Wither White Wolf?

Usually, I try to keep my posts in the 500-800 word category, and usually end up around 600-1000 because of that.  That was not the case here.

The perpetual fall of White Wolf Games is something that’s unavoidable, and somewhat expected, but still a strange and miserable way for a former major gaming company to end. Its parent company CCP has finally shelved the World of Darkness MMO for the duration, also pulling back their Dust 514 Ps3-based EVE shooter. There’s a number of reasons for this, the big two being the numbers: the number of fans dropping EVE, and the number of executives who’ve been working on projects that aren’t CCP’s existing cash cow, directly correlating with the first. Oh, and the numbers of the current depression/recession, which caused the Icelandic economy to enter the spin zone.

To get the full view of the setup, we have to go back to 2006, to when CCP was raking in the cash, the Icelandic economy was a booming bubble, and White Wolf was looking like hot property.

White Wolf’s 2011-2012 Schedule Unveiled

White Wolf’s 2011-2012 schedule is now out (thanks to Tenandys for the link), and there’s a lot of interesting stuff on there. Namely, the return to Old World of Darkness, possibly as a tie-in to the WoD MMO (already confirmed to be using the OWoD Vampire: The Masquerade rules), less possibly because irate fans have been clamoring for Old WoD for years.

In all honesty the Old World of Darkness had some serious flaws. With each new game, and each new edition, things began to suffer from not only a bad case of bloat, but also a bad case of power scaling. Oh, the lines didn’t always gel together  mechanically or story-wise. Like how everybody but mages could enter the Umbra fine in Revised. This wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if White Wolf had stuck to its “the games are totally separate” guns, but 2e and Revised had such an over-abundance of crossovers as to make things silly. (Look up Sam Haight if you think I’m wrong.) OWoD was also very much a product of the ’90s, particularly visible in Mage and Werewolf’s Captain Planet, “save the whales!”-esque settings.

New WoD fixed these issues, balanced the game lines, made the games all adhere to the fixed World of Darkness setting, and streamlined the rules (namely by not having every player’s guide/companion feature six dozen worthless new skills). It also managed to piss off most WoD fans; amongst other things, the lines were heavily modified. For example, instead of the bloat of each game having 10-12 playable clans/traditions/tribes, there are a mere five each. And the rules were also “dumbed down:” a little harsh, but true, like how Mage relied more on premade spells (rotes) than ad-hoc freeforming your own. The general consensus is that while NWoD has the better rules, OWoD has the better setting. I buy into that argument and can thus make such biased statements.

Anyways, White Wolf’s moving to reprint its OWoD books… via Drive-Thru‘s print on demand (PoD) services. Having conversion books (“translation guides”) is an interesting idea, since the two lines share roughly the same system (dice pools of “attribute + skill”), but have divergent backstories and settings. Also interesting: Mummy returns, but as a player-developed game and plot line. Given that the last physical NWoD release is already out, Mummy will be PoD/.pdf only… or, perhaps, the first in a return to OWoD. Which would be a bit ironic, since Mummy was almost the last OWoD line released, coming out right before Demon: The Fallen.

The new PoD stuff is great for those of us who still like/want to play OWoD instead of NWoD, but wake me up when they start coming out with new OWoD releases. Not just putting the old lines on PoD, and making conversions between WoDs possible; I’m talking about new material. Yes, the line was jam-packed with bloat to begin with, but:

• a.) the fact that it’s coming back for PoD and is the line for the MMO reveal the level of fan support, and a new edition of OWoD has a lot of potential as a marketing tie-in for the MMO
• b.) it’ll be a while before they get around to doing all the weird OWoD releases in PoD
• c.) to be honest, OWoD needs some cleaning out, revising, and updating so that it all works properly together, so a third (fourth?) edition would work wounders
• d.) what the hell else is White Wolf going to publish? If anything?

Exalted!

Moving on to the White Wolf game line I care most about.

A glance down at the bottom and you’ll see that most of the Exalted .pdf-only releases, including Thousand Correct Actions and Broken-Winged Crane, are heading into the Now In Print part of DriveThru. Thousand Correct Actions tops in at $10, which isn’t bad, since it’s interesting but only really half a sourcebook; my guess is Broken Winged Crane and the other .pdf releases will go for the same. (Waiting for the Scroll of Errata, dammit.) Also, being able to PoD a copy of Autocthonia rules.

