March of the Machine's Implications for the MTG Story

 I'll put this caveat here that I don't follow the Magic the Gathering story super closely, but I kind of absorb it from wikis and YouTube videos, and occasionally the short fiction they publish on the website.

There was a several-year build up to War of the Spark, which saw Nicol Bolas (the one Elder Dragon Legend I ever got, even if it was just the Chronicles version) attempt to restore the godlike planeswalking power he'd had before The Mending by harvesting the planeswalker sparks of as many planeswalkers as he could lure to Ravnica. Given that this was a plot based entirely around killing planeswalkers, it came as a bit of a surprise that only a handful of established planeswalker characters died - most notably Gideon Jura, who tanked the lethal curse baked into Liliana's pact so that she could turn the Dreadhorde against the dragon. A lot of people complained that the stakes, which had seemed to be elevated so high, wound up feeling sort of lower.

Now, the plot also brought about huge changes to Ravnica, which might be the most popular plane, such as the fact that a lot of guilds have been totally reshaped - as a side note, the Ravnica D&D campaign I'm running has an Orzhov Cleric who now wants to kill the Obzedat Council, and while that's not really what my campaign is supposed to be about, I've been trying to figure out if I should introduce Kaya as an NPC and let that play out in-game as it did in canon, though with my party helping.

Still, following the conclusion of that plot 4 years ago (dear lord, time is weird) we're now gearing up for a new climactic arc-conclusion.

I will say, all of this seems to be much faster-paced than I remember older plot arcs, but on the other hand, I'm older. If you consider the original Phyrexian invasion plot to have started with Tempest Block in 1997, its conclusion with Apocalypse would have come after four years in 2001. We could say the current Phyrexian plot officially got going with Vorinclex's arrival on Kaldheim, which was in 2021, so... ok, yeah, that's only two years.

Anyway, very swiftly, the body count has racked up significantly. Not only was everyone's favorite Task Mage killed, but we've now seen a number of long-established characters compleated by the Phyrexians. The longstanding immunity Planeswalkers have to compleation (which, incidentally, is a major plot point in my D&D campaign) has been overcome, and so we've got beloved characters like Ajani and Nissa now playing for team body horror.

This kind of bleak, sweeping wipe-out of canon characters did, of course, happen once before in the past. In Invasion Block, the primary heroes of the past several sets were put through the freaking abattoir. Sure, Urza dying to destroy Yawgmoth for good (and so far it looks like that, at least, stuck) made sense, but we also lost Gerard, Hannah, and a number of other established figures. Basically, when the dust settled, there were only a few characters still around. The subsequent Odyssey Block introduced new characters as a new focus for MTG's story, though after the subsequent Onslaught Block, they decided instead to start jumping from plane to plane each year (and after War of the Spark, they'd start jumping from set to set - something I'm not 100% happy with, as it means we don't get to really become invested in any of these new worlds and plane-based mechanics tend to get swept away in favor of eternal deck archetypes - Kamigawa Neon Dynasty had a lot of cool ideas around Vehicles, but subsequent sets didn't really give us anything to develop that theme with).

That being said, I also think that MTG is a much bigger brand now, and as with all comic-book-like endless narratives, I'm always going to be a bit skeptical about their decision to truly kill off a character for good.

So, I see a couple possibilities for the aftermath of this plotline:

First, the Phyrexians have figured out a way to get to other planes without being planeswalkers. The Mending did bring Planeswalkers down to a power level where they could become cards, sure, but I think the total ban on non-planeswalkers traveling to other planes has been kind of stultifying for the story. We could never have something like the Weatherlight's journeys today (honestly, if there's one compleation I'm most upset by, it's that ship,) and I think it would be cool to have mere legendary creatures actually become recurring, plot-relevant characters once again. I think keeping Planeswalkers to just powerful individuals but then letting others journey between worlds could introduce some really cool new plot possibilities - I mean, just off the top of my head, wouldn't it be cool if House Dimir started planting agents on other worlds?

