DM Chronicles 16: Are we there yet?
Having been playfully accused of doing some heavy comment baiting this week, here’s a more mundane campaign log! 
The RPG season is winding down.
Like some of my blogging buddies, we’re slowly getting ready to call it quits and it shows in our games. Still we managed to have a good time last Friday.
Let’s dig in shall we?
Last time, we left our heroes right inside Zelatar, the city of Demon Price Gratzz that covers three layers of the Abyss.
The PCs needed to find an Ambassador of Orcus, the Demon Lord of the undead. They hoped to retrieve a way to enter the deeper Demonwebs and disrupt Lolth latest scheme (and as a side quest, save their world from absorption into the Abyss).
I was upfront with the players and I asked them how they wanted to go at it in such an hostile environment and they all agreed that they’d prefer being discreet and avoid combat at all costs.
I was all for that. [Read the rest of this article]
And now a little Farniente
If y’all don’t mind, I’m going to take a night off and enjoy the ride this blog has become lately for 24 hours or so.
What with the contest and all, the Chatty minions have literally taken over and I love it!
Great thanks to Shamus Young, Jeff Rients, Johnn Four and all the other cool bloggers who have linked to this blog in the last few weeks and brought so many new readers.
Ah yes, please note that Lijit search has been broken for some time, apparently Google has re-indexed my blog in some weird way (maybe because I got a bump to a page-rank of 4?). They are working on it and I’ll let you know when it does.
I’ll re-instate the default search widget for the time being.
Peace out!
Jeez, Just Wait 'til you Get to Liberty City…
Obviously, Joe and Hill-rod are correct about video games!
10 Word Adventures Contest at ChattyDM
Phil the Chatty DM is holding a contest to get adventure synopses/hooks. The only catch? They have to be exactly 10 words.
Yours truly will be helping to judge, so head over there now and give me tons of good stuff to look at! (And steal ideas from!)
Stealing a good idea: The 10 words adventure synopsis
In order to make up for my militant rant of last night, I thought I’d steal Penny Arcade’s excellent concept and give out a little brainstorming writing assignment for your RPG campaign and then share it
Here’s the assignment, write an adventure concept (any genre) in exactly 10 words and post it in the comments. Believe me, I sent in two entries to the PA contest and it’s hard to do.
Let’s make this a contest shall we? I’m opening it up for 1 full week starting on Noon EST of April 29th until the same time next week (May 6th). You enter by posting your entry in the comments here.
The best one will get a choice of a D&D mini Dungeon of Dread booster or an equivalent value Gift Certificate from DrivethruRPG.
For the contest to be valid, I need at least 20 entries from 20 different people. There are currently 265 RSS subscribers on this blog so I think it’s feasible to hope for a 7-10% participation.
You can submit multiple entries.
If I don’t get enough, I’ll still post the best entries in a later post with credits.
Actually, regardless of how it goes, I’d probably make a selection of entries (or all of them) into a PDF and offer it for free. Therefore, please note that while I will credit your entry by your true name or internet moniker, I get the rights to the entries. I don’t plan on selling any of this though.
Heres a few examples to get you started:
- Help tiefling bastard daughter of snobby paladin quests for Birthright.
- Castle falls from sky, PCs must uncover where it’s from (Contractions count for one word ok?)
- Dragon ate poisonous cursed gnome, will trade hoard for relief
- Barbarian posse drops in hell, kick Diabolic Ass, take over (Perfect for Broadsword)!
I know you can do better!
Sound off! Tell your friends, pimp that contest abroad!
Edit:
Dave the Game of Critical-hits and Jeff Rients have offered to be judges. Better shape up cuz these guys are good!
This is shaping up to be a lot more popular than I expected. If any Sponsors wants to step up to sweeten the prize deal it would be great, contact me at chattydm@chattydm.net, I’d be willing to add a permanent link of your organization in this post!
Want to see the entries in a more Digestible form? See here. The list is updated periodically as the contest progresses.
