Tag Archives: dresden files

DFRPG Q&A 2

By | | Dresden Files Playtest, What's he playing?
8 Comments

Just one set of questions today:

Iorwerth says:

How do weapons and armour work? Do they just add stress levels / subtract stress levels?

Yup. The system is pretty chunky – what I mean is, there aren’t extensive weapons and armour lists. Each has four categories, rated from one to four, that tells you how many stress levels it adds or mitigates. Given how much difference a single level can sometimes make, this is about as detailed as you really need in the game. And with the idea of setting up the kinds of cinematic, rollicking action scenes you see in the novels, that’s about the level of detail you want to keep things simple and fast.

As to magic, when drawing down power do you need to roll, or do you just draw down a level equal to the relevant skill, whatever that skill is?

Once you have drawn down the power I believe you roll your control. Do you need to get a score above the power level to control it? if you don’t, I presume it spills out and has unforseen effects, and may do the caster damage?

With a stress inducing spell, does it do the power level in stress points, or the level of control you have, or something else?

Okay. Quick-and-dirty breakdown of spellcasting. First, you decide how much power you want to use. If this is an evocation, you take one point of mental stress for drawing up to your Conviction skill rating, then an extra point for each level above your Conviction.If this is a thaumaturgical ritual, you don’t take that first level of mental stress, so if you stick to using power equal to or less than or equal to your conviction, actually calling the power doesn’t give you any stress for thaumaturgy.

Then, you need to beat that power down with the strength of your sovereign will and force it to do what you want. This is a Discipline roll, where you have to equal or exceed the levels of power you have called. If you don’t, you either take the difference as backlash (hurting you as either mental or physical stress) or give it to the GM as fallout (hurting the environment and maybe your buddies – this is how Harry manages to burn down buildings). How things are split up is your choice – you can be selfless and take all the damage, selfish and take none, or somewhere in between.

There are, of course, other factors, like focus items and preparation and taking extra time, that can come into the mix, but those are the basics. Basically, even a minor spellcaster with plenty of time to research and prepare can accomplish a great deal safely, while even a fully tricked-out badass wizard caught offguard can push himself over the edge pretty quickly, wearing himself out and melting his brain.

Just like in the novels.

That’s today’s questions. Keep ’em coming.

DFRPG Q&A 1

By | | Dresden Files Playtest, What's he playing?
2 Comments

First off, a clarification from Chad Underkoffler, one of the authors of the game:

Point of fact: Chicago is not fully game-statted as Baltimore is, but it’s got a METRIC TON of cool, real-world (not necessarily series-based) weirdness in it.

My bad, folks. I was skimming the sections for the previous post, and missed this. Thanks to Chad for setting me straight.

Now, on to questions:

Lanodantheon says:

Question: Does the magic section talk about the limits of magic’s interaction with technology?
What I’m talking about is the magic items/foci/whatever-they’re-called that interact with technology to work.
(Specifically, Elaine’s chain thingie that she charges in a light socket.)

Well, there are rules for hexing, which covers the basics of magic and technology interacting. Elaine’s chain would be an enchanted item, like Harry’s force rings, I believe. There are no explicit rules for how it charges up in the light socket, just like there are no explicit rules for how Harry’s force ring charges from him moving his arms, because really it’s just jazz. Looking at the guidelines in the section on hexing, though, I would rule that it might cause problems around sensitive electronics, but not more than Elaine herself would. That is, unless I was using it to throw a complication at the player, in which case I’d give him or her a Fate Point to go with it.

Rechan says:

Hey Rick! I lost the URL for your site, I’m really glad to be back. :)

Welcome back! You’ve been missed.

The DM chapter, does it talk about how to make adventures? To be honest, the DFRPG scares me in terms of GMing, because coming up with a cohesive mystery every “week” is really daunting! I know “Tie it to your players aspects”, but for instance if they smoke one PC’s nemesis, that aspect – that avenue – is gone. Same thing if they shut down something one player is very concerned about, then it’s hard to bring back. Not to mention other matters of maintaining a good Noir/Mystery/whatnot feel to the game, like clues and how to make things not obvious, does it address this well?

Lenny Balsera actually posted a really good answer to this in the comments of the post. Thanks, Lenny! About all I can add to what he says there is that, at the end of the city creation process, you will have so many good locations, themes, threats, and NPCs that ideas for adventures are fairly squirting out of your ears. And if you get the players involved, then they’re going to have a lot invested in those things, and their own agendas – more rich and fertile ground for adventures. Also, the section on advancing cities talks about how to deal with changes to the established environment like killing off a nemesis or solving a major problem in the city. In short, the advice in the book is very good on this subject, but the rest of the book supports the idea of making good stories so well that really it’s just the icing on the cake.

