Wow, two posts in one week. That's got to be some kind of record, though we'll see how long it lasts.
As you might have surmised, I was pretty darn busy over the prior weekend, what with being down in Plano, Texas for the 6th GamerNationCon and 4 Days of Gaming Goodness.
Prior to that however, I had the chance to run a one-shot for my Discord gaming group, that being "If Looks Could Kill" by Cubicle 7 for the fourth edition of the venerable Warhammer Fantasy Role Play game (aka WFRP4e). I made a few one-the-fly tweaks to events in the module, but overall it ran rather smoothly, with my buddy Eric (who is notorious for abysmal dice rolls) having a blast simply due to his usual habit of rolling low working in his favor, even going so far as to snark that "this must be what it feels like to be Jon!" in reference to my own habit of making some pretty awesome rolls when I'm playing.
Now, while I've got the PDFs of the characters from the Starter Set, I opted to instead use a quintet of characters that I'd created myself, as I knew for a fact they were legally built starting PCs and didn't suffer from any oddities incurred by the errata. Plus, having made these characters myself, I had a fairly solid idea of what each of them was capable of doing. And for the most part, they did what they were designed to do and did it well.
In the interest of sharing, here are the group of adventurers that refer to themselves as the Intrepid Fellows. You can either click on the links in the individual character's name to get their character sheet, or click here to download the entire group as a single zip file.
Cedred Laudenheim, Human Guard
The ostensible leader of the band, Cedred is actually from a noble family that has long since been impoverished and fallen upon hard times. He's very much a front-line combatant using a sword and buckler, but is also quite sociable thanks to a high Fellowship, and hard to surprise thanks to high scores in Intuition and Perception. This was the character that Eric played, and between his very much getting into character as a generally heroic-minded individual and his habit of generally rolling very low on his percentile dice, Cedred was probably the MVP of the entire adventure, taking down the major threat of the adventure and gradually working on building for himself a reputation as a heroic figure.
Erwin Brahms, Human Rat Catcher
Erwin is very much a salt of the earth sort of fellow, as indicated by his trade of hunting down and cleaning out vermin infestations, with his small (but vicious) dog Otto being his most stalwart traveling companion. Despite of only having a sling, he's the groups ranged attacker, which in this system can be surprisingly effective given how a single well-placed sling bullet can undercut whatever combat momentum the target has built up for themselves. Erwin was played by Rick, and I didn't realize it until much later that Rick and Eric had largely reversed the character dynamic they have with their characters in my Force and Destiny campaign, with Rick being the crass boor contrasting with Eric's well-mannered heroic figure this time around.
Heidric Strohmann, Human Wizard
The token spellcaster in a setting where being a spellcaster can get you into a lot of trouble with the locals (namely, being lynched and/or burned at the stake), Heidric is an apprentice at the Colleges of Magic in the capital city of Altdorf. For a one-shot, I didn't designate which color of magic he was studying, and figured that since he only has access to petty magic that he's drawing on just drabs of magical energy rather than properly channeling and focusing the various winds of magic. Brennen played this character, and while unaware of the consequences of being an open magic user outside of Altdorf, he did much to avoid making it was obvious that he could use magic.
Karrag Thronsson, Dwarf Bounty Hunter
A surly and rather blunt individual, as befits a dwarf, Karrag is the group's muscle and ostensibly their tracker (sadly, the player's dice rolls didn't really help in that regard). Played by Doran, Karrag as indeed quite blunt in his dealings with others, and had made good on capturing all three of a trio of local bandits that'd been plaguing the area that the adventure took place in. He did notably get covered in ichor, and took down two of the bandits (who'd tried to lay an ambush for him) by himself without killing either of them.
Rosalinda Dottenbacher, Human Apothecary
This was a pre-gen I made specifically for Linda, as she has a deeply abiding love for medic/healer characters. I had debated about making Rosalinda a Halfling, and in retrospect I kind of wish I had, but that would have pushed Rosalinda too far into being the party face, a role that I know Linda is usually not very comfortable with taking most nights. Still, Rosalinda was helpful in patching up the injured members of the group and identifying a few plot threads, though she is very much a support character and generally not much use during a fight. Still, her staggering variety of Lore skills can certainly provide the group extra information in the right circumstances.
For those curious, for each character I used the same set of randomly rolled values for their characteristics, which amusingly worked out to 125 points. For race, I rolled randomly with the exception of Karrag, thus winding up with a party of Humans for some extra XP. Talents were all rolled randomly, with most of them working out for the character concepts quite well, though Cedred having Noble-Blooded was a wrinkle that I eventually made work out for the character.
April 10, 2019
Post-GamerNationCon 6
And once more, another GamerNationCon has come and gone. As was the norm for me, I had a lot of fun, got to play a lot of games, catch up with old faces, and make some new acquaintances. It was pretty cool to meet the members of the Dice Pool Podcast, most of
whom made the very long trek from Australia just to attend the
convention. And naturally getting to see Linda and her family in person, as well as having at least a couple chances to sit down and share a meal with them. It was a major shame that Eric couldn't make the trip, as the con's theme was superheroes and he's a big-time superhero fan.
One thing that helped the mood for me was that this year, I'd opted to spring for the MVG pledge on the Kickstarter. Granted, it was a few hundred bucks, but the pledge got me a guaranteed seat in two games as well as first dibs on getting into scheduled games when even sign-up went live. This was a marked difference from previous years where I wound up getting locked out of a number of games that I really wanted to play in, such as GM Phil's always entertaining Fallout sessions.
Highlights for me were playing in the Star Wars D6 1st edition session run by convention Guest of Honor Michael Witwer, who is a very enthusiastic GM, with our group having a blast all around playing through the classic module Starfall. We had to speed things up a bit, but my smuggler did get a chance to shine by engaging the big bad in a one-on-one AT-ST duel, which ended with my character ramming into the overly chatty Imperial officer's vehicle to end the fight.
There was of course GM Phil's Fallout session, run using the Genesys system with the theme of the PCs having adopted heroic personas in the post-apoc wasteland. In this one, I played a Protectotron that due to a programming glitch believed it actually was the space-faring hero Captain Cosmos, accompanied by a robot companion that had a stuffed toy hanging off the front of it to play the roll of the Captain's loyal space monkey companion (and was apparently not happy about it). Phil is probably one of the most fun and energetic GMs that I've had the privilege to play under, so any time spent in one of his sessions is sure to be a lot of fun.
Another major highlight was playing in a GI Joe session again using the Genesys system (detecting a theme for the con yet?), this one run by Dustin of the Staggering Dragon crew. In this one, I played Spirit, who was the team's tracker and sharpshooter as our team of Joes (Flint, Mainframe, Chuckles, and Snake-Eyes) got dropped into Transylvania to see what mischief Cobra was getting up to in Castle Dracula. Playing Snake-Eyes was my Texas friend Will, who got seriously into character and never spoke once until the session had concluded, which for those who know Will is a major achievement as by his own admission he is an incredibly chatty fellow, and communicated by way of writing on index cards. We each got a number of cool moments, starting up with the two of us coordinating to flawlessly take down a Cobra sentry without raising an alarm, starting with Spirit timing his rifle shot (normally a very loud crack) to fire in time with a peal of thunder to mask the sound, and Snake-Eyes being right next to the guy to catch him before the sentry hit the ground and noiselessly tuck away the body. Next was Snake-Eyes taking out a bunch of Cobra soldiers while hanging from a chandelier without scratching Chuckles (who was wearing a Cobra uniform) with his sub-machine gun. And finally, after completing our objectives and bugging out of the castle in a stolen Cobra Stinger jeep, while being pursued by a pack of some sort of serpent-themed lycanthrope/Frankenstein's monster crossbreeds, we worked together to take down all but one of them while Mainframe got an old Russian helicopter up and working. Snake-Eyes did most of the work with using the jeep's on-board missiles, while I got to take down the very last monster while quoting an appropriate line from Dresden Files, that being "Mother says you don't belong here. *crack of thunder* Father says you're ugly too" before putting a rifle round into the thing's gaping maw and out the back of its freakish head as it leapt to attack the group, and stopping its sliding body with my boot before we boarded the repaired helicopter and made our exit.
A couple of unexpected highlights came from a pair of pick-up games, both being Genesys games. The first of these had the group playing members of Marvel's Alpha Flight, the Canadian government's sponsored team of superheroes, as run by Canadian Chris Hunt, which pretty much wound up with myself and another lady playing Canadian superheroes in a game run by a Canadian GM with other members of the Canadian contingent. Also in the group was convention guest Andy Hurley of Fall Out Boy, who is a pretty chill guy and fun to game with. We were probably one of the few teams of superheroes to shut down a bad guy's operation by way of government regulations. It was also amusing to be witness to the Canadians dropping cultural references that we Americans are generally unaware of.
The other unexpected highlight Genesys pick-up game that I got into was Sunday morning, due to the GM for the scheduled 7th Sea game being "under the weather," which I'm sure had nothing to do with the night prior being "GamerNation After Dark" (i.e. booze being served and shared liberally). Said game was run by Brett Bowen, one of GM Phil's longtime friends, and was using the Earthdawn setting. Now Earthdawn is a setting that I've always liked (post-apoc high fantasy), though sadly the game's mechanics were in short a total mess. Heck, I liked this enough that when a printed copy of the theme (signed by Brett) came up for bid in the post-con auction, I largely made sure it was mine to take home by effectively squashing the bidding war by doubling what was the current bid at the time. I've skimmed through the book a couple times, and may well try running some one-offs for some of the gaming groups I'm in. The look of the document is very slick, and you can tell from looking at it that Brett is not only a major fan of the setting but put a lot of work into this.
Other gaming included playing in both parts of the Android two-part module that FFG released for their Shadow of the Beanstalk Genesys supplement. This one I didn't find quite as enjoyable, but I think that was more circumstances than anything Darren West (the GM) did specifically. First part, we had one player pretty much commandeer the group at a critical point and effectively tell half the group (which I was in) to sod off in terms of how to resolve a particular dilemma and instead make things a whole lot worse for us. In the second part, we got hung up in a combat encounter that the module intended for us to avoid, except that the way things played out there was no way for us to really avoid it, which in turn effectively lead for a TPK with the exception of the medic PC.
In terms of food, I got to try out a couple of places that I'd never eaten at before, which were generally good, although one of them was a Chinese place where the food smelled good was way too spicy for me to really stomach. The pre-con barbecue feast provided by the Rayburns was just as delicious as last year's, and was a great way to start things. I wound up not going with the majority of the remaining con attendees to the post-con dinner, and instead headed with Lin, her family, and our friend Doran to a Chinese buffet that was pretty solid in terms of food, and it was nice to have a chance to wind down after four solid days of gaming goodness.
So yeah, a whole lot of fun was had, and I've already got at least a couple ideas for things I could run for next year's GNCon, from a Genesys major cross-over using various fan-made themes to a 7th Sea adventure whose roots can be drawn from a pick-up session I played during this recent con.
One thing that helped the mood for me was that this year, I'd opted to spring for the MVG pledge on the Kickstarter. Granted, it was a few hundred bucks, but the pledge got me a guaranteed seat in two games as well as first dibs on getting into scheduled games when even sign-up went live. This was a marked difference from previous years where I wound up getting locked out of a number of games that I really wanted to play in, such as GM Phil's always entertaining Fallout sessions.
Highlights for me were playing in the Star Wars D6 1st edition session run by convention Guest of Honor Michael Witwer, who is a very enthusiastic GM, with our group having a blast all around playing through the classic module Starfall. We had to speed things up a bit, but my smuggler did get a chance to shine by engaging the big bad in a one-on-one AT-ST duel, which ended with my character ramming into the overly chatty Imperial officer's vehicle to end the fight.
