Reflections on the gaming year 2020

 
A year has passed and I have not written anything on this blog. So it seems fitting that I start and close this years's blog post season with the retrospective on 2020. It has the same structure as last years retrospective.
 

What I did

This year I did not keep track of the games I ran as I did last year. So, there are no numbers and my choice of order is an educated guess. As GM I ran regular sessions with in order of decreasing number of sessions

• Starfinder: Signal of Screams (complete) and Dawn of Flame (we are in book 3 for now), 
• Pathfinder 2: Age of Ashes (still playing the first AP, we are in the middle of book 5)
• Cepheus Light: Uranium Fever (custom campaign)
• Amazing Adventures 5e: The Stone of Rosetta (custom campign)
• Mutants & Masterminds: Teen Titans (custom campaign)
  
• Dungeon Fantasy: Mortality of Green (Castles & Crusades Conversion)
• Modern Age: London (custom campaign, inspired by the Rivers of London)
• Starsiege: Fall through the Frost Ruby (custom cmapaign based on Perry Rhodan)

There have been a couple of one-shots and left over sessions from last years mini-campaigns, but the above were my main focus. I tried to make a collage out of all the games I played as part of a mini-campaign this year:

What worked?

In general most stuff works ok-ish.

I challenged myself to run a game in English and with a bunch of strangers nontheless, but it worked out decently and we have had much fun. A quick shout out to Babies with Knives, where I managed to do this.

Other than that, I wanted to get a mini campaign in the Perry Rhodan started, as promised last year. I was pondering which system to use and ended up with the classic StarSiege (the Amazing Adventures based StarSiege has been released as preview and is supposed to come out in 2021). So far, we are only two sessions in, but I see no problem with the way the system works, i.e. simple D20-style rules with nova points as bennies.  The characters are reasonably competent in their area of expertise, having powerful computers called syntronics supporting their actions.

I hope to continue this campaign next year and might even be looking the get into a another iteration of the system using Cortex Prime after that.

What didn't work?

When it comes to this, I'd say, it is mostly about expectations and group interaction.

One time I asked a player to leave a campaign, since he could not stop to correct other players mistakes in interpreting the rules up to a point where I felt uncomfortable running the game. Another time a player was very unhappy with the way another character was treated by the group which lead to an in-game escalation and him losing the fun in participating in that player constellation.

Especially, I have to keep in mind that the pandemic situation is more demanding and might lead to me being annoyed more easily than usual.

As a GM I have not had campaigns that ended in total frustation for me like last year's Splittermond. To be frank, I have not even played Splittermond after that.

As a player a thing that left me sad was they way my playing in the Dungeon Musing's campaigns ended. The Starfinder campaign broke up after almost exactly a year and I can understand how this happened. We did try to play Modern Age: Threefold then, but that broke up as well. These experiences are my main reason that I always try to bring my campaigns to some kind of intermediate endings and never have more than two of three session story-arc until some kind of minor conclusion is reached. In cases where one player left a campaign I did offer a conclusive session, just to provide closure.

One-Shots

There have been a couple of one shots as well. I liked Cyberpunk RED, Genefunk 2090 and Cortex Prime: Mythikal.

Two one shots were particularly bad, but for similar reasons:

1. The Sprawl: This is a Powered by the Apocalpyse Cyberpunk-style game and it was less fun to play than it could have been, because the system is highly rigged against the player characters. Each Move has more negative consequences than positive. If you play the game as written a chracter's best option is to do nothing or to play with loaded dice. Since there was a wonderful GM, the expericience had some positive moments as well, but I actively advise people not to play the game as written. Unless, you like to be a crew member on the Titantic.
2. Hellboy 5e: This is another game where the mechanics are problematic. You would like to play a gmae like in the Hellboy movies or comics? That is not what is in store, if you go with the playtest adventure. There the players have to choice to investigate a room which leads to negative consequences, not to investigate a room, which leads to the same negative consequences or to do nothing, which also has this negative consequences. If you run the adventure as written it is a garantueed total party kill.
   

