A Star Wars combat effects system for Mythras

This is a combat effects system built for a Star Wars campaign I thought of running, using the Mythras game, but designed to shift the combat effect choice to place it before the dice are rolled, rather than after the die roll (as is the case in the default Mythras rules). This better suits my player’s preferences and my own understanding of the OODA loop. While our next campaign will have a renaissance theme, rather than use the Star War setting, the ideas here will influence the combat system I am planning for that. This builds on some rules in an unofficial Star Wars rules for Runequest 6, and information on the Wookieepedia.

Some assumptions:

• Hit Points will be at Pulp Cthulhu levels, general HP, no location HP.
• Roll on a serious wounds table if you lose half your HP in one attack, or drop below 0 HP.
• Initiative used the Fast/Slow actions from Shadow of the Demon Lord.
• Most blaster weapons do 3d6 to 4d8 dice of damage, while most lightsabres do 3d12 damage.
• Armour works by first removing dice, one die per point of armour, then by reducing the last die, one point per point of remaining armour. For example, a Heavy Blaster (3d8) is used against someone in heavy armour (five points), the dice roll 1, 5, and 8. The first two points of armour discard the 1 and the 5, the remaining three points reduce the 8 to five points of damage.
• Light, medium, and heavy armours have one, two, and five points of armour respectively. Medium armour reduces Athletics skill by /2, Heavy armour by /5.
• Light, medium, and heavy shields have one, two, and five points of armour. Medium and heavy shields are harder to conceal. Once a shield stops a hit, it has no further effect until you survive a combat round without being hit. Shields are working more like the computer games than in other Star Wars media. The campaign was going to be set centuries after the movies.
• Use Advantage/Disadvantage dice rather than modifying skill levels for situational and environmental factors.
• “Mastery” was going to be a skill progression mechanic that extended the die rolls on which you scored critical hits – which I suspect in practice would require a bit more time in play, and take up a lot of character sheet real estate, so its not a concept I am sure would have worked.

This is not a set of mechanics I have tried at the table!

Combat Traits for Non-Lightsabre Weapons

For non-lightsabre weapons, choose one of the following traits for each of your professional combat styles:

• Cavalry: you are proficient using your weapons while mounted on a riding beast or vehicle – your combat style skill is not capped by your ride or pilot skills.
• Concealable: you are proficient at concealing your weapons from view or casual inspection and have advantage on any Stealth checks required.
• Enforcer: you are really good at setting your blasters to stun, with targets getting disadvantage on their Endurance checks.
• Heavy Weapons: you can sunder armour with heavy weapons, your damage dice are reduced to one point rather than being discarded by armour.
• Martial Arts: upgrade your unarmed combat die to 1d12.
• Sidearms: you are proficient at getting in the first shot, drawing and firing your weapon is a free action with double advantage in the first round of a combat scene.
• Skirmisher: You can do a partial move on a Fast Action (equal to Athletics/5).
• Sniper: you are capable of precision targeting, even with a blaster, and can aim with your first attack each turn (gain an advantage die).

Lightsbares

You do not have to be a force user to use a lightsabre, as this weapon was popular during the golden age of the New Republic, and is favoured by nobles and assassins. Rather than choosing a combat trait, for every 20% skill with lightsabres, take one of the following forms:

• Shii-Cho: on a successful attack, you can attempt to disarm your foe, or sweep – make one attack (with disadvantage) against each foe in melee range.
• Makashi: on a successful attack, you can impale your foe (counts as a major wound if you do at least one HP of damage), or overextend them (disadvantage on their next action). An impaled weapon is trapped in your foe’s body and requires an action to remove.
• Soresu: allows you to parry blaster fire (and deflect back on a critical success), or to arise from the ground as a free action.
• Ataru: on a successful attack, allows you to ignore a point of armour, or to make a second attack (with disadvantage).
• Shien: allows you to parry blaster fire (and deflect back on a critical success), or to parry and make an Acrobatic leap.
• Djem So: on a successful attack, knock your opponent back, or impose disadvantage on their next attack roll.
• Niman: when using two lightsabres, on a successful parry you can pin an opposing lightsabre to make it unusable until freed, or make a free attack.
• Juyo: on a successful attack you can attack again if parried or evaded, or increase your damage by +1 for each other form you have learned.
• Vaapad: this form has Juyo as a prerequisite. Your Acrobatics mastery is included with your Lightsabre mastery for the purpose of determining critical success, or spend Force Points equal to a damage die roll to bypass armour (e.g. if you rolled 5 and 7 versus one point of armour, spend five force points to inflict 12 damage rather than seven damage)
• Lus-Ma: allows you to interrupt and make a free attack against someone rising from the ground, or to use a slow attack to ignore all shields on a target.
• Sokan: if exploiting high ground, gain double advantage, or make an extra movement action (to a maximum distance of Acrobatics/5).
• Jar’Kai: when using two lightsabres, either forgo defence and two strike as one (both weapons hit on a single attack), or forgo your attack and parry with both weapons, with each critical success parry allowing another free parry.
• Trakata: this form exploits quickly turning your lightsabre off and on again, when attacking forgo your ability to parry to ignore one enemy parry, or to force you opponent to stumble, granting you advantage on your next attack.
• Zero: before a duel begins, use this to gain advantage on a single skill check of your choice (e.g. a Persuasion check to prevent the fight, a Perception check to identify the form your foe is about to use, etc). If you know five or more other forms, gain advantage on your first action in any duel.
• Stanzi: a form that exploits the reach of Force Pikes, allowing you to interrupt a fast attack from someone with a shorter weapon with your attack action for the round. This can be combined with a slow action.

