Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: First Session Impressions

The regular guys played our first session of WFRP just now. It was good - the irreverence in the game world was a good fit for the group. This meant that the jokes worked well, which pretty much took up the first half of the session.

Making up the characters was great fun. We have:

• An unemployed dwarf clown (he left his previous employment for "artistic reasons").
• An elf kithband warrior (kind of their woodland militia) who really wants to be a magician and figured that hanging out with a guy who hunts down evil ones is a good place to learn about it.
• A human vagabond who is fighting chaos out of misplaced liberal guilt - he is trying to make up for the fact that humans are the most susceptible to corruption by the dark powers of chaos.
• A halfling hunter who, well, he's just a bit of a weed really.
  

Three of the characters (our fourth is lazing around on holiday in Hawaii right now - for this he misses my game!) were given a task to prove themselves to their master Rudiger, a Witch Hunter. First they spent a bit of time making fools of themselves at the tavern he was going to meet them at (totally messing with his plans to keep it quiet). They were to track down a chaos sorcerer in the village while he dealt with more pressing matters, armed with a document that none of them can read to give them authority.

The elf headed out of town to search suspicious farms, finding nothing. The human and dwarf tried to find out things at the tavern but all they got was pointed at the local healer (due to a local thinking the dwarf had a personal problem that needed some strong herbal remedies).

They began questioning the healer, which didn't go very far until they blurted out that they were witch hunters. She immediately figured they were going to have her executed and freaked out. Following some of the random comments she blurted out they eventually found a chaos shrine in the cellar of a burnt out farmhouse. They had brought the healer (bound and gagged) with them and when the vagabond heard a scary noise he dropped her and bolted. The giant three-eyed chaos frog promptly ate her.

Our heroes gradually got their act together and slew the frog. Then they headed back to the tavern to rest (and hopefully ponder the needless death of an innocent woman).

Next morning they tracked down the chaos cultists to a hut in the wood. They assaulted it, and there was an exciting fight as the elf basically killed the three thugs and the other two captured the sorceress and finished off one guy.

The sorceress was handed over to Rudiger and all was well. Except for the healer (I think they pretty much kept quiet about her fate, hoping nobody would ever find out).

Setting is good, the Warhammer world is a grim and fun one and the new edition of the game has this shining through. Especially the careers, which are at least as cool as the ones I remember from the first edition. The mechanics work well enough, especially as I was pretty much running it as conflict resolution even though it's written as task resolution. Combat doesn't allow that, but it runs smoothly. There are a few tactical options but they're not confusing.

The only thing that annoyed me was the critical hit system... it's far to complex. After rolling to hit, the victim rolling to dodge or parry and then hit position and then damage being calculated (another roll with modifiers). Then, if it is a critical, you roll another percentage dice and look up on a table on the column for how much excess damage there was to get a number you then look up on a table for the hit position was the actual effect was. I'm pretty sure that you would get the same result with something like d10+excess damage on the critical table for the position. I'll consider checking the effects there, because it was an enormous hassle to do that. And every fight to the death will have some - you only kill people with critical hits. The system is that damage wears you down until you run out of wounds (typically 2-4 hits) and then you take criticals that can maim or kill you.

Overall: pretty good game, and a hell of a lot of fun for our group.

Recent Game Impressions: Polaris and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

They're not a natural pair. In fact, it's hard to imagine a greater contrast. I haven't had time to think in detail about these games but I want to introduce them and compare.

Polaris is about somewhat elfin knights at the north pole fighting the demons that are inevitably going to destroy their kingdom. The narration duties are split up unusually. Four people play the game. For a scene about your character, the person sitting across from you creates adversity and the people to your left and right play the roles of the two types of NPCs (those you have an emotional relationship with and those who are related to you mainly by your role in society). All the main characters are doomed. Game play is highly ritualised. For example conflicts are resolved using specific phrases to let the others know what you are doing. The expectations for each player at each stage of the game are well-defined and the setting is extremely cool. The art and design of the book feed into the feel as well. My main problem at the moment is that there are five of us in my gaming group, so we can't really play the game (there are suggestions for playing with three or five players, but I feel like they would be sub-optimal). Overall, looks great.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is about various adventurers having adventures. It's the second edition but stays true to the style of the first edition back in the 1980s. The career system is still there and just as cool as I remember. It's also terrifyingly old-fashioned in other ways. It suggests that the GM may want to purchase a screen so that the players can't see you cheat, and the introductory adventure includes instructions to simply not let the player characters do certain things that will derail the climax of the story. It's pretty shocking to meet this again after playing Forge-type independent games for a while, but I am confident that all this crap can be ignored. The system is basically sound and the setting extremely fun. Tweaking task-based into conflict-based resolution won't break anything in there and I can write my own stories (by which I mean "set stuff up for the players to choose where the story goes") easily enough.

