Game Balance

Another short ranting post I made on the forums that I wish to save, this one in response to a thread where someone claimed 'Game Balance Is A Myth'. Here goes:

Game balance is sort of a nebulous ideal. You're never going to achieve it with a game system, at least not perfectly, but that doesn't make it a bad thing to strive for.

If a typical group of players with a typical game master (based on your target audience for the game) would enjoy your game with minimal problems, you're probably good. It's not so much that balance makes the experience better as certain kinds of imbalance can make the typical experience worse. The plight of the poor newbie that plays a fighter in 3e D&D, expecting to contribute meaningfully to epic battles against dragons and such, is a good example of the problem imbalance can cause.

However!

I think it's more important that the game designers understand and explain the balance and relative capabilities of things, and make them explicit, than that everything be balanced against each other. There's a significant difference between 'this character type is better because that's how the setting works' (Solars in Exalted, for instance) and 'this character type is better because of miscalculations by the game designers' (Clerics in 3e D&D). When people complain about poor balance, they are almost always complaining about the latter sort of problem -- relative power assumptions by the game designers that don't bear out in play because of poor game design.

The Fates

The Fates

Via various sales (mostly on drivethrurpg.com), I've picked up a multitude of Fate versions. They're all pretty similar at the core, of course, but each offers a slightly different experience, with different advantages and problems. I've only had a dozen or so short sessions so far, with few players and minimal conflict, so I can't rate the rules terribly well, but I can at least give me impressions of them.

I'll list the games in the order I picked them up.

Strands of Fate
Strands wants to be the GURPS of the Fate world, a multipurpose multigenre toolkit for whatever type of game you might want to run. It uses Abilities plus Skill Aspects rather than Skills, making it a bit more like a traditional RPG, and its Advantages system feels a bit more like GURPS or Tri-Stat than Fate. It works decently, but I'm not sure I'd ever want to run this thing out of the box. It's got a lot of rough edges. However, it's full of great ideas and rule options, and I'd recommend it to anyone planning to run Fate - it really does a good job of showing off all the ways you can tweak the system.

The Dresden Files
This one's amazing. Anyone that's a fan of Jim Butcher's book series or is even just looking for a good urban fantasy RPG wouldn't go much wrong here. Its one glaring flaw is that the system for ritual magic is kind of a mess, with a lot of things left under-detailed or absent, and a system for casting rituals that doesn't actually balance very well.

Legends of Anglerre
Anglerre is probably the most complex Fate game I've seen, but it seems to cover all the facets of epic fantasy from the 'mud-stained peasants getting beat up by baby goblins and small farm animals' of first-level D&D all the way up to the 'epic swordsmen singlehandedly fight armies while master sorcerers call down fire and ruin on entire cities' levels that Exalted reaches. The stunt construction rules are good, the rules for mass combat and organization conflict are good, and the rules for fighting out-of-scale creatures make me really want to run a Shadow of the Colossus game.
The big downside: if you buy it online, the .pdf is absolutely TERRIBLE. I mean, it's good quality in appearance, but it comes to something like 130 megabytes, loads painfully slow, takes forever to page through, and doesn't contain links in the text like better quality RPG products do - for instance, in Dresden Files, if something says 'see page 130', you can click on it and it'll take you to page 130; with Anglerre, you have to do that manually.

Free Fate
Free Fate is simply a fanmade compilation of the basic Fate rules in very generic terms, with a simplified stunt system and a decent advancement system. As the name suggests, it doesn't cost anything. I found it through a link on someone's forum signature on RPGNet. Not much to say here about quality: it's not so much a version of Fate as it is just a description of the core rules, so there's really nothing wrong with it and it doesn't really offer anything innovative.

Diaspora
The Fate space game. I think if I run a space game I'm more likely to use GURPS 4e (mostly the GURPS Spaceships line) rather than Fate, but it's a nice system. The cluster generator is probaby the best part of this book, though it's only one chapter; it allows you to randomly generate a small cluster of interconnected solar systems without spending massive amounts of time on it. Diaspora also introduces the concept of Scope, for Aspects, which lets the storyteller throw around scene and item Aspects much more freely without worrying about the balance issues that might occur.

Spirit of the Century
This is the game that started it all. If you're getting into Fate, I recommend picking this one up! It's cheap to buy the .pdf, or you could just hunt down the system reference documents, which are free but lack detailed examples, art, etc. Spirit of the Century's missing some of the innovations of the later games, but it is probably the 'purest' iteration of the system so far. Its biggest problems are a sort of stunted character advancement system that may not appeal to some (you basically start out as skilled and powerful as you'll ever be, and advancement is a matter of changing your focus rather than increasing in power) and a too-generous stress and consequence system that can (from what I've heard, and the math seems to back this up) make combats drag on for too long.

