RPGaDay 2015 #24 Favorite House Rule

I'm not much of a house ruler. I like to at least see what the designer wanted me to get out of the game before I adjust anything. And every designer has an agenda. Even Gary Gygax. If I were to tweak and hack games into shape before trying them out, I think I'd miss half the fun of the games I want to try.

One thing that I will do is award my players a little bonus XP when they give me something to eat. There was a period I did not, because my players were 2 or 3 people who regularly brought food to share during game and 1 guy who was down on his luck. The guy who was down on his luck point out how unfair this could get. I realized the wisdom of it and stopped. Now that I'm not gaming with him, I've handed out a few XP for a cookie here or there.

Not sure if this counts, but one thing I've been doing with my games is keeping a calendar. It started with my old school megadungeon game with notes on graph paper. I've since upgraded to a computerized method which allows me a bit more room for notetaking than those little squares. This is the program I use. While it would be nice to have something that can deal with custom calendars like so many fantasy worlds have, adding notes for month transitions and other details on a numerical timeline is fairly easy.

RPGaDay 2015 #23 Perfect Game For You

I'm sure there are people who will be surprised and disappointed that I'm not going to say GURPS here. It has seen me through many fun campaigns and there might be even more GURPS fun in the future.

But I also don't really believe that there is a perfect game that will fill all my desires for every campaign ever. There might be a perfect game for a given genre, tone, setting, or any other category. But even that can be subject to debate.

I like to think that I've designed the perfect Oz RPG. At very least, I think it's safe to call it the best Oz RPG currently on the market. It was definitely the first.

I'm tempted to say that some version of Fate might edge into a fairly high place in my list of go-to games for a variety of settings. I like an awful lot of stuff written for Fate, but haven't really had the ability to give it a serious try. Once I do, we'll see how it shakes out.

In the meantime, I've got lots of games on my shelf that have yet to see some use. My ultimate goal is to play them all!

RPGaDay 2015 #22 Perfect Gaming Environment

I can't say that I've ever encountered my perfect gaming environment. There have been a few very neat setups, sure. But perfect?

At DunDraCon, each scheduled game takes place in a semi-private room with a nice large round table. It's up to individual GMs to provide props, such as maps and minis. That's pretty sweet.

The gaming store I go to is also nice, with a room off to the side of the main gaming area with a large table and a very large battlemat. But I haven't used it since they decided to charge for the space.

To get better than that is going to require personal attention. Like the First Edition DM that I know who collects miniatures. Mostly the cheap plastic prepainted kind, but he's got a ton of them. If you ever need a monster, he's very likely got it. If not, it's something close.

As I'm actually learning to accept technology, it's being incorporated into my gaming. So my ideal gaming setup should include at least power, and maybe wi-fi for my laptop. While some people may swear by wi-fi, I am willing to admit that it's as much a distraction to me as anything else. Unless I start adopting that whole "cloud" idea. We'll see.

Though I do also enjoy physical books, so my perfect game space would necessarily include bookshelves. Books are also easier to share with players during game if they need to lookup rules for any reason. This also means that I can limit the books that players can reference at my table without limiting myself (Keeping PDFs of bestiaries and setting notes on my laptop).

Dice towers and projectors aimed at my table are totally optional, but might be fun to have.

RPGaDay 2015 #21 Favorite RPG Setting

One thing that irks me about the modern RPG publishing industry is how often they say "setting," but actually mean "campaign."

To clarify, a "setting" is a place for adventures to happen. A "campaign" is the answer to the question: "Who are the characters and what do they do?" The Discworld novels are a great example of this. The Discworld as a whole is a setting. But the series has not one, but several story threads running through it. Each with a unique set of characters who live in different places in the world and do different things. So even though all the stories take place in the same setting, Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax, and Moist von Lipwig are all effectively playing in separate campaigns.

I don't know how long this trend has been going on, but I started noticing it a few years ago. The first time I spotted it was the FantasyCraft Adventure Companion. It promised 3 settings, but all it really offered was campaigns. Sure each campaign took place in its own setting, but the opening paragraphs of each section were from some sort of in-setting mentor figure giving you the Big Speech about how you're going off into the big bad world to do X. While the X was usually pretty broad, and in one case was simply the wandering adventurer as respected social role, the rest of the material was presented in such a way as to support that specific campaign.

But what if I don't want to be a wandering adventurer? What if I want to be a merchant? Or establish a homestead out of the frontier of the world? If I want to use this so-called setting as an actual setting, I'm going to have to do at least half the work that buying a packaged setting was supposed to save.

