A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... wait, wrong franchise. Of course, now JJ Abrams is directing both, so... Anyway...
I used to be active in the International Star Trek Fan Association, also known as STARFLEET. I joined for the first time in 1993, and after a period of lapsed membership rejoined for good in 1999 and participated in the founding of what I truly believe is one of the most unique chapters in that organization's history. USS Ark Angel was something to see in action. For those of you who are uninitiated in such things, a quick trip to www.sfi.org can give some insight, but the organization has chapters that are named for fictional starships or space stations, and the members carry organizational rank within the chapters in recognition of their service to said chapter. The president and vice president of each chapter carry the title "Commanding Officer" and "Executive Officer" and are free to create titles for their members to hold as part of the chapter staff.
The freedom of each chapter to operate as it sees fit can be said to be the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of STARFLEET at the same time. On one hand, it embraces the philosophy of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) so often touted by Trek fans of the older school. It allows each chapter to be whatever it wants to be as long as it turns in reports on time and has ten dues-paid members. On the other hand, it means that aside from these two requirements, no chapter has anything else asked of it. This allows for chapters with individually tailored tastes and focus, but it also allows for chapters with a distinct lack of focus - and as I will discuss in this article or series thereof, lack of focus is a dangerous precedent if one wishes to have a successful organization.
Long story short, from 1999-2008 I was active. VERY active. To the point my wife considered herself a STARFLEET widow. During that time I served as a CO, an XO, a Marine unit commander and Marine unit Sergeant Major. I went beyond chapter duties and served as Brigade Commander over the states of Texas and Louisiana, as a Branch Director for the STARFLEET Marine Corps Academy creating courses and exams and grading them, as a Deputy Chief of Staff to Region Three (again, Texas and Louisiana) and later Vice Regional Coordinator South. During this time I was recognized with every service award Region Three had to offer all the way up to the now deprecated Polaris Award 2nd Order, of which I only know of about five recipients over the course of the decade. I was promoted into the flag grades, rising to Fleet Captain, then Commodore, and finally to Rear Admiral before my semi-retirement in 2008.
Why do I bring all this up? Well, it's not to dazzle you with my STARFLEET club rank or awards. I bring it up to establish a baseline for future discussion. You see, I was at the time and until quite recently absolutely baffled as to why I kept getting promoted, and issued these service awards. In my head, I was just doing the jobs I was elected or appointed to do. In that paradigm, I don't see the point of showering someone with accolades for doing a competent job. An exemplary job, sure. An amazing job - absolutely. But as far as I was concerned, all I was doing was the common-sense requirements of the posts to which I was assigned.
Only in the last six months have I begun to believe that I was terribly mistaken in this belief, and that I was selling myself short. You see, it's all my mother's fault. I say that in jest, and with no ill will toward my Mom, but it was recently pointed out to me by Dr. Lisa that all my life I have been surrounded by people who are above the curve. Mom can paint, draw, sew, decorate cakes and arrange flowers and do all of these things at a professional proficiency. She tends to go into a job, organize the hell out of everything, and square things away. I've seen her do it at several of her jobs. She basically runs Catoosa County, GA after a few years working in the clerical staff. From glorified secretary to being allowed to trigger the explosives for the highway construction project she's now in charge of, Mom was an overachiever and a perfectionist at everything when I was growing up. I learned that good enough was never good enough, and that above and beyond was adequate. Couple this with being blessed with an above-average imagination and IQ. I was placed in gifted classes in the first grade, and stayed there until graduating High School. I gravitated toward others like me, or in many cases they gravitated to me. I never really gave it much thought before, but I've been something of a leader figure in almost all aspects of my life for as long as I can remember. On Facebook this week, one of my old elementary school friends, Richard, made the comment that I was "COMMANDER of the playground" in third and fourth grade at Robertson Elementary. Looking back, what I did on that playground is not so different from game mastering or running a LARP. I organized my fellow kiddos into scenarios based on the television series "V" and we played out the conflicts between the Visitors and the Resistance, complete with lizard makeup consisting of green marker and masking tape as tearaway skin. None of that seemed out of the ordinary to me, but Dr. Lisa starting putting my recollections together and noticed a pattern. In Middle School I founded my first Star Trek fan club along with some other uber-geeks. We came up with ship manuals, regulations, and even scratch uniforms. We discoverd Dungeons and Dragons, Battletech, and the Star Trek Roleplaying Game, among others. I joined the Boy Scouts and was a patrol leader before I could make it past 2nd Class. I was an SPL for a while as well. All without really looking for the job.
In High School I excelled in Marine Corps JROTC. I was Battalion XO my senior year, despite having started the first day of school as a Cadet Staff Sergeant due to being on the wrong side of one of our instructor's bad days and getting busted out of my lieutenancy late in my junior year. The high school incarnation of our Star Trek club did some amazing things, including marching in a parade in Georgetown in our Trek uniforms. Oh, I miss those Monster Maroons.
After graduation, I went to college and joined the Army ROTC at University of Texas and worked toward my commission as an honest-to-God officer. It was here that I hit my first brick wall - sleep apnea. I was medically disqualified from picking up the ROTC scholarship that should have finished my degree and started my career. I was crushed. I got lazy, and put on weight... and before the ink had dried on my medical disqualification I was starting a Battletech-based club called the Caladan Highland Dragoons. We were the largest Battletech club I'd ever heard of, with over thirty members at our peak, and were organized into a short battalion of two companies with a GM staff. The stories were EPIC, folks. It was good times, and I made friends that I still talk to and roll dice with to this day. I was married in my CHD dress uniform. My best men were my XO and our Sergeant Major.
The CHD fell apart when we discovered LARPing. Instead of one big team of 30 MechWarriors, Amtgard gave everyone the opportunity to become a boffer-wielding hero in their own right. The group fractured, but we all played Amtgard for several years. Once again, I ended up becoming a leader. I had a park of my own to be Baron of, a noble household and became squired to the king. I founded the Army of the Celestial Kingdom and we had a successful engagement or two. I hear the ACK is still going in Amtgard. My wife hated the Amtgard culture around here - too much drinking and drugs mixed in with the contact sport. It didn't help that the first overnight event I took her to involved a knifing and someone staggering in front of a car and getting hit. Ugh. So it was out of Amtgard for me... and on to STARFLEET.
When we formed the USS Ark Angel, I constructed the chapter the only way I knew how. I drew on my experiences of what the "proper" way to run a chapter should be. We had a fairly rigid organizational structure, a promotion system that made advancement tough, and consequently more valued when it did occur. We stressed military bearing and snap when in persona and in uniform. We went on to win chapter of the year every second year more or less for six to eight years. Our Marine unit got organizational (international) unit of the year twice in a row, a feat not done before or since by any other single unit. We had officers of the year, volunteers of the year, newsletters of the year, etc. We raised almost two thousand dollars (actually, $1889, our NCC number) for the Battleship Texas foundation. We became the defacto color guard for Region Three. In short, we rocked.
Then it all came apart. The death of my grandfather in 2006 started my mental slide away from being as hard core as I had been from '99 up until that point. I spent two years lame ducking it even as I ascended to Regional leadership positions. The political jockying that screwed me over later just cemented my decision to go into a sort of retirement, and sadly the politics and bullshit broke the back of the most impressive organization I have the honor of having lead. There are members who will never again look at STARFLEET as something fun or desirable to be a part of. A few monumentally bad leaders destroyed what could have been the sharpest command team in the history of Region Three...
But none of that was to be. And to be honest, it all turned out for the best. I'm a dad now, and a college graduate. Would I have been able to complete those goals if I was working overtime on STARFLEET regional organizational stuff? I've also got to admit that the current RC is precisely what Region Three needed to clean up the mess left by the last two RCs. One was a micromanager, the other was... You know, it's been five years and I still don't know how to describe precisely how unsuited to leadership this person was. It was impressive. And now that I've begun... the story is bound to come out. In any case, the current Regional Coordinator of Region Three at the time of this writing is Commodore Reed Bates. She was just what R3 needed. Reed has a keen eye for rules and organization, and considering the mess that was the Regional records, finances and staff what was needed was a crack organizer who wasn't afraid to dismiss people who weren't pulling their weight. That's what she did - cleaned up the town. Now there's a bunch of new faces on the Regional staff, and that's partially what lured me back.
