Game Findings: Mage (First Level)

The gang got together to make characters for the new Mage campaign starting up. We've not played yet, but we've got our group together. There was a lot of confusion and vagarity in discussing magick, which is to be expected when you've got a bunch of folks who have never played the game before. It's not mechanically difficult, but the broad philosophy of designing your own paradigm of reality is something of a mind bender when you try it the first time.

Sans actual play though, I'm not going to discuss any of that. Instead, I'm going to focus on the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on, even if they didn't use my exact words: first level sucks.

What We Play

As you may have guessed from all the writing I do about the games I've run and the games I seek to create, I'm ever on the quest for a better game experience for myself and my players. Now my players are a lot that are largely happy to show up and game, but I'm the sort who sees the "just show up and play" as settling for mediocrity. I want to run the kind of game that has people thinking about it in the time between sessions, that has them showing up early and rearing to go, that truly captivates them. This isn't an ego thing. I'm convinced that when you've got a player base that invested in the game, you're going to get better play, and from that you get a better game experience for everyone.

Game Findings: Extreme Vengeance

Anyone who plays my games for any length of time comes to know that I'm a fan of pathos in my fiction. I love to heap pain on my characters and force them into agonizing situations with an eye toward seeing how they grow to overcome their adversity.

The answer, by the way, is to become cold and murderous. No, I'm only kidding. Well, I'm painting with an overly broad brush anyway. I mean, there were only a few executions and torture sessions and...

Ahem.

Fully realizing that I was doing the same thing over and over and might not only be stuck in a dramatic rut, but also frustrating the hell out of my players in doing so, I decided to try something wholly different in not only mechanics, but tone too. So I got my mits on a game I'd only heard about in passing: Extreme Vengeace, a game of action movie mayhem.

This is the game to play if you're looking to reproduce the stories and style of anything you've seen on the big screen starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stalone, Jean Cleade van Damme, Dolf Lundgren, etc. Light on the story, lighter still on the logic, and big on the explosions and ass kicking. It's a game where you take it easy on the players and let them badass their way around the set for a while before pulling out the stops with the final heavy, who everyone knows is going to get his ass beat something fierce. It's the exact opposite of how my games typically go, so I figured it would be a good stretch for me and a fun change of pace for them.

Now, while you play a character in the world of an action movie, like Jack Slater in Last Action Hero, I decided to change it up just a little bit and put the focus on the cinematics of the game. So instead, I had the players play actors who were playing parts in an action movie. This way, when they invoked their powers, I had an easier time asking them to narrate flashback sequences and camera angles.

How'd it play?

Conceptually, the game is great. And while it wasn't intentional, the way character creation is done makes the transition from character to actor a snap. See, characters consist of two aspects: your description and your type. Descriptions are things like athletic (Jackie Chan) or pumped up (Schwarzenegger), while types are things like soldier, fighter, and agent. In a standard game, you pick one of each, add together the stats and powers, and BAM! Your character is done.

All I did was make the description into something called typecast and applied it to the actor. That was the base character. Thus, every role that actor Glitterpony Sweetcream (yes, an actual character from my game) ever played would be played smooth. Smooth was his typecast, but his role might change from film to film. One film he might be playing a smooth cop (though knowing Glitterpony, he'd refuse that role), in another he'd be playing a smooth soldier (though again, not really his thing). If he plays a hitman, he'd be a smooth killer. Same with a ganger. I've belabored this example enough.

Mechanics were pretty simple: you've got two stats. When you want to take an action, you say what you want to do and allocate dice to it. Roll those dice and look to beat a target number or the opposed roll. One neat thing about this is that your description can modify your pool.

Oh yeah. This was my favorite part of the game. See, the GM plays the audience watching the film, and audience reaction to what's going on affects the die pool. "I shoot the helicopter," gets snores from the audience and thus takes a penalty. "I race my motorcycle up the stairwell, blow open the door to the roof and jump the bike off the edge, crashing it into the cockpit while emptying my gun into the gastank so it explodes while I fall into the harbor," on the other hand would get a rousing round of whoops and hollars, maybe even get people doing the wave (anyone remember that? Anyone?). Of course, it also comes with a hefty die bonus.

I'll admit though, my joy in playing the audience didn't come from encouraging more narrative input from the players. It should have been that, and it has been something I wanted more of in the past, but this time it was something far simpler.

I got to heckle the actors, and it was part of the game, so it was 100% okay.

Oh, the joy. Maybe some of that player character sadism has worn off on me, but I did so very much love dropping my head on the table and snoring, or outright booing when someone wanted to search bodies for spare cash. And yes, I even got to yell "you suck!" at Glitterpony once when he played it like a girly man. It was far more fun than it was supposed to be, I'm sure.

As for observations that might be useful to you, faithful reader, well, here's what I observed:

• Simple, but out of the box: The combat system is pretty cool. As I said above, you want to do something, you give the action dice. Combat in Extreme Vengeance is loosely organized chaos. There's no codified initiative. Instead, everyone shouts out what they want to do when they want to do it, and whoever puts more dice into the action gets to go first. If you want to go before someone else, up your bid. He can up his as well until someone comes out on top. There aren't any rounds either. You stay in the current exchange until everyone's out of dice. Then all pools refresh and you go at it again. Thus you can be truly awesome at one action, or try to split your pool among multiple actions. Remember though, narration can increase your die pools, so even though driving and shooting might require you to allocate dice to two actions, while keeping some in reserve for defence, saying you're yanking your hot rod underneath the trailer of an 18 wheeler to come up on the passenger side and emptying your uzi at the gunman hanging out the window as you sideswipe another car is probably going to get you plenty of bonus dice. The game encourages you to think big.
  
  This is all handled with die pools, which are a tried and true method of game mechanic design. This chaotic element, while something I found cool though, was something that some of my players found frustrating. There was a lot of confusion in the beginning. One player wanted to shoot three guys. He thought he was putting three dice into the effort, but in order to shoot three people, he was really putting one die into three different shots, which meant he was routinely interrupted (he was shooting extras though, so one die was all he needed).
  
  I like out of the box thinking in RPG design. I've already got many many many shelves filled with similar, now stock, mechanics. So this sort of thing was refreshing for me. It might push some out of their comfort zone though, and not everyone likes that.
• Action movie effects: While you only have 2 stats, your character gets loaded up with a series of powers call his repitior. This is a series of camera tricks, special props, and special acting abilities that allow him to manipulate the movie. Examples include catchprases, soundtracks, zooming camera, and the famous single hit shown in quick cut multi-angle replay. They're awesome, and upon reading any of them you immediately know what they look like and how they can be used. I loved them.
  
  So did my players. Too much. This game laid bare a simple truth: give a player something to play with on his character sheet and he's going to use it. All of it. All of the time.
  
  Characters start with too many repitiors in this game. The session we played consisted of a single scene: the characters converge at a run down project building where a gang has taken over and the leader, whom the characters all have a grudge against, is issuing demands. After a quick fight with some extras, the group blasted onto the roof.
  
  At this point we're about15 minutes into the movie. It's an in media res sort of beginning, with minimal character development so far, and we're about to kick off the first big fight that spells the end of the beginning action sequence. After this, we'll probably throttle it back, show the characters relaxing a little bit, establish them more as people, and then ramp things up again. You've all seen films like this. But remember, right now the credits are in recent memory and we've just begun the movie.
  
  So the characters bust down the door to the roof and converge on the gang leader.
  
  Suddenly one of the players invokes a flashback to show the gang leader killed his brother and then flashes back to the present all angry and crying tears of vengeance with screams of "Luigi!" (he was playing Mario, a plumber).
  
  As Mario throws a wrench at the ganger, Glitterpony draws his piece and fires, the camera riding the bullet to impact.
  
  Now we cut to one of the other characters and the film speeds up as he fires off a burst with incredible speed.
  
  The ganger manages to get his hands on one of the characters and proceeds to grab his throat and punch him in the face over and over, pausing after each one in true JCVD fashion.
  
  Glitterpony doesn't like that, and as the camera turns back to him, his soundtrack begins to play, and he cuts to a flashback of the ganger grabbing his friend by the throat and punching him in the face (I outlawed that use).
  
