More on the OGL, and What We Might See Going Forward

OGL-gate continues to power its way through the ttrpg Internet, basically undimmed for a month or so.  Trying to cover the story (or, really, stories) is a bit like being a deadline writer at a newspaper--I've put together drafts of posts that were 3/4 of the way done, only to have the next development invalidate them.  

I am once again at the risk of having this happen again with this post.  But, let's give it a shot, because I would like to talk about the recent draft of what is now called "OGL 1.2."  You can find the text here.  Much of the commentary, not surprisingly, has been focused on what this means for creators that would make, or would consider making, content for One D&D.  That is, at the end of the day, the target audience for OGL 1.2--at least unless you believe that OGL 1.2 is entirely pretextual on the part of Wizards, in the sense that they know no one will agree to this and want to use that to shut down 3rd Party creators in toto.  For what it is worth, I don't think it is pretextual.  While it is clear Wizards wants 3rd Party creators to have a relationship to Wizards that is more tilted in favor of Wizards that the previous framework, Wizards has made moves (particularly getting rid of the royalty provisions) that only make sense if you actually want people to use the license to make stuff.

But, at the end of the day, I'm not really interested in the One D&D ecosystem.  I've been out on 5e for a few years now, and I cannot see myself engaging with One D&D except out of mere curiosity over what they have done.  What I am interested in is how OGL 1.2 affects the folks that make competitor games in what is known as the "d20" space.  I have said on numerous occasions that I am a big fan of 13th Age, which currently in playtest for a revised edition.  I'm in the playtest program, and Rob Heinsoo has asked that playtesters not comment about the specific changes, but I can say in general terms that I am extremely pleased with what I have seen, in that it makes small but meaningful changes to the mechanics in ways that improve the game flow without invalidating any of the previous support material.  I would really, really like to see that game come over the finish line.  Likewise, I have reviewed and been very impressed with both Pathfinder 2e and Level Up, and I would like those games to continue to grow and develop.  And, finally, Kobold Press has announced that they are going to do their own game system.  In my judgment, Kobold Press's 5e material is the best around, better by a significant margin than Wizards' material.  I stopped buying Wizards' 5e stuff, but I still buy Kobold Press's stuff, so their project is something that I am very much looking forward to.

All four of the publishers of the games mentioned above have signed on to the "ORC" initiative, spearheaded by Paizo, which aims to create a new OGL-like framework outside of the control of Wizards.  Thus, they are not going to be using the OGL 1.2 structure for their games.  So, my interest here is to what degree does the OGL 1.2 framework impact or hinder the publication of these games.  

Right off the bat, the first element of OGL 1.2 is that it states that OGL 1.0(a) is "deauthorized," which means (according to Wizards) "you may not use that version of the OGL, or any prior version, to publish SRD content after [a date to be determined]."  However, that same paragraph states "[i]t does not mean that any content previously published under that version needs to update to this license.  Any previously published content remains licensed under whichever version of the OGL was in effect when you published that content."

The ORC initiative, or at least Paizo, has taken the firm position that Wizards does not have the power to deauthorize OGL 1.0(a), and that question will have to be resolved (to the extent it gets resolved), via litigation.  But let's put that to the side for a moment and assume Wizards can deauthorize 1.0(a).  The second part of that paragraph is pretty clear that, for example, Paizo would not have to pulp all of its existing copies of the Pathfinder 2e core rulebook, as they were printed under the then-valid OGL 1.0(a).  And I think the language strongly suggests that Paizo could print more copies of the Pathfinder 2e core rulebook, since the core rulebook was "published" prior to the deauthorization of OGL 1.0(a).  The question, though, is whether Paizo or any of the other OGL 1.0(a) publishers can make new works that are based on previous OGL 1.0(a) material.  Pathfinder 2e has its own SRD, but that SRD is by its own terms derivative of the OGL 1.0(a) (at least right now).  OGL 1.0(a) is the base of the tree that all of these games rely on, and so if you get rid of that, then it seems likely to me that all of the branches are cut as well.

This is in large measure what ORC is for.  Presumably, Pathfinder 2e and Level Up and 13th Age will be re-published under ORC, and ORC will form the base of a new tree from which those games and any supplemental and derivative materials can grow, recreating at least in general principle the framework of the now-"deauthorized" OGL 1.0(a).  In doing so, the argument will be that these games are now completely separate from Wizards' ecosystem, not subject to OGL 1.2, and free to go their own way.

But that in turn raises another set of issues.  Each of these games utilized at least some version of the SRD, and derived their game concepts from that document, which is Wizards' IP, at least to some degree.  When all these games get republished under ORC, Wizards could sue on the theory that they infringe Wizards' copyrighted material which is only accessible under OGL 1.2, which these parties are not using.  Presumably, all of the ORC participants would like to avoid that if they could.

