Miniature Wargaming on a Budget

Miniature wargaming may have the hardest time staying relevent in the 21st century. While pen and paper role-playing games are outdone at the point hack and slash styled games by their computer counterparts (I do love me some Diablo), the options of the players are still only limited by imagination. Even if they are in nature a social activity, play-by-post or Google wave games prove that the activity can still thrive in a new format. Not so with miniature wargaming. The hobby, is bulky, expensive, and requires patience that the conveinences of electronic gaming have drained away from even the nerdiest people. It doesn't help that Games Workshop, the face of the hobby, has helped to turn more folks out of it with prices rises way ahead of the inflation rate. Why spend your money on a single Land Raider when I could have days worth of easy entertainment from a copy of Red Dead Redemption or Fallout 3 for the same price? What do miniatures have left to run with?

The spectacle of it all, of course. There is little cooler than seeing two completely painted up armies numbering in the hundreds, each model painted with love, fighting it out over on a battlefield of barricades and ruined buildings. At its best, miniature wargaming is an exciting museum diorama that you get to command and control in a game of wits and tactics against a like-minded individual.

With that in mind, we need to look at the cost of these games, and what one would get out of them. A complete Warhammer 40,000 army costs about 600 dollars, give or take 100 depending on how much of a horde army you're playing. What about Flames of War, which is at this time the premier WWII game? About $300. For the price of the former, I could get a Playstation 3 or a budget gaming PC, and the latter, perhaps a Nintendo Wii. Warmachine is around $200 for a playable force, which is probably the most I could imagine the average person being willing to spend without buying the aforementioned Playstation. However, I think we can go even cheaper than that. Here's the plan. For our purposes, let's say we want to play out WW2.

#1 Go with 15mm, individually based, platoon to company scale
Big enough to be visible to the human eye and small enough to be bought cheaply, 15mm scale is perfect for our goal. based on pennies or smaller, 15mm figures can be picked up and moved around a battlefield with little issue. you could also put them with 2 per a small sized Flames of War base so they don't seem so spread out over a huge area, in case you wanted to compact them into some ruined building, or play a Soviet horde with about 50 models per squad (Za Stalinaaaagh!!!). Actually, that two models per base thing was something I just thought of moments ago. I'm totally going to do that for my next squad. As an extra bonus due to their scale, weapon and movement ranges don't have to be halved and abstracted to fit a 6' by 4' table, adding the sense of mass combat on a grand scale. a whole company of infantry can be bought in flames of war company boxes at your local store for only about $50, leaving only tanks and miscellenia. point-wise, buying a squad of 3 tanks is like getting 3 Leman Russ' for much less than the price of one.

#2 Find an applicable rule set
The Warhammer WW2 mod availible from its respective yahoo group, which covers battles at a company scale (army lists are organized simialar to the Imperial Guard, with a platoon being a troop choice). For smaller scale games, Disposable Heroes by Iron Ivan Games will fit the bill, with half a squad operating as a single unit. They've stated that they've run games upwards of battalions with the rules, so it might fight our goals well.

#3 Start painting it up
Dude, they're 15mm, it can't take too long to paint them up. All you'd need is a basecoat, followed by a quick citadel wash of black or brown

#4 Start playing
You are now ready to go out and proves yourself a masterful general. Go forth. I have shown you the door, it's up to you to open it.

Looking Back: Street Fighter II

This is it: The original, the first, the grand-daddy of the competitive fighting game. Since 1991, Street Fighter II has been considered a classic of arcade goodness and a mentionable milestone in video-game history.

Its formula is simple: two characters out of a colorful and mildly racist cast 8 (or 12, or 16) World Warriors duke it out on a 2d plane. Utilizing a variety of punches, kicks, and unique special moves, both attempt to reduce their opponents energy bar to zero. First to do so twice wins the match.

