OUYA Revisited

The backer version of the OUYA finally shipped, and saw a couple of reviews go up on the sites Engadget and The Verge. Both were a bit… less than favorable; I’ve been waiting to see if another review will emerge—maybe a positive one to contrast with—but so far I haven’t seen anything more substantial than a positive tweet or blog post. The most positive I’ve seen was at Joystiq, and it admitted the OUYA “is not ready for primetime” and that “people want a sure thing.”

Granted, I know a lot of people will discount the reviews off-hand, with something like “Well, of course it, it wasn’t an Apple product, of course they’d hate it.” While the sites have a little more leniency with Apple products, I’ve noted they can be predisposed to ranking other products ahead—the new Roku 3 getting better remarks than the Apple TV, for example. But I think it reveals a little more of the underlying reasons why I’ve been so hesitant to buy into the OUYA hype: I’m surprised as heck that they managed to get it out by their expected March production dates, but as the reviews show, it’s somewhere in the Alpha build, or very early Beta.

The store is pretty hot, in the XMBC/new Roku vein.

I’m getting the sense that people are liking it more for its hackability as a home media center—this generation’s XMBC, using off-the-shelf cellphone parts and a forked version of Android—despite the product being pitched as an alternative for the indie gamer who doesn’t want to shell out the big bucks for the PS or Xbox systems shipping in the next few years, or who’d take the time and effort to make their own STEAM box. It’s for enthusiasts who get hyped up about Raspberry Pi, not the mainline gamer. (While Pi is actually pretty cool, most people have no use for it on a daily basis.)

Which is fine; different strokes for different folks—I’m lazy and my Roku works fine for me, though I wish the originals would get the new hotness update instead of that shitty old carousel display that wastes space, and better support for USB devices and various audio/video codecs would be nice, to use the content on my external drive. Anyways, I’m getting sidetracked.

As a game system, the reviews point out the same reasons I was hesitant and didn’t go with the Kickstarter after all. First, Google’s had enough of a hard time getting people to design apps for 10″ tablets (again, plenty of apps on my Nexus 7 that scale for shit can attest to that); getting people to design apps for a 50″ HDTV would be nightmarish. Plus, OUYA doesn’t have the benefit of hiding its push behind the weight Google’s throwing around, since they’re using their own appstore environment. So not only do they have to convince developers to release another version of their app—bigger, stronger, and free-but-not-really-free, you’ll have to re-purchase all the apps and games you already bought for your phone or tablet. Sigh.

Next, that app needs to run fine using the technology and parts used to power smartphones. Next, smartphone parts become obsolete every 6-10 months; the tech in the current OUYA is already falling behind. So OUYA is coming out with yearly $99 releases; ok, that keeps the tech nice and current, but the cost is becoming more of a burden at that point. More than one and you’re already past the cost of a Roku; more than two and you’re past the cost of a decent Xbox 360; after five or six years of updates, you’ve just spent as much as you would on a next-gen Playstation, Xbox, or a solid mid-range gaming PC. Is $99 a pop expensive? Kinda, but in the grand scheme of technology, not really. Do you have to buy a new one every year? No, but I’d be surprised if the speed at which mobile gaming increases doesn’t necessitate purchasing a stronger OUYA every 2-3 years.

I like the implementation of the menu system as shown thus far, though I hope they patch over the bits of stock Jelly Bean sooner or later with their own stuff. And the promise from developers to make titles just for OUYA is a step in the right direction. Maybe it’s just my hesitation to be an early adapter, because early adapters don’t come in to the established, full-fledged experience; case in point, compare the Blackberry 10 or Windows Mobile app stores to Google Play or the iOS Appstore. Maybe it’s just that I’d rather put up with bad control schemes to play the same games on my mobiles because they fill a certain niche (killing time on the one electronic device most people consider essential), and would rather play the grandstanding, mainline titles—the Haloes, Bioshocks, and Elder Scrolls of gaming—on my TV or computer. Whatever the reason, I’ve actually been losing interest in the OUYA the closer it comes to mainstream production, and feel kind of bad about it.

Tablets, Storage, Cloud Computing — And You!

I know it’s old news, since it came out just over two months ago, but Apple came out with their first high-capacity tablet: an iPad with 128 gigabytes of internal storage. Compared to personal computers, that doesn’t sound like much space, but most tablets and smartphones have wallowed in the 8/16/32/64 sizing mire, where the 8 gig isn’t terribly useful, the 16 utilitarian, and the 32/64 pretty expensive. Needless to say, the big iPad generated a number of articles and arguments before being forgotten after about a day… except by me, who didn’t have time to finish writing this until long after it stopped being news.

Three points I’d like to touch on.

Price

First, the price is definitely high, but not at all unexpected; Apple has a habit of making products as good or slightly better than the competition, months before any serious competitor can match their marketing and promotional machine, much less their supply/demand, and then sell it at a 30% markup. Then, they come out with incremental, yearly updates, and have everything fall into a very specific pricing hierarchy where the next step up is around $100 more than the one below it. $499 for 16gb, $599 for 32gb, $699 for 64gb, ergo, $799 for 128gb.

$799 for a wifi-only tablet is high: you could get, what, three Chromebooks for that price, or a decent Windows laptop, a solid midrange-plus desktop, one of the better Mac Minis, or both a Nexus 10 and Nexus 7 (both 32gb models). Actually, that last option isn’t a bad way to spend a chunk of change. And the Macbook Air is just a short half-step, price wise, above the $929 wifi + cell data 128gb iPad.

But unlike its competitors Google and Amazon, Apple doesn’t subsidize its products to make bank on easy access to an online marketplace—Apple is selling an image, and the Apple Tax helps build that reputation by making the products more exclusive. (Creating both the hardware and software can’t hurt; where else are you going to go but Apple if you want to get upgrades for your Mac? Check those prices on RAM and the new hotness Fusion Drive, please.) Plus, miniaturization of a 128gb SSD can’t be too cheap; it costs $80-140 to get a PC-ready internal SSD, and the tablet model would have to be notably smaller, thinner, and lighter.

All in all, it’s actually cheaper than its competitors ($1,049 for a Acer Iconia W700, $1,299 Razer Edge Pro, the Samsung ATIV price-slashed from $1,929 down to $1,300-something)… but note that all of those are running Windows 8, and desperately trying to be tablets, computers, and gaming consoles simultaneously. If Google/Samsung kept their pricing structure, a 128 gig Nexus 10 would be $699, which isn’t that much cheaper than the iPad pricing, considering the comparative lack of Android apps designed for large screens. (I’ve found plenty of awful looking apps on my 7″ Nexus, and I can’t imagine how bad they’d look on a 10″ one.)

Programs/Platforms

Second, more storage is very much a good thing; in another five years, we’ll all look back and laugh when we think about computers that don’t have a terrabyte or more of Solid State storage. The main criticism about a 128gb iPad, other than the price, was “What are you going to do with all that storage?” which I think is a very backwards-looking question. Yes, I can only see around two types of users who’d have need for that: consumers who want to have their entire music library—or a large part of it—on their tablet; and the few professionals who use the top-end CAD and graphic design software. The release saw quotes from the AutoCAD iOS app developers, and it’s their kind of product that would really shine on a large-capacity tablet.