Fate Worlds has this sort of problem as well. It promises settings, but delivers campaigns. And the majority of those campaigns are simply hacks. Rather than offering anything resembling a setting, we get mechanics to support a given campaign style. So rather than telling us a little story about Jack and Diane, we are instead given different rules to detail how Jack and Diane (for any given value of Jack or Diane), can interact or relate to one another.

Please note that I am not calling these products out as flawed designs or bad products. I simply feel that they are mistakenly marketed. If something calls itself a setting, I am presuming that it will be well-written enough to support multiple campaign types. If all you are offering is a campaign, please do not call it a setting.

I think it also sets a bad precedent. A while back on Facebook, I saw an established publisher of third-party Pathfinder material post in a Pathfinder group "Help! I'm writing a setting, but my playtesters have just figured out that it's really just a campaign!" I am paraphrasing, but that's pretty much what he said. Needless to say, that guy's not getting my money.

Maybe I'm just spoiled on the way GURPS does their setting books. They have a reputation for being bland, but thorough. And I think that a portion of this is that they do not assume a campaign. There are suggestions and ideas for different campaigns and adventures throughout the book, but it doesn't assume you'll follow any of them. (Considering my Discworld example above, it makes remarkable sense that GURPS Discworld is a thing.)

(I do have lots of cool settings on my shelf, as well as a few campaigns. But this rant has been brewing for some time and I thought I'd take the opportunity to get it out.)

RPGaDay #20 Favorite Horror RPG

Unfortunately, I am not a horror gamer. It's not an experience I particularly enjoy.

The Mythos Trek scenarios that I've played in at DunDraCon the last couple of years are inspired by the Chthulhu Mythos (hence the name) and sometimes other horror films. But they've generally been great fun. I might be the one derailing the horror experience with my humor and nerd references, but the guy who runs them has never complained about having me there. He's also a fan of AiO, which might give me some slack.

RPGaDay 2015 #19 Favorite Supers RPG

I've got a number of superhero RPGs on my shelf. Marvel-licensed games. DC-licensed games. Games set in their own universes of superheroic action.

I'll say that I like a lot about the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game. I'll also admit that it's one of many games that I have only read and not played.


But the main things that interest me in the supers genre are not the superheroics, but the "people with powers" stories. One of the reasons that Spider-Man is my favorite superhero is how relate-able he is. He has a very complex life as Peter Parker and his role as Spider-Man often winds up complicating things further.

Some of my favorite TV shows feature characters who have superpowers, but never put on a costume. I loved the first season of Heroes, though I think it went downhill after that. For vintage TV fans, who remembers Misfits of Science? A short-lived show in the 80's featuring one of the girls from Friends and the guy who wore the Predator suit in the first movie. More recently, the British show Misfits traveled this same sort of territory, with darkly comic results (mature viewers only, please!).

The Wild Cards setting (based on mosaic novels edited by George R.R. Martin, and part of the story of how I met my wife) explores this idea as well. And since I own the GURPS adaptation of this setting (Though there's been a more recent version for the Mutants & Masterminds rules), it's been my go-to system for this concept.

The current Fourth Edition of GURPS handles super abilities much better than previous editions. The last time I ran a game in the Wild Cards setting, I was able to do so with only the Basic Set for rules. While they have put more support out for higher powered heroics, I don't know if I'd use them for this style of play.

RPGaDay 2015 #18 Favorite SF RPG

While I do have a number of sci-fi RPGs on my shelf, my heart will likely always belong to Star Trek. I have collected all of the Star Trek RPGs I can. I've got the FASA game from the 80's that used percentile dice. I've got the class and level based game from Decipher. I even have Prime Directive, the RPG spinoff of the Starfleet Battles starship combat game.

But I think my favorite overall Star Trek RPG is the one produced by Last Unicorn Games. While other other games did one thing or another really well, LUG provided a Star Trek RPG that did everything competently. It actually provided 3, with core rulebooks covering the Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine.

Of the three, since we insist on narrowing things down, I find I prefer the Original Series corebook. Not just because I'm planning a campaign in that era. Maybe it's just the fact that it was the second corebook released, but I feel like it has a lot more polish that the TNG game. Or maybe they did TNG as an "all encompassing" game and once they did the other core books, they allowed themselves to be more focused. It just feels like everything from the way the rules are explained to the GM advice is much more finely tuned.