FATE Playtest Notes: Playing with Half a Chess Set

Do not wing things in FATE. I know, the temptation is there; this is such a simple and fast game - why not wing it?

Because if you do you will be playing with half a chess set.

We ran into this in one of our last playtests, as a referee, I winged a lot of the enemies and situations, and things felt a little flat. Why? Usually this game is a blast to play! Well, for one, the aspects of the enemies and challenges were not laid out very well. The players had nothing much to go on, no enemy aspects to trigger, and the enemies and challenges themselves couldn't really work that well within the rules.

You need to design your enemies and challenges. You need to create those 'aspect hooks' for players to trigger and for enemies to take advantage of. You need to design those stunts the enemies or challenges can use on the players to ad some excitement, and also up the difficulty level.

FATE is a game where if the players have weak opposition, the players shall roll over said opposition easily. The game will start to bore, and the session will devolve into "my +5 skill against what?"

No, there needs to be moments where the players are forced back on their heels, and they need to start spending those fate points (and regenerating them) to push back. The game simply isn't fun unless the enemies push back.

And they need to push back hard, and have those aspects and stunts to make pushing back hurt.

Consequences beginning to stack up on the player's side is a good sign. They need to look at their character sheets with worried eyes. They need to start using those FATE points to save their hides, not overpower rolls.

But how you get there, and how you get players involved, is by taking a little time and spinning up those enemies and challenges. Not only does this give the enemies tools to push back, it opens up opportunities for the players to take advantage of an enemy's weaknesses and return the favor by loading the enemy up with conditions.

The game works better if everybody in the situation is playing by the same rules, and everything is spun up and working as a machine. Taking shortcuts and winging it, in my experience, makes the game feel like it really isn't 100% there - especially from a player perspective where you want them playing against the enemy's character sheet rather than the referee's whims.

More notes soon.

FATE Playtest Notes: Old habits, Boss Monsters, and Turtling

We did a wrap-up session last night for our unfinished FATE game, and this time it was a little less crazy and a little more subdued, but we still had fun. We did notice a couple things:

Old Habits!

One of our players started with, "...so I wait for a car to approach the building's parking garage..."

Not really FATE in a way. I as a referee waited for the player to announce the story action and none came. In a typical RPG, this sort of 'open ended wait for the referee to give me a bone' is a pretty normal thing. In FATE, you need to remember you are narrating a part of the story. What works better?

"When a car drives into the corporate parking garage, I sneak in alongside it, out of the driver's view and the security guard, creeping and walking fast along the opposite side of the vehicle."

Better. You are narrating a part of the movie scene and the skill being used (stealth) is obvious. Me, as a referee still needs to decide if a car comes or not, but in this case cars are coming and going all day so that fact will likely push the difficulty a step easier for the players. Fewer cars? Fewer chances and higher difficulty. No cars? I inform the player to try something else.

Remember our 'actions are better as macro events' feeling about the Star Wars RPG from Fantasy Flight? The same applies here. You don't want to aggregate too much into one roll, but you want the rolls to cover more than a turn-by-turn fine-grained breakdown of every action.

If an event has a chance of going wrong, and it requires a different skill set, make it a separate roll. If it is inconsequential, or you are finding you are making too many rolls for a single event (just to throw sand in the gears of the players), stop it, declare one last roll to clean up, and move on to the next story part.

You can focus 'too much' on one part of the story and slow things down by requiring too many rolls. As a referee, you need to be a little more aware of pacing and not punishing great ideas by layering on too many rolls on the implementation.

Boss Difficulty

When four players focus in on your bad guy, please make sure your bad guy is significantly more skilled and capable than an average starting character. You players can 'pile on' with their best skills, and a character equal to one of them is going to go down fast.

A big part of this game is building challenges, and players know when to pile on, drain an opponent's fate points dry, and finish the bad guy off with merciless abandon. I am trying to come up with guidelines on how tough to make a bad guy, but it is going to take some more time with the game and practice.

Our bad guy went down quick when all of the characters were focused on him and not fighting each other. Next time, I will need to give my bad guy a larger fate point pool and some defenses against a couple common attacks (mental and physical). Mental attacks, especially from an enemy unaware of the manipulation, can be very effective and drain a bad guy's defenses quickly.

One Trick Turtles

We saw a tendency to 'one trick pony' characters with their best skills in situations where they were protected against having to make skill checks in less-optimal skills. Of course, this came about with a great plan, but you don't want a game to devolve into 'I am the hacker and sit off in a remote site while I hack and stay immune to any risk.'

You want players in the facility, on the site, and taking risks. You want them sneaking through the enemy base. You want to force players out of their 'this is my +5 skill' box where all they do is sit there and roll that +5 skill when the proper time comes up.

As a player, don't turtle up! As a referee, discourage turtling!

The computer terminal you need to use is inside the building, past defenses and in an area patrolled by guards. You need to be using a couple other skills to get in and get out, and you those will likely be not your best ones either.

A great plan tends to put experts in places they need to be. But don't ignore the fact that getting these experts where they need to be should require a wide and diverse array of efforts. Create challenge by forcing characters out of their 'easy boxes' and into dangerous places.

More Playtesting Ahead

We are not done, but FATE looks like a solid game in our schedule of things we play. One of the things we love about the game are aspects and consequences, and we keep coming back to  those and seeing how other game worlds would benefit from having such a system. A lot of games out there are really 'cut and dried' where you just need to burn down a pile of defenses and hit points to 'win' and there really isn't any sort of control over temporary or long-term effects inside the narrative (other than GM fiat). FATE gives the players some input, and also forces the referee to consider what happens next because something else happened.

It really is an interesting system of storytelling and consequences that has captured our imagination.

FATE: Playtest Post

I have never laughed so hard since I played the classic Paranoia RPG in the mid-1980s.

So we did a playtest of the FATE Core System last night and we had an absolute blast, we had players having characters laying down aspects on the bad guys, and then in a moment of pure backstabbing greatness, on each other.

For a group of self-centered con-men and thieves trying to pull off the ultimate heist like something out of TNT's Leverage series, this was an absolute blast. At one point the mastermind of the caper was talked into killing off the band of criminals working under him he put together - by the bad guy they were trying to steal from.

"You work for me now."

Madness ensured.

Fun was had by all.

Not for Stat Crunchers

One thing to remember is FATE is not really a system for those who like their +1 longsword, AC 18, +6 initiative modifier, and 17 hit points. It is not that type of game. Your character's story, skills, and special 'stunts' are not there for singular "did you break down the door" type skill rolls, they are there to measure how much your actions impact the flow of the narrative.

And the narrative means the story itself, the room you are in, the situation around you, and even the stories and backgrounds of other characters with you - good or bad. The illustration on the cover of the book is a bit misleading, you may think this is a game about being that magic-wielding spy, samurai thief, or gorilla monk kung-fu guy - but it is not a game of personal min-maxing power at all. This is a game about how "whatever your power is" can push a story forward, sideways, or backwards and have a blast doing it no matter which way things go.

It is really a freeform "story simulator" and it excels in letting players delightfully mess things up for everyone at the table, good guys and bad guys included - and even your own character should you wish to take a setback for a couple extra hero points (so you can mess with things a little later in the scene). Yes, you will even find reasons to set your own character back if it advances the story in a way, or gets your character captured so you can finally be taken to the villain's secret lair.

You will start your own brand of trouble once you are there, trust me.

This is hard to simulate in a traditional style of pen-and-paper without a lot of GM fiat or "it is written into the module that you get captured" sort of stuff going on. Here? No, there are times you crave being set back because it opens the door to more trouble. We had a character try to sneak into the evil corporation's high rise fortress only to blow the roll spectacularly, where I instantly ruled, "...and they walk you into the evil CEO's office and say look who we caught trying to sneak in...."

And the player smiled in glee because "he was in" anyways, and then proceeded to go about his nefarious original plan when the bad guy offered up a new angle, and the player smiled at the chance to backstab all of the other players around the table with a double-cross.

And after an entertaining attempt of this player trying to eliminate the other high-tech thieves around the table with multiple chances to eliminate players, a devious triple-cross plan was formed and we are back at square one-hundred with the traitor serving as a part of the plan to pull off the biggest back-stab the world has ever seen on the evil CEO.

Oh, and now the evil CEO has devised a plan to tap all the city's phones and search for the player's characters throughout the city by monitoring every electronic device.

