Still, since I have plans now into at least the early Epic Levels, considering a transition before I reach mid-Paragon is not something I look forward to.  And likely won’t consider, for this group, at least.  Since WoTC is talking about an extensive public playtest (or at least more so than in years past), it sounds like I’ll have at least another year and a half to make the decision.  As with many others, I figured something of this ilk would be announced for 2014 and the 40th anniversary of the game.  I was figuring at D&D Experience in January 2014, but now it sounds like that is being rolled into GenCon starting next year, so GenCon2013 appears to be the odds on favorite guesstimate of the ‘Next’ launch.

And while I’m not planning to converting my existing campaign over to playtest, I have other options.  I’m still running the Encounters program for the local game store, and rumblings are that the Encounters program will be used in the playtest in some manner.  I look forward to that, since while I am happy running 4E, there are a few issues I would like to see addressed (or maintained as is) in the new… iteration?  After the 3.5 vs 4 edition wars, the WoTC folks seem to be going out of their way not to use the E-word.  I have mentioned that I have run more 4E games than I have pretty much any previous Edition of D&D – I love the simplicity of setup and prep it has over 3.x.  While I still enjoy playing in 3.x games, I’m not sure I would ever want to run an extended 3.x game again.  That’s one of the things I most fear in a new version of D&D – an increase to prep work for DMing.  If there is one thing I would want to get out of playtesting, it is that the game isn’t changing back to the complex leveling model of 3.x.  While I love the flexibility of that system as a player, it got to be such a chore as we got to higher levels as a DM.  There are things I would like tweaked, of course.  While I love the action economy of 4E, and the inherent balance in classes, I do not care for how long battles run.  My group of 4 (with our companion character gnome bard) seldom gets through more than one combat encounter per session.  We have to wait to start until the young son of our hosts go to bed around 8pm, and at times we balk at continuing past 11pm because we are getting ready to start a new combat.  No doubt that contributes to us still being in high Heroic tier.

There isn’t much that can be said about the system, one way or another yet.  Not a lot of folks are privy to it, and they are under NDAs.  So we have speculation based on Mike Mearls’ and Monte Cook’s Legend & Lore columns over the past year.  Many had speculated based on the topics that they were a precursor to a new edition, and one can hardly dispute that now.  However, I don’t think what we’ve seen in those columns necessarily translate to a sneak peek into the coming revisions.  For that, I am taking a wait and see position.  Some folks will get a better look once they attend D&D Experience in a couple of weeks – a public playtest called “The Caves of Chaos” is scheduled.  Another call back to Keep on the Borderlands, which seems to be a favorite of Mearls, so I’m intrigued.  Unfortunately I won’t be attending, so I will be watching for nuggets of info like everyone else.

Any glimpse through the Encounters program is likely to be late this year (perhaps around GenCon – with a Game Day event like the Neverwinter one this past year), or perhaps even next.  If I want to get in on the playtest bandwagon sooner, I may have a chance.  There is mention of more extensive public playtesting coming in spring.  Hopefully they mean this spring.  I had been considering starting up a D&D campaign for the regular players of Encounters at the game store.  There is a regular Pathfinder game, but no ongoing D&D.  I don’t know if I’ll have the time, but I might make the time if I can use this to playtest.  I’ve signed up on the WoTC website, so we’ll see what comes of it.  Regardless, I will still be plotting the continuation of my 4E Keep on the Borderlands game, and running the next few seasons of Encounters, so 4E is in my life for a few more years, at least.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have also been running the D&D Encounters program at the local game store, The Gaming Goat, that opened this year in Elgin.  When they opened in January, the Keep on the Borderlands season of encounters was already running (D’oh, I would have liked to have seen what WoTC did with that), so I started running with season 4 of Encounters in March.  Since then I’ve been running a 2-hr ‘Chapter’ pretty much each Wednesday, only taking off when I’ve been out of town for work for two weeks in June, and a week in October.  Running a short, regular game each week that I don’t have to prepare much for has been interesting.  Some times really fun, it can also be a bit of a chore since, designed as a pick-up game anyone can show up for, there isn’t any practical way to call off on short notice if something comes up.  And the restriction to play Wednesdays only (as mandated by WotC) means it’s been inconvenient at times for both players and DM alike.  Fortunately we have developed a couple of alternate DMs since March, which is good, since that first season (March – May) saw me sometimes running 8 or 9 players in a scenario written for 4-6.  Adding monsters helps balance things, but it also means every turn takes a loooong time.  But since we started splitting into two tables of no more than 6 players, the pressure of wondering how I would accommodate more players has gone.

Still, despite my misgivings about certain aspects of the program, it’s really forced me to up my game with respect to running monsters in 4E and reacting to unknown player actions.  My home game has benefited from that, I think.  I was not always sure of my ability to challenge the players with each encounter, and I wasn’t moving my monsters around enough my first year of running 4E.  I don’t think my players would say that these days, though maybe sometimes they wish I did…  There have been other outside benefits, as well.  My Thursday night Elgin Area Gamers League rpg sessions had been holding steady at 3 players and 2 rotating GMs for over a year, but then late last year the other GM got a school-related job that keeps him away during school months, dropping us to 3 regular players with myself as the GM.  Fortunately I’ve been able to entice players from the Wednesday night Encounters to try our Thursday night game, and we quickly had one new regular player.  And recently we’ve had a second GM join us from there as well (and brought a new game with him – the latest Gamma World based on 4E D&D).  At the start of the year I was wondering if that group would survive for much longer, but this new infusion of people makes me confident that it is there to stay.  For which I am grateful, since while I could probably always find a place to run or play Encounters, it’s nice to take a break from D&D (especially now that I am playing it weekly).

