The Virtual “We’re behind you” Card: Chris Sims
(Editor’s Intro: Chris Sims was recently diagnosed with a Skin Cancer condition which, thankfully, turned out to be minor and treatable by facial surgery. This post is a virtual get well card and we would really appreciate for you to share a few kind words with us and sign it)
(Post publication edit: Turns out that Chris’ truck betrayed him and had to cancel the surgery and push it to next week… so let’s make this card a “we’re behind you” card then!)
Dear Chris,
We at Critical Hits, all our readers and fans would like to wish you a rapid recovery for what the “authorities” called a treatable growth. Rest assured that we all know the truth and support you with your fight against the spawns of the Far Realm. We know what invaded your stoic visage right after this unfortunate encounter with an overripe piece of Brie cheese in your refrigerator a few months ago.
Know that we all sent secret prayers to our deity, meditated upon our respective spiritual philosophies and harnessed our power sources of choice to unify our voices to aid your surgeon and crew. Thus, we hope she doesn’t score 3 failures before the required 8 successes that is this challenge of fending off the growing Fell Taint from your handsome face.
Rest assured, we all believe that the big DM in the sky is way less of a killerDM than some of your friends and former colleagues.
We look forward to seeing you back again on your feet and on the pages of this here website.
Phil & Dave on behalf of the whole Critical Hits crew, friends and readers.
Art graciously offered by Jared Von Hindman
Roludothon 1 Report, Morning: Robo-Rally, Agricola and Cheetoism
Last Saturday, I attended a Montreal-based mini- gaming convention, called Roludothon 1, based around our newest bilingual gaming forum Roludo (which, unless I’m mistaken, means roleplaying in Esperanto).
The event, held in a beautiful 8 room apartment in Montreal’s Plateau brought together about 20 gamers playing board and roleplaying games over 3 tables and 3 time slots. The apartment was this HUGE early 1900s multiplex so typical of my city and our hosts Jocelyn and Marie-Mousse showed all the grace and informal generosity typical of Québécois hospitality. They also ran a tight ship, having tables and chairs prepared before each event, including cardboard signs with the names of the events and participants on each.
The apartment was located near a local commercial street filled with cafés, bistros and restaurant, it truly was a perfect setup for such an awesome nerd party that was this mini-con.
Board Games Morning Slot
The morning slot had a supers RPG called Wild Talent and a more general board game area. That’s where I registered and was joined by my friends Eric, Martin and 3 other very friendly gamers. We started the day with a game of the latest edition of RoboRally, Richard Garfield’s game of programmable racing robots shooting, pushing and screwing with each other’s well crafted plans.
We played a short game focused on one map with 5 robots and it was absolutely hilarious. This game remains the closest thing to a what I’d like a fast paced version of Car Wars to be. Still, I love that game and the small tweaks they did in the newest edition makes for a smoother running game (like adding a timer to prevent stragglers from thinking for too long).
I still want to use RoboRally in a D&D 4e game and I in fact have made mechanics for them.
Soon, real soon!
We then started playing a game of Agricola, one I had started hearing more and more about in my gaming circles but hadn’t had seen yet. For others like me, Agricola is another of those fast to play, more complex than expected European games. All players control a family of farmers staving off starvation while trying to build a farm and make it prosper.
Here’s a great quote from Nico Solitander over at Board Game Geeks:
…turns out its about raising wild boars and making babies in the German schwartzwalds. But then you press “play” and it’s pretty damn awesome a game.
The game is a “worker placement” game in which you have a certain number of turns to place your family tokens on various tasks to generate food, resources, make babies and build stuff like grazing fields, stables and new rooms to your house (to make room for said babies). The interesting/cool/unnerving thing about this game is that as the game progresses, you have more and more options on which to place your workers and less and less time before harvesting season comes, forcing you to feed everyone to avoid making everyone beggars.
The game is very interesting but the sheer amount of choices one needs to make can be catatonia-inducing. For high-level, reactive types like myself, I find myself unable to stick to a clear plan and it costs me dearly. Still, I caught on mid-game and finished with a pretty decent score for a beginner.
Yet, as clever and as engaging as this game can be, it screams Analysis Paralysis and I would not want to play this game with aggressive analytical types who requires to be given as much time as needed to “think & plan properly”.
Oh man, I just had a nightmare flashback to my one and only Federation and Empire game.
In fact Agricola is one of those games where you have to punch through the steeper than expected strategy learning curve to truly start appreciating the genius of that game. But be forewarned, a small early planning mistake can and will haunt you for the rest of the game.
Cheetoism at its best!