This was a simple heist. Get in the building's computer room, steal the plans, and get out.

The game has turned into a cross between Christopher Nolan Batman movie, The Exorcist, and The Matrix.

And we love it.

Player Directed Energy

So if you think about this game as "stats drive narrative" you begin to get it. We walked into this game thinking "traditional rules light game" and we were wrong. While the game itself has rules-light elements, there is a structure there around the basic four actions in the game (and subcategories of rules that control them) that is pure genius. You have to wrap your head around these concepts a little to get started, and about halfway through our first session it clicked.

You are not using "strength" to "bust down a door," you are using your strength to push the narrative along by busting down a door. You may additionally create an aspect (situation) for the scene stating "everyone suddenly ears the door crashing down" and use that short-term story-changer to your benefit. Or someone else may use it for their benefit.

You could use it to shock the group of baddies in the room on the other side into inaction.

They could use it to sound the alarm for help.

Someone nearby could use it to figure out where you are.

But the concept is the players use the situation, modify it, take advantage of it, or succumb to it (for their benefit) to create player-directed energy into the center of the table. This is not a one-way game where the referee tells the players what happens next. The players have direct input into what happens next, what is going on, and where the flow of the story is moving next. You may think in a traditional game this would be the case, if the players weren't in the goblin-infested tower rescuing the princess "they are driving the narrative!"

But in reality, they are not. They are playing through the referee's narrative and moving along a set path of events laid out in the adventure. Even if the adventure is free form, the only impact the players have on the story is through the result of skill and attack rolls.

In FATE, you lay down aspects of varying lengths of time on the story, create them, use them up, let them expire, or create long-lasting ones called consequences that stay in play for the entire adventure.

You make rolls with your skills to stir the pot, add new ingredients to it, and change the nature of the soup. The goal is not individual, atomic success that accumulates towards a conclusion. Here, you and your friends are aiming at changing the story through your individual skills and specialties. This game is not about winning X number of battles, collecting treasure, getting XPs and levels, and defeating the final boss.

Here, every player is a gamemaster in a way when it comes to writing the story together The players' stats rate how good they are at changing and adapting to the story. The gamemaster plays the bad guys, lays out the combined narrative, and is the final decider on how all this chaos comes together.

Silly, but also Serious

And we walked away realizing this is not just a silly party game. You could dial down the insanity a couple notches and have a really serious and satisfying game where you play spies, gangsters, space explorers, horror adventures, or any other sort of normal situation with normal characters. There would still be that subtle 'change the story' thing hovering around there in the background, but it would be used in different ways.

In a horror game, your character may suffer a consequence 'afraid to go in the basement' as a result of being scared by a sudden shock.

In a gangster game, your character could start a soup kitchen with some illegally gained dough and gain a 'loved by the working class and poor of the neighborhood' aspect.

In a spy game, you could talk an enemy agent into 'mistrusting a trusted source' of information and gain an advantage in a situation where that information becomes critical to the mission.

You can dial this down and play it straight. The characters do not need to be fate-alerting gods of chaos, and the insanity can be set at a manageable but still realistic level. It was a strange and sobering moment for us, that there was actually 'more there there' after a night where we laughed our heads off at the potential and insanity of what we just experienced. It was one of those door-opening moments for us that we experienced a few times, like when we first played role-playng games and realized 'you can do that?'

Here, with the narrative and story, yes, 'you can do that.'

Some Mental Assembly Required

As noted, it takes you looking at gaming and the story in a different way. There are a number of terms and interlocking pieces here you need to understand to get the most out of the game. You need to let go of your fear of spending "precious" fate points, and accept the fact you will be playing against your own best interest (in the short term) in order to get fate points back. You need to abandon some of the learned behaviors that traditional pen-and-paper games train you in, like some weapons being better than others, stat building, or min-maxing.

We had one player looking at their character and wishing they could be more than a single-purpose combat expert, that he had some social and technical skills when the situation called for a different approach and their influence wasn't as powerful. The player made up for it by spending fate points, playing smart, and steering the situation back towards what his character was good at - but still, that feeling 'you need to be good at many things' stayed with us. Also, that feeling of 'move the story to where it can be affected by your character the most' also became a tactic, and the bluffing and poker game began between players when they each tried to steer things their way.

But understanding the story-related aspects is key here, and letting each player have that 'ah-ha' moment where they realize the story-shifting parts of the rules are the most important parts of the game. Boosts, stunts, free uses of aspects, triggering them, creating them, and shifting the narrative playing field is where this game shines. If you play this as Basic D&D looking to see what's in the next encounter key you are not going to have as much fun, because you will limit your exposure to the best parts of the game with limited in-the-box thinking.

The more you understand and master the story-based aspects of the rules and how they are used, the more fun you will have with FATE.

Yes, we are Coming back to This One

We are planning a regular weekly game with this rules set, which is a rare thing. It is rare to find a game like this, that allows a high amount of energy to be directed into the game session from all of the players, and for pure chaos to send the story down a path nobody expected. That is the magic of roleplaying to us, not the stat-crunching or MMO simulation a lot of modern games get into, but the free form, 'we gather together to tell a story' thing that makes us feel like we are sitting around a campfire and kicking back with old friends.

FATE cerebrates the narrative. It gives everyone a chance to tell their part of the story. It gets this whole 'shared storytelling' thing that attracted us to the hobby long ago. Nicely done.

Star Wars RPG: A Slow Session

Our Star Wars campaign is still getting on its feet, and last night's game was a slow session. One of those where "most of the characters get 5 XP for participating and only one or two get a 15 XP reward sort of games.

Yeah, most of the group played salvage bunnies in a junkyard while two of the characters went off and had all the fun.

They need to get a derelict starship up and running, so it is going to take a lot of work. Maybe I will give the entire group a reward after the thing gets space worthy as a story award.

The two characters who had the fun? Card sharks playing a strange version of "Texas Hold-Em Sabacc" that they made up on the spot and conned the rest of the bar into a game of. They actually made up the rules they played, dealt the cards to NPC 'players', and everyone got a good laugh out of all the silly antics these two put on. It made no sense, the rules were setup totally in favor of the house, and my two players kept repeating "everybody wins, everybody plays" so many times it became a running joke - yes, even though any NPC who played got fleeced by this highly silly con job.

It is also a stupid, silly moment uniquely Star Wars. Well, not the Texas hold-em part, but what is Star Wars without something totally stupid and silly happening every once and a while? Players need to be able to laugh and have fun every once and a while, and it brings an occasional break to the seriousness of the game. While I like to run my games really gritty and serious, I know when people need to kick back and laugh, so we take time out to have hilarity like this between the dark and realistic parts.

The larger campaign arc is appearing, and I am starting to see where this game is going! I can't share it here, but it is a fun and very twisted take on the whole Empire and Rebellion thing that will have both sides wondering who to trust, and also be throwing both sides in with each other with shifting loyalties. How is my galaxy setup?

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

We are playing in a post RoTJ galaxy, and this is sort of mixed in with the Star Wars: Aftermath continuity. The Imperials are on the run (and largely holding out in the corporate sector and a large fleet around Courusant as two major factions). The capital fleet holds onto the "Empire as government" view of things, while the corporate sector Imperials have been taken over by a faction seeing the Sith way of life as a religion. This kind of parallels the book, and it is a fun way to split the Empire into two warring yet sometime cooperative factions with a lot of distrust between each other.

It also brings in the more commonplace Jedi and Sith into the game by the RPG's aesthetics. There is a large faction of Sith that see their way of life as a religion, and there is one faction of the Empire holding onto that belief.

The New Republic is what we would call the rebels nowadays, and they are awash in victories and an unstable political atmosphere. What they want is Courusant, and they are blockading the capital system and even resorting to using space pirates to break the will of the Empire. Did I say the good guys are resorting to underhanded tactics? Yes, there is a lot of corruption in the New Republic's halls, and Hutt money is flowing like wine. Any player who deals with the New Republic has come away with a bad taste in their mouth as nobody knows who to trust, and the New Republic's freshman senators back-stab and deal under the table to grab power.

The inmates are running the asylum, and the entire galaxy is worse then when it started off under the Empire. Even Ackbar's fleet has been called back to his homeworld as the bickering raises the possibility of proxy wars between factions inside the New Republic.

