Getting My Wheels Burning

Busy and productive week this has been!  After months of trying toying with the idea of various different game designs and hitting various walls with each one, I had a random bit of inspiration the end of last week, and put together the early parts of a new game!  It's obviously still very raw, but I'm very excited with the shape that it's taken so far.  I gathered up some additional materials that I'll need, and I think the next step is to actually start some playtesting.  I've never hit this stage with a game before, so this is all very exciting.  Once I get a bit father along, I'll likely try to recruit some additional playtesters to get some more eyes on it.  But still, progress.

Also very exciting is the fact that I received my Kickstarter copy of the Burning Wheel Codex.  For those unaware, the Codex is a sort of rerelease of the original books that made up the original Burning Wheel set but weren't included in Gold - specifically, the Monster Burner, Adventure Burner, and the Magic Burner.

The Burning Wheel Codex

So not that I finally have the complete rules in hand, I've been pouring through everything pretty regularly.  The essays contained in the Adventure Burner in particular have been fantastic to go through, with a lot of great advice on running the game itself and some pretty rad ideas of gaming and GMing as a whole.

Anyway, the biggest upside of all the information contained in the Codex is that now I have better tools for making a setting to run a campaign!  Outside of the people I've played with online, the majority of the people I play (and I think a lot of casual gamers in general) are more likely to get behind the idea of a new game or campaign based on the setting.  So which one is the best to explore with my fancy new books?

Banner Saga
This one is partially on me playing this one recently, or rather Banner Saga 2, but I think from a Burning Wheel standpoint there are a lot of awesome possibilities.  The setting itself is pretty close to the out-the-box Sagas of the Icelanders game, but with enough distinctions that I think there would be a lot missed running in that system.  In particular, I think BW allows for really trying to flesh out the hulking Varl.  Still, pretty niche audience I think for the most part.

Elder Scrolls
In keeping with the northern European but not quite viking high fantasy idea, the Elder Scrolls series provides some great options for running a game I think.  The setting itself is incredibly fleshed out, which is a benefit as well as a bit of constraint, as there's more room for butting up against canon in terms of campaigns.  Not the hugest deal in the world, but something to think about.  The other question in using the Tamriel is settling on the primary province of the game, and how that will affect mechanics.  Skyrim?  At least one person is going to want to play as a dragonborn, meaning shouts will need to be fleshed out.  There's also a much greater number of race options that will need to be determined.  The various man and mer races are likely to be covered by limiting and tweaks various existing lifepaths, but what about the kaihjit?  Or the argonians?  Some heavy lifting would be required here.

Which, I think, brings me to my most likely setting for a future Burning Wheel game.

Witcher 3
I'll confess something here:  I have Witcher 3.  I've played Witcher 3.  I have, as of yet, been unable to really get into Witcher 3.  This is largely to due with the control schemes of the game itself, particularly when it comes to combat.  For whatever reason, the game is very counter-intuitive to my play style when it comes to video games.  However, what is inarguable is that I do find the game world itself incredibly fascinating, well developed, and (perhaps most importantly for my purposes here) open.

There's a lot of generic in Witcher 3 that I think it would be simple enough to try and convert to a default setting like Burning Wheel's, and likely without much fuss.  Are there towns in Witcher 3?  Are there important characters?  Yes, of course.  But while I know many players could tell you there's a character named The Bloody Baron, I would think fewer would be able to tell you what the name of his town is.  I'm a fairly reactionary GM - I plan scenarios, I'm good at interpreting player action and coming up with creative responses to that action, even if I didn't plan anything ahead of time.  Where I am very weak is in carefully planning out encounters and fleshing out the meticulous details of a world.  I'm perfectly fine referring to a town as "that place we went where the duke killed his wife while we were there" in my groups, and I'm much more apt to remember that than the name of the town anyway.

That being said, it doesn't mean there's no work to be done in order to convert Burning Wheel's default setting framework over to Witcher 3.  For one thing, there's a lot of limiting of the available character races.  Dwarves would make sense given their roles in the game, elves would be iffy I think, but no orcs.  Really I would ideally limit the PC choices to human and dwarf.  Then, assuming the players are mostly planning on playing witchers, there need to be some specific traits made up.  Witchers are sterile in game terms, and also have their unique cat eyes that allow them to see the magic secrets in the world around them, so there's some call-on or die traits to be dealt with there.

