Free RPG Day impressions - Castles & Crusades

Now I have had some time to look over some of the freebies I got for Free RPG Day. Just like last year, Troll Lord Games participated with a booklet of quickstart rules for Castles & Crusades. Like last year it also included a small adventure.

The booklet starts with character creation rules, covering levels 1 to 4. Four classes (Fighter, Rogue, Wizard and Cleric) and four races (elf, dwarf, half-elf and human) are included. In just fourteen pages they even manage to include spell lists, equipment, combat rules and some short notices about how to personalize your character. Good job.

The booklet ends with a short adventure about exploring a wizard's tower. If that's not a classic, I don't know what is! It's intriguing enough, and a decent job for showing what you can do with the game.

Now for the oddities. When I came to the last pages and read the adventure, I stared at the monster stats. The monster has 7HD8, AC 20, HP 43, "Its primary attributes are physical" and it attacks with 2 slam attacks for 2d8 of damage. Plain and simple enough, right? Except that there are three physical attributes. Are we to pick one ourself? Are we to roll them up, since they are not provided? The creative gamer can get past that, I guess. Now for the next one, which I didn't manage to solve. Players attack using a d20 roll, add their level, add their BtH combat bonus and if I understood correctly their stat bonus. Compare the result to the target's AC. Take a look again at those monster stats. What's the BtH, level and stat bonus? Maybe I have misunderstood the rules, but I can't find a description how to play the adventure when it comes to combat with monsters! I borrowed the rule books for C&C but returned them just before getting the Free RPG Day booklet. Now I'm wondering if they have managed to be this opaque in the full rules, or if they just managed to slim the rules down a bit too much. I went back and looked in the quickstart from last year, and no more hints in that one. Feel free to enlighten me, if you know how it's supposed to work!

All in all I can't decide if I like C&C or not. It feels a lot like D&D3 without feats, and with a system of stat based rolls instead of skills. One could almost say it's AD&D2 done without trying so hard to keep the cruft of old. Or, one could say it's 3rd ed. done by streamlining AD&D2. I think AD&D1 is kind of messy, with it's nonsensical system of saves, and quixotic arrangement of rules and data in the PHB. I can see why some gamers feel it's a smooth running engine, though. D&D3 is a really slick machine of a game system. It can be tooled with and is a lot more adaptable than old AD&D2 ever was, creaking under the load of diverse settings as Dark Sun and Planescape. That being said, D&D3 without being tweaked is a bit to heavy and if you just add stuff without taking away something it will fall down under its own weight. C&C feels a lot like a mix between of the two. It is slick, and makes sense. It's possible to pick up and play, and don't try to do more than one thing at once but unifies what is does in a neat mechanic. So, why do I feel kind of disinterested? I really don't know. Many parts of me love this game, but my heart wont listen. Curious.

Slowdown in postings

I'm sorry, but I have found myself slowing down a bit in my pace. With a new born in the house you will feel tired and drained, even if the little one is fairly easy going so far. That combined with some ill health have left me feeling very uncreative. Hopefully the creative spirits will return again soon. I'll continue to post, but it might be at a slower speed for a while. Thanks to all who return here to see what I'm posting! Your interest and support is appreciated.

Playing the Dungeon of Voorand - fighting spellcasters

Tonight's game was a fairly simple affair. We had few players, but one of them was a new recruit. I'm trying to spread the love of old school delving.

They did some fooling around in Khazan, and tried to make the wizards at the Wizard's Guild create some specialized items for them. One character had heard the rumour that dragons was crazy about avocados, and since they dragon-man in the party eyed him often enough he wanted a box that always would keep some avocados fresh. I have heard of some players trying to "invent" gunpowder in a fantasy game, but having someone trying to invent a magical fridge was new to me.

When they got down to the dungeon, they went purposefully to the most overpowered site they had yet found. I was impressed. Since I had put a very intriguing puzzle there (which have caused some physical discomfort to some poor dwarf) they keep coming back. Once again the hypercube of doom delivered. Now I have mutilated yet another player character.

The big fight then started with three lich kings, or something to that effect. I guess if you dangle enough bling in front of delvers they will bite sooner or later, against better judgement. After two rounds and the effects of protective magic they retreated down to a deeper level, since stairs just happened to be nearby. Later they sneaked out with bleeding and barely conscious party members. Fun was had.

One lesson was had by me. I have not had much opportunity to test the Kremm Resistance rules, and now it confirmed my suspicions. If they spellcaster is more powerful than you it doesn't mean much, and if he is less powerful he can't do much. The rules as written are way to binary.

More about experience mechanics

For those of you who don't remember Rolemaster, this post by Zzarchov at Unofficial Games might be of interest. It's worth reading for the old RM players as well, I might add. Tweaking experience and using spell casting, exploring and objective based experience are all interesting options.

