I wish I'd thought of that

I'd like to take a moment to nod to a couple of one-shots I did not come up with, and did not participate in in any way, for which I am very sorry. Both sound like great concepts. Lots of fun and easy to wrap your brain around. Friends of mine played in them, and they've come up in conversation recently, making me envious.

• Savage Lorax - Dr Suess characters, using Savage Worlds mechanics
• Dr Dworkin's Sing Along Blog - Joss Whedon meets Roger Zelazny

Blessed Be

Sunday afternoon was the first session of my Deadlands Reloaded campaign. A few observations:

• Blessed freakin' rock. I knew that they were pretty buff on paper, but I really wasn't prepared for just how potent they were. In theory, they're kept in check by not being able to sin, and getting penalties for attempting miracles that aren't direly needed. Given the questy nature of the campaign -the PCs are hunting supernatural evil- that second restriction isn't going to factor in as often as the rules may be assuming. This session, for example, the two Blessed in the party were the dominating force in the game, and the penalties I applied weren't even effective speedbumps. Who'd a thunk Clerics would be such powerhouses? This will take some getting used to.
  
• Savage Worlds is "Fast! Furious! Fun!", but Deadlands Reloaded definitely notches up the complexity. Poker hands, magic rules, and 3 flavors of fate chips seem to be the tangled roots of it. It's a little more fiddly than I'd like, to be honest.
• One player maintained it was more complicated than d20, but I have to strongly disagree there. What the player wasn't taking into account was that this wasn't the equivalent of a 1st-level d20 game. The Blessed each cast multiple of what would be a 5th level spell in d20, and the nasty they were battling was a pretty huge challenge. If 3 out of 5 players have no previous d20 experience, and you handed them 9th level D&D spellcasters to play, and then threw them up against a CR13 vampire, I dare say your first session would be rather painful. (Especially if the GM had never run D&D and had only 20 hours of d20 Modern GMing to handle things - which is roughly my situation, except in regards to Deadlands Reloaded and Savage Worlds.) Compared to that, this was a pleasant walk in the shade while a comforting breeze blew at my back.
• Next time, I'm carrying the lego minis to the game in a hard-sided tub, not a cloth bag. Within that tub, everything will be ziplock-bagged. When the fight started, I was shocked to discover I had to fish for pieces and put my pre-made terrain back together, which rather sucked. Once that delay had been solved, things went pretty smoothly, but the rocky start to combat had me scared for a bit.
• Blessed kick butt. I know I already said that, but it bears repeating. I'm gonna have to play hardball when enforcing the sinnin' rules, as that's the only easy way to maintain/restore balance. If I don't, then Blessed are the best character archetype, no contest.
  

Hooray again! And yet, I think I'm done.

When I got home last night, I popped onto my two online empires, and discovered I'd been attacked on Ogame. A real attack this time, not some accidental misclick with an espionage probe!

At first, I was thrilled! Just like last time.

I've been unable to attack anyone else - you're under "newbie protection" till you hit a certain point value, which means little guys can't attack each other (though it's main purpose is to stop big guys from smashing little guys into cosmic dust). Problem is that once you're out from under newbie protection, you don't want to pick a fight with someone way above you. You're such a small fish, you can't do a damn thing. So, you sit around building up defenses in hopes of one day being able to compete. There wasn't anyone near me (on the map) who was anywhere near my score, so I didn't have much to do. For a couple months, I could only attack inactive players. I'd been slowly giving up hope of it ever getting exciting, and was really looking forward to some measure of conflict. But I stuck with it for a while, in hopes that someone else would crawl out from beyond the newbie shield near me and we might start a puny little war.

Instead, I got pummeled mercilessly by some random guy ranked 500 places above me, whom I'd never interacted with before. The biggest ship in my fleet was a Battleship, which I had just unlocked, and only had two of. I was attacked by a fleet with 125 Battleships, plus 70 Bombers and a Battlecruiser, neither of which have I unlocked yet, and 15 cargo vessels to haul away the wreckage of my world. The fight lasted 3 rounds. I destroyed 2 of his ships in the first round, and then inflicted zero casualties in the 2nd and 3rd rounds. His surviving 13 cargo vessels (you'll note I didn't destroy any of his actual military units) made off with nearly 200,000 resource points from my world. (And in case it wasn't clear from the above: he destroyed every single ship and planetary defense I had at the world in question).

