Epic RPG Review: The Core Books

Epic Role Playing (note: site plays music), from Dark Matter Studios, is a small press fantasy game with large press ambitions. There are four books on the market at present: Rules Manual, Bestiary, Book of the Arcane and Atlas of Eslin, Volume 1.

So what’s Epic RPG like? Overall, Epic RPG is a mixed bag — two of the books are great, one is decent and one is terrible, and some of the game’s best features are hidden behind a bad first impression.

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Halflings with French Accents

Back in high school, I went through a long phase where every one of my fantasy games, regardless of system or group — featured a halfling with a (bad) French accent.

Why? I’m not really sure. Halflings are fun to play, and I do love a bad French accent. And my players always seemed to enjoy them. But I’m not the only GM who does this by far, so I think there’s more to it than that.

Do you have cross-game, cross-group or even cross-genre NPCs like this? Why do you use them — and how have your players responded to them?

Hindsight: Reversing Your Decisions Can Be a Good Idea

“The GM is always right.” Right?

Sort of.

In the heat of the moment, yes. But in the calmer spaces between sessions, no. And it’s okay to be wrong sometimes.

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One-Legged Cheetah Syndrome

One of my group’s inside jokes comes from the ex-husband of a former player, who (I’m told) always played the gimpiest, most oddball characters he could come up with.

GM: This campaign is set in 1960s Europe, at the height of the Cold War.
Player: Can I play a cheetah? Like a cat-man, you know — but I only want him to have one leg.

What’s the deal with players like this?

The most common response I’ve heard to the question of why some players like playing weird and useless characters is, wait for it, “roleplaying.”

Character flaws are good. Unusual characters are good. But when you wind up with a one-legged cheetah, that’s not roleplaying — that’s creating a pointless character that will drag down the rest of the group.

And, in my experience, a character who will demand a disproportiniate amount of “onscreen” time, at the center of attention.

Is there a deeper social issue at work here? A common (and unfortunate) personality trait common to some gamers, along the lines of cat-piss man? Or is there a purely gaming-related reason behind this behavior?

How Important is a Level Playing Field?

When you get ready to start up a new campaign, or try out a new RPG (or both!), how important is it to you, and to your players, that all of the PCs start out at the same power level?

Some games treat balance as a core design goal, like D&D (although the success or failure of that design goal is debatable). Others, like Decipher’s Lord of the Rings RPG, don’t bother with it — in LotR, elves are flat-out better than everyone else, right out of the box (just like they are in the books).

I value balanced PCs very highly, both as a player and as a GM. As a GM, though, I can think of at least one occasion where I took the pursuit of balance too far — it can be a tough line to walk.

How hard should you work to ensure game balance? And how much of a factor is the game itself — the rules, the tone, the style — in making that decision?

6 Signs That Your Players May Not be Having Fun

When it comes to figuring out whether or not your players are having fun, it helps to have several arrows in your quiver.

Getting player feedback is the best (if not always the easiest) approach. Keeping a Loved, Blah, Hated List is also a good idea.

Along those lines, it’s also useful to just observe your players. If you know what to look for, it’s not hard to tell when they’re bored, nonplussed or just flat out not having fun.

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Alignment is Like Communism

Alignment is like Communism: It sounds like a good idea, and in principle it could work, but in the real world it just falls flat.

In every RPG I’ve ever run or played that has an alignment system, I’ve found the following to be true:

In games where character development doesn’t matter (an old school hack-and-slash dungeon crawl, for example), neither does alignment. In games where character development does matter, alignment discourages it by painting everyone with broad brushes.

Does alignment ever work the way it was intended to work?

When Dice Go Bad

When dice go bad, there’s only one thing to do with them.

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