This appears to be a good time to be watching TV. Between the BBC, Amazon Prime, and Netflix there’s a lot of really decent stuff on. We’ve just finished blitzing Haven from start to finish (and if that wasn’t someone’s off-beat Cthulhu Now campaign at some point I’d be very surprised), have just started Lucifer… Stephen Moffat and Peter Capaldi are leaving Dr Who – don’t get me wrong, Mr M has written some superb episodes in the past and he’s not quite as guilty of pushing the big reset button as RTD was, I’m just happy the show is being handed over to someone else. And it will be new lead writer, new Doctor. Not been the biggest fan of Mr C’s Doctor.
We’ve got Stranger Things, The OA, Sneaky Pete, Timeless, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man and a few others racked up and ready to roll as soon as a gap in the schedule emerges (usually known as “Summer”)
And then there’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Excellent books, great audio adaptations, a decent TV show starring half the cast of Elvenquest. But the Americans got their hands on it.
I was sceptical. But it was on Netflix, which I didn’t have, so plenty of people got a chance to watch it first and opine in my general direction. I heard positive things – it’s good. It’s funny. It’s a complete story. It leaves enough threads dangling to make you want a second series (which has been green-lit already). And there’s a kitten. You’ll love the kitten.
And the kitten (amongst other things) is why this post is here in the gaming section.
Now. Spoilers, darling. If you’ve not seen past Episode 5, “Very Erectus”, there are some details about the kitten you may not have worked out yet. I know I hadn’t! So go and watch the series now, come back as and when…
In my left hand, the 13th Age SRD. Or rulebook if you’ve got it. Big, weighty, gorgeous, full-colour, tome of everything you need to run an RPG in the Dragon Empire and beyond. It’s my go-to game for fantasy gaming. Or it was…
In my right hand, The Black Hack. 19 pages long, including the obligatory license page. Simple. Streamlined. Sweet. Pares everything down to bare bones and makes gaming on the fly an absolute joy. Grab the dungeon dice or cards, grab an old module that’s been collecting dust on the shelf, convert as you go along.
It seems somehow logical that left and right should meet…
13th Age is, if approached from a certain direction, the ultimate gaming condiment set, full of tasty morsels that can season and spice whatever game you happen to play. You don’t have to use all the rules, just the bits and pieces you want to.
The Escalation Die
Get the biggest damn D6 you can comfortably lift. Round 2 of combat, it goes on the table, 1-up. Given that TBH is a roll-under system, you subtract that from your d20 rolls in combat. Criticals now occur on 0 or 1. 20 is still a fumble and if you roll your stat bang-on you trigger a GM Intrusion. (Okay, so I’m stealing that from Monte Cook’s Cypher system games, basically it’s carte blanche for the GM to introduce something into the game – reinforcements for one side or the other, your weapon breaks, something interesting happens. And it’s got to keep the story moving forward).
Round 3 the Escalation Die shifts to 2. Criticals now occur on -1, 0 or 1. Fumble on 20, GMI on rolling your stat exactly before modifying.
Round 4… You’re clever, you get the idea.
Go nuts with this. Base monster powers off the die. Is it odd? Is it even? Can a nasty special monster also use the Escalation die?
Damage on Miss
Simple. You fail to hit, you deal your level in damage to the creature you were attacking. Point is, you’re the Big Damn Heroes and you’re there to kick arse and take names. Even if you can’t write the names down, don’t have a pen, and couldn’t read them even if you did manage to write them down. Yes, Barbarians, I’m looking at you here.
You can also play with the attack rolls. Natural Even Hit, Odd Miss, exact hit… Base powers off and around things like that. A magical sword that deals double damage if you roll the exact number you need to hit. A pair of gloves that grants you an extra action if you miss on a natural even roll. Index cards come in handy, or post-it notes.
Backgrounds
An idea I’ve already seen suggested as a skill system option in TBH elsewhere. Characters in 13th Age don’t have skills, they’ve got Backgrounds. Maybe you were the Chief Gardener for the Chef of Ulambril. Roll with Advantage whenever you can blag a use for that Background. Oh, and you’ve also introduced the Chef of Ulambril into the game world – what made you leave her service, what did she cook, what did you grow? Where or what is Ulambril? Interesting enrichment to the game world in a single sentence. Every Background should add almost as much to the game canon as “The Doctor’s Wife” did.
