bunny vs. fence

the other day, this lengthy stretch of fencing (branded nicely enough with so much black, white, and red to represent the construction company Sundt, whose slogan seems to be three standalone words, "Skill. Grit. Purpose.") went up all along the drive that goes between my academic office building and various parking lots between here and places off-campus.

I'm told that they'll be building a new dormitory somewhere on top of the rocky, scrub-filled gully on the other side. it'll have more student housing and more classroom space. so cool. so necessary. 

some of us in my academic office building are mildly worried that this new construction will block our most excellent west-facing views of Granite Mountain. we shall see, I guess. I remain hopeful that the slope of this gully will mean the top of the new dorm will be low enough for us to look over from our third floor offices.

as I walked back out from my office to my car last Tuesday, I noticed a little grey-brown bunny frantically searching for a way through the fence, up and down the hill in short bursts, back and forth over the blaring red curb, every so often sprinting for its life all the way across the road back to the unfenced rocks and bushes to the east.

I watched it for a solid few minutes. it hopped away in panic from my slowed footsteps, then dashed in further panic across the path of someone's big white SUV driving up past us both. 

I didn't see the bunny come back that evening. so I studied the fencing as I walked. surely one little bunny would eventually find a gap to squeeze under, I thought. (the creatures seem to squeeze through pretty tiny gaps in our back garden gate, after all.)

if the chainlink were bare of this black branded tarp, then could a little bunny more easily get through? or if the corners of each fence panel were less square and more rounded, that would surely help.

I wonder if any of the planners and facilities and maintenance people worried about the impact of this construction project would have on the non-human critters in the area. hopefully at least a little bit. probably not as much as they worried about other aspects though-- the costs of labor and fencing and other materials; the design and the blueprints and the building's whole physical footprint; and the timing and logistics and how soon they can start selling spots in the new dorm.

at the bottom of the hill, the fence merely ends,. for now. the sidewalks remain open and the parking lots in regular use. for now. if the bunnies are persistent enough, they will find their way back into their hideaways in the scrub-filled gully. 

and hopefully they will all find new hideaways once the gully is dug out and filled with a bunch of concrete and whatever else dormitories are made of.

and if not?

they're just bunnies. some of their cousins, whichever side of whichever fence they've ended up on, will replace them soon enough.

the tournament of TTRPG books, final round

the final round:
Dungeons & Dragons (5e) vs The One Ring (2e)
 

in the beginning, along with a lot of scribbly scattered notes and spreadsheets of metadata on each RPG book, I mapped out my relative prior experience with each of the 16 systems, like so:  

None-- The One Ring (2e), Cyberpunk RED, and A Song of Ice and Fire
    
Barely any-- Wrath & Glory, Scion: Hero, and Exalted 

Some-- Pathfinder (2e), Shadowrun (5e), Mage: the Awakening, and Changeling: the Lost

More than some-- World of Darkness, Star Wars: Force and Destiny, and 7th Sea (2e)

Lots-- Vampire: the Masquerade (5e) and Dungeons & Dragons (5e) 

there were some idle thoughts about coming up with a color code to go along with this, even. maybe it would've started with grey, then blue, yellow, green, up to a nice purple for the ones I've played most, or something like that? not important, I suppose. arbitrary distinctions to signify those slightly less arbitrary.

in any case, The One Ring has already vanquished one of my most-played RPGs. does it have what it takes to beat the other? 

either way, it will feel like Tolkien wins.

we recently finished listening to The Fellowship of the Ring narrated by Andy Serkis. so excellently done-- all the voices and the singing. I loved it. at least 20 years have gone by since I last read the book myself. I still mean to reread them all at some point, but who knows when. there is such a richness in that story. it is beautiful, touching, deep, and timeless. I'm not saying anything here that hasn't been said a hundred times.

last week, we gathered friends at our table to begin another D&D campaign. I'm still working on putting the finishing touches on my first-ever bard: Ennagold Lindenrill, a wood-elf from Waterdeep. the rest of the party shall include a couple of wizards, a couple of clerics, and a paladin. it's exciting to be gearing up to play once again after about a year and a half spent in other game systems.

judging these two against each other is as expectedly challenging as most of the last few matches have been. which do I value more? the focus, simplicity, and artistry of the newer book, or the flexibility, openness, and mainstream appeal of the older? which deserves this more? the world-changing system that paved the way for pretty much all the others, or the beautiful latecomer based on a world-changing fantasy that paved the way for it in the first place?

SYSTEM	Dungeons & Dragons (5e)	The One Ring (2e)
cover tagline =	"Arm yourself for adventure."	"Enter the world of Middle-earth..."
publisher =	Wizards of the Coast	Free League Publishing
pub. date =	2014	2020
original cost =	$49.95	$49.85
length =	11 chapters / 320 pages	10 chapters / 240 pages
my exp. level =	very much lots	none prior

---

 

the easy part is judging these two on aesthetics. The One Ring will probably never lose on that count. I bet the designers of this book put as much attention and effort into its appearance as Tolkien himself put into the elvish language. it seems to me almost as perfect as any functional book could ever be (semi-garish cover notwithstanding). beyond the surface of the pages, too, the aesthetics of this epic storyworld come with all the depth and richness of their source material. it's lovely.

and while The One Ring is soaked in the vibes of deep green-grey forests and cozy, semi-lit hobbit holes, D&D injects all that with a little more brightness. the saturation is turned up, the gleam of adventure a little more polished against a grab-bag stage-set of fantasy. they aren't opposites, but we might say they are different shades of the same hue: The One Ring a deep piney dark-olive, like those magical woven elf-cloaks in shadow; D&D more like new grass, or spring-time oak leaves in the sun, or a green leather satchel freshly polished. you can tell serious, weighty stories in either game, but D&D will always feel lighter to me.

judging on mechanics, I have a harder time choosing which I like more. The One Ring is simple and unique. it's character creation options are very focused, its gameplay processes similarly so. destiny and heritage and lore combine to draw strong lines around the possible story arcs. player characters rotate through adventuring phases and fellowship phases. journeying, counseling, and resting are given just as much attention (if not more) than combat.

D&D divides its gameplay slightly differently into exploration, social interaction, and combat. it's close enough to the same ingredients, but used in a significantly new recipe. and much like an easy, endlessly-adapatible recipe (like this one-- so easy and so fun to mix and match with), D&D feels infinitely flexible. dial down the combat and add more exploration or skill challenges or socializing if you're feeling like it-- it'll still taste awesome. it will still be exciting. 

in terms of approachability, do these games come out equal? as I've said before, D&D has the advantage of being very well known, with an established fan base and a widespread community to help ease new players into it. practically, playing D&D can be as basic or as convoluted as you choose.

without the same relatively longstanding advantages, The One Ring does just fine. I like its organization and approach a bit better, and that beautiful simplicity earns it plenty of points here.

if we wanted to get quantitative about it, we could tally things on a rough scale like so, dividing a pool of 10 points per category between the two systems...

SYSTEM	Dungeons & Dragons (5e)	The One Ring (2e)
points for aesthetics =	2	8
points for mechanics =	6	4
points for approachability =	6	4
total =	14	16

 

a close match if there ever was one, eh? and honestly, I keep wanting to fudge the points further. (full transparency: I have fudged them up and down and back already a few times. this is my tournament, so it's allowed, right?) I mean, are the aesthetics of D&D so very lackluster in my eye? and maybe shouldn't the mechanics be weighted more heavily, given that's what the game is essentially built out of? 

but beyond my trusty old three-pronged rubric... I wrote last time that I value vividness, simplicity, and consistency in these forms of interactive art. I seem to have the most imaginative fun with a clear framework in which to invent freely, wildly, with all the power of the game's limitations to help me build something cool. 

so which of these truly offers me more of that feeling?  

in another prior match-up, I also wrote that compared to D&D, The One Ring's character creation process seemed so limited, so relatively constrained. this remains pretty much my only grasped-at disappointment with The One Ring, I think. a barely-there complaint. and yet I concede that there is a nice structure to it and to everything else in the game, though. it's fitting, given the game's setting and all that. it's a great framework for narrative gameplay, narrow and vivid in its scope.

on the other hand, D&D has a bigger, wider frame. just as sturdy and serviceable, if far less technically beautiful. 

