Beam Me Up Before You Go-Go

Last night I ran "Wham Trek" at my weekly one-shot group. The mechanics were an extremely light trimmed-down version of Warhammer FRP 3rd. After a brief explanation of the rules, and a tiny bit of clarification that this had nothing to do with George Michael, we were ready to go.

For those still scratching their heads, Wham Trek was an RPG scenario blending of a couple of crazy old boardgames designed by the great Tom Wham, with just a hint of Star Trek parody. The PCs were the crew of the Znutar, and they were responding to a distress call from the backwaters world known as "Snitopia". It would appear there was an unexplained geological upheaval on Snitopia, and an entire mountain range was jumping up and down on the peaceful snits.

For those still scratching their heads, George Michael was half of the 80's UK pop duo "WHAM!"

For reasons I can't really explain, this was a game I'd wanted to run for a long time. I'd been unable (until just recently) to figure out mechanics that would work for it. In theory, it needed to be goofy and light, but able to support random interactions of bizarre weapons and alien biochemistry. I used the board from Awful Green Things as the map of the PCs spaceship. That map shows (amongst other things) where 12 different weapon types can be found on the ship, so I assumed I needed a system that would make these 12 weapons functionally different. I felt that Fudge or Risus or the like wouldn't do that - but in retrospect I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

As it turns out, I forgot to make the PCs specify what weapons and equipment they took down to the surface until they were in the middle of a fight and had already sounded the retreat. As a result, my big list of weapons didn't really matter. I also managed to forget to print one very important sheet of paper - the page with all my NPC stats. Several days had passed since I'd statted out those NPCs, and the morning of the game I'd had a very distracting emergency trip to the vet for one of my cats, so I really had no fuzzy clue what the stats were. Which meant more improvisation, as it turns out was alright.

Dice mechanics were pretty simple, using the dice from Warhammer 3rd as a narrative engine without most of the baggage that game brings with it. I skipped the green and red dice, the fatigue rules, the recharge rates, etc. The "comets" on the yellow dice gave PCs narrative control, the "Chaos Star" on the purple dice meant something really bad happened. In theory I had worked out success, boon and bane results for all the weapons and a few locations internal to the "mountain range" (that is to say, the Bolotomi from the Snit's games) but they really didn't end up mattering as we just improved our way through my missing paperwork. (I wouldn't be surprised if none of the players even knew I was missing most of my GM's notes, since I just kept my error to myself and rolled with it. GMing and grifting have more in common than most of us suspect. If you can fool your players into believing everything is running smoothly, it usually will.)

I replaced the intricate critical hit system from Warhammer with a neat little subsystem stolen from the "New Hope" game I played in last week. Each PC had a handful of consequences - disarmed, wounded, distressed, and captured/killed - they could choose from when a foe got a hit on them. A critical success (lots of hammer or eagle symbols on the dice) let the attacker choose which consequence they suffered, otherwise it was defender's choice. In addition to the common consequences, every PC had one custom consequence unique to that character. The captain could be seduced by aliens, the chief engineer could avoid personal injury by having the engines go offline, the doctor could get cranky and drunk, the communications officer might start speaking in tongues, etc.

It worked well enough for a one-shot, but probably would have been better if I'd had my carefully-balanced NPC stats on hand so I would have felt more confident throwing real challenges at the PCs. As it played out, there were very few injuries and no real PC fatalities. I was probably too easy on them to really capture the proper Tom Wham feel. No one seemed to complain, though.

The best developments of the night started when the Pilot (played by Peter) engaged the warp drive while in the atmosphere of Snitopia, and thus slingshotted around to an hour before the scenario started. You know, the classic Star Trek trick of bumbling into time-travel. This gave them the opportunity to actually cause the problem they'd responded to. When things went poorly and the 1st Officer was lost, they just flew out to where their ship had been half an hour earlier, and kidnapped the younger self of the 1st Officer, thereby disrupting the time line. Transchronal ripples spread throughout the universe as they continued to mess with their previous selves and engage in more time travel. In one time line, they contaminated the Snit gene pool with xenomiscegenation and converted them into a Fremen Fedaykin army that spread across the cosmos destroying everything in the name of the 1st Officer (who, along with the ship's mascot, was revered as a God). Then they undid that timeline and prevented themselves from ever visiting the planet in the first place. Good clean stupid fun.

All in all, we had a blast. I sort of regret the amount of work I went to trying to customize the game system. I made Ook and Leadfoot (the mascot and the robot from Awful Green Things) into followers akin to the "Small But Viscious Dog" in Warhammer, and created small deck of random weapon affects, none of which probably needed the level of detail I'd prepped for them. The game was a big success, but probably would have been just as successful with 1/3 the prep work. Hopefully I'll learn that lesson one of these days.

May the Blackbird be with you

Last night I played in a one-shot called "New Hope" that was sort of set in the Star Wars Universe, and used mechanics somewhat based on the indy RPG "Lady Blackbird".

