Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Let’s start with the quickies, and then we’ll talk gaming:

Reading: RunePunk
Wearing: Comfortable close-fitting clothes suitable for cycling. I love this weather.
Planning: The first session for the Sky Pirates game, this Sunday
Playing: Rule of Rose and Skies of Arcadia
Not Playing: The Siren: Blood Curse demo. Laaaaaaaaame. Tried it last night, and seriously, what’s with these crap-looking games not making the most of their platform’s hardware specs?
Writing: Some notes for various game design projects, mostly an Art List for the Cannibal Contagion book.
Listening: Pimsleur Spanish I
Watching: The Wire, Season 4. Man, the end of Season 3 almost brought tears to my eyes. One of the things that gets me the most is seeing people fail when they’ve worked so goddamned hard to succeed.
Anticipating: Dead Space in October.

Have you ever played a game that just bothered you so very very much that you could not begin to fathom how other rational people would actually enjoy it? For me, that game is Chronicles of Ramlar. I ranted about this one a year ago on my older blog, and just today learned that it has apparently received an Ennie nomination. Wow. Hey, at least it’s just for art, which to me has always been one of the least necessary parts of a role-playing game book. I’ve always been a fan of art-lite books, like The Burning Wheel, in which the art is always second fiddle (or even third or fourth trombone) to the actual game rules. On the other hand, games like Warhammer, D&D, Ramlar, and such all seem to be gigantic extravaganzas of art and display - and oh, look, here’s this widdle game you can play while you gaze at our over-stylized Punk Rock Fantasy artwork.

I think Game Art definitely has its place in art-driven games. Everway is a fantastic example of this, as the game is entirely based upon visual interpretations of ideas and scenes. Several diceless games greatly benefit from extravagant visuals, especially those games filled with esoteric and abstract images that make you wonder what the hell you’re actually looking at. But I don’t need a thousand and one stylized images to tell me what a guy with a sword looks like. Art should supplement the contents inside of a game book, and should never dominate it.

But Back to Ramlar. I’m not exaggerating (nor am I holding back) when I say that last year’s Ramlar demo was one of the worst game sessions I’ve ever experienced. The system was so cumbersome and redundant, and provided a gigantic obstacle to roleplaying and fun. It advertised features such as roleplaying-focused advancement and goal-oriented game-play, but in reality it was just a “kill them all and take their stuff” dungeon crawler with yet another tacked-on hit-location system. It makes me shiver when a game that is such a blatant fantasy heartbreaker rip-off of every fantasy game ever published gets nominated for an award of recognition for some kind of excellence.

Chronicles of Ramlar is an example of a disappointing (at least to me) game created and produced by some pretty spot-on nice guys. I met some of the folks and chatted briefly with them at Dragoncon in 2007, and really enjoyed the conversation. They were very enthusiastic about their product, and that’s always awesome. Then again, that crazy TV commercial guy in the question-mark-suit is pretty enthusiastic about the books he is selling, and they are a total rip-off (trust me, I found one in a library once, and it was all crap). I hope someday they make a new edition of the game which replaces all the cumbersome pseudo-tactical rules with better ones more conducive to the “roleplaying-driven” game they seem to want to promote. Until then, I’m still sticking with Savage Worlds and the upcoming Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game.

Speaking of Savage Worlds, I just this week acquired the RunePunk game setting and Plot Point Campaign book, and after a quick once-through I’ve decided that I really like what I see. The Setting Background section could use some editing, or even a complete re-write, as it tends to ramble off track frequently and make gigantic assumptions in what the reader has understood so far. I had to re-read that part alone a handful of times before I figured out what the writer was trying to convey (or so I think)

Aside from that one nag, the rest of the book is awesome. From my perspective, it feels like the movies Dark City and City of Lost Children mixed in with the Thief series of video games, and a whole lot of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station thrown in for filler. Maybe a dash of Hellblazer and Metropolis (the anime, that is) sprinkled on top, too. Really dark, desolate steampunk stuff here, with steam-borg factory workers socially clashing against posh spectacle-and-top-hat-wearing nearly-immortal aristocrats, and a whole lot of demonology and paranoia mixed in-between. I can definitely see using this stuff in the near future, and I think my local cadre of gaming enthusiasts will love it.

I think they’ll also love this:

Some miscellany…

I just looked through my AdBlock settings are realized that about 80% of all the images I’ve blocked are irritating and/or creepy livejournal user icons. Most of the remainder are MySpace ads.

“It happens to the best of us so it is nothing to be ashamed of. ” A customer just said this to me in an email (yes, I’ve taken it completely out of context). Another customer just now told me that he wishes they would make aerodynamic cellphones, so that when you throw them out of frustration they will fly much further.

There’s now a trailer for the Max Payne movie. This excites me so very much.

Savage Worlds House Rule: Helping Out

In order to save on the dice-rolling, I have a house rule for times when players want to work together to accomplish a task. Instead of each person rolling and adding, one main person takes the lead and makes the check. Each person helping out gives that person the following modifier to their roll, based on the helper’s die rank in the relevant skill or ability.

d4 = +1
d6 = +2
d8 = +3
d10 = +4
d12 = +5

(Or, for those who like math formulae, [X/2]+1, where X = the die size.)

If the helper is untrained (aka D4-2), then they draw a card to determine the modifier. Spade = +1, Heart = 0 (no mod), Diamond = -1, and Club = -2.