#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 5 – Old School Game

This one really hasn’t changed since last year.

#RPGaDAY

Today’s #RPGaDAY topic is most old school RPG owned. This is going to be difficult as I doubt there is an actual definition of what “old school” is. I’m going to say that it’s not the oldest RPG I own, because that would be either Ghostbusters or Twilight: 2000, both of which have some modern elements in them.

Twilight: 2000 aside: While I probably don’t have to go into how Ghostbusters was groundbreaking with dice pools, brownie points, or a crazy successful example of expanding a rather limited IP into something so much more than the original, but Twilight: 2000, a modern game? Surprisingly, yes! (Well, partly.) See, in T:2000, your character could buy contacts – people in the game world that your character knows. But the clever part was you could leave them blank and fill them out in play. You filled them out in play by telling the GM that a specific NPC in the game is someone that you know. Even if the NPC is the Baron of Warsaw, which would completely derail an adventure if GM slavishly stuck to his master plot.

Twilight: 2000 is the earliest game I can recall that allowed for the players to take some narrative control over the story that didn’t involve their character’s actions.

But back to the most old school RPG I own:

It’s got to be a game with a defined GM/player divide – the players are playing in the GM’s story and have no input on the setting or storylines apart from in-game character actions and reactions.

One of the game’s primary focus is combat resolution. Preferably, this is the main focus of the game. Combat resolution is done with an attempt to make the combat as “realistic” as possible, despite the setting. Tables with many, many combat modifiers helps. Characters should also have to keep track of how many arrows/bullets/laser blasts they have fired off.

Pile of DiceCharacter creation should last an entire game session; some players will have to finish making their characters before the next session, but probably won’t.

Encumbrance rules? Good.

If the game has magic, are there spells that directly target one attribute score, suggesting that magicians in the game world have realized that every living thing in the world is, in fact, a character in a game?

Does the background section of the main rule book (Of course we have supplements and additional sourcebooks!) have a timeline or is at least twenty pages long? ((The best example of going way overboard on the background section is Blue Planet, 2nd Edition. There’s a long in-game fiction section about the setting, an equally-lengthy narrative about the history of the world of Poseidon and recent events back on Earth, plus an incredibly long timeline.))

Is there a meta-plot?

My most old school RPG is Shadowrun, 5th Edition.

 

#RPGaDAY2015, Day 5: Most Recent RPG Purchase

See? I was going to answer this at the bottom of the Last Year, Day 4 post, but the question is asked again this year as its own topic.

So, what was the last RPG I purchased?

Oh, man, what was the last roleplaying game I purchased? Geez.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I haven’t really been playing RPGs, and those that I have been playing are older games. If I go with the most recent accessory, oddly, it would be a set of dice to play FFG’s Age of Rebellion! I picked those up about two weeks ago, because I really like the boost/setback dice concept. ((Plus I was going to borrow that for a homebrew superhero game to play with the girl.)) It’s crazy innovative and a great way for GMs to quickly come up with plausible rulings in the game. Shooting a blaster at a bad guy that’s tussling with one of your friends? Crap, I don’t know the official rule for “firing into melee combat”. Hey, just toss in a setback die. ((And later, you look up the actual rule: you’re supposed to boost one of the difficulty dice. Oh well, you were pretty close and the player sweated a bit.))

I don’t seem to buy games right now. But that’s because I’m doing so much RPG layout work, most of what I want to get, I’m the one working on it.

You know, I’m going to have to go back to Kickstarter, but I really haven’t purchased games there, I’ve backed games. Sometimes they’ll give me a PDF or physical book in thanks, but let’s see…

Bulldogs! Fate Core Edition, I only threw in a buck because I’ll be laying that out, but that hasn’t been delivered, and I don’t think I really purchased anything other than access to the backers-only updates. Same with Blades in the Dark (well, I’m not laying that out): it’s not due to be delivered for several months and I really got that to get access to John Harper’s .indd files, not the actual game. Feng Shui 2? Yeah, I guess I’ll go with that.

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fs2So Feng Shui 2: Action Movie Roleplaying Game is done by Atlas Games and Hal Mangold did the layout on this book, and that’s why I backed it to get the PDF. The bad thing about this is Feng Shui is a game whose subject just doesn’t interest me at all. ((For gaming, I’ll point out. I don’t particularly care for the genre as a thing to play, but the movies? Yeah. They’re pretty cool.)) Given a chance between playing this and another game, I’d probably pick the other game. But the book is so beautiful. So skillfully laid out. It’s one of the best graphically-designed games of the past year.

Tell you what, gentle reader. You’ve read 1000 words about the layout of FFG’s Age of Rebellion earlier today. I’m not going to go into the layout of Feng Shui 2 right now — I’ll go into it in another post once #RPGaDAY2015 is over — but what I’ll leave you with is a promise: if you like books that are masterfully laid out, either of the two books in today’s post are well worth looking over.

