RPG a Day #21 Simplicity

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

For simplicity I’d like to talk about an amazing game for beginner players, Quest. If you haven’t checked Quest out I recommend giving it a look. It is a setting neutral system that gives you and your player’s lots of freedom for character/world creation with a set of easy to use rules for playing the game.

Quest uses a single D20 for all of its rolls. Everything is handled with that one dice. Success is decided on a basic scale with 20 is a Triumph or critical success, 11-19 is a success, 6-10 is a success with a cost, 2-5 is a failure, and 1 is a catastrophe or fumble. For the most part, players will succeed at their actions with the possibility of having to choose between two setbacks with a roll of 6-10. I like this because succeeding is fun and even the setbacks are just excuses to have something interesting happen.

I know that some people will balk at this type of system, but I like it because it lets the players and the Guide focus on the game without forcing in unnecessary failure. You can fail, and even in that you don’t just miss your attack, something happens. You will miss with your attack, but you’ll also do something in conjunction with that, maybe you drop your sword, overextend your attack and are now in a bad spot, or your attack went wide and shattered the 18^th century vase that the king was particularly fond of. Who can say?

Character creation is easy. You have a worksheet with a couple of questions on it and use those to figure out what type of character you’re playing. Most of the questions are character based. They help you fill out your characters hopes, dreams, and appearance. Some of the questions are mechanical, like what class you’re playing or the equipment you’re carrying.

As a quick tip, weapons in this game follow anime rules. You want a sword, sure that’s an option, but you can also go into battle with an umbrella, yo-yo, or fishing rod. Weapons in this game fall into categories of light, heavy, ranged etc. The category of your weapon will affect how much damage it does and other rules that go with it. For example, swords, hammers, and such do 2 points of damage.

World building is handled much the same way. There’s a worksheet that gives you a series of questions to answer. These help you define the threat to the world, starting location for the adventurers, and the general feelings of the populace. This gives starting guides a great introduction to world building. Plus once you’re done with either the character or world sheet you have an introductory paragraph to use when describing that thing.

Here’s an example of a setting I designed using this method.

Your story begins in one of the magical worlds that make up the Planar Roads. From the endless caves of Selinia to the floating cities of Gato, you’ll find a darkness has been sapping the will of the people. In this world, magic is quickly fading, danger is becoming more and more common, and daily life has become hard and unforgiving. It’s a lot like a cross between Hogwarts, Kingdom Hearts, and Pirate 101. People here are hopeful that the darkness will recede, but despair and fear become more entrenched every day.

Your acceptance letter for the Lady Primrose School of Etiquette for the Modern Itinerant Daredevils; a School for Gifted Youth with a Tendency towards Adventure has arrived by messenger hare. Hoping to rekindle the spirit of adventure a new headmaster has reopened the school and you are to be one of the students from its inaugural class. With any luck, you may be the ones to help save the Planar Roads and the countless worlds that call it home.

 

Both of the worksheets I’ve mentioned are available on the Quest RPG website. I’ve used them for other games as a great starting point for setting up a character or setting.

I’ve described the rules and creation mechanics and it sounds like a great game for beginners. How does it work for experienced players? Every seasoned player I’ve run through a game has enjoyed it. It took a little bit to get used to the freedom the system offers you. I still have a hard time coming up with setbacks for a 6-10 roll and the players are usually uncertain what to do when the game starts but once they get their footing everything moves forward pretty well. I don’t see us ever running a year’s long campaign of Quest, but it is fun for a couple of evenings.

One last thing on this game because I think it’s a wonderful touch. The rulebook is one of the most charming reads I’ve ever had. I’m not entirely certain how they did it. Reading this book was a pleasant experience. The best way I can put it is this. One the last page of the book it thanks me for reading the rules. I’ve seen this before and since then. This is the only time I actually believed the book meant it.

Those are my thoughts on Quest, if you can give it a look it’s worth the time.

I’ll see you all tomorrow for substitute.

Until then. Stay safe and be well.

