Alignment Check: Play on Target Podcast Ep. 48

In this week’s episode of Play on Target we wrestle with alignments, morality, and the ethic of GM intrusion. Maybe our discussion isn't grand as that but it feels like a big issue in some games. What happens when players and GMs disagre on what a particular alignment mean. That axis of evil/good concept’s been around since the beginning of D&D, though as I mention in the episode in weirdly different forms. For an over-the-top example of alternate old-school approaches to this, see Lizard’s Gaming Blog discussion of alignment in Arduin, . If you like close read-throughs of highly weird early gaming stuff, work through that whole series. Note that alignment, like many other concepts, didn’t become concrete until Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax’s effort to codify and create one correct version of D&D. Despite that novel system (and the various alignment guide meme posts it spawned) those descriptions remain a point of contention.

Throughout this post I will shorten “I Was Just Playing My Character” to IWJPMC

Play on Target: Character Behavior and Alignment

Play on Target Episode Roundup

SPARE THE EXP PENALTY, SPOIL THE PLAYER

Usually when GMs talk about alignment in games, they’re dealing with problems. They've hit the point where the game's gone off the rails. That can look like some version of Sam’s example in the episode, leveraging alignment picks for advantage, or even using it to create interparty conflict. GMs often struggle to find a good way to apply consequences to those players. Or put more roughly, to punish those characters for bad behavior. That creates several problems.

First, as we say in the episode, alignment draws lightning because it speaks to player behavior- or at least player choice. While most GMs want players to have freedom, all players want that. Gamers react badly to perceived unfairness or limits to autonomy. Given that alignment reflects internal and personal choices- restricting that can seem supremely unjust. And if a player’s sincere in their choice, then judgement about that behavior can be a real world judgement. "That’s a crappy and evil thing your character’s doing" translates into "You’re a bad person."

Second, there’s the question of “punishment.” If the GM assigns a penalty via the rules for an action based on a player’s choice, then that’s a system-regulated consequence. But the grey area of moral choices means that interpretation can appear vindictive. On the GM side those arguments may look more like players trying to game the system. IWJPMC comes across as an insincere excuse. Both parties have to be careful about how they frame those discussions. They can escalate quickly.

Third, GMs have to be careful where the hammer falls. It may seem like an easy solution to make the players police themselves. Collectively punish and cause problems for the group when an individual character gets too far out of line. But that can create real tensions between players. Fellow players rarely buy into IWJPMC with any good grace. A couple of times I’ve seen groups blow up over this: sometimes when players fight and sometimes when the group resents the GM shoving things onto their plate. Consequences for alignment breaking or alignment “justified” behavior need to begin with the acting character. Where possible you have to minimize the fallout to the rest of the group.

BUILD A BETTER SOCIOPATH

That’s why over the years, when I run games with Disadvantages, Flaws, Drawbacks and whatever the system calls them, I’ve limited them. For example Lone Wolf’s a disruption, justifying players not working with the group. Things like Stubborn, Vindictive, Jealousy, Casual Thief, give players an excuse to be crappy to one another. It’s worse if players want to have those disadvantages secret. Then they can feel wounded that IWJPMC and no one got it. By default I make players share these elements during character creation. 

Other disads suggest they'll create problems for the PC, but more often create greater disruptions for the group. For example Bad Temper and Berserk mean players can justify their character smarting off or killing NPCs who irritate them. Usually the player gets the satisfaction of having done that, while the group suddenly finds themselves having to clean up the mess, fix their rep, or get out of dodge. That’s not always how that falls out, but it’s a short step to get over the line. The same thing can happen with something seemingly innocuous like Codes of Honor .

I notice here that I’ve expanded alignment to more broadly consider “behavior justifiers.” That’s seems like a reasonable jump to me. But it may be far enough away from the original topic that it doesn’t apply.

VILLAINS

As we mention in the podcast, both Sam and I have done villains games. That's a fairly common trope these days, especially in Supers where you can see Necessary Evil and Better Angels trying something new with the concept. Of course there's the evil PC book from D&D 3.5 which I've forgotten the name of. I skimmed it once and put it back on the shelf. In any case, Villain games never end well. I base that on my experience and multiple conversations with GMs, including a seminar at Origins. 

