Virtual Grogmeet 2021

Once again I had to skip the Thursday night pub quiz, as that's my home group's game night, so Virtual Grogmeet didn't start for me until the Friday night.

Game 1: Blades in the Dark

My home group played a few weeks of Blades in the Dark a few years back.  (I don't know how long.  Time has lost all meaning.  I just know it was in the Before Times.)  I loved it, but it didn't last very long and we never played it again.  So while the game options for Friday night made it a tough choice, Blades ended up being my top choice.

Having played a Leech in our home game, I wanted to try something different this time, so went for the Hound.  On seeing that my equipment included a trained hunting animal, I considered various options, before concluding that the other party members were correct and it could only be that classic piece of RPG equipment, a Small But Vicious Dog.

With several new and inexperienced players in the group, the GM started us off with a kind of training mission to get used to the mechanics.  We had to deliver a handcart full of brandy to a contact at the docks, and succeeded through a combination of bribery, explosives, and accidentally summoning the ghost of a guard's dead mother.

Then came the heist proper, tracking down a socialite and stealing some stuff from his mansion.  Which we managed to effectively turn into three different heists, as the Leech and the Spider attended a party with fake credentials, the Hound and the Lurk broke in dressed as waiters, and the Whisper used the ghost field to get inside.  Kudos to the GM who managed to keep track of these three different approaches and ultimately reunite us in a comedy moment that saw all of us standing in a line trying to hide behind the Spider.

The Hound and the Lurk had planned to leave the same way we came in (through an open bathroom window) but given that the Leech had managed to poison most of the party guests with laxatives, there was, shall we say, something of a queue?  Still, this did mean that pretty much any exit route was now viable, with most potential witnesses being very much otherwise occupied.

It was great to get another shot at this fantastic game and I really hope I can find more opportunities in the future.

Game 2: Liminal - The Reid Legacy

I originally pitched Bad Blood, my current favourite of my own scenarios, but then noticed the time slots.  Three hours.  Bad Blood takes four hours to play.  Normally, so does The Reid Legacy, but there was a section of that one that I reckoned I could cut without impacting on the game play.  I wasn't sure it was enough to cut out an entire hour, but in the end we only overran by 20 minutes - which wasn't bad, under the circumstances.

There's something that many of us have observed in RPGs over lockdown.  People really enjoy roleplaying doing things like going to the pub.  On this occasion they managed to resist the lure of the pub, but did end up spending some time in a cafe having coffee and cakes.

Other than removing an unnecessary encounter, my other approach to speeding things up was make certain NPCs a bit chattier, meaning certain clues got passed on earlier in the adventure and the characters were able to put the pieces together and get to the final location a lot faster.  It's been an educational experience running with this tighter deadline, and ultimately I think I've got a better adventure out of it.

Game 3: Edge of the Empire

Apparently liking this version of Star Wars more than the WEG d6 version is some kind of grognard heresy, but I've played a bunch of different Star Wars games and FFG and the funky dice is the one I like best.  I wasn't sure what it would be like as a one-shot, as it can be pretty complicated, but by not including the talent trees on the pre-gen characters, the GM managed to remove a lot of the crunch and we could mostly focus on the skill system.  Not something I would have thought of (my first instinct when looking at my character sheet was to look for the talents) but this turns out to be a good way to simplify the game for new players who've already got the weird dice to worry about.

This game served as a good reminder of the benefits of leaning into the cinematics when playing this game.  I played the pilot, and at one point during a chase had the option to either take the safer option of trying to outrun our pursuers or to take the risky option of flying through a narrow gap between some buildings to outmaneovre them.  As I said in the game, what's the point of having a Corellian freighter if you don't at some point fly it vertically through a narrow gap?  So that's what we did.

The Roll20 implementation seems pretty solid for this game, with the only downside being that the GM needs to set the difficulty for dice rolls.  Which is fine under normal circumstances when everything is the same difficulty, but once things get more complicated this can easily lead to situations where the players are rolling before the GM has set the difficulty pool and getting the wrong dice.  While both VTTs I've played Star Wars on handle it well, I think Foundry might just have the edge for this game.

Game 4: Liminal - The Curious Case of the Casket Girls of New Orleans

A rare opportunity to play Liminal myself!  The GM has been talking about this scenario for a while (partly to crowd source for the British part of the adventure) so I was keen to see how it was going to go.  While Liminal is primarily focussed in British myth and folklore, New Orleans turns out to be a great choice if you're going to take the game outside Britain, with a ton of its own folklore that ties in well to the Liminal setting.

The game lasted slightly longer than the intended three hour slot.  Two hours longer, in fact, but fortunately it was the evening slot and none of us needed to be anywhere else.  This was the first time this adventure had been played, so understandably we did quite a few things the GM hadn't anticipated, particularly when it came to interrogation, although of course also because of the aforementioned desire to roleplay going to pubs.  There was no way any of our characters were going to take a trip to New Orleans without trying out the local food.

Hopefully the GM is working on Part 2 of this adventure, because this definitely wasn't a one-shot, and not just because it took five hours to play.  Without giving any plot points away, at the point where the game finished there was clearly a lot that the characters still needed to do, and I hope we'll get the chance to do it some day.