I am apparently not burned out on 4E yet, however, since in August I also volunteered to run the first Lair Assault for the game store.  The first one is called Forge of the Dawn Titan, and as might be gleaned from the title involves a LOT of fire-related critters and damage.  And since there is no set time for the sessions, we are free to schedule them whenever we want in the 3-month period the Assault is valid for.  So far I have run the Lair 4 times, three times on Saturdays, and once for my Thursday night crowd.  The first session was a pretty quick TPK, which I then worked with the players to figure out a way to circumvent (by ignoring a few rules regarding teleports) so they could actually see the next room and get killed (again!) by the boss bad guy at the end.  The second was also a TPK, though it was amusing to see when some of the players decided it was hopeless, and ran to check out rooms they hadn’t seen yet before they died.  If they hadn’t done that, they might have saved some of their companions before they finally died (and if we have learned anything, it’s that no character is dead until that final death saving throw is failed – twice now I’ve had players self-stabilize and recover with a healing surge on a nat 20 Death Saving Throw) since the critters they were facing had been reduced to minion-level hp at that point.

The third run was almost a TPK.  The one surviving character was of a returning player who had completed the Assault at another store, so knew what was ahead, and almost did so again but finally ran out of time (the big bad has to be defeated by round 20, or it’s over).  By the fourth run, I think I was ready for the players to win, since I could have probably run out the clock again, but instead took the fight to the players when they were hiding behind the portcullis from the baddies in the last room, throwing ranged attacks.  This was already in Nightmare Mode (ie, extra monsters), since there were 7 players that time (in a game designed for 4-6 like in Encounters), and almost all of them had run through the adventure multiple times.  We were down to the last 3 rounds and I had killed off half the party when the survivors finally got the big bad at the far end of their ranged attacks and took him down.

After that, I was ready to take a break from running this particular Assault (though I am looking forward to the next, Talons of Umberlee) and let one of our other DMs try his hand (not that he’d won it).  I have played once, but while none of us died, we had to stop playing only 5 rounds in because we got a late start, and half the party had to leave.  That is one of the lessons I’ve learned in running the Lair Assault – it can take a LONG time.

Longer, if the players aren’t that familiar with their characters.

And since we have been getting a lot of Encounters players for Lair Assault, it’s a bit of a learning curve.  They are going from running 1-3rd level characetrs to a 5th level for Lair Assault.  Add to that the fact that many of the players either are making up their characters just before the Assault (using the DM’s books or DDI account to do so), or use one of the 3-4 pre-gens we have made available for those who show up without, a valid character, and play can come to a halt at times when a player tries to figure out how their powers work.  In the old days, a DM was expected to know it all and help the player with their class abilities, but in 4th Edition, there are so many options and rules are so specific, it’s next to impossible.  The DM has to rely on the player to have a working knowledge of their character and on the wording of the power on the cards printed out by the character generator.  If we had to look up each power, we’d lose our patience pretty quickly on each other’s turn.  And still, during Assault we found ourselves looking up a handful of powers or items (some sounded too good to be true, and they often were – little things like ‘Encounter Power’  vs At-Will make a big difference!), and as DM I made a few judgement calls when looking something up yet again would be disruptive to play.  Lair Assault is not for the average ‘let’s drop in and play’ Encounters player.  This isn’t the game to learn how to play 4E.  Or how to play your character, really.  I would have liked to have turned away players not familiar with their characters already, but while I had 6 players the first session, and 7 the last, I only had 4 the other two, and each one of those players is necessary to the survival of the others (as abandoning characters to burn in the first room attests to…).

Though I see the Lair Assault is supposed to be able to run in 2-3 hrs, I’ve seen more along the lines of 4-7 hrs.  I could have made 3 hrs if I had let the first group stay dead when they all fell into lava simultaneously, but other than that, the size of groups and decision-making indecision has resulted in much longer times than I originally thought.  Other than cancelling games that don’t have enough experienced players, I could try and enforce a time limit on decision-making to streamline things.  Though the Lair is potentially so deadly, enforcing a time limit seems like another barrier for the players.  I might try that for the next Assault, however, as running one of these with a full group can quickly take up the whole day.

One of the nice things with Encounters, especially since it is run during the week, is that it is designed to be a quick 1-2 hr session and it actually PLAYS in that amount of time.  Even when I was running 9 or 10 folks at a table, it never took of 2.5 hrs.  Streamlining the Lair Assault run is one of the things I really have to figure out if I am going to continue running each scenario multiple times.  In the meatime, however, I am looking forward to finishing up my own assault on the lair, and leaving the DMing to another for a few sessions!

• dojo a mess
• painted front window
• bullets, flying kicks

[I knew the PCs were all students at Leon's dojo, and I knew Leon was a retired Transformed Lion. Leon, get it? I also had a really rough map of the two-story strip mall that the dojo was in; it was arranged around a central courtyard, with a falafel joint called Falafel Heaven, a food court, a cheap lawyer named Harry Preston, Esq. that I mentally based on what's his name from Breaking Bad, a used book store, and an sporting goods store. Cause you can find weapons in a sporting goods store.]

~10 mooks
Guns 7, MA 6

[Yeah, you think your old school renaissance stat blocks are concise? Eat flying fists!]

