#RPGaDAY2021 Day 12 Triumph

This one was much harder than it should have been.

Day 12 Triumph

What would I consider my greatest RPG-based triumph?

I have had some great opportunities in the RPG world.  I have had some great gaming groups over the decades, met some fantastic people and I have worked on some great projects.

But I have to admit that Ghosts of Albion is one of my greatest triumphs.

Back when Eden Studios was working on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG I was part of the team.  But I was also, for various reasons, growing dissatisfied with Buffy and the license.  In the process, I got the chance to meet and talk with Christopher Golden.  He had done some original fiction for the game and was interested in the process.  He was at the time also working with Amber Benson on a new property with the BBC.  It was about two siblings who discover they have a legacy of magic to live up to and a country to fight for in early Victorian England.  The new animation, written by Golden and Benson and directed by Benson, was Ghosts of Albion.

From the very start, we wanted it to be compatible with Buffy and Angel. It had more magic and more powerful creatures.  While Buffy had vampires and Angel had demons, Ghosts would vampires, demons, as well as fae creatures and of course ghosts. And all of these could be player characters. 

It is one of the highest-rated and best-selling titles I have ever worked on.  People still tell me how much they love the magic system, the content, and the rules.  I have to admit that sometimes I read over it and think to myself "wow, I wrote that!"

I love the Victorian era, I love writing about magic and honestly, I loved working with Chris and Amber.

I have worked on many licensed products before and this one was by far the best experience I have ever had on a game.  

Here's to hoping I can do more with NIGHT SHIFT to capture the same sort of feeling. 

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 11 Wilderness

The name of the game was Dungeons & Dragons.  So there was a certain expectation on, well, dungeons.  But that is not all of what we got.  Sometimes we went outside.

Day 11 Wilderness

Live-Action Role-Playing was not really something we knew a lot about back in the early to mid-80s.  Yes even in my little town we had heard about SCA but that was something that happened far away in places that sounded exotic to us.

We did know about live D&D. 

Of course, we had heard stories of people getting trapped in their make-believe world. I mean we had seen Mazes & Monsters right.  But still in the time after discovering D&D and before discovering easy access to alcohol there was a time when my D&D group would run around the woods wearing all black to play "live D&D."  Sometimes this was near the train tracks near the Hospital north of town but most often it was at the local Boy Scout camping area out way west of town.  Known as Ebaugh County Park, we always called it Ebaugh Corner since it was on this corner of old Route 36.

It felt a lot bigger than what is on that map I can assure you.

We didn't get out there often.  Our town was hit with Satanic Panic back in the mid-80s and we worried the cops would come out and harass us. 

Not a lot of D&D was played here really.  Frankly, my eyesight was getting bad then (and it never got better!) so running around in the dark was not something I could well.  I was actually pretty pathetic really!  I remember my last time there too.  June 1987 right before college.  

I never really did try live-action D&D again. Was never really my thing.

This has come up again recently as I am getting ready for a trip to the Renaissance Faire in Bristol, WI.  My son and his friends are all dressing up in Assassin's Creed gear. I have been there in the past in Steampunk gear.  Though I must admit I want to go in period clothing and keep a Star Trek badge hidden, just in case.

Hope to head there this weekend.  It might not be the actual wilderness, but for a city kid like me, it is close enough.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 10 Advantage

Going for another alt-word today. Plus it gives me the chance to talk about one of my favorite topics.

Day 10 Advantage

One of my favorite new mechanics with D&D 5e is the Advantage / Disadvantage ruling.  It is pretty simple really. A situation is in your favor, roll with Advantage, that is roll two d20s and keep the highest.  If a situation is against you then roll with Disadvantage; roll two d20s and take the lowest.   

It's not really revolutionary, but it is a nice quick way to adjudicate rulings and many rules use it.

Simply if you have advantage due to one condition and advantage on another one you still have only two d20s.  If you have advantage and disadvantage they cancel each other out. 

The thing that I like about it the most is the nice probability curves they generate. 

You might recall that prior to selling my soul to the dot com world I was a Statistics professor at the University of Illinois colleges of Education, then Medicine. I taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels for years.  I LOVE statistics.    

I knocked together some simple frequency graphs of rolling a d20 normally, with disadvantage, advantage, and with a simple +3.   These are chances of rolling the number (1 to 20) or higher on a d20.

The Data

The Graphs

Rolls are on the X-Axis (1 - 20) and the Probability on the Y-Axis (0.0 - 1.0).  

The red line is our normal d20 roll. Blue is disadvantage (2d20, take lowest), yellow is Advantage (2d20, take highest), finally, the green is normal +3. 

Is it much?  Not really in the short term, but over 1000s of rolls over the last 7 years the effect has added up.   And it is always a lot of fun.  Especially when you are rolling and get two 20 (a 1 in 400 chance). Fun when you are rolling with advantage, but fantastic when you are rolling with disadvantage.

