Welcome to December...

  Wow.  I can't believe Thanksgiving is behind us and the New Year is just ahead.  I can see by my post count my resolution to post weekly went right out the window long about the start of my MA program... along with my regular trips to the gym.

  I feel like I've got a polite invisible assistant standing over my shoulder most of the time these days whispering "remember, thou art mortal" all the time.  I've finally caved and admitted to myself and my therapist that yes, Virginia, I've got an actual problem with stress and anxiety.  I've been on anxiety meds since October-ish and I couldn't begin to tell you if they're helping.  Too much going on. 

  The holidays are rough this year.  I've still got schoolwork due each week, including the week of Christmas, so there's no letting off the gas.  I keep telling myself, if I can just make it to 1 March 2015, I'm good.  That's when all my MA work should be done, and I can start looking for adjunct hours and turning this academic slog into income.  My wife and a few others are trying to talk me into a Ph.D. program... but one thing at a time.  I'm nearly insane as it is, and I'm not doing any one thing especially well.

  So, let's talk about stuff that makes me happy.  Like gaming.  Gaming makes me happy.  Bobby and I spent some time a couple of weekends ago putting some more work into our version of MechWarrior.  The file dates on our draft copies showed me that we've been working on this project for over a year.  That makes me feel frustrated, as I know we should have had something more than a few Word documents to show for our work by now - but then I remember all the other plates I'm spinning and it all begins to make sense.  Family, Job, School, in that order.  Then Guard, then gaming.

  I seriously considered resigning from the Guard.  In fact, I consider it almost every day.  I worked so damn hard to get into the Guard, but sometimes it just seems like one more thing I have to do that I'm not particularly enjoying anymore.  I can't go too much into it, but I'm not on track with my weight loss anymore, and the duties I have been assigned are too much like what I do in the civilian world.  I know I have talents in the area in which I am being asked to work - but it wasn't what I had wanted to do as a soldier.  Needs of the service, I suppose.  At this point, I'm staying in my unit for my comrades who supported me in my struggle to swear in.  I'm staying in because hell, I just got here, and I want to do something significant before I get out.  I'm staying in because I'm to embarrassed not to.

  OK, so gaming.  We've got our character generation rules locked down, more or less.  What we're working on now is the back end stuff - we're borrowing Pendragon's concept of a "Winter phase" between campaigns.  I like the idea of the MechWarriors going back to their holdings and taking care of the business of being knights/nobility since that was a trope of the original MechWarrior material.

TO BE CONTINUED.

FASA Trek - A Return To Yesterday

  It's 1987, and I'm in the seventh grade at Chisholm Trail Middle School in Round Rock, Texas.  This school and the friends I had there are responsible for putting me on the path to being an unrepentant gamer for the rest of my life.  From my first D&D books in 1986 to my rapid acquisition of FASA's Star Trek : The Roleplaying Game and Robotech from Palladium, it's just gone nuts from there.  I stopped counting my book and game collection when I got over 1,000 books.  Now, this counts multiple copies and things like 32-page adventure modules and GM screens, but it's still about 70 shelf-feet of "active" library of books in my game room, with 60 shelf-feet of games and that's not touching the archive boxes.  But I digress.

  I've been a Star Trek fan as long as I can remember.  Somewhere, out there, my mom has a picture of toddler me in a Mr. Spock t-shirt - like, a small Trek uniform with stripes on the cuffs and the arrowhead insignia on the breast.  Like every other child born in the mid-70s, I had Star Wars figures.  A lot of Star Wars figures.  That said, one of my favorite toys (until my uncle Jon sat on it) was a Star Trek : The Motion Picture Enterprise toy that made sounds and could be taken apart and converted into several different re-arrangements of hulls and nacelles.  My Mammaw (East Texas for "Paternal Grandmother) hand-embroidered an Engineering arrowhead on a sweat shirt that I wore as a uniform shirt throughout middle school.  I was a huge Trek nerd.   I had the story records and comics - you know, the ones where Sulu is black and Uhura is a blonde?  I had the films on VHS, I watched the TOS re-runs every afternoon after school.  As an aside, did anyone ever notice that if Star Trek was shown in another TV show or movie the episode being shown was always "Spock's Brain?"  Also - my personal experience growing up was that if I ever missed TOS re-runs, or if I happened to tune in in another town, the episode being shown was ALWAYS either "Devil in the Dark" or "The Apple."

  Enter the two Trekker bibles of my youth.  Now, being born in 1975 I remember a time when Star Trek was just Star Trek.  There was no TNG, DS9, VOY or Enterprise and certainly no Abrams reboot.  Up until I was in Middle School, there was naught but the original series and Treks up to Search for Spock.  The Voyage Home came out my sixth grade year.  In those days, there was a rabid and prolific fan publication community.  Problem was, this was pre-Internet, dear readers, and a kid like me had no way of knowing what was out there.  I received as a gift a copy of the Star Fleet Technical Manual

  This book opened my imagination in a way that I'm not sure a book had before.  Sure, by that time I'd read "The Hobbit" and played D&D and was well on my way to being the creative mess I am today- but Star Trek was something that I had grown up with, something that I identified with and that held a great deal of fascination for me.  Inside the cover of this plastic-bound tome I found a wealth of brain fodder from the fonts used in the show to the Articles of Federation to the actual rank and insignia charts to patterns for the uniforms.  There were schematics of phasers and tricorders and the flags of Epsilon Eridanii and... more ships!  In the original Star Trek we only see Constitution-class ships like the Enterprise.  Here we were introduced to the Scout, the Destroyer, the Transport/Tug and the mighty Dreadnought.  I felt a bit like the culture from "A Piece of the Action" that read Chicago Mobs of the Twenties and decided to live their lives the way the book told them to.  Like the Iotians, I was, shall we say, imitative.  We founded our first Star Trek club at Chisholm Trail.  We forged passes into the Apple II-equipped computer lab to used Bank Street Writer to make crude manuals and schematics of starships.  We started to devour everything we could about Star Trek - and I was the ringleader.  Enter Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise by Shane Johnson.  Now we're talking!

