Some deeper thoughts on Wild Skies (since this was a legit review copy instead of just us talking about stuff we bought):

Wild Skies: Europa Tempest is an RPG that was funded by kickstarter from Wet Ink Games, written by Brandon K. Aten and Matthew Orr. It is a dieselpunk, anthropomorphic animal, airship game set in an alternate 1930s Europe. Lot going on there, but it's definitely a neat mashup. Dieselpunk / Airships means that there's a magic ore in the game that makes big old flying battleships feasible, and you'll be playing characters that are probably really closely involved with flying around in some kind of vessel. Anthropomorphic animals - think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Usagi Yojimbo, Talespin; everyone is an animal of some kind. The setting makes sense here - after World War I, there's a lot of intrigue in Europe, and technological developments of flying corps means things probably depart from the "standard" history track right about here - WWII would be really different with flying battleships.

I like the depth of this world. There is a ton of material here, in a way that reminds me of the old Rifts sourcebooks (and this is good). I can't speak to more recent Rifts material, since I stopped playing in the 1990s, but Rifts books were always a great source of highly-realized story content. There's a ton of stuff here about the different factions, lots and lots of animals, and quite a lot of equipment. On the one hand, there may be too much - if you're a minmaxer you may feel compelled to scour the books to find the gun that does optimal damage or something like that. On the other hand, I don't think this is really an optimizer's game - I'll get into that later.

Phil pointed out that even if you don't want to play the setting, you could use it to recreate Talespin. There's pretty complete rules for skills, flying vehicle handling and combat, and each animal species is pretty distinct from the others without being too ridiculous.

There's also a really nice system for operationalizing character goals and advancement. You set up a couple of axes (like "wealth to sacrifice") and set a direction on them. As you advance towards your goals, through roleplay, you are rewarded with advancement points. I really like this for two reasons. One, it segments out advancement from things like "kill a monster to get XP". You can advance in a lot of ways, and the GM isn't left handing out ad hoc XP for good roleplay in a kind of house-rule fashion. Here, the game rewards you for living up to your character's needs and desires. Two: there's room in this system for a whole party to do different things, but still each advance their own stories and characters. I like this idea and I am going to borrow it for some of my own campaigns for sure.

If I had to nitpick a little, it is that I'm not wild about the mechanics of conflict resolution. As I read the rules, with attributes, difficulty, and so on, a characters skills and attributes will not often change the outcome of a roll. Generally, you're rolling a d100 with the GM telling you how difficult the task is (easy, medium, hard). Your attributes, which range from 1 - 10, can be added to this roll. So, a really able person with a 10 in their attribute will succeed only marginally more often than someone with a 2, since you have to roll in the window where your bonus takes you from failing to succeeding for it to matter. There are other ways to boost rolls (skills, dice pools), but ultimately it really looks like your character stats - the things that define who your PC is mechanically, skills and abilities - really won't influence your success checks all too often.

I actually have the same problem with Numenera / Cypher system gaming. You spend pool on effort to get a +3 on a 20-sider roll, and often that pool is wasted. You basically have a 15% chance of rolling the die in such a way that the expenditure takes you from failure to success, and that's thoroughly unsatisfying.

Anyway, that's my nitpick, and it's minor, really. The gameplay seems pretty smooth in terms of mechanical resolution (a small number of rolls rather than being simulationist), and the whole thing seems to focus a lot more on the roleplay than on the mechanics. If you've got a hankering for Mutants in Space but not in space, and not using the really old and creaky palladium TMNT system, give it a look.

Three words for tonight are:

• Femur
• Animatronic
• Crude

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• Dark Souls
• Near and Far
• Vurt

We also chat some business ideas for software that supports gamers.

Three words went an interesting direction, I'd say.

