Our Earthdawn game has finally advanced to the point where our characters have left their kaer to explore the outside world. Even though I’ve played out that particular scenario before, it’s still a powerful idea: explorers seeing a new world for the very first time.

Funny thing is, Kaer Teloris is in the Scol Mountains, so all the stuff we encountered in the adventure (a stone lion, rockworms, the Firescale Moot of trolls) came from the Crystal Raiders sourcebook, which I wrote back in the ‘90s. Stupid rockworms did like 18 points of damage to my character, too! I knew I shouldn’t have made them so tough...

It is resolved: a game mechanic that allows for a re-roll of the dice, especially if it involves expending a limited resource (uses per day, points, etc.) should never result in a worse roll than you started with.

At the gym this morning (I do a fair amount of thinking and wool-gathering while doing mindless cardio), I wondered about how D&D 4e designers chose to tackle the “issue” of martial-type characters (i.e., fighters) having more options in combat to presumably remove the constant “I attack again!” litany and thereby make D&D combat more exciting.

It seems to me a potentially significant element of RPG design is “how do you make somewhat predictable events exciting”? That is, when you’re dealing in fairly established fictional tropes, how do you make your game something other than “going through the motions”? Like most things in RPGs, it seems there are both mechanical and story-based (narrative) solutions:

( ruminations after the cut... )

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought D&D 4e and Earthdawn were a good match:

Earthdawn Age of Legend Announced for D&D 4E

Best of luck to the RedBrick guys with the project; I’m very curious to see what they do with it.

Cute movie. I disagree that it’s Pixar’s best film (Incredibles is still tops in my comic-geek heart), but it’s definitely up there among their best. Fun family fare with some brilliant animation, plus a good “date movie.”

Sometimes (like today) I miss 64-page RPGs. You may know the ones, from the early days of the hobby, when an entire RPG came in the form of a 64-page, saddle-stiched (which is to say, stapled) booklet in a box. Oftentimes, there would be a 32-page adventure along with it, or maps, or other components (dice, counters, and whatnot), but the core, the essence, of the entire game would be contained in that 64-page book.

Many of mine became dog-eared, their covers intended with thumb- and finger-marks from holding them so often. I’ve still got most of them, games like Gamma World, Villains & Vigilantes, Champions (the second edition, before they went with a square-bound single book), Boot Hill, Top Secret (before S.I.), Marvel Super-Heroes, Star Froniters, and, of course, the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set(s). Those games packed whole worlds of fun and adventure into those booklets, and still do, in many ways.

Now, I’m not making judgments about more recent RPGs, with their hardcover “core rules” with hundreds of glossy, full-color pages. Hey, I’ve written or contributed to more than a few of them. Still, there are times when I get nostalgic for those booklets, for games smaller than many typical magazines these days. I know part of it is because, as the saying goes, “the Golden Age of adventure is around age 12,” and so, too, was the Golden Age of gaming, in many ways; my Golden Age of gaming, anyway (my “Silver Age” of gaming was around age 16, I’d say).

It’s no small feat, what those early game designers accomplished, fitting worlds into 64 pages. In some ways, we designers weened on their work are still catching up.

So today is Free RPG Day, a game industry promotion based on the comics industry’s successful Free Comic Book Day promo. Publishers create sample products, which are distributed to participating game stores and given away, allowing gamers and would-be gamers the opportunity to try out some new things, find out what’s out there, and learn about what’s in the works.

Green Ronin’s contribution is our A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Quick-Start; a complete (abbreviated) set of rules, sample characters, and a short adventure for playing SIFRP. (It’ll also be available as a free PDF on our website sometime in the next couple weeks.)

Check out the list of participating stores to find one near you and check out the various offerings. Chances are you might find a fun new game or product you didn’t know about!

Finally got to run a playtest of D&D 4th Edition for my game group last night. Overall: fun was had, but reactions were mixed, and we’re not planning on playing again any time soon.

( Potential Keep on the Shadowfell spoilers ahead )

While working on some Mutants & Masterminds stuff this morning, I idly wondered what it would be like to apply the power structure of D&D 4e to the superhero genre: on the one hand, it would be an odd artificial limiting of some powers to “daily” and “encounter” usages. On the other hand, it might model the idea of rarely-used powers and “power stunts,” the things superheroes do sometimes, but not regularly. The “special” and “finishing” moves.