Also have a look at the Random Adventure Synopsis Generator Tommi created with the entries!
Prizes have been offered by Kobold Quarterly, Wee!!
Kobold Quarterly magazine is devoted to D&D and roleplaying games, covering fantasy, steampunk, and swords-and-sorcery at their finest. It features articles and interviews by leading game designers including Ed Greenwood, Keith Baker, James Jacobs, and Monte Cook.
Each issue comes with an Ecology article, new spells and monsters, and the finest player and DM advice we can find, from super-rules-heavy design crunch to rich, meaty flavor usable in any homebrew or published campaign setting.
Subscriptions are just $16 for 4 issues, and available at http://www.koboldquarterly.com/
Inq. of the Week: Multi-Classing
I thought that Dave’s musically inclined poll last week was great, because it’s one of those general questions that I probably would have never thought to ask. It looks like the most people prefer the alternative/indie/college rock genre (69%), which I find interesting when you consider that our age poll surprised us with more people over 30 than we had anticipated! That’s not to say I don’t think people that age don’t listen to alternative music, it really means that I’m scared…of old people? I’m kidding, I think. Second most preferred goes to Classic Rock with 65%, now THERE’S our demographic matching! Hard Rock/Metal is in third with 60%, while Classical just barely edged out Jazz/Blues, Dance/Electronic, and Other with 48%. It’s good to see ALMOST half of us can enjoy the finer things in life.
On to the now time, Dave and I had a brief discussion (we tend to do that) and I was delighted that we actually got onto the topic of things about 4th Edition which we are not all that thrilled with. One we both agreed upon was what little we know about the changes to Multi-Classing. The way Dave described it was that in previous editions you could be a Fighter/Wizard, but in 4th Edition you’re really more like a Fighter with Wizard powers, or vice-versa. There is definitely a large amount of satisfaction that comes with the “slash” designation which might be lost with the coming of these new rules. Naturally, the first goal is to know thy enemy, so:
Are you a Multi-Classer?
- Always, I'm like the swiss army knife of D&D! (35%, 36 Votes)
- Never, single class is the way of purity (35%, 36 Votes)
- Sometimes, if we loot a +1 keen Bastard Sword and I'm not proficient with Martial weapons... (30%, 30 Votes)
Total Voters: 102
Loading ...I feel like this is a much needed change and definitely one of the best ways to fix the entire idea of multi-classes. A first level character has to have a certain level of abilities to be any fun to play, because a fun beginning is vital for any game’s survival, so naturally you have severely front loaded characters in that if you were playing a level 0 commoner it’d be way less dynamic than a level 1 Wizard. [Read the rest of this article]
You Put That in Your Car?
Is it just me?
Like your average working parent, I can’t look at the media’s alarmist take on the world food crisis (re: increasing prices of basic foodstuff ) and stay unfazed.
Like many upper middle class North American, I probably don’t spend more than 10-15% of our household earnings on food.
That’s why I can afford to spend time on a second virtual job and churn out somewhat entertaining posts on games.
I know that there are many reasons for the increase in basic foodstuff price, oil price and speculation on futures being key drivers beneath it all. I’m not an economist but I know the basics.
I’m also fairly to the right in terms of Canadian economics policies (which is actually to left of America Centre, but this isn’t a comparative political blog). I strongly believe in a free economy with minimal obstacles to trade and ideas.
But for the love of all that is merciful in the universe, be it God or social Darwinism, why the hell are we allowing to create fuel for cars out of fucking FOOD?
Making ethanol out of corn, the food that Latin America depends on to survive and using it for cars is quite possibly the stupidest things humans have done in the last few years. It should be criminal!
That freaks me out way more than climate change (for the moment).
I’m a microbiologist, I (somewhat) know how Ethanol is produced. It’s basically what microorganisms excrete as waste when ‘eating’ plant sugars in the absence of oxygen.
