Review – Imperial Histories

I finally got my copy of the latest book for 4th Edition Legend of the Five Rings.  My review of the previous book can be found here.

Unlike last time, I have read a substantial review of this product on a gaming site already.  David Giles wrote one for rpg.net there.  So, some of my remarks may be in response to things he wrote.

I’ll just go quickly through some areas I mentioned with the previous review.

Aesthetics

Typical of the line.  David brings up that the art is from the CCG.  While I think the art in these books is decent to great, I do feel like certain images are overused and there is art that I’d like to see more of – cleaner images of people interacting with the world mostly.

Outline

There’s an introduction that speaks of how to use each chapter.  Some may want to focus on canonical stories, others may want nothing to do with knowing what’s going to happen, while some may want a different spin on the familiar.  Different eras may suit different desires better.  And, so forth.

Each era gets an explanation for how it can be used.  Then, you get a chronology with notes.  The status of clans and other factions, such as Shadowlands, is detailed for each era … one can easily forget that the Unicorn are absent for almost all of the first nine centuries of Rokugan … for reasons that I will get into.  There is some discussion of theme for the era.  Important characters.  And, a few mechanics that may or may not be relevant only to the particular era.

Fiction

I quickly grew tired of reading it.  While arguably not the same as the chapter heading fiction, I did read some of the sidebars with Ikoma’s comments about The Dawn of the Empire era.  I just didn’t feel like Ikoma was saying them as they lacked a worldliness to them.

Meat

The meat of each chapter is what challenges are going on during the era.  These are all done well enough, I suppose – I haven’t really thought about how I would use the information to run a campaign.  That I’m not really looking at the material as someone eager to incorporate one of the eras into a new campaign is a bias that should be taken into account, of course.

Clear effort was put into explaining what sort of campaigns the eras would be good for, and I have a lot of respect for that.  Not every group wants a political campaign.  Not every group wants a survival campaign.  Etc.

I do question, a bit, how four of the eras are all within a century of each other.  David and I may have different views on specifics – he wished that Heroes of Rokugan did more with the Spider Clan, I wish the Spider Clan had never been conceived as it’s insipid, we seem to agree that L5R, the RPG, is overly tied to L5R, the CCG.  Sure, 4e is the first version of the RPG to aim for timeline neutrality rather than setting in where the CCG currently is, but Imperial Histories reminds us of how influential the CCG is by having era after era that starts with the era when the CCG was originally set and continues forward from that point.

There is certainly value in providing info on such eras for someone like myself who doesn’t follow the CCG at all.  The current HoR campaign, in fact, picks up right after one era and draws upon the following era, so I get to learn more about important NPCs, the background, and possible, related events.

It’s just that one might expect more on eras that we know little to nothing about.  Heroes of Rokugan II gets a chapter.  I, of course, know all about it.  David thought it was more what the product should have been about.  He is far more concerned than I am with the repercussions of events in Rokugan, with evolution.

Everyone seems to agree that The Great Famine chapter is awesome.  A contest was held to have someone contribute an era to the book and Jason Bianchi’s entry won.  For a game largely driven by its CCG, this sort of supplemental material only for the RPG that does no harm to the CCG is perfect.  Well, maybe not perfect.  David’s complaint is that in order to not mess around with future history everything needs to be swept under the carpet, expunged from “official” history and forgotten by later generations.  That it makes one feel like nothing you do during that time matters.  Though, as I would never have a campaign where the future is already written, I don’t see the issue with having a campaign in the 7th Century and diverging at that point in history.

My greater concern with the eras set before the 12th century is that so many elements of L5R I’m familiar with don’t exist.  Numerous minor clans won’t exist.  Schools won’t exist.  In The Dawn of the Empire, obviously, a lot of the schools won’t exist.  Families won’t exist.  The Unicorn aren’t even present for three of the eras and partially present for one.  HoR2, with its “take everything you know, assume that not much has changed except that we aren’t doing the same events as the CCG anymore” tactic is the most comfortable to me.

For instance, I am playing in a home campaign, now.  I don’t know that I mentioned this previously.  Our home campaign is set in 1001.  No Monkey Clan.  No Jade Champion (was vacated hundreds of years earlier and reinstated a century later).  It’s not superweird – the Unicorn are back, for one thing.  But, it’s different enough to notice.  It does have the advantage, of course, of ignoring the Spider Clan, the Destroyer War, Iweko Dynasty, even The Four Winds era, none of which I’m all that enthralled by.

The other notable alternate timeline to HoR2 is KYD – The Thousand Years of Darkness, an era mentioned before and highly desired by some.  It provides an example of how to make a real mess of Rokugan.  Other chapters talk about how you could diverge immensely from canon.  This chapter is that divergence.  HoR2 ends up being a major divergence in what crazy stuff didn’t happen rather than what crazy stuff did happen, but it also predated a lot of the weirdness the CCG inflicted upon canon.

Imperial Histories 2 is a product that already sounds in the works for release maybe two years from now.  A number of people have commented about what they would want to see.  Some want to go animesque, sci-fi, modern, whatever.  After all, there’s only so many variations on The Great Famine, “fill in the gaps with secret history” style era.  And, yet, the Devil is in the details.  We all likely want our version of L5R, but it takes effort to come up with your own campaign ideas, so if someone is willing to go to the trouble of detailing the ideas, makes life so much easier, as we see by people using HoR2 for their own campaigns.

Mechanics

There aren’t a lot of new mechanics.  That’s not so unusual, as Emerald Empire didn’t have much, either.  Even more so than EE, though, I’m just not that interested in what game mechanics are included.  Some are time specific.  Most are far too narrow in scope.

The one thing most relevant to me – Tattooed Monk mechanics – weren’t even all that.  First, they are schools rather than paths or advanced schools, so I doubt the campaign staff for HoR3 would make any use of them.  Second, even if they were somehow relevant, the mechanics go in the opposite direction I want to go in.  While it’s claimed that Hoshi Tsurui Zumi care less about combat, the school still forces unarmed combat mechanics down your throat.  Why can’t there be a Tattooed Monk School where you get to choose not to be a martial artist archetype?

Bottom Line

I am of the belief that one buys every product put out until it becomes clear that the quality/effort drops.  It’s a trivial amount of money to keep up with about four products a year as expenses go.

Here’s my system and rating from my last review:

x	Don’t bother if free.
*	Don’t pay for.
**	Look for if you must or buy at deep discount.
***	Worth buying.
****	Should have in collection if you play the game/genre.
*****	Should have in collection if you don’t play the game/genre.

While kind of a strange way to measure things, since it will lump this book in with books I think are better, it rates ****.

My system is showing its fundamental flaw, as Imperial Histories would still get **** due to being a worthwhile reference, but I would say it’s more like Emerald Empire and less like the more important The Great Clans.  I’d even put it behind Emerald Empire due to the mechanics being mostly meaningless and the ideas being more for an aspiring GM, rather than a player or someone already running a campaign.

So, new system.

x	Waste of space, sell or toss if owned.
*	A bad product that might have one thing you want.
**	Mediocre to average product.  Usually limitedly useful.
***	Good product.  Gets looked at *or* key to specific campaign.
****	Superior product.  Regularly referenced.
*****	Product that’s so good that you want to use it for other games.

So, this fits better as a ** or ***.  I might decide that it’s a good reference and gives me ideas for characters, campaigns, or whatever.  For the moment, it’s an interesting read that I think is necessary up to a point for consolidating various canonical storyline information but not a product I’ll need to look at all that often.  I don’t even look at Emerald Empire that often, which suggests to me that EE should be a ***.  Because of more important mechanics, I do look at The Great Clans often enough, but it’s also probably a ***.  Enemies of the Empire, for enlightening me to a great deal I didn’t know and for giving ideas for antagonists, would be more like a ****.

I mean, I do love the aesthetics of all of the new books.  They are so much more pleasant to read than other RPG books with a lot of evocative art.  And, if you play the game regularly, there’s no reason not to have the books, but some are just better than others.  And, I do think having more relevant mechanics is something AEG can work on.

Enjoy?

So, I was reading Starcitygames.com’s front page, free section.  (All the articles in this section are Magic related.)  One person’s post talked about what he enjoyed in Magic.  What prompted the thought for him, Matt Elias, is interesting in other ways since it was a game Matt played where his opponent played a land and a one-drop, Matt won on turn two, and his opponent asked him if he enjoyed playing decks like the one he was playing.  Matt goes on to explain that the answer was “yes” because he enjoys drawing lots of cards and not, assumedly, because he likes having games that don’t qualify as being an actual game.