We'll be playing Warhammer for the next while, so expect a more detailed post on how it plays later.

October's Reading

Here goes..

See also Make Tea Not War.

Total this month: 9.5, which I'm going to round up to 10. Total this year: 130.

The Eagle's Conquest, When The Eagle Hunts, The Eagle and the Wolves and The Eagle's Prey by Simon Scarrow. The other four books are just as good as the first one. The plots get a bit more outlandish as they go - he's definitely after thrilling adventures more than historical accuracy.

Hello Laziness by Corinne Maier. Amusing book about why and how to slack off at work.

Newton's Wake by Ken McLeod. Excellent, fun space opera. Perhaps his best book since The Star Fraction.

The Terror by David Andress. A history of the French revolution. Didn't finish this due it needing to be returned to the library. Very interesting but really dense - needs a lot of time to read. If I see another copy I would like to finish it someday.

The Algebraist by Iain M Banks. Initially this seems to have all of the things that I don't like about Banks (detailed descriptions of atrocities, in particular). However, once the story gets going it is exciting and fun. One of the things he seems to do best is alien societies, and the Dwellers who are the main focus in this one are just great. They're like the eccentric grand-uncles of the galaxy and quite hilarious. Probably one of his best (not quite as good as Excession or The Player of Games, though).

Thud! by Terry Pratchett. Very funny, very good. Pratchett at his best, aided by the fact he is writing about Vimes, dwarves and trolls.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. A fun story about how difficult it is to be Anansi's son in the modern world.

The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell. Second in the series about Alfred the Great. Excellent - I felt like the first book was just setting things up really and the second takes off. Uhtred, the narrator, is also interesting in that he absolutely hates Alfred. This leads to some good stuff in this book and I look forward to the rest of this series.

September's Reading

Another month, another bunch of reading. This month: 8 books, This year: 120. Make Tea Not War read this other stuff.

The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. A nice idea for a book, executed very well indeed. Dawkins traces the entire history of life framed as a pilgrimmage back to the beginning. Each chapter relates the story of a common ancestor of ours and whichever group is next. A lot of interesting biology essays and the most current analysis of which bits of life are most closely related to which other bits made this an extremely enjoyable read for me. Lots and lots of information in this book - probably requires a second reading.

How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. A fun little book. Mainly made me jealous of the guy for managing to have already arranged his life to be really quite enjoyable while I'm still on the early stages of my own plans that way. Bah, humbug.

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde. Not as good as the Thursday Next books, but still good. Jokes are mainly about nursery rhymes and detective stories.

Under The Eagle by Simon Scarrow. I finish one series of historical novels just in time to be introduced to another. This one follows two soldiers in the Second Legion at the time of Claudius' invasion of Britain. Reminiscent of Bernard Cornwell (in fact the book has "I don't need this kind of competition" as a publicity quote from him), but I found them an easier read. Scarrow doesn't seem to dwell quite so much on all the horrors of war and there's a few more characters with warmth and humour to them. The characters are a lot of fun, too. The centurion Macro is a hard-bitten soldiers' soldier. His optio (second) is Cato, previously a scholarly slave in Claudius palace. He is posted to the second legion as an officer by imperial decree in honour of his father's work for Claudius, something that pleases neither Cato nor the soldiers he is in command of. The interactions between these two are a lot of fun.

The Cross of St. George, Sword of Honour, Second To None and Relentless Pursuit by Alexander Kent. Well, that's finished off that series (kind of). Stayed good until the end, although it did become a bit more formulaic again in the later parts. Overall, very good.

Spoilery bit follows:
Note that Richard Bolitho actually dies in the novel Sword of Honour and the following books are centered on his nephew Adam (a long time character in the books in his own right). There is actually another two novels I have yet to read - one following on there and another set early in Richard's career. However, I am deeming the series finished and not seeking those two out in particular.

More Devil & the Deep playtesting

Last night the regular group played another session, number three of our story about a U-Boat crew (heavily borrowing off Das Boot, obviously).

Play went well. Scenes played out smoothly and quickly and everyone had a good time.

So the rules are now done. I have three little changes to make, and then I'll be writing up the full playtest draft of the game.

