House Rule: Farfallans (Half-Bothans) for Star Wars d20 Saga

Who's still thinking about Star Wars? I am, and having recently picked up a well-loved copy of the Saga Edition Core Rulebook, I'm thinking I'll probably run it instead of d20 Revised. (Half skill ranks... ugh...) Luckily my fixation on fauns (faunxation?) can be quickly remedied by the fact that this little-seen species shows up in the works formerly known as the Expanded Universe; this is my take on making them playable. Enjoy!

Star Wars Miniatures By Species, Episode V

Follow-up to this post, and it only took me two months! Must be something I ate.

Anyway, same deal as last time, except I'll be covering the playable alien species included in The Star Wars Sourcebook. The overall list is rather similar to that in the later d20 rules, though obviously it doesn't have any species that were invented for the prequels; a few omissions are a bit strange, though. But nowhere near as strange as what the W.O.T.C. decided to do with some of their miniatures...

Quick and dirty diagram I made for one of my friends. As cool
as that Darth Talon mini is, no way am I paying $90 for it.

Star Wars Miniatures, By Species

So, a little project I've been working on today. I'm a huge, huge fan of the old WOTC Star Wars Miniatures, not only as a collector and an RPG nerd, but as someone who's grown to like the Miniatures Game with which all of these are compatible.

Everyone knows that one of the coolest things about Star Wars is the almost infinite variety of alien species. The minis do a pretty good job of this, with even a few of the old Expanded Universe types getting a figure here and there - although some of them really got the short end of the stick, as we'll see later. But finding them is not always easy when they use a character's name instead of the species name, hence my little project.

This is gonna be a list of all the WOTC minis of each species, as I'm able to find them. For now, I'll just be listing the three alien species from the core rules of the old D6 RPG: Ewoks, Mon Calamari, and Wookiees. Future posts should (should) contain more.

(shamelessly stolen from here, don't blast me Syd)

Silver Lake, Star Wars, & Where I've Been

This post will probably take a lot of time to write... My gaming this year has been fairly limited. The one consistent thing I've been doing, however, is running The Silver Lake Chronicle, a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign (running on the Introductory Kit rules) that just had its "season finale" a little over a week ago. I've been writing the session summaries and posting them on the blog whenever I have the time and energy; go ahead and take a look if you're interested.

Running this "game" (really almost entirely RP-focused, as one might find in a MUD) has been interesting in a few ways. First, every session after the second has been entirely online, using Discord's text chat and a very nice dice-rolling bot called Dice Maiden. The disadvantages to this are the greater difficulty in conveying tone, and the amount of time that is eaten up just with writing responses (even with my reasonably fast typing speed); the advantages are the greater ease of "assembling" everyone (no transportation or parking issues), and the ability to fiddle with my descriptions and dialogue until they're just right.

Since the season finale, I've been planning two separate games: an online D&D game using For Gold & Glory (the AD&D 2nd Edition retroclone), and a face-to-face Star Wars game using the original West End Games rules... along with some nice vintage Wizards of the Coast prepainted miniatures that can range to absurdly low prices here. Apologies for the low quality of my cell phone camera, but here are the minis I've gotten so far (the only one I already had was the Wookiee soldier).

So darn cute! :3

Finally, I've applied for graduate school (library science!), I'm planning to move in with my girlfriends sometime in the next year, and I've tried to become more active in spiritual and political spaces; the latter two are somewhat outside the scope of this blog, so I won't go into detail about them here. What I will mention is that I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with how much control G**gle has over my data, so don't be surprised if I make a post sometime before moving explaining my plans for future blogging and journaling. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment if you need to get in touch with me. That's all for now!

Fixing Fifth Edition

It's looking more and more likely that my options for local RPG play will be severely curtailed unless I can suck it up and get over the worst of my issues with D&D 5th Edition. I've suspected this for a while now, but as everyone gets increasingly busy with schooling and work (except me - I got downsized this past Friday), I may have to take a few hesitant steps into the hypodermic-needle-strewn oceanfront that is public gaming.

I've said before that the ultimate core of 5e isn't one that I have issues with; I cut my teeth on Pathfinder, and after several years of AD&D 2nd Edition I can see why certain design decisions were made. The main problem is the guff that has accumulated from years of poor thinking and bad influences (not all of which can be blamed on 4e), and the way that completely green players have had their assumptions set and their preferences shaped by bad refereeing passing itself off as good. There are a few relatively easy things that I could do to limit this, and make a game more to my taste that can still be played in by those who have already sunk $150 or more into the currently supported product line.

