Showing posts with label roleplaying games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label roleplaying games. Show all posts

Monday, July 03, 2023

Geekerati Video: Chatting with Alan Bahr About Swords of Meropis and Tabletop Role Playing Games

 Alan Bahr is publisher and lead designer for Gallant Knight Games and his company recently launched a crowdfunding campaign for a storytelling game called Swords of Meropis. Alan was inspired by Sword & Sandals films like Jason and the Argonauts and wanted to make a game that captured the feel of those classic fantasy tales.

In this interview, I chat with Bahr about the inspiration behind Swords of Meropis and the basic mechanics underlying this storytelling focused role playing game. Bahr is no stranger when it comes to designing games focusing more on interaction than on tactical combat, but this is one of his first designs that fully utilizes what I call a “player focused” storytelling approach.

It’s an approach that really came into design focus with Better Games’ series of Free Style Role Play games in the 1990s. While there were some earlier games that incorporated storytelling elements, like Greg Stafford’s inspired Prince Valiant Story-Telling Game (originally published in 1989), the Free Style Role Play system games like Conrad’s Fantasy, Where Fools Dare to Tread, and Good Guys Finish Last by Better Games really pushed the boundaries of player agency and narrative focus in a way that would be immediately recognizable to a player of Apocalypse World and other modern storytelling focused games. Better Games were a major contributor in the Southern California gaming scene in the 1990s and their ideas were ahead of their time.

Just take a look at this character sheet for their horror game Where Fools Dare to Tread.

Image

Since this is a starting character, there are no numbers on the sheet except for the task resolution chart. As the character gained experience, the only numbers you would see would be bonuses, such as a +1, to the skills. I’ll be doing a deeper dive into the mechanics of Better Games’ Where Fools Dare to Tread in my extended analysis of Candela Obscura by the Critical Role team, but you can easily see how cutting edge this game was mechanically.

Alan and I don’t discuss Better Games in detail, but it is a game in the same vein as Alan’s design for Swords of Meropis. The focus is on player agency and storytelling, but with mechanics that allow for solo gaming as well as troupe based play.

Check out the conversation. We talk about a lot more than his upcoming game and our discussion ventures into how while we often hear and see role playing game play presented as art, we don’t often enough think about game design as art. Just as live streaming performances and home games are moments of theatrical art, so too is good game design an example of artifice.

Take the time to watch and/or listen and please make sure to share if you enjoyed the discussion.


Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Miniature Games I Wish I'd Developed Further: Disney's Frostlanders



Starting with Field of Glory in 2008, and continuing with the excellent Bolt Action in 2012 Osprey Publishing has published a number of high quality rules for use with miniatures in a wide variety of genre. This multi-genre approach to miniature wargaming is best highlighted in the series of blue spined paperback digest books (Little Blue Books? LBB) they began publishing in 2012. This series started with the Dux Bellorum “Historical” Arthurian rules and has included a number of excellent games like In Her Majesty's Name, A Fistful of Kung Fu, or Black Ops: Tactical Espionage Wargaming.

Building on the success of the LBBs, they released the first edition of the Frostgrave fantasy miniature skirmish game in 2015. A couple of years later, they streamlined and clarified the rules with a second edition.

Like many of Osprey's offerings, Frostgrave has an easy to learn system that is highly flexible and moves quickly. The focus of the rules are on casual fun and not on tournament play. In some ways, this is a similar approach to the one that Games Workshop has with their smaller minigame offshoots of Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Age of Sigmar such as Space Marine Adventures or Blitz Bowl, only cheaper and more ecumenical with regards to which miniatures can be used.

Unlike Games Workshop’s current Brandon Sandersonesque epic fantasy game Age of Sigmar, Frostgrave is firmly entrenched in longstanding and traditional fantasy tropes. Frostgrave shares many thematic elements with Games Workshop's classic Mordheim game, but is much easier to learn is more focused on story than Mordheim was when it was first released. Though it has some advancement rules, again similar to Mordheim, in Frostgrave those advancements are limited to a few characters in your warband which minimizes bookkeeping from session to session. Frostgrave is so easy to learn that it inspired me to begin creating a derivative game that I can use to play with my 7 year old twin daughters History and Mystery. Inspired by James August Walls’s many Google+ posts about gaming with his family, I began designing a mashup of Disney Infinity and Skylanders to play with my twin daughters.

The game never quite got finished and I thought I would take it back up again. We still have a ton of Disney Infinity and Skylanders figures around the house and since both of those games are unsupported by their designers, I’d love to put those wonderful figures to good use. I even designed a couple of potential logos for use in my home game back in the day.