Indeed, the limited-use powers sort of address what I call the “Form Blazing Sword!” problem in dramatic terms: if a character has a big “special move,” why not bust it out right away? If it’s a one-shot thing, however, players are more inclined to wait for that big dramatic moment when it’ll do the most good: for the decisive attack against the big bad, or the action that turns the tide of a fight. This is especially true for daily/encounter powers designed to come into play later in an encounter, requiring the user (or target) be bloodied, for example.

While I think the D&D 4e framework would still need a fair amount of modification to work for four-color superheroes, in many ways it’s closer to start off with than D&D 3e was when I was first designing M&M. When Wizards gets around to doing other RPGs based on the 4e engine, it’ll be interesting to see.

It occurs to me that ability scores in D&D are largely redundant, and have been almost since the beginning of the game.

In OD&D, abilities served something of a purpose: they were a sort of “natural selection” in that you rolled them randomly (much like an accident of birth) and they helped to shape the choices you made about your character. A high-Strength, low-Intelligence character was clearly destined for a career as a Fighter, not a Magic-User, for example. This made ability score requirements (as opposed to mere bonuses for high Prime Requisites) more significant: if being a Paladin required you to randomly roll a 17 Charisma, along with the Paladin’s other requirements, or being a Ranger required a broad number of above-average abilities, then those characters would be correspondingly rare in the game; playing one was a bit like winning a lottery.

In the evolution of D&D, player choice has displaced random determination of abilities, starting with being able to arrange rolled scores in any order (so you can put your high score in the ability important to your desired class), then variants like 4d6 and drop the lowest die, multiple sets, and various other mulligans designed to ensure nobody is stuck with a character they don’t want to play. D&D 4e has eliminated the final vestiges of randomness in character generation, going with a point-buy system for ability scores and even standardized hit point progression.

This approach renders abilities largely moot: after all, does the system really need support for weak fighters, dumb wizards, clumsy rogues, and foolish clerics? Sure, such characters might exist in the world as NPC plot devices , but it’s fair to say the vast majority of player characters follow a certain mold when it comes to what Castles & Crusades calls the “Prime” of their chosen class. “Strong” and “Fighter” are virtually synonymous, as are “Smart” and “Wizard” and “Nimble” and “Thief” (sorry, “Rogue”). Indeed, C&C almost goes far enough in recognizing this fact, but not quite: they still retain ability scores and modifiers, even with their clever system of Primes.

“But what about character individuality?” some cry. A system wherein all fighters are strong and all wizards are smart means everybody is the same. Personally, I think this is more of an issue of perception than anything else, but I think it can be addressed with a combination of secondary and tiertiary traits alongside descriptors, like the “Aspects” in FATE or specialties in the forthcoming A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying (SIFRP). Sure, fighters are all strong, but in what way? Big? Brawny? Savage? Forceful? Apply some modifiers encouraging players to play up their characters’ unique strengths and you get a wide range of differentiation with very little in the way of added mechanical complexity.

Apple’s announcement of the release of the 3G iPhone, with a starting price of $199 for the 8 GB model, may be the final push needed to get me to buy an iPhone (since the price-tag is pretty much the only thing that kept me from getting one thus far). Funny thing is, up until now, I’d been seriously looking at the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone without the phone because: 1) I’ve got a cell phone account with Sprint and the iPhone is still exclusive with AT&T Wireless, and; 2) I don’t really care that much about talking on the phone, I want the e-mail, web, and A/V capabilities of the thing and don’t care much about the phone. But now the 8 GB iPhone will be $100 less than the 8 GB iPod Touch, unless iPod prices drop as well.

On the flip side, I’m not too happy to learn that Apple’s MobileMe replacement for their .Mac service will no longer support synching with OS 10.3, which is what I’ve got on my G3 iBook. The iBook won’t run 10.5 (needs G4 or higher) so I need to “upgrade” it to 10.4, which is outdated, get a new laptop (which ain’t gonna happen unless a large chunk of money drops into my lap), or just live with not being able to sync my address book, calendar, and such. Of course, if I get a 3G iPhone, then I can sync all of that information on it and not worry about having it on the laptop... Hmmm...

Erick Wujcik passed away on Saturday from complications of pancreatic cancer. I didn’t really know Erick, and he certainly didn’t know me; our professional paths never crossed. He was well-established as a name in the RPG industry long before I was ever published, and began transitioning to greener pastures by the time I was becoming established myself. Still, he had an impact on my gaming, and therefore my career.

