Save Vs Rant

Today on Save Vs. Rant, we’re talking about  some of the gems Jeremy plumbed from the rich mines of the exhibit hall. Join us, won’t you? My cat did for about the first 5 minutes of the podcast. Everything is better with cats!

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Jeremy went to GenCon this year, and I went to the hospital. I mean, I didn’t plan to go to GenCon in the first place, but I also didn’t plan to go to the hospital. When I got back from the hospital, I was still a little goofy from the concussion I suffered. Here’s a picture of my cat in the cardboard house I made for her while Jeremy was at GenCon and I was concussed:

I’m not bitter. I’m excited – for new games! Today, we’re discussing a few games that Jeremy pulled down from the convention.

We remain very excited for Ultimate Werewolf: Legacy by Bezier Games (with a credit to the esteemed Rob Daviau), but our groups just tend to go on the very large end (>20) or too low end (<8) which makes it difficult to get that sweet spot number of people involved in the game. Still, a party will doubtless come up where we have a chance to give it a go.

The Mind and The Game, both by Pandasaurus Games, are both fairly simple games about counting. The Mind is a uniquely enjoyable experience in interpersonal synchronicity. There’s something enlightening and enjoyable about the experience of, without exchanging a word, successfully counting three numbers consecutively. Jeremy, my brother Justin and I were able to get 36, 37 and 38 consecutively, much to our great amusement and delight. The Game is a slightly more cerebral and less intuitive experience, but still an interesting light game with a lot of hidden depth.

Nyctophobia (also by Pandasaurus Games) is a fascinating concept, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired. Personally, I would have much preferred the game come with actual blindfolds instead of blackout glasses (which give me a bit of a headache). It might have also helped to have slightly higher quality components, but I understand the desire to keep costs down, and what was presented worked adequately. My biggest complaint about the game was, perhaps, how limited its scope was. There have been several games I have player where I found myself asking after playing, “Ok, so now that we’ve played the beginner version, what’s the full game like?” Some examples of this, apart from Nyctophobia, are Cheaty Mages, Sheriff of Nottingham and Kodama, all of which I consider very good games, but which, to me, definitely felt like they could have a lot more without being in any way overwhelming.

Too Many Bones by Chip Theory Games is one of the more interesting RPG lite games we’ve played. It brings to mind Gloomhaven,  albeit with considerably less persistence and less of a sense of exploration and discovery. Not to say there are no surprises in Too Many Bones – it’s a remarkably deep game, after all – although I can imagine after a sufficient number of runs, it could become as predictable as any other game with random story elements. Even so, I can see it being very enjoyable for many playthroughs, especially with adjustable difficulty and the abundance of character and build options.

Naturally, GenCon always has far, far too many new and exciting games to play than we could possibly review. Whatever you personal flavors of fun, we hope you see something that interests you. We’ll be back soon with out DMing 102 episode, wherein we will give more of our favorite tips for improving your game. Until next time!

Today’s episode is all about our impressions of the Pathfinder Playtest. Since we’re both veteran Pathfinder players, we came to the playtest with a pretty strong understanding of what we felt were Pathfinder’s strengths and weaknesses, and what makes Pathfinder, Pathfinder.  As such, we were both excited to see the developments.

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Paizo Publishing, makers of the Pathfinder RPG, started out as 3rd party / contract publishers for D&D responsible for the publication of Dungeon and Dragon magazine (the former being a magazine of published adventures, the latter being for the discussion of rules and hobby culture material). The Golarion setting of the Pathfinder RPG (which we plan to discuss in a future episode) began its publishing history in the 3.5 era of D&D but received the majority of its material under the Pathfinder RPG proper..

The RPG itself was published as a sort of counterpoint to the sweeping changes made in D&D 4th Edition. Many players and publishers felt that 4th Edition’s changes were too sweeping. For instance, I did.

Me. I thought they were too sweeping.