  "Scotty's Guide" was a book done to illustrate all the changes made to the Enterprise in Star Trek : The Motion Picture and it was a more modern, more information-filled book than the original Technical Manual.  There was a lot of explanatory text that filled in the universe with so much detail I couldn't help but memorize most of the book.  What engine company produced the warp nacelles for the refit Enterprise?  Why, those are FWG-1 pattern warp drives by Leeding Engines, Ltd.  and the Enterprise was the first ship to mount them.  Little did I know that a lot of Mr. Johnson's writing would become apocryphal in later years since Paramount basically ignored anything that was never shown on screen.  The nice thing is that Mr. Johnson had used the otherwise excellent Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology to make sure at least his publication jived with other popular fan publications.  I wouldn't see the Spaceflight Chronology for many years, but reading it now I can see that not only did fandom take a huge cues from this book, but FASA's Star Trek Roleplaying Game used it as the basis of their timeline and technology.  Scotty's Guide told us what was available from the food synthesizer units, where the lifeboats were, that there WERE lifeboats, how the decks were numbered, etc.

  So there we were, Star Trek geeks just exposed to role-playing through Dungeons and Dragons (Mentzer Red Box and Blue Box, naturally) and being told there was a Star Trek Roleplaying game!  By the time I'd gotten my hands on the FASA-Trek basic boxed set, I had played D&D, AD&D, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Gamma World and a few other games.  Star Trek was the first game I played that resonated with me on a "realistic" level - I know, I know.  Marvel and Robotech were based on cartoons.  D&D, Traveller, Gamma World - great games, but not based on something I'd been steeped in forever.  I hadn't yet found West End's Star Wars RPG - but I would in 1989 and it would change the way I looked at game rules.  Anyway, here was Trek.  It used a percentage dice system that seemed sharp and "scientific."  It had a life path method of creating a character - by the time my Science Officer was ready for play I knew how he did at the Academy, what missions he had been on before now (Colonial Operations?  Yawn.) and what skills he had.  I could even compare his skill ratings to the classic Trek crew.  The Cadet's Orientation Sourcebook filled in even more information about the Star Trek universe for myself and my friends.  We took it for gospel, married to Scotty's Guide and the Black Book.  From this trio of sources we started our Star Trek adventures.  The Game Operations Manual had rules for generating planets and missions - and when we saw in Starlog and Dragon magazines that there was a ship combat game, I saved up my money and went to King's Hobby and bought it.  Now we were cooking with gas!  The FASA ship combat game came with rules for using your RPG characters to run your ship in combat!  Holy crap!  Now, by this time we were playing MechWarrior First Edition so the idea of an integrated combat game and RPG wasn't groundbreaking to us - but this was STAR TREK!  The Deluxe Boxed Set even came with "consoles" designed so that you could lay them in front of your players and have each player move chits on the console to track damage, power, weapons fire, casualties...  It was the closest thing to a live-action RPG I had ever done at the time.  And it was wonderful.

  Just two weeks ago, some of my friends from the Starship Texas club decided we wanted to play some Trek.  Now, the club has fully endorsed Savage Worlds as our universal game engine of choice, and I've even made a custom SW character sheet with our ship's logo on it.  Something called to me from the boxed set shelf, and I turned to see the FASA Trek goodness staring back at me.  Yes, it had to be done.  Thus were the voyages of the TOS-era Starship Texas begun by myself along with Jim Cook - who had been there at Chisholm Trail Middle School when it all began.  With us we had Quinn Bratteng, Tony Walker and Cody Wyatt - who hadn't been born yet or were wee lads when our adventures began.  We created a crew of stalwart adventurers in Gold, Blue and Red who each had histories and backgrounds that would form the core of future stories.  Jim and Tony even came up with a plot hook based on their both having rolled randomly and found that each of their characters had just come off a 5-year tour on a Constitution-class starship.  Was it the same ship?  Did they know each other?  Turns out they were two of the only five survivors of the mysterious destruction of U.S.S. Hornet - a plot point we will explore as the game goes on.  Our Vulcan science officer studies Vulcan martial arts in the hopes that the centering it brings will help him toward the achievement of Kohlinar.  Our half-Vulcan security chief is a Chief Petty Officer who served against the Klingons in the Four Years War.

  The adventure thus far has been everything I had hoped for - as it turns out, you can sorta go home again.  I say "sorta" because with 27 years of gaming experience under my belt, I know the FASA system is clunky by modern standards.  I've already started the house rules.  In fact, I've got an 11-page document revamping character creation to include enlisted characters, and people who direct-commission from civilian life due to holding degrees in law, medicine or engineering.  But screw the rules problems - what about the GAME?  The Story?  Well - it was GREAT.  The crew of the Texas take her out of spacedock after an EoSL (extension of service life) refit for her post-refit shakedown, and find themselves stranded on the wrong side of the Klingon border without warp power.  For the first time in decades I had a crew who played Star Trek like Star Trek - and not McHale's Navy In Spaaaaaace.  We had a blast.  People played in character and acted as one would expect a character from TOS to act.  We even had TOS morals and tropes going on that I'd not have imagined this bunch to grok (aside from my fellow grognard Jim.)

