Microgames, Monster Games, and Role Playing Games
(SPOILER WARNING: If you intend to play the Isle of Dread, you probably shouldn’t read any further!)
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“If the PCs unknowingly venture into an area they’re not prepared to handle, they should suffer the consequences, including death.” — Justina’s Player
Here’s the score:
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It is not my view of this island that characters can necessarily respawn there ad infinitum. Unless you come up with a different vision/goal, you are conquistadors. You’re here to pillage and loot and then GO HOME. That’s part of the reason why I was originally pushing that XP would only be awarded to the folks that make it back to Specularum. Two reasons for that: civilization is the only real home base… and this extreme lost world wilderness location does not provide the fame aspect of the leveling up process. (I have ruled that Justina, Han Yolo, and Steve Erwin will get XP before next session, though. I’m not going back on that agreement– mostly because I’m curious what you guys will do with access to the second level cleric spells.)
Now… there is some objection to the wimpy first level villagers that now make up the bulk of the party. There’s a few reasons why I think you should embrace this:
It would be pretty darn useful for continuity purposes if either Justina or Han Yolo actually did make it back to the ship. (And I know this has been a low-treasure high-death game… but do not underestimate the value of the exploration you’ve done and the intelligence you’ve gathered.) BUT… that’s my assumption. However… I haven’t heard anything to make me think that you guys think that would be awesome. In fact… maybe it is that you… dread… the onerous trek through the wilderness. Maybe the thought of taking a twenty day journey back the ship and then backtracking back to the plateau again– maybe that sounds just completely silly, dull, and pointless. If you genuinely feel that way… let me tell you. Maybe you don’t really want to play “The Isle of Dread.” If you want to do unlimited respawn with a town that is very close to a massive dungeon such that you would not ever have to play out very much in the way of hexcrawling… then what you actually want to do is play Stonehell Megadungeon. Just sayin’!
So… that last bit is the reductio ad adbsurdam that explains why I am so stingy with the concessions you’ve been asking for here and there. At some point, you can make so many modifications to the implied campaign structure of this adventure that you’re not really playing “The Isle of Dread” anymore. If you genuinely want to play a different type of game, that’s fine. There’s a reason why there is a big campaign setting map included with the module. I know I need to be flexible juggling the desires of the players and all that, but I’m not going to tinker with the parameters of this scenario until it is functionally identical to every other adventure you’ve played. The Isle of Dread is its own place. It has its own distinctive qualities and if we’re going to play it, I intend to preserve them.
Which leads us to option five: We could just rule that Justina and Han Yolo made it back to Specularum only to get killed in a bar brawl before they could get another expedition together. Your new party would have their log, so you’d know everything you already know and you can take another stab at the adventure with that information more-or-less intact, but out of date by a few years. This gets your balanced, full-strength party in place without violating my precious sense of narrative coherence. It would also preserve the island as being a remote, treacherous location that you cannot adventure on indefinitely. Option six would be the same as five except that you would do something else for a while on the mainland and then tackle the Isle once you think you have enough levels and magic-items to do it. If that is the case, then I can place both Stonehell and The Darkness Beneath on the campaign map and you can take your pick of those two megadungeons.
My chief concern in all of this has been to reasonably and impartially present this classic module to you as a change of pace from whatever else it is that you normally do. I am not necessarily trying to steer you one way or the other… but I do hope this explains why things have been done the way that they have been. It’s not my job to continuously throw resources at you which you then spend like drunken sailors until you manage to systematically clear out every stinking hex on the island. It’s your job to take the resources that you do have and then see what you can accomplish with them in the context of a situation that is rapidly evolving.
This is Gaming Notes, the weekly news-magazine about all kinds of games and the home of Space Gaming News, Designer Spotlight, and Blog Watch. This week’s special guest is Kyrinn S. Eis, the designer of Porphyry.
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Space Gaming News:
Star Fleet Universe (ADB) The latest update on upcoming releases — “Origins is looming. It’s only 29 days away as I write this, and none of the new products are ready. Captain’s Log #47 is the highest priority, and that (at least) will get done…. It remains to be seen if the rules problems in ACTASF and the production problems with the 2500s have fatally wounded those product lines. We’re basically going to have to reboot them to make them the success they should have been…. Over the next two years, SFB will get X2, F&E will get Minor Empires, FC will get X-ships and go beyond the Borders of Madness, Star Fleet Marines will get a third (armored cavalry) and fourth (monsters) module, new RPG books (Orion Pirates, Feline Empires, Gorns) and new game engines will be done, the long-awaited expansion deck for SFBF will happen, Starmada needs another couple of books, and more Starline 2400-series miniatures will be done. Those won’t be the only products released for existing lines.”
