Apathy Blogs

I have always felt you learn a lot about a system through character creation. So when I received a complementary PDF of Shadow, Sword, and Spell I figured the best way to check it out is to make a character. SS&S is a rules light RPG intended for a pulp fantasy style game.

First step is choosing abilities. I notice that the character doesn’t have a name yet. I assume we will get to that. Abilities range from 1 to 12 with 7 being average. It looks like you get 35 points to spread around five abilities, which means characters aren’t above average. If you want to be really good at something, you need to be bad at other things. Here’s where I decided to allocate my points:

• Brawn: 6
• Quickness: 9
• Toughness: 7
• Wits: 8
• Will: 5

I decided my character should be quick with his hands and his wits, if a little low on self control. This character is going to be based on my original Deinol character, who was a traveling gambler. There are three more abilities that are derived from the above stats. Vitality comes from a combination of brawn and toughness, Resolve is from wits and will, and Sanity is from will. It looks like my character is going to be weak against madness.

• Vitality: 30
• Resolve: 30
• Sanity: 25

According to the 5 steps at the beginning of the character creation chapter backgrounds is next. However, the book stops and talks about hooks (which is step 4) between abilities and backgrounds. I’m following the steps so I’ll skip to backgrounds for now. These are packages that adjust your character to fit a theme. Backgrounds come in two parts. The first is your culture: primitive, barbarian, civilized, and advanced. I’m going to go with civilized. This gives me some starting skills: Bureaucracy, Diplomacy, and Native Language. Then you add another modifier to that which gives some skill bonuses. I choose Mercantile and get a +1 Bargain, and +1 Diplomacy.

Edit: After reading D20 Source’s article which pointed out errata (Clarity on Skills linked from here) I realize that the following is all incorrect.

The next step is choosing skills. The math for buying skill ranks is a little strange, as it is based on your original ability score. I would have probably preferred a more unified math formula, as this one feels a little awkward. There are odd point breaks in the system. Past the first rank in a skill, it is better to have a 4 in the base ability than a 5. 8 seems preferable to 9 if you plan to put a skill above 10. It also looks like starting points are spent differently than experience points. There also seems to be a bit of confusion about what a base rank looks like. If I buy the base rank of Melee (a brawn skill), will it start at Rank 6 (my brawn score), Rank 0 (so it plus brawn = 6) or Rank 1 (so it plus brawn = 7). I’m going to run with base Rank = 0 and go from there. Let’s see what I end up with.

• Bargain (Fast Talk) 2/4 (cost 7 points)
• Brawl 0 (cost 3 points)
• Bureaucracy 1 (cost 0 points)
• Defend 0 (cost 5 points)
• Diplomacy (Persuasion) 2/4 (cost 4 points)
• Divination 2 (cost 8 points)
• Dodge 0 (cost 5 points)
• Gaming 3 (cost 10 points)
• Melee 0 (cost 3 points)
• Native Language 0 (cost 0 points)

I was tempted to have a bit of magic just to try out that system, but settled on Divination instead. I think I did a decent job making a fast talking card shark who relies on his natural quickness to survive in a bar fight. I still think the point buy system is a tad bit awkward, having to look up the exact point values each time I bought a skill. Being a computer guy, I actually built a spreadsheet. Something simple like 4 points for initial rank and 2 points per rank after would have made more or less the same character without being quite as fiddly. Edit: It looks like the “Expert” book will have an option to simplify it to 6 points for base skill rank and 3 points per rank after that. I’m also not certain specialization is worth it in the long run, as you have to buy them up separately after that. If I am wrong about the base rank then all my ranks above should be one higher. Actually resolving skills looks pretty easy (roll under Rank + Ability on 2d12). I do like that fighting, magic, and other skills all use the same core skill mechanic.

Update: I felt I shouldn’t leave this article with incorrect stats, so after learning from my above mistakes, I came back and updated my skills. SS&S is setup so that abilities imply competency in a lot of skills. For example, I can do Investigation (Wits) untrained at 8 (ability) + 8 (base rank) – 4 (untrained penalty) = 12, which is still almost 50% for a routine task. Since that is the case, I bought all of the skills (using 45 points) at base rank so Deinol is decent with a knife, and good at dodging, gaming, and card-reading.

