Team Yankee in 6mm

As I have said before, in addition to tabletop role-playing games, I also dabble in tabletop wargames. One of the wargames I play is Team Yankee, a game from Battlefront Miniatures, a delightful company out of New Zealand that has a popular World War II game by the name of Flames of War (yup, another wargame I dabble in). Team Yankee (TY) is, unlike Battlefront's other games, not based on an actual war that happened in Earth's history, it is a "what if?" scenario based on a fictional novel of the same name by Harold Coyle - what if World War III kicked off in Eastern Europe in 1985? It's an interesting time as it was the time when Gorbachev took over Soviet Union, the moment when the Soviets realized they were not keeping up with NATO and the West economically and could have chosen someone other than Gorbachev who would have kicked off WW3 just because it was their only choice to survive as they were at that time. In TY, that is what the USSR does, chooses a warhawk as General Secretary instead of Gorby (remember when he was the bogeyman here in America?) and the tanks start rolling towards the Fulda Gap. It is also interesting, time-wise, because it is pretty much the last time when the USSR enjoys technological parity with NATO and the West. Shortly after the mid-80's, I know that America improves many of their weapon systems - M1 Abrams were upgraded to M1A1, the Cobra attack helicopter was replaced by the Apache, the Dragon man-portable anti-tank guided missile was replaced by the Javelin, the M113 armored Personnel Carrier was replaced by the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, and so on. Many other countries in NATO also were upgrading their equipment. That is not to say that the USSR and later on Russians made no advancements, but those advancements were not as major as what was seen in the West.

Enough geopolitics, just know it's an interesting concept (yes, may you live in interesting times kind of interesting) and Battlefront made a fun little game based on their Flames of War (FoW) rules set. It is kind of funny, because in addition to FoW, Battlefront had several other wargames related to it that had not been as popular - one for WW1, another for the Vietnam War, and another for the Arab-Israeli wars in the '60s and '70s - but had still made them because the company was interested in making them and there had been enough demand in the market for those games. They figured TY would be more of the same and gave it a similar limited release... and then it became more popular than FoW. At least until FoW, which was in the need of a rules refresh, got that rules refresh and became top dog (at least in Battlefront's stable of games) once again. But it still is interesting to see that Battlefront totally did not expect this game to be as popular as it is, which is where we find ourselves today.

So about the time TY came out, I was just getting into FoW due to a friendly coworker in the Army Guard who wanted to get into that game and wanted to make sure he had someone to play with. We discovered TY at about the same time, and the same friend made the comment that TY would play so much better in 6mm. Back in my Confessions of a Tabletop Gamer post, I talked about how I am playing TY in 6mm, but this is where it started - my friend was interested in playing TY in 6mm because he knew the classic modern wargames (Cold War Commander and the like) play mostly in that scale and a major miniatures manufacturer, GHQ, had been making miniatures for US Army sand tables and civilian wargame players for generations. I took a look at prices of the standard 15mm models vs 6mm models, the size of tables needed to play one vs the other, the common scene of "tank parks" in TY games (so many tanks on the field they are parked track to track), and told my friend, let's do it. And so I did, I purchased a bunch of 6mm mini's for the US and the Soviet forces, got some pieces together to do terrain, bought rule books and army books, joined FB groups, talked with other friends who have played the standard 15mm version and have played exactly zero games. Until today (or a few days ago, depending on when I get this typed up and posted).

This is a real photo of a major TY game in 15mm back in July. No, tanks rarely get that close together in real life.

It does not seem like much of a difference, so why not just play the game in the standard 15mm? For me, and these arguments have gone on many other places so I am not really breaking new ground or convincing anyone who thinks that 15mm is their preferred scale, but for me it is a better scale to play this in. The savings on the cost of minis is a big factor for me. Due to this being military vehicles, Battlefront can't put their trademark on them, so they are not the only suppliers of these models like other wargame companies, and their prices are competitive with the other 15mm scale minis out there. And quite good quality (as long as you stay either with the metal or plastic minis, and away from the resin minis), but for my game I want huge armies clashing over big fronts, tens of vehicles and hundreds of infantry clashing across huge battle boards, and when you talk those numbers, none of the 15mm mini manufacturers can be close to the 6mm price. Not just on the tanks and infantry, but on trees and buildings and roads and so on, not to mention storage for everything is also commensurately cheaper because everything is half the size. In addition to cost, the size of the game expands greatly. As you will see in the pictures of our game later on, you can play a 6mm game in a very small space and still have plenty of room to maneuver. And space to maneuver in a game like this is so much more satisfying than sitting there, front armor to front armor and pound away at each other. Having said all that, are there downsides to playing in 6mm? Yes, it has been noted that these types of games are much more visually attractive in 15mm, so potential new players are more likely to come over and see what you are doing, as it is more visually striking. And, of course, Battlefront tends to make more money from book and miniature sales than they do just book sales, it's always nice to support the company who makes the games you play. 

