ACKS II, Preview PDFs

I really like the ACKS II rules, and I have been following the Kickstarter and have the art-free PDFs to read. They removed all OGL content from the game, and the game is better for it. D&D has enshrined certain immersion-breaking tropes into the genre, and I noticed all ESP is gone from the game. Displacer cloaks, invisibility 10' radius, and detect secret doors are gone. Wizard eye and spell storing (spell and item) are gone. Wands of detecting secret doors and traps are gone.

A few ability scores have been renamed; intelligence is now intellect. Wisdom is now willpower. Clerics are now crusaders. The race-as-class entries are thematic and tighter-tied to the world.

One of the most exciting aspects of the changes is the removal of problematic, game-breaking spells and magic items. This shift requires players to engage in more strategic dungeon-crawling, relying less on spells and magic items and more on their own wit and skill.

If you make the SRD a golden idol over fun gameplay, you will inherit all of its flaws and weaken your game. If you approach fantasy gaming with a "completist" attitude, where you must have everything, you will bring broken things into your game and hurt the player experience.

Another improvement here is tightening the official world to the rules and eliminating the assumption of a generic world. I have enough generic B/X systems, and seeing something different is refreshing.

Of all my B/X games, this one looks like my "last one standing" after I put many in storage.

Game Designers

Any version of D&D and almost every OSR game shares the same flaw. They assume the game designers can do a better job than you. This one thing kills my interest in both the OSR and Open 5E, and it sucks.

I am proficient with GURPS and other classless games, like Runequest, Basic Roleplaying, and Open Quest. I look at all these new 5E games, and it feels like a bunch of Seattle game designers all arguing about who has the best implementation of each class - a set of assumptions based on stereotypes that define your role in the game.

They are trying to sell games to people with strong senses of personal identity, and the message is, "Please conform to a class."

Who says that a game designer knows who you are at the table?

Aren't YOU the best expert on who your character is?

It is hard to get excited about new versions of 5E, like Tales of the Valiant. I love what they did with this game. It is one of the best versions of 5E out there, evenly matched with the excellent Level Up Advanced 5E, which brings a flat math model and old-school sensibilities to 5E.

This even hurts old standbys like Castles & Crusades and some of my OSR favorites. All of them are fatally flawed. Who says my bard has to take these choices and nothing else? Why do I need more "killing power" if I never use it? Why do these games give me powers I never use or am interested in? Do the game designers "expect" me to follow some script through "discovery" that they know far ahead of me "discovering" it, and I can't form my own combos of skills, powers, and abilities?

Class-based games feel like this big railroad.

Yes, a class-based game is more accessible to sell to a group. You aren't all going in a thousand directions during character design. They are quick. You have established party roles built in.

But for solo play?

Why?

I get bored of these games and their safety rails and train tracks. I know what every character is and will do, and they never develop organically.

Games that give me power interests me more, and they are killing my interest in the offerings of "expert game designers."

You will know the day you look in a mirror and realize you are the same thing.

Level Based Games vs. Character Builders

I like Community 5E; I really do. It works well for stories with larger groups with more cookie-cutter characters. But the entire "level track" with "pre-picked options" really sucks for me. I still find myself drifting away from 5E and towards games that allow me to build a character through play.

I don't like how 5E "forces you to get better at killing" and how it puts classes in tightly restrictive boxes. The designers tell you, "This will be all that you can do," and there is no freedom or ability to grow in ways outside of that box.

If all my bard does is social stuff, why is he getting better at killing and casting magic?

Character Builder games like Runequest, BRP, Open Quest, GURPS, and Dungeon Fantasy capture my imagination. I can play these solo and have my character progress organically; if all they do is social roleplay, they will start growing in those areas. If all they do is combat, they will grow there. I will spend points on thief skills if they only do stealth and roguish activities. If they need to be skilled in culture, history, and specialized knowledge, guess what? That is where they focus their improvement. And they can fall behind in every one of those areas. If they only use magic and concentrate there, that is what they become better at. 

They can choose to be "good enough" in combat and defense if that is their thing.

They can fall behind in every area, too, but improving those abilities requires using them. Even in a point-based game such as GURPS, it is easy to say, "If you did not use it, pay for training, or somehow find a reason to say why you got better in an area - you can't improve it." BRP is a more direct system of putting checkboxes by things you used and rolling for improvement.

