Tales of the Valiant is here! Let the 2024 Edition Wars Commence

 I finally got my Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide and Monster Vault books, along with the very nice GM screen. Together these two books comprise all the core you need to play the game, so I am intrigued to see all the useful (but non critical) content in the GM's Guide coming out later this year.

The new books are sturdy, standard Kobold Press style, with gorgeous Kobold Press artwork that "feels like D&D" which is the best compliment I can provide to the game. Given that the Kobolds have essentially positioned Tales of the Valiant to be to D&D 6th Edition what Pathfinder 1E was to D&D 4th edition, this is a good place for them to reside.....whether that is by accident or design I cannot say. If D&D 6th edition -and go look at all the release details so far if you don't think the new D&D 2024 isn't a full-out new edition!- does not grab as much attention and go over as well as it could or should, then Tales of the Valiant could provide a more than suitable alternative. 

TotV will most likely remain niche no matter what, as its the kind of thing you sort of know about and get interested in if you're already hip deep into RPGs, while D&D has cornered a different kind of market with a more casual crowd who's overall interest is less obscure and more trendy. But if it turns out that D&D shed too much of its identifiable crust in the remaking, then we could indeed see people start looking around for alternatives (or maybe even just stick with their old books). 

I can see this happening: D&D 6E seems to be caught between two markets right now. The general perception of the new class and rules promotional details coming out strongly suggest a mechanical rework designed to appeal to a more hardcore crowd interested in a bit more mechanical rigor and tactical acumen. Simultaneously we are being told the game is being revamped for "how people really play" and there seems to be a strong push toward friendlier and less violent art, character focused development that leans hard into the "start as a super hero, not super zero" thematics that 5E was already noted for, and a broader sense of inclusion for game tables which eschew the rigors of mechanical combat in favor of pure role playing. These are interesting and very opposite demographics to appeal to simultaneously in a product....and I will be interested in seeing if WotC can pull it off.

There's also an entire segment of modern D&D gamers who have only come in to the hobby with 5th edition, and have never had to experience an edition change. For many, a perceived increase in mechanical rigor (or even just a moderate level of changes for change's sake) could be more than they want to deal with. I could be wrong....who knows!

Even if D&D 6E takes off and also succeeds via D&D Beyond and Roll20 (which, correct me if I am wrong, seems to be substituting for D&D Beyond's original goal of making the online experience more video-game and microtransaction driven), it's okay, because Tales of the Valiant clearly has the "I like physical books" crowd covered, and even better if you do want to go VTT with it, Shard Tabletop is a damned fine product. If TotV can manage to make Shard or something similar provide an easier set of tools to desgn and subsequently print out for live table gaming, they will manage to cater to both live and virtual crowds easily. With D&D Beyond.....I feel like maybe D&D is not as poised here as they had originally intended. But hey, it's not September yet, we shall see how that goes.

Amidst all this are other game systems, but I think they all suffer in odd ways that prevent them from getting to be the next Pathfinder 1E to D&D. Pathfinder 2E, for example, shed so much OGL identity that it is functionally a different sort of game now, one with few to no identifiable "D&Disms" left. At least Tales of the Valiant wasn't afraid to include an owlbear, for example! It retains a lot of stuff that firmly plants it in the realm of "D&Dlikes" which means its comfort level will be more familiar to many players now than PF2E. PF2E, meanwhile, is poised to be a good alternate for people who want a D&D inspired experience but also really want a lot more mechanical rigor and very tight math. There is a crowd for that, and they are already playing their preferred game (PF2E). 

Other potential contenders lurk out there, but each offers a niche experience. Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised is my favorite OSR experience next to OSE. OSE is also cool. Shadowdark is out there, and it seems like people do like it. None of them are poised to become the next Pathfinder 1E, though, because each is catering to a specific playstyle subset of the broader population.

Anyway, the last six months of this year will be a fun roller coaster for D&D and now Tales of the Valiant. I'm developing a new campaign (well, an old one set in a new -or old- era) for TotV and will start posting some details here soon. I think I have buy-in from my group, so I'm excited to get a chance to try it out before the D&D 6E madness hits in three months.

More thoughts on running D&D 3.5, D&D 5th and Pathfinder 2E at the same time

 So for several months now I've been running three different games: a more or less weekly Saturday Pathfinder 2E game, and a rotating weeknight session that jumps between D&D 3.5 and D&D 5E. In Pathfinder the group has hit 5th level, so still relatively low powered. D&D 3.5 deliberately started at level 1 and has crept up to level 4ish for most of the group now. D&D 5E rolled in at level 3 and is hitting level 5. 

In each case I worked out a fairly detailed scenario/plotline to keep things focused. In Pathfinder the group is a gang of young acolytes in a local assassin's guild with strong political, patriotic ties to protecting the city itself. They face a crisis as the heir to the throne is killed, then resurrected under extremely suspicious circumstances, even as their senior leadership are taken out of action, leaving them alone to figure things out.

In the D&D 3.5 game I started with a level 1-3 zone in which I worked out a main dungeon of interest and several minor side quests. I then built it around leading in to a specific Necromancer Games module from the good old 3.5 days of Necromancer, which shall remain nameless in case any of my players are reading. The key conceit of this campaign is it is extremely sandboxy and open-ended; I don't care where the PCs go, as long as they do something of interest....I have most angles covered unless they suddenly decided to journey two hundred miles away in a random direction.

In the D&D 5E game I an running it in a different section of the same world the D&D 3.5 game is taking place, and it starts with a group of ragtag mostly monstrous heroes who work for a local investigator of an orc-dominated city; they are essentially given tough jobs that require protecting the interests of the city against the neighboring human kingdom which often mistrusts the orc-run area. The group is currently wrapping the latest investigation, into the attack and kidnap of a priestess who channels the will of a popular goddess, and it is exposing a deeper mystery of other groups who seem interested in sowing conflict between the orcs and humans. I started this campaign as a 3.5 venture for the first scenario, but then moved to 5E for the next storyline as I wanted to do exactly what this article is about: contrasting 3.5 D&D against its successors, 5E and PF2E.

Here's what I've learned now after several months of gaming:

Pathfinder 2E Remains Fun but it's Balance is Too Much 

Pathfinder 2E's rigidly designed skill system is annoying. Seriously, I wish it was a broader set of skills, and not so tightly woven into the structured pathology of Pathfinder's overly balanced advancement, balanced to the point of eerie predictability. In fact, after running a level 1-20 and some smaller campaigns in PF2E, I have decided that, in contrast with the editions it is meant to replace or compete with, that it's highly structured style just isn't as flexible or fun as prior editions have been. PF2E, on occasion, has been compared to D&D 4E, and I can understand why: it's design was handled with too much emphasis on a specific play experience, and not enough feedback clearly entered during design and playtest to allow for Paizo's team to realize that there are other styles of play which their new game would not support so well (such as at my table, where I am sick and tired of calling on Society checks or generic crafting checks or Nature, Survival, etc. etc. for myriad other skills that the PCs should actually have as separate skills).

 Do I still enjoy running it? Yes, particularly in Roll20, which makes it easy. But it is painfully clear that in contrast with 3rd edition and 5th edition D&D that Pathfinder 2E feels a bit more like a "sandbox playground where everything has been padded to prevent the players from escaping its confines." Moreover, my players describe PF2E as "A GM's game, for GMs who don't like uppity players." They like elements of it....such as how ancestries work, but they also sense that a lot of PF2E's design went in to removing the potential for players to design truly interest characters and unexpected synergies. 