So, there you go! That's my initial thoughts on the various versions of Fate I've encountered. If you're interested in Fate, check out Free Fate (if you can find it), read up on it online, and maybe pick up Spirit of the Century. Fate's not a perfect system, but it's worth the read, and some of the .pdfs are really cheap!

The Rules aren't a Black Box

There's a pet peeve of mine that I see come up a lot in RPG discussions - the idea that you can't houserule something until you've tried it rules-as-written. This is my reply to such a post on RPG.net.

Hm.

I think I've done pretty well, honestly, and I find it a little offensive to be painted as a sort of ignorant fool that doesn't 'really' understand the games I run.

It's really not that hard. Rules comprehension is a skill you can develop. The rules are not a black box, only revealing their effects through careful study during play. They're all laid out in the text in front of you. Some games (again, Exalted comes to mind) have everything so interlinked that it IS really a pain to work out the ramifications of even a minor change, but such is not always the case. Many games are fairly straightforward or modular in design, such that you can modify one part or another without doing any harm. Yes, there's a chance a house rule will be a mistake. But you don't need hours of playtesting and empirical evidence to realize that someone made a math error or didn't consider an important edge case when they wrote a rule. To use an extreme example, I really, really don't need to experience 'bucket healing' in play to decide that it's stupid and declare that drowning does not work that way.

In fact, sometimes empirical experience is actively a bad way to develop a houserule, especially when you're working with probabilities, as you often are in an RPG. Personal experience is notoriously susceptible to bias and superstition when dice are involved, while it's relatively easy to apply statistics and thought experiments to map out the results of a change.

A lot of game systems just have bad math, incomplete-but-interesting subsystems that could use a little more detail, and, often, contradictions that outright need house ruling because the RAW are incomprehensible.

'Bucket healing', by the way, came up earlier in the thread; it's a weird obvious loophole in the d20 drowning rules that lets you heal a dying (between -1 and -10 hp) character up to zero hit points by briefly drowning him, such as by dunking his head in a bucket of water for a short time.

Revisiting Old Thoughts, Again

Wow, I've been away for a while! My apologies to anyone that's been reading this. Anyway, status update on things:

I've basically stopped work on the handful of projects listed here. Rul-Skaath is still rolling around in my head. It needs a better name and a smoother system. For the time being, I'll leave it alone, but it's the one I'm most likely to revisit.

In the time I've been gone, I've picked up the Dresden Files RPG and Strands of Fate, both FATE games. FATE is a system I've avoided in the past, but curiosity finally got the best of me. Once I've had a chance to see the system in play, I intend to post a review of it. As yet, though, all I've been able to do is read the things.

I also picked up Unknown Armies. I don't think I like the system on that one, overall, but I really like the adept magic system and the detailed stress meters. Again, I haven't had much chance to play with it due to player scarcity during the holidays, though.

If it ain't broke...

'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

A useful aphorism in many situations, but such a pain when playing around with game design.

You can pick even the most incomplete or obviously broken rule in an entire game, and if you post a suggested modification on a forum a great many people will still angrily defend it.

Granted, some house rules are just bad, but even those often fail to get a real discussion, with the actual forum threads buried under the combined cries of heresy (after all, a house-rules poster isn't a paid game designer and is thus inferior), elitist rules conservatism ('the rule as it is worked great for me, and I've been playing for 72 years!'), GM fiat ('you don't need rules for that, the GM should just make stuff up'), or even a sort of vague confusion on what house rules are ('but if you change that, things won't be the same!').

Oddly, it's worse the more broken the rule is. I posted a suggestion on making the Link +10% enhancement in GURPS cheaper, on the SJ Games forum and got a few people mildly upset but no real discussion on the rule. On the other hand, the threads on modifying some of the most obviously broken rules I've seen in gaming result in massive flame wars and arguments (Scion is the one that comes to mind most easily, with its haphazard nightmare of bad rules built into an otherwise great game.)

The best I can tell, this happens because if you say something is really broken, everyone that's used the broken rules (slogged through it, carefully avoided breaking it, or even just happily went along with the weirder results) feels threatened if you point out how broken it is, because you're in some sense telling them their game was 'wrong'.

I suppose that's a problem with any form of constructive criticism.

Another of my posts on RPG.net's forums. Re-posting it here because it's long enough and doesn't really need the forum thread's context to make sense.

There are a few different kinds of people that might join a first session in a game. The situation is different for each, but for many of them /how/ you introduce them to gaming doesn't make much difference to whether they end up being gamers -- just to whether they ever want to game with /you/ again.

1) People that know about RPGs, are interested in the idea, but have never played before. If you give them a bad first session they may decide they dislike you, your friends, and possibly the specific RPG you tried to introduce them to, but they're likely to go on to find another group of nicer, saner people and play a different RPG, rather than quitting the hobby altogether.