The Jedi? Remember, we are in the RPG's world, so the Jedi are a little more common that the official universe. These are the children of those taken down by Order 66, untrained and they are scattered to the wind of the galaxy as they find their own paths. I am keeping the prospect of a new Jedi Academy out of the picture for a while, as this is a bit too EU for this game, and I want Jedi players surviving on their own without a school to run home to. If a player starts a new Jedi order? More power to them, and this could be a force of stability in the galaxy.

If they do.

What is so fun about this setup is there are characters from all sides that can get together and play, plus a clear and defined set of bad guys. Some of the more stability-minded Imperials could team up with the players and work towards a common goal, and the Empire can even play the hero in some situations. The bad guys are clearly the Sith-as-religion types, bloodthirsty Republic power-grabbing types, and the Hutts, and unchecked, they will destroy this galaxy quicker than anything you know. In short, this is a war of stability and civilization against the forces of intolerance and corruption.

Both sides are guilty of corruption and intolerance. And there are heroes on both sides, Empire and Republic, that will stand against that tide.

What am I hoping? That there will be a new faction led by the righteous few who will bring peace and stability to the galaxy. This must be led by the players. If they choose to be profiteers or do otherwise, they will see the galaxy slowly slide into war and madness. It will be a choice I can't force, but one I can subtly present as an option as NPCs from both sides seek their help.

Star Wars RPG: Campaign Start

We are in the middle of running a joint three-book campaign with the Star Wars RPG, and things are going along well. We are building out our characters, running through a sample plot, and the larger plot is just starting to form up.

Despite the voluminous system and the large amount of character archetypes, character customization feels a little soft and many character feel and play like each other. As experience points come in, this is improving, but some of our characters feel a little too samey for our liking.

I am not a real big fan of the character generation system, which puts a premium on getting your starting ability scores as high as possible at the cost of skills and other customization. Your ability scores are very difficult to change, and the difference between starting with a 2 or a 3, or even a 4 is huge. You end up min-maxing in a few key scores and forgoing the cool things that make your character special. I would rather place a rack of preset scores (4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2) and then be given 20-30 points to customize the character rather than have to make a choice between good scores and a unique character. Yes, this would make starting characters a bit more powerful, but I would rather have that and knock down XP rewards by 5 points than what we have currently (which feels like it is being gamed in favor of ability scores).

Less rolls doing more is the way to play this! I ran into a situation where one character tried to open a storage box with an electronic lock, and I ruled "only one try per skill" on the attempt, and it worked beautifully. We have been so trained by the "then I do something slightly different and re-roll" sort of soft-ruled gaming that we immediately fell into that, trying a rock to bang it open, a prybar, and a this and a that. Nope - all of those attempts were part of the same "force it open" roll, and you failed - try another skill. Mechanical, perhaps? Another character with skulduggery skill was able to save the day, and we avoided having a player buffalo their way through a task by throwing the dice so many times they just succeed.

If this was a d20 player I would expect to hear "I take a Triumph" and then I would begin to rub my temples in a mock headache.

I swear letting players "try something slightly different" and reroll the same task is some sort of dice-rolling tantrum. In Star Wars, it doesn't work that way. I am not going to sit here and adjudicate fifteen borderline horrible rolls of random selections of threats, despairs, and advantages until you get the roll you want. The dramatic situation happened when you tried to bang the lock open, it didn't work, and it is time to move on. There is no "let's do a second take" here. Maybe in Hollywood, but in this world you get one shot and then you need to change your tactics.

That said, things are going well, and we are capturing that Star Wars feeling. We are getting a wonderful low-level game as well with very relatable characters, including the bad guys, so I expect the fights and conflicts coming up to get very gritty and personal. This does not feel as light and flippant as the d6 and d20 versions of the game, there is a lower-level grit and realism here that I love. Things are broken, the galaxy itself is broken, and every item, vehicle, character, and societal structure is coated with a level of dirt and grime. I plan on keeping things that way, and forcing some hard choices on the character's behalf.

There are no heroic and clean decisions in this world, there are just bad choices, and worse. Only sacrifice and heroism can turn the tide.

Playtest Report: Fantasy Age

Fantasy Age is an interesting game. It is sort of a spiritual successor to True 20, minus the d20 and many of the fiddly d20-ish based rules. We sat down and playtested the game the other night, and these are our first impressions.

3d6 Fantasy is Fun!

It has been a while since we used a 3d6 system for fantasy (since SBRPG 1.0), and it was cool. I loved the break from a d20, and getting a bell-curve back made modifiers meaningful again. There is a big difference between a +1 and a +3 with 3d6 versus 1d20, and it felt good.

v1.0 Skills

Why are separate "search" and "sight" skills needed? Where is the survival skill? We ran into a bunch of problems with skills, and players started attempting actions the skill system was unclear about or did not have the skills to cover.

Also, the regularity with with stunt rolls came up forced us to the stunt tables with a pretty regular frequency, and players started dreading rolls with stunts because nobody wanted to reference the book. We adopted a system where if you rolled doubles "something good happened as determined by the referee" and we ignored the stunt die's magnitude. It was a patch and ignored one of the game's key mechanics, but it sped up play and kept players from searching the tables and trying to invent something cool happening after the fact.

Three Main Classes

We didn't mind having three main classes that could specialize into different areas. It felt like a good balance or fighter, mage, and rogue with mages being able to fill in for a dedicated priest class with a healing specialization. I don't mind this sort of structure in a world where this is the norm, and it worked for us.

We wanted some sort of official world (other than Dragon Age) that supported this three class structure. It is different enough from Dragon Age to support a unique world, though making one wasn't a part of our playtest (nor did we want to check out the worldbook mentioned in the rulebook).

Four Spells per School?

While I like magic to be meaningful and not take over the game, only having three mastery levels and four spells per school felt really thin. Mages get two schools (start with four) and they can get new schools and spells as they level, but four spells under fire and the other various masteries felt like mages couldn't really do too much with spells and magic. We want more spells, deeper schools, and more stuff for mages to do.

It hurts, because this is one of the big things we felt would hurt the long-term interest in the game for us. A game like Pathfinder gives you a reason to stick around and play with spells and magic until you just don't want to read anymore. This is admittedly a more simple game, but we felt the lack of the high end magic options and selection would keep us interested at the lower levels and not the higher ones. yes, the classes have build options and choices at every level ,but there is something to be said for a great spell selection as well.

Action!

The game worked well in play, although 3d6 per combatant initiative dragged down the start of combat. There is something to be said for one-die-per-combatant initiative, because before you know it, with just 10 people in the battle, you are rolling 30d6 just to figure out who goes first.

Stunting dragged combat down, but other than that, the system worked. We enjoyed some of the options that classes gave at level one, but we didn't get a chance to level up before the night ended, so we need to keep testing to get a feel for levels and powers as you advance.

We liked the simple combats, but we felt the gravitic and realistic pull of Legend hovering over us. The games are enough alike. Once you experience Legend in its brutal and visceral glory, it is hard to want to play a simple game with stunts like this and not compare the two. This is more lighthearted, fast and easy adventure more aimed at a audience looking for a simple and quick game. We also thought of Savage Worlds when we played, and how that game has the same sort of adventure and simple system feel.

It is faster and easier to learn than D&D 5 or Pathfinder however, and it does get the job done for fantasy roleplaying.

What Would Hurt This?

For us, what would hurt this becoming a go-to game for us is the lack of character options, spells, and magic items. It is a simple-enough system, but the game feels like a really basic fantasy game that doesn't have a really great depth of options for supporting long term play. As a pick-up-and-play game, it is great and good for groups new to roleplaying and fantasy gaming. It does share some of the 'shallow class options' problems that D&D 5 has, but this is a lot more straightforward that D&D 5, so it feels like a better fit for new gamers or those looking to simplify.

This was a game I wanted to like and had higher hopes for, especially since it will be used for the Blue Rose reboot coming next year. I have a slight bit of remorse, but I am hoping to houserule that away and then convince others the changes are needed. With roleplaying, anything can be fixed, the work comes when you try to convince others that these things need fixing. Some games are more difficult than others to houserule, since there is a lot of 'by the book' play and fandom out there in tabletop gaming. Stunting would be one I house-rule, as we shall see.

Stunted Post-Roll Stunting

I like Legend's take on post roll stunting, but Fantasy Age's implementation leaves something to be desired. Let's begin by describing post-roll stunting.