  Those of you that follow me know I struggle with stress, depression and overcommitment to my way-too-busy life and that gaming is the one thing besides playing with my kids that really helps me calm down.  Even gaming lately has become more labor than love - and I've thought more than once about cancelling what little gaming I get to do here and there to try and reboot my brain.  I was starting to lament ever really "getting into" a game again.  In the last two weeks I've been reintroduced to two of the games that were absolutely seminal to my appreciation of the hobby - FASA's Star Trek and WEG's Star Wars.  Thanks to the Starship Texas group and my Wednesday irregulars...  I've gotten my groove back as it were.  I've been gaming for the sheer enjoyment of gaming, rather than because I'm committed to running a game for people.  Too often I carve out precious schedule time to run a game because I feel required to do it to entertain my friends, but then stress out over the game in the exact opposite effect of the one I'm trying to fix.  FASA Trek has helped me find the parts of my brain that absolutely love Star Trek and gaming.  And it looks like I'm going to be able to keep doing both, at least once a month when the Starship Texas meets.

Live Long and Prosper!


 
 

The Battletech Stew Continues to Simmer...

  Well, I blew it.  Missed a whole month of posting.  In my defense, Work + Grad School + Parenthood + State Guard = OneTiredOldDragoon.  I could go on about life, but hey, you guys have Geek Dad for that, right?  I continue to burn myself out on all of the above while trying desperately to relax here and there.  It ain't easy.  I can't turn my worry off.  So... when I can ponder gaming, what am I pondering?

  Well, as everyone has seen before in this blog, I love gaming of all types but I have a particular love of Battletech and the wonderful universe that has been created to go along with it.  Specifically, I love what has come to be called "Mad Max" Battletech - the Third Succession War and thereabouts.  Your 'Mech is an heirloom over a century old, repair parts get fought over, battles are almost ritualistic and MechWarriors are knights and nobility by virtue of owning a 'Mech, and the whole thing feels like A Game of Thrones with giant robots.  Or Dune with giant robots.  Or both.  With a side of Thunderdome.

  I've searched long and hard for the "perfect" Battletech.  I keep coming to different conclusions, mostly because different ways of playing fit different styles of story.  The ultra-crunchy Solaris VII rules are great for duels between warriors on The Game World, but would make for ridiclously slow play at the company level or above.  Standard Battletech grinds at company level, but runs fairly smooth in lance-on-lance engagements.  The new Alpha Strike game could do battalion-level engagements with ease, but loses some of the detail and crunch a lot of Battletech players love.  Each has its own applicability.  Add on top of this the question of what RPG system to use...  you've got a good little gaming conundrum.  MechWarrior 1e had the atmosphere, but a bit of a clunky system.  2e had math that was easily broken at character creation, but was otherwise easy to run and easy to learn.  3e had wonderful lifepath options, but a hideously overcomplex skill-points-to-skill-bonus mechanic on top of a 2D10 resolution system that was not immediately compatible with Battletech.

  The other night it occurred to me...  Something I'd love to try for a campaign.  Bear with me.  So, Stars Without Number uses a d20 task resolution but with 2d6 skill rolls, with skills starting at 0 and each level representing a great amount of improvement over the last, yes?  OK.  Adventurer, Conqueror, King has a chart for figuring out where in the grand scheme of things your class level places you.  Alpha Stike (and Battletech) have benchmarks for skills for the average MechWarriors at Green, Regular, Veteran, Elite, etc....

  So...  Use SWN as a base.  Use the level equivalencies from ACKS.  Use Alpha Stike as your 'Mech combat engine.  Voila...  A fast-playing, old-school-feeling Battletech roleplaying game that does not require a spreadsheet for character creation (A Time of War, I'm looking at YOU) and has a simple enough 'Mech combat to be dropped in on a whim just like a random encounter might be in old school D&D.  You can get your 'Mech on without devoting a whole day to a large battle...

  Will I ever get to try this?  I'm not sure.  Bobby Dean and I have written a perfectly usable version of MechWarrior grafting what we liked about 1e and 2e together into a single game and adding our own touches.  We still need to playtest it.  This was just something I was thinking about when trying to sleep the other night...

The Old Dragoon Revisits - SHADOWRUN FIRST EDITION

  Shadowrun First Edition - my first delve into genre-mashing goodness.  So, do I view it through rose-colored mirrorshades?  Let's find out together.

  I remember when I first laid eyes on Shadowrun in early 1990.  Schoolmate of mine sold me a stack of Shadowrun books he'd gotten and decided he didn't really want.  BRAND NEW ONES.  I scored the corebook, the Street Sam Catalog, and a couple of the early modules- I wanna say DNA/DOA and Mercurial.  There is something about this game that keeps me coming back.  There is a wonderful alchemy going in in Shadowrun, an arcane alloy made of artwork (Laubenstein, Bradstreet and others with cover by ELMORE) setting and unique rules.  Put them all together and you get something quite unlike anything I'd ever held in my hands. 

  Opening the book, the first thing that presents itself is a map of Seattle - on my copy I've got notations from some of my players from the early 90s who put their safehouses and apartments on the map.  The Renraku Arcology and the Aztechnology Pyramid are quite notable on the map.  The next page shows the classic Shadowrun logo with the ram skull, above which is a piece of Meso-American-inspired art.  This is where it starts getting REALLY cool.
 