Using the same form in two successive rounds grants your opponent’s advantage on attacks and parries against you. If you use it for a third successive round, they gain double advantage. You must choose your form before rolling the dice for an attack, otherwise you are assumed to be repeating the last form you used.

In most force or dueling traditions, Shii-Cho is the first form taught, followed by Soresu or Shien. Ceremonial Guards are more likely to be taught Stanzi. Juyo and Vaapad are only taught by force traditions that take inspiration from the Sith.

Runequest 6th Edition

The sixth edition of Runequest is a comprehensive successor to previous editions, and for me, comes the closest to capturing the look and feel of the second edition that was one of my favourite roleplaying games.  As well as looking at this new edition, I will also present my thoughts about the supplements and supporting material released so far.  I have played and run games with the second and third editions, looked at the fourth edition drafts that never went anywhere, and had the Mongoose edition – but for some reason I just never liked the they way they put the game together so I did not run any games with it.

Runequest VI is a hefty 456 page all-in-one tome.  Its available as a softcover & pdf bundle from http://www.glorantha.com/product/runequest-6th-edition/ or http://www.thedesignmechanism.com/products.php ($62), and in pdf format from http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/index.php?&manufacturers_id=4057 ($25).

A hardcover version has been funded through Indiegogo and should be out soon for backers and direct sales.  Runequest VI is primarily a set of rules, but provides examples of game mechanics through a backstory set in the bronze age city state of  Meeros and the aspiring female warrior Anathaym.  This is kept in the sidebars, and I found the story entertaining, like Rurik’s story in RQ II, but not too distracting from the main text.  Apart from the cover, which is a colourful homage to the RQ II cover, the interior art is black and white illustrations, and largely complements the overall mood and themes of the text.  More setting specific supplements are due for publication in the future, including:

• Luther Arkwright (based on a time travelling secret agent character, apparently a big UK comic in the 1970s-80s)
• Mythic Briton (after the Romans have left)
• Shores of Korantia (based on Age of Treason, a fantasy setting that tries to capture the feel of a rising new Empire, where internal threats may outweigh external threats).

A number of free pdf downloads are available for Runequest VI at the Design Mechanism website, including:

• A supplement for Firearms (and futuristic weapons)
• A GM pack
• Character sheets.

Two generic, setting free, game supplements are already available:

• Monster Island (a “sandpit” jungle island)
• Book of Quests (seven loosely connected scenarios).

Organisation and Layout

There are sixteen chapters, plus reference sheets and an index.  While the material is in a logical order, there will be a bit of page turning in character creation as people start with the process in chapter one, but may need to dive into the skills, equipment and magic chapters to figure out what they want their character to be like.  I had some confusion on first reading the rules, in that while skills are mostly explained in chapter four, some specific parts of skill use, such as haggling, are dealt with more thoroughly elsewhere in the text.  If I were running a game, I would want prepared material for the players with example combat styles, magic traditions, cults and brotherhoods for them to join.

• Chapters 1-3, character creation, culture, community, careers and development
• Chapters 4-7, skills, economics & equipment, game mechanics, combat
• Chapters 8-13, magic systems
• Chapter 14, cults and brotherhoods
• Chapter 15, creatures
• Chapter 16, games master.

Character Creation

Basic character creation involves the seven traditional characteristics: Strength, Constitution, Size, Dexterity, Intelligence, Power, and Charisma.  These can be rolled for randomly, or purchased with a point buy system.  Secondary attributes are calculated based on the characteristics: Action Points (number of actions per combat round), Damage Modifier, Experience Modifier (bonus improvement rolls, based on Charisma not intelligence, as you smile sweetly at your instructor…), Healing Rate, Height & Weight, Hit Points, Luck Points (one use per game session), Magic Points, Movement Rate and Strike Rank (initiative in combat).  There are some fairly significant break points in these attributes, for example your Action Points are determined by combining Intelligence and Dexterity, 12 or less is one action, 13-24 two actions, 25-36 three actions.  If using a point buy system, I suspect the temptation for players to have intelligence and dexterity summing to 25 will be strong.