It was set several years after Return of the Jedi, and the New Republic was every bit as as nasty as the Empire had ever been. Everything you recall from the movies was just Republican propaganda. It was an interesting twist on the Star Wars setting as seen through the perspective of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." It was a good game and plenty fun, but could probably have used a stronger opening scene. The GM vaguely explained the situation, but since it's a game where the Players have a lot of narrative power, he left most of the details fuzzy at first. He was trying to leave us free to take things in whatever direction we wanted, but as a result, we had a really slow start. I think if he'd narrated the opening situation more forcefully and given us a memorable villain to really hate, the first hour of the game would have been a lot better.

The rules were really interesting. They were derived from or inspired by Lady Blackbird, which is an indy game I was ignorant of until last night. I downloaded it this morning and took a peek through it, and I can tell that New Hope customized and built on it quite a bit. Overall, I think the changes were good ones. That said, I kind of felt like the GM's backlash dice pools were just a little too small. I think they could stand to range from 5 to 9 instead of 4 to 8. It's hard to say for certain, because we had some really lucky rolls on the players part. I just think the game would have been in it's best possible light, if the PCs had taken 25% more damage across the board and had to start worrying about resources and situations. I was the only one really hurt badly during the game, and that was only because I took some very big risks and painted a target on myself. I was so intrigued by the damage system I intentionally left myself open to suffer more of it.

My favorite part of the rules were definitely the "hit points"-like mechanism, which were customized to each character and really made you agonize over damage. You had three rows of labeled boxes. The first row was more like traditional HP, or like a World of Darkness health boxes, in that they were labeled "Hurt", "Wounded", "Crippled" and "Dead" or something to that effect. Below that was a row that had to do with our social status and the level of pursuit, so they were "Recognized", "Wanted", "Hunted" and "Infamous", I think. Then the fourth row were customized to each PC. My character had a wife and family - their health and safety were 5 of my 6 boxes in the third section. When you take damage, it's usually 1 or two points, and you get to apply them to any empty box that seems appropriate. So in a bar-fight I'd probably take the damage as physical damage in the top row, but I might instead take it in the second row and narrate that I was now a wanted man for having killed the person I was struggling with. If my family was present during a conflict, I might knock boxes off of them and say they were captured or harmed in the battle. One of the other characters was a rich man, and he took damage to his wealth when he got backlash off a roll to bribe someone. Having these custom consequences for each character was pretty cool, and really spiced up the conflicts. I may just have to steal the idea sometime.

Overall, it was good fun, and I'd definitely recommend it if you like the free-form "story game" narrative approach to role-playing. The RPG it was closest too in feel (at least of RPGs I'd played before) was probably Universalis, and I imagine if you like that you'll probably get a kick out of New Hope (or Lady Blackbird). It had more structure than Universalis, but appealed to the same mental space and had a similar spirit.

You can download New Hope for free.

You can also download Lady Blackbird for free.

Opposed Checks House-Rule for WFRP 3rd

When I've run Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd, I've replaced the "Opposed Check Difficulty" table from the main rule book with the following chart:

If the Opposing Characteristic is:
Rated at 1 to 3 characteristics dice: add 1 challenge die
Rated at 4 to 5 characteristics dice: add 2 challenge dice
Rated at 6 or more characteristic dice: add 3 challenge dice

The various "+1 misfortune die" modifiers from the original chart remain unchanged.

Overall, it's a fairly minor change, that mostly helps the little guy. This house-rule also cleans up a few weird corner-case situations where someone with an unusually high or low defensive stat seems to circumvent the default math of the rest of the game's systems. It also removes division and comparison from the tabletop, giving standard difficulties instead of needing to recalculate difficulty by the relative traits of the participants, thus speeding up combat a little.

Note that 3 characteristics dice is human average, and 5 characteristics dice is the most a PC can start the game with. So those being the break points on Opposed Checks is reasonable and pretty easy to remember.

To explain why I made those changes, here's an example:

Let's say a character has a Strength or Agility of 3, but no Weapon Skill or Ballistic Skill to go along with it. Average and unexceptional in every way. His odds of hitting the target with a basic attack are 40% or so. I mean any target. That was assuming a Defense 1 (most armors) and 1 Active Defense. There may be freak situations that nerf his odds, but if he's attacking round after round over the long haul the hit rate stays above 35%. In general, the game has very high success rates, give him an stat just 1 point above average, or a single skill die and he'll have a better than 50% success rate.

The majority of attacks use that same math, as their difficulty is "vs Target Defense" which means in general 1 challenge die and 1 or 2 misfortune dice.

Some attacks, however, use Opposed Checks. Often these are on fairly oddball actions, or ones that don't have really big splashy effects. When I've tried to assign a compare or balance the existing actions, I keep coming back to the conclusion that someone on the design team thought that using an Opposed Check was somehow beneficial to the attacker. It's not. Instead all it does is make it harder on the attacker if their stats are unexceptional.

Let's look at that person with a 3-rated stat, who has a 40% chance of hitting any target with a basic attack. What are his odds of hitting a foe by using an Opposed Check?

