My first 40 years as a role player

Today, I turned 51 years old. And, as I've mentioned on numerous previous birthdays (and probably numerous "how did you get into gaming" posts), I got my Mentzer Basic Set for my 11th birthday. So I've been a D&D and other RPGs player for four decades now. 

For the first decade, 1984 to 1994, I both ran and played BECMI with my friends and family. We also ran a lot of Star Frontiers. We also played some AD&D of both the 1E and 2E variety, but not that much. And occasionally we'd play, or at least make characters but never get around to playing, lots of other games. Gamma World. Star Wars d6. Cyberpunk 2020. TMNT and Other Strangeness. Marvel Superheroes. I'm sure there are others we tried or at least sampled that I'm forgetting. We played a LOT of BECMI D&D though. Tales of this decade are labeled as The Old BECMI Group, obviously.

For the second decade, 1994 to 2004, after a bit of interruption in RPG play due to Magic: The Gathering and not wanting to associate with the campus Gaming Guild who embodied most of the negative gamer stereotypes that were out there at the time, I got back into gaming with a group that played a mix of 1E/2E AD&D. Then I went to Japan, and by the time I got a group to game with, 3E had just come out. So we dove into the world of the d20 system, playing 3E D&D and a bit of d20 Modern and d20 Star Wars. The final few years of this era, I had moved to a different part of Japan, and started gaming on RPOL.net since I hadn't found a group to play with there. These tales are under the Evansville Group (1E/2E), and Toyama Group (initial 3E stuff) tags.

From 2004 to 2014, I got in with a group playing in Tokyo. Again, we mostly played d20 stuff, including 3E, d20 Modern, and d20 Conan. But through this group, I also got to try a variety of Forge-style story games, and also it rekindled my love of old school D&D. I also got involved (finally) with some local gamers, and we played some Abberant (an obscure White Wolf game), 3E, and old school D&D. We also developed Presidents of the Apocalypse, which I know I've mentioned many times before, but no, it will probably never get released because it's so scattershot. In the middle of this era, I moved to Korea. For a few years, the emphasis was on board games, but eventually I got some old school D&D going, using the house rules that have by now evolved into Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins. I also got to try 4E and we sampled a few One Page and microlite RPGs, played a bit of Gamma World (the 4E D&D stuff AND classic GW), Pathfinder 1E, and a few other games here and there. I continued to game on RPOL, and also got to sample various OSR offerings through online realtime play (Google Meet, when that was a thing). I also developed, play tested, and released Flying Swordsmen. You can find these stories in the tags Ebisu and Yamanashi Gamers for the Japan era, and Busan Gamers for the Korea era.

My fourth decade, 2014 to today, coincides with the release of 5E D&D, and I've played it a fair amount. As a player, it's fun. As a DM? Not so much. So I've mostly stuck to my TS&R old school D&D rules as a DM. And I've been running my d6 Star Wars game for many years now. As a player, there have been a wealth of games and game systems, that are face to face, online realtime, and play by post. While I've mostly given up on 5E (except for a really good game on RPOL), my TS&R game and SW d6 game are both going well. I've sampled lots of OSR and micro-games, both in person and online. I've recently started both a Gamma World and Star Wars game on RPOL. And very recently, just joined a game of RECON. I developed, play tested, and released Chanbara, and have recently finished up releasing everything to make TS&R a complete game that others can play. I've been too busy to post about that. These last few years of gaming can again be found under the Busan Gamers tag, as will most games I post about going into my fifth decade of gaming. 

The first 40 years of gaming have been on the whole really good. I'm excited for the next 40 years!

First Turn at Mapping, and Using His Head

 Last Sunday, I ran my TS&R Jade campaign. Only three players showed up: Steven (my 10yo), Charles, and Nate. They hired half a dozen men-at-arms, purchased a few torches, and headed into the Pits of Lao. For some reason, Nate and Charles thought it would be fun to let Steven be the mapper this time. It took him a bit of practice to get used to translating the descriptions into lines on the map, but once he got the hang of it, he did really well.