2) People that only aren't RPGers because they haven't played in any. Perhaps they play MMOs and videogames and such, read fantasy and science fiction, etc. but have never encountered polyhedral dice. It's possible to make a bad first impression with these people and have them give up on RPGs, so handle carefully. Still, these people are usually open enough to the idea that they'll assume a bad intro is your fault or the game system's, and whether they ever get into RPGs is sort of dependant on whether someone better offers to run a game for them in the future.

3) People that don't really care about RPGs, but are open to trying new things. Usually they won't be really engaged in the system mechanics, or even the setting or roleplaying opportunities as such. I've had good luck with a lot of these types, though: sometimes the social aspect of playing with friends gets them into the game and keeps them there, sometimes the opportunity to gain cool powers for their character or do impressive things gets their interest.

4) People that don't care about RPGs, don't like the idea, and are only at the session because someone dragged them there. This honestly usually doesn't work out. I've seen it go well maybe one time in six, usually for rules-light games with lots of action and laughter and minimal geekery. Otherwise, they'll leave the game wishing they hadn't come, and they're not likely to look into doing any more gaming in the future.

For all of these people, the 'how do you properly introduce someone to the game' boils down to: don't be boring, don't be creepy, and don't be rude. The latter two are easy to follow (or should be, anyway, if you're not just naturally rude or a creep) but the former can be tough, as everyone finds different things boring. People that love systems will be bored by rules-lite games, people that love roleplaying might be bored by especially mechanical systems, people that love power fantasy might find gritty settings dull and depressing, etc.

Paper and Pencil Procedural Dungeons

I haven't had a lot to say on the blog for a while now. It's harder to think much on RPG-related topics after an extended period of no-current-gaming-group syndrome.

Anyway, though, thought I'd point this out. It's more of a toy than a game, but it's fun enough, and there's a free version.

How to Host a Dungeon

I bought the full version a while back. It's not a huge addition to the free version, but at $5 for the .pdf, the price is right.

Revisiting Old Thoughts

This blog is still young, and built pretty haphazardly. A post here, a post there, and almost no pattern or sense to them. As I mentioned before, there are lots of incomplete thoughts.

My current unfinished business includes:

• Rul-Skaath, which has a variety of posts near the beginning of the blog, but is still not even the bare bones of a system. This one I'll definitely return to at some point, I just can't be sure when.
  
• The Games I Play -- I reviewed the ones I hate the most, but what about the mediocre and the good? I should get around to that sometime.
• The Changeling-esque oath system. It doesn't interest me as much when I'm not playing around with a game that uses it. The best odds for me ever finishing it are if I do some kind of fae-oriented GURPS game or something, or if someone actually requests it.
• The random thoughts on that other game I didn't start. Not sure if I'll use it or not, but I'm going to hang on to it. It may or may not see development in the future.
  

CTech Mecha via GURPS Spaceships

Well, I've had CthulhuTech for about a week now and I've been fiddling with GURPS 4e stuff to convert over.

In the interest of not infringing on any copyrights, I'm not going to go into deep detail on my conversion, but I can at least give my basic observations to help any readers that might be interested in running CTech in GURPS.

• CTech seems to be largely Tech Level 10 in GURPS terms, with some things only at Tech Level 9. Arcanotech provides superscience energy generation and gravity manipulation.
• Mecha can be built with some effort using GURPS Spaceships 1, 4, and 7. I picked up Spaceships 3, too, but it doesn't have much use for this unless you're planning on doing actual space battles.
  
• Remember that the Spaceships Size Modifier is mass-based; a mech is probably going to be about half as tall as the Spaceships Size Modifier suggests. That puts the NEG's main battle mech (the Broadsword) at SM+5 in mass (and thus, spaceship design) terms, but SM+4 in height (and combat) terms.
  
• You may need to tweak the stats on Spaceships missiles and the Robot Legs component to get the proper genre emulation.
• You'll need to work out how you want to handle normal GURPS combat time versus the Spaceships combat time. There are a variety of threads on the official GURPS forums about this. It seems to work best to give full (twenty-second) rate of fire per twenty seconds, letting the user divide the shots however he wishes, rather than trying to convert to a per-second rate of fire, which results in some oddities when applying the Aiming rules.
• If you have an old version of GURPS Spaceships, make sure you check the errata on ballistic weapon damage, or you'll have the smallest gun shells punching huge gaping death-holes in your sixty-foot mechs.
• For oversized melee weapons like hyperedge blades, I suggest using the GURPS Supers rules for huge improvised weapons to get something roughly similar, convert to the appropriate damage type, and apply templates like Superfine Blade (from GURPS Ultra-Tech).
  
• Alternately, check out the house rules of 'Reverend Pee Kitty' for Heavier Weapons for Stronger Characters. I think the physics are a bit weird there, but the end result is still a very usable system that lets you scale up human-size weapons for the mechs.
  

Anyway, just my thoughts. I haven't got to the point of testing this out yet, just been building, converting, and doing thought experiments.