There are also three new releases: an update of Manacle & Coin (yay!), more martial arts (double yay!), and Shards of the Exalted Dream, the Exalted version of NWoD: Mirrors. Mirrors was one of the most interesting books in recent memory, and of course, it’s already out of print. (Hey, White Wolf, about that new Print On Demand service…) To be honest, I already thought I’d bought Exalted Modern when I got Scion, but if this one’s half as good as Mirrors, Shards/Exalted will be fantastic. Still, what sells Exalted is the depth of its setting, not the rules—otherwise Scion could have become a longer line, like Changeling did—and I’m not sure that Shards can carry the game without that setting. Wait and see.

On The Move

For such a large publisher to jump into the PoD market is an interesting change of pace. PoD has long been the stomping ground of small-press and indie markets; now, we have a major publisher moving into the mix. Still, the DriveThruRPG Now In Print share is opening up to a number of other large publishers, so it looks to be a cost-cotting move by game companies across the board.  The World of Darkness has such able neighbors as AEG’s L5R and 7th Sea, Catalyst’s Shadowrun (including some old FASA releases), and Monte Cook’s Ptolus.

Having the option to buy hard-copies of out-of-print games—especially AEG’s Swordsman’s Guild for 7th Sea, which goes for a hundred or more on eBay—is pure awesome. The same thing goes for most of White Wolf’s Revised books, which have been demanding some serious scratch online for the past decade. (Well, serious if you want new copies; used ones can be found at or below retail with some work.) And the prices have so far been pretty low: low as in original MSRP, which feels pretty damn low for today’s age of high-gloss, high-price softcovers ($20 for a 96-page Pathfinder Adventure Path module; $20 for the 60-page CthulhuTech: Dark Passions; $35 for all those 160-page L5R 3rd softsplats).

On the flipside, this downsizing of their print lines and move to PoD could be another step of White Wolf turning into nothing more than a content developer for CCP. Truth be told, CCP is probably the best choice for a WoD MMO developer, if it turns out to be a player-driven game like EVE. (EVE doesn’t have developer-written quests or storylines, so it’s totally up to the players to derive fun from its galaxy of pixels and spreadsheets.) EVE’s heists and fuckery is legend, deriving from CCP’s hands-off approach to things like griefing and scamming. Also legendary is EVE’s intense learning curve and hostility to newbs. All of this fits the traditional mold of the World of Darkness, particularly the LARP side, in terms of player-driven paranoia and backstabbing.

But it’s a little disconcerting to see the second largest roleplaying publisher in the country erode as badly as it has. (Yes, there was a long period of time where White Wolf ate up the largest chunk of market after TSR/WotC. Now, that second-tier slot is under some pressure from Fantasy Flight Games, Paizo, Pinnacle, and a few others.) My guess is that White Wolf is gearing up for a major release event to tie in with the WoD MMO, or otherwise is building steam for some new release.

If they did end up cutting their ties to the print RPG industry to focus on the MMO, I wouldn’t be surprised; White Wolf’s had its time in the sun, and while it had a major impact on 1990s roleplaying trends, things have changed. The Storyteller system is a crunch-tastic behemoth compared to the new indie gaming trend. The slower output of the NWoD game lines, last years’ underwhelming Gen Con booth, the ending of the Exalted and NWod product lines, and the CCP buyout… yeah, White Wolf is a mere shadow of its self from a decade ago.

Corrupted Lunar Exalts

In hindsight, the level of new stuff we’ve designed for Exalted has been pretty minimal. In 3.5/Pathfinder, there’s always something to mod as a GM: monsters, feats, NPCs, magic items… In Exalted, which we played more of (and longer), most of the things which were GM-created were plot-bearing artifacts of major proportion. (I’m thinking of Reuben’s various plot-centric manses, and the Tyrant Lizard skeleton turned mecha.)

Part of it’s because the books offer a swath of new and interesting material; Oadenol’s Codex and Wonders of the Lost Age are brimming with hearthstones and artifacts. And they’re a lot more complex than a simple +1 longsword, so even the basic artifacts presented in the books are truly wondrous items of power. The other part is that most of the new items I introduced were ignored, such as the special Wavecleaver Daiklaive nobody used, or its socketed hearthstones nobody could find the manses to attune to. (Part of a plotline that never followed through in the grand scheme.)

