Adorable picture of Japanese kids playing RPGs. I tried to find the artist so I could link, but couldn't

I have a background in running and playing (mostly running) tabletop roleplaying games for over twenty years. I consider myself highly skilled in gamemastering. My library of games covers pretty much everything in terms of style, mechanics and subject matter. Some of my biggest loves are Call of Cthulhu, Vampire and Dungeons & Dragons.

D&D 4E

In this post I’m talking about Dungeons & Dragons and especially its fourth edition. It can be tricky to run, but done right, it’s the fastest “crunchy” game – something with very tangible, satisfying mechanics – around.

I know there’s the fifth edition being talked about right now, but still a year or two out, so let’s concentrate on what we have right now. And besides, most of this is going to apply to a new edition, too.

In order to get a new D&D 4E campaign off the ground I knew I had to be able to do it with as little time invested as possible. My schedule at work is very hectic right now. I was lucky because I have a good pool of potential players available. To get things going, I just bought the core Essentials books and agreed to have the first game next week. I had no idea what I was going to do.

I’m going to assume you have players available. D&D has been designed for five players. You can go with four, but I wouldn’t recommend going below that as you want some extra numbers against players dropping out of sessions on short notice.

What I do is keep track of potential players and bring them along as guests if need be. If you haven’t been vocal about your love for D&D, you might be surprised by how many players – veterans and lapsed and curious – there are around.

1. Go Essentials

Unless you’re really good in 4E already, you want to go Essentials. This saves up on (money and especially) time spent reading. You can get the basics covered in a weekend. Get the Rules Compendium, Heroes of the Fallen Lands and the Monster Vault box.

The second and third character books are optional, you don’t need them for now. If you’re really familiar with D&D monsters from previous editions, you don’t strictly speaking need the monster box, either, but it’s good for background and pictures – and you shouldn’t underestimate the value of those in a game about the imagination.

What Essentials does is streamlining character creation. The D&D books outside of the Essentials line have a ton of character options available, and making characters becomes a very involved process. Additionally it takes money and a lot of reading.

Read through the Monster Vault book and make a list of monsters you want the players to fight. This saves time later on when you need to come up with monster of the week.

2. Subscribe to DDI and sign up for Power2ool

Get out your credit card and subscribe to Dungeons & Dragons Insider on the Wizards website. It opens up a suite of tools and resources to you, but only one thing is really of value and indispensable when running the game: the Character Builder. You will want to use this to create and upkeep all of the main characters in your game.

The other thing you get out of the DDI subscription is access to a ton of magical items and traps, which is something you miss when only using the Essentials line of books.

You need a printer, too, or else you’re spending lots of time writing out character sheets.

Power2ool is a free web app that frees you from paper and saves time otherwise spent writing notes by hand. Sign up and link it with your DDI account. When planning and running your sessions, you can just drag and drop monsters, traps and magical loot from DDI Compendium into your Power2ool notes. This is extremely useful and key to running the game efficiently.

The monster scaling tool gives you more variety with the monster levels.

3. Get a battlemat and pens (and dice and miniatures)

Any on the fly notes you need when running the game go on the battlemat. Using wet-erase pens, keep track of initiative, monster HP, any ongoing effects, Skill Challenges and of course combat terrain. The visible information helps players focus and fosters team effort.

If you don’t have dice, get multiple full sets (D6, D8, D10, D12, D20). They’re inexpensive. If you don’t have miniatures, you can play without – the Monster Vault comes with a lot of cardboard counters you can use, and really any object can be a stand-in for a character or a monster. I use mostly miniatures from the Descent boardgame.

Encourage your players to look for a miniature they’d like to use to represent their character. It doesn’t matter what series it’s from, as long as it’s roughly the same scale with the others. Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Pathfinder have lots of good options. If they find something they like, that binds them more strongly to the game, making dropouts and cancellations less likely, saving your time.

3. Agree on a rhythm

In order to take away pressure from getting the games organized, always try to agree on the next two sessions when you’re wrapping up for the night. This way even if you have to cancel the next session for whatever reason, there’s already the next game planned.