Like, don’t get me wrong, 4th Edition makes a great baseline for a tactical miniatures combat game. Honestly, I’d like to see a pared down streamlined version put to that use (sort of like D&D’s flopped CHAINMAIL miniatures line). Paizo Publishing, however, saw that the open gaming revolution begun by 3rd Edition D&D was still strong and decided that they would perform what the open source community refers to as a project fork, marking the beginning of their independent development of the Pathfinder RPG, sometimes nicknamed D&D 3.75.

The main design goals of Pathfinder were to keep as true as possible to the spirit of D&D 3.5 – to update and improve on the game, but also to make converting beloved characters and material relatively simple. The changes from 3.5 to Pathfinder were, in a few cases, already things the community at large had house rules to address or already did (honestly, who played with experience penalties for multi-classing?). For the most part, though, they simplified rules, expanded the options of characters, increased the power of classes, or shifted the abilities gained at different levels around.

Of course, there were still issues. Some still thought of Pathfinder as “D&D: Spellcaster Edition.” There was still criticism of the skill system, where some skills didn’t become substantially more useful with additional ranks (Heal, for example, simply needed a character to be trained to perform the more obscure actions with the skill) and others just weren’t that useful at all (Intimidate and Bluff’s combat uses were forgettably bad for any character who didn’t invest Feats or Powers in them, which makes their “good” uses more a function of the Feat or Power and the Skill itself merely a prerequisite).

I’m not going to go into a huge discussion of what we like and dislike about the playtest from our limited experience with it, but I do want to emphasize one point that I feel the playtest has done well: unification of terminology.

All improvement in a specific aspect of a character (other than attributes) is covered by the term Proficiency, which, in turn, has a single unified mechanic. Any modular ability gained by a character is a Feat, with several sub-categories. Everything your character does is an Action, Reaction or Activity. All this makes the game feel much cleaner and, importantly, easier to explain to new players. I have already arranged a game with players of numerous levels of roleplaying experience, from veterans to almost complete noobs. I’m excited to see how the learning curve of this game compares to that of other editions.

Expect more updates regarding this as the playtest progresses.

What’s a gaming group to do when you feel like your favorite games are played out? The answer may be “find a new game,” but it might also be “get an expansion!” Today’s Save Vs. Rant is about expansions – their history, what kind of expansions exist, the advantages – and disadvantages – of each, and why they may or may not be right for your gaming group.

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We already explained, when last we considered broaching this very broad topic, that we did not want this to just be an episode listing what expansions we like. After all, you can get that information from a much larger aggregate of sources on BoardGameGeek.com or just by reading reviews on Amazon.com. Instead, we wanted to discuss the different kinds of Expansions and what makes them tick.

Some games were explicitly meant to be expanded from their creation. The original Hero Quest contained a blank quest sheet that you could use to plan out a custom quest. Flux, Cards Against Humanity and many other games contain blank cards, sometimes intended as proxies for lost cards, other times explicitly intended to give you an opportunity to expand the game. One of the major problems of such blank cards, however, is that your custom content will frequently fail to match both the tone and art style of the original game. Unless you’re an accomplished artist, you’ll probably bet left with content that is substantially inferior to the original.

One kind of content that is often easy to add in expansions is maps. Consider Ticket to Ride. While its games are all technically sequels (and each one contains at least one unique game mechanic), the principle of map-based expansion is in full effect. The most obvious and significant difference between the Ticket to Ride Games are, in fact, the maps. Likewise, there is a major box expansions for Small Worlds that allows you to use map tiles to create unique worlds for greater replayability. Captain Sonar likewise gets a lot of mileage out of just having additional maps to play on.

For games with selectable characters, classes, equipment, skills, spells or other RPG elements, it’s often a fairly simple matter to expand the roster or inventory with more items. Super Dungeon Explore, Arkham Horror, Tannhauser, Cash and Guns, Dead of Winter, Sentinels of the Multiverse and Small World all have expansions that capitalize on this. In some cases, the same can be done with the monsters or enemies in the game – variety is, after all, the spice of life. The major flaw in this approach, though, is that the more things you add to the game, the more you water down any existing themes in the game and the more likely you are to completely break the balance in the game.

