Barsoom Or Bust

I don’t like movies.  In a general sense.  I just don’t like movies.  I’d much rather read a book or watch TV.  I’m not all that into special/visual effects.  Even better movies are typically too short and unsatisfying.

So, why did I see John Carter when I hadn’t been in a movie theater in years?

Eventually, I will get to how all of this relates to gaming, in the meantime …

I particularly think it’s a bad idea to see a movie when you are familiar with the source material, especially if that source material is a book (including comic books).  I’ve read the I Am Legend novella.  I didn’t like it.  I wouldn’t recommend it, though I’m not a fan of true horror, so maybe it’s more appealing to people who like horror.  But, it had a very specific point to it – the ending.  A point utterly failed by Will Smith’s movie.  Use the same names and a similar situation … and tell a different story – that’s what movie adaptions typically do.

The adaption might be far better, but I don’t recall any instance when knowing about the original going into the movie made the movie seem so, rather it just struck me as different.  There are James Bond novels I’ve read after the movies, and I enjoyed the movies more, hardly remembering the particulars of the books.  Can I think of an instance where I was happy to read a novel after being introduced to a story through a movie?  Not off the top of my head.

So, it may just be that I identify a story as something unique.  One can see this in comic books as well, where I rarely had interest in reimaginings of characters I knew, even though comic books do that all of the time.  Note also, this is why I don’t watch superhero movies, even ones that get good reviews, like Iron Man, though I never cared that much about Iron Man, so maybe I could break down and watch that some day.

Obviously, I’ve read the John Carter stories.  I think of them as an eleven book series, but originally, they were magazine stories as most science fiction, fantasy, and/or adventures stories from back in the day seem to have been.  I’ve read them multiple times.  I like them.  In fact, given how much other series I’ve read deteriorated to the point where they are embarrassingly bad (Laurell K. Hamilton’s stuff, Wheel of Time, Elric stories), my respect for series that didn’t fall apart had been growing.  I suppose it helps to just stop at some point and no longer continue a series just for monetary reasons.  That book 11 suddenly ends without a resolution to JC’s predicament is unfortunate.

While I never expected to enjoy the John Carter movie because of my experiences with not enjoying movies based on books I’ve previously read, I did feel compelled to check it out because it felt important.  I was amazed that someone had finally tried making a movie after only a hundred years.

The box office has been far worse than the reviews.  The reviews have been mediocre.  The reviewers have pointed out the numerous difficulties of selling an audience on the property, given how much later properties have drawn upon the (more) original and have already claimed the minds of those unfamiliar with the older stories.

Though, reviewers often give passes to movies they shouldn’t have, such as Star Wars Epidodes 1, 2, and 3, which I find to be abominations.  Maybe, if they weren’t Star Wars movies, they would be adequate movies, appealing to those who care about special effects.  But, they are just offensive in how boring they are, how unappealing the characters are, and how obsessed they seem with special effects over an enjoyable story.

The twin contexts of, one, having the books to compare to and, two, not generally liking the medium of movies left me quite unimpressed with John Carter.  Much like Natalie Portman was the only thing of interest to me in the more recently made Star Wars movies, Lynn Collins was the primary thing that held my interest, calling to mind someone I used to work with.  And, for those who have read of Dejah Thoris, perhaps read the comic book stories I’ve never read, it can be amusing to contrast the damsel in distress of the novels with the warrior/scientist of the movie.

Conan, Spellsinger, Gor.  Versus.  Thomas Covenant, Wheel of Time, any Eternal Champion.  I don’t expect people to have read the same series I have – I certainly haven’t read many series others have and don’t remember all that well some series I have read, such as Lord of the Rings.  So, the difference between the first group and the second group needs some explanation.  One could say the second group is either high fantasy or prone to high fantasy, but that isn’t the point.  The point is that the first group has worlds that make for good places to set a role-playing game where the latter group has worlds where that’s a problem.

What problem?  The problem that the world is far too dependent upon a singular character or small group of specific characters.  Conan may be the most badass dude in his world, but he isn’t necessary to it.  Whereas, no Eternal Champion story functions without an Eternal Champion or three.  It’s unfortunate in that Thomas Covenant’s fantasy world and Wheel of Time’s world are both well suited to having RPG characters – those characters just wouldn’t be the characters who are of prime importance (outside of playing an established character).  It’s certainly possible to play some bit character in the grand scheme of things; I just find it offputting to know that no matter what my character will ever do, it won’t be relevant in the way that the book characters are relevant.

John Carter may be the Jesus of his world, but he’s not necessary, unless you give a crap about every race uniting, which I just see as a side plot to the constant attempts to recover kidnapped women.  So, Barsoom fits well into the group of worlds where the characters can carve out their own destiny.  JC and Conan are much alike in how they both rise to a level of great prominence but are easily replaced.  When I reread the whole series, I’ll know, but my recollection is that about five of the eleven books in the John Carter series aren’t about John Carter at all.

While reasons have been given for why a movie took a hundred years to make, needing the special effects technology to catch up mostly, it has been amazing that so little had been done with a RPG.  I was in a local game store a few months ago and stunned by how a RPG completely ripped off the Mars books.  Why not just get the license for the real thing?  Probably because estates are weird and reluctant to do such, even if it’s unlikely to be screwed up.

I don’t hold out much hope that a new official RPG will be made.  There was the 1978 miniatures game John Carter, Warlord of Mars and there is the newer game, whose name escapes me and which I cannot find with an online search, that is a complete ripoff.  I’ll just have to check the store again.

Still, you don’t need an official RPG to set a game in a world.  I believe JC was written up as a 30th level fighter in AD&D terms.  Can scale however you want, but given unaging warriors who fight for the thrill of fighting to the death their entire lives, a mediocre swordsman on Barsoom could be 10th level, with 20th level fighters being rather commonplace.

I hadn’t thought much of what system would work well.  I don’t find that level systems model source material all that well, unless you freely start characters at mid/high levels or have them jump in level rather easily.  A percentile system could possibly capture the difference between the 90%/90% attack/parry “common fighting man” and the 99%/99% or 180%/180% or whatever elite fighting man of Mars.  I have a hard time envisioning L5R working, what with there being far too much variance in results and far too many rank 8, 9, 10 Swords skill characters.  I wonder if Savage Worlds might scale correctly with numerous d12+1 vs. d12+3 fights, though, again, variance.

The whole point of sword fights on Barsoom is that you are either clearly better and cut down a dozen warriors easily or face a highly skilled swordsman and have to open a dozen minor wounds before polishing someone off with a desperate/rage-induced/lucky final strike.  Actually, 3e L5R dueling rules might capture the nature of important one on one fights.