Serenity: Viewed

Hooray, I got to go to a preview of Serenity on Monday.

It is very good.

It suffers a bit compared to the series in that the characters don't have the same depth (probably not aided by the need to introduce them all for people who haven't seen the series).

It is different from the series in that it is a lot more grim. I know that the series wasn't as dark as Whedon originally intended, but the film's Mal (for example) is a lot more callous than he was before. Almost scary. The plot also has a lot of stuff about the Reavers, which is all pretty unpleasant.

The film deals with a big chunk of River's story, and closes it off pretty well. There's more there, but I wouldn't be surprised if any sequels deal with other characters primarily.

If you liked the series, see this. If you like SF/action movies, see it as well.

Oh yeah, there's an absolutely great space battle. Fast, chaotic and awesome. Better than anything else I've seen recently (i.e. Star Wars episode 3).

The Devil & The Deep: Thoughts On Playtests

I've run a few playtests using the current version of the rules, and with three different groups.

It feels like the rules are now pretty much right, with just minor tweaking required to get it exactly right (e.g. the exact values of risking specific things in a crisis are still being revised after each game).

Most importantly, each game has been fun. Everyone seems to have enjoyed themselves, although the explicit scene framing required seems to cause some stumbles. Last night's WARGS game suffered from this, with almost all the scenes being set by me, but as three of the four players decided to play at the last moment without ever seeing the game before, that's perhaps unsurprising.

Things that are working really well are:
- The sense of tension as people select what they are risking in each crisis. This is particularly emphasized if a roll fails and it needs to be saved, as each subsequent attempt has more and more staked on it.
- The rest of the crew develop really well. Players seem to quickly give certain crew members enough personality that they come to life when played for a single scene. This has the effect that people like to play these people instead of their main character, which was the idea.

Things that aren't working so well:
- Explicit starting and ending of scenes is important, but most roleplayers are used to letting them organically draw to a close.
- The order things are declared in a crisis is crucial and I keep messing up... the GM is supposed to declare the threat level first (i.e. is it harder than usual?). I keep forgetting this and going on to picking what's at risk. This is bad because players are supposed to select risks based partly on their knowledge of what their chance of success is. In short, they need to be able to know that the GM won't slam a huge penalty on them just after they risk their character's life and the ship sinking (for example).
- Maybe the free stuff you get at the end of a social scene should be more generous... and I think I just worked out how.

Overall, a lot of the problems come from the game's definite scene-based structure. It's not something that games generally do. In particular, it's rare for the purpose of the scene to be stated up front. In The Devil & The Deep, players should be saying (for example) "I want a social scene in which my character is pondering the deaths of his comrades in the battle earlier that day. He's in the wardroom so your guy might be there. I'd like someone to play the wardroom servant and someone else to be the marine officer." This is probably something that will develop fairly quickly as people get their heads around the rules, as there are some definite rewards in game for setting up your own social and crisis scenes.

Work has begun on the full playtest draft. Optimistically I dream it will be done in a couple of weeks but four to six is more likely. Too bad.

Playtest notice: The Devil & The Deep (locals only)

For any readers in Wellington, I'll be running a game of The Devil & The Deep at the WARGS club meeting tonight. Hopefully I'll see some of you there.

August's Reading

Here's this month's batch. Here is what Make Tea Not War read (no overlap this time).

Monthly score: 10, Year so far: 112.

Beyond the Reef, The Darkening Sea and For My Country's Freedom by Alexander Kent. Still going strong on the Bolitho novels, and the end is now in sight (although he just wrote a new one, apparently). Still good.

A Sheltered Life by Paul Chambers. A light but interesting history of giant tortoises. Not a good story for the tortoises but many of the people involved with them on the way were fascinating.

Sin City: The Hard Goodbye by Frank Miller. Well written but totally grim comic. I can see why people like it, but personally I'll stick to things where I might have some sympathy for some of the characters. If you want to see bad things happen to bad people, you can't go wrong with this.

Point Blank by Ed Brubaker and Colin Wilson. Lead in to the Sleeper comics. Great stuff, although not quite as good as Sleeper. Nicely reminiscent of the Lee Marvin trippy action film.

Proof of Concept by Larry Young. A selection of trials for possible graphic novels by the author of Astronauts In Trouble. Interesting. Several of them look like they'd be as good as the astronauts stories, too.

Losers: Trifecta by Andy Diggle. Part three of the story carries on the main plot and also reveals a lot of the team's history. Good stuff, can't wait for part four.