There was of course GM Phil's Fallout session, run using the Genesys system with the theme of the PCs having adopted heroic personas in the post-apoc wasteland. In this one, I played a Protectotron that due to a programming glitch believed it actually was the space-faring hero Captain Cosmos, accompanied by a robot companion that had a stuffed toy hanging off the front of it to play the roll of the Captain's loyal space monkey companion (and was apparently not happy about it). Phil is probably one of the most fun and energetic GMs that I've had the privilege to play under, so any time spent in one of his sessions is sure to be a lot of fun.
Another major highlight was playing in a GI Joe session again using the Genesys system (detecting a theme for the con yet?), this one run by Dustin of the Staggering Dragon crew. In this one, I played Spirit, who was the team's tracker and sharpshooter as our team of Joes (Flint, Mainframe, Chuckles, and Snake-Eyes) got dropped into Transylvania to see what mischief Cobra was getting up to in Castle Dracula. Playing Snake-Eyes was my Texas friend Will, who got seriously into character and never spoke once until the session had concluded, which for those who know Will is a major achievement as by his own admission he is an incredibly chatty fellow, and communicated by way of writing on index cards. We each got a number of cool moments, starting up with the two of us coordinating to flawlessly take down a Cobra sentry without raising an alarm, starting with Spirit timing his rifle shot (normally a very loud crack) to fire in time with a peal of thunder to mask the sound, and Snake-Eyes being right next to the guy to catch him before the sentry hit the ground and noiselessly tuck away the body. Next was Snake-Eyes taking out a bunch of Cobra soldiers while hanging from a chandelier without scratching Chuckles (who was wearing a Cobra uniform) with his sub-machine gun. And finally, after completing our objectives and bugging out of the castle in a stolen Cobra Stinger jeep, while being pursued by a pack of some sort of serpent-themed lycanthrope/Frankenstein's monster crossbreeds, we worked together to take down all but one of them while Mainframe got an old Russian helicopter up and working. Snake-Eyes did most of the work with using the jeep's on-board missiles, while I got to take down the very last monster while quoting an appropriate line from Dresden Files, that being "Mother says you don't belong here. *crack of thunder* Father says you're ugly too" before putting a rifle round into the thing's gaping maw and out the back of its freakish head as it leapt to attack the group, and stopping its sliding body with my boot before we boarded the repaired helicopter and made our exit.
A couple of unexpected highlights came from a pair of pick-up games, both being Genesys games. The first of these had the group playing members of Marvel's Alpha Flight, the Canadian government's sponsored team of superheroes, as run by Canadian Chris Hunt, which pretty much wound up with myself and another lady playing Canadian superheroes in a game run by a Canadian GM with other members of the Canadian contingent. Also in the group was convention guest Andy Hurley of Fall Out Boy, who is a pretty chill guy and fun to game with. We were probably one of the few teams of superheroes to shut down a bad guy's operation by way of government regulations. It was also amusing to be witness to the Canadians dropping cultural references that we Americans are generally unaware of.
The other unexpected highlight Genesys pick-up game that I got into was Sunday morning, due to the GM for the scheduled 7th Sea game being "under the weather," which I'm sure had nothing to do with the night prior being "GamerNation After Dark" (i.e. booze being served and shared liberally). Said game was run by Brett Bowen, one of GM Phil's longtime friends, and was using the Earthdawn setting. Now Earthdawn is a setting that I've always liked (post-apoc high fantasy), though sadly the game's mechanics were in short a total mess. Heck, I liked this enough that when a printed copy of the theme (signed by Brett) came up for bid in the post-con auction, I largely made sure it was mine to take home by effectively squashing the bidding war by doubling what was the current bid at the time. I've skimmed through the book a couple times, and may well try running some one-offs for some of the gaming groups I'm in. The look of the document is very slick, and you can tell from looking at it that Brett is not only a major fan of the setting but put a lot of work into this.
Other gaming included playing in both parts of the Android two-part module that FFG released for their Shadow of the Beanstalk Genesys supplement. This one I didn't find quite as enjoyable, but I think that was more circumstances than anything Darren West (the GM) did specifically. First part, we had one player pretty much commandeer the group at a critical point and effectively tell half the group (which I was in) to sod off in terms of how to resolve a particular dilemma and instead make things a whole lot worse for us. In the second part, we got hung up in a combat encounter that the module intended for us to avoid, except that the way things played out there was no way for us to really avoid it, which in turn effectively lead for a TPK with the exception of the medic PC.
In terms of food, I got to try out a couple of places that I'd never eaten at before, which were generally good, although one of them was a Chinese place where the food smelled good was way too spicy for me to really stomach. The pre-con barbecue feast provided by the Rayburns was just as delicious as last year's, and was a great way to start things. I wound up not going with the majority of the remaining con attendees to the post-con dinner, and instead headed with Lin, her family, and our friend Doran to a Chinese buffet that was pretty solid in terms of food, and it was nice to have a chance to wind down after four solid days of gaming goodness.
So yeah, a whole lot of fun was had, and I've already got at least a couple ideas for things I could run for next year's GNCon, from a Genesys major cross-over using various fan-made themes to a 7th Sea adventure whose roots can be drawn from a pick-up session I played during this recent con.
February 22, 2019
Does the answer lie in the heart of battle?
Okay, been a lot longer than I'd intended between updates (seems to be a habitual thing). Fair warning, this is going to be a long post without a whole lot of crunchy content.
So quick update, gaming-wise I seem to be suffering from a plethora of gaming opportunities. Yeah, I know, woe is me, amirite? ;)
Don't recall if I talked about on this blog or not, but last summer a local friend of mine decided to take her third crack at being a GM, after her first two efforts went less than swimmingly. Her first effort was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer one-shot, being inspired by the Roll4It series Layla the Vampire Slayer (Season 1 is solid, Season 2 was middling at best for me; I'll include a link at the bottom of this post to the YouTube playlist if you want to check it out) which went okay and was fun, but was a little rough as nobody really knew the system all that well, so combat was a bit of a slog. Her second effort was running the WotC Saga Edition campaign Dawn of Defiance under FFG's Star Wars system, but her mistakes were having us all start at Knight Level and having a couple of players that are a struggle for experienced GMs to handle given their personalities and eagerness to go completely off the rails of what a GM has planned at the drop of a hat, both of which are bad things for a newbie GM still cutting their teeth to deal with, and the campaign came to a screeching halt after only four sessions. Third attempt was the charm, as she ran an original campaign mostly with players that were both new to the FFG system and new to RPGs in general; I was asked to help everyone make their characters as I knew the system but also wouldn't be super-pushy in terms of how they should build those characters, and while some sub-optimal choices were made, it all worked out and the players had a lot of fun before the campaign closed with a near TPK at the hands of no less than Darth Vader.
Well, her husband had an idea for a new Star Wars campaign, having learned from mistakes he made in trying to run prior campaigns, and assembled a new group (and deliberately not inviting those two problem players that caused his wife's Dawn of Defiance campaign to crash and burn), with a primary focus of us being spacers on the fringe, with a slight cant towards archaeological ventures due to one PC being an Explorer/Archaeologist. We're still in the early stages of the campaign (only about six sessions in), but it's been pretty fun and certainly has a Firefly vibe to it, with the PCs being something of an impromptu if occasionally dysfunctional family. Award for the quirkiest character in the group is undoubtedly the astromech Tech/Modder, who instead of being the classic R2-series is an even smaller model based upon artwork from the defunct mobile game Star Wars: Uprising, while most badass is the Twi'lek Hired Gun/Enforcer, who can be charming and intimidating with equal aplomb while mixing it up quite well in combat. So far the GM's mostly been running canned adventures with a few tweaks, but it's been working out for us.
For the Saturday Discord group, I wrapped up the penultimate arc of my Force and Destiny campaign, with the final session having the PCs finally square off against the Chiss Inquisitor that's been stalking them from behind the scenes and that half the PCs were terrified of facing. And to be honest, even after buffing the guy up a bit, the PCs didn't have nearly as much trouble with him, though part of that may have been my dice were not rolling all that well for him, and even with the Enhanced Nemesis rules he was still getting wailed on by the party. I know there's going to be at least one more encounter between them, but I'll need to reconsider how I approach it. Given that half the group will be at GamerNationCon 6 in a little over a month's time, we've opted to instead run some one-offs, with this Saturday (hopefully) being our first major venture into Savage Rifts. Now, to be clear I've always found the initial concept of Rifts Earth to be interesting, just that it was sadly paired with one of the most unplayable RPG systems on the planet and very quickly succumbed to radically escalating power creep, to the point that if you tried to play a class from the core book, you were hilariously outgunned by characters made using classes from the latest splats. Still, with Savage Worlds being a far more refined system and being well and truly playable, I'm curious to see how this one-shot will play out. If it goes well, we might be playing it as the pick-up system of choice for one of our recurring GMs. After that, we're doing an Age of Rebellion adventure that will eventually lead into a new AoR campaign, after the GM of our prior AoR campaign finally admitted that she had no interest or desire to pick up the old campaign. And following the AoR adventure, I'll hopefully be running an adventure (or two) using the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play. I have to say, I'm liking WFRP4e, especially in how the difficulties were tweaked so that starting PCs aren't a bunch of bumbling incomps and that combats don't drag out due to the extensive whiff factor that 1e and 2e suffered from. I've got a bunch of pre-gens for my players that I rolled up using the character creation rules, and they're an interesting bunch.
I also recently decided that it was within my budget to buy a gaming console that was made this decade, and bought myself a PlayStation4, as my PlayStation2 Slim finally gave up the ghost (was having trouble reading discs and wouldn't read PS1 or PS2 memory cards). Granted, this means that most of my PlayStation library of PS1 and PS2 games I can't play anymore, but to be honest it'd been years since I'd played most of them, and frankly I'm in no hurry to play most of them again. I did buy Kingdom Hearts 3 and Spider-Man along with my new system, and did digital purchases of a few other games, notably Final Fantasy 7 and the Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 pack. I've only played a bit of KH3, but sadly the game's just not grabbing me the way first two KH console games did, and instead have been spending time playing FF7 (just got out of Midgar and into the world map) and KH1 (just arrived at Atlantis), and having fun doing so. I'd played FF7 when it came out (and had the big shocker scene spoiled by some twit) and had fun, but never really did a second complete play through. We'll see if I can make it all the way through this time, given it's been well over a decade since I lasted made the attempt. And Kingdom Hearts 1.5 is just a fun title without having what I feel are the needlessly flashy combat gimmicks that KH3 seems intent to shove down my throat. Haven't delved into Spider-Man yet, but going to try and change that over the course of the weekend.
The most recent bit of gaming news is another of my local gaming friends got a bunch of us together earlier in the year to take the old Street Fighter RPG by White Wolf out for a spin. The game is something of an old shame for the so-called "serious" White Wolf fans, as due to the nature of the source material (especially in recent years), the SFRPG is admittedly goofy, and I feel it works for the best if you embrace the goofiness and just go with it. We've only played two sessions, but they've been fun, with me playing an ex-street kid shotoclone and another player running a snooty-yet-winsome upper-class kick chick, and an alternating third player (first session had a comedic Jiu-Jitsu Hong Kong ex-cop while second one had a ghetto-fab hip-hop dance battler who was painfully stereotypical). We've finally been able to get schedules worked out enough to try playing on a more regular basis, starting with this coming Sunday, so we'll see how it works out. I kind of hope the ex-cop returns, and frankly am not the least bit sad the dance-fighter won't be making a return, but we'll see. Fair to say the GM has incorporated some house rules in character creation and advancement, allowing us to start out a lot more competent than a typical beginning SFRPG character would be. For instance, my shotoclone has watered-down versions of the Dragon Punch/Shoryuken and Hadoken attacks that I'd normally would probably not see for quite some time due to how expensive character advancement in White Wolf games are and how stingy they can be with XP awards. I have to say I'm looking forward to this, as it promises to be generally light-hearted series with our disparate team of fighters traveling the globe, having adventures and competing in various underground tournaments. There's also been some hints of sparkage between the shotoclone and the kick chick, especially given their very different backgrounds, and the lady playing said kick chick is a long-time friend that I've gamed with several times before and have had our characters in those past campaigns get into relationships, so we'll see if the UST between our latest characters ever resolves or not.
