Deadlands, Weird, Wasted, Reloaded and more!

I enjoy a lot of different types of RPGs, I have played Gamma World, D&D (2nd, 3rd, 4th), Pathfinder, Dark Heresy, several whitewolf games (not a big whitewolf fan, just saying), a bit of Call of Cthulhu, Mutant Future, Labyrinth Lord, Rifts, etc. Now lately my main gaming group has been doing a lot of Deadlands. Deadlands is a somewhat obscure game but quite interesting put out by the folks at Pinnacle. My group plays the classic version, IE the non Savage Worlds version.

Deadlands is one of the first games I want to talk about here both because it's a game that I'm playing right now and also because it actually taught a fair amount in terms of game design, running a game, and even about aspects of different types of gaming. The next few posts are going to focus on different aspects of the game and some of my own observations and thoughts on it, as well as things I think they did really well and things that they kind of messed up. Any fans of the game are welcome to post, as are detractors come to think of it.

I think I'll start off by talking a little about the game itself. The central game is essentially a steampunk civil war torn US with cowboys and zombies. An event known as 'the recknoning' occurred during the battle of Gettysburg and weirdness started popping up all over the place. The dead began to walk, monsters of folklore began to appear, and magical power suddenly became available or more potent. The source of this is a bit more than I want to get into right here (probably a future topic) Now the thing is that by and large most people don't know/don't believe in this sort of thing and in many respects that's how the dark forces like it. A big monster charging into town might make the populace piss their pants but then a few people either get brave or angry enough to fight back and manage to kill the thing. Suddenly the people see that the creature wasn't so scary and that they can be beaten. Instead the monsters tend to lurk on the outside, a few people here and there might disappear and sometimes people see things they don't understand but most of them try to chalk it up to hallucination, accident, or some animal.

The heroes are the exceptions, these are the people that find out about the supernatural and try to push back, defending people as best they can and spreading hope. Some of these people are shamans, some are blessed by a higher power, some have learned to pull power kicking and screaming from the spirit world and a few are guided by maddening muses to create mind bending tech, and plenty more are just normal people armed with courage and a good shooting arm. Now all of this is more true in the weird west for Deadlands but the basic principles hold. The game also deals with the idea of evil in some fairly interesting ways and points out that sometimes evil can be very grandiose and sometimes in can be very banal and in both cases it can be terrifying.

The game itself is a bit of a mix of pulpy action and horror, I tend more towards the pulpy action side but that's more because I absolutely suck at running horror. That's about all I can say for now, hope to see you all again soon.

Wow, I'm back

Hey, I have returned after my long absence, mostly because I realized that if I want this to work I have to produce regardless. So that's what I will do dammit! I am hoping to come to some kind of schedule for producing posts, probably about once a week or so.

One or many?

I was recently in a forum argument that got me thinking about the question of games in terms of DMs and players. There are going to be times where a DM has restrictions in a game that will restrict the ability of one or more players to produce the kind of character that they want. The debate came up in the context of if a DM should have to compromise or if the player had to decide to give up what they wanted or leave the game.

My views on the subject have to do with how my own games go. When I design a game world I make it for my players. I often try to help people find items, feats and offer advice when they want to try to make a character that fits a particular concept with available mechanics. Now, maybe I'm more liberal as a DM. But I can also understand the argument that a DM might need to reign in certain things to ensure that the game doesn't go out of control or so that the kind of world they make can feel workable.

But, I'd like to know what others think if anyone is interested.

Sorry for the absence

Sorry for the extended absence. I think some of it was frustration due to a lack of comments and discussion here. I am probably still going to be somewhat irregular but I will try to at least make a habit of posting, though it might help me some if I know anyone is actually reading this.

What makes a good game

A question that can come up relatively often is what makes a good game? What makes a game better or more interesting? Why do we choose some games over others? The most obvious answer is how fun a game is but fun has the problem of being somewhat subjective as well as being rather difficult to quantify, so my focus is going to be more on aspects of fun, IE what makes different games fun/not fun.

One basic part on the idea of fun might be participation, IE being able to be and stay involved in the game. This is why I've met some people who hate monopoly because it is very easy to be eliminated from the game and the game itself can take hours (or that lovely record setting months). It does get a bit hard to enjoy a game when you can get knocked out of it and be forced to watch everyone else. This is dull, not to mention frustrating, in fact this is probably where a lot of relatively well known variant and house rules come from to help keep people in the game longer. RPGs have similar elements, most players hate being hit by things that remove them from combat or enemies that they are unable to affect.

