Most of my mages have cash to burn in Shadowrun Missions. Let’s see if we can help with that….
Dedicated Philanthropist
Cost: 1 Karma
You work for the people, and you pay for the people too. In addition to the normal, once per mission exchange of 2,000Y for one karma, you may make an additional 2,000Y for one extra karma per missions exchange.
Thoughts?
I love spellcasting monks, but I think they don’t get enough options. How about giving them a few more.
Discipline Training
You have spend most of your life in the temple training body and mind. Gain the following:
Thoughts?
I love monks, and I love clerics. Let’s see if I can mix these two together into one great class.
Monk of the Heavens Monastic Tradition
Monks of the Heavens spend much of their time in practice and prayer. They are chosen to execute the will of the gods as they strike out from their lone monasteries to hopefully make the world a better place.
You know the touch of silence and one other divine discipline of your choice. You gain additional disciplines at 6th, 11th, and 17th level. When you learn a new discipline, you may replace any others you know as you see fit.
Casting Cleric Spells. Most divine disciplines allow you to cast spells. These spells are cast as per the Casting Elemental Spells rules on page 80 of the Players handbook.
Divine Disciplines
Touch of Silence. You may touch a dying ally or enemy and either stabilize or kill that enemy as a bonus action. If you kill, that creature must make a constitution saving throw or die immediately.
Touch of the Healer. You may cast cure wounds. You may spend one additional ki point to cast this again and target another creature. You must still follow the maximum number of ki points allowed per level however.
Touch of the Damned. You may spend two ki points to cast inflict wounds.
Sights Unseen. You may spend 1 ki point to cast Detect Magic.
Songs of the Heavens. You may spend 1 ki point to cast Bless.
Discords of Hell. You may spend 1 ki point to cast Bane.
Authority of the Teacher. You may spend 1 ki point to cast Command.
Guard of Heaven. You may spend 1 ki point to cast Shield of Faith.
Heaven’s Training (6th Level Required). You may spend 2 ki oint to cast Enhance Ability.
Guard from on High(6th Level Required). You may spend 2 ki point to cast Spiritual Weapon.
Master’s Quite(6th Level Required). You may spend 2 ki point to cast Silence.
True Strength in Self(11th Level Required). You may spend 3 ki point to cast Dispel Magic.
Guide the Soul(11th Level Required). You may spend 3 ki point to cast Revivify.
Speed of Steps(11th Level Required). You may spend 3 ki point to cast Water Walk.
Protect the Faithful(11th Level Required). You may spend 3 ki point to cast Spirit Guardians.
Avatar of the Master(17th Level Required). You may spend 5 ki point to cast Guardian of Faith.
Master’s Castigation(17th Level Required). You may spend 5 ki point to cast Banishment.
Thoughts?
I’ve been reading a bunch of old Forgotten Realm’s stuff, and I think its time for the stuff of nightmares to take their place on the world stage.
Netherese Shade Sorcerer
You are the stuff of legend. You are born from shadow. Somewhere in your family line, someone was a Shade-a creature of pure darkness who stalked a world of negative energy. You can now channel that, and it’s slowly consuming you.
Shade Resilience
You begin to get hints of your family history. At first level you gain resistance on all necrotic energy damage and stealth becomes a trained skill for you. If you are already strained in stealth, double your proficiency bonus with that skill instead.
Shadows Increase
At 6th level, when you cast a spell that does necrotic energy, you my add your charisma modifier to that damage. You may spend 1 sorcery point to cast Inflict Wounds.
Shadow Adaption
You are beginning to learn to be a shadow. At level 14 by spending 1 sorcery point, you may travel from any area of shadow to another area of shadow as a move. These areas of shadow must not be more then three times your movement speed apart.
Shade Apotheosis
At level 18, you have stopped being mortal and moved beyond. You are now a shade. Your race changes to shade. You now have advantage on stealth checks made in shadow and are now immune to necrotic energy. In addition, you may now spend 5 sorcery points to cast teleport to teleport as if teleporting to a portal to any area of shadow you know about.
Thoughts?
My wife and I love the Lord of the Rings Card Game. We play a ton of games together, but we really don’t have any desire to play with others at game store or con events. A problem with that is, among other things, names can be a problem. Named heroes can’t play in the same table, so some players have to quickly fix up their decks to play. How about his idea FFG….