Lion Thug (Hector Ezkibel)
Bod 7, Chi 5, Mind 5, Ref 7
MA 13, Guns 12
Mark Prey
Chi: 3; Shots 3
MA check vs. Chi, no damage,+1 MA on future attacks vs. enemy
Pounce: X/3 — Chi = meters jumped = damage bonus
Surprise: X/3 — Chi = AV bonus, surprise only

in his pockets: note on MGM Grand stationary

• visit dojo, look for clues
• contact Joe Ackle to check Golden Bear
• do not risk Leon’s life!

[MGM Grand -- another lion! Also, J. Ackle, get it? Get it? It was a good clue! My experience is you can never have too many blatant clues. Golden Bear. Heh.]

MGM Grand
The Chairman

• Four lions
• 0 bodyguards
• Family resemblance to Leon — younger, somehow more vital
• no info available on him
• MGM security looking out for PCs
  • handoff to special guards
  • penthouse suite

[I lost the penthouse suite in play, but I replaced it with a wicked cool hidden room in the middle of the MGM Grand with a non-tame lion pack in it. I mostly wrote this list down to fix it all in my memory; didn't refer back to it in play. I did use the Joe Ackle bit that followed, though.]

Joe Ackle

• J. Ackle Private Investigations
• narrow face, looks Egyptian
• off Fremont St.
• no idea, but will put PCs in touch w/Chairman “The Big Guy” if PCs share MGM connection

Construction Site

Bears (2)
Bod 8, Chi 3, Mind 4, Ref 6
MA 13, Guns 10
Slap C: 1 S: 3
MA check
Outcome = meters hurled; dodge check vs. Action Result or damage

Demon
Bod 4 Chi 0 Mnd 7 Ref 8
MA 14, Creature Power 13
Abyssal Spines +4 Damage
Flight
Slippery Slope – 13 meters: Agl check vs. 13, miss = fall

[And that was it. I threw in another running fight during a car drive, to start the second session off with a bang, but I mostly ad libbed the combat values and all. That fight was all mooks so it was simple. I also ad libbed one NPC, Mary Oro, real estate agent to the very best. That conversation happened in the Venetian, where I've stayed, so that was pretty easy to make up too. Although I don't know if there's really a private nightclub like the one I made up.]

And frankly why had I not picked it up already? Well there were also two strikes against it: 1) I didn’t like the cover art style and 2) it’s based on FATE with which I’ve had some issues in the past. But I understand both of those things are purely subjective and my issues and neither one was strong enough to overrule the positives (this is kind of like FATE dice right here). Or the $2 price tag.

I’ve said in the past that M&M is a love letter to Mayfair’s old DC Heroes system, wrapped in a d20 shell. Icons then is a love letter to Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP) in a FATE shell.  Which is another check in the plus column. There’s random character creation, there’s Slam/Stun effects for succeeding above the base level, the abilities are more or less the same with the absence of Endurance, and there’s even a suggestion that you name the power levels things like “Incredible” or “Amazing” instead of just numbering them 1-10. Daddy like.

(for those Berts like myself who aren’t down with random character creation there is a very simple point-buy system).

My FATE problems in the past stem from running a Spirit of the Century game and I think are largely related to the organization of that game and its book. SotC bills itself as a light prep game but I (and my group, which may have just been an extension of my own bias) found it nearly impenetrably thick with complex skill and power descriptions and nested levels of prerequisites. Figuring out which skills and powers to take was a chore akin to d20 3.5′s Feat selection, and you had to have pretty detailed notes on what each of them allowed you to do and how they interacted with other things. It was a good game but I felt it was bloated and definitely off-putting for a casual game.

Icons takes the bits from FATE I liked and doesn’t get weighed down by the bloat.  Yes, there’s still a list of skills (handled here as Specialties under the attributes) but for the most part they’re given one or two line descriptions and to what they say on the tin. “Mechanics”? Add the bonus to rolls when building or repairing stuff. “Martial Arts”? Add it to your Prowess (Fighting)  ability and substitute it for your Strength for purposes of slam/stun. Simple. The Powers are, as one would expect, a little more complicated but not terribly so. Most just require a test against a particular ability and then either do damage or have some kind of other effect. It’s presented remarkably clearly which owes a lot to the old MSH system I suspect – it’s been a long time since I read that but I remember the powers being very simple and clear.

As I aid above it’s been a while since I looked at the MSH rules so I don’t know if this next bit is from that or Kenson borrowing from his M&M design but there’s also a clever way that certain powers grant or link to other powers.  Many power descriptions list a related bonus power that you can take for one of your other slots (I suspect this is more useful in random character creation but it helps conceptually in figuring what a character can do either way).  Have Absorption? As a Bonus Power you can use the damage you just absorbed to either boost an ability, blast the damage back, or heal.  Density? Pick up Phasing as a bonus (and be able to use Phase as an attack by taking a bonus of that).  It’s mostly suggestions and the bonus powers aren’t tied to the rank of the original power in most cases but it’s a nice presentation.  For some more complicated umbrella-type powers like Elemental Control you can take any 2 effects (attacking, creating, defending, moving, shaping) for free with the power and pick up any additional effects as a bonus by using one of your power slots.

And the big test of any supers system: can it do Green Lantern and the Flash? From what I’m seeing, yes and easily (GL would be device-based Cosmic Wizardry with Elemental Control – Light (Attack, Defend, Create, Shape), Flight, maybe Life Support and the rest is all done with Power Stunts which allow you to duplicate the effects of other powers. Flash has Super Speed with Fast Attack, Phasing, Defending and Surface Speed as bonus powers).