There might be persons out there who are into roleplaying these kind of "this a trainwreck unfolding in front of our eyes" style, but I'm not one of them. Neither as a player nor as a GM.

What was not run?

There are a couple of things I'd like to try next year:

• I have not played the recent edition of The Dark Eye, but I'm really curious if all the preconceived notions I hear are still valid for this edition. 
• I'd love to run a more heist oriented Cyberpunk style game. It does not need to be with the original Cyberpunk 2020 or RED rules, tough.

Reflections on my Pen & Paper RPGs in 2019

This posting is inspired by The Dungeon Musing’s retrospective. I asked Kev for his outline and will walk through moreorless the same points here.
 

What I did

As GM I have had regular sessions with in order of decreasing number of sessions Torg Eternity (24), Mutants & Masterminds, Starfinder: Dead Suns, DCC Lankhmar, Cepheus Light: Uranium Fever, Amazing Adventures: Rise of the Red God, Pathfinder 2: Age of Ashes (4), Cybersprawl Classics (3)

As a player: I have played Starfinder: Against the Aion Throne & Fistful of Shobhads, Lex Occultum: Great Mysterties of Übel Staal, Infinity: Operation: Honeywasp, DCC: Doom of the Savage Kings & The People of the Pit

What worked?

In general most stuff works ok-ish. We can maintain a campaign for six month to a year, if we all really want. I wanted to run a complete Adventure Path for Starfinder, which we almost did. It worked well, but book six of the Dead Suns campaign did not fit into the way my players solved their stuff before, so we skipped that part and did things a bit differently, but that is what rpgs are for.

Playing in English also seems to work, as I do this in my Starfinder campaign and Infinity as well. I have played Castles & Crusades in English before, but that was only two sessions, so it doesn’t count. I still need to find out, whether I can run a game in English as well.

What didn't work?

 I’m not sure if “didn’t work” is the right category. I see room for improvement in my understanding of the rules of most games. Most of the time I have a solid understand of the basics, but there is always this complicated extra stuff going on, like people using a certain type of grenade or obscure combinations of powers. My usual approach is: each player needs to know how her or his character works, but we lost two players for Pathfinder 2, who never figured their stuff out.

The other thing is: I need to get a little more robust in my way with certain players who tend to drag the game. I tend to let them do their stuff a bit too much and that sometimes frustrates other players. But as always balance is a delicate business.

One-Shots

There have been a couple of one shots as well. Some worked tremendously well, like Shadowrun 6 Quickstart Set, Dragon Heresy, Cyberpunk RED Quickstart Set, Die Schwarze Katze (German RPG where you play antropomorphic cats hiding from humans, elves, orcs and the like in a traditional fantasy world), or  Cortex Prime. Others failed like Ghost Planets (FATE) or Splittermond (also a German language game due to different expectations see above). Sometimes the results where viewed as a mixed bag: Savage Worlds Adventure Edition in different settings.

What was not run?

The only thing I still want to do is run a longer Perry Rhodan (German pulp SciFi series) campaign, but I am still unsure what system I should use for that.

Sword of Cepheus

What is old school?

• Imagine, you would like to play a fantasy game where the characters are the heroes, but not that kind of heroes who win in hand-to-hand combat against hordes of ogres and trolls. But the kind of heroes that use their cleverness and cunning. Heroes that might have a home and a job, in a fantasy world that has a bit of magic but also has more mundane traits.
• Imagine that rpg has very simple rules. Just roll 2d6 and check the result for any task. The character sheet is not more than a few lines of simple text.  Not four sheets of paper, but something that you could take with you on a credit card size piece of paper.
• Imagine, that you would not start adventuring as a young adolescent, but as someone who has live a life for 30 or 40 years and is on that epic quest of his life now.

