I think my favorite thing about Gen Con is that I can haul back a bunch of books and ride the high for weeks, maybe months. Today I finally cracked open Cults of Freeport, a supplement by Green Ronin for their Freeport setting, which is well-written and interesting stuff, especially if you like the idea of a Cthulhu/pirates mashup.

(Total aside: what is it with me and Cthulhu hybrid games/settings? CthulhuTech is bliss, and I really dig the obvious Mythos references in the Freeport setting. If there were benchmarks for modern day Cthulhu cultists…)

Not sure if I’ll use anything directly from the book for my True20/Freeport setting, but it definitely gets the gears turning. Also worth checking out is a tip or two for running 4th edition D&D in Freeport, hinting that they may make a 4e guidebook one day. That has the potential for fun stuff.

Otherwise, more house prep work, and more gaming. Slowly getting the ball rolling again on the play-by-IRC/wiki game in my custom/Freeport setting hybrid, need to do some plotting (and maybe even real writing!) for CthulhuTech. Awesome times.

Bunch of gaming stuff today. I’ve spent my off time the past couple days working on Sepulture, my True20 campaign, and while there’s still not a whole lot there at the wiki, it’s a lot more than was there on Thursday, and another dozen or so pages still need to be made just from yesterday’s session. It’s this kind of activity that is so helpful and so hard to get the ball rolling on for world-building — every link makes the setting seem more real, if for no reason other than to have a proper noun to throw out. It feels nice just to be able to point towards something with actual information, and the fact that there are crude approximations of maps and other handouts to link to is wonderful. It really lights a fire under a world-builder.

And as alluded to above, the IRC group gathered yesterday (and today, we went from 9 AM–3AM) to play for the first time since March, and it went, in my opinion, very well. I think everyone is showing new excitement and interest in their characters, as everyone gets a feel for their abilities and dynamic in the party and so on. I’d like to see more actual roleplaying — I think some of us still get dragged into dungeoneering routines too often, myself included — but overall it’s going very well. The game left on a light cliffhanger — two dungeon levels down, at least two to go — and featured one near-death experience, as we all saw first hand the danger of swarms of enemies in True20, even mere minion enemies.

The key point is that any one creature’s natural 20 can get a hit in, and if the PC then tanks their Toughness save, it could start the road to death: an otherwise capable and well-defensed character gets two bad rolls in succession, is stunned for a round, and then is poked and prodded while stunned until dropped. It’s not instant, but it is a very dangerous situation in True20 to be surrounded by much of anything. 1st-level minion orcs took out two of the four 5th-level party members in my game, and it was only a series of beneficial rolls that took out the “boss” before at least another party member dropped.

But, nevertheless, dripping from head to toe in orc blood, blades dull from so many strikes against bone, the party made it out alive, and certainly with a story to tell in the tavern.

True20 Companion (which, by the way, still rocks) just arrived at my door about an hour ago and despite having seen it all from the PDF, I’m still paging through it, because it seems every time I open it up I find some insight, or something to pinch and apply in my game. It really is an amazing book in its own right, perfect for tinkerers such as myself. PDFs have limited appeal to me, compared to books, and I don’t really mind paying for True20 product twice, when it’s something as nice as the Companion.

One last thing: in a comment which might have slipped through the cracks for interested parties, a visitor suggested rolling a d20 in tandem with a 2d10 attack roll, where the d20 is used solely to determine if the hit is a critical or not. If the 2d10 attack roll hits, and the d20’s in the threat range for the weapon, it’s a critical hit, and otherwise the d20 is ignored. It seems like a pretty good compromise, although I’m still waiting for a good opportunity to test it.

I got carded today buying a can of compressed air. Apparently kids are getting high off cleaning their keyboards. It’s such a huge problem, the company in question has come up with “UNIQUE BITTERGENT TECHNOLOGY” to help “deter inhalant abuse". Or so they say. We know what the real story is. The dirtistas are threatened by clean electronics, firearms, and artificial plants.

In other, less inane news, I have been working on getting parts of the True20 Companion prepared for use in my campaign. Most of the fantasy section will be included, and I’m still thinking about using ritual magic and corruption as well. I’ve already started introducing the heroic character archetypes. The book is great, and although I don’t think I’ll feel the need to make custom roles for the game, there is a lot there to use.

True20 Companion, a great book for all setting and system tweakers looking for a guide and some interesting additions.

Read more! »

In discussing True20 stuff with Kad for the Shards of Jade group, we again got on the subject of alternatives to rolling the d20 (in a d20 system, of course), and the various merits and drawbacks involved in changing the system’s roll.

For starters, I updated the graph I made before, not in content but in style. I needed to play around with Gnuplot anyway, so I figured to give the graph a revisit.

The d20 roll obviously is a linear distribution of 1 through 20. With the d20 system, this randomness is modified in various ways to provide a result higher or lower than your roll, but nevertheless, the core of the process is the random number provided by the roll. On a d20, you have an equal 5% chance of getting any roll. In some ways this is interesting (such as often getting at least a couple natural 20s every session), but perhaps not desirable.

So, with some googling and thinking, a handful of alternatives were put together. (Okay, 3d10, drop the lowest is just there as a joke.) The impact on the game is nuanced, and not possible to quickly explain, but in short, all of the alternatives emphasize the character’s skill over random chance, by reducing the likelihood of reaching high rolls and causing opposed checks and ability checks to become far less about chance.

An in-depth look at a couple alternatives is here, ending with the same conclusion we’ve made: if you’re going to switch, switch to 2d10. We haven’t decided if we will switch yet, but I’m interested to see what others think. I think I brought it up, half-jokingly, at Iron Heroes once.

Just some itty bitty news.