Apparently, people liked this enough to continually pump quarters into the game's machine at the 7-Elevens and arcades across the country, inspiring continued updates and expansions (4 more, in fact), merchandise, and a terrible movie with Raul Julia as the all-awesome M. Bison, master of Shadoloo (and totally sweet shin guards). Sadly, people would have to wait until 1997 for Street Fighter III (the Third Strike edition in 1999 being my favorite fighter of all time), and by then people had stopped caring, this being a combination of the decline of arcades as a whole and rise of 3D competitors like Tekken and Virtua Fighter.

though basic by today's genre standards, Street Fighter II brought untried complexity for its time. You had around 36 special moves per character, 8 of them playable and unique, and the whole thing could be learned and enjoyed on different levels. Though the balance of power may have rested with the first of your friends to discover the mighty projectile attacks, others will soon follow. The high jumping attacks of Chun-Li countered by the anti-air Shoryuken, the cheapness of constant defensive blocking undone by the realization of throwing (that's forward and a heavy punch or kick, for those who don't know). This system of checks and balances within the game proves incredible to those who take the time to notice it. Even with the increased complexity of fighting games over time, Street Fighter II has remained relevant specifically because of its simplicity, continually being played in master tournaments like EVO. No EX attacks, assists, parries, or dashes: a balance of straight offense a defense, a straight-faced game of feints and dexterity between two individuals.

It hasn't aged as well as games like Super Mario Brothers or Tetris, but when I want an excellent brawler, Street Fighter II will always be there.

Round One...

That One Finale

Like others, I decided to watch the final episode of Lost, a show about people on a mysterious island filled with strange phenomena and riddles uncounted. I started watching the show at the beginning of season 2, right after they found the hatch that led to a guy pressing buttons (the reason why was, at the time, a mystery). As time went on though, plot elements and questions as to the nature of pretty much everything on the show piled up. For every mystery solved, two new ones took their places. I quit in frustration. Flash-forward (or sideways, your choice really) a few years and we come to the end of things. I'm caught up and ready to watch the climax. Does it pay off?

Well, it could've been worse. All that really happens is that Locke (possessed by the Smoke Monster) and Jack "Protector of the Island" Shephard fight each other, a magic plug is removed and almost sinks the island, and then it's put back. Eventually, it finishes with a Jacob's Ladder homage, and Jack dies.

It's probably a good thing I didn't invest in the past few seasons, or I probably would've felt a lot more gypped by the ending. A lot of questions remain unanswered, an act of trolling by the writers on fervent, obsessively detailed fans who will never get to see the explanation to these riddles they've waited so long to be answered after their grand unified theory of LOST was smashed to pieces each season by some new revelation that changed everything.

Now genre-wise, the show is considered a drama, and not a mystery. So of course the focus, and the story as a whole, is about the characters and their relationships to one another. In that case, it's fairly well resolved. But it's not fair to introduce constant new plot elements, macguffins, and other twists without seeing them through to the end. It's like some giant "aborted arc" pile-up.

Taken as a whole, from beginning to end, Lost is a jigsaw puzzle half-complete, that if given maybe another season or so to piece them all togethor, could have produced a good, coherent whole. Instead, the show became some run-away train that was successfully stopped a mile before reaching the station. And even if they had the ending in mind from the beginning, the whole thing shouldn't have gone on for that long: maybe it was a victim of it's own success?

Goodbye Lost. You provided so many with joy.

Gaming at Conduit 2010

Well, the yearly convention again returns, with a bevy of exciting one-shots. For convenience, I've listed all the non-fantasy, non-D&D games.

FRIDAY 7:00-11:00 PM

Shadow over Obama (Call of Cthulhu)
By Ken Kersey. Some say the stars are nearly right for a change. The date the Mayans predicted for the end of the world is just days away (December 21, 2012) and the planet is in the grip of a crawling chaos - economic collapse, global pandemics, disasters, supernatural events, dogs & cats living together, mass hysteria!! Find out what happens when you mix ancient prophesies, political puppets serving a cosmic evil (possibly cyclopean or even squamous), and a discovered birth certificate. Can you and your fellow Investigators stop the "Change" or will the Earth succumb to an unspeakable apocalypse. A sanity blasting adventure designed for 5 to 10 players (experience much preferred but not required), pre-generated characters will be provided. NO PREREGISTRATION!

If this is being done by the same guy that did the mystery about Al Gore a few years back, then I'll want to check this out, if only to see what kind of actual madness may exist amongst the people who want to play this scenario for all the wrong reasons.

SATURDAY 2:00-6:00 PM

Savage Worlds: The REALLY Bad Day (RPG)
It was just another boring day at the office, made even more trite by another boring office party. Then something went very, VERY wrong, and whatever else this day may become, it certainly isn't boring.

