I guess Monte Cook has been back at Wizards for ~4 months? And he’s been writing a column? This makes sense, given that there’s now an announcement about this 5e playtest.

Looking back on 4e, I still think it was a really solid edition, but I’ve come around to agree with some of the criticism with regard to losing some of the old school flavor. It’s inevitable that a thick layer of mechanics, no matter how crisply designed, are going to focus people’s attentions on that.

One part of 3e and Pathfinder I strongly want to remain addressed or fixed in some fashion is character power level. 4e rather strongly pushes a philosophy where PCs get a sort of metaphorical +2, and if nothing else, I found that to be a revelation. If there’s anything I would preserve from 4e, this would be at the top of the list. (Second would probably be: fighters and their ilk should not be inherently less interesting to play than casters as they have been with previous editions.)

This is in contrast to 3e and even Pathfinder, wherein you get some kind of bonus or interesting ability but there’s a trade-off baked into the ability. The game is balanced for characters without that sort of advantage, so any advantage a PC receives has to be offset with some penalty or substantial drawback.

I recall this being true in particular of the sorcerer’s at-will attacks. You get an ability to make some kind of attack. Fantastic! So I don’t need a crossbow? Well, not quite. A crossbow requires a move action to reload but it does 1d8, which is too much. It would also be too powerful for a caster to do more damage than some spells, so it’s 1d4 or 1d6 + 1 for every N levels of sorcerer. Oh, and at-will is too powerful, so you’ve got a fixed number of uses per day. There’s a neat mechanic attached to some of them which makes it worthwhile but in our analogy of 4e handing out +2, this is more like +0.5.

As you go on and on, you see that there’s a limit to how awesome even Pathfinder can make you. They can bolt on additional abilities all they want, but they must be 3.5-esque in terms of versatility and power level and they must be in lockstep with what’s gone before.

Note that, at least from a balance perspective, I’m entirely sympathetic. The system has got to work. And people who like 3.x are presumably fine with this. I mean, I’m saying all that stuff up there like it’s a bad thing! There’s nothing wrong with people enjoying that flavor of mechanics. Hell, it’s far and away more interesting than many of the 3e classes, especially for fighters and whatnot. Nevertheless, this is something that has bugged me ever since 2e and Pathfinder is more of the same when it comes down to it.

Anyway, I don’t want to spend all my time knocking Paizo’s product. More power to them if they can make something of the contracting tabletop RPG industry. It seems like both they and WotC have their work cut out for them, though. I fear I’ve turned this blog into some kind of platform of doom and gloom but I can’t lie: I suspect our hobby will only become more and more niche.

I found a list here, from the Unofficial White Wolf Wiki:

• Russell Bailey
• John Bridges
• Chad Brown
• John Chambers
• Mike Chaney
• Ken Cliffe
• Shane DeFreest
• Brian Glass
• Craig S. Grant
• Sara Luebke
• Aileen E. Miles
• Ethan Skemp
• Michelle Webb

You can hit the list of layoffs to find links to each person’s White Wolf CV. There are a lot of names here that go way back before you even start talking about such as Ethan Skemp and Aileen Miles.

I reiterate, this time with emphasis: holy fucking shit. It breaks my heart.

Now, I don’t pretend that I would even recognize any of these people on the street, let alone that I have any sort of personal relationship with them. I only have a relationship with these people insofar as I’ve spent countless hours curled up with books they’ve written, typeset, and otherwise lovingly crafted. I couldn’t have bought and read a decade’s worth of White Wolf books without recognizing at least some of these names.

It’s tempting to opine about the whole White Wolf/CCP thing. Of course some part of me feels bitterness. But if the complaint is that CCP is killing White Wolf, I have to wonder whether White Wolf would’ve survived, alone, for this long.

No, I don’t really have any big pronouncements. Recessions suck. I’m sad about RPGs being on the decline. White Wolf was one of my favorites because I like creepy and/or modern shit.