  In short, the party tried to blow through every last use of repitior they had in that first fight. Only one of them thought to try a stunt action without resorting to a repitior (and it was prety cool, running at the ganger, dropping to his knees and sliding through the guy's legs while driving the butt of his guns into the ganger's knees; I gave him big cheers, and big bonus dice for that). Repitior are cool, but they're too available in the beginning. I think the game should start you off with less and ease you up as you progress. This forces you to come up with more stunts of your own and get more comfortable milking the crowd for cheers, which is where the real meat of the game is, I think.

In the end, I think Extreme Vengeance has a number of really interesting ideas, but it's a bit rough, and perhap a little overenthusiastic in the beginning. It gives players what they want, but provides too much of a good thing. Because the die system is a little unusual, I think forcing new players to rely on it more in the beginning to get them comfortable with it would be a superior way to ease into the game as it wants to be played. Still, it reeks of fun potential, and I hope to give it another try. When I make my own action game (yes Raj, I'm still going to complete "BAM! the RPG" just for you), I intend to use this for plenty of inspiration.

Game Findings: 7th Sea

This post might seem a little unusual. After all, 7th Sea is hardly some small indie game that no one's heard of, and it's been around long enough to generate tons of reviews. I'm willing to bet that any gamer who is both old and ecclectic enough has at least given this a short go.

So why the hell am I talking about it here? Because in the course of finishing up my campaign I encountered a few things that I'd not read about, nor ever experienced in all the 7th Sea games we'd played previously, and those things caught all of us by surprise. That sounded worth talking about here.

In a nutshell, high-level 7th Sea is a very different game from low-level 7th Sea (if you'll forgive the rough nomenclature). Now sure, there's an excellent argument to be made that if the game doesn't change at all as your chracter advances, then there's no point in advancing at all. If you're prepared to say that, I'm prepared to agree with you. Statistical analysis of the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons showed that the average hit percentage stayed the same and even dipped a little bit as you progessed from level 1 to level 30. You opposition ramped up in pace with you, meaning that while you were doing math with larger numbers, your actual performance wasn't changing much at all. What's the point then?

Well, in D&D, you get access to more and better powers. These things open up avenues of action that you didn't have previously, making you a little broader in addition to numerically taller. But we're not talking about D&D, we're talking about 7th Sea. The thing is, 7th Sea does that exact thing as well, assuming you're either a swordsman or a sorcerer. In all the time I've played and run this game, eery character has always been one or the other (usually a swordsman), so that shouldn't be much of an issue. But you can in fact make a character who is neither, which happened this last campaign.

I'm rambling, so let's break this down a bit, and start with the basics. The roll and keep system is a good one. No, it's a great one. It's simple, it's flexible, and raising is still the single most awesome game mechanic that I've encountered in a decade. 7th Sea takes roll and keep and makes heavy use of it to great effect. However, at the end of a long campaign where most people are rolling pools approaching 10k5 or more, things begin to slow down. With rasing and well placed bonuses, those pools can shoot close to the 10k10 range, especially when dealing damage. Add in exploding dice, and suddenly you're dealing with a whole lot more math than you were at the beginning of the campaign where people were tossing 6k3. Actions began to slow down, and while the size of the pools finally convinced most people to throw everything away once they reached their target number, anytime we had opposed rolls there was no choice but to add everything up. This would have been muchworse had we done raising by the book, which drove target numbers ever higher instead of reducing the pool size. We could still move the game along, but there was a noticeable lag. In short, the roll and keep system didn't scale well to the high end of the game. It worked, but it didn't work as well as it once did.

High scores impacted combat in another way: panache. For those few out there unfamiliar with the system, combat has 10 phases, and you get one action per point in your panache score. Roll those dice, and each one tells you which phase you get an action on. If you've got a panache of 3, you're going to have 3 actions, the phase of each determined by the results of the dice. It's a cool system and one I found got things moving quickly and cleanly. There's an easy sub-system for dealing with ties, and certain options to let you act out of phase. It's good, and well designed.

When most the combattants have 3+ actions though, the nature of combat changes. Obviously, there's going to be more ties that need to be resolved, but more than that there are a lot of abilities in the game that build up over rounds or require rounds to recharge. Swordsman schools are big on this, and they're what I was getting at when drawing a comparison to D&D, but I'll deal with them more specifically in a moment. For now, suffice to say that when you've got an ability that takes a few rounds of combat to really develop power, there's a big diference in its effectiveness if your opponent is going twice this round or if he's going five times. And Theus help you if you're ganged up on by two panache 5 opponents. You've got no chance.

Therein lays the big scaling problem with this game. The way your character grows mechanically in ways more intesting than larger numbers is his accrual of special abilities, granted by either his school or sorcerous heritage. However, when you factor in the average die pool size getting chucked around by the time you can lay hands on many of these abilities, they lose a lot of luster. The best example of this is an ability one of my players wanted from the very first session of play. It was the ability to begin administering last rights to your opponent in the middle of a fight, and the process was so unnerving that it gave you a mounting fear factor in the combat. In terms of imagery, it's phenominal, and I wanted to see it in play as badly as he wanted to use it.

As the game grew to a close, he amassed enough experience to earn that power. Each round he was in a fight, his fear rating would increase by 1. Unfortunately, by the time he got it, each round was so chocked full of actions that the fights would be over in a single pass, or two in extreme cases. Everyone was doing so much that the party could lay waste to the opposition, who also had a ton of actions, before his fear factorcould grow to anything meaningful. He hung his head after several fights like this and proclaimed he'd dedicated his character to gaining a useess ability.

Normally I don't pan things so quickly, but he really did seem to be right in this case. His ability still looked phenominal on paper, but because to much action could be packed into each round now, it was useless, especially since fear is a resisted thing in thi game, and high level opponents had appropriately high scores, which meant you'd need a high fear rating to shake them. This proved true of many swordsman abilities (though certainly not all of them). The bredth promised in that style of advancement wasn't keeping pace with the power level of the game, which drove several people to begin concentrating strictly on numbers, and within that stats. The power of stats over skills is a widely known quirk of the system, but that stats outshine everything else, including schools and sorcery, was something none of us were ready for.

In short, 7th Sea remains a fantastic game with a rich world anda great system filled with simple innovative rules, but the game tops out long before anyone maxes out their scores. Just because the character sheet goes to 11 (or, really, 5) doesn't mean you can play that same game all the way through.

Game Findings: Swashbuckler

With most of my recent gaming caught up in playing other people's work and playtesting ground to wish dust, I'm left with precious little design work to write about. But that doesn't mean I haven't been learning this whole time. So, for a little bit, I'll be musing about the things I've learned by playing some other titles.

First up, Swashbuckler, by Jolly Roger Games. This was something I really wanted to try as soon as I read about it. The setting is more or less real world Europe, and the core system is pretty spare. Roll some dice, add them up, look for a target number, and you succeed if your total exceeds the difficulty. One thing about this I thought was pretty clever is that attributes are measured with different sized dice, ranging from d6 to d20, while skills are pools of d6s. Since rolling a 1 on your attribute die constitutes a funble, this strikes me as a clever way of differentiating talent and training and making them distinct and equally important.

Since this was a game played with FLux rules, I made the characters, and I made them with experience already spent. I think I spent experience in a way not intended by the game though, since the players all had skills so advanced that they regularly blasted past most target numbers with ease. This had them wanting to raise. Alas, there is no raise mechanic, and I didn't cobble one together for them.

So if you don't spend xp on skills, what do you spend them on? Fighting tecniques. See, combat in Swashbuckler has nothing to do with your stats or skills. Combat is its own independent system. You have a number of techniques available to you, and at the start of combat you select which one you're using. You compare your chosen maneuver against the one your opponent is using, which gives you a modifier. You then apply this modifier to a straight d20 roll, and the higher roll wins. The next exchange, however, you can only use certain techniques, ones the last technique allows. For example, after you lunge, you might only be able to perform a hasty parry, even though you know the maneuvers "shoulder ram" and "hack" as well. Thus your techniques form a web, with some leading to others.

It's neat in concept, and it's pretty cool in application too. I found that what happened was that players first jumped to what they thought was the best technique, but after a few fights they began watching the opponent to determine what kind of style he used, and tried to pick their way through their own fight webs to choose techniques that would give them the best advantage. I'm sure that's exactly what the game intended, and my players had a lot of fun with it.

