Talking Game

Dungeon Twister 20th Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 12:05:00 +0000

I'm not sure if anyone is still reading, here - it's been a while since I updated, and even longer since I updated regularly.

But, on the off chance someone is still out there, Ludically is crowdfunding a new edition of Dungeon Twister. You have about a month left, if you want in on this. And you probably want in on this.

... Whaaaaaaat?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 17:19:00 +0000

I'm gobsmacked! It appears as though Skarka actually got the PDF of Far West released.

Now taking bets on how long before the physical copies are released to backers.

Synnibarr: Kickstarter Nearing Completion!?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 12:05:00 +0000

A while ago, I talked briefly about Synnibarr. I found the game to be nearly incomprehensible (and, honestly, I still do). I even used the word "bad" to describe it.

But, despite my experience with the game, I backed the Kickstarter because I was super-curious what three decades had done to Raven's design sense. Maybe he'd absorbed some of the lessons of newer story-focused games like Apocalypse World.

I mean ... it's not like his game could get any crunchier, right?

Realistically, I didn't expect to get anything from the Kickstarter. I honestly expected to just be throwing my money away. But, at the time, $80 was laughing fun money for me (oh to be there again). And there was always a chance I might get the game out of it. And, if I didn't, it was probable I'd get a good story or two out of it.

And then, two years post-funding, I got some PDFs from DTRPG. This was 2015, after just over a year of radio silence from the project. I figured that was all I was going to get from the project, and - I'll be honest - I've been too busy (yes, for seven years) to actually look at the PDFs.

Last month, nine years post-funding, there was an update letting us know that the game was live on DTRPG and we should e-mail them for fulfillment.

And it's true. The game is live on DTRPG. In all honesty, I think their pricing is too high. But they have been listening to feedback - even indirect feedback. For example, when it launched, The Ultimate Adventurers' Guide I had print and PDF available, but there were no bundles. Now there is a print + PDF bundle available that saves a chunk of change.

So I e-mailed them for fulfillment, thinking I was going to get three DTRPG coupon codes.

I did not.

Instead, I got two PDFs direct by e-mail and a note that the third was too large to e-mail and they were going to figure out how to get it to backers. I e-mailed back asking about coupon codes, and ... the next day I had a coupon code for that third book.

Again: They are listening and learning and improving.

I say "they," because I don't know how many folks are involved with this. It might be just Raven, chasing his passion, or he may have a team backing him up. No clue. And I don't really have a way to find out (I mean ... I could ask Raven, but I kinda like the ambiguity that comes with not knowing).

So I have, in fact, now started to look at the PDFs, and ... maybe I'm just too sleep-deprived for this, because I'm still bouncing off of it. The setting is as gonzo as ever it was, but the system is still not something I can wrap my head around. Even having read the quick-start and watched a couple of the videos Raven has shared on the World of Synnibarr Facebook page.

One of my goals for 2022 is to wrap my head around enough of the game that I can run a one-shot for some of my regular group. So that thumping you hear? It's me, beating my head on a wall as I try to understand what Raven wants me to do with his game.

Dungeon Twister: Still Playing, Still Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 12:05:00 +0000

I don't know if y'all realize this, but Dungeon Twister is still - nearly two decades later - my favorite game. And I love to play it. Just love it.

I know I mentioned a few years ago that it was on BoardGameArena.com (which is where most of my gameplay lives these days, although I do get to play in person on Wednesdays again). It's still there, and it's only gotten better. They've been slowly adding expansions, including the rooms (but not the gameplay) from the 3/4 player expansions. And if I'm reading this correctly, it's not Premium-only anymore!

A few weeks back, I spent some time playing rules support for a new player - there are new players for Dungeon Twister!

Then, a week or two later, I got an e-mail out-of-the-blue from someone I'd been e-mailing back-and-forth with when Prison had just dropped. He's introduced his son to the game - another new player!

I'm not going to scream that the community is growing - but I don't think it's shrinking as much as I'd thought it was.

I'm also really loving the gameplay on BGA. I'm seeing new tactics in play, and watching new players grow and develop. I'm still a mediocre player, but that's okay. I honestly don't mind losing games.

There are occasional bugs, but I've also learned a few things. Like, for example, I'd had a couple of details about the Anti-Magic room dead wrong (for nearly 20 years, I'd thought only the spaces next to the Artifact in the middle were anti-magic, for example).

Feel free, by the way, to challenge me. I'll play any DT, provided you make it turn-based. I'm a good opponent for when you need to boost your rating a bit.

There are other reasons for playing multiple games, too - if you play enough different games, you can qualify to test games that BGA has in Alpha. Some of these games are super-buggy, or need some work on their UI, but it's very cool to see what's coming (and just as cool to be able to contribute to the discussion of what needs fixing).

Either way, I'm still here and still chugging away. I hope you and yours are still doing well.

Getting Ready To Go Again

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 12:05:00 +0000

In early 2020, we put in-person Game Night on hold. The state had banned in-person gatherings, and, realistically, it wasn't safe. I was still dealing with the general public and going in to work every day, and several regular attendees were either immunocompromised or were one step removed from folks who were. I had (and still have) zero interest in my weekly game gathering being responsible for illness or death.

We had a couple of sparsely-attended in-person game nights in August of 2021, when our crew was vaccinated and the governor loosened restrictions on gatherings. And then numbers went up again and we put Game Night back on hold.

Our local mask mandate was lifted in March. At the time, I expected numbers to skyrocket upwards again - like they have every time restrictions were loosened. So I told the crew, "We'll give it some time to see what happens." Because there's no point in launching gaming if we're just going to turn right around and cancel again two weeks later.

But it's been a month, and the numbers haven't gone nuts. They're up, yes, but not rocketing up. And the core group is fully vaccinated.

So I'm steeling myself to get things rolling again. And ... it's scary.

We're starting over from near-zero. And we may need to stop again if things get bad again.

But we're gonna try.

Blood Bowl

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 12:05:00 +0000

A good friend of mine passed unexpectedly about a month ago. He's someone I gamed with in the mid-Nineties, in between high school and moving out on my own. Jeff introduced me to a lot of games - and a very different approach to some of them. If you've enjoyed reading my blog over the years, then you owe Jeff a small amount of gratitude, too.

The most impactful introduction he made for me was Blood Bowl, and so the weekend after he passed, I went to a Games Workshop store, and I picked up the new (2020) edition.

I have a ... complicated ... history with GW. They, for their part, have vacillated between rabidly anti-fan moves and actively supporting fansites, depending on who was in charge at any given time. Right now, they're starting to swing back to being anti-fan.

But Blood Bowl has always been That Game for me. Prior to it, I'd never played a board game that had an advancement mechanism - that'd been something I'd considered a dividing line between RPGs and Board Games. I'd also never enjoyed a sports-themed game - I'd tried a few, but they were always either oddly clunky or super-dry. Or both.

But Blood Bowl hit that sweet spot for me. They've released it a couple of times, and each time, there were some minor tweaks and adjustments. I got good at the game - I even won a couple of tournaments, including an official Rogue Trader tournament which gained for me the World's Ugliest Trophy.

Since then, other games have hit similar spots - especially when Games Workshop was at their absolute worst. I really enjoyed Elfball and Dreadball and Guild Ball, for example. But I kept coming back to Blood Bowl.