When it comes to Magic, I also like drawing cards, though it’s probably not as important to me.  The reason why card drawing is important to me has more to do with how I believe Magic’s greatest problem is the draw one card a turn mechanic.

Anyway, I want to talk about more than Magic.  I want to think about what I enjoy most in the CCGs I have played or have been most invested in.  I’m going to try to go in order of what I’ve played the most.

Vampire: The Eternal Struggle

I’m sure I’ve spent more time playing this than anything else, perhaps as much time playing this as all other CCGs combined due to longevity of play and relative  consistency of play.  It’s also my largest CCG collection from a straight card quantity metric.

What do I enjoy most about V:TES?

Not deck construction.  I may be prolific, but I dislike many of my decks, certainly don’t have the same attachments as I’ve had with decks for other CCGs.  I don’t even consider deck construction all that important.

Not the source material.  I was once fond of Vampire: The Masquerade, back before I played much of it.  I have some connection to the source material, I guess.  Though, I’ve always had separate interests.  For instance, I actually enjoyed playing cards that require Dominate for many years whereas … to give an idea how little interest I had in Dominate in the RPG, my two main characters were a Tremere and a Ventrue – neither had any dots in Dominate.  I could go on about the differences, but there are so many examples that it would likely just be tedious.

Not the politics.  Funny thing is that politics was far less important in my early years of play – 1996 (when I started) to maybe 2002.  People were much more focused on either the player to the left or the right and doing what their decks did, which was often lots of bleeding.  My style of play, which is far more concerned with what the crazy people across the table are doing than with my natural partners to the left and right, developed in reaction to that.  Now, of course, I often lament how much table management is a consideration over having people get ousted.  I have a basic view that any table can be talked to victory, and that’s just annoying.  What interests me the most seems to be …

Card interactions?  I stress context.  For everything.  There is no meaning without context, an argument I remember making in a college philosophy course.  Card interactions, in and of themselves, probably don’t do it for me.  I think it’s because games, more so with some CCGs than with other CCGs or other games, have a feature to them besides just the numerical values of the components.  I’ll come back to this when I get to Babylon 5.  But, as a V:TES example, I find it hilarious to Shattering Blow someone’s Assault Rifle in constructed play.  It’s not so much the flavor, it’s that there’s a game context that Shattering Blow is a bad card and that the odds of being at close range against someone with an Assault Rifle are negligible, after all, the odds of even playing against someone with an Assault Rifle while running Shattering Blow are minute.  It’s these sorts of odd/surprising card interactions, where odd/surprising is determined within the context of how a game plays, that floats my boat.  Because they are so much more varied in CCGs than in other games is likely why I value CCGs so highly.

What about on a more tree level than forest level?

I enjoy having lots of minions, though I seem to forget this a lot.  I enjoy being successful at actions.  I enjoy surviving when survival seems implausible.  I enjoy guessing at what is in my opponents’ hands at any given time.  I enjoy discarding master cards to Pariah.  I enjoy lots of sound and fury signifying nothing – lots of cards played with little of consequence occurring, to an extent, anyway.  Far more than other CCGs, V:TES is the game where I can accomplish the least in results and still be enjoying playing.

Babylon 5

For a game that I didn’t start playing until the year after it came out (1997) and which I haven’t played in nearly a decade(?) at this point, I sure did play a lot once upon a time.  Once our group started playtesting, it was crazy how much we had to switch between living in the future and going back to what was already in print.

Far more so than V:TES for me, Babylon 5 was about the connection to the source material.  I didn’t start out a B5 fan.  I was far more interested in Deep Space 9 as the look of season one and the terrible acting of Sinclair were so offputting.  I only saw a couple of season one episodes and gave up on the show.  Then, I saw season two, and I became a fan.

Where V:TES is much more a “game” CCG, B5 was definitely a “genre” CCG.  You were required to play with main characters and numerous cards were recognizable, obviously virtually all of the character cards.  For me, this was an opportunity to mess with people’s expectations, a common theme throughout my gaming.  I think the first tournament I ever won was with a Centauri Diplomacy deck, pumping B5 influence.  That would have been the Fall of 1998, just a tad (3 sets) before Centauri Diplomacy was legit.  I played Minbari Intrigue before Shadows.  Londo got Vorlon Marks.  Sheridan, Shadow Marks.  I often played Centauri Military, in part to counteract obnoxious Narn war decks, but also because … well, there were a number of reasons, so maybe not a great example.

Some characters I liked better than others.  I kept trying to get a Walker Smith card created, including when I was working on the Anla’shok design team.  Again, the point is that B5 was a CCG that lived within the context of the flavor of the show.

Other things I enjoyed:  Non-player influence, especially B5 influence – Shadow and Vorlon influence could get annoying due to the major agenda, but even so, to me, the best part of the show was the Shadow War.  Marks – I loved me my marks, even Conspiracy Marks, even Doom Marks after they became far harder to convert to Destiny Marks and Seizing Advantage got rewritten.  I loved me my hyperspeed, especially hyperspeed military – unlike the V:TES players who virtually always see me screw around, my Spike-ness came through with trying to win major victories in 20 minutes with Conscription openings, even though it was incredibly unfun to play against.

Which brings up something deserving of its own paragraph.  Precedence CCGs allowed you to choose your opening hands.  This was huge, potentially large.  Choosing optimal opening hands was its own subgame.  I agonized about it more with Wheel of Time, but I spent more time (because I played more) on it with B5.  The Great Machine openings, Military Build-Up openings, Gambling Londo being all about not having an opening hand – I think it was a major fun factor to these games that one had so much control *and* so much variety with how to play the early game.  Of course, as B5′s early game was often anti-fun to play, it was likely essential to have something fun about it.  Also, this would be why any sort of aggro opening, like Conscription, was so much more fun – avoid the tedious building actions and taking entire turns just sponsoring or promoting someone.

Magic: The Gathering

I’m not so clear what the order should be after B5.  I think this is where Magic falls in how much I played a particular CCG, though with all of the playtesting we used to do for Precedence games, it’s hard to be sure how much Wheel of Time I actually played.

What do I enjoy about Magic?  This would seem to be yet another opening for me to rant about how frustrating it is that I don’t enjoy the game more, but that’s not the spirit of this post.

I enjoy building limited decks.  I hate building constructed decks for Magic as there are simply too many options.  Yes, the complaint that I’ve seen by others for various CCGs I’ve played where I built tons of decks of it being too hard to complete one deck without thinking of a bunch of others is exactly the problem I have with Magic constructed.  But, limited doesn’t have that issue.

Similarly, I enjoy drafting.  I don’t love it.  But, having a plan for what sort of limited deck to build is interesting.  Drafting Magic is a lot more interesting than drafting V:TES since Magic is designed to be drafted and may be the only good CCG for drafting.

I like burn.  I especially like burn that can go to the dome or nuke critters.  I very quickly developed a distaste for creatures given how easy it was for one to die to Terror, Lightning Bolt, Swords to Plowshares, or whatever.  On the other hand, Spitting Earth doesn’t kill your opponent.

I like multicolor cards and non-basic lands.  A lot of this might just be aesthetic appeal due to coloration and layout, but for some reason, I’ve always been attracted to lands that didn’t just tap for mana or that tapped for multiple colors of mana.  I think it’s because basic land is the most boring part of Magic.  Similarly, multicolor cards are rarer, thus more exotic.

I enjoy the ability to come out of nowhere for unexpected victory.  Pretty much the only thing I ever enjoy about a game of chess is when I make some unexpected sudden win move.  It’s a bit more likely in Magic.  I was playing Zak Dolan, that would be Magic’s first world champion, with sealed Tempest product when I had him shut down offensively with Humility, but I had to jump through a bunch of hoops with Capsize with buyback and pinging until I could get enough land in play with the last card in my deck to burn him out with Rolling Thunder for exactly how many life points he had left.  The game was dumb for him for quite a while as it looked like I’d just deck with the board choked with creatures, but I knew that the game was winnable for me.

I enjoy thinking about all of the various card combos.  Well, not all, I’m not that Johnny.  Some, with cards I think are cool.  And, that’s the thing.  Magic has so many cool cards.  In a more general sense, I enjoy thinking about deck archetypes and how to win the metagame.  I hate how Magic relies on hosers and I’m no fan of sideboards, but sideboards do enable vastly more metagame choices.