Another area could be random chance vs. stability. IE how much random chance (dice rolling, drawing cards, position in turn order) affects the game versus relatively stable rules that affect everyone more or less equally. A game that is perfectly stable gets dull, everyone moves X squares, etc. it can feel incredibly dull. One example I see people use is Risk, almost anyone that has played it normally wants to start in australia because that lets you constantly build up large numbers of troops. While there is the element of dice rolls in risk there is still the problem that no matter what some areas are just hands down better regardless of chance. However, go too far on the side of random chance and you can develop issues of your own. Random dice rolls/card draws/RNG decisions start making any hope of strategy or planning moot. One example there might be the Handheld RPG game Lunar Dragon which didn't even let you target enemies, you hit attack and your characters bounced randomy attacking different targets, focus fire and strategic assaults were out.

The last big area I can see is in the idea of games playing to strengths. People enjoy showing off talents that they have. Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of various subjects are likely to enjoy trivial pursuit for example. Those who are good at persuasion are likely to enjoy games like Malarkey. That being said I kind of want to know what my readers, if I have any, think. If you feel that there are other elements of what make a good game or make a game fun, feel free to reply.

Game Weights

Tabletop games, computer games, board games, all of them have a certain degree of weighting involved. The idea is where the majority of the power, the focus of the system, and the theoretical goals of the game lie. In my experience you either will see games weighted on the side of the player, games weighted centrally, or games weighted in favor of the system. Now, an important note, here is that none of these is necessarily inherently better or worse than the others, however they tend to lend themselves more easily to certain types of games. For example, a game weighted more towards the players tends to create excellent heroic games, more neutrally set games are theoretically more versatile and able to work with many genres, and the ones weighted more towards the system are best used for horror and survival games.

Games weighted in favor of the players are games that expect the players to win. The players are on average more durable and more powerful than the monsters and it is relatively difficult to lose if the game is used in its standard format. The players can be challenged but it is indeed difficult to wipe them out. Most heroic tapletop games follow this premise and in fact the d20 system could be said to be weighted heavily in favor of the players. A heroic game tends to give the players a greater margin of error, early levels have training wheels and the game tends to focus on approximate escalation, the players will sometimes face things stronger than them but their collective abilities will almost always outmatch it, they will also have more escape hatches and panic buttons than their opponents can match. In these games death for a character ranges from impossible to easily recoverable. Some games are actually set up where the player characters cannot die, one of the versions of 7th sea is like that. Others have death, but death is fairly easy to get around, either offering ressurection or similar means to return the character to life and continue on.

Games that have more neutral weight are fairly rare admittedly, but they do exist. By and large these games are point based, in this setup everyone has the same abilities to pull from and similar rules on the points spread. Characters can die and probably will. However, the idea in this case is more that the game assumes roughly equal chance between everything. These games are also a bit more diverse, usually allocating build points based off of the genrea involved. A game where the party is meant to hide and survive in a wasteland ruled by powerful mutants will have far fewer points than a superhero game for example. The theoretical idea here is that this game might show more skill, but it can also be problematic. SOmeone with a greater level of system mastery can wipe out less skilled people, and synergy is more important. Neutrally weighted games also tend to be somewhat unfocused, the game doesn't necessarily 'care' what each side does, the goal is more to create a game that is generally workable and the focus of balance is more towards ensuring that nothing shattering comes in rather than defending one side of the screen or the other.

The games weighted in favor of the system are a bit more complex, most of them are games like Chaosims Call of Cthulhu or certain whitewolf games. In this regard the game is either actively set against the players or it is designed to make the game essentially an ordeal for them. The game is set heavily against the players, odds are that their opponents least soldiers are 50 times stronger than they could ever be, they need all their cunning, caution and luck just to get away let alone have any hope of harming the thing. In these games you don't slay great monsters and horrors, instead you usually fight tooth and nail, more than half the group dying, to stop a cultist from summoning a great horror. Your greatest victories are phyrric, and your successes only fleeting. But there is another type, in this game you might be reasonably powerful, perhaps even above average. The problem instead is that you face a goal, a challenge, that does not yield to power, to most wit, instead you play the role of a tragic hero, perhaps to find redemption but more likely to become a figure who is cheered on despite knowing they will not succeed. White Wolf has several games like this, one of them being Promethean. The game itself is hard to describe but the tale of sisyphus is probably the closest example, however in this regard someone is constantly throwing stones at him as well as trying to pour grease on the hill.

These game types can allow for a lot of different interesting stories, for those starting in a genre these games can help explain and set a tone and scene. For those more experienced they can even make a horror game using a game weighted towards the players or a heroic game with a system weighted against them.

First post

This blog is meant to serve as sort of a general discussion on RPGs, mostly tabletop games but occasionally video games and MMOs. My topics are likely not going to have a central focus to them in terms of what I cover, my big things are going to be discussing design theory, balance, different styles of gaming and how different types of games are. If anyone has something they'd want mentioned say so in the comments section and I will see what I can do. Hope this goes well, thanks.