• Bargain (Will) 5 {cost 5} TN = 5 (ability) +5 (skill) +1 (bonus) = 11
• Bureaucracy (Wits) 8 {cost 0} TN = 8 + 8 = 16
• Defend (Quick) 9 {cost 9} TN = 9 + 9 = 18
• Diplomacy (Will) 5 {cost 0} TN = 5 + 5 + 1 (bonus) = 11
• Divination (Wits) [Card-Reading] 8 {cost 8} TN = 8 + 8 = 16
• Dodge (Quick) 9 {cost 9} TN = 9 + 9 = 18
• Gaming (Wits) 8 {cost 8} TN = 8 + 8 = 16
• Melee (Melee) 6 {cost 6} TN = 6 + 6 = 12
• Native Language (Wits) 8 {cost 0} TN = 8 + 8 = 16

Hooks remind me a lot of aspects from the FATE system (Spirit of the Century, Houses of the Blooded, and Dresden Files RPG). They are descriptive things about your character that you can activate using an action point to get a +2 bonus or a re-roll. Every character begins with five hooks. For Deinol, I came up with the following:

• A well traveled man with a friendly smile, he is easily liked.
• Likes to gamble, lives on the edge.
• Quck to anger, quicker to forgive.
• A tad bit lazy, never passes up an opportunity for easy money.
• Always keeps his word, when you can get him to give it.

Since I’m my own gamemaster in this exercise, I’ll have to approve those hooks. I certainly think it gives him enough quirks. As for finishing touches, the only required details are name, age, and gender. Deinol is a 24 year old male. For equipment I’d get him a deck of cards, a deck of marked cards, some dice, a dagger, clothes and a cloak with many pockets, and a deck of divination cards.

So that’s it for making a Shadow, Sword and Spell character. The book is everything you need to play and comes with a variety of premade foes and monsters. Since stat blocks are fairly short with a few skills there are 2-3 per page. That means there are 40-50 in the book and it would be easy to add more. The default setting includes a cult of Azathoth, which made me smile. I probably wouldn’t run the game as a long campaign, but I would definitely run a one-shot here or there. If you are looking for a light game in one book, this one is well worth checking out.

Want to learn more about Shadow, Sword, & Spell? Read on…

• Atomic Array: Episode 045: Shadow, Sword & Spell
• Apathy Blogs: Shadow, Sword, & Spell Character Creation
• D20 Source: En Garde! Shadow, Sword, & Spell

White Wolf used to be a powerhouse in the RPG industry. They first released Vampire: The Masquerade in 1991 and by the mid-90s became one of the best known RPGs next to Dungeons and Dragons. Partly it was because the rules encouraged a different style of role-playing. It also had a unique world vision of supernatural beings hiding in the corners of the modern world. Inspired by such works as Anne Rice, I think White Wolf managed to bring a new set of role-players to the hobby. I believe that White Wolf contributed a lot to the growing popularity of modern Vampire movies and stories as seen in Twilight, True Blood, and Underworld.

So where are they now? Barely alive and on life-support, as far as I can tell. In 2004 they brought an end to their existing world, which at this point had grown to encompass Vampires, Werewolves, Mages, Wraiths, Changelings, and many more creatures of myth. Unlike GURPS, they released a new edition with a new world that was similar to the old one, but somehow not the same in many ways. So while the rules were a unified and reformed system that many players applauded, the world was no longer the same.

I can only really give a good comparison of the Changeling line. While I have played in most of the older systems, Changeling: the Lost is the only new system I’m greatly familiar with. From what I hear though, others experiences are similar across the board. The old Changeling: The Dreaming game is about playing a faerie. Every once in a while a human is born with the soul of a fae inside them. As they grow up they realize that they aren’t quite like other children. Their imaginings become real. So if you really believe there is a monster under the bed, it is there. Mortals can’t see them, but other Changelings can. The game is about keeping your child-like innocence in a cruel and uncaring world. Most of the games I played in where light-hearted and fun, filled with whimsy and amusement.

Changeling: The Lost is a completely different animal. You are mortals who are kidnapped by faeries and taken to an unreal world. You are forced to entertain the true fae in torturous ways. You finally escape your abusers and return to the real world to find that you have been replaced by a soulless caricature of yourself. The game is about recovering from traumatic abuse at the hands of fae and hiding from those sent to bring you back to their cruel embrace. It feels like a support group for abused children. It is horrific and depressing.