On a side-note, GURPS Spaceships is ridiculously fun. Just designing the ships has this sort of crazy abstract RPG space legos feel. I mean, the example ships in the supplements include thinly-veiled ripoffs of TIE Fighters, the Enterprise, and even a TARDIS. And they all work.

Giant Mecha and Sleeping Squid-Gods

I just picked up CthulhuTech yesterday. It was an impulse buy; I'd come to the local gaming store to see if they had any goodies for free RPG day (got an Exalted adventure out of it) and, while looking through the shelves, found this game.

It looks pretty awesome. Not a fan of the game mechanics as such, and I've heard the expansions are kind of iffy, but the setting at least as outlined in the core book is great. It's Call of Cthulhu + Evangelion + Guyver + Robotech, with various other things thrown in. It cost me about $30, but it's probably possible to get it cheaper via Amazon or something.

The art is very good. They have some of it posted in full color over at Cthulhutech.com.

In a way, CthulhuTech seems to be a combination of multiple games, which aren't exactly intended to be played together. There's the mecha games... either using mechwarrior type mecha or the impressive Evangelion types (called 'Engels'). There's also the Guyver-inspired Tagers, which sort of remind me of a combination of the Venom symbiont from Spider-Man and the old World of Darkness werewolves. The game has rules for personal scale combat, skill use, and even sorcery as well, and supposedly the first expansion covers psychics.

It looks like the ideal way to use this game is via conversion. Rather than using the 'Framewerk' system that the game uses, I'd run these different mini-games with different systems. Any of them look like they could work with GURPS 4e. Personal scale stuff would also work well with d20 Modern (with a dash of d20 Call of Cthulhu thrown in, of course!), and Tagers seem like a great fit for the new World of Darkness rules.

Bound in Word and Wonder

In mythology, fairy tales, and fantasy stories, the idea of a magically binding contract occasionally shows up, generally when dealing with powerful supernatural beings. An old witch sets a strange and impossible task for a child, but must let him go free when he somehow accomplishes it. A man bargains with the devil, trading away his hope for an afterlife in exchange for wealth and power in this life. A wizened little gnome promises to return the stolen child only if the mother can guess the gnome's name. However it works, there is something magical about these kinds of arbitrary mystically enforced rules. They reinforce the meaningfulness of even trivial interactions, and they give an air of storybook wonder to what could otherwise be dull tasks.

The idea of binding oaths and bargains is explored in many games. As far as I know, White Wolf's Changeling: The Lost is the first to really codify these agreements into an actual detailed system, though I'm sure others have come before. As such, the system I'm proposing here owes a lot to that game. My system is generic: the specific details will need to be filled in to fit whatever system it will be used with -- in my case, most like Ars Magica, Exalted, Changeling, and GURPS.

The Components of an Oath
Each oath is constructed from several components. Each component has a rating describing how significant it is, with a number associated with each rating:

• Trivial (0)
• Minor (1)
• Moderate (2)
• Major (3)
• Mythic (5)

Each component is also described as 'positive', 'negative', or 'neutral.' Positive components add to the value of the oath, negative components subtract from it, and neutral components don't actually affect the oath's value at all. Oaths should generally sum to a total value of zero, excepting special rules to the contrary (some games might allow fairy lords to have positive-value oaths, or require oaths with demons to have a net negative value at some level, etc.)

Personal, Dual, and Group Oaths
A personal oath is the simplest to build; you just set the components together, make sure they add up to zero, and you're done. Many systems and settings either won't support personal oaths or will penalize them somehow, though, since they're lacking the aspect of interaction that is most of the purpose of magical oaths.
A dual oath is probably the standard; an agreement between two individuals. To build it, you design each individual's side of the oath as a separate oath and make sure the durations match and there are no contradictions. When one character breaks the oath, the other one involved has his end of the oath nullified as well but does not suffer any punishment for breaking an oath (since he didn't break it.)
A group oath works like a dual oath, except that when someone breaks their end of the oath, provided there are still at least two people sworn to it and the oath still makes sense, the oath is not nullified for the remaining characters. For instance, if a group of characters swear an alliance to each other and one turns traitor, the traitor suffers the punishment and loses the benefits of the oath, but the rest of the group is still bound to the alliance to one another.

Duration
Every oath requires a single Duration component, defining how long it lasts. Duration has a variable value; sometimes it is considered positive, other times negative, and sometimes neutral. This depends on the other components of the oath. If even one component states that it treats Duration as positive, it is a positive component. If no components treat duration as positive and at least one describes it as negative, it is negative. Otherwise, it is neutral.

• Trivial Durations last no longer than a quarter of a day. Examples include: 'until sunset' (on an oath sworn at noon), 'an hour', 'the length of a sunrise' (about two minutes; the time it takes the sun to go from showing only a sliver to fully crossing the horizon), etc.
• Minor Durations last up to a week. Examples include: 'until Sunday', 'when the sun has twice risen and fallen'.
• Moderate Durations last for a long while, but significantly less than a year: 'for an entire lunar cycle', 'until the next solstice', 'forty days and forty nights', etc.
  
