Late Bloomers

I'm already a confessed electronic RPG fan, but I've also got an eye for nostalgia and 16-bit gaming systems. The Nintendo Wii has cornered the market on that. This is most fascinating to me because I bought the Wii to play the silly motion control physics type games. Then I figured out that those physics weren't all that versatile. However, there's a deep back catalogue of excellent RPG and adventure-RPG games on the Virtual Console service, and I've enjoyed several over the last few years.

Chrono Trigger: This is my latest download, and I'm really enjoying just about every aspect of it. The music is excellent, the story is deep and engaging, and the combat (the bread and butter of any RPG experience, though it is sometimes a grind) is fun. The combat system actually changes and grows differently depending on which characters the player decides to use from the roster, as there are dual and triple techniques that require more party members to execute.

This one threw me for a loop when my main character and virtual proxy was slain in a cutscene, and was gone for like 3 hours of gameplay while I completed an optional(?) sidequest to resurrect him. Most JPRGs tend to allow the player to focus all advances and powerups on that single character, without worrying for his safety. I foolishly did this, and I missed him while he was gone. 3.5

Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: I'll lump these two together, as they're practically the same game. I was skeptical at first, as the art style of both games is, well, Mario-cartoon. They're "kid-friendly" titles as well, and while that tends to turn some people off, I've always been able to enjoy games in an objective space.

Quite simply, if a player can get past the art style and occasionally childish storyline, these games are fucking stellar. I couldn't put them down at some points. The music is amazing, the combat is engaging and awesome, and the writing is great. While all RPG stories are a bit contrived, the Mario RPGs spend a lot of time winking at those conventions, so a savvy player feels like they're always in on the in-joke. Kids won't get that, but since the games are kid-friendly they don't need to; they're still fun. 4.0

Dungeon Explorer: This is a bit of nostalgia for me, as a good friend had a Turbo-Graphix 16 when I was wee, and we played this game then. I played it a lot. However, I never beat it, as I never had the stretch of time at a friend's house necessary to play through a one-player game (it's rude?).

I picked it up to see how it holds up, and I was again pleasantly surprised. Most of the TG16 games I've bought aren't so good in retrospect, but Dungeon Explorer is a blast. It plays like Gauntlet II, but there's two types of magic which have specific effects for each of the dozen character classes. The Fighter and the Thief can beat the game straight through, with no continues, utilizing some strategy. The other classes have a rougher go of it, but it's a lot of fun all around. Good music to boot. 3.0

Final Fantasy whatever: it's the first game for the old Nintendo Entertainment System in the FF series. I guess it's actually like the third release in Japan but the first in the US? Whatever.

I've already given away the pun blind here in that I didn't enjoy this game much. The final fantasy games have, with a few exceptions, always been a mystery to me. I've never been particularly engaged by their story, and the gameplay feels more like a grind than a fun romp.

Final Fantasy Tactics breaks this mold, and I loved it. Final Fantasy Legend II for the Game Boy is another wonderful game (one of my all-time rags actually). But Final Fantasy for the NES is blah. I'm not down on the characters, the music, the combat. . .I just put it down one day and haven't returned. 1.5

The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time: this is often heralded as one of the best RPGs and one of the best console games in history. Nintendo even plans to release it again (and again, and again in all likelihood) on their 3D handheld. However, I didn't dig it all that much.

There's a difference between party-based RPGs and single-dude adventure RPGs, and for me that gap is huge. I want a deep roster of fantasy character tropes to work with in any game, and as fun as it was running Link all over the countryside, OOT just didn't do it for me in the long run. I was still just one guy all the time.

It didn't feed my fractured psyche at all.

The music was good, the chicken rescue missions were fine, and the story seemed good, but the insipid side quests and childish storyline were too much for me. It amazes me that Zelda games are too childish for me, but Paper Mario was not. Go figure. 2.0

Baby's room: painted.

Baby Furniture
: assembled.

Arcane Tempest Gun Mages: painted, based, and arced.

Harlan Versh, Illuminated One: painted, arced.

