Monday 21 April 2014

What would make my "perfect" Role-Playing Tabletop game?

A previous post alluded to my slightly complaining as to the time it was taking me to roll up a character for a modern RPG (in this case Shadowrun 5e). A subsequent comment on Facebook got me thinking as to what would I want from a modern RPG? These are my thoughts..

"Easy" character creation

As I alluded to in that earlier post regarding creating a character in Shadowrun 5e, it wasnt straight forward to almost the point of impenetrability, Pathfinder is not far off that level that but not quite as bad. 13th Age has had one of the easiest to follow systems i've encountered for a while and that's what I want, particularly if there is no digital backup like D&D had with both the downloadable and online versions of Character Builder (I've not played with Hero Lab so can't really comment). You pick your ability scores, choose your paths, buy equipment and you are done. Both Edge of the Empire and FFG's Rogue Trader employ a tree based system that works well and shows you how the character works and is relatively straight forward.

Structured Combat

The fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons has had many detractors and the combat system has been a constant target for two reasons, the second I will talk about later (character advancement) but the first was that people didn't seem keen of having to resort to miniatures to resolve combat. Most combat systems treat things like distance as arbitrary values at the discretion of the Game Master but 4e wrote concise miniature rules into the core system. Some thought that it felt too much like a wargame rather than a traditional RPG. I disagree, I liked the system and think this part of the combat system works. It removes confusion and helps when working out cover, area effect, line of sight, etc. Even back when I was a fairly avid second editon player we would often resort to miniatures just to be clear of ambiguity when in combat, plus people do remember where D&D came from, don't they?

Character Advancement

The biggest problem with 4e (in my opinion) is the character advancement after around 10th level, the number of powers available increases and each round of combat takes longer as players try to string together ever more impressive combination of powers. This is great at level 1 as you have multiple options in combat but what is great at early levels soon goes out of control. This problem only gets worse the higher the player level, the more powers, the longer combat takes. My ideal system would handle this by scaling the effect of powers with a player level with the option of swapping powers out at various points which I think how 5e will handle it (or at least handle it better than 4e did). I also like the mechanic in 13th Age that has the escalating die in combat that increases by one each round and that number is added to the player attack rolls.

Some kind of Tablet Interface

Using paper and a pencil is certainly traditional and has its roots in the very beginnings of the hobby (which is around 40 years old) but this is the 21st century, isn't it time for some innovation here. There are a range of homebrew spreadsheets for both character creation and management and these range massively in functionality. The only real attempt at something like I'm envisioning is by Hero Lab and that isn't quite what I would hope for (I haven't used it but going on what Ive read and been told by other users), it gives you character management and there is a reader for the iPad but it's read only and not quite the interactive sheet I would be hoping for. Wizards of the Coast, with their Character Builder have shown the way that online character management can work and be a real boon for the player. They took flak for the subscription model but it gets to the stage its almost too useful not to have, certainly in my book.

Summing Up

So is my "perfect" system out there yet? No, If you had the story mechanics/character creation of 13th Age, the dice mechanics from Edge of the Empire, combat rules and digital backup of D&D 4e. I have high hopes for D&D Next but until the official release it's hard to say what shape the final rules will be in.

Saturday 12 April 2014

It was the dawn of the 13th Age?

I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for over 20 years, starting with some first edition, a lot of second, not much third (wasn't keen) but been a relatively steady player of Fourth since it's release in 2008. Fourth edition of D&D has been the subject of a lot of criticism for aspects of its system, such as it's reliance on miniatures to help resolve combat. For me, I like the structured nature of the system and the ordered way you are able to achieve things, but then when you get over 10th level combat takes an exponential amount of time as you get additional powers and abilities, how this got past playtesting is one of lifes mysteries. But what happens when the lead designer of third edition and the lead designer of fourth edition get together and design a system, 13th Age happens..

During a D&D Next playtesting

Just over a week ago I was able to attend the fifth D&D Tweetup (@dndtweetup) and got chance to play the system and experiance it. The organiser of the Tweetup, Adam Page, has been asking for some comments about the system and here are mine from what I've seen/played so far.

Creating a Character

I used a pre-generated character at the Tweetup but there was still scope for customisation before play began and this philosophy carries from the main sourcebook which puts character background, history and where you slot into the campaign before pretty much everything else. Three pieces of background information are key to beginning your character and also help to differentiate it from any version of D&D I've played, they are: -

  • One unique thing about your character
  • Your relationships to the Icons
  • Background skills

The first two are primarily there to enhance your background and story and instead of picking from a list of skills that you might have done previously, you pick skill titles that fit in with your character background (as tailored in the first two elements) and assign points as appropriate and these are then used at key points in the adventure such as a skill check.

 

Rolling a 1st level character didn't take that long and was a refreshing change from when I tried to roll up a character for the new version of Shadowrun that I blogged about previously. The core rule book flows well and reminds me a lot of D&D booms of old but remembering the designers backgrounds that's not much of a surprise.

