Let’s start out with a bit of the negative. This can be delving too far into the concept that they like to pull into RPG’s from Improv of “Yes – And”. Quickly, “Yes – And” is the concept in improv that you let things roll. When someone throws out an idea, you roll with it and there is no such thing as a bad idea. Now, this is a bit oversimplification of the concept, but it often gets pulled into RPG’s. In theory, this seems like a good idea, it allows for creativity in your game, but there’s an issue with it. And it’s an issue with balance in the game. I’ve seen the concept of “Yes – And” exploited for some people who are too afraid to run their own game for fear of stepping on someones fun, and eventually you are no longer playing an RPG, or if it’s a podcast, it’s really hard to listen to.

So, how do you balance that out so that your game doesn’t go off the rails?

Firstly, I think that ‘Yes – And” is something that you can use in bits and pieces, it just won’t work every time. Or if you want to go to a point where you are really playing a game that is focused on that, pick a rules light game and is meant to be silly or absurd. A game like Fiasco is a good example of a game where it can be as absurd as possible as things fall apart and while there are dice, they are used exceedingly sparingly, to vaguely shape the story.

Next is a reframing of how we talk about improv in RPG’s. There isn’t a one to one correlation in my mind between the two. In stand-up improv (which is what I’m referring to when I say improv here), it’s about content generation and you start with the vaguest of concepts, often a place and a situation, that come up on the fly. That isn’t how most RPG’s work. Again, there are rules light ones like Fiasco or Dreamchaser that are much more about on the fly content generation, but when you have someone running a game who has put time into it, a lot of the improv has to change into something that is a bit more focused. One of the best examples I can give of this is a spoiler for a recent film, so let’s go back a little bit further. In Princess Bride, Billy Crystal, playing Miracle Max, improvises most of his lines. And they are hilarious as you can see below.

However, one thing to note about how Billy Crystal does with his improvised lines is that he is always moving the scene forward. I get wanting to be the funny person in the game you are playing, but ask yourself, is it moving the scene forward, does it make sense in the scene? While Crystal is doing improv, he’s also acting, and that balance is important often for a fun game for everyone. So before you start generating content with your improv, ask yourself if this is the right game and table for that.

Finally, for DM’s, “Yes – And” can work sometimes, but there are other phrases that work as well. These are “Yes – But” and “No – But”. I’ll try and explain these decently well so that you get the concepts that I have in my head.

Yes – And – An anything goes policy and a free flowing policy for playing RPG’s. Works in systems that are very light on rules and rolls but instead focus on collaborative storytelling. You also see that in board games like Winter Tale, Gloom, and Once Upon a Time.

Yes – But – This is probably the most common one that I do. The example that I’d give for this is someone wanting to jump down on top of a monster with their sword. Can they do that, absolutely. Will they take damage from the fall, absolutely. This is something that the character would know in the game, so I’ll tell them the consequences of their action before they do it. Even if it isn’t directly damage based, there are other things that can come from it. You kill all the goblins in the middle of town because that was the best plan you could come up with, or the safest one, that’s cool, you’ve thought it through, but don’t expect the towns folk to love you. They’ll respect you and keep and wary on you, but love you, probably not.

No – But – Out of all of these, I would use this one the most sparingly, at least until you are familiar with your group. The reason being, you want people to have fun, so you don’t accidentally want to shut them down by shooting down their ideas. The concept behind, “No – But” for me is that the player wants to do something that isn’t feasible in the game. For example, knock over a castle onto the evil king that is inside. Something like that, sorry, you cannot do that. Sure, you could eventually, but you don’t have the time or resources to do so, and if I let you do it now, it might break something later in the game, or become your go-to move. But, once you tell me you want to do that, I now can tell you about the loose tiles that make the roof and how you can use a grappling hook or something and pull down a punch of tiles on top of the guards on the top of the wall. The reason that I’m saying this one is trickier is that you need to understand what your players want to do and what they like. So you want to avoid shutting them down, but when you know your players better, you can get an idea of what they want to do, and bring in similar things for them.

