Samantha Patri's Blog

Let's talk about this a bit. One of our favourite games as far as setting is concerned, is Exalted . You play larger than life, epic heroes in a super high fantasy world, who can do the impossible, casually. The thing is, there's different tiers of Exalted, who draw their power from different sources, and each type of Exalt has different castes, which focus on different things. The game allows you to build your character how you want - what skills to pick, how you want to set your attributes, what powers you get, what backgrounds, the whole nine yards. You have so many options, so many ways to build your character to be just what you want. Some examples? An Abyssal Exalted who can command you to drop to your knees, tear out your heart, and turn you into her thrall (while keeping you alive). A Solar Exalt who wears power armour, and pilots a self-aware mecha, and in a week turn any normal mob of people into an elite fighting force. A Sidereal Exalt who can leap into the way of a...

Superheroes We're a big fan of the superhero genre - the telling of stories not too dissimilar to the myths of the past. The idea of characters, larger than life, performing great deeds of heroism and villainy, of human pathos and hubris. Not so big a fan of the 'perpetually bound to the same, unchanging characters, for generations' thing -- a big part of this would be to allow the characters to age, hand off to the next generation, and keep going, but that's more an 'us problem'. Also not a fan of the 'no hero is allowed to be happy' thing that keeps going on, and the big glowing 'reset everything to zero' button. Anyway. The one thing we do find difficult is trying to find a good tabletop roleplaying game for playing heroes. The first one we ever encountered was the Classic Marvel Super Heroes RPG (or what we like to call the FASERIP system after the attributes for the game). The game is a relic of its times - everything is charts, and random d...

  A Review      I've had the luxury of picking up pretty much every one of the current e20 books by Renegade Studios -- including GI Joe, Transformers, Power Rangers, and My Little Pony. Because of the campaign I ran, I'll mainly focus on the first three, but you can expect that my comments would hold true for MLP as well. For this review I'll be using short form from time to time: GIJ: GI Joe, TF: Transformers: PR: Power Rangers, MLP: My Little Pony, and CRB for 'Core Rulebook'.     So where to begin.     Renegade Studios is using what they call the Essence 20 or 'e20' engine. Each of the game books uses the same engine, allowing for ease of play and of bringing one's characters from one setting to another (or fusing the settings together). Because of the order the books came out (I believe PR, TF, then GIJ) there are some slight bits of difference in the mechanics as Renegade got more comfortable with the engine and had a few more months or more...

Bear with me, this is 100% my opinion, and isn't necessarily going to work at your table. Everyone has their own desires at the table, and everyone's table is different -- and if you play a different game with me, it doesn't mean you're playing it wrong . If you're having fun, that's all that matters. Your table, your rules. And with that out of the way. If I'm going to have a new game master -- one I'm not familiar with (and it's been a long time since that's happened) the first thing I ask is this: do you fudge at your table. And if the answer is 'yes', then I walk away. I don't begrudge the GM -- I hope they find good players and have a blast -- but it's not for me.  And here's why: Agency. To me, agency involves the following: freedom of choice in character creation within the bounds of the campaign setting and rules. My attributes, abilities, feats, gear, etc, are all decisions I make. During the game, agency involves bei...

   Do you give your players a 'warning shot' when they're being ambushed or sniped? "An arrow strikes the tree inches from your head" kind of thing - the thing you see in movies and TV shows, alerting the hero they're in imminent danger so they can dive for cover. We're not fans, really. It's plot armour that the PCs don't need. If they've made an enemy that's going to use ambush tactics, or the creatures they're going to face are known for ambush tactics - then the ambush tactics should have a chance to actually succeed. The PCs get their Perception Checks (if it makes sense).  The enemy get their Stealth rolls. The attack roll is made to hit the PCs.  All of this is fair . If it drops the PC, so be it - the PC drops. And there's nothing wrong with the PCs doing the same.  PC rolls stealth, enemy rolls perception, attack roll is made.  If the PC one-shots the BBEG because of this? So be it, the BBEG drops. Is it 'anticlimactic...

Our playing group likes to open most encounters with parlay. It just happens to be their thing. If it is at all possible, the party tries to prevent combat - they'll talk things out, try to negotiate, look for common ground, and even win over enemies if there's an opportunity. The excuse that D&D is mostly a 'combat' game doesn't hold water. Yes, most of the rulebook is on how to hurt your opponents - but that doesn't mean that's the best path (or first option) people should take. There's social skills for a reason - so why not use them? "Well, I don't want the BBEG to be defeated with a single roll." Then think of a way to draw it out. How many successes are needed? Each success prevents combat for a few rounds, as the PCs try to work on the opponent's resolve. But it goes beyond this. In 1st edition Mummy (World of Darkness), they discussed what a character with higher-than-human social charms could do (in D&D, we'd go wit...

