Reminder to Self: Sometimes, You've Just Got to Go For It

I've been having a spot of existential doubt: in the last few months there have been a few game sessions that I've not really been happy with, to the extent that one session got postponed because I just didn't have the time to prepare well enough to be sure of doing a good job. And I've been having some difficulties getting the Christmas Game into any sort of a shape that I'm happy with.

But the first and most important prerequisite for running a good game is this: you first have to run a game.

That's really the core issue - if you don't run the game at all, it can't be a good game. But, sometimes, regardless of the initial signs, the magic can happen such that what might have been an uninspired session turns into a great story that is fondly remembered for years to come.

And so the crucial next step with the Christmas Game is not to write the perfect adventure, or the perfect set of characters to go with it... initially, it is just to write any version of the adventure. It can then be fixed in the edit.

Practically a New Person

This year's Christmas Game is another Firefly one-shot. It takes place thirteen years after the events of the movie "Serenity", and features the crew of that ship engaged in their usual mix of hijinks and desperate improvisation.

As a consequence of some time having passed in the setting, and also due to some of the revised roles taken on by the characters, it had been my intention to modify the various characters slightly for use in the one-shot. Thus they would remain largely recognisable, but there would also be a clear sense of growth.

However, as I proceeded to make the relevant changes, I quickly found that this was a less-than-ideal approach. Some of the new Distinctions just don't align at all well with the character's skills, and in some cases (notably River), the skills assigned by default don't match her new role at all.

As a consequence, I'm now planning a more or less complete rebuild of the characters for this one-shot, effectively recreating them as a new person for this session.

Mal: The captain of Serenity has spent the better part of the last thirteen years in solitary confinement on Perdition. For most of that time, the one thing that kept him going was the knowledge that Zoe simply would not abandon him to his fate and that therefore he just had to wait for a rescue. In the end, he was rescued two years ago by a crew of mercenaries hired by Inara and Simon. Reunited with his crew, he has found that Zoe did indeed leave him to his fate, a matter that sticks in his craw rather.

Mal's revised Distinctions will be Ship's Captain (because he is), Unresolved Issues (or similar) to reflect his being left behind, and Lost a Step (or similar) to reflect his ordeal on Perdition.

Zoe: There was only one thing that could take Zoe from Mal's side, and that was the birth of her daughter Emma Washburne. Zoe has thus spent the last decade or so serving as the sheriff on the moon Tombstone, and for most of that time believed that Mal was dead. When news reached her that her captain had been freed, she immediately disentangled herself from her new life, and she and Emma headed back to the Black.

Zoe's revised Distinctions are Backwater Sheriff, Mama Bear, and Steady.

Jayne: When Serenity was identified as the most wanted boat in the 'Verse, and when the jobs dried up, Jayne decided the time had come for him to leave. He has spent the last decade bouncing around from job to job without any great direction. He's now captain of his own ship, with a hotshot mechanic, and a rotating crew of ne'er-do-wells. But word has reached him that an old friend is dying, and his conscience (Kaylee) has been nagging him, and so he's heading back for one last job.

Jayne is probably the least changed of the characters: his Distinctions of Crude, Mercenary, and Family Ties can all still apply.

Simon: No longer on the run, Simon spent some time considering whether simply to return home with River. But when Mal was captured, he found a new purpose: to become the saviour of the man who once saved him. He has spent a decade working closely with Inara, building up a network of contacts and becoming a veritable mastermind, all with the aim of bringing the captain home. Alas, this all came with a cost - Simon's relationship with Kaylee broke down very early on, driving the mechanic from the ship. Simon is therefore wracked with both guilt and loss as a result of this mistake.

Simon's new Distinctions are Ship's Doctor, Mastermind, and Family Ties.

River: Unlike Simon, River never had any intention of going home. Instead, she has found a new family on Serenity, and a new place behind the controls. She's been the pilot of that boat for some years now, and has developed quite a connection to the old girl.

River is probably the most changed of the characters, because as written she completely lacks any skills in Fight, Pilot, or Operate. These will need changed, and she should also have Serenity added as a Signature Asset. Her revised Distinctions will be Government Experiment, Ship's Pilot, and Reader.

