Samurai Squad

I’ve played an unusual amount of Heroes of Rokugan recently, two mods in the last week.  I commented recently to people I play with online that, while it’s obvious that the more you play the more you get into the campaign, I didn’t realize how pronounced the effect was.  I’m constantly in touch with the campaign due to weekly local play, where I either GM or superfluously hang out while another GMs an adventure I’ve already played.  But, I haven’t been as jazzed about my (main) character in ages.

Then, I had a few other observations from the unusually prolific recent play.  There are my usual views on party composition – unlike home play where a GM can adjust challenges, the living campaign challenges are largely out of a GM’s hands, so metagaming party composition is important.  Combat tactics was something I spent a good amount of time thinking about.  Sure, it may be ironic that someone who favors combat as an activity so much less than others thinks more about it, but it is an outlet for analytical thinking.

I guess I’ll start with some comments on recent mods.  I will do a new set of rankings on subjective desirability and attempted objective quality for what I have played to this point.  But, first, I enjoyed both recent mods I played – Cold Hands, Stone Heart (SoB15) & Tear Away the Darkness (SoB22).  I especially enjoyed the former.

One of my complaints about HoR3 – yes, I have a variety, no, I’m not trying to grief staff by regularly pointing them out – is that too many mods are underdeveloped.  The underdeveloped ones tend to just be short at least one scene or major challenge.  Some play okay but seem to hint at far more than what you end up doing.  I got really tired of investigative mods from HoR2 because they felt like they dragged, but it wasn’t due to having too much to do, simply that what you did had too much sameness to it.

SoB15 was not one of the underdeveloped mods.  It gave me plenty of opportunities to do the things I enjoy … going to try to avoid being spoilery.  The rolls in the game made my character useful mechanically.  It had one or more themes that speak to me.

Meanwhile, SoB22′s enjoyable experience had a lot to do with relief.  I keep telling folks that I really want to read the mod to see whether it’s as harsh as it seems and how it scales for different groups.  I’m a big fan of smiting evil in L5R – as the first Shadowlands mod for the campaign, there was evil to be smited.  I didn’t have as much of a thematic experience, but I got to use my analytical mind …

Latest thoughts on HoR3 mods:

Scenario	Stars	Rank – Quality	Fun	Rank – Fun
SOB07	3.5	1	4	2
SOB00	3.5	2	3.5	4
SOB18	3	3	3.5	6
SOB15	3	4	4	1
SOB06	3	5	3.5	5
SOB09	3	6	3.5	7
SOB13	3	7	3	10
SOB12	2.5	8	3.5	8
SOB20	2.5	9	3	11
SOB11	2.5	10	3.5	3
SOB19	2.5	11	3	13
SOB01	2.5	12	2.5	16
SOB14	2.5	13	2.5	14
SOB08	2.5	14	2.5	15
SOB21	2.5	15	2	17
SOB04	2.5	16	3	9
SOB16	2.5	17	2	18
SOB10	2	18	1	21
SOB03	2	19	1.5	19
SOB02	2	20	1.5	20
SOB05	1	21	0.5	22
SOB17	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
SOB22	pending	pending	3	12

Moving on, party composition.  Fairly sure I mentioned some elements to an effective party in another post.  Some additional comments and some reminders.

First, the more shugenja, the better.  Shugenja are just superior to other schools for the usual reason that magic is almost always better than the lack of it.  Supernatural stuff dies to Jade Strike like it totally doesn’t to a lot of other things.  Tempest of Air, though I believe GMs are too generous with how many enemy targets and how few friendlies get hit by it, wins fights, including fights that wouldn’t otherwise be winnable.  Fires of Purity is broken.  Path to Inner Peace is essential.  Commune is broken.

After that, we get into specific roles.

Always want a talker – Awareness at least 3, preferably higher, at least 3 ranks in Courtier and Sincerity with Etiquette being important if less so.  Why Sincerity?  A lot of adventures come down to convincing someone to shake off possession or the like.

Hunter – I used to call this the Perceiver but most folks realize the importance in Investigation where too many people don’t value Hunting highly enough.  Picking up trails is essential in a number of mods, more so in HoR3 than HoR2.  The Hunter will have Perception at least 3, preferably higher, at least 2 ranks in Hunting, preferably at least 3, at least 2 ranks in Investigation, preferably 3, should have Battle too since Battle is the only other Perception skill.

Brain – Intelligence 3+, Sage, Commerce, Medicine.  Engineering makes sense but isn’t rolled that often.  Yes, a number of party brains get by without Sage, but Sage is so stupidly good that it really should be part of any character who plans an INT of 4+ and gets the party by while the character works up from INT 3 to INT 4.

“Ranger” – a new category for me, someone who can control range, more specifically, prevent a target from getting out of range of the party when in pursuit and who can affect enemies at range when melee isn’t effective.  This isn’t as essential as the others, and shugenja typically fill this role by accident what with Tempest of Air or Water spells increasing actions/movement or Earth’s Stagnation/Grasp of Earth.  Fire has a harder time with this as Fires from Within is actually not that effective damagewise.

Grappler – grapple is broken, sometimes it’s the only way to deal with problematic enemies.

Murderer – massive damage is the party’s friend, good to target with buffs from shugenja.

Taking my characters’ roles as examples, we can see a bit why I’m so reluctant to play my alt (nevermind not wanting an XP suck for my main).  Typical online party for me is:  Utaku A’Nen, Kitsuki Ketsumei, Ide Xiao Xi, Kitsu Kagami, and Moshi Shigeo (moi).

Ketsumei is the talker.  Xiao Xi and, now that Ketsumei has Hunting, Ketsumei are the hunters.  Xiao Xi and Kagami are shugenja.  I have become a much more useful brain now that I’m INT 4, though I lack Sage.  I don’t think Kagami has Sage, which means no Sage in party.  I think Kagami can ranger, though my recollection is that we don’t ranger well.  A’Nen is a mild grappler (less mild outside of combat).  Xiao Xi can probably grapple well.  Xiao Xi murders well; I’m okay at slaughtering.

Now, my alt, Hoshi Takumi, is best at talker but inferior to Ketsumei.  Two talkers is okay but not thrilling, depending upon what is given up.  For instance, two Air shugenja talkers would be fine because they have shugenja brokenness.  Takumi recently went to INT 3 and is a Sage!  But, he’s been pretty much behind Shigeo at all times as a brain.  Takumi is only a demibrain and will likely never rise to quality braindom.  Takumi also offers nothing else in these categories, though he is a moneypockets, which is a category that’s occasionally useful.

Bottom line, a solid talker and demibrain isn’t as useful to my typical group as a demibrain (Shigeo lacks Sage!), front line fighter, and demimurderer.  Take Ketsumei, though, out of the party and Takumi’s value rises astronomically due to not having niche overlap.

Combat tactics.  I’m not going to go into a lot of depth on combat tactics in this post.  More, there are some bad tactics that amaze me.

Frequent bad tactic – attacking someone who has already gone in the round when there are enemies who have yet to go.  Another, though this is more of a 4e phenomenon due to the awful inversion of the wound chart from 3e – not murdering the wounded, aka spreading damage rather than concentrated fire.

Spellcasting – yes, any spellcasting tends to be highly productive, but not splitting Jade Strike, splitting is far more damage output than calling raises for damage, wasting spell slots on easily winnable battles, and not healing the damage sponges, er, bushi are the main criticisms I have.

Initiative and stance manipulation should be much more common; I’m particularly guilty of forgetting that Center Stance exists, though I rarely see it being a good idea for my character.  Typically, initiative is going to be manipulated by Void Point expenditures, well, speaking of spending Void, people seem to overlove spending VPs for damage soak when ATN boosts are likely to be better defensive return on investment.

Everything is situational.  Most fights aren’t deadly enough for a total party kill, but that’s what gets people dead.  Fight a tough fight and all of those bad habits actually matter.

And, those are my primary HoR thoughts today.

[Classic] Strength of Air

Another instant classic, this time from a post to the Alderac L5R forum.

* * *

I started responding on the thread about Mirumoto Bushi when I realized I would have just been threadjacking, so here goes my concern.

So far, I feel like every school (even shugenja) is an Air school in 4e play. I’m not entirely sure why 4e feels so Air heavy, but it may be due to:

1. Inversion of wound chart, making even low Earth characters unlikely to be in wound penalties.

2. Lower attack bonuses (Free Raises, static) combined with higher base ATNs making it harder to hit, not only reducing damage which the lower Earth characters enjoy but also leading to high Reflexes making hitting much, much harder than in 3e (3e being when missing was never expected).

3. Less reason to buy up skills, leading to more points devoted to traits with the best bang for the buck with skill use being Awareness. Increased Void cost of 4e can siphon off points, but that still doesn’t encourage Earth above 3, Water, or even Fire (as important as Agility generally is, see 4. for more on Reflexes) for bushi and courtiers.