Today (or, you know, whenever), after a long hiatus, the friend who originally got me interested in FoW and TY and I played some Team Yankee, in 6mm. Both of us have had some pretty intense life events the past couple of years, including one of us going on a deployment to a foreign country with the Army National Guard, buying and selling houses and moving, changing jobs, and life in general. But today the stars aligned and we finally got to get some playtime in. My friend, who is very much a war buff, has never really played many tabletop wargames, though he has played a lot of the simulation board games, he just never had the opportunity to play wargames. And to be honest, even as popular as FoW and TY are, they really aren't historically accurate, leaning more towards playability and fun and expediency over simulation and accuracy, but I think he understands that is why he can find people to play those games, but not the more accurate board games he has played in the past. I on the other hand have tabletop wargame credentials going back to high school with games like BattleTech, Warhammer and Warhammer 40K, and more recently Mobile Frame Zero and Gaslands, games that are more like FoW and TY. Plus, as I have all the books - my friend has been meaning to buy the books, it is not me saying he cannot, just he hasn't done it yet - and have other friends who are actively playing the game (albeit in 15mm despite all my attempts to get them to try 6mm), I am more familiar with these type of games. But I still had not played the game much more than my friend had. Knowing we both did not have enough familiarity with the game, we decided to throw a game together, play with what we had, and learn as we went.

By "throw a game together, play with what we had", that is what we did. Even though I have gathered some terrain bits and pieces together, namely some size appropriate trees I have yet to put on bases, plus some road pieces that need painting and assembling, and a ton of papercraft buildings that need printing and putting together, I do not have any finished terrain and my friend even less than that. So we took some sheets of paper and started drawing out some basic terrain pieces - trees, hills, roads, buildings, walls, and even fields. Knowing that terrain has to be mirrored, something I have seen far too often in other games is an unbalanced board giving advantage to one side over the other, I set up a board that offered a good mix of dense urban and open and close wilderness areas. Too often I see wargame tables that offer little to no cover, something that anyone in the real world would look at and decide it is tactically not worth going into that particular killing field, so I made sure the board felt like it had decent cover (not just in the start box), but not so much that there weren't any open fire lanes at all. Over all, as cheesy as it looked - tiny table covered in various paint hues from past projects, half painted miniatures (even some standing in for other vehicles or pieces of paper standing in for even more minis I did not have ready), and pieces of paper representing terrain, it was still lots of fun.

I am not going to go into the details of the Battle, we both made pretty big mistakes tactically, but it was a learning experience that we can build on and that is what matters. The cogent points of what we learned about the game are as follows:

-Repetition, repetition, repetition is what teaches you the game. The more you play it, the more you remember it, the easier and faster the rounds go.

-Don't spend your opponent's turn thinking of what you should have done on your turn, use that time to think about what you are going to do next turn.

-The rules try to be as common sense as they can be, but let's face it, you will come across something Ina my game that you don't remember perfectly, don't be afraid to dig in and verify.

-As in many wargames that used six-sided dice for everything, TY uses just one d6 to decide if you hit or not. Try to do as much as possible to make that chance to hit worse. If by using cover you change your chance to hit from a 3+ (or on a 3, 4, 5, or 6, or 2 chances in 3, or 66%) to hit to a 4+ (or on a 4, 5, or 6, or 1 chance in 2, or 50%) to hit, it may not seem like much, but you have changed the odds significantly. And in games like this where there is an element of randomness to everything, you have to swing the odds in your favor as much as possible.

