Superhero Games

Hey, I'm back and am slowly getting over my problem of bloggers block, hoping I can produce something new and interesting. One thing that I was thinking about recently was different kinds of games, IE the types of role playing games that exist and what the most and least common stuff is. One big thing is that fantasy is huge, and I can see a few reasons why. Obvious ones are that it's relatively easy to work from since almost anything can be used for it and you can modify various epics from different cultures to produce a fairly interesting story. Couple that with the fact that the first RPG (Chainmail, later D&D) was fantasy based and it's also what's had the most time to 'mature'. Also popular is the post apocalyptic game which again has some good source material and also has some fairly venerable roots. The horror game can be a bit hit or miss but has a nice pedigree, and to be blunt I almost classify Whitewolf as its own genre. One genre that's been kicking around in my head lately is the superhero RPG (and it might be because I started playing City of Heroes Freedom).

What intrigues me about this genre is that it doesn't really have an iconic game the way that fantasy does with D&D. It isn't for lack of trying either, Palldium has a couple superhero books, Mutants and Masterminds has gone through several editions, I am fairly certain that GURPS has something specifically for superheroes, and if not you could probably cobble something together fairly easily, whitewolf has Aberrant, as well as Scion if you consider that a part of the genre. There are a lot of interesting superhero type games, I've run a few games of Savage Worlds Necessary evil, I played in the tri-stat Authority game, I also played in a game using the rules from the recently released Mutants and Masterminds book that has a strong eye on DC. I've played in several superhero style games and run others and I've observed a few things that tend to happen or be problems of the system, and I'm unsure if it's a a problem of RPGS in general, a problem of the systems they attempt to use, or if it's native to the concept of a superhero RPG. There are a few problems that I've noticed cropping up in the superhero games that I've played, I also want to get into the concept of online superhero games like DC Universe or City of Heroes.

One problem I've observed has to do with game balance between players. Now some of you are going to say that balance is irrelevant in a game of player to player, but I have to disagree. I'll also clarify, balance shouldn't mean that every character is identical, but it should mean that one person shouldn't be able to do everything by themselves easily while the rest of the group just sits there. When I go to a game I am going to play, and if one person is able to not only outperform me but outperform everyone else at the table when given the same resources there is a problem somewhere. The problem can come out in a lot of different ways, but I guess one good comparison might be Superman and Green Arrow. Both are heroes, both have a good sized fanbase, the thing is that Superman can do everything that Green Arrow is capable of easily and more besides where it isn't so true the other way. This isn't about who can beat who up, this is simply that in an RPG environment unless the group is rushing off to deal with multiple threats individually one person shouldn't be able to neutralize a threat that would normally require the combine efforts of the rest of the group. In some superhero games this is more common than others, it can either be that a player found a loophole that allowed them to get nigh infinite power or are able to hit so hard/fast or have a power that can change things enough to where they are able to neutralize any and all enemies. When a player is able to make it so that they themselves cannot be threatened by anything and simultaneously can cause a lot of damage there is an issue, though the degree to which it is a problem could be debated. One example that I'll use is from the recent Mutants and Masterminds game. I won't go into all of it and some of the arguing that came in, but our gadgeteer was able, due to the nature of the system, turn a moon into gas, launch an ancient warship and an enemy base into the sun hopefully never to trouble us again. We needed to end the game and it worked, and the person playing the gadgeteer was very scrupulous about not overshadowing others, only going full tilt at the end. The problem was that his character was able to mimic every single power at a level that exceeded anyone else in the group. There were other issues too with certain powers but I'd probably need to be a bit more in depth with that game to give a full argument on it.

The second issue has to do with player to game and this has to do both with what mechanics can allow for and a side effect of players going in different ways than a comic character might. One example can be found in the old tri-stat game set in the comic continuity of the authority. The problem in this one is that certain powers in the tri stat system can allow for...shall we say interesting combinations. Some are fairly simple, a person who wants to have a really powerful energy blast buys up an attack power, kits it out with a few extra bells and whistles, then grabs the 'augmented attack' power and chains it to their attack power and cranks the damage up to 11. Other tricks are a bit more complicated, one of them is that you could give damaging powers a backblast effect where you would be injured by it, then take powers that when you are injured convert the damage into temporary health levels or even into extra points you could pour into existing powers to further augment them. You can probably guess where that would go in terms of problems. There were also issues with people putting container powers into container powers and the like. Now some of this was probably just an issue of the system, but there can be other problems too. A character that is hypothetically perfectly balanced in a system can also be difficult to challenge, and that's even assuming that you aren't using something like the Palladium or early Marvel Superhero games that involved random rolls for powers wherein a person could be anywhere on the chart from 'Dog man! With the incredible power to...smell things really well and speak with canines!" to "Titan, Demigod with the power to manipulate all forms of energy, fly, teleport, and is impervious to any and all forms of physical harm that don't include element X!" No game can properly account for both characters at the same starting point without either killing dog man messily or Titan stomping everything. To go back to the main issue of what a player might do with a powerset that a comic book character might not, I give you the standard codifier of a weak powerset, Aquaman. Aquaman is actually hypothetically the most powerful superhuman on earth. Go to the logical conclusions of being able to command 2/3 of the worlds biomass and can make them act without thought of self preservation, and this even ignores the fact that he has the kingdom of atlantis at his disposal. From a slightly different angle, I once had a character called the Wraith, his main powers were insubstantial form and superspeed, I believe he also had a special tracking power and an attack that was designed to weaken enemies. The person running it actually refused to allow that character in because with it I could track any criminal anywhere, evade almost any enemy, and in essence be nigh untouchable. The problem that the person running had with the game wasn't that I was devastatingly powerful, but that I would be difficult to plan for, no villain could escape and actually making me harmable required such a degree of preparation that it was impractical for him. There's another area where things can get a bit wonky too and it has to do with the both the genre and the general system. Superhero games are very difficult to build challenging villains for. In point buy games the challenge is making a villain that is a challenge for the group without being fatal, which can be tricky without any kind of challenge level system. There are some other issues too, a group of players can all have wildly different powersets that can either take out an enemy much faster than anticipated or could end up inadvertently neutering one or more players. In a comic book it's one thing to neutralize a few heroes because it either helps move the plot along or explains why some of the A list heroes don't just nuke the enemy or how they got around the various detection and scanning abilities of different heroes. But in a game, it kind of sucks to have to sit out for most of a session because the person running accidentally or on purpose made the enemy du jour immune to your capabilities.

There are other things too but I really need to finish and post this, not to mention that I'm sure at least some other people will offer ideas or comments.

Edition Changes and updates

Hello to anyone that reads my blog. I have had a bit of trouble coming up with ideas but recently I actually managed to come up with something that might be interesting, game edition shifts and updates. They always tend to cause frustration in people as well as hope, hope for improvements and streamlining. Hope that major issues in the current game will be fixed and that the new system will emerge stronger and better organized. In essence the players hope for a more evolved system, and just as often people fear the changes. They fear the system that they've grown comfortable with changing into something foreign. They fear a system that makes players too strong or weak, that radically changes how things were done. Every time that a game changes editions there is a barbeque of sacred cows.

Talk to anyone that has a favorite game or system, when D&D changed from 2nd to 3rd edition, and when 3.5 came out, and again when it became 4th edition there were complaints on each one, some loud, some quiet. Some reasoned, some simple rage, but the complaints filled blogs and forums. The same is true for the new world of darkness and the new versions of the settings that were brought forward, when Deadlands became Savage Worlds the same thing happened. It happens regardless, but the big question should really be what creates the hostility, and for that matter why do some people jump forward to the new system, only to leave it later?

I already mentioned some of what caused my group to jump to 4th edition when it came out. It created a system where all the classes were in fact playing the same game, gameplay was more streamlined, and overall the system was far more balanced. Now this opinion changed over time, as you can see by going through my archives. What I find interesting is that looking back at it 4th edition seemed to fall apart as fast as it produced new things to fix itself, but I digress. The stuff for Deadlands between the original formats and the Savage World settings are also worth studying. Armor and toughness are different so are the concepts of arcane backgrounds and power growth. While I can see some definite advantages in the new system I find myself preferring the old one.

Gamma world is another example, look at each edition, each one had a different attitude and style, some more serious than others. I will say I quite like the latest incarnation that uses the 4th edition model, and uses it much better than the 4th edition game IMO. What is it that brings us to keep an edition or leap to the new one, I have a few guesses.

1) Fear of change or desire for it can motivate the migration or staying with an edition. In some cases people are comfortable with an older system and are more willing to use a few houserules and argue that a new edition will either be unnecessary or will introduce new problems and headaches, aside from having to relearn the mechanics. Similarly, there are people who get frustrated with a system and having to alter it, remake it, and in some cases have entire books devoted to clarifying rules (The Rules Compendium of 3.5 was a great argument for 4th edition let me say). For world of darkness it could have been trying to juggle rules between different 'settings' like Werewolf, Vampire, Mage, etc. It also could have been the fact that their tabletop and larping systems reacted very differently and had a lot of balance complaints.

2) Sacred Cows, once again this is an area that causes people to want to change or want to keep. People will sometimes look at a game and say "This isn't X" people would say that 4th edition wasn't D&D, that the products for the New World Of Darkness weren't 'really' Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc. The usual reason for it was that the sacred cows had ben barbecued, vanican spellcasting was gone, class distinctions were annihilated or reshaped. Principles that had guided design for supernatural beings in the world of darkness were suddenly wildly different. Some people hated these things, I will say that Vancian Spellcasting is probably one of the biggest problems for game balance in 3.5 D&D and in the current Pathfinder. I will also say that getting rid of it as they did also probably helped create some of the problems that 4th edition faced. Some people are afraid of losing something that's been part of the system from the get-go, and others see those things as either anachronisms or bad design choices.

3) Cash, a simple one, and more towards keeping to an older edition. If you have a game that runs well the idea of forking over more money for new books that essentially invalidate your old ones can be infuriating. And it can also be annoying that things you would have been happy to pay money for (expansions on a few new power systems, books for greater customization levels, etc.) are no longer being made for your game of choice, at least in the incarnation you have most of the other stuff for.