• 88% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 1.
• 59% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 2.
• 38% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 3 (human average).
• 24% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 4.
• 24% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 5.
• 14% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 6 or higher.

That doesn't look to bad - 88% is sweet. You might think opposed check attacks are amazing at sweeping mooks out of the way. At least until you realize how rare those 1-rated traits are. Even snotlings don't have 1's. The only 1's in the game are the social traits of undead and wild animals. Outside of spells, there's only 1 attack (Backstab) that will ever face off in an opposed check vs a trait rated at 1.

An irrelevant and snarky aside: Backstab faces off against a 1 trait because it's resisted by Intelligence + Observation. There's nothing to the text of the Backstab card to suggest it's meant to be better than other opposed roll attacks. It does face some extra misfortune dice, but they come equipped with an easy way to sidestep them. I think it just got the boost (of being the only action to face Trait 1 opposed stats) by virtue of left-hand-right-hand-syndrome. One person designed the action cards and someone else designed the monster stats. I know the "design by commitee" gripe is a cheap shot on my part, but it's probably exactly what happened. As written, Backstab is best against Zombies, Boars, and huge freakin' Trolls. That just doesn't feel right to me. But, admittedly, it's a minor quibble.

That those same sorts of foes also have really low Fellowship scores is a little weird. Yes, it makes sense a Zombie shouldn't be very friendly, and shouldn't have much luck Influencing you with Social Actions. But as written there's nothing that stops a PC from using "Winning Smile" against a Zombie, or "Insulting Blow" against a Boar. Common sense and/or GM intervention is likely to prevent either, but per the RAW (Rules As Written) these mindless foes are not just valid targets, they are particularly vulnerable to social actions of this sort. I find that a bit silly.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled slightly less ranty post about math and house-rules...

If the foe outclasses you just a tiny bit, the Opposed Check rules in the main book will totally nerf you. The game assumes your odds of hitting with a normal attack will never drop below the high 30%s. Why would you pay for a special attack that might drop as low as 14%? You've dropped from hitting 1/3 of the time to hitting 1/7 of the time. Stick with your basic actions at that point.

Now let's look at the numbers using the house-rule at the top of this post. The same 3-stat individual is attacking. His odds of success under the house-rule are:

• 59% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 1.
• 59% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 2.
• 59% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 3 (human average).
• 38% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 4.
• 38% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 5.
• 24% if the target's opposed trait is rated at 6 or higher.

The extremes have been ironed out of the scale. There's no longer the random boost making Backstab situationally better than all other Opposed action cards. The 24% difficulty vs the hardest foes is now only a little bit worse than normal odds, and still probably worth attempting an attack. You're hitting 1/4 the time instead of 1/3 the time (or 1/7th under the normal rules). For a card like Dramatic Flourish, those 10 extra percentage points mean it might actually be worth using sometimes.


There's two other minor reasons I like this rule:

1. The reduced variation frees up some character design space. The example above focuses on attackers with human average stats, but it's possible to have a 2-rated trait for a PC in warhammer. The odds get much worse than presented above if your stats are that low, dropping down to an 8% success rate. Applying the house rule takes some of the sting out of being below-average in a stat. Having 2 dice in something is limiting enough without Opposed Checks stomping you down further. The game system includes character classes like "Scribe" and "Rat-Catcher" so being a little substandard should be encouraged, not punished.
2. No math, just a chart with 3 entries. The system from the rulebook required comparing stats to figure out if something was less than, but not less than half a stat. If I'm keeping track of the wounds, status, and recharge tokens per action of half a dozen goblins, two orcs, a giant boar and 3 mobs of snotling henchmen, I don't want to have to do even the tiniest bit of division in the middle of that. It was pretty minor mindless division, but it was still prone to slowing the game down or even derailing the GM's focus.
   

I've run the house-rule for a 6-PC one-shot and few smaller test combats, and it seems to work well, with no unexpected ripples into other rules. It's pretty tight, easy to remember, and very functional.

A few of the GMs on the WFRP forums do something similar, but they divide the opposing trait by 2 and either round down or use a misfortune die for the fraction. I don't like that because it still leaves the weird trait-1 loophole for Backstab, and because it's marginally less elegant than my system. Marginally.

An email from my friend Peter reminded me of this House-Rule, which I meant to post more than a month ago. I'd been working on some pie charts to go with it, and gotten sidetracked on other probability related topics. Thank you for jogging my memory, Peter!

The Isle Of Dr. FlawedMath

A couple weeks ago my wife and I picked up a cooperative card game called "The Isle of Dr. Necreaux". The concept behind the game is a good one - it simulates a team of spies infiltrating an evil scientist's island lair, and escaping before the bomb goes off. But the more I play it, the more I feel like there's a mathematical flaw at the core of the game.

What it comes down to is this: You'll like the game if you're not particularly fond of, nor frightened by, math, and you're okay with games with really wordy text-dense cards.

If you really like math, you're going to enjoy your first several plays of the game, and then tire of the fact that what is presented as multiple strategic paths is actually just one solution and an array of sub-optimal choices that deceptively look mildly appealing at first blush. The more you analyze the game, the less it holds up to the scrutiny.

