Handheld Gaming Update: ROG Ally X vs. the Switch 2

 Well much has gone on in this weird space of "video game devices you can hold in your hand." In prior posts I talked about my experience with the Asus ROG Ally, the Steam Deck, and the Lenovo Legion Go. Since then, I have ditched the Asus ROG Ally and Legion Go, selling both to cohorts who found good homes for them. For the Steam Deck I have my original, but last year I upgraded to the Steam Deck OLED model, which was a nice improvement in terms of screen quality and battery size. 

And then....I picked up the Asus ROG Ally X, about a month or so back, when I saw it on a bit of a sale, and just last week wandered into a Target and found a Switch 2 on the shelf. So no sooner had I pared my handheld collection down than I reboosted it back up. This does mean that I have been exploring the advantages of the Asus ROG Ally X more or less in tandem with the Switch 2, and have some thoughts for those interested. 

Right off the bat, I'll just state this: if you want the best overall handheld device with the most flexibility, I think the Ally X is the best choice. It has superior screen quality and processing power to the Switch 2; it has better battery life; it does rest on a Windows 11 platform but I understand you can load up Steam OS for Linux if you see fit. While a Xbox themed ROG Ally X is on the horizon, that doesn't appear to do much that this one doesn't other than provide a streamlined Windows experience. I have been running plenty of "play anywhere" Xbox titles on the Ally X already with excellent results, so not sure how much better the branded edition will be.

The Switch 2 does have some cool features going for it, though. They are very specifically as follows: you can play most of the original Switch games on it, so backwards compatibility in like 95% of cases so far; it is a smaller "footprint" and weighs less than every other handheld except the original Switch and Switch Lite; it runs all those Nintendo games you like (well for me that's the Xenoblade games, Metroid, and I dabble in the Zelda titles but never get far in them). It's got gorgeous visuals compared to the original Switch, and a surprising number of older games run better on it, which is good because not many Switch 2 games are out yet, certainly not enough to merit a purchase on their own. If you get a Switch 2, grab Fast Fusion, it is easily the cheapest and best tech demo for the system yet (at only $15 USD it is much cheaper thank both Cyberpunk 2077 and Mario Kart World, both of which are also good tech demos for the machine).

Both systems have some downsides. The Ally X is still a Windows environment, and that can be annoying. It's a much smoother experience now than when the original Ally came out, however. They also fixed the MicroSD card problem, so that's a positive (don't even try using a MicroSD card in the original Ally unless you want to heat-kill it). The Ally X is a bigger device, so its a bit chonkier (not as chonky as all those Legion models, though).

Meanwhile the Switch 2's downside is that if you compare games on it to equivalent games on the Ally X, you will immediately realize that the best Switch 2 can do right now is at best mid-tier for what the Ally X can do. I was running Gears 5 and Starfield on the Ally X and it was a smooth experience for Gears 5 and pretty good for Starfield, but if you load up Cyberpunk on the Ally X and compare it to the Switch 2, you will notice that the Switch 2 version is doing some tricks to make it work, while the Ally X is just a better overall experience, with more options to tweak the graphics to suit to taste (Switch 2 have quality and performance mode, that's it).

EDIT: should mention price. While the Ally X goes for around $800 base model or $900 for a model with more storage, the Switch 2 of course is $450, which many news outlets have been complaining about. As price goes, its actually pretty reasonable. It's not 2017 anymore, unfortunately; a $300 original Switch is simply not going to hold a candle to the Switch 2. I feel like I got my money's worth, in other words.

For owning both systems I am content to have them, and they both have their use cases. For travel I kind of prefer the Ally X overall, but the Switch 2 continues to allow you the ability to play games without having to check in on the internet (unless you've set it up that way), and has a smaller print when it comes to packing and portability. It also is built for multiplayer experiences, and can handle that easily. The Ally X makes up for that by letting you access any of your PC gaming libraries on the go. Both seem to have decent battery life, as far as handhelds go; but you want to tweak Ally X to improve overall performance. I haven't tried running them both down yet, but I have gotten more time of the Ally X overall on an unplugged playthrough.  

Cypher System Rising

 As the weeks have gone by I've begun to settle on a system with consistency: Cypher System. I mean sure, I've run this plenty in the past, but I've honestly not run it in a good while and I think maybe now it would be the ideal solution to my doldrums. 

Cypher System does have some warts, though. It's a player-roll facing system, meaning the GM never really needs to roll dice except maybe for some random cypher charts or something. 99% of the time the players roll to attack, roll to defend, roll to take action, etc. So this does mean that the core conceits of the system depend on player honesty and understanding of this mechanic. A player who unfaithfully does not report a roll of a 1 which incurs a GM intrusion, for example, is defeating a key story-telling element of the game. 