RPG a Day #20 Foundation

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

What is the foundation of a good game? I’ve read some of the other response to this prompt today. I’ve seen a lot of great answers. People have talked about rules, systems, culture, mechanics, and so many other things.

However, for me the foundation of a great game is the people at the table. I’ve talked about a lot of different things this month and it occurred to me I haven’t talked about my friends. I’m not going to get very specific because I haven’t talked to them to ask if it was okay; it’s something I like to do. I will talk in general terms though.

For me, setting up a game starts and stops with the folks at the table. I always try and pick who I think will have the most fun in a game when I invite people to play. There are some of my friends I won’t ask to a horror game because they don’t like that type of story. There are people who don’t like mysteries and I’ll not invite them to take part. Beyond those few things we all try and meet in the middle about pieces of the story we tell. We try and work together to figure out what characters will work best in the group.

There are specific stories about each one of them I’d love to tell. Maybe someday I will.

We do invite new folks to the table. I’ve met many good friends for the first time at an RPG night. My current DM was introduced to me in another friend’s game. That’s how it works.

Maybe for you it is a focus on the rules or the system. For me it’s always been about who will enjoy the game the most? Even with that I usually give my players a couple of choices for which setting and story we’d like to tell.

That’s my take on foundation. I’ll come back tomorrow to talk about simplicity.

Until then. Stay safe and be well.

RPG a Day #19 Theme

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

There’s a lot of ways to use theme when writing adventures. For myself I tend to weave theme into anything I run in two different ways. Either by the concepts I weave into the narrative or the recurring types of encounters. Though I suppose the second one could be more considered aesthetic.

For the first one, I like to focus on the ways in which my players interact with things and how the world around them reflects those ideas back at them. In a Through the Breach campaign I designed I had a focus on family in my game. The overall idea behind the campaign was built around them being assembled by a professor in Malifaux to work as an investigative team working out of his manor house. I wanted the campaign to focus on the mystery but I wanted family to be a big part of the story.

Part of bringing this idea across was to use their first case as a way of introducing the idea of family to the party. They were going to investigate a stolen painting. While doing so they’d discover that the thief was being forced to steal the art by a local crime faction. When the thief turns up dead so he couldn’t reveal who his employers were I was going to arrange for his widow and son to be brought into the house as NPC’s by the professor. This was going to be how I started to inform family as part of the story.

I wanted the game to have this background focus on how family effects the decisions we make and the things in our lives. Even the villain for that campaign was partially motivated by their relationship with their family.

The other way I use theme is by how I add motif to specific adventures. I’ll have something that pops up over and over as a way of foreshadowing things that are coming. One adventure I enjoy for doing this is from Tales from the Loop. Spoilers for the first adventure in the main rule book will be found in the next paragraph.

In that adventure there is a recurring bird motif; birds show up everywhere. They’re decorations in houses, books on tables, and they show up in the description of the various locals. As the group travels through the adventure they’ll eventually come across birds as part of the antagonists plan. Hostile birds start showing up in town. But by the time the first bird attack happens, the players will have already seen some reference to birds a couple of times.

Moments like those, that subtly suggest what’s coming without saying it, are some of my favorite. You can also find a great example of foreshadowing themes in a recent episode of the Dungeons and Daddies podcast. Though that one is by the players and not the DM.

I think these things are important in helping build a great narrative. Though even if your group doesn’t play for story and just enjoys a good dungeon crawl the use of theme can be a great addition to the flow of the dungeon. I think back to the old days of D&D where random monsters lived in complex cave systems with no real logic behind what was where or how it got there. You know the maze of 10 foot hall ways that lead to a single massive room with a giant living inside of it despite the fact that there’s no way for them to reach that room.

However, that’s a rant for another day. I’ll see you all tomorrow for foundation.

Until next time. Stay safe and be well.

RPG a Day #18 Write

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

Do I write my own adventures? Yep. I’ve talked about this from the other side earlier this month. I like to write my own adventures and supplement them with purchased content. It works best for me. For today though, I think I’ll cover how I start writing an adventure.