As easy as the rules for Frostgrave are to learn, they do have a couple of "fiddley-bits" that might have made things a little complex for playing with my daughters. For example, in the Frostgrave rules as written it is possible to hit an opponent and not injure them and most rolls in the game are contested rolls. By and large, I am not a fan of contested rolls. I understand their utility in competitive games, but I plan on running this game more like an RPG than a competitive wargame. So I want to move away from having contested rules as much as possible and use a Monte Cook and Numenera inspired mechanic where the players to all the rolling. Additionally, Osprey has not published a fan license that states what we as fans are and are not allowed to do with their rules, so I've decided to use a rules set inspired by the actual Frostgrave rules.

So here are the beginnings of the simple rules I came up with and which I want to get feedback on to expand. I’m happy to change themes later so that these can become the basis for something more, but I’d love to have all of you pitch in on the development with your thoughts.

1) All die rolls are made with a d12.


2) Turns follow the following pattern.
            a) Roll for Initiative.
            b) Hero Phase
            c) Ally Phase
            d) Villain Phase

3) Player Characters are rated in the following areas:

MOVEMENT -- Min (4)/Max(10)

MELEE -- Min(-2)/Max(+4)

RANGED -- Min(-2)/Max(+4)

RESISTANCE -- Min(0)/Max(5)

MENTAL RESISTANCE - Min(0)/Max(+4)

 HEALTH -- Min(8)/Max(20)

4) Villains are rated in the same statistics, but their numbers are 5 higher for all values 
     other than Health and serve as difficulty numbers the players must roll better than.
5) On a player's turn, the player may move and take 1 action. That action may be an
    attack, a power activation, or another movement action.
6) When a player attacks a Villain, the player rolls 1d12 and adds their relevant statistic
   (melee in hand to hand and ranged for ranged attacks). They then add their statistic to that value. If that value is greater than the Villain's equivalent statistic, the Villain has been hit.
7) On a successful hit, subtract a Villain's Resistance from the total and what remains is the amount of Health lost.
8) If a character is "prone" then it takes half of their movement to get up.
9) To activate a power, the player rolls 1d12 and compares it to the activation score of
     the power. If it is higher than the score, the power is activated.
10) When a Villain attacks a Hero or Ally, the Player rolls a Melee or Ranged test. If the roll is higher than the Villain's value in that area the attack misses.
11) Villain powers activate in the same manner as Player powers. This is one of the few
      rolls the Game Master will make.

I've only done stats for a couple of characters, but I have a feeling that this will be fun. What are your thoughts?

All icons used in this post were made by Lorc. Available on http://game-icons.net

Monday, June 12, 2023

A Conversation with Steven Schend about Super Hero Role Playing Games

 


A while back Geoff Engelstein wrote a 2-part series on his GameTek newsletter about game balance. The discussion primarily focused on different types of balance in table top board games, but it inspired me to think about the different types of balance in table top role playing games and how that focus has moved around over the years. I’m in the process of organizing my thoughts and doing a lot of background reading. This reading has ranged from Glen Blacow’s article in Different Worlds #10 and Robin Laws’ Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering and includes a lot of additional reading in rpg game design theory.

The tl;dr version of my thoughts is that table top role playing games have a number of types of game balance that ought to be considered when designing the game and that these kinds of balance tend to line up with different styles of play. The most obvious type of game balance is “combat balance” where the various kinds of characters are balanced mechanically with regards to their combat capabilities. You can see the evolution of the importance of this kind of balance in D&D from one edition to the next. Earlier editions had tremendous imbalance in this category, but more recent versions have much more “balanced” classes in combat. The first real step in this direction was when D&D 3rd edition gave Wizards proficiency with the light and heavy crossbow. This gave Wizards much more effectiveness in combat and much more to do in combat situations.

This was a break from D&D’s traditional balance focus. Prior to 3rd edition, the main thrust of balance between character classes had been an “activity” balance. John Eric Holmes, the author/editor of the first D&D Basic Set, discussed the vitality of this kind of balance in his book Fantasy Role Playing Games when he discussed how D&D’s game balance was expressly designed to promote moral behavior.

I’ll save further discussion of this topic for later, but I mention this because these thoughts were all in the background when I sat down with game designer Steven Schend to talk about super hero role playing games. I’ve got a deep love of super hero role playing games, and at one time could say I owned every game in publication, and Steven worked on the old Marvel FASERIP system. In this YouTube chat we talk about a lot of different elements of super hero rpgs, but one thing I mentioned a number of times was “role” balance. Super hero rpgs have a number of design decisions to make with regards to balance, and one is to abandon combat balance and focus on activity or role balance. One of the best, and Steven’s personal favorite (FASERIP), does exactly that.