Precursor Knights painted (of 12):2

Number of VPs the Flint crew got at the NAC at origins this year: 1

-Merlin out

Location:The Hizzle

Classics from the Daze of My Youth: RPGS

It's a cheap pun, but I quite like cheap puns.

I wrote this at Christmas, while between classes. I did not publish it, so that I could keep the ol' blog going in case the semester got anxious.

It got anxious. And I never posted it. Silly of me, really.

So here it is anyway:

RPGS

Might and Magic II: This game was absolutely immense for the time. There was something like 100 hours of gameplay, with many optional sidequests and specific character-driven storylines. I remember liking the randomized encounter and treasure systems, and the character options. Not a lot of fantasy games allow the party to have a ninja. Ninjas are awesome, and they’re exponentially more awesome to pre-teen boys. Still, the game lacked a certain something. Maybe it was the music or the graphics, both of which were good but not great. 2.5

The Bard’s Tale: This game was one of the first party-based rpgs I ever played, and it’s incredibly cool. The graphics and music on the Amiga were immersive, and I can still recall some of the songs for which the game was known. The fact that the bard had a series of instruments he could play, and each tune would change for the instrument was incredible for the time. The game’s puzzles were awesome and at times difficult, and there was at least 30 or 40 hours of gameplay. Great stuff. 3.5

Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony: This game was weird. The player takes the role of a disciple of “Moebius” and then must work their way through the four elemental planes (earth, wind, etc) to reclaim the world from whatever evil has taken control. It was something like a combination action-RPG, as “combat” was a separate side-scrolling almost street-fighter-esque mini-game. I remember that the game was incredibly difficult, and that it had a spiritual component. In order to ascend from one plane to the next, the player had to complete a “meditation” mini-game in which they kept a randomly spinning yin-yang within a certain area of the screen. Moebius gets special mention because it was so unique and because the melodies that Mobius gave to the Amiga platform haunt me to this day. 3.0

Ultima IV: I’ve skipped Ultima III because I didn’t play it as much as IV and I have even less good things to say about it. And I don't really want to talk about Ultima after IV either. Fock that noise. IV had some really cool things going for it, in that the player actually did a strange virtue-based character creation process to get their character set up. After that, the player had to wander the world and collect a party of characters which all represented virtues and use them in combination to complete a divine quest. There was a lot to like about the game, but I didn’t really enjoy playing it that much. The combat system was lame, the magic system was whack, requiring the purchase and mixing of reagents to cast spells, and the music in the game was forgettable. Apparently I was quite affected by the music of RPGS on the computer. 1.5

Defender of the Crown: I’m not sure how to characterize this game. Is it a Simulation? An RPG? A strategy game? The player takes the role of a Saxon noble in middle-ages Norman-dominated England and tries to become powerful by conquering or allying with the other nobles on the map. It’s incredibly difficult, as the Norman antagonists are all much better at everything in the game than the Saxons are, and there isn’t any progression in the game. So the player can’t eventually become a better swordfighter or jouster through gameplay. The player has to either lead troops to battle or siege, joust at tournaments, or lead daring personal raids in the night to gain fame, a lady, recognition, and more land. I could only win as the sword-fighter Saxon (Geoffrey of Flapjack?), as that was the part of the game I didn’t suck at. Plus, the sword-fighter guy got more chicks than the jousty guy or the jack-of-all-trades type guy. It was an odd game, but I managed to while away a few hours with it. 2.0

Heroes of the Lance: This was a side-scrolling “adventure”-RPG where the player got to take control of one of the characters from the iconic dragonlance books to complete their first quest in Xak Tsaroth. It was a weird game. When the character that the player was using died, they were replaced with the next Hero of the Lance in line. There were 8 or 10 in all. The wizard Raistlin was a great choice, and Riverwind the barbarian was one of the best jumpers in the game. It was important to be able to jump because the game had a lot of platforming sections where the heroes had to traverse caverns filled with holes or traps. The sad thing about this game is that there was only one way to win it: kill the black dragon at the end. And there was only one way to kill the black dragon: throw the priestesses’ blue crystal staff at it. So after figuring out the maze of the game and condensing it to a list of 20 or so caverns to traverse, the game became incredibly easy to beat, and therefore not fun. Not that it was much fun to begin with: the jumping bits were frustrating and controls not always responsive. The music was awesome for about five minutes and then it became grating. The theme song was a little too energetic. And the game’s replayability after winning was pretty much nil. 1.0