I totally get how important it is to find an alternative fuel source. The developing world, China and India’s at its head, can’t be denied the growth the occidental powers were allowed just because we did it first and now there’s not enough resources to go around.
I’m all for using ethanol as an alternative fuel (I prefer electricity, coming from a fully Hydro-powered region of the world), but come on people! Ethanol can be created from anything that has a sufficient amount of complex sugars, as long as we use the proper tools to unlock them.
Anyone that says that other ethanol producing technology aren’t worth it yet should take a good look at rising Maize price (and everything else getting hit because of oil). Also, look at the food riots that have flared in Haiti and Africa. After all that, one should think about supporting the funding of some serious R&D.
Use cornstalk, Grass, Sawdust… We’ve found bacteria and yeast that thrive on the quasi-useless byproducts of agriculture.
Heck use Maple Syrup, it’s not like the world needs it to survive!
If I’ve discovered a bacteria that can degrade Chrysene into Carbon Monoxide during my Master’s research (which is as ‘unedible’ as rock) there’s a bug out there that will eat up our worst waste and shit fuel.
I can afford to pay 100% more for food in the short term… but a lot of people in North America and Europe can’t, let alone the rest of the world. That alone is good enough to stop using corn ethanol for fuel now.
Do you agree or am I full of it?
(We’ll return to our regular programming soon… that shit really freaks me out and I feel I can’t do anything about it)
Chatty's Review: Broadsword or Let Me Break that Sword on Your Head!
A few months ago, I promised fellow RPG blogger Jeff Mejia (infamously known as ‘The Evil Dm‘) that I’d review Broadsword, the indy RPG game he co-wrote with James Stubbs, as well as his recently published companion book World of Broadsword.
As mentioned yesterday, instead of asking Jeff for free review copies (he offered to do so more than once), I purchased both product for a grand total of 8$ US to support his work.
I set out to read both product with the only reference that it was a RPG based on the cheesy Barbarian/Sword and Sorcery movies of the 70′s and 80′s.
This post will be about the Broadsword game. I’ll post a second one soon about the game’s expansion: The World of Broadsword.
As I was reading through Broadsword, my initial gut reaction wasn’t all that positive… Once I was done and slept on it, I started digging around and I realized that to be fair to the product I needed to review it from a different perspective than a D&D veteran used to current design philosophies.
Broadsword is a simple, Beer & Pretzel RPG that has no other assumption than letting a bunch of players create Brawny/Buxom, ham-fisted warriors in minutes and spend 2-4 hours killing stuff and getting hacked to bits numerous times.
So I’m going to tackle this review from another, less anal-retentive, crunch obsessed angle…
Once upon a time…
Back in 1983, I was a 10-year old nerd that loved to play with the Atari, Intellivision, Legos and boardgames. One lazy weekend afternoon, my childhood friend Mathieu G. (not the same Math of my current group) called me and asked me to come and try this new game he had discovered.
Picking up my motocross-shaped bike (I’m too old for the BMX craze), I dropped by my buddie’s house. We sat on the basement table and he brought up 3 sheets of white paper, a pencil and a d6.
“My cousin has this game called Dungeons & Dragons” my buddy started. ” It comes in a Red Box and it has full of weird dice. Let play a game I created based on that. You are an adventurer and you have a sword and a shield. I’m going to draw a map as you explore a dungeon and you get to kill monsters and find treasure”
‘Sure’ I said. “How do I kill the monsters?”.
“Hummm… roll a d6, if you roll 6 it’s dead, if you roll 1 you’re dead”
“Cool! And what if I roll 2-5…”
“We’ll say that you go from near death(2) to wounding the monster real bad (5).
“Awesome!…”
We played that version of the game for hours and hours. I showed it to my father and all my other friends.
Then a 13 year old neighbor I kept pestering borrowed the AD&D Players Handbook from a friend and showed it to me (probably just to shut me up).
I never looked back…
Broadsword is that game I played before I discovered AD&D (And learned English trying to decipher Gygaxian Prose).