While it affects all of the d20 publishers, the most interesting case to me is Kobold Press's "Project Black Flag."  In their most recent post, they stated that they intend to make Black Flag "forward compatible" with at least some of KP's 5e offerings (Deep Magic 2 was mentioned).  So, it seems like KP is going to try to make a game that is as compatible with 5e as they can.  But, this is a double-edged sword, as the closer they get to 5e, the greater the chance that they will get sued by Wizards under this copyright infringement theory.  So, how close can they go?

This leads to the second interesting element of the OGL 1.2 draft, which is that it creates a third tier of D&D-related materials.  Under OGL 1.0(a), there is the material in the SRD which is Open Game Content that participants in the OGL can use, and there is Product Identity which you can't use (at least not via the OGL).  Under OGL 1.2, there is a third tier of material, so called "core D&D mechanics," that will be licensed under a separate Creative Commons License.  Thus, anyone can use those materials without having to agree to any of the other OGL 1.2 terms, so long as they abide by the attribution requirements of the CC license.  This CC-designated material consists of specified excerpts of SRD 5.1.

This material is significant.  It includes, for example, the 5e XP advancement table (pg 56 of SRD 5.1), the idea of (and one example) of Feats (pg. 75),  the six ability scores and how they work (including conversion of ability scores into bonuses--pg. 76), the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic (pg. 76), saving throws (pg. 83),  all of the combat rules including HP, hit dice, and the death and dying mechanics (pgs. 90-99), all the rules for spellcasting (pgs. 100-104), and all the rules for how monsters work (pg. 254-260).  Because it will be in CC, Kobold Press can use all of this material in their game, if they want, with no potential problems.  This will make it easy to make at least some of their previous content compatible and usable in Black Flag.  So, for example, because the basic rules for how monsters work is accessible, all of KP's (extremely good) monster books could work in the new game.  It also means that you can use these concepts generally, even in wildly transformed ways, because the CC license in question allows for transformative works.  So, I would say that any use of the six core D&D attributes is unambiguously permitted, to take an example.

On the other hand, some critical elements of the SRD will not be CC--notably all the classes, all the spells, and all the monsters.  Presumably, KP is going to want to have a Fighter in their game, and Magic Missile, and goblins.  The degree to which they can depends on how much Wizards can actually copyright the material in the SRD.

Take the spell Magic Missile, as presented in the SRD 5.1 (for reference, it is on page 161 of SRD 5.1).  It is helpful, I think, to think of that text as having three components.  First, there is the name "Magic Missile."  Second, there is the game mechanical elements of the spell--1 Action, range of 120 feet, does 1d4+1 points of damage per missile, can be cast at a higher level to generate an additional missile per level of slot.  Finally, there is the text in the box that describes how the spell works.  The general consensus is that Wizards does not have a valid copyright as to the second component, as the United States Supreme Court has held that you cannot copyright a process, and rules for a game are basically a process.  So, even though Magic Missile is in the SRD, I think there is a very strong argument that you could have a spell in your game that takes 1 Action to cast, has a range of 120 feet, and auto-hits for 1d4+1 damage without falling under the ambit of OGL 1.2 or Wizards' IP.

On the flip side, it is also pretty clear that if you copy the SRD 5.1 entry in its entirety, including the descriptive text, then you are utilizing the SRD and are subject to OGL 1.2.  The question comes in between these two poles.  For example, what if you use the title "Magic Missile," keep all of rules elements, but re-write the descriptive text?  That's basically what Level Up does, in addition to adding some additional rules associated with its "rare spells" concept. In isolation, I don't think that Wizards has any control over the title "Magic Missile"--it's not trademarked, and it is too generic to be something that really is within its intellectual property.  So, if Wizards doesn't have any real IP rights to the mechanics, and it doesn't have any rights to the name Magic Missile, then the argument would be that the two of them together must also not be something that Wizards can control  [FWIW, this seems to be the argument that the Electronic Frontier Foundation advances in this piece].  On the flip side, the name plus the mechanics is much closer to what is in Wizards' copyrighted SRD than either of the two separately, so I could see a judge saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

What about the fact that Pathfinder 2e's version of Magic Missile alters the mechanics slightly--instead of one action, Magic Missile is now 1 to 3 actions, with the number of missiles determined by the number of action spent?  Does that make it outside the scope of the SRD?  Paizo certainly seems to think so, as they assert that Pathfinder 2e is not a product of OGL-dependent material.  And, if that is true, then KP could just tweak the mechanical parts of the classes, spells, and monsters (which they likely want to do anyway) and they are in the clear no matter what they call them.  