 

Combat

Combat is where fourth edition fell over. Badly. One of the primary complaints is that it turned the role playing game into a board game or a war game of some kind (these people do know where this game descended from, right?). I wasn't one of them, I liked going down to miniature level, it removes ambiguities about location, line of sight, cover, difficult terrain, etc. Where the game fell apart for me was in the character progression and the number of skills/powers gained. The first 10 or so levels are ok-ish but soon after combat can become unwieldy as the number of options open to players begins to overwhelm and ever more intricate plans to try and chain them together eats into combat time. As an experiment we created level 28 characters for a one off game and a single round of 5 players took just over 45 minutes to complete. I believe this is one thing that been fixes in the fifth edition of D&D (also known as D&D Next) but I haven't played enough of the available preview packets to really comment on that.

The nature of the combat is fairly familiar, roll for initiative, add modifiers, roll for attack, add modifiers, roll for damage, add modifiers, etc. one thing that stands out and one thing I wanted to see how it played was the escalation die. This is basically a D6 that in the second round of combat, it shows a 1 and that gets added to players attack roles, this increments every round until getting to 6. This gives players am increasing chance to hit and various powers have better effects depending on what the D6 is showing. I think this works well and gives players a feeling of being suitable heroic the longer a combat goes on for.

We had two significant combats during the Tweetup and both went well and seemed relatively quick. Reading the book character progression seems familiar to 4th edition but as the core sourcebook only covers the first 10 levels of character advancement it's hard to know how this would work when characters get into their teens in terms of levels.

Summing up

I had been wanting to learn more about 13th Age for a while and I can say I wasn't disappointed, there are a lot of good ideas here that seem to want to shift the emphasis of the game from rules to story and that's not a bad thing, mostly. Unlike other, it seems, other people I liked the reliance on miniatures in Fourth Edition, for reasons I've already stated above. 13th Age also sidesteps the problems of character progression above 10th level by only having 10 levels in the sourcebook. It's also keen to keep to overly familiar tropes (such as rolling a D20 to hit) instead of trying something new with dice like Fantasy Flight have done with both Warhammer 3rd Edition and Edge of the Empire. All of this against what is likely to drop at GenCon this year with the probable release of 5th edition as from little I've played a lot of the ideas either had or were planned to be incorporated into it.

 

Arguably 13th Age is a spiritual successor to the D&D that a lot of us have played, it fixes a lot of things wrong with Fourth edition whilst putting story and roleplay back at the forefront and that's not a bad thing but without the brand recognition that D&D has, can it ever really penetrate the market with much success? With only one expansion on the horizon, a lot is left to the players and DM's imagination and that will carry you so far before you become hungry for more.

 

 

Sunday 6 April 2014

Adventures in Arduino

Around 9 months ago I bought both a Raspberry Pi and An Arduino Micro-Controller. The Pi is a proper computer whereas the Arduino is much more simplistic, I was looking for a programming project and it would take an off-the-cuff comment after a Laser-Tag LRP event to provide inspiration. The latest sensors we use for Laser-Tag have the ability to programmed with different configurations as per each games requirements. The only way to do this in the fielt was to pre-program set configurations that could be transmitted using a device in the field, but if you wanted a different configuration to one that you had with you then you would need a PC to reprogram them, the idea was floated of a device that could do on-the-fly configurations in the field without needing a PC.

First test with LCD menu

The Arduino seemed a perfect fit for this as the Pi would seem like overkill. Initial research seemed to indicate that the Arduino would work so picking up a couple of other bits (such as an LCD screen) I set about prototyping my project on breadboard.

The hardware came together relatively quickly, the first part of the programming was implementing a menu system, I had a couple of examples of the type of thing I wanted to achieve and moslty they worked. The majority of the logic used in the code hasn't really changed since I was coding back in College (more years ago then I care to think) but there were other issues (like switch debouncing) that I hadn't anticipated but the Arduino user forums were both helpful and unhelpful in equal measure, as with most times when searching the Internet, it's not the answer that matters but how you ask the question.

Finished Prototype

Once the menu system was done my next problem was to how to transmit my parameters to the sensor, the methodology was simple, Infra-Red, but the I didn't understand the format of the data, and the fact the data also relied on a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) to confirm the data just added to the problem. In the beginning I hadn't been keen on involving the designer of the system as I knew he had a lot on so I tried to only ask questions when I had to, after one such conversation, he sent me some code and he had converted his code from Assembler into C (what the Arduino uses). A few tweaks were still needed but mostly it was there, once we had the basis of transmssion we could then add in multiple parameters. Hopefully the code I'd written was scaleable and able to be expanded with future developments.

Constructing an actual prototype was relatively quick, requiring only one afternoon and a bit of a morning once I'd got my Dremel back from my dad. It's not the finished design as I'd like to mount the front switches better than I have and the circuit needs mounting better to keep it from moving where the programming socket it on the side.