We're all pretty cool with Savage Worlds. Defenitely Something to look into, since I'm getting a "Full Life Consequences" vibe.

7:00-11:00 PM

Call of Cthulhu Newbie Session (Call of Cthulhu)
Come learn to play the classic horror roleplaying game, Call of Cthulhu! Your friendly Keepers will walk you through creating a character, then you'll have the chance to play a short scenario. Register at the con.

Neat, we could actually play a fun horror game of CoC without dealing with people who think Obama's the Anti-Chr- I mean, strong political opinions.

Paranoia (RPG)
Ever play an RPG and said man I wish I could just kill the PC next to me? Well here is your chance come join the fear called paranoia XP. You are a clone a world of color and the Computer is your friend. DO what it tells you and you will live unless it wants you dead. Paranoia is a six die game where you play a clone in the future. You live and breath for the Computer who is well Insane.

I'll say it: I have never had as much fun with any RPG as I had playing a convention game of Paranoia. We'll play this, whether anyone likes it or not.


Vampire the Requiem LARP (LARP)
All across Utah, the call has gone out from a vampire in Park City--the call is for peace. All across the state, violence against mortal and vampire alike has been on the rise, and the source of this violence appears to have been perpetrated the vampire court of Salt Lake City, Utah. Thus the court of Salt Lake City as well as all Utahn vampires have been invited to a summit to discuss the possibility of peace between vampires (if such a thing can exist) as well as to set misunderstandings straight. Will this event bring peace to the Valley and the neighboring cities or will it only promote hostilities? From whom did this call originate and is his or her intentions honorable? And what is the cause of all the recent violence all across the state? These questions may be answered by attendance but chances are they will actually become far more complicated.

It's always fun to watch goths method act from the sideline. In another thought, wouldn't Utah kinda be the best place to hide if you're undead?

D&D 4th Edition: Why it isn't for me

I remember posting a video up on Youtube when I was young(er) and naive(er) about why 4E D&D was a pretty good role-playing game that remained (kind of) faithful to classic D&D.

My opinion has changed and, looking back, I was completely talking out of my ass.

Don't get me wrong, It's still a pretty good role-playing game, and the books themselves look absolutely great, but the game itself isn't in my style. Of course, I'm not talking about this in terms of changes from the various classic edition's rules (there never were any) or spirit (there might have been groups that played it as a series of miniature battles above all else).
Why don't I like it? Let me count the ways.

#1. Dungeons and Dragons: The Game of Fantasy Battles
4E retains the goal of accumulating power via looting ruins and stabbing orcs in the gut, which is cool. However, it takes this to the extreme. Everything is balanced around combat. I can't remember what page in the DMG this is on (someone out there help me out), but it says that a 4 hour session will likely consist of 4 fights around 20 to 30 minutes long. That's way to long to keep the attention of me or my players. All the character classes abilities are balanced around them spending half an hour using their Hadokens and Tiger Uppercut powers grinding down hit points (God help you if you try anything else). Half the excitement of classic D&D to me is exploration into the unknown, wondering what lies beyond the dungeon at the edge of town, into a vast wilderness.

In 4th edition, the time spent between a fight feels like a rush to get to the next exciting scene in a narrative linear story crafted by the game master (more on that later). Add to the fact that you are pretty much required to have a grid with miniatures since spacing and flanking is more important than ever. I know a fun activity where I spend a few hours having two teams fighting, with an emphasis on tactics and strategy, getting to watch my warriors improve from battle to battle: Skirmish wargaming. I recommend Necromunda, Gorkamorka, and Mordheim(a).

#2. Every Little Thing in its Place
The rules seem neurotic about balance (looking at magic-users in 3.x, I really don't blame them). It feels like a lot of the risk that was inherent in older editions is gone, as if a potential player who had his character die in a freak critical hit will tear up their character sheet and never play again, forever cursing the name of Dungeons & Dragons, warning any prospective new-comers...

To ensure no loss of a prospective customer base, every character is an unique and beautiful snowflake from day one of their career. This is fine by itself, allowing everyone a chance to shine on and off the battlefield. Too bad this also applied to everything else. Your adventure must have exactly 10 encounters (fights or skill challenges), give out these treasure parcels, and have this matrix of difficulty that we have set for it as a whole. What if a new player has his character come into the middle of the adventure? Maybe I'd like to put in this neat house rule? Uh-oh, then the balance of the whole thing is ruined, and all the little systems collapse in on themselves!