So, the big benefit I’m seeing is that it opens up the floor for use by more professionals—not just thinking corporate/Enterprise users, but anyone who use high-end software for engineering, graphic design, 3d modelling, etc. Now that there’s more storage, those big apps with big files aren’t as much of a problem. And while I’d personally dread to use most of them on a touchscreen tablet, I can see the appeal of putting CAD, Adobe CreativeSuite, Maya, etc. on a device that’s twice as light and portable as your standard laptop. (Besides, if it works for people in science fiction films, professional tablet computing can work for us, right?)

So, the detractors are saying “too bad there’s not many programs on there taking advantage of all this”—and by that, I also refer to the 4th generation iPad’s processor and graphics, which benchmark high on the current round of tablets but really don’t have anything in the app store to put that much strain on the hardware. On the other hand, there’s the a hopeful “well, it means the doors have been opened for others to develop bigger, more demanding apps to take advantage of the disk size and hardware.” Whether they do or don’t, we shall see. The option is there, but designing those high-end programs to function gracefully on a 10″ touchscreen is a whole ‘nother matter.

Storage Media

Third, thanks to the rapid developments in cloud computing, I do have to question the values of physical media in our age of cloud computing and cloud storage. On the one hand, remember the embarrassing iCloud outage about a month after the 128gb iPad was announced? On the other, something I’ve learned from personal experience:

I have a 32gb Nexus 7 (wifi model), and a 64gb iPod touch 5th gen, both of which I use with regularity. (I wanted devices that were ultra-portable and lacked an expensive cell data contract; the Nexus fit my bill for a combination Android gaming platform, e-reader, and digital RPG assistant; the iPod fits in my pocket, stores most of my music, has an insane battery life, and it’s blue.) Both currently have around 20 gigs of free space, after formatting and loading them down with apps. They both store around 30 gigs of music, a little over half my music library, but in different ways. The iPod is packed because it has to hold all the song files on its drive; meanwhile, you’re probably wondering how the Nexus 7—with only 27.85 gigabytes of storage after formatting—can hold 30 gigs of music and still have other apps installed and 20 gigs of free space.

The answer is cloud computing: Google’s Play service hosts all the tunes you buy through them, uploads the music library off your computer, and stores it in the cloud to stream back down. My 30 gigs of music—plus some things I bought off Play but haven’t put in iTunes yet—take up not a single byte of storage on my device. Free of charge, I should add; Apple has their own cloud music storage system, iTunes Match, but in comparison it’s not very good. It does store more tracks, and in higher qualities, but it doesn’t allow you to stream them back down out of the cloud: instead, it plays them while downloading, and then they’re back to taking up space on your hard disk. So I guess it streams them once, while downloading. Not an ideal solution, especially if you’re the poor sap who thought they could get by with an 8gb iPhone. In short, it stores my songs, I stream them back down to play, and my tablet has both all my tracks and loads of free space.

My gut says physical storage will remain the preference over cloud computing, especially since there’s a number of issues with it—if I’m not at home, or within range of a free wifi network, my awesome Google Play library is worthless. A server outage would wreck me as well, and if Google somehow went under, I’d have to find another service to dump all those tracks into. Part of the reason I picked up the iPod was because of this very same issue: the music is on the device, so I can go for a walk around the neighborhood without worrying about stopping the rock because I went off the network.

But, given the way our technology is developing, I think cloud computing will eventually overtake physical storage when two criteria are met. First is that they’re more stable and secure; they’re no use if they go down for more than ten minutes. The more important second is the prolific and widespread use of wifi. Most restaurants, malls, and even businesses have realized that, in our technological world, it’s considered an essential service to provide free wifi, and do so along with restrooms and free water and decent lighting. You get free wifi at your local library, or in the hospital waiting room. We already have cars that function as wifi hotspots as well; I could use it to connect my Nexus and stream my MOG, Pandora, or Spotify through the car speakers via Bluetooth, a sentence I’m pretty sure would have confused my grandparents. Give it another 10-15 years, and we could see wifi provided as an essential service everywhere: grocery stores, gas stations, you name it. Possibly a replacement frequency of some kind, combining the strength and stability of wifi (or Bluetooth for that matter) with the wide coverage of a cell data network. We’re nowhere near that yet, but if I had to guess about our future, I’d bet it all on ease of access to the internet. The growth we’ll see in the next decades will probably floor us.

When we reach the egalitarian science fictional utopia where our cities beam out free network connections from every streetlight, that’s the point where we can take physical storage out behind the shed. I’d take that over moving sidewalks any day… but the flying cars, now, that’s another story.

A History of Violence – Far Cry 2

I have to say, the trailer to Far Cry 3 makes me really want to run out and pick it up. The depth and breadth—not to mention the various critics’ praise—shown in the ten-minute teaser trailer is impressive. The single-player story looks cool, the environments look immersive, and the leveling up tattoos and gun modifications look amazing. But I’m still a little hesitant; it looks too much like an improved Far Cry 2, and Far Cry 2 was one of the most disappointing games I’ve ever played.

Far Cry 2 didn’t try to follow in the original game’s footsteps, other than having lush, expansive environments to drive around in, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to focus on; they even expanded the amount of sandbox, putting Far Cry 2 on the Elder Scrolls/Grand Theft Auto level. It took place in a war-torn African nation, playing a mercenary stricken with malaria who was after the arms dealer supply both factions in the war. With an arsenal of weapons, it’s your job to take on the two factions and fight your way through the jungles to kill the arms dealer. Sounds all good so far, right?

Well, the actual gameplay is very hit or miss. Some of the game’s mechanics are great, some of them terrible. Most of them are just bland and irritating.

• The setting is just plain huge, covering deserts, plains, jungles, slums, all the key African environment types. And when I say huge, I mean fucking gigantic: the map you start out on is bigger than most sandbox games, and then halfway through the game another map is unlocked, doubling the world size. The day-night cycle is impressive, and goes by at a decent pace. And those expansive maps are filled with lush vistas and really cool locales, even if the plants can be rubbery at times.
• The problem is, it’s empty, and infuriatingly boxed-in despite its size. Big and expansive with not a damn thing to do it in, except at the scattered waypoints on your map. There’s no real wildlife out there, and except in the wide-open plains and desert areas, you’re restricted to either a.) traveling by foot, which takes YEARS for you to cross the map, or b.) driving along rivers and dirt tracks through the jungle.
• The problem with the dirt tracks and roads is that there are faction checkpoints every mile or so filled with troops that you have to kill. Between the checkpoints are roving vehicles on patrol. Either way, you have to stop to fight after about five minutes of traveling, which gets monotonous and repetitive. Worse, it takes the focus away from the gorgeous scenery.

I wasn’t kidding when I said the environment was lush.

