Final Exam 2765: We Play Some Battletech

This past Friday, we geared up for the upcoming Star League-era campaign (almost done with the lifepaths!) by playing some Battletech straight out of the new starter box in order to teach our newbies the system. Marc, Scott, and I have been playing since the mid-80’s, but Cat and Bob had never played before. For simplicity we decided to go with the basic Final Exam scenario in the introductory rulebook…two identical equal-tonnage lances (Catapult, Trebuchet, Jenner, Commando) in wooded terrain.

Timeframe: Late October, 2765

Situation: As Rim Worlds Republic units gradually replaced SLDF forces departing for the Periphery, those Star League units left in the Terran Military Region held various ceremonies, parties, and joint exercises to welcome their Amaris counterparts. One common practice was to pit newly-minted academy grads serving in Rim Worlds and SLDF regiments against each other in mock battles with second-line ‘Mechs. On Terra Firma, Sandhurst graduates of the 1st (Terran) RCT’s 138th Hussar regiment faced off against equally-recent graduates of the Tadeo Amaris Military Academy from the 88th Amaris Lancers, little realizing that they would be facing each other again in deadly earnest in a few short months.

Both sides raced for the largest woods in the middle of the field, hoping to be the first to make it to the cover and dominate the area. Unfortunately, both SLDF and Amaris light ‘Mechs reached the trees at the same time. While the Rim Worlds cadets showed an aptitude for springing ambushes out of the thick growth, nether side was able to gain decisive superiority before heavier units arrived.

With both the SLDF and Rim Worlders fully engaged, the woods became a battleground with ‘Mechs jumping over the treetops to find their targets and then disappearing back into the depths of the forest to avoid return fire. Between this and the general inexperience of the cadets, both sides displayed a total inability to hit anything at all and there was much headshaking and loud giggling from both Amaris and SLDF veterans (on the bright side, all the misses did give the newbies plenty of opportunity to get used to adding modifiers).

As visibility was such an issue, the combatants closed to finish things with punches and kicks as well as weapons fire. After a few well-placed strikes both Jenners were crippled and the SLDF Commando had lost an arm. Finally, time was called and internal damage added up. The Rim Worlds team was the victor by one point. 

Analysis: All in all this did what it was supposed to do: get everyone to play together and give the inexperienced an opportunity to learn the system. Some more experienced pilots would have made things go faster (Gunnery 4 + Woods = lots of missed rolls). And of course had we been playing with Level 2 rules that middle forest would have been a blazing inferno from all the firepower being dumped into it. On the bright side, everyone seemed more than willing to play again.

Scott called this “jumping him from behind”, but veteran MechWarriors and adult film stars refer to it as a “money shot”. More naughty BattleMech pics and vids available for a small monthly fee!

Ships of the Fleet: Omega Class Destroyers

A while back in December, just before the holidays, I got a request (I occasionally do get them believe it or not) for some shots of my Omega class Destroyers. Now that the holidays are over and things at work have firmly settled into a new semester, I decided to take a few pictures. Let me warn you in advance that what you are about to see is not Art.

One nice thing about the Earth Alliance is that their ships are easy to paint. Humans in a lot of science fiction settings seem to like basic flat white or grey color schemes, and Earthforce is no exception. Therefore, work on a new ship basically breaks down into these stages:

1. Give it a good undercoat of black primer.
2. Basecoat it grey. I’ve been using an old pot of Ral Partha Dark Grey, but Citadel Fortress Grey is about the same thing.
3. Give it a wash of black ink to bring out detail.
4. Highlight it with light grey. Again, I’m still using up my Partha Light Grey, but there are plenty of equivalent colors. I have a pot of Vallejo Silvergrey all set for when the Partha paint runs out (or for when I finally start work on my Andermani ships for Saganami Island Tactical Simulator)
5. Details. I use Citadel Regal Blue for the characteristic EA striping and engine nacelle decoration, but any version of Prussian Blue (except the scary white supremacist girl-band) works fine. Other colors as needed for sensors, hangars, etc.
6. Give it a coat of gloss and then a coat of matte sealer, and a new vessel is ready to leave the shipyards.

So without further ado:

That’s EAS Acheron, the first Omega I ever painted. The basic technique is clearly at work here. Note the bendy neck from the old Agents of Gaming mold.

The same ship in a frontal-top view. She actually does have her hangar painted orange, but it’s not readily visible from this angle.

