Chunky Soup

Our first Pathfinder game is less than 24-hours away as I write this, and I am feeling a bit less than prepared. After purchasing an electronic version of the rules direct from Paizo, I spent most of the last week’s leisure time reading rules, and most of today hammering on character creation. It hasn’t been an entirely smooth process.

These are chunky rules, with plenty of options, and the multiplicity of those options practically requires that character creation be spread over multiple chapters (rather than pages). Still, there was more page-flipping than I would have liked in working through the many possibilities on offer. As a mature game, there are no limits to the player-created resources on the web for character creation, but it was still a pretty study-intensive process to put together my fighter and (about half of) my wizard today. I expect we will finish up character generation at tomorrow’s game, and hopefully have time to bash some orcs as well.

Notice that I said the rules were “chunky,” and not “clunky.” This is a rules-heavy system, but the rules appear to work, and make their own kind of sense. It is a system that demands study. I hope it will reward study, as well. It has been some fun figuring out my character. I was tempted to leave everything up to an on-line character generator, or to just grab a pre-generated character, but if we are going to use such a rules-heavy system, it seems defeating the point to avoid the rules. You just have to embrace the horror, and try to appreciate the severe beauty of bonus feats, skill points, and racial and class bonuses.

this might be my guy … twenty levels from now!

The rules did let me create a vaguely interesting fighter. Roog is a Varisian youth, six-foot-three and still carrying baby fat at age sixteen, checking in at a hefty 320 pounds. I figure he was a carney or a rube for his family’s Gypsy-like traveling circus, but now that he’s come into his majority (and scored a longsword and a spiked shield) he’s off to carve a name for himself. I optimized his attributes and hacked the two-weapon fighting rules to make him a sword-and-board killing machine — at least to the degree that a first level character can aspire to such ambitions. With low charisma and low intelligence, he will be a secondary character to my still-in-progress Elven wizard — and I know from experience it is best to let a character’s personality emerge during play — but I already have a couple character tags in mind for Roog. For one, there are the aforementioned man-child physical dimensions, and the promise that Roog may not know his own strength. For another, for some reason I expect Roog refers to himself in the third person — “The Roog” — and that he shouts “ROOOOOOG!” when rushing into battle.

I am certain that he will annoy Dave, which is reason enough to play him.

More after our first game.

Pathfinding!

Seventeen months after my last post — and nearly two full years since I declared myself done with old-school roleplaying — Andrew asserts that he’d like to run the Rise of the Runelords campaign using Pathfinder.

And so this blog lurches back to life and gets a new header and a new coat of background paint.

This system and this campaign is about as old-school as it gets, so we’ll see how it goes. For those who don’t know, Pathfinder is essentially a revised edition of Dungeons & Dragons version 3.5, which forked from the main branch when Wizards of the Coast embarked on that whole, unfortunate 4th Edition business. Pathfinder seems to have thrived while the official game failed to impress, and so the tail wags the dog, with Paizo leading the charge with the rebadged version of the “old” game while the WotC boys go back to the drawing board for “D&D Next.”

I gave 4th Edition D&D a good shot in it’s “Essentials” form and am not interested in trekking that path again, but I don’t mind going back to the future … I played a bit of D&D 3.5 in the 1990s and I trust the rules will come back to me.

Pathfinder is a far chunkier RPG than I would pick for myself at this time in my gaming life, but Andrew has flushed a pile of cash into books, figures, and Dwarven Forge Kickstarter pledges so it is the least I can do to show up and roll a D20. What the heck … I go into this with an open mind and an open heart.

I will post here from time to time as I grapple with the rules and eventually play the game. First up will be character creation, which I expect we will attempt to handle away from the table, to preserve our first night for pulse-pounding free actions and attacks of opportunity!

Here we go!

Meanwhile, what of poor Irv, caught up in Regina intrigue? I dunno. It’s been a year-and-a-half since my last post, so there’s little urgency in returning to my solo, blog-based Traveller game. But as the unexpected resurrection of Goblin Soup attests, nothing in this crazy, mixed-up RPG blogging world is ever completely dead. Stay tuned.