5E sucks like AD&D sucked, especially in forcing characters down "set paths." It sucked in the 1980s, and it still sucks today. There was a reason everyone quit AD&D and played GURPS through the 1990s. Class-based games sucked. They were relics of the 1970s. That is the way almost everyone saw them back then.

If you play D&D for the "nostalgia flashback" to the 1980s, you will eventually drop the game for GURPS. We all got sick of D&D. Roll your retro-flashback clocks forward to 1988, and you will see what I mean. And many were playing Runequest and Rolemaster, too. Oh, and there was always Rifts. The Stranger Things kids would be playing Rifts in the sequel series. You play Rifts because everyone you know hates it, making you the cool kid.

By the end of the 1990s, you will have given it all up for Vampire, BattleTech, and Magic the Gathering. Most just left for video games and MMOs and never looked back.

Character-builder games are superior in every way to class-based games. With a class-based game, I can "see" the progression ahead of time. It is boring. I know what I am getting. I look at the next level, and nothing surprises me. In fact, I look at the next level and see how I will not improve in an area - such as social skills - so I give up doing social-skill stuff. Let the bard do it. I will never get any better at it as a fighter. Even with the "new style" background, heritage, etc., generation systems in 5E still fall short. So I can pick a few things before I get on the rollercoaster; it is still the same ride.

With a character-builder game, the adventures I have will shape my character.

With a class-based game, my class tells me what adventures I should go on.

Open Quest Redux, and GURPS

Open Quest has put Mythras in storage. This is just the more accessible and complete game, especially compared to Classic Fantasy Imperative and the base Mythras book (still too small type to read easily). I want Mythras to rock, but as they convert to the ORC license and get material reprinted and cleaned up, it does not feel like either Mythras or Classic Fantasy is there.

Open Quest stands out for its simplicity and directness, a design choice that sets it apart from other games. Its most intriguing aspect is the absence of traditional classes, which paves the way for a unique gaming experience. This is akin to the fun and diverse play options offered by GURPS, where the lack of classes opens up a plethora of exciting possibilities.

The one thing that keeps me from using 5E for many stories is classes. I will have a more social or story-based campaign, and a character that should not be "becoming more and more of a killer" is suddenly becoming one and not improving social and story skills. I like the concept of a character "falling behind" in fighting power because they aren't getting into fights and having to go back and train to compensate for the lack of combat ability.

All of this is slowly pushing me back into GURPS. Open Quest is a great game, one of the best BRP-style dungeon games on the market. But for how I play, it would still fall short. It would be better than 5E for me, but GURPS is the king of character builders. GURPS also lets you design a 1,000-point historian with zero combat power; in that element, they would be the best in the world.

I get it; 5e is fun from a "structured play" aspect.

But when I tell stories, they are never structured. Do you mean to tell me that if my mage spends six sessions in social situations, talking, solving problems, and not casting a spell - the XP will be enough for them to get a level and be a better killer and user of magic?

I didn't even use one spell!

Now I know more?

What is even dumber is that I have zero social skills and problem-solving abilities. Here is some killing power! Thank you for being social and solving all those problems!

I have a game in which I am doing X, Y, and Z, which gives me more power to do A, B, and C.

That sort of "no reward play" leads me to quit. I will never get rewarded for XYZ (social and problem solving), never do ABC (combat and killing), and at every level, it gets worse. Nothing helps me do XYZ, and I get worse at it as my combat power goes up like some JRPG character on a preset, hardcoded into the ROM progression track. They will never be good at anything other than making a damage number go higher and higher.

Some classes force you into killing. My fighter isn't given many social skills since the game has a built-in death bias towards some classes. This bias is lame and has been the fatal flaw in D&D and class-based games for 50 years.

This is why we left D&D in the 1980s for GURPS.

If the king sends my character to stop two warring tribes, I can approach it however I want. I could get history books, spend character points on specialized history skills for each tribe, and come at them knowing everything they are about. Your tribe did this 300 years ago, but this tribe still holds your sacred hunting ground; let's make a swap and figure this out peacefully.

Or I could go combat, get tactics and battle leadership skills, pick a side, and wipe the other out.

I could go stealthy and subterfuge.

