L5R Roleplaing Launches

Monday we finally got back into the swing of roleplaying after a few month break since the end of our Scion game.  I host a group of five players who come out to try out new stories.  I try to keep the scope of them small and inevitably fail at every turn.

This time around we are going to be playing Legend of the Five Rings.  Three of my players know the world well and the other two are pretty new to it.  Personally, I know little of the new storylines, but I used to love playing in the old stories back in the day.  When 2E, d20, and 3E were out for Legend of the Five Rings, I really did not like the system that much.  Second changed needlessly.  There’s nothing more to be said about d20 other than the fact it was d20 which doesn’t fit the feel of Rokugan I like to go for.  Third edition was a step back in the right direction, but was far too complicated.  Fourth was the best edition I’ve seen since the original one, taking a lot of cues from what made the first edition work and adding in the few changes I really liked from other editions.  So far in reading through it, the only thing I dislike about it is the dueling system, which was better in first edition.  As such I’ll be using the old version for my game for that particular piece.

Legend of the Five Rings also launches a first for our gaming group: the first time I have run a game for them where I knew the rules better than they do.  My past two games, Alpha/Omega and Scion, ended up with my players telling me how the game worked while I ran the story.  This time I have a lot more experience roleplaying in this world and with this system than they do.  As a GM, it’s a liberating experience.  I no longer feel like my players are pulling one over on me, or are going to get the better of me based on knowing the rules more than I do.  I can match what they do without having to rely on them telling me how to do it.

So for the story I’m starting everyone out in the time period I know best: pre-Scorpion Clan Coup.  The characters are all coming from the Crane clan and make quite an eclectic group.  I have a courtier-turned-bushi when he was pulled out of training to be a courtier at the behest of a powerful Crane samurai for unknown reasons.  I have a Mantis who was hostaged to the Crane after a failed war almost a decade prior who now finds himself without a true home in either place.  I have his yojimbo, a peasant who did the nigh-impossible of being raised from peasantry to the samurai caste and is finding it far different than the idealistic way he used to see it.  I have a fourth, yet unknown character (one of my players was called into work at the last minute and missed the session).  And I have a duelist/philosopher whose family all committed seppuku to erase a stain they had caused, and the stain itself has been stricken from all records.  She was spared as her influential sensei spoke for her and now wonders what happened to her family.

The story starts with the characters all sent to Toshi Ranbo to meet with a Dragon delegation.  The Crane and Lion are at war, and it is heating up.  The Crane have been trying to economically strangle the Lion by imposing prohibitive tariffs on Lion goods traveling through their lands.  The Dragon had a poor harvest the previous year and a harsh winter, and now are within months of having the peasantry starve.  They need food, and the Lion have a surplus to sell.  The influx of koku would give the Lion an edge in the war.  The Crane have no food of their own to part with, at least not in the quantity that the Dragon need.  If the Dragon do not get their food from the Lion, they may well enter the war on the side of the Lion to force the Crane to let the food cross their borders.

Going from a much more action/adventure type game to a high political one is making a nice change.  Already one of the characters has had some minor dealings with a Scorpion courtier, another has managed to gather some potential minor blackmail material on a few people in the court, and a third has gotten into a sparring match and impressed the general of the Crane military in the city.

In the end, it’s great to be back in roleplaying again.  Looking forward to where the story takes us.

My Warmachine Weekend and Thoughts on Malifaux

At Gencon I found myself at a strange place.  I am certainly a huge fan of Wyrd, but was disappointed with their releases.  Expecting a fair chunk more given the initial estimates of 70-80% of their line, I was hoping for more than just Jakob to play with.

At the same time, Privateer Press had some very interesting products.  I hadn’t been following them closely, so I didn’t know much of what would be out.  I knew Level 7 would be there, as would the IK RPG.  I managed to get the former, and got to play the latter.

As a result of my waning interest in Wyrd’s products, and my being impressed with Privateer Press’s, I started thinking I wanted to play some more Warmachine.  Conveniently, our local Press Ganger was running an event this past weekend for smaller-scale Warmachine armies (35 points) to just come to the store and play a lot.  I dusted off my Cygnar and brought it out to the table.