I think what really makes the most sense, to me today, is to add a fourth category and do a little bit more math. so here we go-- along with aesthetics and mechanics and user-friendliness, I'm going to look quantitatively at flexibility. 

and there, using this arbitrary system I've suddenly applied across this match, I'd give D&D a whole 7 and The One Ring the remaining 3. it's still awfully close, but D&D ekes out the higher score. 21 to 19. 

 

imagine approximately three seconds of a low and subtle drumroll for us, please?

the 2023 champion of the Tournament of RPG books: Dungeons & Dragons (5e)

fantasy sprawl

quarterfinals match 4:
The One Ring vs A Song of Ice and Fire

as much as the authors behind these two worlds may match each other for ambition, scope, and nuanced historical detail, the two worlds themselves feel vastly different. both may be vast, rich, strikingly realistic fantasy lands, with some very cool linguistical inventiveness threaded through, but Tolkien and Martin do not tell the same kinds of stories with anything like the same kind of tone, do they? 

I did find the two RPG versions of these literary works equally immersive games, at least. in terms of their layered, evocative gameplay and vibes, the two are very well matched.

in response to my opening round review of The One Ring, friend Chris commented that in no other match thus far had my preference been quite so blatantly obvious from so early on. at the time, I didn't realize how thoroughly, one-sidedly gushing I'd become, even if I did acknowledge that The One Ring had swept me off my feet.  

likewise, the opening round performance of A Song of Ice and Fire may have been just as imbalanced. it certainly didn't have to do very much to beat out Shadowrun (though my one-sided-ness that time ran in the opposite direction).

and now, how does the adventurous-but-still-somehow-cozy epic of Middle-Earth fare against the cut-throat political dances of Westeros? 

I can't say it's quite as simple as it might seem. both games were delightful to play, uniquely engaging, and satisfyingly substantive. the story moments of both felt meaningful, plot lines perfectly in tension among our characters' colorful backstories, current circumstances, and murky reached-for futures.

thankfully, in real life, we don't have to choose between Tolkien and Martin; we can be fans of both stories and make time to play both games. but this is an arbitrary tournament set-up where only one of these sixteen RPG systems can win the prize.

SYSTEM	The One Ring	A Song of Ice and Fire
back cover tagline =	"Enter the world of Middle-earth..."	"Adventure, war, and intrigue in George R.R. Martin's World of Westeros"
publisher =	Free League Publishing	Green Ronin Publishing
pub. date =	2020	2014
original cost =	$49.85	$49.95
length =	10 chapters / 240 pages	13 chapters / 320 pages
my exp. level =	none prior	none prior

---

and so the cozy version of adventure is going to win. me being me (aspirationally part hobbit, after all), how could I not choose the gameworld where extra meals, singing, and warm baths can be part of your character advancement? 

the only thing I found to mope about with The One Ring is that its character creation options feel so relatively minimal. I mused aloud to Jeremiah the other day that if we could mix just a few more of the classic Dungeons & Dragons classes and races and stats into the simplicity of The One Ring, that might be a perfect combination for me. but upon further thought, I don't think it would actually work that well. it would muddy the beauty and integrity of the game's design just a bit too much. 

likely the only reason I imagine myself wanting such a combination is because I feel so familiar with D&D character creation processes. my brain is latching onto it for comfort more than out of any true preference. and that means the real answer here is to do more character creation using The One Ring, to get familiar with it, and to trust that I'll fall further in love.

 

semifinals match-ups (coming soon...): 
The One Ring vs Vampire: the Masquerade
Star Wars vs Dungeons & Dragons

certain shades of darkness

quarterfinals match 3:
World of Darkness vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

since opening match 1, our zombie-plagued World of Darkness chronicle has ended. my stubborn, workaholic Andi Garcia did survive, somehow. in the end, wrapped in a metaphorical shroud of mourning and dampened ambitions, she held on to just enough hope for teaching the younger survivors everything they could want to know about the technologies of the past. given the campaign's Lake Michican setting, Andi's epilogue has some real Station Eleven Museum of Civilization vibes-- in my imagination anyway. a little bit like that. but different.

sadly, I have not played any more Vampire this year. but I do think about the world and the system fairly often. driving past a self storage compound on the highway, I wonder how Anarch vampires could use such a space for hiding their renegade plans and secrets. hearing news snippets about a rapper on trial for drug trafficking, I wonder what kind of vampire story that might be, if the drug dealers were in thrall to vampires, or if the rapper himself were undead, using a late-night partying lifestyle to disguise his sun allergy. it would definitely be depressing to be a vampire in real life-- but isn't it interesting to ponder the logistics of living in darkness for decades on end? I can't be the only one who thinks so.

mechanically, these two games are almost identical. the one system encompasses the other entirely, pretty much, and the other is a sharply focused specialization of the first. on that point of my rubric, I cannot really distinguish them. 

in terms of relative approachability, there are perhaps some differences but not substantive ones, for me. World of Darkness can stand alone, just as this version of Vampire can. the possibilities for branching out or remixing other subsets of the world don't take away from that.  

so does that mean my only meaningful axis of comparison, other than past gameplay experience, is aesthetics?

I initially summed up the vibes of World of Darkness as "film noir–artsy" and "alternatingly grunge/emo/punk," with a heavy tinge of romance and mystery. then, in Vampire's opening match 6, I wrote, "let's take everything I said about World of Darkness in opening round #1, but add a few gallons of flawlessly immortal elegance and deep red, viscous blood."

so... which is more worthy of this arbitrary prize? the artsy black-and-white film noir? or the highly polished, classic gloss of black-and-white-and-blood? which one looks best posed against the backdrop of a perfectly staged alleyway at night?

 

SYSTEM	World of Darkness	Vampire: the Masquerade 5e
back cover tagline =	"Your greatest fears aren't make believe; they're real."	"Death is not the end."
publisher =	White Wolf	White Wolf
pub. date =	2004	2018
original cost =	$24.99	$55.00
length =	8 chapters / 223 pages	13 chapters / 400 pages
my exp. level =	more than some	lots

---

 

it is a difficult choice. both of these styles please me. both games and gameworlds have helped me experience visceral, intense struggles and tell sweeping, tragically beautiful stories. 

my decision comes down to a fairly small nuance, I guess. for all that these two systems share, the one is by design very broad and open-ended, accomodating of plenty fairly typical man-vs-monsters adventures. World of Darkness will most likely have you roleplay a communal struggle against encroaching supernatural evils from who-knows-what great beyond. and while that is is awfully heroic and awesome, it is a bit less unique. 

to instead struggle against a persistent, internal, irreversable corruption inside your own blood... that is different. it feels... more, somehow. less trite, less bounded by the rules of a proper hero's journey and all that. the focus of it, the individuality of it-- it makes the struggle a lonely, desperate, mostly hopeless one. how much more romantic can we get than that? and with the focus of Vampire, we get to fight-- for whatever idealistic or misguided or prideful reasons-- against something our own fallen selves have become. that dark conflict gives this game a more unique and interesting trajectory for stories than any other game I've ever played. so far.