4. Far more tactical movement use, leading to combats that start further away, leading to more ranged combat.

5. Three key Awareness skills, generating increased value out of Awareness increases.

6. Agility no longer mattering for dueling.

All of this can be undermined, of course. Magic and special attacks are a great way to ignore ATN and make Willpower more relevant. Successful Fear is incredibly harsh. Cover or restricted combat setups and forcing characters to string bows (which I wouldn’t as it’s just annoying and shafts Tsuruchi, et al) would reduce the value of bows. Making Investigation, Hunting, Intelligence skills more essential to success reduces focus on Awareness skills.

But, still, given that the Awareness skills can’t just be ignored and Reflexes didn’t lose anything from 3e to 4e, while my sense is that Earth did and Agility has a harder time keeping up with Reflexes while losing dueling relevance, I’m weary of how important I see the Air Ring being. Only likely to be exacerbated when The Book of Air comes out.

* * *

While I probably disdain the Water Ring the most, I’m fond of Perception.  I just find the Air Ring a bore and try to ignore it when my characters aren’t forced into it.  This is quite detrimental, of course.  Putting aside how important Awareness is for dealing with people, by ignoring Reflexes, I’m hurting initiative, which was essential in 3e, the game of whoever strikes first wins, and Armor TN, essential in 4e, the game of grinding away where someone might actually miss with an attack.

I had a 3e character who sucked, hard, relative to the 3e standard.  But, I enjoyed him for his unkillability.  He could hit people, especially with Full Attack stance, which he could survive due to Earth 4.

I have a somewhat similar build with 4e and it’s obnoxious how dependent he is upon armor (for not getting hit and reducing damage).  Sure, I see all 4e bushi being largely screwed when not allowed to use armor, but at least a Reflexes character can dodge attack after attack and still isn’t that likely to be in wound penalties if someone rolls unusually well.  At least initiative is not as important as it used to be, though that does depend upon not facing a bunch of spellcasters who can make a mess of combat before you act.  On the flip side, those spellcasters do ignore ATN, so at least Reflexes doesn’t help as much defensively.

Maybe, it’s just that I play in less investigative adventures and more social + combat adventures where Intelligence and Perception become less relevant.

Bushido Mechanics

Can’t spell Compassion without Passion,
Can’t spell Courage without Rage,
Can’t spell Sincerity without Sin,
Can’t spell Duty without … um … doh!
… back to the drawing board.

No, not talking about the RPG Bushido, though I do own it and met someone recently who ran/played it, much to my surprise – very hard system.

I’ve been thinking increasingly about distinguishing character facets by pulling out each of the L5R tenets of bushido.

Bushido Hierarchy

I have trouble seeing my HoR characters’ personalities.  Since I’m pro-Honor, I started thinking about which tenets they cared more about to act Honor-ably (try to up their Honor Ranks) during play.  It didn’t take long to realize that the obvious thing to do was to simply rank every tenet.  For the moment, not putting any numerical value on them but just seeing what was relatively more or less important.

My first pass was interesting.  I certainly realized that I didn’t really know for many of the tenets what they believed was important.  Also, I ended up with two very similar profiles, which seemed wrong.

Example:

Bushido Hierarchy:
Courage > Courtesy > Sincerity > Honor > Honesty > Compassion > Duty

I ended up redoing my hierarchy for my other character.  One thing that was throwing me was that I was using astrology, both Eastern and Western to aid forming these characters’ personalities and the keywords I pulled out for their signs pushed me into a lot of tenets.  At first, I had both characters caring little about Duty but realized that Duty was one of the most important aspects of my other character.

Of course, the higher one’s Honor Rank, the stronger the character feels in general.  The lowest tenet for one character may be more valued than the highest of another.  Which brings us to scoring.

Individual Scores

One of my characters is Honor 5 and the other Honor 7.  These are the averages of the rank values for the individual tenets, though I don’t think a lot of people really think about it from this direction.  While certainly people realize that Honor Rank is an average and that different tenets are ranked differently, that the average of those ranks should be the same as the overall can be surprising to look at.

A character may very well be 10 in Duty and 1 in everything else, a Scorpion say, and average out to a 2.  Not surprised?  Well, that’s a stereotypical case.  What about someone who is 10 in three tenets and 1 in the rest, averaging out to about 5.  This character is extreme, to the point where I couldn’t see it being all that reasonable.  Still, variance is an issue, though high Honor and low Honor characters are going to be much more limited in variance.

Example:

Bushido Hierarchy:
Sincerity – 9
Duty – 9
Courtesy – 7
Compassion – 7
Honesty – 6
Courage – 6
Honor – 5

This is, of course, my Honor 7 character.  What stands out to me isn’t the high end but that he’s really not all that Honor(tenet)able.  Just average.  Ignoring that Honor (tenet) and Honor (mechanic) get confusing, it helps me to realize what I can let slide.  There’s also a medium level of variance, in my opinion.  An Honor 8 character has to get into 10′s to have more than a slight variance.

It would be interesting to build more characters with one superlow number to really define the character in the setting.  Speaking of which, how do these numbers come about?

How To Score?

For my characters, I’ve given them astrological signs and went through my astrology books to pull out character traits.  Often, those traits correspond to tenets (or work against them).

Example:

Sheep – righteous, sincere, gullible, mild-mannered, shy, artistic, fashionable, creative worker, emotional, pessimistic, withdrawn, gentle, compassionate, forgiving, dislikes strict schedules, doesn’t take well to discipline or criticism, fond of children/animals, close to nature, homebody, subjective, food/shelter/clothing, lucky, survivor, placate/evade enemies, roundabout, worrier, romantic

This is for the second character.  Note that his Compassion isn’t all that high relative to other tenets.  Other tenets came up as important when looking at his Western sign.

But, not every character has had this much work put into it.  The mechanics of L5R, itself, help produce values or a hierarchy.  “Paragon of …” or “Failure of Bushido: …” should clearly distinguish tenets.  I’m working on a character at the moment with Paragon of Compassion and Failure of Honesty.  If I don’t score Compassion highest and Honesty lowest, I’m being inconsistent.

Then, there’s background and the more common stuff that players come up with for their characters.  My Sheep belongs to a family that puts in a lot of hard work and is very traditional but also went to a school that is very much into hard work.  All of this lends itself well to Duty being an important aspect, which was why I redid my numbers for the character to where, now, Duty is a 9.

There’s another way.  I don’t have much respect for random character creation out of a book – any system.  But, inconsistently, I find randomizing for my own benefit very helpful for coming up with a more fully realized (or weirder) character concept.  While building the new character, I hadn’t decided what Paragon or what Failure (if Failure at all) the character would have, so I rolled d10′s to give relative values for each tenet.  As the character is starting out with 7.5 Honor, I simply added two to each die result.  The average was right on.  The results kind of problematic.

A disadvantage of random results, which is why I’m against being forced to be random, is that you get results you aren’t comfortable with.

I also randomly rolled d12′s for astrological signs, getting Ox and Pisces.  That was less problematic, though, going with this will force me to stretch some as a role-player.

But, why does this all matter?

Tenets

I see the tenets being rather confusing.  In particular, sincerity and honor are confusing.  What’s amusing is that L5R doesn’t really try to define honor, even though that only makes it worse for players and GMs.  At least there’s some attempt to separate honesty and sincerity.

Compassion

Not much of an issue here.  Though, it’s interesting how much of Rokugani society is predicated upon the idea that your lessers aren’t even people when the encouraged philosophy says to be nice to them.

Courage

Courage is not the absence of fear.  Courage is making fear your bitch.  However, fear, itself, is considered a weakness in Rokugan, which is also inconsistent when courage can’t exist without it.

Courtesy

Okay, be polite at all times.  But, it’s no biggy if you murder someone for disrespecting your sword?  Okay, kind of weird.  Metagamewise, anyone accidentally touching your blades, you, or whatever should be left off the hook so that you look compassionate and courteous.  Though, see honor.

Duty

Simple enough, until you get into Scorpion “loyalty”.  Is loyalty just duty or something more?  Do Scorpion even make sense?

Honesty

I get the distinction between honesty and sincerity when it comes to speaking.  When it comes to philosophy, it’s messier.  So, just being truthful, in and of itself, is honorable, yet being dishonest in a sincere way is also (partially) honorable?

Honor

Big problem of definition in L5R because Honor is a mechanic as well as a tenet.  I did a dictionary search of honor for guidance.  Very interesting in that it went in a direction I don’t think about for L5R.

Respect, esteem, privilege, exalted position – these all tie heavily into Status.  The idea that honorable actions are actions worthy of praise or reward is different from the internal concept of integrity, which seems to be what L5R is going for.

Killing an oni is?  Dutiful?  To an extent.  But, really, it’s honorable in the sense of doing something that should be esteemed.  Yet, the game would think of this more as Glory-ous.  Similarly, everything under Glory would tie into honor if you look at honor externally as something to be proud of.

