Based on this poll I’m currently working on my first professional design work featuring the Pathfinder system. (The 3-to-1 advantage over 3.5 was impossible to ignore. Hopefully the other people, like me, using 3.5 in their home games will be OK with the minimal on-the-fly conversion work necessary to make a Pathfinder module work in 3.5.)

I’ve run into a conceptual difficulty, however, surrounding the conflation of Listen, Spot, and Search into a single Perception skill. It’s a fairly minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but I wanted to get some outside opinions on it.

LOCATION KEYS

The way I structure location keys is fairly straight-forward:

• There’s boxed text which conveys the common information that anyone walking into the room would immediately perceive. (“You see a box in the corner with a weird symbol painted on it.”)
• After the boxed text, I immediately list any reactive skill checks which should be immediately made by anyone entering the room. These are typically perception-type checks, but they might also be knowledge-checks. (For example, make a See Hidden check to notice that there are small spiders crawling all over the box. Or a History check to recognize the symbol as the royal seal of Emperor Norton.)
• Then each significant element in the room is independently described with additional details that will become important if characters investigate or interact with it. (“Inside the chest is ruby which has been cracked in half. You can see that the inside of the ruby is filled with empty spider’s eggs.”)

The significant elements often include specifically delineated skill checks that become relevant during the investigation/interaction. In my work with 3.5,  this delineated skill check was usually a Search check and, as a result, the format was self-evident in its utility: A Spot check for the room was almost always at the top of the key entry; specific Search checks for various elements within the room were located with those elements.

What’s happening in Pathfinder, however, is that I’ve just got Perception checks scattered throughout the room description. My concern is that it’s not necessarily self-evident which Perception checks are passive versus which Perception checks require active searching, which could lead to the key being more confusing to use at the table.

EXAMPLES

Here’s a really simple example of what a room element looked like in a 3.5 module:

Iron Door (Area 11): This locked door has been severely dented and scarred.
—Search (DC 12): It looks like the door was battered upon using handheld siege weaponry.

Here’s what a straight conversion to Pathfinder looks like:

Iron Door (Area 11): This locked door has been severely dented and scarred.
—Perception (DC 12): It looks like the door was battered upon using handheld siege weaponry.

In isolation, that doesn’t look particularly problematic. But if you’re a Pathfinder player, what I’m specifically interested in is what you think about this:

Iron Door (Area 11): This locked door has been severely dented and scarred.
—Perception (Active – DC 12): It looks like the door was battered upon using handheld siege weaponry.

Is it clear what I mean? Is there a better solution for what I’m trying to distinguish here?

Reactive Perception checks are part of Pathfinder, but the term “active Perception check” isn’t actually part of the core rules. It does seem to be fairly widespread among fans, either as a natural evolution of the “reactive” terminology or because it migrated over from 4E (where “active Perception check” is a term of art).

Thoughts?

(click for PDF)

UPDATE: These cheat sheets have been revised and improved. I recommend checking out Version 2.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I frequently prep system cheat sheets for the RPGs I run. These summarize all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced combat options. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it also provides a valuable resource at the game table for both the GM and the players. (For more information on the methods I use for prepping these sheets, click here.)

This particular set of cheat sheets was designed for Eclipse Phase. It should be noted that these cheat sheets aren’t designed to serve as a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will almost certainly prove wholly insufficient for teaching you the game. (Although they do serve as a valuable adjunct reference if you’re teaching someone the game.)

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

The most notable absence from these cheat sheets are what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). So you won’t find psi sleights or the effects of specific nanodrugs listed here.

HOW I USE THEM

I keep a copy of these cheat sheets behind my GM screen for quick reference and also place a half dozen copies in the center of the table for the players to grab as needed. The information included is meant to be as comprehensive as possible; although rulebooks are also available, my goal is to minimize the amount of time people spend referencing the rulebook: Finding something in the 14 pages of the cheat sheet is a much faster process than paging through a 400 page rulebook. And, once you’ve found it, processing the streamlined information on the cheat sheet will (hopefully) also be quicker.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive. The actual sequencing of pages (combat before hacking, hacking before psi) is mostly arbitrary. The sheets as they currently exist have been tweaked several times based on actual play experience.