Nethack: I’m going to condense all modern roguelikes (Angband, Moria, etc.) into a single header here as Nethack. I was always terrible at this game, but nonetheless I played the hell out of it. To this day I have never completed it, though now I have access to piles of spoilers which I could use to learn the ropes better. The learning curve on nethack is quite simply astounding. It’s a game where you must replay and work with contexts to learn just how to succeed, and even then there is a possibility of death. And death is permanent, so after dying the player must restart from the beginning. It’s terribly frustrating, and yet I still find it fascinating and I occasionally play through a game, only to lose of course. 3.0

For roguelike sampler goodness, check out the Desktop Dungeons freeware game.

-Merlin out

If I Do'd it I Get a Whoopin'

I’ve always been a fan of game systems that break down things that are intuitive in real life in an attempt to understand or simplify them for players and game masters in a RPG. For this reason, the morality systems that most role playing games have attached to them fascinate me to no end. I think they’re ultimately the result of a group of villainous players who took the rules and living vicariously through their fantasy proxies, proceeded to rape, loot, pillage, and otherwise commit horrendous acts of depravity. Because of them (at least in my own imagination), alignment and morality systems became the norm in role playing games. These systems are the reason players don’t just do whatever they want with their powerful brute/dude who can cast real magic/supernatural beast etc. characters.

The flip side of that imaginative coin is that alignment systems are actually a tool for game masters, so that they have a basic belief system in place for each non-player character which the players interact with. But then, why all the fuss about alignment and such for players, too?

AD&D

Ah, alignments. I sometimes feel that this system was put in place simply to “balance” some of the more powerful classes in the game. Paladins had tons of special abilites, but they had to be law-abiding goodfellers. This often was played for comic effect as Lawful Stupid, but I digress.

Alignment in AD&D was divided along two axes, the good-neutral-evil axis, and the lawful-neutral-chaotic axis. A player would choose one from each axis (evil was often discouraged by both the rulebooks and the dungeon master) and then they’d have a basic outline for their character’s feelings about order, society, and freedom, and looking out for number one. Chaotic good tended to be the default morality for most of my characters, because blindly following the orders of a society seemed silly, but “doing the right thing” seemed like a good way to play the game.

Of course, there are only a few other reasonable alignments (besides chaotic good) to play. The rest are all clinically insane. Lawful evil was interesting (be selfish but honor your agreements and keep to the laws), and neutral good (“do the right thing” most of the time) and neutral evil (do what’s best for you and screw everyone else if it isn’t good for them) are pretty clear cut. But lawful good, lawful neutral, later editions of true neutral, chaotic neutral, and chaotic evil are all pathological nightmares. They, respectively, in the first two cases slavishly adhere to law and order like some kind of OCD crusader, in the next always seek “balance” so that everything is always meh, or in the last instances do things for entirely random reasons, sometimes in the name of wanton destruction.

So, overall, the system was whack. The penalty for acting out of alignment was a stern talking-to from the DM. If you were naughty while playing a character who needed to maintain a good alignment (say, a Paladin), then you’d lose your awesome bonuses from being a haughty fucker until you were a proper haughty fucker again. 1.5

AD&D 2nd edition

As you were. 1.5

Rifts

To me, it seems like Rifts took the AD&D morality system and simplified it somewhat. Instead of the grid o’ alignments there were discrete choices to make: Principled, scrupulous, unprincipled, chipotle, aberrant, cake ‘n’ bacon, warm vanilla sugar, diabolic, and lame-o. It was sort of like someone looked at the D&D conventions, and then removed most of the clinically insane ones and changed the names. So, no chaotic neutral. No lawful neutral. I was so sad to see these go. Rifts had such a slapdash system at times I wondered what the hell was going on, but this particular aspect of the whole thing was pretty good in my opinion.