With post-roll stunting, after you roll if you roll good enough, you get to perform a special stunt based on the roll's result. This is something like do extra damage, push an opponent, stun them, or do some other cool extra special effect.

In Fantasy Age, stunting is done through rolling doubles on any of the dice, and the magnitude is determined by the random result of the "stunt die." You don't really announce your cool stunt before you roll, you announce an attack, roll, and then if the dice come up doubles, you then describe your stunt.

With Legend, it works like this, at least for us. With Legend you start with a base percentage to-hit. You describe your stunt to the referee before you roll, and the referee modifies your chance to-hit. You roll the dice, and your opponent may make a defensive roll. The difference in success level of the roll (success vs. success, success vs. failure, crits vs. failure) determines the power of the stunt. Now, if you are being really cool and swing across the pirate ship on a rope to deliver a kick to the Pirate King, the referee will likely reward you with a +10 or +20% chance to-hit, which will raise the chance to stunt and likely the level of stunting success. If you just succeed normally, no stunt happens, but you still connect and do some damage. Otherwise, it is obvious what happens, and the Pirate King goes flying.

In short, what you do before you roll matters. Players push it and try crazy things to get roleplaying bonuses. Those bonuses matter and increase the chance for something cool to happen.

What you put in increases the chances for cool stuff to happen.

Fantasy Age takes the English out of the stunt attempt, and does not really allow a player to pre-declare a stunt. Sure, you could give the rope-swinging player a +3 to-hit in Fantasy Age, but that does not affect the chance for the stunt to happen, nor does it affect the magnitude. When it happens is random, and what happens is point-bought off a Chinese menu of effects, further slowing play down. With Legend, there is still a list of effects to choose from, but they are simple and what you want to do is usually one or two of the picks from the list. It is a simpler system, and it does not force you to the charts every time you stunt.

In short, roleplaying bonuses do not contribute to post-roll stunting. Stunting happens at random. You are not encouraged to do cool stuff before the roll (only to-hits), and the cool stuff happens at random.

What you put in only increases your success chance, and not the cool things.

The Sample Adventure

We didn't enjoy the sample adventure as much as we would have liked. It was a Hunger Games style sort of 'young adults on an isle of mystery' sort of thing, and it made some balance and motivational missteps that we struggled with. There didn't seem to be a great motivation other than 'sit out the night' and when the fun started, the fight was with a magic creature that couldn't be hit by normal weapons. Guess what most starting characters start with? You got it. There was a stunt (costing 3 stunt points) that allowed you to 'hit' this incorporeal shadow creature, but it took a lore roll (thank you, smart players) to figure out. I don't think an average group would have had an easy time with this, so it came off poorly for us.

There was no real motivation to get out and explore the island, so the NPCs went off like lemmings to explore while the PCs built camp for the night. Trouble happened, they handled it, and a ghost appeared with part two of the mission - kill five other spirits. Five is a lot, especially without magic weapons, but a quick temporary enchant by the ghost solved that in sort of a 'make things easy' way. It wasn't rewarding or really cool, so we have a group now with depleted resources and health going down to take out five other ghosts they really are going to have problems with. Three felt like a good number and would have been a great challenge without wearing out its welcome, but we are now stuck with taking out five ghosts by sun-up or it is the end of the world.

The sample adventure also had a lot of fluff text describing things that we would have never encountered, and lots of little irrelevant detail on the valley that we found a bit on the fluff side. Yes, this sort of detail is good to know if you are planning a campaign here, but the 'walled valley' wasn't interesting enough for us to want to, so we would have rather had more adventure and a little less background trivia.

We also wanted a more classic style of adventure, with some rescue the princess, swing from the chandelier, and smash the orcs stuff going on. You know, a basic game needs a good basic adventure with some meat-and-potatoes fun to it. We also compared this to the Star Wars Beginner Sets' adventures, and would have loved for a tutorial to have been written into the encounters.

Character Sheets Needed

We didn't find the printable character sheets all that useful, and we wanted dedicated places for all the different aspects to a character. This kinda got in the way as we designed characters, and we wanted a sample filled-out character sheet in the book to crib from on what goes where.

Immediately we wanted to make our own character sheets.

Other Bits

There are enough monsters to have fun with, and the equipment selection is good and fits the needs of characters. I wanted more in the way of magic and magic items, and we also wanted some great survival rules. A couple more level-up options would have been cool as well.

There are no paladin options, but you can buy an expansion PDF with these and other builds. My feeling? Make it all fit withing the three class system, and put those options in a basic fantasy style game at the start. There was a chance here to break from the traditional Dragon Age style of game, and it did not feel they went far enough to support some of the non-Dragon Age standards, such as paladins, druids, bards, warlocks, and others. These classes would have complicated the basic three classes in options and rules, but I feel they would have provided a great break from Dragon Age's feeling and catered more to the MMO and D&D crowds.

More to Come, I Hope

Fantasy Age is a fun game and we like it, it just has some v1.0 feeling issues and a lack of options to make this a go-to system for us. I am hoping we get to finish the adventure, perhaps I will level up the characters pretty quickly to keep things going and players coming back. The game needs a worldbook and an expansion to provide some better options, and the stunting needs to be rethought to provide more of an incentive to say what you are going to try first, and then roll. Stunting after the roll feels like an afterthought, and it plays like one too.

I want the players to be pushing me for bonuses, trying silly stunts, and taking chances and rolling the dice to see what happens after the dice are thrown. Getting a stunt when you didn't even want it feels very strange and backwards to us, and that forced to stop play and sift through charts asking, "Well, what can he or she do?"

I like the system though, it is 3d6 and simple. It gets play started quickly. It creates interesting characters. It levels up nicely. It is straightforward and focuses on action and story. It is a strong system, but we feel it has a couple issues that a second version needs to work out. Hopefully by the time Blue Rose rolls around, some of the depth and other sticky issues will be worked on and the game shines as much as it deserves to.

A great simple system, it is just a little sticky and underdeveloped in some areas. I have high hopes for this one, but I want to see more. I also want to see an open license so some of the rough spots could be filled in by the community and others. But overall, a great beer-and-pretzels RPG wthat is simple enough to grasp the basic concepts for quickly, and get you adventuring within 10 minutes of prep. Not bad, and a fun one I look forward to seeing more games from.

Playtest Report: Star Wars Age of Rebellion

Let's play Star Wars RPG: Age of Rebellion Beginner Game!

So we sat down to play this, put on the Star Wars music, and started to fulfill our fantasies about Rebels and Imperials blasting each other in the far reaches of space. Yes, this is the last of the intro sets we are playing for the Star Wars RPG from Fantasy Flight, and we had a great experience with the smuggler one, so we wanted to check this one out.

It also came with an extra set of dice, so we needed those too.

These are tutorial adventures meant to teach you the game and get you started, so you have to take that into consideration. The second beginner's set we tried had some major issues with the story line, but it ended better than it started, so we had our doubts about the rebel-themed boxed set.

Right off the transport shuttle we hit several major issues. Nobody plans an attack like that. The players just walked in! The first scenario assumed a plan for the characters and didn't let them really have a say in how things worked out. We felt railroaded, and the players wanted a little more freedom in how they attacked the problem of capturing the base.

Okay, referee intervention time.

I took the adventure off the rails at that point, ditched the rest of the encounters, and let the players run with the rest of the module. We lost the cool AT-ST and speeder bike fight at the end, and DarkgarX expressed some remorse at losing that fight, but overall things went well. Our diplomat did a fun disguise thing and talked with the base commander, posing as an Imperial spy. Our technicians wrecked havoc with the computer and security systems while sneaking around the base. Our soldier and pilot worked on capturing that shuttle. It was a cool Mission Impossible style take down and switcheroo, and the group had fun playing through the mission.

Did it come out better than the module? I feel it did, though we lament missing the vehicle battle. I don't think in any of these starter sets we ever got to a real vehicle or starship battle, so our knowledge of that system is probably lacking. Still, we had more fun than I feel the module would have let us have, and I don't regret calling for an intervention and taking the beginner's set off the rails and running it as a sandbox.

It struck us as an odd ending to put players in a lousy situation such as this, and force them to hold a base that is known to the Empire. The entire epilogue felt really weak for us, and given a choice, my players felt abandoning the base was the best bet. Even if the Empire itself can't acknowledge the base, someone in the Empire knows about it, and we expected retribution and the hammer of the Empire to be rapidly dropped on this place with just a handful of rebels to protect it.

