CIOASIISAG Part 18 - AD&D 2nd Edition - Part 1

April 27th, 2008 by Brack

So after a session of MERP, this new gaming group introduced me to the most popular RPG on the planet - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

AD&D was such a sprawling game, that I’m going split this up as during the time I was playing AD&D, I played and ran such a wide variety of campaign systems that they deserve some comment of their own. Today, just some comments on the game itself.

AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989, I didn’t start playing until 1993, but that 1989 date is pertinent. Effectively the second edition is a document of TSR’s needless contrition to the 80’s witchhunt from Christian groups and spurious psychological claims that dogged them throughout that decade. The 2nd edition purged all references to devils and demons, and significantly toned down the artwork to try and placate criticism.

Backing down like this never works out well for the person backing down. The right move would have been to ride the storm of controversy and fight the criticism. There was an opportunity to become an anti-establishment subculture here and use the furor to sell more games. Instead, like the US comics industry in the 50’s, they kowtowed to their critics and cemented themselves as pawns to the establishment. Three years later a merger in the small press gaming world, would create a true anti-establishment gaming company. But we’ll get to them later.

The rules themselves were fine at the time. In retrospect, they are full of logical contradictions, albeit ones that long time D&D players were intensely fond of. Mainly they fondly remember the combat rules that revolved around the classic acronym THACO (To Hit Armor Class Zero).

The rule books were fairly horribly laid out, but fairly typical of American publishing - I remember seeing US console magazines in 90-91 and being bewildered by the poor typesetting they’d have, particularly compared with UK and Japanese magazines, they felt more alien to us as British readers than the magazines that read back to front in a language we couldn’t read, such is the power of layout.

However they way they replaced their “Monster Manual” from the first edition was a masterstroke of layout and design. The Monstrous Compedium was a ring binder containing sheets of monsters, normally one monster to a page. You could find the information with ease, and didn’t need to take a whole book with you to wherever you were playing the game. Of course later on they’d go back the old style monster manual in the sort of double dipping that must have played some part in TSR’s financial downfall.

Artwise it was the usual clash of styles that characterised TSR material at this time. It often felt like uncommissioned fantasy art that they’d purchased, rather than work created specifically for books. I’ll be coming back to TSR’s terrible handling of art in a later installment.

I’m probably being over-critical due to disillusionment created by TSR’s handling of the product line, and 3rd Edition that Wizards of The Coast released (yup, I’ll be getting to this too, very later). At release, and through the early years, this edition was very successful. And you can still have fun times with the rules, and definitely fun times with some of the material published for it, which I’ll start to get at next.

Bookmark to:

Posted in Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems, Role-playing Games | Tags: 2nd edition, advanced dungeons and dragons, dungeons and dragons, tsr | No Comments »

CIOASIISAG Part 17 - MERP

April 20th, 2008 by Brack

I think I’ve covered all the games my first gaming group played. If I recall any others I’ll have to come back to them. And so onto the first game I played when I joined my second group - MERP or Middle Earth Role Playing as it was known in its unacronymed form.

MERP was created by US company Iron Crown Enterprises, using a simplified version of their Rolemaster system to create an RPG for the lucrative Tolkien licence. I’ll go into Rolemaster (and it’s sci-fi cousin Spacemaster) later, let’s just say the cut down version of the rules was a good move. ICE’s fortunes were pretty much tied to this game, when the license was withdrawn in ‘99 the company only lasted another year.

Due to my lack of interest in Tolkien, I suspect some of the appeal was lost on me. However that also meant I wasn’t ever going to argue “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKED IN THE BOOKS!”. The first session I played involved a bunch of hobbits goofing around in some wizard’s tower. We didn’t play it that often, the GM for the game moved onto AD&D soon after I joined in.

Bookmark to:

Posted in Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems, Role-playing Games | Tags: ice, iron crown enterprises, merp, middle earth role playing, tolkien | No Comments »

CIOASIISAG Part 16 - Chaos Marauders

April 19th, 2008 by Brack

This was a funky little 2-4 player card/board game from Games Workshop. Of course it turned out it’s funkiness was due to it’s inspiration from the more established German boardgame Ogallala, and so it disappeared from the shelves when this was pointed out.