• Major Durations last for long but finite spans of time. Examples include: 'until your child is born', 'for a year and a day', or even 'in a decade's time'.
  
• Mythic Durations can be truly impressive: 'until the day you die', 'unto the seventh generation', 'for three centuries', etc. At this level there's no real limit to the duration, and oaths can even be set to last forever (provided nobody breaks the oath, of course.)

(part II, detailing 'Challenges', to come later)

Thoughts on a new game...

It's amazing the inspirations that come when performing some otherwise mindless activity, like walking on a treadmill or taking a shower afterward. I had some thoughts on a game... a sort of rough fusion of concepts between Paranoia, Dungeon Keeper, Dwarf Fortress, Exalted, and Angband.
The player characters would be monsters from the dungeons -- goblins, imps, dark elves, etc. -- that somehow had the same spark of potential that adventurers have, able to gain levels and such without limit. They would be sent on missions by the ruler (or rulers?) of the vast dungeon-world they live in. Stuff like gathering resources, recovering ancient relics, rescuing lost mining expeditions, repelling treasure-hunters from the surface, raiding settlements of rebel monsters that don't submit to the overlord, etc.
I haven't figured the system yet, at all. These are just thoughts on the setting.

The Heart of the Hero

In the Realms of Men, some individuals are blessed with inspiration, potential, and raw determination that far exceeds that of their brethren. These few become adventurers, heroes, champions and kings... well, those that survive. At first they're no more skilled, intelligent, or powerful than any other, but over time they learn and grow, never reaching a plateau where their improvements must cease.

The Dark Gifts

Even in the Shadowed Depths, among the many inhuman kinds, this spark occasionally emerges. It still provides the same potential for boundless improvement... but it grants a little more than that. By ancient pacts and terrible sorceries, the three great powers of the underworld -- the Viles, the Lords Cthonic, and the Goblin King -- have worked a change upon how that spark manifests in their minion races. Each of these powers grants one Gift to the blessed one, one special power or feature that lets them stand apart from others of their kind.

The Viles

In modern times, the beings that rule the Heavens beyond the Realms of Men are known as the Celestials, angelic beings of peace and light and nobility. They were not always so. At the dawn of time, the Celestials were united only in their beauty, power, and immortality, but all had their own interests and agendas. And their own religions. When the many worshipers of Beauty and Light and Truth organized into a single religion, they cast out their 'lesser', 'inferior', and 'sinful' cousins, banishing them deep beneath the earth where the inhabitants of Heaven would not have to look upon them.
These banished creatures are known as the Viles. The name was originally an insulting title given to them by the ones who banished them, but later claimed by the fallen Celestials as a title of honor: a Vile is one who is true to himself and loyal to himself, with none of the pathetic arrogant nobility of serving some intangible 'higher power'. Some are horrific monsters, embodiments of a love of fierceness and strength. Others are dark but beautiful, shadowed beings that still recall their former lives as the angels of heaven. Many take both forms.
The minions of the Viles are imps and evil spirits, monsters crafted and formed from the tortured dead souls of mankind's most detestable examples.

The Lords Cthonic

The world was created long ago, by the collective effort of the Celestials (even those who later fell to become Vile) and perhaps the aid of some greater, more distant being or beings. Everything that exists comes from them.
Or, so the priests would have you think. The truth is, little by little, perhaps once every century, an otherworldly thing creeps in through one of the dark corners of the world where nobody's watching. The Celestials patrol the Heavens, and the Realms of Men have their own inhabitants, but in the darkest realms such as the depths of the oceans or the deepest tunnels of the world, these creatures can enter the world unmolested.
Some are harmless. Little many-legged crawling things, impossibly-colored funguous growths, or lumbering, mindless beasts. But not all of them. The range of power is incredible, and many of these things dwarf even the grandest Celestials in their power, though their intelligences and priorities tend to be quite alien and incomprehensible. These nightmare-creatures are known as the Lords Cthonic. The Father of Dragons. The Ocean of Slime. The Skittering Horde. The Great Eye.

The Goblin King

Nobody's sure what the Goblin King is. He is clearly something supernatural, able to work great sorceries and often appearing in different forms. He rules over the monster-men and armies of the Shadowed Depths; the highest authority among the cities and the roving tribes of that dark realm, to whom all the chieftains and mayors and lords report to.
Some think he is merely one of the Viles who didn't quite fall as far -- hence his sometimes fae appearance and his greater willingness to rule in a organized and almost benevolent fashion. Others think he was once a human hero, who achieved near-divinity in his adventures into the dungeons, until he eventually carved out a kingdom with himself as god-king over its monstrous inhabitants. Still others think he might be one of the Lords Cthonic, a monster from beyond the world, just more human-seeming than the others.