If you look to define integrity, once you get past honest, you get into a definition loop.  Moral, righteous, virtuous – it all ends up being the same thing.  Correct action.  But, that’s circular.  What is correct?  Can only know that by knowing what is honorable/virtuous.

Sincerity

At least honor seems like something we comprehend even if we can’t define it.  Sincerity’s problem is honesty.  Again, it’s simple to distinguish the two when it comes to what someone says.  If someone speaks truth, then honest.  If someone lies or hedges, dishonest.  If someone sounds truthful, then sincere.  If someone sounds dishonest, then insincere.

But, that just means that honesty and sincerity are differed by perspective.  That’s not entirely the distinction with sincerity that L5R is going for.  There’s a concept of sincerity of action that honesty doesn’t really apply to.

Being one in action and word gets mentioned multiple times.  What does this mean?  There’s an element of believing in one’s actions, including one’s speech.  There is no try, there is only do or do not.  Even if try is more honest.

How does this apply to playing the game?  Sincerity, to me, is very much about the lack of doubts, whether internal or external.  Credulity, believability.  Overconfident types aren’t sincere even if they have no internal doubts as they aren’t believable in what they think they can accomplish.

Actually, I’ve been trying to come up with a good model for opposing the Three Sins of Rokugan:  fear, desire, and regret.  Courage clearly opposes fear.  Duty clearly opposes desire.  What opposes regret?  I thought about honor, which also fits with seeing duty/honor/courage being the “action” tenets to compassion/courtesy/honesty/sincerity being the “social” tenets.

While sincerity’s lack of doubts lends itself to opposing fear, I can also see lacking doubts being anti-regret.  Then, compassion could have some element of overcoming regret, like courage overcomes fear, by being compassionate to oneself.  Maybe it’s easier to apply every tenet in some way against the Sins than I thought once you get into this line of thinking.

The Quiet Year

End of the year.  Thought I’d look at what I predicted for 2011 and wrap up anything else for 2011.

Were there any major changes?  I don’t think so.  The Conan campaigns had already lost traction, so that we haven’t done much this year is hardly surprising.  We don’t play Mondays at conventions anymore, which was our one consistent time.  Running HoR2 weekly continued throughout the year, possibly a surprise, the group has even grown.

I did start playing Friday nights with a new RPG group.  That’s a change but not major in the grand scheme of things.  Nor is going to a different convention than ConQuest rise to the level of a major change.

V:TES

I was wrong about storyline play being the big deal this year.  In fact, the big story this year was attendance at standard, constructed tournaments.  We’ve had more 20+ player tournaments this year than every other year combined.  That’s just weird.  It’s so hard for me to understand what interests people when it comes to CCGs.  For me, once I’m invested, I’m invested.  If I’m not, I’m not.  Matt Morgan winning the NAC was notable if not a great shock, had been one of the top players in the game for quite some time.

I may have enjoyed play more but certainly enjoyed tournaments less.  Not playing in finals means less stories to tell, which makes the various tournaments less notable.  I’ve also been less invested in what I’ve played in events.

L5R

Yes, 4e now has at least one broken school – Asako Henshin.  I have really liked the quality of the books that have come out, more so in terms of aesthetics.  I’m much less of a fan of the official forums, where rules questions are rarely answered and are buried in an awful single thread.  As I frequently mention, I’d rather be playing 3e (well, 3r).

Other

I can’t really speak to other predictions.  I just don’t know enough about what is going on in the industry.  Even from a personal perception standpoint, I’m hesitant to believe some of the things I’ve mentioned have either come to pass or haven’t.

Concerns

HoR3 has done well.  It feels slow to me, but that is possibly due to being involved from the beginning.  I’m not clear why there’s so little discussion on the Yahoogroup about the new campaign, but there were a lot of players at Gen Con, so something is going right.

Gen Con was ridiculously expensive again, though just taking the time off as an hourly employee ends up being a huge part of the cost.  I didn’t make it out to Origins.  I realized that I’m not really interested in traveling for cons (except Gen Con) by myself.  A lot of the fun of the cons is in talking about gaming on the way, at the event, and on the way back.

Hopes

DunDraCon was enjoyable for the first time in years this year.  I ran the intro mod for HoR3 and, while stressful, it was also beneficial.  I haven’t generated an interest in running it again or other HoR3 mods at local cons because it’s hard for me to anticipate that things will work out as intended, with players who want to play a living campaign getting to play and those who don’t avoiding the events.  Also, the mods are oriented toward 4 hour slots, and local cons are more about 6 or 8 hour games.  And, I’m not that into most of the mods.  Even the best of the new mods is not a great RPG experience.

V:TES has gone pretty much the way I hoped.  In particular, we finally got rid of the newsgroup as the primary location of discussion.  With 2012, we even will have a major fix to the game by “unbanning” Minion Tap.

I haven’t gotten inspired by a new product.  Though, likely getting into something new means finding a different group of gamers, which isn’t something I’m inclined to try to achieve as I game reasonably often.

Execution

I haven’t come up with a mechanism for creating new decks.  I’m constantly reminded that the best way to come up with deck ideas is to play and to talk with other players.  There are so many cards I’ve been meaning to do something with that I just never get around to.  Of course, actually playing more decks that I design rather than writing out something and never bothering to build it remains an issue.

The best I’ve figured out with Solomon Kane is that I’m not that motivated to run it.  Running a weekly game is far more GMing than I’m really interested in.  My RPG schedule is kind of low on play, but full enough to keep me not only busy but from going to a Thursday class that I’ve been going to for nearly two decades.

I haven’t done hardly any fictions, possibly none at all for HoR3 or Conan.  In both cases, the rarity of play is a significant cause.  In the first case, that I don’t really want anything anymore for my characters has an impact as well.

Haven’t been organized with this blog.  Card of the Weak is actually a good idea for a series but one I don’t spend enough time thinking about to commit to additional card choices.

I did throw a lot of cards into boxes as I needed to clean up the computer room for work to be done.  But, I’m thinking I should really do a massive organization as I’m kind of tired of having some sets never organized.

What else?

I’d say 2011 has been a quiet year gamingwise.  The most surprising thing has probably been the increase in V:TES tournament attendance.  Otherwise, usual evolution of what in particular I’m involved in.  I suppose I could have hoped for more, but there is an element of getting out of something the amount of effort put in.

SoB007

I have thought quite a long time about writing a mod for Heroes of Rokugan.  As is the norm for anything that has no meaningful deadline, that hasn’t amounted to much of anything.  I did start thinking through an idea, but I got bored with it.

For the next local convention, I haven’t thought of anything to run.  Then, I realized that a playtest of a mod would be the perfect thing to run.  Being deadline and commitment driven, putting an actual date on when it would need to be done might see me put the work in.

What’s difficult is narrowing down to just one idea.  Sure, there’s always writing more mods, but let’s get through one, first.  There are so many things I find lacking in HoR adventures, but they can’t all go into one mod.

What are these lacks?

1.  Honor gains – Honor gains aren’t that common to begin with, I don’t recall any major Honor gains that didn’t involve losing your character from HoR2.  A lot of my recent discussion about what bothers me about 4e L5R is that Honor seems far less important, being a resource only for certain schools or for characters who start with 6.5 Honor schools.

2.  Unusual skills – The lack here isn’t one of omission but of dearth.  On the other hand, rare skills are rare.  Having one mod greatly benefit one skill is neither fair to those who didn’t take it (why would they?) or to the lucky party where someone is good at the skill and can break a mod.  This is where it’s kind of sad that macro skills work the way they do.  If macro skills – Perform, Artisan, Games, etc. – meant you could use the skill with all subtypes, then the skills wouldn’t so rarely be used.  To benefit specialists, emphases could be used to differentiate someone more skilled in one area than another.  In HoR2, I got enough use out of Sailing to be satisfied.  My mod needs to elevate some more obscure skill while not being stupid about it.

3.  Flavorful mod rewards – These crop up from time to time.  No reason not to include them.  Well, I can see where only a limited number of mods should include certs, however, not every unusual reward needs to be certed.

4.  Flavorful story rewards – Not a great way to describe this category, but what I’m thinking of are unusual locations, unusual events, etc.  Any mod that involved leaving Rokugan, whether by traveling into gaijin lands, the Shadowlands, or by traveling to another spirit realm, interested me much more.  Also, just having identifiable locales is better than not, such as a major shrine or a “lost” shrine or whatever.  “Plot mods” are likely better than ones that just exist to have people accumulate XP.

5.  Shadowlands – Already mentioned traveling to them, but what I mean here is really “Monsters”.  I don’t find Taint interesting, but I think there should be far more oni-slaying.  Or, since it appears that the Lying Darkness is important to HoR3, Shadowspawn-thrashing.  I’d rather see much less intrigue and much more monster-murdering in my Asian gaming.  What I’m not interested in is the casual monster – the monster that isn’t necessarily there to be fought but just a plot device.  We want to use our katana, tetsubo, war fans, et al.