I first became aware of Erick back in my first years of attending the GenCon Game Fair. He did a seminar on diceless roleplaying—a pretty radical concept for both the industry and the early 20-something me. I found Erick’s ideas and the stories about his own games in which he applied and refined them fascinating. It made me think about roleplaying, and game design, in a different way. I attended other seminars he gave on game design and gamemasters over the years as well, and found them just as interesting.

So, in addition to your body of work, which is an achievement that speaks for itself, thank you, Erick, for leading me down a few unexplored paths and lighting the way for me to follow them on my own. Rest in peace.

One concept discussed over our Thrilling Tales of the Midnight Society Game last night was that of using the addition of aspects as a means of “advancement” for FATE characters. It often seems like players come up with better aspects during the course of the game (an oft-heard comment is “Hey, that should so be one of your aspects!”).

Seems like one way to make a “pick-up” FATE game like Spirit of the Century more suited for long-term play might be to limit a character’s starting number of aspects to half (or even less) and have the character acquire or accumulate aspects, much as RPG characters tend to acquire (or accrete) history, personality, and depth as they are played. The acquired aspects might be more “rooted” (the other players were “there” when it “happened”) and their addition more organic, growing out of “actual” events.

The extreme example would be to start a character out with just one or two aspects (say, “elf” and “wizard” for example...) and add others on like “the legendary bow of Brindenwood” and “Goblinslayer” as the character adventures and improves. It could be as many as one aspect per adventure or just one per “significant” moment in the overall series arc. It’s a method of character advancement that its widely free-form but does actually add “abilities” to the character sheet, since it widens options for Fate Point usage (and even “stunts” if you’re using some sort of stunt system based on what aspects a character has).

Edit: One additional idea would be the potential of shedding or losing aspects as well. A "use it or lose it" rule that says any aspect that isn't activated or tagged for X number of sessions is scratched off the character sheet would be an interesting way of ensuring the removal of "dead wood," possibly freeing up space for newer, more interesting aspects (assuming characters have a reasonable limit of how many permanent aspects they can have at once). As it is, I'm allowing players to drop aspects they started with but have found less interesting or useful in play to acquire newer ones.

A screenshot of somebody playing the Centurion in City of Heroes. He’s a character I created as one of the iconic heroes of Freedom City, who appears on the cover of the second edition of Mutants & Masterminds. (Although renowned as the greatest hero of the setting, Centurion died saving the world years ago, in the scene depicted on the cover. Unlike most comic book heroes, he has stayed dead, leaving room for some new heroes in the setting.)

Moments like this make me happy with my job.

Saw Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull tonight. (Fear not, no spoilers in this post for those who may not have seen it yet.) A perfectly satisfactory Indy film, with lots of fond homage (and the occasional fromage) for the franchise. Worth seeing, and certainly inspirational fodder for my ongoing Thrilling Tales of the Midnight Society game.

Finally saw Iron Man tonight and, overall, the film lived up to the hype: it was tight, humorous, and respectful towards the source material without being too self-conscious. The first half was a touch too long and the second half a touch too short but, overall, a really top-notch superhero flick. Robert Downey, Jr. was fantastic for the title role and really brought Tony Stark to life. If you're a superhero or comic book geek of any stripe, you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

(Borrowed from gmskarka)

Entertainment Weekly has a feature where comics pros talk about the first comic book that hooked them.

Mine were actually two: an issue of Action Comics and one of Fantastic Four that I bought at a 7-Eleven in Las Vegas one summer. My family had moved there and, while my parents were house hunting, we lived in the Ponderosa Motel on the edge of the city. Not much for a bored ten year-old to do except watch TV... and read comic books.

I don’t recall the issue numbers offhand, and a quick Google image search didn’t turn up the covers, but I still remember them well. The Action Comics story was about Vandal Savage changing history so he ruled the world and Superman worked for him (surprisingly similar in concept to the “Savage Time” story for the Justice League animated series). The Fantastic Four story was intended to wrap-up the Shogun Warriors series, with the FF fighting “the Samurai Destroyer,” a big Japanese robot, in Tokyo.

Those two were the start of my perusing convenience store shelves for months to come, eventually discovering things like comic specialty stores existed and doing extra chores to earn money so my Dad would drive me down to one to buy my semi-weekly comics. I’ve still got those original two, along with the probably thousands of others in the boxes in my basement.