The second issue with Cypher is really user-dependent: the system's dice pool methodology has some "numbers that mean other numbers, and ways of making tasks reduce in difficulty that also mean converting to numbers" sort of approach that can seem simple enough to some, and can be oddly baffling to others. I know that when I first got Cypher System I sat on it for like a year or two because the core conceit of the system seemed so counter-intuitive to me, and felt like it would be a real hassle to teach people. I eventually pushed past that (long, long ago) and quickly grokked and loved the mechanics for what they are, but this has always proven to be a problem for at least two of my regular players. One of them has actually expressed keen interest in playing it though, despite my recalling she was very frustrated with the system in the past.....so maybe she (like me) suddenly grokked it. 

The third and final issue I have always had with Cypher (and other players of the system as well) is that XP gain is pretty quick, and the rules as written make it that way. Your characters advance over 6 tiers of play, the system's version of leveling and in each tier you have four advances which cost 4 XP. In addition, there are a range of temporary and circumstantial benefits that can be gained by spending XP. In the past, and this tends to reflect the first edition of Cypher, it was easy to see PCs gain power creep by advancing fairly quickly in tiers (especially if they horde XP for long term advancement, as that only takes 16 XP to hit a tier cap). This led to a problem where the PCs were improving overall power level faster than the GM could readily account for it (a polite way of saying that you could plot out threats that in a matter of sessions become trivial and inconsequential for the players to overcome). 

My first few campaigns of Cypher System (all in the first edition) ran into this issue, as I would tend to hand out enough XP through GM intrusions along with 1-2 XP at the end of the session, and the players hoarded XP so they tended to tier up every 4 sessions or so. After 20 sessions the PCs were approaching tier 5 and the storyline (and my newbie GM experience at the time) meant my plot was pacing for a group about half that power level, and they were already hitting what felt to me like godlike levels of performance with boosted Edges, talent pools and effort levels. In Cypher System, higher stat values often simply mean that difficult tasks at tier 1 by tier 4-6 often become "descriptive sentences in which the GM explains how cool you are" as you step past a task...unless of course the GM wants to drop an intrusion on you.  

Under the Revised rules there's more wiggle room baked in to how one goes about handing out and allowing XP to be spent, so I think this will pose less of an issue. The new rules emphasize options such as requiring players to spend XP awarded in-game to be spent in game, and XP between sessions (so end of game, for goals met, story arcs progressed, etc.) to be retained for tier advancement. The GM can award XP at a slower pace as well by focusing only on XP gained through character arc advancement, and between-game awards amending that total for specific "group/plot" goals. They give the GM a lot of leeway, in other words.

In addition, as the group levels up I have since wrapped my own head around the idea that higher level threats and concerns in Cypher System are (and should be) more about discovery, cosmic revelation, and existential threats of unusual nature, and the things which were of dire nature at tier 1 are now just footnotes along the way. 

Either way, I am looking forward to this planned excursion, and I have been pretty exclusively focused on what I can do with Cypher next. I am still mulling over the idea of Numenera vs. one of the Cypher genre settings (or maybe Magnus Archive which is rather cool), but its definitely going to be this. 

Hot Take: D&D 5.5 is kind of boring now (but it could just be me)

 Well, the title says it all: I played more D&D 5.5 ongoing last night, and while fun was had, I realize I've been avoiding combats, sometimes like, a lot. We have them; the game kicked off with an encounter between the group and a red hag, some millitaurs (both from Tome of Beasts), and a stone giant from the new Monster Manual. The fight was brief and while its "sort of fun" the combat wasn't terribly exciting for a group of level 6 PCs, nor was there much in terms of dynamic interaction......D&D 5.5 is basically a process of generating numbers (attack rolls and damage) to make other numbers (hit points) go down. Words are interspersed to imply something different is going on, but ultimately it is a very basic process. 

I would argue this isn't entirely a D&D 5.5 issue, and not even really an issue; I may just have played this game for too long now, and its no longer as exciting. But there are some fingers that can be pointed: D&D 5.5, for example, has some big numbers being thrown around, and there's not a lot of nuance; the notion that someone might miss an attack isn't terribly common; its far more likely that the staying power of a monster isn't in resisting damage or avoiding it, but instead in being a bag of hit points. All of the older mechanics that let a monster bypass, ignore, or deflect damage are mostly gone these days. I was musing on the fact that the red hag, with her magic resistance, was still easily dropped by magic missiles in the final round (she was whittled down to a few HP left) because, unlike the original incarnation of magic resistance from long ago there's no possibility it would affect magic missiles. 

The characters all have their cool attacks and abilities, but these are by and large the same abilities, used over and over again, because the game system has since at least 4th edition been trying to flatten out and remove all the bubbles or bloat in character options; the bygone era of 3rd edition where a PC could have too many choices to pick from in terms of actions and strategies are a thing of the past, for the large part. It all plays more or less the same.