• Respawns! When you leave a checkpoint after blowing it up and looting it, walk five feet out of view, turn around and go back because you’re short on grenades, bam reinforcements have arrived. There is no sense that anything you do impacts this world, since the checkpoints and road patrols regenerate some ten seconds after you get out of view. This also works in the inverse; walk too far away from a vehicle and it vanishes.
• Enemy AI! This exists only in on/off form; either they’re shooting at you, or they’re milling about. If you silently kill one of them trying to be a stealthy sniper, they all see you and open fire within minutes, and have the accuracy to shoot the ass off a gnat at half a mile. Enemy tactics revolve around a.) seeing you regardless of how well concealed you are, b.) shooting way more accurately than you do, and c.) running wildly in your general direction. Gone are the tactical geniuses of the original Far Cry; these guys are just dumb mooks with superhuman accuracy and x-ray vision. Their vehicles drive faster than yours, too, which makes chases not very interesting.
• Realism! Your weapons will degrade over time, so you have maybe three or five pitched battles before that awesome assault rifle blows up in your hand. Pick up an enemy weapon and it blows up even quicker, because these sniper ninjas use garbage equipment. The same thing happens to your vehicles; they can take scant little damage before their engines start smoking and you have to hop out and crank the fix bolt a few times to repair it.
• Malaria Outbreaks! As part of the realism, now and then your screen turns sepia-toned, and you have to travel back to the center of Map A to restock on medicine. If you don’t, you become sick and wobbly-cam ensues.
• Vehicles! Handle like overladen shopping carts, and can accelerate from 3 to 30 in about a minute. They are made of glass, except for the special Unimog armored truck (which is made out of particle board). There’s also a hang glider, which is neat, and boats, which are not.
• Fire! Okay, this was pretty cool: throw a Molotov cocktail or set off an explosion and the world catches fire. It spreads out to a certain radius and stops, but it looks cool and can be really helpful. The plains burn especially well.
• One of the great ideas the game brought in was the allies system; you’ll have some mercenary allies who’ll ask you to do sidequests, and will offer alternate routes for doing main quests. Do enough of those and their friendship bar will increase; then, when you’d otherwise be shot to death, one of your buddies would arrive to pull your ass out of the fire. Way cool. What made it better was when your buddy went down trying to save you, requiring your medicinal syrettes for healing or a mercy-kill overdose if they’re too badly injured. Added a bit of depth to a game that sorely needed it.

The gunfights were intense, if repetitive; the blur is from the character sprinting.

• The game uses conflict diamonds as currency, which is a fantastic piece of flavor.
• The diamonds are used to unlock weapons, then to buy and upgrade them. There’s a wide and interesting selection of killin’ utensils, but the best options are if you preordered to get the bonus DLC. At any one time, you get a selection of grenades and Molotov cocktails, and get to pick between one light weapon (pistols, machine pistols, a flare gun, an M79 grenade launcher, or a sawed-off double-barrel-shotgun), longarms (a variety of assault rifles, a shotgun or two, and a bolt-action sniper rifle), and heavy weapons (an RPG, a crossbow that fires explosive bolts, a flamethrower, a mortar, machine guns, and a recoilless rifle). The upgrades only modify accuracy, damage, and reliability (how long it goes before it blows up), and are a nice touch, but I’m not actually sure how much they improve anything by.
• The designers tried to institute some story-oriented missions and sidequests, but these are so predictable that they become boring as hell. Standard mission setup involves you traveling to the other side of the map, emptying out all the checkpoints in between, killing everything at the mission location, then clearing out the checkpoints on the way back, to get paid with a few conflict diamonds. Missions include “blow up the convoy looping endlessly from point A to point B,” “kill dude X for the dude at the cell towers,” “kill things so the gun shop unlocks more gear,” “kill everything at location Z and bring back the area’s macguffin,” etc. Imagine a half-dozen copy/pasted versions of those mission types and you get the picture.
• The main missions weren’t much better, and only a handful fall outside the most generic mission types. In truth, there isn’t much of a story, just an endless series of repetitive quests similar to the sidequests. Lord, it’s like the world’s emptiest MMORPG. The exceptions were hunting for secret diamond caches (a scavenger hunt), and unlocking safehouses (you’d bump into them, kill the occupiers, and have a save place to sleep at night). Both were useful and entertaining pursuits, from an exploration standpoint, if a little gamey.
• TL;DR:  To complete one mission, you’ll most likely have to end up driving for half an hour, adding ten to fifteen minutes to the trip for each checkpoint you run. After spending the better half of an hour to get to the mission, you fight more mooks—just like at those checkpoints, but at someplace bigger!—then fight your way back through that half-hour drive and all those refilled checkpoints. Rinse, wash, and repeat for six billion identical missions.
• Did I mention that no matter whose side you’re working on, all the faction checkpoints will open up on you at first sight? The game tries to play it off as you being some undercover operative on a secret mission for the head honchos so they can’t tell their hired mooks not to shoot at you, but it feels like lazy game designers.

pretty pretty pretty visuals!

So, some interesting features, fantastic immersion, great graphics, and a number of serious, critical flaws that ruined the entertainment value of the game. I get the feeling the developers were trying to make a first-person Grand Theft Auto, which they set in the African equivalent of an Elder Scrolls game. But they did so without understanding what made those sandboxes fun. Most of all, those worlds were packed with interesting locations, NPCs, and missions, things that Far Cry 2 sorely lacked. In a way, it was too much sandbox, not enough content. And your actions had next to no impact on the cookie-cutter world.

Some people really liked Far Cry 2. The critics loved it; just look at its Metacritic rating to see the difference between “critic” and “corporate shill.” I stopped playing after some twenty hours and went off to beat Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Maybe things got better on the second map, but I was just too bored—it’s not a game, it’s a slog.  Compared to sandboxes like Fallout: New Vegas, Just Cause 2, Saints Row 2, Oblivion, Skyrim, even the STALKER games (limited sandboxes though they are), I just didn’t find Far Cry 2 entertaining or redeemable. Hence my apprehension at the third game in the Far Cry series, despite the trailer’s lovely promises. Won’t get fooled again.

Points of Light, Oceans of Darkness

For a long time now I’ve been interested in running an old-school points-of-light style fantasy game, for no particular reason. I’ve never played or run one, so it’s not for nostalgia’s sake; rather, it’s probably for the opposite reason—because I’ve never really experienced with that style of game.

“Points of Light” was the one thing I really liked about 4th Edition D&D, rolling things back to a more AD&D-style world setting where civilization existed in the form of small towns and isolated waystations, surrounded by oceans of dark forests filled with monsters and brigands and primal savagery. Heroes come from small-town beginnings, or from the few well-fortified city states; they venture forth into the unknown to beat back the darkness and plunder strange relics of lost civilizations—faded empires, shattered races. Help may be days or even weeks away, so life can be brutal and harsh, even for the prepared: it’s the rugged individualism of a new frontier.

In sum, the generic OSR setting without archaic OSR game mechanics. The Hyperborean Tales, Lankhmar, Averoigne; old Weird Tales pulp fantasy meets the Dark Ages.

You can see a lot of the original D&D game in it, too: when a half-dozen men-at-arms is a “sizable” patrol in an underpopulated world, compared to forty or more hobgoblins, it becomes a bit of small-unit skirmish. (As in, wargame.) Hex grid wilderlands notwithstanding. They had this gee-whiz sensawunda, too; stumble into this hex and you might find some dude’s magic arrows hidden in a hollow treestump, stumble into this one and you get attacked by the plesiousaur in the lake.