It's not a bad game. It's actually a fun game, but it's got elements that are sloppy and annoying. You look at it, and think "this could have been so good, if they'd just spent another month in blind playtesting followed by a month in development followed by one more thorough editing pass." Gaming companies function on small margins, though, so I understand why that didn't happen. But it makes me sad.

My main gripe has to do with the Speed mechanic which lies pretty close to the core of the game.

The vast majority of the cards in the game assume you'll be traveling with a Speed rating somewhere in the range of 2 to 7. There's several traps that are triggered if you roll less than your speed rating on a d6, and others that trigger if you roll more than your speed on a d6. There's a few character cards that let you roll two dice for these sorts of things and use the better die, or let you add or subtract +/-1 to/from your effective speed for such things. Throughout the game is the implication that every turn you should be adjusting your speed a little bit to take into account these various cards. It implies you should move slower when the party is injured or low on resources, and make a bigger run when you're relatively unhurt. At least half the cards in the deck provide some sort of interesting tactical decision if your speed could only be between, say, 1 and 8, with an average of 5 or 6 being ideal.

Problem is, the game expressly states that there is no upper limit to how fast you can move. It's extremely clear about this - you can set a speed of 20 (or 5,000) if you'd like. Your speed determines how many bad cards you flip over in a turn, so at first blush it seems like a large number is suicidal. After playing about 4 or 5 games without a single win, my wife and I just on a lark tried a turn at speed 20. It went off without a hitch. So we did it again. We've played another half-dozen games since then, and found that as long as we move at speed 20 or higher as often as possible, we always win.

We either sit at speed zero for the rest bonuses, or jump ahead at a breakneck speed of 20 or more. It's come down to essentially a binary decision, rest or run as fast as we can. Which means those cards that care about your speed rating don't have any decision-making weight or randomness they initially seemed to have. All the cards that involve "if you roll less than your Speed rating, bla bla bla..." trigger automatically, and the ones that say "if you roll greater than your Speed" never trigger at all. There's no reason to ever want to move at a speed low enough that you'd ever agonize over, be surprised by, or even contemplate such cards. They just happen, beyond your control, and you can mostly laugh off the results.

The game has several cards that hose you if you move to fast - but they hose you equally if you're traveling at speed 8 or speed 80. Having a higher speed means you're more likely to draw these cards, and more of them in a turn, so it can get a little dangerous. In general, though, you can always survive any one card, and the retreat rules make it relatively simple to back off if a turn starts to go against you. In the default 2-player game you're trying to get through 65 cards in 11 turns, so Speed 6 sounds good. But you'll want to rest a few times, so you go speed 0 one turn and speed 12 the next. That just opens the doors to speed 20, or 30, or 50, any of which is vastly superior to a bunch of turns at speed 6. The benefits of setting an arbitrarily large Speed number significantly outweigh any minor benefit of potentially missing a trap or two by going much slower on some turns. It seems like such an inescapable conclusion, I've hunted through the rulebook and BoardGameGeek forums trying to find something we could possibly be doing wrong. Everything I've read in the rules or forums supports my conclusions.

Which would all be just fine, except for the fact that some of the character cards seem predicated on helping you only if you move in tiny little baby steps. The Security Expert, the Infiltrator, the Rocketeer, the Rogue, etc, all give boosts that would only be helpful if speeds 2 to 7 were viable, and those speeds just aren't.

Worse yet, the game presents this Speed-based risk management as one of it's core concepts. In theory, it should really resonate with people who like to number-crunch and analyze, or at least play the odds intelligently. But speaking as one of those people, I find I'm taunted by the fact that there's a better game with more meaningful decisions lurking beneath the surface if only there were some sort of speed limit and/or a smaller deck to go through. As it is, going infinitely fast is the way to win, and the deck is big enough you can't really hope to win if you don't do that on at least one turn. It just feels like they missed an opportunity in game design here. It's like they're aware of what makes the game fun, but didn't realize that the dominant strategy specifically downplays the fun aspects.

Anyhow, the game has a couple other flaws. It's fun, but the whole time you feel like something's amiss:

• The pulpy retro-futuristic vaguely Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon theme is kinda neat, but if you went by the description on-line or on the back of the box you probably thought you were buying more of a vaguely James Bond themed product. It's grown on me, but it was a big shock when I opened the box.
  
