RPG Events: NEON Retrofuturism Festival 2018

Last week, I attended the inaugural NEON Retrofuturism Festival!

NEON is, in the organizers' own words, "a celebration of Retrofuturism from the late 20th century."  As a love letter to that period's technology and pop culture, this celebration featured synthwave artists, obsolete tech, hard video games, and tons of So Bad, It's Good movies from yesteryear!  For example, Ninja III: The Domination!

A notable part of this convention was a huge arcade consisting of original restored cabinet games, including Pac-Man, Tapper, Dig Dug and Spy Hunter, only this time they were all free to play, so no need to keep begging Mom for more quarters!

The fun also included a massive selection of 80s and 90s game consoles, including relatively obscure platforms like the Vectrex:

I was amused that I still remembered a bunch of the secret treasure locations for Castlevania!

And, I had the opportunity to run the rules set I'm working on, Sorcery & Steel, for a bunch of strangers!  Specifically, I ran Ravenloft of Cthulhu, a reimagining of the classic AD&D gothic horror module with a bunch of Lovecraftian twists (e.g., Strahd is an eldritch horror rather than a vampire).

I changed a number of things so that even someone who had played and DM'd I6 many times before said he could see where certain things came from but the end results were quite different.  For example, I emphasized Lovecraftian horror rather than gothic horror, so there were no romance elements and Strahd was much more inhuman and unsympathetic.

Much fun was had, and I was happy that the session went smoothly and the game's mechanics were easily understandable by newcomers.  As a bonus, I also found a number of places to further refine the rules set.

A reboot of TempleCon, NEON still has a way to go to fill the shoes of its predecessor.  However, this year was definitely a good start.  If you're a fan of the 80s or a fan of things that love the 80s (e.g., Stranger Things), you should check it out!

RPG Focus: Trail of Cthulhu (2008)

Last year, I took a look at Call of Cthulhu, the grandfather of Horror RPGs, and, last month, I took a look at Investigations in RPGs.

So, in honor of Messr Howard's birthday today (8/20), I wanted to take a look at a different take on Lovecraftian Horror in RPGs: Trail of Cthulhu.

Named after the series of interconnected short stories by August Derleth (who did much to keep Lovecraft's literary legacy alive after Messr Howard's unfortunate demise), Trail of Cthulhu is, like Call of Cthulhu, an RPG focused on the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror fiction.  Published by arrangement with Chaosium, Inc., creators of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, there are a handful of familiar trappings in this game (e.g., Occupations, skills) but it's just window dressing as Trail of Cthulhu runs instead on Pelgrane Press' in-house Gumshoe System.

Unlike Call of Cthulhu's d100 mechanic, playing Trail of Cthulhu only requires a single d6 for Gumshoe's target roll over mechanic.  Also, there are no ability scores for Investigators, only skills.

The supposed "killer app" of Trail of Cthulhu is the absence of rolls for Invesgiation skills.  Namely:

"Gathering clues is simple. All you have to do is: 

1. Get your Investigator into a scene where relevant information can be gathered,
2. Have the right ability to discover the clue, and
3. Tell the Keeper that you’re using it. 

As long as you do these three things, you will never fail to gain a piece of necessary information. It is never dependent on a die roll. If you ask for it, you will get it."

ToC's boosters argue that this is a revolutionary mechanic because the failure of a single roll can derail the entire session/game/campaign!

However, I consider this "No clue roll" mechanic to be highly overrated and the above argument to be hyperbole.  For example, the argument doesn't take into account that typically there's more than one PC with a relevant skill to acquire a particular clue and that typically the GM will allow multiple rolls.

In addition, such bottlenecks that this "killer app" is meant to address are usually the result of poor adventure design.  This issue can easily be overcome by the Alexandrian's Three Clue Rule (i.e., if there are enough clues, missing one in particular should not be fatal to gameplay).

Additionally, as the Alexandrian notes:

"[The "No clue roll" rule] is a mechanical solution to the problem. But while it may result in a game session which superficially follows the structure of a mystery story, I think it fails because it doesn’t particularly feel as if you’re playing a mystery. 

[Robin] Laws’ fundamental mistake, I think, is in assuming that a mystery story is fundamentally about following a “bread crumb trail” of clues...But, in point of fact, this type of simplistic “A leads to B leads to C leads to D” plotting is not typical of the mystery genre."