So for me, this means I spend an inordinate amount of gameplay time focusing on the story, exploration, role play moments and mystery because that stuff is fun and doesn't get old. But for my players, some of them do look forward to those combat moments. It is hard for me to admit to them that....yeah....those combat moments are just not doing it for me. And for some of my players they aren't that excited anymore, either. 

Last time we played Cypher System a couple of my players commented that it was really exciting to play a game where the combat/conflict was genuinely exciting and unpredictable, with a sense of tension. It is very, very hard to get that feeling in D&D 5E. This is, of course, why a lot of my recent posts are all about figuring out what game system I want to play next.

Heck, I feel like I would love to be playing this exact campaign I am in, right now, but with the Cypher System and Godforsaken fantasy book. That would be cool! And fun! And surprising. Maybe that will be what we do next. 

On AI Slop Part 2 - When the AI Consumes Bigger Projects

 I just received my hardcover copy of Delta Green: God's Hunt, a four part campaign series that is, as all things tend to be with Arc Dream and Delta Green, really cool. The reason it comes up is because, in a rather interesting observation from my son, we were looking at the cover, and I was speculating on the insects on the cover swarming the astronaut when my son said, "That really looks AI generated." 

I was a bit defensive at first, suggesting that there appear to be obvious tells its not AI generated by the use of certain painting techniques, such as on the bugs, to evoke imagery through a stylized brushstroke, and that I wouldn't think AI could easily replicate that, but I sort of realized that yeah, at this point it probably could. Moreover, my son pointed out some other inconsistencies, such as the difficulty in telling where a thumb is on the hand. My take is, the thumb is hidden....but in consideration, that's not really an easy "pose" for a human hand. But still....it seems so unlikely to me this would be AI art, right?

Well, when I read the contents of the book I find that there are credits to Dennis Detwiller as the art director and illustrator, which is interesting. There's no other artist in the book? My old school self is just impressed at Dennis Detwiller's art talent even as modern me is growing suspicious. My son, however, finds it odd that no piece is evidently signed, as real artists tend to leave signatures. I don't muddy the water by pointing out that AI can probably imitate badly scribbled artist's signatures easily enough. 

When in doubt on these things I google a bit, and do hit a patreon notice about Dennis taking steps into using AI art. I'm not a patreon supporter so can go no further on this, but it does lead to me now leaning toward the notion that my son, in fact, is right. 

All of this is a bit of a shame. I really want to enjoy my Delta Green works, but at the expense of real artists? I am more than a little uncomfortable at supporting projects out there which are not giving real artists a fair shake. To contrast, there are an enormous wealth of real artists supporting the gorgeously illustrated Daggerheart RPG (more about that soon.) You know all those weirdly bemused reviews I and many others had about the oddly off-putting art in the new D&D books? Yeah well all the really cool, evocative and inspiring fantasy art is sitting in Daggerheart, which resoundingly slaps the D&D art  around when it comes to showing it how its done. But if you do some searching, people have at times questioned if the art in the game is AI generated, and while this has been refuted, it is an example of how the use of AI more broadly is impacting the ability of people to tell when a real person is behind the art. 

Anyway.....more examples of how AI generated art is creeping in to places you could not or would not expect it, and the unfortunate results. Look, I get that some AI art is now reaching the point where it is quite impressive. But every time I see a piece of AI art like that, it means somewhere an actual artist was not given a chance to show their work and get paid for it. I know art is probably one of the most expensive components of writing an RPG product (especially for small press publishers), but this is one corner of a larger erosion of human value and input into the picture; I'd rather just not buy a product that doesn't support live creators (be they artists or authors) than contribute to a product that removes live creators from the mix. Unfortunately this means I need to be more meticulous in my consideration of Arc Dream purchases in the future.  And if I am on Drivethrurpg going forward, if your art credits on your listing don't look like the ones on Daggerheart RPG which says "hand crafted" (see here), then I am going to assume that declining to identify your Creation Method (as Delta Green Products do, for example) is tacitly endorsing AI use in your art, and that's a no-go for me. 

AFTERTHOUGHT: I was looking through older Delta Green books and it seems Dennis Detwiller is pretty consistently the only identified illustrator, even when its from books that predate the rise of AI generated content. This certainly makes sense, as Delta Green has a pretty distinct style to it and having one illustrator will keep that style. Maybe Dennis doesn't want to identify himself as utilizing AI in the art to avoid conflating his use of the tool with his own style, but this is only exemplifying my point: AI is muddying the waters here, badly, when it comes to identifying human generated works vs. AI generated works. So I suppose if, regardless of tools in use (treating AI as a tool) the artwork would remain consistently the vision and intent of Dennis Detwiller then there is perhaps no conflict here. But how much longer before we start seeing competition that uses AI with prompts like, "Make it like Dennis Detwiller does?" I can see a lot of art like that on Drivethrurpg already.....even with the "block AI art" button turned on. 