The aim of the game is to build three battle lines of your orcish army and accumulate more Victory Points that your opponents. The battle lines are assembled from cards representing different orcish army units that you draw from shared deck. You could also use any completed lines to attack your rivals.

The game design, wherever it came from, is really solid and for my small first gaming group this was a fun, quick, game to play. One other big appeal to this was, like a lot of Games Workshop’s board games at the time, unified consistent artwork. This had John Blanche at his slimiest providing a variety of mould encrusted cartoony orcs on the cards. Nothing’s worse than a boardgame where the artwork is done by many hands with styles that don’t gel. OK, maybe there are plenty of things worse, but you get my drift. This issue will raise it’s head again later in this series, when I get to a true abomination of games design.

Bookmark to:

Posted in Boardgames, Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems | Tags: chaos marauders, Games Workshop, john blanche, stephen hand | No Comments »

Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems Part Fifteen - Dungeonquest

April 6th, 2008 by Brack

Right let’s get back on this horse, as I want to get to the entry on AD&D sooner rather than later.

This German boardgame, published in the UK by Games Workshop, was something of Talisman’s poorer relation for my first gaming group. And rightly so, as it’s even more random that Talisman, with little to recommend it in terms of tactical gameplay. You pick a character and then try and work your way to a dragon’s lair by picking random dungeon tiles that you lay on the board. I remember it being a fairly unforgiving game, as you’d frequently die before getting to the middle, and even more frequently run out of turns before getting back out the dungeon again. I think the add-on Heroes of Dungeonquest made it little more forgiving, and much more variable. While I’ve continued to play Talisman, I’ve not played this since probably 1990.

Bookmark to:

Posted in Boardgames, Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems | Tags: dungeonquest, Games Workshop | No Comments »

CIOASIISAG Part Fourteen - Top Secret/SI

February 15th, 2008 by Brack

Top Secret/SI was the second edition of TSR’s not particularly popular spy RPG. The SI stood for Special Intelligence, a fact I am only just learning today. My sleepless nights are now over. I believe our teenage gaming group played this a grand total of three times, all of which I remember as being fun. It was just that we tended to be fickle in our tastes and we still tended towards the old Games Workshop wargames. We played one game using the standard rules, which was very much in the James Bond / Man From UNCLE mold. You played agents of ORION battling the evil espionage group WEB, it was all very sixties spy movie-like, girls, gadgets and glamourous locations.

Then, the other two games were using the adventure settings books they had brought out for it. “Agent 13” was the first, a setting recreating 1920s and 1930s pulp adventures. I’m not sure if this was based on the novels by Flint Dille (GI Joe/Transformers) and David Marconi (GI Joe/Enemy of the State/Die Hard 4.0~!~!) that TSR printed, or vice versa.

The second was F.R.E.E. Lancers by Jeff Grubb, that was plain nutty. Grubb, who’d been behind TSR’s Marvel RPG, spot-welded super powers and cyberpunk onto the espionage genre, resulting in a gloriously goofy mess. I can’t recall the details, but I do remember it being great fun.

Bookmark to:

Posted in Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems, Role-playing Games | Tags: Top Secret/SI, tsr | 1 Comment »

CIOASIISAG Part The Thirteenth - Judge Dredd RPG

January 29th, 2008 by Brack

Now I’m moving into the realm of games that other people ran in my teenage gaming days. Though I did buy myself a copy of this later in life (and sold on ebay for a tidy profit year or so back).

Judge Dredd ran on a set of rules that were kind of WFRPG-lite, and similarly your starting character was pretty useless at everything. However that didn’t really matter, as being a Judge you were still better equipped and skilled than most NPCs you’d encounter. The game really caught the mood of the comic, and for a while was probably the closest thing to an encyclopedia of the Judge Dredd world. Mid-Late 80s Games Workshop had a similar sense of humour to 2000AD and the license was a good fit (though 2000AD was still a little more punk, whereas GW was new wave of British heavy metal). It originally came out as a boxset, later reprinted as a hard back book. Despite it’s all round ace-ness at being Judge Dredd, we never really played it that much, and I only ran it with my later gaming groups on a couple of occasions. It’s a shame as I believe the guy who had it also had the “Slaughter Margin” adventure, which I remember as being a critically acclaimed piece of RPG writing at the time.