Watch the video. Like and subscribe and feel free to comment on what we missed. We missed a lot, so I’ll be wanting to chat more about super hero rpgs in the future.


Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Just in Time for Your Holiday Themed Role Playing Games, it's Shadow of the Krampus

Four years ago I posted this little adventure for those of you who want to add a little of the Season into your gaming.

I am a big fan of running seasonal adventures for my regular gaming group. Though my group hasn't played as regularly this year as they have in the past, I was inspired by Robert J. Schwalb's dark fantasy roleplaying game Shadow of the Demon Lord to write an adventure for this season. For the past few years, I've written and reshared adventures featuring Cthulhu Claus (based on my wife Jody Lindke's illustrations for an old Kickstarter) or the V'sori (evil aliens in the Necessary Evil setting for Savage Worlds), but this year I decided to feature Krampus -- that most devilish of Santa's helpers. While Krampus might be a bit played out for some, having gained mainstream notoriety, I'm still a big fan of the character and I have the pleasure of knowing an artist who has been participating in Krampuslaufen long before it was trendy to do so and Bill Rude's Krampus costume is amazing as is the fact that he can get even small children to pose with his horrifying costume.


Bill Rude is a talented artist and you can look at a variety of his projects over at his 7 Hells: The Retro Art of Bill Rude website.

Illustration Copyright Jody Lindke 2016  

In this mini-adventure, the PCs are passing through the town of Nesbitt-Hill during one of their other adventures. You can use the map below to represent the portion of the foothills of the Iron Peaks immediately south of the Zauberspitz with Nesbitt-Hill being the northern-most community on the map and Tower number 3 representing the once great Beacon Fortress.

Shadow of the Krampus is a Novice (though not a "just now Novice") adventure for Shadow of the Demon Lord with a post-Christmas theme. 

The town of Nesbitt-Hill is a vital stop for wanderers and miners who brave the dangers of the Iron Peaks in search of adventure or riches. For years the town has been a peaceful refuge, seemingly immune from the spread of the Demon Lord's Shadow. For even as the Shadow has spread, the town of Nesbitt-Hill remains a spark of light an happiness in an otherwise dark and desperate world.

But that changed last night. Historically, the Winter Solstice has been a time of celebration when the townsfolk of Nesbitt-Hill memorialize the the Solstice King and his champion Krampus. For it is this duo who has protected the town since the Battle of Zauberspitz where the Solstice King and Krampus defeated a horde of the Demon Lord's servants, or at least that is what the stories say. The stories also say that Krampus steals children who misbehave and returns them at the Spring Equinox after the darkness has been purged from the children's souls. If it is true that Krampus takes children and eventually brings them back, why is it that Krampus has taken no children for twenty years? Why does Mistress Oetzel swear she saw Krampus take adults this Winter Solstice? And why were these adults among the most generous citizens of Nesbitt-Hill? Has Krampus returned, but as a servant of the Demon Lord? Or is something else afoot?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rxemivrin1vvt34/Shadow%20of%20the%20Krampus.pdf?dl=0



With the exception of the map depicting the area of the Iron Peaks I refer to as the Gronwald, an area that lies in the shadow of the Zauberspitz, all of the maps were drawn by Dyson Logos and were taken from his Commercial Maps webpage. According to the page, Dyson has released these images under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. If I have used any images that are not covered by this license, I will be happy to remove them.

The cover image of "Shadow of the Krampus?" was illustrated by Bill Rude, who was kind enough to give me permission to use it. Please visit his website and consider purchasing some of his art.

The other image is the "survival map" from Robert J Schwalb's playing aids page for Shadow of the Demon Lord. I am using it with the intention of it being fair use, but if Mr. Schwalb deems my use inappropriate I will be happy to remove it. This adventure requires the use of the Shadow of the Demon Lord rule book since all monster statistics, with the exception of Krampus, are located within the pages of that "vile" tome. Krampus was designed using rules from the Of Monstrous Mien supplement. It is highly recommended that you also own Hunger in the Void and Terrible Beauty to add details around the edges of this adventure.

The cartoon illustrations in the module are the work of my talented wife Jody Lindke. I included "rpg humor" cartoons because they remind me of the cartoons in the old AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide and Dragon Magazine.

I hope you enjoy the adventure.