I could go 100% diplomatic.

I could use history against them.

Anyway, there is a skill that can support my problem-solving.

You get a typical 5E module, and it is either an OSR-like "dungeon atlas" to kill through, or all of the above solutions have to be "thought of" by the writer of the adventure and put in there as options they choose for you - since 5E characters kill first and think later. 5E Adventures presents killing as the first solution and has to go out of its way to show a few non-violent options (if they do at all, since combat is "fun," just like a video game).

Open Quest would do this style of play nicely in a d100 BRP-style framework. You control your advances. Thus, you control the areas in which your character improves.

GURPS is still the master of this style of play. It has everything Open Quest doesn't, but in some ways, doesn't need. However, I still like being able to design characters down to the point, buy advantages and disadvantages, and specialize in skills most games would dismiss as "needless, pointless detail."

If I am playing a game where needing to know specialized things matters?

It matters a whole lot.

Solo (Zoser)

The Solo system for Cepheus Engine has always been strange to work with, and it differs from the more popular Mythic Solo tools in a few significant ways. For one, in Solo, you make a plan, determine the difficulty and danger level, tally up the modifier to the roll, and then roll the dice.

Success means the plan worked, and you are done.

Failure means the plan failed, and now you must adjust.

Consequences are rolled for either result. If the plan succeeds, this has a positive modifier and can include results where characters get killed, with a greater chance of this on a dangerous plan that fails.

Then, you write a story answering the question, "What happened?"

It is a strange system because I don't see the need for skill checks. You just determine if you have the skill, which is a positive modifier. It is like I don't need characters at all, just plans. Skills play into positive modifiers, and characters play into plans, but I don't see too much of a need for characters.

The system is innovative in that I haven't seen too many "plan-based" solo play systems.

Myself? The future is not predetermined. If a plan signals a failure, and something terrible happens, I will start the end of the mission in media res and have characters fight to avoid that fate or make it worse. Most "easy-peasy" plans, yes, just say what happened, but there are times when I want to know what went down, have a chance for characters to play a few turns of combat, and try to salvage a bad situation for the better.

Something worse could happen. A result where nobody gets killed could be that half the party gets wiped out. That is the price for trying to change history. Could they change history, turning a failed plan into a success? It may be possible with a few critical success rolls, but that adverse fate will haunt them later.

Is the failure or success still predetermined?

Yes. A failed plan is still a failed plan.

How it fails will be how you play it out. The same goes for success. You may get to the end and wonder how you could fail, but you still do. You could lose it all, yet that roll for success means you still won. It may fail or succeed in a way you did not expect.

The consequences can change more drastically. You tried to change fate. Or maybe you did.

I like to use my starship combat systems, run interpersonal combats, and do my Car Wars battles. I don't want an abstract system taking it all away, only for the boring parts. So "be kind, rewind" is still how I use the system to lay out what happened. I go back and fill in the middle. But that is when I start playing if I so choose. If I don't like the result, I can change things. Maybe.

But I always leave the door open to return to the critical moment, set up the scene, and begin a short play session to figure out what happened. This has full combat, skill rolls, exploration, and all the other parts I love using. A character may be able to talk themselves out of trouble. They may have failed the mission, but what damage did they inflict?

It is a different take on solo gaming, but I like deciding when it is "play time" versus "plan time" and letting the dice fall where they may.

Autoduel GURPS/Champions 2024

I am working on converting Classic Car Wars to a 3d6-or-less system, such as GURPS or Hero System. The ideal goal is to use the 3d6 system for the to-hits, while everything else—damage, handling, combat, and vehicle designs—still use the Car Wars system and keeps the "metal underneath" the same.

Damage is going to scale. Car Wars to Champions is a 3-to-1 scale, so 1d6 Car Wars is 3d6 Champions. Car Wars to GURPS is more like 18-to-1, based on the 0.50 cal. M2HB (7dx2) and the 66mm LAW (6dx6). So if a LAW in Car Wars does 2d6, that is 36d6 in GURPS, and the 0.50 MG in GURPS does 14d6, which is close enough to 18d6, so 1d6 in Car Wars, which matches the MG damage.

