So, my lunch time FOTN game wrapped up. I don't currently have a FOTN game being played. Why did I wrap it up? It was very hard to do a FOTN game in the timespan of lunch. There was a lot of setup and it is a relatively alien system. If you have players that aren't reading between sessions, and they only touch it for an hour a week, it kind of fails.
That having been said, I'd like to do it again on our Friday game, which is longer, steadier crowd, and more experienced gamers. Some of the group who did FOTN is in the friday game as well. I'd also do my own thing rather than run Fafnir's and Egil's like I did. I felt like I did a reasonable job with them, but I think I followed the book a bit much. I am thinking now that I will continue where my 13th age game left off, as they started Ragnarok in that. I have at least 2 players that are pro that, and I think another 2 are willing.
Some random thoughts/criticisms/kudos about it are below.
- I like the playmats. My players like the playmats. For the player, it works very well - they are relatively static, they don't need a lot of stats on the sheet. Once they learn their powers, it actually flows very smoothly. Even fun. The rune economy is quite interesting and engaging. It reminds me a bit of Puerto Rico in it's resource management. I think this is actually a fairly major selling point for the game - it could bridge the way from board game to RPG for some folks. The mini-game with the runes also really satisfies the crunch-lovers out there.
------ - I think 40mm x 30mm (my homemade ones) work well on an 11x17 mat and are a good size to actually play with. 11x17 is a BIG mat though. The standard mat is 8x11, and that is very small for doing any reasonable set of runes, certainly if they are over an inch tall. Runes under an inch tall are somewhat hard to read/manipulate. Because of these things, I tend to think the Norn style (sideways) is a better fit on a table, and in the larger 11x17 format. 11x17 sideways (I think that's A3 in rest-of-the-world sizes) is good because a) it doesn't extend more than a foot into the table and b) a person is going to get more than 17" of table space wide (standard chair is ~18", add 6 so you don't bump each other). I highly recommend it, and would love to see a high resolution PDF of a SINGLE norn mat put out for player use like this.
------ - One of my players pointed out that it is HIGHLY unlikely that the Norn is going to be changing damage tracks for the players in the middle of a game, or in the middle of a combat. Thus, the need for multiple damage tracks seems kinda small. I agree with this. I might do it on MY end, but I probably won't on the player end. Thus, I don't think the playmats need them and should save the space for something else, like the few single stats that a player might need from his main sheet (PF, movement, DF, evade, etc)
------ - I LOVE the app for iPad as a Norn. However, it is somewhat game slowing if you have Mental damage. The player can't decide which pile he's going to target without you passing over the iPad. With a physical mat, that's relatively easy to see. Still, I really like the app and highly recommend it for new Norns. Being able to handle 6 mats + runes + saveability from game to game, not to mention pre-prepping encounters is very nice. In fact, if the app had a way to save multiple encounters (save on thursday night when you are prepping, load on friday when you are starting it) it would be an AMAZING DM prep tool. I would have loved to have had 3-4 whole encounters (4-6 boards each) ready to go for my game. With an Apple TV or other projector tech, I could easily project the board and alleviate the "gotta see it to target it" mental damage issue I mentioned.
------ - From the player end, I don't think it is as handy, although all my guys got it. It was good for a lunch game because it remembered state if we had to end in the middle. It was also nice because it was a set of runes they could buy for $3 and get instant gratification. From the Norn perspective here, I don't like it, because I can't see their stuff. Thus, when I run it next, I'm going to insist on physical mats.
------ - I don't like the Norn monster creation. Building up monsters seems like fun, but it's the same process as players, and that moves very slow. It requires a lot of prep, and is not conducive to "just pull some runes and go with it" which is implied in the main book. I get the goal of it, and I do like the fact that one monster board can make quite the range of guys. However, it's not very Norn-friendly, timewise. I would like pre-gens - perhaps not with the colors pre-drawn, but rather "1st red power = power attack. 2nd red power add in raging assault. 3rd red power add in backstab" sort of setup. I should be able to have 2-3 "cards" with 1 monster each and have them out for reference. then pull runes out of the bags when I play. Said card might be "Sneaky mugger" and have "sneaky" powers vs a "desperate mugger" and have powers that are "desperate", or "high priest zealot" and have powers related to that.
------ - Norns could easily get by with a set of small rectangular gems/beads/tokens for their "runes". Like $5 on amazon. Building around this notion makes things go much faster, IME.
------ - A related point of this - some mook rules would be good. I started putting together some - essentially, 1 rune per mook, they have one power, they never defend. It plays much like a single monster, but with less complexity. "Ganging up" would be adding metas. So, if you have 5 desperate bandits, they get red runes, say. One of then power attacks (their only power) and the rest move into attack someone, each gets to add his red rune on to amplify. If the player attacks, he removes one rune per hit. Thus, you can get some truly epic hordes being taken on (hello, mr 125 point blacksmith, here is a small army to attack) and get that really mythic viking feel. Healing could be handled with summoning new/reinforcements, etc. You could even do something like "limit 6 runes applied to any one player" so as to give it some limitations/feeling that you have controlled the crowd a bit.
------ - Players learning powers was surprisingly hard. I've expressed this in other places, but there are a lot of new parts to the system, and some wordings that could be redone a little better. I suspect that there was some abbreviated review/reviewers that were quite familiar with the system and "tribal knowledge" was assumed. Understandable, but I wouldn't be the first, second, third, fourth, or 50th to go wtf on some parts of the system, although Denizens helps a lot here. It is somewhat difficult to overstate how important Denizens is to the system. Indeed, I would cut some sections of the core book (immortals, for example) and put in more Denizens material (most of the norn section, classes). I get why it happened that way, but I would seriously consider round 2 of it at some point. So much of denizens has important information and lessons learned from the core book and new players. Even the history section is far better fitted to the core book, IMO. It gives the context needed to build the character from the ground up, and leaves out the parts they probably aren't going to interact with right away.
------ - I honestly love the feel of the game, once you understand how it's supposed to work. It feels quite epic, with a scope that you could really run with. The fact that the nine worlds are bleeding through is good stuff. I think that the second age is a great place to be playing in - a lot of conflict, only the strong are around. It's a good place for heroes.
------ - Hexes - love and hate. Hate because there is so much stuff that is NOT hex, and I had to scrounge to find hex stuff. Love because I think it works well with the system and the ticky-tacky of it. Personal preference i suppose. I almost converted to squares because of the availability. I also wanted to buy an awful lot of Heroscape for terrain because I love terrain.
Anyhow, this is much longer than I expected, and I imagine that if you got me over a mug of mead, I would have more to say that I forgot here. Despite many criticisms, I do like it quite a lot. we're kinda gearing up for Runequest here shortly, so it might be a few months before I get to, but we'll get to it.
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