The penalty for acting out of alignment was similar to D&D, but alignment meant little outside of “know alignment” type spells that could broadcast to local do-gooders that you were a selfish prick. Scary. 2.0

Vampire: the Masquerade

Oh, the Humanity. In vampire, each character has a Humanity rating that describes how close to their human origins their vampire self is. Most characters started right around seven Humanity on a scale of one to ten. If the character did villainous things (or even antisocial things at high ranks of Humanity) then they had a chance to lose Humanity. Losing Humanity was, at first, a good thing. After accidentally killing a human during a feeding frenzy, having to sulk and be all angsty got old after a while. Going down to like five Humanity was alright because around there “murder in the heat of passion” wasn’t so bad. Call me jaded.

The penalty for being a depraved monster was that the character actually looked more and more like a depraved monster as Humanity diminished. At zero Humanity the character is handed to the Storyteller, because they have become a savage predator without thought, only instincts. That’s some serious shit right there. Of course, when the character is down to one Humanity they have to do some seriously evil shit to lose the last point, but I guess if you’re really role playing “the beast” you might go there. 4.0

Vampire: Other Moralities

For those players who liked to be villainous bloodsuckers, the later supplements added Paths of Enlightenment that could be taken instead of Humanity. Each one functioned similarly to Humanity, but the “Hierarchy of Sins” table was different for each. For instance, not lying to someone when it would benefit you was a level 5 or 6 Sin for adherents to the Settite Path of Typhon. So if you were that guy you were pretty untrustworthy.

I didn’t play much of these systems. I think they’re interesting and dumb all at once. I like the Humanity system so much I like the tweaks on it that this system does. It’s also interesting as a Storyteller, because knowing that an antagonist or perhaps a mentor of the characters is thinking differently than the players can make for some interesting interactions. Still, at some level I feel like it’s a cop-out for those who want to commit vicarious horrendous acts of depravity. 3.0

Werewolf: the Forsaken

I don’t recall a morality system for this so much. I do remember that as the character gained in werewolfy power they became predators and creatures of the spirit realm more and more, and that humans were more and more uncomfortable around them. But. . .I don’t remember a morality system per se. I do remember that the “laws” of werewolf society were pretty much enforced by werewolfy powers-that-be. Is it freedom, then? Not really. But there wasn’t a morality system in play that governed a character’s actions, simply a societal one, with taboos to avoid. 2.0

Dungeons and Dragons 4E

This is a lot like the Rifts system melded with previous D&D systems, actually. There's only Good, Evil, Unaligned, and then the insane Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil alignments. I actually like it better than other D&D alignment systems, at least. Still sorta wonky. 2.5

Dark Heresy

The morality system of Dark Heresy is actually a sort of negative system. The characters all start out as relative tabula rasa, with no inherent flaws (well, you can give yourself quirks, but none are governed by gameplay. There’s no real reason to not commit acts of horrendous depravity, aside from the fact that if the character is caught doing so by other members of the Inquisition they will be slain in spectacularly painful fashion.

However, there are two trackers on the character sheet for Insanity and Corruption points, and as the character gains these, they become more and more unhinged and evil. Insanity points are what happens when the Warp (space? Evil space? Chaos?) breaks through to reality and some crazy shit goes down. Everyone floats for a while, or a banshee howl blasts the area, or a demon is released, or whatever. And then the character goes a little crazy. Or a lot crazy, in the case of the demon. Corruption points are similar, but they track how much the Warp has actually gotten a hold of the character physically. Characters will eventually become Mutants if they gain corruption points.

If the Inquisition finds out an adept is corrupt (or Emperor forbid, a Mutant), in any way, they will kill him in spectacularly painful fashion. Insanity points aren’t so bad, and actually, having some helps with willpower tests against the things that drive characters bonkers. However, having a lot gives the character some pathologies to roleplay, which I’m certain aren’t so good for long-term survival when the organization for which they work is willing to kill them in spectacularly painful fashion at the drop of a hat.