There was one major thing I introduced, though: tainted Lunar exalts. There’s a sidebar fairly early in the Lunars book about the possibility that a Lunar mate’s bond could still work for an Abyssal. The Abyssals book goes further on this idea, stating that Abyssals and Lunars can feel a powerful love/hate bond, a subconscious reaction to the fading Lunar Bond between the ex-Solar and its mate. It’s mostly left up to the GM, but there’s enough there to get the gears turning.

Needless to say, I think the idea’s awesome, so I ran with it.

GenCon Recap: Paizo Grabs ENnies, Ravenloft, CthulhuTech, White Wolf’s Booth Blew

Let’s start with White Wolf, since I’m of the opinion that they need to be savaged continually for bad decisions. This time, it’s their booth: White Wolf’s Gothic New Orleans Nothing For Sale Shop. It had booth babes, booze, a DJ, everything… except product. Since their merger with Icelandic game giant CCP (the guys behind EVE, and keeping the Icelandic economy afloat), White Wolf has been continually minimized in terms of product releases. Word on the World of Darkness MMo was a vague “It’s coming.” I’d been hoping that Exalted would see some kind of revitalization, but aside from publishing the errata books, it appears to have finally run its course. In any case, I wouldn’t be surprised if White Wolf ends its life as content developers for the WoD MMo, since they don’t seem to be doing very much with their pen and paper lines.

Paizo won the crowd. Lines for the Advanced Player’s Handbook were long and constant, a good sign considering the main material has been free to gamers in open-beta testing for a year. There’s also a few tidbits of info about the company’s new products, under the working titles of Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat, which are to have new feats, spells, and equipment from across Golarion; Tian Xia is supposed to be the next campaign setting for the Pathfinder world.

On top of that, Paizo’s Pathfinder products swept the ENnies… not entirely surprising, but another solid win for the company. The full list includes:

• Pathfinder RPG Bestiary: Best Cover Art (Gold), Best Monster or Adversary (Gold)
• Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook: Best Interior Art (Gold), Best Game (Gold), Best Production Values (Gold),
• Product of the Year (Gold)
• Stolen Land: Best Adventure (Gold)
• Classic Horrors Revisited: Best Monster or Adversary (Silver)
• City Map Folio: Best Cartography (Gold)
• Advanced Player’s Guide Playtest: Best Free Product (Gold)
• GM Screen: Best Aid or Accessory (Gold)
• d20PFSRD.com: Best Website (Silver)

The Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Edition grabbed three itself, and Hero System 6th Edition got the Silver for Best Rules. Not to be outdone, Eclipse Phase ended up with three solid ENnies: Product of the Year (Silver), Cover Art (Silver), and Writing (Gold).  And Mysteries of the Hollow Earth pulled Best Supplement away from Wizard’s Player’s Handbook III, the only Wizards product to place. Gaming Paper won an award, which makes sense, given how cool their tech is. And Diaspora, a relatively unknown indie game using FATE to handle hard SF, beat out Hero 6th for Gold Best Rules; that’s a pretty good track record for FATE.

Wizards’ major news was the upcoming release of a 4th Edition Ravenloft for 2011, which has been somewhat decisive amongst fans. Namely, it will include rules for player monstrous races like werewolves and vampires, a major break-away from the old school Ravenloft mentality of corruption slowly leading to horrible, damning changes. Wizards also released its 4e Dark Sun books, a few weeks before their street date, though I haven’t seen any reviews of them as of yet. They’re also going the boxed set route, with a new Red Box style set, and a Shadowfell box set upcoming. So very late ’80s/early ’90s of them so far: Dark Sun, box sets, Ravenloft… where does it end?

For new releases, there were a few, but nothing major. Eoris Essence finally saw release, after having made a variety of minor splashes since (before) 2008. The publishers have been making gamers drool with its gorgeous art and claims of a ridiculously flexible system, enough to keep a following of “Is it done yet?” threads on RPGNet. Green Ronin kept up appearances with its DC Adventures; as you probably guessed from the title, it’s a supers game licensed from the DC world. Since the company sold out of them, it’s safe to say that the license was a success. Apart from that, Cubicle 7 and Pinnacle were swamped, like usual. Probably due to new Deadlands and Space 1889 releases for Pinnacle, and Cube 7′s well regarded Doctor Who RPG.