It helps everyone plan their schedules if you have a steady rhythm agreed with everyone. Every other week should fit most people’s schedules. If you have one player who just can’t commit, find someone else or agree that it’s okay if people drop-in and drop-out.

4. Plan and communicate campaign goals

To maintain player interest with minimal fuss, be clear about the campaign goals. When starting out the game, it would be a good idea to plan the entire first tier of play (“Heroic”). Make a rough outline of what should happen over the campaign up to level 10 and provide your players with goals that cover ground that far.

The goals help the players concentrate and they drive the game. With the goals outlined, you only need to hint towards ways of making progress on them and your players will jump at the opportunity. This makes your job as the gamemaster much easier. Don’t be afraid of feeding the players party motivations that may not be 100% in-character in every player’s mind. It helps everyone.

Make sure the players write down the goals.

Example: the players’ ultimate goal for the Heroic tier is to return to their homeland. There is a series of goals they need to meet to be able to start their journey – gather allies, raise an army, raise funds. These three are major quests.

Another expectation to manage is the style of play. Explain what sort of D&D game you’re going to be running and what your players should expect when they turn up for a game. Talk about themes and rules and roleplaying. This is especially important if your players are not all old buddies at the game table – there are a lot of ways to play tabletop RPGs and you shouldn’t suppose yours is the one familiar to new players.

Make a list of any house rules.

I made a presentation of the campaign goals for the players (PowerPoint). That way any new players can be easily given the same introduction with minimal fuss.

5. Make a campaign outline behind the scenes

Coming up with session ideas can be time-consuming. So do it all in advance when you have time. Over a single afternoon, you can plan your entire first tier. It’s like grocery shopping: doing it in bulk is economic, doing it while hungry is expensive and stressful.

Things to consider are adventures, treasure and encounters.

Planning adventures is easy using the 5×5 method: come up with five plotlines (quests). Divide them into five steps, each one a single adventure, concluding with an epic event. Drop each adventure into a place in your campaign world.

There’s more to it, but just doing this, you can play in a sandbox fashion, not worrying about where your players are going to go – there’s always stuff to do, and it all ties together. Just make sure they’re aware of the ultimate goals of all five quests… and things should pretty much run themselves.

I’ve added a five-step arc to all major characters, too, including the players. It helps keep a campaign running when you can think in arcs.

Pre-plan treasure to minimize between sessions book-keeping. I go for complete sets of magical equipment for all the characters, pre-choosing the loot.

Figure out your encounter budget and pacing. Remember to include skill challenges. You should build a rhythm to it – easy fights followed by tough fights, strings of skill challenges topped off with a tough fight, easy fights if you’re planning a roleplaying heavy session, optional fights if you want your players to have more say in the session’s direction, gauntlets where the players don’t get a rest between fights. I find it convenient to do this for the whole tier at once – that way you can build up thematically to cool boss fights and have a good idea of how many monster types are required.

Done correctly, when you’re coming up to a new session, you already know what the players are going to do, who they’re going to fight and what loot they should get, and how it advances the overall campaign, with no preparation between sessions.

6. Stick to the session plan

Players coming over and you have no idead of what needs to happen in the game? Just look at your map and plot grid (the 5×5 method). Where are they? That alone should tell you what happens next. Once that is sorted, make a note of what scenes and NPCs should feature and jot them down in Power2ool.

If the players are done with the current location and you want them to get a move on to advance another plot, just cut to them arriving to a new location. You don’t have to explain everything in-character or go over the tedium of choosing where to go next, unless there’s drama there.

Then figure out an enemy. You should vary your fights, but D&D lives and breathes through its combat. Thus for every session you should have an opponent in mind the players can fight. Once you have something chosen from your list of cool monsters to fight, locate its card in Power2ool. Pick one or two supporting monsters to round out the encounter.

Pick a place for the fight. There should always be an interesting thing about the set the fight is placed in. You should draft a list in advance of things you could use – movement limitation, dangerous areas, traps, timed obstacles, risky advantages, opportunities.

Then figure out a twist to the encounter. Is there a time limit? What is the objective – it should rarely be just defeating the opponents?