 

next match-up review (the last before the semifinals!): The One Ring vs A Song of Ice and Fire

tournament of TTRPGs: opening round review

here we are, at a midpoint in this somewhat random tournament of roleplaying games. in this post, I'll summarize the opening round matches and finally, unequivocatingly, declare winners for each.

this all started almost six months ago with a tournament introduction. since then, I've played half a dozen new RPGs and tried to articulate my opinions about them all. it's been fun. 

Jeremiah asked me which of the new one-shots we played were most enjoyable, and at the time my answer was Cyberpunk RED. looking back now, I'd want that one to share a three-way tie with The One Ring and A Song of Ice and Fire. Cyberpunk was certainly the most fun in a wild hijinksy way. The One Ring was fun in a simply beautiful and heroic way, and A Song of Ice and Fire was fun in a  sweeping, majestic way.

the others were fun too, in their ways-- just a little bit less for me: Exalted in an almost frighteningly epic way, Werewolf, in a mystical have-we-bit-off-more-than-we-can-chew sort of way, and Scion, in a extremely bombastic and colorful way.

making final decisions about all these pairs has not always been so fun or easy. a few were really very hard to choose, but I had to. for the tournament. so without further ado, here are the winners--

match #1 "Dark vs. Grimdark"
(World of Darkness vs. Wrath & Glory)
I haven't changed my mind about this one-- World of Darkness still wins for its artsy storytelling approach and flexibility. but I will say, we've played a bit more Wrath & Glory since May, and it has grown on me a little.

match #2 "Power Fantasies"
(Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs. Werewolf: the Forsaken)
I thought this might be a close one, and while Werewolf was a great experience and I'd love to play more of it, the thrills of Dungeons & Dragons pulled ahead for me in the end. is it still unfair? yeah, it kinda is.

match #3 "So Much Potential"
(Pathfinder 2e vs. Mage: the Awakening)
given than neither of these systems left me with the greatest first impressions, it was hard to choose between them, but Pathfinder wins out for thus far having provided more enjoyable gameplay overall.

match #4 "Fatefully"
(Changeling: the Lost vs. Star Wars: Force and Destiny)
this one was absolutely the most difficult. the enchanting style of Changeling still holds plenty of sway over me, but ultimately I couldn't let it win just on vibes and potential; thus, Star Wars takes it.

match #5 "Two Flavors of Epic" (Scion vs. The One Ring)
at least we can't say this one is so very unfair-- as limiting as first impressions may be, The One Ring wins for simply being so thoroughly cozy and inspiring and marvelous.

match #6 "Masked and Unmasked"
(Vampire: the Masquerade 5e vs. Exalted 2e)
not many RPGs, in my view, could stand up against V5 and expect to do all that well. both it and Exalted are intense games with some complex elements, but I find Vampire more engaging.

match #7 "Once and Future Risks" (7th Sea 2e vs. Cyberpunk RED)
this one was so, so close as well-- I had the hardest time weiging the epic historical adventure against the flashy futuristic excitement, and 7th Sea does kind of win for mere stylistic preference, all else being way too even.

match #8 "Here there be Dragons"
(Shadowrun 5e vs. A Song of Ice and Fire)
A Song of Ice and Fire truly does deserve to win here for deftly evoking a really neat and engaging world and providing mechanics for a truly sweeping game; I promise I'm not only using this as a chance to snub Shadowrun.

and a few honorable mentions:
Changeling and Cyberpunk RED earn my top tier honorable mentions. I love them both quite a lot despite the less-than-perfect-fit I feel with their mechanics. one tier down, Exalted and Werewolf earn some brownie points for just feeling really cool to roleplay in. it is not their fault that they got matched up against the two games I've played the most and have the fondest memories of.

and so we continue on into a new round. here are the new match-ups--  

Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs Pathfinder

7th Sea vs Star Wars

Vampire: the Masquerade vs World of Darkness 

The One Ring vs A Song of Ice and Fire 

I almost do want to play them all again for the quarterfinals. wouldn't that be fun?

for the sake of time, however, I'm afraid we'll have to imagine all the gameplay we can and work with the experience I've been able to glean so far from these 8 potential champions. only one pair of the lot includes systems that were brand new to me when I started this thing. those two being matched together seems fair enough. 

how will I approach this second round? I think I'll revisit each book directly and reconsider aesthetics, mechanics, and approachability in context of the new contrasts of each match. I'll likely draw on my prior reviews a bit as I do so, but I'll avoid as much repetition as I can possibly avoid.

masked and unmasked

opening match #6:
Exalted 2e vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

here we have two games where the nuances of managing one's appearance and identity might matter more than anything else. what becomes of a soul exalted by the glory of an actual sun-god above all other mortals? what becomes of a soul damned to avoid every shred of sunlight for the rest of its unholy existence?

thus far I have not fussed very much over why my tournament has featured which edition of which RPG book-- it's all been dictated by what we had in our collection and nothing else mattered. we happen to own the second edition of Exalted, so that's what I'm working with. 

in the case of Vampire, things are a tad more complicated. this time, as we come to the last of the World of Darkness-adjacent gameworlds I will cover, I must note that I did have a choice. the others I've written about so far-- Werewolf: the Foresaken, Mage: the Awakening, and Changeling: the Lost-- all come from a certain line of White Wolf RPG offerings, and while we do own the fourth piece of this little quartet-- the version that would more properly complete the whole series, Vampire: the Requiem (pictured below)-- that is not the edition I'm writing about here.

{ our very red and shiny, 2004 copy of Vampire: the Requiem that we own. its tagline is: "a modern gothic storytelling game." }

I will briefly mention the older version in my account of prior vampire characters, because I have played a short mini-campaign of Vampire: the Requiem with dear friends in Indiana. however, my main focus will be on the more recent 5th edition of Vampire: the Masquerade-- the latest in a line of game systems that actually predates the early-2000s versions featured in my prior opening matches. since almost the very moment this 2018 edition of Vampire came out, I've played many more and longer campaigns in its very similar setting but fairly different game system. so despite the incongruity it adds to my set of review matches overall, we're gonna roll with it.

I've switched up the usual outline a little bit here, diving into aesthetics and mechanics first, then overall approachability, before finally summarizing past and present characters and their stories. the preliminary verdicts for this one are perhaps the most unfair of all the opening rounds so far.

SYSTEM	Exalted (2e)	Vampire: the Masquerade (5e)
tagline =	"This is the story of the Exalted."	"Death is not the end."
publisher =	White Wolf	White Wolf
pub. date =	2006	2018
original cost =	$39.99	$55.00
length =	8 chapters / 400 pages	12 chapters / 400 pages
my exp. level =	none prior	lots

---

aesthetics

Exalted reminds me of nothing so much as the Mortal Kombat franchise. its colorful comic-book style overlaps with that of Scion a fair bit. and all three feature high-powered, more-than-human characters, with tons of lore and a sense of history inexorably iterating and perhaps repeating itself; but for style and presentation alone, Exalted exceeds Scion on almost every level. the colors and contrasts are richer, the paper is semi-glossy, the page numbers backdropped with stars, and the margins printed to look a little bit like marble. across every spread is a narrow little montage of epic fight scenes to serve as a letterhead above the rest of the contents. between every chapter we get to read mini comics following the exploits of various sample characters and villains. I almost can't overstate how shiny and dynamic it all feels.

perhaps because the world and setting of this system draw on everything that is not Tolkien, everything not already over-represented among typical classical western mythology and heroics, the book cannot simply rely on readers' general familiarity with existing mythology and mythic tropes. instead, it builds everything from scratch, new and intentional and intricately detailed. all of that gives Exalted a richness and diversity I haven't seen in any other RPG thus far. I was struck, for example, by just how many women are featured as main NPCs. that shouldn't be so remarkable, perhaps, but I think it's cool. 

aspects of this game seem quite anime/manga-ish, and other aspects remind me very much of the dark fairytale destinies of The Witcher, the cut-throat vibes from Game of Thrones, and even the razor-sharp whimsy of Discworld (mostly because the setting consists of a huge flat plane of earth, but also because the gods are referenced as playing endless little "games of divinity" with the world). it all seems very robust and crunchy, like shards of lava and obsidian rocks glinting dangerously in the sun. for all the outlandish, colorful extremes, the world needs to be taken seriously. 