Combat's very fast, with damage being the margin of victory over your opponent, and wound checks working as a simplified version of 7th Sea's own mechanic (as soon as you fail a wound check, you're down). This makes for fragile characters, but I think it works with the combat system, which is geared more toward not getting hit with the right use of techniques than it is about weathering repeated blows. That strikes me as true to the genre as well. You don't see many swashbuckling films where a fencer powers through receiving thrust after slash after lunge. It's more about desperate, last minute parries, so my hat's off to Jolly Roger Games for getting the genre down in mechanics.

Any hitches? Well, a few.

The combat system is AWESOME when it's one-on-one. One of my players got into a duel with an arrogant musketeer and we went back and forth through multile exchanges that were exciting and beautifully choreographed for us by the rules. It turned tense as they both struck home several times and were woozy and exhausted, either one about to drop when the next blade cut flesh. Everyone agreed it was a fantastic way to run a fight.

This back and forth falls apart very quickly when you're trying to run multiple combattants at once however. It was true both when you have a single opponent fighting multiple foes and when you have multiple one-on-one fights going on. In both cases the fact you need to shift focus from one pair to another means that natural rhythm that develops in one-on-one fighting is lost, and the whole thing becomes just another combat. I'd almost suggest that this become a separate duelling mechanic used to handle duels of honor and use a more abstracted ruleset similar to attribute and skill use for broader combats, since it's a real pitty how much magic the combat system loses when you can't focus in on two fighters exclusively.

The other complaint, though I suspect this will be a common one in many games, is that there's no raise mechanic. Ever since being introduced to raising, my players have become hardcore addicts of the rule, in whatever incarnation it may take. They crave the ability to set their own stakes and reach for the stars in ways that aren't exclusively the call of a high die roll. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with too many games that provide this. Hell, a lot of my own games don't even do this, and I love the concept as much as they do. I don't count that as any failing of the game though; it's a taste thing only.

All in all, Swashbuckler proved to be a fantastic sidebar in our campaign, and I think everyone enjoyed it. That said, given how the combat system really seems to need to be constrained to two individuals to shine, I thnk playing this as an extended one shot worked best for us. I'd want to flesh this out and create a combat system that better handled larger fights (perhaps something like 7th Sea's system, where your techniques aren't tied to a web and can be used in place of basic attacks). It's a fun game though, and not pricey either. Recommended.

Heroes of Destiny: Fourth Playtest

The last playtest blew a huge hole in the mechanical basis of the game, so I had a lot of work ahead of me to get the game in shape to play again, as prior posts attest. Walking into this game, I wasn't sure how the revisions would go over, so I had the train roll into town and got the players into trouble right away.

Non-combat rules changed very little, so people were fine with just rolling along. Destiny worked a little different, what with 10s counting double, but it didn't come up much. No one defended or endangered dreams this session, so despite the fact that those rules underwent a massive rewrite, there wasn't much testing going on there.

We did see several combats though. That's right, several. The new rules allowed us to engage in multiple altercations and have time left over for not ony more game, but more combat. Needless to say, it went much more smoothly. I found information much easier to track on my end with NPCs reduced to series of target numbers, and not once did a player stop to ask what the hell he was doing.

New recovery rules proved intuitive, and while I still wonder if they make a person a little too tough, hard opposition can still put plenty of hurt on a PC. Players found the entire system far easier to track than the bloodied/bruised system in place previously, so there's a win. I think it bears more watching/testing, but it's a step in the right direction.

Damage, special damage that is, needs some work though. The whole damage = margin thing is cool and it works, but having all weapons provide bonuses to the attack pool isn't translating into harder hits the way I hoped it would, and it puts our spellcasters at something of a disadvantage when compared to gunslingers. I haven't worked out how to make it work instead (players are pushing for a straight damage bonus, but that feels wrong to me for no reason I can articulate), so that's grist for the design mill. The short of it is, there needs to be ways of making special attacks more potent, ideally without adding a while separate damage score to the whole thing.

Which brings us to the other major complaint of the game: potencies suck. Okay, no, they don't suck, but they're not, well, potent enough. The general feeling was that for abilities that cost extra successes to activate, they should have a lot more oomph than they do now. Some of the design suggestions made them into quasi-feat chains ala D&D, which was a real turn off for me. I don't hate D&D, but I want to avoid the design methodology that created that system as much as I can, given the playstyle it engenders and that I've experienced. I want to avoid a power grab system that turns characters into compilations of special abilities. That said, if people aren't feeling their potencies matter much mechanically, that absolutely does need work. Throw that on the pile I guess.

Next up, some possible solutions... I hope.

Heroes of Destiny: Third Playtest

The third playtest of Heroes of Destiny was the first one that involved a multi-sessions campaign. Our very first test was a one shot run at the rules in a swashbuckling setting, and the second one was largely a character generation session. Now, we got to sit down with player-generated characters and have a full game session dedicated to gaming.

The rules are still rough, very rough, in places, but I'm happy to report that when this system works, it works.

The game picked up with our group of old west heroes on board a train headed out to Redemption Colorado from the east coast, each for reasons of his own. The three are brothers, and the ties of blood pull them together even though their pasts might otherwise drive them apart. One is a former law man, the other two of more shady occupations, all looking to set up life in the west through a shared stake in an area supposedly rich in gold.

Last game, one of the passengers went crazy, half ate two others, and then proceeded to fight the three of them. He lost to a small hail of gunfire that sent him tumbling off the roof of a train car, falling into the rushing darkness.

We picked up pretty much right there. The session that proceeded was very heavy on role playing and non-combat die resolution. The latter went amazingly smoothly. Despite the long hiatus between sessions, people picked up on the basic roll really quickly. That's not too surprising, as there's not a lot to it. Pick up some dice, roll them, and look for 5s. If that took a long time to figure out, we'd be neck deep in a whole other set of problems.

What was really exciting, however, was how talents and trainings affected play. Without any prompting from me, people would throw their dice, look at their sheet, and then alter their role playing so that they could leverage those bonuses that allowed them to manipulate the pool results. Characters really came to life early in the game, and while good players will always bring that kind of spark to their play (and this group had at least one such player), it happened early in the game, without much of a warm up period.

Even better still, I got to see first hand what it was like to watch a system fade into the background. We played for several hours without anyone stopping to puzzle something out. What questions there were became routine (mostly asking if a particular talent or training could apply to a situation/approach), which left the game wholly uninterrupted by the rules. We played, people occassionally tossed dice with complete confidence, read the results without any difficulty, and we proceeded with play.

One hang up we hit a little early was a question of cooperation, as in how to do it? The on the fly ruling I made was that the primary actor rolled his pool, but all participants could modify that roll with their talents, trainings, and gifts. However, if any participant wanted to include his Destiny dice, he could swap those out for any of the pool's Hope dice. That kept die rolling down while letting everyone participate. The group came up with the little flourish that you still rolled your own Destiny dice, which turned out to be a nice touch. This ruling went over big, and it's become part of the baseline rules from now on.

The play about erodiing Hope and burgeoning Destiny is also growing on people. One player lost almost all connection to his wife during play as he stood up and took over as lawman more and more throughout the session. He remarked at one point that it felt right, both in terms of his character and how it was coming off in play. His wife wanted him to put away the badge and live the simple life, but his ideals were calling him back to action, and he was consistently choosing them over her, and it was straining their relationship. He said there was a small story playing in his head about such things, even though we weren't playing them as part of the game, and that made the whole experience richer for him. I can't say that would happen to everyone, but it was really nice to hear about.

Then we closed in on the end of the adventure and hit combat. Combat hit back too. Even though they were supposed to sprout from a common root, combat was everything basic resolution wasn't: it was difficult, intrusive, slow, confusing, and ground play to a halt. No one was happy with it.