  The introductory fiction "A Night On The Town" really, REALLY gets the setting into focus quickly.  Even better, it's directly tied into the cover art, which is a lot less usual than you'd think.  "And So It Came To Pass" has to be one of my favorite data dumps to bring people up to date with the world as it stands in the Shadowrun universe.  Now, here's where things get a little odd for some people living in 2013- this was written back in the late 80s, using late 80s assumptions for what technology would look like going forward.  Bear that in mind when you see things like telecoms that stay at your house, or 500-nuyen mobile phones that just make phone calls.  I usually deal with this by telling my players this world took a vastly different technological path post-1980s, and that just because we have something now doesn't necessarily mean we have it in Shadowrun.  The Shadowrun tech is at the same time more advanced, and less than what we currently have- and I'm OK with that.  I have often said that I like my Cyberpunk 20 minutes into the future of 1987, and that's the way I'll continue to GM it.  Moving on.

  OK, so there's not really enough of a Native American population left to pull off what happens in the history section.  I'm good with fudging that, because I like the implication that the Amerind peoples (of which I have 1/4 blood myself) get to stick it to whitey in a pretty epic way.  I used to think about how unrealistic corporate extraterritoriality was, and the huge corp influence on government, and the idea of completely electronic commerce, and putting all your important data on a worldwide computer network so it could be hacked, and... wait... we're living it?  Never mind.  Perhaps not ALL of Shadowrun is that far-fetched.  Just the parts about spellcasters and elves.

  In the Game Concepts section we look at the rules.  And what rules they are!  At the time, the only dice pool game I could say I'd played was really Star Wars D6 from West End Games (and it's parent game, Ghostbusters.)  In those games a player rolls the entire dice pool and adds the values all together.  Shadowrun was the first game I'd seen to have the individual dice checked for success and failure.  We'd see this again in '91 with Vampire: The Masquerade with d10s.  So, first dice pool system.  Also, first system I'd played with what has come to be called 'exploding' dice.  Roll a 6 on a d6, and roll another one and add them together.  That was new at this point as well.  Compare the successes to what is needed, or to the successes of the opposing character, and you're golden.  Not nearly as complex as it looked at first- but there are some strange mathematical issues.  The most glaring example is that there's no functional difference between a target number of 6 and one of 7.  If you roll a 6, you've already got the 7 if the second d6 comes up a 1. 
  Another strange mechanical issue is that armor counts as free successes against damage.  In Shadowrun, weapons do a set amount of damage, with that damage becoming more severe if you rolled extra successes and less severe if the target makes a good dodge or body roll to resist the damage.  This was called 'staging' the damage up or down.  Weapons had various staging numbers (this was set permanently at 2 in Shadowrun 2nd Edition) with the lower numbers representing a weapon that varied in damage more often, and higher numbers representing a weapon that usually did its normal damage.  The 3L1 Tiffani Self-Defender only needed 1 success to stage the damage either way, but the Ares MP Laser's staging of 8 (!!) meant it was nearly always possible to hurt someone with an MP Laser, but next to impossible to kill them.
  While we're discussing rules strangeness, note that the entire combat section of this game is 11 pages.  This is VASTLY smaller than the rules in later editions.  I'm not sure if this is good or bad - but I lean toward good as I come from the Basic D&D school of Game Mastering - if there's not a rule, make it up.  And I prefer not to have to look up zillions of rules.  Games like D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder try to cover all the bases, but in some ways they hem players in by explicitly ruling what they can do with the implication that anything not covered by the rules is off-limits.  In the old days, we made it up as we went, and had a fine time.  A good example of this is 2-weapon shooting.  One of my players has to go all John Woo every damn time she plays Shadowrun.  I couldn't find the rule for it in SR1 when we played our retro-game, so I just made up a rule.  The rule in SR2 is present, but VERY restrictive to the shooter, who takes a TN penalty on top of losing any benefit of smartgun or smartgoggle interface.  This just seems... off... in a game that has a reputation for high-action gunfights.  The system handles Orcs and fireballs, it can't really say it's going for hyper-realism.  So... rulings, not rules.

  OK, so I've gotten on a rules track and skipped character gen.  Let's finish covering the rules, and then we'll talk about characters.

  Magic.  OK, this section is a glorious mess.  I'm still not sure I grok all of it, since most players I've had for the last 23 years NEVER go astral, summon anything, or enchant anything.  In fact, few of them make use of talismans or fetishes, most of them just go D&D-style flash-bang on their magic.  In this version of Shadowrun, your Sorcery skill gives you magic pool, but it's the force of the spell that really has an effect on the outcome of the spell.  Magic can be quite overpowering in this version of Shadowrun if you're not careful- especially the mana-based magic.  Shadowrun NPCs (and some players) had a habit of having mediochre Willpower stats in favor of more directly combat-oriented applications.  This meant mana-based magic would drop them like they were punched by George Foreman.  Brutal, and not a whole lot to do for it, except for the REALLY effective spell defense rules in 1e, where the mage can lend Magic Pool dice to the entire party for spell defense.  This is why you geek the mage first!

