The One Ring

Until the very end, Boromir was wrong about many things. Ironically, in regard to The One Ring roleplaying game, he was right. You're only given the option to walk into Mirkwood. At least that's what the core books give you.

It's certainly not like Middle Earth Roleplaying. It's far simpler to play and definitely feels more Tolkien. I played a bit of MERP when I was far younger and obviously liked the setting so much that I bought many of the source books. In fact I highly recommend the MERP source books - they were an amazing alternative to reading the Silmarillion. Like many of the games I played at the time, the system applied rules liberally. I didn't play its progenitor, Rolemaster, and having heard it's even more chock full of tables I doubt I ever will. A friend I visited recently grumbled that he was quite fond of Rolemaster but unfortunately his GM didn't want to play it anymore. I wonder why...

The lack of magic is glaring. Another player at the table (the DM for our Tuesdays D&D game) had clearly done his homework and knew of some kind of dwarf cantrip. But that was about the scope of it. No pew-pewing through battles. I'd almost say no tactical positioning, but this is actually what stands in place of initiative rolls. Punks at the back, hoods on the right, etc. And there you have your order. This is quite nice really.

The meat of the system is rolling a D12 (with an auto-win Gandalf rune on 12 and an auto-fail Sauron rune on 11 - although this logic is flipped when the baddies roll). You can add to this the scores of some extra D6 that you draw from whatever stat is called upon by the GM (providing you have pips in that stat). You're aiming for a 12-14 result with extra flavour added by the runes on the D12 and by rolling a 6 on the D6s. There's a lot on my character sheet I don't follow. Lots of isolated phrases or words that imply some ability or knowledge I have. It's a concern, but not one that's bothering me because it looks like fluff as opposed to Vancian invocations. I played an axe swinging Beorning with aplomb and let the GM worry about the fiddly particulars.

It has a roll-boosting mechanic called Hope Points. It also has Shadow Points, gained by rolling Saurons or perhaps GM fiat. It gives the game a Call of the Cthulhu feel that's totally appropriate to the creeping madness that claims many of the characters in the Lord of the Rings novels. These I both enjoyed.

I didn't enjoy the experience system. Oh dear. Will anyone ever get experience points right? One gains advancement in certain categories of skills by rolling well. Can you see the problem here? You watch your lucky fellows shoot ahead of you in advancement whilst wondering why you toil at similar tasks to no advantage. Not learning from your mistakes is poetic I'm sure, but not fun. There were some extra experience points elsewhere as well. I suppose to make up for this Who Rolls Wins bullshit.

I've sat through three games, little the wiser about how one would dare to run a campaign of it. But it was nice. It's a relaxing game to play. I recommend playing a game of it if you fancy a step down from the crunch of D&D.

Dungeon World

I like how simple the rules are in Dungeon World. D&D aims to have shallow waters which then drop you into the freezing depths of 100ft or more after a few paces. It's a solid aim for a system that wants to be played and scrutinised for a very long time. But it's also an arduous journey if you want to DM it without reaching for the books. It actively fights you trying to master it. Sage Advice is proof enough that whilst D&D 5th Edition has a solid foundation, most people have little idea of what they're standing on.

Dungeon World on the other hand is hilariously simple. It still has a little bit of fiddliness by keeping 1-18 stats for Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Etc. Something familiar for D&D players like me. And then the rest is mostly feats your character can do. In Dungeon World they're called Moves. A Move is the basic currency of action you can do. Like combat, searching, casting spells and chatting up the NPCs. With the downloadable character sheets and a basic grasp of the rules you can experience making a character for a table top roleplaying game in literally five minutes. This is as glorious as it sounds.

I was skeptical about the collaborative storytelling element in DW, I thought it would just devolve into silliness. It turns out I was right to doubt it but for the wrong reasons. Dungeon World lets the players prep for the DM - they can be asked questions about their world and can create a backdrop and links between their characters. It's a change from most roleplaying games as there's a bond with everyone at the table (there's even a Bonds mechanic in the game - just in case the point hasn't driven home yet). It's also incredibly slow, it sets a precedent for discussing the Why over the What for the conversations that follow. Introspection and action are not great bedfellows. But it does create investment, so whilst I'm not a fan of the pace of it I think it's a positive thing to have in a game.