Wet Paint

So over two years ago, I thought that I would probably never paint miniatures. But it's 2018 now - the Year of the Dog! - and I have slowly started painting some miniatures.

Well, a miniature. My FLGS started stocking the unpainted plastic D&D miniatures by WizKids, and they stocked a lot of them. At $5 for a two-pack, including bases, it's a pretty good deal. An even bigger advantage for me is that they already have primer applied, so they're ready to paint. Faced with these facts, I decided that I might as well give miniature painting another shot.

My first purchase was the female Halfling Rogue two-pack; I really like the top figure, and it is a pretty good representation of my gnome character Roywyn. One can criticize the WOTC for any number of things, but the scale of these miniatures is a lot less inflated than that of HeroForge or even Reaper's Bones minis.

I'd imagine Roywyn likes to let her hair down now and then.

Since I try to avoid carrying around large amounts of spending money, I only buy a couple of items at a time. Currently, I only have three pots of paint, all of which are Citadel paints: the Layer paints Kislev Flesh and Warpstone Glow, and the Base paint Mournfang Brown. I also bought the Human Monk two-pack today, partly because Mournfang Brown can be used for both Roywyn's leather armor, and a darker flesh-tone for my monk character Cavidge.

So far it's going pretty well, although I can't post any pictures until I get my old digital camera out from wherever it's hiding. The pre-priming on the figure saves me both time and money, as I'm not going to dive into the wacky world of primer until I figure out whether I like the painting enough to start working on my Bones and metal figures. I know that I'm not buying any more unpainted minis until I get at least this one finished... but now that I have a day job, pre-painted plastic figures aren't too expensive for an occasional purchase.

Original Thought

So, I just read this post by Alexis of The Tao of D&D. Before reading my post here, you should probably read that one (and some of the preceding ones dealing with credibility) if you haven't already. (I was going to just respond on the post itself, but this turned into something way too long-winded for a comment.)

It's an insightful post, but what jumped out at me was a comment made by Archon:

"Amongst the people I know; half of them would think the worse of you for being a league GM. It shows an inability to have an original thought. Ever."

As soon as I read this, I remembered a small conversation I had in the chat server with members of my alma mater's tabletop gaming club - a club that I helped found, but which took very little time to mutate into something I'm not a fan of. Case in point: a great deal of rules discussion was occurring back in September about some minutiae with class powers in (what else?) D&D 5th Edition. This particular instance of bafflement happened back in September of last year, and - because I'm a hopeful Library & Information Sciences student with strong document-consciousness - I copied the text of the conversation for later use.

 The issue was whether a particular action could be done at the same time as another action, or whether they conflicted with one another. The rules as written in the book - like so many of the rules in 5e - are unclear and incomplete. If you're a Referee, you probably have a good idea of what you'd do should such an issue come up at your table: make a ruling of your own (with input from the players) and just use that ruling from now on. The ruling becomes a new rule once it's accepted.

Now, the Dungeon Masters of the club are trying to make a decision for the large "West Marches" style game that includes multiple parties and multiple DMs, so I can understand why they'd have more discussion about this than would occur at a single table. What baffled me was that they apparently didn't trust themselves to make that decision, and chose to delay their final verdict until after they got a response on Twitter from one of the current developers of 5th Edition. At this point, I interjected:

"Since this Westmarches campaign is confined to [University], you as [club officer] could just make a decision and put it in the document (ideally with input from other Westmarches DMs)."

One of the club officers in charge of keeping the club campaign in order made a decision... that they stated would only be valid until clarification arrived from WOTC (in the form of a Sage Advice article). Another club officer confirmed that they had sent the question to the developer. My response:

"Right, but I don't see why a 'house rule' can't just be applied. Since this isn't a game organized/run by the WOTC, it doesn't necessarily have to fall to them to make an 'official' statement on it.

"I get that there's some desire for rules consistency between different groups, but this seems like a fairly minor issue that could easily be adapted to if a player were to join who had previously played in a different campaign."

The officer responsible for the temporary decision insisted that "[a]n official ruling is necessary to avoid confusion in the future and have an absolute ruling."

Umm... why?

I'm not going to post the entirety of the officer's (quite lengthy) response, because they have not given express written permission for me to do so - and the club server may or may not be considered a public space where statements can be on official record. Basically, they stated that the club was relying on "official" rulings to prevent confusion; this statement was repeated several times, with only slightly different wording.