Speaking of one on one fights, another huge problem that RPGs have modeling.  Interestingly, Conan has a supplement that has rules for an epic duel.  But, in general, the mechanics just don’t lend themselves to duels.  I suppose I could play with it a bit to see if normal L5R can model general combat where my Agility 7 Earthling with Swords 10 just rips apart a dozen Agility 4, Swords 5 nobodies, while the Iaijutsu rules get used for one on one fights.  Though, a huge problem with one on one fights has nothing to do with mechanics and everything to do with the difference between a single protagonist in a book and a party in a RPG.

Well, okay, that and the rather important bit that book characters don’t die (unless they can be resurrected), that they are irreplaceable to the story where RPG characters are rather less interesting when they must win fights for the story to make any sense.

Given the nature of Barsoom, one could try to find players into modeling duels, one could abstract action to some degree to avoid having a single player fighting a long, drawn out duel while others aren’t involved, or one could just choose to find a more party friendly world.

Given that few people I know have read the books and, therefore, have no particular allegiance to Barsoom, probably just not bother coming up with something, just as I don’t bother with most of my RPG ideas.

Desired Supplements

Oh, the sin of desire.  Whatever.  AEG runs a column on rpg.net for the L5R RPG.  For 2013, they have two undetermined slots for sourcebooks.  Here is my post on what I’d like to see for future sourcebooks:

Sourcebook interests:

1.  Spirit Realms besides Ningen-do detail, including areas between realms.  What do Fortunes look like when you meet them?  How would you survive for extended periods in Toshigoku or Gaki-do?  And, so forth.
2.  Military Campaigning – Imperial Legions, Jade Legion, Clan Legions – What are they like?  How do they fit in with samurai serving locally or “adventurous” samurai?  Can be more on mass combat for tabletop RPG play, though I’m expecting The Book of Water will address mass combat alternatives.
3.  Adventuring in the outdoors – There’s a lot of uncivilized sections of Rokugan but too many details need to be worked out by a GM for anything more than “oh, look, a bandit camp” such as having animal encounters laid out in detail.  Not to say it should all be about fauna, how to find water, extreme elements, and such that can be found with some research but also just what are the uncivilized areas of Rokugan like?  What is it like to go into Shinomen Mori?  What is it like to spend a week climbing mountains in Dragon Lands?  What are islands without ports and cities like?
4.  Monsterhunting campaigning – While monsters can easily show up in a book focused on Spirit Realms and it’s not really necessary to statblock everything under the Moon, I’m thinking more of a campaign that is monster-smiting focused, not to be confused with a pure Shadowlands supplement.  In addition to more on the Shadowlands, what would a roving band of monster hunters really find within Rokugan?

Perhaps may notice the trend:  I get plenty of politics and intrigue already, I’m more interested in heroic adventuring and more physical adventuring throughout the world(s).

When I think of what Asian fantasy role-playing that I want to do [censored], I think of an InuYasha style world.  There are all sorts of spirits and many of them are naughty and the roving band of heroes tries to help innocent folks get by in the country – cities and large population centers are never, to my knowledge, shown.  Now, InuYasha is a bit lacking in subtlety for me; I wouldn’t say it’s too high fantasy as I like high fantasy but more that the PC abilities tend towards the over the top stuff you see a lot in anime.  In particular, InuYasha with his sword and Miroku both have abilities that are more superheroes in a fantasy world, which would be okay but not the more ghostbusters vision I have.

L5R could do this, but most folks who play L5R want the politics and intrigue, the infighting between clans and Imperials, that I just don’t care anything about.  In my Ghostbusters of the Five Rings world, the Scorpion Clan would have no reason to exist.  In truth, the idea of clans is unnecessary.  The Crab would be specialists in monsters.  The Crane Clan would just be courtiers, artisans, and merchants.  The Dragon would be esoteric monks.  The Lion would be soldiers.  The Mantis would be sailors, island-dwellers, and merchants.  The Phoenix would be priests.  The Unicorn would be … nonexistent.  Imperials would be off stage to where they would be just plot device individuals – “I, rich noble dude, am being haunted.  Help me.”

But, this isn’t going to happen.  Or, at least, it’s unlikely.  It’s not that it would be all that hard to strip L5R of numerous mechanics and flavor elements logistically, the issue is that people have expectations based on the source material, including just the mechanics in the source material.  In other words, as a GM (though I’d prefer to be a player) in such a campaign, the actual L5R RPG books would need to be hidden to not give players preconceived notions of how the world works.  Roll and Keep core mechanic, Rings/Traits as per L5R, combat system, weapons, mundane goods, even magic system could all be retained, but it should be written out in a document stripped of all of the Rokuganiness of L5R.

A different Asian FRPG system could be used much the same way.  Qin: The Warring States, Weapons of the Gods, whatever – the need, though, is to separate out world specific elements that don’t fit this sort of campaign.

Do people do this sort of thing all of the time?  Sure.  Fantasy Hero or any other generic system could be redone to reflect an Eastern world.  Non-generic systems are repurposed all of the time, as well.  It’s just that so much of L5R is wrapped up in its world as a niche product.

Anyway, back to the realistic.  I find 4e L5R supplements to be amazingly good.  A step up from 3e and a huge step up from some of the 1e books that felt mechanics heavy even if they were supplying some essential world information.  Now, having said this, I still need, as a GM not so much as a player, visuals and details that players largely don’t care about.  I want to know what a small Mantis island looks like.  Do they vary much?  I want to know what the terrain is like in Gaki-do and what there is besides gaki.  I want to know how the Imperial Legion functions since it rarely seems called upon to fight in times of peace and it’s a major disruption from the normal duties of samurai.

Actually, I don’t even know what is normal for samurai.  Emerald Empire will talk about birth, gempukku, death, marriage, but what about:  What do samurai get assigned to do after gempukku?  Why?  How?

Emerald Empire and material in other books addresses mundane aspects of a samurai’s existence, but I’m still trying to process how the world works.  You aren’t supposed to wear armor anywhere that is supposed to be safe – this often comes up when traveling in adventures.  How far out are patrols?  What are the areas without patrols like?  No peasants?  How big are these wilds areas?

On a different topic, ashigaru get mentioned often but samurai are often the ones who do stuff in adventures, for obvious metagame reasons.  But, what about these ashigaru?  How common are they?  What are their lives like?  What is their military organization like (given that I don’t have virtually any sense what the samurai military organization is like)?  How do they work together with samurai?  In theory, much of warring is done by ashigaru, but the game acts like it’s Crane duelists taking out Lion commanders while actual lions are running around and dying to Phoenix fireballs as Utaku Battle Maidens charge into dual-wielding Mirumoto.