It didn't feel like a great start to a long running game, so our group abandoned the base, silly rebel orders be damned. Once the main rulebook gets here we want to restart our game with a fresh situation and planet, and run these groups through a classic set of situations that we are cooking up.

Some of the characters also had little to do, most notably the pilot, and other characters felt like they didn't have a great role or clear skills to contribute (the commander web supplement character, and the tech and spy also being medics). The soldier also felt one-dimensional with the kill choices, and of all the beginner sets, this one felt like it had the most issues with the character designs not living up to the things our group wanted to try.

A high point in the game came when one of the players infiltrated the comm room, slayed one of the techs, and the base's robot walked in. The player tried to reason with the robot, and rolled a despair die on the social interaction. I sat there and had the robot give the player a speech about how humans are always like this, how they love war, and how they think violence solves every problem. The damn robot went on and on moralizing like a ham-filled actor in a Shakespeare play, and the players laughed and groaned with delight as the robot went on and on moralizing and giving a speech about how droids are so reasoned and superior.

"You. You. Humans. How typical. You think violence solves anything? You think these the actions of a civilized member of the galactic community? I think not." 

See that dwarf meeple in the picture above? That is the robot, and the group adopted the droid as a reluctant but hilarious mascot after that masterpiece performance dramatae. Yeah, expect more of his moralizing guys, you bought him.

Sometimes the dice just take you places in this game, and you have to go along for the ride. That is what I enjoy about the dice, sometimes they make something so cool or hilarious happen that the game takes a life of its own.

Overall, we enjoyed this one more than the Jedi boxed set, and till the smuggler set holds the top spot on all three of these for us. The decision to go off-rails helped a great deal, but still the setup for this campaign felt wrong, and the character designs lacked polish and utility.

We like the characters in these sets, but we wanted more. We will probably be redesigning them when the full books come, and making them our own. I also want to come up with my own 'tutorial' adventures based on our new campaign, and restart these heroes in an entirely new situation. I also would love to see some cross over between the groups, have them meet each other, and thrust them into the grand campaign of a classic game.

More on this soon. It is kinda fun to be excited about a game and planning adventures in one again. Also, this RPG has lived up to the hype, and we great about getting excited for the game and playing it. This is a rare treat for us, and one we want to savor and enjoy for quite a while.

Playtest Report: Star Wars Force and Destiny, part 2

What is it about beginner modules and us lately?

First off, this is a fun game. I like what Fantasy Flight has done with Star Wars and their entire RPG line. I liked the dice, and I like the system. We had a great time with the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game too and loved that adventure. That boxed set was great stuff, and you even got to dogfight with TIE fighters at the end.

But we had no luck with the Star Wars Force and Destiny RPG Beginner Game boxed set. The module fell flat for us, and we found ourselves rubbing our eyes with disbelief at some of the situations. As a "introduction to the post Order 66 Jedi life" it felt like it didn't deliver, and I probably need to go over what happened during our game. Warning, spoilers ahead.

It all started out good enough, as we left off last time, our group of Jedi students holed up in a shelter on their way to the mountain temple. We left off feeling pretty good, and then we proceeded to the next part of the adventure, the ancient holocron with the Jedi master. Let's just say things didn't go so well there, and the players didn't like to have a hologram threatening them when they were there to help. There is a line in the holocron's dialog that is an outright threat to pit them against the locals, and that set my group and the omnipotent computer on a collision course. DarkgarX told the holocron, "We find you, we're pulling your plug."

Yes, like a line out of the Expendables movies. And that was it with the holocron, until...

Let's move on to the next encounter, where "dark side infused" primitive villagers were directed to attack the party by the "I am really a Jedi not a Sith" holocron. Now, the entire "dark side infused" rationale for both the wolves and the villagers in this module is pretty silly, my players were playing this like true Jedi, and they did not feel it was right for good Jedi following the code to wipe out a group of primitives. They ended up scaring them off with blaster shots and disengaging. Yes, this encounter was just supposed to be a simple run-through to teach the combat rules, but two things:

1. Good Jedi do not wipe out villagers (given deception caused this)
2. "Dark side infused" felt like a cheap rationale to make the villagers more like D&D monsters

Nobody liked the "dark side infused" thing in either encounter and my players didn't buy it (probably because there feels like little in the movies that supports this). Good Jedi do not pull out the longswords and kill the orcs, they act a step above. I give my players credit for taking the high road here, and the whole encounter would have been better served had the primitives been disposable combat droids or something.

The stupid holocron being there and sending the villagers off to attack the party did not go over very well at all. DarkgarX had this look on his face that said, "When I find you, I am erasing your memory circuits." Even if you are a good Jedi holocron, sending primitives off to their doom is a pretty Sith move. Especially since, um, when the dark side taint from this valley is going to be removed at the end of the adventure later, and it will be supposedly removed from the villagers as well.

Yes, don't put the players in a position where they are having to explain why they wiped out the village to the survivors. Not Jedi, and not cool, dude.

I mean, really, droids here would have been the better choice, and I could have imagined my players jumping at the chance to swing lightsabers at combat robots and whoop it up having a good time. Instead, the group elected to take the high ground, and the combat tutorial turned into a moral choice, which is probably not what the module designer had in mind, but my players are true hardcore Jedi fanatics who believe in the code.

Now, I don't like railroads as much as anyone else, but the whole "everyone falls into a separate hole and can't get out" encounter that WIN or LOSE the previous fight felt really, really silly after that fight. Yes, this is just another tutorial encounter, but it did not go over well, especially for six players falling into six separate holes. One of the players ended up getting out and helping the others out one by one, though by the end, some of them at least tried to use the force as the tutorial directed as a face-saving move.

You know that scene in Return of the Jedi where the whole gang gets caught in the Ewok net? Yeah. Painful like that. Times six.

From there, the adventure got better since the tutorials were over. The bridge encounter with the guard mercs went well (non combat resolution), the wolf encounter ended up being another moral choice but it ended up with another novel non-combat solution, and the temple fight was a pushover. My players wanted a lightsaber duel, but the big-bad had a longsword, and lightsaber versus longword fights usually don't end well for the "I am a D&D fighter in Star Wars" side. Plus we wanted this guy to have some cool force lightning or telekinesis powers, and he had some lame ones, so minus fun points there as well.

And in the end, that stupid holocron got pulled out of its socket.

"Adventurers! Thank you for rescuing the temp-"

...PHSSST!

But seriously, we came up with  better structure for this entire module, and it goes like this:

1. Players are students at this Jedi temple
2. A strange ship lands
3. Combat robots seize the temple, school, and village
4. Escape and get your stuff from the school
5. Save the village!
6. Rescue the master at the temple!

It is simple, and you could have even mixed in the tutorial parts with the "students at the temple" part before the attack, or mixed them in with steps one through five. You could have even left the holocron in as a helpful mentor directing players along the way. It is a much better setup, avoids the problem of "how do they know each other" issue, and gives the players a heroic motivation and robotic bad guys that are fun to beat up without sticky Jedi code moral decisions.

Yes, I expect later when stormtroopers show up, the grim reality of being a Jedi and doing bad to do good will come up, but my players didn't feel that decision should have came here, and not for the reasons given.

In the end? The big-bad was captured, the mentor saved, and the players wanted to turn the Sith over to the Rebel Alliance for judgment. Did we have fun? Yes, when the silliness of the first encounters ended, and the real fight began at the temple, but it took too much absurdity to get there, and the last fight was a kind of a letdown. It was a tough time for this group and for this adventure, but the promise of hooking up with the Rebels is looming out there.

I guess this will lead us into the next beginner's set, next time....

Playtest Report: Star Wars Force and Destiny

So we picked up Fantasy Flight's Star Wars Force and Destiny RPG Beginner Game the other day and sat down for a playtest. They have a boxed beginner's set for each of the main rulebooks, and it is a pretty good deal if you are picking up sets of dice. You can pick up one of these sets (with dice) for around $20 on Amazon, and a set of dice is about $15, so you get some maps, an adventure, some pogs, and a set of intro rule books for just a little more than a set of dice by itself, so these boxes are a good deal.