Where the Codex really caught my eye as it relates to the way magic and the witchers actually tackling supernatural creatures would be handled.  The game is largely based around northern European folklore, so the system works perfectly there with the Folklore skill.  Players can use that to try and discern remedies and charms for combating various ghouls and beasts, very similar in that regard to how the story progresses in the actual game.  The bigger question relates to how the game would handle magic.  The game has witches and the like in it, so there are some spells there, but by and large the witchers themselves have only a handful of magical powers to work with.  These come off less like true spells in the traditional RPG sense and more general skills that happen to be magical in nature.

This, I think, would be something best covered by using the Art Magic rules rather than the standard sorcery rules built into the system.  For the most part, the spells like Igni and such would be covered pretty well by the various functions of the Sorcery skill under the Art Magic rules, maybe with some slight tweaking and interpretation.  The big thing is that, in trying to emulate the game world, the witchers less learn new spells as they do improve their existing powers, which grow in strength as they go on.  In that sense, it seems to me to work better to just have a single skill, broken into different schools of magic in order to allow a bit more customization opportunity and less ability to munchkin as much, and having that skill improve through play as the game wears on.  Plus, then we don't have to constantly remember exact spell names and functions (again, planning and details aren't exactly my thing).

This will take some time and some percolating as far as the specifics go, but I think there's enough here to work with.  Once I get things fleshed out a bit more, I'll try and post some of my tweaks and such for anybody else out there who'd like to run their own Witcher game.

As always, thanks for reading.

The Waiting Game

I think it's true of any roleplaying game enthusiast that at some point in your life, your collection outpaces your actual gaming.  Inevitably, you end up with more games than you have either time or players to get on the table.  Sometimes time is the enemy - you're involved in too many games concurrently to be able to devote prep or play time to another game, or simply real life doesn't allow for any more game nights on top of your other responsibilities.  Other times, it's that the game you really want to run doesn't appeal to your playgroup, and so the book sits on the shelf, waiting for either their minds to change or for you to find another playgroup interested in the game.

So for this post, I'll look at some games that, for one reason or another, are still sitting on my shelf awaiting their first go:

Dogs in the Vineyard

Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard starts off the list.  This one is an interesting one, as this is one of the few games that my wife is really on board with playing.  We went to PAX East a few years back and the Burning Wheel guys ran a panel on adjusting your GM style to suit the game system that you're playing, and Dogs was one of the games they mentioned.  When we left the panel, my wife mentioned that the game sounded interesting, at that we should look into getting it.  I grabbed it, but the problem at this point has been setting.  For those unfamiliar with the game, Dogs is based around the idea of an alternate-reality Old West that was originally settled by a people very similar to Mormons.  The players then take the role of God's Watchdogs - members of the faith that go from town to town settling disputes and rooting out demonic influence.

Given the religious-heavy setting, I haven't gotten any other players on board with this one as of yet, and given my wife's reticence to play solo (she's not really much of a gamer, despite her interest in this game in particular), this one hasn't seen play yet.  However, the system is one of the most innovative I've seen, so I may end up trying to hack this one a bit to get it to a more player-friendly setting that will appeal more to my friends.

Swords Without Master

Speaking of innovative systems, another game I've yet to play is Epidiah Ravachol's Swords Without Master.  This one is more or less on me for not playing, as this one comes down to two factors.  For one thing, there's a time issue, as the #SundayAMSwords online game that runs weekly (when there's enough players) tends to not be super convenient for me to be able to jump in schedule-wise.  But the other part of it comes down to me being a little bit shy when it comes to jumping into online games.  Google+ has been an incredible boon for me as far as gaming goes.  I've been very lucky to have had nothing but good experiences so far playing games over Hangouts and PbP games through Drive, but I still always hesitate taking people up on offers for new games, particularly when there's a webcam involved.  Chalk it up to just shyness I guess, but I'm hoping at some point I get past it enough to be able to play this gem of a game.

