Gencon in Review

I was treated to a short adventure of my own on my way home from Gencon: my return flight was evidently booked for September 16, instead of August 16.  Of course, with a hundred thousand gamers leaving Indianapolis on Sunday, all of the flights out were fully booked.  Fortunately, a ticketing agent for Continental went beyond the call of duty and managed to get me on a flight out on standby.  I regret to say that I didn’t get his name.  I can only say that I was a bit stressed at the time.  Still, I’m very grateful and will definitely keep Continental in mind for next year.  I’ll also keep a certain ticket-brokering website in mind, in a less favorable light.

Enough about me, though.  I’ve got a couple of impressions about the convention to report about.  Some of them might merit further discussion later on, but best to get the bullet points down now, while it’s fresh.

This post is part of August’s RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by Chgowiz.

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Cryptic Offering Lifetime Subscription to Champions MMO

Cryptic Studios, formerly of City of Heroes, has been working on the Champions MMORPG set for release September 1.

They’re taking a page from Turbine and offering a lifetime subscription for $200.  They’re throwing in extra costumes, an in-game widget, eight extra character slots for alt-aholics like me, and access to the Star Trek Online closed beta later this year, along with the lifetime access.  The only catch:  the offer’s only good until the game launches.

In case you’re wondering, at $15/month, the lifetime subscription pays off in 13 months.  So if you think you’ll like the game enough to be playing it for years, it’s a pretty good deal, even without all the extra goodies.

On the other hand, it’s a lot to fork over for a game sight-unseen.  I played City of Heroes for over two years, and it was pretty fun, and I generally trust Cryptic’s game-development instincts (although I would hope Champions has a stronger endgame than CoH did).  But that’s a lot of trust.

They’re also offering pre-orderers a 6-month subscription for $60, which saves you $30, and also gets you Star Trek beta access and one of the bonus costume sets.  So if you like the idea but you aren’t sure the game’s going to hold your interest, that’s a pretty nice way to go.  Or if you’re interested in both Champions and Star Trek, I guess.

I’m going to need to think this one over.  I like the Champions universe, so it’s a very tempting offer for me, even though I’m mildly disappointed that the game won’t be using the HERO system.  Of course, it couldn’t use HERO fully, but I think HERO’s system of points, advantages, and disadvantages is practically made for an MMO setup, where you gain experience to become more powerful to gain more experience, and so forth.  A streamlined version of HERO might’ve been fun to see.

Even so, cheers to Cryptic for making a superhero MMO.  It’s a genre that’s sadly underrepresented at the moment.

Foxbat for President: Sacred Cows and Hamburger

Sacred cows make the best hamburger, or so the saying goes.  When it comes to RPGs, they tend to provide grist for the mill.

There are sacred cows aplenty in rules systems, of course.  That’s one of the reasons why we have edition wars:  change anything, no matter how inconsequential you think it might be, or how much better you think the new version is, and there’s sure to be someone loudly decrying the change and lamenting that the new version just isn’t the same game any more.  No more assassins or cavaliers in 2e?  Sacrilege.  No more THAC0 in 3e?  A travesty.  No more Vancian casting in 4e?  Well, that’s fine, but not for any game whose title includes the words dungeon and dragon.

That’s not the sort I’m thinking about today, though.  I’m interested in the sacred cows within the settings.  The characters, locations, and other elements that are always present, if only lurking somewhere in the background.  The ones that define that setting, that — in a sense — make it what it is.  The ones that are iconic — not Tordek and Mialee, but the real icons.  The ones with names like Bigby, Mordenkainen, Raistlin, Elminster, Vecna.  (There tends to be a good share of wizards among them.  I don’t believe this is a coincidence.)  The guys you know and love.  Or hate.  Sometimes both.

A campaign set in one of these published settings must acknowledge its sacred cows at one point.  Either it kowtows to them, making use of the pre-existing body of lore that surrounds them (however nebulous it might be in some cases — how much do most D&D players really know about Bigby, other than that he’s the guy with the hand spells?), or it slaughters them, creating some explanation for why they’re no longer present or have no impact.  The former option limits the GM somewhat; the latter often infuriates players who have a fondness for that setting.  Witness the reaction of Greyhawk fans to Greyhawk Wars, or the more recent reaction of Forgotten Realms fans to the 4e redesign of that world.

Which brings us to Foxbat.

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MMORPG Armageddon?

While catching up on the news this week, I came across an interesting tidbit at Virtual Worlds News:  Worlds.com has sued NCSoft, the publisher of such games as City of Heroes, Lineage II, and the ill-fated Tabula Rasa.  Worlds.com was one of the early developers of virtual worlds; WebWorld, their earliest, launched in 1994.  That’s practically prehistory for the WorldWide Web.

It turns out that, a decade or so ago, Worlds.com filed for two patents.  One of them was patent 7,181,690, “System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.”  The capsule version:  this is a patent on tracking the positions of avatars via a client-server method.

Which, incidentally, closely describes all of the variety of methods used in many modern MMORPGs, including the 900-lb. gorilla, World of Warcraft.

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Wrapping Up Warcraft

When I ran the first part of my Shadowfang Keep adaptation, I brought a stack of pre-made characters.  I explained the basics of each class and the d20 mechanic, told them we’d get to the rest during actual play as it came up, and jumped right into the adventure.  This is a faster start than I’ve normally used in the past, but it seemed to work pretty well.  During the first encounter, with the extremely simple terrain, they were able to pick up most of the combat rules very quickly.  But the game really took off when they reached Baron Silverlaine’s hall.

“It’s going to be tough to fight all of those,” one of the players mused.

“Is that what you want to do?  Fight them?”

“…What?”

“Well, he just demanded to know what you’re doing in his keep.  It’s up to you to decide how your characters respond.”

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