-The one thing I had to keep reminding my friend was "this is a game and not a simulation." TY is a fun game, and fairly historically representative, if not 100% accurate, because the makers realized it is a game and must do some things for the game's sake. It does a good job of giving the feel of the forces and technology in play at the time - the Warsaw Pact has lots of cheap vehicles and infantry with some high tech, costly options, while the NATO forces have lots of high tech, costly mainstays with a few cheap options that help them balance out the force charts. It is very much "quantity vs quality" on one side and "quality vs quantity" on the other.

Enough of me prattling on, time for the pictures.

I told you, pieces of paper were our terrain. Here we are after the end of everyone's first turns. Yes, the table is under 4' corner to corner (the long way) and you can see that we still have enough area to do some maneuvering around each other. We settled on halving all distances, even the area covered by artillery bombardments, halved to accommodate the scale of the miniatures.

The Soviets stuck together while the Americans went for envelopment. The Soviets' biggest tactical error was not going for cover whenever possible. And clustering up under repeated artillery barrages, though every time I "ranged in", he made sure to run away from the marker.

The American Abrams are standing in for M60 Pattons, so this is not as threatening as it looks. We played 50 point armies, which is not all that bad, but Pattons meant I could do more than minimal tank platoons. Likewise the Soviets went with T72s instead of T64s to get more on the field. 

Yep, one of my biggest tactical errors - M901s go BEHIND any other vehicles, as they have tons of range and no armor. With a moving ROF of zero and a minimum range on their weapons, M901s need to get their firing positions early and sit as far away from the action as possible.

Americans have already lost their scouts, but the Soviets lost their arty and some tanks. The American Pattons are doing well only because they are forcing misses by sticking to cover, as the T72s' AT of 22 is a bit much for the Pattons' front armor of 15. I did manage one roll of "7" on an armor save... but only one.

The Soviet BMPs died to concentrated fire from several different units but most of the Soviet infantry managed to bail out and not die. The American infantry is trying to set up to assault, mostly because I wanted to test out those rules, not because I thought this was a good idea. 

The American HQ sat at this corner of the building and calling in artillery more than doing anything else. The American artillery was busy the whole game, and while it would have been most effective against the infantry, it never got to shoot at them as no one ever got a line of sight to them. And in the background, yes, that is Shilkas fighting M901s at point blank range. Oddly enough, the M901s made it through the battle.

Yup, besides one move at the very end, American artillery sat here from the beginning and kept their guns hot. And I just realized that my friend who was playing the Soviets wore a red shirt. That irony escaped me until just now.

The end. The M901s have run, the T72s have been almost wiped out, the Shilkas died to concentrated Patton fire, the American infantry lost their M113s but are having a good time assaulting the Soviets. The Soviet Commander is about to get wiped out and have to jump into a nearby T72.

The Americans did not come out unscathed, one Patton platoon is wiped out and the HQ Commander passes from the Captain to the Lieutenant. 

As we had spent more time than necessary learning and researching, we decided to end it here even though we were playing Annihilation. With as many losses as the Soviets had - all that was left was part of the infantry, the commander, and the last two T72s of one platoon - we decided the Americans won and called it there.

The biggest lesson from all of this was, if you want to play a game, just go play the game. You don't have to have fancy terrain, painted minis, or know all the rules. Or even a table of sufficient size.

Getting Back into the Cyberswing of Things

I have not played any Cyberpunk 2020 in well over a decade, but with Cyberpunk Red and Cyberpunk 2077, and my D&D 5e group at an odd crossroads of needing a one shot game session for just one weekend with only a portion of the party, here I am Reffing CP2020 yet again. As I am getting back into it, I am rediscovering many resources that I just did not have when I last played it, because the internet is a wonderful thing. Figured I would share some of the wonderful resources I have found as I gather them together.

Part of the new technology I find myself using in my tabletop gaming is 3d printing. About a year and a half ago, the technology (still very much in it's pubescent stage) had gotten good enough and affordable enough that I felt good about making a printer purchase. In other words, at the price point I could afford, I did not feel like I was wasting time nor money by purchasing a printer that would not perform or be unreliable or too complicated and hard to keep running. I picked up a Creality Ender 3, and have since been using it mainly to print medieval fantasy terrain for my D&D game. I do not have the time to print much for my one shot game - 3d printers are awe inspiring, but they are not fast, especially if you like higher quality prints, and mine is not just printing for me, but also for the wife - but I have already gathered quite the collection of .stl files from the 'net. By the way, when someone draws or drafts a digital object to be 3d printed, it is generally saved as a .stl file. Okay, enough technical gibberish, if you do have a 3d printer and are interested in doing some printing for a CP2020 game - search not only for "cyberpunk" but also for "shadowrun" on the usual suspects, Yeggi and Thingiverse. Yeah, yeah, I know, Shadowrun has got too much medieval fantasy in its dystopic sci-fi cyberpunk, but there are some really decent cyberpunk-ish prints out there.