Finally, decide when to stage the fight. Sometimes you should open with it, with characters already in the thick of it, sometimes you should let the players plan for it, sometimes you should surprise the players in the middle of roleplaying.

Avoid concluding the session with the fight unless you’re good in time management. Even a great fight can be ruined by players getting antsy about catching the last bus home.

Skyrim. Hot damn they've improved from Oblivion's tasteless fantasy tropes

My wife got me Ready Player One for Christmas. It’s pretty good for a kid born in the 70s, and its themes of virtual worlds and their relation to the real world gels really well with a science fiction thing I’ve been working on. Then I started playing Skyrim and any of my doubts about where we’re going were swept away.

Forget virtual and real.

When I started walking in Skyrim, immediately after exiting the introductory dungeon, instinctually knowing where to look for specific plants, how to fight, and what kind of moons to look for in the night sky – it’s a (real) place I’d stepped into. This is the third game I’ve played in this world, having spent hundreds of hours in Morrowind and Oblivion, and that’s really the thing for me: it’s not so much a game series as a world, a place, to me. The world in Skyrim is just as I remember it from my previous adventures, only prettier, up to today’s standards. In the case of many other games, I would say lack of progress and feeling of familiarity are negatives, but in this case it’s a major pull for me.

There will be ever more of these virtual worlds with so much personal and cultural relevance – be it through Minecraft or World of Warcraft or Elder Scrolls – that they really do transcend being “games”. When it feels like you’re logging on or booting up to be somewhere else, to meet people and go about your own ambitions instead of a traditional single player storyline, that’s a place, a world we’re talking about.

I don’t think it needs to be an MMO to do this. Guys talking about Skyrim never talk about the storyline – they talk about their own ideas of how to play the game. I’ve spent hours crafting jewelry and armor, really proud of my work and figuring out stuff on my own.

I think the key is giving the player enough freedom to find their own way and view the world from their own perspective.

I’m still trying to get around my general distaste for sandbox experiences. The thing about the Elder Scrolls series may be that they go to an awful lot of trouble to make it feel like a cohesive place instead of a virtual playground (think GTA, Saint’s Row, Mercenaries).

T-shirt design by Penny Arcade

I’ve been running a lot of D&D Essentials lately. I think it’s interesting to see how my initial expectations have fared against nine games into a campaign and a couple of off-shoots.

I’ve ended up with a lot of stuff I have no use for.

The characters are created using the online Dungeons & Dragons Insider (“DDI”) subscription service. You might want to flip through Heroes of the Fallen Lands if you’re a player looking for inspiration, but honestly, I haven’t had a need to open it since subscribing. The computer assisted creation removes a lot of guessing and confusion from the process. We are now also using some characters from the second Essentials player book (Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms), but have no real need to get the book.

The Rules Compendium I do use… a bit, even though looking up the rules from the DDI Compendium is often quicker. Mainly the Compendium’s user interface is a bit shit, so when you know where to look for something in the book, the book is preferred. All told I’d want to have it around when running a game, but I rarely open it.

I use the Monster Vault book, but just for pictures and fluff text for inspiration. It has great fluff text! It’s full of adventure ideas and atmosphere. The box and the cardboard cutouts are useless, as we’re using whatever miniatures we have lying around to represent the monsters. The adventure is of no interest, I haven’t even read it. I get the stats and rules from the Compendium, straight into Power2ool.

The Red Box is only useful as a beautiful thing to have on the shelf. The contents I can’t use, although they’re valuable just because they set me down this path. If someone is interested in the game, I could give them the box to go through and they’d have a good idea of how it works.

I’ve ended up with a lot of stuff I do have use for.

Chessex Battlemat and wet-erase pens. Any notes I’m taking, they go on the Battlemat – mostly how the players are doing in a skill challenge, initiative order and monster hit points. All combat encounters are of course drawn on the Battlemat, too. I love the concept so much I think it’s going to be used in also my miniature-less games from now on – it brings an air of open challenge to the table which I really like. My players are totally into it, too, often suggesting ways to draw stuff better and talking about the stats they can see.