Deeds, Not Words

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.

Miscellaneous Articles

A variety of thoughts have come to mind recently.  One was even based off of comparing the NFL vs. MLB to one CCG vs. another.  But, then, I realized that there were too many sources.  I thought I’d just list some articles I’ve read recently and what sort of thoughts they inspired.

The Play’s the Thing

Ah, daily Magic articles.  The best are Mark Rosewater’s Monday ones.  The “nice, relaxing” reads are Friday’s Tom LaPille’s (a V:TES player, btw).  My third favorite are Mike Flores’s as, while possibly hard to see by my opponents in games, I am more of a Spike than anything else.  I should just have a permanent link somewhere – Timmy, Johnny, and Spike.

Two things that came to mind.  One is obviously that playtesting requires PLAYtestING.  People pontificate endlessly about (in CCGs) cards, decks, strategies without actually knowing what is true.  This is theoretically important should V:TES actually see new cards.  Though, if the cards aren’t going to be manufactured as real cards but simply be electronic, hardly matters as they become easy to change after being provided to the playerbase.

Of more interest is Tom’s comment about how playing a CCG is not the primary activity with it.  Maybe having a professional make this remark will help people understand this.  Why is it important?  Because it goes back to investment of thought, which I’ve harped on before when talking about how investment of dollar, dollar bills is not really the significant cost to enjoying CCGs.  I don’t understand people who enjoy playing CCGs but don’t spend time thinking about them.  Might as well play a boardgame, and I think it’s just that – I differentiate the experience between boardgames and CCGs precisely because the former doesn’t necessitate the thought investment of the latter.

Sure, I think about boardgames.  I think the Game of Thrones boardgame is an awful game, even with errata, but because it was so limited, it was interesting to consider optimal moves, basically it was chess to me.  I read boardgamegeek.com sometimes and like the analytical forum posts.  But, I mostly don’t care – I don’t care what’s good, I don’t care what’s bad, I don’t care to know how to win.  In comparison, even with CCGs I don’t play, I’m interested in what’s good, what’s bad, and how to win (even if I don’t make use of the knowledge).

Getting back to thinking about CCGs.  As Tom says, designing cards that create interesting choices is more fun.  If I had to say what the greatest failing of V:TES has been since White Wolf brought it out of torpor, it would be the lack of interesting choices.  Not as much with individual cards but with the metagame of what the best strategies are.

Dominate’s failing isn’t that it’s awesome, it’s that it squeezes out a lot of interesting choices because it’s so much more effective.  In comparison, something like Una doesn’t do that.  Combat ends has always been a problematic mechanic because it forced combat into much narrower paths as too many rush strategies just lose to combat ends.  Looking around today, I’d say Crows/Bats has taken over from combat ends as a tactic that makes other tactics so ineffective as to be frequently ignored.  If V:TES weren’t a game of small effects and weren’t multiplayer, it would never have survived developing as it did.  Relative to other CCGs, the metagame of superior deck archetypes for V:TES has just been amazingly stale.

I do go back and forth.  Sometimes, I feel the “I might be playing different cards, but I’m not doing anything novel” problem that others feel with V:TES.  Sometimes, I’m of the view “And?  It’s not the cards that really matter, it’s how interesting deck interactions occur regardless as to what the decks are made of.”

RPG.net

I’ve been reading more and more columns, reviews, and forum posts on RPG.net.  Some of it is fascinating.

Lloyd Brown’s Business of Gaming Retail column is my favorite.  I realized quite a few years ago that the gamer dream of having a game store wasn’t a very enthralling dream.  Unless you don’t care about losing money, you have to run a business like a business, which takes a lot of the joy out, nevermind that you aren’t going to be playing while you are running, though I suppose you could just be an owner who has others run the store.  Nothing about his articles makes me want to change my view, if anything, it’s somewhat more discouraging, but it is fascinating.  It does give hope to those who feel the desire more strongly that staying in business is plausible.

I read the Naked Steel column, of course, though it doesn’t get me that juiced for upcoming L5R products.  There’s finally going to be new tattoos, but I see a lot written about kihos, which are meaningless to me.  And, overall, I still feel like 4th Edition is too mechanical, too low power, too dry.  It’s funny because some of the things that bother me – the focus on weird schools – is precisely intended to not be dry and to show off the variety and depth of the world but only bores me because I wouldn’t want to play such a character.  Sure, it was absurd that 3rd Edition gave every clan dueling techniques, but so many techs at least seemed cool, which is probably more about the powering down of 4e (and increased focus on tactical movement) than anything else.

The animal column is … well, I preferred the article way back when in Dragon about how real world animals are badass or, at least, annoying as hell.  Not that I’ve read more than a couple of the articles.  I find it less interesting for gaming and more interesting for science!  That hot climates encourage larger surface areas is not something I recall reading about elsewhere, for instance.

This interview with Reiner Knizia is a recent read.  I actually find that cooperative boardgames are fundamentally flawed, so I focused on what he had to say about replay value.  In the forums, commenting on an earlier article in the column, someone said that cooperative boardgames owe a nod to RPGs.  Perhaps, but I find that they are completely different when it comes to the fundamental flaw of cooperative boardgames.  Cooperative boardgames are only penalized by having multiple players.  Perfect cooperation is superior to achievement than lesser cooperation, so you are always better having one player do everything.  What about traitor games (Shadows Over Camelot, Battlestar Galactica, etc.)?  I don’t find that they work or are enjoyable.  Having one person singled out to oppose the others randomly does not interest me.  Shadows Over Camelot is so hard by itself that a traitor should cause losses almost all of the time, which is neither interesting for the larger group or for the traitor.  Speaking of difficulty, I also see that the games must be exceedingly difficult in board mechanics (i.e. putting the traitor element to the side) to have any replay value.  While difficulty is hardly a major turnoff to gamers.  What the difficulty encourages is people playing more efficiently, moving towards the “why don’t you just play everyone’s position since that’s more effective?” problem.

Meanwhile, yes, with RPGs, having the best tactician tell everyone how to handle combat is going to make the party more effective, at least, at combat.  I don’t know if this element is one reason I’m not as excited by combat as others or not.  What I do know is that good RPG sessions have personal decisions that matter.  I like to get along with NPCs or obliterate them.  I like exploring, whether actually wandering around some place or reading through the castle’s library.  Cooperative boardgames lack the personal element as do all boardgames.