6.  Daimyo – Unlike some of my HoR2 players, in HoR2, I couldn’t care less about daimyo, including my own.  They didn’t rise to the level of nebulous NPCs, and that was fine because I was busy trying to plot how to leave Rokugan … er, advance my societal position through proper channels of expression and duty.  However, HoR3 is not HoR2.  The daimyo system is a mechanic in HoR3 that is supposed to matter.  It doesn’t.  Maybe someone, somewhere has been affected, but I have yet to see it.  Of course, there are far too many daimyo, so it’s difficult to incorporate them.  Who wants a dozen names listed as mattering with a hundred or whatever not?

7.  Contests – Again, they exist.  They just aren’t common enough.  I actually rate contests, whether tournaments or not, to be the most desirable elements to include in adventures.  Though, as with everything, it’s easy to overdo.  Not every session should have them.  But, I need to increase the average.

8.  Recurring characters – This I may not be able to do anything about.  If I only ever write one mod, the chances seems slim of using someone else’s character or having someone use one of mine, though mods get edited before publishing, so maybe a recurring character will get inserted into a mod.  Can’t hurt to have as interesting characters as possible to increase people’s desires to see them again.

9.  Limited characters – I hate running Winter Court mods.  It’s not WC, itself, as I find snowy environs evocative.  It’s the endless number of irrelevant NPCs.  Other mods have similar problems.  For running HoR2 as a home game, cutting in half or so the number of NPCs is often the way to go.  Now, as a player, I don’t tend to mind having a large cast of red herring characters.  After all, I just pick a NPC based on clan or other feature and focus my efforts to interact with the world.  That has paid off well enough.  Still, discipline.  Define only interesting characters who serve useful purposes.  The point of these mods shouldn’t be to trick people, should be to entertain.  I’ll leave the “parade of names” mods to other writers …

10.  Action – … because I want the focus to be on action.  Not tedious investigations that involve confirming stories or repeated climbing checks but action that’s actually exciting.  This is not a strongpoint for me.  I’m much better suited for soap operas.  But, we get far too much politics and intrigue and far too little running in abject terror and smiting.

11.  Advantages/Disadvantages – Typically, an advantage or disad either comes up all of the time or virtually never.  That’s not how they are supposed to work.  Much like underused skills need to see some use, underrelevant ads./disads. should matter.

12.  Bears – Total party kills are far too rare.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some lacks.  Though, if you’ve read this far, you’ve probably realized something.  This is a terrible way to create entertainment.  You don’t create by trying to address problems.  This is why I’m not a good person for game design – I look to fix what’s broken not create new, broken things.  I’d be far better suited to editing other people’s mods.

Instead of laying out what I see as weaknesses, I should be honing in on what’s awesome and making that awesome be awesome.  Like, bear fights.

[For those who don't get the joke, bears are like the scariest things in the game that you could ever expect to face.]

Playgroup Cohesion

While there’s the concept with CCGs that as long as everyone is on the same page about how to play the game, it doesn’t matter how you play it.  Yet, CCGs, like other competitive games have defined goals.

I was reading rpgsite.com when I noticed that one of the posters had a link to a quiz for Robin Laws’ system of defining RPG gamer types.

http://quizfarm.com/quizzes/Fashion/ellydragon/laws-game-style/

An explanation of the different gamer types can be found here.

I took the quiz.

You Scored as Storyteller

You’re more inclined toward the role playing side of the equation and less interested in numbers or experience points. You’re quick to compromise if you can help move the story forward, and get bored when the game slows down for a long planning session. You want to play out a story that moves like it’s orchestrated by a skilled novelist or film director.

Storyteller

100%

Specialist

58%

Casual Gamer

50%

Tactician

50%

Method Actor

50%

Power Gamer

17%

Butt-Kicker

8%

I think the quiz could be better – I certainly don’t believe that I’m 100% anything and my mental state when I took the quiz might have had significant impact where a more detailed quiz would have weeded out some of the variance.  However, I can see this being an entirely reasonable explanation of my gamer profile.

In many ways, it speaks for itself.  I don’t need to elaborate on how little I care about combat for the sake of combat, and so forth, oh, shoot, just did.  The one thing I sort of wonder about is what sort of specialist I prefer being.  I think it’s “knowledge guy”.  My favorite Serenade in Immortal was the one where you could view the future, but you didn’t necessarily want to tell anybody as it locked events in for them as well as you.  I could see “charming dude”, as well, with “knowledge guy” representing a strength and “charming dude” a weakness.

Well, whatever.  Analyzing myself is hardly useful to anyone else.  The more useful thing to write about is how profiles affect a playgroup.  I sent the quiz link on to my L5R players (and the Conan group but nobody responded there).

Here are some results:

You Scored as Method Actor

You think that gaming is a form of creative expression. You may view rules as, at best, a necessary evil, preferring sessions where the dice never come out of the bag. You enjoy situations that test or deepen your character’s personality traits.

Method Actor

83%

Specialist

75%

Storyteller

67%

Tactician

58%

Butt-Kicker

58%

Power Gamer

33%

Casual Gamer

0%

I scored as a Tactician, with Method Actor as second highest.

 

You Scored as Tactician
-2nd and 3rd were tied between Method Actor and Specialist
You’re probably a military buff who wants to have the chance to think through
complex problems.
-Yeah, pretty much.

You want the rules, and your GM’s interpretation of them, to match up what
happens in the real world or at least be consistant.
-I would say consistency is the most important part by far. Though I do find
things frustrating when they’re totally counter-intuitive.

You want challenging yet logical obstacles to overcome.
-I’d say this is a fair generalization.

 

I had a three way tie which was broken into power gamer.  It was tied with Tactician and Specialist, though Storyteller wasn’t too far behind

Given the prevalence of method actors and tacticians, I should adjust the L5R campaign to promote consistency – for the method actor, it’s consistency of character, for the tactician, consistency of the world.  Should be an interesting challenge, given that my number one complaint with HoR mods is lack of consistency.

Lore: Doors

How many skills should a RPG have?

Putting aside the thief (and weirder stuff), oD&D/AD&D had none.  My sense is that this is a reason why some like to go old school and play those games.  You don’t worry about being able to climb a cliff or talk to a NPC (maybe throw a Charisma check in) or know anything about anything, not even doors.  Nope.  Just figure out the optimal way to kill monsters or use spells to solve all mundane problems.  Spider Climb or Breathe Water replace athletic skills, Charm Person solves diplomacy, Identify/Detect X/divination spells replace trivia.

I find this kind of bizarre.  It’s so gamey.  There are reasons to avoid getting bogged down in detail or mundane activities – I’m actually lacking in interest in either.  But, it just seems so primitive.  I think it was someone I came across in person who was saying how great D&D 4e was because it fixed the skill rank system of 3e by forcing skills to be binary rather than tailored.  *cringe*  The skill rank system is the only thing I like about d20.

Yup, I like skills.  It may seem strange when I (relative to the norm) vastly prefer high fantasy and other cinematic genres, but I see skills providing the reality to contrast with the fantasy of magic/psychic powers/mecha/etc.

Before getting into greater detail, I wonder if my declining enchantment with the Hero system had anything to do with how boring and tacked on skills came across.

One thing I’ve thought about on and off again for ages, at least beginning with when we got into our Conan play, is how many skills a RPG should have.  The usual problem is too many.  Probably not a chicken and egg situation, but it’s fairly common for too many skills to result in skills not being that important.  In one system, it might be because skills were never supposed to be a primary mechanic even if there are a bunch of them, like D&D 3e where there are plenty of skills but many classes only get 2+INT per level, such a paltry level that it’s clear that they weren’t essential to solving problems.

In another system, the needed skill set is one of breadth rather than depth to where you can’t feasibly specialize.  Systems with harsh unskilled penalties but relatively easy difficulty targets are like this.  Generally, stronger attributes determine effectiveness … but I’m getting off topic.

More than many, many other things, what I want out of a RPG is that every PC be unique.  If everyone has the same abilities, then, sure, play first edition AD&D or whatever where you are pretty much described by level and class.  Skills can be problematic in this regard when going to either extreme in volume or when certain skills are far more important than others.  Let’s say a system has three skills.  How likely is it that characters will differ if the three skills are important to effectiveness or, not that unlikely, two skills are important to effectiveness and the third is just for flavor?  Or, let’s say you have an appropriate number of skills, whatever that might be, and have one be a primary combat skill and everything else not be all that relevant to combat – it’s not hard to imagine what players will do.

Besides being the two systems I’ve played the most in the last five years, Conan d20 and L5R (3e or 4e) are two systems where I think they aren’t far off the mark on the right number of skills.  It’s because I believe they miss just a bit high that I wanted to go into depth on each.