While the books are near-impossible to get, a group of fans did put together a "20th Anniversary" version compiling data from the line into one resource (sans of the stat blocks of the World Warriors or other NPCs) which can be freely downloaded. It's worth checking out, and while the combat system takes some definite getting used to (after all, the Storyteller system was not intended to be used for combat given White Wolf's disdain for combat at the time, and man does it show!), it's a fun and quirky system that if nothing else is good for one-offs of a non-serious nature.
So, that's about it for now. I'm going to get back to playing me some videogames, and see about navigating Atlantis without getting too annoyed at what I remember being frustrating controls.
Linkage
Roll4It's Layla the Vampire Slayer YouTube Playlist (Seasons 1 and 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlus4T4FXi0&list=PLefFB0SBo4P7dpxfJep-kMTK-ZlqhfIvo
Street Fighter RPG 20th Anniversary Edition
https://sfrpg.neocities.org/sf20.html
The G-File, a fan supplement for SFRPG covering fighters and moves outside of Street Fighter II
http://sfrpg.com/g-file/
So quick update, gaming-wise I seem to be suffering from a plethora of gaming opportunities. Yeah, I know, woe is me, amirite? ;)
Don't recall if I talked about on this blog or not, but last summer a local friend of mine decided to take her third crack at being a GM, after her first two efforts went less than swimmingly. Her first effort was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer one-shot, being inspired by the Roll4It series Layla the Vampire Slayer (Season 1 is solid, Season 2 was middling at best for me; I'll include a link at the bottom of this post to the YouTube playlist if you want to check it out) which went okay and was fun, but was a little rough as nobody really knew the system all that well, so combat was a bit of a slog. Her second effort was running the WotC Saga Edition campaign Dawn of Defiance under FFG's Star Wars system, but her mistakes were having us all start at Knight Level and having a couple of players that are a struggle for experienced GMs to handle given their personalities and eagerness to go completely off the rails of what a GM has planned at the drop of a hat, both of which are bad things for a newbie GM still cutting their teeth to deal with, and the campaign came to a screeching halt after only four sessions. Third attempt was the charm, as she ran an original campaign mostly with players that were both new to the FFG system and new to RPGs in general; I was asked to help everyone make their characters as I knew the system but also wouldn't be super-pushy in terms of how they should build those characters, and while some sub-optimal choices were made, it all worked out and the players had a lot of fun before the campaign closed with a near TPK at the hands of no less than Darth Vader.
Well, her husband had an idea for a new Star Wars campaign, having learned from mistakes he made in trying to run prior campaigns, and assembled a new group (and deliberately not inviting those two problem players that caused his wife's Dawn of Defiance campaign to crash and burn), with a primary focus of us being spacers on the fringe, with a slight cant towards archaeological ventures due to one PC being an Explorer/Archaeologist. We're still in the early stages of the campaign (only about six sessions in), but it's been pretty fun and certainly has a Firefly vibe to it, with the PCs being something of an impromptu if occasionally dysfunctional family. Award for the quirkiest character in the group is undoubtedly the astromech Tech/Modder, who instead of being the classic R2-series is an even smaller model based upon artwork from the defunct mobile game Star Wars: Uprising, while most badass is the Twi'lek Hired Gun/Enforcer, who can be charming and intimidating with equal aplomb while mixing it up quite well in combat. So far the GM's mostly been running canned adventures with a few tweaks, but it's been working out for us.
For the Saturday Discord group, I wrapped up the penultimate arc of my Force and Destiny campaign, with the final session having the PCs finally square off against the Chiss Inquisitor that's been stalking them from behind the scenes and that half the PCs were terrified of facing. And to be honest, even after buffing the guy up a bit, the PCs didn't have nearly as much trouble with him, though part of that may have been my dice were not rolling all that well for him, and even with the Enhanced Nemesis rules he was still getting wailed on by the party. I know there's going to be at least one more encounter between them, but I'll need to reconsider how I approach it. Given that half the group will be at GamerNationCon 6 in a little over a month's time, we've opted to instead run some one-offs, with this Saturday (hopefully) being our first major venture into Savage Rifts. Now, to be clear I've always found the initial concept of Rifts Earth to be interesting, just that it was sadly paired with one of the most unplayable RPG systems on the planet and very quickly succumbed to radically escalating power creep, to the point that if you tried to play a class from the core book, you were hilariously outgunned by characters made using classes from the latest splats. Still, with Savage Worlds being a far more refined system and being well and truly playable, I'm curious to see how this one-shot will play out. If it goes well, we might be playing it as the pick-up system of choice for one of our recurring GMs. After that, we're doing an Age of Rebellion adventure that will eventually lead into a new AoR campaign, after the GM of our prior AoR campaign finally admitted that she had no interest or desire to pick up the old campaign. And following the AoR adventure, I'll hopefully be running an adventure (or two) using the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play. I have to say, I'm liking WFRP4e, especially in how the difficulties were tweaked so that starting PCs aren't a bunch of bumbling incomps and that combats don't drag out due to the extensive whiff factor that 1e and 2e suffered from. I've got a bunch of pre-gens for my players that I rolled up using the character creation rules, and they're an interesting bunch.
I also recently decided that it was within my budget to buy a gaming console that was made this decade, and bought myself a PlayStation4, as my PlayStation2 Slim finally gave up the ghost (was having trouble reading discs and wouldn't read PS1 or PS2 memory cards). Granted, this means that most of my PlayStation library of PS1 and PS2 games I can't play anymore, but to be honest it'd been years since I'd played most of them, and frankly I'm in no hurry to play most of them again. I did buy Kingdom Hearts 3 and Spider-Man along with my new system, and did digital purchases of a few other games, notably Final Fantasy 7 and the Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 pack. I've only played a bit of KH3, but sadly the game's just not grabbing me the way first two KH console games did, and instead have been spending time playing FF7 (just got out of Midgar and into the world map) and KH1 (just arrived at Atlantis), and having fun doing so. I'd played FF7 when it came out (and had the big shocker scene spoiled by some twit) and had fun, but never really did a second complete play through. We'll see if I can make it all the way through this time, given it's been well over a decade since I lasted made the attempt. And Kingdom Hearts 1.5 is just a fun title without having what I feel are the needlessly flashy combat gimmicks that KH3 seems intent to shove down my throat. Haven't delved into Spider-Man yet, but going to try and change that over the course of the weekend.
The most recent bit of gaming news is another of my local gaming friends got a bunch of us together earlier in the year to take the old Street Fighter RPG by White Wolf out for a spin. The game is something of an old shame for the so-called "serious" White Wolf fans, as due to the nature of the source material (especially in recent years), the SFRPG is admittedly goofy, and I feel it works for the best if you embrace the goofiness and just go with it. We've only played two sessions, but they've been fun, with me playing an ex-street kid shotoclone and another player running a snooty-yet-winsome upper-class kick chick, and an alternating third player (first session had a comedic Jiu-Jitsu Hong Kong ex-cop while second one had a ghetto-fab hip-hop dance battler who was painfully stereotypical). We've finally been able to get schedules worked out enough to try playing on a more regular basis, starting with this coming Sunday, so we'll see how it works out. I kind of hope the ex-cop returns, and frankly am not the least bit sad the dance-fighter won't be making a return, but we'll see. Fair to say the GM has incorporated some house rules in character creation and advancement, allowing us to start out a lot more competent than a typical beginning SFRPG character would be. For instance, my shotoclone has watered-down versions of the Dragon Punch/Shoryuken and Hadoken attacks that I'd normally would probably not see for quite some time due to how expensive character advancement in White Wolf games are and how stingy they can be with XP awards. I have to say I'm looking forward to this, as it promises to be generally light-hearted series with our disparate team of fighters traveling the globe, having adventures and competing in various underground tournaments. There's also been some hints of sparkage between the shotoclone and the kick chick, especially given their very different backgrounds, and the lady playing said kick chick is a long-time friend that I've gamed with several times before and have had our characters in those past campaigns get into relationships, so we'll see if the UST between our latest characters ever resolves or not.
While the books are near-impossible to get, a group of fans did put together a "20th Anniversary" version compiling data from the line into one resource (sans of the stat blocks of the World Warriors or other NPCs) which can be freely downloaded. It's worth checking out, and while the combat system takes some definite getting used to (after all, the Storyteller system was not intended to be used for combat given White Wolf's disdain for combat at the time, and man does it show!), it's a fun and quirky system that if nothing else is good for one-offs of a non-serious nature.
So, that's about it for now. I'm going to get back to playing me some videogames, and see about navigating Atlantis without getting too annoyed at what I remember being frustrating controls.
Linkage
Roll4It's Layla the Vampire Slayer YouTube Playlist (Seasons 1 and 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlus4T4FXi0&list=PLefFB0SBo4P7dpxfJep-kMTK-ZlqhfIvo
Street Fighter RPG 20th Anniversary Edition
https://sfrpg.neocities.org/sf20.html
The G-File, a fan supplement for SFRPG covering fighters and moves outside of Street Fighter II
http://sfrpg.com/g-file/
November 16, 2018
Welcome to the Wizarding World, Mister Potter
So given that the second installment of the Fantastic Beasts film series (aka the "we're giving you backstory on the Potterverse!" films) has just hit theaters, as well as the fact that Chris "GM Chris" Witt has released his Harry Potter Genesys theme to the masses (link to be found below), I thought it'd be appropriate to publish a collection of pre-generated Hogwarts students that I've used for a couple of one-shots that I've run using said Genesys theme.
You've already seen one of them, a young chap by the name of Timothy Barnett, an adventurous young Gryffindor with a mild penchant for mischief. But now is perhaps a good time to present a few of the other students in his year from various other Hogwarts Houses.
When I initially came up with these characters, I had originally figured that they would be having their adventures a few years after the events of the Second Wizarding War as detailed in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and that it had been at least a few years since Voldemort's final defeat. With that said, for the first one-shot I ran with these characters I set their doings during Harry's third year at Hogwarts (when things were still fairly innocent and Voldemort was a not much of a threat to the wizarding world), if only for the chance for me to portray Professor Snape as the horrible person that he was to students, especially those who got into trouble.
It's also worth noting that I initially conceived each of these characters as being First Year students, fairly fresh off the Hogwarts Express and with plenty to learn. But given how Genesys operates, they just felt too competent for a group of eleven year olds, so I opted to bump them up to being Third Year students, putting them all at about thirteen years old; this way they're capable without seeming ridiculously so, but also still have a lot of room to grow.
You can of course download the Harry Potter and the Theme for Genesys file from the d20 Radio BackerZone page, with the link located under the "2017 Content" header.
And now, on to our students...
Dedrick Bigglesworth, Hufflepuff Athlete
To put it plainly, Dedrick is a jock with a focus on the wizarding sport of Quidditch; he's not very good at casting spells, but can get by when it comes to low-end magics. Though he's a pureblood by birth, he really doesn't have any of the more negative traits that many of the pureblood families and students are shown to have in the books. That doesn't mean muggleborns and muggle society won't leave him as baffled as they do Ron Weasley.
Emmamanelle "Emma" Falk
So Emma is actually the second of the first series of characters I made using GM Chris' Genesys Harry Potter theme, and drew inspiration from a dear friend of mine, that being Nateal "Tariel" Falk. Emma's big thing is her fondness and knowledge of animals, especially the fantastic beasts and magical creatures that populate the world of Harry Potter, but she's also by far the sunniest and most cheerful of the students. She is a bit of a "squishy wizard" but can play well as support and help get people to see her side of things.