Magic, more than V:TES, where I don’t think it matters, more than Babylon 5, which is more about doing “what if” riffs on the show, is a CCG that appeals to my sense of efficiency and effectiveness.  Now, for two others.

Ultimate Combat!

I’ve probably played more Wheel of Time than Ultimate Combat!, but UC! is more important to me, and it makes sense to put it next to Magic, considering that it’s basically Magic, with the awesome flavor and variety of Magic replaced with fun game play.

I feel compelled to mention, yet again, that UC! was the first CCG I ever played.  My first game turned out to be frustrating after the fact, but it’s quite possible that failing to win that game after taking away 19 of my opponent’s 20 hit points in one turn motivated me to learn more about the game.

It’s an impossible sell.  For those who like UC!, it’s preaching to the converted.  For everyone else, can’t get past the art, the theme, and/or the card names.  Nevertheless, UC! is the most fun CCG to play.

Why?

Well, what makes games fun to play?

I’m fairly sure that the single most important thing to a game being enjoyable is closeness of result.  In other words, that every player had a good chance at winning the game.  A huge turnoff to me is when I feel like a game is unwinnable, including for an opponent.  Similarly, the sporting events I find most compelling are the ones where the winner barely wins.

This is why Magic is a vastly inferior game to UC!.  Sure, there are blowouts in UC!.  There are games where you can get a lock.  They are rare.  Or, at least, they are so much rarer than other games that I always think of UC! as the game where “if I don’t get you this turn, you win next turn”.

UC! is the CCG where games play fast, players get beat down hard, and both players are always in danger of losing.  It’s also a game where tight play and subtle moves matter.  Deciding whether to throw a Speed/Strength in defense may determine the game.  May deck one turn before putting an opponent away (decking is easy and has the same result as it does in Magic).

As for the limited variety that comes with only having two sets, I still believe that there are plenty of decks for me to build.  Sure, some day, the variety won’t be there not just because of the small card pool but because so many cards are functionally the same, but it’s sad that the game was never given a chance to be played out to that level.

Wheel of Time

A strange entry in that it was never particularly popular, I only had two regular opponents, and it didn’t last that long, but I was incredibly invested in the game.  Can I call myself a designer?  Maybe not.  I’m in the game credits as of the second expansion, but whether that’s because I helped enough with design or whether it was because I was doing things like art requests, I’m not so sure.

B5 introduced me to the awesomeness of choosing an opening hand for a CCG.  Wheel of Time was where I spent hours deciding on an opening hand for one deck.  While the dice mechanic was full of problems, some of which were fixed with the expansions, the probability calculations and permutations of results meant that a tremendous amount of analysis could be built just around the first few turns of the game.  This for a two-player game that often took us two hours.

I enjoyed the brokenness.  Typically, I get tired of brokenness quickly, but WoT was different in that it embraced brokenness to where it was the norm rather than the exception.  Okay, admittedly, a couple of card drawing cards got fixed as they were absurd, but the game was always a battle of broken card drawing, searching, and discard.  I really liked the different starting character possibilities.  Yes, this is just a subset of opening hand, but I became highly knowledgeable about the source material and the Forsaken options were particularly flavorful.

On a more general level, I can probably say that Wheel of Time was the one CCG I took seriously (most of the time) and really put my analytical skills and interest in efficiency/value to the test.  I can’t say I was a great player.  The one major I played in, I was screwed in the one game I lost because I was playing with a proxy, but I also didn’t feel like a great player during the event.  I was never top 10 in the world like I was with three other CCGs.  But, our playtesting was by far the best playtesting I’ve ever seen.  I still can picture sitting in Dave’s apartment, proving to ourselves that Forsaken.dec had no game against Maidens.  The level of analysis I read about with Magic is the level of analysis we were doing for WoT.

Tomb Raider

Yes, Tomb Raider.  What’s interesting here is that almost all of my Tomb Raider play was playtesting or demos.  I just really wasn’t that into the game.  So, why bother bringing it up?

I’ve defended Tomb Raider a lot.  I’m not an art guy when it comes to CCGs.  I appreciate great art, but it doesn’t determine whether I enjoy playing a game or not.  So, it’s hard for me to relate to people who will only get into a game that appeals visually, even if I did pass on checking out Magi-Nation because of aesthetics.  In terms of game play, Tomb Raider is not a strong CCG.  It’s not even that much of a CCG.  It’s really more of a boardgame with CCG elements.

Sure, I thought about opening hands with Tomb Raider.  My best recollection of one was running two copies of the “draw two cards” card.  And, I’m sure the CCG elements were important to having the game be something more than just a boardgame.  But, I think the main takeaway from my experiences with the CCG is that it could be a fun boardgame that could handle a range of players that, with a different genre (or much hotter Lara Croft art), could have been something as appealing as the HeroQuest boardgame, which I see similarities between.

Other?

I had a Netrunner collection once upon a time.  I could include Dragon Dice.  And, so forth.  But, really, this has gone on long enough and none of these were comparable to the above (except, maybe, Tomb Raider).

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.

Review – The Great Clans

One might believe that reviewing RPG products would be something I’d be inclined to do.  One might even believe it would be a natural fit.  Yet.

There are a couple of obvious reasons I don’t do more RPG book reviews:  I actually have bought very few RPG products in the last 10+ years as I realized at some point that I actually make very little use of RPG books; when I do acquire them, it’s typically long after they were published.

But, there’s another reason.  I have a hard time reading them in one sitting.  This is the complete opposite of how I typically read novels in one or two sittings.  RPG books are things I keep looking for things that interest me greatly, keep failing to find them, and then coming back when I’m being less picky.

Not … The Great Clans

Fourth edition L5R has the mainbook, Enemies of the Empire, Emerald Empire (4e), and The Great Clans.  I have some problems with the mainbook in terms of lacking fluff and 4e mechanics just being inferior in my mind to 3e mechanics, but it’s still a very nice book and is a far better balanced game.  Enemies of the Empire seemed like it would be questionable with how it was so much fluff to go with monsters, but the fluff is awesome.  I’m a huge fan of how it’s put together.  Emerald Empire (3e) constantly annoys me.  It annoys me because I hardly ever am able to find information that it should have in it.  It doesn’t help that people constantly rave about it and its scarcity makes it the most valued 3e book as the raving just reminds me of how useless I find it.  The 4e version is very similar, however I think it’s a much better book.  Information is presented in a more reader friendly way, and the mechanics are more interesting.  This version of EE is far more what 3e’s version should have been like.

Finally … The Great Clans

Aesthetics

The aesthetics of 4e L5R books are fantastic.  The covers might be kind of dull in the images, but the colors are excellent.  The interior art always includes old art pieces, but that’s okay when there’s enough newer art, and a decent amount of the art is gorgeous.  The Great Clans doesn’t fail in keeping up the quality of the look of 4e books.

Outline

The structure is to have a chapter on each of the great clans (shocking!) with three appendices.  Within each clan section, we get fiction, clan history, additional family information, “heroes” with stats, import holdings, sections specific to features of the clans, and new mechanics.

Fiction

I’m still reading the chapter opening fictions, but so far, I’m just not that excited.  My recollections are that my favorite fictions are from the “Way of …” books and that the “Masters of …” were better.  While not a major feature, L5R sells itself on coolness, or, at least, I sell it on coolness and it’s the only way I can imagine the CCG being so popular given how much I hate the CCG mechanics.

So, fiction should get someone pumped to play a character of the clan or, at least, get pumped about the setting.  Overall in L5R books, I do think the fiction gets me more interested in the setting than reading about what some clan’s role is in the Empire or what happened to what’s-his-name in year whatever.  Maybe, I’ll change my mind after reading some of the others, but the layout of the book actually doesn’t help the fictions stand out like the layouts of other books from various editions.

Clan History

The clan histories are limited, but there’s not much you can do when you have to cover a timespan across the entire official timeline.  It’s particularly interesting to read on what’s happening more recently in the official timeline since I knew next to nothing about the Iweko Dynasty and reading more on what the early centuries were like since there has always been so much focus on the Clan Wars and the 12th century.  Reasonable might be the best word I’m looking for to rate the information presented.

Family

More family information is often welcome.  Sometimes, it gets hard to draw out why you would prefer playing one family than another thematically.  I often choose families based on mechanics and, then, fill in the flavor after the fact.

