Depression Sucks

And now you know why I haven’t posted in more than four months. It has been coming on for several years now, but hit me full force halfway through November (which is why I’m astounded that I came as close to my NaNoWriMo goal as I did). Later this week my treatment will finally begin. After that I should become more active in everything.

On a lighter note, despite the depression I have gotten some work done on my magnum opus, the game I hope will become our roleplaying group’s go-to system. The rulebook has become a bit of a mess as I changed various rules – even the number of attributes. So I spent yesterday writing out the current rules in a new document so I could use it to continue developing the rules and then rewrite the rulebook.

I also created two new aids for the Pokémon video games. One is a type chart that is slightly smaller than a DSi. The other is a pocket-sized list of every Pokémon as of generation 5, including their types and what EVs they provide. It is two sheets of paper that each form a little booklet the size of 1/8 of a sheet of letter paper. I will be uploading both and adding them to the Download page as soon as I finalize the copyright line. I’m currently a bit stumped on how to make sure Nintendo, etc. get their due without taking up a ton of space.

November is National Novel Writing Month

November has arrived, so that means it’s that time of year again: National Novel Writing Month. Expect posts to be rare from me this month as NaNoWriMo consumes all of my free time on my quest to join my fellow NaNos and write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

I haven’t yet decided which story I’m writing this year, so I’m planning to flip back and forth working on all of them. My humble readers may find it interesting that two of them have ties to my roleplaying history.

It’s a sci-fantasy novel, sort of like V in basic concept but I wrote chapter 1 before I’d ever seen the series, where “benevolent” aliens came to Earth and helped clean it up and forced us to make peace with each other. But one morning we woke up and realized we were enslaved.

What brought the aliens to Earth is that it is the only planet in the known universe that produces mana, although humans in general lost the ability to tap it centuries ago. (Have I mentioned that my favorite genre is sci-fantasy?) Part of the way through the book the resistance will learn that the aliens have developed engines that are powered by mana but only use that technology to make weapons to fight against the resistance. Knowing me as well as I do, it is quite likely that those engines will eventually find their way into combat mecha.

The story centers around one particular squad of resistance fighters, the leader of which is grizzled old retired US Army sergeant who refuses to believe in magic or psionics, despite the fact that two other members of the team are psions. He’s a blast to write… and to play the few times I have.

That story holds a special place in my heart because Sgt. Carter and Celeste, the team’s latently-psychic hacker, are the first two roleplaying characters I ever made, way back in the third edition of GURPS before we even learned how to play roleplaying games.

One of my other stories for this year is based on my very first campaign behind the screen (in GURPS 4e by then). It was set on Earth about 200 years in the future, but after the planet had merged with a fantasy world from another dimension (inspired by the anime Those Who Hunt Elves). The merging caused a worldwide earthquake that nearly wiped out all civilization on both worlds.

Now things have settled down, and, thanks to the Internet, much of which was kept in satellites, the world has mostly recovered and is now adapting to the all of the new races and the magic they bring. A few weeks ago a book fetus set in that world started latched on to my brain and started feeding. As is usual with my writing, I have no idea what will happen until the characters tell me.

Finished My HackMaster Sheet and Revised the Rest

HackMaster Character Sheet

I finally finished my HackMaster sheet uploaded it to Scribd. Figuring out how to do weapons stumped me for a long time.

As usual, I designed it with three major goals in mind:

• Earth- and wallet-friendliness. In other words: cheap to print.
• Only force the positioning of things that will be the present on every character or are tedious to hand-write every time: stat blocks; name, race, age, etc.; skills; base weapon stat calculations; and so forth.
• User-customizable depending player taste and character class. Normally this would include having the lowest item on the front of the page be the column headings of the weapons table. That way it as long as needed, no more or less, yet still details out the math for new players and for ease of making changes as needed (specialization, talents, magic items, etc.).

Unfortunately, in this case it proved impossible to squeeze everything for weapons into one line – not even as small as I write. So I compromised by making a small-as-possible weapon block that is easy to duplicate if you need more. By default I include two, assuming most characters will have a melee and a ranged weapon.

If you really need more (if you are or want to be a knight, for instance), you can download the original ODT from YouSendIt. It has four of them, and you can delete or copypasta more as needed.

One final thing: It may not be obvious, but, as usual, I intended for the right margin to be used to track gained experience to keep the current experience spot from being erased into a hole. Naturally, you are free to do as you please since that is the whole point of the sheet.

There is one small problem I’m still trying to tackle: the lines around some of the boxes won’t print. I’ve managed to make some of them appear by finagling things a bit (like putting some frames inside other frames and then making those frames’ borders show), but I gave up completely on the box around the stat block. Once I get it tackled I’ll upload a revision. If you have any idea how to fix it, please drop me a line.

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HackMaster Grimoire Update

I also updated my HackMaster grimoire. When I couldn’t squeeze all of the info I needed for each spell onto it, I knew I definitely needed to redo it. Each row is now half-again the height it was (.6 inches instead of .4), and I tweaked the width of some of the columns.