There were several large categories of problems when it came to combat:

• Too Many Dice - Despite my assumption that the creation of multiple effort pools would make people die hungry, it turned out not to be the case, and all the various options that granted additional dice turned some people's pools into veritable seas. They had so many ways of drumming up more dice upon more dice that they literally had too many options and didn't know what to do with them all. This means that Dreams and Ideals need a complete overhaul, since playtesting showed they were important to play and populat as a concepts, but their mechanical implications need wholesale replacement.
• Hope Limits on Potencies - The idea that only the extraordinary can really let rip with potencies is a good one. Representing this by placing a semi-flexible cap on the amount of Hope you can put into a potency is not. It created confusion and the need to perform a calculation every time someone wanted to roll a potency.
• NPCs Are Hard - I'd designed NPCs to be diceless in order to speed and simplify their resolutions. I did this by listing the automatic successes they had toward several kinds of actions by way of assigning them gifts. Nice theory. In fact, it didn't work so well. The fact that NPCs have gifts means they still have resources that need management. Removing the dice meant that I didn't even have the physical tracking aid to use. I started using dice to help out halfway through, but it still was far more complicated than it was supposed to be.
• Damage - Damage is all kinds of screwed up. People either miss or commit grievous wounds on their opponents. Each time a player took a hit he went from fine to half dead. I wanted injuries to matter in this game, but this is too deadly for the kind of experience I'm trying to create. It needs to be scaled WAY back.
• Different Die Statuses - We've tried it several times now, and the whole fine/bloodied/bruised thing is just not working. Even though everyone gets how it works, people don't like them. The general consensus is that a die should be in play, or not. But having some that can do something when others can't, when they're otherwise identical, is unpopular. Wounding, and by extension recovery, needs new rules that simplify this.

Despite the rash of problems that came up, however, the game was seen in a positive light overall. People loved the basic resolution, and even those who were skeptical about dropping skills and using more descriptive traits like talents and trainings are 100% sold on the idea now. They love them, and they love using them. The goal is to make combat work much more like basic resolution, ideally to the point where combat is no different from any other kind of die rolling.

The ways I try to make this happen follow in later posts.

Shadowitz 2e: First Playtest

Our regular group hosted a guest recently, and so we took a break from the regular game to give Shadowitz 2e a trial run. I used a Die Hard like scenario, where the players would be inside a tower that got taken over by terrorists, initially separated from their weapons and with all their cyberware locked down. The idea was to have them sneak to the security station at the base of the tower, recover their gear and unlock their ware, and then have a series of running gun battles with terrorist groups as they tried to diffuse a bomb set to blow the top 15 floors off the building.

Instead, they jumped the first guys they saw regardless of the fact they had no weapons and little in the way of augmentation. The scenario ended before it began, and we instead settled in for a 90 minute fight that ended with a whole lot of dead hostages and an exploded building. But hey, the combat system got a hell of a workout.

The first thing I noticed was that wounding hurts a lot more than it used to. A lot more than it used to. Maybe too much. I'm not sure. In a single fight it really slapped the group around, but it was a situation that was stacked with near impossible odds (in the hopes they'd decide to do something other than overtly rush the bad guys) with no down time with which to recover from even stun injuries, so I'm not sure it's a fair test of how the penalties impact regular play.

That said, getting hit really messes you up now. You can't blithely ignore the flying lead anymore. Defensive actions are really a must. So much so that I'm thinking that dice put toward yin shouldn't be eaten up by an attack. While I prefer to shade things in favor of offense to move the game along, wounds are simply too crippling to nail someone with without providing a hearty defensive option.

Raising seems pretty cool, but again, with wounds locking down your pool, once you take a big hit, you're not raising anymore. I'm actually fine with that.

The new shot clock works just fine. I didn't expect any problems with it. In fact, the multi-track approach was very well received by any who had a comment about it.

Physical mages are powerful. I had adjusted the rules from what I posted here to make the magic rules a little more forgiving, but with the right suite of powers they are monsters. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, since the group never unlocked their cyberware I can't fairly compare them to the samurai, who never got to cut loose. That's a comparison I'd really want to make before deciding what, if anything, needs to change with the physical mages.

With a flat target number of 4 and wound penalties changing way more dice into wound dice, I think my initial assessment of the knack list and pyramid is correct. Knacks need to be more specialized and more numerous. There's one other major revision I think I need to look at though, and that's the attempt to keep all pools at 10.

See, when the game judged the level of success based on the number of hits you rolled, having a massive pool just became cumbersome after a while, and once you exceeded a certain number of successes, you hit a point of rapidly diminishing returns in terms of how long it took you to sort your pool. For that reason, keeping the knack ratings capped at 10, and limiting them to 7 to start, was a good idea. But that's not the way the game works anymore.

Now, no matter the hits you roll, you only score a minimal success. If you want more, you have to raise, and to raise you have to drop dice fro your pool. Now, a massive score in a knack doesn't mean lots of sorting. You're looking for the task threshold and that's it. In fact, the new raise rules don't just mean that large pools aren't as cumbersome, but I think they require larger pools. If you want to really shine, you need spare dice you can throw away on raises. The existing knack pyramid needs a revision. While 7 dice to start is probably still okay, if lower powered than it used to be, I think there needs to be more slots for higher rating knacks, and maybe a higher ground floor. Knacks of 3 aren't very useful.

What surprised me most, however, was how many comments I got back immediately upon wrapping up the session about how people would readily return to this game to test it further. One big fight scene didn't give people opportunity to play with their demons, and that was something nearly everyone wanted to explore more. They saw a lot of potential in mucking about with questions of edge and punk and worldliness. I'm not sure when or if that'll happen, as this was a sort of design on a lark and one I wasn't planning on returning to, but hey, you never know.

Heroes of Destiny: Second Playtest

Our second playtest for Heroes of Destiny was rough. There were a bunch of scheduling snafus that lead some, but not all, of us to gather. Since this was supposed to be the beginning of a short campaign, and a test of the character creation system, I wanted everyone there at once. Not only did I want to avoid having to schedule a second time to walk those absent through the process, but I wanted everyone together to see if they could work out the rules amongst themselves. In that way it was a test of the text as much as the system.

Since we were a man down, I instead decided I'd take the opportunity to run another game from the menagerie of "I'd like to try this" titles I have. I took a few so we'd have options, and headed on over...

...only to learn that we were indeed going to have a full crew, just a hour later than normal.

Well, hell. I hadn't prepped anything. Sure, I had some story notes, but no numbers. That meant play was more than a little halting. But I'm getting ahead of myself, because we started with character generation.

As I noted earlier, the group decided on a fantasy western. One of them was looking for D&D in the wild west, but wasn't very clear about it. Someone else wanted Deadlands with different rules, which is what I trended toward. Our world is less Brisco County than Deadlands, but the idea is similar: rising sorcey and grim magic have made a mess of the United States.

The players all came in with some idea of what they wanted for their characters, some more detailed than others, so we sat down and got to work. Even though there's not many points to spend in character generation, I was astounded at the agony of expenditure. It took a loooooong time to get those points spent. Normally I'd be demoralized, but in this case it wasn't because the rules were too complicated or unclear; they simply gave a lot of thought to point distribution. Hey, some people put a lot of thought into that. It wasn't a failing of text or system, so we rolled with it.

Talents and trainings were a problem, or the concept of them was a problem. One of the players still kept going to skills as a reference, and kept coming up with terms that were too grounded in game mechanics as opposed to descriptive text, and were in general too limiting. However, over the course of about two hours, we had a good list among them all. Some stars of the bunch included:

• Small Town Sheriff - you're used to being the law in small communities. This means you know how to dig up information, throw your weight around to get what you want, intimidate those under your authority, and gather up a posse when the need arises. However, you're totally lost in cities, where the red tape and "proper channels" just baffle you.
• I Work Alone - running dusty trails solo to avoid authorities almost all your life has made you very comfortable with adapting your abilities to any situation. Whatever it is, you have a knack for bending your skills to the task, but your mind has no place for others; their presence tends to foul up your instincts.
• I Used to Be a Bad Guy - you've come west to get away from your criminal past, but some of it still lingers. Despite your best efforts, there are going to be people who have heard of you, and while that can be a problem with bounty hunters, it gives you extra leverage when convincing folk they don't want to cross you. Plus, having plied the bandit trade yourself, you have insight into how they think and act.

One of the suggestions that John (the person for whom the game was written) had was "Lucky with the Order," from Unforgiven, in which Eddie Munny describes always hitting the most dangerous gunman in a fight first, just because he does. It's a great name, but getting lucky with the order doesn't fit with how talents and trainings work. Get the bonus when hitting the right guy? Get the bonus when determining which guy to hit? I couldn't find a way to make it work, but I really want to because the name sounds perfect.