I’m a huge fan of HeroQuest (the old boardgame), but I clearly see that it has the cooperative boardgame problem that each adventure should be optimized.  You don’t even need one player as the game is sufficiently limited that all decisions can be figured out easily enough.  And, this is where I see the most value in cooperative boardgames – as solo gaming experiences.  Play against the board mechanics and see how well you do.  That might have been something I’d be more into before I got to know a lot of other gamers.  Nowadays, I can’t imagine the Pool of Radiance grinding that I used to do.  Probably why I don’t play videogames anymore.

Since new articles don’t come out that fast, I’m catching up on archived columns.  This post is long enough, maybe I’ll come back to some old articles in another post.  Or, people can just read articles themselves and let me know what they think are interesting articles.

The Magic of CCGs

A trend started a few years back is to eschew the CCG model and go with a LCG model of fixed sets of cards for a given product.  Obviously, there was an economic reason for this.  The CCG industry didn’t just have a shakeout to where you no longer saw the ridiculous CCG of the Month launch situation but an environment where only a couple of handfuls of CCGs could even be considered surviving.

I’ve talked before about what a huge investment a CCG is … of time and thought.  I’d also add finding opponents for niche CCGs.  Certainly, the model of having regular releases of hundreds of new game components puts a great deal of pressure on the customer base.  Even putting aside any needs to remain competitive by acquiring either considerable cards for each release or very specific cards that everyone else would likely be interested in as well, a very real reality for most CCGs, there’s the ballooning of collections and mechanics/rules.

I’ve also mentioned how mechanics bloat ends up being a problem, the greatest being that the barrier of entry to new players keeps getting greater and greater over time.  But, even the constant and significant increase in how many cards someone owns becomes a downer.  I have boxes lying around of various CCGs that were never integrated into my collections’ organizations – Crusade for B5, Sword of Caine for V:TES, Visions for Magic are just some examples.

Without critical player mass and some selling point that keeps a player committed, it’s easy for someone to leave a CCG.  It may be easy to return, as Magic and V:TES often see, but if there’s nothing to return to because the playerbase crumbled away, then the game is essentially dead.

Not being a LCGer, I can’t say how the model in general or the marketing plan for specific games has panned out or will likely pan out.  While the perception that a game is no longer a treadmill may be strong enough to get someone to buy in to a LCG, how does the game not retain the longer term problems that CCGs have had?  New cards still means more things to remember, whether text or mechanics/rules, more things to store, more components to use for a game that someone may not have time for.

It’s not like you stop at just one set.  After all, that doesn’t make more money.  Dominion is a good example of how boardgame-cardgames can steal from the CCG model and keep putting out expansions.  The speed of those expansions as well as the importance of them is quite different, which is likely how they get away with it.  While my original Jyhad group didn’t allow expansions, believing there was sufficient variety already in the game and that expansions would only reduce the awesome, far more CCG players I’ve run across desperately want new cards on some sort of regular basis.

In this way, I think CCGs have “won” in a perception sense for their marketing strategy.  The CCG model is predicated on the idea that there must always be something new that shakes up the play environment, even though the play environment for CCGs often is far more diverse with premier sets or few expansions than people think, since the number of possible decks with 300 unique cards is effectively infinite.  Sure, some strategies will dominate and many cards are chaff, but there is often really interesting metagaming that can occur with limited options, and there’s always the option of playing different formats that limit what cards can be used or that have special rules that change the metagame.  For instance, with V:TES, if you never had anything past Sabbat, but you had storyline events like Eye of Hazimel, you wouldn’t need to ever print new sets.

If there’s one thing about Magic, from a marketing standpoint, that I would say it has annihilated most, possibly even all, of the competition at, it’s that the game is awesome for limited play (even taking into account my views on the funness of playing Magic).  If niche CCGs had anything even 10% as good as Magic for limited play, maybe they wouldn’t be niche and maybe they’d still be “alive”.

This is another area where I’m struggling to see the advantage of a LCG.  Sure, it’s possible to have some sort of limited format, even do some sort of randomization in special products to enable sealed/draft environments like those seen for CCGs, but this does kind of contradict the nature of LCGs.

So, what prompted my writing about this now?

I played some Legacy format Magic recently.  I could probably write a great deal more about this, but one of the main things that came away from my trying to build decks was that I have a large, disorganized, incomplete Magic collection.  A key card I couldn’t find was a common from a set I had cards from*, a card reprinted a decent number of times.  Do I feel bad about the limitations of my collection?  Sure, I was never competitive in constructed because there were virtually no tournament decks I could ever build.  But, I also find it interesting.  I find the completely imbalanced quantities of which sets I own tell a story of my participation in the game.

*  Back in the day, one of the local cons had a free sealed deck tournament.  Though it was like 8AM on a Monday, people were obviously going to show up for free Magic cards.  One year, it was Urza’s Saga, and I thought I was going to be done quickly to do stuff with people I knew.  In one of my few Magic successes, I played for like 9 hours, coming in second in the tournament, not only getting a couple of starters and some boosters for the sealed portion but a bit more as prizes.  I don’t know if I ever bought any Saga outside of that.

More important, at least to what I’m writing about today, is that I have some unopened product lying around that was meant to be used for Type P decks, and I opened a couple of boosters from Guildpact and, after playing, Dissension.  The idea was that I could not only get inspired for some additional Legacy decks but that newer cards are more powerful on average than older and maybe I’d crack some constructed worthy cards.

I hate opening boosters most of the time.  Why?  Because I buy enough for games I’m invested in to have everything and it’s just a matter of making sure I’m getting my fair share and cataloguing my quantities of chase cards to figure out what to trade for.  So, every pack is just an accounting exercise.  Good rare?  k, that’s what I’m looking for.  Bad rare?  Sucks to be me, hope the box gets better.

Magic isn’t like that, for me.  I’m never going to have everything.  There has never been a set that I bought enough of to have four-ofs of every card I care about.  This is what it’s supposed to be like for all CCGs.  The gambling element of whether you get good cards or bad cards is a huge part of the card crack addiction.

I might consider launching a CCG these days even with the huge hurdles of marketing and distribution because I think the CCG magic is still possible for a CCG besides the current crop that have proved themselves fit enough to survive.  An awesome limited environment is what I would focus on because the number of benefits limited provides a game from a marketing standpoint are just so great, including the lack of need for people to hop on a treadmill and invest in every set ever.  Of course, some CCG (Spoils?) took this approach and it didn’t work, so it’s not like this is the magic bullet of how to publish rather than perish.

