design & development » UnderDiscussion

Children of the Gods: Scion Farm Leagues

Apr 222011

I’ve always been intrigued by Scion. I remember the first time I heard about the setting was at GenCon ’07 (my second). Kbrighton and I were wandering through the dealer hall when we walked by the White Wolf booth when he went in. I, having never played or really been interested in their games, stood around for a few moments before I noticed that one of the book covers sitting on a nearby waterfall rack was of this guy with a big revolver. I picked it up and was looking at the back cover when one of the people manning the booth came by and asked I had any questions and we started talking about Scion for a few minutes. A few months after we got back from GenCon Kbrighton ran a game for us that for one reason or another didn’t last all that long. I always kinda’ felt that that that game could have been something really fun.

Recently, WDR, Hooligan, Mahon and I went on a Shameless Self Promotion tour of the tabletop gaming stores in the Kansas City metro area (there will be at least one podcast about it). While traveling around I found perfect copies of the rulebooks for the White Wolf game Scion at about half off the cover price. I debated with myself for a few minutes while I wandered around the store before going back and picking them up. I figured that if nothing else I would have all the books (I’m a pack rat and a completionist when it comes to RPG books).

The past week I’ve been reading through the first book inn the series (Scion: Hero) and like any well written RPG product its given me the urge to run the game. I, being an unrepentant cheeseball, am not exactly the target audience for most White Wolf games, so I thought I would write about it.

First off [Editor's note: It's far too late for this to be a "first" of anything.] Scion is a game where you’re playing the children of the gods. Normally that wouldn’t concern you or your mortal existence, but crap is going down in the overworld and the gods are gonna’ need all the help they can get. You get visited, you get boons, and you get sent into the world to grow your legend.

The system is a dice pool system. I’m used to this from playing in both Nockergeek’s and That Damn Punks’ Shadowrun games, but I haven’t really played Scion, so this is going only off of what I’ve read so far. It success is a 4-10 on a d10 and your stats determine how many you get to roll. It looks like (in Hero at least) that because of the way Epic attributes add successes there doesn’t seem to be the “buckets of dice” problem that I’ve heard Exalted has (Again, never played, so I’m going off of rumors and hearsay). You get access to amazing abilities do to your divine heritage, but you’re limited in what you can pick up based on your Legend rating, which grows as you travel the world, growing in power in renown.

I don’t really want to go to far into the game’s system until I have a few sessions under my belt so that I can give an impression of how it plays. As far as those sessions go I think I’m going to steal the setup from the Scion game Kbrighton ran, modified a little bit to suit my cheeseball ways. The players will be wrestlers in the farm leagues, traveling from city to city for matches and to deal with all manner of Titanspawn. Sort of a Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling meets Scooby-Doo, dealing with divine powered opponents in one session and investigating the strange goings-ons of a small town “haunted” mansion the next.

I’ll be posting more as I read through the rest of the books, recruit players, and develop the ideas for the game.

Eberron Game House Rules

General Roleplaying 1 Response »

Jan 262011

Here’s the final document for the Eberron House Rules.

Here’s the Artificer conversion that will be used for the game.

Look them over, tell me what you think. Suggestions are welcome.

Away with the gun...

General Roleplaying 6 Responses »

Jan 252011

… or at least the gun as presented in the playtest document for Paizo’s Ultimate Combat. First, I’d like to address one thing found in the playtest document: “These rules are final and not open for playtest.” You can find that quote at the end of the first paragraph on page 6 of the playtest document. Neither book (so far as I know) have gone to print yet, and they don’t want any input on these? Seriously?

Alright, my first (or is that second) problem with Paizoguns* is their expense. Jesus christ they’re expensive. The pistol itself (just one, not a matching pair) costs 1000 gp and the musket costs 1500 gp (gp is the notation of the Gold Piece, your standard unit of fantasy currency.) “Well,” you may say “That cost is most likely there to balance the gun’s amazing stats!” Nope. the pistol (for a medium sized creature) does 1d8, has a range increment of 20ft (and has a max of 5 range increments instead of the 10 for bows) a x4 crit and is bludgeoning and piercing. The musket’s only difference is that it takes two hands, does a d12 and has a range of 40ft (again with the max range of 5 increments.) Well, and it misfires twice as often.

“Hold your horses,” you exclaim like someone looking at an overpriced thesaurus, “Paizoguns have a chance to misfire?” Yup. The pistol gains the broken condition if you roll a natural 1 on any attack roll, the musket on a1 or 2. If you roll the same way again while it’s broken they explode. All that for for the price of hiring fifty archers to follow you around and just volley fire things to death for you.

It’s not just the weapon itself that’s crazy-expensive. The black powder needed for paizoguns is 10gp a shot. Add in the 1gp they charge for the bullet itself and you have the single largest money drain I’ve ever seen in an rpg. Seriously, this is 110 times more expensive than crossbow bolts (yes, one-hundred and ten.) Add to that the fact that the paizogun is an exotic weapon, so you’re also paying a feat tax for these worthless weapons.

The only benefit the paizogun has is that within its first range increment the attack is against touch AC. Sense the AC of most opponents doesn’t scale that quickly this is of little benefit unless your BAB is 1/2 your level.

I would recommend not using the piazogun. If you must have firearms in your fantasy game (and I completely understand if you do. They can be cool if done correctly.) then I would recommend Skortched Urf’ Studios’ Fantasy Firearms. The stats are comparable (slightly better damage and a lower crit mod), the ammo cost is 1gp a shot instead of eleven (this includes power, wadding, and the ball), they are simple instead of exotic (which makes sense as they have actually trained monkeys to fire guns) and the misfire rule it suggests is both optional and far more reasonable (and points out why arbitrary restrictions on only certain weapons suck.)

*Paizogun is what I’m going to refer to these money drains as.)

Damn Dirty Liar

General Roleplaying No Responses »

Jun 042010

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.”

Now the Hard Part

General Roleplaying No Responses »

Jun 012010

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.