Stand-alone expansions are relatively rare, which is a shame, given that a well-crafted stand-alone expansion typically provides at least two new ways to play the game (in some cases more, depending on how modular the components are).

An interesting aside to all this is roleplaying games which have been providing expansions and additional content since their creation. Consider, though, the recent curious case of D&D 4e. Partially in response to backlash against the homogenous nature of the player character classes in the Player’s Handbook, two additional stand-alone handbooks were released – Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, and Heroes of the Fallen Lands. Each reintroduced classes that had already been introduced to the game in a manner that was not necessarily intended to replace them, but provide an alternate interpretation of them for players dissatisfied with the originals. I personally liked these interpretations of the classes far more than the ones presented in the Player’s Handbook and, had 4th Edition opened with these versions, I may have had a somewhat more forgiving attitude towards it.

Adding an additional element to the game, as is done in Potion Explosions’ Fifth Ingredient and Five Tribe’s Artisans expansion, can make for a pretty spectacular change in gameplay, but is a risky venture to say the least given how much it shakes up the delicate balance of the game. Still, these games pull it off in a way of which we here at SVR think other companies should stop and take notice.

One game with a nearly endless series of expansions that all seem to “work” in a fundamental way is Cards Against Humanity. While adding more cards to a giant game of CAH may water down some of the more subtle jokes (for instance, you’re far less likely to have players play “Bees?” and “BEES!” on the same turn) it does reduce the frequency of some of the more played out ones (“Mecha Hitler” is pretty much a cheat code to win on any given round). A lot of these sort of improvisational discussion games are both officially and fan expandable for this reason (Superfight, Apples to Apples, et al). If you really want to go hardcore with expansion, you can always play 1000 Blank White Cards, which is, in perpetuity, available from your local office supply store.

As a final, almost completely unrelated note, is it weird that Monopoly released their Stock Market expansion in 1934 – during the Great Depression? I just… I feel like that’s in poor taste. Perhaps only those who were mostly intact after the crash could afford board games, which would, obviously result in them being the ones least distressed by the crash. Still, I doubt the Irish were making any games about farming in 1849.

Today’s episode is all about a specific brand of NPC ally – the cohort. For our purposes, a cohort is a character that the player has some control over, but not the level of control they may have over a player characters. They are common in some of the most popular RPGs and can be traced back to the very early days of Dungeons and Dragons. Join us as we discuss how they have been and can be used in RPGs both past and present.

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One type of cohort that we didn’t speak of much today is the protégé.  In any sufficiently gritty RPG, death is all but certain. Arguably the worst part of a character dying is that you can’t play without a character, so being dead is the worst thing that can possibly happen*.

Enter the protégé – the protégé is a henchman played with the explicit goal of being a replacement player character if the crap hits the proverbial fan. While the term “protégé” tends to bring to mind Robin to the player character’s Batman, a protégé is typically going to be only a level or two weaker than the player character – possibly even the same level.

The real strength of having a protégé, though, is that it gives you a backup character if things go downhill. While resurrection magic is frequently an option for your character (and we handled all sorts of things relating to character death in one of our first episodes), that doesn’t diminish the inconvenience of not being able to play until you “get better.” Enter the protégé – a character that has been previously prepared as a replacement PC in case of catastrophic character loss.

How do your properly introduce a  protégé to a game? I’ve played in games where each player controlled multiple player characters, and that can certainly be a valid way to have a backup character available, and a protégé could certainly follow this pattern (with the caveats on balance we gave in this episode, of course), but there are other solutions. They could, for example, be apprentices or assistants who, rather than adventuring, perform tasks on behalf of their masters. They might be members of a lesser adventuring party, desperately hoping they will someday break into the “big leagues.” They might be a sibling, a friend, a lover, a parent or a child who takes up the mantle of the departed and continues their quests on their behalf. There could be any number of explanations.