It’s just amazingly frustrating to still enjoy opening Magic packs and thinking about how cool the cards are and how they could be used, when I don’t even want to play the game.  Why can’t other CCGs capture that magic?  (Part of it is that Magic actually has a really high coolness factor, what with awesome art, better new mechanics, etc.)

I’ve missed having a two-player CCG for quite some time, for those times when I didn’t want to care about table politics.  I’m now getting to the point of missing cracking packs to see what random cardboard I may never play with.  I have no idea how LCGs and boardgame-cardgames compete with that.  That they do suggests, yet again, that maybe I fall into a category of gamer too small to support the games that interest me.

A Gnu CCG

I had a dream recently where I was playing a card game at a big table with a bunch of other players.  I had a strong hand that consisted of a forest, snow, polar bears (no gnus!!, though), and something I’ve forgotten (I think it was interior decorations) strategy.  This game, of course, doesn’t exist.  Or, if it does, hopefully, someone lets me know so that I have further proof that I’m psychic (but, then, so is everyone else, so it hardly matters).

It got me to thinking about how I would approach CCG design these days.  The more I thought about writing a post about how I’d step by step approach designing a CCG, the more I thought of two things:  one, I don’t know that I could design one step by step; two, there’s no point in designing one.

Why the latter?

Magic is the industry standard for mechanics even if other CCGs outsell it.  There are plenty of ways to do CCGs differently – see hundreds of CCGs that have been printed (and probably died).  But, many designs lack the elegance that Magic has.

For instance, one of the most defining elements to a particular CCG is one’s faction.  Whether race in B5, clan in V:TES, side in Star Wars, and on and on and on – factions provide structure.  What of Magic’s factions?  That would be colors.  Mark Rosewater often comments that the most important thing in Magic’s mechanics is the color pie.  Numerous games have identifiable factions and can expand the game with additional factions, providing important hooks for fans of the genre/source material, magic has its 5 colors (and some colorless “factions” like land and artifacts).

Why is the latter so much better?  Elegance.  Control over mechanics.  It’s not strictly better, of course, as I don’t find strong attachments to the colors (“I play green!”) in the same way that we see strong attachments to various CCGs’ more specific factions.

Elegant in that it’s both consistent and simple, with a lot of natural ways to build into greater complexity.  With just 5 colors, you get 10 two-color combinations, 10 three-color combinations.  Ultimate Combat!, with its 4 foundation types, loses a lot of variety in potential cards, yet still has a much more coherent structure around which to build a game.

On the flip side, games with factions often get out of control with the number of factions.  Though B5 limited its playable races, it still added Psi Corps, home factions, Drakh, corporate (well, would have if our set got published).  V:TES has over 30 clans.  Other games, such as VS, had to keep adding factions.  I even sort of forget how many allegiances Wheel of Time got up to.  Not only is this a headache for things like maintaining balance, but it’s a disaster when trying to sell sets.  With only five factions, you will build decks of every faction and every card is theoretically useful to you, but with some indeterminate/expanding number of factions, most players will get cards that are UOA (useless on arrival, ignoring that there’s such things as trading and selling singles).

As to controlling mechanics, one of the more frequent complaints of players of CCGs is that the distinctions between factions blur as more cards get made.  I heard this all of the time when I talked to Shadowfist players.  I get this a lot with V:TES even though my top suggestion is to open up a mechanic to everybody (and not just two discipline “factions” and an underpowered disciplineless card).  Naturally, the larger the number of factions, the less specialties each should have.  Overlap becomes inevitable as more and more cards see print.

So, Magic is it?  No, for the reason I often comment upon, even Friday when I had lunch with an old gaming buddy at work – Magic is not fun to play, not in comparison to other CCGs at any rate.  I’d so much rather play B5, which I often had terrible games of, Wheel of Time, which had virtually no playerbase and severe balance problems initially, and, of course, Ultimate Combat!  Hell, I’d probably rather play Dragon Dice.

Where does Magic go wrong?

I can bring up previous comments about strength of permanents and whatever, but I think I narrowed it down to one overwhelming factor, and it’s not lands/mana (which UC! also has).  Drawing one card a turn, while incredibly intuitive and quite elegant, is amazingly bad design for a CCG.  Drawing two cards a turn seems pretty bad as well, but it’s worlds better.  With such a low replenishment rate, card advantage simply becomes too important and playing off the top is too prevalent.  More than anything else, this is why Ultimate Combat! is so much more fun an experience (on average).

I have a hundred or so Type P Magic decks and I pull them out at times and goldfish them, though I don’t think about how I want to evolve them like I once did.  I tried playing some of them with a mechanic of refilling the hand every turn.  Of course, it was a problematic experience – Magic wasn’t designed to work that way, so the costing of cards would be way off.  Decks with more cheap cards would just overwhelm slower decks automatically.  Now that I think about it, maybe I should try playing them with a draw 2 mechanic to see how that would work.

So, yes, I think a much better CCG can be made than anything currently being played.  Unfortunately, I’d go with something akin to Magic’s five colors, something akin to Magic’s turn order, something akin to how a lot of Magic cards work (though very possibly without a land mechanic), etc.  I would just start with the concept that either the normal draw in a turn was refill, immediate replacement a la V:TES, or multidraw of some sort of fixed number, probably starting at 3 cards a turn and tuning from there.

This theoretical game fails on two obvious accounts.  The first is that it wouldn’t survive because people like Magic and there are simply not enough people who want to play a better version of Magic.  The second is that it would infringe upon intellectual property rights.

Sad.  What makes this more sad than just the fact that the attempt wouldn’t work because of economics and legal reasons is that there’s no chance that a sufficiently established CCG will reboot itself to fix fundamental problems.  Magic reboots itself constantly to fix short term problems, a major help for keeping it lively for the long term, but the fundamental flaw of drawing one card a turn just isn’t going to be addressed, nevermind that most CCGers wouldn’t even consider it important to be addressed.  For V:TES, sure, Nights of Reckoning could be banned, Dominate cards could get nerfed, bounce could be opened up to a far greater percentage of decks, etc., but there’s no feasible way to reboot the game as it invalidates so much effort that was put into the game over the years by existing players while offering nothing special to new players even if the game could be radically simplified to be more appealing to new players.

Sure, L5R rebooted a significant number of years down the line and other CCGs have done reboots, but such occurrences threaten a DOA game when they come back online.  I could see Magic, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! being able to survive a reboot, but where’s the impetus for it with those games?  When you are actually making a lot of money, are you going to remake your product?  For RPGs, which admittedly don’t make a lot of money, sure, as you need to have something new to sell always.  For CCGs, where a reboot eliminates all value of previous purchases, a painful sell.