Of course, Wizards may not look at things that way, and try to sue on some of these corner cases.  I think in the end that KP and the rest of the ORC contingent have the better of the argument, if for no other reason that they also have all of the OGL 1.0(a) revocation arguments in addition to these IP arguments (because if OGL 1.0(a) is irrevocable, then it doesn't matter how close anyone's games are to SRD 5.1, as they could just use that).  And it is possible that Wizards might choose not to push the copyright infringement claims out of a fear of a court giving them a ruling they don't want on the revocation issue.  But, if Wizards chooses to sue, it will be expensive and protracted, and thus very difficult for small companies, of which all of them except arguably Paizo are.

Paizo is clearly going to stand on its arguments that its material is different enough to fend off any IP challenge. 13th Age is, if anything, more different from 5e than Pathfinder 2e, so I suspect they will ride it out as well.  Does Level Up do the same, or do they revise their material?  Since the core mechanics are now not at issue, I would be inclined to ride it out if I were Level Up, but then I don't have to pay to defend an IP suit from a Fortune 500 company.  And then there is Kobold Press.  We are supposed to see playtest documents next month, and I will be really curious if it has "Magic Missile" in the first packet, or whether it says something like "Force Missile."

The bottom line, as I see it, is that this new OGL 1.2 makes it far, far less likely that we are going to see full-on "lawfare" between Wizards and the members of the ORC initiative.  Wizards has, on its own initiative, dramatically reduced the places in which their IP might clash with that of these other games.  This signals to me that Wizards is not itching for a fight--a fight that has big risks for Wizards.  Taking the OGL 1.2 release as a whole, it seems to me that my initial instincts were correct--all of this is not about shutting down Paizo and Pelgrane or EN Publishing, or even preventing Kobold Press from "Pathfinder-ing" 5e, but about preemptively protecting its soon-to-be released VTT from other competitors in the VTT space who would otherwise run One D&D.  Rightly or wrongly (and I think wrongly, but we will see), I think Wizards does not view Paizo or Pelgrane or Kobold Press as real competitors, at least not real enough to risk a lawsuit that might declare that Wizards has almost no rights to the D&D IP.  Whatever the wisdom of Wizards' position, it means that I suspect that fans of Pathfinder, 13th Age, and other d20 games will have uninterrupted access to their preferred games in a form that is basically the same as it is now.  And I think Project Black Flag will be fairly close to 5e, or at least as close as the KP team wants it to be, with perhaps some names changed.

At the risk of being very controversial here, I think this is what really matters with this whole OGL kerfuffle.  I get all of the technical, legal arguments about whether the OGL is irrevocable.  But at the end of the day Dungeons & Dragons, the trademarked brand of a ttrpg, belongs to Wizards of the Coast.  I don't believe that they have some positive obligation to allow people to play in their sandbox, let alone do so under any particular terms.  Nor do I think they have some obligation to allow VTT makers to be able to provide a platform for playing D&D.  But to the extent Wizards was going to use these OGL shenanigans to try to shut down or hamstrung their once and/or future competitors, that to me is fundamentally unfair, and is a problem for the ttrpg industry as a whole.  If you don't like the terms under which Wizards allows you to make One D&D content--and I don't blame you for not liking those terms, to be clear--the proper response is to play a different game.  The good news about OGL 1.2 is that I think the draft text suggests that Wizards is far less likely to be positioned to prevent people from pursuing alternatives.  That's a reason to be celebrate.

In Defense of "Rules, Not Rulings": A Pathfinder Second Edition Review

To be honest, I wasn't planning on picking up Pathfinder 2e.  There are a lot of games out there, and I try (not particularly successfully) to limit my tabletop RPG purchases, both out of financial concerns but also out of trying to manage the currency of my time to read and digest them.  I was interested in what Paizo was doing with Pathfinder 2e, and I have mostly positive views about Paizo and the games they make, but you have to prioritize, and so Pathfinder 2e was placed outside of the circle of interest.  And then Paizo offered a sweetheart deal through Humble Bumble for the core materials (the Core Rulebook, the first Bestiary), a print copy of the Core Rulebook, and some of their useful flipmaps in PDF form, with the proceeds going to Black Lives Matter.  In that light, I felt like I had no choice to but to buy in.  [And, for the record, if you are inclined to respond to this with anything in the penumbra of "SJW!!!!", just save everyone the effort and move along.]  At which point, I put it aside, and mostly forgot about it.  But, last weekend, I picked up the Pathfinder 2e Core Rulebook and started reading.  And, since then, I've been pretty much sucked in, going through all of the materials and looking through some Youtube channels dedicated to the game (the best of which, IMHO, is Nonat1s' channel, which can be seen here).  