The value of a protégé, though, is in that it prepares the game for what might be inevitable – the loss of a character and subsequent need to replace them, and it ensures that the replacement is handled more elegantly than, say, the introduction of a new character in the last season of a long-running series. It gives a sense of continuity, allows the player some experience with the character (as they should be afforded the partial control that comes with a cohort)  and helps keep the game running smoothly. Finally, while it doesn’t completely take away the sting of death, it removes the long break in characterization that can result from it without cheapening the experience: a character is still lost, and there may be a very real setback as a result, but the player doesn’t lose everything as a result.

* As a general rule, any rule that makes you play the game less is a bad rule, but that’s a rant for another day.

Today’s episode is about Micro RPGs, typically defined as compact games that fit the entirety of their rules onto one or two pages. These are usually best for one-off or short campaign games, and are, in many cases, intended to be a complete story in a single session.

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One of the beautiful things about Micro RPGs is how far out there they can be. Without the commitment of playing an entire campaign. While there are a few truly bizarre (and very original) RPGs out there with full rulesets (CthulhuTech, for example), but, for the most part, the RPG market is dominated by certain genres. Fantasy games, urban horror and space opera represent the vast majority of the landscape. Micro RPGs, however, frequently represent much greater diversity and are frequently setting agnostic.

The Apocalypse Engine is one of our favorites, not merely because it is representative of the sort of diversity that is growing within the gaming community, but also because of how well it adapts to many different settings. As a strongly narrative system, it can be adapted to a great many different play styles and scenarios and balances player and GM responsibility for the action quite well by granting the player some narrative control over the outcome based on their rolls. I have friends who prefer Dungeon World exclusively to D&D / Pathfinder. I tend to like crunchier systems, so its appeal to me is more limited, but it’s definitely a neat game (and a bit more rules heavy than the others, where the books are typically only about 3 – 4 pages of actual rules and mostly just examples and setting options).

Honey Heist, by Grant Howitt, is readily available online. It is, perhaps, one of the most obviously amusing Micro RPG on the list, and an absolute delight to read (with cute sketchy illustrations to boot!).

The 200 Word RPG Challenge is an absolute treasure trove of games! While it might be tempting to jump straight to the Winners category when looking for a game night diversion, there are some incredibly gems among the games that didn’t quite make it. Boyz II Men in Black is not only amusing, but has a well defined time limit (57:31 to save the world). Stop Hiding Your Crush could be a really intense roleplaying experience (consider including an X-Card* if you play this sort of game). Drink Tea. Forget, meanwhile, is probably the best “mindfulness exercise as a game” that I’ve ever seen. Rule 1-2-3 RPG mechanic system is the very essence of a microrpg distilled down to its simplest parts – no setting, no presumed story, just an incredibly simple resolution mechanic. Tabula Rasa, meanwhile, really isn’t an RPG in and of itself, but could be an incredible hook for a setting.

Meanwhile, the Winners, such as the truly original game Time Travel Thaw,  the crafty game #WinterIntoSpring, and the introspective game Stardust, are all tiny treasures awaiting a group with an interest in novel experiences.

And, if you have a few minutes, you might as well play Stop Reading This To Lose.

Everyone Is John (alternate link here), by Michael Sullivan, hasn’t actually been published officially to my knowledge, but it’s still a neat game. Even if you don’t play it, I encourage you to read logs and/or watch vlogs of other people’s experiences with it.

kill puppies for satan is amusing. Well, to me it is. I remember the author, Vince Baker, used to have a website where he printed hate email that he got from people, categorized into four categories: “Angry about ‘kill puppies'”, “Angry about ‘for satan'”, “Angry about both ‘kill puppies’ and ‘for satan'”, and the amusing category of “Somehow angry about something else” (which included, as I recall, a tirade from someone who was angry the game had virtually no art, as well as someone enraged by the grammatical, punctuation, spelling and capitalization errors in the book). The game deserves to be more infamous than it is.

Micro RPGs are an intriguing part of the RPG landscape, many of which are inexpensive or completely free! Give them a try, either as part of a special game night or as a break from you usual games.