Descent: Journeys In The Dark miniatures. I’ve got a big bag full of white and red plastic figures from Descent. So far I haven’t really needed anything else, and when I do, there’s usually a suitable Games Workshop Warhammer miniature lying around. I also think I’ll at some point put a dungeon together just using the Descent modular board pieces. Should be fun.

Dungeons & Dragons Insider subscription. Invaluable when running a 4E game. I have very little use for anything besides the Character Builder, but that alone is worth it. I wouldn’t mind them adding more in the way of managing your campaign (I have complex Google Docs spreadsheets for everything).

Colour printer. You want to be able to print those character sheets and especially power cards.

Deluxe Dungeon Master’s Screen I’m referencing all the time. Plus it’s big, sturdy and beautiful, giving you loads of confidence at the table! Seriously, it’s the best GM screen ever, four panels full of useful stuff.

Power2ool. I believe I’ve spoken of it’s merits at enough length already, but I wouldn’t want to plan and run a game without it. It’s that good.

Essentials really works for me and my group.

If the aim of Essentials was to lower the barrier to entry for new players, they’ve succeeded. We’re having a lot of fun with D&D and spending money, which would likely not have happened without Essentials. While I can now read and understand powers with ease, the “vanilla” flavor of D&D still feels a bit ridiculous to me. The Essentials streamlining is just about perfect.

There are some things that could be even more straightforward. They could’ve done a much better job streamlining the magic users into something more newbie friendly – as it is, I’d never give a wizard to a new player. They’ll be swamped and paralyzed by options.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

I found the first Kane & Lynch an important game. It was not very good as an action title – although by no means bad, either – but it was very interesting.

Games should generally be more interesting.

What made it interesting was its sad bastards of protagonists. These guys are the same in the sequel. They’re bad guys, but human. They’re trying to do right by their own, skewed perspective. They’re trying to meet their own gaze in the mirror, no matter all the shit they’ve gone down with.

What made it interesting was the setting. They used that Michael Mann cool, hard criminal urban aesthetic really effectively. Despite sometimes lackluster graphical technical quality, that game had atmosphere and cool more than it knew what to do with. The sequel does the same thing, only this time with Shanghai’s exotic underground, and nobody can fault their technical execution. It’s a gorgeous game.

But its ultimate triumph was the narrative. Riding as Kane, a morally bankrupt gangster trying to do right by his family, but only knowing his criminal ways and violence, makes a sad mess of his already messed up life, and every attempt he makes, he just draws himself and everyone he loves deeper into a hopeless situation. It was intense. Games are rarely intense on a narrative level.

It is this last point IO Interactive fumbles in the sequel. It is still an interesting title and well worth the ride, but the narrative just doesn’t have the same gravitas.

The problem is that the protagonists are mostly reacting to stuff happening to them. They don’t take action. They don’t plan. Run and gun can never replace intent. When you decide that you are going to do a Bad Thing and then you carry it out, that’s powerful stuff. When dudes show up to shoot you up, shooting them up isn’t very interesting.

They do still know how to use their setup for very effective scenes. There are multiple memorable moments in the game. But the shocks are never as effective as in the first game, and that’s because you don’t have a similar emotional bond to these absolutely flawed protagonists. You don’t care.

I felt very conflicted about playing the first game, because on a level I did sympathize with Kane’s plight, but goddamn, he made a lot of very bad calls and did a lot of very bad things. This was not an easy man to like. In the sequel, mostly because the guys are constantly under fire and on the run, it’s easy to side with them. Of course it’s okay to shoot at guys who are shooting at you. Of course it’s okay to blast some guys who have just tortured you and killed your girlfriend.

While the central conflict is not as engaging, the gloriously improved, stylized presentation makes up for it. This is a journey well worth taking, if not living up to its full potential. Kane & Lynch titles are some of this medium’s bravest writing and for that alone they’re worth your time.

Dark Souls

I had to have Dark Souls on the PlayStation 3 instead of Xbox 360 because of the free multiplayer. (I gave up on Xbox Live Gold due to over a year of not using it.) This is surprising considering that there is little direct playing together with other people going on. I’ve played for over 30 hours and had one invasion where another player enters your game with intent to kill. Aside from that, I’ve had other people helping out with boss encounters a couple of times.