There's a lot of talk going on right now about WotC's, new "OGL 1.1". First and foremost, something to consider. WotC isn't going to be able to enforce 1.1. They can't. 1.0a already says it can't be revoked if someone's following the rules that are laid out for it. That, right there, protects people using the original OGL. Second, if 1.1 is enforceable, this gives WotC the rights to Lord of the Rings , Diablo , World of Warcraft , Wheel of Time , Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser , Mutants and Masterminds , Star Wars , DC Comics, and Wild Cards . That's a whole lot of companies that would be righteously pissed off with Hasbro. It would most likely lead to a class-action lawsuit. And the courts, when it comes to the kind of contracts you see here, lean in favour of the people signing the contract, and not the people who wrote it up, when there's a grey zone. Not that there's a grey zone. With all that being said, WotC needs a smack upside the head....

This is from an essay we wrote back in 2012, when Shadowrun 5e was first announced. A lot of this still holds true to this day. We're going to tweak it slightly, but for the most part it holds up well. Shadowrun 5e  is slated to come out this summer.  I decided to make a wish list about what I would like to see in it, and I was (not entirely) surprised to see people wanting a reversion back to the first edition "feel" of mirrorshades, cyberdecks, and the removal of the wireless world from the setting. Having just finished writing an essay on science fiction, this debate was already fresh in my mind. Good science fiction uses the setting as a framework to reflect aspects of the modern world and raise questions, while near science fiction will usually extrapolate from where we are to where people think we will go. Shadowrun , I feel, does this very well, which is why it is one of my favourite roleplaying games. When dealing with many science fiction games, I tend to think ...

The topic of how D&Done  ( yes, we know it's called 'one D&D' but it is supposed to be the final edition ) is handling "race" has come up a few times lately, and there is a lot of mixed reactions about how it's being done. We compare this to the new Advanced 5th Edition , which we feel is not a bad way of doing things. To wit - your race is not your culture, or nation, or anything of the sort. It's a heritage and should deal only with your genetic traits, and nothing else.  In A5e you choose your heritage, and then you choose your origin - your background, what you've done and where you've done it. Essentially, your homeland. This is what give you skills and ability score modifiers. And honestly, we feel this is a much better way to do it. Consider.  You're playing a dwarf. You were raised among, say, halflings. Let's look at dwarves in basic 5e. Dwarven Combat Training : You have proficiency with the battleaxe, handaxe, light hamm...

 "Just increase the difficulty" This is what we hear from time to time when it comes to competent characters. The big idea is that, well, you want to challenge the character, so you put in things with a higher difficulty for that character to overcome. Let's throw in a theoretical. Let's say you have a 5th level character in 5e who can't roll below 14 on sleight of hand checks and to pick locks and disarm traps , and once per short rest also gets to roll with advantage on such checks. More often than not, the character's going to be fortunate and succeed at such checks.  Note that, in 5e, picking locks is DC 15.  No less, and very, very rarely more. This means the character will only ever fail to pick most locks with a roll of 1, and can usually get through most traps as well. Alright.  So, the game master wants the lock picker to be challenged, and raises most of the DCs for picking locks and removing traps to 25, meaning our rogue is going to need a 11+ to...

In which we discuss the history of AD&D through to Pathfinder and its impact on what one could play over time. In the early days of D&D, there was no rhyme or reason about how strong one thing might be against another. In the early days you could play a 'young' balor (demon) as part of the PC party. Later, with D&D, you could play were dragons, faeries, or other creatures of all sorts (BECM), and by the time AD&D came around there were half-ogres, drow, and a variety of other creatures of varying power. With 2nd edition AD&D, things became a bit more formalized. Level Adjustment was added to the mix, increasing the effective level of a character by their race. If you were strong enough, you were treated as one or two levels higher to determine how much XP you needed to level. This carried on into 3rd edition AD&D, which allowed players to play stronger characters at the cost of slower level growth. Then we get into Pathfinder. Here, level adjustment was ...

Sorry, had to slip an Exalted reference in the title. 😉 How much is too much when it comes to sourcebooks? Our simple answer is this: It takes as many books as is needed to cover the major groups within the game and the choices provided in the core rulebook. The rulebook is expected to give broad strokes of the setting and what's available, as well as the rules for playing the game. If it covered everything , it'd be thousands of pages long. For example: Legend of the Five Rings      - Clan          - How do the different Clans stand apart from each other? What are their beliefs and traditions? What makes them unique, culturally?      - Family          - How does one Family stand apart from the others? What are the duties of the families, what's expected of them?      - Dojo          - What is each dojo, what do they teach, what special techniques do each have? In L5R...

Picture It:  Calgary, 1984. (With apologies to Sophia) I was given the D&D Red Box for my 12th birthday in March.  In April, I got my first adventure, Palace of the Silver Princess , and the April 1984 edition of Dragon Magazine. I'd not run a game yet. I had no idea how to run a game, or even to play, since I'd never been in a game and nobody around me had access to game books. I didn't know what a power game was, or min-maxing, or being a munchkin. I didn't know what a Monty Haul campaign was until I saw the term in the Dragon Magazine - and even then all I knew was 'it's a powerful character'. Two years later, I was running games at school. There was a group who played AD&D, and I'd later dub it the illegal D&D group , because the characters had stats above 18, levels in the 100s, and access to Death Stars, laser weapons, and chromatic dragon familiars.  (Yeah, small, 5-headed dragon familiars of Tiamat). I didn't play with that group,...