Harping on my belief that all PCs should be unique, PCs should never be stereotypes, yet if you don’t know much about a family, you may strike the wrong note in achieving non-stereotypeness.  Also, some families are more obscure.  Unicorn have a lot of families in the mainbook, I’ve been considering having my third HoR3 character be a Horiuchi, a family I don’t really know a whole lot about.  While bringing up certain key points in history for clans helps, knowing more about how the families fit in the clans is going to be more important to playing a character.

Heroes

For someone like me, who has been getting up to speed on many aspects of the background, the heroes sections are the greatest value add.  There are a lot of names in L5R and a lot of references, but often, it’s all about one thing that someone did and not the full story.  Sure, plenty of supplements have posted notable individuals, but what sets this book apart is that it posts a large number of big names, not just major players, but the biggest players.

Ikoma.  Not some Ikoma who was very important or clan champion at some point or something, but Ikoma!  While providing statblocks for legends may have problems – “what, I have Iaijutsu 10, I could totally take this dude in a duel” – I quite like the statblocks for the big names just to get a rough sense of how the designers picture them in relation to each other.

Also, every character write-up also helps with understanding the history of Rokugan.  Fortunately, statblocks don’t have to take up a lot of space or be dense for this game, so there’s plenty of room for the character’s story.  It also seems to me that more was written about the characters after they achieved their major events than I’ve ever seen elsewhere.

Lands

I must admit I haven’t studied the “lands of the clans” sections much to this point.  I think it has something to do with being very heavily interested in particular provinces/locales because of the daimyo system in HoR3 and for fictions I write for HoR, so I focus on those regions of Rokugan most relevant to me.

Mentioning locales I’m not already familiar with and giving them far more detail than what may come out of an edition’s mainbook is welcome, even if I’m not that interested in some of the descriptions.  Eventually, a lot more of these locales will become relevant to me as I continue to tell stories in the L5R world.  It’s always nice to throw out some landmark in passing to remind people that there’s a lot of depth to the world.

Clan Idiosyncrasies

My favorites of these sections are “Courtly Romance: How to Have an Affair in Rokugan” and “Strangers in a Strange Land”.  But, whatever someone’s personal interests, these slice of life articles, which are the sort of thing you expect in Emerald Empire, are a major bonus since it’s so hard to grok Rokugan and its society.

Mantis = pirates.  But, what does that really mean?  Pacifistic Phoenix – how does that actually work in a warrior’s society?  I see these things often get mentioned, but having a great deal more depth makes them more relevant.  I don’t really see pacifistic Phoenix.  I see fire shugenja who nuke things and Shiba yojimbo who itch to duel.  I hear Mantis get called pirates, but most adventures aren’t near the sea, so it’s just an empty remark.  I don’t really care about siege weapons, but damn, those things can hurt.

Mechanics

To my understanding, it’s a truism in the industry that you need mechanics to sell books.  It’s interesting how few mechanics L5R books can get away with.  It’s also so much more pleasant to have books chock full of flavor with some mechanics rather than the painful D&D, d20, etc. supplements where it’s just endless numbers.

Still I care about mechanics, too.  I want to find the next weird path to take or advanced school to try to turbo into or obscure kata/advantage/whatever.  I’m not that excited by the new mechanics here.  There are enough of them, but I just don’t care about most of them.

Ancestors are a problem because they don’t apply to HoR, and I don’t like how they work, anyway.  Yes, some of the ancestors are quite cool to where I’d like to have them, but I find there to be a fundamental problem with how ancestors work in that they don’t seem all that special if ancestors are common and they don’t seem remotely special when someone else has the same ancestor.  I can see two characters in a party having ancestors and it still being cool.  Also, they are so weirdly costed that I’m sure there are balance problems, even ignoring the idea of losing one.

Having clan kata is a good idea as I find the mainbook kata just mindnumbing in terms of how dry they come across.  I’m not bothered by the “Strength of …” blandness, I just wish there were more clan kata.  Sure, it got dumb in 3e and kata tend to be either useless or broken, but it’s possible to have cool kata that aren’t either.

There is a path that is relevant to one of my HoR3 characters.  It’s hysterical because it would make my character strictly worse.  Not worse.  Strictly worse.  And, it’s not the book’s fault that my other character belongs to a minor clan school.  Actually, if this book had been out a lot earlier, he would have probably used one of the schools in this book.  But, there are just so few paths and schools that make me want to build particular characters.

Matsu Beastmaster, sure, but then, I think about how it won’t fit that well in a campaign with a lot of social stuff.  Lion stuff in general tends to interest me.  But, like, how come there are no new tattoos for Tattooed Monks?  That would have been way more useful to me, in theory, than Togashi Defender.

Why are the shugenja schools so odd?  It’s actually not that easy to be able to pick the element of magic you want to specialize in.  Maybe, that was true of earlier editions as well, and my aversion to shugenja caused me to miss it, but I feel like so many schools in 4e are weird, like how Tamori don’t interest me at all in 4e when they did a lot in 3e, that it feels incredibly constraining on playing the shugenja I might want to play.  Get more odd schools in this book rather than “different element focus” schools.  Now, of course, you can always be better at elements outside of your school’s specialty.

Appendices

None of the appendices are of that much interest to me.  I hate the concept of the Spider Clan, and it’s never going to be relevant to me as a player.  Vassal families – I like having a list so that I know who they are since they will show up and it is something I could play, but this section is so much more “listy” than what I’m used to that it feels undeveloped.

Heritage tables are not something I play with, but I can see them being of interest to others who have home games where they want some randomness in character creation.  The main problem I have with them is not that they aren’t balanced – people complain about the Spider being so much better – but that they aren’t so varied as to appear to give uniqueness.  Random stuff that comes up often is just not distinctive.

Bottom Line

I think all of the 4e books are must haves.  It’s not a product line that has so many products that you can’t keep up or should have to worry about budget.  I certainly don’t feel nearly as inundated with supplements as I did with 3e, which might have just been not buying products when they were newer.

Great Clans is solid.  I don’t think it’s Enemies of the Empire in description (ironic for a “monster manual”).  I think it could use some additional mechanics.  But, I give credit to it for covering all of the major clans, something that was covered in earlier editions in single clan supplements and in three-clans-in-one supplements.  There’s nothing really wrong with anything it provides (since it’s required to include the absurd Spider Clan).  The heroes sections are a major plus.

I don’t know what system to use for RPG ratings, either.  Let’s say:

x	Don’t bother if free.
*	Don’t pay for.
**	Look for if you must or buy at deep discount.
***	Worth buying.
****	Should have in collection if you play the game/genre.
*****	Should have in collection if you don’t play the game/genre.

While kind of a strange way to measure things, since it will lump this book in with books I think are better, it rates ****.

How Many Wonders?

I didn’t realize until after the weekend that my weekend (don’t normally include Fridays but an exception here) went:  Friday, RPG; Saturday, CCG; Sunday, boardgames.

We only played two different boardgames Sunday – Scepter of Zavandor, 7 Wonders.

Scepter was a waste for me as I got Kobold and played my default strategy of maximizing early income with Opal #3 and Sapphires.  I got such a jump on the other players that my endgame production was over 100 and I won by around 17 VPs; I even had so much money to burn that I picked up the Spellbook in the late game and upgraded all my Opals to Emeralds.  Kobold suits this style of play just too easily.  While I’m not obsessed with getting the correct Druid strategy, I still want to try strategy variations.  I don’t know how many are left outside of Druid, though.  I finally played dust dude in a previous session and it was easy to do what I wanted even if it felt different.

The far more interesting thing was playing games of 7 Wonders.  I had played once, at DunDraCon for those who didn’t know.  It was seven players and I won, so I was prepared to retire my 7 Wonders career as supreme victor, having no strong feeling toward the game to where I felt a compulsion to ever play it again.  After Sunday, however, it’s going to be a staple.

I still don’t feel that strongly about it.  I actually find the cards rather lacking in variety.  But, there’s nothing wrong with it, and there’s tons of analysis that can be done.  I read through a number of boardgamegeek.com strategy threads, though too many of the games people play are three-player.

A side note:  At one point, someone compared it to Race for the Galaxy.  The primary reason for doing so was that one of my friends hates Race and likes 7 Wonders.  He tried to argue that they weren’t at all alike, but after various people pointed out analogous mechanics, the rest of us pretty much agreed that they are very similar.  Now, Race is one of my favorite “boardgames” because I like the variety of cards even if my strategies tend to be repetitive.  The reason why he hates it is that he feels like he gets screwed by random opening hands all of the time, whereas I never feel screwed in the game, just playing what I can.  Though, the people I play with explore way too much which allows me to get cards to get out of bad hands.