4) Simplicity, another argument in either direction. A person familiar with an edition will usually know all the necessary rules or at least have houserules and rulings to deal with hiccups. That being said there can be huge rule cludges that are either avoided or rewritten, things that come up after multiple sourcebooks and errata colliding with one another as well as the ubiquitous problem of player inventiveness. New editions tend to be fairly simple to start off, rules are streamlined and USUALLY the books don't have too many glaring errors or problems, but you usually have to relearn the system and rules not to mention the problem of dealing with new errata and rulebooks adding new features and changing things.

Now playing groups and the like are part of it too but those are a bit more subjective and this is more based on personal desires one way or the other. Any other ideas, comments, etc. are welcome. I hope to hear from someone.

Does Balance Matter?

Some of you out there are probably familiar with the game Gamma World, for those of you that are younger or more familiar with the most recent release of it (quite fun btw) it is a very fun and very bizarre game. One thing that I find is that there are a lot of people who enjoy Gamma World in part because it is so crazy and to an extent because it is imbalanced. You can be a super mutant with radiation powers and have a suit of power armor alongside a crazy feral person with a sword, and oddly it doesn't matter too much. The game does somewhat assume frequent deaths, but really you can have people of wildly disparate power levels in the game and it will still be fairly fun.

Now some of it might be that Gamma World runs heavily off of the weird factor, IE a big part of the enjoyment is more the bizarre spectacle than say balanced gameplay. On a note with my own group, I have mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Deadlands, my group currently has a Deadlands game going. When I set up a Savage World jaunt for them briefly I got a few positive responses but a lot of negative ones. Now Savage Worlds is more balanced, and the response may have been more rooted in either a desire for familiarity or something similar but I found it interesting that by and large their reaction was relatively negative towards it. A few of them even commented that the relatively imbalanced nature of the game was part of the fun.

For the record my group does generally care about game balance and if someone has abilities that are dominating combats and the like we usually talk about either nerfing or altering how the abilities work. And I'm sure that's true in most games. Maybe the question should be if balance really matters but also what we mean by balance.

Character deaths

I got into a rather interesting discussion recently which helped me around some bloggers block. One of the things brought up was the idea of a game where it was hard for PCs to die, or as he put it 'Care Bearing'. I thought about it, now in my games character death can vary wildly depending on systems but I will admit that I tend to be a bit more merciful than some, maybe due to player complaints or because of how I feel about games. Some of it is that I have fairly clever players, and some of it is that I try to avoid doing games that are going to eat the players alive consistently. Another person that was somewhat intermittently involved mentioned that he enjoys the look on players faces when their characters die, usually the shock that it happened, and complained that modern games coddle players too much. The person I was talking more directly to also complained about ideas like game balance and the like.

I disagree on a few fronts, but some of it also has to do with how I view the games. For example, in most editions of gamma world I've played you can whip up a new character quite fast and frequent deaths are part and parcel of the experience. The same can be said for games like All Flesh Must be Eaten or even certain games using the Cthulhu mythos. Some old school fantasy games are similar, in these cases death might be annoying but the relative speed in which you can make a new character means that the death won't mean that either the player is sitting out for most of the night or that everyone else has to put things on hold while a new character is made. In such games character deaths aren't a big deal and can even be a source of amusement.

Take games that have more involved character generation however, say for example something from the folks at Palladium, and a character death could set you back hours in terms of time spent generating a new character. There is also the argument about how a character dies, is it different if they die from a single failed saving throw than if they died in a mass battle? If there are resurrection options in the game that might change things too, but how accessible do you make it for players? (IE at low levels do they have to suck it up and just wait until the cleric gets high enough to resurrect before they can die and keep their character?) Then again there is the question of if character deaths mean anything to the players or game itself. If you have a big story planned is it better to just keep the basic group alive so they don't have to keep reading the new guy or gal into the groups mission and enemy list or is it necessary to make sure that you prune their numbers so they don't get too sure of themselves?

Well, any readers out there are welcome to comment, hope to hear from you.

Magnificent Failures: Magic of Incarnum

One thing that I've been thinking on recently is on a lot of game supplements that were what I would call magnificent failures. These are games or supplements that while they never quite managed to catch or really get a big level of focus or were somehow flawed still had a really good concept, idea or system that was lurking under the problems. One of my favorite examples for this was a D&D game for 3rd edition called Magic of Incarnum, it was a supplement that offered a new kind of magic system to the game.

Thematically Incarnum was the calling and binding of souls, you called on the essence of all who lived and all yet to be born, you channeled this energy into objects that symbolized heroes, villains, warriors, thieves, etc. It was a very interesting system conceptually, you could mix and match powers and features to either gain new abilities or augment existing ones. There were also a few options for someone wanting to dabble in it a bit the real problem with the system however is that...well it was very poorly implemented.

Using the powers to their fullest extent meant giving up item slots, doable and there were options for sharing slots and the like but it was still kind of iffy. Also a lot of it involved juggling a second resource called 'essentia' that you got from being an incarnum using class or by taking incarnum feats that granted you essentia in 1 per feat. You had to track how much essentia you invested in the feats, the soulmelds, etc. and you couldn't change it during the day so you had to make sure you knew what you wanted to do and what was supposed to go where. It was clunky and it added a lot of extra book keeping.

The secondary issue was this, the classes themselves that were meant to be the central incarnum users were for lack of a better term questionably designed. The Totemist was probably the best designed of the three but the problem I have with it is that it depends heavily on the natural weapons that some of its soulmelds offer without bothering to explain how they interact and essentially 'locking' certain slots automatically during game progression, it's overall still pretty good but it was a pet peeve. The Soulborn was the second creation, this one was more a problem of there not really being enough of the actual class feature available. What I mean is this, the class itself didn't get much to actually use the soulmelds and abilities this was particularly bothersome because it made it feel like they, a class BUILT for using the new system, were little more than dabblers.

The third class needs a lot of explanation, the Incarnate was sort of the flagship for the Incarnum classes in my view. It had the most essentia, most access to soulmelds and gained them the fastest. It had full armor proficiency and full weapon proficiency, decent saves as well, in fact there was only one problem, it had the base attack bonus of a primary caster, IE the wizards. The first problem here is simply that looking at it was a little confusing, most of the stuff shown, and the description they gave said that this was a combatant that harnessed Incarnum to augment themselves and their allies, but the wizard BaB said that they were going to have trouble hitting and that their main focus would apparently be elsewhere.

I think that there were two reasons that this happened, and it probably also explains why the Soulborn actually got so few Incarnum soulmelds. The first is that because of how a lot of the soulmelds worked you could actually get a really good bonus to hit, probably edging out the fighter or at least getting close even on the poor base attack bonus. The second one is more that the soulmelds were really versatile, it wasn't just combat bonuses. They offered bonuses for just about every skill, if your group woke up locked in jail cells stripped of gear you could simply summon up the hands of the thief, the rogues vest and a few others and suddenly the jail cells might as well be made of paper.

I think the fear was that due to potential versatility they were afraid of the Incarnate becoming too powerful, the same with the Soulborn. This is one of the areas where the designers might have botched things a bit, it's kind of where theory and practice veer in different directions. The amount of versatility was hypothetically a major power for the Incarnate, but due to elements of design much of the vaunted versatility would sit unused. The reason was simply this, with everything but the base attack bonus proclaiming that it was meant to fight in melee or at least in ranged, most points and abilities were likely to veer in that direction, the other abilities were likely to sit unused unless say the person playing the rogue couldn't make it to that session or something similar.

It's not that the versatility idea was bad, just that given the nature of the class that had it it was unlikely to really be very often used. I view it in ways similar to high level wizard or sorcerer spells that were designed to turn them into melee powerhouses. While the spells themselves may have been impressive they weren't really all that likely to be used, or if they were something had likely gone wrong somewhere or things had changed rather radically.

What made Incarnum such a magnificent failure in my view is that while there were a lot of things that went wrong with Incarnum there was actually a lot of really great stuff here. The concept of essentially harnessing the raw spiritual energy of all the universes souls, shaped my archetypes of heroism or villainy, is a pretty neat idea. The sheer number of options that you could mix and match from was pretty cool too. The other thing is simply that the idea was unique, it was very different and very dynamic, I applaud innovation in game design and while this experiment might have been problematic it was still quite an interesting one.

The Right Way to play pt. 3

In my last few posts I've tried to talk about the concept of a right way to play games and this last post is somewhat of a tricky one, in part because I want to finish it here and this question is the root of a lot of bigger arguments in gaming. The biggest issue with the idea of a right way to play, at least in my mind, is that it's sort of a mask for either a bigger question or idea that the person is trying to state.

It can be about gamestyle preferences, it can be a question of what a person brings to a game, really there are a lot of ways to look at it. One way is simply a matter of style and preference, the people talking about roleplay or optimization as if they were mutually exclusive for example. Another is a bit trickier and it's somewhat more prevalent in online gaming than it would be in tabletops.

In online games there can be said to be a more objective right and wrong way to play, part of why I say this is that those games are generally of a less 'sandbox' method in that classes or skillsets are designed for certain things and the game can't really alter itself based on learning curves on a case by case basis (barring server wide patches and the like). The games are also much more based around cooperation in that if a person doesn't build the warrior to tank as well as they can or the healer is built incorrectly...well that ends up making things hard for others and creating frustration for all those involved. Part of what makes a game work, and what makes a way to play 'right' or 'wrong' has to do with what makes all the people involved happy and lets them have fun.

Ignoring the systems, the arguments, etc. we all game to have fun, to relieve stress and do something interesting with out friends. Now the biggest thing in all of it is that you and those around you are having fun. Someone is playing the wrong way when they and those around them aren't having fun, sometimes it means that the person should redo their character, sometimes it means that the group needs to change in terms of some people leaving or something similar.

The right way to play pt. 2 (sorry this took so long)

Sorry to any readers out there, real life got in the way of things for a while, I guess I'm back and will hopefully be able to put out more posts and make something enjoyable.