Furthermore, ToC is a very New School RPG in the sense of expecting the GM to cater to the players and tilting the odds in the players' favor by reducing the overall challenge.  This is as opposed to the traditional GM role of an impartial referee.

This game does have a vocal group of fans.  However, in terms of actual play, I personally cannot recall seeing a listing for Trail of Cthulhu on Roll20.

Board Game Review: "Royal Game of Ur" (~3000 BC)

This week, I want give a shout out to one of the most popular board games of all time that also happens to be almost completely forgotten nowadays: The "Royal Game of Ur":

The Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares or simply the Game of Ur, is a two-player turn-based strategy game where the players race to be the first to move all their pieces through and then off the game board.  However, this is easier said that done in this simple but elegant game that can become surprisingly intense.

On the player's turn, they roll four dice to determine how many squares they can move a single piece.  However, the dice are d4s (a triangular pyramid with four triangular faces), and not the d4 that are commonly used in RPGs today: two of the four vertex corners are marked with a white tip.  The number of white tips pointing upward equals the number of squares they can move a single piece.  This means a player can move 0 to 4 spaces, with the results distributed on a bell curve.

The game board consists of 20 spaces arranged in two rows of 6 and one row of 8 (looking like a deformed "I").  Each row of 6 is controlled by one player only and the row of 8 is shared.  Players must send a game piece through both their controlled row and the shared row before they can move the piece off the board.

The Royal Game of Ur, so named because it was first rediscovered by the English archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley during his excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934, was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC and was popular across the large parts of the ancient world among people of all social strata.  In addition, boards for the game have been found at locations as far away as Crete and Sri Lanka.

This game is probably a direct ancestor of the backgammon family of games and was popular until late antiquity. At this point, it have may evolved into backgammon or may have been eclipsed in popularity by early forms of backgammon.  However, the Game of Ur was also brought to the Indian city of Kochi by Jewish traders, where they were still playing a recognizable version into the 1950s.

Modern replicas are available for purchase with an easy internet search.

If you'd like to see this five millennia old game in action, played by Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, who rediscovered the rules of the game by translating in the early 1980s a clay tablet written c. 177 BC by the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balālu, check out this awesome video!

RPG Design: Active v. Passive Defenses

Last year, I discussed the importance of considering Tactical Depth v. Complexity in RPG Design.    This week, I wanted to touch on an important related design issue that is sometimes overlooked, Active v. Passive Defenses:

By "Active Defense," I mean any system where the PCs can take action to defend themselves, typically parrying or dodging.  Examples of RPGs with Active Defenses include Call of Cthulhu, and oWoD.

By "Passive Defense," I mean any game where the PCs have one or more defensive stats (calculated using the character's ability scores and/or their gear) representing their ability to avoid harm in one or more ways.

The most famous example of Passive Defense in RPG is D&D's Armor Class, which represents the difficulty to actually land an effective attack on the PC and which is calculated from the PC's Dexterity and/or their gear.

Other examples of systems with passive defense are nWoD and Savage Worlds.

There are, of course, RPGs with *BOTH* Active and Passive Defenses.  For example, REIGN allows parrying and dodging (Active Defenses) and has Damage Reduction stats for armor (Passive Defense).


So, what's the big deal about Active v. Passive Defenses?

As I mentioned before when discussing Weaponry, many RPGs make combat is a key or even central element of gameplay.  There are many, many, many different approaches to modeling Combat in RPGs, but a key design decision is whether a particular approach is more Tactical or more abstract.

Combat, as it is usually portrayed, is fast paced. However, game mechanics (e.g., Initiative, attack rolls, etc.) by their nature are slow paced.  Thus, in terms of Tactical Depth v. Complexity, the more crunchy a game's combat mechanics, the more complex and slower that game's combat becomes.

Unless a game is very narrative, most RPGs have Active Attacks.  But when the designer also adds Active and/or Passive Defenses involving rolling, a game can really slow down.

Some people love really Tactical games (e.g., miniature war games).  However, myself, I prefer faster paced combat, as it can be the more dramatic and the emergent narrative of the game session flows quicker and more easily.