Anyway, back to 7 Wonders.  I’m not really into these games to the level where I’d memorize what Wonder produces what to go with what cards require what.  We aren’t talking about CCGs here where there’s enough ability to bring one’s own personality into the game that thinking hard about a game has a payoff.  I do realize that there’s a huge jump in play skill by memorizing all of the possibilities and that the game is very different when played by players who know how to play the game optimally.  Just as Scepter is a different game when players play optimally, or anything else.  It’s just that there’s little value to achieving expertise in a boardgame when your opponents aren’t interested in doing so.

So, I lost in my second game.  And, lost badly in another game.  Finally, around game four or five, I started doing better.  I think it’s because of the shift in military.  In the early games, the players on either side of me went hard on military, so I abandoned it.  When they started getting bored with that, I picked up military.  The most “we don’t really know what we are doing yet” game was when I had 56 VPs and 50 were from Science.  That game had a three-way tie (all of the games were four-player).

What do I think of the game?

I’d say the card pool is rather dull.  Yes, there are advantages to this, as it enables people to dissect the game to figure out optimal plays, but, then, I’m not really into that.  I’m a romantic chess player, not a mechanic.  On the other hand, there are 14 different possibilities of Wonder boards and a great deal more possibilities of interactions between them based on who plays what, who is next to you (or anywhere if you want to get superadvanced), and how many players there are.  So, there’s a lot of room for trying to understand different positions.

It’s fast.  It’s harmless – by which I mean that it doesn’t lend itself to griefing other players or being in positions of annoyance even when you know you are going to lose.  Drafting is interesting and I’m sure going to be a big mechanic in “boardgames” for a while.  There might be some paralysis by analysis, but it isn’t even as bad as say the endgame of Scepter where you are trying to optimize.

I don’t have a rating system for “boardgames”, so maybe I should come up with one.  The tricky part is that a game might be really good, but I might have no interest in playing it, like Puerto Rico, because of how limited boardgames are in comparison to CCGs.  So, do I rate how much I want to play a game or how good I think the game is or both?  Do I use a “most things are average” system of rating or a balanced system?

Let’s say I use a 1-5 system with 3 being average, 1 being suck, and 5 being beyond good.  From a quality perspective 7 Wonders is 4 or 5.  From a want to play perspective, 4.  I’d much rather play it than play a lot of other things.  I think I’d pretty quickly rather play it than play more Phoenicia or Stone Age or Glen More, which are all games I’d rather play at the moment, once I get a game or two more of these in.  Since it is so similar to Race, it’s not much of a surprise that it beats out a lot of other games (like Scepter).  On the other hand, it’s hard to rate anything a want to play 5, since I’d rather play RPGs or CCGs.

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.

HoR2 Retrospective #1

So, I’ve been running the HoR2 mods kind of from the beginning.  It’s interesting to see things from the other side of the screen (so to speak).  It’s also interesting to see them played in approximate order as I played most of the early mods really late, like after my characters were rank 2 and, in one case, an Emerald Magistrate late.

Not to disparage anyone since writing mods is hard work, especially accounting for the ways players will not get what they are supposed to do, but I thought I’d do some analysis of the first seven mods.  Why seven?  I have never actually played #8 – Uncertainty – and haven’t yet run it either (maybe next week).  Also, seven seems like a reasonable number to work with in a first batch, though I might never get around to making this a series.

#1  Treacherous Terrain

What I like about Treacherous Terrain is that there are clear bad guys.  One of them is more of a society thing which is good for getting people into the social mores of a society we Westerners just aren’t going to grok.  The other shows true evil.  One of my biggest complaints with HoR is that it isn’t heroic enough.  I really don’t actually like Rokugani society – I like demonslaying.  The mod flows okay, very linear.  There’s opportunities to be social without being overboard.  The mod doesn’t punish you overmuch if you aren’t perfect.

Is it predictable?  Sure.  But, the thing with a lot of these mods is that people can figure out what’s going on easily enough (or as one option among red herrings) but lack the ability to resolve things until certain actions are performed or the bad guy goes blatant.  I don’t know if it’s so much a criticism as that it’s a feature of this mod that it’s really almost entirely about one big combat sequence.  In GMing the mod, the combats aren’t that dangerous, though any combat in L5R is dangerous.  When I played it, it seemed far more dangerous … for brand new characters; my party was way overpowered for this as I wasn’t the only one playing an experienced character.

Decent.  Btw, “decent” to me has more the definition that “good” does in a dictionary.

#2  Writ of Justice

I think this should come later in the series.  We were another experienced party, far, far more deadly than someone coming off of playing Topaz Championship and Treacherous Terrain.  I was playing my first alt character, which was useful as we went with a strategy of “oops, I guess this is a frontal assault” on like 30 dudes.  L5R is not a system where you want to just slaughter your way through 30 dudes, at least not before the party is rank 3ish (second attacks for bushi, more degenerate spellcasting).  So, useful because this was my “try to kill me” character who actually came close a few times.

There’s another reason for it coming later.  While you may want to set up some metaplot stuff early on in a campaign, the metaplot stuff here can easily go over the heads of the players.  The yakuza gang stuff just didn’t mean anything to me.

Getting back to the danger level, when I ran this, the undermanned party almost did the right thing but ended up botching it after making things more complicated than they needed to be.  Where we could botch things and just murder our way to victory, my players didn’t have that as a solid option.  While there are some holes in what happens if players do certain things, a far too common problem which I’d be less critical of if we were talking about doing things not explicitly mentioned in the mod, this mod does cover a vast variety of options for what the players can try.

Unenthralled.  Too dangerous for people who don’t do the right things.

#3  Tears of a Fox’s Heart

This was funny in that my players played this so much better than I did.  I fixated on the Kitsu because of his incompetence.  Now, a lot of mods try to have red herrings, but this is the sort of thing that is obnoxious.  If I would have failed rolls, I wouldn’t have realized he didn’t know what the hell he was doing and wouldn’t have been as suspicious.  In other words, I was penalized for success.  Now, one of our players did figure things out pretty much immediately, it was just a matter of proving it.  And, because the GM allowed it, I got to use an obscure skill *a lot*.

I like the mood of this mod and the story mostly works.  The ending, if dealt with socially, makes enough sense that you can go the easy option.  I like the supernatural mods because, again, it’s not getting bogged down in courtly nonsense and legal arguments.  It’s more like Inuyasha, say, which is something I’d much rather play.

Decent.  I have a fair number of notes, so felt reasonably meaty.

#4  Wrath of the Kami

This was a bit of an odd experience for me as our group was sufficiently buff and likely to get on the right leads that I spent a lot of the mod just following the fluff.  Sure, I got to show off a bit of my deadly combat prowess doing 35 damage with a war fan in what I think was a boring roll, but I missed out on a cool experience as I was barely engaged on what was going on.  Also, my experience might have suffered from playing the Remorseful Seppuku series of mods out of order as I already knew about the major NPC and my experience in Unquiet Graves was brutal (in a number of ways) making this kind of easy.

I would have said there was nothing really wrong with this mod after playing it or after reading it as a GM the first time.  Then, I realized something.  It actually forces you along a much more linear path than it seemed at first.  It did impart some metaplot while introducing an infamous NPC and there were humorous ways to resolve things, but it forced you to either choose options that are kind of ridiculous for lower rank characters … or take an option that is never addressed in the mod yet is probably the most obvious thing in the world to do if you have a certain bent (my players talked about it but I never considered it).

Unenthralled.  Resolving things is too predetermined.

#5  Unrequited Love

Set immediately after Wrath of the Kami, this is a purely courtly mod.  I can see some people – the type of player who likes to play antisocial Crab bushi – hating this mod as being boring and frivolous.  But, I actually am quite fond of it, putting it in my upper echelon for HoR2 mods.  It’s a nice break from murder investigations, which I eventually got tired of, and enables some character development while playing in what feels a bit like a romantic farce.  It also plays quick.

It does have some problems on when you are supposed to do things since the Emerald Championship is still going on in the background.  My players did okay, though I notice the courtly stuff ends up being more mechanical for them than it is for me.