As a GM I have come to realize that combat encounters of even 1 CR more than the players can be a pain in the ass and risk unexpected deaths and TPK, it simply doesn't have the range that you can get out of D&D's editions for encounter design due to its hard focus on tight balance. I have ranted about this in prior blog posts, of course, but to give you an idea: I mostly design encounters around a CR 1-2 less than the PCs. Anything more than that is too trivial, and anything except a rare CR+1 will be too deadly with remarkable consistency. 

D&D 3.5 Is Funner Now That It's No Longer The Only Game Around

Put simply: D&D 3.5's key flaws evaporate once people are playing it for fun and enjoyment and you no longer have a large player base and online presence talking about min/max game design and turning everything into an arms race. My group is having fun in a way that very much reminds me of the early fun days from 2001 to 2006. Sometime after that I feel the game hit a level of notoriety and the obsession with optimal builds began to infect everyone who played it. Now? It's just a fund game and I am enjoying a sandbox campaign with a group that is barely optimized for fighting paper bags, let alone serious stuff. I run it as a DM aimed at providing for a good time, and I don't worry too much about balance at all, a welcome reprieve from PF2E on the other game night.

One thing I realize with 3.5: I prefer the old skill system. It was flexible, a little unpredictable, and had more stuff in it that feels natural to call out for in the course of play. I am sure a great many people much prefer "perception" as a skill (or not at all in the OSR crowd) but I love the fact that Spot, Listen and Search are three different things and can reflect that one PC might be a keen eyed observer but have a hearing problem, while another PC might have bad eagle vision but can search methodically with great efficiency. Good stuff.

I don't anticipate running D&D 3.5 past level 12 or so, but who knows. 

D&D 5E Feels Better to Run with 3.5 Fresh in Mind

D&D 5E is good, and running it back to back with 3.5 makes me appreciate it more. Most interestingly, sometimes I find myself using 5E as a reference point for adjudicating some moments in 3.5, to keep tings simple. Other times I find myself tempted to house rule in a few items from 3.5 to 5E, but I try to restrain myself as much as possible. Like with 3.5, I suspect that as D&D 5E goes on I may grow a bit tired of its core simplicity and lack of dynamic elements in stuff like saves and damage; but I did decide with this campaign to run it using gritty resting rules and that is going a surprisingly long way toward my feeling like the players are "tough guys in a tough world" rather than the standard 5E trope of fantasy superheroes. Still...they've only just hit their good levels, so we'll see how things go in the coming months.

Also, I don't hate the D&D 5E skill system, at all. In fact, while I still like 3.5's granularity on skills,  will take the 5E skill system over PF2E's skill system any day.

After the group completes their current storyline, I am considering integrating a module, possibly Rise of the Drow, which I just snagged. We shall see.

Some Conclusions (so far)

So....it's fun running three iterations of basically the same game, and seeing how my expectations and experience in one lend to observations and changes in the other two. The real takeaway I have gotten from this experience so far has been one about how I structure and focus on campaigns. Specifically: I am not as interested in the "big story" campaigns as I once was, and the D&D 3.5 game where I basically made a sandbox for them to do whatever (including regions of different levels they can wander in to regardless of their own level) has actually been the most fun. But my structured investigation stories in the 5E game have also been a lot of fun because I took some time to lay out interesting paths of discovery and skill challenges related to the investigations. It's "pseudo-rails" in that the PCs could, like, stop investigating and go elsewhere, thus ending the module, but they had motivation and interest to proceed so it worked. 

Meanwhile, the very structured big picture storyline which admittedly makes the PCs more integrated to the world and setting proved perhaps a bit too much in terms of scope and design. I realize now that I came up with a great idea, but then sort of left it as a "and so that happened," type event, without a lot to go after the main event. Luckily I proceeded to dive in to some of the smaller angles and pieces, fleshing out the game to feel more like a sandbox, but I concede it's hard to just do sandbox in PF2E because a good sandbox should allow for the PCs to get into more trouble than they can handle on occasion, and in PF2E that can quickly turn into a lethal TPK. So....we'll continue for a while on this one, but afterwards I need to think hard on whether I plan to continue with PF2E or not, because it almost....but not quite....manages to frame the sort of adventures I like to run, but just not as well as either D&D 5E or D&D 3.5, which both do it so much better.

Final conclusion.....turns out too much balance in design is not necessarily a good idea! Who knew?

Also, and this is extremely important to stress: the D&D 5E and 3.5 edition games both have a huge edge over Poor Pathfinder 2E, in that they are live games I am running in person. PF2E is online, and while the online tools make for an easier time of it, I know my lack of time to sink into enhancing the graphic elements of the experience factor against the game to some degree, as does the predilection for the overall experience to be a generally less satisfying experience than the sort where normal humans are able to see each other live and not share a single audio channel. So, I must concede that PF2E in a live environment might still be a better overall experience than I am giving it credit for. Poor Pathfinder though....I think I got about 10 levels in to the original campaign when it had to migrate to online due to the pandemic, and its more or less lingered there ever since. May need to change that soon.

Short vs. Long Form Adventures

One of the great things about the market today is that there is no shortage of material for your favorite D&Dish game. Whether you're playing D&D 5E, Pathfinder 2nd Edition, Labyrinth Lord, Swords &Wizardry, Old School Essentials or literally dozens of other variants, retroclones and heartbreakers there's both a system to suit your needs and a mess of scenarios to make prep easier.

While perusing a variety of recent finds I have been enjoying, for their own purposes, a range of modules....but these modules are not all created equal. For example, Trilemma Adventures is arguably a huge bang for its buck, with dozens of scenarios wrapped in a setting and bestiary suitable for adaptation to your preferred system. Age of Extinction, by contrast, is a pricey six book series for Pathfinder 2nd which will get you close to level 20 albeit through a process of reading an elaborate campaign in Golarian which is exceedingly difficult to adapt to your own setting (and likely not worth adapting to other rules systems).

Still...taken as a whole the typical Pathfinder adventure path may look huge, but they are designed to be digested in six discreet pieces. Not so with most WotC modules, which are monstrous incarnations of mega campaigns. When you buy one of these you are getting everything including the kitchen sink in one gigantic purchase.

In many ways it seems like the conventional wisdom for D&D and Pathfinder in their contemporary editions, the pinnacle of achievement over the last two decades, has been the extensive long form adventure campaign. Most of 5th edition's published modules amount to lengthy campaigns, designed to provide structured frameworks for leveling up to 10th level or greater. Only a few adaptations of older works such as Tales from the Yawning Portal focus on smaller scenarios (and even then providing a framework to interconnect it all together). The only one of these I've run was the early release of Siege at Dragonspear, a level 1-10 romp in four parts.

I don't really understand this style of long-form adventure design. I am much better with (and can appreciate) a good setting book such as the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica (well, as long as the book is engaging and fun to read, which most sourcebooks are not). I get more out of the content in Volo's Guide to Monsters than I do out of the latest 300 page super module. I suspect I am not alone in this; for many who GM, the creative process is more rewarding and may be the key reason to play; but there are many who enjoy reading and puzzling out these giant modules to provide much needed direction to their group and games.