But for now, let’s find some paths!

The Regina Monologues: Follow That Groundcar!

Before we get back to the pulse-pounding saga of Irv avoiding encounters, a bit of retroactive accounting! I realized that I assumed Irv had a revolver because he mustered out of the merchant service with that skill, and so had him carry his gun around in the last adventure (and nearly get caught by a security detail when they spotted the bulge in his pocket). But I forgot that Irv would have had to buy a gun someplace on Regina, because his service days didn’t award him a piece. Rather than play out Irv’s acquisition of a weapon on law-happy Regina, I’m going to assume that he picked up a revolver on the black market, for three times list price — CR 465, though they threw in six shells for free. So now we know how Irv came to have that hot rod in his pocket when that celebrity’s chief of security spotted him in the plaza.

Because Traveller is nothing if not an accountant’s game, we should deduct the cost of that weapon — and a week’s room and board — from Irv’s little nest egg. Irv enters his second week of travelling with CR19435 and no clear idea of where to find his elusive patron. About the only thing he knows for sure is that he’s going to give the starport town’s streets a miss this week and concentrate his efforts in the dive bars and wrestling clubs that ring the space fields.

Because I’m bumping up against the narrative limits for solitaire Traveller play I’m bringing in a supplemental rules manual starting with this post. Mythic is a universal role playing system and “GM emulator” that I’ve noodled around with in the past. The core of the system is a probability engine which indexes the basic likelihood of something happening with a “Chaos Level” to produce a range of dice results used to answer yes/no questions. By addressing the Mythic charts as a kind of dice-driven Magic 8-Ball a solo player or GM-less group can (slowly) work themselves through a series of scenes making up a role playing adventure.

Mythic has a full-on character generation and action system, but I’m just going to use it for GM emulation, leaving as much as possible to the basic Traveller rules, including the chance and basic nature of random encounters. I will use Mythic to build on and explore the situations generated by Traveller, and will use a good deal of common sense and artistic license to nudge things in the most interesting direction.

Mythic structures a game into scenes. The basic nature of my first scene is driven by Traveller’s encounter system. In his second week on Regina, Irv continues to look for a patron. He doesn’t find one, but he does have an encounter on day four.

The rules say the encounter is with “non-committal adventurers” (the story of my life!), quantity one. We know Irv is hanging around dive bars, and it makes sense he’d find adventurers there. Fudging a bit with my Names book tells me the bar is named “Huppo’s,” and I assume this is the same shady place where Irv scored his revolver. We pick up our scene as the as-yet undefined adventurer enter Huppo’s, where Irv is already nursing a mug of Basic Plus. But Mythic throws me a curve — rolling against the basic “Chaos Factor” of the scene (which starts at five), I get a result of three on 1D10. Because this number is less than or equal to the Chaos Factor, it means the setup is modified, and because the number is odd, it means an altered scene.

Thursday night at Huppo’s

Under the rules of Mythic, this requires that I ask a yes/no question about the scene. I want to respect the Traveller encounter system as much as possible, so I’m firm that the scene is an encounter with a non-committal adventurer. My question — Is there something different about the setting? — results in “no.” Is there something different about the adventurer? Mythic says “yes.” Hmm. Is it an alien? I consider this “unlikely,” but roll for it — nope, not an alien. Maybe she’s having a private meeting and Irv won’t be so welcome? Nope. Does she already know Irv? No, but just barely so. Is she trying not to be noticed? Again, no … but since this question allows me to surmise the opposite, I am going to assume the adventurer is trying to attract attention, but ultimately proving non-committal about … something.

Next I need to decide what the adventurer is on about. Is she part of a starship crew? I rate the answer “very likely” yes, and roll — the dice say no. Maybe a mercenary? Nope. Merchant? Yes! Now I’m starting to understand the scene. This person is in the merchant service, and she’s non-committal toward Irv because she runs into guys like him all the time.