BattleTech (Board Game Geek Geeklist) Games Where You Become Emotionally Invested with the Game’s Universe — “I had such an attachment for my pilots, that I started writing fan fiction about them.”
Star Frontiers (Delta’s D&D Hotspot) SciFi Saturday – Ship Index Cards — “I also shrank the Basic Game Combat Table onto an index card. Print out a page of these, and then you can basically run the entire game from your stack of index cards.”
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Designer Spotlight:
Jeffro: Okay, I’ve looked over the sample that’s over on Lulu. First off… it looks gorgeous. It sounds like the setting is much more serious than Gamma World, much farther gone than Car Wars, and unsettlingly creepy what with all the weird magical fallout that you’ve engineered into it. It’s almost like… you’ve managed to preserve the insane post-apocalyptic ethos of eighties gaming while adapting to more current sensibilities. Did you specifically set out to accomplish something like that or did this game’s comcept simply emerge from the ether unbidden?
Kyrinn S. Eis: The game’s first session was actually a D&D pick-up/one-off game with G+ folks. It was decided before that there would be no standard fantasy RPG races, and other tropes were to be toned down. I decided to run this as a post-apocalyptic setting, and drew inspiration from fleeting and half-remembered concepts from “The Night Land” novels by William Hope Hodgson. H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreamlands,” too, was an instant influence — I’m a very visual thinker — as well as Rodney Matthews’ depictions of various book covers, etc.
Duke Barclay’s PC was a cleric of Finnian, and he was sent out from his cloister by his master, and the other PCs were henchmen sent with him on his mission to reach civilised lands top the south. Their cloister was one of the remaining towers of the Barrier of Elysth, once used to try and contain The Burn when it had touched down upon Porphyry. These intrepid travellers made their way through the blasted heath and mossy rocks until the vast pine forests were encountered across a broad and strong river or tributary. A PC was lost in the crossing and the player soon left the game. The two remaining PCs made their way to forsaken Ownys, rich in un-looted goods, but crawling with Burn cultists, mutants, and cannibals. A bungled burglary attempt resulted in the cleric’s unconsciousness and the end of the first session. I remember telling them that I liked the game and planned not to write anything down for it. I failed. Within a week I had a large amount of kernel of the setting sketched out and ran the first Tunnels & Trolls 5th edition session with at least five players.
Jeffro: So… you framed up just enough of a setting to get a game off the ground… and then your brain inexorably continued to interpolate the reality of it in the aftermath. Nice. It sounds like an extended journey through wilderness was fundamental to your games’ sessions. This is something that seems to have fallen out of favor over their years as games have shifted towards focusing on large, set-piece MMORPG-style combats and/or six scene fully-plotted narrative arcs. How did your players react to having such a wide open set of choices…? Did this style of play impact Porphry’s overall design…?
Kyrinn S. Eis: That journey was fairly brief, subsumed in the course of a few hours of play, but a large portion of the campaign, most of it, I dare say, was wilderness or surface urban exploration. Actually, I think there were only two or three underground portions: a mythic underworld akin to that of the Aztecs, a foray under the streets of Ownys, and at the end of the campaign, north of Ownys once the Burn Cult was wiped out. That last one was true delving, and felt the most disconnected from what had come before it. Of the hours in the Playtest campaign, the vast majority had the characters experiencing the rigours of overland travel, the foul weather, constant vicious attacks, etc. Even the urban sessions (many of them) of Ownys the characters were slogging through the ashfall of winter (in place of snow), and much in the way of murder and mayhem.
The campaign was entirely PC-driven, based on their interest in following up on rumours, repaying debts, utilising contacts, taking advantage of contacts or their reputation. Mercantile adventurism played a part in two or three portions (beginning, middle, and end), and was actually the way the game started. Hiz Eruk from a Black Ship hired two PCs to produce weapons and shields for a young prince’s birthday party. When the party arrived, they found that the party was actually a ritual to determine the right of succession. Backing the existing prince with a poisoned and enchanted sword guaranteed his place upon the throne.
