The Monthly Blog Post!!! - Cypher System, Tales of the Valiant, Steam Deck OLED and Future Plans

 Wow, I have gone almost a month without bothering to post. In my defense I have had an enormous amount of work going on, and with that a lot of business travel, so time has a way of escaping under such circumstances. Still, I managed to have a bit of fun in the travel (which is all in-state, at least, so not horrible; New Mexico is if nothing else a very pretty region to drive through). 

My highlights this month include finally getting my hand on the Steam Deck OLED edition, which is noticeably an improvement over all the other prior handhelds I have gotten my hands on; enough so that I plan to sell my original Steal Deck and the Asus ROG Ally-- but not the Legion Go! That machine may have crappy battery life but all its other components make up for it. The Steam Deck OLED is not a maor leap, but its noticeably improved battery life (I took a trip from Albuquerque to Carlsbad and did not kill the battery the entire way, even playing games such as Crisis 2 on it), its screen improvement (I am a big fan of OLED screens), and its minor tweaks and improvements all led to the best handheld travel experience I have had so far with a PC handheld. 

This month is so crazy I have gotten almost no gaming in, and have so far had to postpone my live games until the end of the month. I managed to get one of the two campaigns to a decent pause point, where the PCs could rest, recuperate, scheme and also the players could decide what they want to do next. I am all for continuing the campaign which paused at level 14 (D&D 5E) and get them all to level 20 with a final glorious story arc, but I am also keen to try something different, such as Cypher System or Dragonbane. We'll see what happens when we resume gaming around Halloween.

On the Saturday group the story paused one session away from the big resolve, kinda annoying, but we'll get to it eventually. After the plot arc finishes (it[s D&D 5E in the fictitious not-Japan region of the Realms of Chirak setting), we'll see if the group wants to continue or we do something different. I am keen to try Tales of the Valiant, possibly on this night, as a focused campaign using only TotV books for a decently purist experience. My worry is that, since TotV is just a new iteration of D&D 5E, that my group will find that too restraining, as I notice some of them seem to go almost exclusively for weird 3PP stuff they find online these days to make characters, and a couple others in the group are really, really into D&D traditional, so TotV might be one step removed from their comfort zone, simply because it is not a WotC product. So I am unsure if this will really happen or not.

Saturdays have been rough for me as it is, as I've gotten older and had less overall time for things, it has made Saturdays harder for gaming. I have been more or less trying to regulate by doing every other week, but it is possible down the road I may consider other options. The thought crossed my mind that Sundays might be better for gaming....but traditionally I use Sunday as my "home maintenance day" so I'd have to switch that to Saturday if I tried gaming on Sunday. There is also the problem that I bought my house a roughly 30 minute drive from the city, where the group normally meets, and I often find myself a lot less interested in driving on the highway back to the city to run a game. Oh well...it will sort itself out eventually.

I may have my priorities backwards, too. I should consider Cypher System, a ruleset which is better for shortform campaigns of 10-20 sessions at the most, on Saturdays, and propose TotV for Wednesdays. I have a lot of really great Cypher books I have yet to use, as most of my original Cypher campaign time was with 1st edition and not the revised edition. I regret to say that, much as with several other games, the revision did not click as well with me as the original did, so I have only run a couple campaigns in the newer edition. I ran into this same problem with Unknown Armies, where I loved 1st edition but found that the subsequent revisions fell flat for me. Sometimes, that initial rough magic of the original game gets lost in the efforts of the designers to rethink/repackage/reimagine the system for later editions. In Cypher's case it's tolerable....I see why they changed character design the way they did to be cleaner and more generic, but in the process they lost the charm and suggestive flavor of the original's approach. This can be worked around, but it has forever left something behind with the original that made it a better overall evocative experience, in favor of a more organized and mechanically consistent experience....so a trade off, I guess. 

Anyway, this post has served mainly to remind myself that I should be blogging more often. More to come!

Tales of the Valiant Vs. D&D 2024

 Amidst an endless array of personal family turmoil (ranging from family health issues to cat problems to dying cars) I thought I'd take a few minutes to decompress with an innocuous blog post. Specifically, to call out a fine post over on the Kobold Press Blog! This one, in fact.

