Question #20: What was the most memorable character death you've ever experienced? What makes it stick with you?

This, I think, is where the D&D rules and I parted ways. Character death - player character death, at least - is not usually interesting. There are two ways it happens: either the player is tired of the character, and opts to have them leave the campaign by dying, or the dice come out badly, and the character runs out of hit points. In the first case, all the interest is moving toward the new character that player will have, and in the second, well... there just ISN'T any interest.

The principal difference between a tactical game (wargames, ccgs, whatever) and a role-playing game is that of story, and an abrupt end of "and then she was hit really hard by the bad guy's second subsidiary minion's sister in law, and died" is... not a good story. "She almost died, and here's what happened next..." is far, far better.

This ties back to the notion, which comes up again and again, even in such tactical games as 4th Ed D&D, of making failure interesting. And certainly, there has to be a risk, or the whole structure of the game, whatever the characters are striving for, becomes meaningless. And if a player insists on having their character do something absolutely stupid, then death is on the cards. My players, however, tend to be a lot smarter than average, so this doesn't arise.

"Failure should be interesting" is one of the things that, in my mind, distinguishes modern games from the old-school kind. The old-school games go: You don't find the secret door in the first level of the dungeon? Tough, the other nine levels remain inaccessible. You rolled six ones in a row, and now your 21st level character is dead? Tough, roll a new one. You can see how that's not interesting. Even "this door is locked" can be a show-stopper if the party's only rogue fails the "pick locks" roll, and the party are left standing outside a locked door. The failure has to do something; events have to have another fork to follow.

So, I don't have memorable character deaths because I'm not interested in them. One of the major, major advantages of the Fate system, for me, is the "taken out" result at the end of combat. Sure, that can be "dead". But it can also be kidnapped, injured, missing... all of those are far more interesting, and lead to more story.

New year, new venue.

As some of you know HRTA which has been the home of Midway since its inception back in 2010 has been shut down and is no longer operating. While this is unfortunate it hasn't and won't stop us. 

Our next event is going to be on Feb 17th and we'll be heading out to Red Barn for this one. 

We'll post more details like bus times etc in the coming days but we wanted to get the word out as soon as possible.

See you all on the 17th. 

What a way to start the weekend for all you war machine fans, 3 huge announcements from Privateer Press.

First up COLOSSALS!!!

PP announce their next BIG expansion for war machine, called Colossals, which introduces Massive new warjacks to the system. These warlocks will sit on battle engine bases & are 3 times the size of normal warjacks.

Check out the video

Next up is Iron Kingdoms

“It is a land like no other, a place where steam power and gunpowder meet sword and sorcery.

The Iron Kingdoms possess a rich history—and a tumultuous future—full of unique monsters, deities, heroes, and villains. Immerse yourself in the detailed world of gritty conflict and sorcery with the Iron Kingdoms RPG. Unleash the power of mechanika, the fusion of magic and machine. Take on the persona of unique character classes, like the gun mage who combines powerful magic with a deadly acumen for firearms or the steamjack-commanding warcaster. Travel through a fantastic world that takes classic fantasy concepts and gives them a new twist with a high-octane rush of steam power and industrial engineering.

Prepare yourself for an experience like no other.

The world of the Iron Kingdoms awaits!”

The role playing game that spawned Warmachine and Hordes, is relaunching this summer with a whole new rule set, based on 2d6 mechanic similar to whats used in the tabletop game. I for one can’t wait for this, there will be plenty of powder kegs for all!!!

Check out the video

Last but not least, War Room

PP’s new war machine app for building lists, tracking damage & keeping up to date with rule changes

• Army Creation Workshop: Players can select their faction and game size and then choose their warcasters and warlocks, warjacks or warbeasts, units, solos, and battle engines to create valid lists, all within the War Room application.
• Full Card Display: Model stat cards are shown exactly as they are printed, so players can reference them easily and with the same confidence as printed cards.
• In-Game Status Tracking: In-game damage and status tracking will give players immediate and easily accessible information on every fighting model in their command.
• In-Game List Sharing: Lists will be sharable between every player using War Room in the same game so they can quickly access each other’s model status and abilities, allowing players to keep their focus on the tabletop action.
• Turn Clock: This optional player-initiated feature allows players to keep individual turns fast but fairly apportioned.