Page 1: Basic mechanics. The stuff on this page should become irrelevant fairly quickly because players are going to rapidly memorize it through play. The information in “Your Muse and You” is more verbose and advisory than the sort of material I would normally include in a system cheat sheet, but after a few sessions I found that new players were routinely under-utilizing their muses. Adding this chunk of material significantly improved this and the inclusion of the stat block for a standard muse was significantly useful.

Pages 2-4: The combat reference. If you’re looking for a more simplistic system introduction for new players, temporarily remove pages 3 and 4. The Eclipse Phase combat system really comes alive when both the GM and the players are actively trying to create situations that will create positive modifiers on their combat tests, so I recommend continually refocusing attention on the combat modifiers table through both word and deed.

Page 5: In a future version of the cheat sheets, I might try to find some way to incorporate more info on medichines, nano-bandages, and repair spray. (They’re fairly ubiquitous and commonly used.) But letting health and healing spill onto multiple pages made things significantly less useful and most of the key information is summarized on the Healing table in any case. So, for now, I’m merely including the page references.

Page 6: The streamlined rules for jamming shells and vehicles is one of the major improvements Eclipse Phase makes on the Shadowrun rules. I just recently added the default stat block for a bot/vehicle AI to this page. Including the muse AI on page 1 was so useful I decided I should try to include a few more of these stat blocks. I’ve never done this with a cheat sheet before, but these AIs are so ubiquitous in the Eclipse Phase setting that I think this will prove very valuable.

Page 7-10: The methodology here is a page of general information on the mesh and then two pages of material on hacking… and then another half page on hacking because I couldn’t figure out a way to squeeze it all onto two pages. Fortunately, the key information is all on the two main pages (although this took a few playtesting tweaks to really figure out what was essential and what wasn’t in typical play).

Page 11: Reputation. This page is oft-referenced by new players trying to figure out how the new economies of Eclipse Phase work.

Page 12: I initially didn’t include resleeving rules in the cheat sheets. Big mistake. First, there are many scenarios in which the PCs are going to seek frequent resleevings in the middle of the action. Second, for new players this sheet helps to acclimate them to some of the unusual features of the setting.

Page 13: This is a recent addition to the cheat sheet because I specifically avoided including psi in the first half dozen sessions of Eclipse Phase that I ran. That’ s not because I don’t like the psi system (or its inclusion in the setting). Rather, I decided there was already so much stuff to grapple with in the setting that simply avoiding psi would be a convenient way to simplify things.

Page 14: And, finally, a page of miscellanea. Which is exactly what it sounds like. Some people might consider leaving this sort out of stuff off the cheat sheet entirely, but over the years I’ve found that this is actually the stuff you’ll find most useful in the long-term. As the other core mechanics slowly ingrain themselves into your memory, it’s going to be the random miscellanea that you’ll need to keep referencing every time it comes up.

A SIMPLER SET

If you’re looking for a quick introduction to the system for new players, here’s what I recommend:

• Page 1: Basic Mechanics (tell them to report test results to as “# out of #”, for example “I rolled 32 out of 65”)
• Page 2: Basic Combat (emphasize how valuable combat modifiers are)
• Page 5: Health and Healing (make sure they understand wound/trauma thresholds; you can’t trust players with their own bookkeeping until they do)
• Page 7: Basic Mesh Use (emphasize how valuable Research tests are)
• Page 11: Reputation / Social Networks

For this approach to work, you’ll want to avoid PCs that are focused on jamming, hacking, or psi. That’ll be very limiting in a long-term campaign, unfortunately, so you might want to start with a couple of one-shots to build up system familiarity. Or, alternatively, set aside time with the specific players interested in those areas to review those rules.

There is also, of course, setting information that you’ll want to pass on. I recommend 10 Things You Should Know About Eclipse Phase as a good way for accomplishing that.

The Eclipse Phase: System Cheat Sheet is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Seeing the development of the whole “friend-zone” concept is, in fact, enlightening about the pervasive misogyny that’s still culturally foundational in America despite decades of progress.