* we hope to talk about accessibility in a future episode; I’ve heard people worry that their horror or intensely emotional game will be “ruined” by the inclusion of an option to stop the action, but for now I’ll just mention that I’ve run some intense scenes involving some very dark and distressing themes and I’ve never had a game “ruined” by being receptive to the emotional well being of others. Meanwhile, I do know people whose experience with roleplaying games WAS ruined by a GM who crossed a line and refused to hear someone asking them to stop.

Today, we decided to take a detour from our road map and talk about world building – the process of creating compelling settings for your RPG. World building is a vital aspect of almost all games, with only a few abstract and classic games offering experiences devoid of flavor.

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Today, we touched on the two approaches to world building, the Top Down and Bottom Up approaches (sometimes referred to in gaming circles as the Macroscopic and Microscopic approach). While there are many different approaches to world design, it’s generally possible to categorize them into one of these two broad categories.

Something we didn’t touch on as much as I would have maybe liked, is the concept of having a hook for your setting. As we’ve mentioned before, one of our favorite game rules is the One Unique Thing rule from 13th Age. There’s a reason we consider it such a great rule: it gives the character a “hook” – something you can hang your hat on. And just like characters, worlds should have something about them that makes them unique and special.

The role of magic is commonly used as the hook, offering a virtually limitless array of fantasy metaphysical concepts to work with. In some settings, magic drains life from the world. In Dark Sun’s Athas, for example, powerful wizards can someday ascend to become dragons or avangions as their magic either defiles or preserves the world. In other settings, such as Dragonlance, magic is influenced by celestial objects. In Ebberon, magic has created a sort of pseudo-steampunk dystopia. In each case, the origin and purpose of magic is an integral part of what makes the setting interesting.

Religion is another source of inspiration for setting hooks. Very few D&D / fantasy settings are monotheistic (at least in any provable way) and in many, the gods directly influence the lives of mortals either through direct intervention, arcane machinations or by empowering their clergy. In Dragonlance, the return of the gods was an important plot point in the campaign that spawned the setting. In Dark Sun, there is a bleak lack of theistic influence, with no gods. In some settings, such as Pathfinder’s Golarion, mortals sometimes ascend to true godhood, and gods may be slain. Almost every fantasy setting has its own take on religion, and in some cases the interesting nature of the metaphysical realms is reason enough to take interest in the setting.

While diversity within a campaign setting can be good, some settings limit the amount of cultural diversity to mimic a historical or cultural theme. Rokugan, the setting of The Legend of the Five Rings (and the 3rd Edition D&D version of Oriental Adventures) and blends historical and popular interpretations of far eastern culture. Al Qadim, meanwhile, was an explicitly Arabian setting. Settings have also been created for Viking Games. The de facto fantasy setting of most role playing games is influenced by Tolkien which, in turn, takes a great deal of influence from the myths and legends of the United Kingdoms, especially Great Britain’s King Arthur and the Matter of Britain. Other games mimic Roman, ancient Hebrew and Russian Mythology.

Characters can be hooks for settings. A setting based on, for example, a great explorer or despotic ruler can be excellent. Ravenloft originated as Count Dracula: The Campaign Setting, but it expanded into Victorian Horror: The Campaign Setting with the addition or other realms of dread ruled by analogs of Vlad the Impaler, Dr. Frankenstein, Pinocchio and others. In each case, the setting is built around the character.

Events, furthermore, can be hooks for stories. Great cataclysms are often sources of major adventure hooks, with the entire genre of post-apocalyptic fiction and fantasy being of particular note in this respect. The event need not be cataclysmic. The arrival of alien life, proof of the existence of gods, the technological singularity, the return of magic or all of the above could be fantastic adventure hooks.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Is that the most important step? Who can say? But what can be said is that it is important to make that the right step.

Today’s episode of Save Vs. Rant is all about novel ways of telling classic stories, be they real-world legends, existing fiction, outdated modules or other sources of inspiration.

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Something that we touched on in this episode is how every monster has a connection to stories – modern or classic – from which to draw inspiration. I’d like to talk a little bit more about that.

