I just got my pre-release copy of Dungeon World (I’m a backer) and I think I’m in love with this game. I’ve read a good chunk of it at this point (the moves, the classes, some of the GM stuff) and I can’t wait to play this thing. It’s delightfully old school in its tone and feel but the mechanics are like nothing I’ve ever seen before (yes, I understand that this is a hack of another game; no, I haven’t played or read Apocalypse World yet).

I’m really hoping to get into a game of this at GenCon. I don’t think I’m ready to run it yet, but I really want to sometime soon. I think getting to play the game would give me what I need to figure out how to run this game effectively.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. As you were.

If you like Diablo well, Diablo III is certainly another one of those games, and easily one of the better ones. The systems within the game have been streamlined in very thoughtful ways, the gameplay is as compelling as it ever was (which will vary based on your tastes), and the game looks great. As a game, I highly recommend it.

As a complete package I’d still recommend it, but somewhat less. Here’s the thing: Diablo III is all about the co-op. And the co-op is very, very good. I was playing today, trying out the wizard, when my friend Irven dropped right into my game and started playing with me. Co-op is well put-together in a lot of ways: lots of great interface touches, easy trading, and individualized loot (meaning that, if you see it on your screen, it’s yours). So what’s the problem? The problem is that, even if you’re playing single player, you’re playing co-op.

What do I mean by that? If you’re playing by yourself, nobody else in sight, you still have to connect to the servers (which sometimes go down), you still have to log into Battle.net (though this is a minor annoyance), and you still have to deal with latency (though the latency isn’t bad most of the time). It’s most irritating when all you want to do is play single player but the servers are down for maintenance; when this is the case, you can’t play. Period. It’s frustrating.

Having experienced the co-op, I can understand why they designed it the way they did. The game is better in co-op, and everything about the game facilitates co-op in the best ways possible. If that’s not your thing though, be prepared to get annoyed from time to time. That said, the experience (again, if you like games like this) is worth putting up with some irritating qualities for.

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Marcelo Dior comes back to us with a review of Heroes of the Feywild, WotC’s latest D&D supplement. He makes it sound pretty good, too.

It’s been a while since I read a D&D book (almost two years) so I was very surprised by the quality of this supplement. At fist, I though “oh boy, a book about fairies and pixies, rainbows and unicorns, all pink and flowery…” Man, was I wrong! Of course there are pixies and rainbows, Princes of Summer and cities of eternal autumn, but they’re the ones from old Greek and Irish myth — dangerous, deadly, incredibly powerful and not at all impressed with humanity. It’s the kind of fairy tale that reminds you all too well how fragile mortal life is, and how fleeting our achievements are compared to the immortal and godlike beings from beyond the Veil.

I need to give special praise for the layout of this book. Throughout the pages you see leaves, masks, branches and uncut stones decorating the book — a very nice touch that conveys the idea of a book about the Feywild. But the best part are the “Bard’s Tales” sections, side-blocks of stories small and large, conveying the most interesting, strange, and bizarre folklore tales. They not only set the mood at every chapter, section, and page, but also give immense amounts of material to weave into your games if you want to.

The only downside of the book is the lack of DM-related material: the book is 95% for the player, who will have a ball with the new backgrounds, races, and builds — not classes, mind you, but new powers for existing ones, and new builds, which I find brilliant, for there are more than enough character classes out there. I’d give special attention to the very last chapter, where you could create a rich backstory for the entire party at random — a tip of the hat to the old AD&D “Complete” supplements, I think. The three races added to the Dungeons & Dragons mythos (the hamadryad, the pixie and the satyr) are surprisingly interesting and fun. I’d not only allow, but indeed invite at least one character from those races in my table at any time.

If it wasn’t for the lack of love for the Dungeon Master, I’d have given Heroes of the Feywild 4 stars. Let’s hope something in the vein of The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond is in the pipeline for the Feywild.

If there’s one thing I took away from running Old School Hack, it’s that less can be a lot more when it comes to character generation. I saw this in Gamma World, too, and while OSH isn’t nearly as random in its character generation as that game is, it still offers very little in the way of character customization.