The base app is a free download and contains cards from all current WARMACHINE and HORDES starter products.

Full faction decks for both WARMACHINE and HORDES will be available as additional downloads for $6.99. Every deck will include all currently released stat cards for that faction as well as new model updates for the life of the current rules set.

Very interesting idea about instant update to rules & errata! Cant wait to check it out

Check out the Video

An Infinity tournament will be run on the Sunday at the University College Dublin RetCon games convention.

Details below.

For anybody who might be interested and doesn’t know, 250 points is a 30 euro starter box, plus two of the higher point value 9 euro blisters . So it can be reasonably done for 50 euro if you want. Here’s a guide to starting Infinity for anybody considering it - http://infinity-ireland.org/node/13

All available from Gamers World on Jervis street of course.

Quozl

RETCON Infinity tournament – Sunday April 1st.

2nd member tournament of the 2012 All-Ireland Infinity Cup.

Free to enter – however you need to pay in to the convention, 7 euro for the day or 10 euro for the weekend.
250 points.
5 SWC.
Beginner friendly.
Scenario based.
Painting NOT required – minor bonus for fully painted forces of +1 to willpower for starting roll.
Space for 12 players – maybe more, TBC.

Rules are as per the Infinity cup rules – available here http://www.dragonslayers.org.uk/images/files/infinity%20cup%20rules.pdf

With two minor changes:
Sign-up email address is ‘events at infinity-ireland dot org’ (replace at with @, and dot with .)
Players can sign-up on the day as well as in advance. Spaces will only be held for those who have signed up beforehand until official tournament start time.

Question #19: What's the weirdest character you've ever played? How did you end up with him/her/it?

I've played many strange characters from behind the screen. At this stage, I don't really think about how weird or not they are, just about how they think.

One of my campaign world's central notions is that it has a very deep history. It's had sentient life for about three and a half billion years. There's also the possibility of immortality. So over that span of time, quite a few creatures have become immortal. Immortals are weird anyway, but some of them are downright alien.

Davonian life is varied. Hundreds of different body-plans have been tried by evolution over time, aided by magic, psionics, and other, wilder effects. Not all of these forms reach intelligence, but many do. So there are immortals out there who aren't just alien by way of culture - they're tri-symmetrical, or arachnoid, or insectile, or aquatic, or shaped like starfish, or use chlorophyll.

Davonian life is fecund. Species, as Linnean taxonomy usually uses the term, don't quite work. It's not the case that anything can crossbreed with anything, quite. Dragons can, though, and once a few of them have, normal processes will carry some of that capability down through successive generations. So anything that had an ancestor intelligent enough to appeal to a dragon has a chance of having some draconic blood, however small a fraction. And fiends and celestials, of course, have the same capability. So many of the immortals are of mixed blood.

The upshot of this is that there's a creature out there who has lived for two billion years, will never die, and is half-dragon, one quarter coral-starfish, and one quarter intelligent tree. He's lived long enough that remnants of his birth culture's artworks are turning up in igneous rocks. Every intelligent thing on the planet younger than him is probably a descendant. How do you play something like that?

I've done a lot of thinking about this, and arrived at the idea that any immortal who is out and about, rather than dormant, hiding, or in stasis of some kind, has self-selected for the ability to deal with and understand the world as it is. So while they're alien, they're at least used to getting on with humans, or their immediate ancestor species. That makes it one step easier.

Fiends, celestials, and the like are easier to play in many ways. They have aims that are more or less comprehensible to humans, and they're busily getting on with them.

Second, I don't completely have to understand them to depict them, any more than an actor playing, say, Winston Churchill, needs to understand everything of Churchill's life and thinking. And in a lot of cases, one or two strange habits of mind can account for a lot of alien-ness.

For instance, there was one relatively recent race who left very little trace in the world, called the Siroose. They left little trace because they did very little; their major cultures valued indolence, cowardice, and efficiency above all else. That alone makes for a very alien creature from our point of view; a paranoid couch-potato who occasionally acts very swiftly and decisively in order to ensure it can go on being paranoid and stationary. Playing a Siroose is therefore weird.

A lot of my thinking on the immortals - and indeed, deep history as a concept - comes from Vernor Vinge's books, A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness In The Sky. The interactions between different species there, and the communications between them on what looks very like usenet have been a massive influence.

