Kaos in the Catacombs falls short of its mission statement

 Kaos in the Catacombs is a free download from PnPArcade that is billed as a one-page dungeon crawl that’s designed for children but will work for adults too.

If you don’t want to read any further, I found it a meh gaming experience but I respect the design elements. And, to be brutally honest, it isn’t one-page because you need a character sheet but that’s just being pedantic. The meat is in the one page.

Said one page is a map of the dungeon and a bunch of tables. The dungeon is really a hallway of rooms. You roll to see what is in each room, which will be a monster half the time. There’s a boss monster in the last room. You then have to fight your way back through a hallway again that now has more monsters.

Combat is rolling a die. Even, you damage monsters. Odd, they damage you. So combat is a coin flip. Since you are only have one direction to go, Kaos has very few actual choices. The only actual decisions in the game is managing special items that you find and your character’s special powers. And, in the long run, that isn’t enough to overcome the random.

There are some elements I do like. The flavor text is cute. The graphic design is very clean and easy to understand. But I found the actual gameplay lacked agency and was monotonous.

When I was first looking at PnP games in general, well before it became its own hobby to me, I played two one-page dungeon crawls that were touchstones for me: Solo Tower Hack and Delve. I would play Kaos over Solo Tower Hack but Delve is a better game.

Kaos in the Catacombs is aimed at kids. And it does do the part of the job of being accessible. However, just being aimed at a younger audience doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t be making the choices.

My spoiler-free first reaction to My Hero Academia

I heard enough about the manga  My Hero Academia over the years that I finally decided to give it a go.

It’s basically school for superheroes. 

Yes, there’s a lot more going on than that and I’m pretty sure it will go beyond that. However, superhero school is the cornerstone and if you can’t get beyond that, it’s just not going to work.

(Is it weird that to me while the X-Men were technically always a school but it never felt like one until the 2000s because there was never a real student body until then?)

It is a Shonen manga and, oh boy, is it ever Shonen. It reads to me like mashup of Sports story and an action/adventure story.  Midoriya, the protagonist, is having a coming of age story as he slowly masters his Superman-like potential. It’s like the creator Horikoshi wrote a checklist of Shonen elements.

So, is it any good?

I have to admit that I was not impressed at first. It felt like a parody of a sports manga with being a superhero being a comedic standin for being a professional athlete. All Might, the Superman/ Captain America figure, in particular, seemed like a parody. The initial introduction of superhero economics seemed silly and the world building felt shallow.

But I kept trudging away, hoping to find the magic everyone said was there.

Then came the point when actual supervillains showed up. Not rivals at the school. Murderers and terrorists. Serious, dangerous plot elements.

Suddenly, My Hero Acamdeia had stakes.

The world stopped being one where superpowers were economic commodities and one where they were matters of life and death. Characters get horribly hurt and death seems like a real possibility. 

All Might stops being  a silly figure as we are shown how much he has risked and sacrificed. More than that, as opposed to an ideal word where super hero shenanigans just get to happen, we are shown that his example of morality may be all that keeps the world from sliding into a dystopia.

I went from wondering why I should care to Shogoth got real.

It took a bit but I eventually saw why folks get engaged by My Hero Acadenia and why the characters are interesting. How there is a deeper world beneath the shallow sports metaphor and that world is scary.

So I’ll keep reading. (I was on volume four when I started writing this and I’m on volume ten as I finish it up lol)

Game books, railroading and what’s okay

 As I've mentioned, I have been poking at some gamebook-style RPGs. Which opens up the question: "Do these even count as RPGs?"

I think, given the fact they have been a part of the industry since the 1970s, the answer is yes. But, even with that yes, I think you also add a 'but' because there are clearly obvious limitations to the format.

You already know them. With the exception of character builds (which can make a big difference in some cases), you can only make the decisions that the book offers you. Your agency is very limited.

Which, in some respects, is how many video game RPGs work. The difference is that a computer can handle a much, much broader decision tree. With enough decisions to pick from, you get that agency back.

Computers have gotten much more complex over the years while physical books haven't.  Computers keep discovering new limitations while books hang on to their old ones. (I am aware that the Fabled Lands series was designed to be a sandbox game book system. I have sadly never read/played any so I have no idea how well it worked. And it is clearly an exception to the rule)

But... if you pick up a gamebook, you are agreeing to those limitations. You know the deal and if you still play a gamebook, you are saying you are okay with the restrictions. So if you choose to have a gamebook RPG experience, you go.