What I wasn't expecting to bounce off was the Apocalypse World System. It puts the onus on the players dice to resolve both sides of a conflict. You make a move: Roll 2D6, add your meagre modifiers and consider the results below.

• 1-6 You fail. In combat the enemy has struck you, and in other endeavours something else goes wrong.
• 7-9 Partial success. You hit, but you get hit back. Each move has its penalties for failure and so you accrue one of those as well as performing the task.
• 10+ Success. Everything is good and well in the world. In combat you can ask for extra damage as well in trade for getting hit back.

All the dice are in the player's hands. It keeps the DM free to simply bind it all together - and why not? They're usually doing the most work.

It wasn't until I'd burnt through all of my spells (opting to forget them till I could pray again for my partial successes) that I realised I was scared of making a Move. Dungeon World has a cute system of awarding you an experience point when you roll 1-6. It's supposed to soften the blow, but what it actually does it make the blow hit harder. If you fail a roll in D&D, sometimes it's bad, sometimes nothing happens. But in DW, bothering to act can be more trouble than it's worth. I'm reminded of the angry father in David O'Reilly's External World, resorting to escalating means of punishment when his son screws up playing the piano.

I explained this Action Paralysis to a colleague who DMs Dungeon World and he suggested our DM was treating it like Call of the Cthulhu, that the manual recommends the DM be a fan of the players and want them to prosper. But I don't see this reflected in the mechanics. What we have is this marvellously simple system that unfortunately operates like a minefield.

I don't think Dungeon World is bad, I think it's pretty good all in all. I simply don't think it's Great. Which is what I was hoping for. A simple alternative to D&D that wouldn't require so much work to run. Instead, it's got this Hard Mode built into its fabric that requires people bring something to the table. The DM has to prod people to make sure they move (there is no initiative order so you can effectively hide from consequences by being quiet). And players have to have balls of steel to engage. You need neither of those in D&D - the mechanics of it nudge people into having turns and let you evade a lot of unnecessary danger.

It's a good game, but good in a Super Hexagon kind of way (disclaimer: I don't actually like playing Super Hexagon, but I get that lots of people like it because it's hard, analogies eh? I liked VVVVVV, but it's less of a common currency title).

I look forward to playing Dungeon World again. Next time with the mindset that I'm entering a tough as nails indie game as opposed to a AAA monster that leaves no player or DM behind.

...

Um. My second game didn't go particularly well. I haven't spoken to people from that group since...

...

However, half a year later I learned what was really going on with the Powered by the Apocalypse "drama engine" and how it could make my life a lot easier. Take my hand.

The South Wing - A Novice Campaign

Here it is. My first campaign. My first, badly written, inconsistent, power creeped and experimental campaign.

The South Wing

It's an episodic crawl through a mega-dungeon. It even has two preceding episodes from one shots that gave me the basis for the campaign. Each week I would write a new episode, trying to break up the format I used the previous week. Then the next week I would go, "fuck it - let's just do this as a dungeon", and it would go down better than the experimental stuff.

Although the experimental episodes let me bridge some very interesting settings. When you give the players an astral starship and send them off into the void - anything you want can happen.

I'm very sorry for the lack of maps. Truth is, I sketch out a sensible bounding box for battles and just roleplay through the corridors. PHB:p182 describes marching order so you can get through skirmishes a lot quicker. For episode 7 there is a flow chart (there's portals involved - you'll need the diagram). And um, for XP I just gave out 300 every week. The sporadic attendance of many meant that shooting up through levels would leave a lot of part-timers behind. I just stalled on XP and bumped people halfway through the campaign to 4, leaving good old 5 for the grand finale. Oh, and I didn't get round to putting the Monster Manual pages in. Sorry. I did write a list of all spells in the PHB that require costly components though. I even put the materials and prices on.