So, with all of that, is Pathfinder 2e a good game?  I think the answer is yes, especially if you reframe the question to be "is Pathfinder 2e good at doing the things it wants to do?"  But, perhaps more relevant than whether Pathfinder 2e is a good game or a bad game, Pathfinder 2e is without question the most game.  In a time when the tabletop RPG space is dominated by design that often tries to hone-in on a couple of  hyper-specific mechanics or game play use cases, Pathfinder 2e is an example of a maximalist design ethos.  Everything about Pathfinder 2e is big and heavily engineered.

More to the point, I think, Pathfinder 2e represents a perfect counter-point to D&D 5e, its primary competitor.  A while back, I mentioned an interview with 5e lead designer Mike Mearls in which he laid out the design philosophy behind 5e, expressed in a pithy way by "rulings not rules."  The framing here, per Mearls, is that 3rd and 4th edition tried to build a comprehensive rules system that would "control[ ] the experience of the game."  This approach is to be abandoned, again per Mearls, because those rules systems constrain DM flexibility rather than being "empowered" to make decisions on the fly.

That's one way to frame it, and obviously the way that paints the 5e project in the best possible light.  But the thing about "empowering" someone to do something is that it usually means that they are also obligated to do the thing.  Yes, the DM is empowered to make rulings, but 5e also requires the DM to make rulings on the fly, because the rules don't cover every situation, or even some rather common situations.  "Rulings, not rules" is a transfer of work from the game designers to the the DM, and a DM has a lot on his or her plate already.  "Rulings, not rules" adds to DM task-loading, and not every DM is going to want to spend their bandwidth on making rules-calls.

Pathfinder 2e doesn't promise that a DM/GM is never going to have to make rules calls--the designers are way too smart to make a promise that they will never be able to deliver on.  But there is far more codification and specificity in Pathfinder 2e about how the game is supposed to be run.  And that specificity makes it easier for a GM to just let the rules do their work while he or she focuses on other elements of the GMing job.  To take an example, consider the Stealth rules.  The Stealth rules in the 5e Player's Handbook were a word salad, so much so that rules guru Jeremy Crawford had to come out with a set of "clarifications" that were not at all obvious from the actual text in the book.  And, even after these clarifications, whether characters are either "hidden" or not hidden is mostly DM fiat.  By contrast, Pathfinder 2e gives you five different conditions that relate to not being seen, each with a very clear explanation for how you can get that condition and what you can do with that condition.  Add on to that the Hide and Sneak action under the Stealth skill, and you have all the rules you need to adjudicate this rather common and important element of game play.  And while the rules are spread out over a couple of pages, it is not actually that many words (there is a half-page piece of art that pads the page count in the conditions section).

In fact, the chapter of the Core Rulebook where I think I really "got" what Pathfinder 2e was doing was the Skills chapter.  For each Skill, there are a set of actions that are within the ambit of the Skill, each with a small text box describing how the outcomes are adjudicated and even in some cases how the DCs are set for the check.  In a way, the actions in Pathfinder 2e are like Moves in Powered by the Apocalypse games--discrete, somewhat self-contained rules mechanisms that are triggered by player action and spit out a narrative outcome.  There are far more actions in Pathfinder 2e than a typical PbtA game has Moves, and you are going to want reference material with all the actions at hand during play, but the basic idea is the same.  The vast majority of the meaningful things a PC is going to do during a game are going to have an action associated with it, providing a clear way of resolving it.  With the codification of actions in this way, a significant portion of the heavy-lifting on the rules is transferred from the GM to the players.

Speaking of players, the other obvious difference between Pathfinder 2e and 5e is found in character creation.  5e, very intentionally, limited the number of choices that a player makes during the life-span of the character--once you select your class, race, and background, for non-spellcaster classes the only remaining choices are subclass at level 3, and what you do with your Ability Score increases at 4th level and beyond.  Pathfinder 2e goes in the completely opposite direction.  Now, class and ancestry (the welcome replacement for "race") are skeletons, upon which you hang feats that provide the majority of your character abilities.  Each character gets a feat of some sort at every level, giving the player meaningful character building decisions at each level.  By "some sort," I mean that there are different sorts of feats--class feats, ancestry feats, skill feats, and general feats.  At first this seemed like unnecessary complexity, but it occurred to me that it allows the designers to silo different choices so as to make it easier to balance everything.  Pathfinder 1st edition was notorious for having players stitch together feats that created broken synergies with class abilities, and so keeping different types of options in their respective lanes might work to minimize that tendency.