All of this without an opportunity to do anything - battles are completely computer-moderated, with targets chosen randomly round-by-round. You just get a battle report showing how much your fleet and planetary defenses failed to accomplish. I'd imagined some sort of excitement to come from an epic battle, but instead it felt like reading a spreadsheet. No oomph, no color, just a list of ships and "the attacking fleet did a total of 328,000 damage, of which 16,000 was absorbed by shields. The defending fleet did a total of 25,000 damage, of which 18,200 was absorbed by shields." Lame.

Worse, I never had a chance, and I have no capacity to strike back in any meaningful or productive way. My overall score is like 12,600 development points, and his is 181,000. He's got a lot more ships than me, twice as many planets, and much higher tech development. If I did nothing but build Battleships, it would take me a month and a half to build a fleet the size of his - and he'd have those 2 months to make more of the really big ships I haven't unlocked. A totally one-sided affair, and there's 400 players that out-rank him in our Universe. I spent every remaining resource in my "Empire" just rebuilding the defenses on the planet he blasted, and two of my three other worlds are every bit as vulnerable as that one was.

Now, I realize there's things I could have done to mitigate this disaster. I could have "fleet saved" - a strategy that involves constantly rotating your ships from place to place at slow speeds so they can't be attacked while you're away from your computer. I could have spent every spare resource on defenses so there'd be nothing stockpiled to make it worth a raid. Both of those sound tedious, and I wanted a game I could play for 10-20 minutes a day - which Ogame claims to be.

So, though it was an interesting experiment while it lasted, and kinda fun a couple days, I think I'm probably done with Ogame. It's a poor design. Too slow to get started, and too unbalanced once things start happening.

By contrast, I'll keep my x-wars account active, at least for now, as it still has me fooled into thinking there's some potential to enjoy the game for it's trading and starship-designing subsystems. It doesn't look as pretty as Ogame, but it's got more to do. There's various posts from the X-Wars moderators asking people not to attack the same target more than 20 times an hour, so I suspect it may have the same balance issues that Ogame does. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar painful disillusionment occurs at X-wars in a few more weeks, but for now it seems to be the more rewarding game.

Paaaaaaaaaan

Last night, Malachi ran a game he called Deospora. It was technically a InSpectres derivative, but didn't feel a bit like the game whose system it used. We were all Gods - and we could choose to be traditional Mythological figures, or make up our own Divine personages. A comet passed near the earth, and we hitched a ride. It took us two a primitive little planet where primitive little people worshiped what seemed like a primitive little deity to us. Turns out it was basically Cthulhu. We whupped his but, anyway.

I played Pan, or rather Paaaaaaan, since I gave him a proper Goatboy voice. I ran around lusting after things - mostly womenfolk, but ya never know with Pan. You know all those Greek myths where Pan chases after various Nymphs until they turn themselves into a tree to escape him? We discovered it's not actually an ability inherent to Nymphs and Dryads. Instead, it's a universal property. Anything, and I mean anything, being lusted after by Pan has the potential to turn itself into a tree in an attempt to dissuade his passions.

The game had a lot of fun moments, many of which had nothing to do with me - while I was the most depraved member of our group, we were pretty much all raucus party gods. The group included Pan and Raven and two made-up Gods (one was God of Beer, the other God of Drunk Driving) and the fifth player started off intending to be God of Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n'Roll, and instead landed on being Arlo Guthrie. All those radio stations that still play "Alice's Restaurant" once every Thanksgiving is close enough to worship for him to get invited to the Divine parties.

