tcpip | Gencon and Brisbane, Campaign Law

Recently returned from a solid four day's gaming and engaging in related seminars at Gencon Australia in Brisbane. Spent most of my time at various seminars and was impressed and amused by the various presentations by Tracy and Laura Hickman and the insightful comments by

robin_d_laws. It was good to hear from other designers and their perspectives, including of course

stephen_dedman along with quite a number of other Australian freelancers. Somewhere among all this managed to get a the opportunity to play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition which now bares very little resemblance to a roleplaying game in a systematic sense but rather is an very well designed single-unit wargame. Also managed to spend some time playing Feng Shui, watching movies, and visiting stalls.

The Con was also particularly good for

caseopaya as there was a "Living With Diabetes" convention next door for the third and fourth day. The first day was a little surreal with the XXII World Poultry Expo next door with various delegate wandering around with little faux chickens attached to ID cards. Also whilst in Queensland went along to

aromameet on Friday eve and spent time with the ever delightful

drjon,

one_bat and many others including Emily, the six-fingered librarian from Melbourne with turbercolosis (no really, I'm not making this up). On Sunday also caught up with

doomydoombear before she moves to the UK.

Returning from the Con, discovered that the first draft for Campaign Law had been rejected by ICE who have decided that the much of the basic outline was wrong and out-of-date and much of the writing and material was not of high enough quality. I could agree more, although it has hit some of the other designers quite hard with at least three indicating they don't want to work on the project anymore. To me the only really annoying part is the time that has elapsed between submission of the first draft and this response (but I feel fairly confident it wasn't my writing or material they were referring to). So far I am the only one who has indicated that they wish to continue with development. Finally, I must also mention that my review of Mongoose's RuneQuest Deluxe has been published on rpg.net and apparently I've won a prize of some sort at said site for my review of Legend of the Five Rings.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Tracy Hickman was in Australia?
Cool.
I still love the Dragonlance books for all their flaws.

Tracy and Laura Hickman are awesome! They're funny, they have good gaming ideas and they can sing!

I managed to get a small mountain of items signed and watched the new Dragonlance movie; it's for kids but I found it very enjoyable. Even with all the Mormon metaphors scattered throughout.

I saw the DL movie a while back. It sucked.

It was a kid's cartoon. For a kid's flick it wasn't too bad. I mean, it had a plot, it had theme and motif, there was even some character development. None of it was particularly sophisticated, but I found I was able to get into a "child like" mindset of viewing it with an attitude of "this is my first experience of Dragonlance and what fantasy RPGs can do".

I am eager to hear your views on 4th ed.

From my second hand explorations I think the only reason I will own 4th ed is for completeness of my D&D rules collections, although I wouldn't mind playing dungeon through as a once off, just to try.

From what I have seen so far - the Penny Arcade podcast and other reviews - I tend agree with your description of the rules set presenting a tight single unit tactical wargame. I do love my wargames and euros, I play them more than RPG's these days. If I want to play single unit fantastic themed battles, I may as well play Descent, which already does an excellent job, has a campaign mode, and it already comes with all the miniatures.

There was a long thread on BGG discussing classifying 4th ed as a board game.

As a game it plays very well. All characters now have 'something to do' whilst beating up monsters and taking their stuff. All characters also start with a (more than) decent amount of hit points. It's worth playing, but seems very limited in terms of what it can provide in a systematic sense.

The discussion thread is really great, thanks for that.

ICE's Campaign Law???

They're rewriting it again?

Tell me more! What does it take to get involved?

Heh, we've been rewriting it for months. I think I first mentioned it in May :-)

It'll be great to see one of ICE's best products back in print again... I can understand that they really want it to be good and up-to-date.

Are you part of that? I love that game system.
Nearly wrote a module for them once (scheduling conflicts nixed the deal).
Cool beans.

~Wylde~

I'm sort of part of it. I'm writing sections of the new Campaign Law and Rolemaster Companion VI was nearly entirely all mine.

The core game system is fine, the scope could sometimes be a little narrow (all adventuring classes) and sometimes the bookeeping during character creation and development could be annoying - and some of Arms Law was very broken.

But the magic system was quite evocative and well organised, and Campaign Law was an incredible 22 pages.

No kidding. The Campaign Law rules were one of the very first in the rpg genre to give truly valuable guidelines for GMs' world-building efforts. Gotta love that. The magic system has inspired much of my own, and I (re)introduced an adapted version of Arms Law/Claw Law into my current campaign after a decade+ of not using it, simply because it so aptly described the detailed combat elements I wanted to capture in my newest game incarnation.

I hope you kick some major butt with your work in this project. I look forward to any revisions of the system, or even just streamlining of it. Always open to food for thought in that regard.

Thanks for those helpful reviews of RQ and L5R: exactly what I needed to know. And ...

bares very little resemblance to a roleplaying game in a systematic sense but rather is an very well designed single-unit wargame

Bingo. Those are exactly the words I've been looking for.

(Though I have to admit, it's pretty crafty how the game makes CHA a useful attribute in combat.)

Thanks for the kind comments, I'm glad I could provide the necessary information.

It is indeed very clever and makes a fair bit of stylistic sense to assign much of the Warlock's damage to CHA. :-)

I'm not really sure about fourth edition. It may be a great game, but in the end I think that it's a bigger jump in some of the mechanics than it was from 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition, and I think that flavourwise they've changed a number of things in their implicit setting that as far as I can see have always been a part of Dungeons & Dragons*.

Good luck with the second draft of Campaign Law!

*Please note that I haven't properly played with the basic boxed sets and with 1st Ed though I have at least browsed through them.

I think that it's a bigger jump in some of the mechanics than it was from 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition

That's a pretty brave claim but I think you're right.

Also I remember now that the product launch wasn't for D&D4e it was for Dashin Dungeons.. which I didn't get to try out.

To tell the truth when I first started leafing through the PH I couldn't even believe that it was Dungeons & Dragons that I was looking at. It was only after a while that the D&D side of it started swimming into focus for me and I could actually kind of believe that it was.

Bad luck with the first draft, good luck with the next. Persistence pays off in the end :-).

Well, there was a bit of misunderstanding between the writers and the reviewers on the process, but that's neither here nor there at the moment. Although I can't say much at the moment on the subject in a public forum, the second incarnation of the beast is looking very good.

Re the new D&D version: you liken it to good single unit wargame. Yet supposedly overall it serves the purpose of narrative gaming as well. I understand that transplanting its encounter dynamics more thoroughly unto a wargaming grid (essentially) makes it look and play more like a wargame, but do you think this will cause it to lose its narrative gameability? I.e., do you think the one attribute excludes the other?

~W~

The two attributes don't exclude one another , but it's hard to have them occur at the same time in a game session. Possibly impossible.

The narrative aspect must be differentiated from narrativism (this is something that

strangedave beat into my head many years ago). Any roleplaying game can have a narrative insofar there is a sequence of events and even with an introduction, a period of rising tension, a climax and and a denouement.

Narrativism on the other hand is a systematic means for a player to grab hold of the story direction and put it under their own influence by introducing plot devices and so forth. If I'm going to be particularly broad, I would also include simulations of character personality as a "horizon" between narrative and simulation, in which case the closest thing that D&D had was the old alignment system.

But in D&D4e alignment doesn't mean anything in a systematic sense. It is entirely for colour and nothing else.

Gencon and Brisbane, Campaign Law

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Narrow-focused question, here

Re: Narrow-focused question, here