State of the Planes March 2021

I'm sure like many of you the past year has been...challenging....at best. Last fall I dove headfirst into action figures and DnD, the OSR, and RPGs took a back seat to that new hobby which is where my passion has been directed since then.

I don't want Cross Planes to go away but I don't know if I can go back to anything close to a post every day. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I just am not sure that I have the time to do it.

I have worked at Comic Book World since November 1999 and it has always been the plan that my wife and I would purchase the store from her parents one day. Her parents retired in November and a busy job got busier and since there aren't any in-person Pop Culture Conventions, those people lucky enough to have jobs are spending it locally, so we are busier than ever (and I'm not complaining). On top of that Collectibles have EXPLODED, I was hired during the firs Pokemon boom and at one point my job involved going to Wizard of the Coast's website and ordering Pokemon TCG boosters directly from them for 8 hours a day on a dial up and these days about 1/4 of my day involves finding Pokemon TCG boosters again. I don't know how long it will last but I'm going to enjoy the ride.

The blog isn't going away but it's obvious that what I've had to say on here is different now and I'm trying to figure that out.

I'll be seeing you.

Frustrating RPG Design

I've been interested in RPG designs which often leads me to pick up a PDF of a game just to see how it was designed. I've recently done that with Ruin Master from RiotMind which is a bit of a blend of the OSR and Basic Role-Playing, but there are some places where they seem to pointedly ignore some of the recent innovations to the family of D100 games created by Chaosium's RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu.

Let me reiterate that these complaints are merely based on my opinions and this might be the game you have been waiting your whole life for.

For one thing, many of their bonuses and penalties are multiples of 5 and in my experience, many people are intimidated by double-digit arithmetic so why not keep their penalties (and bonuses) in increments of 10? If you are going to stick with multiples of 5 then why not use a D20 (which I believe they did with Trudavang).

I was also surprised that Ruin Master uses a version of the old Resistance Table which I have seen replaced with a blackjack-style solution where the highest successful roll wins.

Additionally, when casting spells you have to spend Magic Point and roll your Magic skill but receive a -5% to the chance per Magic Point spent. I get the impression that this is a low magic setting, but why require so much math? If you don't want magic to be prevalent don't provide spells we are all familiar with from every edition of DnD. For reference, a person's Magic skill at character creation will be from 40 to 60%.

I completely grok that everyone has specific tastes in their games I just don't see the point of making things so challenging to use Magic and fill the game system with, in my opinion, unnecessary complexity.

Apparently, I'm not Ruin Master's target audience and that's okay. Its a gorgeous book and for the right group an interesting streamlining of The Design Mechanism's Mythras and Chaosium's Magic World and RuneQuest: Glorantha.

The Most Played RPG System

I'm a backer of Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms setting for DnD 5th Edition. I've loved the setting since it was released for DnD 3.0 back in the day and am looking forward to running it under 5E.

Matt Wilson of Privateer Press made this statement in response to a question about why they stopped supporting the Iron Kingdoms RPG with its own unique system, "5e is the most played RPG system in the history of RPGs, and so if we're going to keep exploring and expanding on the Iron Kingdoms."

Do you think that statement is true?

I know 5E is huge, I mean H-U-G-E, but B/X DnD and ADnD 1E were pretty successful too and they've had the benefit of being played since the 70s and been reinvigorated with the OSR in the last decade.

Let me be clear here, I'm not taking Mr. Wilson to task for his statement it simply made me think about the life cycle of various versions of DnD and the inventory numbers. His statement could be completely spot on and I'm sure he has a better chance of having insight from WotC than I do.

I'd love to hear what you think on the subject.

My Quest

My first RPG was Champions which allowed a neophyte like me to build anything I could imagine once I learned the language of the HERO System. However, I still had a wandering eye that led me to Heroes Unlimited, to TSR's Marvel Super Heroes, and on and on. I don't know if I realized it at first, but part of my Gaming ADD was looking for that perfect system. For a long, long time I thought that was what made a long-term campaign work, clear, concise, and unified rules. The OSR would eventually teach me otherwise and I now know that what makes a long-term campaign work is a DM who can stay focused and roll with the punches and a group who buys into the game. That is it, in my opinion.