Dark Souls is an oppressive game, but don’t believe the marketing: it’s not as difficult to approach as Demon’s Souls.

Part of it is due to the world structure. It is a big open world without loading, and from the beginning, you can go in so many places. Many of them are insurmountable until you’ve gained a lot more experience. As you find how places relate to each other and find shortcuts, you gain a mastery over the virtual world that you never reached in the previous game. It feels like drawing back curtains to reveal new sets.

The other thing is that the game is just not as difficult as Demon’s Souls. The checkpoint system (bonfires) give you a fair bit of freedom to control what happens when you die. The health system with the health potions which refill automatically upon death makes things a lot less grind-y.

Still, the atmosphere is one of being alone against a very hostile world and its hellish denizes. Even if you’re not playing with the other people all that much – aside from being invaded sometimes and summoning help with the bosses at times – you really appreciate the knowledge of being connected, sometimes seeing ghosts of other players resting at the same bonfires you are. The otherworldly messages can be very helpful, too. It’s dangerous to go alone.

I would have perhaps expected From to make playing together between friends easier in the sequel. No such development is evident and although I sympathize with the internet crowd’s frustration over this, I get it: being able to effectively co-op would destroy the game’s mood.

But the reason Dark Souls is the most social game in years for me is that its lack of hand-holding and instructions, even with key game mechanics, forces you to talk to other players. You go on the forums and you talk to your colleagues, figuring out how to proceed, because you don’t really have an alternative. Conquering this game alone, back before the internet, would’ve been a Herculean task. I don’t feel like I’m cheating when I go on a Dark Souls wiki – to me it feels like the way the game was meant to be played. It’s a gauntlet thrown down (lovingly) by From, and we take it up as a community.

Mass Effect 2

I used to think that Bioware was the coolest studio out there. They were putting out games I absolutely loved: mainly Baldur’s Gate and its sequel. I always forget that the AD&D game I liked the best, Icewind Dale, was not a Bioware production despite using their Infinity engine in the Forgotten Realms setting – it was Black Isle’s (of Planescape Torment and Fallout 2 fame).

Up to Knights Of The Old Republic – still the best Star Wars entertainment out there apart from the original trilogy – they could do no wrong. I fell in love with Star Wars all over again because of that game.

I skipped Neverwinter Nights due to not having a gaming PC at the time. From what I hear, it suffered from a lack of focus. MDK2 was alright. I was a big enough man to allow them this sidetrack into action.

Then there was Jade Empire, which was good, but not what I was expecting. The mechanics were weird. The fighting worked, but it never felt good. As ever, the world and the characters were very cool and inspired. I did not mind the smaller scale and overall I really enjoyed my time in the kung fu epic.

I am a big fan of Mass Effect, but that’s the point I realized Bioware is not something I can unconditionally trust anymore. The inventory was broken, most of the mechanics were poorly implemented (poower use, Mako driving), inadequately explained (grenades) or just broken (skills) and the fighting was never fun in and of itself.

What they got right was a super cool science fiction world, characters, and dialogue. My FemShep kicks all kinds of ass and I love her for it and Bioware for letting me do that. The story held me all the way, even though it contained only new space opera cliches. I didn’t care about the problems, because the narrative completely seized me.

Considering that Mass Effect 2 got even higher praise than the original game, I was ready to get it on. About ten hours in, I completely lost my interest.

It’s the same world, much of the same characters, same good dialogue, improved combat and somewhat improved mechanics, but they’ve completely dropped the ball with the story.

I have no idea what I’m doing and why (I guess there’s a gate I should jump in), and I don’t care. I’ve been told to go and collect all of my missing friends, gotta catch ‘em all style, and then talk to them and talk to them until they offer me a mission to get them to trust me. This is not what I imagined the second chapter of saving the goddamn universe (again) to be like!

It’s like an endless sequence of those pointless fetch-a-thons that comprise the side quests of most RPGs (Bioware’s included). Even though the missions are generally well put together, well framed and well acted, I just don’t give a shit. Getting my crew together should be a side order, not the main course.