  The Matrix.  Another glorious mess.  I don't think I've EVER played the Matrix rules as written, but it's a goal of mine to do so someday just to see how it would flow.  Most of the time, I have players that don't bother playing anything but street samurai, riggers, and combat mages.  Nobody wants to bother with the complexity of the decker, and it's just that complexity that I, as a a player loved.  Which programs do I load into memory?  Can I swap them fast enough to get the job done and get out?  How long will it take me to design and cook new chips to make my deck more badass?  Nope, most players just want to shoot stuff.  Oh, well.  The decking rules use the concept of the Cyberdeck as a container into which the programs fit.  Programs are like skills or weapons for the Decker to use in the Matrix, and the deck itself can be enhanced with response increase, more memory, more storage, etc.  It's sort of a sub-game within Shadowrun that I was very fond of - but many people aren't.  This is because once the decker goes full VR, it's kind of a solo-show for the Decker while the other players take a bathroom break or go get pizza.  Shadowrun 4 and 5 try to mitigate this through various means, but for some reason wireless matrix and augmented reality feel too much like real-world tech and not enough like Shadowrun to me.

  OK, character creation.  One of the things I loved about Shadowrun was the priority character gen system.  Most, if not ALL of the games I'd played up until that point were random-generation games.  D&D, Traveller, Marvel, etc.  I'd not gotten too far into GURPS or anything like that yet, so the idea of allocating priorities and points was pretty darn cool.  I liked the concept.  In practice, metahumans kinda got boned.  Ever notice how low the attrivute scores were for most of the pre-gen metahumans?  I mean, the Elven Decker pre-gen had a Charisma of 3 and a Body and Strength of 2?  Better buy some armor, Chummer, and hope you're not the party face, despite being an elf...  One of the wonkier things in Shadowrun 1e and 2e was the ability to put top priority into gear/cyber/stuff and get a cool MILLION nuyen to spend.  I've yet to see someone spend that much scratch elegantly.  You usually end up either trying to buy a single, REALLY hot piece of deltaware and eating most of it, or ending up with a chunk left over that isn't enough for anything super-awesome but is still somewhere around 200k nuyen, because by the time you've spent 800k what do you really need?

  Ah, the gear.  Iconic stuff in there.  The Ares Predator (the Robocop gun)... The Colt American L36 (the Battletech gun)...  The Panther Assault Cannon (Don't be a troll without one!)...  I will note that the choice between the Harley Scorpion and the Yamaha Rapier was pretty much a telltale of what kind of player you were.  Also - the Dodge Scoot.  For Deckers who spend too much of their starting scratch on decking stuff.

  CRITTERS!  This part of Shadowrun, much like the Native American themes, are woefully underused in the more modern versions.  Awakened creatures really do help establish the feel of the world.  I mean, it's not just people who have been born dwarves and elves or goblinized into trolls and orks.  There's dragons, and phoenixes, and sasquatches... sasquatchi... yetis.  All sorts of stuff just in the corebook, not to mention the excellent Paranormal Animals of Europe/North America books.

  So it it just nostalgia?  Well, I don't really think so.  Last night I ran part one of a two-shot of Queen Euphoria for my group of people who have never played SR1 before.  We have a Decker, a Former Wage Mage (Healer), a Street Samurai and a Former Company Man.  We've done a bit of Matrix, a bit of combat, and a tiny bit of magic.  So far, the rules have held up.  Nothing has come out as overtly broken, and we've had a hell of a time.  The players carried out a classic Shadowrun-esque extraction of Euphoria in her penthouse through disguise, skullduggery, hacking, seduction, bushwacking with a Narcoject pistol...  Everything's been pretty smooth so far.  Did I fudge the decking?  A bit, yeah.  But then, I did that back in The Day.  Did anyone actually PLAY AD&D 1e initiative as written?  Nobody I know- so no foul.  I'll know more when we go back tonight to finish up the adventure.

  Variable weapon staging might be a little confusing, but to be honest the players have kept combat to a minimum to get the job done, get in and get out without attracting undue attention.  They even managed to talk their way into and out of some potentially shooty situations- unlike most Shadowrunners who don't know how to do a job all quiet-like.  We'll see where the night takes us - but so far I'm pretty damn happy with my pink mohawk and mirrorshades.  See you twenty minutes into the future of 1987, chummers.
 

What is best in life?

  This is sort of a gaming post, and sort of a life post.  See, for me, one has a lot to do with the other.  I have recently come to the conclusion that everyone I've talked to over the last two to three years has been correct where I've been telling them they're way off-base.  People have been telling me that the amount of stuff on my proverbial plate is bordering on insane, and that I need to slow down.  Feh, says I, that's talk for the lazy and the uncommitted.  Only folks with no drive or ambition or passion talk that way.  I can handle this load - and more - if necessary and I'm a better man for it.

  Well, maybe not.  I've maintained a pace for a long time that I didn't give a second thought to.  My ever-enduring wife pointed out to me last night that in a given calendar month, I've got maybe two days that aren't already committed to something.  Now, some of those things are my familial responsiblities.  I make sure I make time for my kids.  I'm no longer the new dad who's scared to death of being left alone with the kids.  I love spending time with Zane and Kaylee - we have a blast.  Being a dad is, without exaggeration, the most amazing thing I've accomplished in my life.  So add to that my 40-hour-a-week job as a senior computer technician.  Then my duties as a soldier in the Texas State Guard.  Then add my graduate studies, I am enrolled full-time in my MA program.  Now, to ice this cake, there's the time I spend in recreation which is - you guessed it - pre-planned and on the calendar.  Oh, plus every two weeks I get to see my therapist.