 

I managed to get three games in, each one quite different from the others.  I’m not going to go through a blow-by-blow of the games (mostly because I don’t know the rules well enough to know what was happening) but I’ll give some overall general impressions.

The first thing I noticed when pulling out a list in my first game was that the game is a lot bigger than I remember it.  I haven’t played the game really since back in MK1 days.  I used to have a hard time putting together a list because I found myself having to cut and get my list down under the points.  Now I found myself tossing in more stuff because I had plenty of space in my list size.

Another thing I quickly learned was that I knew very little about some basic rules.  Unit cohesion, squad leaders, morale checks all worked a bit differently than before.  It wasn’t really a big deal – my opponents were pretty open to helping me out with my gaps in knowledge, but I could tell just how much my decisions were hampered by things I didn’t know.

Two of my games ended very similarly.  In one of them, my opponent popped his feat, rushed his models through my army without me being able to stop him, and plowed into my caster.  Luck was on my side and I managed to survive with one wound remaining, but I wasn’t able to turn the tables on him the next turn and he finished me off.  The other game, I had my wall of jacks in between me and my opponent, but he managed to get his warlock jumping over my jacks, engaged with my caster, and took me from full-to-dead in one hit, then moved back to safety to face other opponents.

Both of the games were good lessons, reminding me how little I knew about the game anymore.  My brain is currently set to a Malifaux-style of play rather than a Warmachine style of play.  I found myself looking at the board and trying to control area on the board rather than looking directly for an assassination run.  I got caught flat-footed and died both times due to it.

My other game went a bit differently.  I found myself on the wrong side of a very good opponent who spent the game locking me down but keeping me alive so he could win the game and get the most objective points for the day’s event.  I learned a bit there, and managed to nearly deliver a killing blow earlier on in the game (one wound short, just like had been done to me), but pretty quickly he had me in a position where I could not do anything back.

At the end of the day, I had to look back at my games and consider what my plan was with Warmachine.  I recognize that most of my failings came from not knowing the rules and models, neither the ones I was playing with nor the ones I was playing against.  I came to the question of whether I would want to spend the time filling in those gaps.

I would enjoy continuing Warmachine, I don’t doubt.  I would go through a period of painful defeats while I learned what things did on the board, but I don’t doubt I would end up a pretty good Warmachine player once more.

But I have already spent the time learning the same from Malifaux, a game I already do enjoy.

An interesting point I found was that what I hear as complaints about Malifaux – that there are abilities that are too powerful or the game is too broken – were things I could see someone else saying about Warmachine having walked away with my experiences.  In all three games, a warcaster/warlock was killed or knocked down to 1 life from full in a single round.  In one of the games, I was effectively locked down to the point where the last half-hour of the game felt as frustrating as I’m sure some early Malifaux games feel for others.

What I came away with was that there was very little difference between the two games in that area.  Both games have super-powered abilities and models.  That’s kinda the point of them.  It’s the other areas that you have to determine which of the two you favor.

Warmachine is based around setting up full turns of all your models working together.  It has a single prize that you need to keep your eye on.  The groups are larger and terrain is less important.

Malifaux requires you to spend more time reacting to the changing battle since your opponent almost always has a chance to react to your combinations.  You have to keep track of a half dozen different objectives throughout the game.  There are fewer models on the table.

Both require an investment of time and patience to learn to play well.  Both are great games.

I’ve spent the time learning Malifaux, and I still enjoy it.  I prefer the size and objectives of Malifaux to those of Warmachine.  My brief weekend with Warmachine was fun, but I’m ready to put it back on the shelf and re-devote myself to Malifaux.

Board Games on Tuesday

Last Tuesday came and went and I was able to make it out for a night.  Between my wife’s birthday last week and our anniversary next week, finding time to game is a bit tough in September.

Since I’m still on the post-Gencon gaming cycle, I packed my car with some of the new board games I had and hit the road.  I had Mage Wars, hoping to get a game in with Dan, and I brought Level 7, Zombicide, and Flashpoint.

When I arrived, I quickly had a group of four people (led by Skill-less Brian) who wanted to give Level 7 a try, so we started there.  Since none of the other three had played it yet, I dropped us back to the second mission.  The first mission is alright, but it’s a pretty watered-down mission just designed to show you how the game works.  The second level was where things started getting fun.