Are Pure Mortals the only ones that can take mortal stunts?

Anyone can take mortal stunts. They’re called that because there’s no supernatural powers involved. Having said that, supernatural characters are less likely to have mortal stunts because they’ve spent their Refresh on supernatural powers instead.

How is Sponsored Magic different? Is it a template that can be dropped onto any PC? Or access to new stunts/powers? It handles stuff like deals with Fey too, right? Or is that just “Hey, look at Emissary”.

Fluff-wise, Sponsored Magic is different because it’s something that originates with an outside power source, like an angel, demon, dragon, magic talking sword, or, yes, one of the Fey. Emissarys are one of the templates that have the option of taking Sponsored Magic, but Changelings and Knights of Faerie also have it. Crunch-wise, you get a little extra oomph in some of your spells, but you are subject to the whims of your patron – if they don’t want you to work a spell, it just don’t work. And they can attach any strings they want to it. For example, if you’re the Winter Knight, and you want to use your Unseelie Magic in a manner that your Lady disagrees with, she can just not let the magic work. Or, she may allow it to work, but demand a favour in payment.

This is also a general question for you. You talk about multiple character creation sessions. How do you deal with players who want to Get to the Game RIght Now? A lot of people I know would not be patient enough for spending more than x hours doing that sort of thing. And, doing City AND character creation simultaneously sounds very… ADD. How do you organize that?

Good questions. There are options for quick play, when you don’t want to spend the time up front building the city or the characters. In these cases, the characters and city get built during play, on the fly, adding Aspects and Skills and whatnot as they come up in the story, and paying any Refresh cost then. If you’ve seen the quick play options in Spirit of the Century, then you’ve got the basics.

Now, as for the time involved, character creation goes pretty quickly – the sessions I’ve run have all taken less than three hours, and that includes explaining the system to the players. And the character creation system is fun, in itself; in fact, the game takes the point of view that making the city and the characters should be part of the play, and as much fun as all the other parts.

Doing city and character creation together would be a little taxing, I agree. The way it’s spelled out in the book, you work it in stages: once you get to a certain point in creating the city, you have enough of a framework to build characters that really fit in with what you’re doing with the city. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in a single session, either; I can see doing portions of the city creation (like, say, research) independently, getting together in a session to work up to the point where you’re ready to build characters, then having another session to build characters and finish off the city stuff. Two sessions.

James Cartwright says:

Great write-up, can’t wait for these books.

Thanks! I’m anxious to get my hands on the physical versions, myself.

Are there stats for ‘Mouse’ in the books and is there the ability to make your own temple animals like ‘mouse’?

thanks

Yes, there are stats for Mouse. There’s also an extensive write-up – almost a full page – on Temple Dogs, that would make it very easy to create other Temple Animals. There’s also a note in the in-characters notes that, as statted, Mouse is a viable player character, if you choose the right power level.

Jon Hammersley says:

So how are enchanted items handled? Some (potions) are obviously single use items but how do you limit something like Harry’s ring that stores kinetic energy?

Each crafter has a number of slots allowed to them, based on the kinds of powers you’ve taken, which they can fill with enchanted items. By default, enchanted items have a limited number of uses per session. You can remove that limitation by having it take up more than one slot. Expending extra slots can also increase the power and flexibility of items.

Does using a specific created foci (ritual knife, blasting rod, staff, etc) decrease the difficulty of controlling magical forces and how does it do so?

Okay. Magic is comprised of two phases: gathering the energy and controlling the energy. When you create a focus, you choose whether it will help you gather energy or control it. If it helps you gather energy, then you can safely call in one more level of power than you would otherwise be able to. You can still exceed this amount, but then it starts causing problems, like fatigue. If you choose to make a focus that helps you control energy, then it gives you a bonus level to the skill that you roll to control the power. And if you fail that roll, bad things happen to you, your surroundings, or both.

So, that’s all the questions I’ve received so far. I hope the answers are helpful.

Let me know if there are other questions I can answer, but I won’t get to them before tomorrow evening.

Digging a Little Deeper

By | | Dresden Files Playtest, What's he playing?
18 Comments

So, judging from the traffic coming in this past day, people are very interested in the Dresden Files Role Playing Game preview sent to the playtesters a couple of days ago. I’m still working my way through the books (did I mention it’s almost 700 pages?), but I figured I’d do two things to help satisfy the desire for information.