Actually, I can chart this interest back to when I first played Baldur’s Gate, because its setting fits my ideal bill pretty well. A lot of open wilderness filled with hostile creatures and the occasional dungeon (or humanoid stronghold), with a few scattered hamlets along the way. Candlekeep, seaside resort for rich nobles, old wizards, and dusty tomes; Nashkel, occupied by a neighboring city-state, its iron mines besieged; Beregost, sizable trade city, and Baldur’s Gate, sprawling metropolis of the region. The Friendly Arms Inn in particular jumps out at me; a badass adventurer couple overthrew an evil overlord and turned his fortress into a waystation. Baldur’s Gate is nasty and harsh, a tough slog filled with memorable locales and unique NPCs… it’s how I imagine a great AD&D game would be like. (Not having to calculate THAC0, weapon speeds, or Armor Class modifiers—yep, that would be a great AD&D game.)

I’ve always enjoyed playing the Icewind Dale games the most—they have a rich if subtle flavor (case in point, items) and they’re easiest to progress in—while Planescape: Torment had the best story, and Baldur’s Gate II was the most accessible (while retaining a similar top-notch story). I’ve never really given the original Baldur’s Gate that much interest, despite how much it’s influenced my gaming perspective. Maybe the Enhanced Edition will change that. Maybe if it had been developed enough to not give me fucking bluescreens.

Part of my problem is that I realize it’s not an ideal genre to play in, and besides, everyone else who may be interested in this probably played it thirty years ago—it’s still a major source of nostalgia, and I’d wager most gamers into more trad fantasy have already played this. Plus, OSR just doesn’t interest me—I’d rather run a stripped-down version of FATE, or perhaps (glorious day!) take The One Ring for a test drive, considering Mirkwood matches my ideal points-of-light setting pretty damn well. (Plus its rules are kinda hot.) For the most part it’ll remain on my back-burner until I find the time and interest for it.

Deadlands Recap Session 4 – The One With The Dog

A lot slower session, which will hopefully balance the fire the posse jumped out of and the frying pan they’re heading into.

So, a retcon. Zeke’s player decided to retcon the ending of the last session so that Zeke died a heroic death, grappling the werewolf with his last breath, shoving it under the mire with his hammer, and going down into the sludge. This was under the assumption that Zeke wouldn’t want to live as a werewolf, but wouldn’t commit suicide either, so the player figured this was the best route out of a potentially interesting character development.

But, since the party has already cornered the market on Six Foot Tall Man-Mountains What Kill Things, his replacement option—occult investigator—filled about six niches the party was lacking entirely, and was welcomed aboard.

So, the actual session.

Having returned to the village from whence they originated—Troika Sinclaire having woken up in the process—the posse bravely decided to bed down for the night. Troika and Raizo Warlord Kang decided to sleep in the abandoned saloon, Jeremiah found an old wall to sleep next to, while Sam Steele opted for an actual bed. The next morning, they decided to head back into the woods to search for the werewolf nest, and finish them off.

Sam worked up plans for a Gizmo; the original idea was for some kind of rudimentary Smelloscope, but in actuality it turned out to be an elderly bloodhound which acquired the fucking terrible name of Bingo. Buying some loot donkeys to carry whatever gold and magic gems the werewolves undoubtedly retained, they set out across the woods and thicket after the missing girl, Sam having purloined an article of clothing thick with the missing girl’s “scent.” Yeah, they went there. Pervs.

The endangered Loot Donkey, or Lonkey, in its natural habitat.

After talking with a prophetic departed Zeke, and when Bingo returned them to the trains from whence they’d departed, the posse decided there was nothing more of value here and went to Denver, terrifying the countryside with tales of werewolves in the meantime. Upon arrival, Sam Steele assaulted bar patrons again with vintage frontier gibberish of the rough Canadian frontier, then went to talk to his Masonic contacts, while everyone else stayed at the hotel. Bumping into occult investigator Tony White, Sam found out Mr. White had been referred to them by a mutual connecting.

Arriving back at the hotel, Sam berates Jeremiah into action. Jeremiah heads out to his local Ranger contacts, where he’s almost killed (again), and “discovers” (again) that he’d blown up a mountain, killing thousands and resigning from the Rangers over the incident. (Learning Curve: social skills are useful, too!) Directed to a nearby town called Bakersville, one of many affected by the explosion and its ensuing wasting death, the posse headed out in that direction. Sam trades in his lonkies for a horse. Jeremiah scrapes up enough money to buy one of the lonkies.

Bakersville is now a ghost town—literally, as Sam and Mr. White discover. The occult investigator, and Troika, investigate, meeting the groups’ contact in town: a man named Texas Red, who didn’t make it out of the blast zone.  Most of the party rents expensive air-filtration suits to survive, and trundle slowly upwards to the crater set in the middle of a mountain range—basically, picture if Mount Saint Helens had been one peak in a long continuous range of tall mountains. And if it was flattened a bit more, and then filled in with debris and rainwater.

Flatter. Wetter. And with 100% more side-mountains.

So, White questions Red to figure out what happened, and discovers that the guy that Jeremiah, Warlord Kang, and Zeke (along with an Injun and Red) killed—Sherman Henry Miltworth, mad scientist and minor Smith & Robards competitor—was blown out of the world because of something he was working on dealing with tiny particles that exist somewhere in the ether. (You know, atoms.) Also, weaponized ghost rock, and Reckoner-powered future gadgets. He built his mercantile empire on the backs of his mechanical men, sent out to burglarize Union, Confederate, and Canadian weapons shipments, which Miltworth then improved upon using his own pyrotechnic flair, selling the end results back to the warring states. Robots which, by chance, had ambushed a Canadian train and slain most of Sam Steele’s merry mounties.

Meanwhile, Jeremiah gets his suit aquatically adapted by Sam, adds on a Bingo-powered oxygen system, and descends into the lake—Sam conveniently dumps some chemicals in to make the water glow. Finding not much but rubble and melted cannon, Jeremiah stumbles into a vault-like door set into the wall on his way out, which he then opens, and (of course) Jeremiah is sucked into the passageway, snapping his lifeline.

Sam ends up throwing Bingo’s air-supply treadmill into the lake, and using this as a raft, he, White, and Warlord Kang paddle their way off to rescue Jeremiah. They find him in the remains of the bunker, surrounded by cans of P.M. Potts’ Potted Meat Company’s Potted Meats, along with a very dead Sherman Miltworth. Also, his infernal clanking robotic butler, which was effectively slain before it could reveal any interesting plot information. With the butler burning behind them, the posse bravely paddled their way back to Troika, having done their duty and collected some waterlogged blueprints and a probably case of ghost rock fever.

Failing to pay a fate chip to make Bingo a permanent Gizmo, the strain of powering Jeremiah’s oxygen supply is too much for the old dog and he suffers a catastrophic failure of his circulatory system.

Deadlands FATE Recap

So, Deadlands. Three sessions in and we’ve got the rules hacks pretty much nailed down now, namely balancing the initiative system so that the spread didn’t result in either 1.) half the party holding four cards and the other half holding one, or 2.) the entire party holding three to five cards. Our fifth character finally appeared: Troika Sinclaire, former outlaw and ne’er-do-well who was left for dead, suffered a vision quest, and is now giving up parts of the white man’s ways to get back to nature. (So, a gone native Shaman.)