Products like Trilemma Adventures, of which there are lots and lots of examples (from Dungeon Full of Monsters which flirts with being both mini and mega to AAW's Mini-Dungeons series on down to Dyson Logos' amazing collections) are designed to provide tools to a different kind of GM, the kind who likes improv and needs only a seed to grow a mountain. Plus, if you like campaigns that are deliberately less structured or more focused on hexcrawling then mini dungeons and short-form scenarios provide plenty of content for populating your wilderness without also committing to memorizing hundreds of pages of content.

The fact that the market is so well served on all fronts right now is a good sign. Most short-form and mini adventures are coming from the indie, OSR and small press side of the equation, but an argument can be made that even Paizo and WotC know there's a market (just not one worth chasing beyond a limited set), and their respective Pathfinder Society and Adventurer's League modules may actually cater to some degree to this market (and not just organized play).

That said....once again I'll toot the horn for Goodman Games, which has built an entire business structure on short-form modules (with an occasional long-form gem like The Chained Coffin) and of course putting an emphasis on making them eminently readable and fun. Like with my prior article, the notion of readability and the even more important factor of being Fun to Read is extremely important to modules, and if someone were able to collect more than anecdotal evidence I sincerely believe we would find that the modules most played are, on average, going to correspond the modules that were the most fun to read (and well-designed too, no doubt).

Ironically, Goodman Games is also responsible for one of the most interesting cases of short to long form design you can find: the Original Adventures Reincarnated Series literally take the classic modules of yore and, under license, adapt these short form gems into modern long form designs. Yes, they can take a 32 page module like The Isle of Dread and turned it into a 200+ page adaptation (while somehow still being the original module, a feat in and of itself). If ever there was a better example of how the short form module contrasts with the long form, this is it.

The Many Sourcebooks for D&D 5E That Are Luring Me Back: Arcana of the Ancients, Alien Bestiary, Alien Codex, Cthulhu Mythos

In 2013 when Dungeons & Dragons was moving from "next" to 5E, a common complaint among fans was the general dearth of content. Wizards of the Coast had moved to a more austere and careful release schedule, with a limited range of products year over year. So far they've stuck pretty close to this strategy, releasing at most about 5 notable products per year, and until quite recently had avoided any significant new campaign settings aside from Forgotten Realms. Instead, all of the "fluff" content that old school gamers are used to seeing and choosing from migrated to the DMs Guild store, or through other third party content. Over time, the third party content became so enormously prolific that here in 2020 we have an almost overwhelming array of products to choose from for our own curated D&D experience.

Recently I've picked up an array of books which have been filling some really interesting niches in D&D  and providing an array of tools for really interesting gaming concepts, especially if you want to try a genre mashup. For example:

If you want to really make your game Legendary, there's no easier way to do it than to look at Legendary games' Alien Codex. The Alien Codex comes in several flavors, for Starfinder, Pathfinder 1E, and 5th edition (so far; I'm hoping one day we see a PF 2E version but I'm not holding my breath). The book is sufficiently good that I grabbed the 5E edition for sure, and will likely grab the Starfinder editions soon as well.

For those interested, as with many Legendary Games products, Alien Codex is a potpourri of stats, rules,  ideas, equipment and generally useful content to let you populate a setting filled with a future-themes science fantasy campaign. Using this with D&D 5E is almost (not quite, but almost) as robust as grabbing Starfinder. If you're a dedicated fan of the 5E mechanics and like the idea of science-fantasy space adventures this is an extremely useful book.

Alien Bestiary, also from Legendary Games, is a natural compliment to Alien Codex. You get hundreds of pages of 5E adapted monsters with a science fiction space-fantasy theme, from old OGL favorites to mythos monsters to completely new things. It's got content designed to tie in to the default settings Legendary Game offers, but the book is primarily a toolkit for your own games. Like Alien Codex the Bestiary is full of goodness, with hundreds of monsters as well as some SF spot rules and equipment in the back. I have both the 5E and Starfinder version, as it fills a much needed roll for both game systems.

Arcana of the Ancients is a Kickstarted experiment from Monte Cook Games aimed at bringing Numenera concepts and content into line with 5th edition mechanics. It, like the other books on this list, has some content with an implied setting but is primarily aimed at being a toolkit to inspire the DM and allow for the population of your own setting with unique monsters, items and ideas. Because it is deriving this content from Numenera, the mechanics include ideas unique the the Cypher System, such as actual cyphers, rule concepts such as the GM intrusion mechanic, lots of monsters and some new special rules introducing distinct traits and mutations for characters. Future books in this series will focus on Numenera proper, but this one is an excellent stand-alone product for adding far-future "technology indistinguishable from magic" concepts to your campaign.

Last but not least is Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos, an enormous adaptation of the Cthulhu Mythos to D&D 5E. Originally released for Pathfinder 1E, this tome adapts to 5E quite well, providing a strange array of options for adding Lovecraftian themes and elements to a D&D game, including lots of Dreamlands concepts that mesh better with fantasy and weird fiction than the horror elements. That said, the many monsters of Lovecraftian lore and pastiche are well represented here, and the book, like the rest on this list, provides an implied setting while primarily offering you an array of toolkit options to customize to taste. The net result is a book that lets you skew as faithfully or deviate as much as you want to the core conceits of the Cthulhu Mythos. I have enmeshed the Cthulhu Mythos a lot in my own Pergerron campaign, which should I revisit one day will be greatly served by this book, as an example.

All of these tomes as presented allow you to expand your D&D 5E campaigns in strange and interesting directions. For bonus points you can take all four and imagine what sort of strange universe you can devise with them. I've been toying with ideas on this, using Alien Codex to establish a post-Spelljammer future universe in which technology and magic have intersected, and with the future civilizations of this setting exploring a universe populated by the denizens of the Cthulhu Mythos and Alien Bestiary. Meanwhile, traces of lost civilizations across the sci-fi fantasy galaxy suggest that "the ancients" colonized and then abandoned countless worlds for mysterious (and probably Mythos related reasons), leaving these colonies to degenerate back to fantasy worlds populated by the material of the Arcana of the Ancients.

Such a setting, a kitchen sink of space fantasy and weird horror, would provide more than enough gaming content to last decades, I imagine. The four books above would each individually provide enough such content on their own as it is! Anyway.....A+ from the Death Bat for each of these tomes, check them out if the idea of 5E with sci-fi fantasy and weird horror thematics intrigues you.

Contrasting Pathfinder 2E against Dungeons & Dragons 5E

We're approximately 8 games in to Pathfinder 2nd edition between two groups now. Both games have inched along to 3rd level and I think (depending on whether or not I'm interpreting the XP rules correctly) it seems safe to say that a fairly active group of players accomplishing a lot will advance at least 1 level every two sessions or so.

After last night's game I think, at least for the low level experience I am getting a similar vibe to my initial exploration of D&D 5E at low level: the experience feels very consistent, the combats can be quite dangerous, and risk/reward is quite noticeable. There are some distinct differences, though, which I'll point out about combat, skills and GM resources.

Combat 

Right now combat in Pathfinder feels tight, intuitive, and the action point system lets you do things you can't accomplish in PF 1E or any version of D&D; you can make iterative attacks as long as you are willing to accept the penalty to hit, and the increased change of a fumble on your successive tries. There's a more strategic element to it even if you aren't using a map and minis (which we have not used except for basic map reference). Combats don't last long, and thanks to the 10-point differential which allows for normal attacks to convert to fumbles and crits combat often has some interesting and swingy results. It's interesting and I like it.