I have adapted it for use in my OSR games and it works great.  

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 9 Medium

It's a Monstrous Monday and it is also Medium day for the #RPGaDAY. 

Day 9 Medium

Most of my monsters in the various Basic Bestiary are Medium-sized.  This works out well for a number of reasons, but mostly it is a boon for something I had been wanting to do for a while.

In D&D 5 monsters have different HD die types depending on their size.  It works out like this.

Table: Size Categories

Size	Space	Hit Die
Tiny	2½ by 2½ ft.	d4
Small	5 by 5 ft.	d6
Medium	5 by 5 ft.	d8
Large	10 by 10 ft.	d10
Huge	15 by 15 ft.	d12
Gargantuan	20 by 20 ft. or larger	d20

So Medium monsters use the common d8 for hit dice and the truly monstrous Gargantuan creature gets a d20.  While AD&D and Basic D&D went more for larger creatures having more HD this works for what I call the giant baby problem.  A gigantic creature can have a lot of hit points, but no combat ability, two things that HD covers. 

I also like this idea for personal reasons.  When I moved from Basic D&D to Advanced D&D I often used a d10 for monster hit points and not the RAW d8.  I figured the monsters had to be more "advanced" so they got more hp.  I also rationalized this with the fact that Basic fighters use d8 for hp, and Advanced fighters used d10.  Of course on average, this is only 1 extra point per HD, but I liked it all the same.

3e and 4e also used different die types for hit dice, but these were different for different types of monsters.  I like the 5e way of using these for size. 

You might have seen these in some of my write-ups.  The Mad Hatter Goblin is a small creature. I list it's standard HD is 2 and it's average hp from a d8 and it's Con mod is 9 +2 or 11.  As a small creature, the same 2 HD and +2 con mod gives the creature an average hp of 7 +2 or 9.   Sure not a lot of difference, but enough over the long run. 

I am presenting both sets for people that want to use my "Advanced" set of size-based hp calculations or the standard RAW ones.   I have been using this for a while now and while there might not be a significant difference in the play of the vast majority of monsters, the ones it does affect really affects them.

I hope people, especially in the OSR crowds, take to the change.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 8 Stream

We are back around to Sunday and that means we are all on the same word.

Day 8 Stream

I think it is no great assumption to say the advent of streamed games online has changed how the public sees RPGs in general and D&D in particular.

Making the claim that shows like Critical Role have increased the number of people interested in RPGs is not really disputed regardless what one's opinion of them is.

Personally, I am not a fan of watching or listening to others play D&D.  I have nothing against them, and I think many of them are quite nice and I am thrilled for their successes and for what it means for the game as a whole.   I just get bored with them.

Right now my favorite streaming pass time is The Great Courses.  Thanks to this I have listened to/watched the history of the world in various courses from early pre-history to the Victorians. I have listened to a number of courses on religion, detailed history on England, and more about the Vikings than I care to admit.  Currently, I am listening to How We Learn by Monisha Pasupathi, Ph.D. It is really great even though much of it is a repeat of my Undergrad days. Though I am chaffing under dismissal of treasured theories that have since fallen out of favor. ;)
Most of these Great Courses feel like undergrad courses, but I have really been enjoying them. 

So far I have gone through about 33 of these, about 75% of another Undergraduate degree. Though this degree would most likely be in history. Sadly there is no homework, no assignments, and no exams, so there is no opportunity to show I have been anything more than a passive learner.

Mind you in my choices here of one stream vs. another (say Critical Role vs. the Great Courses) is not a value judgment in any way other than how I choose to spend my own time.  I also listen to a lot of highly questionable music while at work.  

I think for my next stream I could work on shoring up my German. A language I learned in High School and for a couple years in college that I have not used in nearly 30 years. 

Sword & Sorcery & Cinema: Sorceress (1982)

Getting back to this last week I was at my parents' and the week before I was celebrating my wedding anniversary.  So let's jump in feet first with another cheesy 80 Sword & Sorcery flick. This time I am watching 1982's Sorceress.

I was pretty sure I had never seen this one before and I was right.  I would have remembered something so dreadful.  Bad acting? Check. Weird mutant creatures? Yup, check. Gratuitous nudity? Oh yeah. Lots of violence against women? Well, yeah it was the 80s.

Let's be 100% honest here, this movie was made for one reason, to show off the nubile assets of Leigh and Lynette Harris, and I am not talking about their fighting ability. Or acting ability. 

