actions per season (presented in 3.x's standard vs free action nomenclature). Regent actions are diplomatic or heroic things like annexing land, casting ritual magic, declaring war or peace, ordering espionage operations, and training troops. Realm actions are mostly building and upgrading settlements, improvements, roads, and so forth. Martial actions (orders to units) are then issued on a weekly basis throughout the season. I think making growth paperwork and income a per-season event is not a bad idea; it encourages the pace of play to slow down a bit and makes the work somewhat less onerous.
Their espionage rules may provide some inspiration for fixes to hijinks. The available espionage operations are spying (reveals information about an enemy province), infiltrating an enemy guild (temporarily reduce an enemy guild's level), and disrupting trade (temporarily reduce's an enemy province's income). Each operation requires two d20 rolls; one determines the effectiveness of the action, while the other determines that the ruler of the target province learns about the operation (unaware, aware but isn't sure who did it, and knows instigator). Thieves' guilds cost money to maintain, and can offer bonuses to defense against espionage as well as bonuses to performing espionage operations. This is more what I would like to see in hijinks; there's a chance to be unmasked while still succeeding at the operation, and they achieve utilitarian effects-in-the-world instead of just being magical economy-breaking goldfountains.
One thing that bugs me about both of ACKS and FoB is that domain growth is very much a function of the ruler's actions / reinvestment. I'm not sure this makes sense; I suspect most growth historically has been a result of benign neglect rather than active management. Lay off the taxes, leave enough surplus for the common folk to have and feed some extra kids and 20 years down the line they'll be working more land and producing more for your heir. Would be interesting to make growth a per-season or per year percentile roll to see if the domain's settlement has upgraded itself to the next size category, with accompanying increase in rural population and income, rather than primarily a function of dumping gold into the economy.
Chapter four covers unit construction. In classic 3.x style, it's complicated, with unit subtypes and feats and careful weapon selection for all your mans. Domains at War wins for simplicity here. The Shock Modifier is an interesting mechanic, in that it models units which are scary but maybe don't do all that much damage; one might expect the common spearman to be somewhat disheartened by fighting the undead, even if he's giving as good as he's getting. Mostly unit stats are based around 3.x's combat mechanics; AC and to-hit are unchanged, while damage is rolled into Power, Toughness, and Wounds. After you hit, you roll power against their toughness and if that hits too, they take a wound. Morale and command modifiers are present, but they're mostly small and rolled on a d20, so the dice dominate.
Chapter five is the mass combat rules. Nothing horribly insightful to steal from here. No command-and-control rules, morale is an all-or-nothing save-vs-flee-at-top-speed. Units get to-hit and power bonuses from having a PC leader attached in addition to morale and command. Their terrain rules are handled in paragraphs rather than as a trio of booleans, and there's a whole list of 3.x-style conditions for units. The siege rules are reasonablish. There's also a quick combat section closer to DaW: Campaigns' battle rules.
Chapter six is magics. Couple of feats, some conversion rules for personal-scale spells to battle scale, costs for realm-ritual magic. Regular units who come under magic fire only have to check morale if they fail save, elite units never have to for magic.
Chapter seven is heroes. Noble Birth is a feat. Some of the other feats are vaguely entertaining as well. The prestige classes are, well... prestige classes. Rogues sort of get the short end of the stick with these. Living Legion is hilarious (the premise being that you're one guy who specializes in fighting 100 guys at a time). A couple of the leadery prestige classes (Dreadlord, Hordemaster) might have things worth stealing
Chapter eight is on actually running the game. Includes guidelines for turning your map into a hex map, assigning government types, starting standing armies (40% of realm income by default; ACKS is closer to 25% by default). *shrug*
Appendices: converted spells to battle scale (Man I haven't seen Evard's Black Tentacles in ages! That was a hilarious spell; I used it once and then never again), new battle-scale spells, realm spells, most of the Monster Manual monsters converted to battle scale. Some of the realm and battle-scale spells would make decent rituals in ACKS; encircling an entire domain with a ring of fire or a bubble-shield for a full season is pretty rad.
Other things: the art is black and white and generally pretty good; I'm fond of it. There are some short fiction blurs at the beginnings of the chapters; about a half-page each. They tell an ongoing story of a ruler who inherited a domain and could've done a better job running it. I've read worse. The editing of the whole book is alright, though not amazing.
