Rpgs

Introduction

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve decided to put my theory to the practice.

Woe to all who step down this dark path.

There’s a longstanding cliche about the separation betweeen theory and practice. Some people think about things, other people do things. “Those who can’t do, teach.” The bigotry and condescention between the two groups is just as longstanding; get a chemist or mathemetician talking about the differences between the “theoretical” and “applied” branches of their field, and watch the sparks fly.

RPG Errata: Errant Challenger, and Bad RPGs

Okay, let me first take a step back and say this unequivocally: I don’t think Errant Challenger is a bad game. This is a rhetorical device, yeah? Just go with it for a second.

Errant Challenger, by Fauix, is still in its Beta at time of writing. It’s a fairly straightforward system, easily graspable by most anyone familiar with RPGs.

It’s a bad RPG.

I mean, look at it! It’s not so much a rule-book as it is a word document exported to PDF. The cover is poorly structured AI mush. There’s no real setting, just a chunk of fantasy pablum. The system itself doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done twenty time over in different systems.

RPG Errata: Against the Apocalypse, and Simulations vs Abstracts

Against the Apocalypse, designed by Oleander Garden, is a game about war, last stands, isolation, and death. It is a game where the players are soldiers in a war against the Demiurge, who sends their hollowmen every Sunday in an attempt to kill the players. They have little in the way of supplies or hope, and the game will end the way all wars must, in death.

The game is, in a single (compound) word, Anti-narrative.

Divided into two parts — the fighting and the downtime — the game encourages the players to unfold their character’s lives in the manner things would happen, not should or could. The book asks players to be honest with both themselves and their imagined world: the goal is not to tell a story, but to simulate life.

RPG Errata: Errant, and Procedure

Errant, published by Kill Jester, is a, quote: “rules light, procedure heavy, classic fantasy role-playing game in the vein of the first few editions of that role-playing game and its many imitators and descendants.”

Another one?

Not to complain, but the RPG medium is rife with OSR D&D-likes. Rife, I say. What is there to be gained with breaking down yet another one, when we could be talking about interesting games like Rosewood Abbey, LORDSWORN, Pine Shallows, Lumen Ryder Core, Edelweiss, The Long Shift, or All the While?

What is to be gained, I think, is purely an excuse to talk about that first line in the description: Rules-light, Procedure-heavy.

RPG Errata: Iron Halberd, and Rules-Light

Iron Halberd, by Level2janitor, is a medium weight OSR Fantasy RPG. Recognizing the variety of definitions in the world, the game clarifies OSR to mean that the game is deadly, the story is player-driven, resource management is important, and the system itself is compatible with most other OSR resources.

Anyone familiar with OSR systems will be quickly familiar with most of Iron Halberd’s offerings. Stats are randomly generated, the world is deadly, and the focus of the story is on the player’s actions, rather than the GM’s Mary-Sue villains. Inspired by Dungeon Crawl Classics, Knave, and 13th Age; the system has rules for warbands, strongholds, crafting, hirelings, and long-travel.

But what does “medium weight” mean?

RPG Errata: Endeavour, and Themes

Endeavour, by Armiger Games, is a playset for the Paragon RPG system, which was made famous by AGON, the epic myth TTRPG. Inspired by the hopeful and optimistic Science Fiction genre — specifically the original Star Trek — Endeavour sees your characters traveling throughout the galaxy, discovering new species, alien cultures, and strange artifacts in your quest to learn more about the universe.

AGON, on the other hand, is about retelling epic adventures in the style of the Odyssey. Your characters travel from island to island on their journey home, subject to the whims and wills of the Gods.

RPG Errata: Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger, and Personal Games

Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger, by Graham Gentz, is an artifact of its time.

It’s hard to explain what Henry Kissinger is to people who don’t know. It’s very easy to explain who Kissinger was, but what “Kissinger” is

Memes of Death playing a claw machine, Steven Colbert dancing in his office, and a prevailing sense of an omnipresent cruelty existing in the world; its easy to see why The Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger was made. Henry Kissinger was, in many ways, a complicated person.

RPG Errata: Night of the Hogmen, and Single Stories

It would be easy to mistake Night of the Hogmen for a module, easily adaptable to any system or setting you’d like. It’s meant to be played in a single evening, encompassing a single event: a panicked run from a crashed carriage to a church, chased all the while by a swarming sea of ravenous hogmen.

But it’s not a module: it has its own small ruleset and premade characters. It’s Forged in the Dark, and while it is a part of a larger setting, it has no concrete connection to anything beyond its single run. It’s a One-shot RPG, similar to Lady Blackburn or Honey Heist.

RPG Errata: Diceless Universal, Ends, and Leveling Up

Diceless Universal, by Michael Raston, is a very simple Universal Deterministic RPG. Only four pages long, the rules of the system are barely worth calling rules. Being deterministic, the rule section mostly details how the GM describes the world, and the players react. It is shared storytelling at its most basic; little more than a collaborative argument.

But I talked about that kind of play earlier. What I’d like to discuss now is the very last page, where the system details its progession mechanic: what it takes for characters to level up.

RPG Errata: Darkest Days, and Random Difficulty

Darkest Days is a dark fantasy RPG designed by Bell Moon Games. A bit souls-like, the game sees its players as former legendary heroes returned to life by ancient ritual, in a desperate attempt to save the world from demons and monsters. It has an interesting “pip” system for skills, which gives you bonuses from both your stats and your equipment.

One of the more interesting parts of the Darkest Days ruleset is how it handles skill checks. In most modern RPGs, when a player wishes to undertake a task, they are given some measure of difficulty. Most systems call this a “difficulty rating” or a “target number.” You have to roll “better” than this number to succeed at your task.

Okay, but where does this number come from?