Another choice that I suspect was made to avoid broken combos genuinely shocked me--there is no 3e (or, for that matter, 5e) style multiclassing in Pathfinder 2e.  Instead, you have an Archetype system which is similar to the system in Starfinder, but also somewhat similar to 4e multi-classing, in that you use some of your class feats to buy into the abilities of other classes, as well as smaller, more thematic character concepts, without having to abandon progression on your original class.  The Archetype system covers the conceptual ground of multi-classing, 3e prestige classes, and Pathfinder 1st edition archetypes, in one system and in a simpler way than any of the three of them.  It really is an inspired piece of design, and one of my favorite implementations of mixing up multiple classes in an d20 system.

The other two distinctive pieces of rules material in Pathfinder 2e are the unified results model and the combat action economy.  Almost every check has four possible outcomes of critical success, success, failure and critical failure, with a corresponding scale of 10+ the DC, equal to or above the DC, below the DC, and 10+ below the DC.  A "natural 20" bumps the result up one level and a "natural 1" bumps it down a level, allowing for the possibility of outcomes that would otherwise not be mathematically possible.  One interesting result of this that I really liked is the possibility of critically failing saving throws, resulting in double damage or some other really bad effect, making spells and traps more exciting and unpredictable.  As far as the action economy, everything is expressed in terms of requiring one or more actions, and each PC or opponent will get three actions in almost all cases on a given turn.  Multiple moves and multiple attacks (albeit with escalating penalties) are possible, and there is a lot of design space for special actions that provide action economy advantages (for example, the 1st level Fighter feat "Sudden Charge" lets the fighter Stride twice and attack once for a cost of two actions).  

With all it this, it would be wrong to pretend that Pathfinder 2e is not a crunchier game than 5e--it definitely is.  But in going through the Core Rulebook, I found it to be (1) not as crunchy as I expected, and (2) pushing most of the crunch onto the players.  Playing Pathfinder 2e is clearly more involved than playing 5e, but it is not clear to me that running Pathfinder 2e would be more involved.  As discussed above, there is far less rules adjudication that the Pathfinder 2e GM has to do than the 5e DM.  And I will also note that the monster stat blocks in the Pathfinder 2e Bestiary are very clean, much simpler than the 3e/Pathfinder 1st edition stat blocks and I think a little cleaner than the 5e stat blocks.  This is in large measure because (as in Starfinder) they abandoned the "monsters work exactly like characters" framework from those editions, a welcome decision in my book.  I never ran 3e or Pathfinder 1st edition, and to be honest I was a little intimidated/put-off by the monster stat blocks and complexity.  I would be willing to give Pathfinder 2e a shot.

At its heart, if 5e is the "DM empowerment" game, Pathfinder 2e is the "player empowerment" game.  Players have a robust suite of character creation choices, lots of round-by-round combat actions, lots of very clear ways to translate the rules into narrative and visa versa.  But, just as DM empowerment requires the DM to put in the work, Pathfinder 2e requires the players to do the heavy lifting.  Trying to run a Pathfinder 2e session with players that don't know their character abilities and look to the GM to tell them what they can and cannot do would be a nightmare--it's not great in any game system under any circumstances, but would cause Pathfinder 2e to collapse under its own weight.  And, let's face it, some RPG players are kinda lazy, and you have to know the group you are playing with.  This raises the related challenge of onboarding new players, getting everyone to the point where the players can carry their weight.  The folks at Paizo are about to drop a Beginner Box for Pathfinder 2e that is a possible solution to that problem, and it's worth noting that the 1st Edition Beginner Box was a great product.  

Those challenges aside, Pathfinder 2e is a skilled, confident, considered design.  If you find 5e to be constraining or too simplistic as a player, then Pathfinder 2e is absolutely something you should look it.  If you were turned off, or scared off, from 1st edition as a player or GM, you might have your mind changed by Pathfinder 2e.  It is both fits well within the broader umbrella of d20 fantasy while being clearly and defiantly its own thing.  It's an impressive piece of work. 

Origins 2019 After Action Report

So, another Origins game convention is in the books.  This year, I did three full days--Thursday, Friday, and Saturday--and I had overall a great time.  As I have said before, I think Origins is more or less the perfect size, being definitely big, but not overwhelmingly big as Gencon can be (though, I was surprised to see that four-day badges for Gencon are still available, which suggests that it may not be quite so big this year).

Here are my highlights and thoughts:

1.  How Not to Sponsor RPG Sessions at a Convention:  Last year, I ranted a bit about game companies who sponsor game sessions and then have the GMs not show up, and how bad a look that is for the publisher.  [As it turned out, Kobold Press (the folks who had the GM flake on me last year) turned over the running of sponsored games to a third party entity, Warduke Press, and while I didn't get a chance to play in one of those games, I talked to those folks and I am confident they were on the ball.]  This year, I ran sponsored games for two different companies--Pelgrane Press and another publisher that shall remain nameless (so as not to, as the kids say, put them on blast).  This is my fifth con (between Gencon and Origins) that I have run things for Pelgrane, and every single time it is a joy.  Running games for the other publisher was, um, less of a joy.

