I recently upgraded to the most recent version of WordPress, and it seems to have nozzed up my Feedburner feed. Thus, the numbers are no longer accurate. Don’t you love it when you’re rewarded for doing what you’re supposed to do?

[Edit: For those of you who don't read the comments on this blog, please update your feeds here. Thank you.]

I did more playtesting over the weekend for Gamecraft 2.0. I’m not going to do a full session report like I did last time because, frankly, not a lot really happened. I got to put the conflict system through its paces (at least, so far as physical combat is concerned; I still want to use it for social and mental conflicts), and I got to see how easy the character generation system is for other people to use. I can bang out a character in about 10 minutes, but I designed the system. I playtested with the same people I did last time, but last time they got pregen characters and this time they made their own. It took us more than an hour to put them together, but I think that a lot of that was rules explanations and coming up with stuff that went with their concepts, but would be useful in the scenario we were playing.

In the end, the session was pretty valuable. I changed how certain things work based on the session, but I think I’m getting closer to what I want each time. I still want to playtest social and mental conflicts, and I’d like to try playtesting with a different group at least once, just to get another set of eyes on it, so to speak. At any rate, one thing that hasn’t changed as a result of either playtest is the skill list (though how skill specialties functions has changed, for the better I think). So, by way of preview, I’m posting a PDF of the skill list. As with everything else on my site, this is released under a Creative Commons license. Note that the license that I actually release the full system under will likely be a little different; I’ll probably lift that ‘noncommercial’ restriction, largely because I want people to be able to use my system in commercial products if they so choose. For now, though, because this is just a preview, the restriction stays. Enjoy.

Gamecraft 2.0 Skill List

A lot of people who read Iron Heroes bemoan the fact that there isn’t a class devoted to mounted combat. I didn’t really have a problem with this; you could pretty easily make a decent mounted fighter out of the man-at-arms class by picking up the Mounted Combat feats. However, when I started crossing Iron Heroes over with Eberron, I noticed that there really wasn’t a class that did what I wanted as far as the Valenar elves went. What I wanted was basically a harrier, but on a horse; however, all of the harrier’s abilities function while on foot. So, I created a class template. A class template functions a lot like a monster template, except that you apply it to a specific class and it modifies that class, changing its abilities and focus somewhat. What I wound up creating was thematically very similar to the harrier, and with many very similar abilities, with the exception that they all depend on the character riding a horse instead of being on foot. I give you The Outrider.

This Treasure Tables post puts me in mind of a session I ran way back when. I think it might have actually been the first 3rd Edition session I ever ran. It was a somewhat short-lived solo campaign, myself in the DM’s seat and my friend Mike playing a human fighter, accompanied by a roster of NPCs. Among these NPCs was a rogue named Japhed (the first time I ever used this name, which I use all the time now), who was the best friend of Mike’s character. At any rate, they went into a dungeon infested with kobolds and started hacking their way through it (there wasn’t actually that much setup, as I recall, just a simple dungeon crawl to start things off). About halfway through, they ran into a kobold sorcerer who really gave the party a run for their money. This was where I first discovered the joys of mage armor. The kobold had a 19 AC, difficult for a group of 2nd-level characters, to be sure. They won, but not before the kobold summoned a viper which managed to actually kill poor Japhed. I think that’s probably why the name sticks with me, after all this time. He became a much beloved character in that campaign, and returned in various pseudo-dream sequences.

Anyway, the kobold sorcerer was considerably tougher than I had originally intended, and this was exacerbated by the fact that the (higher level) human cleric that I had created as the ‘end boss’ of the dungeon was killed in two or three rounds, despite his use of a potion of invisibility and more than one cure spell.

Now, I realize that, at best, this probably only qualifies as unintentional session padding; that kobold fight lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. And I guess it was sort of canceled out by the rather quick (and anticlimactic) final battle. However, this was what first sprang to my mind when I read the aforementioned post.

As to session padding in general, I’m for it and against it. The term carries some negative connotations with it, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing all the time. There’s something to be said for not having everything planned out in advance, and if you go into a session figuring that you’ll have to pad it a little, you can use what the PCs are saying and doing to generate some really great role-playing situations based, in whole or in part, on their own personal goals and agendas. What I’m against is throwing in monsters for the sake of drawing out the session, or because the party isn’t beat up enough, or because they’re not getting enough XP. I think that doing that can give your session a more generic and arbitrary feel, and it’s definitely something your players will notice.