Second, I wonder if there's some redemption for any of the compleated planeswalkers. Phyrexia is a horrifying and implacable foe, but they've already established that while it's not clear that any Phyrexians are "good," so to speak, at the very least there are figures like Urabrask who are capable of resisting the hive-mind tendencies of Phyrexia and even tolerating the existence of un-compleated people. As it stands, any of the planeswalkers we've seen get turned have swiftly fallen in step with Elesh Norn's agenda of total conquest and conversion, but is it possible that some of them might simply develop new agendas that aren't entirely contradictory to more heroic characters' desires?

Third: is this the end of Phyrexia? I somehow doubt that they'd be willing to ever totally wipe out the Phyrexians. It came really close at the end of Invasion Block, with the destruction of Yawgmoth and even the original plane of Phyrexia, but then Karn had to accidentally bring a drop of oil to Argentum (I believe within the Mirari?) Again, we have to think of this in terms of comic book continuity. In any other medium, eventually bringing the Phyrexians back for a third time (arguably a fourth if you count Antiquities as their first appearance) would feel repetitive, but give it a decade or two and I'm sure that people will feel ready to face them again. I do, however, think that MTG needs to develop some new multiplanar threats (something that the first possibility could help establish).

Anyway, we've only gotten one card-art preview of March of the Machine, which seems to depict Thalia, from Innistrad, riding a legendary frog (can't recall the name, but he's summoned as a token) from Kamigawa, and possibly in Ravnica, which would seem to lend credence to possibility 1's likelihood.

Metroid Prime, Two Decades Later

 In November of 2002, I was in my Junior year of high school, and I got what I believe was my second Metroid game. I was first introduced to Samus Aran thanks to the surprise hit that was Super Smash Bros. in 1999 for the N64, which got a follow-up a mere two years later in the clearly far-higher-budget Super Smash Bros. Melee, which would remain the gold standard of the series I think until Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Anyway, I was familiar with Mario and Link, Donkey Kong, Yoshi (there were a lot of Mario-adjacent characters in it) and Kirby, etc. But I'd was unfamiliar with Samus other than the single screenshot of Super Metroid on the back of my SNES-Donkey Kong Country bundle that was my first game console. Samus quickly became my favorite character in Smash Bros, and so I decided to try out Super Metroid, and loved it.

And then, they announced Metroid's long-awaited transition to 3D, having missed the N64 generation entirely outside of Samus' appearance in Smash Bros. Rather than a 3rd person action-platformer, they made it a 1st person shooter and... somehow it worked?

Metroid Prime works just like a Metroid game, except that it's in a 3D world and you see things from Samus' POV. One of the charming touches of that choice is that they really make you feel like you're inside the helmet - when there's a flash of bright light, you can see Samus' face reflected in her visor, and things like condensation or electrical interference with her HUD will pop up.

Anyway, there's now a remaster of the game on the Switch. While I don't believe there's any really intense gameplay rebalancing, there are two major elements: the graphics are fully updated, which makes it look like a modern game, and the controls have what has become the standard two-stick control for first person shooters - the left stick for movement and the right for aiming.

I haven't yet unlocked any of the alternate beam weapons, so I don't know how I'll be switching between them, but so far the Pro Controller has been a great way to play the game (the standard JoyCons are too small for my big hands, and cause me to cramp).

I believe I selected the easier difficulty level, so I hesitate to remark on its challenge. I still dread the frost-elemental boss in Phendranna Drifts that gave me so much trouble back in the day, but I also have 20 more years of gaming under my belt. If I could one-shot Malenia on my most recent Elden Ring playthrough (albeit with an overpowered build) I should be ok, right?

I actually never finished Metroid Prime 1 or 2 - I only finished the 3rd one. So perhaps I'll finally put that notch on my belt.

First Look at Project Black Flag

 Kobold Press, which collaborated with Wizards of the Coast on some early 5th Edition books and has also produced the massive Tome of Beasts and Creature Codex (and Tome of Beasts 2) books, along with many others, was one of the 3rd party companies that announced their intention to build their own RPG system in the wake of the OGL fiasco. While I haven't written One D&D off, I'm also eager to see the RPG world diversify, and I've been curious to see what these other companies have cooking.