The plot:

• We decide to party on a passing comet, which eventually collides on a crappy little planet somewhere, stranding us. The natives worship some nasty dark cthonian Titan, and so we decide to subvert that. With booze, drugs, music, and orgiastic reverie, we convert the local tribes.
• 100 years pass, and I father all sorts of Satyrs and Paniskoi. The formerly barren world now has all sorts of trees - prior to my lusty arrival it was just mushrooms and lichen.
• Tribes of seafaring raiders attack us, bearing marks that they are the favored ones of the Cthulhoid monstrosity. A great Panic descends upon thier beached fleet, and they are stranded on our shores. (I take a bow). With the attack fleet in shambles, the rest of the group sets about converting the stranded raiders.
• Another 100 years pass, and Raven, Arlo and Pan got the urge to take a road trip. Little did we realize, the enemy was still out there and prepping to invade again. While we're off probing the enemy territory, our continent was attacked by a mutant critter very reminiscent of Cloverfield. The Gods who stayed behind managed to handle it, luckily. On the road trip, we bumbled into the dark dank cave that was the center of Cthulhu worship. Arlo and Raven were captured by demi-titans and hauled down to the cavernous orifice of the great evil.
• Now, since this is a mostly family-friendly blog, I won't go into detail on how Pan rescued them. Suffice it to say, it weren't pretty. The entire continent turned into a big ol giant tree, and then got pregnant anyway. There was a quick round of jokes about how I'd just proven true the theory of Panspermia. Somewhere in all the excitement, Cthulhu went missing.
• 9 months later, our child, Shub-Niggurath, was born. This became the creation myth of how this planet got a moon. Pan decided he needed to settle down at that, since he finally had a kid worthy of his being a respectible parent, and the love of a good world tree.
• Another 100 years passed, and by this point we'd set up a ridiculously complex stratified caste system for our chosen people, mostly fueled by the trade of beer, rock-folk music, and pornography. Such were the gleaming pillars of our society. Due to various Godly acts of miscegenation, the population involved little gray people, little tie-dyed people, goat-headed people, tentacled people, tree people, and various cloven-hooved hybrids of the above.
• Then one day, a spaceship landed. It had a US flag with little cthulhoid tentacle clusters instead of stars, to answer Arlo's question of "Hello, America, how are ya?" Apparently, the big bad had decided to do to earth what we'd done to his planet. They came to invade and colonize, but didn't stand a chance. Serotonin, God of Drunk Driving, had a plan to deal with it.
  
• He stole the spaceship (in a hurry, too, like he thought I was going to do something nasty to it if he didn't act quickly) and headed back to earth with all our chief exports. He landed in Japan, where tie-dyed-goat-headed-tentacle-tree porn would be most quickly accepted. Somehow, this resulted in peace between the worlds and the defeat of the big bad. I'm a little unclear on the details, but it mostly made sense at the time.

I'm sure there's plenty I missed there, but you get the idea. All things considered, this summary was quite tastefully inexplicit.

Meet the Posse

Shallow Gulch has been destroyed by Finnegan Cobb and his damned gun. Only a handful of folks survived.
From left to right:

• Jebediah Hunt, semi-retired Texas Ranger
• Sister Josephine, Blue Nun
• Natalie Bliss, the sunday school teacher and town gossip
• Dr. Immelmann, creator of an amazing flying stagecoach
• Baucum Pike, Hexslinger and schitzophrenic drifter

Some changes may still happen. Our lego collection only included one body that you'd really call feminine, so it went to the school teacher, as the Nun didn't need to be winning any beauty pageants. However, it is a blue body, and she is supposed to be a Blue Nun of Texas. So, I bit the bullet and ordered up a couple of females on Brick Link. Not only will that allow the ladyfolk PCs to be a bit more distinct at a glance, it'll also get me some proper saloon girl attire for NPCs. ;)

Dr. Immelmann's flying coach may also undergo some modifications. I built it to Kevin's rough specifications of size and shape, but he hasn't seen it yet as of this writting. Since it's a vital part of his character concept, I certainly won't give him any grief if he chooses to rebuild it some. He'll have to come over to my place between sessions to do so, though, 'cause I know what a disaster it would be to just pop open the lego collection while we're trying to roleplay. Everyone, me included, would be distracted.

Relearning How To Breathe

When I ran Continuum, I had to largely give up the notion of controlling the pacing of the game. Players were time-travellers, and could bop over to whatever moment caught their interest. There were things I could do to provide direction, but if they really wanted to focus in on a moment, or span over the slow bits, they could do that themselves, and as long as they didn't frag themselves in the process I couldn't stop them. This made for a game that was very player driven, and every moment was entertainly pregnant with opportunity. It was a great campaign.