I made a conscious effort to fill the world with very Pulp-inspired locales, and enough of a latticework of interrelation for it to hang together as a whole, while being very conscious to make it wide open enough that you folks could make it your setting without concern of it violating canon or holy writ. There is a lot of flavor without there being anything like a chronology or other absolutes apart from Tsanzel Metal, Arcane Inks, the Serefolk/Hiz Eruk, and the Beastfolk. The cursed and magic items are all flavor-filled, but could easily be replaced or added to without throwing the setting.
Jeffro: Ah, the Beastfolk…! I almost hate to mention it, but they bring to mind the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I can’t tell you how cool those independent black-and-white comics were when they first came out– though I was more of an Adolescent Radioactive Blackbelt Hamsters fan at the time. The Palladium T.M.N.T. and Other Strangeness Role Playing Game was pretty innovative back then, with martial arts, a point-buy system for animal abilities, and psionic powers. All of that went away with the advent of the movie franchise and the Saturday morning cartoon. Given that almost freakish chain of developments, how did you go about making animal type characters cool again in your game? (Maybe this particular sub-genre has lain fallow long enough that it can make a comeback again…?)
Kyrinn S. Eis: I grew up with Aesop’s Fables, cartoons, wildlife shows like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and pets. Animals are always going to be cool. I often prefer the company of animals over people. That said, I don’t really pay attention to trends, and haven’t ever gone in for the TMNT cartoons, nor read many after High School (an artist friend was heavily into them). I owned a lot of the supplements and know the system, but I’d say that Ken St. Andre’s Monsters! Monsters! is of much greater and earlier an influence than TMNT. In it are Chinese Foxes, Tsathogua, Chinese Demons (bat creatures), Snollygosters, Snarks, and other non-human, animaline creatures as playable races. Porphyry never strays far from Tunnels & Trolls ’Canon’, as it were, and where it does, by not including standard monsters and Kindred, it preserves the ‘Other’ aspect from the aforementioned product’s ethos. I will say, however, that the all-animal mutant Gamma World Cryptic Alliances: Zoopremiscists, and The Ranks of the Fit have more to do with my treatment of the Beastfolk than anything that came afterwards.
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Blog Watch:
Cthulhu (Los Angeles Review of Books) To Understand the World Is To Be Destroyed By It: On H.P. Lovecraft – “Both during his lifetime and immediately afterward, other authors made use of Lovecraft’s ideas and creations in their own stories and novels. Lovecraft’s generosity with his own creations ultimately gave them a longevity that other, better writers’ ideas and characters did not have.” (Hat tip to Akratic Wizardry.)
GURPS (RPG Snob) Thoughts on GURPS and Skill Levels — It may be that a lot of the recent… er… grappling with tempo and pacing issues in GURPS combat are in fact due to the recent trend of increasing point levels for starting characters. If you are a fan of the grittier 150 point game, this is one reason to stick with it…!
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (Dungeon Fantastic) PC Tips for my GURPS DF Game (inspired by the OSR Primer) — Well, you can sit around scratching your head and wondering why your players don’t get it. Or you can post something like this to the front of your GM Screen. Allons-y!
Game Design (Lewis Pulsipher) Giving Victory Points for Fighting Battles — “Now if you see a game design as just a collection of mechanics devised to allow certain things to occur, you might see awarding VPs for fighting as just one more mechanic. If a game is abstract, this point of view is easier for me to understand. But a non-abstract game is modeling some reality in some sense, and that’s when this VP-for-fighting mechanic becomes an obvious kludge.”
Adventure Design (Semper Initiativus Unam) Integrity, the Living Dungeon and Module Design – “What Gary had on his paper, that’s what was written in stone about his world. The rest was a living thing that came about in play through memory and winging it.”
Policy (Jeff’s Game Blog) How many commandments have you broken? — I think Tolkien fretted over the fact that orcs were irredeemably evil in his last days. Still, it’s weird to see something like that turned into corporate policy.
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Apropos of Nothing:
How David Weber orders a pizza — I read a dozen books in the Honor Harrington series, often starting the next one immediately upon finishing a novel. But I gotta say… this nails it.
Rules Of The Most Complicated Board Game Ever – Risky Settlers, Knights and Allies of the Lords of Dominion of Earth, Pandemic Edition!
How To Plan Your Life, When You Can’t Plan Your Life — “You follow this Act, Learn, Build Repeat model until you have a job, your own business, or have achieved your goal. It’s not career planning. It’s acting your way into a future you want. How do we know this approach will work? Because it already has.”