A week ago, I spent my weekend assembling figures. For 3rd Edition, the Blood Bowl figures were pretty much all two-piece single-pose or one-piece metal figures (other than some Big Guys and Star Players). When they re-released the game in 2016, they upgraded the figures to the current GW standard, which is ... a mixed blessing.

With 3e (which was 1994 all the way up until the 2016 release), I could buy a box and press-fit the Orc and Human players. I was ready to play in less than an hour from the time I opened the box.

With the Second Season Edition, I spent hours assembling figures. And the instructions in a couple of cases were so bad that I had to keep going to their website to see what the finished product was like. It was a continual exercise in frustration.

And that's bad. Blood Bowl had been an excellent gateway game for budding miniatures game hobbyists. Their simple figures meant that rookies who painted them often got decent results (but experienced hobbyists could still get spectacular results).

For example, here is the classic Champions of Death team. They're all metal figures, and it's clear which figures are zombies and which are skeletons, ghouls, or mummies...

The new version is all-plastic - and the poses are much more dynamic. But these guys are not easy to assemble, and are difficult to paint, too. Especially if you want to make it clear which figures are ghouls vs zombies or wights vs skeletons.

Every team is similarly changed. And, while they look nice, they're not a good entry point into the miniature painting hobby like they used to be. The assembly is frustrating, and the painting is - frankly - intimidating.

With all of that said, however, I've got a team of snotlings on their way to me. Because one of my first memories of the game was Jeff showing me a snotling, and expressing dismay that they were not playable in the (then-new) 3rd Edition.

When they get here, I'll be painting them in Seahawks colors. Classic Seahawks colors, not the current ones. Because Jeff loved the Hawks.

If things ever open back up again, I may look into joining (or hosting) a league again, too.

Games Played!

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 12:05:00 +0000

We successfully played some games last week. It wasn't a large crowd, and the games weren't new. But it was a definite turning point for me.

We started with Bohnanza (which was new to one of the players). It's the new edition, which doesn't include the Third Bean Field. I was initially puzzled by this, but then I read a ton of forum threads and learned that that third field is a trap. Players who buy it rarely win. Which - now that I think about it - matches my memory of the gameplay.

We followed that with a game of Skull & Roses (I know that the current edition is just Skull, but I have both of the original boxes).

We wrapped up with two games of We Didn't Playtest This At All. The game continues to be everything Fluxx wants to be. That is: good, random filler fun. If a game lasts ten minutes, you've probably missed a rule somewhere.

We wrapped a bit before ten. I was exhausted - I'm out of practice at dealing with people in person, and even when I'm used to people, I still find them tiring at best.

But it was good. And a start. With more to follow.

Horror Games: Why I Think I'm (Mostly) Done

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 05 May 2021 12:05:00 +0000

Last time, I mentioned that I think I'm done with horror RPGs, and, since then, I've spent some time thinking and percolating and trying to figure out how to say what I'm going to say here.

To explain my issues with horror gaming, I first need to talk a bit about Player Agency, Railroads, and Sandboxes.

Player Agency is the ability of the players (and their characters) to influence the story being told at the table. A lot of this is mechanical - AD&D, for example, didn't have any "Story Points" that players could spend to influence die rolls (or anything else). But a lot of it was the available adventure template(s), too - players are unlikely to negotiate with mindless undead in a dungeon. Even when adventures moved out of the dungeon, things mechanically didn't work well unless the players followed the path laid out for them by the GM. It's a style of play often referred to as a "railroad" - players must follow a set path in order to meet the adventure's goals.

Fast-thinking or flexible GMs were able to tweak this, allowing players to head in pretty much any direction. But, if you (for example) ignore that small-time necromancer a few towns over, he's going to get more powerful and be a bigger problem by the time your players decide to deal with him. But players can go anywhere they want. This is more of a "sandbox" game. A good GM either knows what's going on in various parts of the world )or can fake it well) - and players can do pretty much anything in the world.

Railroad vs. Sandbox is a lot like the Lord of the Rings series. Sam and Frodo are players in a railroad campaign. The rest of the party is playing a sandbox game. Had they not split the party up early, we might not have seen the battle of Helm's Deep, and Wyrmtongue might still be the effective ruler of Rohan. Gondor would still be ruled by the Steward. Even after the (full-strength) party got to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring, I don't know that Sauron's influence would be immediately dissipated in some of those places. It'd still be an interesting story, but it'd be very different. And readers wouldn't know nearly as much about Middle Earth and its residents.

Mechanically, there have been a lot of innovations that support Sandbox play. The clocks in Blades in the Dark, for example, are spectacular. And can serve as a reminder to players - "Do that petty crime all you want - the Big Bad's scheme is still advancing until you stop them."

Sandbox games tend to give the players more agency, because players decide the paths they take.

Many recent games have given players tools to help define their setting (and even frame and re-frame current scenes). 13th Age, for example, lets players do a bit of worldbuilding via their skills and One Unique Things. Other games let players establish facts about the scene by spending points - Cortex Prime lets players create Assets that they can use for the scene ("We're fighting in a cave? I'm going to break off a stalactite and use it as a club!"). Scenes can also have Distinctions that players can use to their advantage.

But horror gaming throws all of that out. Horror games nearly all rush players in the direction of predetermined outcomes. "By the end of this adventure, most (if not all) of your player's characters will be dead or insane" is a not uncommon fact of horror gaming. Even the good ones push players in the direction of insanity. And in many of those games, that insanity removes the player's ability to control the character.

I try to be a sandbox GM. I'm not perfect, but I try. And I'm a more traditional GM - my players are players, and I'm the GM. But the line I don't like crossing is "Players control their characters, the GM controls the rest of the world." In horror games, that line is all too easy to cross. Because horror often has a pre-determined end point.

There are exceptions. Dread, for example, is an excellent horror game with little railroading, and where players control their own fates (although the game's survivability does favor dexterous players).

But, all in all, when I sit down to play a game, I want my players to (mostly) control what happens to their characters. And that's super-hard to do in a horror game without a lot of railroading. And I'm not a conductor.

The Life Update

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 12:05:00 +0000

It's been too long since I was updating regularly, here. I'm working on getting back up to speed. But I figured it'd be a good time for a full update on where I am and how I'm doing in the non-gaming sphere of things (and some coverage of my gaming life, too).

Since I was regularly updating, I haven't moved. We're still in the Greater Seattle Area, which is what most of us locals mean when we tell people that we live in Seattle. Because non-Seattle folks don't know where Puyallup and Bellevue and Everett and Redmond and Renton and Auburn and Burien and the like are. So we tell people we're in Seattle, and, when we run into another local in a far-flung land, we then narrow it down to the actual city we call home.

Our household consists of myself, my wife, a good friend who is renting our guest room, and a total of three cats (three upstairs and one down).

As of Friday (two days from now), I'll have been two weeks after my last COVID-19 vaccine shot, meaning I'll be legally considered Fully Vaccinated, which allows me to mingle in groups with other fully vaccinated folks. That's a good thing.

The company I worked for for just over 13 years closed up shop last summer. While doing so, though, they sold most of their inventory to another distributor that was interested and made a case for them to hire me. And they did. So one morning I went to work for one company, and the next day I went to the same place at the same time and signed in to work for another company.