Last but not least, in the list of “game lines I care about,” CthulhuTech and Eclipse Phase were back with reckless abandon. Eclipse Phase saw the release of Sunward, its first sourcebook. CthulhuTech saw its next supplement come out, Ancient Enemies, a fairly slick book detailing the Eldritch Society (Tagers) and the Chrysalis Corporation (Dhohanoids). I’m very happy to report that Ancient Enemies keeps up the strong production values as its previous books; Sandstorm looks like a great replacement for the stricken Catalyst.

Overall, GenCon 2010 was a bit quieter in terms of announcements and releases compared to past years, but still had some solid releases.

• Pathfinder RPG Bestiary: Best Cover Art, Best Monster or Adversary
• Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook: Best Interior Art, Best Game, Best Production Values, Product of the Year
• Stolen Land: Best Adventure
• Shipyard Rats: Best Electronic Book^*
• Classic Horrors Revisited: Best Monster or Adversary
• City Map Folio: Best Cartography
• Advanced Player’s Guide Playtest: Best Free Product
• GM Screen: Best Aid or Accessory

Stunts or Something Like Them

Whenever I explain Exalted to people, I generally get the biggest snags when I get to Stunts. The usual response is that it’s broken, that it’s too easy to abuse, that it gives an unfair advantage to the players. You’d think so. But pulling off high-action stunts can be a milestone accomplishment, after much prodding and encouragement. And I’m not talking about the people coming from a D&D background, where they look at everything and see the -2 modifiers, 5-foot steps, and Reflex checks floating around everything.

Let’s roll back a step. In case you don’t get out much, Exalted is an epic fantasy RPG by White Wolf, using a modified version of the Storyteller system used with Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, etc. This would be the standard d10 dice-pool system where you take your attribute and your skill and roll that many d10’s, 7-9 are a single success, with 0’s counting for two successes. Generally, you need two or three successes to do anything important. Exalted is a high-cinema game akin to an action movie or Japanese anime mixed with Greek myth with an Asian backdrop. Your characters are Exalts, having received a blessing from the gods, giving them powers far beyond mere mortals. Even the weakest Exalts can be as tricky as the Monkey-king or wrestle rivers like Achilles, while the most powerful shake the pillars of heaven and the foundations of the world. Even heroic mortals are still miles above being simple mooks, and can stand their own (briefly) against a single Exalt.

Part of the game’s system meant to promote epic action are Stunts—description of something vaguely within the realms of being physically possible, which gets you one to three bonus dice for attempting something badass. Examples range from running along walls, balancing on the blade of a sword, running up a cloud of dust, or attempting an attack more interesting than “I stab the guy with my sword.” I’ve seen all of those pulled off, by the way. If the stunt is successful, you’ll get rewarded by either regaining motes of essence (mana) or a point of willpower (needed to activate cool abilities, or spent as a single automatic success).

First off, players either need a lot of encouraging to stunt, or they need encouraging toning the amount of stunts down a little. Honestly, it can be feast or famine; most first-time players don’t stunt, and see it as something foreign and dangerous which they should shy away from. This isn’t so bad; all you need is some encouragement or an angle. Some things can be beneficial to stunting; certainly, the scenery can inspire things (“throw the guy into the burning pit of lava,” “kick out the support beam on the scaffolding to bring it crashing down on the mooks”), as can having artifact wings, a good Athletics skill, or a mobility weapon like a whip or rope.

The other half try to stunt everything, doing cartwheels down stairs and eating cereal by stabbing the bowl with a spoon while doing side-flips over the dining room table. Generally, this is more problematic, but once players realize they can still fail or botch while stunting they might be a little more lenient to face ridiculous penalties for doing random mundane tasks such as going downstairs or eating breakfast. You can’t stunt everything, but at the same time, you need to be on the lookout for ways to pull one off.

Even when prodding people to stunt, the results can be…well, objectively terrible. Example one. I missed this lovely dialogue but have had it repeated to me numerous times. The setting is a recently exalted Solar, a reincarnation of a fallen god-king of old, fighting off some enemy soldiers. As a Solar, the player is arguably the most powerful kind of exalt in the game. The soldiers are some well-disciplined and armed, but still blatantly “generic thug” mortals—these guys are extras, but good ones. Roll film as the Solar hero approaches them to do battle.

I stunt at them.

How are you stunting at them?

You know. Basically, I jump at them.