I use Ideament to sketch out dungeon diagrams before writing them up in Editorial - this means my scenes play out more like a choose your own adventure novel than a hex crawl. It's a campaign designed around each episode taking exactly a session to play - which I needed because I always had new players at the table every week.

Now I'm off to try something different. A new day of the week to run the game and a new setting. A black market portal plane through which the players are drawn together as bounty hunters. Less of a continual story, more of a continual setting. Plus a ubiquitous magic item that will help shore up those weeks where only fighters turn up to play. If it isn't a disaster I'll post the material.

Next time I should post some adventure paths that were indeed disasters. I've learnt the hard way what makes a fun adventure. But after I started the South Wing I never had a bad week. Maybe there's something in there you can use.

Rifts

I've just finished my South Wing campaign. I'll post the paths for each episode once I've put in some page references for the Monster Manual. It was quite the learning experience, and now I'm wiser I'd like to design something better.

At an open table game you need a tool for bringing lots of random players in at any moment. So I want to run a world like Planescape or Rifts. Portals make bringing in new people (especially homebrew weirdos) very easy.

So I had a look at Rifts.

I've played Rifts. I've got the original book and a lot of splats. I got into Palladium games through buying TMNT & Other Strangeness, thinking it was going to be a graphic novel (shrink wrap's a bitch). I bought a lot of splats for that too. I think the main thing was that I liked the worlds, the system never really figured in. I barely asked for skill checks, skipped over fights, mostly roleplaying really. Not a big surprise that when Werewolf came out I jumped straight into White Wolf's system and never looked back.

Now that I played a designed game like 5th edition - I'm having a wholly new reaction to the Palladium system.

• How the hell am I supposed to ask for skill checks? There's so many of the buggers. And each new splat adds more. It completely breaks any use of skill checks to control the pace of the story or player's turns.
• Each paragraph is Sigmund-Freud-style long. To one extent you're getting rule clarifications. But on the other you're putting fatigue on the reader, so they skip stuff and get it wrong anyway.
• I'm wholly a convert to just having one damned experience table. Seeing so many again just made me wonder how I'd be able to get all players on an equal footing so no one at the table feels rubbish. I remember once rolling a character from the Rifts Atlantis splat and my mate rolled a gromek juicer and thought he'd hit the jackpot. Then I showed him that I had mega-damage skin and a truck load of magic and psychic powers. He was so salty.

The Palladium System isn't about balance. I get it. I think it's fine it spawns lots of books, because DMs and GMs need ideas. It's fun that you can roll a candle wizard.

But it really is The Hobbit, An Unexpected Threequel of roleplaying games. It desperately needs editing. I'm happy there's been news that someone's giving it a go.

Campaigns

Because I ran open table games I felt I should do adventures that basically consist of session units. The problem with having such contained scenarios is that when players drop out for a week or so and return they always start in a world that's a clean slate. Even if I contrive a link at the start of the game to bind last week's and this week's session, the actors enter a set that looks too hastily constructed.

Campaigns feel more real. When players stump you you have all this ammunition lying around from the world you've created. So I've recently been writing a campaign of one shots. An expedition into a mega-dungeon in chapters.

Mega-dungeons I think I favour over a world map for what I'm doing. There's no reason a dungeon can't break into open sky and involve the players in some politics amongst creatures that have populated the ruins. And new people coming to the table get a little of what they were expecting from a Dungeons and Dragons game: A good old fashioned death maze.

So far I've ran 2 episodes. This rolling world feels more lived in, the stakes are raised. Hopefully episode 3 will go down well today.

The South Wing

Elements for the campaign were set up in Scully and Crosby and Dungeon Expansion - which wasn't the best idea when I started with a table of players that weren't in those sessions. It's the spirit of the overlap that counts - players who've been before see something familiar to get them reacquainted with the world, new players get up to speed on prior events. This stuff is a bit messier than my previous offerings, you can see my writing style change and ret-cons slowly creep in. I also changed to the 4Bro-System for the number of players that everyone else seems to use. Mainly because it ties into the Challenge Ratings better.