No matter where you look at it, this road doesn't end well for human artists and authors. 

Random Musings - AI Slop on Drivethrurpg (and elsewhere)

 I was browsing Drivethrurpg.com and noticed a lot of what looked like AI generated content (cover images on the home page). Sure enough, these were listed in their descriptions as containing AI generated content. I double checked my account settings and the icon said I had it set to turn off showing AI generated content. Hmmmm. I clicked it on and off again and now it seems to be working.

It is weird, because there is indeed a lot of AI generated content. The one image I checked out was a solo scifi book (solo journaling book? Not sure). The woman had too few fingers (but had a cybernetic hand so who knows) and her negative percent fat stomach had more muscles than I think actual human bodies do. Still, it seems like there's a lot of this art out there. 

As someone who grew up in a family of artists I can empathize with the irritation and existential threat that AI art creates for real artists doing real work. From a purely aesthetic perspective I find the AI art to feel derivative and soulless. But from the writer's perspective, after decades of battling with people who liked to pirate work and complain about cost (as there's a majority out there who are good consumers of content but have no creative bone in their bodies) I eventually let it go with the caveat that hey, these people who pirate were never going to pay anyway. 

While I gave up on the fight of protecting written works, I feel a bit differently about AI art, though. I am not a great artist myself by any means, but if I put some effort into it I can do something halfway okay. If you are a good artist, one would like to get some fair compensation for your work, right? But AI art removes the creative soul from the process, generates a product that is purely derivative of other works, and ends up being, to use the popular term, slop. 

A lot of people like slop, though. And some of these AI products I saw on Drivethrurpg.com are probably not coming with content that was heavily written by a human, and may also be computer generated. How much of a market is there for this? None of the AI stuff I saw appears to be showing up on the top 100 list on the site, so that's probably an indicator that people prefer content with actual agency behind it. If this is true, then does this content, which will only appeal to people who are not bothered by AI slop, really harm anyone anymore than the pirates who would never pay for a PDF will not also harm anything?

The answer of course is: yes it will, as does the ancient problem of piracy and the devaluation of the work and effort a creator puts into their work, be it writing or art. But without a good solution, which the internet overlords are disinterested in providing unless it suits them to do so in some way, nothing will happen here. AI slop will, over time, devalue human work as it becomes more normalized. PDF piracy at least diminished somewhat, but people still engage with it and continue to perceive a PDF as somehow having no value to it despite containing the core energy and creative output necessary for the PDF to be worth downloading in the first place.

There's not much to be done other than to abstain from supporting AI slop generators. Likewise, to not pirate PDFs if you want to reflect a respect for the creators of actual human content. But these things require taste and consideration, and the large crowd out there that has grown conditioned to consume content regardless of quality are a tidal wave of cultural destruction.

Okay, rant off! 

Narrowing the Game Nights Down

 I've been gaming a lot in recent months....too much by a long stretch, as the fun of hanging with friends and supporting my son's desire to run games overwhelms the pragmatism of how much time I really have for fun vs. work and life. Well, I made an important step recently to free up some of that necessary time and have bowed out of my Saturday group for at least the next few months, which will help. I am keeping my Wednesday game going as that one is firmly rooted in the hump day, the least productive day of the week when it comes to "getting stuff done" after work is over anyway, so its good enough for me to continue gaming on that night! Been my main game night for decades now, anyway.

Running just one game a week has me thinking more seriously about what I actually do want to run, though. And despite my prior recent posts musing about all sorts of systems from now and then, I think I've been able to narrow down some thoughts on this significantly: 

First, Pathfinder 2E is a better design and experience than D&D 5.5 in every way. But, it is what my son is running on Friday nights now when he GMs, and for those nights I can attend that is probably enough for me. Plus, a nontrivial chunk of my desire for a break is "fantasy gaming burnout" so I'm trying to reduce the amount of D&D or Pathfinder I run so I can recharge the batteries. 

Second, for game systems which deliberately prompt creative energy I have to hand it to Cypher System. This is a resoundingly smart, creative engine which encourages interesting and fun games. So Cypher is definitely "in."

Third, some of my more traditional choices stand out as obvious preferences that I enjoy running short form campaigns in, therefore providing what I need in the form of a break from long-form campaigning and D&D specifically: Traveller and Call of Cthulhu come to mind right away. Less "traditional" but equally viable are the indie alts for these systems, which are Mothership and Liminal Horror respectively. So all four of these games are viable choices to focus on.

Now to just decide what to run, and when! I think my Wednesday group would be a good sport about any of these systems, but I probably need to at least get the D&D game to a happy pause point (or conclusion) first. 

The 90's RPG Nostalgia Bug

 I've been thinking lately about how getting older impacts your perception of current value in change vs. the experience held from long ago. Or, put another way, the contrast between where gaming is now vs. where it was (for me, at least) in that golden era I hold in memory that is the late 80's and early 90's. 

