RPGaDay 2017 #26 Which RPG provides the most useful resources?

It may sound funny, but the books that I find the most useful are for games I have never run.

The Dream Park RPG featured a plotting method called the Beat Chart, which I often refer to when I'm trying to turn an idea into an adventure. However, I have never used the rest of that book. The setting of Dream Park and the idea that characters can be customized to each new adventure is neat, but I would want a campaign that is just that if I were to use the system.

The random adventure generator tables in Pandemonium: Adventures in Tabloid World are great fun and wound up fueling a D20 Modern campaign that I ran many years ago. The system for Pandemonium is very simple and could be fun. I just wanted to try out D20 Modern and it seemed like an easy way to write weird adventures.

As an aside, I always felt like D20 Modern's goal of "D&D in the modern world" was not my idea of fun. The D&D magic rules in particular felt like a poor fit to anything outside its designated domain. But the weird elements and kooky monsters seemed like a great fit for a "secret weirdness," "Tabloid World" sort of game. So that's what I decided I would run.

RPGaDay 2017 #25 What is the best way to thank your GM?

With food.

For a very long time, I actually offered bonus experience points for those players who bribed me with food. I stopped doing it for a while when I had a player who was down on his luck and didn't have the spare money for bribes, but it has crept back into my repertoire.

My current GM (Wow, it feels good to say that!) has a similar policy. He probably learned it from me all those years ago. A couple of weeks ago, my wife bribed him with a batch of beanless chili. It was amazing.

RPGaDay 2017 #24 Share a PWYW publisher who should be charging more.

Technically, I could mention myself. I do have a PWYW product out there.

But really, the true answer to the question would have to be Whistlepunk Games, AKA Kris Newton, designer and publisher of Feed: The Vampire Mythos RPG. Because not only is Feed an awesome game, but Kris is a heck of a guy as well. He and his wife put out the Gameable Podcast, which is excellent, as well as the snarky, yet loving MegaDumbCast.

And they don't ask a dime for any of it. Most of the other podcasts I listen to have Patreons or some other monetization going on. Not Kris. He does it for love and for fun, and I'm sure the moment it feels like a job for him, it will be far less fun for him.

But I'm sure every now and then, they might enjoy a little boost to pay for a slightly nicer podcastng rig that can stand up to Portland heat waves, or enough alcohol to endure the next Cars movie.

RPGaDay 2017 #22 Which RPGs are the easiest for you to run?

GURPS and Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

GURPS because I've had a lot of experience running it over the years. I've internalized a lot of the system. I know the generalities very solidly and can look up the details quickly.

Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road has the advantage of not only being very simple mechanics, but also mechanics that I designed. Also, thanks to the research I did while designing, I have a very strong grasp of the setting as well. So when players try to come up with some totally random thing, it's very easy to say "Oh yeah. Just like the Growleywogs from The Emerald City of Oz."

RPGaDay 2017 #21 Which RPG does the most with the least words?

There are RPGs of all sizes out there. From the massive tomes of D&D all the way down to one-page gems like Lasers & Feelings and even 200-word RPGs.

In my collection, I've got a few fairly small volumes. The two that pack the most punch for me are Fate Accelerated Edition and Warriors of the Red Planet.

Fate Accelerated is a digest sized book with only 32 pages, but it's a complete game. A lot of other games have put out "quickstart guides" or introductory versions that are a stripped down version of the full game, but FAE really feels like it can stand alone. While it doesn't have an adventure or a setting to it, it demonstrates its flexibility in its sample characters, filing serial numbers off of kids favorites like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Harry Potter, with a side of steampunk and Treasure Planet.

For something that does have a setting, my vote goes to Warriors of the Red Planet. It's a pulp-inspired sword and planet game using Old School mechanics. It's still digest sized, but with 126 pages. The setting is not conveyed with maps and locations, but a wonderfully weird bestiary and a collection of random encounter tables. I feel like I can run any sort of adventure in a sword & planet mode with this book.

RPGaDay 2017 #20 What is the best source for out-of-print RPGs?

I love checking out used games from the bargain rack at the friendly local gaming store (when I have one) at the Buyer's Bazaar at DunDraCon. While browsing the extensive, curated collection at Noble Knight Games can be fun, there's nothing quite like digging through a pile of old books yourself. It's sort of like the gap between visiting a museum and doing your own archeology and making your own discoveries.

RPGaDay 2017 #19 Which RPG features the best writing?