The big suggestion that came out of this is that the game needs a standardized list of talents and trainings. I resisted this initially. If these are supposed to be bits of description that really display the core elements of the character, picking them from aa pregenerted list seemed counter to their purpose. My players insisted, however, and one pointed out that some people will just pick from the list and that'll be that, but others will eventually make their own, using the list as examples. And he's right. Given that I want to keep the rules themselves genre neutral though, what I'm likely to do is create a list of example talents and trainings that have emerged in our various playtests. People can  pick from them if the campaign's appropriate, and they should provide a solid guide to help people make their own.

Okay, so we got our crew together and then had to take a break as I got my hands on some files, and I began scribbling notes and making stats on the fly. As I said, play was kind of halting, and the initial session had a lot of role playing and not much die rolling. That's okay. I do like those kinds of sessions, and given that this game is ultimately about having to make deeply personal choices and scrifices in character, the heavy role play is just as essential as checking the dice.

What die rolling we did see showed that the basic resolution mechanics are fine. They were a little slow at first, mostly on the differences between potencies and everything else, and the idea that your talents, trainings, and gifts applied to your entire pool once per exhange, not to each effort made. The latter only took a couple to tosses of the dice to work out; I suspect potencies will take just a little longer.

As we didn't really get into much heavy stuff, I noticed people were leaving Destiny out of their rolls, which sat just fine with me. Determining if someone was cheating at cards isn't the kind of high stakes risk that calls for the risk of Destiny. All fine.

XP is a little problematic, as players are having a hard time remembering to write it down, and I've missed reminding them a few times. I still like the idea though, so I'm going to hang onto it and hope that we'll grow into that mechanic.

The one combat we had involved guns, brawling, and some dangerous athleticism (a gunfight moved to the roof of a moving train, where it changed to knives and guns). People called on Destiny, risked Dreams, and invoked ideals. It was pretty cool. Damage sounds high when you deal it out, but given that starting characters have so many Hope dice, they take it pretty well. We didn't get a chance to try out healing at all, so that'll be next time.

What did I learn about the mechanics? Not much, I'm afraid. I spent so much time making numbers up on the fly on my end becaus I hadn't statted anything out that I didn't pay much attention to analysis at the time. I know it felt like more work than I intended to run a fight, but NPCs already only have a few stats and don't roll dice, so I can't simplify it much more. We'll just have to try it again with more organized notes. After all, low prep doesn't mean no prep.

Heroes of Destiny: The First Playtest

After much revision an messing around with the game on my own, I finally had an opportunity to give Heroes of Destiny a try in a full fledged game session. My normal 7th Sea game had to skip a week due to the host being called out of town on work (in the middle of his scheduled vacation no less). While he offered us use of his place despite his absence, we decided it would be better to hold off until he got back.

That left us with a week with a slot of empty time normally dedicated to gaming. So I floated the idea of giving this game system a whirl. It's been background noise in conversations to date, and I've discussed it in various stages of development with nearly everyone, but none knew much about it in anything but the vaguest terms. They agreed to have at it. One offered to destroy it for me, since he views that as his role as the playtester (and it's one I appreciate).

While I call the game Heroes of Destiny, it's got another, in house development name: Fantasy, Bitches! For this inaugural playtest, I rolled out Swashbuckling, Bitches!, and set it in the same world and city as the 7th Sea game I'm currently running. I made characters that were identified as much by their nationality as anything else, just as 7th Sea does, and in short represented the setting of 7th Sea through the Heroes mechanics. This so that there'd be absolutely no ramp up in terms of getting a feel for the world. I wanted the only new thing to be the mechanics. In that, it worked absolutely perfectly. No one once complained that things didn't feel right or that there were aspects of the setting that were being forced into the game but didn't fit. Mind you, we played for 2 hours and no one was playing a sorcerer, so it was an extremely limited sampling, but as far as the pedestrian stuff, it worked.

I made the characters, and while that gives me both a bias and an advantage in that I understood how the mechanics of chargen are supposed to work, I found the process both quick and thought provoking. I concentrated on giving people talents and trainings that were both descriptive and broad, not only because that's how I think they should work, but to highlight how the system can work. One character had a training called "Work the Sword Cane," and another had a talent of "I know what kills people." Both were assumed to be combat skills, which they certainly could be used as, but I had opportunity to demonstrate how they could be expanded beyond that when the sword cane man decided to charm someone and I pointed out that he could add a little flare with the cane to added effect. After the session I pointed out a few examples of non-combat applications of kill knowledge, such as investigating a murder scene or performing an autopsy. That aspect of the game went over big. As soon as the potential breadth was pointed out, people ran wild with potential applications for what was on their sheet.

The target of 5 seems like a good one. It requires people to dedicate serious effort to anything they want to accomplish, especially in the beginning. Even with a large pile of Hope dice, people were routinely coming up with small numbers of successes. The need to throw in Destiny established itself early.

Something I didn't expect was how tightly people clung to their hopes. As soon as I explained destiny creep and how it eroded hope, I got hit with questions about reversing that, and once in play, there was a real reluctance to throw any destiny, even when people were loaded up with 9 Hope. I did expect the choice to be hard, but this was more than I anticipated. Someone did point out the possibility of a player potentially deciding to forever be mediocre and never use Destiny, but when I explained that bloodying Destiny counts as use, he figured it would be an ultimately self correcting problem. Another player figured that while the choice is hard, the desire to have a cool character (defined by higher levels of competence) would balance out the price of Hope.

There was, however, a fair bit of confusion about the conversion rates of points to dice. It wasn't a rules problem so much as it was a problem with explaining the concept. In the discussion that followed the game we came up with an alternate tracking method. It doesn't change the rules, but does change what you see on the table. In short, you start with all point in your pool. You then convert them to dice when you want to act at the top of an exchange, but track your damage in points still. Previously I was tracking Hope with dice (since they're always 1:1) and Destiny with poker chips (since they give more dice the more you spend). I'll be writing that up and we'll try this method when we have another game.

Finally, we didn't get much of a chance to try it out in a 2 hour session, but at the very end of the game someone endangered Hope, and while the extra dice didn't help our errant hero, the explanation of what happened to his hopes on account of his actions made a bell go off for the mechanic. I'd explained it before, but when people saw how it worked, both in terms of dice and in terms of the game narrative, they found they liked it quite a bit. There was a lot of reluctance to use the option because of that aforementioned tight personal cling to hopes, but it seemed well received when the effects came into view.

Tweaking Gifts

Small edit here: Instead of adding successes, gifts now guarantee successes. They can transform a certain number of dice from failures to successes, but can't add more successes to a roll than the number of dice dedicated to the effort. This makes the character more dice dependent, thus more likely to endanger his hopes and spend more destiny. It also prevents gifts from overpowering other options by effectively granting free actions.

Also, gifts are now pools of automatic success conversions available once per exchange, not unlimited bonuses added to all actions. This brings them in line with talents and trainings.

Damage Revision

I've done some playtesting on my own with the new system. Overall, the die system seems to be working okay. I can stat up two people have have them slug it out without any major difficulties.

With one exception: damage.

Damage as it currently works is like hitting people in full plate with papercuts. Someone will eventually drop, but every single fight will be interminable. That's because your damage is based on the margin of success of the attack roll and nothing else, and the margin of victory on an attack roll tends to be a point or two, almost never higher.

To resolve this, I'm setting the damage of an attack at the margin plus the total effort of the attack. That means that even dice that don't come up successes still factor into the hit (assuming you connect). This has the happy side effect of making people more dice hungry, thus encouraging endangering hopes and spending more destiny.

This does make multiple attacks, such as those granted by some potencies, less effective though. You split your effort pool to make multiple attacks, which now have a lower chance to hit and do less damage to boot. Not a good deal. To make up for that, multiple attacks do cumulative damage in terms of effort. For example, if you make two attacks, one with 3 effort and one with 4, the first attack will do 3 + margin damage. The second, however, will do 7 + margin damage. 4 for its own effort and 3 for the effort of the first attack. If, somehow, the character had a third attack too, it would add the effort of that attack to the 7 total effort of the prior two attacks when figuring base damage.

Madness Made Real

I had a chance to put the madness rules discussed earlier into play, starting with explaining them to the players. The good news there was that they were easily absorbed, and the player most likely to use them most heavily liked them right away. Score!