I don’t know if there is a way to get rid of either corruption or insanity points. I assume so, perhaps Psyker powers? Tech-priest machine-voodoo? Psychoanalysis? There’s not a lot of therapy in the 40K world. If something is broken, the powers-that-be tend to fix it by killing it in spectacularly painful fashion.3.0

-Merlin out

A Predilection for Wizards

It’s the name, really. When your middle name is Merlin you tend to gravitate toward playing sorcerous characters in RPGs. Trust me. I was fascinated with them from an early age, and as I played more and more RPGs I always wound up playing similar characters, at least in terms of party role. I generally don’t play leader-type characters. I don’t tend to play brutes in a physical sense. I play characters who use their wits and whatever force of will they can muster to alter reality to fit their needs. Wizards are a “mind-over-matter” character type. I dig that.

AD&D

The AD&D wizard was called a “Magic-User”, which lacks poetry. There’s a certain literalness to the original character classes like “Fighter” and “Magic-User”. They lack imagination, but I suppose they are at least descriptive. The original “Magic-User” was incredibly lame at low levels but gained godlike power in the later game. I never really got to the later game. It took a good goddamn long time to do so in tho’ days. For as influential as this class was, it lacked panache. 2.0.

AD&D 2nd Edition

2nd edition AD&D made wizards a lot of fun. For starters, there were multiple possibilities, such as the specialty wizards. Specialty wizards broadened the character concept somewhat, and in effect doubled the effectiveness of low-level mages without making the high-level ones too much more godlike. The complete Wizards Handbook added wizard kits to further customize the class. However, without those bells and whistles, the mage character was essentially the exact same as it was in AD&D, though perhaps a high Intelligence score would get them an extra spell. 3.0.


Rifts

The Line Walker and Shifter are the basic “wizard” OCCs in the main Rifts book. OCC stands for “Occasionally Cumbersome Concept”. These classes both borrow heavily from AD&D in that low-level magic isn’t very powerful, but the disparity between low-level mercenaries (and psychics, and racial classes, and just about everyone else) and low-level wizards in Rifts is nuts. A guy with a gun is something like 2-5 times more effective in a combat situation than a line walker at level 1. Maybe they achieve parity at level 10, like AD&D? I wouldn’t know because Rifts sucks enough ass that nobody played that long. The Techno-Wizard class is pretty cool. And the world book supplements added a lot of cool magic OCCs. But overall, Rifts wizardry is blah. 1.0

Vampire: The Masquerade

The vampire equivalent of “wizard” was Clan Tremere, a clan made up of mages who stole the “secret” of vampirism and then went on a wild diablerie rampage to become a for-real “clan” instead of a bloodline. Weird and wonky backstory aside, Tremere are kickass wizards. Their in-clan disciplines give them access to blood (and other) magic, rituals, precognitive and extrasensory perception, and various forms of mind control. Those hit most of the classical wizard stereotypes from art and literature: the mysterious power, the sinister adviser/grand vizier, the prophet, the mind-controlling powermage, the sage. They were awesome, and well designed in my opinion.

The flavor wasn’t the greatest, as the backstory made them insular and backbiting puppets within their own little “wizard towers”, Chantries, in like every city, but it can’t all be gravy I guess. 3.5

Supernatural Creature: the Gothic Noun

Mage: The Ascension and World of Darkness: Sorcerer are two supplements/games that also dealt with magic in the World of Darkness. Sorcerer is dumb as hell, and the fact that it coexisted with Mage is even dumber. Mage: the Ascension was an interesting concept that led to either incredibly creative players or incredibly weird power-gaming. I saw more of the later. The Men in Black and the New World Order Technocratic Convention almost make up for all of it, however. That’s one of the better “tradition” books out there in my opinion. Why was the technocracy the antagonists of the game? I really liked those guys. 3.0.