But I still own a ton of RPGs and I still have a yearning for that "perfect system". I've been a big fan of Pinnacle Entertainment Group since Deadlands was published and when they launched Savage Worlds I thought it would be my answer for all further campaigns. It was, however, not the answer and that is mainly because I prefer Hit Points and it lacks them. It's also not quite as fast for my tastes as it advertises. I love PEG and I adore the idea of SW, but not the execution.

However, when I took SW for a spin about two years ago I picked up Chaosium's Down Darker Trails and I realized how much I love the Basic Role-Playing System that powers Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and the forthcoming Rivers of London RPG. I've been thinking about running a BRP game for the last six months or so, but BRP wasn't exactly what I was looking for.

Meanwhile, I've fallen in love with The Design Mechanisms' Mythras RPG (it was RuneQuest 6th Edition for a while) and I really appreciate how many settings and sourcebooks they publish. As a Chaosium fan the release schedule often leaves a lot to be desired. However, Mythras is more fiddly than I like in my D100 games as I don't care for Strike Ranks or Hit Locations.

On top of all of this is a game engine I've been tinkering with for years and is inspired by Mike Pondsmith's Castle Falkenstein. In that game, there are Ability scores just skills and you default to Average in any Skill you have not assigned otherwise.

What I'm getting too is I took Castle Falkenstein's basic Skill premise, plus a D100 resolution system, and pyramid style Skill allocation system that borrows from the World of Darkness, Hero Wars/HeroQuest/QuestWorlds, Chaosium's Magic World, FATE/FUDGE, and the Mythras Companion.

HEre is the set up. 

Your Hit Points equal 12+2d6.

You assign the following values to your Skills: 80, 70%, two at 60%, two at 50%, four at 45%, and two at 40%. Any Skill you don't have defaults to a 33% chance of success.

I borrow weapons and equipment from BRP, Mythras, or Delta Green.

I started using this to run another Star Wars game. This time the Imperial Navy, now led by Grand Moff Kaine, wants to remove Darth Vader for his failure at Battle of Yavin. The Grand Moff has an elite unit of the Navy comprised of Force-Sensitive operatives and he has been given the blessing to train them and deploy them to hunt down any surviving Jedi or bring in any Force-Sensitives that they become aware.

The Players are that squad and their first assignment was to retrieve Talon Karrde from the prison planet Eisen alive if at all possible.

We've played two sessions and I'm having a blast. For me, the percentile resolution system is darn easy for online play and I truly appreciate it.

I plan on developing and previewing the system further on here.

Stay warm and stay well.

Anxiety & Dragons

If you've been around here long enough you've seen me write about my mental illness--I have General Anxiety Disorder--which means, essentially, my fight or flight goes off a fair bit more than usual and doesn't always need a reason. I've been taking medicine for over 20 years and it makes things a lot better and I'm one of the lucky ones.

My gaming group from 1991 to about 2006 was fairly stable and had up to 11 players at any given time. We were all fairly young and there was a lot of drama--almost constant drama--all of the time. If I'm honest with myself I created the majority of the drama because my mental illness was not being treated nor had it been diagnosed. For various reasons my self-esteem was intertwined with being the group's Game Master and also its "leader"--more like a "group mom" really. As my Anxiety increased my decisions became worse and the drama got worse as well. It was a dark time in my life as I took something I loved and was supposed to be fun and twisted it up.

Things got better after 2006, for a variety of reasons, but much of it has to do with the medicine I was on as it was very, very effective. Not all meds are created equal and everyone is very different in how they interact. 

I have always had Gamer ADD but after starting this medicine it mostly disappeared which allowed me to start this blog and eventually run several long-term campaigns including at levels 1 to 20 DnD 5E one.

Almost two years ago that medicine stopped working--the truth is it worked for about 12 years which is a remarkable amount of time--and while the new medicine is pretty good it doesn't handle the Gamer ADD as well and some of the old feelings have bubbled up.

At my worst, I was both obsessive and paranoid and my fight response was far more dominant than my flight response so I was a raging bitch sometimes. Thankfully, a combination of coping mechanisms and experience let me see the behavior as it starts to bubble up again but it doesn't remove the emotions.