• The cards are insufferably wordy. Look back up at this post (and most of my other posts on this blog). You'll see that I'm a man who likes words, and I'm not the least bit terse or laconic. I'm certainly not phobic about words. I don't find text distasteful as a general rule. But these cards are too damn wordy for me. They need to implement a few more keywords. Example: There's 4 cards called "Brain Spiker", "Entropocyte", "Psychic Leech" and "Tangler". Each has 9 lines of text in tiny little print. Of those 9 lines, 8 lines are identical on all four cards (except for the repeated instances of the name of the card you're looking at). The one line that's different can be found in the middle of the text, making it hard to locate or parse. That's a huge pain in the visual cortex.
• The rules are sloppy and contradictory. Example: You win by ending your turn with the "Escape Shuttle" card in play. The rules twice mention that the turn must be completed in order for you to win. But the card can (and indeed must) be put into play as soon as it's drawn, and the card says "You may end the game at any time". So you really don't have to end the turn, you can just end the game as soon as you play it. I think. There's a few other places where the cards disagree with the rules, and not in a fun "M:tG" way. Instead, it just seems like sloppy editing. There's no timing rules, and several instances where they'd be very helpful in clearing things up.
• In this game, ninja's operate better on a team then alone. Everyone knows the opposite is true. If you're watching a movie and there's one Ninja after the main character, he's a badass. If there's a dozen ninja standing in the main character's way, they're just mooks and it will take 3 seconds to drop the whole bunch. In this game, however, a ninja on his own is ineffectual, and a ninja on a team is a powerhouse.
• The sliding wall that splits up the party is actually good for you. If you are not willing (for whatever reason) to take turns at Speed 20, then your only hope to win is for the party to be split up into separate groups by the sliding wall. If you think you can handle 20 cards together, you can handle twice that easily if you split up. The sliding wall is the single-most beneficial card to the party, yet it's labeled a "trap" in big letters. Makes me scratch my head.
  

So, lots of little things to complain about, but overall it's still fun if you can manage to look past those flaws. Fun can make up for inelegant design, but only for so long. It's a game in desperate need of a revised edition.

Modding a Feral Beast

A while back I mentioned the Humble Indy Bundle, which was a set of 5 or 6 downloadable computer games. Very cool little titles, of which the cream of the crop is a beautiful game called Aquaria. My wife and I have logged a lot of time playing Aquaria. It's one of very few computer games I've ever felt the compulsion to truly play all the way through. After about 50 hours of play, we not only reached the end but also amassed nearly all the in-game achievements.

Then we broke out all the mods we could find for the game. Most of them were pretty short, though, so Sarah and I decided we'd take a stab at modding it ourselves.

Download Link
Our mod is called Feral Beast. What's available from that download is just a preview; enough to keep you busy playing for an hour or so. The mysterious beginings of the story, and the first 5 map levels we got finished. There's a few hints towards the eventual plotline, but it's mainly just an exploration mod at the moment. Poke around with it and have some fun. You'll need Aquaria to play, of course. You should carefully read the installation section of the readme.txt file included in the download, as the new recipes don't install automatically, and must be manually placed inside the game folders.

Additional chapters will be added as we create them. The actual level editing stuff is fast and easy, but there's some significant time investment in designing new creatures and coding anything particularly interesting, so it'll be a few weeks before you see an update.

You got your Everway in my Warhammer!

This is an article about how I folded two very different game systems into one another, and found the place where they intersect to be more immediately enjoyable than either on it's own.

First, some context about the two games:

The new(-ish) Warhammer FRP has some really awesome groundbreaking elements like group initiative, abstract movement, multiple-axis of success, and wickedly cool dice. However, on the whole it's a lot more fiddly than I'd like it to be, and it involves a boatload of components that hog the table-space. It's a strange (but mostly enjoyable) mix of complicated bean-counting and elegant time-saving innovations. It's a game that can't quite decide on its target audience. Too fiddly for fans of most indy games, too revolutionary and abstract for those who approach combat as a comfortable tactical challenge.

Everway is a cool older game that was one of the first really light and abstract game systems. But it's in practice, too light. Combat is entirely narrative, and things like damage, healing, initiative, and even who wins any given conflict is almost entirely a matter of GM fiat. With the right group, and the right GM, a good dose of trust, and plenty of time to get the balance of the non-mechanics fine-tuned, it can be incredible. I've had some fun with Everway before, and gotten a lot of joy from Amber, another game with roughly the same level of GM fiat and rules non-existence. While I like that style of gaming, I know they're not for everyone. If you're playing infrequently, don't know your play group well, or want a little more "game" in your game, Everway is not a good choice.

Hauling out my old Crunchometer, I'd say Everway is an umistakeable c4. It's light and simple, the rules could fit on a single page. Character creation is entirely open-ended, with the exception of four very basic and flexible attributes. There's hardly any math involved in character creation, and far less while you're actually playing.

Warhammer 3rd, on the other hand, occupies no single niche, and instead is spread across a hazy band near the other end of the spectrum. It's a c20 that plays more like a c12 (and gets to that lower rating by incorporating some features usually found in a c6).

The resulting hybrid was about a c8, which for me is pretty much the sweet spot where the gaming is really good. I was very happy with the way it turned out.

I'm not sure exactly how I realized that Warhammer had exactly what Everway was missing, but after that thought popped into my head last week, I started noticing other similarities. The real breakthrough came when I realized that in both games, nearly all character attributes will be in the range of 3 to 6 (the extreme apex of the range is higher in Everway, but in practice I've never seen a PC go above 7 and most don't go above 5). Which meant the basics of Warhammer's intriguing dice system could be ported over into Everway without having to make major changes to the character creation system of the lighter game. From there, it all fell into place organically.