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Guidelines Added to All Character Sheets

My wonderful gamer wife pointed out that she can’t write in straight lines as well as I can – I only can thanks to natural talent and minoring in drafting in college, the same thing that allows me to write as small as I do – so for her sake and others I added very faint lines to the large whitespaces on all of my sheets and uploaded a second copy of each.

The lines are .05″ thick and 20% gray so they will nearly vanish if you hold the sheet at arm’s length. My fellow draftsmen might call them “construction lines”. That way they are there if you need them to keep you writing straight, but are unobtrusive enough that they won’t interfere with any drawings or other things you put on the sheet.

The lines are spaced .10″ apart, smaller than even I write. (For reference sake, the boxes on my sheets are generally .25″ high.) However, placing them that closely makes them highly versatile. I expect that most people will use two lines per line of text, but younger players might use three. If I made the lines .2″ apart then people who write larger than that will be inclined to write even bigger than they normally do to fill the space (assuming I’m not the only person with that inclination).

Further, that spacing allows you to do things like having headers be slightly taller than normal text or to put varying, measurable, amounts of space between sections.

The newly-lined D&D and GURPS sheets have been uploaded, I will be getting to the HackMaster sheet the next few days. Please go check them out and let me know what you think. Thanks.

UPDATE: The lined HackMaster sheet has now been uploaded.

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I also moved my copyright line on all of my character sheets so that they’ll be less intrusive and won’t get chopped off by some printers, like ours half the time. All three of them have been reuploaded to Scribd (the links haven’t changed).

HackMaster and the D6 System are now FREE

Yep. You read that right. Free.

As I’ve mentioned before, KenzerCo has finally released the Player’s Handbook for HackMaster 5e. The only problem is that it frequently refers to rules in the as yet unreleased Gamemaster’s Guide. Fortunately, many of those rules are in HackMaster Basic. To help people out, K&C has released a free version of HMB that even includes a bunch of pre-generated characters, but lacks character creation rules – they wisely make you pay for those.

Up until now you could try out the new edition of the only class-based game I actually like for a mere $20 (and you probably still can at your FLGS, who may also be able to refer to others who have purchased the book so you find people to play with). Now you can try it out for free! If you like it, then you can drop your $20 to have a Player’s Handbook, Gamemaster’s Guide, and Hacklopedia of Beasts all rolled up in one rather portable book.

Or, if you can’t find a copy or just don’t like dead trees, you can pick up their other new version of HMB, aptly named HackMaster Basic Plus, for $10.

Back when HMB first came out they even released a free starter module, White Palette, Ivory Horns, to get new players started. Seriously, how could possibly pass, $20, $10, or even $0 for one of the most unique and engaging roleplaying games I’ve ever seen? Why are you still reading this? Go get the free version.

Oh yeah, I did mention another freebie didn’t I. 8o)

While the D6 system has never appealed to me personally, I know quite a lot of other people love it. It has a reputation for being easy to play and run, but I’ve just never been fond of using numbers of dice as attributes or of GM-determined target numbers, so it’s simply not my thing. However there was, and may still be, a Star Wars D6 weekly game running at one of our FLGSes, so obviously someone around here likes it.

I don’t know whether this a limited time promotion or the going rate since the release of OpenD6, but for now at least D6 Adventure, D6 Fantasy, and D6 Space are all absolutely free in pdf form from RPG Now.

UPDATE: Thanks to Clay Gardner (creator of the roleplaying game Open Versatile Anime) on twitter, I now know that my second guess was correct: it has been free since the release of OpenD6. That begs the question, why did Roleplaying Tips suddenly make an announcement about it, thus making me think it was a new development?

Free Random Dungeon Generator

A little while ago I saw Dizzy Dragon’s free random dungeon creator mentioned on Kenzer&Co’s forums and just had to check it out. My current HackMaster 5e campaign started out as a random dungeon I built using HM4e’s random dungeon tables, so I’ve got a bit of sweet spot for such things.

With one click of the “Quick Dungeon!” button I got a fully fleshed out dungeon, complete with monsters and treasure. Then all I have to do is either stat out the monsters for GURPS or grab HackMaster Basic or the Hacklopedia of Beasts and add the critters to a new sheet in my encounter builder. So for GURPS I can be ready to go in 5 or 10 minutes, and no more than an hour or two for HackMaster 5e. An excellent time saver in either case.

Since my HackMaster campaign is an experiment in cooperative world design and has so far only used random dungeons, this is indeed a welcome addition to my toolbox.

As referenced above, it’s pretty system agnostic overall, but if you want monsters you have to specify Pathfinder, Moldvay Basic, or “Moldvay/Cook B/X  Dungeon”, whatever that means. It also prompts you for party level but that means totally different things depending on the edition of D&D you’re using – especially since some are less “zero to hero” than others.

