As any GM can tell you, the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley. Though very few GMs put it into those words. Because they aren’t Scottish poets of the 1700’s who have only a tenuous grasp of the language in which they are apparently trying to write. But then, most Scots only have a tenuous grasp of the language of the language in which they try to speak. Trust me. I’ve heard Scots talk. That crap’s indecipherable. I always assumed it was just an accent, though. Apparently, based on the writing on Robert Burns, it seems to be a fundamental problem in the language center of their brains. Probably from getting hit by one too many golf balls while eating haggis.

Anyway…

Due to a minor medical mishap last week, I ended up canceling a lot of stuff. Like the first actual game in my new campaign. The one I’ve been writing about. And also like the article on mapping a dungeon for that “let’s build a dungeon” thing. And then, a couple of other problems cropped up and by the time they were all handled, it was the weekend. And I didn’t get anything done over the weekend because, weeks ago, I had decided that all the book stuff and the chaos of life would be behind me by this point and I could happily run off to the mysterious land of Madison, WI to attend Gamehole Con. And then I had a follow up with some doctors and here we are.

Now, Gamehole Con was a fun experience. I mean, it was stressful and I was exhausted and not feeling well and various members of social circle kept introducing me to people so I couldn’t be incognito and relax. But it was fun nonetheless. And I have this sort-of tradition of coming back from conventions and offering a little recap of some of the games I tried and some of the activities I participated in. So, that’s what we’re going to do today. I’m going to give a few hot takes on some games, share some funny stories, point you to an interesting project to check out, that kind of thing.

Next week, we’ll finally get to that map. I swear. Oh, and eventually, we’ll get to the neat pantheon I barely designed for my Pathfinder campaign and talk more about item crafting. That’s on the docket for this month. Okay?

But first, Angry’s Post Gamehole Show

Shove It Up Your Gamehole

First and foremost: Gamehole Con. Honestly, I hadn’t heard of Gamehole Con before I moved to Wisconsin. Various Wisconsiners told me to check it out once they found out I was moving to their cheese-scented, beer-stained state. The website claims it’s the largest tabletop gaming convention in the upper Midwest. The thing is, I believe them. Not because it’s particularly large but because they are limiting the geographic scope of that claim so much. “We’re the biggest gaming convention west of Pax East, east of Pax West, and north of GenCon.”

That said, the convention wasn’t as small as I expected. They had about a dozen tables for Pathfinder and maybe two dozen for D&D, a few rooms for other RPGs, a dealer hall with about fifty vendors, and up to half-a-dozen food trucks. Outside. In the Wisconsin November. “Gamehole Con: Where all the food is frozen food!” And they also had a sizeable hall for True Dungeon to run two different dungeon adventures in. And, unlike GenCon, you could actually get tickets for True Dungeon. More on that below.

Gamehole Con is not a big convention, but it’s big enough that there’s plenty of stuff to do. And it also attracts – apparently – a sizeable number of names. There were a lot of industry people there who were somebody. Now, apart from the normal D&D Adventurer’s Society and Pathfinder Society stuff, there weren’t a lot of official company events. Not really any at all. But there were people there repping their companies in various ways. And there were also a lot of members of the old guard. Tim Kask and Jeff Easley were there, for example. I think at least one Gygax was in attendance. And that’s alongside the Mearlses and the Mercers and the Montes and Merwins that you expect at most conventions.

Check out the special guest list to see what I mean.

So, that’s Gamehole Con. For the price of attendance, I got good value. I probably wouldn’t travel across the country to attend, but if you can make the drive in a day, it’s pretty worth it. Consider that the Angry Seal of Grudging Approval. “If you don’t have to get on a plane or stop the car more then once for a meal, Gamehole Con isn’t a waste of money and time.” I’m sure they’ll want to use that on their website next year.

Oh, one disappointment: with a name like Gamehole Con – and I have no idea where that name came from – with a name like Gamehole Con, you’d think they’d have some pretty good taglines. Like “shove it up your gamehole” or “shut your gamehole; play some games” or something. They don’t. Missed opportunity there. But whatever.

Finally, full disclosure: my traveling partner, @TheTinyGM didn’t plan the trip super well. With books being published and health issues and college and jobs to work around, we weren’t even sure we’d be there. Ultimately, we ended up buying a full weekend pass just in case we actually could attend and then not registering for any events. I also didn’t want to run any events because I was really trying to just relax and have a quiet vacation and not be The Angry GM for a few days. Which was kind of my doctor’s orders, for reasons.