My first step is almost always determine the final boss. I want to know where the story is headed and it gives me a guide for what sort of things they’ll have to deal with. Knowing what the boss is lets me know what minions to use, locations to prepare, and types of underling encounters that will help set the stage. I want everything to be a gradual rise in tension to that final encounter.

 Also, the boss may not be the villain of the story. I’ve used the boss encounter as a stepping stone to future adventures or had it under the sway of a physically weaker character. This particular dungeon may only be a stepping stone in the overall villain’s network.

I also think it’s important to point out that the boss might not be a combat encounter. Sometimes the boss is a puzzle, a diplomatic encounter, or a series of emergencies crashing into one another like giant cosmic dominoes.

 A little while ago I wrote an adventure for Star Trek Adventures. The boss set the tone for the entire mission. For this mission I had decided that the “boss” would be a massive unstable wormhole in orbit around a mining colony on an asteroid.  The rift was destabilizing the asteroid and putting the lives of everyone in danger. It was going to be up to the team to evacuate survivors, stop the field generator that was causing the rift, rescue a Klingon scientist who was pinned by rubble, and get their own ship to a safe distance.

After I knew this was the boss encounter for the mission I was able to go in and seed the different things that led up to the final encounter. They were required to host a formal diplomatic dinner for a group of Klingons and Romulans to build rapport with both groups to improve the odds that they’d try and save him. I was going to have them examining an ancient control panel in a hidden section of tunnel that would eventually break down and cause the rift they needed to repair.

The entire adventure was either setting up the end problem, laying out future possible adventures hooks, and giving the group a chance to use their skill and look good doing it. This is why when I write adventures I start with the monster at the end of the book.

I’ll see you tomorrow when I talk about theme.

Until then, stay safe and be well.

RPG a Day #17 Trap

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

I like traps. Grimtooth and I go way back, and I realize that’s a reference some of you are too young to get. For thos of you who are, Gritmtooth’s Traps were a series of books that were filled with incredibly unfair traps that were almost guaranteed to kill entire parties. The books were written in a catalogue style and given a bit of humor by Grimtooth’s utter disregard for players. While I don’t recall ever using any of the absolute murder pits that were Grimtooth’s design, I did learn for the books.

One of the things that I picked up and still use is this; not all traps are mechanical or in nature. Sure, a good number of them have springs, counterweights, hidden levers, and so many other moving parts. However, some of them are something else entirely. One of my favorites was a little trap I designed to get play on my player’s reliance on dark vision.

The trap was simple enough. A blind samurai was positioned in a fifteen foot round room. There was there were two exits from the room. The samurai was kneeling in the center of the floor with a bandage wrapped around his head indicating that he couldn’t see.

The group approached the samurai and talked to him. He was a decent fellow who followed the local lord out of a sense of duty. He was sworn by family honor to obey the lord despite his terrible ways. He also told them if they tried to get past him he would defend the hallway and the castle.

The group liked the character, and figured that since he was blind and outnumbered they would have an easy win. That is until he drew his sword. It was a magic katana with a Permanent Darkness spell cast on it. This worked a treat since my players had all chosen races that had dark vision so they wouldn’t have to worry about torches. It also meant that none of them had taken blind fighting.

This was my trap. No moving pieces, no bits of machinery to disarm, and no way to detect it via spell. It was a simple trap with exactly one piece in play; a blind samurai with a magic sword.

I love doing things like this. These little traps that get people without them really understanding what’s about to happen. I think we forget that a trap can be much more than a pit full of spikes. Though the pit of spikes can be a ton of fun.

That’s traps, tomorrow I’ll look at Write.

Until next time. Stay safe and be well.

RPG a Day #16 Villain

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

RPG a Day finally beat me. I just could not come up with a way to talk about move. I’ve seen some interesting answers to the prompt floating around, but nothing jumped out as a way for me to cover it. Thus, I’m going with one of the other prompts; villain.