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We talk about Star Wars some more; my preliminary dieroller webapp can be found here. Warning: it looks terrible. I was mainly messing around with some new frameworks and libraries. In general, I think Angular 2 (now 4, actually) is pretty magical, but there's room to grow in there - I found myself fighting the framework at times. My goal was to do the entire thing with observable streams. This is something that Angular hypothetically supports, but there ends up being a lot of duplication, as getting @Input and @Output streams to line up ends up requiring the creation of a Subject (since that can be created and subscribed to in the object constructor) instead of just passing streams around (the control stream doesn't exist until ngAfterViewInit, since it does an Observable.fromEvent() on the roll button's click event, but that means it's not available for the child components during their creation, since the app's ngAfterViewInit doesn't fire until too late.

But I digress. I'll figure that bit out soon enough. Also? Angular-Material (the beta version 2.0 that's out for Angular 2/4 which has some serious numbering and naming issues), angular-material is not fun. Documentation was lacking, and I was unable to do something as simple as saying, "this svg icon that I registered with the nice icon library? I want to render it here 48 pixels high" (so I could have the difficulty die look like an actual die). Can't do it - any icons you register with their service render at the same size. There's even a sass variable (which would set the preference system-wide, but wev), but it's ignored. And the style is statically injected into the document head. It's fugly. Instead, I played around a bit with material design lite, which is a different google-supported material design reference implementation. It's also kinda meh - you can't use the behaviors that it ships with unless you do a lot of work registering them with the angular system (because the javascript behaviors don't get attached to new DOM elements that angular puts in with any of its own stuff).

In the end, I am rewriting the whole thing in ionic. Version 3 has some really nice support for desktop-size interfaces (I previewed it in v1.0 days, and it was good back then, but you'd have to do a completely different parallel interface for your desktop web client). It also has tooling that's pretty rad (although the angular-cli package is great too).

The real version, once I'm ready to show it off, will have svg for die shapes and maybe a few more useful features like saving die roll types (I rolled a lot of 2a1p vs 1d or 2d in combat).

Oh also? I am digressing. We talk about the button men kickstarter, and ... um, actually also get side-tracked into talking about politics for a while.

Three words this time were:

• concept
• signal
• avoid

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Eric gets into High Frontier, which he loves.

Shout out to the online ButtonMen implementation at http://www.buttonweavers.com

Three words this week are:

• Eagle
• Curved
• Identity

Listen to see where we go with them!

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We also chat about the Fantasy Flight Star Wars RPG, 5E D&D, and Blue Medusa. It's a hoot as always!

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In an update, I left the game I was talking about towards the beginning, the one where I was having trouble fitting in with the party. Sometimes,

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In today's episode, we talk about different game systems (a topic of endless fruit), how awesome N. K. Jemisin is, and some kickstarter and random game news.

Interesting Links:

• Clash of the Battle Goats, aka Gruff
• Rogue Stars
• N. K. Jemisin
• Heroes of Land, Air and Sea
• Star Patrol

Music credits for the show can be found here.

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We also spend some time talking about Harlem Unbound, a pretty rad-looking Cthulhu sourcebook based in the Harlem Renaissance. It's becoming a golden age for role-playing, friends. There are all sorts of new voices being heard, making really neat stuff from all points of view. I'm excited!

Have a happy decemberween!

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Anyway, this is the first in a hopefully ongoing series of conversations with gamers, especially people who are new to the hobby, about why they play and what they think of gaming in general and role-playing games in particular. I apologize for some of the audio artifacts - as this was my first two-person interview, I actually only had the one mic, and we handed it back and forth. Better equipment is forthcoming.

As always, feel free to yell at me in the comments or on twitter.

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We also talked about some kickstarters:

• Operation Unfathomable
• Moonstone Fantasy Skirmish

As always, feel free to yell at me in the comments or on twitter.

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We also take some time to chat about vancian spellcasting, and it turns out (somewhat surprisingly) that Eric is kind of nostalgic for 4e Dungeons and Dragons. I'll have a real blog post about that soon, but for now, feel free to yell at me in the comments or on twitter.

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In this podcast we're going to talk about the evolution of modern RPGS, plus two kickstarter campaigns that are currently active (Invisible Sun and the Tiny Epic Galaxies expansion). We also chat a lot about what makes the "Old School" in Old School Renaissance role-playing actually feel Old.

• Invisible Sun
• Tiny Epic Galaxies: Beyond the Black
• Maze of the Blue Medusa

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