It started as an observation that once someone had placed you in the “friend zone” of their mind, it was difficult for them to consider a romantic relationship with you.

It then picked up negative connotations when it was applied to women who flirtatiously imply the potential of a future relationship in order to have men perform favors for them that they would not do for normal friends. This sort of thing probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the pervasive cultural assumption that it’s the man’s role in society to earn money and, therefore, the way to woo a female mate is to throw money at her in the form of gifts and so forth. But up to this point the term was at least describing an actual thing that actually happens.

But then the wheels come off the bus, because in the lightning-fast memetic chamber of the internet the term continued to expand: Now it was any woman who politely said “no” when you asked her out on a date. But, of course, the negative ethical connotations stuck to the term — so now the entire concept of “friend-zoning” implies that any woman who says “no” to a man’s sexual advances is doing something ethically wrong.

This also simultaneously expands the other side of the term: It now applies to any man who is friends with a woman. But here, too, the negative connotations stuck to the term. As a result, it implies that “just” being friends with a woman is somehow a punishment or a failure.

This rapid progression from useful concept to misogynist ideology is all built around the lingering cultural scaffolding in which women are objects of desire which are pursued like treasure. Although this scaffolding is slowly being demolished, it’s both interesting and depressing to note (from the sufficiently safe distance of being a white male) that, like any construction site, this transitional period can actually be more vile and misogynistic in some ways than what came before: Leave intact the “pursuit of the virgin” but strip away the idea of “no sex before marriage” and you replace Lord Wessex from Shakespeare in Love with pick-up artists who treat women like Super Mario Bros. power-ups and their sexual resumes like a Call of Duty leaderboard. Leave intact the idea of “no sex before marriage” as a moral imperative, on the other hand, and you end up with all women being “whores”. The jagged edges of these half-forgotten cultural memes can be dangerous. (Which doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t be getting rid of them. That would be like arguing that the slaves shouldn’t have been emancipated because they were more vulnerable to lynchings without the protection of their owners. It just means that you have to anticipate that it will be hard work and a tough slog before the light at the end of the tunnel completely banishes the darkness behind.)

A fellow named Caleb asked me in an e-mail recently why I’m not a fan of the way GUMSHOE handles clues. In writing a reply to him, I think I’ve found a better way of expressing my personal distaste for GUMSHOE’s approach than I have in the past.

Start by considering a scenario with locations A, B, and C.

First, let’s assume that each of these locations contains a clue which points to the next location. GUMSHOE says, “Oh no! What if they don’t find a clue? Then the adventure can’t continue!” And in order to solve this problem, GUMSHOE says, “It’s OK. We’ll just remove the resolution mechanic and we’ll simply assume that the PCs succeed.”

Investigative scenarios have been done wrong since the early days of roleplaying games. As a consequence, they’re hard to run and prone to grind to a halt. (…) You have to search for the clue that takes you to the next scene. If you roll well, you get the clue. If not, you don’t — and the story grinds to a halt. (…) GUMSHOE, therefore, makes the finding of clues all but automatic, as long as you get to the right place in the story and have the right ability. (Esoterrorists, pg. 26-27)

In other words, we’ll remove the chokepoint of failure by simply removing the possibility of failure.

So what’s the problem?

Well, now let’s assume that each of these locations contains a monster which you have to fight before you move to the next location.

Presented with this problem, we would expect GUMSHOE to say something like, “Oh no! What if they don’t defeat the monster? Then the adventure can’t continue!”

And in order to solve this problem, GUMSHOE would then say, “Well, that’s OK. We’ll just remove the combat system and we’ll simply assume that the PCs always defeat their foes.”

To be fair, GUMSHOE is right: If you make it so that the PCs automatically win, then they will never lose. It’s tautological and everything. And is there anything wrong with that?

Not necessarily: If the game wasn’t actually about fighting people, there might be little harm in skipping past the fights. But if the game was about combat, then you might have a problem.