The con organizers had set a 90 minute period for lunch, which allowed each participants to go out and choose whatever takeout delight they wanted. I decided to go with a classic Montreal Submarine sandwich of grilled steak, Sauted veggies (green peppers, onions and mushroom) with melted cheese and fresh tomatoes!
Yum!
We all converged back to the apartment where the kitchen and backyard tables had been made available to all those hungry gamers. Now this may sound inane, but the fact that our hosts suggested that we get the food for take-out and directed us to these tables made us all mingle a lot more than we had so far in the day.
Through the smells of Subs, Burgers, Poutine and Persian delights, I got to talk and listen to stories about Pathfinder, French RPGs and Burning Wheel quite a lot and I got to learn more about a lot of people who had mostly been strangers. It’s been said that the activity of sharing a meal is an important step in forging stronger social ties and I witnessed it clearly during both lunch and dinner. This is a must repeat for future events, regardless of the venue we chose as this event grows.
Up next: Chatty plays Mouse Guard, and prevails!
Origins 2010: “Game Design is Mind Control” Seminar
During Origins 2010, I dropped by a packed seminar run by Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen. Luke Crane is the designer of Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard RPGs, of which we (mainly ChattyDM) have spoken of on many occasions. Jared Sorensen is the game designer behind a number of games including Action Castle and the Parsley system, as well as a variety of electronic game projects. These are just some of my notes from the seminar, so nothing here is verbatim what they said, just how it was interpreted by me.
What does it mean that game design is mind control? As they explained it, games encourage you to do things you wouldn’t normally do. They encourage you to put yourself in situations you wouldn’t otherwise be in and have your feelings manipulated, which is a form of mind control. Well-designed games evoke certain feelings in players and put those players in the middle of a scenario. As they emphasized, the goal is not to make your players have fun, since fun is a very subjective thing. (Just like Yehuda said.) But if you can succeed in designing a game that causes the players to have the reaction you intended, you’ve succeeded as a game designer. They said everyone in the seminar is a game designer… which as they joked, meant arguing and starving. [Read the rest of this article]
Lost Words of Power
Greetings, travellers! I bring to you the lost arcana of the ages. Words of power not found in any spellbook!
- Power Word: Buttons – A powerful multipurpose spell, this can either summon an incredibly powerful kitten, or cause a PC’s fly to come undone with such force that it rips a hole through the Planes themselves. In the latter case, the player should roll percentile. On a natural 00, two buttons fly into Ravenloft and infiltrate Strahd’s favorite tuxedo. They eventually overthrow him and become the cruelest entities the multiverse has ever known. Don’t laugh. You know not the evils that lurk in the mind of a button.
- Power Word: Agnew – Spiro Agnew appears and destroys everything in a 1 mile radius with waves of fraud and anachronism, except for PC’s under the age of 30, who behave as if affected by a Sleep spell. Unless, of course, they have ranks in Knowledge(U.S. History). They die first.
- Power Word: Broccoli - The party dies of nutrition. All characters in the immediate vicinity must save or receive 1d8 points of education damage about the four food groups. Any player who mentions the food pyramid is sentenced to death by Mulligan Stew.
- Power Word: Femur - One of target character’s legbones becomes sentient for 1 turn, and is privy to many of the secrets of the universe. Unfortunately, no means of communication has been developed for femurs thusly affected. Polymorphing test subjects into femurs in attempts to make contact have only resulted in uncomfortable stories to be brought up at the annual Mages’ holiday party after a few drinks.
- Power Word: Detassel - Perhaps the most popular spell among teenage wizards in the plains. Also fun at parties.
- Power Word: Kegel - The other enemies may not even know the spell was cast. The target definitely will.
- Power Word: To Your Mother - All characters within earshot take 4d20 ice damage. The caster dies and cannot be resurrected because the gods now hate him. Forever.
P.S. All of these are completely legal At-Will powers in 4th edition, usable by any class. And farmers. Also, ducks.
Photo by Katkrieg, someone who deserves to be hired as an art director at WotC immediately. WTF people? Power Word: Hire!
Inq. of the Week: D&D and Magic Items?
Last week Dave asked about which of the big summer conventions you are planning on going to just before he set out for Origins 2010 himself (which he’ll no doubt be writing about this week). The largest group was 46% of you that aren’t planning on attending any of the big gaming conventions. The most popular convention was GenCon with 26% of you planning on going, followed by the Other response with 13% and just above Origins that 12% of you attended just last week. Dragon*Con came in at 9%, San Diego Comic Con had 5% and PAX Prime was at the bottom with 4%. We don’t take these as full proof numbers, just a decent look at which cons are more popular and get more attendance amongst you guys.