World Wide Wrestling RPG

Fun fact about me: I am a wrestling fanatic.  And so between my love of wrestling and my love of roleplaying, it's only logical that I would own Nathan D. Paoletta's wonderful World Wide Wrestling RPG.  It's admittedly kind of surprising that I haven't gotten a game of this one rolling yet, given that there's a considerable overlap in my friends of wrestling fans and roleplaying fans, but this one really just comes down to time.  I've got a regular Mouse Guard campaign running along with a Stars Without Number campaign, and so this one is really just waiting for one of those to wrap up so I can get it on the table.  It'll have it's time to shine soon enough.  Also, if you're not aware, Nathan D. Paoletta is both a genuinely wonderful human being and also a fantastic game designer, so if you're reading this you should head over to ndpdesign.com and check out his stuff.

The Burning Wheel

The last game I'll talk about in terms of those that I haven't played yet is also probably the most surprising.  Full disclosure: I am an enormous Burning Wheel fanboy.  Luke Crane's Mouse Guard was actually the game responsible for getting me back into roleplaying games.  I'm a huge fan of David Peterson's comic, and I actually found out about the game because of that.  When I picked it up, I was kind of dumbstruck by how much roleplaying games had changed since I was playing them regularly as an eleven- or twelve-year-old kid.  I immediately fell in love with the Mouse Guard system, and it was actually the first game I ever actually GMed.  Similarly, I grabbed Torchbearer as soon as it came out, and that game was the first and only game to this point that I've played over Hangouts, with an amazing group of gamers that I was fortunate enough to play with.

Here's the thing though: I have yet to actually play Burning Wheel proper.  To this point, all I've been able to play have been it's offshoots.  This one has largely come down to system.  Burning Wheel has one of, if not the most complex combat systems I've ever seen in a roleplaying game.  For a lot of my friends who are roleplayers, who generally were brought up on Dungeons & Dragons like most other hobbyists, the most important rules for a gaming system are how a game handles combat.  This presents a problem with Burning Wheel.  As I've always looked at the game and explained it people, Burning Wheel is more a game that has combat than a game about combat.  A fight really only takes place when it has to, when it's really important, and so the rules are set up to make those really important fights seem as epic and important as they should be.  Unfortunately for players who head straight for the Fight! chapter when they first crack open the book, this means that the rules for combat can be incredibly overwhelming, and that has turned off most of my friends from being willing to try out the system.  However, running my Mouse Guard campaign has gotten a group of my friends much more comfortable in the Burning Wheel system, and we've talked about finally getting this one going after our current game ends.  I really cannot wait.

Feel free to comment below and let me know what games you've been dying to play but haven't been able to as of yet.

Wherein I Talk About Space RPGs

I have always been more of a fantasy guy than a sci-fi fan for as long as I can remember.  I don't know if it comes from growing up in woodsy New Hampshire or if it's something other influence from my childhood, but I've always been way more into swords & sorcery than space operas.  This isn't to say I didn't love Star Wars growing up or that I don't still get the hankering for some space traveling now and again in my games, but it's something that comes and goes more often than not.

Surprisingly, the first roleplaying game I remember playing semi-regularly growing up was West End Games' D6 Star Wars. I had tried AD&D and couldn't get my head around it mechanically at ten or eleven years old, and I snagged a copy of ICE's Middle Earth Roleplaying around the same time period, but since I had the book I was expected to run the game, which I was very ill-prepared for at that age.  Star Wars kind of had everything in it that made it a perfect for me at that time period, which I should point out was also around the time the special edition movies were released in theaters.  The mechanics (or at least what we considered the important mechanics of combat and skill tests) were somewhat easier to follow, it came packed in with a familiar setting, and the best part was that it had rules for space combat and modifying starships.  All of our games tended to center around drumming up cash to buy a new ship or mod out an existing ship, and it functioned as a fantastic campaign device.

I recently had a group of close friends decide they wanted me to run a game for them, and they skew much more to the sci-fi end of things, so I started to look at different sci-fi roleplaying games that are out in the market at the moment.  Unfortunately, I never bought the West End Star Wars back in my heyday and it's currently out of print, so that wasn't an option.  But the big thing I wanted to make sure was included in the system was the ability to both modify starships and rules for ship-to-ship combat.