Name/Title cards- As part of the game night kits, new cards come out that are the nicknames and titles for the characters. If two or more players want to play Aragorn from the same sphere or just with the same exact name, then these two players take a nickname/title card specific for that character. These cards could say-Dúnadan, Longshanks, Wingfoot, and/or Strider. Now these same players can play together, tables are not as hard to legally make, and there is some in game effect for having the same cards in play.
I even propose expanding this out for allies. If a deck has a card like Gandalf and a hero Gandalf is played, then both players take a one time threat increase at the start of the game.
Thoughts?
I have some barbarians with some massive constitutions out there who will fail three death saving throws while the asthmatic wizard pops up like toast whenever he gets hit because he’s insanely lucky with a d20. Let’s help those barbarians out there…
Hard to Kill
You’ve survived things that lesser people would never walk away from. You gain the following benefits:
Thoughts?
I like that Pathfinder has some Pathfinder Society Specific feats and abilities. I’d like to see a few of those in Shadowrun. Let’s make the first one.
Trust Fund
Cost: 2-6 Karma
You’re pretty smart, and you learned to read the megacorps from a young age. Also, you figured out how to invest in the stock market before you were out of diapers and set up a trust fund to help yourself out no matter what trouble you get yourself into. Now, you can get a bit of extra scratch each month from those investments. It’s not going to break the bank, but it get you better than McHue’s for lunch. You can spend 2, 4, or 6 karma, and at the end of every month of time in Shadowrun Missions gain 500Y, 1000Y, 1500Y from your current stock portfolio. You may not withdraw the rest of your stocks and only gain this bonus at the end of the month.
Thoughts?
I’ve been listening to some audiobooks lately, and I want to help those fighters who wield the too big weapons enter the fray!
Monkey Grip
Prerequisite: Strength 18
Benefit: Gain the following:
Thoughts?
It’s election day. How about a board game of political maneuvering?
Product– City Hall
Producer– Tasty Minstrel games
Price– ~$60 here http://www.amazon.com/Tasty-Minstrel-Games-TTT1010-City/dp/1938146840/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1415154750&sr=8-3&keywords=city+hall
Set-up/Play/Clean-up-2~2.5 hours (2 to 4 players)
TL; DR– Influence might be you favorite addition to gaming too! 93%
Basics- Want to be mayor? In City Hall, each player is striving to win enough public support to become mayor of New York. To do that, players try to our maneuver or out influence each other through action selection and territory control. Each round, players take turns placing a meeple on one of seven offices in the town: tax assessor, surveyor, campaign manager, lobbyist, zoning board, deputy mayor, and health commissioner. The tax assessor position provides money based on the locations owned on the board and current population score. The surveyor allows a player to buy new positions on the board. The campaign manager increases your approval rating. The lobbyist gets the player more lobbying cards (more on that later). The zoning board allows a player to build on places that the players owns on the board. The deputy mayor changes the order of players. And, the health commissioner grants players population based on the number of stars the player has on the board with the player with the most getting 4 population while all other players get slightly less population. What makes this action selection game stand out are the influence cards. When you choose an office, you bid a number of influence cards. Every other player in turn order can increase that bid, bid the same, or not bid at all. When it gets back to you, you get to either pay the highest bid to the bank or take influence cards from the highest bidding player and they take your action with that office instead. The game is also a territory control game. When you use the zoning board to build on a location you own, you choose one of four different buildings from your hand that range from factory, park, tower, and housing. Factories are worth $7 when you are the tax assessor, but only one star. Housing is worth a maximum of five stars, but has no tax value. Towers are a combination of the two with one tower being a max of three stars and $3 for tax. In addition, you can build parks which are worth no taxes and no stars. All buildings are worth nothing by themselves, but gain and lose stars depending on what buildings are adjacent. (Location, Location, Location!) Towers, housing, and parks always increase stars, but factories decrease the values of nearby housing. Thus, you have to carefully plan and capitalize on situations so you can have the most stars. Stars help you when you take the health commissioner action. Each player counts their total stars on all building with the player who got the commissioner action either adding three to their score or doubling their score. The player with the most stars then moves up the population tracker by four, the next by two, and the third place player getting 1. Each time a player selects the zoning board in addition to the action of gaining building cards and building on a location, a token moves up the approval rating, and when either that token or a player’s token gets to five approval, the game is over. Players multiply their population total by their approval rating for their points. Additional points are given out for most parks, most influence, and other factors at the end of the game, and the player with the most points wins the election and is now mayor.