Mongoose have a Judge Dredd RPG out nowadays, but I don’t know if that’s the old version updated, or something totally new.

Bookmark to:

Posted in Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems, Role-playing Games | Tags: Games Workshop, judge dredd | No Comments »

CIOASIISAG Part 12 - Cyberpunk

January 4th, 2008 by Brack

I picked this up from a RPG shop way out on the outskirts of Peterborough, the name of which I forget, but I remember it had a specialist doll shop round the back run by the owner of the RPG shop’s wife. It was pretty much the only place to get really indie RPGs in the immediate region. Even Boston and Lincoln wouldn’t have the sort of curios this shop had.

And that was what the 1st edition of R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk was. It came in a box with 2 six sided dice and two books. One which had the character generation, background and general rules. And the other was Friday Night Firefight, a standalone set of combat rules that Cyberpunk used. And it was quite the eye opener. Unlike other games I’d played this combat was short and nasty. Even more brutish than WFRP, which was always tempered by how hard it was to actually hit things. Here, hitting things was easy if you were close to the target. And getting hit by a bullet really hurt. And getting hit by lots killed you. This wasn’t a cinematic combat system, there was a definite sense that if your character got into a fight at any time, there was a chance you weren’t going to walk out.

And it felt very punk too (at least compared to later editions), the paper it was printed on was rough, the layout’s clear, but very ghetto in their design. The edge of the pages of my copy hadn’t been properly guillotined. It felt like a zine, especially compared to the slickness of a GW product or the strangely quaint TSR house style. It kicked off a trend for Cyberpunk-ish games, quickly being overshadowed by the luke-warm watered down Cyberpunk of FASA’s Shadowrun (ELVES? THEY AREN’T PUNK!), until the release of more professional Cyberpunk 2020, which is bone-fide classic tabletop RPG and was a deserved success (though it fell afoul of rule bloat through various supplements about 5-6 years into it’s life, which signified the end of it’s lifespan).

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of William Gibson, but I was a big fan of Repo Man and the sourcebook mentioned that as a cyberpunk film. And an article in Fantasia magazine argued that Cyberpunk was dead and that Repo Man was the only true cyberpunk film. And so my games tended to be influenced more by that film, the first Mad Max film and crime dramas than anything from Neuromancer. Indeed the world of the original Cyberpunk RPG was much closer to our own, than later editions which were closer to Gibson’s ouevre and more noticeably - Bubblegum Crisis (the book “Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads” admitted that the setting of Cyberpunk 2020 was animemetal, rather than cyberpunk. Good book btw, if you were to run Cyberpunk, that’s the one book you should get alongside the 2020 rulebook. My brief look at 3rd Edition gave me the impression of a poorly laid out, poorly illustrated Snow Crash influenced game. OK this long aside has finished, carry on).

R. Talsorian is still around today, but a shadow of it’s former self, in part due to the RPG market and in part due to head honcho Mike Pondsmith’s Xbox related job. I’ll get to some of their other games later on, as there’s some beauties in there.

Addendum: I also recall our teenage gaming group would on more than one occasion plan what we would do in the event of an apocalypse, and the ensuing collapse of civilization. This kind of thinking also made the dystopia of the Cyberpunk world appealing. I’d like to think this was because we’d grown up in the 80s and had seen things like the BBC’s adaptation of the Day of The Triffids at a young age. But I suspect it is just something all kids do at some point. After all Nostradamus, occult nonsense, being a goth, witchcraft and the like tend to popular among teenagers. Is thinking about doom and gloom entertaining at 14?

Bookmark to:

Posted in Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems, Role-playing Games | Tags: cyberpunk, mike pondsmith, r talsorian games | No Comments »

CIOASIISAG Part 11 - Talisman: The Magical Quest Game

November 30th, 2007 by Brack

I love this game.