I think a lot of people who get bitten by the nostalgia bug tend to think of their gaming experiences in their teens, but despite being a very active member of the fanzine gaming community in the eighties during my middle and high school years, I don't actually have a lot of "fond" memories of that time to fill with nostalgia....despite being so active in gaming, I didn't get to actively game very much at all until I was in college. I spent most of those formative years on a remote ranch in the middle of nowhere, so gaming was something I did on rare occasion during trips, or vicariously through the fanzines and play-by-mail resources. My sister and I managed some one-on-one gaming, but my first real, consistent game group didn't manifest until I was driving 63 miles one-way to my first year in community college. 

That first group was great! We were all around the same age, having the same new freshman college experience, and the group was very forgiving of my desire to mainly run DragonQuest (the SPI edition mixed with the somewhat sanitized TSR edition) and Runequest 3. They eventually convinced me to pick up AD&D 2nd edition and the rest is history. My college years were laden with consistent weekly games throughout the next six or so years, with campaigns designed to last one whole semester each. It was fun stuff.

So for me, my fondest memories of gaming are during college. I started thinking about how it would be fun to look back upon that time, and contrast how things were then with where things are today. How many of the RPGs I loved back then are still around now, and how many would it make more sense for me to find some old copies of on Ebay to "relive" that moment in time? How many back then are actually not worth revisiting? And....how many are still around today in a recognizable manner?

So first off, what were the games I ran iin college? I have a fairly modest list:

AD&D 2nd Edition - this was the go-to system. I ran AD&D in its new incarnation pretty much weekly from late 1989 all the way until D&D 3rd edition arrived on the scene. 

Runequest 3rd - I actually ran a fair amount of this early on using just the Standard Boxed Set and later ran the Deluxe book with more enthusiasm by 1992ish. My Realms of Chirak campaign initially started as a Runequest campaign in its very first form (there was also a Gamma World connection).

DC Heroes (MEGS Edition) - I ran a lot of this in the 80's and by 1992-93 I ran a very fun campaign using the 3rd edition of the DC Heroes MEGS rules.

MegaTraveller - This was the edition of Traveller I truly cut my teeth on. I had run a miscellany of Traveller Classic in the 80's, but the vast majority of my Traveller campaigning was during college with MegaTraveller. I even actually used the Imperium setting for most campaigns back then, too. I was one of those gamers who eventually washed out with The New Era, but I did give it my best shot.

GURPS 2nd and 3rd - I used GURPS for most of my campaigning that didn't fit neatly anywhere else. I used GURPS for most of my Cthulhu Mythos games as well, interestiingly; I preferred it a bit over Call of Cthulhu (which was I believe up to 3rd and then 4th edition in the 90's).

Call of Cthulhu - I only ran a bit of it (I used it as a resource for GURPS Cthulhu mostly) but it counts; it was pretty pivotal in terms of my horror gaming preferences.

Metamorphosis Alpha - not the original but rather the Amazing Engine powered game! I ran a lengthy and very fun campaign using this singularly unusual edition.

Dark Conspiracy - I loved the first edition of this game, it was amazing; I have heard it is now owned by Mongoose Publishing, and I am keen to see what lies in its future. Dark Conspiracy was a fantastic weird, dystopian horror setting and I ran a lot of it.

Kult 1E and 2E - the other horror game I ran a lot of; when I wasn't running GURPS Horror or Dark Conspiracy was Kult, which was as close to "Clive Barker the RPG" as one could get, even now. Back then Kult was a fantastic, creepy reality-warping deep dive into weird non-Cthulhu horror and I loved it.

Mutant Chronicles - I loved this RPG and collected all of it. I managed to run a couple campaigns, but it never quite took off the way I'd like it to.

Cyberpunk 2020 - this was the second most played system in my college years behind AD&D. Cyberpunk was highly formative for the time, so much so that it resides in memory as a fantastic reflection of where we imagined a future we'd live to see might go....and how so very different (and yet similar) that future actually is now that 2020 is in the rearview mirror.

There were likely other RPGs I dabbled in, but those were the big ones for the most part.

So where do these RPGs stack up by contrast today? Unsurprisingly (as this hobby does not grow as much as it seems) just about every one of these games is either still around in a new edition or has had a recent revival within the last 10-15 years. But are the new editions comparable in experience, particularly in terms of the nostalgia factor? This is my own personal take:

AD&D 2nd Edition - well, we all know where this went. It got more complicated (3E), then jumped the shark (4E), then revived itself spiritually (5E), and lately may have both jumped the shark and stagnated at the same time. But interestingly, I no longer feel an overwhelming desire to play the original 2E edition.....I would rather, like many other older gamers, look to what is new in the OSR community where the spirit (rather than the design) of the game thrives. My current poison of preference is Shadowdark or just sticking with D&D 5.5 or Tales of the Valiant. So Nostalgia does not win here (yet).