Kaylee: Once upon a time, it seemed that no power in the 'Verse could stop Kaylee being cheerful, and certainly nothing could take her away from Serenity. But these were both proven wrong when Simon became obsessed with rescuing Mal Raynolds. He managed to deeply offend Kaylee and in fact drove her away from her home. Heartbroken, Kaylee went to work with Jayne, and has been serving as his conscience as well as his mechanic.

Like Jayne, Kaylee is largely unchanged: her Distinctions remain Ship's Mechanics, Sweet & Cheerful, and Everything's Shiny. Even her abiding love for Serenity, reflected in her Signature Asset, remains unchanged - while she cares for Jayne's ship, you never forget your first love.

Inara: The former Companion is dying, and serves an expository role in this game. As such, she won't be available as a PC.

Emma Washburne: The daughter of Wash and Zoe, Emma is being dragged across the 'Verse by her mother. She doesn't know it, but she was actually delivered by Simon and cared for by the crew of Serenity in her earliest days. But for the past years she has lived on Tombstone, and is less than pleased at being taken from the only home she remembers. Plus, her mother is way over-protective.

Emma has inherited more from her father than she knows: her Distinctions are Ship's Pilot, A Little Nervous, and Wet Behind the Ears.

Aki Ross: When Kaylee left, Serenity foud herself in need of a new mechanic. Inara therefore contracted Aki Ross, a no-nonsense gal with a list of recommendations longer than your arm. Aki barely talks, and never about her past, but she's a calming influence on the ship with much the same demeanour as the late Shepherd Book.

Aki's Distinctions are Ship's Mechanic, Mysterious Past, and Steady.

(With five players and nine members of the Crew - eight possible PCs - I don't know quite which set of PCs I'll end up with. I think my "ideal cast" would be Mal, Zoe, Emma, Simon, and Kaylee since that probably gives the maximum scope for intra-party strife. But it should work okay with most combinations - maybe not Jayne, Kaylee, River, Aki, and Emma, but I think that's unlikely.)

Firefly: The Knitted Jumper Caper

I have a quiet challenge that I've set myself: to find the thinnest possible premise from which I can spin a workable game adventure. The adventure based on the exhibition of Egyptian burial art was easy. The adventure based on the 'ghost' underground station they found in London is likewise easy. The adventure based on the Women's Institute and their charitable endeavours? That's a little harder.

So, anyway, I had this idea. And I thought it was a good idea, one that would give plenty of adventure for a three-hour game session, where the villain was suitably psychotic, and it was all good fun. My one concern was that the players might decide I'd just gone too far this time.

What I didn't expect was for one of the players to say, "oh, they're probably smallpox blankets" within ten seconds of the Crew getting the cargo they were to transport, followed by another noting that harmless old Ethel was clearly an evil assassin. Pretty much the only thing they didn't immediately have was why.

Still, it was a fun session - the big advantage of Firefly is that the characters do a good job bouncing off one another, which means that with a good group you can get a fun session almost regardless. And so we had balls of purple wool being handled like soft, squishy grenades, we had the evil alliance between Kaylee and Ethel (which River detected based on their mutual cheerfulness), we had an asset named "The Crate Escape"...

It was a good session to end the year on. And now the Lost Episodes take a break until January...

On Hidden Rules

Over on ENWorld, I managed to get myself embroiled in a debate about the value of 'hidden' rules - those rules in the game that aren't immediately obvious but which only become apparent with system mastery.

It's fair to say I'm not a fan. Frankly, I'm of the opinion that if something is important enough to be a rule it should be spelled out in big, clear letters; and if it's not important enough to do that, it's not important enough to be a rule.

Now, it's worth noting that a rule may be 'hidden' for several reasons:

A rule may be hidden because the game is badly organised. This is quite common in early editions of the game, where things were gradually added as the game was crafted, largely on the basis that they were 'cool'. I'm inclined to think that if there are rules hidden due to bad organisation of the rulebooks, that's a design flaw that should be corrected up at the next reasonable opportunity.

A rule may be hidden because the rules-text is badly phrased and inpenetrable. The classic example of this is the rules for initiative in 1st Edition, where it's entirely possible to read the text carefully, and several times, and still not understand what it's getting at. (See also the 5e rules for creating monsters.) Again, I'm inclined to think that any such instances are a design flaw, and should be corrected at the next reasonable opportunity.