And I take a certain comfort in thinking that even in the selection of weird creatures I've played, I still have things as peculiar as the Tines and the Skrode-riders to reach for.

Question #17: What was the best reward you've ever gotten in a game? What made it so great? How much do you need tangible rewards (loot, leveling, etc.) to enjoy a game?

Once more, the reversal: some thinking about rewards in games from a GM point of view. There's a very simple formula to this: the more mechanical the game, the more the rewards of loot and levels matter. The more story-oriented the game is, the more outcomes matter. This is a pretty stark difference between my campaigns at the moment.

The 4E D&D game is all about the rewards. Particularly the XP, although the gold counts too. There's some attention paid to the story outcomes, alright, and I think the players have some investment in the outcomes of their side in the ongoing civil war in Ostaracho, but the biggest shouts come when someone gets enough XP to level, or enough gold to afford a particular new toy. Some of this, of course, is in how we play the game; we play a very mechanical, miniatures-and-battlegrids style, so of course mechanical rewards matter more. But the game lends itself so well to it that using it for other play styles would be like using a hammer to drive screws.

The Fate games, though, and even our older D&D games, from 2nd Ed through 3.0 and 3.5, have always emphasised story rewards. We stopped tracking gold coins in possession very early on - somewhere around 6th level in the original 2nd Ed game - and by this point, we only keep an eye on signature pieces of equipment. Levels, or their equivalents, come slowly, and we're still experimenting to find a rate of advancement that's comfortable - Legends of Anglerre's one skill point per session as in the rules isn't particularly balanced for a regular weekly session in a long-term campaign.

Indeed, material rewards tend to get in the way a bit in the Fate games. They're extra material to keep track of, and there's already plenty of information floating around. It's a natural thing, in a D&D game, to go digging through your character sheet's appendices and find that you actually do have a Staff of the Nine Winds or whatever; it's a lot less so in a Fate game where you're more used to considering how you can bend an aspect to what you want it to do.

Instead, we work a lot more with the story rewards. For characters in organisations, promotions work very well. For a lone artist, an offer for an exhibition is a very nice thing to have in there. New apprentices, family members turning up, a chance to talk to a very notable NPC, all of these work as rewards, and then there's the slightly more meta-game idea of material the player developed entering play.

This kind of thing can carry a lot of meaning even in the more equipment-and-points oriented games. Some years ago, an offshoot campaign, run under D&D 3.0, had a player character called Athel. Athel's player is a military history buff, so he took great pleasure in drawing up plans of the triangular fortress the group were building in a border marches area of the campaign world. Soon after the fortress was built, events conspired to take the group away on a long trip across the planes, and they didn't get back for more than year in-game. By the time they returned, the fortress had had a small town built around it, and it was becoming one of the regional capitals of the new province - and was called Athelstown. The player was floored when this appeared on the map, and he still talks about it now, the best end of ten years later.

GP: This round doesn't make me feel smart! Answers to party@theadventuringparty.net

Discuss this episode on irishgaming.com 

2012 is of to a great start for Warmachine and Hordes, a great turn out for Warpcon’s war machine tournament & a big congrats to Neil Kettles & his Retribution of Scryah army  for taking the win in his first Irish tournament, great stuff.

But whats next? Well the next 2 tournaments coming up for Warmachine are just around the corner:

February 12th in Gamers World – 50 Point Tournament, SR2012 – Starts at 10pm for registration & costs 10 Euro entry - Details

Looks like its going to be a busy couple of months, can’t wait!

Hope to see you all there!

Ciaran

Question #16: Who was the most memorable foe you've ever come up against in a game? How did you beat him/her/it? Or did you?

All these questions are aimed at players, you know. In my experience, GMs are much more likely to be blogging about their games... so I'm turning this one around again, looking at enemies I've used. Or, rather, why they're enemies, and what they do.

At least one of my regular players has a terrible habit of getting under the skin of enemies, and making them offers they can't refuse - turning them, eventually, into allies. She takes a certain justified pride in this.

Irichallanak (detailed in Shades of Grey) started out as at least a potential enemy, before he became an ally. Avaldan, a character with a history long enough to feature in three eras, was very definitely an enemy when he first appeared. And of course, the enemies that didn't become allies tend to become dead instead.