Today I’d like to touch on a topic that is very prominent on my mind lately, the topic of how magic items are handled in Dungeons & Dragons and specifically how they’re designed to be used in 4th Edition. I would imagine there is some good discussion that can be had on this topic, but between Dave and I we pretty well agree on the matter so I’m bringing it up here to hopefully open up to a larger range of opinions and see what we get. The DMG2 introduced some solid rules for skipping magic items and keeping the math intact by adding flat bonuses per tier/level so that the PCs can keep up with the monsters without the need for magical weapons and armor.
One of the really fantastic elements of D&D is that you can have one group’s campaign where magic items abound and every character is draped in more than enough of them to handle various situations, or you can have a game where magic items have been unheard of for centuries and the discovery of only one of them can change the course of the entire campaign. Of course there are always the artifacts or the healing potions which run the range from incredibly rare and powerful to common and used nearly every day but are all still magical items, but it’s not very difficult to look at any campaign or setting and figure out roughly how common magic items are in that world. With all of this in mind, I’m asking:
Loading ...Please feel free to share any details about your characters or campaign worlds in the comments. It doesn’t matter if you have a Conan-like character who doesn’t need a magical sword to slice people’s heads off or an epic paladin wearing radiant forged plate armor and a holy avenger, we want to hear about it all!
Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots, Preorder Starts Today
Engine Publishing, owned by RPG blog legend Martin Ralya (creator of Gnome Stew and Treasure Tables) announced today the pre-launch of their first RPG publication: Eureka, 501 Adventure Plots. It is available as both a fully bookmarked and hyperlinked PDF and a soft cover book.
Engine Publishing announced today that everyone pre-ordering the book would get instant access to the PDF, weeks before the launch of the book.
Touted as a multi-genre adventure seed repository, Eureka offers GMs looking for adventure ideas that can be easily be fleshed out in full adventures. Each entry of the 312 pages book features:
- A plot outline detailing enough material for a complete adventure
- A hook to draw players in
- Summary descriptions of 3-5 encounters to run the adventure
- Game mastering notes
- Plot twists
- Advice to run the plot
The book is divided in 5 sections: Game Mastering Advice, Fantasy Plots, Sci-Fi plots, Horror plots and an index. The numerous, system neutral plots are presented as multi-paragraphs adventure summaries outlining the situation, the key scenes and the choices that PCs are to be presented with. The description ends with minor tweaks to the plot to change its flavor or function.
Each plot also features a list of genres into which the adventure can be adapted to. For example, an adventure about escorting a captive bandit lord through badlands with minions harrying the PCs to free their boss, is presented as a generic fantasy adventure. It is,. however, said to be adaptable to the following genre
Action Horror, Cyberpunk, Gothic Horror, Grim and Gritty Fantasy, Hard Sci-fi, High Fantasy, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic, Pulp, Sci-fi, Space Opera, Steampunk, Swashbuckling, Traditional Fantasy, Victim Horror, Western.
Finally, each plot presents a set of tags that can help game masters seek elements of interest while hunting for an adventure idea. In the above bandit example, the tags are featured as:
combat-heavy, escort mission, mass combat, sandbox, shady, travel, villain
This product is ideal for GMs that want to create their own adventures but need help to kick start their creative muscles.
For more details, including a cool dice contest, see Martin’s article and many preview links here.
You can pre-order the book here, for 34,95$ which will give you the hardcover as soon as it’s ready to ship AND a PDF copy as your order is confirmed.
Origins 2010: Origins Awards Winners
Due to massive, systemic techfail, we were not able to live cover the Origins Awards. But we do have all the winners of the 36th Origins Awards below, with all the nominees. [Read the rest of this article]
Origins 2010: “Back to the Future the Card Game” and “Pirate Fluxx” by Looney Labs
Origins is, without a doubt, the biggest convention for Looney Labs. Between a gigantic demo space (which this year you can follow a path of multicolored daisies to), a decent-sized booth in the exhibit hall, and dozens of excited volunteers in lab coats, this is the show to be at if you’re a fan of Fluxx or their other games.
I have a bit of an inside story with Looney Labs. I was the first paid employee they hired, giving me my first real break in the gaming industry. Even years after that summer job ended, I still regularly attend their game night, where we playtest some of their upcoming releases.
Thus, these two products aren’t necessarily new to me, but this Origins is the biggest unveiling of these two new upcoming games, and judging by the reactions of their fans, they’re likely to be another set of hit card games. [Read the rest of this article]
What if, Twitter Edition: Dailies as Encounter Powers
One of the things I absolutely love about Twitter, once you reach a certain critical mass of followers, is its instant ability to create multiple parallel discussions about a subject.