Oh, there I go. The point of this whole damn post. Bobby Dean, currently the head of the Battletech club that's been active since 2008 - The Royal Dragoon Guards - has not only decided to become a member of STARFLEET, but to initiate the creation of a new chapter of STARFLEET consisting for the moment of members of the RDG who wish to be affiliated with the Fleet. We're calling the chapter USS Texas, and she'll be a battleship vessel built in the time of Captain Archer and NX-01 as a response to the Xindi threat, and that of the Klingons and Romulans. I thought I had put leadership in the Fleet behind me, and moved on to other things, but damnit, Star Trek runs in my blood. I've been a Trekker as long as I can remember, and the thought of Trek-flavored roleplaying has me unshelving many old FASA books and writing all kinds of plot in my head. I'm looking at garb, I'm only 30lbs from my TXSG goal weight, and soon I could be wearing a STARFLEET uniform alongside my ACUs. In short... I'm jazzed. Excited. Elated.
There are risks, though. Amtgard destroyed the original Highland Dragoons. STARFLEET came when I stopped playing Amtgard. The Royal Dragoons replaced the 342nd Marine Strike Group (part of the Ark Angel) when I retired from Fleet in 2008. I do not wish to see the RDG go away. If it becomes an aspect of the USS Texas, or vice versa, that would be awesome. I never intended the RDG to be a completely separate entity to begin with - but circumstances warranted that at the time. I suppose we'll tell that story, too, as all of this develops.
In short, Bobby Dean will soon be commissioned Commander Bobby Dean of the USS Texas. He'll need an XO, and I've agreed to serve. Although STARFLEET will no doubt continue to send me emails and address me by the two star rank they gave me back in the day, I am absolutely content to be Lieutenant Commander Webb as befits the XO of a chapter in shakedown (the first nine months of a chapter's formation) along with Master Chief Baum as part of the tripartite command team. You'll notice we're the same team that leads the RDG as Battalion Commander, XO and Sergeant Major. This is intentional, as we want the Fleet and Battletech aspects of the club to be two different skins or feels to the same group of people. In effect, we'll each have a persona for each side of the house, except for the folks who are absolutely against having anything to do with STARFLEET. At present, there are two of them out of 14 or so. I honestly hope we can show them that Fleet does have a point, and that it will be a hell of a good time.
I'm off now to read up on Trek gaming, and get some much-needed sleep. I think in addition to my normal musings about parenthood, gaming and the like I'll add a goal to tell the story of the rise and fall of my Fleet experience, and chronicle the launch and subsequent commissioning of the battleship USS Texas as a STARFLEET chapter.
Live Long, and Prosper my friends.
11 February 2013
04 February 2013
Returning to Where no Man has Gone Before
As long as I can remember - almost literally - I have been a Star Trek fan. One of the first toys I have recollection of that wasn't a Fisher Price item was a wonderful model of the Star Trek : The Motion Picture Enterprise. My uncle Jon sat on the base for it so I couldn't use the stand anymore. I saw one at a con a few years back but wasn't wealty enough to drop the $200 it would have cost me for that little piece of nostalgia. I had a Spock uniform t-shirt as a toddler. My maternal grandmother hand-embroidered a TOS engineering arrowhead on a sweat shirt for me, using the Franz Josef technical manual as a guide. I was big into Trek. BIG into Trek. Somewhere along the line, that love began to run as an underground river. I got out of Trek-specific fandom, haven't run a Trek RPG in years, and have focused on other things.
Lately, I have been thinking about the wonderful age when I first began to really dig into the world of Star Trek. TNG had not yet premiered. When you said Trek, you meant the original crew. No bloody A, B, C or D. The Holy Bible of Trek Geeks was the Franz Josef Star Fleet Technical Manual. Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise was a close second. LOTS of fandom publications could be found at cons, like the Star Fleet Line Officer Requirements series I was just looking at earlier today. FASA's Star Trek roleplaying game and ship combat game were brilliant for the time. The miniatures stared at me from the advertisement in Starlog magazine. It was truly an awesome time to be a Trek fan. Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, Voyage Home. Monster Maroons were the standard uniform, and I saved many Luby's paychecks to purchase my set. I proudly wore them to school.
I am organizing some thoughts to expound on this... but I will admit the tiny keyboard attached to my tablet and the parental duties of the hour force me to come back to this later in the week. There are thoughts here... stick around and you'll hear them.
Lately, I have been thinking about the wonderful age when I first began to really dig into the world of Star Trek. TNG had not yet premiered. When you said Trek, you meant the original crew. No bloody A, B, C or D. The Holy Bible of Trek Geeks was the Franz Josef Star Fleet Technical Manual. Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise was a close second. LOTS of fandom publications could be found at cons, like the Star Fleet Line Officer Requirements series I was just looking at earlier today. FASA's Star Trek roleplaying game and ship combat game were brilliant for the time. The miniatures stared at me from the advertisement in Starlog magazine. It was truly an awesome time to be a Trek fan. Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, Voyage Home. Monster Maroons were the standard uniform, and I saved many Luby's paychecks to purchase my set. I proudly wore them to school.
I am organizing some thoughts to expound on this... but I will admit the tiny keyboard attached to my tablet and the parental duties of the hour force me to come back to this later in the week. There are thoughts here... stick around and you'll hear them.
29 January 2013
The Search for "Our" Battletech
So... THIS is why everyone told me I'd never sleep again once I became a Dad. I'll spare you the details, dear readers, but sometimes it's frustrating to be loved so much not only do your children try to climb into bed with you, but they fight over who gets to be next to Daddy and inevitably wake up when you try to put them back in their own beds...
OK, so... the search for "Our" Battletech. As most folks who know me and read by blog know, I am an officer of the Austin area Battletech club known as the Royal Dragoon Guards. Right now there's around 10-12 of us on the rolls, and a metric buttload more folks who follow us on Facebook. Realistically, we usually have 7-10 at meetings due to real life encroaching. We're looking to grow the group, and I find it personally satisfying that the "kids" who I taught Battletech to at age 12-13 that are now 19-20 are bringing in a new group of teenagers to train. Some of these young folks are really "getting" the leadership and initiative I've tried to teach youngsters in my hobby activities for years and that, too is satisfying. What's more, about half of the membership are also soldiers in the Texas State Guard - so the training we do to enable the players to accurately portray professional soldiers comes in very handy. Case in point? The Dragoons who chose to become TXSG members have been praised for their ability to march, their military bearing, and of the entire unit of 30+ soldiers the guidon bearer and backup guidon bearer were both selected from the soldiers who came out of the RDG. Neat, eh?
So we love our Battletech. We have a campaign that has been running for three years, and have added a lot of our own backstory and detail into the published Battletech universe. We've also started an alternate timeline beginning in 2914, and as of the current campaign date of 2917 we've launched the Clan Invasion early... from the inside out... without any Clans... long story. Basically, we wanted to see the Battletech universe proceed in a different direction with a far, far lower explosion of tech than the official game now contains. Speaking as a lover and player of Battletech since 1986- it's just too damn much.
When I got into Battletech, I was amazed by the world that was built around these giant robots. The Houses of the Inner Sphere were fascinating to me, and just enough snippets of info could be found in the saddle-stapled thin rulebook from the 2nd Edition Battletech boxed set to get my imagination going. Almost immediately, I declared myself a supporter of the Lyran Commonwealth for life. The system was simple (for an 80s game) and it contained the things that captured our game group at the time - rules for advancement of pilots and a reason to track histories, rules for creating our own BattleMechs, built-in storylines. We then discovered Battletechnology Magazine, and whoa, did that blow us away. I'm still a fan of the BattleAxe to this day thanks to the article on it in Battletechnology. "Why use a blunt Warhammer when you can have the keen edge of a BattleAxe?" Thanks to all the in-universe stuff in Battletechnology - including the grainy pictures taken of model kits and toys representing the Unseen along with pieces of Robotix to simulate destroyed buildings - I was hooked. We played for YEARS using just the boxed set, and slowly adding TRO:3025 and MechWarrior the RPG. We even gave the Autocannon/20 a range of 6/12/18 and heat of 1 since the Technical Readout 3025 showed us it weighed more, and presumably did more damage, but said nothing about its heat and range. The line on the weapon table in the 2nd Edition Battletech rulebook simply says "Autocannon." So we made it an 18-hex 20-point hit for 1 heat... Huzzah.
What some now derisively refer to as "Mad Max" Battletech, when technology was on the decline, company-sized raids were the order of the day, and the Third Succession War was still winding down- THAT was the battletech my group knows and loves. Even our players who weren't born yet have looked at the old material and the new material and universally prefer the older game.
What went wrong?