You jump at them.

Well, basically, I jump at them and attack.

There’s six of them. Which one are you attacking?

Basically, well, I’ll jump at them and attack all six of them.

You jump forward and stab each of them once?

Yes.

Ok, but you’ll have to take a pretty rough penalty for making all those attacks plus the jump.

Well, I jump at them, and basically attack them, you know. Like swing my sword and hit all six of them.

They’re not in a line They’re kind of spread out…  like a military unit would be.

Well, I’ll jump forward and hit as many of them as I can with one swing.

The problem here is trying to do too much at once, while under-describing the actual action. The point of stunting is doing something cool, either doing something just outside your abilities, or doing something within your capabilities well. Jumping at six people and swinging a sword is something you do normally. Granted, it is hard to stunt sword combat—it requires a tactical wire-fu mind—but this is a textbook example of bad Stunting.

Example two. Over-describing an otherwise mundane action as to gain as many possible negative modifiers as possible, hopefully also using impossible physics, ridiculous math, or something else which doesn’t just bend the laws of reality but breaks them over your knees. The below example was thought up after two or three actual instances. If you replace a few words with “my sword” and “demonic ice-lion,” you’ll probably have an accurate re-creation. Roll it!

Reaching forward towards the red terra-cotta bowl of two parts milk and three parts cornflakes, coming in at exactly three miles per hour at a forty-five-degree angle, I thrust my weathered steel spoon deeply into the viscous milk, quickly reversing my stroke as soon as the spoon hits to follow the angle of trajectory outward, a trail of milk droplets arcing into the air with a dramatic lens flare, making a little rainbow between them, then as I stretch my head backward in a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, I spin my arm counter-clockwise around my head to deposit the cornflake-laden spoon in my mouth via a sideways thrust as I chomp down, my molars grinding the cornflakes into easily digestible particles as torrents of cream dribble down my chin and neatly cropped beard, while…

You get the picture. Imagine, if you would, not reading this description but hearing it told out, through a series of breaks and pauses, over a period of thirty minutes, with the player expecting you to hand them a juicy three-dice Stunt bonus upon completion. I don’t know about you, but just writing that was boring enough to put me to sleep. Stunts need to be energetic, high cinema, and action-heavy; I honestly consider this kind of over-description to be the anti-stunt, because instead of being fast-paced and epic, it’s just overcomplicated and muddled. Implausible physics are part of it—a lot of player abilities, and stunt examples, make it very easy to come up with a Prince of Persia knockoff as a starting character. But even Stunts can’t break the bounds of reality in that a sword can’t immediately reverse direction with the same amount of polarity as it had mere seconds before, nor can characters bend themselves like Plastic-man (not without the Double-Jointed merit, at least).

Now, examples of good, group-approved stunts. Good stunts are innovative, plausible, cool-sounding, and most importantly, are described enough to get a good idea of how it works without over-describing them into a corner. Balance is the key, as is making it sexy and making it interesting.

Example one. The Solar characters were being attacked by a T-Rex made of blood-ice attached to its skeleton, charging toward our characters as we battle saber-tooth lions also made of ice and snow. Matt’s character attempted to kill the Rex by flying into its mouth, in the process casting the spell Obsidian Butterflies, which would throw a ton of razor-sharp obsidian shards down through the back of its neck, then using the spell’s momentum to blast himself back out of its snapping jaws. It’s certainly cinematic enough, is death-defying, furthers the plot, and got a lot of positive surprise from the other players, making it rank at a solid three dice.

At an earlier point, these same characters were taking down a series of enemy mecha armed with energy weapons and oversized battering-ram clubs. To take them down, we had to stunt. A variety of techniques were used, but I was pretty tired and don’t remember most of them, except that Rich blasted through a hatch on one to wrest control away from its pilot. Mine was pretty simple; I’d jump toward one with my sword up, cutting the tendon-like cables in its arm joint, causing its energy weapon arm to fall limply to its side. The timing ended up being perfect; my two-die stunt caused its arm to fall downward right as its pilot fired the main gun, demolishing another mecha instead of blasting apart the mech Rich was claiming for himself.

Honestly, Stunt details are up to your play group and GM, but there are some general rules outlined in the book. Stunts shouldn’t be something to avoid or fear, nor should they be something droll and ordinary. It’s easy to fall into a rut of “I stab the guy with my sword,” but that’s not why we’re playing Exalted, now, is it? Being concise, cinematic, and innovative are three keys towards pulling off a good stunt.