Gygax and Arneson's best idea - coins

I have talked about coins before. Now there was a good post over at Black Dougal, that once again got me thinking. I want to pot the spotlight on the design effects of using collecting gold as a measurement of player advancement. According to me the fact that gp = xp is a strike of genius with many interesting effects on the game. I will view both of D&D and T&T through the golden lens of a coin.

In Basic D&D a suit of plate will cost you 60 gp. In AD&D it will cost you 400 gp, and in T&T 7 th ed a suit of heavy plate costs 1300 gp and in 6 th ed it will cost 600 gp. In BD&D and AD&D you get xp for gold, and in T&T you don't. In AD&D you have to pay for training to level up, and in T&T you have to pay the Wizard's Guild to get new spells. All this will of course influence how the game plays.

In my old D&D3 campaign (which I have written about before) I managed to get into the situation where my players considered coins as useless treasure. They barely bothered with gold, unless they got enough of it to buy a magic item they wanted. In my T&T campaign I have now started to see some of that as well, and I was wondering about the effects of the gp as xp rule.

In T&T, what happen when you have gotten the best armor and weapon you can get? You still have to pay the Wizard's Guild if you're a spellcaster, but if you're a fighter you probably only want gold to buy magic items. The latter is not something I really appreciate. Getting magic items to order have a high chance of making the wonder of magic turn into the blandness of Wallmart.

In D&D you very easy get the best armor and weapons. Frankly, surprisingly easy! After that you will still be interested in gold, since then you need to start saving for a stronghold when you reach level 9. When you have to pay for training it makes even more sense. I think this is a very good way to make sure that at all levels of play you still have a reason to go adventuring.

Here we can now see how the simple design of gp as xp have many small effects on play. Since you get a lot more xp from gold than you'll ever get from killing monsters, it encourage you to get your money without combat. In T&T you get most of your points from Saving Rolls so it has a similar effect. I like how those games make murder of other intelligent beings something that might happen, but not the point of the game. All these points of how this rule influence play impress me. To achieve so much with one rule is impressive. It's good design in my book if you can get much mileage out of a rule like that.

The shift from AD&D 2 nd ed onward to giving most of the xp from combat, combined with the “wallmartification” of magic, is the biggest shift in how the game is played throughout its history. I'm not sure I like it. In my 3 rd ed campaign it clearly became ridiculous when gold wasn't “worth it's weight in gold” any longer.

For T&T I'm thinking about experience. The gp = xp is neat, and I wonder if I'd “fix” a problem that isn't there if I try to import it? I do think it is a bit troublesome when a fighter basically don't have any more reason to get gold when he has gotten his plate armor. Sure, he can chip in and help buying some spells which he'll benefit from, but it isn't the same thing. From some conversations on Trollhalla lately I'm wondering if the experience rules don't could use a tweak or two.

Free RPG Day - horray!

Today was Free RPG Day all over the world. As before Noble Night Games is available as a participating store for those who don't have a FLGS to go to. Maybe there's someone else, but I only know of Aaron's store. I want to thank my FLGSs Kingston Gaming Nexus and Minotaur Games and Gifts for their generosity! Thanks Michael, Justine and Michael!

Last year I was running in-store demos for T&T and Trail of Cthulhu. But this year with a new baby and everything, it was a lower level of attendance for me. The freebies this year looks really nice, and some of them were actually games I've been looking at for a while. This might push me over the edge. On me this kind of promotion works just as intended!

Sadly Flying Buffalo bowed out. I kind of wonder why it was done so late, but I guess there were reasons. Hopefully T&T will get some publicity come Gen Con, when the next boxed set of supplementary material will be published. Until then, you can still buy T&T from Flying Buffalo!

Playing the Dungeon of Voorand - the entrepeneur phase

Note: I have a newborn son who's only a couple of days old, so right now I'm not totally focused on blogging. I'll try to keep up. This post is a little late. Sorry about that.

Our Wednesday game have had to move to Thursdays, and I've been worried that some of the walk-in attendees would be confused by this. Unfortunately that happened, but we still had enough show up for a game this week.

Now we have entered what I call the entrepreneur stage. Our dwarven hero have lost a couple of limbs, and in order to scale back on the hazards he decided to start a tavern. Earlier that player managed to become the chief of a small tribe of hyenakin by defeating the former chief in single combat. He is now the player's second in command and gets to run the show as usual. Now the tribe have become recruited as loggers, and builder of the tavern. I really like this development. I have not set out any clear targets for the players, except some hooks and rumours about the dungeon. From out of player initiative we now have another campaign reaching development! I can let this tavern be a source of more information, problems and adventures for the players. The best part of being the one player who has to build the environment and provide the building blocks for fun, is when a player starts giving you building blocks they have carved themselves.

