I couldn’t agree more. To deny Tsarnaev his Miranda rights is a terrible precedent, even in the face of the terrible crime he is thought to have committed. The constitution, and the notion of innocence until proven guilty, argues against this decision. Each time a decision like this is made, it creates another chip in the foundation of democracy.

I was given a 90% complete pre-made character with stats, skills, and back-story already in place. I was given the task of developing character traits and to select a few feats… Tadhg provided the rest. I really like having a pre-made character that “fits” into the story. It improves the narrative, allowing for a more cohesive story and playing experience, however it doesn’t give me 1st hand experience of the Iron Heroes character creation process, Tadhg did all that. What this speaks to is Tadhg’s incredible preparation. This is a well fleshed out world and my character, Verin, belonged in. That was awesome.

My character was essentially a ranger with stronger spell-casting/healing spells than I’ve normally thought of as rangerly, and this was balanced out by having relatively weak archery and melee skills compared to my fellow combat specialists, and far weaker offensive spells than the Wizard player. My strategic role was as the healer and support spell-casting, our Wizard was the primary offensive caster. This class was Tadhg’s modified version of the Iron Hero’s squad-leader type ranger class. Maybe I could have done a better job of developing a character with better play mechanics using the Iron Heroes rule-set myself, but I doubt it. My examination of the rules leads me to believe that Tadhg improved on the Iron Heroes Ranger. Good job Tadhg. I was mostly happy with my character’s play mechanics —I felt important to the group and I had multiple roles to fulfill: healer, buffer, scout, off-nuker, off-melee. While I also received a few tactical combat skills, I didn’t find much opportunity to use them — more on this later.

Tadhg’s world is a fleshed out noir-ish military thriller set in a classic fantasy setting, that’s my impression anyway. Imagine a Chinatown/Three Kings mashup…with fireballs. There was an intricate weapons black-market smuggling ring perhaps being engineered by banks, and dwarven run city-states clandestinely supporting half-elven rebel forces against a Roman style, human dominated, continental empire that is probably driven to a constant state of conquest by a military industrial complex…maybe. Certainly the war we were at the center of seemed unnecessary for survival of the Empire, but rather foisted upon the populace for unclear purposes. The parallels to real life were never overtly laid out, but there was a subdued acknowledgement from my fellow players, we were clearly pawns in a grim military juggernaut. The Half-elven enemy forces were from somewhere far across the sea, they seemed like nice enough people who were fending off invasion. Mostly we, as players and as characters, didn’t really know. We were just a squad of recalcitrant irregulars executing special forces missions that threw my character’s personal goals and his personal values into conflict. It’s a great story.

My complaint, however, was that while my character felt like a pawn in some greater evil’s game, he wasn’t given a compelling reason to play, and neither was he presented with narrative boundaries that trapped him into the role he played, instead I just had to “keep him in the game” because otherwise we weren’t playing D&D. I did like the large, inscrutable, and amoral forces driving our lives. And it was great that it wasn’t some Kafkaeske re-tread story filled with the bureaucratic absurdities that plague Cthulhu investigators. It felt like no other game universe I’ve ever played in, but my character Verin needed to have a compelling reason to stay. I also wanted him to feel like he was making real choices that impacted things. From my vantage, we were called to play it straight. This meant, for Verin, pushing back against military superiors who insisted I go kill rebels I personally had no beef with. Since there seemed to be no real option for our group to quit our assigned tasks, the inevitable result was “Even though I know it’s wrong I’ll just do this one last evil mission to support The Man…again!” But it seemed like my own character was given both motive and ability to just split…but he didn’t because otherwise there’s no story. That didn’t feel solid.

On the other hand, the degree to which I felt like I had a character in conflict with himself, caught in a political web outside his own control —that was fantastic. A truly great role-playing experience. Verin just needed more truly intractable situations. It needed to be impossible for him to go AWOL. He needed a clear, internally cohesive, while completely paralyzing, reason to keep running missions while remaining morally opposed to them. THAT would have scorched his poor soul and played well, I think.