Issac Tobin, Ravenclaw Academic
Yeah, I'll admit to going with the stereotype and making the Ravenclaw representative being both a bookworm and very much the brains of the party. He is a bit of a genderflip on Hermione, being that he's a muggleborn who is probably far more knowledgeable about the wizarding world than many of his peers who were born and raised in it, but he's much more shy and reserved than the much more outgoing and frankly bossy Hermione; he's much happier with his nose in a book thank you very much. He's not adept at the flashier sort of magics, and works best when trying to think his way around a problem as opposed to just blasting it.
Selene Vale, Slytherin Potioneer
So originally, Selena started out as being more of a "social expert" who was better at getting people to do what she wanted with words and manipulation before I decided to toss that and embrace yet another stereotype of the Slytherin who excelled at potions. However, she does still have some traces of her original concept, from being able to drop the occasional zinger to put others at a disadvantage in social encounters and a fairly strong base for most social checks she might have to make. She does break the mold a bit by being a half-blood, since to my mind in the wake of Voldemort's defeat it made sense that Slytherin would dial it back regarding pureblood mania. Selena's not inherently ruthless but she is pragmatic, such as having the right potion on hand at the right time.
Timothy Barnett, Gryffindor Opportunist
The first character I'd written up for this Genesys theme, Tim very much is not the typical "brave and forthright Gryffindor" that many folks would presume a student of that house to be. Now of course, you've got the Weasley Twins and the Marauders for examples of generally well-meaning Gryffindors who managed to get into loads of mischief during their school years, to say nothing of what Harry got up to, especially during his second year, in the course of doing what was right. So in that respect, Tim is following a fine Gryffindor tradition of getting into mischief but not doing so out of malice, and he's quite good at it, though he is a bit lacking in the raw physicality department. Magically speaking, he's got a number of tricks up his sleeve and is broadly capable, as long as you don't ask him to do any serious potions work. And by making a third year student as opposed to a somewhat more naive (for a given value of the word) first year, it's easier to explain why Tim has a bit of a record for getting into mischief at school, as he's quite good at getting into the exact sort of situations that more sensible students would prefer to avoid; if played right, he should be the one dragging the rest of group into whatever adventure is at hand.
And there we have a quintet of third year students of the illustrious Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizadry, each of them with their own strengths to contribute to whatever sort of adventures a group of young students might find themselves drawn into during the course of the school year.
You can download the zip file with their respective character sheets from here:
Harry Potter Genesys Pregenerated Characters
All character images were made using Hogwarts Student Maker, found on the Doll Divine website here: https://www.dolldivine.com/hogwarts-student-maker.php
You've already seen one of them, a young chap by the name of Timothy Barnett, an adventurous young Gryffindor with a mild penchant for mischief. But now is perhaps a good time to present a few of the other students in his year from various other Hogwarts Houses.
When I initially came up with these characters, I had originally figured that they would be having their adventures a few years after the events of the Second Wizarding War as detailed in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and that it had been at least a few years since Voldemort's final defeat. With that said, for the first one-shot I ran with these characters I set their doings during Harry's third year at Hogwarts (when things were still fairly innocent and Voldemort was a not much of a threat to the wizarding world), if only for the chance for me to portray Professor Snape as the horrible person that he was to students, especially those who got into trouble.
It's also worth noting that I initially conceived each of these characters as being First Year students, fairly fresh off the Hogwarts Express and with plenty to learn. But given how Genesys operates, they just felt too competent for a group of eleven year olds, so I opted to bump them up to being Third Year students, putting them all at about thirteen years old; this way they're capable without seeming ridiculously so, but also still have a lot of room to grow.
You can of course download the Harry Potter and the Theme for Genesys file from the d20 Radio BackerZone page, with the link located under the "2017 Content" header.
And now, on to our students...
Dedrick Bigglesworth, Hufflepuff Athlete
To put it plainly, Dedrick is a jock with a focus on the wizarding sport of Quidditch; he's not very good at casting spells, but can get by when it comes to low-end magics. Though he's a pureblood by birth, he really doesn't have any of the more negative traits that many of the pureblood families and students are shown to have in the books. That doesn't mean muggleborns and muggle society won't leave him as baffled as they do Ron Weasley.
Emmamanelle "Emma" Falk
Yeah, I'll admit to going with the stereotype and making the Ravenclaw representative being both a bookworm and very much the brains of the party. He is a bit of a genderflip on Hermione, being that he's a muggleborn who is probably far more knowledgeable about the wizarding world than many of his peers who were born and raised in it, but he's much more shy and reserved than the much more outgoing and frankly bossy Hermione; he's much happier with his nose in a book thank you very much. He's not adept at the flashier sort of magics, and works best when trying to think his way around a problem as opposed to just blasting it.
So originally, Selena started out as being more of a "social expert" who was better at getting people to do what she wanted with words and manipulation before I decided to toss that and embrace yet another stereotype of the Slytherin who excelled at potions. However, she does still have some traces of her original concept, from being able to drop the occasional zinger to put others at a disadvantage in social encounters and a fairly strong base for most social checks she might have to make. She does break the mold a bit by being a half-blood, since to my mind in the wake of Voldemort's defeat it made sense that Slytherin would dial it back regarding pureblood mania. Selena's not inherently ruthless but she is pragmatic, such as having the right potion on hand at the right time.
The first character I'd written up for this Genesys theme, Tim very much is not the typical "brave and forthright Gryffindor" that many folks would presume a student of that house to be. Now of course, you've got the Weasley Twins and the Marauders for examples of generally well-meaning Gryffindors who managed to get into loads of mischief during their school years, to say nothing of what Harry got up to, especially during his second year, in the course of doing what was right. So in that respect, Tim is following a fine Gryffindor tradition of getting into mischief but not doing so out of malice, and he's quite good at it, though he is a bit lacking in the raw physicality department. Magically speaking, he's got a number of tricks up his sleeve and is broadly capable, as long as you don't ask him to do any serious potions work. And by making a third year student as opposed to a somewhat more naive (for a given value of the word) first year, it's easier to explain why Tim has a bit of a record for getting into mischief at school, as he's quite good at getting into the exact sort of situations that more sensible students would prefer to avoid; if played right, he should be the one dragging the rest of group into whatever adventure is at hand.
And there we have a quintet of third year students of the illustrious Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizadry, each of them with their own strengths to contribute to whatever sort of adventures a group of young students might find themselves drawn into during the course of the school year.
You can download the zip file with their respective character sheets from here:
Harry Potter Genesys Pregenerated Characters
All character images were made using Hogwarts Student Maker, found on the Doll Divine website here: https://www.dolldivine.com/hogwarts-student-maker.php
August 27, 2018
Thoughts on Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 4th Edition
So to switch gears a bit (apart from the actually posting), rather than jawing about the Star Wars RPG I'll be giving my thoughts on the newest edition of the Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, published by Cubicle 7. I won't be going into exacting details on the mechanics, just sort of an overview.
For a bit of background, I got my proper introduction to WFRP with the second edition created by Green Ronin. I had a good deal of fun with the small handful of characters I got to play, in particular a Bretonnian Knight Errant and a Human Protagonist (i.e. professional bully).
The world of WFRP is is much darker than your typical fantasy RPG setting, with magic being (ostensibly) a very rare and unusual thing, with the general tech level being around early Renaissance with some steampunk elements, mostly revolving around gunpowder weapons. Also, the PC are not going to be grand heroes saving the world; in fact the best summary I've heard for WFRP is "the world's finest crappy peasant simulator" since most PCs are going to start off being on the lower end of the social strata and will be lucky to have a decent weapon or a leather vest. You can read more about the game's history and elements of of the setting here.
So now the preamble's out of the way, on to what my thoughts are with the latest edition of "the world's finest crappy peasant simulator." Overall, I like the tweaks made between 2e and 4e (sorry, but just couldn't get into the Fantasy Flight Games edition as it felt far too gimmicky and too much like a board game than a proper RPG). I've only played two sessions thus far, having rolled up a Human Protagonist (what can I say, I love the entire concept of the career) for the group.
One notable change right off the bat is that it's officially part of the rules that you can either roll randomly to determine things like your race and your starting career or you can pick what you want. However, if you opt to go with the random roll method, your awarded with a bit of bonus XP for each part of the process that you go with the rolled result; it's not a huge amount, but it's a nice little bonus to allow a little extra tweaking to your PC in the early going.
An issue that plagued the first and second editions was the "whiff factor" given that for most trained skills a PC would typically need to roll under a 35 on percentile dice, meaning that unless your had circumstantial bonuses you were more likely to flub the roll, which got especially tedious with combat as you could go several rounds of two opponents swinging and missing at each other. What 4e has done is changed skills so that they now have ranks (or Advances as this game calls them) that give you a bonus to your value, meaning that as a PC gains more XP they can get better at the skills in their career; starting PCs still won't be amazing but at least there's a definite improvement track.
Talents have gotten a significant overall, as many of them are now ranked and provide a small bonus to successful tests
Another tweak is to combat itself, where melee fighting is now an opposed check, with the attack hitting if the aggressor gets the better degree of success. Also changed is the introduction of Advantage, with each point you have giving you a bonus to your combat checks. Defending against attacks have been expanded, so that a creative player has a bevy of options available to them to protect against people trying to cave their face in, which is nice.
Combat overall feels a bit more dangerous, as every successful attack will inflict at least 1 point of damage no matter how good your armor rating it, so the much maligned "naked dwarf syndrome" of 1e has been averted, though it will still take a while to chip away at the health of foes with a high Wounds total. Also, if you roll doubles on a successful attack (or even a successful defense) you inflict a critical hit, which can lead to some really nasty injuries that will linger for quite some time if nobody in the group is a trained healer. So much like 2e, getting into a fight can have some nasty consequences beyond losing health points even if you win, which will definitely come to a shock to those players used to a "kick in the door" style of play.
Spellcasting has gotten quite a revamp, now requiring a skill check, with the more advanced spells needing a better degree of success. It's definitely a bit more complicated than 1e or 2e, but if you do really well on the skill check with the lower power spells, you can get a greater degree of effect.
Now I've only played a couple of sessions so far, with the GM running us through a converted 2e adventure (don't know which one), but it's been pretty fun thus far, starting off with a bar brawl to ease us into how combat worked without too drastic of consequences, leading then into a investigative segment where we had to exonerate an innocent farmer that a local (and not very trustworthy) bounty hunter looking for a quick payday by claiming the farmer was a local bandit that'd been causing problems, and leading to a rather intense social encounter between the us and the bounty hunter as each side made their case to the local road warden. Next portion had us on the road after liberating the farmer and the disreputable bounty hunter winding up with a heck of a black eye (literally and figuratively), and then getting roped into rescuing a little girl who'd been snatched up by bandits and was apparently the illegitimate daughter of a local noble baron, only to find the bandits had been ambushed by a band of goblins that had taken the little girl as a prisoner. Our attempts at being sneaky and distract/scare off the goblins didn't really work out so well, leading to our Halfling Rat Catcher catching a nasty head wound from the lead goblin, though we managed to flee away with a couple of horses and the rightly terrified little girl, which itself lead to an amusing situation with the Witch having to deal with calming down the little girl at least enough that she wasn't screaming as we made our speedy escape from the pursuing goblins. Of course, now we have to bring the girl to her father, which I'm sure that given this is WFRP is going to go swimmingly.
Overall, I've been enjoying playing this system. It's definitely a bit more on the gritty side, and I will admit it's kind of fun to play a PC that's not the typical noble and upstanding individual, and instead embracing that fact that my character in this group is a boisterous rapscallion with a penchant for punching folks in very uncomfortable places.