Project Black Flag is the codename for Kobold Press' new RPG system, and there's a free PDF of its initial playtest packet out via this link. I recommend taking a look.

My impressions are fairly positive if a little surprised to see how similar it is to the existing 5th Edition system, but I wanted to point out some of the differences that I think are really notable:

First, you can generate ability scores basically the same way, and then you can add a +2 to any score that's 16 or lower and a +1 to any score that's 17 or lower, which means no one starts with a 20 in their main stat. Point buy and the standard array no longer allow for the +2/+1 bonuses, but those are incorporated into them. The Standard Array is now 16, 15, 13, 12, 10, and 8 - which is a little more rigid, given that currently, you can put you +1 bonus to whatever stat you give the 15 and your +2 to whatever you give the 14 so that you get two +3 modifiers at level 1.

Point buy now has a maximum score to take of 18, and still uses a table where higher scores are harder to come by. So, for example, if I were playing a Rogue and really only wanted to max out my Dex and maybe get some decent Con, I could get Dex to 18, Con to 14, and then put 10s in Int, Wis, and Str, and have an 11 to Cha. If I wanted a broader spread for a Paladin, I could take 16 in Str, 14s in Con and Cha, maybe a 12 in Dex and then, say, a 9 in Int and a 10 in Wis.

The next change I think is actually really cool is the division between Lineage and Heritage. Lineage is the new name or race, and specifically refers to your inherited physical traits - things like a Dwarf's resistance to poison or an Elf's Trance ability. Heritage, then, is the culture you grew up in, and kind of takes the place of "sub-race."

However, because your Heritage is purely cultural, you don't actually have to be a member of that Lineage to pick it. While Elves in this have the Cloud and Grove Heritages (more or less High Elves versus Wood Elves,) if you were a Human raised by Wood Elves, you could take the Human Lineage traits and the Grove Heritage traits. This is also suggested as a way to represent mixed ancestry - if you're a half-elf/half-dwarf, you might physically represent your elfishness in your Lineage while your have all the training and culture of your Fireforge Dwarf heritage.

Backgrounds are fairly similar, and come with a "Talent," which is the equivalent of a Feat. Talents come in different categories - Magic, Martial, and Technical. Like in 5E, you can choose them instead of an ability score improvement at certain levels (we don't have the classes yet, so I don't know if the frequency is different here).

The talents are a little more streamlined - Armor Training, for example, basically works as Lightly Armored, Moderately Armored, and Heavily Armored and you can take it multiple times if you really want your Wizard to wear plate. My general sense is that these talents are a little stronger - for example, the equivalent of Tough not only gives you the +2 bonus to HP for each level but also increases your hit die by one step (for example, giving your Fighter a d12 hit die) though my little quibble here is that it doesn't seem to be retroactive, meaning that you need to take this early if you want to benefit fully.

It's interesting, and closer to 5E than I expected it to be. I'll be curious going forward to see how this develops.

Gold, Credits, and Player Motivation

 So, while I'm not really anywhere close to running it, I have at least gotten one friend to build a Starfinder character (a Brennari Xenodruid Mystic) and hope that some time this year I'll actually be able to run something.

One of the issues I find myself having running D&D is that after a certain point, most characters don't really have a need for gold anymore. The most expensive piece of personal gear you can buy that has a standardized price is plate armor, which is 1500 gold. That's enough that Paladins, Strength-Fighters, some Clerics and Armorer Artificers will need to save up for a good long while and probably not get a set until they're about halfway through tier 2 (historically I think around level 7 to 9). Once that purchase is made, though, gold as a reward starts to drop off in urgency.

There are, of course, spell reagents that cost gold - in particular the diamonds required for resurrection spells, though also components for powerful buff spells like Heroes' Feast - but I think that the kind of exponential growth of gold acquisition if one is giving it out as loot starts to make a lot of character builds stop caring. Your Rogue, for instance, can get kitted out with Studded Leather Armor for only 45 gold - something they can probably afford at level 2 or 3. From there on out, other than maybe buying replacement arrows (which are trivially cheap for anyone who's not a 1st level adventurer) there's not much you can explicitly buy that will be necessary to succeed at your role in the group.