Sunday, December 12, 2021

How Not to Present/Market Your RPG: Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition


 Edition wars have been around for a long time in role playing games and have affected a wide variety of role playing IPs. TSR experienced a major edition war regarding Advanced Dungeons & Dragons* when they released the 2nd edition of the game*. Players complained about the removal of Demons and Devils from the monster manuals and critiqued a number of the rules. At the time, the company was often referred to as T$R. They weren't alone though. GDW has experienced a number of edition wars over various Traveller* rules sets, with the original "Classic Traveller" rules set coming out as the still dominant setting and style. Games like 2300 AD* and MegaTraveller* were excellent, but they didn't click with the audience the way one might hope. Even Champions had a bit of an edition war with the release of their 6th edition rules* set. The 5th edition of Champions* expanded the player base and had a number of excellent sourcebooks and supplements, It also marked a return to the base mechanics after a FUSION version called Champions New Millenium had its own edition war. The game had hit the telos of its initial design, so any new rules set would have to make significant changes. It did and that split the fan base. For the record, my favorite version of the rules is 4th edition*, but I own all of them and think they are all very good.

When a fan base is divided, it can lead to a reduction in sales and open up the market to competitors. That's one of the reasons that many companies have taken a careful tack when releasing a new game or a new edition. Paizo and Wizards of the Coast opened up the playtesting of new editions to the public in order to incorporate the fan base in the design process for the Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition respectively.

The point of all this prologue is to say that when 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons was released, edition wars were nothing new in gaming and they were something that any marketing and design team should have been aware of and should have been seeking to combat. Instead, they made what I consider to be a couple of major errors. The first was in the physical layout of the rulebooks and the balance of mechanics and background material presented within them. The second, and much worse, is that they attacked their consumer base and disparaged their own rules sets. They made a "this new edition is better and all the older ones sucked" pitch. Needless to say, this was not a wise choice. I'm leaving out the third possible error, tying the game to a digital platform that never manifested, because that involves a very unforeseeable murder/suicide.

Let me return to what I consider to be the first error in the presentation by looking at the differences between how 3rd edition characters and 4th edition characters where presented to players in the books. Let's have a look at the first page of a 3rd edition character class, the Cleric. Don't worry about what the actual content of the mechanics is, rather look at how things are presented. There is a ton of background and explanatory text, both for what a Cleric is and what their abilities are. Yes, there's a lot of content there and it's wordy. That might be intimidating to some, but it is filled with rich information.

The Cleric for 3rd Edition D&D
 

Contrast this with the 4th Edition Cleric. Once again, it's not the actual mechanics I'm asking you to examine. Look at the layout. Where we have only one "spreadsheet cut and paste" in the 3rd edition presentation, we have four or five in the 4th edition layout. In some ways, it's a cleaner layout. It's more approachable, but once you start looking at the ability outputs it becomes very much like reading spreadsheet outputs and less like reading abilities. The presentation is mechanics focused, almost as if they intended you to fill out cards or something similar. The fact that they later sold "power cards" makes this more and more evident. It looks far more like a Magic the Gathering card breakdown manual, or a video game hint book (back when those existed), than it does a role playing game manual.

 

The Cleric for 4th Edition D&D

Back in February of 2011, a couple of years into 4e, Robert J Schwalb who worked on the design team, wrote a blog post asking if "the format matters." In that piece he wrote:

Fourth edition’s presentation abandoned nearly everything familiar about the game’s look. Eight years of 3rd edition, I think, created strong expectations about how the game should read and since the game didn’t match the visual expectations, it certainly must not match the play experience. Yes, there are considerable mechanical changes that alter the play experience somewhat, but compare how the game plays now to how the game played in the twilight of 3rd edition. Just look at Tome of Battle, Complete Arcane, and many of the variant rules presented in Unearthed Arcana (complex skill checks, healing surges, and so on). In them you can find the proto-rules that would eventually evolve into the mechanical underpinnings of 4e. They are different, but not as different as I imagine some folks believe. I wonder if those changes might have been more palpable had we shifted back toward the old presentation, even if doing so meant that the game would be harder to learn.

 Let's have a look at what Robert's reformatting of the Cleric (now I wish I'd selected the Cleric for the others) looked like. Note that Robert hasn't filled in all the content, so don't worry about the lack of text. Just look at the layout. One thing that should strike you is how this looks exactly like 5th edition playtest materials and that it looks very similar to 3.x's layout. Had the design team opted for a presentation like this, it might have been slightly less shocking and been one less hurdle to overcome in order to minimize edition war effects.