The FATE system comes in to play with the use of Aspects. These are broken into two categories: Qualities and Challenges. Qualities are how you spend your Determination Points, Challenges are how you earn them back. Qualities are abstract and you make up whatever you want although there are some suggestions of categories (catch phrase, connections, motivation). If you can bring your Quality into play in a given action (or “tag” it) you can spend a Determination Point, which will give you a bonus to your roll or other stuff. If the GM invokes one of your Complications (dependent NPC, secret identity, weakness etc) to, well, complicate your life you earn a Determination point. I’ve always liked this way of handling weaknesses or drawbacks so there’s a reason to have something that’s going to come up reasonably frequently rather than just taking a “Catastrophic Irrational Phobia: dogs with bees in their mouths” for a couple extra points at character creation.

There’s one bit missing from the aspects though, or I missed it in my first read. One of the things I liked best about the aspects in my SotC game was being able to pass your bonus to another character. One character who had no business being in a combat scene could be on the sidelines giving orders and doing social challenges and pass his +2 bonus to another more physically-oriented character who could use it to smack down the big bad.  Teamwork! It’s why Superman and Batman can work together without massive unbelievable disparity. Batman can tag Darkseid’s “Arrogant” aspect (Three batarangs plunk into Darkseid’s arm, beep and explode.  “You DARE touch the being of the great Darkseid, mortal! Suffer my wrath!”) and bounce the +2 over so Superman can lay into the distracted villain with even greater power.  I’d definitely allow that

Now that I think about it, I also didn’t see that you can only use each Aspect once per scene. That gave them a dwindling resource-type feeling (in addition to your pool of points) in SotC. Not sure how I feel about this either way. Probably better to not have them be expendable to encourage lots and lots of point spending and big cinematic results. But again, I may have just missed it as I was kind of tired when reading this.

I’m still not a huge fan of the dice mechanic here – you roll 2 dice with one designated positive and the other negative giving you a result of -5 to +5. I’m sure mathematically it works out and it removes the need for tables and charts but there’s a feeling to it I don’t love.  Can’t describe it any more than that. I don’t recall it being a huge impediment in SotC though.

Overall I’m very happy with what I see in Icons. Still not a huge fan of the art style but I see what they’re going for. This is definitely at the top of my list for the next supers game I run, be it a campaign or just a one or two shot. And again I must emphasize: the pdf is (at the time of this writing) $1.99 so you really can’t go wrong.

While I still regularly game with the same two groups I have written of previously, the composition of both groups has varied several times over the past year, and there has been consolidation.  Instead of groups of 6 and 7 with an overlap of two, the groups are now 4 and 5 with an ovelap of 3 players (myself included).  The changes are due to loss of jobs, and the subsequant consequences  some of which entailed players moving away to other states, or taking shifts preventing them from making traditional game times.  Included in these personnel changes have been the other regular GMs for the groups, so I’ve been running more, and more regularly, than I perhaps ever have.  Given all of the ideas I have for games, this should be a good thing, right?

In many ways, it is.  I get to try out new concepts, and run storylines that take several sessions to resolve that might have been truncated or skipped when I was switching off with other GMs.  On the otherhand, I need to spend more time each week to prepare, and in some cases I’ve drawn out certain scenes longer than necessary (and not always by letting my players shine in their in-character interactions – sometimes I’ve let them stumle around in trying to figure out a clue, or a course of action longer than I would have normally) or let a session end early because I had run out prepared materials.  I’m a great believer in going beyond preparation, and spotaneously adding elements to accomodate players – and I’ve been told I’m fairly good at this.  But I’ve reached my limit a few times this past year, and my GMing has suffered at times because of it.

And while I may have a wide variety of ideas, and systems I want to try out, the increasing homogeneity of the groups means that there are limits on how far from traditional rpgs I can go.  Which is not to say my players aren’t open to trying new things – not in the least.  We’ve had games using Spirit of The Century, Mutants & Masterminds, D20 Modern, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and D&D 4E in the past year.  In the past they’ve indulged the GMs by trying out Amber Diceless and Prime Time Adventures (both of which are closer to my preferred playing style), though the last was probably too far out of their comfort zone and got the least favorable reactions.  Indications are the current makeup of the groups prefer the traditional rpg model, with regular level and power bumps.

There’s nothing wrong with that.  I’ve enjoyed running and playing D&D 4E since it came out, and with the tools WoTC have made available online I find the preparation needed streamlined, and easier to scale to fit circumstances.  Conversely, I’m not sure I would want to run a full-on 3.5-style game anytime soon.  I was a subscriber of DDI until recently, and the character and monster builders, as well as a wealth of adventures to plunder from have been a godsend.  In fact, I’ve gotten a little used to that convenience, and now that I’ve let my subscription lapse I find myself missing the newer magazines.  I don’t feel much of a loss with regard to the character builder, as it became apparent with the move to an online-only model that it would be of limited usefulness to my players.  As another consequence of the economy, a few of my regular players have limited or no dial-up access anymore, so we agreed as a group to hold our characters to the second-to-last update of the old character builder (as the last update removed some functionality, and otherwise made some changes we didn’t need).  And while the Monster Builder is buggy, I find the ability to pull powers and traits from existing monster to skin my own beasties of paramount utility.  The numbers may be a little off here and there, but I can adjust for that during play if need be.  So, other than having fewer adventures to pull from, the loss of our DDI accounts hasn’t changed much else.