But here's the thing I always come back to. I have had face-to-face, tabletop RPG experiences that have also lacked agency. Railroading is real. Some of the best GMs I've known have even resorted to it, because they had a story they really wanted to tell or because they were burnt out or because they didn't want the party to commit suicide.

I’ve said that before and I still think it’s true. For whatever reason, sometimes, an experience with limited control is what you are going to get when you sit down at the table. But I’ve changed my condemnation of it.

Because , frankly, it’s not always a bad experience. I mean, if you're at a con or a game store, this is what might be reasonable to get run. You still get to play your characters and interact with other human beings. You get to react to the story.

And a lot of OG adventures were really just maps with monsters on them. Your decisions were which way to room to walk into and how to fight the monsters you found in them. That's functionally the same as the original Buffalo Castle. (I understand the reprint does add a goal beyond experience and treasure)

And if that’s fun, who am I to play gatekeeper?

The first goal is to experience a story. To have some kind of fun. After that, we sort out the details.

My April Gaming

 The only new-to-me game I learned in April was What's Kraken.

Which, to be honest, wasn't a bad game if I only had the game space to only learn one. While not a brilliant Roll and Write (a description that I would use to describe games like Voyages or Island Alone or others), it uses well worn mechanics in an enjoyable way.

Honestly, what I had hoped to do in April was try out maps and scenarios I hadn't tried yet in games that I like. That sadly didn't happen but there's always May.

Frankly, as long as I get a single new game in, I feel like I have accomplished my gamer identity without going overboard. One learning experience is enough to balance things out since there's so much other life to take care of.

And Roll and Writes continue to help make that balance work for me. Easy to make and constrained in their space. I've written a lot about Roll and Writes over the years and, the odds are, if I learn only one game, it will be a Roll and Write.

What's Kraken has a sequel, Ghost Captain. Perhaps that is what I'll learn in May.

My April PnP

In April, I finally had a month where life stuff meant that Print and Play activities had to get sidelined. Oh, I still crafted but the goal of playing something I made just didn’t happen.

I made:

Roll Crawl

Aquamarine Map 5

Autumn Leaves (R&W Global Jam 2018)

One Page Expedition maps 1&2

Kaos in the Catacombs

Roll Crawl was the ‘big’ project, a purchase from last year’s PnP Arcade Black Friday sale. And while I am curious about it, I’m not sure when I’ll find the time to try it out. 

(Incidentally, I am amazed at both the number of Dungeon Crawls that are out there and the number I find myself crafting)

Everything else was just laminating R&W sheets. Amusingly, I dig up the Autumn Leaves files because I’ve been playing the puzzle game Stitch on the Switch and it reminded me of Autumn Leaves.

Learning Pathfinder by yourself

I have recently taken a look at Party of One: Kalgor Bloodhammer and the Ghouls Through the Breach, a one-player, GM-free Pathfinder adventure. It’s designed to be an introduction to the system, a narrative and an adventure. Honestly, it does an okay but not amazing job at each of these.

Party of One is basically a Choose Your Own Adventure/ Fighting Fantasy scenario with Pathfinder rules plugged in. It’s quite short; with only 73 sections. Pathfinder rules are boiled in, teaching them as the game book goes on. (To be fair, it really only covers basic combat and skill checks)

What surprised me was there was an actual narrative in Party of One. I didn’t realize that at first and then I had to go back and play it again so I could actually figure out the story. You actually have to explore the area and gather clues to put everything together. That touch means I will probably remember the adventure, as short and slight as it is.

And the narrative is the actual value of the experience. The tutorial element is honestly so simplistic (Roll a d20 and try and roll higher than this number) that I don’t think iit teaches much.  And the small amount of content limits how much adventure you get. I’m not even sure it’s a half hour’s worth of play.

The two adventures that come to mind for me whenever I look at D&D reimagined as Choose Your Own Adventure are The Djinni’s Ring from Dungeon issue 9 and Buffalo Castle. The Djinni’s Ring was the first time I’d seen this sort of thing and Buffalo Castle is quite likely the very first solo adventure ever published. My only memory of the Dungeon magazine adventure was the realization that oh, there’s a story going on here.

Buffalo Castle, on the other hand, I remember as having almost no story. It was a map in the form of a game book and not actually mapping it out as you went made it very confusing. It both feels like something that still works and sometuing that wouldn’t be made today. (I would be amused to be wrong about the second part)

For me, a crucial part of the RPG experience is creating a story. (Which you can still do with Buffalo Castle. It just takes some real input from you) Party of One has enough story to explore that achieves that for me. Enough that I’ll look at the other Party of One adventures.