In the end, we drove down to Madison from Manitowoc – about a three-hour drive – on Friday afternoon after Tiny got out of school and we drove back up Sunday morning. We figured we’d have one good day there – Saturday. So, we pulled up the event calendar on Thursday night to see if there was anything we could sign up for on Saturday. I wanted to check out a demo of the Pathfinder 2 playtest since I still haven’t gotten around to even looking at any of the material. And we also decided – on impulse – that it was high time we tried True Dungeon. More on that below. We got into both events. True Dungeon on Saturday morning, Pathfinder on Saturday evening.

We ended up doing a lot more than we planned.

Friday: The Best Board Games the 1970s Had to Offer

Friday night, we hit town, checked in at the Super 8 motel we were staying in about ten minutes from the venue – The Alliant Energy Center – and headed over to the con to check it out. And we discovered two interesting quirks about the venue and the convention. First, the Alliant Energy Center is apparently a sizeable complex that includes a convention center, arena, and numerous large barns for county fair-related activities. I should note that that is just a common feature in Wisconsin. It seems like every town above a certain size includes a space and numerous large barns for county fair-related activities.

Surrounding these buildings are numerous parking lots, service roads, loading docks, and gates. And the entire thing sits at the confluence of two or three lakes. I mention all of this because, unless you approach via the one correct gate, you will be lost in a maze of outbuildings and service ways, some of which will be coned off, some of which will be open, and some of which will be open but which will feature threatening signs and unmanned security stations suggesting you should choose a different route. And depending on where you are coming from – because there are several approaches that take into account the relative positions of roads and lakes – you may end up coming in the wrong place. And very lost despite being able to actually SEE the building you are trying to get to.

And, here’s the thing: the GPS mapping system in my iPhone did not concern herself with which gates were open and closed and public and not. She just found me the most direct route from my hotel, around the lakes, and to the venue. And not once did she direct me to the actual, convenient, public entrance. So, if you decide to attend, here’s a helpful Pro tip from Angry.

Angry Pro Tip: Rimrock Road. That’s the proper road. If your GPS system is taking you via any other road, ignore it. Find Rimrock Road. Use that.

Anyhoo, Friday night we met up with some friends for dinner. We went to the Takara Japanese Restaurant and Sushi Bar. It was about 20 minutes from the convention center but worth the drive. Our friends – who live in the area – suggested it. It was good stuff.

Angry Pro Tip: Takara Japanese Restaurant. And then, when you head back to the convention, take the Beltline Highway to Rimrock Road. Whatever your phone tells you.

Thereafter, we ended up in the free board game library. Because it was late and we were just looking to kill time. Tiny and some of our friends decided to play this sickeningly cute game about pandas and bamboo farming. And I ended up desperately looking for anything else to do. Because I don’t do sickeningly cute and I am opposed to pandas on principle. That left me and friend of the site @TheCarpeDM alone and casting around for something to do. And that’s when we discovered in a hidden corner of the board game library a collection of board games from the silver age of gimmicky board games, the 1970s. See, in the 1970s and 1980s, there was this sort of push by companies like Milton Bradley, to come up with the weirdest, gimmickiest, and most unique board games you could imagine. And they were based less on game mechanics and rules design then they were on fantastic gimmicks and out-and-out silly fun. Remember fun? It’s the thing we used to have before smarmy Eurogamers started sneering about “roll to move” and “elimination” and “Ameritrash” and turning every frigging game into a Legacy game because you can’t just have a quick, simple, wacky experience; you’ve got to make a commitment to being brutally beaten week after week by some Cthulhu virus spreading across the world while zombies devour your cavalry in Mozambique.

Anyway, I remember a lot of these games because my older cousins – who grew up in that era – had been very into board and role-playing games and had left their extensive collection of board games at my Aunt’s house. So, when I was a kid and we spent many holidays there, my sisters and I and my younger cousins would dig those gems out of the board game closet and play the heck out of things like King Oil. Which was neat. That game had this sculpted plastic landscape. And it had rotating panels underneath. Each player was a multinational oil conglomerate – and what kid doesn’t want to be a heroic multinational oil conglomerate – and they spent their turn drilling for oil. You’d sink this little oil well onto one of the holes on the board and the hidden panels under the game would shove a little plastic thingy like a meat thermometer out of the top to tell you how much oil was in that reserve.

