Penned by the Captain's Quill

No time for clever introductions today. I am far, far too hype for that. Because there's something far more awesome than whatever awesome thing I might be saying here. And that's what I might be saying here:

Aw yis.

Thanks to the very talented people at Fat Goblin Games, I had the opportunity to write a book with my name on the cover. Among other freelancers this probably isn't a big deal. "Sure," they might say, "I wrote that book and like twelve others."

I do not have twelve others. This is my first. Which makes it particularly special. 

As you might have guessed, it involves pointy sticks that you can throw at people. Pointy sticks which are totally underwhelming under Pathfinder's rules. Fortunately for others like myself, I have set out to rectify this problem.

Inside you'll find all sorts of neat new pointy things to throw at people. Pointy things that explode with magic! Pointy things that aren't actually very pointy at all! Pointy things that are really, really heavy! Pointy things that bounce from one dude to another and impale everyone in a 30 foot radius! And more, probably!

Plus, I've got a bunch of other stuff you'll probably think is cool. At the very least, I think they're cool. Feats, class archetypes, cool new rules for javelins, and even mass combat rules for javelins! It has cool art by Rick Hershey and no short helping of love from my primary editor, Luke Palosaari. (Seriously guys, thanks!)

Not convinced yet? Perhaps I can play upon your sympathy and ask you super nicely to support a budding young designer author guy. What a clever fellow! And my god, he's so handsome? All of this, for such a bargain? Wow! 

Not working? I didn't think so either.

So what are [the rest of] you waiting for? Buy the book! Think of as buying me a coffee. We can sit down and talk about nothing Seinfeld style while I sip away your hard earned money with my hard earned money. It will be glorious.

The Edition War-icane

Another late post. With any luck, this won't become a habit.

I blame D&D night. And Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Two very time consuming affairs, but for very different reasons.

Now's probably a good time to get all my complaining about 5th edition out of the way. I've got my grumpy-old-curmudgeon hat on. And it's not that it's a bad system, it's that I just don't like it. I'm also notoriously hard to convince of anything. I may be the worst person to argue with ever because I'll just eventually devolve into name-calling and consider that a victory.

I am not a sensible man.

Seriously, though, I think my biggest problem with 5th is the complete dearth of class features and customization. It all seems very samey--though I'll admit that might be a problem with the table i've played at. Maybe it's the removal of massive piles of feats, or maybe its the condensation of power into much smaller modifiers overall.

The biggest offender in my book is the bard's inspiration. Instead of applying +1 (or more!) to pretty much everyone on nearly everything for practically forever, you give a single +1dX to a single person for a single roll per use. And you don't get all that many uses. Sure, they come back faster once you reach a certain level. You still have a really pitiful amount of 'inspiration' to share with the group.

Also, why are bards 9th level casters? Since when should a bard be roughly equivalent to a wizard in terms of magical oomph?

Who seriously looked at D&D and thought, "Hmm. We need more 9th level casters. Magic is too weak!" Meanwhile, my beloved ranger is gutted and miserable. Martials get the shaft, as they always do.

Goddamn.

Forget it. I could rant and rave forever, but I'd rather let the edition war-icane die down. Let me just briefly mention what it does right it does really right. I love the overall simplification... to a point. Accessibility is one thing, dumbing them down is another. I think 5th has hit a pretty happy medium on that.

Advantage and disadvantage is really a brilliant little mechanic to that end. Why bother with all the situational modifiers adding and subtracting and percent-ifying your attacks, when you can just roll twice and take the better/worse?

Removing saves is the same deal. It takes out an unnecessary complication and makes saving against some X spell or Y effect what it logically should be. Allowing any stat to be a target makes playing minmaximus the mighty less appealing. After all, your charisma dumps are actually punished when you have to resist a charisma-based charm. No longer will every barbarian ever have 7 Cha.

Besides, real barbs dump Cha to 5. Charisma's for babies.