Runequest 3rd - The thing I liked about Avalon Hill's edition of Runequest was that Glorantha was optional. I could use the rules to make my own setting (as I did), or to run adventures in a mytho-historical earth. The current way to do this is with the admittedly excellent Basic Roleplaying RPG, but unless you have the reprint monographs that were based on Runequest 3, you won't have all the resources that originally were packaged in the Runequest 3 Deluxe Set. Runequest Glorantha in its modern incarnation is, while a fine system, entirely focused on Glorantha and is not welcoming to Runequesters who were fans of the mytho-historic earth settings. Chaosium is thankfully rectifying a bit of this with the new Vikings RPG using BRP, but even then....not the same as what the original Runequest 3 accomplished. So for my purposes? Playing this game in its original incarnation is a strong preference.

DC Heroes - interestingly this game had a successful Kickstarter reprint that may release later this year. I will be curious to see where that goes. I loved playing this back in the day, but my enthusiasm to revisit it is conditionally dependent on the players I have; the group I ran for in 1992-93 was very much in sync with the spirit of a comic book superhero RPG; these days it is harder to find such a group.

MegaTraveller - my memory of this edition is that it was great for the day, but it only got more convluted before it got less. Thankfully the great thing about Traveller is that its current edition with Mongoose Publishing is arguably the best edition to date, and this is one case where the contemporary version of the game can scratch that nostalgia itch quite easily.

GURPS - This is a rough one. I do believe that the current edition of GURPS (4E) is its most comprehensive and well organized, but something changed in the translation from 3rd edition to 4th edition that made the game a harder sell and less "friendly" for lack of a better word. GURPS 4E has an entire line of resources today in the form of "How to GM" books that suggest something was lost in translation from 3E to 4E. Unfortunately I suspect that it had a lot to do with the fact that 3rd edition was more concerned with parsing out content by setting book, and providing a flexible but less complete core experience, which accidentally meant is was more digestible and modular....while 4E became more comprehensive, but like Hero System, it also became more overwhelming and less welcoming to the new gamer, or the crowd that used to be able to do pick up and go games of GURPS. I mean....remember when GURPS provided a quick random character generator and it didn't pose any problems for quick play? Yeah....unfortunately the shift in design focus to 4E removed that convenience, replacing it with awkwardly formatted templates and a never-ending focus on mechanical rigor. So maybe finding an old copy of GURPS 3E might not be such a bad idea here.

Call of Cthulhu - like Traveller, this one only got better with time. You can even find 1st and 2nd edition in print again if you want thanks to a Kickstarter, and the 7th edition can be as nice or cruel to players s you desire. Call of Cthulhu's contemporary experience is if anything even better than it was back in the day, or maybe my ability to run campaigns with it is simply easier now thanks to experience? Either way, the newest edition of the game scratches that nostalgia itch just fine.

So how about the rest? Well, with Mutant Future you had a revival but it scrapped the original game engine and wedded it to the 2D20 engine from Modiphius, which was a mistake in my opinion. Then Kult worked out a Powered by the Apocalypse hybrid approach, and while it works....it's also somehow no longer quite the same feel as the original game (imo). Then there's Metamorphosis Alpha, which got a reboot on the original from Ward and Goodman Games, which is definitely cool but unfortunately my unique niche case for running the Amazing Engine edition is, I feel, unreplicatable....I will forever remember that campaign fondly for the unique and unrepeatable moment it rests within. 

Cyberpunk 2020 is also unique. I gotta be honest....the new Cyberpunk Red looks great and my son loves it. But when I crack it open I wish I was opening Cyberpunk 2020, and it just doesn't hold up to that edition in time, unfortunately. Worse yet, If I do look at CP2020 I can't imagine going back to it; the 90s really are gone, along with that vision of a future 2020. The new 2020's are both much less exciting and in many ways slowly getting worse than the megacorporate dystopia that was softened by cool cyberware; and the video game exemplifies a fantasy now, not a future projection. Cyberpunk Red and 2077 are both visions of an alternate reality; the next wave of future punk fiction will be a sober look at where the real 2020's today are taking us, which is unfortunately into a bleaker future than anyone really wants to game in (since we're living in it, instead). 

The shining light is Dark Conspiracy, which barely survived the GDW crash in the late nineties, to be tepidly kept on life support in some poorly realized updated editions. So maybe now with Mongoose in control we will finally see the game get properly revived with the dedication it deserves. We shall see!