These campaigns can fail for multiple reasons. Sometimes the GM realizes they don't really enjoy running villainy. Heroic choices are often difficult and require sacrifice. Being evil is the easy road. Being awful rarely means hard choices. In other cases the freedom of an evil game leads to massive and drastic interparty fighting. Villains might get along for a while, but once some portion feels shorted or slighted, the knives come out. I ran a villainous Rolemaster campaign for a long time. The players held it together, but then two of the players began to resent another player's leadership. So they killed him. The victim's player didn't rejoin our games for about four years. Even then his enthusiasm for play had been killed as well. 

Villainy can seem sexy and that itself can veer the game towards destruction. I joined a Supervillain late, a few months into play. The PCs were awful and did indirectly horrible things, but worse it seemed the players themselves had no idea how bad they were. They laughed off things that made me cringe. I briefly tried to bring the implications to their attention, but ended up getting mind-wiped by my fellow PCs. I quit after that. Some games have built-in sexy bad guys, like the Scorpion Clan in Legend of the Five Rings. We had a player who loved being the sneaky, secret, potentially backstabbing character from that clan. He reveled in it. But then we had a session where he had to do truly awful things, embracing the racism, absolute loyalty, and superior attitudes of the Scorpion. He was ordered to cut down a family of Ratlings who had assisted them. The player ended up furious that he'd been put in that position. He made it clear that I'd been unfair as a GM to make him have to consider those implications. 

So, yeah, I don't run villain games anymore.

Play on Target: Character Behavior and Alignment

Play on Target Episode Roundup

If you like RPG Gaming podcasts, I hope you'll check it out. We take a focused approach- tackling a single topic each episode. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes or follow the podcast's page at www.playontarget.com.

RPG Top 100 (Part Three: 26-50)

Here's the third part of my rundown of my Top 100 RPGs. As before, these aren't necessarily the 100 Best RPGs, but they're ones I want to play. We'll see if that changes in a year. Games marked with (*) mean I want to play the setting/premise, but I don't want to play with the existing rules. In some cases, there aren't any rules right now: I just want someone to write up a cool game based on that. 

50. Glorantha*
49. Ashen Stars*
48. Cthulhu Invictus/AD 43*
47. Road to Slaughterbowl/Bad Bard’s Tale
My #threeforged entry didn't make it through the third stage, but I still love it. I want to figure out how to put that together and make the playing of the central sporting event a compelling mini-game while still being easy. Alternately I want to take some of those mechanics and run my fantasy "band on the road" game, Orclectric Lyte Orkestrar. 

46. Lady Blackbird
45. Durance
44. Hunter the Reckoning
This appear higher than Monster of the Week. Why is that? MotW's a solid game and has some dynamite mechanics. Plus you have a host of clever fan-made playbooks. Combat's fast and easy. There's lots of room to fashion a world. If I wanted to do that Luchadore/Supernatural TV show mash-up I'd probably use MotW. I might even use that system to do this game.

So what grabs me about this game? I'm not completely sure. Some it's nostalgia. I like the way it provides an off-kilter entry point to the World of Darkness. It's a game that suggests the reality presented in any one of the games might look completely different from the perspective of another. That's a fantastic concept. When I ran Changeling the Lost, I made Promethean's a background fixture. They're so strange and dichotomous that  the former couldn't grasp the logic of the latter. And that was great. That's the same thing happening in HtR.

But even more, Hunter focuses on the cost- or at least the best supplements do. Forces beyond their control drive the PC's to this task. It takes a toll on their loved ones. Inevitably it destroys those relationships. And the PCs may well be insane. They have visions, see people as monsters. I love that uncertainty.

43. Worlds in Peril
42. World Wide Wrestling
41. Progenitor*
40. Keith Stetson’s Kingdom Management Prototype
Last year at Metatopia I got to play this. It was awesome. I want to see more. I can't say much more than that.

39. Unknown Armies*
38. Rotted Capes*
37. Masks
36. Mummy the Resurrection*
35. Rolemaster Standard System
Don't judge me. I ran Rolemaster for many, many years. I went through updates and edition changes. When they went to RMSS I hung on and ran several games. But I dropped off before the next shift, to RMFRP, hit. Some of that came from buyers' fatigue, but more came from a desire for less complexity in my games. I wanted systems I could hack more easily. I've spun that tale before. 