Werewolf: The Forsaken

There’s some kind of Theurge-analog in this game. The Theurge was the auspice in the old Werewolf game that was all shamanesque. There’s another one in this game. They get rituals cheaper. In the game we played my boneheaded character was better at rituals than our boneheaded Theurge-analog. It might not have been the rules-system’s fault. I felt that overall WTF was a little samey in that all the tribes/moons/etc co-mingled a little too well. There wasn’t a big differentiation between all of them. Also, there was lots of rituals which didn’t have big game effects, they just cost XP so that you could like, mourn the loss of a fallen comrade ‘correctly’. For reals? Experience systems are generally trhere to make your characters “better” at whatever they do, and spending points on “flavor” instead is. . .weird. 1.5.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

There’s something I like about the 4E wizard: it has some incredible combat-useless class features. It was a big complaint when the game came out. Almost every class in the 4E PHB has 3 or 4 class features that directly relate to some kind of advantage on the field of battle. Not so the wizard. He’s got one middling advantage based on whether he prefers his wand to his staff, if you catch my drift. And then he has Cantrips, which are little spells that produce minor effects, like Light or Mage Hand. These aren’t going to do much in a fight.

But there is the Spellbook, which lets the wizard powerswap his daily superspell when he regenerates it (uh, daily), basically. So instead of Sleep he could learn Flaming Sphere for a day. And then go back the next. This last feature was only useful if the players knew who they would be fighting in advance and the wizard said “shit, they have fire resistance, I’ll learn Sleep for tomorrow.” I dig that, but there were complaints. Fuck the haters. 3.0.

Apparently 4E has some new wizardyness in the works now, and it looks like the wiz is getting some bonus damage to a lot of powers. That seems alright. Apparently the haters were vocal enough.

Dark Heresy

Dark Heresy doesn’t really have wizards as such. There are scholars, who can get some psychic powers late in their career, and there are psykers proper. Psykers really fulfill the role of both wizard/artillery and healer/cleric in this system. It’s a little wonky that way. Also, psykers have a base 10% chance to interact poorly with the Warp every single time they use their powers, so it’s a risky proposition. I’m actually not a fan of the system. Psyker powers seem incredibly powerful even at the outset, and our psyker has already found a way to circumvent the whole “power has consequences” thing by using his psychic powers to reroll dice which accidentally engage the warp. So, the system is in effect made to be broken (before it breaks you), which is weak. 2.0

-Merlin out

Roleplaying: The Backgroundening

I put the acronym “RPG” in the title of this blog. I did this because I still play roleplaying games. I don’t do so as often as I used, nor as often as I’d like. But it still happens. So I figured I’d write about that, too. But what, exactly, to write about? I could chronicle the events of each session, perhaps from the perspectives of one of more of the characters in the game. Or I could simply collect objective notes, lists of the events which occurred, plots foiled or come to fruition, and monsters slain.

I’m not sure that’s compelling reading.

So, inspired by recently discovering Lore Sjoberg’s The Book of Ratings amid the interwebs of the past, I think I’ll recount my roleplaying history and give a grade to each roleplaying game, a composite score based on my nostalgia and my much more critical current self. I won’t use letter grades; I teach composition at a Community College, so I’ll use the grade point system, where 4.0 is outstanding, 2.0 is middling, and 0.0 is Scrappy Doo failure.

Later blogs will focus on particular aspects of one or several roleplaying games, mainly so that I can be snarky about roleplaying games.

AD&D

I didn’t play a lot of AD&D. I was a bit young, though I did read all of my older brother’s books. I still have his copy of the now out-of-print and apparently litigious Deities & Demigods, which usefully includes statistics for using Chthulu as an antagonist for a game. Meh. In a world where every third dude is a sorcerer Big C isn’t all that gripping.

The game seemed alright, although some of the systems were sort of random. The psionic rules in particular seemed tossed into the back of the late-model Player’s Handbook willy-nilly. I can say that AD&D increased my vocabulary dramatically, as words like “enervate”, “contagion”, and “lucubration” entered my mind during elementary school. All of those are taken from magic-user spells. I always liked magic-users. My biggest gripe was the inclusion of a mechanic for even the most banal of tasks: the Open Doors roll from the Strength table. “Yes, I’d like my character to interact with the dungeon at an incredibly rudimentary level. Let’s see, can I open this door?” DM Response: “There’s a roll for that!” (checks Strength table) “Oh, and your chance of success is actually quite low.” 2.5

Favorite supplement: Unearthed Arcana.