Session 1 – Point Insertion

The characters wake up to find themselves hogtied in a barn, with short-term amnesia and sketchy memories of the last four months. The last thing they remember was a New Years’ 1878 celebration, where they were out drinking and partying—only, each remembers the posse holding different roles (one thinks Ezekiel the Blessed was the bartender, Zeke remembers the Ranger Jeremiah Johnstone handing out drinks, etc.). That and a selection of clues (e.g., props to make up for the lack of plot—photos, stock certificates, and the front page to a Tombstone Epitaph). Easily breaking their bonds, then arming themselves with whatever  junk they can find, when Warlord Kang jumps down from the rafters.

So, a note. Four of the five Posse members took a Veteran draw, and the ninja ended up with a free mysterious background from snagging a joker during character creation. His joker gave him Doppelganger—and, being a man of the Orient, the logical pick was Warlord Kang, tyrant-king of his own Shan-Fan (San Francisco) based criminal syndicate and leader of the Iron Dragon Rail Corporation. Pretty much your standard Yellow Peril caricature made flesh. No shit, he looks like Ming the Merciless:

Of course, only two people recognize that he’s Warlord Kang: Sam Steele, Moutie, and Zeke the blessed. So, Sam arrests him and want to bring him forth to Ottawa to be hung for his crimes. After arresting the others for being “drunks.”

Moving right along, the exterior is filled with cornfield and dust, rolling hills in the background, and a forlorn farmhouse. Going inside, they find the farmhouse is filled with blood and some of their gear—the more noticeable and/or stabby parts. And that’s when Zeke notices the dust cloud coming ’round the hills, which looks to be a posse of some sort.

After Warlord Kang discovers some bodies in the well, including an undead girl, Sam demands that they investigate, and rescues a ghost—making the others question his sanity. Having spent quite a while in the well, the riders show up, being a frothing-at-the-mouth lynch mob. Warlord Kang does the sensible thing and hides in the corn, while everyone else parlay. Through much work, they work the leader of the mob down to a “sporting chance” and gives them to the count of thirty before they ride whooping after them into the corn. They manage to escape by diving into a cave the ghost girl shows Sam, and they sneak they way through some caves.

Emerging on the other side, Warlord Kang guts some locals, including some Sam and Jeremiah tied up, and Zeke struts off back to the farm to bury the corpses. As they’ve already been buried, the lynch mob moving home in a well-organized fashion, the posse notes the date: April 4th, four months since their last memory. With that knowledge in mind, they ride off to get train tickets to get to DODGE CITY, where Jeremiah’s guns are known to be held.

They ride on a train that is ambushed by werewolves, and almost all die in the scuffle. They don’t, which is the important part.

Session 2 – Residue Processing

Battered and bleeding, with the train’s workings beyond their ken, the posse treks off to some lights in the distance, which turns out to be a near-abandoned canning factory, property of the E.M. Potts Potted Meat Co. (easily identified by the blue cow on their cans’ labels). Heading inside, Warlord Kang sneaks away, while everyone else marches into the main office, chatting down the sole survivor: the disrupted Bruce, with a shattered arm. Revealing that the head of the company was doing experiments on livestock and Mexican immigrants, some howling in the distance attracts the posse’s attention. Finding himself abandoned to the elements, Bruce commits suicide.

Meanwhile. Having noticed a room full of sharp cow-gutting automated saws, and finding a sleeping Troika Sinclaire locked up in a cage in some kind of office, Warlord Kang stumbles into some werewolves when attempting to avoid the howling things. He ninjas away, only to stumble into some more werewolves. One smoke-bomb later, he starts hiding himself in the ventilation system, and after the rest of the posse got out of the death-room, stumbles onto the werewolf breeding pit, a nest forged out of bones and bits within the central control office.

The rest of the posse gets in through the processing factory’s open doors, which slam shut behind them just as the automated saw system kicks in. Not wishing to go through them, Zeke attempts to kick the door open—and succeeds in bashing open the aluminum siding. At which point he is grappled by a werewolf. As Sam and Jeremiah shoot at the pressure pipe powering the saws to disable them, Zeke grapples the werewolf and beats it to death. Peering outside, they see… more werewolves. Zeke and Sam decide to crawl through the meat trough in the center of the room, underneath the saws, to get to the door at the other side. Jeremiah attempts to hold the werewolves back, but is badly wounded, and falls into the trough to crawl his way to safety. As he emerges, the saws finally turn off.

Regrouping, they fortify themselves in the office where Troika Sinclaire finally awakes. They debate proper strategy when they realize they’ve been trapped by werewolves, plans to climb to the roof are brought up and brought down, as are plans to run out, kill a cow, and drag it back into the room as a werewolf lure. Eventually, they run off while setting some dynamite next to the ghost rock boiler (that Warlord Kang had spotted in his immaculate escape), bringing the whole building down, and causing a massive stampede of cattle that glow eerily blue under the moon.

Regrouping once more, they make their way to the ruined factory’s train, and fending off the alpha wolves and the wolflings, make their escape thanks to Science!.

Outside of town, Zeke asks them to stop because he will not ride on stolen merchandise. Instead, he rides Troika’s horse Swiftwind while Warlord Kang runs alongside him.

Session 3 – …in noctu luna lacrimat

Finally arriving in Dodge City, having converted their stolen train into a steam wagon, they disassemble. Troika falls into a miraculous and eerily session-long coma. Jeremiah goes to the telegraph office to warn the Agency of the werewolves, and gets entangled with sheriff Bat Masterson. Sam gets into a bar brawl with an unkempt man wearing a Lance Corporal Mountie uniform. Zeke walks off to find Jeremiah, and also gets embroiled with the local law, who is trying to figure out why Jeremiah abandoned his roots to become a wanted man who blew up a scientific institute in Colorado. He does send a deputy to get Sam out of trouble, who then buys the uniform off of him.

Dodge City’s Front Street, 1878

Save for Warlord Kang, the group opts to spend the night in jail, where it is attacked by the ninjas of Warlord Kang. Attempting to capture them using smoke bombs and knockout gas, the ninjas cause havoc before they are put down. Jeremiah and Zeke go back into their wall-less cells, while Warlord Kang runs off with some of the dead ninjas’ gear, and Sam goes to get the law. One midnight trial later, and the posse is riding back to Denver, to find out more about the explosion they were reputed to cause.

When the train they were on was stopped by a strange coincidence—a stopped, empty, and surprisingly familiar-looking train heading from the direction they are now currently going—Jeremiah is roped into a missing persons investigation on behalf of one of the locals. Heading out into the woods, they find an abandoned mill in a swamp, the tree branches littered with little occultist charms.

Progressing further, they find a stone circle in the center-ish of the swamp, lined with candles, the circle containing scattered bits of feathers and honey. Lighting the candles and filling the area with torches, Zeke stumbles upon a crudely-made broadsheet advertising the Enlightened Order of the Weeping Moon, a Victorian-style gentleman’s club that is very exclusionary and which primarily exists in California, Oregon, and Back East.

While debating their next course of action, a massive werewolf, black as the night, covered in even blacker snaking tattoos carved into its fur, jumps into the middle of the circle and attacks. During the pitched battle, Zeke is mortally wounded, and Jeremiah is battered, but by the skin of their teeth they survive. At which point they hear more howling off in the swamp, and skedaddle.