You can see the hangar detailing a touch better in this shot of EAS Pegasus, my second Omega. By the time I was six I had pretty much decided that I wanted to be Lloyd Bridges when I grew up, so there’s been a Pegasus in my fleet pretty much from the day I started my starship combat career with TSR’s Knight Hawks expansion for Star Frontiers.

That’s EAS Leonidas (Madness? THIS IS…Proxima III!), my third Omega. I had hit my stride by this point and added a little more detail. Note the generally cleaner quality of the cast; Acheron and Pegasus were cast with the old molds that Mongoose acquired from Agents of Gaming. Leonidas is from a new mold.

 

Finally, we have the second version of EAS Pegasus, or more properly Pegasus-C since she’s a command variant. The older model was also intended as a command variant on paper, but Mongoose wasn’t selling the kit yet and I had no access to a Poseidon model to steal parts from. 

The same ship from above. I think the highlighting here is much improved from my initial effort with Acheron.

Apart from these Omegas, I have three Shadow Omegas sitting on the workbench waiting for paint: my own EAS Charon, and two belonging to Marc. Of course as you might be able to tell from the photos, the workbench itself needs some de-cluttering first.

That, incidentally, is my entire painted EA fleet. You can see my almost never-used Empire army for Warhammer below it.

Not exactly Golden Demon material, but it doesn’t embarass me to put it on the tabletop. I’m looking into getting a set of decals for the next Omega I paint, which should make it a significant step up from the ones you see here.

A Tabletop Trip into Phlan

I’ve recently been feeling the love again for Forgotten Realms. Like an old codependent girlfriend, the Realms and I have had an off again/on again thing going pretty much since I started playing D&D in grade school. Sometimes I’m a historical snob and I kick them out of bed to pursue higher class settings with more “historical” flavor like Warhammer Fantasy or Space 1889. Other times I embrace the sheer size, opportunity, and wealth of support the Realms offer and welcome them back into my life for wild make-up sex.

Having recently attended my first PA Renaissance Faire I think I’ve finally worked out a stable relationship. Considered as a whole, the Realms themselves are pretty much a giant Ren Faire, with all the attendant anachronisms and blending of cultures and situations. When you can embrace that “what the heck…just throw in whatever sounds cool” attitude, you can really appreciate the value of Forgotten Realms as a setting. It also helps that I’m coming down after two years of running Iron Kingdoms, a setting that appears to me to have begun taking itself MUCH too seriously given the amount of support that exists for the D20 game.

So…back to the basics! Inspired by my recent rediscovery of the Gold Box series, I snagged the .pdf of the old Ruins of Adventure module and started work converting it over to 3.5. Ruins has a similar design philosophy to Keep on the Borderlands; it’s a bunch of adventure locations with a loose connecting plot. The advantage there is that you don’t have to convert the entire module before you run it. I basically had to roll encounters for the Slums, stick in a couple of twists of my own, and I was ready to go. The real work was in providing 3.5 stats for the encounter tables.

And so on Friday, three mighty adventurers strode forth to take up the cause of urban renewal in Phlan: a Fighter, Cleric of Tempus, and Sorcerer played by Scott, Marc, and Bob respectively.

After visiting the city council and receiving a commission to map and reconnoiter the Slums, the party got off to a shaky start by boldly entering the slums without any means of actually drawing the map. After returning with paper and ink, they started work in earnest, killing some Orcs and rescuing an “independent entrepreneur” (played by my girlfriend Cat) from a fate worse than death. Now equipped with a thief, they fought their way through several buildings infested with undead, haggled their way through a marketplace, and moved ever closer to a burned out shop with a subbasement that the Thief had heard contained a cache of loot. Inside, they faced their toughest challenge yet: a newly hatched Black Dragon whelp. Having dispatched the evil (but cute) monster, they loaded up the gold, some potions, and some potential magic items and headed back to Civilized Phlan. Not bad for a first adventure!

All in all it was a nice break from running Iron Kingdoms with high level PCs for so long. There’s something very visceral about playing at low level, when both monsters and characters have few HP and a single hit can mean death. It was also nice to be able to use some more familiar tropes; Thralls and Farrow are very cool in their own way, but skeletons and orcs are the comfort food of monster-slaying.

Funniest moment: having dispatched a wight and two lesser undead, the party piled them up and burned them within sight of the walls of Civilized Phlan. Understandably alarmed by the sight of smoke rising next to their wooden palisade, Phlan’s city guard turned out and promptly charged the PCs a five gold piece “burning permit” fee. Just another day in the life of a low-level adventuring party…

Where Have All The Gnomes Gone: Dungeons and Dragons 4e as a Generational Save Point

My friend Dave Hucke refused to play D&D 3e.