RPGs writing is a tricky beast to evaluate, because it's actually two kinds of writing. To use terms every gamer is familiar with, "Fluff" writing and "crunch" writing. Sometimes, a game book can be full of fun and evocative text, but the rules are poorly written and poorly explained. Other times, a book can have on-point technical explanations of the rules, but any setting or campaign material is dry and boring. Most games are between these two points.

For a game that strikes that balance, I would have to nominate Bubblegumshoe by Kenneth Hite. Not only is it written to emulate the teen detective genre, it's written to appeal to fans of the teen detective genre. The rules are well explained, and they're explained in very casual language. Not quite slangy, but also not dry.

RPGaDay 2017 #18 Which RPG have you played the most in your life?

Somewhere between D&D and GURPS.

On top of the 4-5 year OSR D&D campaign I've mentioned several times, there was also a 3.5 megadungeon campaign run by my friend Kris. On top of several other small campaigns and false starts shortly after Third Edition came out and all my friends were saying "Let's play D&D!"

If I've got a little less GURPS under my belt, it's due to the lack of "pick up and play" that GURPS has. For the most part, I've had to write my own adventures when I've run GURPS.

There's also the fact that I've gotten a few more than these two systems under my belt. I even found time in my gaming career to run a playtest campaign for Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

RPGaDay 2017 #17 Which RPG have you owned the longest but not played?

That would probably be Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness from Palladium Books. I bought it from a game store in Burbank in the summer of 1999, when I was working at a Renaissance Fair. It was one of several books that I bought there, but one of the few non-GURPS books that I bought at that time. While I may have never played GURPS Werewolf: The Apocalypse or GURPS Riverworld, I have played a good amount of GURPS, so I'm not going to really count those.

This game was actually based on the original TMNT comics, even having a few pages of those comics in the book, rather than the later cartoons or movies. You could make characters based on a broad variety of animals, not just turtles, and customize them with BIO-E points. There was even a chance that significant mental trauma would turn you gay (though if you were already gay, this result on the insanity tables would mean that you are now straight).

Although it's now one of several Palladium games on my shelf, I have yet to play any of it.

RPGaDay 2017 #16 Which RPG do you enjoy using as is?

As I said yesterday, all of them.

So instead, I'm going to talk about the time that running a game as is actually opened up some doors to me.

Old School D&D, at least as conveyed to me by OSRIC, included a couple of rules regarding mandatory downtime. That is, time that characters must spend away from adventuring in order to take care of other things. In those rules, these included training times for when a character goes up in level and medical recovery when they are dropped below 0 hit points, but not actually killed. I'm sure most tables would ignore this sort of rule. The guys over at the System Mastery podcast have complained plenty when this sort of rule is included in a game they review.

But I wanted to get that First Edition, early-days-of-gaming feel, so I left it in. Another thing I knew that happened in Ye Olden Dayes was players having multiple characters, suitable for multiple levels of adventuring. So I encouraged my players to build multiple characters in case one of them became unavailable to play for whatever reason.

In the early days of this, what mostly happened was that players would wait for all characters to be recovered before venturing into the dungeon. Even if that meant days or weeks of waiting. If I was on top of my game, I would have put pressure on them by highlighting the expenses of staying in town and also taken the time to repopulate the dungeon, but I was new to the whole process myself.

But once there were enough characters and enough players involved, deciding which character to play became part of the strategy of the session. "We're going down to the tomb level. Who's got a cleric to turn all the undead?" "I do, but they're in training right now. Do we want to wait on the tombs and clear out the gnolls on the fourth level instead? My fighter's looking for some action!"

It was a unique and fun experience that I wouldn't have had if I had ignored those downtime rules.

RPGaDay 2017 #15 Which RPG do you enjoy adapting the most?

To be honest, I'm not much of a system hacker. I don't fold, spindle or mutilate rules from an existing game to create the sort of game I want. I'm more interested in trying to divine and support the designers intent for that game. Gaming can create so many diverse experiences and focus play on a variety of specific types of stories or characters that if I want a specific experience, I'm more likely to aim myself at a game that does provide it than trying to hack an existing game. Though I did design my own game to emulate a story style that hadn't been taken on by other designers.

But I will point out one system that I have used for multiple diverse games over the years. I have run it more or less as is for several campaigns. And that would be GURPS. I did science fiction adventure with GURPS Prime Directive. Traditional fantasy in GURPS Banestorm and  modern fantasy with GURPS Technomancer. People with super powers in the world of GURPS Wild Cards.

RPGaDay 2017 #14 Which RPG do you prefer for open-ended campaign play?

There's a very strong temptation to go with the system I used to run the longest campaign I've ever done; My megadungeon campaign that started in OSRIC and eventually got some Adventures Dark & Deep mixed in, especially behind the screen.