To make the scene more interesting, I assume the merchant is both female and attractive (and the girl in the picture above will do) — if she’s trying to get attention, but non-committal toward Irv, that already gives the scene somewhere to go. What’s wrong with Irv? Not good enough for her? Let’s find out.

Irv slides up to the bar next to our merchant and the scene is finally ready to get moving.

Irv opens with smalltalk, mentioning he’s just out of the merchant service himself, seeing if he and Judith Clark (another mundane name!) have any colleagues in common. They do, but this doesn’t improve Judith’s disposition — she still seems interested in anyone but Irv. Irv knows when he is wasting his time, and slides back down the bar, but is still more than a little wounded when Judith practically throws herself at a young Marine that doesn’t do much more than give her a look. The two leave in a hurry, but something isn’t right, and certain that this isn’t the random hookup that it appears to be, Irv trails the two out of the bar.

there’s our jarhead

Now here’s where Mythic finally gives me something to work with. I ask “Is there violence?” and “Is it against the girl,” and get an emphatic indication that the violence is against the Marine … so following the principle that no event is truly random, I figure it goes down like this:

Just outside the bar, Judith drunkenly lurches against the Marine — and that’s definitely not right, because Irv was with her a moment before, and she wasn’t drunk. The Marine catches her, and Judith’s hand reaches up inside his coat. The Marine stiffens, like he’s been shocked, then half-slumps to the pavement. Judith catches him, then bundles him through the door of a silver late model hovercar that screams around the corner and halts at the curb. Of course it’s the same car that nearly ran Irv down last week. Irv isn’t spotted but he catches a glimpse of the driver and it’s the same face from before. The door slams shut and the car takes off.

Irv looks around for a cab, and luck is with him. It’s like an old movie as he leaps in the back and commands the driver to follow that car! The suspect car weaves off through traffic, heading away from the starport district and out of town. The cab driver starts to back off, but Irv waves fifty credits under the driver’s nose so he keeps up the pursuit. Once out of town it is harder to tail the car without being spotted, and the cab drops back a good way, nearly missing the turnoff where the silver car leaves the main highway and speeds up a private drive toward one of the estates that ring the city. The silver car shoots through a force gate which snaps shut behind it and the cab has to slide to a halt — Irv is certain they were spotted. He tells the driver to get out of there — fast.

a glimpse of the estate

On the way back to town, Irv asks the driver who lives in the estate. And again, because nothing is truly random or wasted in role playing, the driver replies that it belongs to Adorina Mattan — the celebrity Irv saw in the square last week, when his gun was spotted and he had to run from security.

Which seems like a good place to cut the scene …

The Regina Monologues: On The Town

When last we saw Irv he was freshly mustered out of the merchant service, still dealing with father issues, a bit richer but not much wiser for his twelve years of quasi-legal free trading, bush piloting, and tail gunning along the Spinward Main.

Let’s see what happens next.

In honor of this blog series subtitle, Irv begins his travelling career on … Regina! If you look real close you can see him there in hex 0910 of the Regina Subsector map:

Far be it for a guy writing about solitaire Traveller on a role playing blog to wonder at the geekiness of anything … but Traveller Wiki? Really? OK, I’ll go with it (and I’ll take your maps!) God love the internet.

Because the romantic-as-a-parts-catalogue ethos of Traveller demands it … Regina is classified as A788899-C. It’s a sub-sector capitol, a pretty high-tech place, a watery moon in orbit around a gas giant with the unfortunate name of Assiniboia. There are a lot of bureaucrats and cops around, and everyone’s jumpy because of some new Zhodani panic that the wags say is going to brew up into a Fifth Frontier War.

planet-rise on Regina

Normally it’s the kind of place that Irv would leave but rather than risk his life with a Low Passage to some equally depressing system, Irv’s instead booked himself a characterless, beige room out by the starport and has decided to nose around for a bit. Room and board cost CR100 a week but Irv’s got 20K in the bank so small money is no problem. He’d like it if big money was no problem, too, but has little idea how to make that happen.