To-hit modifiers in both games are doubled. So, if firing at the front of a car is a -1 in Car Wars, that is a -2 in Champions or GURPS. Use Car Wars for all to-hit modifiers, with the only exception being the OCV and DCV modifiers in Champions - the driver's OCV and target driver's DCV do apply to the to-hit roll (if they have Combat Driver skill otherwise it is zero), as they do in Champions. This was a cool rule in the Autoduel Champions days, where a driver's abilities could make the vehicle harder to hit.

Do not do size and range modifiers with either system! Stick with Car Wars' range and to-hit to calculate the final CW to-hit modifier, then multiply by two.

To-hit modifiers for weapons are based on a Car Wars 7+ to-hit number. Every point above or below is a +/-2 modifier to hit when using the gun. Targeting computers factor in as usual, so a hi-res target will give a -4 to-hit modifier (lower is better).

For handling, use the Car Wars Control Table. If you get a 'safe" result, do not make a driving skill check. If you get a number 2 through 6, that is your negative modifier to your driving skill check to avoid a roll on the Crash Table. So if your vehicle is at 60 mph, and you have a current -2 HC, the number on the chart is 2, so you need to make a driving skill roll at a -2 to avoid a Crash Table roll. HC resets as it does in Car Wars.

With GURPS, the combat turn is one second, and you usually get one attack, so this is a very clean conversion. The Hero System rules use a Speed system from 1 to 12 and a 12-second turn. This does not work that well in Classic Car Wars, and the old Audoduel Champions' way of handling it is allowing characters to make a vehicular weapon (not hand weapon) attacks every second (like SPD 12) but zero out OCV and skill bonuses on non-acting phases.

This means an SPD 4 character in the Hero System who acts on phases 3, 6, 9, and 12 and gets their full skill and OCV bonuses on those phases only. They can attack in phases 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, and 11, but at an OCV or zero.

Hero System DCV always applies; this helps balance the "firing every phase" issue below!

Stick to the Hero System phases when making hand weapon attacks or using superpowers. So that SPD 4 characters can make a hand weapon or superpower attack every 3 seconds. This is a change from Car Wars, but given the games, it makes sense. This also puts people on foot at a more significant disadvantage than vehicles since they can get fired at every phase.

This has stayed the same since Autoduel Champions, and letting characters keep their full DCV (even in non-acting phases) helps balance this out and keeps superheroes from being sitting targets by a stream of per-phase machinegun fire. Haying for a DCV of 6 is going to be a huge benefit when the attacking vehicle is acting off-phase, and the attacker can't use their OCV and skill bonuses.

Movement should be done in Car Wars, with everything in mph, including foot movement. I know this will mess up Hero System movement rates, where characters only move during their phase, but we are entering "simulation land," where all foot movement is done per phase.

Hero System uses meters, so do a rough conversion and multiply by 3 for feet. For simplicity, assume Hero System "meters per turn" equals "miles per hour." Most characters in Hero System move 12m, which is about 12.5 mph in Car Wars, which is running speed foot movement (Car Wars Compendium). If a character has a running superpower of 40m per turn, he runs at 40 mph, and all movement is done according to Car Wars (every second).

Speaking of Autoduel Champions, we were sort of inspired by this project since we played it a lot in the 1980s. We had our own Traveller-like system for our game, but having Champions' superpowers convert easily was a huge plus. It allowed us to do the mixed superheroes and Car Wars campaign we loved.

And you can tell we played many of these games since these conversions are very natural for me to bust out as I think through how the games are played.

If I were to do our game today, our Traveller-inspired 2d6 system, I would skip all the newer versions of Cepheus and go straight for the digest-sized Cepheus Light. The skills are 99% compatible with Car Wars and are all 2d6 and N+ compatible. The personal combat rules can be used instead of the ones in Car Wars. The only rules I would add are the optional Traits system (30 XP to buy a new one) and the Cepheus Enhanced Edition rule for raising an ability score (3x new level in XP).

Why Cepheus Light and not one of the newer versions? I don't need anything in the newer versions. It is digest-sized and feels like a Car Wars book. The game even has a "cargo" system that works directly with Car Wars to haul loads between cities (Grav Vehicles would be Auto Parts or the cars themselves).