While I have continued with my re-imagined 4E Keep on the Borderlands campaign (the characters have just leveled up to 6th, and have yet to approach the Caves of Chaos – but that’s all to plan), the loss of one of our GMs meant I haven’t had a chance to play 4E in awhile.  Which is why my Not Your GM’s Keep on the Shadowfell column ended abruptly, with a partially written post abandoned since it was no longer relevant.  Upon hearing about WoTC’s D&D Encounter’s program, I was tempted to go out to the nearest (and coolest) gaming store in the area (Games Plus) to try out the 2 hr weekly sessions, but in the end I couldn’t see myself driving the 1 hr plus each week for just an hour or two game.  Fast forward to the new year, and I discovered a new gaming store (The Gaming Goat) opened January 1st in my town, just 10 minutes away!  Finally, another chance to play!

Checking in at the store, I discovered it was geared mostly towards ccgs (and who can blame them, given the economics involved) but had a small selection of rpgs (D&D 4E, Pathfinder, and a few WoD books) and they didn’t have anyone running the D&D Encounters program.  They were looking for someone to do so, though, and almost before I realized it, I was volunteering.  So, yes, in an effort to find a game to play in, I ended up running a third weekly game!  And have been at it almost a month (the last 3 weeks have been using the prepared D&D adventure, March of the Phantom Brigade – earlier sessions were filler from my own “4E Keep”  campaign while we waited for the WoTC material to arrive).  Fortunately the prepared nature of the Encounters program means it takes minimal work before hand, and doesn’t require a great time commitment.  There have been other GMs available after the first session, but I have been encouraged by a few of my players and the store owner to continue, so I’m in for the 13 week season.  With chaper one of the season coming to a close this week, I hope to relate my thoughts on the program soon, and perhaps add in details as the season progresses.

At times this past year, I have been concerned that my gaming groups would disappear.  One I created, but the other has been going strong for a decade before I joined.  It would be a shame for it to die out. Plus I wanted to continue to have the opportunity to run games.  And while we’re not out of the woods, I am running more than ever now.  I’ve been advertising our Thursday Night EAGLES games to the D&D Encounters group, so  maybe we’ll be able to grow from crossover with my third group.  That could be a lasting benefit that is worth the time expenditure each week, in addition to supporting a new gaming store that I can drive to on a whim.  And the store does support us, even if they don’t quite know how to make money on rpgs yet.  They want to encourage more groups to start up and play in their open gaming area (which is 2/3 of the store), and are offering 20% discounts on rpg materials on the night we play Encounters.  I can get behind that.

At the same time, running three games is going to start wearing on me.  I have two adventures sketched out for the 4E Keep game before I need to do some more work, so I am encouraging others who have ideas to take a turn at GMing if they want.  In the past I’ve been reluctant to turn the plot-reigns over, but I think I’m in the right frame of mind for it.  For the longest time I’ve wanted to do nothing but run.  Now, I’m ready to play, too.

And honestly, as a player, there were some things I did come to enjoy about 4e. Man, can you play the ultimate sneak thief sniper from hell in that game!

But as an erstwhile DM, I was frankly horrified by the amount of labor that seemed to be involved in prep, and then the herculean task during the game session of keeping tabs on all the moving parts and widgets for not only all your NPCs but also trying to ::ahem:: help keep the PCs honest.

Anyways, as I was saying (talk about burying the lede), lately there have been some rumblings of dissatisfaction with 4e amongst various and sundry in the remaining Boston loyalists of the Ephemeral Circus. Hopefully I’m not outing anyone when j’accuse the founder of this site– Chris Tatro himself– confided in me that he’s toying with the idea of possibly thinking about perhaps looking in to maybe moving his campaign (which is about to enter Spelljammer territory) to something that “better suits his DMing style.”

Maybe nothing will ever come of this, but never being one to shirk from any consideration of rules toolboxes and tinkering with fiddly bits, I began thinking about it. One of the first games that came to mind was Lady Blackbird, an indie steampunk skyship game that crossed my desk a year or two ago. I honestly only skimmed it at the time, but it stuck with because the graphic design is gorgeous.

I hit Story Games for the first time in many months yesterday, and saw some of the great things people have done with those rules in the meantime, and was duly impressed and intrigued. Could one truly step down from the precipice of 4e rules bloat, play ersatz D&D in a rules light indie game, and at the same time breathe new life into all those bookshelves worth of sourcebooks by recycling their simulationist widgets as narrativist ‘tags’ and ‘aspects’? It seems so!

However, the one thing that gave me pause was Lady Blackbird’s seemingly baked-in conceit of GM pre-generated characters. I don’t know if that’s a relic of the game being a convention one shot or something… or perhaps because of some narrativist need for touchy/feely inter-party story hooks… but it strikes me as incredibly odd that in their quest to liberate the grognards from the shackles of DM railroading and ‘bad’ “I kill and loot the body” storytelling by introducing player narrative control, that they’d shackle those same players to being unable to roll up and create the character they want to play and evolve through said enlightened storytelling.

(And yes, before anyone yells at me in the comments that I’m being insulting, simplistic, and ad hominem, I am being deliberately hyperbolic and obtuse here for *hopefully* comedic purposes. Deal with it.)

So anyways, if you are still bearing with me, let me share with you some ideas I’ve come up with for addressing this gross oversight and crime against not only the hobby, but affront that cuts to the very core of what makes us human.