From my point of view, if you agree to GM games on behalf of a publisher (especially a medium or smaller publisher), part of your job is to make the game, and thus the publisher, look good.  I want to try to sell people on your games.  But the publisher needs to put the GM in the position to make that happen.  And the #1 way to make that happen is to provide high-quality, finished materials for the GM to run.  Instead, I got a half-finished draft of an adventure.  And when I say "unfinished," I mean it was unplayable strictly as written, because there were no stats for the antagonist in the last encounter.  And when I say "no stats," I don't mean there were no stats printed in the adventure, thus requiring the GM to hunt down the relevant stats from various published books (though, that, too); I mean the stats for that antagonist are not printed anywhere.  Either the GM has to come up with the stats on his or her own, or (as I did) you have to cut the last encounter.   

And, to be clear, I got the adventure with a cover email saying "[the product line manager] wants you to run this at Origins," so this was what they wanted put out there.  I suppose you might say "well, you got the adventure the 1st of May; this wouldn't have been as much of a problem if you looked at it earlier than the week before the con."  And, true, but (1) I was busy; and (2) at the end of the day I am a volunteer.  Don't make me do all of this free labor to get your materials in a position that I can use them.  And if your adventure is not ready for prime-time, don't send it to me to run in public.  Help me help you.

By contrast, Pelgrane has a set of publish-quality adventures, written by their top authors in a publish-ready format, strictly for use at conventions.  I also ran an adventure for a game that is in playtest that was at a far higher level polish and completeness than what I got from the other publisher.  This not only makes it much, much easier to run and a much, much more enjoyable experience, but it makes me want to run more things for Pelgrane so I can promote more of their games.  I split my GM time two and two, and I wish I had just run four games for Pelgrane.

Be like Pelgrane, publishers.  Do right by your GMs that volunteer to promote your stuff.

2.  Gumshoe:  Speaking of Pelgrane, I ran an adventure for Trail of Cthulhu and the playtest adventure for the forthcoming Swords of the Serpentine.  Both went well, especially the Swords of Serpentine adventure.  I'm going to do a series on the Gumshoe games, including Swords of the Serpentine, so more on this in a bit.

3.  Starfinder:  I played two Starfinder Society games, and had fun with both of them.  Whatever you want to say about organized play in general and Paizo's version of organized play specifically, they really do a good job of showing off the strengths of the game.  The setting of Starfinder is fun and light-hearted while still having stakes and tension--I've used this analogy before, but it has that Guardians of the Galaxy magic.  So, for example, the first scenario I played involved being on a game show run by undead, and the second one involved a massive invasion of an enemy force, and both of them felt like they belonged in the same world without contradiction.  And the Starfinder scenarios, while not usually breaking any sort of new ground from a design perspective, are consistently solid.  Plus, I have found that they do a good job of making sure the GMs are prepared to provide a good experience at the table.

Saturday night was "the special"--a forty or so table extravaganza where the results of your table affect the things going on with the other table.  There are a series of discrete encounters that the table gets to select from, and after a certain number of groups complete a particular encounter, it is closed for other tables and new encounters are unlocked.  It's chaotic, combat-heavy, and a bit disjointed, but fun--I wouldn't necessarily want to do this every week, but as a once-a-year thing, it's something different and enjoyable.  Also, shout-out to the Starfinder Society folks, including many from the local area--it looked like an enormous undertaking to put this on, and they did a great job.

4.  Pathfinder 2nd Edition:  I was hoping that the two hour demo game I played would be using the final, forthcoming 2nd Edition rules.  It wasn't--it was basically the last version of the playtest.  That was an odd choice, and if I had known that was the deal I probably wouldn't have done it, as I have already messed around with the playtest.

As far as the game itself, I worry that they are going to caught between worlds, and between audiences.  It certainly seems like they have smoothed and streamlined the game as compared to 1st Edition, making it appealing for someone like me who finds 1st Edition too slow, too complicated,  and with too many options to wade through.  But, I'm not sure it was streamlined and smoothed out enough for me to really want to dive in and/or use it as a replacement for 5e or 13th Age.  And, on the flip side, the complexity and options of 1st Edition that turn me off are the very things that have hooked a big chunk of the Pathfinder community, so the streamlining reduces the thing that draws them to the game.  That seems to be the conclusion in the main from the folks in the local Pathfinder Society around here--they have been pretty clear that they intend to run both 1st and 2nd Edition stuff come August when 2nd Edition launches.  So, whatever the merits of the game as a game, I think it may be a misstep as a consumer product and as a community building exercise.

