Playtest #1: Adventures Under the Laughing Moon

We picked up Adventures Under the Laughing Moon - Role-playing Game (Volume 1) at our last comic-con (Las Vegas) and got this one signed by the creator - which is pretty cool. This is our current RPG play test, and we are working through some of the character design rules and how the game works. Design-wise, it is an interesting game.

This is sort of a D&D type game, and the basic set does a good job of laying out the 'basic set' of the first few spells, monsters, and options for building characters. This is a skill-based system without levels, and it also uses sectional hit points and wounding, along with an over-riding stamina system designed to subdue you before your character's limbs are hacked off. Wounds take off body part hits, but all wounds do stamina damage and reduce your character's effectiveness and consciousness.

The big difference with this game is that special combat moves are bought into with skill points, such as sweep, head butt, block, and parry. You have to level up all your tricks, and all combat actions are used with a randomly rolled number of combat "action points" each character determines each turn.

Where some games abstract combat, this one dives into details and reminds me of some ways of the Runequest or Legend systems. The difference between this and those other two is this has a combat-stunt focus, where Legend has more of an abstract and free-form stunting system where the player invents moves (using their skill as the base) and the referee gives it a difficulty. This is point-buy character build melee stunting, and it is interesting from a building characters sort of point of view.

Character generation is straightforward, and there are some omissions that we would like cleared up, but we haven't gotten hung up. We wish there were a few more points to spend during character creation, as we are finding we are ignoring all the neat options that you can buy for just being able to hit or cast magic at a basic (more than 5%) level. It feels tough to get the character you are feeling you want, at least for us, so maybe we are doing something wrong (or characters really are very inexperienced to start).

We wanted a few more world details as well, and yes, we haven't read the books this was based on, so this will be an interesting play test. That said, we wanted some background detail about the world to get us started, like a really cool  starting town with some lore or something along those lines.

Also, pregens! What we would give for some pre-generated characters for use with new players. I can see this game taking 4+ hours to explain to a new group and go through character creations page-by-page, this was our experience with 4th Edition D&D, and this one with a edetailed point-buy system feels like it will be harder for new players to grasp what's important and what they need to perform well with the idea they have in mind.

This looks interesting, and it is a beautiful game - full color throughout. We expect to be having fun with this one and reporting back soon, so stay tuned.

Old-School Gaming is our Minecraft

"Take a look at this," the computer sales clerk says, "Dual SLI cards, the latest Intel 8-core, 64 GB of RAM, and..."

"But does it play Minecraft?"

Minecraft is a cultural phenomenon, and it is also one of the dominant forces in gaming today. It "gets it" by being so simple. It isn't complicated, it doesn't need RPG stats, and it doesn't need the latest game engine - it just is what it is, simple and infinitely expandable. It is also fun.

I am reminded of old-school gaming in this regard. Go into the dungeon, steal the loot, get XP, and avoid monsters. Combat isn't supposed to be exciting or well-balanced, this is a dangerous world and you have limited resources, so cheating the system is a part of the game. Fighting sucks, and it is an overall loss if you have to go in with spells flying and spells slinging.

I think that is a huge difference between true old-school gaming and the old-school clones (and I feel D&D 5 is an old-school clone as well) - there is this notion of a balanced, fun combat experience. This started with the magic-card-if-ication of D&D with 3E, where yes, tactical combat is a big draw of the game, and of course "modern" game designs have to make every aspect of the game fun and enjoyable. With 4E, we went back to the tabletop, and everything was 'balanced and fun tactical combat'. With 5E, we still keep the 3E balancing, but 2E's scripted story-gaming comes back with players having parts written in for them during character generation, and builds and combat are designed to be satisfying.

All choices are good, right?

Not really. Combat isn't supposed to be enjoyable or balanced in true old-school gaming. The rules aren't designed to protect you from bad choices, lousy rolls, or stupidity. You are a lucky hit away from a kobold killing your cleric, a poison dart killing your thief, a fireball killing your fighter, or an accidental step into a pit full of green slime away from melting your expendable magic user. Avoiding combat is what makes the game fun, tricking monsters, sneaking through the dungeon and disarming the traps, and putting the royal golden corkscrew to the dungeon master's well-thought out design.

Old school gaming is closer to a puzzle game or a text-adventure game than it is Diablo 3. You listen, you think, and you act carefully. You avoid combat if you can. You beat the dungeon master's diabolical designs. You sneak out with the golden chalice and the princess, and laugh as the dragon wonders "what just happened?"