For those who are unfamiliar (and really, the game is free, so you have no excuse) with the character generation system in OSH, it’s pretty simple. The basics are these: choose one of 7 classes, roll your attributes, choose one of 5 talents for your class, choose a weapon, choose some armor. There are some other choices that you make that amount to role-playing hooks, and have little to no impact on mechanics, but that’s basically it. At first blush, this seems limiting. A level 1 goblin isn’t going to look that different from another level 1 goblin, mechanically; that much is true. But there’s more there than is immediately apparent.

First of all, you can’t have two players with the same class. I actually like this limitation quite a bit, as it does allow for a lot more differentiation between PCs. The real genius is in how open-ended some of the mechanics are. Weapons and armor, for example, are simply generic categories: light armor, heavy armor, light weapon, reach weapon, etc. There are three kinds of armor to choose from, and there are five kinds of weapons. However, you’re encouraged to flavor these choices however you like.

This is an approach I really like: generic mechanics nearly devoid of flavor, so that the players can fill that flavor in, themselves. This is how you wind up with caber-wielding fighters and clerics who use their holy book as their primary weapon. It’s great fun, and leads to a lot of great role-playing situations (like when, isntead of using a torch, the party lit the figher’s caber on fire, which remained on fire for the rest of the session).

Another area where the minimalist approach works is in covering different situations. OSH does not try to come up with rules to cover every situation; it has a few simple rules that can be applied broadly, and some guidelines for coming up with rules for improvised actions. Players, when given this kind of freedom, tend to come up with crazy stuff. Rather than saying, “I attack the kobold”, you get, “I throw my caber at the kobold; after it hits him it ricochets off the wall and rolls back in front of my feet”.

This is reinforced by another simple yet elegant mechanic: awesome points. There’s a bowl of these in the middle of the table; players can reward each other awesome points from the bowl whenever another player does something they think is awesome. They can then spend those awesome points to do more awesome stuff. That’s pretty much it; specifics are not discussed. Instead, it’s left up to the players and the DM to determine what falls under the umbrealla of “awesome”.

Old School Hack is a very simple, streamlined, rules-light game. The whole thing is maybe thirty pages long. It never felt like there weren’t enough rules to handle things, though. And it always felt like people were using their mastery of the rules (which came quickly) to do all kinds of fantastic and interesting things. This is an approach to game design that I have grown to appreciate quite a bit.

Today I’d like to talk about some awesome things, all of which (for me, to some extent or another) originated at GenCon this year.

Thing the first: The Awesome Die. The core of this idea was originally posited to me by frequent commenter mbeacom. I’m simplifying it a little bit here. I bought an Awesome Die (a d30) at GenCon, specifically so I could use this trick. The idea is, whenever a player does something really awesome at your table, that player can roll the Awesome Die instead of a plain old d20. Obviously, this works best with games that use a d20, like D&D. A couple of implications go along with using a d30 rather than a d20. First, success is considerably more probable; this is the intent. You want to encourage awesome things at your table, and making those awesome things more likely to succeed will do that. Another implication is that, if it’s an awesome attack, it’s much more likely to crit, since you can roll a natural 20-30 on this die. Assuming 4e D&D, your crit chance jumps from 5% to around 30% for that attack. That’s significant. As a result, you might want to limit how often you hand out the Awesome Die. This, in turn, will have the effect of players trying harder to get it, in all likelihood, provided you make it clear that it’s available and hand it out at least once early in the session.

Thing the second: How to Host a Dungeon is a fantastic game to read; I haven’t even played it yet, but I totally want to. On its own, it seems like a lot of fun to simulate the life cycle of a dungeon. But wait, there’s more! You can use that dungeon in a game if you want to. In a game like D&D, this can be a lot of work. That’s fine, if you don’t mind the prep, and it’s a great way to get a convincing dungeon with a lot of backstory for your game. But if you want to dive right into the dungeon with little to no prep, there’s another game you can use . . .

Thing the third: Old School Hack. I heard about this game at GenCon (it won an ENnie, even), and it is indeed awesome. OSH is an indie game inspired by the original D&D Red Box, but with much simpler and more modern rules that encourage a lot of crazy, off-the-wall actions and cool character concepts. It’s also free. And elf is a class. Awesome. At any rate, it goes with How to Host a Dungeon extremely well, so much so that I’m going to print it out on card stock and drop it in the same folder as HTHAD, and basically treat them as two linked games. I can’t wait to make a dungeon, then run some unsuspecting party through it. It’s going to rock.