Sword of Cepheus

That game for me is Sword of Cepheus. It is built on the established Cepheus Light rules engine that itself emulates a more streamlined version of the original Traveller game. It will be a not a 300 pages tome of intricate details, but rather a quick and fun way to play. The game uses the typical life path character generation, i.e. you not only roll for the attribute values but also for the career, skills and possessions of the character.

Omer Golan-Joel and his coauthors have made a beautiful game here that I had the honor and pleasure to playtest. I can’t wait for the game to be released.

Allow me to share my impression based on the playtest which isn’t the final version of the game, yet.

1. It feels more real, because danger is less abstract. Being hit with a sword is really threatening, because it may very well take a character out. He or she likely will not die on the spot as in simpler hit-point based system, but the chances for passing out because of damage is high enough. Wounds also don’t just heal that quickly.
2. I like that armor is reducing damage. Yes, there are many arguments that have been had whether armor should make a person harder to hit. But it feels more rewarding to a player, when the armor reduces that two or three critical points that made the difference between life and death.
3. Magic is rare and has potentially devastating consequences for the magician if done incorrectly. 
4. Characters are in general more ordinary people and not superheroes. That fits to it feeling more real.
5. If you really want superheroes than there are optional rules for that as well.
6. Character progression is less about boosting stats, but more about acquiring status, influence and wealth. There are rules for trade and hirelings.

To put it in another way: maybe some of you remember how playing the Keep on the Borderlands felt in the day. Sword of Cepheus manages to produce that kind of feeling for me. I can explore a new world with it, which is fascinating, yet dangerous.

For more info, see the old announcement from January http://spacecockroach.blogspot.com/2019/01/announcing-sword-of-cepheus.html

I will update the link, to the full announcement when the game is officially released.

Dragon Heresy at HeinzCon 2019

This is a short report on my Dragon Heresy session from HeinzCon 2019.

Since, I guess, most people never have heard of HeinzCon let me just say it is smaller local con in the North of Germany which is hosted by Clockwork Publishing (Space 1889 and Dark Conspiracy) [1].

Dragon Heresy is a setting for 5e that is based on a fictional version of the Norse mythology. So it is based in a Viking-like world. Douglas Cole did a great job with the Introductory Book which is a self-contained  hardcover that allows to play characters from level 1 to 5. Self-contained means you only need that book and no other 5e material (no players handbook). I wrote the session for the con using only that book, so it works. [2]

I had 5 pregenerated characters: a human berserker, a human fighter, a human skald, a drwaven cleric and a half-elf wizard. Each was level one, so we could immediately start to play.

In order to show the features of the game, I had them start a teenagers around 17 or 18 years and they would start on the day of their right of passage. (The book says that age should be 16 in Thorengar, but I adjusted a bit). The first scene was the characters standing in front of their Jarl, who challenged them to prove their worth.

Some local farmers were losing cattle to some malicious wolf over the last week and the group should take care of the problem, but before they could: as a rite of passage they had to win an unarmed fight against two veteran bodyguards from the village.

In game terms we had then a Flything between the veterans and the players (imagine the Viking version of a rap battle), followed by a brawl which showcased the grappling rules. It was a tough brawl in which to everyone’s surprise the wizard and weakest character managed to wrestle one of the bodyguards down in an astounding case of repeating beginner’s luck. Eventually, the second one could be overcome as well.

The Jarl declared each character an adult now and a feast started in their honor. At the dawn of the next day a hung over, exhausted party started their quest to find the wolf. They arrived at a shepherd’s cottage, found that the fence had been smashed, talked a bit with the shepherd and slept off their hangover.

The next day they tracked down the wolf, which turned out to be of enormous proportions. I had used the Varulfur stats (werewolf) since that wolf turned out to be a human cursed by a Falleglygi. The party managed to fight her of as well and stop her from spreading that curse to other people. With that amount of success we finished the session after 3.5 hours.

I did collect some feedback on the game and its mechanic. The players felt that the game had successfully captured a Viking-like atmosphere, from the way the characters were build through the spotlight on things like Flything, grappling and the distinction between vigor and wounds.