When last I left my second issue in the idea of playing right or wrong had to do with the concept of a player focusing more on the mechanical aspect of the game, and when the others in the group complained he argued that he got into the game to fight monsters, slay dragons, and find treasure not sit in town conversing in 'thees and thous' with local yokels. For those who are familiar with such arguments part of this is from the whole 'roleplay vs rollplay' or 'optimization versus RP' and other things that crop up.

In some cases it's a false dichotomy started by people more enamored with RP than mechanics arguing that a person who has any interest in mechanics is clearly only interested in that and they don't know how to properly roleplay. While there can be cases where people obsess over raw numbers to the exclusion of any RP elements I think this is the exception rather than the rule. I also would argue that to an extent optimization IS roleplaying but that might be a discussion for another day. Now, some people might argue that the mechanically focused player in the example is playing wrong, or at least isn't playing the game to its full potential. Conversely people might also feel some sympathy for him, if he's in a game like Dungeons and Dragons, Hackmaster, or any other game that sells itself as a game full of action and exploration then it does seem a bit like the player in question might feel like they were the victim of a bait and switch. Depending on the game some might even argue that the roleplay centric players might be 'doing it wrong' if the game they're using is a much more heavily action oriented one.

This isn't to denigrate roleplayers either, roleplay can help bring a game more to life. It can help flesh out characters and work out backgrounds for them as well as make players feel like they're a part of the world and really care about the story and feel excited about that happens around them. Some games do a better job of stimulating roleplay than others and I won't say much more on that subject.

The real crux of the issue in this one is more a matter of player expectations and group style. I have had players who have told me of my own games that they are alternately too roleplay light or heavy, that we need more or less action, etc. Now a lot of it boils down to personal preference of the players and what the person running is comfortable with. This might be a case where the group would either need to seek a compromise, maybe doing more action sequences if reasonable along with trying to get the recalcitrant player to interact more with the story. It might also just be that the player is a bad fit for the group, he or she would be happier with a group that did more action, adventure and exploring in their games rather than emphasizing social interaction.

At least this is my view, if anyone has any comments, feel free to offer them in the comments section.

Right way to play? Pt. 1

I'm going to try to address each question as a blog post and be as concise and coherent as possible, and hopefully interesting. Let's look at the first one, where a person new to a game posts on a forum about the game asking for advice on their character. The responses are varied and each one seems to give an idea of a 'right' way to play, or the reactions to said posts. The concept of a right way to play is varied, to some people there is no real wrong way to play but there are ways that are better and worse.

To the people simply giving general advice IE what abilities to pick or offering a build strategy they are simply answering the question and don't seem to offer any judgement on a right or wrong way. But I've heard some gamers condemn 'builds' as wrong or something to be avoided because they felt it detracted from organic character growth or that it took the person outside of the game. Others might counter "the player wants to be good at X, I wrote up how to be good at X" and X could be anything from a fighting style, to a method of using magic, to efficient underwater basketweaving.

To those offering builds there might also be divides, some are far more mechanically intensive where others are bare bones. In here we get the idea that if you're going to do something as a focus you need to go at it full tilt, IE second best isn't good enough. They might even justify it as 'If you're not doing your best the rest of the group is being let down' And then other people argue that he wasn't necessarily even asking for a comprehensive build, just some general information about what to look for, saying that they're trying to force others to play like them.

There are also some who might say that the players decision was a poor one and they should try a different class or set of options in order to do what they want. Now, their commentary is seen by some as simple advice and help to a newbie, IE if they want to play a certain style of character certain classes match the theme better than others or certain power templates offer that ability collection more easily. Or perhaps a certain class or ability template is just bad, at least from their perspective, and they want to warn the player against using it to avoid frustration.

Each of these things and the reactions to them imply concepts of right and wrong ways to play the game, hell a lot of them might even just be seen as tracing from the idea of an 'optimization' vs 'role play' dichotomy. Where there is seen as a sort of scale where you can't do both one and the other and that being good at one necessarily means being bad at another. The idea also that either one is a good or bad way of playing. So I guess the question that should be asked is if any of the people in my example were 'wrong' and if so why? I'll try to address the other questions soon.

Is there a right way to play?

This is something that comes up every now and again in games, and it's in both online and tabletop games, is there a right or wrong way to play? I think this one is going to be somewhat piecemeal because it's kind of a big question or at least one that isn't easy to answer. Part of the idea of there being a right or wrong way to play is the concept that there are better and worse ways of playing a game. The idea on this is somewhat dependent on who is asking and why, and it's part of what causes all kinds of arguments at game tables, forums, and blogs.

One thing to start with is to ask why the question is being asked and who is asking it. I'll give a few different examples of where I see people making assumptions, sometimes unconsciously, about a 'right' and 'wrong' way to play a game, be it tabletop or online.

1) A player relatively new to a game going to a forum asking for advice and help on making a character, explaining the concept and class that they want to use. The responses are mostly either build advice or being told to avoid the class mentioned because it sucks, doesn't do what the player wants very well, etc.

2) A player new to roleplaying games focusing more on the mechanical aspects of their character than on the personality, the person gets chastized for being unwilling or unable to get in character, they argue that they wanted to be hunting for treasure and monsters instead of chatting up random yokels in town with thees and thous.

3) A person playing an online game with a talent system is messaged out of the blue being told that their design sucks, that they aren't capable of playing the class or character correctly, etc. and that if they want to do it right they need to copy the designs shown on website X.

4) A person talking about their character, either their roleplay or background, is chastised because their portrayal of some fantasy race is obviously wrong. Dwarves are never mages, humans are never better than elves, elves don't act like that, halflings are supposed to be jolly, etc.

5) A person playing either a tabletop game or an online game is called out for being cheap or a munchkin because of an ability, item, or some combination of effects because those things are 'too powerful' 'broken' or 'an I-Win Button' and that they should 'learn to play the right way' or something to that extent.

Now in each of these the mindsets are different and there are probably arguments on each side. I'm not going to go into direct particulars on stuff because it is very much a case by case basis but over the course of the next few days/weeks I hope I can shed some light on my views and maybe stimulate some discussion.

When Roles Go Bad Pt. 2

Here I am for a belated part two. I apologize for taking so long but I hope it will be worth the wait. I mentioned that one issue that comes up in the role system is simply that the roles themselves can get in the way and screw things up trying to keep everything balanced. This area is a bit more subjective but can do a lot to impact fun as well as being common in video games as well as tabletop games. In essence it's a matter of things feeling overly similar, or 'samey'. IE two classes that are supposed to be different and distinct end up feeling identical in results and play.

In tabletop games I would argue this is somewhat easier to notice than it is in video games, the main reason I say this is that a video game can mask similar mechanics with graphics and thematic things that a tabletop game has to do a lot more work to conjure. Now things feeling samey is somewhat subject to interpretation and it can come from a lot of different things and have different levels of annoyance or frustration for the person working on things. Some matter more and some matter less, and I will try to address them quickly.

One area is when different classes in the same role start to feel samey, this could be due to similar mechanics or just because build information and damage output end up near identical. This can be frustrating in some regards but it isn't necessarily a major issue. In video games the mechanics, graphics, etc. can be utilized to make the differing classes seem more dissimilar while their overall output is about identical. In a tabletop game this is somewhat more obvious but it can be fairly manageable so long as the gameplay elements keep the classes feeling distinct or at least different enough so that the player doesn't wonder why there are two classes if they functionally do the same thing and are identical in most regards.

Another area has to do with different aspects of the same class, IE if there are different build options but both end up being about the same. On the one hand this can be somewhat expected, but when literally everything seems to be identical a problem crops up, the variant options seem superfluous when the end result is the same. It can make the player feel like their choice meant nothing and it can also feel like the book or supplement that the new option was put in was ultimately a waste. The way this can happen is if power choices, augmentation options etc. end up with a character functionally identical mechanically to the build of another type.

The basic problem is this, if classes feel samey, or if allegedly different options for the same class feel samey, it means that the designers screwed up. Part of the fun in a game that offers customization is making a character that feels unique, that is YOUR character, when the ability to do that is compromised the game suffers a bit. It gets worse when this sort of thing ends up being a means to nip system mastery in the bud, essentially making any abilities that improve hitting, defenses, etc. as a necessary and assumed thing, thus ensuring that there will be little to no ability to make your character 'better' than anyone else. The reason I link this as a problem the role system faces or at least tends to conjure more is that roles by nature have limits and locks on them, a healer should not be doing more damage than a straight damage dealer for example and this can lead to overreaction by designers and a fear that any customization could break the roles set up.

When Roles go Bad pt 1.

I mentioned before that in 4th edition one of the better ideas that they had was putting forward a solid role system, IE the classes would be set to certain types and their functions would be set around that. Defending the group, healing party members, raw damage, or AoE/Debuffing. The role system is used in other games and there are a lot of advantages to it. For one thing designing classes is a bit easier when there is a clear idea of what the class is supposed to do as well as helping figure out if something is marked too high or low in terms of damage, hit rating, etc. The problem is that roles can also lead to stagnation and can, if used incorrectly, lead to a game that is frustrating, samey, or just plain bad. I am going to try to do this in shorter bursts, I realize a lot of my posts are kind of text walls and it might be easier for someone to follow the posts with shorter posts and maybe my stuff will improve if I'm more focused.

One common problem in role based games comes from a problem in division of labor, especially in the area of the damage dealer. In most of these games everyone is able to deal a certain amount of damage, it isn't impossible for the people healing, debuffing or tanking to also lay a pretty good smackdown. However this leads to a problem, if their damage is comparable to that of the 'dedicated' damage dealer then three questions arise.

1) Why bother playing a dedicated damage dealer if a class in another role can crank out about the same amount of damage and have other options and features besides?

2) What was the point of the pure damage class in question, or even the pure damage role if the other classes in these roles can get near the damage output or perhaps even outpace it?

3) If the pure damage role is able to put out an incredibly high amount of damage, high enough that the other roles can't match it at all, then how do you avoid the idea of everyone simply going for raw damage and trying to overwhelm the targets with speed and a few hard blows.