Even after all three corebooks were out, and several members of our group back in turn-of-the-21st-century Milwaukee had read them, Dave held out. He was our GM, so we soldiered on with the 1st and 2nd edition hybrid that many of the most old school of the old school gamers seem to end up adopting. I didn’t actually get to try out the 3.0 rules until I moved to Boston to start library school a year later. Back then, I didn’t really understand what the problem was. 3.0 had a nice unified d20/target number system which I thought was clearly superior to the older versions’ hodgepodge of rolls ( the Bend Bars/Lift Gates check was the one that bugged me most. Why have a separate roll when you could just make a simple Strength check like you do for everything else?), and an extremely flexible multiclassing system. Now, having perused a copy of the Races and Classes 4e preview book, I think I have some idea. It was because he was in his mid-thirties and we were all in our early twenties.

I won’t go into the changes in detail here. For those of you who are curious and want a quick recap, there’s a review on RPG.Net that captures them pretty well. As it happens, I agree with many of the mechanical changes (fewer skills, per-round abilities for all classes, and soforth). I’m having a lot of trouble, on the other hand, wrapping my head around the change in flavor. It’s beyond the scope of my limited vision to say wether these changes are “good” or “bad”; only the final sales numbers of the finished product will tell us that. I will, however, say that they are clear evidence that my generation of gamers is no longer D&D’s target audience. We’re at a virtual Save Point in gaming history, where we can stop and look at the changes in the hobby and its participants.

In his excellent and insightful Technopoly, Neil Postman postulated a shift in the early 20th Century from an essentially print-driven “Technocratic” culture to a first audio and then visual media driven “Technopoly”. I would suggest that 4e is representative of this shift on a smaller and more recent scale.

Gygax, Arneson, and all of the other original pathfinders of the gaming world, first encountered their subject matter via print through fantasy novels and historical wargaming. D&D’s early iterations followed those conventions with clearly defined roles (multiclassing was almost impossible), a check-and-balance approach to character abilities (wizards have hefty damage potential but low hit points, fighters can take damage but have no magic access), and use of easily recognizable fantasy tropes of the time (elves, dwarves, halflings/hobbits, and gnomes). Early D&D reflected a low-key, low-fantasy worldview inspired by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber. It was not flashy because print does not lend itself to flashiness in the same way as more visual media. It involved mapping and strategizing as an integral part of the experience.

Now I hail from a border generation (I’m 31), and I had a lot more exposure to the kind of market driven mass-media modern kids have to deal with (Thundercats, Ho!), but I encountered fantasy literature and fantasy gaming in the same way: through print (Tolkien, Kay, and Salvatore), and shared a lot of the same expectations and prejudices. The fantasy genre was still considered somewhat “fringe” at the time, and print was pretty much the only place you could find stuff in that vein which was not explicitly created to sell toys.

4e, conversely, is going to be fighting for the disposable income of gamers who grew up being able to watch anime on cable TV and whose first gaming experience is likely to have involved a World of Warcraft subscription. They’ve been raised on a diet of visual storytelling with sweeping action, over-the-top effects, and quick transitions.  A Technocratic gaming culture has been replaced by a Technopoly. And 4e caters to it. All classes (even the long-suffering Fighter) have some kind of special combat move or power. Gnomes are gone, and Tieflings and the new and anime-like Dragonborn are now core races. Elves have subdivided into Blood Elf-esque Eladrin and Night Elf-y vanilla Elves. The memorization system for spells is out, discarding long-range planning for immediate flexibility. The thin veneer of Greyhawk, which once overlaid the core rules, is gone and has been replaced by a new 4e “house” setting replete with fallen empires, races suffering under terrible curses, and Halfling boat people.

It is at this point that I suddenly find that I empathize with Dave’s long-ago objection to 3.0. Yes, the spell memorization system is a little goofy outside of the Jack Vance novels that inspired it, but its very goofiness was what gave D&D its unique character. Yes, I’ve never played or do I intend to play a Gnome, but Gnomes as a core race have been a staple since 1st Endition. Consider the case of Chris Cecil over at the Penderyn Campaign website. There’s a man who clearly loves his Gnomes. And what’s the Baldur’s Gate franchise without Tiax? You will notice that my objections here are largely based on “that’s the way it’s always been”. I suspect Dave’s tight grip on the Bend Bars/Lift Gates roll had a similar motivator. The things that we’re attached to aren’t always better, they’re just what we’re most comfortable with. And with seven years gone by since 3.0’s 2000 release, I’ve had time to get comfortable with a lot of things both in gaming and in life.