  It's only recently that I've come to admit to myself that I've got a lot of stuff going on.  A LOT of stuff.  Like, to the point that I really don't have much time to call my own.  The obvious answer is to cut out the hobbies - two Saturdays a month, plus Wednesday nights.  Problem is, these times are what keep me sane.  I no longer watch TV, not because I disdain the medium or think there isn't anything to watch- but because I always know I have something more important to do.  If something is on TV it's because Zane or Kaylee or Mary wants to watch it.  When was the last time I sat down to a classic SNL episode?  Or Night Court?  Or Cheers?  The things that help me calm down and center?  I really can't remember.  Now, I did recently watch the first two seasons of A Game of Thrones with Mary over the course of a few weeks - we'd watch an episode or two after the kids went to sleep.  I can't believe I've missed out on that show as much as I have.  But every time I sit down, I always tell myself there's coursework or bills or FEMA exams that I have to do and never really relax.

  Even my hobbies have work.  We've built an amazing wargaming club.  I mean amazing.  The RDG is something I'm very proud of - but the amount of work and emotional investment that goes into it is not inconsequential.  Some of it is just frustrating.  All our members are adults - well, most of them.  We do have some 16-17 year olds.  We put out our meetings in email, Facebook and text messages.  We still have people who can't be bothered to know when meetings are.  Then we have folks that saunter in thirty minutes to an hour late.  It's FRUSTRATING. What's worse is folks who KNOW we only meet for 1.5 hours before we go on lunch break - and they're late because the STOPPED FOR FOOD.  Seriously, 1030 is not too early to ask friggin adults to be up, dressed, fed, and at the meeting.

  Why am I rabid about this?  Because I devote quite a bit of time to making it happen.  Bobby, Trenton and I give up two Monday nights a month to plan to the two Saturdays a month.  It's frustrating when, like this past weekend, we plan out games that we don't have the attendance to run.  With Facebook, GroupSpaces and the friggin phone one would think responsible adults could be counted on to RSVP by at least the Wednesday preceding each meeting.  My time is precious to me - and I don't mind giving some of it to plan the events that make my friends happy and increase our group's fun time.  I mean, one of the things that I've identified that makes me happiest is running a good game, so this should be all good.  Problem is, either the players don't care enough or aren't mature enough or don't respect me, Bobby and Trenton's work enough to care to RSVP, show up on time, or show up at all.

  THAT.  SUCKS.  I mean it really, really sucks.  These are my friends.  Some of them are the closest friends I have.  We game together, we consider each other family, some of us soldier together.  I'm talking about godparents to my kids.  Young adults who were like kids to Mary and I as they grew up.  GOOD friends.  Every time I get "Oh, I guess I didn't see the 167 messages about the meeting" or "I got drunk and overslept" or have someone sauntering in with a McDonald's bag fifteen friggin minutes before lunch break...  It's like my good friends are winding up and giving me a huge, John Bigboote finger. It pisses me off, makes me wonder if they know how much work goes into running the club, planning the games, etc. and if they even respect the work their elected club staff does to keep the game going.

  This is kinda like my duties in the Guard.  I've been given the responsibility to publish the battalion's quarterly newsletter.  I've asked my fellow soldiers for photos, submissions, etc.  I've gotten precisely one article.  From a soldier who's leaving the battalion.  AARRGGH.

  What is best in life?  I quote Conan because last night my therapist asked me to close my eyes and tell her what makes me feel calm, restful.  Only two things came to mind.  Playing with my kids, and gaming.  Specifically, sitting in my game room, at the head of my big, battered heirloom table and running a game for fun with a small group of close friends. 

  What bothers me about that is that when I closed my eyes and thought about calm, I didn't think of sex, or soldiering, or video games, or the Royal Dragoons, or any of the things that I would have thought would be up there in the top ten list of stuff that calms me down and makes me feel relaxed.  I immediately thought of playing with Zane and Kaylee, spending time with them just... playing.  Zane's "I didn't do it" smile, Kaylee's bright eyes and Eskimo kisses.  Gets me right there.

  Gaming.  And by this I'm specifically not referring to the type of gaming I've been doing for almost two decades now.  Mass-gaming.  Entertain the club gaming.  Entertain many players gaming.  Huge groups, double-digits of players.  Entertain my friends.  I'm telling you, what sends me to my happy place is sitting around the table in my house with close friends running games I love.  Red Box D&D.  Robotech.  Marvel FASERIP.  Maybe have some snacks.  Maybe music - on vinyl, perhaps.  Just... game.  Relax.  Tell stories.  Have a good time.  RELAX.

  So... I don't know what this means.  I haven't slept well in weeks, despite a new sleep study and a new CPAP machine.  My weight loss has continued to stall, even though I'm hitting the gym about 5 days a week.  This might be because the extra PT has made it very difficult for me to stick to my 1,100 calorie a day diet.  Of course, breaking my diet makes me feel guilty, and further stressed.  Which makes me screw up and break diet further.  It's a cycle.  I'm tired, I'm demoralized.  Things I used to love no longer really hold joy for me.  It kinda sucks.  A lot.

  At the moment I write this, I'm going through the motions.  I exercise and diet so that I can soldier.  I soldier because I have always wanted to soldier.  Why do I want to soldier?  Right now, at this moment, I'm not sure anymore.  Just like I'm working on my MA because I have to.  I can't NOT get my Master's.  I must get it so that I can start teaching on the side and make some extra money.  Our finances are only barely stable.  I watch our savings dwindle.  We get bills I have to fight or pay - like Medicaid refusing to pay for Kaylee's emergency room visit, or FedLoan Servicing telling me I need to start paying off my student loans now.  This is, of course, after my employer decided they won't do tuition reimbursement this year since there's not enough money in the fund to make good on it.  Now the car needs tires, and that's gonna run half a grand.