Well - consider for a moment the sheer size of the current game. Put "The Battletech Manual : The Rules of Warfare" or even the later "The Battletech Compendium" together with the MechWarrior RPG plus The Mercenary's Handbook and you still haven't gotten the pagecount of the massive "Total Warfare" tome. And that is one - ONE - of the five core rulebooks for modern Battletech. Add in Strategic Operations, Tactical Operations, A Time of War and the insufferably long-awaited Interstellar Operations and you get over 1,800 pages of stuff without Interstellar Ops.
I know, I know - a lot of that is optional material, stuff you're not going to be able to use in a given campaign etc. Thing is, just the size of these massive rulebooks starts to scare away players. And here's the real rub - what do we get for that complexity? Battletech, at its core, is still the same game it was in 1986. The only real changes to the core rules I can think of off the top of my head is the elimination of the reaction phase nobody used anyway and the change to the partial cover rule.
Let me put it this way. A Time of War, at over 300 pages, gives me more complexity in character design and combat ules than it does utility as a roleplaying game. Why on Earth would I want a system where I have to keep track of Margin of Success to remember that each point of MoS grants an extra 0.5 or 0.25 damage points? Also - I get the whole penetration rule for armor and how it makes things more compatible with Battletech in theory - but in practice my players are just not grokking what weapon damages mean by looking at them, or how effective armor is. This system may be more "realistic" or "better" than the MW1e or MW2e systems, but is it more playable? Not in our experience.
So the complexity is not our friend. And it's not just me holding this opinion, it's the majority of our gaming group. We basically need a spreadsheet for each PC to keep track of their stuff, and we're ready to look elsewhere. Sadly, this seems to be a trend. I saw a LOT of Battletech stuff in the inventory clearance sale at one of our two Friendly Local Game Stores, and the other store barely carries any Battletech product at all. If something is in the inventory reduction sale, it means it hasn't moved a copy since last January. Tons of sourcebooks, TROs, and even a couple of rulebooks. This is not the sign of a healthy hobby. When we were at Millennium Con last November, the sanctioned BattleTech tournaments had a teeny turnout, and were over in three rounds due to a small player field. The scenario games were attended by... us. There was the scenario GM, and members of the RDG.
So why is Battletech not as popular as it once was, despite our having a good-sized local Battletech club? Well, there's the size of the books and the complexity. There's the time it takes to play Battletech. Even a lance-on-lance game takes hours to play. We play company-on-company and it takes 6-8 hours to reach a decision, sometimes we don't even get that far frustratingly enough. There's the rules bloat - so many new weapons and equipment it's hardly recognizable as BattleTech anymore. And then there's the storyline...
OK, so it starts out as Dune/A Game of Thrones with giant robots, right? Then they rediscover tech, and 'Mechs become high-tech tanks again. The nobility of the MechWarrior takes a back seat, and we're talking about Divisions and Regimental Combat Teams instead of a lance of 'Mechs garrisoning an entire worlk by holding the one or two objectives that would be worth taking. The Clans come in with tons of new tech, better than that of the Star League. I'm not a total hater of the Clans, or of the new tech up to this point. TRO:3050 brought some intersting stuff to the table, and it was still more or less the noble Houses of the Inner Sphere plus the Clans to shake things up. This is, however, where things begin to come apart for me, and many other players. A side problem with this is that the current keepers of the Battletech flame at Catalyst Games are openly derisive and dismissive of the 3025 crowd, despite there being quite a lot of them on the message boards.
OK - my issues with the Clan stuff. The timeline jumped ahead from the 4th Succession War in 3028 to 3050. This was done with the book "20 Year Update" that outlined the War of 3039 and the events leading up to the Clan invasion, such as the creation of the Free Rasalhague Republic and the absorbtion of the Tikonov Free Republic by the newly created Federated Commonwealth. Why the jump? The official answer is "to sell books" and we get the party line trotted out constantly that "if the writers didn't do something, nothing would sell." Bullshit. Catalyst kept the Jihad storyline running for FIFTEEN YEARS. The original setting of Battletech wasn't good for more than five? Cop-out. More weapons and equipment needed to keep players interested? Well, I don't see them adding ER Pulse Short Swords to D&D to keep people interested. I digress.
So they brought the tech back. And how. They reduced MechWarriors back to soldiers driving expensive but replaceable war machines. They wrote themselves into a corner. So what did they do? Twice? The Dark Ages storyline created for the clicky-game and the destruction of the Jihad cause - you guessed it - a re-set to scrounging for tech and a rarity of 'Mechs. Trying to get back to the older feel of the game through plot changes. Why not just revisit the original era? "We've moved on..." they say. Well, Catalyst released Shadowrun 2050 for their cyberpunk-fantasy RPG allowing players of the current edition of the game to use the setting and equipment from the 1989 version and guess what - it sold like gangbusters on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow. It is in the top 2.6% of all products on RPGNow/DriveThru as of this writing. Wouldn't an Era Report : 3015 or 3025 be a good fit? Sure, the latest BattleChat said they would release one - in 2015 or so. This should have been one of the first Era Report products done, to support the introductory boxed set. There is an Era Report : 3052 and 3062, but the technology and fluff from these eras is not really covered as much by the Introductory Boxed Set. It seems a no-brainer to us in the RDG that this product should have been prioritized.
Think it's just us? The folks developing MechWarrior Online and MechWarrior Tactics both set their games in the pre-Clan era. Before MechWarrior Online became an MMO project, it was slated to be a PC release set in 3015. Someone, somewhere still thinks the original storylines and setting have some life left in them. These people are not apparently in charge at Catalyst. Two of us RDG folks looked through the entire glut of unsold Battletech stuff to see if there was anything that would be useful to the club - and even at 75% off we found nothing. Not a thing. Everything was post-period for us and nothing we could use.
To be fair, some of the Age of War stuff from TRO 3075 has made it into our games, as well as the PDF-only releases that support the Succession Wars. Every now and then Catalyst throws us a bone, but we see questions constantly on the forums at bg.battletech.com asking for Succession Wars-specific era data. We're still waiting.
So we've got complexity, storyline, lack of interest in current products...
That leads Bobby Dean and myself to start a quest to make the RDG's Battletech run better. This means we're retiring A Time of War at the end of this campaign arc, and switching to a new game system. The front runner right now is an adaptation he and I have written of MechWarrior 1e and 2e. It moves fast, it's intuitive to our players, just what we need. We've also looked at using, either in totality or for inspiration Savage Worlds, Stars Without Number, Mongoose Traveller, FATE, Interlock, FUSION and even D20. We need a simple, intuitive game system that meshes well with Battletech.
For Battletech, we're working on house rules to speed up play. Static defense modifiers for fast 'mechs, group-firing weapons, stuff like that. I'm sure we'll post our house rules when they're done.
The sad point is, there's not much on the Catalyst horizon right now - immediate future - that we're very excited about. Our group could just as well play with books published during the FASA era and still have more fun than we're having now. We're already cobbling rules together to fill in the blanks since A Time of War, despite having a massive page count, did NOT include tables for currency, factions, etc for the various eras of play. That was left to a book that may or may not ever see the light of day.
We will continue our search. We will keep playtesting various changes, various character systems, even various mecha systems in the search for something more Battletech than the the current Battletech...
OK, so... the search for "Our" Battletech. As most folks who know me and read by blog know, I am an officer of the Austin area Battletech club known as the Royal Dragoon Guards. Right now there's around 10-12 of us on the rolls, and a metric buttload more folks who follow us on Facebook. Realistically, we usually have 7-10 at meetings due to real life encroaching. We're looking to grow the group, and I find it personally satisfying that the "kids" who I taught Battletech to at age 12-13 that are now 19-20 are bringing in a new group of teenagers to train. Some of these young folks are really "getting" the leadership and initiative I've tried to teach youngsters in my hobby activities for years and that, too is satisfying. What's more, about half of the membership are also soldiers in the Texas State Guard - so the training we do to enable the players to accurately portray professional soldiers comes in very handy. Case in point? The Dragoons who chose to become TXSG members have been praised for their ability to march, their military bearing, and of the entire unit of 30+ soldiers the guidon bearer and backup guidon bearer were both selected from the soldiers who came out of the RDG. Neat, eh?
So we love our Battletech. We have a campaign that has been running for three years, and have added a lot of our own backstory and detail into the published Battletech universe. We've also started an alternate timeline beginning in 2914, and as of the current campaign date of 2917 we've launched the Clan Invasion early... from the inside out... without any Clans... long story. Basically, we wanted to see the Battletech universe proceed in a different direction with a far, far lower explosion of tech than the official game now contains. Speaking as a lover and player of Battletech since 1986- it's just too damn much.