His master plan of finding a Psionics Institute thwarted by Regina lacking the requisite 9+ population rating, Irv decides to explore the town and look for a patron. Patrons are easy to spot — they have one-and-a-half dimensions, rather than just the one like everyone else. After all, as the rules assert, “The patron is the single most important NPC there can be.”

Irv doesn’t find a patron in his first week of searching, but he does trigger a random encounter on the first day of his search — a couple “hostile traders”, probably gun runners or drug dealers. Both of the mooks have blades, and one of them has an autorifle in the trunk of the vehicle the encounter table ensures me is present. They have Strength 7, Dexterity 10, and Endurance 5.

got a look at one of the mooks

The dice give Irv the element of surprise, helped a bit since the mooks are in their vehicle. The encounter begins at very long range. The biggest danger on Regina is usually a police sweep so Irv isn’t packing his revolver today (he fails to throw greater than Regina’s Law Level, and so doesn’t pass his weapons check).

Now to knit these numbers into an encounter.

I figure that Irv steps off a curb and nearly gets run over, flips off the occupants of the hovercar as they speed by, then knows he’s in trouble when the car shwooshes to a halt and starts to back up. The encounter is at very long range — eighteen range bands. Irv wants no part of these guys, so he fades into the crowd (using his surprise to disengage), but he commits the vehicle to memory — a silver late model hovercar with mud splashed on the plates.

plenty of these in the streets around the starport

A bit paranoid now, Irv decides to keep his revolver in his coat pocket, and breaks out in a sweat when he encounters seven “enthusiastic guards” later in the week. They’re armed with halberds and daggers, and one of them has a revolver, so they sound like some kind of private ceremonial guard, maybe the security detail for one of the countless minor celebrities taking up space at the subsector Capitol. I decide that the “enthusiastic” part applies to everyone, rather than just Irv — these guys must be working the crowd, trying to get citizens to wave or raise a cheer when the celeb goes by, doubtless accompanied by a horde of media members recording everything for watchers on the Regina Grid. Irv must have come out into a square or plaza someplace and gotten caught up with the crowd.

stand aside, minor celebrity coming through!

All that matters to Irv is if one of the guards spots the bulge from the revolver in Irv’s pocket. The basic throw for anything to happen in Traveller is 8+. I’m applying DM -2 because of the size of the crowd, plus the enthusiastic guards are concentrating on a photo op more than security. I roll an adjusted 9, so … yep, one of the guards spots Irv, points him out, and all hell breaks loose.

The encounter begins at medium range. The guards are Strength 7, Dexterity 9, and Endurance 9, and they have Irv outnumbered. Irv throws an adjusted 11 to escape, and bolts through the crowd and down a couple alleys, with shouts and whistles ringing in his ears.

What a week! Irv is out CR100, he’s looking over his shoulder for that silver hovercar, and now he’s worried that someone got a description of him fleeing the square. Should he ditch his revolver? Should he cash in that Low Passage and head out of system? Should he use his revolver on himself in his beige room by the starport? Tune in next time (if there is a next time) to find out!

The Regina Monologues: Don’t Call Him “Frank”

You guys left me no choice.

Here comes some solitaire Traveller. And it’s ok — this is covered by the rules. As Traveller Book 1 notes, “Solitaire is ideal for players who are isolated by situation or geography.”

Man. “Isolated by situation.” There’s a whole universe of subtext in that one.

The rules are Traveller revised second edition, circa 1981, as republished in archival form by Far Future Enterprises, because my own original little black books are long gone. While I have reprints of the supplements enabling advanced character generation, tonight I’m going to stick to the original Book 1 Characters and Combat, just to keep things simple. My sole concession to 21st century character generation is that I’m using an online dice server rather than rolling the bones by hand.

All right! Let’s roll up an untrained, inexperienced 18-year-old!

The rules assure us that “Characters in Traveller are precisely defined using the universal personality profile (the UPP), which expresses the basic characteristics in a specific sequence using hexidecimal (base 16) numbers.” Well, of course it does. Remember — this is precise definition!