Strong … for courtly types.  Maybe I like it so much because my hottie won.

#6  Devoured by the Sea

I had a bias.  I was a big fan of sea mods because my first alt was a [Phoenix, Mirumoto School] sailor, and another player was playing a [boring Mantis] sailor who happened to be my character’s love interest.  So, we happily coupled … um … sailed as a couple.  I think I was actually useless any time we weren’t making sailing rolls.

On the other hand, I could see some people getting a bit frustrated with the mod.  If you weren’t prepared to be at sea, might be rougher than it should be.  There’s way too much “why is this happening?” going on.  I actually commented to an observer that I thought one scene was completely pointless even though it was supposed to be dramatic.

I’m not really sure whether it would be all that for a more normal party.  As for my players, since one of them was playing HoR for the first time with a Mantis who Doubts his sailing skill, it was quite amusing.

Mixed.  Lets people use obscure skills, big letdown on major scene.

#7  Scholarship

As I was playing an Emerald Magistrate at the time, this was kind of odd (I know, I say that a lot).  I was very frustrated by how mods have NPCs who are way too stubborn, but the combat was nice and brutal.  By brutal, I mean that I rolled 90 on my attack roll in the first fight (in a low rank mod) and the final battle saw the spell I hate the most give me nothing to do in the fight.

A big problem I have with this mod is that it isn’t clear how much urgency there is and how long it takes to do anything, so you have intense timeline issues.  If you don’t do things right away, you get screwed.  My players did a good job acting quickly (if wasting a lot of time deciding what to do once they were at a place with clues) but almost let things get away from them because so much is frontloaded in the mod.  Again, I like how the bad guys are really bad.

Decent, I guess.  I get tired fast of recalcitrant NPCs, though.

 

So, a thread broke out on what people’s favorite early mods were (first 20 or so) and I was stunned by what people chose.  I still despise Charge of the Baraunghar for instance, yet some people picked it as the top mod.  Of course, since I played a lot of early mods much later with characters who were much more experienced and in groups that had broken (aka normal rank 2) characters, they were possibly different experiences for me than they might have been otherwise.

That Unrequited Love is my favorite of the early mods and that there isn’t much in the way of competition for that is probably highly unusual; I think it has a lot to do with not feeling screwed by the mod in one way or another.  I really liked the ending of Unquiet Graves (where people I know had an absolutely terrible ending), I found much of the rest of it tedious.  I liked In Search of the Future much more than others, apparently.  I liked Bloom of the White Orchid more than others (who aren’t shugenja), which isn’t saying much as players of non-shugenja seem to think there’s nothing to do in it, where I mostly forgot what happened since it was the second mod in HoR2 I played (I do remember doing stuff).

Anyway, getting back to the first seven mods.  I think they could be better, both in terms of making decisions easier for newbs, for making what’s going on less obscure, for being less dangerous.  Some of the later low rank mods are much more to my liking as early mods to play, like Secluded Village, which I think is really good at presenting the world and an adventure in the world that’s player friendly (even if people I run it for make one of the villages way more difficult than it needs to be).  Of course, everyone should start a new character with Grave of Heroes, like I did with one character, but that requires some careful metagaming – I survived, somehow.

End of Time

So, I don’t speak much of boardgames even though I do play them on occasion.  I went to a get together Saturday where I failed to complete a single game.

Vinci

We started a game of Vinci, four players. I think I had played it before a long time ago and had a vague idea what it was about. For such a simple game mechanically, we had a lot of questions. We called the game when the other group was done playing something (11 people total for the event) both to mix people up and because one of my friends just didn’t find it interesting, feeling that it had too little going on.

Actually, I just think the game is too subtle for his interest with the game mostly being about planning what to do when you go into decline. That combat never hurts the attacker actually is pleasantly different from the wargames and warboardgames I’ve played where attacks often go horrendously for attackers to where the player is discouraged even if the position isn’t untenable.

I would have been fine playing more, especially with how my second game went. I’m fairly sure I have a strong interest in seeing games to completion, even if only to better understand endgames.

Through The Ages

Today, I looked at its boardgamegeek.com ranking – #4. I’m somewhat surprised, though I think people on BGG suffer from short term memory far too often as newer games get ranked way higher than they should be.

The reason I’m surprised is that I think it’s an awful game. Now, one 5.5 hour learning game called 1.5 hours or so before it would have ended if played out is hardly a depth of experience. I’m sure the game is far more interesting to people who know what the cards do. I’ve read some of the forum threads on it to see if there was something major I was missing. Neither that nor our postmortem on the game leads me to think that it’s a desirable game to play for people of my ilk or for my usual boardgaming crowd.

Why awful? Let’s start with things that others complain about that don’t bother me or bother me trivially.

1. Duration, length of turns – I can be mightily drained by long games and there’s a fundamental problem with games where you can be disenfranchised early that last longer than a couple of hours, but I wasn’t bothered by people (four players, one who knew how to play, one who had some familiarity) taking 5+ minutes since we were learning. For one thing, the game is incredibly nonintuitive in core mechanics.

2. Atrocious rulebook – I don’t really learn games from rulebooks. While it would be nice to be able to find answers to questions, especially for a game with this many parts, I assume people will figure things out with the help of online resources eventually.

Moving on to what does bother me:

1. Complexity, nonintuitiveness – I’m not, in general, a fan of complexity in boardgames. As a CCGer, I can hardly argue against complexity per se. But, CCGs are inherently inelegant and prone to high levels of complexity followed by increasing complexity as more mechanics and cards get added. Boardgames can afford to be more elegant. Actually, the complexity in TTA is not that high, it’s that it’s nonintuitive. How population becomes workers becomes things, by itself, is fine. How resources move back and forth to supply, by itself, is fine. Together, they are awkward (nevermind “happy”), something that we newbs had a hard time managing quickly several hours into the game. Of course, there are many other things going on. That some cards can be played right away and some not, that some actions take one type of action versus another, that there are a number of tracks with actual VPs being disengaged from a lot of what else is going on, that certain cards go away at certain times, etc. are the sort of features I’m talking about. While not unintuitive, the number of cards that you need to know adds dramatically to the complexity for people new to the game. I had absolutely no idea that Napoleon + Air Force + big Tactics card was an important thing to be concerned by. Of course, I didn’t learn that military strength variance gets absurd until late in the game.

2. Variance – Talking both about card strength variance and military strength variance. I have a tendency to ignore military strength in any game where building it is an option (rather than being the primary element of the game, or whatever). Early in the game, military strengths were similar and I knew I was behind in production (due to newb mistakes), so I didn’t bother. Then, others got so far ahead, I continued to not bother. While an apparent problem with the game is that it encourages picking on the weak rather than dragging down leaders, that’s a different issue; we called the game when one person could generate 81 military to someone else’s 68 … when I had zero. Then, there are the key leaders – my two leaders did pretty much nothing for me (Julius Caesar pacifist strategy is not effective, just saying), the openended military cards, the late game VP scores (which I only heard about rather than actually saw, with what I heard sounding a lot like Age of Empires III’s endgame cards which I think contribute a lot to that game being obnoxious).

3. Military – Apparently, the game has a prey on the weak incentive, which is insipid for obvious reasons. Taking variance into account, there was talk of capping the openended military beatdowns, but I actually thought the real problem was how much military strength could vary to where I never played a defense card because they wouldn’t have done anything.

4. Uniqueness – Now, it’s very possible that the game has a lot more variety in how your civilization develops than in similar games, and it could just be that the game is more abstracted in how your civ is represented, but one thing I find kind of dull about all games like this is how you don’t tend to end up with really goofy creations. Yes, I jumped from bronze to coal, with no iron, and Caesar had the Hanging Gardens built, where the Kremlin was built next door centuries later, but I still felt like I had to pursue the same core strategies as everyone else – maximize stone, maximize food, maximize light bulbs (science), get harps (culture – VPs), build a respectable army. As I understand it, there are known strategies that focus; one is Napoleon’s Air Force, another is superscience, another harptastic, Cook’s territories, Michelangelo’s happy, etc. There are certainly plenty of cards to do different combinations. I just felt like I needed to grow a very specific way, much like how Outpost, The Scepter of Zavandor, et al require that you not screw up your engine.

I don’t hate the game. There are some interesting concepts. I very much like the idea of building a civilization, though I find that the boardgames that do it are often much less interesting than the concept and often the end results are wildly unbalanced games. I just don’t really see the point of TTA. The amount of effort required to learn it followed by the effort of playing it does not seem to be justified given how unenthralling the actual play is and with how lopsided I would expect results to be.

