Active Weekend

So, last weekend schoolpsychnerd and had another party finally! And true to form, schoolpsychnerd couldn't decide on a day to hold it, and so I picked the weekend, and then it rained. Of course. If we had had the party on Sunday, it would have been a brilliant sunny day, and then we could have gone on our two-hour-long walk to get a new keyboard on Saturday instead, when it was probably ~8 degrees cooler and cloudy. Then again, maybe I wouldn't have spilled chrysanthemum liqueur on my keyboard if we had it on Sunday and we wouldn't have had to go for a walk at all on Saturday, which if you notice, would have been anticausal anyway.

I missed out on playing Betrayal at the House on the Hill, but I did get to try Elder Sign and...I thought it was pretty terrible, honestly. It was pure Ameritrash--a very strong theme, of investigators trapped in a museum and hurling themselves at the terrible horror from beyond the stars (the King in Yellow, in our case), but with mechanics that are kind of forced through the round hole to fit the theme. I mean, I suppose all of your actions being at the whim of the pitiless hand of the RNG does fit Lovecraft's uncaring universe and the lack of any special place for mankind, but I felt like there was very little I could do that would actually affect the outcome of the game other than occasionally add a couple more dice into the pool. And even that wasn't always good, because those dice were supposed to be more favorable results, and thus didn't have the tentacles "Terror" icon, but sometimes there were locations that required multiple Terror results and the extra dice didn't do any good. The strategy relied on determining where to allocate the results of dice after they were rolled, which is strategic, yes, but it wasn't very satisfying.

It was described to me as Arkham Horror-lite, which if that's true, makes me glad I've never played Arkham Horror. I'll stick to games like Android.

Unfortunately, as I said, I managed to spill alcohol on my keyboard, and despite schoolpsychnerd's heroic and nearly-successful attempts to repair it, it was too far gone. She managed to get some of the keys to work again, but there were still about half of them that were broken, including both enter keys, and the second attempt to fix all those caused it to give up the ghost completely. Fortunately, in a burst of foresight two years ago, I had deliberately bought a $19.99 keyboard, reasoning that before mechanically failure hit I would spill something on it and ruin it. And what do you know...

Anyway, we ended up going on a two-hour walk trying to find a new keyboard. First to Target, which had a spot for the wired keyboards but nothing actually in stock, and then to Radio Shack, except Google Maps listed them as seven blocks south of where they actually were, so we had to walk that distance and then all the way back home. On the other hand, we did pass by Golden Pacific, which is good because we needed another bag of rice, and because I got to walk through Little Saigon around Argyle Street. As I told my father when I called him for Father's Day, I was walking through a place where I looked different than the average person, I couldn't understand most of what people were saying, and I couldn't read half the signs. I felt right at home.

We'll have to go back. There were a ton of restaurants I didn't know were there that we have to try.

Dungeons & Design 6.5: Combat Addendum

So, yeah, I forgot a couple things.

Facing and Grids
Urgh. I'm really, really torn here.

I've already written a lot about trying to avoid the kind of things that computers do better, because it just leads to ever-increasing complexity and minutiae and pretty soon you're playing Advanced Squad Leader by yourself because everyone else has jumped screaming out of the windows. On the one hand, facing and a battlemap adds a lot of tactical depth to combat and allows for flanking, backstabs, variable defense depending on where the attacker is, blocking enemy movement, formations, and so on...and on the other, all of that doubles or triples the time combat takes as well, since it requires moving the actual figures around as well as recognizing when different modifiers apply, remembering the actual modifiers, and then taking the time to apply them. Using something like encounter zones, where characters are "in melee," "close," "medium," or "far" from each other, makes it easier to keep track of range but harder to deal with if other parts of the system are concrete. I'd personally say it's better to provide detail and let it be stripped away, but that's mostly based on personal experience--I like it better when I know the distances and can handwave them if necessary, but still pull them out if I or the players need to know.

I don't have the kind of instinctive revulsion of miniatures and grids that some gamers online seem to have, and a couple months ago I broke out the old 3025-era Battletech boxed set from the 90s and ran schoolpsychnerd and one of our friends through a scenario. It wasn't bad at all, though there were some moments when I was flipping through the rulebook looking for a modifier or how a specific scenario actually worked. Battletech is no Advanced Squad Leader, but it does have several fiddly bits. One of them I screwed up as we played was how movement interacted with fire: flat penalty if the mover is firing, penalty based on distance moved if the mover is being fired on.

Maybe I should just test it out and see how long it takes. Are Attacks of Opportunity the main reason 3.x combat was so horrible, the way parts of the internet seems to claim? Obviously ever-escalating interactions of spells and feats using exception-based design and skyrocketing hit point numbers had a part to play too, but I've solved the second one except for boss battles against giant monsters and maybe part of the first one--that will come in when I talk about magic and advantages.

Edit: Poll removed because it didn't work.

Monsters & Magic
So, Monsters & Magic is out, and I bought it! Now I can reference it as I write here the way I'm already referencing True 20.

Relevant to the current topic, Monsters & Magic uses a similar system to the one I was thinking of, where it's roll + mods vs. static difficult, and then you can spent the points on different effects. Either on damage, or on continuing bonuses or maneuvers in three ranks--at 5, 10, and 15. There's an odd quirk that it tries to stick to one roll and adds weapon damage to this roll, meaning that it ends up the same as nWoD combat where the roll is "How much have you hurt the target" rather than "Do you hit?" Since it keeps pre-3.x's one-minute combat rounds and sticks to abstract AC, I think this actually makes more sense than the rather odd separation between attack and damage, but it seems like the kind of thing that would cause a lot of grief among OSR advocates--and in fact, it was brought to my attention by reading a forum thread where someone was questioning why it's easier to hit with two-handed swords than daggers.

5,10,15 seems really high for effects to me, though. I'll need to read further to see what they think giving up 15 damage is worth, and take that into account when I'm costing my own maneuvers, especially considering the lower hit point values I was thinking of using. On the other hand, if a few blows can kill you, disarming the enemy seems like a good idea, and if the dragon has 400 HP because it's huge and you have ~25, maybe shooting it in the eyes to blind it is better than swording it in the hitpoints.

Playtest playtest playtest.