 

Observations on Running Three D&D-Types At Once (D&D 2024 vs. Shadowdark vs. Pathfinder)

 Running Shadowdark back to back with Pathfinder and D&D 5.5 has been an interesting experience. I have observed the following in running what is essentially 3 "D&D likes" at the same time:

1. D&D 5.5 has some nice (small, but nice) improvements on monster design...subtle, but makes a difference in actual play. Monk still feels very broken; you have to want, as DM, to design the encounter to actively kill the monk to have a chance of doing so. In running the game I am still hauling older books with me to fill out missing content in the newer edition, which is annoying. Overall though its still D&D 5E, just now in a slightly more abbreviated edition. I concede that it's fun....but maybe a tad long in the tooth. I now think D&D benefits from a bigger reset with new editions. This was not a big enough reset.

2. Pathfinder is proving the most enjoyable in terms of pacing vs. rules complexity; it falters only when player familiarity wanes (so a player with their act together progresses quickly; then a player who does not know what they are doing stops the game on their turn...stuff like that). I have adjusted to the system well enough, and feel like this is proving to be my "comfort zone" for a D&D-style game right now. I appreciate that it is easy to build a challenge for PCs in PF2ER that feels meaningful. My biggest gripe with the system these days is adjusting to all the modified content, stuff that is still there, but was "scrubbed" of old OGL references.....think kholo vs. gnoll, for example. Search the Monster Core for the Brain Collector! He's hidden away in there. Stuff like that.

3. Shadowdark feels simple....almost too simple....but as a result it's rules get in the way the least; the pacing of the game feels much smoother and faster than its more robust cousins as a result. Shadowdark also cleverly removes most "get out of jail" spells and effects from the players....truesight and feystep type stuff which can turn in to convenient "bypass encounter" mechanisms are simply absent from the game. The GM can include this stuff if desired through treasure and boons....but entirely at the GM's discretion.

This is, all in all, too much D&D-like for me to run all at once, even if I am enjoying all three games. I am now, in consideration of how much I am enjoying the rules pacing in Shadowdark, once again looking to another rules-minimal system: Cypher System, for a future non D&D-like game. 

Doing Too Much Gaming - Bad Time Management Theater

 I don't know why, but it seems easier for me now to get too many games going, even when I can arguably state I have less free time....or, in some cases, a need to value free time in which I am not doing anything in particular if I want; you know, things like reading, watching a show, going for a hike, cleaning the house, stuff like that. "Downtime" one might say.

So lately I've been wrestling with the fact that I have a periodic Tuesday night game online a friend GMs, the Wednesday night live game I have been running since the dawn of time (more or less), and the Saturday night game I have run on and off again for ages....and lately have been managing weekly due to my renewed interest in Pathfinder 2nd edition. Then there's Friday night: for a few weeks I experimented with playing in a local Pathfinder group which washed out due to GM health issues. The remaining players talked me in to running on that night, and I elected to run Shadowdark. It was fun! But then the common problem with RPGs rears its ugly head: weekly sessions. Repeatability. Time consuming dedication to a routine. I shoulda offered a one-shot! My bad.

On Wednesday I complicated things even worse by winding down Mythras and resuming D&D, now shark-jumped right to D&D 5.5. It's actually been perfectly fine; despite some elements being weird, I rather like most of the oddball little changes I've encountered so far, and some of the more subtle changes in monster design do make the newer monsters stand out as a bit tougher. It's hard to kill the monk, but you can do it with a bit of tactical consideration, so I no longer think the new monk is "that" powerful...just sometimes, in encounters not designed to overwhelm the monk.

But the point is that A: after stupid hand-wringing about design differences in the new edition it is all clearly just more nonsense sprouted by the Internet Machine, and the new edition is functioning just fine (even if I have to edit my orcs and drow in from the earlier iteration of 5E for now); and B: yeah, I didn't just double up on the D&D experience, I tripled-up on it, running D&D, then Shadowdark, then Pathfinder each week. So now I am at risk of burning out on too much D&D-like gaming again, and also not getting enough of the other non RPG fun stuff done I would like to do (which is mainly keeping up on my reading but hey, that takes a lot of time, too). 

There used to be a time when I could run two games a week (really, back in the day I only ran a weekly game on Wednesday and a bi-weekly game on Saturday) and it was just fine. What the heck happened??? I need to figure out a way to get this all under control. At bare minimum, I need more time to prep for the games I do run; Tuesday night should be my time to prep for Wednesday and Friday night my time to prep for Saturday (unless I am taking the missus out for the evening...although the missus was showing up to play Shadowdark so I guess that counts...?) Honestly, I know it all kind of went off the rails post covid, as that is when the addition of online gaming, the need to fill time with "things to do" made VTTs viable, leading to a tendency to overfill time with gaming. Newer games do admittedly need less prep time, too; back in 2010 when I was running Pathfinder 1E I really did need about as much time to prep as the game itself could take; and as many GMs may recall from those editions, it took some time to learn good shortcuts, tricks and techniques to reduce the GM workload; not so with the new D&D, new Pathfinder, and Shadowdark...these games reduce GM prep dramatically. 