Yesterday I was working at prepping my Font of Sorrows D&D 4e adventure when the following thought struck me:
What if dailies were encounter powers but could only be used while bloodied? That’s what I see in action movies like Iron Man 2
When thoughts like this strike me, I drop them on Twitter to see the reactions to the unrefined, raw idea. Amid various calls of approval and one notable exception, here were some responses:
WyattSalazar That would add an interesting dimension to healing too. Heal only if you’re near-death, so you can use your bomb powers and therefore risk getting an enemy critical or a fat recharge attack knocking you out. (Chatty: Exactly!)
Tomas_Chernits What if another type of power existed, and it could only be used while bloodied? “Last-resort powers”? (Chatty: That would work too without needing too much work … that or making dailies/encounter more powerful when bloodied, but it makes PCs more powerful)
Owen_Stephens Sure, the Form Blazing Sword effect (Chatty: Hey man, I’m all for Final Fantasy 4e).
Siliconwolf I’m not big on extra daily use, but what about bonus to hit (+4 or something) or daily is reliable if your bloodied (Chatty: Reliable is an excellent suggestion).
FleaBeard Then every player would rush into combat with no armor on (Chatty: Am I wrong to think that would be extra cool?).
countingku That is what @gamefiend is doing with his “LimitBreak” powers, iirc. (Chatty: You can find Gamefiend’s posts here)
EpicDestinies I like the idea. Perhaps it only works in “Final” encounters for that real climatic movie-moment feel?
lotofsnow Maybe a chance to recharge 1 daily per encounter when you become bloodied. Add feats to increase recharge chance. #dnd (Chatty: That’s also a simple and elegant design choice)
Alios7873 Maybe a daily you can use as you drop to zero HP. Go out in a blaze of glory! Mnstrs shouldn’t be the only ones to have that ability (Chatty: They already do, my lvl 16 players explode into powers when they drop to 0)
GeekyLyndsay @chattydm We have ‘surges’ built into our game, where we can take ability damage to gain an extra attack/spell. !d4 Ability damage = 1 more standard action (Chatty: D&D 3.5)
I would use the idea in a Gritty Heroic setting for D&D 4e, quite possibly using Dave’s E11 variant where no one levels up passed 10 except gaining new feats and swapping powers.
I submitted the idea to my friend Yan (who’s our closet game designer) and he countered that this would seriously hamper some class fundamentals, like the Warden’s forms and the Fighter’s stances. He counter proposed that all “dailies” (which would need to be renamed) would recharge after a short rest but PCs could use only one per fight until they were bloodied. At that point they could use all others.
Of course this would mean adjusting monsters, mostly increasing damage output…
I think I’m going to try this later this summer.
Thoughts, comments?
What D&D 4e hack are you contemplating but haven’t talked to others yet? Bloggers, feel free to link to your posts about 4e hacks.
Have a great weekend all!
Review: “Fiasco”
Jason Morningstar likes to describe Fiasco as being about “powerful ambition and poor impulse control,” and the rules are laser focused on this. It provides the powerful ambitions and interferes with the players’ natural impulse control. The rest – the juicy stuff, the fun stuff – is in the hands of the players. That minimalism – that focus – will turn many gamers off, but it is also the reason Fiasco succeeds so brilliantly.
The Skinny
Fiasco is inspired by a certain type of movie, most strongly associated with the Coen Brothers, where there are several characters that have a plan, plus, possibly, a couple who have strong convictions. These plans and convictions run up against each other over the course of the movie, and a human train wreck results. Morningstar, in an appendix, cites Blood Simple, Fargo, A Simple Plan and Burn After Reading as the four perfect examples of the genre (he also includes about 100 lesser exemplars). In Fiasco, each player creates one of these characters and then, during play, they run their characters at each other at high speed. By the end, there will be winners and losers, and they won’t necessarily be deserving of their fate.
The system is a far cry from Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer. In fact, it belongs to a new school of RPG design that calls itself as Structured Freeform. Related to the Scandinavian Jeepform movement but aimed at tabletop play instead of LARP, Structured Freeform does not focus on conflict resolution or skill checks, let alone combat systems. Instead, the rules of these games focus on developing characters and scenes that produce the kind of story the designer wants, and trusts the players to go in the direction these pointers indicate. As with Fiasco, many of these games avoid GMs, and play in a single sitting. In this case, all players take turns establishing scenes that feature their characters (and any other characters they feel are appropriate), although they only get four turns, plus a denouement, to tell their character’s story. An entire Fiasco arc should take no more than 3 hours to play out, plus a little extra time if there is a rules explanation. With a group of experienced players, playing time should come closer to two hours than three. [Read the rest of this article]