The Kobolds provide a bit of an overview on why one might consider Tales of the Valiant even in the face of the new D&D 2024. I have heard a lot of interesting feedback on D&D 2024, and one thing I've noticed is that the new rulebook is much likelier to cause consternation and conflict if you are a newer gamer. No one I've talked to who takes umbrage at any level with the new repackaging of the rules has been through the various prior edition changes, notable in particular being 1E to 2E, 2E to 3E, 3E to 3.5E, and the most egregious of all: 3.5E to 4E. That last one was, on a certain level, not a change of editions but a change of game systems, draped in the corpse skin of the game the mimic replaced.

I like to frame it like this: from my jaded ancient gamer perspective, there are about as many notable changes in D&D 2024 to the regular 5E D&D as there were between Call of Cthulhu 5th and 6th edition. Were there changes? Yes. Can you still use everything that came before with what is coming next? Totally. Is the new rules mainly just incentivizing you to buy it by being cooler, offering more options, and packaging everything in a very clean and organized package? Totally.

Tales of the Valiant comes in to this discussion with the idea that it offers what amounts to 90% of the same game, with the last 10% looking darned similar and just being a mess of tweaks and mods for a particular feel and style. It has its own merits, but I really do think I could run a campaign with mixed 5E PHB, 2024 PHB and TotV characters all at the same table, so long as I am clear on which underlying variant of the rules we are all agreeing to abide by. They are that close.

What Tales of the Valiant offers that is different from the new 2024 D&D however is style and character: it's presenting a distinctly Kobold-Pressian representation of adventuring that looks and feels a lot like the D&D I thematically have enjoyed for many years now. It's got a traditional vibe to it that makes it feel different from the newer 2024 D&D, which is so far totally fine but also feels like it is trying too hard to be too many things to too many people at once.

What this all gets down to is that while I rather like the new 2024 PHB, I think I can hold off using it until its two complimentary volumes are out, so I plan to convince my playing group we should give Tales of the Valiant a spin for a few months so we can really grokk the subtleties here. I want to see if the promise that monsters hit harder and the game is a bit tougher is true, because I like that concept space. I also like how TotV does the lineages and heritages, it provides more versatility and flavor, something I feel is a bit weak in the 2024 PHB edition, where it feels like "least troublesome presentation" was the order of the day.

That said.....neither of these systems have half elves or half orcs, and that is just weird. It's one of those moments where you have to ask what curious logic was on display to invalidate the notion of people of mixed race, and what sort of madness percolates under the guise of good intentions to think that somehow such notions had to be expurgated from our fantasy tales?

Ah well.

If I manage to get this off the ground I shall report more soon. 

Post- Session: Player's Handbook 2024 is A Utility Driven 5.25E D&D

 Just a brief follow-up, and this is with the noted caveat that the devil is in the details, but my group last night agreed that the D&D 2025 Player's Handbook is basically a marvel in reorganization and a clear rewrite, but it also appears to be simultaneously far less invasive than we expected in terms of rules changes, and also somehow a bit more so in some very specific cases. The fact that it really does appear to be backwards compatible with no fuss (that is to say, you can run a 2014 character with a gang of 2024 characters and not miss a beat) is helpful. That makes it noteworthy as being less of a hassle than, say, using 3.0 products with 3.5 books back in the day, where there were a lot of discreet structural and design changes to improve mechanical problems. This book is far less about fixing mechanical issues then simply adding new content and revising stuff that will, while not invalidating the older PHB, make your players want the new PHB.

No one in my group had a copy yet, and as it turns out despite getting several boxes of books my FLGS sold all of them on Tuesday, and so no one in my group other than my son and myself had the new PHB yet. Still.....I am sure they will grab it on D&D Beyond or something quick enough, or when the formal non FLGS release hits on the 17th.

By the way, I have gotten over the freakishly friendly smiling phenomenon I was ranting about yesterday. After making such a big deal about it, I began to notice that this is not quite the bother it initially felt like to me.....yes, there are still about 10-15 notable illustrations where I am a bit weirded out at the maniacal joy of the expressions on these character's faces, but a disproportionated number of them appear to all be bards and (weirdly!) druids. So yeah....probably just a "me" problem LOL

Anyway! We already started using the book in actual play to look up stuff like spells and such. We did not find any surprises (yet) but there are some. Healing seems to be buffed up a bit, for one. It is much, much easier to look content up in this edition, so it is already feeling pointless to me to reach for the old PHB unless I really needs to identify some legacy content information, such as on a class that got more heavily revamped, or the poor half orcs and half elves who have lost their identities in this new edition. 