In between starting this post and typing to this point, I ran the one shot with my players. We did not play for long due to some scheduling hiccups, but I had just planned a quick intro for them - chose from the Screamsheets in the core book the bad cyberware one, made up characters for them and made them roll to see who got to randomly choose first, provided them with cheat sheets stolen from Seth Skorkowsky, and even reference materials like the US history timeline from Land of the Free and the Night City map from the core book. After a brief intro to the world - you live in the combat zone of Night City, a large metropolitan complex between LA and San Francisco in the free state of NorCal, think Mogadishu from Black Hawk Down, but with more guns, drugs and technology - we were off. The players were duly impressed that combat is not serious but downright deadly and had only one combat, but many social interactions. It does show that CP2020's combat rules, at least if played straight out of the core book, does take time, and me and one of my players are looking into creating an app for ourselves that would make it much easier. Also, as none of us has grabbed the Red Jumpstart kit from GenCon (no, I didn't get to go, why didn't you pick one up for me, too?), which I have been meaning to get at least the digital copy from Drive Thru RPG, we'll take a look in there and see if there is anything useful when it comes to making combat go a little quicker. But, I was also planning on whipping together an app to generate characters, at least for all the things that involve a random roll table, so I may be doing a combat app as well, anyway.

A few notes from running the game - I did just the most minimal prep on the game, literally as little as I could get away with. No over-arching plot, no grand scheme by shadowy forces, grabbed one of the Screamsheets like I said, decided how it would go (yes, basically railroaded my characters, but it was introducing them to the world and the system, didn't have time to let them wander) and spent most of the time making up the characters I gave to them. Speaking of, I made them roll randomly, and let the highest pick a character, again at random, just held the character packets face down, so none of them knew what they were getting. I made sure the scenario was far more talk and investigation than it was combat, but this way they got more of a feel for the world and setting. That was the biggest issue, my players are used to D&D, where almost every campaign synopsis ends with "...and save the world/country/civilization", but CP2020 is far more "...and earn enough money for the next cyberware upgrade" or "a night in a coffin and kibble for the week" or "pay off my loan shark", and always "and don't piss off too many better armed people/corporations/gangs/other edgerunners". The other idea I had to disabuse my players of was the question of legality. Legal or illegal in the dark, grim future is more of a question of if you are pissing off someone with a bigger or more guns than you, hence the dystopic setting. Smaller, more personal goals, both for the PCs and the NPCs and bad guys that is what is called for in this game. It is not a bad thing, but I could easily run a game in CP2020 for years off a basic random jobs table (the columns would be which gang/corp/other entity is hiring you to do what to which gang/corp/other entity and also have a plot twist column and who likes that you did this thing and who hates you for it), I have even started up similar tables for both Champions and Planet Mercenary in the past, and now I will have to do one for Cyberpunk, either Red or 2020, or both. Yet another project, hopefully this one gets more time to devote to it and if I do complete it, enough time and interest from my players (current or future) to actually use it.

Speaking of CPRed, as I am typing this all disjointed and whenever I get a spare moment, I did finally pay $15 and got the Jumpstart Kit from Drive Thru Games. This is a very hasty, "I glanced through it, but haven't played or reffed it" review of that product, so take this with a huge grain of salt and understand I may be missing some huge issues or fixes for those issues. Things I really like so far - art is very good, liking the new Netrunner rules, as well as the simplification of the combat mechanics, the print and cutout paper minis (though I had to source my own bases, but that is what 3d printers are for, just need to wiggle them into my printing schedule). What I am not so fond of is that as a long time 2020 player, the Jumpstart Kit just is not meaty enough for my tastes. No, I don't expect them to update every supplement from the old game immediately for the new game, but I want the core book updated fully for Red. I want pages of cyberware and weapons and gear and programs and drugs. I want Screamsheets by the dozen. I want to meet this new generation of NPCs and get new, funny quotes from them. I want pages of random character generation tables. Oh sure, I know we got to wait a bit, and a beefier core book is probably in the works, waiting to come out with the video game Cyberpunk 2077, but I was kind of hoping it would be sooner. We shall see. More in depth coverage coming soon.