In this mission, the power to the elevators had been cut off.  We had to find three generators, activate them, and then book it back to the elevator before things went to hell.  Of course while we were doing this, Clones and Guards would start swarming, trying to find us.  At the beginning of the mission, the Guards and Clones would play nice with each other, but if the Clones ever found a knocked down Guard, they would kill him.  And if the Guards ever outnumbered the Clones in a space, they would kill the Clones.  Then all hell would break loose.

We started this game out and I tried to influence the other players as little as possible, just to see how things would go differently.  The last time I had played, the players were very careful about avoiding the Threat, but in this game, we had quickly dropped our available Threat Pool from 5 down to 2.  At that point, we were all very careful about what we did and managed not to trigger Lockdown from pulling too much Threat.

Additionally, this time we were far more careful about setting up our vents.  By the end of the mission, we could jump along almost the entire board through the vents.  This proved instrumental in our escape, as we were able to find the three control panels and turn the elevator back on, then jump in the vent and drop back near the elevator at the end of the game.  However, it was also a huge danger earlier in the game as the Clones could also travel through the vents and would often drop on whoever had the most fear and kill them off quick.  Before we had gone around the turn cycle a half dozen times, we already had three of us die.

The game stalled in the middle as we struggled to get away from the Clones and bring our fear under control, but the Guards moved in and helped us out with the Clones.  Two of us were headed in one direction, luring the Clones and Guards away while the other two of us were exploring fast and furious for the last panels.  Finally we reached them and jumped into the vents to make our way back to the front.  The Guards that had spawned cleared out chasing the Clones and we jumped into the elevators, moving on to the next level.

After that, Dan had finished his game of Warmachine.  There were three of us ready for a game (Dan, Skill-less Brian and me) so we played Zombicide with more-correct rules.  I say “more” because we still did not play it completely correctly, though we came much closer.

We tried mission one, where we have to find rice, canned food, and water, and we have to find five different objective points on the board.  We each racked up our characters and started playing.  Dan took to exploring while I took to clearing out zombies and Brian split between the two early on.  With all the zombies in the buildings, we became swarmed quickly, especially with an early Abomination hitting the table.  It wasn’t long before I was surrounded by a swarm of zombies (already in the Orange experience level) and killed.

I started laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing was and one of us made the comment of how much the difficult ramped up from 4 characters down to 3, since you have less activations before the zombies go again.  Which made us think… we were supposed to have more characters?  Sure enough, the rules for three players were two characters each, so I pulled up a second character and joined the fight.  Brian was quickly overwhelmed and killed so he took a second character.  Then I was killed again, as was he, while Dan kept skating for each of the objectives.

Without support, he got mobbed by about 80 walkers and killed.  His new character lasted one more turn after that.

Had we started the game with all six characters on the board at once, it would have been a much different battle.

Still, two very fun games, both of which I am ready to pull out again.  I have to say I am very pleased with my Gencon haul this time around.  Level 7 was an excellent purchase, and Zombicide arriving from the Kickstarter was a great boon.  Add in Flashpoint, Mage Wars, and Timber Peak and I’m calling this the Gencon that had the best stuff.  If I had managed to get the IK RPG, and if Wyrd had the Misaki or McHammish box out, I would be in a huge dilemma of what I wanted to play most right now.  But until 10 Thunders becomes more varied to play, and until the IK RPG comes out, I’m on a pretty big board game frenzy.

Mage Wars - A First Try

 

I spent some time over the weekend reading the Mage Wars rules and getting the spellbooks set up with the suggested starting books for the Wizard and the Beastmaster.  My wife and I were looking for a new game to play after work yesterday and she surprised me by suggesting Mage Wars.  She’s not usually keen on learning whole new rulesets, so I figured this may be a window of opportunity and we pulled out the game.

So a little background about what Mage Wars is – it seems to me to be a combination board game/card game.  You each play a different Mage (there are currently four options: the controlling Wizard, the healing Priestess, the swarming Beast Master, and the attacking Warlock), create a spellbook from all the spells the game comes with (and there are a ton of spells), and then go back and forth casting spells, summoning creatures, and fighting until one mage is defeated.