Arguably this is what happens when times change; the old stuff, which has its own merits and trade-offs, falls by the wayside or is otherwise transformed. They are replaced by new things, which also have their own merits and trade-offs, and will themselves, at some subsequent time, be replaced or transformed. It’s not the end because it’s never the end; RPGs live in on multiple forms. Many of their concepts and mechanics are now more pervasive than they’ve ever been. And in a more concrete sense, White Wolf itself still lives, as does WotC and numerous indie developers.

That’s about all I’ve got.

One of them was unboxing my roleplaying books. They’d been boxed up as part of some home improvement and I never got around to unboxing them. This weekend, I did. It’s hard to describe how I felt. It was bittersweet, in that I felt nostalgic but also some sense that I might be done with roleplaying for good.

And then just now, I saw that White Wolf had put up their publishing schedule for 2011 – 2012. Huh.

I’ll admit I’m less than thrilled by the whole V20 thing. (I guess we’re all curmudgeons now?) (Uh, “now”?) There wasn’t much thrill in a game I wasn’t all that interested in, although on some level I have to feel happy for the people for whom this is a big deal. The guy who runs my FLGS certainly seems pleased. My visits aren’t often these days, and he brings it up each time. I don’t have the heart to tell him I thought Requiem was a superior game by nearly every measure.

On top of that, I presumed that the nWoD was all but dead. Perhaps that says more about me than anything else: from glancing at DriveThruRpg.com, it seems there’s been a trickle of releases. It’s difficult to see at what rate with DriveThruRPG’s interface, but it doesn’t seem like that many. Maybe that’s consistent with the rate before the move to digital publishing in any case.

I’m rambling.

So then I see the new publishing schedule, and it’s an interesting mix. Releases are one per month, as far as I can tell, and the list goes out to 2012. Remarkably, it seems they’re releasing new material for the old games (including finishing up some of the old Technocracy Convention books, ha!). But the majority is either nWoD or Exalted.

Another notable piece is that there’ll be another nWoD expansion game, a remake of Mummy.

Finally, it looks like some of the print on demand stuff came through. On top of the oWoD stuff, a bunch of nWoD stuff will be on here. So there’s that.

My own hiatus

My thoughts on roleplaying these days are few and far between, as I’m sure I’ve reiterated the few times I’ve posted lately. That’s persisted. I’ve spent more time reading, coding, working, or goofing off. A big chunk of it is that my core gaming group is heavily ensconced in their own game, for which I have little interest. Hearing about their game evokes the opposite of what I’d imagined; the more I hear about it, the less I’m interested in roleplaying overall.

I’d say it’s a phase, as these things do move in cycles. Two year cycles, though? That’s the last time I posted any really coherent thoughts on roleplaying. Oh, I’m sure I’ve played some one-shot D&D since then. But I never ran Changeling, nor Dark Sun, nor Geist, nor anything else.

What’s funny is that when I was shelving my books the other day, I was reminded about how I kept acquiring books even after I’d ostensibly lost interest. I’ve got a fair number of D&D books I haven’t read. In my defense, some (but not all) were gifts. Some of the later Vampire: the Requiem books are mostly unread. I probably finished The Mage Chronicler’s Guide.

There’s something alluring about the books, though, as always. The Requiem clanbooks in particular were among the most enjoyable role-playing books I’ve ever seen or read.

This is all just a long way of saying that I’m sure I could get interested again if I tried. But do I want to? I’m not sure! This I will say: as of this evening, and it sure is tempting to crack open a role-playing book or two in the meantime. I might have achieved the point (seven years?!) at which there’s enough nostalgia to get me reading, if nothing else.

Then I started reading The Next Wave in Digital Offerings. I got really confused as to what was what until I looked at the catalog entry for Class Compendium: Heroes of Sword and Spell. It spells things out pretty clearly and I sort of feel like an idiot for not being able to figure it out. Oh well.

I’m not sure how I feel about this method of splitting up the books. I suppose there’s no inherent reason why someone unfamilar with D&D would find the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual triumvirate less confusing (aside from the bundle of three books you’d buy).