Mechanics-This is a fun one. I’ve seen the combination of action selection and territory control before, but the addition of the influence cards really knocks this game out of the park. The different actions are simple and quick so the game moves at a good clip. Also, the game has a built in end. You only get so many moves to build, and letting your opponents have any of those moves could be devastating. When you steal an action with influence is such an important part of this game, and in my opinion, influence is the most fun part of this game. Honestly, this might be my favorite game from Tasty Minstrel Games for the influence mechanic alone. 5/5
Theme-This game feels like political maneuvering, but it doesn’t feel like an election. Influence and stealing turns feels like politicians fighting over what gets to make what happen. It’s an amazing game in that respect. However, I didn’t feel like I was running for an election instead of just maneuvering to get people to move to my places across town. It felt more like I was running a chain of hotels and businesses than a true mayoral race. 4/5
Instructions-These instructions are done pretty well. The rules by themselves teach how to play well. I was left with a few questions such as are your cards secret? These were minor questions however. Also, I would have liked a few more pictures in the rules, but overall the rules were clear and easy to read. 4.5/5
Execution– I like the way the game is produced. I would have like bigger cards, but the card size keeps the total game size down. The board is easy to read, and each player gets a player board to help them understand what each position does. That really helps speed play up. However, I have a major problem with this game. There are not nearly enough stars! The game comes with a single sheet of punch out stars. That is about half of what you need for a good sized game. I know I am not the only one who has had that problem. 4.5/5
Summary– This game might have one of my favorite new mechanics. I’ve seen action selection before. I’ve seen area control/management before. What I haven’t seen is action bidding/stealing before. That’s a small change that really adds a ton to this game. This game isn’t perfect as some small problems in the execution, instructions, and theme hurt this game a bit. But, what is here is a quick, excellent board game with lots of political maneuvering that I want to get to the table as soon as I can again. 93%
I love gaming, and spend way too much time and money doing it, but not all games are created equal. Some of my more popular blog posts have been my game reviews. Let’s go through what I look for in a game, and what I want in each area.
Board Games
When I examine a board game, I look at four areas: mechanics, theme, instructions, and execution.
Mechanics-Board games are applying logic and people skills to better handling a situation compared to your competitors. The way that logic works is the mechanics- mechanics covers how a game works. Be it a deck building game, area control, dice rolls, randomocracy, or something mixed between everything, this can really make or break a game. I like when I see several dimensions of mechanics at play. Games like Tiny Epic Kingdoms or Trains take two or more simple mechanics and mix them into something better like flour and eggs making a cake. Some games do this amazingly well like Rococo. Some games fail at doing something as basic as rummy….LOOKING RIGHT AT YOU TENTICAL BENTO! If a game feels like it runs smoothly, then that game will most likely get a five. If the game runs like a car on its last legs about to die on a bumpy road, that game will most likely be a one or less.
Theme-Theme is the story of a game. Chess is a war between two kingdoms. Rococo is different dressmakers vying for the most prestige at a ball. Besides beating your friends at a game, this is the thing that will keep you playing. If you lose the Lord of the Rings card game, you’ve not only lost, but the world will be plunged into darkness! But, theme is hard to make happen. It might just be a simple intro story like in Lost Legends, or it might be an ever pervasive thing that winds through the whole game like Arkham Horror. Weaving a story into the theme is the height of game design for me. Games that have tons of story like Eldritch Horror are great games that deserve a five for theme, while some games like euchre don’t even score a one as there is no story to the game. As the amount of story you want is a game varies from person to person, this is consequently one of the most subject portions of my scoring.