Speaking of half orcs and half elves Is it just me or does that feel like some sort of weird form of discrimination? Was WotC more worried about the kind of questions being half-this and half-that raised, and decided it was better to not raise those questions and hope no one brought up the counter point that in a world where elves, orcs and humans can all apparently interbreed that there will be people of mixed descent? Is this purged because they decided to remove the concept of races and go for species, implying everyone is genetically too different to interbreed? The entire thing feels weird to me, and like there was no right way for them to address this without offending some camp, so they just tried to dodge the entire issue instead. I feel like this is even stranger given they made orcs, as the most contentious example, far more "not evil" in this version, at least according to the lone paragraph of detail they get, which strongly implies that humans, elves and such who have a green muscle mommy fetish (damn you internet for creating these memes) would inevitably lead to even more half orcs in the world, not less. Oh well. It's like 1989 all over again, and no doubt a future book will find a way to delicately address this such that the WotC overlords don't look like they are crapping on people of multiracial descent through their fantasy game analogues.

2024 Player's Handbook Is In the Wild!

 I picked up my special edition cover of the 2024 Player's Handbook yesterday and spent a fair amount of time reading through the book. As many have already commented, this books' single greatest contribution to the game is organization....the book really is incredibly well organized, in a smart way that makes a lot of sense, and leads the reader to wonder why it took this long. I have a few other observations so far....but this is hardly a proper review as of yet, just observations. The real meat of any discussion will have to wait until I've met with my group tonight and we have formulated a plan of attack for when we will start using the new PHB in actual play. But in the interim, here are those observations....

Someone Hates Fluff

This is the least fluff-filled PHB I have ever seen. A single page for most character species (and I like that they are using the term species now) of which half of the page is an illustration seems scant at best. Most of the species and their possible subtypes are getting maybe a paragraph of introduction at best. 

Gaucho Orcs

Orcs got a reboot in this book. They have exactly one page, half text and half illustration. Gruumsh is now some sort of orcish analog for Odin or something, and orcs have a penchant for nomadic wanderlust. There's like 1 paragraph of detail, and half of it reframing Gruumsh. All of the other details can be derived from an illustration of an orc family that makes them look like sombrero and poncho wearing gauchos from the old west. In a post World of Warcraft universe I respect the idea that orcs are a thing people want to play but it is insanely weird to see all the core conceits of what it means to be an orc get completely stripped out and replaced by a vague suggestion of form in the example illustration. 

Very Clean Class Write-Ups

The classes are all reframed and reformatted, to the extent that even spell lists are now included for each class in the class description proper. Its incredibly efficient and impressively done. There are so many weird little changes to the classes that this part more than any will be where people find the most arguments for this being a D&D 5.5 or even better a 6E.

The Core Mechanics are Still The Same

There are lots of tweaks and bits everywhere, but the way the game plays remains the same. This system is arguably a bigger jump than 3.5 was from 3.0, but it all in the extraneous details such as classes, spells and species and far less in the mechanical core.

A Really Weird Number of Characters in This Book Have Freaky Open Mouthed Eerie Smiles

I don't know what the artistic intent is here,* but the number of characters smiling like they are hopped up on mushrooms or derived from some freaky AI generated model is just a tad on the disturbing side. There are, thankfully, lots of illustrations of D&D characters doing actual D&D type stuff (fighting, spell casting, exploring, investigating, etc.) but possibly better than half the illustrations in this book appear to be of freakishly weird denizens whose exact class and species is up for debate smiling like an amorphous AI generated illustration about to bite your head off, and it's frankly weirding me out, like, a lot.

The Garb of Characters is in Stark Contrast to Equipment Illustrations

Aside from the excessive use of smiling and expressions of sheer, unmitigated and possibly drug-induced joy, the art in the book is pretty solid. There is a moment of disconnect for me when you get to the nice but very mundane sample illustrations of arms and armor, and I then look at the insanely elaborate dress and garb of the sample characters and wonder to myself, "no one is wearing any of the practical gear this book is telling me the average mundane PCs will be using, they are all wearing aristocratic designer garb straight from the poshest corners of Waterdeep, the sort of things you wear to your cousins' wedding and not to a dungeon fight."