The emotions are recurring because we've just finished an excellent 5E campaign after almost 2 years and I just assumed that I would run next. However, I didn't share my assumption with anyone and another DM did communicate their desire to run. This DM is a great friend and a great DM but a part of me feels hurt because I wasn't asked to run. Obviously, this is an immature response fueled by my mental illness and there is absolutely no real issue here. My group is filled with wonderful and kind people and we have a great time together.

This situation is compounded by the fact that I'm starting a Roll20 5E game and some of the players don't know if they can commit yet but sadly my anxiety tells me that I'm not a good DM and they just don't want to play in my game because they don't like me. Again, these are wonderful and good people involved and there isn't anything sinister about any of their situations.

I'm writing about this because I try to be very open with my mental illness and I'm just letting people know it's okay to talk about it and realize that you can beat it. I've felt fragile and been really low before, to the point that I considered suicide and I just want everyone to know that you are important, you are stronger than your illness, and the world is a better place with you in it. Don't kill yourself, there are good people out there for you, you can be diagnosed, you can be treated, and you are not the exception to recovery. 

My situation probably isn't unique and the best thing I think I can do is to enjoy the new campaign as a player and just be flexible with people's schedules for my Roll20 game.

The Riftbound Keep: Races

Palladium Books' Rifts is always on my mind to one degree or another. I began thinking about a DnD 5E game where the players have to the Keep which is surrounded by the Borderlands--an area where leylines run wild and rifts open and close constantly. It is controlled by the mysterious being known as the Castellan, who offers relative freedom and a path to riches undreamt of as long as you live by the Code: No violence and no thieving within the walls, and to break the code means being petrified and placed within the Forest of Fools that visitors must pass through in order to enter the Keep.

I try, quite often, to convince myself to run Rifts with its own system (I'm not a fan of Savage Worlds because I like Hit Points), but I like 5E and so does my group.

One of the things I would do in this campaign would be to limit the races available.

Humans, Dragonborn, Tortles, Aarakokra, Minotaurs, Shifters, Leonin, Lizardfolk, Tabaxi, Yuan-Ti Pureblood, Kalashtar, Simic Hybrids, Warforged, and Loxodons would be the races I'd greenlight. I'm not saying that other races couldn't be considered this is just that I'd like some unusual choices and I'm a fan of Palladium's TMNT and Other Strangeness and After the Bomb games. For me, Kalashtar are good to represent Mind Melters and Dragonborn are a good option for Dragon Hatchlings and I'd allow the Dragon Wings feat from this Unearthed Arcana.

In terms of other changes to character creation, I'd give every character an extra Feat at 1st level.

The Plague Year

For me, it's become harder to focus on RPG material with so many terrible things occurring within the world, and obviously, the COVID-19 global pandemic was front and center for last year. I've always tried (and failed sometimes) to keep world events, especially politics from this space and I've become so disillusioned this year that I didn't know if I could do that so I took some time away.

As I've written before I have General Anxiety Disorder but I have a good support circle including my GP so I weathered that storm better than I expected.

Our group is still playing and we are starting our final adventure in our Saltmarsh campaign. I'm enjoying being a player and honestly can't wait to get together each week. My monk died and I'm now playing a 16 the level Human Fighter Battle Master. I like the Battle Master but unless you are taking short rests fairly regularly it's a bit underpowered.

I haven't worked on any new products even though I have a couple of ideas, mostly because my wife's parents retired this year and we are in the process of buying their comic and game stores from them. I'm busier than ever and we are always brainstorming new ways to connect with customers.

I need to thank Wizards of the Coast for its Magic: the Gathering products that helped keep us afloat this year, especially some free products that made a huge difference for us. Sadly, I'm not sure they are on the right course for M:tG and I hope I'm proven wrong about that this year.

I got to play DnD 5E, Tiny D6, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Vampire: the Masquerade 5E, and playtested the Fallout 2d20 RPG from Modiphius.

I'm contemplating a couple of games to run online but we'll see what happens.

My intention is to give the blog more attention and I hope I am able to do that.