In any case, I still haven’t picked up any Essentials books. What can I say? I haven’t felt much enthusiasm about roleplaying lately. Maybe that sums up the reason for the decline in roleplaying overall. It’s effort to set up a game, to wrangle a playable group of characters, and so on. Oh, sure, my thoughts on Essentials as a game or a system is mostly unchanged: the move towards simplicity is probably a good idea, I like the price point for the books, the size is pretty adorable, and overall, I’m intrigued. The fancy hasn’t struck me. Admittedly I’m probably more likely to run a World of Darkness game of some sort. That’s still unlikely.

Character builder

I’ve still tried to follow the stuff about D&D lately, however, and another thing caught my notice. They’re finally doing a web-based version of the Character Builder! It’s been discussed before, but they mention it once again in the November news. This is quite a development. I own a Mac laptop and it was always a little silly that I could only do things on my Windows machine. I sort of get why. If they’re going to hire developers in the Seattle area, there’s a very high chance that any candidates will have worked for Microsoft at some point in their career. That biases things in favor of Windows and, to some extent, client technology. I’m trying not to make a value judgment here, because neither of those things are inherently awful— Windows is obviously the dominant OS, and you work with the talent you have available to you. So the original client was in .NET.

That’s done in Silverlight, apparently, is also understandable for those reasons. However, it seems like a pretty big mistake. Yes, I know: it’s easy to second-guess whoever’s in charge as I sit comfortably at home. There’s nothing riding on me successfully finishing this blog post. Hear me out.

Silverlight is a dead technology. I get that it uses .NET, so they wanted to be able to use that expertise. Although the writing was on the wall, arguably, the team couldn’t possibly have known that Microsoft was going to deprecate it when they started (link). That announcement was last week or so. But let’s be honest: it was never terribly popular outside of a few highly specific applications. I’ll grant you that Netflix streaming is a huge win. I can’t name much else, outside of Microsoft’s own stuff.

The other wrinkle is that there is no mobile story (as geeks call it these days). I could see not having figured out something for the iPad. If we assume a 12 – 24 month development cycle, they started well before the iPad was out, and although the iPad lived up to the hype in terms of sales, you can’t predicate your development cycle on that. Even so, the lack of any solution for Android or iOS is baffling. Mobile is enormous and it’ll continue to grow. And Silverlight runs on zero mobile devices. Not a single one! Yikes.

I think there’s some good news, though. As I understand it, Silverlight is just a frontend. The rest of the stack may be Microsoft tech, but that’s outside of Silverlight’s purview, modulo whatever interop stuff Microsoft has set up to make it easy to deveop apps. As part of that, Wizards has got tools in place for adding and editing game data. Writing a new client is somewhat “easier” than doing the whole thing from scratch, since “all you’d need to do” is write a new frontend to interpet the same data you were sending down to the Silverlight client. (Scare quotes highly intentional.) Here my ignorance about the Microsoft stack precludes me from informed commentary: it seems like ASP.NET is would be the right answer to this, to provide some relatively .NET-like way of writing a web client. I’ve no idea what the situation is with mobile devices.

There’s also this:

There are five things I really, really like about the new Character Builder.

1. It’s ultimately portable. I can use it on any computer or computer-like device, wherever I am.

Hang on, there. Does this mean there is a web-based client after all? Otherwise I don’t get what a “computer-like device” would be— notebooks, netbooks, and laptops are all fancy words for small but “real” computers running desktop operating systems. iPods, smartphones, iPads, and the like are all small “computer-like” devices, running mobile operating systems. They don’t run Silverlight. Windows Phone 7 runs Silverlight, apparently, but once again, that came out only recently. An iDevice client wouldn’t be amiss, of course, so maybe that’s in the works. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Bill could just be referring to netbooks and their ilk.

Miscellany

When I did visit my FLGS a week or two ago, it was interesting to hear the local guy pass on the latest news about White Wolf. The Afterword in Mirrors indicates that the new World of Darkness isn’t over per se, just that it’s going digital only, right? This fellow indicated that it was over. Probably confusion, right? Probably. It’s easy to see why, though.