Robert J Schwalb's Reformatted Cleric

Regardless of how formatting would have had the potential to minimize anti-4e backlash, there is one thing that is certain and that is that the marketing team did the game no favors with their marketing campaign. Below, I've embedded the D&D 4th Edition Teaser marketing video. You can watch the whole video and you can feel the meta-cognitive irony and seeming disdain for earlier editions of the game. In particular, I'd recommend watching at 1:31 for the "Okay, what is THAC0 again" question and to 2:26 to see how the 4th edition marketing represented 3.x by mocking that version's rules for grappling.


D&D 4th Edition "Teaser" Marketing Video

The entire video is filled with snide commentary and the THAC0 and grappling jokes, while representing genuine critiques of those editions by some players, have a mocking feeling. This is a tone that 5th edition largely managed to avoid until "THAC0 the Clown" in the recent Witchlight adventure. The unifying thing between the 4th edition marketing and The Wild Beyond the Witchlight is Christopher Perkins. Perkins has written some of the best D&D content out there for several editions of the game, but I find his repeated mocking of THAC0 staid. At least he waited until later in the 5th edition cycle to pull out the anti-THAC0 joke from the dustbin. Had this attitude been evident earlier in 5th edition, rather than the "we love the old editions so much that Keep on the Borderlands is our playtest module" attitude, the game might not have gotten off to the great start it did and Critical Role would have continued promoting Pathfinder instead of D&D.

Those are what I see as the main flaws marketing and presentation wise of 4th edition, but those aren't the only challenges the game faced. It really did change much of the focus of the game in a new direction. Where 3.x built upon the 90s trend of "a rule for everything" in games like Champions and GURPS. The stat blocks for doors and magic items regarding how difficult they are to break look a lot like Champions. The fact that you can run an entire campaign simulating how many gold pieces characters earn running a tavern via skill rolls just screams GURPS. Third edition might not have been point buy, but there was a rule that answered how much a Bard earned for its performance. One could more easier "Roll" play with 3rd edition in role playing situations than in any other prior rules version due to the incorporation of a broad array of skills and 4th edition stepped away from that level of granularity. It substituted a focus on ease of play and clarity of tactical mechanics. It was not, as many claim, "more" miniatures based than 3.x. Anyone who has looked at the flanking rules and rules for zones of control in 3.x knows that to be false (with 3.5 being even more miniatures focused than 3rd straight). 

In a conversation with game designer Leonard Pimentel (Prowlers & Paragons* and By this Axe I Hack!*), he mentioned 5 key flaws/obstacles presented by 4th edition. I agree with most of them and think that these, in combination with terrible presentation and marketing, lead to a significant edition war and loss of sales. Those flaws are:

First, the presentation was poor. Or perhaps it’s better to say it was a failed experiment. Every power every ability every whatever you wanna call it was choked in meaningless flavor text. They simply overdid everything which made understanding your character and their abilities a perpetual chore.
Second, I really feel that they fail to understand how unpleasant it is to have abilities you could use only once per day succeed or fail. Every character is structured to work with this unpleasant dynamic.
Further I don’t think that they understood the psychology of how anemic the at will or encounter powers would look when compared to the daily powers. This exacerbated the frustration of the fact that your best power or powers or mostly One-A-Day type abilities that we’re gone whether you succeed or fail that using them
I also think they overestimated peoples desire to use miniatures or underestimated how many people prefer theater of the mind and always have.
They also completely disregarded the sort of role-playing game Golden rule which is that most combats should last approximately three rounds.
As you can see, the first thing mentioned is the presentation. The other points I think are worthy of a great deal of discussion and deserve posts of their own. I know that many reading this have strong opinions about 4th edition and might think, "but I hate it because of x and y." I'd ask these people to really think about how presentation affected their opinions. After all, as discussed in the "zones of control" article linked above, the game has always been miniatures focused and much of the "video game/collectible card game" feel was due almost solely to presentation. As for the marketing...below are a couple more examples of just how potentially off putting it could be, especially the Gnome/Tiefling video. The ironic ridicule of the Gnome put of some of my friends and it runs against the growing cosmopolitan and non-Tolkienesque style of play.


Tiefling vs. Gnome


Interview with a Dragon


Interview with a Mindflayer

* Affiliate Link




Monday, August 31, 2020

Geekerati Reviews: For Coin & Blood 2nd Edition by Gallant Knight Games

 

In 2018, Gallant Knight Games published a role playing game entitled For Coin & Blood. The game was designed with the intent of capturing the freeform mechanical feel of first generation fantasy roleplaying games and the narrative tone of Grim Dark fantasy novels and shows. It was a game inspired by Original D&D and the writings of Kate Elliot, Joe Abercrombie, Sarah Monette, Glen Cook, Anna Smith Spark, Scott Lynch, and others.

