Recent Gaming (spring 2025)

Lots of gaming lately. Here's some highlights:

My Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign continues to go strong. It's rolling on 5 years now, roughly twice a month, so we've recently crossed our 100th session with the same characters. Dworkin/Oberon's universe was destroyed, and the action now takes place in Corwin's universe and another universe that Fiona created, plus the occasional scene in the tiny islands of primal matter in the Abyss that were left when the old universe imploded. Those are basically the only place where Brand can exist without the "immune system" of the other universes trying to destroy him.

I just wrapped up my Feng Shui 2nd Edition campaign about a week ago. The players foiled a really major push by the Ascended to conquer 2 of the 3 Junctures they didn't already control. This caused a Critical Shift (the second one of the campaign) and after a truly epic battle we ended with the PCs stepping into a portal to a future they don't know.

For the same group (as played Feng Shui), I'm now prepping a Cyberpunk Red campaign. Scroll down to my last post, from earlier this week, to read about that. 

It was a bit of a toss-up among the group whether we wanted to do Cyberpunk or Pendragon, so in the next few months I'll be reading The Great Pendragon Campaign and the Book of Uther and doing bits and pieces of light GM-prep for that, so that when Cyberpunk wraps up, I'll have that in my pocket and ready to go. But, given that the last two campaigns for this group ran multiple years each, I'm not too worried about getting Pendragon ready in a hurry.

I'm also now playing in an RPG as well. A friend of mine is running Night's Black Agents, aka spies vs vampires. In NBA designs their own vampires and determines whether vampirism is supernatural or superscience or literally infernal demon hell-powers. Our campaign is taking place in the 1980s, so in the two sessions we've played thus far, we've had to sneak across the Berlin Wall three times now. Our characters have rescued a journalist, and the goons who were holding her captive had weird mysterious creepy stuff going on, but we haven't really connected that they (or their leader) is a vampire yet. There's one of them that makes us instantly nauseous when we get near them, but we haven't really figured out why. A different one jumped on top of our car and ripped the roof open trying to kill the journalist, but the roof-rider burst into flames when we shot the heck out of her. We're not at all certain what to expect, or what we're up against. Unraveling the mystery is pretty fun, and the uncertainty makes it easy to tap in to the fear and bewilderment our characters are experiencing. 

This weekend I got together with some friends and played the card game Innovation and the board game Thunder Road.

Innovation is really good, but kind of overwhelming the first time you play.I had really good early turns, or so I thought, as I was in the lead in points and achievements.  Unfortunately, in the mid-game I just could not manage to draw cards with any synergy at all. Well, really the problem was that I had a great hand, but I foolishly commented on it, so someone Melded a card that they could then use via Dogma to steal my hand. I didn't even know that was a possibility... but, duh, I should have, it's not like this is the first game to ever let you steal cards from another player. I just never recovered. Good game, but boy does it have a ton going on.  It's sort of a civilization-builder, where every card is an invention or cultural breakthrough. You start in the stone age, and end in the far-future. Every card in the game is unique, and they all have multiple unique ways to play them. So while I liked it a lot, I imagine its' not going to be good match for everyone.

Thunder Road is much simpler. Just good chaotic Mad-Max style shenanigans. Sort of like if Gaslands or Car Wars was a streamlined racing boardgame. We played with the Chop Shop expansion, which adds cool asymmetric super-powers to your cars via a drafting mechanic at the start of the game. I enjoyed it a great deal, and may end up buying the game and that expansion. Based on just one play, it seems like the core game without that expansion is very light beer-and-pretzels without much depth, but that expansion made every turn interesting and unpredictable. 

I continue to play the occasional solitaire-RPG or solo-skirmish miniatures game when I have insomnia. For the solo-RPG I've been mostly running D&D, with one PC (a Satyr Circle of Stars Druid) and a rotating cast of lower-level NPC sidekicks. When I started I had to lean a lot on the Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and its sequel. I'm a little more freeform of late, but that book is great for getting you started and comfortable with solitaire play.  

And every once in a while I boot up Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur's Gate 3, but I have to be careful with those because man can I ever lose an entire evening just rearranging my darned inventory. When that happens, I feel like I've wasted a resource (my life, my time) that I'll never get back... and yet, I love both those games so much.

Meatwagon In The Time Of The Red

Starting a new campaign soon. It'll be Cyberpunk Red, with the PCs being the crew of an REO Meatwagon Combat Ambulance. If you've consumed any flavor of Cyberpunk, you've probably heard of Trauma Team, the premiere combat ambulance medical extraction company. REO Meatwagon is the low-budget disreputable version. 