That "I've got ADD, lets span" dynamic made me a little lazy, though, and thus when I ran the Amber campaign that started the week after my Continuum campaign dropped curtain, I did a poor job of pacing. Instead of grabbing the reigns and cutting scenes, I spent too much time waiting for players to do things in the first 6 sessions. I sort of blame Continuum, because it required I take such concise notes, and left me really wanting to prep and record absolutely nothing. One campaigns success contributed to another campaigns failure.

When I ran Scion, I definitely got the pacing back under control - at least outside of combat. The combat system was pretty volatile, however, and the game rules had ugly tattered seams. I started house-ruling to mend them, bit by bit. As the campaign progressed, and the basic math of the system fell apart, I had to compensate by getting much more aggressive in my house-ruling. When the second chapter of the Scion companion released in PDF, I tore into it, leveling harsh criticism and pre-emptively houseruling like a man possessed. I don't regret that, in and of itself. White Wolf composes beautiful settings, but their "too many cooks" approach to authorship results in sloppy, even contradictory, rules with holes you could drive a mac truck through. Scion is, hands down, the worst perpetrator of White Wolf's signature flaw that I've read. The game is desperately in need of a revised edition, but they'll probably never make one and I'll probably be too jaded to buy it if they did. End result was a game my players are still talking lovingly about the setting and plot, but which I hated to run. Too much hard work and frustration.

So now I'm running Deadlands Reloaded. It's "rules medium-light", meaning a little lighter than D&D 4th, but a step heavier than vanilla Savage Worlds. It's got some extra complexity (beyond Savage Worlds) in the Magic system, Dueling rules, a few other card draws, and the way Bennies work. The first printing had some rough edges. They weren't nearly as tattered as Scion's rules, and Pinnacle released a nice little FAQ that mended 95% of the fraying. It's still not perfect, but it's more than playable.

Problem is, the campaign that went before is casting a shadow on the various games that follow. Just as Continuum allowed me to focus on flavor and PC freedom at the cost of pacing, Scion has inclined me to focus on niggling rules flaws at the cost of... well, I'm not sure at the cost of what (beyond perhaps my peace of mind), since we've only done character creation. I am noticing, however, that my gut instinct has become to bitch here and then house-rule. It's kinda sad how quickly I jump to fix what ain't necessarily broke.

For example, in Deadlands Reloaded, I find that the Poker Hands chart isn't perfectly to my liking:

• it isn't terribly clear whether "Jacks of Better" counts as a whole hand rank above a mundane pair when you're dueling, or if that's just for spellcasting. (Same vagueness with Ace High - is it just a tie breaker in a duel or does it count as a hand rank above slop?)
• the system ranks Straight Flush above 5 of a Kind - despite 5 of a kind requiring a Joker. Jokers burn the PC a little, so I'd think you'd wanna make the best possible hand require them.
• they didn't make the Dead Man's Hand special. The hand is both black aces, both black eights, and whatever you believe the 5th card Wild Bill Hickock drew - I lean towards Jack of Diamonds myself - seconds before he died.

For those incredibly minor "flaws", I nearly house-ruled it to duplicate the hand ranks of Doomtown, the old Deadlands CCG. That would have been silly and pointless, since I'm the only person in the group who played Doomtown, and the vagueness about a pair of jacks in a duel will hardly ever come up. If and when it does, I can rule on it. The other two complaints are just flavorful things, and functional (playtested!) mechanics is probably more important than cramming just a little bit more flavor into an already zesty rule set.

As I look through the Deadlands Reloaded book, lots of little things like that keep popping up. What can I say? Scion made me gun shy. I need to learn to just "go with the flow" again, instead of riding hard to head off potential rules-flaws at the pass. I need to relearn how to relax and breathe.

Cop-Out on page 173

Savage Worlds is a great system, and Deadlands is a great setting, and both are great games. In general, they're very well written. That said, the sidebar on page 173 of Deadlands Reloaded is an egregious cop-out. I'm gonna give 'em some hell here, because that sidebar really got under my skin. It's the most frustrating part of the Deadlands Reloaded rulebook.

The first three paragraphs of said sidebar explain how they won't make any efforts to indicate what rank of PC while find any particular monster / NPC appropriately challenging. The game has this nice ranking structure for characters, Novice/Seasoned/Veteran/Heroic/Legendary, which corresponds to how many XP advances you've had, and dictates what level of Powers and Edges you have access to. Sure, two Veteran characters are gonna be very different, but they'll both be serious badasses at whatever it is they chose to specialize in, and they certainly won't have a Parry of 2. So the framework is there to have given monsters a ballpark rating. They chose not to use it for the monster section.