The first edition of For Coin & Blood was well received by critics and gamers and remains a "Gold" seller on DriveThruRPG, the internet's largest digital rpg store. As successful as the game is, it was an early design by Alan Bahr and there was room for expansion and improvement. Bahr's done a lot of game design between 2018 and 2020 and he thought it was time for a second edition that reflected the lessons he's learned over the years and he wanted to release that edition in a printed edition as beautiful as he thought the updated rules deserved.

So he did what any independent designer does in these situations and launched a Kickstarter. In fact, that Kickstarter launched today (August 31, 2020) and will be running for the next 10 days (until September 9th). You'll have to act fast if you want to get one of the premium books from the Kickstarter, though I'm certain the game will be sold via DriveThruRPG afterwards. One thing to note here as you read this review. If you want to get a printed copy after reading this, make sure to back the Kickstarter. As good as the printing quality of DriveThruRPG's books are, and they are good, they are nothing compared to the print shop printing Gallant Knight puts together on their full print run products.

Now that the background is taken care of, how is For Coin & Blood as a game?

The TL;DR is that it reflects every ounce of design knowledge Alan Bahr has learned over the past few years and is an excellent and evocative design. One that I immediately backed on Kickstarter after reading my review copy.

Now for the longer review. What's Good, what's Bad, and...what's Awesome about this game.

The Good

The first thing that jumps out about the game is its setting. Grim Dark is a great theme that has an abundance of fiction game masters and players can look to for guidance on how to play. Some of the best fiction in Fantasy is in the Grim Dark genre. My own personal favorites include Glen Cook's The Black Company series, the Thieves' World anthologies, David Gemmell's Waylander tales, Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos tales, Andy Remic's Clockwork Vampire Chronicles, Simon R. Green's Hawk and Fisher stories, Kate Elliot's Crown of Stars series, and a long list that includes Michael Moorcock, Brent Weeks, Karl Edward Wagner, and so many more.   

As great as the setting is, Grimdark roleplaying sessions can wander down the path to excess. Thankfully, Alan Bahr provides a little advice on how to be more Joe Abercrombie and less Edgelord von Torturestein. Adding to the advice on running the game (there should be more), For Coin and Blood 2nd Edition provides a nicely detailed setting. It also includes two tales of tone setting fiction by Steve Diamond and Mari Murdock

Mechanically, the game uses a modified version of the d20 based role playing game we all know and love including some of the most recent innovations like Advantage and Disadvantage. In doing so, it has mechanics that appeal to both fans of newer heroic roleplaying and older more tactical and freeform gaming.

For example the skill tests used in For Coin and Blood echoes the assumed mechanics of Moldvay/Cook (aka B/X edition) of Dungeons & Dragons.  Hidden in the depths of that games mechanics was a foundational skill system where 1d6 being rolled against a difficulty. You can see it in the break down doors/bend bars, find secret doors, and locate traps rules of Basic/Expert D&D. In For Coin and Blood the basic skill roll tends to default to a need to roll 4+ on a six sided die. This is true for all of the narrow class skills that are specifically listed in the character classes. There is one exception. The thief  has a broad skill bonus that adds to a broad set of thief related tasks. There is no specific breakdown of thief skills, nor is there a default given in the thief class section. The lack of specific skills is fine, as we'll see in the discussion of "professions" below.

In addition to the skill system echoing B/X D&D,  Alan Bahr adapts the "die tree" from The Black Hack for use on skill tests and a couple of other game mechanics as well. The die tree, or step die mechanic, is a very neat mechanic that has its roots in Earthdawn and Alternity. Instead of giving a player a +1/-1 or +2/-2 modifier that is added to a roll, a die step mechanic has the player roll the next higher/lower die. A +1 die step would mean a player who normally rolls a d6 for an outcome would roll a d8 or d4 depending on whether they received a bonus or penalty.
 

The game's attribute modifiers are similar to those of OD&D instead of more modern versions. In For Coin & Blood only scores 15 and higher give a mechanical benefit and only those below 6 give a penalty. What this means is that the game is more Archetype focused and less stat focused. Statistical bonuses are "cooked in" to the things players are expected to have and thus exceptional bonuses are exception and players don't need to roll high statistics to be "on curve" for play. I love that the game focuses more on Archetypes than statistics, tot that this will stop me from a very long boring discussion below in the "The Bad" section when it comes to statistics and character creation.