5.  Overlight:  I try at conventions to find at least one game that I will never play otherwise, and this year it was Overlight from Renegade Game Studios, which I had not heard of until now but had a big presence and appears to be a large company.  Overlight was interesting, and a little bit hard to describe--I think the best short description is "surreal, non-Tolkien fantasy."  For example, I played a talking archaeopteryx--a bird-like flying dinosaur--that are expert scientists and logicians.  The system is tied to colors, which in turn are linked to emotional traits like compassion and wisdom.

I could be reading too much into this, but I got the sense that this game was on some level trying to be a metaphor for being LGBT--the PCs are "skyborn," who are noticeably different from other people at birth and inspire either adulation or fear among others.  So, basically, the X-Men, which is probably why I got the "this is really about being LGBT" vibe.  Plus, the rainbow color thing.  If so, great--the fact I am not sure if this is the designer intent show that the metaphor, if it is there, is applied deftly enough not to bludgeon the players in a way that will take away from game play.

I had fun with Overlight, and I would definitely play again if offered, but I wasn't completely captivated by it.  I flipped through the core book in the dealer's area, and it is a beautiful book with a unique art style, but it was $60, and so I passed.  But it is definitely something that folks should look into.

My Origins After-Action Report

I have the good fortune of having a big games convention right in my hometown--Origins Game Fair, commonly known simply as "Origins."  I've been going for the last few years since I got back into the hobby.  This year, I ended up going in the evenings on the weekdays plus a full day on Saturday (I wanted to do a full day on Friday, but various work commitments got in the way.  Next year).  With the convention over, I wanted to give my thoughts on the convention and what I played.

1.  The convention itself.  Origins might be the perfect size for a convention.  It is, by all metrics, a big convention--one of the top five every year.  But it is not nearly as big and chaotic as Gencon, which is a couple orders of magnitude bigger.  I've been to Gencon twice, and it is so large as to be kind of exhausting.  Origins is much more manageable, but yet has a wide variety of events and experiences such that you get the "big con" feeling.  In the last two years, it has had a very Wizards of the Coast/5e presence and focus, but Paizo brought out the full show (including the Pathfinder 2nd Edition demo--more on that in a bit and in a subsequent post), as well as a number of small and medium-sized publishers with a presence (not to mention all of the board game and miniatures folks).

The one major problem, and this has been an issue for the last couple of years, is that the registration system is bad and unreliable, leading to a number of system crashes.  I wasn't focused on 5e particularly (I tend to use cons to play things I wouldn't/can't play in other contexts), but those events were weirdly not available to register for when I logged on the first day to register, freezing out lots of people from the D&D Open and other big name events.  Plus, the system apparently doesn't let even the event organizers see how many people are signed up for the event, which prevents people putting on multiple events from organizing themselves more efficiently.

They really need to fix this.  There is no reason why it should be like this.

2.  GMs not showing up.  While I am in complaint mode, I was really excited to play a Midgard event that was (or at least, appeared to be) sponsored by Kobold Press.  Cool, Midgard is awesome, Kobold Press is awesome.  So, 9 am on Saturday rolls around, and no GM.  Turns out, according to the people in the room, that he hadn't been there for any of the prior scheduled sessions as well.

This is extremely uncool, and really screws up people's cons.  If you volunteer to GM, you need to be there.  And if someone can't make it for true emergency reasons, the folks organizing the event need to work to find someone, or at least tell people that the event is cancelled ahead of time.  Kobold Press did not, as far as I could tell, have a presence at Origins, making it hard for them to react when someone didn't show up.  I get that, but I feel like if they are sponsoring events they should have a contact person at the event to be able to respond to situations like this.  Don't make people scramble at the time of the event.

Enough about the event.  On to the games.

3.  Torg: Eternity (GMing 2 4 hour sessions).  This was my GMing turn, running Torg under the auspices of the Ulisses Spiele's (technically I guess, Ulisses North America is the official name) demo team.  The groups were smaller than I was hoping, I think in large measure because of the time slot (4 pm, which is sort of in-between sessions--next year, if UNA wants to run demos, I'm going to push for mornings and evenings only).  But I feel like they went well, especially the second session.

One of the things that came across running Torg in a convention setting is that Torg is an easy system to teach noobs.  Torg is not exactly "rules light," but I think the rules are mostly intuitive, and that makes it easier to pick up on the fly.  My worry with Torg is that the card play would cause too much task loading on new players, but people took to the cards quickly.

Anyway, it was fun.  Torg is great.  Go play more Torg.