Steven had been thinking about the campaign rumors over the weeks (scheduling nightmare) we weren't playing, and he had a plan. We'd been discussing the use of his locate object spell. One rumor was from a former adventurer who had located a machine that allowed him to find a big score of treasure and retire. He wanted to find that machine. I told him that his locate object spell could help with that. 

When they got down to the second level of the dungeon (there is a set of stairs leading down from the entrance room), they bribed a group of bakuto (gambler yakuza) who collect tolls there with some wine, then went on their way. At first, the spell didn't detect the machine. It has a radius of 120', and the target was a little out of range...but none of them realized they had explored and mapped to just a room or two away from the target. Luckily for them, they decided to explore east instead of west or south, and moving to the next room allowed Steven's PC to get a ping with the spell. 

The next room had some low level Taoist mages and their ashigaru bodyguards. Reactions were positive, so they discussed trading information. I had to come up with a reason why the mages were examining the room they were in, and I decided they were doing an inventory for the Lao family (the last Lao, the crazy wu jen daughter of the Venerable Lao, having died 100+ years ago). This led to a brief discussion of the Dungeon as Underworld for the benefit of Charles, who is new to RPGs. After the game, I sent him a link to Oakes Spalding's blog, which has a copy of Philotomy's Musings on the subject. He was thankful for that. 

Anyway, the party found a well with treasure but the "water" was actually acid, and didn't try to recover it after Saro, Nat's PC, got singed. Then they wandered up and fought some giant toads, but had a surprise round so they weren't in any danger. Finally, the locate object spell led them to the Fighting Ring, an area they'd been to before, where you can summon a Level 2 Random Encounter to fight for cash prizes, while phantasmal fans cheer on the fight. They'd been here before. 

Just beyond it was the room with the Potion Transmuter machine. The machine has two settings: healing potion and potion of treasure finding. After a bit of examination and experimentation (a healing potion poured in became a potion of treasure finding, wine poured in became ruined wine). Nate's henchman had another healing potion, and he decided to convert it as well as Saro's (the first experiment). Then Saro drank his potion and off they went, trying to find treasure. 

Pro Tip: I had marked my dungeon map with gold dollar signs using a colored pencil in any room with monetary treasure, and with blue stars for any room with magical treasure. That made it easy to let them know which direction the nearest treasure was. Of course, the nearest treasure to the transmuter machine was the gold down the acid well that they had already found... But there was more treasure beyond that. 

They ended up with a really nice haul in the end. Slider, Charles' Thief, made it to Level 4, so Charles can make a henchman for him. He's considering a Wu Jen. Niko, the henchman of Citizen Snips (Steven's character), also leveled up. It was a good session, and I'm really happy to see Steven getting into the game a bit more, rather than just trying to make jokes and do silly kid stuff.

Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins Rules Reference books are available!

 After way too long of a wait, I've finally got around to adding my Rules Reference books for Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins on DriveThruRPG. There's one for Ruby and one for Jade. 

These are meant to be table reference books, with just the rules, procedures, charts, etc. that the GM might need while running the game. If you don't need all the instruction of how to run the game or how to build your adventures and world, but need refreshers on the mechanical bits, this is the book for you! 

Ruby Rules Reference (standard Euro-style setting)

Jade Rules Reference (Asian inspired setting)

They're both Pay-What-You-Want titles, so you can go grab them for free and check them out. As always, if you like it and find it helpful, why not return and throw a few dollars my way? I reinvest the money I'm making from TS&R back into the gaming community. I'm not trying to make a million on this. But a few dollars here and there is nice. 

Oh, and in hopeful news, my younger son Steven is interested in maybe trying to DM his own game. He did some crazy free-form DMing when he was 5 or so. Now he's 10, and is thinking about maybe trying to learn how to DM the "right" way. I'm gonna order him a POD copy of Moldvay Basic to read through. This could be fun!