Round One: Fight!

Obsidian Portal asked an interesting question a few days ago: who would win, an ancient red dragon or the legendary Tarrasque? It points out some issues I’ve had (both thinking about and saying) for a while about D&D.

In a pure cage match, it’s hands-down the Tarrasque. It has amazing regeneration, is immune to fire, has mondo spell and damage resistance (36 and 15/Epic); as soon as it gets a hold of the dragon, that dragon will be mauled to death in a couple of rounds. If it went like standard D&D combat—run up to each other, stand relatively adjacent, and whale away with attacks—the dragon doesn’t have a chance. Its stats are nowhere near as good.

Of course, that also overlooks the dragon’s amazing tactical advantages, and is looking at this challenge from a really short-sighted angle. Because if played right, there’s no way the dragon can lose. First off, it has several amazing advantages that the Tarrasque can never overcome.

1. Smarts. The average person’s intelligence is 10. If I remember my D&D stat examples, a really smart person (Einstein, Napoleon, etc.) would have around a 16-18. An ancient red dragon has an intelligence of 20 and a wisdom of 21. It exists on such a higher plane of thinking that it could do complex calculus and trig in its head, and could poke holes in Einsteinian physics. The Tarrasque is on par with a crow or a wolf. Both of those are cunning, but such animal cunning is limited against lateral thinking and tactical planning. The dragon is about on par with Rommel—tactically brilliant, yet prone to overconfidence and hubris.
2. Flight. You know how players first beat the “unkillable” Tarrasque? They flew up where the damn thing couldn’t reach them and pelted it with powerful effects and abilities, dropping rocks on Big T and relying on that nat 20 critical hit on ranged weapons. A dragon gets flight as a natural ability: it can just fly up and drop spells and stuff on the Tarrasque. (You know the Tarrasque’s +43 to jump? Using RAW, that means it can jump 13 feet in the air if it Took 10 on the roll. You’ll be fine with the flying.)
3. Spells and Abilities. Yes, the value of wall of fire or firebreath is pretty nil against something immune to everything. But that spellcasting means it can cast scrolls, and maybe even brush up on some spell choices of its own. Because of its…
4. Hoard. The last few times I dealt with dragons were in Pathfinder, where I note they’ve tricked out dragons with cool magical artifacts. Take Legacy of Fire for example; the PCs had this dragon tailing them for most of the City of Brass sessions. Said dragon was printed with an insane amount of bling: rings of protection, belt of strength, amulet of natural armor. It had around 60k gp worth of items on, and had stats way better than it should have for CR 15—its AC was 36, meaning the PCs had to roll upwards of 15-17 to hit. That’s before getting to its stoneskin, periapt of wound closure, or ring of invisibility The point is, dragons have a hoard of stuff, and it’s always kind of confused me why the damn things don’t walk around wearing thousands of gold worth of stuff. They should, and it’s nice to find modules where they do.

Now, that’s not even looking at how the dragon could use its powerful abilities. But sit back, think about it. If you had those advantages, what would you do to kill the Tarrasque? I know what I’d do if I were the dragon in that situation.

• Go recruit an army to help deal with it. Those fifty billion kobolds might not do that much, but a nat 20 is still a hit, and it’ll give the Tarrasque something to focus on. An army of lizardfolk or dragonborn or something would be better. Maybe easily cowed orcs.
• Or bribe/intimidate some dragons which might also be affected by the Tarrasque, who have abilities it’s not immune to—Cold being the obvious one.
• Or summon a balor, bind it, and task it to get rid of the Tarrasque. How? I don’t care, that’s why I summoned you. Summon some more evil outsiders or something after I fly away.
• Better yet, Polymorph, go into town, and set some of those pesky humans after the damn thing. When they’re off defending their crops, I can polymorph back and raze their town for valuables.
• Go home, look through my stash, sigh at the thought of losing one of my wish scrolls, and chuck the Tarrasque somewhere else that way.
• Lure it to an ocean or volcano or something, cast grease, and let it drown.
• If that’s too far away, knock it out and do whatever you want with it. If it’s unconscious, it’s considered willing for greater teleport, which a lot cheaper than a wish scroll. Drop it at the bottom of the ocean, so it drowns. Send it to Krynn or Faerun, just to be a dick. Bury it deep under a mountain and worry about it later—bonus if it’s a volcano, which will slow that regen down (25d6 lava damage per round equals to 60 average post-DR).
• Leave an open bag of holding at its feet, and telekinesis a portable hole into that. Let the gods sort ‘em out. If an ancient red dragon doesn’t have/can’t afford those, it’s not a real dragon (hoardless! hoardless!)
• It may have fire immunity, but last I checked, it wasn’t immune to the choking ash of having the countryside around it set alight. Just set fire to everything, dropping spells as available while flying outside of the Tarrasque’s reach, and let it choke to death.
• Hell, if I were the dragon and wanted to just go through bog-standard combat, I’d just circle-strafe Flyby Attacks using Greater Vital Strike (that’s 16d6+21 right there, crits on 19-20) until it was knocked out. On average, 16d6 deals 48 damage; plus 21 and minus the DR 15/Epic leaves you with 54 damage per round per average. Not including gear bonuses. When it’s unconscious, beat on it every few rounds while you prep to drop it into a live volcano to balance out the regen and let the two forces of nature fight it out.

The same things adventurers did in 3.0, really. But but, you say dragons aren’t as cool as people? It’s an ancient red dragon with stats statistically smarter than most people in the real world. Saying these are outside its scope or are impossible is downplaying just how powerful the dragons are. This is also based on my experiences with 3.x/Pathfinder; from what I can tell it’d be a slightly easier win for the Dragon in 4e.

For those of you saying “But the dragon had to fly away/couldn’t kill it in one round, that’s not winning!” Bullshit. If the Tarrasque ends up dead, the dragon has just won. Using its intelligence for long-term tactical planning and magical stash for an edge, to overcome a unique, legendary obstacle… that’s loving sensible, especially for a cold, cunning, logical dragon. It’s not a cheat, it’s using its Gygax-given abilities.

I feel kind of bad because I’m gaming the metagame here; many people who look at this see a clear victory for the Tarrasque, and the only way I can see that thing winning is if combat played out like the normal D&D slugfests.

Why Don’t I Use Classic Deadlands?

I’ve had a couple people ask me this, since I have a lot of good memories of playing Classic, and own a surprising number of the books. (Also, I have some Great Rail Wars miniatures stored away for a rainy painting day.) One of my friends actually got a bit miffed about it, since he’s a huge fan of Classic, and wondered why we didn’t stick with Classic Deadlands since it is such a “simple and elegant” system. Well…

First off, there are a number of positive things I will say about classic—it’s awesome, it’s got a unique charm, it’s my ideal balance of style and substance—but “simple” is not a descriptor that anybody in the world uses to describe the Classic rules. I consider Star Wars d6 a simple system—skill-based dice pools, no special abilities to shop for, no derived stats or rolling on random tables, no need for GM fiat since it has plenty of rules depth. It has its flaws (e.g. character advancement power curve, buckets-of-dice) but when you can make a character in about a minute, without needing to consult any rulebooks, it’s a simple system. Dread is simple, it’s fucking Horror Jenga. Marvel Superheroes is simple (roll dice, consult chart); ICONS is actually more complicated in some ways, but also damn simple, hence why it’s a good pick-up game. Cyberpunk 2020 is relatively simple (d10+stat+skill vs difficulty, ye-haw).