[Edit: fixed title.]

Your results:
You are Wash (Ship Pilot)

You are a pilot with a good
if not silly sense of humor.
You take pride in your collection of toys.
You love your significant other.

Click here to take the Serenity Personality Quiz

Interestingly, my wife took the test, and she’s Zoe. Go ahead and take the test, yourself.

[Edit: Apologies for the wacky format of this post. My wife, the famous web designer, couldn't figure out how to get it to work right. WordPress keeps adding crap in, apparently.]

I finally finished reading Ptolus the other day, and I’ve been letting my thoughts percolate for the past few days. I’ve decided that I’m not going to do a full review for a couple of reasons. First, the review would be ridiculously long and I’ve already covered a number of aspects of the book, anyway. Instead, I’m just going to present my thoughts on the book, in a sort of rambling fashion. Enjoy.

As a campaign setting, Ptolus falls a little flat for me. It’s huge, it’s deluxe, it’s incredibly thorough, and it’s got almost everything your PCs will need to go from 1st level to level 20+, without ever leaving the confines off the city. That said (and I believe I’ve mentioned this before), Ptolus feels a little generic. This generic-ness is, at once, the book’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. I don’t think I’m ever going to use Ptolus for its intended purpose, as a campaign setting. To me, Eberron does a lot of what Ptolus does, but it does it with more panache and originality. To be fair, Ptolus was created first (though Eberron came out first), but I still like the WotC’s setting better, and given the choice I’ll use it instead.

As I said, though, the fact that Ptolus is generic is also a great source of strength. Because it is so generic, and because it is so painstakingly detailed, most elements of Ptolus can be lifted out of the setting and used independently of it, whole cloth, in other settings. There are literally dozens upon dozens of locales, NPCs, organizations, plot hooks, adventure seeds, even entire dungeons within the tome’s covers, and most of them are generic enough to be used in most D&D settings, but flavorful enough to be worth using. In this way, Ptolus actually becomes the ultimate mega-supplement for your favorite D&D setting, chocked full of invaluable, imminently usable material worth the price of admission, alone. I, for example, will be using elements like the Galchutt, chaos cults, ratmen, the Dark Reliquary, the Vai, and possibly even the Balacazars and Kevris Killraven in my own Eberron campaign. They’re great elements, and they’d add a lot to any game and, best of all, they can be easily picked up and dropped into any setting with a big city (like Sharn), and even the city isn’t necessarily a prerequisite.

Of note is also the fact that there’s some steampunk technology in one of the chapters, and the book comes with an included electronic copy of Monte Cook’s Chaositech, which details the dark, twisted twin of technology. Either (or both) of these things could be easily used in your own campaign, though adding chaositech to your campaign might necessitate using the Galchutt and their associated chaos cults, too.

At any rate, those are my thoughts on Ptolus, having just read it. It’s good, but in a different way from its intent. Also, Cook does tell you which chapters to read if all you want to do is mine for ideas, which is nice and indicates that he thought that this might be the case for some people. It’s big, it’s expensive, and it’s pretty. Whether or not it’s worth the price of admission to you is a decision you’re going to have to make on your own. I can say that it’s worth it for me (or would have been, if I had actually had to pay for it), purely as a source of years worth of material.

I love craft stores, like A.C. Moore or Michael’s. I went into one today, and came out with three pounds of colored glass beads for use as counters, as well as 36 1-inch ‘coins’, which I’m going to tape pictures to for use as cheapass miniatures replacements. Total cost: less than $8. Not too bad.

Well, I finally got the Marvel Trading Card Game Online to work; you may recall my previous post regarding my difficulties in this area. Let me tell you, although the game actually works on my computer now, my opinion of it hasn’t improved much. The client teaches you how to play with the Vs. System through a series of tutorials, throwing loads and loads of information at you all at once. The problem is, once you’re actually playing the game, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get back at this information (perhaps, in a handy encyclopedia system as with the Civilization games) to refer to it. Which means you basically have to memorize all kinds of obscure rules in order to play a game that ostensibly remembers the rules for you, because the game itself is so unforgiving about the actions you perform that you wind up (or at least, I wind up) making all sorts of sub-par decisions throughout the game that contribute to your downfall. Interestingly, the game prompts you to ask if you’re sure you want to end each phase, and most of this is unnecessary. It’s the fact that you can accidentally double-click on the wrong character, committing him to an attack that he has no hope of winning and thus, costing you precious Endurance, that irks me. I also have suspicions that the computer cheats to some extent, or at least uses decks that are way better than the two that come with the game. I keep marveling (no pun intended) at the amazing hands that the computer player keeps getting, and the fact that it always, always has the exact card that it needs, while I keep on getting stuck with a million cards that I’ll never use.