We were drawn to a game called Dungeon Dice. Now, if you’re a modern gamer, you might immediately think of some dice-drafting, semi-cooperative dungeon delving experience, right? Or maybe exploring a procedurally generated dungeon whose features are determined by rolling and placing dice? But you’re not thinking like Parker Brothers in 1977.

Basically, each player is an imprisoned oaf with a tragic page-boy haircut who has been wrongly imprisoned in a dungeon and is trying to tunnel out via the process of rolling doubles on various dice in the proper combinations to make progress before rolling the wrong combination and being beaten unconscious by dungeon guards. Yeah, it’s basically zombie dice with the most 1970s aesthetic you can imagine.

I give it 2 bowl cuts out of 5. If you get a chance to play it, play it once to laugh at the art, and after that, you’ve got the whole experience.

Now, as we were sitting and playing this game – and having a blast, mind you – a convention volunteer ran over to our table and became very excited to see us playing Dungeon Dice. See, he was the one who was responsible for donating the entire pile of 1970s’ board games to the convention board game library. And he loved every last, gimmicky one. So, once we were done with Dungeon Dice, we asked him to suggest another. He suggested Dungeon! – he had both the original version and the reprinted Classic Dungeon – but we nixed that. Because who HASN’T played Dungeon!? And then he got very excited and thrust something else at us and told us we absolutely had to play it.

The Bermuda Triangle was a 1975 game by Milton Bradley which invites each player to take on the role of an international overseas cargo fleet – because what kid doesn’t want to play as a… nevermind. Now, these cargo fleets are trying to make a fortune by shipping goods like sugar, lumber, and bananas between ports situation around the mysterious Bermuda Triangle. As the players’ ships sail from port to port, selling cargo and making money, the Mystery Cloud of the Bermuda Triangle sweeps around the board, swallowing ships and transporting them to ports unknown in dimensions unseen, to be neither seen nor heard from ever again. I shit you not.

The Mystery Cloud game piece has its own spinner. And it’s elevated above the board a bit on its rotating central post. So, you rotate it and move it around the board every turn. And if it passes over a ship, through some mysterious force, it will literally swallow up the ship. Sometimes. Sometimes, you get lucky and your ship simply gets blown a little off course and recovers once the cloud passes by. I cannot stress how awesome that is. There is a literal mystery cloud – with suggestions of eyes and tentacles among the waves and clouds – that actually swallows the ships off the board as it passes over them.

The game is so amazing that – thanks to E-Bay – I now own my very own copy. And I recommend it to everyone. It gets 30,000 pounds of bananas out of 5.

Side note, though: do not turn the cloud over. Otherwise, you’ll discover the mysterious forces of the Bermuda Triangle Mystery Cloud are just magnets placed in the bottom side of the cloud to grab hold of the ships that get caught under them. That ruined a lot of the mystique for me. Also, spoiler warning: don’t read the preceding paragraph. It’ll ruin the mystique for you.

Flushed with excitement from our experience with The Bermuda Triangle, we ran back over to our guide to the gaming world of the mid-70s and he handed us Stop Thief: The Electronic Cops and Robbers game. In it, you play as a detective trying to stop an invisible thief who is controlled by a computer – yes, the rules really said that – by using an illegal surveillance tool that somehow plays the sounds from the thief’s location, so that you can hear him breaking glass, opening doors, stepping on squeaky floorboards, and riding the subway. Basically, you’re supposed to listen to the sounds coming out of the electronic thingy, look at the board, and guess where the thief is based on how many steps he took and when he broke a window or display case or opened a door or whatever. And the sounds were reproduced with all the realism of an Atari 2600 console. Given that and the fact that the venue was loud and the hour was late, we didn’t really get a chance to play Stop Thief.

And that was Friday night.

Now on Saturday.

Saturday Morning: The Truest Dungeon Experience

So, I have a confession to make: before this weekend, I had never actually done True Dungeon. And True Dungeon is a thing that everyone who’s anyone who’s ever been to a big enough convention to have True Dungeon has done. I’ve also never seen The Goonies. Well, Tiny and I decided to drop the collective 120 American bucks on two tickets for True Dungeon and find out why everyone who had ever done it said it was the thing to do. On Saturday morning, we were handed a little pouch of weird tokens and ushered into a too-dark room with about ten other people to meet our dungeon trainer.