There's more yet to be gone in to. I am still soaking up the new stuff, especially weapon stunts and the enormous number of class tweaks, but overall this is a pretty solid book, and still feels very much like 5E in terms of what its accomplishing, so I can accept the interpretation of the 2024 PHB being more of a 5.5 edition than anything else, because its mechanical core remains the same solid nugget we've been using for the last ten years. 

*I once watched some Youtube videos where they talked about how adding a open-mouthed, shocked or smiling look to your image in a thumbnail was supposed to dramatically increase clicks (user engagement) with the video. So for a while every bloody Youtube video had someone in the thumbnail expressing delight, surprise and shock with a wide open mouth. Eventually, the novelty of this conceit must have worn off as people got tired of the gimmick and it stopped being useful to most Youtubers except I imagine for Mr. Beast. 

I bring this up because I feel like the art team at WotC were told by someone that people love sheer, unrelenting borderline insane expressions of joy crossing people's faces, regardless of the illustrative intent or context of the image, and that became an embedded design imperative. Luckily, as I mentioned, there's enough more conventional illustrations to offset this, but holy cats....either a few more smiling maniacs or a few less illustrations of non drugged up adventurers behaving normally and I think the art alone could have sunk this book just by crossing some uncanny valley line. (EDIT - probably not, and this is probably just me and my preference for characters "fitting the mood" better for the subject....and me being out of touch with the totality of what the mood is for D&D 2024, I suppose. But still! I can't be the only one who finds some of these maniacal smiling adventurers off-putting.....this is probably just a personal extension of why I don't enjoy Disney movies or something.)

The Myriad Ways Nostalgia Seeps In

 So I think I hit a nostalgia phase recently, and I realize now that there is a vast difference between "Nostalgia as represented by other people online," and "Nostalgia that works for me." To be more specific, I recently began thinking about what would be considered "nostalgic" for me in a sense that I understood....that is, wanted to engage with and liked in a way that felt like I was reconnecting with an old past I had all but abandoned. 

It's hard for me to feel nostalgia about D&D because, in the time I have been a gamer I have played D&D consistently across about six editions and numerous variants almost weekly now for close to 43 years. So D&D specifically isn't a nostalgia driver - its an old warhorse I can both rely on but also feel the need to give the poor old boy a break these days, as he's old and weathered.

I likewise have a lot of bygone hobbies that no longer "click" for me at least partially because the overall value of the hobby has now passed on to memory, or its dated in a unique way that makes it difficult to re-engage with. Sometimes its because the elements of the hobby that made it fun now seem a bit quaint, as I have moved on from it and developed more sophisticated tastes (for example: as a teenager I was fascinated with Transformers, but that was 40 years ago and I really don't care for them these days outside of mild amusement and perplexity at just how much that IP has polymorphed and warped over the years). 

There are sometimes hobbies I was so in to that I exhausted my interest, and now find that any rekindling of interest is mostly a mellow "reappreciation" of an old interest. I think of Star Trek this way, for example. Loved it - a lot- back in the day, will still watch any of the original movies and episodes on occasion, but otherwise have very little interest in what goes on in Star Trek now, or in seeking out, collecting, or obsessing over the Star Trek of yore. It's time has passed for me.

But, amidst all of this, I figured out what does click for me on the nostalgia scale: stuff I was really into in the very late eighties and much of the nineties, stuff I particularly enjoyed and then moved away from, often due to life circumstances, but never properly got back to. Sometimes its also because my moment of enjoyment was deep and profound, and the "thing" in question was ultimately left behind but not because I was oversaturated or done with the property, but because life conspired to take me away from it. I have managed to identify a few of these things, which I have been rediscovering lately and finding I am really enjoying getting back to these ancient, neglected interests. Specifically, here are a few:

Cyberpunk - Specifically Cyberpunk 2020, the most played game I ran in college that wasn't AD&D 2E, and easily one of the best gaming experiences I had back in the day. I moved away from it for plenty of reasons, none of which were because I was done with it, although later editions didn't tempt me back; we'll see about Cyberpunk Red which I am reading through again with an eye for seeing if it can recapture that zeitgeist of Cyberpunk gaming in the early nineties.