PC Grimoire for HackMaster 5e

For one of my mages in HackMaster 4e I designed a grimoire for all of her spells so I wouldn’t need to keep the Player’s Handbook and Spellslinger’s Guide to Wurld Domination on hand every time I played her. For several years now our only HackMaster campaign has been mine and no one is playing a mage so we haven’t needed the grimoire. I forgot it existed until I stumbled across the character in my giant file of dead and retired characters.

The original ODS is one of the files I lost when the harddrive from my first laptop crashed so I started from scratch. It didn’t take nearly as long as I expected since it’s just an empty spreadsheet with headers and appropriately sized columns.

I first made it legal-sized (8.5″x14″) since it’s much easier to get everything you need on the page that way. But since the only sheet of legal paper I could find in the house already had a 4e grimoire on one side, and since I expect most households probably don’t have legal paper either, I made a letter-sized version by squeezing the three spell component columns (Verbal, Somatic, Material) into one.

If there’s enough interest, I’ll make an A4-sized version too.

Because some of them may not be obvious, here is what the columns are for, in order:
1) Check or X the box if you have memorized the spell.
2) Spell’s level.
3) Spell’s name.
4) SP cost (determined by spell level but included here for those that want it).
5) Casting time, in seconds.
6) Spell’s range.
7) Spell’s duration.
8) Saving throw type (Agility, Mental, or Physical) and result.
9-11) Verbal, Somatic, and Material components.
12) Spell’s effects, additional SP schedule, or anything else you need to use the spell without having to reference the book.

As usual, download links are available on the Download page, but for your convenience here are the legal- and letter-sized versions.

D&D Next Character Creation

When I first read through the new playtest materials I started getting excited. It looked like I was finally going to be able to make Brianna Sheàri, the female protagonist of the series of short stories I’ve been working on over the past several years.

She started life as a Wood Elf Ranger in Champions of Norrath years and years ago. I later used her name for an elf ranger in a HackMaster 4e campaign. After that I started writing her story.

She has largely kept the ranger theme: her skills are primarily focused on archery and wood lore, and she has some access to both elemental (mostly by enchanting arrows on the fly) and healing magic (infusing into healing poultices after applying them). The details of those skills have changed as my world has developed (for instance, elves, orcs, and humans are all different types of humans instead of distinct races), but that’s enough to be getting on with.

Naturally, I can only truly make her in GURPS, and have done so, but I’m forever trying to shoehorn her into various class-based games just to see how close I can get. So far I have only managed it by focusing on one aspect of her character and ignoring others. In D&D Encounters she is a Hunter Ranger. That gives her the forest survival and hunting skills, as well as the marksmanship, but complete ignores her magic side.

Then came the new playtest and it looked like I might finally be able to make Brianna in a class-based game. I started with High Elf since it gives her a free wizard cantrip, and made her a Fighter with the Sharpshooter Fighting Style. To gain her herbalism and healing magic I added the Healer Specialization. It gives her the ability to make healing potions and healer’s kits. I can easily flavor those as using the combination of herbalism and healing magic she uses in my book.

That left me with two unsolved issues: neither of her cantrip choices were reasonably re-flavored into her ability to ignite arrows as they leave her bow, and she didn’t yet have any skills beyond the ability to shoot and heal. Looking at the skill list, she needs Natural Lore, Survival, Spot, and Stealth for her ranger skills, and Magical Lore to finish her off.

The first problem I can solve by simply adapting Ray of Frost into a fire attack, or devising a new spell that lets her spend her action to add extra fire damage to her next bow attack.

The second problem is harder. As in the first playtest, skills are gained via Backgrounds, but unlike before all backgrounds now yield exactly three skills, no more, no less. Each also includes a Trait that gives things like owning a house and plot of land somewhere, knowing where to find a piece of information you can’t call to mind, or having contacts in various places and organizations.

Not surprisingly, the included list of backgrounds is short so it can’t possibly cover every possible combination of skills, but I can’t find one that’s remotely suitable for Brianna. For one thing, the only background that includes Survival is Soldier (which bundles in Intimidate and Spot) and the trait gives you a military rank, which is likely not at all useful to the majority of characters that want that combination of skills.

In 4e, included backgrounds were suggestions to give you an idea of the things they can do, with the assumption that you would make up your own (which I do with nearly every character). The playtest likewise calls them “Sample Backgrounds” so I expect there will be guidelines for making your own eventually, but if they’re all “Pick three skills and make up a fluff Trait” then I’ll pass.

As far as I can tell, the only way to have more than three skills is to take the specialty that gives you the Skill Training feat at first and third levels, but that prevents you from taking far more interesting specialties instead.

At that point my balloon of excitement popped. Adding further to my disappointment is that skills are now tied to attributes again. Their separation was brilliant and one of the things I loved best  about the original playtest.

It makes me wonder why they don’t adapt D&D 3.x’s skill points instead of being so restrictive with skills. Even better would be following HackMaster’s example and go full-on hybrid point-buy – but I’m not holding my breath.

So here’s the short version: I’m loving D&D 5e so far, except for backgrounds and skills. Those two things are very in the way of me enjoying the system.