In fourth edition D&D there were quite a few, for lack of a better term, errata storms that would hit because the Fighter was apparently outdamaging strikers, and then they would dial back the strikers to keep them from doing too much. It got frustrating but it also showed a basic problem, damage isn't exactly a complicated thing compared to what a lot of other classes do but it can still be easy to screw up, and when it goes wrong here it can get worse in other areas. I'll get into the problem of things feeling identical and some of the other issues from the role system in later posts.

Time in Preparation versus TIme in Play

I mentioned in my previous post an issue that I had, dragons were one example but it was frequently found with just about any monster that was in mid paragon tier to epic tier. While putting the encounter together was relatively easy, if a bit time consuming if the person running had to copy or type up the monsters stats, the encounters themselves required a hell of a lot more attention and probably more than a few pauses as you tried to figure out what was triggered and anything else that happened. This got progressively worse as you went up in levels, I was actually sorely tempted to shell out an extra 15 bucks a month to Wizards of the Coast for the D&D insider stuff because they had been promising a digital battlemat that a DM could use that would also let me see the ranges for abilities marked on the board as things moved and would actually let me know what went on, even track and calculate damage, ability recharges, and if anything would get triggered. The feature was never implemented for reasons I won't get into her, but had it been done I might have put the money down for it just because I was having so much trouble.

One of the big selling points of fourth edition was supposed to be that it was easier to run and that encounters were quicker to set up and use. This was sort of true but it kind of glossed over a few things. Encounters in heroic tier were in fact fairly quick and easy to run as well as set up, I kind of think heroic tier got the most playtesting and study because of that and it also avoided the HP inflation problems. Encounters above that had problems both in terms of tracking everything and having to stop combats or interrupt turns because they had triggered something, entered an aura, or something similar. The other thing ignored is that unless you typed up the statblocks of the stuff you were using you had to keep hopping around in monster manuals which broke flow and was more likely to make you forget things, and given all the abilities and features there were times where typing up a single regular encounter (where I made NO modification to the monsters) took more time than me building and modifying a 'big' opponent like a dragon or high level spellcaster, and it was also much more tedious since I was just copying things from a book rather than playing with abilities and actually designing something.

A bit older and wiser, a bit more experienced with games and systems and I would have to say that if I have to choose between having to spend more time preparing an encounter or having clunky and issue laden encounters when running I will take having to take more time to prepare almost every time. There are a few reasons for this, the biggest being simply that I have a hell of a lot more time to prepare than I do to play. Unless I am a professional game master (IE I'm being paid to run games and am doing it 5 days a week for 6-8 hours a day) I am probably only running games once a week. Even with a job you can usually take a few minutes each day to mess with a monster or tweak things. Conversely most groups probably only play for about 4 hours, maybe 6 and even then they probably don't game for the full duration of that and if I have to keep halting or dealing with issues during combats it means that the game is bogged down and less progress is made. Part of it is this, I have more time to prep than I do to play and when the game bogs down it's not just my time it's the time of everyone at the table.

The other thing is that prep work gets easier and quicker over time due to familiarity, if you have to choose spells there are probably some you use frequently and can simply put in from memory. The same can be said somewhat of things during encounters but that has more to do with remembering what the triggers and area sizes are constantly, and unless the monsters in question are used a lot it's less likely to be easily memorable. Also a lot of the prep work can help familiarize a game master with the system in question, if only in seeing how things like magic systems, special abilities and things like that work and how they interact with other things.

It can also help keep encounters relatively distinct, so that it doesn't feel like you're doing a retread every time you use a certain monster or classed enemy. You can do more to tweak the monsters, alter spell selections or change powers and generally make the creatures feel more unique. It's good for the players because it means they are less likely to get bored and it means that the encounters you make can be adjusted and reused if you end up a bit short on time without feeling like a rerun.

There's another element in this as well about using multiple monsters, this can almost be its own thing but I'll try to stick to the topic at hand. A lot of encounters will have more than one big honkin monster and as mentioned at mid to high levels there is a lot to keep track of on one monster. For groups of them it can be a nightmare, yes, in theory you can keep it all tracked on notes but a lot of them have auras and other trigger effects or things that happened if they became injured. It almost feels like they felt they could get away with doing this because, hey, you usually didn't have to do any special work before the game putting the encounters together, or not very much so it was fine to overload the monsters with all these features. The thing was that at least with prep work it's more like a learning curve, it is initially difficult but the stuff you're working with is fairly simple and you'll be reusing a lot of it as you go through the game. With the other system it should be better in theory, simple stuff at first with more complexities added, the problem is that you tend to get whole boatloads of effects at once around the same time for many different creatures rather than a nice gradual increase and not much of it is similar so it's hard to generalize stuff you learn from one encounter to the next.

I speak on this as someone who mostly runs games. Though I would like to hear what others out there think..and if I have any readers. Comments on this would be most appreciated, thanks.

Declining of Dragons

As those who know me personally, and those who see my profile can guess, I am a big fan of dragons. Dragons to me represent a lot of cool things and they're great in a lot of fantasy games because they can be powerful enemies, dangerous masterminds, knowledgeable oracles, puissant allies, you get the idea. In the fantasy role playing game that most people know, Dungeons and Dragons, the Dragon is one of the most dangerous opponents you can fight. They have thick armored scales, razor sharp claws and teeth, they hit like trucks, their breath is charged with elemental energy, the oldest dragons can shrug off all but the most heavily enchanted weapons and of course there's the fact that they can also use magic. The magic thing was probably one of the more interesting things with dragons as monsters, spells offer all kinds of variables and interesting options, it also meant that you could theoretically fight a full string of red dragons and the fights might be radically different in theme and feel based almost entirely on the spell list held by each dragon. Now for some people it was an issue, dragons could theoretically end up more powerful than listed because of a great spell selection or the person running might forget to use them, you get the idea. I mention this because of what they did for fourth edition D&D.

4th edition changed a lot of things, for one thing the vancian magic system was dropped. The vancian system being a setup where you had slots for spells that were expended in casting along with levels of power for different spells. This also meant that dragons no longer used magic, they followed the same format as the other monsters, this was both good and bad. The good was that they were easier to use and required less prep time. But there were two problems that came from this, well I'd almost argue three but some of it is my own bias and not really what I would say a system problem is.

The first problem was that the dragons got very samey, in that while dragons did vary color to color in terms of abilities and tactics one red dragon was more or less identical to another, they did add some stuff in their Dragonomicon supplements but things still felt fairly identical. The issue is that if the fights start feeling similar it's harder to stay engaged in the game and the story. Not to mention that the changes between the dragons in terms of age category (the older dragons get the stronger they get) was really fairly incremental. I understand that that's part of how the system works but it also meant that facing dragons through age categories didn't become inherently more threatening so much as it felt more like they were slightly bigger and maybe hit a bit harder, though once or twice getting a new power.

The second problem was a combination of how the dragons got stronger and again an issue with how monsters were designed. If you get a chance to look through monster manuals, (the first through the third one at least since my group more or less dropped the game before MM4 so I can't speak on it), the monsters at mid paragon tier and up level get craploads of extra effects. Not even attack exactly but constant effects, energy auras, things that kick in when they hit half HP, recharge effects, random reaction powers, their standard stuff, synergy effects, etc. The problem with this for me was that while yes, in theory a fight was easier and faster to prepare and design it took a hell of a lot longer to run and was harder to track. I had to keep reminding myself of how big an aura was so that if a monster moved or if a player did I could figure out if there were going to be things kicking in. I had to watch player positions because some monsters, dragons especially, had things talking about what happens if a player is in one place or another, IE player goes behind dragon, dragon automatically smacks with tail, forcibly moves player, and maybe adds a status effect. It meant that I had a much harder time keeping track of abilities and effects, I had players getting angry with me for not explaining something completely but I was trying to track everything and more than once had to pause or I had missed things that were supposed to happen because I was tracking other stuff. There were a few exceptions, the Cobalt Dragon from the second Dragonomicon was actually fairly tightly designed and also a fun monster as an encounter but sadly it seemed to be an aberration as far as that went.

What makes this funny/enraging to me is that back when I ran 3rd edition I had a much easier time running encounters than I did in 4th. I will concede that some of it was experience but that wasn't it alone and when I thought about it I realized why. When I built an encounter in 3rd edition many times I had either spellcasters or I had monsters that could use magic for high level stuff, and in many cases they started the fight with a lot of their magic already in use. They would cast self buff spells, conjure allies or other things. I could write down what the bonuses were and just mark what each thing was from, if someone could strip the buffs off, fine, if not then the stuff was listed there. What it meant was that while I did have to do a bit more work and take a bit more time designing the encounter it didn't take any longer to run or use in the actual battle. It also helped in other ways, spells are beautifully versatile and I can just play with the spell list a bit to change the feel and flavor in a combat as well as alter how the encounters work. Overall it meant that they could theoretically face 50 clerics of about the same level and each fight could be radically different. I'll wrap this up before I go on a full off topic tear but I'd say that it's a lot better to have to take a bit longer to design an encounter than it is to have to keep halting and pausing because you need to double check effects and interactions.

The third problem, and as I said before this is a personal thing rather than a direct problem in the system, is that dragons were demoted to being just another monster. I'll try to explain that in a way that makes sense, Dragons are supposed to be pretty damn powerful, but more than that, in 3rd edition they were best looked at as a kind of super character class, magic, highest base attack, best saves, along with a plethora of abilities, resistances and immunities. Dragons had a kind of majesty to them, and had enough built in options and versatility that dragons could be as varied as the player characters were, possibly even moreso. Because 4th edition is much more tightly structured the dragons were simply another solo monster, they might have been a bit tougher than the other solo monsters at their tier but they still didn't have the same level of oomph or majesty. I will say that a lot of it comes from the mechanics of the system but I am not going to call it a flaw of the system, more a side effect. I know people might have similar views on certain classes or maybe favorite monsters and while the systems format might make them stronger/weaker/whatever than they think the thing in question should be that's more an area of personal taste than a system hiccup.