The delving this time focused on a weird intra dimensional room they found earlier, which spins like a carousel. Tugging the rope that hangs from out of nowhere in the centre of the room, they started the room spinning and then opened the doors that now lead to adventure. What was most fun for me at this point was when they found a room which wasn't really like anything else they have encountered before. Save or die effects are hated by some, and ridiculed by others. In this instance I had a room with a very subtle threat, that none the less had hints to decipher about what was going on. To my amusement they looked in the right direction and draw other conclusions than the wholly correct one. Hilarity ensued and the party was split in two and had to flee when a fight showed itself way to much for them. Learn to run away, and remember that sharks swim in the shallowest water. I have good players, and they know that. But, it is fun to see them not just waltz through it all and get a reminder once in a while.

Sometimes you hear that any touch of technology or "science fantasy" makes hard core fantasy gamers run away screaming. The module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is one that those kind of gamers love to hate. Those also seem to be vary of anything related to Blackmoor, since they know there are hi-tech there. Personally I kind of like to mix anything fun in. I decided to put a piece of gaming history in my dungeon. Anyone ever heard of Adventure or The Colossal Caves? If you have, you have probably also played the version with the vending machine in the labyrinth. For me vending machines are neat. They are fun to play with and might dispense all kind of wondrous stuff in a world of magic. Needless to say, I couldn't resist putting in a vending machine filled with toys, gewgaws and magically powered trinkets. I have no idea what some of them can be used for, but I trust my players to come up with something funny. Already the bouncing ball that doubles in size every time it bounces have provided us with fun and laughter. Imagine that one in a cramped environment down in the tunnels of a dungeon.

How to succeed at adventuring according to Gary Gygax

I just looked through my copy of the 1st ed PHB. In it are described some tips on how to be successful at adventuring. Apart from the importance of having an objective, is also mentioned that having two maps is the key to success. One map could get destroyed by a fire ball, or some other environmental hazard. It brought home to me the idea that the player's map is not just a help for the player's memory, but also an object in the game. The advice is actually something I recognize from the first place I read it, in the Swedish game Drakar & Demoner. Back then I thought it odd that it said that the DM should destroy the physical map his players had drawn if the in game map was destroyed. I really wonder how common it ever was for gamers to actually do that. A very special kind of immersion, indeed.

Endurance sports in fantasy

After a weekend of motorsport I have started to think of how to import the "Le Mans experience" into a fantasy rpg campaign. Once a long time ago I had all the boxes Avalon Hill put out for RuneQuest. One of those were a thing called Monster Coliseum, which if I remember correctly included some kind of Ben Hur style racing arena. The box didn't contain much that caught my fancy, so I sold it and kept just the Glorantha boxes. Now I'm wondering if it might have contained something useful after all.

For a fantasy world to feel "real", I think there are somethings which has to be there. Two of those things are sports and religion. For the latter it is usually present in weird cults and as a source of spells for "clerics", which often is just wizards with another name. The former is, as far as I know, more scarce. Sport is something which means a lot to many people all over our world, and it involves a lot of people from the very casual level up to those who are professional athletes. It's not that odd to expect some measure of that devotion to sport in secondary worlds, is it?

Personally I only care for motorsports, which in most fantasy settings will be a bit hard to implement. But, the Monster Coliseum got me thinking. Now, I'm not going to talk about futuristic settings since they are obviously more easy to adapt to phenomena in our world, and fantasy gaming is the major part of gaming. Taking a queue from the enormously popular and truly epic classic Ben Hur, I think low tech sports probably could be the focus of a whole campaign without it being boring! The first thing you think of will probably be arena gladiatorial fighting (like the classic Arena of Khazan from Flying Buffalo for T&T, but since I'm a race fan I'd prefer some sport that is less focused on fighting.

For those of you who don't know what "Le Mans" means, I can summarize the idea like this. You take a car and try to make it run as fast as you can, as far as you can, for 24 hours. It will take not only speed, but also a lot of endurance both by man and machine. Doesn't that sounds like something that could be used in gaming? How about a hunt, going on for many days? How about trials and tribulations along a messaging or mailing service, like the Pony Express in the Old West? How about some arena racing, like in Ben Hur?

I'm beginning to see a lot of interesting campaign possibilities, all having elements of competition and endurance. Not only will there be interesting to explore the wilderness outside the dungeon, it will be an interesting way to roleplay interpersonal conflicts and maybe even some resource management for players who like things like that. If you want to go crazy, you could even have a racetrack, in the dungeon. I'm seriously tempted, let me tell you! I'll be all happy after getting my racing fix for a long time after this weekend. We'll see if it will show up in my campaign. What about yours? If you have included any sports, then I'd love to hear how it went. Race On!

Some pause in blogging: Le Mans!

If you're waiting for today's post, it might be late. Today the greatest motor race of all started, and I'm glued to Radio Le Mans for 24 hours.

This is so much more fun than another racing series I could have mentioned.