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/257644/cepheus-light

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/262129/cepheus-light-traits

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/342060/non-random-character-generation-for-cepheus-light

Those three are really all you need. Another benefit? If you need a simplified RPG for Battletech, that works just as nicely. For Battletech, you may want to use a more complete and modern edition since you will get a lot of extra "sci-fi stuff" you will use, but for Car Wars, Light is all you need.

Goodbye, Pathfinder 1e

My Pathfinder 1e books are in storage now.

I tried running a GURPS campaign, but meh. I was fighting the world more than I was having fun. With this much work, I would create an original world and have fun there instead. Dungeon Fantasy needs its own world and setting, which I have and will talk about soon.

Theme park worlds were excellent in the 2010s. Today, it is a cultural appropriation city. I would rather have a dedicated Egypt setting and Fantasy Africa than this. Everywhere you go, a Fantasyland, Adventureland, or other Disney-like little theme park area sits there and says, "Not Ravenloft, not Egypt, not Vikings, not science-fantasy, but close enough!"

Dedicated settings where it is one world, all Norse, with races and cultures that fit in that world, are far more immersive than this messy mix of everything, every culture, every race, and every culture. They end up being buffets of low-quality food but with great choices. At the end of the meal, you end up feeling sick.

Theme park worlds are also a source of the rot within the hobby, inviting in endless expansion books, grift opportunities, and encouraging every player to pick an "alien" background and nothing fits together; no one has to be a part of the culture of the world, and everyone is a special something or another. Pathfinder 1e was going there with the Advanced Race Guide, and there were far too many player races in the game by the end of the edition.

I would rather play in a Norse-themed world, where I have to read about the cultures, understand the diverse peoples, and make some hard choices on who my character is in this world. You play D&D or Pathfinder 2, and you will get the person at the table wanting to be a talking plant or Muppet and be the goofball when everyone else is trying to play seriously.

Theme park worlds invite everyone to be "the outsider," and they just feel touristy. Once you get the tourist, the planar crowd is not far behind, and then everyone is a particular "someone from somewhere else," at that point, I don't care about their characters since the players are not showing any effort to care about the world I am running.

One of the most toxic trends in modern gaming is escapist identity marketing; the game has to support being an anything tourist, and everyone that plays wanders through a theme park.

At this point, most locals look at the PCs like the locals look at tourists who wander through, destroy things, and take all the parking places.

Runequest's Glorantha killed the Pathfinder Golarion theme park for me. There are "elder races" here, but most of the backgrounds are a variety of diverse humans and mixes in between. There is much diversity here; you must read and care about the world to unlock it.

The world has a few themed areas that aren't blatantly "theme parky" like other worlds. These cultures may mirror some on Earth, but they are ultimately their own, with history and plenty of detail and flavor. And there is a ton of history to read. Runequest describes the world in one book, and there is a unique two-volume set if you want to dive deeper.

The Great Wheel and Pathfinder's Golarion have become far too cartoony and childish for my taste. I outgrew them. They are turning into this mass market; look at the cute things, smug heroes with attitudes, and mass market experiences that any 3D Hollywood animated movie for kids is these days. Both feel like Pixar or Dreamworks animated movie games; the worlds are bland, too much steampunk, and uninteresting. Some of the worlds rely too much on the old guard remembering them, and they are currently unsupported and left to decay.

Pathfinder 1e was visually appealing because of the "rule of cool" art. All of that has been erased and feels like a hangover in the setting today, a party the company wants to forget happened. The art can't carry a campaign setting alone, though. It is also dated and a little silly, and I prefer stylistic realism with a more serious tone. Even the remastered art tries too hard, feeling strangely surreal and unrealistic. Final Fantasy swords larger than a body belong in video games for kids. This is fantasy, but I outgrew that style when I gave up my PlayStation 1.

Give me a serious-toned world with history and a defined set of cultures and backgrounds, and let me enjoy digging in deep and being rewarded for my research.

And I was a super fan of Pathfinder 1e, and it all fell apart. I realized I had outgrown it, and there were better things to spend time with. The whole theme park thing made me cringe. I don't want to play in a rip-off of ancient Egypt, and Castles & Crusades has a Fantasy Egypt campaign guide where you can play in the actual setting in a fantasy context. There is far better out there, and a dedicated setting will make players invest in the setting with their background choices rather than play "another Dragonborn."

I am not selling the PF 1e books, but they are stored away and out of my mind.