RPG a Day #7: an RPG with "Good Form" and #8 An Accessory You Appreciate

I'm kind of at a loss on #7, not sure what it means. Others have posted on the design of the product (it's physical form) rather than its rules implementation (oh, good form, chap!) so I'll take that and go with Ben Milton's Knave 2E in that is designed to be compact, clear, easily reproducible for the players, and has all the rules for each part of the game mechanics on a single page or two page spread. This carried across the rest of Milton's work.

For #8 Accessory You Appreciate, if we're looking at things that aren't games or supplement books, then I have to go with Roll20. Because without that I wouldn't have been able to run the last 4 years of my 13th Age game for my daughters and her friends. Yes, maybe I could have managed it in some other online platform, but Roll20 was easy to use and had great 13th Age support. And this game has been one of the best things in my gaming history. 

RPG a Day 6: A Game that's East to Use

This is a doozy of a prompt because it's actually a combination of "how does your brain work" and "what systems have you already internalized" with a frosting of "do you consider character creation play?"

Still, I have an answer, at least for me: WEG Star Wars 1st edition. 

Going with this image as the book is appropriately worn down from use

Just like the Star Wars universe presents itself.

If you have not had the pleasure, this is the d6 system. Players pick a character archetype from the 30 in the back of the book that all perfectly catch the feel of Star Wars, and have dice scores of in Dexterity, Knowledge, Mechanical (which is vehicle use), Perception (which doubles as persuasiveness), Strength, and Technical. These scores go 2d, 2d+1, 2d+2, 3d, 3d+1, 3d+2, and 4d (the Wookie has 5d Strength). Each of of those has skills under them that all roll at the base ability, but you have 6d to distribute to add them, no more than 2d in any one skill. If you have a 3d Dexterity, you shoot any weapon at 3d, but might have Blaster at 4d. The game doesn't get more granular than that. As my friend Jim put it, "Princess Leia doesn't need to be checked out on heavy blaster." As Harrison Ford paraphrased said, "It's not that sort of game, kid." 

Character creation is quick and easy. Understanding the rules, for 90% of the cases, likewise - you GM sets target numbers from 5 to 30, generally in increments of 5. If you try to do something, roll the dice for that skill, add them, and see if you hit the target number. DONE. 

There's also a super spiffy Force Point mechanic where everyone has 1 Force Point per scenario that you can spend during play to DOUBLE the number of dice you're throwing on an action. If you use that force point to do something HEROIC, you get an extra force point back when they refresh. If you spend it doing something EVIL, you still get it back at the refresh, but you also get a DARK SIDE POINT, and roll right then and there - 1d6, and if you roll less than your current number of Dark Side Points your character is consumed with evil and start working for the Emperor. Hand over your character sheet, start over, everyone is now fighting your old PC. 

Everyone who had seen the original trilogy got this IMMEDIATELY. Play was brisk and fun. I'm not a huge fan of the declare up, act down initiative system but with a small number of PCs it's fine. If you haven't ever played it, find a copy and give it a whirl.

RPG a Day: Game with Great Writing

It's scary for me to think about how long ago this was written and what it means for my age (since the stuff written when I was a kid was always there but the stuff written when I was an adult was always, what, 8-10 years ago?) but for decades the book I kept going back to read just for the fun of the prose and presentation was Robin Laws _Feng Shui_ 1st edition. Not only is it chock full of revolutionary (for the time; many people have incorporated them since) game mechanics, the breezy, personable presentation just makes it feel like you're hanging out with another gamer. It's no surprise now, after 10+ years of KARTAS.

I'll also toss out 13th Age 1E and its supplement books, if only for the willingness of the design team to lift the hood and explain WHY they made the decisions they made, and how they see certain monsters working as story elements. Its very useful in that space. 

RPG a Day Catch Up: RPG with great art

This is an interesting question because of the purpose of the art in an RPG - it's supposed to help design the world, set the stage, evoke the setting, and bring you into play. And I'm not sure a lot of them do that. 

I'm gonna make a couple of off beat suggestions, but remember, again, old. 