For a bit of background, I got my proper introduction to WFRP with the second edition created by Green Ronin. I had a good deal of fun with the small handful of characters I got to play, in particular a Bretonnian Knight Errant and a Human Protagonist (i.e. professional bully).
The world of WFRP is is much darker than your typical fantasy RPG setting, with magic being (ostensibly) a very rare and unusual thing, with the general tech level being around early Renaissance with some steampunk elements, mostly revolving around gunpowder weapons. Also, the PC are not going to be grand heroes saving the world; in fact the best summary I've heard for WFRP is "the world's finest crappy peasant simulator" since most PCs are going to start off being on the lower end of the social strata and will be lucky to have a decent weapon or a leather vest. You can read more about the game's history and elements of of the setting here.
So now the preamble's out of the way, on to what my thoughts are with the latest edition of "the world's finest crappy peasant simulator." Overall, I like the tweaks made between 2e and 4e (sorry, but just couldn't get into the Fantasy Flight Games edition as it felt far too gimmicky and too much like a board game than a proper RPG). I've only played two sessions thus far, having rolled up a Human Protagonist (what can I say, I love the entire concept of the career) for the group.
One notable change right off the bat is that it's officially part of the rules that you can either roll randomly to determine things like your race and your starting career or you can pick what you want. However, if you opt to go with the random roll method, your awarded with a bit of bonus XP for each part of the process that you go with the rolled result; it's not a huge amount, but it's a nice little bonus to allow a little extra tweaking to your PC in the early going.
An issue that plagued the first and second editions was the "whiff factor" given that for most trained skills a PC would typically need to roll under a 35 on percentile dice, meaning that unless your had circumstantial bonuses you were more likely to flub the roll, which got especially tedious with combat as you could go several rounds of two opponents swinging and missing at each other. What 4e has done is changed skills so that they now have ranks (or Advances as this game calls them) that give you a bonus to your value, meaning that as a PC gains more XP they can get better at the skills in their career; starting PCs still won't be amazing but at least there's a definite improvement track.
Talents have gotten a significant overall, as many of them are now ranked and provide a small bonus to successful tests
Another tweak is to combat itself, where melee fighting is now an opposed check, with the attack hitting if the aggressor gets the better degree of success. Also changed is the introduction of Advantage, with each point you have giving you a bonus to your combat checks. Defending against attacks have been expanded, so that a creative player has a bevy of options available to them to protect against people trying to cave their face in, which is nice.
Combat overall feels a bit more dangerous, as every successful attack will inflict at least 1 point of damage no matter how good your armor rating it, so the much maligned "naked dwarf syndrome" of 1e has been averted, though it will still take a while to chip away at the health of foes with a high Wounds total. Also, if you roll doubles on a successful attack (or even a successful defense) you inflict a critical hit, which can lead to some really nasty injuries that will linger for quite some time if nobody in the group is a trained healer. So much like 2e, getting into a fight can have some nasty consequences beyond losing health points even if you win, which will definitely come to a shock to those players used to a "kick in the door" style of play.
Spellcasting has gotten quite a revamp, now requiring a skill check, with the more advanced spells needing a better degree of success. It's definitely a bit more complicated than 1e or 2e, but if you do really well on the skill check with the lower power spells, you can get a greater degree of effect.
Now I've only played a couple of sessions so far, with the GM running us through a converted 2e adventure (don't know which one), but it's been pretty fun thus far, starting off with a bar brawl to ease us into how combat worked without too drastic of consequences, leading then into a investigative segment where we had to exonerate an innocent farmer that a local (and not very trustworthy) bounty hunter looking for a quick payday by claiming the farmer was a local bandit that'd been causing problems, and leading to a rather intense social encounter between the us and the bounty hunter as each side made their case to the local road warden. Next portion had us on the road after liberating the farmer and the disreputable bounty hunter winding up with a heck of a black eye (literally and figuratively), and then getting roped into rescuing a little girl who'd been snatched up by bandits and was apparently the illegitimate daughter of a local noble baron, only to find the bandits had been ambushed by a band of goblins that had taken the little girl as a prisoner. Our attempts at being sneaky and distract/scare off the goblins didn't really work out so well, leading to our Halfling Rat Catcher catching a nasty head wound from the lead goblin, though we managed to flee away with a couple of horses and the rightly terrified little girl, which itself lead to an amusing situation with the Witch having to deal with calming down the little girl at least enough that she wasn't screaming as we made our speedy escape from the pursuing goblins. Of course, now we have to bring the girl to her father, which I'm sure that given this is WFRP is going to go swimmingly.
Overall, I've been enjoying playing this system. It's definitely a bit more on the gritty side, and I will admit it's kind of fun to play a PC that's not the typical noble and upstanding individual, and instead embracing that fact that my character in this group is a boisterous rapscallion with a penchant for punching folks in very uncomfortable places.
July 4, 2018
Y2K-class Light Freighter - A New Ride for FFG Star Wars
Firstly, to my fellow American residents, a happy Fourth of July. While our nation's current state of affairs is tumultuous (to put it mildly), as a young nation (at least when compared to Europe) we've still managed to accomplish quite a bit for what was once derided as "The Great Experiment." So that at least we can celebrate. There's still a long ways to go, but I'm hopeful we'll get there sooner rather than later.
Now, while it might not be May the Fourth, it's still appropriate to say that the Fourth will be with you, so in that vein I'm posting up a little something I threw together not that long ago.
Over on the FFG Star Wars RPG forums, a thread cropped up with a newer member asking for some suggestions on how to stat up a ship design they'd found on the interwebz, jokingly calling said ship a "Falcon Junior." Dubbed the Y2K Peregrine by Miniature Scenery, it's actually a pretty neat looking ship, and to my mind would indeed be perfect for a small group of PCs, probably no more than two or three characters as a starting ship, perhaps especially for a Force and Destiny group, who frankly don't have a lot of options when it comes to available starting craft due to the limit of a 70K credit price tag.
The thread's OP was initially just using the stats of the JumpMaster 5000 (which still holds a place of amusement in my brain for reasons) as the baseline, but the JM-5K is designed more as a scout ship than any sort of cargo-carrying craft. So I thought I'd take a stab at coming up with a set of stats for this "baby YT-1300" that set it apart at least somewhat from the JumpMaster.
So one point of contention in the forum thread was the Silhouette, with a few folks being rather insistent that based upon their calculation of the ship's measurements that it must be Silhouette 3 and no bigger. However, given that Silhouette 3 is pretty much the domain of starfighters and the Y2K freighter is a lot wider compared to most starships, I felt that this fits into the lower end of Silhouette 4 and is better suited for a ship that's designed to haul cargo. I also wanted something that wasn't a flying death trap in case the PCs wind up getting into a starship battle, so making the ship Silhouette 4 also justified a higher Hull Trauma threshold than a Silhouette 3 ship would generally have. The initial armament isn't great, but it's serviceable and it wouldn't be too hard to swap it out for a quad laser cannon at some point down the road; admittedly I was tempted to give the ship a quad laser cannon as the default weapon, but I felt the ship had enough going for it already that it didn't need an awesome gun right off the bat.
I won't bore you with too much more of the creative thought processes that went into coming up with these stats, as if you take a look you can see where the stats for the JumpMaster 5000 had a strong influence on the stat block for the Y2K-class light freighter.
Y2K-class Light Freighter
Designed and put into production a few years after the end of the Clone Wars and the formation of the Galactic Empire, Corellian Engineering Corporation sought to create a smaller-scale version of their venerable YT-series of freighters, which were beginning to show their age. Applying lessons learned over the decades, the design team for the Y2K-series strove to design a courier-vessel, opting to skimp on the frills and focus on functionality.
Unfortunately, not unlike Kuat Systems Engineering's much-maligned S40K Phoenix Hawk-class Light Pinnace, the Y2K-class crew compartments were considered cramped even though it was spacious in terms of cargo hold. While most independent freighter pilots aren't overly concerned with having luxury accommodations, the Y2K-series' crew berths were certainly not a major selling point. What the Y2K-series did have was a high-performance ion drive that was reliable and needed far less maintenance than similar models, and while the hypedrive is not exceptional it too is very reliable. Instead of the more typical single laser cannon that ships of the YT-series featured, the Y2K-series comes standard with a twin blaster cannon, allowing it to more easily pass the Empire's increasingly strict weapon restrictions. The Y2K-series is surprisingly robust and nimble for a ship of it's size; a Y2K-series freighter won't be doing loops around your typical starfighter, but it won't be easy prey for raiders and pirates either. Unfortunately, even CEC's long reputation of easily modifiable craft couldn't overcome the ship's reduced size, and the Y2K-series isn't nearly as welcoming of modifications as many other CEC designs.
Unfortunately, CEC's core market weren't overly interested in what amounted to a cramped courier vessel, even at the deeply-discounted price the ship was being sold at, and production ceased after only a couple years. While replacement parts for this specific make of freighter are becoming increasingly scarce, the Y2K-series is surprisingly accepting of parts and components made for the YT-series, allowing this small and largely overlooked ship design to continue to operate and even thrive long after CEC had forgotten about it and moved on to other, more profitable ship designs.
Now, while it might not be May the Fourth, it's still appropriate to say that the Fourth will be with you, so in that vein I'm posting up a little something I threw together not that long ago.
Over on the FFG Star Wars RPG forums, a thread cropped up with a newer member asking for some suggestions on how to stat up a ship design they'd found on the interwebz, jokingly calling said ship a "Falcon Junior." Dubbed the Y2K Peregrine by Miniature Scenery, it's actually a pretty neat looking ship, and to my mind would indeed be perfect for a small group of PCs, probably no more than two or three characters as a starting ship, perhaps especially for a Force and Destiny group, who frankly don't have a lot of options when it comes to available starting craft due to the limit of a 70K credit price tag.
The thread's OP was initially just using the stats of the JumpMaster 5000 (which still holds a place of amusement in my brain for reasons) as the baseline, but the JM-5K is designed more as a scout ship than any sort of cargo-carrying craft. So I thought I'd take a stab at coming up with a set of stats for this "baby YT-1300" that set it apart at least somewhat from the JumpMaster.
So one point of contention in the forum thread was the Silhouette, with a few folks being rather insistent that based upon their calculation of the ship's measurements that it must be Silhouette 3 and no bigger. However, given that Silhouette 3 is pretty much the domain of starfighters and the Y2K freighter is a lot wider compared to most starships, I felt that this fits into the lower end of Silhouette 4 and is better suited for a ship that's designed to haul cargo. I also wanted something that wasn't a flying death trap in case the PCs wind up getting into a starship battle, so making the ship Silhouette 4 also justified a higher Hull Trauma threshold than a Silhouette 3 ship would generally have. The initial armament isn't great, but it's serviceable and it wouldn't be too hard to swap it out for a quad laser cannon at some point down the road; admittedly I was tempted to give the ship a quad laser cannon as the default weapon, but I felt the ship had enough going for it already that it didn't need an awesome gun right off the bat.
I won't bore you with too much more of the creative thought processes that went into coming up with these stats, as if you take a look you can see where the stats for the JumpMaster 5000 had a strong influence on the stat block for the Y2K-class light freighter.
Y2K-class Light Freighter
Designed and put into production a few years after the end of the Clone Wars and the formation of the Galactic Empire, Corellian Engineering Corporation sought to create a smaller-scale version of their venerable YT-series of freighters, which were beginning to show their age. Applying lessons learned over the decades, the design team for the Y2K-series strove to design a courier-vessel, opting to skimp on the frills and focus on functionality.