The other thing in this, again a part of the system, was that dragons went down more or less the same way any other monster did. Back in the old days, I can't believe I'm saying that at my age, beating a dragon quickly normally was either a result of extreme luck or a lot of careful preparation assuming both sides are competent and the encounter is roughly level appropriate. In terms of luck it might be a series of lucky high damage critical hits, maybe the DM can't roll very well, but it comes down more to the players performing feats far above normal expectations, however this is still pretty good so long as it doesn't cause an anticlimax though plenty of groups might just enjoy it for the amusement factor. Careful preparation is a bit more common, the group tries to figure out what they can about the dragon, the color type indicates elemental strengths and weaknesses, the age helps determine size and power as well as hypothetically how potent the magic it can wield is as well as what sort of weapons or tactics might be needed. The other part of the preparation is using spells and consumable items (potions, scrolls, etc.) before the battle, IE you are also consuming a good chunk of resources to fight said dragon and make yourself really powerful against it. In this case they can probably overpower the dragon as well fairly quickly but they had to put a lot of work and resources into it which again is fairly reasonable. This level of planning is somewhat less necessary for other types of monsters barring things like titans, major demons and such, though they also don't have the full versatility either. Conversely in 4th edition the players can just charge in unprepared and the fight will be the same as against any other creature of about that level, though you can't really do out of combat preparations in 4th edition nor are there really many consumable items and such.

I guess some of this is my little lament about how dragons seemed to kind of decline. But also it's this, Dragons are in many ways the iconic fantasy monster, they're the big enemy, a symbol of fantasy. And I think in some ways the way that the dragons are portrayed and used can tell a bit about the game you're in, but that's just me.

Hitpoints and Damage scaling in 4th edition

Fourth edition had flaws, maybe one of the biggest areas had to do with the problem of hitpoint and damage scaling. I mentioned that one thing that had worked nicely was that the monsters at the early levels of play could threaten players, but likely wouldn’t kill them outright unless they were foolish or very unlucky. I believe in gameplay that early levels are sort of a time for training wheels, when you should be able to learn the abilities of your character and have some room to make rookie mistakes and learn the ropes. Earlier editions of D&D had it where you could die from a single strike from a blade at low levels, while this can heighten tension it also means that a bad initiative roll can wipe out a whole group before they even get to act. Fourth edition fixed this nicely, a decent sized pile of hitpoints at the beginning with a slow fixed amount gained at each level, it also helped equalize encounters since randomly rolled HP could either doom a player or make them practically impregnable depending how long they sat on one side or another of the luck curve for rolls.

While the system worked well in fourth edition it started falling apart after heroic tier, becoming damn near absurd in the epic tier. The problem was twofold on the monster angle, the first was that their hitpoints grew in great leaps and bounds but their damage refused to grow properly with it. This meant that after level 12-14 the fights began to turn into obnoxious slogs. Part of that was also that the amount of damage dealt by the monsters was fairly low compared to what the players had. While I get that this might have been built around the concept that they would deal more damage overall since they could last longer it didn’t really work out that way. I have described the experience as being something closer to trying to peel a really big potato while it occasionally pokes you with a toothpick rather than fighting a dangerous opponent. This made designing and running fights annoying, in many cases the players had functionally won the battle but their opponents were still fairly alive, so I could either simply declare a battle over with there still being a fair amount of creatures on the board or I could run the battle for another half hour. Despite being touted as being faster and more streamlined at higher levels this proved to be false, at least without some kind of aid, I took much longer building and running encounters than I did frequently in third edition.

Fourth edition had managed to mostly rid the game of rocket tag, where monsters and characters would fire off their biggest ability and try to devastate and destroy. This was good in that in theory battles would require more work and thought as well as more teamwork, discouraging lone wolf behavior. Unfortunately what was created in its place might be described as two sumo wrestlers wrapped in pillow armor trying to fight. Battles became annoying at best and frustrating at worst, the only types of monsters that could produce proper levels of damage were solo monsters and those weren’t really meant for constant back to back use. Part of the problem that came with this also is that battles got boring, players weren’t threatened by the monsters and the battles got to be repetitive and the players lost some of the investment. One of my favorite examples from the books is the printed statblock for Orcus, demon prince of the undead. Orcus had well over one thousand hitpoints, however Orcus didn’t really have a whole lot that threatened physically. Yes, he could probably kill at least one character in the party but it wasn’t of the level of threat that one would expect from the mighty demon prince of the undead. They did upgrade him a fair amount in a later published adventure, but in some ways that’s almost worse in that they had to almost entirely rebuild him to make him viable in any ways or means.

The other area where it got weird was that players hitpoints were more stable in increases but only solo monsters were able to take appreciable bites out of their hitpoints and even then it wasn’t always a sure thing. As mentioned before this makes the fights a lot less intense when those involved are able to take dozens or hundreds of hits before going down. While I sort of get the idea that was being pushed, players were supposed to be tougher and battles could last longer as well as more battles occurring during a day, it also gets hard to feel threatened when huge monsters can’t seem to land a reasonable blow on you. Some of the sense of fun in a game comes from there being difficulty, the problem wasn’t so much that the fights were too easy to win but that they were too hard to lose. While they sound similar it’s not really the same, it’s one thing where a fight is balanced somewhat towards the players but still has them at risk where they are likely to win but might end up with one or more characters badly injured or requiring some sort of expenditure of resources. In this version the players were usually able to strike down targets with fairly high speed and ability with relatively little sacrifice, it got worse when there were multiple leaders, IE those who could heal.

What it ultimately boils down to was that both sides had so many hitpoints relative to damage dealt that fights went on past tedium and the players weren’t especially threatened by monsters, not even the larger more potent creatures like dragons. This wasn’t the biggest problem in the game by itself though it was one of the biggest. The problem itself was a piece of what made my group walk away from the game but there’s more coming on that front.

4th Editions good points

I’m going to be a bit rough on 4th edition and while plenty of people are likely to agree that it deserves some of the lumps it’s getting it also needs to be pointed out that they actually did do some things very right. Some of them aren’t necessarily ideal for all games but they were improvements or at least worthwhile ideas. I’ll try to cover each of them and explain where I think things went well and where…well where they kind of screwed up. The main point of this though is that because I have seen a lot of examples of people strongly disliking 4th edition the goal here is to provide a kind of counter as well as try to give a more balanced take on what worked and what didn’t and trying to figure out why. Now I stress that pretty much all of this is opinion but I will explain my views as much as I can on each.

One idea that was a major winner in my view was the change they made to hitpoints. Just to clarify hitpoints were an abstraction showing how much damage you could take before you died. In the earlier games you started out small, especially if you were an arcane spellcaster, and in many cases even if you were incredibly hardy one good sword hit could knock you out or even kill you. The main issue I have with this is that it wasn’t a matter of doing something stupid and dying, it was a stray shot killing someone who had just started. It was making a situation where you could easily go through two or three characters in one night at low levels, especially at first through third level. The issue with this is threefold. First, new players were likely to experience a great deal of frustration, losing one character let alone two or more could make them wonder what the point is (and I am mostly using D&D as the example here, I know some games with very fast generation can allow for instant generation and thus death is less an issue). Second is that when starting the game a player is, at least in theory, learning their characters abilities and the rules of the game at low levels the game should have some form of training wheels be it more durability, comparatively fast recovery or something in that nature. Third was simply that it meant that the players weren’t constantly outnumbering each enemy they faced, IE four people to kill an orc or goblin creatures not exactly known for their supreme power.

Greater hitpoints meant that a player could handle attacks from a few more creatures, it also meant that they had time to try to get a handle on their abilities. They could learn about what their class did, what the others in the group were capable of, and figure out how to use abilities together. Part of it was also that hitpoints were gained more slowly, a flat small amount each level rather than wild swings as levels progressed. It made it easier to balance and build encounters on the designers end as well as helping things on the playing end. An encounter could exist where the players were outnumbered and not end with their characters all dead. It also meant that the players could be a bit more daring, stupidity would likely still end up with a dead or badly injured character but now they were unlikely to lose one simply due to one bit of bad luck or a rookie mistake.

The second improvement would be in the reintroduction of the roles system. I say reintroduction because in a lot of ways what they did was simply put in a more codified version of what we had back at the start of the game ‘Fighter, Thief, Magic User, Cleric’ or ‘Defender, Striker, Controller, Leader.’ The role system caught a lot of flack, claiming that it was ‘video gamey’ but the truth is that most games, at least many fantasy ones, run with the idea of a class focused on damage, a class focused on being ‘tough’ a class that heals and probably some skill classes or AoE ones. The concept of roles existed but either weren’t as codified or weren’t set in stone. The role system allowed for a few things, from a design standpoint it helped benchmark class abilities and figure out if something seemed too high or low since they had a clear set of parameters to test it against. From a playing standpoint, well it helped to know what the class was meant to do, in 3rd edition there were classes that I seriously had no bloody clue what they were meant to do because their design felt off, a class with full armor proficiency and full weapon proficiency and yet with the same attack bonus as a primary caster is a class that seems like the designers weren’t really thinking or at least weren’t considering how such a design looked. In some cases a class was made that was interesting but didn’t seem to have a hint as to what it was meant to do or how it worked in a group.

It also did help to avoid a problem that seems to come up frequently with classes that do the hybrid thing or ‘jack of all trades master of none’ schtick. The idea of a jack of all trades kind of class is nice in theory but in practice they will usually run into one of two walls. In one case their abilities are spread too thin to be anything more than middling in any area, if you have to take over for a teammate that falls you can’t really duplicate their skills in that role or you often just find yourself outperformed in everything. The other side of it is when a class is too potent, say 75% ability in a few roles of a base class coupled with synergy and while they might not be as good at X as the class focused on it they’re close enough and bring other things to the table so that the non hybrid ends up being worse in comparison. It can be a tricky balance and it often either falls into over or under power. There is also the fact that it can be hard to objectively determine balance when clear roles aren’t established and many classes can perform multiple roles, in some cases they can do it nearly simultaneously.