First, I’m going to invite questions. Want to know something about the game? Leave a question in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer it. One proviso: I’m working from the preview and, while it’s fairly complete, there may still be some last-minute changes. From what I’ve seen, I doubt it, but you should know.

Second, I’m going to put a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the two books below, with a brief comment on what’s in each chapter. That’ll give you some idea of what to expect when the book comes out and you go buy it.

Because you are going to buy it, right? Right.

Volume One: Your Story

This book is about playing the game. It’s a combination of player book and GM book; the co-operative nature of setting up the game advocated in the book makes this a natural choice.

Chapter One: Harry’s World

This chapter gives a short overview of default game world, based on the Harry Dresden books by Jim Butcher. It lays out some important concepts that you need to understand about the underlying assumptions of the world and game, including a section on Maxims of the Dresdenverse.

Chapter Two: The Basics

Here you get the bones of the FATE system, the modified version of FUDGE that’s the engine driving the game. It covers the mechanics of your character sheet, the dice you roll, what they mean, and how to use Fate Points.

Chapter Three: City Creation

Part of the fun of playing DFRPG is creating the city to be a home base for the game. This chapter walks you through the steps, including showing you where in the process you create the PCs. The system is more structured and focused than the playtest version, and you wind up with a nice collection of aspects and NPCs for your city, as well as some good dynamic situations for your players to deal with.

Now, there’s a sidebar in this chapter that talks about how you don’t really have to do this step as a group with your players. They recommend doing it as a group, though, and so do I. Why? because that way you make sure that the city you build has all the pieces for the kinds of stories and conflicts that your players are interested in dealing with. And it’ll give you some interesting surprises throughout the process.

Chapter Four: Character Creation

In the previous chapter, they recommend that you do the character creation as part of the city creation, to help tie the characters more tightly into the setting. This is a good idea. They also recommend doing character creation as a group. I think this is essential for any FATE game. The novel phase of character creation pretty much demands it.

They also mention the idea of having the GM create a character, and I found this to be a great idea in the playtest. We had multiple playtest character generation sessions, and I created a number of NPCs this way. It gave me a nice stable of NPCs with ties to and history with the PCs. I’m going to go one step farther than their recommendation, though; I’m going to suggest holding a couple of extra character creation sessions to have your players help put together some NPCs.

Chapter Five: Types & Templates

This is where they list the different types of characters available, and what powers and stunts you need. The options outlined here are:

  • Pure Mortal
  • Champion of God
  • Changeling
  • Emissary of Power
  • Focused Practitioner
  • Knight of a Faerie Court
  • Lycanthrope
  • Minor Talent
  • Red Court Infected
  • Sorcerer
  • True Believer
  • Were-Form
  • White Court Vampire
  • White Court Virgin
  • Wizard

There’s also a discussion about what to do if you don’t want to play one of these archetypes, but instead want to play something different, like, say, a Ghoul. Really, it’s pretty easy and flexible.

Chapter Six: Advancement

I haven’t looked closely at this section yet, but along with the standard information about how the characters advance, there’s also a section on how your city advances, which I think is a brilliant idea.

Chapter Seven: Aspects

Aspects are the meat of the system. They’re what makes FATE work. The discussion in this chapter spells out everything you need to know about them, including the kinds of things that make good Aspects, and what I call the Aspect Trick – picking Aspects that do double or triple duty for you.

Chapter Eight: Skills

Not much to say about this chapter. It’s skills -  the list of them, how to use them in different situations and for different purposes, stuff like that.

Chapter Nine: Mortal Stunts

Stunts are what give mortals their edge in the game. The way things balance, mortals will be the ones with the most stunts available to them. These are usually special ways to use some skills, or a different thing you can spend a Fate Point on, little things like that. Nothing huge, but stunts can really add flavour and variety to a character.

The chapter consists of three pages of rules for creating your own stunts, and then about nine pages of example stunts. This is very nice; one of the things my group had asked for during playtest was an expanded list of example stunts. And Evil Hat came through in spades.

Chapter Ten: Supernatural Powers

The counterpart to the stunts of the previous chapter, supernatural powers are the extra gravy you get for playing a supernatural character – the things that set you apart. These are expensive, and really cut into the Refresh Rate of Fate Points. This is the primary balance mechanic between mortal and supernatural characters, the thing that lets you play a Karin Murphy alongside a Harry Dresden. There’s about thirty pages of these, and it covers a wide enough range to let you build just about anything you want.