When I got into Battletech, I was amazed by the world that was built around these giant robots. The Houses of the Inner Sphere were fascinating to me, and just enough snippets of info could be found in the saddle-stapled thin rulebook from the 2nd Edition Battletech boxed set to get my imagination going. Almost immediately, I declared myself a supporter of the Lyran Commonwealth for life. The system was simple (for an 80s game) and it contained the things that captured our game group at the time - rules for advancement of pilots and a reason to track histories, rules for creating our own BattleMechs, built-in storylines. We then discovered Battletechnology Magazine, and whoa, did that blow us away. I'm still a fan of the BattleAxe to this day thanks to the article on it in Battletechnology. "Why use a blunt Warhammer when you can have the keen edge of a BattleAxe?" Thanks to all the in-universe stuff in Battletechnology - including the grainy pictures taken of model kits and toys representing the Unseen along with pieces of Robotix to simulate destroyed buildings - I was hooked. We played for YEARS using just the boxed set, and slowly adding TRO:3025 and MechWarrior the RPG. We even gave the Autocannon/20 a range of 6/12/18 and heat of 1 since the Technical Readout 3025 showed us it weighed more, and presumably did more damage, but said nothing about its heat and range. The line on the weapon table in the 2nd Edition Battletech rulebook simply says "Autocannon." So we made it an 18-hex 20-point hit for 1 heat... Huzzah.
What some now derisively refer to as "Mad Max" Battletech, when technology was on the decline, company-sized raids were the order of the day, and the Third Succession War was still winding down- THAT was the battletech my group knows and loves. Even our players who weren't born yet have looked at the old material and the new material and universally prefer the older game.
What went wrong?
Well - consider for a moment the sheer size of the current game. Put "The Battletech Manual : The Rules of Warfare" or even the later "The Battletech Compendium" together with the MechWarrior RPG plus The Mercenary's Handbook and you still haven't gotten the pagecount of the massive "Total Warfare" tome. And that is one - ONE - of the five core rulebooks for modern Battletech. Add in Strategic Operations, Tactical Operations, A Time of War and the insufferably long-awaited Interstellar Operations and you get over 1,800 pages of stuff without Interstellar Ops.
I know, I know - a lot of that is optional material, stuff you're not going to be able to use in a given campaign etc. Thing is, just the size of these massive rulebooks starts to scare away players. And here's the real rub - what do we get for that complexity? Battletech, at its core, is still the same game it was in 1986. The only real changes to the core rules I can think of off the top of my head is the elimination of the reaction phase nobody used anyway and the change to the partial cover rule.
Let me put it this way. A Time of War, at over 300 pages, gives me more complexity in character design and combat ules than it does utility as a roleplaying game. Why on Earth would I want a system where I have to keep track of Margin of Success to remember that each point of MoS grants an extra 0.5 or 0.25 damage points? Also - I get the whole penetration rule for armor and how it makes things more compatible with Battletech in theory - but in practice my players are just not grokking what weapon damages mean by looking at them, or how effective armor is. This system may be more "realistic" or "better" than the MW1e or MW2e systems, but is it more playable? Not in our experience.
So the complexity is not our friend. And it's not just me holding this opinion, it's the majority of our gaming group. We basically need a spreadsheet for each PC to keep track of their stuff, and we're ready to look elsewhere. Sadly, this seems to be a trend. I saw a LOT of Battletech stuff in the inventory clearance sale at one of our two Friendly Local Game Stores, and the other store barely carries any Battletech product at all. If something is in the inventory reduction sale, it means it hasn't moved a copy since last January. Tons of sourcebooks, TROs, and even a couple of rulebooks. This is not the sign of a healthy hobby. When we were at Millennium Con last November, the sanctioned BattleTech tournaments had a teeny turnout, and were over in three rounds due to a small player field. The scenario games were attended by... us. There was the scenario GM, and members of the RDG.
So why is Battletech not as popular as it once was, despite our having a good-sized local Battletech club? Well, there's the size of the books and the complexity. There's the time it takes to play Battletech. Even a lance-on-lance game takes hours to play. We play company-on-company and it takes 6-8 hours to reach a decision, sometimes we don't even get that far frustratingly enough. There's the rules bloat - so many new weapons and equipment it's hardly recognizable as BattleTech anymore. And then there's the storyline...
OK, so it starts out as Dune/A Game of Thrones with giant robots, right? Then they rediscover tech, and 'Mechs become high-tech tanks again. The nobility of the MechWarrior takes a back seat, and we're talking about Divisions and Regimental Combat Teams instead of a lance of 'Mechs garrisoning an entire worlk by holding the one or two objectives that would be worth taking. The Clans come in with tons of new tech, better than that of the Star League. I'm not a total hater of the Clans, or of the new tech up to this point. TRO:3050 brought some intersting stuff to the table, and it was still more or less the noble Houses of the Inner Sphere plus the Clans to shake things up. This is, however, where things begin to come apart for me, and many other players. A side problem with this is that the current keepers of the Battletech flame at Catalyst Games are openly derisive and dismissive of the 3025 crowd, despite there being quite a lot of them on the message boards.
OK - my issues with the Clan stuff. The timeline jumped ahead from the 4th Succession War in 3028 to 3050. This was done with the book "20 Year Update" that outlined the War of 3039 and the events leading up to the Clan invasion, such as the creation of the Free Rasalhague Republic and the absorbtion of the Tikonov Free Republic by the newly created Federated Commonwealth. Why the jump? The official answer is "to sell books" and we get the party line trotted out constantly that "if the writers didn't do something, nothing would sell." Bullshit. Catalyst kept the Jihad storyline running for FIFTEEN YEARS. The original setting of Battletech wasn't good for more than five? Cop-out. More weapons and equipment needed to keep players interested? Well, I don't see them adding ER Pulse Short Swords to D&D to keep people interested. I digress.
So they brought the tech back. And how. They reduced MechWarriors back to soldiers driving expensive but replaceable war machines. They wrote themselves into a corner. So what did they do? Twice? The Dark Ages storyline created for the clicky-game and the destruction of the Jihad cause - you guessed it - a re-set to scrounging for tech and a rarity of 'Mechs. Trying to get back to the older feel of the game through plot changes. Why not just revisit the original era? "We've moved on..." they say. Well, Catalyst released Shadowrun 2050 for their cyberpunk-fantasy RPG allowing players of the current edition of the game to use the setting and equipment from the 1989 version and guess what - it sold like gangbusters on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow. It is in the top 2.6% of all products on RPGNow/DriveThru as of this writing. Wouldn't an Era Report : 3015 or 3025 be a good fit? Sure, the latest BattleChat said they would release one - in 2015 or so. This should have been one of the first Era Report products done, to support the introductory boxed set. There is an Era Report : 3052 and 3062, but the technology and fluff from these eras is not really covered as much by the Introductory Boxed Set. It seems a no-brainer to us in the RDG that this product should have been prioritized.
Think it's just us? The folks developing MechWarrior Online and MechWarrior Tactics both set their games in the pre-Clan era. Before MechWarrior Online became an MMO project, it was slated to be a PC release set in 3015. Someone, somewhere still thinks the original storylines and setting have some life left in them. These people are not apparently in charge at Catalyst. Two of us RDG folks looked through the entire glut of unsold Battletech stuff to see if there was anything that would be useful to the club - and even at 75% off we found nothing. Not a thing. Everything was post-period for us and nothing we could use.
To be fair, some of the Age of War stuff from TRO 3075 has made it into our games, as well as the PDF-only releases that support the Succession Wars. Every now and then Catalyst throws us a bone, but we see questions constantly on the forums at bg.battletech.com asking for Succession Wars-specific era data. We're still waiting.
So we've got complexity, storyline, lack of interest in current products...
That leads Bobby Dean and myself to start a quest to make the RDG's Battletech run better. This means we're retiring A Time of War at the end of this campaign arc, and switching to a new game system. The front runner right now is an adaptation he and I have written of MechWarrior 1e and 2e. It moves fast, it's intuitive to our players, just what we need. We've also looked at using, either in totality or for inspiration Savage Worlds, Stars Without Number, Mongoose Traveller, FATE, Interlock, FUSION and even D20. We need a simple, intuitive game system that meshes well with Battletech.
For Battletech, we're working on house rules to speed up play. Static defense modifiers for fast 'mechs, group-firing weapons, stuff like that. I'm sure we'll post our house rules when they're done.