I also give them partial credit for making the monsters more interesting, or maybe it’s more accurate to say making the battles work more cleanly. At low levels players could face swarms of enemies, the minion rules and higher starting hitpoints made things like goblins and orcs a threat and it wasn’t a situation where you needed four people to kill one of them. The battles felt more interesting, the players felt stronger and scope of the campaign felt more epic. Also the idea of having monsters in different style categories similar to player roles helped new DMs design encounters and things like Elite and Solo monsters also helped people set up fights with a clearer concept of scale and threat.

They also did manage to make good on the promise of greatly reducing dependency on magic items. Bonuses to hit and damage and various things provided by items were often less important than player abilities and powers and I actually think that this was a fairly good thing. That being said, the changes did help make it so that you were no longer a set of items wearing a character for some of the classes, now the magic items while useful were no longer the defining characteristics.

In later posts I will point out flaws and issues and why my group walked away from 4th. Some of their initial plans went haywire and some things went wonky, but at the very least 4th edition did some good things and I feel they should be mentioned first.

To 4th Edition

I'm going to be taking a break from Deadlands for a while, I intend to focus on D&D in its various iterations. My plan is to begin with 4th edition, both because it's the current one and also because frankly it's a fairly divisive edition and I want to offer thoughts on both sides of it. Now I will begin by saying that while I have played it my group does not use it any more. The reasons will be explained later, that being said, I do not think it is a BAD system per se but that its format does not work for me or my players in many respects. I will go into further detail in the future, hope you all enjoy it however many are reading it.

Horror in Role Playing Games

I will start this out simply, I have a great deal of respect for people who run horror games that are genuinely scary, the same to those who can make video games and the like that are genuinely creepy. I say this starting out because my topic for today is the difficulty in running a horror based game and especially in terms of trying to create one. Horror games, at least in my view, have several main issues that can often gum up the works in terms of delivering a good scare.

The first is simply whoever is running the game. I have said before and will say again, I SUCK at running horror games, maybe it’s just not my personality but I have a hard time making it work. I have been able to creep my players out occasionally but really these were the exceptions not the rule. While I recognize the truth that any system has to depend heavily on the person running it does mean that horror can be very difficult because some people are going to have a harder time than others. The second part which dovetails is the players and some groups are hard to properly creep. Again, while I admit that I suck at horror I also have a fairly jaded group of players, if they saw cthulhu they’d be more likely to walk up and shake his hand or say hello than to run in panic, but meh.

The third thing is somewhat a consequence of how the system is organized, but I think it was explained best by Ben ‘Yathzee’ Croshaw of Zero Punctuation, heavy ordinance does wonders for keeping fear at bay. This is simply to say that when players are able to reasonably threaten the various horrors of the night said horrors are a bit less scary. Some of it is simply that the danger is somewhat more abstract, while said entity might be able to hurt their characters it can also be hurt. Having a means to make the thing blink is a fairly potent security blanket and can appreciably cut down on the horror.

That being said the other way can also be a problem. Make something totally invincible and it might not elicit horror but instead either frustration or exasperation. Being totally unable to deal with something can end up creating apathy, if the players can’t do anything then they’re more likely throw up their hands if they experience it and say ‘well, that was fun’ or something more colorful and less printable. Horror requires something that might be possibly beatable but it would either be difficult or it has to represent something complex.

I think a part of it comes down to how the systems are designed but also the mindset of those involved. Fear comes from a lack of understanding but also out of a belief that the unknown thing can harm you. Suspense and tension are helpful in this but there is also the helpful element of things not feeling quite right. Horror can sometimes be achieved by having a mechanical tie, sanity checks from games like Call of Cthulhu or the guts checks in Deadlands are all good examples of things that impede a character through terror or minds falling apart. These things are bad and while they might not ‘scare’ the player they are likely to at least make them feel uneasy or nervous.

As to system design, just the way the game is weighted can do a lot to create or impede horror. Heroic systems like d20 are probably going to have to depend more on the person running than say a game like Call of Cthulhu by the nature of the systems and the mindests of the games. Games where things scale more in the players favor and bonuses to saves are easier to acquire things are likely more to lean in their favor. That being said there are other examples too, Dark Heresy is another interesting horror game that managed to sit between a heroic game and a true horror game, I hope to get into that one in the future.

I want to know what others think though, anyone out there that wants to mention their own ideas of what makes horror work in a video game are welcome to chime in. I hope to hear from people.

Weird vs. Wasted

One thing that I have been doing a lot of lately, and here at the keep, is look at the similarities and differences between Weird and Wasted west. One thing that is probably inevitable from all of this is the question of which one I prefer, and I’ll try to answer that but I will also be putting in qualifiers. When I talk about this it should be noted that both are actually very good and enjoyable and that there is a bit of unfairness in the judgement as Wasted West had a bit of time to learn from Weird West and some of the mistakes or hiccups there. In doing my comparisons and comments I will attempt to be as fair as I can, however I will admit that I have a fairly strong preference for Wasted West over Weird and I hope here to explain why.

One of the biggest reasons that I found Wasted West to work better was that by and large they removed the ‘muggle problem’ that existed in weird west. What I mean is that using the powers of an arcane background in a town was likely to get the people to think you were a witch or monster and thus needed to die. The exceptions for this were mostly the blessed and mad scientists though those weren’t always safe bets either depending on the communities temperaments. In Wasted West supernatural abilities are a bit more widely known, trying to assault a town is likely to get you kicked in the teeth by angry townsfolk merely using the powers isn’t going to get you forcefed into a wood chipper merely for using the power in front of the locals. One of the reasons for this is probably that most people have seen undead, many people have seen or heard about the four horsemen of the apocalypse literally RIDING ACROSS THE UNITED STATES CALIFORNIA TO THE EAST. Ahem, yes as you can see the supernatural is a bit more widely understood and accepted, not to mention things like Psykers being a part of the old militaries as well as cyborgs (more on those later). In essence people might have attitudes on various arcane backgrounds or have rumors but merely using them won’t get the townspeople to either faint dead away or turn green.

I understand that part of the reason for this is a bit of the thematics, in Weird West the people weren’t supposed to know that all this stuff was going on, showing that magic existed was likely to cause panics and havoc. But it also created some problematic situations as well as being a source of some of the imbalance between arcane backgrounds. I guess some of it is also that I prefer not having to have a great big book of euphemisms when I run for the players and the few NPCs in the know to use and/or having to figure out what each side is trying to imply when the group is trying to work out how much the town sheriff or local heroes know about the more… bizarre happenings. The other reason I prefer it is on some level I think that in a lot of ways the masquerade seemed almost to just be window dressing. A good enough stealth or bluff check could let you hide what your hands were doing for hucksters, Shootists (a later introduced arcane background) only had the guns spark or look interesting which is easily covered by mad science, and as for the blessed…well they can just take unnoticeable always on abilities and even if their powers are noticed people figure you’re just righteous and a servant of (insert deity/philosophical principles here). Not to mention that if a monster/cultist/whatever decides to be more overt in an attack on a town rather than just nipping at the edges, or goes for it as a climax half the time the only way to hurt it necessitates using arcane powers which might be why later stuff seems to downplay odd appearances.

The Arcane Backgrounds are also an improvement in a lot of ways too, I brought some of this up in my earlier post when I talked about some of the best and worst arcane backgrounds but I want to go into a bit more detail here. One of the biggest changes was the near universal adoption of the Strain mechanic among the various Arcane Backgrounds, essentially getting rid of a lot of appeasement points and the like and instead simply using strain. This change was big for a few reasons, one was that it made a clear limit to how many times you could use your abilities, strain could be recovered through rest or other means depending on the arcane background but now you didn’t have people able to use their abilities nigh continuously back to back as the Blessed and Hucksters were able to do, the latter only having to worry about backlash. The powers were more codified, you could pump in more strain for greater effects in a few cases and the better a power was the more strain it required but the powers were more in line with one another, less wild and prone to surges of luck. The powers and abilities were also more focused.

Doomsayers abilities were mostly blasting and energy based with a few exceptions, and had a strong theme of radiation and mutation. Doomsayers could develop any power in the base book easily enough through spending bounty points, the ones in supplements required a teacher or an area with radiation so severe that it might kill you, and in the latter there was still a chance that you might not learn the power but still lose the bounty points. Psykers were a bit more versatile, but they had to pick a discipline, they could easily learn any power in that discipline but learning others required teaching machines, training manuals or another psyker, all of this besides spending bounty points to learn powers. Toxic shamans learned from their spirit servants, and their powers were based on the various toxic spheres. Junkers, Templars and Witches were the three arcane backgrounds that went without Strain but instead had other limitations. Junkers needed parts to build their wonders and usually needed G-rays to power them which meant having to find ghost rock. Templars had primarily self only powers that were on constantly but their powers took a lot of work to raise and their one healing ability could only be used once per person per day. Witches were fairly underdeveloped but their concept was using materials to cast spells or work magic, love potions for example or finding baseballs and human skulls to be focuses for spell blasts.

By and large while the backgrounds were still pretty darn potent their limitations both in terms of sustained usage and versatility meant that it was easier or at least more workable for a mundane person to keep pace with them in a game. It could still be imperfect but the elements here did help the arcane backgrounds be more balanced against one another as well as helping make sure that the regular mortals still had practical use and a place in the group as a whole. Weird west did have this as well, but as mentioned in the comments a while back higher point levels things would swing more and more heavily to those with arcane backgrounds for varying reasons.