Consider, the common orc, a mainstay of fantasy games. The orc originated in Lord of the Rings, where they were fearsome warped creatures created by Sauron to form an army. They are dull-witted, violent, savage and, most importantly, die pointlessly for expressly evil causes. In short, they are a perfectly unambiguous enemy. As a whole, they are a perpetual aggressor in the world. In D&D’s interpretation, they are religiously devoted to a god of slaughter with a special hatred to elves, and in Pathfinder they are creatures of the literal underworld come to conquer everything with nihilistic glee.

Goblins, as they are understood in a gaming sense, are kind of an amalgam of mythological goblins (typically small mischievous sprite creatures) and Tolkien’s goblins (just an implicitly diminutive way of saying “orc”). D&D in all its incarnations have taken it to mean “Tolkien’s goblin” while Pathfinder veered more towards “fairly tale goblin, but without inherent magic.” Changeling: the Lost makes goblins a sort of lesser fae creature.

All of these are valid interpretations of the materials, but it should be noted that there is a broad spectrum of things that can be called “goblin” without the term being nonsensical.  One could conceive of settings where “goblin” could be anything: literal little green space aliens! Fairy creatures! A term for all supernatural creatures! The fun size version of Tolkien’s orcs! Pathfinder’s miniature misshapen mischievous monsters! All “feel” like something that could be a goblin. Perhaps “goblin” being an alternate term for a hag, or a kind of shaman might be awkward, but “goblin” is remarkably flexible with lore!

Less so with “orc:” it would be strange to imagine orcs as being very smart or very beautiful. The term “orc,” in all its incarnations, have been associated with ferocity and bloodlust.  Shadowrun’s orcs still feel like orcs because, despite being well out of a fantasy settings, they are something we are comfortable calling orcs. Pathfinder, D&D and most other fantasy orcs are largely interchangeable,  with only a few version exhibiting notable differences to culture and organization. Generally speaking, though, orcs may be cunning, bold or honorable (as in the World of Warcraft and some of the classic D&D settings) they are always boorish and savage.

We don’t have to have savage orcs, but we must have it continue to resemble an orc, or calling it an orc becomes nonsensical. Look at the box art for Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness:

That orc is a classic Treasure Island version of a pirate, and it feels just as much an orc as when it was wielding a battle axe! How could we expand on this? Maybe they have control of or ties to some violent sea creature such as sharks or even dolphins . Maybe they are fond of particularly brutish weapons such as cannons that fire burning slag or vicious boarding maneuvers. It’s not hard to picture orcs as wild west outlaws wielding a pair of shotguns, wretched primitive survivalists with savage traditions, bloodthirsty shamans of lost gods or soulless servants of dead lords. An orc that was a beautiful, graceful willow-like elf is a stretch because it embodies none of what it traditionally means to be an orc. Playing to established stories makes a connection seem real.

Moreover, one does not need to know the lore of the Wisconsin Hodag to enjoy including it in a campaign incidentally, but if this Hodag (so specific a creature) doesn’t resemble this creature in any way, it seems a shame to bother to borrow the name.

An important question to ask yourself when you choose to go with something unique rather than sticking to the establishment: am I only doing this because it makes my setting unique? Does it serve the needs of the setting in a deeper way? As an example, there are no orcs in Dragonlance. This was a deliberate decision. The “cannon fodder of impending doom” role of the setting was taken by the draconians who, like orcs, represent little threat in small numbers, but an existential threat to good society en masse. The sudden emergence of these creatures is eventually a crucial plot point, and proof that evil has broken its word and violated a terrible taboo. While draconians are still uniquely Dragonlance (although 4th edition introduced them in a general monster manual), they are not unique solely to be unique.

While it is easy to run the risk of becoming an “everything but the kitchen sink” setting by including too many fantasy tropes, Dragonlance, likewise, serves as an example of including more than one incarnation of something, with five different types of elves, two of which embody the two common fantasy interpretations of elves: the wild forest elves and urbane high elves. D&D 4th edition accomplished much the same sense of separation between the two interpretations with the Eladrin taking the role of high elves, and “Elves” referring to nature-connected elves.