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3

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This campaign I finished at a short 10 episodes, which I posted later on here.

D&D 5e - the Bad Bits

I've liked 5th ed D&D so much that I've binged on it recently. I've been DM and I've had fun as a player as well. Over all, good game. But I have bones to pick with you 5th edition. That's right, plural.

• Inspiration Irony Points
  Ludonarrative dissonance: In the video games industry we've struggled with this as more ways to gamify the content has creeped into play. The term refers to those moments that remind you you're playing a game when the purpose of the experience was to make you forget you're playing a game. And that is exactly what Irony Points do. If you want to use them in your games for whatever wishy washy reasons it states in the rule books then go for it - I'm all about experimentation. But the original intent, that of rewarding the player for being immersed in the game, defeats its purpose. At the moment the player forgets they have a spreadsheet of numbers in front of them that defines who they're playing, you the DM should then yank them out of that experience and make them look at that spreadsheet again, so they can add another number to it. The more I think about it, the more I hate the space it takes up on the default character sheet for 5th ed. I was originally on board, I tried them, and no it didn't feel good. They don't even feel good to spend either - why not just roleplay your way into having a permanent advantage? Why not just use one of your more interesting class powers? The more DMs I play under, the less I see this mechanic used. It should be relegated to the Dungeon Masters Guide as house rule funsies and not take up the space the saving throw against my spells should take. Which leads me to...
• The Default Character Sheet
  This is the smallest of my bones, I quite like it overall, but I play a lot of casters. In fact almost all the classes cast spells. So why when I'm starting a new character do I have this sheet that ignores that? I don't need several pages for a level 1 wizard and yet I'm adding side notes to every damn sheet. And so is every other player. It's not a strictly bad design, but something's definitely wrong there. Okay, I take it back. They assume you're using the 3 page variety which has spells and whatnot. That's better, not perfect but okay.
• Experience Points
  This is probably just me. I like that there's one table now. That solves a lot of mess. I still like levels - call me old fashioned but I like that treadmill of unlocking new powers. I don't get experience points. I never have. Perhaps it's the fact that they rocket up into multiple digits. Or that the DMG suggests a bunch of multiplication and division along with other decisions about how brutal the encounter will be. I thought White Wolf's story points were alright, not from a character development view (admit it, you're going to dump them all in Disciplines), but easy to keep track of. Preferably I'd like something I can use instead of just doling out 300-500xp every game. I like to reward completing adventures, not killing stat-boxes.
• Usability of the Books
  The 5th edition books are meant to be read. They are not meant to be used. The most shocking evidence of this are the beige on beige page numbers (that I can't see without my glasses on). I've not gotten through a single game without someone getting something wrong or right and spending the next 5 minutes searching through the PHB for the one sentence that capped an ability being game-breaking. And then we're all thumbing through the books because godammit if I get called up on this rule again then I want to know where the hell it is. Of course there isn't an online resource - WotC wouldn't make a cent otherwise. But where the hell is the app? I'm using all sorts of semi-legal options just to stop a game grinding to a halt whenever a caster uses a whacky ability. And then on top of that the whacky ability might be a class power - so the app I'm using doesn't have that functionality and out come the books again. Charge as much as you like for it. Piracy? Pump it full of video ads in the Android version until they pay to get rid of them. The Basic Players guide is out there - why not just put that in an ad supported free version? It would be so much better than these two PDFs that have almost identical covers in their iBooks preview and are as bloody irritating to navigate as the hard back books. I don't want it to be pretty - I just want blocks of stats, lists of esoteric crap and the occasional hyperlink I can poke to bring up a screen filling painting and go, "it looks just like this." I've just been watching the 2015 PAX game and ole Perkins starts flipping through the books several times. He has a tablet too. Is it company policy not to use Lion's Den or something?