The new company has a very different corporate culture from the previous one. Which is not by any means a complaint. I'm actually doing more work (both because we're busier and because we're a bit short-staffed), but I'm feeling significantly less stress at the same time. Which is super-nice. I'm also feeling appreciated here in a way I haven't ... ever, actually.

Asmodee has gobbled a few more small publishers. At least one - Plaid Hat - ungobbled themselves. I haven't worked on a game in ... a while. I've worked on promotional materials here-and-there, though.

You know what a weird feeling is? It's seeing a new edition of a game you worked on that doesn't have your name (or that of the translator you worked with) anywhere in the credits. That said: I love the new edition. I'll talk about that ... sometime. Add it to my "posts to follow," list, I guess.

So all in all, my life is better than it was at the beginning of 2020.

While 2020 wasn't pleasant for anyone, I was one of the lucky ones. My job was considered essential, so I didn't miss any work. Steph was able to work remotely (and was actually more productive that way).

I had some Kickstarter projects come in - that's another post I need to write, I guess.

... and that is the Eric Update, I guess.

Cross-Compatibility

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 12:05:00 +0000

Some rambles for your Wednesday morning:

You're probably already aware of this, but I buy a lot of games. Board games, card games, role-playing games. You name it, I buy it. With the exception of collectible games, really. And, even then, I occasionally dip a toe in to see if it's any good.

Even through 2020, I still bought a fair number of games. And I read and re-read a ton of games.

Something I've become quite fond of in games is cross-compatibility, especially in the board game end of the hobby. It's not a new thing - Dominion: Intrigue was a standalone expansion for Dominion in 2009. The three Hero: Immortal King games released in 2007. I know there are earlier examples (Stoner Fluxx was released in 2003, and appears to be the first standalone expansion in that series). Magic: the Gathering's Ice Age set was released in 1997. If I remember correctly, it was the first standalone expansion for MtG.

Board game expansions (and standalones) are almost always 100% compatible with one another. Once in a while, you'll see a set from a game that recommends that you don't play it with certain other sets. For example, The 7 Wonders (first edition) expansion Babel integrates poorly with Armada. Not because of a rules clash, but because players suddenly have a lot more to juggle on their turns. More experienced or advanced players can do it, but even then it's less fun.

Babel, by the way, seems to be the most divisive expansion to the game. It is a love-it-or-hate-it set because of the fundamental changes it makes to some of the strategy.

Race for the Galaxy has a couple of expansions that are not cross-compatible, too. It's not unheard of, it's just unusual on the board game end of things.

Meanwhile, on the RPG end of things, people tend to expect that a "house" system will be cross-compatible. And, much like the board game end of the gaming hobby pool, it usually is. Mostly.

It probably goes back further, but the oldest example I have a significant amount of personal experience with is the old World of Darkness series of games, starting in the mid-Nineties. Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, Wraith: the Oblivion, and Changeline: the Dreaming. These games were ... mostly compatible. But there were (for example) Werewolf powers that targeted an opponent's Rage. Which was all well and good when using it against other Werewolves, but Vampires didn't have Rage. Nor did Mages. Or any of the others. And so groups tended to collect house rules on how to mix-and-match.

I've seen discussion back-and-forth on why they're not fully compatible, and the most compelling argument I've seen is that in-character mixed parties are not supposed to happen. Werewolves hate Vampires, for example. So the various "others" should be treated as monsters in games other than their own.

But then we get into newer and more modern games. I'm a huge fan of Cortex Plus (now Cortex Prime). But no two games of Cortex Plus have been cross-compatible - you can't take your Leverage Crew into Smallville or Firefly without a ton of work. It was the first time I've seen a house system that was still recognizably the same core system, but was so grossly incompatible.

Modiphius' house engine, the 2d20 system, is similarly not cross-compatible. Your Starfleet ensign can't beam into the Mutant Chronicles universe, or visit Barsoom without a lot of conversion work.

At first, these incompatibilities between games really rankled me. I wanted to see Leverage-style play in the 'Verse. I was curious what Magneto would do in my personal Smallville.

But then I read more closely, and I saw how the various tweaks and adjustments flavored the game - and refocused it. Smallville wasn't about what most super-hero games was about - it was about the relationships between the characters. So not giving characters traditional attributes very much made sense for that setting.

Where I'd expected a GURPs-like, "Every book adds genre-specific player options" series of releases, the various Cortex Plus games each drilled in and hyperfocused on the core of what they were about.

The first few 2d20 games from Modiphius - Mutant Chronicles, 3rd Edition and Infinity are ... very crunchy. But they're also based on universes from miniature games. I'm honestly surprised they don't have conversion rules that allow you to use your character in the connected minis game. Later games, however, like John Carter of Mars and Star Trek Adventures are significantly less-crunchy. I won't say they're storygames - they're still very traditional in their build and their outlook - but they're definitely a step back from the first two.

Either way, where I was originally frustrated by the Cortex Plus engine, I now look forward to each new iteration. Tales of Xadia, the Dragon Prince game due out later this year looks to be a lot of fun - and a solid engine for Cartoon Action.

I also dread each new Modiphius title less-and-less. I've been a fan of the Mutant Chronicles setting since forever ago, but their system clunked for me and (something I need to write about) - I think I'm basically done with horror-themed RPGs in general. I have all of the books they've released for it, but aside from a one-shot (that did not go well online), I don't think it's going to hit the table again in its current incarnation. But I've also loved Star Trek since I was a small child, and Star Trek Adventures is night-and-day from Mutant Chronicles, 3rd Edition. Where MC3 clunks, STA moves easily. But it still has too many moving pieces for online play, IMHO. I'm actively looking forward to Dune: Adventures in the Imperium.

I hope your FLGS survived 2020, because there are some very good-looking things showing up in 2021. Even if they're not cross-compatible.

Soon.

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 12:00:00 +0000

This last weekend, I played a game in person for the first time since February 29, 2020.

It was a two-player game, played with my wife, but it's still the first time I've gamed non-digitally in over a year. And I loved it and I want to do it again.

This pandemic has been tough. in all honesty, I've had it pretty easy - I'm considered essential at work, and so my routine hasn't changed much. But the lack of gaming for me has been rough.

For a few months, BoardGameArena filled that gap, but, as time went on, it ... didn't. I'm still gaming there. A lot. But it's not scratching that itch that I need filled. And, honestly, I found that trying to force it to scratch that itch made me resent it a little, so I stepped 100% back from gaming on Wednesday evenings. Because if there's one thing I do not want to resent, it's gaming with friends.

My buddy Rob stepped up and has been keeping Wednesday going without me. And I really appreciate his doing so.

I hosted an online movie night for some friends - and have done so for most of the last year, in fact - and that has helped some, too.

But I still need something. I need that in-person face-to-face social interaction.

Someone on Twitter said, "I can't wait for this all to be over so I can go back to being an introvert by choice," and ... I feel that. I feel that to the very core of my being.

But we're almost through, friends. Vaccines exist, and are being distributed. People are slowly being able to come out of their homes and meet up again safely.

I expect to be hosting my weekly game night again by midsummer. I hope to be hosting it again sooner than that, but that's out of my control.

Since I haven't been gaming, I haven't had much to say here. I hope to change that soon, too. I slowed my game buying over the last year, but I didn't stop. And a few Kickstarters delivered, too. This means that I have a number of games to play that will be new to me (and new to my group, when it exists again).

Thank you for sticking with me.

