Star Wars Edge of the Empire: Beginner Game

A long while ago (a year or more) I bought the Star Wars Edge of the Empire beginner box by Fantasy Flight Games. It looked interesting and I had a local friend that was playing in a game of it. My friends and I played through two or three sessions before giving up. Today, I did something I've never done before: I through out an RPG system, namely the aforementioned game.

Improvised Background Stories and Forced Interactions

Every so often I get an idea of how to stimulate more role-playing in my games. Usually the implementation of these ideas reaches it's conclusion with my players offering threats to my general health and fertility should I ever try to use that particular idea again. (For instance, one of my favorites was when the players were about to meet the dwarven king, I had them all pass their character sheets around the table to the left and made them role-play whatever character they got. It was a ton of fun... for me at least.) This time, however, my idea actually went over really well.

I find that game mastering is a lot more fun when players actually have decent background stories for their characters. The players have more material to go off of when role-playing and I can tie elements from their background stories into the general plot of the game. However, if I just ask the players to write background stories, usually half the group never gets around to it. Furthermore, the quality of background stories varies greatly. One of my previous attempts to improve this was providing prompts for the players to fill out. What is your characters job, what is his or her family like, etc. Overall, I would consider that idea to be a success, though it required quite a bit of nagging on my part and I still had to write a background story more or less in it's entirety for one heavily writer's blocked player.

The particular game for which I came up with the idea this post is actually about was only intended to last 2-3 sessions, so I didn't want to be that demanding of the players. What I decided to do instead was to provide the players with prompts to answer during the first session, and have them improvise answers in front of the group. Since I wanted there to be some reason why this motley group was adventuring together, I decided to force interactions between players responses to the prompts. For instance, I asked one player what was the worst thing that had happened to him during his training at the Royal Magic Academy. His answer was that he had once accidentally summoned an enormous hydra that nearly killed him. The next player in line was playing a somewhat out of control alchemist, so I asked him how he was actually to blame for the accidental hydra summoning. Apparently, as a joke, he switched out some of the ingredients ahead of time and got a bit more than he bargained for. Then I went back to the first player and asked him how this had led to them becoming friends.

World of Darkness: House Rules Draft 0.1

My last post was a long list of problems with one of my favorite RPG systems, World of Darkness. A couple weeks ago (4 weeks ago? 5?), I did have a sit down with two members of my gaming group and started trying to hash out some house rules. As I remember, we generally agreed what the problems were though their opinions on why those things were problems and how they should be solved sometimes surprised me.  Also, I meant to write this post the next night but I was busy, and then one week turn into two, then three and so forth, so I might be forgetting things, though I did take some notes at the time.

One of the key things we agreed on was that the World of Darkness system needs to be dark and gritty but not necessarily realistic. There are plenty of stories in the genre of dark and gritty where heroes walk off gun shots and stab wounds that should require immediate trips to the hospital. Moreover, World of Darkness is a game that needs to be fun to play, so we should avoid rules that put characters out of action for extended periods of time. Doing so only leads to having frustrated players sitting on the side lines.

Also, the following is just a draft and none of it has been play tested.

Problems with the World of Darkness RPG System

A Brief Overview of the World of Darkness System:

First of all, let me say that I like the World of Darkness RPG system a lot. It has an extremely flexible and elegant design with a very simple basic mechanic. Roll some number of ten sided dice and if any of them come up eight or higher than you succeed. If you roll multiple dice with an eight or higher, then you succeed more. For instance, you might do more damage to that monster that is trying to gut you and your family. Another example might be that you're argument is extra persuasive and not only gets you past the guards, but it also makes the soldiers there more friendly toward you. For each ten you roll, you get to roll a bonus dice for possible extra successes.

To determine the number of dice that you get to roll, you add up all the values of factors in your favor and then subtract the values of factors that work against you. This is nice for players that aren't particularly good at math as all these numbers represent amounts of dice. A player can use the physical dice to add together bonuses and then remove dice to represent penalties and roll the remainder.

Dungeons and Dragons Next Epilog

In case anyone is wondering about what happened to my play-test game of Dungeons and Dragons, in short, it ended. Basically, my group got tired of the limited character options and began to feel that they'd exhausted the repertoire of combat available. Of course, a week or so after we called it quits, the second play test packet came out from Wizards of the Coast which addressed some of these issues, but by that time we'd revived our previous 4th edition game that had been on hiatus and no one has expressed much interest in further play testing. Also, my new job so far hasn't left me with a lot of free time for DMing. At this time, I have no plans to run further 5th Edition play-tests.

