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February 5, 2012

December 11, 2011

Happy Birthday to Me

by John Payne — Categories: Andras, Commentary and Electrum Pieces — Comments Off

I’m 40 today. I don’t feel any kind of middle-age crisis or anything like that.

Andras crawls as it is a busy time of year. I hope to have an alpha level PDF soon for Om Magike.

Meanwhile, if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see that I’ve become more of a curator of things geek and RPG. If you enjoy the links, let me know. One day, I hope to be a human on Twitter as I miss the interaction.

December 2, 2011

Football Sims

by John Payne — Categories: Boards and Tokens — Tags: , , , , — Comments Off

A lot of folks visit my site because of the Statis-Pro for Windows and Statis-Pro cards downloads. Despite lots of RPG posting, I still enjoy many Football simulation games.

I love Statis-Pro. Despite issues around gaming the system, I really enjoy the individual stats, the ability to have fantasy leagues with it, and that the knowledge to create teams is available from multiple places. In fact, many visiting my site looking for the cards created by Lee Harris.

The good news is that Lee Harris is working on his website. He aims to repost everything from the old Bomber’sGolf site. I can’t wait until he’s back.

I also enjoy Second Season. This game was designed for solo play, so it play better alone. Even better, the Football America set features an entirely fictional league. Now when I’m playing football, I’m not concerned with emulating reality, I’m only concerned with football. Like I did with Electric Football, I sketch out articles with a commentator’s description of the game. Had I the time, I would do magazines like I did when I was a kid. My cousin has about 20 seasons of storyline he and I wrote.

Also going for Second Season is that I purchased the rules to create teams. Unlike Statis-Pro, team making for Second Season is more of an art. There are also lots of fiddly bits and making up sub-systems happens. For example, a running back’s rating may have a note that says “Rating is AA for the first five plays”. Something about this kind of fiddling evokes the First Edition DMG.

Yeah, I know. Don’t cross the streams.

I also enjoy playing Paydirt. The wonderful things about Paydirt is the incredible compactness. The team fits on one page. Using dice, you look up results on various charts and record the result. It plays quickly and does a great job emulating the ups and down of a game. I only wish that I knew how to create teams for it.

Speaking of the formula, Matt Floray passed away earlier this week. I only knew him from reading the Paydirt Yahoo group. Condolences to Matt’s family and friends. He will certainly be missed.

Matt had the formulas used by Dr. Nicely to make charts. Occasionally, he made charts. Otherwise, charts are available from two or three folks that developed their own formulas. Sure you don’t have individual players with as big a role, but the elegance of the design compared to Statis-Pro is beautiful. If I ever got the formula, I would develop the ability to do Fanatasy Football with Paydirt. The system is that good.

Anyway, I am still working on my Football sim based on Statis-Pro. I hope to address certain issues that I personally find annoying, but YMMV. I do not like the gaming of the system by using certain players that had a minor role in a team’s play.

For example, if a running back managed a breakaway for 30 yards once in a season, but averaged 2 yards a carry for his remaining carries, his card comes out like an All-Pro player. The card would make it seem that he can get 5-6 yards every time he touches the ball despite the reality of his actual play. To mitigate this, Statis-Pro invokes a rest rule that says that this player can only play in the game for a certain length of time. This creates all kinds of strange play calls. If you have a guy that is almost guaranteed a 10 yard run or a 20 yard reception, but can only play once a quarter, when does he play? That’s right, he comes in the game at critical moments. This is backwards!

I hope to use a different statistical method to shave off these odd cards. The cards for these players will still be made, but there should be no need for a rest rule as the player’s contribution to the team will not be artificially inflated. He will still be able to get the big gain, because he got it in real life. However, he won’t be able to get larger gains on average than he did in real play.

I recently got about 8 seasons of play-by-play data. When I get done with my analysis, I hope to have a system to make teams that’s as straightforward as the current system to make Statis-Pro teams. Here’s to hoping! I may find out that I crunch all the numbers just to recreate the original system developed by Avalon Hill.

November 30, 2011

More Om Magike for M200

by John Payne — Categories: Andras, Electrum Pieces and Microlite 20 — Tags: , , , , — Comments Off

Those that practice Miracles were mentioned in the previous post. This post provides a bit more detail. I also include a bit of rationale for the magic system as a whole.

In Microlite20, every spell as a DC target. This makes both Clerics and Magi skill-based spell casters. In earlier D&D there are no skill-based spell casters in the standard rules. Adding one to Andras or any retro-clone has a much different effect than doing it in Microlite20.

The same is true for any Mana based system. It doesn’t exist in earlier D&D, but all spell casters in Microlite20 use their hit points as a mana pool. Varying how the mana is used doesn’t do much in Microlite20. In fact, it looks like a record keeping nightmare. (Am I going to cast this as a 6th level Thaumaturge or save a point and cast it as a 4th level one?)

The classes themselves, however, offer an intended tradeoff. This is the element I want to keep. Over time, a Thaumaturge has to pay more to cast the same spell as a Wizard. At 15th level, a Thaumaturge will pay 9 points for a full Magic Missile while the Wizard will pay only 3. The gap closes as spell reach higher levels. At 21st Level, both the Thaumaturge and the Wizard pay 19 points for a 9th level spell. Yet, even at this high level, the cost for the Thaumaturge will continue to increase.

I also want to keep the feel of miracle magic. In other words, Shamans have strange and fearsome powers and Psions are regarded as atheists by the Priests. I like the idea that Psion create an issue of faith for a priest. This is further enhanced by the other changes that will make psionic ability much more similar to Priest spells.

Many telepathic abilities are similar to divination. A psion can determine a person’s thoughts, discover the history of a place or item, travel astrally to be in a place far away in order to gather information and much more. Psions can heal. Psions can create things in a similar fashion as the gods (though not nearly as powerful as the gods). There’s more, but you get the idea. Many abilities are already similar, so tweak the rest of the Priest spells to fit for psions.

Lastly, just like Priests can have various domains (or spheres in 2nd Edition), I have changed the Psionic disciplines from six to many. Just like 2e had Priests of Specific Mythoi, the framework is in place for GMs to create Psions of a Specific Path. This makes individual psions different based upon which school they attend. This is optional, just like the Specific Mythoi rules, but for a flavorful campaign, it feels a lot more fun.

Shamans are intended to be fun for the GM. I’ve almost ported over the D6 Fantasy Spell Building system to D&D. Since that spell building system has options for group casting, big effects, day-long rituals, etc, it becomes easier to build spells that just don’t fit into the Vancian system.

For example, to create a spell that places a wall of force around an entire village isn’t effectively possible. The spell caster would have to be a triple digit level spell caster to get a diameter that large. Using the spell builder, however, longing casting time and community help can make it possible. Not only that, it can provide a good measure of the appropriate level of this kind of spell.

Work continues on. Hopefully the next post will provide the new disciplines for psions and detailed examples of shaman spells.

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