The funny thing is, D&D is a game that's very limited in terms of growth. Old school versions had level limits that some characters could hit fairly early. More recent versions create a top end that applies to all characters, at which point the characters have reached the top in nearly every conceivable way.

One of the things that helped that campaign last as long as it did was the sheer amount of content. Whether or not characters had a top end, the dungeon didn't really seem to. And as a dungeon, it was fairly easy to run. While I could have made things complicated and political, it was just as easy to let the players kick down the door and fight whatever monster was in the room.

I won't say that the OSR rules systems are best for open-ended campaigns, but that the megadungeon and its pile of ready to run content is my best experience with long term play.

RPGaDay 2017 #12 Which RPG has the most inspiring interior art?

As I've said before, Castle Falkenstein's entire presentation is a visual treat. Every page is in glossy color and it uses that at every opportunity.
Since I've already discussed that enough a few years ago, I'm going to tackle an alternate question.

Campaigns: do you prefer set-length or open-ended play?

 As much as I've wanted open-ended campaigns that last for years, most of my gaming life has been with set length, or at least short run, campaigns. I get one or two good ideas, see them to fruition, then move on. For a long time, I saw this as a flaw. I kept hoping that this campaign was going to be the one that grew legs. This one would last past its first story arc and becomes something awesome.

Never happened.

Then I did have a successful long-term campaign. Which died and came back a few times. But ultimately died as the players found other things to do.

And that's really the thing. No matter how much we want to keep everything going forever, life conspires against us. People change. People move. Campaigns die on the vine.

I think the best thing to do is to plan for it. What I really want to do next is an episodic campaign. Run something with a clear end, but that can also be picked up later. So if the group falls apart, there's a satisfying ending, but if things go well, there's something more to do.

RPGaDay 2017 #11 Which ‘dead game’ would you like to see reborn?

This is a tough one, but for the best reason. So many of the older games on my shelf do have newer editions, either on the way, out there now, or even on my shelf.

Talislanta is getting a new version thanks to a Kickstarter. Arduin has begat Arduin Eternal. There's a new Star Trek RPG that's only a month or two old. The OSR keeps churning out new material and ideas for the oldest RPG in existence.

If I had to pick, I'm tempted to say Big Eyes Small Mouth, the generic anime game. Mostly to see what it would look like if it were designed today, with modern storygame sensibilities rather than a 90's era simulation-style game.

RPGaDay 2017 #10 Where do you go for RPG reviews?

To be honest, I don't look at reviews that much. Most of my gaming purchases are in two categories: Stuff I was going to buy anyway and impulse buys.

I've been a long time fan of GURPS, so every time there's a new print release, it goes on my shopping list. My wife has us subscribed to Paizo's Pathfinder rulebooks, so those come to us automatically as they are released. The new Star Trek RPG from Modiphius Games is one I will definitely pick up to satisfy my Trekkie soul if nothing else.

Which brings us to the impulse buys. These mostly occur at DunDraCon, when I have budgeted myself to be fairly flush with cash. It's also the closest I come to listening to reviews, as that's when I go to Ken Hite's annual "What's Cool" seminar and build a little bit of a shopping list.

RPGaDay 2017 #9 What is a good RPG to play for about 10 sessions?

Most of them.

For a decent-sized chunk of my gaming career, this is what I did. Pick a game, run it for 10 sessions or so. Maybe up to 20, but nothing past it. Repeat with another game.

On the one hand, it did mean that I never played Exalted to the point that characters got to be too powerful to be managed at all. On the other hand, it meant that my D&D games never got to the point where the really iconic D&D monsters, like mindflayers, beholders and displacer beasts became reasonable enemies for the party.

RPGaDay 2017 #8 What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?

I'm going to go ahead and say Fiasco. While other games are cropping up in the one-shot/short form space, Fiasco is the one that I've read and actually played. Though most of my experiences put a typical Fiasco session at about 3 hours or so.

Though I am struck by the idea of a "Perils of Pauline"-style campaign of short sessions, with a brief recap, a little bit of action ending in a cliffhanger to be resolved next session.

RPGaDay 2017 #7 What was your most impactful RPG session?

It's funny that for all the time I've spent gaming, I've had very few sessions that I would call "impactful." There's been so much time spent in that "just having fun" mode that deep, emotional roleplaying moments just haven't been in the cards for me.

But I have had a couple.

In the Fate Star Wars game I played in at DunDraCon a few years back, each player was given a backstory that they got to fill in pieces of themselves. On my character, I was told that I made a fateful action in my past that set me on my path. As play progressed, one of the NPCs pointed out my fateful action and suggested that it may have been the wrong course of action for me to take. It was quite a shock to go into this scenario thinking of my character as a Big Damn Hero in her own way, only to find out that it might not be true. It actually got some real, non-roleplayed emotions out of me.