My last day at GenCon was good, if short. I started by going back to Games on Demand to see what was on the menu. I got a chance to play TechNoir, a cyberpunk noir RPG with really elegant character generation and conflict resolution rules. The session was so-so; the GM hadn’t been planning on running anything and decided to at the last minute, so he wasn’t really prepared. I can’t really fault him for that. The session did sell me on the game, though. I’m definitely buying this one.

That was the only game I played. I did, however, go to the IPR booth and pick up a copy of Dread (a horror game that uses a Jenga tower as its primary resolution mechanic). There I ran into Amanda and Clark Valentine (Amanda edited Bulldogs!), and we got to talking (about games). Tracy Hurley (Sarah Darkmagic), Thadeus C., and Tracy Barnett (Troll in the Corner) also stopped by, and we had a nice conversation.

Shortly after I went to the airport, where I started killing time by reading some of my games.

Zombie Cinema is short to read (took 15 minutes or so, all told), but it seems like it’ll be a lot of fun, especially as a zero-prep pick-up game. How to Host a Dungeon looks like a great one-player game, and I have a hunch it’ll go well with a game that I heard about today called Old School Hack, which I’m going to research tomorrow. I’m halfway through Mortal Coil, and every freaking page is giving me ideas. It’s great.

So now GenCon is over, and I’m a little sad. Still, it’s nice to be back home, and it’s not like I won’t be gaming. I’ve got D&D Encounters this Wednesday (new season, new character), and I’m also planning on running at least one demo of Bulldogs! at my FLGS. I may run some other indie games, just to get a chance to play them. Huzzah!

Lately, I’ve been playing a couple of games on Steam.

The first, and arguably the better of the two, is Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012. I played the first Duels game and liked it quite a bit. The second surpasses the first in just about every way. There are more decks available (and some of them are just plain awesome), lots of unlocks to get, and three separate campaigns to play. One of them, the Revenge campaign, is just a harder version of the main campaign, where your enemies have better cards available. The third, though, is the Archenemy campaign, which allows you to play with a whole new, cooperative style of Magic. In addition to the campaigns, you can also play custom games. I haven’t experimented with that yet, but I would imagine that’s where a lot of my time will go once I’m done with the campaigns. If you like M:TG, I highly recommend this game; it’s only $10.

The second is Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale, an awkward name if ever there was one. This is not what I’d call a particularly good game. The graphics are ugly, the gameplay is repetitive, there are a number of bugs and balance issues (the most glaring of which is that the rogue kills more stuff and therefore levels up faster than anyone else), there’s no real voice work to speak of (the NPCs talk with text boxes accompanied by grunts). Despite all this, I’m having a great time playing it with my friend Mike, and I’m enjoying it for what it is: stupid, cheap fun. So, while I can’t really recommend the game, if you have friends keen on playing it, there are worse ways to spend $15.

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My wife sent me a link to a little indie game called Desktop Dungeons, and I’ve been obsessed with it since I downloaded it.

Let me back up and explain what it is. Desktop Dungeons is a Rogue-like game, for those of you who know what that is. For those who don’t, the idea is that you pick a race and class and fight your way through a randomly generated dungeon for treasure and XPs. Rogue-likes tend toward the difficult side, and most games will end with your character’s death; also, you can’t save your game. However, completing an entire dungeon takes maybe ten minutes, and it’s pretty easy to get caught up in it and just play a new dungeon once you’ve finished (or been finished by) the current one.

There is a sense of progress in the game, despite the disposable nature of your characters. Whenever you successfully complete a dungeon (which I’ve done exactly once so far), you are rewarded with unlocks in the form of new classes, new races, and new types of dungeons to explore. Stores within the game will also start stocking better items, and different monsters will start showing up.