Exalted Combat 095

We’ve been metagaming Exalted a lot more, having two fairly long-running Dragon-Blood games on campus, plus a number of one-nighters, a failed Solar experience, and several plans for Sidereals and Dragon Kings that came and went almost overnight. Rummaging around on my hard drive, I found this quick batch of formulas I’d once whipped up to help out both myself and some newer players, before finding the fine Exalted Combat 201 lurking around the net. Still, nothing should go to waste, so here it is–Exalted remedial combat basics.

Hitting and Damage:

1. Hitting: Calculate your general accuracy/to hit dice; this would be (Dex + Ability) + Weapon Accuracy, plus any stunt dice, willpower successes, virtue dice, or any other bonuses to your roll. Did you exceed the target’s Defense Value (DV)?
   1. If yes, you’ve hit; go to Hardness.
   2. If no, you missed.
2. Hardness: Calculate your damage dice by adding your successes over the target’s DV to your raw damage (Str + base weapon damage). Did you exceed the Hardness of the target’s armor?
   1. If yes, you’ve damaged them; go to Soak.
   2. If no, you made a glancing blow and damage is ignored.
3. Soak: Calculate how much damage you’re doing at this point, which would be your raw damage (Str + weapon damage) plus the number of successes over the target’s Dodge/Parry. In other words, any dice left over from step 1. Subtract the amount of dice in the target’s soak from how many dice you’re currently at. Are you still in the positive?
   1. If yes, proceed to Damage.
   2. If no, the target’s armor and toughness soaks all the damage.
4. Damage: Roll the amount of dice left from step 3; in other words, your raw damage dice left minus the target’s soak. Results of 7 through 10 are equal to one success each.

Here’s a quick example to illustrate the formulas. My Terrestrial, Iselsi Ethryu, is smacking around another Dragon-Blood with his Wavecleaver Daiklave, for some reason.

• 1.) First, I roll my attack. Dex (4) + Melee (5) + Accuracy (3) = 12 dice, meaning my attack is equal to 12. I roll, and get a spread of 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, for five successes. The target’s highest DV is Dodge at 4, so I manage to sneak in a hit. Barely.
• 2.) Next, I add my raw damage to my successes. Str (3) + weapon damage (8L) + successes (1) = 12 dice of the Lethal damage variety. This more than surpasses the target’s paltry 5 hardness from wearing a Buff Jacket. The attack hits and allows me to apply damage.
• 3.) This leaves me with 12L dice against my target’s soak; luckily for him, his Reinforced Buff Jacket isn’t so terrible, with a Lethal soak of 7, plus half of his 2 Stamina (… Matt, what kind of gimp character did you make?), which totals for a Soak of 8L. Subtracting this Soak from my raw damage, 12 – 8, I’ve got a final damage value of 4L dice.
• 4.) Rolling these 4 dice, I get the result of 3, 5, 7, 7, for a total of 2 successes, a pitiful roll if I don’t say so myself, but pretty standard for our Exalted group. We record this data, and hope that Matt wonders why his gimpy character has taken two Lethal damage before the game even started.

The other thing to keep in mind is the Flurry ability, shown under your weapon’s Rate in the books. This is the number of times you can attack with your weapon per round; for example, the Wavecleaver Daiklave has a Rate of 2, so you can make up to three attacks with it in a single round. For each attack you make, your overall dice pool subtracts that amount for the first attack and one additional for each following attack. So, if I were making three attacks with my Wavecleaver, I’d receive a -3 penalty for the first attack, and a -4 for the second. Don’t forget to flurry often, especially if you’re the lowly archer or mage doing a measly 2L+ from your arrows or Elemental Bolt.

This is somewhat countered by Onslaught, meaning that every attack past the first on a single enemy modifies its DV by -1. So, if I made all three of my attacks, the second would give the target a -1 DV, and a third gives a -2 DV. Note that this only applies to a single attacking character; Onslaught doesn’t continue to apply for multiple people, so if another person attacked with a Wavecleaver, they’d only get -1 to the DV on the second attack and -2 on the third.

Each action you make in combat modifies your DV by -1 until your next action; so, if I couldmake three attacks with my Daiklave, I’d have a -3 penalty to my DV until my next turn. This can be very helpful when you’re attacking, and balances nicely with the fact it screws you when you’re on the defensive.