The sad point is, there's not much on the Catalyst horizon right now - immediate future - that we're very excited about. Our group could just as well play with books published during the FASA era and still have more fun than we're having now. We're already cobbling rules together to fill in the blanks since A Time of War, despite having a massive page count, did NOT include tables for currency, factions, etc for the various eras of play. That was left to a book that may or may not ever see the light of day.
We will continue our search. We will keep playtesting various changes, various character systems, even various mecha systems in the search for something more Battletech than the the current Battletech...
21 January 2013
WotC gets it all wrong again... maybe...
Hah! I remembered to post today so as not to screw up my NY Resolution within the month of January. Today has been kinda exhausting. K got her ear tubes put in today, which meant getting to the surgery center by 0645, a quite early morning on the heels of a week of crappy sleep due to Z and K both having issues sleeping through the night. Ugh. It's so amazing - I mean, everyone who has had children keeps telling us this, but until you've lived it... Z is sharp as a tack, and is falling in love with Star Wars, without much prodding from me. I just showed him the movies, he decided he wants to watch them all the time. He asks me some very interesting questions about the films, it's interesting the details a three-year-old can remember from films. I've still not gotten around to explaining to him about Qui-Gon falling asleep at the end of Phantom Menace. Yes, I showed him the prequels - but he saw the original trilogy FIRST. Twice each. My wife is the one that insisted we introduce him to the prequels... K amazes me by not being a baby anymore. It seems like it was just the other day she was an infant who would only fall asleep on my chest, and now she's walking, learning new words every day, using utensils when she eats... wow.
OK, so, gaming. Two things had me extremely excited about D&D products over the last two days, but one of them is only a possibility and the other may turn out to be totally disappointing to me. First of all, Wizards of the Coast, following on to their successful reprints of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons first edition and the 3.5e corebooks have decided to reprint AD&D 2nd Edition. This had me pretty excited. 2e is quite often either ignored or downplayed by the D&D community. There are quite a few people who feel that 2e lacked flavor, since TSR removed demons, devils, assassins and half-orcs from the 2nd edition. Some say the Dungeon Master's Guide was inferior to the first edition version. Some think it was either too far from 1e, or not far enough. For me, 2nd Edition was the game of choice when I was in high school. 1989 was my freshman year, and by that time I'd been playing D&D and AD&D for three years, with D&D taking the lion's share of that gaming time. My BECMI books and later the Rules Cyclopedia (more on that later) were most of my gaming where D&D was concerned. Now, don't get me wrong - during this period I played Traveller, Palladium Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Price of Freedom, Gangbusters, Gamma World, MechWarrior, Star Frontiers... lotsa stuff. But as it was for many other players, D&D and AD&D were our bread and butter.
Back to 2nd Edition. When it came out it was pretty awesome to our high-school eyes. Visually, the Easley covers were striking, the glossy interiors with some pretty iconic paintings - like Elmore's dragon hunters - were inspiring. The rules were cleaned up, things like initiative actually made sense... At the time we called it a win. The DMG was thinner, and it was missing things like Gygaxian prose and artifacts. The Monster Manual came in a three-ring binder, kind of odd, but I did later get some of the expansions that clipped into the binder. With 2nd Edition came some of the campaign settings that drove us for years. I was a fan of Ravenloft and Al-Qadim. I still keep them both on my bedroom bookshelf for before-bed reading. I loved 2e. I didn't realize at the time I was supposed to hate it... We didn't have the internet back then. Oh, and don't get me started on how amazing the actual content of the monster book was - ecology, society, behavior. You had more than a paragraph and some stats, there was real flavor to their monster writeups!
Around 1995, 2e got a revision. The covers were re-done, the interiors re-done, the errata worked into the text, and a lot of extra rulebooks like the Player's Option and DM's Option books came out. THAT, we hated. The new trade dress was just... not as heroic, not as inspiring somehow. The interiors of the books had red text on white backgrounds for section headers. Ugh. The art had changed, the "feel" had changed, and what the hell were all these extra rulebooks? No thankee.
So, I find out WoTC is going to be reprinting 2e as premium collectibles. Sold. Put me down for a copy of each book. Maybe extra copies of the PHB. But wait - is it the iconic 1989 version they're reprinting? Nope. It's the craptacular 1995 version. The one none of us played, as we were playing MechWarrior, Shadowrun, Vampire, Traveller : The New Era and a bunch of other stuff by then. The black cover books hold no nostalgia for me. I hated them when they were new, I avoid them at Half-Price Books. I'm not shelling out $50 per book for that interior layout, or that cover art. Just... no.
So... disappointment. Now for the part where I get excited. WotC has a poll to find out which product we're interested in seeing get the premium reprint next. On the list is... THE DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS RULES CYCLOPEDIA. Yes, folks, my single favorite D&D book of all time. With this volume I could run campaigns from now until doomsday and never need another book. Characters levels 1-36, mass combat, domain management, even a basic overview of The Known World and Hollow World. It's all there. THIS book summed up D&D for me. It compiled the Basic, Expert, Companion and Master's rules into one sturdy tome and delivered it for fast and easy play. Huzzah. I own three of them. There's one more at Half-Price Round Rock for $40 that I'll score if I get a 50% off coupon before someone else buys it. Why? Because my extra copies await the day some needy young gamer comes along and needs to have one bestowed upon them. In the last year I have given away copies of Star Wars D6, Shadowrun, D&D 3.0, Basic D&D, Marvel Superheroes and MechWarrior. I buy spare copies of my favorite games when I can find them cheap, and I gift them to folks who would benefit from having them. My way to propogate the gamer species.
So there's my thoughts for the week. AD&D2e, sold, but only if they go with the orignal 1989 material. Rules Cyclopedia? Definitely sold, if they decide to do the reprint. I fear if they reprint the black border 2e and it fails to sell, as the reaction of my fellow gamers on www.therpgsite.com and www.rpg.net seem to indicate it might, more reprints may not happen.
I've got a lot more thoughts, but it's late, I've gotta get to work early tomorrow, and I think I just heard K wake up crying... again...
Until next time, True Believers.
OK, so, gaming. Two things had me extremely excited about D&D products over the last two days, but one of them is only a possibility and the other may turn out to be totally disappointing to me. First of all, Wizards of the Coast, following on to their successful reprints of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons first edition and the 3.5e corebooks have decided to reprint AD&D 2nd Edition. This had me pretty excited. 2e is quite often either ignored or downplayed by the D&D community. There are quite a few people who feel that 2e lacked flavor, since TSR removed demons, devils, assassins and half-orcs from the 2nd edition. Some say the Dungeon Master's Guide was inferior to the first edition version. Some think it was either too far from 1e, or not far enough. For me, 2nd Edition was the game of choice when I was in high school. 1989 was my freshman year, and by that time I'd been playing D&D and AD&D for three years, with D&D taking the lion's share of that gaming time. My BECMI books and later the Rules Cyclopedia (more on that later) were most of my gaming where D&D was concerned. Now, don't get me wrong - during this period I played Traveller, Palladium Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Price of Freedom, Gangbusters, Gamma World, MechWarrior, Star Frontiers... lotsa stuff. But as it was for many other players, D&D and AD&D were our bread and butter.
Back to 2nd Edition. When it came out it was pretty awesome to our high-school eyes. Visually, the Easley covers were striking, the glossy interiors with some pretty iconic paintings - like Elmore's dragon hunters - were inspiring. The rules were cleaned up, things like initiative actually made sense... At the time we called it a win. The DMG was thinner, and it was missing things like Gygaxian prose and artifacts. The Monster Manual came in a three-ring binder, kind of odd, but I did later get some of the expansions that clipped into the binder. With 2nd Edition came some of the campaign settings that drove us for years. I was a fan of Ravenloft and Al-Qadim. I still keep them both on my bedroom bookshelf for before-bed reading. I loved 2e. I didn't realize at the time I was supposed to hate it... We didn't have the internet back then. Oh, and don't get me started on how amazing the actual content of the monster book was - ecology, society, behavior. You had more than a paragraph and some stats, there was real flavor to their monster writeups!
Around 1995, 2e got a revision. The covers were re-done, the interiors re-done, the errata worked into the text, and a lot of extra rulebooks like the Player's Option and DM's Option books came out. THAT, we hated. The new trade dress was just... not as heroic, not as inspiring somehow. The interiors of the books had red text on white backgrounds for section headers. Ugh. The art had changed, the "feel" had changed, and what the hell were all these extra rulebooks? No thankee.