Legend of the Five Rings (Fourth Edition)

High Skills
Acting
Artisan (macro)
Calligraphy
Courtier
Divination
Etiquette
Games (macro)
Investigation
Lore (macro)
Medicine
Meditation
Perform (macro)
Sincerity
Spellcraft
Tea Ceremony

Bugei Skills
Athletics
Battle
Defense
Horsemanship
Hunting
Iaijutsu
Jiujutsu
Weapons (macro)

Merchant Skills
Animal Handling
Commerce
Craft (macro)
Engineering
Sailing

Low Skills
Forgery
Intimidation
Sleight of Hand
Stealth
Temptation

Did I say miss the mark by a little bit?  Written out, this is just scary long.  In my mind, I envision around 12-15 skills, including macros.  Macros?  That would be skills where you have to be more specific in what the skill is for.  With both L5R and Conan, there’s no general knowledge of a macro skill – if you know Games: Go, you know nothing about Games: Shogi – no partial credit, as is the case with some games where you can roll either a similar skill at a penalty or the general skill at a penalty or whatever.

Not only are there a bunch of macros, with some being incredibly important, e.g. Weapons, but L5R also has Emphases – ways to specialize in a skill that may even end up opening up an ability not available otherwise.

Getting back to diversity of characters, a list should be varied enough as well.  As long as this list is, which one of my players thinks is absurdly long, I actually find that it works decently for being able to do what you want to do while being able to do what you need to do.

Let’s go section by section, I’ve added tiers (ratings of usefulness from 1 best to 5 worst):

High Skills
Acting  [4-5]
Artisan (macro)  [3 with fast diminishing returns on additionals]
Calligraphy  [3]
Courtier  [1]
Divination  [3 ... if used]
Etiquette  [1]
Games (macro)  [4-5]
Investigation  [1]
Lore (macro)  [2-5]
Medicine  [2]
Meditation  [1]
Perform (macro)  [3-5]
Sincerity  [1, not as common but hugely important]
Spellcraft  [1 shugenja, 5 other]
Tea Ceremony  [2]

A lot of these skills are particular to L5R’s world.  The world is highly socially rooted.  Some of these skills will rarely be used (unless the player forces them), but there are entire schools (aka classes) built around Acting, for instance.

Should Acting exist?  No.  Perform is a macro skill that clearly covers this thematically.  As long as we retain macro skills, and I don’t see a good reason not to, it should be rare to extract out skills as rare as this.  Calligraphy?  While Calligraphy has a strong individual identity, what does it hurt if it’s an Artisan skill?  “But, if you condense many of these skills into macro skills, anything that pumps all of a macro skill will pump a ton of skills.”  That seems good.  I find Calligraphy to be about a third tier skill … out of about five tiers.  A third tier skill is something that gets rolled maybe 10-20% of the adventures.  That’s something that needs help.

Courtier, Etiquette, and Sincerity (and Temptation) form the core of the courtier’s skill base.  Rather than having a generic social skill that covers them all, which is a bit odd even though that’s exactly what a weapon skill is for combat, I’m good with having distinct social skills.  Temptation is not one of them.  Temptation is clearly just an Emphasis of Courtier.  Sincerity used to be an Emphasis of Etiquette and I can see an argument for going back to that.  It’s funny how 4e really screwed skills by taking away most Insight bonuses and the Free Raise at rank 5, and, then, on top of that, forced social characters to take a third social skill.

Divination is strange.  It could probably be a Lore skill, but it has its own unique mechanics.  It could be an Emphasis of Theology, except in 4e, Theology is a Lore skill (in name) rather than a separate skill, like in 3e.  I don’t really mind it being separate due to having specific mechanics.  Similarly, Medicine has specific mechanics to where some skills really do need to be separated.

Speaking of Lore skills and macro skills in general, in 3e, the most obnoxious thing to me about skills was how someone good at go knew nothing about shogi and vice versa.  Games should just not work like other macro skills as individual Games skills are tier four to tier five, the ~5-10% to ~0-5% of adventures rolls.  I would have Games be a skill with individual games as Emphases.  Because Games would still be a distinct skill and not rolled into something like Perform, it could have skill specific mechanics to where an Emphasis gave an unusually significant bonus.  This, theoretically, solves the problem of the go master being a shogi master, Fortunes & Winds master, Sadane master, Letters master, etc. at the same time; though, it wouldn’t bother me that much if skill in one meant skill in another – we are talking about a tier four skill.

The most obnoxious thing to me in 4e about skills has to do with Lore skills.  Whereas, I can live with someone being good in all games simultaneously – it’s not super implausible in real life … or in Yu-Gi-Oh! (the TV series), I can’t deal with someone being a generic knowledge master.  Which, by the way, is why Sage is so dumb.  I’ve actually had a player roll Lore: Doors because his character had Sage.  It’s not just that Sage makes buying Lore skills lame, it’s that buying Lore skills is already lame with the changes from 3e to 4e.  At least, with 3e, you got extra Insight from taking these tier four skills.  Not all Lore skills are tier four, though.  Lore: Shadowlands is tier two based on its usefulness bumping it up from its commonality of use.  Lore: Theology is tier three along with History and Heraldry.  Still, there should be better rewards for both the better tier Lore skills and the obscure stuff.  In terms of consolidation, there’s nothing really to do, already separate 3e skills of Lore: Shadowlands and Theology were consolidated.

Investigation is hands down the most used skill in the game.  Okay, I’m sure there are campaigns where Defense (passive bonuses) and Weapon skills are far more important.  Campaigns I’m involved in, it’s Investigation.  What’s funny about Investigation is that’s kind of like a macro skill where you get every individual skill under it.  In d20 terms, it’s Spot, Search, Listen, Gather Information, Sense Motive, and sometimes a tracking skill all in one.  For HoR play, always, always take at least two ranks in this.  I’m okay with this.  It’s not ideal, but it’s further down on my list of things to fix.

Perform, as is the case in any game that has these sorts of tier five skills – tier five being the “Whoa, really, I have to roll a Dance skill?  Come on, this is so unfair!” level of skills, should function like I described how Games should function.  I’m okay with skill in one being skill in all, even if that produces some odd scenarios, and that might be fixable by having there be special Emphasis rules.

Spellcraft is, amazingly, okay.  It was arguably too good in 3e, but that didn’t overly bother me, either.  As long as it doesn’t define how good a shugenja is at casting spells, I can see it existing on its own, even if it is kind of a Lore skill.

Meditation and Tea Ceremony are fine as is, being necessary skills for the genre and having special mechanics.

Bugei Skills
Athletics  [1]
Battle  [3]
Defense  [1]
Horsemanship  [4 even for Unicorn]
Hunting  [2]
Iaijutsu  [hard to rate]
Jiujutsu  [in 3e, 4, in 4e, 1]
Weapons (macro)  [1]

I like that there’s only one non-weapon martial arts skill.  Can anything really be removed here?  Hunting could be cut with Lore: Hunting and Investigation taking over its uses, though that only makes Investigation that much better.  In 4e, they specifically wanted to split Weapons: Spears from Weapons: Polearms, but I think they were crazy, as I don’t recall seeing either rolled by any 4e PC.  While half the Weapon skills are useless or nearly so and the mastery abilities are way out of line with each other, I’m perfectly fine genrewise with there being some imbalances in the Weapon skills.  If only more weapons were viable …

Merchant Skills
Animal Handling  [5]
Commerce  [3]
Craft (macro)  [n/a]
Engineering  [5]
Sailing  [4-5]

Some oddities, here.  Thematically, it’s important that Commerce not be a high skill, that Animal Handling be distinct from social people skills.  I’m not sure why Engineering needs to be a separate skill, not really sure why it’s a merchant skill.  While Craft is a mess in Conan, it’s okay here.  Sailing is odd, really odd when you consider that in 4e it’s a two trait skill, which does make sense.  I guess I can live with all of these the way they are.  They are pretty obscure skills, being on average tier five, with Commerce being maybe tier three, but they have distinct identities as, well, merchant skills.

Low Skills
Forgery  [5]
Intimidation  [4]
Sleight of Hand  [5]
Stealth  [3]
Temptation  [4 for PCs]

Forgery, okay – it’s scuzzy and more than just a Lore or Perform.  Temptation, I already talked about – should just be a Low Emphasis of Courtier.  The others have similar problems.  Stealth is frequently not a Low skill.  By far the most common use of Stealth I find in my play is sneaking up or away from bad guys, not guys we don’t like, but Shadowlands monsters and bandits and other scum.  It’s not dishonorable in such situations.

Sleight of Hand?  I’m sorry, but by far the most common use of this I see is entertainers entertaining children and stuff.  The idea that hiding something is insincere is so absurdly out of line with how lying besides to bolster one’s reputation is not in any way dishonorable.  Check the tables.  It’s inglorious to get caught lying.  The only time I really see a PC use Sleight of Hand, it’s against enemies of the Empire, palming jade against Tainted dudes or the like.  It’s also a good choice for making a Perform skill, with there being two reasons it likely isn’t – one, the false belief that hiding objects is dishonorable and, two, that it has distinct mechanics.  Which, since it’s like a tier five skill, it doesn’t need to have distinct mechanics.