Icons
These are the movers and shakers of the world. Not gods, but rulers of kingdoms, of guilds, the powers behind the throne perhaps. 13th Age gives you 13 laid out and beautifully illustrated, the SRD gives you 13 more. And you can find more online or make up your own.
Each player gets to have a relationship with 1 icon at 1st level, gaining another relationship every 4 levels – so 1st (1), 5th (2), 9th (3). Relationships can be Positive – the icon likes you and wishes to help. Conflicted – the icon is like a cat, it doesn’t really care if you live or die, it may help you, it may wind itself around your legs when you start to walk down the stairs. Negative – the icon hates you and will do everything in it’s power to ensure you fail. Wait, that’s more like a cat.
At the beginning of the session, roll a d6 for each relationship. On a 1, your icon will exert some influence to assist you (positive or conflicted) or hinder you (negative). On a 6, the opposite happens and you could find yourself working alongside crack troopers of the Skeleton Lord to steal a rare ingredient from the gardens of Ulambril (no, I still don’t know where they are or what’s growing there).
The 13th Age Icon mechanics are different. Use them if you like.
Next Time on the 13th Hack…
Character classes! Monsters! Powers! Levelling up!
As a family, we love games – especially games we can all play (aged 5+). Board games, card games, computer games, roleplaying games… So here’s a quick run-down of the games we played Christmas 2015. Some we got as presents, some we already had, some we pretty much made up on the spot!
Dominoes
An old family favourite, and an excellent way to kill 10 minutes while you’re waiting for something else. Even my youngest loves dominoes – and he’s pretty good at it as well. For the older players, you’ve the strategy of working out how many 5’s have been played and if you can mess up the entire game by playing that 5:1 this way around. For the youngers, you’re pattern-matching. Great fun. And there’s nothing like the look of triumph on your youngest’s face as he slams down that last tile in victory.
Pontoon
A great way to teach kids some basic maths – cards add up to more than 21? You’re bust, pay up. Probability – what’s the odds of drawing the card you need? Seriously? A 10? Bust. Pay up. Strategy – do you stick on 16, hope the bank goes bust? And, ultimately, that the Bank always wins.
We play with a pile of pasta pieces for each player. It’s always entertaining to see individuals’ piles get smaller and smaller, while the pasta mountain in front of the banker gets bigger and bigger.
Scotland Yard
Lots of little pieces, a map of central London, beginner and advanced games, and the ability to victimise one of your family members! What could possibly go wrong?
This was a game we received this Christmas and broke out to play on Boxing Day. Put simply, one player takes the role of “Mister X” and has to evade capture by the other players, moving around the map of London in a number of different ways – bus and taxi in the beginner game, tube and ferry are added in the advanced game. The other players take the role of detectives hunting him down. Some moves Mister X makes are made invisible to the pursuing detectives, recorded on a little tracker so that the other players can see they’re not making things up. In the basic game, if the detectives capture Mister X before turn 12, they’ve won. If Mister X evades them, he’s won. The furthest any of us made it as a fugitive was turn 11.
The advanced game is a little more complex. Detectives only have a limited budget of transport tickets to spend, starting points are randomised across the map, Mister X makes most of his moves invisible, only popping up from time to time to blow raspberries at his pursuers, hopefully from a comfortable distance away across the board. Mister X also has to evade capture for a lot longer – 20-odd turns. Again, 11 or 12 is about the most any of us have managed.
The detectives work as a team, moving after Mister X has made his move.
I’d definitely recommend this for players of 8 and over. The game has a maximum of 5 players – 4 hunters and 1 Mister X. The feeling of persecution you feel when being hunted is really rather unpleasant, but you do find yourself thinking about your strategy for next time long after you’ve finished playing.
Ticket to Ride is one of the big hitters in the boardgame market. I’d rank it up there with Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. We bought 2 copies before Christmas, realised that one of the people we were going to give it to already had it, subbed for a different game and decided to keep it ourselves.