Standard skills are available to all characters, most are self-explanatory (Dance, Perception) but Customs (of your community), Evade, Influence (persuasion) and Insight (into motives) will need a look at the rules to figure out what they are about. Evade is not quite the old Dodge skill, its more a throw yourself to the ground that leaves you prone to vulnerable to whatever happens next.

Combat styles represent a major design choice for the individual game master.  For a combat light campaign you could decide to just have two styles, one for melee weapons and one for ranged weapons.  For a detail rich gladiators in the arena campaign, you might have a dozen or more combat styles (spear and net, spear and shield, etc).  Deeper in the book (page 135) its explained how combat styles can have special traits, such as Formation Fighting, where a group of soldiers work together to reduce their opponents action points by one.  Quite nifty, and an obvious place for house rules for campaign specific chrome.

Four generic human cultures are presented: Barbarian, Civilised, Nomadic and Primitive.  Each culture comes with a set of standard skills, combat styles, and professional skills.  Of these, I think the primitives are the weakest, but I just don’t find the stone age all that interesting.

A 1d100 random background event table is included. If choosing an older character, its suggested that you roll more than once.  I quite like 13 “You believe yourself to be suffering a divine or magical curse. Moan, groan and whinge at every opportunity, or remain completely stoic at every misfortune that befalls you in the future.”

Social class is an option, with as usual, the lucky nobles getting wealth, land, horses, weapons and armour. Personally, I like the idea of starting a campaign where the nobles start with equipment and hideously huge piles of debt.  One can keep rolling randomly for family, but for contacts, allies and adversaries you’re expected to use your brain and think of something.  The rules do provide a major incentive for the players to come up with a reason for hanging out together – Group Luck Points (tucked away on page 124) a pool of shared luck points anyone in the group can use, and you get one per player who has a good reason for being in the party.

The last section of culture and community is the most important from a roleplaying perspective: passions.  Passions are cool! Passions represent:

• loyalties and allegiances
• strongly held beliefs or ideals
• emotion felt towards someone or something.

Passions are rated 1-100, can change over time, and be created or discarded in play.  Passions are described by a verb such as: comfort, desire, despise, destroy, espouse, fear, flee, forswear, hate, love, loyalty, protect, repudiate, respect, seek, subvert, torment, or uphold.

Over 20 generic careers are provided, offering a package of standard and professional skills for the player to spend points on for their character.  The careers are fairly broad, the Agent for example, is intended to include Agitators, Assassins, Detectives, Informers, and Spies.

An older character gets more skill points, and can spend them to a higher starting level.  Age penalties don’t kick in until 40+, so I see players being strongly incentivised to choose middle aged (200 bonus points) over young (100 bonus points).

Game Mechanics

Its the old 1d100, roll against skill level system, but with some developments:

• 01-05 always succeeds
• 96-00 always fails
• A roll of 1/10 of skill is a critical success
• A roll of 99-00 is a fumble.

Rather than providing an exhaustive list of modifiers to skill checks, the approach taken in Runequest VI is to adjust the skill level by fractions, e.g. for an Easy task, add half again to the skill value, for a Formidable task, reduce the skill by half.  Characters can augment a skill with one other skill, e.g. using local area knowledge to improve drive skill checks, equal to twice the critical success value of the augmenting skill.

For contested rolls, critical beats normal beats failure, but if two people have the same result, e.g. critical perception versus critical stealth, the character with the highest roll on the dice wins (i.e. a 13 beats a 7). Pro tip: because of the need to compare rolls you need to train your players to leave their dice on the table, untouched, until the roll is fully resolved.

Equipment

After that mechanic introduction the rules take off on a tangent for equipment, before going back for more mechanics.  Mostly familiar stuff with the traditional kitchen sink lists of ancient to renaissance era armour and weaponry. What I noted here was the armour penalty to Strike Rank (the average of Dexterity & Intelligence), which is determined by total armour encumbrance value divided by 5.  For a full set of plate mail this works out to a hefty -9 penalty.  This is also applied to the the characters movement.  I grumble about this, a custom fit set of plate armour can be easier to run in than a maille hauberk, but I can put aside the stickler for accuracy and recognise it for a game balance device that ensures some niche protection for those leather clad (or skyclad) character concepts out there.