Why They Lost

Recently, I posted a list of twenty-four different games I play or have played in the past, ranked from those I like least to most. I didn't, however, say much on why they're in the order they are. This is the first post on that topic, covering the games I listed as being the least interesting.

#17 -- All Flesh Must Be Eaten

What it is:
All Flesh Must Be Eaten, often abbreviated AFMBE, is a game using the Unisystem game system, also used for other games including Witchcraft, the games set in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe, and something I've never heard of called Conspiracy X. I have no experience with the rest of the Unisystem but understand it's well-liked in general.
The game itself is basically the game for playing zombie survival horror, and it's most notable for including a zombie creation system from which the GM can easily build any kind of zombie he wants to use, ranging from slow-moving B-movie jokes to blindingly fast, wall-crawling, intelligent hunters. It wouldn't take much work to re-skin the zombies as monsters of various sorts, either.
Why I dislike it:
To be honest, I'm just not that into zombie survival horror. And if you're not a huge fan of zombie movies and zombie games and the like, this game doesn't have a lot to offer you other than a sort of incomplete generic system. Also, in the event that I do want to run a survival horror game, I think I'd either use GURPS for customizable and gritty mechanics, or Call of Cthulhu for the general doomed-ness 0f it all and the simulation of stress, terror, and emotional fatigue in the Sanity mechanics.
Why you should (maybe) buy it anyway:
It really is a decent game for handling zombies, and the rules are simple enough to teach to people. It comes in a single, small, easily portable book. It's very good for one-shots and short campaigns. It doesn't cost a lot. And every true geek has a zombie apocalypse survival plan he'd love to test out, so you can get a lot of enthusiasm from the right group of players with this game.

#18 -- The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game (d20)

What it is:
The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game is a d20 system game set in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. It was written long before the series was complete (I think it's still being finished, in fact, taken over Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death) but it's accurate up to maybe halfway through the books, which is easily sufficient for gaming with.
Why I dislike it:
It's d20, and yet it fails at one of the things d20 tries its hardest to excel at: game balance. And while it's interesting to see the magic system from the books codified in game system terms, the D&D-esque system of spell levels and spell slots is a very poor fit, even with the more flexible variant this game presents.
Why you should (maybe) buy it anyway:
It's the Wheel of Time game. As far as I know, there isn't another one. If you're really into Wheel of Time anyway, and you use the d20 system, you can get a few decent games out of it, maybe even a campaign. I don't like messing with licensed settings because it often feels like all the important stuff is already being done by main characters, but if you don't mind throwing out the continuity or staying to smaller-scale heroics, it is a very detailed world.

#19 -- Ars Magica, Fourth Edition

What it is:
Ars Magica, one of the most interesting games I've played. Set in a version of medieval Europe where the supernatural really exists. The player characters are magi in the Order of Hermes, an organization of powerful wizards. Really, a good game, and it would rank higher on my list if Ars Magica Fifth Edition weren't so much better.
Why I dislike it:
Well, the obvious first; Ars Magica 5e has been out for long enough now that it's just as richly detailed as 4e, and it's significantly better designed. 4e feels clunky in the same hard-to-explain way that the older editions of D&D felt clunky. It has a great many arbitrary, ill-defined rules and contradictory examples. The ideas present are amazing, but the implementation is lacking something. I got one or two good games out of Ars Magica 4e, but I had to house-rule far too many things to make it work.
Why you should (maybe) buy it anyway:
It's free. No, really. Atlas Games released the core book of Ars Magica 4th edition back when 5th edition came out. I think the idea was advertisement, in the form of: 'here, look at this awesome game. You can have it. There's a better version of it out now, if you don't mind paying a little.' As far as I know, you can still go to atlas-games.com and download the .pdf version of Ars Magica fourth edition, completely legal.

#20 -- Tri-Stat dX

What it is:
A generic point-buy system sort of distilled from Big Eyes, Small Mouth, the 'anime' RPG. The dX in the name comes from the dice mechanic, which is based on the genre and power level of the campaign (so you can run Tri-Stat d6, Tri-Stat d10, etc.)
Why I dislike it:
Bad mechanics, mostly. Lots of good ideas, and as a point system it's simpler to work with than GURPS, but... any pretenses of balance are an illusion, most of the point values seem pretty arbitrary, and the rules really only work within a narrow band of power: if you run a d12 game, weak characters don't work right, and if you run a d6 game, it's hard to differentiate between more skilled characters.
Why you should (maybe) buy it anyway:
Last I knew it was free, though it might be hard to acquire now that Guardians of Order is gone. Still, though. Not gonna recommend this one. If you want Supers, there are games that do that better. If you want a point-buy chargen, GURPS is tons better for it. If you want a game with an 'anime' feel... well, I'm not sure, but Tri-Stat never really felt very 'anime' anyway. You might be able to pull something anime-esque off with a cinematic system like FATE.