Playing Online

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 12:05:00 +0000

Due to the current situation, I've had the opportunity to play role-playing games online three times in the last few weeks. It's both wonderful and painful.

It's wonderful because I get to see and interact with people who I know and like. And we get to game. Hell, Wade got us through one of the major arcs of our long-running 13th Age game.

Wade runs his games using Slack for die-rolling. He has a few more plugins and customizations there, too, and it works. It makes sense. We use Google Hangouts for the interaction with one another. Voice, video, etc. It's good to see the crew, but I very much hate that we can't all cluster around the same table the way we usually do.

Last weekend, I ran Mutant Chronicles for most of my L5R group. I used Discord for the die-rolling and - again - Google Hangouts for the face-to-face. It was ... less-good than I'd hoped. The system has too many metacurrencies to easily keep track of online, and tracking damage required that players have scratch paper, so - online at least - the system really got in the way. And now is not a good time for dystopian horror. But it was largely a test drive to see if the group could handle online play without weirdness, and it worked. So until we're allowed to game in person again, I'll be moving the L5R game online. The "Sidekick" bot even handles roll-and-keep and exploding dice, so the die-rolling is super-streamlined for us. The characters were up on Obsidian Portal. When we needed a map or an image, I just cut-and-pasted it into the Discord chat (and it worked pretty well).

In addition to running L5R online, I'm likely to do more one-shots. One of my players really desperately wants to play some sci-fi, so I'm re-reading Hellas for a one-shot play.

The problems I had were the same problems I have face-to-face. I have one player who doesn't do much - he rolls his dice, but his character rarely engages. He will react if poked (and will interact with NPCs who interact with him), but for the most part, he sits back and lets the party play.

My party also does a lot of cross-talk. We spend a ton of time interacting with other players. It's the kind of thing that some groups really hate, but I enjoy it. Gaming is, after all, my social outlet. And they do snap back in character when I approach them in character.

I just really really want to see them in person again.

Ready To Play vs. Tournament Legal Play

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 13:05:00 +0000

I was at Fantasium a week or so ago, and saw that they had received the first shipment of the new WWE Dice Masters. They had the Campaign Box and both of the expansion boxes. And I love the Dice Masters games. They're good, and they're 100% cross-compatible. Which is nice.

It means I can field Ninja Turtles while my opponent has an army of Space Marines, and there are no hiccups or other issues.

Here's what I don't like, though:

The Campaign Box gives you three of each included character's dice. The expansions give you two of each included character's dice. In tournament play, you can have up to four dice for each character you include.

So, while you can play tournaments with just the base game, you might be at a disadvantage compared to someone who bought two base sets (or two copies of the expansions). But buying two copies of these gets you a bunch of extra cards. Two copies of the base game gets you a bunch of extra cards and a couple of extra dice (and a bunch of extra Basic Action and Minion dice).

There are a few other oddities, too. Like Bret "The Hit Man" Hart has three dice in the base game, and two dice in one of the expansions. But the expansion dice are a different color.

It's frustrating. It's still better than the random distribution they were using, though. And it's dramatically better than what Fantasy Flight has done with their Legend of the Five Rings card game (L5R).

A tournament-legal deck for L5R includes 1 Stronghold, 1 Role, and then two decks of 40-45 cards each (the Dynasty and Conflict decks). The Dynasty deck can only contain cards that are neutral or from a single clan. The Conflict deck can only be neutral or from a single clan or from a single other Clan puchased by using Influence.

I'm going to ignore the Conflict deck for a moment, here. Let's talk about the Dynasty deck:

The base game includes 20 neutral Dynasty cards and 15 Dynasty cards from each clan. That's 35 cards for someone's Dynasty deck. There is no way to make a tournament-legal deck from the starter box. There's not even deckbuilding strategy involved, either. To play in a tournament, you need to buy more cards. And, unless you buy a bunch more, you won't have many options for deck construction, either. Their expansions all include "play sets" (three of each included card), which is nice. But why doesn't the base set even include the ability to put together a single tournament-legal deck?

Let me put on my Grumpy Old Man hat for a second, here:

In 1993, when I bought my first deck of Magic: the Gathering cards, I paid $8 for a starter pack, and instantly had a tournament-legal deck in my hands. It wasn't a good tournament deck, but it was legal. Unless I had a banned card - but the banned/restricted list was still in the future. In fact, I played in a number of single-starter sealed deck tournaments. Because they were fun and viable.

Now, I know that a Magic starter is not $8 anymore. But it's still a whole lot less than the $40 that FFG is charging for their L5R starter. And WotC now produces non-random starters, too, so you know what you're going to get. And - yes - Magic is still mostly provided in random booster packs, where L5R (and Dice Masters now) are mostly sold as fixed starters and expansions.

It just throws up unnecessary speed bumps for new players.

With Dice Masters, you have limited options, but you can put together two tournament-legal sets from just the base game.

Honestly, it's almost enough to get me back into Magic.

Almost.

Everything Old Is New Again: Changing Expectations

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 13:05:00 +0000

I'm not a huge video gamer. Haven't been since I was much younger.

My brothers and I saved up, and - together - bought an NES. This was during the era when the system included the Zapper and the included cartridge was Super Mario Brothers / Duck Hunt. My younger brother, who has always been better at anything physical, was significantly better than I was at both games.

After a year or two, we bought Defender II. At some point, we wound up with Legend of Zelda. We had one of the Castlevania games, too.

But that was it for us. We borrowed games occasionally, and played games at friends' houses, but the NES didn't take over our lives like our parents feared it would (probably because we never had Tetris or Dr. Mario).

We never got an SNES or a Genesis. In fact, the next video game system to appear in the house was my original Playstation - more than a decade after the NES showed up.

But when I was in HS, I spent many a weekend going to friends' houses and playing Street Fighter II for hours and hours and hours. "Winner Stays" was the rule of thumb. And I was very rarely the winner.

For Christmas this year, my mother bought me a device called a "Retron 5." I'd seen it on the shelf at a record store, and then added it to my wish list (which I use as a way to keep track of things I'd like to check out later), where she saw it. It's a retro system emulator, with slots for NES, SNES, Genesis, Famicom, and Game Boy Advance cartridges. Have a game? Stick it in, and you can play it!

I thought it was pretty neat, so I spent a few bucks and got some games. And I was amazed at how well some of them had held up over the years. Dr. Mario is still super-addictive (and fun). Tetris is amazing. Super Battletank II is ... not but it was cheap. Golden Axe is alright. Altered Beast is what it's always been.

I see a lot of discussion these days about the price of games and how short they are, and I realize that these retro games are almost all shorter than most modern games.

Super Mario Brothers is all of 32 levels. People are beating it (without warps) in under 20 minutes. But I don't remember people complaining about how short it was, because it was from a completely different era of gaming.

I remember when I played Star Wars: Republic Commando on my XBox, I was disappointed at how short its single-player storyline was. It's about a nine hour game. And so (on average) is Legend of Zelda. But I don't remember any complaining about that one being super-short.

Of course, my XBox had an internal hard drive that remembered where I was, so I could turn it off and walk away. Some Nintendo games had internal memory storage, and could remember where you were, but most of them didn't. Some games gave you codes once you hit a certain level. That code would jump you to that level so you didn't have to start over every time you turned the device on.