Ah well....first world problems, I guess ...and honestly just the sort of problem to worry about when I'm avoiding a glance at my 401(k) retirement fund these days ;-)

 

Shadowdark Session One - Things I Learned from Actual Play

 I ran Shadowdark on Friday and can now safely make a few comments on its from an actual play experience. Here are my observations:

The rules are minimalist in design

I was surprised time and again at how brief and mechanically simple the rules were. There's a lot of buried "implied mechanical intent" hidden away in the rules, and while Shadowdark has a veneer of D&D and OSR all over it, this means despite looking and feeling like you are playing an old school version of D&D, you definitely can't make any assumptions about this edition of the rules from older editions (or even 5E); if you do, you will get tripped up. You can house rule.....but I suggest playing it straight for a few sessions before making any assumptions. Even the one house rule I brought in to play I am unsure was a wise idea.

There are some interesting approaches that are counter-intuitive to 5E and OSR design

That last observation leads to this one. Here are five examples of design in Shadowdark that is counter-intuitive to what your brain might tell you the rules should do:

--You don't start with max hit points (you roll), and you only add CON (maybe?) the first time, not every level

--Classes don't have auto-progression on to hit at all; it's gonna happen (sometimes) with talent rolls

--You don't add stats to damage (STR and DEX), just to hit rolls; damage might be added to your roll, but only as a class feature

--Monsters have no hit dice; I didn't notice this until I was in the thick of it

Leveling up is not what you might think

When you level up, your XP counter resets to zero. So if you are level 1, gain 12 XP for the session, and level up then you are now level 2 with 0 XP, and you now need 20 XP to get to level 2; this is not immediately clear from reading the book, because your learned experience from prior editions is telling you otherwise; and the incredibly brief rules-minimalist instructions do indeed tell you how it works in the book, but it took everyone at the table a minute or two to figure this out (but not the young players who did not have older editions burned into their memories)

XP through loot and prestige awards is deeply engrained and informs play

The XP mechanic is a deliberate throwback to AD&D, where treasure begets XP, but it does away with XP for combat and encounter engagement (traps, puzzles, etc.) more or less entirely. I am sure not everyone plays it this way, but I am for the sake of seeing how it leads to the flow of advancement. It means that the GM needs to keep this in mind; a stingy GM is not only withholding loot, he's withholding advancement. Luckily, advancement includes things like ephemera such as titles, deeds, land grants and promotions; anything in which the station or social ability of the characters might improve is considered an award in this system; in thinking about it, a group could fight an ogre and kill it, discover no loot, but then tell the tale and have a bard carry on their deeds on song thus spreading their reputation far and wide as monster slayers....and the song would be what gets them XP, which is an interesting approach. 

The "Cast a spell until you fail" mechanic is a fascinating limiter

So in Shadowdark you have spell slots, and you can keep casting spells as long as you keep making your caster checks. Once you fail, you lose access to that spell (and fail to cast it) until your next morning's preparation. It's a clever bit of book-keeping reduction and also allows casters to be useful until their luck runs out. I kind of wish I had conceived of this method back in the AD&D days, when I disliked Vancian magic so much I wrote an entire spell point mechanic to allow for more fluid spell casters in play. 

The game really wants you to go into dungeons with torches

I actually tripped myself up at the start of the game, focusing on perhaps more plot than Shadowdark demands or needs. Next session will lead quickly to a dungeon teeming with issues (and treasure), but yeah, to contrast with my Saturday Pathfinder game (yes, I ran two games this weekend) where everyone spent half the session in a complex mystery following leads, interviewing suspects and eventually getting into a brawl when the right (wrong?) suspects were caught up to, that game would have in Shadowdark terms been considered a bit of a wash, especially given how Shadowdark's entire focus appears to be on "things happen, preferably in dark and dangerous places." There's a reason it has the torch timer mechanic....although I did feel like its loose effort to identify what ancestries (or monsters) could see in the dark was a step too far in the simplification of things for me. Some third party supplements have added drow in as playable ancestries, for example, but then fail to address whether these drow would in any universe not have dark vision? The Shadowdark book suggests some things are better suited to moving about in total darkness, but seems to hand waive it off to the GM to determine what those things are. It's perhaps a slightly better approach this way than, to contrast, 13th Age's assumption that light doesn't matter at all unless you want it to, but still - I find it interesting that some of these "we do D&D differently" RPG approaches seem to double-down on light levels being a bone of contention that must be simplified or stripped out in some manner. Shadowdark's approach of saying "light totally matters, and nothing can see without it" is a fun approach to simplification, though. 

A lot of Shadowdark is spiritually reminding me of how Tunnels & Trolls plays; mechanically its closer to D&D, but the net result of its design choices (talents in classes, for example) and focus on dungeon delves (minus the treasure = XP mechanic, which is deeply antithetical to T&T's approach) really remind me of my old days with T&T.

Okay, more observations soon as we continue with Shadowdark!