  Sorry, everybody.  I just needed to vent.  I'm tired.  I'm tired of not sleeping, I'm tired of dieting and exercising and not having it get me anywhere.  I'm tired of giving my time and effort when other folks obviously don't care - be it my friends in the RDG or my fellow soldiers who can't be bothered to contribute to the newsletter nobody will probably read.  Every waking moment is studying, working, working out...  I get to play with the kids, then they go to bed and Mary wants to relax by watching TV and all I want to do is read, and sleep.  Even sleep eludes me, after Lunesta, Ambien, Clonapin, Sonata and Rozarem.  I fight to fall asleep, then I fight to stay asleep.  It never happens.  I wake up four or five times a night - usually ravenously hungry.

  After I post this, I've gotta go to Medifast and get on the scale and have people look down their noses and tsk tsk me and see that I've either maintained or gained.  Then I have to go to drill this weekend and embarrass myself at PT.

  I need a vacation.

 

Funky Dice Mechanics - My Initial Thoughts on Star Wars : Edge of The Empire

   Greetings, programs.  Sorry it's taken me so long to get back into the posting groove.  Grad school started for me, and now I'm working on HIST500 and HIST501 trudging the expensive, reading-intensive path toward my MA in Military History.  Luckily, we used 4 and 6 July 2013 to roll some dice, this time on a new game system - Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars : Edge Of The Empire.

 This is far from my first Star Wars RPG.  My all-time favorite iteration of Star Wars has been, and at this time remains, the first edition of Star Wars D6 from West End Games.  I still find it the perfect gateway drug to get new folks into gaming - the system is quick and intuitive, the Star Wars Universe is pretty well known even to folks who are not game geeks, and the feel of the first edition material is spot-on to where I want my Star Wars to be.  From the graphic design to the in-universe advertisements to the plethora of ready-to-play character archetypes D6 is my go-to Star Wars game.  I was lukewarm on Star Wars D20, and D20 revised.  They were OK, but not quite what I was looking for.  Saga Edition was pretty sleek, but still had some issues my group had trouble dealing with - the level-based scaling being quite a bit of it.

  So here we are giving the final print version of Edge of the Empire a spin.  The book is beautiful - the illustrations are all in a wonderful full-color style that can't help but put the line art of the D6 later editions or the cartoonish art of the D20 editions to shame.  There's even a few pictures that are either Ralph McQuarrie originals or re-imaginings of them.  I nearly squee'd when I saw the early concept for the Millennium Falcon, the one that looks more like the Rebel Blockade Runner, sitting in a bay waiting for adventure.

  This game is class-based, but not level-based.  Sure their are tiers of abilities that must be purchased in a tree, like Feats in D20, but there's no strict "leveling" aside from the accrual and expenditure of Experience Points.  XP are the currency with which characters are created and improved, and aside from the Characteristics - Ability Scores for us old grognards - everything is purchased the same way after character creation as it is during character creation.  Now, this leads me to something I feel I need to point out, because our initial group missed it despite it being in bold letters on the page.  Characteristics can not be bought with XP after character generation.  They must be raised by taking a Talent that is all the way at the end of the talent tree, and appears only once on each tree.  To really crank up a Characteristic after play begins, one must invest a LOT of XP to get to that level on the tree, and if one wants another point in characteristics, one must "multi-class" and choose another specialty and climb all the way to the end of THAT tree to get a second one.  So... if you're creating a character, heed the advice that's in the bold sentence and think hard about spending most of your starting XP on Characteristics.

  Here's where the funky die mechanics come in.  So, to play EoTE without constantly referencing a table, you need their custom dice or the Star Wars Dice App from the Android or iOS app stores.  To sum but the dice mechanics, there are no target numbers - only "bad" dice in the pool you roll.  Your "good" dice come from three basic places.  Your Characteristic gives you a base set of the green "ability" dice.  So, if you have an average Characteristic of 2, you would have two of the green dice.  Now, if you have a skill of one rank in whatever skill you are rolling, you "upgrade" one of those green dice to a yellow one.  The yellow dice are twelve-sided as opposed to eight-sided, and have more positive results.  The bad dice are determined by difficulty.  Now there are situational dice, like boost dice or setback dice that can also be added.  The whole pool is rolled, and the results are tallied.

  On these custom dice are two axes of outcome.  Successes and Failures are one, and Advantage and Threat are the other.  It is possible to succeed, but have threat.  It's also possible to fail but gain advantage, and every other outcome.  Oh, there's also Triumph and Despair, but those are just extreme versions of the above better explained by the full rulebook.

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  So, the dynamics of the game rely a lot on these dice pools.  Do something cool to set up an action, and you may get to add a boost die to the pool rolled for that action.  If something unfortunate happens, it may add a setback die.  Dice are upgraded and downgraded and added or subtracted, and then the pool is rolled and all the little symbols counted - with each negative symbol cancelling out each positive symbol.  The net results inform the outcome of the die roll.  GMs are encouraged to interpret these rolls dynamically - such as you got a bunch of successes but also quite a few threats - you made your blaster shot, but now your weapon is out of ammunition!  (As an aside, I love this way of not counting ammo, it reminds me of 1st Edition D6)

  So... do I like this kind of system?  It's hard to say after one marathon session.  D6 is certainly quicker and more intuitive to most players, but by the end of our game even our most game-mechanic-impaired player was quickly grokking what was going on.  We were using the rules for trading advantage to add boost dice to our own and each other's dice pools, and having a great time.