Image Comics from the Nineties - I jumped hard on the Image comics explosion in 1992 and stuck with it until time and money conspired to take me away from comic collecting following my move to Seattle in 1995. I have very fond memories of just how great, new and interesting it was to follow the various comic creators behind Image at that time as they constructed a new, interesting shared universe that was outdoing Marvel and DC at every turn. It fell apart eventually, but I only left it because I graduated and went off to Seattle to pursue some direction toward a career. I came back to comic collecting in 2012 and have stuck with it, but only recently did I begin to recollect various Image series from the nineties (all of my original comics have been long gone). Wildcats, Stormwatch, Grifter, Authority, Gen 13, Team 7 and many others are all a "best of" from  unique era in the nineties when creator controlled properties briefly made the entire industry quake in fear. Of these, Spawn alone is the one I have kept up with collecting so I don't need to bargain hunt at local comic shops and on Ebay for Todd McFarlane's angry hero from hell, but for the rest? It's proving to be a lot of fun to restore these lost collections, and even find the stuff that came out after I was forced to take a 17 year hiatus in comic collecting.

Unknown Armies - I played a lot of 1st edition Unknown Armies, and loved that edition. I was out of the loop by the time 2nd edition was released (it was too soon!) and now I've had 3rd edition on my shelf for ages. But that said, I think that either getting back to the original 1st edition or re-embracing the newest edition is another proper nostalgia itch scratcher for me. 

Pseudo-Nostalgia: Over the Edge - I actually loved reading all the Over the Edge books, and wanted to run it but never got the opportunity. I am now recollecting with exactly that intent!

Anyway.....these properties (and a few more I might write about in the future) have actually been ticking the nostalgia box for me. So now I think I understand how some people feel....maybe!

Borderlands Movie Review

 I saw Borderlands over the weekend with my son....it was, well, fine, but the movie clearly has so many weird little issues that it was doomed from the beginning. There's a lot of individual performances and moments that feel very right for Borderlands, but the film is stuck in a pre-Last of Us/pre-Fallout Series quagmire of the sort of lowered expectations Hollywood has had toward video game franchises from the time before someone started doing it right. Still better than the Halo TV show, but that's a super low bar. See if for free and be only slightly disappointed.

Pros on the movie:

--Looks really good for the most part; some nice effort was put in to give the world of Pandora its junky, trashed feel from the games.

--Cate Blanchett really puts it all in on a grizzled older Lilith, who is a gun-toting shoot-first lady version of Han Solo in this film.

--Jack Black really nailed Claptrap the Robot, enough so for me that he almost sounded like the game version.

--Kevin hart does a pretty good Roland circa Borderlands 1. Krieg is Krieg, though if you know him from Borderlands 2 he says a lot of crazy stuff this version in the movie barely touches on. Marcus the gun dealer works surprisingly well given he, like so many Borderlands characters are such distinct visual and audio personalities that that can make it tough for a live actor to live up to the more cartoonish elements of its source material.

And the Cons:

--Made years ago during the pandemic, this project clearly went through too many screen rewrites and edits, and the story is a mashup of bits from the games and "Save the Cat" plot elements jammed in by nervous screenwriters who didn't know what to do with the material and were worried it wouldn't appeal to a mass audience. It ignores or rewrites chunks of game plot in ways that The Last of Us and Fallout Series have shown you do not have to; it is an artifact of the elements of Hollywood that do not like video games and do not know what to do with them.

--The movie has three principle female leads, all in their fifties to sixties. In an action movie about a video game aimed at teens and twenty-somethings, featuring mostly characters also in their teens and twenties. Gina Gershon as Mad Moxxie is arguably the closest in age to her own character, but in the Borderlands universe even Mad Moxxie is still using some unholy biogenetic/cybernetic enhancements to make herself perpetually young looking (maybe, I dunno; its video game logic, okay?) But as I watched this movie all I could think to myself was, "I saw the perfect actress for Lilith earlier this year, and she was playing Furiosa." 

--Even Kevin Hart, despite playing a decent Roland (IMO, YMMV), felt a bit too old for the Roland from the game who I would have pegged at maybe 25-26 years old and fresh out of a tour of duty leading him to vault hunter as a profession. Plus, in the movie, he's actually portrayed as an AWOL crimson lance, which is....maybe what happens to him in a later game? I don't honestly know, I only got about 10 hours in to Borderlands 2 (I've played the first game start to finish 3 times, but never finished 2 or 3, sorry).