The game is a turn-based affair, with an almost puzzle-like quality as you decide what order to tackle your opponents in and what parts of the dungeon to explore, and to leave unexplored. That actually brings me to one of the more interesting elements of the game: exploration. The entire dungeon is covered by a fog of war-style darkness that recedes as you progress through it. The interesting thing is that every tile of the dungeon you explore restores some of your health and mana. This leads to an interesting dynamic where you want to explore the dungeon to find monsters you can kill and loot you can pick up, but you want to leave sections of it unexplored dungeon so you can heal and get back mana.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the best part: it’s free. Sort of. You can download the alpha of the game (which is extremely polished and complete, for an alpha) for free, and you’ll always be able to. However, QCFDesign, the people behind Desktop Dungeons, do plan to release this game for pay, on Steam as well as iOS and Android. My suggestion: go download the alpha and give it a whirl. If you like it, buy the game when it comes out (or pay for it now, to help fund the project). That’s my plan, at least.

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A little while ago, there was a lot of flutter in the Twitterverse about Fortune Cards, and what kind of effect they would have on D&D. Will they unbalance combat? Will they add even more complexity to an already complex game? How are they used within the game?

For the most part, I abstained from this conversation because I had nothing meaningful to add. I do now, though. You see, last week at Encounters, I got the opportunity to use them. The store I play at, Family Fun Hobbies, is a Wizards premier store, so they sent a bunch of packs of Fortune Cards to the store for playtesting and feedback during Encounters. Each player at the store got a pack of cards, and got to use them during the encounter. These are my observations.

First off, I don’t think they introduce any significant balance issues. Most of the cards are extremely situational. One requires that you hit with an at-will or encounter power while you have combat advantage, while another only triggers when you are dropped to 0 hit points or fewer. Those that are not situational, that are more broadly applicable, usually have some sort of trade-off; a simple damage bonus usually comes at the cost of accuracy, an attack bonus at the cost of a minor action, or a full-speed shift at the cost of possibly falling prone at the end of it. Further, you can only have one of these cards at a time. The situational cards can be extremely helpful, but if you’re saving a card that triggers when you drop to 0, that means you’re not using any of your other cards, and you may not get to use the card you have at all.

As far as complexity goes, they do add some. It’s not a lot of complexity, since you can only have one, but it is an additional card to keep track of, and once you’ve leveled up a few times and have a sizable number of cards already, it would be easy for some of your abilities to get lost in the shuffle, even more so than usual. Drawing or discarding a card is also another thing you have to remember to do at the beginning or end of your turn, and (in our case) was occasionally forgotten.

My primary concern about Fortune Cards is simply that they provide yet another prescribed action for you to choose from which, in general, reduces the chance that you’ll be creative and come up with your own improvised actions. Combat tends to be a lot more fun when players are utilizing the environment, or attacking in creative ways, and Fortune Cards provide another thing that serves to distract from doing that. There’s a tendency in D&D, particularly among new players, to think that the only actions available to you are those that are laid out in front of you on your power cards, and I’m afraid that Fortune Cards might muddy the waters further.

In general, though, for a player like myself who is extremely familiar with the rules of D&D and tends to try to find interesting things to do anyway, I think Fortune Cards are fine. I’d probably shy away from using them in groups with newer players, or with players who aren’t that familiar with the rules. For that reason, it’s unlikely that I’ll be using them in my home game.

I got Gamma World for Christmas, and at this point I’ve read most of the book and all of the cards. In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t yet read the monsters or the introductory adventure, but I’ve read all of the rules and, as I said, all of the cards that came with the box. Also, this isn’t really going to be a full review. That’s been done a lot already (I am late to the party on this, after all). Instead, I’m going to talk about some of the things within the game book that struck me, and what I think about them. Overall, my impressions of the game are pretty positive.

Character Generation
This is a pretty big departure from D&D, despite being built on the same game system. Virtually every aspect of Gamma World’s character generation system is randomized. You roll two random origins and get powers from those origins. Your origins determine one or two of your ability scores, while you roll randomly for the rest. You get to choose your armor and weaponry, but all of your gear is randomly rolled. You roll a random skill to be trained in (though the concept of skill training, as such, doesn’t exist in the game), and get bonuses to others from your origins. All of this random rolling, combined with the absence of feats, means that character generation is, in theory, very fast.

This is largely because there is little decision making to be done from a mechanical standpoint; your origins determine the powers you get (though you can play around with the order in which you get them), and there are no feats, so you’re not making a lot of decisions like you are in D&D. That said, even though you’re not making a lot of mechanical choices, you still get to do a lot of customization in terms of role-playing choices. You randomly roll two origins; these origins are things like “android”, “seismic”, “telekinetic”, “hawkoid’, or “yeti”. There are twenty-one of these origins and, as you might expect, you can roll up some pretty wacky combinations.