(Also, hopefully, I'll have some awesome news to share later this week. Woo.)

The Man of Many Hats

Today's post is late because I was off doing what I do best.

Wearing silly hats.

Seriously, though, I love silly hats.

I've done a bit of shopping around in tabletop games, and I usually fall back on my two tried-and-true favorites. Pathfinder, which is the logical evolution of the system I learned to play on. And Shadowrun, where troll terminators jump out of windows with a pair of uzis to avoid a rampaging fire spirit that just wants to tell him how upset he is that he'd give up his humanity for a secondary bionic heart. They both have their merits.

But I am not opposed to branching out. Especially not when it means I can hang up my GM cap and exchange it for a silly feathery and totally-bardic hat. I've played a few games in D&D 5th edition, and thought it was alright. Nothing to write home about, but that's a whole different hat for an entirely different day. No, this particular hat is all about how awesome bards are.

 

And silly hats, which are never limited to bards. Every character concept is made approximately 72% more awesome with the addition of a silly hat. Yes, even that one, smartass.

This bard, though, had her work cut out for her. Because this adventure wasn't just taking place in any random fantasy location. It was happening in Innistrad. For the uninformed, it's a plane in Magic: The Gathering with a heavy dose of gothic horror and plenty of good versus evil shenanigans. A place where happiness goes to die. Fortunately, I wasn't having any of that.

See, I don't mind a bit of grimdark. I enjoyed Dark Souls. I even bought a PS4 in part because Bloodborne was on it and it seemed neat. But when I get right down to it, my Shadowrun games are full Pink Mohawk with maybe a smidgen of Black Trenchcoat. Having the player characters turn life up to 11 is part of the fun. And that was exactly what I was planning to do.

I started the session as any true bard would. I showed up late.

 

The first encounter I'm there for begins. There's a devil riding a hellhound. There's only one thing to do. I attempt to feed the hellhound a pile of jerky from my pack. All dogs love jerky. It devours the meat, and then turns on the devil that the other PCs murdered while I was feeding the dog. As it devours its former master, the group collectively facepalms.

 

In a single moment, I had become that guy. In a setting with clearly established lines of good and evil, where demons ruin everything and terrorize the normal folk, I ignored all of it. And it was glorious.

(It turns out they tried to put Toof down when I ran to the bathroom, but he was smart enough to get away. Good boy.)

The adventure proceeds, and things continue in a similar vein. Horrible monsters come out of the woodwork to devour us, and the bard not only manages to see the good in every situation and put that obnoxiously high Cha score to use, but enjoy life on the brink of death because it'll make for a great story later.

And really, isn't that what really matters--game or otherwise?

 

That's half the reason I love silly hats. They make for great stories. The other half, of course, is because they're frickin' awesome.

Another Port of Call

Maybe it's because I'm a strong proponent of the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle or maybe it's because I grew up on trips down to the Jersey shore (not that Jersey shore), but I've always found the best way to deal with stress or whatever is to hit the beach. So when RPGSSS9 hits too early for inspiration to slap you in the face, a man's got to do something!

Granted, this particular trip had been planned well in advance of the announcement and I was totally going to go anyway, but it's always nice to have a good excuse for slacking off.

This trip, though, wasn't just to the land of popped collars, fake tans, and gallons of hair gel. This trip was to Ocean City, Maryland. A place I've been once, nearly two decades ago, and have absolutely no recollection of. Pfft, I said to myself, how could it ever beat out Jersey's boardwalks and beaches--even with the annoying idiots who give them a bad name?

We arrived late and figured we were screwed. Except that a ton of places were still open, including an awesome pizza place open until 4(!) with pizza not only acceptable by NJ standards, but excelling. The boardwalk was a few blocks from where we were staying, and even at 2 in the morning people were still pleasantly walking and enjoying the sights and smells of the ocean. 