I'm setting it up like an episodic TV show. Every session will have an A-Plot and a B-Plot. 

The A-Plot is "this episode's story" that's usually going to be an emergency call, where the PCs show up in the middle of a terrible situation and have to try to get their client out alive. Often this means going in guns-blazing, but sometimes it will be more of a puzzle or require subtlety.

The B-Plot will be a few roleplaying scenes around the edges of that, which tie in to one PCs backstory or personal arc each session, or perhaps advances "this season's simmering meta-plot" in the background.

I've done something similar to this in a one-shot before, and it worked great. Now I'm going to find out how well the idea holds up for a longer campaign.

Planning to assign IP a little differently than the books suggest. 

• Making any serious attempt at the A-Plot scores everyone on the team 50 IP, even if they fail. 
• If they save one or more paying customers, and deliver them safely to a Hospital (or other place the customer says is safe, provided the customer's not bleeding out or KO'd) the group +10 IP per customer saved. 
• Engaging with the B-Plot in any way (e.g.: not just hanging up on the NPC) scores an extra +5 IP for the team.
• If that B-Plot scene is a real dirty suckerpunch that seriously complicates the character's life, hits you in the feels, or someone's roleplaying really impresses the GM, everyone gets +10 IP bonus (beyond the usual +5 from the B-Plot)

The intention then being that the PCs gain 50 to 75 IP per session, which is a little higher than the average the book assumes, but not crazy high. Doing it this way to motivate the players to engage with the plots in particular ways, so there's just a little extra push to try to save a customer. Also to give you a reason to include NPC friends or family in your backstory so it's not just "I'm an orphan and a real loner" as many people seem to love to do with Cyberpunk. I find there something about dystopian futures that really make folks want to create dysfunctional lone-wolf bad-asses by default. 

The Way of the Weredodo

 Back in December, I wondered aloud about the Wereraven stats in the 5e Ravenloft book. It was, at the time of publish, the only official Lycanthrope that could regenerate. It had this Regen instead of the Resistance to non-magical Slashing, Piercing and Bludgeoning damage that all Lycanthropes had. As I mentioned in that post (Transitive Property of Gaming: Wereraven Throwbacks) this made the Were-Raven much more powerful than most Lycanthropes. They're really hard to kill, in a way that none of the other lycanthropes are, and that seemed odd to me.

Since then, I picked up the Deck of Many Things set, which included stats for a Werevulture. This Werevulture was almost identical to the Wereraven. Identical except for more hitpoints and higher damage. The mimicry power is removed, but there wasn't anything added to make it more like a vulture. 

When I noticed that Werevulture about a month ago, I wondered if maybe the upcoming 2024 edition of the Monster Manual was going to give all Regeneration instead of Resistance. There'd been rumblings for a while that Resistance to non-magical weapons was going the way of the (were)dodo. So I suspected that Regeneration was going to be added to all the Weres as a way of making them feel like the dangerous hard-to-kill shapeshifters that they are in the lore. 

Well, now I've got the 2024 (aka 2025, aka 5.5) Monster Manual, and I can see that no, there's no new Regenerating Lycanthropes. So, I guess just bird-based lycanthropes can regenerate, for some reason. I don't understand why. I suspect it's just a case of "the left author doesn't know what the right author is writing".  

There's no lycanthrope section in the new Monster Manual, but there are stats for Werewolves, Weretigers, Wereboars, Wererats, and Werebears (and Jackalweres in the "J" section). The rules for contracting Lycanthrope are abridged heavily, and just shoved into the individual monster stat blocks. Overall, they are a lot less likely to turn you into a Lycanthrope, and I think it's a bit of a shame as that downplays the most interesting thing about them. On the other hand, if you don't make the initial save, and they also manage to reduce you to zero HP after that failed save, then you transform and become an evil lycanthrope instantly. On the rare cases where that first save is failed, you'll now really be sweating, assuming you know how the rest of the power works. That scariness is kinda cool... but it does make fights very swingy, as a PC going down is a double-whammy to the action economy when they get back up and join the enemy. 

It's also unclear from the Monster Manual whether or not its possible to restore the newly-evil newly-NPC character to their original status. The MM doesn't make it clear if Remove Curse works or not after you've transformed. It's pretty clear Remove Curse works between when you get the Curse from the first bite to when you fall to 0 HP, but once you've been KO'd you "become a werewolf under the GMs control". Is that new status an ongoing symptom of the curse, or is it a permanent change of status? Is "you're now a werewolf" the equivalent of "you're under an enchantment" or is it the equivalent of "you died"? I could make see an argument for either interpretation. 