With Minecraft, yes, combat is enjoyable, but it is also something that doesn't net profit (other than xp and an occasional item). Some combats are less enjoyable, and should be avoided (creepers). The zombies will show up, and you need to defend your fort. The game is not all about "enjoyable combats" though, since building and exploring are the game's main focus. There is a theme in Minecraft of "make your own fun" and I feel this is closer to an old-school game's philosophy than the more modern balanced/fun videogame-inspired designs.

In an old-school game, you were given a bunch of pieces and told to "make your own fun". With newer games (starting at 2E), you were given "stories" to "play through" and (with 3E) "balanced combat systems" to enjoy "building characters" with (4E and 5E). In an old school game, a 9 hit die green dragon could come stomping into town, and players were left to figure out how to deal with it through wits or clever roleplaying. Fighting it? Out of the question.

In newer games, we get the concept of "CR" or challenge rating tool to build encounters with, and a dungeon master who pulled the green dragon plot on a group would be frowned upon for not "balancing the encounter". It is really an alien concept pulled from self-balancing videogames, and one I feel that has no place in old-school gaming. If a party of level one characters wanted to go out and lure an owlbear into a pit and steal the beast's loot while it tried to climb out - so be it. That owlbear could probably clock them all in two rounds, but the risk and danger is what made the game fun.

The dungeon master didn't 'balance' things, the dungeon master created the world, and the players judged risks and were free to explore and adventure wherever they chose, and against whatever level of challenge they thought they could get away with. Sound familiar? Yes, that's Minecraft. A dangerous world where you could do anything you want, and there are no 'stories' or 'balanced fights' - you make your path through the world, you cheat death, and you deal with the challenges by working with what you find.

You are free to make your own adventures, and you are free to take as big of a risk as you can find out there in the world. The more you explore, loot, and exploit - the better off you are. And if you can do it all while avoiding unnecessary fights? Genius. In a way, it is philosophically the same game.

D&D 5: Expensive Modules

I am not a fan of the $50 adventure module format. I miss the days where adventure modules were lined up and sold like $6-$8 32-64 page folios, almost like magazines on a rack.

Yes, these new adventure modules are great-looking, with super-high production values, gorgeous art, and they are beautiful collectors items. But to me, they are just that, collectors items. Without a PDF so I can run them from my tablet, they have little use for me. They feel like they are primarily for reading and not playing. Would I like to read them? Yes, I am a fan of fantasy and would, but I still have that buyer's regret of never being able to use them.

Yes, you can get these for $30 on Amazon, but that's not the point. You are killing my FLGS if the price of these things are so high I feel forced to go to Amazon to buy. And yes, Pathfinder's adventure paths are more than two to three times as expensive for a 6-book run of $20-25 each, I get that (but those can be picked up in PDF for $12-14 each). But with the adventure path, this is a spread out release across a longer period of time and it sort of is like buying a quarterly magazine.

Still, I miss the old days. Not every adventure needs to be turned into a summer blockbuster. While it is nice to see some of the classics re-imagined, my group doesn't find much enjoyment in living in the grand spectacle. We tend to like the small, personal, local, and gritty adventures where things are down to Earth and less IMAX save the world. I miss the original Tomb of Horrors in that thin little paper folio, or the Slave Lords series. They are now purchasable via PDF, and that is a good thing, but I feel the larger direction here is all wrong - at least for me and my group.

With an expensive module, I have buyer's regret. I could buy the Witcher III for this price. I simply don't know if I will ever use another mega-module or if my group will ever play it.

Core rulebooks? Yes, I can justify those, since they open up options for all adventures. Modules? I prefer them to be smaller in scope and in price. Not every release needs to be a huge, AAA affair, and the lack of third-party support hurts my choices for buying the adventures I want to buy. It feels like it is getting harder for me to stay excited for this version because of the lack of options in rules, creative third-party support, and adventures. The D&D 5 system has beautiful books with an interesting simple system, but I dislike how tightly controlled everything feels with this version of the game.

Pass the Book?

We have both the Legend RPG and the $1 Legend PDF available over at RPGNow. Which one do we use more? I can't say we have even opened the softcover book yet.

The PDF? On my tablet and phone, and each chapter is printed out and stabled together in handy booklets. We could even have more than one copy of the character creation chapter printed out so more than one player can reference it when building characters.

You don't know how nice it is to be able to hand someone the skills chapter, someone else the character creation chapter, and keep the combat and adventuring chapters open to pages and ready for use. It's like someone has revolutionized our gaming experience, and I just can't force myself to go back to the hardcover "single user" soft or hardcover book way of doing things again.