He also mentioned old World of Darkness books being available as print-on-demand. I have a policy that I like to summarize in terms of “I try to stay out of religious wars.” This includes PC vs. Mac, emacs vs. vi, 3e vs. 4e, and yes, old World of Darkness vs. new World of Darkness. (Against my better judgment, I’m tempted to write up a sort of farewell post to the oWoD. Maybe someday.) I was already leaving at the moment, so I murmured something polite and stepped outside. Folks at that store appear highly sympathetic to the old World of Darkness, and that’s fair. No use is pissing on anybody’s parade.

It is a little sad as I think back. I bought most of my Mage: the Ascension books from his store. And when the new World of Darkness came out, I bought a ton of Vampire and Werewolf books used. (I owned them previously, but having moved from the east coast to the west coast, I left the majority of my WoD books at my parents’ house.) I’ve relegated all but M:tAsc‘s books to the other room.

Mostly they all gather dust. I don’t have the heart to read them. I strongly suspect that they won’t hold up for me. The way I figure, it’s better to stick with my hazy memories from about 10 years ago than to realize concretely just how dated the books, the setting, and the aesthetic will feel to me.

ttfn

Until next time, blog.

"Look, no one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said 'Let's get rid of all of our fans and replace them.' That was never the intent," Mearls said.

Man. I know no reasonable person believes that. Even so, I feel pretty bad for the Wizards folks. No matter what they do, some subset of the RPG fans will hate it.

Call it the narcissism of small differences, if you like, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. The Internet offers gigabytes of evidence which suggests we’re all susceptible to those dynamics. They don’t call them Edition Wars without reason, whether the conflict in question is D&D 3e vs. 4e, or old World of Darkness vs. new World of Darkness. If there’s a bright side, it’s that people care enough about the pastime to express strong opinions about it.

To hear the author tell it, even this article provoked some amount of controversy! The Escapist posted the whole transcript in an effort to clear the air. It’s funny that people (apparently?) accused the author, Alexander Macris, of having some kind of intrinsic bias in various directions.

D&D and the “death spiral,” for instance: does anyone doubt that although 4e might’ve sold “well,” the industry continues to shrink? I’m not saying anyone has to like it. I’m just pointing out that it’s a no-brainer: there are many more choices, media-wise, than there were in the days of 1e, 2e, and to some extent, 3e. Or about the alleged axe Macris has to grind: do people not give any weight at all to the criticism of 4e? Reasonable people can disagree on issues like whether there are simply too many concurrent effects for many people to track.

Towards the end, they get into an interesting discussion about how the current environment for games differs from the environment D&D came out of. The short of it is that RPGs— or any board game, really— are competing for time with video games. Video games have many strong incentives to get you up and running very quickly, whereas learning an RPG or any sort of board game typically takes time. It’s a boostrapping problem: how do you start playing immediately if you have no idea how to play? I imagine that first hour, if that long, is extremely fragile.

It’s a tough problem, and I’ll confess I don’t know enough about, well, anything to predict whether or not the Red Box approach is likely to work. The time investment is still an issue: people are willing to spend comparable time on MMOs for raids and such, but by that point they have some idea of what they’re in for and they’re reasonably sure they’ll enjoy it.

And if it’s a hurdle for players, it’s often worse for the DM. There are ways around this, like making the mechanics of encounter-building very easy. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way in any case; I might very well be projecting.

I think they’re right in some sense that the more you play an RPG, the more you’re likely to get out of it. But that’s a tough sell, isn’t it? For an MMO, the game is fun immediately, without ramp-up time and without having to find like-minded people. Frontloading the experience is one way to deal with it, but we’re back to the bootstrapping problem again.

At this point, I’ve begun to regret not having picked up Essentials. Oh, sure, I knew what I was getting into with the Red Box, and I still want to play it. And I’m a goddamn collector! No, the problem is that now I’m curious. I want something to read through and digest.

I foresee a trip to my FLGS in the next week or so.