So, what about magic items?

Here's the thing: while the books claim that you can run a whole D&D campaign without any magic items, I quibble with that when you start to look at a lot of high-level, epic monsters. A lot of legendary creatures in the higher CR range become immune to most weapon attacks unless the weapons are magical. Now, yes, a character can cast Magic Weapon, but I think the assumption is, instead, that the characters will have gotten each of their weapon-wielding characters at least your basic +1 weapon (Adventurer's League characters, at least the last time I played in AL, could pick up any +1 weapon of their choice upon hitting tier 2).

Furthermore, the primary expected means of acquiring magic items is through loot - you find a Defender Longsword in the dragon's hoard. This does introduce a great convenience to the DM, which is that they can control how and when the party gets access to the magic items that they select.

Now, comparing this with Starfinder, things are very, very different.

In Starfinder, literally every item in the game has a value in Credits (the sci-fi equivalent of gold). This ranged from weapons to armor to cybernetic implants to magical jewelry to holographic strategy games (the latter very clearly meant to be the game on the Millennium Falcon). The only "item" that doesn't is your spaceship and its components, which instead "levels up" with your party.

But this also translates to character progression. In D&D, every Greatsword, from a common, nonmagical one to a crazy Holy Avenger, does 2d6 slashing damage, to which you add your Strength modifier. The bells and whistles on your magical weapon can potentially increase that damage by a lot, but nothing that's being mass-produced is going to have anything particularly fancy - depending on how prevalent magic is on your world and how well understood it is, even a +1 weapon could potentially be made with the lost art of a bygone age, and cannot currently be reproduced, making such weapons jealously sought after.

In Starfinder, though, mundane weapons can get insane as they become more expensive. Your standard laser pistol does 1d4 fire damage (there is no "radiant" damage in Starfinder) but by the time you hit high level and can drop a lot more credits, you can get a laser pistol that does 8d4. And that's not some "laser pistol of incredible magic power" or anything. It's a fully mundane and nonmagical piece of technology that, at most, is maybe some bleeding edge new tech, or a weapon that is strictly regulated and only permitted to be used by especially elite soldiers or operatives (...crap, those are both class names in Starfinder. I meant the terms more generically).

But even if the mundane weapons and armor come in a broader variety, on top of that even magic things have a price.

Now, what's the upshot of all of this?

In the early days, D&D was, I think, conceived as a more morally neutral affair - it was all about delving into treasure-rich dungeons and plundering them. Indeed, when you look at the alignment system, the idea of a lot of morally ambiguous people working together makes a lot of sense. Your lawful good character might want that gold to help the innocent and bring order to the wilderness, and your neutral evil character might instead want to use it to establish themselves as the king of the criminal underworld. But everyone can make use of money, so you band together to get it.

I think most players of my generation tend to instead prefer more of a narrative basis for their campaigns. Gold becomes a secondary or tertiary objective - what you really want to do is instead slay the evil monster that is threatening to destroy the world.

Indeed, I think a lot of modern campaigns are built around responding to a crisis rather than going out to explore and acquire. Compare, for example, Tomb of Horrors with Tomb of Annihilation, the latter of course being a kind of modern update to the former. The original Tomb of Horrors was a death trap, and the only reason to go in was to get the treasures found within - indeed, the "twist," if one can call it that, is that the dungeon itself is basically a big honeypot to try to lure adventurers there and feed their souls to Acererak's phylactery. In Tomb of Annihilation, on the the other hand, there's a massive crisis where resurrection magic is failing, and anyone who had been resurrected previously is wasting away. The dungeon there is an obstacle not to the glorious treasures hidden within, but the resolution of a crisis that threatens the whole world.