Initiative, or the “Wheels and Parasites” system, is a lot easier than some would have you believe. The basic strategy is to download a battle wheel and use that as a guide, then follow the instructions in the books: roll your Join Battle, the highest roller taking tick 1 and the first action. Everyone else subtracts their roll from the highest Join Battle roll and act on the according tick. So, if the highest was 6, the highest would act on tick 1, the 5’s on tick 2, the 4’s on tick 3, and so on. After making an action, move that many ticks along the battle wheel, and then the next tick can act. If your action is so slow that you’d go around the battle wheel and pass another actor, instead move into the secondary ring of the battle wheel; you’ll move back out once the actor on the last tick has gone, bringing it back full circle to you.

Rollplaying 101

For the Halloween game, we decided to focus on a meat-grinder Dungeon Crawl to kill everyone off. What started with my normal Exalted playgroup eventually took over our Friday game, where half of the players are from the Exalted game and the other half are Freshmen new to gaming or transfers new to the group.

Running through the 3.5 version of Tomb of Horrors, a lot of problems become pretty inherent in the system. Obviously, the game isn’t meant to handle a lot of characters (like, say, two per player) running around at the same time, especially since combat, traps, spells, etc. tend to take up a lot of time: crawl is an apt description. Four sessions in and we’re only halfway through the tomb, though a good number of characters have bit the dust. Likewise, dungeon crawls specifically cater towards the tactical, the skirmish-based, and are direct offshoots to the game’s miniatures (Chainmail) roots; the problems inherent in the dungeon crawl are many, specifically after running and playing a number of other games since my last dungeon delve.

Though, the biggest problem I found with the system is the total lack of innovation or incentive to roleplay actions. This is a problem I’ve had with the system since I started playing, and it feels like it’s gotten worse with each edition’s attempt to streamline things. At one point, developer Mike Mearls (who helped design 4th Edition) ran an OD&D game (Original D&D, as in the little brown books that are damn near impossible to find), and came up with the following:

I think that OD&D’s open nature makes the players more likely to accept things in the game as elements of fiction, rather than as game elements. The players reacted more by thinking “What’s the logical thing for an adventurer to do?” rather than “What’s the logical thing to do according to the rules?”

OD&D and D&D 4 are such different games that they cater to very different needs. For me, in OD&D things are fast, loose, and improvised…[OD&D players] are probably more likely to accept…a game that requires a bit more deductive reasoning (I disable a trap by wedging an iron spike into the lever that activates it) as opposed to D&D 4 (I disable a trap by finding the lever then making a skill check).

This is the problem I’ve had with D&D all along, and continues to this day. People who started with earlier editions of D&D, or other games in particular, tend to approach problems from a specific logical viewpoint: what can I do to achieve the desired results. They then roll the dice to see if their intended action succeeded or not. However, a lot of newer players–particularly those who started with 3.x–come at it from a different mindset: I make a skill check, therefore it works. There’s little actual innovation there; the players like this I know seldom actually give me a description of what happens, or what they even wanted to do. It’s kind of annoying, for a number of reasons: I know these players are better and more capable than that, and besides, I feel kind of bad when it’s always the same couple of guys who do the really awesome stuff.

For example, running Tomb of Horrors, a number of instances came up where some of my Exalted playgroup tried intricate means of disarming traps, sticking pins in and making excellent use of ropes and poles, while some of the D&D-based players gave me the standard “Well, I made my check, so I disarmed it.” Disarmed it how? A lot of the traps don’t make much logical sense, so I’d like to hear the explanation of how they were disabled, usually resulting in “I made my check.” Rollplaying has always been a part of the game–some people just like the stats-crunching, tactical-skirmishing, and loot-grabbing aspects, which is fine. I can roll with that. And while it’s not all the player’s fault, it’s not all part of the system either.

In another game (using the White Wolf Storyteller/d10 system), one of the D&D players was trying to climb up the roof of a tower to escape; when he neared the top, he realized a guard was posted on the roof. The GM then asked him how he was getting onto the roof, hoping for a wild flip to knock the guard off, or for the player to otherwise do something cool to get some stunt dice. “Well, I reach up, and get one leg over, and pull myself up, and stand up.” This continued for about ten minutes, until the player, getting pretty irritated, snapped back with “Well, I made my damn check, so that should mean I’m on the roof,” followed by a “Yes, but *how* did you get on the roof?”