D&D 5E's main issue by contrast is that while combat flows well from level 1-4, as you advance it often feels more and more like "big bags of hit points try to deal enormous amounts of damage." Players and creatures alike in 5E have too many abilities that boil down to damage dealing without enough distinctly interesting effects (PF2E has lots of interesting effects at the low levels for contrast).  Despite this, D&D 5E combat isn't bad by any stretch.....if I ranked it vs. PF2E I'd call it a "good combat system contrasted with a great combat system."

If 5E had mor interesting effects and wasn't so obsessed with Hit Points as the catch-all I think it would hold well in this comparison. But so far: Pathfinder is a clear winner when it comes to the feel and flow of combat.

Skill Systems

As I see it, there are three modes of thought on skills: you love them and no game is sufficient unless it allows for maximum granularity; you hate them and want to know why any skills are really needed; or you recognize that there are "things you need to do" in any given game that can best be handled by skills and so try to find a modest compromise for handling this.

PF2E and D&D 5E both seem to fall in to this middle camp on the surface. 5E gives you a list of skills that I would call "the minimum decent list of skill thingies you will probably do in a D&D session." Pathfinder 2E technically also takes this approach, but then ultimately makes it enormously granular and complex....which should in theory make the "guy #1 who loves skills" happier, right? But it doesn't....it's actually making a skill system for "guy who recognizes a compromise mechanic but also wants tons of detail on what the compromise skill system does."

On the one hand, I like how specific the skill actions in Pathfinder can get, but on the other hand as I have delved deep into the skill feats I have sort of grown to dislike it. The problem is best described like this, starting with a D&D 5E skill challenge:

1. Player wants to do action X.
2. GM looks at the 5E skill list and thinks skill Y is a good choice.
3. Roll and resolve!

In Pathfinder 2E so far it goes like this:

1. Player wants to do skill action X.
2. GM suggests rolling on Skill Y.
3. Someone points out you can't really do that the way the player wants unless you have Skill Feat Z. GM reminds himself he needs to memorize in great detail all the skill feats because they are lots of "special exception rules" that are in reality hard limiters on the "what you can and can't do without this feat" take which PF and 3E are known for taking to insane extremes.
4. GM manages a compromise on the action, but then realizes he's not asking for the right skill because it turns out that by trying to reduce the skill list as much as it did (while also not looking too much like a copy/paste of the D&D 5E skill system) has led to Pathfinder making some really strange and counter-intuitive choices in skill consolidation. Do they work? They will, once you accept that this is how they are meant to work. Or you could go play another game with a more intuitive skill system, and that is a problem for PF2E.

Now, Pathfinder does some stuff incredibly well with the skill system as provided. Key items of note include: a better and more consistent approach to how to identify and figure out the use of magic items; a simpler crafting mechanic that, while losing granularity, is still easier to use as written; and the perception mechanic no longer being a skill but an ability. Most significant is how initiative is a skill-based thing now which can play off of perception or a relevant skill (e.g. stealth) as suits the moment. That's the most innovative thing I've seen in a game in a long time, so simple yet so logical.

But both Pathfinder and D&D 5E fail to a degree when it comes to how much verisimilitude you want in your game systen. To 5E's credit you can use the DMG rules to add as many skills as you want in, and learning skills is a matter of time and investment and totally untethered from leveling. Both systems wisely add some sort of RP-focued background mechanic (profession/background) which helps flesh out the role-play element that your character will otherwise suffer a bit on with a less granular skill system. And both do this the way they do because they are trying to find ways to solve the mechanical issues on skills imposed by 3rd edition design.

In the end....D&D 5E wins here.

The Gamemaster's Resources

This is a tough one, because to get the full experience with D&D 5E you need three books, so you're spending a fair amount of cash. Pathfinder 2E, despite having some rules to run the game in the Core Book, has offloaded a chunk of what used to be in the core and bestiary in to the upcoming Gamemastery Guide. If you want decent NPC stat blocks, rules for making, scaling and modifying monsters, rules for lots of "GM adjudication" stuff....we have to wait until January next year. Once it's out, it will be a 3-book core system. This is on equal footing with D&D 5E so I have to call this as a draw.

But! The problem here is key items (NPC design, monster design and more depth in the GM rules) were all in two books in PF1E. It is a shame to see this drawn out. One of my players thinks they were forced to rush PF2E to release. I think maybe they just wanted to get it spread out more; but I gotta be honest, I'd have much rather had some NPC/monster design rules in the core books than the goblin ancestry and alchemist. Oh well.

Pathfinder 2E is proving a lot of fun, but it is also making me appreciate some of the design choices put in to D&D 5E. I am thinking that a perfect version of the game could be found in a system with PF2E level combat and action economy, D&D 5E level skill mechanics, and some blend of the spell systems.

Another contrast is the "gradient of success" mechanic in PF2E vs. the advantage/disadvantage mechanic in D&D 5E. I feel like both are interesting and equally innovative. I wonder if one could implement some version of both in a hybrid version of the two games.....hmmmm.

Brainstorming on Presenting the Realms of Chirak in a New Print and PDF Format

As some of you know, I have an ongoing world (Realms of Chirak) which I have tried to produce a working final published document for for a few years now. The timeline for Chirak as a publishable D&D setting has kind of looked like this:

1992-1999: The dark ages, in which I started with a basic 20 or so page document that was my springboard for campaigns in Runequest III and AD&D 2nd edition during the nineties.

2000-2008ish: during this period I did more work solidifying and updating a massive accumulation of notes and bits from prior campaigns into two working documents. The first was a 50 page document that was my GM's gazetteer which rapidly grew to about 150 pages, and the other was a 32 page player's guidebook. I kept a working document for both D&D 3rd edition and whatever version of Runequest was extant at the moment. These saw publication as chapbooks but were only made available to players in my groups.

2008 -2011: One major problem with 3rd edition D&D for me was that it was nigh impossible to do a custom homebrew setting in the system without breaking or mashing some rules. All to often what worked just fine for my own game table would be considered blashphemy in the D&D 3rd edition community, and as a result I never felt comfortable completing a working document for publication. 4th edition D&D changed all of that, with a very codified ruleset which made mechanical implementation pretty easy. I managed to upload a finalized document for sale, and a version on lulu for print in this time period. To date it remains the "print" version that is pubically available, outside of what I have released on the bog.

2011-present: all of my ongoing work, ideas, future and current campaigns and so forth have made their way in some form on to the blog. By not monetizing the blog and keeping it free and "you get what you pay for" this freed me up to offer my take on content without worrying too much about what people would think of it for their own needs.

2013-2019: My Pathfinder 1.0 document is a shambling mess of material and notes but I never came close to a definitive rules doc with Pathfinder like I did with D&D 3rd, probably because Pathfinder didn't really need it. However with D&D 5th edition I found the task of editing the book for 5E mechanics to be fine (but boring; 5e stablocks: "easy but boring")....but the real task is that the sum total of a unified document reflecting the campaign over 27 odd years of weekly gaming totalling what might well be somewhere around what I estimate to be at least 6,000 to 8,000 actual game hours spent in Chirak, with thousands of pages of loose documents and files to draw from, to be a horrifying challenge.

So....here I am now, with a rough draft of a final 5E update that is close to 500 pages in the edit and I'm still far from done. Where to go from here?