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Note: You can find “Jeffro” on Google+ here. Add me to your circles to receive notices about each new blog post! If you cannot stomach the recent improvements to the Google+ interface, you can alternately get email updates with the “Follow” button in the right column.
“There’s some kind of weird six armed statue on the dais. It’s about four feet tall and it looks like it’s made out of some kind of metal.” This was it. The epic climax of my adventure. Half the party had died to make it this far, and a trail of bodies was strewn across three levels.
“How heavy is it? Can we carry it?” That would be Ogbar the dwarf’s player– only interested in one thing.
“You can’t tell how heavy it is just by looking at it,” I said… perhaps a bit too smugly. “I dunno, though… if it was made out of brass or something, a couple of you could haul it out of the dungeon. It’d slow you down because you’d have to stop and rest every ten minutes or so.”
“Thief! Check it for traps!” Ever since getting hit by that crossbow bolt while looking for secret doors, Flinderflaff the elf had been noticably more careful. Heh.
“Yeah, okay. I check it for traps,” said the thief’s player.
“Yeah, but how do you check it for traps,” I asked. “Describe your actions!”
“Well… I walk around it and look it over very carefully. I keep my distance, though. I don’t want to come any closer than one foot from it.”
“Okay. You see nothing special about the statue.”
“Fair enough,” said Ogbar’s player. “I’m going to sort of tip it over to see if it comes off the dais without us doing any stone work. Thufir, give me a hand with this, will ya?”
Thufi’rs player nodded in assent.
“Okay, Ogbar…. You grab the statue and give it sort of a shove… and yes, it does tip over. It doesn’t seem overly heavy. Not for you, anyway. But before Thufir can pick up the other end of it… you notice that the statue begins to glow with a dull cobalt light.” At this point, I picked up an oversized twenty-sided die and rolled it in front of everyone. It was a seven! “Huh. That’s weird. Your hands have gone numb.”
“Wait, what did you just roll? Was that a saving throw?”
“Well….”
“I’ve always rolled my own saving throws.”
“But, well–”
“That’s not right!”
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Sometimes things happen like this that make me realize just how big of a cultural gap there is between me and some of the players in the games I run. In the first place… the rules at best govern what goes on in maybe twenty percent of what we do at the table. And secondly, most of the rules that we have are there for one reason only: so that when I say, “you’re dead,” you starting rolling up a new character instead of kicking the table over. Role playing rule sets are, if anything, a solution to the long standing cops and robbers problem. (And you do realize, of course, that if things get to the point where you’re making saving throws that it’s pretty well game over for you anyway, eh?)
Never mind, for the moment, the absolute absurdity of anybody insisting on being able to roll their own dice. Sure, it’s a courtesy of the game master to let the players to do that. And yeah, gamers love their personalized dice sets. Role players especially are superstitious as hell. But at the end of the day, the only reason you get to roll your saving throw is that it’s fun. You hold that swirly D20 in your hand and think about all the stupid stuff you’ve done in the game… and everyone is watching to see how this plays out…. It’s just stupidly fun.
But maybe there are reasons that I might want to roll something like that myself. Maybe I suspect that certain players have loaded dice or else are fudging die rolls– maybe I just want to be one hundred percent sure of this roll’s authenticity. Maybe I don’t want to go through a big production of asking a player to look something up on their sheet and rolling a die. Maybe there’s some stuff going on that I want to be more discreet about. Maybe I just want to make a real quick roll to keep the game going…. Or maybe… just maybe… you have a huge misconception about what we’re doing. Maybe we all think we’re playing this thing called “Dungeons & Dragons,” but in actuality, we’re both bringing radically difference assumptions to the table about how this works.
So… let me make myself perfectly clear…. The rules aren’t there for you and they aren’t there to protect you from me. And even if I were one of those mythological “abusive Dungeon Masters,” rules cannot afford you any protection anyway. (“Rocks fall; you die.” Q.E.D.) If the rules could protect you from me, then we wouldn’t be playing a role playing game anymore. It’d be either a straight up tactical wargame or else some kind of board game. What really holds the game together is a loosely enforced separation of concerns. The players and the referee are each responsible for different things– and the individual player and the party as a whole each have their domain as well.
With that in mind, here are ten meta-rules that take precedence over anything that is spelled out in the actual rule sets:
1) Play the game I’m running, not the game you think this is. If something goes wrong or else something doesn’t work out quite like you expected, you will feel a strong temptation to blame it on the rules. Don’t do that. You’re probably focusing on what other systems emphasize anyway.