And if the character creation chapter ever gets worn out, ripped, and stained I do not care at all, as I can always print out another copy. That isn't so easy with a $50 hardcover. I also have these on a secure and private little place in cloud storage so I can access them anywhere I go. My D&D 5 books? On my shelf, at home. With a PDF, if I have Internet access and optionally a printer I can play.

I like collecting things, and I like collecting books. I like the feel of them, and I like reading them. As I collect more, it gets harder to justify new ones. And for playing with them? I collect, so I always worry about them getting damaged - and many are. But PDFs? PDFs don't get damaged during play. I can collect a lot more PDFs than I can books. And PDFs are way more useful during play. So much so I find it hard to play games that aren't on PDF.

Now there is a limitation to all this. 1,000+ page games need not apply for my PDF good feelings and excitement, as those are way too huge to print out and own in a usable form with just the PDF. I like short, tight, simple games where more of the rules are in a core 64-128 page form, and easily printable and dividable into sections. I feel PDFs for larger games are only good for reference material or online reading, as printing out the spells of even basic Pathfinder would take reams of paper and be a nightmare to use at the table. Even though I have many Pathfinder PDFs, they are not as useful as PDFs of shorter and simpler games.

So there is a sweet spot for PDF games. Short enough to print out everything and organized enough that dividing the book up makes sense and allows players to pass chapters around as needed. The future isn't the traditional coffee-table RPG book collection for our groups, it is taking the form of a smaller, lighter, and easier to use and play with set of electronic documents that can be used how and in the forms we want to use.

Simplifying

I am in a process of simplifying the number of games I play, and the amount of books I want to play with. Going back in the box are games we never play, and on our shelves will be only the basics.

I mean "just the books you need to play" and nothing more.

Pathfinder is now just the main book and the Bestiary 1, and possibly the Gamemastery Guide. D&D 4 is just the first three books. D&D 5 is just the first three as well. D&D 3.5 is that nice foil-covered collector's set.

Legend is up on the shelf because we like the game, but my PDF printouts are seeing more use than the main book so go figure. Our World of Darkness collection is up there too in its madness and glory, along with Exalted.

The rest of the books? Away from the core books and in another room, but on a shelf in case we need them. I don't want them out, I don't want them creating a wall of "play me" and intimidating us with their weight and presence.

Games have gotten way to fat nowadays, super-sized and written primarily for the collector's market. Who plays these things anyways? Even with the basic three books, many of the big-name fantasy games are pushing 1,000 pages of rules and content, and you wonder where that simple game went, the one we started this hobby with.

Game designers love to hear themselves talk, I guess.

But seriously, simplification is a good thing. Without a ton of books weighing you down, you are free to improvise and use your imagination. That's the point of this hobby, to make stuff up and have fun, no matter what game you play.

I like to collect, but I would never play with my collection - even just a single game. I like simple games, ones where we make up what happens next, and we don't have to navigate down a path of rules, treasure, or options to find something 'legal' and 'by the rules' to add to the night's festivities.

This is why Legend is so interesting for us right now. It is sort of a Traveller take on fantasy, and there isn't much in there. We are free to make most of the stuff up, and we are having a blast. With an active imagination, it is a great little game, and open for many possibilities. I don't want to sort through a thousand pages of monsters, spells, and magic items just to provide a sea of meaningless options to a game we have an idea for and want to keep it focused.

It is pretty hard to focus a D&D game on a single topic, say pirates, because there is so much stuff in the game that says "not pirates" to us. When the Drow crawl out of a cave, wizards start using teleport to skip ahead to the next port, and someone pulls out a flying carpet the players who want the focused pirates-on-the-seven-seas-experience are sitting there saying, "well...yar, I guess." Yes you can focus the game, but then you get into a game of "yes or no" on 95% of the content in the books.

So simplify.

Put away books you bought only to collect.

Focus your fun on the things that you enjoy.

You may find yourself a little happier and actually playing those games on your shelf.

D&D 5: A Cultural Icon?

From yesterday:

Why one of D&D's biggest video game devs thinks that tabletop game has lost its way

I read this, and it is an interesting read. My first thought, of course he wants to push Pathfinder, he's making a game with Paizo. That's not a surprise. But he is connected to the D&D community, the creators there, and he has a long history with the brand.

He wonders if D&D can survive in such a big corporate structure. Now, Disney is also pretty huge, but they also own other huge things and they are good at running big things, like Marvel, Pixar, the Muppets, and now Star Wars. Big companies can run big things. But can they run small things? Or do these small things need to become big?