In my campaigns, I don't like to designate "enemy" NPCs. I find it leads to those NPCs eventually basing actions on "because I'm the bad guy", and whatever about anyone's cognisance of being evil or otherwise, few people think of themselves as the "bad guy". So instead, enemies are a more fluid category of characters whose intentions are opposed to those of the PCs. Sometimes they want to rule the world. Sometimes they want to rule some small part of the world. Sometimes, there's someone they want to kill, for whatever reason. Or there's something the player characters have that they want. Or they're conservatives, when the party is trying to change things, or radicals of one stripe or another when the PCs like the status quo.

I prefer rational characters, so generally, my NPCs will go for subtle routes to achieve their objectives first, negotiation second, and only go for violence if it's a last resort. But there are some who are not rational - which I've some difficulty playing, I'll admit - and there are some who have gone through the rational process and concluded that direct violence is the only workable answer. Those two kinds will find ways to attack, straight off the bat, and generally, anyone who attacks gets classed as an enemy straight away.

Something that's never really apparent to the players - and deliberately so - are the interactions between these NPCs. Even as the PCs can make allies of someone by negotiating to a mutually satisfactory position, so too can people whose aims they oppose. So at any given time, there are alliances being formed and broken all over the campaign world, some of which are aimed directly at the player characters, and some of which will be much more incidental.

And sometimes, too, those alliances go wrong. Several times, there've been situations where it was clear to me that two current enemies could no longer cooperate, and one of them had to take out the other. I do struggle a bit, sometimes, with how to work that into player knowledge. "In a place far away, one chap you've never heard of has murdered another chap you'd only met once, and who you didn't even know didn't like you. Well done!" - it lacks a certain something. Mostly, they find the remnants of conflict, bodies or just abandoned strongholds, and have to try to work out what happened. Often, a mystery like that can hang around for a while, which isn't a bad thing.

I've little enough interest in the "betrayal" trope so common in fantasy. But sometimes allies, or apparent allies, have their interests diverge. This happened, certainly, with a fiend called Tamergrin, in the Kingfisher's Way campaign, and he definitely turned out to be an enemy. I'm not terribly sure, though, that anyone was particularly satisfied with that outcome.

I think at heart, many of us are happier with honourable enemies becoming strong allies, and dishonourable enemies becoming dust.

Warpcon is finally here, and we’re sitting in the main hall setting everything up. Looking forward to when the doors open at 5pm.

Let the games begin!

Warpcon 22 Dice: https://twitter.com/#!/Warpcon/status/162891977338265600/photo/1

Question #15: People often talk about the divide between what happens "in game" and "in real life." Do you maintain that divide in your own play, or do you tend to take what happens to your character personally? Why?

To be honest, I have difficulty in conceiving how someone could not make this distinction - and I suspect that the only people who think this happens aren't gamers. And they're probably the people who think that the actions of fictional characters represent the opinion of the author, too.

My interest in this area is precisely the opposite - what elements of real life can I carry over into games? Whenever I learn something new about the world, from geology to current events, there's a background process going on in my head about how this - whatever "this" is - is represented in the campaign world.

There's a strip in Knights of the Dinner Table where BA is saying that he spent a long time on the orcish threat gestures, something that has plainly never entered play. That's me. I know stuff about the geology and climatic zones of Davon that will never, ever enter the game - but it gives me a considerable sense of satisfaction to know them anyway.

I do try not make the parallels clear. I feel it's jarring if someone can say, "Hang on, this happened in Spain in the 17th Century!". The material I'm currently studying in a History module, for instance, concerning the Wars of Religion in France, likely won't be identifiable when it appears in the game. But it will appear - though probably separated into distinct pieces, with a weak monarchy there, rapid switching of allegiances over here, and maybe two enemies with the same name in an entirely different campaign.

There's also the observation that if you put the events of real history into a game, stripped of the national identifiers and half-known narratives that surround them, players might well refuse to accept that NPCs could be that stupid, arrogant, or evil, and go looking for the demons or compulsions that are clearly behind such actions.