That said, I do intend to keep this blog going, though I might only be posting once or twice a month. I still have plenty of topics to post about.

My opinion on 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons: I'll be interested to see what the finished product looks like. I might even run some games in it, if it's good enough. However, I'm not sure at this point if 5th Edition will be an improvement over what we already have in Pathfinder, and, if it's not, there really isn't any point in buying the books.

Shout-Out: The Gamer Crafter

This post is long over due. Over a month ago, I was at a local game shop when I ran into a guy who runs the following company:

The Game Crafter

Basically, if you have a home-brew game that you would like to publish, or just would like a more finished version of it for yourself, you can go through this site. They will print whatever cards, pieces, game boards, etc. you need and package them for you. They have a large selection of various game tokens, dice, and so forth which you can pick from to build your game. Not only that, you can also sell your game through their site and, if you sell any copies, you can keep part of the profit!

I, sadly, do not have any home-brew games I would like to publish at the moment, though I'd like to give this a try sometime. However, I suspect there are some people reading this blog that have some ideas of their own and might benefit from their services.

Haven't Had Much Time for Blogging But Plan to Be Back

In the last month I have gotten a real job, have had to relocate myself, and my stuff, twice, and will have to do so twice more in the coming weeks. Hopefully by October my life will have settled down enough that I can devote time to this blog again but until then there will be occasional updates at best.

The best,
Lewis F

The Art of RPG Haggling

While playing pen and paper RPGs, I have often witnessed a player trying to negotiate the price of an item with a game master controlled character. I have witnessed this as a player, as a game master, and as another player watching from across the table. This is a quintessential part of pen and paper RPGs and one I have seldom seen done well.

Fighters vs Wizards, A Simple Solution

One common complaint about D&D 3.5 is that spell casters completely outshine physically based characters (such as fighters, barbarians, rogues, rangers, etc.) at higher levels. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to the first group as “wizards” and the second group as “fighters.” In my experience, however, this isn’t much of a problem around levels 5-8. Below that level, if anything, wizards are weaker than the fighter type characters. This is one problem I think everyone would like to see fixed in the new version of the game.

Trying to do Social Encounters in 5th Edition, Attempt #1: Failure

This past weekend I ran the second session of my 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons game. Based on the feed back I got from the group, the session left something to be desired. When I was planning it out I wanted to try out some ideas I had for doing social encounters, a much neglected part of role-play games in most rule sets. I also through in a stealth mission and a sport called "Orc Ball." I thought this was going to be one of my better sessions but there were several points that I failed to consider in planning it.

How to Be a Good Game Master, Lesson 3: How to Attack your PCs with Finesse

This will probably be the last in my series of "better games by making things difficult for the players" posts. This time I will deal with the dos and don’ts of direct assaults on player characters (PCs). This is actually one of the more difficult things to do as a game master; at least, it is one of the things I have seen many game masters, including myself, mess up regularly.

First of all, this is not a guide for eliminating an annoying PC. That should be simple enough to do. A giant robot picks them up and throws them into a pit of lava. This post is about using a direct assault on your player characters as either a combat encounter or a plot development.

Shout-Out #2: Nerds the Gathering

All images in this post are under the copyright of Ryu S Stemp.

I've been meaning to do a shout-out for something one of my friends, Ryu S Stemp, has been working on. It's a visual novel call Forever Alone: Nerds the Gathering. In Nerds the Gathering, you experience an engrossing story about high school nerd angst, mostly to due with the fate of the Anime and Gaming Club. The story is told through the eyes of an intelligent, witty, yet socially inept girl named Michelle, or Mike for short. What's wrong with the Anime and Gaming Club? Well, all its members have wandered off, leaving Mike short a social life outside posting on random internet forums. The goal of the game? Rebuild the club!!!

Alternative 5th edition character: The Bow Fighter

Note: This is very out of date with the current version of the D&D Next (5th Edition) rules.

I talked to my group last night and the guy running our current game is going to be unable to run it for a couple weeks either starting the week after next or the week after that. As a result, we will be playing my 5th edition D&D game during the interim. That should lead to some interesting posts but in the meantime there is a problem: I now have six players and there are only five premade characters. Now someone could run a clone character of someone else but we decided to try an idea that came out of last session: the bow fighter.

Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons: Play Testing, Night One

Last Friday night, we finally got around to test playing 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. The following are my impressions of the system. To be clear, these reflect my initial opinions on 5th edition, not necessarily those of my group.

Candid Conversation on 5th Edition and Fighters vs Wizards

The following is a candid conversation between two of my friends on facebook. Figured it was relevant and an interesting read beside.