AD&D 2nd Edition

I actually got a lot of mileage out of 2nd edition AD&D. I was the only one in my social circle of pre-adolescents who liked it enough to run the game, so I did. Often. It was pretty bad, narratively. But it was fun. The rules. . .were a lot like AD&D. There were some subtle differences, the Non Weapon Proficiency system being my favorite. Psionics was still fucked. The Open Doors roll was intact. Goddammit. 2.5

Favorite supplement: Tome of Magic.

Rifts

A buddy of mine picked up Rifts around my thirteenth Christmas. I think he gave it to me for Christmas, as a present to himself. Because he wanted to play the hell out of Rifts, but I was the guy who ran games. Poorly; but still, I ran them. I have this conundrum with Rifts. I absolutely love the “flavor” of the setting, the backstory, the varied mythologies, the various possibilities for gameplay, and the NPC Characters, which is amazing because of how referential it apparently is to other Palladium efforts. I came to Rifts cold and it resonates. Those other games didn’t even merit a look from me.

On the other hand, Rifts (and perhaps Palladium games in general) is so mired in awful rules and arcane, arbitrary systems I simply have to hate it. Two people can look at the core rulebook, make two different, interesting characters, and then find that their power levels are so wildly divergent at even the starting level one of them could vaporize the other with a thought. Perhaps I was too “power” focused when I was exploring Rifts. Perhaps it’s awesome if you give it the ol’ roleplaying chance. Or maybe the whole Mega-Damage system is fucked. Also, not so many great new words were learned from Rifts. Rifts makes up new shit, it doesn’t cater to etymology. 1.0

Favorite Supplement: Rifts World Book 2: Atlantis.

Vampire: The Masquerade

I was about sixteen when I played this game for the first time. My buddy’s brother Tom was home from college for the Christmas holidays and somehow got roped into Storytelling (GMing, every system has its own vocabulary) for a bunch of socially-awkward high-schoolers. We played for like ten hours straight. I think it was light when I went home. It was awesome.

I hate to say that I liked it so much, because the more we played the more I saw design flaws and weird rules bits, but those seemed so small compared to the good things about the game. Combat was a little silly: hours of die-rolling. God forbid someone have Celerity and get to take extra actions. Everyone else might as well go out to eat.

On top of that, scant months later Jyhad was released, and Tom actually gave us some cards for it. I have little negativity to bestow upon V:tM, and as positivity is generally not as funny, I’ll be brief. Vampire was also great for my vocabulary; I learned “obfuscate” years before someone used it to describe the Bush Administration’s closed-mouth White House Press policy. 4.0

Favorite Supplement: Clanbook: Tremere.

Supernatural Creature: the Gothic Noun

I wound up playing a lot of World of Darkness stuff, and buying a lot of supplements and games that we never even played. I have to say that I think that there was some interesting roleplaying elements going on in most of these games. We were still too young to realize it, so we didn’t get as much out of Wraith or Mage as possible. The downside, of course, is that ultimately those games weren’t compelling for the masses. There’s not a Mage: the Sorcelating video game out there. Vampire was as good as it got, I think, and every game they released actually seemed to cheapen the World of Darkness. I’ve got a copy of Mummy: the Resurrection around here that speaks volumes to the later point. Still, pretty good for the words. 2.0

Favorite Supplement: Changeling: The Dreaming (hardbound 2nd edition).

Werewolf: The Forsaken

I hadn’t roleplayed in several years when Robb, my local VTES Prince, asked if I’d like to participate in his own roleplaying resurgence. I of course agreed, as I don’t annoy him enough at the VTES table. He ran a WTF game for over a year, and I didn’t really enjoy it. It was around this time I realized that most roleplaying games take Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey a little too seriously. The characters start out as level/rank/whatever one and they’re chuds. It sucks. There’s some weird supernatural society that domineers the characters into certain patterns of behavior, and then the characters slowly accumulate power until they become, as my friend Joe puts it, studs. Chuds to studs, as it were.