That’s where the fun comes in; you have to try to reconcile these two potentially disparate and possibly contradictory origins (Pyrokinetic plant, anyone? How about a seismic rat swarm?) and come up with a character concept that makes sense within the world. This is an exercise in creativity, and means that your character can look, quite literally, like just about anything. It’s a cool feature that I like quite a bit.

Gear
This narrative customization extends to the gear you carry, too. There are three types of armor in the game: light, heavy, and shields. You choose which one you get, and you get to describe what it looks like. Are you wearing a heavy leather duster? An umpire’s padding? A conglomeration of road signs soldered together? Medieval plate mail? It’s really up to you.

Weapons get this treatment, too. There are melee weapons, ranged weapons, and guns, and each comes in a light and heavy flavor and a one-handed and two-handed flavor. If you’re a big tough character with a high Strength, you’ll probably want a heavy melee weapon, and possibly a two-hander if you don’t need a shield. That said, it’s not that interesting to just say “I have a heavy two-handed melee weapon, and I hit the mutant badger with it.” What does that weapon look like? Is it a stop sign? A chain saw? A bastard sword? A cash register? Again, the details are left up to you.

No Money
The game lacks any system for money. In the postapocalpytic world, everything operates on a barter economy, so if you need more ammo, you’re going to have to trade something you have for it. This means that the random junk you find can potentially buy you life-saving gear (like food, ammo, water, armor, or gas for your truck), so you’re going to want to scavenge as much as you can. Luckily, there’s a big random table of Ancient Junk in the book that makes generating mundane scavenge pretty easy.

Cards
A lot of people have made a lot of noise about Gamma World being a collectible role-playing game because of the included Alpha Mutation and Omega Tech cards, and the fact that you can buy booster packs of them. I can understand where people would get that impression, but having looked at the cards and read the rules, I can tell you this: you don’t need to buy a single booster pack if you don’t want to. The two included decks have plenty of stuff in them, and they give you a booster pack to customize your decks a little bit. I haven’t yet decided whether or not I’ll be buying any boosters, but I can tell you this: if I do, it won’t be for a while; certainly not until I’ve played the game a few times first.

As for the cards themselves, I think they’re great. Alpha mutations are encounter powers or passive abilities that range from extremely situational (like a power that counters life-leeching) to extremely potent (like an attack power that deals 7d8 points of damage). There are no level restrictions on these powers, and they’re randomly drawn, so you can potentially get something really powerful at first level. The catch is, you won’t have it for long. During every short rest, your alpha mutation changes, so you’re going to constantly have new powers to try out and use.

Omega tech is a little more dependable; it’s gear that you find, and you keep it until it dies. Each has a consumable power or an encounter power, and if you use an encounter power, at the end of the encounter you have to roll to see if you’ve used that item’s last charge. Many items can be salvaged if you’re high enough level, and salvaging omega tech gets you some pretty nice swag. Typically these are suits of armor, weapons, or mundane items that are more potent than what you can get otherwise, but they’ll never be as powerful as they were when they were omega tech. Again, there is no level requirement for using these items (though there is for salvaging them), and they’re randomly drawn, so you could wind up with something pretty potent from the get-go.

Lethality and Healing
There is no healing magic in Gamma World. There are no clerics. A couple of the origins have healing powers or powers that grant temporary hit points, and some of the alpha and omega cards do so as well, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll see any of that. This makes for a pretty lethal game. To combat this somewhat, some concessions have been made. Your second wind, for example, now allows you to regain hit points equal to your bloodied value (half your hit points), and costs you a minor action. There are also no healing surges in the game; all healing is effectively free (though uncommon). A short rest heals you completely and refreshes all of your powers (there are no daily powers in the game), making it about as good as an extended rest in most situations. In fact, the only reason to take an extended rest is to level up (you have to take an extended rest to level up), and to shuffle the discard piles back into the alpha and omega decks.

Another note on lethality: your character may very well die (and there is no resurrection in Gamma World, so if you die, you’re gone), but as I mentioned earlier, making a new character is a pretty quick and easy process. This means that your character might be dead, but you’ll probably have a brand new one ready before the next encounter.