-

you'd expect a game called Vampire: the Masquerade to be sexy, eh? and this one certainly channels as much sexiness as it possibly can into the pages of its rulebook. glossy pages, tons of full-bleed photo-realistic art, classy serifed type in black and white and red. glints of temptation at the edges of your vision. all the angular imagery of cities. skyscrapers. crowds. bodies in motion. techno. neon. teeth against a bottom lip. stalkers or soulmates? overstimulation. stars drowning in light pollution. the scent of old money. roses. silk. touch. adrenaline. diamonds. fangs. alleyways. the taste of unknown spices in the air. leather boots. mind-control. catacombs. castles. mystery.

for me, this is a game of intense moments layered together like leaves of fine vellum, each calligraphied with dreadful secrets, risks, bonds, and sacrifices. let's take everything I said about World of Darkness in opening round #1, but add a few gallons of flawlessly immortal elegance and deep red, viscous blood. the word masquerade itself conjures so much decadence and intrigue, artifice and uncertainty; all RPGs are games of pretending, but this one leans in as close as it can and gets really meta with what that can mean. 

you cannot play this game as a good guy. it's too late for that. you'll see. once you've been Embraced (that's the polite term for what happens when your greedy vampiric Sire takes all your mortal blood and replaces it with some of theirs), you might struggle however much you want against the Beast of your inhuman blood-- but that part of you won't be silenced and it won't be controlled. your soul is Damned. what will you do with that inescapable truth?

 

mechanics

bring out the d10s once again. you'll need plenty for Exalted, and you'll need two distinct colors, at least five of each, to properly play Vampire.

Exalted's mechanics match up with those of Scion to a large degree-- similar stats, similar types of rolls, similar Willpower and Health tracking systems, similar bonuses for describing your actions as epic stunts-- but of course there are key differences that make Exalted its own thing. instead of Legend, the exalted are powered by Essence. and instead of skills in the basic categories of physical, mental, social, skills are divided up into sets of 5, each set favored most by a particular Solar caste.

creating an Exalted character is decently involved, but once you've done it a time or two it isn't so intimidating. first you'll choose a concept and a caste. there are five castes to choose from: Dawn, Zenith, Twilight, Night, and Eclipse. the Dawn caste exalted ones are fearless warriors, Zenith caste shining, charismatic leaders, and Twilight caste the bringers of wisdom and champions of scholarship. Night caste are the clever, stealthy bodyguard types, and Eclipse caste are the most political, interested in diplomacy and balance.

once you've chosen your caste, you get a certain amount of points for skills, advantages, and Charms, plus a few bonus points to spend on upgrading any of these things a little bit further. choosing Charms is the trickiest part. these are your magnificent heroic powers, setting you apart from any other semi-divine creature that might think it can tangle with you and walk away unscathed. you start with ten Charms, half of which must be from your favored skill domains. ten sounds like a lot, but every Charm comes with strict prerequisites for Essence level and skill level. your character will start with the basics and level up from there, just like in any good kung-fu training montage. (not all Charms are combat-related, but still.)

to use Charms, you'll spend points of Essence from either your peripheral essence pool or personal essence pool. these regenerate pretty quickly in game, so there is no excuse not to use them. the only side effect worth considering is the possibility for your character's Solar anima to manifest in more and more obvious forms. if you spend more than a certain amount of your Essence pool before it can regenerate (especially the harder-to-control peripheral Essence), the glorious light of the sun will start to leak through your skin and betray your exalted identity to anyone who might be watching. 

-

the gameplay mechanics of Vampire work very much like the other World of Darkness systems, with relatively small differences. the nine core Attributes are the same, but this time we get 9 skills per category (physical, social, and mental) and a more flexible approach to allocating points to those skills at character creation. however, the available advantages and merits are more limited here. a few are general (like linguistics or resources) but many are specific to vampires only (like a folkloric bane that makes one sensitive to garlic, or pickiness about sources of blood). 

crucially, vampires in this game are not lone hunters, slaking their hunger as they may and enduring a deathless eternity. unless they don't care too much about preserving their un-life, a vampire will be subject to the ancient bureaucratic traditions and structures of a Kindred society. the Camarilla is the ancient hierarchy of most remaining Kindred clans. in recent times, rebel Anarchs have tried to pull down what they see as the oppressive and unnecessary aspects of the Camarilla. which side of this conflict you find your vampire character on will likely depend on the game your storyteller wants to run. in either case, the political frictions within Kindred society can greatly add to the basic horror of waking up as an undead monster.

first step for character creation is to choose a Clan into which your character will be (or will have been, depending on you storyteller's timeline) initiated. there are seven playable clans, each with a particular vibe, in this core book:

• the Brujah, rebellious but down-to-earth scholars, poets, punks, and rabble-rousers 
• the Gangrel, most animalistic, wild and fierce as nature
  
• the Malkavians, touched by madness, derangement, and absurdity
• the Nosferatu, classically stealthy and strange, deformed by the curse
  
• the Toreador, those obsessed with beauty and hedonism,
  
• the Tremere, blood alchemists who stretch past the edges of magic and science in their search for power
• and the Ventrue, aristocratic and manipulative, thoroughly convinced that they deserve to rule the world.

there is a "clanless" option too. the Caitiff wander among Kindred society without the protection of a clan; perhaps there are pros and cons to that sort of undead lifestyle, but I have always found it kind of boring.

separate from your clan is your coterie-- the group of other player characters in the game, usually vampires of similar age, thrown together for some convenient but also compelling in-game purpose. and along with the bloodline of your clan, you'll gain access to a few Disciplines-- superhuman abilities granted by the vampiric blood in your veins. these are what let you effortlessly crush an enemy's throat, leap from balcony to gutter without a sound. this is how you read others' thoughts or intensify your charm to the point that mortals find your seductive glances impossible to resist. 

rolling anything higher than a 6 on your d10 equals success this time: nice and simple 50/50 odds in most cases. but 1s and 10s have the possibility to shake things up in very exciting ways. mostly you'll be rolling the typical Attribute + Skill combination (sometimes adding dice for Disciplines), but with some of those normal dice replaced with Hunger dice. those are the handful of whatever different color (red, the book cooly suggests). Hunger is a stat tracked during gameplay along with health and Willpower and XP. the higher your character's Hunger levels, the greater the risk for totally uncontrolled frenzy. at Hunger 4, any perceived threat or scent of blood will trigger a dice roll which if failed, may result in the storyteller taking control of your character and leading her to act out whatever monstrous impulses fit the scene. even for regular skill checks, the more Hunger dice in your pool, the more risk there is of either bestial failure (when you roll a 1 on any Hunger dice) or a messy critical success (rolling 10s on Hunger dice). in either case something unexpectedly bloody, cruel, or tragic is about to happen. 

unlike the other World of Darkness games, this one does not use Virtues and Vices-- what virtue could a blood-sucking demon find within themselves, after all? we use Ambitions and Desires as storytelling structures for each player character, instead. an Ambition is something to guide the overarching story of your game-- an ultimate goal to work towards. maybe your vampire wants to enact revenge on the one who created them, or to get permission from the Prince to Embrace a mortal loved one. smaller than Ambitions, Desires are like the stepping stones that may help you get closer to that larger goal. ingratiating yourself with the older, more powerful vampires by doing favors for them, or tracking down resources to better secure your coterie's haven, for example.