And thus my character’s UPP is … 674749. That makes him average in Dexterity and Intelligence, a bit below average in Strength, above average in Social Standing, and significantly below average in Endurance and Education. Hmm. Maybe an overweight kid, from an upper-middle-class household, average smarts but a failure academically. Perfect fodder for Traveller’s legendarily merciless character generation system! Even if I wanted to re-roll the sucker, I couldn’t … the rules say to embrace the dice even if they don’t fall your way, and to push your character into the “low survival rate” Scouts service if you can’t bear to play with your little weakling.

Old. School.

Time to name my little UPP. Using the “Space Cowboys” tables from The Story Games Names Project book, I generate the entirely uninspiring name of “Frank Irvine.” The Scout service is looking more attractive! I decide that Frank was named after his father, but that he hates his father, and calls himself, “Irv.” To go by that name, he must hate his father a lot. A lot! That’s probably why he flunked out of school … the old man expected too much of him. He just doesn’t understand!

Time to choose a service!

Scanning the PRIOR SERVICE TABLE tells me Irv’s brains would be welcome in the Merchant Service. Being a Merchant could also lead to a ship and riches — sold! The dice are kind and Irv is accepted for a four-year hitch. His survival roll is a six, so he had some kind of close scrape his first term … he also earned a commission, becoming 4th Officer Irvine. And Dad said I’d never amount to anything! I split Irv’s three skill rolls between Personal Development, Service Skills, and the (not so) Advanced Education tables, earning +1 Endurance, Vehicle, and Electronics skills. For Vehicle I specify “Winged Craft,” and imagine Irv spent four years as a kind of short-haul bush pilot, building up his endurance at high altitude, fixing the faulty electronics in his rig, and probably flying at night and through storms, accounting for his near-run survival roll. Irv successfully re-enlists for a second term.

Irv’s rig

Twenty-two year old Irv has an adjusted UPP of 675749 as he continues his career. His survival roll permits plenty of margin for error — maybe he got out of the whirlybirds. No promotion, though, so four years of Irv’s life yields one lousy skill roll — Gun Combat! Irv started packing a revolver this term, and learned how to use it. His cargos must have been valuable. Or illegal.

Promotion in the Merchants looks remote for ol’ Irv, but I decide to spend the last of the poor fool’s twenties in the service. Irv’s survival roll is even more comfortable than before, so he must be getting a little wiser about his job. No promotion (again), and I decide Irv is growing tired of the Merchants and will muster out. He does earn Gunnery skill in his final term, and I am more convinced than ever that Irv’s job was more “Pirate” than “Merchant.”

Irv avoids boxcars on his re-enlistment roll and is free to go his own way. He gets four rolls while mustering out, walking away with CR20K, +2 Education (Dad would be proud?) and a Low Passage.

And so, in orthodox terms, we have:

Frank “Irv” Irvine, ex-merchant 4th officer. 675769. Age 30. 3 terms. CR20,000. Vehicle (Winged Craft)-1, Electronics-1, Gun Combat (Revolver)-1, Gunnery-1. Low Passage.

Join me next time when (if?) Irv is unceremoniously deposited in some lonely starport along the Spinward Main!

my name is Irv, and I ended up just like my Dad!

Fellow Travellers

Been thinking of playing some Classic Traveller. How about it? Any interest in noodling around with Traveller via this blog?

If I have to do it solo, I suppose I could call it, “The Regina Monologues.”

Not With A Bang …

… and so it ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Not our D&D Campaign — that went out with an explosion of dragon-fighting! No, rather, I mean this blog, and pretty much the whole concept of big orchestrated role playing with a regular cast of players.

I tried to keep that going, but I think it’s done.