Lessons Learned 22

Welcome to the last Lessons Learned of this arc of my campaign. I have, over a year and about 4 to 5 months dragged my party of players, kicking and screaming, through 2 campaign arcs, 1 interlude, and their characters up level 10. Or 11, I have not done the last experience point disbursement, and too tired to go mess with it right now. I am handing off the party to the one player in the group who was dumb brave enough to agree to run a couple of sessions to let me catch my breath and also get in some playtime.

Finally, we got to the boss battle. Like many tables, mine is fairly loose when it comes to attendance, not that I could really enforce any strict rules with these players. If I did try to enforce a strict attendance policy, I would have to find new players as all of them have missed multiple sessions. This is why I make them leave their character sheets at the end of every game with the understanding that if they miss next week, someone else will be playing their PC. However, with the end of this arc of the campaign, I had to take 3 weekends off before I could get them all together for the big final battle. I did not want them to miss out, and also did not want the party to suffer because someone was not there giving the best performance of their PC. 

The players knew they were close to the big bad, and knew generally where he was at, but they just couldn't ignore the secret door nearby. It did lead to the big bad's personal chambers and treasure room (and she-devil lovers, which, by the way, "semen demons" is the funniest thing I have heard in a while from my players). You never can tell, there is an entire and admittedly empty section of that dungeon my players showed not one lick of interest in, but even as close as they were to the final battle, a whiff of secret treasure hoard and they were all over it. Though I couldn't get them to search in the right places for the treasure room's secret entrance until one of the PCs - half dead from the encounter with the erinyes devil girls - decided to take a breather and sat down, leaning on the secret door. I don't want to kill the PCs, I want to see them win but cannot hand it to them on a silver platter - that just robs them of all of their agency and makes it not fun. That is something I get accused of online all the time when all I have done is created a world that makes sense to me and not allowed every race, class or option to my players. *shrug* Oh well. But when i have to, I work with whatever my players give me, because in the end, I am rooting for them, too.

After a long hiatus, I finally got my 3d printer going, upgrading it to a glass bed - which has made levelling a breeze, utterly negated any curling or "elephant foot" I had previously experienced, and vastly improved the bottom of my prints. I had previously printed up a bunch of OpenLock dungeon tiles, thinking to make some very Dwarven Forge-like dungeons, but those, printed before the glass bed, had not come out very consistent and are just not great. As we have been running almost all of our combats on a hunk of Plexiglas with a grid underneath it, the tiles weren't as useful, and I realized what I really need are walls, not floors (which is mainly what the tiles are for) and I needed more "scatter terrain" - tables and chairs and pillars and chests and fountains and thrones and altars and summoning circles and so on. 3d printing is a wonderfully complex and fulfilling hobby that, if you can find a need or want to fill it with, can be very rewarding with only a little in the way of resources. Tabletop RPGs and wargames have a lot of needs in the way of miniatures (and their accoutrements) and terrain that a 3d printer can satisfy, but while it is relatively cheap - my printer I bought new for a little over $200 and the filament is roughly $20 for a 1kg roll that prints a lot of pieces - it is very time consuming. Multiday prints are more the norm then not, and while I am not actively maintaining the machine that whole time, it is a very long time between hitting print and pulling the finished piece off the bed. Anyway, deciding on scatter terrain, I have started with a basic set of pillars (every good medieval fantasy needs pillars in it) and am currently printing up a bunch of basic walls I can use to add a lot of depth and flavor to my admittedly bad drawing skills on the Plexiglas board. Next up, tables and chairs.

Here are some pics of my last setup from the final session, which I had to recreate afterward because I forgot to take pictures during the session. You can see the 3d prints I have made recently (the black is the filament I printed them in, the gray is my rather poor painting skills to make them look more stone-like), printed them from this file and this file, the actual miniatures are a mix of WizKids Deep Cuts and Reaper Bones, both fantastic, affordable options for the modern gamer (and not painted by me), and the printed paper minis are Rich Burlew's fantastic A Monster for Every Season, of which I've talked about many times before. And the marks on the Plexiglas are my usual feeble attempts at relaying what is going on with dry erase markers (hence, why I'm printing out scatter terrain), so the dwarves are crouched in a trench outside the ambush area, our heroes (the minis) are crouched in cover, and the dragon, cocky old thing, has landed and is about to relay his ill temper, right next to the pit trap filled with spikes. The stone pillars and walls are barricades the players and locals have placed in this area for what little protection they can offer.