I've yet to play enough to form nitpicks elsewhere. However, the issues above I'm running into again and again.

There are many gushing reviews of 5th edition, and rightly so. But we all have our flaws.

Spiders, They're Pretty Sweet

This week I tried out spiders.

I had high hopes for these monsters and boy did they deliver. Mechanically they've got a decent set of moves. They can stealth, they have high mobility and they either do safe damage or can send a player into a blind panic from failing a poison check. (Of course I added homebrew variants so dwarves can experience the fun as well.)

But it's the web theme that really works wonders. Webbing is tripwire. It turns the entire dungeon crawl into a set of meaningful traps. It lets you go up walls and do really strange things with the space. And the dungeon can do that because spiders can climb. And when you cap it off with an intelligence controlling the spiders you get something a bit more like this:

A Monk(3), Cleric(2) and Fighter(2) tackled this all out hack and slash adventure. They took a fair beating but managed to avoid any K.O.s by using every skill they had and taking some rests.

If I revisit having a monster amount of players I'll probably run this adventure again. It seems to scale well and there's lots of fun to be had watching the players try to meta round the traps, only to get an acid spraying spider in the face.

Web, D&D 5e adventure for 2+ Lvl 1-3 characters

The Undead Sheepdog

Sometimes you need to herd the players. Your adventure is a bit linear and you need get those sheep to the other side of the field. Creeping death doesn't work. It's a roleplaying game so one plucky player will still try to meta past such obstacles - killing them for interpreting your push as a puzzle isn't fair. What you really need is a sheepdog.

If you're as old as I (my sympathies), you'll remember Lassie. Her most well known trope is showing up, barking, and leading the party to deal with the problem. People trust Lassie, no one has to figure out her ulterior motives - she just brings people to the action.

My sheepdog in this week's adventure went through a few revisions till I settled on making him an old friend of one of the players. This I think is key to making an effective sheepdog. The Barbarian player did question the reliability of the guide on one occasion. But the player who was the friend of the sheepdog felt they were permitted to define the friendship: No, this guy is alright, I know him.

The adventure is a short romp escaping from a ghost ship. It was tackled by 4 melee classes. (I had to halve the wolves in the dog pen because the Barbarian was a secret Dr. Dolittle who ended up adopting one of the wolves - and add an extra shadow because I'd lost track of how munchkin our half-orc fighter had gotten. I also omitted the finders-keepers coin, that's a dick-move that should be saved for an experienced group.)

Scully and Crosby, D&D 5e adventure for Lvl 1-3 characters

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Also, one of the players ran their own homebrew fox-race. All game I just thought of their character as Sir Didymus. It's quite fun bringing these things to the table though (so long as they're not O.P. nonsense). I'm quite tempted by the blue mage sorcerer myself.

Dungeon Expansion

Hello.

I wanted a nice filtered space for my D&D stuff, so I thought I'd set up a new blog for it. The first time hosting D&D at Loading Bar I winged it (no prep, no modules). I always used to wing it, but now I'm older and I've read hundreds of books since the last time I ran a roleplaying game. I like a bit of foreshadowing. I like mysteries. And yes you can wing that but when you write out some ideas and leave them for a few days you spot opportunities to create some really cool chains of events. And then you've got more ammo, more Dungeon Master bullets to fire at the players.

My first mistake writing adventures was thinking I was going to use every bullet. And each bullet ends up dependant on the last - and now I know what railroading is. And then I found Courtney Campbell's blog and his Tricks document. A massive list of bullets, Rambo-levels of ammunition - you don't need to fire it all, just pick up something appropriate and start shooting.

So I wrote something linear (let's not confuse the newbies), yet with some sandbox moments. It's a one-shot that resulted in a fun game for 7 players. I even cut parts out because the game was running late - but it felt nice to have so much extra content to fall back on without needing to commit to it:

Dungeon Expansion - D&D5e for 2+ Level 1-3 characters