The Fiasco Fallout game that I played last year had a different, very interesting impact on me. In that session, I wound up with significant leverage over one of the other characters, which I then used to destroy their relationship with the other character in the group. That's something that I had never done as a player or GM. In a traditional, longer game, you don't really want to do that because then the group has to live with the consequences of that action. Also, the sort of casual adventure gaming that we'd been doing didn't really allow for stuff to build up to the point that it was interesting or useful to smash them down like that.

RPGaDay 2017 #6 You can game every day for a week. Describe what you’d do!

If it was me running it, I would probably dig out the Castle of the Mad Archmage and see how far the players can get at the end of the week.

I might also try a Fiasco campaign. While Fiasco is technically geared to one shot play, it is possible to run a set of linked one-shots. You can use a single playset multiple times, with each session building into the "canon" of the campaign, even though they may approach it from different angles. There are also some "historical" playsets available, some of which can be strung together to create linked stories over time. 5-7 sessions should be enough room to explore either concept, or maybe even both.

If a GM was offering to run a game for me, I'd be open to just about anything.

RPGaDay 2017 #5 Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?

This is a tough one, because I find most covers illustrative rather than evocative. "Look that that character doing their thing. Your character can do that thing, too." Licensed games often less so, because they're trying to remind you of the show and therefore just have the characters from the show on the cover.

World of Darkness core books generally avoid anything simply representational. The most striking example of this would be the old Werewolf: The Apocalypse book with its claw marks slashed across the cover. The new World of Darkness core rulebook was another good one, with the image of an empty street with a shadowy, incomplete figure in the center.

Though I think I have to give the award to Golden Sky Stories. The cover depicts 3 children with animal ears enjoying a sunset on a hillside. Most of the image is given over to the warm red sky than transitions to yellow just below the middle of the cover, where we see the children. The overall mood of the piece is warm and relaxing, which is much what the game inside the book promises.

RPGaDay 2017 #4 Which RPG have you played the most since August 2016?

My Pathfinder megadungeon campaign fell apart around July, so I started this period without an active campaign, either playing or running.

Since then, I've managed one session of Vampire: The Masquerade, 2 sessions of Fiasco, and 4 sessions of GURPS. The amazing thing is that I was not the GM for any of these games. The Vampire game was run by Kris Newton of the Gameable Podcast. He was playtesting a scenario that he was submitting for a contest. I played a character in Fiasco because that game doesn't have a GM, though I wound up guiding the process since I was the one most familiar with the game.

One of these days I'll dust myself off and run a game myself, but I want to make sure I do proper planning beforehand. My days of running by the seat of my pants are over.

RPGaDay 2017 #3 How do you find out about new RPGs?

Mostly from Ken Hite. He's at DunDraCon every year like I am, and every year he does a "What's Cool" seminar. Since that also happens to be when I am fairly flush with cash, I am generally able to act on his recommendations. Also, I am a regular listener of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, so I get regular updates on anything that Ken or Robin are working on.

The One Shot podcast is another source of updates. It also comes with the added bonus that I can see the rules in action. Though just as often, they'll play a game that I already own and their performance makes me want to play it for myself (which doesn't happen as often as I'd like).

Other than that, I check in on RPG.net, various Facebook groups and Tumblr to get a sense of what people are buzzing about.

RPGaDay #2 What is an RPG you would like to see published?

I would love to see a solid space/techno-fantasy game, where magic and technology are both well-integrated into the system and the setting.

For a long time it felt like magic and technology were the oil and water of RPGs. Even when they were allowed to interact, the interaction was often antagonistic. The more advanced your tech, the less effective magic is against it, and vice versa.

I think Mage: the Ascension and GURPS Technomancer are the best games in terms of modern magic. The setting for Mage does have antagonism between magic and science, but it's a conflict that is as much about people and ideas as it is about natural forces. Whichever version of reality you believe in is the one that is true for you, so getting more people to believe in magic makes magic more effective.

Also the Sons of Ether and the Virtual Adepts were able to do magical things with technology. The Sons of Ether believed in ether science, which had been "disproven" by the Technocracy, the big bad of the setting. So even though they believed that what they were doing was science, it was technically magic. The Virtual Adepts were so "bleeding edge" that they pushed technology to do magical things. You know, like all the stuff hat movies and TV tell us that computers can do, even though people who know how computers work know that they can't.