Like many games, For Coin and Blood uses a combination of armor class (defense) and armor as damage reduction. In this case armor doesn't contribute to "defense", the number required to hit the character, at all and only provides damage reduction. This is similar to the system used by Wizards of the Coasts Star Wars Saga Edition role playing game. In this case, Alan Bahr added armor attrition and shield rules inspired by The Black Hack as well.

 

The Bad

There's not a lot to critique from a non-mechanical perspective, if I was to add something to the text I would add a good deal more advice on how to run the setting to keep it "Grim Dark" and not "Murder Hobos on Parade." This is the genre of Michael Moorcock, Steven Brust, the Thieves' World crew, Brent Weeks, Andy Remic, David Gemmell, Glen Cook, Karl Edward Wagner, and Cameron Johnston. While some of these authors incorporate certain types of disturbing violence into their fiction, they usually don't wallow in it. For Coin & Blood does have a strong disclaimer at the beginning that provides context, but I'd like to see more DM advice in this regard. As someone who has played in "evil" campaigns before, I've found they are more rewarding when they deal with moral complexity rather than focus on being gorefests. There are those gamers who want to play F.A.T.A.L. and this is not the game for them. This is not an edgelord game and those who want that style of play should look elsewhere. Still, it could use more advice on how to handle sensitive situations or provide a bibliography to existing resources.

I love 99.99% of the mechanical decisions in this game, but there is one mechanic I really don't like and that is the system of attribute determination during character generation. Alan Bahr has a favorite character generation system for OSR style games. He's used it in a number of his other "Venerable Knight Games"  publication. The system does allow for some flexibility, but depending on how you use it results in very focused characters and never really seem to accomplish exactly what Alan is hoping to do.

It starts straight forward enough with characters having six core attribute rated from 3-18: Might, Learning, Insight, Fortitude, Agility, and Charisma. Before we continue, I thought I'd let you know that I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about this, so you might want to skip down to the "Awesome" section below. There is a lot that's awesome, but for some reason the stat generation system rubs me the wrong way. What's even more ironic is that because of the Archetype and not Attribute approach of the game, the generation system really doesn't have much effect on gameplay.

Having said all of the above, here is the basic stat generation system.

 

Essentially, you roll 5 dice and then you order them as you wish following the above algorithm picking the highest die for your "most important stat" and the lowest die for your "dump stat." You'll note that Alan writes, "this will give you one particularly good statistic, one weak statistic, and four that range between average and good." Well...this is not exactly true and depends on how you arrange the stats.

The following analysis is based on a bit of Rmarkdown code I wrote for demonstration purposes that you can find here. If you don't have R-Studio and only want to look at ALL the output, you can find it on this webpage. But I will also be nice and show you some real examples below. 

In essence, you have a few choices as a player. You can choose to be the Specialist who has one fantastic stat and five stats that are for all intents and purposes average. You do this by rolling 5 dice, sorting them in order and using the above algorithm to generation your stats. For the sake of argument, let's say you roll the following array (I've already sorted them from high to low).

So you've got a 6, 5, 4, 3, 3. This is actually a pretty good roll. If we assumed these were added to the average on 2 dice of 7, we'd have a 13, 12, 11, 10, 10. In For Coin & Blood, none of those would be exceptional. But that's not the system. We start with 12, 11, 11, 10, 10, 10 and follow the algorithm above. Doing that, going from high to low in order, we get the following array.

One very high number, a bunch of straight up average numbers, and one low number but not low enough for a penalty (penalties start at 6 and lower).

What if we mix it up a little and still put the highest value on our prime stat, then second lowest, then middle, then second highest, and finally lowest on our dump stat? That sounds interesting right? This is what we get.

The numbers look more interesting, but there is still no real impact on play except that we are still specialized in our max stat. Remember, there are no penalties for 8s and no bonuses for 12s.

Let's mix things up a little bit more and go a little counter-intuitive by not putting our highest stat in our prime stat. This time we'll put the middle stat in the first spot, the second lowest in the second slot, the highest in the middle, the second highest next, and the worst last. This gets us the following:


In a regular d20 game, this might be the most interesting to play. This is close to the "Generalist" array from various versions of D&D. The only thing is that in For Coin & Blood, all of these stats except the 16 are still "average" and provide no bonus. Adding salt to the wound we could have a mechanically better, but aesthetically less appealing, array with a max 18 instead.

I know that I praised the game for relying on Archetypes rather than Attributes for what really matters in the game. I still believe that, but that's why I find this system odd. The algorithm is clunky for new gamers. You add dice and subtract prior dice as you go and as your reward you either get a specialist with one good stat or you end up with something very close to what you would get from just rolling 3d6 and being able to put them in any order you want. It just strikes me as inelagant in a game that is otherwise very elegant.