Intimidation is another social skill that shouldn’t exist by itself.  It’s also another case of being a skill that is not honorable but not dishonorable in virtually any sort of normal situation.  Sorry, again, but by far the most common uses of it in play are by samurai telling peasants what to do and magistrates telling criminals what to do.  The idea of browbeating a courtier with it or whatever, well, that may be dishonorable, but that’s because it’s a dishonorable thing to do in the situation, where being courteous to half-people and scum is honorable, not not dishonorable.

At most, I’m looking at cutting six skills.  Yikes!  That leaves 27(?) without even taking into account macro skills being large groups of skills and Emphases being kind of like different skills.  And, yet, … and, yet, I don’t know.  I don’t feel that it’s that painful.  Maybe, it’s because I typically get 4xp per session and one rank in a skill is 1xp.  I tend to be bothered far more by how it isn’t worth buying up skills than by how many skills I should buy, by how tiresome it gets to raise traits or, in 4e, the Void Ring, or how kata, memorizing spells, and other random stuff take away from planned trait/ring/skill improvements.  There still seems to be something wrong, like how maybe Meditation and Tea Ceremony are awfully similar in role, if not in flavor or mechanics.

There definitely are too many tier four and five skills, which is frustrating.  On the other hand, a way to use a skill more often is to … use it more often.  Force its use.  Play shogi with every NPC.  Cook like you’ve never Artisan: Cooking-ed before.  There are ways, more so in home play but even in HoR, to leverage bad tier skills.

So, this ended up being far, far longer than I expected.  I thought I’d run through L5R and Conan in under two grand words.  Guess this is part one of a two parter.  Stay tuned for the next episode of “roll what?!?”

Gen Con 2011

Usual smooth logistics.  Potential roommate backed out a few days before trip, but it wasn’t a new experience to be on my own like last year, so I was in a much better mental state.

Thursday

9AM – Emperor’s Favor, Part I

Start the con off with some Heroes of Rokugan.  First two-part mod in the campaign and I had scheduled to do it back to back.  Unsurprisingly, not everyone else had.  Cory, the campaign admin, made an announcement that it would be a very good idea to play this before the political interactive, much more important than the other new mods.

From my left, it was Mirumoto Katsubishi, Hida Kaminari, Shosuro Sakura, Hiruma Genji, Mirumoto Ito, Doku (ronin), and I was playing Moshi Shigeo (my main).  Ben Fredericksen was the GM; I am now trying to note GM names so that I better recognize people both in person and through their online handles.  I took a lot of notes, more than I expected.  Because others hadn’t planned to play the 2PM slot and we wanted to keep our table intact, we pushed through to get done by 4PM.

The most amusing thing about this table was that the two highest Honors were the Mantis and the … ronin.  It felt strange to not play online.  I think it was a combination of factors:  seven players; playing with people and characters I wasn’t familiar with; GM style; importance of moving quickly.  Mods just seem to be much more direct in person.  Maybe, it’s because it’s easier to determine leadership and come to an agreement on what people are doing and GMs don’t get terribly distracted with things not all that important to the plot.

2PM – Emperor’s Favor, Part II

Not really 2PM, we probably started 1PMish.  Similar level of notes.  I want to witness people’s reactions to what happens.

I go by the exhibit hall to check on Great Clans, as the most value to getting it at the con is to get it early and see if it affects my existing characters or what characters I might want to make if my I lose one.  Sold out.

7PM – Mouth of Milu

I had signed up for this because it was set in Hawai’i.  I’m surprised more things aren’t.  As we finished Emperor’s Favor early, I got to the game almost two hours early.  The GM had a large number of decorations, a tiki hut of sorts, leis for everyone, etc.  I ended up taking home a number of the decorations for work to put up.

This was FUDGE set in the modern day.  I played Dr. Lenk Martell, radical scientist working on NEOP Near Earth Object Probe(s).  These probes could be used to deflect asteroids and whatnot by self-destructing.  The PCs had various relationships, though not with everyone else.  After a recent meteor shower (caused by one of my probes), Kilauea erupts and the Big Island is being evacuated.  Blue geodes and strange cave formations appear around the island, with the blue crystal seeming to move.  We barely get off of it with our helicopters and start flying to some dink town because the stoner husband to one of our pilots has family there.  While arguing what to do, we let some people on the roof of a church get immolated.  Flying elsewhere, we rescue some Japanese who talk about monsters.  Eventually, we figure out that all of our theories – scientific, spiritual – point to going up to Mauna Kea where I hope to blow my probe.  The less intelligent PCs instead decide to throw some magic rocks into a frozen lake to get spirits to reactivate the volcano.  The GM is surprised that I survive and ours is the only group to never blow the probe.

Apparently, the meteor shower brought alien life that was trying to conquer the volcano goddesses.  The goddesses fought back by having the lava chase the crystal.  Reactivating Mauna Kea was enough firepower to keep the alien stuff at bay.

The lack of agreement on what to do was fine.  The lack of caring of what others did was a bit odd.  Some characters had way more to do than others.  A lot of time was spent with the husband and wife and ineffectually hanging around locals.  For me, it was fine as I got to do my thing.

Friday

10AM – Dragon Dice Quests

Yes, Dragon Dice.  I couldn’t get into a slot of a RPG at this time, so this ended up being the very last event I signed up for, figuring it was different and I could talk to someone about stuff Andrew and I worked on over a decade ago for Campaign Dragon Dice.

This was not at all what I expected.  This was Dragon Dice the RPG.  By using dice to reflect character skills, your character was a collection of dice that had normal RPG adventures.  A terrain die reflected range to enemies.  Number of health determined character level.  As a demo/playtest, it was mostly a combat scene, a combat that dragged on forever with no way we were going to lose.

It’s a really interesting idea, one I wouldn’t have considered.  On the one hand, I like how it enables using a bunch of dice to do something besides play Dragon Dice, to use dice one might normally use, and I think it can actually work.  On the other, I’m skeptical about selling the idea of using Dragon Dice to people for a home RPG.  While I like Dragon Dice on some aesthetic level, others I run into don’t.  I can see the relatively gaudy colors making things seem too cartoony for serious fantasy role-playing.

Being right next to the exhibit hall, I look for Great Clans.  Sold out.

2PM – Grand Theft Chariot

Greek heroes.  I choose the Cunning Hero and name him Kyrevaius.  His epithet, a game mechanic (one I’m used to with other Greek mythology games), is “The Resourceful”.

We begin in Patara, where the land goes dark.  The priests of Apollo wish to make additional sacrifices and the crowd gets unruly.  Being cunning, I douse torches to blind the crowd.  Others do their things.  Oh, the others being:  agile hero, strong hero, wise hero, charming hero, and fast hero.  The next day, we are called in by the queen to be sent to find the Oracle to Apollo on an isolated island.  I am the only person the GM recalls who actually asks what we know about the island.  Seems odd, when two of us are heavy on the Knowing skill.

Mechanics.  Roll a number of d6′s equal to your skill.  Fives and sixes are successes.  You have a Competency ability that is a pool of additional dice that can be added to a bunch of appropriate skills.  Competency dice explode on sixes.  So, my Knowing, for instance, is 3d6 from Competency and 4d6 from normal.

On the way to the island, we realize the entire world is in darkness.  The Storm strikes us, but we don’t lose the ship.  Korus “The Beguiling” loses a follower, as I recall.  The player gives his followers the most awesome names:  Red Shirticus; Expendicles; Meat Shieldian.  We begin to scale the 100′ cliffs, when harpies attack.  Pythus “The Knowing” cyclones some.  We dispatch the rest.  The filthy, sarcastic oracle tells us that Apollo has been taken to the Underworld, tells us about Charon, Cerberus.  I make some honeycakes for Cerberus and two sleeping potions, one a fake.

We music Charon as Orpheus did.  Cerberus we toss some poisoned honeycakes to and seems asleep as we sneak past but wakes up and attacks Cassius “The Colossus”.  I try to remove Cerberus’s acidic spittle from Cassius’s armor and get attacked by Cerberus’s serpent tail.  I survive the venom, so I milk some into another container … for I am cunning.  Meat Shieldian bleeds some for the ghosts so that they will give us information.  Expendicles helps dig a pit for the blood.  To Tartarus.

We find a centaur guarding a tree where the head of Orpheus sings, making this area of Tartarus pleasant.  Orpheus will tell us where Apollo is if we get him out of the Underworld.  Centaur doesn’t like that.  We cut off the centaur’s leg to free him from his chains and take the two with us.  Orpheus had been kept in a box by Hades and Persephone liked to take him out.  She dropped him, which is how he ended up in Tartarus.  Orpheus saw Hecate dragging a chained Apollo, so we look for her cave.