I can say that both of them are good games that explore interesting ideas. The problem is, the new “Changeling” is designed to almost purposely alienate the existing fans. It tries to draw in new players, so it seems like the people who really like it are those that didn’t like the original. For every person I’ve heard that likes the new version, there are at least two who were fans of the original that have been lost. That’s not a way to grow your fan-base. There are few people I know that like both. They threw out everything that their existing fans had grown to love and seemed to spit on it with distaste. The best analogy I can come up with is if Wizards of the Coast had released a new Forgotten Realms setting called “Forgotten Realms: The Deserting” which contained the Dark Sun campaign setting. Sure, it has familiar things such as elves and halflings, but all of the assumptions are different. If they wanted to start doing something completely different they should have given it a fresh new name. Exalted and Scion may or may not be to your liking, but at least people didn’t have false expectations over what to expect inside them.

So two years after the launch of the new World of Darkness line, White Wolf announced a merger with CCP, the company that makes Eve Online. As far as I can tell, this has slowed the release of books over the last few years and changed White Wolf into a more PDF oriented company. Most fans that I know are happily playing in the older world and waiting for White Wolf to return to them. In theory there will be a World of Darkness Online game, but there are few details about it. Will they try to push their new setting on people? Or have they learned and realized that fans want the old familiar universe back? I suspect that an MMO based on the new World of Darkness will do as well as D&D Online wish pushed the newer Eberron setting instead of going with the far more familiar and popular Forgotten Realms setting. Which is to say mostly a failure.

I do hope that White Wolf survives into the future. I have many fond memories of their games. I myself have to limit myself to some of their more unique new creations, like Geist or Immortals. Overall though, I think I now prefer the new Dresden Files RPG (more on this coming soon) as my modern supernatural game of choice.

For most of my gaming career, Steve Jackson Games has been a strong independent producer of role-playing games. They’ve always maintained a portfolio of interesting products like Car Wars and Illuminati. Their main RPG product has always been GURPS. The Generic Universal Role-Playing Game is the Swiss Army knife of RPGs. Designed to be modular, it is easy to adapt to any setting or genre you could want.

I’ve never been a die-hard GURPS fan. I always appreciated it for its utility though. Their supplements have always been top-notch and full of creative ideas. I use them to help brainstorm even if the system I want to use is totally different. Who couldn’t find a use for a book on Dinosaurs? Who isn’t fascinated by the myriad worlds of Alternate Earths? Who doesn’t want to explore Space? or Time? GURPS’s greatest strength is its willingness to go where no other RPG is willing to go. Places like Discworld, Cthulhu Punk, and even Bunnies and Burrows.

I will admit, there are only three games I’ve actually used GURPS for. I subjected my friends to “The Prisoner” and was amazed at how my players managed to recreate the first episode of the series without having ever seen it. I collected a large amount of GURPS Traveller to supplement my knowledge of the Traveller universe. My friends have also usually used GURPS for Super Heroes games, liking it as a lighter RPG compared to Champions.

So with my friends talking about another Supers game on the horizon, I went looking to see what is new in the world of GURPS. They released a new edition in 2004. It looks like it is nicely streamlined but still fairly close to the “original”. Ok, I mean the 3rd Edition because the first two editions came and went fairly quickly. 3rd Edition was the definitive version of GURPS for 15 years. So I’m a little saddened that after a flurry of releases in the first few years of the new edition it has died down to one or two books per year. I am happy that they are slowly putting their back catalog online as purchasable PDFs. I really hope that someday they make a deal with a print on demand company and make some of the really hard to get titles back in print.

Looking at Steve Jackson’s Annual Reports (2005-2010) Munchkin has entirely taken over the companies revenue stream over the last 6 years. Don’t get me wrong, Munchkin is a fun game. I just think it is a sad state of the RPG industry that when so many classic games are making comebacks (Earthdawn, Traveller, Shadowrun, etc.), GURPS is falling behind. It is true they are releasing a lot of smaller PDF titles, which is smart for them. I understand that a company has to stay agile and respond to their markets. They’ve stayed alive when many other game companies have come and gone. I am glad their Munchkin success is keeping them alive in this crowded marketplace. Maybe the problem is they’ve already covered a lot of ground. In this even more crowded RPG marketplace it is hard for generic to stand above the crowd.