So, I find out WoTC is going to be reprinting 2e as premium collectibles. Sold. Put me down for a copy of each book. Maybe extra copies of the PHB. But wait - is it the iconic 1989 version they're reprinting? Nope. It's the craptacular 1995 version. The one none of us played, as we were playing MechWarrior, Shadowrun, Vampire, Traveller : The New Era and a bunch of other stuff by then. The black cover books hold no nostalgia for me. I hated them when they were new, I avoid them at Half-Price Books. I'm not shelling out $50 per book for that interior layout, or that cover art. Just... no.
So... disappointment. Now for the part where I get excited. WotC has a poll to find out which product we're interested in seeing get the premium reprint next. On the list is... THE DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS RULES CYCLOPEDIA. Yes, folks, my single favorite D&D book of all time. With this volume I could run campaigns from now until doomsday and never need another book. Characters levels 1-36, mass combat, domain management, even a basic overview of The Known World and Hollow World. It's all there. THIS book summed up D&D for me. It compiled the Basic, Expert, Companion and Master's rules into one sturdy tome and delivered it for fast and easy play. Huzzah. I own three of them. There's one more at Half-Price Round Rock for $40 that I'll score if I get a 50% off coupon before someone else buys it. Why? Because my extra copies await the day some needy young gamer comes along and needs to have one bestowed upon them. In the last year I have given away copies of Star Wars D6, Shadowrun, D&D 3.0, Basic D&D, Marvel Superheroes and MechWarrior. I buy spare copies of my favorite games when I can find them cheap, and I gift them to folks who would benefit from having them. My way to propogate the gamer species.
So there's my thoughts for the week. AD&D2e, sold, but only if they go with the orignal 1989 material. Rules Cyclopedia? Definitely sold, if they decide to do the reprint. I fear if they reprint the black border 2e and it fails to sell, as the reaction of my fellow gamers on www.therpgsite.com and www.rpg.net seem to indicate it might, more reprints may not happen.
I've got a lot more thoughts, but it's late, I've gotta get to work early tomorrow, and I think I just heard K wake up crying... again...
Until next time, True Believers.
14 January 2013
I suppose there's a first time for everything...
First of all, second Monday of the new year, and Huzzah, I'm posting. Heh. The title of this post refers to the fact that after many years of viewing Games Workship's Warhammer 40,000 universe with a yawn and a distinct lack of interest aside from the stellar realtime stragetgy computer game Dawn of War, I have finally found a glimmer of interest in one of their RPG books. Don't get me wrong, I get grimdark. I've played in enough dark game worlds to say that I can definitely enjoy grimdark for what it is, and dig a storyline or campaign setting that is gritty and distinctly lacks the sort of thrilling heroics often associated with the roleplaying game hobby. That said, the 40K universe just never clicked with me. Is it some form of twisted humor that what turned me off to the 40K background is that it was endless war after war after war... and yet the title of the book that caught my attention is "Only War?"OK, so Space Marines seem one-note and cartoonish to me the way they are portrayed in 40K. No, I've not read any of the novels or other media, I just know what little I've been exposed to from Dawn of War and my limited knowledge of the 40K miniatures game. Ho-hum. Yawn. So said I. When I began playing Dawn of War, I fell in love with the Imperial Guard. These folks at least *looked* like human soldiers. Their equipment, while still a bit space-Gothic, was still recognizable. They had weak but plucky infantry, and good armor and artillery. I dug them. When FFG started releasing the 40K roleplaying games, I found myself disinterested in the various lines for different reasons. Rogue Trader looked neat, but I was put off by the scale of the vessels the main characters were assigned. Dark Heresy? Mildly intriguing, but I didn't see that my game group would get a lot of milage out of it. Death Watch? Same thing. Why, then did I find Only War so interesting? Well, I blame my interest in World War One.
The Imperial Guard are almost always overmatched, under-equipped, and in for a good shellacking. They make insane charges against superior foes and do so out of love of their Emperor. For some strange reason this reminds me of Tommys in the trenches of World War One, and I find that kind of endearing. These poor bastards join the Imperial Guard to fight for their Emperor against incredible odds, most of them knowing they'll never make it home, and yet they fight. They're not genetically engineered super-soldiers like their Space Marine counterparts, they're just people. I started doing some reading about the Imperial Guard, and I came across the Imperial Infantryman's Handbook - which is, amusingly enough, designed to look like an early 20th Century book, at least looking at the cover design. The grain of the cover reminds me of my great-grandfather's 1943 Bluejacket's Manual, or the 1914 Manual of Military Training I have. I wonder if the analogy my brain drew between the IG and the poor bloody infantry of the past is intentional?From the reviews I've read, this book is an in-universe artifact that the soldiers of the IG are required to have on them at all times. The book is written from that perspective, and is supposed to be kind of humorous in that someone in the real world reading the book can see the blatant lies and propaganda being fed to the lowly trooper of the Imperial Guard. At $16 on Amazon, it might be worth my checking out.
I suppose that's what interests me about Only War. I've spent the last two years finishing up a degree that saw me reading a lot about the plight of the lowly soldier. I took a special interest in the experiences of soldiers in the First World War, but the reality of the conflicts of human experience and the viewpoint of the common trooper was always forefront in my mind. When I began this course of study, I fancied that I would be thinking about things fromt he perspective of the generals, admirals and marshals that planned and executed these massive campaigns- but instead I found myself much more engrossed by the view from the bottom, where what we would call the "Commander's Intent" was usually impossible to determine. Where the scope and focus of the Warhammer 40,000 universe would usually turn me completely off to the game - it is that possibility for being totally lost in the shuffle that leads me to find something interesting in Only War. I find the idea of telling the story of a group of soldiers that fight they know not why to be a very interesting one. Perhaps, through the perceptions of my players, I can gather some insight into the minds of the kinds of average people who find themselves in decidedly nasty circumstances with very little background on why they were there.
If I can fit these books into my budget, maybe I'll post some further thoughts about them. Being a Dad means not having as much income to spend on gaming stuff. My grandmother asked me what I did with the Christmas money she gave me and was dismayed when I said "car payment." Being an adult often sucks in a financial sense, doesn't it?
07 January 2013
Happy New Year, Dear Readers.
Today is Monday, 7 January 2013. I am going to try valiantly to publish something worth reading every week of 2013, and Monday is my target day to do so. At my day job, Monday is the day I generally take stock of what needs to get done over the course of the rest of the week, with work, home life, hobby life, etc. The rest of the week is for implementation, especially Friday as that's the day that our classroom utilization is much lower allowing me to do the maintenance that is my main function. So Mondays are when I plan to blog, and I'd love to make sure there's something fun here to read for the whole seven of you who like The Old Dragoon.
So, how was my Christmas and New Year holiday? Exhausting is the first word that comes to mind, but amazing is the second. This was in many ways our first real Christmas as parents. Last year we were beset with water leak issues, getting used to being parents, living in a hotel... there were lots of things that made the Christmas season a blur. This year, Z and K are both firmly entrenched as "our" kids and Christmas felt like Christmas - and now I can see why parents all over find magic in the holiday. The Z-Man is now a confirmed Star Wars fan. I mean talking about lightsabers and Obi-Wan and Luke and wearing a Darth Vader mask around the house and everything. Oh, and I did get him the Playskool Millennium Falcon like I said I would. The hinge breaks a lot, but we still have fun with it... I digress. Christmas was awesome. Playing with the kids, taking them to visit family, listening to K sing "Purr, purr purr..." when we sing Soft Kitty to her. More of those magic parent moments that are so deeply touching.
New Year's Eve? Gaming, what else? We played Cyberpunk. The original Cyberpunk 2013 boxed set. Why? Because it's 2013, chombatta. I own two copies of CP2013, one of which is my battered and well-loved copy from 1987 and the second is a PRISTINE copy I got at Half-Price Books for $7.98 a few years back. On Ebay now that would cost me over $100 - I checked, I wanted to score one for my players. Not at those prices. Luckily, I have PDFs and a printer. Anyway, the game was a lot of fun. We rolled up characters becuase everyone present enjoys lifepaths. I always love how a lifepath gives players some roleplaying meat to chew on for a brand new character. In example - Bobby Dean's netrunner PC rolled life events that indicated he was accused of murder, and imprisoned for ten years. That became a backstory in which my wife's PC was his younger sister, and he was recruited by the mob while in prison. Mary's PC is dating the cop who put her brother away, in order to get information to clear his record. Coupla die rolls, and a lot of roleplaying material for two of the PCs involved. We had a blast, thanks to Clint, Dixie, Randi and Bobby for helping Mary and I make NYE 2013 memorable. Z and K slept through the game, thankfully... GRIN...
