Servants of the Secret Fire - Middle Earth RPG

I've taken on a challenge that's been on my mind for years and years now - I want to design a Middle-Earth RPG that actually has something to do with Middle-Earth.

There have been a few attempts in the past - the two big ones that come to mind which have taken on that liscence are MERP and the attempt made by Decipher. Of course, thousands of fantasy RPGs owe a huge amount to Middle-Earth and some, like Burning Wheel, have in some ways tried to do Middle-Earth with the serial numbers filed off, so to speak. Frankly, none of them have satisfied me. Some, like MERP, use another system and tack on Middle-Earthy stuff. ICE actually had very well-researched supplements for MERP with lots of interesting extrapolations about the setting, but the core system was still Rolemaster, which isn't particularly Middle-Earthy.

Decipher's own attempt was the Coda system, which is fucking D20 with the die-type changed to protect the innocent. Their big innovation? Use 2d6 instead of a D20 and change...almost nothing else. I frankly had to buy the base book, and I think I was bamboozled into getting one more when the company ended the RPG line because it was cheap and I'm a sucker for Middle-Earth stuff. The book was actually well put-together. In changing the names of Feats from D20, they gave them names that referenced the films and the books. The book was relatively well written, and they gave the magic system a better stab than MERP for sure. But it was freaking D20 for crap's sake.

Burning Wheel has a lot of cool stuff about it, but what you end up with is sort of Middle-Earth through a distinctly Luke Crane lens. It definitely has a lot of interesting aspects, and picks up on a lot of the color and setting material in subtle ways. Burning Wheel is a great system, and probably the best attempt yet. Still, while it is a good game, it is definitely its own creature. You get something interesting and fun, but it isn't Middle-Earth.

The Song of Arda, which is now defunct, was an attempt to have a Pendragon-esque Middle-Earth RPG. It was never finished, and the site has long since been taken down. I was following its progress with a lot of hope, but...well, I definitely know about games not being finished. Song of Arda would have been freely available online, which would also have been nice.

This brings me to Servants of the Secret Fire, which is the working title I have for my own system for a Middle-Earth RPG. I plan on finishing the playtest document, playtesting it, and then getting together a complete game document that I'll then distribute for free to whoever wants it. I just...I want a good Middle-Earth game to be out there.

Anne Lamott said once in an interview I believe - "Write the book you would want to come upon." Others have said similar things - design the game you want to play. So that's what I'm doing right now.

It's pretty likely it'll come to nothing, but I'll get to play it, and my players will get to enjoy it, and I can give this idea a rest. I've feld like I should write this game since I first picked up a copy of MERP many years ago and ran it and had that feeling of missing the mark but not knowing why or how. I now feel like I know a lot more about the how and the why, so we'll see where this goes.

The Podgecast and My FLGS Make Sweet Love

And their baby is due December 6th. Right now they're calling it One-Shotter Day, but I think they'll pick a better name when the due date is closer. I mean, come on. One-Shotter Day? That'll get your ass kicked on the playground, no question.

So, first, the Podgecast. It is an awesome gaming podcast that I always enjoy listening to. If you like Fear the Boot, the Podgecast will have some familiar voices, and it is a better podcast in every way. I mean that as someone who still listens to Fear the Boot as well (though if I had a shorter commute and had to choose, the Podge would win hands down). It is funny, interesting, and for the most part avoids the rambling that many long-form podcasts just fall into. When they do ramble, it is usually either funny, or the person is made fun of, and either way, the listener wins.

Second, my FLGS, Gamescape North. I really enjoyed working there, and still sort of do, doing things like their next IPR order and so on, but the chaplain position has devoured my time such that I can't have more than one job anymore. Which frankly feels weird, since I've had more than one job for years now. But, anyway, its a great store, and if you live in northern california near San Francisco, you should check it out.

It isn't often that two awesome things get together and invite me to come along. So this is cool. Usually when awesome things are happening, I'm here in my living room writing in a blog or something geeky like that. So I'm a happy guy, and if you're in our area on the 6th, come by and check it out.

Podgecast and Gamescape North - keep up the good work fellas.

Hunter: the Vigil and the New World of Darkness

The New World of Darkness games seem to be intentionally designed to give players insane results. In the old world of darkness system, you could get crazy results, but it was because you gamed the system well - you set up a roll with lots of dice and low difficulty.

In the NWoD, everything is target 8, so successes can be relatively rare, but you also have "exploding dice", re-rolling 10's and sometimes even 9's and more rarely, 8's as well. This means that the most common results of rolls are one or two successes or a large number, and it comes out of nowhere. It is also less under your control. Even when you can make some of your successes explode, they are relatively rare, so its more of a game of luck and randomness.

One effect of this that I found in my own play is that it turns the game towards comedy. There is a lot of botching and absurd successes, and it is hard to handle.

The exception here is in combat, when some kind of defense number is subtracted from almost all of the dice-pools for attacks and special abilities. This means that you're rolling fewer dice than you're used to, which in turn means that combat involves a lot of singular successes or marginal failures.

This can get to be...a little unexciting. Your vampire grows her agg-dealing supernatural claws, leaps from the rooftop onto her opponent, slashes the claws down his back, and deals...one aggravated damage. Nowhere near a would penalty or anything. A scratch, really. Then in rage he turns around, pulls out his Desert Eagle, shoots you, and deals...two bashing. And so it goes until one of you has some exploding dice and randomly ends the battle in a paroxism of bloodshed.

I like a lot of the changes that were made to Vampire, Werewolf and Hunter. I think that Mage took a step backward both in its fluff and in the system itself in almost every way. But the dice system is just sort of hard to manage sometimes. It doesn't work for me. It doesn't deliver the play experience I want - it isn't reliable when it should be, and it isn't exciting when you want it to be.

I find that I'm left wanting to hack White Wolf's games all the time. When we used to run V3 (Vampire third edition), we probably had a minimum of house rules, but by the end of a chronicle we had a few to make the system more playable.

I wonder - did they playtest the new system before they brought it out? It just comes off as...unfinished in a lot of ways. So you have huge, beautiful books with unfinished systems in them that don't deliver what you want them to deliver.

I sort of want White Wolf's graphic designers and artists and setting designers to team up with Paizo, maybe, or a team of designers who can create a game that is tight, efficient, and delivers when you want it to deliver.

We just had a session of Hunter: the Vigil with some members of our new home group we're trying to put together, and it went really well and was a lot of fun. It isn't like I'm not having fun with White Wolf's games - I almost always do. It just isn't...reliable. Their new system, its core dice mechanic, just isn't as good as their old one, and it takes something away from the game that used to be there. I'd have kept a similar dice system, with variable pools and variable difficulties on d10s, because that just lead to a more interesting game, a system that the players can use to set their characters up for huge success or for big risks at critical moments. The dice helped the game along - not so much with the new WoD stuff. Its really too bad.