Weapons have a list of combat effects they can do, for example the Glaive can inflict Bleed and Sunder (smash armour) effects, while the Rapier can Impale.

More Game Mechanics

Specific rules are given to handle: Acid, Ageing, Asphyxiation, Blood loss, Character improvement, disease, poison, encumbrance, falling, fatigue, fires, healing, luck, passions, wilderness survival, traps, visibility and weather. Phew!

Skill increase is familar, roll 1d100 and add 2-5% if you roll equal or greater than the skill, or 1% if not.  As a freebie, if you fumble, you get to add 1% as well.  Increasing characteristics is not easy at all, essentially you sacrifice experience rolls, both now and in the future, to boost a characteristic.  Stop making the sacrifice, and your characteristic goes back down to its natural level.  I think this is fine with a point buy system, but if using 3d6 rolls in the old school style, its very hard on the unlucky player.  An optional rule is provided for people like me who prefer something a bit more like RQ II.  FOr those with time and money, training is an option, allowing skill increases of anywhere from 1-2% to 5-10% depending on how much better than you your trainer is.  You can’t stay at school forever though, you have to spend an experience roll on a skill before you can work with a trainer again.

Encumbrance remains the rule most likely to be ignored by both players and game masters.

Healing serious/major wounds takes a very long time unless you have magic.

Luck points can be used to:

• reroll dice
• gain an Action Point
• downgrade a Major wound to a Serious Wound (this is how player characters survive the brutal, gritty, Runequest combat system).

Combat

This is comprehensive enough for my re-enactor background, and complex enough to be intimidating – there is even an Android App for helping sort out combat effects!

Actions can be spent on proactive actions or reactive actions.  When you run out of actions you just have to suck up whatever hurt the bad guys are throwing your way. You probably want some tokens/counters to track this around the game table (and that might help with luck points as well).

Proactive actions include:

• attack
• brace
• cast magic
• change range (moving in closer or further away)
• delay
• dither
• hold magic
• mount
• move
• outmaneuver (make an opposed Evade check against a group of foes, those who fail cannot attack you)
• ready weapon
• regain footing
• struggle.

Reactive actions include:

• counter spell
• evade (dive or roll clear, ending up prone – this is not the dodge of RQ II)
• interrupt
• parry (combining parrying, blocking, leaning and footwork to avoid the blow)

The detail about evade/parry is included as that seems to be one of the most common misapprehensions about how the combat system is supposed to work.  How effective your parry is depends on the size of the weapons/shields involved.  Equal or greater size mitigates all damage, one size less mitigates half damage. Two sizes down mitigates nothing. So if the giant is swinging a tree trunk at you, throw the buckler shield away and evade!

In addition to damage, you get special effects, potentially as many as three, if one side fumbles when the other criticals.  There are a LOT of special effects, too many to sum up, but I think its likely that players will choose things like Select Target (head) and Maximise Damage (instead of rolling one of the damage dice its treated as being at full value, so a 2d6 weapon becomes 6+1d6).  For those who want it though, you can do a lot more to your opponents than “whack, and I whack it again” which is where RQ II was it in 1980.

Shields are a passive block, not an active block, so you need to pick the locations being warded. A bigger shield can ward more locations.  As in past editions, weapon damage minus armour = hit points lost to a body location.  Damage and wounds are pretty horrific:

• minor wound: location has HP left
• serious wound: location has zero or less HP (this will put most people out of the fight very quickly)
• major wound: location reduced to negative starting HP (this will kill most people without first aid or healing magic).

Magic

It is a joy to see all of the magic traditions in one rule book.  Each of them is quite different, and a game world might not have all of them present.  We get a primer on the runes too, as this is Runequest. What I would really like is a set of the runequest runes on some small tokens I could draw randomly from a bag for oracle type stuff in game sessions.  A quick web search did not find anyone with something like this for sale.  Maybe I’ll track something down later on.

Folk Magic – this is what we called Battle Magic or Spirit Magic back in RQ II, its fairly low power community magic.

Animism – dealing with the spirit world and its monsters, Shamanistic traditions.

Mysticism – warrior monk/Jedi enlightenment aiming for transcendence.  Potentially the most overpowered of the magic traditions as a skilled mystic can be very hard to kill and very dangerous in combat, not at all the glass cannon of your traditional RPG mage. Beware of little old men with brooms!

Sorcery – a complex system, potentially powerful but often very narrow in focus and difficult to use (but good for villains who need long rituals to be interrupted)

Theism – religious cult based magic and power.

Off-hand, not too different from past editions, but the GM should decide for the campaign how common magic is, how long it takes to cast a magic spell or ritual, and how quickly magic points can be regenerated and by what means.  A world where you only regenerate magic on the night of the full moon is very different from one where you get new magic points every sunrise.