Partial reboot?  Something more along the lines of Magic’s rotating formats?  I think the two are still fairly far apart.  Suppose, for instance, we partial reboot V:TES.  V:TES 21st Century has Brujah, Gangrel, Malkavians, Nosferatu, Toreador, Tremere, Ventrue and so forth with no Govern, no Conditioning, Deflection being disciplineless, etc.  You can still play any copies of the old game that got printed in the new; over time, the percentage will greatly increase.  Game expands to cover more clans/disciplines but not everything.  There’s never any sterile rule, scarce rule, events, Imbued, Red List/Trophy – the game contains mechanics to a much greater degree, has real timing rules, changes a bunch of wordings to make interactions clearer, rebalances cards.  In other words, it’s sort of a mass bannings/errata with some “you will eventually be able to play this, just not right now” thrown in to really irritate people.  In what way could this possibly sell to the numerous people who have kept the game alive by buying boxes of every expansion?  Even when many of the cards were reprints?  Who replaces those who leave?

… 2011

So, following up from the look back at 2010, might as well throw out some thoughts on 2011.

Predictions

I don’t foresee major changes.  Boring?  Sure.  I’m sure something inconvenient will happen, like computer issues or a shake up in what sort of gaming I end up doing or having convention plans not work out quite right for Gen Con or, if I’m feeling frisky, Origins.

I don’t foresee picking up any major new game.  … boring.

Need to predict something.

V:TES will see a continued emphasis on storyline play, meaning something this year.  No new set in 2011.  A continued problem with coherent conversation on the game.  The lack of material compensation should see fewer out of country participants in the NAC, so it’s likely a NorAmer will win.  Columbus group should do well, even ignoring that it’s in their backyard, but we might see another Canadian coup.

L5R 4e will put out broken schools/paths.  One CCG that isn’t Magic, Pokemon, or Yu-Gi-Oh! will hold people’s attention briefly.  Self published RPGs will continue to take marketshare from established companies and the e-ification of RPGs will grow to the levels that they should have already.  Boardgames (and non-collectible card games) will continue to be where the hobby gaming money is.  The expandability concept built into many recent games will continue towards becoming the standard, just as Hollywood loves its franchises.  On average, EuroGame complexity will rise (falling when the boardgame bubble bursts next year).  Online gaming, of course, has an impact on tabletop, but I think most of the damage has already been done.

Concerns

I am concerned with the smooth sailing of HoR.  Even if I don’t have any troubles getting mods in and the campaign doesn’t have a major problem in 2011, I imagine that an increase in players will put stress on how things are currently done.  Also in the realm of HoR, my plan to run mods at local cons may not work to get more players or even work so well as one-shots.

While my planning for major cons is superb, I can’t control everything in ways that are rather important, so there’s always the concern of keeping the cost of Gen Con under control.

I don’t know that Origins or Gen Con will fare all that well, which might not be a big deal this year but may be a problem for next.  Both appear to be struggling mightily, possibly due to online gaming’s hold on the mainstream.  I expect ConQuest will have its last year near my house, possibly its last year.

Hopes

I hope that the local cons are better experiences than in recent years.  But, I might as well keep expectations low so that I’ll be pleasantly surprised rather than disappointed.

I hope that V:TES’s management doesn’t try too hard and end up making some decision that reduces the fun of playing the game.  I hope that some site replaces the newsgroup and much of the fragmented discussion on various forums as a central place for discussion of the game.  I hope that players stick with the game and don’t try to come up with house rules.

I hope to find some new product that is inspiring.  Unfortunately, I think the ship has sailed on a two-player CCG being that product.

I hope to find the magic mix of time and money to make it to more interesting events.  And, for those that I do attend, I hope that they work out a bit better than the last couple of years.

Hope to correct any of my mistaken theories on how games, the industry, or whatever works.

Plans

My intention is to continue to try to find a mechanism for generating decks that amuse me to play and to eschew reactionary concepts.  I might have to break down and play some of my tournament concepts in casual play, though, if I manage to get to Origins, that won’t be necessary.

My intention is to tighten up my RPG schedule, as I hope to be busy enough with other things that I need to manage things more wisely.  Hopefully, Conan will be more consistent.  Hopefully, I’ll figure out what to do, if anything, with Solomon Kane.

My intention is to get some of my fictions done that I’ve intended for ages.  I can hope to get some non-gaming writing done, but that’s asking a lot.

Look to finish off one of my blog series and expand on the Card of the Weak series.

Look to put away all of these loose piles of cards, even if it only lasts briefly.  Will need to switch to bigger boxes, though, as I can’t even fit Serpentis in its box.

Try to be even more chill on public forums and avoid using this podium to unfairly criticize.

Is 2011 the year to consolidate lessons of the past and move forward more wisely?  Or, will it be surprising?  Or, will it be much the same?

2010 …

It actually didn’t occur to me until a few hours ago to take a look back at the year.  It’s still a few hours until 2011 here, so here I go with my look back on my 2010 gamingwise.  No top 10 lists, no deep thoughts on theory or strategy or astrology, no particular cleverness at all – just some things to ramble about.

Biggest Story

I watch a lot of ESPN/ESPN News, and they had a poll of the top story for 2010.  LeBron’s decision led.  I understand that; it was the story that had the most that could be talked about and was really intended to be a media frenzy thing.  It wasn’t the most important story, but it was the biggest.

Heroes of Rokugan.  I got invested in 2009, but I was involved in 2010.  I did most of my fictions, played in the final events, scrambled to try to get all the mods in, planned things out, and completed my (main two) characters’ stories.  HoR3 hasn’t been that big of a thing, yet, I still don’t know what I want to do with characters, but I’m still looking back at HoR2 both for the stories and because of my running it for others.

Most Notable Event

V:TES going out of production.  While I actually don’t care a lot that there’s no cards expected any time soon, which is a complete reversal of my views on CCGs I played in yesteryears, it’s akin to Tiger Woods (the most important sports story of 2010) in that what it precisely means is unknown, yet is disturbing in its implications.

It’s not just about V:TES, which, really, has already had a period in which it looked like production was over.  It’s also a general sign of the decline of CCGs.  Where have all of the niche CCGs gone?  Oh, not being plugged into the CCG market like I once was, I’m sure there are ones doing okay out there.  Just had a conversation with a store owner where L5R seems to be hanging on.  The market isn’t likely to die as enough CCGs have gone mainstream and (even more ludicrous) Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes keep getting shown in the US.  But, I don’t see any effort to publish new ones.