I thought about talking about some of my favorite villains that my players have dealt with over the years. There are quite a few that really stand out for me here. I even considered covering some of the ones I’ve encountered as a player. Harlequin from Shadowrun was a nice contender here. In the end, I decided to go with a non-typical villain.

One of my favorite games is X Crawl. The game is set in a modern world where magic exists and dungeon crawling is an extreme sport televised for the masses. Every dungeon is designed and run by a Dungeon Judge. Their job is to challenge the crawlers with physical and mental obstacles while putting on a ratings grabbing piece of entertainment. It would be easy to call every DJ the players have run against a villain but I don’t think it really applies here. You see, most of DJ’s are just people who do this for a living. DJ Cudgel Up sets her crawls to highlight the athletes and make them the starts. Sure, she’ll kill some of them but that doesn’t make them villains any more than the doctor who administers the lethal injection is one.

However, there are a couple of DJ’s that are absolutely villains. Some of them are from published crawls and I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll use one of my own. DJ Vine Child was the head of Napa Valley Crawl. She hosted her event as part of a large wine celebration in honor of Bacchus, god of wine and celebration. She was pleasant, funny, and to all appearances ran an extremely fair crawl.

Except she didn’t. She was an emotionless killing machine. How she hid this was to choose a type of person and target them on each team. Maybe she went after elves, healers, tanks, or blondes. Whatever it was she picked a type every year and set out to absolutely kill every one of them. She curated her teams so there would be exactly one of her target on each team. It didn’t matter to her if the rest of the team lived or died as long as she killed that one target.

The time I ran her, I randomly rolled a party member and made them her target. That year she was going after the teams healers. To do this she had to set it up in a way to escape suspicion. Sure the DJ can kill tons of Crawlers and no one would care. But those deaths had to be random; they had to be the will of the Fates. To specifically target someone was crossing a line.

This meant that she couldn’t order the intelligent monsters to focus her target she had to be creative. I did this by setting up some out of crawl events as part of the experience. First, she held a huge festival the night before opening of the crawl. The festival was filled with music, lots of drinking, and ran well into the night. She would then schedule one of the teams very early the next morning ensuring that at least one team would have a bit of a problem focusing.

Before the second level she set up a charity bachelor/bachelorette auction. She seeded the crowd with people who were specifically there to win the company of her targets. As part of the date each target was given a gift of cologne or perfume that was mixed with a specific scent that she dosed the food of her more vicious monsters. This made sure the creatures would focus her target.

For the final level she could put an emphasis on her one target since only one team went through the final level. If she’s only focusing one target its strategy not part of some nefarious plan. She also worked to alter their lives outside the crawl. She’d try and sneak a subsonic noise generator into their hotel room the night before the final level to mess with their sleep. If they were allergic to something she’d try and get it hidden amongst the refreshments offered in the green room.

And if any of them survived the crawl she’d congratulate the team and be outwardly happy for the crawlers. However, a few months later during the off season, accidents started happening. Maybe someone was caught in a hit and run, there might be a mugging, or possibly someone fell victim to an obsessed fan given just the right push.

Her goal was to murder that one person on each team. If she did it during the crawl it was her best victory. If not, she’d still find a way to secure her quarry. This to me as villain in X Crawl.

What are some out of the box villains that you’ve seen over the years?

Anyway, I’ll see you all tomorrow when I talk about Trap.

Until then, stay safe and be well.

RPG a Day #15 Supplement

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

As a writer for Meeplegamers.com I cover a lot of RPG products. One of the most frequent types of supplements I get are starter sets. I like starter sets and have developed some opinions on how starter sets should be put together.

A starter set should do a couple of things. It should give you an overview of the game and the rules, have a nice introductory adventure to set the tone for the system, let’s you figure out if it’s a game you’d enjoy, a selection of pre-generated characters, and do it for a pretty reasonable price point. Some things they might also include but don’t need are any type of special bits you need to run the game, a decent selection of tokens for use on battle maps, some cards the cover frequently used pieces of equipment or abilities, and some blank character sheets for future use.