The danger was becoming mindless a mercenary running missions, in a world with political machinations I could have remained oblivious to: ride to there, get those smuggled weapons, kill anybody in your way. I wanted Verin to be closer to his part of the story. What I mean by that is I wanted more events that engaged my character’s ethical boundaries, and then compromise them more painfully. We spent too much time on mission debriefs that did not impact events. Debriefs should have been clipped and at the same time morally flaying, or leveraged characters diverse ethical boundaries against each other. I don’t like intra-party combat, but I DO like characters with opposing ethical standards that cause friction.

Another way to frame my complaint, which is a challenge for many role playing experiences, is that often the GM would leave the party to determine a course of action without giving us enough information to work through between ourselves. We needed more hints, options, and some concept of potential impacts to gnaw between us. We also needed more outcomes that indicated our choices had had an impact.

And then we needed a severe constraint on our debate and planning time with nasty repercussions for failing to be in action. If we’re just on a roller coaster track (which is appropriate sometimes) then the ride should have an intense driving narrative pace. If we’re actually making real choices, we should clearly know what those choices are and what’s at stake. And it’s fine if you deceive me, giving me the sense I’m driving, when actually all roads lead to Rome…just make me believe.

About the game system and combat: Iron Heroes offers numerous “Token” actions that can be earned through combos and saved actions. I liked the mechanism, though I often felt like I couldn’t implement the more exoticstrategy actions available to my role as a tactical leader because it so often just made more sense to cast a spell or attack. I wanted the hurdles to implement these skills to be lower, or for the payoff to be higher. To cite an example: I could skip an action to instead have about a 30% chance to gain a token. That token could be used IF two of my team-mates were flanking an enemy, THEN they could get a bonus to their damage IF they hit. That’s a LOT of IFS, especially when my alternative was to fire a “never-miss” magic missile, or to just swing my sword. Mostly I spent my time healing or buffing. That was great, I really enjoyed being a swiss army combat medic. But the strategic options were tantalizing and I wanted to implement them.

I had a similar experience with the Damage Resistance mechanism used for armor in place of the standard AC rating for armor type. I got 1d2 DR whenever I was hit wearing my leather armor. This is ostensibly for realism, however it seems to me that the movement penalties for armor are far higher as compared to just wearing cloth, which provides no dr at all. It just felt off. I wanted 1d4 at least… But then I never experienced a movement penalty either. I think I had always wanted armor class to have a damage resistance mechanism, I was excited to use it, and I wanted it to be more impactful in play. I’d imaging wearing field plate would do that.

The place where lots of great pacing and narrative happened was in the combat sequences themselves. Important enemies got away to return later…I love me some mysterious nemesis :) We were in unique, challenging, and well paced combats almost every session.

What made this work? In part, the Iron Heroes combat system. Additionally, Tadhg seemed to really know our edge, often throwing us against powerful mages, large groups of enemies, or chaotic terrain, and we often felt like, “Wups! We’re going down.” …but we’d pull it together with creative tactics, prudent regrouping, and intestinal fortitude (…and probably some DM dice fudging.) The best parts were fighting unique enemies in odd terrain (up on a city wall, through a burning building, against a flying opponent, etc.) I loved it when stealth was required as well. Occasionally there were too many nameless guards for us to wade through hacking, but that was the exception.

An unfortunate break in the 4th wall was that if the battle board was rolled up in the corner I knew we were safe, and then I’d “feel it” coming. Tadhg would almost project that the battle-board and felt tips were coming out, and that would impact our characters behavior. I would have liked to be surprised more often about an impending combat. Lots of the narrative theme hinged on, “Forces at work are beyond your ken.” And the battle-board status shouldn’t betray that.

I’m quite excited for Q’Rith Season Three :)

Thanks Julie and all, this was still one of the best things I ever did in my life by far!

Jon

Oh, and switch FA Cup with “SPL decider” – more factually likely and adds a requirement of understanding the acronym and the soccer league system.

Now Frequently and Daily have been replaced by Google Reader and various interfaces to it. If I check things that often it seems easier for them to tell me rather than the other way around. Weekly, Randomly and Rarely then seem pointless.

I’ve not really bothered with very good organisation since then but I do love the fact that Chrome syncs it all making it available anywhere I have Chrome.

In other news – as you use recaptcha – press the “Get an audio challenge” button sometime – it’s hilarious.