And, in my opinion, the actual act of investigation is, in fact, a relatively major component of what a mystery story is about. GUMSHOE says it isn’t because you never see a fictional detective miss a clue. (But if they did miss a clue completely and entirely, how would the reader or viewer ever know? And, in point of fact, there are many mystery stories in which the detective does miss a clue and later goes back to find it or realizes that they missed it only after the crime has already been solved.)

In addition to this, as I’ve discussed in the past, GUMSHOE’s “solution” doesn’t actually solve the problem it claims to be solving: Failing to find a clue is only ONE of the ways in which the clue can fail. Since the problem hasn’t actually been solved, you still need to implement the ACTUAL solution to the problem (which is to not design your adventure around chokepoints in the first place). And once you’ve implemented the actual solution, you’ll discover that characters failing to find any particular clue is no longer any sort of problem… which means that the GUMSHOE “solution” isn’t required at all.

Tagline: Another excellent, if not so cheap, Cheapass Game.

Cheapass Games has created quite a reputation for itself. Producing games from the cheapest materials possible, they create highly affordable games with highly original premises. Almost all of their games have catchy titles and/or taglines, and their concepts are usually intriguing and amusing enough in their own right so that, even if the gameplay doesn’t catch your fancy, the product is still well worth the cost of entry.

And I say that as if their gameplay is usually poor. Quite the opposite is true – Cheapass Games doesn’t just have a reputation for their cheapness, they have a reputation for the high quality and playability of their game concepts. In short, Cheapass has ushered in a breath of fresh air to game design. Because they can produce games with such a low overhead they can experiment in many different directions very quickly, and with comparatively low risk. As a result you can see Cheapass play with and discard innovative game mechanics that other companies would be forced to milk for years, if they ever tried them in the first place.

Which brings us to Falling, an innovative and relatively unique card game. As with all of Cheapass Games’ products the first thing I heard about it was the tagline: “Everyone is falling, and the object is to hit the ground first. It’s not much of a goal, but it’s all you could think of on the way down.”

Instantly intrigued I surfed over to the Cheapass Games website and went digging around for more information. I came across an article written by James Ernest, the game’s designer and the driving force behind Cheapass Games, discussing some advanced tactics he had recently discovered… long after releasing the game.

I knew right then and there that I had to possess a copy of Falling. Most games, you understand, are like Sorry or Candyland — what little strategy and tactics there are in such games was known by the designers before the first playtest. It is the games which take on a life of their own, which have hidden complexities and dynamic interactions between their components which result in strategies and tactics which the designer never dreamed of, which are the very best games. Games like Chess and Diplomacy. If Falling was truly that type of game, and it contained the same type of powerful innovation found in other Cheapass Games, it was definitely packed with potential.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find Falling anywhere. I scanned the Cheapass racks (with their distinctive white envelopes) in, literally, half a dozen stores without any luck.

Why not? Because Falling is sold as a card pack, in one of those little cardboard boxes, on playing-card stock, for a price of $9.95. From Cheapass Games? What the heck?

Well, after playing the game it has become quickly apparent why this is the case. The cards simply have to be of a higher stock than your typical Cheapass game because, as the box says, Falling is a “frenetic” card game. Without the durability of an actual playing card, anyone owning Falling would quickly find themselves in need of a new deck.

So is this Cheapass Game worth a not-so-cheap price tag?

Hell, yeah.

THE RULES

Falling reminds me of another favorite game of mine, Twitch (from Wizards of the Coast and reviewed elsewhere on RPGNet). They’re both copyrighted for 1998 and therefore I won’t engage in pointless speculation as to which came first – it is far more likely a case of simultaneous inspiration (or drawing from some primal source with which I am wholly not familiar).

I say they remind me of each other, because both of them are “turn-less cardgames” – instead of following a set play order, like your typical card game, both Twitch and Falling feature simultaneous play by all the players at the table. No lazy downtime from these games (I actually managed to work up a hefty sweat while dealing for Falling).

In Twitch, simultaneity is accomplished because the basic mechanic of the game is determining the play order – the card one person plays determines who goes next, and if anyone else can play before that person can, then that person has to pick up the discard stack.