So with that, you can create a game that doesn’t go off the rails but also still gives the players agency to add to the story and do cool things.

What I hope I did was show a little bit of difference between a pure improv sort of game and how you can pull some of the improv techniques into your game in places. The reason that I wrote this isn’t to say that games that are in systems with more mechanics, such as D&D and Star Wars RPG shouldn’t use improv, but as players and as the GM/DM, know how to balance it out in the game. Especially if you are making it into a podcast or adding in new players and don’t fully  know the group. And I will say that players who do have an improv background, you often can generate better dialog and crazier ideas on the fly. Just make sure that you are progressing the story while you do so, and everyone at the table, listening online, or watching will love you for it.

What are your thoughts on improv and RPG’s? How well do they mesh together?

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Secondly, I am going to be using more comparisons, most likely, in this post. My plan is to compare and contrast it against Dungeons and Dragons in particular and probably will compare it against the Fantasy Flight Star Wars game that I’ve run as well. The reason for doing this is to better be able to highlight what I do and don’t like about the Dragon Age RPG. It’s also to be able to highlight what I prefer so that you can make a more informed decision and see where my hang-ups with the system are more clearly.

Dragon Age RPG

Let me set-up the reason that I was running this game. With Dungeons and Flagons, and having tweeted about running Curse of Strahd, I clearly am most comfortable running Dungeons and Dragons. However, Kristen and I have some friends, a couple of whom hadn’t played many if any RPG’s before. They are big fans of the Dragons Age video game series, as am I, and the thought was that this would be a good introduction to RPG’s for them. I agreed to run this game, going through an introductory scenario, over a few sessions.

So, let me start right there. I was running a free module put out by Green Ronin Press. The module itself was laid out pretty nicely, and having the monster stat blocks easily available was nice. However, I don’t like running modules all that well. My reason for that, even with Dungeons and Dragons, is because it limits my creativity as you do need to follow the story fairly well or at least verify that on the fly I’m not changing a major plot point for no reason. This mean the game generally runs with less of a flow. The Dragon Age module actually runs pretty smoothly, but a lot of that was because it was a very simple straight forward module. I also felt like I couldn’t go off script because I know a little Dragon Age lore, but it’s just from the game, other players knew way more than I did. The one issue that wasn’t my personal preference about not running modules that I have was that there were a ton of NPC’s, and a lot of NPC’s with stat blocks. The issue with that is that it means those NPC’s are supposed to be in combat. So we had 4 players, 6 monsters and 4 NPC’s in the final combat, and it could have been five NPC’s. Any time I see a module doing that it makes me sad, because it’s taking focus off of the players. However, the module is balanced for that, so it’s risky to remove those NPC’s.

The game itself has a well written book. I’ve heard, but we didn’t get to high levels yet, that the balancing of the various classes is all over the board and that eventually rogues tank just as well as fighters. The information is laid out nicely and it gives you a ton of options. Literally a ton, the book is giant. However, it combines the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the Players Handbook, and Monster Manual all into one. While Dragon Age only has 3 different classes, Rogue, Mage, and Wizard, the classes from the video games; it gives you a ton of variability within the class. A rogue can be ranged or sneaky or stabby, a fighter can fight with a bow if you wanted or with a great two handed sword or a sword and shield and mages have a plethora of different magic options to diversify into. I think the biggest way the game let’s you diversify is with the races as you have various different Dalish elves (the elves in the computer game) that you can play depending on what you want your backstory to be and what class you want to play. The downside to this is that you need to know the world of Dragon Age some before selecting a character, otherwise the options don’t mean all that much. This compared to either Dungeons and Dragons or the Star Wars RPG that plays with more common character types that people are more familiar with, so it makes it easier for people to pick up.