One other thing that I found useful was that the offense/defense ratios can scale a bit more cleanly than they do in Wasted. In Weird west a player that pours enough starting points into resources (5 points into belongin’s) can have body armor strong enough that it ignores small arms fire and can even let the wearer shrug off a shotgun slug with relatively little consequence, not to mention some nice weaponry and other defensive items. This is somewhat countered by the fact that the items are made by mad science, so they have to have their reliability tested each time they’re hit but it is fairly unlikely to kaput. Armor piercing weaponry is comparatively uncommon, and even what’s there is all mad science, subject to reliability rolls and the ammo that can punch through armor is only going to ignore one layer of armor, for regular guns it won’t work to punch through and for shotguns it only makes them a little better. In Wasted purchasable body armor that players could purchase at character creation were set up in such a way that against normal small arms a player could probably walk away fairly safe, however the minute armor piercing ammunition entered the fray much of it was negated. Armor piercing ammunition was also now ‘standard’ meaning that they didn’t need to worry about reliability and the cost for such ammunition was low enough that it was fairly easily attainable, and ubiquity among various enemies is reasonable.

Heavier armor, stuff that approached what was in Weird West, would either have to be temporarily conjured through the power of an arcane background, created by a junker, or would have to be one of the very expensive suits of power armor. The ones created through Arcane Backgrounds required spending energy to maintain, leaving them somewhat questionable for duration as well as meaning that they couldn’t do other things while the defensive field was up, or in the case of the psyker that an armor piercing bullet just tears straight through it. Junker built armor has to deal with stability rolls, it is also ridiculously heavy, even relatively low armor levels were fairly hard to lug around, a Junker that rolled ridiculously well MIGHT have been able to make a fairly potent lightweight suit of armor but there is still the issue of reliability making your suit fall apart, vanish, go flying around, vanish and leave a giant demon next to you…(the junker mishap table is odd). The third option was a suit of power armor, this was pretty damn expensive, either you poured just about all your starting points into a suit or you were a Veteran of the wasted west and had to deal with the table (and even then you had to spend a ton of points to get the suit). The power armor had some issues as well, it had excellent armor, weapons systems and even muscle and speed boosters but it also required a source of energy to recharge, as they tear through power quickly and recharging them is fairly hard. There was also the fact that the suits could get torn up pretty well, wounds meant that the armor was also damaged, so you had to spend a lot of the fate chips that would become XP in keeping yourself from being injured and the armor from getting wrecked, slowing your character advancement.

Related to armor scaling there is also the fact that it’s harder for the players to reach untouchable status. What I mean by untouchable is this, in my weird west game I had actually gotten to a point where non-supernatural opponents were practically pointless to put up against the group. The reasons were that simply put normal armaments couldn’t threaten them due to body armor and the fact that it also felt odd sending people who had dealt with a werewolf cult attacking a town, managed to fend off Stone twice, and do several other things against regular criminals. I could do things like load up bandits in mad science body armor and other gear, but given the expenses it feels a bit ridiculous if it happens more than once or twice. There are ways around it, maybe the group is backed by a mad scientist, that sort of works but mad scientists need labs and work areas as well as parts. The same sort of thing can happen with Arcane Backgrounds, there are times where it can work but there are a lot of situations where it ends up rather iffy. Supernatural opponents offer more consistent threat to established groups while more mundane ones are more likely to simply get overwhelmed and wiped out. I am however willing to admit that some of this might have also just been a mental block on my part so I am willing to concede that more of it might be me than the game.

In Wasted there are a few ways that threats can scale a bit more reasonably with your group. One thing is simply that mundane guns hit harder and mundane armor isn’t quite as heavy but it can be more common so road gangs with infantry battlesuits or kevlar vests aren’t out of the question. Junkers are another handy thing on this front, in my view junkers are a gift to marshals because in addition to being able to produce some fun and potent tech they also don’t need workstations or big labs to do their thing, so junkers backing road gangs or warlords are quite reasonable, they even reference that sort of thing in some of the books. There is also the handy fact that many of the basic military weapons pack quite a wallop, giving them to a group of normal enemies can still make the players keep their heads down. One other thing is a bit more subtle, I actually missed it when I first thought about it. The walkin’ dead in weird west started to lose effectiveness after a certain point in the game, even the veteran walkin’ dead with guns still had trouble making more experienced players worried, especially since the zombies went through chips like water if they didn’t just get their melons popped immediately. In wasted west the veteran undead, the zombies from soldiers, are now wearing body armor and thick helmets, wielding machine guns with grenade launchers. To be blunt they are a fair amount more threatening, not all of them need to have the full battle armor or grenades, but the fact that they can have it, or other military equipment, makes them far harder to kill and suddenly a lot more threatening to a group of people wandering through a battlefield digging for salvage.

Some of the things in the game can be used with less work on the marshals part, the two big evil armies, Silas Rasmussens Mutant Hordes and the mechanized legions of the Combine. With the mutant hordes there are the evil doomsayers with their radiation powers as well as large groups of aggressive mutants with other abilities, and the radiation priests are while not exactly ubiquitous at least common enough to be usable in decent numbers without feeling strange. With the combine, the standard troops have fairly effective guns as well as the automatons and other advanced tech bots and cyborgs, also giving you space to create bizarre technology to give them to wield against the players. These groups fit in the wastes, they represent the mutant apocalypse or machine uprising popular in post apocalyptic fiction and can actually be faced by the players in different ways. They can be occaisional nuisances that might be run into at towns, in ruins, etc. They can be used as a growing nemesis, telling a story of a dark tyrant wanting to remake the shattered world in their own image, they are a well placed tool for a marshal and their abilities and arsenals make them workable and useful with minimal modification at many different junctures in the game.

I should also though point out that a lot of this has to do with the kind of games that I prefer running and playing in. I like more pulpy action games. A game that is more based in mystery would find an easier home in the Weird West, not to mention my view that horror is probably easier to produce in that version as well. Wasted west can also be a lot more goofy in some regards, killer tomatoes, head cases, robotic killer clowns, while these can be interesting and fun opponents they can also be rather silly for a lot of people and there are plenty who would argue that they don’t belong in Deadlands. I should also point out that Wasted West can easily be considered a more high powered game, so if you prefer lower powered games Weird West might be more for you. I should also bring up the mutation table, mutations themselves are really almost a mini arcane background, though they can make you weak just as easily as making you potent. The standard mutations from the books as well as the major ones from a later supplement could alter the person using it heavily, at best augmenting their physical stats or granting them improved healing or a few special abilities, at worst physical weakness, disgusting appearance, fraility etc. Major mutations were even more severe in swings, a bad pull from the deck could turn you into a giant slug where a good one could give you levels of armor, the ability to regenerate limbs, etc. The mutations can offer incredible things, some made strain recovery easy so long as things died around you for example. I could easily see players either crippled by their mutations or greatly augmented, which also means that some players might just throw their characters into radstorms to try to get a mutation to make themselves better at something. I can see some marshals getting uneasy about the mutation feature and wondering about power balance. I also want it to be understood that while I do find a lot of things in Wasted West to be an improvement I definitely enjoy Weird West and would easily recommend either.

Arcane Background Reviews, Weird and Wasted

Ah Deadlands, a game that my group recently picked up and had a fair amount of fun with. The game is a steampunk western game set during an extended civil war where zombies talk the earth and there is all kinds of supernatural evil afoot. Overall it’s actually a good game, but there are some issues in the system. One of them has to do with the arcane backgrounds. Arcane backgrounds are somewhat like classes, the edges let you pick up certain abilities, and some of these were pretty cool but some of them…well let’s just say there were issues. Two of the big ones in my view would be the Mad Scientist and the Shaman.

The reason that I pick these two out has to do with my own experiences in game, as well as their counterparts in the later released Wasted West (which does show they learned from some of their mistakes). Now I should start out by saying that one of the things I really did like about Deadlands was that the Arcane Backgrounds in weird west Deadlands felt very distinct. Each one had its own mechanics and feel, my favorite among them being the huckster. But there were problems in each that do need to be brought up. I ran a Deadlands game for a group of players who are fairly good at finding mechanical flaws as well as quite creative. The Shaman is the one that all of us came to agree was a problem and for similar reasons so I’ll begin with that.

The basic idea behind the shaman is actually an interesting one. The shaman can potentially do just about anything, they can call lightning from the sky, become inhumanly powerful warriors, cause earthquakes, heal, etc. If it was possible a shaman could probably do it. The problem came from the mechanics involved; see the shaman had one of the clunkier systems for getting their powers to work as well as being probably the most resource intensive at character creation. The way it worked was that the shaman had to do things like dance, sing, produce music, sacrifice of their bodies, sacrifice animals, fast, make sand paintings, put on war paint, or do any number of other things to produce ‘appeasement points’. Appeasement points were spent to call for favors from the spirits, the problem was that you rarely got a lot of appeasement points and there were no rules for holding onto them until later stuff was added so you had to use them immediately. At best it meant you could buff up before a big fight if you were aware and had time, at worst it meant that a lot of your best stuff wouldn’t see use during fights. That wasn’t even the worst part, shamans also had to make rolls to use the favors of the spirits aside from spending appeasement points, and apparently the spirits are bitchy little bastards because when you tried casting the same favor more than once the number you had to roll to make it work (and in some cases the appeasement points you had to spend) climbed.

That sort of thing is obnoxious enough, but it got even worse with how they tried to fix it. In the supplement book Ghost Dancers they tried to find ways to make being a shaman easier, and I will admit that they probably didn’t want to forcibly rewrite the whole thing from the ground up (though they did pretty much do that with Martial Artists and Junkers) so they tried to figure out how to make it easier. What they did was divide the favors into different categories of medicine, they also added in a new edge called ‘guardian spirit’ it let you store some appeasement points and also gave you bonuses if you spent fate chips. Not a bad start, and each of the spirits was tied to a type of medicine, so if you spent an appeasement point for the type of medicine it now counted as 2 instead of 1. This was coupled with various relics and items that you could purchase during character creation (equivalent to various levels of the belongin’s edge) that were tied to specific types of medicine or particular favors so you could theoretically get a lot of mileage out of fewer appeasement points as well as being able to pull off some pretty nice effects. The problem was that this band-aid still left a fair number of things to be desired. One of them was this, assuming you took the full number of available flaws you had 10 points to build with, 3 points are needed to be a shaman, 5 points are needed for the guardian spirit, this leaves you with 2 points. You could take Veteran of the Weird west, that nets you another 15 so you can get some shaman relics and maybe something else independently but you’re still eating up a TON of starting character points for what boils down to being able to MATCH the other arcane backgrounds. Not to mention that Veteran of the Weird West means you have to risk what the deck of fate can throw at you, some are fairly minor (ugliness, an enemy) some are rather severe (can’t sped fate chips to negate wounds or recover wind, can’t be positively affected by the powers of blessed or shamans, infested by Gremlins) so it’s kind of a crapshoot.