Sound like Magic?  It sure did to me.

Of course, I always liked Magic.  It just got too expensive to keep up with.  The idea of mages slinging spells, summoning creatures, enchanting the battlefield, etc. appeals to me.  The collectable nature of Magic cards does not.  Mage Wars resolves that nicely by giving me the opportunity to customize my selection of spells and tailor my style of play based on the type of mage I selected.

The rules to the game are actually pretty easy.  Every turn you increase your mana (magic-casting resource) by your current Channel value.  You look through your spellbook and pick out two spells you want to cast, be they creature summons, attack spells, walls, enchantments, etc.

Every creature (including your mage) gets an activation.  You get a wooden token to represent whether a creature has activated.  If it’s starburst side up, the creature can activate.  Once you activate them, flip it to starburst side down.   On your activation, you can either do a full-round action or move and do a quick action (which could be a weaker attack, a quickcast spell if you are a mage, or another move).  Additionally, once per turn your mage can use a quickcast action.  So if you’re about to activate a creature and want to give it a buff, your mage can interrupt with a quickcast of the buff and the creature can move in for the attack.  This wouldn’t take your mage’s activation yet.

When your mage does activate, he behaves like all the other creatures except that he can also cast those spells in your hand.  So he could use a full-round spell (like summoning a creature into his space) or he could move and use a quick spell.  With the free quickcast he gets for the turn, he can get both spells rolling each turn.

The game gets more complex as the individual creatures, spells, and mages come in.  There are a lot of loaded keywords, special cases, and new rules on the cards.  To me it felt more like playing a Warmachine or Malifaux type game where the rule system was fairly standard, but the models themselves brought the complexity.  The spells didn’t have quite as many special rules as those games tend to have on them, but there were a lot more spells being thrown about.

The game feels like it’s going to be much more an investment to play than I expected.  Not in terms of monetary investment – for what you get it’s actually not bad.  But it feels more like a game that you can’t play casually.  If you play it, you play it.  I can see a lot of gaming areas taking the approach of this becoming a game with its own group that plays it pretty consistently.  You create your own spellbook based on the rules, hone it, refine it, and keep going.  In that way it feels like a CCG – you come with your mage and deck and give the game a whirl.  One person might be trying a creature rush while another might take the same mage and play a slow attrition build.  But the game itself does not seem like it could take place in a rotation of other board games to just pull out from time to time.

The other piece that makes it less likely to hit a rotation with my current group of board gamers is that it is only a two-player game.  There are variations where you can play more than two mages at a time, but generally they require the purchase of a second copy of the game so you have enough spells for the other two mages, and so you have enough room to make sure people aren’t walking all over each other.

My wife and I tried a quick game just to understand the rules.  She took the Beast Master and I took the Wizard.  The game started out slowly as we both had to take a good 5-10 minutes reading our spellbook to try to figure out what spells we would want to take.  I imagine that time will shrink once we know what’s available.  But the turns themselves went pretty quick after that.  Move and attack.  Shoot my bow.  Cast my spell.  Okay, we’re done?  Now back to the spellbook for a while.

We called the game early, but we both had a great time and are looking forward to the next match.  There are things we learned from our game that would change how we play next time.  Early on I was building up a strong defense and my wife tried a few weaker creatures and sent them in, but they got chewed up.  I pressed the advance and she figured out how to raise tanglevines on my two advance creatures to bypass them and attack my strong archer.  I fought her off again, and it wasn’t until she was almost out of creatures to cast that she dipped into some of the enhancing spells that the Beast Master’s spellbook provided.  Then, in a single turn, she killed off two of my big creatures, pressed to where my Wizard was, and put me in a spot of bother.

Meanwhile, I spent a lot more time building up defenses for my Wizard than I probably needed.  By the time I was pushing the offense to Laura, I had a high Armor value to reduce wounds coming in, a Defense that could stop one attack a turn, a barrier that would wound anyone coming in, and an enchantment that would bounce an attack back on the attacker once.  If I had been more aggressive early, I could have been teleporting my creatures into Laura’s Beast Master and forcing him back.

Overall, a great match though, and we’re looking forward to the next one.  This game will likely make it out to game nights to see if I can find an opponent for a while.