Besides being known for being Playboy playmates in 1981. Lynette also went to prison for 5 months in 1990 for tax reasons. She and her twin were both mistresses of businessman David Kritzik.  He was paying them to have sex with him and the IRS doesn't like it when they don't get their cut.  They both would later be exonerated in 92.  Not to be outdone Leigh would later expose herself to some minors.  Their real-life stories sound more interesting than this movie.  Though they seem to have fallen into a bit of obscurity.  Likely that is what they do prefer. 

Hmm...maybe I should return my attention to the movie.

Not to dump on this movie too much.  We do have a cool wizard who gives the twins their fighting powers. A creepy satyr. A generic Viking-like warrior.  An evil sorcerer who is also the twins' father. An evil priestess. Zombies attacking. And a battle of the gods.  So I mean all the right elements are here.

It does have Corman's fingerprints all over it.

They have the same abilities as the Corsican Brothers; they can feel what the other is feeling.  With the brothers that was typically pain, these two...well it's a bit different.  The idea though is not a bad one, I used a similar idea with the Anamchara.  Well, the sensing the others feelings part anyway.  

Roberto Ballesteros, the evil sorcerer Traigon, is really the only one here that has any sort of resume here.  I hope the poor acting here is really due more to bad dubbing.

I will give the director credit on one thing.  While the twins are constantly in trouble they never once appear weak or scared about their situation.  When given the chance they pick up weapons and fight.  Sure they act naive at times, but they were sheltered their whole lives so that is expected. 

In the end rather laughable, but the zombie battle is fun.  The gods battling in the skies is weird, but I will admit I got a solid Deities and Demigods vibe from it.  Ok the D&DG if it were made by Roger Corman

Yeah. Not great.

Gaming Content

The movie is very generic 80s fantasy; derivative to be honest.  It's not so much what you can get out of this for your game since likely your game has already done everything in this movie. 

--

Tim Knight of Hero Press and Pun Isaac of Halls of the Nephilim along with myself are getting together at the Facebook Group I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters to discuss these movies.  Follow along with the hashtag #IdRatherBeWatchingMonsters.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 7 Inspiration

Going with another alternate word today.

Day 7 Inspiration

Every so often I get asked what sort of things inspire me.  I usually half-jokingly say 70s metal, cheesy horror movies, and comics.

Only half-jokingly because there is a not-so-small amount of material in my bibliography of published material and blog posts that are exactly all of that.

Presently I am re-watching Star Trek Enterprise with my wife. We only saw bits and pieces of it when it was new, our kids were babies then, and keeping up on TV was not our main priority. 

So Enterprise takes place before The Original Series, thus the ship feels a little "low tech" and everything has a frontier feel to it.  While I am enjoying it for its own merits I am getting a ton of ideas for my two Star Trek campaigns; BlackStar and Mercy.  Season 1 deals with the Temporal Cold War and the Temporal Accords, which comes up later in Star Trek Discovery.  This is also putting back into the mood for a combined Star Trek/Doctor Who game which means FASA rules.  BUT inspiration aside I don't want to start YET another Trek game. I haven't even gotten the ones I am planning off the ground.

SO...maybe I can add some of these ideas to Mercy, BlackStar is a bit full as is.  Maybe I can add a character from the 31st century on my medical starship.  But why is he/she there?   Maybe I'll leave that to the player.  

Getting back to music for a bit, there is a song that has some solid Trek connotations to it.

One of my all-time favorite songs by the band Queen is '39.  Written by the guitarist, and Ph.D. in Astrophysics, Brian May.   The song deals with 20 astronauts that leave Earth on a one-year-long mission. One of the astronauts says goodbye to his wife and daughter, but due to the time dilation effects of moving near the speed of light, it is many, many years later when they return.  While he is "older but a year" his daughter is a grandmother now.   In the song, they had discovered a new world.

I have often thought it would be possible that later warp drive ships would run into older, slower relativistic ships with a crew that had left Earth decades if not a century before.  You see this played out really well in Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth.   It was one of my favorite books of his and I loved the idea of "gritty" space travel and one very removed from the notion of warp drives.

Now we have seen visitors from the past in Trek before, TNG's first season episode "The Neutral Zone" has frozen humans from the late 20th century, the second season "The Emissary" with frozen Klingons, and the awkwardly named "The 37's" from Star Trek Voyager's second season with humans from 1937 found on a planet in the Delta Quadrant some 70k light-years from Earth. 

This would be an adventure for Mercy.  The starship Mercy gets a distress beacon from a ship that left Earth in 2139, just prior to the wide adoption of warp drive. Yeah, there are cargo ships that can go warp 1.8 or so, but most ships are going to be sleeper ships. Mercy, being Mercy, goes in to investigate and discovers a crew from 156 years ago.  Likely the ship, I might call the Arthur C. Clark, was headed to a planet that is now claimed by the Klingons, or Romulans, or some other species.  

I'll need to ponder this one a little more. In any case, I guess I'll keep looking for inspiration.