--What was with female General Knox (and why gender swap Knox when there was a perfectly workable actual female villain in the original game who filled this exact role?) and her relationship with Roland? Why was that not even remotely developed in a way the audience could see so it had some meaningful payoff? Was that stuff that was filmed and then cut in editing? 

--No skag attack? In a Borderlands game? Yeesh!

--A mishmashed ending which took more from Borderlands 2, but shifted who the characters were and made only a slight nod to the tentacle brother to Cthulhu that is the end boss of the original game. Okay but also not ideal.

--The biggest con with the movie was how remarkably little of it felt "right" and how those moments stood out when the movie did, in fact, occasionally start to feel very much like Borderands, only to then do something that felt ham-fisted and either the result of poor writing or poor editing/direction. 

--The fights lacked pizzazz. The director (Eli Roth, I believe) doesn't seem to know how to do satisfying fight choreography.

--For every region from the game that got an interesting facelift (such as Fyrestone or Piss Wash Gully) there was another location where it was just head-scratching as to why they changed it (the ending sequence, for example, where the Vault entrance is located).  

--Weird and ham-fisted "Save the Cat" plot moments felt jammed in to satisfy story beats or force emotional resonance. The entire backstory of Lilith, Tannis and Lilith's mom was just...unnecessary.

--Tiny Tina was a doomed choice of character from the start; no one was going to top the Animated Tiny Tina for sheer crazy, period.

--Tannis, played by Jamie Lee Curtis is the most out of place of all of the characters. In the game she is a late twenties/early thirties scheming psychopath driven mad by the planet in her pursuit of Eridian artifacts. In the movie she is a seventy-something savant on the spectrum who botched her friend's request to take care of her daughter and who hides away in some attic studying artifacts with no real agency. Curtis does fine, but this just ain't the game's Tannis, by a long shot.

--Why do none of the characters reflect their iconic abilities? How could the movie go at length without showing Lilith use phasing powers, or Roland using his turret machine gun? These were such easy gives for certain scenes, essentially the character's superpowers, and they ignored them. 

--The vibe of the movie is just completely off. It feels at moments like the art and FX team totally got the message, but the writers and director totally did not. Somewhere in this mix someone knew enough to crib material from the game, but not enough to understand the core appeal of the game that could translate to film.

So in short: I give the movie a C for trying, but also a C for somehow failing so badly. I don't regret seeing it, but I also hope the movie is quickly and quietly forgotten so that maybe now, in this post-The Last of Us era of films based on games, we can see a real Borderlands movie done right eventually. I wonder how much cash could be thrown at George Miller to make it? Seriously, he made a much better Borderlands movie earlier this year, called Furiosa. 

This is Probably too Clever But....

 In reference to my post yesterday about being confused as to why Robert Downy Jr. would return as Doctor Doom, the thought crossed my mind that if you wanted to have a big Iron man comeback, and didn't want to obviously give away your plans, this is the way to do it, through misdirection. Unfortunately a fellow I know with more Marvel lore than I do says the whole Iron Man/Doc Doom connection is a thing in recent Marvel comics, so maybe its just that. Who knows!

Let's Play: Losing the Plot or Out of Touch!

 The title of this blog came to mind after two conversations. The first one was with a couple friends who, like me, are of an older generation that remembers a time when Star Wars worked reasonably well because the oversaturation of content was restricted to comics, books and games; the core conceits of the universe were officially corralled within a handful of movies. So today my son, who should be target demographic #1 for Disney's Star Wars, had lots of scathing opinions about The Acolyte's loose effort at either mishandling or redefining the core conceits of what its universe is. In a bygone age something like Acolyte would be another random Dark Horse Comic or maybe a West End Games sourcebook that was quickly forgotten. Today....it's a TV show and sort of feels like someone has steered wildly off course on the original sparse but satisfying core nugget of the Star Wars Experience.

The second one was me reading about How Robert Downy Jr. will return to the Marvel Universe as Doctor Doom. I don't know how this works. I can speculate its more of their multiversal madness, but the reason they are not working right now is precisely due to the fact that multiversal storylines do not make for coherent storytelling, and they reduce the gravitas of the main plot. Comics use multiverse storylines to "fix" issues prior authors and artists caused for future artists. They sometimes use it to do hard reboots to clean up the myriad obscure plots that make it hard for new readers to break in to the current books. They often (in DC's case) use it to tell cool stories they can't tell any other way because the core conceits of a comic universe require things be static and not change. But the film universes of these comics clearly work differently, and the application of multiversal themes seem to be the death knell of both the Marvel and DC film continuities. You can have fun in the moment, but then you leave and realized it tasted great but was just empty calories. These is nothing to feel invested in, at the end of the day. It is a storyteller's dead end.