They claim it's for mostly philosophical reasons. They say it's more realistic for the Weird West to be populated by variable threats that don't conveniently correspond to the experience level of the party. They thumb their noses at D&D's challenge ratings and balanced encounters. Sometimes the PCs will massacre the baddies, and sometimes the PCs better just turn tales and run.

On one level, I agree with this sand-box approach, as it leads to far greater verisimilitude - the world is unfair and some challenges have no easy solutions. On the other hand, it seems kinda out of place - since so much of Deadlands is about capturing the feel of Western movies (admittedly, flavored with some supernatural evil) and random encounters of variable power is antithetical to that genre. Nearly every damn Western I've ever seen escalates to a gloriously violent climax. The heroes do sometimes get left for dead in scene one, but that's always set up for a revenge tale that ends with a fairer (but still challenging) fight in the final reel. It's never "That random encounter nearly killed us, we'd better not go back for round two!" No Western hero would ever do that.

But, if they really meant to go full-blown-oldschool-sandbox-and-random-encounter mode, I could respect it. Instead, come paragraph four, the sidebar undoes itself:

"All that said, the GM should tweak encounters to fit the nature of his party. You'll have a good handle on what your party can manage after a few sessions, without the need for some sort of formula."

WTF? So, realism trumps balance, except really you should balance it after all, and we aren't gonna help. I suspect the truth is that laziness trumps realism and balance both.

Oh, sure, I'll get the hang of it, at the cost of my first few sessions being clumsy and poorly balanced. Great. If this preceeded a 4-page monster section, I'd understand that you could eyeball the easier encounters quickly, and something akin to Challenge Rating isn't necessary. But no, the antagonist section it heads up is 77 pages long. Sure, there's several things in there I can push off till later in the campaign by means o' knee jerk reaction to their stat line, but I really don't want to have to read 77 pages in order to start planning my first session.

Why not include a short list of, say, the 6 monsters most appropriate to Novice characters. That would have saved the new GM a lot of trouble, and been pretty damn easy to fit in the book. Off the top of my head, I can think of 3 or 4 paragraphs they could have taken out to shoehorn it in.

OGame advice

I still can't make up my mind whether or not I like OGame. I pop over to it once a day to queue up new building constructions and research - it only eats up 10 minutes of my day that way, which is just fine, but I'm certainly not finding it exciting, nor am I really making much progress in the game. I feel like I've hit a plateau where the remaining meaningful advances are beyond what my planets can produce in 24 hours. So, instead, I just keep building more Gauss Cannons. Meh.

Today, some random new player contacted me, asking for handouts and advice. I'm still not really at the point of having excess (well, except Deuterium, on one planet) so I couldn't really spare any resources for him (well, I suppose "chose not to" is more accurate on the Deuterium, but the game has weird rules prohibiting charity and I didn't want to run afoul of them), but I did pass on some advice that I'd figured out, mostly in the forms of "here's what I'd do differently if I started over".