As for the major release of 2010 – Heirs to the Blood – I have such mixed feelings.  On the one hand, the starter thing was painful.  On the other, the set overall was quite pleasing.

I must rant about Visionquest, however.  There are plenty of horrible cards in V:TES, astronomical numbers in all of CCGdom, so why single out this, rather harmless, card?  I get offended by certain cards because they are such a mindboggling failure of design and/or development.  There’s no rational reason for how bad Visionquest is.  Sanguine Instruction isn’t technically, strictly better, it’s just “strictly” better, which is absurd when you consider how bad a card Sanguine Instruction is.  When SI was first published or maybe when we were playtesting the set, I don’t recall, I couldn’t understand why it was only a 1 stealth action.  That Visionquest does far less *and* has a drawback suggests to me a few possibilities.  One is, of course, that maybe nobody read the card, something I highly doubt if it was provided to playtesters since even niche playtesting sees a high enough level of scrutiny that how bad it is would have been caught.  My preferred theory, at the moment, is to think that the card was stronger in playtesting and got nerfed after the playtesters were done, something that happens quite often in my experience.  I don’t prefer this because I think it’s the most likely scenario, I prefer it because playtesters often get blamed for things that aren’t their fault.  There’s always the niche CCG playtesting problem of not having enough time to worry about underpowered cards, but that would still mean that people found it acceptable as it is currently written, which would be discouraging.

Conventions

Gen Con was a major mixed bag for me.  The lack of comrades on the trip had a huge impact both monetarily and in terms of enjoying my downtime.  DunDraCon was awful, as it has been for years.  KublaCon was okay.  ConQuest was virtually nonexistent.  I had more fun going to the Vegas Qualifier and the LA Storyline events, events where I didn’t game a whole lot, than I did most of the local cons.  Hell, I tend to get more enjoyment out of a casual gaming day than most of the local cons.

The question is whether this is the cons’ faults, my fault, or both.  I certainly don’t make much of an effort, anymore, at local cons.  The first ConQuest near my house I rather enjoyed as I played a few scheduled events, and that was only a couple of years ago.  On the other hand, a reason I don’t make much of an effort is that the cons don’t really offer much that enthralls me.  I’d rather play HoR online than virtually any of the RPG offerings at local cons.  A lot of that is due to a “been there, done that” view of things.  CCGs are all but dead at cons.  Boardgames …

Here’s the thing about local cons – they no longer provide something I can’t get elsewhere.  I can play boardgames probably like 5 times a week if I wanted.  Right this second, I’m not playing as many RPGs as I’d like, but I could be playing more, and I’m GMing my limit.  And, with CCGs being a nonfactor at cons, RPGs are the only things left.  Where are the special events?  Where’s the diversity?  Oh, right, have to go to Gen Con to find those.

Order or Chaos

I actually have very little consistency in my gaming schedule.  The only consistent thing these days is my running HoR2.  In general, though, the average amount of gaming seems fairly normal.  Maybe V:TES playdays pick up and Pleasanton slows down or South Bay RPGing picks up when HoR slows down or whatever.  No doubt, the amount of time spent gets fairly consistent due to filling up my free time with the sort of things I enjoy doing.  If I were busier, I don’t think I could continue running HoR2, for instance.  Should be interesting to see what happens in January.

Grade

What’s the grade for 2010?

I see discouraging things in the RPG industry and I’ve mentioned many times my views on the decline of CCGs.  I find a lot of boardgames popular with others rather tedious; those I don’t, I tire of reasonably quickly since boardgames are so inferior to CCGs in variety.  Campaigns have been inconsistent.  We have far too few V:TES tournaments.  I haven’t gotten terribly inspired by something new.

On the other hand, gaming leads to meeting new people and doing some different things (hadn’t driven to SoCal in ages) and gives me far more things to think about than I ever write about in this blog.

C?  C-?

2010, still

I should have time tomorrow to write about 2011 – what I predict, what I hope for, or whatever comes to mind.  Still thinking about 2010, is there anything I really would have changed?  I would have, of course, preordered HttB starters like I did for every set prior that WW published, but that’s not really what I mean by the question.  Should I have made more effort, whether it was with cons or getting people to play things I wanted or whatever?  Should I have tried more new things (or just more things in general)?

I give this year a mediocre to poor grade for gaming, but one thing that has struck me quite a bit in recent years is the idea that gaming should just be fun.  At the point where it is more of a chore or a downer or whatever, it’s kind of failing.  Now, gaming to me is more than just actually playing games, so I enjoy things that others can’t comprehend, like horrible RPG sessions and terribly designed boardgames that nevertheless have strategic options that are up for analysis.  I don’t have the mentality that some do that every session/experience should be enjoyable, but I see 2010 as being more of a year of just letting things happen rather than being as driven.

And, somehow, I taught people Ultimate Combat!

Clan Marketing

While it would likely make more sense to write about our LA storyline experience, I have been thinking for a time about how poorly V:TES has marketed clans.

One reason I’ve been thinking about this is because I’m involved in L5R where clan identity is huge.  The HoR3 campaign not only has polls about what clan one will play but what daimyo one will serve and, of course, what clan you are has mechanical impact in the mods.

Another reason is thinking about V:TES storylines.  V:TES storylines have traditionally encouraged player identifying with clans over and above any internal interest.  However, the obvious problem with emphasizing clan identity is that there are 38 clans in V:TES as compared with about 8 great clans in L5R or 7 clans from V:TM Camarilla or any other sort of reasonable number.  Now, yes, there are a host of minor clans, Imperial families, and whatever in L5R and the 13 bloodlines and 4 Laibon clans are not on par with the other clans in V:TES (nor is Pander).

While events can be run that limit the variety of clans, that’s only likely to annoy people.  Annoyed me when a storyline was Cammie losers only.  Putting aside the problem, and it’s most definitely a problem as supporting more things in game dilutes sets, there’s still the lack of clan identity enforcement.

What are Brujah known for?  Being saddled with the horrible combination of Celerity and Potence, sure, but lots of clans have bad discipline spreads.  Out of Jyhad, they had allies.  Terrible allies in most cases, but allies; yet they haven’t gotten a new ally since set #1.  New Carthage is way better than Carthage Remembered.  As with all clans, they get clan cards.  They get access to Camarilla stuff, though they have far more non-Camarilla vampires than other Cam clans, which shows a bit of clan identity as rebels.  In the end, I see them get played mostly because people like combat overkill.