The war of Dungeons and Dragins versus Time Management

 I recently watched a Mathew Colville video where he advocated for shorter adventures over big campaign books. (And I’m such an OG D&D player that big hard bound campaign books still look weird to me. Back in my day, Against the Giants came in three booklets. And we used THACO.  And we hated it! You kids can stay on my lawn with your new tangled games that you don’t need an engineering degree to understand)

And that parenthetical note went out of control.

Back to the topic I was trying to get to, his basic point was time management. You can finish a shorter module. As I understand it, the big campaign books are literally designed to be a year of weekly play. Life gets in the way a few too many times, it’s too easy for things to fizzle out.

So I totally agree with him. Yeah, in my twenties, multiple gaming sessions a week were a thing. But by the time I moved away from my old gaming groups, that kind of time sink just wasn’t possible.

However, I feel like you can go a step beyond Colville’s point. Dungeons and Dragons is designed for more long term play and there are systems that are intrinsically more friendly for time management.

Some games are essentially designed for one-shot play. Lady Blackbird or The Quiet Year, for instance, are clearly designed for a very finite playtime. And that is the simplest form of balancing time and tabletop RPG-play.

Which is hardly a new idea. I have friends who feel that the ideal format for Call of Cthulhu is a one-shot, preferably with everyone dead except one madman. Hey, I have some friends who believe in tradition.

Puppetland has a interesting approach to time management. The rules literally state that each session should only be a half hour long. I seriously doubt most folks follow that rule. And, indeed, if I had to travel to someone else's house, that would be interesting too much travel time for too little return. Playing it via video conferencing, on the other hand, sounds ideal.

However, the system that I find myself considering as a time management too is Inspectres. It is one of the early examples of a game where the players share the traditional work of a gamemaster. More than that, the game is centered around a branch of the titular paranormal investigators, not necessarily a specific group of characters.

As long as each investigation is self-contained, you don't need to have the same group of characters every single time. If you wanted to, you could rotate gamemasters or even play without one. (If you aren't used to GM-less games, that option might be one to work up to)

Still, the idea that a game doesn't get derailed by missing players or even a missing game master seems like a way of keeping a game going, even when you have adult responsibilities. More than that, having some kind of organization being the main character of a game instead of the actual players can allow for more freedom. I was in a D&D campaign centered around a mercenary company with that in mind.

Whicu actually didn’t work very well. You do need to a consistent group for continuity. 

In the end, Mr Colville is right. Shorter adventures are the best time management tool. But it was fun to consider other options.

Rumis ticks so many boxes

I recently taught my son Rumis, a game he has played with as a set of blocks for at least seven years. He’s much, much more of a video gamer so board gaming is always a win. And, quite frankly, Rumis is a great game in general.

I know that it has been also printed as Blokus 3D but since it isn’t designed by Bernard Tavitian, it’s hard for me to think of it by that name. It’s a different concept. That said, if more people got to experience the game due to the Blokus branding, that makes the world that much better a place.

Rumis is a place where two different but not even remotely conflicting design concepts come together.

On the one hand, you are playing with literal building blocks on a Lazy Susan. The game has toy value because all of the physical elements are literally toys. As I mentioned, long before he ever learned to play the game, my son loved playing with the game.

On the other hand, Rumis is very definitely an abstract strategy game. And a very pure one at that. There are no hidden elements. There are no random elements. There are only the open decisions of the players. More than that, and I realize I might be prejudiced, it is a very good abstract strategy game.

And play value is definitely a thing and can be a powerful thing. It helps make a game engaging, it helps make it easier to learn, it helps make it fun. I remember being told that Connect 4 has been used as a therapy tool because of the sound and act of dropping checkers into the grid. Mind you, I don’t have any actual citation of that and the person who told me that could’ve been totally lying to my face.

But Rumis definitely has play value. a lot of games do. However, what Rumis also has, and is something that you cannot count on finding, is solid game design. The actual mechanics and gameplay have never failed me yet. Everyone I have taught it to gets it and likes it.

Rumis is a game that I think can work for anyone. That’s a rare thing to say.