And I think that this change in story structure reflects 5E's ambivalence toward gold as a reward. Yes, you're never going to be upset that you have more gold, but if you were to tell a group of level 13 adventurers that a sum of 10,000 gold was sitting in a dungeon somewhere, but that it had nothing to do with whatever the main story of the campaign was, they'd probably be reluctant to go. After all, if you're a heroic adventurer in a world where there's some crisis like an ancient lich coming back to send an unstoppable army of the dead across the world, you might say that a several-day detour to delve into the lost mines of some dwarven clan aren't going to be worth it (except perhaps through the players' meta-knowledge that the DM worked hard on that dungeon and that they'll probably have worked in some narratively convenient clue that can only be found within).

By tying money directly to player power in a way that 5E does not, though, I think Starfinder might potentially work better to motivate a more mercenary group of adventurers.

Here's the thing: I think that you build the system that rewards player power along the lines of the experience you think people will gravitate toward.

And you might notice that most people who play 5th Edition these days don't really bother with experience points as a path to player power. Milestone leveling is, anecdotally at least, a much more popular form of play. And what does milestone leveling encourage?

Story. Plot.

As an example, in the Wildemount game I'm playing, the milestone moments where we've gotten to level up typically happen when one of the "prophecies" in the "heroic chronicle" system are reached. (This is a pretty thorough character-building system in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to build a character tied into the setting and with goals and personal stakes).

As such, if we want our characters to get more powerful, we need to work our way through their plots - which leads to a very narrative-driven system.

Experience Points for killing monsters, though, naturally pushes players to want to fight monsters as much as possible.

And when money becomes a progression system because everything has a price you can buy it with, you're going to have a game where people want to make lots of money.

Now, I'm someone who likes narrative. I am a writer, after all, and I love telling a story with my D&D games. So, milestones work very well for me.

But I think it'll be interesting to run a system like Starfinder, where at least in one aspect, there will be other incentives in play.

Naturally, as a GM for Starfinder, I think you could basically play it like a D&D game - maybe only lower item-level items are available for purchase, and you might reserve the right to only allow people to get super-fancy weapons and armor or magic items by finding them in the world.

By contrast, you could also set prices for magic items in a D&D game to make gold more of a constant motivation (there's some guidance on these things, but if you want to do this, I recommend sitting down and really figuring out how much each thing you want to make available should cost).

This is all kind of theoretical at this point for me, and while I want to run some Starfinder before the end of the year, I also think that any extended campaign is unlikely to happen until one of my two current games I'm DMing reaches a conclusion.

Phyrexia: All Will Be One: Getting a Compleat Picture

 So, given that I'm running a Ravnica-set D&D campaign with the Phyrexians as the big bads, the focus on them in MTG's canon story has been useful to me for inspiration (I picked them just because I'm an old school MTG fan who started playing first during Fallen Empires and not long after our campaign started, Vorinclex showed up on Kaldheim).

The newest set is Phyrexia: All Will Be One, which puts these fantasy-genre cybernetic body horror monsters front and center (there's a card, I can't remember the name, that shows a bunch of humanoid Phyrexians who could very easily just be the Borg from Star Trek).

Now, I'll confess that I'm not the most adventurous deck builder. Arena's system where anyone can get any card pretty easily is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you can get all the coolest cards. On the other hand, there's less incentive to try to scrape together a functional deck with just the stuff you have. Most players it seems are working with the carefully-crafted deck archetypes that the pros use.

That makes these early days of a new set kind of exciting. You don't really know what the good deck types and good cards are, so you scrape together what works. The downside is that you still encounter a lot of the really strong decks from the past set's era, which usually blows you out of the water with your weird new one. But occasionally, you wind up playing something that's just out of left field enough to work pretty well against people expecting you to play a certain way.

There are two decks I've found pretty satisfying to play - even if they're still not tuned up fully yet.

The first is a mono-black deck that uses a cool new threat called Archfiend of the Dross. This is a 6/6 flyer for 2BB - yes, it's cheap and huge. It also causes your opponent to lose 2 life any time a creature they control dies. The big and scary-sounding downside is that it starts with 4 oil counters, and each upkeep, you remove one of those counters. Once it's out of oil, you lose the game.