They Lost Me

 For the past two years or so, I've been playing a mobile game called Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. While it had its annoyances (heavily pushing in-app purchases, making the free-to-play [F2P] a long slog, requiring you to unlock characters after weeks or months of effort, then more weeks and months to level them up, etc.), it scratched an itch I've had since I was a kid. 

Growing up just barely on the good side of the poverty line, I never had many Star Wars action figures. The few that I did have were like gold to me. I loved Star Wars. Still do. And looking at the back of those figure cards, or through the Sears Holiday Catalogue (remember those?) made me wish that I had so many more. 

Well, this game definitely scratches the itch of the would-be figure collector I was as a kid. And yeah, I could be spending money on the actual figures now. But I'm too old to play with them (maybe?). And neither of my boys ever got into playing with action figures. They have a lot of my (and my brothers') old figures, but never played with them much. So I didn't have that excuse. And my wife wouldn't be too happy if I was filling up our apartment with unused toys, making it look like every cringe "nerd" channel on YouTube. 

So I found this game to be a pretty good substitute to that. I was happily going about part of my day grinding for characters, or gear, or completing challenges in the game. Building up my Mando squad. My Rebel squad. My Empire squad. Slowly, little by little, putting some effort into improving the Jedi squad. Pretty much ignoring the sequel trilogy characters as much as possible. 

But this week, the game went through a big update. Before, there was one game mode that had a F2P and P2P (pay-to-play) track. It wasn't the main part of the game. F2P was slow, but you could still make progress without handing over tons of money to EA every month. The new update makes the main game a distinction between F2P and P2P. And that looks like it will slow down that slow grind even more. It will be hard to gather the ridiculously varied types of resources and in-game currencies that are needed to unlock and improve characters. 

So, today I uninstalled the game. 

Am I going to miss it? Maybe for a while. I had quit the game last year after playing for a few months. Then I downloaded it again and was really enjoying having it back. But I think this time, I'm done for good. 

Subscription-based gaming is not something I think I'll ever be interested in.

Update on Flying Swordsmen 2E

Progress has been slow, but I am making progress on the game draft. 

I've got the first draft of the character generation guide. It's only two pages, so it's pretty basic. I plan to add a detailed guide to both picking a template and building a character from scratch later, once the actual rules and the combat system are nailed down a bit more.

I've got a list of about two dozen template ideas. Once I've got the rules stuff more or less complete, I plan to show what I've got to my various play groups (TS&R Jade, Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu), and ask them to help me test the system for character creation. Then I can use what they create for some of the templates. It will save me some time, and prevent some of my own character preferences from biasing the sample. (Can you guess I've been more focused on academics than gaming lately?)

I have write-ups for all of the system's basic skills. It's d6 system, so a referee could easily add more skills to the game as they wish. I don't have sample difficulty numbers yet though. I'll be cross referencing Star Wars and d6 Fantasy for that. And then when I finally get around to play-testing, I'll adjust the numbers based on whether certain tasks seem too easy or too difficult. One thing that I did try to do was to make sure that there is at least one skill useful in combat under each Ability. Star Wars has a lot of situations that don't involve combat, so there is room for the know-it-alls and the fix-it-up guys and the get-you-from-here-to-there guys to shine, along with the dedicated blow-you-to-bits guys. Wuxia should have plenty of non-combat stuff, but a lot of it in the source media is more managing relationships rather than testing your learned proficiencies. So combat should probably play a bigger part, and I want room for characters to specialize in evasive or manipulative techniques in combat, not just punchy punchy Street Fighter types. So I'm pretty happy with that. 

I also have suggested Specializations for each of the skills. 