Taking a page from Spirit of the Century, I can envision the first session of a prospective campaign being one in which the DM pitches the overarching plot he’s got in mind (“in this game, you’ll be pirates in arcane space,” “in this game, you will be agents for a decadent and increasingly paranoid King”) and the players then make up their characters and build hooks to each other by writing up some of their prior off-screen adventures together; basically replacing SotC‘s pulp novel conceit with D&D‘s adventure module one.

So, mechanically, here’s how I’d run char gen for Dungeons & Blackbirds:

1. Each player names 4 Traits for their character. These Traits can be pretty much any tried and true D&D trope like race, character class, prime requisite ability score, class feature, skill, AD&D non-weapon proficiency, 3e feat, signature weapon specialization, magic item, alignment, patron deity, 4e character role, etc. etc.
2. For each of these Traits, name 2 Tags that further build upon and describe what that Trait means and does.
3. Now, each player will come up with a title for one of the modules/adventures their character took part in. There will be one module for each player at the table. And feel free to dust off dimly remembered chestnuts from your childhood… who wouldn’t want to have their new character to have been in the Expedition to Barrier Peaks?
4. They will write up a few sentences describing a pivotal scene their character had during this adventure. Based on this scene, they will come up with 4 more Tags that further flesh out their developing Traits and character advancement. These can be four Tags under one Trait, one Tag under each of the four Traits, or any combination thereof.
5. Once everyone has done this, they should pass their adventure page to the player to their right. Now, they will write a scene their character performed as a member of the party in this other adventure. Based on what they describe, they will come up with a further 3 Tags for their character, again under any combination of Traits.
6. Keep passing the adventure sheets off to your right until everyone has had a part in every adventure. For each of these additional scenes they get 2 more Tags due to character advancement. Once your adventure has finally returned to you, you should have several Tags for each Trait (it appears the pre-gens in Lady Blackbird each have between 5-9 Tags per Trait). It is time to move on to:
7. Coming up with Keys. Keys are the motivations, problems, connections, duties, and loyalties that pull on your character. Each character will have three Keys.
8. Each player should read aloud the final write-up for their adventure module. Based on what transpired in the story (and rather than choosing from pre-fabbed laundry lists of Keys which I honestly don’t have the time or desire to do right now) the players should discuss and brainstorm and come up with some ideas. Again: character classes, origin and background feats, alignments, prestige classes, magic items and relics, Forgotten Realm secret societies and Planescape Factions… they can all provide possible fodder for Keys. From the crowd sourced list that arises from their module, the player will pick one Key for their character and one Key for the character of the player to their left– the last person to add to their adventure module (and the one who ostensibly wrote the exciting climax).
9. Once everyone has two Keys (one they picked themselves, one given them by the player to their right), the DM will assign each character their third and final Key. This can be something left over from the brainstorming session lists, something new that they want to see explored by the player during the campaign, etc.
10. Finally, each character gets 2 Secrets. Secrets are extraordinary powers, abilities, rituals, magic items, etc. Dust off your D&D and AD&D sourcebooks and find some spell, artifact, prestige class, etc. that you want to be your character’s big guns. Mechanically, it appears Secrets are supposed to work in one of two ways:

* You can re-roll a failure once per session, or give someone else in the party this benefit.
* You have a power or ability that automatically accomplishes something storywise, and you get to narrate the scene of this success.

It all seems fairly straightforward, but never having actually *played* Lady Blackbird, I can’t quite be 100% sure that it is this simple. I think I may want to try and use this rules hack to run that Planescape police procedural I’ve always wanted to do (Law and Order: Sigil?!?), so if I can ever make that happen, I’ll let you know.

In the first stage of play, you generate both characters and the setup, which is where the playsets come in. They contain setting elements — Relationships, Objects, Locations, and Needs — which serve to give definition to the characters. You figure out who your PC is after you find out how he or she is connected to the various other PCs by the setting elements. Elements are chosen semi-randomly, which is one of the two things that makes the game awesome for me.

The key here is that the random element constrains the narrative and keeps me from controlling it. When I have too much control over the narrative, as a player, I tend to lose interest. I need a GM to say no to me, or to introduce something I wouldn’t have thought of, or I can’t get any of the immersive play that I personally need. Fiasco is perfectly tuned: there’s enough choice so that you aren’t getting ridiculous combinations that make no sense, but you don’t have a completely free hand.

Also, you don’t own your own setting elements. I.e., in phase 1, I’m not necessarily the person who’s defining the relationship between my character and the others. Maybe I had the option to choose Crime or Family as the top level Relationship element between my PC and Susan’s, and I chose Family. Colin, bless his soul, promptly chooses “Kissing cousins” as the specific relationship, and that’s what we’re stuck with. So there’s another bit that’s outside my control, satisfying my usual need for a GM.

In the second and third stage of play, you tell the story. Act I is setup; there’s a twist in the middle, also semi-randomly determined; and Act II is the rush to conclusion. There’s some montage stuff at the end to wrap everything up. You’ll get two scenes involving your PC per act, guaranteed, plus you might wind up in someone else’s scene. Each scene is pretty concise. There’s no particular randomness associated with each scene, and you’re not rolling dice to determine outcomes or anything, but there is shared control. You can either define your scene or determine the general outcome, but not both. If you want to make sure your PC comes out of the scene in a more or less positive way, you don’t get to set the scene. If you want to say “OK, it’s Kevin and Carla in the back alley behind the MGM Grand, and they’re arguing about whether or not they should give the lions the sedatives before Leon goes on stage,” you don’t get to decide that plucky Kevin gets his way.