I’ve hit a lot of different starter sets with a range of qualities. By far the best one is the Legend of the Five Rings Starter Set from Fantasy Flight Games. It was one of the first ones I reviewed and it set the tone for what I wanted out of a good starter set.

Rule Book

It has a rules reference book that is set out in a way to help you answer any questions you might have as you play. It’s designed to supplement the game play and how you’ll run your players through the rest of the included materials. The rules reference is meant to be the second book you read in this set and is used to fill in any holes that might come up as you play. It’s not a full rule book, you’ll need to purchase that separately but you won’t need it for use with the Starter Set.

Adventure Module

The adventure book included in this set is meant to be the first book you read. If you’re going to be running this for your friends you should only need to read this book. In fact, before running the game for my friends, this was the only book in the set I read. The adventure evolves as it moves forward adding a new rule or concept as you play through it. The first scene in the game is entirely role play based. You’re just talking to a peasant you meet on the road. It lets the player meet a local, learn about how the world works, get used to the idea of talking in character, and find out some information about what’s coming up.

The second scene introduces dice mechanics and how to perform a simple role to solve a problem. The second scene also has a strong role play component to build on the first. It moves the story and the game forward while adding to the rules and mechanics the players understand.

Future Enjoyment

The adventure and rules provided are an excellent selection of mechanics, theme, and story that lets players know if they’ll want to delve deeper into the game. By the end of the adventure provided in the game you’ll have seen everything this game has to offer. However, you’ll only have been given a hint of the depth to the game. You can expand you’re knowledge of the system and the rules if you want by going deeper in the game with further play but at this point you’ve seen social encounter, combat encounters, and been given a good example of how much of each you’ll be getting. You’ll also have a good representation of how difficult the different bits are.

Additionally, if you want to keep going and see what else you can get for these characters there’s a second adventure you can download from their site. This adventure continues the story for these characters, offers a couple more systems from the game, and gives the players more choices moving forward. Though it might be more helpful to have the full rules if you want to go this way I don’t think it will necessary.

Pre-generated Characters

The box comes with four well designed and diverse characters that players can use. Each character sheet is designed and annotated to show what your character can do and when things will be useful. It also has multiple pages that are used during the session. Midway through the adventure the characters level up. To work through this process you turn to the second page where the sheet walks players through the changes that occur when leveling and gives them a couple of points to spend to alter the character.

They even have three additional character online that you can download and play if you so desire. The three downloadable characters are more advanced than the ones included in the base game adding different themes, ideas, and styles of play to the game. For example one of the downloadable characters has a horse, one of them is less concerned with their outward appearance, and another has a dark secret. (If you’re a fan of L5R you can probably guess which clan each of them is from.) This also gives you a character from each of the seven great clans of Rokugan to choose from.

The only drawback to this is that they only give you one copy of each sheet and don’t have a place online where I can download copies. This is slightly surprising considering the three downloadable characters.

Price

The basic box is $40 and I get that it’s a bit high. However, in this instance I think it’s worth it. In addition to what I’ve already laid out it comes with most of the extra bits I like. A full set of the custom dice you need to play, a large collection of the cardboard tokens for the character bits, and a map of Rokugan and the town the adventure takes place in. I would have loved some equipment cards and such, but overall I think it’s worth the money and something I’ve used multiple times for different groups.

I could go the other direction with this review and talk about the starter sets that didn’t work for me or fell down in some way. One in particular I still haven’t gotten to the table because the game requires custom dice that I’ll need to buy in order to run the game comes leaping to mind.

However, I think RPG a Day is more about putting out positive vibes for the hobby and I’d rather sing the praises of one game than spew venom at another.

I would love to hear from you folks. I really like starter sets and am forming quite a collection of them What are some good sets out there I can look for to include in my collection? I’m always looking for more.

I’ll see you tomorrow when I talk about Move.

Until then, stay safe and be well.