My unreasonable expectations of Drops of God

Earlier this year, I bought a digital manga bundle that included the complete Drops of God. Indeed, that was a big reason I bought it. I've long been interested in reading Drops of God, which takes wine tasting to soap opera extremes (but not Dragonball Z extremes)

I wrote about the series when I was at the halfway point. Now, I've finished it. Did it live up to the potential of the first half?

spoilers

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Oh so many spoilers

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Nothing but spoilers

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Okay, I was ultimately disappointed by how Drops of God resolved itself and that was because it didn't resolve itself. I was aware that there was at least one follow-up series, Drops of God: Marriage. Knowing that, I found that many elements in the later part of Drops of God were actually setting up for that. A whole group of characters, the Watkins family, I now see were really being set up to be major players in the next series.

As a comparison, when I was younger, I read Dragonball and its transition to Dragonball Z. While it was clear at the end of Dragonball that Goku's adventures weren't done (because he is a loveable but psychotic manchild who lives for fighting) but all the conflicts were resolved. In Drops of God, barely anything is resolved.

Well, the Twelve Apostles, the wine identification test that determined which son would inherit  Yutaka Kanzaki’s vast wine collection, that gets settled. However, since a more extreme wine identification competition (the titular Drops of God) immediately starts, there's no sense of pause, let alone closure.

One element in particular I wanted to see addressed, if not resolved, is that Issei is actually Shizuku's half-brother, that the Twelve Apostles competition is actually a true family affair. However. while Shizuki does figure it out, no one ever brings it up and takes the matter to at least the next step of talking about it.

More than that, as the series progresses, it becomes clear that Yutaka Kanzaki was a terrible father and husband. Issei in particular was clearly damaged by his negligence. However, that seems to get glossed over since Yutaka Kanzaki was an absolute wine god so that makes it all right. That kind of rubs me the wrong way and I hope it gets addressed in Drops of God: Marriage.

With that said, the fact that the Twelve Apostles were an autobiography in wine form became even more apparent in the second half. That is an interesting and engaging form of storytelling. If the ‘ending’ fell short, the journey was fascinating.

The side stories also reflect the life experience that the wines are expressing. With the final wine being about death and loss, one of the major supporting characters develops pancreatic cancer. It is such a well written gut punch that it helped me get over the lack of closure for the overall series.

It can be argued that my expectations for Drops of God to tell a complete story aren't reasonable since the continuation was clearly intended. And the art and writing of the series is solid. Glad I read it. Good stuff.  Annoyed at having to hunt down another series. 

Where I praise but try not to spoil Tamora Pierce’s Wild Magic

 Two years ago, I discovered Tamora Pierce through the Protector of the Small series, which I really quite liked.  So I decided to add Pierce to my authors to read list and her Tortall books in particular.

Last year, I read The Song of the Lioness, her first series.  Definitely had some early installment weirdness and didn’t feel as polished as the Protector of the Small books.

This year, I’m reading The Immortals series, the one be in between The Song of the Lioness and Protector of the Small in her Tortall books. (After that, I can just go in publication order)

And I have to admit that I went into Wild Magic not too excited. I had an idea of what the overall series would be like since it does get referenced in Protector of the Small. Daine didn’t sound as interesting or sound like she had as much conflict as the other two protagonists I’d read.

Instead, I found out that the Immortals was where Pierce stepped on the gas and the writing got really good.

Not that the Song of the Lioness is bad. It made Pierce’s reputation for crying out loud. But there are some rough edges (but that’s a different blog) If I had read it in the early 80s, it would have knocked my socks off.

But Wild Magic is a solid improvement, particularly in the actual writing style itself. There is an ease and confidence in the voice of the author. The world building, which took a couple of books to settle in, is very defined. And Diane is more complicated and interesting than I’d feared.

While the Song of the Lioness was never low fantasy, the Immortals steps into higher fantasy with fantastical creatures of myths and legends breaking into the world of humanity. I was worried that would be jarring. And it is jarring, but in the right way. The characters are not responding like Dungeons and Dragons PCs, who expect to see the world fantastic. Instead, they are confused and even terrified. It’s good stuff.

Wild Fire doesn’t rewrite the Tortall of Song of the Lioness. Instead, it expands and deepens it. And it left me eager to read the next book.

What’s Kraken’s use of familiar forms

What’s Kraken is a Roll and Write that is centered around what I’m starting to think is the single most common mechanic in R&Ws, drawing stuff on grids. That being said, the game keeps it interesting by having you draw on more than one grid, as well as deal with inventory management. Oh, and checking off tracks.

The theme is pretty simple. You are manning a pirate ship that is trying not to lose a fight with a Kraken. Fortunately, these pirates are all about deep sea diving.