Here’s the deal: True Dungeon is a life-size dungeon adventure. But it is not, strictly speaking, a true dungeon. The players pass through a series of dungeon room mockups whose production values are on par with a local haunted house feature in a good-sized town. Better than high-school booster club Halloween haunted house level, but not the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. Maybe, a big county fair level of production. However, the makeup jobs on the actors are excellent. Like, Disney World excellent. I have to say.

The idea is that the party of adventurers – and you’re grouped up into groups of about a dozen – must travel from room to room through the dungeon, solving puzzles and defeating monsters, to accomplish whatever the hell the adventure is about. But it’s not just an escape room. Or a series of small, 12-minute escape rooms – see, you have 12 minutes in each room and if you don’t finish the room, you lose and you’re kicked out – it’s not just a series of escape rooms. It really is an attempt to capture a tabletop RPG experience.

First, you have a character and a class and skills and equipment. At the beginning of the game, you’re handed a bag of random tokens. Each one has some piece of equipment on it. And before you start the game, you choose which tokens to equip on your character by placing them on a little vinyl mat with spots for weapons, armor, headgear, belt, shoes, figurines, and so on. I’m not sure where you wear a figurine, but you can wear two of them. Whatever. The items all have neat effects on them like giving you +2 to Dexterity or immunity to cold damage or a bonus to Will saves or something. Which gives the nice illusion of making a character. I don’t know why. Since none of that crap actually seems to matter.

Now, I know there are some obsessive True Dungeon purists out there who run the dungeons over and over again at every convention and trade all the tokens to get the best items and run the same dungeon over and over and they attended the True Dungeon seminar which explains all of this crap – there really is one – I know there are some obsessive True Dungeon purists out there who are going to take issue with what I’m going to say about True Dungeon. And I frankly don’t give a crap. Because I didn’t attend an hour-long seminar about the thing first. And that seminar isn’t required anyway. And I don’t want to have to obsess over a thing just to enjoy it. I don’t care what becomes clear later or what can be blamed on a poor quality GM or whatever. I’m explaining the experience that actual, normal people will have their first time playing True Dungeon. And probably their second and third time playing it. So, shut up.

Also, as I will also explain, no one likes you.

See, the game fails to make some things clear. And one of those things is how any of those stats matter in way, shape, or form. I had an item that granted me some kind of bonus to Dexterity, I think, and another that rendered me immune to cold damage, and another that allowed me to grant my party a bonus to Will saves. The damage thing was totally on me to remember and apply. Which is fine, I guess. But the damned space is dark and you don’t get a handy reference for your equipment. Just a handful of tokens to shove in your pocket and remember that you have or to frantically search through under a time limit. In the dark. To remind yourself what you have and what you can do. And if you’ve been playing a lot, you can have dozens of tokens worth of equipment. On top of that, not one of us at any point made anything resembling a Dexterity check for anything. I’m not even sure what such a check would do. And the one time we made a Will save, it was a surprise thing that a monster just did to us and I hadn’t prepared my one stupid token in advance in case the monster in the next room started the festivities by forcing a Will save. As a result, except for your weapon and the odd consumable item you remember you have, the equipment did precisely squat for my group.

The game also fails to make something else clear. But first, let me explain how all of this actually works.

As I said, you move from room to room trying to work your way through a dungeon. When you enter a room, you’re greeted by a Game Master who delivers some flavor text about the room and your goal. And then, you’re either left to figure out how to solve a puzzle or else you’re attacked and have to win a combat. If there’s a puzzle, you just move around the room interacting with the props, looking for clues, doing substitution codes, solving logic puzzles, assembling the statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey, or whatever. Standard stuff. If there’s a combat, you’ll be ambushed by an actor in excellent costume and makeup, a recorded voice-over, and some amateur magic show lighting and smoke effects and sounds. The actor will wander around the room menacing you without actually touching you while you play out combat, round by round. If you have a weapon token, you go over to a shuffleboard with the rest of the PCs and, one at a time, try to slide your puck into numbered spaces on the board to attack. If you’re a spellcaster, you tell the GM you’re casting a spell and then it happens. The GM does a lot of math, announces the results, the GM rolls a die to resolve the monster’s action, and uses a remote-control doohickey to flash the lights and provide sound effects and smoke and fog and stuff.

It’s neat. It’s fun. But, it’s also a game of playing shuffleboard on a strict time limit while a costumed actor wanders around being menacing without actually touching anyone and tries to get the people who have already done their shuffleboard for the round to pantomime combat moves. It was kind of like the combats in Chrono Trigger. It’s basically just turn-based combat, but everyone is also wandering around the battlefield between their turns striking poses.