A rule may turn out to be hidden because there are in fact two contradictory rules and it's not clear which takes precedence. Or a rule may turn out to be hidden because there are multiple rules in play and the interactions (or order in which they should be applied) is not clear. And, sure enough, I'm inclined to think this is a design flaw. The authors should consider the situation, work out what they intended, and clear it up at the next reasonable opportunity.

But all of those are basically just mistakes that can, and should, be fixed when possible. What really annoys me are those cases where the designers have deliberately hidden rules away, as Easter Eggs to reward those players who develop "system mastery".

3e was probably the worst edition for this. A good example was that they made the longsword the best melee weapon (in 3.0e - it changed in 3.5e), because it did the most damage for a one-handed weapon (allowing a shield), and had a 19-20/x2 critical which meant that you tended to get less 'wasted' damage if you rolled a crit against a low-hp opponent.

There are two things wrong with this thinking, though. The first, and lesser, problem is that the designers didn't actually have as much control as they thought they did - the fact that the longsword was better than the battleaxe was a trivial nonsense next to the difference between 3e casters and non-casters - who cares about marginally more damage when the Wizard can move mountains with a word? And for all that the designers have very cleverly built in this 'best' melee weapon, they seem to have utterly missed that cheap magic item creation has the consequence of removing the constraints of Vancian casting - the only thing keeping those casters in check.

But the bigger problem is that the designers didn't seem to consider that adding hidden rules, and rewarding system mastery, in this manner makes the game harder for the DM to run. And the DM isn't a competitor in the game, nor a competitor with WotC (in any sense) - one of the purposes of the DMG should be to make the game as easy as possible for the DM to run. If there are any hidden rules there for the players to find, those same rules should be spelled out very clearly in the DMG, complete with their explanations.

Another example of a hidden rule in 3e perhaps explains this better: there's a convention in the spell design that a spell either requires a touch attack roll or a saving throw (almost never both). Spells that require a touch attack will almost always hit, since touch ACs are generally poor, and so they do "1dX plus level" damage. Conversely, spells that require a save a much less likely to hit, and so they do "XdY" damage - they're vastly more damaging. But this convention is never actually spelled out, even in the DMG where it talks about creating new spells.

(And, consequently, when later designers started adding new spells, they seem not to have known about that convention, and therefore tend not to apply it - with the consequence that many newer spells are simply better than the PHB ones.)

Or, again, there's a convention that spells that do ability score damage (such as ray of exhaustion) can't reduce a target's ability scores to 0, since that would lead either to death or complete incapacitation on the part of the target. But, again, this isn't spelled out, and so there's a spell in the "Spell Compendium" that does massive Dex damage with no cap, and therefore allows mid-level Wizards to trivially one-shot dragons.

Oops.

(There's also the Wealth by Level table, which for years led to DMs being accused of not giving out enough treasure, indeed to the extent that Pathfinder now encodes that DMs should give out a 'right' amount of treasure. Only it turns out that WbL wasn't any sort of target amount, but rather just the likely outcome of using the provided treasure tables. And, indeed, DMs certainly shouldn't have let new high-level PCs start with the value given on the table, but more likely around 60% of that value. Though in that case I'm not certain whether that was a deliberately hidden rule or something that was only realised later.)

Now, it is worth noting that, of course, there will always be some hidden rules. The complex nature of the overall ruleset, coupled with the fact that the designers are human and therefore imperfect, guarantees that this will be the case. So I'm not foolish enough to request they be removed entirely. However, while I'm not going to call for perfection, I think it is reasonable to ask for better - and to keep asking for improvements as time goes on. After all, wouldn't we all like a game that is exactly the same... but better?

Ease of Use in 5e

The more I've run 5e, the more frustrating I've found the experience. Don't get me wrong - I really like the game, the rules, and the vast bulk of the experience. But the more I've played, the more I've found that the game itself gets in my way. For example:

The Character Sheet. I've complained about this before, and it's still true - the official character sheet for 5e sucks. I still haven't found a really good one, largely because I haven't looked very hard, but the one that we have is certainly not it.

The index. The index of the PHB is bad - it's full of entries reading "see something else" where, frankly, it would just be easier to give the page number. Perhaps the worst example is "Dash".

(Of course, in the 21st century what we should really have is an easily-accessed online database of all the rules, all painstakingly hyperlinked and searchable. Physical books, and even PDFs, are actually entirely the wrong format for this game.)