In conclusion! The economics are completely made-up, the unit creation is overcomplicated, and in general there's a lot of 3.x philosophy showing through. Realm/regent actions are a clear compromise between playability and realism. But their level of granularity is very gameable. Population is expressed as a ten-item enumeration of settlement types rather than as an integral number of families residing on the land, income from domains is in units of 100gp rather than individual GP, military units are hired as a whole rather than being constituted piecemeal from mercenaries hired individually, and realm paperwork happens once a season rather than once a month. These are things maybe worth stealing for ACKS.
Showing posts with label Fields of Blood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fields of Blood. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Release Updates (also Iron Heroes)
From the list of releases I'm watching for:
Starmada Nova: Cricket publicly released a finalish-looking draft of the first 11 pages of rules of the new edition. It's very similar to the early draft that I mentioned previously, but there are some interesting differences. In particular, on page 5 under Sequence of Play, there's a note that if one player outnumbers the other by 2 to 1 or more, they move or fire with two ships for each one that the outnumbered side fires with. OK, nothing new there. What is new, however, is that if you get to activate two or more ships per activation, your opponent chooses one of the ships for you to activate. That's a hell of a tactical wrinkle under alternating movement and with damage being resolved during firing rather than at end of turn.
There's also an interesting note about Partial VP on page 11; it's like the crippling rules we used during our campaign, but better - you need to take a ship down to 2/3 hull to get half its value, rather than 1/2 hull. Also nice that it's just a standardized rule now, rather than something we hacked on.
Finally, we got a confirm from Cricket down-thread that fighters will have their own reactive movement phase. Oh well; probably for the better. The new enemy-forced activation rules would really mess with fighters by allowing them to force you to activate your fighters early during ship movement, which would be quite a waste.
Mongoose Traveller Campaign Guide: Released to pdf this last week, the Campaign Guide looks pretty interesting, actually. It's about as long as the Core, but full of random tables and whatnot for GMs. I'm tempted to pick up a copy and do a review.
5e: No official news via EnWorld in the last two weeks. However, this last week Monte &co spent most of their blog space talking about "high-level play", and how it always breaks down in previous editions. Arguably in 1e/2e it was least bad, but casters were king (but, they had earned it by positively sucking for the first, oh... long time). In 3e, it was way too complicated and combats took six hours, despite the fact that they were only two rounds of game time. My understanding is that 4e core high-level / epic combats also take a long damn time because monsters have ridiculously high HP and AC (er, defenses). So, I say to Monte and Company: Get thee to a playtest! That's been the issue with both iterations of Wizards D&D (as opposed to TSR D&D before 3e) - high-level play was horribly under-playtested.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be what they're focusing on; rather, they're looking at whether the play experience should change at high levels. Me, I'd love to see kingdom building and ascension to deityhood as things on the high-level agenda. "Epic dungeon crawls" make very little sense to me, and frankly seem somewhat dull. Unfortunately, that seems to be what they're looking at; it's all about the artifacts and the plane-hopping. While planar travel might not initially sound like code for dungeon-crawling, it pretty much is. What is the Abyss but an infinite dungeon, full of an infinite number of high-level monsters with corresponding treasure, in addition to serious environmental trap-like threats? It's the biggest dungeon ever.
And artifacts. Argh. So many artifacts these days are just big shiny swords with more bonuses than you could normally get. 3.x exemplars of this problem are the Hammer of Thunderbolts and the Saint's Mace. While these are very nice weapons, they don't feel like Artifacts with a capital A. Artifacts, to me, must bear an element of risk or sacrifice. The Hand and the Eye of Vecna, the Sphere of Annihilation, and the Deck of Many Things all feel like artifacts. Powerful evil intelligent weapons (Blackrazor / Stormbringer, for example, or our own instantiation of the trope, Mavrilith) definitely qualify, too. The Orbs of Dragonkind also have the nice drawback that all dragons now hate you. That's pretty acceptable, as far as drawbacks go. But those shiny +6 keen goblinoid-bane throwing dwarven waraxes? Not so much.
Trailblazer Monster Book: Not a whole lot of progress on this front. Still working on lycanthropes and layouts, I guess. I found their gnoll art, though; it's pretty sweet. The werehyena's good, too.
VBAM 2e: Still in editing. They did post an update a while back with some draft supply, facilities, and loyalty rules, but I have not yet perused them. Going to wait until they put out a combined playtest draft, I think.
ACKS: Not actually something I'm waiting for a release on, but something I'm seriously tempted to pick up, especially given reasonable pdf prices. Their mapping system has been getting some attention in the blogosphere of late (at Grognardling, with a series in responses at Untimately), and from Untimately's review (part 1 and part 2), it sounds a lot like "Traveller Meets 1e", with the 1e side favored in the mechanics. I also got quite the Iron Heroes setting vibe off of the publisher's website:
If nothing else, I should probably pick up copy of ACKS to compare against Fields of Blood, which is what I'd probably use for high-level 'realmy' play presently. Though now that I think about it, Iron Heroes + Fields of Blood would fix / ignore a lot of FoB's high-level caster problems... hmm...