Is it fair to pan a game based on a single experience? I’m not actually trying to pan it, even if calling it awful is pretty much doing so. It’s not really the game, but that the game is so newb unfriendly that there are better things to do. But, then, I could see someone saying the same about virtually any CCG, with V:TES being one of the worst offenders. So, to each their own – I was running through a list of boardgames and there are plenty I wouldn’t want to play again.

It was still enjoyable to try the game out, and it’s always interesting to try out games that I won’t know I’ll hate until after I’ve played them.

Heirs to the Blood – Library Ratings

I was remiss in not getting around to something actually asked for. I would have liked to gone back and reviewed the ratings I gave Ebony Kingdoms cards at this time, as well, but too many things to do for Gen Con. I probably will never get around to vampires as: 1, it would take time; 2, it wouldn’t be that interesting; 3, value is way too dependent upon other vampires.

Reminder on the system, though maybe I changed it as thinking in Magic terms for V:TES cards is not necessarily the way to go:
1 – Play these only for humor value.  Or, don’t.
2 – Average, can cover a lot of ground.
3 – Standouts, justifications for playing a clan, discipline, or whatever.
4 – Clearly superior cards, also cards that make you want to play certain types of decks.
5 – Best in the game.

Of course, I value breadth higher than awesomeosity in a narrow range of decks, in general. Govern isn’t the best card in the game because, amazingly, not every deck plays Dominate. (Of course, it’s not even the best Dominate card, but Deflection isn’t the best card in the game, either.)