Willpower functions almost the same, but instead of adding dice to a roll, you spend Willpower to re-roll up to three from your pool. instead of Morality, Vampire works with a Humanity mechanic. a brand new vampire may start with decently high Humanity (6 or 7 out of 10), but it's likely they won't keep it unstained for long.

approachability

Exalted and Vampire both do a nice job of presenting their systems to readers in an organized and accessible way. they both have quite a lot going on, but it's all divided up into pieces and labeled pretty clearly for us. applaudable book design all around, I say.

despite being just as old as Mage and Changeling, Exalted doesn't suffer from the "let's cram our rulebook full of stylish-but-less-readable typography choices" issue. they save the stylishness for the interstitial comics and art bits, it seems. however, it is quite a dense book, with so much interesting lore poured into practically every section, you might get lost in it. I found it tricky to navigate at first, and very tricky to remember where exactly I first read about that one important NPC or that one city's specific political conundrum. because the lore is somewhat spread out among all the other information in the book, it can feel a little mushy. 

on the other hand, I appreciate how much that lore contributes to a full and logical sense of the world. it seemed a little strange that much of the introduction delves into the lives and culture of the Dragon-blooded, or Terrestrial exalted, when players can only create Solar exalted characters. but in any case, there is a great amount of detail and nuance to build on and to hook your character concepts and plot ideas into. your Exaltation isn't random or without cause-- your Soul, chosen and empowered by the Unconquered Sun in a long-ago age, is now escaping its prison and returning to a new body, transform that body with power and glory and intense purpose. it's fun to think about how your character's original form as a Solar exalted in the First Age might inform their new incarnation.

-

the lore of Vampire is a little less overwhelming. the game has the luxury of decades-worth of tropes and vibes from existing vampire media to lean on (sidenote: Only Lovers Left Alive is the best vampire movie, if we must pick one). the book lets any potential wordiness in its exposition breathe among generous amounts of negative space and provocative art. I was intrigued by and quite pleased with its three-column layout. the shorter lines thus created by such formatting makes the text content itself nice and quick to skim, so finding things throughout the book is way easier.

perhaps most notably, for a World of Darkness property, this particular Vampire rulebook can function entirely on its own. there are mentions of the World of Darkness as a setting, and this Vampire is as compatible as its older cousins with the wider gameworld (I know our prior Vampire games have featured Mages as antagonists, at least).

I should say that the gritty gothic horror and unavoidably bloody content of Vampire might not be for everyone, either. the sexiness may not be inherent to the game, but violence in some form or another is. even so, any good storyteller should be able to balance story details against what everyone is comfortable with. every game and every gamer is different. find some that you like and let everyone else do the same. 

 

previous characters + stories

other than a vague and nameless concept I once outlined for a fame-hungry Zenith caste character, I have no prior character for Exalted-- only my two new tournament characters whom you'll meet in the next section.

there are a good handful for Vampire though. ready?

very first was Eve Richards, who technically existed in Vampire: the Requiem. not the same system, but still a vampire. we played that game for just a few awesome sessions in Indiana as I was finishing gradschool. Eve was a Gangrel, with a found-family of biker chicks. I remember her drinking pigeon blood and ultimately adopting a good and loyal (and yes, okay, blood-addicted at this point) bulldog named Winston. so cool. 

in Louisiana, a Vampire game was one of the RPGs we were able to stick with for quite a while. friends Frank and Daniel and Oona and Andy and sometimes Emily would join us every two weeks to play as Seattle-based vampires figuring out their afterlives amidst overlapping alliances of older, more powerful Kindred all trying to use them as pawns. I played Sierra Adler, a Malkavian artist/photographer with a deep strain of sibling rivalry. so many things happened in that game-- too much to even try to summarize well. near the end, Sierra confronted a shapeshifting hippie-chick Mage named Thistle and mostly failed to do anything very useful against her blatant threats. our final session came somewhat suddenly and in hindsight feels comfortably ambiguous. there was a gathering. chaos. combat. flames. death. regardless of what really happened, in my gentle rewrite of Sierra's ending, she and her sire (the deeply morose Orla Grace) both met their Final Death together, each flailing to save the other from Mage-hurled fireballs.

next we have one of my most favorite characters out of all the characters I've ever played: Ms. Victoria Abigail Evanston Bell. for this game, set in 1920s Chicago, we played a few prologue sessions as mortals before falling into our fates as vampires. I styled Vic as a high society heiress trying half-heartedly to hide her tomboyish, absinthe-drinking flapper side from the newspapers. she was so much fun. our small coterie (a Gangrel Celia and Malkavian Doyle, later joined by a techie Nosferatu Ethel) helped her recognize and fight back against Vic's awfully controlling Toreador sire and survive the Valentine's Day massacre all in the same weekend. she obviously had to give up her high society life, but as consolation she opened a little back-alley cinema and dabbled in producing films herself. at one point, Vic's hunger got the better of her (see my notes on frenzy, above) and she tore apart an entire speakeasy of gangsters almost single-handedly. many nights later, as the coterie was just about to uncover more clues to the whole deadly underworld conspiracy of it all, a pack of rogue Gangrel in coyote form ambushed them in a city park. none of her friends could save Vic from being torn apart herself. so tragic.

for the same campaign story, now time-jumped into the '60s, I drew up the character Maeve Wells, an eager young Tremere whose curiosity outweighed her sense of ethics even before she was bitten. she was interested in the effects of psychotropic drugs in combination with vampire blood. the clan leaders had all kinds of ideas for experiments she could run, and Maeve was quite prepared to impress them as much as possible. unfortunately the campaign dissolved a little while after that, so we'll never know just how depraved she may have let herself become.

and finally, in addition to those three, I've got Margo Wallace. she starts out as just a teenager cocooned in a tight-knit group of wannabe-enlightened friends, bemoaning the death of the local mall and dreaming off and on about fashion design school or something. she was also destined for clan Tremere, but this campaign barely got off the ground either. maybe we'll pick it back up one of these days... 

lastly for this section-- I also dabbled in running a Vampire story for Jeremiah once upon a time. I still have pages and pages of notes and maps, tracking my ideas for the Kindred who might sneak around drinking blood and manipulating the world of Salt Lake City after dark. there were going to be secret backroom hideouts downtown and ancient cultish libraries and child trafficking rings and the ruthless redirection of refugees into very particular households... but we only played three or four sessions before I just got too intimidated by the prospect of engineering that much darkness.

new characters

I created Zaya Greane, Eclipse caste, to play in a simple one-shot session. she's a mash up of Varys from Game of Thrones, Gus from Breaking Bad, and Madeline Stillwell from The Boys, with some sprinkles of Lorelei Gilmore from the seasons where they're running the charming little Dragonfly Inn. prior to our short one-on-one session of Exalted, we spent a good amount of time developing a setting and context for Zaya. she was ambitious and very skilled with business, negotiations, and managing people even before her Exaltation. after, she would be unstoppable.

and she was. almost. in a world where Solar exalted are seen as dangerously overpowered and in urgent need of annihilation, she faced her fair share of threats. playing her had me tapping into the most determined, fearless, un-intimidatable version of myself. I unlocked secrets, forged alliances, generally struck fear into all the underlings in my service, and succeeded in humiliating Zaya's ex-lover in battle. it was great fun.

for a second Exalted character, I made a Dawn caste gladiator named Canessa. after her Exaltation she is suddenly burdened with far grander ambitions than to win every fight, battle, or war. instead, how about we take down the Empire by infiltrating the mystical center of its powers? why not? Canessa is sure she's powerful enough to find and topple the Imperial Manse. perhaps she'll find the Red Empress there and be the one to finally supplant her. that would be suitably epic, I think. 