Mechanics:
Broadsword is a 17 page RPG that’s part of the 1PG line of games.
1PG stands for 1 page. That means that the actual rules of the game (including char gen, but excluding magic) fit on just one page.
They’re even reprinted on the character sheet so players have all they need to know about the game.
The mechanics are simple: Each character has 2 sets of randomly determined stats:
The Primary stats are Brawn, Personality, Perception and Knowledge. Each has a numeric value between 1 and 3. Each primary stat has between 4 and 10 skills that you can buy with randomly determined skill points. You can spend up to 3 points per skill.
Task/Combat resolution is then: Add skill to related primary stat and roll less than that on a d6, 1 is always a success, 6 always a failure. Opposed checks (like combat or contests of whatever) are won by succeeding by the widest margin against the target number.
The secondary stats are:
Presence: The character’s charisma. Determines the number of ‘traits’ you can buy with the character at char gen.
Guts: Your resilience to fear. Failing a guts roll makes you lose a presence point. Dropping presence makes you too unnerved to be of any use in the party (and actually makes you prone to hurt the other members)
Blood: Hit points !
Reputation: General perceived badassness.
Combat then is done by foe and PC rolling opposed Fighting/Shooting skill (from the Brawn list ). The winner deals Blood damage equal to weapon rating (from 1 to 8 ) + Brawn rating (an extra 1 to 3). A PC starts with 3d6+10 blood points.
Armour has a rating of 1 to 3 and absorbs that many damage upon a hit.
There are 20 advantages that a player can choose from to customize a character. That’s where the whole Barbarian feeling comes to life in that game. With choices like Animal Buddies, Flesh Wound, Good Looking and Lightning Reflexes you can deck your Thundar McConan with the traits to make it a perfectly acceptable unidimensional warrior!
Finally there is a one pager about Magic that gives some indication to adjucate magic (although it actually refers to another product for the core magic rules).
There are some character advancement rules but this game was not designed with campaigns in mind.
Actually, the game assumes that players may go through numerous characters in one evening!
Fluff
Once you account for mechanics, character sheets and cover pages, the book contains a one-page series of tips for referees which can be resumed as
…this is not a scholarly work or an in-depth roleplaying experience; it’s “make-believe goes to the movies.”
The rest are one page adventure plans: 3 stand alone scenarios and a 6 part ‘campaign’ arc.
So basically, there’s no fluff in the book, apart from a 1 paragraph introduction before the rules stuff starts.
At that point I was a bit perplexed, the game has no setting and explains none of the tropes of the genre…
That’s when I realized that the setting and fluff of Broadsword reside in the player’s minds. The game was created to appeal to players who watched hours upon hours of pulp barbarian movies and want to recreate that feeling for in an evening without having to buy 3 Core books, 2 sourcebooks and designing a 15 page adventure.
(That being said, World of Broadsword, the second product provides an actual setting, stay tuned).
Chatty’s take on the game
So now that I’ve taken the game in perspective, what do I think of it?
First, I’m not the target audience for that game. I don’t usually play a pick-up RPG game. On casual evenings, I’ll usually reach for a board game or play console games with my buddies.
However, for a simple game that can be learned in 5 minutes (15 if you create characters) and whose GM can whip an adventure almost instantly, it truly delivers on its promise.
Still, I think the game makes a few assumptions that might not be evident for literal minded GMs like me. First, it’s clear that such simple mechanics mean that the GM must wing a lot of how things happen when it can’t be resolved by a simple skill roll.
For example, how do you handle a 2 (or more) on 1 fight?
Additionally, there’s no indication about how much Armour and Weapon cost. Characters get silver but there are no equipment/service costs anywhere.
I think it was intentional because the game was not designed to be focused on gear or loot except as a vague motivator
(I mean why does Cohen the Barbarian raid the temple of the Scantily clad Snake priestesses if not to get his grubby hands on the Gem of Eternal Stiffness, sell it and spend it on ales and whores right? ).
