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.
Showing posts with label Savage Worlds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Savage Worlds. Show all posts
Friday, September 23, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Deadlands, Weird, Wasted, Reloaded and more!
I enjoy a lot of different types of RPGs, I have played Gamma World, D&D (2nd, 3rd, 4th), Pathfinder, Dark Heresy, several whitewolf games (not a big whitewolf fan, just saying), a bit of Call of Cthulhu, Mutant Future, Labyrinth Lord, Rifts, etc. Now lately my main gaming group has been doing a lot of Deadlands. Deadlands is a somewhat obscure game but quite interesting put out by the folks at Pinnacle. My group plays the classic version, IE the non Savage Worlds version.
Deadlands is one of the first games I want to talk about here both because it's a game that I'm playing right now and also because it actually taught a fair amount in terms of game design, running a game, and even about aspects of different types of gaming. The next few posts are going to focus on different aspects of the game and some of my own observations and thoughts on it, as well as things I think they did really well and things that they kind of messed up. Any fans of the game are welcome to post, as are detractors come to think of it.
I think I'll start off by talking a little about the game itself. The central game is essentially a steampunk civil war torn US with cowboys and zombies. An event known as 'the recknoning' occurred during the battle of Gettysburg and weirdness started popping up all over the place. The dead began to walk, monsters of folklore began to appear, and magical power suddenly became available or more potent. The source of this is a bit more than I want to get into right here (probably a future topic) Now the thing is that by and large most people don't know/don't believe in this sort of thing and in many respects that's how the dark forces like it. A big monster charging into town might make the populace piss their pants but then a few people either get brave or angry enough to fight back and manage to kill the thing. Suddenly the people see that the creature wasn't so scary and that they can be beaten. Instead the monsters tend to lurk on the outside, a few people here and there might disappear and sometimes people see things they don't understand but most of them try to chalk it up to hallucination, accident, or some animal.
The heroes are the exceptions, these are the people that find out about the supernatural and try to push back, defending people as best they can and spreading hope. Some of these people are shamans, some are blessed by a higher power, some have learned to pull power kicking and screaming from the spirit world and a few are guided by maddening muses to create mind bending tech, and plenty more are just normal people armed with courage and a good shooting arm. Now all of this is more true in the weird west for Deadlands but the basic principles hold. The game also deals with the idea of evil in some fairly interesting ways and points out that sometimes evil can be very grandiose and sometimes in can be very banal and in both cases it can be terrifying.
The game itself is a bit of a mix of pulpy action and horror, I tend more towards the pulpy action side but that's more because I absolutely suck at running horror. That's about all I can say for now, hope to see you all again soon.
Deadlands is one of the first games I want to talk about here both because it's a game that I'm playing right now and also because it actually taught a fair amount in terms of game design, running a game, and even about aspects of different types of gaming. The next few posts are going to focus on different aspects of the game and some of my own observations and thoughts on it, as well as things I think they did really well and things that they kind of messed up. Any fans of the game are welcome to post, as are detractors come to think of it.
I think I'll start off by talking a little about the game itself. The central game is essentially a steampunk civil war torn US with cowboys and zombies. An event known as 'the recknoning' occurred during the battle of Gettysburg and weirdness started popping up all over the place. The dead began to walk, monsters of folklore began to appear, and magical power suddenly became available or more potent. The source of this is a bit more than I want to get into right here (probably a future topic) Now the thing is that by and large most people don't know/don't believe in this sort of thing and in many respects that's how the dark forces like it. A big monster charging into town might make the populace piss their pants but then a few people either get brave or angry enough to fight back and manage to kill the thing. Suddenly the people see that the creature wasn't so scary and that they can be beaten. Instead the monsters tend to lurk on the outside, a few people here and there might disappear and sometimes people see things they don't understand but most of them try to chalk it up to hallucination, accident, or some animal.
The heroes are the exceptions, these are the people that find out about the supernatural and try to push back, defending people as best they can and spreading hope. Some of these people are shamans, some are blessed by a higher power, some have learned to pull power kicking and screaming from the spirit world and a few are guided by maddening muses to create mind bending tech, and plenty more are just normal people armed with courage and a good shooting arm. Now all of this is more true in the weird west for Deadlands but the basic principles hold. The game also deals with the idea of evil in some fairly interesting ways and points out that sometimes evil can be very grandiose and sometimes in can be very banal and in both cases it can be terrifying.
The game itself is a bit of a mix of pulpy action and horror, I tend more towards the pulpy action side but that's more because I absolutely suck at running horror. That's about all I can say for now, hope to see you all again soon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