Let me say something up front: the Red Box is priced to move. I assumed it would be somewhere around $30. That’s just how RPGs go these days. I assumed it’d be $35 and was not going to buy it. It’s $20. The same goes for the Heroes of the Fallen Lands book. Given that a nice hardcover RPG from White Wolf or Wizards goes for around $30, it’s hard to imagine not picking up one or the other if you think you’re ever going to play it.

At all events, I bought the Red Box, and I’ve had a chance to flip through it.

My first impression is that it’s quite adorable and delightful. It really makes me nostalgic. I can’t pretend I grew up with any of the $color boxen— I started with D&D 2nd Edition around the time that the black book came out. Before that, though, I was an avid fan of the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks. The means of introduction in the Red Box just so happens to be a gamebook-style choose your own adventure. It’s as if they’re trying to warm the black chunk of ice that serves as my heart. I’m flashing back to when I flipped through AD&D 2e for the first time. Even when I acquired the PHB, I read the “what is roleplaying?” introduction over and over. If anyone’s trying to compel me to have children, the Red Box is the most persuasive argument I’ve heard by far.

Mechanics-wise, all of the differences are not clear to me. Based on what I’ve heard, the engine— basic mechanics like defenses, attack progression, daily/encounter/at-will, saving throws, and so on— are mostly unchanged. Rather, they’ve changed the implementation layer, the classes and how they function.

When I heard about this, I had mixed feelings. I purchased a ton of books already and having invested a lot of time in 4e before Essentials. A lot of complaints that I hear are animated by ideas I’d rather the designers not act on. I strongly believe that 4e is a huge step forward in aggregate. People may get bogged down by choice, but as I saw it, it made a strong case for playing something other than spellcasters. They incorporated many concepts from indie RPGs, and in general made D&D that much easier to run.

Even so, it’s undeniable that 4e can really get bogged down in play. Some of this has to do with a preponderance of choices. People end up haggling over what to do, or simply can’t decide and default to using the same powers over and over. It can be difficult to track conditions. Experience mitigates this substantially, but for some people, it doesn’t seem to help.

From flipping through the Red Box books, Essentials’ thesis, so to speak, appears to have two parts: a) the fundamentals of 4e are solid, and b) classes can still be fun without being terribly intricate. In theory, that is pretty persuasive. They could rejigger some classes so they’re on par with the previous ones without reducing their potency. In practice, the implementation details are, er, essential. I think they have a lot of wiggle room, but hitting the sweet spot between overwhelming and underwhelming choice seems like a real challenge.

We’ll see how this works out with the Red Box. I’m guessing that, if nothing else, I’ll pick up the Essentials stuff to say in the loop. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even try running it for the group that found 4e too overwhelming.

Now then: the second part.

Did I call it? Kinda.

I’ve been kicking this around for some time. How do I write about this? I have no idea. My blogging’s been so spotty lately, sure. But chiefly I feel like I talked about it already, back in April.

There’s not much to say: I saw the back of World of Darkness Mirrors, and thought it read an awful lot like a farewell. You know the sort: now that we’re nearly finished, here are ways to shake it up, some theory behind why we did it, and so on. I put the book down for a few weeks.

Turns out I was right. I flipped through it again and noticed an Afterword. It’s for real: they’re going digital only.

I shouldn’t act so surprised, surely. They’ve been working on the MMO, and it seems an awful lot like they don’t have most of the core WW employees working on books. I do not mean to say I perceive a decrease in quality. I don’t. But the schedule has obviously slowed.

I can’t say I called it, precisely, because I didn’t predict what should’ve been obvious: rather than closing up shop, going digital-only solves a lot of problems, if it doesn’t reduce some costs.

Where do we go from here?

Then again, I hear the old World of Darkness books will be available as print-on-demand. Could that mean the entire catalog is available via PoD? My FLGS did have a PoD Exalted supplement at one point, and it seemed good enough for my purposes.

