RPGaDay 2015 #10 Favorite RPG Publisher

I like myself. It's important to like yourself. So my favorite RPG publisher is myself.

Though I wish I did more RPG publishing. I haven't put out a new product recently. I wish I had more product support for Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road. I wish I were able to bring any of the other ideas I have to fruition.


Hopefully, this writing burst will turn into some actual productivity. Time will tell.

RPGaDay 2015 #9 Favorite Media You Wish Was An RPG

This one's a toughy. There are so many media properties that have received the RPG treatment. If I wanted to, I could stake vampires with Buffy, Harry Dresden, or the Winchesters. I could fight supervillains with Superman or Spider-Man. I could dogfight in space with Luke Skywalker or Starbuck. I could explore strange new worlds with Captain Kirk, Captain Picard or the crew of the Red Dwarf. I could wander the wastes of the Dying Earth or the steaming jungles of Planet Krishna. I could fly in the TARDIS with 8 incarnations of the Doctor and their companions. Heck, I could even follow the Yellow Brick Road along with Dorothy and her friends.

And that's just with books on my shelf. Nearly every media tie-in RPG I want is already there.

Except one.

When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction reader and my favorite author was Isaac Asimov. He was a very smart guy and wrote some very intelligent stuff. He could lean towards the zap gun-type stuff if he wanted to, but even that showed thought and effort that not every writer put out.

If there was one universe I would want that has not yet received the RPG treatment, it would be the universe of Isaac Asimov's writings. I don't know if there's a formal name to that universe, where most of his major work seems to belong. Certain sections of his body of work have collective names, like his robot stories, or the Foundation novels, but I don't know if there's a word that means the whole connected future history that he created. Whatever that word is, I want to see it on a gaming book full of well-though out science fiction goodness.

My wife's vote is for the world shown in the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. That would be cool too.

RPGaDay 2015 #8 Favorite Appearance of RPGs in the Media

I've never been a fan of the media portrayals of RPGs. First off, you had the "Satanic Panic" of the 80's, where RPGs were the ultimate evil. The TV movie Mazes & Monsters was the high (and low) point of this phenomena.

While most of that has worn off (though it's still around in some circles), gaming is still considered a weird geeky hobby. While this sort of portrayal is arguably better, it's still not actually good. Having the gang on Big Bang Theory play D&D just reinforces their nerd cred and demonstrates their outsider status.

I would like to see a show where the game is more normalized. The players aren't ubergeeks, but regular people. People with jobs, spouses, kids, drama, comedy, and all that. Like the people I game with. Like, what if everyone on Seinfeld played D&D? What if they had a weekly game night on Friends? That sort of thing.

Until that show appears, there is Titanfall: Ashes of Volkana. It's a very well produced show that is really quite watchable. The people are very normal-looking. Attractive, even. Half of the players are female (and I think one of the male players has a female character) and nobody bats an eye. The game is run very rules light, with helpful graphics so the audience can follow what's going on. The players are all clearly having a blast.

That's the kind of gaming media I think we need.

RPGaDay 2015 #7 Favorite Free RPG

Free is such a funny word.

Some games are freely available for the downloading. Just find the right link and go. I'm not trying to condone piracy here. Only pointing out that there are games that the designers released into the wild for no charge. My favorite here would probably be Lasers and Feelings. It looks light and fun, as well as being inspired by a really fun song by the Doubleclicks.

Then there are the SRDs. When the Open Gaming License became a thing, it meant that system designers had to take the first step and release some of their content so third-party publishers had something to work with. Thus was born the SRD, or System Reference Document. For Wizards of the Coast, the SRD was a different beast than their actual rulebooks. Their intent was to release enough information that 3ppublishers could use, but not so much that they lost their ability to make money from their own content. So their SRD did not contain rules for character generation or advancement for players, and a couple of the more iconic D&D monsters from the first Monster Manual were left out.

Later publishers have been less strict about what they include in an SRD. For example, the Diaspora SRD pretty much gives you the entire game. But the most open Open Gaming Content would have to be Paizo's Pathfinder PRD. Every time they put out one of their hardcover rulebooks, the content winds up on their website a few months later.

The final category would have to be Pay What You Want. Evil Hat started this trend with their Fate Core project, but a lot of other people have jumped on the bandwagon (including me!). And $0.00 is a valid price, so they could be said to be free. In fact, both Fate Accelerated and Aether Sea (from my Day 3 post) are PWYW in PDF, so you can pick up that Complete Gaming Package I was talking about for a song (or less).

RPGaDay #6 Most Recent RPG Played

Well, the most recent session I participated in would be a session of the Pathfinder version of the Castle of the Mad Archmage. But I'm the GM, not the player, so you might not count that.

As a player, I most recently played 1st Edition D&D in a friend's campaign. That was actually a few weeks ago. My character died after being stomped by an immense giant (Last words: "You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny!"), though I've been told that it was all some sort of magical holodeck and that my character is actually fine.

I've also gotten around to playing Fiasco a few times. That's GM-less, so I got to be a player even though I'm the one who owns that game and said "Hey guys! Let's try this!"

RPGaDay 2015 #5 Most Recent RPG Purchase

My overall game buying has slowed down, but on my wife's insistence I do maintain a subscription with Paizo for their hardcover rulebooks. So a week or so ago, I received their latest book, Occult Adventures.

Occult Adventures looks like Paizo's official take on psionics. As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I have never been impressed with the way Wizards of the Coast handled psionics for D&D 3.x. It never felt like psychic powers from any other media.

Paizo nailed it. They lean a bit closer to horror movie tropes than my preferred science-fiction approach, but it finally feels like someone actually looked at how psychic powers work in media before writing a big expensive book of psionics rules.

RPGaDay 2015 #4 Most Surprising Game

It's kind of hard to think of a game as surprising. I mean, sure, somewhere in all of that D&D merchandising back in the 80's there must have been a pop-up book with monsters that jump out at you. But a regular old game book?

Well, maybe a few things have surprised me.

I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed reading Monsterhearts. While I don't know that I could really go for the PVP/teen drama style of play, I liked how it encouraged thinking about supernatural powers as a metaphor for puberty, queerness, or both. Being the awkward kid who didn't fit in at school when I was younger, that resonated with me.

Diaspora was another game that surprised me. It's a small book that is mostly rules, but nearly everything about it is brilliant. The overall setting is very broad, with relatively few hard facts. Because of how the FTL drive of the setting works, civilization is divided into clusters, groups of solar systems that are connected by hyperspace links. The play group is assumed to create their own cluster, randomly rolling the stats for each system and deciding exactly what that collection of stats looks like.

It offers spaceship combat and tactical squad combat that work in the FATE milieu and are playable as separate minigames if you want to. But the real kicker is the social combat system. Most other social combat systems I've seen are not very different from the game's physical combat system. But Diaspora's social combat is more about positioning and maneuvering. The result feels much more like a system where you're trying to change someone's mind rather than just whacking away at their resistance to doing what you want.