Likewise, this year's entire sociology module will reappear at some stage, chopped up and made into a sort of narrative soup. Hegemonic ideas have already made an appearance; that was too juicy a concept not to press into immediate use. Effects on societies of inequality will be another one; I've already done a lot of thinking about the effects on human societies of long-lived elves and dragons, and how those creatures' societies would handle, say, inheritance.

News and current events are an obvious thing to add to the mix. I keep notes for myself; abstracted out so that I don't connect them with the real events, and look back on them every couple of years for stuff to include. I don't know where "weak leader establishes power-base by clever use of gutter journalism" came from, nor "personal beliefs cause rift between politically aligned families". But they're good things to integrate into a game world.

I've done a lot of reading in geography and economics over the years, and that turns up in the games too. Climate science, chaos theory, causality, all those are elements from the pages of New Scientist and Focus that have landed here and there.

I can tell reality from fantasy perfectly well. But I get great entertainment out of bringing one into the other anyway.

As promised …

Gamers World will be offering a 5 round 1000 point 40K tournament on Saturday February 11th. Capacity will be max 32 players.

There is no reservation of tickets for this event. Tickets are available on a first come first served basis for those who wish to purchase them.
Tickets are available after 10:00 Friday 13th January 2012 and can only be secured by following the instructions in the rulespack.

The rules-pack is available here …

The TO reserves the right to update rulespack based on questions received.

Any queries you can PM me or email me at warriorviii@gmail.com

There's a review... well, an article, anyway, about Skyrim up on Futurismic, which is such a spectacular example of missing the point that it should probably be printed out and framed. Maybe calligraphed and illuminated.

Quite aside from the fact that I disagree strenuously with the article, this is one of the things that drives me spare about computer game reviews. I'm sure it happens in other fields as well, but I don't read many film or book reviews any more. That is, the reviewer plainly doesn't like the genre. Jonathan McCalmont doesn't like open world games. So why have him review one? It seems clear that he'd be much happier reviewing something with a wholly pre-written storyline - there are excellent examples out there like Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins.

Indeed, it's worth arguing that unless you like the genre, you can't identify good or bad within it. Broadly speaking, I'd be hard put to identify good or bad country & western music, because it all makes me grind my teeth and look for a hammer.

But in this case, McCalmont sits down, ploughs his way through the game, and then proceeds to whine through a long article (as web articles go), wherein all the points can be summarised as "I don't get it". If you don't get it, a) play something else, and b) review that instead.

Question #14: What kinds of adventures do you enjoy most? Dungeon crawls, mysteries, freeform roleplaying, or something else? What do you think that says about you?

Each has their place. I like dungeon crawls, because I don't have to think after I've written the scenario. I like mysteries, because it's often fascinating seeing how players and characters go about solving them. I like freeform roleplaying, because it immerses me much more in the campaign world.

It's hard to pin it down to any of those types, and I can think of a dozen more - political intrigue, economic maneuvering, creeping horror, action mission, swashbuckling rescue, high-fantasy exposition, for a start - all of which I've used at various times. It comes down to what the campaign needs at that point in time, really, and to some degree what people are in the mood for.

My main groups don't do dungeon crawls much. That's mostly reserved for the D&D 4E crowd, although one of the main campaigns is venturing into the Underdark soon, to try to work out what's happening down there to push all kinds of unpleasant creatures to the surface. Even that, though, won't be the open-the-door-roll-for-initiative-kill-the-monster-and-grab-the-treasure routine; the group just doesn't work that way. On the other hand, the 4E game is essentially a series of dungeon crawls, some more blatant than others. They're entertaining, but they're... not really RPGs, more sort of a scenario-based tactical boardgame. And that's ok, too.

Mysteries underlie a lot of my game sessions. There is some piece of information that's being sought, or there are unexplained events that need to be stopped. Someone has to be located. Unknown information, and the assembly of new facts into a coherent (or semi-coherent) whole has been a major focus of most of my longer campaigns, so mysteries are important to me.

Freeform roleplaying is a fuzzy enough term; I'm choosing to interpret it as conversations between PCs and NPCs taking most of the session, with a minimum of dice-rolling. In any campaign I've ever run, this becomes the default play-style for a good chunk of time toward the end. It can crop up earlier, as well, of course, and I find that the decisions that guide the rest of the campaign usually happen in these sessions. Players from Spellbound still recall the long session of discussion about who to give a particular artifact to; they were down to two choices, which looked about equal. Eventually, they settled on one. Had they given it to the other, I'm pretty sure the entire history of the campaign world since would have been different, and involved a lot more in the way of smoking ruins and glowing craters.

