Comments Response Day

I always get some nice comments from all you lovely Gameblog readers. Today I'm going to put a few reponses here up where everyone can see them without digging through old posts.

Regarding my post on playing a pirate game at a con, Chris recently asked "Do you have any info you could pass on about how the Playmobil game was done? My son would get a kick out of playing that." Chris, the rules were a somewhat simplified and modified version of Savage Worlds. You can get a free Test Drive version of that system down at the bottom of this page. I like Savage Worlds a lot. I've played a fantasy campaign with that system, ran a Prohibition era gangster minicampaign, and a con one shot that was sort of an X-Files/Men In Black jobbie. The dude running the game had simplified range and movement by eliminating the use of inches. Instead all distance measurements were in 'hands' and you just used the tip of your thumb to the tip of your first finger. Needless to say, I did all the measuring for my team. But even with that simplification, it was a much more robust system than needed for the number of figures involved, the broad cartoony comedy of the game, and the wide age range of players. Had it been my game to organize, I probably would have ginned up some easy sleazy charts using a single d6 for all actions and simplified the card-based initiative. But that's just the con GM in me nitpicking. Now that I think about it, that's exactly what I should do if I run my rubber dinosaurs versus plastic army men con game again. I love Tom Moldvay's Dino WARS! rules, but they aren't very kid friendly.

My last installment of five links got a great reply from norman:

Couldn't find a way to email you. So, here are two more links.

I bet you've seen this game but if not...

http://www.basicfantasy.org/main.html

"It's based on the SRD so there's no further need to reference the SRD. It's designed to be as close as possible to a very early edition of D&D. He never mentions "D&D" for fear of a lawsuit, but it's basically just like an early edition of D&D from the 1970's."

Learned about it from this thread
http://www.treasuretables.org/forum/index.php?topic=1072.0

But I doubt you know of Brutal http://www.brutalrpg.com/ aka "Big Bad Ball Busting Bloody Battles". If that title doesn't get you mashing the link with your mouse then you're not the gamer I thought you were :)

Basic Fantasy is good stuff in my book. My specific tastes lean more towards Labyrinth Lord, but I don't turn my nose up at other variations. It's one thing to have an opinion and another thing entirely to be a system snob. If I can roll some dice to kill an orc and steal his pie, then I'm pretty much down with it. Treasure Tables is a totally awesome blog and I should definitely hang out on the TT forums more than I do. I'm pretty sure that I visited Brutal's website early in the games development. I can only imagine that they had not yet developed the "Big Bad Ball Busting Bloody Battles" tagline at that time, otherwise I would have downloaded the sucker and posted about it! I've got a zillion things to do this weekend, the main one being an overnight visit from my nephew the ninja, but I'm gonna try to flip through the game and report next week. Thanks for the link!

Just yesterday I got two comments on the recent unveiling of the OGL version of FASERIP, 4C System. First we get the Evil DM (author of another totally awesome blog) asking the simple question "So what are your plans for it?" I should note here that I got the announcement of the release of 4C System from his blog and forgot to attribute him yesterday. Sorry, o Evil one! Anyway, the obvious answer as to what to do with 4CS would be to run some sort of con one-shot at Winter War in February and maybe tackle my on-again off-again New Bronze City project seriously. Of course, I need more con game ideas like I need another hole in my head. I'm already for sure running Encounter Critical and my 'maybe' list includes OD&D, Forward... to Adventure, and the dinosaur game I mentioned above. That's a lot of stuff to run in one weekend! With some work I could maybe do a PDF mini campaign setting of New Bronze City, assuming Jeff Hebert would be cool about using HeroMachine illos in a gamebook. (N.B. The new expansion to HeroMachine is out! I did not know that! Cool!) But then I'm also kinda thinking that the world doesn't need a new and even more stereotype supers setting, especially for a game that already has a more-than-fully fleshed out one built right in. My other idea is a crossgenre fiesta in the vein of Tom Moldvay's Lords of Creation, but more lowbrow and fisticuffs-oriented. Something less like Moldvay's carefully researched mythopoetic work and more like my own attempt to run LoC.

Finally, an anonymous reader reports that the free PDF version of 4C System lacks the crucial color chart that power pretty much every die roll. I went and nabbed the freebie version myself and he is right as rain. The chart got dropped somehow. That really sucks. I dug up an email address for Phil Reed and sent him an email. I can't think of any good reason why this problem would be easy to correct. That's one of the great things about electronic books: updating doesn't require a new print run.

UPDATE: Just heard back from Phil. He says he just discovered that Lulu likes to remove the cover of free downloads and that a corrected version should be available by Friday or so.