2) Quit making rulings. Focus on imagining exactly what your character is doing. (I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a veteran player explain to a new person that they shouldn’t even try something because of their interpretation of the rules… or even because of the rules in some other edition of D&D! In a lot of cases, I would have just said, “yes” to whatever they were suggesting in order to keep the game moving and reward out-of-the-box thinking.)
3) Don’t tell other people what to do with their combat turn. Sure, there are times when the party could conceivably hash out a game plan before battle; that’s cool. But in the heat of battle, you’re just not going to have time for a full-on committee meeting. Of course, explaining a new player’s options in order to be helpful is different, but the “help” should be given in a spirit of preserving their individual autonomy.
4) Likewise, if your character is not in the same location as another party member and they’ve found something cool or dangerous… then step back and let them play it out without your interference at least until your character gets into their vicinity.
5) If you’re dead… then please just be quiet about everything the surviving party members decide. Really. Go roll up a character or something. It’s part of the suspense to slowly be losing the creative input of other players over the course of a session.
6) Some players get hung up on who knows what and which players can communicate with which other characters. For the most part, I am happy to hand wave all of this and just assume that the entire party knows everything that is discussed at the table. In an immediate situation, who knows what may matter a great deal… but after it is resolved, it’s safe to assume that the party has hashed out the ordeal even if they have to pantomime it.
7) If rules and rulings are the domain of the referee, then deciding what your character does is yours. I will not stand in your way– even if it will kill you or set the campaign on an unsustainable course. Player autonomy is sacrosanct.
8) Strategy and tactics are therefore the domain of the players. It is bad form for a referee to tell players the finer points of these things directly. Divulging “what might have been” or even slightly more efficient solutions to known problems really kills the magic of the game for some reason. (I’ve never heard anything good come of it.)
9) Death, then, is the only real way that I have to signal that your tactics aren’t effective. Sure, a lot of deaths are just stupidly random… but others are flat out your responsibility. And even the random ones are something you have to be prepared to manage. Instead of begging for more resources or more character options, try to think about what you could have done differently.
10) If I’m running a classic module that has unique monsters in it, it is an extremely bad idea to announce their true names and then start iterating through everything you can recall about them. Anything that smacks of this brazen, meta-gaming, spoiler-ridden attitude makes me want to kick the table over!
“So the set of rules we play by is the shared cultural set of rules passed down through the generations, and not the ones written on the booklet inside the box.” – The Campaign For Real Monopoly (via Noble)
Normally when I’m running a game, I just do initiative by sides. When it’s time for the players to attack, I just go around the table and have them roll to-hit and damage. I usually can’t even see the die rolls from where I’m sitting. They just holler stuff out while I frantically make notes on the status of their foes. Usually these combats end pretty quickly– either the players cast one of the “we win” type spells or else the monsters fail a morale check. (Alternately, the party is surprised and loses initiative on their first turn and then is almost completely wiped out… but that’s another story.)
Anyway, when I first start playing a new rule set, I am often extremely careful to attempt to play as much by the rules as is possible. But especially with some of these older rules sets, I’ll start coming up with rules of thumb to keep things moving and hand waving other stuff… and then after a while I’m making lots of rulings based on what I’ve been doing rather than the actual rules. For instance, I’ve been ruling that magic users that lose initiative and take damage during a turn cannot cast spells. I have no idea where I got that rule other than that I just suspected that there had to be some sort of substantial justification for the legendary tactic of targeting the magic-user first. The thing about this sort of thing is that when I go back and look at the rules they have almost nothing to do with what I actually do at the table.
So… let’s go back through this and see what’s actually there.
So here’s the thing. Why is there such an elaborate sequence of play like this when we just do initiative by side anyway? I’m not seeing a lot of reasons here right off. All I can really come up with is that if melee happens after magic, then spells will get let loose before the party can know what they heavy hitters will do. Is that really worth not being able to just go consecutively around the table? I dunno….
What really stands out to me is that these combat rules are undeniably miniatures rules. This is interesting more for the fact that in the mid-eighties, I don’t recall anyone playing with these rules even close to as they are written. Indeed, none of us would be able to afford miniatures until after we graduated college. Never mind that we’d maybe never obtain the requisite skill and patience in order to actually sit down and work them up. Of course, these rules as remembered will always be much closer to the loose, lean, simplistic form of play that seemed to spontaneously emerge on playgrounds at elementary schools all over North Armerica right around 1983 or so and which just so happened to be reflected in computer games like Zork and Ultima II.