As an off-hand remark: three of the players had never played any incarnation of D&D or Pathfinder and were only familiar with the general principle of that array of attributes and boni because they had played Dungeon World before. I never would have anticipated that this might be possible in the real world. So, I will be even more careful with my presumptions.

In closing, I think all of us had a massive amount of fun exploring the game and I really like to run it again soon.



[1] German speaking readers might known them as Uhrwerk Verlag.
[2] Actually two spells that a referenced in the book are missing in the spell section in the hardcover. I guess there will be an errata page as a download. (Floating Disk, Weapon Ward)

Pen and Paper RPG with FLOSS

Pen and Paper RPG with FLOSS

In the following I'm going to describe how to set up an RPG environment to play games online with your friends without the use of proprietary tools. I have tried the things I describe below in some Traveler and Dragon Heresy sessions and everything worked fine. There were some hassles with microphones and so on, but nothing unusual. So, the stuff worked for me.

The tools used

For communications we used Nextcloud Talk and as a Virtual Tabletop (VTT) we used Maptool. We did not use in the calendar functionality of Nextcloud or the ability to make a Doodle like poll, but the use of Nextcloud as filesharing service was helpful in other campaigns.

Maptool and Nextcloud

Prerequisites

I have a self hosted instance of Nextcloud on my home server with valid SSL over Let’s Encrypt. This runs on a low powered Intel-box the size of a hard disc from some nameless vendor.

I am not 100% sure whether you really would need an IPv4 for address to host Maptool but I read about certain problems with IPv6 regarding Maptool. My router knows about UPnP which also is a point when you want to use Maptool, but manual port redirection will work as well.

It is probably obvious that you must have an internet connection with sufficient bandwidth.

The Setup

When you want to start a game online, it is a good thing to have a fixed communication channel for all participants. I just made a public Nextcloud Talk call, named it after the session and sent invite links to the players. If you play with the same guys regularly it may be wise to make a special group for them on your Server and make the calls to the group.

Some game chat

These talk stays open for days before the game. Most of the time someone has a question before, or players just want to talk about things, or you have sessions notes to share around. There is always something. This talk is just a permanent chat channel at this moment.

When you want to start the game you start the video or audio chat with the other players.
If you do not require shared dice rolls or something like a common table to move stuff around, then you are finished here and game happily.

Some groups prefer to have a shared experience for character sheets, dice rolls and a virtual table where anyone has tokens. That is when you would need Maptool.

Some view from a Dragon Heresy game I ran in Maptool

Maptool is not just a tool to share such a virtual table, but is also capable to simulate dice rolls and even have more complex character sheets with automated rules. I will not go into to many features since I tend not to use them so much. I want to have a representation of the player and non-player chracters as tokens and some basic die rolling. I do not bother to have all character sheets in fancy automation, but if you want Maptool can handle that as well. The best thing about it is that I can use it much more intuitively than the proprietary competitors’ software.


To have great tokens the people behind Maptool offer a simple software called Tokentool which simplifies the craft of token making to simple drag and drop.


Once everything is setup to your liking in Maptool you just share your IP address and let the players connect. Have a nice game.

Caveats

I will not go into the complexity to setup your own Nextcloud box or possible IPv6 problems here, but the rather simple things. Maptool does not work so well with HiDPI displays, i.e. things tend to be too small. You can fix it by giving certain command line arguments to the Java VM, but that is not so great anyway.

Depending on the level of automation you want to have Maptool might not be what you are looking for, since there are no official rule sets and the degree of integration is not the same as with Starfinder in Fantasy Grounds for example.

On the FLOSS aspect

Let us just for a moment consider that both programs are not only free in the sense that you are free to use them, but also free in the sense that you have the source code and you are allowed to modify and share the programs.
Maptool is under GPLv3 (with some parts Apache 2.0) and Nextcloud AGPLv3.

Source code: Nextcloud and Maptool