1. Start raiding Inactive players as soon as possible. To do so, you'll need Espionage probes, Small Cargo, and a Light Fighter or two. Inactive Players are the ones that have "I" or "i" next to their name in galaxy view. Lower case means inactive for a week, upper case means inactive for a month. Send an espionage probe first to locate planets with no current defenses. In the early stages of the game, quite a bit of your resource needs can be met by raiding defenseless abandoned players - you probably won't want to pick fights with active players till you've built up a bit.
2. Ignore the missile silo. It's a ton of expense, and not needed till much later when you're well established. I've built missile silos on all my planets, but never once needed one. It feels like a big waste of resources and fields, in hindsight.
3. The game's "fluff text" makes Deuterium seem like it's a big deal and really important, but honestly you don't need it hardly at all till later in the game. While I frequently lack the Crystal I need for a building or research, it's really rare that I'm out of Deuterium. In general, I keep my Metal and Crystal mines around double the level of my Deuterium Synthesizer, and it's only lately that that's been any issue at all. Crystal seems to be the biggest limitation to growth (at least at the point I'm at - that may change at the very top ranks of play)
4. It's gonna be a while before you need the Storage buildings. I built one early on, and it was weeks later before I needed it. So for now, save yourself the resources and hassle.
5. When you start spreading out to additional colonies, they won't need Research Labs. I built a couple of levels of Research Lab on my 2nd and 3rd planet, and now regret it. I actually dismantled the lab on one of them, which costs a little resources and time, but freed up more space for developing other buildings. Better to just build one big lab and ferry resources from the other planets over to fuel it. (At least that's better till you get the Intergalactic Research Network unlocked, which I haven't yet.)
6. Each planet has a particular number of available Fields, and each level of a building uses one up. If you colonize a crummy planet, it won't be able to develop very far. In the long run, you generally don't want to colonize planets with less than 150 fields. There's a terraformer that builds extra fields, but it takes a lot of resources and research to unlock it - I still haven't.
7. Aside from that, I'm afraid there's not much point (or benefit) in specializing your planets. It's much more effective to make sure every planet has metal, crystal, and deuterium mines. They'll all need Shipyards and Robotics Factories, too.
8. If you haven't checked out the OGame wiki, you should. It's got tons of info.

Not sure how amazingly wonderful any of that advice was, but I figure it's worth my saving here in case someone else asks. I suppose I could go put it on the OGame wiki... but I'm too lazy at the moment.

Savagepedia

I posted some of my house-rules for Savage Worlds to Savagepedia today. It's a Savage Worlds wiki. Everything I posted there was already on this blog for some time, with nothing new beyond some organization-related edits and minor clarifications. Here's the relevant links:

• Cinematic Damage: aka "1 Hit = 1 Wound" rule. Speeds up damage rolls and prevents random anticlimactic PC death.
• Non-Arcane Cybernetics System: Uses a new thing called The Cyber Die instead of making Cybernetics just another form of Arcane Background (as I'd seen elsewhere).
• Cyberpunk 2020 Setting Conversion: A framework for catching the feel of R. Talsorian's classic setting without losing the mechanical elegance of Savage Worlds.

1 hit = 1 wound, except for duels and drops

I want my Deadlands Reloaded campaign to feel cinematic, with PCs only dying at dramatically appropriate moments, not random first round of combat just 'cause of a lucky roll. So, I was considering using the 1 hit = 1 wound houserule. That, however, may be a little too cinematic as originally proposed, and it completely underplays the tension of duels at high noon and holding someone at gunpoint.

Duh, that has a simple solution. Here's what I'm running with. Any hit only does at most 1 wound, except in the following circumstances:

• During a duel, when the poker-hand mechanism is in play. That way it's entirely possible that the first shot of a duel can result in death or disability against your stationary target. After the first shot, the 1 hit = 1 wound rule kicks back in for the rest of the fight.
• When someone has The Drop on another character, their attacks ignore the rule, in addition to getting the +4 bonus to attack and damage. Stick a gun to someone's head, and they better play along.
• Get caught in a "Mexican standoff" (my apologies for the racism-laced term, but it's a trope of the setting) - that's probably gonna use the duel rules unless there's a threeway (or more) standoff, then it'll be counted as everyone having The Drop. Roll the final scene of Reservoir Dogs... and get ready to make some new characters.
  
• Anytime The Gun is present, as it's a harbinger of supernatural disaster. This will likely just be during the Season Finale, and players should have a good idea a few scenes ahead of when that's happening.

Note that Heavy Weapons are NOT on that list (unlike my previous version of this rule). Deadlands isn't military-heavy, so PCs won't be packing LAW rockets, and jumping away from a stick of dynamite unscathed fits the setting plenty well. I may however make exceptions for big nasty monsters that can't engage in a duel. Say - if there were a T-Rex attacking the party, I might suspend the rule. That sort of thing shouldn't come up often, though, and will be foreshadowed/announced while avoiding the combat is still an option. Just don't let ol' T-Rex get The Drop on you.

Other than those situations, no single attack can do more than 1 point of damage, and a Soak roll of a 4 will suck up the one and only wound. Not only does this protect PCs from random anticlimactic death, it also really reduces the math in the game, thus speeding up combat. "Fast! Furious! Fun!"