Up to 5 players work to build train routes across Europe to match the tickets they’ve got in their hands. Tunnels and ferries act to complicate things a little (or they would if we’d played the full tunnel rules). It can get frustrating at times, when someone else claims a route between 2 cities you need to complete your ticket, but there are usually multiple ways to do any given journey. There’s a lot of strategy discussed across the internet, but we’re only just getting going.
This one is a bit more taxing for the younger players – I’d say our 8 and 10 year olds struggled to sit through the full length of the game – but a lot of fun. Like Catan and Carcassonne, lots of expansions are available once you’ve got the base game down pat – map routes for the UK, darkest Africa, and so on, all with their own little tweaks to the main rules.
A tabletop roleplaying game. Largely made up as we went along, using the simple(ish) Fate Accelerated system. The FAE book doesn’t contain any rules for playing in a particular setting, the Force, droid abilities, and so on, were all made up as we needed them.
Basic premise of the game was that while the battle of Endor was ongoing, another group of Rebel agents were to infiltrate the Imperial shipyards on the ice world of Praxis 7, retrieve the plans for a new secret weapon (the nature of which was never revealed) and then destroy the base on the way out. Through some clever Jedi mind tricks (and some spectacularly gullible Stormtroopers) the party blagged their way in to the base under the pretext of a surprise Health and Safety inspection, which the party’s R2 unit retroactively added to the base commander’s diary while searching the computer network for the secret weapon plans). Much fun ensued as it turned out the base commander feared the HSE far more than the Emperor himself.
We played this a few hours after watching The Force Awakens, more on which in a future post. It was the first time I’ve run FATE as a system, I’ll definitely be going back to it.
Destiny
The only Playstation gaming I got done at all this Christmas was picking off the odd mission in Destiny. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this game.
I love the graphics, the weaponry, the architecture on Mars and Venus, the varieties of enemies you face. I love the fact that when you’re killed, the game tells you what got you.
I hate that it’s single-player on the PS4 and that to do any sort of multiplayer you need to shell out more for a PSN subscription. Okay, so they bundle a month free in with the game but that’s not the point. Borderlands gives you 2 players on one PS3, 4 players over LAN or WAN. And there’s all this stuff you can collect – helium coils, spinmetal, spirit blooms, none of which I’ve found any use whatsoever for! You can’t trade with other players – hell, you can’t actually communicate with other players unless you’re friends with them already. Judging by what I’ve read online, many other players feel the same way.
I hate that I’ve nearly completed the bulk of the game I can play without a PSN subscription in what feels like a very short amount of time. End-to-end, probably a couple of days of gameplay. That’s not great value. I hate that every time I come back to the game it’s forgotten how much ammo I had for each of the 3 gun categories and set me back to no heavy weapons ammo.
I don’t understand the loot system. Unlike Borderlands, where every container can be opened and ammo or cash collected, loot drops in Destiny seem seriously infrequent. I’ve only found a handful of chests in the levels I’ve explored, and they’ve contained this useless crud that only appears to exist to clog up your inventory. Apparently there are uses for them, but I’ve not discovered them yet.
I hate the fact that, having presented itself as a fairly straightforward first person shooter, the game diverges into a precision-jump platformer in a couple of the missions I’m currently stuck on. I’ve no idea what the main storyline is, where I am along it.
It doesn’t have the humour of Borderlands, the character progression of Borderlands, the narrative flow of Borderlands… Let’s face it, it’s no Borderlands.
Would I buy Destiny (I got it bundled with my PS4)? No, probably not. Not sure what the replay value is – the races and character classes don’t appear to make a great deal of difference to the gameplay, so it’s not like seeing how the Siren handles compared to the Gunzerker or the Mechromancer.
Oh, and the PS4 has other shortcomings – no Blinkbox movies, no All4 player. So realistically, when the other PS3 dies, I’ll replace it like for like.
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So that’s that! A decent handful of games played this Christmas, we’ll continue with them as the year goes on. What did you play?
Ticket to Ride is one of the big hitters in the boardgame market. I’d rank it up there with Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. We bought 2 copies before Christmas, realised that one of the people we were going to give it to already had it, subbed for a different game and decided to keep it ourselves.