The player sheet actually has a fair number of things to keep track of. The biggest part is a grid map for diving for stuff. And trust me, you will need stuff if you want to win. It also has two more grids for the pirate ship, starboard and port sides. Those are for keeping track of the damage the Kraken does. There is also a salvage track and three tracks for doing damage back to the Kraken.

Each turn, you roll four dice. Two for you and two for the Kraken. If I read the rules correctly, they have to be differently colored so you don’t get to mix and match dice. Which, quite frankly would make the game a whole lot easier but also remove the value of one of the special items.

Fundamentally, there are three things that you are going to be doing on your turn. Diving to get resources, repairing damage on the ship, and doing damage to the Kraken.

Diving is probably the most interesting part of the game. You are making a path of shapes and collecting the resources your shapes go over. In fact, it’s quite like Postmark Games’ Aquamarine, except honestly , Aquamarine does it better.

And, as I mentioned before, you are going to need resources if you are not going to lose the game. There are fish to modify dice rolls. There is timber that is required to repair the ship. There is treasure that lets you swap dice with the Kraken. And there are blasts which make it easier to damage the Kraken.

And it is actually kind of annoying to damage the Kraken since you need specific doubles of dice. You are going to need to use these resources if you are going to fill in the Kraken tracks and kill the thing. Luck is not going to do it.

Damage and repair follow the same basic rules. You use two dice to determine which side of the ship you were drawing or erasing a specific shape. If you ever can’t add a shape, you guessed it, you lose.

One of the things that really strikes me about What’s Kraken is how granular it is. Most of the time, you are only going to have two dice to work with each turn. And a lot of the actions require you to use both of them to do that action. 

That said, that economy of actions drives the game. You have to juggle hurting the Kraken, keeping the ship afloat, and diving for stuff. And the Kraken just keep whaling away at you every turn. You have to do the best you can with your rolls and your stuff.

While there is a lot of moving parts (and I haven’t even described all of them), they all work together. More than that, they are thematic, which also helps the game experience. Which ends up being a good one.

What’s Kraken does absolutely nothing that I haven’t seen before. Every mechanic in the game is one that I’m familiar with. Which does make the game easily to learn. It isn’t innovative but it does well with what it uses and it all makes sense.

What’s Kraken isn’t the best R&W I’ve learned this year. Nor is it the most innovative. However, it is a profoundly pleasant game. It won’t fit in a minimalist game collection but it will work. Well for one aimed at variety.

I discover the Garfield Spider-Man twelves years late

I am definitely a key demographic for superhero movies. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I was an avid reader of comic books. 

But up until a week ago, I never watched The Amazing Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield. At the time when it came out, it was part of a crowded field of superhero movies and word of mouth hated it. 

Now that I’ve seen it, I am absolutely bewildered by the bile that I’ve heard about it. Yeah, it isn’t Spider-Man 2 but it also isn’t Spider-Man 3.

Actually, I do understand why people were upset. The original Spider-Man movie, along with the original X-Men movie and original Blade movie, did a lot to set up the modern superhero movie movement, the idea that a movie about superheroes doesn’t have to be a toy commercial or a joke. (The first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies and the two Michael Keaton Batman movies also treated their subjects like films instead of shames but they were exceptions rather than trendsetters) Spider-Fans were invested in Toby McGuire and interlopers were not to be tolerated.

But I had been told that Andrew Garfield was the jerk Spider-Man, not the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man that everyone could love.

So, what did I find? A Peter Parker who is an orphan and a social outcast with all the damage and baggage that that implies. A Peter Parker who is awkward and uncertain and angry. A Peter Parker who lashes out and struggles to figure out what to do.

After a half hour, I said to myself ‘This is Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man!’

Now, I am not going to say there is a definitive Spider-Man nor that there is a best Spider-Man. Many people have worked with the character in many media and that is part of what makes Spider-Man such a wonderful cultural phenomena. Honestly, Ditko’s Spider-Man isn’t my favorite one. However, there is no denying that he created the most crucial Spider-Man. If he and Stan hadn’t made it work, there’d have been no Spider-Man.

I am not saying that the Amazing Spider-Man is my new favorite Spider-Man movie. Heck, for the reasons I gave, I don’t have one. However, I felt that the Garfield version of Spider-Man was one that was engaging and interesting. I am glad that I have seen it.

(And, yes, Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy was a great interpretation of the character but everyone says that so that wasn’t a surprise)