The biggest feature and issue that I have with the game comes mechanically. Instead of a Dungeons and Dragons style die system like a lot of games have where you roll a D20 (twenty sided die) and add something, in Dragon Age, you roll three D6’s (six sided dice). This means that the math is slightly different from other games, which isn’t a big deal while running a module. Two of the dice are supposed to be the same looking, and one should look different. The different die is known as your “dragon die”. If you get doubles on any of your dice when doing an attack or casting a spell, you stunt. You then get stunt points equal to what is facing up on your dragon die. Stunting allows you to do cool extra things, like ignore half an enemies defense or deal extra damage. As compared to a critical hit in Dungeons and Dragons or a triumph in the Star Wars RPG, stunts happen a lot more often. How often they happen is and isn’t my issue with them. It isn’t an issue because it’s still exciting for players when they happen and you still feel a little bit like you’ve just had a critical hit. The issue with it is that picking out and spending your stunt points is not a fast process. There are multiple stunts all at varying point levels, so do you want to spend two points on these two things or three points on that one thing and then do something less with your last point? With the monsters they at least tell you what the  monsters favorite stunts are in order so it goes fast for them, but as players and as often as stunts happen, it slows down the game and combat.

In our game, we just used stunting in combat. And in the module there was a lot of combat. In Dragon Age, combat itself is quite brutal in terms of resource management which is similar to D&D and other games. The reason I call out just using stunting in battle is that you can technically choose to use stunts for more mundane activities as well. This takes away from the role playing aspect of the game and makes it into a roll playing game instead. As compared to D&D, Dragon Age focuses a to more on the dice, but a more apt game to compare it to is the Fantasy Flight Star Wars game which has you rolling a handful of dice at all times. In my opinion, while the Star Wars game can bog down with the dice as well at times, it does so less. There’s one major reason, in Dragon Age, the extra time spent on the dice is mechanical. In the Star Wars game, it’s much more focused on adding to the story. So even in the Star Wars game where eventually you’re doing less story and more mechanical things because you don’t know what to do with all the advantages and disadvantages, it’s still allowing for story based things and out of combat it allows for that as compared to out of combat stunts which are still more mechanically focused.

So, I’ve hit on the big things with the Dragon Age RPG, how well do I like it overall? I think it’s a fine system that feels like it tries to emulate a video game RPG a fair amount. While it isn’t my cup of tea as much as a more free form system like Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition or most definitely the Star Wars RPG from Fantasy Flight is, some of that comes from me having run a module. There’s just too much busy work for me to really want to run a game in the world. I would be interested in trying Fantasy Age, also from Green Ronin, which is using the Dragon Age system but is more generic. The reason for that is it gives more world flexibility and the freedom to play wherever you want without worrying about messing up cannon. I also think that I can run a game with more interesting characters in the Dragon Age world with a Dungeons and Dragons rule set than I could with Dragon Age RPG. But as a way to get someone to try out a pen and paper RPG who wouldn’t normally otherwise, but would try Dragon Age because of the video games, it’s not a bad spot to jump in.

Have you played/run either the Dragon Age RPG or the Fantasy Age RPG based off of the same system? How well have you liked it?

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As I’ve been teasing for a little bit, we are doing Star Wars trilogies. Using the Star Wars RPG system created by Fantasy Flight Games. So this is the first part of the Trilogy of Tatooine Troubles where we have a group of Bounty Hunters taking on a mission. Jason, Scott, and Sam (who did a guest article on Magic the Gathering back a while) were the players this time around.

First, I would like to apologize for the audio, it isn’t good. It’s actually very unacceptable. With new players, I turned their mics up higher knowing that they wouldn’t be as on top of them as we’ve gotten for Dungeons and Flagons. However, doing that, we ended up picking up a buzzing noise. I’m not sure if it was a projector that was running on the ceiling on the floor below that was causing enough of a vibration or a large Windows update that caused the issues, but there is buzzing in the background throughout the whole thing. I was able to remove it from a chunk of it, but where it was the loudest, there wasn’t much I could do without ruining the audio for our voices. I also then had to adjust the audio so that the volume of all the players would be a bit closer to mine, since I’m used to being on a mic now. So the audio quality is bad, I’d recommend listening to it with headphones as that was the best quality I got was when I was using my headphones and the audio gets worse as it goes as the buzzing noise gets louder.