I'm in the middle of writing up the special martial arts/mystical techniques. These are all inspired by the martial arts maneuvers, spells, and special class abilities in Flying Swordsmen. Mechanically, they work somewhat like the SW Force powers, or like 3E D&D feats. Or like special ability trees in a video game. There are six Powers, and getting trained in a Power grants access to its techniques. One die in the Power grants access to the Level 1 Basic technique. Gaining a second die in the power grants access to three to five Level 2 techniques. Gaining the third die grants access to Level 3 techniques, but only those based on the Level 2 techniques you have learned. 

I've drafted text (including difficulties) for the Qinggong (light step), Neigong (body power), Dianxue (acupressure), and Suan Ming (divination) techniques. I'm working on the Wu (white magic) techniques, leaving only Ku (black magic) techniques to get this section of the rules done. 

Some techniques are automatic ("always on") while most need to be used as actions. Some have unlimited use, others with more power are limited to a number of times per day equal to the dice in the governing Power, or just once per 24 hours for some really powerful ones. And some are unlimited in use until you roll a 1 on the Wild Die while activating it, then you need to wait for the cool-down period to finish before using it again.

In addition to all that, I've got a series of questions based on the Virtues of the Xia and general goal advancement which, similar to White Wolf games I've played, would need to be answered by players at the end of a session or adventure to gain Character Points. I've got guidelines for spending CP to improve skills and Powers, and spending them to gain additional techniques and learning new Powers. And, of course, they can also be spent from time to time to improve rolls. And a few high level techniques rely on spending some CP as a balance measure to prevent their abuse. 

I've got weapon lists, but I'm still playing around with them. I need to decide how certain weapon properties will interact with the combat system, especially around making special maneuvers like flips, blocks, holds, disarms, reversals, etc. I've got a basic Combat Resolution guide draft complete, but I need to add more detail, and especially go into those special maneuvers (and their difficulty numbers). 

The Education ability has a skill called Stratagems which in addition to covering battlefield strategy and tactics, allows for special maneuvers like those mentioned above. The difficulties for using a regular combat skill (like Sword Combat) to say disarm an opponent will be higher than for using the Stratagems skill. But certain weapons, like a hook sword, may allow you to attempt disarms at the Stratagems difficulty level. But then that all has to play well with the basic difficulties to hit with certain classes of weapon and with unarmed martial arts. So I've got a lot of number crunching and experimentation in the future, once I get the draft sorted out and a bunch of sample characters made. 

And there is a lot still to write. I've got to make monsters, magical treasures, update the FS 1E campaign world (or make a generic guide for "fantasy China" or maybe both), and write up the guidelines for creating adventures, interesting NPCs and locations, and challenges. 

And once all that's done (or more likely done piecemeal while working on all of the above), I should start working on a guideline for Wuxia. Probably not as extensive as those in Brendan Davis's Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate or Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades (which are both quite impressive!) but useful to players who might approach this game expecting D&D style hack and slash gaming, only to find a game made for martial arts soap operas.

Hirelings: Making the Players Care

When I started my TS&R Jade campaign, I made a list of 20 randomly armed men-at-arms for the home town. When players wanted to hire some, I'd check their Charisma scores to see how many turned up, and have the players roll d20 however many times to determine who they got to hire that session. And of course, my sons helped me come up with funny names for many of them, like Yuseok (a Korean name that sounds like 'you suck') or Geun Hae (the name of the disgraced former president). Not all the names are Korean, and most are not jokey. But a good number of them are. 

It didn't take long for repeat hires to appear. Players remembered the names, and this made them feel a little more attached.

It also didn't take long for the group to start losing men-at-arms in combat. If a repeat hire was slain, there was a bit more emotion behind it.

At first, I was replacing them. I'd erase the line with that character in my notebook, and come up with another one. I made a random table to roll for their weapons and armor (mostly not very good). 

Early this year, after a particularly rough adventure for the men-at-arms, I told the players that this was it. I was replacing these guys, and that was it. The town of Pine Bridge was running out of young men and women willing to risk death for a bit of coin as hired guards/soldiers. 