as promised, I've taken little Briella Jameson, rock-climbing activist, and complicated her life by throwing mystical alternate realities at it. she will not have a good time as a vampire, I imagine. but anyway-- clan Brujah immediately seemed most fitting for this idealistic activist and advocate for the unhoused that I created. I did toy for a moment with making her either a Nosferatu or a Ventrue. her willingness to work in proximity to the dirt and ugliness of the street might put her in the path of a sewer rat Nosferatu, and such a transformation would be quite interesting storywise. conversely, her political connections would make her attractive to the aristocratic pullers-of-strings that are the Ventrue. but the Brujah vibes were just too perfect, so I went with it. Briella will fit right in with them, eventually. but at the moment she is too squeamish to drink from humans, too confounded to know exactly how she'll survive. perhaps she and her raccoon companion (what should I name it? hmm) will run into Eve and Winston hunting pigeons and stray cats and such, one of these evenings.

preliminary verdicts

someone asked me, as I was explaining this tournament project back at the very beginning, which game might win if I had to pick a champion right that moment, without any of this everso rigorous process. it didn't take much time at all for me to think and answer: Vampire: the Masquerade. it can't quite compete with D&D on number of characters or total hours played, but there is something about the setting and the tension and the way dear husband Jeremiah runs this game... maybe it's the mostly modern setting, giving my brain a more relatable, more seamless set of connections for my roleplaying and storytelling muscles? somehow I find gameplay in this system the most intensely invigorating. all the sensuous and visceral details, the quiet scenes of inner struggle and the obscene moments of bestial ferocity, and everything in between. this game and its stories come alive in the best way for me, somehow. I guess measuring all the deepest, most horrible selfishness of an actual vampire against beautiful little shreds of hope and humanity is really cathartic, or something.

it's definitely not fair to judge one three-hour session of Exalted against all that, but I will say that it had an intensity and sensuousness of its own, and that fed my enjoyment of it quite well. in this case, some of the same reasons I don't mesh with Scion (huge, bombastic stunt descriptions are tricky) are also at work. but at least I felt very well-situated in the game's central conflict. that helped me bring Zaya to life pretty well, and it was very fun to watch her (us?) in action.

when I revisit my preliminary judgements at the end of the opening round, we'll see how everything shakes out for real.

 

next match-up review: 7th Sea vs. Cyberpunk RED

next (and final!) new mini-campaign: A Song of Ice and Fire

power fantasies

opening match 2: Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs Werewolf: the Forsaken

I had thought to write up Pathfinder 2e vs Mage: the Awakening as match 2 of this opening round, but as I drafted that review I kept tripping myself up with the fact that Pathfinder is basically a Dungeons & Dragons spin-off faction. it would make more sense to write about its predecessor first, so I switched things up. match 3 will likely be up pretty soon though.

this, once again, is a very unbalanced pairing. Dungeons & Dragons has been part of my life for so many years now, while Werewolf is still very brand new.

I've kept the same rough outline going in this review: table of basic metadata, summaries of prior characters and any other past experience relevant to each system, followed by observations on aesthetics, mechanics, and overall approachability. let's go!

SYSTEM	Dungeons & Dragons (5e)	Werewolf: the Forsaken
cover tagline =	"Arm yourself for adventure."	"A storytelling game of savage fury."
publisher =	Wizards of the Coast	White Wolf
pub. date =	2014	2005
original cost =	$49.95	$34.99
length =	11 chapters / 320 pages	8 major sections / 398 pages
my exp. level =	very much lots	barely any

---

previous characters and experience

I looked everywhere in our house for my very first D&D character sheet, and I could not find it. and this means I cannot remember or recount to you the mouthful of a dragonesque surname I gave to my dragonborn character who was raised by halflings. her given name was Raffya (like the paper ribbon twine you get at craft stores, but oh so fancily spelled with a y). all I recall of her surname is that started with M and contained multiple Ls and Xs and such.

Dungeons & Dragons was properly introduced to me in early 2016. at the behest of this charming guy I was dating way back then, I obligingly created a practice character (the aforementioned Raffya) as a way of exploring the system and all its creative options. it was interesting enough. meanwhile I watched him run the tail end of an epic Eberron campaign with some Chicagoland friends. there was magic, mystery, love, and looking back I don't think very much of it actually made sense to me as a game with rules. but I would learn.

the first character I actually put into gameplay was called Brickna, a cute little wizarding gnome with colorful hair and rather modest dreams of making it through wizarding school.

around the same time, there was Arxillia Liaholinaii, a talented elf warlock who started out traveling with a local troupe of performers but ended up fighting and adventuring alongside three others for a few months until we had to move and leave that group's campaign. I later heard she was captured by orcs or something, and the DM was toying with the idea of having her return as a villain. I do like to imagine Arxillia's mysterious warlock patron turning her gradually from neutral to evil somewhere along the way... but I lost touch with those friends and never found out her ultimate fate.

not long after that, I built Nadja Gunderson, a human fighter sailor, blonde and tanned and toned, who quested with a band of longtime childhood friends to protect their home from imperial overlords of some sort. when at level 4 or 5 Nadja fell, instantly, regretfully, to a blue lightning dragon, I repurposed the name Raffya for an intrepid dwarf ranger for a little bit in the same campaign.

the next D&D character I made was at least a couple years later, after we'd moved to Louisiana: Juniper Thornspur (June for short), a halfling monk with some alchemy skills. 

much more recently, I played as Lady Lidda Woodsweep, halfling rogue noble carrying on the tradition of arcane trickster magic that flows through her maternal lineage. Lidda had quite an arc, in one of the longest D&D campaigns I've been part of so far. she rescued her elder brother and saw him take up their father's mantel as Lord of Sycamore Keep, liberated (Robin-Hood-style) a ton of gold from a huge corporation, and almost died any number of times. I love her and I loved playing her. I have a bunch of notes for her story's epilogue that I still need to write up one of these days.

then there were three relatively shortlived concepts: Jinxia, an earnest dragonborn barbarian hoping to study more deeply the histories of her tribe; Ilva Ivoryhearth, a vengeful half-elf druid mostly based on Poison Ivy from the Batman comics; and Rylika Aven, a wood elf sorcerer artisan making ends meet with her crafty leatherworking skills. all of these were built for short and sweet one- or two-shot adventures. (why are single-session games called one-shots? I'm not sure. but if anyone has the etymology of the phrase, please do share.)

last but not least, there is Vikki (Victory if anyone's trying to be formal). she's a purple tiefling barbarian entertainer, and she is high in the running for least serious of any of my D&D characters. I modeled her just a little bit on Xena Warrior Princess: showy and brash, forcefully strong and highly acrobatic, awkward at anything that isn't fighting.  

so what does that come to? counting Raffya the first, a total of 11 unique characters. and on top of my player experience, I've helped out with Jeremiah's plans to run one-shot games for family at the holidays, dabbled in running the Curse of Strahd adventure module twice, and presided over my own short and sweet one-shots of Ginny Di's everso whimsical "Bard Behind Bars," once in person and once online, so far.

that's seven years' of experience for you. on top of that, there's all the cultural prevalence of D&D we could pile on, too, from Stranger Things to Critical Role to all the memes that use the basic alignment chart as a frame for funny jokes. also the new movie! have y'all seen Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves yet? it's a truly hilarious and wonderful film. go see it. come visit me and we'll watch it together if you want.

on the totally other hand, before this little tournament I had never made any characters for Werewolf, nor even thought about doing so. I hadn't heard much about the game either, just knew it was one of several World of Darkness flavors.
 

new characters etc.

it does feel like overkill to make yet another D&D character, but I gotta be consistent with this, right? I was quick and a little bit slapdash about it, at least. this version of character creation is all too familiar, so thinking through it without writing anything down on paper seemed sufficient. I've never played a cleric or a paladin or a half-orc, so this was a random chance to build something along those lines. let's call her Nyva the Compassionate. she is strong and wise, mostly reserved but with some reputation as a Folk Hero for saving dozens of townsfolk (half-orc and human alike) from a great flood and looking after local orphans. missionaries converted her to an order of extra-selfless paladins just two or three years ago, and Nyva has since traveled the realms doing as many good deeds as she possibly can.

there. will this inspired half-orc appear in any future gameplay? we shall see. she rounds out my dozen D&D characters interestingly, at least.

for Werewolf, I created two brand new characters. since Werewolf is a World-of-Darkness system, it seemed fair enough to shortcut half of this character creation process by repurposing the normal rock-climbing human Briella (previously mentioned in the first match-up) as a template of sorts. (confession: I've used her as a base for my new Mage character, too, and I'll very likely also make her into a changeling and a vampire when the time comes. why not?) 