Nothing in the Monster Manual takes a stance on it, and the Remove Curse spell in the 2024 Player's Handbook is vague as well. So I went looking in the DM's Guide, where it says: 

"Some monsters are associated with curses, whether as part of their origins or due to their ability to spread curses—werewolves being a prime example. You decide how a spell like Remove Curse affects a creature with accursed origins. For example, you might decide that a mummy was created through a curse and it can be destroyed permanently only by casting Remove Curse on its corpse."  

So, officially, the answer is "it's up to the DM". This is actually a bad answer. Everything is always up to the DM. What's a Werewolf's AC? How many HP does the werewolf have? Those are also things that a DM can (and often will) choose to change, but having a default answer is really helpful. It makes DM-ing prep run faster, and provides a default the DM can use if they want a baseline experience. If the Monster Manual said "AC: DM's Call" and "HP: Whatever the DM things is appropriate" we'd be annoyed that this monster entry was incomplete. Being vague, and not providing a default lethality setting for a werewolf's curse is lame. But this is worse than saying "Damage: DM's choice", because they don't even say in the monster description that this is up to DM fiat. They talk around it, thereby implying that the rules must be somewhere else. A new DM could well throw a werewolf encounter at their party without having thought this through at all, and then get stuck with a situation where a PC turns mid-battle. That player will naturally be curious as to how final/fatal this new condition is, and the DM's going to be caught checking two other books (like I did) only to find that in the end there's no guidance offered at all. 

I'm also not happy that their vulnerability to silver went away. I get that a design goal of 2024 was to try to bridge the martials vs spellcasters gap. Monsters that have Resistance to non-magical weapons makes them much harder for low-level non-caster PCs to battle, in a way that benefits spellcasters. Which is a shame, because spellcasters already have some big advantages especially later in the campaign when high-level spells do crazy things. So closing that gap is a noble goal, and I understand why that was something 2024 edition leaned into hard (see Weapon Mastery for another example), but I'm still not happy with the impact here. Silver weapons though were a really cool thematic element, so their removal detracts from the lore, and makes lycanthropes just a tiny bit less interesting. 

What makes a lycanthrope a lycanthrope? What separates them from other monsters now? Two things:

1) They can transform as a Bonus Action, but those different forms have identical stats, so this is kind of meaningless. It's narratively cool, and I'll certainly use it in play. But it doesn't do much, and since only Weretigers have anything else they might do with a Bonus Action instead, it's not meaningful.

2) If they kill you, there's a 50% chance you'll get up instantly as an NPC Lycanthrope and attack your fellow PCs. That's certainly interesting and meaningful, but it's got serious potential to cascade into a full TPK. Even if it doesn't do that, it's likely to ruin a player's fun, and/or result in an argument that boils down to DM's fiat after you've searched in 3 books for a rule. And the implications of what this means in-universe are kind of crazy. Because there's no delay now, any Lycanthrope ought to be able to convert any village into a full-on wolf's den faster than you can say "One-Night Ultimate Werewolf". I mean I guess it's good that you don't need silver to damage them, as now its possible that the villagers could get lucky and kill the new werewolves as fast as they are made. 

Lycanthropes in previous editions (including 2014 5e) were very hard for commoners to kill, so the scenario of "we need to hire the PCs to save our village" was very believable. At the same time, those older rules delayed the onset of lycanthropy until the next full moon or other trigger, so the PCs had some time to get hired and conduct an investigation. Now there's less need for the commoners to hire the PCs, and it takes the werewolf a lot less time to co-opt the entire town. I'm not crazy about any of that. 

Session-Based Advancement vs XP from Combat RAW

 It's really weird to me how completely disconnected the main level-up options in the Dungeon Master's Guide are.

Here's the text from 2014 DMG about leveling up your characters based on how many sessions you'd played:

A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. This rate mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long.

The 2024 DMG adds a couple little sentences about adjusting this for length of session and accomplishment, but sticks to the general formula above. 

So how does that compare to XP gained from combat encounters, which I will note is the default system that the game largely assumes you are using, and which the various rulebooks (2014 and 2024 DMGs, and also Xanathar's Guide To Everything) spend a lot of time and word count (and math) hashing and rehashing.

I'd say that if you're tracking XP by combat it will take you at least 2, and more likely 3 sessions to get to level 2. I've also seen it take a lot more than that, especially with cautious players, or with those still learning the system or playing a new class for the first time. 

I'm not saying it's in any way a problem that the recommended progression rate for leveling-up by session is two to three times the speed of advancement if you did the XP math, but it is odd to me that this wide a gap exists without them mentioning it in any of the books that present that math.

Supporting XP math and book references can be found below the fold, along with a fair amount of rambling.