That prompted me to think, so am I the crazy one who is out of touch here, thinking that bringing Iron Man guy back s Doctor Doom guy....a  move I can only imagine will do no justice to either character....is just kind of digging the hole Marvel is in even deeper? Or am I Out of Touch, and if I were one of the cool kids this would all make sense somehow?

My son, who is 12, barely remembers the Avengers movies that offed Tony Stark as a character. He has seen some Fantastic Four films and found them old and out of date. He doesn't know of care why the Iron Man actor is now also the Doctor Doom actor, and has so much Marvel content at his finger tips that he gains satisfaction by refusing all of it, because his generation, to survive, must set these boundaries against the hordes of IP issued forth by the Media Overlords. So....if you feel this way does that mean you are Out of Touch too? Even at 12? Or has Disney well and truly Lost the Plot?

I guess if we're lucky my son will know how awesome (or terrible) a Downey Jr. Doom is before he's graduated High School!

Long-Form vs. Short-Form RPGs - Or, There's Never Enough Time to Run Everything

Right now my gaming group....well, I as GM anyway....have a problem, and that problem is that we are currently playing Dungeons & Dragons 5E on both Wednesday and Saturday. That's a good thing, sure! People love playing games and its nice to have had a consistent D&D group in one form or another for decades now. But here's the problem.....I''ll provide a short list:

Tales of the Valiant; Mothership; Call of Cthulhu; Savage Worlds; Pathfinder 2E Revised; Traveller; Mork Borg; Vast Grimm; Mutant Year Zero; Gamma World; Swords & Wizardry.

I could go on....but you get the point. There's a lot of RPGs I have I'd like to also be playing right now, but I keep running D&D 5E. The reason, of course, is because D&D at its heart is a long-form game experience. You can run short campaigns, sure, but D&D is built around the core conceit of forging lengthy tales of heroes who venture forth and have exciting experiences over many, many game sessions. As a result, starting a D&D campaign isn't just (for my table, anyway) a case of "go explore that dungeon," its a campaign-level "Start at level 1 and work your way to whatever level the DM can get to before breaking," type deal.

Some of the other games work much better with a more short-form experience, where the game can last 1-3 sessions or maybe a mini campaign arc of 5-10 sessions followed by a satisfying conclusion. Savage Worlds does this well. Horror games are particularly suited to this format and I run Call of Cthulhu and Mothership usually with the expectation that a campaign will rarely go past 5-10 sessions. I did once run a CoC campaign that went 18 sessions, but even that one had to end spectacularly and with a measure of finality that was quite satisfying and is still talked about years later.

The problem is: I love running long-form campaigns but I really thrive on short-form campaigns where you can remain more focused on a specific concept space. And right now, I am running essentially two long-form campaigns because when it comes to D&D and its clones, it is all too easy and natural to slide in to the lengthy campaign format, sometimes without even realizing it. Now, luckily for me the Saturday campaign has a definite potential closing point. For whatever reason, my "secondary campaign" night (which is Saturdays) is always easier for me to eventually tire of and want to bail on. So I expect we will get 2-3 more sessions out of it before I am proposing something new. This is unfortunate for my players on Saturday who would like a long running campaign, but necessary for my sanity, because deep down these days I am full of 20 ideas at a time, but have room for exploring only one and a half-of them at a time. 

Wednesday is the real problem for me: I want to try out Tales of the Valiant, but we're hip deep in our ongoing D&D 5E campaign with no end in sight. Tales of the Valiant is meant to be a 5E replacement ruleset, so in theory I could cheekily just start using it and gradually shift the campaign over but....nah, that wouldn't be as satisfying as starting a new campaign aimed specifically at using Tales of the Valiant by itself. So yeah, I remain stuck there for a bit.

Meanwhile, I have loads of new ideas for other games, including Mothership, Cthulhu, Savage Worlds and some more obscure ones such as Dreams & Machines and Gamma World (the 4th edition of the game from the nineties, no less!) that I want to entertain. I feel like I could have done this more efficiently twenty years ago. Ah well! We'll see what I can do.

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.