What can you expect from The Old Dragoon's blog in 2013? Well, I hope to do what I've been doing, only better and more frequently. My top ten games seemed to generate some interest, so I've been asked to do some more in-depth reviews and visit some other games on my also-ran or honorable mention lists. I've got a lot of 'em, lemme tell you. There's also some things I'd like to post about GM concepts, the Royal Dragoon Guards and our associated projects, story inspiration for gamers and other things. Whatever comes out, I promise I'll try not to make it read like stereo instructions.
See you next week (crosses fingers)...
So, how was my Christmas and New Year holiday? Exhausting is the first word that comes to mind, but amazing is the second. This was in many ways our first real Christmas as parents. Last year we were beset with water leak issues, getting used to being parents, living in a hotel... there were lots of things that made the Christmas season a blur. This year, Z and K are both firmly entrenched as "our" kids and Christmas felt like Christmas - and now I can see why parents all over find magic in the holiday. The Z-Man is now a confirmed Star Wars fan. I mean talking about lightsabers and Obi-Wan and Luke and wearing a Darth Vader mask around the house and everything. Oh, and I did get him the Playskool Millennium Falcon like I said I would. The hinge breaks a lot, but we still have fun with it... I digress. Christmas was awesome. Playing with the kids, taking them to visit family, listening to K sing "Purr, purr purr..." when we sing Soft Kitty to her. More of those magic parent moments that are so deeply touching.
New Year's Eve? Gaming, what else? We played Cyberpunk. The original Cyberpunk 2013 boxed set. Why? Because it's 2013, chombatta. I own two copies of CP2013, one of which is my battered and well-loved copy from 1987 and the second is a PRISTINE copy I got at Half-Price Books for $7.98 a few years back. On Ebay now that would cost me over $100 - I checked, I wanted to score one for my players. Not at those prices. Luckily, I have PDFs and a printer. Anyway, the game was a lot of fun. We rolled up characters becuase everyone present enjoys lifepaths. I always love how a lifepath gives players some roleplaying meat to chew on for a brand new character. In example - Bobby Dean's netrunner PC rolled life events that indicated he was accused of murder, and imprisoned for ten years. That became a backstory in which my wife's PC was his younger sister, and he was recruited by the mob while in prison. Mary's PC is dating the cop who put her brother away, in order to get information to clear his record. Coupla die rolls, and a lot of roleplaying material for two of the PCs involved. We had a blast, thanks to Clint, Dixie, Randi and Bobby for helping Mary and I make NYE 2013 memorable. Z and K slept through the game, thankfully... GRIN...
What can you expect from The Old Dragoon's blog in 2013? Well, I hope to do what I've been doing, only better and more frequently. My top ten games seemed to generate some interest, so I've been asked to do some more in-depth reviews and visit some other games on my also-ran or honorable mention lists. I've got a lot of 'em, lemme tell you. There's also some things I'd like to post about GM concepts, the Royal Dragoon Guards and our associated projects, story inspiration for gamers and other things. Whatever comes out, I promise I'll try not to make it read like stereo instructions.
See you next week (crosses fingers)...
11 December 2012
Episode 4e : A New Hope?
Good morning, True Believers, and sorry it's been over a month.
LOTS of things have happened since I posted my Top Ten, so let's sum up. I finished my Bachelor of Arts degree in Military History with a GPA of 3.791. Now I just have to wait until February to actually have my degree conferred. We are moving closer to adoping Z and K, and I can't wait to share photos of them with the world. Z saw Star Wars for the first time last night - he started it once before and fell asleep as we'd started it too late at night. He loved it, and wants to see it again. I am *so* trying to score him the toddler Millennium Falcon now... K is now W A L K I N G. It's amazing how quickly they grow. And also amazing all those "dad" moments I've gotten lately just playing and spending time with the kiddos. I'm halfway through my weight loss, havign lost 38lbs and having another 38 or so to go to hit my TXSG height/weight. After that, I'm trying to knock out another 17lbs or so to hit an even 200. Also, for the first time in four years, I'm no longer the lead game master for the Royal Dragoon Guards. That's right, I did not seek re-election as Battalion Commander instead opting for the top player spot, Company Commander. I'm now the lead player, and letting Bobby Dean GM for a while. Six months, at least. If he doesn't suck, and he won't, we'll see if he runs for another six.
OK, gaming. Well, first of all, since I'm not currently enrolled in any college courses for the first time in two years, I can put together a regular game session. Since the Royal Dragoons are a major sci-fi campaign and Bobby runs an occasional Star Wars game, I decided to do something fantasy-based with my game. I also wanted some folks I don't usually game with. I got both wishes, having created a D&D Essentials group with two players I don't normally game with, and one who I usually only game with at RDG. Randi and Bobby round out the group.
I know, I know. Why 4e Essentials? You guys know I'm a grognard, and that my desert island book is the Basic D&D Rules Cyclopedia (I even had Aaron Allston sign mine.) You know I've run AD&D 1e using Rules As Written. (We never even played it that way back in the 80s.) You know I regularly re-read and occasionally 1-shot things like Marvel FASERIP, Star Frontiers, Melee/Wizard, Car Wars, Gangbusters, Top Secret/S.I.... so why in the name of all that's holy did I decide to run a game using what is largely considered to be the least D&D of the D&D games?
Basic answer? Because I've never done it before. Sure, I've run Essentials when I used to DM D&D Encounters at Rogue's Gallery. That was a cycle of modules that covered levels 1-3 over and over again every few months. I've never dreamed up my own campaign and run it "in the wild" for a group. I wanted to give this a shot before deciding that the Old School was the Only School. One of my players in particular is giving me a lot of gas about running 4th Edition, claiming that all the rules get in the way of the story. Well, time will tell - and after two game sessions, it's already started to. The GM and the Players are what makes story happen, not the rules. But more on that later.
I'm going to lead off with why I hated 4e at first, and what caused me to decide to give it another try in its D&D Essentials incarnation. Part of my problem was that the game dictated HOW to run D&D to its Dungeon Masters. Thou shalt have five players. Thou shalt bludgeon them with roles and party balance. Thou shalt hand out this much treasure and no more. It shall take this long to level, and encounters should be balanced to party level. Oh, all your players really should be the same level or the math breaks... Stuff like that. On the player side, I didn't like martial classes playing like spellcasting classes. Also - since 3E the game has really encouraged the use of a battle map and counters or minis. I never used minis much in older editions - which is to say at all, except to mark marching order. I didn't hate the idea... just didn't like the more-or-less requirement. 4e made that even more mandatory with powers that relied on relative placement of combatants. Do not want, really.
Well, with Essentials came a new take on 4e. If it constituted 4.5 is a discussion for another time, but gone were things that just tweaked me off. Martial daily powers? Gone. Martial marks? Gone. In their place were stances, which made perfect sense, and defender auras, which also made a lot of sense. Something about the Essentials builds just felt more D&D to me. I tried playing a Warpriest, and lo and behold I felt like a badass Cleric from the days of old save for the turning ability. I could fight, heal and move all in the same round. Maybe this wasn't so bad after all...
So I decided to get into the D&D Encounters scene and stayed there for over a year. I really started to enjoy the game, and the playstyle. I realized that there was a good game under the hood of 4e... it just wasn't what I called Dungeons and Dragons. And that's OK. So I started planning to run my own campaign to test some of my assumptions... and got back into college, and got my two awesome foster kids. Gaming went on hold except for the RDG commitment. So here we are, and I'm getting this Essentials game going - so what do I like about it? Strangely, some of the things I hated when I had it mentally tagged as D&D.
First and most obvious - the battle map and map-based combat. This game, unlike the versions of D&D I prefer, requires them. Powers are written in bursts and blasts and ranges and adjacent and aura and you really, REALLY need a map to make them work. The powers are so much a part of each character that you risk really bringing the game engine crashing down on you if you just try to fudge it. I used to see that as a bug in my normally narrarative style dungeon mastering. What I needed to do was look at the way it played on its own merits, not as a replacement for my beloved BD&D and AD&D. Okay, so what does the system do? It's a tactical combat system in which each class has its role to play and each character potentially has a completely different set of strengths, weaknesses and abilities to bolster the party as a whole. I used to hate that Fighters were now referred to as "Defenders" and expected to be meat shields... but that's just codifying the way low-level mages hid behind the fighters anyway, isn't it? In fact, the Defender Aura makes them better at it than old-school D&D fighters were in a way. I also liked that spellcasters never ran completely out of spell juice. I loved playing Magic-Users in BD&D, but damned if it wasn't annoying to be out of spells... and that happened a LOT at low levels. In the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, Venger never ran out of those cool magical bolts...