And there are some fantastic groups on Facebook (FB's only purpose, in my mind, unless you want your family to endlessly send you the same memes everyone else is and everyone argues endlessly about politics) that talk about nothing but 3d printing terrain and miniatures for tabletop role playing games and wargames. You should check them out - Tabletop 3d Printing Guild, The Horde, 3d Printing for Gaming Terrain, and 3d Printed Terrain & Miniatures.

The party is heavily using the polymorph spell to turn various party members into dragons to use in combat. This isn't early level bad guys, we are talking CR 10 to 13 bad guys, so I have decided they know that little trick and don't go after the dragons, they go after what looks like the most likely spell casters and wail on them instead. Or cast dispel/counterspell as often as the players can. Either way, whether those spells get countered or the spellcaster fails a concentration, that doesn't actually matter, as long as the spellcasters are worried. That's what makes the game exciting, a sense of danger and struggle.

In D&D, go for the ones holding Concentration spells, not the high HP tanks.

In addition, when I am building up my big bad's, especially as I am translating a lot of this from 3.5 to 5e, I do not follow any of the established character guidelines - they get what I think is cool. Wizard/sorcerer spells and cleric spells, plus thematic cantrips and multiple initiatives, and Billy Badass in hand to hand with a high AC and big HP pool? Yup. You know my players (and yours, don't fool yourselves) are a bunch of rule twisting munchkins and they'll destroy your precious BBEG faster than you can blink, so make it interesting. And if they are draining the HP too fast, make the pool bigger and deeper. It is all about the tension and the worry.

My players chose during the fight with the big bad to have an argument about the mathematics of dice probability. Well, okay, two of them tried to argue with me, but my side got taken up by a third player while everyone else sat out. Including me. I don't argue probability curves, especially with my players or anyone who thinks they know them but really don't. If you ask nicely I will explain it, however I don't care if you think you know but are wrong. That is your problem. The two most important things you have to remember are this - dice have no memory, otherwise known as they do not "remember" what they just rolled when you roll them the next time; and the more dice you roll equals less random results and more average results, also known as why do we continue to roll 3d6 for stats, why not just go straight to a d20 and be done with it?

Even with this being the final two sessions of the campaign arc, your players will be as flaky with their attendance as any other session. Just remember, no matter how hard you stress being there or arriving on time, it just does not matter as much to your players. Feel free to punish them accordingly. I kid, I can't punish them, they just don't take the game as seriously as I would like them to. I guess that is why I am the DM and they are the players. I think the only other thing that really bugs me about my players - because the lateness and missing sessions is easily my number one, being former military it drives me to distraction - is that I have been trying for well over a year to get my players to do a flashback at the beginning of each session, kind of remind everyone where we are at in the story and what they were planning on doing this session. I start every game with "Last time, in the continuing adventures of [INSERT PARTY NAME HERE]..." and then I have to hand hold them through a quick flashback. They never just go back and say what they did last session, they always, ALWAYS, go back to the last thing they did. Time is linear folks, start at the beginning and then move towards the end. You would think after more than 50 sessions they would figure this out, but you would be wrong. Huh. Maybe they're doing it on purpose to push my buttons. Never thought of that.

Okay, last lesson I learned from this campaign - if no one else in your group is willing to DM or GM or Referee or whatever your game calls it, just go for it. It isn't like the bar is very high, as it is literally "did you have fun?" "yes" "SUCCESS!!!" So you can't do all the voices Matt Mercer and the Critical Role cast can, no one else but they can do that, trust me. You're not as experienced as Matt Colville, but even he doubts what he is doing constantly. And if you stick with it, eventually you will be as experienced as he is, too. You may not be as creative as Gary Gygax, but the world (and your players) doesn't need you to be, they just need you to keep trying, and they'll meet you in the middle. Does that mean you shouldn't try to improve? By all means, no, keep learning and trying to make the game more exciting and fun, but don't despair that you're not the best when you start.

I Love Technology as Much as the Next Guy, But...