But over the last year I've played in Shawn Sanford's RM Classic campaign on off Mondays. It's goofy fun and each fight feels like it could be the one where I get my arm lopped off. If old Rolemaster is a patchwork of randomly sized pieces, then Standard System has cut things to a regular size but used weak thread. You can see the gaps- the compromises made in an attempt to create unity while maintaining variety. And I kind of love that. If I actually ran this, I'd follow a suggestion made on one of Hans Messersmith's threads: create easy to pick up and evolve playbooks for classes. I think I'd go further and collapse skills down into categories, with the ability to specialize. I'd also unify the maneuver chart and include the hard bargain for success option.

34. War Against the Chtorr*
33. Night’s Black Agents*
32. Mage the Ascension
31. Adventure!
30. Shadowrun*
29. Mutant City Blues*
28. Iron Kingdoms*
When Warmachine came out, people in our group still clung to WH40K. I bought most of the preview sets and tried to convince others to try it out. I managed to get a few of them interested, but the money they'd sunk with GW kept them from picking another game up. It didn't help that the only rules were scattered and hard to pull together. Everyone liked the models, but not enough. 

Over the following years I bought some more minis, picked up the main book, played in a Unisystem version, and generally kept my eye on the setting. I liked the world-building, but I'll admit I started to lose a grip on the story and continuity. Magic, mecha, steam-stuff, blunderbusses, goblins with wrenches, Russian analogues...that I could keep straight. The "extended universe" of new factions (and Hordes) lost me. But when the Iron Kingdoms core book came out I bought it. 

That thing's more like a textbook than any other rpg I've read. There's so much backstory and detail, and it hits you with that first. That's a strange choice, like an Umberto Eco novel. You have to make it through the first section obstacle course to get to the good part. I'm not sure who the audience is. Not new gamers. I can attest they'd get lost even if they knew the setting a little. Veteran Warmachine folks? They already know the setting. There's so much cool stuff there, but it needs to be teased out. I think you need clear playbooks ala AW or nation archetypes ala L5R. That would be my first task. Finding a way to present the material and setting simply and clearly. After that I could figure out mechanics.

27. James Bond 007
26. Blades in the Dark

Part One 76-100

Part Two 51-75

Part Three 26-50

Part Four 1-25

My VirtuaCon Events: Rabbits, Rapscallions, and Rescues

I'm running three sessions for RPG Geek's VirtuaCon (Oct. 23rd-25th). You can see the full list of events here. If you see something you like, you can hop to the VirtuaCon G+ Community and sign up under an event. There's a ton of awesome gaming going in and there's no cost. If you've wanted to try out online gaming, this offers a great opportunity. 

I'll be running three sessions, all set in a collaboratively-built fantasy city, Askelion. You can see the full write-up for that here. We built that over the two sessions before the con. A couple of others are also running games set there. My three sessions are:

In the Cracks and Crevices
Theme: Rabbits
Friday Oct. 23rd Noon Eastern Time
The Warren
Rules will be taught. Short character creation. 

It may be a city of wonders for humans above, but it is a dangerous, precarious existence for animals trying to survive in the nooks and crannies. To quote from the description, "The Warren is a game about intelligent rabbits trying to make the best of a world filled with hazards, predators and, worst of all, other rabbits. While the rabbits in your games will solve some of their problems and learn some new tricks along the way, they are still bound by their anatomy and spot at the bottom of the food chain."

"The Warren is primarily a game about survival and community. There are many creatures, humans included, that are bigger, stronger, meaner, or more numerous than rabbits. The seasons and the elements do not care that rabbits are only little things. Rabbits cannot hope to meet these threats head on. Only through speed, wits, and keeping a cool head can rabbits hope to avoid the dangers of the world outside their warren." 

Zillia Zonkala's Confectionery Workshop
Theme: Fantasy Survival Horror
Friday Oct. 23rd 8PM Eastern Time
Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel!
Rules will be taught. Many disposable pre-gen characters. 

Many have sought to discover the secret's of Sweet Bottom, an underground complex producing sweets for the city. You and a gaggle of fellow youths discovered a hidden way into one of these workshops. But now the doors have slammed behind you, the lights have dimmed, and the singing has begun. Can you find a way out? Will you survive? Will the candy stuffed in your pockets survive the experience? Loosely based on DCC #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea.

Each player begins with several 0-level characters. They end with fewer. See here for a little more on funnels.