OK, so looking at the way the game PLAYS, the PCs have to have a sense of their own abilities and those of their allies. They have to learn to use those abilities together to accomplish goals in combat. It's... tactical. Hey, wait- I love tactical. It's no different from the way we obsess over BattleMechs in Battletech and their capabilities and how they work together and separately and how best to employ them and how NEVER to employ them. So... my favorite part of Battletech can become part of my fantasy games. OK, I can dig this. It also reminds me of the great XBox game "Gladius" and Final Fantasy Tactics. I had always listened to people rail against 4e saying that it was too much like a video game, or an MMO. Thing is - I'm beginning to see that as a feature of this particular game.
Is it what I want out of all of my D&D? Negative, ghostrider. Does it work for this campaign? It's seeming to.
What I mean by that is I've begun to write this campaign as if I was writing a classic 8-Bit RPG. The enforced pacing I had hated so much in the DMG was now my ally. I could use that pacing in writing the campaign arc - since it took X number of encounters to go up a level, and encounters were figured as level-appropriate... So this means that I can now plan the pace of the game based on those assumptions. The ability to reskin 4e monsters is pretty cool, too. I've already decided that I'm going to include some creatures my players won't expect - like Oktoroks and Leevers.
We have played two sessions, and tonight is a third. I'll blog more about this game after that session, as I think three sessions is enough to get a feel for where this is going and if it's working or not. Right now, I'm cautiously saying it's working well - even my staunchest 4e hater is having a blast...
LOTS of things have happened since I posted my Top Ten, so let's sum up. I finished my Bachelor of Arts degree in Military History with a GPA of 3.791. Now I just have to wait until February to actually have my degree conferred. We are moving closer to adoping Z and K, and I can't wait to share photos of them with the world. Z saw Star Wars for the first time last night - he started it once before and fell asleep as we'd started it too late at night. He loved it, and wants to see it again. I am *so* trying to score him the toddler Millennium Falcon now... K is now W A L K I N G. It's amazing how quickly they grow. And also amazing all those "dad" moments I've gotten lately just playing and spending time with the kiddos. I'm halfway through my weight loss, havign lost 38lbs and having another 38 or so to go to hit my TXSG height/weight. After that, I'm trying to knock out another 17lbs or so to hit an even 200. Also, for the first time in four years, I'm no longer the lead game master for the Royal Dragoon Guards. That's right, I did not seek re-election as Battalion Commander instead opting for the top player spot, Company Commander. I'm now the lead player, and letting Bobby Dean GM for a while. Six months, at least. If he doesn't suck, and he won't, we'll see if he runs for another six.
OK, gaming. Well, first of all, since I'm not currently enrolled in any college courses for the first time in two years, I can put together a regular game session. Since the Royal Dragoons are a major sci-fi campaign and Bobby runs an occasional Star Wars game, I decided to do something fantasy-based with my game. I also wanted some folks I don't usually game with. I got both wishes, having created a D&D Essentials group with two players I don't normally game with, and one who I usually only game with at RDG. Randi and Bobby round out the group.
I know, I know. Why 4e Essentials? You guys know I'm a grognard, and that my desert island book is the Basic D&D Rules Cyclopedia (I even had Aaron Allston sign mine.) You know I've run AD&D 1e using Rules As Written. (We never even played it that way back in the 80s.) You know I regularly re-read and occasionally 1-shot things like Marvel FASERIP, Star Frontiers, Melee/Wizard, Car Wars, Gangbusters, Top Secret/S.I.... so why in the name of all that's holy did I decide to run a game using what is largely considered to be the least D&D of the D&D games?
Basic answer? Because I've never done it before. Sure, I've run Essentials when I used to DM D&D Encounters at Rogue's Gallery. That was a cycle of modules that covered levels 1-3 over and over again every few months. I've never dreamed up my own campaign and run it "in the wild" for a group. I wanted to give this a shot before deciding that the Old School was the Only School. One of my players in particular is giving me a lot of gas about running 4th Edition, claiming that all the rules get in the way of the story. Well, time will tell - and after two game sessions, it's already started to. The GM and the Players are what makes story happen, not the rules. But more on that later.
I'm going to lead off with why I hated 4e at first, and what caused me to decide to give it another try in its D&D Essentials incarnation. Part of my problem was that the game dictated HOW to run D&D to its Dungeon Masters. Thou shalt have five players. Thou shalt bludgeon them with roles and party balance. Thou shalt hand out this much treasure and no more. It shall take this long to level, and encounters should be balanced to party level. Oh, all your players really should be the same level or the math breaks... Stuff like that. On the player side, I didn't like martial classes playing like spellcasting classes. Also - since 3E the game has really encouraged the use of a battle map and counters or minis. I never used minis much in older editions - which is to say at all, except to mark marching order. I didn't hate the idea... just didn't like the more-or-less requirement. 4e made that even more mandatory with powers that relied on relative placement of combatants. Do not want, really.
Well, with Essentials came a new take on 4e. If it constituted 4.5 is a discussion for another time, but gone were things that just tweaked me off. Martial daily powers? Gone. Martial marks? Gone. In their place were stances, which made perfect sense, and defender auras, which also made a lot of sense. Something about the Essentials builds just felt more D&D to me. I tried playing a Warpriest, and lo and behold I felt like a badass Cleric from the days of old save for the turning ability. I could fight, heal and move all in the same round. Maybe this wasn't so bad after all...
So I decided to get into the D&D Encounters scene and stayed there for over a year. I really started to enjoy the game, and the playstyle. I realized that there was a good game under the hood of 4e... it just wasn't what I called Dungeons and Dragons. And that's OK. So I started planning to run my own campaign to test some of my assumptions... and got back into college, and got my two awesome foster kids. Gaming went on hold except for the RDG commitment. So here we are, and I'm getting this Essentials game going - so what do I like about it? Strangely, some of the things I hated when I had it mentally tagged as D&D.
First and most obvious - the battle map and map-based combat. This game, unlike the versions of D&D I prefer, requires them. Powers are written in bursts and blasts and ranges and adjacent and aura and you really, REALLY need a map to make them work. The powers are so much a part of each character that you risk really bringing the game engine crashing down on you if you just try to fudge it. I used to see that as a bug in my normally narrarative style dungeon mastering. What I needed to do was look at the way it played on its own merits, not as a replacement for my beloved BD&D and AD&D. Okay, so what does the system do? It's a tactical combat system in which each class has its role to play and each character potentially has a completely different set of strengths, weaknesses and abilities to bolster the party as a whole. I used to hate that Fighters were now referred to as "Defenders" and expected to be meat shields... but that's just codifying the way low-level mages hid behind the fighters anyway, isn't it? In fact, the Defender Aura makes them better at it than old-school D&D fighters were in a way. I also liked that spellcasters never ran completely out of spell juice. I loved playing Magic-Users in BD&D, but damned if it wasn't annoying to be out of spells... and that happened a LOT at low levels. In the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, Venger never ran out of those cool magical bolts...
OK, so looking at the way the game PLAYS, the PCs have to have a sense of their own abilities and those of their allies. They have to learn to use those abilities together to accomplish goals in combat. It's... tactical. Hey, wait- I love tactical. It's no different from the way we obsess over BattleMechs in Battletech and their capabilities and how they work together and separately and how best to employ them and how NEVER to employ them. So... my favorite part of Battletech can become part of my fantasy games. OK, I can dig this. It also reminds me of the great XBox game "Gladius" and Final Fantasy Tactics. I had always listened to people rail against 4e saying that it was too much like a video game, or an MMO. Thing is - I'm beginning to see that as a feature of this particular game.
Is it what I want out of all of my D&D? Negative, ghostrider. Does it work for this campaign? It's seeming to.
What I mean by that is I've begun to write this campaign as if I was writing a classic 8-Bit RPG. The enforced pacing I had hated so much in the DMG was now my ally. I could use that pacing in writing the campaign arc - since it took X number of encounters to go up a level, and encounters were figured as level-appropriate... So this means that I can now plan the pace of the game based on those assumptions. The ability to reskin 4e monsters is pretty cool, too. I've already decided that I'm going to include some creatures my players won't expect - like Oktoroks and Leevers.
We have played two sessions, and tonight is a third. I'll blog more about this game after that session, as I think three sessions is enough to get a feel for where this is going and if it's working or not. Right now, I'm cautiously saying it's working well - even my staunchest 4e hater is having a blast...
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