My second complaint is relatively minor. There is no base number given for various thief related tasks in thief section. The rules section states that the default for most actions is 4+ and that the narrator should modify this for effect. The game provides a very useful chart to do this, but it would be nice to have mention in thief class.

The weapon rules are AWESOME (see below), but the weapon degrading rules look like they need modification to update the mechanic from a "weapon die" system to a "class die" system. Given that one can easily assume that Sellswords and Knights are knowledgeable on how to care for their weapons than Magi etc., this is only a one sentence change to remain consistent.

Not a lot of complaints, just one overly long one.

City Raid Illustration by Ger Curti
Illustration by Ger Curti

The Awesome

First and foremost, I love so much about this game that I had to stop listing the "Awesome" rated stuff before this review became a "just copy the rules" review. 

One of the things that For Coin & Blood revives is the old money earned = XP earned mechanic from old versions of D&D. What I'm about to write may seem counter-intuitive, but this XP system actually reduces the "Murder Hobo" nature of adventuring. Monsters in older versions of D&D are rated in XP for "defeating" (usually being killed) and in how much treasure they have. In new versions, you pretty much just have the "defeated" XP value. What having the money = XP mechanic does is it immediately gets people to ask, "can I get the treasure without fighting?" Why? Because monsters usually have more in gold than their defeat XP value. When you add the old rules for "Encounter Relations" from B/X, Charisma becomes the "get rich and not kill ever" stat and ends the cycle of "Breach, Sleep, Clear!" that D&D can become. Sadly, Alan doesn't incorporate the Encounter Reaction chart, but given how much time is spent on sections itemizing how much characters get paid for certain activities, the money = XP system really ups the "let's find other solutions than killing" aspect of the game.

For Coin & Blood has a new statistic called Infamy that reflects how well known the character is. This statistic affects the jobs characters can get and which organizations they can join. Characters can gain and lose reputation in a way that echoes the old Marvel Super Heroes game. Infamy also affects how much players get paid for missions, gives them an XP bonus at high levels, and by affecting payment it also affects XP directly. It also provides a lure for those who want to oppose the players. The higher your Infamy, the more people know who you are and the more foes you have. Great idea!
 

Alan borrows a great idea from Shadow of the Demon Lord with the inclusion of Professions. What's a profession? It's what your character actually does for a living and is separate from class and can be anything you want it to be. It could be related to your class, a thief could be a "cat burglar" for example, but it need not be related. Maybe your Thief is a Bodyguard or Wandering Young Noble. You get to choose freely and fit it to whatever backstory you want. Profession does have some mechanical benefit. It aids characters in making skill tests. Any skill tests associated with your profession more likely to succeed because you get a one step die improvement on the skill roll. Very nice. Allows for flexibility and player agency.

Alan decided to incorporate one of my favorite gaming mechanics by including class based weapon damage. Instead of having weapons do a fixed amount of damage, swords doing 1d8 for example, weapon damage is based on class. Classes that are martial in nature do more damage than those unfamiliar with them. This is a nice way of letting Mages use swords without altering balance. They still roll d4 for damage, but they get to look cool doing it.

The game has so many cool classes and each has interesting mechanics. I particularly liked the Diabolist and their Pacts. The system of pacts was very evocative and flexible and fit within the Grimdark theme exceptionally well. I also absolutely loved the inclusion of the Executioner class...can we say Gene Wolfe inspired?

The game has one of the best fantasy incorporations of firearms from a mechanical perspective. Keeps the fearful lethality of the weapon (via crits and another nod to Marvel Super Heroes) and does this without amplifying the damage dice rolled.

The system for how magic weapons and magic armor come into existence is really evocative and narrative. When players roll a critical hit, or survive one in the case of armor, they may devote XP to the item. When they've devoted enough XP, the weapon gains properties. It's a very nice "low magic" mechanic and I adore it.

I could go on and on, but I'll just list three more things I thought were very good design elements The rules for Legacy experience for when characters die and the player transitions to a new character, the concept of Grim effort which literally ties lifeforce to success, and the Organization rules really round out the product.

Overall

My overall opinion is that this is a fantastic role playing game that I'd love to see get play time with my group. There are areas for more development, so I'd love to see some expansions, but this thing packs a lot of punch.

What are you waiting for? Go back the Kickstarter.

Oh, and this is VERY different from the 1st edition. That edition is good, but 2nd edition adds so much.