Treasure Tables just posted on the role of published adventures now that Dungeon has gone toes-up, and it got me thinking. Was there much demand for published adventures at my table? Not really, no. That isn’t to say I don’t own any; I own an Eberron adventure, and I got five or six $2 adventures for a birthday or Christmas or something a few years back, but the vast majority of published adventures that I own were torn from the pages of the aforementioned late, great magazine. And really, I don’t use them that much.

But does that mean that they have no place at my table? Hardly. It’s true that I don’t often use published adventures in their entirety, but I frequently use them as springboards for my imagination, allowing me to riff off of them and create my own, somewhat similar but subtly unique, adventures. As I see it, there are basically three types of published adventures that I will buy in the future.

1. A collection of adventures, a la Dungeon. I like the short adventures, not the mega-adventure paths; I like to craft my own adventure paths, and I prefer to use my old Dungeon adventures to mine for material: NPCs, monsters, items, and situations. It seems to me that Dungeon was the perfect format for this kind of adventure; hopefully the online version will offer something similar, though it’s doubtful that I’d actually spend money to subscribe to such a thing.

2. Pack-ins. I love it when games or campaign settings come with introductory adventures, and I do make it a point to use them, at least in part. My first experience DMing Eberron was using The Forgotten Forge, the introductory adventure for that setting, which I then used as a way to get into a modified version of Shadows of the Last War, a published adventure.

3. Mega-Adventures. It’s true that I don’t often use these, and I wouldn’t subscribe to a publication that provided these exclusively, largely because there’s no guarantee that I’d get something I wanted to use. What if I want to run a demon-stomping campaign, and the published path’s focus is on fighting yuan-ti? I’m out of luck. That said, I’ve had my eye on some of the hardcover adventures that WotC has been putting out, in particular Expedition to Castle Ravenloft.

When I want adventures that someone else created, those are the formats that I want them in.

In no particular order:

1. The Elder Scrolls 4: The Shivering Isles is really, really cool. It’s so vastly different from the main game that it reintroduces the sense of wonder you got from the original. The characters are really interesting (you know, cause they’re all crazy), the dungeon design seems pretty good, and you get some very cool quests and magic items. My favorite magic item so far is Ruin’s Edge, a magic bow that hits my target with a random spell effect every time I shoot someone. I recently used it to great effect: there was someone I was trying to kill, guarded by two daedra. I shot one of the daedra, which had the effect of berserking it, causing it to attack (and kill) my target, thus completing my quest for me. Good stuff.

2. Peggle is addictive as hell. It’s like pachinko with magic powers, and I can’t stop playing it. Go download the demo, and see for yourself.

3. Having a cold sucks. Conversely, Theraflu works like magic. It only lasts for four or five hours, but the relief is worth the short duration.

Treasure Tables posted an article, complete with lengthy commentary, on fudging die rolls. As has been mentioned in that article, the topic of fudging is something of a hot-button in the RPG world. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why. Why is it so important that other people game the same way you do? There is no “right” way to game, and ultimately any group is going to game in whatever way works for them, regardless of what forum-goers think. I think a lot of the argument comes from (on one hand) the misconception that GMs are always fudging die rolls against the players, and (on the other hand) that GMs are simply allowing players to die willy-nilly because it’s what the dice told them to do.

I’ve already made my opinions clear as far as fudging goes, but I’m going to expand on that a little bit now. My previous post aside, saying that I’m “pro fudging” or “pro cheating” is a gross oversimplification. Ninety-five percent of the time I roll the dice, and I go with the result. Sometimes, though, the result of the dice would either bog down the game and ruin it for everyone, or kill the players and bring the game to a halt. Is this the result of poor planning on my part? Maybe. I’m not perfect, and I don’t profess to be. Regardless, my players shouldn’t suffer for my poor planning if there’s something I can do about it in the moment.

There’s also the fact that (I suspect) many people who would balk at fudging die rolls wouldn’t have a problem with making an NPC attack a different PC when the one they’ve been pounding on is almost dead. Is this different? I don’t think so. Ultimately, when I’m running a game, I’m always thinking about what I believe will be most fun for everyone. If the result of the dice is going to cause one of the players to not have a good time, then I consider that a failure on the part of the dice, and I’ll correct it. If the result of the dice would serve to heighten dramatic tension in the game, then I’ll let it stand; this is what happens most of the time, as I’ve already mentioned.

I guess the bottom line, as far as my way of thinking goes, is that I’m not infallible as a GM, so I use dice to resolve most disputes (since they’re impartial). However, dice aren’t infallible either (since they have no capacity to perceive how much fun the players are having), so sometimes I bend the results a little. I should note that it’s very, very rare for me to ignore the dice completely. If a monster scores a critical hit that would kill a PC outright, I won’t turn that into a miss. Instead, I’d probably cause that hit to significantly cripple the PC for the rest of the fight, but at least the PC would get the opportunity to live to fight another day.