Instructions-I’m a pretty smart guy. I got me a PhD and everything! (cue people pointing out all the grammar and spelling mistakes….) But, if you can’t tell me how to play your magnum opus of a game, then that game is crap to me. Getting your point across is important, but also how you do it is really key. If you hit me with a wall of text in size 4 fonts on a plain white sheet of paper, then I’m going to hate you. What you write has to be entertaining and informative while still being easy and fun to read. Top marks go to games like Dungeon Petz where not only are the rules taught with lots of pictures, but there are lots of small jokes for the players. Games like CO2 are horrible. It is only a few pictures with several pages of just black text in three columns on white pages. Also, if your rules are flat out wrong like pointing to a card that says weapon and discussing how armor works, you are going to make me very mad! The original rules for The Lord of the Rings Dice Game had massive misprints that completely broke the game. Needless to say the online rules were much better. Pictures say a thousand words, as well as, breaking up the text. Even if I can play your game after reading your rules, your rules still have to serve as a quick reference. If I can’t find the rules I need even after a few plays, then those rules are still bad. Layout, text size, text type, word choice, easy of readability, and pictures really define this section.
Execution-Here is my kind of catch all. This encompasses some of the instruction that you might see on cards, the art on all the components, component quality, and even the box. Execution is easy to mess up. If the game is about shuffling cards, and you buy the cheapest cards you can find, then the cards will break/fold/tear and the game is crap. Fantasy Flight games is the king of game execution. Their games have lots of nice tokens with good quality cards. Some games fall apart in the box like my copy of Machina Arcana which had a few warped ties and the cardboard standees for the monsters that broke or bent. This won’t kill a game, but it will make the game more or less fun to play depending on the quality of what you get to play with.
Role Playing Games
RPG’s cover paradoxically more and less ground than a board game. This category covers both a completely new game that is its own thing while also covering a short adventure for an established game. I tend to cover both roughly the same, but some reviews are much longer because of what I have to cover. Let’s look at the pieces that are out there. I roughly divide my reviews on games into: mechanics or crunch, theme or fluff, and execution.
Mechanics or Crunch-The real solids of an RPG is its mechanics. This is the part you will argue over with your GM. I judge an RPG based on how well the mechanics work by themselves or work with the existing rules. I also tend to judge the mechanics of how well the work with the story. RPGs have to have much more focus on the story than a board game does. Players are much more ok with just rolling dice in a Shoots in Ladders to decide how their characters move, but no role playing game person wants to play a game where all their actions are completely out of their hands without some story behind it. Some mechanics are amazing like the simplicity of Dungeons and Dragons 5e, and those systems earn the fives I give them. Some systems are just way to much crap like Fatal (DON’T, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LOOK THAT UP!).
Theme or Fluff-If something is the crunch, then the other side has to be the fluffy bits. Theme and story are the story you play in. You can play a simple game where you just go around and kill monsters by rolling a die and adding a number, but you won’t play that for weeks on end with your friends. A great story is what draws players back to the table. I judge this aspect of the story by how well the story is written and how involved I get in that story. I love when a story draws you in and won’t let you go. I really enjoy the theme of the second part of the Skull and Shackles adventure path. The whole adventure path is about being a pirate, and this whole module is about having a ship, raiding other ships and being a pirate. Weak stories just turn your players away and bore them to tears. If you can’t keep me, the GM, in your story, then how can I be expected to keep my players in your story?
Execution-As with board games, this tends to be a catch all for a lot of little things. Text size, art, layout, spacing, font, tables of information, and even the paper quality all factor into this score. I really like how the Dungeons and Dragons 5e players hand book is laid out. For a lot of RPG’s, I know I’m basically reading a text book about a place that doesn’t exist. Here is where you keep me reading. Giving me a boring list of places with little regard to art or spacing will drive me away in a flash.
This is how I judge the games I play. I’d also like to make an aside. I tend to give higher scores than most reviewers. There are multiple reasons for that. For one, I tend to like most of the games I play. I don’t often read bad RPGs or play horrible board games. I tend to see the best out there, but some games are bad, and I know it. And another major factor is I don’t have time to tell my readers about the bad stuff out there. I review one RPG and one board game a week. Reading through 300+ pages of a horrible RPG is not only a poor investment of time; it robs me of time to read and do the things I like. I have way too many stacks of good games and RPGs to read and play that I can’t waste the time to tell you about any bad ones. Oh, I do play them, and sometimes I do talk about them. But, for the most part, I just don’t have the time to spend 3-4 hours playing a bad game/10+ hours to read and play a bad RPG, and hour to write about it, an hour to (poorly) edit my writing about it, and an hour to post that around the internet. If I’m talking about your product, then most likely I like what I see. If I don’t, and you know I’ve seen your stuff, then maybe there is a problem we should discuss.
How about you? How do you evaluate the games that come across your desk?
Throat Punch Games 