Some of the token mechanics would get weird in mass combat, but it would probably be OK. If the Armiger, the Berserker, or the Weapon Master engage in mass combat, they come out with piles of tokens. Heck, this would be the best time to play a Weapon Master; usually combats are too short for them to build up to their finale / combo moves. The Archer would convert well, since it's just based on aiming time, and mass combat turns are long. Executioners and Hunters would do the worst of the token classes, I think. Hunters could do OK via Tactics / Lore feats to provide wide-areas bonuses to their units, but their class abilities are too small-scale. Executioners could do the same unit support stuff via Lore, but they're really most useful for engaging single high-value targets like enemy generals and heroes. Harriers just get the running-around bonuses all the damn time, and Men-At-Arms are as versatile as ever. Thieves... not so much for the battlefield, but the Social feats would make them master spies. And Arcanist power is sufficiently limited and sufficiently dangerous to use that applying it is actually a question, rather than "Yeah, I'm a 9th-level wizard, I'll go stop the invading army single-handedly, be right back *teleport*."
Upon further reflection, though, IH characters have huge numbers of abilities geared towards small, discrete bonuses in skirmish combat which cease to be applicable or are otherwise too granular for mass combat. Granting an extra flanking bonus to an ally via War Leader, for example. The scale on that is just far too small to be useful in mass combat. One tempting option, however, would be to provide a second scale of tokens. Mass Combat $TYPE Tokens are earned as normal tokens of their type via more-or-less equivalent actions in mass combat. They can then be spent to provide bonuses on that scale to units which the PCs are secunded to. The berserker works his men into a frenzy, the archer directs the volleys of his bowmen with great precision, the armiger organizes a shield wall, and the hunter exhorts his troops to capitalize on fortuitous terrain.
Weapon Master and Executioner get kind of stuck here, though - sheer weapon skill is hard to provide to people, and martial units tend not to be particularly sneaky, nor deft at backstabbery. It might be reasonable for certain types of units, or for units which are officially under the command of the WM / Exec; if you're a light scout unit and your commander is the Lord Assassin, you might pick up a few tricks. Likewise, the 4th Northbridge Pikemen, having been drilled extensively under the harsh tutelage of the Pikemaster, might be able to pull off some impressive feats of pikesmanship (quiet, spellchecker).
Frankly, though, I'm not really sure I have a problem with Executioner, Berserker, and Weapon Master not being ideal line-unit commanders. They seem more likely to be best for either cutting swathes through enemy units on their own (Berserker and WM), or seeking out and disabling or dueling enemy leaders (Exec and WM). Armiger, Hunter, and Man-at-Arms all gain Tactics Mastery, and are frankly not as suited for one-on-one confrontation with strong enemy leaders as the more offensively-powerful classes, nor to cutting though massed troops unsupported like the Berserker. Archer and Harrier are tricky; they make most sense as commanders of specialist units (archers and cavalry, respectively). And Thieves... saboteurs, infiltrators, and general-purpose commanders, I suppose. They certainly have the skill points to put into Command, even if it isn't a group skill. Honestly, the Thief shines in diplomacy, not on the battlefield.
One additional promising avenue of research here would be to convert the Fields of Blood prestige classes (where applicable) into mastery feat trees or class abilities. Warlord's abilities fall under Tactics mastery (possibly merging Warlord and Warcrier into one mastery feat), Master Mason's under Siege Lore, Living Legion's under Power or Armor, and Hordemaster's look a lot like Berserker rage abilities.
Finally, if I were to attempt such a game, I think I would likely use Hong's Hack, which fixes a great many things in Iron Heroes (though not the armor problem, which is frankly less of a problem in mass combat. Neat).
And so we see that I don't actually need any more books, as long as I can be still be inspired by the advertising copy. Why am I writing a post about new and upcoming releases again?
Starmada Nova: Cricket publicly released a finalish-looking draft of the first 11 pages of rules of the new edition. It's very similar to the early draft that I mentioned previously, but there are some interesting differences. In particular, on page 5 under Sequence of Play, there's a note that if one player outnumbers the other by 2 to 1 or more, they move or fire with two ships for each one that the outnumbered side fires with. OK, nothing new there. What is new, however, is that if you get to activate two or more ships per activation, your opponent chooses one of the ships for you to activate. That's a hell of a tactical wrinkle under alternating movement and with damage being resolved during firing rather than at end of turn.