GURPS Technomancer posited modern world where magic was a known and public force, replacing atomic energy as the driving force of the latter half of the 20th century. It did some pretty solid world building, looking at how modern people would use and view magic.

But something like either of them taken to the stars is what I would really like to see. Magic and technology working together to explore space. I've got some ideas that I may or may not develop, and the upcoming Starfinder RPG looks like it might scratch my itch, but we'll see.

RPGaDay 2017 #1 What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?

As a player, I would love to play in a Fate game. Of the published Fate settings, I would probably like to play the Dresden Files. I know there's the new Dresden Accelerated out now, but I haven't picked that up.

I would like to try something Powered By The Apocalypse. I've got several games on my shelf, but haven't had the chance to give it a go. Monsterhearts seems like the most compelling one to play, though Masks also looks very interesting.

As a GM, my goals are a bit different. I would be interested in running Fate, though I'm perhaps more interested in something like Diaspora, with its random setting generation and social combat. I'm also more likely to pick stuff that other GMs might not have or run often. I have some nostalgia for D20 Modern that is rising back up now that I've reconnected with one of my old players.

The DunDraCon Review 2017

Masks: A New Generation is a teen superhero game using the Apocalypse World engine. All of these things sounds really cool. I picked this one up because not only did Ken Hite recommend it at his seminar, but the One Shot podcast played it on a recent episode and they made it sound really cool. And it is. It is also one of my major disappointments this time around.

One of the strengths of the Apocalypse World engine is that each character type has their own character sheet that includes every rule they will ever need. This works because those rules (called moves) are very spare and very specific. 1 or 2 pages of information is all you need to play that character in that game for as long as your campaign lasts.

The flaw here is that neither the character sheets nor any of the rules that are on them are reproduced in the physical book. In the section discussing the different character types that the game uses, it's basically "This is a cool character type to pick if you want to X" with a side of "They come with cool ability Y so you can do Z" with no way to know what anything actually does.

Of course, like all modern games since the dawn of the internet, you can download the character sheet from the internet, which does have all of the rules on it as expected. But to have this be mandatory in order to get core rules of the game is incredibly annoying.

Epyllion is another Apocalypse Engine game, this time themed around dragons. You play as dragons of varying types, but the overall playstyle is a little more My Little Pony: dealing with relationships and solving small problems. There is a War of Shadow in the setting's backstory and the implication is that Shadow is a corrupting influence. Preventing the next rise of Shadow is all about seeking out the small evils of life in Dragonia before they have a chance to grow into the corruption of Shadow.

Bubblegumshoe: This is the new hotness of the year. A teen detective game in the vein of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew or Veronica Mars using the Gumshoe mystery RPG system. On top of a streamlined version of the basic Gumshoe rules engine, it also has extensive rules for relationships and a detailed social combat system. In fact, there's very little to support physical combat in the game.

One of the things that this game takes pains to point out is that you're playing teenagers, who don't have the same freedom of action as adults and much less freedom of action as an adult in a heroic, action-oriented career. When guns come out, it is serious business and any teen detective should take that as a cue to get out of that situation.

The writing feels modern and casual, without using a lot of slang or "of the moment" lingo that is going to make this feel dated in a year or so, so it should appeal to actual teen fans of teen detective fiction. Bonus points for being inclusive, with the sample characters being ethnically diverse and mentions of characters in non-heterosexual romantic relationships.

I was also able to pick up both Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents in the Buyer's Bazaar, making this year a real Gumshoe-a-palooza for me.

On the subject of Cthulhu, the copy of Call of Cthulhu went directly to a friend of mine, as did the Song of Ice and Fire RPG and a copy of the D&D module White Plume Mountain (I'm sure it's in the picture, but it's very thin, so you might not see it), so I didn't have the opportunity to develop an opinion of them.

Myriad Song (not pictured) is a space opera game from Sanguine Productions, publishers of IronClaw and a couple of other furry RPGs. This game, however, is a departure from that. All of the races are aliens. Sure, some of them are dog aliens or spider aliens, but there are also some really interesting alien aliens, as well as humans and robots available as playable races. I haven't seen the second edition of IronClaw, but the mechanics of this game remind me very strongly of the rules variant used for their Usagi Yojimbo game.

The setting is not specific about where in space and time it is compared to us, so it could be our far future or it could be like Star Wars and its "Long ago in a galaxy far far away." The Myriad Worlds were run by an empire known as the Myriad Syndicate. The Syndics were a race of advanced beings that had mastered the art of xen-harmonics, which enabled them to do all sorts of amazing things. They even had the ability to imbue beings with xenharmonic powers via genetic engineering, so the same principle that powers the setting's space drive can also enable your character to teleport and so on.