We got down to the business of play, and things chugged along without a hitch. The group was in a pirate town trying to keep their heads down while making repairs to their ship before heading out in search of a lost relic when the group scholar, and budding madman, was singled out by a scoundrel for a high stakes game of chance in a tavern. All proceeded normally until a wager went sour and a fight broke out.

C'mon. It's a swashbuckling game, there was an inn, and it was in a pirate port. Who didn't see that coming?

At this point there are two party members in the bar. There's Mr. Suave, the budding madman who prides himself on fabulous hair and is even better known for his relative frailty and aversion to melee combat (though he's rectifying that), and then Dr. Destroyer, who's a little bit of a scholar and much more of an ass beater. Everyone knew what Dr. Destroyer was going to do, but Mr. Suave had a plan. We rolled initiative and he began to describe in cool, confident tones exactly how he was going to twist this situation.

That's when I tossed him a madness point, and, like a scene from Jacob's Ladder, he begins to see... things among the press of violent human flesh. Vile, loathsome things. And not just any things, but things. You know. Them.

I invoked Mr. Suave's fear insanity, and instead of whatever "I'm so cool I don't need to fight" thing he was going to do, he spent the round curled up in the fetal position under the table screaming.

Next round comes, and Mr. Suave asks me if he can act if the action is based on fear. That sounds fine by me, so I let him declare. In his panic-addled mind, he fixates on the scoundrel who started the fight. Clearly he summoned them, and thus needs to be put down. So he draws a pair of knives and proceeds to tackle the man and cut him to ribbons. He even throws in his madness point in order to emulate insane strength. He does so much damage he kills the scoundrel. That even came with a "Sorry, Clifford. I know you don't like these games to go killer, but I'm kind of crazy right now." As it turned out, I completely agreed with him.

The following round I let him recover his senses, and the rest of the brawl just realized someone had been killed. Mr. Suave beat a hasty retreat (burning a drama die, and thus getting rid of the madness point in the grip), while Dr. Destructor held the door long enough for him to get away. Or, that was the plan anyway. Instead, Destructor decided to brawl the whole bar himself, 1 on 20, and won. He's like that. He got himself a drink before heading out to find Mr. Suave.

This has been the only time we've used madness so far, but the initial impressions are good. All of the mechanics associated with this little rules bundle seem easy enough to use at the table, and parallel rules everyone's already familiar with, which means almost no learning curve. The one thing that's different, the grip of madness, has so far presented no difficulties. Mr. Suave asked once for a refresher and from then on seemed to have it well in hand. I anticipate getting an opportunity to use these a lot more in the future, and we'll see how they stand the test of time. For a maiden voyage though, so far so good.

Combat/Wounding Revision?

We've gotten a few more games under our belt, and had a chance to flex the Shadowitz system more. It still continues to move the game forward in a more or less smooth fashion. Lack of a printed book hangs us up when it comes to looking things up, but that's more a function of me being too cheap/poor to buy more ink for the printer than anything else. Besides, with the majority of players running all sorts of wireless devices at the table, we've managed with pdfs. Hey, might as well put those things to more use than surfing for porn during the game (which does happen).

I noted a while ago that no one ever takes defensive actions in combat. Having played for several more months, this continues to be the case. It's a very small group, so it's not much of a sampling, and this makes it difficult to know if this particular behavior is because of a problem with the system or if it's because of individual play style.

For example, my group currently has 3 members. One doesn't really care about the rules and wants the simplest solutions possible, so in combat he's not concerned about diving for cover, timing his shots, etc. He shoots and moves on. Another has very few combat skills to speak of and considers himself useful if he can goad the opposition into shooting him instead of someone more useful, so he spends all his resources jumping around and waving his hands while screaming "Here! Shoot here!"

And then there's our sam. Said sam doesn't care at all if he takes lead. He's a naked blade that stabs into the deep of combat and twists until all opposition falls. Once his dermal plating's soaked all the damage it can, he tends to rack up injuries fast, then fills in his wounds and eventually drops, condition monitor totally full up (until the medic gets him on his feet again; then it's lather, rinse, repeat). For him, it's clearly a matter of style. He's not a savvy fighter, and entirely too aggressive to bother with dodging incoming fire.

Still, I'm wondering if there's something askew with the combat rules in general if this is the default, and indeed only, behavior exhibited in combat every single time weapons come out. In analyzing a lot of the fights we've had in recent months, characters can stay on their feet for a good long time without any action to preserve themselves. The one shot kill (or take down, really) is possible, but the attacker needs to deal 11 + armor points of damage, not accounting for possible mitigation through injuries.

I've said in the past that the group hasn't faced much skilled opposition, and when they do numbers are usually on their side (one prime runner and a team of mooks, for example). We did have one massive battle royal in an ant hive, and that certainly taxed the team to their utmost. At the end of that fight I said that everyone was laid up in the hospital (as employees of Mega Media, since medical care was provided for in their contract) for nearly four months. Not a single person disagreed with me. Still, for the most part the fighting has been against people not as good as they are.

That changed last game, a little. In that game, the team raided a militant policlub looking to neutralize the leadership. No, it wasn't Humanis, though these guys were just as bad. Anyway, since the group was a paramilitary organization, I built their core membership with a good degree of competency. None of them were as individually good as the team sam, who can chuck close to 13 dice when he really gets going burning his edge for aspects, but they were by no means chumps. In game terms, they were all threat rating 4 with varying levels of dermal armor and reflex augmentation. They also were all armed with submachine guns and wore body armor. The fight involved 4 of these guys, since they'd managed to remove one of the others from the fight through role playing without even knowing it. None of them went down easy, and the sam dropped twice.

But that's the thing: harder opposition doesn't seem to mean anything in terms of team reaction. It just seems to determine whether or not someone drops at all. And this is the thing that has me wondering if there needs to be something more. I've taken to tagging injuries rather often, usually in one big bunch. So I'll pass over a small stack of edge chips and then scoop up a massive handfull of extra dice; injuries are no laughing matter to be ignored in this game. The players know by now that I'll use them often and hard. Still, there's no thought to avoiding damage.

Shadowrun used to have permanent injury rules. Whenever you suffered a deadly wound, you risked some sort of lasting effect. It might cost you a body part (which you could get replaced, but it cost money, and possibly essence), or it could remove an attribute point. That always struck me as nasty, especially given how easy it was to reach deadly; it was a rare game I played where I wasn't at deadly, and I didn't play crazy. I can't recall of such a rule remained in SR4; I'd stopped using those rules back in the 2e days, but I'm starting to see the reason behind that rule. I don't want to create some byzantine system of rolls to determine how screwed you are because you took some damage, but something more substantial might be in order.

Hmm... quick idea flash. Shadowitz rules currently state you cannot heal an injury until all of the wound boxes of a specific level clear out. So if you took a serious injury, you can't heal it until your serious wound boxes (boxes 8 and 9) are cleared. With a good Endurance rating, however, you can clean out your entire condition track in a couple of days. If you're in a crappy place with a low Lifestyle, you pay for some extended care under a halfway good physician and you'll be fine. I saw this happen in the last game.

So rather than bolt on yet more rules, why not just change that balance? You can't heal wounds until your injury of that level is cleared out? Current healing rules put injuries on a much longer timetable for recovery, and even a low level injury can clog up the works for healing higher level wound boxes, since healing wounds roll down your condition track, and if all the low boxes are filled up and stuck because of an injury, those high boxes won't have anywhere to go.

It's a simple rules adjustment, but one with some big consequences. I think we're going to give that a go next time we play.

Revamping Target Thresholds

When I first designed Shadowitz, I made it with a mechanical push toward specialization in methodology as well as skill training. I wanted something that promoted a particular style. The aggressive runner did well with straightforward combat tactics, but also with straightforward social interaction, while the sneak made a better sniper than infantryman. As we've played more, that's becoming evident to the players, and one of them in particular (the one who actually read the rulebook when I finished it), has really embraced this idea of describing what he's doing in ways that let him leverage his strengths. I encourage that kind of flexibility, because it gets the players really thinking about their characters and situations; it's harder to say "I just roll" when you're figuring out how to make said roll the best possible, and doing so requires engaging the game narratively.