Friday night, after arriving in Portland, I taught the basics of the system to my three players (two of which had never played either Everway or Warhammer), and they created characters. On Saturday, we played all day long (about 10 hours of play, IIRC), and everyone had a blast. It was probably the best gaming I'd ever had with this particular group.

So here's how "EverHammer" works. Character creation is identical to Everway. All the differences are in game play, not character creation.

The four elemental attributes use blue warhammer dice to actively do things. The difficulty is a number of dice equal to the defender's relevant stat, of which the first die is purple and rest are black. So if an archer with Air 5 attacks a target with Fire 4, they'd roll 5 blue dice, 1 purple and 3 black (about a 57% success rate, and the counter-attack with the stats flipped would be about a 37% success rate).

Powers added either white or yellow dice to active rolls. As I ran it, I had 0-point powers add a white die, and powers that cost a point or more add a yellow. I'm not 100% certain that was the right break point. The way I did it worked, but it might not have been optimal. I could see reserving the yellow die for powers whose points come from the "Major" quality, instead, for example.

If a power was defensive in nature, it added a purple die to the roll.

Additional white and black dice could be (and frequently were) applied as improvised situational and terrain modifiers.

In all cases, dice pools flow from the character creation system, and causality comes from the shared game world and goes into the dice. Never the other way around. In other words, you can't buy a yellow die on it's own, or upgrade a power to Major just to get a die.

Likewise, if a power is defined as "immunity to fire" and that character is attacked with normal mundane fire they cannot take damage. We still roll, to see if there's any fatigue changes or fortune effects (see below) but damage is off the table. If they were attacked by magical fire, or dragon breath, or some complicated mix of fire and something else (such as a volcanic explosion) then damage might be a possibility but they'd get the bonus purple die for defending with the fire immunity.

I ditched the stance system from Warhammer. I'm not sure I had to, there's probably some reasonably elegant way to work in red and green dice (possibly Fire & Air = Red, Earth & Water = Green), and finding meaning for the delay icons despite not having action cards (more about that later). I was a little pinched for time (having gotten the idea for this system less than 72 hours before we were going to be playing it), and didn't want to try to figure out how to include that extra layer of complexity that comes from stance.

You roll the dice, do all the cancellations, and if there's at least 1 success left, you hit for normal damage. If you score 3 successes, you hit for double damage. Normal damage is 1 card. I made some wound cards to handle this, they were basically the equivalent of a critical wound from Warhammer. I'll probably devote an article to discussing them in depth at some future date, because I think there's some non-obvious considerations on what types of criticals enhance a fight scene, and what just ruin the game. If you suffer more wounds than you have points of Earth, you pass out. Any hit after that point could be a Coup de grâce.

For purely mental attacks, I ginned up a "disorder deck" that's basically criticals for mind powers. It's got a bit of overlap with various critical hits, insanity cards, and party tension meter effects from Warhammer. Again, when I get around to writing the article on the wound cards, I'll revisit this topic in depth.

Boons and banes were handled more simply than in Warhammer as well, eliminating all the complicated effects of various action cards. I kept fatigue, but rolled stress into it so there was just one type of fatigue point to worry about. I ran it with the existing Warhammer rule of 2+ banes = 1 fatigue, but in hindsight, I think I'll run that as 1+ bane = 1 fatigue next time. There were a lot of rolls of 1 boon or 1 bane, and not enough fatigue going around (An Everway character is less likely than a Warhammer character to have a weak-spot that fatigue penalizes.) If fatigue is higher than the active attribute, each additional point of fatigue adds a black die. Passing out sucks, and the wound system already emphasized Earth enough, so I set the pass-out to 10 instead of something attribute-based. One could argue the other way around (that wounds should be a set high number and fatigue based on Earth), and I wouldn't have a good counter-argument. I did what I did, and it seemed to work.

In theory, I still kept the door open for location cards to have more elaborate / non-fatigue-related boon or bane effects. I wasn't quite organized enough to implement that to the extent I would have liked this time out, but I'll be ready with it next time we play.

The biggest changes to the dice mechanics involved the Sigmar's Comet and Chaos Star results. In Warhammer, there's a lot of options when one of these is rolled, and deciding which option to invoke really slows down the process as either can change the other dice in the pool. Comets can, on a Warhammer attack roll, be used as a success, used as a boon, trigger a comet-line of an action, or add a critical hit. It's a lot to contemplate, and the chaos stars aren't any easier. I got rid of all the dice/symbol switching options, and just made these special symbols trigger a card draw. You'd flip over the top card of Everway's Fortune Deck, and if you rolled a Comet the GM would interpret that card in a beneficial way. If you rolled a Chaos symbol, the GM would interpret the card in a negative way. In theory this could have been as severe as a wound, but in general it was narrative effects and bonuses or penalties on future rolls. For next time, I may draft up a list of suggested/default effects by card type or severity.

I used the "group initiative" system from Warhammer 3rd. Initiative rolls were made with the water attribute, because it's linked to senses and awareness, and because Water was looking to be the least-used attribute otherwise (since Earth determines health and Fire and Air determine most attack rolls).