But don't worry, the characters will survive regardless, take this precise amount of damage, survive X amount of fights, and then rest on the 7th day. Of course, as long as they were maxed out at character creation and they're always doing the optimal action on their turn, or else...

The above probably is hyperbole, but it illustrates a point about 4th Edition. Everything must be done the way the book asks you to, and does it to the point where the game as a whole in incredibly un-modular in design. Balance and guidelines can be a comforting blanket for people like me because they ensure that as a DM, I can't possibly screw up. But eventually they act like a straight jacket denying creativity and neat ideas from outside the system. 4E has become self-aware, and now practically runs itself. When the risk and danger that random elements provide are taken away, so is the excitement of the players possibly failing, and the game ceases to be entertaining. And isn't entertainment the reason why we play these games?

#3. It May Be Built on a Gimmick
I'm sure every critic of the game has compared the class "powers" system to another game, that one game, a computer game itself inspired by D&D. I'll be tactful and not state its name. Regardless, it's probably responsible for a number of people leaving the role-playing hobby, the rest remaining as the players who continue to play games like D&D for all the right reasons. This is probably a dumb theory, but might the power systems alongside narrative linear adventure design be a way to get people back into playing these games they abandoned? but here lies a problem: If I wanted to play that one game, I'd just play it. Why bother with an expensive and confusing knock-off in book form? That one game can do the math for me. That one game was written by professional writers and storytellers. That one game has tangible graphics and can take me on an epic quest across a fantasy world with sixty character levels of play.
Interactivity and the act of collaborative storytelling is one of the few things that traditional role-playing games have left over their digital counterparts. The more we attempt to compete with that one game, the more outdated we look.
Traditional RPGs aren't inferior, they're just something completely different, and I can't wait for something like the holodeck to finally replace them.

This whole article probably comes off as a bit Grognard.txt, because it kinda is. I might harsh feelings for 4E, but not of the people who enjoy it. Claiming whether they must like it or not isn't my position, and it never should be.

The meaning of rules and an interesting article

"The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules."
Gary Gygax

Just a quick musing, but I always thought that OD&D was ridiculously hard on players because if Swords and Wizardry is a clone of the original game, that kind of stuff would be in the three brown books. Then I look through the actual OD&D rules, and I realize something: What rules?

The booklets have no real instructions on handing out experience points (it states a troll has 700 xp, leading to people to believe that it's 100 xp per hit die), nor the amount of treasure found per monster, let alone how xp from it is divvied up. Of the rules that really are there, they are quite obtuse in writing (an elf can choose whether to be a fighter of a magic-user at the beginning of each adventure. What constitutes an adventure? A session? When the referee says?) I would go so to say that Original D&D is almost impossible to play without a hefty amount of house ruling. In reality, Swords and Wizardry is just one of many interpretations of what said rules mean.

For so long I've played games that explicitly tell me what to do and how to play and how to reward players along with hundreds of pages worth of rules to cover miniscule events that might pop up. Going back in time to this savage age of "guidelines" and "interpretation" is scary and frustrating, yet oddly liberating. I can't actually argue that our group is "playing it wrong", if there isn't any text on how to play in the first place. It's up to us. Our game, our rules.

In related news, here's an excellent article on why I shouldn't bother with linear plot in RPGs:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/checkfortraps/7540-Check-for-Traps-It-s-Not-Your-Story

Weww Hewwo evewyboy!

BROWNIES

Brownies are tiny, stunted, naive fairy-folk who live in close-knit communes. Despite their origins, they posses little magic power, and seem to be nothing more than a cruel joke by some capricious, long-dead fey god. 1-1/2’ tall and not too smart, Brownies lie below even kobolds in a dungeon food chain, and survive as a species through an incredibly large reproduction rate. Though a single-sex species, they all appear to be male, with excess facial growth, stylized, curled mustaches being the most common.

Armor Class: 8

Hit Dice: 1d2 hp

Attacks: Weapon, usually a sharpened stick (1d2)

Saving Throw: 19

Special: None

Move: 10

XP: 25