Then the Syndics disappeared. Their technology still functioned, but the ability to manufacture or repair it went with them. Various factions struggle to fill the power vacuum, including a faction that is trying to keep the universe in order for the Syndics eventual return.

Rounding out my GURPS collection, I picked up a couple of adventures. Adventures are not a big part of what GURPS does, so these were interesting finds. School of Hard Knocks is a superhero adventure written by Aaron Allston, who did a lot of work with Champions back in the day, though my primary exposure to him was his novel Doc Sidhe. I thought this adventure was interesting because the script calls for the PCs to win some fights, but lose others. While you can't guarantee outcomes where dice are concerned, it seems like an interesting break from the assumption that the heroes must be successful in every encounter.

Bili the Axe: Up Harzburk is a solo adventure to support GURPS Horseclans. The format is fairly similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but sometimes where the story goes is dictated by a die roll rather than a choice. The storyline here is actually a military campaign, so it could definitely be run as a group adventure as well.

While I haven't had the opportunity to find any of the Horseclans novels since I bought the GURPS Horseclans book last year, I have read some of Robert Adams' other writing. I have little interest in tracking down any more of it.

Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles RPG from Palladium Books was an interesting read. Palladium had the Robotech RPG license back in the 80's, but it seems that they have reacquired it about 10 years ago. The new book is "manga-sized" to catch the eye of the new generation of fans. The order in which the material is presented is odd, starting with game stats of the Invid, who are presumably the primary enemy in the Shadow Chronicles (making this the game's "Monster Manual"), followed by details on the humans and their mecha with the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of the game coming in very last. While it makes sense to catch the eye by starting with the good stuff and things that build the setting, it feels a little odd (and maybe even refreshing) to my experienced RPG-reading eyes.

Also from Palladium was After the Bomb, a supplement for their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG. It features an alternate, post-apocalyptic setting for the game, in which Gamma World's weird gonzo mutants with 6 arms and 2 brains and psychic powers are replaced with mutant animals of various kinds. There's a sample adventure included featuring a conflict with a cadre of rabbits with punny names, such as Bug Bunny and Gun Bunny.

A standalone After the Bomb game was released after Palladium let the TMNT license go. Maybe one day, I'll find a copy of that somewhere.

Dungeon Crawl Classics is an Old School RPG who's primary gimmick seems to be randomness. Players are encouraged to create a plethora of level 0 characters that then go through a "character funnel," a starter adventure that will kill off most of them. Once they have proven themselves worthy, they then achieve level 1 and gain a class.

The magic system is the most random thing in the game, with each spell having its own table to roll on which can determine if you cast the spell and exactly how much bang you get out of it. Spell failures lead to misfires and corruption, each with its own table to roll on. But fighters also get their own critical hit and critical miss tables to roll on during combat.

Warriors of the Red Planet is another OSR game that takes a different approach. Rather than a big sprawling book, it's a very slim volume. It covers only the barest essentials while letting your imagination do the rest. 4 classes with simple mechanics, a few maps and random tables followed by an interesting bestiary and you're off to the races.

The publisher had a few other OSR-style games at his table, but I picked Warriors of the Red Planet because I thought that sword and planet adventures were something that was right up the OSR alley without being too beholden to classic fantasy.

The picture also includes the Adventure Time Fluxx card game, making Adventure Time one of 2 franchises where I have the Fluxx game and the Munchkin game (the other being Oz). Also another Noteboard. Now that I have 3, I have the same surface area as my conventional battlemat in a form that fits in my pocket(s). Though it did wind up being roughly the same cost.

I was very disappointed in the lack of Star Trek merchandise available this year. Notice that there are no Star Trek shirts among the stash (though there is a cool Star Wars one, but that's my wife's). If you look closely at the white bag shopping it has little Enterprises on it, and the lining is command gold. I also got a bag with a Walking Dead fabric featuring the show's logo and a grasping hands pattern. That's another gift for another friend. (If you are my IRL friend, I will spoil you with convention goodies. Just saying.)

The black bag is actually a very deluxe dice bag called a d-bag. Not only is it nice and sizeable for dice collectors, it also has smaller pouches inside it, so you can keep your cool dice sets together without keeping them in their bulky plastic boxes.

I did, however, jump on some of the other Star Trek merchandise where I found it. I know the guy in the bottom right corner is not from Star Trek, but if you don't love the Flash Gordon movie where Queen did all the music, then we just can't be friends.