Elegant is in the eye of the beholder. Some people consider THAC0 an elegant system. For what it’s doing—retaining the AD&D decreasing scale of armor class while compacting it into a single line chart and simple math equation—yep, it’s much more elegant than combat matrices. But I don’t consider it “elegant” in the slightest. Some people find HERO elegant, though I consider it too math-intensive and way too crunchy for my tastes. d20 uses an elegant base mechanic (roll one d20, add modifiers) for everything, but becomes UN-elegant through the bloat of modifiers and mechanics it feeds off. My definition of an “elegant” mechanic is one that’s effective and streamlined, something that’s graceful (or has ornate richness on a metagame level) yet also straightforward, easy to use. An elegant RPG is one free of unnecessary subsystems and rules bloat, yet with its own style and flair, and good mechanical synergy.

My first thought was White Wolf’s Storyteller system until I realized I was just thinking of the dice pool/system resolution, not the sheer level of fiddly crunch that goes into my favorite of its game lines (Exalted, Werewolf, Mage), two of which have stupid-high learning curves. (Exalted’s rules fit the “ornate richness” bill, though.) Something like Adventure!—stripped down Storyteller, fast and streamlined—I’d say is ideally elegant. Star Wars d6 is one of the most elegant systems ever devised—and I say this being less of a fan of d6 compared to my friends. CthulhuTech’s Framework is pretty elegant on its own, ignoring the weird tier effect when your party is a dude in a two-story living mech, a dude in a killer mythos symbiote suit, and Bob the guy with a shotgun. I hate to sound like a raving fanboy, but my prime candidate for an “elegant” game is Fate—simple and streamlined, yet with a surprising amount of heft to its crunch, and a lot of versatility. Hence why I keep trying to run a real, full campaign with it. Houses of the Blooded fits the same bill.

Deadlands is a crunchy game with three layers of mechanics (dice, cards, chips), with sub-mechanics on each layer. Heck, most things have their own mechanic to keep track off (knacks are new chip mechanics, relics are a free edge and hindrance, spells use different card draw levels, et al). It’s nowhere near the high-end of crunch on the RPG scale—it’s not D&D, or even old White Wolf, and something like HERO, the Warhammer 40k RPGs, or GURPS make it look downright light—but compared to the games of its era it’s not very simple; in fact, it’s pretty damn complicated. It’s a bit bloated and clunky when you have different mechanics for resolving everything, and that can make it user-unfriendly. (Also, it requires more dice than the average gamer owns.) Also interesting to note that Deadlands creator Shane Lacy Hensley found his own game bogged down in combat, and broke out the Great Rail Wars rules for big battles.

Simple? No. Elegant? Depends on your preferences. I think the system has great depth and complexity, but that’s the exact opposite of simple and elegant. I also say it’s pretty brutal; coincidentally, so is Dresden.

Why Don’t I Use Deadlands Reloaded?

I realize most gamers love Savage Worlds, but its popularity eludes me—I’ve never particularly liked the system. (Yes, I have played in it; three different games, two different GMs, somewhere around five sessions before we all got bored and went to another system.) In fact, I find it pretty lackluster and a clumsy mess, particularly Reloaded. Savage Worlds just feels odd when everyone’s a bog-standard human, and Reloaded made it a lot easier on characters in general (which takes away some of the typical Deadlands flavor) while taking away some of the gnarly style/substance mechanics (poker draws for everyone, neat chip effects) that fans had to kitbash into the system. While most (if not all) of its settings and Plot Point campaigns are brilliant and/or unique, the system’s many eccentricities astound and annoy me. It’s something like an indie-storygame but for D&D players: safe and accessible because it can use miniatures and has tactical rules, but is rules-light enough to be considered a new, weird, unique system.

It’s a cinematic game that uses miniatures (being derived from the Deadlands miniatures game, Great Rail Wars); it has a low standard difficulty (4) yet someone who’s buffed themselves to a godlike d12 fails 33% of the time on that die (and 66% of the time on their Wild Die d6); higher-level combat is toothless until someone penetrates a PC’s armor and they explode into meat chunks; its Plot Point campaigns have the bad habit of ruining all the world’s secrets, and even screwing over world-specific races; the early books were dominated by the equivalent of the Microsoft Paperclip, Smilin’ Jack, with his overblown tough-guy talk.

It’s a tactical game where the tactics don’t matter. It’s a cinematic game where it’s a challenge to be cinematic. It’s a generic toolkit, which often leaves things flavorless. It takes parts of Deadlands (most of the rules; die types, card initiative, etc.), Star Wars d6 (wild die and feel), TORG (action deck, health system, test/trick/taunt), and D&D (the tactical parts), throws them into a pot, and Savage Worlds is the result; hence why the mechanics can be disjointed and over- or under-developed. (Why does it use cards? Because Deadlands used them for initiative and TORG had its action deck, and both of those were cool, so we’re using them too. That makes us cool, right?)

For having “Fast, Fun, Furious” as its tagline, it may be speedy and efficient, but I didn’t have a ton of fun, and “furious” seems a bit out-of-place. Unless that referred to Smilin’ Jack.

To me, it straddles the fence precisely at the awkward middleweight position in the gaming hierarchy, enough so that it becomes a hindrance: why not move up a step and play a real game with more developed and crunchier mechanics (e.g. Classic Deadlands, 7th Sea, White Wolf, TORG), or move down a notch and play something more versatile and rewarding of cinematic action (e.g. Fate)? To me, Fate does everything Savage Worlds is supposed to do and (for me) didn’t: you can have fast, furious combat (even on the mass scale); it doesn’t need any more bookkeeping or GM prep; it’s a generic toolkit game which easily becomes flavorful and connected to a setting/campaign; and play is a lot more fun (because of its unpredictability and versatility) while being very rewarding as well.

Deadlands Roundup

It’s been a while since I had the free time to post anything, so numerous posts have become backlogged in my mind. They’ll be backlogged a bit further since I wanted to start out my attempt at liveblogging my Deadlands game, and see if that goes to any more fruition than my attempts to liveblog Pathfinder or Starblazer.