If I played this game with others on a regular basis? BYOD, because, really. And if you get into high level play you will need two sets ideally, so this game can get expensive. A couple thoughts on that:

• It is a licensed game, so it is expected.
• It is too bad, because sometimes we play with groups with limited financial ability to buy in.

To be fair, there are official Fantasy Flight supported dice rolling apps for smartphones off the Google Play and iTunes stores for only five bucks, and you can roll as many dice as you like with these programs. While I normally don't like smartphones and tablets at the tabletop, this is an answer for those players who can't spend $30 on a complete double set of dice.

The books are expensive as well, and there are no PDF versions of the game. This is another sticking point for us, since character creation and options are 'book heavy' activities, and this means lengthy pass around sessions at the table. With expensive books, this feels like a problem since I like having hardcopy print outs for character creation and leveling up ready and available for player use without passing a book around.

I am one of those 'character sheet only' referees, and I dislike distractions such as books or phones at the table. If someone is reading (even the rules) or playing on a phone, it is a distraction. We have limited time when we get together, and I like to keep things moving because it is fair to everyone spending free time to be at my table. If a game requires constant book reference by players (like 4th Edition D&D), it is a less optimal design for groups I run.

The Force and Destiny game itself is fun though, and we like the dice. They are a unique narrative control device that handle story elements and what happens next in one skill roll. If you haven't read our older article on the dice, please do so since it is a good primer and hilarious as well. Some groups have reported the dice got in the way of the fun of the game for them, as players had trouble deciphering the symbols, but we haven't had that experience. The dice work for us, and I think that is because we figured out the game's narrative control structure.

Read our previous article on macro-style play for Edge of the Empire. I went and re-read this before we played, and we had a great time since we understood not only how to roll the dice, but when. Fantasy Flight's Star Wars games are by default, macro style games more like Arkham Horror than they are micro-style games, such as D&D or Pathfinder. In a micro-style game, you are rolling dice for every single blow in combat and splitting tasks into sub-tasks so you can roll for those individually. You do not aggregate tasks into larger sweeps of the brush as you do in this game, and understanding that will keep you from endlessly having to throw the dice and interpret results.

Do more with less rolls.

These Star Wars games can do micro-style play for critical rolls, but that is the exception, not the rule. If you are trying to do micro-style play and roll for every shot or subtask, you will tire quickly and the narrative control of the dice will be lessened since so much crazy stuff will happen. The sheer number of results and consequences will overwhelm you, so it is best to treat the dice as a larger tool that determines the results of a task with one roll for the entire "scene" of the movie instead of splitting the scene into smaller parts and rolling for those.

For example, we had a situation come up last night during our play session on the first encounter of theStar Wars Force and Destiny game. Some players wanted to not cross over into the hidden valley, and build a shelter to recover from the trip. Yes, players are how players are, and if they wanted to stop and hang out for a couple days in the first "make a skill roll and just get moving" encounter, I say let them play. This brought up two questions that made us stumble a bit with this adventure:

• We needed survival rules for food and water.
• How did this group of players find each other?

The second question we hand-waved away, but it would have been nice to know how this group of people met each other and decided to trudge up a mountain together in the middle of nowhere. This brought up the second question of survival on the face of a snow-covered mountain. I let them build a shelter with a mechanical roll, and the other half of the party went out looking for food and water.

The game doesn't have food and water type survival rules, although we worked out a system using the game's resilience skill after an Internet search and some forum post reading that seemed like it would work well. The game does have survival rations as an equipment item, but none of the starting characters came with rations or survival gear, so everybody was kind of stuck on the face of K2 without preparation.

Since it is entirely unfair to do this to players in an in media res start, I let them roll back time for a moment and buy any gear they thought they would need for the trip (up to 5 ration packs). We then picked up where we left off, and the group at least had some food and water to chow down on while they sat around in their improvised shelter.

But back to the macro-style play example. The players, even though they had rations, still wanted to scrounge around for supplies. They had a survival expert along, so it seemed like a good exercise to get used to handling a survival-style situation. So as a referee, I could have split this up into several rolls:

• Roll to find a good place to scavenge in nearby
• Roll to scavenge food
• Roll to scavenge water
• Roll to find animals to hunt
• Roll to find out anything else about the terrain and paths forward

In a micro-style game, this feels like a good way to break up rolls for the survival task. It may feel a bit excessive, but in games where the narrative control of 'what happens next' depends on die rolls, you need this level of granularity to determine the results of differing actions and if something is discovered or happens as a result of the dice. You have no other way of determining sub-task or related results, so you end up rolling the dice more, often for every little thing or question you need an answer on. How I decided to do this in Force and Destiny is this:

• Roll once to determine the scavenging result

Why only roll for all that? Successes will determine the success of the result, and if the primary thing sought after will be found (food and water). Advantages will determine the extra benefits of the roll, things not sought after but would be nice to know (paths forward). I wanted to do all of the above in one roll, with a primary focus on scrounging supplies, but a secondary focus on information helpful to their current situation. Plus, I didn't want too many rolls since this would generate so many good and bad story results the task would blow up and create a mess of consequences to resolve.

The roll came out that the group failed to find supplies, but they generated enough advantages on the roll for me to rule the group found a great place to cross the icy ridge, and using that path would give each party member a boost die on the skill roll they used to traverse the ridge the next day. This was one roll, it provided the task result and extra information or result we wanted, and we rolled the dice less for more actions covered. Handle more with less rolls? Exactly.

The next day, everyone got moving and made their individual skill rolls, covering each person's actions in the micro sense as required by the module. Knowing when to aggregate and play in a macro style will be the key to your success in enjoying this game. Knowing when to switch to micro will also keep that feeling of individual achievement and contribution going with each player, and this will also contribute to your success when running the game.

Is this an enjoyable game? Yes, and it is competing for time at our table with the other big games. It pulls in a lot of the Star Wars myths and lore, and it is a fun and enjoyable experience. Is this a game that could hold a group's attention? I feel so, yes, because it fills that Star Wars fantasy experience quite nicely, and the character level-up options are deep and allow a high-level of customization.

Does this compete with D&D 5 and Pathfinder? For attention yes, most certainly. I could play this instead of those games, and being a referee of a Star Wars style game would give my game a drawing power that would definitely attract attention, especially if I setup a weekly game at a hobby store. People like to play Star Wars, there is no doubt, and even when we played the d20 version this had a great wow-factor as well.

There is a side-effect of Disney's de-canonizing of the old Expanded Universe that is drawing in players as well, since the barrier to entry to the universe is basically knowing what happened in the six main movies (plus Clone Wars if you are a purist, but you could get away with just Star Wars thru Jedi and be just fine as a player or referee).

So, licensed games? When I bring in Dragon Age, I begin to see a new pattern emerging with tabletop roleplaying, where licensed games feel like they have a larger pull than the more generic offerings. Admittedly, D&D is more popular than Dragon Age in general, but I am sure if I ran it the Dragon Age game would attract attention from those not only into D&D, but also people who have played the videogame as well.

For Star Wars, the dice could be an issue for some (especially those used to micro style games), but we have mastered them quite quickly using our techniques and theories on how the game should be played. They aren't difficult to use, and they do add a lot to the game. We are huge fans of macro-style games such as Arkham Horror, so having a Star Wars version of that experience is a huge plus for us.

Will we be buying in further? Most likely. For a game that is pricey and lacks PDF options, that is quite a huge feat, and it says a lot for the design and production quality of this game. It is one of the great games of tabletop roleplaying at the moment, and one we are getting a lot of enjoyment out of. More playtest reports soon.

Dragon Age Pen-and-Paper: Playtest Report #1

We played the quick start rules adventure for the Dragon Age RPG, and we noticed a couple things about the game. Well first, we noticed one big thing about the sample adventure included with the quick start rules, it supposedly forces you to make a moral choice in the middle of the adventure which turned out to be an entirely morally reprehensible choice.

It is really a terrible situation to put fresh characters in, even as a supposedly moral choice it is on one hand horrid, and the other a terrible way to start a campaign with the local royal family hunting you down. It’s dark fantasy, I know, but I would never play a situation like the one in the module as lighthearted as the module designer attempted to do (I felt the consequences of 'go dark' were dealt with a bit hand-wavedly and flippant).

Even as “dark fantasy” it is just not what my players expected or liked. To be fair, this isn't the big book (as shown), this is just the older free starter adventure, and it left us a bit wanting.

