I also played some D&D 4e. Tom runs a nifty game, plus it’s always fun playing with new peeps. Rock on, teenage love triangle, rock on. I’m trying to decide if my Felix is crushing on Geoff. It seems likely. That link there is a good description of the game and I agree with all of the points made therein. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a remarkably movement-oriented system. Most of our fights were in clear space, and by the end of the game I was just moving thirty feet every turn, because I wanted to tag enemies with my Curse and you can only do that to the closest enemy. The one fight where my back was to a wall, that made me sad. Playing a Warlock is like playing a GEV with a howitzer bolted to the top in Ogre. Zip zip zip. BOOM. I very much regret the failure of my 5d8+1d6+6 bomb single-turn attack sequence. ...

Wanted sucked rocks. Here’s a list of the good: Set pieces: the skyscraper assassination, the sunroof bit, the keyboard across the face. Angelina Jolie’s performance, which was surprisingly nuanced and subtle, especially at the end. The Russian thriller-verging-on-horror aesthetic: the knife fight in the denoument. Timur Bekmambetov bringing in his Russian homeboy Konstantin Khabensky to play a supporting role. Curving bullets. And the bad: That’s not a plot, Timur. That’s not an American accent, Wesley. Blurred choppy confusing action sequences. And I like fast cuts. Misogyny to beat the band, lovingly preserved from the original comic. No wasting Terrence Stamp, please. What the hell? The rat bit? That makes no sense. Come to think of it, the weird recuperation pools kept changing, too. After all that talk about how assassination can be moral because it saves lives, the train? Excuse me? The scales balance poorly. There were way more blurred choppy confusing action sequences than there were excellent set pieces. If the action had been all good, I might have forgotten about the lack of creamy moral center. However, none of the victory conditions were achieved. Pity.

After too much time spent poring through forums for D&D 4e character sheets, I wound up with this one, which worked out great in play. The form-fillable version, by some new Adobe magic, allows you to save your filled out sheet. Handy. The landscape one found here is also very nice – much more compact – but not form-fillable. Plus I really liked the power card holder on the previous one. Yeah, I assembled it. Rubber cement and scissors and all. It’s handy. ...

This is just another one for the hopper. The system and setting is Over the Edge, with a minor setting tweak; the D’Aubainnes are not quite as powerful in international terms as they are in vanilla OtE, so they need to worry more about maintaining a delicate balance between the USSR, China, and the United States. The campaign framework: there’s a United States consulate located in The Edge. The D’Aubainnes are not currently allowing the United States to have an embassy in Freedom City, although Russia does have one. All PCs work for the consulate, whether they’re American citizens or local employees. Preferably mostly the former, I think. Obvious archetypes: the consul himself, who could be a bright young kid looking to make his name at State, or a cynical veteran, or someone being punished for a screwup elsewhere. The CIA rep under cover as an agricultural attache. The press attache/PR spokesman/cultural activity organizer. (“Hey, kids, wanna learn baseball?”) The US citizen who sought and was granted asylum in the consulate but can’t return to the States for complex legal reasons. The local working as a secretary. ...

Obscenity ahead. You have been warned. In order to provide a proper buffer, I give you this picture of a typical pastoral landscape in Warhammer 40K: There. Now. Where was I about to be? Right. Fucking World of Darkness! I was looking at jeffwik’s list of systems and thinking about my go-to systems, which led me to think about Adventure. I’ve run Adventure in the D20 version and it was fun cause I had great players (original). But the system was a bit of a hack and eminently prone to abuse, so why was I not going “Oh, yeah, the original version, yeah.”? Well, because there’s this stunningly elegant skeleton in the middle of Storyteller. Dots are great, the attributes are great, every shuffle of the names of the attributes and skills and shit has been just fine. Skill plus attribute is the best system, because even if you’re mostly using Guns and Dexterity, hey, the ability to use Guns plus Intelligence is fun. Yes it is. And then there’s this steaming pile of wacky complexity called the combat system, and I lose it entirely, because I hate it, and while various and sundry people at White Wolf have made great attempts at revising it – the Aeon version of the system is pretty OK! – it’s still just oh god my head hurts. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I get trapped in this every single time, too, I go “but the character creation system is great, how bad can combat be?” and it’s bad. You roll! And then you maybe roll again, or maybe there’s soak, and you lose some dice for armor, or do you lose successes based on armor? Do you add Strength to your damage? Do you add Dexterity? Do you add an attribute sometimes, but not sometimes? Does it matter how much you succeed by? Can I dodge? Can I parry? Do I roll for dodge? What do I do with my dodge successes? FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! I mean. I play Champions. For fun. Don’t get on my ass about complexity, it’s my breakfast cereal. This shit makes no fucking sense! Fuck this noise. I’m rewriting it. I even have design goals. Look, here they are.

This is the bit where yet another uninformed non-lawyer spouts off. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Wizards has released a license for third parties who want to publish 4e compatible work. It’s much more restrictive than the analogous license for 3e, which is Wizard’s right. One of the interesting sections is section 6, reproduced in full down below, but which in short says that once you publish a work using the new license, you cannot publish an OGL version of that work or of any works in the same product line. I.e., Green Ronin has this popular and successful Freeport product line. They’ve published a generic book that describes Freeport, and they plan to publish system-specific books for a number of systems which contain stats and mechanics. So far they’ve done three of those; one for Savage Worlds, one for True20, and one for D20. The latter two are OGL products. If Green Ronin wanted to do a 4e system book for Freeport, they could. But they’d have to stop publishing the True20 and D20 system books. And they’re not allowed, by the terms of the license, to go back and republish those even if they stop publishing the 4e book. Ooof. Now the uninformed question: does this constitute restraint of trade? (Oh, god, linking to Wikipedia in relation to legal questions. I’m going to hell. WINAL, as they say.) I note that Wikipedia claims that restraint of trade is generally applied to post-employment clauses in employment contracts and conditions on sale of business. The former is why it’s hard to enforce non-competes in California employment contracts, for example. So probably not; but it’s an interesting question. My instinct is that Wizards would argue that the clause acts to protect their interest in their logo and brand – another clause sets standards of quality for licensed material, and allowing a third party to publish material in the same product line which does not fall under those quality standards perhaps risks brand dilution. But yeah, not a lawyer.

But I did just shell out $4 for a PDF of Against The Giants so I could convert it to 4e. Edit: the tournament characters included in the back of the book are named Gleep Wurp the Eyebiter, Cloyer Bulse the Magsman, Roaky Swerked, Frush O’Suggill, Fonkin Hoddypeak, Flerd Trantle, Redmod Dumple, Faffle Dwe’o-mercraeft, and Beek Gwenders of Croodle. So there’s my money’s worth.

I owe Simon Rogers some conversation about Mutant City Blues, but I haven’t had time to play it yet. On a readthrough, however, I’m quite impressed – all the usual Gumshoe goodness, plus a creative implementation of superpowers, plus excellent material on running a police-oriented investigative game. The section on roleplaying police interrogations ought to be stapled in front of any police procedural game ever. Which, come to think of it, includes Dark Heresy. ...

Squee! (original)

The Dark Heresy game outlined here seems to be about to take off. In the interests of screwing around with new ways to manage information, I started a blog for this one rather than a wiki. We’ll see how it goes. I’m offering all the players posting access to the blog.