Chapter Eleven: Playing the Game

This section covers pretty much the entire mechanics of the game – it’s about thirty pages (well, twenty-eight), and handles actions and physical, mental, and social conflicts. Except for spellcasting, this is all the system you need. The system is great for running very cinematic, action-packed scenes, and we found that physical conflicts were threatening enough that the players were worried every time one came up that their characters would die. This is, I think, important for a game – there needs to be some risk, or success and failure stop mattering. It also led to some great roleplaying, as players (and characters) did their best to figure out ways to avoid the risk of combat, sometimes even just running away.

Chapter Twelve: Living With Magic

Here’s where the nature and flavour of magic in the Dresdenverse are laid out. Here, you find out about things like hexing, The Sight, soulgazing, the Laws of Magic, Thresholds, and Wizard biology and senses. The next chapter tells you how magic works, but this is the chapter that tells you how magic feels.

Chapter Thirteen: Spellcasting

It’s a game about modern magic, based on a series of books with a Wizard for a main character. You better bet that spellcasting gets some love, here. I’ve already talked a little about how the system has been changed to bring spellcasters into balance with the other character types. There have been a couple of other things added that really fill in some gaps: first, along with Evocation and Thaumaturgy, they’ve added a section on Sponsored Magic, which is essentially what you get when you make a bargain with a demon or a god. Second, they’ve included a nice list of examples of all the different things discussed in the chapter: evocations, thaumaturgical rituals, focus items, enchanted items, and potions. Very useful, because this is the most complex part of the game.

Chapter Fourteen: Running the Game

This is the GM chapter, and covers the GM side of all the things spelled out in other parts of the book. As is usual with Evil Hat stuff, it’s solid, useful, and detailed. The advice is practical and insightful, everything focused on telling a good story with the game.

Chapter Fifteen: Building Scenarios

One of my favourite bits of Spirit of the Century is the section on building adventures. This chapter does at least as good a job, showing how to build the kinds of situations and events you see in the Dresden Files books. It’s all about connections, in this game, tying you into the city and characters you’ve already created, so that everyone has an emotional investment in what’s going on.

Chapter Sixteen: Nevermore/Baltimore

All through the city-building chapter, they use the example of Dresdenifying the city of Baltimore. Here, they give you the results of of the fleshed-out example, a ready-to-play city for your use.

After this, there follows a glossary and index, as well as copies of the various forms and sheets used in the game. The index isn’t filled in, yet, but the rest of the stuff is complete and useful.

Volume Two: Our World

This is the setting book for the game, though some of the setting elements are covered in Volume One. As I said previously, you cold probably play the game without this book, but I think you’re really going to want it. Especially if you’re a fan of the books.

It looks like the book is going to open with a new story by Jim Butcher; for now, they have the short story Restoration of Faith as a placeholder.

Chapter One: Old World Order

Here we’ve got the low-down on the various power groups in the Dresdenverse and how they relate to one another. There’s a detailed discussion of the Unseelie Accords, as well as a lovely little section called Supernatural Conflicts That Could Kill You RIGHT NOW. Fun stuff.

Chapter Two: What Goes Bump

This chapter has a complete, detailed, statted roster of monsters, spellcasters, animals, and mortals. This does double-duty, both as a section of adversaries, and as a blueprint for building characters. It also has a very useful little list of how the various different supernatural baddies stack up against each other, so you can answer that vital question, “Who would win in a fight between a Faerie Queen and a Dragon?”

Chapter Three: Who’s Who

And this is where you find all your favourite characters from the Dresden Files. And the ones you love to hate. And the ones you’ve completely forgotten about. This section is amazingly complete – even if you never play the game, if you’re a fan of the Dresden Files, this book is a wonderful guide to the world.

Chapter Four: Occult Chicago

Carrying on in that theme, here we have Harry’s city: Chicago, in all it’s supernatural glory. Yeah, that’s right. Between the two books, you get two, fully-worked up cities, in case you don’t want to create your own, or if you need some inspiration. Because of the wealth of source material in the series, Chicago is a little more fleshed-out than Baltimore, and it’s got a lot of good information for play.

That’s it. After that, you get the index.

So, there’s the look at the two volumes of the game. I gotta say, it’s impressing me more and more as I read through it. It’s good stuff. I can’t wait to buy my hard copies this summer.

But that’s enough out of me. What are you folks interested in? What questions can I answer? Let me know, and I’ll do my best.