What distinguishes them from !Brujah?  Mostly that the !Brujah didn’t cheat by getting a bunch of vampires with Dominate and/or the ability to play Second Tradition and Parity Shift.  Still have the terrible ally theme.  Dogs of War and Unexpected Coalition give a bit of much needed identity that they originally lacked.  Still, where’s the “I want to identify with this clan” feature?  Sabbat clans are much worse about this than Cam clans, getting fewer clan cards and more often lacking signature clan cards.

And, so it goes.  Those that strongly identify with particular clans will, but I don’t feel the pull for those that aren’t already inclined.  In my case, sure, I avoid Cammies, but that has something to do with them being overplayed.  My rooting for the underdogs leads to often playing clans I don’t find as interesting from a flavor standpoint.

But, why does any of this matter?  I find the enthusiasm with L5R so much greater because one feels like one can champion a particular faction.  With V:TES needing some enthusiasm, it makes me wonder whether there’s a better way to market the game, and the obvious way to get people to care is to help them care about individual clans.

Well, obvious, if you kind of ignore that there’s 38 clans in the game.  There’s just no getting around this.  Storylines or tournaments with special rules can restrict options, but you can’t take back the existence of the other clans.  When I played official storyline events, I championed underplayed clans, usually bloodlines.  I had plenty of choices.

Maybe there is no meaningful way to tie people into something like clan, any more than discipline or whatever else.  Maybe focusing marketing efforts through this element of the game are impractical.  What’s the alternative?  We don’t expect any new cards any time soon, if ever.  What can events do today that will make people want to feel more strongly about the game?  I may not be the right person since I get so committed to the games I play and putting myself into the shoes of a prospective player is unfathomable.  Still, would be nice if there were some way to sell the game to new players not just initially but once they start playing a bit.

D-Tales

I know what the next obvious card for a Card of the Weak series is (no, it’s not Portrait), but I can only think of two uses for it, so that will have to wait.

Instead, RPG whining.  No, not whining about balance.  Nothing so pedestrian as whining about how outrageously expensive books are.  Sort of whining about ideas.

I’m a big Elric/Stormbringer/Eternal Champion/whatever fan.  Still.  Probably not as much.  Okay, tangent, but first of all I realized the Young Kingdoms and the multiverse are not as appealing for gaming as I once did as the Eternal Champion’s escapades completely overshadow anything a ragtag, fugitive fleet of PCs might do, unless you get weird and do something like everyone is an aspect of the EC.  Second, I’ve really gotten tired of Moorcock’s formulaic writing in more recent books.  When you know exactly how everything will go (because he tells you), not terribly dramatic.

There’s an adventure I’ve been thinking of doing for Solomon Kane and I thought I could mine some of my Stormbringer supplements.  I found it interesting that I hadn’t even read one of the supplements and it wasn’t at all like I expected.  Also, from skimming through it, it looks like a total fail of a series of adventures because it’s so ludicrously heavy-handed and restrictive.  Anyway, I got out a second supplement, one I barely skimmed through.  Also useless for the sort of things I was looking for.

I was reminded of something, something ubiquitous when it comes to RPG products.  The information they think is important is not actually important.  RPG products frequently are heavy on the crunch (mechanics).  Stats for slavers.  Stats for guards.  Stats for monsters, including ones you want to run from.  Spells.  Powers.  Random encounter tables.  Treasure amounts.  It’s not just D&D style mods.  Alternatively, if not mechanics, then fluff that’s overly world specific.

Take the Victorian Age supplement for Vampire: The Masquerade.  I’m sure for some people it achieves what they are looking for – what is the Victorian World of Darkness look like in terms of how the clans are doing, what secret societies exist, who controls what.  What I wanted to know was what it was like to live in the Victorian Age.  Well, why not just go to the library or, in this day and age, hit up Wikipedia, or whatever?

Because the reality is that historical or real world information is still a hassle to research.  Online searches are scattershot and without any real end.  Books dedicated to history are often dense and excessively academic.  What I’m looking for in a RPG book is often a digestible amount of information that is applicable to gaming in such a world.  Sure, Victorian Age talks about transportation, but really, I can’t fathom what it would be like to live in the 1950′s, let alone prior – tell me more than the difference between a hansom and a Clarence.  Pretty much all I care about in the book is pages 45-46.

This is where GURPS supplements win.  While they too have a lot of crunch, I may be biased considering that I’ve never played GURPS, they have a relatively high level of world information.  Given that standard, it’s amazing how disappointing other supplements end up being when I actually need something.  Sure, I don’t expect to find river names in Mexico near Vera Cruz, even in GURPS Aztecs, which, by the way, trying to find geographic information at that level of detail is a total pain in the ass to try to find online if you just do a regular online search.  But, something like Testament, which got good reviews and is about a time and place that I think would make for kickass gaming, is just endless D&D crunch with only minor amounts of information on the world; I don’t recall any world info outside of how the religions differ – maybe I should dig it out and see.

Sure, I can look up flora and fauna for countries, as I’ve done.  The history of a lot of countries is often fascinating since you hear nothing about them in US schools.  For instance, I had no idea that Hispaniola was basically lost to pirates for a time after the English kicked Spanish ass in the late 1500′s.

One of my major weaknesses as GM or author is description.  I think that has something to do with not being terribly interested in it.  As long as things look right, can focus on characters, plots, and scenes.  But, things still have to look right.  Stuff still has to be appropriate.  Sure, can have camel-like bones in North America because their ancestors came from here.  Mashed potatoes in 14th century Germany?  Not so much, methinks.  I don’t want to overdescribe when I GM, but I want to be able to establish a texture while also being able to answer questions that come up.

Five, ten, fifteen pages of what it was like, even in a fantasy world or quasi-fantasy world like mythic Greece.  Or, maybe, the better approach is what it isn’t like.  What wouldn’t be the case that would get us out of thinking like modern people rolling dice to see how many goblins we killed.

For instance, I did some research on ships that would be used circa 1600.  That didn’t end up mattering.  It wasn’t because I couldn’t find differences in size, crew complements, etc.  It was because there was no link between information and how it matters to people.  That connection between fact and relevance is probably hard work, where just putting out the level progressions for prestige classes isn’t.

Now, worlds with no real world connection, arguably, have an advantage in that you just gloss over mundane details and get right to demonslaying.  On the other hand, for immersion, these worlds probably need more mundane details.  No doubt why worlds that get farther and farther from historical often are lacking.  I’ve been thinking of running something in mythic Greece for some time, but the amount of effort put into getting people to feel like they are in that world rather than some generic fantasy world with a bunch of familiar names has been daunting.

There’s a lot of things I can picture in my mind, it’s conveying those to others so that we are experiencing something similar is where I could use a lot more help.  Of course, as I look around, I see less of this material, not more.