Descent into the Depths of the City
Theme: Dungeoneering Rescue Party
Sunday Oct. 25th 10AM Eastern Time
13th Age Intro
Rules will be taught. Pre-gen characters provided.

The Delver's League is known as the most EXTREME of dungeon explorers. They parkour across pit traps, grind past guards, and gleam the gelatinous cube. Legends and tales- told by themselves- have spread near and far. 

And now you've been hired to go and rescue the most recent lost expedition of these idiots... er... fellow adventurers. 

It's a living.

Come and sign up! 

RPG Top 100 (Part Two: 51-75)

Here's the second part of my rundown of my Top 100 RPGs. As before, these aren't necessarily the 100 Best RPGs, but they're ones I want to play. We'll see if that changes in a year. Games marked with (*) mean I want to play the setting/premise, but I don't want to play with the existing rules. In some cases, there aren't any rules right now: I just want someone to write up a cool game based on that. 

75. Wandering Monsters High School
74. King for a Day
I still have to write up a review for this campaign frame. I've tried five or six times to come at it, but it still defies me. It's a campaign premise I both do and don't want to run. It would take a lot of effort: the GM has to take command of many loose threads. That would mean working through and annotating the book heavily. It's also low-fantasy and kind of dark, which isn't something my f2f players really want to play. On the other hand, it requires a strong investment of time and attention, making it more difficult to run online. This may end up simply being a grail game. 

73. Over the Edge
72. Dungeon World
71. Dragon Age*
70. Orpheus*
69. Birthright*
68. Iron Dynasty*
67. Monster Hunter*
Keep in mind I've only played about ten minutes of a demo for the Monster Hunter videogame before realizing it lay completely outside my skillset. Well outside. Despite that I love the concept, especially its idea of a group of people working together to take down a beast. I want a game that has four major areas of play. First, village life. Dealing with NPCs, building up a reputation, making alliances. You take missions in town for bounties and your ultimate goal is to aid the community. Second, scouting and planning. The players discover secrets about their quarry, track it, set up tricks and traps, learn its ways. Third, the actual hunt. Players have to work together. The monster's huge- made up of many parts which must be climbed on, disabled, or avoided. Actions by one character should support others, with players taking on different necessary roles (like Ghostlines?). There should be a push your luck aspect to it. Fourth, item building and alchemy. There should be a cool sub-system for converting what you harvest from the monsters into new weapons, armor, and other equipment. 

66. On Her Majesty’s Arcane Service*
65. Monster of the Week
64. Wrath of the Autarch
63. Day After Ragnarok*
62. Hollowpoint
61. Star Wars*
I like Star Wars, but I don't love it. Up until the Edge of the Empire one-shot we did for the podcast, I'd never actually played an SW game. I ran one purely homebrew campaign I enjoyed. I think I'd want to go back to something like that. If I did, I'd take one of two approaches. Assuming I could get a good number of the players from the first campaign back, I'd do a sequel- a second film in the trilogy. If not, I'd probably do something much more narrow. Rich Rogers talked about doing a kind of criminal underground game, ala one of the cancelled SW video games. That has a certain appeal- I like the idea of a narrow campaign concept within the setting. 

60. Cybergeneration
59. Midnight*
58. Kerberos Club*
57. The Black Company*
Not necessarily The Black Company exactly, but I'd like to play a mercenary game. I ran a version of this, putting a wandering force into Planescape and hiring them on with various factions. My attempt to run D&D 3.5 (for my first and only time) undercut my efforts there. We had fun, but it lost focus. I definitely want to abstract the fighting and make the planning and logistics part interesting. Blades in the Dark has some concepts that might work to simulate that. Reign's an obvious choice, but there's something about that system that doesn't work for me. I've tried to read through it several times. 

56. Grimm

55. Cold Steel Wardens
54. Ars Magica*
There's much I like about Ars Magica and much I don't. I've been buying products for it since the 1st and 2nd editions. Those had a loose feel and an almost anime art design. Many of the illustrations remind me of Amano. But that would change as the game become more and more historical, embracing the Medieval setting. Notre Dame has a strong Medieval Studies program and so in the heyday of Ars Magica, the folks who played it could be a little pedantic. Early '90's online user groups for Ars devolved into arcane arguments over minutiae and realism. 