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 4 – Most Recent RPG Purchase

Finally! Done with the reposts of first games I’ve played/run/purchased. On to new stuff! Let’s see what the most recent RPG I purchased was last year, then let’s dig into this year!

#RPGaDAY

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 4: What was the most recent roleplaying game you purchased?

aorThat’s Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Age of Rebellion from their incredibly profitable line of Star Wars roleplaying games. While I’m tempted to take this time to write about Star Wars’ lineage in gaming ((Did you know that West End Games made up quite a bit of Star Wars’ non-movie lore in an era when there were just three movies, Splinter in the Mind’s Eye, and the Han Solo/Corporate Sector trilogy to draw from?)), or how FFG has really monetized the Star Wars line. ((Three separate game lines based on the focus of stories you wanted to tell and selling beta versions and “beginner boxes” for $30? All of which are well worth it, for production value alone.)) One thinks other companies would have the base game, then a criminal underworld sourcebook, followed by a rebellion one and a Jedi one – not three separate game lines backed by dozens of support products. ((It’s also odd that FFG didn’t start with the galactic civil war, which is what I think as what Star Wars is all about – I mean, heck, it has the word “Wars” in the title – as the setting for the game is just before Empire Strikes Back. Instead, they start with the Han Solo book, so you’ve got Shadowrun in Space as your default Star Wars setting)), or how it sucks that FFG isn’t releasing PDFs of the line ((PDFs are electronic products, so they fall under a different licensing agreement with Lucasfilm. FFG can produce PDFs that they will never charge for, like the Under a Black Sun adventure or pregenerated characters that aren’t in the starter kit.)), or my personal journey through various Star Wars games and how I fell out of love with the series ((West End Games’ d6 Star Wars was the backbone of one of my favorite campaigns. Wizards of the Coast’s Saga Edition I never played because I hated, hated, hated the d20 system. FFG’s, I’ve run a few times and absolutely enjoyed the times I played it.)).

But I’d like to write about the graphic design of the FFG line.

The books are absolutely fantastic. As a layout designer, there is a lot to learn in just the Age of Rebellion core book. Original illustration – not just publicity stills and movie shots as provided by the IP holder, as you’d see on most licensed games – fill the book. I estimate that there is one piece of artwork every three pages. Most of the lines I’ve worked on suggest one every five pages. And these aren’t small illustrations, either! There’s an illustration of an X-Wing pilot removing her astromech droid from the crashed ship while far above, nearly lost in the sky by atmospheric perspective, the battle continues, just outside the atmosphere. This illustration takes up the entire page, with the composition allowing for the copy of the game text to flow normally on this page. Yet, with all this artwork (and copy overflowing the art in places), the book is nice: legible and readable. Why?

Headings! Apart from chapter headings, the books are laid out in a tightly-controlled number of headings. Three headings, with that last one used sparingly. (A nice change from a recent job that had six levels of headings, all of which were used differently by writers working on their own sections.)

Typeface choice! The typeface used (ITC Symbol, it looks like) has an elevated x-height and is well crafted, giving the letterforms room to breathe. For a game book, where one has a great deal of copy to reference during play, this is essential. The layout of the body copy is a bit jarring, as the template designers have the paragraphs both indented and with space between paragraphs. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Indent or space before, not both. The copy presentation is almost perfect. I could forgive the paragraph spacing issue if only they aligned the copy to the baseline. ((The book’s second typographical sin. Most of the time the designers get lucky because the number of paragraphs and headings sort themselves out, even if the middle of the page gets mis-aligned. Having lots of graphics and having the text wrap around them also helps to disguise the lack of baseline alignment.))

Overall, the typeface treatment works, even with the justified copy. There are very few places where the copy looks cramped or too airy due to auto-scaling, the bane of justified paragraphs. Why? Because they weren’t afraid of hyphenation. The key thing to remember with InDesign’s hyphenation rules is the default settings are crap. Here, FFG adjusted them to improve readability – even in a column with twelve hyphenated words, they do not appear jarring. (This is partially because of the look of ITC Symbol’s hyphens.) The shortest word I have seen hyphenated in AoR is six letters, so I’m assuming they changed the defaults to that minimum length with hyphens no sooner than after the first three letters and no later than before the last three. ((InDesign’s default is five letter words and two letters from either side. This is as bad as turning off hyphenation completely when using justified copy.))

Tables are clean and easily-readable, as are the use of dice glyphs. The basic page layout emphasizes the feel of both games in the line so far: you’re dirty scoundrels/rebels trying to make by. Everything around is dirty and grimy. ((When I think of the Rebellion, the texture I associate with it is grease from ball bearings or working on an old car. It gets everywhere.)) The texture on the background pages subtly conveys that.

That’s a lot of words so far, and I’ve got to get some real work done today, so let me leave you with this: Age of Rebellion is a fantastic-looking book.

What about this year, Thomas?

Oh, well, you’ll see in a few hours. (The same question is this year’s day five.) Hint: the design of the book is as stunning.