Nate had had his PC collect weapons and armor from some bandits they defeated, and he had been loaning these out to any hired men-at-arms to help with their AC and damage potential. But once I made it clear there would be no more replacements (at least not in Pinebridge Town), and men-at-arms continued to die, players hiring them started shelling out for better armors than the brigandine Saro (Nate's PC) was providing them. It helped that at 3rd to 5th level, they've got plenty of cash saved up. 

Even that is not always enough. This past session, one of the men-at-arms was killed, despite wearing plate armor. The monsters got a good attack roll, and he only had 1hp, so he was gone. The players were a little bit upset that they had lost a man. Not terribly so, but there was a lot stronger reaction than there were in the earlier sessions when they thought there would always be a Hau En Wai to replace Nobuo, or a Nguyen to replace Jin Ping.

The men-at-arms are a useful resource, and making them memorable (even without personalities) then limiting their number has greatly increased their value in the players' eyes.

Rise from Your Grave (again)

 Hoo-boy, it's been a minute since I've posted here. Well, I've been pretty busy with non-gaming stuff the past couple of weeks, but also a bit of gaming here and there. 

The big thing is that this morning, I pulled up my design notes for a revised, second edition of Flying Swordsmen, this time powered by the Open D6 system. I read through what I'd written, and made some edits and modifications here and there. In particular, I read through the notes on the 108 Martial Arts Techniques* and made some of them a bit more distinctive. Some were more or less the same mechanical effect with just different flavor text, which is boring.

I'd also done a simple character sheet, but I wasn't happy with it. I gave it a big revision, turning it from one sheet to two, and making more space for characterization, notes on your Sifu (master/teacher) or organization, your goals, your rivals, and the like. It's not just game mechanics and a bit of fluff now. I like it much better. 

Then, I wrote the first draft of a Preface, explaining the creation of Dragon Fist, Flying Swordsmen as a retro-clone of DF, and my dissatisfaction with both games, necessitating this new edition. It needs a bit of work as I can be overly wordy. 

And I just finished with an outline for the chapters in the book, and what each chapter should cover. Of course, this is also still likely to change as I actually get into turning my notes into actual text. And I've got to decide how much to update/edit the Zhongyang Dalu setting, or else just copy/paste that. I could actually get dinged for self-plagiarism if I do the latter, so I'll probably have to rewrite it. 

Here's what I've got so far: 

Introduction

-What is this game? RPG Basics

-What is wuxia? Background and Tropes

-Recommended Wuxia Media

-Getting the Right Feel

Playing the Game

-Abilities, Skills, Powers, Techniques

-Basic Action Resolution

-The Wild Die

-Combat Basics

-The Five Virtues and Advancement

-Example of Play

Character Creation

-Think of a Concept

-Select a Template (Simple) or

-Assign Ability Dice and Powers (Advanced)

-Assign Skill Dice

-Personality, Flaw, Background, Sifu, Relationships

-Example Character Creation

Abilities and Skills

-Ability Basics: Prowess, Might, Agility, Presence, Education, Observation

-Skills and Specializations

-Improving Skills

-Skill List

Powers and Techniques

-Powers Basics: Qinggong (Lightness), Neigong (Internal Power), Dianxue (Acupressure), Suan Ming (divination), Wu (White Magic), Ku (Black Magic)

-Training New Techniques

-Techniques List

Running the Game

-Creating Challenges

-Action Resolution (detailed)

-Combat (detailed)

-Training (detailed)

-Rewards of Play

-Creating NPCs

-Creating the World

-Using NPCs and the World as Challenges

-The Stages of Campaign Development

Monsters and Magic

-Monster List

-Magic Items

-Legendary Items

The Setting

-Using Quasi-Historical China

-Using Zhongyang Dalu

-Using Your Own World

-Zhongyang Dalu Overview

Character Templates