Reflections

There were four games of Liminal run at this convention and only one of them was mine.  Hooray!  More people should run this fantastic game.

There are more games happening this afternoon and evening, but I decided four games was enough this time.  I did tune in for the 'First, Last and Everything' zoom chat this morning though, as this required no effort on my part.

It's looking increasingly like I'm actually going to have to drag myself up to Manchester at some point, which at £70 for the train or three hours plus in the car, is not a particularly appealing prospect.  Clearly we're going to have to make the less northern conventions as exciting as this one.

Terminator Quickstart Reviewed

 The new Terminator RPG is doing a kickstarter that finished today.  The quickstart was available free on DTRPG so a bunch of us thought we'd try it out to decide how much we wanted to pledge.  Let's take a look.

Content

With 43 pages of content, this is a reasonable length for a quickstart.  It's not bookmarked, or clearly divided into chapters or sections, but what you do have is an introduction to the game and rules, a sample adventure, and seven pre-gen characters.  Attempting to break it down any further is something of a challenge, but here goes.

We start with some general information about what an RPG is, what the quickstart is, what the kickstarter is all about, a rather odd inclusion about hacking rules, and something really useful: what dice you need to play it with.  (Several d10s.)

Next comes an overview of characters, explaining stats and skills and what these represent.  It does mention that the full rules will include a much larger skill list - which worries me slightly, given that there's already a pretty long list here.  Then there's traits - an assortment of advantages and disadvantages to add colour to a character.  This is quite brief, only including traits found on the pre-gen characters, and again it's clarified that the full rules will have a much longer list.

So far everything's been pretty clear, but on page 6 we get to rules and mechanics and it's here things don't go so well.  The game uses the same S5S system as SLA Industries, and presumably if you're familiar with that game you're not going to have any problems with this one, but for our group of complete noobs, this section was not well written.

It starts out well by explaining passive skills - you don't always have to roll, if you have a sufficiently high skill and are not under duress.  It covers how to determine target numbers, and then gets onto actual skill rolls.  While we did not find this particularly intuitive, it does provide a number of examples which help clear up any confusion.  It briefly covers the Fate mechanic - basically a small pool of points that can be used for rerolls or to add to rolls.  These get spent after making the roll, which obviously I thoroughly approve of.

There's also a fear mechanic, which makes sense given the nature of the setting.  Terminators are supposed to be scary.  This part isn't particularly clear though - it explains fear ratings at length with some clear tables, but when and how you make a fear roll, and what counts as success, is buried in a paragraph.  Fear then ties into Willpower, which has not previously been mentioned, and it seems like all the interesting effects of fear actually come out when you lose willpower, which can be lost in a number of situations, of which losing fear is just one.

I'm not saying it's a bad mechanic, but trying to dig through it in the context of a quickstart was definitely a challenge, compared to the smooth way that stress and panic work in the Alien RPG.  Not that any of that mattered in the end, given that our characters all rolled so well on every fear roll that we had to assume we were all completely accustomed to encountering terminators.

It also notes that players and directors (once again, god forbid anyone just calls a GM a GM) should try not to get hung up on counting points too much, which given what a crunchy system they've just thrown at us, seems a little out of place.

Page 11 brings us to combat, starting with initiative.  The roll is pretty simple, but then it gets into the declaring of actions, having the slowest initiative go first so that faster initiatives can react to their decisions, and then resolving the actions with the faster initiatives going first.  There's a reason hardly any games do this kind of thing, and in the playtest we immediately threw this part in the bin in favour of the normal acting in order of initiative.  I get that it makes for more tactical combat, but when you're claiming to be a game focussed on the story, that isn't supposed to be a gun-fest, this level of crunch feels entirely unnecessary.

A list of possible combat action is given, which mentions that it's reduced from the full list to keep the quickstart adventure running smoothly, but then goes on to include rules for charging into combat and a movement system that I still don't understand.

Next up is the actual combat rules, covering hand-to-hand combat and ranged combat.  Again, for what's supposed to be a slimmed down rules-lite version for smooth play, there are a lot of examples of modifiers, defensive maneovres, rules for cover and aiming, and firing at engaged targets.  It's not bad, but it's a lot.  And buried within it is the target number for combat skill rolls, which is 10.  It took us a long time to find that.

And then there's damage, which is a whole different subject and once again comes with a stack of modifiers related to margin of success, strength of the user for melee weapons, and rate of fire for ranged weapons.  Again there's a note mentioning that this isn't the full rules, which also includes different types of ammunition.

Armour comes next, and on the face of it is a simple damage reduction.  No problems there.  However, weapons can also inflict armour damage, which reduces the armour's armour resistance.  Once armour has lost half its armour resistance, it halves the damage reduction.  So effectively your armour has hit points as well as you.

At least hit points are fairly simple, with 0 hit points meaning death.  Although of course there are also wounds and conditions and these are further tied into the character's Endurance skill.  Again it's a slimmed down list, and it's not bad, but it's a lot.