That sounds scary, and is clearly the downside that justifies its absurdly low cost for its size. The thing is: this gives you four turns to attack your opponent with a 6/6 flying creature. That means there's a good chance that you're going to swing in for the kill before you run out of oil - 24 total damage is more than enough to win. But then, also consider that you'll likely be removing more life from the opponent. One creature down and now the archfiend can finish the game in three attacks.

A creature surviving four turns is pretty rare in Magic anyway - you might swing in once and it dies to some removal, and now the downside has disappeared.

The other terrifying threat in this deck is Phyrexian Obliterator (a creature I've homebrewed stats for in the aforementioned D&D game - though it's not quite as nasty, if I'm honest). This is a reprint of a card that basically took its inspiration (the Negator - which I've also homebrewed) and turned the punishing drawback into a horrifying bonus. Again for just 4 mana (though it's BBBB, so good luck using that in a multicolor deck) you get a 5/5 trampler, and when it takes damage the opponent needs to sacrifice permanents equal to the damage dealt. Note that nowhere does it say "nonland permanents."

My experience with the Obliterator is that most opponents know that it's way more punishing to kill one of these things with damage than to just let it swing through and hit them - though any sort of kill, bounce, exile, or otherwise nondamaging removal spell works just fine. Still, I did play against an Izzet Prowess deck and the opponent must have either been desperate or not understood the text, because they buffed up a creature to kill my Obliterator and they wound up having to sacrifice literally everything they had on the board to start from scratch (or, they would have if they hadn't just conceded there - I can't blame them).

The deck uses a few black staples like Graveyard Tresspasser, Liliana of the Veil (a card I always feel a little skeptical about) and lots of removal. Gix's Command combos very well with the Archfiend especially against go-wide Soldier decks.

The other thing I've been trying to do is build a solid Toxic deck. Toxic is the new Infect/Poisonous ability that decouples the number of poison counters from the power of the creature (I actually wonder if this could become a retroactive keyword on old cards like Surveil did - does my Marsh Viper from The Dark now just say "Toxic 2?")

Initially I wanted to try using the new Phyrexian Mite tokens as a go-wide strategy with Toxic, but I'm not convinced it really works that well. I've had more luck with a Golgari deck of my own clumsy design that gets a bunch of cheap creatures (that are probably too simple to be considered by really competitive constructed players) with flight or deathtouch to make blocking them either more difficult or more costly. Venerated Rotpriest is a 1/2 for G that has Toxic 1 and also causes your opponent to get a poison counter whenever they target any of your creatures. Given how cheap my creatures are, this creates a bit of tension when it comes to removal spells where it might be worse to remove them than to just let them hit you (especially if I can get multiple Rotpriests out). Another insane green card here is Bloated Contaminator, a 4/4 with trample for just 2G (man, power creep is real) that has Toxic 1 but also lets you Proliferate when you hit the opponent with it. 4 power and trample along with Toxic is pretty nasty.

I can't say that this Golgari Deck is quite off the ground yet, but I've definitely racked up a few wins with it.

I will say, I now it's been a few years since they stopped doing "blocks," but I kind of miss it. I know that they've been able to introduce a lot of new ideas this way, but I also think that it often means that the really distinctive mechanics of any given setting or set wind up usually falling behind more general and kind of perpetual deck archetypes.

Also, while I don't really follow the Magic story very closely, I am struck by how this set really feels like it represents the darkest hour. While originally introduced in Antiquities, I think the original Phyrexian saga could be said to have run from Tempest Block through Invasion Block, so about four years. This one, has, I guess, gotten three years (certainly coming about after the War of the Spark). I do wonder if the relatively low bodycount from the War of the Spark and the complaints about it encouraged the folks at WotC to kill off a lot more established characters (to be fair, Jaya Ballard's the only one who has really died-died, but of course a lot of these folks have gotten a fate worse than death).