Apparently it's too confusing for some people if they go to a game run by one DM, and the rules are slightly different than the rules used by another DM. Sure, they might use the exact same selection of races, classes, combat mechanics, skill lists, dice-roll fudging, and horrible halfling art... but if it takes both an action and a bonus action to emerge from hiding, that'll make it too hard to adapt!

As I think of it more and more, Archon's comment seems right on the money. If the current club officers' lengthy discussion about getting official WOTC support wasn't enough of a smoke signal, the insistence on only using WOTC-approved rules should have finally tipped me off as to their "inability to have an original thought."

The best part about this? The club officer then asked me to "be patient and abide by the current ruling". Apparently they failed to notice that I have never played a single one of the club's "West Marches" game sessions, nor do I intend to.

Trimming the Fat II: The Trimmening

Here's the promised followup to my previous post. Last time, I pruned a few extraneous classes, and hung question marks over many more; today, I'll be looking at the typical selection of character races. As with the last post, to qualify here, the race in question must have appeared in the core rules of at least two "editions" of D&D.

Dwarves and Halflings

(First playable appearance: Men & Magic, 1974)

Dwarves have long been a staple of D&D, due to their ubiquity in Tolkien's Middle-Earth stories - major party members in The Hobbit, less so (at least directly) in The Lord of the Rings. These roles have been reversed in the latter, where four of the central characters are hobbits. These two races have often been grouped into similar categories; in original D&D (pre-Supplements), they are both restricted to the fighter class, while AD&D (both 1e and 2e) allow them to be thieves in addition. (1e is unusual in that halflings cannot be clerics, but halfling NPCs are allowed to be druids!)

The reason that I group these two together is as follows: I feel that having both as distinct species is a bit redundant. Short people, sometimes with long beards (including female dwarves, at least according to Gygax), who can't usually be wizards? In my campaign, I've long considered merging the two into a single species, with the subraces having different characteristics; perhaps it's the "Tallfellow" or "Stout" dwarves who are longer in leg and beard.

Elves

(First playable appearance: Men & Magic, 1974)

Elves are pretty much essential components of any high-fantasy game. They look and act similarly enough to humans that the two can conceivably adventure together, but are just different enough that a Referee with any creativity can put vast oceans between the two species just under the surface. (This is another reason that the Vulcans on Star Trek tend to pop up as major characters; in fact, one can easily draw parallels between the two). And if these are different species, not just different ethnicities of humans, then it makes sense that they would have some classes that are harder (or flat-out impossible) for them to pursue. An acquaintance pointed out that, logically, they should also be able to do things that humans can't do, and this is why I think multi-classing (with a few limits) is a good way to differentiate demihumans from humans.

Gnomes

(First playable appearance: Players Handbook, 1978)

Oh jeez... If dwarves and halflings as separate species seems superfluous to me, gnomes are about as useful as a third thumb. Rarely do I see anyone play them; in fact, I've only encountered two gnome player characters in any fantasy RPG I've run or played (one of which is my own PC, Roywyn Raulnor). Considering Tolkien's influence, it seems fairly obvious that their origin lies in Tom Bombadil, but it doesn't really seem necessary to have yet another species of short height and long beards.

"I gnow thee gnot, old man."
(model from Battle for Middle-Earth II)

The main point of interest is that, in AD&D (both editions), gnomes are the only demihuman race that can be illusionists; I concede that my own gnome PC, if ported over to AD&D from her current home of 5e, would be a multi-classed illusionist/thief. But I say just let the combined dwarf/halfling species be illusionists, and free up the gname of "gnome" for fey creatures more resembling those seen on American lawns.

Half-elves

(First playable appearance: Supplement I: Greyhawk, 1975)

Half-elves do technically appear in The Lord of the Rings. Elrond is called "Half-elven", although his parentage has little actual impact on his mortality or the way he is viewed by others (at least from what I read - I read all of The Fellowship of the Ring, but couldn't get through more than about a quarter of The Two Towers). He chose to identify with his elven ancestors, and so he's considered an elf.

If a player character wants to be a "half-elf", that's fine by me, but they have to choose whether that means they will identify as an elf or a human; there's no real reason for such a strong level of incomplete dominance that they're considered a separate race. I get the feeling that the desire for half-elves is largely based on min-maxing, as half-elves get more classes to choose from than elves, but still have some special abilities. In that cast, why not just let elves have more classes, and drop the mechanical differences of half-elves?

Half-orcs

(First playable appearance: Players Handbook, 1978)

Same here as for half-elves. If a Referee wants to let players be a potentially "monstrous" species, just remove the status of full orcs as mindless, faceless evil minions, and let players be orcs. The games in the Elder Scrolls series, starting with Morrowind, did this with great success; orcs are integrated into society for the most part, and their fierce reputation serves them well as soldiers.