#21 -- d20 Modern

What it is:
Third edition D&D in the modern day! d20 rules, but more of an 'action hero' setting than one with wizards and swordsmen and such. That's all there is to it, really.
Why I dislike it:
It's d20, which I've acquired a distaste for after several years of struggling with the same errors in the rules. And for what it does (modern, somewhat cinematic, possibly with magic or psi added in) I get better results using GURPS or World of Darkness.
Why you should (maybe) buy it anyway:
It's not quite free -- ideally you'd want the actual book -- but the System Reference Documents are out there somewhere, free to reference and perfectly legal. You can get a good sense of what the system's like without having to invest much into it, so you don't need to take my word on whether it's a good system or not. Anyway, it's also pretty well-made for a d20 product and you can run a pretty good game with people that are already familiar with 3e or 3.5e D&D, without having to teach a new system. Pick up the Urban Arcana supplement, and you can even run what is effectively 'D&D Modern', which has a kind of charm all its own. Seriously, if GURPS and WoD didn't make this so redundant to me, it would be much, much higher on my list of games.

#22 -- Star Munchkin

What it is:
A parody game making fun of Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and any number of other sci-fi series and settings. Star Munchkin is also a card game, and this RPG is its d20 incarnation.
Why I dislike it:
d20 again, with all the usual complaints. In addition, this being a joke game, no real effort was put into balance, and the jokes aren't even all that funny.
Why you should (maybe) buy it anyway:
Unlike its cousin, the D&D-esque Munchkin, the jokes conceal an actual usable game. It's cheap, easily portable (the books are much smaller than the standard RPG book size), and it is kind of funny. You can probably get a good game or two out of it before your group decides to lynch you. Also worth noting is that it, bizarrely, actually has a fairly decent system for custom-building star ships that might be worth a look. If you find it in a bargain bin or something, it won't hurt to pick it up, just don't spend too much money.

#23 & #24 -- Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Second Edition, and GURPS, Third Edition, respectively

What they are:
The games that got me into gaming. My first two RPGs. Not the oldest of games, but old games nevertheless, from the ancient days when dinosaurs roamed. AD&D 2e was my introduction to RPGs, and GURPS was my first serious foray into something outside of the typical D&D dungeon-crawling fare.
Why I dislike them:
They're old and clunky, and newer games have developed that do what they did, but better and more smoothly. I actually recommend GURPS 4e for both, personally, with the Dungeon Fantasy .pdfs if you want to run something that feels AD&D-esque.
Why you should (maybe) buy them anyway:
I won't really argue that these should be bought; I mean, good luck even finding them. That said, there's something to be said for the old clunky charm of AD&D, so picking that up if you see it might not be a bad idea. I can't in good faith recommend picking up old editions of GURPS, but the supplements are many, often relatively cheap even now, and pretty good reads and references even without the rest of the system.

The Games I Play

I got started in roleplaying with an old and worn 2e AD&D starter set - the intro thing without the full rules, with flimsy little paper books - bought from a friend back in middle school. Ran a game or two for my friends, then kind of let it be until, miraculously, I discovered the actual 2e AD&D books for sale in a bookstore.

From there, I've gone on to run and play so many games.

I thought it would be interesting to list those games, starting with those I like least or am least willing to run or play, and working up to my favorites. It's hard to place some of these games exactly as my interests fluctuate from day to day, but I think it's a good first attempt. I may write some posts later to evaluate the pros and cons of each game. Note that some of the games rank poorly on this list only because there is another game that does better; for instance, GURPS 3e is the last on my list not only because there are so many things I dislike about it, but also because I love GURPS 4e so much more.

24. Generic Universal Roleplaying System (GURPS), Third Edition

23. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Second Edition

22. Star Munchkin

21. d20 Modern

20. Tri-Stat dX

19. Ars Magica, Fourth Edition

18. The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game

17. All Flesh Must Be Eaten

16. Paranoia XP

15. Dungeons and Dragons, Third Edition

14. Maid

13. Blood of Heroes

12. Call of Cthulhu d20

11. Scion

10. Vampire: The Requiem

9. Iron Heroes

8. Arcana Evolved

7. Genius: The Transgression

6. Geist: The Sin-Eaters

5. Nobilis

4. Exalted, Second Edition

3. Changeling: The Lost

2. Generic Universal Roleplaying System (GURPS), Fourth Edition

1. Ars Magica, Fifth Edition

You may notice a curious absence from this list; I have yet to play 4e D&D. From what I've heard of it, it's not really the kind of game I'd be interested in, and buying into it with all the books it has and is likely to gain will be expensive. I'd rather save the little money I have for games I'm more certain I'll like.

My Worlds

There's a thread on RPG.net right now, 'This setting feels like home.' It talks about how game-masters have different kinds of worlds and settings that they just feel more natural and comfortable with.