The Phyrexian plot here does suggest to me that they might pull back on the restrictions on planar travel that happened after Time Spiral. This allowed them to make Planeswalker cards in the first place, but I almost feel like, as cool as that is, Planeswalkers have kind of taken the place of Legendary Creatures, and now it's like anyone who isn't a planeswalker is an NPC in the planeswalkers' stories.

Anyway, the new set is gross and so far I'm having fun with it.

Getting Prematurely Invested in Starfinder

 So, I have not yet run a single game of Starfinder. But two days ago I ordered two supplementary books beyond the Core Rulebook and the first Alien Archive.

I have never played Pathfinder, largely because the genre in which it exists seems to be handled sufficiently by D&D 5th Edition. Pathfinder was, of course, released something as a response to 4th Edition and an attempt to build a kind of new edition that was more of a continuation of 3.5th Edition.

The point is, Pathfinder was built, pretty explicitly, to just be something you could play D&D-like games in.

Now, the nitty-gritty of it is something that players might have strong opinions about - Pathfinder's relative open customization versus 5E's more streamlined and narrow approach to character builds (not to say that complex multiclass builds don't exist in 5E). But the point is that just about any story you could play through and most character concepts you could come up with in 5E would have some analogue in Pathfinder, and vice versa.

I think the reason I've become so interested in Starfinder is its farther lean into true Science Fiction tropes. Spelljammer in D&D makes no attempt to change game systems - indeed, it does even less than what I think we expected it to do, which was to create ship-to-ship combat systems (there are such systems in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, but I haven't heard a lot of people using them).

This got me thinking, though, about the utility of new game systems.

In the midst of the OGL controversy, a number of companies announced plans to build their own new RPG systems. I believe Kobold Press, Paizo, and MCDM (and likely others) have all been talking about doing that.

On one hand, I think that a more diverse marketplace would be great for the TTRPG world - competition can drive innovation. But it's also true that these games tend to be difficult to learn - there are tons of nuances and tricks to them that can be daunting for a new player.

Those same nuances and tricks are, of course, also part of the appeal. It's exactly these sorts of things that allow clever players to come up with clever builds and strategies, and which get online communities playing around optimization or even just building ridiculous concepts that focus on narrow strengths (I played a one-shot with a Fighter who had specialized into grappling, and literally held an archdevil underwater while we pummeled it to death).

The point is, purely from a player perspective, if there's a system that does what I need it to do, I'm probably going to be very hesitant to try out systems that do the same thing. Starfinder looks like it can scratch an itch that D&D doesn't quite reach (though it comes close).

There are, of course, simpler RPG systems. I briefly played a bit of Kids on Bikes, and while I think that's almost absurdly easier to pick up, it's a system that is sort of there to be unobtrusive and avoid getting in the way of the improvised storytelling. I don't think there's such a thing as a really effective "build" in Kids on Bikes. And that's fine given that its focus is more about telling a story than being about overcoming challenges (the story might be one of people overcoming challenges, of course).

One thing I do wonder about is whether Starfinder could be used to tell more Star Trek-like stories - the ones that are less about the big phaser fights and starship battles, but are more conceptually complex. I think D&D and Starfinder kind of default to just making a bunch of ability checks or skill checks to resolve things like that, though on the other hand, it seems that most systems do that anyway.

I don't know if I have a huge point here, other than that I really hope I can run (and maybe, maybe, play in) some Starfinder one of these days.

WotC Announces OGL 1.0a and SRD Going to Creative Commons

 So, once again, I am no legal expert and certainly not one in this field. Those who are wary of celebrating any grand victory when corporate forces are in charge are right to be skeptical. However, it looks like Wizards of the Coast has reversed course.

Again, I want to seriously preface this with saying I am no more an expert in this stuff than you are. My legal background is that my mom was a lawyer who stopped practicing around the time I was born in the mid 80s - so in other words, everything I'm saying is just what I believe this all means.

The OGL, or Open Game License, is a document that WotC created detailing how other people can use the system they developed (originally 3rd Edition, but this was extended to 3.5 and 5th edition - though not, I believe, 4th). It promises, in what I believe is a legally binding way, that anyone who wants to can make products relating to their game as long as long as there is attribution, and that one does not need permission or to pay royalties. To define what "their game" means, the OGL refers to the System Reference Document, or the SRD.