One final thought: it’s a common argument that, while GMs think it’s OK for them to cheat, they don’t allow their players to cheat. My counter-argument is that a good GM (particularly one who’s open to fudging) should either be cheating on behalf of the players at least as much as on behalf of the NPCs, or should allow the PCs a mechanic that allows them to “cheat within the rules”. This is exactly why I use mechanics like story tokens, even when such mechanics aren’t in the core rules of the game. If I give the players a means by which they can pull their own bacon out of the fire, then I don’t have to do it for them when they make a silly mistake or bite off a little more than they can chew.

At any rate, that’s how I GM. And if it’s wrong, then I don’t wanna be right.

Alright, some news: Gamecraft 2.0 is no more.

Wow. That was misleading. What I mean to say is, the project is still happening, but the name is changing. Gamecraft 2.0 has always been a working title for me, and I’ve been wanting to change it for a while; it’s too wordy, and the system has never really been that similar to the original Gamecraft System. More a spiritual successor than an actual successor. Thus, I’ve changed the name to Saga.

Oh, and one more thing: it’s done. Sort of. The system is mechanically complete, but still under development. To put it in computer terminology, it’s entered beta phase, and is ready for open testing. As such, I’m releasing it on this website, in this very post. Feel free to download it, peruse it, play with it, and give me feedback on it (please). Also note that it’s being released under a different Creative Commons license from everything else on this site; effectively, you can use it, modify it, and create and sell a commercial product with it, as long as you give me credit for its original inception (the full license is in the document, itself). Anyway, here you go:

The Saga Rules System (Version Beta 2)

The Saga Character Sheet

[Edit 5/18/07: Saga has been updated; specifically, the rules on using skills and tokens outside of conflicts have changed.]
[Edit 6/10/07: Another Saga update. Mainly rules clarifications, but the rules for pushing have been improved, too.]
[Edit 2/6/09: The file that you used to be able to download from Lulu was corrupted somehow, and I'm unable to replace it. I'm now hosting the file directly on this website.]

This is just a quick post, the the promise of something bigger later (probably over the weekend). I’ve got a lot of packing and stuff to do and, frankly, my spare time right now is being spent gaming. Some of that gaming, though, has been HeroCard: Cyberspace, TableStar’s most recent entry into the HeroCard series. Overall my impressions of it are pretty positive, though that’s far too simple a statement to really sum up how I feel about the game (there are nuances, you hear? Nuances!) I’ll give it a full review sometime this weekend. Anyway, back to the acid mines.

Monte Cook just did an interesting post on his blog. I must say that I do agree with this position. When it comes to board games, stories are great, but it’s the gameplay that’s the real clincher. I’m a big fan of games with themes, and I sometimes make my decisions based, at least in part, on the theme of the game. Take BattleLore for example. Now, Memoir ’44 uses the same basic mechanics, but I probably won’t buy it. Why? Apart from already owning BattleLore, the fantasy theme of the first game appeals to me quite a lot more than the WW theme of Memoir ’44. That said, though, I’m a huge fan of the Command and Colors system that both games use, and if BattleLore didn’t exist, and I played Memoir ’44 at some point, I’d probably like it a lot and wind up buying it, despite the theme.

And that is exactly why I love it when game designers put manuals for their games in electronic format on their websites. I suppose that you could make some argument against that, invoking things like piracy, but it would be a pretty silly argument. Reading a game’s manual, if that game has mechanics that I’ll enjoy, only gets me more excited to play the game, and makes me want the game that much more. It’s a far more powerful form of advertising for your game than simple, story-based ad copy.

I guess I spoke too soon when I said that the Gamecraft 2.0 skill list was final. I did a little tinkering, and decided to take out the Survival skill. When I created the skill list, I wanted each skill to be general enough to cover a wide variety of uses. For example, Awareness covers virtually everything having to do with sensory perception (or extrasensory perception), including things like danger sense, tracking, and crime scene investigation. Survival was just too . . . narrow. It coved finding food and shelter, both in wilderness and settled environments, but that just seemed like it was too limited in utility, and in practice, playtesters didn’t really use Survival all that much. So, I dropped it. But that left me with eight skills, and that seemed like too few. Nine was a good sweet spot, and I designed character creation around nine skills; any fewer and I’d have to re-examine character creation, and I’m actually quite pleased with how it works now. So that begged the question, what should I replace it with?

While answering that question, I came up with and discarded a number of options. The main problem with virtually every single one was that, while they each covered things that the other skills didn’t, they weren’t universally applicable to different settings. A realistic modern urban setting doesn’t need a Magic skill, and a high-flying Wuxia setting has little use for Pilot or Drive. So what then? The answer was staring me in the face: Skill X.

Simply put, Skill X is a create-your-own-skill slot. The idea is that, when you create a setting for use with Gamecraft 2.0, you decide what Skill X is, and tailor it to the needs of your setting. In a fantasy campaign, you might have Magic, while in a cyberpunk setting you could have a Cyberspace skill. If you want the Survival skill back, it would probably be pretty useful in a post-apocalyptic wastelands-type game, or some other setting where living off the land and finding shelter is important. I’ve already decided that, for Wild Blue, Skill X is Sorcery, and this decision allowed me to create a much better, more flexible magic system than I had originally designed.

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.]

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.]