Ella in this shard of the multiverse is still herself, but Changed by the fate of the half-moon into a sharper, even more driven creature. she knows when you're angry or lying or guilty, and she is not afraid to boss you around. 

I also created Mr. Ryan Booth, a scrawny hacker dude for whom his werewolf powers give him even more charisma, insight, and control of technology.

since I'd never played any of this game at all before, dearest husband was graciously willing to run a short one-shot of Werewolf for us the other day. my two prototype characters + four others were added to a pre-made roster for me and two other friends to choose for the game. I ended up playing a strong, extra-tall, extra-spiritual Taylor Grettig, whom I pictured as a mashup of Brienne of Tarth and Luna Lovegood. my tournament characters Ella and Ryan served as fun NPCs. by the end of the session, after a few gripping battles and cunning investigations, our pack of werewolves restored balance to the natural and supernatural aspects of Jerome, Arizona, but not without almost losing our alpha in the process.

aesthetics

what else can I say about the solidly Tolkein-ish legacy that D&D has been built on? we could call it classic. or maybe neoclassic, in a way. indeed, it reminds me of all the romanticizing of medieval times that goes on in western art and literature (i.e. let's tell stories of gallant knights and fairest ladies and idyllic countrysides, but just for fun ignore all the plagues and injustices that don't fit the picture). this is rather an oversimplification, I know. of course of course games don't have to be "historically accurate," whatever that means, and neither do stories-- not all of the time. I'm making observations here, not logging criticisms quite yet. 

the D&D books exude bright and striking contrasts-- rich shadows and vibrant magics all layered on top of each other. the worlds and realms of this system come with a certain clarity. maybe it's in part because D&D is so popular, so ubiquitous: for whatever reasons, you tend to know what you're getting. it's a sturdy, robust, serviceable high fantasy, with a multitude of opportunities for exploring and fighting as heroes, for saving the town, saving your allies, saving the kingdom, or saving the whole world. it's not a simple or limited fantasy world by any means, but its range flows out within the lines of a culturally predominant kind of storytelling, for the most part. good guys vs. bad guys, rinse, repeat. there are caverns and monsters, magic and danger, but more than enough courage and pluck to vanquish it every time. sometimes there might be poignant costs to pay. but the heroes will always see victory. D&D is an optimistic, mostly cheerful sort of fun.

Werewolf is obviously much more focused and the boundaries of its world are colored with more muted tones: earthy, rusted, teeth and bone. the lore and folklore evoked by Werewolf stretches back eons farther than any pseudo-medieval age of heroes. we're talking ancient, echoing myths, seemingly infinite and inescapable. the moon's subtle glow filters into this world through layers of prehistoric legend. this isn't high fantasy. it leans on the grungy urban fantasy of World of Darkness and gives it an almost pantheistic tinge of spiritualism. everything has an underlying spiritual essence, and that essence has agency and personality of its own.

to play this game, your character must be or become a werewolf: a member of a Changed supernatural people sworn to respect the honorable old ways of their tribe, their pack, their lunar auspice. maybe your werewolf will be a hero, but it's not necessarily the bold, relatively more colorful Tolkein-esque hero D&D would have you play. I wouldn't call Werewolf optimistic in at all the same way. 

what both systems tap into, for me, is a sense of power. physical and supernatural powers are out here for the taking in these two games. for Werewolf it seems a raw, overflowing, barely-civilized power, frightening, at times violent, difficult to control but undeniably holding everything together somehow. part of the vibe of this game is whether or not you can find balance in your existence as part wolf, part human. 

for D&D the power we're playing with seems just a little bit more refined-- a power accessed through just the right steps, through hidden doors, magic books or months of training. the edges are sanded off a little. it's measured and glittering like lightning caught in a shard of crystal or starlight coaxed into a polished jewel. am I working my way into a metaphor where Werewolf is bare-handed street fighting and D&D is olympic fencing or something? well, not quite. but maybe sort of.

mechanics

like World of Darkness, Werewolf uses ten-sided dice and the same basic stats and skills and willpower, with modifications depending on which form the character may shapeshift into (human, near-human, wolf-man, near-wolf, and full wolf). there are also custom advantages and gifts that only werewolves have access to. they channel magic of a sort through contact with spirits and spiritualized objects. each werewolf earns dots of Renown in one of five categories, and these memorable feats contribute to that character's visible reputation, kind of like gang tattoos or ritual scars, but more mystical. they also have points of essence and primal urge that inform how powerful or capable they are. the Virtue and Vice system also functions here just like it does in regular World of Darkness.

health points work a bit differently for werewolves, which I find very cool. werewolves heal fast. even lethal damage goes away naturally within 15 minutes of in-game time, as you regenerate health at the beginning of every turn. if you choose to spend an essence point, you can regenerate even faster.  

this is partly why I have a sense of Werewolf as a game of power. they have heightened senses, buffed strength and speed, magic rituals and innate regenerative powers-- it feels like werewolves can do anything far more easily than anyone else can.

I'm sure in a longer series of play sessions that sense of power would have been tempered by various mechanics we just didn't get a chance to deal with in our one-shot. shapeshifting too carelessly can induce Lunacy in humans around you. essence points don't last forever. and instead of regular human morality, werewolves are bound by the rules of Harmony: an ethics system meant to measure the balance (or lack thereof) between instinct and reason, spirit and beast, tranquility and rage within each werewolf. sins against Harmony might cause derangement. and on top of all that, there's your legendary weakness to any pure silver weapon or bullet.

-

D&D characters are built with three main foundations and some very mathsy framing to hold it up for gameplay. we have 9 basic races (dwarf, elf, halfling, human, dragonborn, gnome, half-elf, half-orc, and tiefling), 12 basic classes (from barbarian to warlock), and various backgrounds (from acolyte to urchin). and this is exactly the order the book would have you choose each element-- race, class, and then background.

the options you choose here will influence your six ability scores (strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma), and these, in combination with other proficiency bonuses, will influence all other skill modifiers, maximum hit points, initiative, attacks, and defenses. on top of that you can acquire weapons, armor, and other equipment of mundane and magical aspect, some of which will add bonuses to your skills as well.

the book outlines D&D gameplay using three-ish categories: exploration, social encounters, combat encounters, and downtime. given the flexibility of RPGs, any given session or campaign might have more of some and less of others. in my experience, most players seem to expect and enjoy at least 2/3 (or more) combat encounters, with everything else filling in the other third (or less) around the edges. combat is some of the most exciting gameplay in this system. it can be an intense context for creative, critical thinking. and the dice keep everyone on their toes not knowing exactly what will happen.

the most important random number generator of D&D is the twenty-sided die. for most significant actions in this game, you'll roll a d20 and add a modifier depending on which skills or tools you're using to do the thing. the magic crossbow gives your attack a +8 to hit? add that number to whatever your d20 roll gives you. higher rolls with higher modifiers added are more likely to succeed, but it always depends on how difficult the task is to begin with.