Angry Pro Tip: if you’re bad at shuffleboard or manual dexterity related tasks but good at memorizing trivia, play a spellcaster. If you have a terrible memory, but you’re good at table games like foosball and stuff, play a melee combatant.

Now, one of the neat features of this is the skill check feature. Each character class has a special ability they can use to provide a bonus to certain actions. For example, I was the wizard. And the wizard, along with the cleric and the druid, can enhance their spells – usually for a damage boost – by doing a memory test. Before the game began, I was given a diagram of the sixteen planes of existence. Air, Fire, Arcadia, Void, Olympus, Hell, you know. And I was told to memorize their locations in the Cosmos. Whenever I cast a spell, the GM would hold up a blank map of the cosmos and say, “where is Olympus” or “what plane is this?” If I got it right, I got bonus damage. If not, the spell still worked, but I didn’t get a bonus. I got them all right but one. Eight spells cast that allowed skill checks, seven correct answers. I was an awesome wizard. Clerics had to memorize which beads on a prayer necklace represented which virtues. And druids had to identify leaves by silhouette or something.

Meanwhile, Tiny was the rogue. And in each room puzzle, she could attempt a game of irritating stick for a bonus. You know, the game where you have to move a metal rod around a winding path without touching the edges? If she did it, she got us an extra clue to the puzzle at hand.

Angry Pro Tip: If you saw that thing about melee combatants and shuffleboard and decided you were only ever going to play primary spellcasters, don’t even THINK about trying to play a rogue.

I don’t want to give away the plot of the adventure because I know True Dungeon reuses them from convention to convention and spoilers totally ruin the experience. So, I’m just going to say that our adventure was themed around Norse mythology and my own skill at logic puzzles and knowledge of the Norse pantheon helped me carry us through all of the puzzle rooms – which is good, because I can’t shuffleboard worth crap – and there are puzzles that commit the cardinal Escape Room sin of relying on outside knowledge. Like knowing the story of how Tyr lost his hand to Fenrir. But the GMs are also pretty nice about clues. Especially if you have the logic to the puzzle and are in danger of overthinking yourselves out a right answer by arguing some minor of logic like whether the week technically starts on Sunday or Monday.

For the reason of avoiding spoilers, it’s hard for me to explain the other problem I had with the game not making stuff clear without being overly vague. So, in the second room, we got attacked by a menacing actor and had to shuffleboard the monster to death. Standard True Dungeon combat. After the fight, while we were waiting for the GM to give us the go-ahead to proceed – you have to wait for the parties ahead of you to clear their rooms – while we were waiting, we asked about a particular odd prop. The GM – who we had been chatting with amiably while we were waiting – the GM suddenly dropped into his narration voice and described what the prop appeared to be. It turned out that, had we interacted with it or asked about it during the combat, it would have triggered some narrative text. And that narration immediately suggested that the object could have been used to shut down one of the monster’s troubling abilities.

The problem is the structured nature of the combat rooms, the way the GM was handling combat round-by-round, and the division between combat rooms and puzzle rooms all worked against us screwing with the props in the non-puzzle rooms. They all looked decorations. And we were all standing in lines waiting to take our turns or striking poses to make the actor feeling like they were earning their free hotel room. That also tripped us up big time in the boss fight. Which is why we didn’t win the boss fight at the end of the dungeon. The boss didn’t kill us. We survived the entire 12 minutes with it. And we were awarded True Dungeon Survivor pins. But we also didn’t win.

Aside from those issues, though, the experience was a lot of fun. I realize I probably sound very critical. In point of fact, it really didn’t matter about the stats and the items. They just never came up. And I forgot about them eventually. We all did. I can’t even fault the outside knowledge thing with the puzzles because that’s part of the RPG tradition and because there were clues available if we needed them. And yes, I am poking fun at the cheesy special effects, but it’s all done with such earnest gusto that it doesn’t matter.

I give the True Dungeon experience four shuffleboard pucks out of a five. Everyone should do it once. And, if the money isn’t a sticking point – it is expensive – it’s worth doing whenever you go to a convention that has it. Is it worth running the same adventure multiple times? Nah. Is it worth doing it more than once per convention? Not really. And if you’re one of those people who spends any amount of time at the True Dungeon Trading Post trying to optimize your equipment, you have an unhealthy obsession and you need help.