The Rest of the Sixth Edition

The creatures, cults and brotherhoods and game master sections are all fairly straightforward stuff for world and adventure building.  On a second reading of the GM advice, it was better than the first time, and gives some good tips for using the preceding material.

How does it play?

This is not a convention friendly game, its just too rich and complex for people unfamiliar with the rules to get a lot done with it on the three-four hours you get.  The combat and magic systems, while powerful tools, are likely to confuse people at first.  It is much more a game system for running a long campaign with, and for people who love detailed world building … because you can always write up one more cult!  I am very much looking forward to running a campaign with it when my Dragon Age game wraps up.

The GM Pack

This 78 page free supplement contains two scenarios and charts and reference sheets for use with Runequest games.  Meeros Falling is a “prove the hero is innocent” scenario, and involves finding the conspirators/evidence and bringing this back to the authorities, with a potential earthquake to complicate things.  Has a deceased NPC called Mysoginistes!  The Exodus Matrix involves more action, monsters and magic and the plot involves stopping the bad gal from activating the matrix to do bad things in a temple in some post-apocalyptic post elder god intervention Earth.

The Firearms Supplement

Short, to the point, and free.  A few notes on myths about firearms accuracy and lethality, it has the tables you need for primitive and mdoern firearms, as well as blasters, flamethrowers, laser weapons and other far future oddities.  Does the job well.

The Star Wars Supplement

This free 47 page supplement was only available online for a short period of time before it was pulled.  If you search carefully, you may find it online somewhere.  The skills, equipment, vehicle combat, and homeworlds sections would be useful for any science fiction setting.  I quite liked the rule whereby the number of “magic points” spent in a session by a Jedi was the chance of the Emperor detecting them and sending off some assassins to hunt them down.  A useful mechanic for any setting with a Dark Lord and player characters who have special secret powers that can get them killed.

The Book of Quests

I found this a bit disappointing.  Its generic and flavourless, which is not like the epic RQ supplements of yore.  In particular the opening scenario Caravan is weak, in that at its conclusion the players may feel like they have failed, as the merchant they are escorting will most likely scarper for safety rather than see their caravan through to its intended destination.  I also think players would struggle with the monster, which prior to their arrival had essentially acted as brute force deliver of a massacre, but now the players are present becomes a sneaky skulduggery murder in the dark.  The Curse of the Contessa is the diamond that makes this book worthwhile, an excellent city intrigue game with multiple factions, including a well portrayed demon.  Most of the other scenarios just felt a bit too linear, but this is one you could have a lot of chaos and fun with as the outcome is very open.

Monster Island

Wow. After the Book of the Quests, this is the sandbox pack to make you want more from the Design Mechanism!

The main supplement is 298 pages, plus another 17 pages of companion material and maps.  It details a huge volcanic/jungle island, with mountains, ocean, highlands and ancient ruins and tombs.  It has a strong pulp theme, with shades of Mu, Lemuria, Skull Island, E. R. Burroughs, R. E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft coming through.  The main protagonists on the island are the serpent folk, found in both degenerate lowland villages, and the vestigial remnants of the sorcerous priest-kings who once ruled the island.  Other foes can be found in the bestiary. The rationale for packing lots of apex predators into the island is that there are magic gates which drag them here from other dimensions.  So you can mix dinosaurs, werewolves and tentacled aliens in powered armour if you wish.  Humans have a colony struggling to establish itself on the island, with the natives preferring the obsidian weapons over the rusty iron the traders have.  Everything is detailed to the level you would expect from the great RQ adventure supplements of the past, a good bestiary, some magic and cults, ancient gods and lore, some nice tombs and traps and a world with shades of grey that leaves the players free to decide who they will ally with and who they will work against. While this is not something I will run out of the book anytime soon, I will be pillaging its pages for a lot of its ideas in a future campaign setting.

Summing Up

I am very happy to have these game books sitting on my shelf and in my hard drive. While there are some bits I disagree with here and there, on the whole the Runequest Sixth Edition rules are clear and comprehensive and I look forward to sharing them with a gaming group in the not too distant future.  I’m torn between some kind of Star Wars/Lovecraft mash up, or a Byzantium/Spider Oracle fantasy setting.  Its good when a set of game rules unlocks my imagination like this.

Starwars Beta Test Impressions

The NDA has been lifted, so I can write about my Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR) beta experiences.

To sum up: it’s great fun for what it is, but don’t expect radical differences from other themepark MMORPGs already on the market.

I took part in the Oceanic test, which I think was specifically to test how the game worked with latency and lag out to places like Australia and New Zealand.  I don’t think the servers were too stressed out by the number of players we had taking part, but overall I had no problems with latency/lag.  Latency in general was  lower than I usually see in WoW.