With all of that disclaimer in the front, Tatooine, shortly after Episode 3, the Empire is gaining ground and they are always looking for the smartest and brightest. Our heroes haven’t been affected by that though as they Bounty Hunt on Tatooine, looking to make a payday, get a bigger score, get free drink tickets and as many chance cubes as they can. They are approached by a damsel in distress and their adventure begins….

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Peder and I first learned about the Star Wars RPGs through Campaign, a podcast run by One Shot. Campaign is just one of the many great podcasts One Shot runs, but it’s the one I’m most familiar with, and was a great (and hilarious) way to get introduced to the Star Wars RPGs. Through listening to Campaign, I learned a bit about how the game is played — and a LOT about how absurd and fun it can be when your RPG story regularly goes off the rails…but I digress.

There are currently three different modules of the Star Wars RPG — Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny. But even though the one Peder and I were most familiar with prior to playing AoR is the Edge of the Empire module, since that’s the one the Campaign group used, this knowledge still served us well. As I mentioned, gameplay is very similar for all three modules; there are just some different options and basic storylines/timelines within each.

AoR is, to my understanding, meant to be set at about the time that the Rebel Alliance was at its peak (so, close to when Luke, Leia, and Han were entering the picture — or at least, that’s how I choose to imagine it). In our session, we and the other players played as the motley crew of a Corellian YT-1300f freighter — the same type of ship as the Millenium Falcon. Together, we had to work together to stop the evil Director Lucas from releasing edited versions of a certain trilogy of beloved films to suit his “great vision.” We had to destroy the master copies of the edited (read: degraded) films before they were released across the galaxy — and before the original versions were destroyed forever! Much quoting and some George Lucas impressions (even one from me…) ensued.

This storyline was a really fun one, and struck the perfect balance between casual fun and high-stakes action that you want for a one shot session. Some of us played as human characters, and some as aliens (I was a young human woman, Peder was a Bothan); this let us get a feel for the spectrum of different characters you can play within the Star Wars RPG universe. And even in that short time, we were able to pack in a fair amount of character development. I kept on rolling horribly throughout the game, so I used that to style my character as absurdly clumsy and absentminded. And during our first combat encounter, Peder had his character use his knife — he then took this moment and ran with it to make his character super sneaky, sly, and obsessed with stabbing people, and used that element to hilarious effect several times.

Though the Star Wars RPGs have character sheets and skill mechanics that are similar in some ways to what you’d see in a few other RPGs, what’s really interesting and unique about these games is the dice system. This is because these RPGs use their own special set of dice — instead of using the usual many-sided numbered dice like in most other RPGs, the Star Wars games have different colored dice printed with symbols, which correspond to different aspects of the game. There are green dice, which determine how successful a given action is, yellow dice, which determine how successfully a skill is used, purple dice, which influence an action’s difficulty, and red dice, which are added in for especially difficult actions. There are also blue dice, or boost dice, that can be used to make a skill more effective, and black dice that add in extra threats. The white die you see in the image is a Force die; however, we didn’t use this much, and it’s one that never really seems to get used often, so for our purposes, I won’t go into it for now.

There are a couple of elements involved in how the type and number of dice to be rolled is determined. Beside each skill on the character sheet, there are symbols showing which dice should be rolled when using that skill. In addition to this, the GM will let the character know how many dice to roll for the difficulty level when the character performs an action.