There's also an interesting note about Partial VP on page 11; it's like the crippling rules we used during our campaign, but better - you need to take a ship down to 2/3 hull to get half its value, rather than 1/2 hull. Also nice that it's just a standardized rule now, rather than something we hacked on.
Finally, we got a confirm from Cricket down-thread that fighters will have their own reactive movement phase. Oh well; probably for the better. The new enemy-forced activation rules would really mess with fighters by allowing them to force you to activate your fighters early during ship movement, which would be quite a waste.
Mongoose Traveller Campaign Guide: Released to pdf this last week, the Campaign Guide looks pretty interesting, actually. It's about as long as the Core, but full of random tables and whatnot for GMs. I'm tempted to pick up a copy and do a review.
5e: No official news via EnWorld in the last two weeks. However, this last week Monte &co spent most of their blog space talking about "high-level play", and how it always breaks down in previous editions. Arguably in 1e/2e it was least bad, but casters were king (but, they had earned it by positively sucking for the first, oh... long time). In 3e, it was way too complicated and combats took six hours, despite the fact that they were only two rounds of game time. My understanding is that 4e core high-level / epic combats also take a long damn time because monsters have ridiculously high HP and AC (er, defenses). So, I say to Monte and Company: Get thee to a playtest! That's been the issue with both iterations of Wizards D&D (as opposed to TSR D&D before 3e) - high-level play was horribly under-playtested.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be what they're focusing on; rather, they're looking at whether the play experience should change at high levels. Me, I'd love to see kingdom building and ascension to deityhood as things on the high-level agenda. "Epic dungeon crawls" make very little sense to me, and frankly seem somewhat dull. Unfortunately, that seems to be what they're looking at; it's all about the artifacts and the plane-hopping. While planar travel might not initially sound like code for dungeon-crawling, it pretty much is. What is the Abyss but an infinite dungeon, full of an infinite number of high-level monsters with corresponding treasure, in addition to serious environmental trap-like threats? It's the biggest dungeon ever.
And artifacts. Argh. So many artifacts these days are just big shiny swords with more bonuses than you could normally get. 3.x exemplars of this problem are the Hammer of Thunderbolts and the Saint's Mace. While these are very nice weapons, they don't feel like Artifacts with a capital A. Artifacts, to me, must bear an element of risk or sacrifice. The Hand and the Eye of Vecna, the Sphere of Annihilation, and the Deck of Many Things all feel like artifacts. Powerful evil intelligent weapons (Blackrazor / Stormbringer, for example, or our own instantiation of the trope, Mavrilith) definitely qualify, too. The Orbs of Dragonkind also have the nice drawback that all dragons now hate you. That's pretty acceptable, as far as drawbacks go. But those shiny +6 keen goblinoid-bane throwing dwarven waraxes? Not so much.
Trailblazer Monster Book: Not a whole lot of progress on this front. Still working on lycanthropes and layouts, I guess. I found their gnoll art, though; it's pretty sweet. The werehyena's good, too.
VBAM 2e: Still in editing. They did post an update a while back with some draft supply, facilities, and loyalty rules, but I have not yet perused them. Going to wait until they put out a combined playtest draft, I think.
ACKS: Not actually something I'm waiting for a release on, but something I'm seriously tempted to pick up, especially given reasonable pdf prices. Their mapping system has been getting some attention in the blogosphere of late (at Grognardling, with a series in responses at Untimately), and from Untimately's review (part 1 and part 2), it sounds a lot like "Traveller Meets 1e", with the 1e side favored in the mechanics. I also got quite the Iron Heroes setting vibe off of the publisher's website:
Enter a world where empires totter on the brink of war, and terrible monsters tear at the fragile borderlands of men; where decaying cities teem with chaos and corruption, nubile maidens are sacrificed to chthonic cults and nobles live in decadent pleasure on the toil of slaves; where heroes, wizards, and rogues risk everything in pursuit of glory, fortune, and power. This is a world where adventurers can become conquerors – and conquerors can become kings.See, 5e devs, that's what high-level play should sound like.
If nothing else, I should probably pick up copy of ACKS to compare against Fields of Blood, which is what I'd probably use for high-level 'realmy' play presently. Though now that I think about it, Iron Heroes + Fields of Blood would fix / ignore a lot of FoB's high-level caster problems... hmm...