I kind of don't give a shit about that. I love the core concept of the game. Wizards live in Covenants. They come from different diverse traditions and have to work hard to get along. They're selfish and have put upon servants. Covenants have to deal with growth and survival- they're a community which can be tracked and developed. They have problems, move through seasons, have to deal with ornery neighbors, and answer to a higher council. I dig those elements and that's what I want. 

53. Jadepunk
52. Esoterrorists
51. Rolemaster Classic

Part One 76-100

Part Two 51-75

Part Three 26-50

Part Four 1-25

DFAE: Anakin Yashpal, Magical Cleaner of NOLA

Spader7 from Deviant Art

We've just started playtesting Dresden Files Fate Accelerated. I'm not a big DF fan, though I enjoy the concept and I like the original Fate version and its clever mechanics. The FAE take on it is pretty sharp and just as easy as the base game. I'm looking forward to seeing how the system operates for more complex situations. We did a character creation session and because I get things into my head, I had to write up the full backstory for my character, Anakin Yashpal. The game's set in New Orleans and I wanted to justify my character's goofy first name and bring in a few elements from Unknown Armies. Anyway here it is, but it's pretty rough. 

Davu “Davis” Yashpal was unusual, an obsessive Indian emigrant who managed to break into the Hollywood system. In the early 1970’s he’d climbed his way up, becoming known as a skilled technician of practical and visual effects. Eventually that landed him a job on Star Wars, where he toiled hours building models, many never used. He had a meticulous eye for detail. His efforts made him valuable to ILM and he hired on to work on the other films in the series. Davis was proud of his work, despite it eating up all of his time. Between jobs he worked on new concepts and models to the exclusion of all else. This left his family on a tight budget.

His obsession and eye for detail also meant he rubbed his co-workers the wrong way. After Return of the Jedi, he found opportunities he'd expected never appeared. He’d burned bridges and found himself forced to work on terrible films. When Dino Delaurentis tried to set up a "New Hollywood" in North Carolina in the mid-1980’s he followed along, dragging his wife and young daughter, Maya. However the move frayed their relationship and his wife left within a few months, heading back to California and an ongoing affair. She left a bewildered Maya behind. Finding himself having to care for his teenage daughter alone shocked Davis to his senses. He knew he had to find a more solid place to live.

Davis called on a few remaining friends, people he knew in passing who'd left to work in TV and small scale movie production. Eventually that brought Maya and Davis to New Orleans. He rolled into the city with him a trailer filled with broken models, salvaged mechanisms, and weird drawings. When they settled into a house, as he’d always done, he immediately filled it with all of replicas, tools, equipment, and works in progress. But now more than before, he paid attention to his daughter. They bonded over the films he’d worked on, particularly the Star Wars trilogy. Davis did very well, a skilled technician who had big name credentials that impressed small-scale producers filming here. He worked hard, perhaps too hard. Just after Maya graduated from high school, Davis died of a heart attack.

Maya somehow managed to keep herself together. She’d worked alongside her father and developed skills surpassing his. Despite barriers and bias against her gender in this world, she excelled at a local technical college. Maya took on many of her father's old jobs: lighting, wiring, model building, and practical effects. On the side she repaired small things, often buying broken appliances and devices at garage sales, then fixing and trading them. She needed extra money for her obsession: her collections. She’d always loved the Star Wars toys, many gifted to her during her father’s time with ILM. Now these became a beacon for her, and she began to acquire memorabilia wherever she could. Maya began to hoard and fill their house with an ever-expanding collection.

Then in 1992, she found herself pregnant. He had suspicions about his father, but she would never tell her son exactly who he was. She named him Anakin, after the promise of a difficult man redeemed. Growing up was tough. Anakin's family lived on the margins, cut off from support networks of community and relatives. Maya worked hard and tried to do well by her son. She repeatedly watched with him the Star Wars films. But only the original trilogy. Anakin learned not to ask about the others. He made friends, but never close ones; his uncertain ethnicity, odd dress, and weird status isolated him. It didn't help that he couldn’t bring friends home. Over the years his mother’s hoarding had become worse and worse. Anakin felt ashamed when he went to friends' houses, and rarely visited more than once. His mother worked hard, but aside from time spent with him, she sunk more and more into collecting and her hobby building. At first she crafted clever and creative models, but over time these became increasingly broken and weird pieces as her strangeness grew.