It’s a fantasy board game that was released by Games Workshop, where you attempt to work your way through 3 regions of a board to get to the Crown of the Command, and then win the game by making all the other players bow to your will. The game mechanics are fairly simple, you play as one of a bunch of fantasy types (Troll, Wizard, Thief etc…) each with their own rules variations and 4 stats - Strength, Craft, Gold and Life. Your aim is get your Strength and/or Craft high enough to enter the final region and undergo the trials to get the crown. As you go around the board you take adventure cards that act as random events you encounter. There’s a high random element in how the cards flow and how your dice roll (everything is on a D6). The key to winning is in three things:

• Gambling - there’s a lot of random elements to the game, but because the odds are so easy to calculate - normally number plus D6 versus another number plus another D6, or a roll against a chart with D6 or 2D6 options - and some gambling elements are static - there’s various spaces where you can roll a die and get positive or negative alterations to your character (extra stats or turned to toad). The only unknown random elements are the cards decks. Which brings me to point two.
• Deck Knowledge - Knowing what cards are in the deck is a huge advantage. The adventure card deck is large and varied enough that exact memory of it’s composition is unlikely. However certain useful cards are either unique or in low numbers and so controlling their presence on the board is useful. For instance, the horse and cart card allows a player to have unlimited Item cards compared to the normal four. There are two horse and cart cards in the deck, so it’s useful to get both, or get one and rapidly put the other in the discard pile (it will resurface when the deck is depleted, the discards shuffled and the deck made fresh again). Of course you may not get to draw the horse and cart card. Which brings me to point three.
• Player Vs. Player - You can attack other players and take their lives, gold or items. Also a number of characters in the game have abilities you can use on other players. This can be a vital key in winning. There’s the chance that in doing so, all the other players may turn against you, but I’ve found that once you start messing up other people’s play, if you keep it up aggressively it can turn the game for you.

The Luck/Strategy balance is probably leaning heavily towards luck, if only to prevent the PvP elements becoming too overbearing and preventing the endgame being reached. But the visibility of the luck aspect allows the players a lot of control over how big a risk they choose to take each turn.

The 2nd edition is the version I’m most familiar with, though I’ve never owned it myself, two of the gaming groups I’ve been a part of have had access to a copy. The 3rd edition made it more Warhammer-y and less recognisable as Talisman. The exhorbitant prices the 2nd ed. was getting on eBay made it look unlikely I’d get my own copy, but thankfully GW have seen the light and last month released the 4th edition. This is based on the 2nd, down to the artwork being reinterpretations of Gary Chalk’s great art from the 2nd Ed. And it looks to have fixed the two rules that bothered me from the 2nd ed., namely you can earn Craft as easily as Strength (before it was harder, though random increases favoured Craft slightly.) and it has eliminated Spell Deck burn.

Characters can cast spells, and certain characters have abilities that mean they always have a set number of spells. The spells are a deck of shuffled cards similar to the  adventure deck, each card representing a spell. Certain spells were described as “cast as required”. This meant certain characters could burn through the spell deck, casting spell after spell after spell, in search of the particular spell they desired. It held up the game flow and was more than a little unfair. Now, apparently, you can only cast the spells you start your turn with and I assume you restock your hand at the start of your turn, to avoid cumbersome bookkeeping.

An aside: between getting excited about the release of 4th Edition Talisman and playing far too much Tetris, my mind has now become preoccupied with the idea of the balance of Luck and Strategy in games now (all games should aspire to the balance Tetris has btw).  So - “RANDOM STRATEGIES” - sounds like a great name for something. In fact it sounds so great I think I must have encountered it in some sort of games writing before.

Anyone have any ideas where? Dragon? GM Magazine? White Dwarf?

Bookmark to:

Posted in Boardgames, Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems | Tags: Games Workshop, talisman | No Comments »

CIOASIISAG Part X - Conan RPG

November 5th, 2007 by Brack

And now I’m getting games I played in that first gaming group, but didn’t own. So these posts will be noticably shorter.

We played this once and all I recall was it involved the most massive dungeon map I can recall seeing, being as it was drawn on sheets of chip paper (we gamed on Sundays in the restaurant of the Fish and Chip shop my friend’s parents owned - “The Crispy Cod”). Ah the nostalgia of that chip shop smell, R-Type arcade machine, playing imported PC-engine games and chip shop buns filled with nice and spicey nik naks and/or refreshers fizzy sweets!

Bookmark to:

Posted in Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems, Role-playing Games | Tags: conan, tsr | No Comments »

CIOASIISAG Part 9 - Marvel Super Heroes

November 3rd, 2007 by Brack

These are probably the RPGs I’ve run the most, and written the most material for a campaign for. Which is astounding considering how poor the actual rules are.