Speaking of…

A Public Service Announcement: The Know-it-All Who’s Played Before

There is a particular type of person that you always run into when you’re doing things at a convention and being grouped together at random. Actually, it doesn’t even have to be at a convention. If you go to the local game store’s board game night and end up playing a cooperative board game with strangers, you’ve met this person before. But, based on my one experience, they really have the power to wreck a True Dungeon experience.

See, my little True Dungeon group of ten consisted of eight people who had never done True Dungeon before, one person who had done True Dungeon before and who wasn’t an asshole, and one Know-It-All Who’s Played Before. The KIAWPB is that person who is the only person in the group who has played the game before and who is so obsessed with winning that he can’t let other people have the joy of experiencing something for the first time. Instead, he has to give them “helpful tips” that amounts to “telling everyone what to do” and insisting that “he’s not going to spoil anything, but he’s just going to provide this one clue that will become a spoiler the moment you see the context.”

If you find yourself being the one person who’s played before in a group of people doing something for the first time, here’s an Angry Pro Tip for you.

Angry Pro Tip: SHUT YOUR GAMEHOLE YOU OBNOXIOUS ASSHOLE AND LET EVERYONE ELSE ENJOY THEIR FIRST TIME DOING SOMETHING THE SAME WAY YOU DID. BECAUSE UNLESS THERE IS AN ACTUAL FRIGGING CASH PRIZE, THERE IS NOTHING AT STAKE WORTH RUINING EVERYONE ELSE’S FUN.

Remember: Angry says don’t be the Know-it-All Who’s Played Before or else he will find you and kill you. He promises.

Saturday Evening: The Pathfinder 2 Playtest Two-Combat Adventure Extravaganza

The other major thing we did at Gamehole Con was to sit for a demo Pathfinder 2, which is currently in open playtest. I’ve been curious about the Pathfinder 2 playtest for a while. I even bought the now obsolete book, intending to read it, maybe run it a bit, and check it out. But I never got around to it. So, Gamehole Con seemed like a great opportunity to give it a shakedown.

Now, I would love to give a long analysis of the mechanics of the game and discuss what I think works and what doesn’t, but there’s not really any point. PF2 has been going through a lot of revisions. And the revisions are pretty major. We were warned, when we sat down, that the game was in a constant state of flux. The published version of the book was utterly out of date. The action economy, for example, had been completely rewritten. Moreover, the version of the game we were playing was also somehow out of date. I think the demo we were playing had been written for GenCon. And, apparently, a lot had been rewritten in three months. There were features on our character sheet that no longer existed. Or they did exist but wouldn’t be used because they hadn’t existed when the adventure was written. Or something. I don’t know.

The point is, it’s kind of silly to render opinions on specific mechanics when those mechanics might be three to six months obsolete or might become obsolete by the end of December. I was very much reminded of the D&D Next Open Playtest, wherein entire vast swaths of the rules were being completely rewritten on a weekly basis. And considering what eventually got churned out for 5E, I don’t have high hopes for Pathfinder 2 not being the thing that breaks Paizo. I miss the days when public playtesting was something that happened after the designers agreed on a vision for the project, wrote down some design goals, and had finished most of the major mechanics. I also miss the days when games were designed by actual, professional game designers instead of just, you know, everyone.

It was also very hard to judge the current version of the playtest based on the two-hour demo we played. Because that consisted of fighting the guards outside the door, walking through the door and into the boss room, and then fighting the boss. So, as big a thing as our GM – who was extremely well informed about the Pathfinder 2 design process, I might add – made of Pathfinder’s explicit modes of play mechanic that divides the game in Exploration Mode, Encounter Mode, and Downtime Mode, it didn’t actually seem to do anything more than just add the experience of trying to shift gears when you’d never driven a car with a manual transmission before. The actual play in Exploration Mode and Encounter Mode were exactly the same as playing before they invented those modes. But they added an audible clunk to mark the transition between the two. It’s hard to describe though.

The other interesting change was that they removed Initiative. At least, that’s what they said. In actuality, what they did was rename Initiative to Perception. See, when you grind your game into third gear and start an Encounter, the GM has everyone make a Perception check to determine when they can act in the initiative order. Unless you can convince the GM that the last thing you did in Exploration Mode would be a better determinant of initiative. For example, if you spent Exploration Mode sneaking around, the GM might use your Stealth check to determine when you can go in the round.