In a way I feel it is partly my fault. Ok, not me personally, but me and the other gamers who once purchased GURPS books and haven’t been around in a while. Maybe I’ll submit a proposal for one of those PDF products; I have some ideas for a Space Atlas entry. I would also love to see Car Wars return in an easier to play game, but that’s probably just a dream. I do hope that whatever happens GURPS is still around in some form for another 15 years.

When I was fairly young my older sister’s friend told me about Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t really remember much of what she told me, only that by the end of that summer I wanted to play. I had some experience delving into dungeons as my favorite computer game was Hack, a rogue-like game that later evolved into Nethack. It was a very old school RPG, where magic items were identified through trial and error, or the lucky use of an identify scroll. When you died you got your name on a high score list and started all over again from level 1. Monsters get harder and harder the deeper you go. The dungeon was randomly generated each time, so no two games were a like. Ok, I need to stop talking about how awesome Nethack is so I can move on to the actual point of this article.

My birthday is in the fall and I asked for Dungeons and Dragons for my birthday. I didn’t get it. My mother wasn’t certain about it, so she bought me the Middle-Earth Role-Playing Game (MERP) instead. She’d read The Hobbit, so she figured it couldn’t be too bad. It was based on Role-master, which is not a beginner’s game. It was a great read and had fantastic art though. I don’t think I ever played a real game of it though, although I know I made some characters.

Shortly thereafter I convinced her to let me get actual Dungeons and Dragons. I think I started with the AD&D Player’s Guide (First edition, but we didn’t call it that since the second edition was a long way off). I shortly thereafter had the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (Red Box), the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide and In Search of Adventure (A collection of adventure modules B1-9). I only had myself and my cousin to play with, but that was enough to keep us going for a couple years. We didn’t have anyone older to play with or teach us the rules. We just read the books and muddled our way through.

So now I have a niece and nephew. They aren’t quite as old as I was when I started, but they are the age many of my friends started gaming. Their father is also a gamer, but he’s concerned about introducing true violence to his children this early. I can’t blame him, D&D is about murdering people and taking their stuff. Still, sometime soon I’d like to get them an introductory RPG product.

Wizards of the Coast has recently released A 4th Edition Starter Kit (in a red box). From what I hear it isn’t really a complete game. It doesn’t have a standard character creation rules book, it has a choose your own adventure thing that walks them through character creation. That’s neat to include, but a little red player’s guide would have been handy. I’m not convinced this is a good stand-alone starting set. It’s designed to get you to buy other books, not to be a complete package for more than 1 level of adventuring.

I am really curious about Green Ronin’s Dragon Age RPG. It looks like a better boxed set, with a complete game that is fairly rules light compared to 4th Edition D&D. If they were about 5 years older I’d be tempted to get it for them, except the dark in “Dark Fantasy” is probably not age appropriate. I would have to read through the book myself before getting it for them.

My love of Doctor Who makes me want to check out Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. It has an advantage in that the Doctor never carries a weapon, and always tries to resolve things peacefully. Monsters may exist, but talking to them is usually an option. How many times has the Doctor tried reasoning with the Daleks? Of course, the price point is such that I can’t just casually get it for them on a whim. Still, it might be a strong possibility for a Christmas gift.

I also keep thinking that Traveller RPG could work with some guidance. Sure, there is the possibility for fighting space pirates. On the other hand, my brother-in-law will likely be running a game for them. You can easily run a more Star Trek The Next Generation style game that focuses more on peaceful exploration of the galaxy. Not quite the out of the box experience, but still quite possible.

So it should be noted that other than Traveller, I don’t own any of the above products myself. I’d certainly like to try them out sometime. Does anyone else have a suggestion for a less violent starting RPG? I really want something that is self-contained in no more than two or three books. It’s kind of too bad Bunnies and Burrows is out of print. Maybe I’ll just get them Squirrel Attack! instead.

Since my birthday is coming up at the end of the month, I went ahead and updated my Amazon Wishlist. Those of you who don’t actually know me may disregard this link.