Some of the token mechanics would get weird in mass combat, but it would probably be OK. If the Armiger, the Berserker, or the Weapon Master engage in mass combat, they come out with piles of tokens. Heck, this would be the best time to play a Weapon Master; usually combats are too short for them to build up to their finale / combo moves. The Archer would convert well, since it's just based on aiming time, and mass combat turns are long. Executioners and Hunters would do the worst of the token classes, I think. Hunters could do OK via Tactics / Lore feats to provide wide-areas bonuses to their units, but their class abilities are too small-scale. Executioners could do the same unit support stuff via Lore, but they're really most useful for engaging single high-value targets like enemy generals and heroes. Harriers just get the running-around bonuses all the damn time, and Men-At-Arms are as versatile as ever. Thieves... not so much for the battlefield, but the Social feats would make them master spies. And Arcanist power is sufficiently limited and sufficiently dangerous to use that applying it is actually a question, rather than "Yeah, I'm a 9th-level wizard, I'll go stop the invading army single-handedly, be right back *teleport*."
Upon further reflection, though, IH characters have huge numbers of abilities geared towards small, discrete bonuses in skirmish combat which cease to be applicable or are otherwise too granular for mass combat. Granting an extra flanking bonus to an ally via War Leader, for example. The scale on that is just far too small to be useful in mass combat. One tempting option, however, would be to provide a second scale of tokens. Mass Combat $TYPE Tokens are earned as normal tokens of their type via more-or-less equivalent actions in mass combat. They can then be spent to provide bonuses on that scale to units which the PCs are secunded to. The berserker works his men into a frenzy, the archer directs the volleys of his bowmen with great precision, the armiger organizes a shield wall, and the hunter exhorts his troops to capitalize on fortuitous terrain.
Weapon Master and Executioner get kind of stuck here, though - sheer weapon skill is hard to provide to people, and martial units tend not to be particularly sneaky, nor deft at backstabbery. It might be reasonable for certain types of units, or for units which are officially under the command of the WM / Exec; if you're a light scout unit and your commander is the Lord Assassin, you might pick up a few tricks. Likewise, the 4th Northbridge Pikemen, having been drilled extensively under the harsh tutelage of the Pikemaster, might be able to pull off some impressive feats of pikesmanship (quiet, spellchecker).
Frankly, though, I'm not really sure I have a problem with Executioner, Berserker, and Weapon Master not being ideal line-unit commanders. They seem more likely to be best for either cutting swathes through enemy units on their own (Berserker and WM), or seeking out and disabling or dueling enemy leaders (Exec and WM). Armiger, Hunter, and Man-at-Arms all gain Tactics Mastery, and are frankly not as suited for one-on-one confrontation with strong enemy leaders as the more offensively-powerful classes, nor to cutting though massed troops unsupported like the Berserker. Archer and Harrier are tricky; they make most sense as commanders of specialist units (archers and cavalry, respectively). And Thieves... saboteurs, infiltrators, and general-purpose commanders, I suppose. They certainly have the skill points to put into Command, even if it isn't a group skill. Honestly, the Thief shines in diplomacy, not on the battlefield.
One additional promising avenue of research here would be to convert the Fields of Blood prestige classes (where applicable) into mastery feat trees or class abilities. Warlord's abilities fall under Tactics mastery (possibly merging Warlord and Warcrier into one mastery feat), Master Mason's under Siege Lore, Living Legion's under Power or Armor, and Hordemaster's look a lot like Berserker rage abilities.
Finally, if I were to attempt such a game, I think I would likely use Hong's Hack, which fixes a great many things in Iron Heroes (though not the armor problem, which is frankly less of a problem in mass combat. Neat).
And so we see that I don't actually need any more books, as long as I can be still be inspired by the advertising copy. Why am I writing a post about new and upcoming releases again?
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Games I Want to Run, Part 2
So the votes are in among the options I posted here, from three players from last semester. One vote of "Fields of Blood would be cool if you can fix the caster issues, but Western Marches would also be badass", one vote of "Fields of Blood would be awesome if you added rules for fighters training units and such, but Wilderlands / episodic would be awesome too", and one that was primarily for Wilderlands. This input leaves my predicament ultimately unsolved... but that's OK, because the purpose of asking for feedback wasn't to resolve it, but to get some thoughts from third parties.
So... Fields of Blood got a good bit of support, but it was all predicated on shrinking the strategic advantage casters get as a result of FoB's increased scales. First, I'm not sure that's doable; non-casters have no equivalent to spells to be researched, nor an equivalent to items to be created, and they just can't do the strategic-level movement and reconnaissance that teleport and scrying permit. Craft Fortification, letting individuals boost unit training rates, Command as a class skill, and solo missions into enemy territory are all well and good, but I really don't think it's fixable.