White Star

One of the first ones to jump out at me was James M. Spahn's / Barrel Rider Games' White Star, which is based on the OSR Swords & Wizardry White Box system.  I should point out that none of the players in the group were experienced gamers and had really only light experience with d20 rules, so this seemed like a good bet.  The character creation process is simple, with a limited number of choices, and there are rules for ship modification and dogfights, so this was the first game we rolled out.  One of us lives outside New Orleans, so we ended up using Roll20 for the game, which may have helped killed this one from the get-go unfortunately.

I should point out that there is nothing wrong with White Star as a system, and in fact I think that the game itself is a very well designed and appreciate the work involved.  It unfortunately was just not the game for my particular group.  Part of it was the lack of Roll20 character sheet integration, as I had to self design crude character sheets to keep track of everything.  But the bigger part I think was that the game itself is just too rules-light and open for me to run with this group, which is by design.  Combat is simple enough, and the space combat rules are seamless, but where the system falls apart for us is in the lack of skill checks.  This probably comes down to me not being a big OSR guy, but given how unforgiving combat in White Star can be for low level players, they needed to try and get creative in how they approached encounters rather than go guns-blazing.  But there is nothing there from a system standpoint.  No skills, which we could've probably gotten around by using attribute modifiers for instead, but there are no rules for increasing attributes when gaining levels either.  This meant that they would never improved as the game went on.  So then we looked at the saving throws (which advance with each level gained) as an alternative, but it was too broad.  It seemed very counter-intuitive that a pilot would be roughly as likely to be able to hack a security system as he would be able to execute some feat of great strength.  We made it three sessions with rules discussions in between before we shelved this one.

Stars Without Number

While we were working through our ill-fated White Star game, I continued researching other systems.  The next one that jumped out at me was Sine Nomine Publishing's much-lauded Stars Without Number.  This one also used a modified version of the d20 system, had rules for ship modding and space combat, and now most importantly had rules for skill rolls.  This addition also allows for slightly more customization of characters despite having only three classes compared to White Star's seven (including races), which meant rolling characters took slightly longer, but not Burning Wheel level by any means.

SWN also benefits from having interactive character sheets on Roll20, and I can say that I likely wouldn't be able to run the game with this group without it.  Between the completely different mechanics for combat vs. skill rolls and the number of modifiers for each combat roll, I doubt my players would've been able to grasp the mechanics without the Roll20 macros.  The game also has a pretty rad ruleset for factions and star system generation, although we haven't yet ventured into this part of the system.  In addition, the game allows for helpers on rolls, which appeals to the BW fanboy in me considerably.

That being said, I still find myself kind of dissatisfied with the system.  Part of this is that I am not a big prepper as a GM, and SWN is a game that requires a lot of it.  Another part of it is that the system is still more or less part of the OSR umbrella, which means it's very unforgiving combat-wise, especially as it pertains to healing.  The healing aspect is likely by design in order to function with the faction turns system, forcing characters onto the sidelines for an extended period while the universe around them advances plot-wise, which would be awesome if we were using that part of the system.  Given that we aren't, we've instead had to improvise our own healing system in the game.  I'm also not completely sold on the rules for Psionics, but that could dwindle a bit the more they get used in play.

D6 Space

Were it not for the group really being reticent to step outside of d20 mechanics, I think I would've gone instead with the spiritual successor to Star Wars, D6 Space (also by West End Games).  Granted it's been years since I've played in the D6 system and it lacks the built-in setting strength of Star Wars, but I still think if I had gotten my players on board with learning a new system we all might have had a better experience with our game to this point.  If the opportunity presents itself down the line for another sci-fi game, or if my players decide to give another new system a try, I think this will be the system I run in the future.  It will be interesting to see how much I've romanticized the system in my memory as well.  It could very well be that it just doesn't hold up as well with time, but given that the PDF is free on DriveThruRPG it's no real risk outside of time spent.  Plus, it has a Roll20 character sheet, which is a pretty surprising bonus.

Feel free to comment with some of your favorite sci-fi game stories or systems.  In particular, if you play White Star, let me know what I'm missing.  I don't enjoy the idea of calling a system a loss, so please try and convert me back into getting that one onto the table again at some point.