Anakin learned to take care of himself. He loved his mother but increasing spent what time he could away from her. At first she worried, but as he was around less and less, her attachment waned. He learned when he could stay around without harassment, how he could survive cheaply, where he could crash without being questioned. Then in ’03 he met Bernard Soles. It was a strange meeting. Anakin had learned to be wary: avoiding adults when he could. But Soles tracked him down, knew his name, knew about his wanderings. Bernard offered him an option. Anakin could come and hang out with his circle, The Grey Cups Social Club. Or he could choose not to. No bargain threat or punishment in the offing. 

Anakin didn’t understand, but something about Bernard’s manner overcame his resistance. He went in expecting something like a Youth Group and finding something else entirely. Older men and women, some much older, talking, drinking, smoking, playing music, and somehow via all of that teaching magic. Anakin stayed on, listened, and learned. Time with his mother had made him sensitive to eccentricities, and how to act around them. Club members took to him quickly. He felt valued and respected here, becoming an errand boy in exchange for lessons in the arts. Anakin picked things up fast, but he never learned exactly how Bernard had found him.

Spader7 on Deviant Art

Then in 2005 Katrina struck. The Cups had hazy premonitions before it came, but they railed and argued about what to do. Only late into event did Anakin realize how bad things had gotten. Things went wrong, went terribly- and while some of the club members escaped, other vanished or died. Even today Anakin doesn’t recall much of that time. He fled into the Nevernever. He’d learned the paths, and they were like the streets of the city to him. Anakin used those passages and ways to survive- but even there the hurricane and floods posed a danger. The mirror of the real world, the storm battered and destroyed the echoes of supernatural New Orleans equally. Like the city itself, the Nevernever is still recovering and rebuilding.

Anakin survived- running, making bargains, and helping where he could. He recalls it only in fragments. He remembers something of the search for his mother. He tried to find her at shelters and among the few friends she still had. But she was gone. When the waters pulled back, Anakin returned back to his home. It has been devastated, everything his mother had collected, treasured, and stored had been flooded, rotted, covered with mold. He saw all of those things his mother had cared so much about destroyed.

And where he might have resented it, hated those things which had eaten up so much of his mother’s life, he didn’t. He simply felt sad- sad knowing that these things she’d loved ended up this way. He went through the collection as best he could, uncovering a handful of pristine things, mostly cards and the like held in plastic. Damaged pieces still worth some money he sold. But he kept the cards. They became a talisman for him, creating the focus and emotional connection for his magic. Bernard eventually found him and brought him to what passed as a home for him for the next five years, a house miraculously protected where the oldest of the Grey Cup Club still lived.

Anakin finished school and did a two-year technical degree to gain an arguably useless piece of paper. Even before he graduated, he turned his talents to his twin obsessions: restoration and collection. He volunteered for every cleanup and repair crew. He apprenticed with different companies doing tear down, excavation, and mold removal. He learned all of the mundane tricks and techniques necessary: the sprays, the gear, the sealants, and beyond. He became in demand to head up crews and to take on jobs others wouldn’t do. But his trials went beyond the material world. Many magical and supernatural elements had been broken along with the city. He took work that gave him the opportunity to put those things down as well. And he had other clients who hired him to fix places and locations in the Nevernever. Often that had echoes of the mundane work, but sometimes it involved more complicated challenges.

His other obsession became deeply entangled with his vision of magic, despite Bernard’s warnings against it. Anakin collected- mostly cards- baseball, movie, CCG, comic book- never anything Star Wars though, that wasn’t his to do. He spent much of his money and time to collect. Acquiring a particularly rare card could give him a boost when he opened a lucky pack or closed a potent trade. They’ve become tightly tied to his visualizations. For ritual or serious magic he usually has to sacrifice something from his collection, to give him and focus and a connection. 

High Concept: Waterlogged Plutomancer Cleaner
Trouble: Obsessive Collector
Other: Son of New Orleans

The Many Ends of Rokugan

I co-managed a game store in the heyday of CCGs. I started back there just as the first Magic the Gathering expansions landed: Arabian Nights and Antiquities. While I didn’t dig Magic that much, I tried to push it. I didn't dislike like these games, I'd just dug Jyhad, INWO, and On the Edge more. CCGs had a weird life-cycle in those days. New lines popped up every week. We could generally get some traction for just a few of those. Usually you’d get an early adopter who would bought heavy and brought new people in. That’s how Wyvern, ICE's Middle-Earth, Netrunner, Feng Shui, and Star Trek survived through a couple of expansions before crashing. Part of my job involved spotting and pushing those impressionable folks.