Political intrigue has been a varying factor. Sometimes, it's an absolute mainstay of a campaign, usually in the early-to-mid stages where the player characters are still working out who's in power, and who's not. And sometimes it never comes up at all. It seems to depend on active decisions by player characters, rather more than most styles of game, and that varies greatly from character to character.

Economic maneuvering has never been a major factor in any of my games, although it's starting to appear now in the D&D 4E game. It requires a few things in the system - specifically, explicit tracking of equipment and money - so any game that has, say, a Resources skill can't run anything meaningful in that field. Within the rules constraint, there are two ways it can come up; a player character can decide to get rich, or to take down someone whose power depends on money, or alternately, it can be the background reason for missions and jobs the PCs are sent to do by some mentor or employer. The 4E game is headed in that latter direction.

Creeping horror is a thing I've used touches of here and there. There are two major ways I've approached it; one is the subtle (or not so subtle) implication of really physical, gross aspects of bodies and interactions. This, I find, can creep players out, but can also result in them being too grossed out to actually continue playing. The other approach is the more cerebral; is this NPC actually on your side, or has he been stringing you along? Betrayal is a very visceral horror. I use it lightly, though - it's such a staple trope of fantasy that I don't find it all that interesting anymore.

The action mission is a very simple concept - go here, do this thing, fight if need be, come back when you've achieved your objective. There are a million and one episodes of TV shows based fairly directly on this, from Charlie's Angels and Mission Impossible to Star Trek. It's well suited to episodic play, and also to situations in which the player characters are members of an organisation that can direct their actions. This gets a lot of use in my main campaign at the moment, and also in the 4E game. It's possibly too broad a category to really be useful, though.

Swashbuckling rescue is a specific kind of action mission, but it seems to have its own tropes and rules. "Go here, rescue this person, come back" is obviously the core, but there's a lot of swordfighting on stairs, swinging on ropes, swinging on chandeliers, and climbing up balconies implicit there too. I've mostly encountered this in convention scenarios, and I tend to think of it as more single film than TV series. Rescue missions of any kind are not a thing I've made a lot of use of, since it hinges on there needing to be someone to be rescued. That means using the player characters' contacts as an "X is in danger!" motivation. Any more than a little of that, and the PCs start to maneuver toward having no friends because they're clearly a liability, and that's not a kind of game I'm interested in.

High-fantasy exposition is a particular type that has come out of me trying to pin down types for sessions I've run. Plain old exposition for a full session is boring, but occasionally you need to provide a massive information download so that the campaign gets moving again. This works far better if the player characters take a trip through a new plane in which they see bits of history and prophecy rendered as dreams, or find a talking magical item which has the information but has to be coaxed into letting it go, or a massive archive of books and objects collected over centuries, or... you get the idea. Anything other than "So, the sage says..." and then the GM talking non-stop for three hours.

I'm sure there are a few I've missed; I might have to return to this question again.

Hey all!

My name is Daire and I am the chairman of a new wargamming club called WarSoc set up in Thurles, LIT Tipperary.
WarSoc are running “Conquer”, a one day Warhammer 40k event in Thurles, on the 18th of February. The tournament will be held in the college campus of LIT Tipperary Thurles. It will be a 1000 point tournament with standard force organisation rules. It will be €5 entry on the day and five games shall be played. There will be a maximum capacity of 32 players for the tournament.
Conquer will be our first event and we hope to share it with ye all, mostly we want to just have some fun! See ye all on the 18th!

http://w-ired.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2459

Question #12: Do you prefer collaborative or competitive games? What do you think that says about you?

I'm not a competitive person. Sure, winning is nice, but it's hardly the point of a game. If it was, then we'd all play nice, easy, solo games, which we could win every time. If there are other people involved in a competitive game, you're sometimes going to lose, and if that's a problem, you shouldn't play them. So the collaborative/competitive divide isn't as stark for me as it for most people, I think.