Obviously the pull of these games to me was the Marvel license. I’d liked Marvel comics as kid, starting with a Spidey/Ghost Rider UK reprint as a treat as a kid after having to go to London for various tests (the other treat being a Battle Of The Planets transfer kit). Then various second comics picked up in school fairs/jumble sales and the occasional present from my grandmother. Finally there was the UK printing of Secret Wars, Secret Wars II and Spider-Man and ZOIDS.

I kind of forgot about them when I went to secondary school, until WH Smith’s started getting US Marvel comics in. Which coincided with when I got into RPGs. So TSR’s licensed Marvel RPG was a natural draw.

Now the rules were based around this colour coded chart. You rolled percentile dice, the cross referenced the roll on the chart against the value of the statistic you were using. They used this system on various other non-D&D games that TSR released at the time. One of the Gamma World editions used it as did their Conan RPG and Star Frontiers. Possibly the Indiana Jones RPG too. I don’t think Top Secret/SI did, but I could be wrong. I’ll look it up when I get to that one.

Some people liked this system, but I found it a pain. I dislike games with unnecessary work, and cross referencing two numbers on a chart definitely count as too much work. But I still kept hacking away, trying to get a decent campaign going, because I had such Marvel love. And this really was a game for Marvel lovers.

It was essentially OHOTMU the RPG, particularly the Advanced version and it’s supplements. Most of it’s supplements were vast depositories of statistics for Marvel characters both prominent and obscure. And on top of that there were the Gamers Guide To The Marvel Universe books that at the time were arguably better than the information provided by Marvel at the time. At one point I had all but 5 products published in this line (I’ve since disposed of a lot of that material via eBay) and here’s the products I’d recommend if you were interested in playing:

Marvel Advanced Set - The core rule book. The rules aren’t particularly clear and you’ll end up winging a lot of it. Plus there’s not that much scope for character variety.
Ultimate Powers Book - An expanded character creation book. You’ll end up rewriting the character type table, as frankly it’s barking mad, but the range of powers and the rules to use them are expansive.
Realms Of Magic - This was for the Basic set, but the magic rules in the Advanced are, if anything, even worse than the Basic’s. This supplement completely replaces the magic rules and makes them workable.
The MT Modules - This was a 3 part time travel themed campaign by Ray Winninger. A great adventure with a superb meta-gaming climax.
The MX Modules - This was a 4 part campaign based on The Nightmares Of Futures Past story from the X-Men. It’s clever trick is to set the adventure in your hometown. Of course this trick works better when you are in America. I had to pretend Spalding was in Massachusetts when I ran it.
Deluxe City Campaign - This is the only supplement that actually gets around to telling you how to run your own campaign. I think TSR must have thought you were only going to play their published supplements.

Most of these can be downloaded in PDF form for free at MarvelRPG.net

It should be said a lot of my criticisms of the game are in hindsight, back when I started playing I was a lot less critical of game mechanics and more interested in settings. But I do think those flaws held me back in every getting a campaign really off the ground in my first gaming group. I’ll talk about my long-term Marvel campaign when I get around to talking about the SAGA rules Marvel RPG, but here’s some teenage brain spill about the characters we created at secondary school.

AXE-MAN - This was the first character I created using the Basic set. His power was that his hand turned into an Axe. I was 13, this seemed cool to me then. I believe he was a mutant and that his background was that he had been asked to join the X-Men but was thrown out for being too cool.
TWISTED SOULS - This was the superhero team that my players in my first group came up with they were:

MR MYSTERY - a robotic Rorschach clone, with Hank Pym powers
ACE OF SPADES - a mystic swordsman
TWISTER - a mutant with wind based powers
and there was a Captain Marvel-type whose name I forget. The twist was that he was a cat who turned into a human superhero.

THE WRESTLER - a teleporting wrestler
MEK-A-NEK - a blatent copy of the He-Man character
ALIEN SKATER - The HR Giger creation. BUT ON A SKATEBOARD!

Bookmark to:

Posted in Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems, Role-playing Games | Tags: faserip, jeff grubb, Marvel Comics, marvel super-heroes rpg, tsr | No Comments »