Compare to one of the other guys; Matt started gaming during my Freshman year in a homebrew Fallout pnp game, and played a lot of Deadlands, Exalted, and Star Wars d6 with us. After moving out of town for a semester and a summer, he came back with some pretty hilarious stories. One friend of his coaxed him into a d20 Modern game, where he gave the GM headaches by thinking so much outside the box. For example, during the first firefight, he shot out power lines to blind and distract the enemies, since the players had low-light vision while the enemies did not. This so boggled the GM and other players that they literally had to ask why he would shoot out the power lines, and further, what it would do. Matt ended up leaving the game because it grew into a homebrew munchkin fest rather quickly, to the point where he got sick of it (his character had a bluff of 36 at 3rd level, yet couldn’t do pretty much anything with it).

It’s that kind of thinking that I love as a GM–watching players come up with brilliant ways to combat whatever I’ve thrown at them, more than just “I shoot at him with my rifle,” or “I made my skill check.” Originally, I used to hand out extra XP for doing cool things and thinking outside the box, but by now I’ve realized that some people do it instinctively while others have a hard time with it, to the point where some characters will be a level or two above everyone else. That doesn’t encourage creativity–in fact, it just disenfranchises people who think tactically instead of cinematically. Rewarding the lateral thinkers just hurts the horizontal thinkers. Still, I do think it’s good to reward players who do amazing things, although I now hold them to a higher level to try and balance things out. For example, I expect Matt and Reuben to try something nuts on the go-big-or-go-home level, and while I’ll still reward them when they do it, I’ll be comparing it to their past few stunts when I hand out XP.

Granted, this isn’t a problem for everybody, and therefore I have no good solution for it. It all goes back to the standard dichotomy on how you want to run your game: tactical or cinematic. I do love some tactical gaming–don’t get me started on my various ideas for linked miniatures campaigns–but for roleplaying, I always enjoy a blended game, though a blend which leans more towards cinematic. Mostly, it’s the problem with the dungeon crawl format–there really isn’t much to do for anyone without intelligence bonuses or trapfinding abilities. It’s also something that really turned me off from D&D 3.0, and now 4.0: the difference between gaming group styles. Until I found my current group, I’d just about sworn off D&D, having run in some miserable adventures (see the GM’s Workshop article I wrote a few months back). When you have a gaming group that you can mesh well with, every game is fun; but until then, you’re stuck in the realm of differing play styles.

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A related issue was brought up by one of my players, who happens to be the major GM in our group. After watching two characters come very close to making DC 18 will saves and failing (rolled 15 and 17, respectively), thus becoming dominated, this player mentioned to me the arbitrary nature of D&D dungeon crawls; no matter how close you came in a skill check or save, if you failed, you failed miserably. I’d like to branch this out into gaming in general: games, as a whole, need to have certain gaming elements in them. Without the win/fail scenario, games don’t have the challenge, and thus they need certain elements like this to stay games. But, I agree with him my player: as a GM with a story/campaign planned, we don’t want to see characters bite it just because they were a point away from an arbitrary number. D&D, while a fantastic game, is still somewhat bogged down in this respect as a tactical dungeonpunk game, with the “Press X or Die” mentality. I see each cumulative edition trying to break that mentality as much as it reinforces and streamlines it: to fix non-weapon proficiencies, which enable characters to be fleshed out, we have skills, which leads to skill-checks and “Well, I made my check.”

As always, this is incredibly subjective; I already view rules not as an absolute but as guidelines. The point of gaming is to maximize fun, and if there’s something that detracts from that fun, get rid of it. (Yes, this is probably a throwback to my 2nd Edition AD&D days, when we jokingly referred to half the rules-as-written as “poorly designed optional rules,” such as the demihuman level limits, the rules for non-weapon proficiencies, character kits, etc.) That’s not to say I don’t kill characters–some situations, and some games, like Deadlands/Call of Cthulhu, demand it. I wouldn’t change the way DCs or skill checks work for 3.5–that’s just the milieu, the style and focus of the game. Most of the group is very intuitive, and the rest are grasping the concept of a cinematic game pretty quickly. But it does make me a lot more appreciative of how my players handle Exalted and their dice pools.