There's also a kind of timing problem - I don't know how long Tim's current campaign is going to run into the semester. If it runs long, then FoB might end up starting up towards the end of the semester, and then I foresee it dying on Thanksgiving and Winterbreak. Since FoB would require a lot of work to prep, that would be kind of a shame and a waste. The episodic structure of Wilderlands would be more likely to survive this kind of thing - as long as I keep a one-adventure buffer prepped and ready to go, Wilderlands could almost be run on a spontaneous basis. Tim also mentioned today that alternating DMing / co-DMing would make everybody's life a lot easier; as it stands, we have more players than a single DM can run a game for. Having two DMs who kind of work in parallel, allowing players from the other game into their own game would allow each of them a little more slack. There is much potential here.
Finally, Western Marches. I had an epiphany last week, which was kind of disappointing to me... It was prompted by an observation Ben Robbins makes in the last post in his Western Marches series. To quote:
So, conclusions: Wilderlands it is for the parts of next semester when I'm not playing in Tim's game (I don't think I'll be able to commit to both running and playing regular games, and I really want to finish Fjolkir's grudge against the dragon). Now the task becomes tweaking Trailblazer for the episodic style of play, studying the setting, and coming up with good hooks and opposition.
So... Fields of Blood got a good bit of support, but it was all predicated on shrinking the strategic advantage casters get as a result of FoB's increased scales. First, I'm not sure that's doable; non-casters have no equivalent to spells to be researched, nor an equivalent to items to be created, and they just can't do the strategic-level movement and reconnaissance that teleport and scrying permit. Craft Fortification, letting individuals boost unit training rates, Command as a class skill, and solo missions into enemy territory are all well and good, but I really don't think it's fixable.
There's also a kind of timing problem - I don't know how long Tim's current campaign is going to run into the semester. If it runs long, then FoB might end up starting up towards the end of the semester, and then I foresee it dying on Thanksgiving and Winterbreak. Since FoB would require a lot of work to prep, that would be kind of a shame and a waste. The episodic structure of Wilderlands would be more likely to survive this kind of thing - as long as I keep a one-adventure buffer prepped and ready to go, Wilderlands could almost be run on a spontaneous basis. Tim also mentioned today that alternating DMing / co-DMing would make everybody's life a lot easier; as it stands, we have more players than a single DM can run a game for. Having two DMs who kind of work in parallel, allowing players from the other game into their own game would allow each of them a little more slack. There is much potential here.
Finally, Western Marches. I had an epiphany last week, which was kind of disappointing to me... It was prompted by an observation Ben Robbins makes in the last post in his Western Marches series. To quote:
You could have a “solo” West Marches game with just one group doing all the exploring, and it would probably be a fun and pleasant affair, but it’s nothing compared to the frenzy you’ll see when players know other players are out there finding secrets and taking treasure that they could be getting, if only they got their butts out of the tavern.So: to capture the awesome that was WM, I'd need to have a big playerpool with multiple groups. This means that I can't run WM during the summer; there just aren't enough people around. Likewise, to run it as well as possible, I'd also need to have multiple, competing groups meeting regularly at different times. This implies that I'd need to have a couple nights free a week to run games for different groups... and I don't see that happening during the semester. So there is basically no time when I can run it. After college, I imagine I may have trouble finding a playerpool of sufficient size... so I think that's a dream which may never come to fruition. Saddening, but I'm going to keep it in the back of my brain nonetheless in case an opportunity presents itself (say, spring of senior year maybe).
So, conclusions: Wilderlands it is for the parts of next semester when I'm not playing in Tim's game (I don't think I'll be able to commit to both running and playing regular games, and I really want to finish Fjolkir's grudge against the dragon). Now the task becomes tweaking Trailblazer for the episodic style of play, studying the setting, and coming up with good hooks and opposition.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Games I Want to Run
I have an awesome problem going into next semester: there are more games that I want to run than I could possibly actually run. So I'm going to toss them up here and see if I can get some feedback.
The first I've been considering is Fields of Blood. For those unfamiliar, FoB is a sourcebook devoted to letting players rule and run realms under D&D3.5. As far as setting goes, I'm considering a Norse / Germanic / Northern European land of Black Forests and grim peaks, where the cunning nibelungen dwarves of Niflheim can craft whatever you desire for a dread price, and the Fey Folk of the woods are dying out as the power of the realms of men waxes. To the north is the Grey Sea, and to the south lie the Howling Hills of the wulfen beastmen. The realms of men are fractious, tenuously united beneath a High King, but with each of the noble houses scheming for its own advantage. Notable source of inspiration of the Song of Ice and Fire, as a lowish-magic northern European highish-lethality setting. The PCs enter this milieu as landless humans, disinherited second or third sons of minor lords, minor knights, upjumped peasants, highwaymen on the run, that kind of person, probably around 8th level, and proceed to carve out lands and titles for themselves.