That said, there's still a difference - collaborative games mean that I won't have to deal with people who are competitive and get grumpy when they're not winning, as many competitive folks seem to do. And this is where my normal preference comes in; RPGs tend to be collaborative, and board- and card-games tend to be competitive. I've a strong preference for RPGs over any other kind of game, so I just haven't that much exposure to the others.

Collaborative efforts result in good RPGs. This is particularly true of the newer breed of RPGs, where player input helps shape the setting and the story, and where building on what someone else has contributed makes for a better experience for everyone. While my main group has been slow to take up the notion of guiding a narrative in play, they're old hands at contributing material to the world - a number of priesthoods, an order of paladins, and more cities and kingdoms than I can track have been formed either around small details provided by players, or fully developed by them.

The simple (or, in the later stages of a campaign, not so simple) process of coming up with a plan is one of the things I really like about RPGs. It takes the Irish tendency to bluesky, the process of logic, knowledge of the campaign world, and the burst of inspiration, and blends them all together.

On the competitive side, a little internal conflict isn't a bad thing, but it has to be carefully managed. It can very quickly become the focus of the game, and therefore uninteresting for anyone who doesn't have a stake in the conflict, and it's remarkably easy for an in-game conflict between characters to wash over into being an out-of-game conflict between players.

So overall: I don't mind competitive games, but I really like collaborative ones.

Starting to get back into writing for Lost Heroes but the first thing I do isn’t writing. I end up re-evaluating everything in front of me – I’m currently working on a character creation guide and despite having actually written up the rules for creating Magic Practitioners, I’ve decided to remove all mention of magic and non-Chosen types (including Magic Practitioners) from what ever thing I make public. I’ll keep the stuff I wrote, but this creation guide will be specifically about the Chosen only.

That isn’t really a radical change. I’m just moving some of the stuff aside. And it was something I had already considered for a while. But then it lays the seed of a change much more fundamental.

I am of the opinion that in game design, mechanics should follow flavour and setting and help re-enforce it or expand it. But I’ve always felt that the current power-system of Lost Heroes does not do that. I’ve invested a lot of thought and design effort into it, built elements of the system around it, but it always felt a little disconnected from the rest of the setting and the other rules which all otherwise have their place in relation to the setting. I did have a design goal way back when I started, not to have a distinct magic system but one that shared it’s core with the basic power system. That however I think is holding back a more refined vision of the RPG.

Currently a character can have gifts and faults, some of these are mundane and some supernatural or divine. Chosen with different Patron Gods will have different gifts and faults. Then there is abilities. There are psychic abilities, which have their place within the setting (a good example would be visions), and then there is the supernatural and divine abilities. These are powered by the character’s passions. Magic then aligns with these abilities (instead calling them paths), using the basic same rules but with a few extra restrictions and some broader concepts, example; Magic always takes time but Abilities are instant, however Magic can be used to create magical items but Abilities cannot. And so on. Abilities have ratings which can be increased via experience points and I’ve built them up using the mythos and elements of the setting.

But I felt they never really reflected the source idea of Lost Heroes. While characters in mythology often gain powers, they don’t work like abilities. They don’t get supernatural skills as such but learn specific tricks and powers. It’s not really something that’s part of the theme of the setting. I think I pulled the ideas for abilities from existing RPGs and martial-art based fantasies where characters only purpose is to train and build on a supernatural martial art (including all the flashy light shows).

I’m considering ripping out abilities completely, replacing them with just a set of gifts and faults. This suits the setting much more, as in the characters are human but have some  advantages. They don’t have these supernatural abilities that would make them truly distinct (i.e. alien) to human characters. They are simply different. Another angle on this is to wonder how that these sort of supernatural abilities would affect how one would sees the world. It’s not just gaining an alien sixth sense, but also a new limb to control the world within that sixth sense. It would be not possible to describe how or what that would mean to some without it.

Magic of course can still use the stuff I devised for abilities, but I shall put it aside until later.

The question then I have is, does this make sense from a player perspective?

The current gift system in Lost Heroes allows for tiered gifts and faults. Some gifts and faults can be stacked up to three times, increasing their scope or power. But there is no gift or fault tree. Players can buy new gifts, learning them from gods or other supernatural beings. But anything then with an ability is not a player character and can’t really be. Does not having powers-based skills like abilities weaken the system?