Of course, I’ll be the first to admit that all of this might just be sour grapes because I lose so often. I might just not be that great at the Vs. System. And really, that’s what I’m coming away from this game with. As an advertisement for the card game and the Vs. System at large, it’s not stellar. I kept on thinking, “If this is what the Vs. System is like when the computer is supposedly handling a bunch of the rules for me, I never, ever want to play the game in real life.” I’ll probably give it another try, just because I really like Spider-Man (though I haven’t seen his card yet, just plenty of Spider-Friends), but I doubt this game is going to have much longevity on my machine.

I’ve already posted about the playtest that I did for Gamecraft 2.0. However, that post was almost entirely story-related stuff, and I’d like to post about what I actually got out of the playtest. So, here it is, in no particular order.

• Most importantly, I guess, I found out what did and didn’t work. I sat down and revised the whole system the day after the playtest, and I think my revisions have made it a better game all around. Finding out what wasn’t working gave me the opportunity to streamline certain things and drop other things out completely, and also gave me the opportunity to add new things that complement elements that were already present. I really can’t overstate how valuable this aspect of the playtest was.
• It gave me a great idea. My original plan was, when the system is done, to release it for free download on this site, then to bundle the system with a setting and release the whole package on Lulu. I still plan on doing that, but with an addendum: I’m going to package it with more than one setting. I still plan on packaging it with Wild Blue, but this playtest session has given me an idea for an entirely new setting to include. Further, I plan on including guidelines for on-the-fly, collaborative setting creation as well, which I think is one of the major strengths of this system.
• The playtest allowed me to see that I was on the right track. I wanted a system that was easy to use, gave a lot of power to the players, allowed for collaborative setting creation and storytelling, and allowed for a lot of easy ad-libbing on the GM’s part. I seem to have accomplished that, even if the system did need some revision. I tested this by basically planning the first scene in the vaguest sense, and then letting everything else flow from there. So, going in, I knew that it would take place on a subway train late at night, and I knew that the train would be attacked by creepy bad guys, and that there would be a few bystanders. Everything else grew organically out of what the players did and how I responded to it.
• One of the players, Chris, told me something that I hadn’t thought of. The system is great for new players, because the rules are easy to learn and unobtrusive, and allow for a great deal of flexibility as far as what you can and can’t do. There aren’t a lot of stats to keep track of, and virtually everything is represented by allocating and spending tokens on your character sheet, so there’s an easy-to-see, visual representation of your character’s status and abilities right in front of you at all times. On the flip side, the system, to some extent, requires a GM who has a bit of experience with GMing. It requires a GM who’s comfortable with giving the players a lot of power, and who is comfortable with coming up with a lot of stuff on the fly (the system doesn’t really encourage or reward a lot of careful planning on the GM’s part). In short, it’s a good game for experienced GMs to use to introduce new players to role-playing. It’s also a good system to use for pick-up games, since you don’t need to plan a whole lot and character creation can be taken care of in about fifteen minutes.

All in all, I’m very pleased with how the playtest went, and what it told me and allowed me to do. I can’t wait to do another one, with my updated version of Gamecraft 2.0 (actually, I’d probably consider it to be Gamecraft 1.6 at this point, since the pre-playtest incarnation was probably about 1.5; it’ll be 2.0 when it’s actually done).

You probably already heard about this over on EN World (that’s where I heard about it), but at the risk of redundancy, I’m going to post about Monte Cook transferring ownership of Iron Heroes to Fiery Dragon. One the one hand, I must admit to knowing very little about Fiery Dragon; thus, I’m somewhat dubious about what this means for the quality of future Iron Heroes products. On the other hand, Cook never planned to make more than three Iron Heroes books (which are all already out), and there are now going to be future Iron Heroes products. So that’s possibly a very, very good thing. I guess my attitude about this whole thing is what you’d call cautious optimism, with a desire to transition into full-blown optimism sometime in the future.