Unfortunately, not unlike Kuat Systems Engineering's much-maligned S40K Phoenix Hawk-class Light Pinnace, the Y2K-class crew compartments were considered cramped even though it was spacious in terms of cargo hold. While most independent freighter pilots aren't overly concerned with having luxury accommodations, the Y2K-series' crew berths were certainly not a major selling point. What the Y2K-series did have was a high-performance ion drive that was reliable and needed far less maintenance than similar models, and while the hypedrive is not exceptional it too is very reliable. Instead of the more typical single laser cannon that ships of the YT-series featured, the Y2K-series comes standard with a twin blaster cannon, allowing it to more easily pass the Empire's increasingly strict weapon restrictions. The Y2K-series is surprisingly robust and nimble for a ship of it's size; a Y2K-series freighter won't be doing loops around your typical starfighter, but it won't be easy prey for raiders and pirates either. Unfortunately, even CEC's long reputation of easily modifiable craft couldn't overcome the ship's reduced size, and the Y2K-series isn't nearly as welcoming of modifications as many other CEC designs.
Unfortunately, CEC's core market weren't overly interested in what amounted to a cramped courier vessel, even at the deeply-discounted price the ship was being sold at, and production ceased after only a couple years. While replacement parts for this specific make of freighter are becoming increasingly scarce, the Y2K-series is surprisingly accepting of parts and components made for the YT-series, allowing this small and largely overlooked ship design to continue to operate and even thrive long after CEC had forgotten about it and moved on to other, more profitable ship designs.
May 25, 2018
Some Force & Destiny rules tweaks (Star Wars RPG)
Yeah, yeah, I missed "May the Fourth" in terms of posting something relating to the wide world of Star Wars geekdom. Still, given that Solo is officially released today here in the U.S., I figure a Star Wars themed RPG post is acceptable.
Far warning, this post is going to be a bit on the lengthy side, not due to the volume of things being tweaked, but more due to explanations of the reasoning behind why the tweaks were made in the first place. That and the matter that the bulk of what I'd consider my rules tweaks for Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars Force and Destiny RPG is covered in version 2.0 of my old Ways of the Force fan supplement.
Now to be clear, I consider the FFG Star Wars RPG to be a pretty solid system, one that can be run very well without a single house rule needing to be made or implemented. I've played and run a number of games, from one-shots at conventions to campaigns of varying lengths, and not once have I been disappointed beyond a rare string of crappy dice rolls, but that's more an issue with the Star Wars dice roller apps generally not liking me than any sort of fault of the system.
That's not to say there's elements that I don't think could be tweaked a bit, such as the revised talent trees that I posted a while back for the Ataru Striker, Shii-Cho Knight, and Soresu Defender specializations (you can check them out here), or things that could be added such as the inclusion of synthetic lightsaber crystals (much as I like Dave Filoni's work on Star Wars Rebels, I disagree on the notion that synthetic 'saber crystals are emphatically not a thing in the new canon).
I've been working on most of these for a while, running a series of test combats as well as using them in live game sessions where possible. Some of what I'm posting below is fairly minor, some of it less so. But, enough prattling, on to the house rules...
Skills
Deception checks are now opposed by Vigilance instead of Discipline
Okay, so this isn't so much a house rule as adopting a rules element from FFG's Genesys RPG, one that I happen to like. This change/update/tweak takes some of the value off of Discipline, which is already pretty solid since it's used to resist Coercion and fear, is the default skill for Force powers when a skill check is required, and can be used to recover strain. As a result, Vigilance becomes a bit more than the "roll initiative" or "resist an ambush" skill.
Talents
Feint
So like I posted last year when discussing the various Lightsaber Form specializations, the Feint talent for a Makashi Duelist is problematic because given how the game's combat system works, said talent is likely to be become less and less useful. Reason being that combat is skewed towards making it harder to avoid getting hit than it is to be able to hit your opponent. And since as written Feint requires you to miss on a melee-based combat check, that means that the talent is going to see less and less use as your character gets better at using a lightsaber, which is bad since Feint is the Makashi Duelist's primary defensive talent.
So my suggested tweak is to re-word the talent's effects to read as follows:
F&D pg82 (short description)
Spend Triumph or 3 Advantage when making a melee combat check against an opponent to upgrade the difficulty of the opponent's next melee combat check targeting the character during this encounter by the character's ranks in Feint.
F&D pg142 (full description)
When making a Lightsaber, Brawl, or Melee combat check against an opponent, the character may spend Triumph or 3 Advantage to upgrade the difficulty of the opponent's next Lightsaber, Brawl, or Melee combat check targeting the character during this encounter by the character's ranks in Feint.
In short, make it so that Feint can be spent whether you hit or miss, but as a trade-off the effects only apply if the opponent themselves is making a melee-based attack, which makes sense for a combat form that is built entirely around dueling; Feint should be zero help if the other guy decides to draw a blaster or throw a grenade at you.
Defensive Circle
So after some pondering based upon observations of the Soresu Defender PC in my current F&D campaign, I've decided that this talent needs a bit of a tweak to make it more viable as a tactic. While on paper it looks pretty good as written, the stumbling block comes when you've got a party where most everyone is wearing armor that provides defense or routinely takes cover when the blaster bolts start flying. Even more so is the fact that you're rolling against a Hard difficulty, meaning you're probably not going to be getting a lot of Advantage to spend if you succeed on the Lightsaber (Intellect) check that the talent requires. This is a rules tweak that I've tested in live play sessions, and it's worked out pretty well as it lets the PC be a "defender" for the party without having to min-max his Lightsaber skill or Intellect in order for the talent to be worth the XP. So for this tweak, the rules text would be re-worded as follows:
F&D pg77 (short description)
Make a Hard difficulty Lightsaber (Intellect) check as an action. The character plus one ally within short range per uncancelled success increases their defense by 1 until the beginning of next turn. Increase defense bonus by 1 per 2 Advantage.
F&D pg141 (full description)
Force Talent: While wielding a lightsaber, the character may take the Defensive Circle action, making a Hard difficulty Lightsaber (Intellect) check. If successful, the character plus one ally within short range per uncancelled success increases their current ranged and melee defense by 1 until the beginning of the character's next turn. Increase the bonus to defense by 1 for every 2 Advantage.
With the most recent FAQ adding some needed clarification on defense stacking as well as a hard cap on how high a character's defense can get, the rewording of Defensive Circle now allows for the character to help out his party members who are benefiting from armor defense or cover, but not to such an extreme degree that enemy dice pools are loaded with setback dice thanks to the hard cap that's now in place.
Strategic Form
So another Soresu Defender talent, this one caught my eye as at a later date I will be entering into a friend's F&D-themed campaign using a character that has this as his starting specialization. While he's only at Knight Level in terms of XP, I did take a look at other talents in the tree, especially since the GM is keeping things fairly close to RAW with regards to specializations. For me, the problem with this talent is there's an entire Signature Ability called Fated Duel, which is for the Guardian career, that does a lot of what Strategic Form does (forces an enemy to attack you and only you), but does it in such a way that the Soresu PC isn't suddenly overwhelmed. Which, given my experiences with Feint above as well as general play regarding the strain cost of Parry and Reflect, means that a Soresu Defender using Strategic Form as written is pretty much drawing aggro like crazy and more likely than not will be taken out of action before they get another chance to act, either from burning strain to fuel Parry and especially Reflect or from the sheer volume of wounds taken.
Now, as I mentioned under Defensive Circle above, one of the key tenets of Soresu is don't get hit, but is also to use those defensive motions to create opportunities for the Soresu user to make their own attacks while weathering the storm of their opponents' offense. As written, Strategic Form does neither of these, and instead it really just paints a huge bullseye on the character's chest, making it more of a desperation tactic than something the player would want to use. Yeah, the talent's tucked into the top corner of the spec, so the player doesn't have to purchase Strategic Form if they don't want to, but it's location does mean that you'd either need to buy it anyway or purchase and go through a second Guardian specialization if you wanted the previously mentioned Fated Duel Signature Ability. So, my proposed revision to the talent is such:
F&D pg77 (short description)
Make a Hard difficulty Lightsaber (Intellect) check as an action, rolling Force dice no greater than Force rating. Add 1 Threat to results of combat checks targeting the character until the beginning of next turn; add additional Threat per 2 Success. Spend Force point to recover one strain.
F&D pg152 (full description)
Force Talent: While wielding a Lightsaber weapon, the character may take the Strategic Form action, making a Hard difficulty Lightsaber (Intellect) check and rolling Force dice no greater than Force rating as part of the check. If the check is successful, add 1 Threat to results of any combat checks targeting the character until the beginning of the character's next turn, adding additional Threat per 2 Success generated on the check. The character may spend Force point to recover one strain.
So with this revamp of the talent, Soresu Defender now has a tactic that lets them "weather the storm" (recoup strain used to fuel Parry and Reflect) while creating openings for them to exploit by making it more likely they'll be able to trigger Improved Parry and/or Improved Reflect, which is going to be the main way a Soresu Defender PC is able to make attacks seeing as how using this talent causes them to forfeit their action, and thus pass on attacking with what is probably one of the most devastating close-quarters weapons in the game, especially if they're using a highly-modded Ilum or Mephite crystal (which given Intellect is one of their key characteristics is fairly likely).
Equipment
Most of this is actually tweaks to some of the previous homebrew material I previously published in Ways of the Force rather than tweaks to officially published FFG material.
Adegan Crystal (Lightsaber Attachment)
Okay, so this originally began as a "starter crystal" option for GMs that were hesitant about handing out some of the potentially more potent crystals early in the campaign. However, given the lore behind Adegan crystals over in Legends, and how they were standard for the Jedi prior to the discovery of Ilum, I felt I was underselling them. Now granted there are a number of varieties of Adegan crystals, from the Pontite and Mephite to the lowly Katharcite, but I ultimately wanted to keep things more on the simpler side rather than have several different types of Adegan crystals. I also wanted something that had a bit more punching power than the Athiss Cave crystals from the F&D Beta adventure Lost Knowledge, which are themselves excellent starter crystals for a group of aspiring 'saber monkeys.
So here's an updated version of the Adegan crystal, one that's more potent than the WotF version, but not as potentially potent as a fully-modded Ilum crystal:
Adegan Crystal Base Modifiers: Installing this crystal changes a lightsaber's base damage to 6 and critical rating to 2, and the lightsaber gains the Breach 1 and Sunder qualities. If the crystal is ever removed, the lightsaber loses these qualities and reverts to its previous base damage and critical rating. Modifications: 3 Damage +1 Mods, 1 Decrease the weapon's critical rating by 1 to a minimum of 1 Mod, 1 Item Quality (Vicious +1) Mods. Hard Points Required: 2 Cost: 8,000 credits Rarity: 10 (R)
So main changes are an extra damage mod, one less rank of Vicious, a mod to get the crit rating down to 1 as well as an increase in both price and rarity owing to the increased power of the crystal.
Now, having pretty much removed Adegan crystals as a lower-end "starter crystal," that left me with something of a blank space in that regard. I still wanted something that a player whose character was designed to be a lightsaber wielder could have that wasn't as timid as the training emitter but wouldn't give novice GMs pause by providing the Breach 1 quality. The answer was found in the lore for the Tapani lightfoil, in particular the modern versions of the weapon, which per Legends are effectively novelty store knock-offs of a proper lightsabers, not being nearly as well made and employing sub-standard or synthetic focusing lenses. And so was born...
Synthetic Focusing Lens Base Modifiers: Installing this crystal changes a lightsaber's base damage to 6 and critical rating to 3, and the lightsaber gains the Pierce 1 quality. If the crystal is ever removed, the lightsaber loses these qualities and reverts to its previous base damage and critical rating. Modifications: 1 Damage +1 Mod, 1 Decrease the weapon's critical rating by 1 to a minimum of 1 Mod, 1 Item Quality (Pierce +1) Mod, 1 Item Quality (Vicious +1) Mod. Hard Points Required: 2 Cost: 500 credits Rarity: 8 (R)
So yeah, definitely a good deal more heft than the training emitter, given the potential to make this a Damage 7 with Pierce 2 weapon, but not as potent as a full kyber crystal, making a nice midpoint between the two. I'm not 100% settled on the price, as a part of me thinks 500 credits is too cheap, but I still want this to be something a starting character could begin play with.