With the players more carefully considering the how of their actions, and me still making suggestions along the way to show how I envisioned it working, the players very rarely find themselves rolling pools with a method lower than 3. The hacker/rigger/face/adept still gets stuck with 2s sometimes, but he's spread very thinly, so sometimes he's just got no choice. Most of the time, however, players are rolling for 3s or lower, and shooting for less than 5 a large part of the time. Combined with the fact that they like to roll the knacks that they're good at more often than not (and who doesn't), it means they're coming up with a high number of hits every roll.

That's good. I want to reward them for playing to their strengths. But it also means that the current hit thresholds I have for the game are kind of ridiculous. For an average person, they're fair, but they make my team near superhuman. For example, I have hard at 5 hits. Between gear, cyberware, adept powers, and aspects, any member of my crew can score 8 hits in his area of expertise without even trying. Easy is 1 hit, hard is 5, and they're clean off the charts nearly every time.

My kneejerk reaction is to simply double all thresholds, making easy 2 all the way up to making hard 10, but that makes hard rolls nearly impossible to pull off. Even someone trained all the way to 10 in a knack with a 5 method won't make it most the time (though with aspects and gear he probably will, since those can push the pool over 10). So, rather than do that and leave it that way, I think what's really called for is the creation of a more robust difficulty table, that defines difficulties for a larger range of results. This lets me keep easy in the range of the possible for those times when the runners need to roll something outside their area of expertise, while making the difficult things difficult for them. It'll take some tinkering to get the balance right, but the first order of business is to jack that high end way up. No more 10 impossible things before breakfast anymore.

Team Templates in Action

My group has played three sessions with the template rules so far. To date, outside of giving me some flak for calling the team "Street Trash," there's not been a lot of activity with it. Our erstwhile team leader pushes for everyone to make a contribution to the team edge pool at the beginning of every session, but until this last game, it just sat there unused. In fact, at the beginning of this session that little factoid caused our sam to refuse to put in more than a couple points, because he uses his aspects in every single combat and wanted to keep his edge for himself. If I were a bigger nerd, I'd go on about how this conflict of the character vs the team is great and that it happened with a street trash team seemed particularly appropriate.

Okay, chip truth, I am that big a nerd, but I'm still going to move along. Oh, on a related note, I renamed the template "Street Level;" the players appreciated that gesture immensely.

Anyway, things were chugging along as normal, with the group planning a raid against a policlub but trying to make it an elaborate confidence job that ended with gunfire but still involved a large number of rubes. The planning got so complex that they lost track of their own scheme and wound up implementing something of a hodgepodge of elements from multiple drafts of the plan. It was a gigantic logistical nightmare.

It did, however, still end with gunfire.

And this is where the team plot editing power started to come in. After a massive firefight with a side of rioting, Lone Star had locked down the area and were doing weapons checks (there were too many people for mass arrests, so they were just nabbing those most likely involved in the violence). The party was physically trashed; combat had been hard and they paid for victory with an awful lot of blood and die penalties. The rigger refused to let anyone else drive his car because it was his car and no one else is ever allowed to drive it. Unfortunately, his Sleaze isn't so hot, and they really wanted to just slip away rather than risk a road chase in a mob scene with more Lone Star forces showing up any minute and Red Samurai lined up nearby (they were right on the border of Renraku territory, close to the archology). So, drive and Sleaze it was, or it would have been.

Instead, the player picked up a chip out of the team edge and invoked their dumb luck power. For no good reason outside of pity from the spirits, they waltzed out of the situation with a bare minimum success level, which was good enough for them.

I expect they'll be contributing more eagerly to the team edge pool in the future.

Seeing this in action makes me eager to see some of the other templates in play, though I can't really see this team ever shifting away from this team type. They're not the sort to sign on with a corp, and while a syndicate has hooks into them, it's not a voluntary thing. And quite frankly, the players don't take the game seriously enough to ever get the professional freelancer template; they revel in being screw ups far too much. Ergo, street level it is, and likely will remain for a good long time. At least that template should get a workout.

Fifth Playtest

The fifth session running under Shadowitz was a combat intensive session, and the finale of the run. As in the real finale, not the faux finale that I gave them a couple of sessions ago. Last time we played, the team was hired to track down what happened to the simsense star they'd previously kidnapped. She'd gone missing again, and it was now their job to get her back.

Much investigation and negotiation later, the team stood outside a bug infested warehouse outfitted with security armor and heavy weapons looking all the world like the space marines from Aliens (one player even went so far as to find a clip of the movie and play it prior to getting underway).

I was a little nervous going into the fight for a couple of reasons.

This was supposed to be a claustrophobic modern day dungeon crawl, and the Aliens analogy was apt. The thing is, I suck at running horror games, and it became clear that this team would not be skittish. No matter how I described the alien looking bug men, they just wanted blood. Granted, this is a team of veterans and while this was their characters' first experience with a hive, they've all played Shadowrun long enough to have faced this kind of thing in other games before. So it quickly became "I shoot it!" with little emotional impact. Clearly I was missing something essential.

So after a few small skirmishes, I had the sound of gunfire awake the rest of the hive and the shaman directed them to assemble in one place to protect the queen. No more small encounters. Now every spirit, flesh and true, was assembled in one massive encounter. And here was the second point of doubt I had: would the mook rules work?

As it turns out, they worked out famously. All told, the party faced close to 30 opponents, all in a single combat. Most of these were low threat mook squads made up of ant worker spirits. I had a few higher threat level mooks made of soldiers, and then a few true villians (as in mechanically identical to PCs).

It was a long fight, nearly 2 hours, and at the end the party was severely chewed up. Most were staring at completely filled damage tracks, complete with injury slots, and more than once first aid treatments and magical healing were the only reasons someone made it through the fight. People screamed at one another for aid, some sacrificed themselves to buy others time to do something only someone else could do (banishment was a big one here), and it came down to a few critical moments toward the end to see which side would be victorious. Tension rode higher and higher as the fight went on. Really, I was happy with how it turned out.

How did the mooks fair? Poorly for the most part. But they were near useless in the fight by design. After all, they were worker spirits. Still, there were 20 of them, and they demanded attention, and it took a few grenades and some Vindicator minigun spray to wipe them all out (largely because the party didn't know how to throw grenades or fire a heavy weapon, so die pools were small). The thought of being swarmed by them terrified some members of the group, and even if they were low threat rating mooks, a squad of 20 brought pain enough.

The other thing I learned in this session is the value and appeal of tactical combat. Narrative combat is freer; you can do what you like as long as you and the GM agree on the details. Don't sweat movement rates, threatened areas, or terrain modifiers. Just do what you want, and roll with the descriptions. The problem is that it sounds all kinds of wonderful in theory, but can quickly fade to "I attack" over and over. I as GM tried to provide some extra detail for my NPCs, but I slipped away from that as the fight went on as well. And especially when you're using guns, there's only so much extra detail you can pack on round after round to shooting at someone.

Tactical combat provides an additional layer of detail without needing the description. It too can rapidly become "I attack" if you have two people standing in place and slugging it out (ranged or melee), but tactical combat systems usually introduce more combat considerations that can give the proceedings more detail and more substance.

My group seems perfectly happy with the combat system as it currently works and doesn't seem to need the full tactical array, so I doubt I'll be laying down a battlemat anytime soon, but it was an interesting thing to observe. In the meantime, I think looking into some mechanic to inspire more detail in combat actions is in order.

Fourth Playtest

By now people are getting pretty comfortable with the rules and how to use them. Aspects are seeing regular use, though while I've compelled a few myself the players still seem reticent to do so themselves. Someone did ask if they could spend their edge to activate someone else's aspect, and while I ruled no for the moment, it does have me thinking about developing some team mechanics that would allow them to contribute to and use some sort of shared resource.

I've got a couple of examples of this from other games I can draw on for inspiration. I really like the Warhammer 3e idea of giving the party as a whole its own sheet and resources, and during the brief time I ran Shadowrun using Feng Shui rules I threw group shticks into the mix, and they were pretty popular. It's something to think about, but I've got nothing solid yet.

Healing is humming along smoothly, and I'm very glad to see that while magical healing is quite potent at aiding in the recovery of acute injury, it's a poor substitute for medical treatment when you're dealing with a large number of wounds. And injuries give our resident medic something to do in providing acute care as well.