Apparently the game ends in a cliffhanger once you’re finally ready to go to the gate and jump in to tackle the actual threat to everything in existence. Sorry, a game of cloned preludes cannot hold my attention. I don’t think I’m going to complete the game, and probably will just skip to Mass Effect 3.

We’ll see how Mass Effect 3 manages to resolve these issues, if at all. At least my damn group should be together already. And based on how much the fans of the original Dragon Age hated the sequel  - which I haven’t played already, but I very much mean to, precisely because of the internet furore – maybe they’ve learned some lessons.

Less is more: Dragon Age has a lot to learn here with its swathes of uninteresting content. Show, don’t tell: Mass Effect’s best stuff is hidden away in a codex. I need a motivation to do stuff: Mass Effect 2, I’m looking at you. These are cliches because they’re true. They’re also simple rules which Bioware used to know. Previously they’ve only struggled with mechanics and game rules – initially helped by using an established ruleset when working on Wizards‘ systems – now they’ve started to stumble on their unique strengths. It worries me.

Driver: San Francisco

Before Driver: San Francisco, I thought that maybe you just can’t do engaging storytelling in a car game. Rockstar had given it a shot, and while I really enjoy Midnight Club: Los Angeles, the storytelling is really very bad and uninteresting. If Rockstar can’t do it, who can? It turns out that Reflections can.

The initially bonkers story taking place in the protagonist’s head as he lies in a coma is a stroke of genius. They’ve decided to incorporate their crazy gameplay gimmick of “shifting” between cars on the fly into the story, and in my opinion it really shouldn’t work. It’s too out there, combined with a realistic world.

But it does work. The characters spout good dialogue, rarely missing their mark. Why it works and something like Midnight Club: LA does not, is because it’s all about the game. They’re discussing what’s happening in the game, even if it’s something videogame loco like the bad guy throwing cars around the expressway by force of will. When you’re shifting around, the characters talk about it. Very quickly, you start to take it at face value.

The other thing they get so right is that it’s all happening inside or right around the cars. The characters are essentially extensions of their vehicles. There was one inconsequential scene with a couple of meters of running outside of a car, but that’s it. Everything of consequence happens in a car, with the player driving. The really well done CGI characters help, of course, but I’d say the sharp focus on the cars and the guys driving the cars is the key here. No, it wouldn’t work in a movie (I think… might be interesting to see someone try), but as a videogame, it’s a masterclass act in writing.

The big open world I’m not a fan of. It works as a mission selection screen, but I fail to see the point of the open world, as it’s just a sequence of missions to me. I like the real life San Francisco a fair bit, but I couldn’t really get an SF vibe from the game. It makes me think what they could’ve done if it didn’t have to be an open world experience.

Videogame first, then, but a coherent narrative experience at that, Driver: San Francisco has been the year’s biggest surprise to me so far. Great stuff, really looking forward to what Reflections does next.

D&D Rules Compendium

I’ve praised D&D fourth edition’s skill challenges before, but they warrant some more love. Initially I dismissed the system – I thought it was just about Wizards branding the concept of rolling for a skill outside of combat or something.

But they’ve taken a leaf out of new wave roleplaying games, with their non-negotiable open systems, designed to direct the roleplaying in the table instead of being just a tool used for a purpose (say, combat). I find that I’m using skill challenges all the time, and my players love them. (I like to think so, anyway!)

Skill challenges are a stuctured way of approaching out of combat conflicts. The players want something and in order to make it interesting, they risk something.

The system could use more structure with what’s at stake – as it is, it’s left for the game master to determine how failures are punished. Typically you lose some healing surges or take some damage, but as seen with my example of the city defense as a skill challenge, you can think of more substantial wagers.

Players get experience points for completing a skill challenge (even if they fail it), so they’re automatically invested to a degree. But what really makes them pay attention – much like a combat encounter – is that the skill challenges require them to start their imaginations. You don’t just propose a solution and ask for a roll – as the Dungeon Master, I set the goal, lay out the terms (this is what you’re risking, this is how many successes you need), and then ask the players how they’re going to approach the situation. What they’re doing is rolling, but what it requires is team-play and imagination. Typically everybody chips in with assisting skills.