Our Adventure: Inquisition Prolog

We ended up running through the first scenario of Dragon Age Inquisition as our sample adventure instead of the quick start adventure and found a couple more observations.

DarkgarX plays a ranged rogue in the videogame, and we noticed an immediate lack of damage output with ranged rogues in this game. Compared to the videogame, rogues with bows have it good, and they are a decent damage dealing class. In the pen and paper game ranged damage per second for rogues felt woefully inadequate. They addressed this concern in a forum post where a developer suggested letting rogue ranged attacks use the rogue melee talents, such as backstab and dirty tricks. They further corrected this with an even better solution in the sister game Fantasy Age.

We ran into a situation where our melee character in our playtest, the heroic warrior Cassandra from the videogame, where she out damaged the rogue using the bow with her sword. DarkgarX was playing the rogue, and his arrows struggled to get through the darkspawn’s armor. As if the darkspawn should have any armor, as I was using the sample darkspawn monsters out of the module. That was probably a mistake on my part, but I did not have any monster statistics on hand so I used those.

DarkgarX expected to be able to do decent ranged damage, but his bow only did one die plus five, where Cassandra’s longsword was doing two dice plus three. This was to five points of armor, and Cassandra’s blows were consistently cutting through and the bow was typically rolling 1 to 3 points of damage per hit. He got this feeling of “why bother, grab a sword” and we struggled to replicate the feeling of the videogame. It was a frustrating start, and we found ourselves wondering why a longbow would do a base of 1d6+3 damage to the longsword’s 2d6 base. I could see a shortbow doing 1d6+3 (which does 1d6+1) and the longbow 2d6, or possibly halving armor versus bow damage (and keeping the damagers the same), but as it is the bows feel weak in this game.

Mind you, there is little need for a shortbow at all, and the game doesn’t go into too much detail on why and when each was used. I wanted more detail in this area as well.

Fantasy Age makes a huge improvement with rogue bow DPS, allowing rogues to add 1d6 to one attack per turn if their DEX is greater than their opponent’s with a “pinpoint attack”. This solves a lot of problems, and I am sorely tempted to port in this rule to make rogue bow DPS feel on par with what we experienced in the videogame.

Hell, I am sorely tempted to port in the videogame’s power list and give the characters some cool pyrotechnics. I would love to have the videogame’s ‘explosive shot’ available as a rogue archer spell to charge up an arrow and let fly. The pen-and-paper game is decidedly “down” on powers, so the characters play more like real people than action game shoot-and-blast MMO characters. Still, the videogame powers are fun, and they are what the world is like for us now.

There is something to be said for reflecting the world as most people enjoy it, and I would love to have an Inquisition sourcebook listing all the powers, magic items, and other cool bits for use in the pen-and-paper game. Actually, I would pay good money for that, and I would love for the game's super cool stuff to make it into the pen-and-paper game somehow.

Maybe I will spend some time with the Inquisition hint book and do a full conversion. If my hint book would stop being back ordered and ship, that is....

I am hoping we get another session in, this looks like a fun game and I like how it plays. It’s just how it plays isn’t really matching up with how we expect, and that is our problem. Fantasy Age looks to have better, more cleaned up rules, but I don't want to feel I have to pull in rules from that game to compensate.

Savage Worlds: Playtest Report #1

We sat down and played Savage Worlds Deluxe: Explorer's Edition last weekend. This was an interesting game for several reasons, and we wanted to give some first impressions of how things went.

First off, get the PDF copy should you order this. I spent some time with my duplex printer and heavy-duty stapler, and made booklets out of the chapters, and man did play go a lot smoother. Call me strange, but I do not like physical books during play, and I only found myself picking up the book when I needed to reference something in the index. Otherwise, I had a printed booklet for the game rules, character creation, gear, and other chapters that I could reference, toss to a player, and keep open to important pages during play.

Unlike a book, I could have multiple booklets open to different pages at the same time. I could take notes on my printed copies and not care. If they get damaged or torn I don't care, as I can always print another for cheap.

If you play the games and not collect them, go for PDF and print copies. Actually, if you collect them, use PDFs to play and store your book in a plastic bag somewhere. There are some games (Pathfinder, D&D 5) where it is hard to use PDF print copies, due to the lack of availability or the length of what you would have to print, so your mileage may vary. But games I play with people? I am finding my use of D&D/Pathfinder type "library-style" games fading, and my appreciation for compact, PDF style rules makes my life easy and my player's enjoyment of the game much greater.

Polyhedral Dice Lovers' Dream

If you love playing with polyhedral dice, play Savage Worlds instead of D&D style games, where polyhedral dice are really only used for damage. Savage Worlds makes full use of the dice range, and you will be rolling every shape during play. I enjoyed this part of the game's design, and different shapes were flying and being used throughout the session.

D&D games in recent years have been upping the damages, and really making the base set of polyhedral dice irrelevant. D&D 4 was a high water mark with huge damage rolls, but even Pathfinder and D&D 5 are on the higher side of damages and hit points when compared to something like Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy. When your character or the monster you fight only has 6 hp, a d4 to d8 difference in weapon damage matters a lot. When a fighter has 20-30 hp to start (D&D 4) or even 10-20 hp (D&D 5), die choice matters less than fixed attribute modifiers do.

But yes, this game makes good use of all the shapes, and it is nice to see that for a change. The d20 is used for charts as a randomizer, and d100 isn't really used much at all (so you can do without the 00-90 "tens" die).

One possible issue is that high ability scores are still a bit random. Even with a d12 in an ability or skill, you can still quite often roll below a 4 with consistent regularity. The game does feel a bit slippery on rolls at times, at least in our experience. Since a d12 is the highest die in the game, there is a cap on how powerful characters and monsters can become. It is very much a human-centered game in terms of power and ability, but given its focus, that doesn't seem to be a problem.

Organization

The basic game of Savage Worlds is poorly organized. It took us a while to get proficient with the system, and we were wrestling with basic concepts all the way to the end of our first session. The Index helps in cases like this, but too many rules felt hidden all over the place, especially in skill descriptions. The system feels a little like a game that has been out a while, with all sorts of special cases cleared up and patches in random places to cover special cases.

That said, when we did understand what was going on, the rules system worked fairly well. We were able to make judgments on what roll needed to be made for what action, combat went quickly, and the system worked as we felt it should. It is a great pulp-action system for quick play, one-offs, playing "Pick a Movie or TV Show: The RPG" and groups more interested in playing a fast and fun game. It does what it does very well, and the generic quality to it reminds me of the old d6 System games where you could just pick a setting, roll characters, and play.

Skills and Attributes

The basic attribute die for an attribute NOT being used for an unskilled check threw us. No matter what your agility is, if you are unskilled, your chance of success is only d4-2 (exploding dice and also that wild die applies). You could have a d12 agility and try to throw something, and your chance of success is only d4-2.

This also led to a situation like this when determining if a particular roll was a skill check or an ability check:

1. FOR (1 to MAX_SKILLS) DO:
1. IF (skill[x] COVERS action attempted) THEN:
1. ROLL SKILL CHECK (unskilled or skilled)
2. RETURN result
2. //NOTE: no skill applies!
3. ROLL ATTRIBUTE CHECK (action attempted)
4. RETURN result

I hope you can read code, but that procedure basically is iterating through the entire skill list in the game each time a test comes up, and determining if a skill would cover the action. If no skill covers it, then the test falls out and is covered by an attribute roll. This throws you a little, especially when it comes to acrobatics (not covered, ability roll), or climbing or swimming (covered, skill roll). Most all social interactions are skill rolls, so base spirit rolls are very rare (except for resisting fear, removing shaken results, or internal willpower tests). Smarts tests are common with common knowledge rolls. Vigor rolls are also semi-common with health and resistance rolls.

This makes skills like Notice, Persuade, Streetwise, and Stealth must-buy skills, since they are very common to see in play. Notice is especially powerful, because this is one of those "gateway" abilities that measures you character's ability to "see " the world. Fighting and Shooting are also other must-buys skills if your group is doing any sort of combat.

The social skills are interesting since Streetwise is used to get information from NPCs, Persuade is used to convince NPCs, Intimidate is used to coerce NPCs, and Taunt is used to get NPCs into disadvantageous situations. Charisma is very powerful, and our 'charmer' PCs greased the skids for any type of social interaction with NPCs. If you referee this game, make sure to apply negative interaction modifiers when NPCs are hostile, and don't be afraid to load these up to make charming your way out of everything a too easy option.