Library	Comments	Rating
The Ailing Spirit	Synergistic even when there aren’t special targets, superior is quite brutal in combination.	3
Amulet of Temporal Perception	Why would I want inferior Temporis that’s more expensive?	1
As the Crow	Freak Drive is a 5 but is easier to play.  Tupdogs are already broken.	4
Barrenness	Really annoying, combos with Scourge of the Enochians, et al, but what is it doing to help win the game?	2
Benefit Performance	Not remotely Con Boon, though it won’t accidentally give others pool.  Have a hard time seeing it replace the better card.	2
The Black Beast	Too limited.	1
Blessed Resilience	Strong in the right deck?  I wish I knew.  Only useful in one type of deck?  Yup.	2
Blessing of the Beast	In many CCGs, effects like this would be hideously broken.  For some reason, this effect hasn’t had a big impact.  Should be a 4 or a 5, but where’s the evidence?	3
Bliss	Too limited.  Not remotely in the class of other Dom or Pre cards.	1
Blood Tempering	An action, that costs blood, that requires a terrible discipline and an out of clan discipline, that does virtually nothing.  Amusing, but awful.	1
Brick by Brick	I hardly see Stone Quills anymore, I don’t expect this to make many cuts.	2
Cavalier	Probably the most overrated card in the set, though that doesn’t make it bad.  The question is whether it’s good.  Borderline – I err on the side of average.	2
Charge of the Buffalo	Does this serve any sort of purpose?  Why would a vamp with Spi want to be at close?  Fortitude level is slightly interesting.	2
Cheat the Fates	I don’t find getting bleeds through actually all that difficult.  I do find getting paid back on 3 blood cards occasionally difficult.	1
Clockwerx	Again, what purpose is served?  It’s an interesting effect, but how does it stop a BB deck from getting ousted?  It’s tempting to rate every BB card that doesn’t address their lack of survival as a 1, but this has potential.	2
Code of Samiel	Quite a bit more than a HG, but what’s the “tournament level” impact?	3
Command Performance	Reminds me so much of Glutton, though Ishtarri are even better at untapping.  If you can afford it playing DoC, you probably don’t need it.  While I’m iffy on it, at the same time the number of things it can do is significant.	3
Dabbler	Man, this card is cool.  I see a lot more decks for this than Cavalier, though the Cavalier decks will likely be more abusive.	3
Dagger	It may not make for particularly potent decks, but there must be some efficiency in this card besides just tricks.	2
Death Seeker	A rather flexible answer, though it just feeds some players’ interests in building bad !Salubri combat decks.	3
Decompose	How does it help you win?  It’s a reasonable effect (read – playable).	2
Development	An underdeveloped mechanic.  Currently, awful.  In the future …	1
Diabolic Lure	It’s free.  It’s also interesting in that it encourage blocky Dai, but it’s fairly limited.	2
Din of the Damned	Will I play it?  Sure.  Will it ever pay off?	2
Dive Bomb	Multirush with broken vampires, not bad for nonbroken (and largely bad) vampires.	2
Draeven Softfoot (Changeling)	Well, he’s free.  Song of Pan will likely kill him.  Would I not want him in a Kiasyd deck?  Should want him most of the time.	3
Ears of the Hare	One of two types of Spiritus cards I specifically didn’t want made because they wouldn’t expand options enough yet got made.  Does actually help, though.	3
Ensconced	Too limited.	1
Evil Eye	Superior is harsh.  But, the number of decks that are going to play Maleficia is minuscule.  Those that do are going to be in complexland.  More of a referendum on deck complexity.	2
Faerie Wards	Younger is so often a problem drawback.	2
Fanfare for Elysium	Interesting, but is it as good as the alternatives?	2
Flames of the Netherworld	Really mostly about the Tha version.  I just don’t find offense to be the issue with Dai-ers in combat but defense.	3
Foldable Machine Gun	Serves what purpose?	2
Fractura	A card to make a deck around … because its badness is an interesting badness.	1
Gift of Sleep	Good, but how good?  As many metas have important allies, borderline really good.	3
Great Symposium	Always play in a limited number of decks.  Does it make me want to play Kiasyd, though?  Not really.	3
Greater Curse	The Mal versions are typical infernal annoyance.  The Dai version is actually a powerful effect, being far more important than, say, Vermin Channel.	3
Gremlins	Why does it have to have a Dom version?  Without that, I could play it in my Con-Dom Kiasyd decks.  Anyway, kind of unnecessarily useful.  Does make me want to play Kiasyd.	4
Groaning Corpse	Samedi were not designed to fight.  They have far, far better things to do.  If Carrion Crows is at least a 4, as much as I can’t see good decks coming from this, it does at least begin to give a reason to do Samedi combat.	3
Harmony	Does it suck?  That’s how I look at cards like this.  Choir sucks, so is it possible to have cards that key off of Choir not suck?  Even if it makes Choir less bad, I struggle with how it makes decks not bad.	1
Hatch the Viper	So cool.  So not productive.	1
Hay Ride	Are actions really a BB issue?  It’s hard to say that it should never be played beyond that BB really have no game.	2
Hexe	Eh, ennui setting in.	2
Hide the Heart	Saving other people with cards that are useful to yourself is not weak.  I’m not much of a Telepathic Counter fan, but then, this isn’t TC.	3
Hive Mind	This set did to San what The Final Nights did to Quietus – give it stuff redundant to what it already could do without addressing the real problems the clans with these disciplines have.  Similar to San’s best card – Unwholesome Bond.	3
Hunger Moon	What purpose does this serve?  Waste of an interesting title.	1
I am Legion	The cancelling Auspex part is where I see this having a lot of impact.  For Baali, getting one action through is a lot more important than for, say, some random clan with Obfuscate that will be more weenieish or midcappish.  Tended to think it was being overrated, but the more I think about it, the more I can see an Infernal Servitor …	4
Infernal Servitor	This “guy” is just a beating, with like no particular downside.	4
Jar of Skin Eaters	Explosive, but what does it have to do with winning?	1
Joumlon’s Axe	Nice, solid weapon.  Which is saying something for a melee weapon.	3
Journal of Hrorsh	I’m still concerned about the combo potential, but I don’t think nuking a dude is as enthralling as it originally sounded.  Still, gets chaff out of the way.	3
Knotted Cord	It’s tempting to say that this is an absurd waste of a set slot, but Baali vote is so much more credible now.  Would I ever play this?  It’s questionable whether it’s better than Bewitching Oration.	1
Lead Fist	It hurts, but does it matter?	2
Lily Prelude	A beating.  Doesn’t like Delaying Tactics, but just scary.  If KRC is a nobrainer 5, than this can’t be too far behind.	4
Lord of Serenity	Will it get burned?  Should, but it is a reason to go more blocky with Salubri, which I like as Spirit Marionetting is tedious.  Kind of borderline terrible, but I lean towards average.	2
Loving Agony	Has a lot of competition.  Is it better than running out some other !Salubri strategy?  I tend to think it’s not clearly better than doing other things.	2
Maleficia	A requirement card.  So, does that mean a referendum on how much one gains from the non-discipline?  Not sure it matters, since I’d go with the same rating either way.	2
Masca	Assuming I’m reading this right, it’s meant for combat but doubles as stealth if you really want something to occur.  The combat benefit is sketchy and so not worth grafting Striga for.  I guess overcosted stealth makes it above terrible.	2
Member of the Entourage	Really a matter of what sort of combos one can do with this or, more likely, a metagame play.  Cheap defense for a clan that can untap easily but should be better off putting in better pool defense than this in most cases.	2
Mind of the Wilds	The first question is how much the inferior matters.  May disincentivize blocking.  Dependent upon so many variables.  What about free stealth in non-stealth disciplines?  I easily imagine Tzimisce with Breath of the Dragon getting use out of either.  But, there are plenty who can get some extra stealth.  I don’t see much game impact, though it is interesting.	2
Minor Curse	This effect can really disrupt certain decks, OTOH, there’s a reason we don’t see them since that doesn’t lead to winning.	1
Mole’s Tunneling	Stealth/evasion is strong.  Expensive stealth still sees play.  Another thing I didn’t want to see for Spiritus as it’s boring.  How much will it get played at Animalism?	2
Momentary Delay	Blah, blah, blah … wake, block with second minion.  I know, more text may mean that the best uses are hard to identify, but I’m still thinking that there are less complicated things to do in one’s deck.	1
Morphean Blow	Okay, can’t get too excited one way or the other.	2
New Moon Sigil	Just too expensive for me to see getting virtually any play.	1
Off Kilter	Frustrating to have as one’s prey.  It’s so not likely to get blocked.  Unlike a lot of new cards, actually addresses a need for the clan.	3
Olid Loa	How much is lost by taking up a deck slot on this rather than a better card?  A lot.	1
Oppugnant Night	Comes down to how much someone thinks rushing is a good idea in the first place.  While it will likely lead to bad decks, it’s not the reason the decks will be bad.	2
Outside the Hourglass	There aren’t a lot of cards in this game that combo with themselves.  That tends to be quite strong in CCGs.  As a card I have more familiarity with, it’s proved to be quite obnoxious.  Hard to get too high on a combat card, though.	3
The Path of Harmony	Still don’t have that much that costs blood.  I might play it in Ahrimanes stealth bleed, or maybe just play Life in the City instead.  Probably overrating it.  Though its clan and its lack of necessity means it will probably never be burned.	2
The Path of Service	I think there are better reasons for this path, mostly in Create Gargoyle decks since Tupdogs don’t need it, and I’m not sure anyone still plays real Gargoyles anymore.	2
Penitent Resilience	An interesting answer in some metas, the superior is Seduction which some like a lot, I’m not sure how much I like it when it isn’t attached to Dominate.	2
Pocket Out of Time	If you want a good instance of my biases, I’m obviously biased away from combat and toward stealth.	3
Potio Martyrium	I guess ludicrous cards have their place.	1
Pressing Flesh	I think it does what it’s trying to do well.  Now, how important that is is less clear.	2
Psalm of the Damned	Based on looking around, you’d surmise that this is pretty good.  I think it’s functional.	2
Ravager	Seriously, what is the point of this?	1
Raw Recruit	Not entirely sure I understand this, but it seems like a good way to prevent rescues, and of course Tupdogs are slaves.  Worse than Graverobbing in Tupdog decks?	2
Research	See Development (or lack thereof of this mechanic).	1
The Rising	I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about this.  I had pegged it as one of the more important cards in the set, though it is a lot of work, and there can be a lot of event hate.  Just because it may be a win more card, I’ll be more conservative.	2
Ritual Scalpel	Why?  Why not something that encourages playing Nagaraja?	1
Safe Passage	Small effect but not bad.	2
Scarlet Lore	I have hopes for this, but for whatever reason, there’s not a lot of recursion and searching, two effects normally broken in other CCGs, being used.	3
Scobax	Cheap.  I have to admit that this encourages me to actually care about Striga.  Presence reduce with no drawbacks is not trivial.	3
Scourge of Alecto	I’ve discarded it.  Often.	1
Shaal Fragment	Another bias, I don’t care about increased hand size.  The funny thing is that this card is possibly better because it can be stolen, but really, HoS have enough problems with competivity.	1
Shadowed Eyes	Still accumulating them, still haven’t found a reason that they would be g- useful.	1
Shatter the Gate	Bluffworthy?	1
Shattering Crescendo	When am I going to do stuff with this?  I got hammered by it.  I think it’s superinteresting, maybe really good, maybe not.	3
Slake the Thirst	Addresses no need.  Only so many slots in a deck.	1
Spirit Claws	It is strictly superior to cards that get played all of the time.	2
Stiff Contempt	Um, who even thinks they will successfully block Samedi?  Especially with Under My Skin, these days?	1
Striga	Weaker than Maleficia and less interesting.  I’m having trouble seeing what is even desirable to do with Striga.	1
Strix	One of the more interesting things to do with it.  But, still, why would you want to fight with infernals who tend to be squishy and expensive?	2
Summon History	How broken is this card?  That’s really the question.  It’s so openended that it must be utterly abusable somehow.  Rarity is one thing that has prevented more visibility on what it can really do.  That Trujah have problems is another, though there are now enough Trujah with bounce to cover the biggest problem.	4
Tend the Flock	There are cards you would always put in a deck for a given clan, then there are cards that you can’t get away from when playing that clan because they are so absurdly better than anything else you could do.	5
Thicker than Blood	A weird card in that it, on the one hand, does address an issue with BB of getting their engine going fast enough to survive, but on the other, doesn’t address it in a way that makes me feel comfortable that it changes matchups.  It was amazing in one game where the BB deck’s predator was weenie Hack.  Better than Effective Management?	2
Threading the Path of Orpheus	Maybe someone had something in mind with this, but answers to unlikely problems do not compete well with useful cards.	1
Three’s a Crowd	I always found it humorous how the common BB decks had no answer for maneuvers.  Support for bad strategies doesn’t do anything for me.	1
Tinglestripe	I’ve cooled on this.  It’s fine, but it was never what Kiasyd needed as they have Earth Swords if they want to fight.  It’s not like Kiasyd need combat defense either, which is what this is better for.  Combat ends, cancel Grapple, ultrarare weapon hosers – it’s covered.  If I’m going to take an action to equip, I’d rather have a gun, as either a SNS would be useful with DBR or a .44 would be better.	2
Treat the Sick Mind	Untapping is good for Obeah … sadly.  The superior is funny as it makes passing around Dementation skill cards useful.  But, is this really doing anything important enough to waste card slots on?  I think it can rise to the role-player status.	2
Under My Skin	Interesting how playing with this card has affected people’s views.  It’s a lot of stealth.  It’s also spread out over multiple actions which is better for a clan with Obfuscate.  I still don’t see in what way it’s necessary, but it’s likely to show up in decks for how discouraging it makes trying to block Samedi.	3
Unleash Hell’s Fury	Because so many Baali decks run the fatties and decks with fatties suffer more from random screwage, this serves a desired function.  Still, a role-player even if an important one.  Easy to overrate in that people won’t notice as much when it won’t help or what could have taken up its slot.	2
Vaticination	This one is a toughy for me because I have seen an interesting use for it somewhere, and I tend to think that there is a place for looking at everyone’s hand, but I generally have no interest in looking at other players’ hands or discarding cards from them.	2
Veneficti (Mage)	Who costed “Baali” allies in this set?  Why can’t Salubri get any allies?  Oh, look, burn option, I might be underrating this.	4
Virtuosa	I haven’t really found my DoC getting blocked.  OTOH, makes Concert Tour more relevant.  Is it playable or is it not?  I guess it is.	2
Visionquest	Why is this card so weak?  I mean, really, isn’t Sanguine Instruction better?  That’s setting a rather low mark.	1
Voices of the Castle	It’s fine.  Tupdogs are broken.  Yeah.	3
Warding the Beast	Three incredibly sketchy effects does not make for one card I can see adding value.	1
Wider View	By far the best card in the set, but, then, it’s a generic card.  Still, a generic master that competes with existing masters and beats them.  That’s hardcore.	5