This past Friday evening That Damn Punk ran a Deathwatch demo instead of our usual Shadowrun game. Deathwatch is the third installment of roleplaying in the grim world of Warhammer 40K. This time you get to play the Emperor’s elite, Space Marines. Being a Space Marine player in the table top game, I was looking forward to strapping on some Mark VII Power Armour and bringing glory to the Emperor. We each chose our marines and got down to business. The demo seemed to be fairly combat heavy but considering that one is playing a member of a Deathwatch Kill Team that is to be expected. They are not kidding about the kill part . Five marines are practically a small army in game terms. The designers of the game cleverly introduced horde rules to represent large groups, which is good because great bloody swaths were cut by the Marines. The game does epic battle quite well. There is also enough room for roleplay. The game moves fast, or at least it did for us. It was quite easy to pick up and most importantly we had a ton of fun. I look forward to the arrival of the rule book so I can really dig into this game. Assuming that there are no major changes, I can recommend giving this game a try. And if you can’t wait, then get your own copy of the demo here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=108&enmi=Deathwatch
I came across a site and it got me thinking: How can I do my part to increase membership in the RPG hobby? I ask because it certainly isn’t increasing its self.
I’m currently running a Ghostbusters game up at Pulp Fiction in Lee’s Summit, and that seems to be drawing a small amount of interest, but the game is currently at the size I’m comfortable running at. I have four players. To me this is the perfect number of players for a game. There are just enough people that I can keep the encounters interesting without being overwhelming and I can balance the face time between all of the players reasonably well. Adding new people at this point faces problems from a number of directions: character creation is somewhat time consuming if you don’t know what you’re doing with GURPS and it’s difficult to justify in game where these people are coming from or dropping off to. That’s just my game. I’m open to the idea of playing with new people (provided that someone that I know can vouch for them, but I’ll get to that in a moment.) There are other games run at the same shop that have similar issues. WDR’s Warhammer fantasy game or That Damn Punk’s Shadowrun game just don’t have any space for new people when you already have large groups of friends that want to play. It’s just human nature to go with what you know and it means that given the choice between playing with someone new and someone you already know you’re going to go with the new person most of the time. I’ve personally read a lot of horror stories on RPG forums about new people joinging this group or that and completely wrecking the game. I know that those stories are the worst cases from a self selecting group but it’s always a concern in the back of my mind.
To me the only real answer is to run an open game specifically to attract new people. Now most people might not be up to the task, either because they don’t want to recruit or don’t want to deal with the issues of teaching someone off the street how a particular system works every single game session.
I personally think that to entice people to try something they’ve never tried before it should be as familiar as possible. In terms of customers of a comics and games store who have never played RPGs the answer is really simple: superheroes. Running a Justice League style game with a boat load of pregen’ed characters and a really streamlined introduction to the rules paperclipped to the character sheet should get some people’s attention.
I’ll be posting more about this idea as it forms and solidifies.
So the other day I said that I would post my notes on what the d20 system would need in order to be “fixed.” While typing up my notes on what I considered the necessary revisions I began to think about all the work that would actually be required to transform my pages of notes into a finished revision of the system. It would require a rewrite of a few base assumptions of the system, a rewrite of basically every class in the game, a change to the balance of most of the armor and weapons, a complete rewrite of every feat in the core book and scrapping the entire magic spell and magic item system that has been core to d&d for thirty years and rewriting it from scratch.
To say I was not looking forward to the task would be understating it a bit. I decided that there was a very good reason that when I decided that I wasn’t going to play 4e d&d anymore that I only stuck with pathfinder for a while before picking up GURPS. Making the d20 system do what I feel it should do and how I think it should do it would effectively render it a completely different game. I could never advertise it to new players as “d20” or even “d20 with major house rules” because almost everything about it would be different. In the end I think it would be too much effort with too little payout to be worth it.
I still have my notes and some day I may sit down and try to hammer the system into something playable and balanced at all twenty levels, but that day is not going to be any definition of “soon.”
I’ve been playing RPGs for about eight years now. I first got into RPGs through the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons and managed to get in just late enough to that game that the first set of rule books I owned were the 3.5 core set. After that I purchased things like d20 modern, Mutants and Masterminds, and almost every supplement for d20 that I could get my hands on. So it’s pretty safe to say that I was a pretty big fan of the system back in the day.
As far back as the first game of D&D that I played I’ve noticed a few things that were a little weird, but back then I just assumed that the system had a way of dealing with them that I hadn’t noticed yet. All through the time period that I played in or ran games little issues popped up and I would just address the specific symptoms without trying to fix the underlying cause. I realized a little after the release of D&D 4e that the underlying cause is that the system was inherently borked.
The d20 system has a few major flaws (like melee centric characters essentially being reduced to meat shields and spell book caddies at higher levels to name just one) and tons upon tons of minor flaws (the built in assumption of magical equipment being a requirement at any level higher that 3) that can reduce a game to a heap of broken and counter-broken home rule patches if you attempt to fix them one issue at a time. The only solution in my mind is to rebuild the systems from the ground up.
I’ve always said that given six months in seclusion in Tibet with the Zen masters I could fix all that ails d20. I don’t actually think it’s that broken, but I do think that tearing it down and rebuilding it would be the best thing for it. For the past couple of days I’ve complied a list of notes that I think could be used to drastically improve the game. Basically it’s a collection of great suggestions, my own house rules, and some possible responses to the largest complaints of the system.
Today’s question: Is there any issue in d20 that you think should be addressed? Please note: “fighters suck” is already being worked on.
Tomorrow I’m going to put up the first part of my notes having to do with magic and how it needs to be overhauled completely.
So while at a friends house during a night of Warhammer 40k, the topic of my planned Hybrid Galaxy game came up and with it, the discussion of personal cloaking devices.
In a couple of the sources that I’m drawing heavily from a man portable fuctional cloak does exist. The Tactical Cloak from Mass Effect, the Isolation Suit from Star Trek, and the ever popular Jedi and Sith have the directly named Force Cloak. So the concept is one I would need to address regardless of any player’s desire to use the ability or not.
In my brief discussion on the subject with That Damn Punk we came to the understanding that it could be potentially balanced by running it as an either/or function of the already available personal force field. The question remained about the balance point. Because of the semi-ablative nature of the feilds, I as the Game Master, in a desire to prevent an all-ninja assualt squad situation initally suggested that when you switch from stealth to shield, it should have to build up from zero. Punk didn’t like that suggestion, his point was that if you have to make the switch, it will most likely be a situation where you need it all. In the end we reached a compromise where it would switch at half power.
In thee end it’s a really easy example to post about the back and forth that makes a good game.