That choice is really good. For me, it means I can set the scene and then just roleplay without having to worry about the “right” outcome. My fellow players become the GM for a moment, and I get to react to the world, the way I want to. If you hate the idea of having to define scenes off the top of your head, you can have your fellow players do it for you. I think this rule serves as a safety valve, particularly if you’re not into narrative play as a general rule.

I strongly recommend this game. There’s a lengthy excerpt available, and a bunch of free playsets, which probably aren’t that informative by themselves. The excerpt has a bunch of the example of play, and a sample playset, and a lot of flavor.

Latest additions: Liquidation, a playset about modern retail.

Current count: 49 playsets (one in Italian), plus one translation.

Bully Pulpit Playsets

Rulebook

The rulebook comes with four playsets.

Main Street

A nice American southern town, although I grew up in a nice New England town and you could pretty much use this one for that, too. If you don’t have the game for some reason, this playset appears in the preview.

Boomtown

The Wild, Wild West.

Tales From Suburbia

More family connections and Edge City than you get in Main Street. Interesting study in what makes two playsets different, in fact.

The Ice

Death and life at an Antarctic research station.

Specials

Currently none of these are available, so hold onto ‘em if you have ‘em.

Las Vegas

You got this at Gencon 2010 if you bought the game there. I don’t think there’s any other way to get it. Here’s an actual play report.

Los Angeles 1936

Chandler-esque LA noir. This was available if you bought the Fiasco PDF download through the end of 2010.

Poppleton Mall

A holiday mall-themed playset inspired by Bad Santa and Mallrats. It includes alternate elements if you don’t want to do the holidays. It was free with the purchase of a Fiasco T-shirt during the holiday season in 2010.

Free Downloads

All of Bully Pulpit’s free Fiasco downloads can be found here.

Touring Rock Band

The best and worst of rock and roll.

Gangster London

Bad guys in London; slanted more towards modern London than (say) the Kray Twins, but you could adjust it very easily.

Last Frontier

Life in an Alaskan fishing village. Best sub-section: “Bear Insurance.”

Lucky Strike

A U.S. Army replacement depot in November, 1944, full of bored soldiers.

Flyover

The great American Midwest, anywhere from Texas to North Dakota.

Reconstruction

1867, in the Virginia, right after the Civil War. Some potential for offensive play, but you’re playing Fiasco, so you thought about that already.

Manna Hotel

A run-down motor lodge in Kansas; contains supernatural overtones.

1913 New York

Graft, anarchists, and plutocrats in New York City.

Transatlantic

An ocean liner en route to New York in 1932. (Two decades after the Titanic, by the by.)

Dallas 1963

Right before the Kennedy assassination. The Book Depository is a Location.

London 1593

Queen Elizabeth I, spies, and Shakespeare.

Dragon Slayers

The aftermath of a successful Dungeons & Dragons dungeoncrawl. The PCs, not the players.

Operation Zebra

Something very bad happened, and something very bad is about to happen, and you’re trapped on a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. During World War II. Emphatically occult.

Foreign Language

Horse Fever

This’ll show up as an English Playset of the Month at some point, but this is the original. Looks like it’s about horse racing.

Ice (Russian)

Translated from the rulebook; lives on the Bully Pulpit download page.

Third-Party Playsets

A few of these link directly to PDFs, which I have marked as such cause who wants a surprise PDF? Some link to landing pages, from whence you can download the PDF. These are noted as “PDF download” in the description. All else can be assumed to be a text page of some sort.

General

All The Damn Time

Experimental playset in which everyone plays the same person at different points in his life, because he’s a time-traveler. PDF download.

The Big Anime Con (PDF)

Otaku with as much right to screw up as anyone else. (One of two con playsets; we know our own turf, yo.)

Bravazzo!

Italy, 1435, as the Renaissance begins. PDF download.

Break A Leg!

Awful things behind the scenes at a theater. Could be community, could be Broadway.

Devil’s Night (PDF)

Vampires in Detroit on Devil’s Night; horror-themed. Discussion and art are here.

Double Down

Atlantic City casinos. Some horse racing here if you want your horse racing in English.

Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is an ASCII-based dwarven community building simulation with a cult following. This is probably mostly of interest to Dwarf Fortress players, although if you read up on the original you’d get the humor and references.

Firan

Firan is a fantasy multi-player text-based roleplay environment, which is all we had before these newfangled MMOs and VTTs and stuff. I think it would be difficult to play this one without Firan players involved.

Funny Old Game

A football (soccer) playset; not yet complete.

GenCon: The Worst Four Days In Gaming

Everything bad about going to a gaming con in four short days. Awesome sense of the hobby’s less attractive side. PDF download.

Hollywoodland Noir

The Hollywood located midway between James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler.

Home for the Holidays

A holiday-themed playset from Megan of the Jank Cast.

Liquidation

A playset about a big chain bookstore closing. PDF download.

No Strings Attached

Muppets. See also discussion. PDF download.

Outrageous Fortune

Shakespeare! In contrast to London 1593, this one is about the joy of being a Shakespeare character.

Pink Mohawks

Low-lifes in the world of Shadowrun. Not official.

Science Comics

Sometimes there are third-rate supervillains, and sometimes they make mistakes too. Best sub-section: “Minions.”

Toil and Trouble

Wizarding school for youngsters. Yeah, inspired by those books. PDF download.