And much like building a training emitter as detailed in the sidebar of the Lightsaber crafting rules from Endless Vigil, it'd take an Average difficulty Mechanics check and 150 credits' worth of parts to build a synthetic focusing lens.
Force Powers
And this is the part where I'm likely due to irk some folks, as one of the powers that I've been working on tweaking is the Move power. However, unlike a number of folks that have sought to water down the power based solely upon their presumptions of how potent Move is (9.9 times out of 10, the naysayers are using hypothetical examples of PCs with either awesome dice luck to be constantly rolling double light side pips or a few hundred XP invested in both Move and getting to Force Rating 3 or higher), what I've been testing over the past several months probably makes this most contentious of Force powers a bit more powerful, at least in the early going. But more on that in a moment.
Enhance
Okay, full disclosure, there's been two things with Enhance as written that have irked me. The first is that leaping horizontally and vertically are split into two separate Control upgrades. The second is that as the effect is written (and was confirmed by Sam Stewart during one of his guest appearances on the Order 66 podcast), you can't use a Force leap to engage or disengage with an opponent, meaning that you'd have to spend at least one maneuver to either disengage and then Force leap away, or Force leap in and spend a maneuver to engage.
So, my tweak to Enhance is to address both of those points, first by rolling the "leap horizontal" and "leap vertical" Control upgrades into a single Control upgrade that reads as follows:
Control Upgrade: Take a Force Leap action to make an Enhance power check. The user may spend Force point to jump to any location with short range, ignoring obstacles and difficult or impassible terrain. The user may not activate this multiple times.
(if using OggDude's awesome character generator, you can label this as Control: Force Leap)
Now, that leaves an empty slot where the "leap vertical" Control upgrade used to sit. This is easily filled in with the following:
Control Upgrade: When taking the Force Leap action, the user may disengage from or engage with another character as part of the action. Cost = 10XP
I've not really tested this outside of a few test combats, but given that for the longest time I'd been allowing a character to use this power to engage/disengage without problem, I don't foresee any major issues with implementing this revision.
Move
And here we go, the tweak regarding the one Force power that's drawn all sorts of concern and consternation from many folks who are going on pure speculation of how "overpowered" this power is compared to the reality where it's not nearly as potent as it looks on paper.
Now way back in the EotE Beta days, I had toyed with the notion of incorporating an inherent "attack" ability into the base Move power, much like a character trained in Use the Force could do in WotC's Saga Edition game. That never made it past the concept phase, until last year when I was working on a bunch of Force user pre-gens for the Star Wars module I ran at this past April's GamerNationCon, when it struck me that none of the PCs (who were originally Padawans of the Jedi Order) had the ability to make ranged attacks. Yes, most of them had lightsabers, but nobody could really attack at a distance if the situation called for it, something that I recalled happened to Chris "GM Chris" Witt of Order 66 podcast fame during one of his initial Saga Edition games, which resulted in a frustrating experience for players and GM alike. Of course, the tricky part was "how do I balance this without making Move too powerful?" The answer proved to be deceptively simple once I stopped obsessing over it.
So, my tweak to the Move basic power is as follows:
Basic Power: The user may spend Force point to move or hurl one object of Silhouette 0 that is within short range up to his maximum range. Hurling an object is a ranged attack using an Easy difficulty Discipline check combined with a Move power check, and deals 5 damage if successful. The default range is short range. May not be activated multiple times.
So, the offset is that while you can now use Move to attack as part of the basic power, it's no longer a Discipline check with no difficulty dice, meaning the attack is generally going to do less damage or not generate as much Advantage as said attack would under the rules as written. And this change has actually seen play at the table, both in the con session I ran (though most of the players were too eager to use their lightsabers to attack than hurl small objects) and in a recent campaign a friend of mine is running. Thus far, it's not proved to be unbalanced in the slightest, and the increased difficulty actually helps address a point of concern with throwing bigger objects (see below).
Now, with removing the "hurl objects" Control upgrade, that leaves a blank spot in the power tree, which similar to Enhance is rather easily patched with the following:
Control: The target of an attack mad with a hurled object is disoriented for a number of rounds equal to the number of Force points spent on the power check. Cost = 10XP
I took this idea from the Bind power in that any damage the base Bind power inflicts is determined by the number of Force points spent on fueling the power, so long as at least one of them came from a dark side pip. Yes, there is potential for a target to be disoriented for several rounds by a powerful Force user, but as being disoriented only adds a setback die to checks, and can itself be overcome with various talents or even equipment upgrades (such as the custom hilt attachment), that's not too big of a concern.
Now, by rolling the "hurl objects to deal damage" Control upgrade into the basic power, this necessitates some rewording of the Magnitude and Strength upgrades, such as:
Magnitude (add the following sentence): If hurling multiple objects or attacking multiple targets, the attack uses the rules for the Auto-fire quality.
Strength (add the following sentence): When hurled, damage is equal to ten times the object's silhouette and the base difficulty is increased by the object's silhouette.
Magnitude isn't really changed so much as relocating verbiage from the "hurl objects" Control upgrade regarding attacking multiple objects or attacking multiple targets.
Now with the Strength upgrade, this actually addresses one of the concerns with the difficulty (or lack thereof) for hurling around larger objects and doing considerably more damage. As one of my friends put it, the increased difficulty made it so that the tactic of hurling multiple silhouette 1 objects (base damage of 10 each per hit) at only 2 difficulty is no longer an easily accomplished thing. This change also happens to make it so that hurling anything above silhouette 4 falls under the purview of "impossible tasks" and can only be attempted by flipping a Destiny Point, which since you're limited to one Destiny Point expenditure per skill check means that you'd be stuck with whatever pips your Force dice rolled, meaning you'd be unable to convert them if the wrong flavor comes up. This puts tossing around truly colossal objects is the realm of the very powerful among Force users, and won't be the sort of thing that player-characters will be able to pull off until they've invested a whole lot of XP into both increasing their Force rating and investing in the Move power.
Okay, that's enough of my rambling on about what my more recent bouts of incessant tinker-monkeying have wrought.
I'm off to go what Solo, which if nothing else I expect to be a fun romp in the Star Wars universe. To be fair, I was never a huge fan of Han Solo as a kid, so I don't have any sort of emotional investment in the character for the film to trample on, and thus no real expectations for how things are going to turn out beyond Han and Chewing taking ownership of the Falcon and Lando being ticked off about them making off with "his" ship.
Far warning, this post is going to be a bit on the lengthy side, not due to the volume of things being tweaked, but more due to explanations of the reasoning behind why the tweaks were made in the first place. That and the matter that the bulk of what I'd consider my rules tweaks for Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars Force and Destiny RPG is covered in version 2.0 of my old Ways of the Force fan supplement.
Now to be clear, I consider the FFG Star Wars RPG to be a pretty solid system, one that can be run very well without a single house rule needing to be made or implemented. I've played and run a number of games, from one-shots at conventions to campaigns of varying lengths, and not once have I been disappointed beyond a rare string of crappy dice rolls, but that's more an issue with the Star Wars dice roller apps generally not liking me than any sort of fault of the system.
That's not to say there's elements that I don't think could be tweaked a bit, such as the revised talent trees that I posted a while back for the Ataru Striker, Shii-Cho Knight, and Soresu Defender specializations (you can check them out here), or things that could be added such as the inclusion of synthetic lightsaber crystals (much as I like Dave Filoni's work on Star Wars Rebels, I disagree on the notion that synthetic 'saber crystals are emphatically not a thing in the new canon).
I've been working on most of these for a while, running a series of test combats as well as using them in live game sessions where possible. Some of what I'm posting below is fairly minor, some of it less so. But, enough prattling, on to the house rules...
Skills
Deception checks are now opposed by Vigilance instead of Discipline
Okay, so this isn't so much a house rule as adopting a rules element from FFG's Genesys RPG, one that I happen to like. This change/update/tweak takes some of the value off of Discipline, which is already pretty solid since it's used to resist Coercion and fear, is the default skill for Force powers when a skill check is required, and can be used to recover strain. As a result, Vigilance becomes a bit more than the "roll initiative" or "resist an ambush" skill.
Talents
Feint
So like I posted last year when discussing the various Lightsaber Form specializations, the Feint talent for a Makashi Duelist is problematic because given how the game's combat system works, said talent is likely to be become less and less useful. Reason being that combat is skewed towards making it harder to avoid getting hit than it is to be able to hit your opponent. And since as written Feint requires you to miss on a melee-based combat check, that means that the talent is going to see less and less use as your character gets better at using a lightsaber, which is bad since Feint is the Makashi Duelist's primary defensive talent.
So my suggested tweak is to re-word the talent's effects to read as follows:
F&D pg82 (short description)
Spend Triumph or 3 Advantage when making a melee combat check against an opponent to upgrade the difficulty of the opponent's next melee combat check targeting the character during this encounter by the character's ranks in Feint.
F&D pg142 (full description)
When making a Lightsaber, Brawl, or Melee combat check against an opponent, the character may spend Triumph or 3 Advantage to upgrade the difficulty of the opponent's next Lightsaber, Brawl, or Melee combat check targeting the character during this encounter by the character's ranks in Feint.
In short, make it so that Feint can be spent whether you hit or miss, but as a trade-off the effects only apply if the opponent themselves is making a melee-based attack, which makes sense for a combat form that is built entirely around dueling; Feint should be zero help if the other guy decides to draw a blaster or throw a grenade at you.
Defensive Circle
So after some pondering based upon observations of the Soresu Defender PC in my current F&D campaign, I've decided that this talent needs a bit of a tweak to make it more viable as a tactic. While on paper it looks pretty good as written, the stumbling block comes when you've got a party where most everyone is wearing armor that provides defense or routinely takes cover when the blaster bolts start flying. Even more so is the fact that you're rolling against a Hard difficulty, meaning you're probably not going to be getting a lot of Advantage to spend if you succeed on the Lightsaber (Intellect) check that the talent requires. This is a rules tweak that I've tested in live play sessions, and it's worked out pretty well as it lets the PC be a "defender" for the party without having to min-max his Lightsaber skill or Intellect in order for the talent to be worth the XP. So for this tweak, the rules text would be re-worded as follows:
F&D pg77 (short description)
Make a Hard difficulty Lightsaber (Intellect) check as an action. The character plus one ally within short range per uncancelled success increases their defense by 1 until the beginning of next turn. Increase defense bonus by 1 per 2 Advantage.
F&D pg141 (full description)
Force Talent: While wielding a lightsaber, the character may take the Defensive Circle action, making a Hard difficulty Lightsaber (Intellect) check. If successful, the character plus one ally within short range per uncancelled success increases their current ranged and melee defense by 1 until the beginning of the character's next turn. Increase the bonus to defense by 1 for every 2 Advantage.
With the most recent FAQ adding some needed clarification on defense stacking as well as a hard cap on how high a character's defense can get, the rewording of Defensive Circle now allows for the character to help out his party members who are benefiting from armor defense or cover, but not to such an extreme degree that enemy dice pools are loaded with setback dice thanks to the hard cap that's now in place.