I only played a Jedi Consular, taking the Sage (healer) advanced class at level 10.  After the starter zone on Tython, I went to Coruscant and then Taris, completing all those zones, before logging out in Nar Shaddaa.  In play, it was a little like a WoW Paladin who also had substantial ranged DPS and crowd control options.  Certainly by Level 15 I felt that the healer talents I had chosen were making a big difference.  What was awesome though, was that even as a healer I could complete quests as easily as a damage dealing class thanks to the companion system.

The Good

I’m counting down the days to when I get to play the game again.

Opening sequence.  You get the classic star wars yellow scrolling text, then a cut away of a ship landing scene, unique for each class, and it felt very cinematic.

Music.  Its great, very star wars, and I love the way it swells up when you engage mobs.  Audio, lightsabres went snap hiss and blasters went pew-pew-pew the way you would expect them to.

Companions.  As a consular I picked up a “lizard” who was part of a mystic cult of hunters, so when I went healer, it developed into a tank.  The AI is smart enough that your companions will not break your crowd control, it’ll kill all the other mobs first, then wait patiently for the CC to expire or for an attack order.  The default AI settings were pretty good.  At level 20 I was able to engage a world boss with over six times my combined health (companion + me) and defeat it after a fight lasting several minutes. Given that I accidentally pulled the boss when I used a Force Wave talent that bounces enemy mobs away from me, and it took me a minute to realise what was happening, I thought that was really cool.

Class story quests.  I found the storyline engaging, although I stayed to complete all quests I could find in a zone before moving onto a new world.  The moment when you craft your first lightsabre is very good.  The large chunk of class-specific quests means that there is a lot of replay value for second and subsequent characters.

Visuals.  Worlds were pretty.  I liked the feel of post-apocalyptic Taris, a good moment for anyone who played the first KOTOR game.

Gear modification.  With upgrades it was possible to keep your best low level items for quite a long time, rather than upgrading them a few levels later.

The Galactic Republic is so corrupt it made me laugh.  Almost every Senator or officer I ran into was on the take somehow.

Combat. No auto-attacks, but the system seems good at turning to face when you execute an attack.  Past level ten I would engage normal mobs at 5:1 odds without blinking, a nice heroic feel.

Jedi force powers … from time to time the game system would let you do things that were not in your standard ability list, like giving you a dialogue option for force persuasion or force lifting a broken door.  That and the republican mooks tend to go “Oh thank God, a Jedi, we’re saved!”

Voice acting, I only hit space bar to fast forward through the voice acting a few times.  Mostly excellent, I did find a few stock phrases grating after a couple of days.

Mob Grinding Quests are optional.  Most of the “Kill Ten Stormtrooper” quests trigger when you start in a zone, but are not essential to finishing the main story quest.  I like this feature a lot.  Still, if you do complete all the kill quests, there is usually a nice reward at the end of it.

The Bad

No macros, no addons at launch.  Maybe later.

Starship combat is “on rails” rather than being in a full 3D environment.  Its been compared to Starfox.  That said, its completely ignorable as the quests are optional and it can be a fun way to pass time while waiting.

The default text is a light blue on a dark blue background, and its tiny.  I stopped reading fluff text because it was too hard on my eyes.

Flashpoints (instances/dungeons) were hard.  When you become eligible for the quests, you simply were not powerful enough for them.  Both the Esselles and Bringing Down the Hammer were awful wipe fests for the groups I tried them with.  The Hammer in particular had a boss fight on par with the difficulty of Cataclysm 5 mans in WoW (the boss had three different mechanics that would wipe you: adds, direct special attack, plus a random aoe attack) which I found impossible to heal – people simply died before I could complete the targeting/casting sequence – and I know I’m not a scrub when it coms to heals (I once made sixth for Heals-per-Second in World of Logs for my paladin).

Crafting is stuck in the old “make a thousand things no one wants” model to grind up towards the skill cap.  On the plus side, your companions will farm for you, and can craft or carry out gathering missions for you while you do other things.  The weird bit, the crafter on board your ship can only craft from the mats your character carries, and the crafted item appears in your bags, not back on board the ship.

The Ugly

For five man content, the UI is pretty much what you had in Vanilla WoW back in 2005.  For tanks/damage dealers, this is okay, for healers its going to be a world of pain as you slowly click to target the person you want to heal, then click the heal you want to use.  Compared to the one click healing of state-of-the art healer addons in games like WoW … it sucks sharp flinty ones, and is a major reason why I will not turn my Sith Inquisitor into a healer at launch.

That said, I did not get a chance to play with the raidframes, which look better in the gameplay videos I have watched.