The advantage of the FoB approach is that it solidly grounds the PCs in the gameworld. Their actions have consequences, and there are incentives for involving themselves in local affairs. They take squires, lead crusades, hold castles, marry ladies fair or strapping young knights, and have children who grow to be the next generation of PCs. On the other side of the same coin, though, is the necessity of a well-detailed setting for the PCs to go conquer, as well as the addition of an extra 'realm layer' of mechanics for me to keep track of and prep. I also expect that balance issues may be magnified in FoB as compared to 3.5; a 9th-level wizard can decimate an army with fireballs and teleport out if things are going badly, while a 9th-level fighter simply can't, to say nothing of realm-level capabilities like scrying and other powerful divinations. Timescales are also a problem; time in FoB is measured mainly in weeks. Casters gain here, as well, from the increased availability of time for things like spell research and item crafting; fighty-types have no similar 'downtime'-burning mechanics. Finally, it isn't very flexible as far as player availability goes; if the General of the Armies can't make it to one session, you're kinda hosed.
The other approach I'm considering inverts these advantages and disadvantages. I found a used copy of the Necromancer Games version of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy Campaign Setting, and want to run an episodic game set there, played in the open-table style. Basically, play would be divided into short, one-session adventures, corresponding to a single episode of a TV show or a single short story in an anthology. I intend to draw on the Thieves' World anthologies and Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar anthologies for inspiration (though I should probably also read up on Conan as well). A typical session runs as follows: I prep a hook and a session's worth of opposition. Players show up, with veteran players assisting new players in rolling up characters at an established 'baseline' level (probably in the 4th to 6th range) while I do a little more prep. The Heroes assemble in a seedy tavern in the City State of the Invincible Overlord, get their hook, and go do their thing (along the lines of the Beyond the Black Gate post linked above with the word episodic). The session ends with them back where they started, but richer and more experienced. XP is awarded by the numbers, so players who show up more often tend to level faster. I'm considering using one of the old-school "Spending GP on ale and wenches gets you XP" rules so that leveling doesn't end up being terribly slow (13 encounters per level is a few too many for me...).
The open-table part comes in with the easy entrance and exit of PCs; if you have a new player (or if somebody dies), they get a new character. If somebody decides not to show up one day, no big deal; larger shares of loot for everyone else (if they survive). If somebody decides never to come back, it's bad, but the campaign goes on. This allows new players to 'dip their toes in', so to speak, without committing to spending n hours a week on the game. This style of play also saves me prep time; prep consists of rolling up a random objective, assembling some opposition from one or more monster manuals, and embellishing as I go. This style of play has another advantage, in that it parallelizes well; if I need a week's break and I know another decent DM (and I dare say that I do), I might be able to hand a week's session off without giving away any big secrets or burdening them with a huge amount of work. Heck, I could even alternate weeks of DMing (or, better yet, roll each week for who's DMing), and play in the campaign on my off-weeks. There are two obvious disadvantages here, though: the first is the inverse of FoB's boon, namely that the PCs are terribly disconnected from the world. They're itinerant sellswords doing dirty work for gold, not holding castles and leaving grand marks on the world. The second disadvantage is of down-time; with no standardized (and probably not even any specified) amount of time between episodes, item creation and spell research suddenly become hugely ambiguous. I'm considering turning item creation feats into 'per-episode' resources; for example, Brew Potion might, at the beginning of each episode that you show up for, let you roll up 2d4 random potions that you brewed since last episode. You get 'em at no cost, but they spoil at the end of the episode. Scrolls could work similarly, but wands would be much trickier; perhaps a variant of Crafting Points as a per-episode resource would work.
The third and final option that I've been tossing around for a year and a half now is to run a derivative of Ben Robbins' Western Marches campaign. This, however, would be a ton of work for me, and I like the Wilderlands as a setting well enough to run that instead. Then there's the other crazy option, which is to run Fields of Blood in the Wilderlands, but then I lose the flavor that I want in FoB and have to put up with the craziness of the Wilderlands.