It’s a neat idea and I can understand where they’re going with using Perception – which is no longer a skill by the way and has been moved up to combat stats to further emphasize how it’s NOT INITIATIVE AND TOTALLY DIFFERENT – but there’s something weird about it. I guess awareness is as good a determining factor of who goes when as anything. And I can see interesting possibilities for using different skills. Like, when the party is standing around arguing with an NPC and the NPC is going to draw a weapon and start a fight, the NPC could use Bluff or Sleight of Hand to get that weapon out without being noticed until he’s already lunging and the party could use Perception to see the attack coming in time. The problem I have is that it also creates this odd situation where, by default, the people who are most likely to act first are the divine spellcasters and not the rogues and skirmishers and archers. Sure, you COULD come up with an explanation as to why clerics are harder to get the drop on than rogues or argue that rogues should only have the drop if they are being stealthy or using some other skill, but you’d be arguing to make an excuse for the mechanic instead of allowing reality to dictate the most intuitive mechanic.

And that just kept running through my head the whole time. “I can see what they were going for, but…” And it actually led to another, bigger issue. As we kept playing and also as we discussed the mechanics and the playtest before and after the game with the GM, I started to notice a weird pattern in the mechanics. Because I kept seeing spots where they had clearly tried to streamline the mechanics of Pathfinder, to make them more approachable. But then, inexplicably, they added some weird complexity for no good reason at the end. At first – for example, with the thrown weapon and splash damage mechanics – I thought they were just bad at streamlining and doing it in the least intuitive way possible. But then, I started to suspect something else was happening. I suspect there are two design philosophies at war. The first is to simplify and streamline things to make the game more approachable and more playable. The second is to panic about how the hardcore fans of Pathfinder will react and throw and some complexity back in. And because a lot of the simplification and streamlining is oddly similar to how D&D 5E evolved from D&D 3.5, I am going to name those philosophies “Chasing D&D” and “But Pathfinder.”

The Chasing D&D philosophy says, for example, that the action economy is a mess and that they need to simplify things down to actions and moves. In fact, they need to simplify further. Moving is an action. Everything is an action. And you just take a certain number of actions a turn. Easy.

Then the But Pathfinder philosophy jumps in and says, that’s great. Because we can build a lot of complexity on that. For example, actions could cost multiple actions. And we can have swift actions. Everyone loves swift actions. And what if we added active defense actions, like readying your shield to deflect an attack?

Chasing D&D demands we simplify the action economy, But Pathfinder demands we have lots of action types and do interesting things with the action economy.

Overall, I rate Pathfinder 2 a question mark out of five because I’ll be damned if I know if I even played the current version or whether the final version will look anything like that and I have no idea if it’ll be good or not. I’m just waiting to see who wins the tug-of-war in the open playtest.

Saturday: Middle of the Day Lightning Round!

Man, this has gone on for a long time. I need to wrap this up. But Tiny and I played – and bought – a couple of board games and tried out at least one other board game that doesn’t exist it but hopefully someday will. So, I’m going to give some quick lightning round reviews of the rest of the things we did on Saturday. With pictures.

Dungeon Mayhem!

Dungeon Mayhem is a cute little last-person-standing card game coming very soon – like next week – from Wizards of the Coast. Each person gets their own deck of cards and the players take turns throwing cards at each other to do damage. I realize it’s crazy to hear my praise anything by Wizards of the Coast, but I’m going to. The game is a lot of fun, it’s really well balanced, it plays quickly, and it’s simple. It’s the perfect game to have in your pocket while you’re at a gaming convention or to play when you’re waiting for the rest of the players to show up for your weekly RPG session. It has a quirky sense of mild humor and the art style is pretty cute. As a bonus, our demo was handled by Shelly Mazzanoble from WotC. She’s an absolute freaking delight. One of the genuine most fun, friendly people WotC has working for them. And I’ve been a closet fan of hers since her days as self-appointed Player-in-Chief during the 4E era… is what I would be saying if I weren’t a real man and interested in manly things like flaming motorcycles and drinking beers at the football world series.

4 manly flaming motorcycles out of 5.