Then I heard about Legend of the Five Rings. AEG advertised in Scrye and elsewhere well ahead of release. I got super-hyped. I knew it had samurai-themed fantasy; a multiplayer component; an evolving limited storyline; and clan-themed decks so players could easily focus on a faction. I pushed hard on L5R- roping in about a dozen players, getting them set up with decks, and arranging for play. But L5R wasn’t easy. It had tricky timing rules, two-deck construction, and the potential for lengthy games. It could lock up hard with more than three players. I kept cheerleading for a while, but it quickly became clear everyone wanted an easier game. I still liked it and felt bad. I bought many players' cards off of them. I wasn't going to play but I wanted to collect. I only kept up through the first several expansions. My enthusiasm had a limit. Lacking players, all I had was the fun of looking through and trying to construct head canon from the color text fragments on cards. Who was Toturi? Why was he attached to the Lion Clan? What was the deal with the Kolat? Why did the clans have non-humans working in their mines?

I’ve been a sucker since then, buying into the CCG again from time to time (and then stopping), picking up all the rpg materials, reading the novels, and falling in and out of love with the setting.

This week the Atlas of Rokugan arrived. And it’s depressing...but maybe not for the reasons you’d assume.

You may know that AEG sold the Legend of the Five Rings license to Fantasy Flight a couple of weeks ago. This isn’t the first time that’s happened, but this feels more final and complete. FFG will have a beta version of a new L5R LCG out for Gen Con next year. Perhaps we’ll see some cool board games in the future. And FFG has indicated that if the LCG does well, they’ll consider doing something with the rpg.

But that means that the Atlas represents the final product for the L5R RPG 4th Edition. That’s too bad. This edition has been lovely and solid. They're best looking L5R products and among the nicest rpg books I’ve seen. The layout team been consistent with the package and text design, making serious use of their existing art assets. It’s also the first edition that embraces all of the setting's history. They shifted metaplot to the back and crafted resources which could be used for any era of play (well, mostly). They came up with new approaches to presentation and themes. The elemental “catch-all” books started weak, but got stronger. The massive Second City boxed set offered a completely new campaign approach. The Imperial Histories volumes encouraged GMs to do new things with Rokugan.

On the other hand it’s also good that we’re finished. The Atlas closes out a solid and complete line. It does lack any good modules, a huge weakness. But there’s enough material to serve any potential gamer. However with no publisher, we'll see how hard it becomes to get these books. Will FFG sell through the backstock? Will PoD be the only source soon? Will it wither?

But that’s not what depressed me.

I’ve run several L5R campaigns, once with Rolemaster, one with Storyteller, and the current game with Action Cards. Before Clan War I painted figures in clan colors and wrote samurai skirmish rules. I love the weirdness of L5R and the balance of social, magical, and physical concerns. That’s despite some serious problems: the way it reduces some of the real wildness and strangeness of the source cultures, the whatev’ smashing together of distinct Asian cultures into a mish-mash, the odd treatment of real world faiths, and the token exoticism of the setting at times. I’ve read Edward Said, and yeah L5R can be Orientalist. I've cringed more than a couple of times. I’ve had to make my peace with that, but I know that’s likely a cop out. My Rokugan’s pretty different as I’ve talked about before. And I hope that I can present a campaign that avoids those pitfalls.

But that’s not what depressed me.

What depressed me were the maps.

Early L5R didn’t have maps. I mean they had maps, but just rough and impressionistic ones. They had a great in-game justification for it. In Rokugan, Imperial decrees had the weight of law. If an Emperor stated or affirmed something about geography: distance, routes, local terrain, it became an absolute fact for future map makers. Contradiction and confusion meant that public maps could only be picture, rather than a guide. In the game material that trickled down to the presentation of places and regions. These existed in relation to one another; landmarks simply lay in an area. But that area remained a board the GM could manipulate easily. Everything was fungible and the GM had room to shift and mold the land. We could steal and swipe, bring in cool descriptions, and fit travel to the scene.

Now we have a sense of distance, a sense of scale. We can measure the miles between locations. Places aren’t empty, ready to be colored in on the fly. Now I know how far it is from Nikesake to Ukabu Mura, what direction we have to walk, what lies between. The imaginative space has vanished. The wave function of fantasy has collapsed.