Is playing correctly something that would even be worth the effort? Well, with a game that was utterly opaque for as long as this one was, it is arguable that it cannot ever be played “correctly.” It’s part of the attraction. Certainly there are dozens of better explained, more tightly designed games of this sort that will effectively go unplayed for all eternity. I have to admit, I take a special pleasure in playing by the more child-like rules. They not only signal that a session played with them will be focused far more on exploration, pretend, and what we now term as resource management, but they also make what is ultimately an obscene gesture at the thirty years of design and development that have occurred within role playing games since the release of Moldvay and Cooke’s B/X rulebooks.
My retro-hipsterism is short lived however, as there are still the seeds of more current styles of play within those old rules. Most notably, there are optional rules not only for d20 style attribute checks, but also for individual initiative rolls modified by dexterity bonus. (So much for being a purist.) At any rate, if there is one case where I will attempt to apply the sequence of play explicitly as written, it is in the unusual case where the two opposite sides roll the same number for initiative. Sure, it doesn’t happen very often, but it is the one situation where the exact sequence of the five “M’s” suddenly take on a lot of significance.
This is Gaming Notes, the weekly news-magazine about all kinds of games and the home of Space Gaming News, Designer Spotlight, Blog Watch, and SciFi Smackdown. This week’s special guest is Andrew Metzger, the designer of the “Barbarians at the Gate” sponsored counter sheets for the upcoming Ogre Designer’s Edition.
Previous installments of Designer Spotlight featured:
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Space Gaming News:
In the mail… tatoos, a book mark, and a post card from The Fellowship of the Troll!
Heroes & Other Worlds (Christopher Brandon) Magi Carta COMPLETE — The Magi Carta will provide over six hundred spells for the Heroes & Other Worlds retroclone, the game that synthesizes Melee, Wizard, and Moldvay Basic D&D to give you a tightly engineered microgaming take on old school role playing. Keep an eye on Lulu for its release, but don’t look for a Kicksarter. Christopher Brandon makes his game the old fashioned way– he just makes ‘em and then, uh… sells them to you?! Yeah, I know… it’s crazy.
Other Suns (via Wayne’s Books) — “Other Suns features a setting of the L’Doran Hegemony, where humans are a defeated race, one of many. Although the alien races — let’s be honest — aren’t very alien (bears, dogs, squirrels, etc.), the setting is tantalizing. With a little less rules, and a little more background, Other Suns would have been more than the obscure game it is.”
PORPHYRY: World of The Burn (Kyrinn S. Eis) Now on Lulu! — A lavishly illustrated game set in a Chtuloid Post-Apocalypse with just a dash of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and run on top 5th Edition Tunnels & Trolls.
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Designer Spotlight:
Jeffro: The Anarchist Relief Front was of course a silly, tongue-in-cheek group for Car Wars that could function as a generic excuse to have random people with armed cars come shoot up the players. Just mentioning them brings back memories of proto-flamewars about Anarchism with Leslie Fish in ADQ’s Backfire department. So… my first question for you is this: when you set about to design your Ogre supplement, did you take ARF and run with them for the sheer, stupid fun factor alone…? Or did you invest a little on the world building side and actually try to follow this insanity through with some logic…? Or was it just the only way that you could think of to slip pink G.E.V.’s into Ogre…?
Andrew Metzger: My counter sheet is in many ways homage to a number of things that have influenced who I am at this point in my life. Some are serious (my kids) and some are whimsical. This falls into the latter category.
Initially, I wanted pink GEVs just for the pure randomness of it. SJ seemed to like the idea, which further encouraged their inclusion, and my daughter thought having a pink tank would just be amazing. She allowed that playing “that tank game” with myself and her brother would be more attractive to her if she could beat her brother with a pink tank. Finally, others echoed my daughter’s sentiment in the KS commentary as a means to encourage girls/women into the game. So in they went.
It was also easy to include them because I already knew that I wanted to include a Missile GEV (and later, a Heavy GEV) into my set. This expanded the available units for an all-GEV squad beyond just the basic GEV and LGEV (I excluded GEV-PCs because I was not including ARF Infantry in this set).