The SRD is basically a giant block of text that details the rules of the game. It includes the core mechanics as well as stat blocks, spell and item descriptions - basically anything you need to run the game. There are, however, some notable absences here, which allow WotC to preserve their copyright on certain things. Creatures that are original to D&D, including Mind Flayers and Beholders, are not in the SRD, nor are named NPCs like Mordenkainen or Lord Soth (indeed, the rights to Lord Soth and Dragonlance were the source of some legal complexities due to the fact that the setting belongs to its creators, the Hickmans. I don't know if WotC fully bought them out or just got a license to make the recent adventure).

Now, as I understand it, the original plan was to put the OGL under Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that basically holds onto licenses and other documents to protect them from being altered or rescinded by capricious corporate interests... you know, like Hasbro.

The seeming change with this announcement is that not only will the OGL be put under Creative Commons (unchanged from its 1.0a iteration, which is the one people were afraid of losing,) but the SRD will as well.

Now, I don't know to what extent it would profit WotC to retain the SRD. I suppose you could say that in theory, having the OGL unchanged but being able to change the SRD would make the OGL useless. After all, a spiteful WotC could theoretically edit the SRD to say "nothing, you suckers," and make the OGL's license to use it worthless, though that seems unlikely.

This move, though, once they go through with it (and here I understand some fear they'll pull the rug out just because, well, late capitalism is full of such bullshit, though I think they've already been bleeding from one self-inflicted wound in the foot and this would be a coup de grace) would mean that the SRD itself belongs to the public, and would thus mean that, perpetually, 5th Edition D&D remains open and accessible to anyone who wants to make stuff for it.

Now, the big question I have is whether any of this applies to One D&D.

In theory (again, remember that I'm just some dude at his computer who knows as much about this as you do) I believe the SRD as it stands is just the rules for 5th Edition (though there's also got to be rules for 3rd and 3.5). Nothing in this announcement has confirmed that the SRD for One D&D - which they claim is not going to be called 6th Edition but... sort of is, isn't it? - will also be put under Creative Commons. There's a possibility that the reason they acquiesced to the community's demands is that they only have a year or two left of 5th Edition to make stuff for before they move on, and so there's not much to win by holding it under such restrictions.

However, looking at the history of the OGL, I think it would be smarter of them to do this for One D&D as well. Yes, Pathfinder emerged as a big competitor to D&D, built as it was on 3.5 as a system, and it ate 4th Edition's lunch. But that pressure also caused them to make a much more popular system in 5th Edition, and D&D's popularity exploded to heights it had never seen before. Indeed, Paizo, which makes Pathfinder, has even started making content for 5th Edition, given the degree to which WotC has roared back into dominating the hobby.

Now, you could argue that this was really just a matter of making a better game system. But to me, it looks like the way that this sort of game thrives, you want to have a lot of people working on and designing things. If MCDM comes out with a monster book and someone got interested in Matt Colville because of his videos about 2001 a Space Odyssey, they might be interested in picking up D&D. If people watching the Legend of Vox Machina hear that Critical Role put out a book about Tal'dorei, and then realize that they could play an RPG in this setting if they get the D&D rulebooks, that's pretty great for WotC.

And, again, I think Pathfinder is one of the big reasons we got 5th Edition in the first place.

One of the core premises of capitalism is that competition breeds innovation. But over my lifetime, I've mostly seen big corporations do everything in their power to prevent anyone from competing, and to force customers down a single path, where they have no choice but to buy one company's products at the price they set.

In the short term, this strategy is, I'm sure, great for the executive class. But what it does is it erodes out the base of the business they are running, mining out the core purpose the business should be there to serve, and leaves everyone except for some CEO or Board member poorer for having lost a great product or service.

This problem of course applies to much more than just TTRPGs. But at least in this circumstance, the community has enough leverage to - I hope - hold back the tide of self-cannibalizing capitalism... on this one, small front.