Testing

It was fun filling out bug reports, not too much else I can say.  I look forward to seeing my fellow testers in the game once it goes live.

I am in one of my phases where I write up some game mechanics, then delete them for being too derivative.  So while I am doing work on the “Xmas Game” I do not know if I will actually get one finished.  In the mean time, some notes on games I have been playing and games I am looking forward to playing.

Star Wars the Old Republic Beta

Not much I can say here due to the NDA. Bioware did a short beta test just for testing the Oceanic connections and I was lucky enough to get an invite.  I am not regretting my pre-order from Amazon.

Lord of the Rings Online

Over the last year I have slowly levelled up a level 30-ish Guardian character in LOTRO.  Its a free-to-play game, but I did spend some cash on a mount and opening some questing zones.  While the Lord of the Rings lore is good, its very, very grindy.  Two points stand out here: advanced combat abilities that are only learned after you have used a basic combat ability a few hundred/thousand times, and the crafting system, where you effectively have to relearn prior tiers of skill in order to master each new tier.  Tactically, the levelling game is more interesting the World of Warcraft, as failure is quite possible if you attack on elite mob or pull too many trash mobs.  I only tried an instance once, and the combination of inability to generate multi-target threat combined with rapid mob respawns turned me off trying again.  After playing the SWTOR Beta, I don’t think I’ll be spending more time in LOTRO.

Dragon Age (tabletop)

My once a fortnight tabletop campaign continues, with the players having reached Level Six.  In the last session, they ran into an interesting moral challenge and my amoral mage jumped a different way from that which I was expecting (he refused to take the Red Book of Monsters from the time-shifted Ebon Tower after a fragment of a God told the party the book could be used to summon monsters that could sunder the world).

Some quirks in the game engine are now becoming apparent.  By Level 10 a character will have at least doubled their health from Level 1, if not tripled it, as well as improving the ability to avoid being hit and to mitigate incoming damage … but their outgoing damage will only have increased by about 1d6 per round.  So against a similar group of “heroes” the chances are that a combat would take an entire game session to resolve.

The Rogue class is annoying, as in each and every combat round they have to make an opposed bluff check in order to gain an attack bonus and 1d6 damage.  Without the bonus damage the Rogue is not competitive in damage dealing.  The extra die roll each round is time consuming.

Mages are annoying, definitely glass cannons, which makes them either overpowered or vulnerable.  If an NPC mage uses a crowd control spell, they can eliminate a player character from an entire combat (which means a bored player), but in return solo enemy mages are not viable as foes – they simply cannot survive without a small horde of minions to intercept/disrupt the players.

My rough rule of thumb now, is that for an enemy to concern my players, it needs to do a minimum of 6d6 damage per combat round (after accounting for missed attacks and armour absorption), otherwise the fact that the party mages can pump out 6d6 healing per round means most combats end with the players on full health.  While I have given out the odd health/mana potion, I don’t think anyone has ever had to use one of them.

Still, the core engine still appeals to me and I am tinkering with reworking it into a SF setting – I am mucking around with ideas for Sidhe, Fomorians and Stargate style Egyptian monsters all turning Earth into a post-apocalyptic setting, with some bright ultra-tech human colonies out in space.

World of Tanks

This is an online “lobby” game, consisting of 15 minute player versus player matches in which each of the 30 players controls one World War II era tank.  Between matches you repair and research.  The tank capabilities and vulnerabilities seem faithful to history, although there are a few fantasy tanks in play which never got off the design board and onto the historical battle fields.  At the moment tanks are limited to US, Russian, and German designs, although I expect we will eventually see British and French designs as well.  The game has been sufficiently successful that we can expect to see World of Planes and World of Ships in a couple of years.

I chose to play Russian tanks, and have slowly worked my way up to my first heavy tank, the KV.  Unlike my previous tanks, its slow, really slow, and the turret is also a slow traverser.  Historically, it was a killer when it ran into German Panzer IIs and IIIs, but in WoT I am as likely to run into Tiger IIs and IS-4s, which I can’t really damage and which can one shot me in return.  Tactically, rather than moving constantly at max speed as you do with light tanks, the KV needs to work in formation with other tanks to avoid being flanked and also needs to skulk from bit of cover to bit of cover.  Out in the open its easily spotted and immobilised by artillery.

Overall, I find WoT to be a really good way to spend 30-60 minutes of spare time.  It also goes well with listening to some heavy metal music.

World of Warcraft – Firelands

My guild has lost two DPS players (rogue/hunter) but continues to raid.  We managed 6/7 boss kills before the content was nerfed, then 7/7 shortly afterwards and are now 1/7 for hard modes.  I’m not sure the content nerf was good for us.  We do not have the throughput in DPS/HPS for many of the hard mode fights, but now the normal mode fights are so trivial as to be boring.