Well, recently I decided to start breaking it down in to discreet pieces to see if that let me focus more specifically on sections of the setting without getting too bogged down. So far this has worked well, and after I complete five or six "pieces" I think I'll try releasing them in smaller setting books which then unite over a larger scope. Eventually I will have enough that I can then turn them into print-ready compendiums without much effort....but at least I can get them in to some working format!

The trick now is what systems (if any) to focus on. 5E is easy enough, but I have been adding Cypher System mechanics to literally everything these days (I have a complete working document of the Sabiri Lands statted out in Cypher System, for example) and it's hard not to, given how easy and liberating Cypher System is for GMs. Also, there's this little thing about Pathfinder 2.0 coming out soon....but I suspect that if I were to try including that, I might run into some of my old problems. We'll see.

What I could do is release different versions of each piece for specific systems. A version for 5E and a version for Cypher System are both easy enough. If Pathfinder 2.0 is a forgiving system to write and design for, then I can add it in. Doing these doc piecemeal may indeed make such tasks less onerous.

In the meantime, my current plan is as follows: before close of year, I'd like to release these short books, each ranging from 30-50 pages for Chirak:
Espanea and the Kaldinian Isles
The Sabiri Lands
Mercurios
A Guidebook to the Cults and Religions of Chirak
Xoxtocharit 
Kasdalan

...With more planned. Some regions haven't been developed enough for a 30-50 page treatment (I've never had more than a couple pages on Adenach, for example), so some of these books could incorporate neighboring smaller kingdoms/regions as well.

Another advantage to these focused location books is that they can string into the intended campaign, but could also be used "as is" by GMs looking for a specific location, or could be dropped in to someone's own setting to fill a niche or corner. My plan is to make sure that everything you need to fill out the detail on the local setting is provided in each book.

I also need to think about the art direction. Plenty of decent stock art out there to be found and paid for these days, but many other publishers are also using that stock art. I have a lot more income to mess with now than I did 10 years ago, so a little money spent on good art for a vanity project might be worth it. I could try Kickstarting, but not unless I do it the Sine Nomine way (also known as "The Smart Way") so I'll need to go read over the excellent publishing doc he provides, as it is well worth any small publisher's read through before tackling any project, let alone a Kickstarter.

Stuff to ponder!

Character Generation in Advent Horizons

I have been messing around with Advent Horizons for the last few days....despite some strong contenders for my attention (e.g. The Traveller Companion from Mongoose which just released in print) Advent Horizon has captured my full focus.

Some details so far: AH is based on the 1.0a OGL which is the same OGL that Pathfinder 1.0 operates under, and therefore allows AH to be a complete rules system, as I am reasonably sure the D&D SRD for 5th edition is more limiting in this regard. The book directly mentions Dungeons & Dragons compatibility by name on more than one occasion, which is something I had thought was not permitted, but maybe I'm just assuming that because so many other products just mention it as "The World's Greatest Fantasy Game" or something else....my OGL-fu is a bit rusty here.

As a result, some parts (not many, but enough) of AH feel like 3rd edition thematics wedded to a 5th edition chassis. This actually works, because while the 3rd edition elements add some variables, they do not change the core design conceit, which was to make sure the game's numbers and math matched the bounded accuracy mechanics of D&D 5E. As a result, while a character in AH will look a bit different (and have more stuff, to be honest) than a 5E character, it will remain fully compatible from a numbers and stats point of view.

One example of these older approaches, now revamped and wedded to 5E mechanics, include proficiency slots as a purchase-mechanic for both skills and feats. By adding a point-buy mechanic to skills, and re-adding in "simpler" feats which are also purchased with the same points, you bring a level of design granularity (along with potential design pitfalls and peaks) that is more common in 3rd edition. However it is tempered with the mechanical consistency of 5E, so you do not see issues such as stacking effects and obvious out-of-control of immediately preferable build options getting in your way. Personally, I love what it is doing here....I wish 5E had a rules option similar to this, actually. But I love games with greater emphasis on skill mechanics.

So character generation is pretty straight forward and anyone who has played 5E D&D will know most of the steps. It deviates a bit...and I'll show how and where as I walk through the steps as follows:

1. Basic stuff first. Attributes can be rolled (they default to 2D6+6 for each stat) or point-buy purchased, using a variant method that is not like the standard 5E mechanic (probably for OGL reasons). You also get to pick a species and class, familiar stuff. Of note: the system defaults to metric, which is fine with me, but it has a couple interesting implications for those who are going to blend content with D&D 5E, and AH includes some conversion tables for ease of reference. I'll also note that so far my reading on AH suggests it does not expect much tabletop map/minis will be going on, and the game seems to assume more focus on TotM style combats. I am still ploughing through combat and the additional environmental rules so will confirm that in the next blog post, though.

2. Species. The species all look fairly consistent with 5E standards, and include the following choices:
--The Ba'alur, a warlike draconian race of reptiles that advanced to space through stolen or restored tech
--Colonials, the standard humans, who can pick special traits based on their type of homeworld
--Ephari, mysterious "gray" like aliens who dwell on world ships
--Empyreans, a humanlike race of transgenics
--Ixaxians, the obligatory insectoid race with the ability to communicate via radio frequencies and a penchant for technology
--Seyvul, the obligatory mischievous race that is basically a species of Rocket Raccoons
--Thothid, the totally-not-Mind Flayer species warped by strange beings of Cthulhuian origin; like mind flayers, but with wings! (Actually I love this species as presented)
--Urroru, bulky four-limbed totally-not-Tharks (hey, Starfinder has like 3 of these!) who have a  introspective warrior culture
--Xhu Akreen, an ancient race of blue skinned human-like aliens of a fallen empire

So, some good and iconic choices. All are well illustrated, too. The book looks like it would be fantastic to see in full color, but alas the Barnes & Noble edition I purchased is a black and white soft cover only.

3. Classes. Classes are varied and all built on the design principles of 5E, so they balance together (so far, I am still rolling samples PCs of each class to look for oddities). I've designed a few PCs so far though, and all look damned interesting and fun to play. The classes include:
--Agent, an espionage themed class
--Combat Specialist, the warrior themed class
--Diplomat, the negotiator class
--Explorer, a scientist/adventurer class
--Insurgent, a guerilla combatant (maybe closer to the Starfinder Operator, thematically)
--Marshal, a commander-type (think warlord) class
--Science Specialist, a skill focused academic
--Spacer, an "EVA and Zero-Gravity" specialist
--Spiritualist, a spiritual/religious themed class using akashic knowledge as its theme
--Tactician, a manipulator/operator type
--Technophile, the engineer/technologist type

Although each class follows the class design principles of 5E, they do deviate in two ways: each class at level 1 is front-loaded with four key abilities as a package they get, but none of the classes have standard D&D archetypes of any sort built in by level 3. Instead, some have a range of specific options (the combat specialist gets some soldier specializations to pick from), others give you abilities you pick over time ("spycrafts" for agents, for example), and still others either get nothing specific like this (single ability choices) or make a theme choice earlier (such as science specialists choosing their focus at level 1).  There is a reason for this, it turns out, and this is where AH varies from traditional 5E approaches to design by using proficiency slots to flesh out characters. Finally, you can multiclass in rules which are recognizable to anyone who's played a 3rd edition version of D&D (but it works fine).