But as I began to work on a backstory for my Tiger units (which ironically, at this time is far less developed than the ARF!), I realized I needed a reason for these units, if I was to be consistent with the set I was developing. It became apparent that just having pink GEVs wasn’t enough; they needed a reason. But why would a commander have combat units with pink as a dominant color? Because they wanted to make a statement, specifically in defiance of someone or -thing else. And my backstory grew from that. I chose the name Anarchist Relief Front as a tip of the hat to Car Wars, in that Car Wars was one of my three favorite games growing up (the other two being Ogre/GEV and Traveller). But I think the name fits with the origin of this ‘faction’.
So in summary, I put them in initially “just because”, but gradually had them grow into a (semi-) feasible faction in their own right.
Jeffro: You say that you’ve put in a Missle G.E.V.– is that a completely new unit? How does it impact the battlefield? It seems it would imbalance the game to have a unit that could move like a G.E.V. but shoot with the same range as a Missile tank. Now… I realize that Henry Cobb has had a unit design system for a long time, but how exactly did you work out the issues that such a unit could create?
Andrew Metzger: It is a completely new unit. Prior to Henry, there was the great piece of fiction entitled “The Lone GEV” by Michael Stackpole. This is in part an acknowledgement of that fun piece of fiction, but the key with any unit is establishing its value relative to other units. In this case, I’m breaking (relatively) new ground in that this unit will cost 1.5 ‘armor units’. Or in other words, you can take two of these instead of three regular GEVs during unit selection. The stats aren’t quite the same as a Missile Tank merged with a regular GEV, in that a unit that had a range of 4 and an ability to move 3 hexes away after firing would give it a ‘stand off’ range of 7. In other words, in open ground a Heavy Tank could never counterstrike that unit. Thus an A3, R4, M4-3 unit was a game breaker. I softened the stats some to allow it to compete with other units, while still acknowledging that it was superior to a regular GEV one-on-one.
I stated that the new ground was conditional, in that Steve Jackson contemplated a 1.5 armor unit (or 9 VP) tank with his Heavy Missile Tank using Ogre Missiles (as seen on the Ogre page at sjgames.com). I just put that concept into actual play. My actual stats for this unit are A3, R3, D2, M4-2. It is a specialized unit; in most cases you’d be better off with three GEVs vs two MGEVs, but there are occasions where having that extra hex of range matters. It is a great infantry support unit.
As an aside, the Heavy GEV included in my set also costs 1.5 armor units during selection. This is a reinforced GEV chassis that carries two GEV cannon on it. it may split its attack in the same manner as a Super Heavy Tank, but moves like a GEV. The stats for this unit are A2+2, R2, D2, M4-3. It attacks like two GEVs, but defends like a single one. The HGEV is a very balanced unit and I think will be a popular one.
All three of my factions (the Vatican Guard, the Sons of Old Nassau, and the Anarchist Relief Front) have both the MGEV and HGEV as the available units, with the appropriate livery. Each faction will have two of each new GEV in the set.
Jeffro: I know that for me personally, I look at the scenarios that are included with the original Ogre and G.E.V. sets and I just can’t imagine surpassing them. They’re are just good, clean designs… balanced… fun… brilliantly executed. Who knows what would happen if I forced myself to sit down and come up with something. What I want to know is… how did you get get up the gumption to tackle something like this? And how did you see it through to the end to a complete, finished project?
Andrew Metzger: I couldn’t agree more that Ogre and GEV are two very elegant games. It all works very well together. And at no point did I ever think I could surpass them; I still don’t. But I hope I can add something to them that allows a broader experience, without hurting the core. My goal was to offer some variety for those who wanted it. Sometimes you jump into the lake without completely thinking through whether you can swim or not. But once you’re in, you better swim! This was a little like that…I wanted to have pink GEVs, the Vatican Guard and a tiger striped faction to play the game with my family, so I sponsored the sheet. Plus I wanted the Missile GEV on my sheet. It was then that I realized if I was to sell all of these sheets and do the game justice, I needed rules for all of this plus some scenarios. Who wants to buy just counters? So it started to grow after I was already committed.
Daniel Jew has been a huge help. He actively worked through a bunch of different designs for the MGEV and HGEV with me, forcing me to look at things from a different viewpoint. They’re as much his as mine! And obviously Steve Jackson had the final say for everything. I’m still play-testing scenarios (man, that takes time!), and with the help of a few others on the forums, tweaking some variant rules. One of my scenarios is a huge “end of the world” type battle with up to six factions on all four maps at once! I’m now mostly at the artwork and layout stage, and Alvin Helms is helping me with that. I’m grateful for all the support I’ve gotten. So no, it’s not finished yet but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is a ton of fun.