I know I’ve mentioned Dragonlance a few times now, but I think it’s contains really good examples of how to do a fantasy archetype. It has wizards dedicated to good, evil and balance. It was one of the codifiers of the “metal dragons good, chromatic dragons evil” system employed in D&D ever since. It has a unique interpretation of halflings, a very traditional interpretation of dwarves and a now-classic interpretation of gnomes (which still felt like something that would be called a gnome).  It is one of the first settings I really appreciated for diverging from standard fantasy fare without feeling forced.

The point is never to stifle uniqueness. It’s to ensure that uniqueness is not forced or alien, but emerges from familiar ideas.  As much as we crave uniqueness, it can often be just as powerful to reimagine the familiar and try to see it from a new perspective.

Unless we’re talking about killing Batman’s parent’s for the millionth time. Or rebooting Spider Man again. Or making yet another zombie movie. You gotta’ know when things are played out.

Today on Save Vs. Rant, we’re going to discuss a fairly broad category of game: those with RPG elements. These games are a sort of gateway between RPGs and pure tabletop games. What makes a game with RPG elements so interesting to the tabletop game hobby is that they act as a sort of bridge between the relatively accessible world of tabletop board and card games and the comparatively daunting world of true roleplaying games.

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We could not have possibly given a rundown of every game experience with RPG elements in the course of a single season of our podcast, much less a single episode. While we touched upon a few of our absolute favorite examples (and HeroQuest was there too!), there are many, many more that we didn’t have time to cover. In this blog post, I’m going to mention a few.

Arkham Horror doesn’t feature persistent characters in the sense that there’s iteration between games, but the same recognizable characters are not only featured in a variety of Fantasy Flight’s Call of Cthulhu-themed games, but with the introduction of the Personal Story mechanic in the Innsmouth Horror expansion, each investigator has not only their own play style and feel, but also a unique story to play out. This sort of character persistence invites attachment, and character attachment is a big part of roleplaying games.

Some consider all tactical wargames a sort of RPG experience. We at Save Vs. Rant tend to want to see more RPG elements than simply moving around, killing monsters and collecting treasure. Even so, games like Super Dungeon Explore and Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft make excellent introductions to the elements common to modern tabletop fantasy roleplaying.

For exploring the social aspect of RPGs, Cutthroat Kingdoms is an intriguing option. While a lot of games feature negotiation skills, in Cutthroat Kingdoms, deals made between players are treated as new rules of the game, lending gravitas to negotiations.

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, created by Paizo, features not only set dressings and lore familiar to players of the Pathfinder RPG, but features persistent characters and scenarios with both escalating difficulty and rewards.

Games that blend traditional board game and RPG elements are a fantastic stepping stone between the genres for players who may be intimidated by roleplaying games. Even for those players who never make the plunge into full blown roleplaying games, these gameplay elements can present an exciting change from the typical tabletop game experience.

Welcome to the 2nd season of Save Vs. Rant!  Today’s episode is all about Virtual Tabletops, and, to a lesser degree, the broader topic of gaming over the internet.

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In today’s episode, we focused on a few specific virtual tabletops that we felt stood head and shoulders above the rest, a position that we developed largely through experimentation under actual roleplaying conditions.

Roll20 is an incredible service. Not only does it run in a standard web browser and feature officially sanctioned content from some of the biggest names in roleplaying, but in addition to its fee based subscription and content, it features an incredible variety of free material, and for the typical user, a full paid account is not necessary. Even so, the paid services are well worth the subscription fee, provided you think your group would benefit from them.

MapTool by rptools is my personal favorite solution. Not only is it completely free and cross platform, but as open source software, it’s freely available and even customizable. Not only does it feature a robust scripting system (though with a higher learning curve than the one provided with Roll20), but, if you have the skills and free time, you could modify the software yourself. On top of that, it has an active community with some frankly amazing content.