But longer games are more viable, now, than they used to be. Early NES games were basically arcade games - play for a few, run out of lives, and then either continue or start over. I don't know that "arcade games" are still a thing, to be honest.

Meanwhile, on the board game end of things ...

A particularly deep or complex game used to take literal days. Empires in Arms was (and continues to be) a particular favorite of mine. It takes weeks to play. Civilization with its sequels and expansions could take days. Whereas Eclipse takes only a few hours (and scratches a similar itch for me).

I don't really have a point, here. It's just fascinating to that video games are taking longer and longer while board games are getting more and more efficient. The two branches of the "game" hobby seem to be traveling in opposite directions.

Pushing To The End: The Failure Of Going Set

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 13:05:00 +0000

A few years ago, I was playing a lot of Tichu. It's a great game that pushes a lot of buttons that I like having pushed. It's (for example) a trick-taking game. And I love those. It's a partnership game, and I love those too.

I really like Pinochle and Rook, too. I suspect that, if I'd played more than a hand or two, I'd really enjoy Bridge. I sure enjoy reading about its strategy.

But all of these games have a small niggling problem: players can "go set." Although different games (and groups) use different terminology for it.

When you "go set," you fail to meet a pre-determined condition and lose points instead of gaining them for that hand. In Tichu, for example, you can call "Tichu" or "Grand Tichu." If you then empty your hand first, you get a ton of points. If you don't, then you lose the points you would have gained. Your opponents still gain the points that they would have gained, too.

In theory - and on paper - it works. And it works in play, too. Mostly.

But losing points actually slows the game down.

Lately, I have been playing a ton of Haggis on BoardGameArena. Haggis is played very similarly to Tichu, only without the special cards (and with a few additional wrinkles). And it has a mechanism that is similar to calling "Tichu" to gain points. In Haggis, you can place a bet.

If you place a bet and then don't go out first, then you don't lose points, though. Instead, any opponents who didn't place a bet score the points you would have made from that bet. So if I place a little bet (15 points) and fail, then my opponents each score that 15 points. If Steph and I each place little bets and Sean goes out first, then Sean will score 30 points from our best and Steph and I won't score any points.

In terms of spacing between players, it makes no difference. If I bet 15 in Pinochle and fail, I lose 15 points and my opponents gain zero, for a total score difference of 15. If I bet 15 in Haggis and fail, my opponents all gain 15 points, for a total score differential of ... 15.

But the key difference is this:

My sliding back 15 points means that the game as a whole can potentially take 15 points longer to complete. Whereas my failure pushing my opponents forward by 15 points means that the game is 15 points closer to a finish.

If everyone fails all the time at Tichu, it's possible to have both teams with negative points. Games like that can drag on for hours. But by flipping that on its ear, Haggis turned itself into a pretty fast-playing little game because every hand moves the game forward towards its end.

I find myself wanting to play Tichu and Pinochle with the failure condition flipped like it is in Haggis, just to see if it changes the feel of the game.

Let's Try This Again, Shall We?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 17:11:00 +0000

I was planning to be back. I really was. But then things at work - which had been chaotic, but on an upswing - took several dramatic turns. In all honesty, I reached a point where I was considering deleting this blog and its archives and just doing what I could to disappear entirely from the internet.

Google Plus closed. Facebook continues to suck.

And now work is ... well, it's complicated.

But it led me to a realization:

If I don't force myself to write, I'm not going to write.

A lot has changed in my gaming life. A lot has changed in my home life, too. And it occurs to me that change isn't going to go away. Things are never going to be 100% stable. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The other day, a friend said to me that I need to blog more. And I realized that I really do.

I won't promise a regular schedule with my usual Wednesday updates. I may post half-formed ideas occasionally and then circle back to them in later posts.

But I'm trying to be better. I'm trying to be here more often.

We'll see how well that ends up working out.

Welcome to 2020.

Are You Back Or Not?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 12:05:00 +0000

I got an e-mail the other day from someone who wanted to know if I was back to blogging regularly here or not. And the answer is (obviously), "Not yet; I'm still sporadic."

Life is both stable and not, and the "not" part seems to be continually coming out of left field just as I'm getting comfortable.

I have a few half-written posts that I need to find time to clean up/re-write and get done, but realistically, I'll update when I update. I've found that forcing myself to a schedule puts me under (self-imposed) pressure that I'm not in any condition to handle right now.

I thank you all for continuing to read, for checking back, and for your occasional comments and e-mails. It means a lot to me.

Scoping the Scene

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 12:05:00 +0000

I'm one of those people who tends to form very strong bonds of loyalty to ... things. I drink Coke (or did, when I could still drink caffeinated beverages). I wear Nike and Red Wing shoes almost exclusively. And I support my local game store. Most of the time, this is neither good nor bad.

But I don't want to be a blind follower, so I work pretty hard at keeping tabs on what else is out there. I've tried on Adidas shoes (which were too narrow). I had an RC Cola. And, last weekend, I took Steph and drove to a couple of game stores that aren't Fantasium.

See, I'm looking at starting to play Corvus Belli Infinity, and apparently there aren't a lot of US distributors who carry it.

The first store we stopped at was The Game Shelf. It was a ways out of the way for us, but seemed to be in a pretty good location. The small facing expanded rapidly into a large space once you walked in. It was brightly-lit and had a decent selection of games. We were both greeted almost as soon as we walked in the door. I forgot to ask him about his special order process (which is always super-important to me), but the gentleman behind the counter was very friendly, very chatty, and - just as importantly - treated Steph as a customer instead of some sort of add-on to my presence. It was a good experience, so I bought a thing of paint and Steph got a couple sets of dice. And we went on.

I'm not going to name the next place we went. It was just a bit down the hill from The Game Shelf, though. It was small, and cramped, and there was an aroma that was ... less-than-pleasant. There was some sort of event going on (it sounded like a regular D&D group), and so they had a table in the middle of their front room that made two-thirds of the shop inaccessible. We were both ignored when we walked in. I spotted a few things that had clearly been on their shelf for a while (like a copy of the original 51st State) - that's not a bad thing, but it was prominently displayed. That's weird, as most retailers try to highlight hot-and-new items or rare-and-expensive items. I bought a thing of paint and got out of there as quickly as I could.

Finally, we headed to The Game Matrix. Over the years, The Game Matrix has been very hit-or-miss. They have (or can get) just about everything, but their customer service ranges from spectacular to nonexistent. You just never know what's going to happen when you walk in. We were promptly greeted by an enthusiastic employee who - when he heard what I was looking for - found the one Infinity product they had in stock on the shelf. "We also have the RPG," I was told. When I asked about a specific product, he checked availability at their distributor without hesitating. Or ignoring other customers.

None of these stores is likely to lure me away from Fantasium on the regular, but for occasional special orders that Fantasium can't get? I'd rather spend at Game Shelf or Game Matrix than online.

Gamethyme's Game of the Year

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 12:05:00 +0000

It's weird to me - even though I'm not an attendee anymore, my personal calendar still revolves around GenCon. Which brings me back to today.

Today is the Wednesday before GenCon, which means that today is the day I pick my personal Game of the Year. For those of you who haven't followed me over the years, this is for the best new-to-me game that I have played since the previous GenCon.

And it's always a challenge. This year, I've been focusing on re-playing old favorites more than pushing into new games. That said, there were still a handful of eligible games. But this was a tough decision.