So far, we’re most of the way through character creation. I’d hoped to jump into the action last night, so that everyone would know what they were getting into, but since one of the players needed more time to work on their character (and several others needed some polishing) we’ll hold off until next week. Regardless, the party:

1. Sam Steele, agent of the RCMP (that’s the Mounties to you and me), law man on a mission, gunsmith, survivalist, and all around badass pulp hero. (Literally, he’s based on a real person, name and all, who would have been as well-known as Bat Masterson or Wyatt Earp had Canada dominated the dime-novel/pulp marketplace.) Lots of wilderness lore and survival, some investigation, a bit of Presence and Endurance, has the only Resources in the party, and uses fists to back up his longarm. The tinkerer is coming out via Science!, and Sam has a couple of nifty gadgets; he’s tweaked out his Winchester ’76, has an armored battle redcoat, and his pith helmet and obligatory Mad Science Goggles peek into the ether so Sam can tell if someone’s lying or not.
2. James Johnston (name forthcoming), agent of the Texas Rangers, law man on a mission, gunsmith, Big Damn Hero, and all around badass. The players for the Ranger and the Mountie showed up with very similar concepts—lawman gunfighter, beloved by all, who must help those in need, who tinker with their guns—yet went in totally different ways. The Ranger, for one, went full-bore gunfighter, with tricked out LeMat Undertakers thanks to weird science, though he’s more into repairing his devices than making them with Science!. He’s also a lot more into intimidating people and using his reputation, though he also has a lot of wilderness survival skills.
3. Name Forthcoming, witch hunter. The party’s blessed, who is Solomon Kane’s 1870s equivalent. For some reason, we decided he had a stupid big hammer, and the player went along with it. (Not sure if he stuck with the John Henry part that we suggested to make the hammer make sense, but we shall see.) After spending all his points, he ended up with a relic Hammer of the Cross, a holy hammer which smites evil (much as the character). With some decent buffs to tale-telling and talking, he can also distribute Fate Chips, heal the sick, and his mere touch harms abominations. Though he’s not the best at ranged, get him up close and he’ll tear apart adversaries. Though I see he should probably switch some skills to take advantage of his powers.
4. Name Forthcoming, ninja. The player wanted Martial Arts in the supernatural sense, and ended up going full-blown ninja—which probably sounds out of place, until you remember that Deadlands had a lot of weird stuff in California, and the Great Rail Wars had an entire faction (Iron Dragon) of ninja and ronin miniatures. So, a lot of crouching tiger, hidden dragon kinds of abilities, buffed up with inhuman toughness, smoke bombs, and a kusarigama. Lots of stealth and deceit and disguising, filling a niche that the party was in desperate need of.
5. Name Forthcoming. Originally was going to play a former eeeevil gunslinger who is trying to redeem himself, thanks to some magical trickery. But having two powerful law dogs and a Blessed with the Lord’s Hammer made that idea a bit untenable, so he’s going back to the drawing board and rethinking the concept.

All of the characters other than the Blessed and the last one are Veterans of the Weird West, though the last one was seriously thinking about it. The law dogs got some of the less-awful but still fun hindrances from the draw, though the ninja got a couple of choice ones.

Roll The Bones Redux

I want to take a minute to point out why exactly I’m so stoked about the Reaper Bones Kickstarter (see last post), which has just cleared its $1,790,000 stretch goal. My hunch is that it’ll easily surpass two million, but I question if it’ll pass Wasteland II’s $2.8 million mark. I’d like to hope it will, but I’m also getting the idea that most people who were going to pledge have already pledged, and increased that pledge multiple times. We’ll see—an amazing stretch goal or two would be great motivation.

Plus, in case you missed it, you can swap out your limited metal Sophie-on-a-bike figure for $25 worth of product. Dracolich, here I come. Unless I go for the hydra and two extra swamp things packs. Or the demons and the colossal skeleton. Or the… sigh.

This fella is a purple worm—if you’re not up on your D&D, it’s a large subterranean sandworm/graboid/etc. that pops up and swallows people whole. Basically, a hundred feet of intestine crossed with a lamprey. Reaper currently has three versions up for sale. I have a Casketworks catalog from when I was last buying metal miniatures—2007—showing the metal version sold for $19.99; now it goes for $27.99, thanks to the rising cost of tin. The pre-painted plastic one (sans tail) sells for $6.99, which is about on par with the Pathfinder Battles large blind packs and non-awesome DDM large figures on the secondhand market.

The bones version (again, sans tail) sells for $2.99. And the detail quality is around 95% of the metal versions, or in other words, negligible for table use. That’s a fucking steal.

At that point, it’s an impulse buy. Not into minis? It’s a great place to start; you’re not out that much capital if you hate it, or screw up the paintjob. Into minis? You can afford to throw 2-3 on to every gaming purchase you make, getting several great figures for roughly the same cost as buying one metal figure. It’s a win/win for everyone, and will get a lot more people into minis since it overcomes to price barrier. No longer do you have to be the middle-aged old grognard to afford an army worth of little fantasy soldiers.

You can do all sorts of stuff new painters do: paint them out of the bottle without requiring primer, drop them, use the heck out of them, throw them across the table, and you know what? Most stress tests show they’ll survive a lot of punishment. And worst case scenario, you spend another three bucks and buy another one.

Because tin—core component of pewter—has increased in price faster than gasoline, thus spiking the price of miniatures, I dropped out of buying and painting them altogether. Not really something you can afford on a high-school/college student budget. Particularly for the big figures, which I’ve ALWAYS wanted to paint; the biggest I’ve done are some Chronoscape gugs, and those cost around $12 for a slightly-bigger-than-normal figure.

Even with a steady (if underwhelming) paycheck, metal minis require a lot more disposable capital than I can throw at them. When the choice is between a $50 book that will see hours of use, or a $50 figure that I’ll spend a few hours painting and use for one or two sessions, it’s pretty clear what I’m going to pick. Slashing the price-point drops “character” size figures down into impulse buy territory, and means that the big figures are priced reasonably enough that I could justify picking one up for a change. And makes me less concerned about spillage/usage from tabletop play since they’re only cheap plastic.

Another example. When I was running Legacy of Fire a few years ago, I really wanted three to five fire giants for the City of Brass, but just couldn’t afford them. This awesome Reaper fire giant king sells for $49.99 ($35 if you buy the lead alloy version), and his minions go for $24.99 a pop. Just for the warriors alone, $100 for four is something I’ll never be able to justify (short of attaining my dream job, managing an orchard of money trees). I don’t see the point in buying one figure if I’m going to proxy three more—may as well proxy all of them at that point. Like I did, using marids and crocagators in lieu of fire giants. But man, did I want to pick those suckers up and drop some painted versions down on the map.

The Kickstarter has options to pick those giants at the cost of $10 a pair. It’s been implied that the Bones will have MSRP about twice their Kickstarter option price, and if that’s true, the fire giants will go for ~$10 a pop. I can justify $40 for four figs; at my painting speed, I can set back $10 a week and be able to afford them without breaking my bank. $10 is an expensive impulse buy, but it’s within striking distance for pretty much anyone who can afford to be a gamer; if you can’t save up $10 a month to pick up a game-related item, you’re in the wrong hobby, friend.

I could go on and on, about the $60-80 dragons, the $50 demon, the $48 hydra, the $35 elementals, frost wyrm, and skeletal colossus. Heck, even the newest bonuses offered in the Vampire pledge level, a griffon and an owlbear, retail for $20 in metal form. From that implied price point, the Bones versions should retail around $8 and $6 each, which is pretty damn affordable.

And that’s why I’m glad the Kickstarter is going gangbusters: it means that next year, everyone can walk into a store and pick up an awesome mini without worrying about the cost. Every “optional” big critter is another monster I could justify buying in the future, because it’ll cost somewhere between $10-35 and not twice (or triple) that.

Though right now I can’t afford half of those awesome big options I want, I’m (mostly) okay with that. It’s comforting to know that I could walk into a store and pick them up later next year without spending an arm and a leg, if I really want a clockwork dragon or an elemental. Besides, it’s not like I won’t have ~200+ figures from the Vampire pledge to paint.