During the episode, I briefly touched on the fact that I have a strong preference for decentralized open source software over services like Roll20. Facebook is the perfect platform as a reference to explain my reservations. The obvious objection is that you don’t control the data you give to a service, leading to the potential for abuse. Furthermore, you don’t own digital properties attached to a service, meaning that if there service goes belly up or changes its terms, you are left with nothing. Finally, you don’t have control over the creative direction of the website. If you’ve ever complained about an update to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that has changed or removed functionality you liked, you know exactly what I’m talking about. With open source software like MapTool, if an update changes the software in a way you don’t like, just don’t update – the old versions of the software are still available for those with preferences for them. Simple. Not an option with a service like Roll20. Further, if they lose funding or have a catastrophic server crash, the service is gone and with it your hard work.

Honestly, the perfect solution had always been to game in person, but that’s simply not always feasible. Despite being an imperfect solution, virtual tabletops are a phenomenal tool for the busy gaming group that can’t always get together in person.

Today is our second episode Kingdom Death: Monster. This is our full spoiler episode where we talk about the unfolding story and discuss the ever problematic nemesis encounters. This episode is a little longer because there are so many hidden secrets in this game and wonderful little twists and turns to explore.

https://www.savevsrant.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/01-24-Kingdom_Death_Monster_Part_2.mp3

Hello once again everybody, Jeremy here! Once again I’m writing this blog post because I feel that John has earned a little bit of time off. Now I figure that we’ve spent two whole episodes talking about Kingdom Death: Monster and that you’ve probably already made up your mind about that game so instead this time in the blog post I’ll pull back the curtain a little bit and talk about how Save Vs Rant came into being and what all goes into making an episode for you guys to listen to.

So what made us decide one day to make a podcast about our geeky, nerdy obsessions? Well back in the day, in the bygone year of 2010, I, along with John’s brother, used to produce a gaming review show called Gaming Disconnect on YouTube. Now, while it was fun to make, the episodes were often very hit and miss. Whenever a new episode would come out I would inflict them on my gaming group. John found the episodes entertaining but sometimes lacking in substance.

Around the same time that I was producing Gaming Disconnect, John was preparing to host monthly lecture series called How To Be A Better Dungeon Master at his friendly local gaming store. He wrote a number of classes on a wide variety of topics but found that times and availability were extremely hit and miss. He mused for a little while about converting the lectures into a YouTube series in which he and our friend Jacob would have impassioned discussions about different RPG rules and styles. Unfortunately this never materialized but the proposed name of that series, Save Verses Rant, held my interest.

Six years go by, it’s late 2016, and I ask John what ever happened lecture notes. He mentions that he still has them in a binder somewhere and that he wishes that he could have done something with them. I mention that I have been listening to a number of podcasts lately and that he should try recording the lectures and turning them into a podcast. The name Save Vs Rant is the first and only name that was proposed.

So John and I got together and recorded the first three episodes of the show all in one night. I took the audio files home and edited them together into a few sample episodes. They were rough but good enough to keep both of our interests. I asked my roommate, Timmy Skittles, to create a theme and logo. A few test screenings, a couple of edits, and a few months later and we decide to release the podcasts online for everyone to enjoy. We split the editing work evenly, John takes every even episode while I take every odd episode. John hits on the idea of pairing each episode with a blog post to give our audience a little more information about the topic at hand, often things we missed while recording.

Making an episode is and involved but straightforward process. One day every few months we sit down and brainstorm a list of topics we want to discuss. On most Wednesday nights around 11 PM John and I get together to play games and talk about the episode. After a walk to the local convenience store for snacks and drinks we sit down and outline the episode. We write notes and bounce ideas off of each other to try to distill the topic down into its most relevant points. The outlining and discussion often takes twice as long as the actual recording. When we are ready we hit record and start rambling and ranting. While we don’t have an actual script we do try to stick to the notes we made beforehand and try not to go off the rails too often.

One of the greatest parts of making this show is getting to spend time with one of my oldest and closest friends. Life is hard and we can’t always find time to see each other. Sometimes family drama or work gets in the way. But having this show gives us a reason to get together and hopefully the fun we have making Save Vs Rant comes through. It’s been a wild ride this season and we can’t wait to continue next season producing this show for all of you to listen to. Thank you very much for listening.