What we tend to do now, is spend two hours wiping on hard modes on Thursday night, then clear up to 5/7.  On Monday we go back and kill the last two, and as we get better at killing Ragnaros we use our remaining time on Tier 11 hard modes.  On Sundays I lead a casual raid, but it is struggling as several of the players there simply cannot meet the DPS requirements – we need 15k DPS and they do 10k – the fights take too long and our healers run out of mana, or the time delay makes the wheels fall off and the fight becomes a train wreck.

I am happy with my Holy Paladin healing, I managed to rank sixth in class in World of Logs for healing the fat fire spider Beth’tilac in the second week of Firelands.  Considering how Paladins 1-6 were all in Tier 11 Hard Mode gear I was pretty chuffed with the accomplishment.  My Retibution Paladin DPS though … it sucks, hovering around 12k for most fights, although on a static tank and spank it can reach 18k.  Part of the reason the DPs is low is that because I do not enjoy it, I don’t practice it.  I’m not sure why I don’t enjoy it but there are two bits of the play style I struggle with: use of cooldowns and proc dependence.

It’s hard for me not to agree with Gevlon over at the Greedy Goblin, that the sheer complexity of the “Boss Dance” in fights is making raiding less fun.  This is especially the case for melee damage dealers in any fight with significant movement, as the loss of contact time on the boss reduces DPS.  It is a never-ending race, in which Blizzard alternates between buffing classes with new abilities, then upping the difficulty of new fights.  In patch 4.3 we are being promised a buff to melee DPS … but I have to say as a raid leader, I have no desire to recruit more melee DPS into the raid group because unless their player skill is exceptional.

Over at Blessing of Kings, a comparison of a Wrath era fight and a Cataclysm era was posted to illustrate this point:(http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2011/09/firelands-nerfs-and-difficulty.html)

Marrowgar:

• One mob
• Tanks stack on each other to split damage
• Avoid fire
• Dodge bonestorm
• Kill bonespikes

Shannox:

• Three mobs
• Dodge traps
• Burst one add with large spells
• Heal one random target who takes high damage
• Trap and kite one add until a stacking debuff wears off, failing this increases tank damage
• Avoid aoe spear damage
• Damage increases significantly as fight progresses

What I would prefer, is a few more fights that stretch my ability to play my class well, as opposed to how well I have memorised the exact dance steps for the special mechanics on a boss fight.  My own feedback on class design for the next expansion was “less is more”.

On the whole though, I think Blizzard made a serious mistake in Cataclysm by making two of the tier end bosses be recycled bosses from Vanilla WoW (Nefarian & Onyxia, and Ragnaros).  Yes, the fight mechanics are different … but it still felt like a failure of imagination to me by the Blizzard design team.

Upcoming Games

Games I am looking forward to include: Star Wars the Old Republic (December), Guild Wars 2 (2012), Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (11 November), and the Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft (2012).

For information on SWTOR I recommend the http://torwars.com/ fan site.  My Sith PvE guild is now part of the Oceanic “daisychain”, a collaborative effort to ensure as many ANZAC players as possible all end up on the same starting server.

Guild Wars 2 is attempting to eliminate the holy trinity, so all characters will have heal/dps options.  Defences will include active dodging by the players, and if you “die” you actually get a different set of combat options while knocked down.  Could be a quality of life improvement, but it might be a much stronger evolution of the genre than SWTOR is shaping up to be (several press reviews describe SWTOR as WoW with lightsabres).

I preordered Skyrim after watching some gameplay videos, especially of combat versus dragons.  It looks like combat is very sandbox, many different ways to solve each tactical problem.  I enjoyed the other Elder Scrolls games, so this will fill the gap until SWTOR is released.

Mists of Pandaria will be an oriental themed expansion for WoW.  I know a few people have gone “WTF! Panda!”  but last time I looked WoW had already jumped the shark (the Goblin starter area has a quest involving sharks with laser beams mounted on them).  I’ll be happy with MOP if I can dress my virtual dolls in Samurai armour.

Probably the most significant announcement was a complete rebuild of the talent system, rather than spending points every few levels to boost power and access new abilities, many abilities will be granted with class spec, and talents will be a choice of one of three options every 15 levels.  When you hit 30, you can’t go back and choose a second Level 15 option, as each set of options will compare like with like, you are unlikely to be forced to choose between utility or survival or throughput.  I like the sound of this new system … fits with my “less is more” preference.

Wowhead already has a talent calculator preview available at: http://www.wowhead.com/mists-of-pandaria-talent-calculator