For a quick example–let’s say I’m dressed up in a stormtrooper uniform, trying to bluff my way past a superior officer. I’d likely use my deception skill to do this. We’ll say I’m really good at BS’ing, and that there are three green symbols and a yellow beside my Deception skill. The GM decides this is a reasonably difficult maneuver, so he’ll tell me to add in two purple dice. So I’ll roll a total of six dice (getting to roll huge handfuls of dice is another great feature of this game, incidentally) to get my result. Successes (on the green and yellow die) and failures (on the purple and red die) cancel each other out, as do advantages and threats. So we’ll say that, all told, I’ve rolled well and gotten two successes, one advantage, and one threat. I would then need to describe just how I succeeded, what my advantage was (maybe I’m so good at bluffing that I strike up a friendship with the officer), and what the threat turned out to be (maybe I don’t know the answer to a key question the officer asks and I have to make up something on the fly).

If it sounds complicated, well…it is, a bit. And this isn’t even touching on some of the other elements of the game (which I’ll avoid going into for now for the sake of keeping this simple as I can). Getting used to the way the dice interact with each other can take a little time to figure out, and I was glad that I already knew at least a little about the dice mechanic from listening to Campaign. However, once you get going, it starts to feel pretty natural, and the GM can likely help out if there’s a dice roll with a particularly confusing result.

In any case, I really like this mechanic overall. Due to the way the advantages and threats affect the successes and failures, players have to be more creative and detailed when they explain what’s happening, and this adds a lot of flavor and depth to the story overall, in a way that feels more baked-in than with other systems. As I tend to favor the narrative side of RPG play over the combat element, this is my favorite thing about the Star Wars games, and getting to experience it firsthand was as fun as I imagined. Beyond the compelling story element, we had a great GM and a player group that gelled well, making for a truly enjoyable session as first-time AoR players!

So, have you played AoR or any of the other Star Wars RPGs? How do you feel about the unique mechanics of this game? If you haven’t played it, is it on your list of systems to try?

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1. It’ll be really nice to already have one of my games ready to go for next year. There was one of the two games that I ran which I’ll have to rework, but it’s nice to know that one of them is ready to go. Along with this, I also need to plan out my games starting a bit sooner than the last minute. I did the character creation on live stream well ahead of time, but actually get the details in place and the encounters, that would be good.
2. Plan more downtime. I always want to be around people, and I loved playing in the games that I did, however, I was burned out physically by the end of it. My mind was telling me to keep going, and my body on Sunday was like “nope” and that won out. So plan a few more open time slots, go back and rest at the hotel more just to keep myself ready for the whole weekend. The nice thing with planning downtime is that if you want to join a game that someone is randomly putting together, you totally can with that downtime or break out a board game, but if you don’t have it scheduled, you can play it by ear or by how you feel.
3. Don’t do a late night game followed by an early morning game. In this case I ran them, one got done just about midnight, and the other started at 9 AM, so really a good amount of time to rest, but not when are you stressed about the upcoming game and wanting that to go well. A late night game and a midday game (or even starting at 10 in the morning) would work better.
4. In my case, bring my own pillow. I’m a light sleeper, and without my own pillow, I was tossing and turning all night, and that led into my body being like “nope” on Sunday. If you need something in particular to ensure you get a good nights sleep, bring it along.

   

5. If you are driving more than 8 hours, split it up into a couple of days.  I think that would have helped myself as well, since I do most of the driving for Kristen and myself, the 13 hours out there was a lot. Splitting it up on the way back with a 5 hour and a 7 hour was much much better, and we’ll definitely be splitting it up next year on the way out as well.
6. Plan snacks and water better. With it being in a convention center, you had to buy their snacks to eat at the place, but we definitely should have done that. Already traveling and eating poorer because of that, we were hungry a lot. I also drink about 75-100 oz of water on an average work day. When I don’t drink that much water for a few days in a row, I start to notice it and that also contributed the Sunday flop. So, healthy snacks or small meals even, at the hotel room, and drink lots of water are going to be key for a better time next year.

For me #4 and #6 are probably the biggest ones for me to remember. I try to eat healthy fairly often, and the food at the convention center was kind of terrible. So next year, I definitely  need my pillow so I can get better rest, but also should try and eat better, have some good snacks and keep that physical energy level higher even when by brain is still telling me go go go.

What are some tips or useful things you’ve found when traveling to a convention?

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