The Core Worlds

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, SotC is getting another outing at my regular group. I’ve even managed to write up the story so far.

It has been a very long time since I’ve been able to run it (so long that one of my players has forgotten about the interesting dice in the game), and I’m really looking forward to getting my GMs hat on tonight.

I’ve been lifting large chunks from a prewritten adventure, but the third act never really sat well with me. So I decided to rewrite it, less than 24 hours before I ran it. Aren’t I clever? Still, I think my efforts last night were worth it, I got rid of annoying sequence of repeated “Look here, fooled you! Look here instead!” scenes, and added an Indy reference (along with a few things that I’d better not talk about before they come out in play).

I own a couple of games based on the FATE system (which is, in turn, based on the FUDGE system), and there are a couple of different approaches for rolling dice that appear in them.

The classic system is 4dF. A dF is a FUDGE die and has six faces representing the numbers -1, 0 and 1 twice over. It is a d3-2.

Starblazer Adventures uses a different approach and rolls d6-d6. This has the advantage that you don’t need to run out and buy dice that are so specialised that your friendly neighourhood gaming store doesn’t sell them.

This morning I decided to invest a few minutes into doing some analysis and comparison of the two systems (no doubt duplicating other people’s work, but entertaining myself in the process).

I generated all possible results that each of the two systems could provide, and converted them into percentages and then charted them.

There isn’t much to choose between the results, although the FUDGE dice give slightly less variance and are more likely to hit closer to zero.

Tomorrow night is the night my Tuesday group lets GMs propose games for the next six week block of games (with voting taking place a week later).

I have found my notes and all the character sheets from the last couple of times I have run the game — both one off sessions — and will be volunteering to run the game every Tuesday night for six weeks. Gulp.

I might even find time to write up the last session. I think I can remember most of what happened.

I picked up a copy of Blood Bowl for the XBox 360 at the weekend. It gets the dubious honour of being the first game that I pre-ordered for the platform.

I haven’t been about to give it much of an outing yet — I had a weekend full of friends visiting, movie watching, Dragonmeet attendance, and GMing of Fantasy Craft — but I did manage to squeeze in a couple of games last night.

I started out attempting the tutorials, but they seemed geared up more to teach Blood Bowl then the control system the game uses, which I felt left to figure out for myself (possibly I just wasn’t looking in the right places).

Once you get the hang of it, the controls are pretty easy. Point to where you want the action to happen, click, and the system figures it out. So click on a square to run to it, a teammate to pass, an opponent to block or blitz and so on. Just don’t get scared off by the range finder when you have the ball, clicking an empty square will still move to it.

So, with the controls figured out, what next?

The AI seems pretty easy, but that could be a combination of using the default settings, having played the boardgame version before and possibly finding “my team”.

I’ve never given Chaos an outing before, but they have a nice balance of stomp and speed. We’ll have to see how they handle themselves if they come up against a Dwarf team (who are as stomping as you can get but about as fast as an injured snail).

The fluff is good too. It has nice graphics and amusing commentary.

Overall? I’m looking forward to getting into it a bit more, and then venturing out onto XBox Live to see how I handle myself against intelligence that isn’t artificial.

I discovered, today, that Q-workshop and Paizo have released some new dice.

They describe them as:

Q-workshop present dice set for the third part of series released by Paizo Publishing – Pathfinder Chronicles: Second Darkness. Dice in our new colour scheme – purple & silver – vividly reflect the devious nature of Dark Elves, their cunning, secrecy and

… but, for whatever reason, trail off.

I wonder how that sentence is supposed to end?

Having given it some thought, I suspect it should be: squinty eyes that are cursed to suffer reading spidery script in low light conditions. (I confess, I like to be able to read my dice).

Can you do better?