In the end, both Dave then and I now were essentially not reacting to the changes in the game in and of themselves, but to the unpleasant discovery in our self-centered world that our generation of gamers is now a second-tier marketing concern. All the nostalgia in the world over gnomes isn’t going to matter if newbies want to play half-demons and half-dragons, and all the flavor of the old magic system means nothing if new players are expecting a more reactive WoW kind of experience. And as much as it hurts to admit it, those players really deserve more consideration than we do. They have afternoons after school and whole days with no college classes to game. They can handle the massive quantities of caffeine and sugar required to pull successive all-nighters while our bodies are beginning to assert the need for better treatment. Their golden years of gaming are before them: they have the right to spend them playing what they want to play rather than what we enjoyed playing when they were our golden years. They’re the ones who will keep the hobby alive and growing when I and my friends and those who went before us have either moved on from the hobby or died off.

4e’s measure of success will be how well it fulfils their expectations. Hopefully it will meet or exceed the bar that 3e set in that respect.  

    

Campaign Design Journal – Stage 3: Affiliations

Back from Spokane, and back to work for the new year. Last CDJ, I established the background and basic parameters for my new campaign. Now, it’s time to get under the hood and start tweaking the character generation rules to reflect the time period.

First off, we need to decide what already-existing Affiliations will be allowed. That’s pretty easy.

Allowed:

• Draconis Combine
• Federated Suns
• Capellan Confederation
• Free Worlds League
• Lyran Commonwealth (use Lyran Alliance)
• Taurian Concordat
• Outworlds Alliance
• Magistracy of Canopus
• Periphery Independent

Not Allowed:

• Any Clan Affiliation (for obvious reasons)
• Any Periphery Affiliation apart from those named above (most of the other “modern” Periphery states were settled by refugees fleeing the wars about to occur during our campaign’s timeline)
• St. Ives Compact (it’s the Capellan Confederation’s St. Ives Commonality in 2759) 
• Chaos March (all those planets still belong to their original Davion, Liao, or Cameron owners in 2759)

A Battletech campaign set in 2759 also requires two Affiliations that don’t exist in “modern” Battletech: the Terran Hegemony and the Rim Worlds Republic. To my knowledge there’s not a lot of “crunch” here for CBTRPG. If we want to have Hegemony or Rim Worlds characters…well…we have to make stuff up. Fortunately, the existing affiliations in CBTRPG are pretty well defined, and provide a model.

I started with the Terran Hegemony because it was the easiest. The Star League book has a nice writeup about the Terran Hegemony’s culture, and that made it pretty easy to assign bonuses.

Terran Hegemony

Primary Languages: English

Secondary Languages: Any (except Swedenese, which only exists in the Draconis Combine)

Bonus Skills: Negotiation +1, Computers +2

Traits: Terrans tend to be broadly educated and are natural mediators. Terran characters may take the Gregarious trait at no cost, or the Fast Learner trait at one point less (2 instead of 3).

Path Restrictions: None

The Rim Worlds Republic was a tougher nut to crack, mostly because information about it has to be gleaned from a lot of different sources. It seems to have been part fascist police state, part Successor-State size feudal manor, and part barbarian horde. I was also influenced by Triptych’s largely excellent Shadow Lords: House Amaris sourcebook (I love the Amaris civil war stuff, but the actual Shadow Lords are a little too Dune for me). In the end, I came up with this:

Rim Worlds Republic

Primary Languages: English

Secondary Languages: Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Gaelic (Scots and Irish)

Bonus Skills: Perception +1, Language: any RWR secondary +1

Traits: Citizens of the Rim Worlds Republic have learned to live with constant supervision by House Amaris’s sizeable internal security and intelligence agencies and have developed a healthy paranoia as a result. On the bright side, the Amarises have created one of the finest compulsory education systems in the Star League. Rim Worlds characters may take the Natural Aptitude trait in any one noncombat skill at no cost, or may take the Sixth Sense trait at one point less (3 instead of 4).

Path Restrictions: None

So there they are…naturally I invite comment. Are they unbalanced? Is there something off-kilter I haven’t noticed? Only you, the public, can tell me.

Watch out for the next Campaign Design Journal, in which I stalk CBTRPG’s Moby-Dick: the Lifepath system!