White Collar (PDF)

White collar crime, high finance, and mistakes.

Yokohama 1865

Foreigners, samurai, and criminals in Yokohama, just as Japan’s isolation begins to end.

RPG Geek Contest (November 2010)

The RPG Geek people ran a contest in late November for the best Fiasco playset, which is so cool I wanted to make it a special section. The title links below go to each playset’s page; the PDF links in the descriptions go to the PDF download page, because it is hard to find those if you’re not familiar with RPG Geek. The overall list of entries is here.

Bangkok 1984

Based on the musical Chess, plus spy stuff. World’s your oyster. PDF download.

The Bull

Purposefully claustrophobic British pub goings-on. Lots and lots of British cultural references, which are politely hyper-linked. Substitutes Events for Locations. PDF download.

Cults of New England

If it’s 1933 in New England, there must be Deep Ones. Lovecraftian. PDF download.

The Fallout

After the bomb falls, people will still make stupid mistakes about each other. PDF download.

Holly Jolly!

Rankin/Bass fun at the North Pole. Comes with a custom Tilt table. PDF download.

On the Rez

Poverty and pain on a Native American reservation. PDF download.

A Shot At The Show

Minor league baseball, small towns, and ambition. PDF download.

State Prison

Problems behind bars, plus Scientology. PDF download.

Resources

There’s a very nice Word template for creating Fiasco playsets. It works best if you use the Fiasco fonts. You could also use the OpenOffice template, and apparently if you’re an InDesign user you can get that template direct from the Bully Pulpit people.

Having played both 1st and 2nd edition of the game I’m having a hard time getting my brain around this. They’ve shifted much more to an effects-based powers system where you basically have to build the powers you want. For example, if I want Super-Breath there’s no such power, so I should take Affliction (Hindered/Immobile/Paralyzed) or maybe Move Object or maybe Damage (Ranged), or perhaps all 3 with an Alternate Effect rider so that I could use any one of those but not all 3 at the same time.

They give some examples of some common powers and how they’re built with effects but it took a couple of reads for me to really get how they worked. There are archetype templates and 25 or so sample DC characters in here to suss it out from as well. But this game is taking a lot more effort than most for me to fully internalize how things come together. I don’t think I’m particularly dumb so I have to imagine this is tough and would be nigh-impossible for someone new to gaming who picked this up because they love comics. Bad form. A page or so outlining how to build some of these powers or even just a couple of examples in the “Jon is building a character and wants to be able to do X” mode would have been very useful.

The upside is that when everything does click into place it’s extremely versatile. You *can* build just about anything by focusing on the effect you want to achieve, and there doesn’t need to be a 300 page list of every conceivable power under the sun. I mean, who’s ever going to go to the list looking for Super Breath? But I figured what it could be in about 5 minutes. And if I dig around on the Atomic Think Tank boards and elsewhere I bet other folks have done a lot of the heavy lifting to put together powers for me.

The combat/action resolution engine remains the same from 2nd edition M&M. There’s an attack roll vs one of 3 set defenses (Parry, Dodge, Will) depending on the type of attack then the defender gets a roll on their defense against the damage rank of the attack. Failure on the resist is measured out in ranks – every 5 you fail by means the attack imposes a more serious condition. There are no hit points in this system – you just accumulate conditions until you get incapacitated or some such. I really dig that.

This edition of the M&M engine moves even further away from the d20 OGL (although it is still in there, but I’m not entirely sure why). The traditional base numbers of 3-18 for your ability scores are gone and now you just buy your bonus. Which makes all kinds of sense and I wish they’d done that for 4e. The standard array of abilities (Str Con Dex Int Wis Cha) is gone too, replaced by 8 stats that cover a lot more ground.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention that part of the reason I love M&M in general and this game specifically is that it remains a love letter to the old Mayfair DC Heroes system. There’s a measurements table where distance/weight/time doubles each rank up. There’s a Motivations list that is almost copied word for word out of the old DCHeroes book. Other little bits here and there nod and smile to my old beloved. And then BAM! there’s an Effects/Damage Resist table at the end of the book that I’m sure is a direct homage to the old RAP tables.

The book itself is beautiful – nice glossy paper, lots of great full color illustrations right from the past couple years of comics (and rather heavy on the JSA, which doesn’t break my heart any).

It doesn’t get any points for organization though. There’s a section on The Basics at the front which I keep having to flip back to as I’m reading the chapter on how combat works, and also to the section on Abilities to see what the defenses and resistances are and how they work. There are some things listed as Extras for powers that feel more like they should be Advantages. Many of the write-ups list things I can’t find (“Protection, Toughness with the Impervious extra is just listed as “Impervious Toughness” which confused the heck out of me at first. At least I think that’s what it means. And some characters have “Arrays” which I’m still looking for a description of). I have a feeling that these troubles are going to hit me in character creation but I *think* in actual play the system should run pretty smoothly. There are still many more different types of Actions (Charging, Aiming, Grabbing) and Maneuvers) (All-out Attack, Power Attack, Slam) than I’m comfortable with – in my experience it tends to create option paralysis in even experienced players so I usually ignore them and just refer to them when a player describes what they want to be doing. A tidge too much crunch for my liking, but honestly I’ve usually found more rules lite supers systems just don’t do the job.

Overall I think it will be a good system and ideas are already churning in my brain for a supers game. It’s a very powerful toolbox and once I have my full brain around it I think it will do everything I need.