4. Backgrounds: Education and Professions. Every character picks from several choices to build their background, allowing for a range of flexible design options. Backgrounds are composed of:
--Education: grants a skill or two and a personality trait based on the type of educational background you have.
--Profession: your career path, which doesn't have to be tied to class necessarily (so a combat specialist who was also an artist is perfectly acceptable). This grants a couple skills and potential reputation and credit boost, as well as an ideal.
--Events: this portion of your background details something that happens to you, as well as the trinket (momento) of your experience and the flaw you gained from that event.

AH also uses something it calls the Axis Alignment, which is a series of descriptors you can pick from to give your character a defining personality focus. The options listed include methodical, analytical, reasonable, passive, zen, passionate, impulsive, zealous, and unaligned. Inspiration rules are also stuck here.

5. Proficiency Slots. Every class grants around 14-16 slots, plus you will gain some free skills due to class as well as possibly your species and later background and profession choices. I found that this meant, on average, you could end up with around 4-6 free skills, plus your points to spend, plus your intelligence modifier in bonus slots.

The system AH uses is based on skill trees: you buy the initial skill in the tree, which opens up basic knowledge of later skills, but you only add your proficiency bonus to skills you have actual training in. For example, if you know Perception as a skill you can use it to make observational checks, but you need to spend another point to also get danger sense, which lets you observe threats you might not notice without actively searching (e.g. passive perception alone won't spot a hidden trap, but danger sense will prompt a roll even if you weren't looking for it).

Proficiency slots/points are a 1:1 cost, and you must have the requisite skills/feats along a skill tree before spending on later items in the same tree. Most of the skill trees have at least 3 layers of depth and multiple forking branches, so in fact there are a lot of things to spend points on. Interestingly, the trees include both standard skills and feats. Feats in AH are not the "deluxe package" feats of D&D 5E, however, and each one usually delivers 1 distinct ability you can use; under this mechanic, a skill is a thing you roll on, and a feat is a thing that gives you a mechanical feature or effect.

My initial thought here was, "this seems like a lot of points to spend at level 1." And it is, from a certain perspective, but most classes then go about giving you a grand total of 12 additional feat points over the next 20 levels of your career (6 for general leveling and 6 for the class; another 3rd edition element). By level 20, assuming a smart character (INT 20) in a class that starts you with 16 slots, you can have a maximum of  33 proficiency slots spent, of which around 19 were spent at level 1. I count at least 154 skill tree choices to pick from plus 14 tool proficiency skills and a bunch of racial proficiencies, and of those quite a few can be taken multiple times for additional effects/ranges....so there are a lot of choices here.

The result of this is that level 1 characters in AH are front loaded with a range of interesting skills and abilities, but then progress more slowly in their long term career. This is offset by the fact that at level 1 most characters can be dropped or even killed by one good hit from almost any handgun in the game, so characters with greater expertise don't seem so out of balance against the threat level of the galaxy.

In my experiments with character design I've looked at an array of interesting choices, from an insurgent archer from a primitive world who kills with melee attacks to a sharp-shooting survivalist scientist to a combat specialist who secretly wanted to be a retired artist. You can make a lot of interesting characters here. I'll try posting some of the characters I've rolled soon.

I have found no feat or ability so far that raised my eyebrows in question of its power level ot utility, so far. I do however imagine with a point buy system like this that some players may find ways to game it a bit, or even find odd synergies. I won't likely see any of these (if they exist) until I see what my table rolls up, though.

6. Reputation and Credit. The last bits of character generation are a Reputation Score (another 3rd edition mechanic) which is basically your "bonus to influence" on DCs, and the Credit Score which is what the game uses in lieu of tracking actual cash. This mechanic can work just fine....you can see a version of it from the old days in D20 Modern, and it's not unlike the credit rating in Call of Cthulhu, but since all purchases are made with this it can mean a lot of die-rolling when time comes to spend. You can gain credit as a reward or lose it to influence advantage on checks, too. It's a solid mechanic. Not my preferred method (I like counting cash) but it expediently focuses the game on a broader range of topics for play than just acquiring specific amounts of filthy lucre.

So far, I am really enjoying the flexibility and range of options in character generation in AH. I'll be honest....I've been so enamoured with this game's design that I've convinced my group we must try it ASAP and also ordered a second table copy through Barnes & Noble (here) for play.

I'll talk more about Combat and the other mechanics next, and post some sample PCs soon!

The Top Articles on Realms of Chirak

Every now and then I like to look at the Google metrics and see what's getting the most attention. Here then is the Top Ten Posts of All Time currently on Realms of Chirak along with my comments on why each article garners so much attention:

1. The 5E Minotaur as a Character Race (3,429 hits)
--I continue to be amazed this sits at the top. It's a write-up of the MM minotaur as a character option, which means you can best use it for class-stated minotaur foes, or if you're not too worried about how OP the minotaur is you can open it up to players. That said, there's an official minotaur option out there, so I can't see much need for this variant now.

2. Shifting From Pathfinder to D&D 5th Edition in 2014? (2,334 hits)
--A lot of people made this leap, around this time, and I find it telling that two of my top ten articles relate to the conversion from Pathfinder to 5E. Makes me wonder about how well Pathfinder 2.0 will do later this summer....I plan on buying all the books, so I guess I'll get to let you know!

3. Ages of Lingusia: The Death Gods (2,224 hits)
--Either people need lots of death gods, or the enigmatic illustration I linked to is highly prized (it's a great illustration).

4. The Many Days of Horror: Return of the Living Dead (NSFW) (2,153 hits)
--The doubling in hits is totally due to my engaging commentary on this zombie classic, and totally not about the nude zombie Linnea Quigley pics in the article.

5. The Super Quick and Dirty Pathfinder Monster Conversion for 5E (1,436 hits)
--Back in 2015 we were still waiting for monster manuals, so converting Pathfinder monsters was often our only option for some beasts not yet documented in 5E. Today...we're drowning in good monster manuals!

6. Tales of the Cannadad Dei: Sabiri Tattoos (1,317 hits)
--I'd like to think there's a compelling interest in Sabiri and their skin-etched tattoo magic, but I think it's really just the linked Luis Royo image. I picked that image because it was the inspiration for my first games set in the Sabiri lands.

7. Halloween Countdown Finale: Dooooooooom! (1,287 hits)
--Just pictures in this post, so presumably more than a few hits from people looking for certain artists or images.

8. Five Things I'm Not Going to Miss About Pathfinder (1,260 hits)
--I think back in 2013-2014 I was not alone among gamers who decided that it was time to take a more or less permanent break from Pathfinder and embrace D&D 5E. I may be having fun with Pathfinder (and Starfinder) these days, but it is with a much more casual and limited approach; 5E made it hard for a lot of us to go back to needlessly more complicated iterations of D20.

9. D&D 5E Updates: The Mohrg (1,170 hits)
--At the time I posted this article no published tome (neither 3PP nor WotC) had stats for the Mohrg, a creature I think is quite popular (or maybe it's just me).

10. Resident Evil 6: The Leon Kennedy Campaign (1,144 hits)
--I'd like to believe it was my entertaining and witty description of this preposterous game's campaign but if the above observations have validity then let's be honest, it's probably Deborah's image.

Bonus: My most accessed Index Page is the Realms or Chirak 5E Index Page which is not surprising, I suppose. The least accessed is my Fantasy AGE Resource page, which is also not surprising, given my mixed feelings about that system and repeated attempts to get in to it, followed by hard crash and burn events.