---Lewis F

Alastair Yee
Gave the playtest material a look over. Truly have mixed feelings. I do like clerics and the wizard. The fact that their spells are pre chosen for the purpose of the playtest is nice. The fighter looks decently tough and damaging, but I feel like its highly lacking. It just looks so sad at 1 page compared to every one elses 2. Rogue was decent but the need for advantage means either you need a defender dwarf or attack every other turn.

Kent Carmine
Well, the info we have on the system is very limited, so there's a lot we don't know. There will probably be more ways for rogues to gain the advantage for sneak attack, for example (and remember that in 3.5e there

How to Be a Good Game Master, Lesson 2: How to Assault Your Players' Stronghold

One criticism I received about my last “How to Be a Good Game Master” post was that it was too focused on combat and not enough on role-playing. This is true and I will attempt to do better in this post. Like most game masters, I tend to be a little heavy on the combat side, but also I would like to have more role-playing in my games. I think the reason why we tend to drift over to the combat side is that it’s easier for us to run. Most pen and paper RPG systems are written with plenty of support for combat. Mean while, the rules for a social engagement often boil down to “make some sort of skill roll.” This isn't much help for game master’s trying to come up with interesting social encounters for our players. Fortunately, much of the advice I’m giving in this blog for combat can be adapted for social encounters. The reason is that in social encounters the players have some goal they have to obtain and various obstacles, often including people who try to stop them, just as in physical encounters. I will attempt to make these correlations explicit later on.

In a lot of RPGs, the PCs' (Player Characters') are essentially nomads; they move from one location to another, over come whatever challenges you’ve prepared, and collect the loot. Other times, whether through your design, or because an enterprising player decides to stake a claim to some dungeon the PCs' just cleared of monsters (assuming they can get the blood out of the carpets…), the players have a strong hold to call their own. In either case, it is entirely logical for one of the PCs' enemies to try to take it away from them. This is a substantially different scenario than what game masters are use to running and, since the players have so much at stake, one that you have to make sure you do a good job with. In this post I will look at best practices when designing assaults against a stronghold belonging to the PCs.

Haven't Gotten D&D 5.0 Together Yet

So, unfortunately, I have not been able to get a 5th edition game running. I’ve set up my notes for an interesting take on the Caves of Chaos adventure that is provided with the test playing materials, but neither I nor the group I was going to play with have had the time to run it yet.

This is in a large part because I’m studying for a second round interview for a job (yay!!!). Of course, if I do get the job, I don’t know how much time I’ll have for running games (boo…).

Still, I am hopeful that I will be able to get in my test playing sometime in the next several weeks. By the way, if you would like to join me, let me know. Good chance I might be looking for players and I have no objection to running this thing multiple times, time permitting. If you're looking for players, also let me know, because playing is fun too.

I'll probably have another "How to Be a Good Game Master" post up in the next couple days...

How to Be a Good Game Master, Lesson 1: Make Things Hard

This is something I wrote for a friend a couple weeks ago. While I'm planning on doing further posts on "being a good game master," I thought this one should come first since some of the things I'm thinking about build from it. Note: I don't always do all these things, though I should. In fact, I thought of some of them as I wrote. But hey, trying to give good advice makes you think about these things:

One part of running an RPG that a lot of people have trouble with is getting the level of difficulty right.

Shout-Out #1: Get Your Character Portraits!

The first shout-out in this blog goes to one of my old high school friends, Karen Leonardo. I ran into her my first year in high school at the activities fair. She was president of the Simulation Gaming Society (SGS) that year and was manning their booth at the time. I had already decided that I was going to join the chess club which met on the same day, so I politely declined to join. That didn’t stop her from chasing me down the hall, trying to get me to join, when she caught me eyeing the RPG books she had on display. As it turned out, the chess club people were less than likable and a few weeks later I joined SGS where I hung out after school, Thursdays, for the rest of high school. Thanks Karen.

Since then Karen has been to college and got her degree in art some years ago. Now, for $20, she’s offering to paint a portrait for your RPG character. Ever wanted an image to illustrate what your character looks like to your group but don’t have the skills to draw it yourself? Ever wanted a group picture for the party to immortalize that one favorite campaign? Well, here’s a link to her webpage: http://www.etsy.com/listing/99310780/rpg-character-portrait

An Interesting Time in the History of Dungeons & Dragons (background info for much of what will follow in the blog)

The Dungeons & Dragons game line is in a make or break moment in its history. I’ll get into why that is more, later, but first I should tell you how we got to this point.