I speculate because, well, PDFs aren’t my favorite. I love books. This will mark me as old school if it doesn’t already. I don’t take any particular Luddite pride in it— I’m pretty thoroughly enmeshed in the world of computing in any case— nor am I particularly ashamed. Some of it is practical: I don’t enjoy reading books on computers, and even then, some computers appear to struggle to handle PDFs. Case in point: I did recently acquire a device that is ostensibly capable of reading PDFs. The jury’s still out on precisely how viable that is. As with my gaming rig, it appears to struggle with PDFs with a lot of art, but it’s fine when it comes to text. Clearly this warrants in-depth, exhaustive research! But in the meantime, I love visiting my FLGS, shootin’ the shit, and coming home with a physical product.

Ultimately I do have to resist the temptation to go on DriveThruRPG and buy up all the PDFs I don’t own. Most everything is cheap enough compared to real books that for the price of a couple of hardbacks, I can get most of the WoD digital catalog. And there’s more to come, albeit no faster than before (grumble, grumble).

Baba Yetu

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’ve got some things to take care of. You see, there’s a gluttonous game that’s greedily devouring all of my time. It begins with a “C” and ends with an “ivilization V.” I have to stop it. And the best way I can figure to do that is to take just one more turn. Just one more! Then I’ll have enough units to make Montezuma pay, and I can get his Incense, which works with my Monasteries to increase culture! A few turns after that, I’ll be able to get another Policy.

…

Oh dear. No, listen, I can stop when I want to. I just don’t want to. Not yet. Just one more turn! One more turn.

The video itself doesn’t offer any information— it’s a cinematic, in other words, and well done— but there was one tidbit. It will be based on “the older Masquerade system.” Based on what little I’ve been able to glean myself, it seems accurate. If nothing else, there’s plenty of corroborating chatter on Twitter.

I can’t say I’m excited. Vampire was my least favorite out of the old World of Darkness games. Mage occupied that spot, although my fervor for it has lessened. I’m not sure it has aged well, and I’d rather preserve nostalgia as it is than tamper with it.

Of course since I haven’t seen or heard anything about the gameplay beyond “it’ll focus on player politics and social interaction.” I can’t form an opinion based on that. The closest analogy is of course EVE Online, which has some fascinating politics and whatnot. I also have too much respect for the World of Darkness folks to dismiss the game out of hand. Purely on the point of adapting tabletop to MMO, the Masquerade setting is a better choice, given that it operated on a global scale. Still, to the extent to which it’s possible to formulate an opinion about this, I’m disappointed.

No matter how I feel, I still wish the White Wolf folks all the best of luck. It sounds like there’s a large portion of lapsed Vampire: the Masquerade fans, or folks who have no strong preference for original vs. newer Vampire. I just don’t fall into either of those categories.

First up, there are those from the D&D Encounters series. The folks over at Dungeon’s Master have posted a PDF containing all six characters.

You can also download the characters from [Bloodsand Arena][bsa].

There is, however, a hitch. Anyone who doesn’t use WinZip to extract the files will see error messages along the lines of “unsupported compression method.” Apparently the archive was created with WinZip, which now defaults to a proprietary compression algorithm. I don’t really blame Wizards for this, to be honest— they’re not the ones who’re apparently trying to destroy interoperability with other Windows apps, let alone cross-platform apps. Thanks for nothing, WinZip!

For my part, I held my nose, installed it, extracted the files, and promptly uninstalled it. It’s a nasty piece of software. If it weren’t for this, I wouldn’t have touched it with a 10′ pole. [7zip][7z] is more than sufficient.

For those of you that don’t have a Windows machine handy, well, you’ll need a workaround. While I can’t vouch for this link from a security standpoint, it does look like someone else has compiled another ZIP file containing the PDFs. Hit this RapidShare link if you’re desperate. I opened it on a Mac and didn’t have any trouble.

What with Dark Sun heating up (GET IT?), I feel I’ve got a few more posts in me for the near future. A few thoughts about White Wolf are tumbling around in the brain-box, too, although to be frank it’s more to do with what’s not happening than what is. I might be repeating myself, though.

In any case, to everyone out there, thanks for reading!