The Moral of the Story: Use more evocative art, post more NSFW content and wax philosophical on the cons of Pathfinder vs. the Pros of D&D 5E! Or maybe not....I'll just keep doing whatever I feel like instead... ;-)

The top ten list is always interesting because, on average, I may have around 200-300 active browsers who frequent this site regularly, people who maybe have book-marked RoC and like to visit every now and then (and yes, it used to be higher, but as is true with all internet content, when the content slows down people go away). That means that this top ten list shows a lot less about what active blog readers are looking at and what Google's search engine refers people to. Or, put another way, it is likelier showing what people are interested in that by accident coincides with some of the content on my site.

There are probably secondary sources...I run into occasional links to Reddit threads addressing something on my site,* for example (I don't frequent Reddit, have an account, or even try to go there except when a link takes me to one of the threads). There may be other links I am unaware of. But most of these top ten are definitely because people:

...need minotaur PC stats fast, are having a breakup with Pathfinder, need mohrg stats fast, like Luis Royo, like Linnea Quigley, like Return of the Living Dead, like that cool death god image, maybe like death gods, like apocalyptic images, and maybe, just maybe, liked my rip on Resident Evil 6!








*Example: when I started looking for 5E-powered SF RPGs recently I first looked in to Hyperlanes again, to see if issues I had with it had been addressed ever, or if new content was out. I found precious little, and wondering if I was the only one who had been bothered by the way the classes in Hyperlanes (but not the monsters, I will note) dropped iterative attacks and escalating damage as a core design feature of 5E, I did some searching....and ironically that searching brought me back to a Reddit article discussing this and using my own RoC blog post as a reference for the discussion point. Oroborous of the internet!

Critical D&D Burn Out

Oh boy...I may finally have to confess to myself that I have played so much D&D that I am now burned out on it.

Since the new year began (two frickin' months ago) I've run exactly two games of D&D: one was to wrap the tail end of a campaign from last year to give it some closure, the other was last night, to try out a new campaign starting at level 5. I ran a fairly straight forward dungeon module I'd devised but had some plot-focused quest options floating around for flavor.

What I realized (posthumously to the session) was that I think I have finally, at long last, burned out  --badly-- on the "D&D experience."

I don't know if it's just D&D as a system, though....or 5E specifically. Here's the conundrum:

1. I continue to enjoy Starfinder (which is just space Pathfinder)
2. Last year the few games of Pathfinder I ran were a lot of fun and I did feel engaged
3. D&D 5E, every game I have attempted in the last year or so has ultimately been a chore for me.

So...could it be the game system? Could I really just not have much interest or investment in 5E as a game? My only satisfaction really had to do with games I ran for my son, and I have enjoyed the plot-intensive campaign wraps, although with the caveat that not all of that particular campaign was as fun as it used to me (it was honestly a long drag to get to the conclusion, much longer than it needed to be).

I know that Pathfinder is a hard sell to my players, moreso even with PF2.0 on the horizon, but I almost feel like I owe it to myself to explore that system some more, as maybe it's just "different enough" to add back in elements that I really like in D&D that have been missing from 5th edition. Like a more robust/meaningful skill system, for example. Or maybe the flashy, wacky numbers of Pathfinder just feel more substantive to me than the bounded accuracy of D&D, even though I felt that the bounded accuracy was a good solution to controlling runaway numbers.

Or, well, maybe (and I do know this to be true) inflated hit points and damage totals in 5E aren't all that fun for me as the GM.

I do know that if I had picked some other system last night for the game, such as BRP (Magic World), Cypher System or even (I suspect) Pathfinder that I might have enjoyed it more. I think....I think as much as I hate to admit it, I am craving some combination or either novelty, complexity or realism in my games such that D&D 5E is just a poor fit for the kind of gaming I want to do now.

Things to ponder!




(EDIT: I was wondering if this issue ties in to my discontent with Fantasy AGE, but I don't think so. Fantasy AGE suffers, if anything, from being too underwhelming and too simple, much like 5E.)

2018 RPGs in Review

This was a strange year for gaming in my household. Notable this year was my son's reaching an age where gaming "clicked" for him; dad reached a unique level of gaming burn-out even as son hits his first stride; all of my top gaming discoveries this year were older games for the most part; and I significantly reduced my game collection earlier in the year via ebay.

Wrestling with what has felt to me like close to a year of burn-out has been tough. Part of me is certain the burn-out is tied to the exponential increase in my responsibilities at my business, which does indeed take much more time out of my life than it ever has before. Some of it is a more general genre burn-out, and discovering a game like Cypher System which let me break out of the D&D box a bit actually framed just how long I had been running D&D, and perhaps how uninspired I was now feeling as a result.

However, I have a great crew of long time friends and family I can game with, and that alone makes it all worthwhile. I have (due to work and other issues) taken more time off than usual this year on gaming nights, but with any lucky 2019 will be less arduous and I will rekindle my creative juices.

So in looking at 2018 in review, it's hard to pick out five or six things to address that are topically new. Instead, I'll do a "this was important to me this year" list instead.

#5: Starfinder

This year I tried running Starfinder multiple times, managed a campaign on an off day for a few months, and got several stalled games running that I wish could have gone further. The general consensus is that Starfinder has a great premise and style, and manages to pull off a fun game in a Pathfinder frame. However, due to my difficulties this year it has been very hard to remain committed to Starfinder for the lengthy period that it deserves.

#4: Call of cthulhu 7E

My campaign for 7E CoC wrapped earlier in the year, and it was a truly spectacular event. Call of Cthulhu's latest editions has captured my attention and this was a highlight of gaming for me in the last two years (the campaign started in 2017). I definitely need to run more CoC in 2019.

#3: Dungeons & Dragons 5E

Despite being burned out on it, D&D 5E remains an important staple for me in gaming. Two events keep me inspired going in to 2019: first, my son has active characters (see an earlier post on this) and we are really enjoying this very simple, very straight-forward 5E game. I actually hope it will help me to start enjoying the game more generally again. I am also inspired by the Ravnica setting which WotC released. This is the first genuinely new setting for D&D in a very long time, and I hope it does well; D&D needs new and innovative going forward; it's got the "classic stuff" well covered already, perhaps too much so.

#2: Numenera

I haven't run it yet, but Numenera as a setting is one of the single most unique and fun settings I have encountered in a long time. It's material is inspirational for any fantasy or SF setting, and I have pilfered from it for my Cypher System games. I hope to finish reading through Discovery and Destiny (the new edition of the game) and have a a campaign lined up for this next year.

#1: Cypher System

Discovering and then figuring out Cypher System was a major revelation to me. Just as I found myself getting tired of the old classics (or 5E's version of the game genre), while finding myself without the time or energy to wrangle the more sophisticated modern offerings (Pathfinder, Starfinder) or the dedication to learn new and unfamiliar things (Genesys Core), Cypher System arrives just in time for me. A game designed to be player-facing, loaded with things for players to tinker with while being written specifically with the time-limited or lazy GM in mind who wants to use RPGs for creative release but maybe isn't too interested in the stat block mini game, Cypher System is the best game find I've discovered in the last twenty years.

...So, going in to 2019, I realize I have some interesting things to consider. I want to keep running Cypher System, for both my fantasy-SF campaign I designed for it as well as my super hero setting and more I am working on. But I also want to run Numenera (same game system, so doing this is all about absorbing the volumes of content for the Ninth World), and really want to get back to Call of Cthulhu. I frequently feel a desire to return to Traveller, or something like it....and a couple oddities such as the Everywhen RPG and Fantasy AGE still command my interest.