We find Apollo chained up.  Before we figure out what to do, Hecate appears.  Cassius breaks the chains and we briefly fight, with Cassius being turned into a tortoise.  Hades appears and gets everyone’s stories.  Xanthos, King of Patara, was pissed that Apollo was banging his wife, so he worked with Hecate to capture him, with Hecate becoming the new patron of Patara for her help.  Apollo and the rest of us are free to go.  Apollo asks us to kill Xanthos and reconsecrate his temple with the king’s blood.  I prepare a fake wound.  In Patara, we explain to the priests.  At the palace, the king punches his wife and attacks us for interfering with his vengeance.  I avoid guard attacks, moving closer to the king, while exclaiming about my “wound”.  I quaff my fake potion to “heal my wound” and accidentally drop my other “healing potion”.  I go to help the fallen queen, who is a slut.  Everyone else does their fighty thing, and the king finally tries my venom of Cerberus.

Temple sanctified, queen servicing all the heroes who want her rewards.  My legacy is Kyrevaius “The Resourceful” “Who milked Cerberus”

7PM – Ancestral Dictate

Back to HoR.  I find out that AEG got in new Great Clan books around 4PM.  *sigh*

Ancestral Dictate cannot be played by the same character as Prison of Earth, which is perfect since I have two characters.  Most didn’t.  So, I play with four characters that have never played before.  Four combat focused characters … in a mod with no combat tag.

Charles Penn GM, Moto Shizu, Ikoma Osamu, Hiruma Sentou, Bayushi Junichi, and my character, Hoshi Takumi.

I do a lot of courtiering with my tattooed monk.  I spend all 11 of my koku with my Wealthy tattooed monk.  I have a lot of notes, again.  I think I take more notes in face-to-face games these days because I know so much more about the world and the campaign.  More XP means I can buy up my social skills before the political interactive, this ends up mattering a lot.

Saturday

9AM – Prison of Earth

An all HoR day.  I play with someone I know for the first time.  He plays his tattooed monk, I play my Mantis, so we have three Moshi at the same table.  We fight well.  The arc of the mod is a bit odd to me, but I guess that’s cool as it’s different.  One may notice the lack of details in my descriptions of HoR sessions, well, Andy and possibly others haven’t played them yet.

Ben, again, GM.  Utaku Zaina, Moshi Akio, Moshi Kokoro, Isawa Koukainashi, Togashi Juichi.

Swing by AEG booth, sold out.

2PM – Summer Storms

Ah, battle interactives, I love them so.  We have 12 Mantis, four rank 2′s, three shugenja.  I’m at the table with the rank 2 shugenja I played in the morning with and four rank 1 bushi.  I am rank 2.  Yes, I who can take 20 mods to rank up am a high ranking member of my contingent.

Moshi Kokoro, Tsuruchi Kendai, Yoritomo Sen (unit commander), Yoritomo Wakou, Yoritomo Kikai.

The nature of the battle event is that there are five locations for each battle.  Crab fight Crane, Dragon Phoenix, Lion Unicorn, the noble and virtuous Mantis vs. the Scorpion.  There are three rounds, where you get a random location.  If opposing tables are at the same location in a round, you can have player vs. player, which the Crab and Crane had.  There were three tiers of difficulty.  If you rolled well enough, you could choose a higher tier, roll really well, a low tier with better tier rewards, if you fail, a mid tier encounter with low tier rewards.  Mantis lacked generals.  We found out later we got slaughtered, not because our PCs did but because our victory points were way lower because our tiers were lower.

In the first round, we defended Gateway Village, the gateway to the Tsuruchi Valley.  We actually played this fairly smart but we took a lot of damage.  Didn’t matter as wounds healed between rounds.  We didn’t make our roll high enough to do anything but a low tier encounter.

In the second round, we tried a mid tier encounter.  Not good.  In the second round of combat, their bushi did 41 damage to one rank 1, 41 damage to another rank 1, 20-30 damage to a third rank 1.  We should have lost after round two.  After round three, we should have been wiped.  They were rank 2 bushi with 9k4 attack rolls.  While we finally took some guys down, mostly with grapple plus gang up tactics, we lost two bushi, one having to use a mod reward to reduce damage not to die.  Our shugenja, me, and our one archer (only one Tsuruchi archer at each table!) had to carry the load.  To give an idea how bad this was, we didn’t realize the bushi we were fighting were Earth 2 until two of our bushi were out of the fight.  We persisted.  We ran over time.  We finally won as the enemy shugenja was surprisingly useless.  We didn’t have time for a third encounter but got the rewards for a low tier encounter for the third round, anyway.  We did gain Honor for fighting a battle we should have lost.

I found out later some of the other encounters people had.  The high tier stuff was just insane, with seven rank 3′s where virtually nobody in the campaign is up to rank 3 yet.

8PM – Spoils of War

Political interactive, how I never have done a normal one in person before.  Prior to the event, everyone got special name cards that had stickers to advertise certain things to NPCs.  I got two stickers that very few had, so it was kind of worriesome.  I played my Dragon, the Dragon contingent was large and disorganized.  It didn’t stop us from doing well early, but we got screwed by the Scorpion towards the end.  The Lion got hosed.  Phoenix did well.  Tortoise!!! and Brotherhood of Osano-Wo!!! did well.

I found out that one of my stickers was for artistic ability, so I got pulled aside by the Kakita family daimyo to join his new artists organization.  The other sticker had to do with storytelling, which didn’t help me.  I probably should have had another NPC’s interest since I gained him as an ally in a mod, but it wasn’t reflected in my card since it happened at the con.  Because we were at an imperial court, Etiquette and other social skills were huge.  Another tattooed monk lost a rank of glory and some Honor for not having his social skills high enough, and as I said at the con “all tattooed monks are courtier builds”.  With my final XP expenditures, I skated, having the 3 Etiquette and 3 of either Courtier or Sincerity to not get hammered.  Woe to anyone with no ranks in Etiquette.

Sunday

Morning – exhibit hall

Sold out.

I did some exhibit hall stuff.  Normally, I do a complete walk of the exhibit hall in my off slot, but I had walked a decent amount earlier in the con when with someone else.  So, I focused on some stuff.  So many things I want, so little interest in paying for them, at least at full price or even 25% off.  I did pick up some stuff, about half my cash I brought went on Sunday.

Had to rush to my final game.

12PM – Wu Xing – The Ninja Crusade

I didn’t need to rush.  We started late.  We did very little.  It was lame.  At the end, the GM thanked people for the “demo”.  Okay, I can accept that there are RPG demos, but advertise things as such.  We had a full table with one fight scene and some other stuff most didn’t care about.  I did relatively a lot of stuff I cared about because I can be forceful when others aren’t, but it was still amazingly hollow.

I’m unimpressed with the mechanics of the game.  First, d20 resolution sucks – too wide variance.  Second, the initiative system was incredibly complex.

The one benefit was that we finished with enough time for me to go back to the exhibit hall, which I think was when I spent most of my money … wait.

Having the last game be lame and so much worse than anything else seemed like it would put a damper on things, but my mind was so much more in the HoR world and the buying of stuff afterwards meant I didn’t think a whole lot about it.  There was nothing great, nothing that stood out to compete with the many HoR adventures.  Grand Theft Chariot was nearly great, just the sort of thing I hope to play, but the con was dominated by HoR for me.  Good or bad?  Good that HoR is doing well, 100+ average number of people for every slot; good that I enjoyed the HoR at the con as much as I did.  Bad that I need some balance.

Okay, why don’t more of my friends go to Gen Con, again?

Off Kilter

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration – so sayeth someone who stole a bunch of inventions.

I could, of course, do my first June post by stealing some idea.  The inspiration hasn’t been great enough to justify the, admittedly modest, perspiration.  Why?  KublaCon came and went.  Normally, write about my con experiences.  Then, other things came and went that kept my mind unfocused.

I didn’t get inspired by KublaCon because it was mediocre.  It wasn’t terrible in any way and some of the annoyances didn’t have to do with gaming, like having my favorite Chinese restaurant have stupid hours on the weekend.  There was nothing particularly excellent.  Sure, there were a lot more V:TES players around than usual, but that also contributed to a lot of messy organization because people can’t be forced to be ready to play on time.  I must remember to never pretend that a convention tournament is ever going to be a tournament and just have whoever is there start a game and keep having games generate as players become available.

It would have been amusing to have my main character in HoR3 get killed on my birthday.  I did like Fire and Water.  The main gimmick is interesting but also not one I’d like to see employed much.  The reward gimmick based off of it is less bothersome and kind of cool, if, typically, unfair.

Rank the Mods (1-10 FQ, fun quotient):

SoB00 New Beginnings – (7)  Cute spin.

SoB01  Undefended Border – (4)  Stuff going on that went over my head, too early.

SoB02  Bonds of Fate – (3)  Not much going on, IME.

SoB03  Standing Against the Waves – (3)  What’s the story?

SoB04  Personal Sacrifice – (7)  Could use more development, PC defining.

SoB05  Poisoned Gift – (1)  Cool ideas, terrible plot, ridiculous rewards.