To Rule The Waves by Arthur Herman. A history of how the British Royal Navy shaped the course of world events. Interesting, but has two flaws. Firstly, I think he gets into too much detail about individual events. Secondly, I think there's a lot of overstating the influence of the Royal Navy on world events (presumably because he's looking for that in particular). Neither flaw should prevent you from reading it, it's still a fine history.

Black Jade by David Zindell. Finally the third of the Ea stories is published, and it is good. Initially I did not like Zindell's fantasy as much as the SF Neverness books, but the characters have grown on me a lot. And it's basically about the same issues. The only problem with this is that it takes him so long to write each volume, I expect it will be two or three years before I find out what happens next.

The Devil & The Deep: Update

I was pleased that the ConFusion playtest went really well. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and the game played out as intended. Lots of scheming, daredevil plans and - as in the playtest - the game ended with the British and French ships engaging each other and finally the British winning after a climactic swordfight between the captains. Huzzah!

There were a few bumps to do with deferring narration. One was that a character had set up a watch for nefarious Frenchmen, and we went into Crisis mode to resolve what happened - I said that some were coming and we'd roll to see what happened. Of course, at this stage where they are coming from and even what they have planned is undefined. This only gets firmly established after the Crisis is resolved - at this stage it's just "A boat full of Frenchmen is threatening your ship." I guess I'll need to make that all very explicit - the Crisis when originally presented is just a more or less defined danger. When the player and gamemaster decide what is at risk, it gets defined some more. But only when the roll (and any follow on rolls, possibly) are done do we finally have an authoritative version of what happened.

Also, it's difficult to play troupe-style games in a convention. I should have planned for this and had a bunch of other crew members on small cards or something - just a name and description probably would have been enough. On the other hand, one player seemed to prefer the sailor who disliked another character's officer more than his main guy.

I'm planning to run another playtest with the regular group starting tonight. Rather than doing a full revision of the rules, I'm running off a new version of the two (now four) page summary that I made for convention players. This is much easier to handle and I think I'll stick with that until everything is settled.

Research on MMORPGs

Interesting stuff on demographics and preferences in MMORPGs (mainly World of Warcraft) at the Daedalus Project.

(Also a survey that you can fill in to add to their dataset).

Good interview with Joss Whedon

Covers most stuff he has done or is doing... here. Serenity gets a fair chunk of it.

Game Design Update

Oh well, I didn't win (or even place) in the Game Chef competition. Too bad. Announcement is here. I am currently planning to revise and publish The Gentlemen's Entomology Club after I have The Devil & The Deep sorted out.

Speaking of which, I ran a playtest of my latest revisions last night with the regular guys. Revisions were good, the game ran much more smoothly and the story ran true to genre... right down to a climactic naval engagement that our heroes won by the skin of their teeth. I'm going to be running the same scenario at ConFusion on Saturday, if any other Wellingtonians want to try it out. (I tried to link but the ConFusion website is down - here's a summary).

July's Reading

Very few again. Not just because of World of Warcraft, either (although I am still playing and enjoying it). 7 this month for 102 over the year. Read Make Tea Not War's month of reading here.

Honour This Day and The Only Victor by Alexander Kent. Further changes in the series as it becomes much more about the way the many years of war have affected and damaged the characters. Interesting.

One King, One Soldier by Alexander C Irvine. Good historical/supernatural/conspiracy tale. Weaves some rather pedestrian starting points (e.g. holy grail, etc) into a pleasing novel. Some unusual choices for historical character involvement, too.

Accelerando by Charles Stross. Nine short snapshots in a history of a Singularity. Lots of fun, some thought provoking bits but mainly just nifty ideas.

Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince by J K Rowling. Enjoyed this. As expected, a fun story.

Olympos by Dan Simmons. Certainly concludes the story. Basically good with a lot of jarring bits. Some important things do not get explained and some things get resolved in annoying ways. Hard call. Read it if you want to find out what happens after Ilium, I guess.

The Life of Mammals by David Attenborough. Interesting coffee-book, lots of good animal factoids and nice photos.

Serenity Trailer #3

Serenity

Second US trailer and third overall, this one includes some extra funny lines from Jayne. Yay!

New Series Of Battlestar Galactica Has Started!

Just in case anyone hadn't been aware. The first one was really good, took all the cliffhanger bits of the end of series one and made everything worse. They really make a scary show as well as a good piece of science fiction.

June's Reading

This is going to look pretty damn short, due mainly to World of Warcraft. As usual, you can see Make Tea Not War's list here. Total this month is a feeble seven, bringing the year's score to 95.