It is possible, outside of my family game, that I might actually be able to stay away from D&D for a while. We'll see....a few more books like Ravnica and I will probably cave and dive back in.

Games not yet released, or games I am in the process of reading and thinking about using, could finally get some time next year. I still would like to run Cold & Dark, for example. I'd like to experience Elite Dangerous RPG, which looks really interesting in a "totally like yet not Traveller" way. Kult will eventually show up in print one day, and that is a game I very much enjoyed back in it's 1st and 2nd edition days.

A couple new games next year: the "new" Fantasy Trip, for example, deserve attention. Cypher System 2nd edition, of course! Over The Edge 3rd edition. I could easily get derailed with any of these three. But beyond this? I think I may be set, honestly. Such is life as an older gamer....getting stuck in my rut, if you will!

Class Restrictions, Race Restrictions - Critical to OSR?

Every time I think about firing up an OSR game I run in to a wall with the tradition of restricting races to certain class level limits, excluding them from certain classes, and of course the old school limitations on multiclassing.

Back in the 80's I ran a looser version of D&D, sticking to class/mutliclass restrictions, but ignoring level limits for the most part. When 2nd Edition AD&D arrived it provided rules for ways to alleviate restrictions on demihuman leveling past the "cap," usually by increasing XP. D&D Encyclopedia somehow ignored the issue by adding a letter-based weapon class advancement in. In retrospect it seems amusingly ad hoc and reflective of a determination to stick with tradition by finding weird optional work-arounds for a problem that was inherently arbitrary. By the time D&D 3.0 arrived on scene, the reality of just how arbitrary it all was became blindingly evident.

As I was parsing out Swords & Wizardry Complete for considering an OSR game once more, I was reminded of this problem. Faced with the reality of traditional old school approaches, I was left with the following problem:

--Do I run the OSR game with my modern sensibilities and simply sweep aside racial/class/level restrictions? Would that really be very OSR if I did?

Or....

--Do I adhere to them strictly, and design a setting that expects and enforces them? No elven paladins, no multiclass humans, no 20th level halfling fighters.

Option 2 would make for some fun and highly specific world building....for a bit. But the arbitrary nature of the distinctions in classic AD&D not only don't jive with my world building interests now, I have to remind myself that they didn't back in the 80's, either; these are rules from the original game which I had to houserule out, and as such for me they were never very OSR; I never liked them then, and find it hard to like them now.

But....if I do option one above, then I am faced once more with a different conundrum....why not just run a more modern iteration of the game? And if it's D&D 5E, why not just use the optional gritty mechanics in the DMG to simulate the more restrictive magic elements?

So now I'm back to thinking about ways to use 5E to run the kind of game I want again. Or, of course, Cypher System....the game which caters most closely to my GM style these days, and a system which inherently rewards players with ingenious descriptor/type/focus combinations in a way that a traditional OSR game can't even conceive of.

D&D 5E: Cylovite Overlords in Chirak

Cylovite Overlord

CR 9 (5,000 XP)

CE large humanoid (living construct)

Initiative +1

DEFENSE

AC 17 (crystalline armor)

HP 114 (12D10+48)

Resistance: fire, cold, electricity

Vulnerability: triple damage from bludgeoning attacks that deal a critical hit

OFFENSE

Speed 30 feet

Ranged Attack – Telekinetic Slam +9 attack (up to three targets within 60 feet) 8D12+4 bludgeoning damage to each target.

Statistics

STR 16 (+3), DEX 12 (+1), CON 18 (+4), INT 18 (+4), WIS 13 (+1), CHA 20 (+5)

Saves INT +8, WIS +5, CHA +9

Languages: common, cylovite, elvish, and usually 1-2 others

Senses: darkvision 60 feet, Perception +2 (passive 12)

Skills: Deception +9, Persuasion +9

TRAITS

Hybrid Traits: See the hybrid template. Thralls have crystal skin, structural weakness, and telepathy. Escaped thralls who are no longer part of the dominated collective gain the mental resistance trait as well.

Domination: the cylovite overlord can dominate the minds of any creature as if it were using the spell at will. DC 17 Intelligence Save to resist; once resisted, the target cannot be targeted by domination again for 24 hours. The target of this effect may roll a save at the end of each round it is dominated.

Puppeteer: once a target is dominated, the overlord may use its bonus action to dictate what the target does, using its actions as normally, but chosen by the overlord. The target is conscious of being controlled but unable to break free. If an overlord dominates more than one target the others will stand by immobile while the bonus action controls one at a time.

Parasitic Eggs: Overlords can produce 1D12 crystalline eggs per month. A dominated target can be implanted with crystite “eggs” as an action. This deals 2D6 piercing damage. An unwilling target may make a Constitution Save, DC 17, to resist the implanting of eggs. Once implanted an egg will “hatch” and convert the target in to a hybrid within 24 hours. Removal of the egg required difficult surgery (Medicine check DC 18) and deals 4D6 slashing damage in the process.

Levitation: The overlord is perpetually levitating. This ability allows the overlord to move both horizontally and vertically at a constant, silent speed, and makes it immune to trip attacks or knockdowns.

Telekinesis: Overlords move objects of up to 250 lbs. by telekinesis, with a radius of 180 feet. This effect requires an action.

Crystalline Armor Bodies: This armor provides protection across the overlord’s body, and grants resistance to cold, fire and electricity. Overlords are entirely made of crystal, and are subject to damage from spells that target inanimate objects. Bludgeoning weapons that strike an overlord with a critical hit do triple damage.

Induce Fearlessness: When within 120 feet of an overlord, hybrid thralls and commanders are immune to fear effects.

   Overlords look like large, oddly formed crystalline statues that travel by levitation. It is speculated that this is the end stage growth of a hybrid after decades of service, but others think the overlord is a unique entity. They have stubby head-like growths with glowing gems for eyes (usually a dozen or more). They seem to have no other appendages, relying entirely on their telekinesis to manipulate objects around them.

   Overlords like to use their thrall minions and commanders to overwhelm a series of targets. Once restrained, in injects its crystal eggs in to those targets, to implant the seeds of a new thrall in to them. Overlords are driven by an obsessive need to acquire and protect territory and thralls. They rarely get along well with others of their kind, despite an understanding of their need to cooperate, and so the Cylovites have not become a dominant force in the world….yet!

Option: Overlord Spellcasters

Some overlords learn magic, and become quite adept at it. These tend to be level 9 spellcasters of CR 10 (5,900 XP), with the following spells ready:

Cantrips: blade ward, chill touch, mending, minor illusion

Level 1 Spells (4/day): charm person, color spray, sleep, Tasha’s Hideous Laughter

Level 2 Spells (3/day): crown of madness, detect thoughts, mirror image

Level 3 Spells (3/day): fear, lightning bolt, nondetection

Level 4 Spells (2/day): confusion, phantasmal killer

Level 5 Spells (1/day): hold monster

Legendary Actions:

The most powerful overlords gain 3 legendary action points to use during battle and are worth CR 11 (7,200 XP). They may commit to the following actions:

Greater Slam (2): As per the Telekinetic Slam, but targets all foes within 120 feet.

Instant Domination (1): use the domination effect immediately.

Control Second Dominated Target (1): if more than one target is dominated, the overlord may spend this point to gain a second bonus action to control the target.