V&V 2E: I've commented on the art for this before, and but the advantage of having one of the game designers also being a top not RPG artist of the time, and having them be the sole artist on the book, gave everything a unified feel. All of the characters shown are well designed, some are downright iconic (Darkstorm and Gauntlet just look GREAT and could easily have been heroes of their own 1970s-80's comics). The back cover art with the author talking to the players about game play is just so full of energy. 

So Much Fun!

Next up, AD&D 1E. OSR people have spent enormous amounts of ink and treasure talking about the glories of the early game art in its ragged, shaggy state, but there's something to be said for the art in the Players Handbook but more importantly the DMG. Why the latter? Because it moves from some deeply evocative pieces of fantasy to pulp sword and sorcery to JOKES ABOUT PEOPLE PLAYING THE GAME AND THEIR STUPID IDEAS. That's just huge. No where else are you going to see the fighter and magic user wearing mickey mouse ears and paper rat noses trying to sneak into the lair of the rat god. Or the troll rolling up the adventurer's labyrinth-defeating string. It shows you EXACTLY what sort of shenanigans you can expect your players to get up to. 

Last one - Vampire: the Masquerade 2E. Man was that stuff mood setting. Just wonderful work. 

RPG A Day Catch Up: Most often played RPG

That this is Villains & Vigilantes 2E will come as no shock. Its a close call with D&D, but that so much of my last few years has been not D&D but various offspring and retro-clones. Still, I think V&V would edge out. I've spoken about my love for it so much here that I don't want to burble too much, but the random character generation built on highly flexible powers, the real world immersion mixed with the comics physics engine of the attack table, and the general attitude of "this is your world, do with it as you will" just make it the ideal game for me. 

RPG a Day Catch Up - Most Recently Played

Ummm, this is gonna sound mean, but the most recent game I was a rolled dice in was a 13th Age 2E demo game at Pelicon, but to say that we played was a bit of an overstatement. The GM admitted that the first time he ran this last year the adventure was unfinished because the author had a death in the family, but they have made no steps to clarify and solidify it in the last year. The Pre-gens were created in 2E by another player and had no connection to the nominal plot. 1/2 the players had never played 13th Age before (one was Cthulhu guy who had never played D&D before) the GM kept asking the players with no experience with the world to improv what they wanted for plot elements, and then when anyone familiar with the world recommended something he would delay until everyone signed on, when people didn't have context. 

I don't want to sound cruel, he was clearly a nice guy, and he was volunteering his time, and if we were all friends at a weekly table for a game I'm sure it would be fine. But I so seldom get to play, never mind be a player in a game with my daughter, So having him try to improv the whole thing, ostensibly to show off the flexibility of the game and the Icon system, fell very flat.

The last game I really played was also 13th Age, but 1E this time, and the ongoing game for the local kids at the town library. They have just made their way into the Forbidden City (from the classic AD&D Module "Dwellers of the Forbidden City"), rescued the chief's son, and have just now overheard the conversation between the leaders of two of the three Yuan-Ti factions in the city about the Orc Lord's offer (I had figured that their Wizard might have had some chance of understanding the Serpentine language, but the Druid's player spent an Icon Relationship point and changed into a snake, which of course could understand serpent tongue), they were torn between sending back immediately for Imperial support or learning more. Fortunately the player who really wanted to call in the cavalry was also the one who was going to be at camp for the next 2 weeks, so he brought the rescued prisoners out while the rest are pushing on to try to cross the city and make camp near the lake. 

RPG a Day Catch Up 1: First RPG this year

I had to go back to check my kickstarters for February and while there were a few supplements the only RPG was The Details of Our Escape, which arrived last week and I still need to digest. The book is an interesting animal, with a collaborative art and story created by two of the creative team and the third building a game based on it. That game is constructing a story/history of a city ill enough off to require 2348 of its citizens to flee (the titular escape), what they encounter on the way, and how clusters of them peel off to form new communities suited to them, using dominos for prompts. At the end you look back on the city and the experience as new legends form. 

It's a delightful concept; If I were to use it it would be to build a faerie environment with isolated pockets of various humans (or fey) that have escaped the Unseelee or from Earth into Faerie, or a the origins of a Jorune/Tekumel style lost human colony spreading out across a world. That domino trail is the map of their expansion. It would need to be done with creative adults prepared to extemporize, but it could be a lot of fun, and seed the world with adventure prompts.