We used abstract movement rules and manoeuvre system per Warhammer 3rd, and the associated fatigue costs. Late in character creation after everyone was done with the Everway Vision Cards, I sorted out all the pictures of places to use as Warhammer Location Cards. I definitely need to supplement this deck, but it worked well enough for 10 hours of mostly-improvised adventure.

Pretty much everything else was pure Everway.

The hybrid system worked well. It had enough going on to spark some interesting challenges during the fights, including an interesting exchange with 2 PCs trying to draw the attention of the bad guys to protect a third that resulted in a very fluid rolling battle. Outside of combat, it was non-intrusive and simple enough that no role-playing scenes were disrupted by needing to consult rules. I think we were all very pleased with the results. There's a few things we'll do a little differently next time, but in general it exceeded all my expectations. Good gaming all around.

From Peak To Valley

In which I admit that I am not always the world's greatest GM...

Last week's Continuum session was awesome, things went way better than expected. But, unfortunately, when you're standing at a peak, there's nowhere to go but down.

Last night's Continuum session was horrid. We had technical issues on both Skype and MeBeam, that made it painful trying to communicate with the players. I didn't handle that frustration well, and made some poor GMing decisions and kneejerk reactions. The plot was okay, I guess, but the presentation and pacing were dreadfull. Other than the tech issues, it was all my fault. I should have summarized instead of trying to play something out that was practically guaranteed to be mostly passive on the players part. I could have just said "You try that for more than an hour, and it proves a fruitless avenue of pursuit. You'll have to try something else." Instead, I basically narrated and played out in full detail the efforts that were certain to get them nowhere. We were on a tight clock because one of the players (my wife) had a union meeting in the morning, and my meandering presentation of the scene and poor topic-control squandered the time we had. So, to my players, I apologize, and promise next week will be much better. It certainly couldn't be much worse.

Springing the Trap

This past Wednesday, I finally sprung a trap that had been set in a game since December. In my Continuum game, the PCs had been carrying around for quite some time a set of tickets to a stage show for a particular one-night-only performance by a mentalist (hypnotist/magician). They were fairly confident that their elder selves had been to the show. They knew for certain that an allied NPC had attended it, and that sometime thereafter that NPC had been fragged very badly.

They'd done a lot of fruning trying to find out exactly what had happened to that NPC, but essentially asked the wrong questions, and missed one really important clue because they focused on one particular "crime scene" at the expense of another one. His fragging had happened at a second location, and most of the PCs inquiries were about that other location and what had fragged him. What they never quite put together until it was too late was that he only ended up at that location because of hypnotic suggestions given him at the mentalist's show. They had solved all sorts of other mysteries tangential to and growing out from this, but hadn't quite figured out what the catalyst for the whole string of events was.

There was a long scene at the lobby of the theatre, and then they went in and sat down. The house lights went down, and the next thing they knew, they were at a third location. The entire audience were at a restaurant, and no one could remember getting there. Nor could anyone really remember anything about the mentalist's show beyond that it was really good.



Clearly, they'd been hypnotized and lead elsewhere, and made to forget the intervening hours. For a spanner, this is especially bad. Time-travelers in the Continuum setting lead regimented lives, with detailed "span logs" of where and when they've been, so they don't frag themselves. The rest of the session was spent trying to piece together what had happened, and the next session will involve a bit more of that. Amongst the great moments were:

• One of the players had taken a really bizarre "hobby" skill of "Memorizing lists of words/names" for his PC. At the start of the restaurant scene, the only thing anyone could remember about the show was a list of memorized titles that had no context. They didn't know why he felt it was important to memorize this list, but he'd done so, and they pieced together some pretty big reveals out of it.
• The revelation that the big bad they'd been investigating all along was probably in attendance at the event, and that they'd noticed her, mis-identified her, and chosen not to interact or interfere.
  
• One of the PCs had brought along earplugs, in case there was a run-in with a hypnotist after the show, and chosen not to wear them at what was, unbeknown to her, the point of no return. Just a tiny bit more paranoid caution would have saved her.
• The big-bad had hired a bunch of off-duty cops as extra security for the show. The PCs talked with the theatre manager, and found out how he was upset and flustered by the unexpected arrival of uniformed security. This tipped them off that something was amiss, but they failed to realize (until it was too late) the point of the cops was to provide witnesses with guns and security cameras so that it would be really difficult for time-travelers to sneak around and undo the events of the evening. It's going to be really tough to fix this now.
  
• The scene at the restaurant afterwards was hilarious. The PCs were surrounded by other audience members at the show, in various stages of suggestibility, and only the PCs were suspicious enough to figure it out. They got into some pretty hilarious arguments with bit part NPCs that were adamant that they could remember the show, but could only regurgitate whatever little snippets the PCs threw at them.

It was a great session, with the players repeatedly exclaiming "if we'd only just done things a little differently!" They were really close to escaping the trap at two different points during the night, where a single simple action they almost took would have prevented all harm to them. To my player's credit, they did a great job of rolling with the punches, and accepting the consequences of the situation. I'm blessed to have such great players. You guys rock.