A couple weeks ago at a software industry event I met with a friend who is connected to Wizards of the Coast and we chatted for awhile about Dungeons & Dragons — about how the property is paralyzed by ownership spread over at least five different factions; about the dwindling circulation numbers of the various books (and I see layoffs announced at WoTC today, too); about the backwards and unlikely-to-be-solved approach D&D has taken to e-books and iOS and technology in general. Thinking of my own failing group, I told him that D&D needed to migrate away from a game played in the garage for six hours at a time and into a game I could play with my connected friends for six minutes a day, and while that little homily might yet show up in a WoTC board meeting, I think it’s dead, Jim.

At least for me.

Dungeons & Dragons Essentials is a fine product, but for me it proved to be a product out of time, a twisted tweener that was too complicated for a story game, but too superficial for a wargame. Essentials (and by association, D&D 4.0) is “simpler” and “broader” and “more streamlined” only when compared to version 3.5. It the is the classic overhaul of a bible by the faithful — cloistered monks who are convinced they are heretical revolutionaries who produce a work that laypeople find a collection of distinctions without a difference.

Having played D&D Essentials for a year or so, I can confirm that it works just fine as a lifestyle game … but my lifestyle no longer includes devotion to a RPG system. I am a pick-up-and-play guy now. I went into this campaign determined to make learning and using the rules my priority, and to play frequently to stay sharp and engaged with the system. And for awhile we kept up the pace. We had some great games! But I’m nearly fifty and a regular D&D game just isn’t in the cards, even if I wanted one. And I have concluded that no, I really don’t want a regular game of D&D — I’d like to role play about as frequently as I boardgame, and with the same degree of preparation (but that’s another story).

So you can write off the ultimate failure of D&D Essentials for me as a problem with the gamer and not the game, but consider:

• I am an experienced RPGer, with a deep background in these games and a will to run a game, and …
• I have a group of like-minded and dedicated players close at hand, and …
• I am in a place in life where I can afford to buy all the game stuff I desire, and can usually manage a game day a couple times a month, and …
• I have game-age kids who are deep into World of Warcraft and nerd stuff in general.

But the game still failed to get permanent traction with my adult friends, and my kids bounced off the side despite my best attempts to get them hooked.

So if the game doesn’t work for me, and if it didn’t work for my kids, then who, exactly, is the audience for this game?

I think, despite all the rigamarole of this new game and the destruction of the old, of “dumbing down the game for WoW players,” of the version wars and the Paizo Heresy — I think the audience for this game turned out to be same as it has always been. The old guard. The hard core. The game shop customers and the GenCon attendees. A loyal and wonderful group of players who unfortunately are not growing in numbers to any meaningful degree. A group that already has forty years worth of RPG stuff to draw upon, and more distractions for their time and dollars every day. A group that might — just might — have six hours a week to slay dragons in the garage.

I wouldn’t bet on it, though, and I certainly wouldn’t build a business on it! Not a paper-and-imagination business.

I think I’m done with this, personally. At least until Chuck runs a game.

the last huzzah!

I suppose this has become a death-of-roleplaying article, but I’m too lazy to back up that assertion, and the only people who would argue the point are going to be the loyal greying customers that are killing the business with their kind and fanatical attachment to this decaying form.

So I’ll half-ass my declaration of death for conventional RPGs offering personal-anecdote-as-sweeping-proof. Assume that I am nearly dead and a write-off and not the future of this game anyway. Figure I’m part of the problem, and not the solution.

Groovy.

But what of the future?

I have a garage-full of great role playing games and board games. My kids will play any of them … if I set them up and take them through the game. They don’t take them out by themselves. They don’t teach them to their friends. On their own time, on their own dime, they have their noses suck in their iPods, or in World of Warcraft, or Xbox Live.

Those paper-and-pencil games that their dad likes?

Fun stuff.

Now and then.

When their dad forces them to play.

What of this blog?

It’s hardly been a regular force in anyone’s life, and it will likely go the way of all things. I have a vague idea of using it to host a play-by-blog version of Traveller, but we’ll see if that still seems like a good idea in a couple weeks. This may be the end of Goblin Soup!

In the meantime, if you want to keep reading my writing, check out Longbox Graveyard, where I obsess over the one hobby that might be deader than role playing games — comic books!

Thanks for reading!