The first I've been considering is Fields of Blood. For those unfamiliar, FoB is a sourcebook devoted to letting players rule and run realms under D&D3.5. As far as setting goes, I'm considering a Norse / Germanic / Northern European land of Black Forests and grim peaks, where the cunning nibelungen dwarves of Niflheim can craft whatever you desire for a dread price, and the Fey Folk of the woods are dying out as the power of the realms of men waxes. To the north is the Grey Sea, and to the south lie the Howling Hills of the wulfen beastmen. The realms of men are fractious, tenuously united beneath a High King, but with each of the noble houses scheming for its own advantage. Notable source of inspiration of the Song of Ice and Fire, as a lowish-magic northern European highish-lethality setting. The PCs enter this milieu as landless humans, disinherited second or third sons of minor lords, minor knights, upjumped peasants, highwaymen on the run, that kind of person, probably around 8th level, and proceed to carve out lands and titles for themselves.
The advantage of the FoB approach is that it solidly grounds the PCs in the gameworld. Their actions have consequences, and there are incentives for involving themselves in local affairs. They take squires, lead crusades, hold castles, marry ladies fair or strapping young knights, and have children who grow to be the next generation of PCs. On the other side of the same coin, though, is the necessity of a well-detailed setting for the PCs to go conquer, as well as the addition of an extra 'realm layer' of mechanics for me to keep track of and prep. I also expect that balance issues may be magnified in FoB as compared to 3.5; a 9th-level wizard can decimate an army with fireballs and teleport out if things are going badly, while a 9th-level fighter simply can't, to say nothing of realm-level capabilities like scrying and other powerful divinations. Timescales are also a problem; time in FoB is measured mainly in weeks. Casters gain here, as well, from the increased availability of time for things like spell research and item crafting; fighty-types have no similar 'downtime'-burning mechanics. Finally, it isn't very flexible as far as player availability goes; if the General of the Armies can't make it to one session, you're kinda hosed.
The other approach I'm considering inverts these advantages and disadvantages. I found a used copy of the Necromancer Games version of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy Campaign Setting, and want to run an episodic game set there, played in the open-table style. Basically, play would be divided into short, one-session adventures, corresponding to a single episode of a TV show or a single short story in an anthology. I intend to draw on the Thieves' World anthologies and Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar anthologies for inspiration (though I should probably also read up on Conan as well). A typical session runs as follows: I prep a hook and a session's worth of opposition. Players show up, with veteran players assisting new players in rolling up characters at an established 'baseline' level (probably in the 4th to 6th range) while I do a little more prep. The Heroes assemble in a seedy tavern in the City State of the Invincible Overlord, get their hook, and go do their thing (along the lines of the Beyond the Black Gate post linked above with the word episodic). The session ends with them back where they started, but richer and more experienced. XP is awarded by the numbers, so players who show up more often tend to level faster. I'm considering using one of the old-school "Spending GP on ale and wenches gets you XP" rules so that leveling doesn't end up being terribly slow (13 encounters per level is a few too many for me...).
The open-table part comes in with the easy entrance and exit of PCs; if you have a new player (or if somebody dies), they get a new character. If somebody decides not to show up one day, no big deal; larger shares of loot for everyone else (if they survive). If somebody decides never to come back, it's bad, but the campaign goes on. This allows new players to 'dip their toes in', so to speak, without committing to spending n hours a week on the game. This style of play also saves me prep time; prep consists of rolling up a random objective, assembling some opposition from one or more monster manuals, and embellishing as I go. This style of play has another advantage, in that it parallelizes well; if I need a week's break and I know another decent DM (and I dare say that I do), I might be able to hand a week's session off without giving away any big secrets or burdening them with a huge amount of work. Heck, I could even alternate weeks of DMing (or, better yet, roll each week for who's DMing), and play in the campaign on my off-weeks. There are two obvious disadvantages here, though: the first is the inverse of FoB's boon, namely that the PCs are terribly disconnected from the world. They're itinerant sellswords doing dirty work for gold, not holding castles and leaving grand marks on the world. The second disadvantage is of down-time; with no standardized (and probably not even any specified) amount of time between episodes, item creation and spell research suddenly become hugely ambiguous. I'm considering turning item creation feats into 'per-episode' resources; for example, Brew Potion might, at the beginning of each episode that you show up for, let you roll up 2d4 random potions that you brewed since last episode. You get 'em at no cost, but they spoil at the end of the episode. Scrolls could work similarly, but wands would be much trickier; perhaps a variant of Crafting Points as a per-episode resource would work.
The third and final option that I've been tossing around for a year and a half now is to run a derivative of Ben Robbins' Western Marches campaign. This, however, would be a ton of work for me, and I like the Wilderlands as a setting well enough to run that instead. Then there's the other crazy option, which is to run Fields of Blood in the Wilderlands, but then I lose the flavor that I want in FoB and have to put up with the craziness of the Wilderlands.
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