He wonders if D&D will never be as big as an evergreen and always profitable Monopoly, and thinks if the game was run by a smaller, TSR-like entity things would be better. Part of me wonders if this isn't some frustration over the electronic gaming for the brand (which has always been locked up in one way of another), but I do feel there is a genuine feeling of concern here.

Monopoly is a different game than D&D. It's more a collection of ideas under a common theme. You can argue it is more marketing and a pop-culture phenomenon than it is a game. It's like Pokemon in a way, Pokemon can be a lot of things, and it is a product that can be turned into a million different products since it is a strong brand with identifiable pop-culture icons. Same thing with Monopoly, the Monopoly guy, the car, the board, the look, the colors, the way it's played, the shoe, chance cards, and the dog. All those pieces can be reshuffled and remixed into a billion Monopoly products.

Forever.

Now D&D.

What is it? If you strike out all the things that are not in the public domain or SRD (and thus in Pathfinder), it is the unique collection of sort-of copyrightable product identity. Beholders. Mind flayers. Owlbears. Drow. And basically anything unique to the game that can't appear anywhere else, such as the game worlds and other trademarked pieces. I don't feel those are a unique and identifiable set of cultural icons, they are just funny-shaped monsters and a couple worlds that once dominated the NYT fiction charts.

I don't feel the 'product identity' pieces of D&D will ever achieve cultural icon status. Pathfinder didn't need them, and it is hard to get excited about a monster you are supposed to hate. A beholder is no Pikachu. D&D's problem is that the 'cultural icons' are the player characters, each one is player created, unique, and it is hard to market an icon that every player creates a unique instance of. If you were playing Elminster or Ash Ketchum, fine, but D&D for every player is a unique player character.

And these player characters exist in every roleplaying game, Pathfinder, GURPS, Legend, Traveller, and so on.

D&D is not every fantasy adventure. It tries to be because it is so generic and malleable, but the same experience exists in a million other games. It exists in World of Warcraft. It exists in Game of Thrones. Assassins Creed. Any dungeon crawling game on Steam. Any Final Fantasy. You can get that D&D experience anywhere, because fantasy roleplaying is not defined by having a beholder and drows or any other piece of product identity attacking the player characters.

Those are just monsters, and they can be any monster in any world, because it doesn't matter anymore. People don't care that the creature in the next room is an 'official' D&D brand displacer beast. Again, Pathfinder proved you can create a whole new mythos to replace D&D's and people will accept it and be excited by it. They are just monsters, they are infinitely replaceable by a new shape with a scowl, fangs and horns.

The worlds are something else. Those are fiction. Those are stories. To me, they feel like a complete mess since 4th Edition, and their futures are unclear, except as being legacy supported settings with little real future support. They need a reboot badly. They need their timelines wiped out. They need a creative team to recreate them for this generation. Like Batman, they need to become cultural properties of their own, and reset from time to time to keep them relevant and fresh.

The worlds and unique NPC characters are likely the best path out of this quandary, but those exist often as a force hostile to player characters. Nobody wants powerful GM-NPCs competing with their player characters. Nobody wants railroad-like modules that force a story on a party.

Roleplaying and D&D is like a box of art supplies. You create what you want to create with it, and one crayon is as replacable than the next. It doesn't matter to your picture if your red crayon came from a box of non-Crayola brand colors. It's a crayon. You roleplay. In a fantasy world. With a set of rules. Specifics do not matter. It's a hobby.

To some, it matters that they are all Crayola crayons. Fine, if that is how you want to color your picture, it's cool. If you want to play D&D and your group enjoys the experience, very cool and more power to you. It is a good game and enjoy it. But for the huge population of players enjoying fantasy gaming and roleplaying, it is a larger community with many diverse options where everything can be played and enjoyed. As a company trying to make something in this environment "big" like Monopoly "big", I don't see how you do it since everything is so replaceable and individual-player creator-focused.

Maybe D&D has lost its way, or maybe it is still relevant and on the path, but in another way. It inspired a million other games and worlds, and on this fertile ground a garden of options and opportunities grew. As a large cultural phenomenon I can get excited about, like a Star Wars?

No. I don't feel it.

As an interesting set of rules that gives me a new option to play with others? I can handle that, along with all the other games I enjoy. "Monopoly big" really doesn't matter to me.

D&D 5: Thoughts by Feargus Urquhart on the Game

Check out this story over on Polygon about D&D 5, it is a good one by Brian Crecente interviewing Feargus Urquhart:

Why one of D&D's biggest video game devs thinks that tabletop game has lost its way

Great stuff to think about, and it is an interesting take.