Strategic Form
So another Soresu Defender talent, this one caught my eye as at a later date I will be entering into a friend's F&D-themed campaign using a character that has this as his starting specialization. While he's only at Knight Level in terms of XP, I did take a look at other talents in the tree, especially since the GM is keeping things fairly close to RAW with regards to specializations. For me, the problem with this talent is there's an entire Signature Ability called Fated Duel, which is for the Guardian career, that does a lot of what Strategic Form does (forces an enemy to attack you and only you), but does it in such a way that the Soresu PC isn't suddenly overwhelmed. Which, given my experiences with Feint above as well as general play regarding the strain cost of Parry and Reflect, means that a Soresu Defender using Strategic Form as written is pretty much drawing aggro like crazy and more likely than not will be taken out of action before they get another chance to act, either from burning strain to fuel Parry and especially Reflect or from the sheer volume of wounds taken.
Now, as I mentioned under Defensive Circle above, one of the key tenets of Soresu is don't get hit, but is also to use those defensive motions to create opportunities for the Soresu user to make their own attacks while weathering the storm of their opponents' offense. As written, Strategic Form does neither of these, and instead it really just paints a huge bullseye on the character's chest, making it more of a desperation tactic than something the player would want to use. Yeah, the talent's tucked into the top corner of the spec, so the player doesn't have to purchase Strategic Form if they don't want to, but it's location does mean that you'd either need to buy it anyway or purchase and go through a second Guardian specialization if you wanted the previously mentioned Fated Duel Signature Ability. So, my proposed revision to the talent is such:
F&D pg77 (short description)
Make a Hard difficulty Lightsaber (Intellect) check as an action, rolling Force dice no greater than Force rating. Add 1 Threat to results of combat checks targeting the character until the beginning of next turn; add additional Threat per 2 Success. Spend Force point to recover one strain.
F&D pg152 (full description)
Force Talent: While wielding a Lightsaber weapon, the character may take the Strategic Form action, making a Hard difficulty Lightsaber (Intellect) check and rolling Force dice no greater than Force rating as part of the check. If the check is successful, add 1 Threat to results of any combat checks targeting the character until the beginning of the character's next turn, adding additional Threat per 2 Success generated on the check. The character may spend Force point to recover one strain.
So with this revamp of the talent, Soresu Defender now has a tactic that lets them "weather the storm" (recoup strain used to fuel Parry and Reflect) while creating openings for them to exploit by making it more likely they'll be able to trigger Improved Parry and/or Improved Reflect, which is going to be the main way a Soresu Defender PC is able to make attacks seeing as how using this talent causes them to forfeit their action, and thus pass on attacking with what is probably one of the most devastating close-quarters weapons in the game, especially if they're using a highly-modded Ilum or Mephite crystal (which given Intellect is one of their key characteristics is fairly likely).
Equipment
Most of this is actually tweaks to some of the previous homebrew material I previously published in Ways of the Force rather than tweaks to officially published FFG material.
Adegan Crystal (Lightsaber Attachment)
Okay, so this originally began as a "starter crystal" option for GMs that were hesitant about handing out some of the potentially more potent crystals early in the campaign. However, given the lore behind Adegan crystals over in Legends, and how they were standard for the Jedi prior to the discovery of Ilum, I felt I was underselling them. Now granted there are a number of varieties of Adegan crystals, from the Pontite and Mephite to the lowly Katharcite, but I ultimately wanted to keep things more on the simpler side rather than have several different types of Adegan crystals. I also wanted something that had a bit more punching power than the Athiss Cave crystals from the F&D Beta adventure Lost Knowledge, which are themselves excellent starter crystals for a group of aspiring 'saber monkeys.
So here's an updated version of the Adegan crystal, one that's more potent than the WotF version, but not as potentially potent as a fully-modded Ilum crystal:
Adegan Crystal Base Modifiers: Installing this crystal changes a lightsaber's base damage to 6 and critical rating to 2, and the lightsaber gains the Breach 1 and Sunder qualities. If the crystal is ever removed, the lightsaber loses these qualities and reverts to its previous base damage and critical rating. Modifications: 3 Damage +1 Mods, 1 Decrease the weapon's critical rating by 1 to a minimum of 1 Mod, 1 Item Quality (Vicious +1) Mods. Hard Points Required: 2 Cost: 8,000 credits Rarity: 10 (R)
So main changes are an extra damage mod, one less rank of Vicious, a mod to get the crit rating down to 1 as well as an increase in both price and rarity owing to the increased power of the crystal.
Now, having pretty much removed Adegan crystals as a lower-end "starter crystal," that left me with something of a blank space in that regard. I still wanted something that a player whose character was designed to be a lightsaber wielder could have that wasn't as timid as the training emitter but wouldn't give novice GMs pause by providing the Breach 1 quality. The answer was found in the lore for the Tapani lightfoil, in particular the modern versions of the weapon, which per Legends are effectively novelty store knock-offs of a proper lightsabers, not being nearly as well made and employing sub-standard or synthetic focusing lenses. And so was born...
Synthetic Focusing Lens Base Modifiers: Installing this crystal changes a lightsaber's base damage to 6 and critical rating to 3, and the lightsaber gains the Pierce 1 quality. If the crystal is ever removed, the lightsaber loses these qualities and reverts to its previous base damage and critical rating. Modifications: 1 Damage +1 Mod, 1 Decrease the weapon's critical rating by 1 to a minimum of 1 Mod, 1 Item Quality (Pierce +1) Mod, 1 Item Quality (Vicious +1) Mod. Hard Points Required: 2 Cost: 500 credits Rarity: 8 (R)
So yeah, definitely a good deal more heft than the training emitter, given the potential to make this a Damage 7 with Pierce 2 weapon, but not as potent as a full kyber crystal, making a nice midpoint between the two. I'm not 100% settled on the price, as a part of me thinks 500 credits is too cheap, but I still want this to be something a starting character could begin play with.
And much like building a training emitter as detailed in the sidebar of the Lightsaber crafting rules from Endless Vigil, it'd take an Average difficulty Mechanics check and 150 credits' worth of parts to build a synthetic focusing lens.
Force Powers
And this is the part where I'm likely due to irk some folks, as one of the powers that I've been working on tweaking is the Move power. However, unlike a number of folks that have sought to water down the power based solely upon their presumptions of how potent Move is (9.9 times out of 10, the naysayers are using hypothetical examples of PCs with either awesome dice luck to be constantly rolling double light side pips or a few hundred XP invested in both Move and getting to Force Rating 3 or higher), what I've been testing over the past several months probably makes this most contentious of Force powers a bit more powerful, at least in the early going. But more on that in a moment.
Enhance
Okay, full disclosure, there's been two things with Enhance as written that have irked me. The first is that leaping horizontally and vertically are split into two separate Control upgrades. The second is that as the effect is written (and was confirmed by Sam Stewart during one of his guest appearances on the Order 66 podcast), you can't use a Force leap to engage or disengage with an opponent, meaning that you'd have to spend at least one maneuver to either disengage and then Force leap away, or Force leap in and spend a maneuver to engage.
So, my tweak to Enhance is to address both of those points, first by rolling the "leap horizontal" and "leap vertical" Control upgrades into a single Control upgrade that reads as follows:
Control Upgrade: Take a Force Leap action to make an Enhance power check. The user may spend Force point to jump to any location with short range, ignoring obstacles and difficult or impassible terrain. The user may not activate this multiple times.
(if using OggDude's awesome character generator, you can label this as Control: Force Leap)
Now, that leaves an empty slot where the "leap vertical" Control upgrade used to sit. This is easily filled in with the following:
Control Upgrade: When taking the Force Leap action, the user may disengage from or engage with another character as part of the action. Cost = 10XP
I've not really tested this outside of a few test combats, but given that for the longest time I'd been allowing a character to use this power to engage/disengage without problem, I don't foresee any major issues with implementing this revision.
Move
And here we go, the tweak regarding the one Force power that's drawn all sorts of concern and consternation from many folks who are going on pure speculation of how "overpowered" this power is compared to the reality where it's not nearly as potent as it looks on paper.
Now way back in the EotE Beta days, I had toyed with the notion of incorporating an inherent "attack" ability into the base Move power, much like a character trained in Use the Force could do in WotC's Saga Edition game. That never made it past the concept phase, until last year when I was working on a bunch of Force user pre-gens for the Star Wars module I ran at this past April's GamerNationCon, when it struck me that none of the PCs (who were originally Padawans of the Jedi Order) had the ability to make ranged attacks. Yes, most of them had lightsabers, but nobody could really attack at a distance if the situation called for it, something that I recalled happened to Chris "GM Chris" Witt of Order 66 podcast fame during one of his initial Saga Edition games, which resulted in a frustrating experience for players and GM alike. Of course, the tricky part was "how do I balance this without making Move too powerful?" The answer proved to be deceptively simple once I stopped obsessing over it.
So, my tweak to the Move basic power is as follows:
Basic Power: The user may spend Force point to move or hurl one object of Silhouette 0 that is within short range up to his maximum range. Hurling an object is a ranged attack using an Easy difficulty Discipline check combined with a Move power check, and deals 5 damage if successful. The default range is short range. May not be activated multiple times.
So, the offset is that while you can now use Move to attack as part of the basic power, it's no longer a Discipline check with no difficulty dice, meaning the attack is generally going to do less damage or not generate as much Advantage as said attack would under the rules as written. And this change has actually seen play at the table, both in the con session I ran (though most of the players were too eager to use their lightsabers to attack than hurl small objects) and in a recent campaign a friend of mine is running. Thus far, it's not proved to be unbalanced in the slightest, and the increased difficulty actually helps address a point of concern with throwing bigger objects (see below).
Now, with removing the "hurl objects" Control upgrade, that leaves a blank spot in the power tree, which similar to Enhance is rather easily patched with the following:
Control: The target of an attack mad with a hurled object is disoriented for a number of rounds equal to the number of Force points spent on the power check. Cost = 10XP
I took this idea from the Bind power in that any damage the base Bind power inflicts is determined by the number of Force points spent on fueling the power, so long as at least one of them came from a dark side pip. Yes, there is potential for a target to be disoriented for several rounds by a powerful Force user, but as being disoriented only adds a setback die to checks, and can itself be overcome with various talents or even equipment upgrades (such as the custom hilt attachment), that's not too big of a concern.
Now, by rolling the "hurl objects to deal damage" Control upgrade into the basic power, this necessitates some rewording of the Magnitude and Strength upgrades, such as:
Magnitude (add the following sentence): If hurling multiple objects or attacking multiple targets, the attack uses the rules for the Auto-fire quality.
Strength (add the following sentence): When hurled, damage is equal to ten times the object's silhouette and the base difficulty is increased by the object's silhouette.
Magnitude isn't really changed so much as relocating verbiage from the "hurl objects" Control upgrade regarding attacking multiple objects or attacking multiple targets.
Now with the Strength upgrade, this actually addresses one of the concerns with the difficulty (or lack thereof) for hurling around larger objects and doing considerably more damage. As one of my friends put it, the increased difficulty made it so that the tactic of hurling multiple silhouette 1 objects (base damage of 10 each per hit) at only 2 difficulty is no longer an easily accomplished thing. This change also happens to make it so that hurling anything above silhouette 4 falls under the purview of "impossible tasks" and can only be attempted by flipping a Destiny Point, which since you're limited to one Destiny Point expenditure per skill check means that you'd be stuck with whatever pips your Force dice rolled, meaning you'd be unable to convert them if the wrong flavor comes up. This puts tossing around truly colossal objects is the realm of the very powerful among Force users, and won't be the sort of thing that player-characters will be able to pull off until they've invested a whole lot of XP into both increasing their Force rating and investing in the Move power.
Okay, that's enough of my rambling on about what my more recent bouts of incessant tinker-monkeying have wrought.
I'm off to go what Solo, which if nothing else I expect to be a fun romp in the Star Wars universe. To be fair, I was never a huge fan of Han Solo as a kid, so I don't have any sort of emotional investment in the character for the film to trample on, and thus no real expectations for how things are going to turn out beyond Han and Chewing taking ownership of the Falcon and Lando being ticked off about them making off with "his" ship.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)