Here are the three runners-up, with a tiny bit of discussion about them:

Fist of Dragonstones: Tavern Edition - I sometimes thought I was the only fan of the original Fist of Dragonstones. It was disappointing, as it was a really fun auction game that saw a lot of play in the early days of Game Night. So I was both floored and ecstatic when Stronghold Games announced that this was coming. I pre-ordered from the FLGS as soon as it had a listing, and then ... I waited. It was worth the wait.

It's not the deepest game, and there are still a few rules details that could do with some clarity, but this is a faster-playing better-balanced version of the game than the original.

Magic Maze - Cooperative games have lately become My Jam. Okay, not just lately. But I especially love it when a cooperative game directly impacts how I communicate with other players. Magic Maze doesn't allow players to speak. Each player has one command they can use to move pawns on the board, and everyone has to work together to move the pawns to specific locations. The game is scenario-based, but the replay value of each scenario is crazy-high because of the random deck.

And playing with three players is a vastly different experience than playing with four or five or up to eight.

Again: not the deepest game out there, but definitely worth checking out. I really loved it, and I thought the expansion was also money well-spent.

51st State, Master Set - This is the second game on the list that is a new edition of an older game that I really enjoyed. The original was very much a multiplayer solitaire game (at least until the expansions started to roll out). The art was decent, but the gameplay was a lot of fun for me. Once I puzzled out the (awkwardly-translated) rules.

I became aware of the new Master Set version when I read the back of a box of Imperial Settlers, which uses the same basic gameplay engine. The Master Set has better (clearer) rules than the original version, and it includes direct player interaction right out of the gate. And it includes two small expansions (and there are a couple of other expansions available, too, if you play them to death).

These have all been fun to play this year, but the real winner for me?

Root - I've joined the band, here. Above, I mentioned that cooperative games are my jam? So are asymmetric games. And asymmetric games are hard to do entertainingly. Root both feels balanced and is fun.

The base game has four factions - the cats, who are in power; the birds, who want to return to power; the woodland creatures, who are tired of the cats and the birds oppressing them; and the vagabond who just wants to bum around living his life. All four factions have different ways of scoring points and they do different things on their turns. The cats are trying to build an economic engine that supports their armies and lets them crush the opposition. The birds have a rigid hierarchy which tightly restricts what they can do on their turn (and telegraphs some of their planning for their opponents). The woodland creatures go around drumming up sympathy. When the other factions step on them, they get more powerful. Eventually, the woodland creatures are allowed to act. The vagabond - seriously - just wanders around doing their own thing.

The expansion adds a different economic faction (albeit one without its own army) and more Vagabond options (including a second Vagabond in play).

In a full game, players can craft and trade and march and recruit and battle one another. But - again - each faction has its own spin on each of those options.

The art is evocative and cute, but not irritating. The components are good quality (wooden units, decent cardstock for the tokens, etc). And the way players interact in the game means that - while there is downtime in larger games, you'll want to pay attention because what they do will impact your turn.

It's light enough that you can play it in an evening, but - again - there's enough going on to entertain many hardcore gamers (but, of course, not all of them).

And that is why Root is my game of the year this year.

Different Preparations, Different Results

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 12:05:00 +0000

As I'm sure I've mentioned dozens of times, here, I live in the greater Seattle area. While we're famous for our small local coffee brand, we also have a number of (very good) tea shops in the area. One of those shops is Friday Afternoon Tea.

If you go to their website, you'll see that they have dozens of blends. Different varieties of tea leaf, different additives and other flavorings, and so much more. Friday also does custom blends. A few years ago, my wife purchased a custom blend for me as a gift. We wound up with a tea called "Pie Dreams." It's white tea with peach, cinnamon, allspice, raw sugar, and a bit of vanilla.

You won't find "Pie Dreams" on their website, though, because it's a custom blend. But if you contact her to order it, I think she'll be able to sell it to you. It's a bit like a secret menu at a fast food place.

But that's all beside the point.

Much like coffee, there are a number of ways to brew tea, each of which subtly influences the flavor. And there are things you can do post-brewing, too, that also change the flavor.

With Pie Dreams, when you make it in a more traditional way (hot water + tea blend, steep for a few minutes, etc.), you wind up with a tea that is sweet, and, at the same time, it's a bit warming. It's a very pleasant tea to drink. And it seriously tastes like you're drinking a peach pie. It's very weird, but really good.

When you brew it hot and then ice it, the peach steps forward a bit more strongly. I often put sugar in my iced tea. I often put too much sugar in my iced tea, actually. But adding sugar to Pie Dreams actively hurts the flavor.

When you cold-brew it, the peach takes a big step back. It's there, but it provides a mellowing flavor against the spices that unfold. It's a more delicate flavor overall, and it's less sweet (but still very very good).

This is what an RPG session is like. Every single group is a custom blend of GM and players and characters and system and setting and ...

As a GM, how I prepare for a game makes the biggest change to the game itself. I can spend my time figuring out every notable NPC (or group) and what they're doing, or I can roughly sketch some details out for myself. I can let the players wander all over the countryside (even though the adventure is right over there), or I can force them to ride the railroad as it were. And, depending on what I have prepared, I can let my players steer - throw up a few signs to guide them now and again, mind you, but let them be players.

None of these options are bad. Even railroads aren't a bad thing (despite their negative reputation).

They're just different ways of brewing that tea.

And by "tea," I mean "fun."

Which is the point, right?

Rediscovering The Classics

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:05:00 +0000

Steph's birthday was just a few moths ago, and I always struggle with What To Get Her. Because she's super-important to me, and a bad gift shows that I have not put thought into it.

She'll tell you that she'll love whatever I get her, but I've noticed that some gifts get used and some get shelved.

Her all-time favorite game is El Grande. It's a good game. It won a ton of awards in the mid-Nineties and is still a Top 100 game on the BoardGameGeek Rankings. Our copy was a bit long in the tooth, and has seen a lot of love, so I figured replacing it would be a decent gift. Then Tabletop Gaming Deals on Twitter shared that the Big Box edition (which includes all the expansions) was cheaper than the core game alone (it still is). So I bit. And it was a good decision.

I've gotten to play the core game a couple of times since, and it reminded me of how much I love this game. It's area control with drafting. Two things I'm terrible at. But I'm ... okay at El Grande. And it's one of those games that I honestly don't mind losing at, because the gameplay is so much fun.

Then, a few days later, I was looking for something to play on Board Game Arena (which - again - is amazing), and I decided to play Can't Stop. Because it's easy to teach, light, fast, and fun.

But these two outcomes have me digging back into (recent) classics, looking for more fun things that I haven't played. Carcassonne, for example, is a ton of fun in moderation. As long as you are not using more than the base game and maybe one or two expansions. Catan is ... hit-or-miss. It depends on who you're playing with. Ticket To Ride is fun, but it gets super-repetitive super-fast.

So what twentieth-century games should I be looking into? What games are fun and good and short enough to be played in an evening with a mix of hardcore and casual gamers? What recent classics need more play than they get?

Let's Talk About 5E, Shall We?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:05:00 +0000

I eat a lot of Mexican food. Probably too much, actually. But when I go to a new place, I'll generally order either something I've never seen before or chicken fajitas.

"Something I've never seen before" is pretty obvious. Those are likely to be the specialty of the house and will set them apart from the tacos and burritos that are ubiquitous on Mexican menus.