Hope points provide a nice cinematic edge, giving characters access to a variety of dramatic feats like making an impossible shot, being extremely brave or brushing off an injury.  They look potentially fun, although I can't find anywhere how many hope points you're supposed to have, and this feels like yet another complication that could have been left out of the quickstart.

And then we come to hacking.

One of the criticisms often levelled at Cyberpunk 2020 is that the netrunner is effectively playing an entirely different game to the rest of the characters, to the point that most GMs won't even let you play them.  At least some editions of Shadowrun apparently suffer from the same problem.  It's clear that making hacking fun is a challenge, when the two giants of the cyberpunk genre both struggled with it.

Of the various efforts to improve matters, Cyberpunk Red still leaves the netrunner somewhat disconnected from the rest of the game, although it's still a significant improvement over 2020.  Carbon 2185, which uses the D&D 5e ruleset, simply recasts the hacker as a wizard with power over electronics, which works well enough in that context.  The Sprawl, using PBTA, has a custom set of moves for hacking but encourages the GM to have this happening parallel to the rest of the action or keep the spotlight moving, which just about works.  This game though...

No.  Hacking mini games are only fun in single player CRPGs.  They were terrible in CP2020 and they're terrible here.

Four or so pages of hacking later, we get onto weapons and gear, for some reason known here as hardware.  This is nicely laid out with a variety of weapon stat blocks with all the information you need.

There's a short section on how to GM (or direct, as it would have it) the game, and then on page 29 we get to the sample adventure.  Thematically it's fine, with a group of resistance fighters having to make their way to a Time Displacement Device and get at least one of them back in time.  In practice I found it didn't really capture the feel of Terminator, not least because there's just so many sodding terminators in it.

Terminators are like daleks.  One is terrifying.  Lots of them is irrelevant.  I also didn't like how fast they're supposed to be.  I don't recall Terminators in the movies being particularly speedy.  What made them scary was their relentlessness.  You could run, but eventually you'd have to rest and all the time it would be catching up with you.  Terminators are persistance hunters like humans, not pursuit predators like cheetahs.

Our GM did his best to play up the horror elements of the scenario, but ultimately this ended up being far more of a comedy game, that we enjoyed in spite of the rules and adventure, not because of it.

Finally we come to the pre-gen characters.  Here the quickstart nails it with a diverse set of characters with interesting backstories who fit well into the Terminator setting.  I would absolutely watch a movie starring this bunch.  I picked Harper, the heavy weapon specialist, and was surprised to find myself with a character using they pronouns.  They had enough personality hooks in their character bio to give me something fun to play up in the scenario, and a solid set of skills.  I'd happily play them again.

The character sheets are largely fine, but fall down in two specific areas.  There's nowhere to put a weapon's stat block, meaning that in combat we were constantly having to refer back to the hardware section for details like damage and rate of fire.  And the skill lists only include the skills the character has ranks in, and doesn't say which attribute its based on, making unskilled rolls unnecessarily complicated as you have to look up in the skills section which attribute to roll instead.

Presentation

The cover is a fantastic picture of a burning terminator, and each page header shows a strip from an image of a terminator, black and white except for the glowing red eyes.  It invokes an unsettling feeling of being watched the whole time, and adds nicely to the mood.  Otherwise, there's minimal art - two full colour images illustrate the sample adventure and the burning terminator is reproduced near the start.  Nothing to complain about here, and it should be reasonable for printing.

The two column layout is pretty standard for the form factor, and is readable on my screen.  Headings and asides are styled to break things up well.  Just a shame the rules section isn't split up better.  Bookmarking would have reduced the amount of time searching for things in the rules, but that's also not present.  Be ready to do a lot of scrolling.

What can I do with it?

You can run the sample adventure.  If you really want to.

More importantly, you can get a very good overview of what the game system is like.  Despite any complaining I might have done above, I do feel like I really know what kind of game this is, and exactly how much I want to spend on the kickstarter, which is the whole reason we decided to try this quickstart out in the first place.  So in that respect, it's absolutely succeeded.  Good work.

Conclusion

As a quickstart, this does its job.  By the end of the game, all of us were confident in selecting what level to back the kickstarter at.  The only things I'd change are to add bookmarking and put the weapon stats on the character sheets.

Pretty much all of my issues here are with the game system itself, which is a crunch-fest worthy of Cyberpunk 2020 at its most ridiculous.  I can't help comparing it to Cyberpunk Red, which still manages to keep a high level of crunch and tactical combat while taking out so much of the complexity that made its predecessor hard to play.

I also can't help comparing it to Alien, which uses its stress mechanic to bring the rising tension in a far more effective way than we experienced here, and also represents its iconic monster in a way that feels true to the source material.

CP Red has demonstrated that you can update extremely crunchy 1990s mechanics to something that works for modern day gamers.  The SLA Industries 2nd edition kickstarter claims to have done the same thing by introducing a new system, but I'm just not seeing it - unless the original SLA Industries was significantly worse.  There are modern features like the fate points, but the system itself still feels straight out of the early 90s.  A solid VTT implementation would certainly reduce the pain, but you shouldn't need a VTT to make a game playable.

I'm looking forward to playing in the Terminator setting, but it won't be with these rules.