Google Trends: The Retroclones

It crossed my mind tonight that there is scant information out there about how big of a piece of the RPG market OSR-style gaming represents. We hear the occasional odds and ends in relation to Kickstarter print volumes vs. the economics of the big game publishers like Paizo and WotC, but beyond a vague idea that the OSR market is 'small', there isn't much information available. Despite its small size, the OSR community makes a lot of noise online. So I started plugging things into Google trends to see what I got.

Several surprising things:

A 'Disease' Domain for Pathfinder

A little while back, I was thinking about putting together a Pathfinder Dragonlance campaign for playing online.  Still haven't actually gotten around to starting a game, but I did create a 'Disease' domain for a cleric of Morgion that I was going to use as an antagonist.  I built off some fan-created work that was around on the web, as well as some older 3e stuff:

Disease Domain
Granted Powers:  You are immune to the effects of all non-magical diseases.  However, you are still a carrier of mundane diseases- you can contract them and transmit them as normal, but never suffer negative effects such as attribute or HP lost as a result of infection.

• Touch of Filth (Su):  As a standard action, you can coat a weapon with filth fever by touch. This disease lasts 1 round, or until discharged by a successful melee attack. You can do this a number of times per day equal to 3 + your Wis modifier. The Fortitude save to resist the filth fever is calculated as per your domain cleric domain abilities, rather than the base save of the disease itself.

• Aura of Illness (Su): At 8th level, you can emit a 30-foot aura o sickness for a number of rounds per day equal to your cleric level. Using this ability is a swift action. Enemies in the area gained the sickened condition. These rounds do not need to be consecutive.

Domain Spells:  1st - Ray of Enfeeblement, 2nd - Ghoul Touch, 3rd - Contagion, 4th - Poison, 5th - Insect Plague (flies and maggots instead of wasps or bees), 6th - Eyebite, 7th - Waves of Exhaustion, 8th - Horrid Wilting, 9th - Energy Drain

Use it with Papa Nurgle's blessing.

E6 for d20

I've never particularly liked high-level play for D&D.

For me, a lot of what makes fantasy gaming fun is the iconic bits from books and movies- guys in armor with swords (or robes, with spells) facing off against Orcs and Goblins and other similar critters.  Once it gets to the point where it is a guy in flying boots air-battling with a host of demons wielding a flaming sword and periodically becoming invisible and invulnerable, I tend to lose interest.

I suppose that is why parts (though not all) of the OSR appeals to me- the back-to-basics, no god-fighting, no MMO-style superpowers and magic armor/weapons/shoes/blankets/hats aspect.  It's probably also why I've always liked WFRP, a game where, v1 naked dwarves aside, even basic opponents had a decent chance of cutting off your arm or something equally terrible if you didn't think carefully and stay cautious about entering a fight.

That's why it was exciting for me to have E6 for d20/Pathfinder pointed out to me in a forum the other day.  It's been around for years, apparently, but entered the world during a time when I wasn't gaming a lot in general, and wasn't playing d20 in particular at all.

E6 has a simple underlying idea: you might be a veteran of a dozen combats, but being hit in the head with an ax by an ogre should still be dangerous.  So after level six, you periodically pick up new feats to represent growing training (a little better at combat, a few more spells, a few new tricks for rogues and bards), but you stop gaining hit points, saves, and other automatic escalations of the game's power level.

The result is that the game retains some of that gritty, early-level feel.  Just because you've been around the block a few times doesn't mean that you can just wade into a pack of 300 goblins without blinking.  That means that iconic, low-level threats like goblins, ogres, orcs, basic undead, etc. stay threatening without the need to add tons of templates and character levels.

The result: a game that keeps the low-level feel of grounded PC's needing to plan and prepare to fight iconic opponents, and a distinct reduction in the amount of preparation that the DM needs to do.  Similarly, higher levels tend to be where the game-breaking magic items, spells, and cheesed-out prestige class/feat chain combinations tend to appear.  Low-level game balance- which is far better play tested and far easier to predict- dominates for a much longer period.  Rituals and magic items can add some extra effects if needed, but a mage can't just wish the entire adventure into total chaos.

Definitely worth a look if you're interested in a similar style of play- you can even grab some Pathfinder-specific E6 rules someone has put together.

Pathfinder MMO Announcement

Here was my honest response when I read the announcement at EN World that Pathfinder was announcing an MMO: I winced.

Not that I don't think Pathfinder is great, but rather because I do.  Making an MMO is hard, expensive, and usually fails in one way or another.  I worry that any resources spent on the MMO (and yes, I know a different company is going to be doing the actual coding and artwork, but there will assuredly be some impact on Paizo's operations) will be resources not spent on the Pathfinder game itself.  I worry in particular about what the impact of a failure in this space would be for Paizo's financial position, and thus the future of Pathfinder.

D&D Online had a much better known property and Hasbro/WotC money behind it.  It's currently a free-to-play and never made the big splash that WotC was hoping.  Warhammer online sank like a stone soon after launch.  WoW perpetually eats everyone's lunch, etc., etc.

I realize that gaming companies feel like they need to embrace the online world in order to survive.  They're right, but I think they often think this means 'make a video game'.  I wish instead they would invest more effort in facilitating online play of their existing games.  WotC's Online Tabletop has been at 'real soon now' status for some time.  Existing 3rd party projects lack publisher support.  Meanwhile, ConstantCon shows that there is both demand and a real possibility of success for facilitating online play.

MMOs, because of their shared setting and scripted interactions, can never really match the creativity and satisfaction of a good tabletop game.  The need to keep mechanics simple enough to be resolved by an algorithm instead of a live GM limits the challenges and situations that can be offered.  New ideas mean new code, which means a limited number of ideas can make it into each release.  I'm still convinced that making a professional online product that facilitated chat-based (or VoIP-based) play with shared maps, built-in rule/monster reference and a supported forum for finding gaming groups would keep a lot more gamers active in tabletop RPGs than trying to make a slightly different take on automated D&D.

On Gnomes

I have a weird confession: I like gnomes.  Not in a way that would be classifiable in the DSM-V, but as a PC race.

The first gnome PC that I remember playing was a 2e Thief created for a game a friend of mine ran during the 7th grade.  We played during a free-form elective class that we took that was ostensibly a chess club; eventually, someone had the idea to talk the teacher into letting us play AD&D instead (on the grounds that it 'used math').  Possibly as a result, I've never really learned to play chess properly.  Further gnomes followed, most of them thieves, illusionists, or (once 3e rolled around) wizards and rogues.

I think this is relatively uncommon.  Dwarves and elves have always been popular, I think, and humans are kept in play thanks to a wide variety of fantasy archetypes and wish fulfillment vehicles.  Even halflings have their constituency, consisting of Tolkien lovers, rogue/thief min/maxers, and recovering kender addicts.

But gnomes?  Gnomes seem to consistently get the short end of the stick, both from players and from the various keepers of D&D lore.  As the latest in a long series of insults to gnomes and their boosters, WotC has seen fit to make some significant changes to gnome lore, turning them into essentially sneaky junior eladrin.

This is a very strange circle to have come for a race that started out as junior dwarves.  No other standard race has undergone anything like the level of transmogrification seen by gnomes over the years.