Chicken Fajitas are a little less obvious - it's because chicken is a good platform to highlight unique or special spice blends. And I've never had two chicken fajitas that tasted the same.

My wife, by contrast, orders enchiladas. Most of the flavor of an enchilada comes from the sauce, and - much like fajita spice - that can vary wildly from restaurant to restaurant. Most Mexican restaurants have more than one enchilada sauce (and many of them allow you to mix and match sauces on your enchiladas).

So what does this have to do with Dungeons & Dragons? Especially the fifth edition of same?

A lot, actually.

I've been playing D&D since I was ten. It was 1e at the time, and we played it on the playground at recess. I didn't get to play a lot, as my parents were part of the satanic panic of the eighties. This means I definitely wasn't allowed to own any books or dice.

Because of this, I played the simplest class. The one that had the fewest complex rules. In 1e, that meant I played a fighter. Why? Because the fighter's only real decision was "Which foe do I want to hit?" Mechanically, 1e fighters were (and continue to be) super-boring.

By the time 2e rolled around, I was familiar enough with the rules that I was able to play something different. I dabbled with Wizards and Rogues before settling on (don't laugh) Bards. Because Fighters continued to be boring.

When Wizards dropped 3e on us, Feats made some interesting changes. Suddenly every class had interesting customization options (and Fighters were more interesting). Some of the fighter feats meant that there were occasional interesting decisions to be made. I only played a tiny bit of 3e (I was much more a DM than a player at that point). By the end of 3e's run, however, it'd turned into an optimization game. "The best fighter takes and and ." Or "Check out this broken Feat combo!"

Pathfinder took the optimization aspects of 3e and turned them up to eleven. The game's power curve was structured so that players who didn't optimize were left behind. It also highlighted those parts of 3e that I didn't like, turning them into the focus of play. Note that I'm very carefully not saying "Pathfinder was bad." I'm saying, "Pathfinder wasn't for me."

Then we hit 4e. Suddenly every class was equally interesting. And theoretically balanced. Fighter powers/abilities hit harder or applied status effects (stun and knockdown were pretty common). Wizard powers/abilities did elementally-flavored damage and applied different status effects to foes. Feats were less-important than power selection.

And now we have 5e.

For those of you who are wondering, I haven't broken my self-imposed boycott of 5e. I received a copy of the Player's Handbook (PHB), Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG), and Monster Manual (MM) as gifts from a friend. I spent the next few days following that gift reading the 5e PHB and ... meh. I don't get all the love it gets.

One friend, when he saw that I had 5e in my hands, asked if I was "finally tired of that tactical combat simulator" that 4e was.

I've got news for you, Matt: All editions of D&D are tactical combat simulators. And 4e is the best/most interesting of the bunch for most classes. Every edition of D&D has fallen desperately short when it came to mechanically rewarding non-combat encounters. Which means that 5e is - for what I want in a game - significantly less-good than 4e. Because it's a less-detailed tactical combat simulator.

Reading through 5e, it's like a bizarre cross between 2e and 3e. There's good in there, mind you, but for the most part it strikes me as a huge step backwards.

The only real "killer app" of 5e is the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanism. And possibly "Inspiration," which lets you trigger Advantage.

I did what I often do when I confront something that is so popular that I just plain don't understand: I went online and asked my friends. Here's what I heard from them:

Combat in 5e is faster. This is both bug and feature, as you can have multiple small combat encounters in a single session, but big set-piece battles are less interesting.
Classes in 5e have three sub-classes that characters move into at 3rd level. Only one of the Fighter subclasses is boring 2e Hit 'Em more/better.
There are fewer ways to apply fewer status effects in 5e, which is cleaner and easier to understand for newer players.
Combat in 5e supports "theater of the mind" better than 4e and 3e. While you can use a map and grid, it's not as strictly required as it was in those editions.
DIY players have an easier time tweaking 5e, as 4e was so tightly interconnected. Creating a power here-and-there for 4e was simple enough, but creating new classes was a lot of work.

Even a lot of 5e players expressed frustration with how boring and limited it felt after a very short time. One friend said, "Loved 5 E at first, got bored with it after a couple of years." And that was pretty close to consensus.

5E hits on more cylinders than 4E for me and also has some good ideas. I have played it several times and will likely play it again.

All things considered, I would still prefer to play OSRIC, Advanced Labyrinth Lord, Blueholme, or Low Fantasy Gaming.

Other games came up, too. Both OSR retroclones and newer branches of the d20 tree (Pathfinder and 13th Age especially). And games that aren't from that family (Fantasy Age got a lot of love).

Indie gaming legend Ron Edwards left a long comment that I'm going to quote in full, here:

I just played 5E for the first time, just a couple of days ago, as a player. It struck me as a very 2000s game, maybe even 2010 on the nose. That's not a slam, but identifying it very much as of its era, and not any kind of old-school whatnot which in this case makes most sense as precise marketing.

More importantly, as a game, it is caught like a writhing insect in what I called The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast. If I play my character, in the sense of all this characterization and agency that the creation process fires up, then the DM cannot create the story, as everything about DMing and especially the published scenarios and campaigns emphasizes. And vice versa, perhaps especially, vice versa.

Everything for the player presumes a DM who isn't actually the DM as written/encouraged, and everything for the DM presumes players who aren't actually those players as written/encouraged. The net effect is almost always the same: the players are reduced to posturing, establishing and repeating tropes, and (eventually) goofing in order to enjoy themselves, as the DM waltzes them through fights that lead to clues, and clues that lead to fights.

Exalted, all over again, and that's merely a refined point of reference among a sea of game texts of this kind.

As with so many of these games, the solution is obvious: pick one or the other, and ignore, as in obviate, reject, abandon, defy, reverse the text and most of the rules concerning the one you didn't pick. But that solution is not arrived at very often. The more usual one is to play while insisting loudly online that this is the most awesome thing ever, then to limp along wondering about or resigned to the necessary outcomes of the Impossible Thing, and eventually to shift into lonely fun with one's extremely expensive purchases.

There was also a ton of nostalgia for 3.x. Publisher/designer Cam Banks said (in one of his comments):

When I moved to 4E, I hit a wall with the way the game was designed to centre around powers/techniques/etc. As a 3rd edition designer, I knew that system back to front; I could come up with stats and monsters and spells on the fly, and I even ad hoc'd a prestige class for a player (and wrote the whole thing up the next day). 4E was an inscrutable black box by comparison. I ran it like I ran 3E, and stumbled. I couldn't make my own classes easily, I couldn't eyeball anything, even with the famous page 42. It was extraordinarily frustrating because I liked what they were doing with the game, but the game didn't let me in.

Peter Darley said:

It seems like D&Ds primary strength, in any edition, is to be a lowest common denominator. I don't think I would ever chose to run or play it given the universe of games available, but since not everyone likes the same stuff, D&D is often something that people can agree on.

I had more than fifty comments on that post. I'd link to it, but it's on Plus and Google is shutting that down next week, so the link would be useless. There was disagreement, but not much. And it never got heated.

So the long and short of it, for me, is this:

If I am forced to play D&D and am given a choice of edition, I will still choose fourth edition. I can see some of the appeal of fifth, and I might play it a bit to see how it compares to second and third, but I don't see anything there that I can't easily find in a dozen other games. Realistically, though, I'm more likely to play something else.