The DunDraPost 2017

As is my tradition around here, I'm writing about my annual trip to DunDraCon. As I mentioned previously, Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road did not have a presence there this year. So this was more of an actual vacation than the working vacation it's been the last few years.

Unlike last year, there was very little to criticize about the trip. Everything went fairly smooth, with connections occurring in a timely manner and no expensive redirections. In spite of the fact that California's weather has been pretty rough this week, my wife and I made it through the trip without getting thoroughly soaked.

Friday was the first official day of the con, but it's usually more of a warmup to the main event that is Saturday and Sunday. Check out the people selling used games for a song in the Buyer's Bazaar, check if there are any cool seminars on Day 1, that sort of thing.

This year came with a new wrinkle, however. It turns out that my younger sister was living just a few hours drive from the convention location. She reached out to me on Facebook and we met for a late lunch/early dinner during the lull in con activities. It was also a good chance for me to finally meet her new husband. I had met him once previously, but only for long enough to shake his hand before they moved away.

Since her husband is from India, we went to an Indian restaurant. (If I were to talk about my family more, we'd probably have a very Modern Family sort of vibe.) I hadn't really had Indian food before, so this was my chance to try it out.

We made it back in time to discover that the official Dealer's Room was open. It normally isn't open until Saturday morning. We wasted no time in making our initial purchases of new stuff.

Then it was time for our game. Yes, "our." My wife and I had signed up to play in the same game. It was a game using the Arduin system, and I knew my wife was a fan of the setting. And it was run by someone who was close to the original designer, who has passed.

It was not what I expected. My reading of the Arduin books in my collection, including some written by the fellow running the game, was of a sort of pulp/sword and planet/fantasy world. What we got instead  was a metatextual genre mash in which the characters were self-aware protagonists of bad, half-written novels who wind up traveling through each others stories. My character was a Wonder Woman sort of superhero, while my wife got a character that was a joke about Mary Sues, who could bend the narrative around her to her wishes. It actually came in handy a few times.

If you've played RPGs long enough, you'll meet the guy who says that their game of choice can do anything. Even if it's some old game that use different dice for different things, some rolls you want high, other things you want to roll low on. But because this guy has been playing this one game for the last 10+ years, he's achieved a sort of bond with the system and knows how to fold, spindle and mutilate it to get the results that he wants. This was one of those sorts of games.

On Saturday morning, I did not play in the annual Mythos Trek game. Not that I didn't want to. It's always been great fun. I was not assigned to the game by the convention's Sorting Hat. It happens sometimes. I could have just shown up and probably could have gotten in that way. But it was early in the morning and the nearest fee-free ATM was about a mile away, which meant about 40 minutes of walking before I could have my morning coffee. (I know I can use my bank card to just buy coffee. But limiting myself to cash that I pull from the ATM ensures that I pace my spending so I don't run out of money on the first day.)

I took advantage of the free time during the day to get some shopping done. As per tradition, I'll spare you the boring details in this post and then go into some exciting details about what I bought in a separate post. Needless to say, I am overall rather happy with my purchases this year, with only a few disappointments.

It also meant that I was free to catch some of the seminars in between bouts of game shopping. Ken Hite did his typical City Building seminar, this time with a post-apocalypse theme. Then shopping before a seminar on indie RPGs by Jason Walters, the guy who runs Indie Press Revolution. I'm regretting not staying after the seminar to introduce myself, since I do sell my game through his company, but I had signed up for a game that was starting immediately after the seminar on another floor of the hotel.

And that game was Mecha vs Kaiju, a setting for Fate Core. Although I didn't realize it at the beginning of the session, but the GM was the setting's designer. Always cool when you can do that sort of thing. The other fun thing is that we generated our characters during the play session.

As I've said before, most con games I've played in have used pregenerated characters. The interesting thing this time was that Fate character generation can be an intensive process. Not a lot of math or anything like that. Just a lot of examination of "Just who is my guy, exactly?" And part of that process is talking with your fellow players and figuring out "Just who is my guy to you, exactly?"

Needless to say, this took a lot of time, so the adventure proper was very simple. The formation of a sentai team, told in 2 fight scenes with some exposition in the middle. It was fun, but a little frustrating. My concept was of a guy who is very modest, but keeps finding himself in the middle of events. But the sentai fighting style that he wound up using was very showy and uncomfortable for him, so at the end of the session, I declared that my characters was officially the "Sixth Ranger" of the team.

Sunday morning was my wife's chance to play in a game without me. Another Fate game, this time using pregenerated characters in an established universe. The Steven Universe, actually. (If they don't call it that, they should.) My wife went in wanting to play Amethyst, but after some negotiation settled on Steven's friend Connie.