A Tradition of Victory, Success To The Brave and Colours Aloft by Alexander Kent. I'm still enjoying the Bolitho novels, but the ones I'm reading at the moment (mainly mid to late 1970s) seem rather more formulaic. Even so, the characters (Bolitho especially but some of his companions as well) are developing in interesting ways as the saga continues.

The Charnel Prince by Gregory Keyes. Second in his current fantasy series. Doesn't seem as original as the first one... his characters here seem to have dropped back into being fantasy novel standards.

More Than Human by Ramez Naam. A good, up to date overview of where transhuman technologies are right now and where they might go. Loads of interesting stuff in here, nothing in a great deal of detail however.

Sharpe's Escape by Bernard Cornwell. A very good novel. As the latest in the series, it really shows how Sharpe has mellowed over time. Cornwell is filling in gaps in Sharpe's history but the man's character is much more honourable now than when the original books were written. I'm pretty sure the Sharpe of the books that go chronologically before and after this one was a much nastier piece of work. This version is scarcely a brutal murderer at all! Still, overall I prefer to read about this Sharpe. His mind-space is an easier place to share.

World of Warcraft - What It's Like

As this game has led to a lack of posts recently, I figured I should at least write up how it plays.

To start with, it's fun and addictive. The game looks great - not due to high technical specs, but just because the design is really good. Stuff just looks cool.

It has a few of the things that had kept me away from MMORPGs. These include (1) morons, (2) boring bits (usually involving repeated killing some type of creature for a quest) and (3) some annoying bugs. However, the overall experience is good. I'm helped there by knowing a large group of people in-game (for one character) and playing with Make Tea Not War for the other (cooperative play with someone in the same room is very good and not often found in PC games). The times I have randomly picked up extra people to do this or that quest, they've been good for the most part. You always see some morons spamming your chat window in cities but I guess they still are a minority.

The game is also so huge that I can see that playing at least four different characters through (with different species and class) will be required to see anything close to all of the game.

So, it is good. Worth the price, just. I suspect I'll certainly get 4-6 months play from it, which will make the total cost about that of two games. That's reasonable - I'd normally probably buy three over a half year.

Carnivale - Review After Finishing It

I watched the final of series two last night. Really good show. Pity they cancelled it, the ending (i.e. setup for series three) looked really interesting.

That said, some really nasty stuff happens and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone easily disturbed by, for example, sexual violence or dismemberment. However, if you're prepared to handle some violent and freaky stuff, it's well worth it.

The way the magic is portrayed is really neat, reminiscent of Tim Powers novels to me. It feels like it has a logic to it, but it's not a very nice logic in most cases. The acting is universally good and the scriptwriting too. The characters are interesting and are forced to deal with situations that have no good way out, which makes some powerful scenes.

The direction tends to include a lot of dark scenes where you can't see what's going on, but aside from that there's little to complain about.

Why does it seem like every TV show this good gets cancelled?

Primetime Adventures - Playtest Impressions

Regular group played a game of Primetime Adventures last night, so I thought I'd share my impressions. This will be pretty brief, I think, mainly hitting the high and low points.

Show and character generation went really well, it seem to be just the right level of detail (not much, in this case). The show was called A Fistful Of Brains and dealt with four bounty hunters who hunted down rogue zombies (apparently some zombies managed to live without mindlessly attacking people). The characters were a truly bizarre bunch - a hillbilly trucker, a voodoo magician/ex-government agent, a beautician/assassin and a zombie rights advocate (yes, he was one of the undead).

The scenes played out pretty well but I think we generally were only thinking of how they started, rather than where we wanted them to go. It was also mainly action-based rather than focusing hugely on character issues (although all their issues were addressed).

One big turn off was the tie-breaking element of dice rolls - ties aren't that uncommon, and the rule is for each side to throw an extra die to add to their pool. Now, odds are successes, so a lot of the time this gets repeated. This is not fun. It also changes the odds - you can have a better chance than the opposition at first but if you tie on that roll, it becomes even whether you win or lose. We decided that a house rule would be that higher rolls win ties, and only add more dice if that is a tie too.

Fanmail was under-used, partly due to people forgetting about it but mainly just carrying the story along too fast. When it happened it worked as intended and added to the game.

Overall, a very good game with maybe a little flaw or two.

Oh, and the pilot? The evil zombie gang pushing the zombie drug 'Z' was taken down, but test audiences were unimpressed. Looks like we'll pull in the next pilot for something new next session...