As George Peppard used to say, "I love it when a plan comes together."

We aren't far from Swarm Prime afterall

My apologies for using the narcissist term "Swarm Prime" to refer to the default Continuum universe. I know it's in poor taste, and I hope my fellow spanners will forgive me.

The Continuum RPG has a list in the GM's section about events that happen in the official timeline of the Aquarian Era (2001 to 2400 CE). It's full of crazy fun stuff, like the birthdate of the first human born on Mars, and the implementation date of one world government here on earth, etc. Since there's a couple of shadowy upper Aquarians appearing as NPCs in my campaign, I decided to add that list to my GM's notes yesterday, which I keep on a secure wiki that I can access during sessions.

Typing it up, I decided I'd skip the entry for "2006: Turkey reasserts leadership of the Muslim world." That obviously didn't happen in the real world, and I was sure it wasn't likely to happen in the near future. Then I read this CNN headline this morning: Turkey emerges as Middle East leader. Shows how little I know about world politics... or perhaps just how weird the political landscape is in the wake of the Gaza flotilla raid.

Correcting for that 4-year discrepancy, and assuming the LHC's problems were some sort of cover story to keep word about the first successful temporal relocation experiment quiet, we're now perfectly in line for the Continuum's future to actually happen. Nothing is likely to conflict with that timeline again until 2019. Happy spanning!

A Touch Of Elders

I was thinking about the board game "A Touch Of Evil" the other day, and trying to figure out the math of the big showdown at the end of the game. In particular, I wanted to know how many dice should really be applied to any given Evil Elder, so I started looking at the math behind it all.

The conclusion I've drawn from this is that what the game presents as a strategic decision is actually more of a sucker's bet. It gives you the option of rolling very large numbers of dice against the Elders, but doing so is very likely to do exactly the opposite of what you expect it to. The whole point of targeting Elders is to reduce the damage you're taking, but if you put more than a die or two against them, you'll run a good chance of doing exactly the opposite.

Those pie charts show the results and percentages of rolling various numbers of dice against a single Evil Elder.

• The green section represents the odds of rolling a single success - exactly the amount you want to roll.
• The red section represents the chance of rolling two or more successes. You'd much rather roll 1 success than 2, since the extra successes are just wasted. That same die, if applied to the main Villain instead of his Evil Elder helpers, would have been 1 more step towards winning the game.
• The black section represents the chance of total failure - not killing the Elder.

So how many dice are the right number to roll? The answer is almost always 2, with only a few exceptions. If you're feeling cautious, dropping it down to 1 die is perfectly fine.

Silver Shot is one of the main exceptions. If you're using Silver Shot, you should only roll against the Villain, and never worry about the Evil Elders at all. Silver Shot doubles the damage of 6s rolled, making even a single die on an elder has nearly a 17% chance of wasting a hit, and you're as likely to waste a hit as make a normal one. Better to pour all your Silver Shot into the Big Bad, then to waste those juicy 6's blasting a single Elder into mincemeat.

Without Silver Shot, you can always afford to put one die against each Elder with no chance of it causing any side-effects or wasted resources. One die per Elder can only help your situation, or break even, it can never hurt you.

The winning strategy is to eliminate Elders quickly, but do so while minimizing the number of wasted extra hits. Every wasted success has the potential to make the fight last one extra round - and in that extra round the Villain will roll at least 5 dice, possibly 8 or more. On average, the Villain will do more damage in one round than any single Elder does in the whole battle. As helpful as it is to pick off Elders and reduce the damage you're taking, you should never lose sight of the fact that killing the Villain is the real goal. There's no better way to reduce the damage you're taking than to just win the game.

Wasting one or two hits total during the whole fight is probably not going to cost you an extra round of fighting, however, because you don't often win by rolling exactly the number of successes needed in the final round. This is especially true in the Cooperative game, where all the players get to roll in each round, and thus as a group average somewhat higher damage per round. If a group of heroes is averaging 4 or more damage per round (and they should be) then they can afford to waste one or two points without it usually dragging the fight out into extra rounds... most of the time.

Wasting three or more hits over the course of the battle, however, runs a big risk of extending the fight by a whole extra round. So, if you were facing just 1 Evil Elder then it might be worth rolling three dice (as a single roll of 3 dice can only ever waste 2 hits). But if there's 2 or more Evil Elders, it's very risky to apply more than two dice against each of them. Resist the temptation to pile dice up on an Elder "to make sure" you take them out. You can never completely eliminate the possibility of failing against an Elder in a given roll. Both 2-die and 3-die rolls have the exact same odds (44.44%) of scoring precisely 1 hit, the only boost that's gained by rolling the 3rd die all comes in the form of wasted successes, which you don't really want. With four dice, you're actually more likely to score 2 or more successes than to score only 1. Personally, I would never roll 4 or more dice against an Elder, as the risk-to-benefit ratio is too high. Those dice are just better if applied to the Villain.