A lot of time with this blog, if you have not noticed it, I tend to ramble and wander all over the place. Most of the time I talk about what we are doing in game (my Lessons Learned series, talking about my 3d printing, the renewed interest in all things Cyberpunk, etc) or I jot down a quick note of something funny that I want to talk about. Like this one. A little over a year ago I posted about how technology was great, but it's not quite at a level that makes sense, at least at my table and at the level of hardware we can afford. You can read that post here.

That is not the funny part, the funny part is that, when I shared the post to a D&D group on Google Plus (which is now defunct... how much changes in a year), one of the replies I got was the following.

Tablets and phones are, for the most part, still too crappy for this. I DM from a monster gaming PC with three 4K monitors, and my players all use high-performance laptops. We track everything through the Fantasy Grounds software, which is all connected and updates in real-time for everyone. We use a combo of online and physical rule books, but the online rule lookups are quite snappy on decent hardware. Honestly, the completeness of the Fantasy Grounds character sheets greatly reduces the number of rules we need to look up.

What kills me is the level of hardware required to make playing a game acceptable - as fast and responsive as using the dead tree editions - is both expensive and heavy. Remember, that is according to their own standards, not my own. Maybe they are counting every time they have to lug a very heavy gaming laptop to and from a game as their workout - and I used to have an Alienware gaming laptop, those things are monsters and heavy as a small anvil, so I know that pain rather well - but if the requirements are so high just to play the game in person, would it not be easier to just play it online, from the comfort of everyone's gaming chairs?

As I talked about in the blog post, if you could make phones or tablets affordable enough and fast enough (hardware wise) to make them as fast and accessible as physical books, I would be all over them. Until then, I like having the .pdf digital copies for research purposes (it takes up a lot less room than the shelf o'books, and much more accessible from the gaming chair in front of the computer), but for the actual games, give me hardcopy.

Medias in Cyberpunk 2020

The Media in Cyberpunk 2020, one of the iconic character riles, has puzzled me for the longest time. Traditionally, I have played Solos (because who doesn't love killing everything within sight?), Fixers (loved being the boss or the guy who can get you whatever you want), Netrunners (COMPUTERS AND THE NET ARE COOL!), and Nomads (Mad Max!). Medias and Rockerboys on the other hand, not some of my favorite roles, mostly because I guess I never really understood them. I think most of that was because I had never run into any really compelling fiction describing medias and rockerboys. Until recently, that is. I have recently come across two pieces of fiction that have really shown me what a Media can be like in a dystopic, futuristic setting.

The first is only vaguely cyberpunk - it is definitely futuristic, science fiction, and dystopic, though the last part you have to dig for - and a zombie apocalypse series to boot. Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant, wrote a zombie apocalypse series by the name of Newsflesh that follows a pair of (adoptive) siblings who report on the news and, while following a big story, uncover some very naughty players in their government, and tell the whole world what they have been up to. I really like these books, because I'm a huge nerd (as if you hadn't figured that one out yet) and love me a good zombie tale. More importantly for all things CP2020, these books are a fantastic example of what it is Media's are doing in the grimdark almost/might-have-been - finding the truth and living long enough to share it with everybody. These are journalists that give up practically everything in search of the truth, and encouraging their readers to Rise Up! at every opportunity they can.

Transmetropolitan, on the other hand, a comic by Warren Ellis from the early to mid "naughty aughts", is an entirely different animal. It is full on a futuristic, dystopian cyberpunk tale, starring a jaded, apathetic (who is really sympathetic, but don't let on that you know) journalist in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson, except with more drugs, more artillery, and more cynicism. It really is the tale of a cyberpunk media with no messing about or digging for the similarities, and about as cynical and dark as you want to be without going so far that your players lose all hope and have to be put on suicide watch. I have yet to finish it, but am most of the way through it, and it keeps surprising me - AI helpers that are also on drugs; strippers turned medias turned nuns turned solos; and more weird, sci-fi oddities than you can shake a two headed cat at.

Both of these pieces of fiction have given me something I was missing, not only the motivation of a media, but what fuels that motivation, as well as what success and failure in a dystopic world means for the media. Yes, even as wildly different they are from each other in tone and setting, they are still both fascinating and entertaining, plus a bit educational. If you have not read either one and looking for some inspiration for your own media, take a look at these.