I’ve finally done something with the corpse of my first Mini-ITX machine, commonly known as the emulator box. The board burned out a while ago, due to my zeal (okay, and a couple ill-placed magazines), but everything else seemed to still breathe life, so I cut my losses and swiped the 512 MB RAM, tossing it and the living Mini-ITX into the vacant case. That, when combined with a second Ethernet card and some time, produces a “new” Linux router for the apartment. DHCP, DNS, Squid, all of those fun goodies. I might bother producing links to all the places I used later.

There are “share on del.icio.us” and “share on Facebook” links at the end of all posts now, if you’re using one of my custom themes. Not that there’s often something here to be considered blogosphere worthy, but still. It’s an option, if you want to stand tall and proudly say “yes, I read Brian Stephan’s ramblings, and you should too!”

Got the IRC gaming group to get on the Sepulture bandwagon, mostly in an attempt to freshen up the game a bit and to help me consolidate my brainspace, since the Sepulture content needs a lot of love still.

Also, are you aware how unbelievably cold it is? I have my coat on while I type this. In my apartment.

Finished converting the IRC gaming group to True20 today (well, yesterday, technically) and ran a game that went a good eight hours. Filled with needlessly excessive and thorough exploration of cliffs near an orc-infested keep the party wanted. Took a while to get going, and combat took some getting used to, but by the end we were moving at a fairly good clip.

Thoughts on the system after one day of actually playing it:

• With the Conviction variant (1 + Cha + 1 per 2 levels past 1st instead of 3 + 1 per 2 levels past 1st), and free access to the Lucky feat, Charisma is a good stat (finally). Maybe even too powerful with Lucky, giving a Cha bonus to both Fatigue (Willpower) checks and Toughness saves to resist damage.
• Combat is more lethal and more unpredictable. One bad Toughness save (instead of using hit points in True20, one makes a save vs. a difficulty; the degree of failure is how much damage is taken) can cause huge problems, dropping an otherwise healthy character to disabled or even dying, and badly in need of healing. Yet on the other hand, for most of the combat (when encounters are balanced), ultimate victory is a process of slowly plugging away at a large enemy, wearing them down, doing little knicks of damage until their Toughness save is so bad they start failing massively and taking real damage.
• The above mostly eliminates the “I have massive armor so I’ll just wade through this torrent of enemies” syndrome. Every little hurt condition affects all later saves.
• Healing is more important; one lethal Toughness save that failed by 5 or more imposes a -2 to just about every check, until the condition is removed. That alone can do a lot of damage to one’s effectiveness, since both traditional combat and most power activation depends on making checks.
• As one could imagine from the above three thoughts, there is a bit more bookkeeping necessary in combat. A necessary evil, I feel, since it allows for more realistic-feeling combat, with tiring combatants.
• Tying power activation (spellcasting, more or less) to fatigue instead of static spells per day lists is brilliant. Important but not terribly consequential powers (like establishing mental contact, or creating little lights) do not immediately fatigue, promoting their use, while a combat caster with a good Will save can unleash many spells while not becoming too tired, which helps thwart spell misers who worry that every spell would be better applied in the future.
• An interesting balance in parry and dodge. High dodge characters are easier to maintain — a high Dex gives bonuses to attack and makes one harder to hit in almost any situation, but high Str, critical for dealing massive damage leads to good parry, which is only relevant in melee combat. The melee combatant has two options for defense, and can generally do more damage than their ranged counterpart, but they put themselves at risk of taking more damage themselves.
• Not sure if Con is any more or less important now; instead of being a major contributor to hit points, it is now a major contributor (one of only a few) to the Toughness save. Maybe alleviated slightly by the fact that Toughness and Fort saves are the only real uses of Con.
• There are some powers with static Difficulty values which kind of seem to scream for a challenge system which increases Difficulty, but I have yet to see one in the rules, although I swore such a thing was there.

That’s it for the True20 thoughts for now, although I’m certain more are coming as I crunch some numbers. I’m looking forward to eventually using this system with the real-space gaming group, if I ever get the time to commit to that. Maybe for Thanksgiving break…

Time for a tiny update to keep my blogging streak alive.

A template for my True20 game regarding residents of Sepulture (so in simpler terms, the dead) can be found at http://wiki.incorporeal.org/Sepulture:Sepulture#Deceased_.28template.29

More updates are still on their way.

Oh. And I have just been informed that Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray barb to the chest. :(

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200609/s1732439.htm

The naturalist and television star Steve Irwin has died in a diving accident in far north Queensland. He was 44.

Police say he was stung through the heart by a stingray while diving off Port Douglas.

He was filming a documentary when the accident occurred around midday AEST near the Low Isles.

A helicopter arrived with paramedics on board to try to resuscitate him, but it was too late.

Where the hell did this Saturday go? Oh yeah, terrible movies on SciFi...

• Deadly Swarm
• Locusts: The 8th Plague
• Larva
• Raptor Island (one of my favorites)
• Manticore

...and I'm working on the end of King of the Lost World at the moment. Very awful. That's followed by Sabretooth, Attack of the Sabretooth, and Not of This Earth. Today's average rating on IMDB? 3.2 3.35.

Alright, Stephan, stay on topic.

Updated the wiki for Sepulture stuff a bit last night, there's now information on Sepulture (the plane), the rest is still forthcoming.

A couple significant updates to IncorporealWiki regarding my True20 game.

• A list of available powers (this may see some additions before I'm through).
• An additional barbarian-like background.
• Details and a revision to Death's Keeper.
• The beginnings of a planar discussion of the setting.

And changes still necessary to make:

• Finishing the planar discussion.
• Detailed description of Exis (the plane and the continent).
• Beginning discussion of the general theme of the campaign, fueled in part by conversation with Dan.

Huzzah updates!