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Blog Watch:
Old School D&D (Dungeon of Signs) Stuff That’s Cool in D&D — “The Owlbear is a ravening destroyer from the chaos dimension of unreasoning hate! Owlbears exist for one reason, Owlbears teach 1st level parties to run. They don’t have treasure, they don’t make sense, they can’t be reasoned with. They are real monsters, and D&D needs monsters that are strange and horrible and without reason.”
Old School D&D (Zenopus Archives) Holmes’ Little Metal People — The newspaper article referenced in the post is fascinating not just for providing a window into the past of D&D culture, but for also demonstrating what in-depth reporting used to look like even for otherwise trivial topics. (See here for additional updates.)
Old School D&D (Random Wizard) One Page Dungeon Contest 2013 Slideshow — If you think that innovation would necessarily be absent from the Old School scene, then you haven’t seen any of the more mind blowing one page dungeons that have been done the past while.
Old School D&D (The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms) Playing the Game Wrong — The modern emphasis on more combat, the demand for more healing options, and the refusal to use hirelings combine to create one of the stranger quirks of the dominant D&D culture.
Old School D&D (Semper Initiativus) Some goings on in the OSR – “I think at this point our community has more to do with exploring the roads that could have been traveled but weren’t, from S&W Complete and LL/AEC making the “AD&:D Lite” that a lot of people would have preferred, to Joseph Bloch creating an extrapolation of “2e if Gary did it” to games like ACKS that explore the endgame. Even megadungeon publications focus on a style of module that never got done well rather than rehashing. There are some middle of the road modules, and there always will be, but I think the OSR has evolved into something far beyond nostalgia and it’s a shame that it isn’t really understood.”
Old School D&D (Roles, Rules, and Rolls) A Short History of Murphy and the Rules He Rode In On – ”To be fair, every edition of D&D has contained a way out for the DM, a big red fiat button to push if the rules corner you into an absurd judgment. But the more rules there are, the more authority the rulebook seems to usurp.”
Steve Jackson Games: Stakeholder Wrapup – ”I’m good enough that I can help my competitors without endangering myself. And I’m a game fan. I want other companies to do well, provided they do right by their customers . . . who are often my customers too. Please note that I’m still doing just fine after ten years of playing my hand face-up, and a lot of the hard-nosed “businessmen” of yesteryear . . . well, they seem to have left the building.”
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Apropos of Nothing:
Currently Watching: Fringe, episode 2 — It looks like this particular show was set up such that you could follow the action without having seen the pilot. This idea of “the Pattern” is fascinating to me, but I just don’t like the characters. The fact that the main girl had an intimate relationship with her partner in the FBI is first overlooked… and then spun into being a positive character quality: she followed the evidence wherever it’d lead. She even gets promotions, job offers, and raises in spite of this clear lack of professionalism. Meanwhile, “the bad boy with a heart of gold” does little more than play the role of baby sitter for his mad scientist father. The latter, of course, is ultimately responsible for the research that is being used to create all manner of freakish accidents and death. To top it all off they collectively have the Superman problem– they spend all of their time attempting to quietly clean up after the bad guys. This passivity actually makes the melodramatically evil Massive Dynamics company compelling in contrast.
House Rules Gone Frighteningly Wrong: The Night I Broke Monopoly — In its earliest iteration it was called The Landlord’s Game, and it was designed for the express purpose inspiring a general suspicion against “evil” property owners. The game became a depression era mega-hit only when the didactic elements of the game were jettisoned in favor of giving regular people a chance to revel in being the “evil” property owner. The game’s transition across the political spectrum would not be complete, however, until a few drunken teenage boys would inadvertently use it to illustrate some of Margaret Thatcher’s talking points.
“You’re Playing it Wrong,” the prequel: A Nation of Wimps – “Over 40,000 U.S. schools no longer have recess. And what play there is has been corrupted. The organized sports many kids participate in are managed by adults; difficulties that arise are not worked out by kids but adjudicated by adult referees.”
Meanwhile, in the real world: Performance Review — “Ahhh. You inherit language from someone else, give me a grade on it and then admit you don’t know what it means. That’s one hell of a wonderful system!”
Schoolin’… Jeffro Style: My wife was out of own this weekend, so I was directly responsible for implementing school for a few days. Besides keeping up with the usual math and chores, we also did the following:
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