The monster creation rules. For the new Eberron campaign, I had a pretty clear idea of the monsters I wanted to introduce. Unfortunately, while all of these exist in 3e, none of them yet exist in 5e, which meant I needed to do a conversion. So, I sat down with the 5e DMG... and spent an hour scratching my head. It turns out that the monster creation rules are actually pretty damn good, but they're almost completely backwards, which is pretty damning.

The binding. I paid $50 for my DMG, and by the time I had finished my read-through, and before I gave it any in-game use at all, there were already pages coming loose. Which is absolutely inexcusable in and of itself, but seriously impacts my ability to use the book (since I'm constantly worried it's about to come apart).

I still like 5e. I still think they've created a damn good game. But at this point I kinda wish they'd take the books back to the design stage and produce a revised edition, and in particular a revised edition with no rules changes whatsoever but carefully rewritten to maximise ease of use.

Well, That Didn't Go So Well...

Last night was the second chapter of my "Eberron: Dust to Dust" campaign, and unfortunately was the second game in the last few months that just didn't seem to work (the first being the Firefly episode "Strawberries"). And, once again, the problems were entirely on the GM side of the screen. (Frustratingly, the problem was also not a lack of preparation - I actually had both enough material prepared and also the relevant material prepared. It just didn't sing.)

The fundamental and biggest problem in the evening was that this session was very definitely a railroad. The players basically had no meaningful choices to make. Unfortunately, I suspect that may have been inherent to the adventure I'm running - I needed to introduce the Draconic Prophecy, the Spell-weaver, and take the PCs to the haunted Lightning Rail station, and in the time allocated that basically meant hitting each of these in turn. Which means that the important lesson there is simple - next time, run a different adventure!

The second problem, though, is an ongoing issue I've found - I don't do well at handling "exploration" scenes. I'm mostly okay with combat (though I'm increasingly coming to think low-level 5e sucks in that regard), and I'm going with interaction, but that exploration pillar is tripping me up. I'm definitely going to have to work on that quite urgently, as exploration plays a significant part in both the third chapter and also in the "Christmas Game" this year! But, for now, suffice to say that some scenes were utterly devoid of any tension, and any notions of resource management fell by the wayside pretty damn quickly.

Regarding low-level 5e combat: I've now run four sessions of 5e, all at low levels, and have had several combats in those sessions. And I'm just not terribly happy. Basically, 5e seems to have taken a significant retrograde step from 4e, and even from 3e and previous.

The issue is partly one of simplification. In theory, this is a good thing, since it frees the DM up from having so many minor issues to worry about, allowing him to worry about the "fun stuff". Which looks like it could well be great at slightly higher levels. But at low level neither the PCs nor the monsters really have many fun powers to play around with. And so a goblin is much like a chitine, is much like a skeleton, is much like a... while the PCs' tactical choices boil down to deciding which bad guy to attack. Even the 3e consideration of how best to achieve flanking is gone.

Fortunately, I think this should fix itself fairly rapidly, as the PCs quickly progress to higher levels and everything gets more interesting. At least, I hope that's the case. Otherwise, it does look like this may be my last-ever D&D campaign, which would be a real shame.

The End

I learned this morning that Margaret Weis Productions have effectively stopped production on any new "Firefly RPG" products. It's not clear whether this is a permanent change or a temporary hiatus, but it does mean that there's unlikely to be anything new for the game for at least a year.

Which is a real shame, as I very much enjoyed those books.

That said, I'm not sure there's really all that much that could be added: more adventures, of course, but beyond that?

Though, actually, there are at least two products I would have liked to see: a big, extensive 'atlas' of the The 'Verse, going into a lot more detail about the various worlds (although that's tricky to do, since ideally it should include material both from Firefly and Serenity, while the license only allows MWP to do the former), and a book on "Patrons, Fixers, and Pimps" (my title) about people who might want jobs done, people who are able to get jobs done, and the people who bring the two together. At present, the setting has Badger and Mingo and Fanty, but is otherwise somewhat lacking, so an expansion in this area would be welcome.

But the truth is I should be okay: by my count I have nine pre-gen "Firefly" episodes still unused, plus four (I think) "Serenity" episodes that I can convert. So that's enough material for more than a year of gaming even without adding any of my own episodes. And that's plenty.

But, still, it would have been nice to have a bit more to play with...