However, because weapons cover a large range of damage (from Shuriken=1 to Greatsword=8) and armour also covers a range (hides = 1 and metal = 3), any player with a smidgen of the power gamer gene will automatically go for a Greatsword/metal armour combo all the time.
While it’s a Sword and Sorcery game, the magic rules leave me a bit confused, probably because it’s actually an extension of magic rules found in the 1PG companion. That’s the game weakest point by far because it fails to deliver on the ‘sorcery’ part.
Still, in such movies, the magic yielders are always the bad guys (i.e. NPCs) and the engine is flexible enough for a creative DM to fake magic attacks and enchantments without arousing suspicion.
Regardless, I can totally see how I could recapture the feeling of playing like I did 15 years ago. Take the description of a creative GM, a barebones rule set and a bunch of eager tongue-in-cheek, slightly drunk players and you got yourself an evening filled with laughs and crude Chainmail bikini jokes!
Final Verdict
Broadsword is a minimalist but effective RPG engine that offers to recreate the best (and worst) of low-budget/low-fantasy movies taken directly out of the collective recollection of the sword & Sorcery genre of the 70′s and 80′s.
Oh and it’s 4$.
Post publication random trivia
As I was checking the weapons list, I noticed that while the game is called broadsword, there is no broadsword in the list! I guess that ‘sword’ is a broadsword…
Mini-Link: The Stew, the Rant and the Barbarian!
Super casual weekend post here, I’ve got my 90 minute Lasagna to prepare (Anyone want’s my recipe?) because tonight I have a special visitor! Extradited Montrealer and DMing blogger extraordinaire Yax is in town on vacation and I’ve invited him over for dinner.
Now either expect us to seal our power sharing deal for world domination or maybe we’ll just watch Hockey and have a few cold ones.
Stew!
In recent news, Martin Rayla of Treasure Table fame is coming back to the world of GM-focused blogging after a 1/2 year hiatus. His new project, a 8 people strong cooperative blog named Gnome Stew will launch in May. Talk about an awesome name!
I hope I leveled up enough during Martin’s hiatus to weather the new competition…
Paizo gets it good!
Also, my good friend Graham recently outdid himself in a Campaign log/Rant post about his last Pathfinder game and the weaknesses of the 1st adventure path that he found. I’m amazed at the energy he puts in hacking an adventure to make it better for his players. I’m having a hard time doing it…
The key message I take home from his post (other than Paizo dropping the crunch ball on a few overpowered encounters…) is that I have to be more carefull in choosing an adventure by actually reading it cover to cover before selecting it for my group.
An ill-devised creates more work to salvage and may end up causing you to stop caring about it and affecting your enthusiasm about it… and an unenthusiastic DM is always bad news.
Support your local Evil DM
While I have yet to read it, my buddy Jeff the Evil DM has two published RPG products under his belt. One called Broadsword that he co wrote sometime ago and another called World of Broadsword that’s all his.
I’m buying them as I write this. 8$ for a game and a world-book about Conan-style Barbarian mayhem, I don’t think I can go wrong!
Expect a quick review here soon!
All right, I need to start cooking!
The Teardown
Let’s start with an analogy. Let’s say you’ve just written a short story for class in college. You hand it in to your professor, and get a B. There are plenty of editor’s marks on it: spelling, grammar, some minor organizational stuff. Then there are the overall comments, like “doesn’t flow well” or “theme isn’t well developed enough.”
Now, you are given the chance to revise the paper for a higher grade. You could just revise the former: it’s easy enough to correct grammar mistakes when the professor tells you what they are. If you just change all those in Word and reprint it out, you might get a B+.
The other stuff is harder. It’d effectively take a rewrite to fix. You know the overall structure now that it’s been written out, but you’re basically starting over. You know you can fix those problems, and if you did, you’d get an A, but it’s going to be a lot of work.
I prefer the latter, in every kind of design I do. And I especially recommend it in games. [Read the rest of this article]