Here were my thoughts:

I think for me...

The sort of 'generic' fantasy setting. The sort of world you put together when you want to run an old-style D&D game but you're not really sure about all this politics and realism and such.

Endless plains or grass stretching under the world's slightly alien sky. A scattering of lonely, walled towns in a wide-open wilderness. Isolated little farms where the farmers struggle to survive, and are sometimes wiped out without warning by rampaging monsters or strangely lovecraftian crop diseases. Forests with trees of impossible size. Sometimes stranger places: deserts of glittering silver sand, wastelands covered in strange crystal growths, vast moss-floored mushroom forests in incomprehensibly huge caverns. Dungeons and monuments and ruins dot the landscape. Some from from fallen kingdoms, some the sewers or catacombs of long-abandoned towns, some the towers of wizards. Some just go entirely unexplained; perhaps there's a reason they exist, but it's nothing the players or the locals know.

No real long range communication. Each kingdom or settlement has only barely heard stories of the next one over. Politics and intrigue limited to the occasional monster-disguised-as-a-royal-vizier, or usurping anti-paladin that kills the wise ancient king. And Kings are just people with castles in charge of fielding a military to protect and control the handful of towns in their little corner of the world. Adventurers as a profession. Maybe even the silliness of a Thieves' Guild in some towns.

I can run that kind of thing.

Give me something like Exalted, though, and while I absolutely love the setting, my brain starts to injure itself under the strain of trying to figure out the motives of so ungodly many different factions and events, as well as deciding what else is happening all over the world at any given moment that will have some significant impact.

Getting an RPG Moving

Running and playing various Roleplaying games, I've encountered one really annoying recurrent problem: players simply talking about the game, rather than playing it. This seems especially true in sandbox-style games, and especially games where players have lots of options.

Players sort of go off on daydreams... 'I could go on quests until I have enough money to start my own village, and then set myself up as the local ruler, and train my villagers in martial arts, and...' And an hour goes by, of the player considering options. Meanwhile, the character is still a peasant with a rusty sword inherited from his father, or whatever. Because for all those thought-exercises and dreams, nothing has actually happened in-game.

And with those players, sometimes if you press them... make them decide to do something, they go 'Okay, uh. I look for a quest.' A sort of noncommittal, general declaration. That doesn't help me much, because then not only do I have to do my job as the game master (deciding the world's reaction to your actions and such), I have to do the player's job too (deciding what your actions actually are), with the player only contributing vague goals.

That's no fun.

If you're a player in a 'sandbox' situation, I suggest taking matters into your own hands. Don't paint your actions in broad, vague strokes. Give active details, to make it feel like something is happening in the game and to give the GM something to play with. Rather than, 'I go look around town', have your character actually walk out of the team's base, mount his horse, and ride into town. Tie the horse to a post somewhere and go into the local tavern. Buy a round of drinks for everyone if you need to. Just... do stuff.

White Wolf is trying, but...

... their support for fansites isn't sufficient.

I was looking into their 'Dark Pack' agreement thing, but...

Well. I can tell they mean well, but it's just not practical to work with this stuff.

This other blog post summarizes it better than I could.

The Extra Changeling Books

The line for Changeling: The Lost was supposed to be completed with Equinox Road, and it really already had enough to be amazingly complete at that point. Apparently sales were phenomenal, so White Wolf went back and added two books to the line: Dancers in the Dusk, and Swords at Dawn.

My initial reaction was irritation that they had added books. I had bought the game and supplements for Changeling on the basis that I would only have to buy a finite number, so it wouldn't become yet another game for which I buy another book every couple months forever. When I heard that they had gone back on their word and were adding new books, I was actually pretty annoyed; granted it's just good business on their part, but they told us, their customers, that they weren't doing any more Changeling books, and then they did!

After waiting quite a while, though, there's no evidence that they're adding any more. Since it looks like the line is honestly complete, I went to the local gaming store and picked up copies of the two books. Turns out they're actually pretty good!

I'm not sure I would recommend one over the other. As their names sort of suggest, they seem designed to fit together in some ways -- for instance, discussion of Fate is in one book, but Talecrafting (Changeling manipulation of Fate) is mechanically defined in the other, so to get a good overview of Fate in general and how it influences the Lost, you really would want both books.

I'm happy with both books so far. The fluff is good, but that's White Wolf for you. That's really what they're good at.

As far as mechanics...

...if you have a player interested in talecrafting it might be a good idea to lighten or even remove the 'addiction/madness' effect of using it, or at least make it so that if the character doesn't use it for a while his accumulated susceptibility to the addiction cools down. The suggestions in the back part of the Dusk book about how to tweak the game all seem to be mechanically terrible and poorly thought-out, so you'll probably want to just ignore those. Other than those two minor issues, which amount to only a few paragraphs that need to be tweaked or ignored, the books seem pretty solid.