While she did that, I checked out Ken Hite's "What's Cool" seminar and adjusted my shopping list accordingly. Which did lead to one of my disappointments, but more on that later.

We then spent the evening taking advantage of the hotel pool and doing a little pre-packing to make checking out in the morning a little easier. We actually bring an extra, empty suitcase along with us that always makes the return trip full.

Time Out!

For those of you wondering if I will be at DunDraCon this year, have no fear. Unfortunately, Adventures in Oz will not be there in an official capacity. It seems that real life intruded at just the wrong time and I missed the event submission deadline this year. Unofficially, if anyone wants to play Adventures in Oz, I and my adventure notes will be there and there's lots of space in the Open Gaming room.

In the meantime, I've been catching up on expanding my podcast listening to the System Mastery podcast. They review old and (best left) forgotten tabletop RPGs with a healthy dose of humor.

It should also be noted that they have a few biases and pet peeves regarding the games that they review. The one that I want to address in this post is the requirement of extensive downtime, especially with regards to healing and recovery. It was a common feature in games for quite some time and some treatments of the subject are indeed worthy of mockery (How it's discussed in the Prime Directive RPG is something of a running gag for these guys).

But it doesn't have to suck. I ran an Old School campaign for many years with all of the downtime rules switched on and that was overall a success. Here's a few tips that I've picked up from my experiences.

1) Give every player a character to play. The first time I did this was back in my Cartoon Action Hour campaign. The party was split, with only one character remaining at the site of the big set-piece battle I had devised. So I decided to give each of the players whose character was not present a temporary character to play for that battle.

For the run of my Old School campaign, each player had several characters, some of whom were in downtime at any given moment. When the characters were high enough level to attract henchmen, those henchmen were also available as alternate player characters while their main character was unavailable.

2) Make downtime worthwhile for everyone. My earliest experience here was kind of a bad one. By Third Edition D&D, most of the required downtime rules from earlier editions had fallen by the wayside, except for those required by wizards. Spellcasters still had to take time out to make magic items, like scrolls and potions, as well as to add newly acquired spells to their spellbook. So for the megadungeon game that Kris Newton ran, the party wizard tended to be something of a drag on the rest of us. It didn't help matters that we had a rival party exploring the dungeon, so whenever we took downtime, we felt the need to negotiate with the rival party to keep them out of the dungeon as well.

I had better luck running the Pathfinder version of the Castle of the Mad Archmage. By the time i got that organized, Paizo had published their book Ultimate Campaign which featured, among other things, a detailed downtime system. Now, while the spellcaster was making magic items or was otherwise holed up in their sanctum, the rest of the party has activities that they can do as well. Earning a few gold pieces, building credit with the locals, or even catching up on experience points for when the player misses a session.

3) Use downtime to provoke dramatic choices. At least some of the problematic treatment of downtime, specifically as it relates to injury, is the assumption that attempts at recovery must happen immediately after the injury. But what if there are still things to do in the adventure? The System Mastery guys suggest that the injured character must go into recovery mode immediately and the player must avoid the gaming table because their character is functionally useless.

But what if the character doesn't go immediately into recovery? While I didn't have this happen due to injury, I did have players make the choice to not take the downtime required to level up immediately in my Old School megadungeon game. Because leveling up not only takes time, it takes money in those rules. In the early levels of the dungeon, there was not a massive amount of treasure, so it did sometimes happen that a character would earn enough XP to advance in level, but not enough money in the bank to pay for the training.

In a slightly different game, that could be a dramatic choice. If the villains of the adventure are working on a timetable, the heroes will have to act quickly and decisively to thwart them, which may not leave significant time to heal up between fights. The big fictional example is the first Die Hard film (The only Die Hard film I've seen). John McClane is increasingly battered in his fights with Hans Gruber's henchmen over the course of the film and the increasing difficulties those injuries cause him are not shied away from. And since he is isolated in the building, the best he can do for healing is some improvised first aid.

The Burning Wheel RPG makes this sort of decision a little more interesting. Since skills only advance in those rules when they are used for increasingly challenging tasks, characters are encouraged to attempt more difficult things. But there are also a lot of mechanisms for making tasks easier. The result is a tension between making the task you're rolling for hard so you can advance your skill, or get lots of help so the roll is easier and you're more likely to get what you want.

When a Burning Wheel character in injured, they take wound penalties to their die rolls, making things harder until they recover. So again that tension comes into play. Do you take the time to recover and remove those penalties, or do you accept the penalties and use them to make tasks more difficult and therefore more likely to improve?

Any other thoughts on making downtime a more natural and interesting part of your game?