Exploding dice did make the game "critty" for us, as some players have reported. DarkgarX thought the d4 was especially critty, as it had a 1 in 4 chance of being rolled again and again. We did have a couple d4 chain explosions in our game, which raised a couple eyebrows on the 'lowly' d4 die when used for skill rolls. He would love me to write a computer program to explore the exploding d4 die and the effects on statistical probability versus d6/d6, but I told him I have better things to do. I would love to know myself, but it would take a while to test and collect data.

The Wild Die

PCs and important characters throw a d6 "wild die" in addition to their normal skill and attribute dice, and the highest of the two are used. Both are modified and can explode, but the highest of the  two final totals are used. We always used a different color 'pipped' die for the wild die, and normal numeric dice for skills and attributes to keep what die was what clear, because sometimes the rules would tell you a "1" result on the skill die was important for some actions - so we needed to keep things clear.

DarkgarX did not like the wild die mechanic as much as I did, saying he felt it was 'player protection' for lower skill levels, and made the d4 skill level matter less. I felt there is actually a bell curve out here that matters more and there is a difference between a d4/d6 roll versus a d6/d6 roll. I liked the wild die mechanic, and I felt it gave the game a heroic feel instead of a straight one-die system for rolling where a straight 'heroic' +2 to +3 modifier would be applied.

Cards Needed!

One note, you will need a deck of cards for this game for initiative. We felt the game did not go far enough in it integration of cards into the systems of the game, as there are some systems that use the cards well (chases) and others where they could be used more (social interaction and conflict).

The game is also soft on using the optional 'action cards' product for narrative events, as these are mentioned at several parts of the rules, yet are not really strongly supported.

We played the game as-is with the normal initiative cards, but we saw an opportunity to enhance narrative events through their use, so we created a system where these cards could be used during play to control the timing of roleplaying action and also add some fun randomness to story progression and random events. The system worked extremely well, and we would love to publish this for other groups to play with this and other games someday.

Damage and Combat

The damage and wounding system actually worked quite well for us. The game has a 'first hit' shaken result that is like a stun (that turns into wounds if you get stacking shaken results), and this worked well enough to simulate all sorts of battles. I was worried that having that 'first free hit' would be unrealistic, but it turned out to be realistic from a movie and TV-show simulation sort of feeling. It worked well, and combat overall was balanced and enjoyable.

The exploding dice, where you roll the highest number and your roll again and add the total up, no matter how high you go, made combat critty. We had a single stick of TNT vaporize an entire group of enemies with an exploding 27 damage total roll off a 3d6 roll. While yes, this could happen, those players who prefer a more simulation and structured approach to damage and effects may be shocked at some of the roll and damage outputs in this game. To me, it is a crit, and fate and the show's writers hated that group of bad guys and wanted the scene over with, so one stick did them all in with a single fait accompli.

You have to accept the "will of the crazy invisible pulp writer" when dealing with the dice in this game. Sometimes things will go really crazy, but really, pulp writers of the time were known to exaggerate and write in silly and unrealistic results, so let it be and live and let live with the crazy dice results and have fun. That's just me though, and that is just this game - if you want something more simulation-style and realistic, please play another game. It's important to understand what you expect in a game versus what a game delivers when you review and play it. Sometimes a game doesn't deliver what you prefer, but that doesn't make the game any less fun or valid for people that do like that style of play.

How It Plays

The game is a pretty standard 'rules light' system. Compared to Mongoose's Legend, this is a more 'pick up and play' system geared towards pulp and movie style adventures. Legend is a Runequest-y style system more for fans of medieval combat simulators, and not really a generic game. From the book, the game does a good job of providing the framework of a night's fun.

We found the sample adventures a bit on the simple side; at two printed pages, all they could do is lay out a couple combat encounters and background detail, so a lot had to me made up. With our hand-crafted adventure and situation cards, the system played a lot better, and filled in some of the missing details quite nicely.

I can see why people like this, it does a good job at being a simple 'anything' RPG. You could play in a standard D&D game world and reasonably simulate mages, fighters, thieves, and clerics and just hand wave the rest. It makes me think that the D&D tropes are just some part of a big circus tent of 'rules and spells and content you must accept' that you are forced to enjoy a high fantasy game. Here, you don't need any of that, and the Savage Worlds system just keeps happily tossing the polyhedral dice around and having fun like those other games don't exist.

I feel the pulp nature is what does this. Plenty of games try to be pulp adventure, but many just say they are and don't live up to the ideals. You could play a pulp adventure with Pathfinder, and in fact, a lot of the new classes and source material for Pathfinder are pulp-inspired, but it isn't the same thing. It's pulp adventure through the d20 AC/hit points/classes glasses of 3.5 D&D, and it is not rules light, and you are still playing lip service to pulp while worrying about the same-old attack bonus and CR d20 D&D magic and hit dice sort of thing. It is the same feeling of playing Steampunk with D&D. It's still D&D.

With a game system that is more malleable and setting-neutral, you don't have D&D or Pathfinder's character builds, Golarion, Faerun, or anything else hanging over your head. Yes, there is that whole thing "you don't have to learn a new system" thing but there is also that thing "the new system really ain't that hard to learn and it fits the feeling better" thing. In the past, D&D simulated generic high fantasy roleplaying. Today?

I feel D&D more simulates D&D, as Pathfinder is just starting to simulate the world of Pathfinder.

But with Savage Worlds, the game is designed to fit a pulp-action feeling. Now this feeling crosses genres and stories. You can find pulp-action in fantasy settings as well as you can Indiana Jones or Star Wars. Jurassic Park. The Road Warrior. Movies and television. You can find pulp-action everywhere, and a game devoted to a universal genre is a fascinating concept with a wide appeal. It does such a good job at doing everything (more so than say GURPS) because it is simulating a feeling rather than a specific genre.

Support

Savage Worlds is a widely supported system, with many different worlds to play in, along with a remarkable amount of third-party support at places like RPG Now. It is nice to see a company support third-party development, and the game's publisher, Pinnacle, does a good job at keeping quality high while keeping the doors open for people to add options and worlds to the game. This feels like the D&D of the early 00's in terms of support and the worlds available to play, and that is a good thing.

Our Experience

The game has its quirks, but it is a good system. We played through the first two adventures with our cast of characters pulled from Scooby Doo, and things worked well. The investigations worked nicely, the narrative clicked, and players were able to contribute and take part in different parts of the adventure. Exploding dice rolls took out enemies with surprising regularity in both of these scenarios, and since our group wasn't as combat focused they had trouble with the combat encounters.

DarkgarX hated the constant d4 rolling, as having to pick those things up every turn got to be a pain. I swear the game industry needs to do more to redesign that particular platonic solid for ease of use, as the d4 is the Windows 8 of roleplaying.

The third scenario where the characters had to check out an abandoned spaceship never got off the ground for us, and that one did not click with our group. Yes, this is sort of an Alien and horror inspired design, but in the spirit of blasting space bugs, give me my laser pistols and cool sci-fi weapons and let my players blow off some steam. We did an spooky investigation in the first scenario, a survival game in the second, and my group was ready for a bit more action.

It is also a game good for beginners and new players, as it gets you up and running and it doesn't have a deep system complexity. There is such a thing as good system complexity versus bad, of course. With Mongoose's Legend, the complexity is rewarding to players that dive in, and we found ourselves ranking that game higher than this one in terms of how the game rewards you in terms of special rules and character advancement. This was a great 'pick up and play' system, while Legend was a great system for those who wanted to shine and take it to the bad guys at higher levels of play.

Would we keep playing this after the playtest? For one-off games, I don't see why not. I sense a hesitance from some of my players, as they are a more experienced group and appreciate a deeper system complexity that rewards progression and complexity of combat and tactics. As a universal 'house system?' Probably not for us. This is simple and no-fuss enough to do the job for many, and it works well, so many groups would probably need little else than the starting book.

I enjoyed this game, and I liked its simplicity and unified mechanics. It did everything I threw at it well, despite some bad choices by characters (in character design) for the adventures we had - they were able to contribute and survive. Not every player wants such a simple game, so your experience may vary. To me, I could enjoy playing this on a regular basis with friends, as it gamemasters well and it is expressive enough for worlds of adventure.