I have never seen more active and imaginative use of player skills in any game. The characters are coming alive just by virtue of their different skills coming to the fore, players thinking of ways to justify rolling with “Athletics” in an academic challenge, say. As a game master, I don’t have to pre-think of ways to make everybody’s skill choices meaningful to the campaign: they’re going to do that on their own – and enjoy it!

To me skill challenges are the best part of D&D 4E Essentials, along with combat that keeps everyone alert. Indeed, 4E has made some age-old RPG tropes exciting again.

Space Marine cover

Based on Relic’s history with Warhammer 40 000 I had a feeling they might really deliver with Space Marine, their first action take on the franchise. I’ve played both Dawn Of War titles a lot and liked the adaptations into videogame form quite a bit. As most Warhammer fans, what I’d really love is a direct translation of the tabletop experience, but that is something Games Workshop is unlikely to sanction. They are worried about their core business of selling miniatures. At least that’s what I’ve heard, but when Relic’s pumping out games of this caliber, I can’t help but wonder if the digital business might be bigger to them already. It’s intellectual property first, games second.

That Warhammer 40 000 – the world, the IP – has survived for over two decades (since 1987 – 24 years) without changing and still feel fresh amidst the endless contemporary clones (of which Gears Of War is the best), is more than a minor miracle. This is a living classic we are dealing with, here.

That this signifigance is lost on the majority of this game’s audience feels so wrong to me.

It would be impossible for me to judge Space Marine on its own. Relic has been able to dig into my brain and extract how I imagined being a Space Marine feeling like as a kid, and you can’t bypass that emotional link. If I were to try, I would say it’s a Gears Of War-y shooter with meaty close combat and satisfyingly tactical scenarios, set in a world with depth and history and too much running in tunnels. Weapon differences don’t feel quite important enough. The enemies could be more varied, and doesn’t a bit of it feel derivative? I mean, “space marines”? That doesn’t even work as a joke.

But that’s not the point of it. It can’t be. It fulfills the fantasy of being a Space Marine, a god of war, more badass than Kratos and out-manning Marcus et al. Captain Titus of the Ultramarines is very much the original badass. They way the (also tough as nails) Imperial Guard troopers stand a couple of feet shorter than you, kneel and address you as “my Lord” – they really let you revel in the fantasy. You are a space knight, riding into the green wave of nasties as the champion of all. You are the boss man of just a handful of guys, sent in because an army wouldn’t suffice. Space Marines. Yeah.

But it also about seeing and experiencing the Warhammer 40 000 world. Traversing a Forge world under siege from an Ork invasion, the historical world crumbling all around you as you’re racing to protect its most critical assets (Titans) from the alien, it’s stuff I’ve imagined countless times, now seen and felt for the first time. And it does not disappoint. Relic have gone to town with delivering the siege mentality, with audio logs (delivered via servo skulls), grissly wounded soldiers and decimated housing complexes.

The plasma, melta and las weapons don’t feel quite as good as I’d hoped and the (grand!) melee could use a bit more precision, but they’ve got the core so right. Bolt pistol and chainsword in hand, there is no number of Orks that could stop me.

I will never look at my beloved Space Marines quite the same again. I’ve finally got to play the part of one, and from now on, these small plastic men will never be inanimate again.

Oh, and I’ve been playing it on the PC, using an Xbox controller. The console versions felt pretty much the same, but I’m hoping we’ll see some cool mods for the PC down the line. It runs really well on my ageing system.

It will be interesting to see how the game is received in the hands of consumers largely ignorant of its legacy. I think it’s appealing enough to have legs, but against the likes of Gears Of War 3, I’m not sure.

Black dragon

We are now five sessions into our “In Exile” (“Maanpaossa” in Finnish) campaign, in which the players portray nobles and their servants who have fled their homeland, now trapped in civil war. It is very much back to basics D&D, as per the Essentials flavor.

The game has been very successful so far and I’m only more pumped to run it as we’re getting further along. Last night we had an awesome fight with a black dragon. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for decades now and I’m happy to say it met my expectations.