And it’s so dumb that I feel this way. The Atlas is a gorgeous book and a fitting capstone to the edifice of Rokugan. There’s a huge amount of effort and skill on display here. My only realistic complaint would be that the glue they used to adhere the fold-out map stains the paper. But my phantasmal complaints are many and varied. I had a similar reaction to Numenera. I love the concept: a wild, mutable, and open world of high weirdness and fantasy, meant for exploration. Then I got the core book and found the world already mapped out with nations, races, factions, backstories, agendas. Yeah, I could ignore all that, but it meant throwing away half of the book.

Luckily this isn’t the case with L5R. My players will never see the Atlas. I won’t hang the map on the wall as I’ve done before. From time to time I’ll flip through, hunting for location descriptions, but I’ll studiously ignore the maps. I’ll keep my Rokugan weird and unknown, a place I’m still trying to figure out the stories for. 

L5R's backlist lives on in electronic form. For my reviews of the earliest products and how useful they are for the present edition, see here. 

RPG Top 100 (Part One: 76-100)

I follow "The Dice Tower" on YouTube. They have a host of contributors covering a range of board games, though I really only watch a couple of the reviewers. For the last couple of weeks two of my favs have done their "Top 100 Board Games" lists. One, Tom Vassal, mentioned that he'd arranged his list by individually writing down the games he liked and then breaking those into a top and bottom 50. He then split each subsection again and again until he came up with a final list. 

Because that got into my head, I decided to see if I could come up with a Top 100 RPG list. These are games I want to run or play right at this moment. Likely my picks will change by next year. I've played some of these; more I've only read. Some of these aren't games exactly, but closer to settings. Anything I've marked with (*) means I wanted to play that setting or concept, but not with those rules. I'd use some kind of homebrew or hack. Final caveat: I don't think these are the 100 Best RPGs. But they have my attention right now. 

100. Iron Edda
99. Ryuutama
98. Castle Falkenstein
I own most of the supplements for this game and I've written reviews about all of them. But I've never gotten to play beyond a couple of stabs at character creation. I went through and prepared a campaign years ago that never got off the ground. It still seems like a cool game, though the card-based resolution present an additional challenge for running it online. That can be overcome, but the tools aren't as simple as dice-rollers.

97. Legacy: Life Among the Ruins
96. The Warren
95. Magic, Inc
94. Kagematsu
93. Night Witches
92. Leverage*
I have a hard time with the Cortex system. It doesn't click for me when I've read it (Firefly, Smallville, Leverage). I kind of got it when I played the Marvel version, but that was at the table with a decent GM. When I went back later to actually read and maybe run it, the rules completely lost me. But I like the idea of a flexible caper game. There's some great ideas on how to do this in the Fate Worlds article written by one of the showrunners. 

91. Deadlands/Deadlands Hell On Earth*
90. Star Trek (FASA or *)

89. Motobushido
I waffled back and forth on this for a while it was among the twenty other games I cut from the list. But going back and looking at how well-constructed the game is makes me want to run or play it. Normally it wouldn't be my cup of tea, but I can already imagine great stories.

88. Nobilis
87. Psi Run
86. GURPS 3e
85. Dread
84. Tenra Bansho Zero
83. Urban Shadows
82. Mice & Mystics
OK, so it technically isn't an rpg, but a board game. But it's really fun. It's the best pseudo-rpg bg I've played. And there's room there to easily hack it and develop the game further. It feels like something that would work with Fate or another light system. Mouse Guard's an obvious choice, but I think the tone's different enough that I'd want to try something more open.

81. Atomic Robo
80. Owl Hoot Trail
79. Cairn*
78. Cyberpunk 2020*

77. Fringeworthy*
I played this a ton back in the early 80's. I loved the idea of being able to switch between settings and genres, while keeping the same characters. They'd be outsiders experiencing new places, so you had a real chance for wonder and discovery. Of course we never played the game strictly according to the highly complicated and arcane rules. If I wanted to do this again, I'd hack it with something simple and try to keep it from feeling too much like Stargate SG-1. IIRC someone had a solid Savage Worlds hack of this out there.

76. Crimson Skies*

Part One 76-100

Part Two 51-75

Part Three 26-50

Part Four 1-25