SoB06  Walk Through the Mountains – (8)  I was much more into this than SoB03.

SoB07  Delicate Negotiations – (9)  Biased cuz my PC was perfect for it?  Felt shafted on rewards.

SoB08  WC: Kyuden Hida – (6)  Would have done more with my other PC.

SoB09  Fire and Water – (7)  Could have done Fire and felt screwed in the end.

Okay, so that’s from a FQ perspective and that’s only factoring in the actual play, not the aftermath that is rewards.  Factoring in a more objective measure of quality of mod, trying to take personal experiences out of it, the rankings of the mods in my mind are more like:

1.  SoB07 – Lots to do, aka depth, personal achievements matter and don’t screw over others.
2.  SoB06 – Things to do before plot, resolution interesting.
3.  SoB08 – Decent number of things going on without being bogged down.
4.  SoB00 – Better intro than Topaz Championship (fewer die rolls), decent narrative.
5.  SoB09 – Linear, which a number of mods have a problem with, but flavorful.
6.  SoB04 – Heavy on the exposition, light on things to do.
7.  SoB01 – Too much wandering about without a sense of what to do.
8.  SoB03 – Maybe there’s more to the story, felt like excuses for combat.
9.  SoB02 – Missing a scene or better connectivity between scenes.
10. SoB05 – Waste of some interesting mechanics.  Is there more than one way to proceed?

In general, the earlier mods suffer from lack of depth either in story or in choices.  Later mods feel fuller, more coherent.  Undefended Border would probably be given more credit if it came later, when it made more sense to introduce “new” things.  Alternatively, if there was follow up to it, to where what happens mattered more.  I really want the sequel(s) to Personal Sacrifice since its reward/punishment mechanic clearly needs a follow up.

It’s good to see some different faces for our Sunday V:TES sessions.  My new Pander deck is the sort of hilarious, “here’s a bunch of cards in five disciplines” deck that is so much more interesting to play than focused decks.  I so need more of these.  Maybe I build a counterpoint deck that is the other five common disciplines.  What I just said might not make any sense.  The Pander deck is an Aus/Obf/Pot/Pre/Tha deck.  Not intentionally, just because it’s what the crypt encouraged.  If I build a deck specifically of Ani/Cel/Dom/For/Pro, I have a challenge and a wacky deck … um, except Stanislava is the only vampire that natively has all of those disciplines, with Forestal in support.  That doesn’t sound wacky or hugely challenging.  Maybe I just don’t run either one.  I could take out the “crutch”, but that leads to boring Gangrel/! crypts.  Taking out Protean is funny for Cardano and Kostantin.  Taking out Animalism has some interesting choices.

As for Off Kilter, only thing I got that would be different is vote, in particular Patsy deck to try to wreck annoying titled decks, except those are the decks that can stop your votes.

Bonus boardgaming section:

I’ve gone to some boardgame days recently.  I played a couple of games of Phoenicia (and watched one before playing which helped immensely).  I liked it.  Not great but something I’d do again for a few more times.  Quick, light, auctions weren’t painful.  It was a day of nothing but auction games for me, though, with a six-player of Scepter of Zavandor.  First six-player game I can recall, though I think I’ve played five once or twice.  Fortunately, only one new player, so things weren’t crazy long.  My strategy of focusing on production with sapphires and buying up production artifacts worked well … for someone else.  I came in third or fourth in what was a reasonably close game.  With players who know how to value artifacts better, the game is much harder to dominate.  Anyway, a reasonable day.

Yesterday, played Alea Iacta Est for the second? time.  We totally didn’t remember how it was supposed to work so we played a practice round first.  I finally remembered what it was like and went through the same feelings as the first time – it seems like sets end too quickly but it makes sense when you play the game out.  Frustrating in some ways because I find the dice mechanic neat and the game is much more tactical than strategic in how you use dice.  Me being a strategist and not so much a tactician.  Another game I’d want to play again, though I’m more interested in how to use the dice mechanic for something cooler.

Then, played Glen More for the first time.  I’m not a big fan of Carcassonne.  It’s okay if uninspiring out of the base game and I’m not too familiar with the expansions.  I hate Caylus.  Didn’t used to.  But, it’s mechanics are not ones to endear me to repeated play.  Glen More has elements of both.  Yet, I’d easily play it again, maybe a few more times.  I like the flavor, for one thing.  That I haven’t figured out the winning strategy is another plus.  I had the most whiskey, the most chieftains, the castle that rewards for villages to counteract my massive territory, and came squarely in last.  I knew a big territory was bad, but I didn’t realize that what VPs I got from my advantages wouldn’t pay off at all.  My theory is that brown tiles are where it’s at and the game is about cashing them as much as possible.  I only had one in my 17 tile empire and I didn’t even max it out.  I find the “bigger territory = less VPs” mechanic highly amusing and innovative.  Do I think it will hold up after about 5 or so plays?  Probably not.  Even with the randomness of tile sequences, the game seems simple enough to solve in terms of optimal strategies.  I’m not a huge fan of games that require spatial planning, since I overthink things, but this has few enough tiles that I don’t see a big paralysis by analysis problem.  Kind of a lighter way to go then Caylus, with more style.

Delicate

I seem to be in the mode to review recent gaming.

Delicate threat balance – Tuesday, I ran City of the Lost.  The mod is very strange in one particular way:  if you do what you should do, it’s absurdly easy; if you don’t, it seems brutal.  Now, deciding to do things the easy way is easy.  My table (as a player) had much the same experience that my players had – things were stunningly easy.  Sure, I could have increased encounters, made it more likely the players would fight enemies in the mod, or do anything so that they were truly threatened rather than just in a state of expecting doom.  But, should I have?  While Shadowlands mods in general aren’t as nasty as players expect them to be, the ease of this mod may give the incorrect idea that the others are not particularly dangerous.  Still, because of the rewards, the story, and the acclimation advantage, it’s the obvious Shadowlands mod to run first.

Delicate party composition – Friday, I got my first taste of a RuneQuest campaign that has been running for a while.  I wasn’t terribly surprised at the incredible levels of metagaming, in this case, in terms of the focus on profit.  It is my nature to try to have a coherent world view with my characters and my concept’s world view has a hard time integrating with the greediness.  Does that mean creating a new character?  Probably means getting killed early on since the others lack any sort of desire to have someone with different ethics around.  I could cave, of course, and just be a spearchucker in the party with no personal interests or goals, much like how I play my Conan character almost all of the time after I realized the Conan group was very metagamey, if not nearly as much over money/stuff, more so on whatever sounded like action or the direction the GM expected, even if other (more logical) choices ended up with the same level of action and the GM didn’t care what direction the party decided upon.

Delicate Negotiations – That would be the name of mod SoB07 of HoR3, which I played Saturday.  I keep getting reminded of how I don’t like using Skype for audible, vastly preferring Ventrilo.  That aside, this was easily my favorite mod of the new campaign.  It had way more structure.  Personal efforts mattered for more than just personal side stories.  There was logic to how things worked and plenty of possibilities for doing different things.  While I couldn’t really accomplish anything that wasn’t written into the mod with my efforts at furthering personal interests (I guess fictions will have to be done to further my personal interests), my character was highly successful at achieving mod goals, mostly because he was suited to the mod’s requirements but also because I found what I was doing interesting.  Even the rewards, which is something I often complain about as seeming arbitrary, made sense to me and didn’t offend me even though in a minor respect they could be highly unfair.

Delicate deck desirability – I built a new deck, today, for our V:TES session.  It’s of a very different style from my norm in that it’s fairly focused.  I can see the deck being interesting in a deck matchup sense, but it was fairly boring to play.  Sure, that I could annihilate people with Lightning Reflexes is something so different from my norm of passivity in all things that it has amusement value, but the random combat nature of, say, my Dem/Vic deck is so much more appealing.  Even my !Nos fight/vote deck that plays lame cards like Carrion Crows and Immortal Grapple has been more interesting than “I hit for 2.  Do I want to nuke you?  Yes.  I hit for 2 a lot more times.”  I played my Greatest Fall deck with some tweaks and that was much more interesting though I didn’t do much that the deck was supposed to do.  When the deck was borrowed for the third game, it did almost everything it was supposed to, which was amusing to watch … for a while.  I really need more decks like my Dem/Vic deck where random cards just appear and, while the card quality is decent and its strategic play is somewhat coherent, it’s unknown at the detail level how it will play from turn to turn and game to game.

Games are delicate.  Usually, one can speak of the delicate balance that either exists or doesn’t in a game.  Try to fix one thing and likely create just as big a problem elsewhere.  But, there’s also a delicate element to flavor.  It’s harder to demonstrate, of course, but some games, particularly RPGs, can suffer a lot if the flavor lacks the right feel.  I’d argue that the Scorpion Clan in L5R has a huge concern with capturing the right balance between being “official” bad guys, not really being bad guys, and being competent at dirty tricks without being grossly overpowered because they get to use tactics no one else does.