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Hey Folks

The con is only days away now, so there are some new updates you should check out. The finalised timetables have been published in the timetable section. The games section have all been update, there were some minor changes to the games mostly the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic got a face change.

In the About section a new tab has been added with the layout of the con around the UCC campus

See ye soon
Steve

Question #11: Have you ever played a character that was morally grey, or actually evil? Why or why not? If yes, did you enjoy it?

If you believe that you have played a character that is purely good, I would like you to study some philosophy, even just a little bit. The only people who think they can even define purely good are thoroughly deluded. Of course, you can play a character who is deluded.

That out of the way, yes, I've played plenty of characters who are greyer than white, some worse than that, and some who are outright evil. Strangely, some of the outright evil ones are regarded as some of the "best" as far as the safety of worlds goes.

The major conflict in my campaigns has always been law against chaos, because it's so much more interesting than good against evil. And to make things more interesting, particularly within the Planescape cosmology I use, I've always portrayed lawful evil as being the most... effective of the classic D&D alignments, with chaotic good following swiftly on its heels.

So it follows that some of the most notable characters are evil. Let me illustrate a few...

Mazaqual is a pit fiend. He runs a chocolate shop in a small but well-connected Prime city, on a world noted for its planar connections. He does a side trade in information, and most of the time, doesn't charge for it. On the face of it, Mazaqual's only real evil is his persistence in using liquorice as a flavouring for some of his goods.

On the other hand, other fiends defer to him, even the tanar'ri. The sphere of Davon suffers far less than it otherwise might from planar intrusions because it's known as "Mazaqual's World". So what's going on here?

Mazaqual is ancient, even among fiends; three billion years old. And he never died in the first place - he was a mortal summoner and demonologist of such skill and power that over time, he became a pit fiend. He worked his way up through the hierarchy of Baator, eventually emerging at the top as one of the Nine Hells' first absolute monarchs. And then, after a few million years of ruling hell, he stepped aside, in order to focus on his own home world; his "garden". Davonian history since has been the story of Mazaqual's subtle guidance, pressing it bit by bit into a form he likes, and which entertains him. It's not clear if he bows to the gods, or the gods bow to him. Certainly, he's more powerful than some of them - but he remains, in effect, a mortal, and comes and goes through Sigil as he wishes. He rarely intervenes directly in the growth of cultures or civilisations, although he "plants" and "prunes" from time to time.

From the point of view of anyone dealing with him on a day to day basis, Mazaqual is a benevolent guardian of the world. This assumes, of course, that you are not a member of a culture he's "pruning", or someone looking to damage his world, or topple him from his control of it. In that case, he will take the most efficient possible route to remove you from existence, and feel no qualms about it at all. It is, after all, his world.

So from that point of view, Davon is a world where the evil overlord won, and has continued to rule.

On a lesser scale, there's Irichallanak. His brother became a god; he got stuck in the body of an ancient green dragon he killed. Of course, godhood has plenty of problems, and having a draconic body isn't at all a bad thing, particularly when you can shapeshift anyway. These days, he's the king of a mid-sized, mildly impoverished kingdom, and second in command of a league of kingdoms that stretches across the continent. He's the kind of ruler who embodies Machiavelli's thinking, with the additional wrinkle that if Machiavelli had lived in his kingdom, well, Machiavelli would have had a nasty accident, and his books would never have been published. No sense in helping out the opposition. Irichallanak considers fear an adequate tool of state, and uses it often. He's also conscientious about eliminating threats, and indeed, often does so without actually notifying his allies. They might bring in tedious things like process, or the notion that thinking about something isn't equivalent to doing it.

He has the mild foible that he has an intense dislike of slavery. Peculiarly, this has brought him into conflict with his allies more than anything else - although they seem to have been careful never to get on his wrong side in other areas. He's also the one they look to when there's something unpleasant that needs to be done - information to be got out of someone, for instance.

So, do I enjoy playing these characters? Oh yes. Very much so. Neither of them - nor indeed, many of the other evil characters, be they allies or opponents - is evil for any purpose than a pragmatic, straight-froward approach to existence. They know they're evil, as such things are defined and measured. They don't much care about that designation, as long as the job gets done. So there's nothing in there that's difficult to comprehend.

I think it might be a lot more difficult, to be honest, to play a really good character.