They also still faced the problem of having to take hours, or in some cases days, to gather up appeasement points before doing something big or calling down some of their stuff either because they still had trouble affording some of the booster items or because they need more than the 5 appeasement points that their spirit guardian holds or they plan to spend it on something other than that guardians sphere. This meant that the shaman had to hope they would get some kind of advanced warning of a big threat and that they would get enough time to prep for it, combine this with the difficulty of doing things on the fly for them and things got a little obnoxious. There were other little things too, one of the ideas they mention is the old ways oath, you basically swear to never use ‘the white mans technology’ and in exchange you get a bonus on your rolls for favors, though you take a penalty for using the tech. In theory not terrible, bows could do decent damage and since you could add your strength a couple of favors could make those arrows better than any gun. The problem came in when being on a train, steamboat, etc. also gave the penalty. This meant that if you had a shaman in the group every time you had a chase on a train or went on a steamboat or anything like that one of the guys was now taking a hit to their abilities. I know that the player doesn’t have to take the oath but it does mean that certain adventures can really screw over someone and that can get frustrating for both the player and the person running. And yes, while they do get chips out of it, as mentioned earlier, it still seems impractical as it will also make a situation where if a Marshal wants to use trains and other things frequently they end up screwing one player. There is also the fact that because of all the extra stuff, the mini relics, the guardian spirits, etc. the shaman requires a lot of bookkeeping, moreso than any of the others with the mad scientist coming in at a moderately close second.

And speaking of the mad scientist, well we might as well go to the issues that that one had. The mad scientist is actually an arcane background I rather like, it has some neat potential and can be a lot of fun, the problem it really has is more a result of the way the system handles mad science than anything else. The Mad Scientist is simply an inventor, someone led by maddening muses to create things that seem to violate known laws of science. Helicopters, planes, gattling pistols, ray guns, body armor, magnetic bullet repellers, all kinds of stuff. One of the basic ideas in it is that you have to be able to explain it in a way that sounds reasonable even if it wouldn’t work by scientific laws (for example the bullet repellant clothing). You explained to the Marshal what you wanted, and then pulled a hand of cards based on your roll to see if it was possible, the more it flouted scientific capabilities the better the hand you pulled would have to be. The issue here was more that the player had very little guidance, they were shown some existing items, jet packs, gattling pistols, bulletproof vests and the like but because inventing things was literally a seat of your pants method with the Marshal being the final judge and as you can imagine things were problematic. Trying to come up with something can be tricky and the Marshal has to figure out if it’s acceptable and what the minimum hand should be for it. The supplements like Smith and Robards or The Collegium helped in some ways, providing more example items with required hands but again some things didn’t quite seem to match what they were capable of with what they took to make. Part of the problem was that the mad scientist didn’t get anything special with their brand of super tech, they weren’t any better at using it nor did they get some kind of special bonuses they could add to their unique creations. They did get one free mad science item starting out, which is kind of nice but that seems to be the bigger draw.

A player can use money to buy pretty much any mad science item in the books, if they take the edges to have some real spending money they can have a full plethora of mad science gear if they want it. Now you might argue ‘well during a game they can’t easily mail order mad science gear so the mad scientist is there for that.’ That sort of works until you remember that said scientist needs a work area and supplies, and given how long it can take to invent some things the players might get it from a mail order to one of the mad science consortiums just as quickly. The huckster-mad science fusion option is actually pretty nice and I do enjoy the options that one gives but it’s still kind of a problem. Some of it might also be how mad science items can lock up on you, all of them have reliability rolls and so can conk out at the worst possible times but that does help balance the power they bring to the table. I guess my issue for the mad scientist is that they don’t have anything special that they bring to the table other than that which can be purchased independently of them and they don’t have anything special they can offer with the tech that they built and are directly using.

Now some of why I mention this is because I also want to address the counterparts to these backgrounds that were introduced in Hell on Earth. Now I will admit that in some ways these comparisons are a bit unfair, Hell on Earth was built later after a lot of trial and error in the original Weird West game but I think it also helps show the evolution of the system and of what they learned from previous mistakes. The Junker and the Toxic Shaman, the Toxic Shaman was released in a supplement but I would say that it follows the spirit of the shaman quite well (it’s possible that the Doomsayers were meant to be their spiritual children but I don’t quite see the relation) and it should also be noted that the Junker supplement rewrote much of how the Junker worked and this was actually for the best as I will explain.

The Junker is the Wasted West techie, they can produce guns, vehicles, armor and just about any other technical wonder from what most people would see as garbage. This fits the post apocalypse theme nicely, but it also had a lovely feature, it actually had hard and fast rules for making stuff. The original book had you still dealing with demons and in this case you basically beat the crap out of them to make them tell you how to build stuff, not terrible exactly but the later supplement actually improved things a lot. The Supplement broke the existing Junker powers down into more distinct abilities, made the craft rules so that you had to have certain types of parts as well as size restrictions, and you also had powers called ‘tool tricks’ that you could use in and out of combat to make your equipment better, reload your guns during a fight, make a different tech item fizzle, etc. But it also did something else wonderful, it gave the Junkers a new source of inspiration, the tech spirits. It explained that the demons they were using at the beginning was because they knew nothing else, then they learned of the tech spirits and could make more versatile devices. Some of it is hard to explain without showing the books but the class felt very interesting and different, the idea behind it was good and the mechanics were quite solid. They also added the idea of ‘the taint’ which is that Junkers who build nothing but weapons start getting a little loopy from keeping in the company of the Gun Spirits. It was a nice flavor thing, but it also was a smart way to encourage players doing this to make things other than superweapons and ammo for same, to look at the other powers and consider them. Players had to think about the risk of losing their character to the Marshal because they finally became too unstable and bloodthirsty to be appropriate for play.

It also addressed another issue, Junker tech can be purchased in the Wasted West, but it’s harder. There are only a few large settlements, no mail order companies for the tech, and Junkers aren’t going to be in every town, nor will they necessarily know the powers to make what you’re looking for. While a player could hypothetically buy some Junker built items at character creation weapons might need unique ammo or power packs, both of which require the player to also buy a lot of the special ammo as well as the power packs. The group, if they want this stuff, is probably better off with a Junker in their group for this reason alone. But if that were it then the Junker wouldn’t be my favorite background for the Wasted West. The Junkers got two other lovely things in Wasted West, both of which were from their supplement, the aforementioned tool tricks and the browser spirits. The tool tricks had things that you could use to either have an easier time building something or stuff that could aid you in combat or in certain other situations (copying information, being able to turn random things into workable tools for repair, automatically reloading guns, improvements to the tech you were building etc.). The other one is the browser spirits, these things were part and parcel to the tech spirit concept and they fit in nicely. Browser spirits could either be purchased at character creation or earned by making things of high quality. Make enough high quality weapons and you’d get a gun browser, build more high quality weapons and the spirit gets more potent. Build enough high quality vehicles and you’d get a high quality car spirit and there were other types as well that covered the gamut of what you could build. The spirits would give you a bonus to building things of their type as well as providing you with special powers you could use in exchange for fate chips, the stronger your browser was the better the powers you could access. The gun browser could make you a master marksman, the car browser could make you a stunt driver or even take over driving the vehicle itself while you did something else, the tool browser made you a better crafter, etc.

The Junker was also nice in that while a lot of the stuff mentioned was great to take at character creation, it wasn’t necessary. You could automatically gain a browser spirit if you made enough stuff of high quality so you weren’t forced to get them unless you wanted them. Similar things could be said towards what I view the evolution of the shaman to be in Wasted West, the toxic shaman.

The toxic shaman was referenced in several books but finally came into existence in a supplement, conceptually it was pretty good. The idea was that the toxic shamans were in one of two camps, caretakers and corruptors; the former tried to remove pollution usually by feeding it to toxic spirits whereas the latter polluted to make more toxic spirits. There were 5 types, Smog, Trash, Sludge, Radiation, and Insects. If you couldn’t guess the first four were basically corrupted elements, the insects were bugs that were sick of getting stepped on and kept hearing that after a nuclear war roaches would rule the earth, they wanted that to happen and wanted the shamans they worked with to help it occur. Part of the improvement was that instead of appeasement points you had strain, strain was something used by a few other backgrounds. Strain was also simple enough to recover, rest could do it, drinking spook juice could do it, or just exposing yourself to the type of pollution that your particular patron was. The patron thing was also a bit different but it actually did fit the flavor. The concept was that you picked one of the five types as a patron, they required you to spread their type of pollution or take it from the world and ‘feed’ it to them (in the case of insects you just had to pollute in ways that would kill people) but it costs more to do stuff outside of your sphere and if you took smog you couldn’t use trash sphere powers, the same vice versa as well as between sludge and radiation. There are also toxic guardian spirits that give extra powers and more strain, I would say that these are somewhat necessary but that has more to do with the extra strain being helpful coupled with the powers they offer you could make a perfectly good toxic shaman without them but the toxic guardians are a major bonus. The toxic shaman also requires a lot less book work, it doesn’t require multiple items and boosters to be able to match others.

Looking at it they definitely seemed to learn from their previous designs, it’s also worth noting that they did keep rules for the original arcane backgrounds but added in caveats for each of them. Hucksters had the target number to cast a hex increased as well as needing one hand higher to make anything work. Their versatility was a possible threat in this much more balanced or organized setup. The blessed and other backgrounds (excepting the mad scientist) were still available but while I can’t be sure I would almost guess that people might have still eagerly grabbed the modern arcane backgrounds instead of the ones from weird west either due to them being more interesting or feeling more…dynamic for lack of a better term. I think I might explore the arcane backgrounds a bit more at a later date as well as working on comparing weird and wasted west.