Roll Player

Roll Player is a game about players making the best damned characters they can make. It’s all about character generation. You have this character sheet. You try to claim the best dice and arrange them to give you the perfect combination of ability scores to fit your class and backstory properly. You make sure your alignment gives you the best bonus. And you maximize your traits, skills, and equipment. But despite the game being based on doing the most boring part of an RPG in the worst way possible, the game is actually very fun. Players compete to snatch limited resources like colored dice and cards from the middle of the board to get just the right mix of things to score victory points. And the different ways of scoring victory points create a fun optimization problem that takes up so much brain space that the players really don’t spend a lot of time screwing each other. That can be a drag in games like this. As a bonus, there’s some real potential for ACTUALLY building unique characters and NPCs by just mixing and matching backstory, alignment, class, and race cards.

4 six-sided dice (drop the lowest) out of 5.

The Institute for Magical Arts

I’m not sure what the deal is with this. I can’t find an official link to it and all the copies on Amazon are, like, hundreds of bucks. But there was a pile of them for sale at Gamehole Con for around 20 bucks. It seems like it’s the result of a successful Kickstarter from a few years ago and never got another print run? Maybe? This is the kind of high-quality journalism that is the reason why I only do articles like this once a year. Then again, fact-checking, quality reporting, integrity, and not hating your customers don’t seem to be like prerequisites for journalism anymore. Anyway, The Institute for Magical Arts is a two-player duel game about two rival wizards trying to seize control of a magical college after Snape killed Dumbled… after the headmaster dies of adult-onset mysterious circumstances. It’s all about picking actions in secret, revealing those actions, and playing them out. But with the fun of rolling dice that limit what actions you can take. Basically, though, it’s about playing tug of war. Each player is trying to claim cards by placing more influence on them then the other. And the cards move around the board. And there’s an ethereal portal that moves through the school swallowing your influence. It’s one of those games whose rules SEEM complicated, but then you start playing it and it’s easy, fun, and quick to play. An excellent game for two players.

3 house points of out 5.

Galactic Infamy

Galactic Infamy is about being a space bounty hunter, fresh out of bounty hunting school, and trying to make a name for yourself by killing your way through the local space mob. To be honest, there’s nothing in the mechanics that make it too special. It’s just your standard “move around the board, collect resources, hunt bounties, turn them in, accumulate victory points” kind of thing. But the presentation is really nice. It was eye-catching enough that we kept trying to find a time when the table was free so we could play a demo. And eventually, we did. What does sell the game is the world-building, the presentation, and the love of classic sci-fi franchises present in references throughout the game? Even though the game we played was only a prototype, it was very nicely presented. The way the cards interlock to allow you to quickly add stats across a row as you outfit your character was a very neat little touch. The way the board is made of interlocking orbit paths and planets was also cool. And the unique character and race designs was a nice touch. There’s a lot of worldbuilding hidden in the flavor text, species traits, and action cards. The problem with this game is that it doesn’t exist yet. The creators have been working hard to build a community online and to hit the threshold of support where they can take it to Kickstarter. And I really want it to get there. Because they are doing it right. And because I want the game to exist. So, I admit, in addition to genuinely enjoying the game as a fun game with a lot of heart behind it, this has a sort of sympathy vote from me. I want it to succeed. Show the game some love if you can. I know I’m going to.

I give this 3 Bobas out of Fett for the game itself and a bonus point for heart and dedication.

Universal Horizons

Universal Horizons is a universal, genre-non-specific RPG. And that’s all I know about it. There was a demo of it going non-stop all weekend. And there was a sign that suggested it was a “fight the hidden world and conspiracies” type game ala X-Files or Dark*Matter, but I couldn’t get into the demo. I did get a chance to talk one of the writers of one of the modules and she explained that the game itself was a universal RPG system that could be used to run absolutely anything and that the X*Files thing was just a specific module a specific writer had created. So, I was kind of disappointed. But the Players Handbook – the only book you need to get started – was like, 20 bucks or something and she offered to throw in a setting. So, I bought it. I haven’t even looked at it. I don’t know what to say about it. I’m only mentioning it for completeness.

Universal Horizon gets a [REDACTED] out of 5.

Conclusion

Man, I’d love to keep going. But this has gone on long enough. And I even kept the Long, Rambling Introduction™ short to give myself plenty of word count. Oh well. I guess I have to leave out meeting Matthew Lillard and checking out Beedle and Grimm’s beautiful platinum edition box sets of D&D modules which are really well-done conversions and presentations only slightly marred by the fact that they are presentations of WotC’s published modules. And I can’t tell the story of why I owe a huge apology to Goodman Games and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Nor the story of a certain dice company secretly using government resources to develop and test new and better dice at the expense of taxpayers.

But I can say this: play The Bermuda Triangle. It’s awesome!