there are other dice, of course. for various other rolls in D&D (damage dealt, hit points regained, hours left until you can cast that spell again, etc.) you need at least one set of seven (1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 2d10, 1d12, and 1d20). friend Patti, I think it must have been back when I was working on the board game version of The Plaid Identity, gave me my first set of dice. they are black with speckles and I still have them all (accompanied by many more at this point). thank you Patti.

approachability

the Player's Handbook for D&D is a slim, easy-to-read, well laid-out manual. decent organization and decent cross references for most stuff that needs it. and though it is not the only D&D book there is-- far, far from it-- it is the only one you really need to play. the rules and mechanics are easy enough to learn, though I do think different classes come with different levels of complexity. not every player is going to love having to keep track of which spells their character decided to prepare every in-game morning, for example.

the ubiquity of D&D of course makes a difference here, too-- there is a ton of support and help and overall enthusiasm for D&D plastered in easy-to-find spots all over the internet, from twenty-year-old forums to yesterday's reddit posts. there are apps that can guide you through character creation and gameplay. there are probably a hundred or more unique actual-play streams or podcasts or youtube shows for you to reference. there is merch of all kinds. almost anything you could ever want to talk yourself into. and the existence of all that is both cause and result of its popularity by now. you probably know at least one person who has done some D&D-related things at some point in their lives. overall it means pretty low barriers to entry for any D&D newbie. if you have any earnest desire to play this game, you have no excuses.

the Werewolf rulebook isn't much longer than the Player's Handbook, and for the most part it is just as well organized. but to be fair, the first edition of Werewolf: the Forsaken isn't so common anymore, nor so widely popular as the opponent I've set it up against. and for Werewolf to work as intended, you'll also need the prerequisite World of Darkness core book to get started. that's a bit of an extra hurdle, but only a bit of one. 

the extra rules of Werewolf are interspersed with plenty of short, moody vignettes and other, shorter introductory sections that set up the ancient gameworld contexts that function as in game mechanics. some of the font choices for one or two vignettes are perhaps a little audacious, the contextualizing lore sections perhaps a little too heavy on the italics. nothing major. I also felt that the order of things wasn't as smooth or intuitive as I might have wanted it to be, but only in quite minor ways. there are a good handful of decisions to make and lists to consult during character creation-- which of five lunar auspices will mark your character? which of five tribes will they belong to? which handful of possible advantages and gifts will you choose? it may seem like a lot for some, but it's all part of customizing the experience.
 

preliminary verdicts

of these two RPG systems, Werewolf is currently a smidge more intriguing because of its relative novelty. but of course it is hard to resist the massive phenomenon that is Dungeons & Dragons. I have already logged hours and hours of fun, engaging, dramatic, moving, often scintillating gameplay with good old standard, core-rulebook-only D&D. it's been around (in general and for me) for so much longer. it has become so ubiquitous, particularly in its 5th edition, for good reasons.

Werewolf though-- it's so unique. and even our basic, zero-XP, no-frills characters were rolling very exciting dicepools of 6 or 7 d10s on a regular basis during our very first encounters, which felt very cool. the spiritualism of the world was intriguing and a little creepy, almost evoking a sort of Studio Ghibli style abundance. and that's what I generally love about all the World of Darkness games I've played-- they get to be so consistently vivid. the imagery of them lingers most satisfyingly in my mind.

so I'll mull over this comparison while I write the rest of my reviews. stay tuned.

next new one-shot (tomorrow!): Scion: Hero

next match-up review (this week, I'm hoping): Pathfinder 2e vs Mage: the Awakening

quests

one of my many indulgences this summer was the game Horizon: Forbidden West. I loved the first Horizon game when I played and replayed it some years ago. its sequel is just as great.

the art is most glorious, with characters and cultures designed so carefully, so fascinatingly. and most key of all, the gameplay is fun and challenging and relentlessly open-world. we get to play as the obstinate, fearless Aloy, the redheaded chosen one, journeying through the wilderness to literally save the whole planet, heroically helping everyone she can along the way.

I can't quite tell if Forbidden West is more challenging than its predecessor or if I'm only feeling that way because I've successfully beaten the first one twice but have only made it through maybe two-thirds of the sequel. who knows.

some weeks ago I did make it all the way through the main story, but there are at least half a dozen more side quests. maybe more I haven't even discovered yet. fingers crossed I'll have time to play more once the fall semester starts.

almost since the opening cut scenes of this game made its themes so beautifully clear, I've wanted to blog about the analogue between its plot-setting and our own impending collection of climate disasters.

on this version of earth-- far, far in the future--we venture forth to explore and fight and piece together clues amid poisonous red vines, blighted land, thick storms, and corrupted machines making all of it even worse. the communities Aloy encounters tell of ruined farmlands, deepening scarcity, increased violence among the western tribes. barren sand has swept over most of what was once Las Vegas. the sea level has risen to bury San Fransisco. the earth is becoming less and less hospitable.

the game reinforces these threats in mild but consistent ways for the player. if you set foot on the red blight, your character coughs and sputters, losing health points little by little. it's not uncommon to find the bodies of birds, boar, and other wildlife struck down by those deadly vines. when you hunt, you might harvest blighted meat just as often as rich game.

Horizon: Forbidden West presents an open world, with lots of choices about where and what you'll spend your in-character time and effort. but it has limits, too. structure. boundaries. edges-of-the-map.

in real life, we have fewer of those, in some ways. we have real physics and real mortality, but there are no big blatant textual warnings that "you are now leaving the play area. turn back or your unsaved progress will be lost."

in real life, the consequences aren't spelled out like that. not so neatly. not most of the time. 

... or maybe the warnings for us just look different. maybe they are somehow differently blatant. if we pay close enough attention.

 

in real life, how to prevent the worst disasters of climate change is huge and complicated and uncertain. we know we have to do something, but it's overwhelming to think through which exact actions are really the best.

how nice it might be if we, like Aloy and her determined assembly of allies, had a clearly designed path we could follow to save our planet?

follow these clues,

... learn these facts,

.... bravely collect these specific resources from these dangerous conflict zones,

... simply reupload this set of technologies, programs, protocols to reboot this essential system,

... and then watch the world settle swiftly back into equilibrium with itself.

that would be fun, wouldn't it? so rewarding. so simple. 

but games are not like real life.

yesterday I watched Mr. Hank Green walk his audience through the recently passed Inflation Reduction Bill. Hank Green is smart and optimistic and it's a useful video.

games are not like real life. nobody is out there handing out step-by-step instructions for saving the world. we are not disposable video game characters stuck in the gears of a predetermined plot. 

pros and cons, eh? we get no easy checklist of instructions for succeeding at this or that quest... but nor is our path set in stone. nothing written in the stars or the script or the code of the world no matter what. (also no completely malicious, evil, alien masterminds hellbent on destroying everything, either, thankfully.)

life is life. we have to figure it all out on our own. not easy. but hopefully not pointless. 

did I mention the art of these games is glorious? someday I will buy this art book (ooh, this one will be out next year to accompany it, too...) and be able to admire it all off screen.

artful mending

I don't know when, if ever, I last used any of the four embroidery hoops I have lying around.

until today. I have put the second-smallest of them to work, and this is what I have done so far:

not the best photos, I know.

I worked in greens and pink using some darning/weaving, very inconsistent seed stitches, wobbly french knots, a tiny bit of chain stitch, and a little bit of reinforcing the eyelets. this is my first visible mending experiment. I hope it doesn't ruin this beloved skirt-- I've had it for 15 years or so. there are at least four more holes that need attention, one right at the base of the zipper, so that'll be tricky.

but here's the next one:

and then there are various pairs of pants and half-sewn skirts. and someday, if I am ambitious enough maybe I'll make a scrap quilt. that'd be cool.