  We have yet to do anything with starship combat or Force powers - Edge of the Empire is pretty focused on places like Tatooine and Ord Mantell and characters who are what have come to be called "fringers" - smugglers, hired guns, etc.  There's not a lot of heavy duty military hardware, and very little that is useful to you if you want to run a campaign full of Jedi.  This is by design - FFG is going to release two more corebooks, one focused on the Rebellion/Empire conflict and another on Force users.  I will say the downplay on Force users is thematically appropriate to the time period the book is covering, as well as being reminiscent of the original D6 core rules for me- published to cover the same time period because in 1987 no other time periods had really been fleshed out.

  My minor annoyances were on the amount of damage needed to get through the soak of opponent characters (DR, in D20 parlance) and do damage.  It made light and standard blaster pistols kind of mediocre weapons.  Our combats took a little too long.  We'll see what happens if and when we pick this game up again.

  May the Force be with all of you!

Top Secret - Not Just A Val Kilmer Movie

  I was once told I was not allowed to flash back to wars I was not in.  To be fair, there was a UH-1 slick involved, there was Creedence blasting from the speakers, we may as well have been in a 'Nam movie.  I bring this up because I am feeling increasingly nostalgic for a game I've never played.  In fact, until recently, I never even owned it.  I'm talking about TSR's Top Secret RPG.

  Don't get me wrong - I played the ever-livin' crap out of Top Secret/S.I. back in high school.  It still has one of my favorite game engines - simple, d100 skills, combat uses the ones die to determine hit location...  It was pretty damn cool.  I used it to do a M.A.S.K. game in the late '90s that was well received by the players.  The first car I ever bought was an '86 Nissan Pulsar - and I was gratified to find the stats for that car in the Top Secret/S.I. equipment list.  A great game that in my opinion is unappreciated.

  What I'm talking about, though, predates the "S.I." part by about seven years.  The original Top Secret RPG from 1980/81 was a single saddle-stapled volume like many other early TSR games.  It came in a boxed set like many other TSR games.  It dripped Golden Age awesome, like many other TSR games.  While flipping through Top Secret I started seeing all the things that I loved about D&D, Star Frontiers, Gamma World and Gangbusters.  Jim Holloway artwork, for one.  Rules that were all over the place, but somehow kinda made sense.  A class-level system for espionage.  Spy missions that looked suspiciously like dungeon crawls.

  I never once played the original or marginally cleaned up second edition of Top Secret.  I wasn't even a gamer until two years before Top Secret would be replaced by S.I.  Sure, I watched Cloak & Dagger with Dabney Coleman about a zillion times on HBO as a kid, so I was aware that espionage RPGs existed, but my first real dalliance with them was the Victory Games James Bond 007 RPG and GURPS Espionage.  I still refer to both books regularly when I am in an espionage mood.  Those and the Covert Operations Sourcebooks for Top Secret/S.I. (which are top-notch collections of actual Cold War events.)

  So... if I've never played this game, why do I want to play it so badly?  Why am I suddenly hyper-interested in this ancient game line that I never actually played back when it was new?  When Top Secret was published I was 6 years old, and not yet a gamer.  Perhaps I am fascinated by it for the same reason I am fascinated by so many other things - I am preoccupied with 19, 19, 1985.  I miss the 80s.  I miss the Cold War.  I miss the world I grew up in.

  I suppose this eventually happens to everyone who reaches a certain age.  I remember rolling my eyes as the old folks insisted that Lawrence Welk represented the epitome of modern music.  At the time I was listening to Huey Lewis and the News, Cyndi Lauper and The Cars.  I remember listening to tales of America under FDR, and Truman and Ike.  Just as those older folks pined for the America they grew up with, so too do I.  At least I guess.  I wish my kids could wake up on Saturday mornings and have the same experiences I did.  Cereal, a pillow and PJs, and The Smurfs, The Real Ghostbusters, hell, even Star Wars : Droids.  I have a lot of these shows on DVD.  My son and I watch Thundarr together, and the D&D cartoon.  My 2-yo daughter loves He-Man and She-Ra as much as her brother does.  I guess it's the experience of being excited to see the next new episode - not having them on-demand to devour entire series in an afternoon.  I dunno.  Damn kids.  Get off my lawn!

  Is it normal to reach a certain age and feel something is just missing from the world?  I look at all the technology that's been developed in my lifetime.  My smart phone and tablet rarely leave my side.  Just a few years ago a tablet was an expensive commodity, and now our family has three of them none of which we pad more than about $225 for. 

  With all of that, though, I still play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends.  I can't wait to teach my kids how to play tabletop games.  I still play Atari and NES with my little ones, as well.  We watch old cartoons.  I read them the books I was read as a kid - often the very same copies thanks to my mom and grandma.  I watch Cheers, and Night Court, and SNL with Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman and John Lovitz.

  So - is my sudden interest in Merle Rasmussen's roleplaying opus rooted in a nostalgia-by-association because it was published in my own sacred decade?  Is it that leafing through Top Secret I can see the bones of the Golden Age of TSR - that it just "feels" like the games I grew up loving? 

  I dunno.  I got nothin'.  I have no idea why I suddenly want to devour these books and play this game.  I just know that at the moment, everything Top Secret is fascinating to me...