Dragonborn and Tieflings

(First playable appearance: Player's Handbook, 2008)

I'm inclined to just say "no". Tieflings have a bit more history, appearing initially in the Planescape setting for AD&D 2e, but dragonborn have no excuse aside from Wizards of the Coast trying to cash in on the humanoid races popular in World of Warcraft. If someone wants to play a dragon-like character, there were already half-dragons for over ten years by the time 4e came out! Also, as Preston Selby pointed out here:

"I just think there's a sort of breakdown in the game when a player can say their character is a half-dragon with a horny lizard-head and a breath weapon, and there is an expectation that the character can walk into a town and an inn with the humans and the halflings and everyone will act like this is totally normal. At that point, the game has seriously damaged its potential for weirdness and wonderment."

At that point, discrimination by non-fire-breathing humans and dwarves isn't necessarily based on irrational, prejudicial fears (although there's probably an element of that); it's a very rational fear that the dragonborn might sneeze too hard and burn down your house!

I realize that this gets into the same thorny area as X-Men (as much of a prick as he was, Senator Kelly was right when he referred to powerful mutant teenagers as "weapons in our schools"). This is why fantasy and sci-fi can only use metaphors for racial and religious discrimination up to a point.

Ack, back on topic: I don't think dragonborn should be a "standard" species in the kind of games I like to run. As always, these are just my opinion, not some kind of holy pronouncement.

The Tally

Playable: Dwarves (including Gnomes and Halflings), Elves, Humans, possibly Orcs

"Break Out Your Wallet and Buy About 30 Games"

This snippet is originally from a comment I was going to make on this post by Alexis; I excised it because it started to get a bit long for a comment. Still, it perfectly sums up my feelings towards the current "market".

Even worse, there's this almost universal fixation on the current, inaccurately-numbered "edition" over virtually anything else; I keep telling my sympathetic friends that what the hobby really needs is gamers who can sit still for five minutes without chasing after the nearest shiny object. These same players, rather than using things that are quite visible within the books they already own (and that see little use as is - gnomes, anyone?) feel compelled to buy the latest expensive hardcover that is literally a repackaging of something that came out 20 or 30 years ago.

A lot to unpack here. Recently, the tabletop club at the university of which I am an alumnus was all abuzz about the live stream of Wizards of the Coast's presentations at some industry convention or other. Much excitement about this stuff that brought back some character or other from 2nd Edition.

Me? I realized several years ago that it's not necessary to keep buying things for a game in order to continue playing it. At least, that's how a game should be designed. From what I understand, this is still largely true with 5th Edition; after buying the Player's Handbook, and then the Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual if you're a DM, you're good to go. (The original intent was to have this also be true of the free Basic Rules PDFs, but evidently those are less useful to DMs than they should be.)

And yet, the other club people were SO FREAKING EXCITED that they might get an official gunslinger class. As I've repeatedly stated to several friends, why is there a need for a separate gunslinger class? If the DM is one to include firearms in their campaign (for the record, I'm not), then why not just have the gunslinger be a ranger and have the character buy a gun? Or, in 2e, even a plain old fighter - who could take advantage of weapon specialization to have a further bonus to hit with their gunshots?

Even worse than this was one 5e game I played in where, apparently, fighters didn't exist... but gunslingers did. Because a cast piece of steel with moving mechanical parts and explosive powder is more common than a stick. (I really need to write a full post on this yahoo's game soon.)

One GM whose Pathfinder game I played in for a while was in the habit of bringing their rulebooks with them in a milk crate. And apparently Paizo has rewritten part of the dictionary and included it in one of those tomes, since the very definition of "core" has apparently changed in Pathfinder. Core classes are not just the ones included in the Core Rulebook, no ma'am; core classes also include the ones from the Advanced Class Guide, Advanced Player's Guide, Occult Adventures, et cetera. It baffles me that anyone would voluntarily subject themselves - and worse, their players - to this level of rules bloat.

If the original D&D rules were released today, they would be seen as mysteriously backwards. Not only with how primitive some of the mechanics are, or the poor art, or the laughable lack of organization. I can imagine a modern "conspicuous consumer" type gamer looking at it:

"You mean that's it? Just three booklets in a box, and you don't have to buy anything else? How are you supposed to keep your players' interest, if you're not constantly adding new shiny books and buying more elaborate dice?"