I didn't get into it here, but it's worth mentioning that the DMG for fifth edition is quite good with some solid advice that applies regardless of the game being played. It's a shame that the game itself is so uninspired.

Still There?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 13:05:00 +0000

*tap, tap*

This thing still on?

I've been super-quiet here for ... months, now. Not as long as I'd thought, mind you, but a long while. And I'm about to spin it back up again for a couple of reasons:

Google Plus is shutting down. G+ is where I've been spending most of my game-related discussion energy, and it's been a really good place for that.
I've finally (mostly) adapted to my work schedule. It's not ideal, but I'm now more-or-less functional again.

I'm not going to hold myself to a post a week, because then I feel guilty when I miss a post. I'm going to post when I have something to say or want to share something. No more, no less. I'm also going to continue to be mostly-idle while Plus is still around, because - frankly - I get a lot more interaction on Plus than I do here. And I've grown to really value that interaction.

The Sublime Joy of Losing

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 12:05:00 +0000

You all know how much I love playing games. And I hope you all know that I'm decent at a lot of games. I'm really only good at a small handful of games. I'm a mediocre-to-good player at the vast majority of games that I enjoy.

And that's okay, because it gives me a chance to lose sometimes, even against new players.

Losing is one of my less-secret gaming joys. I love losing.

Losing doesn't mean I didn't play hard. It doesn't mean I threw the game. Losing means someone else was better than I was (for most of the games I play).

When I'm new to a game, I like watching experienced players destroy me so I can learn the strategies they use. I can see how the various pieces fit together into a win. At that point, I'm often just working on figuring out how the game itself works - what behavior it rewards and what it doesn't.

With "point salad" games, I'm often feeling out if I can single out one element and ignore the others. In 7 Wonders, for example, new players often try to bulk up on military cards. Don't get me wrong - military is great, but it's not The Key To Victory most of the time. It's one part of ~~this nutritious breakfast~~ the win, but it's not the whole thing by itself.

Once I reach the skill level of mediocre at a game, a loss means that either I tried a new strategy that didn't work out or I'm facing someone who is better than I am at the game. Or both. Or sometimes my opponent is also mediocre and her half-baked strategy is better than my half-baked strategy.

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to play CIV: Carta Impera Victoria with some friends. The game is fast-playing, and I'd played it a couple of times - enough that I wanted to play with some of its possibilities and see if winning was still viable. So I used a military discard strategy - it left almost no cards in my tableau and reduced my opponents' tableaus to almost nothing. It got expensive fast, though, because I was discarding two cards for every one card I removed from their tableaus. I didn't win, but I learned that playing "pure" discard is not a path to victory. On the other hand, I also learned that some discard can frustrate your opponents and cause them to stumble.

Most of all, though, I love losing at games at which I consider myself skilled, because it means I still have a lot to learn. I've been playing on boardgamearena.com lately. I'm a premium member, so I have access to Dungeon Twister. I've tried a variety of tactics against a number of players with mixed results. I'm currently 6-4 at the game online, and every one of those games was fun for me. I especially love the game where I messaged my wife, "I just moved my Warrior one space too far. It's probably going to cost me the game." And it did.

A lot of people hate losing because they believe that losing means you are a bad player. This is not true at all. It means your opponent was better. Or you made a mistake. Or you're having a bad day. Or maybe the dice turned against you. These things happen, and none of them mean you're a bad player.

Even in high-level tournaments, most players don't win. Keep that in mind. There are many games where a draw is simply not possible. And, yes, at the higher levels of many games, sometimes that win does come down to luck of the draw.

Losing is as much a part of playing the game as winning. In many cases, I'd argue that it's more a part of the game because of the number of players involved.

So when you lose, just look at the game, figure out what caused your loss, and try to do better next time. Because more often than not, you will.

Room 25 (Again, Some More)

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Franklin) — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 12:05:00 +0000

I know I've talked about Room 25 in the past, but there is a new expansion for it and I'm excited all over again.

I'm going to start with a broad overview of the game, and then get into the details and the nitty-gritty.

Initially, there was just Room 25. The base game held up to six players and had a couple of modes of play - fully co-operative all the way to (my favorite) semi-cooperative play. It was good. It was fun.

It's a programmed-action game, where everyone programs one or two actions at the start of the round and then triggers them in turn. The list of actions wasn't extensive, and the game wasn't too complicated.

The goal was to move your characters through a complex to find Room 25, and then slide that room out of the complex and escape. Before time runs out. But each room was different. There were rooms that would kill you. There were rooms that would trap you. There were a handful of harmless (or even beneficial) rooms, too. So you couldn't just go charging boldly ahead through the complex.

It was one part Cube, one part Running Man, and a lot of fun.

It came in a small box, and didn't get a lot of notice when it was released, as it came out in the middle of a flood of really good games. It's hard to stand out when you're a great game in a small box, especially when there are larger boxes around.

I can't find just the base game for sale anywhere other than the BGG Market, where there's a US version for $10.

The year after the base game came out, they released Room 25: Season 2. It added two new characters (bumping the player count to 8), gave special abilities to the characters, added Adrenaline, and a bunch more rooms. It took a good game that was already fun and made it great. It also replaced the grey minis that came with the base game with color-coded figures (which still had differently-shaped bases for colorblind players). They also released those figures separately for those people who didn't want to buy the expansion. And Season 2 came in a large box with room for all of the base game components (other than the box).

As much as I enjoyed the base game, Season 2 kicked it up a few notches. To the point where I don't suggest that people buy just the base game.

Nothing was released for the game in 2015.

In 2016, though, Room 25 Ultimate was released. Ultimate is the base game + Season 2 in one box with a combined rulebook. And some minor rules tweaks and clarifications. If you're just now getting into the game, I heartily recommend that you start with Ultimate.

In 2017, Room 25: Escape Room was released, giving us Puzzle Mode. Players now had to solve a puzzle (complete with a decoder) in order to escape the complex. Puzzle Mode is a 100% Co-Operative mode of play. And, of course, it had a few new rooms to shake things up a bit. It's compatible with the old base game and with Ultimate both.

And now Room 25: VIP has been released. In VIP, it's possible for one player to be (*gasp*) a VIP. And, because the VIP is famous, he (or she) doesn't truck with that whole "advance planning" thing. They're also impatient, and so the VIP must move every round. Otherwise the players lose (and the Guards win). VIP also included sleeves for the rooms - with so many sets from such a span of years, not all of the tile backs matched exactly, making it possible for some players to be able to determine which room was which. The sleeves fix that. Of course, it includes 40 sleeves. If you have everything so far, you'll need more than that - you can purchase additional sleeves directly from Matagot. Shipping isn't too bad on them, either. I kept my original Base Game and Season 2 separate and sleeved my Ultimate + Escape Room + VIP. It took one extra pack of sleeves, with a few sleeves left over.

There have been three promos for the game so far. The Audience is a die that the first player rolls each round that will impact play. You just need one of these dice and the rules from BoardGameGeek.

There is a Mr. Tom's Hall room, and there is a Raptor Room.

I've managed to track down Mr. Tom's Hall, now I just need to find a Raptor Room ...

VIP also included a couple of blank paper templates for creating your own room. I'd love to see what kind of custom rooms the rest of you can come up with. Just comment on this post, and I'll see it.