Falling, on the other hand, does it in a completely different fashion. One player is the dealer. Throughout the game all that the dealer does is deal cards, he doesn’t play at all. In fact, the dealer is dealing cards continuously throughout the game, proceeding sequentially from one player to the next. While the dealer deals, the players are all playing cards on themselves and against each other all at the same time.

Cool, huh?

In an unmodified situation (such as the very beginning of the game), each player starts with a single “stack” of cards. The dealer will deal one card to each player’s stack, and then move onto the next player (remember, once he starts dealing, he deals continuously). As the players receive cards, they can pick up one card at a time (and only the card on the top of a stack), which they can play on themselves or on another player.

As cards are played, however, things will change very quickly. The main mechanic in Falling are cards known as “riders”. Essentially, a rider informs the dealer how to deal to a player. There are three types of riders:

Split. A split card tells the dealer to start a new stack for the player (so he would deal one card to the existing stack, and then deal a second card to start a second stack). On subsequent turns, the dealer will deal one card to each stack (however, a player can get rid of a stack if he can play through all the cards in that stack before the dealer returns to him – a dealer only has to deal to stacks he can “see”, unless there are no stacks present in which case he automatically creates one).

Hit. A hit card tells the dealer to deal an additional card to each of the player’s stacks.

Skip. A skip card tells the dealer not to deal to that player this time around.

A player can only have one rider on them at a time. The dealer picks up the rider when he finishes its instruction (so a rider is only in effect for one turn).

In addition to the riders there are also “action” cards, which can be used to manipulate the riders in various ways:

Stop. A stop card destroys the rider. Put the rider in the discard pile, along with the stop pile.

Push. A push card takes a rider which has been played on you, and “pushes” it onto another player.

Grab. A grab card takes a rider which has been played on someone else, and “grabs” it – applying the rider to yourself.

Finally there are the Ground cards, which are placed at the bottom of the deck before the deal begins. If you are dealt a ground card you have hit the ground and are out of the game. The only way to avoid this is to “Stop” the ground card as soon as it is played (in which case it is placed back in the deck by the dealer). Because the ground cards are all grouped together once they start coming out it is generally useful to “Skip” your turn and to “Hit” other people (since having them dealt more cards makes it less likely that they can avoid the ground cards or stop them effectively).

There are a couple of extras (including, ironically, the “Extra” cards) – but that’s the core of the game.

DOES IT WORK?

Yes. Absolutely, positively. We had a rough start-up, since we had several neophytes who couldn’t quite get their heads around the “simultaneous play” portions of the game, but after a few trial runs (during which the dealer dealt very slowly and stopped often so that people could ponder how the game worked) we were able to quickly vamp things up to speed.

And at that point the game rocked. Just like Twitch people became speed demons around that table.

One thing we found of particular interest, though, was the differences in gameplay based on the speed of the dealer. We had a couple of very methodical dealers, who would deal at a steady, even pace. This allowed a bit more of personal reserve and tactical consideration. On the other hand, the speed demon dealers – who would race around the table as quickly as possible – inspired a rapid-response style of play in which you did your best to disadvantage the other players while keeping your disadvantage as limited as possible.

IS IT FUN?

You’re kidding, right?

I have a very large shelf of games (which, coincidentally, is coming to be dominated more and more by Cheapass Games). However, there is a small, select handful which get played time and time again. After one short evening of play, Falling has joined that select list. It is fun, it is engaging, and it is captivating. We were playing at a sizeable family gathering, and our initially small group had soon maxed out my deck many times over. Falling was drawing people to it from across the room.

So get out there. Scour your store for it (it may very well be in the last place you look, as it was for me). Buy it. You won’t regret it.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: James Ernest
Company/Publisher: Cheapass Games
Cost: $9.95
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 1999/08/16

I absolutely adore real-time card games. They are so much fun! Unfortunately, most of the people in my immediate circle of gamers are completely disinterested and I almost never get to play them any more. They also seem to have fallen out of fashion. It makes me all frowny-faced.

It should be noted that Paizo reissued this game. I don’t own the new version, but my understanding is that the rules have not been changed and the only difference is that the game has been re-themed to feature Paizo’s crazy goblins.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.