Someone else would then step in and try to explain the value of, you know, running a game that people actually want to keep coming back to because they're having fun, but without a literal sales pitch hawking TSR's reheated leftovers, the CC gamer would quickly lose interest.

There is enough stuff here already. There are more RPGs on the market, past and present, than any one person or group would ever be able to play. I read an interview with Bob Dylan where he said something similar about music, and I tend to agree. RPGs are an even more special case; a huge portion of the product is pre-written modules and settings, which back in the old days were not as widely used. Instead, the DM would actually write their own material.

Now, the simple fact of a DM creating their own campaign from scratch - rather than just reading boxed text out of a hardcover book with boring artwork* - is bizarre to people like those that make up my gaming club. They refer to such strangeness as "homebrew". They spent over one hundred dollars on tools allowing them to make their own games, and rather than do so, they continue to pay other people $50 at a time to make the games for them. And not just once or twice, so they can see how such a thing might be done; they have to invent a label to "other" those weirdos who actually sit down, pay attention, and put in the necessary work to make something of their own.

It's depressing, really.

*The artwork for most of the 5e books is not bad from a technical perspective, but it's so boring. Curse of Strahd and Tales from the Yawning Portal both just have a person sitting or standing there, Dungeonology (yeah, not technically a rulebook, but a lot of people in the club have bought it) shows a picture of a monster that most characters will not meet until much later in the game, and all of the core books except for the Monster Manual fail to give an impression of what actually happens in the game. Compare them to the original Players Handbook (or even the Rules Cyclopedia) and you'll see what I mean.

AD&D 1e PHB Available on Print-on-Demand

Well, it looks like the AD&D (1st edition) Players Handbook is now officially back in print. I believe the DMG and MM are also available in this fashion.

It's currently on sale, so if you want a high-quality PDF along with the book, I'd grab it soon.

I'm sorely tempted to pick one of these up, as I don't yet own the PHB. If I do, I'll write up a post about it, comparing the physical quality to my genuinely premium-reprinted DMG.

Happy gaming!

W is for Wizards of the Coast

(Apologies in advance for getting this post out late. I'll be posting the "X" post later today, so don't worry that I've started shirking my bloggerly responsibilities.)

Some people - past and present - seem to have heralded it as the end of an era when TSR was bought out by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. It's true that AD&D 2nd Edition would soon be on its way out, and the 3rd Edition would make some changes that not everyone liked, but it's not hard to realize that these changes were almost entirely evolutionary.

Grid combat? Six-second rounds? Attacks of opportunity? Those all originated (in official AD&D products, at least) in the Player's Option supplemental rulebooks, specifically Combat and Tactics. The Option books came out in 1995 - at the same time as the revision of AD&D2, and two years before the buyout.

I love this cover; it should have been the cover
to the revised PHB, since it shows actual combat
instead of just busting down a door!

Besides, Wizards of the Coast did keep AD&D alive for several years. They released a booklet allowing for the conversion of AD&D characters to the new 3rd Edition rules (which was slightly iffy, but a nice gesture). They released a number of supplemental books, such as The Scarlet Brotherhood (meant for Greyhawk, but could be used for any setting) which updated and revised the Assassin and Monk classes for the new rules. And, they released an adventure module (The Apocalypse Stone) which allowed DMs to end their 2nd Edition campaigns in a blaze of worlds-ending glory.

Alexis of The Tao of D&D, in his most recent podcast, suggested that the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie would never have happened if TSR had still been around as an actual company. I feel that he's both right and wrong on this point. On the one hand, the particular movie that was made is not very good, and it does a poor job of conveying what a good D&D campaign is like (although I just ran the Fast Play Game based on the movie last night, and I succeeded in introducing a complete neophyte to the hobby with great interest). On the other hand, the movie that might have been made in the 1980s - with Gygax's direct involvement - would have been far, far worse, as I read in this article from The Escapist.

True, WotC is responsible for the debacle that is 4th Edition... but that particular cluster of failure is more the fault of Hasbro, who pushed WotC to make a new version of the game (and probably forced them to make it as MMOG-like as possible) after buying them out in turn. WotC is certainly trying to do right by those who have remained loyal to the D&D "brand", and lure people back who jumped ship for Pathfinder (or even earlier cases). The premium reprints are no longer in print to my knowledge, but they can still easily be found relatively cheaply online.*

I salute you, Wizards. You done good.

* Except for the boxed set of OD&D, which (typical of collector's items) has skyrocketed to twice the list price. If I wasn't willing to pay $149.99 USD for a set, who the hell thinks I'll pay $280?