Fuck that. At least, fuck that in a medium where the intent is to play a single character over that narrative arc for like two years. It takes a goddamn long time to hit the point where the character isn’t a chud.

With a year of Werewolf 2.0 I was really feeling that being a chud wasn’t fun. More to the point, nearly every week Robb would show up and say something like, “Hey, I was reading the rules, and I totally wasn’t rolling that Giant Ass Plundering Spirit’s toughness checks right. You guys actually had no hope of defeating it at all.” This did little to cheer up my lack of enthusiasm for the system. Said Giant Ass Plundering Spirit (apparently it was into big donkeys?) had nearly killed the entire party/pack/collective noun. I liked the rules less and less.

The rules discouraged min/maxing, and I’m not cool with that. I like specialists. I like playing a character that is great at something. Even if it isn’t something especially relevant all the time or even useful in a fight (let’s face it, there’s lots of fights in RPGs). In fact, most of the time that something is entirely useless in a fight.

Not so many new words to be learned here, and in fact I had to relearn all the made-up words for shit I already knew the made-up words for in Werewolf: The Catastrophe with other made-up words for the same shit. New word for near-wolf form instead of Hispo, new word for half moon instead of Philodox. I like learning new language that can be applied elsewhere. I don’t like learning new language that will only be useful if I’m playing the game. Pah. 1.5

Favorite Supplement: None, really. Core rulebook?

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

I’ll admit it. I gave in to the hype. I saw that a new edition of D&D was incumbent, and I liked the look of it. On top of everything else, I had a roleplaying group to play with. So I offered to run D&D 4E, reprising a GM role I hadn’t played in probably 8 or 9 years. I have to say, I wasn’t that disappointed. I quite enjoy 4th edition. But then, I don’t have to play it.

I did play a few sessions with some VTES guys at a local game store, and as a player I got remarkably bored by the actual rules crunch of the system. Mainly because when the dice start flying in combat, there are actually only a few choices each character has at low levels. I enjoyed the roleplaying bits, but most of those were self-directed, and the other players in the group weren’t all that engaged as characters. That’s okay: 4th edition sort of caters to a wide range of players, from people who just want to play board games to those of us who flesh out family histories for our alter ego. But in actual practice it sucked. My characters are nearly always more cerebral than diplomatic, but I found my wizard character doing all the talking to NPCs, despite my backstory of ambivalence.

As a system, I still like 4th edition. It’s standardized and fairly balanced, to the point that it’s quite the opposite of Rifts: two guys could create 4E characters, but their characters will almost certainly have to the same amount of class features and powers of the rest of the party. There’s an emphasis on team play, and it’s all around. It doesn’t appeal to the sociopathic misanthrope in me, but maybe we roleplayers need to be less sociopathically misanthropic. 3.0

Favorite Supplement: Player’s Handbook.

Dark Heresy

There was much talk about what Robb would run next. I was starting a second job and the crew was getting tired of the constant action of 4E. I was game for a lot of things, but I’m really down on the whole chuds-to-studs thing. We eventually decided on Dark Heresy, though we almost played Hunter: the Reckoning instead.

Dark Heresy is pretty cool. I feel like we, the players, are serious chuds most of the time in the early stages, but this is probably unavoidable. At least the game looks like the “stud” factor is actually not that high – most of the bad guys can get so incredibly arch that the odds are stacked against the inquisitors nearly all the time. I like being the underdog. The flavor of the game is pretty good, though there are a lot of unnecessary and ultimately useless new words, presumably to alienate the players from the world of their characters, making it all the more Other. I guess that’s alright.

I’m not sure I’m in love with the system. Some of the choices they’ve made for various game crunch annoy me, and it seems like as soon as the party has enough raw cash they can afford some ridiculous equipment-based advantages. I’ve never been a huge fan of games that allow players to throw money at the problem. Still, the setting is great, and I’m enjoying the game as a whole. 3.0

-Merlin out