Running an epic fight against a dragon

I wanted the players to be invested in their base of operations, the town of Winterhaven (“Talvensyli”) from  H1 – Keep On The Shadowfell. We had already established that Count Padhraig would be evacuating the town based on a warning from the heroes – the black dragon Saessan would be coming for the town at midnight. There were around 50 defenders at the Count’s command.

I wanted an epic dragon fight. My players deserved it.

Even though the 4E combat is fast, I was not about to draw a map with fifty defenders on it. That would basically just make the combat a very large slugfest. As the majority of the defenders were minions, they would just get wiped out very quickly and not really add to the fight at all. Giving them levels (more hit points) would just make the fight very easy for the players.

Skill Challenge: Defend Winterhaven from Saessan, the young black dragon (Complexity 3, 150 XP)

With my love for skill challenges, I set the defense of Winterhaven as a long, complexity 3 task. They would need six moderate (DC 13 for level two heroes) and two hard (DC 20) successes before failing three times. As an advantage, they could remove up to two prior failures by using one of their hard (DC 20) successes.

Every “turn”, the dragon would attack something in the town – either one of the groups of defenders (militia and dwarf warriors in groups of ten and five), one of the NPCs (the count, innkeep and smith), or the PCs. I just whipped up a random table and rolled for it.

On its turn, the dragon would do damage with its breath weapon (2D8+3, I bypassed the ongoing damage in this case) to its target. This means basically wiping out a group of defenders with minion status. To make it interesting for the players, one of them could opt to guard the threatened group and instead take the damage all on their own. Guarding players could not participate in that turn’s skill shallenge.

The players could not use their normal powers and attacks to damage the dragon. Rather, they would need to use their skills as part of the fight. You can only use a single skill once as the “rolling skill” per skill challenge, so they would need to come up with new ways to fight the beast. If someone needed healing, they could use healing surges freely.

Every round they failed, the dragon would destroy part of the town. The players would get to choose between the smithy, the inn, the wizard’s tower or the homes of Winterhaven.

Outcome

The way it played out, the players got to around halfway of the challenge and then failed three times in a row with natural ones. This was a great outcome, actually – demoralized, the defenders wouldn’t dare to face the dragon anymore, parts of the town were in ruins, but the heroes had soaked up all the damage, leaving all the defenders in (relatively) good health.

Failing the challenge meant fighting the dragon the old-fashioned way, and it couldn’t have been better, really. We had gotten a much more interesting, dramatic fight out of it, and would still get to use all the powers and play out the fight “properly”, as some of the players were itching to do. The fight had moved across the city streets and through several buildings, culminating in a trap in the smoking ruins of the smithy.

I counted all the successful attacks against the dragon over the course of the skill challenge, leaving out traps and the like, and let the players roll for damage as normal. This left the dragon down by around a third of hit points.

My crew won the fight fairly with a well-timed illusion winning them some time, almost overcome by the dying dragon’s acidic blood in the end. It was suitably touch and go.

Lessons learned

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have planned to rob the players of the joy of the actual dragon fight. The “best case” outcome should have been leaving the dragon bloodied, which still makes for a fearsome opponent.

Some of the players found the “epic fight” approach confusing to begin with, but by the end, I think my first time actually letting a dragon loose on my players was a major success.

The reason it played so well was that the players got to make the important, dare I say heroic calls about their actions – who to protect, at what cost, what part of the city to sacrifice to the dragon’s rampage. Meaningful choice and facing concequences are interesting and thus fun.

I believe I’ll use a similar approach in other big fights in the game. Perhaps I should find a way to allow the heroes to use their normal abilities and attacks, as well, though.

Someone might fret over experience point economy – the players got the XP for completing the skill challenge (150), as well as felling the dragon (175), as well as completing the quest of saving Winterhaven from the dragon (125). I think it was suitably challenging and a standout moment to be worth it. The game world is now a much livelier place, with a cool moment in history bonding the players to the city. Plus it ties neatly into the multiple quest lines I’ve got running in the background. I want to make the events meaningful to the players to make them care more about the future plot lines.