4.  Pathfinder 2nd Edition (2 hour demo).  I've got a separate post coming in a bit that goes through my thoughts on the demo.  My basic take is that I am far more interested in Pathfinder 2nd Editon than I was prior to the demo.

5.  Starfinder short adventures (2 1-hour sessions).  This was my biggest surprise.  I signed up for the first of these sessions simply because it was the only thing that looked remotely interesting in the time slot I had after I ran Torg, so expectations were decidedly modest.  I went from minimally interested to slotting in a second session and buying the book.

The critics will say that it is Pathfinder in space, and it is impossible to ignore the family resemblance, which is why I was initially lukewarm on the game.  But two things jumped out at me and, to my surprise, grabbed my attention.  First, while I would have to dig in to see exactly why this is so, it does seem to be simpler and move faster than Pathfinder.  No one will mistake it for Numenera or a PbtA game, but combat moved quickly, there were not 40 skills to juggle, and class abilities were straight forward.

But the big thing was that the setting grabbed me.  It's weird science fantasy, with all sorts of brand new races (I was playing a Kasatha, basically a four-armed, grey skinned Conehead).  The central point of the campaign is a giant space station a la Babylon 5 or Deep Space Nine or the Citadel from Mass Effect.  You have sort-of clerics and sort-of sorcerers and the sort-of monk that I was playing, but also gadget based characters and other sci-fi archetypes.  It's nothing close to hard sci-fi--no one will mistake this for Traveller--but it was interesting and fun and it kind of hooked me.  Honestly, the best comparison I can think of is Guardians of the Galaxy, the RPG.

As I said, I went from no interest to looking around for a Starfinder Society game.  I will probably do a Starfinder review in a week or so.

6.  The Dark Eye (2 hour demo).  The Dark Eye is #1 German fantasy RPG, with a 30+ year history and deep lore.  It's published by the Ulisses Spiele folks.  I own the book and have done a read-through, but had never played until Origins.  My basic take is that there is a reason that national stereotypes exist, as this game is very German.  My character sheet was six pages in length, not including a four page cheat sheet providing the descriptions of special abilities and spells.   The skills systems is completely logical--all tasks engage multiple attributes, and so each skill check consists of three sequential attribute checks, which can be manipulated with skill points, and then any left over skill points determine levels of success.  Each successful attack always a dodge or parry roll to try to avoid the blow.  Many spells seemed to take multiple rounds to cast.  And so on.

Now, the world seems very cool--like Midgard, its inspirations are (surprise, surprise) very German and central European.  And it has been a living campaign world since the 80s, with ongoing events that change things up.  The Ulisses Spiele folks want me to run some demos and I want to help out my crew.  But, I mean, a six page character sheet.  That seems like a big ask for a demo situation.

7.  Numenera 2nd Edition (4 hour session).  Also a sneak peak at a 2nd edition (though, Numenera 2nd edition is supposed to be 100% compatible with 1st edition), also really encouraging.  The new stuff, in the form of three new types (i.e. classes) are an explorer type, a tinkerer type, and a face type, fills out the world and adds new dimensions to play.  That's needed, because my #1 problem with Numenera is that it throws a torrent of weird and unique ideas at players and GMs, but doesn't give them a good sense of what to do with all of that stuff.  It seems like they are leaning into a settlement and base-building dimension to play--all the players are set in a town, and they go out and get stuff to help the town grow and prosper.  I like that, though we only saw glimpses of it in the convention adventure.

The bottom line is that Numenera is a great game--it's a breeze to run in the moment to moment, it's easy and fun to play, and the quality of the material you get from Monte Cook Games is uniformly strong.  Great GM, too (whose name, embarrassingly, I can't remember).

8.  Adventurer's League [5e] (2 hour session).  I have not had good experiences with Adventurers' League. A couple times I have had bad GMs.  This time, I had a great GM, but I felt like the adventure was pretty meh, and my fellow players were pretty meh as well.   I don't know what else to say--people love Adventurers' League, and I'm not suggesting they are making it up, but my experiences have not been good.

9.  War of the Cross [boardgame] (dealer's area demo).  New from the 7th Sea folks.  It's basically Diplomacy, with individual faction powers and changing objectives like Twilight Imperium.  Yes please. They will be Kickstarting soon, and I will be backing.

10.  The Ninth World [boardgame] (dealer's area demo).  I bought this game, which is set in the world of Numenera.  It's similar to those "adventure card games" such as the Pathfinder one, in that you play a character that has abilities, complete quests or gather equipment in the form of cards, etc.  One thing I really liked about this game is that it can be played both in a cooperative mode and in a competitive mode, without radically changing the gameplay involved.  I think it will be accessible to people who are not tabletop RPG players or already engaged with Numenera.  It's also beautiful as a physical artifact.