We saw use of vehicles, stunts, and sorcery. Combat chugged along with good speed and flexibility. Injuries are seeing more use now, especially when a heavy hit slams home, and they're holding up in the face of increased use. I tagged a number of injuries during the game and got myself a hefty serving of bonus dice, but this in turn gave my players more edge to burn on their aspects. The players are also getting comfortable with the idea of folding knacks into one another and using them to do far more than basic "I shoot" actions in combat, which has done wonders for the pacing of fights.

At one point the party had a midnight meeting with someone to receive some information. They pulled up alongside his car and began to exchange words through open windows when suddenly a massive bug spirit materialized in between the two vehicles and began to rend the informant's car. The sam and the mage jumped out of the car and leaped into combat, but the two adepts opted to try some acrobatic maneuvers through the combat and get into their informant's car to drive it, and him, away. Was there a rule for that? No, not specifically, but inside of a couple of seconds we got a knack combination that handled it, rolled some dice, and moved along.

That brings us to spirits, which saw their debut in this session. I was looking forward to this because so far human opposition was feeling a little light. Granted, I rarely put highly advanced opposition in front of the team in any significant numbers, but spirits offered the opportunity for uniquely resilient opponents without resorting to cybermancy or military armor (which the players would of course want to scrounge). How'd it work? Beautifully.

Spirit combat played out exactly as I'd hoped. Immunity to normal weapons put a real wrinkle in the team's standard battle tactics, and they'd burned several rounds of autofire and wrecked one car before they figured it out. Once the team resorted to melee, however, the system bore out just as well. Melee was a viable, if not optimal, option for some, while the mage continued to be the heavy hitter (and the one who drew a lot of the spirit's ire). In the end, they left the scene victorious by their own merit, but certainly bloody from the encounter (wounds all around and two deadly injuries). I'd call that a good fight.

Finally, we got another crack at hacking. For this session I made one more go at creating a character for the face/adept/rigger/hacker, which still proved difficult because he had so many areas of expertise, and I'd designed the system to promote specialization. What this meant was that some key knacks had to take a lower rating because there were only so many slots available. This turned out to be a silver lining, however, because a lower knack rating allowed us to explore the full implications of how program ratings work. For some of his hacking actions, the programs didn't modify his roll at all (he had high ranked programs and an equally high hacking knack). For other actions, however, the program roll gave him a boost, since his knack rating came in low. Seeing how the software could provide a boost if you're low, not just a penalty if you're high gave the player a bigger, more complete picture, and he signed off on the system as good and satisfactory. Finally, it looks like we can lay this to rest.

All in all, it looks like we're done with the gross issues now and have moved into fine tuning. The general satisfaction level remains high, which is a great place to be after only a handful of sessions. I anticipate a big battle next game (they're headed to the warehouse where Euphoria's being held), which should give us a lot of opportunities to test not only spirit combat some more, but also the chance to see how the combat system holds up with large numbers of opponents. Who knows, maybe they'll actually want to try defensive actions. Maybe.

Money Note

We completed our mission last session, and I'd handed out advancement rules at the end, so people turned to buying things. In addition to buying increases with karma, there was ever the gear discussion. I described earlier how I changed money to get rid of some of the accounting that takes place in game, and we faced the first real test of this about a week after the session described in the last post.

"Hey Cliff, I got a question about Icelady."
This is a contact they made in the process of a run. "Yes?"
"Do we still get the 50% discount when we buy from her?"

Huh. Players remember the craziest things. Icelady hasn't been mentioned in months. As in a lot of months. But now, after we stop tracking nuyen, they invoke the discount.

How to deal with this? They wanted to just half the cost of anything they bought from her before determining if they needed to make a roll, but that struck me as far too generous. After all, without making a roll, you can walk away with a ton of stuff for free. Now maybe that means that the system's broken, but I wanted to try something different.

So instead I made Icelady an aspect for the characters that can be invoked to gain a bonus on resources rolls when buying through her. This got a "I LIKE that!" response, and got them talking about how specific contacts they'd tried to cultivate in the past could be made into aspects for all sorts of things.

2 games in and it's starting to all come together. They're picking up the system and beginning to play with it on their own. This is where the real fun begins.

Third Playtest

The first session went well, but it's when the honeymoon phase ends and you need to get down to work when problems start to crop up. So I've been looking forward to picking up with my group again for some time (we don't play nearly as often as we'd like, being adults with weekend responsibilities and all that). Last time we left off mid-run, so I figured we'd be on pace to finish things this time. In anticipation of putting a few more parts of the system into testing, I tried to guide the session to certain situations, and for good measure added a milk run to the end of it to ensure I'd be able to test vehicle combat.

As is ever true in gaming, it didn't go as planned.

Most of the session was pure role-playing. This is excellent. As in, really, really excellent. It did mean that I didn't get nearly as much testing as I anticipated though. So while I anticipated action in the Matrix, in gun and sorcery battles, and maybe a car chase at the end, what I got instead was the team arguing with itself over whether it was okay to try to seduce the simsense star they were currently holding, with one gun/sorcery battle, and a little Matrix work in there. They did do a little bit to earn their money, eventually.

So how'd it go? Well, the rules stuck with everyone, which is nice. No one asked any "how do I roll" questions. Spellcasting and drain continues to be quick. Combat was a tad slow, but I'm hoping that was due to my lack of sleep and disorganization than any breakdown of the system. Once I got myself together, things were flowing well enough.

I have some concerns about how much the system seems to favor offense, given that a sam with a flechette firing shotgun seems to be the end of anyone he shoots at. One shot, one kill. On the other hand, the opposition had a low threat level, so right now it looks like it's doing what I want it to. Low threat level opposition should drop quickly. It's what they're there for.

Matrix is working great now. Maybe not perfectly; there's a little talk about tweaking programs, but overall I'm very happy with it. Adding System dice to your pool regardless of interface level seems to really shore things up, and I see a significant difference between hacking on the fly and probing the target. Previously, my hacker would never bother probing because he'd be able to barge into anything on the fly reprecussion free, even when the system security was tight. Now, he prefers to probe when possible, and is selective and smart about picking his on the fly hacks. I really like that.

Counterspelling works. It actually works very well. It's a powerful option, and I'd be tempted to say that it's a bit too good, except that it's a holding action that prevented the mage from doing much else aside from waiting for the enemy spellcaster to strike. For a long number of phases, he had nothing to do but wait. When it was his time to shine, however, he hit hard. I don't know that it will be a regular go to action, but it's a viable one.

Vehicles need a little work, and on two fronts. First, everyone always wants to shoot the driver. Always. They want to cap that poor bastard as soon as they see him, or don't for that matter. This time I had the driver stay inside the vehicle. He drove. He didn't drive and shoot. He didn't drive and throw spells. He drove, with the ballistically rated window up and his seat belt on. It took the party two shots to kill him, even when he was wearing armor, the vehicle had armor, and the damage got downgraded because he was in a vehicle. And you know what? Capping the driver is a really quick way of ending a chase. That'll need some looking into.

There's also an ongoing debate over how methods and vehicular actions should relate. I'm flexible on this, and our rigger seems to have given things a lot of thought, so it looks like we'll see some changes soon. What they are yet, however, is hard to say. Our rigger is making a case that vehicles should intersect with knacks more like non-combat knacks rather than knacks like firearms or unarmed combat. Early discussions seem to be leading us somewhere good.

On the plus side, aspects and vehicles are awesome. Aspects are a fantastic way of dealing with the bane of vehicular combat: the called shot. Anyone who's played any game with vehicles has fielded calls to shoot out the tire, the windshield, the mirrors, etc. Short of putting a separate hit location and damage meter for all this stuff, you're left with handwaving it, or just saying it has no mechanical effect. Aspects proved to be a fantastically rules lite way of giving the players what they want without creating a massive mechanical headache.

Yes, they shot out the tire. Took less than a round for that declaration. So I had them make a combat roll as normal, and then let them tag the vehicle with the "blown tire" aspect. Later, when someone else killed the driver and another person inside tried to wrestle control of the van before it crashed, they invoked that tag and ruined the driver's roll.

Everyone liked this idea. They can cause all kinds of structural mayhem on their enemies' cars, and it causes damage they can exploit. No more detail required.