Role-Playing Games

Game Day: Fighting SciFi RPG Writer’s Cramp

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We’re well into Episode 5 of our Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic campaign and I’ve got to say I’ve found switching gears from fantasy to science fiction harder than I expected. It’s not that I don’t know science fiction; hell I’ve been reading it ever since I could read. But after a dozen … Read more

Star Wars RPG Roundup: Dawn of Defiance, Rebellion Era Campaign Guide, Order 66

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After seeing several Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition round ups over at RPG Bloggers, I decided that Star Wars: Saga Edition could use a little link love as well. There’s not as much news for Saga Edition as there is for 4E, so expect these digests to be posted once or twice a month. In this round up I look at Wizards of the Coast’s new web articles, a new lightsaber form at Saga-Edition.com, and the latest episode of the Order 66 podcast.

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Role-playing Mechanics: The Third Way

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Recently Chris Youngs at Wizards of the Coast wrote an editorial pointing out that people can role-play in D&D 4th Edition just fine without any rules actually governing said role-playing:

Fourth edition doesn’t include some of the mundane mechanical elements of character building that 3rd Edition did. For example, certain skills (I’m looking at you Craft and Profession) enabled a player to feel like his character had some sort of grounding in the “real world” of the campaign. Odds were good that you never made a Craft or Profession check in your game, but having ranks in that skill made you feel connected to your character’s background. In 4th Edition, those skills are gone. Why? Because we feel like a character’s statistics don’t represent the absolute truth of a character’s story. That’s right — one of the reasons those skills (and other such elements from other editions) are gone is that we felt they hindered roleplaying.

This elicited some “Hear! Hear!”-style posts from gaming blogs:

Getting Ready to Storm MEPACon in Fall 2009

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MepaCon LogoMy gaming group’s making a concerted effort to attend MEPACon this fall. The northeastern Pennsylvania game convention is being held November 13-15 in Scranton, PA (exactly where hasn’t been determined yet).

You can find out more about the con by visiting MEPACon’s home page, Facebook page or by joining the MEPACon Yahoo Group. If you’d like to RSVP, you can sign up at on the Facebook event page

We decided to attend in force while we were at Origins, and it occured to us (well, first Bob, then the rest of us) that MepaCon was an awesome opportunity to run the games we always want to play, but never get a chance. Possible events being kicked around the group right now include a Justice Society of America superheroes game, Stargate SG-1 and G.I. Joe (all powered by Mutants & Masterminds). On the board and card game front, we’re looking at Space Hulk, Race for the Galaxy, and Risk 2210.

Initial Thoughts about HackMaster Basic

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At Origins 2009 I had the pleasure of playing in an Introduction to HackMaster Basic session run by Steve Johansson, one of the designers (Dave Kenzer, another designer, was running the other table). Full disclosure: I’m a staff writer for Knights of the Dinner Table but when it comes to HackMaster I’m as much newbie … Read more

What I bought at Origins 2009

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One of my favorite parts of hitting the big gaming conventions is spending a few hours (or rather, a few days) browsing and shopping in the exhibit hall. Origins 2009 was no different, and while I’m happy to say I didn’t break the bank, I did come back with a goodly pile of product purchased at the show.

I didn’t go into the show expecting to pick up any Savage Worlds books, as our Weird Pulp campaign never really got off the ground, and we haven’t played the game in months. But then I went to the Studio 2 booth, and found the brand new Fantasy Companion supplement for Savage Worlds. Published in the same folio format as the Savage Worlds: Explorers Edition, this book repackages the fantasy species information from the previous hardcover release of the game and folds in a bunch of edges, magic items, and monsters from the various fantasy toolkit PDFs.

I like PDFs, but I’d been hoping that Pinnacle would release the toolkits in a dead tree edition. when I saw the Fantasy Companion on the shelf, I instantly picked it up.

Origins 2009: Day 4

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Saturday began with the North Market waffles that my friend Cory and I had been craving all week. Strawberries and cream topped waffled cosumed, I headed to my Spirit of the Century game.

The game was run by David Moore (@vandermore) of The Gamemaster Show and included Mur Lafferty, Chris Miller of The Secret Lair podcast, and a host of friends from Twitter and Balticon. We spent the last few weeks creating our characters online – which was one of the best character creation sessions I’ve been in – and it was a blast to finally get to see them in action.

We each created 1920s, pulp versions of ourselves, recast as fictional characters. Drawing on my time as a newspaper reporter, I created Clayton Berkshire aka Clayton Jones aka The Constant Sentinel. He was a world famous reporter for the London Times who covered the Great War as a stringer and was so horrified by what he saw that he created the secret identity of the Sentinel. 

Origins 2009: Day 3

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My day started withthe uneven Star Wars event, Betrayal of Darth Revan. Uneven partly because of poor dice rolls and incompetence on our part, and poor adventure design on the part of it’s RPGA authors. It has too many encounters, and they didn’t obey Order 66’s The List, specifically the Rule of Six, which advocates making sure you have good terrain, and diverse opponents spread out to take advantage of said terrain. Perhaps the Order 66 community could take on rebuilding the problem encounters. 

After stopping by the exhibit hall to pick up Six-siders and Spaceships, and taking some time to drool over starship minis,  I headed to my second Star Wars game of the day: The Death of the Star of Agnor. In this New Republic era game I played a force wizard Jedi named Kava Starshade on a diplomatic mission. 

The Star Wars game was sponsored by d20 Radio, the folks behind the Order 66 podcast. It was a good game, involving a pirate attack on a star cruiser. I played the Jedi as a diplomatic, somewhat pacifistic character, using his powers to nullify threats rather than kill them.

I ended the day hanging out with friends David Moore (@vandermore) and half the crew from our Saturday morning Spirit of the Century game). We put the finish touches on our characters and broke out a new game: Traitor.