 

Needless to say, it was even better in the daylight. Beaches with tons of activity and none (okay, maybe just less) of the annoying Jersey-shore type. Oceanfront soccer games. Young women of unknowable age playing in a beach volleyball tournament. A kite shop with some of the most bitchin' kites I've seen in a long time flying on display. Arcades with games that worked. Every Time Crisis ever, Ghost Squad, House of the Dead, sucker cranes that pick things up!

 

And Dance Dance Revolution.

Do you know how hard it is to find a working DDR machine at the Jersey shore? Hint: I went up and down the shore this year in search of one. I found one. A Frankenstein abomination cobbled together from a DDR pad and an In the Groove cabinet with several wires that were certainly not an original element of either game. I found three in Ocean City, none of which had been chopped to pieces.

Then add in go-karts and mini-golf and sushi buffets and old knickknacky stores that aren't just full of tchotchke garbage...

All in all, a pretty awesome adventure. Message received, Ocean City. The Jersey shore might be able to call a mulligan over that hurricane a few years ago, but it's time to step our game up.

In fact, the only problem with the trip was that I didn't actually get a chance to mull over design ideas. And the deadline looms...

Must be time for the beach.

How (Not) to be an RPG Superstar (Part 3)

As Gencon comes to a close, so too does my story:

Unsurprisingly, my map did not go over well. I'll save myself the embarrassment of linking the map here. Besides, I'm doing all the writing. You should at least have to put in a little work as a reader.

It was a flop for a number of reasons, but the primary problems were pretty much what I'd expected: it didn't really stand on its own, and it wasn't really good from the how-to-cartograph-stuff perspective. The former was a problem with how I envisioned the challenge, really. The map made a ton of sense with the story I had in my head (I swear!), but none of that story was really visible from the map. It was just a bunch of disjointed pieces all thrown into one poorly-drawn 8.5x11 grid.

The latter, of course, was a matter of practice. My map making skills were terrible because my map making skills are terrible.

Circular logic? Perhaps, but also true. I've gone well and above the call of duty deliberately avoiding maps in my games because they always come out terrible. I keep the games as cinematic and loose as possible because the second I start drawing squiggly lines on the wet erase board, all suspension of disbelief disintegrates. Suddenly everyone is all too aware of being grown adults sitting around playing with tiny little robed metrosexual elven wizards and mostly naked herculean barbarians. It gets a bit awkward.

But that's really besides the point. I think.

So I left RPG Superstar 2015 almost as soon as I'd made it in. Despite knowing I'd have never succeeded, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed. I should have--could have?--done better. I just wasn't exactly sure how. I was woefully unprepared. My initial assessment of being among peers of far greater skill and experience was correct.

The point here is that the only way to get better at these things is to throw yourself at them like an idiot until something works. If I really wanted to get anywhere in the industry (I still do, fyi), I had to suck it up and suck it up. So my maps were going to be terrible for a while? Probably better for my terrible maps to be thrown onto a shelf and collect dust than shared on the internet! I started screwing around and drawing maps. Not even for any particular adventure or anything, but just doodling about and seeing what worked. Doing weekly random prompts my friends threw at me to try out different locations and styles and methods and whatever else.

The end result? My maps are still shit, but less so. I'm never going to grow artistic skill or a true cartographer's hand, but maybe with a bit of practice I can just fake it. They're never going to be the amazing works of art that other people produce, but maybe they can serve as passable.

So if there's a lesson to be learned in all of this, it's a simple one. If you want to be an RPG Superstar, don't just ignore your weaknesses. There's a lot of different elements to the hobby. Fluffing the fluff and crunching the crunch and mapping the maps are only the tip of the iceberg. It's as important to be versed in the stuff you suck at as it is to excel with the bits you love.

I'm no RPG Superstar and I certainly don't claim to be. But I do have a little title next to my Paizo account name that serves as a constant reminder that maybe, one day, I could stand up there with the big boys.

And play with tiny, ambiguously gendered wizards.